Two Million Years in Two Hours: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari

Your Undivided Attention

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4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2021

⏱️ 120 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We tend to think about ourselves as the smartest animals on the planet, this is why we rule the place,
0:06.0	and it's interesting to realize that it's much more complicated than that.
0:11.0	Yes, we are intelligent, but what really makes us the kind of rulers of the planet
0:17.2	is actually our ability to believe nonsense, not our super smart intelligent minds.
0:24.0	Welcome to your undivided attention.
0:26.0	Today our guest is Yval Noah Harari,
0:29.0	author of Sapiens, Homo deus, 21 lessons for the 21st Century, and the new graphic novel of Sapiens, which just came out in the fall.
0:37.0	Yval is a very dear friend of mine.
0:39.0	We actually met on a climate change trip in Chile in 2016, and we're so delighted to have him on the
0:44.3	podcast because we're about to go upstream of nearly every problem we've discussed
0:48.4	on the show so far. We've already explored the countless ways technology is shredding our sense of shared reality,
0:54.0	but we haven't asked a more fundamental question. How do we get a sense of shared reality to begin with?
1:00.0	Yevall being Yevall, he can sum up how we've done it over the course of millions of years, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to modern nations,
1:08.0	and along the way he can describe the moments when a new technology has shattered our sense of reality, only to restore it at an even greater scale.
1:16.0	If the events of January 6th had made one thing painfully clear,
1:20.0	it's that a world where technology is manipulating human feelings into narrower and narrower cult factories,
1:28.0	self-reinforcing systems of beliefs, rumors, gossip, and outrage that build upon layer after layer into a certain view
1:37.0	and the intensity of people's actions that we saw on January 6th reflect the intensity of the beliefs and world views that they hold.
1:45.0	In many ways this is because the institutions we trust have placed the individual and individual
1:49.6	feelings alone at the center of our economic and political universe. The
1:54.0	voters always right. The customer knows best. And we must fend for ourselves in an
1:58.4	increasingly poisoned information environment among predatory business
	...

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