Original subtitles

- Our speakers really don't need any introduction,

so I'm really actually not going

to give them an introduction,

but just to say that it is a great privilege

of this job that every now and again we get to bring

together people who have not met,

but who have admired each other from afar for a long time,

and that is certainly the case for this evening.

Natalie Portman, as you all know,

is an award-winning, Academy award-winning actress.

She's also an environmentalist,

very deeply committed one,

and a Harvard alumni.

Her credentials in many, many fields run very deep.

Yuval Harari's books have sold absolutely millions.

We are so delighted that there's a new one.

Another treat of reading that lies in store for all of you.

Without further ado please give them

the most enormous welcome to Natalie Portman,

and Yuval Noah Harari.

(audience applauding)

- Thank you, thank you.

I'm so honored to be here talking to you,

and thank you for pouring me water, gentlemanly.

So we talked about how the most sort of obvious connection

between us, may be for other people,

would be that we both were born in Israel.

So I'm interested in how you think your origins

have influenced you as a historian, as a thinker.

- I think we were both born in the myth factory

of the world, like a place that specializes

introducing extremely powerful stories

for good and for bad.

And when you live in such a place,

you just cannot ignore the enormous power

of the human imagination, the enormous power of stories

to move the world.

So I guess that, you know, maybe I would have written

the same books even if I had been born in Australia or China

maybe not, but certainly I think that

living in a place where at least recently

people have been killing each other

by the millions over fictional stories

makes you see the world in a very particular way.

- No absolutely,

and that aspect of fiction has so much to do

with what you talk about and of course

what I do in filmmaking telling stories.

And I'm interested in what you think the role of fiction is

in history and historical, in the way you put things

together too.

- Well now certainly Hollywood is competing

with the Holy Land for the title of the main story

factory of the world,

and it's almost as powerful.

And yeah I mean it's really my perception is that

in the end the economists and the engineers,

and the soldiers, they are very often just working

to realize something that came up in the mind of some poet.

And this is also why there is so,

I think there is a huge responsibility

on the shoulders of poets and screenwriters

and actors and artists that you think that

oh we just entertain people,

but this is not the case.

It goes much, much more deeply.

It provides the kind of scaffolding for people

to make sense of their individual lives

and of their collective lives and good stories

create a very good world and problematic stories

create a very problematic world,

and the human ability to create fictions

on the one hand is responsible for all our amazing

achievements as a species, but also to so much harm

that we have done to ourselves and that we have done

to other animals that as far as we know

I would say one of the main differences as far as

we know between us and the other animals

that they can't create these kinds of fictions

but their lives and death is often determined

by the stories that this particular ape species

is able to tell and believe.

- Can you talk more about how you think that

that storytelling has made us survive

or how that has helped humans to thrive?

Like how's it been a survival tool? Storytelling?

- It simply enables cooperation.

I mean the key issue is how do you get

complete strangers to trust one another.

Trust one another enough in order to cooperate

and to cooperate can mean to build a prison

or to build an army or to build a hospital

or to build a school.

In all cases you're dealing with lots of strangers

cooperating towards a common goal,

and the trust is again in the end trust

is always based on believing in the same story,

so thousands of years ago,

two strangers meet in the jungle,

and they want to trade instead of fight.

So they don't know each other,

so how do you trust somebody you don't know.

You realize that you're actually family.

You have some mythical ancestor

that hey your ancestor is also my ancestor.

So we are actually both,

we are both descendants of Abraham.

We have the same ancestor.

We are actually brother and sister

and once you get over that hurdle

we are not now strangers.

I mean in reality we are strangers.

We don't know anything about each other,

but in our imagination we are brothers and sister.

We belong to the same family,

and then we can trust,

and if this sounds very, very primitive

then you just need to take out the currency notes

of most countries today in the world,

and you will see the same thing, the same ancestors.

Like if in the United States so you go to a supermarket

and you meet a stranger, we don't know this person

and you want to buy bread or bananas or whatever.

And you take out this piece of paper,

hey you see this ancestors George Washington these,

you know, we are the same.

And because we both believe in the same story,

we can trust each other and it works.

And it works when the story comes from the Holy Land

about Jesus and God and whatever,

and it can work when the story comes from Hollywood.

And you know it's not a coincidence that now that

I travel a lot around the world and when you meet

somebody very often we try to look for a TV series

that we both watched.

Hey I also watched it.

So suddenly we kind of like, you know

we have some common story together and it breaks the ice.

- What's the difference between a story

that people believe in and a story that

people just watch and know is fictional,

but relate to in some way like a TV show

in terms of like a connecting tissue.

- There is no clear line.

I mean the the whole thing works by being a bit opaque,

by being a bit cloudy and misty and unclear.

When we think about it kind of retroactively

or philosophically, we think that the world is divided

quite clearly into, okay there is fiction

and there is reality

but usually they just get mixed together,

and when you watch a movie so for 90 minutes

if the movie is good, you forget

it's just a fictional story.

If you constantly remember hey it's just a fictional story

it's just actors, they rehearse this scene 50 times

and shoot it again and again and again.

And then stitched it together

and then it's not a good movie.

You are not really getting caught up in the story,

and it's the same with something like football.

To really enjoy it you need to forget for again

at least 90 minutes that you know this is just

fictional rules that who said,

that the most important thing is to get the ball

into into the goal, who said?

If you think like that you won't enjoy football.

So you need to, you know the suspension of disbelief

it's like the first thing that they teach in

almost any art school or any school about literature.

It's suspension of disbelief.

- Yeah it's always mysterious to me in literature

that when there's a fictional book

that seems too autobiographical,

everyone says oh it's just she's writing about herself.

It's not really fiction and then when there's a story

that's nonfiction, but it doesn't totally adhere to facts

people say oh they're straying from it,

and it's like of course everything

is some version of fiction.

- I remember I think it was in the UK

a couple of years ago, there was this huge outcry.

They wanted to stage something from Harry Potter,

like the Harry Potter theater show or something,

and they wanted to have a black person playing Hermione.

And there was this huge outcry "No you can't do that.

"Hermione is white."

And people went over I think the entire

seven volumes, it's seven right?

- [Natalie] I think.

- The entire seven volumes and they found one place,

just one place where the text indicates clearly

that something about Hermione hiding in the woods

on a moonlit night and the moon rays fall upon

her white skin, something like that,

they found the one place in the entire seven volumes

that and no you have to stick with reality.

You don't mind people flying on broomsticks.

You don't mind you know all these things,

but no, no, no she has to be white.

(Natalie laughs)

- Yeah I love, you write in the book about how certain

religions tend toward choosing specific facts

from their texts.

That if you look in old Jewish texts for example

you can find very erotic passages

and even images in--

- [Yuval] In synagogues.

- In synagogues and yet current religious Judaism

is all about female modesty.

Why do you think that so many religions,

so many people within different religions tend toward

the conservative facts as opposed to the evidence

that they can find in the past

that is more loose or open sexually, morally whatever.

- It's a kind of arms race

that everybody wants to be like more orthodox

and more pious than the other,

and there is this tendency to think that the most strict

I am the closer I am to God somehow.

But he's very strict.

So you see along the centuries that

you draw a line and then you draw a line

just behind it, just to be on the safe side.

So nobody crosses this line.

We will draw another line just on

and it gets you know like with,

as you said in the ancient in ancient synagogues

that were excavated by archeologists,

you often find images of women on the

floors in mosaics and on the walls.

I mean today in at least in orthodox synagogues

in Israel, it would be blasphemous and sacrilege

to have any, I mean in many religious neighborhoods

you can't even have, when you have advertisements

it's only men and boys.

Like there was a famous case that they made advertisement

for a new neighborhood or something.

So you know you have these new houses

and then happy families and the happy families

it was just men and boys.

Because you can't show, not only in the synagogue,

you can't show, and when you go back 2000 years

to the rabbis who wrote the Mishnah and the Talmud,

they prayed in synagogues with images of women on the floor

and on the walls, and so yes you have

this escalating arms race.

- And you talk also about, you write about the

use of metaphor in religion compared to

meditative practice where you talk about breath is breath

as opposed to in religion the wafer is Christ's body

or the salt water and Passover for Jews

is the tears of slaves where there's so much metaphor.

Why do you feel that the sort of literalism

appreciating the thing for the thing it is

is more helpful for you in meditation

than its kind of comparison and religion?

- Well in the meditation practice,

at least the meditation I practice is really about

just being able to observe reality as it is

to really tell the difference, what is real

and what is just stories and fictions and metaphors

generated by my mind or by somebody else's mind,

but you know people sometimes pass their entire

lives just within metaphors and fictions

and never getting a real glimpse of reality,

and also I think leaving aside the meditation practice

as a story and I kind of developed a horror of metaphors

because what often happens to metaphors in history

they get solidified and rarefied and become a thing itself

and people forget where they came from.

To give an example like you know,

in religion so people talk about salvation and redemption

and eternity, but what is eternity?

What is salvation?

It's too difficult for most people to grasp

and certainly to attain so you have a metaphor,

you have say a building, a temple, a mosque,

the Wailing Wall, the Western Wall

which stands as a metaphor for eternity,

as a metaphor for salvation and people would go to

the temple and okay so you have a place standing in

for this abstract very difficult to grasp notion

of eternity or for salvation,

but what happens next?

People forget it's just a metaphor.

They rarefy the metaphor.

The temple really is salvation.

The temple really is eternity

and then what do you want to do?

You want to possess eternity.

Suddenly you can.

If I can just get hold or conquer this pile of stones

I have eternity.

I have salvation and then people start fighting

over these things, forgetting that hey

this was just a metaphor.

Don't take it so serious.

And it happened thousands of years ago.

It happens today, but you know the essence of holy places

like temples or synagogues or like the place we are here

right now, is in the end it's about the human experience.

It's the idea that you go to a place

and you experience peace like we have a lot of anger

in your life, you have a lot of irritation in your life

or hate or whatever and there is a place

that you can go and experience peace and feel better

about yourself and also be better to other people.

And this is like you know the essential idea

of a temple or a mosque or a synagogue,

but then what happens is that some of these places

become factories of hatred.

Instead of going there and experiencing peace

people start fighting over these places

you know which is very strange

because you know this is a dysfunctional temple.

Like you have a car factory that doesn't produce cars.

You don't want it.

So you have a peace factory which for some reason

produces wars and you don't want this factory.

It's broken.

- There's there's a thing in psychology

that you probably have heard about where

people who are depressed are more realistic.

Like if you tell them a story,

they will recount it more accurately

and people who are not depressed tend to change the story

to make it more optimistic.

Make things better so there's kind of this thing

about how like being unrealistic actually

is a way to make yourself happier.

Do you find that taking reality as reality

what you're talking about seeing stones

as stones and breath is breath

is a bleaker vision of the world?

- It takes out some of the color yes,

but it brings back I think more than it takes away

because in the end you know the greatest mysteries

in the world we experience them every day.

Consciousness is probably the greatest

mystery in the universe.

And it's not some special experience

of place or whatever.

Just to understand pain, to understand irritation

to understand the experience of boredom,

if we could really understand that

this is the most interesting

and the most amazing thing

we know about in the entire universe,

is this really miracle of consciousness

and so I don't think I'm really giving up on

the big things of the world or of the universe.

Yeah there is a tendency of the big things

to be eventually very banal

that I don't know, I was a specialist in the Crusades.

This was like my first when I began my career

as a historian my special field was crusades,

crusader history.

And I kept reading these chronicles about the first crusade

in 1096, all these knights in shining armor

leaving Europe to go to the Holy Land

and conquer Jerusalem.

And they had these millenarian expectations

that when we will get to Jerusalem

the most amazing thing in the world will happen

like the end of time, the second coming of whatever.

And eventually it was just so banal

like they fought and they killed and they died

for four terrible years and endured terrible hunger

and sieges and battles and eventually conquered Jerusalem,

and slaughtered all its population and reached

the holy places and you know it was just like any other day.

They woke up next day, they ate breakfast,

they fought with one another.

Somebody had stomach ache.

It was just so banal.

- The use of fiction backs that in telling history

and being a historian is and I wonder

if you ever intentionally use it to make points more clear.

Like for example someone told me

I studied psychology in school so excuse me

if many of my examples are from psychology,

but Oliver Sacks the sort of popular psychologist,

some of his case studies, one of my professors told me,

are not realistic, like there's one example of someone

who has a disorder that they can't,

they kind of recognize things from their shape,

and they mistake a fire hydrant for a child.

And they said that would never happen because

you could still see the shape move

and if something's not moving they would know

it's not a child.

It's completely unrealistic and they approached

Sachs about it and he said of course

but you give an example that's so clear

that people remember it and it stays more clearly

in their mind so for medical students

it's a much better example even

if it's not really factually accurate

because they'll remember that when they're diagnosing

someone, they'll be like oh the fire hydrant.

Now is there any equivalent in what you do where you shape

something that might have a little fiction

that you acknowledge but it's a clearer way to

round your point?

- There is always the temptation

because it works very well.

To a certain extent yes I do it all the time

all historians do it all the time,

because we use stories and reality

is just not built like a story.

If you just try to tell reality as it is

then you end up I don't know James Joyce writing Ulysses

like the stream-of-consciousness and a million things

happening and nobody can, almost nobody can finish the book.

Or remember what is happening.

It's just our fortune and misfortune as a species

that we think in stories,

so if you want to make a point

you have to take the messiness of reality

and cast it as a story.

Otherwise people don't understand,

and we have now all these you know discussions

about for example climate change,

that how to make the general public understand

what is happening, what is the enormity

of the crisis we are facing.

What is the evidence supporting it,

what should we do?

And the problem is that scientists,

including climate scientists,

they think in facts, in numbers, in statistics,

in equations, in graphs,

all the things that make most people like fall asleep.

Or just not get it.

If you really want to make the public understand climate

change, you need a story.

So from this perspective it's almost inevitable,

and even again you don't,

I mean there is a step further,

which I try to avoid as much as possible,

which in order to make the story a little better

let's invent some of the facts.

Let's change some of the facts

because it serves a good cause,

and it will be a better story, a more memorable story,

and this is a constant temptation

that I can't promise that I never seen

but I try not to.

I try if the story is complicated so okay

so it will be a bit more complicated.

- Well one of the things

that has most impacted me from your

writing was an article that you wrote

for the Guardian that is also a chapter in 21 Questions.

About the Theater of Terrorism.

And I bring it up in every Times Up meeting that I go to.

Because I was really surprised

and completely shifted my perspective to see how

you showed that the spectacle of 9/11

was the Twin Towers coming down

and not the Pentagon, which was the more classical military

you know target that was hit that day.

But the spectacle, this visual, this image was so powerful

across the world and then using something like that

for positives, for something like climate change

like how can we use that concept of spectacle

and how impactful it is in today's day and age

in a positive way as opposed to obviously a destructive way.

- Yes so you know you have the polar bear on this iceberg

which is the iconic image of climate change.

And it's a very powerful image.

Now of course climate change is not about polar bears.

I mean it's also about them,

but it's not the only thing,

and still this is that iconic image

because again this goes from the birds to the apes.

This is how the apes see the world, so you must speak

their language, if you just give them a list of statistical

facts you lose them.

And you know the big advantage of terrorists

in the struggle for attention

and attention is now may be the most important

resource in the world,

and you have all these, a lot of the political struggles

today in the world, they're actually

struggles for attention.

And again unfortunately because of our evolutionary

background, there is nothing that grabs attention

more than violence.

So staging a spectacle of violence captures

the attention of people of the media more

than anything else.

This is like the simple insight which underlies

the whole phenomena of, the phenomenon of terrorism.

And they understood it and they use it.

They create a spectacle of violence.

They kill a handful of people and make millions

fear for their lives.

It's extremely effective.

It hijacks our brains.

It hijacks our own evolutionary mechanisms.

- How do you think that is different from state violence?

- State violence is very often on a very large scale.

You actually sometimes kill millions of people.

It's not about, the fear is a by-product,

but it's not the main thing.

Actually very often it's the opposite.

When states use tremendous amount of violence

in many cases they try to hide it.

No, no, no nothing is happening.

Don't look here, don't look here.

We don't want reporters.

We don't want journalists.

Terrorists it's just the opposite.

Usually terrorism is the strategy of very weak parties.

They can't use violence on a large scale.

They would like to, but they just can't.

So they have just this spectacle of violence

and then they try to call in yes come everybody.

Come see, all the journalists, all the reporters,

TV camera, oh wonderful come here.

We have a spectacle of violence and we want to be

in every TV set around the country.

So it works very differently.

The states are really powerful.

Very often, they're really powerful.

They don't want to draw attention to their power.

- And you write about how, and we've talked

a little bit about how the women's movement

has achieved this change rather recently without

much violence and how unusual that is.

What do you think, why do you think that happens so late?

Why do you think, I mean obviously there's still far,

very far to go, but why do you think that happened so late?

And why do you think it was successful without violence?

- First we really need to you know to stop a minute

and think about the, really the amazing change

that the feminist revolution has done

over the last century.

And we saw little violence, you know you have much much

smaller changes in human society

during history which required tremendous amounts of

violence, and this you know for thousands of years

all over the world different religions, cultures,

political systems, and one thing is constant,

which is the subjugation in oppression of women.

It's the patriarchal system.

To the degree that many people thought that

this is just natural and eternal.

It's just the way things are, nothing can change it,

and then within a relatively short time

historically speaking of a century or two

and with very, very little violence

a tremendous change has happened.

And we don't really understand how to account for it.

Partly because we also as scientists as scholars,

as historians, we find it difficult to explain

the patriarchal system in the first place.

Many people think that there are obvious answers

to the question why in almost all large-scale

human societies, women had a much lower legal

and political and economic status than men.

And actually we don't have a good theory.

- I have one (laughs).

I don't know if it's good.

Well it seems like it balances out the biological

superiority, can I say that?

Not superiority but the fact that we're like

the center of creation, you're the means of reproduction.

(audience laughing)

To control the means of reproduction

you have to have some sort of balance on that right?

- It may be quite obvious

why men would like to control women's bodies,

women's sexuality.

What is not clear is how are they able to do it?

Because we have other species including some of our closest

relatives in nature the bonobo chimpanzees

in which maybe the bonobo males would like to control

the female bonobos, but they just can't.

In bonobo society, networks of females actually

dominate the society.

Now lots of people have this very simplistic notion

that men are simply stronger physically.

So you know it's a no brainer

but actually this is a very problematic theory

because when you look at human societies,

there is no consistent match between

physical strength and social and political power.

In many cases there is a huge mismatch there

like in most societies people in their 50s and 60s

and 70s dominate people in their 20s

even though people in their 20s are physically stronger.

If you look at organizations, whether it's

the Catholic Church, whether it's United States,

whether it's the Mafia,

so very often the Pope is not

the strongest Catholic around.

It's not like they had this big boxing championship

of all the catabolic males in the world,

and Francis defeated all the competition,

so he's now Pope.

Even in criminal organizations very often

the the Capo di tutti capi, the big boss

he could be a man in his 60s

who doesn't go around beating people up

but he has the power to tell much younger and stronger men

go and kill this guy and they obey.

And usually social power depends on social abilities.

The ability to build alliances.

The abilities to reach compromises with potential allies.

The ability to understand what the other person is thinking

either in order to reach a deal or in order to

beware of a trap and at least according to folk psychology.

I will be happy to hear what you think about it,

but folk psychology usually argues that women are better

than men in all these things like understanding

the viewpoint of somebody else, instead of obsessing about

what I think and what I want.

So if if this is true, and I'm not sure if it's true,

but if it is true that women have superior social skills

or at least some social skills, it's a very big riddle

then why is it that human society is dominated by

these self-centered males and not by women

with their superior abilities to make alliances

and which compromises and so forth

because again if you look at bonobo society

male bonobos are significantly stronger

than female bonobos, but the males don't

have strong networks whereas the females have

very strong networks,

and this is what enables them to dominate the society.

- And so no one has come up with any plausible--

- There's an entire industry with theories about

the origins of the patriarchal system,

and why it has been so robust and long-lasting,

and why is it shaking and in the last few decades

there is no shortage of theories

but there we are very far from having

an evidence-based theory,

which is accepted by the majority of scholars.

- That's, I wanna talk more about that later.

You have a really fascinating part of the book

that talks about how fake news has kind of always existed.

And I'm interested in how you think

this sort of biblical fake news

that you've sort of touched upon

is different than today's kind of intentional

misinformation campaigns.

- Well misinformation and propaganda

have been there throughout history,

the means are different.

Again religion is an obvious place to go,

and even religious people will agree that all religions

except one, are fake news.

My religion is of course the truth.

You go ask a Jew then the Jew will tell you

yes Judaism is the truth,

but Christianity you know all these stories about Jesus

being the Son of God and rising from the dead

this is all fake news don't believe that.

Then you go to the Christian priest,

he will tell you, no, no, no, no,

this is honest-to-god truth.

But all these stories of the Muslims

about Muhammad being visited by the Archangel Gabriel

and the Quran being dictated by God and all that

this is all fake news.

And you ask the Muslim,

he will say the same thing about Hinduism and so forth.

And you don't really need the modern means of communication

to spread fake news.

People you know they blame Facebook and social media

and all that but if you live in some small medieval village

a thousand years ago, so you don't have Facebook,

you don't have a smartphone,

but somebody comes along and tells you hey do you know

the old woman who lives by the forest?

I just saw her flying on a broomstick.

And within an hour you would have an entire mob of people

with torches and pitchforks ready to burn

this woman to death.

So this is you know fake news medieval style.

And so the means of spreading and creating

the fake news change, but the phenomenon

has been there throughout human history.

- Right, the part of the book where you talk about AI

and basically our technology kind of knowing

how to manipulate us,

so that our technology can affect our decision-making

so that we're almost automatons like being,

it was very scary to me.

And I was interested because you had talked about

how this has been a phenomenon forever.

Why this is actually scarier than someone

come into your village?

Like why is this different if we've always been manipulated

and we've always thought our own decisions

were our own decisions but we're actually influenced by

a lot of people manipulating us and telling us stories.

Why is this different?

- Because up till now the manipulation

was rather rudimentary.

Nobody could really know what was happening

inside your brain, so you know they had folk psychology

and folk sociology for thousands of years.

You know which kind of stories make people

do what kind of things, but it's very rudimentary

and unscientific and this was simply because nobody

could really get inside your brain

and inside your mind because nobody understood biology

well enough and nobody had enough computing power

you know to gather all the data about you 24

hours a day and analyze it.

I mean even if you lived in the Soviet Union

during Stalin or during Brezhnev era

and you had the KGB follow you around

24 hours a day,

the KGB didn't have the kind of brain science we have today.

And the KGB did not have like super computers.

So you know you have all this huge file on Natalie

that we gathered for years,

but who can read all that and analyze it?

Now it's a completely different situation.

We are beginning to have enough understanding of biology

and enough computing power, so that for the first time in

history somebody, some corporations,

some governments could be in a position

to hack human beings in a systematic

and large-scale manner, which means that very soon

somebody out there will know me better

than I know myself and will know you better than

you know yourself.

Now again it's not completely new.

There were cases before that somebody knows

you better than you know yourself.

Very often we call this person mother.

(all laughing)

When I was you know three years old or five years old

my mother knew me better than I knew myself.

Understood my quirks and my personality and

what's good for me and what's not good for me.

And the good thing is that in most cases

if you don't grow up in very abusive family

then your mother has your best interests.

So it's good that she knows you better than you

know yourself because as a three-year-old

you won't survive otherwise.

- You're not angry, you're hungry.

That's my rule for my kids.

- But the problem is what happens if you're 30 years old

and the president tells you you're not angry, you're hungry.

That's far more sinister than when it

comes from your mother.

Or when Amazon tells you,

you're not really angry, but you're just hungry.

You need to eat this, trust me.

- [Natalie] Buy this yeah.

- Yeah and this is what we are going to,

and it's not you know science fiction/fantasy.

Actually I think that science fiction is not drilling deep

enough about this point, there are some movies

and novels that deal with it,

but I think personally that science fiction is may be

the most important genre today,

because it prepares people for dealing

with the new challenges of the 21st century like AI,

but it usually focuses on the wrong scenarios

like the scenario of the AI gaining consciousness

and the robots coming to kill us.

It is very unlikely.

I'm far more concerned about the robots coming to feed us

and to sell us stuff,

that the robots are coming to sell us stuff.

- They've already come to sell us stuff.

- And they know how to press our emotional buttons.

So they're very good at selling us stuff.

- So do we throw away our smartphones?

Is that the, does that help us?

Does it save us?

- No I mean it's impossible and also because you know

much of the new technology has wonderful promises.

We don't want to give up all the good things

that the internet and smartphones have been doing for us.

I met my husband on the Internet.

So I don't want to give it up.

The internet has been good to me.

But like with every technology,

we need to make it serve our purposes

instead of us serving its purposes.

The problem is that for the first time

we have a technology that can understand

our purposes better than we do

and can therefore manipulate it

without our even realizing it.

We have all this still myth of free will

that everything we choose is of our own free will

and this is a myth that served us well

for a couple of centuries but now it's becoming dangerous,

because when people believe that every decision

they make reflects why did you choose this?

Oh this is my free will,

then you are very uncurious about what's really happening

inside your brain, inside your mind,

and what kind of buttons and levers are being pressed

and you know as long as nobody can really mess

with your brain and your mind,

then you can believe in free will

and there is no harm,

but once somebody has privileged access

to your inner reality and it's not you.

It's some corporation or government,

then belief in free will becomes very, very dangerous.

The easiest people to manipulate are the people

who are convinced that their decision,

I decided if it's my free will.

- Okay but if you don't believe in free will

then how can you even believe that you have

the choice to be free of it, of this stipulation?

- No we have choices all the time.

We have a will, we have desires, we have choices.

We just don't choose which desires to have.

Our choices in this sense,

they are not free.

They are the result of an enormous amount of influences

genetic, environmental, and increasingly technological.

So you know a lot of people think that if I don't believe

in free will then I will just curl up in some corner

and starve to death because

but actually I find this extremely liberating

that the next thought that pops up in the mind,

the next desire that pops up in the mind,

instead of rushing to identify with it,

this is me, I chose it.

You actually become more curious,

hey where did this come from?

Is it really my desire or was it planted

or influenced by something--

- It sounds like schizophrenia,

to be like this is not my idea.

That someone implanted it in my brain,

like the government put a radio in my brain.

- Yeah but you know what was schizophrenia 50 years ago

is becoming reality.

And it's becoming (mumbles).

- I need something stronger than water.

I need like I need a whiskey or something.

- So you know nobody knows how to deal with it.

I mean I don't know how to deal with it.

I just know that we have to face this reality

as whereas we enter an era in which we are no longer

black boxes, in which it is becoming easier and easier

for all kinds of entities.

Again could be corporations, could be governments,

could be various organizations.

To constantly monitor us and thereby hack us

not our smartphones, not our bank accounts,

hack our brains, our personality.

They can know which, you know you have today

it's not science fiction.

You have today corporations

whose advertisement campaigns are like

precision-guided munitions.

Like we need to find 16 year old girls

with low self-esteem.

This is the ideal clientele for our product,

and we now have an algorithm

that can sift through big data gathered

from YouTube and Facebook and whatever

and we can locate the 16,728 16 year old girls

with low self-esteem that we can target for our product.

And this is not science fiction.

This is happening all the time.

You know Analytica and all that it drew attention

to the political implications of this technology

and personally I think it's actually good it happened

because it was a kind of wake-up call,

and we still have time not a lot of time,

but we still have some time to do something about it.

To realize what is the implications of creating

these kinds of technologies to hack human beings.

- And you talk about global governing bodies

kind of approaching these issues,

and also corporations these tech companies having

sort of philosophers on staff ethicists,

to deal with you know the ethics of a self-driving car

and things like that, how would you design that

sort of committee or what would be your recommendations

for these tech companies in designing their technology

to be responsible if they want to be responsible,

which I would hope many of them do.

- Well it needs to come in from various directions.

We definitely need government and international regulations

about these things and many of the greatest dangers,

they can't be regulated on the level of a single nation

or a single country.

You need international agreements on the good regulation

of the most dangerous technologies.

Otherwise it wouldn't work

because nobody would like to stay behind

in an AI arms race.

There is a lot of things that corporations can do

that engineers and technicians and scientists can do.

It's just you know which projects you choose to work on.

At present a lot of these big data surveillance

algorithms, they survey individuals in the service

of corporations and governments.

This is the usual direction,

but there is nothing about technology

that prevents us from designing the opposite type

of surveillance mechanisms.

For example a big data AI algorithm

that surveys the government in the service of the citizens

to make sure there is no corruption.

You like surveillance so much

why don't we survey you?

No, no, no, this is the red line, this no.

And similarly you know you have all these

big tech companies designing, creating, engineering AI

to monitor and survey us.

You can design an AI sidekick that,

yes it gets to know me even better than I know myself.

It gets to know my unique weaknesses

but in order to protect me from the hostile AIs out there

that are trying to get me.

There is no technical reason why you can't go

in that direction and just as you have an anti-virus

for your computer, that at least tries to defend your

computer from all these malware and Trojan horses,

and so forth we can have an AI that protects me

from all these other AIs that are trying to hack me

and to manipulate me.

It's just a question of what we choose to do

with the new technologies.

- But you also wrote the thing that I'm really connected to

about how we're very good at creating technologies

and not very good at predicting how it will be used.

I'm paraphrasing poorly.

You can probably elaborate more on it,

but I'm just wondering if we accept that

you know we can create fertilizer that we think

is gonna be a great thing and feed all these people

and then becomes the biggest environmental disaster.

We think we're doing something good that will save people

that will help people and ends up being a crisis

or you know Twitter the founders of Twitter recently

expressed regret over they thought bringing news

to everybody quickly would help save the world,

and obviously it's become very, very negative in many ways

although positive in other ways too.

How do we create things when so many good intentioned things

have such negative impacts that we can predict?

There is no easy solution to that.

It's a question of simplicity and complexity

that it's far simpler to manipulate things

than to understand them.

We sometimes naively think that to really manipulate

something you need to understand all its complexity

but it's totally not the case.

It's much easier for example to build a dam over a river

than to understand the complexity of the ecosystem

and all the different implications of building this dam.

Or like the example that you gave is the fertilizer

that yes plants need more nitrogen in order to grow.

Wonderful we have this chemical that provides nitrogen

to the plants, but it was easy for chemists

not very easy but relatively easy for chemists

to synthesize this particular fertilizer,

but to understand what are the implications

when large quantities of this chemical are being washed

into the ocean year after year and what it will do to the

fish and to the octopuses and to the algae and so forth,

this is so much more complicated.

And it's the same with Twitter and it's the same with almost

every technology, there is this huge gap

between manipulation and understanding.

And I think the worst danger on this front

is that we are about to gain the ability

to manipulate the human body and the human brain

and the human mind long before we understand

the full complexity especially of the human mind.

So we are likely to start changing, manipulating

our internal reality without really

understanding the full consequences

which could lead to just as we now face

an ecological disaster in the outside world,

we might face a kind of mental eco disaster

in the world inside us.

And you know we are now conducting

beginning to conduct these huge experiments on billions

of people and billions of kids, nobody knows what are

the consequences for example of raising kids on screens.

We just don't know.

We hope it will be okay.

W hope we will middle through

and so far you know so far so good,

but we just really don't know.

- Something that you write about as being one of

the sort of central tenets of your secularism

is eliminating suffering.

And then you also write very,

you quote extensively and impactfully

from Brave New World about how the Soma,

the drug kind of takes out everything that's like

worthwhile in life, you know this feeling this lack of pain

and takes away so much art

and so much of what makes life life.

And obviously there's such an equivalent with the opioid

epidemic now and how obviously there's a goal of eliminating

pain, but obviously it's also creating like a zombie nation

for us in the US.

How do you reconcile that sort of tenet of trying

to alleviate human suffering

and of course other sentient beings suffering,

animal suffering with the necessity,

I mean I believe in the necessity

of having a spectrum that you can't experience the love

without the possibility of that love

of breaking up.

You can't experience the joy of living without

the threat of mortality.

In my mind I mean maybe that's an opinion

as opposed to a truth, but I'm interested in how you

reconcile those.

- The huge difference between pain and suffering,

very often suffering is I mean pain is a

particular sensation in the body.

Suffering is generated by the mind.

Very often in reaction to things like pain.

The pain is pain, okay I have pain in my knee.

The suffering is when my mind starts going crazy.

I want to get rid of this pain,

and it's still there and I want to get rid of it

and this I want to get rid of it.

There is something in reality

and I don't want it to be in reality

but it's there.

This is the generation of suffering,

so it's something very different from pain.

If we just learn how to live with the pain,

it's still painful but at least some of the suffering

goes away and it's the same with something like sadness.

I mean if you're sad

and your mind goes I don't want to be sad.

I want to be happy, I want to be joyful,

then the sadness also turns into suffering,

and then you also have the temptation,

let's take something to eliminate the sadness.

Let's take a pill let's watch a movie,

let's run away from the sadness.

And you're not only generating suffering

for yourself in doing so,

you're also missing a large part of life.

Life is definitely not just about joy

and not just about pleasure.

It's also about pain and sadness,

they have a lot to teach us.

There can be a lot for example of depth

in sadness and if you just you know all your life

just run away whenever sadness brings its head up

then you're missing a large part of life.

So when I talk about alleviating suffering

I don't mean just let's find some pill

that makes all the sadness and all the pain

and all the anger and all the negative emotions

just disappear from the world.

It won't work and if it does work

well it will be a very very different world

than the one we know.

- I'm also interested in how you write about technology

being able to create art or AI being able to write music now

and play chess creatively,

but those examples are obviously very sort

of mathematical examples.

Do you think that extends to other arts

that are less mathematical?

Like writing a poem or you know painting a painting?

- Well it really goes to the question of what is art,

and I would be very happy to hear,

I mean I've been talking all the time

and I would be very happy to hear

what you think about it

but a very common understanding is that

art is about inspiring human emotions,

but in the end whether it's painting,

whether it's theater, whether it's the movie or ballet

or music or anything, it's in the end comes down

to the human experience.

We want to inspire maybe joy, maybe sadness,

maybe anger, maybe fear,

you go to a horror movie, you go to a drama,

you go to a comedy, the idea is let's inspire

a particular human emotion.

Now if it is true that the ultimate instrument

that all artists are playing on

is the human emotional system,

which is the human biochemical system.

There is a chance that computers could become the best

artists in the world, in the sense of you want joy,

I know how to press your biochemical buttons

to produce joy.

You want to feel sad, I know how to press your emotional

keyboard to produce sadness.

Maybe art is not about inspiring human emotions

but if it is there is a case to be made that

in the not-too-distant future

computers will be so good in manipulating human emotions

that human artists will find it difficult

to compete with them.

And this is where I would really like to hear your

views on about both is it really what art is about

to inspire you in emotions and if it is,

does it mean that maybe quite soon a lot of artists

will be out of work?

- (laughs) You know I don't understand the technology

enough to understand if technology would be able

to really replace art.

Of course for music it seems plausible

because music is so much pattern and math.

It seems less plausible to me of course

that something like storytelling or painting

that seems much more visceral,

and not something that could necessarily be like a product

of an algorithm and be as effective as.

But I don't know and it's interesting to me

that you say that consciousness is

this sort of mystery, but you have a real belief

that emotion is this sort of biochemical algorithm.

How does that separate and how do you think the subconscious

which is also sort of a mystery

but maybe somehow connects between emotion and consciousness

and it's sort of woven throughout as opposed to being

like some layered thing.

How does that relate where something seems like

something that can be hacked and something

is a complete mystery?

- Yeah I don't know I mean I think almost nobody knows.

We don't understand consciousness well enough,

so we don't understand what's happening there,

but we do again this is the gap between manipulation

and understanding.

We don't understand the mind,

but we become extremely effective in manipulating it.

We do know how to produce emotions with

greater and greater certainty,

both in human collectives and in individuals to

the degree you know the most extreme cases

is when in all kinds of medical procedures

you implant electrodes in people's brains,

and you can like with almost a hundred percent certainty

you know that the doctor or the scientist presses a button

and the person feels joy or fear,

and then the mind generates a story why I felt fear

like we know the answer why you felt fear

because doctor X just pressed this button

and it is connected by an electrode to your brain

to the center of the field of the medulla whatever.

So this is why you felt fear,

but the mind, no, no, no,

there is something frightening about this scene.

This person looks to me very shady

and it comes up with a story.

And so we don't, again I don't understand,

we don't understand, but we can manipulate.

- Right which is, I always think of the falling reflex,

you know when you fall asleep.

That's just a spinal cord reflex

but somehow our brain makes the story

that in our dream that we're falling

that makes us feel like we're having that

because of the story but the impulse comes from

your spine first and it goes right back

to like our narrative tendencies

that our narrative tendencies seem to explain

our own body's reflexes more than the other way.

Like that behavior precedes intention

as opposed to intention preceding behavior.

- Yeah and the danger is that when you get to the point

you can manipulate people's emotion so well,

you know the political implications are really horrifying.

Because we know from history that for example

in order to get a population to hate some group

you basically need to hijack their,

not just their fear system,

but their disgust.

Throughout history you see again and again

this trick that the first step towards ostracizing

or persecuting or exterminating a group

is you feel disgust towards them.

Now disgust, the mechanism of disgust evolved by

evolution to protect us against disease

against sources of contamination like feces

or an open wound or a corpse or all kinds of vermin

and things like that,

but then humans in history discovered

that you can actually hijack these brain mechanisms

and direct them not towards these disgusting things,

but against disgusting people,

and again and again you see in history

that people like are compared with cockroaches,

- [Natalie] Metaphor again. - Or compared the disease,

they are like cancer.

They are a source of pollution,

so you know even very large groups of people

like women have often been considered

a source of pollution in many religions.

Why can't a woman be a rabbi?

Why can't a woman be a priest?

Women are a source of pollution.

- Why can't you shake hands with a woman?

- Yeah and this is hijacking.

There is real pollution in the world.

You know again feces, this is pollution,

but woman isn't.

But people have found out how to hijack the

disgust mechanisms in the brain,

and you know 20 years from now,

you can do that in a very precise way

to individuals and make them really feel

disgust towards whatever you want them

to be disgusted by,

and this is extremely dangerous.

- Yeah there's something in entertainment world

that's very related there.

I'm sure you know about this,

there's sort of tracking devices now on TVs.

They track where your eyes go so that future television

or films can make different stories for people

depending on what they unconsciously are paying attention to

so that I think it's actually an Israeli developer

who's developing it,

but one of my friends was telling me that

it was just presented to her that you know if you're paying

attention even you don't realize more to this handsome man

the story will gear towards him,

whereas if another viewer is more interested

in watching the cute little dog,

the story will go and follow them.

And it'll be kind of a choose-your-own-adventure

but based on your things that might not even be conscious to

you, this kind of storytelling.

And it's something that's interesting in terms of

the narratives and the storytelling like your books are

obviously being read all over the world.

Movies and television from my industry is being seen

much more widely because if,

but then there's also sort of a fracturing of narrative

because there's so much access,

but there's just so much more content too.

So how do you feel that that fractured narrative that

that might now be targeted towards people

will affect the way people interact with each other

because in a way you have a bigger chance to share a story

with someone in China,

but you also have much less of a chance

of maybe connecting to someone sharing the story

with someone next to you,

because there's now five million TV shows to choose from.

- Yeah that's a very interesting question

and a very interesting development.

I don't really know, I mean so far the trajectory

in history has been for thousands of years

that there are fewer and fewer stories

that more and more people share.

If you think for example about mythology,

so you know 5000 years ago,

you have a different mythology in almost

every village and every valley.

And then gradually a very small number

of mythological stories took over the entire world.

And we constantly see them and hear about them everywhere.

Even in non-religious contexts they kind of become

the basic metaphors and the basic narratives

for understanding the world.

Like I don't know I think I mentioned Harry Potter before

which I really like the books,

so but some kind of a disappointment for me came at the end

that what will happen in the end.

I want to know how will it end,

and then what happens in the end.

He dies, he comes back to life.

- Spoiler (laughs).

- He defeats the, saved the world.

I'm sure I heard it somewhere before.

You know it's not a really original story.

In the end we go for the most familiar mythology,

and this was not like that 5000 years ago.

You had so many different versions

and it's the same way as fairy tales.

When the Grimm brothers in the early 19th century

they went about collecting German fairy tales.

So there were like 200 versions of Hansel and Gretel.

Like every grandmother in every village

told the different story, a little different story,

and the Grimm brothers they decided okay,

grandmother are from this village,

this will be the canonical story of Hansel and Gretel.

And now you have, I don't know millions of people

that know this story, just this one story.

Just this one version.

So we had this constant more and more concentration,

fewer and fewer stories that everybody knows,

and we are now seeing a kind of divergence,

a breakup for example certainly in television

that if 20 years ago certainly when I was a kid in Israel

in the 1980s, we just had one channel.

So everybody saw the same show.

There was nothing else.

And now you have different sections of societies

watching very different shows.

Where is it going?

We'll wait and see.

- We're going to, we just have about 10 minutes left,

that's been so fascinating.

I wish we could have gone on for hours.

I've had hundreds of questions and my god you are all smart.

I think we've covered quite a few of them.

so I think we're only going to manage two,

possibly three at the very most,

but one and there's been a number of themes coming up

and a lot of people have wanted to speak about Me Too.

So there's a question from a woman Coralie Sonik,

who says in your opinion what led women to share their story

Me Too at this specific time in history?

And Natalie we'd love to hear your thoughts on it too.

- Well Tarana Burke who started the Me Too Movement

clearly utilized technology in a very powerful way

that gave I think really gave women

a sense of solidarity and the safety in numbers.

And we're seeing it today

with the very emotionally impacting Kavanaugh hearings

in Washington, in my country, which is

very, very difficult to watch.

But also very inspiring because of the courage

of people who have been silenced for a very, very long time,

and that you know I think one woman inspires another

and then it becomes a movement.

And then people realize that they're protecting

each other and protecting I think also,

it was a revelation because so many, so many people

not just women were silent about their experiences,

that I think so people didn't realize how widespread it was.

And people thought they were alone

and the technology actually made them realize that

there were others like them,

and not only others like them but many times others

with the same perpetrator,

and I think also once people realized that their

silence could potentially hurt other people

they started to come out and also that when they realized

that their speaking out could help support another person

who had come forward to help their credibility

they also bravely came out because unfortunately

it is still so devastating for people who come forward.

Their lives are extremely impacted and really

they're terrorized, they're harassed.

They have horrible, horrible repercussions

for coming forward still after all of this today.

And so it's very disheartening to hear anyone say

that women are coming forward for their own benefit

or to get attention or to,

no one's hired anyone because they've come forward

about a claim.

So you really see the kind of sisterhood

and solidarity and a decision to say that

this is unacceptable and now that it's been revealed

I think even to people who are victims of this kind of

behavior I don't think anyone realized how widespread it was

and that's been something that's been really revelatory

in some of the women who've come forward is,

and men but some of the people who've come forward

some people's reaction or like Oh everyone's had that.

It's a bad date and that should be an example of

how ubiquitous it is.

Not that it's okay but that this is a widespread

cultural disease that we are living with and sickness.

If every woman has had a date with a guy who's been too

aggressive with her, that she's felt like she's need to

leave at some point, then that's a problem.

Like that's a problem that is in our entire society

and that doesn't mean that we need to punish all the men

who have done that.

It means that we we need to change the behavior

for everyone and show our boys and our girls

and those who identify in between

that behavior is no longer something

that we're comfortable with and to be aware

of the other person and their desire to care

about the other person's desire.

Sorry that was a speech, sorry.

(audience applauding)

- [Moderator] Do you wanna add anything there Yuval?

- I don't know why it started just now.

Could have started you know a hundred years ago

in terms of the necessity.

Probably wouldn't have been possible a hundred years ago,

I would just say that you know you have now all

these people who say well it's gone too far.

What I'm curious about whether the people who now feel this

urge well I must right now,

I must write something to the newspaper to say

it's gone too far,

did you five years ago wrote something to the newspaper

to say that sexual harassment is going too far.

If not then why the sudden urge to speak up about this?

This is what I don't understand.

- I think we're going to have to wrap up in

about five minutes, but I have one last question.

And it's somebody who likes to have the last word.

It's from God, and it says have religions in general

had a positive or negative impact on humanity?

Score it one to five where one is very bad

and five is very good.

(Natalie laughing)

So both of you have to answer this one.

(audience applauding)

- Oh God, no you please.

- I don't know, two.

(all laughing)

It's done some good definitely.

I don't think that I mean that it's all bad.

A lot of the morality of humanity of art,

of again the ability to make people trust one another

and cooperate is due to the various religions,

but they've also done a tremendous amount of harm

and certainly not all religions are the same

in terms of the amount of good and the amount of harm

that they have done, but ultimately both in the past

and also today, I don't think they are really necessary

full morality or full trust or full cooperation.

In the end morality is about reducing

suffering in the world.

You don't need to believe in this God or that God

in order to act morally.

You need to have deep appreciation of suffering.

I do think that we need spirituality as against religion

in all times, in all cases but for me spirituality

and religion are totally different things.

They are almost the opposite of one another.

Spirituality is about questions

and religion is about answers.

Spirituality is when you have this big question

like what is consciousness or what is the

meaning of life or who am I or what is the good?

And you go on a quest to find out

the answer to this question,

and you have the courage, the willingness

to go wherever this question takes you,

because it's very important to you.

Religion is about answers.

It's when somebody comes and says this is the answer.

You must believe that.

If not you will burn in hell or we will burn you,

and this invites the antithesis of spirituality.

And I think that in the 21st century,

we need probably spirituality more than ever before

because a lot of spiritual questions

and philosophical questions are suddenly becoming

practical questions.

Questions about free will,

about what is the meaning of humanity?

What does it mean to be human?

Which you know people argue about for thousands of years

but had very little immediate implications

what you think is just you know a pastime for philosophers.

Suddenly it becomes a question for engineers

because we are able or soon we will be able

to start reengineering humans.

So a question like what does it mean, what does humanity

mean, what is the essence of being human?

It moves from the realm of abstract philosophy

to the realm of engineering.

And this is why we need to engage with

these kinds of questions far more and even corporations

like Google and Facebook and so forth,

I think they really need philosophers.

And they really need experts on spirituality

to understand what they are doing.

Our religion on the other hand

I think it has done whatever good or bad it could

have done for humanity.

And it's now losing more and more of its power.

It's still very important for people's identity

but most of its traditional roles,

I mean in the past religion you know

determined agriculture and medicine.

If you are sick you go to the priests.

If there is no rain you go to the temple to pray

and all these things have been taken over by science

and technology and the engineers and the doctors,

and what is left is really defining collective identities

for human groups.

And in this religion is now mostly harmful

I think because instead of encouraging global unity,

the main thing it does at present

is to support tribalism and nationalism

and prevent greater human collaboration.

(audience applauding)

- I think we might actually have to end it there

but thank you so much.

That was the most fascinating, brilliant conversation.

You are both titans of intellect.

Can I ask you just to give them all both

a huge round of applause?

(audience applauding)