Sapiens

How do you tell the entire history of humanity in a single book? Whatever you do, do not open a browser window. 

Thanks to Dorsa Amir, Duncan Stibbard Hawkes and David Perry for help researching and fact-checking this episode!

Where to find us: 

• Our Patreon
• Our merch!
• Peter's newsletter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• A Response to Yuval Harari
• Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever
• How Humankind Conquered the World
• The revolution that wasn't
• Advances In The Study Of The Origin Of Humanness
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a banal and risible self-help book
• Are Human Rights Western? 
• Bonaparte in Egypt
• Ship of Fools
• The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari
• A Reductionist History of Humankind
• Harari, Sapiens and historical accuracy
• The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40
• The Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East
• Was the Agricultural Revolution a Terrible Mistake?
• The Darker Side of the "Original Affluent Society"
• Harari's world history
• Compassion with Justice: Harari’s Assault on Human Rights
• Reconsidering the link between past material culture and cognition 

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Transcript

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Peter: Do I come across as 5 ’10”? [Michael laughs] It's humiliating. I actually I'm like, shrinking prematurely because I have scoliosis. 

Michael: Your body's catching up to your personality. 

[laughter] 

Peter: Well, now it doesn't matter because I'm just a married old man. It's irrelevant, my whole aura is gone anyway. 

Michael: I will say numerous people have clocked me as 5’6”. Me having said that on the show, I think I have very 5’6” energy. 

Peter: I think 5’ 6” is just a placeholder height. Because 5’7” is like, “That's a short man.” 5’6” is where it starts to get funny. [Michael laughs] Sorry if this is homophobic. I don't think it's relevant for gay men. 

Michael: If anything, we're like, “I'm pretty discriminatory against people over like 6’1”. I don't need redwoods in my home.” [Peter laughs] Okay, let's do this Peter, what do you have? I know it's going to be something about homo erectus. We'll just get whatever you need to say, just fucking get it out now. 

Peter: I think I've got something. 

Michael: You're ready? Okay.

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Peter. 

Peter: Michael. 

Michael: What do you know about Sapiens? 

Peter: All I know is that I should have done that book. That way I could have started this off with, you bring the homo and I'll bring the Sapiens. 

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Michael: The full title of the book is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It was published originally in Hebrew in 2011 and then in English in 2014. It has sold as usual we don't know the numbers, but I've heard 12 million. I've heard 40 million. It has sold numerous copies. 

Peter: 40 million cannot be right. 

Michael: I feel like people just like, say, shit. It was a huge hit among the Davos set. 

Peter: Sure.

Michael: Bill Gates wrote an entire blog post about how much he liked it. Like, everyone should read this book. Barack Obama compared reading the book to visiting the Pyramids of Giza. [Peter laughs] This book was also in Mark Zuckerberg's book club, which was not something I was aware of before, but he did a very long, one-on-one interview where he interviews Yuval Harari about the book. And it seems very clear that Mark Zuckerberg found this very influential. 

Peter: This was right before they facilitated a genocide. 

Michael: I mean, depending on the genocide, it's hard to say. I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific. 

[laughter] 

But also, if you go to Harari's Twitter Feed. It's all like, “I'm speaking today at the AI Summit in Singapore,” and he's being interviewed by Christine Lagarde. He's just on panels in Aspen and Davos and shit. 

Peter: Ugh. That's the dream. 

Michael: So, I am going to send you the first paragraph of the afterword, which is a nice little summary of everything we will be going over. 

Peter: 70,000 years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal, minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia, it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today, it stands on the verge of becoming a God, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.

Michael: W, huge W for humans. 

Peter: I can already tell why this is popular with tech people, because it's when you think about it, [Michael laughs] we're about to be gods due to the technology that you're all bringing us. 

Michael: He is going to get us to this place where we are, where we stand on the verge of everlasting life. He says humans have done this through three revolutions. So, around 70,000 years ago, we had the cognitive revolution, where we learned to think. Then around 12,000 years ago, we get the agricultural revolution, where we learn to grow crops. And about 500 years ago, we get the scientific revolution, where we learn more about the world around us. 

Peter: We learned to think 70,000 years ago? 

Michael: Yeah, we weren't apes anymore. 

Peter: Okay, but apes still think. 

Michael: Do they, though? I don't know. Look, just let me get to the fucking book, Peter [crosstalk] Whatever. [laughs]

Peter: Well, he said it was the first revolution, and I'm just trying to talk about the first revolution with you, and you're yelling at me, and I don't understand why. [laughs]

Michael: He starts with a description of the Big Bang and the formation of the universe. 

Peter: That was the first revolution. 

Michael: Life appears, and then we start to get mammals and then primates, etc., and he starts talking about what sets us apart from other great apes, from other primates. Why was it us who took over the planet? What really sets humans apart is our ability to think in abstractions, our ability to tell fictions. So, we are going to watch his articulation of this in a TED Talk. 

[video begins]

Yuval: We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values, all other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. A chimpanzee may say, “Look, there is a lion. Let's run away. Or look, there is a banana tree over there. Let's go and get bananas.” Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. A human can say, “Look, there is a God above the clouds. And if you don't do what I tell you to do after you die, God will punish you and send you to hell.” 

And if you all believe these stories that I've invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values and you can cooperate. Only humans believe such stories, which is why we control the world. Whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

[video ends]

Michael: Kind of a brutal dig at chimpanzees at the end there. [laughs]

Peter: I don't know why he's being so rude to chimpanzees. 

Michael: He's like, “Enjoy the research facility, bitch.” [Michael laughs] Try thinking of an abstract banana next time. 

Peter: So, this is pretty stupid and made up, huh? I don't like this at all, this seems--crosstalk]

Michael: Wait, do you not. I think this is fine. 

Peter: No, this is dumb. This is dumb. [Michael laughs] I don't think it's entirely correct to say animals don't have imaginations. Like animals engage in play. That's predicated on fictions. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Is the Israeli accent that similar to the French accent? 

Michael: I've been hearing French accents non-stop for the last month, so it doesn't actually sound that close to me. 

Peter: Can you say chimpanzee in a French accent? And then I want to hear this guy, 

Michael: Chimpanzé. [Michael laughs] That was bad. That was so bad. 

Peter: That was terrible. [Michael laughs] And also, what kind of hoity toity French motherfuckers are you hanging out with? 

Michael: You'd think I'd better at it after spending a month around these people. 

Peter: I really would have thought that, Michael. [laughs]

Michael: But so, I mean, this is obviously non falsifiable. To say that any one reason is why we took over the planet and other apes is on some level silly, but also on some level harmless. 

Peter: We use the power of imagination. 

Michael: He's basically talking about social constructions. That we're surrounded by things like, money, religion, democracy. All of these things are ultimately they're real because everybody believes in them. 

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Read here. I'm going to give you his articulation of this. 

Peter: Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on a crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights, and the money paid out in fees. 

Michael: Got you. 

Peter: Whoa, a dig at lawyers. 

Michael: Just sit silently, Peter. Just think about what you've done. 

Peter: It's too normalized, [Michael laughs] the way they talk about us. 

Michael: We then get to the part of the book where he basically describes how this cognitive revolution came about. How did we gain the ability to think in these abstractions? So, I'm going to send you a couple paragraphs where he lays this out. 

Peter: Even though these archaic Sapiens look just like us and their brains were as big as ours, they did not enjoy any market advantage over other human species, did not produce particularly sophisticated tools, and did not accomplish any other special feats. But then, beginning about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens started doing very special things. Around that date, sapien bands left Africa for a second time. This time, they drove the Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East, but from the face of the earth. The period from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, and sewing needles. The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era, as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce, and social stratification. 

Michael: So, he's laying out, like, a very interesting mystery, right? That it's like, we're in Africa. We're like, monkeys, monkeys, monkeys. And then 70,000 years ago, in evolutionary terms, all of a sudden, we started producing culture. We started producing bows and arrows. We had this huge advancement very rapidly in, like, the kinds of things that we were producing and the extent to which were modern humans. 

Peter: We were in our ideas era-

Michael: Yes.

Peter: -70,000 years ago, sure. 

Michael: To any normal person, this little sequence sounds fine. 

Peter: Yeah. This seems one of those things that's probably oversimplified. I'm not smart enough or knowledgeable enough to contest any part of it. 

Michael: This is how I felt too. I was like, “Okay, yeah, fine.” So, if you're somebody without any expertise in archaeology, you're like, “Yeah, okay, sounds fine.” If you are an archaeologist, you are screaming at your telephone right now. [Peter laughs] If you're listening to this while doing the dishes, you just, like, threw a plate on the ground. So, this narrative of a cognitive revolution of, basically, we left Africa and then all of a sudden, we developed all this modern culture, modern tools, etc., is a completely outdated model that was overturned 25 years ago. 

Peter: Okay. Okay. 

Michael: So, for most of the 20th century, archaeologists are based mostly in Europe and American institutions. And they were looking around Europe for bones and stuff because they thought that humans had originated in Europe. This is where we get the term Caucasian, because they thought humans originated in the Caucasus region. So, they start looking around Europe for evidence of human civilization, and they find it. And so, they're like, “Oh, my God, we have all this evidence of this, like, rapid advancement,” but over the course of the 20th century, people keep finding evidence of much earlier development in Africa. And over and over again, the archaeological field is like, “Ah, it's a fluke. Eh, what does it matter? Eh, we don't think so.” 

But then, in the year 2002, researchers named Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks published, people say an article, but it's actually like, an entire issue of this journal called the “Revolution that wasn't” where they basically lay out all of the evidence that humanity did all of this development extremely slowly, and it essentially all took place in Africa. So, Yuval is saying that all of this, like, we basically were just like, monkeys, monkeys, monkeys until 70,000 years ago. We actually have evidence of bladed tools, like the kind of thing you'd use to butcher animal from 500,000 years ago. We start getting evidence of pointed tips, which is slightly more sophisticated, slightly more difficult to make 250,000 years ago. 

Peter: Damn. Took them 250,000 [Peter laughs] years to think of making it a point. 

Michael: We weren't cognitively all that smart yet, Peter. We weren't in Europe yet. 

Peter: Folks, folks, 250,000 years. Give me five years. I would have thought of it. You give me a standard blade in 2020. By 2025, I'm showing you a pointy little tip. 

Michael: He also says that culture didn't really develop until after 70,000 years ago, and it mostly happened in Europe. Totally false. We have use of pigments like ochre, red dye, 300,000 years ago, also in Africa. We have decorated shells from 142,000 years ago. This whole idea of a revolution was only based on the fact that were only looking in Europe, right? The minute we started looking elsewhere, it's like, oh, it's really not a mystery of how this happened all of a sudden, it's just evolution. It's a slow, gradual process. 

Peter: And I feel the real cognitive revolution was when podcasting started. 

Michael: You're the Big Bang bacteria podcasts. 

Peter: In another 70,000 years, they'll be looking back at this moment. 

Michael: It sounded from the archaeologists that I talked to and from the literature that I read that if he had reached out to any archaeologist and spoken for 10 minutes, anyone would have told him, this is not the way that we think anymore. This is no longer the academic consensus. 

Peter: Yeah, but what if he wasn't trying to relay the academic consensus? 

Michael: I will say one thing that really frustrated me as someone who I consider myself, trying to do science communication in roughly similar way to him, is that he wrote this book in 2011 in Hebrew. He did the English translation himself in 2014. He published a graphic novel version of it in 2020, and he just published a 10th anniversary edition of it last year. This section appears word for word identical in every single edition. At no point has he just said, like, “Oh, hey, original edition got it a little bit wrong. I'm going to update it.” I mean, this information is false that this is the academic consensus. But at this point, it really feels laziness to me because you could easily say, like, there was a cognitive revolution that took place over 300,000 years in Africa. You don't need it to take place in 30,000 years in Europe. 

Peter: I feel the way that he talked in that TED Talk clip gives me the vibe of someone who is first and foremost a bullshitter, not someone who's like, “Oh, no, I've made a mistake.” 

Michael: And what's really telling is he talks about, in his intellectual development, he was originally a military historian, but then he gets really obsessed with Jared Diamond in the 1990s. 

Peter: I saw a guy write a dumbass book that experts hate, and I saw my own future. 

Michael: We've seen this thing among, like, self-help grifters, that we now have these second and third generation of self-help grifters that just read previous self-help grift books and produce their own. 

Peter: This is how AI feeds off of bad data, but for human minds. 

Michael: Because we're a second-generation airport book author, right? He's basically taking the ideas of Jared Diamond, which are very controversial among archaeologists and anthropologists, and then he's dumbing them down even more. 

Peter: And that means in another five years or so, we're going to get another even dumber book just like this. 

Michael: I mean, even though we've spoiled the episode at this point, we now have to talk about the agricultural revolution. 

Peter: [laughs] Step 2. I love how just pulled out of his ass these, like, eras are. He's started thinking?

Michael: Yep.

Peter: Step 2 was, I don't know, crops. 

Michael: It's like, first brains, then wheat. 

Peter: Step 3, Facebook. 

Michael: So, he now tells us about the shift from forager societies to agricultural societies. 

Peter: Hell, yeah. 

Michael: So, here's this, Peter. 

Peter: Scholars once proclaimed that the Agricultural Revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fueled by human brain power. That tale is a fantasy. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways and were less in danger of starvation and disease. Okay, just eyeballing that last sentence. 

Michael: [laughs] We're getting there, we're getting there, we're getting there. 

[laughter] 

Peter: With absolutely no knowledge on this topic at all, I'm like, “I don't think so, buddy.” [Michael laughs] The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind. But the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. 

Michael: See, it’s not even that podcasting was a mistake. Fucking growing crops was a mistake. 

Peter: Just let me pick a fucking berry. 

Michael: We fucked up. 

Peter: [laughs] Okay.

Michael: We're going to get there, but I have to present his case first. I have to present his case first. He presents a couple arguments for why agriculture was a mistake. [Peter laughs] So, agriculture, he says, resulted in humans working longer hours. 

Peter: Sure, okay. 

Michael: He says while people in today's affluent societies work an average of 40 to 45 hours a week and people in the developing world work 60 and even 80 hours a week, hunter gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats such as the Kalahari Desert work an average of just 35 to 45 hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be that ancient hunter gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change, and no bills to pay. 

Peter: That's true about dishes. 

Michael: He then says this shift from foraging to monoculture growing on these stable crops restricted the variety of diets. [Peter laughs] So, here's this.

Peter: The forager's secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition was their varied diet. In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising. This had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilized skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants. The forager may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast, fruits, snails and turtle for lunch, and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. 

Michael: Wild onions. 

Peter: Tomorrow's menu might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. 

Michael: I had elk yesterday. Are we out of saffron? That's how it was in foraging society. 

Peter: Yeah. No, I'm sure that they were living it up, dude. 

Michael: Final one, he also says that there were no famines when you are hunting and gathering. So, here's this. 

Peter: Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, fire, or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters and suffered from periods of want and hunger. But they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstuffs they could gather or hunt other species or move to a less affected area. Okay. [laughs] It really feels like it's downplaying the struggles. 

Michael: It hasn't rained here, so let's walk over to where it's raining, you guys. 

Peter: Why don't we hunt another? He is picturing a Disney movie [Michael laughs] in terms of the volume of animals that are around you. The most delicious animal does appear to have been wiped out in the earthquake, but we will simply move on to the second most delicious. 

Michael: This is, again, a totally outdated paradigm. So, the whole social construction of foraging societies, the original model of this was just unbelievably racist. These colonial understandings that were basically like, hunter gatherers are one step above apes. They're super primitive, they're super backwards. We are sophisticated. They are unsophisticated. This is the paradigm of forager societies for 200 years after Europeans started coming into contact with them. Starting in the 1960s, once we started to get much better anthropological data and once a new generation entered the field, there was then a thesis proposed by a researcher named Marshall Sahlins called the Original Affluent Society. He presented this idea that, you say these foraging societies are really unsophisticated, but maybe it's us who are unsophisticated, right? 

If you look at the Kung San in the Kalahari Desert, they're only working two hours a day. The rest of the time, they're just hanging out. 

Peter: Okay, Same.

Michael: When you think about the idea of affluence, it's like you have all of your needs met. These are people who have all of their needs met. So, who are we to sit in judgment of these people? Like, maybe they're really onto something. 

Peter: I mean, this is something that I feel really rich people who work really hard rediscover twice a decade, where they're like, “Wait, couldn't I be relaxing?”

Michael: Right. 

Peter: But also, just have fewer expectations about what should accrue to me in terms of wealth. And, someone tells them that, and they're like, “Oh, fuck, I've wasted my life.” They get really into it. They sort of half embrace it, and then it fades away and they become Nazis again. [Michael laughs] And then the cycle resets. 

Michael: The problem with this model that was proposed in the late 1960s is that other people who work with these populations are like, they don't work two hours a day, dude. All of this data is based on a guy named Richard Lee who had been working with the Kung San. And it is true that if you look at the amount of time that they are hunting and gathering, they're only doing about two and a half hours a day. However, he didn't include all of the time that they were spending processing all of the food. So, the staple crop of the Kung San is this thing called a mongongo nut, which you have to crack open, and then you have to soak it or boil it. So, people are spending eight hours a week processing and making these edible. 

They're also spending four to seven hours a week making and repairing tools. They're spending a ton of time on butchery, like, preparing cuts of meat. They're also spending a ton of time gathering firewood. You have to gather water. They're using ostrich eggs to go gather water and bring it back that's oftentimes many hours a day. So, this idea that they're only spending two hours a day on work is only if you ignore all of the work that they're doing. 

Peter: Right, right, right. 

Michael: The actual estimate is they're working about eight hours a day, six or seven days a week. That's also, of course, only one foraging society. There is studies from Australia showing that it's mostly women. Women are working 70 hours a week just to gather enough food for themselves. And if they have young children, they're working even more. It just is not the case that foraging societies are just you're just hanging out all the time. The weirdest thing about this is, if you reread that sentence that I read earlier about the amount of time that they're working. Here, let me send this to you. 

Peter: While people in today's affluent societies work an average of 40 to 45 hours a week.

Michael: And then skip to the end of the sentence. 

Peter: Hunter gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats such as the Kalahari Desert, work on average for just 35 to 45 hours a week. Wait. 

Michael: Exactly. He says we're working 40 to 45 hours a week. But if you look at foragers.

Peter: They're working 35 to 45. 

Michael: It's his own sentence. It's like, yeah, they're doing the same amount as us. 

Peter: I don't want to be culturally chauvinistic, but our lives are pretty sick compared to a lot of hunter gatherer societies. Like I personally enjoy, think the tradeoff of that possible five hours is worth it. 

Michael: The other thing that he says is that agriculture reduced food variety. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: He says in most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. 

Peter: That just feels it can't be true. 

Michael: If you look at the foraging societies we do know about, it's really hard work to get enough calories in the day. And so typically you're going to look for like, staple crops, tubers and stuff that are going to give you the most calories. 

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: This whole thing of, like, you're eating rabbit one day and elk the next, like, that's a modern paradigm of abundance. People are trying to survive. And so, when you look at the Kung San, they're mostly eating these nuts. 

Peter: I mean, you need something that is growing constantly, really aggressively, right? Because it's not like you pick a bunch of berries and then you go back the next day and there's another bunch for you. 

Michael: Yeah. Exactly. 

Peter: You have to cycle through different areas. Presumably he's arguing that produces a nutritious variety of food. [laughs] I don't know, man. This is all just weird, noble, savage shit. 

Michael: The forager societies that we know about are oftentimes at risk of undernutrition and malnutrition due to seasonal changes. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: Oftentimes a couple months of the year, it doesn't rain or it gets cold. It's much harder to get food. And oftentimes what that means is that you just eat a lot less for a couple months of the year. 

Peter: Yeah, but they can just move. 

Michael: [laughs] This is the other thing that drove me fucking crazy. He's like, “Oh, if it's a drought, you just move.” 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Okay, first of all, you have to know where to move. Secondly, droughts often cover hundreds of miles. We're talking about entire regions where rain doesn't fall. 

Peter: You can look at modern or ancient hunter gatherers and appreciate certain elements of the lifestyle. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: But once you try to make this case that it's, like, clearly better, you are making a complete fool of yourself. 

Michael: Right, exactly. 

Peter: You see it all the time with modern health people. And I feel you probably encounter this more than I do where it's just like-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: Insane. Yeah. 

Peter: There used to be more poop in the food we ate, so I've started to add it. [Michael laughs] t's just glorifying these lifestyles just for the sake of it. 

Michael: This whole paradigm that shifted in the 1960s. You were basically swapping out a mean racist caricature for a nice racist caricature. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: You're like, it's not that they're uncivilized. What if they're more civilized than us? These are human societies. Every human society has some good things and some bad things. Things that we can learn from them, things that they can learn from us. It's just so one dimensional to do this thing of like, “Oh, it was all a mistake. We shouldn't have done this. We shouldn't have grown crops.” 

Peter: I hate that this is making me defend modern society. [Michael laughs] But long term, it did work out for us. 

Michael: So, for this, I spoke to two anthropologists, Dorsa Amir at Duke and Duncan Stibbard Hawkes at Baylor. And what both of them said was just like, anyone who says anything definitive about forager lifestyles or hunter-gatherer diets is full of shit. First of all, the fossil record is incomplete and it's very difficult to ascertain diets from fossilized remains. When it comes to modern day hunter gatherers, by definition, these are not uncontacted societies. If they're participating in research, they're also not a representative sample because most of the communities that have managed to last this long are in remote or inhospitable regions. It's the Inuit’s, it's the Amazon rainforest, it's the Kalahari desert. These are places that have not been encroached upon by agriculture. 

So, these are not necessarily typical of the kinds of forager societies that we would have had in places that were much more agriculturally productive. And when we do get into forager societies, the main thing that sticks out is the huge diversity. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: One thing that Duncan told me, he has a really interesting paper where he looks over all of these stereotypes of forager societies of like, they're very equitable. They share everything, they move around all the time. They don't have these modern concepts of things private property. Every single one of these stereotypes has very notable exceptions. So, there are foraging societies that we know of that have caste systems and they had rulers and some of them had slavery. 

Peter: What about dishes? [Michale laughs] Did any of them have dishes? 

Michael: Although some of them actually did have models of private property. So, there were places where you could have a watering hole where you could drink and there'd be people who would have ownership over that even before they were settled societies. 

Peter: Rise and grind, baby. The watering hole is actually my property.

Michael: The superpower of books like this is that he has a really good take. Agriculture was a mistake. He has stealing is from Jared Diamond. By the way, this is a very influential article that Jared Diamond wrote in the 1990s. But this as a take or analysis argument puts me in a position where it's going to sound like I'm saying the Agricultural Revolution wasn't bad, it was actually good. But the reality is just that it's really complex. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: The shift from foraging to agriculture took place over hundreds of years. This isn't a Simpsons Monorail episode situation where people got tricked into doing agriculture. This was something that took place over many generations and many societies lived with a mixture of small-scale agriculture and foraging for a long time. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: And there also appear to have been benefits and drawbacks to the shift, at least for the first couple hundred years. It may actually be the case that in some places food variety fell and health markers got worse. 

Peter: Yeah, we became reliant on a very narrow subset of crops that we could grow right?

Michael:  On the hand, it appears that infant mortality fell very significantly around this time. Some of the estimates of infant mortality in forager societies are 50%. So, it's weird to talk about more of your babies living as part of this scam of agriculture that took place. 

Peter: Ugh, wouldn't it be nice if you only had to take care of half your kids? 

Michael: [laughs] But this is the complexity of all this, right? Because there's also some debate about whether infant mortality fell before the agricultural revolution and helped sparked it or was caused by the agricultural revolution. We don't really know. The closest thing to a conclusion that I could come to from the anthropologist that I spoke to was that agriculture good versus agriculture bad just isn't that interesting of a question. A much more interesting question is why did I think it's 11 different societies in totally different regions of the world independently develop agriculture and what were the specific benefits and drawbacks and effects of that shift? Like in the Fertile Crescent, the agricultural shift appears to have taken place at the same time as a mini-ice age, which would have affected rainfall productivity of both foraging and agricultural crops. 

So, that could be the reason why the skeletons are shorter or not. You start to see the fractal complexity of this and how this modern, weirdly nostalgic lens and super simplistic way of telling the story just isn't actually teaching people anything. 

Peter: It's just so clearly a guy talking out of his ass that it's hard to address. 

Michael: Right? 

Peter: If you gave me a foraging society in 2020, by 2025, [Michael laughs] I would have turned it into an agricultural society. 

Peter: So, the next section of the book is this period from the agricultural revolution until roughly the beginning of the scientific revolution. His story of what is happening at this time is just convergence. So, we used to have thousands of dialects. We're now converging on a couple of languages. We used to have thousands of religions. We're now converging on these large monotheistic religions. We're having the consolidation of states. The big story of this 10,000-year period is the world coming together, right? And he says as you get all of this scale, larger cities, more sophisticated states, we start to rely on more fictions. It requires more fictions to run a society. We get written language, things like democracy. These things are all social constructions, so we become increasingly reliant on social construction. And so, one of the most influential social constructions that we come to rely on is, like, laws. 

Peter: Stepping into my office here a little bit. [Michael laughs]

Michael: So, he says Hammurabi's Code was of course, one of the first attempts to create a legal structure. And it had this very explicit separation of society into superior people, commoners and slaves. And the entire legal structure was around like, how much is the life of a slave worth? How much is the life of a superior person worth? And so, from Hammurabi's code, he then cuts to 3,500 years later, and he says, eventually we get the opposite principle. We get the Declaration of Independence. 

Peter: We're skipping the Magna Carta here. 

Michael: He does a lot of jumping around in time. He says, we eventually get to this principle that everybody's equal. He says it's easy for us to accept that the division of people into superiors and commoners is a figment of the imagination, yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. So, he goes through the famous paragraph, we hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal, endowed by their creator, inalienable rights, etc. And he walks through it one by one, trying to enumerate whether or not there is real principles behind that or whether it's just a fiction. So, I'm going to send you this. 

Peter: According to the science of biology, people were not created. They have evolved, [Michael laughs] and they certainly did not evolve to be equal. 

Michael: Got you. 

Peter: Oh, no. 

Michael: You thought laws were based on evolution, but they're not. 

Peter: That's not what they mean. They don't mean everyone's exactly the same- [crosstalk]

Michael: Read the rest of it.

Peter: -you fucking dipshit.

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation, and souls, what does it mean that all people are equal? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. Whoa. 

Michael: You say people are equal, but they're actually different. How do you respond to that, how do you respond to that Peter? Are you thinking about your fees right now? Are you thinking about your fees? 

Peter: This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. Created equal should therefore be translated into evolved differently. 

Michael: Fucking got you. 

Peter: What is he fucking just rambling nonsense? Shut your fucking mouth. God damn it. First of all, it's basically poetry, [Michael laughs] like, so shut up, dude. It's about your value as a human being. It's not saying everyone's exactly the same. You fucking-- Okay, all right, let's. 

Michael: Wait. Now he's going to talk about how whether we're endowed by our creator with inalienable rights.

Peter: Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities, and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings. [Michael laughs] And it's not true that these organs, abilities, and characteristics are unalienable. Many of them undergo constant mutations and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. 

Michael: Your legs are alienable, bitch. Think about that. 

Peter: And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? Life, certainly. But liberty, there is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights, and limited liability corporations. Liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. This is the Facebook post of someone who in five years will be a full Nazi. 

Michael: The term I kept coming back to was dorm room.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: A lot of this is just dorm room. Like, you're sitting there stoned, and you're like, man, whoa.

Peter: Why is he fucking talking about birds? 

Michael: Wait, wait, wait, wait. We have to be the happiness bone. We have to be the happiness bone. 

Peter: Birds fly, not because they have a right. [Michael laughs] Shut up, dude. Are you fucking kidding me with this? 

Michael: Here's this happiness thing. Here's this happiness thing. 

Peter: This is the most fake smart guy bullshit of all time. I'm going to lose my shit. 

Michael: It gets so much worse, Peter. We're like, the good part of the book. This is my descent into fucking madness over the last two weeks, Peter. 

Peter: Just a reminder that he's talking about how the Declaration of Independence says, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Right? It's literally just this little poetic flourish. And he's like, “Happiness?” And what about happiness? So far, biological research has failed to come up with a clear definition of happiness or a way to measure it objectively. Most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure, which is more easily defined and measured. 

Michael: Is it, though? 

Peter: I can't do this, man. What the fuck is he talking about? 

Michael: He does this so much where he's like, “It's not happiness, it's pleasure.” Those are basically synonyms. They're not reasonably different. And you're acting. You're doing this smart guy thing where you think you're debunking something. I think, but no one fucking thinks this. 

Peter: These are meant to be organizing principles. Have you ever read something before that's what I think when I hear this.

Michael: Okay, so here's his rewritten preamble to the Declaration of Independence. 

Peter: Just fucking kill me, dude. 

Michael: He really thinks he's cooking. You could tell he really thinks he's cooking. 

Peter: [laughs] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure. 

Michael: Boom. 

Peter: Yeah, no, that's great that’s definitely how I would found a nation. 

Michael: This took him six pages, by the way, to do this whole fucking exercise and, what is the point of this? 

Peter: What is the point of this? 

Michael: He keeps doing this thing where he's like, “You might get mad when I say that human rights are fictions.” I don't think people would. I think people understand. These are manmade philosophical concepts.”

Peter: I don't even think engaging with this is worth it. It's just pedantic bullshit nonsense. 

Michael: Peter, wait. Wait for the rest of the episode. 

Peter: This is so embarrassing. This is so like the fact that someone who isn't like-- I almost get it if you're 23 and just rambling on the Internet. I get it. I get that you might say something like this at some point because you've only experienced five or six ideas, but to be a full ass adult.

Michael: He then gets to a section where he's talking about convergence of religions, right? We're moving from like everyone has often animalistic to these big five monotheistic religions. He's talking about how this plays out in the modern era. So, I'm going to send you this. 

Peter: The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervor. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural law. [chuckles] Come on, man. 

Michael: You knew this is where he was going. 

Peter: God damn it. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural law religions, such as liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions and refer to themselves as ideologies. Ooh. They don't like it. They don't like it. 

Michael: They think they're different, but they're actually the same. 

Peter: But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet communism was no less a religion than Islam. Like other religions, Communism, too has its holy scripts and prophetic books, such as Marx's Das Kapital. Communism had its holidays and festivals, such as the 1st of May and the anniversary of the October Revolution. It had theologians adept at Marxist dialectics, and every unit in the Soviet army had a chaplain called a commissar who monitored the piety of soldiers and officers. Why is this so popular as a formulation among dumb guys? 

Michael: We've talked about this so many times on the show, it's insane. 

Peter: You know what's sort of like a religion Communism, when you think about it? When you think about it, you could use this formulation to say that archaeology is a religion. 

Michael: There's a really interesting article by Mike W. Martin called Compassion with Justice: Harari's Assault on Human Rights, where he goes over this asinine argument and he's like, “You can say science is a religion according to this,” right? There's like a holy book, right? On the origin of species. There is priests, right? Isaac Newton. Harari says here, I love the fact that he includes this. He's like, “This is just a semantic exercise to say that, like, Nazism is different than Buddhism or whatever.” 

Peter: Right, right. 

Michael: But he is the one engaging in semantic exercise.

Peter: he is the one engaging in semantic exercise. Yeah.

Michael: He would admit that, he also said feminism later is just a religion. 

Peter: Yes.

Michael: He would admit that feminism and Buddhism are different from each other, obviously. Right? So, are we arguing about the difference between a religion ideology or are we arguing about the difference between two different religions? It's like, “Isn't a bike a type of a car?”

Peter: That's actually a good-- That's actually a good comparison because you'd be like, no, where's the engine? He'd be like, “Well, is the engine the material part? Because you have wheels and it's a mode of transportation?” 

Michael: Pass me the bomb. It's just so fucking boring. 

Peter: It is so fucking stupid dude. 

Michael: We can sit there, talk about it for hours. It's so tedious. 

Peter: I have always viewed this as just a method for religious people to deflect from the fact that they believe in metaphysics-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: Totally.

Peter: Which by the way, like, whatever. I'm no longer an angsty young atheist. I don't give a shit. But it's always, in my experience, been something that people throw at you when you're like, “You believe in magic, right?” And they're like, “Oh, do we all not have faith in something?” It's just like, “Fuck off, dude. Fuck off.” 

Michael: That is exactly what he's doing here. Right? Because the paragraph says, “You might think religion has declined over the last 300 years,” but if we look at political ideology, we're more religious than ever. But the decline of organized religion over the last couple hundred years is a real trend that has worth understanding if you want to understand current society. It's brain dead to say, “Oh, the Catholic Church no longer dictates daily life for millions of people the way that it did for a thousand years.” That doesn't matter because we're all super into feminism now. 

Peter: You have your holy texts, The Feminine Mystique.

Michael: [laughs] The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. 

Peter: You have your profits. Julia Fox. 

Michael: I want to take a little interlude now to talk specifically about why he is so popular among the Davos set. 

Peter: Okay. 

Michael: This is a kind of intellectual we haven't really talked about on the show. True. To illustrate this concept, we are going to watch a clip. 

[video starts here]

Reena: In this era of global uncertainty, the Trump era, how should we move forward? 

Male Speaker 1: What you really learn from the long-term history of humanity is the amazing human ability to build trust. Because 100,000 years ago, humans lived in tiny bands of just a few dozen individuals and could not trust anybody outside their band. Today, we have these huge networks, nations of millions of people that trust each other. The most important mechanism is the self-correcting mechanism. This is how every child learns to walk. The ability to admit that there are things I don't know or that I make mistakes. That a self-correcting mechanism is not correcting somebody else. This is easy to see the problems of somebody else. It's a system which is able to identify and correct its own mistakes. Ultimately, it all depends on trust between humans. 

Male Speaker 2: Reena. It's amazing how the concepts of community and trust have been present throughout human history. 

Reena: True. 

Male Speaker 1: True.

Reena: Harari also said that the history is only constant exchange. In the end, how humans respond to shifting times is key to finding a way forward. 

Male Speaker 2: Right.

[video ends here]

Peter:  Right, right, right. Dude, just two dumbass newscasters being just like, you know, it's always two dumb bitches [Michael laughs] telling each other, exactly. That's what I'm seeing here. 

Michael: I mean every clip of him is like this. He's being asked a specific question. He's like, how should we respond in the Trump era? And then he points at these 30,000-foot philosophical principles that say nothing about the question he was just asking. 

Peter: Right. He's like, “Society is predicated on trust between individuals.” And they're like, --[crosstalk]

Michael: Wow.

Peter: Damn, dude. 

Michael: The only constant is change. 

Peter: Fuck, man. 

Michael: The sense that I kept getting from this book, and especially from his more recent interviews is, you know that dream where you're standing at a podium and you have to give a 45 minute talk about the Ming Dynasty or something that you just know nothing about, and you're like, “Humans have always had change in society, and that's what the Ming Dynasty teaches us.” 

Peter: It was a dynasty of contrast. Yeah. [Michale laughs] This is something I complained about way back when in our end of history episode about political philosophy in general, where if you don't actually know how to describe the world, you can just use political philosophy because you're operating on a level of abstraction that can't be mapped onto the world in any meaningful way. And so, you can just say whatever you want. It doesn't matter. You can't be wrong.

Michael: Because you're at this 30,000-foot level. It makes people think it's smart, right? Because you're describing these philosophical concepts, right? Of like, “Ooh, trust between people.” 

Peter: Right? They were like, “What's going on with Donald Trump? He was like, “20,000 years ago, [Michael laughs] you lived in a small hut with only a few people.” 

Michael: 20,000 years ago, they didn't have famines. He's like, “Also wrong about that. [Peter laughs] I think this is, what the Davos set, gets from him,” right? 

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: Is because he makes you feel smart. 

Peter: A lot of these guys, these TED Talk motherfuckers, are just selling a feeling. You're just purchasing that from these guys over and over again. 

Michael: So, I want to do something super fucked up to you, Peter. 

Peter: What? 

Michael: For this? I couldn't help myself. I downloaded his subsequent books. He has gotten significantly more vapid as we've gone along. Like Sapiens is by far his best book. His latest book is collection of essays. And I want to dissect an essay that he has in detail to talk about how he argues and his role as a rhetorician. He has an essay in that book called Post Truth, Some Fake News Lasts Forever. It's an essay about the phenomenon of fake news, right? This is Post 2016. Everyone is really concerned about this. So, he starts out by laying out the problem. 

Peter: It seems that we are indeed living in a terrifying era of post truth, when not just particular military incidents, but entire histories and nations might be faked. But if this is the era of post truth, when exactly was the halcyon age of truth. 

Michael: So, he talks about how humans have always had false beliefs, and there's always been a mixture of true information and false information for us, as a demos.

Peter: There's a fake smart person thing where when a phenomenon arises, you just are like, “That's always been there.”

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Actually, it feels a lot more acute, and it's probably measurably worse now and he's just like, “You think this is the first time that anyone has ever believed a false thing?” It's like, “No, I don't. No one thinks that, you absolute schmuck.” 

Michael: Differences in degree matter. It's not only differences in kind that matter in human history. Like, people had been killed before the Holocaust. The fact that the Holocaust was at such a large scale and was so industrialized.

Peter: Interesting that you thought that was the first time that someone died. 

Michael: Right. [laughs] It's not smart. It's a distraction tactic, and it also positions you as smarter than the people who are upset. 

Peter: It's a complete conversation ender. We can move on because this has happened before. 

Michael: Thanks to the same. So, in this fake news piece, he talks about, like, we've always had fake news. He talks about how, like, religion is the first form of fake news because everybody believes this thing that is not true. 

Peter: That's right. 

Michael: Religions can be useful in society because we give alms to the poor, but also religion has done some bad things in society because we had the Crusades. 

Peter: What? 

Michael: He then says, politicians have lied before. The Nazis had myths and fictions. And then the Soviets did propaganda. They covered up their crimes. They cut that guy out of the photograph. There is so societal myths that can be really bad. 

Peter: This is fucking crazy. 

Michael: But also, he says, you cannot organize masses of people effectively without relying on some mythology. 

Peter: I'm hearing about this for the first time. 

Michael: He says, “You might argue that, at least in some cases, it's possible to organize people effectively through consensual agreements rather than through fictions and myths. Such conventions, however, are not clearly distinct from fiction. The difference between holy books and money, for example, is far smaller than it may seem at first sight.” So, money is fake news. 

Peter: I can't do this, dude. 

Michael: We're not even halfway done, Peter. 

Peter: Just shotgun to my forehead. 

Michael: He then says, “Advertising is a form of fake news.” 

Peter: Sure. 

Michael: So, we walk around and, we're being told, this is the best vacuum cleaner. Entertainment can be fake news. He says blurring the line between fiction and reality can be done for many purposes. You cannot play games or read novels unless you suspend disbelief, at least for a little while. And he talks about that for a while. 

Peter: He's interesting that you think that misinformation in the election is bad, even though you got sad when you were playing the last of Us. 

Michael: And he says, “Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later, they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point, you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point, you'll have to renounce power.”

Peter: That doesn't sound correct. 

Michael: That doesn't sound correct. 

Peter: Also, again, just say something useful. 

Michael: Do you feel how fucking annoyed you are, right? You're like, “Mike, get to the fucking point.” Just every single thing that he writes, it feels like he just sat down and started writing. He didn't even open a browser window. 

Peter: He's just glancing around the room like, “Advertising is fake.” He sees a TV, he's like, TV shows are fake news when you think about it.

Michael: I counted. We are 4,000 words into this essay. This is 15 pages of text. 

Peter: And I've got a migraine, folks. I've got a migraine. 

Michael: I know, dude. 

Peter: Yo. framed it as a dream. I feel like I'm watching a kid give a presentation who obviously did not prepare. 

Michael: No, no, no. That's what I can-- [crosstalk]. 

Peter: And you're just like, okay. 

Michael: And just filibustering, dude. 

Peter: You're just internally screaming come on, man. Just like, please say something interesting. 

Michael: We then after 4000 words of fucking preamble, he says, “All this does not mean that fake news is not a serious problem or that politicians and priests have a free license to lie through their teeth. It would also be wrong to conclude that everything is just fake news, that any attempt to discover the truth is doomed to failure. Everyone agrees that fake news is a problem. He's circling back to the premise of the article. It would be a mistake to say that fake news isn't a problem. It's a problem.” Okay. Are you going to say anything about it? We finally get to-- this is the last three paragraphs of the essay. He actually lists some specific things that we should do about fake news. Are you still there? I feel like you've died. 

Peter: Yeah, [Michael laughs] no, I'm still here. 

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: Do I want to be here still? 

Michael: So, we finally get his tips at the end of the essay about fake news. He says, “First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might as well be the product.” So, I don't consider this a very good tip because there's tons of paywalled stuff on the Internet that is extremely odious. 

Peter: Mike. 

Michael: The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. 

Peter: Well, first of all, you're going to tell me to do my research, you fucking halfwit.

Michael:  I know.

Peter: A guy who botched the encyclopedia entry for human beings. [Michael laughs] A lot of time when people are like, “How do we deal with the problem of fake news?” People are like, “Well, try to find reliable news sources.” And it's like, “No shit.” 

Michael: Have you thought about reading things that are true? 

Peter: But also, even if I, Peter, am 100% getting great news, only the best news, no misinformation at all. The problem of fake news is society wide.

Michael: Exactly.

Peter: That's the question that we're asking. 

Michael: Okay, last thing, Peter. He then ends by saying, “Scientists, for their part, need to be far more engaged with current public debates, which is something I actually agree with. I would love more actual experts to sort of be out in front and talking about areas of expertise.” But then here you'll never fucking guess where he goes with this, Peter. So here's the rest of what he says to scientists. 

Peter: Does that mean scientists should start writing science fiction? That is actually not such a bad idea. 

Michael: Scientists shouldn't be saying things that are true. I think the role of science is to say fake things. 

Peter: I have never wanted a recording to end so fucking badly. I can't wait. I can't wait for you to be like, we're done. [Michael laughs] He says “Art plays a key role in shaping people's view of the world and in the 21st century, science fiction is arguably the most important genre of all, for it shapes how most people understand things like AI, bioengineering, and climate change. We certainly need good science, but from a political perspective, a good science fiction movie is worth far more than an article in Science or Nature.” 

Michael: Is it worth more? Do I want scientists writing novels, or do I want scientists speaking about their expertise in journals? 

Peter: This is such rambling moron nonsense that I feel like, “Just stop it.” How is everyone listening to this guy? Why is this guy famous? What's going on?”

Michael: Everything that he does is this fucking insane filibustering where he just refuses to address the topic at hand, but then when he does address the topic, he doesn't have anything smart to say about it. 

Peter: Doing 4,000 words being a lot of things are fake news when you think about it. And then he's like, “But also, fake news is bad.” And then he's just sort of like, there's a long pause and he's like, “Maybe more science fiction from scientists.” 

Michael: Maybe write a novel. Like, “Dude.” So, he can't even say anything smart in the abstract, and he also can't say anything smart in the specific. 

Peter: Isn't it fake news when you're talking to your dog who doesn't even understand English? [Michael laughs] This is crazy, dude. I had no idea this guy was such a schmuck. 

Michael: This is so fucked up. I came across a blog post by a French Revolution scholar who compared the sections on the French Revolution in Harari's book to the Wikipedia entry. Basic stuff like, “Who was the ruler of France in this year?” He's like, “Oh, yeah, you got this wrong.” 

Peter: Right off the bat, he's like, “It was better when we were foraging.” No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. 

Michael: One thing that is genuinely fascinating to me and chilling is that the same scholar, this French Revolution scholar points out, he's like, sub-Wikipedia knowledge. Like, embarrassing lapses information in his French Revolution chapter, but then goes on to recommend the book, and he's like, “Actually, it's a great overview of early man.” 

Peter: When he got to my expertise, he butchered every single thing. But the rest of the book is good. And it's like, “Surely you understand the mistake you're making.” 

Michael: It really is the superpower of books like this because no one has the academic expertise to know how wrong he is in every area. 

Peter: Until now. [Michael laughs] He's like, step one, cognitive revolution. That's when we started thinking and people were like, “Whoa, what do you know about fake news?” 

[laughter] 

He's like, “I think we used to eat more berries. And that was better.” Everyone's like, “Whoa.” 

Michael: So, this is us a couple days later because it literally did give Peter a migraine. 

Peter: That's true. 

Michael: To read all of [laughs] the excerpts from last time. 

Peter: That's true. But I'm very sensitive. Sometimes, I sleep for half an hour too little and I get a migraine. So, you have to put it in that context. 

Michael: Like the agricultural revolution, Yuval is only one of many factors. 

Peter: That's right. 

Michael: So, we're now getting back to the book. This is the part of the book where he talks about the scientific revolution. 

Peter: Hell yeah. 

Michael: He says the relationship between science and technology is a very recent phenomenon. Prior to 1500, science and technology were totally separate fields. 

Peter: That doesn't sound right. 

Michael: Don't worry about it. He then says this about the scientific revolution. 

Peter: The scientific revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the scientific revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge, such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past, possessed all encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gain knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. 

Michael: So, we learned that we don't know things, Peter. 

Peter: Alright, that, okay.

Michael: If I'd read this to you originally, maybe you would have fallen for this. But now that we know about this book, I feel it's just really obvious that this is just not true. 

Peter: I love that he thinks that science started in 1500. 

Michael: [laughs] This is the first time. 

Peter: That's the kind of thing that like, I don't know, if you were 15 and you said that I'd be like, close buddy, you're getting there. 

Michael: And he also has this idea that the reason why this happened in Europe was because Europeans became more curious about the world around them. They all of a sudden were like, “Hey, maybe it's not all in the religious texts.” Maybe we can study things. For this I talked to David Perry, who is a medievalist and the author of a book called The Bright Ages.

Harari's entire explanation here is that when we had religious books, we didn't need to do science because religion was telling us everything about the world. But what David Perry said is that this whole opposition between science and religion is a very modern concept. Medieval religious people didn't think like, “I'm not going to do science because it's going to debunk the Bible.”

Peter: Right, right. 

Michael: They thought science was a way to glorify God. You're like, “I want to learn everything I can about the majesty that he produced for us.” 

Peter: And I imagine that they assumed, believing everything in the holy text to be true, that the more science they did, the more that the Bible or whatever would be validated. 

Michael: To be honest, I don't know that I needed to contact a medievalist for this. I probably could have just said this, but I wanted to give some ammunition to. I did work for this part of the episode. 

Peter: You're so studious. [Michael laughs] I will think of any reason not to contact an expert when I'm doing one of these and you're calling up experts, being like, can you confirm that science did not begin in 1500? And they're like, “Confirmed.” You're like, “Thank you. I will cite your work in our episode notes.” 

Michael: So, he then gets deeper into the scientific revolution. His whole framing device for this section of the book, which is a very large section of the book, is, “Why did this happen in Europe?” He says that the scientific revolution began in 1492 because they were looking at other parts of the world. Here is his description of why this kicked off the Scientific Revolution. 

Peter: The discovery of America was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution. It not only taught Europeans to favor present observations over past traditions, but the desire to conquer America also obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at breakneck speed. If they really wanted to control the vast new territories, they had to gather enormous amounts of new data about the geography, climate, flora, fauna, languages, cultures and history of the new continent. Henceforth, not only European geographers, but European scholars in almost all other fields of knowledge began to draw maps with spaces left to fill in. They began to admit that their theories were not perfect and that they were important things that they did not know. 

Michael: He comes back to this quite a bit and quite explicitly, that Europeans had a scientific mindset. 

Peter: Despite the fact that they were scholars, they had no interest in their own fields. And then someone was like, “We've discovered a new continent.” And they were like, “I must learn.” 

Michael: The core idea here is that both the Scientific Revolution and all of the European imperialism that they also embarked upon at the same time were essentially two sides of the same coin. We're getting into some of the politics of this book in this section. 

Peter: European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects in history. Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. The Arabs, to name one example, did not conquer Egypt, Spain or India in order to discover something they did not know. The Romans, Mongols, and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth, not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in hopes of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories. 

Michael: Knowledge first and then the territories, it was mostly knowledge. 

Peter: Come on, man, how can you write this shit? 

Michael: [laughs] He did include-- to his credit, he did say along with new territories. Like he's admitting that, but he's sort of like as an afterthought they wanted new territories. They mostly wanted to learn. 

Peter: Mr. Columbus, please find us knowledge in the New World. 

Michael: All right. 

Peter: As time went by, the conquest of knowledge and the conquest of territory became ever more tightly intertwined. In the 18th and 19th centuries, almost every important military expedition that left Europe for distant lands had on board scientists who set out not to fight, but to make scientific discoveries. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he took 165 scholars with him. Among other things, they founded an entirely new discipline, Egyptology. [laughs]

Michael: Which sounds fake, but is real. 

Peter: It's real in the sense that is a field now, but the study of Egypt in some sense, to some degree, [laughs] also existed before in Egypt. [Michael laughs] And I guess what he's saying is that it seems colonialism was exploitative. But can you really blame us for trying to learn? 

Michael: So, there's a specific debunking here, and an omni debunking when it comes to Napoleon's trip to Egypt in 1798, it is true that he brought 100 scientists with him. He also brought 50,000 troops because this was a war to take Egypt back from the British. This was primarily overwhelmingly a military operation. 

Peter: He could have said, “Hey, British, you can keep this. You can keep this land. Can we send some scholars over?” That probably would have worked as well, but he took a different approach. 

Michael: There's a very good review of this book in the Wall Street Journal by Charles C. Mann, who wrote 1491, and he points out that in the early 1400s, there was a Chinese admiral who went to Africa with a bunch of scientists. And when I was chatting to David Perry about this, he pointed out that this was not a military expedition. It was partially an effort to spread Chinese influence, but it was also motivated by a desire to learn about the world. So, you've got Harari saying that European imperialism is an example of mankind's insatiable curiosity, but European imperialism was not an example of that. And the best examples of that are from outside of Europe. 

Peter: Dude, I. I love that. I love that you're still like [Michael laughs] getting into the details here. You're like- [crosstalk] 

Michael: Why? 

Peter: “Dear listeners, Europeans were not the first people to think of the idea of learning.”

Michael: I might just cut this entire thing. Who knows? 

Peter: Hold on I need to Google something really quickly. When did they invent algebra? [Michael laughs] All right. I'm getting 1900-1600 BC for the invention of algebra. 

Michael: But when did they invent the mindset? Peter? 

Peter: That's true. 

Michael: They did algebra, but they didn't have the algebra mindset. 

Peter: This is just such a bizarre framework that it feels so inherently racist that I don't even know what to say about it beyond that. It's just like this is Arabs were thinking of algebra for selfish reasons, but one day Europeans decided to conquer the New World, altruistically. 

Michael: Speaking of a little bit racist, Peter, we have one more excerpt. So, this is him talking about the Spanish conquest of Central America. 

Peter: Around 1517, Spanish colonists in the Caribbean islands began to hear vague rumors about a powerful empire in the center of the Mexican Mainland. A mere four years later, the Aztec capital was a smoldering ruin. The Aztec empire was a thing of the past. And Hernán Cortés lorded over a vast new Spanish empire in Mexico. 

Michael: That's the curious mindset for you. 

Peter: Out of curiosity-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: Out of curiosity. 

Peter: The previous rulers of Central America, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Maya, barely knew South America existed and never made any attempt to subjugate it over the course of 2000 years, mindset problems. 

Michael: We're not going to spend time on it, but this is also not true. 

Peter: Yet. Within little more than 10 years of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Francisco Pizarro had discovered the Inca empire in South America, vanquishing it in 1532. Had the Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them, and had they known what the Spaniards had done to their neighbors, they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more keenly and successfully. 

Michael: Have you thought about resisting? Maybe you should have resisted harder. 

Peter: Every people that has been genocided mindset problem. Yeah. Why were the Aztecs wiped out? Lack of curiosity. 

Michael: Yeah, you should have gotten up earlier. You should have done more pushups. We have been here before where you have these books that are attempting to be these long historical ideology free style books. But then the minute you get into them are just super right wing, super ideological. In Steven Pinker's book, it's like, “Oh, violence declined over the last 10,000 years.” And, and then by the time you're on like page seven, he's like, “That's why feminists should stop complaining.” They're just very obviously rightwing projects. The twist of this episode and the twist of this book is that this book is mostly a left-wing project. Yuval Harari has pretty good politics. He is gay, openly gay. He lives with his husband. He's like a vegan. He's super into animal rights. Like every single book that he writes is long, fairly irrelevant, honestly, digressions about animal rights. 

Peter: Just a just a dinner party ruiner. I can feel it. 

Michael: [laughs] And also, throughout this entire section on colonialism, he doesn't actually whitewash the crimes of imperialism. Like, he talks about how the Spanish fucking tricked the Aztecs so they could wipe them out. He calls Spanish colonialism a genocide numerous times. He talks about how the Brits deliberately starved 10 million people in India. He also has a fairly good section about like the “Science” that they were doing as part of these expeditions was mostly just motivated reasoning so that they could prove that they were more advanced than these peoples. Right? 

Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Michael: And he talks about how most societies justify inequalities not on the basis of social constructions, but on the basis of a natural order. They're like, “Oh, we have to be unequal because these people are just inferior to us. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: So, here's him talking about this. 

Peter: He says not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society's imagined hierarchy. Harry Potter is a good example. 

Michael: Is it, Is it? 

Peter: Removed from [Michael laughs] his distinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant Muggles, he arrives at Hogwarts without any experience in magic. It takes him seven books to gain a firm command of his powers and knowledge of his unique abilities. 

Michael: It's very weird to use a fictional example. It's clearly just the first thing that he thought of. But ideologically, I roughly agree with this. If you have downtrodden minorities in society, you can't just expect them to have the same outcomes as everybody else immediately. It takes time. 

Peter: I agree with that. I don't know about the analogy because I have never absorbed even a little bit of Harry Potter. Even in the late 90s when the first book came out, I was like, this woman seems weird about gender. 

Michael: Don't try. Don't pretend you knew in advance. 

Peter: In 1999, I was like, “This is somehow connected to the presidency of Donald Trump. I can feel it.” 

Michael: Speaking of which, he also has a number of good sections about how gender is a social construct. He talks about how, like, it's fake and weird that men have managed to subjugate women in so many societies. 

Peter: Dudes rock, dude. 

Michael: And also, I was ready for his politics outside of the book to be bad too, but they're pretty good. 

Peter: Damn. 

Michael: He's like openly pro trans. He posted pro trans stuff on Twitter and gets like, absolutely cooked in his replies. But that's fairly cool and brave to do in 2025 on fucking Twitter. 

Peter: I'm going to be honest. This sucks. Can we just move to the next thing that he is bad at? 

Michael: I was also pretty surprised by this. He's, I wouldn't say good, but better than the median Davos pundit on Gaza stuff. 

Peter: He's Israeli, right? 

Michael: Yeah, he's Israeli, yeah. Yeah. But he's always been part of the Israeli left. And he started out quite bad. Like post October 7th, he signed an open letter saying, like, “The left is supporting Hamas.” But then by summer of 2024, he appears at a rally where he basically pushes back against the Israeli right and says, “No people have the right to live in peace and happiness on the land where they were born.” And then In August of 2025, I found this from a pro Palestine Instagram account posted a clip of him on a podcast talking about how the greatest threat to Judaism right now is the far-right drift in Israel. 

He says, this could destroy 2000 years of Jewish thinking and culture and existence. The worst case scenario is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign resulting in the expulsion of 2 million Palestinians and the disintegration of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel under an ideology of Jewish supremacy, under the worship of anti-Jewish values power and violence.” 

Peter: Given the fact that he was like-- colonialism is because we're so smart. It didn't feel like we were going towards a moderate position in Israel but okay.

Michael: So, what's so interesting to me is then the question becomes how does a guy who has pretty good values and pretty good politics write this fucking drivel? I think I have two answers to this question. 

Peter: Okay.

Michael:  The first problem is that it's very clear that he values a good story over anything else. He came up with this explanation that, like, it's the scientific mindset. And then he just tries to cram all events in the last 500 years into this theory. He says later in this section, the native peoples of America were not the only ones to pay a heavy price for their parochial outlook. The great empires of Asia very quickly heard that Europeans had discovered something big, yet they displayed very little interest in these discoveries. So, paid a heavy price for their parochial outlook. I don't know if that is how I would describe the years 1500 to 1960. I don't know. 

Peter: Oh God. Parochial outlook, that's pretty wild mindset problems. 

Michael: The crescendo of this storytelling thing is the end of his colonialism section. 

Peter: He says, “Only in the 20th century did non-European cultures adopt a truly global vision.” This was one of the crucial factors that led to the collapse of European hegemony. In the Algerian war of independence, Algerian guerrillas defeated a French army with an overwhelming numerical, technological and economic advantage. The Algerians prevailed because they were supported by a global anticolonial network and because they worked out how to harness the world's media to their cause as well as public opinion in France itself. The defeat that little North Vietnam inflicted on the American colossus was based on a similar strategy. These guerrilla forces showed that even superpowers could be defeated if a local struggle became a global cause. 

Michael: Basically, they changed their mindset. 

Peter: I like that. The idea that the Vietnamese were like, [Michael laughs] we must expand our mind, let's think global. 

Michael: You could argue that some of the decolonization wave in Africa in the 50s and 60s was because countries and independence movements were looking at independence of other countries. They're like, “Oh, hey, this is possible for us.” But these were fundamentally nationalist movements. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: I just read a book about the history of the Vietnam War. Ho Chi Minh was much more of a nationalist than he was a communist. The reason they succeeded was not because of a global vision. It was because Vietnamese people care more about what happens to Vietnam than the Americans or the French. 

Peter: There is a narrative, of course, that this is all part of a global anticolonial struggle or whatever, but that's not what drives it on the ground. I think it's the opposite. 

Michael: There's also, I mean, a lot of stuff about how France was totally decimated by World War II. It was fucking broke. Domestic politicians were super unpopular for trying to send a bunch of money and a bunch of effort over to Algeria. People were just really sick of it and it didn't make logistical sense. There's also just nonideological reasons for this too.

Peter: Right. 

Michael: I wouldn't say nationalism is the only reason why this happened, but it's also very silly to say that the mindset shift is the only reason why it happened. 

Peter: The Japanese, notably insular, that starts unraveling in the 1800s, I think, not the 1900s. I don't know. I feel his timeline is just made up. 

Michael: This is the problem. If you have specific historical knowledge of a single country, you're like, “I don't know about that.” 

Peter: Yeah, no, I'm literally like, well, I did Japanese politics in my senior year of college and this does not align with what I learned. 

Michael: But you see, once he's locked himself into this mindset explanation, he needs to bring this one, this really pat explanation up to the present somehow. And so, he throws in this stuff that is just laughable. 

Peter: I mean, I am just eyeballing this. 

Michael: Also, what he is doing, also what he is doing also.

Peter: But if you had to choose between which is a larger factor in these struggles, nationalism or a global mindset, I'd say nationalism by a mile. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. So, I think that is one of the reasons why this book has some fairly bad politics. The other reason is that he has this need to place himself above politics. He has to operate at this 30,000-foot level all the time. So, he has another section about colonialism that is a little bit more detailed. He talks much more about the British. So, here's this.

Peter: The British conquest and occupation of India cost the lives of millions of Indians and was responsible for the continuous humiliation and exploitation of hundreds of millions more. Yet many Indians adopted with the zest of converts, Western ideas such as self-determination and human rights and were dismayed when the British refused to live up to their own declared values by granting native Indians ideas either equal rights as British subjects or independence. The modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire. English is still the subcontinent's lingua franca. Indians are passionate cricket players and tea drinkers. And both game and beverage are British legacies. How many Indians today would want to call a vote to divest themselves of democracy? English, the railway network, the legal system, cricket and tea on the grounds that they are imperial legacies. 

And if they did, wouldn't the very act of calling a vote to decide the issue demonstrate their debt to their former overlords. [laughs] I like creating a pseudo hypocrisy strawman. 

Michael: He has photos throughout the book and one of the photo captions is of this train station in Mumbai that was built by the British in the 1800s. And he's like the modern-day rulers changed the name but they kept the building. It's just expensive to build new buildings, man. I don't think it's hypocrisy. 

Peter: This stuff always gets presented as if it is like a necessary trade off. Like as if you needed the colonial violence to get the tea and cricket. It just doesn't make any fucking sense. I hate this fucking bullshit, dude. I hate this, like, well, when you think about it, wasn't it good that we-- that's all that this is like, well, wasn't it kind of good? Or at least wasn't it good enough that maybe we don't have to feel bad about it? 

Michael: It's very funny that he has this whole thing about how farming was a mistake. 

Peter: Right. When it comes to colonial violence. He's like, “But now they're playing cricket,” so who knows? 

Michael: [laughs] I do want to dive a little bit more into this one. This is also the thing that struck me and also it's been a pet peeve of mine, this idea that, like, human rights are western concepts, right? And without us, these countries wouldn't have democracy and human rights. So, for this I read a really interesting article called “Are Human Rights Western” by Arvind Sharma. And also, “Are the Principles of Human Rights Western Ideas” by Surya P. Subedi. The argument that he's making is frankly pretty asinine regardless. But India is the worst possible place that you could make this argument about. We have written records from India from thousands of years ago. We have Sanskrit records. India has one of the longest human rights traditions of any region of the world. 

So, early Indian republics were some of the first places to have democracy. Hinduism was one of the first religions to refuse to make the distinction between believers and nonbelievers and basically admit the equality of all peoples, even if they are not the same religion as us. This is something that Christianity took 2000 more years to do. In the 4th century BC, there's something called the Arthashastra, which was an early description of how constitutional monarchy should work. 

Peter: I feel people act like democracy was the most novel concept ever as opposed to something that ruling classes oppose. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Peter: It's not 2000 years ago people didn't understand the concept of humans having input into their own lives. 

Michael: Totally. Yeah. 

Peter: And frankly, if you put me in a blank slate, civilization in 2020, [Michael laughs] by 2025, I think I would have thought of democracy. I just remembered that I was running that bit. [laughs]

Michael: But what they point out in these articles is that like every ancient civilization basically came to this on their own. 

Peter: Right? 

Michael: In this article, she says, if we look at the practices of all major ancient civilizations, we find that every one of them had a system designed to protect the individual safety and dignity both in times of war and peace. So, this isn't something that you need tens of millions of people to be starved to death by the British to get. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: The other fucking bizarre thing about this argument is that, like, “Well, you may not like it, but the Brits brought concepts of human rights and democracy to India.” Brits were not practicing human rights India. Like, I'm beating my wife and I'm like, well, from me she learned the principle of nonviolence. 

Peter: Right. This is the funniest part of these arguments that through violent subjugation, we somehow taught them human rights. It's like, “Yeah, not in practice, but we had the books about it.” 

Michael: These guys have these amazing principles which they are not practicing on me. It's just so insulting on its face, right? But he has to be above it all. So, at the end of the section, he's talking about sort of like various debates about colonialism. He says the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. This refusal to take a stand on various contemporary political debates leads you to say, “It's impossible to say whether starving 10 million people to death is bad.” 

Peter: Yeah, that's the thing is you don't need to do this whole good guy, bad guy thing. 

Michael: Yeah. I actually don't need him to go out of his way to be like, colonialism, which was bad, but he is going out of his way to say that it's not bad.

Peter: When you're thinking about the legacy of Andrew Jackson or whatever. Like, you don't have to hand it to him. 

Michael: It seems like he's coming into every single one of these things and just being like, I have to position myself as not taking a stand on this. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: And then he reasons his way into that. 

Peter: Well, you have one side of the scale and it's the deaths of millions of people, and the other side of the scale is a stupid form of baseball that doesn't make any fucking sense. [Michael laughs] What if you fucking toss the baseball on the ground.

Michael: And it took five days-

[laughter] 

we are going to be here for a work week? [Peter laughs] So, I have a couple other examples of his weird, above it all orientation. So, here is a section on climate change. 

Peter: Oh, so heat's bad,

Michael: And yet we use it to bake. 

Peter: He says, “Why are so many people afraid that we are running out of energy? Why do they warn of disaster if we exhaust all available fossil fuels.” Clearly, the world does not lack energy. All we lack is the knowledge necessary to harness and convert it to our needs. 

Michael: I love him. I've come back around. [laughs] I like it now. 

Peter: I guess that's why I've literally never heard someone say, “We're running out of energy.” 

Michael: They mean that as a shorthand, we're running out of fossil fuels and burning fossil fuels is bad. 

Peter: God damn, dude, he's pissing me off. 

Michael: I was going to use this as a satire of him, but this actually does appear in the book. So, here's another one, also about climate change. 

Peter: He says, “Many call this process, the destruction of nature. But it's not really destruction, it's change.” Nature cannot be destroyed. 65 million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in doing so opened the way forward for mammals. Today, a single theme park has brought them back to life. 

[laughter] 

Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday.” 

Michael: You fucking idiot. You think climate change is bad? 

Peter: You're worried about human beings and mammals. 

Michael: What about the rats? 

Peter: What about cockroaches? 

Michael: Cockroaches are thriving. 

Peter: The heat death of the universe isn't going to eliminate nature. There will still be nature. It will just be an eternal nothing. 

Michael: It's like, “Who are you even arguing with here? What is the point? What are you correcting?” And like, “What have you added to the debate?” Like, “Okay, fine, it's not destroying nature, it's changing nature. Fine, okay, now what?” 

Peter: God, my theory reigns supreme. This is just a really pedantic guy on a forum in the aughts who has somehow broken through, he has made it to mainstream discourse. 

Michael: So, the final parts of the book are just like him talking about the future, right? Of, like, the future of humanity, Homo sapiens. What does the present mean for Homo sapiens? 

So, because he goes around predicting the future now, I thought it was useful to look at some of the predictions that he makes in this book. So, his first prediction. I'll just send it to you. 

Peter: As the 21st century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. Oops.

Michael: Nailed it. 

Peter: More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority rather than members of a particular nationality. And that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics. 

Michael: We're not going to have nationalism, folks. 

Peter:  You just got end of history, buddy. [Michael laughs] Like this is 2011. He writes these 20 years after the Soviet Union collapses. And you're just like, “This is forever.” 

Michael: This is a guy that goes around high altitude panels and shit, talking about what is going to happen in 50 or 100 years. And here's him totally fucking up a prediction about what happened five years after his book. 

Peter: This is also one of those things that we've talked about before which is no one is good at these sorts of predictions. 

Michael: No. 

Peter: Some people will get it right, but that's because there's a lot of people out there predicting it. 

Michael: So, he also says this in 2017. 

Peter: So, in this struggle against calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, scales are tipping in humanity's favor. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them in the service of some ruthless ideology. 

Michael: Early lab leak truther. 

Peter: The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over, but we may come to miss it. 

Michael: Wasn't it fun when we had epidemics? 

Peter: Well, no, he is correct in the sense that we did not stand helpless. Were we grossly incompetent and a big bunch of fucking dummies? [Michael laughs] Yes, but were not helpless. 

Michael: So, once the pandemic starts, a lot of news organizations contact him to be like, “What do you think this means for the future?” Like a lot of people ask him to predict stuff. He says the worst thing to come out of the pandemic will be a massive government surveillance state. So, here is him in the FT in 2020. 

Peter: Consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart rate 24 hours a day. The resulting data is hoarded and analyzed by government algorithms. The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it. And they will also know where you have been and who you have met. 

Michael: I think it's safe to say this did not happen. 

Peter: No.

Michael: The sort of conventional wisdom was that like “Countries were going to use these emergency orders to just keep various surveillance programs in place.” This really did not happen. Like even China, which had one of the most strict COVID lockdowns, did not keep it right. It became politically unviable in most of these countries. What we had was a bottom-up overreaction to non-totalitarianism. This totalitarian crackdown that never came. 

Peter: But how do you know that it wasn't that reaction that freed us [Michael laughs] from the crackdowns? 

Michael: Well, this is what's so interesting to me is like he writes this long essay for the FT predicting what's going to happen. At no point does he say anything about misinformation, anything about existing antivax movements. He has like completely fucked this up. He is obsessed with this idea of biometric surveillance that we now have the technology where government could monitor your body temperature and your heart rate. 

Peter: Do we have this technology? 

Michael: I mean, theoretically, if you have an Apple Watch or something, theoretically, the government could hack into that. I guess the problem with this is that like monitoring your body temperature and your heart rate wouldn't give a government very much information. 

Peter: It's just like Michael's jacking off again. [Michael laughs] 99% of the data is just guys jacking off. 

Michael: It's so weird how the predictions that he makes in Sapiens are almost the same as the predictions that he makes now, despite many things changing in the interim. So, he also, in an interview, he mentions we may have biometric monitoring that is so good that it could have predicted his own homosexuality before he realized it. That it might be so good at these little micro expressions on your face like your little webcam, whatever. 

Peter: Yeah, your fucking gay little micro expressions. 

Michael: Your gay ass face. He says North Korea might be able to “gauge” what each and every citizen is thinking in each and every moment. 

Peter: How?

Michael:  So? Like, if you're looking at a portrait of Kim Jong Un, it could tell that you're not being deferential enough or worshipy enough. This is just not technology that exists remotely. 

Peter: It's like you're worrying about Minority Report and it's like we're so far from that technology that any concern you have is almost inherently misplaced. 

Michael: There's a good article in Current Affairs called The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari by Darshana Narayanan, who interviews an actual researcher who does work on this who points out that the problem with all of this stuff is everybody's biometric markers are different. And so, what affects your blood pressure and affects my blood pressure it might be you being happy and me being sad. People are so different that we can't really do this kind of thing. We're nowhere near being able to do this. He also has a bizarre thing about a genetic catalog that parents would be able to find out that their daughter's going to have chronic depression. 

Peter: Your son is gay. 

Michael: [laughs] But again, it's we don't really have a gene for depression or a gene for gayness. That isn't really how genes work. It's like probabilities. 

Peter: I love that he puts it in terms of his own homosexuality where he's like, “If only the government had told me that I'm gay.” 

Michael: Also, the funny thing is, if you want to know if somebody's gay, you can look at their fucking Google search history. [Peter laughs] You don't need to monitor body heat or whatever. 

Peter: He's a teenager who's just jacking off to gay porn. He's like, “Am I? I don't know.” 

[laughter]

Your government bracelet is like, “Yes.” 

Michael: Also, I don't know if you remember, but in the initial thing that we read, this overview of the book, he says we now stand poised on the verge of achieving everlasting life. I want you to read something from Homo Deus, which is his book. After Sapiens, he's going to refer to two people here, Kurzweil and De Grey. Both of those guys are a huge fucking bag of worms. But the only thing you need to know is that they're both basically tech guys who have startups dedicated to exploring immortality essentially. 

Peter: When he released Sapiens, he probably was like, let's call it Homo Sapiens. And the publisher was like, “Let's keep the word homo out of it.” But then he sold millions of copies and he was like, “For book two,” he was like, “We're putting homo in the title.” 

Michael: He's like, Elon with X.com, he's like, “We're doing it. [Peter laughs] It didn't take last time.”

Peter: I have the power now and I'm putting homo in the title. [Michael laughs]

Michael: Okay, so here's this. 

Peter: Some experts believe that humans will overcome death by 2200 others say 2100. 

Michael: I'm agnostic about whether we get to everlasting life super soon or in like a medium term. 

Peter: Maybe this is my limited imagination, but I'm pretty sure that we're not going to ever solve death. 

Michael: This is another superpower of the book is because you're making predictions for fucking 2100 and 2200. Yeah, I can't really debunk that. Because who fucking knows where we'll be at that time. 

Peter: What if we figure out extending life way before we figure out the biometric that tells you you're gay [Michael laughs] and you're just a 200-year-old guy and the government's like, “You are gay.”

Michael: I'm just a body and a breathing machine. 

Peter: Yeah. You're a floating head in a jar [Michael laughs] and you find out you're gay. Kurzweil and De Grey are even more sanguine. They maintain that anyone possessing a healthy body and a healthy bank account in 2050 will have a serious shot at immortality by cheating death a decade at a time, for sure. Every 10 years or so, we will march into the clinic and receive a makeover treatment that will not only cure illnesses, but will also regenerate decaying tissues and upgrade hands, eyes, and brains before the next treatment is due, doctors will have invented a plethora of new medicines, upgrades, and gadgets. If Kurzweil and De Grey are right, there may already be some immortals walking next to you on the street. At least, if you happen to be walking down Wall Street or Fifth Avenue. 

Michael: Pretty convincing stuff, 2050. 

Peter: We're all about to get the measles again. But, yeah.

Michael: [laughs] The thing is, I mean, me and Aubrey talk about this on Maintenance Phase, all the time, but this whole thing of rich guys saying that we're on the verge of cheating death. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Michael:  It's very telling that both of these guys run startups that make money from the idea that we're going to cheat debt. These are marketing claims. 

Peter: That millionaire guy who's in his 40s who's rubbing his child semen on his face or whatever the fuck he's doing. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Peter: In every interview, he's like, “This is how I've mastered looking 20 years younger.” And it's like, “Actually, dude, just I hate to break it to you, but you look like shit.” 

Michael: You look two thirds as good as 80% of the circuit gays in their 40s right now. Congratulations. 

Peter: I know guys who are fully addicted to cocaine who look better than you. 

Michael: I feel like both of these guys are just getting grifted by their own doctors. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: Bryan Johnson, his doctors are charging him $1,000 an hour. When you look at his actual regime, it's literally just intermittent fasting and a shitload of vitamin supplements. You're not going to live forever on more vitamins. 

Peter: It feels a lot like you're going to die soon. That's just the vibes I have. 

Michael: So, I don't know. You can't really debunk this stuff because, again, it's so far in the fucking future that whatever, maybe we'll have a everlasting life. I don't give a shit. But these predictions for the future and the way that he presents them unlocked for me what he is doing for these Davos people and why he is so popular among this set. So, it's really interesting to me and really telling that all of his predictions for the future he couches in progressive terms. He's like, “If you have the money, you'll have everlasting life.” And he sounds very concerned about it. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: A lot of the other guys that we've talked about, they're basically fleecing poor people. The rich dad, poor dad guy is telling you, you can buy real estate. He's taking advantage of ignorance. Whereas Yuval Harari is talking to some of the most powerful and rich people in the world. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: And I don't think that he's fleecing them. I think that he's giving them something. I think what he is giving them is a way to feel they are engaging in progressive debates. They are a good person because they're so concerned about inequality in a hundred years. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: All of the people who Yuval Harari is talking to are beneficiaries of huge inequality now. And none of these people are doing anything about inequality. That's what he is giving them. A license to pull back from present politics and to act like they are not only above present politics. Oh, who cares who wins the next election in the 500-year timeline? It doesn't matter if Donald Trump wins again. He's giving them that, but also letting them still feel like they care. They're like, “I'm super concerned about inequality. I talked about inequality all day.” 

Peter: This is sort of like Elon Musk spoilers, but it's something I've been thinking about, reading his biography. A lot of these rich guys, they replace the concept of philanthropy with the prospect that innovation will at one point in the future solve a lot of these problems. So, yeah, I don't put money toward inequality, but we're building these little robots that are going to usher in a golden age. 

Michael: You also get to feel smart while you're doing this. Because again, this above it all orientation. 

Peter: Anyone can give money away. 

Michael: Right. And also, you're concerned about climate change. I'm actually concerned about when the sun becomes a red giant and swallows the earth. 

Peter: True.

Michael: I'm actually a bit more moral than you for trying to solve this problem. And you're just focused on climate change. 

Peter: You're worried about minutia.

Michael: Right, right, exactly. 

Peter: Politics now are for the little people and-

Michael: They are totally.

Peter: -they're just haggling over little details. We are the guys who are thinking about the big problems and we're going to solve them and blah, blah, blah. 

Michael: The other thing that really bugs me about this whole Davos set is like, I think because they fetishize ideas so much like, we want the next big idea. But the solutions to inequality, we already know on the merits what the solution is. You tax rich people and you give money to various programs that help poor people. 

Peter: Business. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Credits to small businesses that you earn over a five-year period. 

Michael: Are any of these people doing anything about cuts to SNAP right now, cuts to Medicare? 

Peter: They pontificate about a future where this is feasible, but at every point when it might be, when it's like, “Hey, couldn't we just give people a couple grand?” All of the Davos people will wring their hands and talk about how it's a mistake. 

Michael: And find an excuse to be against it. 

Peter: That is how it has always worked and is almost certainly how it's always going to work until we, through a series of podcasts, overthrow capitalism. 

Michael: [laughs] So, ending of the book we have a chapter called “How to Be Happy.” He talks about the question of whether all of this advancement over the course of human history has really made us any better off. He settles at the end of the book on a Buddhist solution to happiness. 

Peter: Is this another Sam Harris thing where he's just like, by the way, I've enjoyed meditating. 

Michael: Literally Peter. This is where he goes with this. He is officially an atheist, but he talks a lot about Buddhism and he meditates two hours a day. 

Peter: Two hours a day. 

Michael: If feminism can be a religion, then I feel like me watching YouTube for two hours a day can be meditating. 

Peter: It's meditative for me to scroll through TikTok and see half sports highlights and half mentally ill 24-year-olds telling me about politics. 

Michael: He ends this chapter in the book with this-- He's pretending like this isn't advice, but it basically is advice. So, here is this.

Peter: Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them and the more we suffer. Buddha's recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements but also the pursuit of inner feelings. Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes. They consequently spend their life avoiding some kinds of feelings and pursuing others. They never realize that they are not their feelings, that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery. 

Michael: Okay, final paragraph of the book. So, this is after he talks about, like “We're going to live forever.” All the ways that science is making Homo sapiens irrelevant. 

Peter: The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking, since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too. Perhaps the real question facing us is not what do we want to become? But what do we want to want? Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought. 

Michael: What do you think about this weird ending? 

Peter: He's posed some interesting existential questions. What do you want to want is an interesting way to frame this stuff, but in the context of the end of this book, I'm doing the jack off motion. Fuck off with this. 

Michael: I sort of love it because it is both utterly incoherent and totally perfect as an ending to this book. He's looking across the vast scope of history, all of humanity, tens of thousands of years, and the only way he can think to end the story is with an individual prescription to disengage. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Why are you even seeking happiness? 

Peter: Look inward. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. You should just get rid of the desire to be happy. And honestly, if his faith is important to him, if his idea is important to him, that's totally fine. But as an organizing principle of a society and as anything with any scale, you're just telling people to basically disengage and to disengage in a way that presents themselves as above it all. And lets them tell the story about themselves of like, “Oh, you're trying to be happy.” Well, I've actually graduated from that kind of thinking. I'm actually so much more mature than that. 

Peter: Yeah. It seems like he's talking in very material, dumb and bull-shitty but material terms about the future of humanity. He's like, “We can potentially extend life.” And then, like, just stumbles his way into, like, “Yeah, I don't know. Free yourself from want. I got to go.” 

[laughter] 

And then I guess that's it.

Michael: That is what it feels like, he just came up with this and was like, “Oh, yeah, okay.” 

Peter: I've been writing a lot this year because I have the newsletter and shit. And so, I totally get it. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: You've gotten through Part 1 and 2 and you're like, “How do I wrap this bitch? Time to hit him with the way too broad conclusion.” 

Michael:  Yeah, yeah. You've been recording your podcast for four and a half hours. You're like, “How do I get out of this?” I just need a fucking little joke to end with. Who cares? 

Peter: The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves? 

Michael: I mean, what is it? 

Peter: And that's why we need the government thing that tells you whether you're gay or not. [Michael laughs] Mandatory bracelets and the only purpose they serve is to tell your sexuality.

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