A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari

How the scholar became Silicon Valley's favorite guru

- Daniel Immerwahr

"About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being." So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century's most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than 25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some 15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas.

He needs them. Harari might be, after the Dalai Lama, the figure of global renown who is least online. He doesn't use a smartphone ("I'm trying to conserve my time and attention"). He meditates for two hours daily. And he spends a month or more each year on retreat, forgoing what one can only presume are staggering speaking fees to sit in silence.

Completing the picture, Harari is bald, bespectacled, and largely vegan. The word guru is sometimes heard.

Harari's monastic aura gives him a powerful allure in Silicon Valley, where he is revered. Bill Gates blurbed Sapiens. Mark Zuckerberg promoted it. In 2020, Jeff Bezos testified remotely to Congress in front of a nearly bare set of bookshelves a disquieting look for the founder of Amazon, the planet's largest bookseller.

Sharp-eyed viewers made out, among the six lonely titles huddling for warmth on the lower-left shelf, two of Harari's books. Harari is to the tech CEO what David Foster Wallace once was to the Williamsburg hipster.

This is a surprising role for someone who started as almost a parody of professorial obscurity. Harari's first monograph, based on his Oxford doctoral thesis, analyzed the genre characteristics of early modern soldiers' memoirs. His second considered small-force military operations in medieval Europe-but only the nonaquatic ones. Academia, he felt, was pushing him toward "narrower and narrower questions."