Yuval Noah Harari on the Mistake Strongmen Keep Making
About this episode
Klein interviews historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of 'Sapiens' and 'Nexus,' about what he calls Trump's core delusion: that international relations are a zero-sum contest of strong versus weak, and that cooperation is weakness. Harari counters that large-scale cooperation, built on shared stories, is the engine of human progress, and that the liberal order's great achievement was making war irrational. They discuss why liberalism is in crisis — it lost the national story, the fraternity leg of liberty-equality-fraternity — Israel's war in Gaza, and how pain makes societies unable to acknowledge others' suffering. Finally they turn to AI: social-media algorithms already hack human attention, Harari warns, and AI companions could hack intimacy itself, which is why he opposes granting AI legal personhood.