Yuval Harari, What Is the Meaning of Life?

Historian and author Yuval Harari, one of the most influential
intellectuals of our time, is our guest on the second
English-language episode of "Alles gesagt?" ("Nuff Said?"), ZEIT's
never-ending podcast. Harari's book, "Sapiens: A Brief History of
Humankind", was originally published in Hebrew in 2011 and is based
on a series of 20 lectures from an undergraduate world history
class he had taught. It has sold over 12 million copies and was in
the top three of The New York Times bestseller list for 96
consecutive weeks. Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and
Angela Merkel, among others, are all admirers of Harari's work. In
2016 he wrote "Homo Deus", this time focussing on the future of
humankind; his third book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, was
published in 2018. Both have become international bestsellers. This
week his latest book will be released: the graphic novel "Sapiens –
The Birth of Humankind". The hosts of "Alles gesagt?", Jochen
Wegner and Christoph Amend (both based in Berlin) met with Yuval
Harari, who lives in Tel Aviv, via video call on October 14th. (The
session was also streamed live on ZEIT ONLINE.) Harari was born in
1975 near Haifa and studied in Jerusalem; he finished his PhD in
Oxford with a focus on medieval military history and wrote his
dissertation on "renaissance military memoirs of noblemen". In this
episode of our podcast Harari talks about a wide range of topics
from religion to politics, Covid-19 to artificial intelligence; he
describes spending weeks in a silent retreat, visiting a secret
unit at Google and what it takes to become a bestseller writer. We
hear what it was like growing up in a conservative Israeli family
and realising he was gay at the age of 21, and how this personal
experience has influenced the way he thinks about the world, human
beings and history. At the end of this episode, Harari fact-checks
key scenes of the show Game of Thrones and finally, after three
hours and 44 minutes, he has nothing left to say. Because at "Alles
gesagt?" the conversation is only over when the guest says it's
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