#477: Yuval Noah Harari on the Story of Sapiens, the Power of Awareness, and the Brilliance of Bone-Conduction Headphones

Metadata

• Author: The Tim Ferriss Show
• Full Title: #477: Yuval Noah Harari on the Story of Sapiens, the Power of Awareness, and the Brilliance of Bone-Conduction Headphones
• URL: https://www.airr.io/episode/5f996887ecce6a84de95fb83

Highlights

You’ve all so nice to finally see you. It’s good to be here. Thank you for inviting me. So we’re going to start in an unusual place, perhaps. Okay. And that is with correcting my pronunciation On a word. M o S h a V. How do you pronounce that? And what does it mean? H a V o. That’s actually a kind off mistake’s on Wikipedia. It’s much off now. It z some. It somehow got around that I live in and on a moshav, which is some kind of socialist collective community less radical than the key boots but one of the experiments off Socialists in Israel like decades ago, and it’s just not true. I mean, I live in a kind of (Time 0:06:30)review

to a big change in my working methods. In my professional life, I don’t think as a road in this passage you read. I don’t think I could have written SAPIENs or Amadeus or any of these other books without the practice of meditation, because you need a tremendous amount of focus to do something like that. And you need to be able to see through the mass off details. And, you know, you try to summarize the whole of human history in 500 pages. The most important button on the keyboard is delete. Um, that’s the big thing. I mean, what (Time 0:13:47)review

were there in the in the lecture notes, and I wanted to hear more about this because I’ve seen in some books that I’ve quite enjoyed, like 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel and his his co writer also came from lecture notes originally at Stanford. Yeah, it’s a good method because the students take no bullshit. Um, you know, when you right, when you write a book and it’s only you and the screen and the computer, the computer suffers everything. Whatever you write, the computer is fine with it. It’s too long. It’s It’s incomprehensible. It’s boring. The computer doesn’t care. But the students give you immediate feedback. I mean, if you stand in class and you and you talk and you (Time 0:18:50)review

And we have the experience, at least most of us if we came from loving families, that when your kids there were people there, like our parents who did exactly that for us. Even on the most banner level that you know, a child is crying and the mother would say, Well, you’re just tired, just go to sleep and you figure out what you should know that you’re tired, but no, I mean it. It’s amazing that sometimes people are tired or hungry or whatever, and they don’t know it. And then somebody who really understand them comes a simple just go to sleep. And in my writing, I engage a lot with the issue of the future off AI and Surveillance. And I think one off the key (Time 0:54:47)review