Unholy War: A Conversation with Tucker Carlson on DarkHorse

It's going to be a strange one. You've probably noticed that this is not the usual set. I am, of course, sitting with Tucker Carlson, a friend of mine, in his set. He is graciously agreed not only to talk to me today on Dark Horse, but also to let me use his studio. So thank you for that and welcome to Dark Horse.

Oh, it's an honor.

“We talk so much on the phone and I think if he was one of the world's wise and saying people,”

let's just sublusting to have you hear something. Well, thank you. That's very nice of you to say. I will say this is a, this is a mission for me and let me just say up front. I don't do interviews.

I'm not a journalist. I'm a biologist as you know. And I have discussions with people who are worth having discussions with. So I'll probably talk more than I would if I was interviewing you. But let me tell you a little bit about what my mission is and why I decided to come here to talk to you.

I've known you for some time.

“We met you probably remember in 2017 when Evergreen melted down and you reached out.”

You wanted to talk to me about the story and at the time I thought having been brought up as a liberal. That you were a terrible guy and I got your invitation and I thought long and hard about whether or not to accept it. Because I assumed that what you would do is you would make use of the fact that I a liberal was being backed against the wall by other liberals. That as a professor at a radical college that I got what I deserved and that it was a Faustian bargain. I was making by coming on your show because I needed to get the story to a wider audience or they would succeed in doing to me what they attempted to do.

But that it was going to be humiliating and costly.

And you and I had never met.

In fact we didn't meet in person that day. I was in a remote studio. And when I got there I was late in traffic. Got there. I was literally sweaty. We were late from the commute. And I like to threaded the microphone down. My shirt and plop me in a chair.

“I didn't get to brush my hair. I wiped the sweat off my brow or any of these things.”

And you and I started talking and what I was very surprised to encounter was that you were in sensed on my behalf that you were compassionate. And that you saw this as an unfair demonization of a fellow American who deserved better. And it rocked my world. Because here I was faced with this arch conservative someone who had been painted as a demon. And he was expressing compassion for me and it was clearly genuine.

At the same moment that my colleagues who knew me and knew that the allegations against me were false completely abandoned me. With one exception I will say there was one courageous person on the faculty. Mike Peros, a big animal that who also happened to be a professor. He was having none of it. But the rest of the faculty abandoned me and how they're completely and yet you stepped in. So first of all let me just say thank you for that.

And thank you for the friendship that has evolved since that time. I really appreciate you.

Well I always am with the man against the mob period and I really appreciate especially now men of principle.

And bravery and I saw both of those and also by the way I agreed with you. I don't think we should reduce people to their race. Like I've never thought that. I never will think that. No matter how much pressure there is in me to think that I will never think that. Either this episode of the Dark Horse Inside Rail is sponsored by Armra Colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food.

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Go to armra.com/darkhorse or enter Dark Horse to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's ARMRA.com/darkhorse. So, to the mission that brings me here today, I have watched you being raked over the coals in the last year, especially for bigotry. That's the accusation against you. I will tell you, I have a complicated relationship with questions of anti-Semitism.

I grew up in LA.

“I think you grew up in Lahoya, not terribly far apart.”

I didn't experience much anti-Semitism of note growing up at all. The occasional joke about Nazis, but nobody meant it. It wasn't an important issue on the playground where I grew up. Then I did encounter someone. I became a professor.

There's a kind of reflexive anti-Jewish sentiment amongst American academics. But again, it was tolerable. People, you know, when they know you, they look past it, and you know, it certainly doesn't reflect everybody. But it's definitely present on an American college campus. But in recent years, the amount of anti-Semitism that I encounter is tremendous.

I believe it. I don't know if it's bots, some of it surely is. I don't know if it's paid shills who are either trying to gin up discord in the American populace, or if anti-Semitism is politically useful. I don't know what it is, but I do encounter a lot of it now.

It's a regular feature of my life. And I will say that there's a wide spectrum of anti-Semites. You know, there are flat out gas to choose people. I run into them. There are also people who have kind of a reflexive distrust of Jews, which, frankly, you know, when I know somebody like that, I don't toss them out.

“I try to model what I think Jewish values are, and hopefully that breaks through.”

So, in any case, as the accusations of anti-Semitism have been leveled at you, I've had a familiar experience. It's the Tucker Carlson experience. All right, somebody says, "He's a bigot."

The evidence is out, he's finally said the quiet part out loud.

And then you click through to the supposed evidence, and you find Tucker Carlson talking about how terrible it is that we have an open southern border. And you realize, "Okay, that's not bigotry. That's just being rational." So, I've had that experience many times having nothing to do with Jews or anti-Semitism or anything like that. And I'm having that experience again when I hear you accused of having bigotry against Jews. Yeah, when I click through to the evidence, it's not there.

And more importantly, when I listen to you, especially your monologues, which I want to get back to, but when I listen to your monologues, I hear a very thoughtful, careful presentation that does not show any evidence of bias against people based on what lineage they come from at all. I hear an American Patriot. You and I disagree on some things. I don't think it's all that many, but I know that we do. I am a liberal, you are a conservative, but I don't find bigotry.

Well, a September, you had an event. I think it was in Lancaster. And I happened to be in Pennsylvania and, you know, it was a number of hours drive and it's like, "Look, okay, we're in close proximity. I want to go talk to Tucker." And when I did that, one of the things on my mind was that I wanted to have a conversation where there were no cameras present, you know, the stakes were low. And we could actually talk about the experience of being an American Jew, your experience of interacting with other Americans.

And I could sort of gauge where you were and just see if there was anything lurking in you that I needed to know about. And again, I wouldn't have abandoned you as a friend if I had found some sort of reflexive distrust, but I didn't find it. It's not there as far as I can tell. So, in any case, as you've been ranked over the calls, I've felt that it was my obligation to actually give my perspective as a Jew and American, and somebody who knows you personally and just say, "You know what? That's a false accusation based on everything I can see in my personal experience."

I appreciate it. I, I mean, there's so much to say, but I appreciate your saying that I've been called a bigot for so many years because I have been.

And it happened for really for the first time around 2017 when I interviewed you and the core premise of that interview and we both shared that assumption.

We're exactly the same age from exactly the same part of the country, so I do think the way we grew up in forms are fuchs.

“But I were both Southern Californians in our mid-50s. Was that you should not reduce someone to his race?”

And the whole promise of America is that the individual matters and that you can kind of leave behind the sins or the triumphs for that matter of your ancestors can kind of like be responsible for the choices that you make. Which I have always believed that. I think it's, by the way, I think it's a fundamentally Christian perspective. I think it's the basis of Western civilization, so I think it's worth defending, but it's also my default. So anyway, I felt that way my whole life. And they call me a bigot, you know, anti black or whatever, and it bothered me at first.

But the truth is, I don't have that many black friends, you know, I'd like to really close by, like you don't come to your house for dinner type friends, and both them, like please.

I also never was ever hassled not one time by black people in public, never. Black people always like hug me at the airport, like okay. You know, it didn't have like personal effects of me. I grew up in a very Jewish world, like I've been the way I went to Hawaii country day school. I don't know what percentage Jewish it was. It wasn't a lot, and I've million Jewish friends. I've been in the media my whole life. Just a fact, lots of Jews in the media, lots of my friends mine. So this round has been totally disruptive of my personal life.

In a way that I grieve over, because in the end I care about individual people, not all people to care about like people I know and love. And it's driven some of them away from me and in ways that are so painful. I'm not whining, but I'm just saying like, I've thought a lot about this because it has been so painful.

“And I would say two things. I think the core problem about our this whole discussion is the conflation of the nation state, the modern nation state of Israel with all Jews.”

And for the record, I've never been, I said this a thousand times. It's true. I've never been against Israel.

Took my family their invocation. So I mean, I didn't, not an Israel hater. But the second you say that the modern state of Israel is the same as global Jewry. And then you say that the United States has no divergent interest from Israel. We're exactly the same country of exactly the same interest. You're on a collision course, man, and you're, it's going to hurt a lot of people on a personal level as well. So you can't criticize Israel because that makes you an anti-Semite.

That has been the rule for a long time and I've just kind of lived with it because it wasn't worth it. But the second we started moving toward a war with Iran and I knew that we were because it's my job.

“And I had a very clear picture of what that would mean for the United States. And unfortunately, I think it's turning out to be true.”

I feel sad about it. But I, I mean, a conscious decision, I know I'm going to take a lot of grief for this. I didn't realize how much. No idea. But I was like, I'm going to say something because I don't want to go to war with Iran. It's just kind of that simple. And because that's the first thing. This was all inevitable, unfortunately. And the second thing is that there are people who seem to be trying to inspire hatred. And it's, no one I know really well personally. But it's a couple of very loud voices who are trying to make people hate them.

And I don't understand what that is. And I'll, you know, I hate even to use their names. It's all this name one because I sort of know them as Mark Levin.

I have the year of Trump. I had the year of Trump. He does too. So, you know, turning me into a Nazi is helpful to getting to his goal. I get it. He's a goal oriented guy. Not mad about it. I understand what's up. Watching the way that he's responded to Megan Kelly has been a, like, a radicalizing experience for me. Because I know Megan Kelly he does too. And Megan Kelly is sincerely moderate on this question. Most of her friends are Jewish.

Um, she always liked Israel. She did show after show about how October 7th was terrible. Great.

“And she said, like, she refused to denounce me. I think that's how it started.”

Or something like that. I mean, is my friend about going to denounce him. Candace Owens or something. I'm not going to denounce her. They have called her a Nazi. Like, actually a Nazi. So what's the effective that? And at some point you realize, like, the effective a system is what it does. So if you wind up doing something over and over and over, that's the point of what you're doing is to affect that outcome. And they have not turned people to their side, to their cause. They haven't convinced anybody.

They've instead inspired hatred. And I feel like it's on purpose. Like, what's the point of that?

And I don't know the answer. I don't know why you would ever want to inspire hatred of yourself.

“Well, Vin is doing that. But he clearly wants it. And I think there's complicated psychology there.”

Maybe there's a strategy that's so advanced I can't understand it. Maybe there's spiritual elements of play. I really don't know. But if your goal was to turn down the temperature to make people more supportive of the Netanyahu government, which is a totally fine goal as far as I'm concerned. I disagree, but I don't think it's a legitimate to want people to like Netanyahu or something.

This is the opposite of what you would do so clearly. We've exceeded my intellectual capacity. Like, I don't understand what this is, but I know it's not what they're claiming it is.

Or else, BB and I've called these, well, I know a lot of people in these really government. I've been there a number of times and I know them. I've done with them for many decades. And I've called over and been like, dude, this is not helping you. I don't understand why you're allowing this. They're controlling the message to pretty directly actually. And this is the wrong message. It's not going to help you in the end. If you want allies in the United States, don't behave like this. I've literally said that. I said it to Danny Danit, who is, you know, long time is really political figure ambassador to Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

I'm a reasonable guy, smart guy. And I said this to him and he's like, yeah, tough. So clearly, there is a strategy here again. I'll just stop at this that I don't understand. And, but it's not it's bad. It's going, it's dividing our country. You run into real anti-Semitism? Yeah, I believe you. I believe you. And I'm very jaded about that. Everyone's like, oh, people hate me. I believe that you're running into real anti-Semitism. In fact, one of the reasons I don't want to go on X, it's, it's crazy.

He's sort of all kinds based on people's bloodlines. And like, we live in a country that has no majority of anything. And so if that's the state of play where my tribe hates your tribe, I don't see a winning tribe. And I don't see a place where my grandkids can live comfortably or yours or anybody's. Like, this is just a total dead end. Tribalism is a total dead end, and I've spent a lot of my life abroad as you have as well. And you've seen it. It's not resolved quickly. It's resolved like in a thousand years if you're lucky.

And it leads to violence right away. So don't have that. Don't do that here. But we're doing it. We are doing it. And I'm among the things that we should talk about is the modern West. You're describing the modern West. You wouldn't do this if you wanted the modern West to survive. Exactly. The fundamental principle, undergirding the modern West is that we put lineage aside and collaborate as a people because collaboration is a good thing to do. And you and I also remember, you know, the 80s and 90s, and it just wasn't like this. It's not that there was no bigotry or anything. But we knew what direction we were heading.

It was you totally unacceptable to act like this. It was totally unacceptable. And the idea that you would parse someone else's religious views in public.

“I mean, the working assumption I grew up with as a Southern California Wasp was our religious views are right. That's what I mean, that's our religion. So we think we're right.”

But let's be honest, everyone's religious views sound pretty cookie when exposed to the light of day. So how about we don't do that? And how about if we have Mormon neighbors or Jewish neighbors or in my case Roman Catholic neighbors, what's the point of like getting into how their doctrine differs from hours? Like we're confident that ours is right and there's this wrong.

That sounds really crazy. It's like, why would you do that unless you wanted to permanently be at war with your neighbors? And all of a sudden I'm reading all the stuff online about various people's religious views. And I have gotten into it myself with the Christian Zionists. I have explained their religious views on camera. I feel bad about doing that. I knew what their views were. I didn't want to talk about it until they were driving America's phone policy. Anyway, I just feel like this is not a good road to get down. And we need to re-establish a little bit of Anglo-Saxon. Sorry to brag about my culture, but restraint here.

Where there are certain things we don't talk about a dinner and one of them is your sex life and another is your religious beliefs.

And we've often been made fun of for that. You guys are so constipated. You can never talk about anything real.

“You're not in public. You don't actually because it causes fractures that don't heal. That's why we don't do that. Let's get back to that soon.”

Couple of clients. No, I mean, look, you're being cautious about something. I think we've got a five alarm fire on this front. Yes. There's a reason we don't do this. And among the many strengths of your monologues, I want to talk about them at some point, but among the many strengths, your guy with religious convictions. Yes, you make no secret of that. When you talk in your monologues, I hear you talking as a patriot, as a secular person. I hear you talking in a way that I can completely relate to, and it places your religious beliefs exactly where they should be relative to me. I can respect those as your beliefs. You're not asking me to accept them and they are not informing your beliefs about policy.

They're not allowed to. We're not allowed to. The founders were very clear about this, and it's not that they didn't have religious beliefs of their own. They were clear about it because it's a slippery slope to hell. It's a slippery slope back into the past where the only thing that matters is what tribe you're from. So people haven't traveled enough. I really think that's part of it. They haven't. I used to always push back against, oh Americans don't have a passport. They've never been anywhere because I love American. I hate to hear the ugly American stereotype repeated and always been really defensive of American Americans.

However, that is one criticism that's totally real. I know people who planned this disaster that we're in right now. I know a lot of them and some of them are really well informed. Some of them are not informed at all. They have no idea. Ted Cruz didn't know the population of Iran. He acted like it was like, you know, final round of jeopardy.

“And I was asking unfair questions. It's like, you're trying to overthrow the government. So you should know who lives there and how many of them there are.”

And you didn't know anything. And it's not just Ted Cruz. I don't mean to beat up on Ted Cruz was enough problems. But I would say that's like very common.

And that ignorance fails to inform decision making. And it fails to shape perceptions in ways that are super dangerous. And one of them is a lot of people who are making decisions in this country have no experience of chaos. Tribal conflict, you know, protracted generational conflict. They just haven't seen that they have no idea what that is. They can't imagine not being able to get to the store. They can't imagine a country in which ATMs don't work or currency is worthless. They just they or in which like a 15 year old with an automatic weapon controls their block. They can't imagine that.

And because they can't that's all real. By the way, that's the state of play in a lot of the world, most of the time. But they just they're so far removed from reality and they're so unbelievably ignorant. If they can murder someone else's religious leader and expect that would cause the country to collapse. Are you a drug son? Do you let go? What? Let's just murder the Iatola the head of Shia Islam.

And that will that will do what? Tell me what that will do. Well, the government will class people will see that Shia Islam is invalid first of all.

“Our job is to tell people their religion is invalid. What are you doing? You're doing my grandchildren to terror attacks with them all?”

Yeah. Yes. A hundred percent. I mean, what? I mean, look, I think we have to paint with a broad brush. Three choices about adolescents. How to live. We can live in a system of warlords where there's no order and order establishes itself based on who has power in your local environment.

We can live under some kind of totalitarian regime, or we can take the prototype that we have in the West. And we can go back to improving it. Right. The West is the alternative to these other ways of living. And if you've experienced those other ways, there is no way you would gamble on destabilizing what we've gotten. So well put that is so well put. Everyone should spend a year traveling the world.

I mean, it's much more productive than most things we subsidize like drug addiction and college.

Exactly. So I'm not corporate after I've thought of that, but that is exactly right to spend a year. And by the way, rich people used to do that. My great grandmother and my waist grant grandmother went to the same high school. Amazingly, 120 years ago, both for rich girls. And both of them spent the next year, not in college, there was no question of that. But traveling the world with a nanny.

And I know it sounds like incredibly Victorian. Well, it was the Victorian period for one thing, but for another Edwardian. But that was considered a true education. And I actually knew my great grandmother who survived the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Took their boat to Oakland in the middle of the fires. And she was a remarkable person. And she was remarkable because she had wisdom, born of seeing things.

She'd just been everywhere, seen everything. So it'll never have a job.

And her entire life, she lived like 90. Never had a job. But everybody in the family went to her for advice because she had seen everything.

“And part of it was because she'd been everywhere. I think that really matters.”

There's nothing more education. Yes, this isn't. You know, you dive into another culture. And the point is, it's on every channel. You're taking in actual real information about the world, not something that somebody believes is true. And it transforms you. And if you've seen the alternatives to what we have, and look,

I have no shortage of complaints about the way the West functions and how it falls down on its values. But why do I not want to live under either of the alternatives? And back to your earlier point about antisemitism and the strangeness of the activities that are causing it to rise. And where they're coming from, the very people who should be most terrified of antisemitism are behaving in exactly the way that is causing antisemitism. It is, it is, and this is from my perspective, I feel in a bind.

I am being asked to choose one of two teams. I can either go with the vocal Jews of the moment with a few notable exceptions, or I can effectively confront them and join the other team. I don't want to have to choose. I'm an American. My being Jewish is not supposed to put me on a team. And yet, I'm watching the exact preconditions that lead to an anti-Jewish genocide.

“I'm watching that happen, it's real time in my own country, and I'm being asked which side are you on?”

And my point is, I am on the side that wouldn't do that. I am on the side of every single other American that wants to put these things aside and figure out collectively as we're supposed to. What is in our interest? I'm happy to have that discussion. It's a reasonable discussion to have, but to accuse people of being anti-Semitic or in my case, that's not quite going to work as it. So they're going to have to go to self-hating view or something like that.

Sure, of course, of course. And you know, I've been called that in very close quarters, like friends and family. And it's vial, and I will point hard to take it in person. I've got to say that in person is not the end of that one. Someone comes up to you face to face and it's happened to me recently, with from Jewish friends, former friends, I guess, getting right in your face and say that, "Oh, it hurts because you know that they know or they don't.

They've either lost track of what they know or they know and they're saying it anyway." And it stops you and your tracks when it happens.

“I think they really mean it. I think that I think I've watched this, I covered black politics 30 years ago, and you know, I'll sharpen really well.”

I mean, really well. I travel with them a lot around the world. And sharpened, you know, could quality is very funny. But totally fraudulent. I mean, to truly is a criminal, right? I mean, he was a criminal. But you would run into black people like normal black people, smart, know what's up,

and they would all say sharpening. They would never criticize sharpening. Ever.

Because they felt under attack, and they felt they had nowhere to go. Like sharpening may be what he is, but he's on our side, and there's no way I'm going to denounce him in public. You saw this happen with whites in 2016 with Trump. That's really a lot of this was about whites feeling totally threatened through a form of action to E.I. the kind of thing that happened to you at Evergreen, where all of a sudden you could just say, like, the white shouldn't reproduce, like white people are bad. Like they're the bottom of the totem pole now. And so much of that, the whites are like, we feel really, really threatened.

And here comes Trump, and really the promise of Trump was to save white people, just to fact, sorry.

And working class people who you're talking about, talking about, you know, former Democrats, ethnic Democrats, but white people. And they voted for Trump, and, you know, of course, that didn't work. But you see it now, which is, they feel totally threatened. By the way, if we could turn on the temperature a little bit,

“and you ask, like, so many people who have called me names, or said I'm never talking to you again, are you really in favor of what Netanyahu's doing?”

And he like Israel, great. He's not helping Israel. He got crushed last night and Tel Aviv. Like, how is that helping? It's not, and they feel like you're right. And Netanyahu's kind of an idiot, actually. He's just a great tactician politician, but he's not a strategist. He has no long-term vision for Israel that's healthier, going to work. He's a destructive force. But they can't say that because they feel so under attack, partly because of people.

Maybe I'm answering my own question because people like Mark Levin, who are like, the Nazis are coming. And normal people, normal Jews are like, man, that's terrifying. I better not say anything against Israel. It's my only hope.

“I think Jews are starting to feel strongly the way that a lot of blacks felt, a lot of whites felt.”

And now, and you can see where this is going. Is it fair, do you think? Oh, 100%. And I think what's happened is that primordial features of human nature are being triggered by events that are causing this to unfold.

And that's basically, you know, you and I will easily remember what it felt like to be an American in the aftermath of 9/11.

Yes, right? I remember thinking that George W. Bush was a lightweight and an embarrassment as a president. I think I was broadminded enough to have been able to say before 9/11 that I think he's the kind of guy who you could really get along with at the barbecue, but that he had no place in the White House. And after 9/11, there was just a sense from all sorts of people who felt as I did about him that he shouldn't be in that position. That it was dangerous that he was our leader and that we had been attacked and, you know, there was just, it galvanized us.

And I now think that story is a lot more complicated and not as presented than I thought at the beginning. But nonetheless, the point is human beings when they are being attacked, circle the wagons. It's a natural phenomenon and it exists for obvious reasons. And so to your earlier point about the amplifying of the very things that cause anti-semitism, including leveling false accusations, which, of course, cause unbearable resentment amongst people who are falsely accused, these things create a scenario in which Jews are now threatened by a growing way of anti-semitated and hated.

And so the point is the tendency to want to circle the wagons and just simply go to the people who are experiencing it too is overwhelming. But if we do that, we will end the West and it can't be allowed to happen. It's so obviously happening. I was sitting in a meeting in 1995 with Bill Crystal, who I then worked for. And in the meeting was a guy called Jay of left, who was later someone who helped Jeffrey Epstein, weirdly, but this was one before that.

Nine years before that. But we're sitting there and I'll never feel Crystal who was clever, not wise, but clever and nice to me. I was grateful to have the job.

“I remember him saying, and I'm quoting, "A little anti-semitism is good for the Jews. It reminds them of who they are."”

And I just didn't grow up in a world where anybody endorsed that kind of thing. I was like, "Well, I'll never forget that as long as I live." A little anti-semitism is good for the Jews, reminds them of where they are, and remember thinking, "Hey, I just don't think that's actually true. It's not good for the Jews or anyone else." But he really believed that. And clearly you see it with, I saw it with Al Sharpton, who's constantly telling audiences how much they were hated. Why was he doing that? Because it increased his power.

And I really believe that that is what's going on right now. If you scare the crap out of people, and they really have there, and literally not cease. Not people who disagree with what's going on in Gaza or think like the West Bank should have its own government. We shouldn't go over with the raw. It's kind of where I am. But people who are literally genocidal in their intent, people will follow you if you say that.

is that I don't feel like the Judaism that is being represented in the world is familiar. I know that it exists, but it's not what I grew up with.

I grew up in a secular Jewish home in which the values were decidedly Jewish, and they were explicit. And what we did was think through difficult issues very carefully. And I will tell you, the Holocaust played a big role in my upbringing. I'm sure. Maybe you, I did not at the point that I became cognizant, understand how recent it was. I now, of course, do because I've lived for 57 years. But the idea that this is something that can happen.

“Yes, it can happen here, and you need to understand what happened, and you need to understand who lived the people who told themselves, it's bad.”

It will pass their resettling us to the east, whatever those people died. The people who saw it early didn't. And people who understood it didn't.

So, in any case, my point is, as an Episcopalian, and this is not a compliment to the Episcopal Church, but it's not so different from a form of Judaism. And from Judaism, it was actually kind of modeled on the Episcopal Church as you may or may or may not know, but it was. Yet Temple Bethel is kind of like an Episcopal Church sort of started that way. German Jews, rationalists, you know, let's explain this. Let's think through all the hard problems, you know, the emphasis on the miraculous emphasis on the rational, very similar. The one lesson that I got from hearing it with the Holocaust constantly growing up in a very Jewish school was exactly what you said, right then, is that don't lie to yourself, not Jewish, so it wasn't I wasn't thinking about it in those terms, but like the lesson is universally applicable.

“You see the leaves changing, it's probably false, and like don't tell yourself it's not. And Honour Ren, who I was always loved Honour Ren, and I think Honour Ren was like a really kind of a genius and a non-conventional thinker.”

But that was kind of the lesson that I took from her books, not just like me in Jerusalem, but she wrote a lot of magazine pieces to read, and she kept saying that, like, don't lie to yourself, and I have taken that my whole life. And maybe to the extreme, like I'm probably too jumpy about certain things, but like, look at the trend lines, and I would say they are, we should be panicked, not just for Jews, though for Jews, but for all of us, because tribalism kills everybody in the end, and we should be panicked about its rise. Panicked. Oh, absolutely. We are looking at a return to an evolutionary mode of being.

“And to give it its due, I will just say that the way history worked until five minutes ago, until the invention of the modern west, was that populations displaced each other, or they get displaced.”

That's the game. And unfortunately, I now see, first of all, I see myself being spoken for as a Jew. I find Benjamin Netanyahu speaking for me, and I don't know what I am supposed to resign from.

So that he or no longer has that right. I don't know where it comes from. What's more, I want to know where the tradition that I grew up with, which I will defend, went. I feel like, you know, I've been sort of looking into it. I'm not, you know, deeply embedded in Judaism. I have a good friend and increasingly good friend who is a scholar of Jewish mysticism. I learn a lot from him about these various things. I also increasingly realize that my tradition emerges from my monadies, who, you know, barely knew who monadies was, but he was a 12th century philosopher, Jewish philosopher and medical doctor in Spain.

And he had this hard-headed, very rigorous Jewish approach to thinking, and he was actually well respected outside of Judaism, because he was so insightful, and in any case, my point is, we are seeing a very, in my opinion, foolish version of this tradition.

Sometimes it means that you want to see it expanded in some way. And it's like, hey, hold on, wait a minute, we've got a lot writing on not just overwhelming people because they come from a different branch of the tree.

No, I'm not signed up for that, but my sense is, here's what's exactly I'm just letting is, I wish I could put it as crispy as you just did, that those are exactly my views. It's, it's crazy.

“And so, I think this is the thing that I haven't heard anybody else say it, maybe others have, but the thing that is so confusing about what's going on on the present, what's now begun in Iran,”

is, if I just look at it like an anthropologist, that's a holy war, it's a holy war, but it's being led by secular Jews, exactly. And it is that secularness that cloaks it, that makes it look like something it isn't. And I'm not saying, look, I am no fan of the Iranian theocracy, right? I couldn't be more frightened by that structure, for the same reason I don't want to see a holy war initiated by Israel.

Frankly, holy war has no place in a world where we should be moving towards the values of the modern West, because it's hard to resolve them, very hard.

“Well, I mean, it gets resolved by one population displacing another period at the end, and the point is, you know, if you want to talk about the Holocaust, that's what it was, right?”

It was a population taking advantage of the fact that there was another population that couldn't defend itself, that had some wealth on the point is you can create growth by exterminating those people and taking their stuff, right? That's what it is. And that's, that's a go to strategy. So to the extent that anybody on earth is advocating for, hey, let's paint those people as demons and then we'll exterminate them and take their stuff, right? That is not a way the world can go on. Now, it did go on that way, but it did not go on that way in the nuclear era. We can't play that game anymore. It has to end, and I'm going to, I don't think that this discussion is going to be a win for me in the world. I think I'm going to pay dearly for having had it.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But I just live on another planet. This seems like the most reasonable moderate American conversation you could ever have. That's the problem with it.

Yeah, I guess I don't understand the country as well as I thought I did.

“Well, no, I think you and I understand a version of the country that works to an extent, again, it's a prototype. It doesn't work brilliantly, but it works, and we understand the aspiration of what it's supposed to do if it really works, right?”

And of course, that's hard to let go of once you've seen it. And we are being forced to let go of it. And, you know, I will say I've been accused in very close quarters of having a martyr complex. I do not. My life is personally so good. I am not eager to leave it one. I feel the same way. Instance sooner than I have to. However, I'm also aware that what it is to be a man is to face the fact that there are hills worth dying for. And I don't want to, but the point is we have to defend the hill that is the modern west and we have to defend it from this impulse to view the world through a lens of what lineage do you come from and what are we entitled to and, you know, deeds to land that go back millennia or whatever it is.

That's not the way this can work if we are to continue as a species. So, I don't know how we can turn down the temperature and get people who have already chosen the team to rethink whether that was a reasonable thing to do. But they are signing us up for an unthinkable conflagration. And, you know, to have Benjamin Netanyahu in a position to steer the United States and I think that is what has happened. And you can tell that by what Marco Rubio has said and if we take the mild version, you know, where he says it was the timing that was forced by Israel.

Okay, that's still unacceptable. If we take the more aggressive interpretation and the fact is we were forced into this because Israel wanted it, that is completely unacceptable.

And you've heard, as you said, from Bill Crystal, the idea that must circulate somewhere that a bit of anti-semitism is good because it reminds you as if who they are, we don't need that reminder.

We can be very academic.

“We can understand these things based on patterns of history and we do. So, we don't need this amped up, but the question...”

What can I say though? I understand, I think it's poison. I think Bill Crystal himself is poison. I have a lot of thoughts about Bill Crystal who I know intimately, however. It's not strictly speaking false. If you look at the coherent populations, like if your goal is to keep a genetic mix intact, if your goal is to keep a religion intact and you look around the world, like what groups will pull that off, Jews obviously top of the list. The Armenians are really, I mean in California, you grew up there. We were kids. The Armenian people didn't think Jews did not think at least the world I lived and they didn't think of the Jews and everybody else.

It was like they were just kind of like everybody else at least the world I lived and they were, but the Armenians were definitely distinct.

Like Armenians, Marriar Minians, the Armenian Church, why is that? Because they got genocide by the Ottoman Turks and they were literally, they bombed the Turkish consulate in Los Angeles.

“When I was a kid, I never forget that Armenians did because they were still so mad about this thing that happened at the tail end of the first World War.”

70 years before, whatever it was. And so it had the effect they're suffering and their insistence on telling their children about that suffering. Had the effect probably made their kids jump in paranoid, probably. That's the downside, but it did have the effect of keeping them coherent as a group, just a fact.

So it's not as an evolutionary strategy. It's not crazy. Oh, I'm not saying that it is not logically true that a bit of antisemitism will cause that.

On the other hand, I think it very quickly gets to where we are. Right, exactly. No, you're right. You see it as a logical filter for things, you know, a litmus test for the quality of someone's character. And, you know, again, to go back to my own upbringing, the stories of various genocides, especially the Nazi genocide, was such an important feature of, I mean, it's at the core of my being, right? And I will just say, we are living in such an incoherent era that, you know, I watch Darrell Cooper being slandered much as you are.

“And then I listen to his piece on Bobby R. And I think what planet am I living on?”

There's no way that somebody who harbors a deep bigotry against Jews could have made that piece. And I would ask people to go listen to it. No one will. No one's slandering him will. Oh, no one's slandering him will. But I guess I'm worried about a different pattern. Something that you've experienced and I've experienced is that there is a way people are driven away from hearing us. I also agree that you and I are having a reasonable conversation and whether you're right or wrong or I'm right or wrong or we together are right or wrong.

It would be valuable for people to hear this conversation, at least it's an insight into how thinking people are parsing this moment and coming up with a different conclusion than you have. It's worth it for that, but they want. And the reason that they want is that there's a particular strategy. It's a strategy involved saying something along the lines of I'll use the version that I get. It's something like, if you don't understand that Brett is an intellectual lightweight who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, I can't help you.

Now, the effect of that, I call it gaslighting by Ricochet. And the idea is, if you actually listen to what I say, that's not the impression you're going to come up with. You can disagree with me, you may think I'm being stupid about something, but you're probably not going to come away with the idea that I'm just a pure fakeer or that I'm motivated by, you know, greed or whatever. It's not consistent. However, the person who doesn't know me, who thinks, well, that's interesting. I wonder, maybe I'll just take a listen and they go to listen to me and they find that actually sounds like a reasonable person.

And the point is, that will cause them not to want to listen because they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

If they hear what I have to say and it sounds reasonable, then they are opening themselves up to that Ricochet landing on them. So the point is, you at the moment, as I understand it, are resonating with young men, but you're losing our generation. Our generation has accepted a slander about you without sitting down and listening to your monologues. If they did sit down and listen to your monologues, they would have quite a moment because then they would have to say, wait a second. This actually sounds like a reasoned moderate, well-intentioned analysis of the moment. Disagree with you or not. It doesn't sound like zealotry or bigotry or anything like that.

So it is the strategies that are shaping our world. The people who need to hear us aren't going to hear us because there's a booby trap that prevents them from getting there.

And you know, I know my instinct is always to go listen to the people that I'm not supposed to get along with.

It's always that is yourself multiple times.

“Here's the threat though that I think that is not often enough acknowledged, which is that you become what they call you.”

I really feel that that's part of, so if you accept that hatred, tribal hatred destroy societies, but it does empower some people, right? So the incentive is just set up to make certain people demagogues want to increase hatred.

I think there's a spiritual principle there too. I won't bore you with it, but the evil feeds on hatred, that's my view. But whatever the motive, it's clearly baked in that they want people to hate.

And I think it works. I think if you call someone something enough and you repeat it like an incantation, like a spell. You're getting very sleepy bread. You're getting very sleepy. No, you were an incantation, but you're an incantation. And you're like, your first thought is, well, not an incantation. Like, how that's outrageous. What a slander.

“I believe Jewish friends, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.”

It doesn't look like everyone goes through this all our literal people. There would be like, you hate black people, but I like black people. But after all, you're like, why are all the blacks calling me racist? It's outrageous. And by the way, you don't see a lot of black standing up and like defending me. I don't think I like the blacks anymore. And you can actually become what they call you. And that is a true risk, I think. Luckily, it's baked into my religion. You're not allowed to do that. When Christians ask for forgiveness, they have to follow it with forgiveness of others. So you are not allowed to hold hatred against people.

Period, or you won't be forgiven by God. That is Christian doctrine. So it can be, if you stick with that, it's self correcting, like you're saved from hatred, you're saved from becoming an Nazi. But people who aren't disappointed about it, if you call them Nazis long enough, guess what happens, they don't become less Nazi, they become more Nazi. Yeah, you actually, you lower the cost. You grow into the slur. Yeah. And that's like, I sincerely believe as a religious person, that's soul-imparaling. Like, actually, you could go to hell for that.

But it's certainly disabling in this life. Like, if you're to think that way. So I don't know. I've said this a bunch of times. I don't think anyone hears anything. I say, but I just want to say it again. If you're being called names, the number one job you have, even before you defend yourself, is to make sure you don't become what they're calling you.

“That's extremely wise. I think it also leads to another principle I've been trying to formulate.”

We have all of these instances in recent history of groups claiming victim status in order to gain power. And I'm not arguing that there is no victim status worth designating in any of these cases, but the point is it becomes an excuse for an offensive action. All right. When that happens, I am always on the lookout for people who could take advantage of this new status, of course, and don't who challenge it. Right. So, for example, during the the woke revolution, there were numerous prominent intellectual blacks who stood up against it.

And I just wanted the world to understand A, this is not a universal belief amongst blacks. B, there's an alternative. See the bench of black intellectuals is quite deep. And you need to know all these things in order to know what's going on in the street when people are claiming white supremacy is everywhere. It accounts for everything and the only solution is to topple the system and transfer all the wealth or whatever it was.

So, I'm always on the lookout for the people who are in the category that could take advantage of these false portrayals and don't.

Also, the case when it comes to trans activism. We have all of these people who have been using this idea of gender transition as a weapon. And we have a small number of people who have gender dysphoria have transitioned in whatever way and have stood up against it. And we should be standing shoulder to shoulder with that.

“So, my point is I also feel an obligation as a Jew to stand up for the other set of values that I think are better and that really characterized Judaism at least in America much more so than today when we were growing up.”

That careful tradition, the one that holds the values very deeply, would not create false portrayals in order to advance a political agenda much less military.

I was very familiar with reform Judaism as I grew up around, and I'm very familiar with it, certainly with the tone of it. And it was always like, "Ah, it's like the least aggressive. It was just very much in tone and spirit like the church that I grew up in. You like ask a question of it, "Well, it's hard. You know, it would always be like it's hard." And you could make fun of that, and I've certainly made fun of it a lot with my own church, but you're not going to get a lot of extremists coming out of that, like period.

“It acknowledged the complexity of every human decision and of the human condition, and I think there's something nice about that.”

Well, this is uncomfortable. I don't think I'm talking about reform Judaism though I think the thing I'm talking about would have been found in many. Did you grow up going to Temple? No. Oh, wow. Well, I will tell you, I felt a little left out by that. My family was secular, atheist, and, you know, decidedly scientist. You were not permits, but no. I wasn't. Oh, well, I wanted to be. And what happened, I mean, this will tell you a lot about me. What happened was I asked to go to Hebrew school for the purpose of being permits for it. I thought it seemed like a thing I should do, even though I wasn't a believer.

A lot of Jews aren't believers, but that's one of the strange things about Judaism. It's not really about belief in that sense or it's not about faith can be for many it is, but for many it's not. And you remain Jewish. It's just because you're secular. So I asked in my parents, it's on the reason not to and sign me up that I went and I remember asking questions about things that didn't add up in the portrayal that we were being given.

“And I expected it to be like the family dinner table. And the family dinner table, you could ask any question and it was taken seriously and that's how I dressed.”

And that was not the response that I got. I got a response that was basically designed to sort of, I mean, I now know what the response is because I've seen bad professors do it.

You know, the professor who doesn't really know their subject doesn't want to be asked questions that reveal that parents are the same way. Well, it's funny. My house wasn't like that. No, there was mine. My father would answer any question that never judged you for asking it. Yeah, my my family was like that. And my grandfather particularly. So my grandfather was very good with kids. He took them very seriously. He was tremendously fun. It wasn't like he was a super serious guy. He was very fun. That very adventurous take out into, you know, climb mountains and stuff with him. But anyway, you could ask him any question about anything. And he would answer it as well as he could. And then you'd ask the next question.

And when you finally got to the place where he couldn't answer the question he'd say, I don't know. And here's what we might do to figure out the answer anyway. It was it was like having the world best, you know, personal tutor or mentor or something like that.

He went to college, but didn't finish it, got hired away. I think by RCA records to develop, you know, the first vinyl to replace the lacquer records that had existed. So anyway, you know, he worked in industry and eventually he got.

He got a job in pollution control. He was an inspector inspecting factories. He was a very committed environmentalist. And so he was inspecting factories for pollution and things like that.

That's where he was. He wasn't successful in the sense of a career. However, I do think. The real meaning is name was Harry. It's great guy. The real meaning of Harry is that he was very wise about many things. He had seen a lot and he understood a lot. And he was wicked smart.

“He passed this on to any young person who would listen, you know, especially me and Eric, but really my friends all remember him too. Right. I don't, I barely remember my friends grandparents. You know, I met a bunch of them.”

But they were old and it was hard to relate to them and all that. But my grandfather made an impression on every friend of mine he ever met and they, you know, they asked about him right up until his death.

You know, how's he doing? How old were you when he passed? I was in it was 2000. Oh, he lived a long time. Yeah, he didn't. He made it to 94. Wow. Yeah.

But anyway, I forgot an exactly why we were talking about Harry. Oh, it was just a question of what the, what the culture was in my house.

“It was secular. It was intellectually committed and rigorous. And it, you know, it wasn't trying to be mild. Right. It was, it was trying to do the right thing based on what the patterns of the world and the evidence suggested the right thing was.”

I don't see that in the culture at the moment. And I don't understand how, you know, Netanyahuism or whatever it is has overwhelmed it. Right. I, at very least, look, you can do what you want.

And that's, you know, our personal freedom is effectively sacred in the West as it should be. But I feel entitled to continue that tradition and not be suspected of a moral defect for doing so. Well, I couldn't agree more. Of course. In fact, it's the thing I feel most strongly. And I think my right to express my views, my conscience to defend myself. I mean, I think the Bill of Rights, these are natural rights bestowed by God. That's my opinion. That's my deepest belief. So I, I'm totally committed to everything you just said. And I grew up weirdly in a non Jewish household, but also secular household with exactly the same vibe.

My father was a wonderful man and very rigorous intellectually and also extremely open minded. If extremely, it was never, I can't believe you think that never. And that was a massive advantage for me. I do think that world is dying because I think the systems are played out and the systems that I love and support liberal democracy. It's not growing anywhere in the world. There's no, and here's one measure of it. There's no country that I'm aware of in which the legislative body is getting stronger.

There are all becoming weaker to legislative bodies. Of course, the most democratic bodies. You know, it is the voice of the people, the people's house, but that's true in every country with a system like ours or parliamentary system. And in every country that I'm aware of those systems are becoming superfluous, they're becoming the Roman Senate. And that is a measure of a bunch of different things. Maybe it's the end of a life cycle. Maybe it's an expression of people's frustration with the awkwardness of the democratic system. It doesn't work very efficiently.

Whatever it is, it's a global trend where power is vesting in the executive, where people are less free to say what they think. This is throughout the West.

“It may have to do, maybe most obviously with the rise of China, the most successful country, the world is China. And so why wouldn't the rest of the world ape its system?”

I don't think that's crazy. It's non-optimal. It's the opposite of what I want, but I'm not in charge of history. And I think it's happening. There's no question about it when Rome rose.

You imitate the successful. And I think that we're seeing that. And I think we're living downstream of that. We think that we are the headquarters of the world from which all trends emanate, but actually we're not.

“China is. And I think it's been misread in the United States as some secret collusion between American business interests and the CCP, which is, of course, totally real. They have been secretly colluding for sure.”

But it's much bigger than that. It's not just that Apple makes its iPhones in the East. It's that their system appears to be more successful than ours.

Therefore, our social system, our political system, will do some great extent mirror theirs. I don't think that's just explicable. Again, I'm going to spend the rest of my life fighting that, not because I hate the Chinese. I don't hate the Chinese, by the way. At all, but I'm not Chinese. I'm American. And I've been here in my whole life, and I'm not leaving, and I plan to defend our system even if it's dying. But it is dying. That's the point of making it is dying. And so we shouldn't be surprised when many more people in Great Britain are arrested for Facebook posts than we're arrested in Russia last year, three times.

How can that be the country that wrote the Magna Carta? How can it be arresting people for their opinions? Well, they're doing it more enthusiastically than this totalitarian hellhole under Vladimir Putin, because the West, its systems are dying.

“Well, I think there's another element to it, and I don't think it's wholly incompatible with the Mongolia just painted, but I think I have a more cynical view of what's happening.”

And that it effectively we are witnessing an evolutionary dynamic where the founders built a system that had dynamism built into it that is necessary to protect that system from what they couldn't foresee, right? They built a system that could modify itself so that it could change with the times, but it's not dynamic enough. What we need is an immune system that is capable of fending off the evolution of corrupting forces.

And the problem is we have an industrial strength constitution that protects rights which are fundamental to defending our individual liberty.

That is absolutely galling to people who wish to hoard power. Of course, of course it would be, it was designed to be, right? It's a middle finger in the face of tyrants, absolutely. So the point is, over time, tyranny is evolving, and it's like a parasite that is breaking through the defenses of the Republic, because at the end of the day,

“there are lots of people who would love to have asymmetric power over the rest of us. Why wouldn't they?”

Of course, they don't, they're not deeply moral people, some of them have no moral sense whatsoever. And in light of that, you can imagine looking at the American system and saying, you know, that first amendment is a real problem, right? They can talk about anything, like who was crazy enough to give them that right and figuring out how you would target it. What would the preconditions need to be in order for the public to agree to demand censorship of themselves or something like that? Well, we've now seen multiple iterations of this, right? Whether, you know, it's the war on terror or it's COVID or whatever. You can get the population scared enough and wound up enough that they will actually sign up for, you know, being tyrannized.

And the problem is that the Constitution is good enough that the breakdown is slow, right? The chipping away at it, Patriot Act was a major blow, the NDA of 2012 was a major blow.

COVID was an incredibly major blow, but, you know, it's slow going, it's a multi-generation project. But, you know, the tools are getting better, the ability, you know, if you're, if you're itching to censor the population and you can leverage AI to do some job that the public believes needs to be done for the good of us all. Well, it's pretty much game over. If you can replace the currency with a central bank digital currency that can be turned off if you say things that displays the regime, it's game over.

Because the people who had a stranglehold on gaining access to that office didn't see any reason not to do it, which is why I think they freaked out at the possibility of Trump being elected.

They loaded the powers of an emperor into this office, and then suddenly somebody showed up, it's possible to get so real. This, this office is too powerful for you. A certainly can't be in the hands of somebody we don't have control over. That, I mean, that raises such an interesting question about 2028. This is occurred to me. And, the office is even more powerful, much more powerful. The Venezuelo, whatever that was, taking out Maduro. Operation, proves it. That was done without congressional notification, much less authorization, and it was unprecedented. For many reasons, whether you like it or don't like it, nothing like that has ever happened before, and it was a decision made by one man.

And so that means the executive United States, the presidency, is more powerful than it's ever been. It's also better funded than it's ever been, and it has more technological power by far than it's ever had to control the population.

“So at that point, if you're the permanent state, and you've made clearly some accommodation with the current president, obviously. But the next guy, like, can you really pass it on to someone you can control at this point?”

I don't think you can. I can't afford it. Truly, at this point, where the president of the United States at this stage and things change, but right now, can you basically whatever he wants for whatever reason without explaining himself. And we know that because it's happened. So I don't know. It raises the stakes for the next election, whether or not you believe elections are real. It raises them, and I think that maybe sort of real. I don't know the answer, but there, you know, probably more real than you suspect and less real than you hope.

Well said, but however the next guy is chosen, like it can't be someone, it just absolutely can't be someone you can't hand a toddler a gun.

It can't be someone who directly opposes the permanent government, the true stakeholders. Can it? Can it exist at multiple, right? No good point. Levels. Let's put it this way. What you need is a George Washington-like figure, somebody who will willingly limit his own power, because it's the right thing to do.

“And I think not enough of the population understands that that's what George Washington was, but George Washington could have been king. It was the natural thing in the mind of the public with him having won the Revolutionary War, you know.”

He was the king. He could have been. But he decided he didn't want that job, right? So we need somebody with that strength of character. And the problem is we have a system that, for exactly the reasons you've just outlined, will stop it nothing to prevent such a person from attaining the office, because it will see that as an existential threat. And so, truly, we can't get there, but we have to get there. And you know, that's sometimes that's the nature of history. I do. At this moment, go ahead. I think that's what we can't get there, but we have to get there. And I think we have to get there, because the current arrangement can't continue.

You'll either have because the spread between what the people who own the government want, the voters want citizens want and what the government actually does is just too wide, just too wide. It's too obvious that it's too wide. Yeah, and they're not getting what they pay for, they're not getting with their title two, they're being ignored and humiliated. Can I ask you something to clarify that first?

“I think what you're saying is that the degree to which what the government does is not in the interests of the public and not intended to be.”

Yeah, we get an excuse. You know, there's always a rationalization for why this policy is good for Americans, but let's face facts.

It's the lead in our system that allows forces to purchase policy that is not in the interests of the public is too great. It's totalizing.

If it's in the interests of the public and the interests of the special interests, then nobody opposes it. So what we get is a Congress that is effectively doing only that, which will be paid for, which is inherently against the interests of the public.

“That's why it's paid exactly. That is exactly right. And it's not.”

By the way, if you were to go through with someone who spends a whole life in Washington, I can tell you, if you're going to go through all the kind of previous influences on the government, like, what are those special interests? What are they paying for? How bad are the outcomes for average Americans? It's a long list.

You know, and you know what the list is. It's basically everyone who's paying to lobby Washington.

Israel's near the top. Is it the top? I don't know. Kind of matter it's far more than I am in Israel, but that's just me. But there are a lot. And there's a rivalry, right? The difference in what makes the behavior of people like Mark Levin, almost suicidal, is it rather than just doing it? Got to get out there and talk about it and rub everyone's noses in it. And so the current war, which was led by Israel, and our government, I know this for a fact, our government would not have done this except for pressure from Netanyahu.

Because everyone said that out loud, then you know who said it out loud to a lot of different people. He's been caught saying it.

Our Secretary of State said it, whatever they're revising now. He said it. I watched it.

And the advocates are saying it. It's like all of the frustration that Americans feel over the fact that their government doesn't serve them.

“Is now focused on one among a number of lobbies. Why would you want that? Basically there's this deep reservoir of frustration like what the hell are they doing?”

I'm not benefiting. Why are the airports so crappy? Why are the roads bad? Why can't my kids get educated in a public school? Like all these different things, most of which aren't actually connected to Israel. All of a sudden, this is the outlet for all of that frustration. Are you kidding? Are you in drugs? What are you doing? Why would you do this? Why would you push the United States into something that most people don't want? Which happens all the other day? The administration comes out and they're like, "You can continue to spray poison over America."

The people who pushed that didn't immediately go on Twitter and be like, "Yeah, America, you're getting more poison." They don't want to be known. Whatever chemical lobby pushed for that was shameful. But they didn't brag about it. Braking about it is not a good idea for you or anyone else. Again, I'm sorry. I'm going back to the same point, but it's like, that's very self-destructive behavior, I think. Well, I must tell you what I do, my value in the world, comes from the same place. I'm a biologist. I think about complex systems and the thing about complex systems is they defy the normal toolkit.

They defy the toolkit that works for complicated systems. Most of the people that we have trying to steer us in one way or another don't understand the distinction and they are constantly harming us because whatever they think is going to happen when they intervene in a complex system is guaranteed not to happen.

“What I try to do, if you walk into a tropical forest, the first thing you have to know is that we don't know how it works.”

We just don't, it actually immediately violates the first principle of ecology, which is that two species can't inhabit the same niche indefinitely.

It's not supposed to happen and yet you have 300 species of trees doing almost the identical thing without an explanation. So you walk into the tropical forest, you have to know we don't know how this works. And I just interrupt you and say whenever I hear an expert in a topic, begin the explanation with, we don't really understand this, I trust you. Well, everything you say after you say that, Ellison too carefully, everything I say, I take seriously and think about later, that admission at the outset is the price of admission for me to trust you.

Well, I appreciate that. And I think it's a good proxy and I will say that principle you just outlined to the tenth power when you're dealing with complex systems. Yes, complex systems are special and you'll harm yourself every time, and this is, you know, all of modern medicine is us making this mistake. You're intervening in a human body, which is a layered system of complex systems, and you're going to have unintended consequences. Unless you can tell me why people sleep, I'm not going to believe you when you say you understand the human body completely.

I'm just saying like, the beginning of, I'm trying not to swear this year. Well, the say it, my father always said, the beginning of wisdom is knowing what an asshole you are. You'd always say that. And I, I just, I think that's the wisest thing I've ever heard, just remember, I know nothing.

So, all right, so what I do is I look at a system that I know I don't know anything about, and I entertain a model. And I say, does this model explain anything about this that I don't already know?

“And if something explains things, I don't know, I think, okay, that model might have some truth to it, and then I see if there are predictions that might give me more confidence in it.”

Anyway, what I'm telling you is that there is a skill to approaching a system where you know you don't have, you know, a thousandth as much information as you'd like. And you know it doesn't work by rules that you can look up somewhere and trying to figure out what it is and why it works that way. And you alluded to the posi would, posi would principle, the purpose of a system is what it does, right?

That's a cybernatic principle to actually come from complicated systems, not complex ones, but nonetheless, these kinds of tools are very useful.

If you're trying to put together an explanation for historical events where all you have are the public narratives which are mostly lies or rationalizations or whatever they are.

“In complete the best. Yeah, I mean, okay, they're locked in complete and there's a lot of, there's a lot of false signal there.”

So here's the unsettling conclusion that's hard to escape with our, our current reckless adventure in Iran. This was not in Trump's interest. True. This is actually existential for his presidency and fairly directly. Not only might he lose the house, which he's likely to anyway, but and the Senate, which would of course hobble him in his ability to do anything. But if he loses the house in sanity, will likely be impeached and convicted, which means there won't even be a remainder of this presidency.

“I would expect that risk to loom prominently in his thinking and to have prevented him from doing this, right?”

This is felt as a betrayal to many of us, including me who supported him in part on the basis that he promised no new wars and this one was of course, principle on the list of wars that those of us who were worried about it were fearing because of this course, been on the neocon agenda since 9/11 and presumably before. So okay, I have a mystery on my hands. Why would a president who already had enough ill battle in the midterms? Why would he engage in an action that seems very likely to end his presidency?

That's that's a paradox. Similarly, why is the question is that it's a good one. Why would we agree to participate in something that has a strong possibility of ending in a military quagmire of a kind that we now have many familiar examples, a kind that traumatizes and angers the public and degrades our ability to have a functional society because it burns through resources like crazy? Why would we do that? And I don't know that the conclusion that I'm considering is true or could be true. It seems impossible.

But I keep finding myself returned to this as the best explanation for these events simply because I haven't heard one that explains the evidence better. This feels like someone wished to burn down the Trump presidency and Hubble the United States.

And the problem is that that's hard to dispel because the first part of it, the burning down of the Trump presidency,

feels like a natural response to whatever it was that through everything, at preventing Trump from being elected and failed. In other words, you had, I don't know how many of the phenomena were the same entity,

we're not seriously even investigated and he won in a convincing way. The people who are pushing this war, the Neocons, which sides, they actually became Democrats, which I didn't see that coming, that did not seem possible, and yet there they were. So the question is, if you were in those meetings, whatever they sound like, and they were talking about the problem of Trump and I know what we'll do, we'll do this, we'll do that, right? Nothing's working.

“I bet there are a lot of contingency plans, right? What do we do if the worst happens and he gets elected, right?”

Well, A, the president, and I'm not, you know, I've never met the man.

But given what Marco Rubio said, given what I see on my feed, I feel like this president probably wouldn't have done this, if he had had a real choice. I think, maybe that's wishful thinking. I will tell you, given that the Democrats didn't run a candidate who was not a middle finger to the American public and the constitution. I would vote for him again in the same circumstance, but I definitely voted no new wars and specifically Iran. That was high on my list of priorities, and so I do feel like, well, wait a minute, did I just find out that my vote doesn't matter,

because it doesn't matter who's in office, because we're going to war with Iran anyway.

“So the, the long-winded question that I'm trying to ask is, is there any chance that the purpose of this system is what it's just done,”

and that really the idea is Trump beat them every step of the game to this point, but they weren't going to allow him to win in the end and burning down his presidency was a feature, not a bug. Of course. Of course. Yeah. You got it. You got everything you said is true, which wasn't, but it is everything you said is true. And he didn't want to do it, obvious to me, and he didn't feel yet a choice, and there are a lot of ways to read that. I mean, he basically said not giving away any, I talked to him a lot about this before it happened and giving away anything that he didn't say in public, it was obvious.

You know, well, I hope we can reach a accommodation.

And there's, you know, there's so much lying about everything, and you're hearing people say, well, the diplomacy was always fake in order to, you know, by time and all this stuff,

maybe there were elements that are policy that were fake. I don't know the answer. I hope that they weren't. But big picture from the presidents perspective from what I can tell, from just from his public statements, you know, if they could have just hit a run without any of this stuff without any, they just surprise attack, I mean, you know, they didn't go through all this stuff, and he didn't, he wanted a peaceful resolution. Now, you could blame some men on the Iranians. It's a talk about a complicated society, 86-year-old leader, you know, divisions of power that are hard for non-persons to understand.

And there's a lot about Iran that was confusing. There was a lot of turmoil within the country. A lot of that was inspired by CIA and Mossad. Some of it was totally real, like wasn't a great regime. It was not only repressive, but it was corrupt and inefficient, and it was also suffering under sanctions for 45 years. So there, you know, a lot of factors, but there was a lot of unrest in the country. That's totally real. The Iranians kind of couldn't put their best case forward. They retreat. You know, there's a lot that's their fault, too.

And this is my read of it in form, read of it. But, but fundamentally, no, he, he, this was not his first choice at all.

“And so the question becomes well, then why did he make that choice?”

And it's clear to me that the Secretary of State wanted to convey, Secretary of State's little smarter than people think. This is my read of it. A lot of people remember Rubio from 2016 when Trump humiliated him on stage. And he looked like the definition of a beta. And he's, you know, not very smart. He's smart. That's real. And he's subtle in his thinking, and he's just a lot, this is my read, knowing him.

I think Mark Rubio is a lot smarter than people think that he is. And a good guy, too, by the way, how I'll also say, funny. And it's fun to be around. But I don't believe for a second that he said that accidentally. It's just no chance. It was a high stake stuff. This is like days after the war starts.

Israel dragged us into it.

It's not something a Secretary of State says accidentally. Period. And so I do think there was resentment.

“I don't know in his part, but I think there was, I know there was resentment.”

The administration wanted the public to know. There's no question in my mind. Yeah, there's no question in my mind. And, but what really happened and what really made it impossible not to go? It was impossible not to go. That was a calculation. Obviously, just by its effects, we can see that.

You think the president doesn't understand macro energy policy. You think he doesn't know that there's a straight at the end of the Persian Gulf called harm moves through which a lot of the world's energy flows and a run controls it effectively. And then if it goes bad, the midterms are a loss. Well, yeah, they can stop shipping with drones.

You think you didn't know that? Trump is not on some level. Trump is very smart. And I'm not guessing at all. He understands this kind of stuff. Yeah. And there are lots of ways in which Trump is silly.

Or seems to be foolish or whatever, but on like the high level stuff like competitions for power. Who smarter than that? He's really smart. So yes, he understood all of that. He understood the risks.

Not all the risks. I do think he was sold on the idea that we could kill the Iatola. It's one of the dumbest things this country has ever done. But I do think he probably believed that. But like big picture of the risks, all those bases vulnerable.

Our weapon shortage totally real well known talked about in public. These are not classified facts here. He got it. And he didn't in any way. So I don't know the answer.

I'm not hiding anything. I don't have special knowledge.

“But I think that your question like well, why did we do it despite the obvious risks to us?”

And the people encouraging it also were not stupid. They must have understood this. And there are a lot of different explanations. And bigger than others. I would say at the immediate level.

I mean, I know this to be true. Israel is growing in power. It has a highly ambitious leader who is tactically gifted. But above all, willing to roll the dice. Like Netanyahu is a bold man.

And boldness is a huge component of leadership. It's just it just is. And he's a historic figure. And I don't like him, of course. But if you're him or if you're her to honor sheer Putin or anybody who's managed to tame a country,

as complex as all countries are and want to expand, you do not want to be told what to do. Period. And so getting the United States out of the Middle East is of course, a long-term objective of Israel. I don't fault them for it.

By the way, maybe we should get them at least. I don't know. You could argue it both ways. But that was definitely an objective. And it's working.

It's working. For adventure, I can bring for hours on the subject. But it's working. So. But why would you want to destroy the US economy?

Poverish the American people cause to send and strike potentially civil war? I mean, if this isn't, doesn't slow down. That's where we're going. At some point, I pray it doesn't. But clearly around that trajectory.

Why would you want that? And now we're getting into really deep waters. And I'm not confident enough in my view to express it. But, but I do agree with you. Wholeheartedly that the purpose of a system is what it does.

And this system has done this. And it wasn't hard to predict. I'm a man of middleing IQ.

I've never had my IQ taken, but it's not 180 at all.

And this was super obvious to me. Super obvious. It couldn't be more obvious. And not only was it obvious. I said it many times versions of this in public.

And not one time did anyone ever come back. Well, actually, I don't think you're seeing this right. This is what could happen. Not one time. It was always shut up Nazi.

And we've discussed it length. Why people would say shut up Nazi? There's a benefit to them from saying that. But it's also, at some point, you'd think some person would be like, Actually, there is geostrategic rationale here that you don't see.

And because I am interested in the topic and travel a lot, you think someone would call me saying, like, you don't get it. This is going to strain China and preserve dollar dominance. And not one person, despite spinning, I spent all day talking about this stuff. Now, one person said that to me.

So as far as I know, there was never a real plan to benefit the United States that I heard.

Now, making sure Iran didn't become a nuclear on power, I get it. Everyone gets that. That's why that was the talking point.

“But the truth is, this is greatly enhances the chances Iran becomes a nuclear on”

Paris, buys one from Pakistan. Of course, they don't need a nuclear program. They have nuclear weapons. It's buy one. What world are you living in? All right, I want to ask you about a couple things before we wrap up.

Hit me with it. One of them is closer related to what we were just talking about.

Bring down the Trump presidency and maybe to hobbled the US or drive them out of the Middle East or both.

There's something very conspicuous to me about us. Our coalition now having twice violated the most obvious international norms with respect to negotiations for peace. And this is such a provocative move. The idea that you would destroy the concept of negotiation in order to tie your hands in the future.

I can't think of another reason to do it. Why have a State Department? You've got Twitter. You can just issue your decrees. Right.

Right.

“But the idea of attacking on Purim having led the Iranians into the belief that we were honestly interested in seeking peace or the prior instance of attacking literally attacking a negotiation delegation.”

I believe it was in cutter.

These things are so diabolical because they effectively take options that we must have off the table.

Why would you agree to negotiate if you knew that the negotiation itself might be aruse or worse that it would be used to literally target you for death? So those things also seem like moves designed to force our hand in a way that should be intolerable to every American. Yes. Don't take our right to negotiate for peace off the table ever. I don't care who we're dealing with and how unlikely it is that that will ever be useful to us.

We need that option every time. And only a fool eliminates it. Yeah, I've seen it up close. I mean there's so much to say. Don't be boring.

I will say at the part of the difficulty for me in analyzing it as I know Steve Whitkoff well. And I love Steve Whitkoff. Wiki's just a great guy.

And so he is, sorry, just a fact.

I know a son Zack who's an excellent guy in very smart. And so I don't want to believe that he had knowledge of this. And in fact, I don't believe it. Don't just say it. I know Whitkoff.

I just don't see him doing that. And I could be completely wrong. And the evidence is just I am wrong. But at the stage, I don't believe it.

“And I think it's also possible that Whitkoff kind of played no conscious role in that.”

That he, I know he's very enthusiastic. I talked to him a lot about this about his efforts at resolving these two conflicts. In Russia, Ukraine and with Iran and very enthusiastic about reaching a negotiated settlement as his boss, the president was very genuinely, I think, enthusiastic. But along the way, these things happened.

And I think if we do find out that the United States knowingly created like, Potemkin diplomacy in order to low its adversaries into defenselessness, people should get a prison for that. That's disgusting. It hurts all Americans.

It's not a defense of the eye of toler or Putin or whatever. It's like, as you just said, that is stripping from us, one of our prerogatives as a sovereign nation, which is to reach negotiate a settlement if we so choose. I do think the Israeli perspective is very different. I think Israel is very different from the country.

I visited, maybe you visited, you know, years ago. You know, I've been there. Never been. I'd love to go, although I must tell you. I would be afraid to go.

For sure. For sure, for sure. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. I was just there. Israel changed a ton.

You know, countries change. And we're sort of ossified and caught in our previous understandings of things. That's true everywhere. So in our country, it's true internationally. And Israel's very different.

And you described Benjamin Netanyahu as a secular leader. Of course, that's true. He grew up in, like, Philadelphia. He's not, like, a religious extremist. However, his, you know, because for a lot of reasons,

partly because of massive demographic change in Israel. Massive demographic change in a lot of directions. But public sentiment there is less secular than it used to be much less secular. And the politics or system, the parliamentary system, is influenced by minority coalitions more than ours is.

“And one of his key minority coalitions believes in religious war.”

I don't know if he does. But he's been using the phrase omelette, which is a reference to the Malachites, who were a historic enemy of Israel. They're the ones that pursued the Hebrews through the Red Sea, as they escape slavery and Egypt.

And so it's a very well-known group.

They're total slaughter men, women, children, infants, and animals.

And so to use that, and that seems a feature of the Old Testament, that's fine. But to use that in a modern context in the middle of a war to describe your opponent as omelette in the middle of a war and to do it repeatedly, not just in the heat of the moment after September 7th, which I saw him do that.

I was like, "Whoa, that's heavy, but then people get upset." We said a lot of stuff after 9/11. I mean October 7th, right? Did I say September? Sorry.

I was like, "Yeah, October 7th." The attacks in southern Israel. Yeah, from Gaza. Yeah, I was like, "Yeah, they're mad. I get it." You know, we were that way too.

But what he kept saying it, and when he said it the other day, I was like, "Whoa." You know, this is a smart guy who doesn't say things by accident. Amolette?

That's a different vision of war from the one we in the West are used to.

That's total war. That's kill everything. That's genocide.

“It actually derives, I believe, from Moses' laws for war,”

which specify the conditions in which you obliterate everyone and replace them. Well, yes. And in the specific case of the Amalkites, you know, God, of course, this is a huge debate of things between Samuel and God.

And Samuel, I get that right. I think it's Samuel. I've read it a couple times, but God says, "Kill them all." And he doesn't. You know, he doesn't kill them all. And he spares the animals, for example,

and some of the children, and God prevents him from becoming king. And I think maybe mangling the slightly but not too much, because he didn't follow God's instructions. Which is a theme throughout the Bible. Just follow God's instructions. He's God, you're not.

And the instruction in this case was kill all of them. That's God's command. Not a product of human disaster. So anyway, that's a extraordinary thing to say. And I think it, I don't know that that's the actual Israeli plan.

It's a kill every Persian. I don't think it is. But it describes a mindset that's not, that's different from ours. And we are bound to this country in this war. We've described them as a partner in the war.

It's a joint operation. Like whoever came up with that is really deserved punishment. Because that's crazy. But it also means that they have different incentives and motives than we do.

And ending diplomacy would be one of them, because if your opponent is on the lake, you're not going to negotiate with them. Why would you? It's the inverse of the exactly.

Exactly. Yes. And I will say, I'm no religious scholar. But the choice of an attack on Perum. I guess it's the last is shocking in its own right.

Because as I understand the story of this holiday,

“one of the, I believe, ten most major Jewish holidays,”

it is the story of Esther, who was Jewish, and had married the king in Persia. And there was some palace intrigue, an advisor, I think, a cousin of the king is outraged at the Jews and orders them to be killed,

and Esther steps in and reveals that she is Jewish, and prevents the genociding of the Jews in Persia. It's just correct, it's exactly what it says. And then the advisor who recommended the genociding of the Jews is himself impaled to death.

Esther is sent by her dad into the king's harem, and she's like total smoke show in charming,

and basically subverts this plot against her people.

And she ends it, she ends the plot. And then, what the kicker is, and this is what the holiday celebrates, is the genocide of the people who might have attacked the Jews. And 70,000 of them, it says, in the book,

which is in the Christian Bible, so I've read it, and they only stop when their arms get tired from killing. And so it's the only book of the Christian Bible,

“and I think of the tour that doesn't mention God.”

And it's inclusion is a little confusing to me, but whatever, I didn't stack the Bible, but it's there. But what it describes is a killing of people who weren't actually posing an imminent threat

and killing all of them. So it's a different, look, I'm not even judging. I'm just saying that's a different way of looking at conflict from the way that we do. Well, I mean, I think you're being too generous.

I'm trying. I don't like attacking other people's religions, I just don't. I'm sorry. That's the thing I set up top. It's very confusing to have the secular prosecution

of a holy wall. That is so deep. And I think we have to wrap our minds around this. Do you understand it, do you? Well, this brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about,

which is Netanyahu himself, which I have a very uneasy feeling about this person,

And ready stands for.

“But there are a number of things here that I'm having trouble looking past.”

One is that he was very unpopular before October 7.

And that war caused his nation to rally around him as his natural. But I think it set the world up. To my way of thinking, I was as troubled by October 7th as anyone.

I mean, I'm not Israeli, so I didn't feel it in the personal way. It was awful. But I'm a student of history, and specifically of genocide, enough to have felt what that was, what its purpose was,

and to be very troubled by the fact that it could possibly happen in Israel under those circumstances. I was perplexed by it at the time. You can't kill people. You can't kill people.

But how could it have happened that troubled man? I still don't know the answer. Can I say one thing? There's a lot of censorship in Israel more than we acknowledge. It's a military state, obviously.

It's a heavily militarized state,

“but it's governed with the hop of the military.”

And there were a number of Israelis, patriotic Israelis who'd served in the idea for directly after that attack. In October, who said out loud? No.

That's not possible. This is one of the most heavily surveilled borders in the world. Like no. One of them is called Ephraim Fenix. Who is Israeli liberal?

I had her on dark horse. Oh, was she good? She was great. I mean, I had her on right after October 7th. Did she talk about this?

Oh, we talked about it extensively. I don't think she's living in Israel anymore.

I've never met her, but I've just admired her.

She's a big Bitcoin person. I don't think I agree with her, but I like her. She's smart and she seems honest. Yep.

She basically, I don't want to speak for, I don't know her. But she basically stopped talking about that. I don't even know if that video is still up. Like there was a concerted effort to censor anybody who said, wait, what?

Charlie Kirk said that. What? As a lover of Israel, he said, I don't think this doesn't make any sense. Oh, he was very specific.

In fact, he highlighted something that I myself had in trying to figure out what had happened. I had done the calculations myself about how, you know, you can't park on a patchy helicopter of which Israel has apparently 48, more than an hour from that border in Israel.

If you just take the top speed. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a question about even if you got caught with your pants down, somehow, which is almost unthinkable.

What happened after? It's a little hard to explain. And Charlie said that on the Patrick, that David podcast very famously. And, you know, obviously,

a whole other thread is we had the very public, very brutal killing of Charlie Kirk. And it tells the same story as the assassination attempts against President Trump about the failure to properly investigate Jeffrey Epstein,

which is that we don't have an FBI. I know we have something that obstructs our investigations rather than conducts them. So anyway, I don't know what to make of any of that. And of course, it's not hard to imagine very dark things.

But nonetheless, what I thought was required after October 7th was that Netanyahu needed to step down or be removed from power and replaced with a leader who was not in part responsible for Hamas's power in Gaza. And I must tell you, if there are Israelis listening to this,

you have to understand how that looked from at least my vantage point here in the US. You cannot have this person conducting a major military operation in Gaza having been partially responsible for this in having cynically supported Hamas.

Whatever decision he made, and for whatever reason he made the decision to support Hamas to divide the Palestinians, he could not be a legitimate person to preside over that. Exactly.

So in light of that, I've never met Netanyahu,

but I have watched him for a long time. And I couldn't be more disturbed by the person that I see. He looks to me, first of all,

“I think I detect when he discusses the United States”

and the relationship between our countries. I hear the words that he says and I understand them, but I feel his disdain, exactly.

I'm the only other person I know who's ever said that.

But I could not agree with you more. I just feel it. There is a resentment. Does he send a subordinate position? He is undeniably a man of history.

He has shaped historic events. He has moved borders. Yes. He has moved populations.

“You could say it's good or bad, I think it's bad.”

But whatever, he's a man of history. And he understands himself that way. Yes. And here he is like having to suck up to American donors. American members of Congress get permission from the president of the United States.

Look at it from here. I'm a big believer even before I don't like someone. Think about what he's thinking. What's his perspective? Yep.

And Netanyahu's perspective is one of resentment.

As the subordinate partner always is resentful.

It's a subordinate partner who feels himself to be superior. Yes. Exactly. But diminished by this relationship. Of course he has a deep resentment for the United States.

It's very obvious. And I know him. And I've detected it in my conversations with him. It's the most obvious thing ever. And it is a kind of species of like.

You see this with rich people. They're all convinced that their household help love them. I've always noticed this my whole life. You know, she loves me. You know, I got her her green card.

She loves me. I was like, I doubt she loves you. She was washing her underwear. Like she's a human being. I know that she loves you.

Actually, she probably is grateful in some ways. Resentful and others. That's just the nature of those relationships. And in his case, he's a hollow man who I don't think has deep beliefs other than in his destiny. And I do think the destiny of Israel.

I think he yeah. Father's historian wrote a lot about this. His personal life is in total disarray. His wife is a very famous Sarah. It's a very famous person in Israel and reviled.

And she's famously hostile to him. And since we're just being honest, I'll just say I don't trust a man whose wife hates him. And I don't. And I'm not even blaming him for that. I don't know the dynamic.

I'm not in their marriage.

“But I think that if you are making decisions on which the fate of nations hang,”

you need to have a button down at home. And if you don't, I think it's very difficult to make wise decisions. And I think there is a kind of sweaty desperation to him. Now, he's running a small country in the middle of hostile neighbors. I get it, yep.

However, I think a man like that is not strong. He's fundamentally weak at the core. And it's the weak man who are the most dangerous.

By far, strong men are never, they're very straightforward.

They don't lie. Netanyahu lies a lot, including to you as officials who really dislike him for it. Let me just say that. They really dislike him for it. And I often hear people say the US government is controlled by his room.

They do apply pressure points unduly. They just got us into this work. That's all true. But if you actually, since I really from DC and you talk to people who work in the federal bureaucracies, including the intelligence, he's including the FBI, including the White House,

they are hostile because the relations are so hostile on a personal level. You talk to people depending on the IDF has an outpost in our Pentagon. Tons of people I know who work there, but they don't hate Israel. They believe it has a right to exist, whatever that means. They don't like the IDF because they're high-handed, arrogant, nasty.

The relations between these countries on a personal level is bad. You never hear that about the, you know, Spanish contingent in NATO or something. Never.

“So I think the relationship between the United States and Israel is a lot less healthy on every level.”

I'm micro to macro. I think Netanyahu both causes that end reflects it. And I think he's a genuinely dangerous person. The last thing I'll say he's in is 70s. And you notice this, it's the older leaders who tend to make the really reckless decisions.

That's interesting. I do think that. I mean, we just had a face-off between a 79-year-old president of the United States and an 86-year-old at all over Iran, and it didn't end well. I think there's a lot of evidence that men lose their capacity for wise decision-making in their age.

Certainly for quick decision-making. And there does set into some man a kind of nihilism. I'm going to be dead anyway. I do think they think that. I think the ones I know, Rupert Murdoch, that absurd Mitch McConnell, guys like that.

I mean, they're on their way out. They're in their 90s. And they both have. And I know them both. They have this kind of like,

one last war. It's like, what do you even thinking? Well, I would, this is a strange thing for me to say, but I've, you know, I try to be a very careful thinker about these things. Yeah.

And that is the kind of thing, a pattern that you would expect amongst non-believing older men. Yeah. Believing older men have a reason to keep reins on those instincts. And it depends on what you believe.

to maintain your moral posture.

I think there's evidence. The eye of Toler was happy to be martyred. Certainly there were reports to that effect that he stayed above ground. He knew he was going to hit prostate cancer. And he knew he was going to die and he wanted to be martyred.

“And I think there is strong overwhelming evidence from Danielle's public statements that he sees this”

as his and his nation's destiny. And that he believes God has signed off on this approach of it.

And so I do think it depends.

I mean, it really depends. Like if you believe in a God that wants reconciliation between people. Obviously, these are grave sense. But if you believe in a God that, you know, is a triumphal is God who wants you to subdue and eliminate your enemies, this is what God wants.

Well, this is also an uncomfortable topic for me, but one I've been thinking about for decades. I would say this is also a distinction, which I don't think we in the west have grappled with properly between the Old Testament God and Jesus, that the fundamental lesson of Jesus as I see it is the broadening of the in-group and the humanizing of the out-group. And, you know, that is resonant in the golden rule.

It's resonant in the story of the good Samaritan. That's really a point. And taking to its natural conclusion that leads to this western view of, hey, let's put the lineage stuff aside and make wealth by collaborating, exactly. So, I'm concerned, you know, again, I see the disdain from Netanyahu, but I also see, try to figure out how to phrase it, about a kind of Moses complex.

But a godless Moses complex, you know, the thing about Moses is that it's a partnership with God. And, you know, God is pushing Moses around to do the right thing to get his peace of mind against his wealth, right, very much so.

“But Netanyahu, I think clearly views himself, he not only is he a historic figure already, no matter what else he may do,”

but he views himself in that light. And I think he is trying to do something transformative that will be his legacy. No question. And the question is what looks to me like expansionist tendencies that seem to be very much on his mind, do not appear to me to be in the interest of the modern state of Israel, which does have this strong Western thread to it, but it's in competition with this thread that comes from lineage against lineage violence as it's viewed in the Torah.

Exactly right. So, I don't know what to do about that, that seems to me very dangerous. And I guess the last thing I will say is that I don't know if it is my mind playing tricks on me or not. But given what I do know about Netanyahu and what I know about where he stood with respect to his own population prior to October 7th, I feel like I'm looking at a crime boss,

and that this is a person who is decided that they are entitled to do things that a normal person would not feel entitled to do, literally to anyone who stands in his way. I personally worry about this because simply speaking my mind, which is my right as an American, and should be defended by every other American, even if you disagree with every single word I say, the fact that I should be entitled to put my model on the table and tell you why I believe it and tell you where I'm worried about it and all of that,

that shouldn't be controversial at all, and yet when looking at this person who sees the world in killer be killed terms and may view anyone in the West who speaks in opposition to his view as a existential threat to his people,

“if that's how he sees it, I worry about what he might do to anyone who stood in the way of what I think is an extremely reckless program”

that's not in the United States and not in Israel's interests. I couldn't agree more. I think everything you've said is just true and easy to prove based on the last three years of behavior or more.

I mean, I first interviewed Netanyahu 25 years ago. He's been, I will give him points for endurance. He's an amazing political figure.

I don't think that because someone disagrees with me or does something awful that that person doesn't have remarkable strengths. He clearly does. He's highly intelligent. He's charismatic. He's hung around. He's hung around. He's young for his age. No, no, no, no, no. He's an amazing guy. I mean, I think that, you know, I think it's fair to say that. It's not an endorsement, obviously. He's a huge threat to the United States and do his own country,

but he's an amazing person and so I wouldn't underestimate him.

And, you know, there are all these theories about it. These dark theories. He's doing this. He's doing that.

But part of it, and I don't know if those are true or not, I wonder. But what I do know is true, is that his force of will is remarkable. Yes. And by the way, that gets you more than we admit, you can talk things into existence. I've seen it many times. I know people in leadership who've done it. And there is a kind of supernatural phenomena in my opinion, but even leaving that aside is just true.

If you speak something, it does tend to become real. You can bend reality to your will. I've seen it.

“And he has done that. And so you have to sort of say, wow, man, you know, you're not disagree with everything.”

I think it's evil, but, you know, props for imposing your will in the world.

He is a formidable big time in being a big time, big time. Yep. All right. Well, the last thing I want to say, I don't want to leave this conversation before I mention it. I've been watching you for a long time since you had me on in 2017. And I am a big fan of your monologues, not just their content, but the way you produce them, the way you deliver them.

And I've had this thought, you know, I was a professor for 14 years. And I think most professors aren't any good at the job at all. They don't know their subjects very well. You wouldn't expect them to. They were trained narrowly and then they're expected to teach broadly and they don't know how. They don't even know what it is. They're supposed to be teaching.

So they they teach in a defensive way that doesn't allow people to question them. When I watched your monologues and you've had some excellent ones of late ones that go on for or sometimes an hour and it appears that you're not reading it off of anything. Oh, you're just talking. And my thought is actually that

“Tucker's a guy. I don't want to say you've missed your calling because I think you're doing what you need to be doing.”

But that you had another calling that you didn't follow that you could have been an excellent professor. The kind of professor that you think about many years after the course is over. Somebody who made things clear that were otherwise difficult to understand. And I will say in the recent context, this has been made even clearer for the following reason. I look at the conflict in the Middle East and I spend a huge fraction of my time trying to understand what could possibly explain the things that I'm seeing.

Right. That's just what I do. This is strange. It has paradox after paradox in it. What explains it? And I haven't found anybody else who's putting a model on the table that even touches it. I can't even figure out what most people think we're doing in here. Right. What is the goal? What is the the the victory condition? But when I listen to you two things happen. One, you are presenting a model that I don't know if it's true or not.

But I do know that it's a match for the stuff I can check independently. That's a very strong sign that it is credible in some important way. The other thing is that I learned things about the conflict that I didn't know already. Right. I hear you talk and it is a regular occurrence that you will introduce some fact or observation that I wasn't paying attention to that fits. That's another very strong sign that you're telling us something that has real currency under it.

So in any case, A, I want to just say, look, I'm impressed at what you do. It is very difficult to deliver. Why, you know, in the last six weeks, I've been in places that are at the center of the news. You know, I've been in among Jordan, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Tel Aviv, Riyadh. I've been in all those cities. I have friends at all the cities. I know the cities and I've been in and out of those cities since 9/11. So this happens to be a topic. I'm hardly an expert. I don't speak Arabic or Hebrew, but I definitely have spent a lot of time in the Middle East like a lot.

And I'm interested in it. And I like the people. I've always liked the people and even if I disagree with their governments.

And so it is weird to see all their cities like burning. It's very upsetting to me. So there's that. And so no, I don't use a teleprompter.

“I just say, well, I think, but I know a lot about the subject. I think I know a lot about the subject. So that's easy.”

I actually tried to be a teacher. That was my goal. But I hadn't graduated from college. I wanted to be a boarding school teacher because boarding school was so formative for me.

So we always had an appreciation for travel. But they were like, no, you're a loser.

“But that was actually my goal. I first applied to CIA because I wanted to live abroad in a interesting life.”

They're like, no, you did drugs. We can't learn to hire you. And then I tried to work at the American School in Marrakesh. And they were like, so dismissive. They're like, you're too dumb to teach in a boarding school. I was like, okay, I'm going to journalism. Luckily, I had a lot of children and a lot of nephews. So there's always an audience for me to give my lectures. Well, you're doing a great job. And I will say I was, I was pleased. I don't know if you saw it.

But my friend Jeffrey Tucker, you know.

Yeah, of course, Brownstone Institute. So I'm a Brownstone fellow, a proud one.

I love Brownstone. It's the only institution I know of any size that actually works at the moment. It's a great place. I love that. But in any case, he posted on X a couple of days ago about your monologues. He said, look, I don't care if you disagree with Tucker or not.

“You have to understand how difficult what he's pulling off is.”

And he noted that you don't use a teleprompter and that you appear to be just speaking from... It's actually way, I mean, since you do a similar job, I'll just say what you probably already know,

which is the way easier than reading teleprompter.

Reading teleprompter really works. Reading teleprompter sucks. No question. To do it naturally, like you're just kind of talking, I mean, I did it for 30 years. I got pretty good at it, but like, no, that's super hard.

You know what's not hardest conversation? Well, I hope I don't regret saying this. Because neither you nor I know if you're right, but there's a principle that I adhere to, which is that the best asset you can have in delivering an argument is the luxury of being right. Exactly.

If you're actually right, you have all kinds of leeway. And it doesn't really matter where the conversation goes. It goes so true. And by the way, the beauty of giving them our logs is, you get to choose the topic. Well, that's true. We're talking about what I want to talk about.

So, you know, you don't hear me giving a lot of lectures on like women's fashion. You know what I mean, or American football or something. Right. It's only things I think I understand. Well, in any case, you do a brilliant job of it.

Thank you. I want to thank you for what you've been doing. Thank you. You have stayed very clear in your mission as a patriot.

“It's obvious to me that that's what you are.”

And you've been mercilessly punished for it, which I find despicable. So, I hope that what comes out of this is that people who think that they disagree with you or me or both of us will listen to what this conversation sounds like, even if only to understand what the mindset of other people is that have arrived at a very different conclusion. Well, thank you. I hope that's right.

All right. And let's hope that this war ends quickly. And with this little bloodshed as possible. Thank you, Brett. Thank you.