harari is a best-selling author.peaking to me in sky interview in april, he warned that the pandemic poses a threat to democracy, leaving us with some important choices to make. >> we know that democracies s collapse ususually not i in nor times. they alwayays collapse in emergencies. but in emergencieses is the tim when we most need democracy. governments are now handing out billions and trillions of dollars or yen, anand we need democratic supervision. otherwise, a single persrson ca cide to o save the corporations of hisis friends and supportere while letting other businesses fall. so, yes, we need emergency measures, , definitely, but eve in emergencies, we stitill need checks and balances anand we stl need supupervision. >> right. >> to make sure that the government is really serving the inteterests ofof everybobody. >> right. >> and not just ofof those who e connected to power. >> but isn't it often the case when, during the time of ememergency, t the people tend prefer stability over disruption? you know, they

organise our societies today and i'm thinking of the recent past where we have interviewed yuval noah hararily i think believe in a notion of human progress. steven pinker, in particular, will make a point of saying you might think things are bad today, we focus on the wars, we focus on the bad stuff, but actually human beings are living in the best of times. there is more security, better education, more relief from poverty than there has ever been in human history before. and he would say that is because we are evolving better ways of running our societies. your message, although you are an optimist about the human condition, seems to be that we are actually not discovering better ways to run our societies, and you seem in some ways anti—progress. well, i'm absolutely not. we have made extraordinary progress in the last couple of decades, moral progress, technological progress. if you would chose any time to live, it would be now. what i am just saying is that we got the history of civilisation all wrong. steven pinker paints a picture of our history in which supposedly everything was wors