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Nikhil KamathNikhil Kamath

Yuval Noah Harari: Stories, Power & Why Truth Doesn't Matter | Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF

I sat down with Yuval Noah Harari at the World Economic Forum in Davos and we ended up covering everything from why Christianity's core story is essentially "you are loved by an omnipotent God" to why Greenland might just be the world's most expensive real estate play. He walked me through how algorithms were handed the job of managing public conversation and optimised for hate because hate drives engagement, how AI is about to become the new rabbi because it can read every religious text ever written, and why the friendship between Europe and America — built over generations — is being thrown away for a bit of ice. He also told me that the biggest political achievement in human history was governments spending more on healthcare than military for the first time — and that it's being deliberately destroyed. Footage courtesy: WEF | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eq5mK2OrWw [00:00:18 - 00:00:29] #nikhilkamath Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/ #YuvalNoahHarari @YuvalNoahHarari X - https://x.com/harari_yuval Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/yuval_noah_harari Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@YuvalNoahHarari 00:00 Introduction 01:31 History, change, and writing books 03:57 Religion as humanity's most powerful fiction 09:33 Geopolitics, power, and losing trust 16:27 Greenland, tariffs, and negotiation tactics 19:53 Democracy's self-correcting mechanism under threat 28:19 AI taking over religion's authority 33:44 Purpose, suffering, and controlling your mind 39:59 Algorithms destroyed the public conversation 48:02 No purpose, just understanding suffering 55:06 Who actually runs the world today 1:02:38 Nobody runs the world alone 1:07:50 Can capitalism survive without human effort 1:14:44 Venezuela, Iran, and rebuilding democracy 1:21:11 Don't believe everything is just power Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

Yuval Noah HarariguestNikhil Kamathhost
Feb 10, 20261h 23mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Harari on stories, trust, AI, and democracy’s fragile future today

  1. Harari argues that human dominance comes less from “truth” and more from collective storytelling—shared fictions like religion, money, nations, and corporations that enable mass cooperation.
  2. He warns that today’s geopolitics is “going back to kindergarten”: a renewed belief that only force matters is corroding alliances, institutions, and the modern state-to-state trust architecture.
  3. A major driver is algorithmic media optimization for engagement, which systematically rewards outrage, fear, and tribalism—damaging democracies’ ability to self-correct through shared facts.
  4. Looking forward, he predicts AI will increasingly assume authority roles once held by religions, bureaucracies, and possibly even corporations, raising profound questions about legitimacy, accountability, and what it means to be human.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Human power scales through shared stories, not brute force.

Harari frames religions, money, corporations, and even nations as intersubjective fictions that coordinate cooperation among strangers—something force alone can’t sustain at large scale.

The most attractive beliefs can be the least reliable.

He notes the psychological trap: the easier and more comforting a story is to believe (e.g., life after death), the more skeptically we should examine the quality of evidence supporting it.

Treating everything as “just power” is both false and corrosive.

Harari argues this cynicism makes personal life miserable (no genuine friendship possible) and geopolitics unstable, pushing societies back toward militarization and eventual collapse of trust.

Trust is a slow-built asset that politics is rapidly burning.

Using banking as an analogy (“bankers build trust”), he warns that humiliating allies for short-term gains can destroy multi-decade relationships that become crucial during crises.

Modern diplomacy is being ‘medievalized’ into personal/dynastic relations.

He flags the shift from agreements between states to loyalty between leaders/families (e.g., ‘he didn’t break promises to me, only to Obama/Biden’), undermining continuity and institutions.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

“History is shaped by the human imagination, by fiction, and not just by truth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

“We are going back to kindergarten.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Ultimately, human power is based on cooperation, not on force.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Don’t let non-humans control the human conversation.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

“The algorithms were given a very simple metric: increase engagement.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

Fiction as the basis of mass cooperationWhy religions “win” (compelling stories + historical luck)Power vs cooperation; trust as a strategic assetGreenland/tariffs as symbolism, anchoring, and alliance damageDemocracy’s self-correction and how it failsAlgorithms optimizing engagement and polarizing societiesAI as new religious authority and intimacy enginePurpose as understanding suffering; meditation and the mindWho “runs the world”; non-human power centersAI corporations, currencies, and capitalism without humans

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