Name: Yuval Noah Harari Explains How Understanding Stories is a Superpower
Uploaded: 2022-10-19T18:13:07.000Z
Duration: 8 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

I'm so happy that you're here and now we're so happy that you're here in the studio and finally in person, it's glorious.

Is it meeting with presidents or Ceos or being here in front of a studio audience?

Definitely being here because when you meet the president and Ceo and you say something stupid, I mean, they are the only ones that the period and they I've heard many stupid things in their life so they forget it.

But if I say something stupid here, you know, it's on television, everybody hears it and it never goes away.

Why was it important for you to write a book for younger readers?

Because I wanted to really help them understand the world and help them understand who they are?

You know, this is the biggest question maybe in the life of every kid.

And you know, the world is so complicated and sometimes frightening.

Like I I remember that as a kid, I would wake up in the middle of the night afraid of is a monster under the bed.

And this is actually a memory, historical memory from tens of thousands of years ago when our aunt sisters lived in the wild and there were actually monsters that came to eat kids in the night a lion would come to eat you.

And if you woke up in here and ran away or called your mom, you had a chance of surviving.

So knowing this, that it's not, it's not something about, you know, you personally, it's part of what makes us human.

And the book also connected to, it's not just about the stone Age and tens of thousands of years ago, it's about what's happening right now.

You know, you have all these books about lions and elephants and whales, which are really important.

But kids rarely actually meet a lion today, but they meet, say corporations every day they meet google and Tiktok and facebook and Mcdonald's and Disney and they need to understand what a corporation is and how to be aware of the dangers when encountering a corporation, which is today far more dangerous than a lion.

So you think it's more dangerous than the lion.

I mean when was the last time that A Lion in Los Angeles?

I heard some kids, but you know, Tiktoker Mcdonald's, they can be very dangerous.

So it's important I think for history to connect the past with the present and the book tries to explain for instance, what is a cooperation, which is something quite complicated.

You know, it's basically just an imaginary story in the stone Age you had, we had shamans who told us stories about spirits and ghosts, which we believed and basically today we have our own shamans, the lawyers and the bankers and they tell us a story about fictional entities called corporations and we believe them and they become the most powerful, some of the most powerful forces in the world.

I mean when you're on a book tour with with a book like this, is it more fun going on a book tour when you've written a kid's book, do you encounter different things?

You encounter different questions from young people?

Yes, some quite unexpected questions like, I don't know, this one kid asked me, I mean, is there a danger that the baboons will evolve and become smarter than us and take over the world and then look us in the zoos And you're saying that's a silly question, okay, I would be worried about the rats, not the baboons.

The book covers essentially thousands of years of human development.

The central argument is that we've got a superpower that's allowed us to rule the planet.

Well, the superpower is our ability to invent and believe fictional stories, Fairy Tales, which doesn't sound like much of a superpower, but actually this is what enables us to cooperate flexibly in very, very large numbers millions of people cooperate because they all believe in the same story.

You know, chimpanzees can cooperate like 50 chimpanzees or harm a chimpanzees.

You can never convince a million chimpanzees to come together to build a cathedral or to fight a war or to build a spaceship to the moon by convincing them in some story in some mythology, but this is the way that we cooperate and again, it's not just religious mythologies, it's also the economic system.

I mean, corporations, as I said before, there are just a fictional entity.

No other animal on the planet is even aware that corporations exist similarly.

Money is probably the most successful story ever told.

It's not it doesn't have any objective value, like, I don't know, bananas and coconuts and things like that, but we have the greatest storytellers in the world, which are not the people who win the Nobel Prize in literature, it's the people who win the Nobel prize in economics and they tell us a story and it's basically the only story everybody believes and it's worked so successfully that I take this worthless piece of paper and go to the supermarket to a stranger I never met before in my life, and I give them this worthless piece of paper and they give me bananas that I can actually eat, and this is something that chimps can't do, and this is why we control the world and not the chimpanzees.

And if you think about a place like the United States today, when people are having so much trouble agreeing on anything, but they still agree on money.

It's kind of maybe the last line of communication that they agree on the prices.

And the amazing thing about it, it's only in our head, it doesn't come from the laws of physics or biology, it's just a story that people invented.

I mean, obviously the midterms are coming up soon and there's a countless I feel like the last 45 years, six years even actually has been a fear of the state of democracy.

You know, it's such a polarized country are polarized world.

How does democracy survive when two halves of the country are absolutely telling each other different stories, they can't survive.

I mean, democracy is a kind of system that it's like a rare plant, it can't survive under every condition many conditions when it's simply impossible, dictatorship can survive.

In most cases, it's like a weed that grows everywhere.

And one of the preconditions is that the people in the country, they can see each other as their political rivals, but not as their enemies when two halves of a nation increasingly see the other half as their enemy that is out to get them to destroy their way of life.

Democracy just can't survive in this situation.

You will do anything to win the elections, legal or illegal and if you lose, you don't accept the results?

How does a country, the size of America even begin to fix that problem.

And do you think it's something that should be at the forefront of whoever is the next President of United States?

Yes, I think this is the biggest threat to the United States right now, is the threat to the democratic system itself.

But there is a chance that the next presidential election would be the last democratic election in U.

What percentage would you put on that chance?

It was not like that 10 or 20 years ago and it's a one way street.

I mean, it's quite easy to kind of for democracy to disintegrate into some kind of authoritarian regime.

You know, whether on the level of a country or the entire species, it's the future is not written anywhere.

It's the outcome of the decisions all of us make in the coming days and weeks and months, there is no responsible adult up there.

That if we make the wrong decisions will intervene to save us from ourselves.

If we make the wrong, the really wrong decisions, it will be up to the rights.