Yuval Noah Harari

• 1. Introduction

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  Yuval Noah Harari taught himself to read at age three. That detail alone tells you something about the man who would go on to write one of the best-selling history books of the twenty-first century. Born in 1976 and raised in Haifa, he was the kind of child who sat in classes for intellectually gifted students by the age of eight, at the Leo Baeck Education Center. He began university at 17, specialising in medieval and military history, two fields that could hardly seem more distant from the sweeping futurist predictions that would eventually make him famous across dozens of languages.

  The questions this documentary will trace are ones Harari himself has kept returning to across his career. What is the story humanity tells about itself, and who gets to tell it? What happens to ordinary people when technology outpaces politics? And how does a medievalist from Haifa end up speaking at Davos as a digital avatar, donating a million dollars to the World Health Organization, and attracting praise and blistering criticism in equal measure?

• 2. From Oxford to the World

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  Steven J. Gunn supervised Harari's doctoral work at Jesus College, Oxford, where Harari completed his D.Phil. in 2002. That period in Oxford did something unexpected: it introduced him to the work of Jared Diamond. At a Berggruen Institute salon, Harari described reading Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel as "kind of an epiphany in my academic career. I realised that I could actually write such books." The encounter shifted his horizon from scholarly monographs to books that reached a general audience.

  Before Sapiens made him a global name, Harari's published work had a very different texture. His academic titles include Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550 and The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000. He won the Society for Military History's Moncado Award for outstanding articles in military history in 2011, and the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality twice, in 2009 and 2012. In 2012, he was elected to the Young Israeli Academy of Sciences. These were the credentials of a serious specialist, not a celebrity intellectual.

  After Oxford, he pursued postdoctoral studies from 2003 to 2005 as a Yad Hanadiv Fellow, before returning to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a professor of history. The Hebrew University lecture hall, where he taught an undergraduate world history class, would turn out to be the incubator of something far larger than a course.

• 3. Sapiens and Its Consequences

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  The Hebrew edition of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind arrived in 2011, drawn directly from the 20 lectures of that undergraduate world history class. It became a bestseller in Israel before most of the world had heard of it. Three years later the English edition landed, and by the time it reached roughly 45 languages, it had spent 96 consecutive weeks in the top three of the New York Times Best Seller list.

  The book's ambition is hard to overstate. It moves from the evolution of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age through the First Agricultural Revolution and the Scientific Revolution, arguing that a "cognitive revolution" roughly 70,000 years ago allowed humans to develop language and structured societies and overtake the Neanderthals. Joseph Drew, writing about the book's value for students, called it "a wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction" that "highlights the importance and wide expanse of the social sciences."

  Academic reception was considerably sharper. Anthropologist Christopher Robert Hallpike, reviewing the book in 2020, wrote that "whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously." Hallpike's verdict was that Sapiens should not be judged as serious scholarship but as "infotainment", a publishing event that titillates readers through "sensational displays of speculation." Neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan, writing in Current Affairs in July 2022, put it bluntly: Harari "sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors." The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, also in 2022, described him as both a historian and a brand, noting that his listeners celebrated him like a pop star.

• 4. Predicting the Future

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  At the 2016 Davos Forum, Harari floated an idea that would follow him for years: that the Fourth Industrial Revolution would divide humanity between a "superelite of improved humans" and a mass of "useless people," and that "power is in the hands of those who control the algorithms." It was a stark framing, and it found an audience.

  His 2016 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow extended that line of thinking into longer form. Its premise holds that humanity is likely to pursue happiness, immortality, and God-like powers, and among several possible futures Harari develops the term "dataism" for a philosophy that treats big data as a supreme value. Siddhartha Mukherjee, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said the book "fails to convince me entirely" but called it "essential reading for those who think about the future."

  In an October 2017 interview with People's Daily Online, Harari articulated his case at full stretch. He described the coming era as "not just the greatest revolution in history, but the greatest revolution in biology since the appearance of life on earth," arguing that for four billion years life had followed the laws of natural selection and been confined to organic compounds, but that science was likely to usher in an era of "inorganic life shaped by intelligent design." He named the United States and China as the two countries most likely to monopolise the new powers of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. The statement he has repeated most often may be his bluntest: "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so."

• 5. Controversy and Criticism

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  21 Lessons for the 21st Century, published in 2018, drew a split verdict. Kirkus Reviews praised it as a "tour de force" and a "highly instructive exploration of current affairs." A review in the New Statesman was far harsher, pointing to what it called "risible moral dictums littered throughout the text" and accusing Harari of "trafficking in pointless asides and excruciating banalities."

  The Russian edition of the same book generated a more serious dispute. In 2019, critics noted that the Russian translation softened passages about Russian authorities. Leonid Bershidsky in The Moscow Times named it "caution, or, to call it by its proper name, cowardice." Nettanel Slyomovics in Haaretz accused Harari of "sacrificing those same liberal ideas that he presumes to represent." Harari responded that he had been warned Russian censorship would block the book entirely if certain examples remained, and that he chose to publish a partially revised version rather than reach no readers at all, noting that the book "is still very critical of the Putin regime, just without naming names."

  Philosopher Mike W. Martin, in a 2020 journal article, argued that Harari "misunderstands human rights, inflates the role of science in moral matters, and fails to reconcile his moral passion with his moral skepticism." From a very different direction, Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin singled out Harari's embrace of a post-human future as evidence that the modern Western world is "the civilisation of the Antichrist." The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted what it described as an "icy deterministic touch" in his books, an outlook that made them especially popular in Silicon Valley.

• 6. The Man Behind the Ideas

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  Harari met Itzik Yahav in 2002, the same year he finished his doctorate at Oxford. Yahav became both his husband and his personal manager. Because Israel recognises civil marriages only if performed abroad, they married in a civil ceremony in Toronto, Canada. Harari has practised Vipassana meditation since 2000 and has described it as having "transformed" his life. As of 2017, his daily practice ran to two hours, split between the start and end of his work day, and each year he undertook a silent retreat of at least 30 days, without books or social media. He also works as an assistant meditation teacher. He dedicated Homo Deus to his teacher S. N. Goenka, writing that he "could not have written this book without the focus, peace and insight gained from practising Vipassana for fifteen years."

  He is a vegan, a stance he connects directly to his research, including his view that the dairy industry is built on severing the bond between mother cow and calf. As of May 2021, he did not own a smartphone; by October 2023 he acknowledged keeping one only for travel and emergencies. He lives in a middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv.

  During the COVID-19 pandemic, after the United States cut its funding to the World Health Organization, Harari and Yahav announced a donation of one million dollars to the WHO through their social impact company, Sapienship. Harari is openly critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and in a 2023 conversation with Lex Fridman he warned that the Netanyahu government was "openly trying to gain unlimited power" by moving to neutralise the Supreme Court.

• 7. Expanding the Franchise

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  In 2019, Harari and Yahav founded Sapienship, described as a social impact company whose mission is to tell and retell humanity's shared story in order to promote trust and cooperation. The company works across research, education, and the publication of position papers on technology and the future world order.

  The Yahav Harari Group, built around Itzik Yahav's management work, grew into what the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2022 described as a "booming product cosmos" that includes comics, children's books, and plans for films and documentaries. The graphic adaptation of Sapiens, co-authored with David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave, launched its first volume in 2020 at a livestream event organised by How to Academy and Penguin Books. A children's version of the same material, Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World, illustrated by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, followed in 2022. In fewer than 200 pages of child-friendly prose it covers the same sweep as Sapiens; it was the first of four planned volumes in that series.

  In 2018, Harari gave the first TED Talk delivered as a digital avatar. By the time his most recent major work, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, appeared in 2024, he had spoken at the World Economic Forum annual conference in Davos four times, the most recent being 2026. The Nexus title extended a line Harari has pursued since his Davos remarks a decade earlier: who controls the networks that shape what billions of people know and believe.