Jeffrey Bland, PhD (speaker) describes his reading habits and gives a strong recommendation for Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens. He calls Sapiens a transformative, platform book that surveys human history and cultural evolution — touching on economics, politics, science, law, medicine, arts, and technology — and argues it gives useful context for understanding contemporary global challenges. Bland notes the relative recency of Homo sapiens (roughly 200,000 years or less) and advises readers to reflect on provocative claims before returning to the book.
Questions this video answers
Roughly 200,000 years or less.
Chapters
So what are you reading these days? Well, I can tell you where I've been caught up. I always have two or three books going at the same time, and I'll read part of one and then need a while to kind of digest it because I normally pick stuff that really stimulates thoughts. And then I'll pick up another and read it for a while and then go back and finally, over the course of a couple of days, finish two or three books. So the book that has really occupied my extraordinary every neuron in my brain, which I recommend highly, is the book Sapiens by Mr. Harari. This is a book that is truly one of those platform books. It's a little like the book that we talked about some time ago that was equally transformative for me by Siddhartha Mukherjee, the emperor of all maladies and talking about cancer. And in his later book, the Genome. His writing is just so expansive and so powerful. The same is to be said for the book Sapiens, which is a history of this species that has now become the dominant species on the surface of the Earth, that has selectively competed with its competitors over its fairly short life, at least in geological time, you know, just a few million years. And really the advance of the sapiens as a specie to become what we call civilized to some extent, or let's say cultured, is fairly recent in anthropological time, something like 200,000 or less years. So when we really look at the implications of all of this and how it then shapes the culture of today and how it shapes the memes that really become the rules that we use to guide our behavior as cultures, it really is a very powerful lesson plan. When you've got someone with the expansive thinking, as Harari has, it really starts looking at economic models, social models, the role of science in the development of ideas, how in fact cultures advance, what are the ways that political systems manage this evolving concept of the means, the operative principles, what does the rule of law really mean in terms of the evolution of culture? Almost like Jacob Ranozzi with his extraordinary book and series called the Ascent of Man that was done some 30 years ago. It's the next level up, I think the Harari Sapiens book in really helping us to understand the cultural dilemma, the interest challenges, the dynamics that are going on today globally, the apparent kind of chaos that we're having to figure out where this species is going to go from the 21st century on. If you want a really good grounding across the basis of history, which can often be a very good teacher about the potential for future. This has got to be on your reading list. It's really well done, and for me it has given a context from which I understand much better. The evolution of medicine, the evolution of healthcare, the evolution of social thinking, the evolution of arts, the evolution of technology, and actually how we are witnessing the kind of convergence of many, many different forces of change coming together to create what will be the new society that hopefully leads to the survivability of sapiens on this planet. So it's a good read, but be prepared. You're going to be challenged, and there'll be some things in there that will probably aggravate you. But just put the book down for a while, think about it, and come back. You'll be better for it.
