Interview between Ari Melber and Yuval Noah Harari
Sep 12, 2024 #MSNBC #DonaldTrump #YuvalNoahHarari
MSNBC’s Ari Melber sits down with Yuval Noah Harari (@YuvalNoahHarari), author of “Nexus,” for an in-depth interview on a wide range of topics. They dive into discussions on artificial intelligence, Donald Trump, misinformation, the concept of “truth,” and much more. (Check out The Beat's playlist: https://msnbc.com/ari Connect with Ari Melber: / arimelber)
Transcript
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making his return to the beat is you've all knowah Harari the renowned historian and Professor has authored some of the
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most influential non-fiction books today sapiens has over 45 million copies in circulation in over 60 languages Barack
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Obama recommended it as essential reading for understanding the history of civilization while Tech Titans have
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recommended or clashed with arar's AI and Tech theories for years his new book
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is Nexus a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI hi uh
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welcome back thank you it's good to be here uh great to have you in person uh like many people I've read a lot of your
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Works including the new one Nexus you offer a different lens for information
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um and a focus not only on whether something is true or false but what the
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information does how does that lens apply to some of the propaganda that our
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viewers are very familiar with in America say Donald Trump lying about the
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election well the key thing to realize about information is that information isn't truth most information in the
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world is not Truth uh because the truth is a very costly and rare kind of
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information this kind of very naive thinking that if we just flood the world with more and more information the truth
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will float up it won't it will sink to the bottom if you want to write a true
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story you need to do a lot of research it takes time and energy money whereas
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fictions and delusions and conspiracy theories you just write whatever you
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want um the truth also has another problem which is that it tends to be
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complicated because reality is complicated whereas fiction can be as simple as you would like it to be and
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people usually prefer simple theories simple stories over the complicated ones
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and the last point is that the truth tends sometimes to be painful to be
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unattractive whe it's whether it's the truth about me personally and my life and relationships or the truth about the
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history of a Nation there are often dark chapters there that we don't want to
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acknowledge and fiction you can make it as as attractive as pleasant as you would like it to be so if we because the
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truth is is costly and complicated and sometimes painful um if we don't invest
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in in institutions in mechanisms to help the truth float up then we will be
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flooded with junk information and fake news and conspiracy theories so you mentioned pain we we've heard a lot
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about Trump's pain and that he lost and didn't want to face it yeah but his
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followers increasingly preferred his false story their side one over the
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truth that they lost that they were rejected um do you think then part of the reason that was a sticky or
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effective piece of propaganda is it already appealed to that side that group uh let part of it but you know I I
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think we should broaden the perspective and look not just at what is happening in the US but what is happening all over
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the world well you've all I don't know if you've been to this country we don't really do that well we can try no we can
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try we can try it was actually a joke offered not for its truth like so much information go ahead um you know if you
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look at the us today maybe the only thing that Republicans and Democrats can
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agree on is that the Democratic conversation is is collapsing is breaking down people can no longer agree
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on even the most basic facts they can't listen to each other uh they can't hold
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a reasoned conversation anymore and this is a bit strange because we now have the
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most sophisticated information technology in history and people are losing the ability to talk with each
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other yes and there are many explanations about what is happening in the US something about us Society or
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politics or history but you see the exactly the same thing is happening in Brazil in my home country in Israel in
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the Philippines in France so it can't be some unique condition to this or that
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country and the suspicion is that something is at fault with the information technology of our age which
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is really destroying ing the Democratic conversation and democracy in essence is
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a conversation dictatorship is from dictate one person dictates everything
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democracy is a conversation for most of History it was simply impossible to have
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large scale Democratic systems because there was no information technology that
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could enable a large scale discussion between millions of people spread over
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vast territories so the only examples of ancient democracies are very small scale
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city states like Athens or Rome and even smaller tribes all the big systems all
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the kingdoms and Empires are authoritarian you begin to see large
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scale democracies emerge for the first time in history only in the late Modern Age because of the rise of new
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information Technologies like the newspaper and radio and television that make it possible for millions of people
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to hold a conversation in real time so democracy is really built on top of
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Information Technology and every time there is a major change in Information
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Technology there is an earthquake in democracy right which is what we are feeling right now yeah it's funny when
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you put it like that because people generally have an easier time seeing it in the past and as it happens which you
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will understand as a historian so when we describe the shift from we just had a presidential debate yeah I saw the shift
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from yeah uh the shift we'll get to that but the shift from the the political
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communication of radio and FDR giving radio addresses to television and Kennedy did well in the TV debates we
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have an easier time seeing that shift than what you're describing that we're living through now which is if people are feeling like it's getting worse or
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conspiracy style candidates are doing better than before that may be because of the tools as you say I want to read
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briefly from how you describe information the book you say it it doesn't necessarily inform us about
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things it puts things in formation horoscopes put lovers in astrological
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formations propaganda broadcasts put voters in political formations and marching songs put soldiers in military
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formations and that brings us to your concept of the information Network um
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and I wanted to ask you and I finished the book and you have many examples I was reminded of how Richard Dawkins
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initially came up with the idea of meme today that's an internet reference but
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originally he was talking about that before memes today yeah that certain ideas will spread more almost like an
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organism because they're of use to the host yeah which we don't like to think
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about that way if you tell me Ari I am more likely to remember um this Rolling
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Stone article that said my favorite musician is great because it's doing something inside me I might exist that
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and say no you've all that makes me feel like I'm some lab rat I like that
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article because it was true and that seems to be a a risk situation for us
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that is exacerbated by today's networks how do you explain that in the book and this network
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concept um again the key idea is that information is not the truth information
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is connection it connects a lot of individual into a network uh sometimes
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you can do it with the truth it's not impossible but very often in history we
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use fictions and mythologies and Fantasies to connect people together and
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um you know if you think about say images portraits what is the most common
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portrait in the history of the world what is the most famous face in the history of the world it's Jesus yeah
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billions and billions of of Jesus lot of people don't know was Jewish you talk about that's not the point that he was
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Jewish I mean we have these billions of portraits in churches in cathedrals and
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none of them is true none of them is authentic 100% fictional because we
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don't have a single portrait from his own lifetime there is not a single word
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in the Bible about how Jesus actually looked like not a single word which says
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whether he was tall or short fat fat or thin whether he had blonde hair or black
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hair or whether he was bold nothing so all these portraits they come out of the
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human imagination they are fictional and nevertheless they are extremely effective and I'll let you finish but in
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within your theory they come out of the places that were selling or colonizing
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off Jesus so a lot of the pictures whatever one thinks about the history a lot of them imagine him as a European
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when he was clearly from the Middle East by their own story yeah I mean it's very common today seeing images of Jesus as
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somebody from Scandinavia basically and not of the Middle East and again we have
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no idea how we actually looked like again it's it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with it uh you can use
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fiction is not a bad thing you can use it to inspire people to connect people
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but it's important to acknowledge the the the fictionality of of of what we are doing
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because it gives us flexibility about it so let's talk about whether that is getting worse MH there was earlier times
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in American history when a politician being caught in a single big lie was a big deal um President Ford famously was
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criticized and it was seen as a huge deal that he made a false statement about how much control the US had over
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Eastern Europe that he was exaggerating how much control yeah versus Russia
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Donald Trump's been caught in his first term with 30,000 plus lies or misleading statements beating all other officials
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um I'm going to show you some of his lies and how they range from Material as lawyers would say something about
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something that matters to just absurd people that have died 10 years
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ago are still voting illegal immigrants are voting it was going to be hitting
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directly and that would have affected a lot of other states uh but that was the
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original uh chart you know we won Georgia just so you understand it's a little like the
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regular flu it's going to disappear one day it's like a miracle we stopped the missile launchers from North Korea I was
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in Michigan I don't know if anybody remembers this 12 years ago they gave me the man of the year they didn't actually
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give him that award or anything else here's my question for you that's different than the usual way we talk about him your book is more descriptive
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than prescriptive you're not telling people how to use the information networks for the most part
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but if somebody smart read your book and wanted to have effective lie information
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networks they would design someone like Donald Trump maybe that depends on your view of
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the world I think that what we've seen here in some ways it goes back to KL
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Marx there is something that Donald Trump agree with uh with KL
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Marx um that you see the same way of thinking on the radical Marxist left and
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on the populist right this world view that all reality is just a power
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struggle that the only reality is power there is no truth that uh and and this
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way of thinking that humans very cynical that humans are only interested in power
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that any human interaction is a power struggle and therefore whenever somebody
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says something it's a power move move there is no point asking is it true or
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is it not true the only question is who are the losers and who are the winners when somebody says something the
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question to ask whose privileges does it serve whose interest are interests are being served and uh this is this way of
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thinking implies that it doesn't matter what the truth value of a statement is
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it only matters what is the power value of this statement and that works a lot
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of the time and that works a lot of the time but again this is a very cynical view of the world which you see on both
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the extreme left and the extreme right and it's wrong because deep down almost
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all humans they are really interested in the truth uh partly because you can
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never really be happy in life if you don't know the truth about yourself and and your life you think other people
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well I'm going to jump in I like you saying that I am intrigued by that but that is is probably not a fully
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empirically provable claim there may be psychology that shows that but there are counterveiling examples there are
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certainly examples in distress if you are we've heard stories from people who are in long-term prison or other
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situations and they have to use delusion to get through each day but a lot of people are living in situations poverty
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grief where they do that so and eventually if you want to get out of these dark holes yes you use delusion
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and self- delusion as a as a as a protective shield in times of emergency but you don't want to live your entire
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life like that there is something but you could go back to Plato's Cave I mean these are philosophical debates you
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write in the book also about that what you're calling Marxist which is really at least in the west has been seen as a
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critique of how things work there is no real International order because it's all about who has the power and the
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power F can get away with it the postmodern version of that is that there's almost no truth I mean some
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extreme Lefty academics make it sound like you can't measure science which of
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course you can not all science is is controlled by the military-industrial complex even if there's pressures what
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is the modern audience supposed to take from that because I also want to turn to what you call the naive critique of
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information explain that and what you think people can get from better
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understanding this what would an informed citizen look like if we actually could decode some of the BS
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that you're diagnosing and the what we hear a lot again from
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people like fuk on the extreme left but also from Trump on the right is that all
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institutions that claim to be interested in the truth like journalism like
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science like the courts they are not really interested in the truth they are
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conspiracies cabals of small Elites that try to gain power by fully people so
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this is why we shouldn't trust them and this erosion of trust in the
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institutions that are uh uh the truth institutions of society they result
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ultimately in the collapse of democratic societies because democracy is built on
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trust when you have zero trust in institutions and in what people say the
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only system that can still function is dictatorship because dictatorship isn't built on trust it's built on terror fear
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but let me offer a distinction and you could tell me how you think about it Fuko would be on the outside saying
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these are all systems of control that the prison system is not really about
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protecting people it's a control system yes or civility which we hear about a
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lot is just what the elites want because in civility could be used against them
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as one of the last ways that someone with less money and power might affect them and that's on the outside Trump and
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Bannon would look at this and say well no we're not on the outside looking in we're on the inside looking out and the
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only truth is what we say but no they also claim to be on the outside they also talk about the elites but they are
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the elites no he he was the presid they deny it but you but they see it as operational and fukko sees it as a
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observation is that fair I'm not sure if there is such a big difference um again I mean there are of
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course huge differences Trump is not a Marxist certainly not in in his policies
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about taxation or welfare or so forth the place where they meet is in this
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basic cynical view of the world and of humanity as just this power struggle
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that everything is about power that every time somebody says something I'm not interested in the question is it
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true or not but only in the question of whose power is this is this serving
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which is again destructive to the basic instit tions of society that are uh
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again I said in the beginning that the truth is costly and rare So if you imagine this ocean of information
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flooding society and most of it is junk most information is junk most of it is
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lies fake news conspiracy theories delusions Illusions because this is very cheap and easy to produce and you have
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this rare gems of Truth which were very costly to produce and how do we find
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them so this is the job of Institutions like journalist journalism like scientific
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institutions so let's let's talk about that as an authoritarian threat and then I want you to still explain the naive
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view of information so we're coming to that um but you right with the connection here between what you're
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calling the these lies and the and the fake news and all of that to how the strong man or woman wants to use that as
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an authoritarian quote the typical strong man deprives courts of their powers packs them with his loyalists
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seek to close all Independent Media Outlets while building his own omnipress and propaganda machine and you chart how
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that could work with various Technologies um but with I would argue some real warnings for what we need to
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think about where we're headed yes I have an example for you that is not scary it is silly until you think about
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the implications and you know a lot of things I read you know you your your references are like in America it's a
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big deal if you go back more than three elections okay so if you make a reference and you say to someone well this is like look at what Eisenhower did
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people are like wow you're very learned you go back 8,000 15,000 years um have
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you ever seen Trump when the lights went out at his rally uh no okay so here's a
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new one for you okay A bit silly at first but it shows in real time very
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quickly that among his fans he can make the bad good or the good bad um this was
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originally what would be a gaff and I've covered the uh rallies as I'm sure you've been around politics this is what
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candidates worry about being made to look foolish or stupid on on a stage can be a very bad thing and then it can go viral so the lights go out in one of his
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early rallies that could have been a bad thing and then he takes control of it take a
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look put them in our jails because to put them in our jails they didn't pay the electric bill to put them oh I like
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that much better no get those lights off off turn them off they're too they're
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too bright turn them off turn them off let's go ready turn off the lights turn
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off the lights turn off the lights turn them off off
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[Applause]
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light the man is's a genius he's a PR of Genius he has them cheering for the
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thing that was origin Ally embarrassing you you have a rally you can't even keep the lights on what
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do you see him doing there and does the crowd care does it matter that Up Is
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Down um that's a good question I need to think about that um I I haven't seen
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this before so um it's a new one for me but you know the abil it's basically
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the ability to interpret a text to say the opposite of what the text is
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supposed to mean so you know I'm a medievalist my kind of original material
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was the Middle Ages so one of the things you see for in in in medieval Europe is the way that the Catholic church can
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interpret things it it has a monopoly on interpretation so you have The Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus talks about you
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know love and compassion and if somebody slaps you you should turn the other cheek and so forth and you have medieval
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commentators explaining how this is actually means that we should persecute
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Heretics and bur them at the stake and this they really do it and burning
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people alive is not turning the other cheek it is that they find an interpretation that by saving them in
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this way from the Flames of hell this is actually doing them a favor and and
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being compassionate to all the other people who might have been affected by their heretical views and you know of
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the people who advances this interpretation of the text he becomes Pope so very powerful I mean what we
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know from from history is that humans have an amazing ability to interpret
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everything from reality to a text but so to take it to the lights which seems
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like a small thing and you're saying to interpret the text of the reality I'll give you a much bigger example from from
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Israel like netan Benjamin netan has been resp responsible for the worst
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catastrophe in Israeli history on the failure on the 7th of October and many
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of his followers now point out to this catastrophe as a reason why he he must
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stay in power because he's the only man strong enough to lead Israel in this
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catastrophic period so this is you know turn off the lights on a much much bigger scale and
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of course the Israeli public is is divided you have for for half of Israel is more or less the man is the
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Messiah is the a genius a messiah sent from God to to save Israel for the other
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half he's the most hated figure in the history of Israel and again the only
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thing that can be agreed on is that you know if if the if a major task of a leader especially in times of Crisis is
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to unite the nation then Benjamin is the last person on Earth which is
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capable of fulfilling this Mission if you now go to the street in New York and you grab the first random person that
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person has a greater chance of uniting Israel than Benjamin netan right and to
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your point I mean we saw that effect and this is also true about about the us and we we saw it after 911 in the US you
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also have people in lud who claim that Netanyahu has this hawkish approach and
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you need to be strong and hawkish the hawkish approach approach of dividing the would be moderates and the
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peacemakers uh in the Palestinian Community from Hamas and to divide and conquer also failed right you have a
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bunch of different versions of failure and then people as you say interpreting it Opposite we are often
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told fact check respond to bad information with better information M
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you say somewhat provocatively in the book that that is the naive view of this
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challenge explain h and the the naive view is this counter
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speech doctrine that the we just need more information and if you have a lot
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of information again the truth will just come up will float up that in in a kind of free market of information the truth
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will win and it won't you need to tilt the balance in favor of truth because
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again as I said before it's costly it's rare and more to the point the truth is
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complicated and often pain does tilt include stop d-list censor no
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not censor okay but take responsibility it's really an editorial question aren't
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they all yeah it's it's like you know what is the job of an editor of a big
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newspaper The Wall Street Journal the New York Times it's not to censor people it's to decide what should be on the
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front page of the newspaper uh you have all this ocean of
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information and what you learn your job is to to to to so see what is the most reliable
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information and important information you don't censor you don't tell you can't say that but let's drill down
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because you're still speaking at an altitude yeah is factchecking always worthwhile or do you
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see it as a a kind of decision tree where if you are controlling the New York Times some of that material
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shouldn't even be fact checked on the front page because you're now platforming it what what does it mean to
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say it's naive to fact check no it's not naive to fact check before you decide to
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put a story on your front page you obviously need to fact check it but I'm
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saying you what is the naive part because you you say that in here that the response to speech bad speech with
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good speech is itself naive what makes that naive again the naive reaction is
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to say okay let's just have more information out there and the truth will win as a result it won't the idea of a
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newspaper is that you have an institution which just doesn't just flood people with random information it
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makes a a a a rational selection based for instance on factchecking what to put
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the focus on what we've seen with for instance social media is that algorithms
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are now playing this important role of editors but the question that interests
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the algorithms and their human bosses is not what is the truth but what will get
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user engagement yeah I watched your I watched your U long discussion with Mark
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Zuckerberg and you don't have to comment on this if you don't want to but it was like two people talking past each other
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for quite a while um because you were raising substantive evidence-based points about the algorithm and then he
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would broaden out and he made it sound like he was the the world's digital Pope and all he's thinking about is how to
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help Community but we know that's not true indeed he has the fiduciary duty to make money and as you put it keep people
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on the screens I want to ask one more question on the naive part and then move to other things but uh you maybe I'll
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just comment on on on that please that um you know they constantly raised the
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issue of freedom of speech Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and and the other people who now control maybe the
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most powerful media Platforms in the world and uh they say we don't want to
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censor human users but it's not about the human users it's about the corporate
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algorithms right humans produce enormous amounts of content on social media they
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produce hate fill conspiracy theories and they produce cooking lessons and biology lessons and funny cat videos and
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whatever and I think I agree with them that we should be very very careful
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before we censor and ban human beings but the problem begins not with it when
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human post some hateful Conspiracy Theory online but when the Facebook
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algorithm or the Twitter algorithm chooses makes a decision to recommend
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and promote and spread and autoplay this particularly hate fill video in pursuit
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of user engagement right and I thought and this is something that the corporations should be accountable for
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and I thought you were very important on that and the language matters so much because you wouldn't be in a position to
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probably know this but I before this I practiced First Amendment law in the United States I worked for Floyd Abrams
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who won the Pentagon papers case and other big Landmark decisions and so we've done a lot of thinking about First
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Amendment and Free Speech principles yeah a lot of them are bastardized in today's discourse by political and Tech
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leaders um to exactly the opposite of the point you were making which is
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freedom of speech that the government doesn't jail you for participating in public life or politics is very
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different from what they want which is control of volume yes and as you just
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said and maybe you can speak about this Facebook whether it meant to or not um for profit and other reasons was turning
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up the volume on hate speech which which was correlated with violent attacks yeah
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and this many of these companies they gave they still give the algorithms that
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are now the editors uh the task of increasing user engagement and the algorith ithms
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experimented on millions of human guineapigs and discovered that if you
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want user engagement if you want to glue people to the screen the easiest way to do it is to press the hate button and
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the fear button and the greed button in our minds and this is what they did and this is what they should be liable for
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again it's like the editor of a big newspaper that decides to publish a hatefield conspiracy theory on the front
30:26
page and when you tell them what did you do they say you know I didn't invent
30:31
this conspiracy theory I didn't do anything I just decided to put it on the front page well as you know in the
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United States you say liable many of them are not liable because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act grants them a
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very special digital immunity you think that should be ended again that they they shouldn't be liable for the content
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produced by the users they should be liable for the decisions made by their
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own algorithms what I'm calling a volume yes they should this is because this is
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what they do this is on them it's not the users who have deciding what to to
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to put on the volume this is what the corporations are deciding and this is what they should take responsibility for
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and I have two examples of recent propaganda in American politics uh one is from Trump the other has been uh
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circulated by prominent Democrats both seem to fit with your point in the book
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that the information moves based on its use and its appeal and its rewards not
31:33
its truth yeah um now the first I want to be clear with everyone we don't have reports of people
31:39
eating pets in the United States um and Trump has been pushing this based on
31:44
what he has his what you call information uh he was fact checked over at the debate take a
31:51
look in Springfield they're eating the dogs the people that came in they're
31:57
eating the cats they're eating they're eating the pets of the people that live
32:03
there you rig up Springfield Ohio and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there uh he told us there have
32:10
been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed injured or abused by individuals within the
32:15
Immigrant Community your theory says that information gets to him Trump and
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goes out why um
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I I'm not sure I understood why the information the propaganda when I say why I mean what is it doing like someone
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else would watch that and say this sounds bananas and would seem to be hurtful to him yeah um it correlates
32:42
with his larger attacks on immigrants but you you have an information theory that says don't look at the the veracity
32:49
to understand this look at its reward at least that's how I read it the reward is everybody is now talking about
32:55
immigration aha you know um in in politics the big question is not what
33:00
are the answers the big question is what are the questions bars yeah you know if if this election would be about
33:07
immigration Trump wins if this election is about climate change a Harris wins so
33:15
the deciding what is the issue everybody is talking about is the most important
33:21
thing and if everybody is now talking about immigration because of this
33:26
ridiculous story that immigrants are coming to eat our cats in a way it still serves the purpose very smart so you
33:32
know what Jared Kushner said I mean we knew you were smart we already knew this uh Obama said so do you know what
33:39
Kushner said he said conflict elevates message your point that this lie and the
33:47
conflict over the lie still is battering immigration for days into the Casual voter exactly and this is this is very
33:55
old I mean all these lessons Humanity you've learned them again and again throughout history if you look at
34:00
American history so you go back to one of the founding scenes of American
34:05
History the Salem witch witch trials oh I got the witches wait I'm going to I'm going stop you there we have witch I
34:11
have witches but I want to do the Democratic side okay are you familiar with another thing that's not true and
34:17
again I take this part seriously so I'm careful to say which is an allegation I'm not going to repeat about JD Vance
34:23
and and the sofa and no okay so uh it was a a sort of a joke but jokes can do
34:30
a lot of work and it was suggesting something I'm not going to repeat in detail but that that somehow um he had
34:35
some uh personal sexual activity with a sofa not true uh the author of The Viral
34:42
joke even if it is true it's his own private business but for politicians it's very important that we give
34:49
politicians privacy it's democracy cannot survive politicians and it's a
34:55
great additional point I just mean this you're right I also just mean on the veracity um and so here are some
35:00
headlines what the JD Vance couch jokes say about social media um walls Tim
35:06
Walls JD Vance joke throws dirt meaning getting rough with them by using lies
35:12
quote some say it's about time now these are people who know this to be false and
35:17
now I'm going to show you some of these again we're not we're not trying to get into the thing um just like the pets but
35:24
here's some of how pretty top Democrats have gone there I can't wait to debate the
35:31
guy that is if if he's willing to get off the couch and show up
35:38
so you see what I did there his running mate as you probably have heard is uh
35:44
you know getting known for his obsession with couches trust Donald Trump and JD
35:50
fans to look out for your family I wouldn't trust them to move my couch
35:57
[Applause] how does that relate to what you say about false information and is that
36:04
bad um again I I think what what what is really bad about it is that in this case
36:11
it's it doesn't matter even if it's true or false um I think part of the problem
36:19
today with politics and and with the world in general is that uh the border
36:26
between the private and the public is being eroded that privacy is facing anhil and
36:33
the politicians are maybe the first people to experience that that they have
36:39
no privacy at all and I think that especially for politicians it's
36:45
extremely important that they have a private life and a private space where they as long as they do legal things
36:52
they can do whatever they want they can say whatever they want I think that everybody including politicians have a
36:58
right to stupidity and a right to say stupid things as long as they are legal in
37:05
private and it's none of the of of our business and if you destroy this private
37:11
space for for politicians then very few people yeah except Psychopaths will go into politics
37:18
do you see Democrats echoing the Trump approach to lying because people say oh that's how you get tough um you know it's now the currency
37:27
all over the place that this is how the game is played and everybody is playing
37:33
it uh witches whiches witches um you alluded to this earlier I'm going to
37:39
read the quote because I do think it helps we've had many conversations in this country about conspiracy theories of various types um you pinpoint the
37:47
reason you mentioned earlier when people can no longer make sense of the world quote when they feel overwhelmed by
37:52
immense amounts of information they cannot digest they become easy prey for conspiracy theories.
And then you have a
37:58
rather long section on witches I learned more about this witch problem of the old days here than any other book um but
38:05
very serious consequences many people murdered including children you write witch hunts were a catastrophe caused by
38:12
the spread of toxic information prime example of a problem that was created by information and was made worse by more
38:20
information explain well it starts with the H H printing press with the print
38:27
revolu ution a lot of people think and you hear it a lot in places like Silicon Valley that information technology
38:33
always is a good thing because it spreads more information more truth and they they one of the Prime examples from
38:40
history is the way that allegedly the printing press led to the Scientific Revolution well it didn't it almost 200
38:49
years passed between Gutenberg introducing print technology to Europe in the middle of the 15th century until
38:55
you have the flowering of the scientific Revolution with people like Newton in the 17th century in between you had the
39:02
worst wars of religion in European history and the worst witch hunts witch hunts were not a medieval phenomenon
39:09
they were a modern phenomenon and the printing press and the spread of information played a key role because
39:17
you know like today with social media the print industry in the 15th century they were pursuing user engagement and
39:25
you know uh scientific tracks like copernicus's mathematical calculations
39:30
about the movements of planets this is not very engaging but which hunting manuels are so one of the biggest best
39:38
sellers of early modern Europe was a book called the Hammer of the witches
39:43
which is still in many ways influences our world today uh uh qanon and all that
39:49
it goes back to the Hammer of the witches in the Middle Ages people thought they were witches but they were not concerned
39:56
about them some individual in the village that know how to brew love potions and find treasure or whatever
40:03
then they came with this theory that actually there is a global conspiracy of
40:09
Satan worshiping witches that is out to destroy Humanity well you got to do
40:15
something about that you have to do something about it and just to give you kind of a flavor of what kind of book it
40:20
was and why it sold so many copies so one of the chapters in the Hammer of the witches is about the alleged ability of
40:28
witches to uh steal penises from men and it brings all kinds of evidence like one
40:35
man wakes up in the morning and finds that his penis is gone so he goes to the Village witch and forces her like bring
40:43
me back my penis and the witch tells him okay climb this tree you'll find at the
40:48
top of the tree a bird's nest so the man climbs up the tree finds the bird nest
40:54
and inside there are all these penises that the witch St from different men in the village and the witch tells him okay
41:00
now you can take your own but he selects the biggest one and she tells him no no no no you can't take this one this one
41:06
belongs to the parish priest now this was you can understand why one of the
41:11
biggest bestsellers of early modern Europe and uh uh it was a foundation of
41:18
This Global conspiracy of witches which is still alive and well today in the world in conspiracy theories like Q Anan
41:26
and it may sound funny but uh it led to a huge huge tragedy tens of thousands of
41:33
people were tortured and murdered in unspeakable ways in early modern Europe
41:38
because of this Theory and you know the more witch hunts the more Witch Trials
41:44
there was more and more information about witches until people could not doubt it and these are these are some of
41:50
the accounts uh of the attacks does it matter how many people believ this to
41:56
really be true at the time or not a lot of people most people believe that it's true there was so much information
42:03
circulating about it that people said okay maybe we can doubt some of it but not all of it and the more people talked
42:11
about it the more difficult it became to just doubt the whole thing um so this is
42:17
a classic case of how more information actually leads to to a worse situation
42:24
not to a better situation
Another question that occurred to me while I was going through this book and
42:31
sapiens which we've discussed before was we like to Ballpark things sometimes
42:36
in the Press maybe we do that too much uh but do you think that the majority of
42:43
things people base their lives on for the majority of modern history were
42:51
false um most of them were fictional not false a I remember the we talked about
42:57
it but when you say right but fictional money is is fictional but it's not
43:03
false I mean it's it becomes has an operational it has operational utility
43:09
yeah the laws of football are fictional but they are not false what about things that don't operate as cohesively so
43:17
money creates an economic system that everyone understands is is affecting their lives religion and astrology have
43:24
consequences but don't have the actual utility of money they can have a lot of
43:29
utility again depends what you do with them you can use religion to inspire people to be compassionate to give to
43:36
charity to build hospitals and you can use religion to uh you know launch witch
43:41
hunts and inquisitions and Crusades so like with money money can build hospitals and money can you know buy
43:48
weapons it's it's a question of what you do with it uh I wanted to read to you some of
43:54
the critiques of your new book I don't know if if you remember you do so many interviews but we did this for the last time yeah but now there are new
44:01
critiques um I want to read this one at length so it has some substance and let you respond which I think is interesting
44:06
and so much of what you do is analyze the world so here's the world analyzing back um in the
44:13
guardian uh it is written uh they write about the new book Harari is a
44:19
master of sententious generalization a passionate need to be seen to overturn
44:25
received wisdom many people think the printing press made a crucial contribution to the emergence of modern science not so in
44:31
cisari after all printing equally enabled the dissemination of fake news such as books and witches and so Gutenberg is partly to blame for the
44:38
gruesome torture and murder of those accused of Witchcraft across Europe as we just discussed silly as that might
44:43
sound it also misses the fundamental point because the scientific method is accretional modern science could only
44:49
come into being once the results of previous experiments were widely available to those who followed them mhm
44:55
furthermore quote what can we do to save human civilization and our shared reality simple concludes Harari subject
45:02
algorithms and AI to strong official regulation and focus on building institutions with strong self-correcting
45:07
mechanisms so carry on being liberal democracies it's a w sort of conclusion
45:13
to a book that has struck such an end of days
45:19
tone I wonder how do you respond to the critique that as you look at the world
45:25
and its emotions um this critique suggests that you are motivated
45:32
by some sort of emotion that you are want to be different or that you're seeking some Edge and second wait I got
45:38
to finish the question and then second um although you don't claim to be I would say fairly a big uh policy
45:45
prognosticating presence um that you've described so many problems and by the end what we get is carry on with maybe
45:53
Scandinavian style thoughtful objective liberal democracy and nothing else what
45:58
do you say to those two things well with regard to the first thing um the idea for instance that the print didn't lead
46:06
to Scientific Revolution and led to Wars of religion and witch hunts it's not mine it's very common among academics
46:13
who deal with these subjects it's not familiar to the general public and it's not familiar say to people in Silicon
46:19
Valley but it is that they very familiar to historians of the 15th and 16th and
46:25
17th century um and what I do in many of my books is take things that are
46:31
actually quite banale in discussions among historians and kind of repackage
46:36
them in a way that makes them accessible to the general public I mean when was
46:41
the last time that you had on Prime Time television a discussion about the print Revolution and and witch hunts right now
46:47
baby but you know if you go to academic conferences people would say but
46:52
everybody knows that why do you even bother writing about like that too yeah
46:57
so uh so many of these ideas are they are not kind of Sensational uh uh uh
47:03
slaughtering holy cows they are just bringing the the banale findings of academic research to a more general
47:10
public but this imping of you is some sort of fashionable writer you don't buy that as a I want to be a fashionable I
47:17
mean we try to sell books in the end right fair and then and then your prescriptions yeah and this is not a
47:24
book of policy prescriptions it the the the main uh attempt of the
47:29
book is to start a discussion and understand the big picture of what we
47:35
are facing with the AI Revolution based on thousands of years of previous
47:42
information revolutions I try very hard not to kind of immediately jump into the
47:48
trenches and like this is the the right answer and all these other answers are not right so I do discuss some of the
47:56
policy prop proposals again many of them not coming from me but this is not a book of policy proposals which I I
48:03
actually think is a strength of some of these books although people can make up their own minds and I was going to ask you about that as well we spend much
48:09
time in politics with solution first people are running literally on their plans and platforms and then all the
48:16
conversation afterward um this is the exact opposite of how you would do enlightened policy if you weren't
48:22
dealing with the muck of politics you would gather all the evidence and material first you would look at all the
48:28
possible options and then you would remain open to shifting those options Co being an example where the true
48:34
scientific community that was less politically influenced could continue to evolve over time people who decided in
48:40
week one that they hate or love masks we at a disadvantage were they not exactly
48:46
and again with AI we are just at the very very beginning of the AI Revolution
48:52
we haven't seen anything yet so if you have like a very strong opinion about
48:58
what we should do about AI you know centuries to the Future this is far too early so you know I do think it would be
49:06
a good idea to preserve liberal democracies for the simple reason that they are the most flexible political
49:13
system that humans ever managed to create and we need this flexibility in a
49:19
dictatorship if you adopt a certain policy and it's the wrong policy it's very very difficult to change it this is
49:26
the big advantage of democracy well and as you've illustrated The Dictator will spend more effort trying to change
49:32
people's minds and trick them to embrace the failure exactly whether it's covid policy or farming policy or the lights
49:38
going out that's where they will exert their efforts not fixing the underlying thing that affects people um I will say
49:46
with only two minutes left I'm concluding our intellectual book interview and now in closing I just
49:52
wanted to hit you with a couple questions last time we were remote now we're really here I am curious if you care to share um what has been the room
50:00
you've been in or the moment of all of this Global role and a claim that you've
50:05
had where you've either been the most excited or inspired or thrown off balance whether that's heads of state or
50:11
Tech Titans um it is interesting and I would argue positive um that people can
50:19
I don't know if you ever listened to um uh lynwell Miranda you've probably heard of and Dave East they're both um
50:25
musicians mhm you know ly Manuel Hamilton yes absolutely he wrote Hamilton it happens yeah they have a
50:31
song called I wrote my way out and it's about them growing up in tough neighborhoods and writing their way out of them to other things you wrote your
50:37
way into this role uh nobody handed that to you and so I'm curious as a way of introduction any moments like that that
50:44
you've experienced that you care to share where you're sitting with whomever and you're like wow how did this happen
50:49
well the the uh I don't know the disappointing thing about the room where
50:54
it happens is that uh actually you don't hear many wise things there because
51:03
people don't have time in the room where it happens so when you're with really powerful people whether you name them or
51:08
not you find it to be just Fox checking yeah in a way yes because you know when
51:14
people are extremely powerful they tend to be extremely busy so they and and you
51:20
always have to say the feeling is you have to say only extremely important things otherwise meeting is over I have
51:27
a more important place to be right now well I hope we didn't make you feel like that today and when you try to say only
51:32
important things you end up just repeating the same kind of slogans again
51:37
and again and you always in the shallows and again one of my concerns when I talked about privacy for politicians
51:44
they don't have any time to really go deep because they you they're running from one thing to the other from one one
51:51
thing to the other and it's very difficult under those conditions um
51:56
because you know with well now I'm going to jump in you sort of this was more of a personal history you sort of are
52:02
making it intellectual mhm so I'll ask you another question when is a time where you've seen a reaction to your
52:08
work and you felt the Temptation you felt pulled away from your methods I
52:13
mean your methods are very reasoned and object objective but you have been thrust on the global stage have you ever
52:18
looked and said well that's not right or I should post a reply or anything like that to like reaction to world events no
52:26
to your work ah to my work um I I try to keep myself detached
52:32
otherwise you go crazy right if you just kind of follow what people are saying about about the book or about you and
52:39
and and react to everything you you can't really keep the your balance of mind okay last question is is more
52:45
simple um someone listens to you they read the book they say you seem like you got all these thoughts you have warnings
52:52
if they become concerned upset
52:57
depressed about These Warnings or the conditions in their place whether it's
53:03
any country um as a citizen what do you say to them what do you do when you have that feeling final question um join an
53:10
organization but if you really want to make a difference in in the world if you're concerned in the sense that you
53:16
want to change things it will be very very difficult to do anything by our own 50 people who work together in an
53:23
organization in an institution can accomplish far far more than 500
53:29
isolated individuals so our superpower as humans is the ability to to connect
53:36
to cooperate so again if you want to change something either join an
53:42
organization or if no organization exists start an organization uh you all Noah Harari
53:48
thanks for being here thank you really great to do it in person the book is Nexus a brief history of information
53:54
networks from the Stone Age to AI you can get it wherever you get your books