Sep 17, 2026 · 42 min · 11 segments
Episode 2 is available right now for TRIP Plus members. Sign up at therestispolitics.com What can the Aztec Empire's catastrophic failure to understand Cortés and…
Yuval Noah HarariGuest
Rory StewartHost
That's something that you've thought about and written about, and of course, it's something we went through in a smaller way with COVID.
And again, where I felt I, you know, was in government coming through the end of 2019 and very involved in this debate going to the beginning of 2020 was an interesting example of the ways governments can and cannot respond to something which is really strange.
You know, something comes out of a viral lab, it seems, in Wuhan or in, well, a fish market in Wuhan, however it gets there, and it ends up with the British government spending something close to 400 billion pounds trying to deal with this.
In fact, most of the debt problem that we have in Britain, most of our financial problem today, is a legacy from this virus coming out of Wuhan.
I think it, it's a very good example because I, I would say in, in, in many of these cases of these existential risks, and we certainly see it with an AI, is there is a brain stomach barrier.
Like our brain, our intelligence based on various da- data starts understanding something, but our stomach says, "Nah, that cannot be possible." Why not? Because I have never experienced anything like it.
So I have no gut feeling what this thing can be like, so it cannot exist.
I remember, you know, the first few weeks of the pandemic, I remember myself sitting at my home, watching on television the images from Wuhan of a modern, huge city of millions completely shut down.
And as a historian, I had all these kind of synapses going on in my brain, "Ooh, this is like the Black Death.
This is like the Spanish influenza." I read about pandemics and still my stomach says, "No, this is not possible.
It will never get here." Why not? Because I just never saw anything like it in my life.
So I cannot accept the reality of this thing, and the stomach is usually much stronger than the brain.
Even when the brain insists, "This is real, this is coming, we need to prepare," um, there is something that, that just doesn't accept it.
So what I observed at the beginning of COVID, at least in Britain, is that there is a real tendency in government not to want to act.
We're about two weeks behind Milan." And yet the decision was we will go ahead with the Cheltenham Festival.
And very, very quickly, some at least of the people around government were saying We need to take this on the chin.
That's something that you've thought about and written about, and of course, it's something we went through in a smaller way with COVID.
And again, where I felt I, you know, was in government coming through the end of 2019 and very involved in this debate going to the beginning of 2020 was an interesting example of the ways governments can and cannot respond to something which is really strange.
You know, something comes out of a viral lab, it seems, in Wuhan or in, well, a fish market in Wuhan, however it gets there, and it ends up with the British government spending something close to 400 billion pounds trying to deal with this.
In fact, most of the debt problem that we have in Britain, most of our financial problem today, is a legacy from this virus coming out of Wuhan.
I think it, it's a very good example because I, I would say in, in, in many of these cases of these existential risks, and we certainly see it with an AI, is there is a brain stomach barrier.
Like our brain, our intelligence based on various da- data starts understanding something, but our stomach says, "Nah, that cannot be possible." Why not? Because I have never experienced anything like it.
So I have no gut feeling what this thing can be like, so it cannot exist.
I remember, you know, the first few weeks of the pandemic, I remember myself sitting at my home, watching on television the images from Wuhan of a modern, huge city of millions completely shut down.
And as a historian, I had all these kind of synapses going on in my brain, "Ooh, this is like the Black Death.
This is like the Spanish influenza." I read about pandemics and still my stomach says, "No, this is not possible.
It will never get here." Why not? Because I just never saw anything like it in my life.
So I cannot accept the reality of this thing, and the stomach is usually much stronger than the brain.
Even when the brain insists, "This is real, this is coming, we need to prepare," um, there is something that, that just doesn't accept it.
So what I observed at the beginning of COVID, at least in Britain, is that there is a real tendency in government not to want to act.
We're about two weeks behind Milan." And yet the decision was we will go ahead with the Cheltenham Festival.
And very, very quickly, some at least of the people around government were saying We need to take this on the chin.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
