Three Friends on a Campus

Three friends have been arguing for thirty years. On an October afternoon on the Princeton campus, stone buildings in slanting light, the same paths Einstein walked, we picked up a thread we’d been pulling at for most of our adult lives.

Uri is a neuroscientist. Not the kind who appears on podcasts to simplify the brain into actionable tips. The kind who has spent decades inside the hard problem of consciousness, the question of what it means to be you, reading this sentence, right now. The more he has learned about the brain, the more he is seeing how AI research is converging with neuroscience and how much we still don’t understand.

Raanan is a filmmaker. He sees the world in sequences, not just visual but narrative, the way a cut from one image to another produces meaning that neither image contains alone. He has spent his career understanding something most people experience without examining: that meaning is not found in things but constructed in the space between them.

I am a builder who sits with the things