- If Russia is allowed to win, that's the end of the global order as we have known it for decades.

The most fundamental rule was that you cannot just invade and conquer and annex another country, a neighboring country, just because you're stronger.

[soft upbeat music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, he is one of the most popular and at times polarizing authors of the decade.

Yuval Noah Harari says humans have a superpower no other animal possesses, the ability to collaborate and create order through consensus.

It's how societies, governments and laws were established and maintained.

But right now, some of the world's greatest challenges, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, climate change and deep political battles in the United States, seem to be kryptonite weakening that superpower.

What does the future hold for humanity?

We'll talk about that and why he says he fears for the soul of his nation, Israel.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

- Welcome back to Leaders are Readers, where we get presidents and prime ministers to tell us what books are on their night tables.

- But first, here's a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

- [Narrator 1] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture and more.

Learn more at Cox.careers/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright upbeat music] [suspenseful music] - Okay, "GZERO" fans, it's trivia time.

What animals are deadliest to human beings?

Sharks, lions, scorpions?

No, not the case.

According to the World Health Organization, it's mosquitoes.

They kill an estimated 750,000 people a year by transmitting potentially fatal diseases, the most common being malaria.

And mosquitoes have been on the top of that list for decades, but do they deserve the biggest buzz?

Cut back to 2014.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates posted this on his blog.

He was making the case for a global campaign to combat malaria, and he even declared a Mosquito Week to raise awareness, which I know you'd watch over Shark Week.

Shortly after Bill's blog post, "Vox" published this rebuttal, citing a counter-argument from a biologist at UC Davis.

Humans are often ranked as the second-deadliest animals behind mosquitoes, but that's only based on homicide rates.

When you also factor in transmittable diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, even the flu, we beat mosquitoes hands down.

Also, in 2014, a then unknown history professor in Israel was about to bust the intellectual world wide open by arguing that humans have always been the deadliest and the most powerful creatures on the planet.

His book, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," told the story of us as a species and how we evolved to rule the world.

- All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

- But that superpower of cooperation and collective agreement, Harari says, has also led to inequality and slavery and war.

His books have sold more than 45 million copies worldwide in 65 languages as he explores where humans came from and where we're going.

Harari has also provoked criticism along the way.

Some claim he's pushing populist science or sensationalism, and though he's a historian, he regularly tackles today's world, from the war in Ukraine to the threat posed by artificial intelligence, to a deadly conflict between Israel and Hamas.

His latest books explain his theories to kids as he takes on one of the hardest concepts for any of us to consider, why the world isn't fair.

And I spoke with him before a live audience in New York City.

Here's our conversation.

[audience applauds] Thank you, and welcome.

- Thank you.

- We'll start with your book, "Unstoppable Us."

I read it yesterday.

[Yuval laughs] It's a children's book.

It still took me a couple hours.

The thing that I took away most directly, when you're writing for kids about why life isn't fair is, you're saying basically, it's all about stories.

- Yeah.

- Explain what you mean by that.

- Since I was a kid, I was extremely concerned, especially about the issue of war.

I live in Israel, I live in the Middle East.

There is constantly war, and you want to know why there are so many wars in the world.

And many people tell you that people fight, humans fight for the same reasons that other animals fight.

It's just natural.

You fight over territory, you fight over food, the same way that chimpanzees and wolves and lions fight.

And it took me many years of researching history to understand, this is just not true.

Humans don't fight over territory and food, they fight over imaginary stories in their minds.

If I look at the present terrible conflict tearing apart my region of the world, it's not really about territory, not objectively.

There is enough land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody, and this is true of other conflicts in the world.

You look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russia doesn't lack territory.

The last thing they need is more land, and so why do they fight?

People fight over the stories in their mind.

Like, I come, I work in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University, and, you know, it's one of the most fought over places in human history.

It's hard to understand why.

It's not such a great place.

[audience laughs] You know, I mean, it's a very ordinary place.

You walk around, it's just, you know, you have stones and trees and cats and pigeons and people, just like any other place.

- I mean, it's on the water, the land is pretty good.

- The land is not good.

You can grow olives or something.

There are no oil fields, there are no gold mines, nothing.

And, but in their imagination, people think, "Oh, this is not a stone.

"This is a holy stone.

"This is not just any place.

"It's full of angels and gods and saints and prophets," and they fight over this.

I listen to our prime Minister Netanyahu and he says, "This is the selacumeno, the rock of our existence."

And of course, the rock is just a rock, but the stories that we tell about it make it so important that people are willing to be killed, to kill and be killed in millions.

- How would you talk to parents in the audience today to say here is how I think you should try to address the fact that we are living in such a fraught, a dangerous period?

- First, I would say that we can't protect the kids from the actual violence and from the actual bad consequences, so we shouldn't try to protect them from the information about it, that we should talk openly about what is happening in the world.

The key message is that humans created the world in which we live, so humans can change it.

Yes, the trends now are in a negative direction, but this is just a result of human decisions.

We have the resources to deal with all the major problems of the world, you know, whether it's climate change, whether it's the rise of AI, whether it's the rise or resurgence of wars, we can deal with it.

If you think about, for instance, climate change and the ecological crisis, which worries a lot of young people, if you need to place a kind of price tag on it, how much would it cost humanity to prevent catastrophic climate change?

The best estimates I could find is less than 5% of the global budget.

If you think in terms of the budget of humanity, global GDP, less than 5% protects us.

If we invest it in the right places, protects us from catastrophic climate change.

Now, it's a huge amount of money, but it's still, in terms of budget, it's less than 5%.

We can do that.

Doesn't mean that we will do it.

It's a question of motivation.

And like with wars, going back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what I said in the beginning, that it's about stories.

It's not an insolvable conflict.

You know, it's not like in mathematics that there are certain mathematical problems which have no solution, and mathematicians can actually prove to you, this problem has no solution.

It's never like that in politics.

Every problem has a solution, often many more than just one solution.

It's a question of motivation.

Do people have the motivation to solve it?

Now, we haven't mentioned AI so far, but the horizon, I mean, we are at the edge of the cliff.

We are very close to the point when, whether you think about the world in terms of power or whether you think about the world in terms of stories, it's going to shift.

The control of these is going to shift to AI.

AI is the first technology in history that can take power away from us.

You know, every previous tool, stone knives, atom bombs, they empowered us because a decision about how to use them could only be made by a human being.

An atom bomb cannot decide who to bomb.

An autonomous weapon system can decide by itself who to bomb.

A social media algorithm decides by itself what news to show you or what stories to show you, and so it is already taking power away from humans.

For the first time in history, we are losing power as a species at a very rapid pace, and similarly, we are also losing control of the stories that we believe, and AI is the first technology in history that can create stories by itself.

People compare it sometime to the printing press, but it's a completely different thing.

A printing press can only copy my ideas.

I write something and then it can create a thousand, a million copies.

It cannot write a single line by itself, but AI can.

And I think very soon, we will reach a point when the stories that dominate, if we are not careful, that the stories that dominate the world, ideologically, politically, religiously, will be composed by a non-human intelligence.

- Is that not inevitable?

- As a historian, I tend not to believe in inevitability.

Again, at the present moment, 2024, we still have control of the direction that AI is developing, but I don't know for how many more years.

If we don't do anything, then yes, I think that in, I don't know, 10 years, the stories that dominate the world will, for the first time in history, be the product of a non-human intelligence.

It is now able to produce texts and to deep fake voices, and to increasingly even create intimacy with us.

It has no feelings of its own yet, but it is able to fake intimate relations.

You meet someone online, you are no longer able to tell whether it's a human being or an AI.

Now, over the past 10 years, there was this big battle for human attention over social media.

Now the battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy.

If you want to change people's minds about anything, intimacy is the key, and AI is learning how to press our emotional buttons better than any human being, and under these conditions, the conversation could simply collapse.

Just think about the public sphere being flooded, not with a few hundred or a few thousand AIs, but, you know, they can be mass-produced, hundreds of millions of AIs being able to hold a conversation better than the average human being.

- Infinite patience.

- Infinite patience.

- Engagement.

- No emotions of their own, so they are never angry, they are never fearful, they are never bored.

They are just 100% focused on you, on hacking your emotional system.

The longer you interact with it, like, you meet somebody online and you have an argument about climate change or the US elections or whatever, and it's a bot.

Now, for you, it's a complete waste of time.

I mean, you're not going to change the bot's opinion on anything.

It's a bot.

But every minute you spend talking with this bot, it gets to know you better and better, to hone its arguments, to forge an intimate relationship with you.

This is a social weapon of mass destruction.

It could potentially destroy trust between people and destroy the ability to have a conversation.

- And that is already happening.

We see that happening with social media today.

- Yeah, I mean, one of the kind of key questions to ask, you know, any tech executive or whatever is just, explain to me, how is it that you created the most sophisticated information technology in the history of the world and people can no longer talk with each other?

How is it possible?

It could be that we now have, the technology is too sophisticated for the human brain, and that, in the new technological era, again, democracy becomes impossible.

What will replace it is not clear because dictatorships are also in big, big trouble.

We tend not to think about it, but dictators also have problems in life.

[audience laughs] And [chuckles], you know.

- You were actually sympathetic to the challenges of creating order as a dictator in your book.

- Yeah.

- You were.

- And as a dictator, the biggest problem always is how to control your own subordinates.

The one thing a dictator never wants to have is a subordinate more powerful that he doesn't know how to control, and AI is exactly that.

You know, in the toolkit of-- - And that's one of the reasons the Chinese are regulating AI so much more strictly.

- Yeah, they're terrified.

- Absolutely.

- I mean, the most effective tool of every dictator in history is fear.

You are Stalin and you want to keep people in line, what do you do?

You terrorize them.

How do you terrorize an AI?

What will you do?

Send it to the Gulag?

Kill its family?

I mean, what can you do to an AI that starts to say things or do things that go against the party line or try to take power away from you?

Dictators are in a very, very serious problem.

In a way, even worse problem than democracies.

- So speaking of the Gulag, [Yuval and audience laugh] you still believe that Russia-Ukraine is the most important geopolitical conflict out there.

Talk for a couple of minutes about where you think it is and where it's going.

- Basically, if Russia is allowed to win, that's the end of the global order as we have known it for decades.

The most fundamental rule was that you cannot just invade and conquer and annex another country, a neighboring country, just because you're stronger.

This was the case for centuries, for thousands of years.

It was not the, if we talked earlier about state budgets, the reason the average expenditure on the military went down from 50% to 7% and released all these resources to healthcare, education and so forth, is because most people, most countries felt that they're safe, that even if they have a strong neighbor, it's just not done anymore.

They just, they, I mean, maybe there'll be some kind of border clash or whatever, but the idea that the neighbors will just invade us, conquer us and annex our country, it's just not done.

And this is exactly what Putin is trying to do in Ukraine.

We only understand the meaning of historical events with hindsight, and there is a scenario that we are already living in the midst of the Third World War and we just don't know it.

You know, if you think about the Second World War, so today, any schoolkid knows that it started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.

But if you ask people, let's say in May 1941, people in New York, people in Stalingrad, people in Hiroshima.

- It wasn't World War III, wasn't World War III.

- It's not World War III.

Yes, there is a conflict in Europe, there are some conflicts in Asia, but it's not World War III.

Only with hindsight, we say, "Oh yeah, this is when it started."

We could already be in the midst of World War III that started on the 24th of February 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and we just don't know it yet.

- So I have a few questions from you.

I haven't, I'm gonna transition to that by asking the one question I haven't asked you at all.

I haven't talked about the Middle East.

- Oh, the Middle East.

- You live in Israel.

- Yes.

- The question here, which is, do you think there is a way to use your stories, these stories to alleviate the hatred and the violence that we have right now?

And I add to that, you know, the victimhood stories, and that both with the Palestinians and the Jews, for so long, they've defined themselves in terms of the pain of victimhood that doesn't create much space for other people's stories.

So, how do you do that?

- This is the work we need to do, like, individually and also collectively to change the narrative, to change the story.

And the problem with stories of victimhood, they always have an element of truth in them of course, but if you think about yourself primarily as a victim, it relieves you of all responsibility.

I'm not responsible for all the problems in the world.

I'm a victim.

I need more power.

One day when I'm empowered, okay, then I take responsibility, but not now.

Now, I just need to focus on getting more power for myself.

- You're not responsible for any of the people that are killed in Gaza, not one.

- That's the story of the victim.

- Another question, in the months leading up to October 7th, you were highly critical of the Israeli government.

We've talked about that.

Since October 7th, you have defended Israel's right to exist and been critical of the progressive left that blames Israel and the occupation.

How do you reconcile these complicated views?

- Two ideas held at the same time, no problem.

[audience laughs] [audience applauds] I'm in favor of Palestinians realizing their rights to live a dignified life in their homeland, and at the same time, I'm in favor of Israelis having their right to live dignified lives in their homeland.

What exactly the solution would look like, two states, this kind of solution, it's difficult to say the present moment, but at the end of the road, we need a situation when the right to exist, and not just to exist, but again, to live dignified lives of both nations is recognized, and there shouldn't be a logical contradiction.

Just because you are in favor of the rights of Palestinians doesn't mean you have to be also in favor of destroying Israel completely, and just because you are in favor of defending Israel [audience applauds] doesn't mean that you should ignore the terrible suffering of the Palestinians and their rights.

- So the last question I have here is actually about you going off the grid, which I guess you do for a month every year.

- I try to, yeah.

- You also don't use a smartphone except for emergencies.

You're vegan, right?

- Veganish.

- [Ian] Veganish?

- But I try not to make it a religion.

- Well, you do that, you try to make most things not a religion I think is the way we've had that discussion.

You meditate for an hour in the morning, an hour after work.

Are you doing this just to annoy us?

[audience laughs] 'Cause I don't know about you guys.

Like, I mean, I'm aligned with a lot of what he says, but the flesh is weak, right?

So explain, if this isn't just to be better than us, what are you trying to accomplish?

[audience laughs] - You know, people take such good care of their bodies sometimes.

They spend hours, you know, in the gym and special diet and whatever, and I also try to take good care of my mind.

And our minds were shaped back in the Stone Age in a completely different situation, environment.

We are now flooded by enormous amounts of information that we cannot deal with.

On top of that, with our smartphones and social media algorithms and so forth, what the smartest people in the world have been doing in recent years is figuring out how to use these devices in order to hack our brains and press our emotional buttons, and anybody who thinks they are strong enough to resist it is just fooling themselves.

It's much, much more powerful than us.

I also think that we need, part of preserving privacy is to preserve the right for stupidity.

I think that especially politicians should have a right to be stupid in private, that when they are just meeting their friends, they should have the right to say stupid and terrible things in private.

Because I know from, again, my job as a public speaker that you need to be very, to have a good guard of your mouth.

It demands a lot of mental effort, and you can't maintain it throughout the day, day after day after day.

So I think that, yes, we have to be very careful about what we say in public, and we also need, again, time off to be as stupid as we want.

- You know, what I really like about this answer is that I was worried that you were better than us, and in reality, in reality, it turns out you're a little worse, just deep down.

[audience laughs] So will you please join me in giving a hand to help making Yuval great again?

Thank you.

[audience applauds] [gentle music] And now, they aren't human, but they are also unstoppable.

It's time for our puppets.

Roll that tape.

- Welcome back to Leaders Are Readers, where we get presidents and prime ministers to tell us what books are on their night tables.

Let's start with Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

- I'm reading "Eat, Pray, Love," but Russian translation is "Invade, Annex and Laugh."

- Right.

Okay, what about you, President Biden?

- I have been reading a book, it's pretty famous.

"He's Just Not That Into You."

It's helping me cope with these poll numbers.

[gong bangs] - A lot of America is definitely not into you, sir.

What about your opponent, Donald Trump?

- I have been reading a very great book.

It's called "The Art of the Deal."

It's just, whoever wrote this is some kind of genius.

I mean, it's, hey, Jared, who wrote this?

- [Announcer] "Puppet Regime."

- That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

If you like what you see, or even if you don't, tough, the world isn't fair.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[lively music] [lively music continues] [lively music continues] [upbeat tune] - [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator 1] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright upbeat music] [upbeat tune]