An AI Interview: Our War, Up Close and Hopeful |
Over the last little while, many of you have emailed and texted. I’ve been trying to answer the “How are you doing there?” question in a way that’s more honest and complete than a quick text. I was stuck.
So I asked AI to “interview me.” The machine did a guided interview about what life feels like here right now, day to day, emotionally, and looking ahead. Together, the robot and I pulled those answers together into this note.
Thanks for checking in and asking how we’re doing. The honest answer is: we’re actually doing great. The war is real and scary, but in our day-to-day life, we feel safe and well protected.
About 23½ hours of every day, there’s no direct danger at all. The remaining little slices of time are when we head downstairs to our shelter and wait out the “booms,” which are almost always interceptions overhead, not impacts next to us.
We’re all together at home, and we’re even hosting a dear friend. She just moved to Israel and her building doesn’t have a comfortable shelter, so our house has become a bit of a safe hub.
The biggest lifestyle shift is that no one is really going out. It’s a lot like COVID in that sense. Errands are quick, plans are close to home, and bike rides and long walks are on pause.
One of the stranger parts of all this is how absurdly normal our time in the shelter has become. We’ll be in the middle of something totally mundane, making dinner, arguing about old stories, scrolling on our phones, and then the siren goes, and suddenly the whole family is crammed into this reinforced room, picking up the conversation where we left off.
The dogs, for their part, absolutely hate the sirens. They know something is up, sometimes before we do. We quickly grab them, and then they pile in with us, shaking, while we try to act like this is all just another quirky family ritual.
Life has shrunk to a tighter physical radius, but within that space we’ve found a pretty stable rhythm.
Emotionally, the hardest part is the duality. Of course, there’s fear. But in a strange way, this fear is familiar.
Since we moved here, Iran has been an existential shadow hanging over everything, not only through its own threats, but by funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and other proxies that circled us.
For years, I’ve described my biggest concern as a “ring of fire.” This is the group of countries around us, aligned and resourced by Iran, all committed to our destruction. Now, that picture looks very different.
Today, it’s really Iran itself and a much-weakened Hezbollah that remain. Hamas in Gaza is still there, but far weaker. That doesn’t mean everything is solved, but it does mean that some of the scariest long-term dynamics have shifted in our favor.
There’s also been something unexpectedly validating about this period. It has underscored, in a very stark way, that Israel fundamentally wants to live in peace, even when many outside insist on seeing us as aggressors or villains. Our fiercest detractors don’t just disagree with policies; many simply want us gone. Watching events unfold has only reinforced my sense that we were right about the nature of the threat, and they were wrong about us.
At the same time, this hasn’t just been political for me. It has been deeply spiritual.
It’s hard to look at what’s happening, the scale of the threat, the narrow escapes, the way history “rhymes” with earlier moments (especially around the just-passed holiday of Purim) and not feel a presence bigger than all of us at work. It’s pushed me to think more about meaning, purpose, and our place in a much longer story.
If I could correct one misconception for friends abroad, it would be this. Our lives are not one long emergency. Most of our hours are surprisingly ordinary. Each day brings work, meals, family jokes, all punctuated by brief, intense reminders that there’s a war going on.
Our living room has become a WeWork where our eldest is managing schedules for a half-dozen lawyers, our guest is running a new pet salon, Aimee is helping a ton of start-ups, and I scroll videos and twitter waiting for the West Coast workday.
The kids, unfortunately, have become veterans of this kind of reality. They know exactly what to do, and that competence is both reassuring and heartbreaking. We’re not living in constant panic, but we’re not living in complete normalcy either. It’s a strange, tense, very human in-between.
Looking ahead, I’m incredibly excited and surprisingly optimistic about our decision to be here. The US–Israel military partnership has proven itself in ways that exceeded even my own expectations.
For the first time in a long time, there seems to be a real possibility that a nuclear Iran can be defanged, that a hostile Iran might become at least somewhat less hostile, and that a regional détente could emerge where we all learn, imperfectly, and maybe just temporarily, to live side by side.
I don’t want to project my politics onto anyone else, especially friends whose perspective on the US/Middle East dynamic might be different from mine, but from where I sit, I’m more hopeful than ever that my kids and their children will grow up in a region that is safer, more secure, and more prosperous than the one we inherited.
Back to the question, “How are you doing there?” The truest answer is that we’re safe, we’re staying close to home, and we’re living in this weird mix of normalcy and sirens. I’m more hopeful about the future of this place, and our choice to be here, than I’ve been in many years.