Yuval Noah Harari: The Urgent Warning They Hope You Ignore, “More War Is Coming”, Yuval’s Chilling Future Predictions!

Yuval Noah Harari (0:00)

We are now in a new era of wars, and unless we reestablish order fast, then we are doomed.

Steven Bartlett (0:07)

Yuval Noah Harari, one of the brightest minds on planet Earth, historian, a best-selling author, of some of the most influential non-fiction books in the world today.

Yuval Noah Harari (0:16)

I think we are very near the end of our species, because people often spend so much effort trying to gain something without understanding the consequences. For example, we will get to a life where you can live indefinitely, but realizing that you have a chance to live forever. But if there is an accident, you die, the people who will be in that situation will be at a level of anxiety and terror, unlike anything that we know. Then you have artificial intelligence, and the world is not ready for it. It's the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and take power away from us to hack human beings, manipulate our behavior, and make all these decisions for us or about us, whether to give you a loan, whether to give you a mortgage, dating us, shaping your romantic life. But the real problem is that increasingly the humans at the top could be puppets when the most consequential decisions are made by algorithms, global financial decisions, wars. And this is extremely dangerous, but it's not inevitable. Humans can change it.

Steven Bartlett (1:23)

But with what's to come, are you optimistic about the future?

Yuval Noah Harari (1:27)

I'm very worried about two things. First of all.

Steven Bartlett (1:39)

Yuval, I have three of your books here. And these are three books that sent a huge tidal wave, a ripple through society. With these books and with all of the work that you're doing now, with the lectures you give, the interviews you give, what is your mission? What is the sort of, if I was to be able to summarize what your collective mission is with your work, what is that?

Yuval Noah Harari (2:03)

It's to clarify and to focus the public conversation, the global conversation, to help people focus on the most important challenges that are facing humankind, and also to bring at least a little bit of clarity to the collective and to the individual mind. I mean, one of my main messages in all the books is that our minds are like factories that constantly produce stories and fictions that then come between us and the world, and we often spend our lives interacting with fictions that we or that other people created, and completely losing touch with reality. And my job, and I think the job of historians more generally, is to show us a way out.

Steven Bartlett (2:57)

Inherent in much of your work is what feels like a warning. And I've watched hundreds of videos that you've produced, or interviews you've done, all around the world. And it feels like you're trying to warn us about something, multiple things. If my estimation there is correct, what is the warning?

Yuval Noah Harari (3:22)

Much of what we take to be real is fictions. And the reason that fictions are so central in human history, is because we control the planet, and rather than the chimpanzees or the elephants or any of the other animals, not because of some kind of individual genius that each of us has, but because we can cooperate much better than any other animal. We can cooperate in much larger numbers, and also much more flexibly. And the reason we can do that is because we can create and believe in fictional stories. because every large-scale human corporation, whether a religion or nations or corporations, are based on mythologies, on fictions. Again, I'm not just talking about gods, this is the easy example. Money is also a fiction that we created. Corporations are a fiction, they exist only in our minds. Even lawyers will tell you that corporations are legal fictions.

And this is, on the one hand, such a source of immense power, but on the other hand, again, the danger is that we completely lose touch with reality. And we are manipulated by all these fictions, by all these stories. Again, stories are not bad, they are tools. As long as we use them to cooperate and to help each other, that's wonderful. Money is not bad. If we didn't have money, we would not have a trade network. Everybody would have, maybe with their friends and family, to produce everything by themselves, like the chimpanzees do. The fact that we can enjoy food and clothing and medicines and entertainment created by people on the other side of the world is largely because of money. But if we forget that this is a tool that we created in order to help ourselves, and instead this tool kind of enslaves us and runs our life. And, you know, I'm now just back home in Israel. There is a terrible war being waged. And most wars in history, and also now, they are about stories. They're about fictions. People think that humans fight over the same things that wolves or chimpanzees fight about, that we fight about territory, that we fight about food. It sometimes happens. But most wars in history were not really about territory or food. There is enough land, for instance, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody. And there is certainly enough food. There is no shortage of food. But people have different mythologies, different stories in their minds, and they can't find a common story they can agree about. And this is the root of most UN conflicts. And being able to tell the difference between what is a fiction in our own mind and what is the reality, this is a crucial skill. And we are not getting better at finding this difference as time goes on.