Survivor47 is here, which means we're bringing you a brand new season of the only official survivor podcast, On Fire. And this season, we are joined by fan favorite and survivor 46 runner up Charlie Davis to bring you even further inside the action. Charlie, I'm excited to do this together.

Thanks, Jeff. So excited to be here, and I can't wait to bring you inside the mind of a survivor player for season 47.

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Welcome back to The Daily Show, My guest tonight is a best-selling author, Chief Political Columnist and Partner at Talk and Host, The Impolitic Podcast. Please welcome John Heilman.

I knew there would be some Wu-Tang apparel when you walked down here. Well, after you sang the praises of Wu-Tang at your Chicago Convention show- You saw that? Yeah, of course I did. You talked about how that era, 1991, 1995, four best years in American history, I agreed. You agreed, right? I agreed. I'm a little disappointed. They promised me Dezzy tonight.

They did promise you Dezzy.

That's why I'm here. I mean, I love you, but I was like, I wanted to get the best subjohn host.

First of all, I don't consider myself a subjohn host. I am the host of the goddamn Daily Show. You will respect that. You should understand that all of the best groups have a lot of members. Odb, Jizzarizza, Master killer, Inspecd deck. These are groups. Plans, if you will.

I can't believe you. I can't believe some of the ones you'll leave it out there, like Meth, who's going to come over here and beat the shit out of you for that. But here's how you know that I actually knew it was you. Okay. After all that discussion that we had on my podcast last week about the food of Chicago.

Yes, I was slumming it and I did your podcast. He did? Yes.

He was great. He was great. You got to listen to it in Politik with John Hyman. Here's the thing.

Good promo. So you didn't come to Philly? No, I didn't.

You know what they make in Philly?

What do they make?

Cheesesteaks. Cheesesteaks, famously. There's two of them, two famous cheesesteak makers.

Yes, I've been to one of them. Which one? Genos, I think. Well, we got...

Now, these were purchased after. They're to open 24 hours. These were purchased at the middle, like about 3:00 AM.

It's Pats and Genos, right?

Pats and Genos right next to each other. Genos Steaks, right?

Wait, you're bringing me old meat?

Well, no, no. These were transported from Philadelphia as if they were severed limbs, okay? On ice, very well. It's really hygienic. Don't worry. It's going to be great. But Cold cheese with us, there's nothing better. There's nothing better. This is Pat's King of Steaks. Now, these places have been operating in Philadelphia for like 80 years. They're a block away from each other. People will fight you in Philly over which one of these is better. They're indistinguishable. If you take one of these pieces of steak and cover it in cheese whiz, which is what you're supposed to do, and onions, you can't tell the difference. You don't have to eat it now because I know how it's eating on the air is not cool. But I wanted to make sure that you had an offering.

What do you think these people want to see, John? This is the smartest audience on television. Eat it.

Let's do it.

You know what?

We're going to do it. I tell you what, we're going to do it. This is all going to live on the web now because this interview has already gone 17 minutes into... Okay, so I'm starting with my Genos. Okay, I'm going to try this. As I'm trying this, I want you to encapsulate as if we were eating in Philadelphia, your experience last night at the debate in Philadelphia.

First things first. She kicked his ass. Now, I heard John last night talking about how this is a matter of opinion. People will claim various things. Here's the fundamental truth about campaigns. Both sides have either directly under their auspices or in superpacks, they do this thing called the dial groups. They get undecided voters in battleground states to watch the debate in real-time. You've seen these things where they crank the dial. Do they approve? Do they disapprove? That's all they're looking at is what the dials are showing them. Later, they will look at polling, but on that night-Internally, they're getting that essentially in real-time based on the answers that they're having. At the end of the night, they know two things. Did their candidate perform well with the dial groups? The dial groups are meant to be a representative of groups they're trying to reach and bring over onto their side. They will know what worked, what are the things that worked best. By the end of the night, if you know someone at a high level of the campaign, or either campaign, or both campaigns, says, I might, you will know by the end of the night what the group said, what the dial said, basically, is what they'll say.

I would say this is a rare moment where the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign were in agreement. The dial said that she kicked his ass. Really?

The Trump campaign was aware of that because I don't know if you saw, Donald Trump had numbers. I think one of them was 90, one of them was '74. I think there was a pie squared in there. He had numbers.

I thought that was the funniest part when he came into the spin room because Trump is full of shit most of the time. He makes up all kinds of things. But that was one of those things that was the most made up thing on Earth. Of course, like the story about how Albert in America wanted Roe v. Wade to go away, which we'll come back to. It was easily verifiable because, of course, all the networks were to put up their numbers. Cnn was broadcasting their numbers a half an hour later and showing that, in fact, all their Insta polls also showed that Harris had won. I'll tell you the other thing is that what she did best on were all the abortion-related questions, all the stuff about women's reproductive rights. Those were the things. That stretch, she had about a two and a half minute answer when she really started to come on strong in the debate, and she was very emotional, very direct, very powerful. The dial groups love that. That was off the charts, even in Detroit. These are all undecided voters. They're essentially different groups that the campaigns are monitoring, but there are no Trump fans in these groups.

There's no Harris fans. These are, essentially, people who haven't made up their They're undecided.

They're psychotic, insane people who I can't wrap my head around. But there was some poll that around 30% of people wanted to know more from Kamala Harris. What did people actually learn about Kamala Harris?

Well, I'll tell you what I I think there's two ways to look at that. When you think about this from the Harris's strategic standpoint, one thing was that was the New York Times-Ciena poll. It basically said there was a lot of people who still don't feel like they know very much about her and they wanted to know more. That was one thing that you could have tried to aim to do. Tell your story more, try to explain some of your changes on positions, all that stuff. But if you look back at the history of presidential debates, the way that they are often remembered as who won them and who lost them is on one metric and one metric alone, which is like, who commands the stage? Who commanded the sphere of battle? For a candidate who's in their first general election presidential debate, Bill Clinton and others would say, Americans are watching to see whether they can imagine this person as the commander-in-chief, as President of the United States. Can they go toe to toe with an adversary in the moment? Do they command the debate? Is the image of command left in people? It's a plausibility test.

I just think there's no one with eyes in their head who didn't think that Kamala Harris was the one who commanded the stage last night. That's why between the dial groups and just the plain obvious thing that Trump as maniacal, irrational, mentally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, failing as he is at this moment, was she perfect? No. But she was strong, right? I think that she came across as strong, and she decided to play that prosecutor role, and she played it really well. She was incredibly, as you said, incredibly well-prepared, and she kept coming back to her themes that she wanted to hit. I can't, as a debate, quad debate, which is not how are people going to vote. Eight weeks from now is when the election day is. These people are still undecided. Most of you are not waking up today going, Okay, I've decided.

She She looked presidential. Yes.

As you said off camera, I think to these fine people out here, you're dealing with a lunatic. You're dealing with a pathologically lying, insurrection, fementing, democracy, degrading, defiling, asshole. And so...

Allegedly.

So it's a tough... Imagine what that... I have a challenge involved in doing that and holding your composure. And I'll say, because no one did this better than John did on the night of the first debate.

I get it. You liked John Stuart.

He did look you out. He's like, You're a comedy hero.

I like John Stuart as well. Okay, yes.

But he put up those pictures of Biden slackjawn. It was a four box. He's like, When they did the debate prep, did nobody show him these pictures because these don't look great. She I was so aware of the split screen and how the split screen would work that I feel like it was like a bizarre world Biden debate in a lot of ways last night. Because the split screen with Harris was doing to Trump what the split screen with Biden did to Biden. Biden suffered in that split screen with Trump, and Trump suffers in that split screen with her. He looked angry almost throughout, watching without the sound on.

I don't disagree, and I do think Kamala She was more than a depth. She did look presidential. I think she was masterful in many ways of both seeming above the fray, but also poking him as well. But this audience is different. I think people don't see Donald... I don't believe people saw that and saw Donald Trump for the first time as a diminished man. He looked angry, but angry has been something that he's been selling the American public, and there's that 45% who love that. Do you actually think that that diminished- I don't think you're going to take away Trump voters from Trump.

I think what you're What she's trying to get across, I think now, is that he is not just the old candidate of the race now. The generational contrast. She wants to be changed. She wants to be younger. She is, in some ways, implicitly pushing the argument that took down Biden, which is that... I mean, Donald Trump's mental acuity, I say this not in just a trashing him way, which I'm happy to do sometimes.

I think about a minute and a half ago.

But he's getting worse. I mean, he's never been wholly linear. Let's put it that way, right? But if you go back to 2016, when he really won the election against Clinton, in those last 10 or 12 days of the election, they managed to get him to talk about trade, the border wall, China. He was actually a pretty disciplined candidate for the crucial 10 or 12 days of the election. Now, there are a lot of Republicans who look at, Well, she has this momentum. What's going to change between now and election day that will halt her momentum? One thing is like some external event. Vladimir Putin does something, China does something, some cyber war, a Martian invasion that someone has to repel on the White House lawn. Another is, Harris fucked up. She messes up somehow. She didn't do that last night. We all agree about that. The third thing which Republicans all are hoping for and praying for, and that what they've been trying to beg Trump to do is be a disciplined, focused, rigorous, consistent candidate. Make these arguments. That's where we're begging him to do it with this idea in mind that he can pull it together in these last eight weeks and become this thing that occasionally he was in the past.

I just think if you watched that debate last night, there's none of that there. When he started talking about the dogs and cats and the pets being killed, do you know how that question started?

I don't remember.

It started with David Muir asking him about immigration.

Was it? Yeah.

Now, in the Biden debate, go back to my Bizzarro world thing, the Biden debate, rightly, Biden got a question about abortion, his strength, and It turned it into an immigration question. That's when you knew he had really lost it. You're like, What are you doing? You're talking about immigration. They set you up. They put it on the T. Abortion. Talk about Roe v Wade. Last night, Trump got asked about immigration. Here's the issue he wants to talk about it.

That's a sweet spot.

But Harris had baited him on the crowd-size thing. He turned away from immigration and then proceeded to discuss the size of his crowds, World War III was coming, the size of his crowds again, and then the apparent, obviously completely made up, Holocaust of the cats, dogs, and pets in Ohio. Bear in mind that in the last 100 years, in occupants of the White House, every single one of them has had a pet, except for Donald Trump, because he's a sociopath.

Maybe he doesn't like to snack at night.

The guy cares less about dogs and cats than any occupant of the White House ever. That includes other bonafide sociopaths.

It is such an example, too. You give Donald Trump enough time. He's not prepped for anything. He's always grasping at straws. Frankly, he's only got a handful of straws. He's got his immigration as well. He's got a couple of things he's going to bang that drum, and whatever he read on the internet that day. That's what you see getting amplified. He brings the internet to life.

You saw when he arrived in Philly, Laura Lumer, who's literally the craziest person on the right, crazier than anybody in the history of the right.

That's a hell of a crown to wear. I got to tell you.

When she got off the plane, you knew. You were like, he's going to be talking about the cat carnage, the nonexistent cat carnage in Ohio. I will say this again to the question of, can he be a disciplined candidate? What's the other thing he was supposed to do last night? Tie Kamala Harris to Joe Biden's economic record. The first time he mentioned it was at the 1 hour and 24 minute mark of a 1 hour and 30 minute debate. The way he mentioned it was to say, She is Joe Biden. She is Joe Biden. Again, back to the split screen, Kamala Harris is like, I don't really think I'm Joe Biden. Can people see that I'm not Joe Biden? He did it. He finally decided to do what he did so badly that she just like, knock it away with a laugh line.

Well, she got asked that question right off the bat, and she said, I'm going to talk about my history.

Yes, totally. You heard JD Vance afterwards in the spin room where I was talking about how... You know, Trump made these points in his closing statement. I'm like, Now, that's a strong candidate, the one who remembers, Hey, it's my closing statement. I might want to say that thing about Biden at the end.

I guess my question, do people around him, one, do they really have an expectation of changing Donald Trump in that way? Two, do they have a sense of what truly is happening? I hear the moment where Donald Trump comes out and he has those bullshit numbers. Of course, he's always pulling out numbers that make the most sense to him. But are they giving him numbers that make him comfortable in that moment? What is their awareness? The Trump circle, what is their awareness of what is happening? It's not a monolith.

Trump has now brought Cory Lewandowski back into the fold. Cory Lewandowski is the ultimate let Trump be Trump candidate. Cory was exiled. Now he's back. His job is to do things that make Trump happy so that he will not be exiled again. The professionals in that group, people like Chris Lassabida, the campaign manager, and Susie Wiles, the co-campaign manager, you would say whatever you want about them and their values or whatever in working for Trump. But there are professional people who've run important campaigns before, and they are the ones begging Donald Trump to please talk about how she's a San Francisco liberal, talk about how she's a flip flopper, talk about how she's a phony, try to make her explain how she went from being in favor of all these liberal positions to being against them. They are, I think, constantly must live in hope because if they don't live in the hope that they can change them in some way, the world is very cold and dark. If you think that this Donald Trump is going to be the Donald Trump you're going to get for the next 55 days before election day, because that's a Donald Trump.

I'm not saying you can't win, Jordan, because it's going to be really, really close. But man, I think every Republican strategist in the country looks and says, If this guy ran a standard Republican campaign against her, there's a playbook, and he would appreciably increase his odds of winning if he were to be able to remotely execute that. We have no sign that he can. There's this also the thing, we were talking about this a little bit before. I've been in a lot of spin rooms in my life.

I'm very impressed. Pretty cool room to be in. You get to hang out with a Scaramucci now and then.

You get to be with the Muj. Here's the thing about this. People go, Oh, are you in there? Somebody wrote to me last night, a friend who said, Are you in the room where it happens? I'm like, No, the press is never in the room where it happens. We don't sit in the debate hall. We sit in a room next to the room where it happens, and we all get to sit together in a giant room watching it on TV, just like you at home. The only advantage is that when it's over, a bunch of professional liars come out and we get to be lied to to our face.

But don't I think there's something- And I never miss it. I never miss it. But it feels like we talked about this in the beginning of our show. It feels like Trump thinks that is the room where it happens. He doesn't prep for a debate to articulate a vision of the future to America. He preps for a time to lick his wounds and bullshit the press with more cameras. That's where all his energy goes. You got the show, sadly. People shouldn't be performing for you. That's a nightmare. 100%. Trump should be performing for the people at home, but he doesn't see it that way.

I think I may have told you the story for a little while in 2015, 2016.

Don't retell me a story, for God's sakes.

Well, these people I've heard. Trump liked me for a little while.

He liked you?

Is that right? I wrote a tweet about him when he first entered the race in 2015. I said, The Republican Party is getting more racist, socialist, and xenophobic. I think Donald Trump has a chance to win. I saw him and had a face-to-face interview with him the next day, and he said... After he had tweeted, @Jhile has finally starting to understand me. I went and did this interview with him and I said, I thought you might be pissed. He was like, No. At that moment, there were people who didn't think he could win and people who thought he could win. Binary. If you were on the side of people who took him seriously, he didn't care why. You could have said, The whole country is now members of the Ku Klux Klan. Donald Trump is going to shoe in. He would have been like, Thank you for understanding. He didn't care. He just didn't want to be... He didn't like the people who were saying, He has no chance. He's a buffoon. He's doing this as a branding exercise. I was on the other side. For a little while, whenever I would see him, he would say, Heilmann, you're starting to understand me.

We're both German. That always freaking me out. Because I'm not really German in any meaningful way. The name, I have German from German descent, but I'm not like I didn't grow up in Munich. That's not my- But he saw something in it. Yes, it was always a lot He's always like, Yeah, I like it. He's starting to come around on- Is it the haircut you think? The meaner I was, the more he liked me until he then got in office and my secret service code game became that motherfuck.

Well, that's There you go. That's a step up.

That's a step up, right? That was a step up. I'll tell you what you can see in the spin room last night, though, is that it's not hard to know the things that you find out from your sources about how the dial groups went. It's not hard to read the faces. I will tell I posted a tweet last night. I took a picture as I was walking out of Matt Gates. What's his name?

Steven Miller. Steven Miller.

Matt Gates, Steven Miller, and the skinniest the most incelly-looking guy in the world who was carrying their little sad sign out in the spin room because they have a little person who carries a sign. If you were in the spin room, they would carry a little sign that would say, Clepper on it. Love it. Or if they wanted to get some attention, it would say, Stuart.

Okay, they got a damn Then people would...

Or Desi.

I'm going to get it. Or Roy Wood.

There you go. Jordan is having a hard time with that wax there.

It's a hard wax. It's a hard wax.

It's a hard... Have you been skimping on the gym sessions lately, though?

What's going on? I'm waiting till after the This will be good later.

But this picture... Now, I'm not going to be able to do it.

Yeah, I was going to say, look at this. Look at this. It's tough.

God, is there no one around here...

This is the ride, though. The bourbon is much easier to open.

Is there no one around here who can help us here? That's really what waxed on. Is it? It's like Miaghi, wax on, wax off. Stay focused. All right, I'm trying.

I got to wrap this up. This ain't a fun podcast.

Gates Miller and this little skinny kid. They look so sad. I saw the various response tweets people would say, an incel, a neo-nazi, and a pedophile walk into a bar.

That's the way a lot of great jokes start.

Matt Gates was wearing these white Skechers with black jogging pants as his suit bottoms, then a suit jacket on top. I mean, he looked like he was ready for Del Boca Vista, basically.

At his age. Honestly, I think that's a step forward. If he's trying to appeal to the older folks, I think I'll take it with Matt Gates.

But I'll tell you, when I looked at that, I was thinking about what I had thought as I heard about the dial groups from the insiders of the campaign. I thought, David Pluff David Binder, the focus group pulling Impresario from Obama, who's now working for Harris, they are not champagne-popping types. They're trying to keep... But they were metaphorically popping champagne corks last night and how well that her candidate did. In Trump world, they were popping either like Malox or Clonipin. I don't know which, but they were not. When those guys showed up and I looked at them, I was like, Those guys are either very, very sad, very, very drugged up, or someone killed their pets. Maybe that's they lost their... They looked like a bunch of guys who had their cats and dogs taken out by some imaginary Haitians in Ohio.

Yeah, take it from the Sad Man and the Skechers. I think that's how the debate went. Be sure to check out John's column at Puck and his podcast, InPolitic with John Hylman.

Have you ever been watching the news and thought to yourself, wow, the Supreme Court sure does suck. We made a podcast about that. We sure did. There is a super majority of conservative maniacs on the Supreme Court right now really doing some damage.

I'm Michael.

I'm Rhiannan.

And I'm Peter.

Our podcast, 5 to 4, is about all of this. Every week, we dissect and analyze a different ruling that has made our country a little worse, a little more cruel. And you would not believe how many of them there are.

Check out 5 to 4.

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Welcome back to The Daily Show. My guest tonight is an historian and a New York Times best-selling author whose latest book is called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks: From the Stone Age to AI. Please welcome Yuval Noah Harari. You are a popular writer. Your books have sold over 45 million copies. The Atlantic referred to some of your writing style as Since the Dawn of Time style books. You go way back and you bring us into the future. These are big, important tomes. Simultaneously, I heard you meditate for two hours every single day. Yes. How the you make all this happen?

I don't have kids. You don't have kids?

What have I done? Why don't you write a pamphlet that says just that? You want to get shit done, don't have kids.

Some people managed to do both, but you know.

But you have time to dive into this. I'm curious. This book is about information. You reject the notion that more information is a good thing, that it leads to truth and wisdom. Is this you being jaded by the Trump administration in the time we're in, or does this thought process go back?

No, it's basically like thinking that more food is always good for you. There is a limit to how much food the body needs, and In a similar way, there is a limit to how much food for the thought, food for the mind, the mind needs, which is information. The same way that there is so much junk food out there, there is also so much junk information out there, and we basically need to go on an information diet.

Yes. But I need my sweet Twitter snacks, Yuval. I need it. Iwe need it.

It's exactly that. The same way that over the last few generations, the industries learned how to produce artificial food which is pumped full of fat and sugar and salt and is addictive and not good for us, they've We also learned how to manufacture this artificial information which is pumped full of greed and hate and fear and is addictive to our mind and isn't good for it.

Now, I totally agree, and I I feel stuffed on all of it. But I also have this feeling that when you step outside of this information mainstream, that's just this pipeline of BS that is out there, that you suddenly step out of the conversation. It feels like we don't have the luxury of going on a diet if we want to be part of the conversation around us.

Because the conversation is increasingly managed not by human beings, but by algorithms. And algorithms function in a completely different way than us. They are not organic. For instance, human beings, as organic animals, we run by cycles. Sometimes we need to be very active, sometimes we need to rest. But algorithms never rest. They are tireless, and they expect us to be the same. We now live in this news cycle which never rests. The same thing happens in politics, in finance. Previously, if you think about Wall Street, so even Wall Street takes rests. The marketing That is open from Mondays to Fridays, 9:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon. That's it. If a new war erupts in the Middle East, an unlikely event, but let's say a new war erupts in the Middle East on Friday at five minutes past 4:00, Wall Street will react only on Monday morning. It is on weekend vacation. This is actually a good thing because if you force organic entities to be on all the time, they eventually eventually collapse and die, which is really what is happening to us as individuals and as societies. I think maybe the most misunderstood and abused word in the English language today is the word excited.

People think that excited means happy. I meet you and I say, I'm so excited to meet you.

Yeah, that's what happened with us backstage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But excited doesn't mean happy.

It doesn't mean happy.

Excited means that all your nervous system and your brain is like, fussing, it's on. It's good to be excited sometime, but if you keep an organic being, an animal, excited all the time, it eventually collapses and dies.

So you I'm saying beforehand, I should have said, you all-I'm so relaxed to meet you. I'm relaxed to meet you. I apologize, I'm dead inside, but that's not your problem.

Think, for instance, about the election cycles and US politics. Wouldn't it be better if it was a bit more boring?

I would love it if it were boring. I would love it if it were boring, and we see what happens in Europe where it's shorter, it's boring, but everything Everything is pulling us to maximize. The idea, the fact that if we had a news cycle that could end on Friday and then we pick it back up on Monday would be fantastic. But it doesn't seem like the algorithms, it doesn't seem like the financial benefits are pushing us in that direction at all. Where do you see a path like that going through?

If you keep increasing the pace all the time, we can't handle it. The algorithms can, so they take over, but it's not good news for humanity. We need to slow down, basically. We are facing now these non-organic entities which work and think in a completely different way from us. The question is, who is going to adapt to whom?

You're pointing at AI. Now, is AI? Do you see it as an existential threat? I've seen some of these shrimp Jesuses, and I don't like it. These weird images that pop up online, but I don't necessarily connect that with the end of conversation.

I think the most important thing to understand about AI is that AI is not a tool. It is an agent. It's the first technology in history that can make decisions and invent new ideas by itself. Even something as powerful as the atom bomb could not decide anything by itself. All the decisions were made by humans. Now we We've created something which potentially can take power away from us. At present, it starts with very small things. For instance, there was an experiment when OpenAI developed GPT-4, like two years ago. They wanted to test what can this thing do. They gave it a task to solve CAPTCHA puzzles. The CAPTCHA puzzles, like when you go online and you want to access your bank or whatever, and they have this riddle that you have to solve, an image that you have to say, what are the twisted words and the letters to make sure you are not a robot.

It's tough. I've taken the test. It's tough. Is that a street light? Is that a bicycle wheel? I don't know. Let me do it again. Refresh.

It's really difficult for GPT-4. Gpt-4 could not to solve the CAPTCHA. But what GPT-4 did, it accessed Task Rabbit, which is an online site where you can hire humans to do different things for you. It asked a human to solve the CAPTCHA for it. Now, the human got suspicious. The human asked, Why do you need somebody to solve CAPTCHA for you? Are you a robot? It asked directly, Are you a robot? Gpt-4 answered, No, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment, which is why I can't solve the CAPTCHA, so I need your help.

The truly evolved human is not somebody who's smarter. It's just somebody who gets somebody else to do the work for them. Smart? Yeah. Scary.

Very scary.

It's curious. You talk a little bit about... There's a portion here to talk about the artist's role. In the community of whether it's comedy or writers or filmmakers, people talk about, Is AI coming for our jobs. Part of what you articulate right here is that it's an artist's job to paint these fears. Let us understand the dynamics of human interaction. You break things down into what these social networks need. I'm paraphrasing, but like both stories of mythology that lift us up and also articulations of the bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is very important.

It's very important, which I think is… Explain that to me a little bit, but I also feel it's very difficult also for artists to articulate bureaucracy.

That's the We are very good at articulating mythology. We love mythological stories, and mythology is very important. But ultimately, our world, the modern world, is built on bureaucracies. This is also where AI fits into the picture because we are now going to see millions and millions of AI bureaucrats. The existential threat we are facing is not this Hollywood scenario of a single computer trying to take over the world. It's millions of AI bureaucrats in the banks, in the governments, in the armies, in the schools making decisions about us. Like you apply to a bank to get a loan, and it's an AI bureaucrat deciding whether to give you a loan or not. You apply for the job for a place in college, it's the same thing. Now, the thing with bureaucracy, it's boring. It's boring. It's very difficult for artists to write good stories about bureaucracies. But if the function of art is help us understand reality, this is much more important than telling mythological stories. When was the last time you saw a really good TV show about bureaucracy? Let's say about the budget.

I'm binging a 12-part series on the budget right now. Well, I think about it. I think of movies like The Big Short. But for every The Big Short, you have a thousand Marvel movies that live in the world of mythology.

Yeah, so Super heroes, this is mythology. This is not how the budget works. You don't have a super accountant fighting against I don't know what.

Yeah, we can workshop this. Yeah.

But what shapes your Life is these accountants with the budgets far more than the heroes. It's really a challenge to do a good TV series about the budget. Even if we try, it will end up, like a love story between somebody in account and somebody in another department, and the budget will be pushed to the side. But we need to really understand how these things work.

I think what I love about a lot of your work is it does explore the stories that we tell and how important that is to just humankind and the way that we create societies and build off one another's and the danger of not telling those stories or not bringing people in together. I think when I fear about our future and our democracies and their ability to hold these conversations, I think about things like AI, but I also very much think about these mediums that our conversations are taking place in, whether it's on Twitter or cable news or TikTok. None of these mediums are pointing towards or value any type of conversation that is helpful in a way that is beneficial. I'm afraid of the AI in the way that we're tracking, but I don't see a platform or a place where the conversations that need to happen can happen.

I think the number one question to ask to the Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks of the world and so forth.

Do you have their number? I'd text them right now.

If you have their number, this is the question. How is it that we have the most sophisticated information technology in history, and we can no longer hold a conversation. We can no longer talk with each other. That's the big question. You see it in democracies all over the world. You see it here in the US. You see it in my home in Israel. You see it in Brazil, in the Philippines, in France. The conversation is breaking down. So what is happening? This extremely sophisticated information technology, it is not helping the conversation. It is destroying it.

A hundred %. I talk to older people on the road who go to... People at Rauwitz, at Mahagod, There are rallies who will go to Facebook as a place to converse with friends. Frankly, if you're in your '60s, that's the place to talk to friends, to connect. But in order to be a person on Facebook, it's not enough for you just to converse with the friends you have there. You have to publish news sources to get people to pay attention to you. I feel like the Zuckerbergs and the Facebooks and these media sites that we have right now, we promise this idea of conversation or that you can connect with friends, but we ask people to be publishers of ideas stories and promoters of things that are outside the realm of what makes a healthy conversation and more so, muddy up the ability to have that honest conversation.

Traditionally, and we've been in this place every time a new information technology was invented started, we faced the same difficulties. For instance, when the printing revolution swept Europe in the early modern period, it did not lead directly, as many people think, to the scientific revolution. The best sellers of the early print era were not Copernicus and Galileo Galilei and Newton. How did anybody read those books? The big bestsellers were religious tracts and were witch hunting manuals. The big witch hunts, they were not a medieval phenomena. Med medieval people didn't care very much about witches. The really big witch hunts, they began after the print revolution. One of the biggest bestsellers was a book called The Hammer of the witches, which was a do it yourself manual to identifying and killing witches. The Hammer of the witches. It was full of these stories about cannibalistic ogies and gathering things of... And this was far more interesting than Copernicus with all its mathematics.

I got to say, I'm writing it down. Hammer of the witches. It sounds good. Hammer of the witches, also my favorite Led Zeppelin album.

For instance, if If you want to really understand, like Q Anon today, it's basically the same story. There is a conspiracy of Satan worshiping witches that is trying to destroy the world, and good Christians need the ability to identify and destroy these witches. It's not a new thing on Facebook or Twitter. It goes back to the print revolution in the 15th and 16th century.

Are there any examples, looking back at history, though, where we faced these technological watershed moments, where we are given new technology and that humanity has decided to revert and say no to it and move beyond it? It feels like a foregone conclusion that we are heading into this AI revolution, and we're not writing the rules. A couple of rich folks in Silicon Valley are.

You can't go back in history. That's impossible. But the answer is always the same. You need institutions. Institutions, they are not heroic. They are not heroes. They are not the main theme of Marvel movies. But there are always people reach the conclusion they are the answer. Because in the ocean of fake and junk information, if you want to know the truth, you need institutions like newspapers, like academic associations, like courts, that develop mechanisms to sift through the evidence and decide what is reliable information and what is unreliable. Again, it's not heroic, but this is always the answer, and we need to do it again with the current information revolution.

So as long as newspapers stay strong as a business model, perhaps VHS machines can get in there, too, and fight the good fight. You signed a book for me backstage, and one of the comments you made within it was to not lose hope. Help me. Help me do that. Where do you see those little glimmers of hope when you look at this uncertain and perhaps scary future that we're walking into?

I think that AI is nowhere near its full potential, but humans also, we are nowhere near our full potential. If for every dollar and every minute that we invest in developing artificial intelligence, we also invest in exploring and developing our our own minds, it will be okay. But if we put all our bets on the technology, on the AIs, and neglect to develop ourselves, this is very bad news for humanity.

All right, so I'm going to get that gym membership, and I'm going to cut out the suites. Nexus is available now. Yuval Noah Harari.

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Survivor 47 is here, which means we're bringing you a brand new season of the only official survivor podcast, On Fire. And this season, we are joined by fan favorite and survivor 46 runner up Charlie Davis to bring you even further inside the action. Charlie, I'm excited to do this together.

Thanks, Jeff. So excited to be here, and I can't wait to bring you inside the mind of a survivor player for season 47.

Listen to On Fire, the official survivor podcast, starting September 18th, wherever you get your podcast.