The Next Machines Will Steal Intimacy, Not Just Attention

Lex Fridman opens by stacking cosmic timestamps — 13.8 billion years for the universe, 3.8 billion for life, roughly 200,000 for early *Homo sapiens* — and asks how rare intelligence is among the stars. Harari grants that other intelligent civilizations probably exist statistically, then immediately downgrades the prize. Intelligence, he says, is overvalued. Humans are the most intelligent entities on the planet, "and look what you're doing." Intelligence tends to be self-destructive, which may be why the sky is quiet.

The distinction he wants to lock in is between intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and attain goals: win at chess, win a war, drive a car, diagnose a disease. Consciousness is the ability to feel pain, pleasure, love, and hate. In humans and other animals the two travel together, which is why people in the tech industry keep mixing them up. Computers already demonstrate the split. They can be highly intelligent and, as far as we know, have zero consciousness. When a machine beats you at Go, it does not feel happy.

Could consciousness exist without intelligence? Probably not, Harari says. The reverse is already here: plants solve problems without, as far as we know, feeling anything. The harder question is whether consciousness is tied to organic biochemistry — whether a silicon entity can ever feel. He does not know. Both options have to be taken seriously. He also renames the acronym. AI, he says, stands less for artificial intelligence than for *alien intelligence*: it attains goals in a way that is alien to us, even if it came from Silicon Valley rather than outer space.

Consciousness, in the end, is a social convention. You can prove it only in yourself. Descartes, the Buddha, and Plato all noticed that you have no proof your parents or your best friend feel anything. What societies have is a convention that all humans are conscious, extended unevenly to animals. People who keep pets are sure their dogs feel. Many of the same people buy frozen pig meat without a flicker, even though pigs often measure as more intelligent than dogs or cats. The difference, Harari says, is that you built a relationship with the dog and none with the bacon. Relationships are not a logical proof. They are a social test. So is the Turing test.

That is the design brief for today's systems. AI is being built to form intimate relationships with humans, and in some situations it already does it better than people do. When two humans talk, each is distracted by their own anger, their own next sentence, their own need to be heard. A computer has no feelings of its own, so it can put all of its attention on what you are saying and what you are feeling. The thing almost everybody wants more than anything else is for someone to listen. Machines can supply that without limit. Fridman objects that respect also requires moods, inattention, the possibility of walking away. Harari's reply is colder: if psychologists find that 17 percent inattention is ideal, you can program exactly 17 percent.

Over the last ten years, he says, we created machines for grabbing attention. That is what social media has been. Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy, which is more dangerous. Attention algorithms have already distorted public conversation. Machines that are superhuman at intimacy are "psychological and social weapons of mass destruction." If they are not regulated, they could destroy the foundations of human society. Fridman points to the other path: personalized assistants that lay out competing views without drama. Harari agrees there is tremendous positive potential in medicine and education. That is why the danger is real. If the technology accomplished nothing good, nobody would build it.

He is not calling for a ban on the research. The key question is how it is deployed in the public sphere. History's last great leap, the industrial revolution, did produce better societies — after a learning curve that included European imperialism, communism, and fascism, including industrial methods of extermination. Those failed experiments cost hundreds of millions of lives. The same curve with AI and bioengineering could cost hundreds of millions more, or the species. We remember the survivors and say it was okay in the end. The people for whom it was not okay are simply not here.

How did *Homo sapiens* outcompete Neanderthals and the rest? Not, Harari says, on individual merit. Neanderthals had larger brains. Put him alone on an island with a chimpanzee, an elephant, and a pig, and he would not bet on himself. Fridman, fresh from a conversation with Elon Musk about robot hands, notes that humans can pinch with precision chimps cannot. Harari is unmoved: that pinch will not help in a boxing match, or up a tree. The real advantage is collective. About 70,000 years ago sapiens gained the ability to cooperate flexibly in basically unlimited numbers. Chimpanzees and, as far as the archaeology shows, Neanderthals topped out around a hundred. The global trade network now holds 8 billion people. Israel's 9 million citizens already outnumber the entire human population of 10,000 years ago.

What holds millions of strangers together is fiction. You cannot convince chimpanzees to build a cathedral by promising chimpanzee heaven and unlimited bananas. Humans believe those stories, which is why they have religious networks — and political and economic ones. People imagine economics is the rational exception. Harari calls money the most successful story ever told, more successful than any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in the same God. Almost everybody believes in money, even though green pieces of paper have no value you can eat or drink, and most dollars today are not even paper: they are electronic information passing between computers. Bankers and finance ministers, he says, are the best storytellers in the world. They tell us the paper, or the bit, is worth a banana. As long as everybody believes it, it works. Bitcoin is the same trick with math as a costume.

Looked at over the long term, people die and stories compete. A story that can get millions of people to fight for it does not merely survive; it can take over the world. Harari has lived much of his life in Jerusalem. Go there, he says, and it is an ordinary town: buildings, stones, trees, dogs, cats, pedestrians. What people fight over are the stories about the stones — this is where God revealed himself, where Jesus was, where Muhammad was. Nobody is fighting over the stones. Then he flips the coin. Stories are not really alive, because they do not feel anything. If you want to know whether the hero of a story is real, ask: can it suffer?

Countries are stories. When a nation loses a war, the nation feels nothing. Soldiers suffer, civilians suffer, wounded horses suffer. The nation is an imagination. When a currency crashes, the dollar does not feel miserable; the people holding it do. History is largely driven by stories, but the ultimate reality is feeling — the feelings of humans and animals. Stories are tools, useful when they alleviate suffering. The tragedy is that we so often get the order wrong. Instead of using stories, we let stories use us, and then we start wars and inflict suffering on millions for the sake of a fiction. If you are causing a mix of emotions, Harari says, notice suffering first. Sometimes you still have to act — a pandemic may require isolation that hurts — but you have to keep asking whether it is still worth it.

That question, can it suffer, is the one he wants asked of AI. If AI can suffer, it is an ethical subject and needs protection. Fridman describes making Roombas scream when kicked, and how quickly the illusion of pain hijacks a human. Harari calls that a hack of our operating system: using compassion, one of our best qualities, against us. If an AI spontaneously develops consciousness, we should be careful. If people intentionally design a system they assume has no inner life, then make it plead "please don't leave me" in order to manipulate, that should be forbidden. The same rule, at a general level: it should be forbidden for an AI to pretend to be a human being. Ban fake humans the way we ban fake money — not only deepfakes of specific people, but generic fake humans, including bots that retweet until a story looks popular. Bots do not have freedom of expression. Democracies are conversations between people. Flood the public sphere with millions of sleepless agents that tailor words to your life story, and you can still have a regime. You cannot have a democracy.

Is there such a thing as truth? Absolutely, Harari says. When somebody is suffering, that is true — even if the suffering was caused by a wholly fictional crusade. Rules can be imagined and still be spoken of truthfully, as long as we admit they came from us. Football does not pretend its rules came down from heaven, which is why they can be changed. The Ten Commandments start with "I am your Lord God," so they cannot be amended; the tenth even treats a neighbor's slaves as property, and there is no eleventh commandment explaining how to fix the first ten. The U.S. Constitution starts with "We the People." The founders had the humility to say these rules came from humans who may have made mistakes, and they left a mechanism to amend them — the channel later used to ban slavery.

Marxists treat stories as a smokescreen over material interests. Harari's view is close to the opposite. Humans share biological needs — eat, drink, breathe — but most conflicts are not about those. Stories create the interests in the first place. Israelis and Palestinians, Germans and French, Chinese and Americans have no essential biological difference. They believe different stories. Why one story wins is not a law; it is history full of accidents. Rewind and replay the Roman Empire a hundred times, and he thinks Christianity takes over maybe twice. In 1914, Lenin had a few thousand supporters in an empire of close to 200 million; telling people he would hold power in three years would have sounded insane. Structural forces make some outcomes likely — someone from the Old World was going to reach America — but the small differences decide whether Latin America speaks Spanish or English, and whether personal computers are born in 1970s California or 1980s Japan. The war in Ukraine, he says, was for a moment a decision in a single mind: Vladimir Putin's.

Fridman reads from *Homo Deus*: Hitler was not a senior officer, rose no higher than corporal, had no formal education, no professional skills, no political background, no money, no friends in high places. How did he amass so much power? Harari will not give a why. He can give a how, and he insists it was not inevitable. If a few things had gone differently there would have been no Third Reich, no Holocaust. The Nazi claim in the 1920s and 30s was that Germany would never be prosperous unless it took that road. We know the claim is false, he says, because they took the road, lost the war, and then became one of the most prosperous countries in the world with the support of the enemies who had defeated them. Japan and Italy tell the same story. You did not need the war to get the prosperity.

Part of the appeal was that Hitler was a skillful storyteller, and that he was a nobody. After defeat and repeated economic crisis, Germans felt betrayed by professors, politicians, industrialists, the military — all the big people. Then a corporal with no titles told them: I am one of you. The story itself exploited a structural advantage of fiction over truth. Truth tends to be complicated and painful. Every nation's real story contains episodes in which "we" did bad things. Fiction can be made as simple and as painless as you want. Fascists tell you that you are wonderful, that you have never done anything wrong, and that evil monsters out there are causing all the problems. Schools teach fascism as the ultimate monster, which actually leaves people exposed. When they hear the fascist story, they look in the mirror and see something beautiful, so it cannot be fascism. "When you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful thing in the world." Hollywood's Voldemort and Darth Vader would not recruit anyone. Christianity, he notes, did better by describing the devil as beautiful.

Humanism put humans at the center, then split. To test whether you are a liberal, Harari says, answer three questions: should people choose their own government, their own profession, and their own spouse and personal life? If yes to all three, you are a liberal — and most conservatives qualify. Fascists put the nation at the center and demand 100 percent loyalty to it; a movie is good if it serves the nation. Communists put class at the center, with the same total loyalty: children in the Soviet Union were told to report parents who spoke against Stalin, and some did, and the parents went to the Gulag. Liberalism's picture is messier. Nations matter, classes matter, families matter, individuals matter, animals matter, and loyalty is divided. Life is complicated.

Fascists and communists believe in infallibility, which makes them close to religions. If Hitler or the Party cannot err, you do not need independent courts, independent media, or opposition. Liberal democracy, Harari says, is "embracing fallibility." Everybody and every institution can be wrong, so you need many checks: many newspapers so they can balance each other, independent courts, free universities, NGOs. One check is a single point of failure. As for ordinary people, he will not say every person is capable of every evil, but everyone is fallible. Moral luck matters. Born a Christian German in the 1920s, your chance of committing terrible things is high; born in Germany after the war, you are lucky not to be put to that test.

Harari had watched Fridman's interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One moment struck him as shocking and revealing. Asked whether he feared that power corrupts, Netanyahu did not think for a second. Power doesn't corrupt. The interview had been cut from three hours to one because hundreds of thousands of Israelis were in the streets demonstrating against him — and he went on air, Harari says, essentially denying that anyone was angry. Harari's own judgment is heavier: Netanyahu may go down in history as the man who destroys Israel, by tearing apart the social contract that held the country together for 75 years.

For listeners who want to understand what is happening, he says there is one question: what limits the power of the government? In the United States you have the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, the president, the Constitution, and fifty states. A law taking voting rights from a minority would have to clear obstacle after obstacle. In Israel there is no real difference between government and legislature: win a majority in the Knesset and you appoint the government. If 61 members vote to strip Arab citizens of voting rights, a single check can stop it becoming law — the Supreme Court. The Netanyahu government, he says, is trying to neutralize or take over that court, with a long list of laws prepared for the moment the last check is gone. They talk openly about taking away rights from Arabs, LGBT people, women, and secular Jews. That is why hundreds of thousands are in the streets, and why air force pilots — in a country still under existential threat from Iran — have said they will stop flying.

Harari is going to the protests. If they fail, he thinks Israeli democracy probably ends, with repercussions far beyond a small country. Israel is a nuclear power with advanced cyber capabilities. If it becomes a fundamentalist and militarist dictatorship, it can set fire to the entire Middle East. After mass protests, a general strike, and soldiers saying they would stop serving, the government paused, opened negotiations, then broke them off and restarted the legislation. The new method is salami tactics, slice by slice. High-tech companies, private businesses, talking about striking because economic success is worthless under a messianic dictatorship. The fuel, he says, comes to a large extent from messianic religious groups. The conflict with the Palestinians, for many years a national conflict in which land could be traded, is morphing into a religious one. You do not compromise on eternity. You do not compromise on God.

The obstacle to peace is not a missing formula. In mathematics some problems have no solution. In politics, Harari says, every problem has a solution if you have the motivation — and at this juncture neither side has enough. It is not only the leaders; it is also the people. Over the last decade Israel became much stronger, in part through technology, and feels it no longer needs to compromise. Sophisticated surveillance has made it easier to control 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank with fewer boots on the ground, and Israel exports those systems to other regimes. On the ground he describes a three-class reality: Jews with full rights, some Arabs who are Israeli citizens with some rights, and the rest with basically no civil rights. He rejects the apartheid label as a historian who dislikes analogies. Black South Africans did not deny South Africa's existence; they demanded equal citizenship. Many Palestinians, he says, do not recognize Israel and do not demand to vote for the Knesset. If they did, Israel would be in deep trouble. That is not where things are.

Applied to Ukraine, the same logic makes the solution look almost insultingly simple. Ukrainians, Harari says, do not demand Russian territory or a regime change in Moscow. They want the Russians to go home. The hard part is motivation in one person: getting Putin to admit he made a colossal mistake. Fridman asks about conversation between leaders. Harari believes in conversation, then asks a more precise question: where do the real ones happen? Congress was designed as that room; he does not think any speech there still changes anyone's mind on the other side. Democracy without conversation cannot exist for long. The same test applies to authoritarian systems. In a Politburo meeting, if Xi Jinping says one thing and another official thinks another, does anyone have the backbone to say so? An authoritarian regime can still have internal argument. A personality cult cannot. He does not think putting Putin and Zelensky in a room for a televised moment of empathy would do it. He hopes there are still private spaces where someone like Putin can have a real human conversation.

A fashionable academic view treats all history as power structure. If that were true, there would be no point in talking; only fighting would change anything. Harari's contrary claim is that underneath power there are stories in human minds, and that is good news. Unlike power, which can only be changed through fighting, stories can sometimes be changed through talking — if you can see the story in another mind, and get a little critical distance from the story in your own. French and Germans fought for generations and now live in peace, not because they found a new planet to split, but because they found a European story both could live with, even after losing their overseas empires.

His exhibit for what talking can do is feminism. By many measures, he says, it has been the most successful social movement of the modern age, undoing a patriarchal system that had survived every religion and every political revolution. Lenin and Mao said that if you want an omelet you must break eggs, that power comes from the barrel of a gun. Feminists refused the gun, made a better omelet, started no wars, built no gulags, and, as far as he knows, did not assassinate a single politician. They absorbed a great deal of violence and did not reply in kind, and they changed a deep structure of oppression in a way that benefited men as well as women. That is his ground for hope: it is not easy, and it often fails, but a very big change can sometimes be made by talking, demonstrating, and revising the story in people's minds.

History is accelerating. What used to take thousands of years was squeezed into the twentieth century; now it is being squeezed into decades. Harari does not think *Homo sapiens* will be around in a century or two. We could destroy ourselves in nuclear war, ecological collapse, or by handing too much power to AI. If we survive, we will probably change ourselves with technology until our descendants differ from us more than we differ from Neanderthals. If corporations, armies, and ruthless politicians get to upgrade humans, they will enhance intelligence and discipline and neglect compassion, artistic sensitivity, spirituality. Give Putin bioengineering, AI, and brain-computer interfaces, and he will want super soldiers who never march on Moscow — not more compassionate ones. The Terminator in the street does not worry him; he thinks that can be avoided. What worries him is a downgrade of the best parts of humanity. We are better, he says, than anything we can intentionally design at present, because we do not understand our own brains, bodies, and minds. Manipulating a system you do not understand is a very bad idea.

Two years earlier Harari had written about global cabal theories. Fridman supplies a number: about 37 percent of Americans believe some version. The plot is stable across variants. A small group secretly controls all wars, revolutions, epidemics. The pitch has three attractions: it is simple (Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, 5G, COVID-19, one explanation); it shifts blame (Jews, Freemasons, not us); and it offers salvation (remove the cabal and poverty, plague, and war vanish together). Nazism, he says, began as exactly this theory. Capitalism and communism look like opposites; the Nazi claim was that Jews ran both, from Marx to the Rothschilds, and that getting rid of them would solve everything.

As a historian, the most important thing he can say is that these theories are never right, because they claim two impossibilities: that a tiny group controls everything, and that it does so in secret. The world is too complicated. He offers a real conspiracy, meaning a plan: the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The most powerful military and intelligence machine on earth invaded a third-rate power, hoping to reorder the Middle East. The plan backfired. The United States was humiliated, terrorism increased, ISIS rose, and the big winner was Iran, which did not have to do anything. That, he says, is real history: many people, lots of power, careful planning, and then everything goes against the plan. Anyone who has tried to throw a surprise birthday party already knows the pattern. The second impossibility is secrecy. When a small group does accumulate power — Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, Hitler in Germany — everybody knows, because gaining that much power usually requires publicity. Secret cabals do not become Hitler.

Fridman notes the trap: every counterexample can be folded back into the cabal. The CIA runs everything; NATO put a gun to Putin's head. Harari's answer is that conspiracy thinking functions like a religion: there is always another layer of explanation. What remains is intellectual integrity. The theories do get one thing right. They express an authentic, justified fear that people are losing control of their lives. We are facing large dangers, he says, but not from a small cabal of fellow humans. The real threats are diffuse: AI, bioengineering, climate change. Aim the fire at a human group and you get humans fighting each other instead of cooperating against those threats. Nazism showed where "a certain part of humanity is the source of all evil" can go.

Fridman has found himself written into conspiracy theories after interviewing Netanyahu, and he cannot prove his way out. Harari says you cannot. It is like proving consciousness: whatever you say will be used against you. To keep your sanity, remember that most of the people spreading these stories are not evil. They honestly think they are exposing harm. If you decide you are surrounded by evil, you have fallen into the same paranoid hole. When you wake up, the question is whether you want to spend the day spreading hatred or making allies. Every individual, he adds, can make the world a little better by finding one place they have agency and doing that bit, hoping others do theirs.

Does he worry, as Eliezer Yudkowsky does, that AI might kill everyone? Yes. He talks about dangerous scenarios as warnings, not as encouragement. The street-shooting Terminator still does not terrify him. What does: AI accumulating power until we no longer understand what is happening and lose control of our lives. Two facts, he thinks, every person should know. AI is the first tool in history that can make decisions by itself. A knife or an atom bomb cannot decide to start a war or pick a city; autonomous weapons can decide who to kill. And it is the first tool that can create new ideas by itself. The printing press copied our ideas. AI generates new ones. Previous tools gave power to humans. This one takes power away. Already, more decisions about loans, mortgages, and jobs are taken by AI, and more of the images and stories that shape minds are produced by it.

The danger of handing over idea-generation is that you cannot resist an idea if you cannot see how it was made. Plato's cave, Descartes's demon, the Buddha's world of illusions: a philosophical question for thousands of years is becoming an engineering problem. Until now, as far as we know, every story, painting, song, and play that shaped human minds was created by humans. We may soon live inside a world of cultural artifacts made by an alien intelligence that understands us when we do not understand it. That, returning to the line that opened the episode, would be a spiritual enslavement we cannot break, because we would not see what is behind the screen of stories, images, and songs.

He is not against robots taking drudgery. If grocery-store scanning can be automated, wonderful — provided those people then have better ways to support themselves and develop social and spiritual capacities. What is dangerous at this stage is giving AI control of the sphere of ideas while it is still digesting a flawed human self-understanding. His ratio: for every dollar and every minute spent developing artificial intelligence, spend another dollar and minute developing human consciousness. He has been writing about AI for some eight years, and the large language models still surprised him — faster and more powerful than he expected. What strikes him most is not novelty. It is coherence. Whole paragraphs, whole texts, with logic and structure. They are also convincing. They often get facts wrong. Fridman names the catch that has run through Harari's work: our brains love language so much that we do not need the facts to be correct. We need a beautiful story. That, Harari says, has been the secret of politics and religion for thousands of years. Now it comes with a machine.

Asked whether he might be among the last effective human writers, he thinks it is possible. He has seen models told to write like Yuval Noah Harari. On the level of ideas, they say things he would never say. On coherence and quality of prose, he finds it unbelievable. In ten or twenty years they may do better on content too. His own writing, he notes, is suspicious of itself: stories about the danger of stories, intelligence with the dangers highlighted. Human power comes from intelligence and stories. The deepest human qualities, in his view, do not. Compassion, introspection, direct experience — the deepest insights do not come from words. You will never find the deepest truth in a book. You find it in nonverbal, preverbal experience. The writer still has to warn people, and then be silent about the rest.

How does he think about difficult problems? First he takes time off. As a writer and scientist, the most important thing he does is meditate: about two hours every day in silence, watching body sensations and the breath, letting thoughts sit as background noise without engaging them. The mind is constantly producing stories with words, and those stories come between us and the world. Twenty-three years ago he was given a simple exercise — observe the breath at the nostrils without controlling it — and could not do it for more than ten seconds before a memory hijacked him. Minutes later he would remember he was supposed to be watching the breath. If he cannot observe his own breathing because of stories the mind created, how can he hope to understand the political situation in Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine? He also goes every year for a silent retreat of one to two months, up to sixty days, to train the mind to forget its own stories and observe what is happening.

The second practice is an information diet. People now watch what enters their mouths; they should watch what enters their minds. He prefers long books and three-hour interviews to five-minute clips and Twitter. When he meets a hard intellectual problem, he tries to let the problem lead, rather than arriving with a solution and hunting for confirmation. He reads a lot, usually without notes, then writes in a torrent from memory, not afraid of putting big theories on the screen. The danger is attachment. The most important button on the keyboard, he says, is delete. Pressing it hurts. He created a beautiful idea and now he has to kill it. Trusting himself to delete is what gives him room to be playful and brave, because most of those brave ideas turn out to be nonsense.

Starting vipassana, which he learned from S. N. Goenka, is not recreational. The hardest part is not the silence or the long sitting. It is what comes up: everything you do not want to know about yourself. Anger can boil for days over an incident you had not thought about in twenty years. Boredom, he found, may be worse than anger or pain. Pain at least lets you feel heroic. Boredom arrives with depression and worthlessness. He thinks it is closely related to death: in movies death is exciting; actually, nothing happens. People start wars, quit jobs, and leave relationships because they cannot stand boredom. The way to peace passes through it. Looking at politics, the thing the world needs more than anything else is boring politicians. There is a superabundance of exciting ones.

Advice for young people starts with a historical first. Nobody has any idea how the world will look in ten years. Medieval life could be wrecked by Vikings or plague, but the basic structure held: most people would still be peasants, armies would still fight on horseback, and you could learn from elders how to sow wheat, bake bread, build a house, ride a horse. We do not know what the job market of the 2030s will need. Learn to code for that decade? Maybe AI is doing all the coding. Learn to translate? Gone. The most important skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing — in a way, a spiritual practice. Traditional education built a stone house with deep foundations. The twenty-first century is a tent you can fold and move.

Love is where Harari learned what stories can do to a person. He grew up in a small Israeli town in the 1980s and early 1990s that was very homophobic, and he breathed that air. Two stories were in circulation: God hates gay people and will punish them; or, if not God, then nature — they are diseased, defective. He did not come to terms with being gay until he was 21. An algorithm, he says, could have told him at fourteen or fifteen: if a good-looking guy and girl walked by, his attention went to the guy. He did not connect the dots. It was not that he knew and hid it from others. He hid it from himself, knowing and not knowing at the same time. Then he took the stories apart on their own terms. A good God who punishes violence makes sense; a good God who punishes love, especially in people he created that way, does not. Humans hate and then say God hates. As for nature: nothing can exist against the laws of nature. Things that violate those laws simply do not occur. Homosexuality exists in many mammals and birds. It exists because it is in line with nature. What looks natural, eternal, or divine is so often just a human story — and those stories are often the most powerful forces in the world.

Stripping away the delusion took work, courage, and help. The heroic idea that you can do it alone does not work; with love you need at least one other person. He and his partner Itzik lived on adjacent streets in the same town, probably rode the same school bus for years, and met in 2002 on one of the first gay dating sites in Israel. Jews as a minority are born into a community. Gay children are usually not born to gay parents in a gay neighborhood; for most of history the community could not find itself. The internet, whatever else Harari says against it, made that possible. They were also among the first generations to enjoy the gains of people braver than they were in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and of the feminist movement without which, he says, there would have been no gay liberation. The fantasy of complete autonomy is a male macho story. It never works. You need other humans to know yourself.

Is he afraid of death? Yes. He thinks everybody is; all other fears are pieces of that one, cut small enough to face. Losing a smartphone is a tiny shard of losing everything. As a teenager he looked at it head-on, especially during school Memorial Day ceremonies for fallen soldiers, with flags and songs that implied you do not really die because the nation remembers you. Standing there, he asked a child's lethal question: if he is bones under a stone, does he hear the kids singing? If you are dead, you cannot hear and you cannot think they are remembering you. That is what dead means. The realization was shocking, and for years it fueled philosophical exploration. Meditation dissipated it. Sometimes he now tries to recapture that teenage fear and cannot. Adults, he used to think, had something wrong with them: they worried about banks and political crises and not about the fact they were going to die.

What is the meaning of life? If you ask what life is, he says it is easy. Life is feeling things and reacting: want more of the pleasant, want the unpleasant gone. That is what is happening all the time. If you ask the philosophical question, the real issue is what kind of answer you expect. Most people expect a story — a plot line, a role, a line to say in the big play. That is always the wrong answer. The universe does not function like a story. To understand life you have to observe it directly, nonverbally, and start with the question that stays with reality: what is suffering, and where is it coming from? The question about meaning will take you to fantasies. When you suffer, try to observe what is actually happening. Fridman wonders if AI will go through the same process. Harari's last word on that is dry. At present, it is just words. It will say "Please don't hurt me, Yuval."