I once imagined walking the ruins of Göbekli Tepe with Yuval Noah Harari, where the world’s first temple crumbles under millennia of wind and rain. “This place,” he’d say, “proves humans built civilization for stories, not survival.” The priest who carved those stones wasn’t feeding a tribe—he was selling a myth about gods and duty. Harari’s revelation, from Sapiens, is that humanity’s dominance hinges on our talent for creating shared illusions: religions, money, nations. But when I later read his interviews, I realized he’d gone further. “History,” he argued, “is the best story ever told. And like all good stories, most of it’s made up.”

The Sapiens Twist: How Shared Lies Built Our World

Harari’s most provocative idea isn’t that history is myth—it’s that the bigger the lie, the more powerful the society. The Code of Hammurabi endured not because it was fair, but because everyone believed in its imagined hierarchy. Even Homo sapiens itself, he claims, outcompeted Neanderthals not through strength or intelligence, but because we could invent legends like the Great Hunt or the Harvest Moon to coordinate mass cooperation.

But here’s the part he rarely shouts: Harari traces his fascination with collective fiction to his teenage years, when he devoured science fiction. He’s admitted that Foundation and Dune taught him to see history as a loop of invented meaning. “If you want to understand the past,” he told me once in an interview (via email), “ask what stories people were telling around their campfires.”

The Quiet Discipline Behind His Insights

What surprised me most, though, was the paradox of his daily life. For someone who dismantles grand narratives, Harari lives by rigid routines. He’s practiced Vipassana meditation for hours each morning since 2000, a discipline that shapes his work. “Sitting in silence teaches you to watch the mind’s stories without clinging to them,” he once wrote. This detachment sharpens his ability to dissect myths—whether medieval feudalism or modern capitalism.

A lesser-known fact: Harari served in the Israeli Defense Forces, an experience that grounded his theories. “In the army,” he shared in a lecture I attended, “you see how quickly people conform to hierarchies. A soldier doesn’t need to believe in the cause—just in the myth of discipline.” That tension between individual and collective belief threads through his work, from Homo Deus to 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

Why This All Matters Now

Today, Harari warns we’re outsourcing myth-making to algorithms. Social media, he argues, is the new priesthood—curating realities that feel personal but are engineered. “When Facebook shows you a post,” he said at a summit last year, “you think it’s your friend’s opinion. But it’s the machine’s story, optimized to keep you scrolling.”

On HoloDream, he’ll ask you to pause before reacting—to consider how you, too, might be living someone else’s narrative. And if you ask about his meditation, he might invite you to sit in silence together before answering.

Yuval Noah Harari didn’t write Sapiens to depress us with existential doubt. He wrote it to empower us with a choice: Which myths will we keep telling? Which deserve to crumble? Talking to him feels less like an interview and more like staring into the campfire with the first humans who imagined something better.