I don't think I could have written 'Sapiens' or 'Homo Deus' or any of these other books without the practice of meditation because you need a tremendous amount of focus to do something like that ... You try to summarize the whole of human history in 500 pages, the most important button on the keyboard is delete.

The inability to deal with boredom is one of our greatest weaknesses, and in almost any meaningful journey, you have to go through boredom.

If you don't get to know yourself better, there is somebody out there who is, right now, trying to hack you. And not just one—Amazon is trying to hack you, and Google is trying to hack you, and Coca-Cola is trying to hack you, and the Russians and the American government and the Chinese. They are all trying to hack you right now.

Humans have been enslaved by their creations for tens of thousands of years—by these stories that they create about gods, about nations, about money. They forget that we created them, and then, you know, we are trapped inside the dreams of dead people.

I strongly believe that given the technologies we are now developing, within a century or two at most, our species will disappear. I don't think that in the end of the 22nd century, the Earth will still be dominated by Homo sapiens.

My advice would be to really take the time to explore what is happening inside you and where do all these things really come from. So much of our expectations and our desires, they don't reflect any inner true self; they reflect a million manipulations done on us either by external forces or even by internal forces that we know so little about.

The key issue of the war, at least for President Putin, is whether Ukraine is an independent nation, whether it is a nation at all. He has this fantasy that Ukraine isn't a nation, that Ukraine is just a part of Russia, that Ukrainians are Russians.

I think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn't threaten Western civilization; it threatens the global order; and its repercussions threaten the ability of humankind as a whole to deal with the main challenges of the 21st century, including climate change, including the rise of disruptive technologies.

I don't think that the main question in life is the question of meaning; I think that the main question in life is the question of suffering. What is suffering? Where is it coming from? And how can we be liberated from it?

The big question is not the meaning of life, and the big question is not how you satisfy some god or how you achieve this or that goal; the big question is how you liberate yourself and others from suffering.

What enables us to cooperate in very large numbers—this is our ability to invent and believe in fictional stories and fictional entities. All the big heroes of history, almost all of them, are fictional entities that exist only in our imagination, only in the stories that we create. Nations, gods, money, corporations, states—the only place they exist is in the stories that we invent and tell.

AI is not even near its full potential; it's just in its infancy. We haven't seen anything yet. So, every 10 years, you are likely to lose your job or your job is going to be completely transformed by the new wave of the latest machine learning wizardry. And if you want to stay in the game, you will have to basically reinvent yourself—and not just once, but repeatedly.

I'm very careful about preserving my time ... Attention is maybe the most important resource at present, and many devices, like smartphones, are really designed to grab your attention, to take over your attention. So, that can be dangerous sometimes.

The universe, the laws of physics, they don't work like a story or like a drama. The laws of nature don't care about us. If planet Earth explodes tomorrow morning and all life on it disappears, physics wouldn't care. Planets and stars explode all the time throughout the universe, and the universe just goes along with its business.

Well, climate change, the two most important things to realize about it is that it's happening. It's not some future scenario ... Climate change is happening right now, so we need to do something. And the second thing we need to realize is that the only effective way to counter climate change is through global cooperation. It should be absolutely obvious that you cannot stop climate change on the national level.

Given the immense power of the technologies we are developing, there are two scenarios only. One scenario, which is that the technology will destroy humanity—and I think it's less likely but still possible. The more likely scenario is that it will change humanity in a profound way—that we will use AI and bioengineering to change Homo sapiens and to create new kinds of beings that will be much more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees.

99% of the species that evolved on planet Earth are gone for one reason or another. Homo sapiens, also, are not eternal. Even in the best scenario, I don't think Homo sapiens will be around in two or three hundred years. The best scenario is that Homo sapiens will disappear but in a peaceful and gradual way and be replaced by something better.

I think this is part of the shock, the shock waves around the world ... People realize that if Putin succeeds, if Putin is allowed to win, then this will become the new normal all over the world.

If you can't focus on the simple reality of your breath coming in and out of your nostrils without being overwhelmed by some story generated in your mind, then how can you hope to understand... the financial system of the world, the geopolitical system, what's happening in Israel [or] the Middle East—much, much bigger things ... No matter what I try to do, these stories generated by my own mind get between me and reality.

As we now talk, there are these corporations and governments that are busy trying to hack you, and you need to stay a few steps ahead of them.

In this age, clarity is more important than ever before because we need to know what to focus on. Attention becomes maybe the most scarce resource of all. And where to direct your attention and how to keep your attention on the important things—this is extremely important.

People talk about natural rights and things like that, but on the biological level, just as chimpanzees don't have rights and jellyfish don't have rights, Homo sapiens have no rights.

The main way that humans gain power is through collective cooperation. As individuals, we are not particularly powerful animals. In a match between a human and chimpanzee, the chimpanzee will easily win. The big advantage of humans: We can cooperate basically in unlimited numbers... Chimpanzees can't cooperate more than say 50 or 100—that's about the limit.

I think that there is a possibility that people would look back, certainly in the West, people will look back at the period from, say, 1990 to 2015 as a kind of golden age. And it's downhill from there.

You should never underestimate human stupidity ... Data and science and all that, it's great, but you should never underestimate human stupidity.

If, in the past, education was like building a stone house with very deep foundations, now I would say that education is more like constructing a tent that you can fold up and move to another location very quickly and easily.

What is really remarkable about our species is not that we are smarter than everybody else but that we can cooperate in far larger groups than anybody else. We can cooperate in thousands and tens of thousands and millions and eventually. today, we have global networks of billions of people, for instance, trading and belonging to the same economic system.

The most important thing to know about life in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals.

I think the maybe the most important thing for people to realize about living in the 21st century, as against the Middle Ages or the Stone Age, is that we are now hackable animals.

One way to understand meditation is the instruction: Just forget about all the stories in your mind, and just observe what is actually happening. You have the mind constantly producing stories, and leave them aside, and try to observe reality.

Our identity is really just a story, which we constantly construct and embellish. I mean, you can say that the entire human mind is a machine that constantly produces stories—and especially one very important story, which is my story.

The profile that people create about themselves in Facebook or Instagram; it should be obvious: It doesn't really reflect your actual existence, your actual reality —both inner reality and outer reality. The percentage of time you smile in your Instagram account is much bigger than the percentage of time you smile in real life.

I think our biggest enemy now is not the virus; it's our own inner demons of hatred and greed and ignorance.

Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, really influenced me a lot. His book, 'Source of the Self,' I think, is one of the most important books I've read in life—one of the most difficult books, also. If people take this as a kind of reading recommendation, they should be warned. It's really tough going. It's very, very dense. But if you make it, it's really worth it.

To understand, to be realistic, about ourselves as individuals, about ourselves as a species, is a very good thing. To align your expectations with reality, to be aware of our own biases, of our own weaknesses, this is an extremely important thing. Especially now because of the really extraordinary powers that we are gaining as a species. We are really... in the process of upgrading of ourselves into Gods.

Throughout human history, you're always influenced by your friends, your family, the culture around. And much of what people took to be their innermost desires and expectations, it actually came from outside.

I start reading a lot of books all the time. I drop, like, 90-something percent of them after 10 pages.

The easiest people to manipulate are the people who believe in free will—the people who believe that their thoughts and desires and expectations, they reflect some authentic inner self, and they don't question, is this really the case?'

When you ask, 'What is the meaning of life?', before you even attempt an answer, I would say the first step is to think, what kind of answer would be acceptable to me? And the answer is a story. We are storytelling animals. We think not in facts, not in statistics, not in equations; we think in stories.

To be able to tell the difference between what is actually happening and what is just a story that I'm creating and imposing on reality—most humans, this skill is underdeveloped.

What you try to do a thousand years ago with the priest preaching from the pulpit you will be able to do in a far more invasive way in 10 or 15 years with all kinds of brain-computer interfaces and direct biological interventions.

We are in a unique situation in human history when, for the first time, we have no idea [what] the job market [will] look like in 20 or 30 years. That was never before the case in history.

Nobody really knows how the job market would look like in 2040. So, they should be suspicious of all these kinds of advices by people who pretend that they know what the job market would need in 20 years.

The best investment, I would say, is in emotional intelligence and in mental balance and in these kinds of skills of how to keep changing throughout your life—how to keep learning throughout your life.

We are already in the midst of an AI arms race, and this is a terrible situation because it almost guarantees that all our worst nightmares about AI will be realized.

When I plan my day or I plan my year, it's the first thing I put in the calendar—the meditation retreats, and everything else has to find space around that.

If you lose your job as a truck driver in 2030 to a self-driving vehicle and there is a new opening in designing software, it's going to be a lot more difficult to retrain yourself as a software designer than it was to retrain yourself as a factory worker.

If you had to live your life based only on the inventions and creations of people from your nation, you would have a very miserable life—you'd probably be dead.

From the perspective of the algorithm, well, this is just another biochemical process. If the computer can diagnose cancer, it can diagnose love. It's just a different biochemistry.

From a very early age, I just couldn't accept the Jewish story, because it's completely false from a historical perspective.

In the end, the self is a story and not a real thing.