Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How does Yuval Noah Harari define cooperation in human history?
The nation is not even a small tribe. In a small tribe, you know everybody. It's based on personal relationships. With nations, one of the most striking things about them is that you don't know 99.99% of the other people in your nation. And this is true not only of big nations like China or India. This is also true of Israel. There are like about 10 million Israelis. I don't know most of them.
And nevertheless, nationalism makes people care about these strangers enough so that, for instance, you pay taxes so that other people in your nation will get good health care and education. And ultimately, in some circumstances, even risk your life for them. Sometimes, of course, nationalism veers into hatred of others. But this is not an essential feature of nationalism.
Nationalism can exist without hating outsiders. It cannot exist without love for insiders. And many of the people today who present themselves as the champions of nationalism They put the emphasis on hatred, and in many cases, they even create hatreds within the nation. They divide the nation against itself. They think they are great patriots if they hate outsiders.
And, you know, looking at Israel as an example, nobody, I think, in the history of Israel divided the nation against itself more than Netanyahu. And in this sense, he has been the worst enemy of Israeli nationalism. Yes, he hates outsiders, okay, but this is not the key test. And then the question is, how would different nations conduct their relationships?
It starts with issues of security and foreign policy. You know, the Trumpian vision, which is all about force and hierarchy, it basically says the way to organize the international system is if the weak always surrender to the demands of the strong, and then we have order, and then we have even peace.
So if the United States demands Greenland, Denmark must recognize reality and give Greenland to the United States. If Denmark refuses, and as a result, there is violence, there is a war, there is conflict, this is the fault of Denmark. for refusing to recognize the reality and giving the strong what they demand. This is their logic. This is how they see the world.
Now, leaving aside the issue of morality, still you have a big problem. The big problem is, first of all, that all nations are then driven to become strong because you cannot survive as a weak nation in such a world. And then all nations are forced to to invest more and more of their resources in their military.
For most of history, a lot of the budget of every kingdom, empire, republic, city-state was invested or wasted on soldiers and fortresses and warships and things like that, and nobody felt safe. One of the miracles of the international systems of recent decades, and this is not about, you know, writing pacifistic poetry. It's about government budgets.
You look at the budgets, you see that on average, in the early 21st century, on average, about 6% to 7% of the government budget went for defense, for the military, compared to 10% on average that went to health care. It's the first time in history that humanity spent more on health care than on defense.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of shared national and religious stories?
But they were built in such a robust way that even though we don't maintain them, they still function well. But within a year, five years, 10 years, you know, if you live in a house and nobody maintains it, eventually it collapses. And then it's too late.
Something you were saying in there was interesting to me, which is that the sort of two major competitor ideologies of the 20th century, what they both believed in was an end to conflict. It wasn't just conflict. It was that at some point there would be victory.
Yes.
And liberalism in one guise believes in cooperation. Yes. And in another guise that I think we don't talk about as much anymore, but I find interesting, one of its central tenets is there will always be conflict. There will always be disagreement. That the differences in society are not resolvable and should not even be resolvable to an end state. And that the question is how we live together.
both inside a nation and even as a global community, amidst that difference, making room for it to exist without it turning into war, into oppression, into persecution.
Yeah, that's a very, very important point. Liberalism does not believe in redemption. You look at the grand historical visions of religions like Christianity or Islam or Judaism. You look at ideology, secular ideologies like fascism and communism. They all believe in redemption. They all believe that eventually history will reach a final destination where everything will be perfect.
Liberalism does not believe it, that there is no redemption, at least not on earth. There will always be problems and tensions and conflicts. And the question is, how do we live with them? And this is why also liberalism invests a lot in building what I think is the most important thing in every large scale human system, which is a self-correcting mechanism.
if you believe that your view of the world was given to you by God, so it cannot contain any error, you do not need a self-correcting mechanism, because there are no mistakes. Liberalism starts with the assumption that it's just human beings trying to do the best we can, and there will be mistakes, there will be errors, so we need strong self-correcting mechanisms.
The most famous mechanism is, of course, elections. That every four years or five years or whatever, the people can say, hey, we made a mistake last time. Let's try something else this time.
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Chapter 4: Why does the liberal story seem weak in today's political climate?
And this proved to be untenable.
Oh, it's so interesting to me that you've gone here. It's funny, I've been circling something somewhat similar in my own podcast and work on liberalism, which is that the early virtue associated with liberalism, what comes before it is liberality, which is, I would say, very much a cousin of fraternity, this ethic of mutual respect and generosity towards your fellow citizens.
And one thing that you're adding to that story is, is that that has to be based on itself some kind of national story. That there is a difficulty in maintaining cohesion in a national community, maintaining those bonds of fellowship, once you have stopped believing in the connection you have to each other.
Yeah, and I think the important thing to emphasize here, I mean, the reason that liberalism kind of lost touch with fraternity is that some people told a very negative story about fraternity, seeing it primarily in terms of conflict with other communities. That fraternity is about hating and fighting with other nations.
And if we remember that, no, as we said in the beginning, the essence of fraternity is caring and loving a certain group of people. And this does not require hating outsiders. But it does mean that you have a special relationship with a certain group of people, that you share a common history, a common culture, a common language. And trying to kind of imagine it away just ignores history.
Yes, we have certain commitments to all of humanity, but this does not preclude having special commitments towards a segment of humanity, just as, you know, you have certain loyalty to your family, which is over and above what you owe your fellow citizens or foreigners.
I've seen you make the argument that the limiting question on the stories we tell should be, does anyone suffer because of this story?
Yeah, I think that morality is ultimately about suffering and liberation from suffering and happiness. Can the nation suffer? We often use this language, but it's just a metaphor. If a country loses a war, suffers a defeat in war, it doesn't really suffer. It has no brain. It has no nervous system. It has no mind. It cannot feel pain or pleasure. Only individual humans can suffer.
But the nation, I think even in this telling, is a storytelling mechanism to protect the group that is bonded within it. To use one closer to your home as an example, the story that Israeli Jews tell about the Palestinians is not that they are not suffering.
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Chapter 5: How does nationalism contribute to societal cohesion?
that temptations of power are very, very big and not a lot of people or a lot of movements throughout history have managed to resist it. So it's not such a big surprise, but it's still disappointing.
This has been a period in America when I've watched a pretty deep schism for American Jews emerge. And I think one reason it has been so painful is it has pitted two forms of the tradition and the thinking of Judaism against each other, which is... There's a tradition of the stranger.
And one reason Jewish people have been big contributors to the development of modern liberalism and human rights law and pluralism and a lot of the political theory and lawmaking there is it is very connected to the Jewish experience. It's the only way for the Jewish diaspora to be safe, right? would be to be in societies that fundamentally were liberal and were not ethno-nationalist.
And in Israel, there's a view that among Israeli Jews that for that society to be safe and to be itself, it will have to be increasingly ethno-nationalist. And in a way, I think it's not always admitted right now that the tradition is somewhat set against itself. And there was a hope these things could coexist through a two-state solution or other things, but with that increasingly
off the table and with a more ethno-nationalist direction in Israel, I think you now have this kind of tradition and its realizations actually in direct conflict with each other.
Yeah, I think this is a very accurate way to present it. And of course, they adhere to the biblical Judaism, which was a very different religion than what developed over 2,000 years in the diaspora. Biblical Judaism was a very violent religion. very illiberal, very intolerant religion. For its time, it was probably one of the least or maybe the most intolerant religion in the world.
You still, you know, in the Bible, you have a commandment to kill all the Canaanites people. you have an intolerance, a very deep intolerance towards the religions and religious practices and beliefs of all other people. The ancient world, it has its own horrors, but religiously it was a very tolerant place.
Polytheistic religions, which believed in many gods, they had no problem accepting the religions, the gods of other people. And also practicing them to some extent. You know, you look at, say, the Roman Empire. So the Romans had no problem accepting the gods and religions of hundreds of other peoples that they conquered. They did not try to exterminate the other religions.
In many cases, they adopted them. And, you know, as a Roman, you can go to Jupiter's temple in the morning, and then you can go to the Isis temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and you're also willing to hear about this new god, Jesus, Yahweh, coming from the Middle East. You're open. Judaism was not an open religion. This changed to some extent when the Jews found themselves as a tiny minority.
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Chapter 6: What role does AI play in shaping human relationships?
And this is the bet that the Netanyahu government is making. Now, you know, with regard to the bet that Sinoir made, that Hamas made, leave aside the question of justice for a moment. Just in terms of effectiveness, Sinoir had an amazing victory within his grasp, and he lost it just because of his cruelty. On the 7th of October, what happened?
Hamas managed to secure a stunning military victory over the IDF. And to humiliate Israel and the IDF, And they needed to do just one small thing, big thing, different in order to achieve a much bigger political and geopolitical victory. And this one thing was just spare the civilians.
Imagine an alternative 7th of October in which Hamas does exactly the same thing, but instead of killing or abducting the Israeli civilians, they hold them and bring the world press to see how well Hamas is treating the Israeli captives. They bring them water and medicine and food. They capture the soldiers and take them prisoners of war, which is legitimate, but they do not harm the civilians.
And that's the only difference. In such a scenario, Israel's hands would have been tied. Not only world public opinion, but also Israeli public opinion would not have allowed Israel to just, you know, bombard Gaza into rubble. Because we would have had these images of Hamas combatants taking care of Israeli civilians and not harming them
And in that world, there would have been very little legitimacy for Israel to have overwhelming reprisal against Gaza. And Hamas would have won. So not just a tactical victory, but a major political victory. And it didn't happen simply because of their cruelty.
And we are talking on the week when a major report came out about October 7th, based on huge amount of analysis of photos and videos and victim testimonies. And the cruelty and the sadism in it, it's genuinely horrifying. It's a very, very hard report to read, almost any of. People can find it if they want.
And the thing I was thinking reading it, because of course, if you talk to Palestinians and people have been in Gaza, you know, their stories of loss are overwhelming too to hear, is that these now exist and they keep feeding into these two stories. I often think that it is easier to imagine political solutions that could reconcile people's interests.
than it is to imagine a reconciliation of the stories that now drive both societies. And I'm curious as somebody who thinks about stories as a space of both cooperation and conflict, how you think about that. I can imagine, quote unquote, solutions that exist on paper. What I cannot imagine
is those processes taking hold in societies that now run upon the stories of fear and anger and vengeance well i want to say something about anger and fear and something about pain
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Chapter 7: How can AI influence our understanding of language and truth?
Certainly, you know, you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's not about food. There is objectively enough food to keep everybody alive between the Mediterranean and Jordan River. It's not even about territory. Even though it's one of the densest places in the world in terms of population density, objectively, there is enough land to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody.
It's about the stories that people have in their minds, which they hold with tremendous force, but which are ultimately almost nothing. And under certain conditions that we don't really know how to create, people can let go of these stories.
One thing that is maybe a layer down from the question of the stories being fed is the way the stories circulate and who circulates them. And here I'm talking more broadly than just Israel and Palestinians. We live in this age, this age in which liberalism, as we were talking about it earlier, is clearly breaking down. And one thing distinctive about this age is
is this movement to our stories being passed on social media, on algorithmic media, on digital media. There are technologies that lend themselves to cooperation and technologies that I think lend themselves to fracture. And the internet and social media were very much promised as a technology of cooperation. You are, I mean, even the verbs we use, sharing, right?
What could be more peaceful possibly than sharing? And yet I don't think it has turned out that way. So I'm curious for your reflections on this layer of it, the sort of mechanisms upon which our information, our shared or not shared stories now are created and circulated.
So you have these people who, you know, they constantly read all these conspiracy theories and fake news and so forth, and they don't trust anybody. They don't trust the government. They don't trust the traditional media. They don't trust science and the universities. Oh, these are all kind of conspiracies to deceive us. But they do trust the algorithms that show them all these stories.
So it's not that trust completely evaporated from their mind or from the world. It shifted from humans to algorithms. And this is happening in more and more systems. The other thing which is less essential but has been very important over the last decade or two...
is that the algorithms of social media, they were given as their goal, not the creation of trust, not the creation of truth, but the creation of engagement. Like the goal given to the Facebook algorithm, to the X algorithm, to the TikTok algorithm is increase user engagement, right? Which sounds nice, engagement, that sounds like a good thing.
But what it really means is that the algorithms experimented on millions and billions of human guinea pigs to see how do we make humans more engaged? How do we make humans spend longer on the platform and react to it more? For instance, by sharing the posts with their friends.
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Chapter 8: What are the potential dangers of AI personhood?
You're playing on harder mode when you're going for more virtuous communication. And so I do think there is some deep, I know it's been a long response, but I do think there is a deep relationship between the forms of politics that are thriving and the communications infrastructure on which our politics and societies are now built.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing is, it doesn't seem that the ideological differences today are bigger than in the past. In many ways, they seem smaller. You know, if you think about, say, American politics in the 1960s and the issues back then, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the ideological differences, I would say, were much, much bigger.
And, you know, when we talk today about liberalism, and it's good that you mentioned it, we're not talking about this kind of partisan party liberalism. For me, the test of liberalism, like test yourself, are you a liberal? is basically three or four questions. Do you think people should have the right to choose their own government?
Do you think people should have the right to choose their own profession? Do you think people should have the right to choose their own religion? And do you think people should have the right to choose their own spouse? If you answered yes to all four, congratulations, you're a liberal. The vast majority of people in history did not say yes to these four questions.
For most of history, it was taken for granted that people don't choose their government. There is some king chosen by God or some emperor chosen by the army, that people don't choose their profession. If your father was a shoemaker, you will be a shoemaker. If you are born into the Kshatriya caste, you will be a Kshatriya. Definitely you can't choose your spouse and you can't choose your religion.
Now, I think, you know, even the vast majority of Trump voters would say yes to all these four questions. So ideologically, the liberals and so-called conservatives are much closer than probably in any previous time in history. But the type of discourse that is being produced makes people feel as if the differences are enormous.
And yeah, this is to a large extent because of this pressure to be exciting. And we have politicians, you see the politicians who rise to the top, they're extremely exciting and engaging personalities. You cannot take your eyes off them. And thinking about it, you know, even in evolutionary terms, This comes from misusing our evolutionary programming.
Like if you're walking around the African savanna tens of thousands of years ago, most of what you see is not very exciting. Like, there are some bushes here, there are some gazelles there, that's fine. And then there is a snake. Now, the snake is exciting. The snake literally excites your entire nervous system. And if you don't focus your entire attention on the snake, you die.
So we are programmed that if something is exciting, we drop everything else and just focus on that. And that makes sense in the African savanna. Now, if you are on Instagram, so you're basically holding your phone and doing snake, snake, snake, snake, snake. And the algorithm simply hacked our evolutionary program. They've hacked us. And what we are seeing around us is just the beginning.
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