Science Rules! with Bill Nye · Stitcher & Bill Nye

Yuval Noah Harari Charts the Evolution of Homo Sapiens

·56 min·5 clips

Yuval Harari reveals that corporations and money are fictional stories that vanish if people stop believing in them.

Bill Nye opens by discussing with co-host Corey Powell the surprising cooperativeness humans showed during the COVID pandemic, framing it as evidence of Yuval Noah Harari's thesis about human uniqueness. Harari explains that Homo sapiens was not physically or neurologically superior to Neanderthals — who had larger brains — but around 70,000 years ago acquired the ability to cooperate in far larger numbers through shared fictional narratives. He evidences this archaeologically through trade networks revealed by chemical signatures in stone tools found hundreds of kilometers from their source, and through spectacular burial goods requiring hundreds of collaborators — neither of which appear in Neanderthal sites. Harari distinguishes three types of reality: objective (viruses exist whether believed in or not), subjective (personal pain, private dreams), and intersubjective — things that exist only in the shared imagination of many people. Corporations, money, nations, and gods are intersubjective: if enough people stop believing, they vanish. He describes stories as tools that can be good or bad; nationalism, for instance, is the mechanism that makes 300 million strangers pay taxes for each other's healthcare. The agricultural revolution, Harari argues, was not obviously good for most individuals: hunter-gatherers rarely starved, had no epidemics, and had more leisure time than early farmers who relied on fragile monocultures and lived alongside disease-transmitting domesticated animals. But farmers reproduced faster and in greater numbers, so agriculture spread by weight of population. The scientific revolution's core discovery was not any specific fact but the willingness to admit ignorance — that the most important questions remain unanswered. On AI, Harari distinguishes intelligence (problem-solving capacity) from consciousness (the ability to feel pain, love, hate). Computers already have high intelligence with zero consciousness. He argues the critical historical tipping point will be when external systems understand human emotions and decisions better than individuals understand themselves — at which point the future becomes genuinely unpredictable. He uses the bank loan algorithm as an example: it weighs thousands of data points with weights that no human can examine or appeal.

As heard by us

A grounded science-history conversation built around the discovery of ignorance.

Bill Nye and Corey Powell guide a wide-ranging talk with Yuval Noah Harari from COVID-era cooperation to agriculture, birth spacing, and the scientific revolution.

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Press play for a history-of-humanity conversation that keeps asking what changed, and why.

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