The Witch Hunt Never Ended
There is a moment in this conversation where Yuval Noah Harari describes a medieval bestseller — a manual about witches stealing men's penises and hiding them in bird nests at the tops of trees — and Dax Shepard, actor and recovering addict from Milford, Michigan, says with complete recognition: 'every time we have a very outspoken liberal guest on this show, I will predictably see many, many comments — aren't they a pedophile?' The room goes quiet in the way rooms go quiet when someone has just named something true. The witch hunt never ended. It just got algorithms.
This is what Harari's visit to the armchair keeps revealing, across three appearances now: that the distance between us and the Stone Age is mostly a story we tell ourselves. The Bronze Age farmer and the QAnon believer are running the same software. Heinrich Kramer, a sexually obsessed junior church official with a printing press and a grudge, essentially wrote the first viral content strategy. Cannibalistic orgies. Baby sacrifice. A global conspiracy run by women. Sound familiar? The medium changed. The message is the same.What Dax keeps circling — and what makes him such an unexpectedly good interlocutor for Harari — is his bone-deep suspicion of his own credulity. He opens the episode confessing that Yuval is one of 'his guys,' a small pantheon that includes Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Chappelle, people he trusts so thoroughly that critical thinking becomes difficult. He names it because he has to. Because he's spent sixteen years in recovery learning that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are the most dangerous ones of all.
Harari's central move in Nexus is to reframe everything we call 'history' as a history of information networks — not heroes, not great men, not divine will, but the unglamorous bureaucratic plumbing of how ideas flow, who edits them, and what gets recommended. The Council of Carthage, meeting in what is now Tunisia roughly four hundred years after Jesus died, voted a woman named Thecla out of Christianity. She had been performing miracles. She had been baptizing people. She had been leading. And a committee of bishops said: not in our top 27. And that was that. The world turned differently because of a recommendation list.
Now the recommendation list is an algorithm, and the algorithm has no morality, no sleep schedule, and no anxiety about what it's doing to us. It was given one goal — engagement — and it ran a trillion experiments on human nervous systems until it found the answer: outrage works. Fear works. The witch in the bird's nest works every time. The printing press took 200 years and tens of thousands of executions to stabilize into something useful. We may not have 200 years this time.
And yet. What saves this conversation from pure dread is something Dax does almost by accident — he keeps insisting on the humanity of the thing. He asks about Stalin's death. He asks about the doctor's plot. He wants to know what the Jewish doctors were actually supposed to be achieving by murdering everyone, and when Harari says 'don't ask,' they both laugh, because the conspiracy theory was never about the logic. It was about the fear. It was about having a simple answer to a complicated world. It was about the same thing it's always been about.
Somewhere in the post-show wrap, Dax confesses he went to Barnes and Noble and bought a book he already owned. He hadn't read it either time. He says it's like hiding drugs in a spot and finding drugs already there. The whole conversation, really, is about that: we keep stashing the same fears in the same places, and we keep being surprised when we find them.