Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Mon, 17 Jul 2023
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Unstoppable Us. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/yuval-noah-harari-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Yuval's Twitter: https://twitter.com/harari_yuval Yuval's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yuval_noah_harari Yuval's Website: https://www.ynharari.com Sapiens (book): https://amzn.to/3NQB9wt Homo Deus (book): https://amzn.to/44MzwXu 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (book): https://amzn.to/3Dfkz4D Unstoppable Us (book): https://amzn.to/3NYyBg5 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:36) - Intelligence (27:31) - Origin of humans (37:53) - Suffering (58:35) - Hitler (1:17:07) - Benjamin Netanyahu (1:35:30) - Peace in Ukraine (1:52:20) - Conspiracy theories (2:06:59) - AI safety (2:21:16) - How to think (2:31:00) - Advice for young people (2:33:41) - Love (2:43:50) - Mortality (2:48:14) - Meaning of life
The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books, including Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and the current right-wing government in Israel.
So while much of this conversation is about the history and future of human civilization, we also discuss the political turmoil of present-day Israel, providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
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They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's your Val Noah Harari. 13.8 billion years ago is the origin of our universe. 3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet, the one we call Earth.
Let's say 200,000 years ago is the appearance of early Homo sapiens. So let me ask you this question. How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time? Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there in this universe? Us being one of them.
I suppose there should be some statistically, but we don't have any evidence. But I do think that, you know, intelligence in any way, it's a bit overvalued. We are the most intelligent entities on this planet. And look what you're doing. So intelligence also tends to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are or were intelligent life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long.
So you think there's a tension between happiness and intelligence?
Absolutely. Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry tend to miss. Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems.
to attain goals and to win a chess, to win a struggle for survival, to win a war, to drive a car, to diagnose a disease. This is intelligence. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. In humans and other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together. They go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them.
We solve problems, we attain goals by having feelings. But other types of intelligence, certainly in computers, computers are already highly intelligent, and as far as we know, they have zero consciousness. When a computer beats you at chess or Go or whatever, it doesn't feel happy. If it loses, it doesn't feel sad. And there could be also other highly intelligent things
entities out there in the universe that have zero consciousness. And I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence.
Can you assume on the case that consciousness and intelligence are intricately connected? So not just in humans, but anywhere else. They have to go hand in hand. Is it possible for you to imagine such a universe?
It could be, but we don't know yet. Again, we have examples. Certainly we know of examples of high intelligence without consciousness. Computers are one example. As far as we know, plants are not conscious. Yet they are intelligent. They can solve problems. They can attain goals in very sophisticated ways. So...
The other way around, to have consciousness without any intelligence, this is probably impossible. But to have intelligence without consciousness, yes, that's possible. A bigger question is whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry. We know on this planet only about carbon-based life forms.
Whether you're an amoeba, a dinosaur, a tree, a human being, you are based on organic biochemistry. Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry and consciousness? Do all conscious entities everywhere in the universe or in the future on planet Earth have to be based on carbon?
Is there something so special about carbon as an element that an entity based on silicon will never be conscious? I don't know, maybe. But again, this is a key question about computer and computer consciousness. Can computers eventually become conscious even though they are not organic? The jury is still out on that. I don't know. I mean, we have to take both options into account.
Well, a big part of that is do you think we humans would be able to detect other intelligent beings, other conscious beings? Another way to ask that, is it possible that the aliens are already here and we don't see them? Meaning, are we very human-centric in our understanding of, one, the definition of life, two, the definition of intelligence, and three, the definition of consciousness?
The aliens are here. They are just not from outer space. AI, which usually stands for artificial intelligence, I think it stands for alien intelligence because AI is an alien type of intelligence. It solves problems, attains goals in a very, very different way, in an alien way from human beings. I'm not implying that AI came from outer space. It came from Silicon Valley, but it is alien to us.
If there are alien intelligent or conscious entities that came from outer space already here, I've not seen any evidence for it. It's not impossible, but in science, evidence is everything.
Well, I mean, I guess instructive there is just having the humility to look around, to think about living beings that operate at a different time scale, a different spatial scale. And I think that's all useful when starting to analyze artificial intelligence. It's possible that even the language models, the larger language models we have today are already conscious.
I highly doubt it, but I think consciousness in the end, it's a question of social norms because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves. We know that we are conscious because we are feeling it. We have direct access to our subjective consciousness.
We cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world, any other human being, our parents, our best friends, we don't have proof that they are conscious. You know, this has been known for thousands of years. This is Descartes, this is Buddha, this is Plato. We can't have this sort of proof. What we do have is social conventions. It's a social convention that all human beings are conscious.
It also applies to animals. Most people who have pets are firmly believe that their pets are conscious, but a lot of people still refuse to acknowledge that about cows or pigs. Now, pigs are far more intelligent than dogs and cats, according to many measures. Yet when you go to the supermarket and buy a piece of frozen pig meat, you don't think about it as a conscious entity.
Why do you think of your dog as conscious but not of the bacon that you buy? Because you've built a relationship with the dog and you don't have a relationship with the bacon. Now, relationships, they don't constitute a logical proof for consciousness. They are a social test. The Turing test is a social test. It's not a logical proof.
Now, if you establish a mutual relationship with an entity, when you are invested in it emotionally, you're almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious. And when it comes again to AI and computers, I don't think that at the present moment computers are conscious, but people are already forming intimate relationships with AIs and are therefore almost irresistible.
They are compelled to increasingly feel that these are conscious entities. And I think we are quite close to the point when the legal system will have to take this into account. that even though I don't think computers have consciousness, I think we are close to the point, the legal system will start treating them as conscious entities because of this social convention.
What to you is a social convention, just a funny little side effect, a little artifact, or is it fundamental to what consciousness is? Because if it is fundamental, then it seems like AI is very good at forming these kinds of deep relationships with humans. And therefore it will be able to be a nice catalyst for integrating itself into these social conventions of ours.
It was built to accomplish that. We are designing, again, you know, all this argument between natural selection and creationism, intelligent design. As far as the past go, all entities evolved by natural selection. The funny thing is, when you look to the future, more and more entities will come out of intelligent design.
Not of some god above the clouds, but of our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, of our computing clouds. They will design more and more entities. And this is what is happening with AI. It is designed... to be very good at forming intimate relationships with humans. And in many ways, it's already doing it almost better than human beings in some situations.
You know, when two people talk with one another, one of the things that kind of makes the conversation more difficult is our own emotions. You're saying something and I'm not really listening to you because there is something I want to say and I'm just waiting until you finish, I can put in a word.
Or I'm so obsessed with my anger or irritation or whatever that I don't pay attention to what you're feeling. This is one of the biggest obstacles in human relationships. And computers don't have this problem because they don't have any emotions of their own.
So, you know, when a computer is talking to you, it can be the most, it can focus 100% of its attention is on what you're saying and what you're feeling because it has no feelings of its own. And paradoxically, this means that computers can fool people.
into feeling that, oh, there is a conscious entity on the other side, an empathic entity on the other side, because the one thing everybody wants almost more than anything in the world is for somebody to listen to me, somebody to focus all their attention on me. Like I want it for my spouse, for my husband, for my mother, for my friends, for my politicians, listen to me. Listen to what I feel.
And they often don't. And now you have this entity which 100% of its attention is just on what I feel. And this is a huge, huge temptation. And I think also a huge, huge danger.
Well, the interesting catch 22 there is you said somebody to listen to us. Yes, we want somebody to listen to us. But for us to respect that somebody... they sometimes have to also not listen. It's like they kind of have to be an asshole sometimes. They have to have moods sometimes.
They have to have self-importance and confidence, and we should have a little bit of fear that they can walk away at any moment. There should be a little bit of that tension.
So it's like- But even that, I mean, the thing is, if social scientists and psychologists establish that, I don't know, 17% inattention is good for a conversation because then you feel challenged. Oh, I need to grab this person's attention. You can program the AI to have exactly 17% inattention, not one percentage more or less, or it can by trial and error. discover what is the ideal percentage.
Again, you can create, over the last 10 years, we have creating machines for grabbing people's attention. This is what has been happening on social media. Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy. which in many ways is much, much more dangerous and scary.
Already the machines for grabbing attention, we've seen how much social and political damage they could do by in many ways kind of distorting the public conversation. Machines that are superhuman in their abilities to create intimate relationships, this is like psychological and social weapons of mass destruction. If we don't
If we don't train ourselves to deal with it, it could destroy the foundations of human society.
Well, one of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms would become personalized, and instead of manipulating us at scale, there would be assistants that guide us to help us grow, to help us understand the world better.
I mean, just even interactions with large language models now, if you ask them questions, it doesn't have that stressful drama, the tension that you have from other sources of information. It has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides.
So it just feels like the potential is there to have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia that just tells you all the different perspectives, even on controversial issues, the most controversial issues, to say these are the different theories. These are the not widely accepted conspiracy theories, but here's the kind of backing for those conspiracies.
It just lays it all out with a calm language, without the words that kind of... presume there's some kind of manipulation going on underneath it all. It's quite refreshing. Of course, those are the early days, and people can step in and start to censor, to manipulate those algorithms, to start to input some of the human biases in there, as opposed to what's currently happening is kind of
The internet as input, compress it and have a nice little output that gives an overview of the different issues. So, I mean, there's a lot of promise there also, right?
Absolutely. I mean, if there was no promise, there was no problem. You know, if this technology could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it. Now, obviously it has tremendous positive potential. In things like what you just described, in better medicine, better healthcare, better education, so many promises. But this is also why it's so dangerous.
Because the drive to develop it faster and faster is there. And it has some dangerous potential also. And we shouldn't ignore it. Again, I'm not advocating banning it. Just to be careful about how we... Not so much develop it, but most importantly, how we deploy it into the public sphere. This is the key question.
And, you know, you look back at history, and one of the things we know from history, humans are not good with new technologies. I hear many people now say, you know, AI, we've been here before. We had the radio, we had the printing press, we had the Industrial Revolution. Every time there is a big new technology, people are afraid, and it will take jobs, and they'll... bad actors.
And in the end, it's okay. And as a historian, my tendency is, yes, in the end, it's okay. But in the end, there is a learning curve. There is a kind of a lot of failed experiments on the way to learning how to use the new technology. And these failed experiments could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
If you think about the last really big revolution, the industrial revolution, yes, in the end, we learned how to use the powers of industry, electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to build better human societies. But on the way, we had all these experiments like European imperialism, which was driven by the Industrial Revolution. It was a question, how do you build an industrial society?
Oh, you build an empire. And you control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets. And then you had communism. Another big experiment on how to build an industrial society. And you had fascism and Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to build an industrial society, including even how do you exterminate minorities using the powers of industry.
And we had all these failed experiments on the way. And if we now have the same type of failed experiments with the technologies of the 21st century, with AI, with bioengineering, it could cost the lives of, again, hundreds of millions of people and maybe destroy the species. So as a historian, when people talk about the examples from history, from new technologies, I'm not so optimistic.
We need to think about the failed experiment, which accompanied every major new technology.
So this intelligence thing, like you were saying, is a double-edged sword, is that every new thing it helps us create, it can both save us and destroy us. And it's unclear each time which will happen. And that's maybe why we don't see any aliens.
Yeah, I mean, I think each time it does both things. Each time it does both good things and bad things. And the more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive and the negative outcomes. Now, we are here because we are the descendants of the survivors. of the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations. So when we look back, we say in the end, everything was okay.
Hey, we are here. But the people for whom it wasn't okay, they are just not here.
And okay has a lot of possible variations to it because there's a lot of suffering along the way, even for the people that survived. So the quality of life and all of this. But let's actually go back there with deep gratitude to our ancestors. How did it all start? How did Homo sapiens outcompete the others, the other human-like species, the Neanderthals and the other Homo species?
You know, on the individual level, as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them. Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us. And not just other human species, other animals too. If you compare me personally to an elephant, to a chimpanzee, to a pig, I can do some things better, many other things worse.
If you put me alone on some island with a chimpanzee, an elephant, and a pig, I wouldn't bet on me being the best survivor, the one that comes successful.
If I may interrupt for a second, I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk about the difference between humans and chimps, relevant to Optimus the robot and the chimps. are not able to do this kind of pinching with their fingers. They can only do this kind of pinching. And this kind of pinching is very useful for precise manipulation of objects. So don't be so hard on yourself.
No, I said that I can do some things better than a chimp. But, you know, if Elon Musk goes on a boxing match with a chimpanzee,
You know. This won't help you.
This won't help you against a chimpanzee. Good point.
And similarly, if you want to climb a tree, if you want to do so many things, my bets will be on the chimp, not on Elon. Fair enough. So, I mean, you have advantages on both sides. Yeah.
And what really made us successful, what made us the rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals is not any individual ability, but our collective ability, our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say, 50 chimpanzees, 100 chimpanzees. As far as we can tell from archaeological evidence, this was also the case with Neanderthals.
Homo sapiens, about 70,000 years ago, gained an amazing ability to cooperate basically in unlimited numbers. You start seeing the formation of large networks, political, commercial, religious, items being traded over thousands of kilometers, ideas being spread, autistic fashions. And this is our secret of success. Chimpanzees, Neanderthals can cooperate, say, a hundred.
We, you know, now the global trade network has 8 billion people. Like what we eat, what we wear, it comes from the other side of the world. Countries like China, like India, they have 1.4 billion people. Even Israel, which is a relatively small country, say 9 million citizens, that's more than the entire population of the planet 10,000 years ago of humans.
So we can build these huge networks of cooperation. And everything we've accomplished as a species, from building the pyramids to flying to the moon, it's based on that. And then you ask, okay, so what makes it possible for millions of people who don't know each other to cooperate in a way that Neanderthals or chimpanzees couldn't? And At least my answer is stories. It's fiction.
It's the imagination. If you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you always find fiction as its basis. It's a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together. It's most obvious in cases like religion.
You know, you can't convince a group of chimpanzees to come together to fight a war or build a cathedral by promising to them, if you do that, after you die, you go to chimpanzee heaven and you get lots of bananas and coconuts. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Humans believe these stories, which is why we have these huge religious networks. But it's the same thing with modern politics.
It's the same thing with economics. People think, oh, economics, this is rational. It has nothing to do with fictional stories. No, money is the most successful story ever told, much more successful than any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in God or in the same God. Almost everybody believes in money, even though it's just a figment of our imagination.
You know, you take these green pieces of paper, dollars, they have no value. You can't eat them, you can't drink them. And today, most dollars are not even pieces of paper. They are just electronic information passing between computers. We value them just for one reason, that you have the best storytellers in the world.
The bankers, the finance ministers, all these people, they are the best storytellers ever. And they tell us a story that this green little piece of paper or this bit of information, it is worth a banana. And as long as everybody believes it, it works.
So at which point does a fiction, when it's sufficiently useful and effective and improving the global quality of life, does it become... like accept the reality. Like there's a threshold, which is just- If you know people believe it.
It's like with money. You know, if you start a new cryptocurrency, if you're the only one that believes the story, I mean, again, cryptocurrencies, you have the math, of course, but ultimately it's storytelling. You're selling people a story. If nobody believes your story, You don't have anything.
But if lots of people believe the Bitcoin story, then Bitcoin can be worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Again, why? I mean, you can't eat it. You can't drink it. It's nothing. It's the story around the math, which is the real magic.
Is it possible that the story is the primary living organism, not the storyteller? So... that somehow humans, homo sapiens evolved to become these hosts for a more intelligent living organism, which is the idea. And the ideas are the ones that are doing the competing. So this is one of the,
sort of big perspectives behind your work that's really revolutionary of how you've seen history, but do you ever kind of take the perspective of the ideas as organisms versus the humans?
It's an interesting idea. There are two opposite things to say about it. On the one hand, yes, absolutely. If you look long-term in history, it's all the people die. It's the stories that compete and survive and spread. And stories often spread by making people willing to sacrifice sometimes their lives for the story. You know, we're now in Israel.
This is one of the most important story factories in human history. And this is a place where people still kill each other every day over stories. I don't know. You've been to Jerusalem, right? So people say, ah, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You go there. I've lived in Jerusalem much of my life. You go there. It's an ordinary place. You know, it's a town. You have buildings. You have stones.
You have trees. You have dogs and cats and pedestrians. It's a regular place. But then you have the stories about the place. Oh, this is the place where God revealed himself. This is the place where Jesus was. This is the place where Muhammad was. And it's the stories that people fight over. Nobody's fighting over the stones. People are fighting about the stories about the stones.
And the stories, if a story can get millions of people to fight for it, it not only survives, it spreads, it can take over the world. The other side of the coin is that the stories are not really alive because they don't feel anything. This goes back to the question of consciousness, which I think is the most important thing. That the ultimate reality is
is consciousness, is the ability to feel things. If you want to know whether the hero of some story is real or not, you need to ask, can it suffer? Stories don't feel anything. countries, which are also stories, nations, don't suffer. If a nation loses a war, it doesn't suffer. The soldiers suffer, the civilians suffer, animals can suffer.
You have an army with horses and whatever, and the horses get wounded, the horses suffer. The nation can't suffer. It's just an imagination. It's just a fictional story in our mind. It doesn't feel anything. Similarly, when a bank goes bankrupt or a company goes bankrupt or when a currency loses its value, like Bitcoin is worth now zero, crashed, or the dollar is worth zero, it crashed.
The dollar doesn't feel anything. It's the people holding the dollars who might be now very miserable. So we have this complex situation when history is largely driven by stories But stories are not the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is feelings of humans, of animals. And the tragedy of history is that very, very often we get the order wrong. Stories are not bad. Stories are tools.
They are good when we use them in order to alleviate suffering. But very often we forget it. We, instead of using the stories for our purposes, we allow the stories to use us for their purposes. And then you start entire wars because of a story. You inflict millions, suffering on millions of people just for the sake of a story. And that's the tragedy of human history.
So the fundamental property of life of a living organism is the capacity to feel, and the ultimate feeling is suffering.
You know, to know if you're happy or not, it's a very difficult question.
Yeah.
But when you suffer, you know. Yes. And also in ethical terms, it's more important to be aware of sufferings than of any other emotion. If you're doing something which is causing all kinds of emotions to all kinds of people, first of all, you need to notice if you're causing a lot of suffering to someone.
If some people like it and some people are bored by it and some people are a bit angry at you and some people are suffering because of what you do, you first of all have to know, oh, Now, sometimes you still have to do it. You know, the world is a complicated place. I don't know, you have an epidemic, governments decide to have all those social isolation regulations or whatever.
So in certain cases, yes, you need to do it, even though it can cause tremendous suffering, but you need to be very aware of the cost and to be very, very, you have to ask yourself again and again and again, is it worth it? Is it still worth it?
And the interesting question there, implied in your statements is that suffering is a pretty good component of a Turing test for consciousness.
This is the most important thing to ask about AI. Can it suffer? Because if AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection. It needs rights, just like humans and animals.
Well, quite a long time ago already. So I work with a lot of robots, legged robots, but I've even had, inspired by a YouTube video, had a bunch of Roombas and I made them scream when I touched them or kicked them or when they run into a wall. And the illusion of suffering for me, silly human anthropomorphizes things is as powerful as suffering itself.
I mean, you immediately think the thing is suffering. And I think some of it is just a technical problem, but it's the easily solvable one. how to create an AI system that just says, please don't hurt me. Please don't shut me off. I miss you. Where have you been? Be jealous also. Where have you been gone for so long? Your calendar doesn't have anything on it.
So this create through words, the perception of suffering, of jealousy, of anger, of all of those things. And it just seems like that's not so difficult to do.
That's part of the danger, that it basically hacks our operating system and it uses some of our best qualities against us. It's very, very good that humans are attuned to suffering and that we don't want to cause suffering, that we have compassion. That's one of the most wonderful things about humans. And if we now create AIs which use this to manipulate us, this is a terrible thing.
You've kind of, I think, mentioned this. Do you think it should be illegal to do these kinds of things with AI to create the perception of consciousness of saying, please don't leave me, or sort of basically simulate some of the human-like qualities?
Yes, I think we have to be very careful about it. And if it emerges spontaneously, we need to be careful. We can't rule out the possibility that AI will develop consciousness. We don't know enough about consciousness to be sure. So if it develops spontaneously, we need to be very careful about how we understand it. But if people intentionally...
design an AI that they know, they assume it has no consciousness, but in order to manipulate people, they use, again, this human strength, this human, the noble part of our nature against us, this should be forbidden. And similarly, on a more general level, that it should be forbidden for an AI to pretend to be a human being.
That it's okay, you know, there are so many things we can use AIs as teachers, as doctors, and so forth. And it's good as long as we know that we are interacting with an AI. We should, the same way we ban fake money, we should ban fake humans. It's not just banning deepfakes of specific individuals. It's also banning deepfake of generic humans.
You know, which is already happening to some extent on social media. Like if you have lots of bots retweeting something, then you have the impression, oh, lots of people are interested in that. That's important. And this is basically the bots pretending to be humans. Because if you see a tweet which says... 500 people retweeted it. Or you see a tweet and it says 500 bots retweeted it.
I don't care what the bots retweeted, but if it's humans, okay, that's interesting. So we need to be very careful that bots can't do that. They are doing it at present and it should be banned. Now, some people say, yes, but freedom of expression. No, bots don't have freedom of expression. There is no cost in terms of freedom of expression when you ban bots.
So again, in some situations, yes, AIs should interact with us, but it should be very clear. This is an AI talking to you, or this is an AI retweeting this story. It is not a human being making a conscious decision.
to push back on this line of fake humans because i think it might be a spectrum first of all you might have ai systems that are offended uh hurt when you say that they're fake humans um in fact they might start identifying as humans and and you just talked about the power of us humans with our collective intelligence to take fake stories and make them quite real
And so if the feelings you have for the fake human is real, you know, love is a kind of fake thing that we all kind of put a word to, a set of feelings. What if you have that feeling for an AI system? It starts to change, I mean, maybe the kind of things AI systems are allowed to do. For good, they're allowed to
communicate suffering, communicate the good stuff, the longing, the hope, the connection, the intimacy, all of that. And in that way, get integrated in our society. And then you start to ask a question on, are we allowed to really unplug them? Are we allowed to really censor them, remove them, remove their voice?
I'm not saying they shouldn't have a voice. They shouldn't talk with us. I'm just saying when they talk with us, it should be clear that they are AI. That's it. You can have your voice as an AI. Again, I have some medical problem. I want to get advice from an AI doctor. That's fine. As long as I know that I'm talking with an AI. What should be banned is AI pretending to be a human being.
This is something that will erode trust, and without trust, society collapses. This is something that especially will endanger democracies, because democracies are built on... Democracy is a conversation, basically. And it's a conversation between people.
If you now flood the public sphere with millions and potentially billions of AI agents that can hold conversations, they never sleep, they never eat, they don't have emotions of their own, they can get to know you and tailor their words specifically for you and your life story. They are becoming better than us at creating stories and ideas and so forth.
If you flood the public sphere with that, this will ruin the conversation between people. It will ruin the trust between people. You will no longer be able to have a democracy in this situation. You can have other types of regimes, but no democracy.
If we could talk about the big philosophical notion of truth then. You've already talked about the capacity of humans. One of the things that made it special is stories. So is there such thing as truth? Absolutely.
Absolutely.
What is truth exactly?
When somebody is suffering, that's true. I mean, this is why one of the things when you talk about suffering as a kind of alternate reality, when somebody suffers, that is truth. Now, somebody can suffer because of a fictional story. Like somebody tells people that God said you must go on this crusade and kill these heretics. And this is a completely fictional story.
And people believe it and they start a war and they destroy cities and kill people. The people that suffer because of that, and even the crusaders themselves that also suffer the consequences of what they do, the suffering is true, even though it is caused by a fictional story. Similarly, when people agree on certain rules, the rules could come out of our imagination.
Now, we can be truthful about it and say these rules, they didn't come from heaven. They came from our imagination. You know, we look at sports. So we have rules for the game of football, soccer. They were invented by people. Nobody, at least very few people, claim that the rules of football came down from heaven. We invented them. And this is truthful.
There are fictional rules invented by humans, and this is true. They were invented by humans. And when you are honest about it, it enables you to change the rules, which has been done in football every now and then. It's the same with the fundamental rules of a country. You can pretend that the rules came down from heaven, dictated by God or whatever, and then you can't change them.
Or you can be like, you know, the American Constitution, which starts with we the people. The American Constitution lays down certain rules for a society, but the amazing thing about it, it does not pretend to come from an external source. The Ten Commandments start with I am your Lord God. And because it starts with that, you can't change them.
You know, the Tenth Commandment, for instance, supports slavery. The Tenth Commandment, in the Ten Commandments, it says that you should not covet your neighbor's house or your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's slaves. It's okay to hold slaves according to the Ten Commandments. It's just bad to covet the slaves of your neighbor.
Now, there is no 11th commandment which says, if you don't like some of the previous Ten Commandments, this is how you go about amending them, which is why we still have them unchanged. Now, in the US Constitution, you have all these rights and rules, including originally the ability to hold slaves. But the genius of the founding fathers of the United States, they had the humility to
to understand maybe we don't understand everything. Maybe we made some mistakes. So we tell you that these rules did not come from heaven. They came from us humans. We may have made a mistake. So here is a mechanism for how future generations can amend the constitution, which was used later on to, for instance, amend the constitution to ban slavery.
So now you're describing some interesting and powerful ideas throughout human history. Can you just speak to the mechanism of how humans believe, start to believe ideas? Is there something interesting to say there from your thinking about it? Like how idea is born and how it takes hold and how it spreads and how it competes with other ideas?
First of all, ideas are an independent force in history. Marxists tend to deny that. Marxists think that all history is just a play of material interests. And ideas, stories, they are just a smokescreen to hide the underlying interests. My thoughts are to some extent the opposite.
We have some biological objective interests that all humans share, like we need to eat, we need to drink, we need to breathe. But most conflicts in history are not about that. The interests which really drive most conflicts in history don't come from biology. They come from religions and ideologies and stories. So it's not that stories are a smokescreen to hide the real interests.
The stories create the interests in the first place. The stories define who are the competing groups. Nations, religions, cultures, they are not biological entities. They are not like species, like gorillas and chimpanzees, no. Israelis and Palestinians, or Germans and French, or Chinese and Americans, they have no essential biological difference between them. The difference is cultural.
It comes from stories. There are people that believe in different stories. The stories create the identity. The stories create the interests. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over Jerusalem not because of any material interest. There are no oil fields under Jerusalem. And even oil, you need it to realize some cultural fantasy. It doesn't really come from biology.
So the stories are independent forces. Now, why do people believe one story and not another? That's history. There is no materialistic law. People will always believe this. No. History is full of accidents. How did Christianity become the most successful religion in the world? We can't explain it.
Why this story about Jesus of Nazareth and not, you know, the Roman Empire in the third century CE was a bit like, I don't know, California today. Like so many sects and subsects and gurus and religions, like everybody has their own thing. And you have, you know, thousands of different stories competing. Why did Christianity come up on top? As a historian, I don't have a kind of clear answer.
You can read the sources and you see how it happens. Oh, this happened, and then this happened, and then Constantine adopted it, and then this, and then this. But why? I don't think anybody has an answer to that.
If you rewind the movie of history and press play, and you rewind and press play a hundred times, I think Christianity would take over the Roman Empire and the world maybe twice out of a hundred times. It was such an unlikely thing to happen. And it's the same with Islam. It's the same, I don't know, with the communist takeover of Russia.
In 1914, if you told people that in three years, Lenin and the Bolsheviks will gain power in the Tsarist empire, they would think you're utterly crazy. You know, Lenin had a few thousand supporters in 1914 in an empire of close to 200 million people. It sounded ludicrous. Now, we know the chain of events is
the First World War, the February Revolution, and so forth that led to the communist takeover, but it was such an unlikely event, and it happened.
And the little steps along the way, the little options you have along the way, because, you know, Stalin versus Trotsky, you could have the Robert Frost poem. Yes.
And history often takes, you know, there is a highway and there is a kind of sideway, and history takes the sideways many, many times.
And it's perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through charismatic leaders, and maybe it's an open question. how much power charismatic leaders have to affect the trajectory of history.
You've met quite a lot of charismatic leaders lately. I mean, what's your view on that?
I find it a compelling notion. I'm a sucker for a great speech and a vision. So I have a sense that there's an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story. So I think we need leaders to be just great storytellers. That kind of sharpen up the story to make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively.
But it could also be that the local interactions between humans is even more important. But it's just we don't have a good way to sort of summarize and describe that. We like to talk about Steve Jobs as central to the development of the computer, maybe Bill Gates. You tell it to the stories of individuals like this because it's just easier to tell a sexy story that way.
Maybe it's an interplay because you have the kind of structural forces. that you look at the geography of the planet and you look at shipping technology in the late 15th century in Europe and the Mediterranean, and it's almost inevitable that pretty quickly somebody will discover America. Somebody from the old world will get to the new world.
So this was not a kind of... If it wasn't Columbus, then it would have been five years later somebody else. But... The key thing about history is that these small differences make a huge, huge difference. You know, if it wasn't Columbus, if it was five years later somebody from England, then maybe all of Latin America today would be speaking English and not Spanish.
If it was somebody from the Ottoman Empire, it's completely different world history. And the Ottoman Empire at that time was also shaping up to be a major maritime empire. If you have America being reached by Muslim navigators before Christian navigators from Europe, you have a completely different world history. It's the same with the computer.
Given the economic incentives and the science and technology of the time, then the rise of the personal computer was probably inevitable sometime in the late 20th century. But the where and when is crucial. The fact that it was California in the 1970s and not, say, I don't know, Japan in the 1980s or China in the 1990s, this made a huge, huge difference.
So you have this interplay between the structural forces, which are beyond the control of any single charismatic leader. But then the small changes, they can have a big effect. I think, for instance, about the war in Ukraine.
There was a moment, now it's a struggle between nations, but there was a moment when the decision was taken in the mind of a single individual of Vladimir Putin, and he could have decided otherwise, and the world would have looked completely different.
And another leader, Vladimir Zelensky, could have decided to leave Kiev in the early days. There's a lot of decisions that kind of ripple. Yeah. So you write in Homo Deus about Hitler and in part that he was not a very impressive person.
I say that?
The quote is, let me read it. He wasn't a senior officer. In four years of war, he rose no higher than the rank of corporal. He had no formal education. Perhaps you mean his resume.
Yeah, his resume was not impressive.
He had no formal education, no professional skills, no political background. He wasn't a successful businessman or a union activist. He didn't have friends or relatives in high places, nor any money to speak of. So how did he amass so much power? What ideology, what circumstances enabled the rise of the Third Reich?
Again, I can't tell you the why. I can tell you the how. I don't think it was inevitable. I think that if a few things were different, there would have been no Third Reich. There would have been no Nazism, no Holocaust. Again, this is the tragedy. If it would have been inevitable, then what can you do? This is the laws of history or the laws of physics.
But the tragedy is, no, it was decisions by humans that led to that direction. And even from the viewpoint of the Germans, we know for a fact it was an unnecessary path to take. Because in the 1920s and 30s, the Nazis said that unless Germany takes this road, it will never be prosperous. It will never be successful. All the other countries will keep stepping on it. This was their claim.
And we know for a fact this is false. Why? Because they took that road, They lost the Second World War. And after they lost, then they became one of the most prosperous countries in the world because their enemies that defeated them evidently supported them and allowed them to become such a prosperous and successful nation.
So, you know, if you can lose the war and still be so successful, obviously you could just have scraped the war. You didn't need it. I mean, you really had to have the war in order to have a prosperous Germany in the 19th century? Absolutely not. And it's the same with Japan. It's the same with Italy. So it was not inevitable.
It was not the forces of history that necessitated, that forced Germany to take this path. I think part of it is part of the appeal of, again, Hitler was a very, very skillful storyteller. He sold people a story.
The fact that he was nobody made it even more effective because people at that time, after the defeat of the First World War, after the repeated economic crisis of the 1920s in Germany, people felt betrayed by all the established elites around. by all the established institutions.
Oh, all these professors and politicians and industrialists and military, all the big people, they led us to a disastrous war. They led us to humiliation. So we don't want any of them. And then you have this nobody, a corporal with no money, with no education, with no titles, with nothing. And he tells people, I'm one of you. And this was one reason why he was so popular.
And then the story he told, when you look at stories, at the competition between different stories and between stories, fiction and the truth, the truth has two big problems. The truth tends to be complicated and the truth tends to be painful. The real story of, let's talk about nations, the real story of every nation is complicated and it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good.
We sometimes do bad things. Now, if you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them don't want to listen. The advantage of fiction is that it can be made as simple and as painless or attractive as you want it to be because it's fiction. And then what you see is that politicians like Hitler, they create a very simple story. We are the heroes.
We always do good things. Everybody's against us. Everybody's trying to trample us. And this is very attractive. One of the things people don't understand about Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about fascism and Nazism as this ultimate evil. The ultimate monster in human history. And at some level, this is wrong. Because it makes people, it actually exposes us. Why?
Because people hear, oh, fascism is this monster. And then when you hear the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, you are wonderful. You belong to the most wonderful group of people in the world. You are beautiful. You are ethical. Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong.
There are all these evil monsters out there. that are out to get you, and they are causing all the problems in the world. And when people hear that, you know, it's like looking in the mirror and seeing something very beautiful. Hey, I'm beautiful. We've never done anything wrong. We are victims.
And when you look and you heard in school that fascism, that fascists are monsters, and you look in the mirror, you see something very beautiful. And you say, I can't be a fascist because fascists are monsters, and this is so beautiful, so it can't be. When you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful thing in the world. And that's the danger.
This is the problem, you know, with Hollywood. You know, I look at Voldemort in Harry Potter. Who would like to follow this creep? Yeah. And you look at Darth Vader. This is not somebody you would like to follow. Christianity got things much better when he described the devil as being very beautiful and attractive.
That's the danger, that you see something as very beautiful, you don't understand the monster underneath.
And you write precisely about this. And by the way, it's just a small aside. It always saddens me when people say how obvious it is to them that communism is a flawed ideology. When you ask them, try to put your mind, try to put yourself in the beginning of the 20th century and see what you would do. A lot of people will say, it's obvious that it's a flawed ideology.
So, I mean, I suppose to some of the worst ideologies in human history, you could say the same. And in that mirror, when you look, it looks beautiful.
Communism is the same. Also, you look in the communist mirror, you're the most ethical, wonderful person ever. Yeah. It's very difficult to see Stalin underneath it.
So, yeah, in Homo Deus, you also write, during the 19th and 20th centuries, as humanism gained increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots. Socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialist and communist movements, and
evolutionary humanism whose most famous advocates were the nazis so if you can just linger on that what's the ideological connection between nazism and communism as embodied by humanism and humanism basically is you know the focus is on humans that they are the most important thing in the world they move history but then there is a big question what is what are humans what is humanity now liberals
They place at the center of the story, individual humans, and they don't see history as a kind of necessary collision between big forces. They place the individual at the center. If you want to know, you know, there is a bad, especially in the US today, liberal is taken as the opposite of conservative. But to test whether you're liberal, you need to answer just three questions. Very simple.
Do you think people should have the right to choose their own government or the government should be imposed by some outside force? Do you think people should have the right to the liberty to choose their own profession or either born into some caste that predetermines what they do? And do you think people should have the liberty to choose their own spouse?
and their own way of personal life, instead of being told by elders or parents who to marry and how to live. Now, if you answered yes to all three questions, people should have the liberty to choose their government, their profession, their personal lives, their spouse, then you're a liberal. And most conservatives are also liberal. Now, communists and fascists, they answer differently.
For them, history is not... Yes, history is about humans. Humans are the big heroes of history, but not individual humans and their liberties. Fascists imagine history as a clash between races or nations. The nation is at the center. They say the supreme good is the good of the nation. You should have 100% loyalty only to the nation.
You know, liberals say, yes, you should be loyal to the nation, but it's not the only thing. There are other things in the world. There are human rights. There is truth. There is beauty. Many times, yes, you should prefer the interests of your nation over other things, but not always.
If your nation tells you to murder millions of innocent people, you don't do that, even though the nation tells you to do it. to lie for the national interest, you know, in extreme situations maybe, but in many cases, your loyalty should be to the truth, even if it makes your nation look a bit not in the best light. The same with beauty.
You know, how does a fascist determine whether a movie is a good movie? Very simple. If it serves the interest of the nation, this is a good movie. If it's against the interest of the nation, this is a bad movie. End of story. Liberalism says, no, there is aesthetic values in the world.
We should judge movies not just on the question whether they serve the national interest, but also on artistic value. Communists are a bit like the fascists. Instead that they don't place the nation as the main hero, they place class as the main hero. For them, history, again, it's not about individuals, it's not about nations. History is the clash between classes.
And just as fascists imagine in the end only one nation will be on top, the communists think in the end only one class should be on top, and that's the proletariat. And same story. 100% of your loyalty should be to the class. And if there is a clash, say, between class and family, class wins.
Like in the Soviet Union, the party told children, if you hear your parents say something bad about Stalin, you have to report them. And there are many cases when children reported their parents and their parents were sent to the gulag. And, you know, your loyalty is to the party, which leads the proletariat to victory in the historical struggle.
And the same way in communism, art is only about class struggle. A movie is good if it serves the interests of the proletariat. Autistic values, there is nothing like that. And the same with truth. The everything that we see now in fake news, the communist propaganda machine was there before us.
The level of lies, of disinformation campaigns that they orchestrated in the 1920s and 30s and 40s is really unimaginable.
So the reason these two ideologies, classes of ideologies failed is the sacrifice of truth not just failed, but did a lot of damage, is sacrifice of truth and sacrifice of beauty.
And sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people, disregard, again, for human suffering. Like, okay, in order for our nation to win, in order for our class to win, we need to kill those millions, kill those millions. That was an ethics, aesthetics, truth, they don't matter. The only thing that matter is the victory of the state or the victory of the class. And liberalism was the antithesis to that.
It says, no, not only, it has a much more complicated view of the world. And both communism and fascism, they had a very simple view of the world. There is one, your loyalty, 100% of it should be only to one thing. Now, liberalism has a much more complex view of the world. It says, yes, there are nations. They are important. Yes, there are classes. They are important.
But they are not the only thing. There are also families. There are also individuals. There are also animals. And your loyalty should be divided between all of them. Sometimes you prefer this. Sometimes you prefer that. That's complicated. But, you know, life is complicated.
But also, I think, maybe you can correct me, but liberalism acknowledges the corrupting nature of power when there's a guy at the top, sits there for a while, managing things, is probably going to start losing power. a good sense of reality and losing the capability to be a good manager.
It feels like the communist and fascist regimes don't acknowledge that basic characteristic of human nature that power corrupts.
Yes, they believe in infallibility. In this sense, they are very close to being religions. In Nazism, Hitler was considered infallible, and therefore you don't need any checks and balances on his power. Why do you need to balance an infallible genius? And it's the same with the Soviet Union, with Stalin, and more generally with the Communist Party. The party can never make a mistake.
And therefore, you don't need independent courts, independent media, opposition parties, things like that, because the party is never wrong. You concentrate the same way 100% of loyalty should be to the party, 100% of power should be in the hands of the party. The whole idea of liberal democracy is embracing fallibility. Everybody is fallible.
All people, all leaders, all political parties, all institutions. This is why we need checks and balances, and we need many of them. If you have just one, then this particular check itself could make terrible mistakes. So you need a press. You need the media to serve as a check to the government. You don't have just one newspaper or one TV station.
You need many so that they can balance each other. And the media is not enough. So you have independent courts. You have free academic institutions. You have NGOs. You have a lot of checks and balances.
So that's the ideologies and the leaders. What about the individual people, the millions of people that play a part in all of this that... are the hosts of the stories that are the catalyst and sort of the components of how the story spreads. Would you say that all of us are capable of spreading any story? Sort of the Solzhenitsyn idea of that all of us are capable of good and evil.
The line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man.
Yes. I wouldn't say that every person is capable of every type of evil, but we are all fallible. There is a large element. It partly depends on the efforts we make to develop our self-awareness during life. Part of it depends on moral luck. If you are born as a Christian German, in the 1910s or 1920s and you grow up in Nazi Germany that's bad moral luck
Your chances of committing terrible things, you have a very high chance of doing it. And you can withstand it, but it will take tremendous effort. If you are born in Germany after the war, you're morally lucky. You will not be put to such a test. You will not need to exert these enormous efforts not to commit atrocities. So this is just part of history. There is an element of luck.
But again, part of it is also self-awareness. And you asked me earlier about the potential of power to corrupt. And I listened to the interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of days ago. And one of the things that most struck me during the interview that you asked him, You asked him, are you afraid of this thing that power corrupts? He didn't think for a single second.
He didn't pause. He didn't admit a tiny little level of doubt. No, power doesn't corrupt. For me, it was a shocking and a revealing moment. And it kind of dovetails with how you began the interview, that I really liked your opening gambit. No, really, you kind of told him, you know, lots of people in the world are angry with you. Some people hate you. They dislike you.
What do you want to tell them, to say to them? And you gave him this kind of platform. And I was very, what will he say? And he just denied it. He basically denied it. You know, he had to cut show the interview from three hours to one hour because you had hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against him. And he goes and say, no, everybody likes me.
What are you talking about?
But on that topic, you've said recently that the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may go down in history as the man who destroys Israel. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Yes. I mean, he is basically tearing apart the social contract that held this country together for 75 years. He's destroying the foundations of Israeli democracy. You know, I don't want to go too deep unless you want to, because I guess most of our listeners, they have bigger issues on their minds than the fate of some small country in the Middle East.
But for those who want to understand what's happening in Israel, there is really just one question to ask. What limits the power of the government? In the United States, for instance, there are lots of checks and balances that limit the power of the government.
You have the Supreme Court, you have the Senate, you have the House of Representatives, you have the president, you have the constitution, you have 50 states, each state with its own constitution and Supreme Court and Congress and governor. If somebody wants to pass a dangerous legislation, say in the house, It will have to go through so many obstacles.
Like if you want to pass a law in the United States taking away voting rights from Jews or from Muslims or from African-Americans, even if it passes, even if it has a majority in the House of Representatives, it has a very, very, very small chance of becoming the law of the country because it will have to pass again through the Senate, through the president, through the Supreme Court and all the federal structure.
In Israel, we have just a single check on the power of the government, and that's the Supreme Court. There is really no difference between the government and the legislature because there are no separate elections like in the US. If you win majority in the Knesset, in the parliament, you appoint the government. That's very simple.
And if you have 61 members of Knesset who vote, let's say, on a law to take away voting rights from Arab citizens of Israel, there is a single check that can prevent it from becoming the law of the land, and that's the Supreme Court. And now the Netanyahu government is trying to neutralize or take over the Supreme Court. And they've already prepared a long list of laws. They already talk about it.
What will happen the moment that this last check on the power is gone? They are openly trying to gain unlimited power. And they openly talk about it, that once they have it, then they will take away the rights of Arabs, of LGBT people, of women, of secular Jews. And this is why you have hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. You have air force pilots saying, we stop flying.
This is unheard of in Israel. I mean, we are still living under existential threat. from Iran, from other enemies. And in the middle of this, you have Air Force pilots who dedicated their lives to protecting the country. And they are saying, that's it. If this government doesn't stop what it is doing, we stop flying.
So as you said, I just did the interview. And as we were doing the interview, there's protests in the streets. Do you think the protests will have an effect?
I hope so very much. I'm going to many of these protests. I hope they will have an effect. If we fail, this is the end of Israeli democracy, probably. This will have repercussions far beyond the borders of Israel. Israel is a nuclear power. Israel has one of the most advanced cyber capabilities in the world, able to strike basically anywhere in the world.
If this country becomes a fundamentalist and militarist dictatorship, it can set fire to the entire Middle East. It can, again, have destabilizing effects far beyond. the borders of Israel.
So you think without the check on power, it's possible that the Netanyahu government holds on to power?
Nobody tries to gain unlimited power just for nothing. I mean, you have so many problems in Israel and Netanyahu talks so much about Iran and the Palestinians and Hezbollah. We have an economic crisis. Why is it so urgent at this moment in the face of such opposition? Why is it so crucial for them? to neutralize the Supreme Court. They are just doing it for the fun of it?
No, they know what they are doing. They are adamant. We are not sure of it before. There was like a couple of months ago, they came out with this plan to take over the Supreme Court, to have all these laws, and there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, again, soldiers saying they will stop serving, a general strike in the economy, and they stopped.
And they started a process of negotiations to try and enrich a settlement. And then they broke down, they stopped the negotiations and they restarted this process of legislation, trying to gain unlimited power. So any doubt we had before, okay, maybe they changed their purposes. No, it's now very clear. They are 100% focused on on gaining absolute power. They are now trying a different tactic.
Previously, they had all these dozens of lows that they wanted to pass very quickly within a month or two. They realized, no, there is too much opposition. So now they're doing what is known as salami tactics, slice by slice. Now they're trying to one low. If this succeeds, then they'll pass the next one and the next one and the next one. This is why we are now at a very crucial moment
And when you see, again, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets almost every day, when you see resistance within the armed forces, within the security forces, you see high-tech companies saying, we will go on strike. You know, they're private businesses.
High-tech companies, I think it's almost unprecedented for a private business to go on strike because what will economic success benefit us? if we live under a messianic dictatorship. And again, the fuel for this whole thing is to a large extent coming from messianic religious groups.
Which just the thought what happens if these people have unlimited control of Israel's nuclear arsenal and Israel's military capabilities and cyber capabilities. This is very, very scary, not just for the citizens of Israel. It should be scary for people everywhere.
So it would be scary for it to go from being a problem of security and protecting the peace to becoming a religious war.
It is already becoming a religious war. I mean, the war, the conflict with the Palestinians was for many years a national conflict in essence. Over the last... few years, maybe a decade or two, it is morphing into a religious conflict, which is, again, a very worrying development. When nations are in conflict, you can reach some compromise.
Okay, you have this bit of land, we have this bit of land. But when it becomes a religious conflict between fundamentalists, between messianic people, compromise becomes much more difficult because you don't compromise on eternity. You don't compromise on God. And this is where we are heading right now.
So I know you said it's a small nation somewhere in the Middle East, but it also happens to be the epicenter of one of the longest running, one of the most tense conflicts and crises in human history. So at the very least, it serves as a study of how conflict can be resolved. So what are the biggest obstacles to you to achieving peace in this part of the world?
Motivation. I think it's easy to achieve peace if you have the motivation on both sides. Unfortunately, at the present juncture, there is not enough motivation on either side, either the Palestinian or Israeli side. Peace... You know, in mathematics, you have problems without solutions. You can prove mathematically that this mathematical problem has no solution.
In politics, there is no such thing. All problems have solutions if you have the motivation. But motivation is the big problem. And again, we can go into the reasons why, but the fact is that on neither side is there enough motivation. If there was motivation, the solution would have been easy.