Our ability to cooperate in unlimited numbers is what sets us apart from other animals on the planet.
Cooperation for other animals is based on intimate knowledge, while humans can cooperate with hundreds and thousands of individuals.
The human brain is limited in its capacity to form intimate connections with more than 150 people.
The key question in human history is how humans can cooperate on a large scale.
The secret of human success as a species is our ability to cooperate and invent fictional stories.
Intelligence alone is not what gave humans an advantage over Neanderthals; it was our imagination and ability to believe in fictional stories.
Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.
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