Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2026

⏱️ 113 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What are the conditions that enable a country to become great — or great again? The Trump administration — and other right-wing movements in other countries — offers a vision of greatness based on power and domination abroad, and a mix of shared national and religious stories at home. And that vision is clearly appealing to a lot of people. Liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere have been struggling to tell a story that can compete. What story would Yuval Noah Harari tell? One of the through lines of Harari’s best-selling books — “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus,” “Nexus” — is the huge role that stories play in shaping the arc of history, driving humans to cooperate on a grand scale to achieve great things, or divide violently against one another. So I wanted to ask him about the stories that the U.S. and Israel, in particular, seem to have embraced right now. What does history tell us about the power of this story? And why does the liberal story seem so weak right now? Mentioned: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari Unstoppable Us, Volume 3 by Yuval Noah Harari “Understanding AI” by Timothy B. Lee Book Recommendations: The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The I think if you look across his mega bestselling books like Sapiens and Homo Deus, you all know Harari really has one major topic.
0:40.3	That topic is cooperation. Cooperation and the ability to cooperate across scale, across time,
0:49.3	as being the fundamental engine of human progress. Cooperation as of the way we go from being this
0:56.4	creature that absolutely cannot beat a bear or a lion in a fight, to being able to create and
1:01.7	command the societies we have now. I think right now there's something interestingly
1:07.0	challenging about Harari's work, because we live in this moment of Trumpism, of right-wing populism, and one of the messages of those
1:13.5	movements is that this emphasis on cooperation, on positive some relationships, is a lie,
1:21.5	that humanity, that society is driven not so much by these soft questions of cooperation as by power, hierarchy,
1:31.6	dominance, about winning the transaction with the other, about coming out ahead in the conflict
1:37.7	in the trade, that all these like niceties of liberalism, they were a lie. And that really humanity runs on power.
1:50.3	And that to forget that is to forget the engine of our progress. So I've been wanting to talk to
1:55.4	Harari about this. I think there's an interesting debate to put him in conversation with.
1:59.9	He's in a book for kids called
2:01.1	Unstoppable Us, Volume 3. It is also about cooperation and how enemies turn into friends,
2:06.3	but this conversation is bigger than that. It's about liberalism. It's about Israel. Harare is Israeli.
2:13.8	It's about AI and what it's going to do to us and what it's going to do to language as the way we work with and fail to work with each other.
2:23.3	It is, as we say in the podcast, it is a wide-ranging conversation and all the better for it.
2:28.8	As always, my email as Recline Show at nwightimes.com.
2:41.3	Thank you. Klein Show at NYTimes.com. You all know a Harari.
2:42.6	Welcome to the show.
2:43.7	Thank you.
	...

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