American Thought Leaders - How a Tiny Country Launched a Tech Revolution: George Gilder

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

We’ve heard a lot about how Israel is a beneficiary and dependent on the United States. But is that really the case?“Our economy is heavily dependent on Israel. And there’s this illusion that really irritates me—that somehow Israel is a dependent of the U.S., or some kind of abusive child or something. But Israel really gives us far more than they take,” argues George Gilder.He is an investor, economist, and best-selling author of 23 books, including the post-Oct. 7 updated edition of his 2009 book, “The Israel Test: How Israel’s Genius Enriches and Challenges the World.”“You destroy Israel, the value of the world economy would drop by 50 percent,” says Gilder. “It’s knowledge that enables wealth. And knowledge comes from human minds created in the image of their Creator. And this is the great monotheistic vision that Jews have vouchsafed to the world and that is crucial to Western civilization.”From the first pogroms in ancient Egypt and up to the present day, what role has envy played in anti-Semitism?“I think the evil in men’s hearts is to tear down accomplishment, excellence, and genius. It’s really a perverse envy that we all have to labor to overcome. I mean, envy is natural to all of us, and it’s our Israel test. It cleaves the hearts of the world and it continues to challenge us,” says Gilder.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Jews are 0.2% of the world's population and winners of a third of the Nobel Prizes. This is just incredible. We've heard a lot about how Israel is a beneficiary and dependent on the U.S. But is that really the case? George Gilder is an investor, economist, and best-selling author of 22 books. This includes his post-October 7th updated edition of his 2009 book, The Israel Test, how Israel's genius enriches and challenges the world. To destroy Israel, the value of the world economy would drop by 50%.

From the first pogroms in ancient Egypt and up to the present day, what role has envy played in anti-semitism? Envy is natural to all of us and it's our Israel test that cleaves the hearts of the world and it continues to challenge us. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Jekielek. George Gilder, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Great to be back. George, recently we've been hearing a lot about Israel in the context of the war in Gaza. You've written a book that talks about the incredible contributions of Israel, not just to the region, but to the world.

Tell me a little bit, what are those contributions? Our whole tech economy really is based heavily in Israel. It's amazing. Nvidia is our $3 trillion corporation, and yet the key technology that made possible a transformation of graphics processors processing pixels into these artificial intelligence leviathans with trillions of parameters is the networking tools supplied by a company called Mellanox that they purchased in Israel, which

included a company called EasyChip that I used to write about. And then the first edition of the Israel test, I actually featured the people of EasyChip. Mellanox endowed NVIDIA. Google Maps are greatly enriched by an Israeli company called Waze. Intel is our greatest chip company. And it's almost an Israeli company, Intel. Intel's profits for its first five or six years were almost all in non-volatile memories invented by Dov Froman in Israel that really endowed our cell phones with their capabilities that moving towards supercomputers in our pockets. All this stuff has its roots and branches in Israel. Research institutes, a wafer fab for chips that Curiot got. The IBM team that won the chess championship first showed artificial intelligence in chess was Israeli.

Our economy is heavily dependent on Israel. And there's this illusion that really irritates me that somehow Israel is a dependent of the U.S. or some kind of abusive child or something. But Israel really gives us far more than they take. And this is the capitalist principle. Israel is more relentlessly capitalist than the United States, because it's got to be now. They learned their lesson in 1985 when they almost went broke as socialist Israel

with inflation rates close to a thousand percent and led by Netanyahu and they turned Israel around and made it into startup nation and Silicon Valley has 8,000 Israeli workers and key jobs in Silicon Valley itself, let alone all the workers in Israel, so it's that are connected to American companies. It's an amazing phenomenon that a tiny country occupying 4% of Middle Eastern territory gets charged with being too big and imperialistic and occupiers of Palestine in the 1850s. There were only 200,000 to 300,000 Arabs in Israel, in the Israel territory,

and their average lifespan was a little over 30 years. Israel was transformed by the Jews, and it was the transformation, the water galore that was supplied with the desalinization, the drip irrigation, starting with 538 wells drilled in a massive effort, bridges, waterworks, all launched in Israel that made it a magnet for Arabs around the region and resulted in a massive migration of Arabs to take part in the suddenly blooming desert phantasmagoria that the Jews' imagination and vision and creativity fostered. So that's the Israel test. How do you respond to this amazing achievement in the face of six invasions? I mean, six wars attempting to completely obliterate Israel. You know, these neighbors didn't disguise their goal. Their goal was to exterminate Israel.

And they don't talk about two-state solutions. They want one state. They somehow believe that wealth springs from the land rather than from the mind. And this is the great Jewish gift to the world. They show that our opportunities are really unlimited because we live in an infinite universe of mind. There is this great illusion that really blights our politics everywhere in the world of this idea that we're all the same. The fact is that Western civilization depends on a tiny minority with the genius to thrust beyond these material constraints that dominated the world until the Industrial Revolution. Wealth is knowledge. Growth is learning.

The Neanderthal in his cave had all the material resources we have today. The difference between our age and the Stone Age is entirely the accumulation of knowledge. You know, if a fancy car crashes into a wall, all its value disappears, even though every molecule and atom remains. It's knowledge that enables wealth and knowledge comes from human minds, creative in the image of their creator. And this is the great monotheistic vision that Jews have vouched safe to the world and that is crucial to Western civilization. And Sowell explains how the mysteries of capitalism with their amazing creation of wealth arouses resentment and envy and hatred. It's somehow, you know, how did they do it? They must be demons. Taiwan is an embattled land that's comparable to

Israel and its contribution to the world economy. They're both amazing little centers of genius and creativity and entrepreneurial energy and aspiration that enrich us all. You destroy Taiwan or you destroy Israel, the value of the world economy would drop by 50% something like that. There'd be so much disorder and because this is a huge architecture of ideas we occupy. The leading figures in 20th century science and winners of a third of the Nobel Prizes, and the most critical ones,

in my view, were Jewish. And this is just incredible. Jews are 0.2% of the world's population. It's just an amazing phenomenon, and we all benefit from it, but it's a test for many people. Many people don't like that. They must have done something wrong to emerge as such titans. this mysterious gift of Jewish creativity and science and engineering and invention, as were also the Chinese, but there are more of them. So it's less amazing, the Chinese, but the interesting thing is they both have faced this hatred and resentment and efforts to destroy them. And, you know, Sukarno had his whole movement, really, in Indonesia was to banish the overseas Chinese and Indonesia fell in the poverty. It always happens when you banish the geniuses from your country. Nothing good happens. To your point, you have a very interesting view on

what Hitler's key message in Mein Kampf was. It's not what a lot of people think, but it's very significant in terms of his purpose. Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, I was surprised when I read Mein Kampf. And Mein Kampf is the favorite book of the Palestinians, surprisingly, distributed by Palestinian leaders, the Grand Mufti and everybody else who was close to Hitler. But Hitler's point was interesting. It showed how he was so fundamentally a materialist. He believed that there was a limited planet and human beings were in

a fight to the death to master it and the warrior necessarily prevailed. It was moral that the man who was willing to risk his life in war and to remove his rivals was the epitome of virtue. And Jews, he thought, were cheating. They somehow got rich without invading other countries or without seizing the wealth of others. They got rich by exchange and enterprise and finance and invention. And this was cheating on the facts of life, which is a limited planet with a human population struggling against

one another to capture land and limited resources. And that was Hitler's vision, this warrior mystique. And it was really, when you read it, it's an attack on capitalism. I mean, this idea that the creation of wealth opens new opportunities for others and expands population and expands longevity and enriches human life was alien to Hitler's vision, which fundamentally was a materialist, I call it vision, the materialist superstition, the idea that we have nothing but dirt and we're in an eternal struggle for more dirt. You use the term zero-sum a lot in the book. Yeah, zero-sum game.

That economics is a zero-sum game. If one person wins, another person loses. It manifested itself before the Industrial Revolution, before the outbreak of human creativity transforming the dimensions of economic life. Bibi Netanyahu's father wrote a study of the Inquisition and showed that the roots of anti-semitism preceded Christianity. The first pogroms were in Egypt. I think the evil in men's hearts is to tear down accomplishment, excellence, and genius. It's really a perverse envy that we all have to labor to overcome. I mean, envy is natural to all of us,

and it's our Israel test that cleaves the hearts of the world, and it continues to challenge us. I actually pulled a few quotes from the book. One of them you just reminded me as you were speaking. You know, Ben-Gurion told Musa al-Ami, the Arab leader back in the 30s, right, that he believed that Zionism would bring a blessing to the Arabs of Palestine, right, and there would be no particular reason to oppose. And the reply was, I would prefer the country remain impoverished and barren for another hundred years until we ourselves are able to develop it on our own?

Well, I think it's a confession that they recognize the Jewish achievement and the Jewish genius and they respond to it by hatred and resentment and a desire to exterminate it rather than partake in it and benefit from it and learn from it. And as Arabs actually have since that period, the number of Arabs in the Palestine area have increased from a million to 5.5 million. And this has all been enabled and made possible by the Jews, as I show in the Israel test. It's really a confession of futility and nihilism to say that it's better to have the Arabs impoverished and immiserated rather than having to participate like everybody else in the world in an economy that depends on the genius of a relatively few people who are pioneer the new technologies the new enterprises the new visions that the new medical

breakthroughs that make our our lives longer and better and richer. Look at it today, the fruits of the Zionist movement that Herzl pioneered and with his associates like Benzion Netanyahu was the current BB Netanyahu's father and this was a visionary movement that that actually fulfilled its promise and and if we respond to this miracle by exterminating it. We're really suicidal. It's like as suicidal as Nazism proved to be. Enshrined in their laws, the laws of Palestine, increase your pension in proportion to the number of Jews you've killed, while imposing capital punishment on anyone who sells land to the Jews. You know, this warrior notion that the Arabs have to exterminate Israel. That's their religious commitment. It's their identity. It's their goal. It's what gives meaning to their lives. And the successes of Israel are anakba, as the Palestinians say. That's a catastrophe,

even though Palestinians have massively benefited from it. Their longevity, their wealth, their opportunities, their jobs. Even now in the face of all this war, Palestinians really have been great beneficiaries of Israel. They've really been victims of the UN and the UN Relief Works Administration that's turned them into victims and obsessed them with this view that the land is really theirs and that somehow the Jews stole their wealth from the Palestinians. I mean this is really the amazingly fantastic view that actually is taught in the schools in Palestine at the best of UN functionaries who actually disclose their real motives in nature

when they participated in the attack on Israel on October 7th, right? The UN people collaborated with Hamas in contriving the attack on Israel. It's hard to talk about the Palestinian people as being beneficiaries when so many have been killed right now in this war. Well, we do not know how many have been killed. When we endured 9-11, when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. We started a ten-year war in the Middle East to avenge it and stop it. A lot of people were killed in those wars. That was across an ocean rather than across a wall. What the Israelis are

doing is quite targeted and very concerned with civilian casualties. In the Second World War we weren't supplying food and for the countries we bombed. Requirements are being imposed on Israel that I think are really outlandish. They wouldn't be applied to any other group. It's really a disguise for support for Hamas. Hamas can surrender any time they want. During this war, we've actually seen the deployment of these remarkable new technologies like the Iron Dome,

and then there's also the Iron Beam, so to speak, defensive technologies. The Arrow, various, there's a few different iterations of this Arrow project. So tell me a little bit about the development of those technologies. Well, they really began with Ronald Reagan. It takes me back to my youth when I gave Reagan his first microchip. And Reagan was proposing a strategic defense initiative. And I told him that this technology here, I had a Micron memory chip that I showed him and gave to him.

He took it and looked at it, and we discussed it. This can enable a really distributed anti-missile capability that can hit a bullet hitting a bullet. With a bullet. With a bullet in the sky. And the U.S. only partly did it. We did some Patriots that failed against the Scuds during the Iraqi war. But the Israelis really accomplished it. They accomplished the strategic defense and iron dome has intercepted thousands of projectiles and drones and missiles and the david sling missiles from distance and an arrow has actually intercepted intercontinental missiles

above the atmosphere and an iron beam is the first laser-based anti-missile system. Lots of countries are competing to create a laser-based system. And the Israeli one is still experimental iron beam, but it works some of the time. And I believe that they will be the first to launch a successful defense against intercontinental missiles and really relieved the world of a real plague of the threat of thermonuclear war. If these missile systems can be intercepted and zapped from the sky at the speed of light they become less menacing so so this is another facet of Israeli genius that's

manifested in their military capabilities the IDF and its intelligence units that certainly have been underestimated by their enemies over and over again six times so far. This is the Israel test again. We have to decide whether we want to be have a successful civilization recognizing that this means we're gonna have to accept genius wherever it arises. And we can't just imagine that all brilliant, creative entrepreneurs have to be Americans. You know, legal immigration is really good. That's how we've thrived. That's how the Manhattan Project emerged, and how many

of our greatest entrepreneurs were ultimately immigrants, or sons of immigrants. The Jews in Austria. When the Jews left as a result of the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe, people like John von Neumann fled and they came to the United States. The first thing they did was the Manhattan Project that essentially won the Second World War. You can talk about other ways we won the Second World War but really if we hadn't had the Manhattan Project that produced nuclear weapons the US would not have emerged from the Second World War as the

dominant power in the world and reshaping global politics and economics. And so the Manhattan Project was von Neumann, who also invented our key computer technologies and game theory. I mean, he was really the greatest mind of the 20th century, if you ask me. George, a final thought as we finish? There are amazing opportunities ahead, and Israel's in the center of many of them. The U.S. is too, and Taiwan, and it's an amazing world, and we shouldn't get all discouraged and grim about boycotting the future.

Well, George Gilder, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. It's great to be on. Thank you all for joining George Gilder and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.