How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - YUVAL NOAH HARARI - ‘AI doesn't have to end badly for humankind’

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Well, look, of COURSE I was intimidated. Yuval Noah Harari is one of our most revered thinkers - a philosopher for our age and a bestselling writer of books that have redefined our thinking about humanity. You will probably know him as the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (25 million copies sold and counting). Now, he tackles AI in his latest work, Nexus. Yuval joins us to talk about the potential of AI, as well as its dangers (I was actually left feeling more positive than negative, so it’s a great antidote to all the doom-mongering out there). We also discuss his childhood, his sexuality and his one big regret about not ‘coming out’ earlier - not to others, but to himself. He gives an extremely considered response to the terrible crisis in the Middle East and talks about how his critical stance against the Israeli state has lost him friendships. Plus: why he thinks he fails at meditation despite doing it for two hours a day. And if you’re a Failing With Friends subscriber, you’ll get to hear me ask the really BIG questions: his favourite karaoke tune and whether he gives cat or dog energy. These were such enlightening, important conversations, filled with hope and explained with such clarity. Thank you, Yuval. PS. You’re totally a cat. Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Manager: Lily Hambly Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Tickell and Josh Gibbs Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You've probably heard about artificial intelligence and chat GPT, but do you know the person in charge? On our podcast Good Bad Billionaire, we tell the stories of how the world's billionaires made their money. We're telling the story of Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI who make chat GPT. He became a billionaire this year, but his wealth has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. He actually got rich investing in other tech start-ups. Listen to Good Bad Billionaire to learn how he did it and whether he's good or bad. That's Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that treats all failure as necessary data acquisition

about what to do better next time, because that way we can be more truly successful. And would you like access to some extra special content? Extra special? Of course you would. You can join me for more How To Fail in our subscriber series, Failing With Friends. Every week my guest and I answer your questions and play agony aunt and uncle to your failures. You'd be surprised how helpful and therapeutic these mini sessions are. This week, you'll hear more from Yuval. No matter how urgent it seems, slowing down is usually the best thing to do.

And we'd love to hear from you. Follow the link in the podcast notes. And you can listen to How to Fail on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa, play How to Fail with Elizabeth Day on Amazon Music. My guest today is one of the great thinkers of our age. Yuval Noah Harari is an historian, philosopher and a bestselling author of some of the most influential books of the last half century. Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, tells our story from the Stone Age up until the political and technological revolutions

of the 21st century. It has sold over 25 million copies, been translated into 45 languages, and spent 96 weeks in the New York Times bestseller charts. His other works, which examine the nature of consciousness, free will, and whether humanity has a future, include Homo Deus, a brief history of tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. His latest Nexus takes on AI, asking us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth and raising the urgent choices we face today as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Born and raised in Israel, Harari taught himself to read at the age of three. At university, he specialized in

medieval history. This is the best reason to learn history, he later reflected. Not to predict the future, but to free yourself from the past and imagine alternative destinies. Yuval Noah Harari, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you, thank you for inviting me. You are famed for coining the term the cognitive revolution, as it pertains to homo sapiens, that idea that we are our stories,

this is our capability alone. But I wanted to know what story you tell about yourself. If someone were to ask you, who are you Yuval? What would you say? Ah, that's a difficult question. I mean, professionally, I define myself as a historian. I do talk about AI and things like that because I think history is not the study of the past, it's the study of change, of how things change and this applies to the present as well as to the future. Personally, it's a much more difficult question. I'm not sure. I mean, there is no single answer. I think that I keep changing also. So the answers I give to who I am also keep changing.

That child at the age of three who taught himself to read, what was he like? Very inquisitive, very sensitive, really on a physical level. For instance, it took me something like an hour or two hours to be able to open my eyes in the morning. We are not sure still what it was, but when I would wake up, my eyes would just burn so much from any, like even the slightest amount of light that I had to keep them shut. Yeah, very, very sensitive to the world. Did you feel that the world was safe when you were three? No. No.

I mean, I would keep, not at age three, but later on I would keep asking the adults about the big questions that many kids ask about the meaning of life and why we are here and what happens after we die. And what really shocked me was not that the adults didn't have good answers, it's that they didn't seem very concerned about the fact that they don't have answers.

Like, they would be very concerned about other things, like be it the latest political scandal or my grades in school, whatever, this was important. But the fact they don't know the meaning of life, nobody cares about it. And do you think that's a human defense mechanism? Yes, absolutely. Basically, I think that all the fears in the world are just a kind of camouflage or masquerade to this one big fear that usually we just can't face, that we feel that, okay, I can handle this, but not the full scale problem.

I love that image of the young Yuval not opening his eyes because it was too much. And I have read about your information diet and I wonder if it was partly that. You knew at some level that you had to pace what you took in because you felt and you thought so much. Tell us about your information diet. It's not mine. It's basically the idea that people are extremely mindful, many people are very mindful about what they eat, what food they give to their body.

And we should be equally mindful about the food that we feed our minds. And here we tend to be much more careless. First of all, feeding our minds far too much. Like food, that we need food, but too much of it is not good for us. It's the same as information. The idea that more information is always good for us, this is nonsense. We need some kind of moderation there too. And similarly, the same way that it's not good for our body to stuff in too much junk

food, so it's not good for the mind to stuff in too much junk information. And the same way that you have on all the kind of chips and sweet things, these warnings that this contains 40% fat and 10% sugar or whatever. So we maybe need some labels on the information we consume. Like you watch some video on TikTok or whatever, and it should come with a warning, with a label. This contains like 40% greed, 20% rage. If you want to feed your mind with this, okay, it's a free country, but just be aware that this is what you're

putting in. That's such a great idea. And how do you use your smartphone? Because I think you have a smartphone, but you don't use it all the time. Yeah, I try to use it instead of letting it use me and to minimize its usage as much as possible. It's more like an emergency smartphone that when I travel like here now, so I need a method to get in touch. And increasingly, there are many services that you just can't get unless you use it.

Again, be mindful about how often and for what purposes you use it. Again, be mindful about how often and for what purposes you use it. And the key idea is that we need time to digest information just like food. That just all the time putting more inside, it doesn't allow us the necessary time to digest it. So time off could be a few hours, could be a few days, sometimes could be even a few weeks that we don't put anything new in. We just, in a way, detoxify our minds and allow them to digest everything they took in and make sense of it. And then, okay, let's move on to the next thing. I'm going to ask you a lot more about Nexus, your new book, because it pertains to one of your failures. But before we get into the content, I wanted to ask you about the form. Nexus is 400 pages long, 500 if you include the footnotes.

Lots of footnotes. notes. How on earth do you marshal that epic sweep of history that you incorporate and all of your thoughts and structure it and not lose the will to live as you're writing it? First, it takes time. It's a project that's been like four, five, maybe six years in the making, like four, five, maybe six years in the making. And it goes through a lot of iterations and a lot of help from many other people. You know, this, I guess it's true of all books that you often see just the name of one person on the cover and you think, okay, he or she,

they wrote it all by themselves. What an achievement. But actually, if you know how it happens, behind every book that there is a family or a tribe of lots of people helping you. So I have a team of research assistants and I have an editorial team and so many people pitch in so that eventually the book comes out. Do you plan the structure before you write? No. No. No. I have some

idea in my mind. I usually write a very, very rough draft of kind of a flowchart of how the argument will go. And usually I just write. I don't kind of wait. Like I said, okay, I'm not sure what kind of example is needed here, so I just write example and move on. And then when I go over the text again, okay, each example, then I stop and I think, okay, what is the best historical example to explain this idea? I mean, one of my kind of methods of writing is that you always have to say the same thing twice. But you need to say it in two different ways. So like I'll give a general abstract explanation or idea or theory, and then I'll explain the

same theory again, but with a concrete example. As storytelling animals, for us, concrete is almost always better than abstract. Something concrete, something sensory that you can imagine, that you can visualize. For many books, this is ultimately the only thing that remains are a few anecdotes, are a few stories. Very often, the kind of big abstract ideas are the most

important message, but to convey the message, a good concrete visual example is often the best. It obviously, as you say, took you a long time to write and during that time, according to your acknowledgements, your grandmother died at the age of 100. I wonder what- Yeah, really a few days after she- It was like her last mission in life was, okay, I want to be 100. And then it was her 100th birthday and a week later she died. I've seen it all. There is nothing left to do, to explore. Bye-bye. What do you think she taught you about life? First of all, a lot because I lived with her for a few years when I was doing my undergraduate degree in Jerusalem.

So I lived in her apartment. So she wasn't just this remote grandmother that you meet every few weeks on a family visit. But it was like four or five years that I lived with her. And she was one of the most tolerant persons I've ever met, and she can almost put up with anything that I would do or say or that happened in the world, which was very surprising when I thought about it later because she had such a difficult life. Her parents were Jewish refugees from Poland when the Soviets invaded Poland in 1920. So my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, they escaped Poland and

they settled as refugees in Germany. They never got citizenship, and she was born in Germany in 1921. Not the best place for a Jew to be born. And they had the sense to flee again from Germany in 1933-34, immediately after the Nazis came to power. So they escaped in time, but they were again refugees. They escaped to Palestine, to Jerusalem. And almost very soon after they reached Jerusalem, the great Arab revolt erupted in 1936, and they had to go through all that. And then the Second World War and then the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947 to 49. She was in Jerusalem during the siege, so there was no food and no water and bombardments. And this was like

her like basically first 30 years of life. And you would imagine that she would emerge as this extremely hard, tough, she was very tough, but she wasn't hard at all. I mean, her toughness was being very, very soft. That's so beautiful. I mean, no wonder you are drawn to history as the story of change. And I also think that sometimes, possibly unfairly, you're seen as this prophet of doom. But actually, there's a belief in human conversation in your work. And I think you've expressed that so well through

the prism of your grandmother that you can be tough but not hard. You can still be open to new ideas and new conversations. So clearly, she did have a huge impact on you. Yeah, I think one of the biggest impacts of any person in my life. Thank you for sharing that. You and I have, I'm going to say three things in common. Well, four now. I also had an amazing grandmother. Okay. We both studied history. I'm also a history graduate. You're marginally more successful than I am. We're both in our 40s, which makes me feel ashamed that I haven't achieved nearly enough. And then the final thing is we both met our husbands online. And you met your lovely husband who's here today online. And I wanted to ask you about him, about how important he is in your life. Oh, he's also incredibly important, as you can imagine.

And going back to your previous question about how I managed to write these books, it's largely thanks to him. I mean, from all this team of people, this tribe that works together to create the books. So I think he's the real master. I write the actual words, but to mastermind this collaborative effort, we opened a social impact company, Sapienship, a couple of years ago, and we now have something like 20 employees. He was the brain behind this entire operation. If it wasn't for him, I guess lots of people write history books. Many of these history books are excellent and you never hear about them. Yeah.

So I think the fact that people heard about me is largely because of his genius for organization and PR and human relations. And you also love him. Okay. Final question before we get onto your failures. I read in an interview that you gave love him. Yes. Okay. Final question before we get onto your failures. I read in an interview that you gave The Guardian, they asked you the greatest regret of your life and you said not being open about your sexuality earlier.

Why is that? Because I think that the pain of kind of living in denial to myself, I mean, when I say it's a regret not coming out, it's not to other people, it's to myself. And looking back, the writing was on the wall when I was like 14, 15 for sure. Like if I would be on the beach, I would definitely look at the guys, not at the girls. But I couldn't acknowledge it. Just looking back, it was a lot of painful years. And yes, of course, I've learned, like you learn from every painful experience, but I

don't think you must go through a lot of pain in order to learn. There are better ways to learn. ALICE Do you think that makes you passionate about telling the truth now? This is why you tell the truth, because you don't want the rest of us to live in denial. IAN Partly, but it also taught me that, again, this is a main theme of Nexus, that the truth comes with a price also. Certainly, on a social level, there is always a balance between truth and order, between truth and safety. So there are good reasons why I was living in denial. I grew up in a small, provincial, homophobic town in Israel in the 1980s and early 1990s, this was not a good time and

place to come out. So it was a defense mechanism, which again was very costly in psychological terms, even spiritual terms, but it protected me. Maybe if I did come out to myself, to others, when I was 15 in that environment, the results would have been much worse. Yes, that's so nuanced. And it reminds me of that other thing you say about the difference between justice and peace. Which one do you hold? You need both, of course, but there is always a trade-off. there was never a single peace treaty in the history of the world which

provided absolute justice, a hundred percent justice. This is impossible, certainly in Kanyunokan, these grand historical conflicts, because for instance, you can't bring back the dead. Like if there was this terrible conflict and thousands of people died, real justice is to bring them back to life, And you can't do that. So at some point, you need to give up the dream of absolute justice and settle for peace, which requires compromise. And okay, we can't bring back the dead, but at least we can

prevent more people from dying. Let's move on to your first failure. And I just want to thank you for writing these so beautifully. And I won't do them justice, but hopefully you will in your words. Your first failure is politics and specifically how you see your failure within three areas. Tell us more. So in my work and also with this social impact company that my husband and I

established Sapienship, like my goal is to focus the public conversation, to focus attention on the three big threats to humankind in the 21st century, which are the threat of ecological collapse, of global war, and of disruptive technologies, and especially AI, artificial intelligence. And since I began to work on this project of bringing more awareness to these three problems on all fronts, it's just been getting worse very quickly. So of course, it's not on me. I mean, it would be mega-lumineical of me to think that I can move the needle on such

big issues. But still on a personal level, it feels like not a hopeless struggle, but a struggle in which many people, I'm including among them, that are trying to make a change on these issues, we are failing. And we are failing in a big way. You look at the ecological crisis, again, I try to think back to, let's say, 10 years ago, to when I started to research and to write and to talk about it. And here we are in 2024, and lots of people have the impression that it's hopeless. Not because humankind doesn't have the resources to prevent catastrophe. It has.

This is the tragedy. I mean, we are not the dinosaurs. I mean, when the dinosaurs were hit by the asteroid from outer space like 65 million years ago, this was not a tragedy in the Greek sense. It was a natural disaster. There was nothing the dinosaurs could do about it. But we're in a different situation. We know what is happening.

We know what is about to happen. We have the economic, the technological resources to prevent it, and still we don't do enough. I know it's not really on me, but I still feel it as a personal failure. And it's the same when you look at the international situation and the deteriorating. And we are now, like 10 years ago, when people talked about a potential third world war, this sounded completely crazy in 2014, to think there could be another world war. And in 2024, some people say, and not without justification, that it has already erupted,

that the third world war erupted on the 24th of February, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. We still don't call it a world war, but we are on the way there. The same way that when Hitler invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939, people didn't know it was a world war. It took something like two years. And the invasion of the USSR and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor until people say, okay, it's a world war. Obviously, when I look at my region and my country in Israel, I'm living in a country

that is collapsing on many levels, practically, but also morally, spiritually. And finally, my biggest focus in recent years was on the dangers of AI. And this train is moving faster and faster, and everything we say about the dangers, maybe it has a little influence, but it's not slowing down. ["Skyline"] Looking for a path to accelerate your career? Clear direction for next-level success? In a place that is innovative and practical? A path to stay current and

connected to industry? A place where you can be yourself? You will find it at York University School of Continuing Studies where we offer career programs purpose-built for you. Visit continue.yorku.ca. What's 2FA security on Kraken? Let's say I'm captaining my soccer team, and we're up by a goal against, I don't know, the Burlington Bulldogs. Do we relax? No way. Time to create an extra line of defense and protect that lead. That's like 2FA on Kraken, a surefire way to keep what you already have safe and sound. We'll come back to Israel, but for the moment, let's focus on AI.

There is a brilliant section in Nexus in which you analyze the history of the Bible as we know it. I found it so riveting and so clever. Why did you do that? Why did you use that as your concrete example? The fantasy of AI is to create a perfect technology that will enable us to take humans out of the loop. We know that humans are fallible creatures. We make mistakes. We could be corrupted. So humans have dreamt for thousands of years to find a source of knowledge, of information, of decision-making

that is free of all these human problems. This fantasy was not born with AI. It goes back thousands of years, and holy books were a kind of technology that aimed to do just that, to take humans out of the loop. The idea that you have a source of information which is coming from a superhuman source, and it is never wrong.

It has all the answers. It never gets anything wrong. It cannot be corrupted. So this fantasy is old. And we saw in the previous iterations that it's just a fantasy. cannot be corrupted. So this fantasy is old. And we saw in the previous iterations that it's just a fantasy. It doesn't work. The decision what to include in the holy book ultimately is a human decision.

We tend to forget that, but at least people who believe in the book, they afterwards forget how the book was created. But every holy book goes through a process of canonization during which some people choose what to put in and what to leave outside. And these decisions made centuries ago completely forgotten, they still shape the world today. Like you have in the Bible, there is one of the most misogynistic texts in the Bible is the first epistle to Timothy, which is ascribed to St. Paul, but a lot of Christians back then and also a lot of modern scholars say it was a later forgery. Nevertheless, some church fathers at the end of the fourth century in the councils

of Hippo and Carthage, they decided to include this text in the Bible. In contrast, they left out a lot of many texts which were popular with ancient Christians and who had a much more positive view of the abilities of women. And this decision about which texts to canonize and which texts to leave out, they shaped Christian attitudes towards women for 2,000 years. And the same is happening now with AI, that we are now in the process of canonizing certain AIs, and this decision could be even more momentous than the decision what to put in the Bible and what to leave out. If humans have this inbuilt fallibility, and one of those inbuilt fallibilities is that

we tell ourselves stories of denial and futility and we say, well, we can't do anything. And we become extinct and AI takes over. Why does it matter? It's not deterministic, it's in our hands. AI has enormous positive potential as well. It doesn't have to end badly for humankind. Even simple technology like a knife, you can use it to murder somebody or to save their life in surgery or to cut salad

Yeah, it's a choice and in the 20th century. We saw the same technology Electricity and trains and radio it could be used to create totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany or it can use be used to create liberal democracies Nazi Germany, or it can be used to create liberal democracies. The technology doesn't force us what to do with it. And it's the same to some extent with AI. It's not too late in 2024 to make sure that AI is used to create better societies and not allowed to escape our control and potentially destroy human civilization. And how would you suggest doing that? Is that about having a series of councils where people get together and discuss and put their own prejudices aside? What's the solution? I mean, the first step is, of course, to realize what the danger is. Many people still don't have a clear idea of why is it so dangerous.

It's unlike nuclear weapons that it was not easy to deal with the threat of nuclear weapons, but at least everybody could immediately grasp what the danger is. With AI, part of the problem is it's the first technology in history, which is an independent agent. AI is not a tool. It's an agent. It has the capacity to make decisions by itself. It has the capacity to create new ideas by itself, which also means that many of its potential threats, we cannot foresee them right now.

We are basically flooding the world with millions, potentially billions of new alien agents. Now, when I say alien, I don't mean something that comes from outer space. I mean agents that, again, make decisions and invent ideas, but in a very different way than human beings. They are not human. They are not even organic. All the things that we know about how organic entities make decisions and create new things, this is inapplicable to AI. It's really an alien type of intelligence.

And to give just one famous example, one of the key moments in the AI revolution was in 2016 when AlphaGo defeated Lissadol at the game of Go. Go is very important and popular game in East Asia. Some people say it's like chess, but orders of magnitude more complex than chess. It's also been a cultural treasure in East Asia.

It was invented in ancient China about 3,000 years ago. And for 3,000 years, if you were an educated person, not just in China, also in Korea, also in Japan, one of the things you needed to know was how to play Go. It was considered an art. There were philosophical schools about how to play Go and how different strategies, they parallel strategies in real life. Now the amazing thing that happened in 2016 was not just that AlphaGo defeated the world champion.

It's the way it defeated the world champion. It used tricks, moves, strategies that were completely alien, that did not occur to any human being in 3,000 years of playing Go. It's like you imagine it like a landscape that humans for 3,000 years, they researched, they explored this small island, small valley in the landscape of Go. And they thought this was the whole world.

And then AI came and within just a few weeks, discovered completely new continents that nobody even thought of looking there. And now even humans play go differently because they are now learning from the AI. You know, when it comes to a game, then we say, okay, wonderful. But what if this happens also in finance, in the military,

in politics, that these new AI agents, it's not that they are bad, they're not evil, but they're extremely powerful. And it's very difficult to predict what they will do, because they explore different parts of reality that are hidden from our eyes. Well, one of the things that I've heard you say before is that AI agents as yet don't have consciousness, so they don't apply decisions through the filter of feelings. No. So, we have feelings. Will feelings save us, Yuval? Like, is that something that we... In science fiction, it usually ends like that.

When the robots rebel and the humans are like at the last stand, the fact that humans have feelings and the robots don't understand our feelings, this is our saving grace, somehow. Like, the hero does something totally unexpected that the robots didn't see coming because they didn't take love or passion or whatever into account. And this is not how it goes.

Apparently because feelings are biological patterns and AI is becoming extremely good at recognizing all kinds of patterns, including biological patterns. They don't have any feelings of their own, but they are becoming even better than humans at identifying human feelings. Like, if I want to know how you're feeling right now, then I basically look for patterns, not just in the content of what you say, but in your tone of voice, your facial expression, tiny movements of your eyes, your mouth indicate to me whether you are angry or fearful or bored or whatever.

This is pattern recognition. And computers are able to now recognize some patterns much better than human beings. But can they create the feelings within themselves? As far as we know, no. But again, they are moving along a completely different trajectory than us. We are part of an evolutionary process lasting hundreds of millions of years, during which high intelligence usually went hand in hand with emotions, with feelings, with consciousness, not just human beings, but also chimpanzees and elephants and dogs and so forth.

They make decisions based on feelings. So intelligence and consciousness, intelligence is the ability to pursue goals in a rational way to make decisions. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. We make decisions based on our feelings. AI is doing it in a completely different way. When it wins a game of Go, it's not happy. When it loses a game, it's not sad.

It's just moving along a different evolutionary trajectory that could lead to super intelligence without developing any consciousness. You know, the same way that airplanes fly much faster than birds without ever developing feathers. It's the same here with intelligence. Some people try to measure AI with a yardstick of human-level intelligence.

There is a huge debate. When will AI reach human-level intelligence? And the answer is maybe never. It's just not playing by the same rules. It will not reach human level intelligence. It will become super intelligent in a completely alien and non-human way. The same way that airplanes didn't reach bird level flight. Is Boeing 747 able to reach bird level flight? No, it's just not flying like a bird.

It's flying in a completely different way. I adore your metaphors, those concrete examples, the feathers, the feelings. Thank you for articulating that so eloquently because it's so complicated and yet you make it accessible. Let's move on to your second failure, which is also a big one. So we're going to continue talking about these big themes. Your second failure, as you so modestly put it, is history. That your profession, history is a failed profession. Why do you think that? You know, very often history is used in very negative ways. Historians are not able to prevent it.

Our profession is really abused for, and this has been going on for centuries, this is not a new phenomenon. Politicians and religious leaders, they mine history, but they often ignore the most basic facts of history. They construct these so-called historical narratives that then serve as a fuel for wars and conflicts and discrimination and so forth. Some historians cooperate with that, but even those that don't are almost helpless to prevent it. As a professional historian, again, we are struggling against it and we are

failing again and again and again. Let's talk about a part of the world that you are very familiar with where national stories have reached such a level of toxicity and death that it feels hopeless to witness from these privilege seats in this sheltered podcast studio. You've written so eloquently about what's happening in Gaza. And I wonder if I could do that nauseating journalistic thing of quoting you back to yourself. There was a piece that you wrote in the FT that I just thought really pinpointed with such exactitude what it is that we struggle to reach for. So I'd love to quote it in full. And you wrote, the tragedy of this conflict is that the problem arises not from unjustified paranoia,

but rather from a sound analysis of the situation and from each side knowing only too well its own intentions and fantasies. When Israelis and Palestinians take a good look at their own dark wishes, they conclude that the other has ample reason to fear and hate them. It is a devilish logic. Every side says to itself, given what we wish to do to them, it makes sense that they will want to get rid of us, which is precisely why we have no choice, but to get rid of them first. Yuval, I suppose I want to start by asking how you feel about the situation today and whether there is any hope. There is always hope. There is no objective reason why this conflict must be. You know, some people think that humans fight over objective things like territory or food.

There isn't enough food, so we have to fight them, otherwise we starve to death. This is almost never the case. It happens with animals. Sometimes animals fight each other for food, and if they don't fight, they starve. This is not the case, at least not in the 21st century with humans. There is enough food for everybody. We throw away far more food every year than all the food we need to feed the hungry people of the world. And similarly, there is no objective shortage of land, of territory. The land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is quite small and crowded, but still there is enough land to build houses and schools and hospitals and factories for everybody. So it's not objective. And why do people fight? Because they have conflicting stories in their

minds and this can hopefully be changed. At the core level, each side denies the existence of the other. Again, it goes back to this theme of just ignoring part of reality. I talk with many Israelis that they say they don't exist. They really tell you it was a straight face and they really believe it. There are no Palestinians. They's they don't exist and you hear the same things from the other side. Like I've read the Hamas is declaration of principles and goals and it's never acknowledges in a word that Jews have any connection to the work to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Jews have been living in this land continuously for 3,000 years, and the entire Jewish religion is built around this connection. And still, you can talk with Palestinians with a complete straight face and with genuine belief will tell you Jews have nothing to do with this place. There are European

invaders that came here a hundred years ago. And this level of historical erasure, in your mind, you erase the other side. And then when you look at reality and they are still there, then this is the seed of war. War is when you try to destroy something in reality that has no place in your mind. In your mind, they don't exist. In reality, they do. So, okay, you have to change the reality, not your mind. You live in Tel Aviv. What's it like living in Israel right now with your perspective? You are an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance. Oh, it feels like fighting on so many different fronts at the same time. You, of course, have the

war, a very real war against external enemies that do intend to destroy the country. At the same time, you have a conflict internal within Israeli society against messianic and militaristic and nationalistic forces. It's really amazing to see that people, you have reserve soldiers fighting in Gaza against Hamas or in the north against Hezbollah, and then they come on leave. When they are on leave for a few days from the front, they go to demonstrate against the government. And then after a few days, they put on the uniform again, and again, they go to fight because they realize we have to fight on both fronts, both very different types of dangers.

And you also find yourself increasingly in conflict with people that you thought were your friends across the sea. That a lot of people, especially on the more progressive left in Israel, they now feel completely abandoned and betrayed by the progressive left in the Western world and elsewhere. The difficulty of recognizing the situation is complex that not all Israelis support Benjamin Netanyahu and his plans and so forth. And again, it's really tragic because if you think about a fundamentalist rabbi in the occupied territories in some settlement, he relies on a network of friends in the world, like the evangelical Christians

in the United States. And in this moment of crisis, they help him with support, with money, whatever. But then I look at people in my circle, like I have a friend who is a gender studies professor at university, and she tries to teach young Israelis to have a critical view of not just gender, but also militarism and nationalism and things like that. And now she's boycotted by her friends across the ocean. And at the moment of greatest need, instead of receiving support, she now has to another front she has to deal with. So

it's a very difficult situation. And I think what you are pointing at is this idea that the space where we can speak freely about our thoughts, our opinions, our feelings, and where we can also ask the question where we can say, I don't know enough about this, please re-teach me. That space is becoming increasingly rare, increasingly binary. It's almost like you can have this opinion or that opinion, but you can't have both. And I wonder if I can bring this part of our conversation to conclusion by quoting the conclusion of your piece that you wrote for the FT, where you wrote, we have little control over the intentions of others, but we should be able to change our

own minds. Even readers who are neither Israeli nor Palestinian can contemplate whether they wish well for both sides or whether they cherish the hope that one of these groups would simply disappear from the face of the earth. We should be able to change our own minds. Yep. That's the true power, isn't it? It's a limited power, but at least we have some control over that. Again, I can't control what the Palestinians are thinking and hoping, but I hope that at least I can change the minds of some Israelis to recognize that Palestinians not only exist, but they have a right to live peacefully with dignity, with prosperity in their country of birth.

And it sounds obvious, but it's so difficult for so many people to accept this simple fact. UBER EATS A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by regency app for details. Are you Dave, a claims-free hybrid driving university grad who signed up online? Well, Dave, this jingles for you. Who says we'll take the insurance? Because he's a cleanse for having driving university grad who signed up online. It's Dave. Not Dave, no problem. TD Insurance has over 30 ways to save on home and auto. So you can totally save just not exactly like Dave. Save like only you can

at tdinsurance.com slash ways to save. TD ready for you. Okay, your final failure, meditation. Now you say it's a failure, but you meditate for two hours a day. Yes. One hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. Usually, yes. So why do you categorize it as a failure? Again, it's not exactly a failure, but in meditation you constantly fail, but this is a good thing. This is part of the meditation. The meditation often is a process of observing your failure and coming to terms with it. Because you know, like the most basic, at least in the type of meditation that I practice, Vipassana, which I've learned here in the UK when I was doing my PhD in Oxford.

So I went to a center near Hereford and learned from a teacher called S N Goenka, Vipassana meditation. And the first and most basic instruction sounds incredibly easy. You just focus your entire attention on your own breath around the nostrils and around the nose. You just feel when the breath is coming in and when it's going out. That's it. You don't need to control the breath. It's not a breathing exercise. You just need to observe to feel is it coming in or is it going out. That's it. And the amazing thing is it's so difficult. Like, you do it for five seconds, ten seconds, twenty seconds, and then your mind wanders away. Some memory comes, some thought comes, some fantasy comes, and you start rolling in the memory for like five minutes before you remember,

hey, I'm actually supposed to be feeling my breath. And you come back to it, and you do it for 30 seconds, and then again, it runs away. When I went to my first course, this was such a shock that, again, I have no control over my mind. I don't know what's happening there. I thought I was a very intelligent person, and by then I was also out as a gay man. And I thought, okay, I know my deep secrets now. And here I am sitting with closed eyes, trying to do this simple thing of just feeling the breath coming in and out.

I can't do it for more than like 20 seconds. What's happening? And it's been like 24 years since then. I've been practicing two hours every day. Every year I go to a long retreat of 30 days or 60 days of meditation. And still, I do it for a few minutes and the mind wanders somewhere. So it's a failure in this sense. But this is how I get to know my mind and this is how I get to know reality.

This is the inner reality of what's happening in my mind, and this is how I get to know reality. This is the inner reality of what's happening in my mind. And noticing this, and also noticing where the mind wanders away and what happens to the body and to the mind when a particular thought comes up, this is a process of getting to know yourself, not by reading books about psychology or about biology or whatever. You're actually in a laboratory observing yourself second by second, and really there is nothing like that in the world. It's so interesting to hear you describe it as a laboratory where you're observing your

mind because a lot of people would describe it as a spiritual practice. I'm a scientist. I know. So you are uneasy with the idea that it's a spiritual practice. I don't think there is any contradiction between these two. For me, spirituality is about big questions. What is the meaning of life? Who am I?

And the willingness to follow these questions wherever they lead you. And this stands in contrast, I think, to established religions which require you to believe in a certain dogma. So the answer is at the center, not the question. Whereas science is, in this sense, much more spiritual. Science also is about raising these big questions and following them, of course, with different tools.

Like, scientists also, one of the biggest questions in science is what is consciousness? How does electrical activity between billions of neurons, how does this create the sensation of pain? We have no idea. But we investigate. So in the scientific laboratory, we investigate it with tools like microscopes. In meditation, we investigate the same question basically, what is pain? Where is it coming from? But by directly observing the pain, not with the help of any microscope, but just feeling the pain.

God, that's so well explained. My final question, it's a slightly odd one, but I'm interested, so that's why I'm going to ask it. Odd questions are the best. Good. So if someone were to ask you, where do you want to go for dinner tonight? Or what hotel would you like to stay in? Or what time would you like to stay in or what time would you like to fly or what do you want to wear today? Do you answer from your feeling or your intellect? YARO I often let my husband decide. ALICE So interesting. Do you think you're a people pleaser?

YARO In some ways, yes, but in other ways, completely not. I mean, I please them in the areas which are less important to me. Why fight about it? Let them do what they want. But when something is really important, then no. Like with these meditation retreats, I disappear every year for like 30 days or 60 days. If you ask my husband or my mother or the people in my company about it, I'm not sure they're happy about it, but it's just like, deal with it. I imagine it's also because your intellect is so overworked a lot of the time and you're constantly having to make decisions about what to write and

what to think. So sometimes if someone asks you where to go for dinner, you're like, I don't just, that's just too much. Absolutely. But if I forced you and if I said, okay, you're in London tonight and you can eat one kind of cuisine, does that response come from feeling or thought? I think from feeling, but I would probably pick a place I've already been to. I'll go for the safe choice. Ever the scientist, but as we now know, that's also being a bit spiritual. Follow the questions.

I want that on a t-shirt. Yuval, it has been such an illuminating and invigorating conversation. I cannot thank you enough for the work that you do and for giving up your valuable time to be here today. Thank you so, so much. Thank you. Even better, you're staying for Failing with Friends. And our listeners have sent in some amazing questions, far better than mine.

So we'll see you there. Do follow us to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Share a link and spread the love. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.