Welcome to the summit series with Ari Melber. We are joined by Yval Noah Harare, the history professor from Hebrew University with a PhD from Oxford and the author of some of the most influential non-fiction books in the world today with over 45 million copies in circulation across

over 60 languages including Sapiens which stood atop the top three books

on the Sunday Times Best Seller list for two years and has been recommended by everyone from

Bill Gates to Barack Obama who said that this provocative lens shows the import of

keeping the long view in mind.

Mr Harare, thanks for joining me.

Good to be here.

Thank you for inviting me.

Absolutely.

You write so eloquently about this longer framework of history.

What is it that you actually think people today

can learn by understanding past societies?

So many things, but I think most fundamentally, history is not the study of the past. History is the study of change. It's trying to understand how things change. And also

history is not about remembering the past, it's about liberating ourselves from it. Very often we live our lives trapped

inside the dreams of dead people and history can show us a way out of that.

And you know we've learned so much over thousands of years, over tens of thousands of years of history. We are today much more powerful,

thousands of times more powerful, than we were in the Stone Age, but we don't seem to be significantly happier.

And there is also a question mark, to what extent we are significantly wiser.

Do we understand ourselves and our place in the world better, are we more responsible

than our Stone Age ancestors?

I don't think that the answer is obvious.

Hmm.

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