50 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
few conversations with colleagues, on
speakerphone, about the fittings for a
new Harari headquarters, in a brutalist
tower block above the Dizengoff Cen-
ter mall. He said, “I can’t tell you how
much I need a P.A.”—a personal assis-
tant—“but I’m not an easy person.”
Asked to consider his husband’s current
place in world affairs, Yahav estimated
that Harari was “between Madonna and
Steven Pinker.”
Harari and Yahav, both in their mid-
forties, grew up near each other, but un-
known to each other, in Kiryat Ata, an
industrial town outside Haifa. (Yahav
jokingly called it “the Israeli Cher-
nobyl.”) Yahav’s background is less sol-
idly middle class than his husband’s.
When the two men met, nearly twenty
years ago, Harari had just finished his
graduate studies, and Yahav teased him:
“You’ve never worked? You’ve never had
to pick up a plate for your living? I was
a waiter from age fifteen!” He thought
of Harari as a “genius geek.” Yahav, who
was then a producer in nonprofit the-
atre, is now known for making bold, and
sometimes outlandish, demands on be-
half of his husband. “Because I have
only one author, I can go crazy,” he had
told me. In the car, he noted that he had
declined an invitation to have Harari
participate in the World Economic
Forum, at Davos, in 2017, because the
proposed panels were “not good enough.”
A year later, when Harari was offered
the main stage, in a slot between An-
gela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron,
Yahav accepted. His recollections of
such negotiations are delivered with self-
mocking charm and a low, conspirato-
rial laugh. He likes to say, “You don’t
understand—Yuval works for me!”
We left the highway and drove into
the village. He said of Harari, “When
I meet my friends, he’s usually not in-
vited, because my friends are crazy and
loud. It’s too much for him. He shuts
down.” When planning receptions and
dinners for Harari, Yahav follows a firm
rule: “Not more than eight people.”
For more than a decade, Harari has
spent several weeks each year on a si-
lent-meditation retreat, usually in India.
At home, he starts his day with an hour
of meditation; in the summer, he also
swims for half an hour while listening
to nonfiction audiobooks aimed at the
general reader. (Around the time of my
visit, he was listening to a history of the
Cuban Revolution, and to a study of
the culture of software engineering.) He
swims the breaststroke, wearing a mask,
a snorkel, and “bone conduction” head-
phones that press against his temples,
bypassing the ears.
When Yahav and I arrived at the
house, Harari was working at the kitchen
table, reading news stories from Ukraine,
printed for him by an assistant. He had
an upcoming speaking engagement in
Kyiv, at an oligarch-funded conference.
He was also planning a visit to the
United Arab Emirates, which required
some delicacy—the country has no dip-
lomatic ties with Israel.
The house was open and airy, and
featured a piano. (Yahav plays.) Harari
was wearing shorts and Velcro-fastened
sandals, and, as Yahav fondly observed,
his swimming headphones had left im-
prints on his head. Harari explained to
me that the device “beams sound into
the skull.” Later, with my encourage-
ment, he put on his cyborgian getup,
including the snorkel, and laughed as I
took a photograph, saying, “Just don’t
put that in the paper, because Itzik will
kill both me and you.”U
nusually for a public intellectual,
Harari has drawn up a mission
statement. It’s pinned on a bulletin board
in the Tel Aviv office, and begins, “Keep
your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main
global problems facing humanity.” It
also says, “Learn to distinguish reality
from illusion,” and “Care about suffer-
ing.” The statement used to include
“Embrace ambiguity.” This was cut, ac-
cording to one of Harari’s colleagues,
because it was too ambiguous.
One recent afternoon, Naama Avital,
the operation’s C.E.O., and Naama
Wartenburg, Harari’s chief marketing
officer, were sitting with Yahav, wonder-
ing if Harari would accept a hypotheti-
cal invitation to appear on a panel with
President Donald Trump.
“I think that whenever Yuval is free
to say exactly what he thinks, then it’s
O.K.,” Avital said.
Yahav, surprised, said that he could
perhaps imagine a private meeting, “but
to film it—to film Yuval with Trump?”
“You’d have a captive audience,”
Wartenburg said.
Avital agreed, noting, “There’s a pol-itician, but then there are his support-
ers—and you’re talking about tens of
millions of people.”
“A panel with Trump?” Yahav asked.
He later said that he had never accepted
any speaking invitations from Israeli
settlers in the West Bank, adding that
Harari, although not a supporter of set-
tlements, might have been inclined to
say yes.
Harari has acquired a large audience
in a short time, and—like the Silicon
Valley leaders who admire his work—
he can seem uncertain about what to
do with his influence. Last summer, he
was criticized when readers noticed that
the Russian translation of “21 Lessons
for the 21st Century” had been edited
to make it more palatable to Vladimir
Putin’s government. Harari had approved
some of these edits, and had replaced a
discussion of Russian misinformation
about its 2014 annexation of Crimea
with a passage about false statements
made by President Trump.
Harari’s office is still largely a bou-
tique agency serving the writing and
speaking interests of one client. But, last
fall, it began to brand part of its work
under the heading of “Sapienship.” The
office remains a for-profit enterprise, but
it has taken on some of the ambitions
and attributes of a think tank, or the
foundation of a high-minded industri-
alist. Sapienship’s activities are driven by
what Harari’s colleagues call his “vision.”
Avital explained that some projects she
was working on, such as “Sapiens”-related
school workshops, didn’t rely on “every-
day contact with Yuval.”
Harari’s vision takes the form of a
list. “That’s something I have from
students,” he told me. “They like short
lists.” His proposition, often repeated,
is that humanity faces three primary
threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse,
and technological disruption. Other
issues that politicians commonly talk
about—terrorism, migration, inequal-
ity, poverty—are lesser worries, if not
distractions. In part because there’s lit-
tle disagreement, at least in a Harari au-
dience, about the seriousness of the nu-
clear and climate threats, and about how
to respond to them, Harari highlights
the technological one. Last September,
while appearing onstage with Reuven
Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influenc-
ers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in