Finding Peace Amidst Existential Suffering

Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask C Leave Anything This is a special one Sam Harris is here Sam is a neuroscientist, philosopher, author of five New York Times Bestseellers His work covers a wide range of topics neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion meditation practice, political polarization, rationality The generally focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast He's the creator of the Waking U app, which offers a modern approach to living a more examined life through in depth Mindfulness training and secular wisdom. He holds a degree in philosophy From Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience. from UCLA And we're going to talk about a range of topics that I have been eager to ask him about for a long time Before we get into it, let me tell you that this week's episode is sponsored by Leo who asked to say that the episode is dedicated To my son, Noel who told me, I thought your stories of antiemitism were long ago and far away It's a bit shocking to live through what's happening now. The episode is also dedicated to all young Jewish Americans experiencing a similar awakening. And to Haviv and Roel, for those who don't know, that's my wife and the producer of this podcast. who are giving them the tools to come to their own conclusions and the information needed to defend their positions, being part of this podcast and this community has been the silver lining of this crazy period Thank you so much for that, Leia. We really appreciate that sentiment. Don't be afraid. Our young people will not be weaker for having faced some adversity in their lives and for being forced to know their story, to learn their story in the face of the bigotry that they now face I would also like to invite everyone to join our Patreon, subscribe to our sububstack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about, please join us there. You also get to be part of our monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon d. com slash Askave anything And Khaviv Gur. sostack. com thoseose links are in the show notes Sam, how are you I'm good. I'm good. It's great to see you, Aaveve As you know, I'm a big fan of you. So your audience should know I'm a big fan It a very helpful thing for my audience to know. I'm going to be telling them not a lot Uh no, I'm an envirr for many, many years Um, and and let's just get right into it. The most urgent question I have to ask You have been unstining in your support for Israel over the last three years and Not at all in your support for everything Israel does or your support for the Israeli government in any particular way. But just generally understanding who the enemy is And when I went through some of your thoughts on this and record on this, this was a little bit new to me because I had not been following making sense from the beginning back in twenty fourteen Your second ever episode Of making sense back in twenty fourteen was about Israel during that war. and you supported Israel then or you stood by Israel against its enemies. ever since and there's been, you know, a whirwind of criticism. I've been watching it in the last three years your own Some of your listeners coming after you on this question a lot of hate that you've taken online over the last three years. You've engaged Ram Emmanuel, Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan on this issue, you takeake it on the chin and you hit back again and again and again Wouldn't it be easier To leave it alone. Why is it so important to you? What do you see in this issue that the anti Israel crowd doesn't see. Why is it so critical Well, as I think you know, my position here has evolved a little bit since october seventh, as has happened to many people Um there many people are confused about why I doing what I'm doing and just exactly how my My concerns align with those that are you more conventionally simply in support of Israel or you practicing some form of Jewish identity politics. I happen to be Jewish. And that's distracting for many people. M people think I'm engaged in some kind of identitarian project and then I'd be saying something different if we were talking about Denmark in a similar situation. But if you look at what I've said about jihadism over the years over the last know nearly quarter century, You'll see that my concern about it really has nothing to do with Judaism, much less Israel U I mean, I'm, you know, I'm additionally concerned about anti Semitism and we can talk about that, but That has really never been the genesis of my concern. I have been Really since, you know, nine eleven The moment it became clear, you know, somewhere around nine, twelve or nine, thirteen to exactly what had happened there on that day Uh, and that, you know, this was an expression of jihadism Um, I've been concerned about these the zero sum contest between jihadism and Islamism more generally and the norms of open societies and the survival of open societies and the durability of any civilization that should be called civilization at this point So I think open society is everywhere have an enemy in Jihadism. And Israel really is the most, you know, excruciating case of both the conflict being continontuous and unavoidable and also the moral confusion around that conflict from people who should know better being its most extreme. right? So what you have are you know, vast numbers of people in liberal, secular otherwise tolerant, you know, purportedly sane, open societies thinking Israel is the bad guy in this conflict against jihadism And that level of moral confusion strikes me as you know, masochistic to the point of suicidality, right? It' it's just not sustainable and we can talk about its origins, but there's It's just this is where this is how Western civilization will fail Right. And and this is, you know,' even beyond Western I mean, Western is probablyide not the right modifier at this point. So I tend to talk about open societies more than Western civilization but it's a, um, So my concern, you know, I am totally aligned with the concerns of Israel because I'm totally aligned with the concerns of an open toolerant a reasonably secular society against a death cult And and but if the one way to confuse my support for Israel is to think that it really is focused on Israel per se. and Judaism per se and anti Semitism per se I would, you know, if anyone looks at what I said and wrote after the Danish cartoon controversy or the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris You'll see that It was was in exactly the same spirit, exactly the same set of concerns. and this just in sof as I know my own mind, I can say with absolute certainty this is the case. If something like october seventh had happened to another country, like let's say Denmark, right? If if the cartoon controversy had taken that expression with You know, over a thousand people innocent people butchered and hundreds of hostages taken Um and Denmark had to defend itself. making exactly the same noises in support of the Danes. I mean there wouldn't be even the slightest difference. Now again, there's an additional confusing element here which is that I'm also concerned about the global explosion of anti Semitism that has arisen in response to october seventh. I mean, that has blindsided many of us, and, I really thought consequential anti Semitism was behind us everywhere in the West So I'm additionally, you know conerned about antisemitism. That's not really that has never been the center of my concern about Islamism and Jihadism I have to tell you, I I would like to hear your thoughts on where it's coming from. I just read a piece from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. scholar, an analyst who argues that Israel now has this sort of rubble doctrine, he called it where it believes it's just going to be in permanent war with all these enemies, and that's going to bring it peace because it has given up on any other possible avenue for peace. And I'm reading this and I'm scratching my head and I'm maybe even slapping my face a little bit, trying to wake up from a does this guy not understand that the permanent war rubble doctrine is literally Hamas Hezbollah and the Iranian regime. have this Theocratic thought through mass martyrdom ethos. They have a name for it. I keep trying to inculcate the name into people and this episode is going to get views, so I'm just going to say it Mukawama or resistance, but it means much more than the word resistance. It literally means permanent, never ending war through mass sacrifice, including of our entire country to allow us eventually to bring about the great Islamic restoration and It's not that the guy was arguing yes, that's the enemy, but Israel should do a different path or do better they never appear in the and you read analysis after analysis after analysis in which Israel has agency and Is it brown people in a progressive imagination have no agency, can't be wrong?? Is it that simple and cartoonish? What is happening here? Eemy is invisible, that they're not part of the equation when people calculate the moral calculus of this thing Yeah,, you know, if if I had a good answer for that, I, you know, I would really, uh u be able to say something useful here. I you know, I have an answer It makes no sense, right? So I have a theory of mind but it really is a description of u just colossal brain damage on the part of millions of people, right? Be it really it does not run through, but here here is my best shot and an answer What you have in the West, especially in America, but this is really, you know, throughout the West you have a um kind of a primary algorithm running, which could be summarized as, you know a buve all Don't be racist Right. I think race has captured The moral imagination of more or less everyone left of center, the problems of race and racism. power dynamics around that, all that There's this element of kind of Marxist ideology that creeps in here, which is views everything in terms of oppressors and oppressed But race is the lens. that most people use to figure out which way is up or down morally here. So if you tell them that Yeah. and this is really this is this is a it's not especially mysterious as to how we got here. I mean, obviously the history of racism and the lingering effects of that history are you know worth being ashamed of, right? And is there's a lot to apologize for. And you might say especially in America on that score, but there's a very deep and persistent moral confusion that is politically unsustainable that that has produced, which is to say that many people If you describe a situation of violence, if you describe, you know a situation where there was, you know, predator and prey and, you know obvious victims Um, you know, you can put people, you can describe a scene on a subway car where one man, you know, beats another man to death, right And and you can describe it as exhaustively as you want. You can give all the relevant legal and and moral details. You know, were there multiple attackers? Was there a weapon involved, et cetera? You know, how many innocent bystanders were there with what were they doing Could describe it all exhaustively and many people, especially left of center Do not know how they feel about that situation until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved. Right? Was the white guy, the attacker or the victim, right et cetera. And That is considered again perversely left of center to be kind of a necessary part of the moral toolkit, right? Not this is not a you know, one of reasonings, you know, failures and u it's considered buug not a feature, but it is most definitely a bug, right? This is just destroying the moral intuitions of the left and you know in American politics, the Democratic partarty, and we have this is a spell that has to be broken. otherwise we're going to see more right wing authoritarianism taking hold in the West. Obviously, this relates to questions of immigration And you know, Muslim assimilation in especially in Western Europe, right? And the capacity to ignore things like the The grooming so called grooming gang scandals in the UK, right? And how was it that police departments decided to ignore the systematic rape of You know, unbelievable unbelievably thousands of English girls you know, by disproportionately Pakistani cab drivers U Well, the master algorithm here was don't be racist, right? peopleeople are living in terror of being accused of being racist U there's more to the story than that perhaps, but That gets you nearly into the end zone for most people who analyze this. They imagine that they understand the dynamics of what's happening in the Middle East more or less through the American lens of, you know, the civil rights movement for bllack Americans in America. So it's just like the Israelis are the white guys Palestinians are the black guys. Uh it's pretty clear that who the oppressors are if you if if you throw that lens over it and u That's more or less all you need to know Right? And so so, you can chant from the river to the sea because you're basically just chanting in solidarity for uh, these, uh these oppressed non white minority population that's u liivving in in an open air prison, you know, through no fault of their own I'm not quite sure what the second Iifada was, but I'm pretty sure there's a wall there. dividing the populations and there's checkpoints that these these non white people have to pass through to their great humiliation That's scarcely endurable Uh the white Israelis have to be blamed for that, right?, What did they think was going to happen? You put up a wall? Of course these people get angry Um, This is a The emergence of a group like Hamas, there, you know, there' slight excesses as side. It's all too understandable. I mean, this's a revolutionary group You've sometimes you got to break some eggs to make an omelet. Um, you know, and that paraglider situation was kind of, you know, charismatic. Um I'm on their side, right? That's, you know, you could line up u Apparently fifty million you know, twenty year olds in America and they would just raaise their hands in support of that set of moral intuitions Of course, that's completely insane given the ideological commitments of Israel's enemies. and the details of the violence on october seventh and in every other jihadist attack we could describe The u That's where most people left of center appear to be and You know, he I mean the w the one criticism one could make of Israel here I'm not sure what, you know, how much they could have succeeded What we have seen is Um complete failure. to to attempt to win a war of ideas here in the aftermath of october seventh. And you and I' talked about this a little bit, you know where that failure comes from, but Um, again, the, you know,' It was by no means guaranteed to succeed, but We really do have a problem around messaging here. and you, so we have a lot of ignorant people who are getting this wrong. but They're being manipulated quite successfully by people who know exactly what is happening in the Middle East and exactly you know, what the commitments are for groups like Hamas. They know exactly how popular a group like Hmas is in the surrounding culture among Palestinians U they know the implications of all that and they're still lying about it and managing to manipulate you know, otherwise sentient people in in the West. and u Yeah. I mean, the failure mode for Israel has been with the As a culture, you guys haven't figured out how to talk about this in a way that that works and part of the problem is Netanyahu and the other, you know, the other people he's aligned with who we might discuss, but u I don't know. I'm somewhat mystified as to just how fully the war of ideas appears to have been lost in the West. I can't tell you how many left wing Jews I know. So want to be angry at Israel campaigning against Israel They want to be in that safe place for them just hating Netanyahu But the whole world around them and their social world is pro Hamas and And and they're like, can we Can we stopping in proro Hamas so we can get back to the very healthy thing of hating Netanyyahu, which is how they experience it And so they're really tormented. It's gone off the deep end. I mean, it's gone off the deep end in favor of groups Anyway, um Let me you mentioned, you know, fifty million twenty year olds. want to I want to dive into that because The Israel issue is my issue. The issue of this podcast, Jewish and Israeli issues, but somethingomething bigger is happening and we see it in poll after poll. and it's really stark. I want to read a couple of data points to you just so people hear it and know it going in. and you know, we've shared these data points. There is a generational radicalization going on in the United States, as far as we can tell in Europe as well. A kind of radical polarization among young people. And it's happening on Israel, it's happening on Jews, everybody knows that. a lot of people are very anxious about it in Jewish circles and in Israel a little bit. Israelis are not very good at understanding what's happening in the rest of the world. But when they notice, they notice said Gallup has this data that shows that for the first time ever, overall sympathy tilts to the Palestinians fifty one excuse me, forty one percent to thirty six percent compared to the Israelis. Among young people, it's fifty three to twenty three so much more tilted to the Palestinians. That's, you know, there's just been a war where there's been a lot of civilian dead Palestinians and that so that itself doesn't tell me much It doesn't tell me that anything bad is happening Pew, unfavorable views of Israel are at sixty percent overall. That's triple the very unfavorable share since twenty twenty two and young people are driving it. Democrats under fifty are eighty four percent unfavorable. Republicans under fifty are fifty seven percent unfavorable. Harvard Youth poll has forty six percent of eighteen to twenty twenty nine year olds. callalling the U.S. Israel relationship mostly a burden All of that tells us the future of the American Israeli relationship is not in doubt. It is On a clock. And all of that, again, is sympathy for Palestinians, criticism of Israel, dislike of Israel Here's the thing It's the same phenomenon with Jew hatred Not Israel teen to twenty two year olds in Yale's youth poll. twenty seven percent of them sayay Jews have too much power. twenty one percent support boycotting Jewish businesses as a protest over Gaza. The economist Yugov had a poll of Americans eighteen to twenty nine twenty percent agree The Holocaust is a myth So if one in five eighteen to twenty nine year olds agrees the Holocaust is a myth Where do we stand? And just this is the longest question in this interview I promise, but it's not even just Jews in Israel We're as usual, the canary and the coal mine Harvard's fall twenty twenty five youth poll. thirteen percent of eighteen to twenty nine year olds think the country's on the wrong track sixixty four percent say American democracy is either in trouble or failed. That's two thirds Support for capitalism is now less than half down to thirty nine percent And thirty nine percent say political violence is acceptable. So and but just to clarify Oer cohorts above that age group, n young people, middle aged and older ninety percent say political violence is never justified That's down to fifty six percent among Gen Z and Lower What's happening? This isn't about something about this moment. It's bigger than even America. there far right gains in Europe among young men. I mean, very far right The whole Israeli Jewish story looks like an accelerated version of the same forces. Something is disrupting the West and it's at a colossal scale and the young people are gone down that rabbit hole Am I exaggerating? How bad is this? What do you make of it Yeah, I mean, I this is a much larger question about what information technology is doing to the human mind and to the career of our species, R? we've The big change has been the emergence of social media and the coincidence of social media and the smartphone in the last nearly twenty years. and what that has done to our politics, our ability to converge on just just a fact based account of what's happening in the world. I mean, we have balcanized in ways that u arrguably were foreseeable, but you know, I think everyone would would have hoped we would have avoided this. but we are We're now siloed and and u plunged into this sort of this phantasmogorical you distortion machine, right? Everyone is seeing the worst possible Uh version of their political opponents, right? I mean it's just that there's a fun house mirror effect here that is continuous and very hard to correct for. I mean, you It's not a matter of simply being lied to. It's not a matter of pure disinformation, but it's the relentless spread of all two consequential half truths, right? You know It's like to take come back to the current issue of Israel is prosecution of this war and It's not that everything said about Israel is a lie, but so much is a matter of omission, so much as a matter of exaggeration, so much as a matter of just a piecemeal account of um of what's happening that allows people to not recognize how out of proportion, you know everything has become, right? I mean there's just there's this distortion effect. which which again is hard to correct for because We're not we're no longer meeting in the in in this a public square where we can we're debating the same set of facts. I mean, we're just algorithmically siloed and We're seeing the evidence of everyone else's confusion or radicalization And the truth is we can't even properly understand it because we're not seeing their algorithm, right? You're seeing someone behave like a maniac online, someone who perhaps might even know personally who who you once thought was sane. But now this person is seems to be just trafficking and conspiracy theories and lies and Uh, uh just ridiculous claims and you know, on its face, you know, you could you simply say, okay, this person's has broken in some way and there's nothing really profitable to say in their direction. But you also don't see the path they took because you weren't you weren't watching You weren't looking over their shoulder as they got radicalized or confused and again, this is happening to everyone at all times in in a in a in a few places online, um And so we've all been as I've said, many times before, we've all been enrolled in a vast psychological experiment to which no one really consented and it's not working out very well, right? And it's under and we've created a kind of civilizational auto immune disorder where the the foundations of democracy, the information infrastructure we're all using to try to make sense of the world is attacking the foundations upon which every democracy depends So it's not working out well for us U and that's the background condition uh, in which Israel And again, it's just might have been a hopeless project from from from the first moments, but Israel completely failed to prosecute a war of ideas in the aftermath of october seventh. and Israel and not just Israel, Israel and its defenders Um, And Yes, we were totally outnumbered, right? There's fifteen million Jews on earth and there's two billion Muslims. I mean, what do you think's going to happen on TikTok? J just with those numbers alone It's worse than that There are no doubt there have been paid actors and influence campaigns where there have been bought armies and there's been You know, there's Qari money. I mean, who I't I don't know all the details of how this happened, but it all happened And the net result is Most of the civilized world, even our best institutions, even the New York Times, right is can be counted upon to be morally confused about the situation Israel finds itself in and You know, most perversely the situation every open society finds itself in. And the situation we're all in, as I argued a long time ago We're all living in Israel, it's just that only some of us have realized it you know, I mean it's it's just this is So yeah, I don't know that I addressed your question, but that's like that's the background which were're, you know, we're obviously not going to solve there. I have one very strong recommendation I don't want to forget to give you, which is not that I'm the first person to say this, but Honestly and perhaps you disagree, but honestly, I think There's one disaster here that amounts to a kind of own goal that we keep scoring on ourselves that we need not ever score again, which is The use of the term Zionism I don't see why anyone ever has to use this word ever again. This is a Israel iss the only country that has a name for an ideology that really is simply of why it has a right to exist Right. So it's like basically it's a permission slip that you keep putting in front of the world saying Um This is what we call our belief that we have a right to exist Please sign on the dotted line And don't be distracted by the fact that it has a sounds weird and it sounds like a you know, a dogmatic commitment that would be very hard to justify. and it sounds like some form of racism and it can be spun as some form of of you know, colonialism and it has a million ways to criticize it and it's just got this vast attack surface, but we're still so attached to the word that we're going to keep talking about it Um I don't think you ever have to say anything about Zionism ever again Israel exists There's one hundred and ninety three countries in the world, two thirds of which have very similar origin stories, right in the sense that map makers just drew their boundaries without much regard for the people living within those boundaries Right? two thirds of existing countries now actually are younger than Israel, right? whichich is to say that their current national boundaries were specified since nineteen forty eight, you know, since the birth of Israel Israel is the only country that has to keep apologizing or debating its its right to exist Um Z The concept of Zionism is not helping That's my argument Well, that's a blow.. I'm a big teacher of Zionism I'll try, I'll say diagnostically, within the context of Jews and the big Jewish debates about modernity and what modernity represents. and how we frankly deal with vulnerability in the modern world. You had multiple camps offering multiple solutions. One was a retreat into a cultural, intellectual, religious and sometimes even physical ghetto, which is Kredi. And you had socialists and communists and sort of a nationalist socialist bundist. And you had all these different options. and Zionism was one of six seven. B the way, Angloiberalism. Jews came went to America or Britain, they started the reform movement, they started this very deeply integrated liberalist kind of Judaism. And that was a survival strategy. And they talked about it and debated with Zionists and Hedists and Bundhists and all that. So Zionism has a meaning within Jewish history that relates to a conversation that by the way, Jews are still having because there's still a debate over Haidism within Israel and all of this stuff. So it's It's a word that outside of Israel is really only ever useful to enemies. and inside of Israel really describes part of a Jewish experience. And I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't know if you're wrong. I haven't thought about it properly Um, I could say that I'm right in terms of the PR war outside of Israel. just in defending Israel against its all too dishonest critics the word is never helpful. it is it's just a perfect stumbling block because again imposes a standard of argument on Israel that a burden of argument that no other country has Right Nor other country has this ism that is its case that it need not even make for its right to exist. Like you just don't y like Just stop, stop pretending like you have to defend your right to exist. and no longer name that burden And I mean I understand the history of Zionism and how we got here, but It's just ism of the camp arguing that Europe was going to collapse And nobody else believed. And you track the Zinism begins a tiny crazy minority of Jews who would go to come on, really go to this tiny little strip of land, leave Germany, leave Poland. And then everybody was a Zionist because they had no choice. That whole story of the Jews becoming Zionist is the story of the collapse of Europe. And so you know, the irony with of what you're saying and again, this doesn't at all mean you're mistaken. The irony is As the Jews became Zionist, the Jews became Zionists in direct correlation. to the failure of any alternative to Zionism. So Jews even used the word when Jews talk about, certainly I do, when I talk about Zionism outside of Israel, I'm describing the absolute lack of any other choice the Jews of the Easternemisphere had. I happen to think Israel's my own land will forever be my own land and my children learn their Bible and all of that stuff. But Um, So there's an irony that this thing that is a code among Jews for survival. You're saying is actually a kind of a code among Jews for not asking anyone else's permission to survive. You're saying actually functions in the discourse outside of Israel as a request for permission to survive because it's laying it out as if it's an ideological question up for debate. And I do I do think it's it's non recoverable. I mean, I just think it's It's it's never going to help and it's always going to hurt. I mean's reached it's reached a tipping point there. So I don't tend I mean, to be just to just think of what it means as a Jew, a diaspora Jew to be asked the question Are you a Zionist? and then to have to figure out how to dig out of that. like to deal with all of the preconceptions loaded into that question to be on the back foot you know, at the start of this conversation, and to have to fight your way back to some ground truth where U No, Israel is a normal country that has a right to you're not asking this question to any other country. Let's let's figure out why you even care about Israel, right? Like why are you not sensitive to all the other death and destruction you that the U. S has funded, right? I mean, there all these other questions But the first question seems to Um It just it ties a knot in space that then people struggle to untie, right? And it need never have been tied in the first place,? It's just it's kind of an imaginary object that you know, honestly, most Most secular Jews can't I mean you know, ten years ago, like you referenceced my first podcast on this topic In retrospect, even I was confused about this. Right? Like I I burnt a lot of fuels, you know demonstrating my my atheist bona fides. saying, listen, I'm You know, I'm not in support of any kind of religiously defined ethno state Um, you know, far being from me to defend anything like that, right? You know, one of those wor about the atheist apocalypse U mean U And yet Israel must exist and here's why, etceta. So Um It's just it's a point of confusion that no one need ever suffer again. Okay. U I'm sorry, sorry to put you out of business. Have youid you have other work to do? Yeah. Luckily, Israelis speak Hebrews so they're not going to they're not going to hear that. I want to get back to my question, my original question about young people. Oh Why aren't? Why are people scared U it's again The data that we have on the Jews, the incredible collapse of support for Israel, sixty percent of Americans donon't support Israel because they've seen the Gaza W. That you know, I'm uninterested in that. That's an Israeli policy problem. That's not a fundamental moral question. Most people don't dig into the deep complexities of a war on the other side of the world Well, most people think a little color to that point. Most people You can talk about all that's wrong with the CCP, all of the needless human suffering produced by that regime No one is blaming of of Chinese descent living in London or Paris or Los Angeles for those crimes, right? Like there's no conflation of oh, you're Chinese. well You know, I'm really upset about what the CCP is doing to the Ughurs I'm going to hold you responsible for that. like that's just not happening. right? So the anti Semitism has this structure and then we can talk about you the conspiracy theories and Um, but This is the only W this is the only world conflict that gets extrapolated into this Global concern about anyone who could be plausibly associated with Israel based on their religion or based on the religion, they don't even hold but just based on the, you know, the the ancestral descent, you know on their mother's line, right? It's just, you know, your mom was Jewish? Oh, okay I'm going I can now revile you for what this country that you probably have never even been to. just did in its war of self defense the The collapse is larger than Israel I take that point At the same time Um twenty percent think the Holocaust is a myth, and forty percent think political violence is legitimate and political violence is increasing in the United States. My assessment of your position is that you're basically in a political no manan's land Um ye your and your listeners Tal about this in the talk backs as a good thing. This is something you're very much admired for, which is an equal opportunity Critic, you seem very dissatisfied with both tribes with what both tribes are becoming Are you politically? homeless and and and from you please extrapolate to America generally, how do you navigate the radicalization that we're seeing right now. and it's obviously going to get worse if the data we have is reliable M Well, I don't know how to navigate it. and I don't know what the cure for it is apart from recognizing what social media and the shattering of the information landscape is doing to us, right? So it's again, it comes back. you ask what how is it that twenty percent of Young people apparently believe that the Holocaust is a myth or has been greatly exaggerated. Um, That's, you know, that's conser It's crazy ideas expressed on podcasts They go viral, right? That's, you know, people just asking questions who know nothing. But they happen to be on Joe Rogan's podcast and they're given four hours to ask those questions. without any pushback Um It's just people are just watching clips of clips, right? I mean so people watch the ninety second version of that of all of that and that gets into their head and they never see what was said in context. So who knows if even the person was as crazy as they sounded in that clip. That's our information diet or for certainly most people's, right? And so that is the kind of the background problem that is not it's viciated in everything, not just our thinking about, you Israel and jihadism, et cetera U mean, this is a problem when we're talking about, you know, vaccines and their safety, rightight? So it it's everything gets touched by this how how much the generational gap is so big Yeah Can the older people do something about the younger people? Are we helpless? Are we helpless in the face of this mass radicalization? I should tell you, it's relatively weak in Israel. It's not happening as much in Israel. There's a sense of grounded reality and probably it's a sense imposed on us by our enemies because we are very much online's a reality fight fighting for your life. right very small country, you know, the borders east, west, north, and south practically touch one another. I mean, they're just there's you have a you have a uh You can only be so delusional about what's really happening out there in the world before you know, the flight time of incoming missiles and drones is very, very short. I mean it's just like you In America, we can really be confused for a very long time. We've got two great oceans Uh separating us from resturro reality on some level We can lie to ourselves for a very long time before we bump into some very hard object and realize we're delusional U You know, we appear to be losing a war with I run and yet you know, I think we have a president who might be able to successfully spin this as a victory, right? I so it's I we can talk about Iran It's, you know, if you guys lose a war, presumably, you'll know it. and uh I can't necessarily say the same about America at this moment Um I mean, as far as my political position, yeah, there's no name for it. I'm somewhere in this, I mean, I'm very liberal on almost every issue exxcept I'm extremely hawkish with respect to jihadism. Um I'm I guess I'm not a fan of of Trump's or, you know, any of the loyalists that he's put in charge of most important institutions, you know, governing things like war I mean, we have a I mean, my view, we you know, we put a game show host in charge of the world's only superpower and then he, you know, he put a Fox and Friends host in charge of Our defefense Department U and now we're fighting a war, right? So it's it's not H I'm not happy about any of it and yet I can sound like Ben Shapiro or Douglas Murray or any other kind of staunch right of center defender of Israel when talking about the things we're talking about because I see them there's very little daylight between Me and those guys on these particular issues, Ive just I believe I have a more realistic picture of who Trump is and how he's capable of betraying Israel Right. So any Jew who was a single issue voter in America who thought, okay, I'm going to I'm going to take Trump because He's just going he's just going to be so good on Israel he moved the embassy to Jerusalem. I mean, this guy is just all in for Israel I see him as a much more conflicted and superficial character than that. I don't think he understands the real issues of jihadism and Islamism. I think he's happy to you know, to Gad handand somebody who was a jihadist yesterday you know, like the the current, uh, um leader of Syria just because he likes the cut of his jib and thinks he's telegenic You know, he's he'll cut some family. he'll figure out how to make a billion dollars by cutting some deal in Qatar and not care you know, how how much blood is on the hands of the people he's he's, um, now in bed with. m he's just and I honestly, I think if the Moles in Tehran had offered him had bought, you know a billion dollars worth of his cryptocurrency There might not have been a war in Iran, right? I just think he's that selfish and easily misled I will fully agree that It was a safe bet that he was going to be better on the topic of Israel than Kamala Harris was going to be given the kinds of noises she would make on the topic and given, you know, the track record of the Biden administation So it was a, you know, I don't if you were a single issue voter in America who just cared about the fate of Israel U you know, I can't really fault you for having voted the way you voted. Uh, but You just have to recognize that We don't have we don't have a princi we're not in the hands of a principal defender of Western civilization We're we have a far more Far less inspiring, less clear morally clear headed person in charge and If his if his infatuations and personal interests happen to a lion with the defense of open societies and our freedoms and Israels in particular, Uh, well, then that's a very good thing, but There's no guarantee that it lasts for fifteen minutes but, you know, beyond this moment,? And so that's that's what has always worried me about Trump on this topic Of course this visits every other topic. I think he's just he's a terrible human being and is a terrible president Um Given my concerns about jihadism it's and given the reliable confusion of most people left of center on this issue Uh it's, yeah, I'm in a political no man's land. I mean, it's just there's no u, you know, to sound like Douglas Murray in one moment and then to sound like, uh, Trumps Trump's most vociferous critic another in another is is whiplash for for any audience and that's u You know, that's sounds exhusting. I mean, it sounds despairing. Do you feel despair about the near future of America or the long term future of America given that the Those are the directions both sides are going toward And we should add is that if you go far enough left or right, especially in America. I mean I guess this is a more general Western phenomenon you reliably meet antiemites and you don't have to go that far really. I mean, you know, especially on the left, I would say at this moment in America U, So that's It's very depressing. I mean again change for me. since october seventh has been the recognition that Anti Semitism is a real problem. And so it used to be that know something like Holocaust denial You know, even on a podcast as big as Joe Rogan's, you wouldn't really have gotten my attention all that much because There's no really no I didn't consider there to be any real stakes, right? You know, like this is this is not something every anyone any institutions of substance or any are going to be confused about again and you know, the average person can be relied upon to understand the Jew hatred is intolerable. And so yeah, we have we have the people who hate Jews on the far, far right. They're white supremacists, neo Nazi assholes and of course they you know, it goes without saying they're despicacable. Um, and we have some, you know Marxist quasi Marxist revolutionary dummies on the left who are also probably antisemitic We have some you know, identitarians, you know, um intersectal identitarians who if you push hard enough will reveal they're probably also antisemitic,. Again, none of that really matters No, that's completely changed. I think it really matters and I think the fact that you've got Jews wondering where it will be safe to live in the West if this gets much worse You know, for the first time in their lives, Um, that's new You know, that's that' I mean, mean one piece of continuity here. I mean, again, there was a rupture on october eighth which surprise, which, you know really surprised a lot of people and I'm one of those people. but prior to that There was this growing concern about the unacknowledged issue of Islamism in jihadism in the West. and that always had a potent it was always going to work badly for the Jews, right? The Jews were never going to do well. in an open society that was failing to get a handle on Islamism and jihadism. it wasn't it wasn't especially focused on the Jews, right? the big difference now is You have Jews and Israel being blamed for everything. Like we wouldn't be in these wars. It wouldn't have been any of these wars, know maybe not even World War two, but for those Bhemian Jews Right I mean, that's the kind of thing that's being thought. Yeah by, um far too many people Uh And again, independent media is is especially culpable for this. I you know, I keep naming He's a former friend, you know, Joe Rogan. I mean, it's like that will his podcast has done immense damage. I mean it's very hard to to exaggerate the damage being done by stand upp comics now just shooting the shit on you know for hours at a stretch on a few different podcasts and it's the taste for conspir conspiracy thinking, right? just just just the generic template of always being interested in the contrarian take The anti institutional take. the what of those powers doing in secretive you know, rooms Um line of question and again, which Joe has been a super spreader of Given the structure oft the conspiratorial structure of anti Semitism for the last two thousand years. U It's just, it has just heaped gasoline onto that problem and u Yeah. So it's not going away until we Do we really understand the irrationality and divisiveness of all of this thinking and we we relentlessly criticize it in a way that matters to enough people I want to tackle that. I'm to take a little bit of a deeper dive into it. I have a thesis about The version of this on the right, you know, you talk about Joe Rogan and he platformed What was his name? Martyr Maade is his handle Yeah, Darrel Cooper Daryl Cooper and Ian Carroll and you know, Nick Fuentz is now Darling, you know, of Tucker Carlson's pod, all those guys went on Tucker Carlson and he really laundered them and presented the most radical version of them that I think they were a little bit restraining at least with Joe Rogan Or just maybe by then they had already been so popularized by Joe Rogan they felt free to say even more radical things about him And just to add one thing here is that is's not just on the right. I mean, first of all, Joe is a liberal in almost every sense, right? I he's not he's not a far right figure at all. He just got kind of he got radicalized in response to the far left, but He's a very centrist figure A lot of the people who are who are in lockstep with the truly odious far right figures like Fuentes are also kind of quasi leftist, figures. I mean, there's at minimum centrist figures and friends of Joe's like Dave Smith R Dave Smith is just buddy buddy with Nick Fuentes and amplifying his thoughts on his own podcast and on Joe's podcast Um, uh, and, uh you know, and on Tucker, but so any there's there's there's this very weird You know, the horseshoe theory is the term used to describe this where if you go far enough left and far enough right, you begin to meet people who are u indistinguishable from one another. It's especially true with respect to anti Semitism and hatred of Israel., I think too much can be made of this neat heuristic of horseshoe theory But for the Jews horseshoe theory is all too obvious. I wanted, um, I want to in specifically zoom in on Tucker Carlson. I want to suggest that Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens That whole wing of the Republican or right wing conservative, you know podcast fehere are trying to build out what I have come to think of as the American Muslim Brotherhood And ded in it's dressed up in this sort of Christian nationalist drag. It's not Muslim in its content, but the parallels are kind of amazing. The original Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, founded in the nineteen twenties argued or still argues that the Muslim world fell into weakness, It fell into decline economically, intellectually, politically, geopolitically, militarily Because it drifted away from God's design for history, it drifted away from true Muslim piety. It was corrupted by too much modernity, too much liberalization. Women in Egypt in Iran and Afghanistan once walked around with their heads uncovered. They went to universities, very, very know open because we're now trying to chase after Western culture and no longer being piotistic puritanical Islam as in the first holy generations of Islam in the seventh century We have failed and we have become weak because we have become far from God. and the solution they developed and here I bring a TikToucker The solution, they have argued, is a return to a strict piety of puritanical piety, a very traditional religious observance, traditional roles for women, extremely limited roles for women And also, and this was central to the Muslim Brotherhood's worldview then and now. and Hamas is the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. It was a ch to the Muslim brotherood established Gaza in nineteen eighty seven. and in its charter, it is written in its charter They have this deeply conspiratorial view of the Jews. They drew it from European anti Semitism, literally from Naziism that the Jews are a major global conspiratorial force standing in the way of Islam's sppiritual and therefore also geopolitical, you resuscitation and restoration I have watched Tucker. I watched him interview the Prime Minister of Qatar of Thani He is nodding along to every silly claim by the Tatari leader. And as I'm watching that conversation, it occurs to me Maybe this isn't an influencer, Mbe he's not paid, maybe he's not ignorant Maybe they genuinely agree on the fundamental things. Kucker has argued, I've then gone back to read some of his speeches in the past. He argues that America is experiencing a social and moral collapse On that a lot of other normative people will agree But it is fundamentally a collapse that's a result of the loss of Christian piety, of too much liberalization, of too much progressivism. He once described in a speech mainline Protestant Christianity as a hollowed out, hollow tree that progressives have occupied like a family of raccoons. Churches have become these empty Husks filled with sterile sort of progressive politics instead of liing real Christian faith and All through this sense of things, sense of where America stands, sense of the collapse of religion that's driving all of the social problems that everyone's talking about, the epidemic of loneliness, the you know, young people All through it there's a villain And a villain is the Jews And for example, he hass argued repeatedly that the Jews invented pornography, control the pornography industry as a tool of cultural subversion. They dominate American finance, American politics, they care only about their own interests at America's expense. as an incidental marginal part of that argument, the Nazis also weren't really the villains of World War two, right? And he literally argues this. He has explicitly argued that the largest pornography websites in America are controlled by Israeli intelligence agencies as part of a scci opop against American society. And he's doing it a religious restoration that'll resuscitate what he sees as a dying society dying because of a loss of religion Am I crazy? orr is the Muslim Brotherhood migrated into American Christianity through this am I a Middle Easterner who because that's something he's seen is applying that template to a faraway place? I keep accusing people of doing that to us in Israel. Applying American racial experience to Israel is just irrelevant. We're not Palestinians run from dark color to blonde. Israelis run from very dark to very bl. We can hate each other and marginalize each other and fight every war imaginable Without race, race isn't the issue here. and to apply race to us is to misunderstand us Am I doing the same in reverse or has the Muslim Brotherhood? It's not a coincidence that Tucker, as he's arguing that, says he wants to buy a home in Doha and calls their culture an example for America This puritanical restorationism decimated the Arab world It has destroyed everything it has touched part of the kind of ideology that H mass represents in the Palestinian case, which destroyed peace processes. L before driving the kind of war we see in Gaza, Heezbllah is willing to destroy Lebanon on the altar of this. This is a very bad thing to happen to a society. What do you think Well, so I think er is a, um extremely idiosyncratic figure I it's hard to know what he's actually doing. I mean I'm genuinely surprised that he has the audience he has, given the strange moves he's made of late. I mean, for instance, he's broken with he's speculated about whether Trump might be the Antichrist u and he's and one of the one of the the data points in favor of that argument on Tucker's account is that He has disparaged the, you know, otherwise wholesome religion of Islam, right? Like he's strangely for for a Bible thumping Christian, er has said nice things about Islam to the disadvantage of the president who he used to adore Um He just thinks it's beyond the pale for the president to have said nasty things about the sincere beliefs of other God fearing people, even if they have a slightly different God, right? So it's strange to me that Tucker believes He has an audience of millions who are going to go with him on that ride in that direction h especially when you add his, um interview with them Mike Huckabee, did you see that? the American ambassador to your country, right? Wh is a Another Bible thumper. I mean, he's just a straight up evangelical who is not onene of these evangelicals who' religion could have been accused of being vitiated by wokeism or you know, progressive politics. I mean, he's not a progressive. I mean,' he's a right wing Eangelical Christian of a of a sort that, you know, I've been apt to worry about in the past, right? I'm not I don't like the the u An of the shadows of theocracy encroach in, you know, in America in Christian terms. U So I've criticized people like Hakuckabee in the past for their religious dogmatism But was what was very interesting about this interview was that Tucker attacked him U attack Huckabee probably even more viciously than I would have for his , you know, for for his faith in the legitimacy of the Old Testament. And it's, you, the claim the Israel's claims to the Holy land on that basis, right? So If you remember, Tucker at one point said, listen, what my reading in the Old Testament suggests that the Jews shouldn't just have this little smidgeon of land between the river and the sea that they're fighting over now, but they probably probably deserve all of Iraq Right And Syria and Lebanon. I forget the full, you know, the whole ofant, right? Like I forget I forget where the boundary. It's an old Arab accusation against against the Jews that has never been true. but yes, he right's Sting up a somebody. So he he walked Huckab the into that set of biblical claims And Huckabee, you know you Biblical literalist that he is basically said, well, Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't u iffer with that like I wouldn't mind if the Jews took everything granted to them in the Bible. I mean, in so many words, he said that. I mean his heeming and haing and not in more or less to communicateated that And that went off like a bombshell in American political circles. I mean, we have the U. S. ambassador to Israel basically claiming that, you that you guys should just take everything. You just take it all, right U And that would be some, you know, the Bible, the Bible more or less gives you a mandate to do that, right? fromr the point of view of America, right. And But what was fascinating about that is Tucker seems to have found based on his own theology or some theology I'm not aware of, Uh a new lane for devout Christians in America, which is We don't need to support the traditional evangelical Christianity and its inatuation with you know, biblical prophecy and it's it's resulting u love of Israel Right? We don't need to We can completely disavow the Old Testament.? Who cares about the Old Testament? Jesus died for our sins and that's all we need to know You know, we're we're We're saved by him alone. Everything in Leviticus and deeuteronomy and Exodusm, none of that matters at all. It's all barbarism and it's all antiquated. It's all, you know, it's Um There's simply faith in Christ, and that's all you need to know. is there for most Christians, most American Christians, most evangelicals, most people like Huckabe are getting it wrong and This is sort of there's kind of an America first retetreat from the world police our own borders politics that now is getting smuggled into this brand of Christianity. Um And it's interesting It's it's fascinating to me that Tucker seems to know that he's not going to lose half his audience on a Thursday when he gives, you know vent to those those convictions. Uh, he and, uh I you know, I I think he's I haven't heard that that that he he got the short end of the straw in that Um, contest with with Huckabee U So something new is happening. I'm not so sure can subsume what you know a true American Bible thumping Christianity is all about, right? So I think it may be more of a I think I will be surprised if T years from now It is true to say of American Christianity that It's it's More like tuckers and less like Huckabees That would that will surprise me Um So I think I I think this this this infatuation with Israel on the on and evangelical circles is likely to endure There's there's many other things happening as you know in American politics and in the West generally. and On that front You know, Israel has lost many, many of her friends and the situation for Jews in the diaspora has become much more precarious because again, on both the left and the right Israel is hated and the Jews are hated byci by association and for other reasons, again, which we haven't Little to do with Israel and much to do with generic conspiracy thinking and and, um He's not he's not that clever. In other words, he's not that clever. He's just his his political impulses, his political pecadillos. He's just trying to sort of one to He's very clever. I mean, he's very I'm astonished to discover that there's an audience for his brand of contin continually splitting the baby. you know, in ways that you didn't expect be survival survivable for him as a broadcaster. I mean, to call Trump the Antichrist, and to disavow the Old Testament completely and evangelical, you know, evangelical solidarity with Israel based on biblical prophecy, all of that, just called bullshit and all of that the way You know, Richard Dakins wouldood Um and to still know that you're going to maintain your Christian audience? uh That's interesting to me. I just did not know that piece of theological and political real estate existed. Um, I do think Tucker is charismatic enough and facle enough that He could run for president he wanted to. I don't know that he would win, but he's like he he is a He's he's a person who can straddle This this, uh peculiar precipice between, you know totally empty celebrity and u you know, real political convictions and political momentum in American politics, and I think he could He could beat a lot of people you right of center for a nomination. I don't know if he would get the nomination, but you know, much less win, but he was I think he could beat JD Vance for the nomination that's saying a lot at this moment in American politics. I think Christianity has the toolkit for him to reorganize it on the Jews. If he's re you know, that is something ancient in Christianity the ye defining itself in opposition to the Jews. and also there's The Markianite heresy early in Christianity where Marin argued that The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament can't possibly be the same Godd. And so you know, one is the evil God and the New Testament is the good God and the Orthodox Christianity explicitly defined itself against that heresy and said that's not true. this is a fulfillment basasic sort of culture gap, I don't know what to call it. Theological gap between, old and new are there. There are all these pieces that he can piece together. if he wants to build a new American Christianity that is anti Jewish and to use that as I mean The Jews did not invent the porn industry. Do you know what I mean? That is not there's some Jewish businessmen involved in it. and by the, they're not a majority in any way. And he even argues that Israeli intelligence agencies run it in order to make young men in America desperate loners. Um So he's building a politics around the Jews and maybe piecing together a kind of Hodge Podge, bastardized Christianity I'm going to keep walking down thisotherhood analysis, but yeah. he's he's building a politics around conspiracy thinking And he generally he's not found a conspiracy that he doesn't love, right? He just he he'll he just he eats and spreads all of them Um just does not work out well for the Jews, right? I mean, the Jews are at the center of so many of them Okay, so I want to I want to wind down withith a palllete cleanser would leave you behind a lot of this awful stuff. you are famamously, not a fan of organized religion But you have nevertheless been the source of a tremendous amount of comfort for a great many people. Your waking up app, I don't know if you tell the numbers, but how many people or subscribe to that We have u somethingomething like four hundred thousand monthly active users or something like that. I mean there people have free accounts as well, but Yeah. I mean, maybe it's yeah, it's like maybe two hundred fifty thousand subscribers, but something closer to four hundred, five hundred thousand monthly users, something like that That's that's astonishing. It's It's a meditation h a mindfulness. program based on a kind of secularized Buddhism And the user base is huge. Now, obviously meditation, you are from California. so you're, you know, automatically suspect When it comes to those things. Yeah. And And so I signed up and I've been doing it. And I'm pretending to be doing it, obviously for research for an interview But I'm not doing it for research for an interview. it's extraordinary. It's helpful. and I'm a Cmudogally u conservative on these things. if it's old and it's ancient and it's genuinely Buddhist, then it probably has stood the test of time by being used by a great, many smart people and therefore is probably a good thing And so for me, the fact that you base it on old religious practice, but totally secularized was a door opener really to something like that. When you brought me on your podcast, I said to you, Someday I want to talk to you about religion because you know leaving Dmissing monotheism quite so quickly seems to me a little early. I'm a son of a rabbi. I do little religious homilies on holidays on the podcast, things like that U But then when I got really into this app, I realized you're in a much, much more complex place on the question of religion. because you'll take a lot of the things that it gives, narratives of of meaning, community, contemplation, things that religion provides and that sustain it, even in societies that have abandoned the religious cosmology Um That stuff survives and has power and that's something that you recognize. Religion will not tolerate being banished from life I guess what I want to ask is have your thoughts on religion changed In the moment when you've encountered, for example modern progressive dogmas. People lost the old traditional religions, and so they took on these new Marxist ones. The illiberal blowback on the right, which I think, arguably is driven to some degree, at least a little bit, I think even more than a little bit by the decline of traditional you know American religion and American religious communities, the corner church, so to speak. and people encounter a religious version of that online that isn't local and isn't interpersonal and isn't communal and so is also radicalizing Have your thoughts on religion changed? That's such a big thing to open at the end. I apologize, but if there's some brief thing you want to say I can find a way through it. Well, so The reason why I've been an enemy of organized religion because I'm an enemy more generically of tribalism and dogmatism Right. I think tribalism and dogmatism, that the coincidence of those two tendencies in the human mind and in human culture uh That is pretty much all that ails us Right? when you're talking about divisive politics, you're talking about hyperpartisanship, you're talking about irrational hatred of of strangers. you'll never even meet You know, there are people who hate Jews who've never even met somebody who's met somebody who's met a Jew Right? You're talking about irrational belief. You're talking about, you know false certainty. you're talking about half truths and lies, lies told to children by parents because they're consoling, but they're, you know they know they're not they can't possibly be true any distortion of culture that J need it produces needless human suffering and and we just can't figure out how to cooperate and collaborate as a result bottom, it's More or less always a story. of tribalism and dogmatism. It's quite telling that the term dogma is a bad word everywhere whereere but within the Catholic church, right? I dogay is not a pejorative term in religious terms But it's a pejorative everywhere else. I mean the dogma is something you believe without sufficient evidence, without sufficient argument, right? And you believe it despite the fact that you can't actually defend it. and Um, in the religious context, this is considered a noble thing and an ennobling thing, a necessary thing, right? This is uplifting. This is this is This is the only thing that gets you right with God, your capacity to do this. right now, in a scientific context, or in journalistic context, historical any other context, Any other language game is played by very different rules. If you pretend to know something you don't know You immediately feel pressure. from everyone else in the conversation, right? You immediately lose the respect of your interlocutors, right? And And if you're unwilling to talk about it, if you're unwilling to defend this cherished notion of yours, And you say, so, so no, no, I believe this so devoutly. I'm not even willing to talk about it. And if you keep insisting that we talk about it, I might become violent, right? That's the default mode of every organized religion as you know, especially Islam They're not all equally culpable for this style of discourse. but Historically, you know, it's certainly been true of virtually every organized religion Um the, uh, This everywhere else in culture, we recognize how pathological this is It's only in the context of religion where the valolence gets flipped and it seems like Not only an acceptable thing, but an a noble and a necessary thing So' I'm the enemy of all of that. Um, no, happily profound truths about the nature of the human mind that can be discovered and talked about and cherished that don't require dogmatic belief in anything you that? I mean, the thing that'song with tribalism is tribalism is just uh that mode in which you know your solidarity with other people who happen to look like you or happen to talk like you or happen to share some accident of birth with you That supersedes everything else, you know, any other rational consideration about human suffering or you know, what what's really happening in the world, right? So you're not you're not going to think about this thing too clearly because you're just aligned with your you, fellow black people or fellow white people or fellow Jews or fellow Muslims, etcetera. right Um, it's it's it's the false solidarity, that this the spurning of real ethics that tribalism gives you You know, it doesn't give you the wisdom of the crowd, it gives you the the the fears and delusions of the mob. Um, And that's why I think we have to get out of the identity politics business across the board. And that's why I would say in the West in America and you know in the rest of the diaspora Jews that while it is tempting to double down on Jewish identity politics, I feel like That is going to be a mistake politically. I think we need to me let me push back because I want to clarify what you're saying We need family and family is biological, and you don't choose your parents, and yet your parents can be the most important relationship in your life. We need community. We need, I think, in this world, tribe. One of the great gifts I have in this world is that I have a place and a culture and a bookshelf, an ancient bookshelf, as it happens that I come from has to be a critical relationship. It has to be an honest relationship. But so does my relationship with my brother. If my relationship with my brother is not an honest one, but I'm not telling him what I really feel or where I think he's wrong and he's not doing the same to me. we have an unhealthy relationship. So there's a healthy and unhealthy relationship with tribe U but me try let me do I get I get the point of clarification. Let me demarcate that for you. So Um Yes, you can, I'm not saying that families aren't important and communities aren't important and and even, you know, national nationalism is important, right? But Nothing, um Nothing deeply ethical or political hinges on those boundaries, right? So it would be wrong to say that in a political context that your children are more important than other people's children because of Your children are Jewish, or your children are white, or your children are blonde haired or whatever the variable, right? However the tribe is defined No that is is morally indeccent and and indefensible and and odious and dangerous is's it's in principlple divisive, right? And so so civil society and and sane sane civil society organizations and and the same democratic, you know, norms All of everything is brought to bear upon us to overcome that tendency, that tribal tendency and we meet in the public square Whatever the value of our families and our tribes and our fandom of certain clubs, you know, you, you like the the Red Sox. I like the the the Yankees. We know what it's like to take those differences too seriously. And when we take it too seriously, that's what I'm calling tribalism. right? Nothing important politically or ethically can hinge on the color of a person person's skin Right. If you say I have to care about black people because they're black That's that is a problem. That's a kind of identity politics that we have to retire, right? And because the moment you swap black for white, you recognize how despicable that is in American politics, right? White identity politics is something that that should embarrass us pererfce, all other identity politics has to embarrass us. Would you agree with the caveat that there's a difference between innate value and personal responsibility? In other words, you brought up, for example, I brought up, but you agreed to run with kids. My kids are not innately more valuable as human beings than any other human child Absolutely axiomatic, correct But of course more responsibility But also A, they're more valuable than the physical spinning earth and everything on it to me. My responsibility to them, I think, is greater and than it is to others' children. And that that is a difference of So that's a profound difference philosophically, even if it'll express itself as You know, basically right to the way the way I resolve this, you know, both politically and ethically is in the u in in to answer the question, how does San and compassionate and responsible people behave in the waiting room of an emergency ward in a hospital. Right You your k your kid is injured. And you're very, very worried and you know, this is the only thing that is that you care about at this moment in time And you you rush to the hospital And now you'reont confronted with the necessity of triage the level of an emergency room And you look around you and you see other people's kids and other, you know, old people and variously injured people and You understand as a rational human being that though you want your kid to be seen immediately you're in a situation where Generally speaking you don't though though corruption might be possible and you might uh, you know, if you're of a certain cast of mind, you might want to Uh benefit ever so slightly from it Right? Like you might not want a perfectly fair, perfectly blind system That moment even you being re callously selfish and only caring about your own kid, you know that most of the time better bet for you to have a sameely run, reasonably fair, not very corrupt or corruptible system that will triage youith those needs of strangers rationally and be blind to your specific myopic fixation on your own child, right? So which is to say, you want the most desperately injured and ill person to be seen first, right? And then you and you want your kid to be slotted in wherever it's rational to be. right? So if someone's having a heart attack and every second counts Your kid with a broken leg is going to have to wait and you're going to understand that Um So that's the world we live in. tribalism you know, and identity politics breaks that world. likeike the tribalism I'm talking about that like all the all the failure modes where it's like, no, no I really just care about my fellow Muslims And for that reason, I'm going to express my solidarity for Muslims worldwide no matter how psychopathic their behavior, right? I'm going to be slow to criticize them because I'm not going to You know, I'm going to brand any criticism, any inordinate criticism of the people who are burning embassies over cartoons Any criticism of that is Islamophobia because I'm Muslim and this is my this is my real concern is solidarity with my fellow Muslims worldwide. Okay, that is pernicious We should have no patience for it in open societies. I'm not saying people can't be Muslim. I'm not saying you can't read the Quran with know with great attention and love every moment of it though given the contents of the book, I will, you know, I have things I will like the debate, but Um The virtue of secularism is we agree we agree to meet in the public space ethically and politically and divest ourselves of that kind of tribalism. And the failure of certain communities to do that, the reliable failure of certain communities to do that, the especially Egregious failure of Muslims worldwide to do that is an excruciating problem. notot just for Israel, but for open societies everywhere. Um and uh, Yeah, but back to the other part of your question believe that the though I I'm not going to deny that religion gives people community and kind of thick you know, ethical commitments that we that we want to find some secular replacement for because many of them are essential uh The crucial piece for me is that the core claims of all of our religions, the fact that self transcendence is possible, the fact that it's possible to stop suffering in all the ordinary unnecessary ways that produces, you know, just mediocre life where a sublime life is actually available Um that those that set of empirical and phenomenological claims about just what is possible for a human mind born into this world that we can make contact with with the true depths of all of that in a non sectarian way. And I would argue we can really only make u full contact with it Um in a way that is non sectarian because at least we can only I mean, it's not say you can't do it in a sectarian way, but talk about it rationally in a way that can be integrated with twenty first century science and know just a fact based discussion about everything else. And if I find all the interesting points of contact there. Um you have to be non sectarian because the genuine truth claims here are obviously deeper than culture Right? It's just in the same way that physics is deeper than Christianity. though the Christians more or less invented or discovered physics, Um, An algebra is deeper than Islam, right uh The ethical and spiritual truths that await the attention of everyone who you know who goes into a cave for a year and does nothing but meditate or takes the requisite dose of the right psychedelic and has some encounter with the Batific vision These fundamental truths are deeper than any provincial religious identity anyone has. We know this must be true because Hindus and Christians and Buddhists and atheists have the same experiences. Right? Like like So like whatever Martin Buber is talking about in the Iye vow relationship, whatever Meister Eckhard is talking about when he suddenly feels like You know, he's not just you know, praying to God, but is identical to God, right whatever the Buddha is talking about when he talks about emptiness as the core truth of the nature of mind There has to be a way of integrating all of these insights into at a level of the deeper just sheer human possibility of discovering, you, what is true of consciousness And that's a project that demands that we transcend sectarianism And so's why that's why I put myself against organized religion. in that in that my claim is that whatever's true, whatever the baby in the bathwater really is You know, whatever whatever the real human needs are for community whatever is, um whatever metaphor is really getting at something interesting about this, you know, the unseen structure of the human mind U and whatever is real at the level of, you know, consciousness in the brain All of this sinks deeper than than the accidents of, you know, where people were born or the languages their their their parents happen to speak We got a little deep. Let let's wrap up with one last question. just your comment on tribalism and having a kind of non sectarian shared seculularism is a way of sort of having almost a substrate in which we can all have a shared conversation, a shared attempt at fairness It occurs to me that I've heard a lot of anxious and frightened Jews in the English speaking world Wh thought they who thought they lived in that equal shared playing field of of a non tribal society and maybe discovered that actually they weren't and that's a source of a lot of their anxiety of late U I just I have to follow this up. I'm sorry. with one last question. Has that your atheism is therefore it's a kind of faith in the human in human capacity in human capacity to absorb the algebra, right and the physics, which is to say the The m the mind's capacity to achieve a very different state than the regular suffering of regular life and to be kind of released from the tribalism and the dogmatism and the violence and the pain and the brutal politics and the irrationalism, Has has it As this moment at all made you question that Bad faith U Myaon has talked about kinds of lies Almost every kind of lie is a bad kind. The only kind I think he thought was a legitimate kind was the pedagogic lie You can't teach a child about genocide. You have to teach them about an experience. and then slowly as they grow and mature and develop teeach them more and more and more. so you teach You teach a non reality, but that will plank them as they develop into a larger reality. and Imonities being a twelfth century you know, non Democrat who didn't encounter modern liberalism and individualism Um think that for most people that doesn't end at full truth, right? Only for the elite it ends with full truth. So everyverybody has to be told what they need to know You look around at humans and you say, no, everyone has access to the full truth and we have to bring them there by breaking dogmatism, by bre Has this moment made you question any of that and the radicalization in every free and open society and how vulnerable it's been to that Makes you question where the people really are ultimately at the end of the day at the baseline rational and etceter Well, there's a lot in that question. I do think that we should be slow tell lies based on some story that they're Pragmatically wise to tell Right. So the the noble eye, the The white lie, the lie told to children. I'm I think a a fuller analysis of More or less each and every one of those lies often reveals that that was that was a better path forward. Right. There's some version of the truth that didn't hold much of anything back but just was just more, you know, civilly or compassionately told Um, brought other truths into the frame with it so as to give proportion to the communication I think, um That's almost always better. you know, do I look fat in this dress when asked by your your wife We're gonna we're going to lie. Yeah yeah, yeah. so no, I think I think there's a version of the truth because you have to understand what the question actually is, right? So'm I, I wrote aook on this. I wrote a book called Lying, which just looks at the ethics of lying and especially the ethics of white lives. But Um And I so and I'm not I've never felt the need to lie to my children about anything without without, you know telling them harrowing tales of awfulness that that would be inappropriate for that age, right? So it's not that I've I've insisted that they know exactly how bad the Holocaust was you know, you know, even yet, right there the, you know, my my my I haven't impososeed that on either. I've got a twelve twelve year old and a seventeen year old and You know, I think the seventeen year old is probably ready to know everything, but Still, I haven't felt the need to to get into the details of what actually happened at Treblinka, right? So it's just not you, but What we want are We want adults. Eventually we want everyone to be an adult Right? so we so just how much should we cater to adults as children Right? And how much should we worry that adults are not ready for the truth Um O so many people are watching Candace Owens now Yeahs Europe radicalizing to crazy places. What has to happen is we need a culture that recognizes how obscene a product Candas has become. R? I mean, like Candace is Candace' career shouldn't be possible in a healthy culture. Certainly no one should be eager to pay to listen to her. rightight? now we we happen to have a culture where business model of the internet uced incentives that allow for a thriving career of that sort Um, And that's a problem with the business model on the interternet, right? So we have you know, perverse incentives, we have Uh, just, you know, bad business models. we have, um, We've screwed up in variousays, but we should be eager to fix those problems and should so that we can produce the kind of culture we all want to live in. I'm not talking about censorship. I'm not I'm not saying Canda should be locked up. I'm not saying that that anyone should physically prevent her from getting to a microphone and espousing her her nonsense, but um We have a culture that is addicted. to certain things that are obviously not good for anyone Um, That's a cultural problem that only ch only incremental changes in culture or even you know, sudden changes, you see changes in culture can can rectify and only like you It's a million conversations like this that are are uh, you' put part of that change, rightight? I mean, we just need to keep well you and I are are attempting to certain parts of culture and destroy others, you know with every sentence in a conversation like this Um, and the it's an no open question whether any of that is going to be ultimately effective, right? but we can only all we can do is try, right? All we can do is argue for the sanity that we we No we see h and to try to I mean basically this is all in my view a navigation problem. Right politics, ethics uh, you know, even maintaining one's basic sanity is a navigation problem. What should we do next? What should we pay attention to next Oh what should we withdraw withdraw our attention from? and hope it goes away, right? These are it's all How how do we find signal in the noise And how do we amplify that signal to the advantage of of everyone. u That's the pr. have I have to just ask I I have to just focus in on this. mayaybe I'm being ignorant here and maybe I'm being also a little bit religiously intolerant by asking this question. and forgive me if that's the case Atheism requires your kind of atheism, which is an extraordinarily optimistic kind and an extraordinary societies can through proper serious objectively correct because they're you know, self critical scientific method of popper kinds of discourses ultimately achieve a much better state because the human ultimately will'll reach a better place if given all the tools and the toolkidits and not be locked into dogmas and tribes You you have not lost any of that faith in the human in the hum I think that you're raising an orthogonal concern. I mean, my degree of know faith in humanity or my optimism versus my pessimism Um Atheism, what you're calling atheism or my atheism is a very distinct thing epistemologically, it's just a question of what I believe to be true, right? What I believe to be plausible. what argument works on me? what set of facts? you know, am I going to sign up for and what am I going going to doubt Um I'm only an atheist in Abrahamic terms, right with respect to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. because I don't believe the claims to about specific books, about know the revealed nature of specific books. right? So you're going to tell me that a book or any part of a book was literally written by the creator of the universe or inspired by the creator of the universe, and therefore is not the product of human minds I'm going to say, well, let me read that book. and see if there's any evidence of that And let me know something about the history of the composition of that book and the hundreds of years in which certain chapters were in and then they were out, voted out and voted back in again. and And give me, you know, you the council of, uh Na, what were those boys up to and just how rational was that process? The more I learn, the more I doubt the claim And so I am an atheist with respect to those religions Um I an atheist with respect to Zeus and Thor and know thousands of other dead gods, and as are you and as are every other you believer U So the old atheist line, which I forget who coined it, but it's just You know, you and I are exactly the same. I just doubt the existence of one more God than you do, right? You don't believe in IsSIS or, you know Vishnu or any other other dead gods, but u I just add the God of Abraham to that and so it's by the same operation, right And this is the you know, I think this is the most effective argument uh I've ever made in a in a debate with a with a Christian Um I was at Notre Dame. uh, which is a Catholic you know, university in in the U.S and uh, debating, uh, I think William Layne Craig U, and I just this is the first time I happened upon this argument and I I just, um I ask this entirely Christian audience just like, do you you understand than most Muslims because you think Jesus was divine. Not that you love Jesus, but you think He was divine Most Muslims think that is such a colossal error that you are going to hell, right? I mean this is just This is pract it's shir,, it's practically polythheism, right? Like its it's this is's irredeemable, right? I mean, the Muslims love Jesus, but not in that way Um So there's a zero sum contest between Islam and Christianity here. So you realize that you that quarter of humanity when they think about it, think you are going to hell. I'm not talking to Christians in this room Um I want you to just feel in your bones unconcerned you are over that R The fact that you have two billion people believing this about you based on the recourse to their holy book And the whole language game they're playing around it, all theace faceb placing they have done their religious certainty. I mean, just the the centuries of, you know, religious ratiusination that has produced this conviction in them, right? They've got shelves of books onn this topic, you know, confine, you know, consigning you to the flames of hell for eternity as a result of your error theologically Fe in your bones how unconcerned you are about this, how you will not it is inconceivable that you will lose a moment of sleep tonight or on any other night over this conviction on their parts Um You should know that This is the way every atheist feels about you and your convictions, you Christ you Christians R? L it's just it does not make contact with us in this precisely the same way and for the same reason because Just as you can see that the language game played by Muslims is totally unconvincing once you stand outside it Just as you can see that the fact that the Quran itself says that it's perfect and not to be superseded by anything gives it no credibility at all, you know, no more so than You know, if if, you know, the Lord of the Rings said something about itself in the text, right? U So it is that every atheist looks at your Christian project. u in the same way and by the same logic as being this self sealing U and fundamentally delusional language game U So anyway, that's a by by analogy, I consider that to be probablybably the best argument against any u u specific organized religion Um But that's That's where I stand. I mean there's just no The universe can be far stranger than I realize or or am capable of realizing, right? I mean this is, you know, JBS H Dames You know, famous line the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose That may well be true, right? mean So who knows what's actually happening? Who knows if our physics will ever be in contact with the the real base layer of reality Um, That's not to be an atheist by the lies of every religious person, is certainly, you know of the sort we're talking about here You don't have to pretend to know that nothing profoundly strange is true of the universe. you know, we might be you know, all running on a simulation on a you know, an omnisent aliens, you know, hard drive Um call that alien go. Uh Who knows what's true I just know that there's no good reason to believe that any of these books were authored by any anyone other than you know, very smart people of the period, right? And that is completely deflationary with respect to to these religions and that so that's That's all my atheism has says nothing about my faith or lack of faith in the future of humanity R It's like that. And if I felt And I couldt believe I couldn't believe the Bible was the perfect word of the creator of the universe evenven if I thought it was necessary to give us a better chance I mean I being a Pascal's wager is complete bullshit. You can't That's not how belief gets created, right? You can't believe something because there's some instrumental utility in in believing it to be true because that is that's not what it means to to actually think something is true I mean, this is like this is this is a move that religious people tend to make. they, you know, the when you ask people why they believe They tend not to give you the evidence. They talk about how important the belief is to their lives, right? my belief in Christ gives my life meaning. Right? This is it gives my family meaning. It gives my community a center, right? So is they talk about the utility of the belief. And then I say, okay, well just imagine Imagine I u spent half my days. digging in my backyard. I have a pit in my backyard that's now forty five feet deep because I've been digging there for years with a shovel then you know, four hours a day doing this and you ask me why and I say, well I'm looking I think there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard and I'm looking for it And you ask me why I believe this And I tell you not the evidence. I don't give yous a cogent line of evidence as to why I should believe there's a diamond bigger than any ever discovered in my backyard No I tell you how meaningful it is for me to believe this. How much you know, I wouldn't want to live in the universe where there wasn't a diamond in my backyard, the size of a refrigerator. right? I mean, these are the kinds of things people say in defense of their religious conviction When you map it onto any other conviction, you realize it's pathological, right? So this is not how people believe something is actually true. to believe to believe something is true you have to believe that you stand in some relationship to it such that If it weren't true You wouldn't believe it Now, so like You so you and and and virtually nobody's religious faith survives contact with that kind of analysis Right? You just like you're not is there is there some mechanism of reality testing going on within these religious traditions such that Jesus weren't born of a virgin. Catholics would realize it to have to not be true. The first book of the Bible. The first chapter of the Bible is the story of Adam and even the creation of the world. And the second chapter of the Bible is a rehash of a completely different story of the creation of the world with Adam and Eve and To me, that and a thousand other things, you know Abraham is gonna to kill his son Isaac on Mount Moriah and he's told by God, goo up to the mount and kill your son. And he lifts his he lifts his hand with with the knife and he's holding it over his his son. And an angel calls out to him Abraham, and he doesn't hear. And so the angel has to call out his name again, Abraham This man is in a frenzy to murder his son And then Abraham is told, actuallyually, I don't want you to murder your son, even though God had just told him he is. And then Abraham lifts his eyes and he sees a ram in the thicket and he slaughters the RAM and that's why we blow a showfe and Rosia shin up and The rabbis of the to would say that ram had been in the thicket from the beginning of time It had always been in the thicket. Now that is the Iron age Torah, okay, in discourse with the child sacrificing pagan religions around it saying This looks like piety. You should know, this is not piety. this is no longer the desire of God And God even praises Abraham's faith and says, but you don't kill your son. And the phh says strangely the Christians bring all that back and they kill Jesus as they one a fully adequate sacrifice an sacrifice but that actually work. Okay. You know, Judaism doesn't know what the afterlife is. Judaism is very concerned with what you do in this life. This is the life. Incidentally, when the Messiah allegedly you're finding a lele here Thereew This is the Jewish loophole. Okay the problem is everything loophole. notot the Jewish. I don't think the Torah wants to be read as conjective history. The problem with Jews and I say this as a Jew I'm allow to say that this debated rabbis is that Much of what I say about the Orthodoxy of Muslims and Christians does not map onto Jews, even I mean, it probably maps onto the ultra Orthodox Most of the time, it doesn't even reliably map ono so called conservative rabbis. I mean, you know you probably know rabbi David Wty who's you know, nominally a conservative rabbi. I mean he's not Orthodox, but You know he and I once had a debate and I said something Um presuppose that he believed in a God that can hear our prayers And he said What makes you think I believe in a God who can hear prayers Right now like M is, the greatest Rbbive ever g prayers for us to fix ourselves. Okay, so so Um But my point is, Js are not Jews are very non commommittal about what they believe in the otherworldly sense or in the supernatural sense. and it's very hard to find the there that is there Um This is not. you will as Jews, religious Jews, even, you know, apart from Again, the ultra Orthodox Religious Jews are often misled as to how deep the religious convictions of Muslims and Christians actually go because they map their fairly Um uh abstemus epistemological uh pretensions ono their co relig onto the the the other religions thinking that ah yeah, no, they They can't really believe they're all this stuff Really, right? You know, they don't they don't really believe in fire for eternity You know, they don't they don't believe that your skins or your skin is going to be regrown only so that it can be burned off again for eternity in hell, right Um No, no, they really do They really believe in that So it doesn't matter that the Jews don't tell even much of anything We're protected by peoplehood, by tribalism in the sense that you can be a Jew and not believe. And also the belief itself is therefore much more creative. There are many more theologies and many more afterlives and non afterlives and reincarnation even in various very traditional Jewishnesses. In other there's very traditional Jewish texts and bookshels. So There's a diversity there that's possible because to be a Jew is not to be a religion. But when you purify it into pure religion, as Christianity does, as Islam does, you universalize it, but you also therefore need a dogma. otherwise What is it?. And it also the crucially it's not all your emphasis on the next life Right I mean like Jews are much more about this life with all this complexity It is true to I mean this is what this is what is so myst define to all secular people and many even religious Jews is when you're confronted by somebody who says, we love death more than you love life and they mean it It's very hard to realize that they mean it. Sam last question You are probably the most significant deployer utilizer of religious tools of esssentially therapy or you know, self, um Ascendance or self, you used a great term, which I immediately forgot bettering on's self and one's encounter with the world who is not religious. waking up in that whole vision and doctrine and the effect that it's had, I've been tracing out a little bit its popularity and it's quite extraordinary and it's done a lot of good in the world And so as so let me for a moment treat you as a secular rabbi, as a therapist, if you will I am in a society, I'm in a region with a tremendous amount of suffering. My own society is in a place of deep anxiety and fear. Um As a philosopher, as somebody who tracks the American situation, modernity and has dealt a lot with questions of comforting these deep, deep existential anxieties You got any advice for us Oh. Yeah, I don't know that I have advice that's specific to you know the Israeli case. I think I think it's much more I mean, the mechanics of human suffering really are universal Right. and the degrees to which we suffer Uh can be can be impressively independent of the real world context in which we are are living and suffering to whatever degree. So it's like they're like people who The extreme cases illustrate this. I mean, there are people who have everything They have every advantage You know, they're not in the middle of a war They've never been in a war. They've never known anyone in a war They're beautiful and young and rich and you know, they just go from one party to the next. And they're famous and they're even famous for doing something great, right? They're not famous for something boring or something ignorominious, No they're famous because they're so creative and talented that people love them where I think of, you know, u, I don't know the recording artist Prince, right? or Um any other rock star who's ever, you know, died of an overdose, right? you know, there are people who commits someone who's going to commit suicide today who has everything mean that's on most days of the year That's probably true. right. So that the human mind is capable of creating its own hell independent of whatever's happening in the world and conversely, It's possible to be Peace even in objectively terrible circumstances. I mean, I've met peopleople who have nothing, you know, I've met you know, lepers in India who looked looked happier than I looked at the time, right? You know, I mean, I've I've seen I mean if youve seen I mean this is this is u This example probably doesn't illustrate what I what I what I'm pressing intoervice to illustrate at this moment. but It is still nonetheless psychologically interesting U Have you ever seen Peter Jackson's recolorization of all the footage of World War O in this documentary, They Shall N not Gow Old So Peter Jackson, the director who made you know the Lord of the Rings, and he spent millions of dollars to colorize expertly colorize the only World War O footage we have And it's this amazing document. it's a documentary called Theyhall Not Gr Old, I believe it's a title. And you see this, you know, you see these guys who have been fighting trench warfare uh, you know, or about to fight in the trenches, rightight? So they go the Battle of the Sum and like probably the worst place on eararth, you know virtually that anyone could have ever been And, you know, half these guys have smiles on their face that are bigger than, you know, I've ever had on my own podcast, right? Like So it's like The capacity for the human mind to for the clouds to partpart and to just actually be happy is impressively divorceble from the reality of the world in which we live, That's not to say that we don't want to improve the world in all the ways that we can improve it, right? And that's not to say there aren't real sources of suffering coming to us from, you, real tragedy. Um So all that, but it's just it's just to say that We all know that it's possible to find a refuge in the mind based on what we are doing with our attention in each moment R It's possible to forget how sad you you're supposed to be. because you just lost someone close to you You know, you wake up in the morning, all many of us who, you know, had someone close to us die, say or had something awful happen in our lives have had this experience where you wake up in the morning And then there's there's this brief hiatus before you have You've just wok up, you know, you've come to your senses. you see the, you know, the sunlight coming in your window but you haven't yet remembered the thing that is making you miserable If you forgot that your, you know, your mother just died or whatever the thing is, that is just that you will then think about and brood about Um, you haven't picked you haven't picked up the burden yet, right? So that is a glimmer. of what is true about the mind, that it is possible to actually just recognize the peace and tranquility that is there Prior to thought, prior to identification with thought, in the context of every experience, the as the screen upon which the movie of your life is always playing however ugly that movie is in this particular scene, right? And so It's possible to to find relief even in chaos and that's what meditation is really. I mean is that skill And and I you know, Ive certainly recommend it And waking up is the place where I say everything I think I know about it D You know, that's not this is not special advice for anyone in any particular circumstance. It's just it's just advice for all of us uh, in in the chaos that is that we're bound to encounter our lives no matter how lucky we become. I mean like I again Many people u Israel is a very special place and is encounters a very specific set of circumstances, but You know, in America, many people will never encounter a war zone uh, and they're lucky for that and yet everyone You know, the the healthiest person, the luckiest person will be the person whose phone keeps ringing in old age learning that all the people he or she loves have died If you're the if you're the healthiest person you know You know, you're going to be the person who goes to everyone's funeral, right? So no one gets out of here without a real collision with impermanence and loss and and u the reality of just the preciousness of this opportunity we have to be together and to make Sanity of it. So I think it's yeah, your mind is what you have to navigate those moments Sam Harris, thank you so much for joining me Well and thank you for the work you're doing, Javiv. againgain, I'm a huge fan And I just I want you to have more than twenty four hours in your day so we can have More and more of you out there making sense Thank you.