Yuval Noah Harari: Why advanced societies fall for mass delusion

Human history is a paradox: we accumulate knowledge at astonishing speed, yet remain vulnerable to deception, superstition, and the stories that subtly steer entire civilizations.

From the first clay tablets to today’s global media systems, the structures that carry our ideas have always shaped what societies can build, believe, and destroy. That paradox is even more important in the age of AI, says Yuval Noah Harari.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I’m Yuval Noah Harari. I’m a professor of history, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of “Nexus,” a history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. The key question of “Nexus” is if humans are so smart, why are we so stupid? Why are we on the verge of destroying ourselves? We have managed to reach the moon, to split the atom, to the cipher DNA, and yet with all our knowledge and wisdom, we are on the verge of ecological collapse, perhaps of a third world war. And also we are developing an extremely powerful technology AI, which might get out of our control and enslave or destroy us. So the book explores this strange dynamic in human history between our knowledge and wisdom and our self-destructiveness. And this is a question that has been often raised and a traditional theological and mythological answer to this question is that there is something wrong in human nature. There is something in human nature that makes us self-destructive, and the answer that “Nexus” gives is different. The problem is not in our nature. The problem is in our information. Humans, yes, we are generally good and wise, but if you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions. And what the book explores is why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years of history? Why is it that even modern, very sophisticated societies in the 20th and 21st century have been as susceptible as stone age tribes to mass delusion and psychosis and the rise of destructive ideologies like Stalinism or Nazism?

– [Announcer] Chapter one, the rise of alien intelligence.

– Storytelling has always been important from the stone age to the 21st century, whenever a large number of people are trying to cooperate on something, whether it is to hunt a mammoth or whether it is to build an atom bomb. Just knowing the facts about the objective world, about objective reality is not enough. If you want for instance, to build an atom bomb, you need to know some facts about physical reality. You need to know that e equals mc square. If you try to build a bomb and you ignore the facts of reality, the bomb will not explode. But just knowing facts is not enough because in order to build an atom bomb, you need millions of people to cooperate on the project. You need physicists to write complicated equations, but you also need miners to mine uranium. In distant places around the world, you need engineers and builders to build the reactor and the other facilities. And you need farmers to grow potatoes and rice, and wheat, so that all the physicists, and engineers, and builders, and cleaners, and plumbers in the nuclear facility will have something to eat. If they have to grow themselves and grow potatoes and then come back to the reactor to do all their experiments, it won’t work. So you need really hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people cooperating on that. Now, if you just tell them the facts of physics that e equals mc square, this is not going to motivate anybody to cooperate on this project. And this is where storytelling comes into the picture. So what really motivates people is it could be religious stories, mythologies and theologies. It could be secular ideologies like communism or capitalism. And it’s always the people who are experts in storytelling that give the orders to people who merely know the facts of nuclear physics. So in Iran today, the nuclear scientists are getting their orders from experts in Shiite theology, in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the experts in nuclear physics, they got their orders from experts in communist ideology. And even in a completely safe free market economy, there are still stories at the basis of the system because money and corporations are also stories that humans invented. They are not physical facts. If you consider, for instance, a dollar bill, it has no objective value whatsoever, at least not for human beings. Maybe termites can eat it, but humans can’t eat dollars, they can’t drink them. There is nothing useful you can do with them. They nevertheless have value because the greatest storytellers in the world, the finance ministers, the bankers, the investors, they tell us a story that this piece of paper is has value. I can use it to buy bread or potatoes or bananas or anything else. And as long as millions of people believe in this story, they are willing to work, for instance, on constructing and nuclear reactor because at the end of the month, they get these few colorful pieces of paper. And today, of course, it’s not even paper. Most of the money in the world today is not paper notes and metal coins. It’s just digital information moving between computers. But as long as people still have trust in the story about these digital information, it works. People are willing to work hard for a whole month or a whole year just in order to get a few bits of data in their bank account. When we think about this kind of meeting between storytelling, which is a very ancient human capacity, going back tens of thousands of years, and the new technology of AI, I don’t think we should start with words like risk, or threat, or danger. It’s better to just understand the immense importance of what is happening right now. Throughout history, for tens of thousands of years, the only entities that could invent stories, whether stories about gods, or stories about money were human beings. So we lived cocooned inside a cultural world constructed by the human imagination. If you read a holy book, or if you read an economic theory, or if you listen to a song or you listen to a piece of music, this came out of the mind of another human being. So we lived in a human world. Now, for the first time in history, there is another entity. There is another agent out there that can create stories, economic theories, new kinds of currencies, music, poems, images, videos, and this new entity is AI. What happens to human society? What happens to human life if we increasingly live our lives cocooned inside the cultural artifacts coming from non-human intelligence, from an alien intelligence. And you know, the acronym AI traditionally stood for artificial intelligence, but I think it’s more accurate to think about it as an acronym for alien intelligence because artificial, it gives the impression that this is an artifact that we create and control, and AI with every passing year, AI is becoming less and less artificial and more and more alien in the sense that we can’t predict what kind of new stories and ideas and strategies it’ll come up with. It thinks it behaves in a fundamentally alien way. I give two examples to clarify this, because there is a huge confusion around AI today. There is so much hype around AI, especially in the market. If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI. So everything now becomes AI and then people don’t understand. So what is it? And if you think, let’s say about somebody’s trying to sell you a coffee machine and they tell you this is an AI coffee machine, how do you know what what it means and whether it’s true? Not every automatic machine is an AI. If this coffee machine, you press a button, let’s say for espresso, and the machine produces, provides you with a cup of espresso, this is not AI. It simply follows the pre-programmed orders of its human creators, the hallmark of AI. What makes AI, AI is that it is able to learn and change by itself and come up with decisions and ideas that we don’t anticipate can’t anticipate. So if you approach the coffee machine, and the coffee machine before you press any button tells you, “Hi, hello, I’ve been watching you for the last month and based on all the information I gathered on you and on many other users, and based on the time of day and your facial expression or whatever, I predict that you now want an espresso. So I took the liberty to already prepare for you a cup of espresso.” This is an AI. And if now it goes a step further and says, “I actually invented a new drink that you’ve never tasted before, I call it bestpreso. And I also took the liberty to prepare it for you because I think you would like it.” This is an AI coffee machine. And this is not just theory, it’s also we are seeing it all around us. One of the key moments in the AI revolution back in 2016, was when AlphaGo defeated the Lee Sedol, the world champion at the game of Go. Go is a strategy board game much more complex than chess invented more than 2000 years ago in China, and it became a cultural treasure in East Asia. For more than 2000 years, tens of millions of people in East Asia played Go, and entire schools of thought entire philosophies evolved around this game because it was seen as a mirror for life and as a good preparation for politics and for making decisions in the world. And people thought that we know how to play Go and AlphaGo taught itself how to play Go. And within a few weeks surpassed the wisdom accumulated by humanity by tens of millions of people over more than 2000 years. The most amazing thing about its victory was that it used a strategy which was considered beyond the pale. When it played its crucial moves, Go experts were didn’t understand, what is it nobody plays Go like that. And it turned out to be a brilliant strategy. And it also turned out that for more than 2000 years, our human minds have explored only a very limited part of the landscape of Go. If you imagine all the ways you can play Go as a kind of planet with a geography. So humans were stuck on one island in the planet Go for more than 2000 years, because human minds just couldn’t conceive of going beyond this small island. And then AI came along and within a very brief time, it discovered entire new continents on the planet Go. And this is likely to happen in more and more fields, in finance, in art, in politics, in religion. So before we think about it in terms of risks or threat or opportunity. Just think what it would mean to live on a planet which is increasingly shaped by the stories and the products of an alien intelligence.

– [Announcer] Chapter two, how information technology shapes society.

– Every time there is a new information technology was invented, it completely changed society, politics, culture. About 5,000 years ago, one of the most important revolutions in information technology occurred with the invention of writing. Now, from a technical perspective, it didn’t seem like much, because to invent the invention of writing, and we are in ancient Mesopotamia, what is today Iraq, about 5,000 years ago. It basically involves mud and a stick. People started taking clay tablets, and clay is just essentially mud. And they take a stick, a read, and they imprint signs on the clay tablet and then preserve the clay tablet. And this is document, this preserves records of various things. So this is the invention of writing people playing with mud. And this had immense impact. So to give again just one example, think about ownership. What does it mean to own something? Let’s say I have a field. What does it mean that this field is mine? So if you live in ancient Mesopotamia or anywhere else in the world before writing, ownership means a communal agreement among my neighbors, the people in my village that this field is mine. So they don’t graze their goats there, and they don’t pick fruits there without my permission. But because ownership means an agreement of the community, it limits the power of the individual. I can’t sell my field to someone else unless I get the agreement of my neighbors because they decide who owns what field. It also means that a distant king in some capital city, a thousand kilometers away, he can’t know who owns what because there are no records and he can’t know what each field in each village belongs to whom. So it makes it very difficult to tax property, which makes it very difficult to build large kingdoms and empires. Then mud comes along writing, you have these clay tablets, suddenly to own a field means that there is a piece of dry mud somewhere with some signs on it, which says, this field is mine. And this means that now I can sell my field to someone without getting the permission of my neighbors, because to transfer the field to that other person in exchange for, I don’t know, a couple of some gold, I don’t need the agreement of the neighbors. I just give the person this piece of clay, of dry mud. This is ownership. It also means that the king in the distant capital can now create an archive of all the property records in lots and lots of villages. And know he has bureaucrats who know how to read these clay tablets. They know who owns each field. In numerous villages, you can start to have taxation systems. You can start have kingdoms and empires. So paradoxically, in this case there are many other influences. But in this case, the invention of the written document, it on the one hand empowers the individual and creates the basis for private property rights and creates the basis for large scale authoritarian systems of kingdoms and empires. We jumped 5,000 years from ancient Mesopotamia to the 20th century. The rise of mass media, and mass information technology, telegraph, and radio, and television. On the one hand, they now form the basis for large scale democratic systems. And on the other hand, for large scale totalitarian systems, before the rise of modern information technology, it was impossible to create either large scale democracies, or large scale totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes, meaning regimes that try to control the totality of people’s lives. Ancient kings in Mesopotamia, or Roman emperors, or Chinese emperors, they had a very limited capacity to collect information on the people in their kingdom. So yes, they raised taxes and they used the taxes to pay for soldiers and build armies, but they could not micromanage the social, and economic, and cultural lives of every individual in the country. They didn’t have the information necessary to do it. Large scale totalitarianism appears in the 20th century for the first time in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. And it’s based on exactly the same technology that at exactly the same time leads to the rise of the first mass democracies in the United States and the United Kingdom and other places around the world.

– [Announcer] Chapter three, the rise of inorganic information.

– All information technologies up to the 21st century were organic networks because it ultimately, it was all based on our organic brain and this had a lot of implications. Organic entities are live by cycles. We run by cycles. Sometimes it’s day, sometimes it’s night, there is winter and summer. There is growth and decay, there are times for activity. And then there are times for sleep and for rest. All information networks previously in history, they had these cycles. Even if you think about the financial markets, think about Wall Street. Wall Street also obeyed until today, this organic logic, the market is open only Mondays to Fridays, 9:30 in the morning I think, until four o’clock in the afternoon. And then the weekend is off. And this is how organic beings function, even bankers and investors and financiers, as long as they are humans and not algorithms, they need time to rest, and they need time to be with their family and with their friends. So the market take rests. And another thing is that there is always time off and there is always, therefore also private time. Until the rise of AI Even the most totalitarian regimes like in the Soviet Union, they could not monitor, they could not surveil everybody all the time. The Soviet Union did not have enough KGB agents to follow every Soviet citizen 24 hours a day. And even if you somehow managed to follow all the people all the time, they didn’t have analysts, enough analysts to go over all the information and make sense of it. Even if a KGB agent saw you do something and wrote a report about it, there was a very high chance that this report will just accumulate dust in the archives of the KGB because it didn’t have enough analysts to read millions and millions of reports written every day about all Soviet citizens. So organic information networks, they always run by cycles. There is always time to rest, and there is always a measure of privacy. So we now see the rise of a new type of information network, which is inorganic, which is based on AI. It need not have any breaks, it never rests, and there is no privacy potentially it could completely annihilate privacy. Computers, they don’t care if it’s night or day, if it’s summer or winter, they don’t need vacations, they don’t have families they want to spend time with. They are always on. And therefore they might force us to be always on, always being watched, always being monitored. And this is destructive for organic animals like ourselves. If you force an organic being to be on all the time, it eventually collapses and dies. And we see it happening all around us with a 24 hours new cycle that never rests. The markets never rest, politics never rest. So the people involved in these occupations, they can never really rest and this takes a toll on them. It’s very, very difficult and will soon become impossible. Anything you do or say at any time might be watched and recorded and then it can meet you down the line 10 or 20 years in the future. You do something stupid but legal in a college party today, when you are 18, maybe in 20 years, when you run for political office or you want to be a judge or whatever, it’s there. So basically the whole of life is becoming like one long job interview. Anything you do at any moment is part of your job interview 20 years from now. Now, all this is made possible by the fact that AI is the first technology in history that can take decisions by itself. Until today, all our big information networks, they were managed, they were populated by human bureaucrats, whether it’s government offices or corporations, or armies, or banks or schools. All the decisions ultimately have to be made by a organic brain of a human being. Now, AI has the capacity to make decisions by itself. So what we are facing is not, you know, like a Hollywood science fiction scenario of one big evil computer trying to take over the world. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s more like millions and millions of AI bureaucrats that are given more and more authority to make decisions about us in banks, in armies, in governments. And again, there is good potential in that as well. They can provide us with the best healthcare in history. But there are of course, huge risks when power shifts from organic humans to these alien inorganic AIs. It just becomes more and more difficult for us to understand the decisions that shape our life. What happens if you can no longer understand why the bank refused to give you a loan, why the government or the army did this or did that? And this is the world that we are entering. A curious fact is that at least in the United States, there is already a legal path open for AIs to become legal persons, because in the US unlike in other countries around the world, corporations are considered legal persons that even have rights like freedom of speech. Now, until today, this was a kind of legal fiction because a corporation like Google could not make any decisions. Only the humans employed by Google made all the decisions. But now AI can make decisions by itself. So what happens if you now incorporate an AI, you go through this legal process that you incorporate an AI, and I dunno, you call it Boole, now it’s the Boole corporation. It has no human employees, it’s run by an AI and it is now a legal person that according to US law, has a lot of rights and freedoms. So for instance, it can open a bank account, corporations open bank accounts. Why can’t the AI do it? It’s a corporation. It can earn money, it can go online to websites like TaskRabbit and offer its services to clients, human or non-human, and earn money. And then it takes its money and invest it. And because it’s so good at making investment decisions, it earns billions and billions. We could be in a situation when the richest person in the United States is not a human being. The richest person in the United States is an a incorporated AI. And another thing that the US legal system allows is for these legal persons to make political donations because it’s considered part of freedom of speech. So now this, the richest person in the US is giving billions of dollars to candidates in exchange for these candidates broadening the rights of AIs, the legal path to this. This is no longer kind of a science fiction scenario. The legal and practical path to this situation is open.

– [Announcer] Chapter four, the importance of human institutions.

– To deal with the era of AI. It should be clear that we cannot anticipate how this technology will develop over the next few decades. So it’s impossible to kind of think about all the dangers in advance and regulate against them or whatever. What we need is living institutions staffed by the best human talent and with access to the best technology that will be at the cutting edge of the technological development and will be able to identify and react to dangers and threats as they arise. So I’m not talking about rigid regulation in advance, I’m talking about the need for new institutions because you can never rely on just, the letter of the law or on a charismatic individual, some genius to do it. In history humans, again and again encounter these problems and it always goes back to the same solution institutions. And in good institutions, they are characterized by having strong self-correcting mechanisms. A self-correcting mechanism is a mechanism that allows entity, a human being, an animal, or an institution to identify and correct its own mistakes. You don’t have to rely on the environment, on something out there to correct your mistakes. You can correct your own mistakes. This is a basic feature of any functioning organism. Like how does a child learns to walk? Yes, the child gets some instruction from parents, from teachers, but mostly it’s self-connection. You try to to walk, you fall down, you get up again, you try something else, you again fall down, you get up again, and step by step you learn how to walk by identifying and correcting your own mistakes. And this goes all the way to entire countries. This is the heart of democratic systems is this self-correcting. What are elections? Elections are a self-correcting mechanism. You give power to a certain party or individual. Let’s try your policies, after some time if you think you made a mistake, this was the wrong policy, this was the wrong party, you can say, I made a mistake. There are another round of elections. We made a mistake last time, let’s try something else this time. In dictatorships, there is no such self-correcting mechanism. If Putin or Maduro makes a terrible mistake, there is no mechanism within Russia today that can identify and correct Putin’s own mistakes. When we come to the challenge of AI, what we need, our institutions that are able to identify and correct their mistakes and the mistakes of AI as the technology develops. Another important example of self-correcting mechanism is the way that modern science works. In contrast to traditional religions, traditional religions, they were characterized by claiming to be infallible that their holy book, their sacred tradition never makes any mistake and therefore you cannot. There is no mechanism, for instance, in Christianity of Judaism to identify and correct mistakes in the Bible. I’m not talking just about, you know, factual mistakes, also moral mistakes. The Bible, the 10 Commandments for instance, endorses slavery. The 10th commandment says, that you should not covet your neighbors field or your neighbors ox, or your neighbors slaves. According to the 10th commandment, God has no problem with people owning slaves he just has a problem with people coveting the slaves of somebody else. No, no, no, no, no. That’s not good. Now, even today, with all everything that have changed since these words were written in the first millennia, BCE, there is no mechanism to correct the text of the Bible. You can interpret them in different ways, but you can’t change the text. This in contrast to what we find both in science and in modern democracies. The US Constitution originally also enabled slavery, but the US Constitution also had an amendment mechanism, a self-correcting mechanism that eventually the people of the United States amended the Constitution to forbid slavery. And then science works in an analogous way that if you have a theory of how the planets move, or how organisms evolve, the whole of science really is a self-correcting mechanism. The only thing that scientific journals publish are corrections to previous publications. In religious publications, no, they publish again and again the same teachings. But in academic journals, in history or physics or medicine, they never publish the same thing twice. The only thing they publish is corrections, either to pass mistakes or past lacuna. If there is something in the theory of Newton, which is either incomplete or mistaken, then they will publish Einstein’s correction to Newton’s physics. Every large scale human system is based on an unlikely marriage between mythology and bureaucracy. If you think about a country for instance, so mythology explains the rationale, why should the country even exist? Every country to convince its own citizens why it should exist, tells them some kind of national or religious mythology like we are God’s chosen people and we have some very special role here on earth. So this is the mythology part. It gives the motivation, the inspiration, the reason, but then to actually have a functioning country, it’s not enough if the citizens believe in the mythology that they are God’s chosen people with some mission on earth. You also need to build roads, and hospitals, and armies, and sewage systems. You know, no large scale city, at least a modern city if you want to avoid epidemics can function without a sewage system. And in order to build a sewage system, so you need a lot of workers and engineers and you need to pay them. So you need to collect taxes from the citizens in order to build a sewage system. So again, here mythology comes back into the picture, the mythology encourages people or explains to people why they should pay their taxes honestly, so that other citizens in our country will enjoy good healthcare services and a good sew system that protects us from cholera and so forth. Again, when I talk about national mythologies, so it should be clear that there is nothing wrong about it. Nationalism and patriotism have been one of the most, one of the best inventions in human history. Most other social mammals, all other social mammals actually, they care only about a small circle of animals that they know personally they have intimate connection with. And this was also true for our human ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. The miracle of nationalism and patriotism is that it makes us scare about millions of strangers that we have never met in our lives. And again, nationalism is not about hating foreigners and wanting to kill the others. It’s about loving our compatriots and showing this love, for instance, by paying taxes honestly, so that other people in the country will be defended against cholera by building a sewage system.

– [Announcer] Chapter five, information isn’t truth.

– The biggest misconception about information is that information is truth and information isn’t truth. Most information is not truth. The truth is a very rare and costly and expensive type of information. If you want truth, you need to invest a lot in getting it. I’ll give an example, historical example. Let’s think about images and portraits. What is the most common portrait in the world? What is the most famous face in the world? It is Jesus. There over the last 2000 years, people have created billions and billions of portraits of Jesus. And they are hung in countless churches and cathedrals and private homes and so forth. And not a single one of them is an authentic depiction of Jesus. They are all, 100% of them are fictional depictions because we have no idea how Jesus looked like, there is not a single portrait made during his lifetime. There is not a single sentence in the Bible that tells us whether he was fat or thin, tall or short, black hair, blonde hair, nothing. So all these images, they’re fiction. And it’s very easy to create fictional information because you don’t need to research anything. You don’t need evidence. You just come up with something and draw it. If you want to paint a truthful picture of anything, of a person, of an economy, of a war, you need to invest a lot of time and effort and money to research to make sure that you get it right. So if we just flood the world with information and expect the truth to float up, it’ll not, it’ll sink. The more we flood the world with information, unless we make the effort to construct institutions that invest in truth, we’ll be flooded by fiction and illusion and delusion and junk information. So most information is not truth and most information, what it tries to do is gain power by creating order, not by spreading the truth. If you want millions of people to cooperating on something, the easiest way to do it is to create some fictional mythology or ideology and convince a lot of people to believe in it. And the way to do it is to bombard them with more and more stories and images and so forth of your favorite mythology or ideology. And this is how you gain power. And you need to know some truth. Again, a system that is completely oblivious to truth, it’ll collapse of course, but in this balance, how much truth do you need in order to construct the Soviet Union and how much fiction and delusions do you need in order to construct the Soviet Union? You need a little truth and a lot of fiction. And this is true of most of the large scale political systems that existed throughout human history, we tend to think about totalitarianism and democracy as different ethical systems, but they are different information networks. Information flows differently in totalitarian versus democratic networks. Totalitarian networks are centralized, all the information flows to just one place where all the decisions are being made, and they lack strong self-correcting mechanisms. There is no mechanism in the Soviet Union to identify and correct the mistakes of Stalin. Democracies in contrast, they are distributed information networks with lots of self-correcting mechanisms. The decisions in the United States are not made only in Washington. Just a small part of all decisions are made there. Most decisions are made by private businesses, and voluntary associations, and individuals, and so forth. And there are lots of mechanisms to correct the mistakes even of the most powerful politicians and corporations. So this is the key difference in terms of information flow between totalitarianism and democracy. In the 20th century, totalitarian systems work worse than democratic systems. When all the information flowed to just one place, just to Moscow, the people there were overwhelmed by all the flood of information and they could not make the right decisions and there was no mechanism to correct their mistakes. And eventually the system collapsed. A distributed information system was much better when the decision makers were human beings. But AI could give an advantage to totalitarian systems in the 21st century, why? Because AI can process enormous amount of information much faster and more efficiently than any communist bureaucrat. When you flood a human with too much information, the human collapses. When you flood an AI with information, the AI becomes better. So there is a scenario that it’s not deterministic, it’s not certain, but there is a scenario that totalitarian systems will become better in the 21st century because of AI. Still the other problem of totalitarian systems that they have no self-correcting mechanisms. This is still applicable even in the age of AI. It makes it even more dangerous. A totalitarian system relying on AI that the AI makes a mistake. AIs are fallible, AIs are not God. They make mistakes. If you give all the power to a totalitarian AI and you have no way to correct its mistakes, this could prove catastrophic to the entire human civilization. For human dictators, AI is an especially big problem because for an AI to take power in a dictatorship is much, much easier than to kidnap power in a democracy. Because all power in a dictatorship is already concentrated in the hands of just one paranoid leader. The AI needs to learn how to manipulate just this single individual in order to take power in the country. So the danger of AI taking power in a country are much bigger in dictatorships than in democracy. In democracy, a big problem is very different. Democracy is a conversation. The the whole meaning for democracy is that you have large numbers of people conversing about the issues of the day. Now imagine a large group of people standing in a circle and talking, and suddenly a group of robots entering the circle and start talking very loudly and very emotionally, and persuasively and you can’t tell the difference who is a human and who is a robot. That is a situation we are now living through, and it is no coincidence that the democratic conversation is breaking down all over the world because the algorithms are hijacking it. We have the most sophisticated information technology in history and we are losing the ability to talk with each other to hold a reasoned conversation. In order to protect the conversation between people, we need to ban bots from the conversation. We need to ban fake humans. AIs should be welcome to talk with us only if they identify as AIs. If you talk online with someone and you don’t know whether it’s an AI or a human, this will destroy the democratic conversation. So we need to ban that. If we want to ensure that we get the truth. The only way to do it is to invest in institutions like academic research institutions, like newspapers that invest a lot of effort in finding the truth. If we just expect that a flood of information will bring us the truth, it’ll not. It’ll overwhelm the rare and costly kind of information, which is truth, by a deluge of fake and junk information. And as individuals, my best recommendation is to go on an information diet, the same way that people go on food diets. Information is the food of the mind. We have learned that it’s not good to our body to eat too much food or too much junk food. So lots of people are very mindful what they feed their body. We should be equally mindful about what we feed our mind. More information isn’t always good for you, it’s actually good from time to time, take time for information fasts. When we don’t put anything more in, we just digest and detoxify. And similarly, we should watch the quality of the information we feed our mind. If we feed our mind with all this junk information full of greed, and hate, and fear, we will have sick minds.