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Yuval Noah Harari

Israeli historian and author of popular science bestsellers

AI overview

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian who has written bestselling books that present scientific and historical perspectives on major topics like human civilization and the future. His work matters because he has significantly influenced how millions of people worldwide think about human history, society, and what may lie ahead.

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Listeners: 1,410
Total plays: 31,244

Quotes

“Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.”
“Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.”
“Homo erectus, 'Upright Man,' [survived] for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever. This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species. It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.”
“When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force.”
“Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erctus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis.”
“Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.”

Article

Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and popular science writer. He is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first bestselling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. His other works include the bestsellers Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024). His published work examines themes of free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, suffering and the role of storytelling in human evolution.

In Sapiens, Harari writes about a "cognitive revolution" that supposedly occurred roughly 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthals and other species of the genus Homo, developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators, aided by the First Agricultural Revolution and accelerated by the Scientific Revolution, which have allowed humans to approach near mastery over their environment. Furthermore, he examines the possible consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world in which intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said, "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so". Although Harari's books have received considerable commercial success since the publication of Sapiens, his work has been more negatively received in academic circles.