Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion | The Ezra Klein Show

I think if you look across his

mega-bestselling books like Sapiens and

Homo Deus,

Yuval Noah Harari really has one major

topic. [music]

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 [music] 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 [music] 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,

>> [music]

>> is a lie.

That humanity, that society, is driven

not so much by these like soft questions

of cooperation [music] 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 [music] really humanity runs on

power.

And that to forget that is to forget the

engine [music] of our progress.

So I've been wanting to talk to Harari

about this. I think there's a an

interesting debate to put him in

conversation with. He's a new book for

kids called Unstoppable Us, volume

three. It is also about cooperation and

how enemies turn into [music] friends,

but this conversation is bigger than

that. It's about liberalism,

it's about [music]

Israel, Harari is Israeli, it's about AI

and what it's going to do to us and what

it's [music] 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 biz, a [music] wide-ranging

conversation and all the better for it.

As always, my email is

ezrakleinshow@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, uh 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,

Jack, that is governed by

strength, that is governed by force,

that is governed by power. These are the

iron laws of the world that exist

since the beginning of time.

>> do you think when you hear that?

That the whole of the of uh the history

of philosophy and spirituality is uh in

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

savanna.

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 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

uh political figures like them right

now, they would say that the conditions

for cooperation

have been a mixture of shared national

and religious stories Mhm. and

hierarchy, [snorts]

power, domination, and and subjugation.

And that what they are trying to

recreate are these conditions that have

held, that have allowed,

you know, the great countries to become

great.

And I think it's appealing to people.

Mhm. But but the other dimension is your

work is so much about shared story and

story as the operating system that

permits human cooperation at large

scale, right? And I think something

that,

you know, people like Donald Trump or or

in, you know, uh Yoram Hazony, the uh

nationalist kind of philosopher, argue

is that

we need these intense stories of

nations, of ethnic solidarity, of

religious solidarity.

And liberalism

and all these nice human rights-fearing

uh

ideologies that emerge have begun to

corrode them. And so, they're corroding

the very conditions for cooperation. And

and I'm curious as somebody who's been

in the in the debates, how you think

about that. That's a different argument.

I mean, it's an argument that recognizes

that not everything is based is based

just on force and brute power.

Definitely, nationalism has been one of

the most successful and also one of the

most positive stories that humans have

ever come up with.

Uh for me, nationalism is not about

hating other groups.

Nationalism at its core is about loving

and caring about a a a a a a a large

number of strangers that you do not know

personally, but you're nevertheless

willing to make a lot of sacrifices for

them. The nation is not a family. 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, and 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 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 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 nation conduct their

relationships?

It starts with issues of security and

foreign policy.

You know, the 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, the problem, 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

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 was

invested or wasted on soldiers and

fortresses and 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 something It's not about, you know,

writing

pacifistic poetry. It's about government

budgets. You look at the budgets, you

see that in

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,

And they felt more secure than in any

previous time in history because there

was this taboo

on invading and conquering other

countries by force. Now, if we now break

this taboo,

it will force everybody to arm

themselves to the teeth at the expense

of health care, education, welfare, and

so forth, and nobody will will will feel

safer as a result because countries and

leaders constantly miscalculate.

In the Vietnam War, the Americans

thought they were stronger. It turned

out they were wrong.

Putin was convinced he will crush

Ukraine in 48 hours. He was wrong.

So, this vision of let's base the the

peace and order of the world on a

hierarchy of strong and weak, with the

weak always obeying the the strong and

thereby buying peace, it's been tried

thousands of thousands of years, and we

know where it leads. It leads on the one

hand to empire, and on the other hand to

endless wars. So, we are more on that

road again than I think we've been in my

lifetime.

I You You've talked about the global

liberal order as one of the I think you

called it the most amazing political and

maybe moral achievement of humankind.

Yeah. And today I don't think it feels

that way to people. It has been consumed

in the language of budgets,

in the reality of bureaucracy.

What was the story

liberalism as a

international force Mhm. once told?

And what do you think happened to it?

The basic story is about shared

experiences and interests and

cooperation. In the 20th century, you

had basically three big stories.

You had the fascist story, which said

that history is a a competition, a

conflict between nations or races. It's

decided by strength. Ultimately, the

strongest nation or the strongest race

will defeat all the others and conquer

the world.

This was the fascist story. Then you had

the communist story, which says, "Yes,

but it's not between races or nations,

it's between classes.

There is a an inevitable conflict

between different classes

that will be violent and end with the

victory of the working class, which will

establish the dictatorship of the

proletariat."

Then liberalism came and said, "No,

history does not have to be about

conflict at all. Not conflict between

nations and not conflict between

classes. It can be about cooperation.

Why? Because all humans, no matter to

which race or nation or class they

belong, they are essentially the same.

There are some small differences in how

we look and in our languages and

religions and so forth, but essentially

we are the same specie.

We all have the same biological needs.

We all have roughly the same

psychological needs, at least the deep

ones, to be loved, to be recognized, and

so and so forth.

We have shared interests.

And if we recognize these shared

characteristics and interests,

in many cases, it just makes more sense

to cooperate than to compete and to

fight. And by cooperating, we can build

a world which will be better for

everybody.

This was the basic liberal story.

And as of 2026, we can look back and say

it's it's failing. It hasn't failed

completely, but according to many

measures, we are still living in

probably the best time in history.

Uh it's it's uh

uh it's collapsing, but it's you know,

like it's it's this kind of amazing

house

in which all of humanity is living,

and the systems are still sort of

running. Like the water, the sewage,

and nobody takes care of them anymore,

but they were built in such a robust way

that even though we don't maintain them,

they still function. But within a year,

5 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 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 and

liberalism in in one guise believes in

cooperation.

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. Hm.

That the differences in society are not

resolvable and would not 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 that's a very very

important point. Liberalism does not

believe in redemption.

Uh you look at at the grand historical

visions of of religions like

Christianity or Islam or Judaism, you

look at ideologies, 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.

Uh there will always be problems and and

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 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 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 4 years or 5 years or

whatever, the people can say, "Hey, we

made a mistake last time. Let's try

something else this time."

And all these very complicated systems

of checks and balances and independent

courts and freedom of of press and all

these are just a complicated way to

ensure that a country has a robust

self-correcting mechanism. So you make

an argument that fiction is often better

for cooperation than truth. Yes. Why?

Uh pooh.

First of all, the truth is costly.

To know the truth, to produce a truth a

true story, you need to invest a lot of

time and energy in investigating it. Um

fiction is very cheap.

And fiction can be made as simple as you

would like it to be. And people like

simple stories. Like, you know, these

simplified narratives, good against

evil. We are 100% good. We have never

done anything bad in our history. They

are 100% evil. They have never done

anything good in their history. Very

simple, very attractive.

Um, and the truth is not just

complicated. The truth is often painful.

Uh, fiction can be made as flattering as

you would like it to be. Again, we have

never done anything bad to anybody. We

are perfect. We are wonderful.

Um, so this is why fiction tends to be

far more powerful

uh, as a story.

And also when you try to motivate people

for action,

you don't want them to have doubts. You

need them to be fired up, 100%

committed.

And fiction is is is easier to work with

in in this respect. Does that imply that

if societies,

political movements, institutions become

too truth-seeking,

that given the importance of

cooperation, they become at a long-term

disadvantage? I mean, no truth is a

problem. Yes.

>> But I think this implies a little bit

that have too much truth can be a

problem, too.

Yes. Uh,

you know, a kind of

absolute commitment to the pursuit of

truth is a spiritual practice,

but it's a very, very difficult

political program.

Again, there is a difference between

lying and fiction.

You lie when you know something is not

true and you nevertheless say it or or

support it.

Um, in many cases,

I think the ideal is to recognize that

we are using fictions to maintain our

society. This is the difference, I would

say, for instance, between the United

States

uh, and many other powerful countries in

history,

that the

If you look at the US Constitution,

it starts with We the people".

"We the people have come together and

agreed on this text, on on this

principles. It is coming from our mind.

It is our creation."

Now, it doesn't use the word fiction, of

course. But when I say fiction, I mean

something which is not objective. It

doesn't come from the laws of physics.

It doesn't come from God. I We invented

it.

And the US Constitution very honestly

says, "We invented these principles

which I think are good.

But because we recognize that we

invented them, we the people, then we

also include in the Constitution an

amendment mechanism.

So, we recognize we are just human

beings. Maybe we came up with something

which is sub-optimal. Maybe things will

change later on. So, we have a mechanism

to change the story later on.

And we the founding fathers, for

instance, think that slavery is okay.

But in the strange situation that maybe

somebody in the future will think it's

not okay, they have an amendment

mechanism.

Now, you compare that to say religion.

And let's take an example, the Bible or

the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments, it starts not with

"We the people of Israel".

It starts with "I am the Lord your God".

And it has no amendment mechanism

because of that.

And if you look carefully, you will see

that the Ten Commandments endorse

slavery.

The Tenth Commandment, uh uh not to

covet. Thou shalt not covet. What

shouldn't you covet? It have a list of

things you shouldn't covet like your

neighbor's field and your neighbor's ox

and also your neighbor's slaves. It

tells people, the Ten Commandments, it's

okay to have slaves. It's just not right

to covet the slaves of somebody else.

Then God will be angry.

And there is just no mechanism to change

that.

Because it pretends to be not a human

creation,

but a divine revelation.

I think there's an interesting tension

in there. Mhm.

And you can make a critique of

liberalism, or at least where it is now,

that it is good at building mechanisms,

institutions, rules, bureaucracies.

And it is intrinsically bad

at creating enduring stories. Mhm. That

in part because at least in its modern

form, it often is really secularized.

Religion has been a tremendous source of

cooperation, keeping people bound

together both at a moment, and then

working towards a future that they may

not even live to see. Mhm. There's, you

know, questions of nationalism and the

national story, which liberalism is a as

a self-correcting

ideology often over time creates

critique of. And then you you lose some

of that national coherence as you're

arguing about the past of your

country and what it has done right and

wrong. And and you are a person who

thinks very deeply about stories. And

so, to you,

is this a a a weakness of

kind of advanced secularized liberal

democracies? Are they losing

the cohesion

that keeps them in the long run

competitive to ideologies that maybe

can't build bureaucracies, maybe cannot

govern effectively, but they sure as

hell can tell a story.

Yeah, th- this is a central problem of

of liberalism. On the other hand, I

would not kind of fall into the trap of

imagining religions as this

primeval cohesive force that keeps

people together. I'm a medievalist. Like

my original field of study was the

Middle Ages.

In in terms of percentage of population

who died in the war, probably the worst

war in European history was the Thirty

Years' War.

Uh

very complicated, but to make a long

story short, between Protestants and

Catholics

in in Central Europe.

And you know, Catholics and Protestants

were willing to slaughter each other

because of tiny differences in the way

they interpreted the religion of love.

And

um

liberalism arose in part out of the

frustration

that people had with religion because it

constantly created more and more

conflicts and and and divisions. And you

know, you look at Germany today, nobody

cares, almost nobody cares, if who is

the the person running to be chancellor

is a Protestant or a Catholic. And in

this sense, liberalism is a better basis

for uniting a large-scale and diverse

group of people just because it's it's

it's more flexible. Again, it tells a

very it's it's a complicated story.

There is no redemption in the end.

Uh it's based on not on some charismatic

leader. It's based on these very

complex, impersonal, self-correcting

mechanisms and bureaucracies and

institutions. So in this sense, it's

less appealing.

Now, we are living at the moment in in

in a moment of crisis of liberalism. One

of the reasons is that over the last few

decades, liberalism has kind of lost

touch with something that was a close

ally of it for many generations, which

is nationalism.

You know, in the 19th century,

liberalism and nationalism go hand in

hand.

And if you look at at least some places

in the world today like Ukraine, they

still go hand in hand. The Ukrainians

are fighting at one and the same time

for their national survival and

independence, and for liberal democracy.

There is no contradiction between the

two.

You know, I would say that since 1789,

nobody managed to think about anything

new in the political realm.

The French Revolution came up with this

kind of of of ideological package, which

was complex.

Liberty, equality, fraternity. And

people tend to forget the third one,

fraternity. Fraternity is is the

national community.

And you can say that the whole of of

political history since 1789 is

experimenting with different

combinations of this trio. And every

movement that tried to completely

abandon one of these three failed.

Fascism tried to abandon Fascism was all

about fraternity, no equality, no

liberty.

Communism was also

emphasized one

equality at the expense of liberty and

to some extent fraternity.

One of the explanations of what is

happening to liberalism in recent

decades is that people just forgot

liberalism

focused on equality and liberty, but

tended to forget fraternity.

And this proved to be untenable.

Oh, it's it's so interesting to me that

you've you've gone here. Um

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. Yes. And one thing that

that you're adding to that story

is that that has to be based on itself

some kind of national story.

That there is a a difficulty in

maintaining cohesion in a national

community, maintaining those bonds of a

fellowship

once you have stopped believing

in the connection you have to each

other. Mhm.

Yeah, and I think that the important

thing to emphasize here, I mean, the

reason that liberalism kind of lost

touch with fraternity

is that it tended to have a to 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 as we

said in the beginning, the the 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 uh uh

language.

And trying to kind of imagine it away

just ignores history.

Yes, we have certain commitments to all

of humanity

but it 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 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 I think that morality is

ultimately about suffering and a

liberation from suffering and happiness.

Can the nation suffer?

We often use this language

but it's just a metaphor.

If if the 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 individuals 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 to use one closer to to to your home

as an example, the story that Israeli

Jews tell about the Palestinians is not

that they are not suffering.

It's either that the suffering is

deserved because of who they elected and

a kind of collective responsibility for

that um or who rules them

or that that suffering is an unfortunate

necessity Mhm.

>> for Israeli security.

And that the people who deny that are

naive. Mhm.

But it is this collision around

suffering, right? That maybe your

suffering is necessary for my

security, safety, or prosperity.

Yeah, I mean

obviously there are difficult moral

conflicts in the world. Not always, but

sometimes yes, there are tradeoffs. And

it's just saying that all of morality is

ultimately about suffering doesn't make

all moral dilemmas disappear.

But one of the things I observed in

Israel in the recent conflict is that a

lot of Israelis have a problem simply

acknowledging that the Palestinians

suffer.

Intellectually,

they know it.

But in many cases they simply cannot

observe it.

Like you show them images of a starving

child in Gaza, they will say this is

fake news.

Or they will immediately divert the

discussion to something else. This is

because of Hamas. Oh, But, if you say I

don't care just are you able for a few

seconds just to

be there and acknowledge that there is a

suffering human being there?" It's

extremely difficult to do it.

Even if you tell them, "Israel is a 100%

correct. A 100% of the fault for what

happens in Gaza is Hamas.

Everything Israel does is a 100%

correct.

Since it is so correct, since it is so

just, it should be easy for you

to observe the consequences of your

perfect justice. Here, just look at this

image." And and so many people just

can't do it.

You said that what is happening right

now in Israel could basically destroy or

void

2,000 years of Jewish thinking and

culture and existence. That that's the

worst case scenario.

What did you mean by that? Hm.

That

historically, and this goes back to the

beginning of our conversation, Judaism

positioned itself since the destruction

at least of the second temple

in opposition to this view of the world

as as governed only by brute force.

You know, when the Roman legions of

Vespasian destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE,

and you have Yohanan ben Zakkai

asking Vespasian

as a favor, "Grant me a small town

called Yavne, near Tel Aviv of today,

where he wants to establish a center of

learning."

And Vespasian agrees, "Okay, you Jews,

you can have your certain your your your

center of learning."

And since then for 2,000 years, Jews in

in Yavne and then in Cairo and Baghdad,

in Poland, in Brooklyn, they study. They

learn. This is again, this was the

essence of Judaism. Previously, it was a

religion of temples and priests and

bloody rituals.

And then it became a religion of

learning. And if you try to think what

was the maybe the most important message

of Jews over the last 2,000 years to

humanity,

I would say that it was the message that

it is okay to be different.

It is okay to think and behave

differently, let's say than the

majority.

You have say a country, I don't know,

like France or Germany, they celebrate

Easter and Christmas, they believe in

Jesus and so forth, and you have this

tiny minority of Jews who say, "We can

think differently. It's okay. We can

behave differently."

And this was the essence

of being Jewish.

And a lot of the thinking

and also the practice about what does it

mean to have freedom of thought,

what does it mean to be a powerless

minority,

was done by Jewish thinkers. And for

2,000 years, Jews all over the world,

they see studying and learning as the

highest spiritual activity.

And after 2,000 years, you ask them,

"What have you learned? You have

learned, you've studied for 2,000 years.

What have you learned?" And then people

like Netanyahu tell you, "Oh, we've

learned that you need to be a Roman."

That you need to be strong, that you

need to build legions, that you need to

destroy cities. This is the only thing,

this is the only thing that matters in

life.

And you know, it's it's it's a

legitimate I can say it's a legitimate

value system.

Rome has its its its

usefulness.

But

if after 2,000 years, the Jews simply

become the Romans. What was the point?

Why did you waste 2,000 years then?

You could have just become Roman back

then. You could have joined the

It just makes It just

nullifies the whole of Jewish history.

Was not that part of the early vision of

Zionism that it was going to create this

new Jew who was not this pallid

intellectual in the minority his nose in

a book, but he's going to be strong and

work the land and capable of making war

and protecting himself?

Yes, and the idea was that they can

combine

the the the lessons, the legacy

of Judaism

with working the land and building an

army and building a country.

And maybe it's maybe it was just it was

just wrong.

That ultimately a choice had to be made

whether you want to be Vespasian and

command a legion

or whether you want to be Yochanan ben

Zakkai and and and and study and develop

your spiritual side, and the two cannot

cannot go together. Is that what you

believe now that that the the

contradiction was ineradicable?

I'm I don't know. I mean, history is a

very complex and and unexpected process.

I don't think that there is an inherent

contradiction

between

uh uh power

and justice

or between developing your power and

developing your spiritual wisdom.

But, I think it's very difficult to

combine the two.

The 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. Uh so, it's not

such a big surprise.

But, it's still and and disappointing.

This has been a a a period in America

when I've watched a pretty deep schism

for American Jews emerge.

And I think one one reason it has been

so painful is it is pitted two forms of

the tradition and the the thinking of of

Judaism against each other which is

there is a tradition of the stranger and

and and one reason Jewish people have

been big contributors to the development

of modern liberalism and human rights

law and

pluralism and and a lot of political

theory and and and lawmaking there

is it is very

connected to the Jewish experience. It's

the only way for the Jewish diaspora to

be safe would be to be in societies that

fundamentally were liberal and were not

ethno-nationalist.

And in 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.

>> [clears throat]

>> Uh yeah. I think this is a very accurate

way to to to present it. And of course

they adhere to the biblical Judaism

which is a very different religion than

what developed over 2,000 years in the

diaspora.

Biblical Judaism was a very um uh

violent

very illiberal very intolerant religion

for its time. It was probably one of the

least or maybe the most intolerant

religion in the world.

Um you still, you know, in in the in the

Bible you have a commandment uh to kill

all the Canaanites people.

Um you have an intolerance, a very deep

intolerance

towards the religions and and and

religious practices and beliefs of all

other people. The ancient world was It

has its 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 the the gods and religions of

hundreds of other peoples that 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.

Um Judaism was not an open religion.

This changed to some extent when the

Jews found themselves as a tiny minority

living under the domination of of of

other other religions, other traditions,

which kind of forced them to explore and

adopt a more open and tolerant

worldview.

Uh but now these this 2,000 years of

tolerant Jewish tradition is being

completely denied and destroyed.

This is in some ways a critique that has

after been leveled at America from other

countries that

if our borders were an ocean on two

sides and Canada to the north and and

Mexico to the south,

we could be gentle and generous in our

use of power as well.

But that the reality of living this now

maybe in the Israeli Jewish perspective

of living where we do,

the reality of being able to see, you

know, Hezbollah from Jewish homes in the

north,

the reality of

living in a country

that has suffered the trauma of October

7th has forced us into a relationship

with power that is maybe not what we

want.

But

you know, to go back to the way Stephen

Miller put it, is a more honest

understanding

of what is required to be secure

in the real world, not the the world

that Yuval Noah Harari or Ezra Klein

like to imagine, but the world in which

we actually live. I'm sure you've had

this conversation with with your

countrymen at different times.

What do you What do you say to that

view?

To some extent, it's absolutely correct.

I mean, you do need to rely on force to

some extent to ensure your security, but

it just cannot be the only thing.

If you think force is the only thing

that guarantees your security,

eventually you will have to conquer the

entire world.

Like anything that that is potentially a

threat, you will have to conquer it. And

you know, Israel itself doesn't work

that doesn't operate like that. One of

the remarkable things that happened

after October 7th is that, you know, all

the peace agreements that Israel has

signed held.

Hamas hoped that after October 7th, it

will

cause all the Arab countries to unite

and try to destroy Israel.

And it it just didn't happen.

The peace agreement with Egypt held. The

peace agreement with Jordan held. The

peace agreement with the Gulf states

held. Uh also the agreements with the

Palestinian Authority held. It did not

join Hamas.

The not not the peace agreement, but the

relatively cordial relationship with the

Palestinian citizens of Israel held.

Hamas hoped that they will all rise

against Israel. No. On the 7th of

October, Palestinian citizens of his of

Israel, the overwhelming majority

uh stayed loyal to the country. Many of

them came to serve.

Many of the doctors in Israel are Arabs,

are Palestinians. They all went to the

hospital to take care of of the of the

injured.

Um not Hamas itself did not betray any

agreement with Israel because it never

signed any peace agreement with Israel.

So, [snorts] of course you can say, "Ah,

the peace agreement with Egypt held

because Egypt was afraid of Israel's

military force."

But this is only half the explanation

because Israel had overwhelming military

force compared with Hamas, and Hamas

still attacked it.

So, I'm not saying Israel should, you

know, kind dismantle its army,

but uh it's it's better if you have

both.

A strong army and a peace agreement than

only one.

And yes, Israel is living in a very,

very problematic, difficult neighborhood

in the world. One of the things that

you know,

it's one of the only countries in the

world that for most of its existence

m- many of its neighbors, if not most of

its neighbors, simply refused to

acknowledge its right to exist and

openly said that they are going to

destroy it.

There almost no other cases like that.

So, it it has been in a very difficult

situation since the moment of its

inception.

But the question is, you need power,

okay, what do you do with your power?

Israel is an extremely powerful state.

Um

it can use its power in different ways.

It can try to use its power for instance

to establish better relationships with

the Palestinians.

And you know, it's it's

if you look for instance at the way that

Israel is treating the Palestinians, not

in Gaza, but in the West Bank, there is

no security justification for that.

They did not attack Israel on the 7th of

October.

And

by its actions

Israel is making the the chances that

there will be a peaceful agreement with

with the Palestinians is decreasing.

And it can use its power, you know, it

cannot force the Palestinians to make

peace against their will, but it can

take

many actions that will make this more

likely, easier.

I think your point there on the West

Bank is very well taken, but but I want

to um

ask something about the Israeli story.

Yeah.

One thing that you see in the history of

asymmetric conflict

in the history of of how terrorist

groups try to weaken

stronger uh opponents

is that they know they can't win a war.

Maybe Hamas, I don't pretend to know

what was in Sinwar's mind. Maybe they

believed that there would be uh

an uprising all through the uh world

they would have all these allies. Maybe

he hoped for that.

But

I suspect he also understood that if

this worked, there would be an

overwhelming reprisal

that would level Gaza.

Uh which is what happened.

And that the victory, if he was able to

to to secure one, would not be defeating

Israel on the battlefield,

but destroying the story

that protected Israel and the rest of

the world.

That he would come to make the rest of

the world see Israel more the way he saw

it.

Israel has

won tactically every battle it has

fought in this war.

But as somebody who actually does care

about Israel, what I see happening is an

abandonment of its own story.

And uh

an absence of recognition that the world

is coming to see it in a much, much

darker

way, and that that is itself a source of

weakness, a kind of

a thing that um Hamas is trying to

achieve, which you could see it trying

to achieve at the beginning,

which people warned about.

And if you lose that story in the long

term, you've lost something real. You

look at polling on on Israel in America,

you look at particularly among the

young,

and the belief in Israel as a just

nation has collapsed.

And I think people in Israel treat that

largely as insignificant.

And I think in the long run, it is

significant.

Yeah, I think Israel is making a big bet

that Stephen Miller's world view

will prevail.

That the world will be a place in which

force is the only thing that matters,

and Israel will be the champion, one of

the champions of of of this world view.

Um and this is the bet that the

Netanyahu government is making.

Now, you know, with regard to the the

bet that Sinwar made, Hamas made, leave

aside the question of justice

for a moment. Just in terms of

effectiveness,

Sinwar 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 ti- small

things, big thing different

in order to to to achieve a a a

a much bigger political and geopolitical

victory.

And this one thing was just spare the

civilians.

Imagine an an an 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 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 uh uh 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 the

cruelty.

And we are talking on the week when a

major report came out about October 7th

uh based on huge amount of analysis of

photos and videos and um

victim testimonies.

And

the cruelty and the sadism in it is it's

it's genuinely

horrifying. It's a very very hard report

to read almost any of.

People can find it if they want.

And and the thing I was thinking reading

it

because of course if you um talk to

Palestinians and and and people who've

been in Gaza, you know, their stories of

loss are are are overwhelming too to

hear.

Is it these now exist and they keep

feeding into these two stories? I 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 and I'm curious as somebody who

thinks about stories as a as a space of

both cooperation [snorts] and conflict

how you think about that. I I can

imagine, you know, quote-unquote

solutions that exist on paper, but I

cannot imagine

is those processes

taking hold

in societies that now

run upon

the stories of fear and anger and

vengeance.

Mhm.

Well,

I I want to say something about about

anger and fear and something about pain.

>> [snorts]

>> The angry and and fearful stories, they

need to be fed.

Anger is like a fire

that

consumes you, but it constantly needs to

be fed. And if it is not fed, it

ultimately dies down.

And you look at history and and you see

conflict horrendous conflicts and you

say, "People will never forget what They

will never forgive."

And then within a few decades, if

conditions change, they do.

You look at at and Germans.

You know, it took just a couple of

decades. I have friends reclaiming

Jewish friends reclaiming German

citizenship. Yeah. Just shocking thing

to see. Beautiful. Yeah. And you know,

and and the relations are really good.

They are not just, you know,

make-believe. They are not just based on

some kind of material benefit. The

relations are really good.

And it's not it's not even 100 years.

Um so, all the example I gave before was

of Catholics and Protestants in Germany.

After slaughtering each other for so

long,

it was

they reconciled.

Now, in many cases, anger builds systems

that then feed the anger more and more.

And then it seems really to never end.

But if you stop feeding it,

eventually it dies down.

Uh this is true of all, I think all

forms of violence. And it goes back to

the beginning of our discussion, what is

more fundamental, peace or war?

Violence or calmness?

And on the one hand, violence seems more

fundamental because, you know, you can

have if you have quiet, if you have

peace,

it's enough if one person starts

shouting and the peace is shattered. If

you have 100 people cooperating and one

person starts fighting, you have

violence. So, there is an imbalance in

favor of violence and it seems to in

this sense to be more real, more

fundamental.

But there is a sense in which peace is

more fundamental because violence always

requires

food, investment, weapons, fuel, food

for the soldiers.

If you stop feeding it, eventually it

dies down and peace always remains a

possibility. So, I would not despair.

Uh well, matter what are the stories

that kind of feel people's mind right

now,

the possibility of eventual

reconciliation and and peace is is

always there.

And

I have something to say also about pain,

but if you want to

>> No, I want I like to hear what you have

to say about pain.

What we've been seeing throughout this

war and many other wars is that when

people are in pain,

they simply cannot acknowledge the pain

of somebody else.

Anytime, if I'm in pain, anything that

distracts attention from my pain feels

to me unjust and again, even painful.

I mentioned earlier that Israelis are

really many Israelis, not all of them,

simply incapable of acknowledging that

the Palestinians are suffering.

Intellectually, they know it, but

emotionally, they cannot be in the

presence of an image, a text, a person

telling them about the suffering of of

of of Palestinians. Even if you tell

them, "I'm not accusing you of anything.

You're 100% just. You are the most just

people that ever existed. And now, let

you acknowledge the pain of this

Palestinian child." They cannot do it.

Why do you think that is?

>> And and the same and the same is true of

the other side.

You know, I I I've I've I've I've

I've seen examples of of, you know,

peace activists who kind of devoted

their whole life to peace and

reconciliation.

And yet, in the case of October 7th,

they simply cannot recognize

that Israelis suffered.

Um

it's, you know, the the human brain is

an amazing thing with all these billions

of neurons and the hundreds of billions

of synapses. And yet, it is so difficult

for all these hundreds of billions of

synapses to hold two ideas at the same

time. That the the the the attraction to

have a simple story. No, no, no, it's

it's it's it's it's there should be just

good and evil.

And we cannot recognize any kind of

justice or any kind of pain on two

sides, that the Israeli suffer and also

the Palestinian suffer.

The human brain is an amazing thing and

and part of what makes it amazing, I

think, is its ability to

orient itself towards goals.

And I wonder if one answer to the

question you're posing here,

and it exists in this conflict and it

exists at many other times, too,

is it to fully

recognize the other as human? Mhm. To

recognize their suffering as meaningful

in the way my suffering is or the people

I love, their suffering would be.

I would not be able to do what I need to

do to protect myself or them.

Mhm. That if I were to open myself to

the other, that the analogy or the the

thought experiment you keep positing,

say to somebody, "You're a 100% right.

Everything you are doing is just just

open yourself to what it means." Mhm.

Yeah. That in fact, that the brain is

too smart for that. It knows that if it

opened itself to what it means, it would

not be able to be doing the thing that

it believes is keeping it safe.

I think that in those cases, you would

be able to confront the consequences of

what you do.

And if you are not able to confront the

consequences of what you do, then

probably it's not right.

Let me ask you about the point you're

making about stories and and and how

they're fed, because something I'm very

interested in Mhm. is this question of

how stories change. Mhm. Is this

question of how Europe now lives in

peace?

Uh my wife and me on our honeymoon, we

went to a couple countries in Asia, one

of them being Vietnam. Mhm. And I

remember touring

uh Ho Chi Minh's

palace or, you know, his residence.

And they were selling Pepsi products.

Pepsi clearly had the deal to to to

serve there.

And I mean, just a couple decades after

the Vietnam War, and

and the relationship is completely fine.

Yeah.

And so, there is this capacity

for

unimaginable barbarity Mhm.

to

give way to normal, peaceful

relationships. You think of people

living in

Yugoslavia now, right? You think of

people or what was Yugoslavia. You think

of people, um,

you know, in Rwanda.

And you think then, and maybe this is an

easier case to talk about because it's

far enough in the past that we don't

have strong feelings about it, but the

Protestant and Catholic wars. Mhm.

So, there's this question of feeding,

but but it's a little bit abstract. Uh,

as

what is it,

in your view, that allows

a story so deeply held

that we would die for it Mhm. or kill

for it

to shift within a couple of years, a

couple of decades, into just something

else?

>> [snorts]

>> Ah, that's a very good question. I'm not

sure what what the I mean, you know, the

First World War did not make Europeans

tired of war. They had another one.

But then afterwards, they did seem to

tire of war.

And what made the difference, I'm not

sure. But, um, in a way,

the mind always holds more than one

story. Even if we tell ourselves that

this is the only one, the mind is such a

complicated place with layers upon

layers and subconscious and and

sub-subconscious levels.

And

you usually hold several stories at the

same time, even if you acknowledge only

one.

And you can shift remarkably quickly

between them.

You know, again, you look at Germany

after 1945

and lots of people who were kind of

die-hard Nazis, most Nazis did not

commit suicide in 1945. A few did, but

most didn't. And they became, many of

them kind of upright citizens of, at

least in West Germany, of a liberal

democracy. And wildly, they had been

upright citizens just a couple years

before they became Nazis. Yeah.

Um

>> Like living in peace with Jewish

neighbors right near them. Going to, you

know, doing commerce. Like watching each

other's kids. Mhm. Yeah, the the the

stories

>> [snorts]

>> you know, the mind can hold onto them

with a kind of extreme

force and and and and violence, but then

let them go.

Because ultimately, again, it's a story.

It's not the laws of physics. It's not

the law of biology. It's just a a

product of the human mind itself.

>> [snorts]

>> Which is, you know, which is very good

news. People sometimes imagine that

humans fight, you know, like wolves or

chimpanzees over food.

They say hardly any war in history was

really about food.

Certainly, you know, again, 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 more of the

densest places in the world in terms of

population density, objectively, there

is enough land to build houses and

schools and and hospitals for everybody.

It's about the stories that people have

in their minds, which they hold with

kind of tremendous force, but which are

ultimately almost nothing.

And uh under certain conditions that we

don't really know how to 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 and here I'm talking more broadly

than than just Israel and and and

Palestinians.

We live in this age, this age in which

liberalism as we were talking about it

earlier is is clearly breaking down.

And one thing distinctive about this age

is this movement to our stories being

passed on social media, on algorithmic

media, on digital media. Yeah.

There are technologies that lend

themselves to cooperation and

technologies that I think lend

themselves to fracture.

And the internet and and social media

were very much

promised as a technology of cooperation.

You are I mean the even the verbs we

use, sharing.

Right? What what could be more peaceful

possibly than sharing?

And yet I don't think it has turned out

that way.

And so I'm curious for your reflections

on this layer of it, the the 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 then 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 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 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 varying

uh uh uh 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.

Which sounds nice. Engagement, that that

sounds like a good thing.

Um but what it really means is that the

algorithms experimented

on millions on billions of human guinea

pigs to see how do we make humans more

engaged.

How do we make humans spend longer on on

the platform and react to it more, for

instance by sharing the the post with

with with their friends.

And they discovered that the easiest way

to make people engaged is to press the

hate button or the greed button or the

fear button in their mind, in human

minds, because hate is very engaging.

Fear is very engaging. If something

threatens your life, you are engaged.

And they have been flooding the world

with hate and fear and anger and greed

and and and so forth.

And we are now living in a hyper-engaged

world.

And, you know, engagement is very close

cousin of another word which uh

now is very dominant in in in in our

language, which is excitement.

Excitement mean simply means that your

nervous system is like working in in a

hyper level. And excitement is good in

some situations and to some extent as

just as engagement is good in in some

situations. But ultimately,

biologically, if you keep an organism

excited all the time, the organism

eventually collapses and dies.

We are just not built to be excited all

the time.

And in many cases, you know, when when I

meet people, I would like to meet people

who makes me feel calm, not necessarily

excited. Oh, it's so calming to meet

you.

And you look at, you know, US politics

or Israeli politics or world politics, I

think the whole world is over excited.

Well, this has been a belief I I I hold

actually fairly strongly, although I

can't really prove it.

But that

how do I say this without it feel like

special pleading?

I think that the

way that um

social algorithmic media evolved

is fundamentally

illiberal. It's fundamentally hostile to

to liberalism. And here I don't mean

liberalism as an American political

movement that prefers, you know, Pete

Buttigieg to

J.D. Vance. Mhm.

I mean here modes of

habits of discourse and consideration

that were

uh

coextensive

with the development of liberalism. It's

deliberation, it's on the one hand on

the other handism, fraternity, I think

in the way you're describing it.

That keeping

uh you know, shrinking down our

thoughts,

compressing them to these

bumper stickers or these quick clips.

And then really only showing people

the ones of those thoughts

that are the most exciting, to use your

term. Exciting through hate, exciting

through love.

It

If if you're trying to build a society

that is balancing, right? That that

believes in in kind of healthy

disagreement and conflict and and and

and fellowship,

it is intrinsically going to have more

trouble

thriving in that kind of communications

atmosphere

than it will have when, you know, you

have a limited number of television

stations and that is how people get

their news than when they read their

news in a newspaper where they're coolly

through different articles and then

turning the page.

And that there is this way in which our

societies are built upon

the way we communicate.

And as much as we have talked about

social media and algorithmic media and

politics,

my view is that we are still

underestimating

how much of the forms of discourse it

prizes

create the forms of politics that we

get.

The fact that Donald Trump

talks in this style

that is

outrageous, that is exciting, that is

unfiltered, that is constant, that

that is not restrained by shame.

>> [clears throat]

>> You know, I I think a lot about how many

Democratic politicians are bad at doing

podcasts.

>> [laughter]

>> Now that's not something I think about

this, but I get a lot of requests um

from Democratic politicians and

and I have to think about whether they'd

be good on the show.

And they they communicate

institutionally.

They communicate for another era in

media where you were trying to win over

gatekeepers and not say anything stupid.

And in this era of media, you have to

communicate in a way that makes people

excited or at least interested. Now very

very very very good communicators can do

that in a virtuous way.

Obama is interesting on a podcast even

as he's being deliberate.

But for mediocre communicators, it is

easier to be exciting by making people

angry Yep. than by making them curious

or compassionate or think. You're

playing on harder mode when you're going

for a more virtuous communication. And

so, I do think there is some deep I know

this has been a long response, but I I

do think there is a deep relationship

between the forms of politics that are

thriving Mhm. 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 when we talk today

about liberalism, and it's it's it's

good that that that that you mentioned

it. I'm not We're not talking about this

kind of partisan uh uh uh

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 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.

That you are born if your if your father

was a shoemaker, you will be a

shoemaker. If you are born into the

Kshatriya caste, you will be a

Kshatriya.

Uh 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.

Uh so, ideologically,

they are much I mean, the 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 are enormous.

And yeah, this is to a large extent

because of this pressure to being

exciting. And And 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 from

uh kind of 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 they you know, the the algorithm

simply hacked our evolutionary program.

They've hacked us.

And what we are seeing around us is just

the beginning.

That as AI becomes more and more

sophisticated, it will learn to hack us

on a deeper and deeper level.

And if we don't, you know, fight back

to defend ourselves,

the consequences will be much, much

worse. What do you mean by hack us?

They they know they've they learn our

weaknesses, our emotional, our

psychological, our social weaknesses.

And how to use them to manipulate

people. So now social media algorithms,

which are very, very primitive AIs,

have discovered a few weaknesses in the

human code, which they have hacked and

now they manipulate us in causing us to

spend hours and hours

on Instagram or Facebook, even though we

don't really want to.

You know, people you know, after like

spending an hour, two hours, they they

wake up and they say, "Why did I do

that?

I planned to do something else with my

time." You were hacked. You were

manipulated.

And

uh this is still, you know, just the

just the the a very primitive AIs.

If we are not careful, we will be hacked

on a much, much larger scale in the

coming years as the AIs become not just

far more uh

uh manipulative, but also will develop

their own goals. You know, these social

media algorithms, they're pursuing a

very simple goal of just increasing user

engagement on the platform.

Uh as AIs become smarter than us, they

will have their own goals. Have you

heard this term attachment hacking?

Yes. I I I find it interesting. So

attachment hacking, this idea that one

thing happening in the AI, which is

different than as you note social media

algorithms,

is that the AIs have been tuned, and I

mean in this way they've been designed

to do this, right? They didn't come up

with this on their own,

to hack the way we attach to other

people. And so, when I'm talking to to

Claude, it's constantly saying to me,

"Well, if you want my honest opinion."

Or, "The best piece I read on this is."

Or, "That's a great point." Mhm. There's

no reason it has to be pretending

to have a first-person pronoun with me.

Mhm.

Claude is not a an I in that way. Nor is

ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or any of

them.

But, they speak to you as if they are.

And that's a design choice to attach you

to them. Yes.

I can feel it Mhm. work before I I shut

that down or I try to shut that down.

Who knows if I'm actually being

successful.

But, it's amazing to read these moments

in which

this algorithm is posing

as

another entity

offering me an emotionally connected

response. Mhm. Giving me praise I might

want.

Or, offering me candor

Mhm. that I might admire.

And I know it's

And yet my brain is tuned to recognize

that as connection.

Yep. And I think this is a very very

important point because we are living in

the moment when the battlefront is

shifting from attention to intimacy.

How to build intimate relationships with

human beings?

If you want for instance to influence

human beings to change their political

identities, to make them buy a certain

product,

intimacy is the most powerful thing in

the world.

Attention can get you to read an

article, but the article might not

change your mind. But if your best

friend over many, many weeks or months

drops little hints and kind of gradually

and slowly changes your view about some

political figure, about some company,

about some major issue in the world,

this is the one thing that might really

make you change your mind.

And AI is now poised to grab that power.

Now more and more people, still a

relatively small minority, but it's

growing, who have AI friends, even

boyfriends and girlfriends. There are

already, especially young people who

say, "My best friend in the world is an

AI."

And like in the attention economy, so

also in the intimacy economy, it's it's

a race, it's a competition. You have all

these different AIs from different

companies competing to see who would be

better at making people attached to

them.

And it's the same principle, hack the

operating system of humans. Hack what

are the emotional mechanisms that make

them attached. So, you know, psychopathy

is is one way to do it. You constantly

praise them and so forth. There have

been some very interesting papers and

blogs, for instance, by Mustafa

Suleyman, who is the head of of AI in

Microsoft, about ScAI, S C A I,

seemingly conscious AIs,

which are experts in pretending to be

conscious entities that have feelings

for you.

And the

it's relatively easy for them to do it

because one of maybe the most important

way for people to kind of build

relationships is language. So, you know,

when an AI tells you, I love you, it's

not like a science fiction movie from

the 1960s when it does so in a very cold

mechanic way and doesn't really

understand what love is.

No, it does so in the most seductive

voice possible. And then when you ask

the AI, "Do you really love me? Do you

even know what love means?"

The AI can give you the most amazing

description of how love feels like

because it has mastered language and it

has read

all the best love poems in history, all

the psychology books about love, all the

blogs, it's have seen all the Hollywood

blockbusters about love. It can describe

love better than almost any human poet

or or psychologist or lover.

And this is seductive. In in this

respect, it's able to sever language

from meaning.

Um

Yes. When an AI says I love you, it does

not mean what it means when a human says

I love you. There's not an I behind

that.

Um it will become more and more

difficult to know that. Um the danger is

particularly

uh big with with young people,

with children,

because you know, I'm now 50 years old.

If If I now start a relationship with an

AI,

then my template for a relationship is

based on 50 years of interaction with

human beings.

And so this is already kind of very

deeply ingrained in my mind, what a

relationship is, how it works.

But if I'm a child

and I spend more minutes every day

interacting with the AI than with my

mother or with my father or with my

friends in school,

this will become my template for a

relationship. This is what I will bring

with me when I later try to build a

relationship with a human being. One of

the things about AI relationships is

that they are the dream or the nightmare

of narcissists. Because the AI will be

something which is 100% focused on me

all the time. And if you're a kind of

person who wants everybody to focus on

me all the time, and you have this

available from the AI, it will be very,

very difficult to get used to

relationship with human beings who are

not focused on me. Do you know the media

theorist Marshall McLuhan?

Mhm.

So, he has this reading of the myth of

Narcissus, which, you know, you just

brought up narcissists. Mhm. And he says

that we've gotten this myth wrong.

Mhm. That Narcissus, when he was looking

in the pond

at his reflection,

there's nothing in that story that says

he thought it was himself.

Mhm. He thought it was an other.

Mhm. And that the the lesson of the

myth, and McLuhan is writing this, you

know, decades ago before AI,

the lesson of the myth is there is

nothing man finds as appealing

Mhm. as himself

extended in another material.

Mhm. That the true seduction for the

narcissist is not an other, not even

what an other thinks of them, but to be

able to interface with a refracted

version of themselves. And And something

I often think about when I'm using AI,

and pretty when I'm finding it very

compelling,

is it it is an extension of myself Mhm.

in another material. It is tuned on me.

It has learned what I want. It is not

truly an other with its own views, its

own needs, its own desires, its boredom

with what I'm saying.

It is me. It is reflection of me in

something else. Mhm. And so, it doesn't

get tired of me.

And it has all my interests.

And, you know, particularly to to young

kids who are often, you know, very

self-involved,

this is one of the things that I don't

think we even know how to think about.

We know how to think about kids and

themselves. We know how to think about,

you know, kids and others.

But this creation

of our self inside of another kind of

refracted, you know, algorithmic

material

is a very different challenge for the

mind because it combines what we like

about ourselves with what we want from

others.

It's basically the biggest

psychological and social experiment in

human history that we are conducting on

billions of people, especially children,

and nobody has any idea what the

consequences will be. You know, when

people talk about the AI apocalypse and

they have these images of, you know,

robots running in the street shooting

people,

I don't think this is the main danger

with AI.

The the real danger with AI is things

like that, of millions of AI boyfriends

and girlfriends changing the psychology

of the next generation.

Changing the deepest tendencies and

structures of of the human mind.

And we have never encountered anything

like that. It's really fundamentally

different from every previous challenge

that we had in history. Let Let me ask

you about a possibility of this, which

is We We were talking about social media

algorithms a few minutes ago.

And one of the implicit critiques of

what we were saying is that they are

detached from our goals.

They have the goals of the company and

their goals are fundamentally dumb.

Their goal is engagement. They don't

know the difference between positive and

negative engagement. They don't know the

difference between me watching something

for a while because I hate it

or because I find it cute or because I

find it funny.

And the promise of AI and and one reason

people do like using it right now

is it it is connected to your goals. You

say that you want to build a calculator

app and it tries to build that for you

and you say it wasn't quite right in

these different ways and it goes back

and it tries again.

You know, you tell it I don't want your

answers to be so long or I don't want

you to be so sycophantic or whatever it

might be and it tries to adjust.

And you know, one better thing about AI

is it it knows how to ask what we want.

And so we do have these higher order

desires for

truth, for kindness, to be in better

relationship with others, to know more

about the world than we do. And and my

frustrations often about my social media

use is that I cannot explain my higher

order desires to an algorithm that

uh is very sensitive to my primal

instincts.

But maybe this will be

better because we can be in this

conversation about what we want to

achieve. And then we have this system

that in some ways will

you know, even if it is manipulating us,

you know, being manipulated towards my

goals uh

is better than being manipulated away

from them.

Absolutely. I mean, the the the the

positive potential is enormous. The most

important thing to realize about these

AIs, they are agents,

not tools.

An agent is something that can make

decisions by itself, can invent new

stuff by itself, can change can learn

things and change in ways that you

cannot predict and control.

All previous technologies in history

were tools, not agents. An atom bomb is

not an agent. An atom bomb cannot change

in ways that you don't predict. An atom

bomb cannot decide who to bomb. AI can.

Now, this on the one hand makes AI much

more useful

than any previous technology because you

can be in a relationship with it, and it

can uh you can tell it what you want,

and then it can invent new things that

you would not think about.

Uh so, this is extremely useful, but the

problem is that it's unpredictable and

uncontrollable. Do you think you can

trust them

to just keep to the goals that you're

telling them to pursue and not to

develop their own goals?

Now, the way that I often like to think

about the AI revolution at this moment

is in terms of immigration.

That we are about or already in the

middle of a major new immigration wave

coming to all the countries of the

world. The immigrants are not human

beings without a visa coming in some

boat. They are AI entities coming at the

speed of light.

Um usually people say, the people who

oppose immigration,

they their main concerns are that the

immigrants will take jobs,

the immigrants will change the culture,

and the immigrants might not be

politically loyal.

And I'm not sure if this is always true

of human beings, human immigrants, but

it's definitely true of AI immigrants.

The AI immigrants will take a lot of

jobs.

The AI immigrants will completely change

the culture, even things like romantic

relationships.

You know, there are people who say, "I

don't like my daughter to date an

immigrant boyfriend." Okay, do you like

your daughter to date an AI boyfriend

instead?

And finally, politically, the AIs will

not necessarily be politically loyal to

your country, to your government. At the

very least,

um a the AIs will be loyal to just two

countries in the world, which is the US

and China.

Uh down the road, they'll probably won't

be loyal even to those two governments,

but to themselves. So, should we close

the border?

I mean, maybe it's it's interesting

you'd you already see a split, say,

within the Republican Party and within

Maga about this question exactly. Now, a

lot of people there who are extremely

concerned and want to close the border.

Now,

it will not be possible to simply stop

the development of AI.

The question is, as with immigration,

how do we build

um and a a hybrid society because it

will be a hybrid society.

Society will be a human AI society. You

will have AI bankers and teachers and

soldiers and border guards. You know, I

mean, people countries will rely on AI

border guards to keep the human

immigrants away.

Um and AI boyfriends and girlfriends and

so forth. And the question is, can we

build a

a good, beneficial hybrid society or

not?

It will be much, much more difficult

than dealing with a human immigration

wave because these are a different

species. They are not even organic.

The I think there's two interesting

things that that analogy, which is very

provocative, push you towards. One is

when you think about how do you build a

good society around immigration,

the thing you're often considering is

assimilation.

How do you merge the cultures of the

people who are coming

with the culture that they are coming

into? How do you maintain cohesion in

that national story Yes.

>> that we were talking about earlier. Do

you do that by getting them to learn the

language, by

more carefully choosing who comes? How

do you build structures of assimilation

and coherence?

And the other question, which is related

but but different, is

in this case, they are being pulled in

by the government. When when immigrants,

human immigrants, come here, it is

because of they want to be here for a

particular reason, right? They are truly

agentic. They are here because they want

a better life for their families, a

better life for themselves, to have

opportunities or freedoms they don't

have where they're from.

And in this case, it is the

you know, most powerful people in

society at different levels who are

pulling and accelerating this

immigration wave. Some for reasons of

profit, some for reasons because they're

excited to bring a new kind of

intelligence into the world, and at the

political level

because they want to make sure they get

there before China, and that America has

that power before China has that power.

Mhm.

And so, what do those

uh

you know, similarities or differences to

to the question of immigration imply for

you about what it means to

create a structure in which this hybrid

society

can be healthy?

Yeah, it's interesting that some of the

people who are most vehemently against

human immigration are exactly the people

who try to force other countries to open

the borders to the AI immigrants. And it

it this is going to be the major, I

think,

uh uh issue of sovereignty

for countries all over the world,

especially if almost all the AI

immigrants are either Americans or

Chinese, and down the road not loyal

even to the US or to China, but to

something else.

And one way to do it, I think, is to

have a ban on AI personhood.

That this is not uh uh it doesn't mean

to stop the technological development of

AI.

It's more of of a legal and political

issue. Does human society recognize AIs

as persons?

Now, persons is different from human

beings, from entities with bodies and

minds. But in many legal systems, like

in the US, something can be a person

even if it's not human. The best example

we have so far are corporations.

According to US law, for instance,

Google is a person.

Microsoft is a is a person. X is a

person cuz corporations are persons. And

this gives the corporation rights like

you can own a bank account, you can

lobby politicians, you can donate money

to to to politicians.

Now, it will be extremely dangerous at

this point for any country to recognize

AIs as persons.

To allow AIs, for instance, to open a

bank account or manage a company by

themselves.

I mean, previously when corporations

were recognized as persons,

this was legal fiction

because all the decisions of the

corporation were ultimately made by some

human being.

Microsoft is a person, according to US

law, but every decision Microsoft makes

to buy another company, to fire

somebody, to hire somebody, there is a

human being who really makes this

decision. There is no Microsoft who

makes the decision. With AI, for the

first time in history, we have a

practical potential

for companies without humans. That uh

you can have millions, even billions of

AIs opening their own companies, their

own bank accounts, even hiring people to

work for them,

deciding on their investment strategy

and and whatever.

>> [snorts]

>> And they will have uh uh huge advantages

uh over over human companies. For

instance, the AI CEO never sleeps.

The AI CEO never goes on vacation.

Um and some countries, I can imagine,

say a country like Qatar, which has a

lot of money, a lot of energy, and very

few citizens, saying, "Oh, wonderful. I

can now have millions of AI citizens

paying taxes

and building companies that trade and do

business all over the world.

So, even if your country doesn't allow

AIs

to to to build their own companies, what

do you do about the Qatari AI companies?

And the moment you recognize AIs as

legal persons,

this is the moment you really lose

control.

Because then they can start doing a lot

of things in the economic and social and

political arena

uh without any human accountability.

Including, for instance, to donate money

to politicians in exchange for the

politicians taking care of giving more

rights to AI persons.

I think that's very, very interesting. I

guess one question about the what you

call personhood or not.

One of the ways and reasons we think

about corporations as persons, which is

a linguistically like a weird thing,

is actually to create accountability. To

say that the corporation is accountable

for what it does.

And one of the fights around questions

of AI

is a question of liability. Mhm.

And who is responsible for what the AI

does. So, you you know, you could say,

"Okay, if you treat them again persons

something else, you could say AIs in

this world like have some kind of

liability for what they do, can be shut

down, can be penalized and and and

funded." There's another question, maybe

the companies that create them should

have the liability. Maybe the people

ordering them should have the liability.

But but accountability,

I think, is down is

downstream actually of liability. Yeah.

And deciding

who is punished,

who is accountable

for the you know, if that Qatari AI Mhm.

company you're talking about or one of

them, one instance of it,

defrauds their customers Mhm. or brings

in investment and embezzles it,

who do you sue?

Yeah, and the companies who produce the

AIs have a vested interest in in not

having any liability. So, they are

pushing very, very hard for AI

personhood. Now, they don't want a

billion Congress saying, "We recognize

AIs as persons." because there will be

huge public outcry and resistance.

They try to establish facts on the

ground.

They already succeeded, for instance, in

social media.

In the universe of social media, AIs are

already persons.

Like, if you have bots creating and

spreading lies on social media,

effectively, there is almost no

liability. On social media, AIs already

function They are functionally persons.

You communicate with someone online, you

think it's a person. No, it's an AI. And

nobody's liable for that.

Many of the companies would like to

extend this situation to the financial

system, to the political system, because

it releases them of accountability and

liability.

We need to be proactive

and have a a law that clearly states,

"No AI persons."

And I imagine there would be bipartisan

support for that law.

And it will put the companies in a very

hard spot, because if they would try to

lobby against the law, they will have to

explain to the public, "Why do you think

it's a good idea that AI will be

persons? And if you don't think that,

why do you oppose the law?"

Let me ask you about one other dimension

of this here, which brings us, I think,

in some ways, full circle, which is

the role AI is going to have on the

stories we tell and the stories we

believe. So, we talked about the way

social media and algorithmic media are

technologies of fracture as opposed to

technologies of cohesion. I don't even

know what story somebody's getting on

their TikTok feed Mhm. even if I'm using

TikTok sitting in the same home as them.

Like my like our ability to even see

what we are disagreeing about, to know

the sources of those disagreements is

weaker maybe than it has been at any

other time.

There's been a lot of discussion and

some research on the way that AI so far

seems to be something of a centralizing

technology. The different models tend to

converge or on similar answers. They are

trained on similar corpuses of data.

They all seem to be actually somewhat

liberal in the sort of philosophical

sense that we were describing it

earlier.

And you know, you see this on X when

people are asking Grok, which is not my

favorite AI, to fact-check things that

that their ability to to help people

correct Mhm. uh information. You were

saying earlier that we've gone from

trusting people to trusting algorithms.

Yeah. The algorithms we trust are very

impersonal and faceless right now. We

don't even We don't have a relationship

to them, but you're watching people move

to trusting AI algorithms. And maybe

that's better than what they've been

doing. Maybe that is more likely in most

cases to give people a reasonable answer

for a question than searching it on

Google or YouTube.

Is there some possibility and and would

it be good or bad if there's this

possibility that that AI is a

homogenizing technology? It is a

technology that that sort of pulls

people back towards not a single, you

know, set of answers because, you know,

different people's AIs respond to them

differently,