Most people, they just get overwhelmed by the religious stories, by the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and they take these stories to be the reality. Almost 99 percent you realize is just stories in our minds. The other major contribution, I think, is that the entire exercise of Vipassana meditation is to learn the difference between fiction and reality, what is real and what is just stories that we invent and construct in our own minds. The discipline to have this focus I really got from the meditation. It's so difficult to keep reminding yourself what is really the most important thing that has happened in history or what is the most important thing that is happening now in the world. It's so difficult, especially when you deal with long-term history, to get bogged down in the small details or to be distracted by a million different tiny stories and concerns. This is a discipline that I have brought to my scientific career as well. When you train the mind to focus on something like the breath, it also gives you the discipline to focus on much bigger things and to really tell the difference between what's important and everything else. What changes has meditation brought to your work as a historian? Yuval Harari You told the Guardian that without meditation, you'd still be researching medieval military history - but not the Neanderthals or cyborgs. To listen to my whole conversation with Harari - which delves into AI, the future of work, Harari’s favorite books, and more - subscribe to my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your fine audio programming, or stream it off SoundCloud. In this excerpt from our discussion, which is edited for length and clarity, we dig deep into Harari’s meditative practice and how it helps him see the stories humanity tells itself. But what I didn’t expect was how central his consistent practice of Vipassana meditation - which includes a 60-day silent retreat each year - is to understanding the works of both history and futurism he produces. Virtually everything Harari says in our conversation is fascinating. I’ve had one big question about him: What kind of mind creates a book like Sapiens? And now I know. I’ve wanted to talk to Harari since reading Sapiens.

And it, too, is fantastically interesting. His new book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is about what comes next for humanity - and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. The Israeli historian’s mind-bending tour through the trump of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. Yuval Noah Harari’s first book, Sapiens, was an international sensation.

Dr yuval noah harari