On the one hand, the pandemic can increase tensions and hatred and illusions in the world. I think it's up to us to decide what we want the story to be. It's made us realize a lot of new things about ourselves-that people, for instance, value connection, physical connection. Yuval Noah Harari: We still donвЂ™t know what will be the final impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of art and storytelling. How do you think the pandemic has impacted the stories we tell each other and how we evolve as a society? And then you have to get up every day and do it again and again-and frankly, that getting up every day and doing it again and again, this is actually part of what makes it a compelling story. So chasing big ideas, delivering on the promise of those ideas, and telling those stories effectively is what it takes to build a brand. And that requires a lot of invention and grit and frankly, a lot of risk. There are huge obstacles to making them happen. The Climate Pledge, where we committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2040, and encouraging a lot of other companies to join us-these things are hard.

I think that's certainly true for us at Amazon where we have a lot of big ideas. And the best stories, in my view, are the ones you don't want to put down because the goals and the challenges get bigger and bigger over time.

Neil Lindsay: The most interesting brands tell stories that amplify the truth about overcoming real obstacles towards something worthwhile. What stories are at the basis of success of Amazon? And if you try to understand where this ability to cooperate in large numbers comes from, you get to storytelling because it's the basis of every large scale human cooperation. They don't know each other personally, and still they can cooperate to produce a shirt or to have a conference via the internet. If you think about nations like the USA or China, or about the global trade network, this is a system of cooperation between hundreds of millions of people who never met each other. We homo sapiens can cooperate, not just with thousands of strangers, but today with billions of strangers. They could cooperate only with other Neanderthals they knew personally. Neanderthals also never cooperated in large numbers. Chimpanzees can't cooperate in more than, say, a hundred individuals.

What really makes us special is our unique, remarkable ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. If you have a one-on-one fight with a pig or a wolf, they are likely to win. Yuval Noah Harari: When you look at an individual homo sapien like me or you, we are not stronger or more capable than a Neanderthal or a chimpanzee, or even a pig or an elephant.

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