Yuval Noah Harari: «Τhe Ηuman Βeing is Βecoming a Ηackable Αnimal»

Interview by Markos Karasarinis

Until 2014 Yuval Noah Harari was just another scholar of Early Modern military history, the subject he had studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford. Teaching in the former, he had already written a popularizing book summing up human history in twenty chapters. Its English translation (Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind) became an international best seller with more than 12 million copies, turning him into a household name worldwide.

Today, the 44-year-old historian lives in Tel Aviv with his spouse, Itzik Yahav, is frequently invited to fora like the World Economic Forum in Davos where in 2018 he was slotted to speak after Angela Merkel and before Emmanuel Macron, meets with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey and counts Barack Obama and Bill Gates among his readers. According to Harari, the success of Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (all his books are published in Greek by Alexandria Editions) has not changed the rhythm of his daily life.

He remains a workaholic, he continues to set aside four weeks each year for meditation, he has not stopped pushing for bringing science to the public - and this is the reason he collaborated with two well-known comic book artists to remake Sapiens into a graphic novel.

Comic book writing requires a quite different mode of storytelling compared to history. How did you find the experience of working towards adapting Sapiens into Sapiens: A Graphic History?

"The graphic novel was the most fun project I ever worked on. Our aim has been to reach people who don't usually read science books like Sapiens. To achieve this,...