Hello and welcome to Under the Skin. In this episode, the first episode of season two,

thank you for joining us by the way. I'll be talking to Yvall Noah Harari,

who scarcely needs an introduction, but you know, do do introductions,

thanks otherwise people would just be wandering onto stages or into audio spaces and announced.

And Yvall Noah Harari wrote a book called Sapiens, which was recommended to me, name drop,

by Damien Hurst, and he told me about it, that Yvall Noah Harari's theory was that our capacity to narrate

advice as a homo sapiens was what distinguished us from the other humanoid ape-like creatures

that roamed the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago and led to our supremacy.

And indeed the book sapiens distels those stories along with many others,

subsequent books continue on those lines, although sometimes they're a little dystopic,

you know, with the advance of technology. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation that Yvall and I had

about power, the organisation of power, the potential for change, prior to the end,

if you were just done a talk together at a school in South London, and I was very mindful

that we were talking in front of an audience of hundreds of kids, many of whom were concerned

about his visions for a future in which many of the jobs that they would be anticipating

would be taken by machines. It's an interesting chat, I hope you enjoy it.

Trying to achieve a quality with the annihilation of category is not a successful route.

That's exactly right.

We're in this era where it turns out we were never the best.

It doesn't look like an ideology.

What's beneath the surface of people we admire, of the ideas that define our time, the history we're told?

Welcome to Russell Brand.

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