BOM – Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot at what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I am your host, Victor Menasce. Happy New Year and happy first of the month.
On the first day of each month, we review the book of the month. In order to be considered for book of the month, a book needs to meet a simple criteria. It needs to be impactful enough that it might change your life or your perspective on the world. Whether it does or not, of course, is entirely up to you.
I would put this month’s book into the category of philosophy. It’s definitely thought-provoking. It’s a book called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. The book has sold more than 25 million copies since it was first published in 2011. His works have been translated into 65 different languages, and in total he’s sold over 45 million books across several titles.
In the book, he provides a sweeping narrative of our species, tracing our journey from an animal of no significance to masters of the planet. Harari is a historian. He structures the book around four major revolutions: the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, the unification of humankind, and the scientific revolution. I was surprised that he did not include the industrial revolution, but he focused on these four.
The central thesis of the book is that Homo sapiens dominated the world because we’re the only species capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers, a feat we achieve by believing in shared myths—things like money, gods, nations, human rights. These things only exist in our collective imagination.
In each of the four sections, he talks about one of these revolutions. So the first part is the cognitive revolution. Roughly 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens underwent a mysterious shift in brain wiring. While other human species, like the Neanderthals, were physically stronger or better adapted to cold climates, sapiens developed a unique form of language.
Harari argues that our language didn’t just allow us to describe the physical world, like “there’s a lion down by the river,” but allowed us to talk about things that don’t exist at all. This fiction enabled sapiens to cooperate in larger numbers. While most animals are limited by the Dunbar number—roughly about 150 individuals who can know each other personally—sapiens can cooperate by the millions through a shared belief in a religion, a company, or a legal system.
While other animals must wait for genetic mutations to change their behaviour, sapiens can change their entire social structure overnight by changing the stories they tell. During this era, sapiens spread across the globe, often causing the extinction of the other human species and megafauna, like giant sloths and mammoths, wherever they landed.
The second part is the agricultural revolution. About 10,000 years ago, humans began transitioning from hunter-gatherers to people who used to be farmers. Harari controversially calls this history’s biggest fraud. We often view the move to farming as progress. Harari argues that for the average individual, life became significantly worse.
Hunter-gatherers had a more varied diet, they worked fewer hours, and they suffered from fewer diseases. In contrast, farmers worked backbreaking hours tilling the soil to grow a few staple crops like wheat. Harari jokes that wheat domesticated humans rather than the other way around, because it forced us to settle in permanent villages and spend our days protecting it.
The success of the agricultural revolution was not in individual happiness but in evolutionary math. It allowed the population to explode. More people could survive on the same amount, even if their individual lives were more miserable and plagued by social hierarchy and malnutrition.
Part three is the unification of humankind. As populations grew, imagined orders became more complex in order to keep order among strangers. Harari identified three primary forces that brought the world together in a single global entity.
Number one is money. This is the most successful system of mutual trust ever devised. Unlike religion or politics, money is the only thing that almost everyone—even enemies—are willing to believe in.
Though often criticized today, empires were the primary way human cultures were blended. They provided unified legal and political frameworks that bridged different ethnicities and languages.
And then, number three, universal religions. These provided a moral and metaphysical truth that applied to everyone, regardless of where they lived, further enabling large-scale cooperation. By the 15th century, most humans lived in a world where these three forces had already begun the process of global homogenization.
And then, the last one is the scientific revolution. The last 500 years have seen a transformation unlike any other, sparked by the discovery of ignorance. For most of history, people believed that the all-important knowledge was already contained in ancient scriptures. Modern science began when humans admitted they didn’t know everything, and decided to observe and experiment to find out.
This revolution was propelled by an alliance between science, empire, and capitalism. Imperialism provided the resources and the global laboratory. Capitalism provided the funding. And then science provided the technological edge that allowed the Europeans to conquer the rest of the world.
Yuval concludes by questioning the ultimate goal of this 70,000-year journey. Despite our massive increase in power, are we really any happier? Biological evidence suggests our happiness levels are largely determined by biochemistry, which frankly hasn’t changed since we were chasing gazelles in the savannah.
Looking forward, Harari warns that we’re on the verge of the end of sapiens. Through biotechnology, through cyborg engineering, and artificial intelligence, we’re beginning to replace natural selection with intelligent design. We may soon be able to upgrade ourselves into gods or create non-organic life that renders our species obsolete.
His final and haunting question for the reader is: Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied, irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
Like I said, this is a thought-provoking read. While I don’t agree with a lot of the sweeping simplifications that Yuval makes throughout the book, he does make some compelling arguments that are at least thought-provoking. The thing I like most about his entire body of work is that he asks great questions.
As you think about that, go out and get a copy of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen, and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow.
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