TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: Yuval Noah Harari on what history teaches us about justice and peace

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

Each Sunday, TED shares an episode of another podcast we think you'll love, handpicked for you… by us. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian best known for his book "Sapiens", which has sold more than 25 million copies and has been translated into 65 languages. In this episode of ReThinking with Adam Grant, Adam and Yuval examine the power of stories in shaping humanity’s success, discuss the tension between justice and peace, and reconsider the true purpose of studying history. Transcripts for ReThinking are available at go.ted.com/RWAGscripts 

Hey, TED Talks daily listeners. I'm Elise Hume. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective handpicked by us for you. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is one of TED's most beloved speakers. And on his podcast, Rethinking, he talks to some of the world's most renowned scientists, entrepreneurs, and creatives. In this episode, he has a thoughtful conversation

with historian Yuval Noah Harari on the power of storytelling and why we need to reconsider the way we think about history. To hear more deep conversations like these, you can find Rethinking wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode right after a quick break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel.

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or your favorite podcast platform. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Yuval Noah Harari. He's the historian best known for his book, Sapiens, which has sold over 25 million copies and spent more than 200 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Yuval has a new book for young readers, Unstoppable Us, Volume 2, Why the World Isn't Fair. In many cases, there is really a contradiction or a clash between justice and peace. Let's start on fairness then, since it's the subject of the hour. Maybe you can answer a question that's bothered me since I was a kid.

I remember growing up, my mom would always say, life isn't fair. And I hated hearing that. I think you have an explanation that might be a little more satisfying than the one that she gave. Our ideas of fairness are usually stories invented by humans and the universe doesn't follow our stories. So most concepts of fairness and justice, they are just human imagination. And when we try to impose them on reality, it doesn't work.

Actually, some of the worst catastrophes in human history occur because humans try too hard to impose their concepts of fairness on the universe. When you have this kind of fantasy of a perfect world and you encounter the imperfect world, there are many people who are standing in your way to accomplish this kind of perfect world and you then begin to see them as evil because they are trying to prevent fairness, they are trying to prevent justice. And this is at the root of many of the worst wars and worst conflicts that happened in history. Every piece in history needed compromises, including compromises on what we understand as justice.

And one of the big differences between justice and peace is that justice tends to be subjective. Every person, every people, every religion have their own definitions. Whereas peace is much more objective. Are people being killed or not? Is not a matter of belief. This is a matter of reality. Are you saying then that we should care less about fairness and justice than we do? We should care about them very much.

But we should be aware that it is impossible to create a completely perfect society, a completely just society. Again, especially because different people have different concepts of what justice means. And ultimately, if we have to choose between justice and peace, I would go with peace. I would too. In psychology, we tend to think about three different definitions of fairness that people often clash over. One is equality, where everyone gets the exact same outcome, and most people tend not to like that.

Another is equity, where people get what they deserve. And then a third is need, where the people who are most disadvantaged or unfortunate end up getting the greatest attention or support. I'm curious to hear a couple of things. One is how you react to the equality-equity-need distinction. Is this a useful framework for you for thinking about why people disagree on what's fair? What's your take on that? No, I think it's very useful. It's very accurate.

I would only add to that, that in many cases, the disagreements are about something even more fundamental. Who do we include in the community that deserves justice? Do we include only humans or also other entities? And who counts as a human? Very often in conflicts between people, one of the first steps is to dehumanize your rivals or your enemies. One of the big differences, I think, between philosophy and history is that many things that sound simple and obvious in the realm of philosophy, when they try to migrate to the much harsher kingdom of history, they get lost on the way.

Well, this, I think, goes to one of the points that you're most, probably most famous for, which is fiction as humanity's superpower. Without stories about who's in our in-group and who's in our out-group, or who's worthy and who's not, there would be no dehumanization, right? Stories are our superpower. It's what enables complete strangers to unite and to work together towards common goals. But at the same time, they could also be the cause of the worst crimes in history. We invent often terrible stories about the world or about each other. I think if we look especially at the modern world, we can say

that there are three big stories that people tell about history and about the question of justice and fairness. You have the fascist story about the world, about history, which says that history is a conflict between nations or between races and it will end only with the victory of one nation or one race over everybody else. Then you have the communist or the Marxist story of history, which again understands history essentially as a conflict, as a conflict between classes, which will end only with the complete victory of one class over all the others. The third big story that people tell about the world, about history, I think is much

more optimistic. This is the liberal story, which doesn't see history as essentially a conflict, just the other way around. Liberals tend to argue, to think, that all humans share some common experiences. It doesn't matter to which nation or race or class you belong. You don't like pain. You don't like hunger. You love your children. You want dignity.

There are certain experiences which are common to everyone. Based on these experiences, we should be able to formulate some common values and common interests. Why is there conflict and injustice in the world? It is not a structural problem with history. It's really a problem of ignorance or misunderstanding. We fall victim to fictional stories, for instance, like racism, which tells us that one race is fundamentally different from another or superior to another. And the hope is that we can just by not with violence, but by talking with each other, we can sometimes understand

this mistake and come up with a better story. So to take some historical cases, if you think about, say, the formation of the European Union, which is a huge and successful so-for-liberal project, it didn't come about by one country defeating all the others. It came about by convincing people in almost 30 different countries to recognize their shared experiences and values and interests. Or to take another example, the relative success of the feminist revolution, which managed to change what we think about gender, about men and women and LGBTQ people and so forth, with very little

use of violence. So you can understand from the way I describe it that I ascribed to the liberal story, which places a lot of emphasis not on these kind of inevitable structural conflicts between human groups, but rather on the content of our mind, on the content of our imagination, gives rise to the hope that sometimes, I mean, not always, but at least sometimes we can resolve conflicts and we can end at least some injustices just by talking with each other. Well, I obviously subscribe to that viewpoint as well.

I think the empirical evidence I've read is really clear on this, right? That non-violent resistance campaigns are significantly more effective than violent resistance campaigns, even when you're trying to overthrow an authoritarian government, which is extraordinary. I don't know if you've seen the Erika Chenoweth research or not, but in their case, they study violent and nonviolent campaigns, every single one that happened over the course of more than a century, starting in 1900.

And we see, actually, that peaceful resistance is more effective than violent resistance. It seems like there's rising discomfort with that idea. And people are more and more unwilling to accept that that might be possible today than they were even a decade ago. What do you think has changed? As a historian, one of the things that kind of characterizes my way of thinking is that very often we cannot explain the causes of what is happening. We can describe the chain of events, but we don't understand the deep causes.

Again, because it's very often, it's because something changes in people's minds, in the stories they believe, and not in the structures of the world. You know, I look at the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s. We now have so much evidence on it. We have the wisdom of hindsight. And yet, personally, I don't have an explanation why fascism rose in the 1920s and 30s. I can describe how it happened, but I don't know why.

And this is also true of what is happening now. Looking at the world, it's obvious that people are again gravitating towards seeing the world in terms of inescapable conflict, whether it's the way that Putin sees the international arena or whether it's internal conflicts in Putin sees the international arena or whether it's internal conflicts in countries like the United States or like my own country of Israel, people are increasingly attracted to seeing the world simply in terms of power. As if any human interaction is always a power struggle. When you understand reality simply in terms of power, then you are inevitably drawn towards conflict and towards ultimately towards violence.

Because if everything is just power relations, there is no way to change something in the world to end injustice just by talking. The only way to change power relations is ultimately with force. When I think about myself, I don't think that the only thing that interests me in the world is power. Yes, sometimes I want power, but very often I have other interests. People are interested, also genuinely interested, in something like truth or something like love, not as a mechanism to gain power.

So if I don't think about myself as a simple, power-crazy individual, why should I think like that about the other people in the world? A lot of the relations between people in the world, they are shaped by these fictional stories, these fantasies in our minds. Many of these stories are wrong, are deeply wrong, but they potentially could be changed through conversations and not through violence. I think that's certainly a great place to start. I think it seems that this is harder to do in times of threat.

So I'm thinking about a whole body of evidence showing that when people are facing personal threat or when they perceive society as turbulent and unstable and potentially disadvantaging them, they're more likely to vote for tough dominant leaders as opposed to kind, caring ones. I think that has obvious implications then for leaning toward violence, war, as opposed to peace and cooperation. Yeah, I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you think about the world simply in

terms of power, you will tend to vote, for instance, for politicians who behave that way, and then it becomes a reality. Then reality becomes like this zero-sum power struggle, and then other people are also forced to think and behave in that way. The way we understand history is it itself shapes history. That the more you think about history just in terms of power struggles, the more power struggles there will actually be in the world. To make peace, you need an effort from a lot of people at the same time.

To make war, often just one individual or one party is enough to force a conflict on everybody else. This makes it much more difficult, of course, because if you want peace, you need basically to change the minds of everybody simultaneously. If you have even one important party which sticks with this kind of more violent and forceful view of the world, it is enough to thwart all your attempts. I've been curious about where we intervene to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecy from happening because it seems like the more times the cycle repeats

the more it provides historical evidence that well if we ignore power then we're going to become victims of it and so we need to respond to force with force. I think one of the places that I've tried to intervene personally is to say, let's actually think about what it takes to be an effective leader. Let's think about reframing the job. Let's consider the possibility. It's not just a role that requires the capacity to use power, hard power. It's also a role that requires relationship building skills and emotional intelligence, the capacity to communicate, to build coalitions, diplomacy, conflict resolution. And I found in one experiment that when I simply reminded people that this was a critical part of a leader's job, that it shifted

their preferences on who they were willing to vote for. I don't think that's enough, obviously. It does strike me that that's an example of a way that we can begin to change the story of what we need in people who are going to play these roles that ultimately decide how power is used. How do you think about ending the self-fulfilling prophecy or maybe even making it a self-negating prophecy? It's important to realize

that if you take a long-term view of history, we do not see a kind of constancy of violence. We see more peaceful and more violent conflicts, periods following one another. Those people who argue that humans have always been violent and war is a constant feature of human nature, they are just projecting their own ideas onto the record. It's not there. Even after that date, you see these kind of waves of peaceful periods and violent periods interchanging. In recent decades, we have actually managed to reduce the level of international violence

to a historical low. The early 21st century was the most peaceful era in human history, as far as we can tell. It's not just evidence from, you know, number of wars or number of casualties. It's also if you look at, for instance, state budgets. What do governments spend their resources on? For most of human history, the number one item on the budget of every king, every emperor, every republic, every city state was the military. If you look, say, in the early 20th century, then during World War I,

the Britons spent about 50% of each budget on the military. During World War II, it rose to 70%. And this was the normal state of affairs. If you look, if you read state budgets from the early 21st century, this is maybe one of the most optimistic and reading materials ever, much more convincing than any pacifist track, because you would find that worldwide, taking all countries into consideration, the average expenditure on the military was down to 7% of the government budget. In contrast, expenditure on healthcare rose to 10% of the budget. Worldwide, governments were spending considerably more on healthcare than on the military. And this was unthinkable for most of history.

And this was actually achieved. And it's not some kind of pacifist fantasy for the future. It was actually achieved. In recent years, we are seeing the resurgence of war in many parts of the world, including in my region of the Middle East. Because again, the decline of war was not the result of some divine miracle or the result of a change in the laws of nature. It was a result of humans changing their own behavior, and they can change it back. And we are now, unfortunately, changing it back, and we are seeing a resurgence of war, but simply realizing that the level of violence

is not constant, and that if we make the effort, we can create a much more peaceful society. This is the first step towards actually realizing it. I love the point that we can disrupt the inevitability narrative just by attending to variability throughout history. And I wonder if we could broaden the lens a little bit and say, we don't just have to do this with humans. You could actually do the same thing with primates too.

So I can't count the number of times that I've heard somebody say, you know, humans at their core are just chimps. And chimps go to war and it's just inevitable. And whenever I hear that, I wanna say, well, what about the fact that we share 99% of our DNA with bonobos who are peace-loving sociable creatures? Like why are we only indexing on the chimp model? The bonobo model is just as relevant to us.

And we should be aware that both are possible and our choices decide which path we end up on. Absolutely. And, you know, people often say that we live in a jungle. I mean, this is actually a hopeful thing to say. Because you know, if you look at how jungles actually function, every jungle in the world, in Amazonia, in India, in every rainforest in the world, it's really based on a lot of cooperation and symbiosis and altruism displayed not just by apes, but by countless animals and plants and fungi

and bacteria. If in real jungles organisms simply competed for power, for hegemony, the rainforest would die very, very quickly. This is the real law of the jungle. And it should apply to us too. And another thing that when people compare humans to chimpanzees or to wolves or to lions and so forth and say, you know, conflict is inevitable. One thing we should remember is that there is actually a difference there. Humans usually fight for different reasons than chimpanzees or wolves. Among social animals, we do see a lot of conflict. Most conflict is either about food or wolves. Among social animals, we do see a lot of conflict.

Most conflict is either about food or territory. Humans, a lot of people think that humans fight for the same reason, that we also fight over territory or food. But this is not true, certainly not in the modern world. If I think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's not about food. There is enough food between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to feed everybody. There is no objective lack of food. And if you think about, you know, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it's certainly not for territory. Russia is the biggest country in the world. It doesn't lack territory. War is really about the imaginary stories in the mind.

And on the one hand, this is extremely tragic that even though there is no objective reason to be killing each other, people still do it, but you can also read it in a hopeful way that there is no objective reason to fight. And if we can somehow sort out the fantasies in our mind, we can then live in peace. I think this goes to one of my favorite observations of yours, which I'm just going to quote you to you. Hopefully you'll recognize the words. You wrote it this way. This is the best reason to learn history, not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.

When I think about, for instance, Jerusalem, this is the biggest problem of Jerusalem. It has too much history. People are caught up in the history, in the stories we tell about the past. And I think we need to learn more history. And not in order to remember what happened 100 years ago or 500 years ago, and they did this to us and they did that to us, but to be liberated from, you have all these dead people from the past, basically holding captive our imagination,

our mind, our feelings, and forcing us to continue their conflicts, their hatreds, their fear. Now, there are also wonderful things about the past. I'm not saying that we need to get rid of all of it. The idea is, you know, like we get this inheritance from the past, like our ancestors are passing on to us this big suitcase full of things they accumulated, and they tell us, we carried it for hundreds of years, now it's your turn, now you carry this baggage. And I think what we need to do is open the suitcase and sort it out.

We don't really have to carry everything that's in there. That's such a powerful way of putting it. It reminds me of one of my favorite memes, which says that traditions are just peer pressure from dead people. Yeah. From the moment we are born, we are shaped by these legacies from the past. You know, our deepest fears, our deepest hopes, they come from there. You know, if you're a kid and you wake up in the middle of the night afraid that there is a monster under the bed,

this is actually a historical memory from hundreds of thousands of years ago when humans lived in the savanna and there were actually monsters that came to eat children in the middle of the night. A cheetah would come, or the lion would come, and if you wake up in fear and cry out to your mom, you have a chance to survive. And this is what is such a powerful survival mechanism that we still carry it with us in the 21st century. The fact that we get these legacies from our ancestors doesn't mean we have to behave like them. It doesn't mean we have to repeat their mistakes.

But equally, we can't just be a blank slate where history has left no marks and we can start from zero. This is also impossible. Matthew 26 Maybe a related mistake that a lot of people make is they're too focused on the goal of basically making their ancestors proud when they should be more concerned about making their offspring proud. You can't help your ancestors anymore, right? You may feel indebted to them, you may owe them something in your own mind, but they're not gonna benefit from any of your choices today.

On the other hand, your successors will, right? Our children, their children, future generations. I think we have a greater responsibility to the future than we do have to the past. And it seems to me that most people think that the other way around. Yeah, that's a very good point. The people in the past, they're all dead. They don't care. The people who lived centuries and thousands of years ago, and that created the languages, the religions, the nations, the ideologies that we now carry, they're all dead. And they

don't care not just about what we do, they don't even care about how we remember them. As a historian, I don't think that history is the study of the past. I think it's the study of change, of understanding how things change. What we can do is try to prevent or correct the injustices of the present and the future. And this very often involves forgiving the injustices of the past for the sake of ensuring peace in the present and the future. Ready for the lightning round?

Yes. What's the worst advice you've ever gotten? Just be true to yourself. I mean, the big question is getting to know yourself. What's your best advice for thinking more like a historian? History is complicated. You should be able to hold two thoughts at the same time. In most cases, the same people are both victims and perpetrators at the same time.

What is something you're rethinking right now or you've been rethinking lately? Can democracy survive without nationalism, more and more convinced that in at least many cases, nationalism is a precondition for democracy. And without strong patriotic feelings, without a strong national community, democracy cannot survive. Now by nationalism, I don't mean the dark side of nationalism, of hating and fighting other communities. I mean the feeling of special love and care for your particular community. I think that without that, democracy cannot survive for long.

This is really tricky though. It feels like a bit of a slippery slope. I think of some work by Marilyn Brewer, for example, which suggests that most discrimination stems not from out-group hate, but from in-group love. And if you just have a preference for your own kind, that's enough to create entire structures and cultures that end up privileging one group over others. That's true. But again, the other side of the coin is that without strong feelings of a national community,

people feel loyal only to one tribe within the nation. They will do anything to win the election for their tribe. If they win, they only take care of their own tribe, not caring about the other tribes in the nation. If they lose, they see no reason to accept the result. And over time, this leads to the collapse of the democratic system. There's the distinction that's often overlooked between being proud of your group and saying this group is a great fit for me and saying I'm attached to my group and it's better than all other groups.

The key distinction is between feeling unique and feeling superior. It's perfectly fine to feel that my group is unique, it has special traditions, it has a special culture, and we need to safeguard and develop it. That's true for almost all groups. And feeling that my group is superior to the others and should have special privileges and the rights that other groups don't deserve.

And this is really the difference between the kind of positive patriotism and the dark side of nationalism that can easily veer in the direction of fascism and racism and so forth. You've been writing and thinking a lot about tech. What do you foresee coming with AI as a historian that most of the world doesn't see? It will take over culture. The tendency is to think about AI in terms of, you know, tech, gadgets, autonomous weapon systems, that it will transform our tools. But as a historian, I'm much more concerned about the potential of AI to take over culture,

to take over art, religion. Already today, it's doing it. In 10 years, maybe it will create not only completely new styles of art, but completely new religions, which will then take over the world. Things to look forward to. What's the question you have for me? Why do you think that it seems to become much more difficult to simply hold a conversation with people who think differently from you.

I mean, you're holding conversations all the time. It's part of the job. And it now seems that, especially in democracies, the conversation is breaking down. We have the most sophisticated communication technology in human history, and people are just unable to talk to one another anymore. What's happening? There was a study published a couple of years ago showing that people would rather have a conversation with a stranger who shared their political views than a friend who didn't,

which I thought was just a stark illustration of the pattern you're describing. We know that algorithms are really good at amplifying outrage and making extremes seem both more extreme and more pervasive than they really are. I think that aggression gets attention. And what that does is it elevates both the most extreme and the most hostile views and then rewards people with status for expressing those views. And pretty soon we have what researchers have called a perception

gap, where, you know, in the US, for example, Democrats believe in a caricatured version of Republicans who, you know, want to control women always at all times, and want people to shoot each other with guns whenever they want to. And Republicans see an equally caricatured version of Democrats who want to completely abandon the idea of merit and want to kill babies and want no one to be safe. It goes back to your idea about the primacy of stories. I think when those stories are the ones that are told most frequently and most vividly, you start to believe them.

Let me take my job back here and turn the tables back around. that are told most frequently and most vividly, you start to believe them. Let me take my job back here and turn the tables back around. The one thing that's always bugged me as a social scientist about the humanities is the comfort with argument over empirical evidence. And, you know, sometimes I'll read a theory from history and say, you could test that historiometrically. Let's begin to measure some of the variables and to to your earlier point, they're not always going to explain, but sometimes we can test whether they describe and predict well. I wanted to push you maybe on

one of those that I was reading about recently. I think you're probably your most famous argument from from sapiens is that there was a cognitive revolution about what years ago? Yeah, 70,000 give or take. Potentially a gene mutation allowed homo sapiens to be better storytellers, better communicators, better at language. And that's why we outlasted the Neanderthals. Is that a fair oversimplification? Yes. Okay, so I was reading a book recently by a sociologist, Jonathan Kennedy, called Pathogenesis, reading a book recently by a sociologist, Jonathan Kennedy, called Pathogenesis, where he says there's no evidence that there was a gene mutation around that point. What I

think is more compelling is that homo sapiens had greater resistance to disease than Neanderthals. And so they were able to survive plagues and other events that could wipe out a species. And I'm like, oh, this is a great opportunity to say, okay, we could gather the data, right? I think getting the historical data is probably hard going that far back, but this isn't an empirical test waiting to happen. In the absence of, you know, of that kind of test,

how do you think about sorting out the differences between your thesis and the disease thesis? I'm not committed at all to the gene aspect of the thesis. What I'm committed to is the centrality of storytelling and fiction and the ability to imagine narratives as the driving force of history and as the source of the unique superpower of homo sapiens compared to Neanderthals or chimpanzees or other animals. What strikes me, again, on the empirical level, that until about 70,000 years ago, you don't see either Homo sapiens or any of the other human species doing something particularly

remarkable. We have our ancestors, very small groups, they don't have any particular achievements unique to them in terms of technology or most importantly any sign of large-scale cooperation. You don't have evidence for trade, you don't have evidence for cultural traditions spreading quickly, or for political arrangements larger than a single band. Then, after about 70,000 years ago, you see two things happening. First of all, you see Homo sapiens spreading out of our ancestral homeland in Africa, very rapidly in evolutionary terms, overrunning not just the Neanderthal

homeland in Europe and Western Asia, but also East Asia, also reaching Australia, which no human species, or actually no big land mammal, reached before sapiens got to Australia around 60 or 50,000 years ago. Then also crossing the Bering Straits to America, which is something that no Neanderthals or Denisovans or any of the other human species managed to accomplish. At the same time, you find the first clear evidence for trade, which you find in the archaeological record, items moving long distances and the first clear evidence for significant artistic traditions like the ones in cave art and for large-scale political cooperation, for instance in burial of certain individuals with lots of grave goods indicating

that this was probably either an important political or religious figure. And all these things together occurring at the same time, leading to Homo sapiens becoming not just the dominant human species in the world, but the only human species in the world. Previously, you had simultaneously five or six different human species around, and within a very short time, in evolutionary terms, only homo sapiens survives. Now what is the explanation? To my mind, the proximate cause of all this is that sapiens gains the ability to cooperate in large numbers. And then the question is, what enables large numbers of sapiens to cooperate?

And we don't have, of course, any textual evidence, but we do have cave art and grave good and so forth. And we also have the evidence from later in history. And as a historian, to me it's obvious every large scale human corporation is always based on fictional stories. Whether it's religion, when it's the most obvious, but also in economics, money is the greatest story ever told, but it's completely fictional. Its value is only in our imagination. So this is the kind of empirical basis.

I'm not saying that the theory of better resistance to certain diseases is wrong. It could very well be right, but it can't be the whole answer, the whole story of how within a very short time, evolutionarily, this unimportant ape from East Africa conquers the whole world. Last topic before we wrap. One of my favorite places of convergence between your thinking and psychology is around the fact that reality is getting better objectively

and happiness is basically a constant. And the way that we explain that in psychology is that essentially you judge your happiness by your expectations, not your circumstances. And I thought you captured this very powerfully when you wrote that, quote, one of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. How do we escape this vicious cycle or at least this hedonic treadmill? I don't know. You know, on the individual level, we can meditate, we can go to therapy, we can rely on art, on sport, different people rely on different methods.

Looking at the whole of human history, I can summarize it very briefly that as a species, we are incredibly successful in gaining power. We are not very good in translating power into happiness. We are far more powerful than we were in the Stone Age. We don't seem to be significantly happier than we were. And this is a huge, huge problem. And also it's one of the reasons why I think we should, as far as possible, focus less on power and more on happiness in our understanding of human relations also in the present and

future. Because we don't need more power. We have enough of it already. That's not where our problem lies. Well, I'm so glad we finally got to meet. It's endlessly fascinating to get a window into your brain. Thank you. Thank you for the conversation.

Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settle down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it

on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Take it from a historian. You don't have to carry the baggage of the past. Your core responsibility is to lighten the burden for the future. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective,

and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sioux and Alison Leighton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Ban Ban Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Part of me thinks that a little bit of unhappiness is necessary for continued progress, but I suppose we could question what really counts as progress.

And as far as having a little bit of unhappiness, it's not going to run out anytime soon. We don't need to engineer misery. It's built in. Yes. PRX.