Metaphysical Middle East with Jason Louv

Welcome to Synchronicity, it's been a while and of course I come back after a prolonged absence with an episode that is shorter in rage at least 60 to 80 percent of people listening but that's I think it's important you'll hear in this episode which is with the wonderful Jason Louve you can check out his podcast Ultra Culture he is a writer and author he does the magic dot me magic with the K dot me online courses he's he's awesome um he wrote a book on John D uh famous kind of esoteric magician wizard of the United Kingdom England uh that I picked up like four or five years ago really one of the best books I've read I highly recommend it what's it called I have it right here John D and the Empire of Angels so really cool how they kind of like scribe for all these weird archangels and got this cool Texanukian magic anyway good stuff but today we talked about Israel and Gaza and Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran and this is a very touchy subject for a lot of people but it's one that I thought is worth delving into I have kept my thoughts on the whole middle east situation pretty much to myself I've mentioned a few things on the patreon over the past year but it has been a year since October 7th and it's been kind of wild for me to see the range of perspectives and reactions to everything that has gone on and so much of the misinformation that has kind of gone out related to this conflict and the historical context of what is taking place in Gaza and I think a lot of people see the devastation and the horror that comes from you know military strikes on a relatively unprotected population that you have in Gaza and even in southern Lebanon where Israel attacks Hezbollah and they just see a country in Israel being supported by a mega giant superpower in the United States and many of its western allies as just unfairly picking on an oppressed and suppressed people I think that's the narrative that has most taken off on social media around the world and it's just been like a very clear open and shut case for people a lot of people believe it's a genocide which is a you know willful and wanton disregard for human life and essentially trying to wipe out an entire population of people based on an ethnic background and you know affiliation other people believe it's an ethnic cleansing which is essentially forcing out whether by killing or displacement of a population um you know in this case Gaza forcing them out of that area a lot of people will say they have nowhere to go which is not completely true if you'll remember um Palestinians in Gaza share a border with Egypt as well there is a border that people are theoretically allowed to go through Egypt does not allow them in and in the West Bank they sure share a border with Jordan Jordan does not let those Palestinians in um when asked usually why those countries their Arab neighbors won't allow the Palestinians in they say well there should be a two state solution this is the most important thing Palestinian should be free in their own land I think it's important to understand like it's not fun right this is a relatively spiritual podcast where we talk about you know consciousness and energy and karmic implications and all that stuff and I think a lot of people who are into that type of stuff don't share the commonality of looking at like historical accuracy right we tend to try to escape the 3d or look at the macro energetic reasons why things happen but there to me is a lot of crossover and especially when we get dragged into um energetic situations where they pull at our heartstrings and our emotions I think these are actually the best examples to look at our spirituality and determine where we stand quite ethically morally spiritually and really this can draw us into a better understanding and refinement of our own belief systems which should be subject to change just to be clear that's why I really encourage this is one of the reasons I had this conversation with Jason Jason well we are aligned in our beliefs related to what's going on in the Middle East we certainly want to hear from other people who disagree here there are reasons for disagreeing have an open and honest debate I have friends and family members who completely disagree with my take on the situation I completely disagree with their take we are still able to you know be friends and family and share love and like you know be cool with each other I think that's incredibly important but we see that often is not the case this becomes a name calling affair how could you be so cruel how can you not see that the Palestinians are a resistance movement being oppressed by a gigantic complex of you know western power and Israel is this demonic agent of the west that is imposing its will on these poor people they've oppressed for 20 30 40 50 years or even going back to 1948 or even going back to the Balford declaration so I mean there's a lot of stuff baked into this I think if you're at the point where you are picking a side right you're already going down kind of a murky path I don't think this is necessarily picking a side territory although you can have an opinion on that but you owe it to yourself to understand some of the historical context of how we got to this situation and it's one thing to say well I don't think Israel ever should have been there after World War II it was a mistake by the countries that got together and gave kind of annex parts of British Palestine to a Jewish state that caused a lot of problems you can take that as your immediate position but you do have to recognize that Israel is a state and has been a state for 60 70 years at this point so to say that that shouldn't have happened and that's the reason why Israel should not exist is not going to work it's not how things happen in the world the other argument that you know the Israeli state is some weird offshoot of colonialism and Zionism isn't just the word for Jew but actually is you know an actual methodology of displacing people who live there also needs to be examined relatively closely because it's not accurate Zionism is a very specific thing and it doesn't mean that we if you believe in Zionism that you all Jewish people believe that Palestinians don't have a right to a coexist with them I think it's another important thing to recognize a two state solution right which basically says there should be an independent Palestinian government either in the West Bank or Gaza or both you know that has been offered as a solution dating back to the PLO days and Yasser Arafat and the deal was actually very close to being signed in the mid 90s and was rejected and it was rejected because that ends the conflict you then Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority gives up their leverage of fighting and once you do that you don't have kind of the leg to stand on to say hey we're only fighting because we're being oppressed they haven't given us what we wanted so to accept it ends the conflict on that way or at least any rational platform for that conflict I also think can we delve into this a little bit and I'm just kind of laying out what my where my beliefs are rooted in you know having relatives in Israel and knowing people have lived in Israel for most of my life there was a period in the mid 90s to the 2000s and certainly before that where suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem and in Israel proper were essentially a weekly affair right suicide bombings of bus stops train stations markets they were happening all of the time you didn't know that if you were walking out into your local market or bus stop whether you were going to be blown up by an Islamic jihadist I think we can agree that that's not a world that anyone wants to live in where you have to have the rational fear of being blown up just carrying out a regular daily activity as a citizen I think we can agree everyone on that now it's also very important and I put this out the other day on Twitter where essentially it's really important to understand that you and I may think that the goal of every human being is to live in prosperity and freedom and grace and love and respect and generosity and kindness that's wonderful those are essentially the western ideals it doesn't mean people in other cultures don't believe the same thing but it's very important to understand that the ideals of a Shiite Muslim who is indoctrinated in their religion first and foremost does not think like that they think it's more important to have their religion be the dominant form of religion and follow Sharia law than anything else this isn't you know doing a caricature of Islam there are many Muslims who do not feel like that there are many sects of Muslim and of Islam that don't you know adhere to that ideology but in a particular form of Islam that is what they believe and they would gladly sacrifice their own children I'm not saying this as a character or dispersion this is something that is stated over and over again by these particular brand of Muslims they would gladly sacrifice their children if it meant exterminating all of the Jews and having Islam be the dominant form of religion all over the world that's very important to understand that you can't assume everyone thinks like you do that's how we end up with you know LGBTQ people supporting free Gaza and Palestine and you know waving Hezbollah flags because they don't understand they would kill you they would immediately kill you they do not tolerate any type of that they think you're an abomination right they don't even agree with your freedom to exist in that way and I think that's where we end up in this weird kind of cynical David vs Goliath flip situation where Israel is viewed as these genocidal maniacs just indiscriminately bombing and carpet bombing which is not happening like clearly not happening areas of Gaza and southern Lebanon now if we look at this and we just believe whatever we see on social media and clearly there are people dying in Gaza who are innocent I want to be very clear about this and you have to ask yourself the question why are they dying why are innocent people dying and it's not as simple as well they got they attacked from Gaza and so now they're just fair game no but you have to understand that going back 30 years Hamas and Hezbollah specifically have had a policy of using civilians as human shields for two reasons one it makes it harder to actually go and kill people in those terrorist organizations and two because it curries favor around the world when civilians are dying so if you surround yourself with civilians and they end up as collateral damage which people don't like that word because it means innocent people are dying you then have a moral justification why the other side is bad and it's a very cynical way of fighting a war it's very destructive it's very callous it's very uncaring for its people but it is very effective it's particularly effective in the age of social media when all you need to see is a Gaza and father holding his dead baby and weeping which is the first image I saw of this war after October 7th of last year and it killed me it's the worst thing to see you immediately put yourself in the position as a parent of having a baby who didn't do anything killed by a foreign force and of course it stirs the emotions and just makes you feel like horrible right and like how could Israel do this how how could they be so unfeeling but please remember this is a war and the war was started after cease fires had been enacted and broken many times by terrorist organizations so the question that always comes up for me is like what do you do if you are in a position where you're constantly being attacked both within and from without your neighbors and from within your own country what do you do do you just sit back and take it and let this kind of like gnaw away at the fabric of your society because people think you don't shouldn't do anything about it or do you do the most ethical thing which is strike back in dismantle organizations as effectively as you can in the moment now I want to be clear I don't fully support everything that Israel does I think there are instances where they certainly can pull back both historically and currently where it would do them a lot of favors and it wouldn't make them kind of the bad guy in everyone's eyes but also I don't live there I'm not in charge of policy I don't deal with having rockets fired and where I live every single day for over a year so I can't make those judgment calls and I don't think other people should be if they're not familiar with the context of which they're being made that said it is very clear to me that the majority of the people who I interact with and I consider you know friends family people in the community of spiritual whatever we do here seem to be on the side of what they would call the resistance or they'll somehow this weird like Che Guevera like you know fighting the good fight on behalf of the Palestinians and the open-air prison that they live in that is crazy to me that we somehow got to this point where that's the narrative that's being subscribed to by many people I understand how we got there but it also shows to me at least an amazing amount of kind of cognitive dissonance of what is actually going on and you know I think these conversations are important I understand that this particular one is a little bit one-sided because Jason and I agree on this but Jason is also one of the few people who I've found online who speaks up about something that I agree with I absolutely would encourage people to share their opinions and bring up why they think I or Jason are wrong and you know why we have it wrong and what we could do to educate ourselves this should be an open and fair debate this shouldn't be just one side trying to convince the other you know that they're right and the other's wrong and you're smart and the other people are stupid that's not how I view this situation I try to put myself in the position of people who believe the things that are opposite to what I believe in and I think that's how we get through these type of situations there's a really good part in this podcast where Jason brings up the Bhagavad Gita which is this epic story in Hindu mythology where essentially there's this huge battle taking place right in Arjuna that a warrior in it who's fighting on one side goes to Krishna who's like the divine kind of lord of everything that's going on and he says like I don't want to fight this fight war is stupid war is bad like I don't want to fight against my relatives the people I love like I want to just like not have this be a thing and Krishna essentially says to him yeah that's not your choice buddy you're thrust into this world of karmic reactions and duality and this is the role your cast to play so figure out where your code is within this like you are already in the world of circumstances and reactions like this is what you're so that is a very firm reminder for us that as much as we want to hold to this altruistic above it all goal that all dying is bad all death is bad there should never be death or dying or sickness or innocence you know being betrayed that is not a world we live in currently we can aspire to that we can use that as a you know tension to kind of move us to a place that feels more ethical and better of which I think its design exists for but to just like throw it away and be like oh any killing is bad and it's not realistic it's not altruistic it's not spiritual it's essentially one of the worst forms of spiritual bypassing you are not engaging with some of the real ills and perils of the world and it doesn't make you a better person for doing that so I think when we get these types of situations that are inflamed and the middle east certainly is one of those it's really an opportunity for us like I said to refine our own ethical and moral frameworks to try to understand where other people are coming from I view this as an opportunity to understand where my friends and loved ones are coming from when I don't disagree with them or I think it's very plain that they're wrong that's hopefully how you're viewing this I understand a lot of people take this very personally you don't even have a vested interest in it personally and write people off I've been through this now this is probably like the third major time since this podcast has existed where I take an unpopular side in something where people get all riled up the first would be Trump the second would be vaccines and now I'm wading into the Israel Gaza conflict you don't have to agree with me my goal here is not to convince you in this podcast it's to present my personal beliefs about this so that hopefully someone can understand how I came to these convictions right and then to have an open dialogue with people again if you are someone who unilaterally supports Palestinians and thinks that Israel is a genocidal maniac of a country let's talk about it you know I do live streams they're open to everyone we'll do one next week and you are happy I'm happy to have a conversation about this you know without it devolving into people calling each other names which unfortunately happens too much had a nice twitter exchange with someone who was definitely pro-Palestinian brought up the nokba and you know I went through and you know they actually learned some things that they didn't know and it was actually pretty conciliatory and I was really impressed that we got to even have that type of conversation online but it's that's not normal and I think it's really important to understand where some of these narratives emerge from and again the historical context of where this stuff is born out of okay not super you know light-hearted and fun stuff but again I think it's important that's why I'm doing it's been a year since October 7th you know a lot has happened a lot of people have opinions on this and I think it's just important to kind of get this stuff out there and so I hope it is useful for your listening pleasure to delve into this stuff just note Patreon is still rocking we just had our mystic of the month Hasra in a.com Sufi mystic we have the next one coming this month haven't decided who it is may do Neville Goddard might just unleash the Neville Goddard beast on this month and we have readings open astrological readings and then the tarot readings are open that's at syncopodcast.com/energy you can go those we have a reduced pricing structure for until the end of the year till the Christ conscious consciousness readings in December at least so if you're interested in those we can do those we'll also do some astrology readings on the live stream coming up next week okay that's it without further ado we're wading into the quagmire with my guest Jason Louv bye bye all right dude thanks for coming on absolutely good to see you yeah good to see you too we have a bright and cheery topic that I suggested we speak about which I'm sure will based on my internet calculations and social sentiment radar will anger 80% of people yeah I've already I've already gone down the rabbit hole on that one because I've been speaking for whatever reason and I'm not exactly sure something possessed my brain I can actually tell you the real story well why I started but I've been getting a ton of blowback because I've been talking I I sat out the first month of the war and in fact at the very beginning I sent some knee jerk tweets out it was like always real bombing them again like yeah yeah you know just kind of like and then I realized no no this is something else and I'm being I'm being reactive without looking at the situation clearly so I let the kind of the first month go by and I was just struggling deeply struggling with trying to get an ethical handhold around things and you know I have I know people on both sides of the conflict I know people who went to were injured in the refugee camp you know I know people who are had kids fighting in the IDF you know so and I feel that I had for whatever reason I felt it was important to start speaking out because I saw like Israel was kidding dragged and then the thing that really did it for me was the UN case where it just became obvious to me that this was part of a coordinated attack and that the point of it was to delegitimize Israel and I I could just see for whatever reason I could just I felt like I could see clearly a lot of the moves that were being made and I just decided you know what it's kind of like I feel I feel the need to start talking out about this but yeah I've got a lot of blowback I've lost thousands and thousands of followers I've lost tons of revenue I've lost pretty critical professional opportunities because it was just too hot to handle yeah my Twitter or whatever so but you know so yeah just be ready because the pushback's real it is real and I mean I think I tweeted out my my thoughts because she's always the best place to put your your nuanced and critical thoughts on Twitter I put them out of a few days ago and it had been almost a year since October 7th and I I I told you I mentioned some of this stuff on my Patreon because I figured those people you know are paying for some type of deeper connection it would be silly to not like delve into things that are major world issues but even in the little bit where I took a very neutral stance and made very clear what my ethical stance which will obviously get into what we believe about this stuff got pushed back from that so I like you expect disagreements I think that's natural and I actually think it's healthy for people to disagree very not healthy to have a dialogue even if people don't come from the same stance and to that effect I'm sure I will have people on here who you know I consider who I really have like an affinity towards like you know more consciousness magical esoteric that's where my connection is with them but then hearing their opinions and thoughts on this I think is also important because that's the context which I look at stuff through yeah not to interrupt but just to add to what you're saying is I have a general role in life that I will talk to anyone because I can learn something from everyone and I truly believe that yeah it's true and I always respect somebody who has thought through their position clearly has thought it through themselves from first first principles and I respect that person actually I think particularly if I don't agree with them because that we can really learn from that person yeah what I don't respect is people just parroting slogans from the river to the sea like what does that mean you know like I don't respect you and you can tell because we're all in the same online world we all see the same stuff you can tell when somebody's just parroting online for virtue points or whatever I don't I don't really have a whole lot of respect for that but you know if somebody's has a totally principle then well thought at argument from the opposite side is me like please let's let's talk let's bring it on so yeah that's how you learn I mean that's how any deeply held belief that I am like pretty confident and it has been challenged the beliefs that you just come up with and don't get any pushback on and everyone agrees with you that's not that valuable of a belief that you don't even know the validity of it most likely so I I I hope that people would approach it in that regard I you know when it comes to people disagreeing on like a like identity level I think that's where a lot of this stuff gets so clouded you saw it with like Trump stuff and vaccines and all these things they people make it a part of their identity what side they fall on this issue it's like they're one issue race but it's for all these different things and it's the most important thing that's why I noticed like the interpersonal stuff breaking down which is sad to me you can see that I think it's been shocking the extent to which that is characterized the argument around Israel because Israel Israel has just become this proxy issue for I don't know it's like colonialism all those stuff people put on it white supremacy yeah Donald Trump the comma just like you know people put all this stuff on Israel and just make it I'm sorry just a scapegoat for so many global issues yeah which is not new and but it's I think it's actually really shocking the extent to which people do it with Israel there's there's a lack of um depth to that type of thinking I've found because so much of like what I believe outside of intuition which is a big part of of how I do come to at least ethical like directions at first if there's an intuitive thing that I try to research and figure out if it's valid or back it up or see if it's just completely going against everything that's out there um one of like people who study and I know it's like annoying to hear about antisemitism for a lot of people because it seems like that is the cry of every oppressed or potentially oppressed Jewish person but what's particularly difficult about antisemitism relative to other isms is that it isn't anything can be put on it it's not just like a stereotype that people have noticed over hundreds of years or dozens of years and then that becomes a trope and it's kind of true and we laugh about it and we do stand up about it because it is kind of true it's like oh that's funny everything bad at one point or another you can use antisemitism for and what gives it that particularly ironic quality to it is the percentage of people who A live in Israel and B are Jewish relative to the entire population of the world is so much smaller than people can possibly fathom yeah and it's like I get you know like it's like seven million people and not just Jews seven million people in Israel I think and I could be wrong about that but I think there's 15 to 16 million Jews worldwide yeah yeah that's that's less than that's a number you could almost visualize I mean that's like what Manhattan yeah it's a this is probably smaller yeah there are cities in the world that are are bigger than that and those are usually abstract numbers to people but the just because you possibly live in an area where you know a Jewish person or a few Jewish people is not necessarily how it is for every I mean there are places in the world where there are no Jews they do not live and and that definitely fuels you know when you don't know Jews it allows you to really put stuff on them I've been very lucky in my life to for whatever reason to have spent my life just Jewish people will always been around me why I don't know but I mean I grew up with other kids I played with were Jewish you know I've lived in Los Angeles I knew a lot of Zionist Jews in Los Angeles I live in New York I almost I live next to Crown Heights at one point yeah right the full-on rabbit hats and all of that you know and and also I live briefly in Golders Green in London the the Jewish part of London and I know I've been lucky enough to know lots of secular like or reformed Jews super liberal Jews and I'm known Orthodox and conservative Jews as well and and all of them are wonderful and I think that you know I'm with Douglas Murray when he says you know he sums this up where he says anti-Semitism is a shape-changer you know throughout world history Jews have been blamed for being too rich or being too poor they've been blamed for being left-wing and for right-wing they've been you know it's like they've been blamed for I mean particularly in the Spanish Inquisition they've been blamed for you know one of the cruelest periods you know they were persecuted for not being Christian and then they converted Christianity to not be killed and then they were persecuted for being secret Jews after converting it's just like it's just it's unbelievable so and I think that you know the last year has been I hope has been a wake-up call that this demon is very much still with us and I do think that is an old old demon and I think it's in everyone to some extent it's kind of part of our our heritage I've been having to like interrogate some of my own so you know anti-Semitic you know I realize there are certain things you know like so many things were proven wrong after October 7th for instance the media seems to be very biased against Israel in my opinion yeah goes against this trope of Jewish media power you know clearly not the case you know just the assumptions of oh Israel is clearly the aggressor state in the Middle East and no one actually poses a threat to it which is kind of this old no Chomsky thinking that I think is not particularly relevant anymore and just looking at that and seeing people mirror that back to me online it's like no I really need to rethink not rethink I really need to educate myself on this issue and I very much I am very much on Israel side yeah very worried about the situation and I think it is far more serious than people are giving a credit for and you know I think I would love to have a long conversation about this because there's so much stuff to talk about I was thinking it's a complex thing but I figured you know when you're ready I think I should probably I think the most helpful thing would be if I start off talking not about my conclusions but about how I my ethical process of how I came to those conclusions totally understand where I'm at even if they don't agree with it and I think that's important that's kind of like where I want to start where I think the ethical component comes in for most people most recently which is the emotional response to hearing and seeing visually reading about it deaths in Gaza and deaths in places that are not Israel and when we hear and see children dying women dying just in its own bubble world as though there were no circumstances that led up to that that we should consider that starts a chain of events that is very easily manipulated by certain ideologies and narratives that if left unchecked every step of the way justifies the kind of rage and anger at how evil and demonic a country Israel could be how dare they could be never mind that and this is a one of those annoying statistics that we can't really develop feelings for but the enemy to combat and rate is nearly one to one which for people who don't know what that is that's how many combatants are killed relative to how much of the civilian population is killed normal is like 17 to one that's like a normal war this is closer to one to one so when the US and I'm no defender of US military but the US had a one to nine rate I believe for certainly in the Battle of Fallujah which is so it's it's this weird thing where we have to and I think this is what makes people who are interested in esoteric and magical and mystical kind of more ephemeral aspects of consciousness would have a vested interest in it is we're dealing with large and complex abstract collective cultural ideas here getting sucked into a tunnel where we just react emotionally like people who say you know at the ultimate source of unity there is no good and bad and all is one it's like well what do you think it feels like yeah down here with us now mother it's like so now you have duality now you have this stuff to parse your way through that and draw what I think are I would like to think that everyone who approaches and everyone who's bothered by death and dying on whatever side it is has a vested interest to figuring out what are the conditions that continue to cause that and then can we alleviate those and like how do we do that those are the natural series of questions I feel like not just like this is bad those people are horrible that's like a very base level superficial approach to it but so much of the narratives that have been in place since this and I and I don't know if it's as coordinated as it seems at times which is you know lets inflame people with images of death and horror blame this completely on the side that seems like Goliath how this David Goliath narrative got completely flipped on its head ironically and like people like Israel said we fund Israel so much we're doing so much it's like if you notice how much of the defensive capabilities of Israel are used on a regular basis relative to the offensive like missile strikes like most of it is defense you just don't hear about it every day because we don't cover every single rocket barrage attack that happens every day somehow completely unaware that Israel gets hasn't been rocket attack basically practically every day like forever so yeah I really pissed people off because I tweeted I like I love innocent people off as I'm sure people is but like I reverse the thing that people are tweeting or they say I don't want my tax dollars to support this something I think I actually tweeted right at the beginning and then I was just like I'm repeating those aren't my thoughts so I you know something we got to catch ourselves sometimes but I retweet I absolutely so but I think it was after it was not after the pager attack but it was I think after they got one of the one of the the top guys I said I absolutely support my tax dollars going to take out these terrorists MF yeah you know the thing is it's like and this is what I was trying to capture and at least my ethical analysis of this is that most of us in the West or who identify with kind of a consciousness of freedom and liberty and being able to not be censored and have beliefs even if they go against other people is is something we believe that well everyone probably thinks like that that's just how everyone thinks in the world because why wouldn't you that's the biggest mistake you can make and that's how we get into LGBTQ group supporting Hezbollah which is like they would kill you immediately right there wouldn't be hesitation yeah yeah I want to get into Islamic imperialism yes and so this is yeah this leads me to what the more I started to investigate it you know you'll hear mothers I've seen videos I've read about it I've read about the ideology that supports it where they're like we will gladly sacrifice all of my children all seven of my kids because it is more honorable to die a martyr and support the cause of Islam than it is to have kids and western people they you're not ready for that trust me mister people don't understand that Palestinian kids are brought up doing math problems like if you killed two Jews it was how many dead Jews do you have and that's that's the you know it's it's like I was just reading somebody and I'm sorry I can't quote but they were saying that you know in the west we have an understanding that evil can be essentially inculcated by trauma early life trauma but what people in the west have forgotten is that evil can also be inculcated by education yeah and we're so keen to this idea of structural oppression well you know it's like look it if you want to see structural oppression look at children who are raised to be disposable weapons because that's what it is that's what it is so um let me talk about and listen up that up let me do my uh yes please so do you know we always hear the middle east is complicated yeah it's really complicated that's not a reason not to try and educate yourself not going to go away so but I will say that when you get into really really complex ethical issues um you you don't want to go alone you it's it's useful to take some tools and heuristics with you and the most useful heuristic I've ever found for ethical this hopefully this will be useful for people um is the most useful ethical heuristic I think that and I'm not alone in this generally ethics professors say the same thing the most useful tool west is ever produced is a manual Kant's categorical imperative that sounds it's big words but it's way simpler than it sounds so the categorical imperative is a thought experiment so give me like a basic ethical dilemma right it's like should I steal Johnny's sandwich or something like that I don't know um let's just say this it's like your your your co-worker has left their sandwich unwarded you're very hungry should you take it okay so um without getting any type of into any type of objective mode of morality or anything like that or the law or anything like that you simply ask yourself you can do it from both sides so you ask yourself let's start with taking the sandwich you do a thought experiment where you say what would the world be like if everybody in the world took actions like this okay so what's a world full of sandwich stealers yeah like never leave your food out everyone's constantly stealing your food okay great do you want to live in that world fuck no okay so con it conversely what's a world like when if everyone respects each other's food and does it take pretty good do I want to live in that world yes okay problem solved right right so so let's apply this to Israel okay now people may disagree with with some of my statements but that's fine um hopefully if they disagree with me at least this tool will be useful and they can be going to use it to reason things through other okay so let's look at just let's take it almost basic like I'm not interested in who started it when did it start in 1948 or you know in 1917 or whatever 1918 um Daufer Declaration was 1917 anyway okay so let's talk about Israel do I want to live in a world in which states recognize states can respond let's say disproportion let's just say for benefit of the argument that is real is being disproportionate I don't think it is but let's just say for the benefit of the argument they are do I want to live in a world in which states can respond disproportionately to terror attacks in order to make sure they don't occur again I'm not super comfortable with this type of thing going on all the time it's horrible but you know I'm going to say tentative yes let's just put a pin in that I mean I don't want terrorists to run around freely but let's now let's make it more clear let's like take a look at the Palestinian side do I want a world in which state or non-state terrorist actors regardless of their level of oppression you know that we could talk about that too do I want to live in a world in which terrorist actors can commit genocide commit let's not even use the g-word but can commit tremendous acts of savage violence on civilian populations that stagger the imagination of any thinking you're feeling a human being on the planet and then not only get away with it but get billions of dollars of aid from the international community right air support provided by the united nations which appears to be in bed with Qatar and Iran yes um and at the end of it all get there get ultimately get what they want which is a state from which they can now attack launch attacks at Israel as much as they want do I live do I want to live in a world in which terrorist actions are are responded to with negotiate let's just make it real simple do I want to live in a world in which terrorist actions are responded to with negotiation but no can you imagine the precedent that sets and don't think that terrorists all over the world won't see that we got tons of them in America now I mean it's just like it's a pat on the back so and they don't give a shit if they're civilians die in fact it's better for them because it increases their they're basically using civilian social media fodder yes that's so in that light I have to say yeah I would you know it's like is Israel's response brutal yes uh what would the opposite look like you know were they to lay down their arms they would all be massacred by everyone around them so and you know this because all these countries have stated it in their charters and you see they're gonna do october 7th again and again and this isn't propaganda I was just watching peers Morgan and from two days ago they had a woman on to represent the the um Hezbollah side and she was saying basically like you can't expect to occupy people in this thing type of thing to not keep happening so they're literally saying this still yeah that's the justification it's the occupation I think it's pretty clear I think it's pretty clear when you look at it that way I think that's an interesting thought experiment too I never really thought about it like that and I do think that that brings up I think another set of ethical frameworks for people to have to deal with which is you know where's the line of restraint and I do think from my um my perspective that like I don't agree with what a lot of what Benjamin Netanyahu believes ideologically and his approach towards achieving peace I do think is at best a short-term fix and at worst creates problems far down the line that have to be dealt with um in terms of how the approach to you know not just surviving but now using language like ruling and being in charge of and framing Israel as this democratic beacon that comes with its own set of dangers and we've seen that with the United States and other large governments that take a very kind of agro industrial war like complex to making money and being players and on the global stage well it didn't work in the middle east with it yeah look at look at how we withdrew from Afghanistan totally that's definitely not the same situation as Gaza no it's not at all but still it's it's to even think that it is is not understanding the subtleties I think what a lot of people and you mentioned you know growing up around Jewish people I grew up reform Jewish I am not Jewish in the traditional sense I rarely celebrate the high holy days you know I did get bar mitzvah when I was a kid but my family is about as reform as it can come I know people who grew up or uh Hasidic who have in varying degrees completely rejected Judaism to figuring out their own relationship with it a lot of people from uh Brooklyn and the Williamsburg community is there um so I know a spectrum of Jewish people right at any given point and they all fall completely along the spectrum it's not like all Jewish people support Israel in fact I would say the majority of Jewish people I know don't right now support us that that seems to be at least from what I've been seeing online that seems to be changing because I think all of a sudden there's a yeah perception of actual danger and so people are potentially changing their minds but you know I'm not Jewish so I'm not going to speak for this yeah and I think that's obviously I've seen like all the scene I'm wanting her all day long so I see every end end of this there it does seem to be that there are more people kind of recognizing that maybe left unchecked this in the best possible approach but the logic here that the emotional response of seeing dead bodies and then seeing that one side has us provided weapons and making the calculation that US is bad US equals Israel Israel is bad dead bodies plus bad Israel equals this is bad like that that's not really how you should be determined cops city my favorite is when you see these stickers it's like stop cop city we're not free till everyone's free George Floyd Palestine and it's just like this is just confusing it's just it's it's wild to me and on the same token like I am very saddened and what what saddens me I think perhaps most about the situation because if we are looking at just like actual deaths and innocent deaths let's say regardless of indoctrination but innocent deaths kids shouldn't be dying combatant shouldn't be dying but seeing that be a part of the part of some of it terrorist combatants should absolutely be dying oh for sure I'm not arguing people who commit terror acts and like will willingly come at you over and over again my my ethical beliefs on this has evolved as I've aged I will say maybe there was a younger more you know anarchist type version of these like all death is wrong no one should ever die and it's like you know someone kept attacking me and my family over and over and over again maybe I would feel a little bit different about my right to kind of like prevent that from happening well also I think as you get older you're just like oh you're you're constantly thinking about death anyways well we're all gonna fucking die anyways yeah it's funny yeah I mean I I do think though that it's recognizing that this I remember being a kid and having relatives live in Israel and some who still do and the suicide bombings were really active from like the 90s to the mid 2000s before Israel completely pulled out unilaterally and left infrastructure behind for them to use which is then subsequently commandeered and burned down by Hamas which is not a talking point these are like these are actual things that happened what did Hamas burn down they so when Israel pulled out of the West Bank and Gaza they had built because remember this was now part of Israel right so they had built infrastructure of various like greenhouses they're actually producing a ton of flowers as exports but vegetables food irrigation the next day after Hamas took over they destroyed it all they're like fuck you Jesus like what do you could have used that you like what are you doing right well I think that potentially I mean I don't know but my immediate response to that was that may have been more about getting subjugation over their governed people instead of it as a fuck you do because because that thing stuff may have represented hope to people and it's certainly an a source of economic you know if they were smart they would have taken it over but you know that's what I mean that's like you don't you can take it over and be like the biggest fuck you is he left at this stuff and then we have like it's it's just it shows a kind of self-destructiveness and that is also put into policy which to me is like the most disheartening thing about the entire conflict is that recognizing that one side is very ready willing and able and have demonstrated over and over again that they will use their populace that they allegedly govern as human shields and this isn't a talking point this is something that I like I said I remember being a kid in the 90s and reading all of these stories which as much as you want to argue as political spin has always exist and there's always one side of the narrative this was happening we would hear from our relatives that someone blew themselves up at the bus stop last week like this it wasn't made up fabricated things to shift political opinion and I just I'm right that was the second into FATA right yes the second one so it's been people what people really need to understand is when you have these I'm sorry dumb F's like Abby Martin running around saying globalize the independent FATA that's what they're talking about do you really want super light bombing globalized yeah you know are you happy with that do you want to live the rest of your life with you know random suicide bombing happening because whatever you're mad at your dad right now I don't mean it's it's I don't think people the reality of that situation affects most people in the world thank god that we live in a world where that's really not something people have to worry about but like to to understand that that is a reality for people based on people's personal and religious and ideological beliefs is something that you really have to weigh in this like it's not no one wants to root for a well-funded you know traditionally looks down upon people you know who maybe got free gifts because of the holocaust or however you want to look at it like it I don't think that counts free if you had to get go to the hall that's my whole point like you have to forget and dismiss so many things that have happened in the last 60 you know 70 years this isn't ancient history and it is weird to me that it has been so effectively framed as Israel being a barbarous savage aggressor and I don't think Netanyahu does himself any favors in this regard I think there is an approach to this which isn't as but on the other side I think something like the pager attack is about as humane and ethical and brilliant as you can get in modern warfare the D's not attack like they went after it let me just put it this way okay it's like you know whether you you think that was bad or not I happen to think that's an incredible you know one of the things that came out of the six-day war is everyone underestimated Israel and then after the six-day war they were decisively victorious that the world was like oh you can sit at the table with us so that everyone was best with Israel for a while and I think that people should have that response to the D's nuts attack I mean that's awesome that's awesome I'm sorry like on so many levels like like that's wars that the level of psychological warfare like that's probably when you're dealing with people who are not afraid to die like I guarantee you all of those dudes would have much rather died than had enough yeah yeah yeah it's blown off and now everyone knows right yeah just on every end in terms of precision targeting and of course everyone's decrying it as a genocide everyone I mean like Syrian girl and troll accounts like that yeah but yeah I mean I think that just on the level of pure military strategy that is one of the best military operations since the Trojan horse yeah my friend in Israel put it to me this way if I can remember it correctly they convinced it this is what they did they can yeah everyone in Hezbollah that your phones or taps first it's your phones or taps so they stopped using their phones and they went to um pagers then they blew up the pagers took three thousand of them out so then they go to walkie-talkies what they do they blow up the walkie-talkies so then what they have to do now they have to meet in person so they wait a minute to meet in person and then they kill their entire command structure and then they replace that they replace uh uh so I blame the guy's name the head of Hezbollah they replace him thank you they replace him a few days later with a new guy and then they kill that guy yep it's and then they evade that is just that seat that is military strategy if you study military strategy that is so much more uh so clever but I really got a hand it to them it's just it's just fucking impressive and when you think about let me put it this way for people who may be like nauseated that I'm right um let me put it this way after 9/11 every not just everyone in America left or right but all over the world everyone was rooting for America everybody because we were naive was calling for well why can't you just basically why can't you just send Bruce Willis in why can't you just send in like speck up skies to just do they kept saying a surgical operation to get bin Laden yeah it's like okay so and that's what everyone wanted instead we got a 20-year quagmire so imagine if the US had been able to do something like the D's nuts attack on al-Qaeda which we should be able to effing do we're the united stints Israel showing us up imagine if the US had been able to do a D's nuts attack after 9/11 how much suffering that would have saved the world if they had just been able to precision target the terrorists even if some civilians were caught in the crossfire as opposed to destroying Iraq and Afghanistan and and murdering millions and displacing tens of you right and eventually causing ISIS pulling out the veteran suicide rate in the US the billions of dollars of weaponry that that Biden left there are people falling off of airplanes as they left after it just it goes on and on and on like I would take a D's nuts attack over that any day that's and that's like the importance of that type of logic and it's not just logic logic it's like an ethical framework like we're talking about thousands of injuries and deaths relative to hundreds of thousands of deaths and terrorist attacks it's like that's like I like no one you're not signing up to be in special forces or the army or a war chief if you're not prepared to live that life you have to accept that there are people out there who that is what their life is about and whatever conditions led to that like that's like that's what that's how international law sees it as well they're combatants yeah right because they're military so it's a completely legal and international uh uh by an international law so totally I to me I I just it's it's hard for me to um understand exactly how there's this like I guess if you just see death on social media nowadays and get a convincing narrative behind it that's all it takes for a concretized opinion to form on who's bad and good and to me that's just like that's wild like good luck in the astral route when you see like any kind of like weird being crying out for help and it's like a trap to like suck your psychic spirit because it conjures you're an idiot going up to everything crap like it's just like I mean like I don't to me that's like very an important part of this it's not to sever yourself and become unemotional and not have feelings and not have sympathy it's precisely because you want to see that suffering kind of mitigated and alleviated for real rather than just say this is the quickest way to end this good verse bad good wins evil loses then we can just move on it's like okay well it's not a it's not a marvel right well I hope that right exactly uh although people seem to think that Ukraine is a marvel and you've got memories um yeah it's amazing people's double standards too because everyone was cheering on the the Ukrainian resistance but they don't feel the same way for Israel you know why is that um yeah I mean ethics are tricky I go back to the Bhagavad Gita for pretty much everything um and the point the Bhagavad Gita makes is if I'm sure many people know this but for those who don't it's a Hindu scripture set in the Ramayana war Krishna is you know a god that appears and and or you know who's an orchard sniper in battle is a hippie he was like a hippie white gusts right and he's praying to or like the people at the nova festival all hippies and he's praying to Krishna he's like my white you know you're the god of wine and song or whatever it is you know the Russell brand of the gods not in a bad way he's praying to Krishna and he's saying I don't want to kill anybody that is a darmic that violates my religious priests at the most fundamental level right says okay see all these people on the battlefield they're all here because they want to be they've signed up okay all of these people are going to die you cannot them from dying they may die now or they may die in their of old age in their bed you don't know in one way or another these people are going to die okay you have the karma of a householder meaning it is your karma yes there are darmic rules about killing also it is your duty to protect the people that you are under your charge you're you know that can that can be your family that can be your culture your world however you wanted to find that meaning if you drop the ball and tuck out sorry you're gonna be that is violating tarma long let me put that more simply without going into mythology he also says by the way everyone is divine anyways yes that's everyone's divine you can't hurt you can't actually hurt to destroy them they're just like a play but yes continue they're signed up for this buddy right so but without going to metaphysical claims yeah yeah if somebody comes to your house to run and you because you're nonviolent you let them come in and torture rape and murder your family are you the good guy for not killing that person no no now those people's deaths are on your head yeah i think it's just that that it's just that simple like street terms and you know it's like it's the same with israel it's the same it's like what do you expect them to do after that i think that some people it's just such a convenient off off ramp to be like well you shouldn't just you shouldn't kill that should you know if they died that's their karma it's like people don't actually believe that let's be clear it's just like a logical it's just something people can say that kind of like is you know i do this because of this this is such a rip but it's it's a very flimsy kind of like straight logic that's easily broken because that's not really how people feel the reason you're so upset when you see a civilian death is there's some aspect of this suffering that you recognize um it doesn't feel good it strikes you as something incorrect because you think people should live and they shouldn't be bombed and killed which to that i would say is you're right that should be something that everyone is entitled to but we also live in a world where conditions and circumstances have led us to the point where this is what is going on doesn't it behoove us to actually really understand and get to the bottom and not just be like this is bad oh well it's complicated to your original point where people talk about the middle east they just go oh you know it's so complicated i i hope they figure it out it's like well maybe that's okay yeah maybe maybe do some elbow put some work in yourself yeah i mean look i was raised about as liberal as you can imagine by an or activist and i was i was raised to believe that war is the worst word in english language or in any language um and you know i went to UC Santa Cruz very much from like the gnome chomsky and ark is kind of background but um my my opinions have changed a lot and we live in the real world and look you know like Douglas Murray talks about this on october 7th they went in and not just killed but tortured raped mutilated um and humiliated uh sexually and violently uh you know 1400 people a lot of whom were at a you know basically hippies i don't know if you've seen the footage of that october 7th so the nova festival they've got their people like us yeah they have things up for shamanic healing for new age stuff the side trance you know i'm sure some of those people they're probably a listened to dutch trussle show for instance you know they maybe or they may have watched my gospel they may have heard you know i thought about that and what am i not going to say anything about it but it's like i bring this up because i come from a peace activist back found i went i i protested the iraq war i was at the biggest at that point the biggest protest in human history in london in 2004 i was hated george bush um and the people that were see the here's the thing the people that were killed on october 7th were people like us in the kibbutzus it was people like my parents it wasn't warhawk it was the super liberal jews who were trying to do like like build those greenhouses projects that you were talking about it and they were subjected to you know anti-human savagery i don't even want to say less than human because it's just non-human Douglas great talks about you know in that infamous footage that's going around there's a part where um hamas has a windows at that party on her knees and they're in front of i either her friend or her fiance i can't remember and they're arguing with each other whether they should take her to gaza or kill her and she's saying again and again please don't kill me please don't kill me please don't kill me then they shoot her in the face and as her face is falling on the ground he's still saying please don't kill me out of the remains of her you know jaw it's insane i mean i don't like that and you know at just one of i don't know if you've seen how much of that footage you i don't watch any of it i don't watch any from either side i don't recommend it i don't recommend it because it's when you see when you see them throwing jewish button the body's dead jewish kids in the back of a truck and then spitting into their caved in heads it's just in absolute contempt and then going back to gaza everyone's celebrating you just at the very least what you need to realize is um Americans have it pretty good oh yeah you have to deal with that reality no i would have heard a guess that the people who have been dealing with that reality probably know better how to handle it than i do so and and i think that all you know a lot of the decisions that is made have been incredibly hard hard decision they've been lose lose decisions but leadership is making lose lose decisions i think that's kind of what it is on behalf of other people yeah and i i have to say that i i hope the things they've been doing incredibly well in Lebanon and of course we're all hoping for an end to regional escalation but i don't think the path to to avoiding regional escalation is just just slapping is real on the risk and telling the defend itself you know i have it yeah it's just crazy no no go ahead i do you're gonna say something else the last bit i was gonna say is you know it's like i have a friend who has kids uh we're at one point serving in Gaza and i cannot particularly with the realities of urban warfare where everything's sniper cover where anybody can be an enemy and you come back and you can't tell women and children are or not i cannot imagine having to send my 18 19 year old kids into that urban hell and then telling them oh ps you don't get air support like you don't get air support like we're gonna send you in to die because the international community thinks it's unfair it's like the point of war is to be fair the point of war is not to be fair it's to win you want overwhelming force you want way better you want a target you want better missiles you want iron dome so that you can end the conflict as fast as possible because nobody or history is ever benefited even sunsou says this nobody has has benefited from prolonged war what you want is the things that the Israelis are doing of Lebanon shocking off followed by fast victory which i hope they get you know so not only shocking all but in a way that truly minimizes basically destroys a command structure with only taking out the most high highest valuable assets in terms of like ranking and not even killing you can't they didn't even kill with the pager attacks far more people were injured and and shitty ways but like you're in Hezbollah like you're literally in the terrorist organization right they're bombed all over the world this isn't like some little thing where they just keep to themselves and bomb Israel we don't have to worry about they were buying people everywhere like it's well they they kill on our behalf the IDF killed the people who did that 1982 be bombing and i was saying people on twitter that relate were related to people who were killed in that attack saying thank you are finally our fan can finally have peace because the us has not done anything about this since 1982 and our family's been living with the grief and that the IDF finally took out the people who spoke for that so it's it's i think one of the perils of living in the kind of fast-moving social digital consciousness age is things are forgotten pretty quickly and everything that came before kind of gets washed into the past maybe just everyone as the age feels like this to some extent but to me just from like day to day to week to week it seems so much more clear that we have very short memories about what led to conditions and that being able to manipulate that type of psychology to shape narratives with is is particularly effective so while israel took by my accounts is winning a war that is essentially unwinnable from what i mean by that is being able to essentially guarantee their survival and protection for the next 10 20 30 years until hopefully there is some real coalition that happens and let's not forget a lot of this stuff happened geopolitically because israel was getting very close with the Saudis which if they started to make peace with other Arab and people who don't also understand this there's the Shiites and the Sunnis and other you know uh sex of of Islam they don't like each other and the people who are Sunni usually aren't the suicide bombing type the Shiites are very much the suicide bombing type so you could see a road between somewhere like israel and the west and Saudi Arabia and other you know ultimately whether that can work out who knows but they're at least is like we share similar values on some things yeah jihadism we really don't like if you met someone who's a jihadist you would not well if you were both on molly you wouldn't walk away from that experience being like hey i really like Jim over there he seems like a nice guy he'd be like holy fucking shit let's get away from where this guy is now it's really dark that you say that because when you watch the nova footage it's really obvious that a lot of those people were rolling and it's yeah probably a good chunk of the people listening to this we have experience with mdma yeah like you can see people running away stumbling and laughing while people are after them with yeah with weaponry and aks and serrated knives like i i can't imagine like imagine being tortured to death on ecstasy yeah you're like an 18 year old girl that's fucked up yeah it's fucked up it's it's you know i'm boggles so that's not as hypothetical of a situation unfortunately yeah and i think like the big distinction that i want to make between that and civilians dying in gaza is those people were there for a music festival and 100% were civilians not some of them were also terrorists who had blown up stuff before um and in gaza you literally i just saw the video and these things are all verified i'm not just saying i saw a video and just wildly speculating but of uh i forget which commander it was um i think of synwar maybe who basically was in a tunnel with his three kids his wife and then 20 hostages around him because he has to move everywhere with 20 hostages so they can't just bomb where he is like that is a policy and a strategy that you can't overlook when looking at how many civilians are dying inside of gaza and kamos is basically surrounding themselves with those people yeah i think i'll give you a read of their strategy because i think it is you know i i don't know how accurate this is but this is my read and i think it is their strategy is unbelievably cynical it's cynical to a level that most most people can't even begin to even try to think like that um but um i would love to know more about the abraham accords and normalization with the sides yeah big hole in my knowledge yeah but for whatever reason why they chose that time to do it um i think that okay first of all there's no you there is no universe or multiverse in which kamos did not know how the israelis were going to respond you can say what you want to say about israel one thing that they are not is unpredictable yes buck with israel they're going to respond militarily and they're going to be really heavy-handed about it um so there's no universe in which they didn't know what the response was however i think they were banking on that response because again what people don't understand about hos is that they're funded by arana katar and the the heads are not in gaza or they're in katar or dohara or whatever um i think that they i think it's a lot more cynical than just human shields because they know that they can do that because the israelis won't shoot cevillian on purpose sure people dispute that but it's not just that it's that they want they were and this is so cynical they were making content they were making social media content right they want the more people get the more carnage that israel levels meets out in gaza and the more that they can you know frame and manipulate that to exaggerate it like showing one destroyed city block and saying it's the hogaza um the better their cases and i think that the purpose of this attack was to pull essentially pull israel's right to use the ability to use the holocaust card by being able to shift the net with that u_n_ thing shifting the net if the point is to delegitimize israel and the way that they plan to do that is by generating all of this you know pumping on social media all this atrocity footage taking into context not showing their side and then hauling israel in front of the u_n_ and they're committing a genocide because when you turn that narrative around now israel's fair game and you can see that the young people of the world are very unfortunately falling for that yeah yeah so i think that that is an unreal it is a remarkably calculated yeah um and and evil in human strategy and you know they don't care about people because i i've even seen footage of um is mill hanaya in katara where one of his kids was fighting as a and him and his wife are seeing him in the hospital he's about to die and they're all smiling and beaming it's like another bar for the cause yeah of their own kids yeah it's fucking insane i i just it is weird to me and i often try to figure out like how much of this is just latent anti-semitism and how much of it is just preying upon people's like you know ability to be susceptible to you know narratives based on only emotional response um like again i'm not someone who could even ever take emotion out of the equation or think that we should it's just it can't be the only driving force you will just be pulled in every direction you know if someone shows you a palestinian uh gaza children video and then in israeli one and then a gaza like you're just gonna be swung back and forth between the pendulum of suffering and horror and never get to a point where you can be like what is actually like what is the fight here about like what is actually being fought here what is the historical context what are you what are you parts about i think recently i'd say in the past 100 you know years or so i do think the balfour decoration i think moving that particular kind of um you know situation after um world war two really inflamed the situation to a point where you're giving statehood to a perceived religious or ethnic group even though it's not it's a little more amorphous than that um that probably has directly led to like the conditions we see like but at the end of the day i think it is important to look at the traditional kind of coexistence or lack of coexistence between the people who lived in that land and jews and arabs have lived there for a very long time before a hundred years ago and yes there were listen the planet used to be a much more savage place so let's just acknowledge that but the level proportionate to the rest of the globe where that type of kind of warren conflict has existed recently at a crazy fever pitch for especially how small of a place in the world it is you know i i think people genuinely there are people who believe that even if we don't agree with people even deep down to their religious and innermost feeling and soul-like beliefs that we can coexist there are those types of people and there are people who say if they don't think like us and they're not like us they might as well not be here that's what i think it ultimately comes down to if we're looking at it as black and white as possible and um i think obviously can be much more nuanced and complex and specific examples if your family has been oppressed and you've lived in gaza and you know nothing but quote unquote you know an open air prison which if you look at the social media content of gaza like three months before october 7th it didn't it didn't work right right right like lattes and driving in porches and it's like what i don't know well i i think that you know not whoever said this first it was i i don't think it was Netanyahu i think naphthali Bennett said it first but but Netanyahu has said it since you know gaza could have been the singapore of the middle east yeah i don't know how realistic that is i how on what timescale but certainly you know i i am of the belief that deep down and i think that this is i think this is clearly how enough thali Bennett sees things um i'm a i'm a fan of him but you see this with the saudis deep town everyone just wants to make money you know it's like if we get and i think this is kind of like the bedrock of of you know whether it's worked or not us kind of foreign policy it's like liberalizing markets yeah look you know just if we could all be prosperous when people are prosperous they stop suicide bombing you know or or doing terrorism i think that's generally true and everyone's happier um that doesn't work for everyone though that doesn't work for super ideologues and i i'm just gonna read a couple quotes out of yeah yeah yeah king's college london islamic imperialism in history by you from karsh and then i'm gonna go grab another soda and come back yeah these are just you know islam is you know she it's uni i will say that the one thing that they both agree on is the destruction of israel um but whatever you know flavor of islam this is uh this is an imperialist force and so the idea that you know the idea that this is some type of decolonial movement is just laughable so here's here's four quotes from different parts of islamic history and i'm reading this in order to demonstrate i'm reading this because you mentioned black and white yeah i think the people in the west are um predisposed to want to see nuance even if we don't give ourselves credit for that very often i think we do see a lot of nuance um let me read you this in contrast some people who think they vary black and white terms all right first quote i was ordered to fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah that's the prophet Muhammad's fair will address march 632 and next i shall cross this sea to their island to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge allah salad in january 1189 next we will export our revolution throughout the world until it calls there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah or echoed all over the world that's the atola ruhollah kamini kamini 1979 finally i was ordered to fight the people until they say there was no god but Allah and his prophet Muhammad Osama bin Laden in november 2001 so say what you will about islam they've been pretty consistently on message and on brand for almost 1500 okay let me get a set up oh man you you you all right thanks for waiting yeah no problem um yeah so i mean i guess you know what do you what is your typical response if someone who says you know that's all unwell and good israel you know shouldn't just be overrun by islamic rhetoric and beliefs that they should be wiped off the which i think i don't think a lot of people even accept that fact that that even that is too much a leap for some people that they would actually want israel not to exist not just in a you know oppressor type of way but in fact in all ways like not have that be there not have the people be there what do you what's your traditional response to people saying well you're just an apologist for you know israel and by proxy the united states and you know they're the ones who are causing all the trouble there they should not be able to bomb these people that's a war crime that's a genocide like what do you what do you say back to those people usually it's really simple you've seen the other side yeah i mean and if someone says that the other side i don't necessarily mean palestine i mean ron i mean russia of course you know i i don't think it's a coincidence by the way that happened during the ukraine war because iran and you know ron is ultimately a russian front and homosis and ronnie in front um quite likely to divert us attention and funding away from support ukraine yeah i was so big have you seen the other side and at the end of the day yes and you don't want to lose a war no one wants to lose a war this is our side whether we like it or not and as far as i'm concerned my grandfather fought in world war two in the japanese front not the world war two front but as far as i'm concerned america when america liberated uh europe and also when we took on the duty of shepherding israel we made a deal and that's a karmic deal that's a deal you can't just renegan just because some gen z people got tick-tock yeah so there's a level where it's like you know yes you can do you can do a gnome chompsky and say that you know this is the simplest chompsky archaic chompsky argument of anything that if there's anything but like basically the chompsky argument which is it's just the de facto ideological position of most american leftists is anything happens if it's bad in the world it's probably our fault anyways we armed the first we trained then first we were using them to destabilize this that and ultimately the conclusion is and so we deserve to be hurt that's an unbelievably naive read of the world and i think it's a weird type of of western and and sometimes even white supremacy view where it's just this idea this assumption that america or the west controls the world and therefore nothing threatens us and other people who are not us can do no wrong because we're the only bad actors right unbelievably naive yeah i mean it's the throw the baby out with the bathwater approach which is i think if you grow up and you think everything is you know perfect and great and then you find out that things maybe are a little bit you go through the classic you know buddha's path of realizing that shit maybe isn't the way it seemed when you came in there's some things you have to deal with the air hopefully you can come to some enlightened perspective on what that all means and live the best life possible for you and alleviate suffering for you and people around you that's kind of the the path people go through but um i guess some people it's easier to just find the you know froid was right about a lot of stuff i'm not a huge froid fan just because i think you'll go that deep relative to some others peers even but he was very insightful and so much of this is like you know froid in an edible and just like rebelling against the patriarch father of the united states father mother at the end of the day because countries are usually feminine and it's just like guys you could be mad at mom and dad for as long as you like but there are some things that aren't the worst it's not just this place is the worst like there are many other go other to other places and see what to you and listen people are different the one size doesn't fit all i'm not saying everyone in the united states has to love every single thing about it but um you know the reason that the war on terror was such an effective kind of gateway to so many other very bad things censorship reducing reducing liberties increase police state and forces gateway it was so effective because people kind of universally recognize we don't want people blowing each other up all around the world all the time in the name of whatever like that's why it was so effective it's nefarious it's it's not great but it's just like the pretext for that is something that you know we as people in the west do tend to prioritize we like the idea of people living and prospering that's generally an ideal we all aspire to one would hope one would hope one would hope but that but but there are ideological actors who will never be interested in that and will never be absorbed by that and will not be absorbed by western material comfort right you know i was actually a muslim for a year i was a practicing sufi in new york oh sufi right next to ground zero yes and i don't know if this counts to his full islam because it was that it was led by woman it was a lot of reform Jews doing interfaith work that were sufis and and and hardcore muslims would come in and like go off like it was it would get really tense they were not below so but i will say this is somebody who's practiced traditional spiritual paths from all over the world um western materialism will never ever fulfill people in the way faith and belief do that's right really just never and so the the western arrogant idea that we are the end of history that like a ps5 account is like the end point for all human aspiration right it is for me personally but for most people not right some of us got lucky as i was making a joke with don't camera i was it's like you know it's like everyone wants to find their true self but it's like and if i if i really found my true self wants to sit smoke weed and sit in front of the playstation and like just eating peanut butter until i die of dehydration so maybe we but uh my my point being i think i want to pinpoint something that you said earlier about people rebelling saying it's their dad things like that i think that western societies for the most part certainly america have a healthy understanding that young people rebel okay and it's part of their individuation you can look at it is you know at a edible phase of individuation something like that but young people rebel and we have a certain understanding that that's healthy it allows them to identify to think through what they've been to begin to individuate themselves from their parents and begin to find a place for themselves in society as as their ethical or low develops and things like this um and we even have a sense of that protest is okay that you know and we we give people a lot of leeway totally because the west figured out a long time i know that if you just come in heavy-handed like tiana mon tiana square and start shooting people are like to happen xico in the sixties and lots of other places then you have an unhealthy society because then people how it turns into a civil war yeah that that's not in anyone's interest but i would say in this case it's a little bit more sinister than you know young people just saying oh look you know super imposing their edible rage on israel i think because it's kind of like it's a little of a three step thing here where you have somebody saying fuck is real fuck the system okay um you know it would actually be quite disheartening i would actually be much more disturbed if all the young people of america were yeah kill them all that would be really so i don't want to take that from people but then that you get to this next step where now they meet everyone else online who feels the same way or they're you know it's a bunch of people standing around saying yeah fuck is real fuck the jews as it has become at times and then finally then you get uh then you get paid people coming in whether it's from ron iranian agents uh guitar russia saying oh yeah we hate your dad too how about we help you out yeah how about we give you some weapons to use against your dad and that's when that's that line right there that is happening in america right and these are these movements are to some extent astroturft they're part of it is useful idiots part of it is extra state actors and the amount of uh ronnie and money and guitar and money that's in uh not just us but uk universities and things like that is truly shocking i haven't done a real deep dive on it uh people like i and her coe have talked about it a lot um there's there's such an element of foreign subversion here you know like i said i'm on twitter i have whole tweet that column set up for russian disinfo agents for ronnie and disinfo agents and once you see they're talking points they get real obvious yeah america needs to stop supporting is real it needs to stop supporting ukraine and give up on these wars so so there can be peace no so that their site can win yeah yeah i mean it's one of the ways of kind of turning i just personally hope it doesn't all end up in like a crazy military because the the way this goes wrong i really feel like for for the united states and some other western democracies out there whatever that means anymore is there's such a autocratic clamp down on basic privacy that we think has arrived but really it hasn't to the extent that some people maybe on the farther or extremes of conspiracy theories exist but it very easily could like i've noticed a preponderance of stories this year specifically also related to the assassination attempts on trump where they start blaming and kind of making it normalize that we are going to use search history as a indicator of intent which is like sure it sounds like in theory like a detective should be able to go in and see what they were doing but in reality like do you want to be completely have narrative swarm around your search history about anything at any point it is very intrusive and can also be very manipulated and that type of like clamp down which is a natural response to i think when the kids are out of control in a country or there's something that's out of control that's the balance that i hope it doesn't so i'm actually not so afraid of like people be i think we should have some concern over how easily people can be manipulated online but the response to that is actually what scares me more and then like a more like oh that doesn't align with how i would like life to be type thing and i think that balance is one that gets lost when you're entrenched on either side but becomes very clear as like the pendulum swings to the other side and that's ultimately what i was hoping i would see more of just right the spiritual community or whatever consciousness community is out there that there is there's more kind of like shit like this is a fucked up situation let's try to figure out how to balance this energy not pick a winner and fight for that light side against the dark or vice versa like that's that's where i was a little surprised and taken aback how how i didn't see that as much as i kind of maybe would have expected to yeah i'm not only i'm a dark worker by the way yeah that's awesome that's i love it and you know like that's a joke no obviously i i mean i think most people listening to this or coming across us at some point regardless of your political beliefs or where you fall into israel situation or you know gaza and all these things you could be open-minded enough to not like ruin friendships ruin you know artistic relationships that type of stuff really doesn't make sense to me unless you know that that's all the person can make their identity about if all i spoke about was israel israel israel is stop constantly no but you don't like if that was literally all you spoke about to everyone then sure maybe don't hang out with that person it's not really that interesting as a personality but speaking up especially when it seems like i mean go somewhere on social media where there's not a watermelon in a profile and how they co-opted the watermelon to mean you know palace time because you can't you can't you cannot disassociate you can't escape this issue yeah it's there it's out there you might as well deal with it or at least determine you actually feel about it in the real world yeah yeah i know i i think that the you know you can tell very clearly just based on things that hillary and kamala have said you can tell very clearly that the democratic party is salivating and has salivated for a long time at the idea of censorship and a chinese china style control over the top you can and by the way i don't trust the republicans in the slightest when they start not championing free speech it's like yeah right it's mean you want more speech for your side yes correct when you're in control i guarantee you're going to be like passing anti-woke laws or some shit to give people from from saying what you don't want to say so i don't trust them at all i don't think they're fighting for free speech uh just based just look at their track record you know when they get power they'll just put in some type of christian nationalism um and uh under the ayatollah peterson yeah but uh what was i saying i think that and you know one of the most disturbing things about america is in the last 23rd certainly since the patriot act is you know if you no matter what side of the political sense you're on if you believe in freedom you're screwed because each side has just been stripping freedom yeah and it really frustrates me when people stay in this partisan mindsets we're like oh yes the bad guy it's like i'm very much with malcomax where he's like people talk about in the ballot or the bullet where he's like oh you got the left wing telling you this you got the republicans telling you this you got the democrats telling you this no that's the government you have the government telling you things and the government is not your friend democrats republicans it's like like does it matter when you're at the dmv it's just the federal government you know and and it is not in their interest you saw this in the presidential debate it's not in their interest you know they were both arguing for for more government funding it's not in their interest to undercut their own paychecks that's a bit of a diversion but yeah no but it's it's not because that our political system is nothing if not a microcosm for larger collective events i mean the same type of identity like politics has devolved so much from like a policy-based ideological view and plan for what you're going to do when you are president or have control of congress and now it is literally just a series of ad hominem attacks and just like talking points that try to undermine the credibility of and that's like i i hope people recognize that like that is one way to do it but you can also inform yourself i mean the only way these systems truly ever changes a complete collapse which is totally possible or systemic change from the inside out which is usually how lasting change actually takes root and like turns into something else it's not just like the thing is over now the new thing and that things the greatest forever like that's not the story of history so you know i do think it's important to to as much as you're drawn in like if you are attracted to the middle east situation as your gateway to ethical frameworks and you know complex geopolitical issues or just studying like energy on a national or global scale be attracted to it there's something there for you you have this response for some reason but i would say don't let it get twisted into something that is just self you know validating a feeling that you think is you know justified or righteously justified as your only reason for liking something that's not like it won't last yeah it's it's well it may last it's gonna say like it lasts longer than i think it should for a lot of people so yeah i think that uh you know nuance nuance and wondering if you've done the right thing and um that's for peacetime sorry you know conversation when the war is you know is real did not start the war and i know people will argue that but they did not the october 7th was as about dramatic as you can imagine if somebody started a war um it didn't start that war we're currently in the war um and we can discuss the ethical complexities of after it's one because if it's not one the human suffering will be magnitude greater than anything that is currently occurring in my opinion um so that's kind of how i feel about it i think that you know obviously the election will change a lot and um we're all just kind of holding our breath there but i know it's fun to live in these hyper condensed transitional periods is what it's felt like since i've been alive and it feels like it's just it's cycling up at such an exponential rate and you know by some we're similar in age like i feel like some of it is an aspect of growing older and processing time and mortality in a certain way but then i see lots of younger people who are half my age or younger and it also seems to be speeding up in terms of experience for them and i'm sure it's in no small part two to the digital kind of overlay we have going on our lives but it's wild like it's just like every day is like some brand new excursion into the unknown and i mean it's just uh yeah if it's a chinese curse we're fucked so yeah and it definitely is like the 24 hour memory hole memory tree like social media is just like a new roll of toilet paper every day it's wild i do find though like the more i've been able to pull away um and you know read books or do other types of long form kind of content engagement um there's a real benefit to that and i think it's so easy to get sucked in i don't want to get preachy about how this is what you should be doing and get away from your screens whatever i get sucked into doom scrolling and screen time all the time i'm not gonna shit on someone else for going through it but i do recognize when i'm able to kind of like pull away for a little bit in our couple hours there's a real benefit to that and i hope that doesn't get too lost well i've always said you know and i'm definitely not the only one saying this long form podcast are really the saving grace of the internet they're an incredible medium and i think that you know i'm definitely not the only person to say this i think that the presidential debate should be long form podcasts you know like it's just that's what we want put them both on rogan let him moderate you may get six hours long it's gonna be great if you're in office you should be doing at least like a 20 minute podcast usually telling people what we did that week a politician would never do that now right it doesn't behoove any politician to be so transparent or forthcoming unfortunately that's like the world we are destined to live in within this system as as far as i can see it i mean what little exposure we have of the presidential candidates the more i see both of them the more i'm like this sucks like this is getting worse i'm not more convinced about it like both of these is not this is bad like this at least we see them less i don't want more of you politician but i do mean like actually being able to figure out and determine who's more capable yeah of course it's hard to bullshit your way through a two to six hour podcast and even an hour now by it's you can't just like manipulate you know you're putting yourself out there and you know there's if you do it over a long enough period of time you get to see you know a person it's not just like one talking head thing that's what half hour hour produced you know dramas and comedies and news programs are for you get a crystal light yeah you need to unleash people and so people can see and did you watch the vp debate i did i watch the vp debate it was uh it was well it was good because they were actually talking policy they were relatively respectful it's exactly what vp debate is supposed to be it's like the actual substance because the people were watching kind of care about that because who the hell is that else would watch vice presidential debate between tim waltz and jadey this is like i don't give a shit out that both of those guys are total goobers but oh total goobers i definitely caught myself at the time it's like why can't these guys be real yeah same talking about policy that's how you're supposed to feel that's literally how you're supposed to do you have your like celebrity you know first ballot you know top of the ballot thing and then you have like oh here's some real political wonkiness they see it does still exist these people do still have you know are are eloquent in the way that they speak that's all we want that's how sad it is i saw jadey man speaking i'm like i don't really agree with a lot of what he's saying it's kind of stupid but he sounds not like a moron saying it so like he seems smart right right yeah can't have both yeah shit let me ask you this if you were to represent if you were to put yourself in the in the shoes of you know an extremely pro palestine person stop the genocide etc yeah what if you could make the best possible argument for that side i know this is a little bit yeah yeah no it's a good art it's a good one i think someone who's not here but i want to at least know and i i think about it often because i want to understand listen i have members of my immediate family well one member of my immediate family um who is very pro palestinian where's the free gaza hat a pin on her hat and um you know i i do try to genuinely understand what leads you there and how you would feel what i do know is if you have no connection to any of these issues and you're just a you know regular person scrolling social media you're not palestinian you're not lebanese you're not israeli you're not jewish and you're just scrolling and you see a video of a god's and father holding a dead baby crying and that's your first yeah that's your first thing you see and this was the first thing i saw related to uh the situation and i was emotionally stirred and moved by it because it's a horrible thing you immediately especially if you're a parent put yourself in that position of having a dead baby on you it's it's it's indescribable you don't want to live there if that was then followed up by you know 20 other videos of people saying how horrible that is how could israel do this this is what led to this there are liars this is all the the occupation and then i find about occupation colonialism zionism which is now just somehow they've turned that into a word to mean jew which is cool but like you see that over and over again and you see very little in terms of opposing voices outside the native like one in ten videos or like one news channel in a national media like one in australia one and you know great great britain very few and far between hosts um you know kind of presenting the other side and historical context of what's happening which certainly takes more time i can see if i didn't weigh that into the equation how it's very easy to believe that israel are you know their jews they get away with stuff they feel bad they use the holocaust is an excuse for everything it's not that bad for them they do really well they kind of control the media even if it's kind of a joke like there's all those jewish names in there and they control music and all these things and their lawyers if you start to like wrap all of this stuff up together and just believe that truly without really examining it but just like bring it in it's like these fuckers like now they're bombing these kids and women right next to them but don't they have hearts what are they monsters are they demons who can do this indiscriminately the problem is is you build up a caricature of like a type of person or culture or country that would be willing to do that so like where it falls apart from me when i kind of put myself in that position where i inevitably kind of jump off the ship i go am i doing the same thing about the palestinians am i doing the same thing about people who don't agree with me about israel or the palestinians and no i don't think they're monsters i don't think women and children getting bombed in gaza and lebanon are monsters i think they're about as close to innocent people as you can get but they're certainly the activity of hamas and hezbalah and not the general population but those command structures and organizations is pretty monstrous i do believe that if israel was doing that if israel was just carpet bombing entire blocks indiscriminately of bay root and gaza and just literally you could watch the leveling take place and they just had indiscriminate you know considerations for anything related to human life which is the narrative you get pretty much when you hear about israel um that i would immediately be like this is barberic this is this is insane how can you think that this is okay they're literally like you said providing air support and waiting until there are sufficient high value targets i know that's a you know um very washed out word but what it means is like there are people who really make decisions for the other commanding force if you can justify that no one wants to talk about collateral damage but you know most liberals weren't bringing up collateral damage when we talked about drone strikes under obama like you can't have it both ways like for you crayon yeah or you crayon it's still going however said collateral damage among russian i know it's an invading army it is it's an invasion you crayon struck back at russia of course and like and then the combatant right there is significantly worse so i mean i just think that like no one wants to see suffering on either side and then if you think about it just in terms of sheer numbers which is not a great way of thinking about things especially if you're fighting an asymmetrical war if israel didn't have the iron dome if they didn't have a way to defend themselves they would have been wiped out by now it's not like would they if we fight if israel fired 200 ballistic missiles at gaza i was like you know understand like that's not normal just because they can deter them is not like it it doesn't mean it's not a big deal and that's what i think it's lost in the shelf i saw a lot today on social media of iranian kind of think tank people being like really getting tough on the rhetoric and being like israel can't hit the nuclear facilities we're stronger than that we have underground bunkers they can't hit our oil reserves you know they will see the full might of iran come it's like what do you mean the full you would have done it already this is the worst like proxy ever everyone knows it's you like you can't do it because you don't have the capability of doing it and i understand that must be frustrating but doubling down and pretending like you're gonna really do something fuck around and find out at this point is insane they certainly don't have the political favor i mean you what do you have like ireland and like some a few european countries like they they're polit you know if you go to war with the sovereign nation not through proxies like you're not going to find unilateral support for your side i don't know i mean like the france just said they were supporting lebanon yeah they said they're supporting a ceasefire the ceasefire is is another punk ass way of saying you're supporting the other side but it's i saw one step below i'm saying that supporting the lebanese people yeah you know i would find it arms sales yeah they're gonna try to stop arm sales but arm sales don't just stop immediately from what i've seen and if they are like ultimately what netan yahoo and i don't agree with him most of the stuff he does some of it but not most of it i think he is right and like history will remember like this this age of social media may seem like you know the gazins are fighting some just you know revolutionary cause but in five to ten years or twenty years or thirty years or fifty years is most likely not going to be looked back on like that it's going to be looked like thank god this was kind of like dealt with in the least catastrophic way it could have at the time yeah the only thing that history actually gonna remember is who won that's how history works that's how it goes yeah and and so there just comes a point where you know you just have to say that like no you know i'm not gonna let you kill me i think that's fair i think that's what it boils down to but that um the irony of that statement you know pro palestinians would say is well then they're killing so many gazins it's like what what did what do you do here well maybe maybe maybe maybe they should give the hostages back and maybe it has to stop shooting rockets it is real maybe but no that's that's that's not uh they they only do that because they're oppressed it's like no history says exactly the opposite so well i will say you know you're mentioning some of this stuff like it is amazing i will say how quickly uh it becomes anti-Semitic and i know that you mentioned you brought this point up a few times let's say oh you know people might have rolled their eyes at that in the past and said like oh come on like that's just that's just an excuse but you know particularly as that first month went on after number seven if you saw how quickly zion is just meant now men jews yep people attacking jews in front of synagogues in la and around the world you saw broken glass and you see at a more subtle level now i'm not jewish and i mentioned jewish people have like about 10 000 times more power on detecting this type of thing than i do but you know you can't deny i don't think any rational person cannot deny the anti-Semitic edge in people's voice yeah and when they're talking about this stuff and but not just that the kind of implicit bias the kind of just assumption is like oh would jews rule the world right so yeah and it's just like well just look around the evidence of the world right now does not support that you know and it's like that's what i was kind of like before where it was like i think that prior to october 7th i can see myself making a kind of kmski argument or it's like well the the israel's and a tool of american imperial power and you know the reality is that there's so much more sophisticated in advance than anyone around them and this is part of the colonial project and it's like i'm sorry that is not born out like the last year yeah it's just not and and and so that for me and just seeing the the bile come out of me of course me i'm just like oh well like yeah i really need to really think about this and it's like am i maybe saying things that have an implicit bias or right right and and so i've spent a lot of time a lot i basically it's all i've been thinking about the last year is israel and not just israel i think we should perhaps distinguish it a little bit from the way of anti-Semitic attacks it has happened in in europe and america yeah it's wild it's wild i i i think unfortunately you do you get kind of hypersensitive to this if you have if you if you are jewish or no jewish people just because like again like it's just there's not that many choose in the world and so it's just one of those things where like it's weird when all of a sudden there seems to be like a and israel has become this like you know magnifying glass for Judaism around the world for better or for worse and i think there are some amazing aspects on display in terms of israel standing in the world but also some very overt you know this this flip from you know lace for people to express religious freedom and you know a a imperialist authoritarian cudgel that the west the rest of the western world imposes on that region is is wild to me like people co-existed there like this wasn't like it's it wasn't always as bloody or as heated as it is now but you see that that's how people see it now or that that's actually what's happening that it's a cudgel i i think people actually see it like that now i don't think it is i think israel is like listen yeah i'm not a a you know firm believer that uh western democracy has figured out all of especially western capitalistic democracy has figured out all the world's ills there's a lot of problems it creates but that against blowing people up because they disagree with you i will take that lesser of two evils until we can get our shit together on like an ethical and moral and kind of like altruistic framework for running our lives i don't think you even have that potential to get there if you go with people who don't think like me or who i don't like should die that's one path potentially gives you the option of like spiraling up the ascension curve the other one completely destroys it like it is gonna be much harder you're going to a lower realm that you're gonna have to work you know 20 times is hard to claw your big way back up to even and um yeah i just uh it's weird that it was so effectively framed as israel it just doesn't care it's a genocide i mean if i heard i've heard probably from no less than five to ten close friends who i'm still friends with and hasn't affected our friendship who genuinely believe that this is a genocide and that israel is is quite literally trying to wipe all gossons off the face of the planet which is wild like if you just like what was that criteria for that did they say their criteria basically stem from i mean it's not what actual criteria for genocide is i mean i pointed out that like your correlation right your criteria is is that you know these people are just trying to live their lives no big deal and then this other country comes in and blames all their problems on them and bombs them and kills them every day indiscriminately and they don't have to apologize because they're bad that's basically how it goes like i mean that yeah at the end of the day that's what it boils down to i mean they give you a definition for genocide or no no one will ever give a definition because it's not a they'll they'll say like the systemic removal of a population i'm like okay well it's not that that's not cleansing that's not genocide yeah i don't think that that's what israel's doing either i think i'd like now to be fair i think they might like to i think that israel would quite like to push um a lot of the palestinians into egypt i totally agree with that statement as well levanon's not taking them either in fact no neither is jordan below in the in the 70s exactly it's not three seven expelled the palestinians yeah everyone forgets the gaza shares a border with egypt do you they conveniently forget that you were here have you heard anybody have you heard a single person on on what we might broadly call the left i think these things are meaningless but pro-palsian have you heard a single person even mentioned that egypt also shares a border with gaza not only did they not share it if it's brought up they will use some weird justification is that logistically they can't possibly they couldn't possibly oh heavens forbid i won anyone as far as i understand chiro's the big city in the world right right egypt is gigantic it's a lot bigger than it's real oh my god it's i i know it's it's just you know uh there's a reason this situation has ended up here and i think it's convenient kind of target that you can put on israel's back but i do think if the lived experience that israelis not just jews but israelis of all beliefs and faiths and creeds and colors like if you had to actually live that life every day regardless of whether you're getting hit with the ballistic missile or not or you have to take shelter you see things it's got to be people you know you would be you would feel a little bit differently about what the right to defend yourself means and that maybe it doesn't mean just bombing other places around you because you don't like them like that's they could do that they could do that they could literally just carpet bomb and probably have enough cover for at least a few weeks to get away with it if they really wanted to but i think they to the best of their ability and knowingly knowing that some of their troops are going to be killed and their civilians are likely to be killed approaching a war in a much more targeted precise way of doing it and no one likes to hear targeted precise when also i want to be really clear about this because it was it was wild to me when i was a kid again reading in the paper you would get um figures and facts and numbers from the plo at the time and it would clearly be printed in the paper these are numbers from the plo these have not been verified basically saying we don't really think these numbers are real but this is what they're giving us now the gods and health ministry right across is basically like 50,000 kids have been killed yesterday and it's like well i think that's true and it's like you can't even challenge the numbers that they're providing now because it's the only source and therefore that's crazy that's crazy and and and also you know it's like israel as far as i know or may have up till recently uh is still trying to you know basically keep get a record of what happened on october 7th and count the bodies from that but automatically homos immediately knows how many people and it's like they're saying women and children but it's like we're talking about urban warfare how many of those were combatants when they say children how many of those are 17 year old homos combatants who are the majority of of combatants they're they're soldiers but just because they can't get america and elder not soldiers yeah you know it's not so so you got to think about that too the way that statistics are manipulated and um you know one of the things that really shifted my viewpoint on this is uh that i'd already spent a lot of time studying urban warfare because ps gaza is going to typify warfare the 21st yeah yeah i know the thing the the thing the u.s military is more afraid of than anything is fighting in mega cities like for instance daka bangladesh total nightmare scenario to total nightmare scenario because anyone can be a sniper snipers can be hiding anywhere women and children can be strapped with bombs this is why we cleared philugia before going in in iraq uh sun's military strategy since the dawn of human history has said that going into fortified cities held by enemies is the worst boss a most destructive possible form of combat and um we're working at we're living in a world of cities now and so you can't just disentangle you know even when you have ai and things like that is the israelis have um and yeah it just boggles the mind i forget what point i was trying to drive at but well i mean i can tell you that the idea of that this is going to typify all warfare going forward it seems pretty clear and it is an effective strategy i mean well it wasn't all urban warfare it was jungle warfare that's the war that you know the united states lost unequivocally it was not a win no one can claim a win you can at best claim out we withdrew but i i wanted zero in on that that's a really good point because you always share people saying they're talking about the military superiority of israel when they have ai they have all this stuff they have drones okay it's like the u.s had maximum military superiority and we got beat we lost or to a bunch of rice farmers with tunnel they had tunnel networks and ak broken aks right so this is a i i i people should study military strategy at least a bit or history so that they can see some of the reality of what war is it throughout world history if you're fighting an insurgent force on their own territory first of all they understand all the terrain they understand they know all the secret hiding spots because they built them they have all of their information networks like old lady sitting on porches they can relay info back about where an idea soldier is and multiple they have the will to fight because it's their territory right and through our world history you know those forces have always won against insert like aggressors the long run i'm not saying israel's an aggressor but they're that coming into that territory yeah i mean so just because they have technological superior if anything it's something can sometimes cause false confidence of course one last point on that is you hear about urban warfare as you always hear people saying like oh the israelis we're cutting off things like yeah they were cutting out for example yeah they were cutting off concrete okay that sounds inhuman but obviously they can't rebuild oh it's because if you study at the warfare you understand that concrete is the number one weapon of urban warfare by far surpassing any other weapon because it can be used to create cover in places that cover walls in and then you can put gun men behind it behind them so that they can kill people with what with all taking fire and you can put that anywhere and you can shore up forifications and so concrete is the number one weapon of urban warfare of course they would be limiting that going into gaza but for people who don't understand that it looks like uh you know well well i think to that point one of the interesting things i've noticed is how quickly the narratives will shift and change like for instance we were hearing a ton about no aid getting into gaza for you know the first eight months of the war and you haven't i don't know if people have been paying attention but you haven't really heard anything about that in the past month or two and the truth is is that most that like billions and billions and billions of dollars like tens of billions dozens of billions of aid has gone into gaza just in the past year it's just that the organization in control takes it and then resells on the black market so they can then go buy weapons from other places and like it's just it's weird to me that people don't see that this isn't just like people making decisions in a bubble you know it's not like oh you know this is isro just is so cruel to the gazans they won't even let aid in it's like what are you what are you talking about like this is like actually they could do so many they could literally just shut off all of the power and water to gaza on a whim like that that's a power they possess they control it they don't because it's not like if you were really trying to like just completely dominate and just like indiscriminately kill everyone in a region they are uniquely positioned to be able to do that right but they don't do it and I don't understand why fully why I I I have difficulty I don't think everyone who supports Palestine unequivocally is anti-Semitic I just think that if they looked at some of the reasons that they support them they may find some latent anti-Semitism in them even if they don't necessarily feel like that like yeah that's kind of that that's kind of what I was pointing out where it's like and it gets confusing too because they're you you have a lot of Jews on the pro-Palestine side and yeah you have people like Norm Finkelstein yeah you can go very persuasive then again you look at who's paying for them you know Norm book needs been to Iran a lot you know so it gets tricky but really it doesn't I think that and I think that one thing that spiritual people can be very good at seeing his big picture thinking yes but you know people do psychedelics they get into this idea of you know all we want etc they think about the world they think about nice things like world peace and bringing the world together and other cultures and yoga and all this stuff so that is one thing that I think spiritual people do have them and for themselves and I would also and that can be very helpful in this situation and I would also just like to underline again who it was that was killed on October 7th it was the type of people to listen to this podcast and it is my way of thinking that was an act of war not just against the Jewish people it just happens to be or Israeli people it just happens to be that the Israelis are on the front lines of this war it was an attack on everything that's not Islam and how do you think they see us yeah right um and I think that Israel is fighting on behalf of the civilized world we used to have this phrase that was you know used to piss people off probably rightly so in the 9/11 post 9/11 period the clash of civilizations theory versus Islam it's a little bit simplistic I think that but Nanyahu in his one of his speeches in the US opened with the one that Kamala skipped um opened it with this isn't it directly addressing that I don't think every you know and I think but people who had years to hear heard this immediately where he said this isn't a clash of civilizations this is a clash between civilization and barbarism yeah and I thought that was a great line and I think it's true and I think that people need to uh not underestimate the ability of not underestimate how many people there are that truly hate and certainly the west in the world yeah well do unbelievable amounts of violence yeah yeah I think it's a good I I for me I mean I try to look at the silver lining even in some horrible a horrible situation like this that I hope that people who aren't directly and immediately impacted by this that is to say aren't living in Israel or Gaza or have family members in each is use this as an opportunity to kind of examine your moral and ethical framework relative to your spiritual beliefs and see where things line up and see if you can't use it as a tool to kind of refine what you believe you may still believe that you know Palestine must be free from the river to the sea I may have a hard time understanding why you believe that but you're free to believe that but use it as not just a reactive tool for believing the other side is exclusively wrong I want to hear from people who I know are good and kind and altruistic people and hear their reasons specifically for why they think you know Palestine is you know there should be an immediacy spire and that should be the end of it and we should just go from there I want to hear those arguments too because I'm always open to being to missing something and not understanding the facts of the situation but the more I kind of delved into this the more it became clear to me that A) I seem to be in the minority of what I believe and B)

I could see kind of how we got here it didn't just seem like an accident or just like at first it was just like this weird phase I'm like oh my god like everyone is definitely hating Israel and Zionism is now just means you like this is weird and you know I've seen it more for a year later now or officially a year past October 7th and you know where we are I'm somewhat surprised that as we sit you know theoretically poised that a broader regional conflict which I don't think Iran is going to press that personally but I think they want to appear that they're going to I hope not either but I didn't think even when Putin was lining up tanks on the Ukrainian border I was like he's never he's just bluffing he's never gonna do that at all but that's more regional they have a border a shared border you know Iran has to make a leap that this is so important for their existence as a country I could understand Putin's logic for you know the the NATO seems to be encroaching they're not really doing what they said they were going to do it's only a matter of time before they go and try to take Crimea back and all these other places that we feel is rightfully ours it's like a weird Russian you know this is who we are type of people will fight through the end like that type of logic to that's a little bit I think contextually different this is like I don't think the Russians want the Ukrainians to ceases to exist as a people they just want their land and they want them to live under them you can be Ukrainian all you want call yourself Ukrainian but this is Russia now so like that's this I this I do think is just you know like if there was a button and you could push and it's white ball Jews off the face of the earth like they're hitting that fucking button it seems they get yeah I think I think one of the things that doesn't help is real unfortunately also is a lot of the stuff they sound that say sounds crazy yeah and it's not it's not crazy but it sounds good so for a classic one is the UN's antisemitic right oh yeah UN is a conspiracy against Israel and they're just anti-Semitic that that too that sounds crazy right and it sounds psychotic but then you actually look and it's yeah yeah the UN really corrupt yeah it's like when I watch that South Africa thing it's like you know South Africa had that case just ready to go and I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how long those things to prepare but that looked pretty well organized they just that ready to go and you know I just saw last week you know South Africa just named named a street after Laila Khaled if you know who that is at the Palestinian PLO hijacker in the 70s and say oh but there's no bias now it's some sure it's totally normal totally normal going side you know like on Ross yeah all of this stuff it's like that that's real it is real it sounds wrong but it is real but when when when Israelis are saying it it sounds like we're preposterous but yeah that's the world the yes even the yes the UN is corrupt you know it's like we know the UN they're not just on this issue you know we know that like every time UN peacekeepers go into third world countries they're just raping everyone yes yes horrifying it's not good yeah when is the UN that's the thing like why like the UN is a concept sounds like such a good thing it's like we're all countries working together for the greater good like Captain America but then it's like or Captain Planet but like then you look at how it actually functions and you're like oh this is destined to be the most corrupt and worst thing we have ever created like this is a terrible idea we're not all going to get along yeah if you get all the countries in the world together to vote on stuff it's like most of the countries are totalitarian so you know say that or just non-functional so how's that going yeah oh man well this has been awesome dude i'm glad i got to speak to you about this i i do want to say that if anyone disagrees with with Jason or i and i about our views on israel like please you know angrily tweeted at us but also maybe try to have like a real conversation because like i i enjoy hearing it's in good faith in good of course like yeah i know i i expect people not to agree and they would be a little concerned if everyone was like kung ho something is wrong i'm in the wrong place right now yeah um but yeah i mean i i just encourage people to to think critically about this and like no one i know Jason isn't i know i'm not is saying we want innocent people to die but drawing aligned where innocence is and recognize that putting innocent civilians in harm's way as a strategy is different than targeting innocent civilians there's a huge and one side has done that and one side has not and it's not the sides you think and innocent people are dying in horrible ways and the blame for that lies with Hamas and their supporters their financial supporters yeah yeah um what's going on with you my friend your your podcast you still i see it's going great what else you got going on a bunch of stuff i can't talk about quite yet cool cool yeah this is definitely been taking up my mind more than it should but it's been taking up everyone's and i think i think so that's why i wanted i debated whether to do anything about it but it's been a year and honestly like i i think about this in the context of the stuff i naturally gravitate towards you know like books on mystics and religion and psychology like these are the magic these are things i naturally gravitate towards i like to try to figure out where the intersection of those things and like you know global politics where those are so yeah well that might jam into that and technology yeah podcast is going great it's ultra-culture with Jason Lou we should definitely come back on yeah you search that wherever you get your podcast you can go to podcast.magic.me, m-a-g-i-c-k.me um youtube you know it's magic me on youtube or just search Jason Lou on youtube youtube channels growing i'm trying to get with the kids yeah it was images of me like with my mouth open like a soy boy you know i think i love it i love it um and um magic.me is my school for magic if you want to be as end up as crazy as i am m-a-g-i-c-k.me which is i would argue fairly you know remarkably sane for the world that we're in but that makes you seem crazy to other people unfortunately that's the perils of doing that but magic.me if you want to learn the occult arts of uh cast magic yoga for medicine, master of travel, etching, tarot, everything in between are about m-a-g-i-c-k.me uh and but and those are paid classes the podcast and the youtube are free uh you can get my japan debook i've done a bunch of books yeah Jason Louve.com has everything yeah i have your john debook it's a really enjoyable read it was one of the better things i've read in the past you know gosh it was a while ago five years four years ago thank you um yeah really awesome go check Jason out he is the best thank you for listening bye bye okay so so thanks for listening to that episode i hope you enjoyed it i know it was a long one it was a heavy subject it is what it is if you stayed at the end congratulations you're one of the few who probably made it again if you disagree with anything that was shared here i encourage uh open and honest debate about it i am available to speak via email uh via patreon wherever you want to reach out i'm happy to have a conversation about this stuff i do not want it to be one-sided and present what we were talking about as gospel that's that's not what this is about if you want to find more synchronicity you can go to patreon.com/synchronicity if you want to connect with Jason Louve go to magic.me magic with a k at the end of it uh yeah that's it i will see you soon for another episode and the patrons you will be getting a bonus episode we'll be doing a live stream next week as well all right until then bye bye love you ready for a fresh start take 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