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[00:00:00.640 --> 00:00:04.400] Let's talk about a special end-of-life care called Hospice.
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[00:00:30.160 --> 00:00:32.960] Oh, hello there, bookworms and Jane Austen fans.
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[00:00:38.080 --> 00:00:43.840] Come visit A Lively Mind Jane Austen at 250, an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum.
[00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:46.160] Iconic artifacts from Jane's house in England.
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[00:01:04.160 --> 00:01:09.920] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:16.640 --> 00:01:22.720] All right, everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show, brought to you by, as always, the Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine.
[00:01:22.720 --> 00:01:24.720] I'm your host, Michael Shermer, my guest today.
[00:01:24.720 --> 00:01:27.200] Oh my God, have I got a great show for you today?
[00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:31.520] He is our returning champion, Douglas Murray, best-selling author and journalist.
[00:01:31.520 --> 00:01:50.240] His books include The Sunday number one bestsellers, The War on the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, and Islam, and The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity, which he came on the show to discuss a couple years ago.
[00:01:50.240 --> 00:02:01.480] He's the associate editor and regular writer at The Spectator since 2012 and contributes to other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Mail on Sunday, and The New York Post.
[00:02:01.480 --> 00:02:03.880] He's a regular guest on broadcast news channels.
[00:02:03.880 --> 00:02:09.240] He's also spoken at numerous universities, parliaments, and big arenas like the O2 Arena.
[00:02:09.240 --> 00:02:09.880] I recall that.
[00:02:09.880 --> 00:02:11.960] I think that was with Jordan Peterson, right?
[00:02:12.280 --> 00:02:14.440] Yeah, an epic lineup there.
[00:02:14.440 --> 00:02:15.240] And the White House.
[00:02:15.240 --> 00:02:16.600] Okay, we have to hear about that.
[00:02:16.600 --> 00:02:17.800] Douglas, nice to see you.
[00:02:17.800 --> 00:02:18.760] How are you?
[00:02:18.760 --> 00:02:20.840] Very good to be back with you, Michael.
[00:02:20.840 --> 00:02:24.200] Yes, and to see you in a non-social setting here.
[00:02:24.200 --> 00:02:29.480] This is nice without adult beverages here to lubricate the conversation.
[00:02:29.800 --> 00:02:35.320] So, you know, we missed each other when your book first came out numerous times.
[00:02:35.320 --> 00:02:38.360] And here we are, July 1st, recording this.
[00:02:38.360 --> 00:02:41.960] And it felt to me like your book must have come out, I don't know, six, eight, nine months ago.
[00:02:41.960 --> 00:02:42.520] And I looked it up.
[00:02:42.520 --> 00:02:44.600] It was April 8th, just three months ago.
[00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:45.800] That's right.
[00:02:45.800 --> 00:02:49.720] It's astonishing how much happens in such a short period of time.
[00:02:49.720 --> 00:02:52.200] Yes, on democracies and death cults.
[00:02:52.920 --> 00:02:53.560] Here it is.
[00:02:53.560 --> 00:02:54.120] There it is.
[00:02:54.120 --> 00:02:55.320] I forgot to hold it up and show it.
[00:02:55.320 --> 00:02:56.040] There you go.
[00:02:56.040 --> 00:02:59.480] On democracies and death cults, Israel and the future of civilization.
[00:02:59.480 --> 00:03:02.200] Sorry for the lacuna there.
[00:03:02.200 --> 00:03:05.560] But yeah, how's the reception been so far in three months?
[00:03:05.720 --> 00:03:06.680] Amazing.
[00:03:07.560 --> 00:03:19.000] It's hit all the bestseller lists, which is, of course, really principally a joy because, as you know, Michael, the best thing for a writer is to be read.
[00:03:19.640 --> 00:03:31.640] And actually getting the feedback from readers about this book has been terrific, not least because it's a pretty personal book in lots of ways.
[00:03:32.280 --> 00:03:41.800] It's an account of the aftermath of October 7th and the war that resulted.
[00:03:41.800 --> 00:04:02.640] And my aim in the book is to, first of all, give a first-hand account of what I saw in the aftermath of the atrocities, but also what I saw first-hand in the ensuing war and being embedded with the IDF in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
[00:04:02.640 --> 00:04:25.120] And then a sort of zooming out of what it is that meant that in this extraordinary and terrible societal moment, so many people threw themselves, not just behind the Palestinian cause, which is something I can understand, but behind the cause of Hamas.
[00:04:25.120 --> 00:04:35.920] In other words, just ran straight to backing and expressing jubilation for the worst death cult terrorists of our time.
[00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:43.760] And we've seen that again just in the last few days with crowds at music.
[00:04:44.080 --> 00:04:45.440] I mean, just consider this.
[00:04:45.440 --> 00:05:04.720] You know, one of the places where the terrorists hit on the 7th of October 2023 was the Nova Music Festival, where young people were dancing in the early hours of the morning when Hamaz terrorists set upon them, raped, butchered, murdered, tortured, and kidnapped.
[00:05:05.040 --> 00:05:29.120] A couple of days before we're talking, another music festival, Glastonbury, had people chanting from the stage and the audience returning the chants of support for the rapists, for the death cult, for the people who'd attacked that music festival in Israel, and if they had a chance, would be gleeful at rampaging through crowds like that at Glastonbury.
[00:05:30.360 --> 00:05:38.440] It's an example of what I go into in the book: of the extraordinary deranging thing that offered a really quite clear choice.
[00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:41.800] So many people decided to jump on the side of the terrorists.
[00:05:42.120 --> 00:05:48.920] Yeah, you open here in your introduction of that video that we've all heard now of the atrocity video.
[00:05:48.920 --> 00:05:54.600] As it were, in the midst of the attack, the terrorist made a phone call back to his family in Gaza.
[00:05:54.600 --> 00:05:57.000] The excitement in his voice was obvious.
[00:05:57.000 --> 00:05:58.040] Hi, Dad.
[00:05:58.040 --> 00:05:59.480] The three-minute call begins.
[00:05:59.480 --> 00:06:03.320] Open my WhatsApp now and you'll see all those killed.
[00:06:03.320 --> 00:06:05.880] Look how many I killed with my own hands.
[00:06:05.880 --> 00:06:07.960] Your son killed Jews.
[00:06:07.960 --> 00:06:11.080] The father replies, may God protect you.
[00:06:11.720 --> 00:06:13.080] The son is exultant.
[00:06:13.080 --> 00:06:16.040] Dad, I'm talking to you from a Jewish woman's phone.
[00:06:16.040 --> 00:06:19.880] I killed her and I killed her husband and I killed 10 with my own hands.
[00:06:19.880 --> 00:06:24.440] He goes on and on, repeating himself, boasting, Dad, I killed 10, 10 with my own hands.
[00:06:24.440 --> 00:06:25.480] Put mom on.
[00:06:26.040 --> 00:06:27.080] That's astonishing.
[00:06:27.080 --> 00:06:29.000] I mean, that's just hard to even read.
[00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:31.480] Is that what you mean by a death cult?
[00:06:31.480 --> 00:06:31.960] Yes.
[00:06:31.960 --> 00:06:41.240] I mean, literally the glorification of death, as you and many of our viewers will know, I mean, there have been some death cult ideologies throughout history.
[00:06:42.520 --> 00:06:56.760] One thinks of things like in Imperial Japan, where some people were willing to get into a plane and commit suicide by flying the plane into American aircraft carriers and more.
[00:06:56.760 --> 00:07:05.880] There have been many groups throughout history, sadly, from all political directions and religious directions, who've literally glorified in death.
[00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:14.600] But yes, in the case of Hamaz, this is Hezbollah and their backers in the Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran.
[00:07:14.720 --> 00:07:23.200] These are literally groups that say they want death and want to bring death to others and get it for themselves.
[00:07:23.200 --> 00:07:34.560] And as I mull on quite a lot in the book, that's something which, so the Western mindset is largely almost impossible to comprehend.
[00:07:34.560 --> 00:07:45.120] And yet it is something worth thinking about and trying to comprehend because there is a presumption, I think, in our societies.
[00:07:45.120 --> 00:07:52.880] You quite often hear it in good, well-meaning people who will say things like, I think most people around the world want what we want.
[00:07:52.880 --> 00:07:58.640] And I usually think that's a sign that the person in question hasn't gone around the world very much.
[00:07:59.200 --> 00:08:20.400] But yeah, there are societies, there are groups who just simply don't want what we want, who have a different view of history, of the future, of the present, and wildly say it all the time, and yet are not believed.
[00:08:21.600 --> 00:08:37.200] And yet, when somebody like Hassan Nasrallah, the former now deceased head of Hezbollah, says, you know, the great weakness of the infidels is that they love life and we don't.
[00:08:37.200 --> 00:08:38.880] You know, we love death.
[00:08:39.200 --> 00:08:43.120] That is really what people like Nasrallah thought and think.
[00:08:43.760 --> 00:08:44.640] Well, they love death.
[00:08:44.640 --> 00:08:49.680] They love the idea that there's an afterlife they're going to for which they'll be rewarded for dying.
[00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:50.560] Yes.
[00:08:50.560 --> 00:09:07.080] I mean, that's a huge part of it: the idea that the present, the life we have, is not the main point, that an afterlife, particularly one in the case of this type of Islamist ideology.
[00:09:07.080 --> 00:09:28.040] The afterlife is the demonstration, the vindication that what you've done on this earth will be rewarded and that the reward will come especially to those who lay down their lives in the service of this ideology, take life wherever they can.
[00:09:28.360 --> 00:09:31.320] And if they lose it themselves, then that's all for the better.
[00:09:31.640 --> 00:09:42.120] Yeah, it's a very strong theological, effectively millenarian movement and one which I think has to be understood as well as confronted.
[00:09:42.120 --> 00:09:42.680] Yeah.
[00:09:42.680 --> 00:09:47.720] Well, at least Marxist regimes, since they're mostly atheists, don't believe in the afterlife.
[00:09:47.720 --> 00:09:59.240] So we can assume that they're rational actors who will be deterred by something like mutual assured destruction and that a game theory analysis will predict what they'll do.
[00:09:59.240 --> 00:10:04.920] And so far, that's worked pretty well in terms of nuclear deterrence.
[00:10:04.920 --> 00:10:07.720] But this brings us to Iran, right?
[00:10:07.720 --> 00:10:16.600] Because this is one reason why we can't let them have nukes, because they're not going to be the rational calculators like, let's say, the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.
[00:10:16.600 --> 00:10:17.320] That's right.
[00:10:17.320 --> 00:10:41.320] I mean, the whole premise, I mean, the whole premise of mutual assured destruction, of a standoff for détente between nuclear powers is that you hope that both sides are rational actors, and they understand that beginning a war with the world's most dangerous weaponry will lead to their own almost immediate swift demise themselves.
[00:10:41.320 --> 00:10:52.080] And there have been plenty of close calls, shall we say, even in the history of comparatively rational countries, leaderships.
[00:10:53.920 --> 00:11:00.800] During the Cold War and in the present standoff with Russia, that's by no means straightforward.
[00:11:00.800 --> 00:11:10.320] But yes, I mean, even at the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin wasn't eager, it wasn't eager in welcoming the idea of death.
[00:11:10.960 --> 00:11:14.640] You might say India-Pakistan is a sort of détente.
[00:11:14.720 --> 00:11:21.520] Both know that if they were to start throwing around the nuclear weapons they have, it would lead to their own immediate demise.
[00:11:21.520 --> 00:11:23.200] So, why would they do it?
[00:11:23.200 --> 00:11:38.160] We haven't yet had a situation where a regime, a government, an ideology which of the kind I just described also has control of the most genocidal and dangerous weaponry.
[00:11:38.800 --> 00:11:52.720] You know, one way to think of it is that mutually assured destruction works until you have an opponent who loves the idea of destruction of every kind.
[00:11:53.600 --> 00:11:59.040] People for whom mutually assured destruction sounds like an interesting thing to try.
[00:11:59.200 --> 00:12:00.640] That's right, yes.
[00:12:00.640 --> 00:12:07.440] Well, okay, I wanted to ask you about Iran and everything that's been happening in the last couple of weeks there.
[00:12:08.640 --> 00:12:21.280] That must be tied, I guess, to Gaza and Hamas because Hamas is sponsored by Iran, and Iran has promised to eradicate Israel if they can.
[00:12:21.280 --> 00:12:26.240] And that would be the justification for the strikes against them.
[00:12:26.560 --> 00:12:27.360] Yes.
[00:12:28.960 --> 00:13:03.880] One of the fascinating things about the post-October 7th war has been that it's gradually that the IDF and the IAF, and now with American V-2 bombers backing them, have managed to roll their enemy up pretty successfully and all the way back to the main backer in the revolutionary Islamic government of Iran, which has misgoverned Iran since 1979.
[00:13:03.880 --> 00:13:45.080] That's one of the reasons why I mention early in the book what I think of as one of the two worst journeys of the 20th century, the most lamentable journeys, which is the flight that took the Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran in 1979, brought him back from exile in the West and to Iran, where once he seizes power and once his militias and everything are embedded and once he's killed and imprisoned and murdered his political opponents, manages to have a vice-like clamp on Iran and then to export their ideology across the Middle East.
[00:13:45.880 --> 00:13:50.680] The great colonial power of the era in the Middle East is Iran.
[00:13:51.000 --> 00:13:59.640] Colonized Iraq, colonized Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, wrecked these countries as its militias have been there.
[00:13:59.640 --> 00:14:18.720] And of course, Gaza, where Iran not only knew of the October the 7th attacks and the planning, but had to get approval for it and had trained and armed Hamaz in the years prior to the attack.
[00:14:19.360 --> 00:14:28.800] It seems very interesting watching the process of the rollback occur since the 7th, as Hamaz has been pretty much decimated, still holding arms.
[00:14:28.960 --> 00:14:34.240] They still have hostages that they are still holding, Israeli hostages.
[00:14:34.240 --> 00:14:42.160] But then the destruction of Hezbollah to the extent that their grip on Lebanon has massively, massively weakened.
[00:14:42.400 --> 00:14:46.400] The destruction of Iran's proxy forces in Syria.
[00:14:46.400 --> 00:15:03.360] And now the regime in Iran standing pretty much alone and certainly naked with American and Israeli fighter jets operating over almost all of Iran with ease.
[00:15:03.360 --> 00:15:06.160] And it's been an astonishing thing to see.
[00:15:06.160 --> 00:15:12.800] And then the removal of the nuclear program that the Mullah has been dreaming about for decades.
[00:15:13.920 --> 00:15:20.720] I wanted to ask you about how much we can trust the media, mainstream media and the U.S.
[00:15:20.720 --> 00:15:25.360] government and Israel on what we assume to be true about Iran.
[00:15:25.360 --> 00:15:27.200] Let me cue this up for you.
[00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:42.800] I just listened to Lex Friedman's podcast episode in which he hosted a debate with Scott Horton, the author and director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com and host of the Scott Horton Show.
[00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:45.920] And for the past three decades, a staunch critic of U.S.
[00:15:45.920 --> 00:15:48.080] foreign policy and military interventionism.
[00:15:48.080 --> 00:15:59.680] His debate opponent was Mark Dubowitz, who's the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown podcast, and a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years.
[00:15:59.680 --> 00:16:02.280] Okay, I never heard of either of these guys.
[00:16:02.280 --> 00:16:05.960] I know next to nothing about Iran, so I thought, okay, this will be interesting.
[00:16:05.960 --> 00:16:15.160] So Dubowitz queues up and just basically, for 15 minutes, outlines everything we've been hearing about Iran for the last 30 years.
[00:16:15.160 --> 00:16:21.480] And pretty much echoing the Trump outline of what's happened recently.
[00:16:21.480 --> 00:16:25.400] And then Horton, his response is: none of that is true.
[00:16:25.400 --> 00:16:26.440] It's all lies.
[00:16:26.440 --> 00:16:31.880] We've all been fed misinformation, disinformation, malinformation from the U.S.
[00:16:31.880 --> 00:16:33.400] government, from Israel.
[00:16:33.640 --> 00:16:35.000] Israel is telling the U.S.
[00:16:35.000 --> 00:16:36.440] government lies about things.
[00:16:37.400 --> 00:16:38.840] We're a puppet of them.
[00:16:38.840 --> 00:16:40.040] And he just went on and on.
[00:16:40.360 --> 00:16:43.320] And they went back and forth for four hours.
[00:16:43.960 --> 00:16:49.400] So what's an outsider like me who knows nothing about Iran to make of these kind of debates?
[00:16:49.560 --> 00:16:51.720] Who should I trust and believe?
[00:16:52.840 --> 00:16:58.120] Well, the first thing is that there is a lot of misinformation out there.
[00:16:58.120 --> 00:17:05.960] And a lot of it, I'm afraid, comes from people who've mugged up very recently on this.
[00:17:06.360 --> 00:17:22.440] This is, of course, as I think you and I have talked about before, Michael, this is a perennial problem in our era, which is that everybody can become a kind of expert fast, thanks to the glories of Wikipedia and Google and so on.
[00:17:22.840 --> 00:17:37.240] And for instance, I've noticed that in recent weeks, there have been a large number of people who said things like, you know, well, Netanyahu has said for decades that Iran was on the brink of getting a nuclear bomb and it hasn't got it, so we're being lied to.
[00:17:39.600 --> 00:17:40.640] No.
[00:17:37.560 --> 00:17:56.400] Thanks like, well, no, thanks to very significant interventions, presumably by the Israelis, things like setting off the Stuxnet virus in Honey 10 that rampaged through the computers of the nuclear project in Iran, thanks to things like that.
[00:17:56.960 --> 00:18:06.400] The Iranians have consistently been set back in their enrichment process, in their development of a deliverable nuclear weapon.
[00:18:06.880 --> 00:18:16.720] So there are quite a lot of people who seem to be bemused by things that if they'd have followed them even remotely closely, they could have realized they're misinformed on.
[00:18:17.040 --> 00:18:33.120] I think it's a striking thing that the weaponization of every aspect of something like the strikes that happened last week now, we've fought, is extraordinary to watch.
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[00:19:33.640 --> 00:19:51.080] In this report that the Trump administration has pushed back on a lot, which is from a part of the national security infrastructure, which claims that the project in Iran has been set back maybe weeks or months, but not significantly.
[00:19:51.400 --> 00:19:57.000] That seems to have been a report written almost immediately in order to leak.
[00:19:57.720 --> 00:20:07.800] Which, I mean, everyone leaks, people leak in every direction, but that smells to me to be very incorrect.
[00:20:07.800 --> 00:20:31.080] I mean, the idea that the, for instance, the reactor at the Ford facility, which needed, I think, a couple of bombs to destroy, which had something like 10 or 12 dropped on it, the idea that that's in any kind of workable shape for the foreseeable future, I think is crazy.
[00:20:32.280 --> 00:20:39.720] There are questions about whether or not materials were taken out of Ford beforehand, and if so, by whom.
[00:20:40.360 --> 00:20:46.200] But this is something that the world, not just America, should keep a very close eye on.
[00:20:47.400 --> 00:21:06.520] But yeah, I mean, I think in general, the bodies that have been expert on this, I think Mark Dubritz and the others at FDD are very good examples of people who've been on top of this for many years, in fact, decades now, should be trusted.
[00:21:06.760 --> 00:21:25.040] And, you know, there are international agencies like the IAEA, which have been committed to trying to keep an eye on the Iranian project and as accurately as they can sum up what the intent and capabilities of the regime there have been.
[00:21:25.200 --> 00:21:31.040] I think they can be at least, if not fully trusted, then taken into account.
[00:21:33.760 --> 00:21:45.760] And, you know, there are sort of very basic ones, which is that the IAEA and others said, you know, there's no reason to enrich uranium to the levels that the Iranians have been enriching it for.
[00:21:45.760 --> 00:21:52.160] There was no reason to do that if you wanted merely a civilian energy nuclear project.
[00:21:52.560 --> 00:21:53.840] There's no need for it.
[00:21:53.840 --> 00:22:09.520] And by the way, the other thing that's worth noting is how some people who would not normally be supporters of Israeli or indeed American military intervention have spoken out in the last couple of weeks.
[00:22:09.520 --> 00:22:22.160] I was very struck by Chancellor Emertz of Germany's statement as the Israelis were doing the strikes on the nuclear facilities in Iran that he said Israel is doing our dirty work for us.
[00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:34.240] And by us, he meant frankly the civilized world, the world that does not want the Iranian regime to get nuclear and then the whole the rest of the Middle East to go nuclear in response.
[00:22:34.240 --> 00:22:47.200] It was very interesting hearing a German Chancellor saying that because he knew, as governments across the West knew, that nobody wants to have to confront a nuclear-armed Iran.
[00:22:47.200 --> 00:22:59.280] No one wants the risk, not just in the region, but globally, of an Iranian nuclear bomb and the resulting nuclear spread across the Middle East.
[00:22:59.280 --> 00:23:05.800] But in the end, it came down to the country most closely threatened by the regime.
[00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:13.320] And Israel, as the German Chancellor said, ended up doing the dirty work that a lot of other countries knew needed doing, but were not willing to do themselves.
[00:23:13.320 --> 00:23:36.360] I mean, we have this very interesting thing where Western governments have sort of called for things like de-escalation in the early days of the bombing, when in actual fact, they all knew in private that massive escalation and victory in removing our nuclear capabilities of the model was the most desirable thing.
[00:23:36.360 --> 00:23:44.840] So, as ever, there's a lot of double-speak and private-public hypocrisy.
[00:23:45.160 --> 00:23:52.520] I guess it's one reason, as a lifelong libertarian, I'm no longer a libertarian, is because they have a very Manichean view of the world.
[00:23:52.680 --> 00:23:53.720] Everything's black and white.
[00:23:53.720 --> 00:23:56.920] Everything the governments do is bad and so on.
[00:23:56.920 --> 00:24:01.400] You can never trust them to do the right thing and so on.
[00:24:01.640 --> 00:24:05.080] And that's just not the world we live in.
[00:24:05.080 --> 00:24:08.680] And, you know, libertarians would like to see a world without political borders.
[00:24:08.680 --> 00:24:09.880] Well, yeah, okay.
[00:24:09.880 --> 00:24:13.240] But, you know, that's not the world we live in, and we're a long ways from that.
[00:24:13.960 --> 00:24:18.760] You know, I'm reminded of Jack Nicholson's character and a few good men.
[00:24:18.760 --> 00:24:22.440] You know, we live in a world with walls, and on those walls are men with guns.
[00:24:22.440 --> 00:24:23.480] That's it.
[00:24:24.280 --> 00:24:25.720] And yeah, so.
[00:24:26.040 --> 00:24:43.480] Well, the other thing I'd add to that, Michael, is that I think it's a very interesting development of recent years that there was always this anti-American, anti-Western view on the left side of the spectrum, particularly in America.
[00:24:44.120 --> 00:24:47.040] I think of it, I suppose, as a Chomskyite movement.
[00:24:47.360 --> 00:24:53.760] That effectively, you know, nothing was a crime in the world unless America was involved.
[00:24:55.600 --> 00:25:04.000] And anywhere in the world that went wrong in any way must be traced back to America, either intervening or not intervening.
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:11.520] And I've written quite a lot in the past about the inadequacies of this interpretation.
[00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:16.960] Nobody can do wrong unless we incline them to do so.
[00:25:17.280 --> 00:25:21.760] But I think that that's now been mirrored on the right as well, particularly in America.
[00:25:21.760 --> 00:25:30.240] This same sort of movement, which is everything in the world that goes wrong must be something to do with America.
[00:25:30.800 --> 00:25:35.440] Either we didn't intervene and we should have done, or we did intervene and we shouldn't have.
[00:25:35.760 --> 00:25:49.040] And it's easy to see why that's a sort of temptation, because if everything in the world is effectively under American control, it's sort of rather flattering.
[00:25:49.680 --> 00:25:54.960] And in a way, it's slightly comforting because it means that the jungle isn't real.
[00:25:54.960 --> 00:25:59.200] It's something we can restrain by acting well.
[00:25:59.920 --> 00:26:04.640] Do you mean the kind of isolationist wing of mega, like the Tucker Carlton types?
[00:26:04.640 --> 00:26:13.360] Yeah, I mean, there's nothing in the world that seems can't be blamed by them on America.
[00:26:13.920 --> 00:26:17.280] You know, America intervenes in a country.
[00:26:17.280 --> 00:26:21.120] And if anything in the rest of the country goes wrong, that's on America.
[00:26:21.120 --> 00:26:26.240] And if America doesn't intervene in a country and everything goes wrong, it's still inexplicably blamed on America.
[00:26:26.240 --> 00:26:40.040] These are people who, for instance, will talk about the falling apart of Syria in the last decade and a half and will talk about it exclusively as an American issue when American military engagement in Syria in the aftermath of the civil war was minimal.
[00:26:40.200 --> 00:26:46.120] The real actors are, you know, Iran, Russia, and so on.
[00:26:46.360 --> 00:26:57.320] But maybe, as I say, it's a sort of narcissistic thing that, well, we have no control over China or Russia's actions or Iran's actions.
[00:26:57.640 --> 00:27:01.720] So it's sort of rather flattering to think it must be us.
[00:27:01.720 --> 00:27:03.480] It must all be us.
[00:27:03.800 --> 00:27:05.960] And it's just not the case.
[00:27:05.960 --> 00:27:09.880] There are other actors in the world other than America, other than the Western powers.
[00:27:09.880 --> 00:27:16.920] And if you look in that region, there's far more involvement by Russia, Iran, and so on than anyone else.
[00:27:16.920 --> 00:27:23.400] But yes, there's a sort of on the right, it's a kind of anti-American isolationism.
[00:27:23.720 --> 00:27:26.760] And on the left, it's very similar.
[00:27:27.080 --> 00:27:27.880] That's really funny.
[00:27:27.880 --> 00:27:36.600] At the end of that four-hour debate, Dubowitz said to Horton, is there anything any other country has ever done that you've been critical of besides just America?
[00:27:36.600 --> 00:27:38.360] And he's like, well, not really.
[00:27:38.680 --> 00:27:40.040] It's like, wow.
[00:27:40.040 --> 00:27:40.600] Okay.
[00:27:40.920 --> 00:27:47.000] Yeah, the normal libertarian response to that is, well, you know, I'm not a citizen of China or Russia.
[00:27:47.320 --> 00:27:49.160] So whereas I am a citizen of the United States.
[00:27:49.160 --> 00:27:50.680] And you think, okay, yeah, of course.
[00:27:50.920 --> 00:27:55.400] And you have the right desire, obviously, to criticize your government.
[00:27:55.400 --> 00:27:55.880] Fine.
[00:27:56.440 --> 00:28:01.000] But don't get it so off that you behave as if other people don't exists in the world.
[00:28:01.000 --> 00:28:08.360] I mean, it's a genuine form of what Saeed lamentably coined, Orientalism.
[00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:19.360] So, if Iran just wanted to enrich uranium to have a nuclear power program, they would not need to do it 300 feet underground, buried by concrete bunkers.
[00:28:19.680 --> 00:28:23.840] Yeah, yes, you wouldn't need to enrich to 60% and above.
[00:28:23.840 --> 00:28:24.400] Right.
[00:28:24.720 --> 00:28:33.920] And if you did have an entirely innocent project, I mean, you would probably not bury it deep and secretly in a mountain.
[00:28:34.240 --> 00:28:51.920] I think everyone who's ever watched the James Bond film will know that in general, people who hide secret nuclear facilities in underground mountain cave complexes tend not to be people interested in world peace.
[00:28:52.240 --> 00:28:52.640] Dr.
[00:28:52.720 --> 00:28:54.160] Evil, yes.
[00:28:54.480 --> 00:28:56.400] Okay, but let's say they're doing it.
[00:28:56.400 --> 00:29:03.200] Here's the other argument: that they want a nuke just for mutual assured destruction and deterrence themselves.
[00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:05.280] Like Kim Jong-un has nukes.
[00:29:05.280 --> 00:29:06.160] He's not going to use them.
[00:29:06.160 --> 00:29:10.640] He just wants them to prevent the United States or anybody else from invading them.
[00:29:11.280 --> 00:29:31.760] Well, there is an argument which has particularly resurfaced in the last few years in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is that countries that do have nuclear capability tend to be hard to invade or unattractive to invade.
[00:29:32.160 --> 00:29:57.120] And that the deal after the fall of the Soviet Union that saw the Ukrainians effectively denuclearize and weapons out of the country with a piece of paper signed in 1994 by other governments, including the British and French governments, justifying, as promising security guarantees for their future.
[00:29:57.440 --> 00:30:04.360] Many people have said in the wake of things like that, yes, it's a mistake to give up your nukes.
[00:30:04.680 --> 00:30:36.600] There's an argument that people have made, and I have some agreement with this, which is that when Colonel Gaddafi voluntarily gave up his nuclear project in the 2000s, which was nascent but developed, that as a result, when the civil war in Libya erupted, people, including Western governments, including NATO, were far more inclined to intervene on the side of the rebels and to try to prevent the massacre that was purported to be about to happen in Benghazi.
[00:30:36.920 --> 00:30:42.760] That they were more likely to intervene in Libya because Colonel Gaddafi didn't have nuclear weaponry.
[00:30:43.240 --> 00:30:50.760] And that is a lesson that I think dictates around the world are likely to have learned from recent years.
[00:30:50.760 --> 00:31:03.640] But at the same time, in the case of Iran, I can completely understand whether the Mullahs would want to have a nuclear bomb because they would be effectively entrenched domestically and arguably international for the foreseeable future.
[00:31:03.640 --> 00:31:19.880] But, you know, one thing not to do, if you're trying to trick the world and actually develop a nuclear bomb, one thing not to do is to say that you want to eradicate other nations and other nation-states.
[00:31:19.880 --> 00:31:27.240] And one thing not to do would be to repeatedly call for death to your enemies, most noticeably America.
[00:31:27.240 --> 00:31:36.920] And, you know, the fact that the Mullahs couldn't resist doing that is in the end one of their weaknesses.
[00:31:36.920 --> 00:31:44.160] Maybe if they'd have kept quiet and kept the Death to America chance down a bit, they'd have been allowed to go further and faster.
[00:31:44.160 --> 00:31:49.600] So we should take them at their word when they talk about the Great Satan, the United States, and the Little Satan, Israel?
[00:31:43.800 --> 00:31:50.640] Yes, very much.
[00:31:51.760 --> 00:31:57.520] That's not hyperbole and it's not a fall and it's not bluster.
[00:31:58.080 --> 00:32:03.520] As I've often said, if somebody says they want to annihilate you, you should take them seriously.
[00:32:03.520 --> 00:32:04.400] Yes.
[00:32:05.200 --> 00:32:09.920] In terms of regime change, Trump has made it clear that's not what we're doing.
[00:32:09.920 --> 00:32:13.840] Okay, yeah, we're not supposed to do that in the international order.
[00:32:14.240 --> 00:32:18.320] But if you go back to, say, Gulf War I, where George H.W.
[00:32:18.320 --> 00:32:23.040] Bush, you know, pulled back and said, all right, we're going to just let Saddam Hussein continue.
[00:32:23.040 --> 00:32:24.160] It's not our issue.
[00:32:24.400 --> 00:32:26.640] Hopefully his own people will overthrow him.
[00:32:26.640 --> 00:32:28.240] That didn't happen.
[00:32:28.560 --> 00:32:34.080] And it seems like if we don't intervene too much, then the cancer grows back.
[00:32:34.080 --> 00:32:37.120] The tumor comes back even stronger.
[00:32:37.120 --> 00:32:38.960] What are your thoughts on that?
[00:32:38.960 --> 00:32:46.560] Everybody would like to see regime change in Iran, but I guess that's just not kosher in terms of international order.
[00:32:48.160 --> 00:32:49.360] It's a tricky corner.
[00:32:49.360 --> 00:32:52.880] I think Trump has trodden it pretty well, actually.
[00:32:54.720 --> 00:33:07.680] The prevailing feeling, I think, is that if the Iranian regime is to fall at some point, it should be done by the hands of the Iranian people.
[00:33:07.680 --> 00:33:21.680] And one can't underestimate how hard that is, because we know from multiple uprisings in Iran, like the uprisings of 2009, so-called Green Revolution.
[00:33:21.680 --> 00:33:35.000] We know, and we know from the history of dictatorships and other terror groups and others, how you can use force to effect to very, very effectively keep down such movements.
[00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:48.760] I mean, it was the shooting of a young Iranian woman in the head by the Basij militia, one of the terror arms of the Iranian government, that helped put a stop to those protests.
[00:33:48.760 --> 00:34:02.520] Because if you, you know, it's rather like the Chinese Communist Party, the mullahs are not afraid to use extreme force, violence, terrorism, and much more against their own people, imprisonment and torture.
[00:34:02.520 --> 00:34:07.800] They're not at all afraid to do that against their own people in order to stay in power.
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[00:34:45.960 --> 00:34:58.680] Most in view in recent weeks, I think effectively you come back to the thing of the famous old pottery barn rule about regimes, which is, you know, if you break it, you own it.
[00:34:59.400 --> 00:35:14.280] And if America, let alone Israel, were responsible for the downfall of the Iranian regime, there would be a sense that they would have to own the aftermath.
[00:35:14.280 --> 00:35:15.920] And I don't think there's any.
[00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:17.360] I know there's no desire in Israel.
[00:35:17.520 --> 00:35:28.480] I'm very certain there's no desire in DC either to become effectively the power that needs to restructure the governance of Iran.
[00:35:28.480 --> 00:35:36.320] There are options available, and I do believe those should be wielded, but by the Iranian people.
[00:35:36.640 --> 00:35:53.520] And I think this is where some of the skeptics about interventionism and so on have a perfectly valid point, which is we have not got a great track record of being able to institute effective governance in some of these countries.
[00:35:53.520 --> 00:36:09.040] But then there's a counter argument, which is that the Iranian people are very different from the Afghans, for instance, much more educated and cultivated people with a genuine sense of national identity and a terrific history and much more.
[00:36:10.480 --> 00:36:12.480] Maybe that would be an easier prospect.
[00:36:12.480 --> 00:36:18.000] But I can see clearly this was one of Trump's red lines, which is he will not be dragged into regime change.
[00:36:18.240 --> 00:36:27.520] And I do believe the reports that he stopped short of the killing of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:36:28.640 --> 00:36:33.920] Remember when W talked about Nathan Sherensky's book, The Case for Democracy?
[00:36:33.920 --> 00:36:45.040] So I read it and I thought, yeah, that seems r right, that it it seems a little condescending to say, you know, some people are just not ready for democracy, as if it's like nuclear physics or something.
[00:36:45.600 --> 00:36:49.200] They just don't have the intelligence or the culture for it.
[00:36:49.200 --> 00:37:00.200] But on the other hand, the counter to that is some countries are very tribal and they're deeply entrenched in religious beliefs that are not conducive to Western values and things like democracy.
[00:37:00.200 --> 00:37:01.800] What are your thoughts on that?
[00:36:59.840 --> 00:37:05.000] Yes, Sharansky's book was a very important one.
[00:37:05.640 --> 00:37:20.040] I suppose that the argument he makes in the case for democracy is essentially, you know, that what has been said about the Arab and Muslim world, the Middle East, and so on, which is, you know, they're not ready for it.
[00:37:20.040 --> 00:37:22.200] They couldn't do democracy.
[00:37:23.560 --> 00:37:29.480] One of his main cases I remember it in that book is, well, this is what they said about Eastern Europe.
[00:37:30.760 --> 00:37:40.360] And then there's a counterweight to that argument, which is, yes, but I mean, Eastern Europe had a memory of democracy where, you know, many other countries don't.
[00:37:40.360 --> 00:37:59.880] But again, you come back to that thing of, you know, maybe Persia, maybe the Iranian people are different in that they do have a memory going back to only 46 years ago to an era where there was effectively a constitutional monarchical democracy.
[00:37:59.880 --> 00:38:06.440] And so maybe the hope that that could exist again is real.
[00:38:06.440 --> 00:38:25.000] It's just that nobody really seems at the moment to want to say nobody seems to have the confidence, rightly or wrongly, I'm not inflecting that word, nobody seems to have the confidence to be sure that if they were to step in and bring about an end to the regime, that what would come next would be workable.
[00:38:25.720 --> 00:38:32.760] I would just say that whatever it is, I mean, there's many scenarios you could see if the MOLAs were finally overthrown.
[00:38:33.080 --> 00:38:41.000] It's definitely possible that if things fragmented, you would have a sort of Iraq, Syria, 2010s nightmare scenario.
[00:38:41.320 --> 00:39:06.320] But on the other hand, there's also the scenario that in any situation, the worst outcome is the one that's already there, which is a madly apocalyptic millenarian regime, which spreads terror and colonization across the region, which at least would be restrained.
[00:39:06.320 --> 00:39:18.720] And I mean, it would be interesting, wouldn't it, to see what would happen in somewhere like Gaza or Lebanon or Yemen if the Iranian revolutionary government was not arming everyone to the hilt on their side?
[00:39:18.720 --> 00:39:24.000] You could see a genuine shift across the region for the good.
[00:39:25.040 --> 00:39:40.800] But it is a very complicated one, and I can understand why President Trump is loath to be dragged into something more than doing what he has told his voters for more than a decade he would do, which was prevent Iran getting a nuclear bomb.
[00:39:41.360 --> 00:39:43.520] You're a staunch supporter of Israel, as am I.
[00:39:43.520 --> 00:39:49.760] Can you be critical of Netanyahu's strategies and still be a staunch supporter of Israel?
[00:39:49.760 --> 00:39:53.440] Say maybe they've gone overboard in Gaza or this or that?
[00:39:54.080 --> 00:40:01.760] I mean, it's funny when people think that, you know, you can't criticize the Israeli government without being accused of all sorts of things.
[00:40:01.760 --> 00:40:06.880] It's like, you know, oh, just read the Israeli press, you know.
[00:40:09.040 --> 00:40:10.000] Yes, of course.
[00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:16.400] I mean, people could criticize aspects of the war, the tactics.
[00:40:16.400 --> 00:40:28.000] I mean, there are people like the former defense minister, Joev Galant, who've been critical of Netanyahu in office and out of office.
[00:40:28.000 --> 00:40:33.560] So, of course, the people who say you can't criticize Israel without being accused of exploitation is nonsense.
[00:40:35.480 --> 00:40:55.800] The place which is surprising and which has been much trodden upon around in the last year and a half or so is the people who condemn Israel whatever it does, but never have a positive view of what they would do in the situation.
[00:40:55.800 --> 00:41:24.520] And it's pretty much a challenge which I've laid out and never had answered by anyone on the anti-Israel side, which is if you do this in population extrapolation terms, a country of 9 million people or so in the case of Israel, 340 million in the case of America, what happened on October 7th is the equivalent of about 44,000 Americans being killed on American soil in one morning and 10,000 Americans being taken hostage.
[00:41:24.840 --> 00:41:37.480] And, you know, my question repeatedly to the just outright critics of Israel is just, what would you do in this situation to get your citizens back?
[00:41:37.800 --> 00:41:41.080] And they say things like, oh, well, I'd get around the negotiating table.
[00:41:41.080 --> 00:41:50.360] I go, yeah, yeah, because Hamas have such a moralistic and decent side to them that you can appeal to.
[00:41:50.360 --> 00:41:52.280] I mean, yeah.
[00:41:52.920 --> 00:41:58.200] So that's the place where legitimate and illegitimate criticism divide.
[00:41:58.200 --> 00:42:14.360] Which, if you never present any scenario that allows Israel to legitimately retaliate for the atrocities committed against it, if you don't come up with any scenario, then you're not simply a critic of Israel.
[00:42:14.360 --> 00:42:16.240] You're an enemy to the country.
[00:42:16.240 --> 00:42:17.760] I'm going to read a portion of your book.
[00:42:17.760 --> 00:42:19.280] I love your writing, Douglas.
[00:42:19.280 --> 00:42:20.400] You're one of my favorite authors.
[00:42:14.840 --> 00:42:22.160] I've read pretty much everything you've written.
[00:42:22.480 --> 00:42:27.120] Among much else, the thought brought me back to a conversation I had near the very start of the war.
[00:42:27.120 --> 00:42:34.960] Late in the evening, at a Friday night dinner with a Sephardic family in Jerusalem, one of the fathers came over to the table I was at.
[00:42:34.960 --> 00:42:41.280] He slammed down his vodka glass and suddenly said, So, Iron Dome, good idea or bad.
[00:42:41.280 --> 00:42:46.480] As I told him, it was a question that no one outside of Israel would even understand.
[00:42:46.480 --> 00:42:50.240] Anyone outside of Israel would say, a good idea, obviously.
[00:42:50.240 --> 00:42:52.560] But my friend's point was not that.
[00:42:52.560 --> 00:43:00.080] What had Israel managed to do since the withdrawal from Gaza in the end of the 2006 Hezbollah War?
[00:43:00.080 --> 00:43:10.000] With the assistance mostly of the United States, it had managed to create a world-class system of which everyone was very proud to shoot down the regular rockets.
[00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:12.480] But perhaps this had not been a good thing at all.
[00:43:12.480 --> 00:43:21.440] If New Jersey had launched rockets at New York City constantly for a decade, would New York State find a way to shoot down and learn to live with it?
[00:43:21.440 --> 00:43:24.960] Or would it take out whatever infrastructure was launching the things?
[00:43:25.280 --> 00:43:36.320] I thought of, because I live in Southern California, I thought, you know, if Mexico started launching rockets into San Diego, you know, where we have a naval base and then we have a marine base at Camp Pettalin, just north of Oceanside.
[00:43:36.320 --> 00:43:40.960] I mean, would the United States say, well, we really need to build the Iron Dome over San Diego?
[00:43:40.960 --> 00:43:44.960] No, we would just invade and take out the people doing this.
[00:43:44.960 --> 00:43:58.880] Yes, and that's one of the frustrations of the pe uh that I have with the people who consistently call for a return to the status quo anti in relation to Israel, which is, you know, that is, you know, October 7th happened.
[00:43:58.880 --> 00:44:02.120] Let's go back to the situation of October 6th.
[00:43:59.600 --> 00:44:25.560] But the situation there was very far from normal either, because since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, regular rocket fire all the time in peace and war into southern Israel and from the north, Hezbollah, regular rocket fire into the north.
[00:44:25.560 --> 00:44:29.400] And that's obviously an intolerable situation for any country.
[00:44:29.400 --> 00:44:36.840] The aim of Iran was to effectively pincer movement Israel so that the north of Israel was effectively unlivable and the south was made unlivable.
[00:44:36.840 --> 00:44:50.040] And therefore, you've got the tiny portion of the middle of the country and their ballistic missiles, ICBMs and others, were partly designed to make even that bit of Israel impossible to live in.
[00:44:50.840 --> 00:44:56.840] That was a pretty effective strategy by Hamaz, Hezbollah, and the Mullahs.
[00:44:56.840 --> 00:45:25.560] But what I think many people in the international community have not realized is every time they say ceasefire, without the destruction of Hamas, the people launching the rockets, Islamic Jihad as well, every time they just say halt it here, the preconditions are set up for the next round of the conflict, which is why I've said from the beginning of this war that the real question is, is this the umpteenth Gaza war or the last Gaza?
[00:45:26.040 --> 00:45:31.720] Is this the third Lebanon war or the last one?
[00:45:32.040 --> 00:45:34.360] And I would like to see it being the last one.
[00:45:34.360 --> 00:45:53.280] I don't think Israel or any of her neighbors should have to exist in this situation where rocket fire is normal and you just invent cleverer and cleverer ways to cower, shelter your people from such routine assault.
[00:45:53.440 --> 00:46:01.440] I think it's uh something that again it goes back to this thing about you know legitimate and illegitimate criticism.
[00:46:01.440 --> 00:46:16.560] Uh, if you can't sympathize with a country's desire to stop its citizenry being repeatedly bombarded by rockets, you're not really being serious and considering the whole picture at all.
[00:46:17.520 --> 00:46:36.000] So, the emphasis by some on the left of the atrocities allegedly being committed by Israel, of let's say children in Gaza who are dying or starving and so on, those things are perhaps some of it is real, but that's just a byproduct of war.
[00:46:36.000 --> 00:46:42.320] I mean, we can't be sympathetic to the people of Hamburg and Dresden in World War II.
[00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:44.880] They started the war, that's just the way it goes.
[00:46:45.200 --> 00:46:48.000] Um, well, that's a part of it.
[00:46:48.000 --> 00:47:00.400] I mean, um, uh, it's it's certainly a morally complex question, but uh, yes, a part of it is, I mean, you know, there is a cost to starting wars against your neighbors, and one of the costs is losing.
[00:47:00.400 --> 00:47:07.840] And uh, Hamas kept starting wars and has very significantly lost.
[00:47:08.160 --> 00:47:32.120] Um, the the the again, one of the things that I think any reasonable person should take into account is to at least notice that Hamaz desires the death of people on its own side as much as welcomes it as much as it embraces and seeks the murder of people on their opponents' side.
[00:47:32.440 --> 00:47:40.600] And that's something which is, again, you just have to take this into account if you're going to be a reasonable critic of any of these actions.
[00:47:40.600 --> 00:47:54.840] You have to take into account the fact that Hamaz welcomes the death of its own citizens, its own citizens, of Palestinians, and encourages the murder of Israelis.
[00:47:54.840 --> 00:48:06.680] Israel, under whatever the government, does not seek the death of Israeli civilians in attacks from Gaza or Iran.
[00:48:07.000 --> 00:48:15.400] It doesn't regard citizens being killed as a desirable thing in order to whip up public program against its enemies.
[00:48:15.400 --> 00:48:17.400] But this is something that Hamaz does.
[00:48:17.400 --> 00:48:29.000] And again, it's astonishing watching some of the coverage of just the ignoring of the fact, whether it's to do with aid, there's endless conversations about the amount of aid that goes into Gaza.
[00:48:29.000 --> 00:49:02.280] And very often, the people who criticize Israel, the international community, for not getting enough aid in, some of the people who make these criticisms are erstwhile friends of mine, they just don't take into account at all Hamaz's tactics of seizing aid for themselves and their terrorists and selling aid that has been given to the citizens of Gaza, selling it to Gaza citizens in order to help to fuel the Hamas war effort.
[00:49:04.200 --> 00:49:13.680] I am pretty astonished, to the extent I still can be, at the number of people who just ignore very significant parts to the story like that.
[00:49:14.960 --> 00:49:15.840] Yeah.
[00:49:16.080 --> 00:49:19.440] I want to ask about your general motive for supporting Israel.
[00:49:13.480 --> 00:49:20.080] You're not Jewish.
[00:49:20.240 --> 00:49:21.440] I'm not Jewish.
[00:49:21.440 --> 00:49:28.880] My reason for it was when I was researching my book on the Holocaust deniers, denying history, I went to Israel twice.
[00:49:29.200 --> 00:49:36.480] My co-author Alex Grohman and I, we visited all the death camps in Europe and went to all the museums we could find and so on.
[00:49:36.480 --> 00:49:49.280] And I really got a sense that, and then, you know, I kind of read about the history of anti-Semitism going back thousands of years and all the pogroms and the anti-Semitism in Europe, you know, Hitler's willing executioners.
[00:49:49.280 --> 00:49:50.480] It wasn't just the Nazis.
[00:49:50.480 --> 00:49:53.600] You know, there were a lot of Jew haters in Europe.
[00:49:53.600 --> 00:49:57.280] I actually chose FDU because of the small classroom sizes.
[00:49:57.280 --> 00:49:59.120] That's something that was extremely important to me.
[00:49:59.120 --> 00:50:01.760] I wanted to have a connection and a relationship with my professors.
[00:50:01.760 --> 00:50:03.920] I didn't want to just be a number in a classroom.
[00:50:03.920 --> 00:50:07.920] I seized the moment at FDU and found my purpose.
[00:50:08.560 --> 00:50:09.120] And so on.
[00:50:09.120 --> 00:50:14.160] And you kind of look at the whole picture, and they almost, you know, Hitler almost finished the job.
[00:50:14.160 --> 00:50:19.120] You know, six out of the nine million were exterminated in World War II.
[00:50:19.120 --> 00:50:20.960] And now they have their own state.
[00:50:20.960 --> 00:50:24.880] And when I went there, I remember getting to the airport and they're like, okay, what are you doing here?
[00:50:24.880 --> 00:50:27.920] I'm like, well, I'm here to research this book, The Holocaust Deniers.
[00:50:27.920 --> 00:50:30.160] I made it clear, you know, we're not neo-Nazis.
[00:50:30.320 --> 00:50:31.920] We're here to debunk these guys, right?
[00:50:31.920 --> 00:50:34.000] They're like, okay, where are you staying exactly?
[00:50:34.880 --> 00:50:35.840] Let's see your hotel.
[00:50:36.240 --> 00:50:38.000] And this went on and on for like half an hour.
[00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:40.400] I thought, man, these people are not fucking around.
[00:50:40.400 --> 00:50:43.600] I mean, when they say never again, they mean never again.
[00:50:43.840 --> 00:50:45.760] You try to do this to us again.
[00:50:45.760 --> 00:50:47.760] We are going to fuck you up.
[00:50:48.080 --> 00:50:50.640] And I think, yeah, okay, yes, I get it.
[00:50:50.640 --> 00:50:51.520] I totally get it.
[00:50:51.520 --> 00:50:53.520] If I was, that's what I would do.
[00:50:53.520 --> 00:50:55.280] That's the world we live in.
[00:50:55.280 --> 00:51:00.000] And so I am sympathetic to, you know, when they have to respond with violence.
[00:51:01.160 --> 00:51:19.160] Yes, I mean, there's again, this is why one of the oddities of the reaction that's happened that I go into in the book, one of the oddities of the reaction around so much of the world is, you know, I don't know, if there are lots of Muslim countries, lots.
[00:51:19.800 --> 00:51:27.960] If you add or subtract one by raising a border or whatever, there's no big shakes, you know.
[00:51:29.640 --> 00:51:32.120] There's only one Jewish state.
[00:51:32.440 --> 00:51:43.080] Withdraw that state or destroy that state, or the state thrives and continues, is everything for the Jewish people.
[00:51:43.080 --> 00:52:08.360] And I believe there are many deep things that I could go into, but I think that there's also something very interesting that people in the West should, in as a whole, should take note of, which is that with 100% accuracy, you can predict where somebody will land on the question of Israel, and it will depend on the country in the West they also live in and their attitude toward that.
[00:52:08.680 --> 00:52:34.200] So that it's not a coincidence that at something like Glastonbury Festival, Music Festival in the UK, it's not a surprise that one act or several acts call for death to the IDF and get this chanted back at them as well by liberals who would otherwise think of themselves, I'm sure, as kind and decent people.
[00:52:34.200 --> 00:52:49.840] But it's no coincidence that from the same stages that the anti-Israel stuff is chanted from, other rappers and singers will sing, you know, taunting songs against the British public and say how rotten Britain is.
[00:52:50.560 --> 00:52:52.640] It's all on a continuum.
[00:52:54.560 --> 00:53:11.920] I almost want to coin it as Murray's law, which is if somebody, if there is a pro-Israel group in Canada, America, Britain, or whatever, a protest, people will fly the flag of the country they're in as well as the country, the flag of the state of Israel.
[00:53:11.920 --> 00:53:22.560] Whenever there is an anti-Israel protest, America, Canada, Australia, wherever, you will never see the flag of the country that the protesters are in.
[00:53:22.560 --> 00:53:26.720] They do not revere or like the countries they're in.
[00:53:27.120 --> 00:53:30.320] And that goes whether they're Muslim or non-Muslim.
[00:53:30.320 --> 00:53:37.280] But you do not see the protesters, for instance, in DC attacking Israel.
[00:53:37.280 --> 00:53:40.000] You don't see them proudly flying the American flag.
[00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:49.920] In fact, the particular protests in question, they will drag an American flag down from a flagpole and burn it in the street.
[00:53:49.920 --> 00:54:00.720] I think this is something that everyone should take into account: that Israel remains the first subject of hatred, by no means the last.
[00:54:00.720 --> 00:54:05.280] And I think you can track with almost complete accuracy.
[00:54:05.280 --> 00:54:20.080] But where people want to annihilate the state of Israel, whether it's the mullahs or radicals on the left or right in the West, they also want the eradication of Western democracies like the ones that we're sitting in next.
[00:54:20.080 --> 00:54:23.120] And I think that that is a very serious thing to take into account.
[00:54:23.120 --> 00:54:33.160] And it's just one of the reasons why people should not be in favor of the annihilation or the demonization of the country that is on the front line of this.
[00:54:33.160 --> 00:54:33.640] Yeah.
[00:54:33.960 --> 00:54:35.080] A couple of quick questions.
[00:54:29.840 --> 00:54:35.960] Two-state solution.
[00:54:36.040 --> 00:54:38.360] Is that off the table forever, temporarily?
[00:54:38.360 --> 00:54:39.880] Can we get back to that?
[00:54:39.880 --> 00:54:42.520] I think Hamaz killed it on the 7th of October.
[00:54:43.320 --> 00:54:51.640] I think it's extremely hard to see how for a two-state solution to exist.
[00:54:51.640 --> 00:55:00.040] I mean, by the way, it would be three states anyway, because Fatah and Hamaz could never get on and kill each other.
[00:55:00.040 --> 00:55:10.440] So the Judea-Samaria West Bank land swap or negotiation would, in any case, always have been separate from the Gaza issue.
[00:55:11.480 --> 00:55:27.480] But in the wake of October 7th, it's almost impossible to see how the trust could exist on any side to go for land swaps and statehood for part of the Palestinian people in the West Bank.
[00:55:28.440 --> 00:55:34.600] I think it's off the table for generations at least, if it ever.
[00:55:34.600 --> 00:55:59.160] I mean, in any case, it has become such a shibboleth of the international community who seem to have, for a generation, left, right, conservative, Republican, Democrat, who seem to genuinely have believed that the question of Palestinian statehood was the question that would unlock all the other problems in the Middle East.
[00:55:59.320 --> 00:56:27.920] This is what we were told left and right for a generation or two, which was if the Palestinians have even more statehood than they currently do, and it is significant in the West Bank and was total in the case of Gab, okay, that Hamaz didn't have control of everything that went in and out, but that was because they should have refrained from smuggling rockets in and then firing at their neighbors.
[00:56:27.920 --> 00:56:41.920] But it's very hard to see how you could get any of the necessary trust that you would have to have in place for an actual solution to that question.
[00:56:42.240 --> 00:56:46.480] I think it's Hamaz killed the two-state solution, such as it was.
[00:56:46.480 --> 00:57:01.440] I think many people can see, by the way, that normalization in the region does not, in the end, rely on Mahmoud Abbas or any of the other failed leaders who tried to run the Palestinian people in recent decades.
[00:57:01.600 --> 00:57:08.480] Normalization, as the Abraham Accords showed, can come a different route.
[00:57:08.480 --> 00:57:26.080] And perhaps instead of the Palestinians being the eternal pawns of the Arab and Muslim world and increasingly part of the left and right in the West, perhaps people will see that actually it's about a liberalization and/or normalization that comes from places like Riyadh.
[00:57:26.400 --> 00:57:40.640] And so, yes, and by the way, I not sound too heartless about this, but there are lots of problems in the world that are not solved and just parked as insoluble.
[00:57:40.880 --> 00:57:45.440] The Cyprus question is a pretty insoluble question at this point.
[00:57:45.440 --> 00:57:57.280] The Western Sahara question, I mean, he's like, and the Palestinian question, which is, you know, and maybe if an insoluble problem exists, it exists for a reason.
[00:57:57.280 --> 00:58:15.960] In the case of the Palestinian problem, I submit that it's still there as an unresolved problem in question because the Palestinian, lamentable leadership of the Palestinians, has repeatedly from 1948 before and since has just consistently said that they would rather not have a state.
[00:58:16.120 --> 00:58:19.400] What they want is the annihilation of the Jewish state.
[00:58:21.000 --> 00:58:23.160] They mark this up for themselves.
[00:58:23.160 --> 00:58:24.120] Yep.
[00:58:24.120 --> 00:58:25.080] Okay, West Bank.
[00:58:25.080 --> 00:58:34.440] One of my favorite documentary filmmakers is Louis Thoreau, a very amusing filmmaker like his films on Scientology or, you know, what it's like to be a prostitute in London.
[00:58:34.840 --> 00:58:36.520] Big fun to watch.
[00:58:36.520 --> 00:58:39.720] Then all of a sudden I see he's done one on the settlers.
[00:58:40.200 --> 00:58:43.480] I watched some of that and I thought, you know, I'm just not getting a fair shake here.
[00:58:43.480 --> 00:58:46.520] I can tell I'm being directed, you know, pulled down this path.
[00:58:46.520 --> 00:58:47.080] I don't know.
[00:58:47.240 --> 00:58:48.600] If you haven't seen it, it's okay.
[00:58:48.600 --> 00:58:52.520] But what are your thoughts on the settling of the West Bank?
[00:58:52.520 --> 00:58:54.280] Is it some of it illegal?
[00:58:54.280 --> 00:58:56.040] Are there some atrocities going on?
[00:58:56.040 --> 00:58:57.800] Is it fair across the board?
[00:58:57.800 --> 00:58:58.680] What are your thoughts?
[00:58:58.680 --> 00:59:04.600] Well, it's very interesting how much misunderstanding there is about the situation there.
[00:59:07.720 --> 00:59:15.560] All sides want to control territory and they want areas they can settle and expand.
[00:59:16.040 --> 00:59:27.320] My view has always been that there are parts of the West Bank, Judea, Samaria, which in any final status agreement are obviously going to be Palestinian ruled and Arab ruled.
[00:59:27.320 --> 00:59:30.440] And there'll be other areas that'll be Israeli ruled.
[00:59:31.000 --> 00:59:33.880] And that's just the facts on the ground.
[00:59:34.440 --> 00:59:39.320] I thought that Louis Threw, who I like you, I admire a lot of his work.
[00:59:39.320 --> 00:59:59.840] I thought that the settlers' documentary was in every way set up to be unfair because, you know, well, let me put it this way: I mean, Louis Threw would not get access to the equivalent or the other side of this.
[01:00:00.160 --> 01:00:04.480] He would not get the ability to live with Hamas' families in Gaza.
[01:00:04.480 --> 01:00:07.440] And he wouldn't have done before the seventh either, by the way.
[01:00:07.440 --> 01:00:07.920] Right.
[01:00:08.800 --> 01:00:15.440] And he will not get access to the millenarian, crazy death cultists in the West Bank.
[01:00:15.440 --> 01:00:20.240] They just maybe kill him and dump his body.
[01:00:20.560 --> 01:00:25.120] So, and that's always something I think in journalism has to be taken into account.
[01:00:25.120 --> 01:00:34.480] I've always said this about covering conflicts in general: you have to be honest about what it is you're not allowed to cover.
[01:00:34.800 --> 01:00:42.960] And, you know, I've told this story, I think, before, but I mean, I was very struck when I was with some international journalists in the south of Lebanon last year.
[01:00:42.960 --> 01:00:58.240] And a couple of them said, you know, I've got to be very careful what I say in my reporting from this because I have colleagues in Beirut who might be mistreated, abducted, kidnapped by Hezbollah if they don't like the coverage.
[01:00:58.240 --> 01:01:00.880] I think stuff like that is what you should say.
[01:01:01.200 --> 01:01:03.280] And so, my thing, I don't mind it.
[01:01:03.280 --> 01:01:18.480] Louis Threw wants to make documentaries about Jewish settlers or anyone else, but I think there's a sort of duty to say, to put it in the context of saying, you know, these people have welcomed me and have subjected themselves to interview.
[01:01:19.280 --> 01:01:22.160] Their counterparts, not so much.
[01:01:22.480 --> 01:01:27.360] And, you know, there are lots of misunderstandings about what is happening there.
[01:01:27.360 --> 01:01:41.640] And it was exemplified only a couple of days ago when a British government minister called Wes Streeting went on television, asked about the chance of death to the IDF and the objections of the Israeli foreign ministry and others.
[01:01:41.720 --> 01:01:47.880] Said, well, I think the Israelis should get their house in order and they shouldn't allow, for instance, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
[01:01:48.040 --> 01:02:06.360] It's like they seem to have no idea that there was an outbreak of violence just a few days ago, some settlers on not just against some Palestinians in the West Bank, but against IDF who are trying to stop the settlers, you know, violence.
[01:02:07.640 --> 01:02:18.600] Those people who have been arrested, Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, incredibly explicit in his condemnation of the settler violence.
[01:02:18.840 --> 01:02:20.280] Why would they not be?
[01:02:21.480 --> 01:02:30.280] It's a very strange thing to see, you know, again, a country struggling with internal problems and misrepresent those internal problems.
[01:02:31.240 --> 01:02:33.320] With Israel, that's just Legion.
[01:02:34.360 --> 01:02:37.880] Okay, a couple of US-oriented questions just to wrap it up here.
[01:02:37.880 --> 01:02:38.920] You live in the United States.
[01:02:38.920 --> 01:02:40.360] Now, in fact, you live in New York City.
[01:02:40.360 --> 01:02:44.120] So what's the deal with the Democratic Socialist Zoran, Mam Danny?
[01:02:44.120 --> 01:02:45.400] Could he win?
[01:02:45.400 --> 01:02:52.440] How can a Democratic socialist be in charge of this world capital of finance and capitalism?
[01:02:53.400 --> 01:02:54.920] It would be very interesting to see.
[01:02:55.160 --> 01:03:11.640] He got through the Democratic primary partly by skill, um, partly through uh the fact that, I mean, uh, Governor Cuomo was a horrible candidate to rerun.
[01:03:11.960 --> 01:03:14.200] Horrible candidate to rerun.
[01:03:14.240 --> 01:03:21.920] Um, so Mandami managed to get her sort of present himself as a generational shift, vibe shift candidate.
[01:03:21.920 --> 01:03:30.480] Um, but also, I mean, he promises things he couldn't possibly deliver, including a foreign policy for New York, which is preposterous.
[01:03:30.480 --> 01:04:00.080] But um, it would be to say it would be a stress test of the city is to understate things were he to actually uh become mayor because, um, as you say, I mean, New York, one of the global finance hubs has already suffered, like London has, a lot of uh, um, of people, you know, hot-footing it to lower tax areas.
[01:04:00.080 --> 01:04:14.320] And um, I don't know that New York would be able to survive a socialist mayor, given that the hits it's already and very visibly taken in the era of COVID and lockdowns and so on.
[01:04:14.640 --> 01:04:31.920] Um, I think that one thing that many Americans don't realize is sorry, many non-Americans don't realize is the ease with which in America, comparatively with other countries, Groons just launched a limited edition Grooney Smith apple flavor, and it's only available through October.
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[01:04:46.160 --> 01:04:50.640] Grab your limited-edition Grooney Smith Apple groons, stock up because they will sell out.
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[01:04:57.040 --> 01:05:02.600] The ease with which you can you can, you know, upstairs and go to another state.
[01:04:59.840 --> 01:05:05.080] The whole system is very clever in that regard.
[01:05:05.240 --> 01:05:09.720] You know, you don't like California, you can go somewhere else in the country.
[01:05:09.720 --> 01:05:17.560] Totally different than the threat to leave, say, Britain and move to France or Italy and move to this.
[01:05:17.560 --> 01:05:18.680] It's just totally different.
[01:05:19.000 --> 01:05:22.600] I think Mandarini would be a real disaster for New York.
[01:05:22.600 --> 01:05:24.840] And I love New York and I want to see it thrive.
[01:05:24.840 --> 01:05:26.680] And I think he'd do the opposite.
[01:05:26.680 --> 01:05:28.120] I think he'd kill it.
[01:05:28.120 --> 01:05:31.080] Well, he said he doesn't think there should be any billionaires.
[01:05:31.080 --> 01:05:37.080] And I just saw, I just watched Bernie on Rogan for a couple hours talk ranting about the billionaires.
[01:05:37.080 --> 01:05:44.040] Why is it so many people just don't even seem to have a basic econ 101 understanding of how it works?
[01:05:44.040 --> 01:05:57.240] That there are billionaires doesn't mean they took their money from poor people, or it's like you hear this, you know, the distribution of wealth as if there's a czar handing out the money and, oh, Elon, you get extra this month or something like that.
[01:05:57.240 --> 01:05:59.080] I mean, it's just so preposterous.
[01:05:59.080 --> 01:05:59.560] I don't know.
[01:05:59.560 --> 01:06:03.480] What do you make of this kind of dunce cap economics people have?
[01:06:03.800 --> 01:06:05.080] It's been around for decades.
[01:06:05.080 --> 01:06:09.800] I mean, in the speech, Reagan used to give that lovely example.
[01:06:09.800 --> 01:06:18.760] He said, you know, there's the type of person who can't help looking at a thin man, the fat man, and thinking that the fat man must have taken some food from the thin man.
[01:06:19.480 --> 01:06:20.120] Yeah.
[01:06:20.840 --> 01:06:22.360] That's that's routine.
[01:06:22.920 --> 01:06:31.720] It's it's the sort of easiest one of these sort of anti-capitalist left is to rail against the tallest poppies.
[01:06:31.720 --> 01:06:39.000] When in actual fact, I don't, as I see it, it's not about inequality when it comes to issues like that.
[01:06:39.000 --> 01:06:40.760] The real thing is fairness.
[01:06:40.760 --> 01:06:59.600] And I think that right and left should take very much into account the unfairness of the system as it relates to millennials growing up, having suffered the consequences of inflation, of money printing, and much more.
[01:07:00.640 --> 01:07:14.080] I think people should be sympathetic to the people who are finding it hard to get going in their 20s and should find sensible policies and to address that unfairness.
[01:07:14.080 --> 01:07:25.760] But I think that the cheapest, easiest, and least productive way is to do the sort of what you might call a populist left-wing thing and say, aha, the billionaires are the problem.
[01:07:28.240 --> 01:07:32.480] I think one of the great things about America is the celebration of success.
[01:07:32.480 --> 01:07:48.640] And I really like that in the American Spirit, that, you know, it's a famous cliché, but it really is true in my experience that there is a tendency in America to say, that guy's got an amazing car, and someday I want to drive a car like that.
[01:07:48.640 --> 01:07:55.600] Whereas in Europe, Britain, and elsewhere, it's much more commonplace to sort of have, you know, that guy's driving an amazing car.
[01:07:55.600 --> 01:07:57.200] He must have taken something.
[01:07:57.600 --> 01:07:58.160] Right.
[01:07:58.160 --> 01:08:00.960] It feels like a zero-sum game.
[01:08:01.360 --> 01:08:03.120] All right, last question on immigration.
[01:08:03.440 --> 01:08:11.280] I was just at a conference in Buckingham with Bacha Ungar Sargon, who's an interesting character.
[01:08:11.280 --> 01:08:17.200] Anyway, so I asked her in the QA because she was ranting about immigration and that was being debated.
[01:08:17.200 --> 01:08:19.120] I said, all right, what's the number?
[01:08:19.360 --> 01:08:21.520] Okay, so too many have come in.
[01:08:21.520 --> 01:08:22.560] Okay, then what's the number?
[01:08:22.720 --> 01:08:24.640] And her answer was zero.
[01:08:24.640 --> 01:08:26.320] Like, oh, zero.
[01:08:26.320 --> 01:08:26.720] Okay.
[01:08:26.720 --> 01:08:28.160] So let me just queue this up for you.
[01:08:28.160 --> 01:08:29.760] So I live in Southern California my whole life.
[01:08:29.760 --> 01:08:34.840] We've had illegal Mexicans here all over the place, but not that many.
[01:08:34.840 --> 01:08:40.360] You know, for decades, it was like everybody knows what's going on, the gardeners, the babysitters, and so on.
[01:08:40.360 --> 01:08:47.480] My dad had a Ford dealership, and half the people washing the cars along with me when I was 15, were illegal Mexicans.
[01:08:47.480 --> 01:08:48.760] Okay, not a big deal.
[01:08:48.760 --> 01:09:00.200] But the problem, it seems to me, is when you open it up and let everybody in, and then you have millions and millions, then finally somebody says, all right, something needs to be done, and you get Trump policy.
[01:09:00.200 --> 01:09:02.280] But even Trump's not saying zero.
[01:09:02.280 --> 01:09:02.840] I don't know.
[01:09:02.840 --> 01:09:05.400] How do you answer the question, what's the number?
[01:09:07.560 --> 01:09:08.840] Look, it's a good question.
[01:09:08.840 --> 01:09:13.240] And as you know, it's partly because it's largely unanswerable.
[01:09:14.360 --> 01:09:24.600] I believe that I've always said that with immigration, there are three things that matter: speed, numbers, and identity.
[01:09:25.240 --> 01:09:33.400] The speed and the numbers, you can get relatively accurate on.
[01:09:33.400 --> 01:09:43.560] I mean, you might, for instance, think a government like the governments that have ruled Britain in the last 20 years, they always talked about reducing immigration.
[01:09:43.720 --> 01:09:51.960] Their view was that you should get it back to 1990s levels, which is the thousands of net immigration a year rather than hundreds of thousands.
[01:09:51.960 --> 01:09:58.280] You might say, what's the difference between 99,000 and 101,000 net immigration a year?
[01:09:58.280 --> 01:10:11.560] And the answer is that the five figures to six figures divide is simply a version of is just where the public would feel more comfortable.
[01:10:13.320 --> 01:10:21.280] The truth is that the numbers and the speed, you can see, I mean, in the Biden years in America, it went way, way out of control.
[01:10:22.160 --> 01:10:31.840] You can't put a finger on the number exactly, but it's just obviously out of control, out of control to control in housing policy, everything.
[01:10:33.040 --> 01:10:39.120] And the bit of it that this I've always said is the hard part is the identity one.
[01:10:39.440 --> 01:10:47.440] It's very hard to put your finger on, or for a lot of people, it's very hard to say not who you want, but who you don't want more of.
[01:10:47.440 --> 01:10:54.560] And that's because there's a whole realm of potential bigotries, real or imagined, that exists in that area.
[01:10:55.040 --> 01:11:18.720] I think what Batia was probably referring to is something that has happened in a lot of countries, which is a call for effectively a moratorium to figure out, you know, how to absorb people who are already in the country, how to distribute things fairly, how to work out who has no right to be and who does have a right to be.
[01:11:18.720 --> 01:11:24.080] That would be a full-time job, even if there was a moratorium, even if somebody Batya got zero now.
[01:11:24.080 --> 01:11:28.560] And the crossings across the southern border in the recent months have been pretty much zero.
[01:11:28.560 --> 01:11:37.200] But it'll be a full-time job just to get the people who are criminals and illegals out of the US.
[01:11:39.360 --> 01:12:02.200] But this is, as I've often said, this is going to be one of the biggest questions of the 21st century, because I think that many people in the West, as well as being wildly ignorant of what is out there, are not aware of how attractive our societies will always be to people from outside.
[01:12:02.200 --> 01:12:04.440] And it's not just values.
[01:11:59.760 --> 01:12:06.120] That is an issue.
[01:12:06.440 --> 01:12:09.000] But many people do not come because they want our values.
[01:12:09.000 --> 01:12:12.680] They come because they recognize that our economies work.
[01:12:12.680 --> 01:12:16.360] And theirs in the countries they're from do not work.
[01:12:16.360 --> 01:12:18.360] 

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Prompt 5: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 2 of 2 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
actly, but it's just obviously out of control, out of control to control in housing policy, everything.
[01:10:33.040 --> 01:10:39.120] And the bit of it that this I've always said is the hard part is the identity one.
[01:10:39.440 --> 01:10:47.440] It's very hard to put your finger on, or for a lot of people, it's very hard to say not who you want, but who you don't want more of.
[01:10:47.440 --> 01:10:54.560] And that's because there's a whole realm of potential bigotries, real or imagined, that exists in that area.
[01:10:55.040 --> 01:11:18.720] I think what Batia was probably referring to is something that has happened in a lot of countries, which is a call for effectively a moratorium to figure out, you know, how to absorb people who are already in the country, how to distribute things fairly, how to work out who has no right to be and who does have a right to be.
[01:11:18.720 --> 01:11:24.080] That would be a full-time job, even if there was a moratorium, even if somebody Batya got zero now.
[01:11:24.080 --> 01:11:28.560] And the crossings across the southern border in the recent months have been pretty much zero.
[01:11:28.560 --> 01:11:37.200] But it'll be a full-time job just to get the people who are criminals and illegals out of the US.
[01:11:39.360 --> 01:12:02.200] But this is, as I've often said, this is going to be one of the biggest questions of the 21st century, because I think that many people in the West, as well as being wildly ignorant of what is out there, are not aware of how attractive our societies will always be to people from outside.
[01:12:02.200 --> 01:12:04.440] And it's not just values.
[01:11:59.760 --> 01:12:06.120] That is an issue.
[01:12:06.440 --> 01:12:09.000] But many people do not come because they want our values.
[01:12:09.000 --> 01:12:12.680] They come because they recognize that our economies work.
[01:12:12.680 --> 01:12:16.360] And theirs in the countries they're from do not work.
[01:12:16.360 --> 01:12:18.360] So they just can't have a better life.
[01:12:18.920 --> 01:12:30.440] But this is going to be the big question in the 21st century because people in the developed Western countries, we're a minority compared to the number of people who would like to come here.
[01:12:31.080 --> 01:12:39.240] And we'll see, country by country, we'll see who succeeds in addressing this question and who fails.
[01:12:39.240 --> 01:12:43.560] And the ones that fail, things will fail very fast.
[01:12:44.200 --> 01:12:55.000] I think immigration is going to become a looming large issue in the rest of this century because I just had a guest on, an economist who studies population growth or degrowth.
[01:12:55.320 --> 01:12:58.760] In fact, you know, most Western nations are well under replacement level.
[01:12:59.240 --> 01:13:00.840] You know, 2.1 replacement level.
[01:13:00.840 --> 01:13:03.400] Most of them are like 1.6 and lower.
[01:13:03.400 --> 01:13:08.680] And that, you know, where are you going to get population to support your economy in the coming decades?
[01:13:08.680 --> 01:13:09.880] It's not clear.
[01:13:09.880 --> 01:13:16.520] Well, yeah, the question I always say is you might end up saying, people, you have a choice.
[01:13:18.760 --> 01:13:34.600] You either have a population decline and you address that and you die in a country that's recognizable, or you address it in the easy fix ways and die in a country that's totally unrecognizable as your own.
[01:13:34.600 --> 01:13:35.640] Yes, right.
[01:13:35.960 --> 01:13:39.160] All right, Douglas, I know you got to go on democracies and death cults.
[01:13:39.160 --> 01:13:39.800] There it is.
[01:13:39.800 --> 01:13:40.840] Beautiful read.
[01:13:40.840 --> 01:13:42.600] The future of civilization.
[01:13:42.600 --> 01:13:43.160] Exactly.
[01:13:43.160 --> 01:13:43.480] Right.
[01:13:43.480 --> 01:13:44.600] That's a good barometer.
[01:13:44.600 --> 01:13:46.240] What are you working on next?
[01:13:46.560 --> 01:13:48.800] Oh, I never know what I'm working on.
[01:13:49.280 --> 01:13:50.080] Good.
[01:13:51.360 --> 01:13:52.880] It's very nice to see you, Mike.
[01:13:52.880 --> 01:13:53.920] I really enjoyed it.
[01:13:53.920 --> 01:13:56.880] And let's glass in private soon.
[01:13:56.880 --> 01:13:58.000] Yes, again, indeed.
[01:13:58.000 --> 01:13:59.520] You're one of my favorite authors.
[01:13:59.520 --> 01:14:00.720] Again, get the book and read it.
[01:14:00.720 --> 01:14:06.880] It's also available on audio, and you read it, which is, I always prefer that.
[01:14:06.880 --> 01:14:11.760] It was like listening to Richard Dawkins reads his books, Hitch read all his books.
[01:14:11.760 --> 01:14:13.680] It's always good to hear it from the author directly.
[01:14:14.400 --> 01:14:16.080] Thank you for doing that.
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[01:14:35.920 --> 01:14:42.160] Morgan's library, as it was called for many years, is the historic heart of today's Morgan Librarian Museum.
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Prompt 6: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 7: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 8: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.640 --> 00:00:04.400] Let's talk about a special end-of-life care called Hospice.
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[00:00:24.480 --> 00:00:29.840] Calvary, for 125 years, where life continues.
[00:00:30.160 --> 00:00:32.960] Oh, hello there, bookworms and Jane Austen fans.
[00:00:32.960 --> 00:00:38.080] You are cordially invited to step into the captivating world of one of literature's most beloved icons.
[00:00:38.080 --> 00:00:43.840] Come visit A Lively Mind Jane Austen at 250, an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum.
[00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:46.160] Iconic artifacts from Jane's house in England.
[00:00:46.160 --> 00:00:53.040] Join manuscripts, books, and artworks to present new perspectives on her literary achievement, personal style, and global legacy.
[00:00:53.040 --> 00:00:57.040] Visit the Morgan Library on Madison Avenue and 36th Street in New York.
[00:00:57.040 --> 00:01:00.320] Plan your literary adventure at themorgan.org.
[00:01:04.160 --> 00:01:09.920] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:16.640 --> 00:01:22.720] All right, everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show, brought to you by, as always, the Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine.
[00:01:22.720 --> 00:01:24.720] I'm your host, Michael Shermer, my guest today.
[00:01:24.720 --> 00:01:27.200] Oh my God, have I got a great show for you today?
[00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:31.520] He is our returning champion, Douglas Murray, best-selling author and journalist.
[00:01:31.520 --> 00:01:50.240] His books include The Sunday number one bestsellers, The War on the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, and Islam, and The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity, which he came on the show to discuss a couple years ago.
[00:01:50.240 --> 00:02:01.480] He's the associate editor and regular writer at The Spectator since 2012 and contributes to other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Mail on Sunday, and The New York Post.
[00:02:01.480 --> 00:02:03.880] He's a regular guest on broadcast news channels.
[00:02:03.880 --> 00:02:09.240] He's also spoken at numerous universities, parliaments, and big arenas like the O2 Arena.
[00:02:09.240 --> 00:02:09.880] I recall that.
[00:02:09.880 --> 00:02:11.960] I think that was with Jordan Peterson, right?
[00:02:12.280 --> 00:02:14.440] Yeah, an epic lineup there.
[00:02:14.440 --> 00:02:15.240] And the White House.
[00:02:15.240 --> 00:02:16.600] Okay, we have to hear about that.
[00:02:16.600 --> 00:02:17.800] Douglas, nice to see you.
[00:02:17.800 --> 00:02:18.760] How are you?
[00:02:18.760 --> 00:02:20.840] Very good to be back with you, Michael.
[00:02:20.840 --> 00:02:24.200] Yes, and to see you in a non-social setting here.
[00:02:24.200 --> 00:02:29.480] This is nice without adult beverages here to lubricate the conversation.
[00:02:29.800 --> 00:02:35.320] So, you know, we missed each other when your book first came out numerous times.
[00:02:35.320 --> 00:02:38.360] And here we are, July 1st, recording this.
[00:02:38.360 --> 00:02:41.960] And it felt to me like your book must have come out, I don't know, six, eight, nine months ago.
[00:02:41.960 --> 00:02:42.520] And I looked it up.
[00:02:42.520 --> 00:02:44.600] It was April 8th, just three months ago.
[00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:45.800] That's right.
[00:02:45.800 --> 00:02:49.720] It's astonishing how much happens in such a short period of time.
[00:02:49.720 --> 00:02:52.200] Yes, on democracies and death cults.
[00:02:52.920 --> 00:02:53.560] Here it is.
[00:02:53.560 --> 00:02:54.120] There it is.
[00:02:54.120 --> 00:02:55.320] I forgot to hold it up and show it.
[00:02:55.320 --> 00:02:56.040] There you go.
[00:02:56.040 --> 00:02:59.480] On democracies and death cults, Israel and the future of civilization.
[00:02:59.480 --> 00:03:02.200] Sorry for the lacuna there.
[00:03:02.200 --> 00:03:05.560] But yeah, how's the reception been so far in three months?
[00:03:05.720 --> 00:03:06.680] Amazing.
[00:03:07.560 --> 00:03:19.000] It's hit all the bestseller lists, which is, of course, really principally a joy because, as you know, Michael, the best thing for a writer is to be read.
[00:03:19.640 --> 00:03:31.640] And actually getting the feedback from readers about this book has been terrific, not least because it's a pretty personal book in lots of ways.
[00:03:32.280 --> 00:03:41.800] It's an account of the aftermath of October 7th and the war that resulted.
[00:03:41.800 --> 00:04:02.640] And my aim in the book is to, first of all, give a first-hand account of what I saw in the aftermath of the atrocities, but also what I saw first-hand in the ensuing war and being embedded with the IDF in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
[00:04:02.640 --> 00:04:25.120] And then a sort of zooming out of what it is that meant that in this extraordinary and terrible societal moment, so many people threw themselves, not just behind the Palestinian cause, which is something I can understand, but behind the cause of Hamas.
[00:04:25.120 --> 00:04:35.920] In other words, just ran straight to backing and expressing jubilation for the worst death cult terrorists of our time.
[00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:43.760] And we've seen that again just in the last few days with crowds at music.
[00:04:44.080 --> 00:04:45.440] I mean, just consider this.
[00:04:45.440 --> 00:05:04.720] You know, one of the places where the terrorists hit on the 7th of October 2023 was the Nova Music Festival, where young people were dancing in the early hours of the morning when Hamaz terrorists set upon them, raped, butchered, murdered, tortured, and kidnapped.
[00:05:05.040 --> 00:05:29.120] A couple of days before we're talking, another music festival, Glastonbury, had people chanting from the stage and the audience returning the chants of support for the rapists, for the death cult, for the people who'd attacked that music festival in Israel, and if they had a chance, would be gleeful at rampaging through crowds like that at Glastonbury.
[00:05:30.360 --> 00:05:38.440] It's an example of what I go into in the book: of the extraordinary deranging thing that offered a really quite clear choice.
[00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:41.800] So many people decided to jump on the side of the terrorists.
[00:05:42.120 --> 00:05:48.920] Yeah, you open here in your introduction of that video that we've all heard now of the atrocity video.
[00:05:48.920 --> 00:05:54.600] As it were, in the midst of the attack, the terrorist made a phone call back to his family in Gaza.
[00:05:54.600 --> 00:05:57.000] The excitement in his voice was obvious.
[00:05:57.000 --> 00:05:58.040] Hi, Dad.
[00:05:58.040 --> 00:05:59.480] The three-minute call begins.
[00:05:59.480 --> 00:06:03.320] Open my WhatsApp now and you'll see all those killed.
[00:06:03.320 --> 00:06:05.880] Look how many I killed with my own hands.
[00:06:05.880 --> 00:06:07.960] Your son killed Jews.
[00:06:07.960 --> 00:06:11.080] The father replies, may God protect you.
[00:06:11.720 --> 00:06:13.080] The son is exultant.
[00:06:13.080 --> 00:06:16.040] Dad, I'm talking to you from a Jewish woman's phone.
[00:06:16.040 --> 00:06:19.880] I killed her and I killed her husband and I killed 10 with my own hands.
[00:06:19.880 --> 00:06:24.440] He goes on and on, repeating himself, boasting, Dad, I killed 10, 10 with my own hands.
[00:06:24.440 --> 00:06:25.480] Put mom on.
[00:06:26.040 --> 00:06:27.080] That's astonishing.
[00:06:27.080 --> 00:06:29.000] I mean, that's just hard to even read.
[00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:31.480] Is that what you mean by a death cult?
[00:06:31.480 --> 00:06:31.960] Yes.
[00:06:31.960 --> 00:06:41.240] I mean, literally the glorification of death, as you and many of our viewers will know, I mean, there have been some death cult ideologies throughout history.
[00:06:42.520 --> 00:06:56.760] One thinks of things like in Imperial Japan, where some people were willing to get into a plane and commit suicide by flying the plane into American aircraft carriers and more.
[00:06:56.760 --> 00:07:05.880] There have been many groups throughout history, sadly, from all political directions and religious directions, who've literally glorified in death.
[00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:14.600] But yes, in the case of Hamaz, this is Hezbollah and their backers in the Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran.
[00:07:14.720 --> 00:07:23.200] These are literally groups that say they want death and want to bring death to others and get it for themselves.
[00:07:23.200 --> 00:07:34.560] And as I mull on quite a lot in the book, that's something which, so the Western mindset is largely almost impossible to comprehend.
[00:07:34.560 --> 00:07:45.120] And yet it is something worth thinking about and trying to comprehend because there is a presumption, I think, in our societies.
[00:07:45.120 --> 00:07:52.880] You quite often hear it in good, well-meaning people who will say things like, I think most people around the world want what we want.
[00:07:52.880 --> 00:07:58.640] And I usually think that's a sign that the person in question hasn't gone around the world very much.
[00:07:59.200 --> 00:08:20.400] But yeah, there are societies, there are groups who just simply don't want what we want, who have a different view of history, of the future, of the present, and wildly say it all the time, and yet are not believed.
[00:08:21.600 --> 00:08:37.200] And yet, when somebody like Hassan Nasrallah, the former now deceased head of Hezbollah, says, you know, the great weakness of the infidels is that they love life and we don't.
[00:08:37.200 --> 00:08:38.880] You know, we love death.
[00:08:39.200 --> 00:08:43.120] That is really what people like Nasrallah thought and think.
[00:08:43.760 --> 00:08:44.640] Well, they love death.
[00:08:44.640 --> 00:08:49.680] They love the idea that there's an afterlife they're going to for which they'll be rewarded for dying.
[00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:50.560] Yes.
[00:08:50.560 --> 00:09:07.080] I mean, that's a huge part of it: the idea that the present, the life we have, is not the main point, that an afterlife, particularly one in the case of this type of Islamist ideology.
[00:09:07.080 --> 00:09:28.040] The afterlife is the demonstration, the vindication that what you've done on this earth will be rewarded and that the reward will come especially to those who lay down their lives in the service of this ideology, take life wherever they can.
[00:09:28.360 --> 00:09:31.320] And if they lose it themselves, then that's all for the better.
[00:09:31.640 --> 00:09:42.120] Yeah, it's a very strong theological, effectively millenarian movement and one which I think has to be understood as well as confronted.
[00:09:42.120 --> 00:09:42.680] Yeah.
[00:09:42.680 --> 00:09:47.720] Well, at least Marxist regimes, since they're mostly atheists, don't believe in the afterlife.
[00:09:47.720 --> 00:09:59.240] So we can assume that they're rational actors who will be deterred by something like mutual assured destruction and that a game theory analysis will predict what they'll do.
[00:09:59.240 --> 00:10:04.920] And so far, that's worked pretty well in terms of nuclear deterrence.
[00:10:04.920 --> 00:10:07.720] But this brings us to Iran, right?
[00:10:07.720 --> 00:10:16.600] Because this is one reason why we can't let them have nukes, because they're not going to be the rational calculators like, let's say, the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.
[00:10:16.600 --> 00:10:17.320] That's right.
[00:10:17.320 --> 00:10:41.320] I mean, the whole premise, I mean, the whole premise of mutual assured destruction, of a standoff for détente between nuclear powers is that you hope that both sides are rational actors, and they understand that beginning a war with the world's most dangerous weaponry will lead to their own almost immediate swift demise themselves.
[00:10:41.320 --> 00:10:52.080] And there have been plenty of close calls, shall we say, even in the history of comparatively rational countries, leaderships.
[00:10:53.920 --> 00:11:00.800] During the Cold War and in the present standoff with Russia, that's by no means straightforward.
[00:11:00.800 --> 00:11:10.320] But yes, I mean, even at the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin wasn't eager, it wasn't eager in welcoming the idea of death.
[00:11:10.960 --> 00:11:14.640] You might say India-Pakistan is a sort of détente.
[00:11:14.720 --> 00:11:21.520] Both know that if they were to start throwing around the nuclear weapons they have, it would lead to their own immediate demise.
[00:11:21.520 --> 00:11:23.200] So, why would they do it?
[00:11:23.200 --> 00:11:38.160] We haven't yet had a situation where a regime, a government, an ideology which of the kind I just described also has control of the most genocidal and dangerous weaponry.
[00:11:38.800 --> 00:11:52.720] You know, one way to think of it is that mutually assured destruction works until you have an opponent who loves the idea of destruction of every kind.
[00:11:53.600 --> 00:11:59.040] People for whom mutually assured destruction sounds like an interesting thing to try.
[00:11:59.200 --> 00:12:00.640] That's right, yes.
[00:12:00.640 --> 00:12:07.440] Well, okay, I wanted to ask you about Iran and everything that's been happening in the last couple of weeks there.
[00:12:08.640 --> 00:12:21.280] That must be tied, I guess, to Gaza and Hamas because Hamas is sponsored by Iran, and Iran has promised to eradicate Israel if they can.
[00:12:21.280 --> 00:12:26.240] And that would be the justification for the strikes against them.
[00:12:26.560 --> 00:12:27.360] Yes.
[00:12:28.960 --> 00:13:03.880] One of the fascinating things about the post-October 7th war has been that it's gradually that the IDF and the IAF, and now with American V-2 bombers backing them, have managed to roll their enemy up pretty successfully and all the way back to the main backer in the revolutionary Islamic government of Iran, which has misgoverned Iran since 1979.
[00:13:03.880 --> 00:13:45.080] That's one of the reasons why I mention early in the book what I think of as one of the two worst journeys of the 20th century, the most lamentable journeys, which is the flight that took the Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran in 1979, brought him back from exile in the West and to Iran, where once he seizes power and once his militias and everything are embedded and once he's killed and imprisoned and murdered his political opponents, manages to have a vice-like clamp on Iran and then to export their ideology across the Middle East.
[00:13:45.880 --> 00:13:50.680] The great colonial power of the era in the Middle East is Iran.
[00:13:51.000 --> 00:13:59.640] Colonized Iraq, colonized Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, wrecked these countries as its militias have been there.
[00:13:59.640 --> 00:14:18.720] And of course, Gaza, where Iran not only knew of the October the 7th attacks and the planning, but had to get approval for it and had trained and armed Hamaz in the years prior to the attack.
[00:14:19.360 --> 00:14:28.800] It seems very interesting watching the process of the rollback occur since the 7th, as Hamaz has been pretty much decimated, still holding arms.
[00:14:28.960 --> 00:14:34.240] They still have hostages that they are still holding, Israeli hostages.
[00:14:34.240 --> 00:14:42.160] But then the destruction of Hezbollah to the extent that their grip on Lebanon has massively, massively weakened.
[00:14:42.400 --> 00:14:46.400] The destruction of Iran's proxy forces in Syria.
[00:14:46.400 --> 00:15:03.360] And now the regime in Iran standing pretty much alone and certainly naked with American and Israeli fighter jets operating over almost all of Iran with ease.
[00:15:03.360 --> 00:15:06.160] And it's been an astonishing thing to see.
[00:15:06.160 --> 00:15:12.800] And then the removal of the nuclear program that the Mullah has been dreaming about for decades.
[00:15:13.920 --> 00:15:20.720] I wanted to ask you about how much we can trust the media, mainstream media and the U.S.
[00:15:20.720 --> 00:15:25.360] government and Israel on what we assume to be true about Iran.
[00:15:25.360 --> 00:15:27.200] Let me cue this up for you.
[00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:42.800] I just listened to Lex Friedman's podcast episode in which he hosted a debate with Scott Horton, the author and director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com and host of the Scott Horton Show.
[00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:45.920] And for the past three decades, a staunch critic of U.S.
[00:15:45.920 --> 00:15:48.080] foreign policy and military interventionism.
[00:15:48.080 --> 00:15:59.680] His debate opponent was Mark Dubowitz, who's the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown podcast, and a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years.
[00:15:59.680 --> 00:16:02.280] Okay, I never heard of either of these guys.
[00:16:02.280 --> 00:16:05.960] I know next to nothing about Iran, so I thought, okay, this will be interesting.
[00:16:05.960 --> 00:16:15.160] So Dubowitz queues up and just basically, for 15 minutes, outlines everything we've been hearing about Iran for the last 30 years.
[00:16:15.160 --> 00:16:21.480] And pretty much echoing the Trump outline of what's happened recently.
[00:16:21.480 --> 00:16:25.400] And then Horton, his response is: none of that is true.
[00:16:25.400 --> 00:16:26.440] It's all lies.
[00:16:26.440 --> 00:16:31.880] We've all been fed misinformation, disinformation, malinformation from the U.S.
[00:16:31.880 --> 00:16:33.400] government, from Israel.
[00:16:33.640 --> 00:16:35.000] Israel is telling the U.S.
[00:16:35.000 --> 00:16:36.440] government lies about things.
[00:16:37.400 --> 00:16:38.840] We're a puppet of them.
[00:16:38.840 --> 00:16:40.040] And he just went on and on.
[00:16:40.360 --> 00:16:43.320] And they went back and forth for four hours.
[00:16:43.960 --> 00:16:49.400] So what's an outsider like me who knows nothing about Iran to make of these kind of debates?
[00:16:49.560 --> 00:16:51.720] Who should I trust and believe?
[00:16:52.840 --> 00:16:58.120] Well, the first thing is that there is a lot of misinformation out there.
[00:16:58.120 --> 00:17:05.960] And a lot of it, I'm afraid, comes from people who've mugged up very recently on this.
[00:17:06.360 --> 00:17:22.440] This is, of course, as I think you and I have talked about before, Michael, this is a perennial problem in our era, which is that everybody can become a kind of expert fast, thanks to the glories of Wikipedia and Google and so on.
[00:17:22.840 --> 00:17:37.240] And for instance, I've noticed that in recent weeks, there have been a large number of people who said things like, you know, well, Netanyahu has said for decades that Iran was on the brink of getting a nuclear bomb and it hasn't got it, so we're being lied to.
[00:17:39.600 --> 00:17:40.640] No.
[00:17:37.560 --> 00:17:56.400] Thanks like, well, no, thanks to very significant interventions, presumably by the Israelis, things like setting off the Stuxnet virus in Honey 10 that rampaged through the computers of the nuclear project in Iran, thanks to things like that.
[00:17:56.960 --> 00:18:06.400] The Iranians have consistently been set back in their enrichment process, in their development of a deliverable nuclear weapon.
[00:18:06.880 --> 00:18:16.720] So there are quite a lot of people who seem to be bemused by things that if they'd have followed them even remotely closely, they could have realized they're misinformed on.
[00:18:17.040 --> 00:18:33.120] I think it's a striking thing that the weaponization of every aspect of something like the strikes that happened last week now, we've fought, is extraordinary to watch.
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[00:19:33.640 --> 00:19:51.080] In this report that the Trump administration has pushed back on a lot, which is from a part of the national security infrastructure, which claims that the project in Iran has been set back maybe weeks or months, but not significantly.
[00:19:51.400 --> 00:19:57.000] That seems to have been a report written almost immediately in order to leak.
[00:19:57.720 --> 00:20:07.800] Which, I mean, everyone leaks, people leak in every direction, but that smells to me to be very incorrect.
[00:20:07.800 --> 00:20:31.080] I mean, the idea that the, for instance, the reactor at the Ford facility, which needed, I think, a couple of bombs to destroy, which had something like 10 or 12 dropped on it, the idea that that's in any kind of workable shape for the foreseeable future, I think is crazy.
[00:20:32.280 --> 00:20:39.720] There are questions about whether or not materials were taken out of Ford beforehand, and if so, by whom.
[00:20:40.360 --> 00:20:46.200] But this is something that the world, not just America, should keep a very close eye on.
[00:20:47.400 --> 00:21:06.520] But yeah, I mean, I think in general, the bodies that have been expert on this, I think Mark Dubritz and the others at FDD are very good examples of people who've been on top of this for many years, in fact, decades now, should be trusted.
[00:21:06.760 --> 00:21:25.040] And, you know, there are international agencies like the IAEA, which have been committed to trying to keep an eye on the Iranian project and as accurately as they can sum up what the intent and capabilities of the regime there have been.
[00:21:25.200 --> 00:21:31.040] I think they can be at least, if not fully trusted, then taken into account.
[00:21:33.760 --> 00:21:45.760] And, you know, there are sort of very basic ones, which is that the IAEA and others said, you know, there's no reason to enrich uranium to the levels that the Iranians have been enriching it for.
[00:21:45.760 --> 00:21:52.160] There was no reason to do that if you wanted merely a civilian energy nuclear project.
[00:21:52.560 --> 00:21:53.840] There's no need for it.
[00:21:53.840 --> 00:22:09.520] And by the way, the other thing that's worth noting is how some people who would not normally be supporters of Israeli or indeed American military intervention have spoken out in the last couple of weeks.
[00:22:09.520 --> 00:22:22.160] I was very struck by Chancellor Emertz of Germany's statement as the Israelis were doing the strikes on the nuclear facilities in Iran that he said Israel is doing our dirty work for us.
[00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:34.240] And by us, he meant frankly the civilized world, the world that does not want the Iranian regime to get nuclear and then the whole the rest of the Middle East to go nuclear in response.
[00:22:34.240 --> 00:22:47.200] It was very interesting hearing a German Chancellor saying that because he knew, as governments across the West knew, that nobody wants to have to confront a nuclear-armed Iran.
[00:22:47.200 --> 00:22:59.280] No one wants the risk, not just in the region, but globally, of an Iranian nuclear bomb and the resulting nuclear spread across the Middle East.
[00:22:59.280 --> 00:23:05.800] But in the end, it came down to the country most closely threatened by the regime.
[00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:13.320] And Israel, as the German Chancellor said, ended up doing the dirty work that a lot of other countries knew needed doing, but were not willing to do themselves.
[00:23:13.320 --> 00:23:36.360] I mean, we have this very interesting thing where Western governments have sort of called for things like de-escalation in the early days of the bombing, when in actual fact, they all knew in private that massive escalation and victory in removing our nuclear capabilities of the model was the most desirable thing.
[00:23:36.360 --> 00:23:44.840] So, as ever, there's a lot of double-speak and private-public hypocrisy.
[00:23:45.160 --> 00:23:52.520] I guess it's one reason, as a lifelong libertarian, I'm no longer a libertarian, is because they have a very Manichean view of the world.
[00:23:52.680 --> 00:23:53.720] Everything's black and white.
[00:23:53.720 --> 00:23:56.920] Everything the governments do is bad and so on.
[00:23:56.920 --> 00:24:01.400] You can never trust them to do the right thing and so on.
[00:24:01.640 --> 00:24:05.080] And that's just not the world we live in.
[00:24:05.080 --> 00:24:08.680] And, you know, libertarians would like to see a world without political borders.
[00:24:08.680 --> 00:24:09.880] Well, yeah, okay.
[00:24:09.880 --> 00:24:13.240] But, you know, that's not the world we live in, and we're a long ways from that.
[00:24:13.960 --> 00:24:18.760] You know, I'm reminded of Jack Nicholson's character and a few good men.
[00:24:18.760 --> 00:24:22.440] You know, we live in a world with walls, and on those walls are men with guns.
[00:24:22.440 --> 00:24:23.480] That's it.
[00:24:24.280 --> 00:24:25.720] And yeah, so.
[00:24:26.040 --> 00:24:43.480] Well, the other thing I'd add to that, Michael, is that I think it's a very interesting development of recent years that there was always this anti-American, anti-Western view on the left side of the spectrum, particularly in America.
[00:24:44.120 --> 00:24:47.040] I think of it, I suppose, as a Chomskyite movement.
[00:24:47.360 --> 00:24:53.760] That effectively, you know, nothing was a crime in the world unless America was involved.
[00:24:55.600 --> 00:25:04.000] And anywhere in the world that went wrong in any way must be traced back to America, either intervening or not intervening.
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:11.520] And I've written quite a lot in the past about the inadequacies of this interpretation.
[00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:16.960] Nobody can do wrong unless we incline them to do so.
[00:25:17.280 --> 00:25:21.760] But I think that that's now been mirrored on the right as well, particularly in America.
[00:25:21.760 --> 00:25:30.240] This same sort of movement, which is everything in the world that goes wrong must be something to do with America.
[00:25:30.800 --> 00:25:35.440] Either we didn't intervene and we should have done, or we did intervene and we shouldn't have.
[00:25:35.760 --> 00:25:49.040] And it's easy to see why that's a sort of temptation, because if everything in the world is effectively under American control, it's sort of rather flattering.
[00:25:49.680 --> 00:25:54.960] And in a way, it's slightly comforting because it means that the jungle isn't real.
[00:25:54.960 --> 00:25:59.200] It's something we can restrain by acting well.
[00:25:59.920 --> 00:26:04.640] Do you mean the kind of isolationist wing of mega, like the Tucker Carlton types?
[00:26:04.640 --> 00:26:13.360] Yeah, I mean, there's nothing in the world that seems can't be blamed by them on America.
[00:26:13.920 --> 00:26:17.280] You know, America intervenes in a country.
[00:26:17.280 --> 00:26:21.120] And if anything in the rest of the country goes wrong, that's on America.
[00:26:21.120 --> 00:26:26.240] And if America doesn't intervene in a country and everything goes wrong, it's still inexplicably blamed on America.
[00:26:26.240 --> 00:26:40.040] These are people who, for instance, will talk about the falling apart of Syria in the last decade and a half and will talk about it exclusively as an American issue when American military engagement in Syria in the aftermath of the civil war was minimal.
[00:26:40.200 --> 00:26:46.120] The real actors are, you know, Iran, Russia, and so on.
[00:26:46.360 --> 00:26:57.320] But maybe, as I say, it's a sort of narcissistic thing that, well, we have no control over China or Russia's actions or Iran's actions.
[00:26:57.640 --> 00:27:01.720] So it's sort of rather flattering to think it must be us.
[00:27:01.720 --> 00:27:03.480] It must all be us.
[00:27:03.800 --> 00:27:05.960] And it's just not the case.
[00:27:05.960 --> 00:27:09.880] There are other actors in the world other than America, other than the Western powers.
[00:27:09.880 --> 00:27:16.920] And if you look in that region, there's far more involvement by Russia, Iran, and so on than anyone else.
[00:27:16.920 --> 00:27:23.400] But yes, there's a sort of on the right, it's a kind of anti-American isolationism.
[00:27:23.720 --> 00:27:26.760] And on the left, it's very similar.
[00:27:27.080 --> 00:27:27.880] That's really funny.
[00:27:27.880 --> 00:27:36.600] At the end of that four-hour debate, Dubowitz said to Horton, is there anything any other country has ever done that you've been critical of besides just America?
[00:27:36.600 --> 00:27:38.360] And he's like, well, not really.
[00:27:38.680 --> 00:27:40.040] It's like, wow.
[00:27:40.040 --> 00:27:40.600] Okay.
[00:27:40.920 --> 00:27:47.000] Yeah, the normal libertarian response to that is, well, you know, I'm not a citizen of China or Russia.
[00:27:47.320 --> 00:27:49.160] So whereas I am a citizen of the United States.
[00:27:49.160 --> 00:27:50.680] And you think, okay, yeah, of course.
[00:27:50.920 --> 00:27:55.400] And you have the right desire, obviously, to criticize your government.
[00:27:55.400 --> 00:27:55.880] Fine.
[00:27:56.440 --> 00:28:01.000] But don't get it so off that you behave as if other people don't exists in the world.
[00:28:01.000 --> 00:28:08.360] I mean, it's a genuine form of what Saeed lamentably coined, Orientalism.
[00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:19.360] So, if Iran just wanted to enrich uranium to have a nuclear power program, they would not need to do it 300 feet underground, buried by concrete bunkers.
[00:28:19.680 --> 00:28:23.840] Yeah, yes, you wouldn't need to enrich to 60% and above.
[00:28:23.840 --> 00:28:24.400] Right.
[00:28:24.720 --> 00:28:33.920] And if you did have an entirely innocent project, I mean, you would probably not bury it deep and secretly in a mountain.
[00:28:34.240 --> 00:28:51.920] I think everyone who's ever watched the James Bond film will know that in general, people who hide secret nuclear facilities in underground mountain cave complexes tend not to be people interested in world peace.
[00:28:52.240 --> 00:28:52.640] Dr.
[00:28:52.720 --> 00:28:54.160] Evil, yes.
[00:28:54.480 --> 00:28:56.400] Okay, but let's say they're doing it.
[00:28:56.400 --> 00:29:03.200] Here's the other argument: that they want a nuke just for mutual assured destruction and deterrence themselves.
[00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:05.280] Like Kim Jong-un has nukes.
[00:29:05.280 --> 00:29:06.160] He's not going to use them.
[00:29:06.160 --> 00:29:10.640] He just wants them to prevent the United States or anybody else from invading them.
[00:29:11.280 --> 00:29:31.760] Well, there is an argument which has particularly resurfaced in the last few years in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is that countries that do have nuclear capability tend to be hard to invade or unattractive to invade.
[00:29:32.160 --> 00:29:57.120] And that the deal after the fall of the Soviet Union that saw the Ukrainians effectively denuclearize and weapons out of the country with a piece of paper signed in 1994 by other governments, including the British and French governments, justifying, as promising security guarantees for their future.
[00:29:57.440 --> 00:30:04.360] Many people have said in the wake of things like that, yes, it's a mistake to give up your nukes.
[00:30:04.680 --> 00:30:36.600] There's an argument that people have made, and I have some agreement with this, which is that when Colonel Gaddafi voluntarily gave up his nuclear project in the 2000s, which was nascent but developed, that as a result, when the civil war in Libya erupted, people, including Western governments, including NATO, were far more inclined to intervene on the side of the rebels and to try to prevent the massacre that was purported to be about to happen in Benghazi.
[00:30:36.920 --> 00:30:42.760] That they were more likely to intervene in Libya because Colonel Gaddafi didn't have nuclear weaponry.
[00:30:43.240 --> 00:30:50.760] And that is a lesson that I think dictates around the world are likely to have learned from recent years.
[00:30:50.760 --> 00:31:03.640] But at the same time, in the case of Iran, I can completely understand whether the Mullahs would want to have a nuclear bomb because they would be effectively entrenched domestically and arguably international for the foreseeable future.
[00:31:03.640 --> 00:31:19.880] But, you know, one thing not to do, if you're trying to trick the world and actually develop a nuclear bomb, one thing not to do is to say that you want to eradicate other nations and other nation-states.
[00:31:19.880 --> 00:31:27.240] And one thing not to do would be to repeatedly call for death to your enemies, most noticeably America.
[00:31:27.240 --> 00:31:36.920] And, you know, the fact that the Mullahs couldn't resist doing that is in the end one of their weaknesses.
[00:31:36.920 --> 00:31:44.160] Maybe if they'd have kept quiet and kept the Death to America chance down a bit, they'd have been allowed to go further and faster.
[00:31:44.160 --> 00:31:49.600] So we should take them at their word when they talk about the Great Satan, the United States, and the Little Satan, Israel?
[00:31:43.800 --> 00:31:50.640] Yes, very much.
[00:31:51.760 --> 00:31:57.520] That's not hyperbole and it's not a fall and it's not bluster.
[00:31:58.080 --> 00:32:03.520] As I've often said, if somebody says they want to annihilate you, you should take them seriously.
[00:32:03.520 --> 00:32:04.400] Yes.
[00:32:05.200 --> 00:32:09.920] In terms of regime change, Trump has made it clear that's not what we're doing.
[00:32:09.920 --> 00:32:13.840] Okay, yeah, we're not supposed to do that in the international order.
[00:32:14.240 --> 00:32:18.320] But if you go back to, say, Gulf War I, where George H.W.
[00:32:18.320 --> 00:32:23.040] Bush, you know, pulled back and said, all right, we're going to just let Saddam Hussein continue.
[00:32:23.040 --> 00:32:24.160] It's not our issue.
[00:32:24.400 --> 00:32:26.640] Hopefully his own people will overthrow him.
[00:32:26.640 --> 00:32:28.240] That didn't happen.
[00:32:28.560 --> 00:32:34.080] And it seems like if we don't intervene too much, then the cancer grows back.
[00:32:34.080 --> 00:32:37.120] The tumor comes back even stronger.
[00:32:37.120 --> 00:32:38.960] What are your thoughts on that?
[00:32:38.960 --> 00:32:46.560] Everybody would like to see regime change in Iran, but I guess that's just not kosher in terms of international order.
[00:32:48.160 --> 00:32:49.360] It's a tricky corner.
[00:32:49.360 --> 00:32:52.880] I think Trump has trodden it pretty well, actually.
[00:32:54.720 --> 00:33:07.680] The prevailing feeling, I think, is that if the Iranian regime is to fall at some point, it should be done by the hands of the Iranian people.
[00:33:07.680 --> 00:33:21.680] And one can't underestimate how hard that is, because we know from multiple uprisings in Iran, like the uprisings of 2009, so-called Green Revolution.
[00:33:21.680 --> 00:33:35.000] We know, and we know from the history of dictatorships and other terror groups and others, how you can use force to effect to very, very effectively keep down such movements.
[00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:48.760] I mean, it was the shooting of a young Iranian woman in the head by the Basij militia, one of the terror arms of the Iranian government, that helped put a stop to those protests.
[00:33:48.760 --> 00:34:02.520] Because if you, you know, it's rather like the Chinese Communist Party, the mullahs are not afraid to use extreme force, violence, terrorism, and much more against their own people, imprisonment and torture.
[00:34:02.520 --> 00:34:07.800] They're not at all afraid to do that against their own people in order to stay in power.
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[00:34:45.960 --> 00:34:58.680] Most in view in recent weeks, I think effectively you come back to the thing of the famous old pottery barn rule about regimes, which is, you know, if you break it, you own it.
[00:34:59.400 --> 00:35:14.280] And if America, let alone Israel, were responsible for the downfall of the Iranian regime, there would be a sense that they would have to own the aftermath.
[00:35:14.280 --> 00:35:15.920] And I don't think there's any.
[00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:17.360] I know there's no desire in Israel.
[00:35:17.520 --> 00:35:28.480] I'm very certain there's no desire in DC either to become effectively the power that needs to restructure the governance of Iran.
[00:35:28.480 --> 00:35:36.320] There are options available, and I do believe those should be wielded, but by the Iranian people.
[00:35:36.640 --> 00:35:53.520] And I think this is where some of the skeptics about interventionism and so on have a perfectly valid point, which is we have not got a great track record of being able to institute effective governance in some of these countries.
[00:35:53.520 --> 00:36:09.040] But then there's a counter argument, which is that the Iranian people are very different from the Afghans, for instance, much more educated and cultivated people with a genuine sense of national identity and a terrific history and much more.
[00:36:10.480 --> 00:36:12.480] Maybe that would be an easier prospect.
[00:36:12.480 --> 00:36:18.000] But I can see clearly this was one of Trump's red lines, which is he will not be dragged into regime change.
[00:36:18.240 --> 00:36:27.520] And I do believe the reports that he stopped short of the killing of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:36:28.640 --> 00:36:33.920] Remember when W talked about Nathan Sherensky's book, The Case for Democracy?
[00:36:33.920 --> 00:36:45.040] So I read it and I thought, yeah, that seems r right, that it it seems a little condescending to say, you know, some people are just not ready for democracy, as if it's like nuclear physics or something.
[00:36:45.600 --> 00:36:49.200] They just don't have the intelligence or the culture for it.
[00:36:49.200 --> 00:37:00.200] But on the other hand, the counter to that is some countries are very tribal and they're deeply entrenched in religious beliefs that are not conducive to Western values and things like democracy.
[00:37:00.200 --> 00:37:01.800] What are your thoughts on that?
[00:36:59.840 --> 00:37:05.000] Yes, Sharansky's book was a very important one.
[00:37:05.640 --> 00:37:20.040] I suppose that the argument he makes in the case for democracy is essentially, you know, that what has been said about the Arab and Muslim world, the Middle East, and so on, which is, you know, they're not ready for it.
[00:37:20.040 --> 00:37:22.200] They couldn't do democracy.
[00:37:23.560 --> 00:37:29.480] One of his main cases I remember it in that book is, well, this is what they said about Eastern Europe.
[00:37:30.760 --> 00:37:40.360] And then there's a counterweight to that argument, which is, yes, but I mean, Eastern Europe had a memory of democracy where, you know, many other countries don't.
[00:37:40.360 --> 00:37:59.880] But again, you come back to that thing of, you know, maybe Persia, maybe the Iranian people are different in that they do have a memory going back to only 46 years ago to an era where there was effectively a constitutional monarchical democracy.
[00:37:59.880 --> 00:38:06.440] And so maybe the hope that that could exist again is real.
[00:38:06.440 --> 00:38:25.000] It's just that nobody really seems at the moment to want to say nobody seems to have the confidence, rightly or wrongly, I'm not inflecting that word, nobody seems to have the confidence to be sure that if they were to step in and bring about an end to the regime, that what would come next would be workable.
[00:38:25.720 --> 00:38:32.760] I would just say that whatever it is, I mean, there's many scenarios you could see if the MOLAs were finally overthrown.
[00:38:33.080 --> 00:38:41.000] It's definitely possible that if things fragmented, you would have a sort of Iraq, Syria, 2010s nightmare scenario.
[00:38:41.320 --> 00:39:06.320] But on the other hand, there's also the scenario that in any situation, the worst outcome is the one that's already there, which is a madly apocalyptic millenarian regime, which spreads terror and colonization across the region, which at least would be restrained.
[00:39:06.320 --> 00:39:18.720] And I mean, it would be interesting, wouldn't it, to see what would happen in somewhere like Gaza or Lebanon or Yemen if the Iranian revolutionary government was not arming everyone to the hilt on their side?
[00:39:18.720 --> 00:39:24.000] You could see a genuine shift across the region for the good.
[00:39:25.040 --> 00:39:40.800] But it is a very complicated one, and I can understand why President Trump is loath to be dragged into something more than doing what he has told his voters for more than a decade he would do, which was prevent Iran getting a nuclear bomb.
[00:39:41.360 --> 00:39:43.520] You're a staunch supporter of Israel, as am I.
[00:39:43.520 --> 00:39:49.760] Can you be critical of Netanyahu's strategies and still be a staunch supporter of Israel?
[00:39:49.760 --> 00:39:53.440] Say maybe they've gone overboard in Gaza or this or that?
[00:39:54.080 --> 00:40:01.760] I mean, it's funny when people think that, you know, you can't criticize the Israeli government without being accused of all sorts of things.
[00:40:01.760 --> 00:40:06.880] It's like, you know, oh, just read the Israeli press, you know.
[00:40:09.040 --> 00:40:10.000] Yes, of course.
[00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:16.400] I mean, people could criticize aspects of the war, the tactics.
[00:40:16.400 --> 00:40:28.000] I mean, there are people like the former defense minister, Joev Galant, who've been critical of Netanyahu in office and out of office.
[00:40:28.000 --> 00:40:33.560] So, of course, the people who say you can't criticize Israel without being accused of exploitation is nonsense.
[00:40:35.480 --> 00:40:55.800] The place which is surprising and which has been much trodden upon around in the last year and a half or so is the people who condemn Israel whatever it does, but never have a positive view of what they would do in the situation.
[00:40:55.800 --> 00:41:24.520] And it's pretty much a challenge which I've laid out and never had answered by anyone on the anti-Israel side, which is if you do this in population extrapolation terms, a country of 9 million people or so in the case of Israel, 340 million in the case of America, what happened on October 7th is the equivalent of about 44,000 Americans being killed on American soil in one morning and 10,000 Americans being taken hostage.
[00:41:24.840 --> 00:41:37.480] And, you know, my question repeatedly to the just outright critics of Israel is just, what would you do in this situation to get your citizens back?
[00:41:37.800 --> 00:41:41.080] And they say things like, oh, well, I'd get around the negotiating table.
[00:41:41.080 --> 00:41:50.360] I go, yeah, yeah, because Hamas have such a moralistic and decent side to them that you can appeal to.
[00:41:50.360 --> 00:41:52.280] I mean, yeah.
[00:41:52.920 --> 00:41:58.200] So that's the place where legitimate and illegitimate criticism divide.
[00:41:58.200 --> 00:42:14.360] Which, if you never present any scenario that allows Israel to legitimately retaliate for the atrocities committed against it, if you don't come up with any scenario, then you're not simply a critic of Israel.
[00:42:14.360 --> 00:42:16.240] You're an enemy to the country.
[00:42:16.240 --> 00:42:17.760] I'm going to read a portion of your book.
[00:42:17.760 --> 00:42:19.280] I love your writing, Douglas.
[00:42:19.280 --> 00:42:20.400] You're one of my favorite authors.
[00:42:14.840 --> 00:42:22.160] I've read pretty much everything you've written.
[00:42:22.480 --> 00:42:27.120] Among much else, the thought brought me back to a conversation I had near the very start of the war.
[00:42:27.120 --> 00:42:34.960] Late in the evening, at a Friday night dinner with a Sephardic family in Jerusalem, one of the fathers came over to the table I was at.
[00:42:34.960 --> 00:42:41.280] He slammed down his vodka glass and suddenly said, So, Iron Dome, good idea or bad.
[00:42:41.280 --> 00:42:46.480] As I told him, it was a question that no one outside of Israel would even understand.
[00:42:46.480 --> 00:42:50.240] Anyone outside of Israel would say, a good idea, obviously.
[00:42:50.240 --> 00:42:52.560] But my friend's point was not that.
[00:42:52.560 --> 00:43:00.080] What had Israel managed to do since the withdrawal from Gaza in the end of the 2006 Hezbollah War?
[00:43:00.080 --> 00:43:10.000] With the assistance mostly of the United States, it had managed to create a world-class system of which everyone was very proud to shoot down the regular rockets.
[00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:12.480] But perhaps this had not been a good thing at all.
[00:43:12.480 --> 00:43:21.440] If New Jersey had launched rockets at New York City constantly for a decade, would New York State find a way to shoot down and learn to live with it?
[00:43:21.440 --> 00:43:24.960] Or would it take out whatever infrastructure was launching the things?
[00:43:25.280 --> 00:43:36.320] I thought of, because I live in Southern California, I thought, you know, if Mexico started launching rockets into San Diego, you know, where we have a naval base and then we have a marine base at Camp Pettalin, just north of Oceanside.
[00:43:36.320 --> 00:43:40.960] I mean, would the United States say, well, we really need to build the Iron Dome over San Diego?
[00:43:40.960 --> 00:43:44.960] No, we would just invade and take out the people doing this.
[00:43:44.960 --> 00:43:58.880] Yes, and that's one of the frustrations of the pe uh that I have with the people who consistently call for a return to the status quo anti in relation to Israel, which is, you know, that is, you know, October 7th happened.
[00:43:58.880 --> 00:44:02.120] Let's go back to the situation of October 6th.
[00:43:59.600 --> 00:44:25.560] But the situation there was very far from normal either, because since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, regular rocket fire all the time in peace and war into southern Israel and from the north, Hezbollah, regular rocket fire into the north.
[00:44:25.560 --> 00:44:29.400] And that's obviously an intolerable situation for any country.
[00:44:29.400 --> 00:44:36.840] The aim of Iran was to effectively pincer movement Israel so that the north of Israel was effectively unlivable and the south was made unlivable.
[00:44:36.840 --> 00:44:50.040] And therefore, you've got the tiny portion of the middle of the country and their ballistic missiles, ICBMs and others, were partly designed to make even that bit of Israel impossible to live in.
[00:44:50.840 --> 00:44:56.840] That was a pretty effective strategy by Hamaz, Hezbollah, and the Mullahs.
[00:44:56.840 --> 00:45:25.560] But what I think many people in the international community have not realized is every time they say ceasefire, without the destruction of Hamas, the people launching the rockets, Islamic Jihad as well, every time they just say halt it here, the preconditions are set up for the next round of the conflict, which is why I've said from the beginning of this war that the real question is, is this the umpteenth Gaza war or the last Gaza?
[00:45:26.040 --> 00:45:31.720] Is this the third Lebanon war or the last one?
[00:45:32.040 --> 00:45:34.360] And I would like to see it being the last one.
[00:45:34.360 --> 00:45:53.280] I don't think Israel or any of her neighbors should have to exist in this situation where rocket fire is normal and you just invent cleverer and cleverer ways to cower, shelter your people from such routine assault.
[00:45:53.440 --> 00:46:01.440] I think it's uh something that again it goes back to this thing about you know legitimate and illegitimate criticism.
[00:46:01.440 --> 00:46:16.560] Uh, if you can't sympathize with a country's desire to stop its citizenry being repeatedly bombarded by rockets, you're not really being serious and considering the whole picture at all.
[00:46:17.520 --> 00:46:36.000] So, the emphasis by some on the left of the atrocities allegedly being committed by Israel, of let's say children in Gaza who are dying or starving and so on, those things are perhaps some of it is real, but that's just a byproduct of war.
[00:46:36.000 --> 00:46:42.320] I mean, we can't be sympathetic to the people of Hamburg and Dresden in World War II.
[00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:44.880] They started the war, that's just the way it goes.
[00:46:45.200 --> 00:46:48.000] Um, well, that's a part of it.
[00:46:48.000 --> 00:47:00.400] I mean, um, uh, it's it's certainly a morally complex question, but uh, yes, a part of it is, I mean, you know, there is a cost to starting wars against your neighbors, and one of the costs is losing.
[00:47:00.400 --> 00:47:07.840] And uh, Hamas kept starting wars and has very significantly lost.
[00:47:08.160 --> 00:47:32.120] Um, the the the again, one of the things that I think any reasonable person should take into account is to at least notice that Hamaz desires the death of people on its own side as much as welcomes it as much as it embraces and seeks the murder of people on their opponents' side.
[00:47:32.440 --> 00:47:40.600] And that's something which is, again, you just have to take this into account if you're going to be a reasonable critic of any of these actions.
[00:47:40.600 --> 00:47:54.840] You have to take into account the fact that Hamaz welcomes the death of its own citizens, its own citizens, of Palestinians, and encourages the murder of Israelis.
[00:47:54.840 --> 00:48:06.680] Israel, under whatever the government, does not seek the death of Israeli civilians in attacks from Gaza or Iran.
[00:48:07.000 --> 00:48:15.400] It doesn't regard citizens being killed as a desirable thing in order to whip up public program against its enemies.
[00:48:15.400 --> 00:48:17.400] But this is something that Hamaz does.
[00:48:17.400 --> 00:48:29.000] And again, it's astonishing watching some of the coverage of just the ignoring of the fact, whether it's to do with aid, there's endless conversations about the amount of aid that goes into Gaza.
[00:48:29.000 --> 00:49:02.280] And very often, the people who criticize Israel, the international community, for not getting enough aid in, some of the people who make these criticisms are erstwhile friends of mine, they just don't take into account at all Hamaz's tactics of seizing aid for themselves and their terrorists and selling aid that has been given to the citizens of Gaza, selling it to Gaza citizens in order to help to fuel the Hamas war effort.
[00:49:04.200 --> 00:49:13.680] I am pretty astonished, to the extent I still can be, at the number of people who just ignore very significant parts to the story like that.
[00:49:14.960 --> 00:49:15.840] Yeah.
[00:49:16.080 --> 00:49:19.440] I want to ask about your general motive for supporting Israel.
[00:49:13.480 --> 00:49:20.080] You're not Jewish.
[00:49:20.240 --> 00:49:21.440] I'm not Jewish.
[00:49:21.440 --> 00:49:28.880] My reason for it was when I was researching my book on the Holocaust deniers, denying history, I went to Israel twice.
[00:49:29.200 --> 00:49:36.480] My co-author Alex Grohman and I, we visited all the death camps in Europe and went to all the museums we could find and so on.
[00:49:36.480 --> 00:49:49.280] And I really got a sense that, and then, you know, I kind of read about the history of anti-Semitism going back thousands of years and all the pogroms and the anti-Semitism in Europe, you know, Hitler's willing executioners.
[00:49:49.280 --> 00:49:50.480] It wasn't just the Nazis.
[00:49:50.480 --> 00:49:53.600] You know, there were a lot of Jew haters in Europe.
[00:49:53.600 --> 00:49:57.280] I actually chose FDU because of the small classroom sizes.
[00:49:57.280 --> 00:49:59.120] That's something that was extremely important to me.
[00:49:59.120 --> 00:50:01.760] I wanted to have a connection and a relationship with my professors.
[00:50:01.760 --> 00:50:03.920] I didn't want to just be a number in a classroom.
[00:50:03.920 --> 00:50:07.920] I seized the moment at FDU and found my purpose.
[00:50:08.560 --> 00:50:09.120] And so on.
[00:50:09.120 --> 00:50:14.160] And you kind of look at the whole picture, and they almost, you know, Hitler almost finished the job.
[00:50:14.160 --> 00:50:19.120] You know, six out of the nine million were exterminated in World War II.
[00:50:19.120 --> 00:50:20.960] And now they have their own state.
[00:50:20.960 --> 00:50:24.880] And when I went there, I remember getting to the airport and they're like, okay, what are you doing here?
[00:50:24.880 --> 00:50:27.920] I'm like, well, I'm here to research this book, The Holocaust Deniers.
[00:50:27.920 --> 00:50:30.160] I made it clear, you know, we're not neo-Nazis.
[00:50:30.320 --> 00:50:31.920] We're here to debunk these guys, right?
[00:50:31.920 --> 00:50:34.000] They're like, okay, where are you staying exactly?
[00:50:34.880 --> 00:50:35.840] Let's see your hotel.
[00:50:36.240 --> 00:50:38.000] And this went on and on for like half an hour.
[00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:40.400] I thought, man, these people are not fucking around.
[00:50:40.400 --> 00:50:43.600] I mean, when they say never again, they mean never again.
[00:50:43.840 --> 00:50:45.760] You try to do this to us again.
[00:50:45.760 --> 00:50:47.760] We are going to fuck you up.
[00:50:48.080 --> 00:50:50.640] And I think, yeah, okay, yes, I get it.
[00:50:50.640 --> 00:50:51.520] I totally get it.
[00:50:51.520 --> 00:50:53.520] If I was, that's what I would do.
[00:50:53.520 --> 00:50:55.280] That's the world we live in.
[00:50:55.280 --> 00:51:00.000] And so I am sympathetic to, you know, when they have to respond with violence.
[00:51:01.160 --> 00:51:19.160] Yes, I mean, there's again, this is why one of the oddities of the reaction that's happened that I go into in the book, one of the oddities of the reaction around so much of the world is, you know, I don't know, if there are lots of Muslim countries, lots.
[00:51:19.800 --> 00:51:27.960] If you add or subtract one by raising a border or whatever, there's no big shakes, you know.
[00:51:29.640 --> 00:51:32.120] There's only one Jewish state.
[00:51:32.440 --> 00:51:43.080] Withdraw that state or destroy that state, or the state thrives and continues, is everything for the Jewish people.
[00:51:43.080 --> 00:52:08.360] And I believe there are many deep things that I could go into, but I think that there's also something very interesting that people in the West should, in as a whole, should take note of, which is that with 100% accuracy, you can predict where somebody will land on the question of Israel, and it will depend on the country in the West they also live in and their attitude toward that.
[00:52:08.680 --> 00:52:34.200] So that it's not a coincidence that at something like Glastonbury Festival, Music Festival in the UK, it's not a surprise that one act or several acts call for death to the IDF and get this chanted back at them as well by liberals who would otherwise think of themselves, I'm sure, as kind and decent people.
[00:52:34.200 --> 00:52:49.840] But it's no coincidence that from the same stages that the anti-Israel stuff is chanted from, other rappers and singers will sing, you know, taunting songs against the British public and say how rotten Britain is.
[00:52:50.560 --> 00:52:52.640] It's all on a continuum.
[00:52:54.560 --> 00:53:11.920] I almost want to coin it as Murray's law, which is if somebody, if there is a pro-Israel group in Canada, America, Britain, or whatever, a protest, people will fly the flag of the country they're in as well as the country, the flag of the state of Israel.
[00:53:11.920 --> 00:53:22.560] Whenever there is an anti-Israel protest, America, Canada, Australia, wherever, you will never see the flag of the country that the protesters are in.
[00:53:22.560 --> 00:53:26.720] They do not revere or like the countries they're in.
[00:53:27.120 --> 00:53:30.320] And that goes whether they're Muslim or non-Muslim.
[00:53:30.320 --> 00:53:37.280] But you do not see the protesters, for instance, in DC attacking Israel.
[00:53:37.280 --> 00:53:40.000] You don't see them proudly flying the American flag.
[00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:49.920] In fact, the particular protests in question, they will drag an American flag down from a flagpole and burn it in the street.
[00:53:49.920 --> 00:54:00.720] I think this is something that everyone should take into account: that Israel remains the first subject of hatred, by no means the last.
[00:54:00.720 --> 00:54:05.280] And I think you can track with almost complete accuracy.
[00:54:05.280 --> 00:54:20.080] But where people want to annihilate the state of Israel, whether it's the mullahs or radicals on the left or right in the West, they also want the eradication of Western democracies like the ones that we're sitting in next.
[00:54:20.080 --> 00:54:23.120] And I think that that is a very serious thing to take into account.
[00:54:23.120 --> 00:54:33.160] And it's just one of the reasons why people should not be in favor of the annihilation or the demonization of the country that is on the front line of this.
[00:54:33.160 --> 00:54:33.640] Yeah.
[00:54:33.960 --> 00:54:35.080] A couple of quick questions.
[00:54:29.840 --> 00:54:35.960] Two-state solution.
[00:54:36.040 --> 00:54:38.360] Is that off the table forever, temporarily?
[00:54:38.360 --> 00:54:39.880] Can we get back to that?
[00:54:39.880 --> 00:54:42.520] I think Hamaz killed it on the 7th of October.
[00:54:43.320 --> 00:54:51.640] I think it's extremely hard to see how for a two-state solution to exist.
[00:54:51.640 --> 00:55:00.040] I mean, by the way, it would be three states anyway, because Fatah and Hamaz could never get on and kill each other.
[00:55:00.040 --> 00:55:10.440] So the Judea-Samaria West Bank land swap or negotiation would, in any case, always have been separate from the Gaza issue.
[00:55:11.480 --> 00:55:27.480] But in the wake of October 7th, it's almost impossible to see how the trust could exist on any side to go for land swaps and statehood for part of the Palestinian people in the West Bank.
[00:55:28.440 --> 00:55:34.600] I think it's off the table for generations at least, if it ever.
[00:55:34.600 --> 00:55:59.160] I mean, in any case, it has become such a shibboleth of the international community who seem to have, for a generation, left, right, conservative, Republican, Democrat, who seem to genuinely have believed that the question of Palestinian statehood was the question that would unlock all the other problems in the Middle East.
[00:55:59.320 --> 00:56:27.920] This is what we were told left and right for a generation or two, which was if the Palestinians have even more statehood than they currently do, and it is significant in the West Bank and was total in the case of Gab, okay, that Hamaz didn't have control of everything that went in and out, but that was because they should have refrained from smuggling rockets in and then firing at their neighbors.
[00:56:27.920 --> 00:56:41.920] But it's very hard to see how you could get any of the necessary trust that you would have to have in place for an actual solution to that question.
[00:56:42.240 --> 00:56:46.480] I think it's Hamaz killed the two-state solution, such as it was.
[00:56:46.480 --> 00:57:01.440] I think many people can see, by the way, that normalization in the region does not, in the end, rely on Mahmoud Abbas or any of the other failed leaders who tried to run the Palestinian people in recent decades.
[00:57:01.600 --> 00:57:08.480] Normalization, as the Abraham Accords showed, can come a different route.
[00:57:08.480 --> 00:57:26.080] And perhaps instead of the Palestinians being the eternal pawns of the Arab and Muslim world and increasingly part of the left and right in the West, perhaps people will see that actually it's about a liberalization and/or normalization that comes from places like Riyadh.
[00:57:26.400 --> 00:57:40.640] And so, yes, and by the way, I not sound too heartless about this, but there are lots of problems in the world that are not solved and just parked as insoluble.
[00:57:40.880 --> 00:57:45.440] The Cyprus question is a pretty insoluble question at this point.
[00:57:45.440 --> 00:57:57.280] The Western Sahara question, I mean, he's like, and the Palestinian question, which is, you know, and maybe if an insoluble problem exists, it exists for a reason.
[00:57:57.280 --> 00:58:15.960] In the case of the Palestinian problem, I submit that it's still there as an unresolved problem in question because the Palestinian, lamentable leadership of the Palestinians, has repeatedly from 1948 before and since has just consistently said that they would rather not have a state.
[00:58:16.120 --> 00:58:19.400] What they want is the annihilation of the Jewish state.
[00:58:21.000 --> 00:58:23.160] They mark this up for themselves.
[00:58:23.160 --> 00:58:24.120] Yep.
[00:58:24.120 --> 00:58:25.080] Okay, West Bank.
[00:58:25.080 --> 00:58:34.440] One of my favorite documentary filmmakers is Louis Thoreau, a very amusing filmmaker like his films on Scientology or, you know, what it's like to be a prostitute in London.
[00:58:34.840 --> 00:58:36.520] Big fun to watch.
[00:58:36.520 --> 00:58:39.720] Then all of a sudden I see he's done one on the settlers.
[00:58:40.200 --> 00:58:43.480] I watched some of that and I thought, you know, I'm just not getting a fair shake here.
[00:58:43.480 --> 00:58:46.520] I can tell I'm being directed, you know, pulled down this path.
[00:58:46.520 --> 00:58:47.080] I don't know.
[00:58:47.240 --> 00:58:48.600] If you haven't seen it, it's okay.
[00:58:48.600 --> 00:58:52.520] But what are your thoughts on the settling of the West Bank?
[00:58:52.520 --> 00:58:54.280] Is it some of it illegal?
[00:58:54.280 --> 00:58:56.040] Are there some atrocities going on?
[00:58:56.040 --> 00:58:57.800] Is it fair across the board?
[00:58:57.800 --> 00:58:58.680] What are your thoughts?
[00:58:58.680 --> 00:59:04.600] Well, it's very interesting how much misunderstanding there is about the situation there.
[00:59:07.720 --> 00:59:15.560] All sides want to control territory and they want areas they can settle and expand.
[00:59:16.040 --> 00:59:27.320] My view has always been that there are parts of the West Bank, Judea, Samaria, which in any final status agreement are obviously going to be Palestinian ruled and Arab ruled.
[00:59:27.320 --> 00:59:30.440] And there'll be other areas that'll be Israeli ruled.
[00:59:31.000 --> 00:59:33.880] And that's just the facts on the ground.
[00:59:34.440 --> 00:59:39.320] I thought that Louis Threw, who I like you, I admire a lot of his work.
[00:59:39.320 --> 00:59:59.840] I thought that the settlers' documentary was in every way set up to be unfair because, you know, well, let me put it this way: I mean, Louis Threw would not get access to the equivalent or the other side of this.
[01:00:00.160 --> 01:00:04.480] He would not get the ability to live with Hamas' families in Gaza.
[01:00:04.480 --> 01:00:07.440] And he wouldn't have done before the seventh either, by the way.
[01:00:07.440 --> 01:00:07.920] Right.
[01:00:08.800 --> 01:00:15.440] And he will not get access to the millenarian, crazy death cultists in the West Bank.
[01:00:15.440 --> 01:00:20.240] They just maybe kill him and dump his body.
[01:00:20.560 --> 01:00:25.120] So, and that's always something I think in journalism has to be taken into account.
[01:00:25.120 --> 01:00:34.480] I've always said this about covering conflicts in general: you have to be honest about what it is you're not allowed to cover.
[01:00:34.800 --> 01:00:42.960] And, you know, I've told this story, I think, before, but I mean, I was very struck when I was with some international journalists in the south of Lebanon last year.
[01:00:42.960 --> 01:00:58.240] And a couple of them said, you know, I've got to be very careful what I say in my reporting from this because I have colleagues in Beirut who might be mistreated, abducted, kidnapped by Hezbollah if they don't like the coverage.
[01:00:58.240 --> 01:01:00.880] I think stuff like that is what you should say.
[01:01:01.200 --> 01:01:03.280] And so, my thing, I don't mind it.
[01:01:03.280 --> 01:01:18.480] Louis Threw wants to make documentaries about Jewish settlers or anyone else, but I think there's a sort of duty to say, to put it in the context of saying, you know, these people have welcomed me and have subjected themselves to interview.
[01:01:19.280 --> 01:01:22.160] Their counterparts, not so much.
[01:01:22.480 --> 01:01:27.360] And, you know, there are lots of misunderstandings about what is happening there.
[01:01:27.360 --> 01:01:41.640] And it was exemplified only a couple of days ago when a British government minister called Wes Streeting went on television, asked about the chance of death to the IDF and the objections of the Israeli foreign ministry and others.
[01:01:41.720 --> 01:01:47.880] Said, well, I think the Israelis should get their house in order and they shouldn't allow, for instance, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
[01:01:48.040 --> 01:02:06.360] It's like they seem to have no idea that there was an outbreak of violence just a few days ago, some settlers on not just against some Palestinians in the West Bank, but against IDF who are trying to stop the settlers, you know, violence.
[01:02:07.640 --> 01:02:18.600] Those people who have been arrested, Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, incredibly explicit in his condemnation of the settler violence.
[01:02:18.840 --> 01:02:20.280] Why would they not be?
[01:02:21.480 --> 01:02:30.280] It's a very strange thing to see, you know, again, a country struggling with internal problems and misrepresent those internal problems.
[01:02:31.240 --> 01:02:33.320] With Israel, that's just Legion.
[01:02:34.360 --> 01:02:37.880] Okay, a couple of US-oriented questions just to wrap it up here.
[01:02:37.880 --> 01:02:38.920] You live in the United States.
[01:02:38.920 --> 01:02:40.360] Now, in fact, you live in New York City.
[01:02:40.360 --> 01:02:44.120] So what's the deal with the Democratic Socialist Zoran, Mam Danny?
[01:02:44.120 --> 01:02:45.400] Could he win?
[01:02:45.400 --> 01:02:52.440] How can a Democratic socialist be in charge of this world capital of finance and capitalism?
[01:02:53.400 --> 01:02:54.920] It would be very interesting to see.
[01:02:55.160 --> 01:03:11.640] He got through the Democratic primary partly by skill, um, partly through uh the fact that, I mean, uh, Governor Cuomo was a horrible candidate to rerun.
[01:03:11.960 --> 01:03:14.200] Horrible candidate to rerun.
[01:03:14.240 --> 01:03:21.920] Um, so Mandami managed to get her sort of present himself as a generational shift, vibe shift candidate.
[01:03:21.920 --> 01:03:30.480] Um, but also, I mean, he promises things he couldn't possibly deliver, including a foreign policy for New York, which is preposterous.
[01:03:30.480 --> 01:04:00.080] But um, it would be to say it would be a stress test of the city is to understate things were he to actually uh become mayor because, um, as you say, I mean, New York, one of the global finance hubs has already suffered, like London has, a lot of uh, um, of people, you know, hot-footing it to lower tax areas.
[01:04:00.080 --> 01:04:14.320] And um, I don't know that New York would be able to survive a socialist mayor, given that the hits it's already and very visibly taken in the era of COVID and lockdowns and so on.
[01:04:14.640 --> 01:04:31.920] Um, I think that one thing that many Americans don't realize is sorry, many non-Americans don't realize is the ease with which in America, comparatively with other countries, Groons just launched a limited edition Grooney Smith apple flavor, and it's only available through October.
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[01:04:57.040 --> 01:05:02.600] The ease with which you can you can, you know, upstairs and go to another state.
[01:04:59.840 --> 01:05:05.080] The whole system is very clever in that regard.
[01:05:05.240 --> 01:05:09.720] You know, you don't like California, you can go somewhere else in the country.
[01:05:09.720 --> 01:05:17.560] Totally different than the threat to leave, say, Britain and move to France or Italy and move to this.
[01:05:17.560 --> 01:05:18.680] It's just totally different.
[01:05:19.000 --> 01:05:22.600] I think Mandarini would be a real disaster for New York.
[01:05:22.600 --> 01:05:24.840] And I love New York and I want to see it thrive.
[01:05:24.840 --> 01:05:26.680] And I think he'd do the opposite.
[01:05:26.680 --> 01:05:28.120] I think he'd kill it.
[01:05:28.120 --> 01:05:31.080] Well, he said he doesn't think there should be any billionaires.
[01:05:31.080 --> 01:05:37.080] And I just saw, I just watched Bernie on Rogan for a couple hours talk ranting about the billionaires.
[01:05:37.080 --> 01:05:44.040] Why is it so many people just don't even seem to have a basic econ 101 understanding of how it works?
[01:05:44.040 --> 01:05:57.240] That there are billionaires doesn't mean they took their money from poor people, or it's like you hear this, you know, the distribution of wealth as if there's a czar handing out the money and, oh, Elon, you get extra this month or something like that.
[01:05:57.240 --> 01:05:59.080] I mean, it's just so preposterous.
[01:05:59.080 --> 01:05:59.560] I don't know.
[01:05:59.560 --> 01:06:03.480] What do you make of this kind of dunce cap economics people have?
[01:06:03.800 --> 01:06:05.080] It's been around for decades.
[01:06:05.080 --> 01:06:09.800] I mean, in the speech, Reagan used to give that lovely example.
[01:06:09.800 --> 01:06:18.760] He said, you know, there's the type of person who can't help looking at a thin man, the fat man, and thinking that the fat man must have taken some food from the thin man.
[01:06:19.480 --> 01:06:20.120] Yeah.
[01:06:20.840 --> 01:06:22.360] That's that's routine.
[01:06:22.920 --> 01:06:31.720] It's it's the sort of easiest one of these sort of anti-capitalist left is to rail against the tallest poppies.
[01:06:31.720 --> 01:06:39.000] When in actual fact, I don't, as I see it, it's not about inequality when it comes to issues like that.
[01:06:39.000 --> 01:06:40.760] The real thing is fairness.
[01:06:40.760 --> 01:06:59.600] And I think that right and left should take very much into account the unfairness of the system as it relates to millennials growing up, having suffered the consequences of inflation, of money printing, and much more.
[01:07:00.640 --> 01:07:14.080] I think people should be sympathetic to the people who are finding it hard to get going in their 20s and should find sensible policies and to address that unfairness.
[01:07:14.080 --> 01:07:25.760] But I think that the cheapest, easiest, and least productive way is to do the sort of what you might call a populist left-wing thing and say, aha, the billionaires are the problem.
[01:07:28.240 --> 01:07:32.480] I think one of the great things about America is the celebration of success.
[01:07:32.480 --> 01:07:48.640] And I really like that in the American Spirit, that, you know, it's a famous cliché, but it really is true in my experience that there is a tendency in America to say, that guy's got an amazing car, and someday I want to drive a car like that.
[01:07:48.640 --> 01:07:55.600] Whereas in Europe, Britain, and elsewhere, it's much more commonplace to sort of have, you know, that guy's driving an amazing car.
[01:07:55.600 --> 01:07:57.200] He must have taken something.
[01:07:57.600 --> 01:07:58.160] Right.
[01:07:58.160 --> 01:08:00.960] It feels like a zero-sum game.
[01:08:01.360 --> 01:08:03.120] All right, last question on immigration.
[01:08:03.440 --> 01:08:11.280] I was just at a conference in Buckingham with Bacha Ungar Sargon, who's an interesting character.
[01:08:11.280 --> 01:08:17.200] Anyway, so I asked her in the QA because she was ranting about immigration and that was being debated.
[01:08:17.200 --> 01:08:19.120] I said, all right, what's the number?
[01:08:19.360 --> 01:08:21.520] Okay, so too many have come in.
[01:08:21.520 --> 01:08:22.560] Okay, then what's the number?
[01:08:22.720 --> 01:08:24.640] And her answer was zero.
[01:08:24.640 --> 01:08:26.320] Like, oh, zero.
[01:08:26.320 --> 01:08:26.720] Okay.
[01:08:26.720 --> 01:08:28.160] So let me just queue this up for you.
[01:08:28.160 --> 01:08:29.760] So I live in Southern California my whole life.
[01:08:29.760 --> 01:08:34.840] We've had illegal Mexicans here all over the place, but not that many.
[01:08:34.840 --> 01:08:40.360] You know, for decades, it was like everybody knows what's going on, the gardeners, the babysitters, and so on.
[01:08:40.360 --> 01:08:47.480] My dad had a Ford dealership, and half the people washing the cars along with me when I was 15, were illegal Mexicans.
[01:08:47.480 --> 01:08:48.760] Okay, not a big deal.
[01:08:48.760 --> 01:09:00.200] But the problem, it seems to me, is when you open it up and let everybody in, and then you have millions and millions, then finally somebody says, all right, something needs to be done, and you get Trump policy.
[01:09:00.200 --> 01:09:02.280] But even Trump's not saying zero.
[01:09:02.280 --> 01:09:02.840] I don't know.
[01:09:02.840 --> 01:09:05.400] How do you answer the question, what's the number?
[01:09:07.560 --> 01:09:08.840] Look, it's a good question.
[01:09:08.840 --> 01:09:13.240] And as you know, it's partly because it's largely unanswerable.
[01:09:14.360 --> 01:09:24.600] I believe that I've always said that with immigration, there are three things that matter: speed, numbers, and identity.
[01:09:25.240 --> 01:09:33.400] The speed and the numbers, you can get relatively accurate on.
[01:09:33.400 --> 01:09:43.560] I mean, you might, for instance, think a government like the governments that have ruled Britain in the last 20 years, they always talked about reducing immigration.
[01:09:43.720 --> 01:09:51.960] Their view was that you should get it back to 1990s levels, which is the thousands of net immigration a year rather than hundreds of thousands.
[01:09:51.960 --> 01:09:58.280] You might say, what's the difference between 99,000 and 101,000 net immigration a year?
[01:09:58.280 --> 01:10:11.560] And the answer is that the five figures to six figures divide is simply a version of is just where the public would feel more comfortable.
[01:10:13.320 --> 01:10:21.280] The truth is that the numbers and the speed, you can see, I mean, in the Biden years in America, it went way, way out of control.
[01:10:22.160 --> 01:10:31.840] You can't put a finger on the number exactly, but it's just obviously out of control, out of control to control in housing policy, everything.
[01:10:33.040 --> 01:10:39.120] And the bit of it that this I've always said is the hard part is the identity one.
[01:10:39.440 --> 01:10:47.440] It's very hard to put your finger on, or for a lot of people, it's very hard to say not who you want, but who you don't want more of.
[01:10:47.440 --> 01:10:54.560] And that's because there's a whole realm of potential bigotries, real or imagined, that exists in that area.
[01:10:55.040 --> 01:11:18.720] I think what Batia was probably referring to is something that has happened in a lot of countries, which is a call for effectively a moratorium to figure out, you know, how to absorb people who are already in the country, how to distribute things fairly, how to work out who has no right to be and who does have a right to be.
[01:11:18.720 --> 01:11:24.080] That would be a full-time job, even if there was a moratorium, even if somebody Batya got zero now.
[01:11:24.080 --> 01:11:28.560] And the crossings across the southern border in the recent months have been pretty much zero.
[01:11:28.560 --> 01:11:37.200] But it'll be a full-time job just to get the people who are criminals and illegals out of the US.
[01:11:39.360 --> 01:12:02.200] But this is, as I've often said, this is going to be one of the biggest questions of the 21st century, because I think that many people in the West, as well as being wildly ignorant of what is out there, are not aware of how attractive our societies will always be to people from outside.
[01:12:02.200 --> 01:12:04.440] And it's not just values.
[01:11:59.760 --> 01:12:06.120] That is an issue.
[01:12:06.440 --> 01:12:09.000] But many people do not come because they want our values.
[01:12:09.000 --> 01:12:12.680] They come because they recognize that our economies work.
[01:12:12.680 --> 01:12:16.360] And theirs in the countries they're from do not work.
[01:12:16.360 --> 01:12:18.360] So they just can't have a better life.
[01:12:18.920 --> 01:12:30.440] But this is going to be the big question in the 21st century because people in the developed Western countries, we're a minority compared to the number of people who would like to come here.
[01:12:31.080 --> 01:12:39.240] And we'll see, country by country, we'll see who succeeds in addressing this question and who fails.
[01:12:39.240 --> 01:12:43.560] And the ones that fail, things will fail very fast.
[01:12:44.200 --> 01:12:55.000] I think immigration is going to become a looming large issue in the rest of this century because I just had a guest on, an economist who studies population growth or degrowth.
[01:12:55.320 --> 01:12:58.760] In fact, you know, most Western nations are well under replacement level.
[01:12:59.240 --> 01:13:00.840] You know, 2.1 replacement level.
[01:13:00.840 --> 01:13:03.400] Most of them are like 1.6 and lower.
[01:13:03.400 --> 01:13:08.680] And that, you know, where are you going to get population to support your economy in the coming decades?
[01:13:08.680 --> 01:13:09.880] It's not clear.
[01:13:09.880 --> 01:13:16.520] Well, yeah, the question I always say is you might end up saying, people, you have a choice.
[01:13:18.760 --> 01:13:34.600] You either have a population decline and you address that and you die in a country that's recognizable, or you address it in the easy fix ways and die in a country that's totally unrecognizable as your own.
[01:13:34.600 --> 01:13:35.640] Yes, right.
[01:13:35.960 --> 01:13:39.160] All right, Douglas, I know you got to go on democracies and death cults.
[01:13:39.160 --> 01:13:39.800] There it is.
[01:13:39.800 --> 01:13:40.840] Beautiful read.
[01:13:40.840 --> 01:13:42.600] The future of civilization.
[01:13:42.600 --> 01:13:43.160] Exactly.
[01:13:43.160 --> 01:13:43.480] Right.
[01:13:43.480 --> 01:13:44.600] That's a good barometer.
[01:13:44.600 --> 01:13:46.240] What are you working on next?
[01:13:46.560 --> 01:13:48.800] Oh, I never know what I'm working on.
[01:13:49.280 --> 01:13:50.080] Good.
[01:13:51.360 --> 01:13:52.880] It's very nice to see you, Mike.
[01:13:52.880 --> 01:13:53.920] I really enjoyed it.
[01:13:53.920 --> 01:13:56.880] And let's glass in private soon.
[01:13:56.880 --> 01:13:58.000] Yes, again, indeed.
[01:13:58.000 --> 01:13:59.520] You're one of my favorite authors.
[01:13:59.520 --> 01:14:00.720] Again, get the book and read it.
[01:14:00.720 --> 01:14:06.880] It's also available on audio, and you read it, which is, I always prefer that.
[01:14:06.880 --> 01:14:11.760] It was like listening to Richard Dawkins reads his books, Hitch read all his books.
[01:14:11.760 --> 01:14:13.680] It's always good to hear it from the author directly.
[01:14:14.400 --> 01:14:16.080] Thank you for doing that.
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