the big problem of science is science is not a very good Storyteller but humans are motivated to action by the stories not by the facts what are the main uh issues that concern voters in the United States in Europe in other part of the world so immigration is one of the top issues everywhere whereas climate change many people just deny it the attraction of immigration is it's again it's a biological drama the drama that we live in One Tribe and suddenly somebody comes from another tribe to our territory this is something that is familiar to
shanes and to wolves and to rabbits oh there is these strange rabbits coming here they will take our our grass they understand it it's very very deep for [Music] welcome to the book of my life my name is Yaga marinich I'm a writer and host of the show and I'm happy to lead you through a conversation about books life and the world my today's guest is a very special guest who's deeply into explaining and understanding this world welcome to the show yual Harari thank you it's good to be here it's good to have you here
and I'm very curious cuz I have been yeah listening to your interviews reading your books like so many people and I'm interesting to find out about the role that reading played in your life when did you understand that books will have this important role that they have in your life I began to read it at a very early age I think the first book I've read surprisingly enough was a history of the world for for children this this huge huge book full of of of images and and uh uh um you know paintings and I
can still kind of remember now many of the images in in that book about people in the Stone Age and Medieval Nights on on Crusade and things like that and do you remember your age I was like four years old at first I just looked at the pictures I didn't read the book and I asked my my my my parents to help me decipher what what are the signs next to next to the pictures and then I I read it like I don't know probably hundreds of times like I would go over it again and
again and again from history went actually to mythology so I had another book which really influenced me which was I think Edith Hamilton's uh Greek mythology and it had no pictures in it this was just just text just words but the words formed this also incredible incredibly powerful images of you know people turning into trees and gods creating things out of out of nothing and um it really kind of lit up my my imagination how old were you then probably it was a few years later uh I suppose I was like seven maybe seven or
eight so may I try to imagine this young seven-year-old boy so I mean you must have had tons of other books with fairy tales and and things that are more child appropriate as we say today and um but then what what stick to your fantasy as a kid was actually the real history and the mythology the two things I'm still de dealing with right now as as an author and as a scholar right yeah but you know these are the ways that we try to explain the world to ourselves um and were you fascinated by
the others other books as well or were you so focused as a child already no I read a lot of books I mean I've read basically every book we had in we we didn't have a big library at home but we had a couple of I guess dozen books quite eclectic and I I just read all of them I mean without exception some quite strange ones I guess as well do you remember the funniest book you read as a kid the book made me laugh ah there weren't many fun I the were couple of books
by an an Israeli satirist fly Kishon so we had like two or three of his books and I also read and reread them quite a number and they were funny but probably they they had not not as much as impact as the mythology in the history so for many people you either like science or you like the storytelling so with you it was very early that you seem to want to connect these things so let me first understand why was mythology so important for you as a kid yeah it it was instinctive it was just
you know trying to understand the world and the way that humans try to understand the world uh at first was mythology I mean this is the way that people thousands of years ago try to understand why the things are as they are the mysteries of the universe of the human body of the human mind so mythology was the main vehicle and um humans are our story telling animals we think in stories so that they come more easily to us it's much when when you reach say the 21st century and you read the latest books about
say quantum mechanics uh trying to explain to you how the universe works on a physical level or you read books in in cell biology and genetics this is this is so complicated I mean our brains are really not really evolved or adapted to thinking in those terms this is why you need to kind of spend years and years in University and rely on complex mathematical equations and even then it's like it's at a distance you it's extremely difficult to actually internalize what this means because it's not the way that our minds function that's something that
you like to stress that that it's more complex than many people would like to have it much more complex than mythology I mean you know the basic and when I think about science and I think about mythology what strikes me is science is far far more imaginative far more wild far more surprising than any mythology that humans ever managed to create most human mythology is taking the basic um you know dramas from our personal lives and just kind of inflating them so you know the guy Gods like in Greek mythology they're basically a squabbling family
and the type of arguments that as a kid maybe you hear between your father and mother so you read it in the mythology this is Zeus and Hera or the way that they fight and or punish the the the children and you know this goes even to to the deepest lays of of later say Jewish and Christian mythology that um the the entire kind of Jewish identity is saying that we are father's favorite children that's it which is the type of thing that you know in every family kids would scrubble father loves me more than
he loves you and you find entire nations that build their identity around this story or you think about how Christian Theologian theologians explain what hell is so you know on the on one level they will say Okay demons roast you alive in burning sulfur and fire for millions of years but then on a deeper level they will say hell is being cut off disconnected from God uh which is the deepest fear of every child and actually of every mammal Offspring to lose touch with the parents because if an offspring of a mammal a human being
or a chimpanzee or a porcupine or a dolphin loses connection with their mother or with their parents they die there is nobody to provide food there is nobody to take care of them so you know the you can you can think of the whole of this kind of Christian theology basically the idea of a lost child crying for their parents and so in this sense I mean mythology is very deep emotionally but in terms of understanding the universe there is something very shallow about it because it simply takes the I would say the biological dramas
that uh have been scripted by Evolution about the life of Children and Families and and and friendships and just kind of inflates it to think this is the whole universe works like my family the whole universe works like our village and things like quantum mechanics say no they don't I mean uh a certain part of the universe like the again the the the biological lives of mammals they work that way but most of the universe doesn't even if you just move from mammals like this rabbit here yeah it's really this rabbit it doesn't move anymore
yeah for the mammals simply you take a small step to the reptiles it's already completely different story like you think about I don't know turtles so you have this kind of image of the turtle mother uh coming from the sea she digs a hole in the sand She lays there eggs I don't know like 40 or 50 eggs she covers the whole and then she goes back to Sea and that's it this is what Freud would have to deal with if he was treating turtles yeah because there is no longer any connection afterwards between the
the mother has done her bit mhm she's not a mammal so she doesn't suckle the young she doesn't protect them nothing she's in the sea doing her things forgot about it and then a couple of weeks later the the young Turtles the baby turtles come out and they go out to the Sea and then all these birds come and eat them and all these fish come and eat them and maybe out of the 50 Turtles maybe two or three survive and they will be the next Generation they have never any con contion with their certainly
not with their father and also not with their mother so what would Turtle mythology be like like this whole fear of Christian theology maybe I'm cut off for my father it makes no sense to Turtles and this Jewish Obsession father loves us more than anybody else it makes no s sense to turtles turtle parents don't love their children at all for us are are like the deepest core of our psychology ology and you still have wars like the wars raging right now in my country the war between Israelis and Palestinians it's still fueled by this
biological mythological drama that we are God's favorite children both sides but isn't that which humans claim makes them so special the fact that they can invent a story the fact that they can connect differently and imagine differently so yeah what's different from in in us from rabbit and probably even elephant and chimpanzees is that we with language we can create stories yeah but and and we have incredible imagination but the thing is that the basic scripts of the imaginations of our stories of our imagination are still constrained by our Maman biology so you have these
incredibly complex mythologies and poems and movies and TV series but when you look at what is the actual plot the actual plot is taken from biology it's taken it's something that in essence even the rabbits will understand so whether not sure whether it's Christian theology whether it's you know the the the the plays of Shakespeare whether it's I don't know like TV series like succession have have you watched the succession I don't watch series cuz I find I feel like I've seen them all know I I understand because it's actually like you know there there
are 10 plots that Evolution scripted and we kind of just retell the same plots again and again in incredible variations but they are the same basic plots I agree and science Works outside these plots I mean quantum mechanics is not a biological drama it's so different from anything in our kind of experience as children as family members as members of a of a community that again with the help of mathematics and with the help of computers we can somehow approach it and so much of the world is built on top of these uh uh scientific
theories and models but um you know psychologically and also politically they leave us completely cold you it's very hard to inspire people to do anything uh by telling that them E equals mc² or by showing them the equations of quantum mechanics yeah because they do need for Action they do still need the activation of the biological drama that's what you say yeah and for good or for bad it can you know it it can lead to the act of Charity and compassion and incredible bravery and it can lead to to Wars and persecution and you
know almost all persecutions in the world whether of ethnic minorities whether of gay people whether of anybody it's basically taking the disgust mechanism which again Evolution provided all mammals including rabbits with a disgust mechanism because you know especially as children we like to explore the world and we explore the world a lot with our mouth we try to eat different things and uh if we eat something poisonous or a source of Evolution that could make us sick we could die so Evolution equipped us with a disgust mechanism this disgust mechanism is quite flexible so often
parents need to teach children what to be disgusted from like that feces or or somebody vomited or things like that oh this is disgusting before we go into the books you brought want to know one thing you must have been s or 11 when you read those mythological stories and you didn't know anything you were not the the smart man you are today so you were a kid finding out first so what was it back then that that that moved your energy into fascination of Mythology what was the feeling you could connect with um again
it's I think it's it's the the the kind of Yearning to understand how the world works so the myth did give you a feeling that you are getting deeper into knowledge about the world yes you know it's a question whether it's uh whether it's misleading or whether it really gives you insight into at least uh um how part of the universe works uh but of course myth is also very dangerous it's very tempting but it's very dangerous as as I mentioned earlier I mean people fight entire Wars and kill millions of people just because of
Mythology so it's an extremely uh powerful but dangerous did you feel that back then that it's dangerous also at the age I don't know seven or eight I was just fascinated by the stories I mean you don't you don't understand how it really kind of shapes your mind decades to the Future these fairy tales and legends and mythologies and you obviously don't understand the kind of dangerous political and social constructs that are built on top of these mythologies you often then spend your entire life BAS basically unlearning these fairy tales and myth that you've heard
as a young child I mean they're incredibly powerful fear creating also this is how then you then look at the world when you're 20 when you're 40 when you're 16 and uh if you're fed the uh the wrong Stories the wrong mythologies then 50 years later you're Putin this can lead to the death and and uh a misery of millions of people it all starts in the mind very few words in history were about objective things or problems in the world people think uh that people fight for the same reason that rabbits and turtles and
chimpanzees fight that we fight over food and we fight over territory and this is almost never the case we are over the last few years we have become so powerful as a species that it's not difficult to provide our basic biological needs um we don't really need to fight over territory and we don't really need to fight over food or resources again if I look at my country the Israeli Palestinian conflict it's not about land there is enough land between the Mediterranean in Jordan to build houses and and schools for everybody it's definitely not about
food there is enough food there is enough water there is enough energy there is all the objective resources there is enough but uh in the mind of people they believe in in fantasies in mythologies in stories that are incompatible and and they they say both sides say God gave us this whole place we cannot compromise on God's love we cannot compromise on God's gift I mean it was if it was up to us no problem we we can give you half but God gave it we can't we can't overrule what God Said but is there
also a dilemma in your own work research thinking that on the one hand you see the mythology as a critical um energy let's say in in in in our common Collective Consciousness but on the other hand you also say that the most people do not react to the facts in science the big problem of science is science is not a very good Storyteller but humans are motivated to action by the stories not by the facts what are the main uh issues that concern voters in the United States in Europe in other part of the world
so immigration is one of the top issues everywhere whereas climate change many people just deny it the attraction of immigration is it's again it's a biological drama the drama that we live in One Tribe and suddenly somebody comes from another tribe to our territory this is something that is familiar to chimpanzees and to wolves and to rabbits oh there is these strange rabbits coming here they will take our our grass they understand it it's very very deep but though on the level of myth the extinction of Mankind through natural disaster has also been a biological
drama at display in the Bible you know so I wonder why in with immigrants it works and with natural disaster it doesn't because in the Bible the process that happens is that humans sin and then God punishes them for their sin by unleashing a flood and you would see that a lot of the conversation around climate change it goes to that story of guilt that people feel guilty oh I did this and therefore the world world is collapsing and it's much more difficult to go beyond this kind of biblical Narrative of sin and Punishment and
forget about this understand the mechanisms the again the ecological mechanisms and the and the physical mechanisms that we are dealing with which are not really these sin punishment mechanisms with God as the intervening H actor though much of the rethoric of climate activists is in within the sin mechanism exactly because this is this they reach out for for a story and this is the the the closest story they can find that again it's it's parent it's it's go back to children and parents we are bad children we did something wrong father is punishing us so
this is something that people can easily understand I I I took too many flights last year I a bad boy God will punish us with climate change this is something that people kind of instinctively connect to and then they dislike it because they're guilty and they don't want to feel guilty it's not that they don't want to feel guilty because guilt is is powerful you know Christianity has become the most successful uh uh uh religion in history and it's built on guilt so guilt is not something kind of and people in a way they like
to feel guilty but it's if you if we really want to deal with climate change then thinking about it in terms of personal guilt is the wrong way we need to understand again the the the systems at work and uh the main problem is not with the decisions of individual people it's the way that the economy is built it's the way that the political system is built I mean the action needs to come from corporations and from governments which are bureaucratic entities this is the organizing principle we have no mythologies about bureaucracy this is something
that most people don't understand how bureaucracies work so you have some artists like Kafka is the most famous but he's not the only one who try to explain to people this new reality of the world works on the basis of bureaucratic systems but again psychologically and mythologically it's very difficult because you know bureaucracies is our documents and protocols and forms and lists it's it doesn't work on stories and to understand like when was the last time you saw a movie or read a novel about the budget not about somebody who works in the budget Department
about the budget like as the hero like you try to understand Germany in 24 you're trying to understand climate change um how does the budget works if you from one perspective this is one of the most important things about our life but nobody writes about it there are no television shows it's it's boring how would you say bureaucracy affects the human being today or the fact if you say that this is how long do you have to wait for a doctor's appointment this is sometimes a life and death question and this is determined by bureaucratic
uh uh principles now again people could understand it if they translated into some kind of sin and Punishment uh narrative or some kind of child parent narrative but this is not how bureaucracy works and we need a completely different set of stories to understand bureaucracy again people like Kafka began to to to to to to try and formulate these stories I think didn't just begin I think he captured a deep aspect of it see just in terms of numbers for every Kafka novel you will be back out there about two boys fighting over a girl
you don't need like 100 Mona Lisas to have the knowledge of a Mona Lisa you know I mean one kfka is enough I think you might be right intellectually but I feel challenged by the danger you see in stories but I completely can follow your argument though I mostly see the the liberating part the story is also it depends what what the story is I mean the key point is stories are incredibly powerful and like every powerful thing you can use them well and you can use them for for evil purposes so you think a
debate that is not taking place is actually thinking about the the bureaucratic and the in the and the structural I mean like United Nations and all the structures we have to to solve the problem we don't understand the structures I mean this is one of the reason you have all these conspiracy theories that people believe that oh you have a small group of billionaires controlling everything and starting Wars and epidemics because this is something that we can understand this goes back to the mythology this goes back to oh the the parents they do everything it's
like thinking that the world have like a small number of parents and maybe they are bad parents and they are punishing us and and they are doing bad things it's easy to understand these conspiracy theories it's much much more difficult to understand the reality there is no small group of people who understand and control everything there is this huge sprawling bureaucratic system which is not evil it's doing what it's doing um but if we want to make a significant change in the world like deal with climate change we need to work with and through the
bureaucracy if we get stuck in these simplistic mythological narratives I completely agree with you and I understand and I'm glad you bring this up so but last thing you have to tell me the book you read between 15 and 18 the books and not scientific ah okay let let me think I I mostly read scientific books I was afraid so they post us to read kinds of you know novels for in in in in school yeah but I I really discovered novels and began to really love them only afterwards as long as they kind of
forced us you you have to read this you have to read dooi because it's in the matriculation exam so it was a kind of H I have to read this afterwards when it was over I kind of reread it and really loved it um but um H between 15 and 18 I almost only read history between history and when you learned to love novels later which one did you love uh so I Revisited some of the of of of the works that we read it in in in school but I I really loved again uh
uh TL sto's war in peace which is very drama yeah but but it's it's also history I need to kind of rekindle my memory for for novels did you read a woman's novel um I read Al osula lewins uh you know science fiction fantasy uh novels and I also read what was her name um I don't remember the name of the author but she wrote uh the two again historical novels the Persian Boy and uh something about Alexander the Great but it was it focused on the love affair between Alexander and a Persian youth who
was previously the lover of of Darius the the the Persian king and this was one of the first kind of before I came out before I realized that I was gay this was one of the first kind of novels about gay relationship that I that I read and did the reading had anything to do with the fact that you came out no not immediately it was not like an immediate cause and effect but I do remember that I was very kind of um particularly interested in in in in in that in that story and I
guess it kind of percolated inside there and was uh uh important instrumental in in in later kind kind of coming out to my self So reading about a A Love Affair that's so long ago did this help you to understand present things better like for you is it better to understand things when they are set in the distance it's it puts the present in perspective and um for me it's not such a long time ago I mean it's only just a little bit over 2,000 years ago if you think about the span of of human
existence which is hundreds of thousands of years and the span of of the cosmos which is like 13 billion years so 2,000 years is is yesterday and um one of my kind of my basic feeling about history is that um it's all present in a way nobody reads history or cares about history because of the past like all the people in the past are gone they are dead we can't change anything that happened back then and uh they don't care what we think about them like Alexander the Great doesn't care what if you think he
was great or he was not so great or whatever um the past is important because of what it tells us about the present and the only you know the only thing that separates us from the past is just time mhm do you understand what what trickled down when you read this book about your own coming out in a way it expands your your reality or your understanding of what what could be in the universe like if you grow up and you only see heterosexual couples around you so you don't even imagine that maybe two boys
or two men can be a couple and then you read the story and it expands your Universe you understand oh these things these kinds of relationships they can also be in reality like uh uh the laws of physics and the laws of biology don't forbid the existence of these things maybe human laws maybe religion maybe the state tries to forbid it but um States and religions forbid only things that can actually exist nobody bothers to issue a law forbidding people to run faster than the speed of light because it's it's simply impossible what's the point
they only issue law to forbid things that are actually part of reality potentially I'm very reconciled that your scientist brain has one story that is not destructive in in your own readers biographies even the kind of mythological stories that I have read they are not destructive again what I'm saying is that they are very powerful yeah so we have to be very careful about them it's interesting because now everybody says we have to fact check and give the statistics and you actually always say that in a way we should be able to put it into
a story yes to transmit a good story for me relies on facts doesn't ignore them um but the thing if you only fact check if you only give the statistic it never works because the only thing that can replace one story is another story if you have if you think about a story like a I don't know a balloon and people think okay I'll take this factchecking needle and I stick hold in it and it'll explode it never explodes if you only poke hold in the balloon you can poke a thousand holes it's still there
no problem the only thing that replaces one balloon is another balloon if you tell a different story and more interesting story a story that helps people better then you don't need to poke any holes in the other story it will just disappear we have talked about stories and uh we have asked you to bring books but since you brought books of science I really wanted to understand your concept of stories since I believe that part of the success of your books is that you do manage to sort of narrate science is as Paradox as it
sounds what I try to do is to bridge the kind of fan s and theories and models of science that are often don't come in the shape of a story and shape them into a story that will be accessible to people without kind of betraying the scientific values of Truth and and and factuality and and so forth and these are some of the books that in inspired me on on the way which one we want to start with so let's start with chimpanzee politics because we actually talked about it already mhm um this book that
was written I think in in the year that I was born in 1976 by France Deval who who um who is one maybe the greatest primatologist of of our age and it tells the story of a single chimpanzee band about 20 chimpanzees living in a zoo in in the Netherlands in Arham and their relation ships and their politics and um basically everything we talked about is based partly on on what I I I discovered in in this book that human politics is much like chimpanzee politics and that uh the these biological dramas that now are
uh controlling entire nations and launching Wars and so forth they are the same biological dramas that you find in the struggles in the relationships of a small group of chimpanzees and it also relates to what we just discussed for instance about about sexuality and what is permissible and what is forbidden um for me not France Deval and of course below France Deval you always find Charles Darin darn is the kind of prophet of sexual Liberation that if I think about the liberation of gay people of lgbtq people then if you if you dig underneath you
eventually find Darin because for at least in the West for centuries upon centuries gay people were persecuted and oppressed because of this mythological iCal idea about sex that sex was created by God for the purpose of procreation and if you use sex for anything else you you're you're sinning against the purpose of the thing so you must be punished and then Darin came and Darin said in biology there are no purposes nothing has any purpose in biology in biology there are only causes I can explain how what was the causual chain of event that led
to the uh uh creation to to the evolution not creation to the evolution of sexual organs and sexual feelings in animals and mammals and humans but they were not created for a particular purpose this is true of everything in in ology like we have fingers not in order to type on computers or to play the piano or to climb trees we fingers evolved through Evolution when humans climbed trees and when humans picked fruits or or ancient Apes did it so those that had uh uh better fingers survived and left these kind of better fingers for
their offspring and similarly if if you think about uh Wings why do birds have wings wings were not created so that birds could fly originally reptiles evolved feathers in order to warn themselves and once but once something exists it can be used for all the things that you you can use it for so some reptiles when they were escaping Predators they jumped and these feathers helped them to jump further and they survived and Generation by generation this became wings so um it would be ridiculous to kind of blame birds why are you using your wings
in order to fly they were originally meant only to warm you if you fly with them this is against the purpose for which they were created this is ridiculous and it's the same with sex it evolved in the context of procreation but among mammals among chimpanzees and among rabbits and among humans uh new usages evolved over time the vast majority of sex today not just among humans also among chimpanzees it's not about procreation people use it to establish intimate bonds between themselves and to say to people no that's wrong you should not use sex to
establish intimacy it's only from procreation this is ridiculous it's like telling birds don't fly and um this is I think the kind of deepest layer of the liberation of of women of lgbtq people the the again darwinian understanding that what things don't have kind of a purpose set from above um they whatever exists is by definition in line with the laws of nature the idea that you can act you can do something that violates the laws of nature this is simply ridiculous what violates the laws of nature doesn't exist whatever exists by definition it's in
line with the laws of nature the laws of a country that's different like a country can say you cannot drive more than but you mean the laws of nature have no moral that you mean total free of morals right it's just the fact that it exists yes uh of course not everything that exists is good people murder and this is part of reality and this is bad but then you have to give an explanation if you want to forbid something you cannot say I forbid it because it's against the laws of nature there is no
such thing you need to provide an explanation so with murder we know the explanation murder is bad because it causes tremendous suffering not just to the person you murder but to everybody around them their family their friends so it's it's bad because it causes suffering now if two men love each other how does it cause anybody to suffer if you think you want to forbid it you need to come up with a better argument then oh it's against the laws of nature and you well may I come back to when you talked about the Turtles
first and the fact that the mother disappears and when you read that book and then you mentioned Freud so how do you look at psycho anal analytics as an explanation tool for these things it's a very powerful tool it's again exploring the mythological and the psychological uh uh mechanisms that shape and motivate humans and if you try to take psychoanalysis and understand Turtles it will not work if you try to understand atoms and subatomic particles it will not work but with humans it works and to some extent it will also work with chimpanzees and there's
also um women that are famous with the research in chimpanzees like Jane gal was she important for you I've read her books also and also you know the the amazing thing about her work is um you know the Brilliance of the Simplicity that you had all these people in universities in Oxford in Harvard arguing about what Apes do and don't do and and she said I'll just go and look and you know she started in such a simple way said just I'll just go and live with the chimpanzees and look at them and see how
they behave not in laboratory is not in in zoos but directly and she also one of the revolutions that she did in the study of of animals was treat them as individuals with uh a really a psychology and a personality she started to give them names whereas previously it was kind of common in most of the research on on apes and other animals to use you know numbers and it was a big SC to kind of treat other animals as persons because this was humanizing them like we we kind of take our own human emotions
and whatever and kind of impose them on the animals and she uh was one of the people who kind of revers it no I mean uh the assumption that emotions for instance are a uniquely human thing it goes against everything that Darin taught us the basic assumption is that it's much more widespread in the animal kingdom than just unique human phenomenon and she was one of the first scientists who began to treat other animals as as persons with emotions with a psychological life and she would give them names and write about them in scientific papers
with their names and not with with with with numbers and today this is like a common fact that every animal researchers that who studies apes or whatever uh takes for granted that yes other animals also have emotions and have psychological needs and not no two chimpanzees are exactly the same and so forth now that we are at the individual there's one book I really want to know about and that is a book that talks about the self and the way identity um shapes or a person shapes its identity when did you read this book and
what did you learn from it I think I've read sources of the self by Charles Taylor in my early 20s and um it's it's more coming from the direction of philosophy and the history of of philosophy and does a a brilliant job in showing how our most basic understanding of ourselves it has a history behind it it's not the way that that people in every age in every culture understood themselves it's the outcome of 2,000 years you know of Greek philosophy and Christian Theology and modern philosophy and modern art that resulted in in the very
kind of uh unique way that Western modern people understand what am I and and this this is one of the most fascinating things in life also in science that you take something which seems to be extremely kind of solid and self-evident and when you look closer you see that there is actually an entire universe of of change inside it that um it's not obvious at all and it's not permanent at all that you know in in for a lot of of people in in the modern West like the whole of of the universe is constantly
changing but there is something inside us which is the basic atom of say our mental life which doesn't change this is the the the the the basic unit of of the mental universe and the same way that physicists are uh looked inside the atom and realized actually this is not solid at all there are lots of changes within this tiny thing so also philosophers like Charles Taylor and psychologists and others they looked into this kind of mental atom of the self and realize like the physical atom it's not solid at all it's a a um
contains not just multitude of subp but they are constantly moving and interacting and changing that was something that both helped you understand like the human nature of the human human of mankind or human beings but did it help you understand something about yourself yes that what I Define as myself um itself needs a lot more exploration that you think you know yourself but you don't not just you know the kind of individual events of your life your very understanding of what is a self is is far from self-evident and it is itself the product of
a lot of stories and and mythologies which are not necessarily true so the last book that we can only touch for a few thoughts but maybe tell us why it's important important um Jared Diamond it's a work of big history kind of covering thousands of years of human history and trying to understand the kind of basic processes what shapes history and for me the the book was extremely important in in my life in my career not just for its kind of particular insights but more for its shap that it showed me that you can write
such books and which was then the basis for for my work that you can actually write a science book not a mythological book but a science book based on the latest findings and archaeological excavations and genetic evidence and economic models and tell the story of thousands of years of History you don't need to just focus on very very small events or incidents or places you can really tell big stories which will still be scientific and not just mythological so this was the book where you learned you can sort of merge the the reader that you
were between seven and 11 the myth and and and and the science and you learned I can merge this and make it one bigger book and sort of get rid of the Dilemma that you have with the myth connect it to fact this kind of of false dilemma that I like the shape of the mythological stories but I also like the factuality the accuracy of the of of history and of Science and I have to choose so Jared diamond in a way said no you don't have to choose you can try and combine you can
integrate which is of course very difficult um but not impossible and you have to you know you have to kind of uh make compromises like in every relationship in every integration you need to make compromises so also in this compromise between myth and science it won't be perfect you will have to make compromises but but it's worth it in your writing and reading but mostly your writing if you would not have the story and the myth What would you lack um the interest the what many of the kind of purely scientific texts lack is that
people don't connect to them and they don't inspire people and again we have to work with humans as they are we can't say well humans are are are are faulty and we will just stay with the facts and the statistics and the mathematics and and give humans up no what I'm doing in my books it's not uh um negating the other types of of of research in in science I don't say that all scientists now should write these big narratives uh without the very specialized researchers you know somebody who works for 10 years on just
Excavating a single archaeological site and kind of um very detailed lists and catalogues of every bone and every piece of of of tool that they found there um without this type of extremely difficult work I would not be able to do my work my work is just to build a bridge between these kinds of scientific studies and try to convey their insights their discoveries to the general public in a way that anybody can relate to and find interesting you do succeed you do inspire people who's a person that inspired you one person as a scholar
both Jared diamond and France Deval were two of like the the biggest intellectual most scholarly Inspirations for me and exactly for for for this ability for for building this bridge because I remember the experience of myself like WR reading chimpan politics and being so interested and you know laughing at some of the uh uh characters and interactions that he described and feeling sad for some of the other and and really getting kind of connected to the politics of this group of chimpanze and um you know there are so many other previous studies written about chimpanzees
but in these very cold scientific like you don't have names you have numbers and you don't talk about uh uh the emotions you just have these statistics about how many times they met and how many times they fought and it it would not have had the same effect you well that is it thank you very much for sharing your books your the people that inspired you your thoughts and the Dilemma that I was able to explore a little bit with you thanks a lot for coming to the show thank [Music] you for
