If Books Could Kill - Sapiens

00:00:00.000 do i come across as 5 10 i'm actually i actually i'm like shrinking prematurely because i have

00:00:06.560 scoliosis your body's catching up to your personality so well now it doesn't matter

00:00:12.180 because i'm just a married old man it's like kind of irrelevant you know my whole my whole aura is

00:00:17.380 kind of gone anyway i will say numerous people have clocked me as 5 6 without me having said

00:00:21.940 that on the show i think i have like very 5 6 energy i think 5 6 is just a placeholder height

00:00:26.860 because five seven is like that's a short man five six is where it starts to get funny

00:00:30.760 i also i just don't sorry if this is homophobic i don't think it's relevant for gay men if anything

00:00:35.980 we're like i'm pretty discriminatory against people over like six one i don't i don't need

00:00:40.180 redwoods in my home okay uh let's let's do this peter what do you have um i know it's gonna be 0.98

00:00:45.640 something about homo erectus we'll just get whatever you need to say just fucking get it 0.94

00:00:49.740 out now i think i've got something you're ready okay yeah peter michael what do you know about 0.96

00:00:54.600 Sapiens. All I know is that I should have done that book. That way, I could have started this

00:00:59.640 off with, you bring the homo, and I'll bring the Sapiens.

00:01:03.920 the full title of the book is sapiens colon a brief history of humankind by uval noah harari

00:01:25.480 it was published originally in hebrew in 2011 and then in english in 2014

00:01:30.400 it has sold as usual we don't know the numbers but i've heard 12 million i've heard 40 million

00:01:36.640 it has sold numerous copies 40 million cannot be right i know that i feel like people just like 0.89

00:01:41.320 say shit it was a huge hit among the davos set sure bill gates wrote an entire blog post about 0.80

00:01:48.360 how much he liked it like everyone should read this book barack obama compared reading the book 0.99

00:01:53.320 to visiting the pyramids of giza this book was also in mark zuckerberg's book club which was

00:01:59.380 not something i was aware of before but he did a very long like one-on-one interview where he

00:02:04.000 interviews uval harari about the book and it seems very clear that like mark zuckerberg found this

00:02:08.860 very influential this was right before they facilitated a genocide this was mid i mean

00:02:12.900 depending on the genocide it's hard to say i'm afraid you'll have to be more specific

00:02:16.240 but also like if you go to harari's twitter feed it's all like i'm speaking today at the

00:02:23.940 ai summit in singapore and he's being interviewed by like christine lagarde he's just like on panels

00:02:30.260 in like aspen and davos and shit oh that's the dream so i'm going to send you the first paragraph

00:02:36.460 of the afterword which is a nice little summary of everything we will be going over 70 000 years 0.62

00:02:42.120 ago homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of africa

00:02:47.220 in the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet

00:02:51.420 and the terror of the ecosystem today it stands on the verge of becoming a god poised to acquire

00:02:57.280 not only eternal youth but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction w huge

00:03:02.580 w for humans so this is i i can already tell why this is popular with tech people because it's like

00:03:08.080 when you think about it we're all we're about to be gods due to the technology that you're all

00:03:13.240 bringing us he is going to get us to this place where we are where we stand on the verge of

00:03:18.640 Everlasting Life. He says humans have done this through three revolutions. So around 70,000 years

00:03:25.440 ago, we had the cognitive revolution where we learned to think. Then around 12,000 years ago,

00:03:30.640 we get the agricultural revolution where we learned to grow crops. And about 500 years ago,

00:03:35.440 we get the scientific revolution where we learn more about the world around us.

00:03:39.740 We learned to think 70,000 years ago?

00:03:41.640 Yeah, like we weren't like apes anymore.

00:03:43.480 Okay, but apes still think.

00:03:44.740 I mean, do they though? I don't know. Look, just let me get to the fucking book, Peter. 0.88

00:03:50.820 Whatever. 0.99

00:03:51.820 Well, he said it was the first revolution. And I'm just trying to talk about the first

00:03:55.140 revolution with you and you're yelling at me. And I don't, I don't understand why.

00:03:58.700 He starts with, you know, a description of like the Big Bang and the formation of the universe.

00:04:03.200 That was the first revolution.

00:04:04.420 Life appears and then we start to get like mammals and then primates, et cetera.

00:04:08.560 And he starts talking about what sets us apart from other great apes, from other primates.

00:04:14.520 Why was it us who took over the planet?

00:04:16.480 What really sets humans apart is our ability to think in abstractions, our ability to tell fictions.

00:04:24.120 So we are going to watch his articulation of this in a TED Talk.

00:04:30.840 We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers because we alone, of all the animals on the planet,

00:04:40.120 can create and believe fictions, fictional stories.

00:04:45.580 And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction,

00:04:50.360 everybody obeys and follows the same rules,

00:04:53.880 the same norms, the same values.

00:04:56.580 All other animals use their communication system

00:05:00.300 only to describe reality.

00:05:03.560 A chimpanzee may say,

00:05:05.160 look, there is a lion, let's run away.

00:05:07.280 Or look, there is a banana tree over there,

00:05:09.940 Let's go and get bananas. 1.00

00:05:11.720 Humans, in contrast, use their language

00:05:14.880 not merely to describe reality,

00:05:18.060 but also to create new realities, fictional realities.

00:05:23.160 A human can say,

00:05:24.600 look, there is a God above the clouds,

00:05:27.120 and if you don't do what I tell you to do, 1.00

00:05:29.180 after you die, God will punish you and send you to hell. 1.00

00:05:32.820 And if you all believe these stories that I have invented, 0.99

00:05:36.060 then you will follow the same norms and laws and values and you can cooperate only humans 0.60

00:05:43.020 believe such stories which is why we control the world whereas the chimpanzees are locked up

00:05:49.020 in zoos and research laboratories kind of a brutal dig at chimpanzees at the end there

00:05:54.980 i don't know why he's being too rude to chimpanzees he's like enjoy the research facility 1.00

00:05:59.400 bitch try thinking of an abstract banana next time so this is pretty stupid and and made up huh 1.00

00:06:06.360 i don't like this at all this seems wait do you not i think this is fine no this is dumb 1.00

00:06:10.880 i don't think it's entirely correct to say animals don't have imaginations right like 0.59

00:06:16.920 animals engage in play that's like predicated on fictions yeah why do is is the israeli accent

00:06:22.960 that similar to the french accent i've been hearing french accents non-stop for the last

00:06:26.200 month so it doesn't actually sound that close to me can you say chimpanzee in a french accent and

00:06:30.520 then i want to hear this guy chimpanzee that was bad that was so bad that was terrible and also 0.99

00:06:36.700 what kind of holy to holy french motherfuckers are you hanging out with you think i'd be better 0.98

00:06:41.020 at it after after spending a month around these people i really would have thought that michael 0.99

00:06:45.760 but so i mean this is obviously non-falsifiable to say that any one reason is why we took over

00:06:54.680 the planet and other apes didn't is like kind of on some level silly but also on some level

00:06:59.560 harmless we use the power of imagination he's basically talking about social constructions

00:07:03.540 right that we're we're surrounded by things like you know money religion democracy all of these

00:07:08.800 things are ultimately they're real because everybody believes in them yeah read here i'm

00:07:13.260 gonna give you his articulation of this churches are rooted in common religious myths two catholics

00:07:19.460 who have never met can nevertheless go together on a crusade or pool funds to build a hospital

00:07:24.820 because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed himself to be crucified

00:07:29.640 to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met

00:07:35.720 might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the

00:07:39.540 Serbian nation. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never

00:07:45.120 met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe

00:07:49.340 in the existence of laws, justice, human rights, and the money paid out in fees.

00:07:53.140 Gotcha.

00:07:53.960 Whoa, a dig at lawyers.

00:07:56.060 Just sit silently, Peter.

00:07:57.100 Just think about what you've done.

00:07:58.000 It's too normalized, the way they talk about us.

00:08:02.180 We then get to the part of the book where he basically describes how this cognitive

00:08:06.320 revolution came about.

00:08:07.900 How did we gain the ability to think in these abstractions?

00:08:12.320 So I'm going to send you a couple paragraphs where he lays this out.

00:08:16.140 even though these archaic sapiens look just like us and their brains were as big as ours they did 0.77

00:08:21.900 not enjoy any market advantage over other human species did not produce particularly sophisticated

00:08:27.040 tools and did not accomplish any other special feats but then beginning about 70 000 years ago

00:08:33.860 homo sapiens started doing very special things around that date sapien bands left africa for a

00:08:40.180 second time this time they drove the neanderthals and all other human species not only from the

00:08:45.200 Middle East, but from the face of the earth. The period from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 0.99

00:08:50.980 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, and sewing needles.

00:08:57.140 The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era, as does the first clear

00:09:02.500 evidence for religion, commerce, and social stratification. So he's laying out like a very

00:09:07.180 interesting mystery, right? That it's like, we're in Africa, we're like monkeys, monkeys, monkeys,

00:09:11.240 And then 70,000 years ago, kind of in evolutionary terms, all of a sudden, we started producing culture.

00:09:17.960 We started producing bows and arrows.

00:09:19.580 We had this huge advancement very rapidly in like the kinds of things that we were producing and the extent to which we were like modern humans.

00:09:27.000 We were in our ideas era.

00:09:28.620 Yes.

00:09:29.020 70,000 years ago.

00:09:30.320 Sure.

00:09:30.660 To any normal person.

00:09:32.200 This little sequence sounds fine.

00:09:33.480 Yeah.

00:09:33.840 This seems like one of those things that's probably oversimplified.

00:09:37.460 I'm not smart enough or knowledgeable enough.

00:09:41.240 to contest any part of it. This is how I felt too. I was like, okay, yeah, fine.

00:09:45.500 So if you're somebody without any expertise in archaeology, you're like, yeah, okay, sounds fine.

00:09:49.200 If you are an archaeologist, you are screaming at your telephone right now. If you're listening

00:09:54.460 to this while doing the dishes, you just like threw a plate on the ground. So this narrative

00:09:58.700 of a cognitive revolution of basically we left Africa and then all of a sudden we developed all

00:10:03.980 this kind of modern culture, modern tools, et cetera, is a completely outdated model that was

00:10:09.320 overturned 25 years ago. Okay. So for most of the 20th century, archaeologists are based mostly in

00:10:16.600 Europe and American institutions. And they were looking around Europe for like bones and stuff

00:10:21.880 because they thought that humans had originated in Europe. This is where we get the term Caucasian

00:10:26.800 because they thought humans originated in the Caucasus region, right? So they start looking

00:10:31.020 around Europe for evidence of human civilization and they find it, right? And so they're like,

00:10:36.960 oh my God, we have all this evidence of this like rapid advancement. But over the course of the

00:10:40.700 20th century, people keep finding evidence of much earlier development in Africa. And over and over

00:10:46.100 again, the archaeological field is like, ah, it's a fluke. Ah, what does it matter? Ah, we don't

00:10:50.720 think so. But then in the year 2000, two researchers named Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks

00:10:56.760 published, people say like an article, but it's actually like an entire issue of this journal

00:11:02.440 called The Revolution That Wasn't, where they basically lay out all of the evidence that

00:11:08.020 like humanity did all of this development extremely slowly and it essentially all took

00:11:12.660 place in Africa. So Yuval is saying that all of this, like we basically were just like monkeys,

00:11:17.720 monkeys, monkeys until 70,000 years ago. We actually have evidence of like bladed tools,

00:11:22.540 like the kind of thing you'd use to butcher an animal from 500,000 years ago. We start getting

00:11:26.580 evidence of like pointed tips, which is like slightly more sophisticated, slightly more

00:11:30.540 difficult to make 250,000 years ago. Damn. Took them 250,000 years to think of making it a point. 0.99

00:11:37.500 We weren't cognitively all that smart yet, Peter. We weren't in Europe yet.

00:11:40.640 Folks, folks, 250,000 years. Give me five years, I would have thought of it.

00:11:46.840 You give me a standard blade in 2020, by 2025, I'm showing you a pointy little tip.

00:11:54.180 He also says that culture didn't really develop until after 70,000 years ago,

00:11:58.180 and it mostly happened in Europe. Totally false. We have use of pigments like ochre, red dye 300,000

00:12:04.340 years ago, also in Africa. We have decorated shells from 142,000 years ago. This whole idea

00:12:10.740 of a revolution was only based on the fact that we were only looking in Europe. The minute we

00:12:15.840 started looking elsewhere, it's like, oh, it's really not like a mystery of how this happened

00:12:19.700 all of a sudden. It's just evolution. It's a slow, gradual process. And I feel like the real

00:12:25.760 cognitive revolution was when podcasting started. You're like the Big Bang bacteria podcast. In

00:12:32.220 another 70,000 years, they'll be looking back at this moment. It sounded from the archaeologist

00:12:37.420 that I talked to and from the literature that I read that if he had reached out to any archaeologist

00:12:43.060 and spoken for 10 minutes, anyone would have told him this is not the way that we think anymore.

00:12:48.260 This is no longer the academic consensus. Yeah, but what if he wasn't trying to relay the academic

00:12:52.400 consensus. I will say one thing that really frustrated me as someone who, like, I consider

00:12:56.500 myself, like, kind of trying to do science communication in, like, roughly similar way to him

00:13:01.420 is that he wrote this book in 2011 in Hebrew. He did the English translation himself in 2014.

00:13:08.940 He published a graphic novel version of it in 2020. And he just published a 10th anniversary

00:13:14.000 edition of it last year. This section appears word for word identical in every single edition.

00:13:20.400 At no point has he just said like, oh, hey, original edition got a little bit wrong.

00:13:25.440 I'm going to update it.

00:13:26.740 I mean, it is misinformation.

00:13:27.760 It is false that this is the academic consensus.

00:13:30.260 But at this point, it really feels like laziness to me because you could easily say like there

00:13:34.700 was a cognitive revolution that took place over 300,000 years in Africa.

00:13:38.540 You don't need it to take place in 30,000 years in Europe.

00:13:41.860 I feel like the way that he talked in that TED Talk clip gives me the vibe of someone

00:13:46.900 who is first and foremost a bullshitter not someone who's like oh no i've made a mistake

00:13:54.780 and what's what's really telling is he talks about in his kind of intellectual development

00:13:58.100 he was originally a military historian but then he gets really obsessed with jared diamond 0.84

00:14:03.480 in the 1990s i saw a guy write a dumb ass book that experts hate and i i saw my own future we've

00:14:11.420 seen this thing among like self-help grifters that we now have these second and third generation of 0.97

00:14:16.420 self-help grifters that just read previous self-help grift books and produce their own.

00:14:20.580 This is like how AI feeds off of bad data, but for human minds.

00:14:25.180 Because we're like a second generation airport book author, right?

00:14:27.960 He's basically taking the ideas of Jared Diamond, which are very controversial among

00:14:31.820 archaeologists and anthropologists, and then he's dumbing them down even more. 0.88

00:14:35.400 And that means in another five years or so, we're going to get another even dumber book 0.96

00:14:40.600 just like this.

00:14:41.740 So, I mean, even though we've kind of spoiled the episode at this point, we now have to 0.99

00:14:45.620 talk about the agricultural revolution step two i i love i love how just like pulled out of his ass 0.82

00:14:52.960 these like eras are he's like first they started thinking yeah step two uh was i don't know crops 0.95

00:14:59.260 it's like first brains then wheat step three facebook so he now tells us about the shift

00:15:06.440 from forager societies to agricultural societies hell yeah so here's this peter scholars once

00:15:14.420 proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a

00:15:19.740 tale of progress fueled by human brainpower. That tale is a fantasy. Rather than heralding a new

00:15:25.860 era of easy living, the agricultural revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult

00:15:30.860 and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more

00:15:35.960 stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease.

00:15:40.700 okay that just eyeballing that last sentence we're getting there we're getting there

00:15:45.940 with absolutely no knowledge on this topic at all i'm like i don't think so buddy

00:15:53.420 the agricultural revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind

00:16:00.540 but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure rather it translated into

00:16:06.880 population explosions and pampered elites the average farmer worked harder than the average

00:16:13.060 forager and got a worse diet in return the agricultural revolution was history's biggest 0.99

00:16:18.740 fraud see it's not even the podcasting was a mistake fucking growing crops was a mistake 0.99

00:16:22.580 just let me pick a fucking berry we fucked up this is okay we have we have to we're gonna get 0.99

00:16:30.160 there but i have to present his case first i have to present his case first he presents a couple 0.99

00:16:34.000 arguments for why agriculture was a mistake, right? So agriculture, he says, resulted in humans

00:16:41.080 working longer hours. Sure. Okay. He says, while people in today's affluent societies work an

00:16:46.320 average of 40 to 45 hours a week, and people in the developing world work 60 and even 80 hours a

00:16:51.400 week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats, such as the Kalahari

00:16:55.580 Desert, work an average of just 35 to 45 hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three,

00:17:00.620 and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily.

00:17:03.700 In normal times, this is enough to feed the band.

00:17:06.280 It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers,

00:17:08.260 living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari,

00:17:10.580 spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials.

00:17:13.540 On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores.

00:17:17.360 They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum,

00:17:20.100 no floors to polish, no nappies to change, and no bills to pay.

00:17:23.800 That's true about dishes.

00:17:25.000 He then says this shift from kind of foraging to monoculture,

00:17:29.240 growing on these stable crops,

00:17:30.620 restricted the variety of diets. So here's this. The foragers' secret of success,

00:17:39.000 which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. In most

00:17:43.700 places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising.

00:17:49.020 This had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well

00:17:52.880 adapted to it. Evidence from fossilized skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely

00:17:58.580 to suffer from starvation or malnutrition and were generally taller and healthier than their

00:18:03.400 peasant descendants. The forager may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast, fruits,

00:18:08.540 snails, and turtle for lunch, and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrow's menu

00:18:14.280 might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all

00:18:19.720 the necessary nutrients. I had elk yesterday. Are we out of saffron? That's how it was in

00:18:24.380 foraging societies yeah no i'm sure that they were living it up dude final one he also says

00:18:28.900 that there were no famines when you are hunting and gathering so here's this agricultural societies

00:18:34.800 are ravaged by famine when drought fire or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato

00:18:40.040 crop forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters and suffered from periods of

00:18:45.280 want and hunger but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily if they lost some

00:18:51.500 of their staple foodstuffs they could gather or hunt other species or move to a less affected area

00:18:57.680 okay so really feels like it's downplaying the struggles it hasn't rained here so like let's

00:19:03.560 walk over to where it's raining you guys why don't we hunt another like he's picturing like a disney

00:19:08.200 movie in terms of like the volume of animals that are around you the most delicious animal

00:19:13.640 does appear to have been wiped out in the earthquake but we will simply move on to the

00:19:18.940 second most delicious this is again a totally outdated paradigm so the whole kind of social

00:19:25.580 construction of foraging societies the original model of this was just like unbelievably racist

00:19:31.640 right this is like these colonial understandings that were basically like hunter-gatherers are

00:19:35.660 one step above apes they're super primitive they're super backwards we are sophisticated

00:19:40.280 they are unsophisticated right this is like the paradigm of forager societies for like 200 years 0.99

00:19:45.140 like after Europeans started coming into contact with them. Starting in the 1960s, once we started

00:19:49.780 to get much better anthropological data and once kind of like a new generation entered the field,

00:19:54.840 there was then a thesis proposed by a researcher named Marshall Solins called the Original Affluent

00:20:00.420 Society. He presented this idea that like, you know, you say these foraging societies

00:20:04.620 are really unsophisticated, but maybe it's us who are unsophisticated, right? If you look at the

00:20:10.100 kungsan in the kalahari desert they're only working like two hours a day and most of the 1.00

00:20:16.240 rest of the time they're just like hanging out okay same when you think about like the idea of

00:20:19.800 affluence it's like you have all of your needs met right these are people who have all of their

00:20:24.300 needs met so like who are we to sit in judgment of these people like maybe they're really on to

00:20:27.760 something i mean this is something that i feel like really rich people who work really hard

00:20:31.120 rediscover uh twice a decade where they're like wait couldn't i be relaxing right but also just

00:20:37.260 have fewer expectations about what should accrue to me in terms of wealth and like someone tells

00:20:42.740 them that and they're like oh fuck i've wasted my life yeah they get really into it they sort of 0.96

00:20:47.980 half embrace it and then it fades away and they become nazis again and then the cycle resets the 0.98

00:20:53.360 problem with this model that was proposed in the late 1960s is that other people who work with

00:21:00.040 these populations are like they don't work two hours a day dude all of this data is based on a

00:21:05.080 guy named Richard Lee, who had been working with the Kung San. And it is true that if you look at

00:21:10.340 the amount of time that they are hunting and gathering, they're only doing about two and a

00:21:14.680 half hours a day. However, he didn't include all of the time that they were spending processing

00:21:19.480 all of the food. So the staple crop of the Kung San is this thing called a Mangongo nut,

00:21:25.920 which you have to like crack open. And then you have to like soak it or boil it. So people are 0.97

00:21:30.500 spending eight hours a week processing and making these edible. They're also spending four to seven

00:21:35.280 hours a week making and repairing tools. They're spending a ton of time on like butchery, like

00:21:40.120 preparing cuts of meat. They're also spending a ton of time gathering firewood. You have to gather

00:21:45.000 water. They're using ostrich eggs to go gather water and bring it back. That's oftentimes many

00:21:49.740 hours a day. So this idea that they're only spending like two hours a day on work is only

00:21:55.620 if you ignore all of like the work that they're doing right right the actual estimate is like

00:22:00.820 they're they're working about eight hours a day six or seven days a week that's also of course 0.97

00:22:04.880 only one foraging society there's studies from australia showing that it's mostly women women 0.99

00:22:09.600 are working like 70 hours a week just to gather enough food for themselves and if they have young

00:22:13.840 children they're working even more it just is not the case that like foraging societies are just

00:22:18.380 like you're just hanging out all the time the weirdest thing about this is like if you reread

00:22:22.360 That sentence that I read earlier about the amount of time that they're working.

00:22:25.560 Here, let me send this to you.

00:22:26.900 While people in today's affluent societies work an average of 40 to 45 hours a week.

00:22:31.660 And then skip to the end of the sentence.

00:22:33.500 Hunter gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats, such as the Kalahari

00:22:38.260 desert, work on average for just 35 to 45 hours a week.

00:22:44.020 Exactly.

00:22:44.680 He says we're working 40 to 45 hours a week.

00:22:46.960 But if you look at foragers.

00:22:48.220 They're working 35 to 45.

00:22:50.840 It's like his own sentence.

00:22:51.780 It's like, yeah, they're doing the same amount as us.

00:22:53.580 I don't want to be culturally chauvinistic, but like our lives are pretty sick compared

00:22:57.880 to a lot of hunter-gatherer societies.

00:22:59.880 Like I personally enjoy, like think the trade-off of that possible five hours is worth it.

00:23:06.040 The other thing that he says is that agriculture reduced food variety.

00:23:09.740 Yeah, yeah.

00:23:10.260 He says in most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition.

00:23:15.060 That just feels like it can't be true.

00:23:16.380 If you look at the foraging societies we do know about, it's like, it's really hard work

00:23:20.320 to get enough calories in the day.

00:23:22.160 And so typically you're going to look for like staple crops,

00:23:25.420 like tubers and stuff that are going to give you the most calories.

00:23:28.960 This whole thing of like you're eating rabbit one day and elk the next,

00:23:31.300 like that's a modern paradigm of abundance.

00:23:33.880 People are trying to survive. 1.00

00:23:35.620 And so when you look at the kungsan, they're mostly eating these nuts. 1.00

00:23:38.800 I mean, you need something that is growing constantly, really aggressively, right? 1.00

00:23:43.220 Because it's not like you pick a bunch of berries

00:23:45.780 and then you go back the next day and there's another bunch for you, right?

00:23:50.120 you have to like cycle through different areas presumably right he's arguing that like that

00:23:54.560 produces for like like a nutritious variety of food i don't know man this is this is all just 0.97

00:24:01.060 like weird noble savage shit the forager societies that we know about are oftentimes at risk of 0.77

00:24:06.100 undernutrition and malnutrition due to seasonal changes right oftentimes a couple months of the 0.98

00:24:11.220 year it doesn't rain or it gets cold it's much harder to get food and oftentimes what that means

00:24:16.680 is that you just eat a lot less for like a couple months of the year yeah but they can just move

00:24:21.760 this is the other thing that drove me fucking crazy he's like oh if it's a drought you just

00:24:26.820 move yeah okay first of all you have to know where to move secondly droughts often cover like 0.79

00:24:31.200 hundreds of miles we're talking about entire regions where rain doesn't fall you can look

00:24:35.600 at like modern or ancient hunter-gatherers and like appreciate certain elements of the lifestyle

00:24:42.080 Yeah. But once you try to make this case that it's like clearly better, you are making a complete fool of yourself. 0.98

00:24:49.920 Right. Exactly. You see it all the time with like modern health people. 0.97

00:24:53.960 And I feel like you probably encounter this more than I do, where it's just like saying there used to be more poop in the food we ate.

00:24:59.860 So I've started to add it. It's just sort of like glorifying these these lifestyles just for the sake of it.

00:25:05.640 This whole kind of paradigm that shifted in the 1960s, you were basically swapping out a mean racist caricature for a nice racist caricature.

00:25:15.880 Yeah, yeah.

00:25:16.300 You're like, it's not that they're uncivilized.

00:25:17.820 What if they're more civilized than us?

00:25:20.020 These are human societies.

00:25:21.260 Every human society has like some good things and some bad things.

00:25:24.480 Things that we can learn from them.

00:25:25.940 Things that they can learn from us.

00:25:27.140 It's just so one dimensional to do this thing of like, oh, it was all a mistake.

00:25:31.780 We shouldn't have done this.

00:25:32.960 We shouldn't have grown crops.

00:25:34.080 I hate that this is making me defend modern society, but like long term, it did work out for us.

00:25:40.880 So for this, I spoke to two anthropologists, Dorsa Amir at Duke and Duncan Stibbard Hawks at Baylor. 0.99

00:25:47.840 And what both of them said was just like anyone who says anything definitive about forager lifestyles or like hunter gather diets is full of shit. 0.94

00:25:58.000 First of all, the fossil record is incomplete, and it's very difficult to ascertain diets 0.98

00:26:03.240 from fossilized remains.

00:26:05.280 When it comes to modern day hunter-gatherers, kind of by definition, these are not uncontacted

00:26:10.360 societies, right?

00:26:11.160 If they're participating in research, they're also not a representative sample because most

00:26:14.740 of the communities that have managed to last this long are in remote or inhospitable regions,

00:26:20.440 right? 0.99

00:26:20.640 It's like the Inuits, it's the Amazon rainforest, it's the Kalahari Desert.

00:26:24.380 Right. These are places that have not been encroached upon by agriculture. So these are not necessarily typical of the kinds of forager societies that we would have had in places that were like much more agriculturally productive. And when we do get into forager societies, the main thing that sticks out is the huge diversity.

00:26:41.140 Yeah. One thing that Duncan told me, he has a really interesting paper where he looks over like all of these stereotypes of forager societies of like they're they're very equitable, right? They share everything. They move around all the time. They don't have these kind of modern concepts of things like private property. Every single one of these stereotypes has like very notable exceptions. So there are foraging societies that we know of that had like caste systems and they had like rulers and like some of them had like slavery.

00:27:08.100 What about dishes? Did any of them have dishes?

00:27:12.080 Although some of them actually did have like models of private property. So there were places

00:27:15.540 where you could have like a watering hole where you could drink. And there'd be people who would

00:27:18.580 like have ownership over that even before they were like settled societies. 0.95

00:27:22.140 Rise and grind, baby. The watering hole is actually my property. 0.95

00:27:25.960 This is like the superpower of books like this is that he has like a really good take, right?

00:27:31.940 Agriculture was a mistake. He is stealing this from Jared Diamond. By the way, this is like a

00:27:35.260 very influential article that Jared Diamond wrote in the 1990s. But this as like a take or an

00:27:40.040 analysis argument puts me in a position where it's going to sound like I'm saying the agricultural

00:27:45.360 revolution wasn't bad. It was actually good. But the reality is just that it's really complex.

00:27:50.920 The shift from foraging to agriculture took place over hundreds of years. This isn't like a

00:27:56.360 Simpsons monorail episode situation where people got tricked into doing agriculture. This was

00:28:01.220 something that took place over many generations, and many societies lived with a mixture of small

00:28:06.820 scale agriculture and foraging for a long time. And there also appear to have been benefits and

00:28:12.440 drawbacks to the shift, at least for the first couple hundred years. It may actually be the case

00:28:16.600 that in some places, food variety fell and health markers got worse. Yeah, we became like reliant on

00:28:23.300 a very narrow subset of crops that we could grow, right? On the other hand, it appears that infant

00:28:28.620 mortality fell very significantly around this time. Some of the estimates of infant mortality

00:28:34.500 in forager societies are like 50%. So it's weird to talk about more of your babies living as part 1.00

00:28:40.040 of this like scam of agriculture that took place. Wouldn't it be nice if you only had to take care

00:28:45.180 of half your kids? But this is kind of the complexity of all this, right? Because there's

00:28:49.880 also some debate about whether infant mortality fell before the agricultural revolution and help

00:28:55.300 sparked it or was caused by the agricultural revolution, we don't really know. The closest

00:29:00.180 thing to kind of a conclusion that I could come to from the anthropologist that I spoke to

00:29:03.340 was that agriculture good versus agriculture bad just isn't that interesting of a question.

00:29:08.540 A much more interesting question is why did, I think it's 11 different societies in totally

00:29:15.240 different regions of the world independently develop agriculture? And what were the specific

00:29:20.580 benefits and drawbacks and effects of that shift. Like in the fertile crescent, the agricultural

00:29:26.900 shift appears to have taken place at the same time as like a mini ice age, which would have affected

00:29:32.780 rainfall, productivity of both foraging and agricultural crops. So that could be the reason

00:29:38.220 why the skeletons are shorter or not, right? You start to see the fractal complexity of this

00:29:45.380 and how this modern like weirdly nostalgic lens and like super simplistic way of telling the

00:29:50.920 story just like isn't actually teaching people anything it's just so clearly a guy talking out 0.94

00:29:56.260 of his ass that it's hard to address right if you gave me a foraging society in 2020 by 2025 i would 0.75

00:30:03.520 have turned it into an agricultural society so the next section of the book is this period from 0.99

00:30:09.820 the agricultural revolution until roughly the beginning of the scientific revolution.

00:30:14.760 His story of what is happening at this time is just convergence, right?

00:30:19.700 So we used to have like thousands of dialects.

00:30:22.160 We're now converging on a couple of languages.

00:30:24.100 We used to have thousands of religions.

00:30:25.340 We're now converging on these large monotheistic religions.

00:30:28.480 We're having the consolidation of states.

00:30:30.500 The sort of the big story of this 10,000 year period is kind of the world coming together,

00:30:36.800 right?

00:30:37.060 And he says, you know, as you get all of this scale, like larger cities, more sophisticated states, we start to rely on more fictions, right?

00:30:46.800 It requires more fictions to run a society, right?

00:30:49.460 We get, like, written language, things like democracy.

00:30:52.720 These things are all kind of social constructions, right?

00:30:54.460 So we become increasingly reliant on social construction.

00:30:57.800 And so one of the most influential social constructions that we come to rely on is, like, laws.

00:31:03.700 Stepping into my office here a little bit.

00:31:05.940 So he says Hammurabi's code was, you know, of course, one of the first attempts to create a

00:31:12.040 legal structure. And it had this very explicit separation of society into superior people,

00:31:18.960 commoners, and slaves. And the entire, like, legal structure was around, like,

00:31:22.740 how much is the life of a slave worth? How much is the life of a superior person worth?

00:31:26.840 And so from Hammurabi's code, he then cuts to 3,500 years later. And he says, eventually,

00:31:34.480 we get kind of the opposite principle we get the declaration of independence oh we're skipping the

00:31:40.000 magna carta here he does he does a lot of like jumping around in time he says we eventually get

00:31:44.220 to this principle that everybody's equal he says it's easy for us to accept that the division of

00:31:50.200 people into superiors and commoners is a figment of the imagination yet the idea that all humans

00:31:55.160 are equal is also a myth so he goes through the sort of famous paragraph we hold these truths

00:32:00.340 to be self-evident all men are created equal endowed by their creator and a limbo rights etc

00:32:04.340 and he sort of walks through it one by one trying to enumerate whether or not there's like real

00:32:10.480 principles behind that or whether it's like just a fiction so i'm going to send you this

00:32:15.000 according to the science of biology people were not created they have evolved and they certainly

00:32:22.320 did not evolve to be equal got you oh no you thought laws were based on evolution but they're

00:32:29.100 not that's not what they mean they don't mean everyone's exactly the same you read the rest of

00:32:33.780 it dipshit okay the americans got the idea of equality from christianity which argues that

00:32:41.100 every person has a divinely created soul and that all souls are equal before god however if we do 0.74

00:32:47.960 not believe in the christian myths about god creation and souls what does it mean that all

00:32:52.180 people are equal evolution is based on difference not on equality every person carries a somewhat

00:32:58.480 different genetic code and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences whoa you say

00:33:04.440 people are equal but they're actually different how do you respond how do you respond to that

00:33:07.340 are you thinking about your fees right now are you thinking about your fees this leads to the

00:33:10.600 development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival created 1.00

00:33:15.180 equal should therefore be translated into evolved differently fucking got you what is you fucking 1.00

00:33:20.600 just rambling nonsense shut your fucking mouth god damn it first of all it's fucking it's basically 1.00

00:33:27.800 poetry like so shut up dude it's not like it's it's about your value as a human being it's it's 1.00

00:33:36.060 not saying everyone's exactly the same you fucking okay all right let's wait now you now we have his 0.99

00:33:42.920 now he's going to talk about how whether we're endowed by our creator with inalienable rights 0.96

00:33:47.400 equally there are no such things as rights in biology there are only organs abilities and

00:33:53.740 characteristics birds fly not because they have a right to fly but because they have wings and

00:33:59.600 it's not true that these organs abilities and characteristics are unalienable many of them

00:34:05.040 undergo constant mutations and may well be completely lost over time the ostrich is a

00:34:11.620 bird that lost its ability to fly your legs are alienable bitch think about that and what are the 0.92

00:34:17.400 characteristics that evolved in humans life certainly but liberty there is no such thing 0.92

00:34:22.040 in biology just like equality rights and limited liability corporations liberty is something that

00:34:28.860 people invented and that exists only in their imagination this is this is like the like the

00:34:35.800 facebook post of someone who in five years will be a full nazi the the term i kept coming back to

00:34:41.420 was dorm room yeah a lot of this is just like dorm room like you're sitting there stoned you're like 0.97

00:34:45.560 man whoa why is he fucking talking about birds wait wait wait wait wait we have to be the 0.99

00:34:51.440 happiness one we have to do the happy birds fly not because they have a right shut up dude are 1.00

00:34:57.140 you fucking kidding me with this here's this happiness thing here's this happiness thing 1.00

00:34:59.820 this is the most fake smart guy bullshit of all time i'm gonna lose my shit it gets so much worse 1.00

00:35:05.960 peter we're like the good part of the book this is like my descent into fucking madness over the 1.00

00:35:11.020 last two weeks peter just like a reminder that he's talking about like how the how the declaration 0.67

00:35:15.420 of independence says life liberty and the pursuit of happiness right it's literally just like this

00:35:19.440 little poetic flourish and he's like happiness and what and what about happiness so far biological

00:35:27.140 research has failed to come up with a clear definition of happiness or a way to measure it

00:35:32.000 objectively most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure which is more 0.99

00:35:37.260 easily defined and measured is it though i can't do this man what the what the fuck is he talking 0.96

00:35:43.520 He does this so much where he's like, it's not happiness, it's pleasure. 0.97

00:35:48.000 Those are basically synonyms.

00:35:50.220 They're not reasonably different.

00:35:52.400 And you're acting, you're doing this like smart guy thing where you think you're like debunking something, I think. 0.97

00:35:57.100 But no one fucking thinks this. 0.79

00:35:58.660 These are meant to be like organizing principles. 0.98

00:36:01.600 Have you ever read something before?

00:36:03.360 Like that's what I think when I hear this.

00:36:06.280 Okay, so here's his rewritten preamble to the Declaration of Independence. 0.99

00:36:11.200 Just fucking kill me, dude. 0.99

00:36:13.520 He really thinks he's cooking. 1.00

00:36:14.980 You can tell he really thinks he's cooking.

00:36:17.880 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are

00:36:23.100 born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit

00:36:27.800 of pleasure.

00:36:28.640 Boom.

00:36:29.060 Yeah.

00:36:29.460 No, that's great.

00:36:30.520 That's definitely how I would have found a nation. 0.99

00:36:32.820 This took him like six pages, by the way, to do this whole fucking exercise. 0.98

00:36:37.200 And like, what is the point of this? 0.98

00:36:38.960 What is the point of this?

00:36:40.140 He keeps doing this thing where he's like, you might get mad when I say that human rights

00:36:44.000 are fictions.

00:36:45.120 I don't think people would.

00:36:46.080 I think people understand these are like man-made philosophical concepts.

00:36:49.340 I don't even think like engaging with this is worth it. 0.99

00:36:51.260 It's just like pedantic bullshit nonsense. 0.98

00:36:53.960 Peter, wait for the rest of the episode. 1.00

00:36:56.020 This is so embarrassing. 0.94

00:36:57.800 This is so – like the fact that someone who isn't – like I almost get it if you're

00:37:02.520 like 23 and just rambling on the internet.

00:37:06.160 Totally.

00:37:06.200 I get it.

00:37:06.920 I get that you might say something like this at some point because you've only experienced

00:37:11.400 five or six ideas, but to be a full-ass adult.

00:37:15.620 He then gets to a section where he's talking about convergence of religions, right?

00:37:20.320 We're moving from, like, everyone has a often animalistic to these, like, big five monotheistic

00:37:26.360 religions.

00:37:27.060 He's talking about how this plays out in the modern era.

00:37:31.380 So I'm going to send you this.

00:37:33.380 The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. 1.00

00:37:40.660 If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. 0.94

00:37:44.300 But if we take into consideration natural law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervor.

00:37:51.380 The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural law...

00:37:54.980 Come on, man.

00:37:56.480 You knew this is where he was going.

00:37:58.740 The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural law religions,

00:38:02.700 such as liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism.

00:38:07.160 These creeds do not like to be called religions and refer to themselves as ideologies.

00:38:12.440 Ooh, they don't like it.

00:38:13.580 They don't like it.

00:38:14.200 They think they're different, but they're actually the same.

00:38:15.820 But this is just a semantic exercise.

00:38:17.640 If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order,

00:38:23.720 then Soviet communism

00:38:25.680 was no less a religion

00:38:27.680 than Islam. Like other 1.00

00:38:29.820 religions, communism too has

00:38:31.860 its holy scripts and prophetic books

00:38:33.860 such as Marx's Das Capital.

00:38:36.540 Communism had its

00:38:37.700 holidays and festivals such as the 1st

00:38:39.820 of May and the anniversary of the October

00:38:41.660 Revolution. It had theologians

00:38:44.040 adept at Marxist dialectics

00:38:46.100 and every unit in the Soviet

00:38:47.960 army had a chaplain

00:38:49.460 called a commissar who monitored 0.99

00:38:51.980 the piety of soldiers and officers this is why is this so popular as a formulation among dumb guys 0.95

00:39:00.120 we've talked about this so many times on the show it's insane you know what's sort of like a 0.91

00:39:03.760 religion communism when you think about it when you think about it you could you could literally

00:39:09.560 like you could use this formulation to say that archaeology is a religion there's a really

00:39:13.680 interesting article by mike w martin called compassion with justice harari's assault on

00:39:19.180 human rights where he goes over this asinine argument and he's like you can say science is a

00:39:24.420 religion according to this right there's like a holy book right on the origin of species there's

00:39:28.640 priests right isaac newton harari says here i love the fact that he includes this he's like

00:39:34.220 this is just a semantic exercise right to say that like nazism is different than buddhism or

00:39:39.820 whatever but he is the one engaging in a semantic exercise yeah he would admit that like i mean he

00:39:44.860 also said feminism later is just like a religion yes he would admit the feminism and buddhism are

00:39:49.320 different from each other obviously right so are we arguing about the difference between a religion

00:39:54.380 ideology or are we arguing about the difference between two different religions right it's like

00:39:58.080 isn't isn't a bike a type of a car that's actually a good that's actually a good comparison because

00:40:03.380 you'd be like no where's the engine right he'd be like well is the engine the material part

00:40:08.460 because you have wheels and it's a mode of transportation pass me the bong it's just so

00:40:13.720 fucking boring it's like so tedious i have always viewed this as just sort of a method for religious 0.58

00:40:22.840 people to deflect from the fact that yeah they believe in like metaphysics totally which by the 0.99

00:40:28.460 way like whatever um i'm no longer an angsty young atheist like i don't give a shit but it's always 0.75

00:40:34.900 in my experience been something that people throw at you when you're like you believe in magic right 0.70

00:40:41.580 and they're like oh don't do not do we all not have faith in something right it it's just like 0.92

00:40:47.840 fuck off dude that is exactly what he's doing here right because the paragraph says you might 0.97

00:40:53.360 think religion has declined over the last 300 years but if we look at political ideology we're 0.99

00:40:59.260 more religious than ever but the decline of organized religion over the last couple hundred

00:41:04.320 years is a real trend that is like worth understanding if you want to understand

00:41:09.080 current society, right? It's brain dead to say, oh, the Catholic church no longer dictates

00:41:15.960 daily life for millions of people the way that it did for like a thousand years. 1.00

00:41:20.240 That doesn't matter because we're all super into feminism now. 1.00

00:41:24.040 You have your holy texts, the feminine mystique. 1.00

00:41:28.140 The beauty myth by Naomi Wolf.

00:41:30.080 You have your prophets, Julia Fox.

00:41:32.860 I want to take, like, a little interlude now to talk specifically about why he is so popular among, like, the Davos set.

00:41:41.080 Okay.

00:41:41.300 This is a kind of intellectual we haven't really talked about on the show.

00:41:44.080 True.

00:41:44.440 To illustrate this concept, we are going to watch a clip.

00:41:48.800 In this era of global uncertainty, the Trump era, how should we move forward?

00:41:54.720 What you really learn from the long-term history of humanity is the amazing human ability to build trust.

00:42:04.420 Because 100,000 years ago, humans lived in tiny bands of just a few dozen individuals and could not trust anybody outside their band.

00:42:15.040 Today, we have these huge networks like nations of millions of people that trust each other.

00:42:21.100 The most important mechanism is the self-correcting mechanism.

00:42:28.000 This is how every child learns to walk.

00:42:31.640 The ability to admit that there are things I don't know or that I make mistakes.

00:42:39.640 That a self-correcting mechanism is not correcting somebody else.

00:42:43.300 This is easy to see the problems of somebody else.

00:42:46.260 It's a system which is able to identify and correct its own mistakes.

00:42:53.480 Ultimately, it all depends on trust between humans.

00:42:58.660 It's amazing how the concepts of community and trust have been present throughout human history, right?

00:43:03.860 True.

00:43:05.100 Harari also said that history's only constant is change.

00:43:09.440 In the end, how humans respond to shifting times is key to finding a way forward.

00:43:15.100 Right. 0.98

00:43:16.260 right right right i dude just two dumb ass newscasters being just like you know the 1.00

00:43:23.960 it's always two two dumb bitches telling each other exactly that's that's what i'm seeing here 1.00

00:43:30.760 i mean every clip of him is like this he's being asked a specific question he's like how should we 1.00

00:43:35.720 respond in the trump era and then he points at these 30 000 foot philosophical principles that

00:43:41.260 have, like, that say nothing about the question he was just asking.

00:43:44.720 Right.

00:43:44.960 He's like, society is predicated on trust between individuals.

00:43:49.800 And they're like, hmm.

00:43:50.780 Wow. 1.00

00:43:51.360 Damn, dude. 1.00

00:43:52.000 The only constant is change. 1.00

00:43:54.080 Fuck, man. 1.00

00:43:54.940 The sense that I kept getting from this book, and especially from his, like, more recent 1.00

00:43:58.360 interviews, is, you know that dream where you're, like, standing at a podium and you

00:44:01.980 have to give, like, a 45-minute talk about, like, the Ming Dynasty or something that you

00:44:06.460 just know nothing about?

00:44:07.760 And you're like, you know, humans have always had change in society. 0.73

00:44:13.560 And that's what the Ming Dynasty teaches us. 0.72

00:44:15.840 It was a dynasty of contrast. 0.94

00:44:17.540 Yeah.

00:44:18.120 This is sort of, you know, something I complained about way back when in our like end of history episode about political philosophy in general, where like if you don't actually know how to describe the world, you can just use political philosophy.

00:44:33.180 Right.

00:44:33.500 Because you're operating on a level of abstraction that can't be mapped onto the world in any

00:44:38.880 meaningful way.

00:44:39.920 Yeah.

00:44:40.120 And so you can just say whatever you want.

00:44:41.360 It doesn't matter.

00:44:41.840 You can't be wrong.

00:44:42.640 Because you're at this 30,000 foot level, it makes people think it's smart, right?

00:44:46.500 Because you're describing these philosophical concepts, right?

00:44:48.920 Of like, ooh, trust between people.

00:44:50.320 Right.

00:44:50.440 They were like, what's going on with Donald Trump?

00:44:51.980 He was like, 20,000 years ago, you lived in a small hut with only a few people.

00:44:58.020 20,000 years ago, they didn't have famines.

00:44:59.920 He's like also wrong about that.

00:45:01.700 I think this is like what the Davos set like gets from him.

00:45:04.960 Yeah.

00:45:05.440 It's because he makes you feel smart. 0.98

00:45:07.440 A lot of these guys, these TED talk kind of motherfuckers are just sort of selling a feeling. 0.98

00:45:12.740 Right. 0.99

00:45:13.000 You're just purchasing that from these guys over and over again. 0.99

00:45:17.620 So I want to do something super fucked up to you, Peter. 0.99

00:45:19.740 What? 0.99

00:45:20.160 For this, I couldn't help myself.

00:45:21.720 I downloaded his subsequent books.

00:45:24.680 He has gotten significantly more vapid as we've gone along.

00:45:29.220 Like Sapiens is by far his best book.

00:45:31.120 His latest book is like a collection of essays.

00:45:35.220 And I want to kind of dissect an essay that he has in there in detail to talk about like

00:45:40.220 how he argues and like his role as a rhetorician, right?

00:45:43.860 He has an essay in that book called Post-Truth, Some Fake News Lasts Forever.

00:45:50.480 It's an essay about the phenomenon of fake news, right?

00:45:53.980 This is post-2016.

00:45:55.100 Everyone is really concerned about this.

00:45:56.680 So he starts out by laying out the problem.

00:46:00.500 It seems that we are indeed living in a terrifying era of post-truth, when not just particular military incidents, but entire histories and nations might be faked.

00:46:10.220 But if this is the era of post-truth, when exactly was the Halcyon Age of Truth?

00:46:16.860 So he talks about how humans have always had false beliefs, and there's always been a kind of a mixture of true information and false information for us as a demos.

00:46:25.240 there's a fake smart person thing where when a phenomenon arises you just are like that's always

00:46:33.300 been there yeah and it's like no actually it feels like a lot more acute and it's probably

00:46:37.760 like measurably worse now and he's just like you think this is the first time that anyone has ever 0.96

00:46:44.600 believed a false thing it's like no i don't no one thinks that you you absolute schmuck differences 0.51

00:46:49.540 in degree matter it's not only differences in kind that matter in human history like people 0.91

00:46:54.180 had been killed before the holocaust the fact that the holocaust was at such a large scale and

00:46:58.460 was so industrialized interesting that you thought that that was the first time that someone died

00:47:03.060 right it's like again yeah it's like it's not smart it's like a distraction tactic and it also

00:47:08.740 positions you as smarter than the people who are upset it's all it's a complete conversation ender

00:47:14.240 like we can move on because this has happened before the same so in this fake news piece he

00:47:19.460 talks about like we've always had fake news he talks about how like religion is kind of the first

00:47:25.180 form of fake news because like everybody believes this thing that is not true that's right religions

00:47:30.280 can be useful in society because like we give alms to the poor but also religion has done some

00:47:34.360 bad things in society because we had like the crusades what he then says politicians have lied

00:47:40.520 before the nazis had sort of myths and fictions and then like the soviets did propaganda they

00:47:46.740 like covered up their crimes. They like cut that guy out of the photograph. There's sort of societal

00:47:51.140 myths that can be like really bad. This is fucking crazy. But also he says you cannot organize masses 0.99

00:47:56.440 of people effectively without relying on some mythology. I'm hearing about this for the first

00:48:00.240 time. He says you might argue that at least in some cases it's possible to organize people

00:48:04.300 effectively through consensual agreements rather than through fictions and myths. Such conventions

00:48:08.920 however are not clearly distinct from fiction. The difference between holy books and money for

00:48:13.500 example is far smaller than it may seem at first sight so money is like a kind of fake news i can't

00:48:19.500 do this dude i can this is then i'm we're like not even halfway done peter just shotgun to my

00:48:24.520 forehead he then says advertising is a form of fake news so like we walk around and like we're

00:48:29.200 being told like this is the best vacuum cleaner entertainment can be fake news he says yeah

00:48:33.960 blurring the line between fiction and reality can be done for many purposes you cannot play games or

00:48:39.000 read novels unless you suspend disbelief at least for a little while and he talks about that for a

00:48:44.660 while he's like interesting that you think that misinformation in the election is bad even though

00:48:49.420 you got sad when you were playing the last of us then he says truth and power can travel together

00:48:54.120 only so far sooner or later they go their separate ways if you want power at some point you will have

00:48:59.860 to spread fictions if you want to know the truth about the world at some point you'll have to

00:49:04.160 renounce power that doesn't that doesn't sound correct also like again just just say something 0.97

00:49:12.940 useful do you feel how fucking annoyed you are right now you're like mike get to the fucking 0.90

00:49:16.620 point just just just every single thing that he writes it feels like he just sat down and started 0.95

00:49:21.760 writing he didn't even like open a browser window he's just like he's just like glancing around the

00:49:26.140 room like advertising is fake. He like sees a TV. He's like TV shows are fake news. What do you

00:49:34.720 think about it? I counted. We are 4,000 words into this essay. This is like 15 pages of text.

00:49:40.380 And I've got a migraine, folks. I've got a migraine. I know, dude. You framed it as a dream,

00:49:47.640 but I am just like, I feel like I'm watching a kid give a presentation who obviously did not

00:49:54.400 prepare no no that's just rambling and you're just like okay and just filibustering dude you're just

00:49:59.160 like internally screaming like come on man just like right please say something interesting we 0.64

00:50:03.320 then after 4 000 words of fucking preamble right he says all this does not mean that fake news is 0.96

00:50:08.880 not a serious problem or that politicians and priests have a free license to lie through their 0.97

00:50:13.660 teeth it would also be wrong to conclude that everything is just fake news that any attempt

00:50:18.700 to discover the truth is doomed to failure everyone agrees that fake news is a problem he's basically

00:50:23.580 he's circling back to the premise of the article. It would be a mistake to say that fake news isn't

00:50:28.380 a problem. It's a problem. Okay. Are you going to say anything about it? We finally get to like

00:50:34.960 the, this is like the last like three paragraphs of the essay. He actually like lists some specific

00:50:39.960 things that we should do about fake news. Are you still there? I feel like you've died.

00:50:43.940 Yeah. No, I'm still here. Okay. Do I want to be here still?

00:50:47.920 So we finally get to his like tips at the end of the essay about fake news. He says, first,

00:50:51.960 First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it.

00:50:55.560 If you get your news for free, you might as well be the product.

00:50:58.920 So I don't consider this a very good tip because there's tons of paywalled stuff on the internet

00:51:02.920 that is extremely odious.

00:51:04.620 The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you,

00:51:08.780 make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. 1.00

00:51:11.660 Well, first of all, you're going to tell me to do my research, you fucking halfwit. 0.99

00:51:15.360 A guy who like botched the encyclopedia entry for human beings. 1.00

00:51:21.960 A lot of time when people are like, how do we deal with the problem of fake news?

00:51:26.480 People are like, well, try to find reliable news sources. 0.99

00:51:29.060 And it's like, no shit. 0.96

00:51:30.180 Have you thought about reading things that are true? 0.99

00:51:31.780 But also, even if I, Peter, am 100% getting great news, only the best news, no misinformation

00:51:39.100 at all.

00:51:40.040 Right.

00:51:40.240 The problem of fake news is like society-wide.

00:51:43.120 Exactly.

00:51:43.720 That's the question that we're asking.

00:51:45.320 He also, okay, last thing, Peter.

00:51:46.740 He then ends by saying scientists, for their part, need to be far more engaged with current

00:51:52.120 public debates, which is something I actually agree with.

00:51:54.200 I would love more like actual experts to sort of be out in front and talking about areas

00:51:58.060 of expertise. 0.64

00:51:59.060 But then here, you'll never fucking guess where he goes with this, Peter. 0.84

00:52:02.280 So here's the rest of what he says to scientists.

00:52:05.020 Does that mean scientists should start writing science fiction?

00:52:07.960 That is actually not such a bad idea.

00:52:11.020 Scientists shouldn't be saying things that are true.

00:52:12.540 I think the role of science is to say fake things. 0.95

00:52:14.540 I have never wanted a recording to end so fucking badly. 0.88

00:52:17.660 I can't wait. 0.85

00:52:18.600 I can't wait for you to be like, we're done.

00:52:21.400 All right.

00:52:22.180 He says, art plays a key role in shaping people's view of the world.

00:52:25.220 And in the 21st century, science fiction is arguably the most important genre of all,

00:52:30.000 for it shapes how most people understand things like AI, bioengineering, and climate change.

00:52:35.540 We certainly need good science.

00:52:37.060 But from a political perspective, a good science fiction movie is worth far more than an article

00:52:42.180 in science or nature.

00:52:43.660 Is it?

00:52:44.540 Is it?

00:52:45.940 Do I want scientists writing novels or do I want scientists speaking about their expertise in, like, journals? 0.98

00:52:52.360 He's just, like, I have never, this is such rambling moron nonsense that I feel like I'm, like, just stop it. 0.97

00:53:02.720 How is everyone listening to this guy? 0.99

00:53:04.420 Why is this guy, like, famous?

00:53:06.040 What's going on? 0.98

00:53:06.980 Everything that he does is this fucking insane filibustering where he just, like, refuses to address the topic at hand. 0.99

00:53:11.800 But then when he does address the topic, he doesn't have anything smart to say about it. 0.98

00:53:15.920 Doing 4,000 words being like a lot.

00:53:17.760 A lot of things are fake news when you think about it.

00:53:20.460 And then he's like, but also fake news is bad.

00:53:23.720 And then he's just sort of like, there's a long pause.

00:53:26.040 And he's like, maybe more science fiction from scientists.

00:53:30.080 Maybe write a novel.

00:53:31.260 Like, dude.

00:53:32.500 So he can't, he can't even say anything smart in the abstract.

00:53:35.220 And he also can't say anything smart in the specific.

00:53:37.660 Isn't it fake news when you're talking to your dog?

00:53:39.980 who doesn't even understand English.

00:53:42.360 This is crazy, dude. 1.00

00:53:43.860 I had no idea this guy was such a schmuck. 1.00

00:53:46.160 This is so fucked up. 1.00

00:53:46.900 I came across a blog post by a French Revolution scholar 0.99

00:53:49.460 who compared the sections on the French Revolution

00:53:53.020 in Harari's book to the Wikipedia entry.

00:53:55.680 Yeah.

00:53:55.960 Basic stuff like, who was the ruler of France in like this year?

00:53:59.540 He's like, oh yeah, you got this wrong.

00:54:00.980 Right off the bat, he's like, it was better when we were foraging.

00:54:03.520 No, it wasn't.

00:54:04.100 One thing that is genuinely fascinating to me and like kind of chilling

00:54:07.040 is that the same scholar, this French Revolution scholar,

00:54:09.220 points out he's like sub wikipedia knowledge like embarrassing lapses in information in his

00:54:14.380 french revolution chapter but then goes on to recommend the book and is like actually it's a

00:54:18.240 great overview of like early man when he got to my expertise he butchered every single thing but

00:54:23.980 the rest of the book is good and it's like surely surely you understand the mistake you're making

00:54:29.060 this is also like it really is like the superpower of books like this because no one has the academic

00:54:34.660 expertise to know how wrong he is in every area until now he's like step one cognitive revolution

00:54:42.400 that's when we we started thinking and like and people like whoa uh what do you know about fake

00:54:47.940 news he's like i think i think we used to eat more berries and that was better everyone's like

00:54:54.760 whoa so this is us a couple days later because like it literally did give peter a migraine

00:55:00.660 that's true to read all the excerpts from last time that's true but i'm very sensitive sometimes

00:55:05.320 sometimes i sleep for half an hour too little and i get a migraine so you have to put it in

00:55:10.000 that context like the agricultural revolution uval is only one of many factors that's right

00:55:15.240 so we're now getting back to the book this is the part of the book where he talks about the

00:55:19.580 scientific revolution hell yeah he says the relationship between science and technology

00:55:24.020 is a very recent phenomenon prior to 1500 science and technology were totally separate fields that

00:55:30.160 doesn't sound right and just don't worry about it uh he then says this about the scientific

00:55:36.780 revolution the scientific revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge it has been above all a

00:55:42.980 revolution of ignorance the great discovery that launched the scientific revolution was the

00:55:47.280 discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions pre-modern

00:55:52.300 traditions of knowledge such as islam christianity buddhism and confucianism asserted that everything

00:55:58.260 that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty

00:56:04.060 God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed

00:56:09.400 to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gain knowledge by delving into these

00:56:15.220 ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. So we learned that we don't know

00:56:21.120 things, Peter. All right, that, okay. If I'd read this to you originally, maybe you would have fallen

00:56:27.620 for this but now that we know about this book i feel like it's just really obvious that this is

00:56:31.460 just not true i love that he thinks that science started in 1500 this is the first time that's the

00:56:36.660 kind of thing that like i don't know if you were like 15 and you said that i'd be like close buddy

00:56:41.940 you're getting there and he also has this idea that the reason why this happened in europe was

00:56:48.980 because europeans became kind of more curious about the world around them right they they all

00:56:54.680 of a sudden we're like, hey, maybe it's not all in the religious texts. Maybe we can like study

00:56:58.760 things. For this, I talked to David Perry, who is a medievalist and the author of a book called

00:57:04.040 The Bright Ages. Harari's entire explanation here is that when we had religious books, we didn't

00:57:10.260 need to do science because religion was telling us everything about the world. But what David

00:57:14.920 Perry said is that this whole opposition between science and religion is a very modern concept.

00:57:21.960 Medieval religious people didn't think like, I'm not going to do science because it's going

00:57:25.540 to debunk the Bible.

00:57:26.860 They thought science was a way to glorify God.

00:57:30.340 You're like, I want to learn everything I can about the majesty that he produced for

00:57:35.080 us.

00:57:35.280 And I imagine that they assumed, believing everything in like the holy text to be true,

00:57:40.960 that like the more science they did, the more that the Bible or whatever would be validated.

00:57:45.980 To be honest, I don't know that I needed to contact a medievalist for this.

00:57:48.440 I probably could have just said this, but, like, I wanted to give some ammunition to, like, I did work for this part of the episode.

00:57:54.460 You're so studious.

00:57:55.660 I will think of any reason not to contact an expert when I'm doing one of these.

00:58:00.660 And you're calling up experts being like, can you confirm that science did not begin in 1500?

00:58:06.260 And they're like, confirmed.

00:58:07.220 You're like, thank you.

00:58:08.280 I will cite your work in our episode notes.

00:58:10.860 So he then gets kind of deeper into the scientific revolution.

00:58:15.040 His whole kind of framing device for this section of the book, which is a very large section of the book, is why did this happen in Europe?

00:58:22.660 He says that the scientific revolution began in 1492 because they were looking at other parts of the world.

00:58:30.820 Here's his description of why this kicked off the scientific revolution.

00:58:34.280 The discovery of America was the foundational event of the scientific revolution.

00:58:37.800 It not only taught Europeans to favor present observations over past traditions, but the desire to conquer America also obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at breakneck speed.

00:58:48.840 If they really wanted to control the vast new territories, they had to gather enormous amounts of new data about the geography, climate, flora, fauna, languages, cultures, and history of the new continent.

00:59:00.580 Henceforth, not only European geographers, but European scholars in almost all other

00:59:05.240 fields of knowledge began to draw maps with spaces left to fill in.

00:59:09.420 They began to admit that their theories were not perfect and that they were important things

00:59:14.060 that they did not know.

00:59:15.700 He comes back to this quite a bit and quite explicitly that Europeans had a scientific

00:59:19.200 mindset. 0.62

00:59:19.980 Despite the fact that they were scholars, they had no interest in their own fields.

00:59:23.440 And then someone was like, we've discovered a new continent.

00:59:25.240 And they were like, I must learn.

00:59:27.320 The core idea here is that both the scientific revolution and all of the European imperialism

00:59:34.280 that they also embarked upon at the same time were essentially two sides of the same coin.

00:59:38.340 We're getting into some of the politics of this book in this section.

00:59:42.120 European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects in history.

00:59:47.380 Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world.

00:59:50.760 The Arabs, to name one example, did not conquer Egypt, Spain, or India in order to discover

00:59:56.180 something they did not know the romans mongols and aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in

01:00:01.780 search of power and wealth not of knowledge in contrast european imperialists set out to distant

01:00:09.340 shores in hopes of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories knowledge first and then the 0.94

01:00:14.740 territories mostly knowledge man how can you write this shit this is he did include in to his credit 0.96

01:00:21.700 he did say along with new territories like he's admitting that but he's he's sort of like as an 0.95

01:00:26.920 afterthought they wanted territories they mostly wanted to learn mr columbus please find us

01:00:31.980 knowledge in the new world uh all right as time went by the conquest of knowledge and the conquest

01:00:38.080 of territory became ever more tightly intertwined in the 18th and 19th centuries almost every

01:00:44.020 important military expedition that left europe for distant lands had on board scientists who set out

01:00:49.720 not to fight but to make scientific discoveries when napoleon invaded egypt in 1798 he took 165

01:00:57.860 scholars with him among other things they founded an entirely new discipline egyptology which sounds

01:01:05.220 fake but it's real it's real in the sense that that is like a field now but like the study of

01:01:10.480 egypt in some sense to some degree also existed before in egypt and i guess what he's saying is

01:01:19.040 that it seems like colonialism was exploitative. Yes. But can you really blame us for trying to

01:01:25.500 learn? So there's kind of a specific debunking here and like an omni debunking. When it comes

01:01:30.520 to Napoleon's trip to Egypt in 1798, it is true that he brought 165 scientists with him. He also

01:01:36.660 brought 50,000 troops because this was a war to take Egypt back from the British. This was

01:01:43.240 primarily overwhelmingly a military operation. He could have said, hey, British, you can keep this 0.62

01:01:50.740 you can keep this land. Can we send some scholars over? That probably would have worked as well.

01:01:55.540 But he took a different approach. There's a very good review of this book in the Wall Street Journal

01:01:59.200 by Charles C. Mann, who wrote 1491. And he points out that in the early 1400s, there was a Chinese

01:02:05.240 admiral who went to Africa with a bunch of scientists. And when I was chatting to David

01:02:10.840 Perry about this, he pointed out that this was not a military expedition. It was partially an

01:02:15.000 effort to spread Chinese influence, but it was also motivated by a desire to learn about the

01:02:20.420 world. So you've got Harari saying that European imperialism is an example of like mankind's

01:02:26.900 insatiable curiosity, but European imperialism was not an example of that. And the best examples of

01:02:33.740 that are from outside of Europe. Dude, I love that. I love that you're still like getting into

01:02:40.380 the details here you're like why dear listeners europeans were not the first people to think of

01:02:46.740 the idea of learning i might just cut this entire thing who knows hold on i i need to google something

01:02:52.900 really quickly when did they invent algebra all right

01:03:01.880 i'm getting i'm getting 1900 to 1600 bc for the uh invention of algebra but when did they invent

01:03:11.280 the mindset peter that's true they did algebra but they didn't have the algebra mindset this is

01:03:15.240 just such a bizarre framework that like uh it feels like so inherently racist that i don't even

01:03:21.680 know what to say about it beyond that it's just like this is arabs were thinking of algebra for

01:03:27.300 selfish reasons but one day europeans decided to conquer the new world altruistically speaking of

01:03:33.700 a little bit racist peter we have one more excerpt so this is him talking about uh the

01:03:38.940 spanish conquest of central america around 1517 spanish colonists in the caribbean islands began

01:03:45.240 to hear vague rumors about a powerful empire in the center of the mexican mainland a mere four

01:03:50.960 years later the aztec capital was a smoldering ruin the aztec empire was a thing of the past

01:03:56.480 and Hernán Cortés lorded over a vast new Spanish empire in Mexico.

01:04:01.740 That's the curious mindset for you.

01:04:02.980 Out of curiosity.

01:04:04.460 The previous rulers of Central America, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Maya,

01:04:09.040 barely knew South America existed and never made any attempt to subjugate it

01:04:13.360 over the course of 2,000 years.

01:04:16.140 Mindset problems.

01:04:17.220 We're not going to spend time on it, but this is also not true.

01:04:19.720 Yet within little more than 10 years of the Spanish conquest of Mexico,

01:04:22.840 Francisco Pizarro had discovered the Inca Empire in South America, vanquishing it in 1532. Had the 0.98

01:04:30.060 Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them, and had they known what

01:04:35.020 the Spaniards had done to their neighbors, they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more

01:04:39.540 keenly and successfully. Have you thought about resisting? Maybe you should have resisted harder.

01:04:43.120 Every people that has been genocided, mindset problem. Mindset problem. Yeah, why were the

01:04:50.160 Aztecs wiped out, lack of curiosity.

01:04:52.820 Yeah, you should have gotten up earlier. 0.94

01:04:53.960 You should have done more push-ups.

01:04:55.420 We have been here before where you have these books that are, you know, attempting to be

01:04:59.880 these like long historical kind of ideology-free style books.

01:05:04.040 But then the minute you get into them are just like super right-wing, super ideological,

01:05:08.100 right?

01:05:08.260 Like in Steven Pinker's book, it's like, oh, violence declined over the last 10,000 years. 0.98

01:05:11.980 And then by the time you're on like page seven, he's like, that's why feminists should stop 0.99

01:05:15.940 complaining. 0.99

01:05:16.580 They're just like very obviously right-wing projects, right?

01:05:18.980 The twist of this episode and the twist of this book is that this book is mostly a left-wing

01:05:24.220 project. Yuval Harari has pretty good politics. He is gay, openly gay. He lives with his husband.

01:05:31.200 He's like a vegan. He's super into animal rights. Like every single book that he writes has like

01:05:35.840 long, like fairly irrelevant, honestly, digressions about animal rights.

01:05:40.100 Just a dinner party ruiner. I can feel it.

01:05:42.780 And also throughout this entire section on colonialism, he doesn't actually whitewash

01:05:48.860 the crimes of imperialism. 0.97

01:05:51.300 Like he talks about how the Spanish like fucking tricked the Aztecs so they could wipe them 0.99

01:05:55.140 out. 0.99

01:05:55.600 He calls Spanish colonialism a genocide numerous times.

01:05:59.620 He talks about how the Brits deliberately starved 10 million people in India.

01:06:05.780 He also has a fairly good section about like the quote unquote science that they were doing

01:06:11.300 as part of these expeditions was mostly just motivated reasoning so that they could prove

01:06:15.640 that they were more advanced than these peoples, right?

01:06:17.940 Yeah, yeah.

01:06:18.440 And he talks about how most societies justify inequalities, not on the basis of social

01:06:22.980 constructions, but on the basis of a natural order.

01:06:25.440 They're like, oh, we have to be unequal because like these people are just inferior to us.

01:06:29.100 Right.

01:06:29.440 So here's him talking about this.

01:06:31.240 He says, not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities.

01:06:36.300 Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within

01:06:39.860 their society's imagined hierarchy harry potter is a good example is it is removed from his 1.00

01:06:47.460 distinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant muggles he arrives at hogwarts without 1.00

01:06:53.520 any experience in magic it takes him seven books to gain a firm command of his powers and knowledge 1.00

01:06:59.280 of his unique abilities it's very weird to use a fictional example it's clearly just like the

01:07:04.360 first thing that he thought of but like sort of ideologically like i roughly agree with this right

01:07:09.180 Like, if you have downtrodden minorities in society, you can't just expect them to, like, have the same outcomes as everybody else immediately, right?

01:07:15.520 It takes time. 1.00

01:07:16.180 I agree with that.

01:07:16.840 I don't know about the analogy because I have never absorbed even a little bit of Harry Potter. 0.75

01:07:22.800 Even in the late 90s, when the first book came out, I was like, this woman seems weird about gender. 1.00

01:07:28.820 Don't try. 1.00

01:07:29.940 Don't pretend that you knew in advance.

01:07:32.500 In 1999, I was like, this is somehow connected to the presidency of Donald Trump.

01:07:37.220 I can feel it.

01:07:37.840 Speaking of which, he also has, like, a number of good sections about how gender is a social construct.

01:07:42.800 He talks about how, like, it's fake and weird that men have managed to subjugate women in so many societies.

01:07:48.100 Dudes rock, dude.

01:07:48.860 And also, I was ready for his politics outside of the book to be bad, too, but they're pretty good. 0.99

01:07:53.920 Damn. 0.99

01:07:54.260 He's, like, openly pro-trans. 1.00

01:07:55.980 He posts, like, pro-trans stuff on Twitter and gets, like, absolutely cooked in his replies. 0.99

01:08:00.760 But, like, that's fairly cool and brave to do in 2025 on fucking Twitter. 0.99

01:08:05.180 I'm going to be honest. 1.00

01:08:05.800 This sucks. 0.97

01:08:06.260 can we just move to the next thing that he is bad at i was also pretty surprised by this he's 0.98

01:08:11.380 i wouldn't say good but better than the median davos pundit on gaza stuff he's israeli right

01:08:17.960 yeah he's israeli yeah yeah but he's kind of always been part of like the israeli left and

01:08:21.580 he started out quite bad like post october 7th he signed an open letter saying like the left is

01:08:27.300 supporting hamas but then by summer of 2024 he appears at a rally where he he basically pushes

01:08:33.700 back against the Israeli right and says like, no, people have the right to live in peace and

01:08:38.500 happiness on the land where they were born. And then in August of 2025, I found this from like

01:08:42.960 a pro-Palestine Instagram account, posted a clip of him on a podcast talking about how the greatest

01:08:50.300 like threat to Judaism right now is the far right drift in Israel. He says, this could destroy 2,000

01:08:57.180 years of Jewish thinking and culture and existence. The worst case scenario is the potential of an 0.89

01:09:01.660 ethnic cleansing campaign resulting in the expulsion of 2 million Palestinians and the 0.80

01:09:05.900 disintegration of Israeli democracy, and the creation of a new Israel under an ideology of

01:09:11.060 Jewish supremacy under the worship of anti-Jewish values like power and violence. Given the fact 0.66

01:09:16.160 that he was like, colonialism is because we're so smart. Right. It didn't feel like we were going

01:09:22.460 towards a moderate position in Israel, but okay. So what's so interesting to me is then the question

01:09:26.680 becomes, how does a guy who has like pretty good values and pretty good politics write this fucking 0.99

01:09:32.440 drivel? I think I have two answers to this question. The first problem is that it's very 0.99

01:09:37.660 clear that he values a good story over anything else. He came up with this explanation that like

01:09:43.560 it's the scientific mindset. And then he just tries to cram like all events in the last 500

01:09:48.380 years into this theory. He says later in this section, the native peoples of America were not

01:09:53.900 the only ones to pay a heavy price for their parochial outlook. The great empires of Asia

01:09:58.700 very quickly heard that Europeans had discovered something big, yet they displayed very little

01:10:02.960 interest in these discoveries. So paid a heavy price for their parochial outlook. I don't know 0.84

01:10:08.260 if that is how I would describe the years 1500 to like 1960. I don't know. Oh God. Parochial

01:10:15.200 outlook. That's pretty wild. Mindset problems. The crescendo of this like storytelling thing

01:10:21.560 is the end of his colonialism section.

01:10:24.700 He says,

01:10:25.320 Only in the 20th century

01:10:26.620 did non-European cultures

01:10:28.260 adopt a truly global vision.

01:10:30.340 This was one of the crucial factors

01:10:31.580 that led to the collapse

01:10:32.900 of European hegemony.

01:10:34.660 In the Algerian War of Independence,

01:10:36.480 Algerian guerrillas

01:10:37.480 defeated a French army

01:10:38.540 with an overwhelming numerical,

01:10:40.460 technological,

01:10:41.540 and economic advantage. 0.59

01:10:43.400 The Algerians prevailed

01:10:44.480 because they were supported

01:10:45.540 by a global anti-colonial network

01:10:47.400 and because they worked out

01:10:48.980 how to harness the world's media

01:10:50.540 to their cause.

01:10:51.560 as well as public opinion in France itself.

01:10:54.280 The defeat that little North Vietnam inflicted on the American Colossus

01:10:58.280 was based on a similar strategy. 0.70

01:11:00.160 These guerrilla forces showed that even superpowers could be defeated

01:11:03.040 if a local struggle became a global cause.

01:11:06.780 Basically, they changed their mindset.

01:11:08.120 I like that. 1.00

01:11:08.560 The idea that the Vietnamese were like, we must expand our mind. 0.98

01:11:13.920 Let's think global. 0.99

01:11:15.120 You could argue that some of the decolonization wave in Africa in the 50s and 60s

01:11:19.060 was because countries and independence movements were looking at independence of other countries.

01:11:23.180 They're like, oh, hey, this is possible for us.

01:11:24.940 But these were fundamentally nationalist movements.

01:11:27.180 I mean, I just read a book about the history of the Vietnam War.

01:11:30.080 Ho Chi Minh was like much more of a nationalist than he was a communist.

01:11:33.120 The reason they succeeded was not because of like a global vision.

01:11:36.960 It was because Vietnamese people care more about what happens to Vietnam than the Americans or the French.

01:11:42.480 There was a narrative, of course, that this is all part of a global anti-colonial struggle or whatever.

01:11:47.380 But that's not what drives it on the ground.

01:11:50.220 I think it's the opposite.

01:11:51.200 There's also, I mean, a lot of stuff about like how France was totally decimated by World

01:11:54.760 War II. 0.98

01:11:55.180 It was fucking broke. 0.99

01:11:56.400 Domestic politicians were super unpopular for trying to send a bunch of money and a 0.99

01:11:59.720 bunch of effort over to Algeria.

01:12:01.760 People were just like really sick of it and it didn't make logistical sense.

01:12:04.540 There's also just like kind of non-ideological reasons for this too.

01:12:07.740 Right. 0.79

01:12:07.980 I wouldn't say nationalism is the only reason why this happened, but it's also very silly

01:12:11.640 to say that like the mindset shift is the only reason why it happened.

01:12:14.760 Like the Japanese, notably, insular. 0.86

01:12:18.820 That starts unraveling in like the 1800s, I think, not the 1900s.

01:12:23.760 I don't know.

01:12:24.340 I feel like his timeline is just made up.

01:12:25.880 This is the problem.

01:12:26.660 It's like if you have specific historical knowledge of like a single country, you're

01:12:30.980 like, I don't know about that.

01:12:32.120 Yeah.

01:12:32.400 No, I'm literally like, well, I did Japanese politics in my senior year of college and

01:12:38.000 this does not align with what I learned.

01:12:40.680 But you see, once he's locked himself into this mindset explanation, he needs to bring this one, this really pat explanation up to the present somehow.

01:12:50.620 And so he throws in this stuff that is just like laughable.

01:12:53.080 I mean, I am just eyeballing this.

01:12:55.020 Also what he is doing.

01:12:55.900 Also what he is doing.

01:12:56.580 But if you had to choose between which is a larger factor in these struggles, nationalism or like a global mindset, I'd say nationalism by a mile.

01:13:06.180 Yeah, exactly.

01:13:06.720 So I think that is one of the reasons why this book has like some fairly bad politics.

01:13:13.740 The other reason is that he has this need to place himself above politics.

01:13:19.540 He has to operate at this 30,000-foot level all the time.

01:13:23.300 So he has like another section about colonialism that is like a little bit more detailed.

01:13:28.500 He talks much more about the British.

01:13:30.520 So here's this.

01:13:31.540 The British conquest and occupation of India cost the lives of millions of Indians and

01:13:35.640 was responsible for the continuous humiliation and exploitation of hundreds of millions more.

01:13:40.260 Yet many Indians adopted, with the zest of converts, Western ideas such as self-determination

01:13:44.920 and human rights, and were dismayed when the British refused to live up to their own declared

01:13:48.840 values by granting native Indians either equal rights as British subjects or independence.

01:13:53.500 The modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire. 0.86

01:13:56.720 English is still the subcontinent's lingua franca.

01:13:59.320 Indians are passionate cricket players and tea drinkers, and both game and beverage are

01:14:03.820 British legacies.

01:14:04.680 How many Indians today would want to call a vote to divest themselves of democracy, English, the railway network, the legal system, cricket and tea on the grounds that they are imperial legacies? 0.93

01:14:14.120 And if they did, wouldn't the very act of calling a vote to decide the issue demonstrate their debt to their former overlords? 0.94

01:14:22.720 Wouldn't it?

01:14:24.000 I like creating like a pseudo hypocrisy straw man.

01:14:27.420 He also he has like photos of the book.

01:14:29.120 And one of the photo captions is of this train station in Mumbai that was built by the British in the 1800s.

01:14:33.440 and he's like the modern day rulers changed the name but they kept the building yeah it's just

01:14:39.000 expensive to build new buildings man i don't think that's like hypocrisy this stuff always gets

01:14:42.920 presented as if it is like a necessary trade-off like as if you needed the colonial violence to 1.00

01:14:50.360 get the tea and cricket it just doesn't make any fucking sense i i hate this fucking bullshit dude 1.00

01:14:55.420 i i hate this like well when you think about it like wasn't it good that we like that's all there 0.99

01:15:00.940 that's all this is is like well wasn't it kind of good or at least like wasn't it good enough that

01:15:07.120 like maybe we don't have to feel bad about it it's very funny that he has this whole thing about how

01:15:11.380 farming was a mistake when it comes to colonial violence he's like but now they're playing

01:15:16.000 cricket so who knows i i do want to dive a little bit more into this one this is also the thing that

01:15:21.780 struck me and also it's been a pet peeve of mine this idea that like human rights are western

01:15:25.960 concepts, right? And without us, these countries wouldn't have democracy and human rights. So for

01:15:31.180 this, I read a really interesting article called Are Human Rights Western by Arvin Sharma, and also

01:15:35.760 Are the Principles of Human Rights Western Ideas by Surya P. Sabati. The argument that he's making

01:15:40.980 is like, frankly, pretty asinine regardless. But India is the worst possible place that you could 1.00

01:15:46.220 make this argument about, right? Because India, we have written records from India from thousands

01:15:52.000 of years ago, right? We have Sanskrit records. India has like one of the longest human rights

01:15:57.240 traditions of like any region of the world. So early Indian republics were some of the first

01:16:03.040 places to have democracy. Hinduism was one of the first religions to kind of refuse to make the 1.00

01:16:08.780 distinction between believers and non-believers and basically admit the equality of all peoples,

01:16:13.600 even if they are not the same religion as us. This is something that Christianity took like

01:16:16.920 2,000 more years to do. In the 4th century BC, there's something called the Arthashastra,

01:16:22.340 which was like a sort of an early description of how constitutional monarchy should work.

01:16:27.580 I feel like people act like democracy was the most novel concept ever, as opposed to like

01:16:33.920 something that ruling classes opposed. It's not like 2,000 years ago, people didn't like

01:16:40.560 understand the concept of humans having input into their own lives. And frankly,

01:16:46.920 if you put me in a blank slate civilization in 2020, by 2025, I think I would have thought of

01:16:54.720 democracy. I just remembered that I was running that bit. But what they point out in these

01:16:59.280 articles is that like every ancient civilization basically came to this on their own. In this

01:17:04.660 article, she says, if we look at the practices of all major ancient civilizations, we find that

01:17:09.400 every one of them had a system designed to protect the individual's safety and dignity,

01:17:13.280 both in times of war and peace so this isn't something that like you need tens of millions

01:17:18.160 of people to be starved to death by the british to get right the other fucking bizarre thing about

01:17:22.720 this argument is that like well you may not like it but the brits brought concepts of human rights 0.91

01:17:26.960 and democracy to india brits were not practicing human rights in india right like i'm beating my

01:17:33.220 wife and i'm like well from me she learned the principle of non-violence right this is the

01:17:37.080 funniest part of these arguments that like through violent subjugation right we somehow

01:17:45.140 taught them human rights it's like yeah not in practice but we had the books about it these guys

01:17:50.800 have these amazing principles which they are not practicing on me it's just so insulting on its

01:17:56.340 face right but he has he has to be above it all right so at the end of the section he's talking

01:18:02.740 about sort of like various debates about colonialism. He says, the first step is to

01:18:07.120 acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past

01:18:11.820 into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. This sort of refusal to take a stand on like various

01:18:17.780 contemporary political debates leads you to say like, it's impossible to say whether starving

01:18:22.680 10 million people to death is bad. Yeah. That's the thing is you don't need to do this whole good

01:18:27.460 guy, bad guy thing. Yeah. I actually don't need him to go out of his way to be like colonialism

01:18:32.540 comma which was bad comma but he is going out of his way to say that it's not bad when you're

01:18:39.940 thinking about the legacy of andrew jackson or whatever like you don't have to hand it to him

01:18:43.980 you know it seems like he's coming into every single one of these things and just being like

01:18:47.440 i have to position myself as not taking a stand on this right and then he can he kind of reasons

01:18:52.180 his way into that well you have one side of the scale and it's the deaths of millions of people 0.99

01:18:57.040 and the other side of the scale is a stupid form of baseball that doesn't make any fucking sense 1.00

01:19:03.220 what what if you what if you fucking toss the baseball on the ground and it took five days 0.99

01:19:07.940 and we're gonna be here for a work week so i have a couple other examples of his weird 0.94

01:19:13.180 above it all orientation so here is a section on climate change oh so heat's bad and yet we use it

01:19:22.320 to bake. All right. He says, why are so many people afraid that we are running out of energy?

01:19:28.780 Why do they warn of disaster if we exhaust all available fossil fuels? Clearly the world does

01:19:34.200 not lack energy. All we lack is the knowledge necessary to harness and convert it to our needs.

01:19:40.260 I love him. I've come back around. I like it now. I guess that's why I've literally never heard

01:19:47.380 someone say we're running out of energy right there they mean that in in as a shorthand like 0.98

01:19:52.640 running out of fossil fuels and burning fossil fuels is bad god damn dude he's pissing me off

01:19:57.820 i was going to use this as a satire of him but this actually does appear in the book so here's 0.95

01:20:01.380 another one also about climate change he says many call this process the destruction of nature

01:20:06.460 but it's not really destruction it's change nature cannot be destroyed 65 million years ago

01:20:13.220 an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs but in doing so opened the way forward for mammals

01:20:18.200 today a single theme park has brought them back to life

01:20:22.580 today humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself

01:20:31.160 but other organisms are doing quite well rats and cockroaches for example are in their heyday 1.00

01:20:36.940 you fucking idiot you think climate change is bad you're worried about human beings and 1.00

01:20:43.100 mammals what about the rats what about cockroaches cockroaches are thriving uh the heat death of the 1.00

01:20:49.440 universe isn't going to eliminate nature there will still be nature it will just be an eternal

01:20:56.280 nothing it's like who are you even arguing with here what is the point what are you correcting

01:21:01.280 and like what what have you added to the debate like okay fine we're not it's not destroying

01:21:05.840 nature it's changing nature fine okay now what god my theory reigns supreme this is just a really

01:21:11.720 pedantic guy on a forum in the aughts who has somehow broken through like he has made it to

01:21:18.020 mainstream discourse so the the final parts of the book are just like him talking about the future

01:21:24.400 right of like the future of humanity homo sapiens what does the present mean for homo sapiens right

01:21:29.360 so because he kind of goes around like predicting the future now i thought it was useful to look at

01:21:34.800 some of the predictions that he makes in this book uh-huh so uh his first prediction i'll just

01:21:40.700 send it to you as the 21st century unfolds nationalism is fast losing ground oops nailed

01:21:46.300 it more and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political

01:21:50.220 authority rather than members of a particular nationality and that safeguarding human rights

01:21:54.780 and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics

01:21:58.680 we're not kind of nationalism folks you just got end of history buddy like this is 2011 he writes

01:22:04.220 this 20 years after the soviet union collapses and you're just like this is forever this is a 0.82

01:22:11.300 guy that goes around like high altitude panels and shit talking about what what is going to 0.96

01:22:15.800 happen in like 50 or 100 years and here's him totally fucking up a prediction about what 0.96

01:22:20.260 happened five years after his book this is also one of those things that we've talked about before 0.66

01:22:24.780 which is like no one is good at these sorts of predictions no like some people will get it right

01:22:29.960 But that's because there's a lot of people out there predicting it.

01:22:32.620 So he also says this in 2017.

01:22:36.920 So in this struggle against calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, scales are tipping in humanity's favor.

01:22:43.080 It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them in the service of some ruthless ideology.

01:22:52.700 Early lab leak truther.

01:22:53.900 The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over.

01:22:57.760 But we may come to miss it.

01:22:59.040 Wasn't it fun when we had epidemics?

01:23:00.720 Well, no, he is correct in the sense that we did not stand helpless. 1.00

01:23:04.680 Were we grossly incompetent and a big bunch of fucking dummies? 0.99

01:23:08.780 Yes, but we were not helpless. 0.99

01:23:10.780 So once the pandemic starts, a lot of news organizations contact him to be like,

01:23:14.400 what do you think this means for the future?

01:23:16.560 Like a lot of people like ask him to predict stuff.

01:23:18.720 He says the worst thing to come out of the pandemic will be a massive government surveillance state.

01:23:25.220 So here is him in the FT in 2020.

01:23:30.860 Consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet

01:23:35.800 that monitors body temperature and heart rate 24 hours a day.

01:23:39.620 The resulting data is hoarded and analyzed by government algorithms.

01:23:43.220 The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it.

01:23:46.620 And they will also know where you have been and who you have met.

01:23:49.560 I think it's safe to say this did not happen.

01:23:51.400 No.

01:23:51.580 The sort of conventional wisdom was that, like, countries were going to use these emergency orders to just keep various surveillance programs in place.

01:23:58.480 This really did not happen.

01:23:59.780 Like, even China, which had, like, one of the most strict COVID lockdowns, did not keep it, right?

01:24:03.540 It became politically unviable in most of these countries.

01:24:06.640 What we had was a bottom-up overreaction to non-totalitarianism, right?

01:24:11.280 This totalitarian crackdown that never came.

01:24:13.500 But how do you know that it wasn't that reaction that freed us from the crackdowns?

01:24:19.300 Well, this is what's so interesting to me. He writes his long essay for the FT predicting what's going to happen. At no point does he say anything about misinformation, anything about existing anti-vax movements. He just completely fucked this up. He is obsessed with this idea of biometric surveillance, that we now have the technology where a government could monitor your body temperature and your heart rate.

01:24:40.400 Do we have this technology?

01:24:41.580 I mean, theoretically, right, if you have, like, an Apple Watch or something, theoretically, the government could, like, hack into that, I guess.

01:24:46.840 The problem with this is that, like, monitoring your body temperature and your heart rate wouldn't give a government very much information.

01:24:53.260 It's just like, Michael's jacking off again.

01:24:55.260 99% of the data is just guys jacking off.

01:24:58.540 But it's so weird how the sort of the predictions that he makes in Sapiens are, like, almost the same as the predictions that he makes now, despite, like, many things changing in the interim.

01:25:06.100 So he also, in an interview, he mentions we may have biometric monitoring that is so good that it could have predicted his own homosexuality before he realized it.

01:25:16.040 Yeah.

01:25:16.200 That it might be so good at these like little, you know, micro expressions on your face, like your little webcam, whatever.

01:25:21.840 Yeah. 1.00

01:25:22.100 Your fucking gay little micro expressions. 1.00

01:25:25.780 Your gay ass face, right? 1.00

01:25:27.620 He says North Korea might be able to, quote, gauge what each and every citizen is thinking in each and every moment. 1.00

01:25:35.860 how so like if you're looking at a portrait of kim jong-un it could tell that you're not being

01:25:41.760 like deferential enough or like worshipy enough no this is just not technology that exists remotely

01:25:46.820 like it's like you're worrying about minority report and it's like we're so far from that

01:25:51.920 technology that any concern you have is like almost inherently misplaced there's a good

01:25:58.720 article in current affairs called the dangerous populous science of yuval noah harari by darshana

01:26:03.960 Narayanan, who interviews like an actual like researcher who does work on this, who points out

01:26:09.060 that like the problem with all of this stuff is everybody's biometric markers are different. And

01:26:13.480 so what affects your blood pressure and affects my blood pressure, it might be you being happy

01:26:17.480 and me being sad. People are so different that we can't really do this kind of thing. Like we're

01:26:23.320 nowhere near being able to do this. He also has a bizarre thing about a genetic catalog that parents

01:26:30.120 would be able to like find out that their daughter is going to have chronic depression

01:26:33.720 your son is gay but again it's like we don't really have like a gene for depression or a

01:26:41.480 gene for gayness that isn't really how genes work it's like probabilities i i love that he 0.52

01:26:46.180 puts it in terms of his own homosexuality where he's like if only the government had told me that

01:26:51.420 i'm gay also the funny thing is if you want to know if somebody's gay you can look at their 0.99

01:26:54.140 fucking google search history you don't need to monitor their body or whatever he's a teenager 0.99

01:26:58.360 who's just jacking off to gay porn he's like am i i don't know your government bracelet is like 1.00

01:27:05.220 yes also he had i don't know if you remember but in in the initial thing that we read he 0.99

01:27:10.060 this kind of overview of the book he says like we we now stand poised on the verge of achieving

01:27:15.100 everlasting life i want you to read something from uh homo deus which is his book after sapiens

01:27:21.220 he's gonna refer to two people here kurtzweil and de gray both of those guys are like a huge 0.81

01:27:26.740 fucking bag of worms but the only thing you need to know is that they're both basically tech guys 0.96

01:27:30.620 who have like startups dedicated to exploring immortality essentially when he released sapiens 0.99

01:27:36.080 he probably was like let's call it homo sapiens and the publisher was like let's keep the word

01:27:39.440 homo out of it but then he sold millions of copies and he was like for book two he was like

01:27:43.880 we're putting homo in the title he's like uh elon with x.com he's like we're doing it it didn't take

01:27:50.080 last time i have the i have the power now and i'm putting homo in the title okay so here's this 0.52

01:27:56.600 Some experts believe that humans will overcome death by 2200. 0.64

01:28:00.900 Others say 2100.

01:28:02.520 I'm agnostic about whether we get to everlasting life like super soon or like in like a medium

01:28:06.240 term.

01:28:06.640 You know, maybe, maybe this is my limited imagination, but I'm pretty sure that we're

01:28:10.840 not going to ever solve death. 0.99

01:28:12.080 This is another superpower of the book is because you're making predictions for fucking 0.98

01:28:15.100 2100 and 2200. 0.99

01:28:17.140 Yeah.

01:28:17.460 I can't really debunk that, right? 0.95

01:28:18.660 Because who fucking knows where we'll be at that time.

01:28:20.320 What if we figure out extending life way before we figure out the biometric that tells you 1.00

01:28:27.080 you're gay and you're just a 200-year-old guy and the government's like, you are gay. 0.96

01:28:32.380 I'm just like a body and like a breathing machine. 1.00

01:28:34.620 Yeah, you're a floating head in a jar and you find out you're gay. 1.00

01:28:41.140 Kurzweil and de Grey are even more sanguine. 0.97

01:28:43.600 They maintain that anyone possessing a healthy body and a healthy bank account in 2050 will

01:28:49.360 have a serious shot at immortality by cheating death a decade at a time for sure every 10 years

01:28:57.460 or so we will march into the clinic and receive a makeover treatment that will not only cure

01:29:02.300 illnesses but will also regenerate decaying tissues and upgrade hands eyes and brains

01:29:08.720 before the next treatment is due doctors will have invented a plethora of new medicines

01:29:13.240 upgrades and gadgets if kurzweil and degray are right there may already be some immortals walking

01:29:19.420 next to you on the street at least if you happen to be walking down wall street or fifth avenue

01:29:23.960 pretty convincing stuff 2050 we're all about to get the measles again but

01:29:27.460 the thing is i mean me and aubrey talk about this on maintenance phase all the time but this whole

01:29:33.080 thing of like rich guys saying that we're on the verge of cheating death yeah yeah sure it's very

01:29:37.540 telling that both of these guys run startups that make money from the idea that like we're gonna

01:29:42.440 cheat death right these are marketing claims that millionaire guy who's in his 40s who's like 0.99

01:29:47.220 rubbing his child semen on his face or whatever the fuck he's doing yeah yeah in every interview 0.99

01:29:52.100 he's like this is how i've mastered looking 20 years younger and it's like actually dude right 1.00

01:29:57.040 i hate to break it to you but you look like shit you look two-thirds as good as like 80 percent of 0.99

01:30:02.460 the circuit gays in their 40s that i know right congratulations i know guys who are fully addicted 1.00

01:30:07.660 to cocaine who look better than you i feel like both of these guys are just getting grifted by

01:30:11.200 their own doctors yeah yeah brian johnson his doctors are charging him a thousand dollars an

01:30:15.440 hour when you look at his actual regime it's literally just like intermittent fasting and

01:30:19.780 like a shitload of vitamin supplements you're not gonna live forever on like more vitamins

01:30:23.840 you're actually probably like it feels a lot like you're gonna die soon right that's just like the

01:30:28.840 vibes i have but then i also so i don't know you can't really debunk this stuff because again it's 0.79

01:30:32.960 so far in the fucking future that like whatever maybe we'll have an everlasting life i don't give 0.99

01:30:36.240 shit. But these predictions for the future and the way that he presents them unlocked for me 0.99

01:30:41.340 what he is doing for these Davos people and why he is so popular among this set. So it's really

01:30:47.160 interesting to me and really telling that all of his predictions for the future, he couches in

01:30:51.500 progressive terms, right? He's like, if you have the money, you'll have everlasting life, right?

01:30:55.940 And he sounds very like concerned about it. A lot of the other guys that we've talked about,

01:30:59.440 they're basically fleecing poor people, right? The rich dad, poor dad guy is like telling you,

01:31:03.260 you can buy real estate. He's taking advantage of ignorance, right? Whereas Yuval Harari is talking

01:31:08.780 to some of the most powerful and rich people in the world. And I don't think that he's fleecing

01:31:12.920 them. I think that he's giving them something. I think what he is giving them is a way to feel

01:31:18.320 like they are engaging in kind of progressive debates. They're a good person because they're

01:31:23.980 so concerned about inequality in a hundred years. All of the people who Yuval Harari is talking to

01:31:29.400 are beneficiaries of huge inequality now. And none of these people are doing anything about

01:31:35.260 inequality. That's what he is giving them, a license to pull back from present politics and

01:31:41.400 to act like they are not only above present politics. Oh, who cares who wins the next

01:31:45.900 election? In the 500-year timeline, it doesn't matter if Donald Trump wins again, right? He's

01:31:50.680 giving them that, but also letting them still feel like they care, right? They're like, I'm

01:31:55.080 super concerned about inequality. I talked about inequality all day.

01:31:57.700 This is sort of like Elon Musk's spoilers, but it's something I've been thinking about reading his biography.

01:32:04.140 Totally.

01:32:04.380 A lot of these rich guys, they replace the concept of philanthropy with the sort of prospect that innovation will at one point in the future solve a lot of these problems.

01:32:19.620 So, yeah, I don't put money toward inequality, but we're building these little robots that are going to usher in a golden age.

01:32:29.740 You also get to feel smart while you're doing this, right?

01:32:32.980 Because, again, this above-it-all orientation—

01:32:34.920 Anyone can give money away.

01:32:36.440 Right.

01:32:36.700 And also, like, you're concerned about climate change.

01:32:38.840 I'm actually concerned about when the sun becomes a red giant and swallows the earth.

01:32:42.720 True.

01:32:42.980 I'm actually a bit more moral than you for, like, trying to solve this problem, and you're just focused on climate change.

01:32:48.320 You're worried about minutia.

01:32:49.840 Right, right, exactly. 0.94

01:32:50.820 Politics now are for the little people and they're just haggling over little details. 0.57

01:32:57.260 We are the guys who are thinking about the big problems and we're going to solve them and blah, blah, blah.

01:33:03.020 The other thing that really bugs me about this whole kind of Davos set is like I think because they're so – they fetishize ideas so much.

01:33:09.880 Like we want the next big idea, right?

01:33:12.160 But the solutions to inequality, we already kind of know on the merits what the solution is.

01:33:16.860 You tax rich people and you give money to like various programs to help poor people.

01:33:20.060 Business.

01:33:20.720 Yeah.

01:33:21.260 Credits to small businesses that you earn over a five-year period.

01:33:26.760 Are any of these people doing anything about cuts to SNAP right now, cuts to Medicare?

01:33:31.180 They pontificate about a future where this is feasible.

01:33:34.980 Right.

01:33:35.260 But at every point when it might be, when it's like, hey, couldn't we just give people

01:33:40.700 a couple grand?

01:33:41.880 Right.

01:33:42.060 All of the Davos people will wring their hands and talk about how it's a mistake.

01:33:45.500 And find an excuse to be against it.

01:33:47.600 That is how it has always worked and is almost certainly how it's always going to work.

01:33:52.500 And until we, you know, through a series of podcasts overthrow capitalism.

01:33:59.060 So ending of the book, we have a chapter called How to Be Happy.

01:34:02.780 He talks about the question of whether all of this advancement over the course of human history has really made us any better off.

01:34:08.900 He settles at the end of the book on like a Buddhist solution to happiness.

01:34:14.580 Is this another like Sam Harris thing where he's just like, by the way, I've enjoyed meditating.

01:34:19.660 Literally, Peter, this is where he goes with this.

01:34:22.520 He is officially an atheist, but he like talks a lot about Buddhism and he meditates two hours a day.

01:34:28.020 Two hours a day?

01:34:29.480 If feminism can be a religion, then I feel like me watching YouTube for two hours a day can be meditating.

01:34:33.920 It's meditative for me to scroll through TikTok and see half sports highlights and half mentally ill 24-year-olds telling me about politics. 0.50

01:34:45.420 He ends this chapter in kind of the book with this, he's sort of pretending like this isn't advice, but it basically is advice. 0.58

01:34:52.660 So here's this.

01:34:53.500 Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions.

01:34:59.560 Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent

01:35:04.040 of our inner feelings.

01:35:06.720 Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them and the more

01:35:11.340 we suffer.

01:35:12.360 Buddha's recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but

01:35:16.640 also the pursuit of inner feelings.

01:35:18.900 Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes, and dislikes.

01:35:24.400 They consequently spend their life avoiding some kinds of feelings and pursuing others.

01:35:27.920 they never realize that they are not their feelings, that their relentless pursuit of

01:35:32.260 particular feelings just traps them in misery. Okay, final paragraph of the book. So this is

01:35:37.220 after he talks about like the we're going to live forever, all the ways that science is kind of

01:35:41.120 making Homo sapiens irrelevant. The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction

01:35:45.360 scientists are taking. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real

01:35:50.480 question facing us is not what do we want to become, but what do we want to want? Those who

01:35:55.980 are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought what do you think about

01:36:00.120 this this weird ending he's posed some like interesting existential questions you know

01:36:04.040 what do you what do you want to want is uh is an interesting way to way to frame this sort of stuff 0.98

01:36:09.220 but in the context of the end of this book uh it's uh i'm doing the jack off motion fuck off

01:36:16.540 with this i sort of love it because it is both utterly incoherent and totally perfect as an 0.74

01:36:23.300 ending to this book. Right. He's looking across the vast scope of history, all of humanity,

01:36:29.660 tens of thousands of years. And the only way he can think to end the story is with an individual

01:36:35.920 prescription to disengage. Yeah. Why are you even seeking happiness? Look inward. Yeah. Like you

01:36:41.840 should just get rid of the desire to be happy. And like, honestly, if his faith is important to him,

01:36:46.640 if his idea is important to him, that's totally fine. But as like an organizing principle of a

01:36:50.220 society. And as anything with any kind of scale, you're just telling people to basically disengage

01:36:55.020 and to disengage in a way that presents themselves as above it all, right? And lets them tell the

01:36:59.380 story about themselves of like, oh, you're trying to be happy? Well, I've actually graduated from

01:37:03.700 that kind of thinking. I'm actually so much more mature than that.

01:37:05.860 Yeah. It seems like he's talking in very material, dumb and bullshitty, but material terms 0.98

01:37:14.340 about the future of humanity right he's like we can potentially extend life and then like 0.96

01:37:20.760 just stumbles his way into like yeah i don't know free yourself from want i gotta go and

01:37:26.380 it's what it feels like like you just came up with this and was like oh yeah okay i've been 0.52

01:37:31.020 writing a lot this year because i have like the newsletter and shit and so i i totally get it 0.96

01:37:35.760 yeah you've gotten through part one and two and you're like how do i wrap this bitch time to hit 0.86

01:37:39.940 with the way too broad conclusion yeah yeah you've been recording your podcast for four and a half 0.99

01:37:44.640 hours you're like how do i get out of this i just need a fucking little joke to end with who cares 0.73

01:37:48.200 the main question is whether people know the truth about themselves right i mean what is that 0.98

01:37:52.080 and that's why we need the government thing that tells you whether you're gay or not 0.65

01:37:55.620 mandatory bracelets and the only the only purpose they serve is to tell you your sexuality

01:38:09.940 Thank you.

If Books Could Kill - November 20, 2025

Sapiens

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