Yuval Noah Harari: evaluation

Transcript context

…I find it a compelling notion. I’m a sucker for a great speech and a vision. I have a sense that there’s an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story. I think we need leaders to be just great storytellers that sharpen up the story to make sure it infiltrates everybody’s brain effectively. It could also be that the local interactions between humans is even more important, but it’s just we don’t have a good way to summarize that and describe that. We like to talk about Steve Jobs as central to the development of the computer, maybe Bill Gates. You tell the stories of individuals like this because it’s just easier to tell a sexy story that way. Maybe it’s an interplay because you have the structural forces. I don’t know. You look at the geography of the planet and you look at shipping technology in the late 15th Century in Europe and the Mediterranean, and it’s almost inevitable that pretty quickly somebody would discover America, somebody from the Old World will get to the new world. If it wasn’t Columbus, then it would’ve been, five years later, somebody else. The key thing about history is that these small differences make a huge, huge difference. If it wasn’t Columbus, if it was five years later somebody from England, then maybe all of Latin America today would be speaking English and not Spanish. If it was somebody from the Ottoman Empire, it’s a completely different world history. The Ottoman Empire at that time was also shaping up to be a major maritime empire. If you have America being reached by Muslim navigators before Christian navigators from Europe, you have a completely different world history. It’s the same with the computer. Given the economic incentives and the science and technology of the time, then the rise of the personal computer was probably inevitable sometime in the late 20th Century. The where and when is crucial. The fact that it was California in the 1970s and not, say, I don’t know, Japan in the 1980s or China in the 1990s, this made a huge, huge difference. You have this interplay between the structural forces which are beyond the control of any single charismatic leader, but then, the small changes, they can have a big effect. I don’t know. I think, for instance, about the war in Ukraine. Now it’s a struggle between nations, but there was a moment when the decision was taken in the mind of a single individual, of Vladimir Putin. He could have decided otherwise, and the world would’ve looked completely different. Another leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, could have decided to leave Kyiv in the early days. There’s a lot of decisions that ripple. You write in Homo Deus about Hitler and, in part, that he was not a very impressive person.…

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