Renowned historian and ‘Sapiens’ author Yuval Noah Harari, in an interview with Ari Melber, who asks Harari about his scholarship, its applications, recent AI developments and criticism of Harari’s writing. Among the many thought provoking insights from Harari - this one really breaks down the current American political climate:

What you see in a lot of modern politics is this delicate dance between conservatives and liberals which I think that - for many generations they agreed on the basics. Their main disagreement was about the pace. That both conservatives and liberals basically agreed we need some rules and also we need the ability to change the rules. The conservatives prefere a much slower pace

[…]

The conservative instinct is to wait it’s it’s dangerous and the liberal instinct is to try it out and see what happens. You see this kind of delicate dance, when things are going to slow people vote in more liberal administration that will speed things up and will be more creative, bolder in its social experiments. When things go too fast then you say okay - liberals you had your chance now lets bring in the conservatives to slow down a little and have a bit of a breath.

And what really I think is happening in recent years and I don’t have a good explanation for that is that in many parts of the world you see a kind of conservative suicide that conservatives are abandoning their kind of traditional role to slow down and conserve institutions and traditions and so forth and they still call themselves conservatives but they become this kind of new radical party which is more about ignoring traditions and destroying institutions

Then it becomes the job of liberals to be the audience of the institutions and the are not good at it. They don’t know how to do it. You know instead of a car that you have one leg on the fuel pedal and one leg on the break you have two legs on the fuel pedal and no leg on the brake and this is a recipe for disaster.

An amazing one hour conversation.