Original subtitles

The big problem of science

is science is not a very good storyteller,

but humans are motivated to action

by the stories, not by the facts.

What are the main issues

that concern voters in the United States,

in Europe, in other parts of the world?

So, immigration is one of the top issues everywhere,

whereas climate change, many people just deny it.

The attraction of immigration

is it's... Again, it's a biological drama.

The drama that we live in one tribe

and suddenly somebody comes from another tribe to our territory,

this is something that is familiar to

chimpanzees and to wolves and to rabbits,

"Ah, there is these strange rabbits coming here,

they will take our grass".

They understand it, it's very, very deep.

When I meet Yuval Noah Harari,

I am struck by his extraordinary precision

in observing his surroundings.

With humour and a razor-sharp mind,

he tries to inform the world and initiate the discourse

on the global challenges of our time.

Harari is an author, historian and philosopher,

holds a doctorate from Oxford

and is Professor of History at the University of Jerusalem.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,

Homo Deus and Nexus have become global bestsellers.

Be there when I meet Yuval Noah Harari!

Welcome to The Book of my Life.

My name is Jagoda Marinic. I'm a writer and host of the show,

and I'm happy to lead you through a conversation about

books, life and the world.

My today's guest is a very special guest

who's deeply into explaining and understanding this world.

Welcome to the show, Yuval Harari.

Thank you. It's good to be here.

It's good to have you here.

And I'm very curious

because I have been, yeah, listening to

your interviews, reading your books, like so many people,

and I'm interested to find out

about the role that reading played in your life.

When did you understand that books

will have this important role that they have in your life?

I began to read at a very early age.

I think the first book I've read, surprisingly enough,

was a history of the world for children.

It's a huge, huge book full of images

and... you know,

paintings, and I can still kind of remember now

many of the images in that book

about people in the Stone Age

and mediaeval knights on crusades and things like that.

And do you remember your age?

I was, like, four years old.

At first, I just looked at the pictures.

I didn't read the book, and

I asked my parents

to help me decipher what are the signs

next to the pictures.

And then I read it, like, I don't know,

probably hundreds of times.

I would go over it again and again and again.

From history went actually to mythology.

So I had another book which really influenced me,

which was, I think, Edith Hamilton's Greek mythology,

and it had no pictures in it.

This was just... just text, just words.

But the words formed these also incredible...

incredibly powerful images

of, you know, people turning into trees

and gods creating things out of nothing.

And it really kind of...

lit up my imagination.

How old were you then?

Probably it was a few years later, I suppose I was, like,

seven maybe, seven or eight.

So may I try to imagine this young seven-year-old boy.

So, I mean, you must have had tonnes of other books

with fairy tales and

things that are more "child-appropriate",

as we say today.

And... but then what would stick to your fantasy as a kid

was actually the real history and the mythology.

The two things I'm still dealing with right now

- as an author and as a scholar. - Yeah. That's amazing. Right.

But, you know, these are the ways that we try to explain the world

to ourselves.

And were you fascinated by the other books as well,

or were you so focused as a child already?

No, I read a lot of books.

I mean, I've read basically every book we had...

We didn't have a big library at home,

but we had a couple of, I guess, a dozen books, quite eclectic,

and I just read all of them,

I mean, without exception.

Some quite strange ones, I guess, as well.

Do you remember the funniest book you read as a kid?

The book that made you laugh?

There weren't many funny...

There were a couple of books by

Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon.

We had two or three of his books and I also read and reread them

quite a number... And they were funny,

but probably they had a... not as much

as impact as the mythology and the history.

So for many people, it's you either like science

or you like the storytelling.

So with you, it was very early

that you seemed to want to connect these things.

So let me first understand, why was mythology so important

for you as a kid?

It was instinctive. It was just trying to understand the world.

And the way that humans try to understand the world

at first was mythology.

I mean, this is the way that people thousands of years ago

tried to understand why the things are as they are,

the mysteries of the universe,

of the human body, of the human mind.

So, mythology was the main vehicle.

And humans are storytelling animals.

We think in stories,

so that they come more easily to us.

It's much... When you reach, say, the 21st century

and you read the latest books about, say, quantum mechanics

that are trying to explain to you

how the universe works on a physical level,

or you read books in cell biology

and genetics,

this is... this is so complicated.

I mean, our brains are really not

really evolved or adapted

to thinking in those terms. This is why you need

to kind of spend years and years in university

and rely on complex mathematical equations.

And even then it's like...

It's at a distance.

It's extremely difficult to actually internalise

what this means

because it's not the way that our minds function.

That's something that you like to stress, that it's more complex

than many people would like to have it.

Much more complex than mythology. I mean, you know, the basic...

When I think about science and I think about mythology,

what strikes me is science is far, far more imaginative,

far more wild, far more surprising

than any mythology that humans ever managed to create.

Most human mythology is taking the basic,

you know, dramas from our personal lives

and just kind of inflating them.

So, you know, the gods, like in Greek mythology,

they're basically a squabbling family.

And the type of arguments that, as a kid,

maybe you hear between your father and mother,

so you read it in the mythology, this is Zeus and Hera.

Or the way that they fight

or punish the children.

And, you know,

this goes even to the deepest layers

of later, say, Jewish and Christian mythology

that...

The entire kind of...

Jewish identity

is saying that we are fathers' favourite children.

That's it.

Which is the type of thing that in every family, kids would squabble.

Father loves me more than he loves you.

And you find entire nations that build their identity

around this story.

Or you think about how Christian theologians

explain what hell is.

So you know, on one level they will say, OK, demons

roast you alive

in burning sulphur and fire for millions of years.

But then on a deeper level, they will say hell

is being cut off, disconnected

from God.

Which is the deepest fear of every child

and actually of every mammal offspring -

to lose touch with the parents.

Because if an offspring of a mammal,

a human being or a chimpanzee or a porcupine or a dolphin

loses connection

with their mother or with their parents, they die.

There is nobody to provide food.

There is nobody to take care of them.

So you know, you can think

of the whole of this kind of Christian theology -

basically the idea of a lost child

crying for their parents.

And so in this sense, I mean, mythology is very deep

emotionally.

But in terms of understanding the universe,

there is something very shallow about it,

because it simply takes them,

I would say the biological dramas

that have been scripted by evolution,

about the life of children and families

and friendships

and just kind of inflates it

to think this is... the whole universe works like my family.

The whole universe works like our village.

And things like quantum mechanics say, "No, they don't".

I mean, a certain part of the universe,

like the... again, the biological lives

of mammals, they work that way.

But most of the universe doesn't,

even if you just move from mammals like this rabbit here...

Yeah, it's really...

It doesn't move anymore.

For the mammals,

simply you take a small step to the reptiles.

It's already a completely different story.

Like, you think about, I don't know, turtles.

So you have this kind of image

of the turtle mother

coming from the sea,

she digs a hole in the sand,

she lays there eggs, I don't know, like 40 or 50 eggs,

she covers the hole,

and then she goes back to sea and that's it.

This is what Freud would have to deal with

if he was treating turtles.

Because there is no longer any connection afterwards

between... The mother has done her bit.

She's not a mammal, so she doesn't suckle the young,

she doesn't protect them, nothing.

She is in the sea doing her things, forgot about it,

and then a couple of weeks later,

the young turtles, the baby turtles, come out.

And they go out to the sea,

and then all these birds and fish come and eat them,

and maybe out of the 50 turtles, maybe two or three survive,

and they will be the next generation.

They have never any connection with their,

certainly not with their father, and also not with their mother.

So what would turtle mythology be like?

Like, this whole fear of Christian theology -

maybe I'm cut off for my father -

it makes no sense to turtles.

And this Jewish obsession - Father loves us more than anybody else -

it makes no sense to turtles.

Turtle parents don't love their children at all. For us,

our, like, the deepest core

of our psychology -

and you still have wars,

like the wars raging right now in my country,

the war between Israelis and Palestinians - it's still fueled

by this biological, mythological drama

that we are God's favourite children - both sides.

But isn't that which humans claim makes them so special,

the fact that they can invent a story,

the fact that they can connect differently

and imagine differently...

So yeah, what's different in us from rabbits and

probably even elephants and chimpanzees

is that we, with language,

we can create stories.

But... and we have incredible imagination,

but the thing is that the basic scripts...

- Of the imaginations are the same. - Of our stories,

of our imagination, are still constrained

by our mammalian biology.

So you have these incredibly complex

mythologies and poems

and movies and TV series,

but when you look at what is the actual plot,

the actual plot

is taken from biology.

It's taken... It's something that in essence, even the rabbits

will understand.

- So whether... - I'm not sure.

Whether it's Christian theology,

whether it's, you know, the plays of Shakespeare,

whether it's, I don't know, like, TV series like Succession...

- Have you watched Succession? - I don't watch series

because I feel like I've seen them all,

- you know... - Yeah,

because it's actually like there are ten plots

- that evolution scripted... - Right, I agree.

And we kind of just retell the same plots again and again

in incredible variations,

but they are the same basic plots.

I agree.

And science works outside

these plots. I mean, quantum mechanics

is not a biological drama.

It's so different

from anything in our kind of experience

as children, as family members,

as members of a community.

But again, with the help of mathematics

and with the help of computers,

we can somehow approach it.

And so much of the world

is built on top of these

scientific theories and models.

But, you know, psychologically

and also politically, they leave us completely cold.

It's very hard to inspire people

to do anything

by telling them E=mc2

or by showing them the equations of quantum mechanics.

Yeah, because they do need for action, they do still need

the activation of the biological drama.

- That's what you say, yeah. - Yes.

And for good or for bad, it can, you know, it can lead to

acts of charity and compassion and incredible bravery,

and it can lead to wars and persecution.

And you know, almost all persecutions in the world,

whether of ethnic minorities,

whether of gay people, whether of anybody,

it's basically taking the disgust mechanism,

which, again, evolution provided all mammals, including rabbits,

with a disgust mechanism because you know,

especially children, we like to explore the world

and we explore the world a lot with our mouth.

We try to eat different things.

And if we eat something poisonous or a source of pollution,

that could make us sick, we could die.

So evolution equipped us with a disgust mechanism.

This disgust mechanism is quite flexible.

So often, parents need to teach children

what to be disgusted from,

like that faeces

or, or somebody vomited or things like that. "Oh, this is disgusting".

Before we go into the books you brought, I want to know one thing.

You must have been seven or 11

when you read those mythological stories

and you didn't know anything. You weren't the smart man you are today.

So you were a kid finding out first the...

What was it back then that moved your energy

into fascination of mythology?

What was the feeling you could connect with?

Again, it's... I think it's

the kind of yearning to understand how the world works.

So the myth did give you a feeling

that you are getting deeper into knowledge about the world.

Yes, you know, it's a question whether it's...

whether it's misleading

or whether it really gives you insight into at least...

how part of the universe works.

But of course, myth is also very dangerous. It's very tempting,

but it's very dangerous,

as I mentioned earlier, I mean, people fight entire wars

and kill millions of people just because of mythology.

So it's an extremely

powerful but dangerous thing.

Did you feel that back then? That it's dangerous also?

At the age seven or eight,

I was just fascinated by the stories.

I mean, you don't...

you don't understand how it really kind of shapes your mind

decades to the future,

these fairy tales and legends and mythologies.

And you obviously don't understand

the kind of dangerous political

and social constructs

that are built on top of these mythologies.

You often then spend your entire life

basically unlearning

these fairy tales and myths

that you've heard as a young child.

I mean, they are incredibly powerful.

Fear-creating also.

This is how you then look at the world

when you're 20, when you're 40, when you're 16.

And if you're fed

the wrong stories, the wrong mythologies,

then 50 years later, you're Putin.

This can lead to the death

and misery of millions of people.

It all starts in the mind.

Very few wars in history were about

objective things or problems in the world.

People think

that people fight for the same reason that

rabbits and turtles and chimpanzees fight,

that we fight over food and we fight over territory.

And this is almost never the case.

We are... Over the last few thousand years,

we have become so powerful as a species

that it's not difficult

to provide our basic biological needs.

We don't really need to fight over territory

and we don't really need to fight over food or resources.

Again, if I look at my country,

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's not about land.

There is enough land between the Mediterranean and Jordan

to build the houses and schools for everybody.

It's definitely not about food. There is enough food.

There is enough water. There is enough energy.

There is all the objective resources, there is enough.

But in the mind of people,

they believe in fantasies,

in mythologies, in stories

that are incompatible.

And again, they say, both sides say,

"God gave us this whole place,

we cannot compromise on God's love.

We cannot compromise on God's gift.

I mean, if it was up to us,

no problem, we can give you half,

but God gave it.

We can't overrule what God said".

But is there also a dilemma

in your own work, research, thinking,

that on the one hand, you see the mythology as a

critical energy, let's say,

in our collective consciousness,

but on the other hand, you also say that

most people do not react to the facts and science?

The big problem of science

is science is not a very good storyteller,

but humans are motivated to action

by the stories, not by the facts.

What are the main issues

that concern voters in the United States,

in Europe, in other parts of the world?

So, immigration is one of the top issues everywhere,

whereas climate change, many people just deny it.

The attraction of immigration

is it's... Again, it's a biological drama.

The drama that we live in one tribe

and suddenly somebody comes from another tribe to our territory.

This is something that is familiar

to chimpanzees

and to wolves and to rabbits.

"Oh, there is these strange rabbits coming here.

They will take our grass".

They understand it. It's very, very deep.

But though, on the level of myth,

the extinction of mankind through natural disaster

has also been a biological drama

at display in the Bible, you know?

So I wonder why with immigrants it works

and with natural disaster it doesn't.

Because in the Bible,

the process that happens

is that humans sin

and then God punishes them for their sin

by unleashing a flood.

And you would see that a lot of the conversation around climate change,

it goes to that story of guilt,

that people feel guilty.

"Oh, I did this and therefore the world is collapsing".

And it's much more difficult

to go beyond this kind of biblical narrative

of sin and punishment

and forget about this.

Understand the mechanisms,

again, the ecological mechanisms

and the physical mechanisms that we are dealing with,

which are not really

these sin-punishment mechanisms,

with God as the intervening actor.

Though much of the rhetoric of climate activists

is within the sin mechanism.

Exactly.

Because this is... They reach out for a story

and this is the closest story they can find.

Again, it's parent... it goes back to children and parents.

"We are bad children.

We did something wrong. Father is punishing us".

So this is something that people can easily understand.

"I took too many flights

last year. I'm a bad boy.

God will punish us with climate change".

This is something that people kind of instinctively connect to.

And then they dislike it

because they're guilty and they don't want to feel guilty.

It's not that they don't want to feel guilty because

guilt is powerful.

You know, Christianity has become the most successful

religion in history,

and it's built on guilt.

So, guilt is not something kind of...

And people, in a way,

they "like" to feel guilty.

But if we really want to deal with climate change,

then thinking about it

in terms of personal guilt

is the wrong way. We need to understand,

again, the systems at work.

And the main problem is not

with the decisions of individual people.

It's the way that the economy is built,

it's the way that the political system is built.

I mean, the action needs to come from corporations and governments,

which are bureaucratic entities.

This is the organising principle.

We have no mythologies about bureaucracy.

This is something that most people don't understand,

how bureaucracies work.

So you have some artists -

like, Kafka is the most famous, but he's not the only one -

who tried to explain to people

this new reality of:

The world works on the basis of bureaucratic systems.

But again, psychologically and mythologically,

it's very difficult

because, you know, bureaucracies is our documents

and protocols and forms and lists.

It doesn't work on stories.

And to understand, like, when was the last time

you saw a movie or read a novel about the budget?

Not about somebody who works

in the budget department, about the budget, like as the hero.

Like you try to understand Germany in 2024,

you try to understand climate change.

How does the budget works?

From one perspective,

this is one of the most important things about our life.

But nobody writes about it.

There are no television shows. It's boring.

How would you say bureaucracy affects

the human being today? Or the fact... if you say that...

How long do you have to wait for a doctor's appointment?

This is sometimes a life and death question,

and this is determined by bureaucratic

principles.

Now again, people could understand it

if they translate it into some kind of sin and punishment

narrative or some kind of child-parent narrative,

but this is not how bureaucracy works.

And we need a completely different set

of stories

to understand bureaucracy.

Again, people like Kafka

began to try

and formulate these stories,

- but for every... - I think he didn't just begin,

I think he captured a deep aspect of it.

Just in terms of numbers,

for every Kafka novel...

- You will be back... - ... how many

- ... with 1000 non-Kafka-novels... - ... books are there about two boys

- fighting over a girl? - But you don't need 100 Mona Lisas

to have the knowledge of a Mona Lisa,

you know? I mean, one Kafka is enough, I think.

You might be right intellectually,

but I feel challenged by the danger you see in stories,

but I completely can follow your argument.

Though I mostly see the liberating part that stories

- also can have. - It depends on what the story is.

The key point is stories are incredibly powerful.

And like every powerful thing,

you can use them well

and you can use them for evil purposes.

So you think a...

a debate that is not taking place is actually thinking about

the bureaucratic

and the... and the structural,

I mean, like United Nations and all the structures we have

- to solve the problem. - Yeah.

We don't understand the structures. I mean,

this is one of the reasons you have all these conspiracy theories

that people believe, that, "Oh you have a small group of billionaires

controlling everything and starting wars and epidemics",

because this is something that we can understand.

This goes back to the mythology.

This goes back to all the parents,

they do everything.

It's like thinking that the world has, like, a small number of parents

and maybe they are bad parents

and they are punishing us and they are doing bad things.

It's easy to understand these conspiracy theories.

It's much, much more difficult to understand the reality.

There is no small group of people

who understand and control everything.

There is this huge, sprawling bureaucratic system

which is not evil.

It's doing what it's doing.

But if we want to make a significant change in the world

like deal with climate change,

we need to work with and through the bureaucracy.

If we get stuck in these simplistic

mythological narratives...

I completely agree with you, and I'm glad you bring this up.

But last thing you have to tell me, the book

you read between 15 and 18.

The books - and not scientific.

Ah, OK, let me think.

I mostly read scientific books.

- I was afraid so. - I mean, yeah.

They forced us to read

all kinds of, you know, novels

in school,

but I really discovered novels

and began to really love them only afterwards.

As long as they kind of forced us,

"You have to read this, you have to read Dostoyevsky because it's in the

matriculation exam".

So it was a kind of, "Ugh, I have to read this".

Afterwards, when it was over, I reread it and really loved it.

But...

Between 15 and 18, I almost only read history.

- History. - Yeah.

And when you learnt to love novels later, which one did you love?

So I revisited some of the works

that...

we read in school, but

I really loved, again...

Tolstoy's War and Peace.

- Which is very biological drama. - Which is also history, yeah,

but it's, it's also history.

I need to kind of rekindle my memory for novels.

Did you read a woman's novel?

I read Ursula Le Guin's,

you know, science fiction, fantasy

novels, and I also read...

What was her name? I don't remember the name of the author,

but she wrote...

the...

Two, again, historical novels.

The Persian Boy and...

something about Alexander the Great,

but it focused on the love affair

between Alexander

and a Persian youth

who was previously the lover of Darius,

the Persian king.

And this was one of the first kind of...

Before I came out, before I realised that I was gay,

this was one of the first kind of novels

about gay relationships that I read.

And did the reading had anything

to do with the fact that you came out? No?

Not immediately. It was not like an immediate cause and effect,

but I do remember that I was very kind of

particularly interested

in that story.

And I guess it kind of percolated inside there

and was...

important, instrumental

in later kind of

coming out to myself.

So reading

about a love affair that's so long ago,

did this help you to understand present things better?

Like for you, is it better to understand things when they

are set in the distance?

It puts the present in perspective

and...

For me, it's not such a long time ago.

I mean, it's only

just a little bit over 2000 years ago.

If you think about the span

of human existence,

which is hundreds of thousands of years,

and the span of the cosmos,

which is like 13 billion years,

so 2000 years is yesterday.

And...

One of my kind of...

My basic feeling about history

is that it's all present in a way.

Nobody reads history or cares about history

because of the past.

Like, all the people in the past are gone. They are dead.

We can't change anything that happened back then,

and they don't care what we think about them.

Like, Alexander the Great doesn't care

if you think he was great or he was not so great or whatever.

The past is important because of what it tells us about the present.

And the only,

you know, the only thing that separates us from the past is time.

Do you understand what trickled down when you read this book about

your own coming out?

In a way, it expands

your reality

or your understanding of what could be

in the universe.

Like, if you grow up

and you only see heterosexual couples around you,

so you don't even imagine that

maybe two boys or two men can be a couple.

And then you read the story

and it expands your universe.

You understand, "Oh, these things, these kinds of relationships,

they can also be in reality".

Like, the laws of physics

and the laws of biology

don't forbid

the existence of these things.

Maybe human laws,

maybe religion, maybe the state

tries to forbid it,

but states and religions forbid

only things that can actually exist.

Nobody bothers to issue a law

forbidding people to run faster than the speed of light

because it's simply impossible. What's the point?

They only issue law to forbid things

that are actually part of reality potentially.

I'm very reconciled that your scientist's brain

has one story that is not destructive

in your own readers' biographies.

Even the mythological stories I've read, they are not destructive.

Again, what I'm saying is that they are very powerful,

so we have to be very careful about them.

It's interesting because now everybody says we have to fact check

and give the statistics,

and you actually always say that

in a way we should be able to put it into a story

- to transmit it. - Yes. A good story for me

relies on facts, doesn't ignore them.

But the thing if you only fact check,

if you only give the statistic, it never works.

Because the only thing that can replace one story

is another story.

If you think about a story like, I don't know, a balloon,

and people think, OK, I'll take this fact checking needle

and I stick holes in it and it will explode. It never explodes.

If you only poke holes in the balloon, you can poke 1000 holes,

it's still there, no problem.

The only thing that replaces one balloon is another balloon.

If you tell a different story, a more interesting story,

a story that helps people better, then

you don't need to poke any holes in the other story.

It will just disappear.

We have talked about stories and

we have asked you to bring books, but since you brought

books on science, I really want to understand

your concept of stories since

I believe that part of the success of your books

is that you do manage to

sort of narrate science, as paradox as it sounds.

What I try to do is to bridge

the kind of facts and theories

and models of science

that are often... don't come in the shape of a story

and shape them into a story

that will be accessible to people

without kind of betraying

the scientific values

of truth and factuality and so forth.

And these are some of the books that inspired me on the way.

Which one do you want to start with?

Let's start with Chimpanzee Politics because we talked about it already.

This book that was written, I think, in the year

that I was born, in 1976, by Franz De Waal,

who...

was one of maybe the greatest primatologist of our age.

And it tells the story

of a single chimpanzee band,

about 20 chimpanzees,

living in a zoo

in the Netherlands, in Arnhem,

and their relationships and their politics.

And...

Basically everything we talked about is based partly

on what I discovered in this book,

that human politics is much like chimpanzee politics

and that

these biological dramas

that now are controlling

entire nations and launching wars

and so forth, they are the same biological dramas

that you find in the struggles

in the relationships of a small group of chimpanzees.

And it also relates to what we just discussed,

for instance, about sexuality

and what is permissible and what is forbidden.

For me...

Not Frans de Waal, and of course,

below Frans de Waal, you always find Charles Darwin.

Darwin is the kind of prophet

of sexual liberation.

That if I think about

the liberation of gay people, of LGBTQ people,

then if you dig underneath, you eventually find Darwin.

Because for... At least in the West,

for centuries upon centuries,

gay people were persecuted and oppressed

because of this mythological idea

about sex,

that sex was created by God

for the purpose of procreation.

And if you use sex for anything else,

you're sinning against the purpose of the thing,

so you must be punished.

And then Darwin came

and Darwin said, in biology, there are no purposes.

Nothing has any purpose in biology.

In biology, there are only causes.

I can explain

what was the causal chain of events

that led to the creation,

to the evolution, not creation, to the evolution

of sexual organs

and sexual feelings in animals

and mammals and humans,

but they were not created for a particular purpose.

This is true of everything in biology.

Like, we have fingers, not in order

to type on computers or to play the piano

or to climb trees.

Fingers evolved

through evolution.

When humans climbed trees

and when humans picked fruits or ancient apes did it,

so those that had...

better fingers survived

and left these kind of better fingers

for their offspring.

And similarly, if you think about wings,

why do birds have wings?

Wings were not created so that birds could fly.

Originally, reptiles evolved feathers

in order to warm themselves.

But once something exists,

it can be used

for all the things that you can use it for.

So some reptiles, when they were escaping predators,

they jumped, and these feathers helped them

to jump further and they survived.

And generation by generation, this became wings.

So it would be ridiculous

to kind of blame birds. "Why are you using your wings

in order to fly?

They were originally meant only to warm you.

If you fly with them,

this is against the purpose for which they were created".

This is ridiculous

And it's the same with sex.

It evolved in the context of procreation.

But among mammals,

among chimpanzees and among rabbits and among humans,

new usages evolved over time.

The vast majority of sex

today, not just among humans,

also among chimpanzees, it's not about procreation.

People use it to establish intimate bonds

between themselves.

And to say to people, "No, that's wrong.

You should not use sex

to establish intimacy. It's only from procreation",

this is ridiculous. It's like telling birds, "Don't fly".

And this is, I think, the kind of

deepest layer

of the liberation

of women, of LGBTQ people,

the, again, Darwinian understanding

that what things don't have kind of a purpose

set from above,

they...

Whatever exists...

is, by definition, in line with the laws of nature.

The idea that you can act, you can do something

that violates the laws of nature, this is simply ridiculous.

What violates the laws of nature doesn't exist.

Whatever exists,

by definition, it's in line with the laws of nature.

The laws of a country - that's different.

Like, a country can say you cannot drive more than...

But you mean the laws of nature have no moral.

You mean total free of morals, right?

- It's just the fact that it exists. - Yes.

Of course, not everything that exists is good.

People murder and this is part of reality

and this is bad.

But then you have to give an explanation.

If you want to forbid something,

you cannot say,

"I forbid it because it's against the laws of nature".

There is no such thing.

You need to provide an explanation.

So with murder, we know the explanation.

Murder is bad because it causes tremendous suffering,

not just to the person you murder,

but to everybody around them, their family, their friends.

So it's bad because it causes suffering.

Now if two men love each other,

how does it cause anybody to suffer?

If you think you want to forbid it,

you need to come up with a better argument

than, "Oh, it's against the laws of nature".

And Yuval, may I come back to when you talked about the turtles first

and that the mother disappears, and when you read the book,

and then you mentioned Freud.

So how do you look at psychoanalytics

as an explanation tool

- for these things? - It's a very powerful tool.

It's, again, exploring

the mythological and the psychological

mechanisms

that shape and motivate humans.

And if you try to take psychoanalysis

and understand turtles, it will not work.

If you try to understand atoms

and subatomic particles, it will not work.

But with humans, it works.

And to some extent, it will also work with chimpanzees.

And there's also

women that are famous with the research on chimpanzees

- like Jane Goodall. - Yeah.

Was she important for you?

I've read her books also.

And also, you know, the amazing thing about

her work

is...

you know, the brilliance of the simplicity,

that you had all these people in universities,

in Oxford and Harvard arguing

about what apes do and don't do,

and she said, "I'll just go and look".

And you know, she started in such a simple way.

Said just, "I'll just go and live

with the chimpanzees and look at them

and see how they behave".

Not in laboratories, not in zoos,

but directly.

And she also... One of

the revolutions that she did in the study of animals

was treat them as individuals

with, really, a psychology

and a personality. She started to give them names.

Whereas previously, it was kind of common

in most of the research

on apes and other animals to use,

you know, numbers.

And it was a big thing

to kind of treat other animals

as persons

because this was humanising them.

Like, we kind of take our own human emotions and whatever

and kind of impose them on the animals.

And...

She was one of the people who kind of reverse it. No,

I mean, the assumption that emotions, for instance,

are a uniquely human thing,

it goes against everything that Darwin taught us.

The basic assumption is that it's much more widespread

in the animal kingdom

than just a unique human phenomenon.

And she was one of the first scientists

who began to treat other animals

as persons with emotions, with a psychological life,

and she would give them names

and write about them in scientific papers

with their names and not with numbers.

And today this is like a...

common fact that every animal researcher

that studies apes or whatever

takes for granted,

that yes, other animals also have emotions

and have psychological needs.

And no two chimpanzees

are exactly the same and so forth.

Now that we are at the individual,

there's one book I really want to know about,

and that is a book that talks about the self

and the way identity

shapes, or a person shapes its identity.

When did you read this book, and what did you learn from it?

I think I've read Sources of the Self

by Charles Taylor in my early twenties.

And it's more

coming from the direction of philosophy

and the history of philosophy

and does a brilliant job

in showing how

our most basic understanding of ourselves...

it has a history behind it.

It's not the way

that people in every age, in every culture,

understood themselves.

It's the outcome of 2000 years,

you know, of Greek philosophy and Christian theology

and modern philosophy and modern art

that resulted

in the very kind of unique way

that Western, modern people

understand "what am I".

And...

And this is one of the most fascinating things

in life, also in science,

that you take something

which seems to be extremely kind of solid

and self-evident,

and when you look closer,

you see that there is actually an entire universe

of change inside it

that... It's not obvious at all,

and it's not permanent at all.

That, you know, in...

For a lot of people in the modern West,

like, the whole of the universe

is constantly changing.

But there is something inside us,

which is the basic atom

of, say, our mental life, which doesn't change.

This is the basic unit

of the mental universe.

And the same way that physicists

looked inside the atom

and realised, actually, this is not solid at all,

there are lots of changes within this tiny thing,

so also philosophers

like Charles Taylor, psychologists and others, they looked

into this kind of mental atom of the self

and realised, like the physical atom,

it's not solid at all.

It's...

contains not just multitude

of subparticles,

but they are constantly moving and interacting and changing.

That was something that both helped you understand,

like, the human nature

of mankind or human beings,

but did it help you understand something about yourself?

Yes, that... And what I define

as myself,

itself needs a lot more exploration.

That... you think you know yourself but you don't.

Not just,

you know, the kind of individual events of your life.

You're very understanding of what is a self

is far from self-evident.

And it is itself the product of a lot of

stories and mythologies which are not necessarily true.

So the last book that we can only touch for

a few thoughts but maybe tell us why it's important,

Jared Diamond.

It's a work of big history

kind of covering thousands of years

of human history

and trying to understand the kind of basic

processes. What shapes history?

And for me, the book was

extremely important in my life, in my career,

not just for its kind of particular insights,

but more for its shape.

That it showed me that you can write such books,

and which was then the basis for my work,

that you can actually write a science book,

not a mythological book, but a science book

based on the latest

findings and archaeological excavations

and genetic evidence and economic models

and tell the story of thousands of years of history.

You don't need to just focus

on very, very small

events or incidents or places.

You can really tell big stories,

which will still be scientific

and not just mythological.

So this was the book where you learnt

you can sort of merge the reader

that you were between 7 and 11, the myth

and the signs and you learnt.

I can merge this and make it one bigger book and

sort of get rid of the dilemma that you have with the myth

- and connect it to facts. - Exactly, that...

this kind of false dilemma,

that I like the shape

of the mythological stories,

but I also like the factuality,

the accuracy of history and of science,

and I have to choose.

So Jared Diamond in a way said, no, you don't have to choose.

You can try and combine, you can integrate,

which is of course very difficult,

but not impossible.

And you have to, you know, you have to kind of

make compromises

like in every relationship, in every integration,

you need to make compromises.

So also in this compromise between

myth and science, it won't be perfect.

You will have to make compromises, but it's worth it.

In your writing and reading,

but mostly your writing, if you would not have

the story and the myth, what would you lack?

The interest.

The... What many of

the kind of purely scientific texts lack

is that people don't connect to them.

And they don't inspire people.

And again, we have to work with humans as they are.

We can't say, "Well, humans are faulty

and we will just stay

with the facts and the statistics and the mathematics

and give humans up". No.

What I'm doing in my books,

it's not negating

the other types

of research in science.

I don't say that all scientists now should

write these big narratives.

Without the very specialised

researchers,

you know, somebody who works for 10 years

on just excavating a single archaeological site

and kind of very detailed lists and catalogues

of every bone and every piece of tool

that they found there,

without this type of extremely difficult work,

I would not be able to do my work.

My work is just to build a bridge

between these kinds of scientific studies

and try to convey

their insights, their discoveries

to the general public

in a way that anybody can relate to and find interesting.

You do succeed,

you do inspire people. Who is a person that inspired you?

One person.

As a scholar, both Jared Diamond and Frans de Waal were

two of, like, the biggest intellectual

or scholarly inspirations for me.

And exactly for this ability,

for building this bridge.

Because I remember the experience of myself,

like, reading Chimpanzee Politics

and

being so interested

and, you know, laughing at some of the...

characters

and interactions that he described and feeling sad

for some of the other, and really getting kind of connected

to the politics of this group of chimpanzees.

And...

there's so many other previous studies written about chimpanzees,

but in these very cold, scientific,

like, you don't have names, you have numbers.

And you don't talk about the emotions,

you just have these statistics

about how many times they met and how many times they fought.

And it would not have had the same effect.

Yuval, that is it.

Thank you very much for sharing your books,

the people that inspired you, your thoughts and

the dilemma that I was able to explore a little bit with you.

Thanks a lot for coming to the show.

Thank you.