Yuval Noah Harari
Professor of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authoracademicfounderscientist@harari_yuval ↗ynharari.com ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗Instagram ↗
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who studies macro-historical questions. He is the author of bestselling books including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
2shows
2appearances
52statements
5resolved
4supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
13said about them ↓ Everything Yuval Noah Harari said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Harari: Superior algorithms will render democracy and free markets completely obsolete
“And once you have an external entity, An algorithm that knows me better than I know myself. This is the real turning point. This is the point when individualism as we've known, it doesn't make any sense when democracy in the free market become completely obsol…”
Harari: Swearing on the Bible is like swearing on Harry Potter
“And even when people testify in court, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they swear on the Bible, which is so full of fictions and myth and error. It's like you can swear on Harry Potter just the same.”
Harari: Corporations and governments will soon understand individuals better than themselves
“What we will see with regard to the individual is that at a certain point, external entities, whether it's corporations or whether it's governments, they will have enough data, especially biometric data, and enough computing power to be able to understand me b…”
Harari: US foreign policy is reverting to Trump family dynastic diplomacy
“So it's now foreign relations increasingly is relations with the Trump family. Not with United States, which is why so many countries are doing business with certain members of the Trump family in order to influence US foreign policy. So this is really going b…”
Harari: Both Hamas and Israel committed atrocities in the recent war
“The truth is that during the war, the recent war between Israel and Hamas, Hamas committed atrocities and also Israel committed atrocities. This is the truth. It's not that, oh, there is the Palestinian truth that only the Israelis committed atrocities, and th…”
Harari: People will increasingly consult AI instead of human religious leaders
“That can read and remember all the books, and has a chance of becoming the new authority. That people will increasingly, they have a question, they will not go to a human rabbi, they will go to an AI, and it's the same in Christianity, and it's the same with I…”
Harari: Autonomous AI corporations will take over the financial system
“In which the AIs decide, we'll buy that, we'll sell that, we'll invest here, we'll buy, and the AIs interact with the other AIs, and if they are more intelligent than us, they will make better business decisions, they will gain more money and they will take ov…”
Harari: Prioritizing healthcare over defense was humanity's top political achievement
“I would say this is, this has been the biggest political achievement of humankind, and this is now being deliberately destroyed by some of the most powerful people in the world.”
Harari: DOGE will replace human bureaucrats with opaque, secretive AI
“What we saw with Dodge and similar efforts is not getting rid of bureaucracies, is getting rid of human bureaucrats and replacing them with AI bureaucrats, which are far more opaque, far more secretive. You can't understand what they are doing. They are far le…”
Harari: Humanity is on the verge of creating inorganic life forms
“So after four billion years of evolution, of organic life forms, we are really on the verge of creating the first inorganic life forms, and if this happens, It's the greatest revolution in the history of life since the very beginning of life.”
Harari: Neuroscience shows there is no single authentic self
“Science now tells us that when you look inside, you don't find any single authentic self. You find a cacophony of different conflicting voices that Well, none of which is your true self. There is just no such thing.”
Harari: The breakup of the individual will collapse democracy and capitalism
“If in the 20th century, the big fear for individualism was that the individual will be crushed from outside, now the threat comes from the opposite direction. The individual will break up from inside, and then the entire structure of individualism and democrac…”
Harari: Neo-nationalism is a temporary phase incapable of solving global problems
“The present stage of neo-nationalism or tribalism, I think it's just a phase. It's a backlash against globalization, and the main problem, it doesn't have any solutions to the deep problems of the 21st century. All the major problems of humankind in the 21st c…”
Harari: Decision-making authority is shifting from humans to tech cloud systems
“Now we are entering a post-humanist era. Authority is shifting away from humans. If in the last 300 years we saw authority descending from the clouds, To earth, to humans, now authority is shifting back to the clouds, but not to God, but to the Google cloud, t…”
Harari: Biotechnology could convert economic inequality into permanent biological inequality
“However, in the 21st century it might be possible for the first time to translate economic inequality into real biological inequality. And once this starts, it becomes almost impossible to close the gap.”
Harari: Religion functions as a virtual reality game with imaginary rules
“Religion is a virtual reality game that provides people with meaning by imposing imaginary rules on an objective reality.”
Harari: Most people today have absolutely no military value
“Most people today have absolutely no military value.”
Harari: Governments lose incentive to fund public services without military need
“But if you don't need them as soldiers or workers, then the incentive to build hospitals and schools and so forth diminishes.”
Harari: The more attractive an idea is, the more likely it is untrue
“You know, the irony, to some extent, is that the more attractive an idea is, chance, the bigger the chance that it's not true. It's so easy for people to find evidence supporting the story they want to believe. So the more you want to believe a story, the more…”
Harari: Evidence for an afterlife in religions is extremely meager
“Everybody wants to believe that there is something after death. You know, this is universal in almost all religions in different forms, and the evidence is so meager.”
Harari: US strong-arm tactics will damage European alliance for years
“Even if you get what you want in the short term, and what happened in the last, of course, it's not just the last few weeks, it's the last few years, but the Europeans will not forget that. And the feeling that you get that, I don't know, your best friend is w…”
Harari: Algorithmic competition is shifting from user attention to human intimacy
“And what is happening now in AI that if for the previous decade we saw this competition for human attention, That the algorithms are competing to grab our attention. Now the front is shifting from attention to intimacy. AIs are learning how to create intimacy …”
Harari: Delegating public conversation to algorithms was humanity's biggest mistake
“Our biggest mistake is that over the last 10 years, we gave one of the most important jobs in the world to algorithms, and they did a terrible, terrible job.”
Harari: Social media algorithms maximize engagement by amplifying hate and fear
“And the AIs experimented on billions of human beings and discovered something, that if you want to increase engagement, to grab people's attention and make them stay longer on the platform, press the hate button. In the human mind, press the greed button or th…”
The other half of the tape: Yuval Noah Harari's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 13 times in 8 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 6Ali Yahya 4Adrienne Mayer 2Umang Bedi 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 12
WTF is with Nikhil Kamath 1
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 10 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- a16z Podcast | All About Stablecoins
- a16z Podcast | Ancient Dreams of Technology, Gods & Robots
- a16z Podcast | Cryptonetworks and Cities -- Analogies
- a16z Podcast | Network Effects, Origin Stories, and the Evolution of Tech
- a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
- a16z Podcast | On Wearables, Quantified Self, and Biohacking
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Yuval's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WTFLEDGER | Professor of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem | 1 | 29 | 80% 4/5 | full record on WTF is with Nikhil Kamath → |
| a16zLEDGER | Professor of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem | 1 | 23 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |