My guest today is Yuval Noah Harari, author of the Blackbuster book Sapiens, which tells the entire history by species in under 450 pages.

Sapiens took the world by storm, selling over 23 million copies and having been translated into 65 languages.

This is your story as a human being. What does it mean to be human?

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levin.

Sapiens' path to success was an extremely unlikely one. At the time he wrote it, Harari was a completely unknown historian of the Middle Ages, lecturing at Hebrew University in Israel.

The book was originally written and published in Hebrew. For years passed before it was even released in English, and yet it became one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 21st century.

What makes the ideas in the books so powerful and compelling? I want to find that out today.

Yuval, what a pleasure kidding to meet you. It's absolutely amazing that you write such intelligent books and you get people to read them.

It's part of the job. It's not about speaking up. It's about being heard. So you need to think how you express yourself in a way that is understandable.

So I've heard the story that if it weren't for your deep insecurities around public speaking, the book Sapiens might never have come to be. Is that a true story?

In a way, yes, because it came out of the course I gave at university and I just would write everything that I have to say during the lecture because I wasn't so secure as a lecturer.

And these lecture notes, they eventually became the book.

So I've also heard that your reaction to reading guns, germs and steel by Jared Diamond back in the day when you were a PhD student was something like I could read a book like that.

Well, maybe not I at first, but it is possible to write books like that. I was doing like PhD on the memoirs or autobiographical writings of soldiers from the 15th and 16th century, quite a narrow subject matter.

And suddenly I read this book and I realized that it is possible to look at history from such a broad perspective.

So we didn't immediately occur to me that I could do it, but at least somebody could do it.

When I read guns, germs and steel, my reaction was how is it possible that anyone could know enough and have enough confidence to write such a book?

I think it's very unusual to have your mix of apprehension in some domains, say like public speaking, and what must be extreme self-confidence to feel like you can write the entire history of mankind.

I'm not sure it's self-confidence, at least when I wrote sapiens, I didn't take myself or the project too seriously because I didn't think that many people would read it.

It came out of this university course, I worked in Hebrew originally.

And I was struck by the fact that there was no book in Hebrew which tells the history of the world to the Israeli audience.

So I said, there must be some people in university and colleges that could use that, so I write for them.

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