Editor’s Notes: In this compelling interview, Nikhil Kamath hosts world-renowned historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari to explore the fundamental stories and fictions that drive human history and cooperation. The conversation navigates a wide range of critical modern issues, from the impact of artificial intelligence on intimacy and religion to the shifting, often cynical landscape of global power and democracy. Harari also shares profound insights into his personal philosophy on truth, suffering, and the nature of the mind, offering a roadmap for navigating an increasingly complex and uncertain future. This deep dive is an essential watch for anyone seeking to understand the intersection of history, technology, and human consciousness. (Feb 11, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction and Background
NIKHIL KAMATH: Hi, Yuval. Thank you. How do I say your name?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yuval.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Yuval. Thank you for doing this. I have read many of your books and I’m quite the fan of how you write and how you think as well. For my audience back home in India, the young wannabe entrepreneurs, maybe we can begin by you introducing yourself a little bit, just for context.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Well, I’m basically a historian, but I’m the type of historian that thinks that history is not just the study of the past. History is the study of change, of how things change in the world. And so it means it’s also the study of the present and the future.
NIKHIL KAMATH: And how did you go from being a historian to being a thinker who’s coming out with new thought in books? What goes on in your mind while you write a book? Is it an idea that comes first?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yes. I mean, usually I try to—I don’t start with a plan, oh, I need to write a new book, so what should it be about?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Right.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Usually I have kind of ideas building up inside my mind and when they reach the point when it feels like I actually have something new to say, then I’ll write a book.
The Power of Stories and Fiction
NIKHIL KAMATH: Sapiens I read. I think that was the first interaction I’ve had with any of your books. Brilliant book. I don’t know if I remember all of it.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I won’t test you.
NIKHIL KAMATH: What has stayed with you? That book is a little old now. What has stayed relevant from then to today?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I think the main point of Sapiens, which is as relevant today as ever, is that history is shaped by the human imagination, by fiction, and not just by truth. That humans control the world because we know how to cooperate better than any other animal on the planet. And cooperation relies on storytelling.
That so much of the world is run on fiction is fueled by fiction. It’s most obvious in the case of religion. But even if you look at something like the economy, corporations, money, all of these things are stories that we invented. They don’t have an objective existence outside our imagination.
I think this was the most important message of Sapiens, trying to understand history as the product of the human imagination and of human fictions. And it’s even more true today, I would say, than it was 10, 15 years ago when I wrote Sapiens.
NIKHIL KAMATH: So if religion were to be a story, and many people wrote many stories, why did the stories of the religions we have today sell and kind of permeate through time? What was so good about these stories? Or what was the reason these stories did well and the others did not?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: We don’t know for sure. To some extent it can be accidental that you have hundreds and even thousands of different religious stories competing for human attention. And of course you need to pass a certain level of attractiveness so humans will be interested in that story. But beyond that point, I belong to a school of historians that think that accidents and luck have an enormous impact on what is happening in history, even on the biggest things. Like why is Christianity the most widespread religion today in the world? To some extent, it’s just luck.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Luck and good storytelling.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No, a combination. Of course, you needed—I mean, Christianity has a very compelling story. It has something that people really want to believe. You know, deep down, if you ask yourself what is the crucial story that Christianity tells people? It is that you are loved by the God that created, that controlled the universe.
That God loves you so much that he was willing to suffer and sacrifice himself for your sake. And that, you know, this is not like the love of a human that you always doubt. Yes, maybe they love me, but maybe they’ll change their mind. Maybe they love me, but they don’t really know who I am. If they can actually see what is happening inside my heart, inside deep down in my mind, they wouldn’t love me.
No, no, no. This is the love of an omnipotent, omniscient creator God who knows everything about me and still loves me. This is such an attractive idea. You know, the irony to some extent is that the more attractive an idea is, the bigger the chance that it’s not true. It’s so easy for people to find evidence supporting the story they want to believe. So the more you want to believe a story, the more suspicious you should be about how easy it is for you to fall for it.
Evidence, Belief, and Life After Death
NIKHIL KAMATH: Can you give me an example?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: This is—you know, everybody wants to believe that there is something after death. You know, this is universal in almost all religions in different forms.
NIKHIL KAMATH: I mean, there is evidence.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Let’s agree that whatever evidence there is is very, very shaky. What is evidence?
NIKHIL KAMATH: How can somebody prove there is life after death or not?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Oh, don’t ask me. I don’t believe it. But this is maybe the most common thing that people believe throughout history. And again, I didn’t want to say there is zero evidence because then the listeners will say, “Hey, I heard this story about somebody who was reincarnated and met his family from…” And maybe there is a little bit of evidence, but compared to what you need to prove and compared to the influence of this idea on history, the evidence is so meager and yet so much influence in history.
You know, the other ironic thing, and here I speak specifically about the Christian belief. They say that they believe it, but you look at their behavior. I don’t know. You look at some of the leaders today in the world. Does Putin really believe that? And he says he’s a Christian, and as a Christian, this is what he’s supposed to believe. A person who believes that an omnipotent God really loves him would go around starting wars, killing thousands, driving millions from their homes. Absolutely not. This is not the action of a man who feels loved.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Don’t politicians say they believe in God because people vote for things that resemble them?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you cannot be elected US President if you say that you are an atheist, right?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Same for Russia, maybe.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I don’t think in Russia you really get elected, but…
NIKHIL KAMATH: Did you watch any of the politicians speak here this week?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I’m afraid I didn’t have time. I read some of the transcripts of the speeches, but I didn’t have time to actually go and listen to the speeches.
Power, Politics, and Geopolitics
NIKHIL KAMATH: What do you think, Yuval, of what is happening in the world today?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Geopolitically terrible. I mean, we are going back to kindergarten to kind of the first, most basic lessons of politics and of human behavior. You now see the rise or the reemergence of this view that the only thing that exists, the only thing that really matters in the world is power, is force, and especially military force.
You hear many leaders and many ordinary people now say this, that everything else is just facade, is just veneer. It never really existed. The only thing that really happens in the world is power and all human relations, all power relations, are power struggles. And if anybody tells you otherwise, this is just a trick they are using to gain power over you.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Hasn’t man always been like that? From the beginning of evolution, you always…
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Had people with this belief. You always had people who said these things. And the whole history of human spirituality and human philosophy is one long struggle against this very nihilistic and cynical view of the world. If you read, I don’t know, you read Plato’s Republic, one of the key texts, at least in the West of political thought. It starts with Socrates asking this one of the people in Athens, “What is justice?”
And this guy tells him, “Oh, justice. Justice is when the strong do what they want. This is justice.” And the whole of Plato’s Republic is an argument against that. And you know, the most basic human level, people should first of all ask themselves, is this how I live my life? Your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues. Are you constantly in power struggles with all you have? Not a single real friend in the world. Like all the people outside your family, you’re just in some power struggle with them. I mean, if somebody really believes that they have such a miserable life.
NIKHIL KAMATH: I agree, but all is an overstatement. But most…
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Would you say even most? You know, I walk down the street, I’m not in a power struggle with people all the time. And it’s the same all the way to the level of geopolitics. That this idea that countries cannot have friends, that, you know, the United States and Europe, I would say as a historian, this was the greatest friendship in the world built over generations.
I can understand if somebody comes and says, “Look, I don’t see why taxpayers in Texas and Iowa should pay for the defense of Germany and France.” Yeah, completely reasonable. But then to stick your finger in their eye and say, “Okay, and because I’m stronger, I’ll now take Greenland.”
NIKHIL KAMATH: Why? What?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: You know, friendship is again, even in terms of power struggles, to have some real friends in the world, this is power. Throw this away for a bit of ice. What’s the rationale behind this?
The Greenland Question
NIKHIL KAMATH: Do you believe it’s about the ice and about Greenland?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I don’t understand. I’m not sure what it is about. I mean, could be different things, could be a couple of things at the same time. One explanation is that he is taking seriously climate change. It’s very hard to understand the Greenland thing if you don’t believe in climate change, because climate change will make Greenland…
NIKHIL KAMATH: More important, because the ice will melt.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: The ice will melt, you’ll have trade routes, perhaps you’ll have easier access to some mineral wealth in Greenland. But it makes sense only if you believe in climate change. And he says he doesn’t believe in climate change. So what do you believe?
It could be just maybe the simplest explanation. He’s a real estate tycoon. This is real estate. He wants to plant his name somewhere like, “So I’m the president who brought Greenland to the US.” Maybe it’s as simple as that.
Maybe the one important thing to say about power is that ultimately human power is based on cooperation, not on force. Even if you want to build an army, how do you get thousands, millions of soldiers who don’t know you personally to obey your commands? Now, if you think that you build an army just by getting someone to threaten the soldiers to obey you, how do you get those people who threaten the soldiers, who threatens them and who threatens them? It’s endless storytelling.
Ultimately, to build an army or anything, a corporation, a country, you need people to really believe in some one story or the other. You need people to really believe in some system of morality, in some systems of laws, not just to be afraid. Nothing. You cannot build anything big in history, in the world, if you try to only base it on brute force, on coercion.
And this is true again all the way to geopolitics, that to have a real friend in the world, that not when you’re strong—when you’re strong, it’s easy to coerce others. But if you’re in crisis, you are on the floor and get somebody then to come and help you. That’s difficult. And between Europe and the US you had this kind of friendship. It’s a small thing, but it’s still important that after the US was attacked in September 11 and invaded or attacked Afghanistan, Denmark came to help the Americans.
NIKHIL KAMATH: I heard Emmanuel Macron wearing—I watched him wearing really cool sunglasses and speaking the day before. And I heard Trump last evening and again this morning. It feels like they’re negotiating for something that is not being spoken about. Overall, I don’t think it’s about climate change or Greenland or the ice melting or the routes opening up. It feels like it’s something else altogether. But that maybe that’s just my opinion of it.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: What is your hypothesis? What’s your guess? What is it about?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Yeah, like, you know, when you’re negotiating with someone, you anchor with something really expensive. So then they take the product, which is less expensive in a store. Greenland seems to be anchoring, in order to get the other person to take something else maybe, which is more acceptable, which it doesn’t seem to be right now.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I don’t know. I mean, again, I still don’t see that these tariffs are doing anybody any good. Not the Americans and certainly not the rest of the world. And as a negotiation tactic, and you’re negotiating with your best friend, you’re doing something that really frightens and humiliates them. They will not forget that even if you get what you want in the short term and what happened in the last. Of course, it’s not just the last few weeks, it’s the last few years.
But the Europeans will not forget that. And the feeling that you get that, I don’t know, your best friend is willing to stab you in the back and to step on you, to humiliate you. And then he says, no, I was just joking, but it didn’t feel like joking at the moment. This is something that can ruin the friendship years ahead, you know, trust. You need to work for years to build trust, and you can lose it in a day.
To take an example, maybe from a different field of life, think about finance, a bank. About, you know, let’s say banks.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Yeah.
Building Trust: The Foundation of Banking and Politics
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Carpenters build tables. Like this table. Some carpenter built it. Engineers build buildings and bridges. What do bankers build? Bankers build trust. This is what they do throughout their life. I trust them that if I will need that money, they will give it back to me. And then the banker goes and builds another trustful relationship with, say, some entrepreneur who wants to start a new company and she needs money. So the banker and the entrepreneur build a trusting relationship.
And the banker lends basically my savings to that entrepreneur so she can start her company. Now, I don’t know this entrepreneur. I wouldn’t give her my money. I don’t know her. I don’t trust her. You have the banker in between. The banker has built a bridge of trust between me and the entrepreneur.
Now suppose one day the banker, I don’t know, goes on television and says, I have no intention of giving back. My bank will just take the money and run with it. We are not giving. If my customers want their money, there is no more money in the bank. No bank would be so stupid. You’ve worked years to build trust with these people. Why destroy this trust? This is the basis for everything you do.
And politics, like banking, is most. You can’t trust everybody in politics, of course, but this, if you finally managed to build a trust, trustworthy relationship in politics, this is your biggest asset.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Could this be the problem with democratic politics where politicians have a finite tenure because friendships don’t have to last forever, but only three, four, five years at a time?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: The basic idea of democratic politics and even of modern politics is that the relationships are between states, not between families or dynasties or people.
NIKHIL KAMATH: That doesn’t seem to be the case. Right.
The Return to Medieval Politics
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: This is crumbling. This is another plank of trust that is collapsing in the world. Like, I heard Trump some time ago talking about Putin invading Ukraine. And people ask Trump, how can you trust Putin when he broke so many promises previously? And what was Trump’s answer? He said, Putin did not break his promises to me. He broke his promises to Obama, he broke his promises to Biden.
Now this is, you know, this is going back to the Middle Ages. Modern politics is that it’s not Putin making a promise to Obama, it’s Russia making a promise to the US. It doesn’t matter who the president is. The whole idea is you sign a peace agreement, you sign it with another country. So even if the president changes, it still holds.
And this is again part of destroying the modern political system and going back to a medieval system in which it’s relationships between dynasties. So it’s now foreign relations, increasingly is relations with the Trump family, not with the United States, which is why so many countries are doing business with certain members of the Trump family in order to influence US Foreign policy. So this is really going back to the Middle Ages, when relations are between dynasties and not between nations or countries.
NIKHIL KAMATH: He will hear originally Israeli. Does it worry you to speak about Trump in a manner that you think, can I go into America again?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It’s worrying that we even have to raise this question. If they don’t allow me into the US or they don’t allow me, but my job as a public intellectual is to speak my mind. If I can’t do that, then I can’t do my job. So why invite me to a podcast to hear me say things I don’t really believe, just in order to carry favor with me, some politician.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Isn’t that the media? Today, everybody is saying what they don’t believe.
The Cynical Worldview and the Price of Lies
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: But no, not everybody. This is, I think, the most. Again, this goes back to this kind of cynical worldview. Everything is a power struggle. Nobody cares about truth. Everybody, whatever they say is just some kind of manipulation. This is giving an open check for the real liars. Not every politician is engaged in this type of cynical manipulation.
And it’s a sign of the time that more and more people say these things that everybody lie, everybody is corrupt, which again, basically says everything is just a power struggle. And nobody cares about. Just as nobody cares about friendship, nobody really cares about the truth, which is a terrible thing to believe, because do you really believe that about yourself? Like, when you look in the mirror, do you see there’s somebody who doesn’t care at all about the truth?
And the thing about the truth is that, yes, you can get a lot of power by lying, but the price you pay is that ultimately you cannot be happy if you don’t know the truth about yourself. Because if you don’t know the truth about yourself and about the world, about life, then you don’t know what are the true sources of misery in life. And if you don’t know that, even if you become the most powerful person in the world, the richest person in the world, you will waste all your power and riches on solving the wrong problems because you don’t know what actually makes you miserable.
NIKHIL KAMATH: What is the truth, Yuval?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: About what?
NIKHIL KAMATH: What? Anything. What is truth in itself?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: What is truth in itself? I would say it’s connecting to reality.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Is it your honest representation of reality or honest viewpoint of reality? Because your truth might be different from my truth and someone else’s truth.
The Nature of Truth and Reality
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: My opinions can be different from the opinions of somebody else. But the truth ultimately is one, because reality is one. There is just one reality. Reality can be extremely complex, you know, I don’t know. You talk about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So the conflict looks different when you look at it from the viewpoint of the Israelis and of the Palestinians.
But this is part of the complexity of reality. The truth is that, for instance, the Israelis believe that all the land belongs to them and the Palestinians believe that all the land belongs to them. This is the truth. It’s a complex truth. The truth is that during the war, the recent war between Israel and Hamas, Hamas committed atrocities and also Israel committed atrocities. This is the truth. It’s not that, oh, there is the Palestinian truth that only the Israelis committed atrocities, and there is the Israeli truth that only. No, there is just one truth, that both sides committed atrocities because there is just one reality in which everything that happens, happens.
NIKHIL KAMATH: If I were to take a step back and look at the Israel, Palestinian conflict and say, one person is wrong, can there be a truth to that statement?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: One person is wrong or one side is wrong?
NIKHIL KAMATH: One side is wrong?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No, it’s far more complex than that. Both sides, they see part of the truth, part of reality, and simply refuse to acknowledge the other side, which is a very common thing in human history. It’s a very common thing, especially in conflicts.
The truth is that Palestinians have a right to live in security and prosperity and dignity in their country of their birth. And Israelis also have a right to live in security and prosperity and dignity in the country of their birth. And the truth is also that many, many people around the world refuse to acknowledge both of these things. They are willing to acknowledge only one side.
NIKHIL KAMATH: I watched the peace group Trump and Jared Kushner explain about what will happen to Gaza going forward. Do you get a chance to see that?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No, I still didn’t have a chance.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Do you think that’ll play out?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Let’s see. I mean, so many things that these people promised weren’t fulfilled. Let’s see what happens on the ground. Again, I’m not against everything that President Trump is doing. Again, it’s a complex reality. Some of the things he’s doing are good. Some of his intentions are good.
I do hope that Gaza will be not only reconstructed, but that the Palestinians will have a good future again in which they can live in the country of their birth and not just live, but live secure lives, live prosperous lives, live lives with dignity. And I hope it succeeds. But we have to be cautious. We need to see results, because we have so many promises that were broken that just to believe the words, in this case, it’s difficult.
Religion and AI: A New Authority
NIKHIL KAMATH: Do you believe religion is dying, Yuval, amongst the youngest of people?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No. It’s changing. It has been changing throughout history, and it’s changing again.
NIKHIL KAMATH: How is it changing now?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: How is it changing now? One thing very interesting is that AI is increasingly taking over religion, especially religions of the book. You know, if I take Judaism, for example, Judaism grants ultimate authority not to human beings, but to words in books. It calls itself the religion of the book. Humans have authority in Judaism to the extent that they know words in books.
Now, until today, nobody, not even the most learned rabbi in the world, could read and remember all the words in all the Jewish books, because there are too many of them.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Right?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: AI can easily do that so for a religion that gives ultimate authority to words in books now there is a non human intelligence that is about to take it over because it can take over the source of authority.
NIKHIL KAMATH: So AI can’t change the book, but.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It can reinterpret it.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Reinterpreted.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I mean, the book has been reinterpreted again and again and again. This is a game being played for thousands of years. And this is how all the other books got written. They’re all reinterpretations of the original book. And now we have something that can read and remember all the books and has a chance of becoming the new authority that people will increasingly they have a question. They will not go to a human rabbi, they will go to an AI. And it’s the same in Christianity and it’s the same with Islam and it’s the same with many other religions.
NIKHIL KAMATH: With trust depleting in the world as quickly as it is. Don’t you think people, millions if not millions of people will not want to resonate with one book? But smaller groups of thousands of people will find their own representation of each of these books could be.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: And again, an AI could write new books.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Yeah.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Almost every religion claims in its story that it was created by a non human intelligence. Maybe for the first time in history it will actually happen that we will see the emergence of new sects created by AI and spread by AI missionaries and you know, to change people’s minds.
The most powerful thing is intimacy. Not power, not force. A good friend can change your mind in a way that almost nobody else can. And what is happening now in AI? That if for the previous decade we saw this competition for human attention, that the algorithms are competing to grab our attention. Now the front is shifting from attention to intimacy. AIs are learning how to create intimacy with humans, how to create friendships, how even to create romantic relationships.
AI and Intimacy: The New Frontier
NIKHIL KAMATH: Can you tell me what you mean by intimacy?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yes. Somebody that you talk with a lot, maybe every day, that you share your deepest fears and hopes and thoughts and listens to you and gets to know you and gives you advice that you take very, very seriously. And this is where AI enters. There are already youngsters today in the world that you ask them who is your best friend and they say it’s an AI.
NIKHIL KAMATH: I met some kids recently who said their girlfriends were AIs.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yeah, they have AI girlfriends and boyfriends.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Like 20 year olds.
The AI Experiment on Human Development
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: And you look at toddlers today, they grow up from day zero basically interacting with AIs more than they interact. If you just measure it in terms of time, you just measure how much time this baby, this child spends with their father, mother, brother, friend from kindergarten, AI. You will find they spend most time with the AI and already they are willing to share with it things that they don’t share with anybody else. It knows things about them nobody else knows.
And this is maybe the biggest psychological and social experiment in human history conducted on billions of people right now. Nobody has any idea what the consequences will be in 10 or 20 years when this child that learns what is friendship, what is emotional attachment, they learned it through a relationship with an AI. What will this do to the social and romantic capacities and relationships in 15, 20 years? Nobody has any idea. And it’s amazing that we just allow it to happen.
NIKHIL KAMATH: If you wrote the book, you will the AI, you wrote the new book that people interpreted and reinterpreted as whatever religion they want to believe in. What would Yuval optimize for? What would be the three tenets of the new religion the world needs?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I’m not in the business of creating religions. I’ve seen enough of them. As a historian, I know there are many, many ways in which this can go wrong. I don’t want anybody seeing me as a rabbi or a priest that holds the truth and tells them how to live. This is extremely dangerous to them. Even more dangerous to me because it kind of inflates your ego and you become arrogant and you go crazy.
NIKHIL KAMATH: And it would be hard to pull off alive. You need somebody who’s dead, who wrote the book or artificial and artificial intention.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It’s easiest with dead people because then you can do whatever you want with the words. But yeah, AI will be a book that talks back to you. Like we had all these sacred books and they were silent when we had a question. We had to find a human expert on the book. Just imagine what happens when the book can actually talk back to you.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Isn’t the book respected in the manner that it is because of the finality of the book and the fact that it is not dynamic? And when I read the book or I read an interpretation of the book and Yuval does, we read the same thing. If the book were to change because…
Reinterpreting Sacred Texts
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: People constantly reinterpret it. You look at Judaism or Christianity of today, Christianity of today completely different from what they were a thousand years ago or 2,000 years ago. Because as the world changes, as human relations change, people reinterpret the book sometimes in extreme ways.
You know, you read Jesus talking with people about compassion and love. If somebody slaps you, give them your other cheek. How did they interpret it? To build the Inquisition, to burn people alive just because they didn’t believe in the exact same way that I believe about the religion of love? They didn’t just burn Jews and atheists, they burned other Christians.
And how is it possible that yes, you and I, we both believe in the religion of love and compassion, but because it’s a little bit different your interpretation than mine, then I will burn you. And I can find a way to base what I do on what Jesus said.
NIKHIL KAMATH: But burning somebody is also maybe out of love.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Of course, they always say it’s out of love.
NIKHIL KAMATH: The love of a story, a really good story.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: They found a way to explain that. I love you so much. This is why I burn you. Because if you hold these terrible views you’re holding, after you die, you will go forever and ever to hell. But if I burn you now, maybe this will cause you to change your mind and then, okay, you die in a horrible way, but afterwards you go to heaven. So I’m burning you out of love.
Is Democracy Dead?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Yuval, is democracy dead? If it has become as dynastic and these friendships and animosities, not between nations anymore, but with individuals, in four years, all that, or in three years in America, all that’s being done today, yesterday, the day before is going to be forgotten because there’s somebody new there at the helm. Then what is the point of democracy? Does it even work anymore?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Democracy is not dead. It’s still extremely powerful. It’s still the most powerful idea around. Everybody still claims, even Putin, he doesn’t go out and say democracy is dead. He still holds elections every four years. I mean, nobody has managed to come up with a better idea so far. So it’s still extremely powerful.
And even in practical terms, the big advantage of democracy over all the other systems is that it is built on a powerful self-correcting mechanism, anti-incumbency.
NIKHIL KAMATH: That is anti-incumbency.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yes, that, you know, a basic truth about human beings is that we all make mistakes. Even the biggest geniuses and presidents and whatever, we make mistakes. And also political parties, countries, we make mistakes. Now how do you correct your mistakes?
The big problem for dictatorships is that you can get it right 10 times and then you get something terribly wrong. An economic policy, a war, whatever. In a dictatorship, there is no built-in mechanism to change the ruler, the ruling party, the policy. You’re stuck with it.
Democracy is all about checks and balances, all about self-correction. The most basic mechanism is elections. You choose somebody, you give them power to pursue certain policies. After four years the people can say, we made a mistake, let’s try something else. This is still the best mechanism that humanity has managed to come up with.
Of course, it’s a complex mechanism because it’s not enough just to have periodic elections. Elections can be rigged. If the problem, the big problem of democracy is that you give power to somebody for four years on condition that they give the power back and then you can make a different choice. But the problem is always what if they don’t want to give the power back?
Now they have the power so they can use their power to stay in power. They can try to take over the courts, the media, and then rig the elections. And you can’t go to the courts because the courts are in the pocket of the new dictator. And the media won’t report about it because the media is in the pocket of the dictator.
So you still hold elections, but there is no longer a self-correcting mechanism like in Russia. There is no way that Putin can actually lose an election. And the same we saw in Venezuela that Maduro, by all evidence lost the last elections big time. But the election committee and the Venezuelan media and courts, they all said he won. So you could not get rid of him that way if you had to.
Building Media for the New World
NIKHIL KAMATH: Build a media house from scratch. This is something I’m passionate about. Yuval, what should the media for the new world look like? Is it something that is not behind a corporation? Is it more like a cooperative, more fragmented media? Because if large corporations that are the social media companies of today have algorithms that optimize for a reaction, control who consumes what, it doesn’t even matter what media is being reported and generated because they get to choose who reads what.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yeah, that’s the big problem today with the media world. How do you fix it? And don’t let non-humans control the human conversation. Our biggest mistake is that over the last 10 years we gave one of the most important jobs in the world to algorithms. And they did a terrible, terrible job.
You know, human society is ultimately a conversation between humans, especially in democracies. We come together, we discuss what to do, foreign policy, economic policy, and for that you need media. How do you manage a conversation between millions of people?
And we built institutions over centuries to manage the public conversation. They were not perfect. No institution is perfect. But they learned from mistakes over time and they became better. And then we did a terrible mistake. We gave the job of managing the public conversation to algorithms.
NIKHIL KAMATH: And why did it work? Why did the algorithms manage this job in a manner that it got more reaction?
The Algorithm Problem
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Because the algorithms were given a very, very simple task. The algorithms were not given the task, okay, manage the conversation in a way that will build trust or in a way that will promote truth or in a way that will improve society. How do you measure improve society? This is a very difficult metric. We want a simple metric. They were given a very simple metric. Increase engagement.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Increase.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: What does it mean? Make people spend more time on the platform and engage more. Like engage. You read a story, you send it to your friends, or you write a comment. This is engagement. And the business model was if people spend more time on our platform and engage more, we make more money by showing them more advertisement or taking their data and selling it to a third party. This was the business model.
The metric was extremely simple, which was good for the algorithms because these are very primitive AIs. This is like the first generation. And the AIs experimented on billions of human beings and discovered something that if you want to increase engagement to grab people’s attention and make them stay longer on the platform, press the hate button in the human mind, press the greed button or the fear button.
You don’t need truth, you don’t need trust, you don’t need social accountability. And if anger is more engaging than compassion, so let’s drive anger. And this is what happened over the last 10 years.
All over the world, you know, you have these people ask, why are Republicans and Democrats no longer able even to talk to each other, to agree on the most basic facts? You can’t explain it by just American society because you see the same thing in Brazil, you see the same thing in Israel, you see the same thing all over the world. It can’t be something specific to one country. It’s the underlying technology we have given.
You know, the job of, say, editors of news was one of the most important jobs in the world in the 20th century. And you ask today, who are the most important editors in the world?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Social media.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It’s algorithms. They don’t even have names. The editors of TikTok and Facebook and X, they are not human beings.
A Better Algorithm
NIKHIL KAMATH: So Yuval, data shows that the youngest of people, age group 16 to 22, are spending lesser time on social media, significantly less. Good news. If I were to build a new social media and have a new algorithm that does not optimize for hate and greed necessarily, what do you think would be good? But also work.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Work in a business sense or work in a society sense?
NIKHIL KAMATH: It has to work in a business sense for it to work in a society sense, yes.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: This is the big problem, because we have many models of how to build much better algorithms for society. Like you had these models from Taiwan, that they actually built it and it worked well, that you can take the same basic premises of social media and reverse them.
You can have the algorithm rewarding content, like the algorithm. First of all, in this Taiwan system, it maps people according to their views into clusters of groups. Very easy to do that. And then that’s the key point. When new content is released, it promotes the content not on the basis of how much engagement it gains altogether, but to the extent that it gains engagement from both sides.
If you just cater to one group, your content is not promoted. It has to be in some way connecting different groups to be promoted. And it’s a very small tweak.
NIKHIL KAMATH: And it worked.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It worked amazingly. And then it’s still running. The thing is that in business terms, this was a governmental experiment. For the business model of social media companies, it’s problematic.
NIKHIL KAMATH: So you’re saying in a way, discourse could work where two people with opinions where they might not necessarily agree, both sides of the argument are presented.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: If you aim to speak in a way that will be heard by somebody from another group, you can do that. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years, but in the last 10 years, the incentive structure changed.
Like if you go, I don’t know, to the Athenian Agora 2,500 years ago, and you speak, you know that you have to speak in a way that will be heard by different groups of people. If you speak to only one group, it won’t work.
But on social media, if you speak in a way that inflames a certain group of people and doesn’t resonate at all with others, doesn’t matter. You build your 1 million followers and you become influential and potentially rich and so forth. And you increasingly, you radicalize yourself more and more because you increasingly speak only to this one group of people. And the fact that other groups are completely put off by the way you speak, you don’t care.
Purpose and Suffering
NIKHIL KAMATH: You bring up Greek philosophy a fair amount. With Athens and Plato and Socrates, you said something against being nihilistic in the beginning. So if you’re not nihilistic as a person, do you believe there is a purpose to life? And if yes, what is it?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I don’t speak in terms of purpose. You know, purpose. People think there is a big story, the drama of the universe, and I have to play a certain role. Again, let’s go back to the Greeks. They invented theater drama. So life is like a drama. I need to find out what is my role, what are my lines, and perform it. This is something I don’t believe.
NIKHIL KAMATH: What do you believe?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I don’t believe that the universe works like a story.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Right.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I think the ultimate reality is the reality of suffering and liberation from suffering, which is not about these dramas that people construct in their minds. The dramas we construct in our minds very often obscure the reality from us that don’t allow us. We often, you know, we sometimes cause immense pain to other people and to ourselves because we think this is. We do it while pursuing our role in the universal drama.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Is this a bit like the Buddhist school of thought where desire is the root of all suffering? How do you eliminate suffering? Or how do you take cognizance to what is causing your suffering?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: And the ultimate root, I would say, is not desire. It’s ignorance. Ignorance of the reality. That again, ultimately, ignorance of the…
NIKHIL KAMATH: Wouldn’t ignorance of the reality actually make me suffer lesser?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Why?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Because if I’m not thinking of something actively, I’m not suffering by virtue of having that thought in my mind. If there is pain in the world, say, for example, people are dying in Iran today. My ignorance of people dying in Iran will make me suffer lesser.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No, from that particular thing. But if then you get into the habit of ignoring inconvenient things. This is a… If you just ignore the suffering in Iran, okay, nobody can care about everything that happens in the world. We are just, you know, we are just frail human beings. We can’t carry the whole world on our shoulders.
But if you get into the habit pattern of ignoring things that are inconvenient, then you will bring this habit pattern into everything in your life. Into your family relationships, into your professional work, into your relationship with yourself. And again, this will cause you to be ignorant of the ways that you hurt others and the ways that you hurt yourself. And then you can’t do anything about it. We can’t fix something that we are busy ignoring.
NIKHIL KAMATH: I hear you, but how do I take cognizance of my suffering in a manner that gives me purpose in life?
Control and the Present Moment
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: The realization that suffering is not inevitable, that you can do something about it. And ultimately, there are only two things in the world which are really under our control. And this is the present moment in my own mind. Everything else is not really under my control.
I can’t control the past. Whatever happened in the past, even if I’m president of the strongest country in the world, I cannot change the past. And similarly, the future I cannot now guarantee something to happen in a year or a hundred years. It’s not under only the present moment and only my own mind. And even if I’m president of a powerful country, ultimately the only thing I really control to some extent is my own mind.
NIKHIL KAMATH: The person in the next room might disagree.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: We constantly try to control the world, all of us, to lesser. And we can’t. Even if we are the most powerful person in the… We cannot stop our body from aging. You know, you want to control countries on the other side of the world. Try to control your own body, stopping it from aging. Try to control the next thought that comes up in your mind.
Let’s say you’re President X of whatever country, and there is this crisis in Greenland, in Iran, whatever. You go to sleep and you say, oh, I need to sleep well tonight because tomorrow I’m giving this important speech in Davos, so I should be fresh, I need to sleep. And as you put your head on the pillow, some really annoying thought comes up in your mind and you can’t get rid of it.
This happens to everybody, including presidents, that you want to fall asleep and you can’t. Because there is this thought in my mind and think about it. I can order a nuclear strike on another country. I can raise tariffs to 1,000%. I can order my eyes to shut. Here I shut my eyes. I can order my body lie still. I cannot order my thought to stop. I can’t even control that. And if you cannot control that, are you really in control of anything?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Nothing. I’m with you. I’m with you that I don’t control much, not even the next thought in my mind. I’m also with you that suffering is inevitable. I’m trying to draw the bridge from this Yuval to how is that solving my purpose problem in life? How do I not be needed?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: What do you mean by purpose? What do you want?
NIKHIL KAMATH: What is the point of life?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: To understand suffering and be liberated from it.
NIKHIL KAMATH: To understand suffering and…
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: And be liberated from it. You don’t want to suffer.
NIKHIL KAMATH: So if I understand suffering, I will be liberated of suffering?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Ultimately, yes, because again, all suffering comes from ignorance. If we really understand what suffering is and where it comes from, then we can be liberated from it. Not just ourselves, but also help other people do the same. And of course it’s extremely difficult, but if you ask me, what is the purpose, you know, people want money. Why do they want money? In order not to suffer.
People want power. Why do they want power? In order they think, oh, if I had all the power in the world. If I had billions of dollars, then I can prevent myself from being sick. I can prevent myself from being sad. I can prevent… And it doesn’t work. People have been doing it for thousands of years. You can ask the previous generations of dictators and emperors and kings and billionaires. This path doesn’t work.
Attention and Status
NIKHIL KAMATH: Aren’t people optimizing for attention deep down?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: In what way?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Let’s go back to the time when there was a society with 10 people and they were hunting for food. The hunter who hunted the biggest animal beyond a certain point where everybody had enough to eat, did not hunt this really large animal, risking his life because he wanted to eat the meat, but because he got the attention of being the biggest hunter. Attention, bar status. Don’t you think people are optimizing for that? Money could be a pathway. Morality could be another pathway.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: And the world is complex. People optimize for many things at the same time. For money, for influence, for beauty, for many things. Each of us decides to put kind of, you know, different quantities in these different buckets.
NIKHIL KAMATH: All leading to attention.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No, again, all leading to trying to escape suffering. We are all aware ultimately, of the fact that we are mortal. A couple of months ago, they caught Putin and Xi in Beijing talking privately when they thought that nobody was listening and the microphones were on. And this was amazing because what were Putin and Xi talking about in private? They didn’t talk about Ukraine, they didn’t talk about Gaza. They talked about living forever.
These people really, you know, if you’re just, you know, some poor guy somewhere and you’re going to die, you still don’t like it. But if you feel that I’m the most powerful person in the world and I’m going to die, like I’m going to lose all that, that’s terrible. So these people, and you see it in many places around the world, not just in that the highest echelon of society today is obsessed with their mortality and living forever.
Because for the first time in history, they feel that it’s not just religion. Maybe science has a cure for death. And you see all this obsession with uploading our consciousness to a computer and stuff like that, because we are in constant denial mode. We try to forget that we are going to die, but deep down we know it and we say, okay, we’ll have kids and it’s through the children we’ll continue to live. I’ll write some book and through my book I will continue to live, or I’ll be so rich and powerful that I can somehow find a way to live forever. And none of that works. And as long as you don’t accept that it doesn’t work and try to go deeper and see what’s happening in there, you’re just a slave.
Meditation and Thoughts
NIKHIL KAMATH: I know you meditate and you go to India two hours into a meditation. I’m guessing you’re trying to actively block thoughts that are coming into your mind.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No, don’t try to block them. Observe them. Don’t try to block anything.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Most revealing thought you’ve had in all of your meditations.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: One thought, one thought. So, for instance, that we have no idea where our thoughts are coming from. People are under the impression that I am thinking my thoughts. I am my thoughts. The Descartes “I think, therefore I am.” I am creating my thoughts. When you actually look again, your meditation or not in meditation, you close your eyes, you… I don’t know, you go to sleep, you try to fall asleep. You can’t. There is some annoying thought in your mind.
Try to observe what’s happening there. And you see words popping in your mind and where do they come from? And that’s… It’s such a simple exercise and it’s really amazing to see that I have no idea. Where did this word come from? Like, I say a sentence, when I begin to say it, I don’t know how it will end. No, the sentence I just said, I don’t know how it will end. When I started saying it, I didn’t know that the last word in the sentence will be “end.”
NIKHIL KAMATH: Right.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Why did I say “I didn’t know how it will end” and not “I didn’t know how it will terminate” or “complete” or “develop” or whatever. Somehow the words pop in the mind. You know, people say about AI that AI is glorified autocomplete, that AI just predicts the next word in the sentence. Observe your mind and you will see it’s exactly the same thing. Like you have an AI inside you.
And we tend to become so attached to our words, to our thoughts, and again, all these opinions, and you have this opinion. I’m not going to speak with you. I’m going to cancel you just because you have this opinion. These are just some words in somebody’s mind. You’re canceling a person because of some words that they said or that they thought.
But it’s also about ourselves. We not only identify other people with the words, we also define ourselves by the words in our mind. And actually we have no idea where these words are coming from.
NIKHIL KAMATH: So if you’re not your thoughts, who are you?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m investigating that. But this is something you need to… I can’t write the answer on a piece of paper. Here, read.
Identity and Change
NIKHIL KAMATH: You think there’s something between the brain and the organ of your body which kind of puts out thoughts. There’s something else that generates who you are as a person.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Who you are as a person is a constant process of change.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Right.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: There is nothing stable there.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Right.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: But the body constantly changes, the mind, the thought, everything constantly changes. Our attempt to identify a fixed point that this doesn’t change. And this is me now, I’m only…
NIKHIL KAMATH: Asking for a fixed point in a period of time. Like at this point today, at 3 p.m. you will as a certain person.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yes.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Given that at 3:30 you will be a different person.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: A little different.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Who you are at this point of time. Is it nature, nurture, experiences? What do you suspect?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It is everything together. I mean again, reality is one and extremely complex. Like you try to understand a war and somebody tells you this war was caused by X. Every time you hear an explanation, a single cause explanation for a war, know that it is wrong. No war in history was caused by just one thing.
Similarly, a person is never one thing or caused by one thing. We are partly the product of biology and evolution of millions of years. We are partly the product of our own personal history and psychology at the present moment. I am partly the product of what I ate for lunch and of the last words that have gone through my mind or through my mouth.
Who Actually Runs the World?
NIKHIL KAMATH: Who actually runs the world today, Yuval? If I’m a 22-year-old boy and I have 100 million followers, am I more relevant to how the world thinks or is a politician?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No single person or group of persons runs the world.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Agreed.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: And when you talk, you know you’re in Davos. You talk to the most powerful people in the world and you always get a double story. Sometimes they will try to exaggerate their power and give the impression that I’m so powerful, whether as a banker or politician or whatever.
And then when it comes to solving problems, they tend to run away and say this is not my responsibility, I don’t have the power to solve it. This is because of somebody else. And to some extent they are correct that even if you are the most powerful person in the world, you cannot solve by yourself most of the world’s problems.
And this goes back to the beginning of our conversation. This is why trust and friendship and cooperation is so crucial. Because unless you build even a limited network of cooperation, you can’t really do anything. So whether you’re an influencer, an investor, a politician.
NIKHIL KAMATH: I hear you. I’m trying to establish the hierarchy of power.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Power.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Not trying to determine if a group has all the power. Okay, who has more power today? Is it okay, in all the people we have seen here, I think Elon speaking next. Is it Elon? Is it Donald Trump? Is it the person who’s programming the algorithm of Instagram and TikTok?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: We’ll know in 100 years who was really important. Or in a thousand years, you know, if I talked with you, like, okay, we are in the Davos of the Roman Empire. This is the year, not 2026. This is the year 26. And you are asking me, Yuval, who is the most important, powerful person in the Roman Empire?
And everybody would say, oh, of course it’s Tiberius. He’s the Emperor. And somebody will say, no, no, no, no, no. It’s Sejanus. He’s the commander of the Emperor’s bodyguard, and he’s actually running the show. Tiberius is just a puppet. And then he would say, no, no, no, no, no. It’s these merchants going between India and the Middle East and bringing silk. They actually controlled the economy.
And after a couple of centuries, people look back and say, oh, it was Jesus. And if you told people in the year 26, the most important person at the present moment in the Roman Empire, maybe in the whole world, is this Jew from the Galilee, this carpenter, everybody would think you’re out of your mind, you’re joking. But we look back, 2,000 years later, we say, yeah, it was Jesus.
The Power of Storytellers
NIKHIL KAMATH: I actually think it’s the original storytellers who are the most powerful. Like if you are a storyteller, if the person who wrote the book that we spoke about, if there was an original one, whoever writes an original story today that people believe, like we believe in money and religion and other things.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It’s never the one person because the story gets retold and even Jesus, actually, it’s not Jesus because Jesus didn’t write the story of Jesus. Jesus didn’t write anything that reached us. The New Testament was not written by Jesus. It was written decades later by different people.
St. Paul wrote certain letters and treatises, and you have the different gospels written by different people. And then over time, these texts changed and were reinterpreted. So to what extent did Jesus control the message of Jesus? To a very small extent.
Again, a thousand years later, people are burned in the name of Jesus, like he preached love and compassion and they burned people in his name. Was this, he had no control over his own message. So even in the realm of ideas, we think that, okay, I write a book, I did. No, this book will then have a life of its own and people will interpret it in the opposite way of what the author intended.
NIKHIL KAMATH: What I fear most is the person with most influence today is the person controlling the algorithm or the groups of people. And I hope any of the other people have more influence, but not the algorithm, because I don’t think it’s optimized for the right thing. If I had to wish.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: But then maybe the answer is that the most important powerful actor today is no longer a human being. I don’t think we have reached that point in 2026, but I think we are close to the point when the most important powerful, if you want, entity on the planet is no longer a human being or a group of human beings, but an AI.
AI and the Future of Capitalism
NIKHIL KAMATH: If we were to tread down that path, if AI eliminates the need for effort, a society of abundance, where intelligence does not have a premium anymore because AI has a higher IQ anyway, does capitalism survive? Like, what would be the point?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Capitalism, yes, of course. Capitalism doesn’t necessarily need people. It needs money and profits and growth.
NIKHIL KAMATH: It needs shareholders.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Who AIs can do, can do that. I mean, capitalism already created non-human persons which run the show. And they are corporations. Google, Facebook, Microsoft. These are not humans. These are corporations which are legal persons. Even though they don’t have a body or a mind, I consider them not.
But until today, corporations were just legal fictions. Because when, say, Microsoft decides to buy a certain other company, it’s not really Microsoft, it’s human beings, it’s the executives or shareholders that decide to do it. But with AI, what defines AI is the ability to make decisions by itself. If something cannot make decisions by itself, it’s not an AI.
So we could be close to the point when AI can be a corporation that makes its own decisions without any humans. Now imagine a world in which there are maybe thousands, millions of AI corporations in which the AIs decide, we’ll buy that, we’ll sell that, we’ll invest here, and the AIs interact with the other AIs.
And if they are more intelligent than us, they will make better business decisions, they will gain more money, and they will take over the financial and economic system. The legal framework is already there with corporations and legal persons. The AIs just need to kind of get into it.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Interesting. Is money also losing relevance?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It could. Depending what you mean by money, money could change its character.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Store of value exchangeable for effort.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It could. We see already the decline of traditional currencies and the rise of cryptocurrencies which are managed and created by algorithms. We could reach a point when, for instance, currency will be AI tokens or even time on servers or data.
That AIs will trade with other AIs for tokens or for data, not for dollars. And the human currencies like dollars and euros and yens, they will become irrelevant. Okay, you have a billion dollars, but the AIs don’t want dollars. The AIs want their currency, they want data, they want whatever.
It’s, you know, like horses give value to different things, not to gold coins. And then one day horses woke up and they found themselves controlled by humans who buy and sell horses for gold coins, which the horses don’t understand. The horse can see that this human is giving me to that human, and then that human gives that human this shiny piece of metal. I don’t understand what’s happening.
It could be the same with us. And AIs, let’s say you are fired from your job and another AI company kind of hires you and you don’t understand why are they doing it? What’s the rationale?
Advice for Young People
NIKHIL KAMATH: If I were you, a 25-year-old boy in India, and I want to succeed in the world of capitalism, what would you suggest I optimize for at this point of time?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: First of all, ask my husband, because he’s the kind of businessman in the family. I know how to write books and give lectures. I’m not good in business, so don’t ask me for business advice.
But my gut reaction is nobody has any idea. If somebody tells you that they know how the job market would look like in five years, or how the financial system would look like in five years, they don’t. Nobody knows.
So my best advice is spread yourself wide. Don’t kind of train for something very narrow. If you’re trying to, you know, you build your skills as a young person, don’t focus on a very narrow skill like coding, because maybe in five years they don’t need coders, because AI’s code better than us.
So have a wide set of skills. The basic set everybody talks about is you need brain, you need heart, you need hands, you need some intellectual skills, but you also need social and emotional skills, and you also need motor skills, body skills. The body is important. So spread your time between developing your intellectual and social and bodily skills. I would also add spiritual skills, skills that also develop your spirit, your mind.
Understanding Spirituality
NIKHIL KAMATH: A lot of people speak to me about spirituality. I still don’t totally understand it. What is spirituality to you, Yuval? Is it collective consciousness?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: No, trying to understand reality. Like for me, religion is in many ways the opposite of spirituality. That religion is about giving people answers that you are not allowed to question like people. You want to understand reality. Here is this story. You must believe this story. Otherwise you burn in hell or we burn you. This is religion.
Spirituality is, I want to understand reality, I want to understand life. I want to understand the thought in my mind, where do they come from? And I investigate that. And this investigation for me is spirituality.
NIKHIL KAMATH: This word investigate, is it very common in Israeli? I have a speech trainer who’s Israeli and he says investigate a lot. I don’t hear other nationalities using it.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Okay.
NIKHIL KAMATH: He says when you deliver a speech, you say a line and then you investigate the people listening to the speech in terms of what expression they have on their face. So he says investigate.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Interesting. Could be.
Geopolitical Perspectives
NIKHIL KAMATH: Geopolitically, you will. Any views in Venezuela, Iran, it seems like so much is going on.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I’m not sad to see Maduro go. I will be very happy to see the current Iranian regime disappear. The question is always what replaces it? Replacing one dictator with another. We saw it, you know, we saw it with Gaddafi. We are so happy. Oh, Gaddafi is gone. Did it really improve things in the Libya? We are so happy. Saddam Hussein is gone. Did it really improve things in Iraq?
So, you know, it’s not like these Hollywood superhero movies that you think all the problem in the world is because this one big evil guy we just get rid of. We get Superman to get rid of Dr. Evil. End of, end of, the movie ends. Happy ending doesn’t happen like that in history very often.
Okay, you got rid of the bad guy now. Now you start the really difficult job of rebuilding society, rebuilding democracy. So again, Venezuela, it’s not enough that Maduro is not there. We need to see a functioning democracy in Venezuela. And just getting the oil of Venezuela doesn’t build democracy there.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Somebody said this, I can’t remember. Hobbes or someone. Everything is better than anarchy. A dictator is significantly better.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I agree with that. Anarchy is even worse. But we need to do better. And the thing is, we now know that it’s possible to do better. If you live in the world of Hobbes in the 17th century, in the midst of the wars of religion, then you think that an enlightened dictator or king maybe is the best humanity can do.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Yeah, benevolent dictator is great for efficiency.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: In the 17th century. We don’t have any example from human history at the time of a large scale functioning democracy. The only examples people in Hobbes time knew of democracies was small city states like ancient Athens or Florence. In the middle ages and the Renaissance, nobody knew how to build a functioning large scale democracy. So people would say, well, this is a fantasy, just can’t be done.
We now live in 2026. We have experience from the last hundred years that you can build a functioning large scale democracy. So nobody can tell us, oh, this is impossible, this is a fantasy. It’s the same with the international system that if you lived, say hundreds of years ago, you think it’s impossible to build an international system based on trust in which countries really trust each other. Never done before. Can’t happen. We know it can happen.
And the thing that tells us it can happen is for instance, government budgets. For most of history, more than 50% of the budget of every government in history. The Roman Empire, the British empire, the Athenian democracy, whatever, more than 50% of the budget goes to the military.
In the early 21st century, the average expenditure in the military worldwide was about 6 to 7%. Countries felt safer than in any previous time in history. Even weak countries felt, hey, we can spend just 6% of the budget on the military. And we know that the neighbors will not invade and conquer us.
NIKHIL KAMATH: At this point, when everybody has enough to destroy each other, it might not be to any end whatsoever.
The Cost of Military Spending vs. Healthcare
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It’s never, you know, it was always a kind of race to the bottom that when all the countries spend more than 50% of the budget on the military, no country can invest in healthcare, in education and welfare. And everybody feels extremely insecure because you look around and you see all these other kings and all these other republics armed to the teeth.
And everybody feels, oh, I need a bit more territory to feel secure. Oh, I need this island. Oh, I need this province to protect myself. And the other country says, oh no, but I need this province to protect myself. Nobody feels safe.
You know, in the early 21st century, when you spend just 6% of the budget on the military, everybody can have more money for healthcare. For the first time in history, the average healthcare budget was around 10%. First time in history, on average, all over the world, governments spent more on healthcare than on the military. I would say this has been the biggest political achievement of humankind and this is now being deliberately destroyed by some of the most powerful people in the world.
The Unintended Consequences of Efficiency
NIKHIL KAMATH: Actually, just thinking about this if The Doge were 100% efficient and successful, slowly, you would wipe out all bureaucracy to the point where one person can make all the decisions, and it would, in a way, lead to a dictatorship. Yeah, right. So Doge has probably put things onto that path, invariably without anyone taking cognizance to that. It might also do that.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Yes, and it did something else. It shifted power from human bureaucrats to AI bureaucrats. You don’t really get rid of bureaucracies. You need bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are not bad. No big human organization can function without a bureaucracy.
Now, what we saw with Doge and similar efforts is not getting rid of bureaucracies, is getting rid of human bureaucrats and replacing them with AI bureaucrats, which are far more opaque, far more secretive. You can’t understand what they are doing. They are far less accountable.
And this, again, is the shift in power and authority from humans to algorithms, which we saw in social media. Previously, the job of the editor was done by a human being. Now the job of the editor is still there. It’s just being done by an algorithm. And the algorithm has so far been doing a much, much worse job than the humans before.
Final Thoughts: Beyond Power
NIKHIL KAMATH: Last thing, Yuval. I think this is the end. You want to leave us with a fleeting thought of some sort?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: All thoughts are fleeting. Fleeting for today, fleeting for today.
NIKHIL KAMATH: In the current circumstance of the things around us.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Hmm. I’ll just repeat, I think maybe the most important message. Don’t believe people who tell you that all reality is just power. Power is the only thing that matters.
First of all, on the personal level, it will make your life miserable. You don’t want to be the person who thinks that all the relationships are just power struggles. That’s a miserable life.
And on the collective human level, it will be very miserable existence for humanity. If leaders, political leaders, business leaders have this mindset that the only thing that matters is power, that all human relationships are power struggles, then we end up in a world first, in a world in which you have to spend 50% of your budget on the military, and nothing is left for healthcare. And then everything collapses.
We reach anarchy, because then the country itself, people will start fighting each other. Because if everything is just power, so why is this guy in power and not me?
So the thought again, maybe it goes back to the thought. If the thought enters that everything is just power, observe this thought and let it fleet. Let it go away. Don’t hold on to this thought. Don’t identify with this thought. It’s very cynical. It’s destructive. It’s a very dangerous thought.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Well said. Thank you, Yuval, for doing this.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Thank you.
NIKHIL KAMATH: Cheers.
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