Yuval Noah Harari on the Mistake Strongmen Keep Making
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What are the conditions for a country to become great?
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I think if you look across his mega bestselling books, like Sapiens and Homo Deus, you all know Harari really has one major topic. That topic is cooperation. Cooperation and the ability to cooperate across scale, across time, as being the fundamental engine of human progress. Cooperation as the way we go from being this creature that absolutely cannot beat a bear or a lion in a fight, to being able to create and command the societies we have now. I think right now there's something interestingly challenging about Harari's work, because we live in this moment of Trumpism, of right-wing populism, and one of the messages of those movements is that this emphasis on cooperation, on positive-sum relationships, is a lie.
That humanity, that society is driven not so much by these like soft questions of cooperation as by power, hierarchy, dominance, about winning the transaction with the other, about coming out ahead in the conflict, in the trade. That all these like niceties of liberalism, they were a lie. and that really humanity runs on power. And that to forget that is to forget the engine of our progress. So I've been wanting to talk to Harari about this. I think there's an interesting debate to put him in conversation with. He's in a book for kids called Unstoppable Us Volume Three. It is also about cooperation and how enemies turn into friends. But this conversation is bigger than that. It's about liberalism. It's about Israel.
Harari is Israeli. It's about AI and what it's going to do to us and what it's going to do to language as the way we work with and fail to work with each other. It is, as we say in the podcast, a wide-ranging conversation and all the better for it. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
Yuval Noah Harari, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be here. I wanted to begin with a clip of Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff, that I began thinking about as I was reading some of your recent work. I'm going to play it here.
You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by... strength that is governed by force that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.
What do you think when you hear that?
That the whole of the history of philosophy and spirituality is an argument with exactly that point of view. That the only reality is power. The only reality is force. And from the viewpoint of a historian, it's clear that this is not the case. If the only human reality was brute force, we would still be living in tiny hunter-gatherer bands in the African savannah. Because the whole of human history is about how do you get more people to cooperate and to trust each other? And you cannot do that only with brute force.
I want to spend some time here on this tension between visions of cooperation as a driving force in human history and visions of power as a driving force in human history. Because I think if I'm trying to steel man the vision that emerges out of the Trump administration and some other political figures like them right now, they would say that the conditions for cooperation have been a mixture of shared national and religious stories.
Mm-hmm.
and hierarchy, power, domination, and subjugation. And that what they're trying to recreate are these conditions that have held, that have allowed, you know, the great countries to become great.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the conditions for a country to become great?
0:00–6:35
2
How does Yuval Noah Harari define cooperation in human history?
6:35–14:22
3
What is the significance of shared national and religious stories?
14:22–26:36
4
Why does the liberal story seem weak in today's political climate?
26:36–36:30
5
How does nationalism contribute to societal cohesion?
36:30–47:06
6
What role does AI play in shaping human relationships?
47:06–59:54
7
How can AI influence our understanding of language and truth?
59:54–1:08:17
8
What are the potential dangers of AI personhood?
1:08:17–1:53:33