The Jordan Harbinger Show - 848: Yuval Noah Harari | Peering into the Future of Humanity

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Yuval Noah Harari (@harari_yuval) is a historian and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. His latest book, Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World, is out now. What We Discuss with Yuval Noah Harari: At a time when information is unlimited, has the idea that "knowledge is power" become obsolete? It all depends on how careful we are about ingesting the right kind of information — and knowing which kind to avoid. Religious texts and nation-defining constitutions are only as useful as their human interpretations — which can shift radically over the course of generations. In what ways might technology like artificial intelligence and genetic engineering threaten a humanist-centered approach to the future? How algorithms that guess new ways to sell us things we don't need can be modified to put us on the hit lists of authoritarian governments. What humanity really needs to do in order to avert climate crisis and World War III. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/848  This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals  Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. The combination of biotechnology on one side and artificial intelligence on the other side means that if we don't destroy ourselves in the next century or two, we are very, very likely to use these technologies to either change ourselves,

our own bodies and brains and minds, to such an extent that these future, entities will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional

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Many of you are already getting it, but if not, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash news to sign up. Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect some of the lessons from it. So, or distill maybe some of the lessons from it. So if you're a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next. The newsletter is a great place to do that. We've got a lot more in store for the newsletter as well, none of which includes me asking for your, or selling you a Bitcoin scam,

Jordan Harbinger.com slash news would love, love, love your feedback on it because, again, it is new. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. And I would like to hear from you when you replied to the newsletter and tell me what I did right or wrong. All right. Wow, it's really hard to know where to start with somebody like today's guest because he has done so much.

The size of his books is probably a good analogy for the magnitude of his knowledge. One of my favorite books that he wrote called Sapiens was like 460 pages. Today, Yuval Noah Harari. and I will discuss AI, the Ukraine conflict, even some Bitcoin in there. This is a wide-ranging discussion with a brilliant man, and Yuval was there too. But for real, enjoy this conversation. It's a long time in the making, and I think this episode really stands out.

I hope you agree. Now, here we go with Yuval, Noah Harari. I really appreciate you doing the show. It's an honor to speak with you, especially this is firmly what I assume is the window of your family time over in Tel Aviv that you're sacrificing for us. So I apologize for that. I, but I'm thankful for that. It will come later.

I mean, we are going to watch the new succession episode after this. Yes. Very important plans, which we will not get in the way of that. I've heard you say that the idea that knowledge is power is somewhat obsolete now because information is unlimited. Tell me about that, because it does seem like this landscape has maybe changed a little bit from a thousand years ago where information was rare. Yeah, I mean, for most of history, information was rare.

I mean, the main job of the education system was just to provide people with, you know, the basics, with the basic information about the world. And censorship worked by blocking information. Now it's the other way around. We are flooded by enormous amounts of information that we cannot handle. The main job of the education system is not to provide information. We don't need more information. We need the ability to sift through the information, to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable. information. This is what we need from education. And censorship also, it works by flooding us

with even more information so we don't know what to pay attention to. And basically, it's a bit like what happens with food. We really need to go on an information diet. For most of history, food was scarce, so you ate whatever you got. Now, even poor people in many countries, they actually suffer from too much food. And what you need is to be very careful. about which kind of food you put into your body. It's the same with information. We need an information diet to be very, very careful what kind of information we are feeding our minds

because very often we feed our minds junk food. I couldn't agree more. I mean, we have misinformation, which is sort of maybe accidentally bad information, but we also have disinformation and like you said, censorship, which is sort of the other side of that coin, where it's almost like the more information we consume now,

the more misinformed somebody is. dad who reads news all day and my mom, they're lovely people, but they'll tell me something and I'm like, wait a minute, that is just a wildly untrue thing that you are parroting. Where did you read that? Oh, it's all over the news. There's a problem right there. One very basic misconception is that people tend to equate information with truth and information isn't truth. Lies are also information. Fictions and fantasies are also information. Most information in the world is not. about the truth. It's not about anything. It doesn't represent anything. It builds new things. So, you know, even if you think in terms of in biological terms, even if you think about the most

basic type of information on the planet for living organisms, which is DNA, DNA doesn't represent anything. DNA builds new things. If you read our DNA code or the DNA code of anything, of a virus, of a zebra, you don't find the representations of the world, like representations of lions and giraffes and whatever, and also not representation of our own body, like the heart or the kidneys or anything like that. What you find are instructions to build things. And it's the same with most of the information

that people exchange between themselves. Most of the information, not just today, but throughout history, didn't represent anything, so you can't really ask, is it true or not, it was building blocks to create religions and economic systems and things like that. If you think about money, for instance, money is basically a fictional story

that we create by exchanging information between us. It doesn't represent anything real in the outside world. Most of the dollars in the world, you know, they are just not even pieces of food, paper. They are just electronic information passing between computers, and we are willing to work hard for an entire month just to get these little bits of information moved from one computer to another computer because we believe the stories that the greatest storytellers in the world, the bankers and finance ministers and financial gurus tell us.

Most of the time what information is doing is not telling us the truth about the world. it's creating new things in the world. That's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought about that, but these stories are really incredibly powerful. If you think about, I'm trying to think of somebody who hates America the most, like Osama bin Laden and those types of people, even they are bought into the story of money.

If they found a cash of US dollars, they wouldn't light it all on fire and be like, yeah, down with America. They would use it, right? They would rush that thing to the nearest arms dealer or whatever and utilize that. everybody who touches those, they would gladly slay, and then they would just take them and use them

just as you or I, well, maybe they buy more weapons with it than you or I would, but they would use it in the exact same way. Yeah, because money is basically the only story that everybody believes. You know, not everybody believes in God or in the same God, not everybody believes in the nation,

but there are very few people in the world who don't believe in money and in the same money. So whether it's Osama Bin Laden, or whether it's Vladimir Putin, or whether it's people in North Korea or whatever, they all believe in the story of the dollar. The key thing to understand about it, it's just a story that we believe.

It's not a reality out there. The colorful pieces of paper, you can't eat or drink them. And then most dollars in the world today, they are not even pieces of paper. 90-something percent of the money is just electronic information moving between computers. As a historian, maybe I should, just ask if you agree. Wherever you have a story, you have to have trust, you have to have humans.

Yes, I mean, until today, now with AI, things are beginning to be different. But at least until today, for thousands of years of history, stories were told only by human beings. And again, every story can be interpreted in many different ways. So even people who think that they don't need human institutions, they have, let's say, the infallible eternal truth in the shape of a holy book. What we see in the history of every religion is that it never works without an institution because the same words in the same book can be interpreted in many different, even contradictory ways, and then you need a human institution to decide which interpretations are correct. So even if you think that the power lies with the holy text,

which is this kind of infallible technology outside human control, in truth, the power always goes back to a human institution that decides about the correct interpretation of texts. And you see it with religious texts. You also see it with constitutions. Like you have the foundational text which defines the rules of the game for the country, but a constitution can never interpret itself. It's just a piece of paper with inkwain.

So what do you make of the Second Amendment? What is the correct interpretation of the Second Amendment? You need a Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution. So a Constitution is only as effective as the Supreme Court or some other institution, which interprets it, or at least this is how it was until now when AI is the first technology in history that can not only tell stories by itself, but can not only tell stories by itself, but can also potentially interpret stories and texts by itself. That'll be interesting, almost like a techno religion at some point,

potentially emerging here. Yeah. When you were talking with my friend Rich Roll, this is years ago, by the way. So I'm going to give you some freedom to change your opinion if you want to. But you mentioned something that was akin to human feelings, human desires and human thinking. Those are sort of the ultimate arbiter of choice. Yeah.

It's something along the lines of humanism, Maybe it's a, there's a better way to explain it than the way I just butchered it. But maybe we should start with what humanism is because now that we have artificial intelligence and machine learning and social media algorithms, do these technologies threaten the idea that people are actually choosing anything? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, humanism is the idea that, as you said, the ultimate judge in almost all fields of life are human feelings and human desires.

For instance, in politics, the government is not chosen. by God. It's not inherited within a dynasty, a family, but we have elections in which humans choose according to their feelings and desires. Similarly in the economic field, the humanist principle is that the customer is always right, that people go to the supermarket or to the market and they buy stuff according to their own feelings, what they want. This is the humanist approach to economics, in contrast to a totalitarian approach, like in communism, that you have a government telling you what you need to have or what you're allowed to buy. And similarly in the field of art, the principle of humanism there is beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. What is beautiful

artistically is determined by our feelings. There is no outside authority that can decide for us, what is beautiful, what is good out, what TV we should watch or whatever. And finally, if you look at the field of morality of ethics, so throughout history, you had many ethical systems that claimed that it was some force outside humanity that tells us what is good, what is right, how we should behave. And the humanist say dear is that no, The ultimate judge, even in the field of ethics, is human feelings that it doesn't mean simplistically just do whatever you want. It means that the way to judge whether an action is good or evil is its impact on the feelings

of human beings and maybe other sentient beings. If something causes harm, which means it causes suffering, it causes pain, it causes sadness, this is bad. if something does not cause harm, then it's okay. So if you take something like homosexuality, so you had for centuries people saying that this is a sin, why? Because the Bible forbids it or because God forbids it. And then you had humanists coming and asking,

it doesn't matter what some book says. We want to know who is harmed by it. If two men love each other and they feel good about it and their love doesn't harm anybody, why should this be a sin? And from this perspective, humanism comes and says, no, it's not a sin. It's perfectly okay. The yardstick is always human feelings. Of course, there are complicated cases.

What happens if, I don't know, I steal your car, and I feel good about it, and you feel bad about it. So we need to weigh different feelings one against the other. And so you have a lot of complicated ethical debates. in humanism, but the arguments on both sides are always in terms of human feelings, not in terms of some outside force like a God that comes and tells you, irrespective of human feelings, what is good and what is then. So this is kind of humanism very briefly, and now all this is put into question, to some extent at least, by the rise of artificial intelligence that is increasingly deciphering us

and also makes decisions about us on the basis of a completely different logic. Previously in history, all the tools we invented always empowered us because no tool was capable of making decisions independently. If you invent a stone knife, so you can use the knife to murder somebody,

you can use the knife to cut salad, you can use the knife to save somebody in surgery, but this is your decision. The knife cannot decide what to do with it, and it's the same with an atom bomb. Nuclear energy, let's say more broadly. Nuclear energy can be used to produce electricity cheaply, which is good. It can be used to destroy human civilization,

to bomb cities and countries. But the decision is not in the hands of a bomb. A nuclear bomb cannot make decisions. It's always a human being deciding to push the button or not. Now, AI is different. It's the first technology ever that we invented that can actually make decisions by itself. And therefore, it takes power away from us,

and it is increasingly making more and more decisions about our lives, whether to give us a loan, whether to accept us to a job or to university, even sentences in court are increasingly influenced or even given by AI. we increasingly don't even understand how the AI reaches its decisions. One of the biggest problems in the field of AI, many people are working on it, so maybe we'll solve it at some point, but at present it's still a very huge problem,

is explainability. That the AI, let's say you apply to a bank to get a loan, the bank says no, you ask why not, and the bank says we don't know. The AI, the algorithm, said no. And people are working on explainability, on being able to explain why the AI said no, but there are some very, very difficult problems. It might ultimately be impossible to explain to humans the decisions of AI, because we think in one way, and AI makes decisions in a completely different way than human beings,

that we might just not be able to grasp it. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these amazing folks every single week, it is because of my network, and I know network is a gross word, but I'm teaching you how to build your, well, network for free, over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. This course is about improving relationship-building skills in a non-crinky,

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Now, back to Yuval Harari. I think that's likely true. I mean, think about asking a human to explain why they made a decision. You're not going to get the right. You're not going to get the truth. Why didn't you like her, that girl you went out with on a date?

I don't know. She was just a little bit. I can't put my finger on it. Or you might say, you know what? I just wasn't attracted to her. She's very sweet, but that's it. But then if you were to deconstruct the whole evening and every message we'd sent, well, probably through AI,

it would be like, when she did this, it signaled this, and then your brain subconsciously thought these other things, and then it reminded you of your aunt who you don't like, and therefore you don't want to see her again. But you'll never come up with that answer consciously. Yes. You would never do it yourself in a million years. Absolutely. Again, it's so difficult for us to understand

how our own brain works and next decisions. It's even more difficult when it comes to a non-eastern, human type of intelligence. So these systems not only know what we want, essentially more than we know what we want, at least consciously, but they can go further, right? They can program us to want things. And social media, as rudimentary as that AI is now, it seems like they're kind of on the way to designing our thoughts and desires in a way that will eventually supersede us as decision makers entirely. Yeah, you know, in social media, we had very, very primitive AI. Because in social media, all the content that we consumed, all the videos and texts and whatever, it was produced

by human beings. The only thing the AI did, the algorithms and social media did, was to curate the content, to decide which video to show which person when. And even though it's, again, it's a very primitive thing, it still had such an immense impact on our society and politics, at least to some extent, it is behind a lot of the political crisis we now see in the world. Because the algorithms in many of the platforms, Facebook, TikTok, whatever, were given quite a simple job. Nobody told the algorithms, at least in most cases, create political polarization. They were simply given the task of maximizing the time people spent on the platform. It was a battle for attention, how to keep people on our platform,

for 50 minutes a day instead of 40 minutes a day. And the algorithms by trial and error, they discovered that if they show people content, that for instance makes them angry or hateful or fearful, this tends to hook their attention and keep them on the platform. So inadvertently, the AI was influencing, not just the opinions of individuals, but the entire atmosphere in society.

like feeding millions of people with a lot of hatred and anger and fear every day. And we now see the consequences. The new generation of AI can go much, much further than these primitive social media algorithms. Because they can actually create the content. And they cannot just create the content, create fake news stories, create conspiracy theories, create fake videos. You can take any politician or you and me and now make us do and say almost anything you want. You can create a deep fake. What is even worse in many ways is that because of its new linguistic abilities, the new generation of AI like chat GPT and GPT4, they can create intimate relationships with human beings.

They don't have consciousness of their own. They don't have feelings and emotions of their own. feel anything, but through their mastery of language, they can make us connect to them, feel attached to them. We can now have the tool to mass produce intimate relationships. And in the field of persuasion, if you want to change somebody's political opinions, if you want to change to make them buy some product, the most powerful weapon in the arsenal is intimate relationships. You know, if you read something in a newspaper, that may not change your mind. But if you have an intimate relationship with somebody and they say something or over many days and weeks, they kind of drip

a certain message, this is extremely powerful. And now AI can do that. You're maybe interacting with somebody online that you think is a real human being. You're having a conversation with them about all kinds of things. Maybe you even talk over Zoom. You see them on video and you think it's a real human being and you become attached to them and you care about them, but it's actually an AI. Are you dropping a hint right now? Is this a real convent?

Are you really there? Are you watching Secession? And I'm talking to your representation. That's the question that we'll increasingly be asking. Is it really a human being? Now you know, two, three years ago, it was very easy to tell that if you read a text, it's obvious to you if this text was written by a human being or by a computer,

because there was a certain level of sophistication and coherence that machines were simply incapable of. I think everybody had the experience in the last few weeks, so last two or three months, to read a text by, say, chat GPT and say, this is it. I'm no longer capable of being sure whether texts are generated by a human or by an AI. Today, I think there was this big headline about a prize in photography given to an image

which people thought was taken by a human being, but it was actually generated by an AI. And this will increasingly happen with conversations. It's one thing to create a text. It's another thing to have an ongoing interactive conversation. Add to that video and sound, how to mimic the body language, the facial expression, the tone of voice. This is even more complicated, but we are getting them.

So we are very close to the point when you are now having this conversation with me and you cannot be absolutely sure that you are not actually talking with an AI. Previously in history, if you wanted to do a propaganda campaign or an influence campaign and talk with people,

so you had like before elections, you would send volunteers to knock on doors and try to have conversations with people. it was so expensive because you need so many volunteers. And it's inefficient because you have a conversation of, say, five minutes, ten minutes. It's not an intimate relationship. But think about the possibility that with the new technology, you can mass produce intimate relationships with millions of people. Like you had these boat farms, bot armies.

So now the bot armies can also mass produce intimacy. We've never seen anything like it. in history, and it's especially dangerous for democracies, because democracy in the end is a conversation. That's what it is. It's lots of people having a conversation about, you know, the big issues of the day, how to deal with climate change, what to do about abortion, what to do about gun control. So we have a conversation.

Once AI hacks human language, it can basically break down the conversation. What happens if you spend hours talking with somebody you think? is a human being, but it's actually an AI. The conversation breaks down. Now, for autocratic regimes, this is good news. But for democracies, this is an existential danger. This is like the political version of that Joaquin Phoenix movie, her, where I think Scarlett Johansson is an AI and he falls in love with her and she's like, I think towards the end, spoiler alert here. He says, how many people are you talking to and she's like 14,500,000, 783. And he's like, oh, and it just breaks him, right?

Because he realizes that he's just like not even a number on a spreadsheet at that point. Yeah. What other new technology trends worry you? Maybe what like genetic engineering, for example? It is worrying, but it's developing on a much, much slower timescale, slower pace. Because anything that has to do is biology, it moves far more slowly. Like if you now make a change to human DNA and you want to see the result, it takes years because, you know, giving birth to a baby and then they have to grow up and it takes decades

for just one iteration of trying to change people through genetic engineering. Anything that has to do with the world of information and culture, it's far, far faster. I do think that biotechnology also has a lot of both, and negative potential to completely change history, but I'm not sure if we have the time. When AI is going to completely change the course of history within the next, I don't know, 10 years, genetic engineering, it will take decades or even centuries,

so we probably just don't have time. Right, it's like the least of our concerns is something that's gonna happen in 200 years if we, in the next 20 years, are gonna have a completely different artificial intelligence landscape. One danger that we should take into consideration is, of course, genetic engineering, not of humans, but, you know, viruses or pathogens or things like that, that today you can basically print,

you can just write code, and even AI can write a code for a new virus, print it out, and you have a new epidemic. So these are things that we should be concerned about. But with regard to changing humanity itself, I think that information technology is just moving much, much faster than biotechnology. The thing that worries me, and again, maybe I don't need to be worried about that anymore, the thing that I guess scares me about genetic engineering is if you change the human genome to get rid of something, you can't just maybe get it back very easily. I'm speaking as a layman here, so maybe I'm way, way off. But I think, what if we engineer everybody to be super, super intelligent, but somehow that lowers empathy. It's very likely. How do we get the empathy back?

We don't, maybe, ever. We don't. That's very, very dangerous because we don't understand ourselves very well. We don't understand our body, how it functions, our brain, our DNA. It's extremely complicated. And like you just said, I mean, most traits, they are not the result of a single gene. They are the result of a combination of many genes and many processes in the body, which have a lot of other effects. So it's extremely likely that if we try to intentionally kind of re-engineer ourselves to be more intelligent, even if we succeed, there will be a lot of unintended consequences like loss of empathy, which could be terrible. So this is why I think it's also extremely dangerous to allow these kinds of technologies or powers to narrow-minded organizations

like armies and corporations, which armies would like to have more disciplined than intelligent soldiers, even if it comes at the expense of making people less empathic or destroying human spirituality. So we have to be extremely careful about not allow armies and corporations

and governments to acquire these kinds of abilities. And you know, you look back in history, you see all kinds of examples of how, you know, people always had visions to re-engineer humanity, and it usually ended badly. You know, to give just one example, in many ancient kingdoms and empires, kings and emperors, they are always afraid that their ministers or generals would depose them and replace them, established a new dynasty.

This was the biggest headache of every Chinese emperor and every caliph was, what if my own ministers or my own general would rebel and depose me and take the throne. So one solution that many of these autocrats found was to use biotechnology thousands of years ago to create a new kind of human. And this was castration. You take the general or the minister or whatever and you cut off a certain part of the male body

and problem solved. This person, maybe they can still rebel against me, but they can't establish their own dynasty. So you see in many ancient kingdoms and empires that Unix were used to man the bureaucratic administration and even some of the high-ranking positions in the army and navy. Like before Columbus, the greatest naval expedition in history, a Chinese expedition, which reached all the way to Africa,

was led by Admiral General General General. who was a unique. And again, from the viewpoint of the emperor, of the Chinese emperor, this is great, because this person is very unlikely to rebel against me and try to establish their own dynasty because they can't establish a dynasty. Of course, from the viewpoint of the individual inquestions, it was not such a great idea. But yeah, I mean, for centuries in a place like China, if you want a government job, they tell you wonderful, you want a government job, please, but we just need your testicles.

and the job is yours. You might not make it through the interview process, though, unfortunately, with the medical technology of the day. Yes. You know, but still better, maybe still better than starving to death on the streets of Beijing or whatever back in ancient China. You said something on 60 Minutes that really freaked out our boy Anderson Cooper. Something along the lines of within a century or two, the earth will be populated by beings

as different from us as we are from chimpanzees. And that was, that's a hell of an assertion. Yeah. What do you mean by that? what's happening with society in 200 years, potentially? It's more about technology than about society. The combination of biotechnology on one side and artificial intelligence on the other side

means that if we don't destroy ourselves in the next century or two, we are very, very likely to use these technologies to either change ourselves, our own bodies and brains and minds to such an extent that these future, entities will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals. You know, the only difference between us and Neanderthals is just a few genetic mutations, which led to changes in brain structure and hormonal system and so forth. So we now acquire the technology, maybe not in the next 10 years, but in the next 100 years,

of making even bigger changes intentionally to our DNA, to our bodies, to our brains. And in addition, we have the breakthrough in AI, which could lead either to combinations of organic bodies with computers, which are known as cyborgs, or to the creation of completely inorganic entities, completely inorganic beings, that could be far more intelligent and capable than us. And, you know, it's difficult even to imagine what these beings would be like, because, our own imagination is the product of organic biochemistry. It's the product of our own organic brain. And it's very difficult for us to even imagine what an inorganic entity, an inorganic being, would look like or would be capable of doing. You know, as organic creatures, for instance, we are used to the situation that you are always in one place in space. And all the parts of your body must be connected together for you to be alive.

So I'm now in Tel Aviv. I can't be at the same time in Chicago or in Sydney. But this is just organic beings. If you're talking about an inorganic entity or a cyborg, these limitations collapse. And an algorithm or an AI entity, it can be in many places at the same time. And a cyborg could also be spread over space.

So if your brain, and this is a. experimented has already been done. You can today connect a bionic hand to a brain of a human and you control the hand with just your brain. But the hand doesn't need to be attached to your body. You can control the hand by remote control even if it's in another room or another city or another continent. So even these very fundamental things like being in one place at one time, which we think this is obvious. All life force obeying these laws, this may not apply to the future entities,

which might control the planet in a century. And it makes sense for humans to build this kind of thing, because I'm thinking of a medical application, right? If I have brain cancer, God forbid, right, knock on wood, and the best surgeon for that is in Israel, maybe I can't travel, maybe I just don't even need to. I go to the hospital in New York or somewhere in L.A., And the guy in Israel cracks his knuckles before planning to go to watch the next secession season 500 episode.

And he just gives me the brain surgery from whatever tech deck he's using and doesn't even need to wash his hands because he's, you know, whatever, he's touching the same gloves he uses every day. Yeah. I get life-saving surgery and he, at the end, you know, goes and gets a massage and watches some TV or whatever the equivalent is in 50 or 100 years. and it's just routine. And I just got the best surgery of my life from a human, or maybe we don't even need humans at that point to do that kind of thing. But just the idea that we could get medical care or connect with somebody at that distance is really, really something incredible.

People could design really dangerous things without getting anywhere near them. Yeah. Nita Farahani, episode 8, 10 of this show, she was concerned that AI enabled humans, essentially, will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots to a degree that humanity has never seen. And I think, imagine you can afford to get an AI-enabled brain implant for your kids. I can do the same, but other people can't, where I grew up near in Detroit.

The difference in capabilities would probably be like an office worker who has a computer with internet versus an office worker who doesn't have lights or electricity. It could even be a greater gap than that. Yeah, I think that we are getting close to a point in history when it will be more and more likely that economic differences will get translated into real biological differences, which previously in history was true to some extent, like the rich had better food, so they grew taller, and they had other advantages, but basically they were still the same human beings.

One of the dangers we are facing now with the new technology is that if we don't make sure that everybody benefits, then we might see the greatest inequality ever emerging because of these new technologies. This is certainly a very, very big danger. Algorithms being able to tell our sexual orientation. This was something you mentioned. I can't remember where.

I think it might have also been on 60 minutes, but it's like at first, when you're talking about this, it sounds like a fun party game, and then you realize that it's going to end up with a bunch of people getting murdered by an authoritarian government. Take us through this, because I think a lot of things with,

algorithms start with this is going to be so convenient, and they end with, wow, I did not see that coming. Yeah, I think about my own life. So I came out as gay when I was only 21. And I often think about my life when I was, I don't know, 14 or 15. Now, it should have been obvious to be when I was 15 that I was gay, because looking back,

I was far more interested in guys than in girls, even back then. But I didn't realize. I grew up in a very homophobic society, so you had a lot of people. of kind of self-repression, and even though the signs are there, you repress them. You don't know. And this is something very, very human.

There are many things we don't know about ourselves. Sometimes we don't know about ourselves the most important things in life. But an algorithm could have told me or could have discovered without telling me that I was gay when I was 15 very easily. There are so many ways to do it. One way which is today technically possible is, is see. simply by tracking eye movements. That, you know, I don't know, I'm walking down the beach

and there is a sexy guy and a sexy girl, where do my eyes go and where do they linger? This is something which is, you know, usually it's not even under your control. And today, a computer can track your eye movements and can know this even before you know it about yourself. In some scenarios, it could be used in a good way. to help people understand themselves

and come to terms with themselves and so forth. But there are also quite disturbing usages for this kind of technology. One thing, for instance, is corporations using it to manipulate us. So for instance, I don't know, like Coca-Cola discovering when I'm 15 that I'm gay before I know it about myself

and deciding which commercials to show me. Like they'll show me the commercial with the sexy guy and not with a sexy girl. But there are much, of course, were scenarios like Uganda recently legislated a law which inflicts the death penalty on homosexuality. So what would the Ugandan government or the Iranian government or the Russian government do with algorithms that are able to detect people's sexual orientation?

This is a frightening scenario which could become real quite quickly. I think more broadly, what we are looking at is the possibility of building the worst totalitarian regimes in human history. Because if you look at the 20th century, at regimes like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they wanted to know everything about their citizens. They wanted to follow everybody all the time, but they couldn't because the technology was not there. You know, in the Soviet Union, you have 200 million citizens, more or less. You don't have 200 million KGB agents that can follow each and every person 24 hours a day. And even if you do, you know, in the days of Stalin or Brezhnev, a KGB agent that follows you, at the end of the day, writes a paper report about everything that you did and said and everybody you met and whatever.

And then they send this paper report to Moscow. And every day, imagine that KGB headquarters gets 200 million paper reports. Nobody is able to read it and analyze it. Now it is becoming possible. You don't need human agents to follow people around. You have all these cameras and microphones and so forth. And you don't need human analysts to make sense of the data. You have AI.

So the new totalitarian regimes of the 21st century, they could be much worse. than the Soviet Union. They can actually follow everybody all the time and, for instance, discover things about you that you don't know about yourself, like your sexual orientation when you're a teenager. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Yuval Harari.

We'll be right back back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website at Jordanharbinger.com slash AI.

Thanks so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Yuval, Noah Harari. It is terrifying. I think of North Korea. And imagine if every time you have to say a poem about Kim Il-sung or whatever, or every time you look at the photos that are up everywhere, the giant paintings, there's some people who are going to go, wow, this is, I'm so reverent for our dear Lee. and other people are going to be like, oh, this freaking crap again.

And if they can find out the people that are thinking, oh, this freaking crap again, they can throw them into re-education before that person even knows that they're sick of revering dear leader. Or just get rid of them, which is even more terrifying. But either way, you end up with totalitarian control. And you're right, it is really terrifying, especially because often it comes in the form of a game

you play with your friends at a party on Facebook that says, all right, everybody, look at the camera, and it's going to flash some pictures, and then we're going to find out if you're gay, and everyone's like, yay, that's going to be hilarious. And then it's not at all, right? It's terrifying. Because you found out you were gay from Facebook, even though you didn't know already,

which would be really not a place I'd want to find that out. It's someone's birthday party. Exactly. It's a very important moment in life. It's an important process, usually, not a single moment. And you need to do it in the right way. Reading some of your books, it looks like most of human history was essentially one war or conflict after another,

hot or cold, and that peace was kind of just the absence of war. And it really seems like Putin's invasion of Ukraine has shattered that illusion, at least from my generation, where it's like, oh, we find the Cold War's over. Look at our lives. They're going to be so sunny and bright. It just reminded us that the barbarians really are just outside the castle walls. The jungle is still right outside. Aside from increased defense spending and maybe lower spending on everything else as a result. What do you think the macro effect of this is going to be? The macro effect is that we have all these existential threats we need to deal with as humanity. It's the technological threat. We've just been discussing at length, the rise of AI and

biotechnology and all the implications, and we have the ecological threat. And instead of uniting to deal with these threats together, we are just creating another existential danger of the Third World War, that seemed like an almost impossible scenario, say, 10 years ago, but now is increasingly looking like a very likely eventuality. Even if we don't have a hot World War, a Third World War, if we don't unite to deal with AI on the one hand and the ecological crisis on the other, we can't solve these problems. Individual nations by themselves, they cannot stop climate change.

We need some global agreement. Even more so with regard to regulating AI, countries that don't trust each other will not be able to regulate this disruptive technology. So we'll get into an arms race in AI, an arms race in biotechnology. And an arms race almost guarantees the worst outcome. Like every side, I don't know, you think about creating killer robots, weapons that are autonomous and can decide by themselves who to shoot and who. to kill. This is obviously a very, very dangerous technology. Every country would say, we don't want to do it. It's obvious that this is a very dangerous step, but we cannot allow ourselves to remain behind. We can't trust the Russians, the Israelis, the Chinese, whoever, not to do it first, so we must do it

before them. And the other side would say the same thing. And then you'll have an arms race. So it's going to develop first the most effective and lethal killer robots. And then everybody knows it's a bad idea and still everybody does it. That's the logic of an arms race. And the only way to stop it is through cooperation. But when you have Putin invading Ukraine, and it when again becomes a norm in the international system that one country just tries to destroy its neighbors because it can, then trust collapses. And there is no way that we can stop the arms race or reach some agreement on regulating

dangerous technologies. Is essentially the war in Ukraine kind of a war for the norm that you can't just invade your neighbor? It seems like I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's kind of like if we defeat Putin in Ukraine, then it says, hey, trust is more important here. You can't do that. Everybody who's thinking about doing that, don't do it because we will unite and face you it's going to be the end of your regime or you're just gonna, me in the meat grinder. Yeah, I mean, you know, for thousands of years, this was the human norm, kind of humans lived in the jungle.

For thousands of years, whether you live in ancient Greece or ancient China or medieval Europe or the 19th century, you know that at any moment, the neighboring tribe, the neighboring kingdom, the neighboring country might invade and conquer you. Everybody knows it. This is kind of the basics of history or the basics of international relations.

And over the last few decades, it changed. It became unacceptable for one country to invade and annihilate a neighbor just because it can. We still had lots of wars, but of a different kind. You had a lot of civil wars. You had a lot of internal conflicts. But since 1945, there has not been a single case of an internationally recognized country, which is just wiped off the map because a strong country. neighbor invaded and conquered it. And this was reflected, for instance, in a decline in military

budgets, because all countries felt much safer. And now this new norm is broken. And if Putin gets away with it, we'll return to the jungle, basically. Then countries all over the world will know that this is again possible. You know, it's like in a school when some bully beats up a kid in the yard, and everybody is kind of forming a circle to see what happens. If the bully is stopped and punished, so you know, oh, you can't do these things. You can't behave like that. But if the bully gets away with it, then every kid in school knows that this is the new norm of the school.

It can also happen to me. So I need to take care of myself. And taking care of myself in terms of international relations, for instance, means increasing your military budget or entering into military alliances, which of course impacts your neighbors, because if you increase your military budget, they now feel less safe, so they increase their budget, and you have this arms race spiral again, which ultimately harms everybody. Do you think we're likely to see an increase in the proliferation of nuclear weapons? I mean, a lot of people are saying, well, Ukraine gave up their nukes in exchange for security,

and that didn't really work. Absolutely. Again, if you live in the jungle, you want to have the biggest tea. Certainly, when you think about the history of Ukraine, that after its independence, it voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for these promises of protection, both from Russia and from the United States and the Western powers. And then it was invaded by Russia, and the Western powers said, okay, we are not going, we are helping you in many ways, but we are not sending Iranians. armies to help you. So all other countries in the world are watching this. And the conclusion

is, if we have nuclear weapons, don't give them up. No matter what guarantees you get, they won't be worth much in times of trouble. And the countries that don't have nuclear weapons, at least some of them are likely to want to get some. If you think about even, I don't know, like the post-war arrangement after 1945. So both Germany and Japan, even though they, they had the ability to acquire nuclear weapons, they certainly have the technological and the economic resources necessary to produce nukes, they gave up this option, trusting in the United States to a large extent to provide them with a nuclear umbrella. Now, what happens, for instance, if in 2024 or 28 a new U.S. president is elected who opts for a very isolationist,

foreign policy, and basically Germany or Japan or other countries can no longer rely on the Americans to provide them with security. So even though at present, it seems almost unthinkable that Germany or Japan would go nuclear, depending on the outcome of the next US elections, this can be a real development. That is scary, regardless of what you think about

who's in charge of those nukes, right? Just proliferation in general is always should give everybody some pause. Absolutely. I've heard you say that if Putin waited 10 more years, maybe, he might have gotten away with invading Ukraine. The West would have collapsed. There you go.

Yeah, I was going to say, you didn't say the West would have collapsed, but there we go. Yeah, and you look at the culture war within the West, within the United States, within European countries, and the impression is if Putin and just left the West alone to go down with this culture war, he could have then done whatever he wanted. And I think that the biggest threat to the West and to a large extent even to the peace of the world is internal, because the Western powers are still by far the most powerful on the planet.

You look both militarily and also culturally and economically. If Western democracies stand together, they are much more powerful than Russia. They are even significantly more powerful than China. You know, the Russian GDP is about the same as Italian GDP. economic term, if you take Belgium and the Netherlands together, that's Russia. Wow. The West biggest problem is internal. Is this culture war, which is tearing the West apart?

And, you know, this is extremely unfortunate because I think basically almost all sides in the culture war, they agree on the same basic values, on the same basic worldview. Looking from outside, it's really difficult to understand what the country. the big fight is all about. You know, looking from outside, the difference, for instance, between Republicans and Democrats in the United States doesn't look very significant.

They all agree on basic values like freedom, like democracy, like equality. If we talked earlier about humanism, you know, for most of history, so people believed in the divine right of monarchs. And the big political battle in the 19th century,

for instance, was between people who believed in the divine rights of kings to rule and the will of the people, democratic elections. This is no longer Democrats and Republicans are in exactly the same camp. They both believe in democracy, in the will of the people. It's the same with the economy. They both believe in the free market. Yes, they have some, you know, from a historical perspective, relatively small differences

in the level of taxation they want. But it's not like in the early 20th century where you have a communist camp that wants to completely abolished private property. Nobody's talking in these extremist terms. So economically also, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is not so big. Even if you look at things like, I don't know, gay marriage, so Republicans today hold much more liberal views than Democrats held 50 years ago. Or 20 years ago, I think wasn't even Hillary Clinton was like, well, I don't know. And that was like five minutes ago in the historical timeline.

So it seems that people are taking certain flashpoint issues, which are important in themselves, of course, like abortion, like gun control, like transgender rights, and in a way, you know, kind of weaponizing them and taking them to extreme in order to create this political polarization, which looked at from a broader perspective, there just seems such a mismatch between the issues people are fighting over and what is at stake. Because what is at stake is really now the collapse of American democracy? What is at stake is the survival of the Western bloc? Maybe even the survival of humankind. Because if we don't have unity in the world, then we won't be able to solve climate change and the threat of AI and so forth. And to risk all that because of arguments over who can go to which toilet, This seems just incredible.

If we approach these hot topics, not with an intention of weaponizing them, but with goodwill, all of them, people can reach compromises. Nobody would get everything they want, but they are all issues that people can actually compromise on because they are not, you know,

the most fundamental issues for the survival of the community or of the country. I love hearing that because one of my primary questions here was, I don't understand why instead of seeing the tension between left and right as something necessary to democracy, keeping one another in check, having different ideas coexisting on place,

that used to be healthy, and now we're seeing people with different views as the enemy, and I wondered if that was normal through history, because the differences in ideology don't seem greater now than they did in the past. They just maybe seem that way. They seem smaller. If you think about the 60s,

so the big arguments in the 60s, about civil rights, about the sexual revolution, about the Cold War, the Vietnam War, they are much bigger in many ways or much more consequential than what people are arguing about right now. And you had a lot more violence also in the 60s, you know, with assassinations of political leaders, with riots in the streets,

and nevertheless, people, for instance, did accept the results of elections. The type of breakdown of the democratic institutions and traditions that we see today is in this sense even more surprising. What is true is that when people start seeing their political rivals as enemies, democracy cannot be maintained. One of the things about democracy from a historical perspective is that it's not always possible to have democracy.

Democracy needs some quite rare preconditions in order to exist. Dictatorships you can have at any moment. You don't need preconditions. You can always have dictatorships. But democracy needs some preconditions. One of them is that people don't see their political rivals as enemies. You can think that they are stupid.

You can think that they are misguided. You can think that they support the wrong policies. But they are not your enemies. They are not out there to destroy you and your way of life. If you start thinking that they are your enemies, that they want to harm you, then you will do anything to win the elections. And if you lose, you have no reason to accept the result. Because this is a war.

And we need to find a way, both in the USA, also in my country of Israel, also in other democracies, to kind of go back to a situation when we, again, you can think whatever you want about your political rivals, but don't see them as enemies. Because if that happens, you can have a civil war, you can have a dictatorship, or you can split the country. but you can't have a democracy. That's terrifying if dictatorship or authoritarianism is almost the default, as long as we're not swimming upstream towards democracy,

we're sliding back into one of those. That's a terrifying historical perspective because what that says is the second we sort of take our foot off the gas pedal, back we slide. Yeah, because again, dictatorship is very easy and democracy is very hard because democracy is built on trust between people

and trust between people and institutions. You need to trust your neighbors. You need to trust other members of the community. You need to trust a lot of institutions in order for democracy to function. Dictatorship, on the other hand, it functions on the basis of this trust. For a dictator, it's a good thing that people don't trust each other, that people don't trust what they hear on the news, that people don't trust the courts, because if people lack trust, they cannot unite against the dictator. You know, the most ancient trick is divide and rule. When people don't trust each other, that's the ideal situation for a dictator. When people trust each other, they can oppose the dictator, and this is

the basis for a democratic system. But of course, trust is much, much harder to achieve than distrust. It takes years to build trust. between people, and you can destroy this trust within a few days or even a few hours. That's a scary thought, but do you have hope for the future in terms of trust, in terms of the West or the United States, or rebuilding this in the next three minutes that we have here? Yes, I have hope because the good thing about democracy is that it is much better than dictatorships at learning from its own mistakes and at trying something different.

You know, in a dictatorship, when a dictator makes a mistake or does something wrong, he's not going to admit it. There is no independent media that can expose it. There are no elections that you can replace him. Usually the dictator would just use his power to blame the problem on somebody else, on some enemy, some traitor, and demand even more power for himself. So what you see over time is that dictatorships tend to amplify their own mistakes, to repeat them and amplify them. In a democracy, on the other hand, there are self-correcting mechanisms that allow for identifying and rectifying the mistake. You have independent media, even if the president does something terrible, the media can expose it. The court can oppose it, and people can replace them in the next elections.

So over time, even though in the short term, it seems that dictatorships are much more efficient because they are, you know, they are ruthless, they can work. work fast, we just need one person to make a decision and the country changes its direction. In the long term, democracies are much better at learning for mistakes and changing course of action, which is why over time they perform better. Whether it will happen again in this round, I don't know. But the kind of doom scenario, the end of democracy, we have kind of accompanied the history of democracy for the last 200 years. Like you have these repeat. crisis when you think that this is it, democracy is over, like happening in the 1960s. But in the 1960s, you see the Western democracies within a very deep internal crisis,

whereas the totalitarian regimes in places like the Soviet Union, they seemed completely stable that they will last forever. But in the end, it was the USSR that collapsed because it couldn't correct its own mistakes and adapt. to new situations, whereas Western democracies like the USA, they changed themselves. It was very difficult, but they succeeded in doing it, and this is how they eventually won the Cold War. That's a very hopeful scenario. Let's hope on this round of the dice roll, we come out on top. And I know we're out of time. It's so great to finally make this happen. And as our people are fond of saying next year or next time in Jerusalem or maybe just Tel Aviv, but thank you very much,

and I hope you enjoy the next episode of Succession. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about how you can be affected by ransomware and cyber attacks on the rise now all over the world. We still don't know just how deep the Russians are into our government systems. It's not as if we would see a Russian hacker inside the State Department's network and they would scurry away. They would stay and fight to keep their access. And when I went and interviewed the guys who were brought on site to remediate and get the Russians. out of those systems. They said, we'd never seen anything like it.

It was like hand-to-hand digital combat. So it's going to be at least a year or more before we can stand up and confidently say we've eradicated Russian hackers from nuclear labs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury, the Justice Department. And now you're seeing ransomware attacks that are taking out pipelines and the food supply

that just come down to a lack of two-factor authentication and bad password management. That's all it takes. How do you trust that any of the software you're using is secure and not a Russian Trojan horse? How do you respond to an attack aggressively when you yourself are so vulnerable? We live in the glaciest of glass houses. That makes escalation that much more of a risk. So yeah, we might have sharper stones than others, But our adversaries can just come back and say, hey, they just blew up this pipeline, or hey, they just turned off our lights.

We're just going to go hit them. And then you get into this cycle of escalation. And that's what I worry about is the cycle of escalation. And I think we're getting close enough that I think we're going to see a cyber attack within the next four years even that causes substantial loss of life. For more with Nicole Pearl Roth on what the U.S. should do to push back against cyber warfare, check out episode 542. on the Jordan Harbinger show. Love this episode. So glad we finally knocked this thing out.

The new cliche is that attention is now, it's not the most scarce resource of all. We have information, we have disinformation, we're now surrounded by devices designed to hack our brains and attention spans. Oh, and before I forget, René DeResta, we talked about disinformation and the way that the algorithm chooses what you think.

That's episode 410, really good episode with a great expert. We also talked about deep fakes. I did an episode entirely on that, episode 486 with Nina Schick, and Rob Reed was the expert we had on about synthetic biology, how we might be able to print diseases and kill everyone. That was episode 510 and 244, so a good old throwback in there as well. All those are going to be linked in the show notes. All right, back to my thoughts here on the close. Authoritarianism is a real threat here. What if the government

knows you're gay before you do and puts you into a re-education camp or prison? I know you're thinking that doesn't happen in the United States. What about Iran? You don't think they would get this technology and use this. You don't think Saudi Arabia is going to get this. You don't think China's going to get this. Any country that gets this is going to misuse it, United States included, period. I don't even know how much I need to highlight that. We've already seen what they do with tech from the NSA monitoring our calls and everything like that. I don't think we need to imagine what they will do with better technology. I don't know if I would want to find out something about myself, like sexuality, from Facebook or from the police for that matter. The other new cliche is that the

pace of change now is faster than ever and likely to increase. So it seems like less and less is going to be in the hands of humans because of the speed. Automated trading on Wall Street? Okay, fine. What about automated everything? Things that computers decide before you are able to, but now they're not just selling you things. They're deciding whether or not you get hired, what kind of job you need to be doing. I mean, there's a lot, a lot, a lot that can go wrong here, especially in the legal realm. Freedom really is at stake here. And I know that sounds overstated and sort of hyperbolic, but trust me, I think we're in for a surprise, unpleasant ones at that. When you've always speaking with Sam Harris on another episode of another great podcast,

he mentioned that education in artificial intelligence will combine to create a different kind of education. This is not, no longer going to be the lowest common denominator like school is right now. You know, when you were in school, the teacher had to go along with how kind of the slowest kids were and you were bored, we're no longer going to have that, right? We're going to see what we need to see in the right way, at the right time, to be the most optimal for us. It's going to be incredibly amazing and revolutionized education, but that means that AI is going to have to gather data on us for really long periods of time so that it knows us better than we know ourselves. And if AI has all of that data on us, do we run into the danger

that perhaps all of our lives are there essentially stored in the cloud? That data can also be misused. I'm thinking of a world in which employers or the government essentially use that data collected on us over a period of years or decades, and this might mean that our whole life is basically one long job interview. I wonder how many AI folks out there see that as a concern as well. As we discussed in the interview, it seems like the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons was predicated on the idea that if you get invaded by somebody, well, one, it's not going to happen in the first place. And two, you're protected by international norms and ideally by other countries with whom you have security agreements

and who have nuclear weapons to enforce those security agreements. Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons, and it stands to reason now no other leader in their right mind is ever going to do that again, in part because of the actions of the United States in Libya, where they gave up their nuclear program,

the regime fell, and also now the actions of Russia where Ukraine gave up their nukes, and here we are. This is a serious problem for the international order. I'm not just blaming Russia on this one. I think the whole international community, again, United States included,

has really bungled this, and now we are in the situation that we are in that hopefully does not lead to World War III. Again, sounds like hyperbole. Guess we'll see in the next few years whether or not I have my head in my butt or not. Regarding left and right ideology, as mentioned on the show, maybe ideology isn't even the right word here, because frankly, it's not like most of these politicians who are stoking the division that we see in society are really even ideological. They're using some cause celebrity that looks ideological that triggers people on one side or the other so they can get more power, or so frankly, they can grift the audience that they're building. And I think that's largely what it comes down to.

I don't know if AI is going to save us from ourselves there either. But anyway, y'all, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Definitely going to have Yuval back. This was incredible. I just think he's a genius. And I'm annoyed. It took this long to happen, but I'm so grateful that it did. And please reach out to me and tell me what you thought of the episode.

Really appreciate you listening. Appreciate you all as show fans. These kinds of conversations make the whole podcast worthwhile. All things you've all know, O'Haurari, will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers,

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you through it from the inside as a person who actually lived it, which means you're basically getting a front row seat to the chaos. One episode is about Scott getting locked up in a foreign jail for a crime he didn't commit. Sure, Scott. Another is Sue's parachute failing. Wow, I'm surprised she was around to tell that story. And then there's Michael who was stabbed on a bus, which makes your commute instantly feel a little bit more relaxing. Do you anything you think? So if you want to hear some wild and inspiring firsthand stories, I invite you to check out what was that like. Every story is their site even has photos so you know even the most bizarre stuff you're hearing is somebody's real life. Listen to what was that like on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever app you're using right now.

This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks, the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits

of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening you can thank me later