I've always been fascinated by this question of what it felt like to be a hunter-gatherer. I think in a way almost all of us have this longing that we had something inside us remembers the stone age and sometimes wants to go back there. Foragers listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits, beehives, and birds nests. We lost a great deal on the way from the stone age to the silicone age but also gained many things.
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and philosopher whose books — "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," and most recently "Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World" — have sold more than 40 million copies. He joins Rufus for a wide-ranging conversation about storytelling, life in the Stone Age, the future of democracy, and the threat of AI.
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