Ask Haviv Anything - 120: Sam Harris on tribalism, religion, and what actually saves us

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).—Haviv sits down with philosopher, neuroscientist and podcaster Sam Harris to explore the moral and informational crisis gripping the West. Sam explains why his defense of Israel has nothing to do with identity politics and everything to do with the long-term threat of jihadism to open societies, a position he has held consistently since 9/11. We dissect the profound generational shift in attitudes toward Israel and Jews, backed by stark polling data on Holocaust denial and acceptance of political violence among young Americans.We explore how social media shattered our shared reality, creating a “funhouse mirror” effect that radicalizes both sides while making coherent moral reasoning nearly impossible; the rise of antisemitic conspiracy thinking on the right, particularly Tucker Carlson’s evolving rhetoric and the laundering of extreme voices; and we debate tribalism, dogmatism, the limits of secularism, and whether healthy particularism can survive in open societies.An honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversation on trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t seem to anymore.--This week’s episode is sponsored by Leah. The episode is dedicated "to my son Noah, who told me, 'I thought your stories of antisemitism were long ago and far away, it's a bit shocking to live through what's happening now'; to all young Jewish Americans experiencing a similar awakening; and to Haviv and Rachel, who are giving them the tools to come to their own conclusions and the information needed to defend their positions. Being part of this podcast and this community has been the silver lining of a crazy period."Thank you Leah.--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask a Leave Anything. This is a special one. Sam Harris is here. Sam is a neuroscientist, philosopher, author of Five New York Times Best Sellers. His work covers a wide range of topics, neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation, practice, political polarization, rationality. But generally focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast

is the creator of the Waking Up app which offers a modern approach to living a more examined life through in-depth mindfulness training and secular wisdom. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA and we're going to talk about a range of topics that I have been eager to ask him about for a long time. Before we get into it, let me tell you

that this week's episode is sponsored by Leo. who asked to say that the episode is dedicated to my son Noah, who told me, I thought your stories of anti-Semitism were long ago and far away. It's a bit shocking to live through what's happening now. The episode is also dedicated to all young Jewish Americans experiencing a similar awakening. And to Chaviv and Rechel, for those who don't know, that's my wife, and the producer of this podcast,

who are giving them the tools to come to their own conclusions and the information needed to defend their positions, being part of this podcast and this community has been the silver lining of this crazy period. Thank you so much for that, Leah. We really appreciate that sentiment. Don't be afraid.

Our young people will not be weaker for having faced some adversity in their lives and for being forced to know their story, to learn their story in the face of the bigotry that they now face. I would also like to invite everyone to join our Patreon, subscribe to our substack. If you're interested in asking the questions

that guide the topics we talk about, please join us there. You also get to be part of our monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com slash ask chaviv-anything and chavivgur.com. Those links are in the show notes. Sam, how are you? I'm good. I'm good to see you, Jav. As you know, I'm a big fan.

So your audience should know I'm a big fan. That is a very helpful thing for my audience to know. I'm going to be telling them that a lot. No, I'm an envirro for many, many years. And let's just get right into it. The most urgent question I have to ask. You have been unstinting in your support for Israel over the last three years and not at all in your support for everything Israel does

or your support for the Israeli government in any particular way, but just generally understanding who the enemy is. And when I went through some of your thoughts on this and record on this. This was a little bit new to me because I had not been following Making Sense from the beginning back in 2014. But your second ever episode of Making Sense back in 2014 was about Israel during that war. And you supported Israel then, or you stood by Israel against its enemies ever since. And there's been, you know, a whirlwind of criticism. I've been watching in the last three years, your own, some of your listeners coming after you on

this question, a lot of hate that you've taken online, over the last three years, you've engaged Rahm Emanuel, Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan on this issue. You take it on the chin and you hit back again and again and again. Wouldn't it be easier to leave it alone? Why is it so important to you? What do you see in this issue that the anti-Israel crowd doesn't see? Why is it so critical?

Well, as I think you know, my position here has evolved a little bit since October 7th, as has happened to many people. But many people are confused about why I'm doing what I'm doing and just exactly how my concerns align with those that are, you know, more conventionally simply in support of Israel or, you know, practicing some form of Jewish identity politics. I happen to be Jewish and that's distracting for many people. Many people think I'm engaged in some kind of identitarian project and that I'd be saying something different. if we're talking about Denmark in a similar situation. But if you look at what I've said about jihadism over the years, over the last nearly quarter century,

you'll see that my concern about it really has nothing to do with Judaism, much less Israel. I mean, I'm additionally concerned about anti-Semitism, and we can talk about that, but that has really never been the genesis of my concern. I have been really since 9-11, the moment it became clear, you know, somewhere around 9-12 or 9-13 to exactly what had happened there on that day

and that, you know, this was an expression of jihadism. I've been concerned about these, the zero-sum contest between jihadism and Islamism more generally and the norms of open societies and the survival of open societies and the durability of any civilization that should be called civilization at this point. So I think open societies everywhere have an enemy in jihadism. And Israel really is the most excruciating case of both the conflict being continuous and unavoidable

and also the moral confusion around that conflict from people who should know better being its most extreme, right? So what you have are, you know, vast numbers of people in liberal, secular, otherwise tolerant, you know, purportedly sane, open societies, thinking Israel is the bad guy in this conflict against jihadism.

And that level of moral confusion strikes me as, you know, masochistic to the point of, you know, suicidality, right? It's just not sustainable. And we can talk about its origins. But there's, It's just this is where, this is how Western civilization will fail, right? And this is, you know, it's even beyond Western.

I mean, Western is probably not the right modifier at this point. So I tend to talk about open societies more than Western civilization. But it's a, so my concern, you know, I am totally aligned with the concerns of Israel because I'm totally aligned with the concerns of an open, tolerant, reasonably secular society against a death cult, right? And but if the one way to confuse my support for Israel is to think that it really is focused on Israel per se, and Judaism per se, and anti-Semitism per se.

I would, you know, if anyone looks at what I said and wrote after the Danish cartoon controversy or the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, you'll see that it was in exactly the same spirit, exactly the same set of concerns. And insofar as I know my own mind, I can say with absolute certainty this is the case. If something like October 7th had happened to another country, like let's say Denmark, right, if the cartoon controversy had taken that expression with, you know, over a thousand people, innocent people butchered and hundreds of hostages taken

and Denmark had to defend itself, I'd be making exactly the same noise. in support of the Danes. I mean, there wouldn't be even the slightest difference. Now, again, there's an additional confusing element here, which is that I'm also concerned about the global explosion

of anti-Semitism that has arisen in response to October 7th. I mean, that has blindsided many of us, and I really thought consequential anti-Semitism was behind us everywhere in the West. So I'm additionally concerned about anti-Semitism, but that's

not really, has never been the center of my concern about Islamism and jihadism. I have to tell you, I would like to hear your thoughts on where it's coming from. I just read a piece from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a scholar, an analyst who argues that Israel now has this sort of rubble doctrine, he called it, where it believes it's just going to be in permanent war with all these enemies, and that's going to bring it peace because it has given up on any other possible avenue for peace. And I'm reading this and I'm, I'm scratching my head and I'm maybe even slapping my face a little bit

trying to wake up from a night. Does this guy not understand that the permanent war rubble doctrine is literally Hamas Hezbollah and the Iranian regime? They have this theocratic, thought through, mass martyrdom ethos. They have a name for it. I keep trying to inculcate the name into people

and this episode is going to get views, so I'm just going to say it. Kawama or resistance, but it means much more than the word resistance. It literally means permanent, never-ending war through mass sacrifice, including of our entire country, to allow us eventually to bring about the great Islamic restoration. And it's not that the guy was arguing, yes, that's the enemy, but Israel should do a different path or do better. They never appear in the peace. And you read analysis after analysis after analysis in which Israel has agency. And is it brown people in a progressive imagination?

have no agency, can't be wrong? Is it that simple and cartoonish? What is happening here that the enemy is invisible, that they're not part of the equation when people calculate the moral calculus of this thing? Yeah, you know, if I had a good answer for that, I would really be able to say something useful here. I have an answer, but it makes no sense, right?

So I have a theory of mind, but it really is a description of, just colossal brain damage on the part of millions of people, right? Because it really does not run through, but here is my best shot at an answer. What you have in the West, especially in America, but this is really, you know, throughout the West, you have a primary algorithm running which could be summarized as, you know, above all, don't be racist, right? I think race has captured the moral imagination of more or less everyone left of center, the problems of race and racism, the power dynamics around that, all that.

There's this element of kind of Marxist ideology that creeps in here, which is, you know, views everything in terms of oppressors and oppressed. But race is the lens that most people use to figure out which way is up or down morally here. So if you tell them that, yeah, and this is really, this is a, it's not, especially mysterious as to how we got here. I mean, obviously the history of racism and the lingering effects of that history are, you know, worth being ashamed of, right? And there's a lot to apologize for, and you might say especially in America on that score. But there's a very deep and persistent moral confusion that is politically unsustainable that that has produced, which is to say

that many people, if you describe a situation of violence, if you describe, a situation where there was, you know, predator and prey and, you know, obvious victims. You know, you can put people, you can describe a scene on a subway car where one man, you know, beats another man to death, right? And you can describe it as exhaustively as you want. You can give all the relevant legal and moral details, you know, were there multiple attackers, was there a weapon involved, et cetera, you know, how many innocent bystanders were there with, what were they doing? Could describe it all exhaustively? And many people, you know, were there?

especially left of center, do not know how they feel about that situation until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved. Was the white guy, the attacker, or the victim, etc. And that is considered, again, quite perversely left of center

to be a necessary part of the moral toolkit, right? This is not a, you know, one of reasonings, you know, failures. It's considered a bug, not a feature, but it is most definitely, a bug, right? This is just destroying the moral intuitions of the left and, you know, in American politics, the Democratic Party. And we have, this is a spell that has to be broken.

Otherwise, we're going to see more right-wing authoritarianism taking hold in the West. Obviously, this relates to questions of immigration and, you know, Muslim assimilation in, especially in Western Europe, right? And the capacity to ignore things like the grooming, so-called grooming gang scandals in the UK, right? I mean, how was it that police departments decided to ignore the systematic rape of, you know, unbelievably thousands of English girls, you know, by disproportionately Pakistani cab drivers? Well, the master algorithm here was, don't be racist, right? People are living in terror of being accused of being racist.

There's more to the story than that, perhaps, but that gets you nearly into the end zone for most people who analyze this. They imagine that they understand the dynamics of what's happening in the Middle East, more or less through the American lens of the civil rights movement for black Americans in America. So it's just like the Israelis are the white guys, the Palestinians are the black guys. it's pretty clear who the oppressors are if you throw that lens over it and that's more or less all you need to know right and psych so you can chant

from the river to the sea because you're basically just chanting in solidarity for these oppressed non-white minority population that's living in an open-air

prison you know through no fault of their own. I'm not quite sure what the second Intifada was, but I'm pretty sure that there's a wall there dividing the populations and there's checkpoints that these non-white people have to pass through to their great humiliation. That's scarcely endurable. The white Israelis have to be blamed for that, right? What do they think was going to happen? You put up a wall? Of course these people get angry. This is the emergence of a group like Hamas, they're, you know, their slight excesses aside. It's all too understandable. I mean, this is a revolutionary group. Sometimes you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet, you know,

and that paraglider situation was kind of, you know, charismatic. I'm on their side, right? That's, you know, you could line up apparently 50 million, you know, 20-year-olds in America, and they would just raise their hands in support of that set of moral intuitions. Of course, that's completely insane, given, you know, the ideological commitments of Israel's enemies. But, and the details of the violence on October 7th and in every other jihadist attack, we could describe. But the, that's where most people left of center appear to be. And, you know, I mean, the one criticism one could make of Israel here, I'm not sure what, you know, how. much they could have succeeded, but what we have seen is a complete failure to attempt to

win a war of ideas here in the aftermath of October 7th. And you and I have talked about this a little bit, you know, where that failure comes from. But again, you know, it was by no means guaranteed to succeed, but we really do have a problem around messaging here. And so we have a lot of ignorant people who are getting this wrong, but they're being manipulated quite successfully by people who know exactly what is happening in the Middle East and exactly, you know, what the commitments are for groups like Hamas. They know exactly how popular a group like Hamas is in the surrounding culture among Palestinians.

They know the implications of all of that, and they're still lying about it and managing to manipulate, you know, otherwise sentient people. in the West. And, yeah, I mean, the failure mode for Israel has been with the, as a culture, you guys haven't figured out how to talk about this in a way that works. And part of the problem is Netanyahu and the other, you know, the other people he's aligned with who we might discuss. But I don't know.

I'm somewhat mystified as to just how fully the war of ideas appears to have been lost in the West. I can't tell you how many left-wing Jews I know who want to be angry at Israel, campaigning against Israel. They want to be in that safe place for them of just hating Netanyahu. But the whole world around them

and their social world is pro-Khamas. And they're like, can we stop being pro-Kamas so we can get back to the very healthy thing of hating Netanyahu, which is how they experience it? And so they're really tormented. It's gone off the deep end. I mean, it's gone off the deep end in favor of groups.

Anyway, let me, you mentioned, you know, 50 million, 20-year-olds. I want to dive into that because the Israel issue is my issue, the issue of this podcast, Jewish and Israeli issues. But something bigger is happening. And we see it in poll after poll. And it's really stark. I want to read a couple of data points. to you, just so people hear it and know it going in. And I, you know, we've shared these, these data points.

There is a generational radicalization going on in the United States, as far as we can tell in Europe as well, a kind of radical polarization among young people. And it's happening on Israel. It's happening on Jews. Everybody knows that. A lot of people are very anxious about it in Jewish circles and in Israel a little bit. Israelis are not very good at understanding what's happening in the rest of the world. But when they notice, they notice it. Gallup has this data that shows that for the first time ever, overall sympathy tilts to the Palestinians.

51 to 36 percent compared to the Israelis. Amon young people, it's 53 to 23, so much more tilted to the Palestinians. That's, you know, there's just been a war where there's been a lot of civilian dead Palestinians. And that itself doesn't tell me much. It doesn't tell me that anything bad is happening. Pew, unfavorable views of Israel are at 60% overall. That's triple the very unfavorable share since 2022, and young people are driving it. Democrats under 50 are 84% unfavorable.

Republicans under 50 are 57% unfavorable. Harvard's youth poll has 46% of 18 to 29 year olds calling the U.S. Israel relationship mostly a burden. All of that tells us the future of the American-Israeli relationship is not in doubt. It is on a clock. And all of that, again, is sympathy for Palestinians, criticism of Israel, dislike of Israel. Here's the thing. It's the same phenomenon with Jew hatred, not Israel, 18 to 22-year-olds in Yale's youth poll.

27% of them say Jews have too much power. 21% support boycotting Jewish businesses as a protest over Gaza. The economist, YouGov, had a poll of Americans 18 to 29. 20% agree, the Holocaust is a myth. So if one in five, 18 to 29-year-olds agrees, the Holocaust is a myth, where do we stand? And just this is the longest question in this interview, I promise, but it's not even just Jews and Israel.

As usual, the canary in the coal mine. Harvard's fall 2025 youth poll. 13% of 18 to 29-year-olds think the country is on the wrong track. 64% say American democracy is either in trouble or failed. That's two-thirds. Support for capitalism is now less than half, down to 39%. And 39% say political violence is acceptable. So, but just to clarify, older cohorts above that age group, non-young people, middle-aged and older,

90% say political violence is never justified. That's down to 56% among Gen Z and lower. What's happening? This isn't about, something about this moment. It's bigger than even America. They're far-right gains in Europe among young men. I mean, very far-right. The whole Israeli-Jewish story looks like an accelerated version of the same forces.

Something is disrupting the West. And it's at a colossal scale. And the young people are gone down that rabbit hole. am I exaggerating? How bad is this? What do you make of it? Yeah, I mean, this is a much larger question about what information technology is doing to the human mind and to the career of our species. I mean, the big change has been the emergence of social media and the coincidence of the social media and the smartphone in the last nearly 20 years. And what that has done to our politics, our ability to, to, to, to, converge on just a fact-based account of what's happening in the world.

I mean, we have been balkanized in ways that, you know, arguably were foreseeable, but, you know, I think everyone would have hoped we would have avoided this. But we are now siloed and plunged into this sort of this phantasmagorical, you know, distortion machine, right? Everyone is seeing the worst possible version of their political opponents, right? I mean, there's a fun house mirror effect here that is continuous and very hard to correct for. I mean, it's not a matter of simply being lied to. It's not a matter of pure disinformation, but it's the relentless spread of all too consequential half-truths, right?

You know, it's like to come back to the current issue of, you know, Israel and the prosecution of this war. And it's not that everything said about Israel is a lie, but so much is a matter of omission, so much is a matter of exaggeration, so much is a matter of just a piecemeal account of what's happening, you know, that allows people to not recognize how out of proportion, you know, everything has become, right? I mean, there's this distortion effect, which, which again, is hard to correct for because we're no longer meeting in the,

in this public square where we can, we're debating the same set of facts. I mean, we're just algorithmically siloed and we're seeing the evidence of everyone else's confusion or radicalization. And the truth is we can't even properly understand. it because we're not seeing their algorithm, right? You're seeing someone behave like a maniac online, someone who you perhaps might even know personally who you once thought was sane,

but now this person seems to be just trafficking in conspiracy theories and lies and just ridiculous claims. And, you know, on its face, you know, you simply say, okay, this person has broken in some way. There's nothing really profitable to say in their direction, but you also don't see the path they took to get there because you weren't watching, you weren't looking over their shoulder as they got radicalized or confused.

And again, this is happening to everyone at all times in a few places online. And so we've all been, as I've said, many times before, we've all been enrolled in a vast psychological experiment to which no one really consented and it's not working out very well, right? And we've created a kind of civilizational autoimmune disorder where the foundations of democracy, the information infrastructure we're all using to try to make sense of the world is attacking the foundations upon which every democracy depends. So it's not working out well for us. And that's the background

condition in which Israel and again might have been a hopeless project from the first moments but Israel completely failed to prosecute a war of ideas in the aftermath of October 7th

and Israel and not just Israel, Israel and its defenders and yes, we were totally outnumbered right? There's 15 million Jews on Earth There's two billion Muslims. I mean, what do you think is going to happen on TikTok? Just with those numbers alone. But it's worse than that, right? There are, no doubt there have been paid actors and influence campaigns, or there have been

bot armies and there's been, you know, there's Qatari money. I mean, I don't know all the details of how this happened, but it all happened. And the net result is most of the civilized world, even our best institutions, even the New York Times, right, is, can be counted upon to be morally confused about the situation Israel finds itself in and, you know, most perversely the situation, every open society finds itself in. I mean, the situation we're all in, and as I argued a long time ago, we're all living in Israel. It's just that only some of us had realized it, you know, it's just this is, so, yeah, I don't know that I addressed your question, but that's like the,

That's the background, which we're, you know, we're obviously not going to solve there. I have one very strong recommendation that I don't want to forget to give you, which is not that I'm the first person to say this, but honestly, and perhaps you disagree, but honestly, I think there's one disaster here that amounts to a kind of own goal that we keep scoring on ourselves, that we need not ever score again, which is the use of the term Zionism. I don't see why anyone ever has to use this word ever again. Israel is the only country that has a name for an ideology that really is simply its account of why it has a right to exist. So it's like basically it's a permission slip that you keep putting in front of the world saying this is what we call our belief that we have a right to exist.

Please sign on the dotted line. and don't be distracted by the fact that it sounds weird and it sounds like a dogmatic commitment that would be very hard to justify and it sounds like some form of racism and it can be spun as some form of colonialism and it has a million ways to criticize it and it's just got this vast attack surface

but we're still so attached to the word that we're going to keep talking about it I don't think you ever have to say anything about Zionism ever again. Israel exists. There's 193 countries in the world, two-thirds of which have very similar origin stories, right, in the sense that mapmakers just drew their boundaries without much regard for the people living within those boundaries. Right.

Two-thirds of existing countries now actually are younger than Israel, right, which is to say that their current national boundaries were specified since 1948, you know, since the birth of Israel. So Israel is the only country that has to keep apologizing or debating its right to exist. The concept of Zionism is not helping. That's my argument. Well, that's a blow. I'm a big teacher of Zionism. I'll say diagnostically, within the context of Jews and the big Jewish debates about modernity and what modernity represents and how we frankly deal with vulnerability in the modern world. You had multiple camps offering multiple solutions. One was

a retreat into a cultural, intellectual, religious, and sometimes even physical ghetto, which is Haredi. And you had socialists and communists and sort of a nationalist, socialist, bundist, and you had all these different options. And Zionism was one of six, seven, by the way, Anglo-Liberalism. Jews came, went to America or Britain. They started the reform movement. They started this very deeply integrated liberalist kind of Judaism. And that was a survival strategy. And they talked about it and debated with Zionists and Chavreidists and Bundists and all that. So Zionism has a meaning within Jewish history that relates to a conversation that, by the way, Jews

are still having because there's still a debate over Jaredism within Israel and all of this stuff. So it's a word that outside of Israel is really only ever useful to enemies. And inside of Israel really describes part of a Jewish experience. And I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't know if you're wrong. I haven't thought about it properly. But it's a different word. I can say that I'm right in terms of the PR war outside of Israel, just in defending Israel against its all too dishonest critics, the word is never helpful.

It's just a perfect stumbling block because, again, it imposes a standard of argument on Israel that no, a burden of argument that no other country. has, right? No other country has this ism that is its case that it need not even make for its right to exist, right? Like, you just don't, like, just stop, stop pretending like you have to defend your right to exist and no longer name that that burden. And I mean, I understand the history of Zionism and how we got here, but it's just not. Zionism was the camp arguing that Europe was going to collapse and nobody else believed. And you track the Zionism began as a tiny, crazy minority of Jews. Who would go to, come on, really, go to this tiny little strip of land, leave Germany, leave Poland.

And then everybody was a Zionist because they had no choice. That whole story of the Jews becoming Zionist is the story of the collapse of Europe. And so, you know, the irony of what you're saying, and again, this doesn't at all mean you're mistaken. The irony is as the Jews became Zionist, the Jews became Zionist in direct correlation to the failure. of any alternative to Zionism. So Jews even use the word when Jews talk about, certainly I do when I talk about Zionism outside of Israel, I'm describing the absolute lack of any other choice

that Jews of the Eastern Hemisphere had. I happen to think Israel is my own land, will forever be my own land, and my children learn their Bible and all of that stuff. But so there's an irony that this thing that is a code among Jews for survival, you're saying is actually a kind of, a code among Jews for not asking anyone else's permission

to survive. You're saying actually functions in the discourse outside of Israel as a request for permission to survive because it's laying it out as if it's an ideological question up for debate. Yeah. Yeah. And I do think it's it's non-recoverable. I mean, I just think it's never going to help and it's always going to hurt. I mean, it's reached a tipping point there. So I don't tend, I mean, to be at just to just think of what it means as a Jew, a diaspora Jew, to be asked the question, are you a Zionist? And then to have to figure out how to dig out of that, like to deal with all of the preconceptions loaded into that question, to be on the back foot, you know, at the start of this conversation, and to have to fight your way back to some ground truth where,

no, Israel is a normal country that has a right to. You're not asking this question to any other country. Let's figure out why you even care about Israel, right? Like, what, and Why are you not sensitive to all the other death and destruction that the U.S. has funded? I mean, there are all these other questions, but the first question seems to, it ties a knot in space that then people struggle to untie, right? And it need never have been tied in the first place, right? It's just kind of an imaginary object that, you know, honestly, most, most secular Jews can't, I mean, I, you know, 10 years ago, like, you referenced my first podcast on this topic. In retrospect, even I was confused about this, right? Like, I burnt a lot of fuels, you know, demonstrating my atheist bona fides saying, listen, I'm not, you know, I'm not in support of any kind of religiously defined ethno state. You know, far be it from me to defend anything like that, right?

Right. You know, one of the four-worsemen of the atheist apocalypse. And yet Israel must exist and here's why, et cetera. So it's just a point of confusion that no one need ever suffer again. Okay. I'm sorry to put you out of business. Have you? Yeah, first of all.

Yeah. Luckily, Israeli speak Hebrew, so they're not going to hear that. I want to get back to my question, my original question about young people. Why aren't people scared? It's, again, the data that we have on the Jews, the incredible collapse of support for Israel, 60% of Americans don't support Israel because they've seen the Gaza War. You know, I'm uninterested that that's an Israeli policy problem. It's not a fundamental moral question.

Most people don't dig into the deep complexities of a war on the other side of the world. Well, most people just to add a little color to that point, most people, you can talk about all that's wrong with the CCP, all of the needless human suffering produced by that regime. No one is blaming people of Chinese descent living in London or Paris or Los Angeles for, those crimes, right? Like, there's no conflation of, oh, you're Chinese. Well, you know, I'm really upset about what the CCP is doing to the Uighurs. I'm going to hold you responsible for that. Like, that's just not happening.

Right. So the anti-Semitism has this structure. And then we can talk about, you know, the conspiracy theories. But this is the only world conflict that gets extrapolated into this global, concern about anyone who could be plausibly associated with Israel based on their religion or based on the religion they don't even hold, but just based on the ancestral descent, you know, on their mother's line, right? It's just, you know, your mom was Jewish? Oh, okay. I'm going to, I can now revile you for what this country that you probably have never even been to just did in its war of

self-defense. The collapse is larger than Israel. I take that point. At the same time, 20% think the Holocaust is a myth, and 40% think political violence is legitimate, and political violence is increasing in the United States. My assessment of your position is that you're basically in a political no-man's land.

Yeah. And your listeners talk about this in the talkbacks as a good thing. This is something you're very much admired for, which is an equal opportunity critic. You seem very dissatisfied with both tribes, with what both tribes are becoming. Are you politically homeless and from you, please extrapolate to America generally? How do you navigate the radicalization that we're seeing right now? And it's obviously going to get worse if the data we have is reliable. Well, I don't know how to navigate it.

And I don't know what the cure for it is apart from recognizing what social media and the shattering of the information landscape is doing to us, right? So it's, again, it comes back. You ask, how is it the 20% of young people apparently believe that the Holocaust is a myth or has been greatly exaggerated? That's, you know, that's crazy ideas expressed on podcasts that go viral, right? That's, you know, people just asking questions who know nothing, but they happen to be on Joe Rogan's podcast, and they're given four hours to ask those questions without any pushback. It's just people are just watching clips of clips, right? I mean, so people will watch the 90-second version of that, of all of that, and that gets into their head and they never see what was said in context. So who knows if even the person was as crazy as they sounded in that clip?

That's our information diet, or for certainly most people's, right? And so that is the kind of background problem that is vitiated in everything, not just our thinking about, you know, Israel and jihadism, et cetera. I mean, this is a problem when we're talking about, you know, vaccines and their safety, right? So it's everything gets touched by this. How much degenerational gap is so big? Yeah. Can the older people do something about the younger people? Are we helpless?

Are we helpless in the face of this mass radicalization? I should tell you, it's relatively weak in Israel. It's not happening as much in Israel. There's a sense of grounded reality, and probably it's a sense imposed on us by our enemies, because we're very much online. But there's a reality we have to contend it. You're fighting for your lives, right?

I mean, you have a very small country, you know, the borders, east, west, north and south, practically touch one another. I mean, they're just, there's, you have a, you can only be so delusional about what's really happening out there in the world before, you know, the flight time of incoming missiles and drones is very, very short.

I mean, it's just like you, in America, we can really be confused for a very long time. We've got two great oceans separating us from terrestrial reality on some level. We can lie to ourselves for a very long time before we bump into some very hard object and realize we're delusional. You know, we appear to be losing a war with Iran, and yet, you know, I think we have a president who might be able to successfully spin this as a victory, right? I mean, so it's, I mean, we can talk about Iran, but it's, you know, if you guys lose a war, presumably, you'll know it, right?

And I can't necessarily say the same about America at this moment. I mean, as far as my political position, yeah, there's no name for it. I'm somewhere in this. I mean, I'm very liberal on almost every issue, except I'm extremely hawkish with respect to jihadism. I'm, yes, I'm not a fan of Trump's or, you know, any of the loyalists that he's put in charge of the most important institutions that, you know, governing things like war.

I mean, we have a, I mean, my view, you know, we put a game show host in charge of the world's only superpower, and then he, you know, he put a Fox and Friends host, in charge of our defense department. And now we're fighting a war, right? So it's not, I'm not happy about any of it. And yet I can sound like Ben Shapiro or Douglas Murray or any other kind of staunch right of center defender of Israel

when talking about the things we're talking about because I see them, there's very little daylight between me and those guys on these particular issues. I just, I believe I have a more realistic picture of who Trump is and how he's capable of betraying Israel. So any Jew who was a single-issue voter in America who thought, okay, I'm going to take Trump because he's just going to be so good on Israel.

And he moved the embassy to Jerusalem. I mean, this guy is just all in for Israel. I see him as a much more conflicted and superficial character than that. I mean, I don't think he understands the real issues of jihadism and Islamism. I think he's happy to, you know, glad hand, somebody who was a jihadist yesterday, you know, like the current leader of Syria,

just because he likes the cut of his jib and thinks he's telegenic, you know, he'll cut some family, he'll figure out how to make a billion dollars by cutting some deal in Qatar and not care, you know, how much blood is on the hands of the people he's now in bed with. He's just, and I honestly, I think if the mullahs in Tehran had offered him, had bought, you know, know, a billion dollars worth of his cryptocurrency, there might not have been a war in Iran, right? I just think he's that selfish and easily misled. But I will fully agree that it was a safe bet that he was going to be better on the topic of Israel than Kamala Harris was going to be, given the kinds of noises she would make on the topic and given the, you know, the track record

of the Biden administration. So it was a, you know, I don't, if you were a single issue, you voter in America who just cared about the fate of Israel you know I can't really fault you for having voted the way you voted but you just have to recognize that we don't have a

we're not in the hands of a principal defender of Western civilization where we have a far more far less inspiring less morally clearheaded person in charge and if his

if his infatuations and personal interests happen to align with the defense of open societies and our freedoms and Israel's in particular, well, then that's a very good thing, but there's no guarantee that it lasts for 15 minutes beyond this moment. And so that's what has always worried me about Trump on this topic. Of course, this visits every other topic. I think he's a terrible human being and is a terrible president. But given my concerns about jihadism, and given the reliable confusion of most people left of center on this issue, it's, yeah, I'm in a political no man's land.

I mean, it's just there's no, you know, to sound like Douglas Murray in one moment, and then to sound like Trump's most vociferous critic in another, is, is whiplash for any audience, and that's, you know, that's where I live. It sounds exhausting. I mean, it sounds despairing. Do you feel despair about the near future of America or the long-term future of America,

given that those are the directions both sides are going toward? And I should add is that if you go far enough left or right, especially in America, I mean, this is, this is a more general Western phenomenon. you reliably meet anti-Semites, and you don't have to go that far, really. I mean, especially on the left, I would say, at this moment in America. So that's very depressing. I mean, again, the big change for me since October 7th

has been the recognition that anti-Semitism is a real problem. And so it used to be something like Holocaust denial, even on a podcast as big as Joe Rogan's, you wouldn't really have gotten my attention all that much because there's no really no I didn't consider there to be any real stakes right you know like this is this is not something everyone anyone any institutions of substance or any are going to be confused about again and you know the average person can be relied upon to understand that jew hatred is intolerable right and so yeah we have we have the people who hate Jews on the far, far right,

they're white supremacist, neo-Nazi assholes, and of course, they, you know, it goes without saying that they're despicable. And we have some, you know, Marxist, quasi-Marxist revolutionary dummies on the left who are also probably anti-Semitic. We have some, you know, identitarians, you know, intersectional identitarians who,

if you push hard enough will reveal they're probably also anti-Semitic. But again, none of that, really matters. No, that's completely changed. I think it really matters. And I think the fact that you've got Jews wondering where it will be safe to live in the West, if this gets much worse, you know, for the first time in their lives, that's new. You know, that's, that new. I mean, one piece of continuity here. I mean, again, there was a rupture on October 8th, which surprised, which, you know, really surprised a lot of people. And I'm one of those people. But Prior to that, there was this growing concern about the unacknowledged issue of Islamism and jihadism in the West.

And that always had a potent, it was always going to work out badly for the Jews, right? The Jews were never going to do well in an open society that was failing to get a handle on Islamism and jihadism. But it wasn't especially focused on the Jews, right? The big difference now is you have Jews and Israel being blamed for everything, right? Like, we wouldn't be in these wars. There wouldn't have been any of these wars, you know, maybe not even World War II, but for those scheming Jews, right? I mean, that's the kind of thing that's being thought by far too many people.

And again, independent media is especially culpable for this. I keep naming, he was a former friend, you know, Joe Rogan. I mean, it's like a, well, his podcast has done immense damage. I mean, it's, it's very hard to, to exaggerate the damage being done by stand-up comics now just shooting the shit on, you know, for hours at a stretch on a few different podcasts. And it's the, the, the taste for conspiracy thinking, right? I mean, just, just the generic template of always being interested in the contrarian take, the anti-institutional take. Like one of those powers doing in secretive, you know, rooms, that line of questioning, again, which Joe has been a super spreader of, given the structure of anti, the conspiratorial structure of anti-Semitism for the last 2,000 years, it's just, it has just heaped gasoline onto that problem. And, yeah, so it's not going away until we really understand the irrationality and divisiveness of all of this thinking.

And we relentlessly criticize it in a way that matters to enough people. I want to tackle that. I'm going to take a little bit of a deeper dive into it. I have a thesis about the version of this on the right. You know, you talk about Joe Rogan. And he platformed, what was his name, martyr maid is his handle. Yeah, Darryl Cooper. Darryl Cooper and Ian Carroll and Nick Fuentes is now a darling, you know, of Tucker Carlson's pod.

All those guys went on Tucker Carlson. And he really laundered them and presented the most radical version of them that I think they were a little bit restraining, at least, with Joe Rogan. Or just maybe by then they had already been so popularized by Joe Rogan. and they felt free to say even more radical things about Britain is a fault in Jesus. One thing here is it's not just on the right. I mean, first of all, Joe is a liberal in almost every sense, right? He's not a far right figure at all. He just got kind of, he got radicalized in response to the far left.

But he's a very centrist figure. A lot of the people who are in lockstep with the truly odious far right figures like Fuentes, are also quasi-leftist, you know, figures. I mean, there's at minimum centrist figure, I mean, and friends of Joe's like Dave Smith. Dave Smith is just buddy, buddy with Nick Fuentes and amplifying his thoughts on his own podcast, on Joe's podcast. And, you know, and on Tucker's. But so there's this very weird, you know, horseshoe theory is the term used to, to describe this, where if you go far enough left and far enough right, you begin to meet people

who are indistinguishable from one another, it's especially true with respect to anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel. I mean, I think too much can be made of this neat heuristic of horseshoe theory, but for the Jews, horseshoe theory is all too obvious. I want to come in specifically zoom in on Tucker Carlson. I want to suggest that, Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, that whole wing of the Republican or right-wing conservative, you know, podcast sphere, are trying to build out what I have come to think of as the American Muslim Brotherhood. And it's dressed in, it's dressed up in this sort of Christian nationalist drag. It's not Muslim in its content. But the parallels are kind of amazing.

The original Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, founded in the 1920s, argued, still argues. that the Muslim world fell into weakness, it fell into decline economically, intellectually, politically, geopolitically, militarily, because it drifted away from God's design for history. It drifted away from true Muslim piety. It was corrupted by too much modernity, too much liberalization. Women in Egypt, in Iran, in Afghanistan, once walked around with their heads uncovered. They went to universities, very, very, you know, open. And because we're now trying to chase after Western culture and no longer being

pietistic puritanical Islam, as in the first holy generations of Islam in the seventh century, we have failed and we have become weak because we have become far from God. And the solution they developed, and here I bring a TikToker, the solution they have argued, is a return to a strict piety of puritanical piety, a very traditional religious observance, traditional roles for women, extremely limited roles for women. And also, and this was central to the Muslim Brotherhood's worldview then and now, and Hamas is the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. It was a chapter of the Muslim Brother

established in Gaza in 1987, and in its charter, it is written in its charter. They have this deeply conspiratorial view of the Jews. They drew it from European anti-Semitism, literally from Nazism, that the Jews are a major global conspiratorial force standing in the way of Islam's spiritual and therefore also geopolitical, you know,

resuscitation and restoration. I have watched Tucker. I watched him interview the Prime Minister, serve Qatar, Althani. He is nodding along to every silly claim by the Katari leader. And as I'm watching that conversation, it occurs to me. Maybe this isn't an influence up. Maybe he's not paid. Maybe he's not ignorant. Maybe they genuinely agree on the fundamental things. Tucker has argued, I've then gone back to read some of his speeches in the past. He argues that America is experiencing a social and moral collapse.

On that, a lot of other normative people will agree. But it is fundamentally a collapse that's a result of the loss of Christian piety, of too much liberalization, of too much progressivism. He once described in a speech mainline Protestant Christianity as a hollowed-out, hollow tree

that progressives have occupied like a family of raccoons. Churches have become these empty husks filled with sterile sort of progressive politics instead of living real Christian faith. And all through this sense of things, sense of where America stands, sense of the collapse of religion that's driving all of the social problems

that everyone's talking about, the epidemic of loneliness, the, you know, young people. All through it is a villain. And the villain is the Jews. And for example, he's argued repeatedly that the Jews invented pornography, control the pornography industry

as a tool of cultural subversive. They dominate American finance, American politics. They care only about their own interests at America's expense. As an incidental, marginal part of that argument, the Nazis also weren't really the villains of World War II, right? And he literally argues this. He has explicitly argued that the largest pornography websites in America are controlled by Israeli intelligence agencies as part of a sci-op against American society.

And he's doing it for religious restoration that'll resuscitate what he sees as a dying society, dying because of a loss of religion. Am I crazy? Or is the Muslim Brotherhood migrated into American Christianity through this? Am I a Middle Easterner who, because that's something he's seen, is applying that template to a faraway place? I keep accusing people of doing that to us in Israel. Applying American racial experience to Israel is just irrelevant. We're not, Palestinians run from dark color to blonde. Israelis run from very dark to very blue.

We can hate each other and marginalize each other and fight every war imaginable without race. Race isn't the issue here. And to apply race to us is to misunderstand us. Am I doing the same in reverse or has the Muslim Brotherhood, it's not a coincidence that Tucker, as he's arguing that, says he wants to buy a home in Doha and calls their culture an example for America. This puritanical restorationism decimated the Arab world. It has destroyed everything it has touched. It is part of the kind of ideology that Hamas represents in the Palestinian case, which destroyed peace processes.

Long before driving the kind of war we see in Gaza, Hezbollah is willing to destroy Lebanon on the altar of this. This is a very bad thing to happen to a society. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I think Tucker is an extremely idiosyncratic figure. I mean, it's hard to know what he's actually doing.

I'm genuinely surprised that he has the audience he has, given the strange moves he's made of late. I mean, for instance, he's broken with Trump. He's speculated about whether Trump might be the Antichrist. And he's, and one of the, one of the, the data points in favor of that argument on Tucker's account is that he has disparaged the, you know, otherwise wholesome religion of Islam, right? Like, he's, strangely, for a Bible-thumping Christian, Tucker has said nice things about Islam to the disadvantage of the president who he used to adore. He just thinks it's beyond the pale for the, for the president to have said nasty things about the sincere beliefs of other, other God-fearing people, even if they have a slightly different God, right? So it's strange to me that Tucker believes he has an audience of millions who are going to be. going to go with him on that ride in that direction, especially when you add his interview

with Mike Huckabee. Did you see that? The American ambassador to your country, right, who is another Bible thumper. I mean, he's just a straight-up evangelical who is not one of these evangelicals whose religion could have been accused of being vitiated by wokeism or, you know, progressive politics. I mean, he's not a progressive. I mean, he's a right-wing evangelical Christian of a sort that, you know, I've been apt to worry about in the past, right? I'm not, I don't like the, you know, any of the shadows of theocracy encroaching, you know, in America, in Christian terms. So I've criticized people like Huckabee in the past for their religious dogmatism. But what was very interesting about this interview was that Tucker attacked him.

to Huckabee, probably even more viciously than I would have for his, for, you know, for, for his faith in the legitimacy of the Old Testament. And it's, you know, the claim, the Israel's claims to the holy land on that basis, right? So if you remember, Tucker at one point said, listen, what my reading in the Old Testament suggests that the Jews shouldn't just have this little smitten of land between, the river and the sea that they're fighting over now, but they probably, they probably deserve all of Iraq, right? And Syria and Lebanon. I forget the full, you know, the whole Levant, right? Like, I forget where the boundary. It's an old Arab accusation against, against the Jews that

has never been true. But yes, he's sending up a strong man. So he walked, he walked Huckabee into that set of biblical claims. And Huckabee, you know, biblical literalist that he is, basically said, well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't differ with that. Like, I wouldn't mind if the Jews took everything granted to them in the Bible. I mean, so many words, he said that. I mean, his hemming and hain and nodding, more or less communicated that. And that went off like a bombshell in American political circles.

I mean, we have the U.S. ambassador to Israel basically claiming that, you know, you guys should just take everything. You know, just take it all, right? And that would be some, you know, the Bible, the Bible more or less gives you a mandate to do that, right, from the point of view of America, right? And so, but what was fascinating about that is Tucker seems to have found, based on his own theology or some theology I'm not aware of, a new lane for devout Christians. Christians in America, which is we don't need to support the traditional evangelical Christianity and its infatuation with biblical prophecy and its resulting love of Israel, right? We don't need to – we can completely disavow the Old Testament, right? Who cares about the Old Testament?

Jesus died for our sins, and that's all we need to know. you know, we're saved by him alone. Everything in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus, none of that matters at all. It's all barbarism and it's all antiquated. It's all, you know, it's, there's simply faith in Christ, and that's all you need to know. And therefore, most Christians, most American Christians,

most evangelicals, most people like Huckabee are getting it wrong. And this is sort of, there's kind of an America-first. retreat from the world, police our own borders, politics that now is getting smuggled into this brand of Christianity. And it's interesting, it's fascinating to me that Tucker seems to know that he's not going to lose half his audience on a Thursday

when he gives, you know, vent to those convictions. And, you know, I think he's, I haven't heard that, that he got the short end of the straw in that in that contest with Huckabee. So something new is happening. I'm not so sure it can subsume what, you know, a true American Bible-thumping Christianity is all about, right? So I think it may be more of a, I think I will be surprised if 10 years from now it is true to say of American Christianity that it's more like Tucker's and less like Huckabees, right? That would, that will surprise me.

So I think I think this this infatuation with Israel on the, on evangelical circles, is likely to endure, but there's many other things happening, as you know, in American politics and in the West generally. And on that front, Israel has lost many, many of her friends, and the situation for Jews in the diaspora

has become much more precarious because, again, on both the left and the right, Israel is hated and the Jews are hated by association and for other reasons, again, which have little to do with Israel and much to do with just generic conspiracy thinking and hatred. He's not that clever. In other words, he's not that clever.

He's just his political impulses, his political peccadillos, he's just trying to sort of force them on to. He's very clever. I mean, he's very, I'm astonished to discuss. that there's an audience for his brand of continually splitting the baby, you know, in ways that you didn't expect would be survivable, survivable for him as a broadcaster. I mean, to call Trump the Antichrist and to disavow the Old Testament completely and, and evangelical, you know, evangelical solidarity with Israel based on biblical prophecy, all of that, just to call bullshit on all of that,

the way, you know, Richard Dawkins would. And to still know that you're going to maintain your Christian audience, that's interesting to me. I just did not know that that piece of theological and political real estate existed. I do think Tucker is charismatic enough and facile enough that he could run for president if he wanted to. I don't know that he would win, but he's like he, he is a, he's, he's, he's, he's a person who can straddle this, this, uh, peculiar, uh, precipice between, you know, totally empty celebrity and, um, you know, real political convictions and, and, and political momentum in American politics. And I think he could, he could, he could beat a lot of people, uh, you know, right of center for a nomination. I don't know if he would get the nomination, but he'd much less win. But I think he could beat J.D. Vance for the nomination. And that's saying a lot at this moment in American politics.

I think Christianity has the toolkit for him to reorganize it on the Jews. If he's rearranging, you know, that is something ancient in Christianity, the sort of defining itself in opposition to the Jews. And also there's the Markianite heresy early in Christianity where Markians argued that God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament, can't possibly be the same God. And so, you know, one is the evil God and the New Testament is the good God. And Orthodox Christianity explicitly defined itself against that heresy and said, that's not true. This is a fulfillment.

But the basic sort of culture gap, I don't know what to call it, theological gaps between old and new are there. There are all these pieces that he can piece together if he wants to build a new American Christianity that is anti-Jewish. And to use that as, I mean, the Jews did not invent the porn industry. Do you know what I mean? That is not, there's some Jewish businessmen involved in it, and by the, they're not a majority in any way. And he even argues that Israeli intelligence agencies run it in order to make young men in America desperate loaners. So he's building a politics around the Jews and maybe piecing together a kind of hodgepodge bastardized Christianity. I'm going to keep walking down this Muslim Brotherhood analysis.

But yeah, he's building a politics around conspiracy thinking and he's not found a conspiracy that he doesn't love, right? He just he'll he eats and spreads all of them. But that just does not work out well for the Jews, right? I mean, the Jews are at the center of so many of them. Okay, so I want to wind down with a pallet cleanser with leaving behind a lot of this awful stuff. You are famously not a fan of organized religion, but you have nevertheless been the source of a tremendous amount of comfort for a great many people. You're waking up app. I don't know if you tell the numbers, but how many people are subscribed to that?

I think we have something like 400,000 monthly active user or something like that. I mean, there are people who have free accounts as well, but yeah. I mean, maybe it's, yeah, it's like maybe 250,000 subscribers, but something closer to 400, 500,000 monthly users, something like that. That's astonishing. It's a meditation app, a mindfulness program based on a kind of secularized Buddhism. And the user base is huge. Now, obviously, meditation, you are from California, so you're, you know, automatically suspect when it comes to these things. Yeah.

And so I signed up and I've been doing it. And I'm pretending to be doing it obviously for research, for an interview. But I'm not doing it for research for an interview. It's extraordinary. It's helpful. And I'm a crumaginly conservative on these things. If it's old and it's ancient and it's genuinely Buddhist, then it probably has stood the test of time by being used by a great many smart people

and therefore is probably a good thing. And so for me, the fact that you base it on old. old religious practice, but totally secularized, was a door opener, really, to something like that. When you brought me on your podcast, I said to you, someday I want to talk to you about religion, because, you know, leaving, dismissing monotheism quite so quickly seems to me a little early. I'm a son of a rabbi. I do little religious homilies on holidays on the podcast, things like that. But then when I got really into this app, I realized you're in a much, much more complex place on the question of religion,

because you'll take a lot of the things that it gives, narratives of meaning, community, contemplation, things that religion provides and that sustained it, even in societies that have abandoned the religious cosmology, that stuff survives and has power, and that's something that you recognize. And religion will not tolerate being banished from life. I guess what I want to ask is,

have your thoughts on religion changed? In the moment when you've encountered, for example, modern progressive dogmas, people lost the old traditional religions and so they took on these new Marxist ones. The illiberal blowback on the right, which I think arguably is driven to some degree at least a little bit or I think even more than a little bit by the decline of traditional American religion and American religious communities, the corner church, so to speak. and people encounter a religious version of that online that isn't local and isn't interpersonal and isn't communal and so is also radicalizing. Have your thoughts on religion changed? That's such a big thing to open at the end.

I apologize, but if there's some brief thing you want to say about it. I can find a way through it. Well, so the reason why I've been an enemy of organized religion is because I'm an enemy more generically of tribalism and dogmatism. I think tribalism and dogmatism, the coincidence of those two tendencies in the human mind and in human culture, that is pretty much all that ails us. When you're talking about divisive politics, you're talking about hyperpartisanship, you're talking about irrational hatreds of strangers you'll never even meet. There are people who hate Jews who have never even met somebody who's met somebody who's met a Jew, right? You're talking about irrational belief.

You're talking about false certainty. You're talking about half-truths and lies. Lies told to children by parents because they're consoling, but they know they're not, they can't possibly be true. Any distortion of culture that produces needless human suffering and we just can't figure out how to cooperate and collaborate as a result, at bottom, it's more or less always a story of true. tribalism and dogmatism. It's quite telling that the term dogma is a bad word everywhere

but within the Catholic Church, right? I mean, dogma is a, is not a pejorative term in religious terms, but it's a pejorative everywhere else. I mean, the dogma is something you believe without sufficient evidence, without sufficient argument, right? And you believe it despite the fact that you can't actually defend it. And, you know, you know, you. And, you believe it. You In the religious context, this is considered a noble thing and an ennobling thing, a necessary thing, right? This is uplifting. This is this is the only thing that gets you right with God, your capacity to do this. Right now, in a scientific context, or in journalistic context, historical, any other context, any other language game is played by very different rules.

If you pretend to know something you don't know, you immediately feel pressure from every, you're a very different way. else in the conversation, right? You immediately lose the respect of your interlocutors, right? And if you're unwilling to talk about it, if you're unwilling to defend this cherished notion of yours, and you say, no, no, I believe this so devoutly, I'm not even willing to talk about it. And if you keep insisting that we talk about it, I might become violent, right? That's the default mode of every organized religion, especially Islam, right? they're not all equally culpable for this style of discourse. But historically, you know, it's certainly been true of virtually every organized religion.

The, this, everywhere else in culture, we recognize how pathological this is. It's only in the context of religion where the valence gets flipped and it seems like not only an acceptable thing, but an ennobling and a necessary thing. So I'm the enemy of all of that. Now, happily, there are profound truths about the nature of the human mind that can be discovered and talked about and cherished that don't require dogmatic belief in anything. I mean, the thing that's wrong with tribalism is that tribalism is just that mode in which, you know, your solidarity with other people who happen to look like you or happen to talk like you or happen to share some accident of birth with you. That supersedes everything else, you know, any other rational consideration about human society. or, you know, what's really happening in the world, right? So you're not, you're, you're,

you're not going to think about this thing too clearly because you're just aligned with your, you know, fellow black people or fellow white people or fellow Jews or fellow Muslims, etc. Right. It's, it's, it's, it's the false solidarity that the, the, the, this, the spurning of real ethics that tribalism gives you, you know, it doesn't give you the wisdom of the crowd. It gives you the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, the fears and delusions of the mob. And that's why I think we have to get out of the identity politics business across the board. And that's why I would say in the West, in America and, you know, in the rest of the diaspora, Jews, while it is tempting to double down on Jewish identity politics, I feel like

that is going to be a mistake politically. I think we need to fight. Let me let me push back in because I want to clarify what you're saying. We need family. And family is biological. And you don't choose your parents, and yet your parents can be the most important relationship in your life. We need community. We need, I think, in this world, tribe. One of the great gifts I have in this world is that I have a place and a culture and a bookshelf, an ancient bookshelf, as it happens, that I come from. It has to be a critical relationship. It has to be an honest relationship, but so does my relationship with my brother. If my relationship with my brother is not an honest one, if I'm not telling him what I really feel or where I think he's wrong and he's not doing the same to

me, we have an unhealthy relationship. So there's a healthy and an unhealthy relationship with tribe, but to me, tribe is really quite important. I get the point of clarification. Let me demarcate that for you. So yes, you can, I'm not saying that families aren't important and communities aren't important and even, you know, nationalism is important, right? But nothing, nothing deeply ethical or political hinges on those boundaries, right? So it would be wrong to say that in a political context, that your children are more important than other people's children because of your children are Jewish or your children are white

or your children are blonde-haired or whatever the variable, right? However the tribe is defined. No, that is morally indecent and indecent. and odious and dangerous. It's in principle divisive, right? So civil society and sane civil society organizations and sane democratic norms, everything is brought to bear upon us to overcome that tendency, that tribal tendency. And we meet in the public square, whatever the value of our families and our tribes and

our fandom of certain clubs, you know, you like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, the, uh, the, the, the, uh, the, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the seriously. And when we take it too seriously, that's what I'm calling tribalism, right? Nothing important politically or ethically can hinge on the color of a person's skin, right? If you say, I have to care about black people because they're black, all right, that's a, that is a problem. That's a kind of identity politics that we have to retire. Right. And because the moment you swap black for white, you recognize how despicable that is in American politics, right? White identity politics is something that should embarrass us, but that perforce all other identity politics has to embarrass us, right? Would you agree with the caveat that there's a difference between innate value and personal responsibility?

In other words, you brought up, for example, I brought up, but you agreed to run with kids. my kids are not innately more valuable as human beings than any other human child. Absolutely axiomatic, correct. But of course they're more valuable to you. But also, A, they're more valuable than the physical spinning earth and everything on it to me. But my responsibility to them, I think, is greater and than it is to others' children. And that is a difference of, that's a profound difference philosophically, even if it'll express itself as, you know, basically could that a person's trauma?

Right. So the way I resolve this, you know, both politically and ethically is in the, in, in, in, in, in, to answer the question, how, how does sane and compassionate and responsible people behave in the, the waiting room of an, you know, an emergency ward in a hospital? Right. Exactly. Your kid, your kid is injured and you're very, very worried. And, you know, this is the only thing that is that is that you care about at this moment in time. and you rush to the hospital and now you're confronted with the necessity of triage at the level of an emergency room

and you look around you and you see other people's kids and other old people and variously injured people and you understand as a rational human being that though you want your kid to be seen immediately you're in a situation

where generally speaking you don't though corruption might be possible and you might you know if you're a certain cast of mind you might want to benefit ever so slightly from it right like you might not want a

perfectly fair perfectly blind system at that moment even you being callously selfish and only caring about your own kid you know that most of the time it's a better bet for you to have a samely run reasonably fair not very corrupt or corruptible system that will triage those needs of strangers

rationally and be blind to your specific myopic fixation on your own child, right? So which is to say, you want the most desperately injured and ill person to be seen first, right? And then you want your kid to be slotted in wherever it's rational to be, right? So if someone's having a heart attack and every second counts, your kid with a broken leg is going to have to wait and you're going to understand. that. So that's the world we live in. Tribalism, you know, and identity politics breaks that world, like the tribalism I'm talking about, like all the failure modes where it's like,

no, no, I really just care about my fellow Muslims. And for that reason, I'm going to express my solidarity for Muslims worldwide, no matter how psychopathic their behavior, right? Or I'm going to be slow to criticize them because I'm not going to, you know, I'm going to brand any criticism, any inordinate criticism of the people who are burning embassies over cartoons. Any criticism of that is Islamophobia? Because I'm Muslim and this is my real concern, is solidarity with my fellow Muslims worldwide. Okay, that is pernicious. We should have no patience for it in open societies. I'm not saying people can't be Muslim. I'm not saying you can't read the Quran with, you know, with great attention and love every moment of it, though, given the contents of the book,

I will, you know, I have things I will like to debate. But the virtue of secularism is we agree, we agree to meet in the public space ethically and politically and divest ourselves of that kind of tribalism. And the failure of certain communities to do that, the reliable failure of certain communities to do that, the especially agree. failure of Muslims worldwide to do that, right, is an excruciating problem, not just for Israel, but for open societies everywhere. And, yeah, but back to the other part of your question, I believe that the, though I'm not going

to deny that religion gives people community and kind of thick, you know, ethical commitments that we want to find some secular replacement for, because, many of them are essential. The crucial piece for me is that the core claims of all of our religions, the fact that self-transcendence is possible, the fact that it's possible to stop suffering in all the ordinary and unnecessary ways that produces, you know, just a mediocre life where a sublime life is actually available. that set of empirical and phenomenological claims

about just what is possible for a human mind born into this world, we can make contact with the true depths of all of that in a non-sectarian way. And I would argue we can really only make full contact with it in a way that is non-sectarian because at least we can only,

I mean, it's not say you can't do it in a sectarian way, but to talk about it rationally in a way that can be integrated with 21st century science and just a fact-based discussion about everything else, and to find all the interesting points of contact there, you have to be non-sectarian because the genuine truth claims here are obviously deeper than culture, right? It's just in the same way that physics is deeper than Christianity, though the Christians more or less invented or discovered physics, an algebra is deeper than Islam, right? The ethical and spiritual truths that await the attention of everyone

who goes into a cave for a year and does nothing but meditate or takes the requisite dose of the right psychedelic and has some encounter with the beatific vision. These fundamental truths are deeper than any provincial religious identity anyone has. And we know this must be true because Hindus and Christians and Buddhists and atheists have the same experiences. Right. So like whatever Martin Buber is talking about in the I-Thau relationship, whatever Meister Eckhart is talking about when he suddenly feels like, you know,

he's not just, you know, praying to God, but is identical to. God, right? Whatever the Buddha is talking about when he talks about emptiness as the core truth of the nature of mind, there has to be a way of integrating all of these insights into at a level of the deeper, just sheer human possibility of discovering, you know, what is true of consciousness. And that's a project that demands that we transcend sectarianism. And so that's why that's why I put myself against organized religion in that my claim is that whatever's true, whatever the baby in the bathwater really is, you know, whatever the real human needs are for community, whatever is whatever metaphor is really getting at something interesting about

the unseen structure of the human mind, and whatever is real at the level of, you know, consciousness in the brain, all of this sinks deeper than the accidents of where people were born or the languages their parents happen to speak. We got a little deep. Let's wrap up with one last question. Just your comment on tribalism and having a kind of non-sectarian shared secularism is a way of having almost a substrate in which we can all have a shared conversation, a shared attempt at fairness.

It occurs to me that I've heard a lot of anxious and frightened Jews in the English-speaking world who thought they lived in that equal shared playing field of a non-tribal society and maybe discovered that actually they weren't and that's a source of a lot of their anxiety of late.

I just I have to follow this up. I'm sorry with one last question. Has that you your atheism is therefore It's a kind of faith in the human, in human capacity, in human capacity to absorb the algebra, right, and the physics, which is to say the mind's capacity

to achieve a very different state than the regular suffering of regular life and to be kind of released from the tribalism and the dogmatism and the violence and the pain and the brutal politics and the irrationalism. Has this moment at all made you question? that bad faith. Maimonides talked about kinds of lies.

Almost every kind of lie is a bad kind. The only kind I think he thought was a legitimate kind was the pedagogic lie. You can't teach a child about genocide. You have to teach them about an experience. And then slowly as they grow and mature and develop, you teach them more and more and more. So you teach a non-reality,

but that will point them as they develop into a larger reality. And Maimonides being a 12th century, you know, non-democrat who doesn't encounter modern liberalism and individualism thinks that for most people that doesn't end at full truth, right? Only for the elite it ends with full truth. So everybody has to be told what they need to know. You look around at humans and you say, no, everyone has access to the full truth

and we have to bring them there by breaking dogmatism by break. Has this moment made you question any of that and the radicalization in every free and open society and how vulnerable it's been to that. It is your question where the people really are, ultimately, at the end of the day, at the baseline rational and, et cetera. Well, there's a lot in that question. I do think that we should be slow

to tell lies based on some story that they're pragmatically wise to tell, right? So the noble lie, the white lie, the lie told the children, I'm, I think a fuller analysis

of more or less each and every one of those lies often reveals that that was a better path forward, right? There's some version of the truth that didn't hold much of anything back but just was just more, you know, civilly or or compassionately told. You know, they brought other truths into the frame with it so as to give proportion to the communication. I think that's almost. always better, you know. Do I look fat in this dress when asked by your, your wife?

We're going to, we're going to lie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, no, I think there's a version of the truth, because you have to understand what the question actually is, right? So I'm, again, I wrote a book on this. I wrote a book called lying, which just looks at the ethics of lying and especially the ethics of white lies. But, and I saw, and I'm not, I've never felt the need to lie to my children about anything without, without, you know, telling them harrowing tales of awfulness that they, that would be inappropriate for that age, right? So it's not that I've insisted that they know exactly how bad the Holocaust was, you know, even yet, right? Their, you know, my, my, I haven't imposed that on either. I've got a 12-year-old and a 17-year-old, and, you know,

I think the 17-year-old is probably ready to know everything, but still, I haven't felt the need to to get into the details of what actually happened at Treblinka, right? So it's just not, you know, but what we want are, we want adults. Eventually we want everyone to be an adult, right? So just how much should we cater to adults as children, right? And how much should we worry that adults are not ready for the truth? On so many questions. Millions of people are watching Candace Owens now.

millions of Europeans are radicalizing to crazy places. What has to happen is we need a culture that recognizes how obscene a product Candace has become, right? I mean, like Candice's career shouldn't be possible in a healthy culture. Certainly no one should be eager to pay to listen to her. Right now we happen to have a culture where the business model of the industry, internet has produced incentives that allow for for a thriving career of that sort. And that's a problem with the business model of the internet. So we have perverse incentives.

We have just bad business models. We have we've screwed up in various ways, but we should be eager to fix those problems so that we can produce the kind of culture we all want to live in. I'm not talking about censorship. I'm not saying Candace should be locked up. I'm not saying that anyone should physically prevent her from getting to a microphone and espousing her nonsense. But the fact that we have a culture that is addicted to certain things that are obviously not good for anyone, that's a cultural problem that only incremental changes in culture or even, you know, sudden changes,

you see changes in culture can rectify. And only, like, you know, it's a million conversations like this that are, are, you know, part of that change, right? And we just need to be, well, you and I are attempting to prop up certain parts of culture and destroy others, you know, with every sentence in a conversation like this. And it's an open question whether any of that is going to be ultimately effective, right? but all we can do is try, all we can do is argue for the sanity that we think we see. And to try to, I mean, basically this is all, in my view, a navigation problem. Politics, ethics, you know, even maintaining one's basic sanity is a navigation problem. What should we do next?

What should we pay attention to next? or what should we withdraw our attention from and hope it goes away, right? These are all, it's all, how do we find signal in the noise and how do we amplify that signal to the advantage of everyone? That's the project. I have to just ask, I have to just focus in on this.

Maybe I'm being ignorant here and maybe I'm being also a little bit religiously intolerant by asking this question, and forgive me if that's the case. atheism requires your kind of atheism, which is an extraordinarily optimistic kind. And an extraordinary societies can, through proper, serious, objectively correct, because they're, you know, self-critical, scientific method of pauper kinds of discourses, ultimately achieve a much better state because the human ultimately will reach a better place if given all the tools. and the toolkits and not be locked into dogmas and tribes. You have not lost any of that faith in the human, in the human capacity? I think that you're raising an orthogonal concern.

I mean, my degree of faith in humanity or my optimism versus my pessimism. What you're calling atheism or my atheism is a very distinct thing epistemologically. It's just a question of what I believe to be true, right? I believe to be plausible, what argument works on me, what set of facts, you know, am I going to sign up for and what am I going to doubt? I'm only an atheist in Abrahamic terms, right, with respect to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, because I don't believe the claims to about specific books, about the revealed nature of specific books, right? So you're going to tell me that a book or any part of a book was literally written by the creator of the universe or

inspired by the creator of the universe and therefore is not the product of human minds. I'm going to say, well, let me read that book and see if there's any evidence of that. And let me know something about the history of the composition of that book and the hundreds of years in which certain chapters were in and then they were out, voted out, and voted back in again and give me, you know, the counsel of Nicaea, what were those boys up to, and just how rational was that process? The more I learn, the more I doubt the claim. And so I am an atheist with respect to those religions. I'm an atheist with respect to Zeus and Thor and, you know, thousands of other dead gods and as are you and as are every other, you know, believer. So the old

atheist line, which I forget who coined it, but. It's just, you know, you and I are exactly the same. I just doubt the existence of one more God than you do, right? You don't believe in ISIS or, you know, Vishnu or any other dead gods. But I just add the God of Abraham to that. And so it's by the same operation, right? And this is the, you know, I think this is the most effective argument I've ever made in a, in a debate with a Christian.

I was at Notre Dame, which is a Catholic, University, in the U.S. and debating, I think, William Lane Craig. And I just, that's the first time I happened upon this argument. And I just, I asked this entirely Christian audience just, like, do you, you understand that most Muslims, because you think Jesus was divine, not that you love Jesus, but you think he was divine, most Muslims think that's, that is a, such a colossal error that you are going to hell, right? I mean, this is just, this is practically, it's shirk, you know, it's practically polytheism, right?

Like, it's just, this is, it's irredeemable, right? I mean, the Muslims love Jesus, but not in that way. So there's a zero-sum contest between Islam and Christianity here. So you realize that the quarter of humanity, when they think about it, think you are going to hell. I'm not talking to Christians in this room. I want you to just feel in your bones how unconcerned you are over that the fact that you have two billion people believing this about you

based on the recourse to their holy book and the whole language game they're playing around it. All the faith placing they have done. They're religious certainty. I mean, just the end of the centuries of religious ratiocination that has produced this conviction in them, right? They've got shelves of books on this topic, you know, consigning you to the flames of hell for eternity as a result of your error, theologically.

Feel in your bones how unconcerned you are about this. How you will not, it is inconceivable that you will lose a moment of sleep tonight or on any other night over this conviction on their parts. you should know that this is the way every atheist feels about you and your convictions, you Christians, right? It's just, it does not make contact with us in precisely the same way

and for the same reason, because just as you can see that the language game played by Muslims is totally unconvincing once you stand outside it, just as you can see that the fact that the Quran itself says that it's perfect and not to be superseded by anything, gives it no credibility at all, you know, no more so than, you know, if, you know, the Lord of the Rings said something about itself in the text, right? So it is that every atheist looks at your Christian project in the same way and by the same logic

as being this self-sealing and fundamentally delusional language game. So anyway, that's a, by by analogy, I consider that to be probably the best argument against any specific organized religion. But that's, that's where I stand. I mean, there's just no, the universe can be far stranger than I realize or the, or am capable of realizing, right? I mean, this is, you know, JBS Hall-Dames, you know, famous line. the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose. That may well be true, right?

So who knows what's actually happening? Who knows if our physics will ever be in contact with the real base layer of reality? But that's not to be an atheist by the lights of every religious person. You're certainly, you know, of the sort we're talking about here, you don't have to pretend to know that nothing profoundly strange is true of the universe. You know, we might be, you know, all running on a simulation on an omniscient alien's, you know, hard drive, call that alien God, who knows what's true.

I just know that there's no good reason to believe that any of these books were authored by any one other than, you know, very smart people of the period, right? is completely deflationary with respect to these religions. And that's, so that's all, my atheism says nothing about my faith or lack of faith in the future of humanity. Right. It's like a, and if I felt, and I couldn't believe, I couldn't believe the Bible was the perfect word of the creator of the universe, even if I thought it was necessary to give us a better chance.

I mean, I think, being a Pascal's wager is complete bullshit. You can't, that's not how belief gets created, right? You can't believe something because there's some instrumental utility in, in believing it to be true, because that is, that's not what it means to think, to actually think something is true. I mean, this is like, this is, this is a move that religious people tend to make. You know, when you ask people why they believe, they tend not to give you the evidence. They talk about how important the belief is to their lives, right? It's like, well, my belief in Christ gives my life meaning, right? This is, it gives my family meaning.

It gives my community a center, right? So they talk about the utility of the belief. And then I say, okay, well, just imagine, imagine I spent half my days digging in my backyard. I have a pit in my backyard that's now 45 feet deep because I've been digging there for years with a shovel, spend, you know, four hours a day doing this. And you ask me why. I say, well, I'm looking, I think there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and I'm looking for it. And you ask me why I believe this, and I tell you not the evidence, I don't give you a cogent line of evidence as to why I should believe there's a diamond bigger than any ever discovered in my backyard.

Now, I tell you how meaningful it is for me to believe this, how much, you know, I wouldn't want to live in the universe where there wasn't a diamond in my backyard, the size of a refrigerator, right? I mean, these are the kinds of things people say in defense of their religious conviction. When you map it on to any other conviction, you realize it's pathological, right? So this is not how people believe something is actually true. To believe something is true, you have to believe that you stand in some relationship to it such that if it weren't true, you wouldn't believe it. Right? Now, so like, and virtually nobody's religious faith survives contact with that kind of analysis, right?

You just like, you're not, is there some mechanism of reality testing going on within these religious traditions such that if Jesus weren't born of a virgin, the Catholics would realize it to have been to not be true? The first book of the Bible, the first chapter of the Bible is the story of Adam and Eve in the creation of the world. and the second chapter of the Bible is a rehash of a completely different story of the creation of the world with Adam and Eve. And to me, that and a thousand other things. You know, Abraham is going to kill his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah, and he's told by God, go up to the mount and kill your son. And he lifts his hand with the knife, and he's holding it over his son. And an angel calls out to him Abraham, and he doesn't hear.

And so the angel has to call out his name again, Abraham. This man is in a frenzy to murder his son. And then Abraham is told, actually, I don't want you to murder your son, even though God had just told him he is. And then Abraham lifts his eyes and he sees a ram in the thicket and he slaughters the ram. And that's why we blow a shofar on Rosh Hashanah. And the rabbis of the tongue would say that ram had been in the thicket from the beginning of time. And had always been in the thicket. Now that is the Iron Age Torah, okay, in discourse with the child sacrificing pagan religions around.

it saying this looks like piety, you should know, this is not piety, this is no longer the desire of God. And God even praises Abraham's faith and says, but you don't kill your son. And the very fact that... Strangely, the Christians bring all that back and they kill Jesus as the one fully adequate sacrifice, human sacrifice. That actually works. Okay. You know, Judaism doesn't know what the afterlife is. Judaism is very concerned with what you do in this life. This is the life. Incidentally, when the Messiah allegedly comes... I'm not a believer. I'm not a believer. This is

the Jewish loophole. Okay, the problem is everything I say... Not the Jewish loophole. Not the Jewish loophole. I don't think the Torah wants to be read as objective history. The problem with Jews, and I say this as a Jew who's debated rabbis, is that

much of what I say about the orthodoxy of Muslims and Christians does not map onto Jews. I mean, it probably maps on to the ultra-Orthodox most of the time, it doesn't even reliably map on to so-called conservative rabbis. I mean, you know, you probably know Rabbi David Wolpey, who's, you know, nominally a conservative rabbi.

I mean, it's not Orthodox, but he and I once had a debate, and I said something that presuppose that he believed in a God that can hear our prayers. And he said, what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear prayers, right? Monody's, the greatest rabbi who ever lived, prayers for us to fix ourselves.

Okay, so, but my point is Jews are not, Jews are very non-committal about what they believe in the otherworldly sense or in the supernatural sense, and it's very hard to find the there that is there. This is not, you will, as Jews, religious Jews, even, you know, apart from, again, the ultra- Orthodox. Religious Jews are often misled as to how deep the religious convictions of Muslims and Christians actually go, because they map their fairly abstemious epistemological pretensions onto their co-religions onto the other religions, thinking that, yeah, no, they can't really believe all this stuff. really, right? You know, they don't really believe in fire for eternity, right? You know,

they don't believe that your skin is going to be regrown only so that it can be burned off again for eternity in hell, right? No, no, they really do. They really believe in that. So it doesn't matter that the Jews don't believe in much of anything. We're protected by peoplehood, by tribalism in the sense that you can be a Jew and not believe. and also the belief itself is therefore much more creative. There are many more theologies and many more afterlives and non-afterlives and reincarnation even in various very traditional Jewishnesses. I know there's very traditional Jewish text and bookshel. So there's a diversity there that's possible because to be a Jew is not to be a religion.

But when you purify it into pure religion as Christianity does, as Islam does, you universalize it, but you also therefore need a dogma. Otherwise, what is it? And also, it's crucially it's not. not to put all your emphasis on the next life. Right? I mean, like, Jews are much more about this life with all this complexity. It is true to, I mean, this is what is so mystifying to many, all secular people and many even religious Jews is when you're confronted by somebody who says, we love death more

than you love life, and they mean it, it's very hard. to realize that they mean it. Sam, last question. You are probably the most significant deployer, utilizer, of religious tools of essentially therapies or, you know, self-ascendance or self, you used a great term, which I immediately forgot, of bettering one's self and one's encounter with the world, who is not, you not religious. You waking up and that whole

vision and doctrine and the effect that it's had, I've been tracing out a little bit its popularity, and it's quite extraordinary and it's done a lot of good in the world. And so as some, so let me for a moment treat you as a secular rabbi, as a therapist, if you will. I am

in a society. I'm in a region with a tremendous amount of suffering. I am, my own society is in a place of deep anxiety and fear. as a philosopher, as somebody who tracks the American situation, modernity, and has dealt a lot with questions of comforting these deep, deep existential anxieties, you got any advice for us? Yeah, I don't know that I have advice that's specific to the Israeli case.

I think it's much more, I mean, the mechanics of human suffering really are universal. universal, right? And the degrees to which we suffer can be impressively independent of the real-world context in which we are living and suffering to whatever degree. So it's like there are people who, the extreme cases illustrate this. I mean, there are people who have everything. They have every advantage. You know, they're not in the middle of a war. They've never been in a war. They've never known anyone in a war. They're beautiful and young and rich and, you know, they just go from one party to the next and they're famous and they're even famous for doing something great, right? They're not famous for something boring or something ignominious. No, they're famous because they're so

creative and talented that people love them. Where I think of, you know, I don't know, the recording artist Prince, right, or any other rock star who's ever, you know, died of an overdose, right? There are people who commits someone who's going to commit suicide today who has everything. I mean, that's on most days of the year, that's probably true. So that the human mind is capable of creating its own hell independent of whatever's happening in the world. And conversely, it's possible to be at peace even in objectively terrible circumstances. I mean, I've met people who have nothing, you know, I've met. met lepers in India who looked happier than I looked at the time, right?

You know, I mean, I've seen, I mean, if you seem to, I mean, this is a, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this example probably doesn't illustrate what I, what I, you know, what I'm pressing it in service to illustrate at this moment, but it is still, nonetheless, psychologically interesting. Have you ever seen Peter Jackson's, uh, recolorization of all the footage of World War I, uh, in this document? documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. So Peter Jackson, the director who made the Lord of the Rings, and he spent millions of dollars to colorize, expertly colorize the only World War I footage we have.

And it's this amazing document. It's a documentary called They Shall Not Grow Old, I believe that's a title. And you see these guys who have been fighting trench warfare, you know, or about to fight in the trenches, right? So like the Battle of the Sum. And probably the worst place on earth, you know, virtually that anyone could have ever been. And, you know, half these guys have smiles on their face that are bigger than, you know, I've ever had on my own podcast, right? So it's like the capacity for the human mind to, for the clouds depart and to just actually be happy is impressively divorcible from the reality of the world in which we live.

that's not to say that we don't want to improve the world in all the ways that we can improve it, right? And that's not to say there aren't real sources of suffering coming to us from, you know, real tragedy. So all that, but it's just to say that we all know that it's possible to find a refuge in the mind based on what we are doing with our attention in each moment, right?

It's possible to forget how sad you need, you're supposed to be because you just lost someone close to you. You know, you wake up in the morning. Many of us who, you know, had someone close to us die, say, or had something awful happen in our lives have had this experience where you wake up in the morning. And then there's this, there's this brief hiatus before you have, you've just woken up, you know, you've come to your senses, you see that, you know, the sunlight coming in your window.

But you haven't yet remembered the thing that is making you miserable. You know, if you forgot that you're, you know, your mother just died or whatever the thing is that you will then think about and brood about you haven't picked up the burden yet right so that is a glimmer of what is true about the mind that it is possible to actually just recognize the peace and tranquility that is there prior to thought prior to identification with thought in the context of every experience as the as the as the screen upon which the movie of your life is always plain however ugly that movie is in this particular scene, right?

And so it's possible to find relief even in chaos, and that's what meditation is, really. I mean, it's that skill. And I certainly recommend it. And waking up is the place where I say everything I think I know about it. But, you know, this is not special advice for anyone in any particular circumstance. It's just advice for all of us in. in the chaos that we're bound to encounter in our lives no matter how lucky we become.

I mean, again, many people, I mean, Israel is a very special place. The encounter is a very specific set of circumstances. But, you know, in America, many people will never encounter a war zone, and they're lucky for that. And yet everyone, you know, the healthiest person, the luckiest person, will be the person whose phone keeps ringing in old age, learning that all the people he or she loves have died, right? If you're the, if you're the healthiest person you know, you're going to be the person who goes to everyone's funeral, right?

So no one gets out of here without a real collision with impermanence and loss and the reality of just the preciousness of this opportunity we have to be together and to make some sanity of it. So I think it's, yeah, your mind is what you have to navigate those moments. Sam Harris, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, well, and thank you for the work you're doing, Haviv. Again, I'm a huge fan, and I just want you to have more than 24 hours in your day so we can have more and more of you out there making sense.

Thank you.