Yuval Noah Harari: Eat Bugs and Live Forever

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2024

⏱️ 137 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, a writer, and a popular 'public intellectual'. He rose to fame with Sapiens (2014), his popular science book that sought to outline a 'History of Humankind' and followed this up with a more future-focused sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016). More recently, he's been converting his insights into a format targeted at younger people with Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World (2022). In general, Harari is a go-to public intellectual for people looking for big ideas, thoughts on global events, and how we might avoid catastrophe. He has been a consistent figure on the interview and public lecture circuit and, with his secular message, seems an ideal candidate for Gurometeratical analysis.

Harari also has some alter egos. He is a high-ranking villain in the globalist pantheon for InfoWars-style conspiracy theorists, with plans that involve us all eating bugs and uploading our consciousness to the Matrix. Alternatively, for (some) historians and philosophers, he is a shallow pretender, peddling inaccurate summaries of complex histories and tricky philosophical insights. For others, he is a neoliberal avatar offering apologetics for exploitative capitalist and multinational bodies.

So, who is right? Is he a bug-obsessed villain plotting to steal our precious human souls or a mild-mannered academic promoting the values of meditation, historical research, and moderation?

Join Matt and Chris in this episode to find out and learn other important things, such as what vampires should spend their time doing, whether money is 'real', and how to respond respectfully to critical feedback.

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0:00.0	The Oh, Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's the podcast for an anthropologist
0:28.6	of a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
0:34.0	I'm Matt Brown, my co-host is Chris Kavanaugh, the Ernie to my Bert, I couldn't do without him,
0:39.1	our most valued player in a Guru's Pod proprietary limited.
0:43.5	Good day, Chris.
0:44.5	Wow, that's a lot of synchrosy going on there because just yesterday I was watching
0:50.8	Sesame Street with my youngest son, not on my own.
0:55.0	And there's a series about the Cookie Monster and a kind of smaller pink monster called Gongar,
1:02.0	and they were on a food truck a food truck
1:04.6	Matt they're cooking various things so he enjoys that mmm so it was topical
1:09.2	that sounds good yeah so only a birthday, they're still around.
1:12.8	I mean, they don't feature that much in that, but they're around, you know, they haven't
1:17.4	got out of Sesame Street gig, they haven't gone independent.
1:21.9	I wonder if they're
1:22.5	if they're podcasting in the
1:24.0	like they've started their own podcast that would be pretty on point.
1:29.5	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
1:30.7	he Burke.
1:31.2	I'd listen. Yeah, I think a lot of people would listen.
1:35.0	I haven't watched kids shows for a while.
1:36.7	I don't do that anymore.
1:38.8	The kids are watching grown-up stuff now,
	...

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