This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

If you look across his mega-best-selling books, like “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” Yuval Noah Harari really has one major topic: cooperation.

The ability to cooperate across scale and time is the fundamental engine of human progress. It’s the way we go from being creatures that absolutely cannot beat a bear or a lion in a fight to being able to create and command the societies we have now.

I think today there’s something interestingly challenging about Harari’s work.

We live in this moment of Trumpism and right-wing populism. One of the messages of these movements is that this emphasis on cooperation, on positive-sum relationships, is a lie — that humanity, that society, is driven not so much by these soft questions of cooperation as it is by hierarchy and dominance.

It’s about winning the transaction, about coming out ahead in the conflict or in the trade. The niceties of liberalism? A lie. Humanity really runs on power — and to forget that is to forget the engine of our progress.

So I’ve been wanting to talk to Harari about this. I think there’s an interesting debate to put him in conversation with. He has a new book for kids, “Unstoppable Us, Volume 3,” that is also about cooperation and how enemies turn into friends.