TRIGGERnometry - Sam Harris X Eric Weinstein: Israel-Palestine

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Sam and Eric join us to discuss current events and debate the wider issues at play. Sam Harris is an American neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. A central voice in the New Atheism movement, he is a well-known critic of religious ideology. Eric Weinstein is a mathematical physicist, public thinker and host of the podcast ‘The Portal’. Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfum intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a lingering touch, solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the Euphoria Elixir Collection by Calvin Klein. We just have to acknowledge that there is a subset of people in the Muslim world for whom it is true, as they say of themselves, that they love death more than we love life. You have groups of people who are offered a state, who we are not listening to,

they do not want the state that they are offered. They are offered a choice between a state and a chant. From the river to the sea is what they chose. I'm just saying we have to recognize we're in a hot war with Jihadists. I think this is the same problem that you're having with trance. problem that you're having with Trump and other things, which is you're being invited into the abyss. Hey guys, trigonometry needs your help. We took a big risk creating the show. And for us to keep doing the incredible work that you all love, we need your support. That's the only way we're going to

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Gentlemen, welcome both. The reason our show works is neither Francis or I pretend to be experts, and we ask the questions that are on the minds of most people, or at least we try. I think the questions that are on the minds of most people now is that we are in a moral quandary, because we simultaneously believe many things about Israel and Palestine that are incompatible. And I'll give you a list. I don't want innocent civilians to die,

and Israel has to destroy Hamas. These two are already internally contradictory, and we can keep going further and further into exploring that. But what I see is that the thing that is right to say on social media to look smart and sophisticated and balanced and nuanced is impractical. It puts you in a position where you don't know what to do. So how do we think about this? How do we think about this issue, Sam?

Well, I'm not saying anything on social media. That's one life hack that I would recommend. I've been looking at social media, and I've been seeing that it's, I just think it's poison for us. I mean, even the good parts are making it impossible to, I think it's making us ungovernable. I think it's eroding the basis of democracy.

It's like even the true information, even the, the virtue of it is that it's giving some kind of transparency that you fear would not otherwise exist and that is, you know, good for error correcting on some level. But even that in surplus is toxic and then there's all the distortions of it. They're the things that are performative that wouldn't be happening in the real world but for the fact that it's going to be broadcast on social media. I just think it's, as I've said, many places before, I think it is a kind of psychological experiment that is deranging us. Agreed. But let's come to Israel and Palestine, because I think that's what people want to think about rationally. How do we think about that issue? Well, I think the most obvious error that people will make now is to imagine that body count,

is the only measure by which the moral balance swings. So if Israel goes into Gaza and inadvertently kills more people than were killed on their side, they've done too much by definition, right? That's wrong in all kinds of ways, but the obvious way that it's wrong is wrong is that it completely ignores what people are actually attempting. attempting to achieve on both sides, what kind of world they're attempting to build, what their intentions actually are,

what would they do if they had more power? If the asymmetric power in the region were reversed, how would Hamas behave vis-à-vis Israel, right? And one thing is obvious. Israel, for decades, if it had wanted to perpetrate a genocide against the Palestinians, could have done that on any given day.

It would have been trivial. Tomorrow, they could kill everyone, in Gaza if they wanted. They obviously haven't wanted that. They obviously don't want to do that. Now, if you reverse that balance of power and ask, what would Hamas do, what would jihadist

organizations anywhere do, they would kill all the Jews. And they have told us that ad nauseum. The founding charter of Hamas said that explicitly. It looked forward to a time where Quranic prophecy would be

realized when the earth itself, would cry out against the Jews, where the rocks and the trees would say, oh, Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come kill him, right? Except for one tree. Except the one tree, yes. Yeah, that's right. So the difference in intention,

while people think intention is this abstraction, intention is the software that everyone is running. Intention is the best predictor of what people will do if they're given an opportunity to do it, if they have the power to do it, if they have the technology to do it. What will a jihadist organization do if it gets nuclear weapons?

What will a jihadist organization do if it gets a viable bioweapon? We know the answers to these questions. These people have been telling us this for as long as I've been alive and in isolated cases, absolutely proven to a moral certainty, their commitment to nihilism and massacre. I mean, the Islamic State, if you knew the details of what was happening in the Islamic State

and couldn't understand that these people mean what they say and believe what they say they believe, then you're living on another planet. So anyone who's surprised, the only surprise here is that there was an assumption, and a historically understandable assumption, that Hamas was not as extreme, as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

And it certainly seems that some among them are prepared to be that extreme. So, but, I mean, we're splitting hairs. I mean, jihadism is a fairly unified concept, you know, whatever the methods, whatever the methods and the past behavior. And we just have to acknowledge that there is a subset of people,

in the Muslim world, for whom it is true, as they say of themselves, that they love death more than we love life. We being free, secular people everywhere, Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims, there are people who actually want to be martyred and see their kids martyred. They're not bluffing. they're perfectly willing to die for the pleasure and opportunity of killing non-combatants, intentionally killing non-combatants. So the moral error that people are going to make now

and they're already making it is to think that when Israel tells people to evacuate northern Gaza, and they don't, because Hamas is telling them not to do it, or it becomes practically impossible, and Egypt doesn't let them out, et cetera, And they drop bombs targeting Hamas installations that have been purposely put next to civilian areas that will cause carnage when Israel bombs them like hospitals and schools and mosques. When Israel bombs those targets and kids die, which is obviously horrible, that is the same thing as Hamas jihadists coming in under cover of rocket.

at dawn and murdering babies in their cribs. It's not the same thing. And body count doesn't resolve that disparity. Agreed. So we'll come to you in sec, Eric. As we all. As are we all. But what does that mean, Sam?

Let me ask you this, right? The United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, two of them. And after Hiroshima, I think it was Hiroshima, not Nagasaki, the U.S. Army went in and they measured the blast impact, not the release of energy from the nuclear bombs, but the actual destructive impact. And then they measured that and said, how much conventional munitions would we have to use

to achieve the same destructive impact? In the last year and a half of World War II, the Allies, the British and the Soviets, dropped 50 Hiroshima's a month on Germany. We flattened it, right? Because it was a death cult that took over that country and Hitler said, we're going to make a last stand. We don't care about civilian casualties.

We're going to stand to the death. What you were saying is Gaza is in the grips of a death cull of the same nature, or worse. What does that mean? I don't want a million children in Gaza to die and be burnt in bomb shelters like the Germans. I don't want that. And I wouldn't defend our aerial bombing of German cities and our dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I mean, I think there there was a calculation that,

and again, I don't consider myself an expert on recent scholarship on this. I mean, I know that about 20 years ago, A.C. Grinlin, the British philosopher, wrote a book about specifically our bomb, the Allied bombing of German cities and concluded that it really was ethically unjustifiable, right? That it's just, we told herself a story about how this was necessary to win the war and it was not a compelling story even at the time. I'm not so sure what analysis is true there,

but what I think, I think Israel is held to a higher standard than certainly we were 70 years ago, and even than we, the British and the Americans are now, I think they should hold themselves to the highest possible standard. I mean, they certainly should be alert to the difference between committing war crimes and following the international law that governs how you wage war. I think they should be as reluctant as they can practically be

to kill innocent. people. And knowing that it's impossible not to kill some innocent people when you're trying to fight militants in a crowded city, right? Especially when those militants, based on their own completely deranged moral worldview, are committed to using their own people as human shields.

I mean, that disparity is as far as the moral algebra that can give you insight into the difference between the two sides, that disparity says everything to me. It's like, you know, this is something I recently said on my own podcast, but if you just imagine the Israelis attempting to use their own non-combatants as human shields, right, in any conflict against jihadists, you know, let's say Hezbollah comes across the northern border and the Israelis line up with their own women and kids, you know, putting the barrels of their weapons on the shoulders of their children, thinking

that Hezbollah is going to be reluctant to shoot through the bodies of their children to kill IDF, soldiers, I mean, it is a completely surreal, you know, Monty Python sketch where all the Jews die. It is not, it is laughable, it is unthinkable, it's unthinkable at every level of it. It's unthinkable that the Jews would treat their own children and non-combatants that way, given what they believe about everything, and it's not unthinkable

that they would think that their enemies would be deterred by that behavior, right? But when you reverse it, as it is the case in the real world, we have had to confront, we Westerners and the Israelis have had to confront this behavior on multiple fronts in every conflict against jihadists. They routinely use non-combatants as human shields, and Hamas is doing that now.

I think Israel has to figure out how to navigate around that and eradicate it. and eradicate jihadists, you know, eradicate Hamat. We're confounded to some degree by our terminology here. We keep talking about terrorists, and we had a war on terror for, you know, a quarter of a century now. Terrorism is a tactic.

Terrorism is not the thing we're fighting. We're fighting jihad. What's the difference, Sam? Explain to people what the difference is. Well, jihadism. Buddhism is the radical core of Islam. It is this principle of holy war that can be justified in various contexts. Yes, there are many, many millions of Muslims, thankfully,

who would justify it in ways that we would recognize as something we could live with, right? So a defensive war, right? A just war, you know, just war theory. Okay, great. There are other Muslims who say, no, no, no, you don't understand. Jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle. Okay, great. But historically and practically now,

a component of jihad has always been you convert, subjugate, kill the infidel, right? It's like Islam is a religion of conquest. It views itself as a religion of conquest. It expects to win these contests for believers at the end of time. time and it has an explicitly

martial ethic which is we have to win through force, right? And we're happy to die trying. However long we fail, we're ultimately going to succeed, but we're happy to throw our bodies and the bodies of our children into this because this life is a total illusion. It has absolutely no value. This is just a

anti-room on the thresholds of either heaven or hell and the only thing that matters is where you go after you die, right? And only the true believers go to paradise and if you kill them

inadvertently, if you blow up a crowd of Muslim kids in an attempt to kill some soldiers that are handing out candy to them as happened in our conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan there's no factor. The kids, the kids, the The good Muslims, the real Muslims, are going to paradise.

They're going to thank you, right? No problem. And the bad Muslims, the fake Muslims, the infidels, the idolaters, they're going to go to hell sooner, and that's good. That's an intrinsic good. That's exactly what the creator of the universe wants. It's impossible to make a moral error when you're a jihadist. If you die, it's good.

If your family dies, it's good. If the infidel dies, it's good. this is a death cult. And we have been lying to ourselves in the secular West that there's some other logic, some other variable that explains as behavior, is economics, as politics, these are much. The assumption is that when you see people behaving

in this extraordinarily destructive and psychopathic way, they must have been pushed there by some awful treatment that would explain it. This must be ordinary human. and rational behavior in extremists, right? These people have been so tortured by the occupation, by the apartheid state of Israel, by the open-air prison of Gaza.

I mean, these phrases that are now used reflexively in the media. I'm not saying life in Gaza isn't horrible. I'm not saying it's not intolerable. We can talk about that. But there's a layer of this phenomenon and this behavior that we've been living with, most clearly since September 11th, 2001, but it obviously perceives that,

which is explained only by the religious ideology, right? When people are doing the unthinkable, again, you can find so many cases where they're doing it without grievance, right? Where somebody drops out of the London School of Economics to go join the Islamic State for the pleasure of killing Yazidis and, you know, raping their women, right?

It's just this is, and this is what was happening, you know, ad nauseum, right? You had from 100 countries. So this is, so what we saw Hamas do in Israel last week is a subset. It's just another example of that same behavior. Yes, it has this local, political, nationalistic struggle over territory context. But that's not the thing that explains the behavior. And we have to get our heads around that. We, again, I'm not talking about, I'm not even talking about non-Muslim,

talking about all moderate Muslims desperately. The world waits in desperation for moderate Muslims to get their heads around the problem of jihad. And Eric, would you agree with Sam's assessment of the situation? I disagree, first of all, with Constantine before I even get to Sam. Excellent. So, you know, you phrased this immediately as what's going on in Israel and Palestine. From the perspective of Hamas, what do you mean? It's all happening in Palestine, right?

So the idea is that there's a European occupier sitting in Palestine. You have an open-air prison. People are oppressed. It's completely unlivable. And resistance was taken against the European oppressor in Palestine. So I don't know what you're talking. about. So that perspective, for example, has to do with the language. So as soon as the frame is in place,

I can tell you what the argument is. You know, it's like looking at different opening tick-tac toe moves. I've got all the games memorized, and so I just don't want to even participate as soon as I hear that because of these different mindsets. Now, to Sam's point, I had a big disagreement in some sense with the way in which the new atheists took on the problem of jihad. And that is because it comes out of totalizing. Totalizing ideology is really the problem.

There's a North Korean totalizing ideology. There's a jihadi totalizing ideology. Sorry to interrupt. Just for clarity, for these people who might not know? What does totalizing ideology mean now? Well, what I mean in this case is that there's an entire worldview, which solves and addresses all of your issues. issues. How should we structure a family? What is the purpose of life? What risks may be assumed? When may one kill? You have an entire

worldview that is effectively incompatible with the outside world. All notions of tolerance of coming up with two people who don't really agree, but agree enough in order to serve each other coffee, maybe marry into each other's families, you know, whatnot, there is a sort of way in which you're open through moderation and through tolerance to the points of view of others within a relatively broad but still restricted spectrum. This is outside of that spectrum. So the issue is not Islam to me. The issue is totalizing ideologies that provide all answers. And there aren't that many. And there aren't that many of them left, right? Like Soviet communism died off.

It was a totalizing ideology. You see the art, the music, the cinema. You can spend your entire life in a Soviet mindset based on what was produced during that period. But not all totalizing ideologies are the same. No, they are. So it's like the martyrdom completely changes the game theory. Right?

Like if Putin was a martyr, we would feel differently about it. I promise. I'm just trying to account for it. Let me drag you there. So the first problem I have is that totalizing ideologies are dangerous because there's no way from outside to check them. So if there's an error, then you end up with whatever that error is to the 10,000 power. Now, when you drop in this as a strategy, the next reason I can't really respond to what got said

is that the language again that we use like both sides oh so what about Christian Arabs somehow they're not part of the Islamic jihad or Hamas but on the other hand they may have sympathies with it or on the other hand they may secretly hate it

and say how can we can't get better representation. Some of them may pine to live in Israel. I lived in Israel for two years, and I had all sorts of crazy conversations. And the spectrum of Arab perspectives or Drew's perspectives, it's a much richer place. And I worry already about the both sidesing, because it ain't both sides. It's so many different factions. And then in order to get at this, because the Israeli government will have to take action against the Hamas government, right? And so that is a both sides.

So let's talk about that, because you're arguing with the frame, so give us the frame the way that you think the frame should be. Well, my first comment is that you're going to use words like Palestinians. You're going to use words like occupied territories. Somebody else might use Judean Samaria, somebody else might say Palestine. As soon as I know the language,

I know that the arguments are going to be. This is not my language, and I don't believe these things, and I've agreed to be more or less silent on a bunch of things while there was a peace process, because peace processes are about BS to certain extent. You have to lie through a peace process in order to get something at the end of it, and that failed. So, you know, the first thing I'm going to say is,

I don't believe that this is an occupied people. I don't believe that the Arabs are under occupation. And that's going to sound crazy because you're not exposed to any perspective that sounds like that. So how could you ever come to that conclusion? You have groups of people who are offered a state who we are not listening to. They do not want the state that they are offered. They are offered a choice between a state and a chant. And if you know the chant, it's from the river to the sea.

From the river to the sea is what they chose. You could have a state or you could have a chant. And they want the chant. They are the tip of the spear in the global battle against Western hegemony, against an occupying European power in holy Arab land. And they're not going to give up on that as a collective political entity for a relatively modest, prosperous state trading with the occupier, with, you know, joint economics, joint faint. That's very troubling to us because we have this idea, why wouldn't you want a state?

You could have a state. You could be prosperous. You could send your kids to Purdue, you know. And that's not easy for us. This is basically, if you think about motherhood, you don't think about monkhousin by proxy. Right? Now, what do you do with a deal, what do you do when you have a mother who comes to the hospital with a child who's continuously getting sick,

you know, and getting harmed? You know, you have to ask, well, is it possible that the mother is harming the child? So you're about to see tiny children pulled out of rubble in northern Gaza. You're going to see it ad nauseum. you're going to see people rushing to the hospital. You're going to see mothers wailing.

So we can talk about the whole thing, about the martyrdom, and how everybody prays that their family will be martyred. And you know what? Sometimes it's true. Sometimes you see on camera somebody saying, thank God they took my son, you know, blah, blah, blah. But those are actually a much more complicated thing. Sometimes you turn the camera off and the person is crying

because they know what they're supposed to say and they know what they're actually feeling. So my problem with this is that this is that this is, is so much more complicated than the discussion we're pre-programmed to have that is guaranteed to fail. The richness of this problem where Hamas is effectively the mother in a Monkhausen by proxy situation, right? And the children, you're damn straight, you're going to be pulling babies out of that rubble because that's what Hamas wants. And Israel cannot figure out how to extricate herself from this dance of death. But that's why we're here. That's what we're talking about.

right so what I'm trying to say is you don't get out of this you have a very unconventional foe in Hamas and in totalitarian Islam and in jihad and in ISIS and Al Qaeda and for some reason mainstream media

refuses to show us the images that they showed us during the Vietnam War through mainstream outlets if you saw what I've seen if you if you watch watched the Hamas videos, the ISIS videos, the, if you read De Beek, if you did any of this stuff, you'd be sick to your stomach, you'd be a changed person. And we don't have that. I remember that the night my parents turned off the TV during the Vietnam War, one of my earliest memories,

I believe it was GI's heads on pikes carried by the North of the Viet Cong. You're watching American severed heads on sticks. If you think about all the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs from the Vietnam era, right, you're watching a monk burned to death. You're watching a street execution right to the head. You're watching naked children with their children with their clothes burned off from Nepal. You didn't see Falling Man. The most famous picture from 9-11 was basically not shown in the United States. There is this layer that is determined to push a fiction to us, which is a transparent fiction.

about the general nature of Islam. Islam is complicated. You have to study it. Multiple schools of thought beyond Shia versus Sunni versus Amadi. You can just in Sunni Islam different schools of jurisprudence, which lead to totally radically different outcomes between the Salafists and the Hanafi adherents. And what we've done is we've come up with this childlike concept of an oppressed people and a religion of peace.

and all of this stuff is unworkable. And it's all mind control and it's all propaganda. And what my feeling is, again, is I don't want to start the conversation from where I think you guys want to start it from. I want to start from the fact that none of us are prepared to have this conversation because we haven't been exposed to it.

We don't know what the real issues are. And if we take the terms that are handed to us, if we have the best and most intellectual conversation, it will still be completely morally defined. Let me just disagree with the, the general thrust of what you said there. Because much of what you said is true, but doesn't actually confound the argument that I'm making,

which is that all of that complexity is true. There's the complexity of Islam. It's this variegated culture, and it interacts with cultural contingencies that have nothing to do with religion, right? So there are things that we would object to under Islam, like female general mutilation, which doesn't have a really direct connection to theology, right?

And yet it's correlated with the Muslim world, but it's not exclusive to the Muslim world, et cetera, et cetera. It's all this hair splitting we can do. But there is a very simple core to this, right? The concept of jihad, the concept of martyrdom, the very clear prescription. You have a totalizing death call. I get it.

Yeah, death to apostates, right? This is the clearest piece of code. this is like eight lines of code that every time you run them produce the same amount. It's not the fact that it's the clearest piece of code same. It's the fact that it has no repressor bound to it to borrow a metaphor from DNA.

And so in Deuteronomy, we have repressor bound to bad code so the code doesn't run. The problem is that all the safeties are off the gun. You've got promoter rather than repressor for some collection of people. For some other collection... Eric, explain that in a different way. Sure.

It's too complicated. It's not that complicated. It's not that complicated for you, but it's too complicated for me to understand, and therefore, for a lot of people watching. So explain it simpler. Okay. We have code in Deuteron. A lot of the bad code in Islam comes from Judaism.

So Christianity and Islam are two of our most popular offsheds. And bad code has an inheritance property that sometimes it permeates through the system if everybody agrees that the Old Testament is important. In Deuteronomy, I believe there's a passage. By the way, what you said before about it being Quranic, I believe you were actually referencing a Hadith. I don't know if that's accurate about the ground. Yeah, yeah.

So I want to be clear about it. In Deuteronomy, there's a passage that says, for example, if somebody says, let's go worship God's unknown to our fathers set upon him with a stone. I don't think there's any record of Jews stoning an apostate, and proselypository, apostat. However, how you get that code not to run, is that you come up with some justification. For example, too bad about the second temple,

if we don't have the second temple, then we can't convene the same hedrons. If the religious courts aren't enforced, then who decides whether this is just and unjust, so unfortunately the code can't run. So we have got bad code that doesn't get run because it's blocked from running. And quite honestly, in many places in the world,

you've got bad code that is blocked from running. And so I don't want to have a conversation about you can read it right in the text. It's true. You can read it right in the text. But you have to think about the epigenetics. What is it that determines does this code run or is this code blocked? So the problem is you have got a totalizing death cult with all the safeties off the gun for some subset of people. And then we're going to have this conversation about are we going to be fastidiously accurate,

in which case it'll take 17 hours and nobody will want to watch it? Or is somebody going to say, do the conservative thing to say, well, something's going wrong with Islam. And then you've got all the collateral damage of reasonable normal people who are a vice president for inventory at some company who happens to go to the mosque. And he's thinking like, what does this have to do with me? And then you have got the weird issues about the sympathies, where you've got sympathies for completely insane positions from completely moderate people,

including now generically college students. college students are up for people firing automatic weapons into port-a-potties, having no idea who's inside. Is a mother nursing a child inside the porta-pot? Who cares? And to say, I stand with Palestine and show a hang glider for Black Lives Matter. Think about all the Black Lives Matter signs. Throughout the entire George Floyd thing, I was saying, don't support Black Lives Matter.

Now, Black Lives Matter was a piece of genius called Declarative Marks Matter. I don't know if you've ever heard it. So we had products in the 70s called, Gee, your hair smells terrific. I can't believe it's not butter. It was the name of the product. So the name of the product is called Black Lives Matter. How can you disagree with that?

You know? So Save the Adorable Puppy Dogs is what I would call a terrorist organization if I had to. Because how can you disagree with Save the Adorable Puppy Dogs? We're deranged by language. We're not watching things in mainstream contexts that would make us sick to our stomachs. and we are becoming infused with a radical ideology through the Democratic Party

that is as if it was liberalism adjacent. Like you've got radical left-wing death cults that want revolution for the oppressed, that have a seat at the Democratic table, at the same time that somebody like Sam or myself, traditionally a Democrat, is completely unwelcome. And, you know, my claim is that you're seeing an echo of this madness of jihadism inside mainstream American campuses. And there's one thing that I would like to add as well

is that my grandfather was an Arab. My grandfather was Venezuelan, but he originated from Lebanon. His surname was Saoud. And he was a Coptic Christian. And he was a doctor, and when he retired, he became a historian, and his books won prizes in his third language.

And we went to Israel on holiday. Now, I'm a Catholic, all our family are Catholic. And they said to my, grandfather, we said to my grandfather, would you like to come to Israel with us? Bear in mind, this is an story and this is a learned man. And he said, as long as I live, I will never set foot on Israeli soil, I will never put money in an Israeli pocket. And I think the other aspect to this conversation that we're not addressing is the hatred that exists on both sides. And we misuse that word hatred a lot. I hate peanuts. I hate the opposition football team. This is

hatred to its core. And what do you do with two groups of people, some of whom hate each other in its truest sense? Can you result that? It's worse than hatred, and it's simpler than Eric, you're making it out. It's not, granted, there's a ton of complexity, but the complexity isn't the main problem here. So it's worse than hatred in that, And again, I really do think this is a failure of empathy on the part of secular, rational people. They just can't get their heads around what it would be like to actually believe in paradise. Right? They've never met, at most they've met people who pretend to believe in paradise.

They just don't know what true belief is like, and therefore they can't kind of sympathetically run this particular piece of code and see its perfectly rational implications. I mean, how would you live if you believed that there was nothing more important than waging war for the one true faith and dying in the process? The only straight path to paradise

was to be martyred, right? It's the only thing that bypasses the resurrection and all of the uncertainty of whether you're going to get there. It's just like you're just whisked past the velvet rope and you're in the bottle room with God waiting for your friends and family to arrive, right? People can't understand what it would be like to actually believe this. And so they think there must be some other motive.

So when you read an issue of Da Bik, right, you know, the Islamic States highly professional newsletter or magazine. Great production quality. It was shockingly good. I mean, that's what I commented on it. It was actually a very bad sign that it was as well written and as well copied as it was. They know their stuff.

It was a big, no, because it shows you the quality of people they were recruiting from Europe, mostly. But it's, and I disagree with the analogy, the epigenetic genetics analogy, ran, because it's, there's not, this is a much shorter piece of code. It's a much more unified code. I mean, the Quran, there's much less self-contradiction in the Quran than you find in the Bible, right? Right? I mean, the Bible is, the Bible simply does not present a unified message, and it's very easy to pick and choose. And especially if you're a Christian, you wind up with Jesus and his better moods, and you could live a completely benign pacifist sort of life.

Or you could be, you know, a religious lunatic who's dangerous and divisive. You can sort of have it however you want to have it. It is much harder under Islam. It's not to say this is impossible. And as I said earlier. Islam is much better design. They absolutely need to find their repressor hardware to figure out how to make jihad just a matter of just war

and just war theory, you know, as the Christians have it, more or less. And spiritual struggle. That would be great. They have to figure out how to do it. It's damn hard to do it, especially when you look at the example of the prophet Muhammad, who's not a guy who got crucified and told everyone to wait for the end of the world. he was a conquering warlord.

I mean, it's like having Genghis Khan as your savior. I mean, it's just not a... Islam is much better designed, Sam. For holy war, for endless conflict. It's not a morally normative observation. It had the opportunity to look at Orthodox Judaism and Christianity, and it became a piece of code that is incredibly difficult to deal with.

down to the engineering of a priority of operations. I forget how it works that you have the, one of the chapters, the Sures. Yeah, yeah. The last ones are the ones that abrogate the other ones, yes. But the more violent ones abrogation.

But you also have an order of operation. So, as a piece of design, we can marvel at Islam. But you still have two very different traditions, one clerical, one more akin to Protestantism of a direct relationship to the code.

In Sunni Islam, you do have multiple schools of jurisprudential thought. What I'm trying to get at is you became fixated on the fact that normal, ordinary Americans, median American, cannot figure out how to talk about the problems that come out of totalitarian jihadi ideology. Well, worse than that, I mean, it's to the point you just raised about what's happening on college campuses. We've got the most privileged and ostensibly well-educated people in our society.

Students right now, today, at Harvard and Stanford, who are signing open letters in support of the murder of infants in their cribs. Who are in support of message killing. Let's be very specific. It's not murder, and it's not the number. Message killing is different than regular killing. Message killing is when you engage in an act and you make it cinematic and you make it hurt. and make it psychologically so disturbing

that you amplify power of each death. Saddam was an incredible practitioner of message killing. When you think about Luca Bratzi, you know, in The Godfather showing up with a vest with a fission and nobody knows how to read the message.

You have kids on college campuses who are so. supportive of message killing. And you think about how do you deliver the maximum amount of pain to a father? But these are the same people who are whinging about microaggressions and they need safe spaces,

they need trigger warnings, they think words are violence. They don't think any of that same. There was no woke ideology. You could not tie your shoes if you imbibed wokeism. It's such a contradictory collection of things that don't

makes sense. Michael Malice said on our show recently something that I think is not untrue, which is that these people don't use language to communicate. That's right. Right. However, one of the things that always worries me about our space is we critique others and we don't model and we don't talk about how to think. And I've asked, we've spent 40 minutes, I've asked both of you how to think about this

issue. We are nowhere near there. So let's try. You both put some ideas forward about how. how you see this problem. How do we think about this, Sam? If you're right, just for the sake of argument, this is all about jihadism.

I have an answer for you, but I certainly preface it by saying that, one, I'm not an expert in any of the relevant areas that will give me confidence in this answer. This is the internet, it's never stopped anyone. So I'm not, like, so I'm very... Have you been on Twitter, so? Not much recently. So I'm very happy that I'm not in charge here.

So I can say this, knowing that I have absolutely no responsibility to actually make this kind of decision. But what I think we in the West, however you want to conceive it, should do, is recognize that we are perpetually at war with aspiring martyrs. We're at war with jihadis. Now, how many people, like, fit in that description, actually exist in the Muslim world? is as yet undetermined, right?

But it's more than we should be comfortable with, and still most Muslims do not fit that description, obviously, right? And then there are kind of concentric circles of decreasing support for the project of jihad. But we have to recognize that we're at war with jihadism, and in whatever guys, whatever organization, or non-organization it exists. And we should be killing jihadis.

We're not going to negotiate with jihadis. We're not going to live peacefully with jihadis. When you raise your hand and you say, I'm a jihadi, that should make your life much more dangerous officially from the point of view of the Israelis, the CIA, anyone who's part of this project, But then we're back to Dresden. This is why I brought her up.

We're back to Dresden. I think this mostly should be covert. I don't think we need to take credit for this. I don't think the Israelis should say we dealt with a problem over here and the U.S. should say we don't have a problem here. Do you mean clandestine? How are you distinguishing those?

Clandestine means secret. Covert means deniable. I'm not sure I understand all that you're when the CIA undertaker. takes a covert operation. The idea that if discovered, it will be denied and that the links to the sponsor will be severed so that it cannot be traced back to the CIA. So, in other words, it's a pretty big distinction.

I just didn't know whether you were making it. Actually, I don't know, I don't know if it's important in this case. But this is an idea that doesn't originate with me. I think I first encountered this with the war correspondent and journalist Robert Kaplan maybe, I think it might even be before 9-11, he wrote on this. But just the idea that we need to, that all of this has to be public,

all of this has to be demonstrative, all of this has to be framed by speeches, that we need to declare, we're going to go to war in Iraq, right? You know, we're going to go to war in Afghanistan. I mean, if my thinking about anything has changed since 9-11, I mean, I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq. I was never a critic of the war in Iraq.

I never knew what to think about the war in Iraq, except I noticed that it seemed like a catastrophic distraction from the war in Afghanistan, which I absolutely did support, and which was, you know, a hopeless failure, it certainly seems. But so if my thinking has changed about anything, is this, the idea that we can do this project of nation building. Like by analogy with what we did with, you know, post-World War II with Germany and Japan, which are miracles of resurrection, really.

I mean, look at the enemies we had in Germany and Japan and look at the state of the world now, right? It's just the idea that they are our friends and collaborators and have been for virtually as long as we've been alive, it's an amazing reboot of civilization after it's near destruction. The idea that we can accomplish that in the Middle East and accomplish that in a Muslim culture just because we think everyone must want freedom on some level

and must want to run the same democratic code as we do and, you know, die their fingers and say they voted, I'm much more pessimistic about that project ever being fulfillable in the lifetime of anyone hearing this than I was. And so I think we should be very circumspect about owning anything. Because the other thing is that

because all of this is seen through religious lens on the other side. And it's all a matter of sanctities and their trespass as far as the eye can see. So you bring in infidel troops, even with the best of intentions, is to do anything good, and it's a sacrilege worthy of the murder of non-combatants, right?

So many people subscribe to this worldview, beyond just jihadists, that you just can't, the project is over with the best of intentions even before it starts. So I think, again, this is, and I say this is someone who doesn't know all that I'm getting wrong here, at least pragmatically. Like, I don't know, in terms of covert or clandestine,

operations, how you go about killing jihadists wherever they exist, you know, we should get as good as we can get at that, we should get as good as we can get at that. So the leaders of Hamas in Qatar, those guys, the clock should be ticking on those guys.

It is. Yeah, so that's the most important piece from my point of view. Jihad, as a job description, jihadism has to be failed. But these people aren't cowards. These people, These people who organize this expect to die. So one of the things that we say is that cowardly, it's not true.

I would never say that. No one has said that. Eric, let's stop arguing with stuff that's not being in. As the old joke goes, Sam, what's the difference between a moderate Muslim and a jihadi? The harassment of his sister at an Israeli checkpoint. The problem is you can't just go around killing jihadis because a lot of people express support for jihad who are never going to pick up a gun or strap themselves to suicide. So that's a distinction I'm making.

I mean, there are people who, in terms of the other very depressing thing is that if we, and we have poll results going back now decades, when you ask Muslim community is not just in the Muslim world, but in the West, what's your level of support for suicide bombing in defense of Islam, right? The numbers are awful, right? And so that's not what I'm talking about the people who are actually deciding to be jihad. They're going to get up tomorrow morning and their goal, their job is

how do I kill the infantil? How do I kill Jews? What was that? When did suicide bombing in Islam start? This is not, we don't have to talk about the Tamil tigers. It's not, it's a tactic. It started with the Beirut barracks, right? Yeah.

So we're talking about a relatively recent phenomenon. Yeah, but bombs are a relatively recent phenomenon. No, no, there was the golden age of hijacking before that. I'm not making any excuses for it. I'm trying to say that you're talking about something of such consequence. the idea that we should, if I take covert, that we should have an official policy of trying to identify people who are jihadi, whatever that means, which is very complicated.

They identify themselves, right? They literally move to Syria. I had a friend in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who you would have identified as a jihadi. And he said to me, once you go to Israel, we will never be friends again, we will never speak. I will have to hate you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He was the one who told me about the Hadith. He says, you know, remember that this is the tree that is the tree of the Jews that will hide you in the earth cries for your blood. It's an incredible mindset.

You and I are allied on that. It's a mindset that Americans have difficulty thinking through. But what you're talking about, when you talk about the decision boundary of which jihadis to kill. Yeah, so err on the side of conservative, right? I'm just saying we have to recognize we're in a hot war with jihadis. I think this is the same problem that you're having with Trump and other things, which is you are being invited into the abyss. You're not understanding.

But wait, let me just clarify what I'm recommending here because if you're not understanding it, the audience isn't understanding it. What I'm saying is much more conservative, at least in my view, with respect to collateral damage and the ethics of warfare, than what is likely to be happening. certainly what I think is likely to happen in Gaza, right? I think we should...

You want a lot of targeted surgical stuff. Hold on two things. First of all, let's let Sam finish. And the second thing is, Eric, I want to hear a positive proposition from you because you're kind of positioning yourself in a critique place from which it's much easier to operate. So let Sam finish his point. And then I want to hear from you what you think we should do, because otherwise it's kind of asymmetrical. So go Sam. So our progress morally as a civilization, especially in the West, as a global civilization, but especially in the West, has been on many fronts, but one crucial front is that we have become more and more uncomfortable in taking innocent life however defensively when we wage war. So collateral damage is that phrase is a euphemism. that hides just the gaseliest outcomes

where you have, you know, children orphaned and children blown up and every permutation of that horror. And we, because we've become more and more transparent to ourselves in how we wage war, we are increasingly less and less capable of waging war the way we did in World War II and Vietnam.

And I think that's, That's a good thing. It's a good thing until it isn't, right? I mean, I can imagine us getting into a war where we have to finally say, fuck it. We have to roll back our moral compass to 1945 because this enemy is hiding behind so many beautiful, blonde-haired little girls. All those girls are going to die.

Otherwise, we all die. So, like, that's conceivable to me. But I certainly hope we don't have a future like that. And so I think we should have a future like that. And so I think we should have a bias toward being more and more compassionate, more and more scrupulous, more and more aware of how intolerable it is for, in this case, completely innocent families in Gaza to have 500-pound bombs dropped on their heads, right? I mean, it's just, it's completely unacceptable.

The details are unacceptable. And I don't share your view that if we just saw more of the imagery that would help us calibrate here, because the imagery is so provocative. The imagery of a dead baby being pulled out of rubble is so provocative. It's impossible to think about what should happen in the world on the basis of that data point. That doesn't guide you. That just confounds you. So I think what I'm arguing for, and again, I don't understand the practicalities of this.

I mean, we need to bring in, you know, Delta Force and the CIA and people who actually know how you do things on that front to know what's possible. But I think, yes, anyone who joins a jihadist organization who's in the business of waging jihad, right, that should be a death sentence. That should be suicide, right? We should figure out how to make that, within the possibilities here, we should figure out how to make that so. And I mean, we have our friend Douglas Murray, who, you know, we both love and who's incredibly courageous and wise on this particular front. he's walking around saying that anyone who supports Hamas, right, even just anyone who gets out on the sidewalk and stands on one of these signs, as they have in this week,

supporting what happened in Israel, those people should lose their citizenship and be evicted from the UK, right? And I try to map that onto your free speech concerns in the U.S. how practical is that, how ethical is that? My free speech, sir. Well, just so you know, guys, Hamas is a prescribed terrorist organization in the UK, therefore to express support for it is a crime.

Okay, but like try to map that onto the American context. Sure. We've got Stanford students who are effectively those people, right? Not only are we kicking them out of Stanford, which I could sort of support. I mean, there's more to talk about there, but like, yeah, I mean, there's a certain form of cancel culture that would make some sense to me at this moment.

But on Douglas' account, we just send them to Gaza, right? Just drop them in Gaza and say, good luck. This is what you wanted. This is your worldview. Okay, that's an... When you're talking about extreme derangements of our civil society and our politics and our way of life

and boundary problems, how do we... Like, just what constitutes support for Hamas in these last seven? days, right, on social media and on the quad. It's an impossible problem. So you can be as judicious as you want to be. I just, and I would advocate that, but I think we have to recognize euphemisms aside that terrorism is not our problem. Jihadism is our problem. And it's not that we, it's not that we don't have other problems. North Korea is also a problem. The other totalizing dogmas are also a problem. This is a very specific problem that is not going away.

with us for as long as we're alive and as long as our kids are alive. Great. So, Eric, what is your vision for how we start solving this? My positive vision so that, okay, look, because you asked for it, I think in all of the appearances, I've never actually shared this publicly, but you're forcing the issue and I'm not hiding from it. It's just, if we don't do anything different, we're going to get what Hamas, wanted. So the first of all, I mean, the level of disagreement is very weird because it's 100% agreement on all sorts of factual things that you and I agree on. But, no, the pictures really do matter because when you pull a baby out of the rubble, the key question is, is that rubble

due to Hamas or is that rubble due to the person who dropped the bomb? Right? So we have this concept of suicide by cop. You're about to see suicide by cop or infanticide by cop or of monk has him by proxy via cop where the cop is the IDF. Agreed. Okay. If you want a positive vision, the baseline is Israel is going to flatten North Gaza, and there's going to be tons of death and destruction. And I would love to stop it.

The right thing to have done, in my opinion, which will not be popular, which will be much more hated by Arabs than the idea of killing families through collateral damage, is very simple. I know where you're going. I think I've read your mind. But go ahead. Israel has a claim on a lot of land that it controls. And the Arabs have a claim on the same land as two competing claims.

If you take the Israeli claim, you say, look, this land is ours. But we are not pigs. And we are not so attached to this land and we are not so blind to your needs that we would not give you a portion of land that we consider to be ours because it comes from our tradition, we have a schedule. If you want to live as brothers in peace, there are arguments between brothers and families, but if you want a prosperous state,

you go this many days without any loss of life due to terror, jihad, or any of these things. And we will cede this land to your future state so that they're guaranteed that there will be a Palestine, even though we consider the land to be ours. you're interested in rape. Here's how many acres we will annex. You interested in murder?

You're interested in blowing up families. You want to take an egg bus over a cliff. Whatever it is that you're thinking about. Here's the schedule of the acreage that you will lose. We will have an annexing ceremony, and we will name it after your victims. Whatever town, whatever settlement that we're going to put in that, and it'll be permanently a part of Israel. And so that way, when you do something to us where you're begging us to kill you and your children, to blow up your buildings, to bulldoze your houses, we're not going to fall for it anymore.

What we're going to do is we're going to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony. And what we're going to see is a larger and larger and larger state of Israel as your moronic death cult continues to grind against innocent life. So rather than have a single death, you're going to have a transfer of acreage. okay but that entails a lot of death right you're taking that acreage with tanks because every time first of all

there's a lot of land that Israel already controls that doesn't need to be taken by a tank you have a different situation in Gaza in particular right so Gaza first of all was it's not occupied it was given it's controlled in terms of its borders

but when you make videos showing how oh look you know we dug up all these pipes, we figured out how to get over the fence with paragliders, et cetera, et cetera. You understand now why the borders are being controlled. So, yes, there's a certain amount that you have to do, but you can certainly minimize this. If suddenly a giant chunk of land disappeared from the West Bank, and that was the response, and nobody died, for example. But how, there's people on that land? I mean, how does nobody die? Well, first of all, people have been transferred from land. And second of all, there are chunks of land, you know, there are settlements and things that have not yet been formally annexed to Israel.

What I'm trying to say, Sam, is that you're speaking to somebody who speaks only the language of violence. And the thing that I don't know how to communicate is I have a rule that I can't care about somebody else's children more than they care about their children. They speak a different, there's even more important language, which is the language of religious symbols. This is where I thought you were going. It turns out telepathy isn't real. I don't know. Actually, I was going there, but I saw what you were doing. They care much more about buildings than about their children.

If you really want to see that the wheels come off, Israel could say, listen, return the hostages in 48 hours or we blow up the dome of the rock, right? And they just rig that building to explode. What do you think happens? The entire world lights up, right? We're talking about, it's like that's Armageddon, right, over a building, right? This is, it's completely crazy.

It's all upside down. The ethics of this are completely upside down. You don't mean buildings because there are plenty of apartment buildings where Hamas has, you know, headquarters and builds rockets. I'm talking about the dome of the rock, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, but like if you're going to talk about emotional leverage, that's the point of emotional leverage. That's more than we're going to kill all your kids. that we're going to kill this one empty building, right? Sorry, I don't know where we are exactly. I'm just saying that that is, if you're talking about, this is where I thought you were going, that Israel does not have leverage saying, we're going to go back and take Gaza for ourselves,

or we're going to take more of the West Bank. That's not leverage. The whole place is as big as his living room. No, it's not true. It's a tiny... Sam, if you annex land to Israel, I guarantee you the world will freak you. It won't freak out as if you'd threatened

Alexa and I don't even want to talk about this because I don't want to get involved. I'm not saying I recommend that. I'm saying that that is how upside down the situation is. That would be the most provocative thing they could possibly do. That's actually under their control. Let's interrogate this

idea of annexing land because I think Sam criticism that I hear Sam's critique rather that I hear and agree with is that if you start annexing land you are going to have to do by force, which is when you're back to square one. Israel is the occupier state, flattening cities, killing babies, etc.

How is that different to where we are now? I'm trying to say that in the cycle of violence, what is sought by the architects of murder, misery, and horror is reprisal. Physical kinetic reprisal. I'm saying deny them that. But you're not going to deny them that. You're going to make them, the jihadis, if we have, accept that they exist, which of course they do, they are going to scupper that process with

everything they have by committing a trust. And then you're going to have to annex land on which Palestinians live, in which case you're back to collateral damage, occupier. Look, you've got a terrible situation, okay? We all agree. I'm not coming up with this as this is what to do when you have two normal foes that are in dispute over mineral resources. We know what that is.

This is not that. This is, I want, please flatten our apartment buildings so that we can pull the babies from the rubble. We have the cameras and we know how to do this in 4K, right? This is a completely different sort of an enemy. And my claim is the story of Israel exercising power over Arabs who are not Israeli citizens is a cancerous story. and if Israel does not figure out how to get out of that story, even to the point where it's got a state that it has to go up against in a war, and I agree with Sam that we fetishize now a level of morality

due to professional military ethics that is probably unsustainable in actual war between comparable rivals. We're going to have to get a lot less squeamish. People are going to die. this is what happens in war. There's always collateral damage. And the situation that I want, and again, this isn't particularly good for this 50th anniversary attack of the Yom Kippur War, I wanted this in place 20 years ago. Nobody would listen. And that was based much more around blowing up a pizza parlor. You know, okay, great. So there's land that we've always thought was

ours and we're going to formally take it and we're not going to have a reprisal and we're not going to have a bulldozer knock over a house. Because Israel is being induced into a game theory, according to the local rules of the Middle East, and then broadcast into a somewhat anti-Semitic West, this is the strategy of the Arabs in this situation, which is how to get Israel to play by local rules of the Middle East for exports into a sophisticated, somewhat, you know, anti-Semitic West for people particularly on the left who don't particularly like Jews and want to be engaged in some sort of recapitulation of the civil rights era or South African apartheid.

I agree. With that, 100%. But that does not mean that the solution you proposed works. And that's the thing that we're talking about. We just have to imagine what happens when you grab all that land. Right. Then Israel just has different borders, but there's still a war with jihadists and Hamas and anyone else.

You're going to be a war with jihadists forever, Sam. That's not going to end. And to be honest, and I can't believe we're not pushing back on this. The idea of killing people with sympathies, with jihadi ideology. I know, I said jihadists. I said, killing jihadists. Yeah. Sympathies, it was sympathies for jihadists.

You said, if I join a jihadi organization, does that make me a jihadi? Well, I mean, depends. We've killed Majid. Let's make it clear. No, he wasn't a jihadist organization. He wasn't a jihadist organization. No. Okay. I mean, so the book I wrote with Majid based on this, you know, verbal debate we had, Islam and the Future of Tolerance is there to be seen.

And Majid makes lots of interesting distinctions between jihadists, Islamists are a subset of Islamists, but they're also revolutionary Islamists who don't, who aren't, you know, signing up to be suicide bombers. And there's also Islamists who are not inclined to use violence. They're inclined to use the democratic process in order to impose Sharia law. But they're very patient, and they don't support al-Qaeda, and they don't support ISIS, etc. And then they're conservative Muslims who don't support any of that, but they're still way more conservative than you'd want them to be

when you're talking about things like honor killing or the rights of women, et cetera. So a lot to talk about. I'm talking about the people who are committed to waging jihad, who's like, that's their gig now, right? If the idea is that there's a bright line, which is that you own multiple suicide vests, you know, or even though you've never put one on, but you're certainly, you know.

But like the leaders of Hamas who are just sitting in Qatar right now, right? Like that, those should be the targets. Do you think those people have long natural lives ahead of them? I certainly hope not, right? But that's, the front line for me is there. It's not... I already assume that those people know

that they're going to die at Israel. Well, I don't know. I mean, we have a non-assassination policy, right? We, the U.S.? Well, yeah, I mean, democratic societies generally... Sorry, would say... Israel has a non-assination policy. No, no, no, I'm not...

But it would be disavowed. Anathema, given our current, again, I'm not even sure I know the rules of war that would govern Israel now, but you need a military lawyer to talk about the details here. What I'm saying is that we should recognize who the enemy actually is and what the problem actually is. And it's not that it's a matter of people with understandable, rational, grievances who've just been pushed too far. And if you could only cater to their demand. Homoss leadership is going to be killed.

Yeah. Well, but that would be a good thing, right? Nobody's arguing that. Okay, but there are jihadists in a hundred countries, right? I understand that. So I'm trying to figure out this idea, whether the CIA or the Mossad, because those are two very different organizations that work together. They should be unified on this front.

We should recognize that jihadism is a non-starter for the future of a global civilization that works. assume that the people in our covert agencies already know that. Well, I don't know if that's a safe assumption, but that would be... Do you remember the Abu Dhabi? I think it was Abu Dhabi video. The guy checks into a hotel, and then all the Israeli teams descend, and they track all of them in and all of them out? Okay, but given the failure of the IDF to not even prevent,

even respond to what happened last? I mean, it's just... What do you mean failure to respond? It hasn't happened yet. No, no. What happened in the first 24 hours? What did you expect it? What was I?

Everyone was expecting a better... No one was expecting people to be hiding in their houses for 24 hours begging to be rescued by an IDF that didn't seem not to exist, right? I mean, this is a colossal intelligence failure? It's a failure to even know what's happening at the border. It's a failure to respond to an emergency once it was unfolding. Do you know how degraded Israel is? Okay, but that's my point.

So you're asking me to assume that the Mossad and the CIA have this assassination program that I'm wishing for for Christmas well in hand. I can't make that assumption when you have a 1,500 jihadis come across the border and there's no response, right? Because everyone, you know, because it's Shabbat, and everyone's doing something, doing something,

something else, right? It's, it's, I don't think we can take for granted that we have this problem, that enough people understand what the problem actually is, because there's so many euphemisms and so much political correctness and so much multicultural bullshit confounding a very clear discrimination that relates to the power of specific ideas, right? You get one issue of d'abique, you should understand who the enemy is, right? And, In my experience, in my experience, in talking to people, especially, you know, overeducated academics, you know, you talk to an anthropologist about this, you just get a wall of confusion, right? So hopefully, again, I don't know, I don't know how clear anyone's thinking is when in the immediate aftermath of of young women being raped and stolen as hostages from a peace rave,

you have their counterparts at Harvard and Stanford celebrating it. Right. So I just, I don't think we can assume people know what the hell is going on and what they should be motivated to pay attention to now. And so that's why, if conversations like this have any value, it's in clarifying those variables. One thing that I wanted to touch on very quickly is you said something very interesting, which is, do you know how degraded Israel is?

And I don't think people understand that, and I certainly don't. So could you just expand on that, please, Eric? Sure. It is my belief that we have an idea that the U.S. is the superpower that won World War II, and I claim that that is not, we are not the same country that won World War II. We are so different from that country. Agreed. We are also different from that country.

from the superpower that we were during the Cold War. Unfortunately, we have incredible capabilities, particularly due to our technology, and we have some sort of problem in our own ability to project power that was manifest, let's say, in the pullout from Afghanistan, particularly with respect to, you know, abandoning the base in the wrong order of operations.

The people who carry out, who are tasked with carrying out certain operations are at different levels of readiness. Now, the big issue between 67 in Israel in the six-day war and the 73-Yom Kippur War is that Israel felt very, very vulnerable before 67 and then sort of reveals its military brilliance in power in 67. and then a short six years later, it is caught unprepared, the wrong image of its foes. The Arabs are always weak. They'll always surrender.

They don't want to fight, blah, blah, blah. They don't have the wherewithal. Okay, well, those beliefs completely cost Israel in 73. This is a recapitulation both directly and indirectly of the 73 situation, where we find out that Israel is not the Israel that we thought it was. And as a result, it's going through a psychological... Sam, you don't remember 73, do you? I do not.

No. So I remember, you know, I remember it a little bit. It was totally shocking. Right now, I think what we found is that parts of the IDF are greatly degraded. And Israel was going through incredibly stupid internal strife over Netanyahu right before this. And, you know, I hear about intelligence failure. I'm sorry. It's like I'm not part of the modern world.

It's not an intelligence failure. You set a reminder that your grandmother is turning 97 on your calendar, so it comes up two days ahead of time, so you remember to call. You don't set a reminder on the 50th anniversary of the greatest surprise in modern times in modern Israel? I just, it's almost to the day. It's like, you know, I think Peter Thiel was the person who pointed out to me that the Battle of Vienna happened on September 11th or something like this.

We should have a reminder on all of these things having nothing to do with intelligence. This is a complete screw up. And it's reflective of the fact that, and I'm very concerned about this. I don't think the U.S. is the U.S. it thinks itself to be. I don't think that Israel is the powerhouse that it thinks itself to be. It may get there in two months. It may be that it's not so degraded that it can't snap out of it. but I'm very concerned

you know we're mostly seemingly you know troubled by whether or not our SEAL Team 6 is transgendered enough we have to recognize that we have world responsibilities we have several politicians who want us to cultically

retreat into ourselves in a multipolar thermonuclear world with new biological capabilities I've been at the top of my lungs screaming Sam took me to Sydney, Australia, where I got up on stage and said, we need to be exploding rare thermonuclear weapons above ground. So people remind themselves of how dangerous the world has become. But we're in some sort of complacency in which we think Israel is this powerhouse.

But it isn't. And, you know, it's also the case that the human intelligence has probably degraded because Operation Magic Carpet and the like pulled Jews out of all. all of these places that natively spoke all of these languages in Muslim lands. So you could pull, you know, and Ellie Cohen and have an Egyptian Jew infiltrate the Syrian High Command way back when. But how many Jews can you recruit? How many Jews are currently operating secretly inside of Gaza with access to Hamas? Hamas is bragging that only five people knew the date and time, you know, of this attack. And so, you know, my concern is that Israel is much more vulnerable because it isn't the state it thinks itself to be, which is exactly where it was in 1973, and it's not a coincidence that they picked the exact anniversary.

Yeah, well, I certainly agree with all of those concerns. I mean, the one thing I actually am confused about it is you raised the concept once and we haven't talked about it. I'm not confused about jihadism, and I can't pretend to be confused about it. but anti-Semitism, I find genuinely confusing. Why? Just the dynamics of it, the fact that even in the immediate aftermath of something like this, it is operative in the places that it's operative. I mean, again, at Harvard, at Stanford.

Sam, are you really confused about that? Yeah. Because Eric actually disagrees with me in this, and I want to hear what you have to say, because we had a private conversation about it that we didn't get to finish. But isn't this, the thing that all four of us have been talking about and have been concerned about is woke, call it what do you want, ideology, worldview, a set of disconnected slogans, whatever.

The central core of it is oppressor, oppressed dynamics. And Jews, where do they land on that? But not in this case. I mean, it's... Oh, no, it's the oppressor being slain by the oppressed, is the argument, right? So it makes perfect sense that you'd celebrate that. Yeah, it doesn't, well, first of all, within this.

Anti-Semitism was just as real, even in America, when the crematory of Auschwitz were still smoking, right? I mean, literally you have anti-Semitic speeches on the floor of the Senate. You read David Wyman's book, The Abandonment of the Jews, right? It's just this catalog of kind of the ambient anti-Semitism in the U.S. during the Holocaust and after. So it's like just the durability of this animus, whether the Jews are on top or whether they're obviously on the bottom.

I mean, literally whether they're practically eradicated. I just find, yes, I understand it's historical origins, and they are actually theological. I mean, so it is Christian and Muslim theology that caches it out ultimately. But I just don't understand there are so many people are anti-Semitic and are interested in the idea that, you know, that there's some Jewish conspiracy that's controlling everything and the Jews are, you know, like if you're very far on the right, the Jews are not white, you know. So if you're white supremacists, the Jews are not white and therefore they're the object of your bigotry.

But if you go far enough left, the Jews are. extra white, you know, extra privileged, and therefore they lose in this victimology game. It's just the fact that it's so well subscribed whatever changes on the landscape, I find perplexed. Thomas Sol has a very good, sorry, Francis, just this one, then you go. Here's a very good explanation. He has a chapter in black, rednecks and white liberals called Arduz generic. And he talks about middlemen minorities all over the world, always finding themselves in this situation because of the role they fill in society, of the jobs that they do, being middlemen.

They're simultaneously misunderstood by the larger society. This is the confusion that Kanye had about his agents and managers. Pretty much. Pretty much. Where is Kanye, everybody? Well, he's our surprised guess, if he was sitting here, this episode would get a lot more views, let's be honest. But to me, it's anti-Semitism comes from a lack of control in people's lives. Now, if you look at, for instance, the far left, they would say the Jews are in control of the banking system.

The Jews, that's what the Jews control. If you look at the far right now, the new conspiracy theory is a great replacement theory. And what is that? The fact that the Jews are in control of Muslims coming to the West because they want to eradicate white people. I mean, it's obviously completely nonsensical. But this is what these people believe. But there's so few Jews. And so that, like, even in an area where they're massively overrepresented, right? I mean, even among Nobel laureates in physics, right, they're still a minority. They're not a majority of anything. And so the idea that they're in control is just...

It's moronic, but that's what these people believe. And they believe that this group, because that's what a lot of conspiracy theories come down to, this group are in control, whether it's a World Economic Forum, whether it's Jewish people. But it's people who feel that they have no control over their own lives. They are powerless. therefore somebody else must have the power, therefore it's Jewish people. Go on. Speaking as a Jew. Do you understand it, Eric?

Well, better than this. What a loving insult. Not meant to. I'm kidding. Go for it. Please. There is a spectrum of anti-Semitism, and we're talking about it. We're talking about the whole rainbow at the moment. And this sort of mutant rainbow has very different origins. So the reason, calling it woke doesn't really point to the fact that it's

revolutionary, it's violent revolutionary thinking. That's what's behind woke. The idea is we have a selling, we have a campaign. And our campaign is that oppression leads to poverty. so now you've got a real problem when you've got a very clearly oppressed group that is not poor because that breaks the entire syllogism that is being used to sign people up so the radical revolutionary left has to hate Jews because they are the counter example that gives the lie to the entire program and so that is why they have you have to have a position on a

on the Jews from the far, from the revolutionary left. Does they hate Japanese Americans as much? Well, it was going to say overseas Chinese, Parsis, you know. But that's because they're middle of minorities. That was my point. We can come back to this, but it was going to say then on the right, you have a different situation, for example. People on the right who are anti-I, I keep thinking about doing a show called my friends,

the anti-Semites, because I'm actually in dialogue with many of them. not to name names. And a lot of them are very supportive, in fact, of Israel right now. Because their issue is who came up with ethno-nationalism? That Swedes carrying about Sweden is ethno-nationalism? F-U! You know, people have a right to be in their country without somebody say, oh, that's just blood and soil like from the Nazis.

So their feeling is, how can you have an estate that is a Jewish star on its flag and not bring up ethno-nationalism. So these are the people that crowd your Twitter comments with, you know, for me, but not for the. That's their line. So their feeling is, hey, you should go defend yourself and get these killers and you should go back home to Israel where you belong, right? And so that's totally different than the last.

left-wing thing. But now the question has to do with a word that needs to be taken out of our vocabulary, which is underrepresented. Now, underrepresented, we talk about an underrepresented minority. I don't know why somebody's underrepresented. Between 1987 and the start of the Boston Marathon in 1897, I don't think there were any Kenyans or Ethiopians who won the Boston Marathon. And then after 1987, it's basically straight Kenyan, Ethiopian, occasionally, you know, a Japanese guy. Are they, are Kenyans and Ethiopians overrepresented? Or the rest of us underrepresented? Well, you're holding a competition that's basically anybody can start, anybody can finish, and some people seem to be better than others. All right. Now, if you look at,

you know, the so-called JQ, which is the Jewish question, why are there so many Jews in all of these powerful positions. If you believe in proportional representation, then Jews are overrepresented. And so you have to, if you believe in underrepresented minorities, you have to get rid of the overrepresented minority. So these are all these language traps and language games. And people fear how can there be a people that look more or less like they're of European descent, who often have names that don't tell you who they are, like McCormick or something

like that. who are privately subscribed to some sort of secret rhizome in a world in which nothing adds up. So particularly right now, anti-Semitism is always going to get bad when people can see that they're being lied to at scale. I don't care who's doing the lying at scale. The Jews will be assumed to be behind it.

That part is mysterious to me. I mean, that could just be legacy code. We had the protocols, the elders of Zion, and then that just got grandfathered in so that people resort to that. But the idea that that would be the story that everyone reverts to. Say more.

Why the Jews under those conditions? You said it was just as though we could just assume this makes sense. If you look at, for example, who founded Facebook and who founded Google, right? Tech giants. You've got Jews in both situations. If you imagine, okay, so our electronic communication with each other is largely mediated our ability to search, for example.

So if I put in American inventors and only black faces come up at Google, I know that somebody's put code in there to make it appear that most of the inventors in American history are black. Who would do such a thing? Like, it's such an obvious, bad faith thing to do on a search engine. And then, of course, it's going to be, well, it's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, you know, or if Mark Zuckerberg doesn't allow a story to circulate or whatever. And so, in part, and by the way, you may start to see this with Indian Americans. There's this very quiet, you know, to use the vernacular of our day, Indian Americans are having a moment. And you're suddenly going to realize that you don't.

understand what's going on with the BJP. You don't know who the Shiv Sena are. You have no idea what Indian Americans care about and suddenly they're in all these powerful political positions. So when you have a powerful minority and particularly one that's visually indistinguishable from others, there's always going to be a fear that because you have high-ranking people in media, banking, universities, all of these, you know, fantastically successful Jewish populations are always going to be on the hook for the fact that people can see that their information is distorted. And why aren't you successful, Eric? Well, you know, the old answer I gave Joe Rogan when he asked me about why one quarter of one percent of the world's

population would get 25 percent of the physics Nobel Prizes that we cheated physics. But nobody believes that. I think one way of answering this question is I don't know. I don't know why 99 of the top 100 chess players in open competition are male. It feels like a trap to answer the question. I would say that our culture is very clear that if we want to survive, we have to do really, really well and we have to contribute back. So as a diaspora culture, in part, our strategy is over-succeed, over-contribute to your host society. otherwise we can't make our equation work. So in part, it's a question of anthropics. You're only asking the supposed JQ because there are still Jews after this many thousand years,

and the strategy works. And, you know, just go, if you're in the U.S., for example, go look at who donated the wings of your local hospitals and tell me what the last names are, and I guarantee you that some of them are going to be Jewish, no matter where you are. So in part, this is how we live. We live by being a net benefit to the societies in which we reside. And we drive ourselves incredibly hard knowing that we're always going to be fighting anti-Semitism. So the example I was going to give is during COVID, I didn't understand that our family's reaction was,

use the time indoors to learn as much as you can, push yourself as hard as you possibly can, would be badly received in the outside world, which is like, of course, you're doing that, because you're in a position of privilege. And you just have this attitude of, you know, for F's sake, if you want to look at a similar culture, there's a female comedian named Zarnagard, who is explaining sort of the Indian tiger mom approach to parenting your own children.

You cannot major in history. You can't major in art. You're going to major in computer science. This sort of drive to excel and succeed is very, very costly. And I understand a culture that doesn't push their kids as hard. But to be honest, if the Jews are going to survive, they have to compete. They have to do very, very well in the competition, and they have to give back. And anyone who attempts to talk about proportional representation is fundamentally messing with the Jewish equation for survival.

If we cannot compete, succeed, and give back, we have a serious problem as Jews. What about IQ? What about it? I have heard that different groups have different IQs. I've heard the same thing. And Ashkenazi Jews, I have heard, have a higher IQ than the average. You know, no offense to that. I think what you really want to say is, is there anything to Jewish genetics?

And gosh, I would hope so. Because otherwise, we don't know anything about genetics. Why can I spit in a tube? And it tells me what my belief structure and what language I pray on Friday night. It's, you know, clearly it's both. a genetic group and a belief structure that have co-traveled. But for IQ, I always find this really strange. IQ is just not that interesting in the upper reaches.

So I'm totally up for believing that Jews have a genetic advantage, but I don't think that a few extra IQ points accounts for the level of creativity and the level of contribution. I think IQ is really powerful below 100. It's much less powerful above 100. This is sort of something that Nassim Taleb and I have discussed. The fetish about the fact that it's measurable causes this real problem because it's a nightmare indicator. It's good enough to suggest that something is very real that can be tracked that has a genetic component.

But it's not good enough to explain creativity. And I think that, for example, if I talk to my East Asian friends, a lot of them are confused. And they say things like, where does Jewish creativity come from? We also are supposed to have very high IQs. And we're still in a leader follower mode. How is it that we get into this Jewish creativity mode? So I happen to think that because people are dissuaded from talking about IQ, because they're dissuaded from talking about genetics, they want to focus on IQ as if it is

intelligence, which it is definitely is not. It's a component. It's related to intelligence, but it isn't. And then you have this problem, which is that in some sense, what really matters is the creativity that co-travels. And how much of that is genetic? I don't know. But it's not a terrible thing to say that people are genetically different and that there are tradeoffs. You know, the Jewish contribution to the National Basketball Association has been pretty meager. Eric, do you think... I blame anti-Semitism. Rampant.

Yeah. Do you think it's also the fact that Jews have always tended to be outsiders? And when you're an outsider of a group to a group, you're always looking in, which means that it tends towards being creative, because then what you were doing is you're reflecting the society in a way that people who are a member of the in-group simply cannot. there's a lot of people who say comedians tend to be outsiders. Comedians are the ones who are reflecting what is happening to the society. And Jews and comedy, I mean, they got together pretty well.

Comedy, trauma and Jews. I mean, it's a perfect combination. I don't think that works because, like, Roma would be outsiders to society. And, you know, I don't think you've seen the same sorts of behavior patterns. Having taught the Roma, having spent a lot of time teaching Roma, but they are much more segregated. They're not really part of society in the way the Jews are. There's also a lot of creativity in that culture,

but without the same, you know, in-system accomplishment. I think the Jews tend to be in-system. They tend to work within the structures that they find. And, you know, my wife being from the Jewish community of India, you know, I have an opportunity to see a very different world about, you know, the impact of, let's just to say, you know, the Sassoon family or the way that the Parsis mirror the Jews inside of an Indian context. So I think that, you know, there's, I don't know why we're

afraid of talking about genetics and cognitive ability. I don't know why we're afraid of talking about culture and cognitive ability. I don't know why we're afraid of talking about culture and drive together. But the world is not uniform. And there is a Jewish strategy. The great part of the Jewish strategy is, is that most of it is pretty much open source. And if you want to push your children really, really hard to survive, and if you want to tell them you've got a dragon with breathing fire down the back of your neck because you've always been oppressed and you'll never know when you have to leave very quickly on short notice, you can duplicate the Jewish experience. Good luck. Tim, do you have any thoughts on this before we move on?

Please don't see. So I have zero interest in IQ, as I've always said, even though I've gotten a lot of pain for having ever touched the topic. But my only interest in differences in human intelligence as measured by IQ or otherwise

between groups is that we need to solve the political puzzle you just mentioned, which is why does anyone think that discovering these differences would be a political catastrophe? Because we know

this is what we should go into the science knowing this. I'm not saying we should look for these differences, but these differences will ambush us because insofar as we understand intelligence or anything else at the level of the brain or at the level of the genome, we will just, you know, 23 and me is just going to tell you that there are these differences between groups

in the relevant genes, say. So I'm not saying we look for these things, but we're going to be ambushed by them, and we just have to know, in advance, that any human trait that is governed by genetics, to whatever degree, is going to be, the moment it becomes measurable, it will be at some different mean value

in different populations, however you define those populations, even spurious populations. You could take Yankees fans against Red Sox fans, and it will be a miracle if the hundred traits you're interested in to inventory have the exact same mean level across those two groups. Now, in many cases, these are just going to be spurious comparisons.

But insofar as there has been a genetic kind of canalization throughout human history where you can look at someone and give a pretty good guess that they're, you know, they come from sub-Saharan Africa or from the Indian subcontinent, or Japan or Norway, and you can do that, you have to expect that there are going to be mean differences in traits that we find valuable. And that can't matter.

I mean, the thing that we know must matter is that we are committed to political equality in all of our pluralistic secular societies, and we should be. And the fact that there's some trait that we could eventually identify and measure that is going to be a standard deviation more or less on average in any given population.

That's just that can't matter. And what we know is that at the individual level, it simply can't matter because knowing that I'm 50% Ashkenazi Jew doesn't tell you anything about my intelligence. Right, like as an individual, I still have to demonstrate that. And it's just not, and I get absolutely no credit. If I'm not, if I'm smart and not a bit smarter, I get no credit for having, being in one population versus another.

The interesting thing is we don't have the Persian question, because Persians are going to test really high. We don't have the Irish and Scottish question. We don't have the overseas Chinese question, right? We don't have the Parsi question. So I think you have to turn it around and say, look, there's a lot of asymmetry in terms of success of groups. And we only have the Jewish question. And I think that this is what I find absolutely offensive. No, we only have the Jewish question in Western Europe.

But Thomas Sol's point was that there are Jews everywhere. They're just not Jews. They're somebody else. In Asia, it's overseas Chinese. In the Ottoman Empire, it was Armenians. You can go down the list, right? So there are local Jews in every area. They don't all look like you, right?

That's really the point. But I think the broader point with both of what you're saying and the reason that we're terrified of these conversations is that it violates the sacred mantra of our society, which is all, we're all equal. You know, this is embedded in all our conversations. No, no, no, no. We're all politically.

So there's two notions of equality here that we can be, we can conflate. Political equality does not at all suggest that every person is equally talented, equally kind, equally smart. I mean, there's just making equal contributions to society. But people don't make that distinction in their head. That's why. Sorry, even the communists, the aphorism of communism is what, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. The idea that we are somehow blank slate equal is totally new. It's beyond communism.

I don't know how to state this. That's why I'm saying. It's worse than communism. It's worse than communism. It is. It is. And the idea that human beings don't vary, including by group, is just demonstrably not true. And the idea of political equality seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, was invented to address that.

That's the whole fucking point. Yeah, yeah. And we know we want a society that is fair, and that's completely independent of the differences between people. Like, like, it's just, we, we want everyone to have the, in terms of our ethical and political commitments, we want everyone to have every opportunity they can use, right? And if there's some people who can't, I mean, through no fault of, like, there's someone right now being born from whatever population, with whatever genetic endowment, whatever culture surrounding them waiting to improve their lives, with brain damage based on just a pure accident of what happened during labor, right?

what do we do for that person? We, you know, in a society where we have the bandwidth to just figure out how good life can be, right? We're not, you know, where the bombs aren't falling and we're not facing some existential threat, we know we want to marshal our resources to make life as good as possible for everyone to the degree that they can have their hopes and dreams realized.

And there's some very limited hopes. hopes and dreams that we need to cater to. I mean, just look at a make a wish foundation, right? It's like you have kids who have pediatric cancer who've got a time horizon of six months. What does a good life look like in that case? We know that success politically and economically for us in our society is to have the bandwidth

to cater to that compassionately. And that's what the project is. figuring out what the mean value for an IQ is across groups is not part of that. And it's not an insult to that either. But if in our founding documents we have the idea that all men are created equal and we know that at that time women didn't have the vote and people held slaves, I don't think it's the case that one part of our soul cries out for equality at this more beautiful level.

And another part of our soul says, oh my gosh, these groups are super. super dangerous. They cannot accumulate more power, right? And that part of our soul, we don't acknowledge that we have our thumb on the scale trying to figure out who really shouldn't be voting, what information shouldn't be at in the public because it will tend to prejudice people. And I believe that in some sense we're just not able to be honest about our conflicts when we stay things like one man, one vote, and yet Wyoming gets two senators and California gets to senators, it's clearly honored in the breach. And we don't make eye contact with the fact that we are of many minds about equality and about accomplishment and achievement and what

constitutes fairness. And in all of those different circumstances, we only feel comfortable with the part of the conflict that we can talk about in public without being eviscerated. And I think that we have to just be honest that we've been very uncomfortable. about what is the form of equality that we are really about. And one of the things I love about the American project is that our documents were abstract enough that things that weren't honored initially in the first instantiation are honored over time because there wasn't an explicit clause saying that women in blacks don't count. Right?

And so as a result of this, you know, we debated should only landholders, you know, be allowed to vote. the headroom in the documents is the thing that we should embrace. And it's one of the reasons why the 1619 project was so dangerous is that we happen to have the good fortune of having wonderful documents with headroom that can mean things that weren't meant when the Republic was founded. And trying to figure out how to become those people that we have never been is part of the most exciting,

maybe the most exciting part of the American project. Francis, we've got one more topic we can open up quickly. Do you have any thoughts? Yeah. So I want to deal because I want and I want to discuss this, which is hope, because it's very easy, particularly in the landscape that we're talking about, social media and all the rest of it, to become pessimistic. But let's look at hope and the grounds for hope.

Are you hopeful, Eric, as to the future, as to the American? This is the one on which I go first? Yeah. Give it to Sam. Okay. Well, just this morning I read a Connor Friedrichs Dorff. I always forget his last name. The Atlantic writer, he wrote a piece today,

which struck a note of hope in this emergency, which I'm not sure, I certainly hope he's right. So he said that just as Joan Didion in one of her books, I think it was the White album, I'm not sure, said that the Manson murders were the end of the, the official end of the 60s, right? August, 1969, all the idealism of the 60s just completely. Once you have, you know, wild-eyed hippies

murdering people, you know, killing pregnant starlets, all the idealism of the 60s just evaporated, right? So his claim, and I... possibly right. What happened on college campuses in response to what happened in Israel was the end of the great awokening in his phrasing. It's like all of us are waiting for the pendulum

to swing back from this just crazily eccentric distortion of ethics and political intuitions on the far left. And he's arguing that that bell just rang this week. And I certainly hope that's correct because the moral, not just untenability, the abomination we're witnessing where you have the same people who are equally exercised over, you know, Halloween costumes that are cultural appropriation. And they're defending what happened in Israel last week.

it's that, you know, that dissonance, I think, is something we need to not lose sight of culture-wide. And, yeah, I mean, I think if that happens, I think that would be a very good thing. I mean, it would be a very good thing

for speaking locally, for American politics. I mean, we have a, you know, 15 months or so of an election cycle that many of us worry could be, truly ugly and divisive, and to not have a crazy, having a decreasingly crazy far left and Democratic Party as a result would be a good thing. If you ask me, just picking up from the Joan Didion reference, if you look at the passage,

it is the white album, carefully, what she says is that there was the sense that someone was going to go too far, right? So she's really talking about a period between 1967 and 1969. It's really only sort of two or three years when the 60s were at that fever pitch. And then she says that it ends at that moment. It's one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read about our time, but I don't think it's accurate. I think that we've been in this probably since the Ruslin Ali, dear colleague letter in 2011. It's now 2023. This has been going wrong for a lot longer. It's much more deeply enmeshed in our society.

I don't know that the hippies at the free clinic in San Francisco were akin to the administrators in the diversity, equity, and inclusion substrate that is now infesting all of our universities. When it comes to hope, to be honest, one of the most hopeful things that happened, and I hate to put it in these terms was the death of Diane Feinstein. And I don't, I'm not dancing on her grave.

I didn't particularly have any strong feelings except for the fact that she was clearly not able to do her job and was being propped up by the system. And so without feeling good about the fact that someone died, although she lived a long life, there is the sense that we will never get rid of Nancy Pelosi. We will never get rid of Mitch McConnell. We will never be free of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in the form of Biden and Trump.

And of course, demography is going to have its way with the things that are blocking progress. We have had the same people in power for so long that we have given up, in effect, trying to make a more hopeful world. If you think about Joe Biden in 1972, he was 29 years old and a senator. And he's been there ever since, more or less. So hope comes from the fact that in 10 years' time, these people who seem like they would never leave the stage are going to be gone. And we have a one-time opportunity to reorder the world around AI, around a different generation of leadership,

around the fact that our phones really matter in a way that are far more consequential than a piece of technology would be expected to, much more akin to the printing press. and there are going to be a crazy set of opportunities that if we screw them up will probably mean the end of the world and if we don't screw them up, we will be exploring the next systems, the successor systems. Instead of trying to take a twin-fitted sheet

and put it on a king-sized mattress and that one corner was always going to pop off, that's what we've been doing for decades now. Sooner or later, somebody's going to have to buy or manufacture a much larger sheet for this mattress to get it to stay in place. And I think that what we're seeing is I was previously hopeful

that the post-World War II order would continue to hold so that the world didn't go multipolar with weapons of mass destruction. I think we're about to go multipolar. And if we survive that, then whatever structures that come after this, it's not going to be capitalism,

it's not going to be communism because you can see the CHETGPT and its successors are going to break the capital versus labor input. This is work that I'm doing with Pia Malani. we're going to have new economic systems. And it's not going to be the same players from the 20th century who are already a quarter of the way through the 21st preventing progress.

And it comes down to, well, what is it that people in their 30s through 50s are going to re-engineer once the silent generation and boomers move on to better things. All right. Well, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to locals where we ask Eric and Sam. your questions and continue with our own. So what you're saying is you're pro-Trump's.

Yeah, so. Build the wall. Bill the wall, exactly. You have recently made the decision not to speak to some people who disagree with you. Why is that? I think Brett is one of them. Let's not because they disagree with me,

but because I think they've behaved unethically. I've always thought Brett was an extremely ethical person. I don't know how he got so turned around.