Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

"Its exploration of humanity's big-picture patterns and systems aligns with Ray Dalio's focus on understanding historical cycles and universal principles. This book offers a framework for understanding human behavior over millennia, a perspective valuable for investors and strategists."

"The best book of the last decade I have read."

"This exploration of humanity's past and future, from our origins to our potential, fits Mark Zuckerberg's interest in understanding the forces that shape society and technology. It aligns with his focus on long-term trends and the evolution of human connection."

"This exploration of human history and intelligence, from cognitive revolution to AI's future, fits Lex Fridman's interest in the evolution and potential of advanced intelligence."

"his book Sapiens, which we're here this evening to discuss, has been a worldwide success translated into over 30 languages... you will be able to get your copy if you haven't read it already signed."

"This is the one I’ve read most recently and I’m sure other people will have recommended this book. It is. What I discovered a couple days ago from a colleague is that Yuval Harari, the author, meditates for two hours before writing anything and, once a year, goes off on a two-week silent retreat. That does help explain the almost crystal clarity of the thinking in the book. He has an extraordinary way of taking the complexities of history and saying, ‘Oh, it’s about this, this, and this.’ I found that captivating. The particular thing that links it with branding is that, early on in the book, he talks about the beginnings of Homo sapiens—of humanity—as the cognitive revolution. He characterises the cognitive revolution as the ability to start to work with what he calls ‘fictions’—but we might call abstractions or concepts or constructs. One of the examples he uses is the Declaration of Rights and another is Peugeot, the car company. You can’t ever touch Peugeot. Yes, it’s got factories, but the company itself is a fiction: a legal fiction. What he’s saying is that the essence of humanity is to build our lives around fictions, and that, I think, is what branding is. It’s creating fictions around ordinary tangible objects—like a can of fizzy drink—or sometimes around things that are themselves fictions like a corporation. So that made me feel that although branding has become a big thing that we all talk about only in the last 30 years or so, it is actually a very human thing. To brand is human, and when you look at the history of branding, you can easily get back to ancient Egyptian times. There is a metal brand in the British museum, from 1500 BC, that ancient Egyptians used. You would heat it up and burn a mark on your cattle to mark ownership. That’s creating a fiction about property and ownership around a tangible object, a cow. But I’m sure you could trace it much, much further back. So although contemporary, clever branding is relatively new, this thing goes right back into the origins of humanity. It’s the same with the Coca Cola brand. Is it the product? No, the brand is a different thing from the product. Is it the name? No, it’s more than that. Is it the design? Is it the packaging? Is it the advertising? It’s not really any of those things. It’s more than that, and so it’s a fiction, if you like, that’s larger than any of those. It’s connected with those things but larger than any of those things. There is something in the way the brain of a human being is wired that makes branding a natural thing to do. We don’t normally talk about this, but there’s a lot of anxiety in being a consumer. It might be a difficult, big choice where you’re paying a lot of money—or it might be a difficult, tiny choice where you’re in the supermarket faced with 40 or 50 different toothbrushes. Or you land in a strange city. It’s 11pm and you’re hungry. Where can you rely on to eat something? I’m sure we have all found ourselves going into McDonald’s in that situation, because at least you know what you’re going to get. The function of branding in reducing anxiety is a very interesting dimension. I do the same thing. When we moved to Bayswater, they had to open a new Pret to satisfy demand from the Wolff Olins people. But I’ve also tried the little local places in the area and you do get a better sandwich at Pret. If Pret A Manger suddenly started buying cheap ingredients, the brand would evaporate pretty quickly. It’s not entirely a trick. You’ve got to keep delivering something really good—and one of the good effects of a brand is that it creates something that the company has to keep living up to literally day, after day, after day, after day, after day."

"I've also been fascinated with Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, but it's quite dense."

"Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens was a revelation."

"The notion that humans are the only species on the planet who create fiction kind of blew my mind."

"I just got to the part in Sapiens where Harari contends that our species owes its success to our ability to make fictions — hard for a novelist not to underline that section."

"it ended up being the best reading experience I've had in at least 10 years. Harari writes about complicated things with unbelievable clarity, and I don't think I've ever experienced a book where the author so often makes bold, original arguments that (somehow) immediately seem self-evident."

"I particularly enjoy big history, for example "Sapiens" (Yuval Harari)."

""Sapiens," by Yuval Noah Harari."

"Thank God someone finally wrote that exact book. It's like a bible for people who don't believe in God."