 with the fighters pretending that they were exclusively capturing and killing militants and soldiers on the Israeli. OK, I've really enjoyed some Sam Vaknen videos and just checking out the chat. Elliot says, do I have more or less trouble falling and staying asleep? I notice no difference in my sleep. So I'm not the greatest sleeper. And I just don't notice any difference on this low dose of Adderall. Right, I've been listening to some Sam Vaknen videos and found them quite thought provoking. An experience, this external shock. Israel reacted the way any traumatized individual does. It promulgated delusional goals. And having promulgated delusional goals for its invasion, Israel then dawdled for three. OK, I think we're touching here on a key left-right difference. So let's say Israel has the goal of punishing Hamas for its terror attack on Israel, October 7. Is that a delusional goal? No, I don't think it's a delusional goal. So if you're on the right, generally speaking, you're going to be much more at ease with regarding punishment for bad behavior. So appropriate levels of punishment for bad behavior as a good thing in and of itself. If you're on the left, you're going to be much more likely to be skeptical of punishment as a good thing in and of itself. Rather, if you're on the left, you're going to much more likely regard punishment as whether or not it has a therapeutic effect. Well, if you're on the right, you'll much more likely be at ease and regard appropriate levels of punishment for bad behavior as a good thing in and of itself. So if Israel is punishing Hamas right now and punishing Hamas supporters, is that a delusional goal? I don't think that's a delusional goal. I think I am on the right. I regard appropriate levels of punishment for bad behavior as a good thing in and of itself, even if it does not lead to therapeutic ends. So I think that's a key left-right difference. Pre-unnecessary and costly weeks before it mustered the courage and the determination to penetrate the aerially devastated Gaza Strip. And then having invaded the Gaza Strip, a stream of triumphant messages followed the ground invasion. Alas, the reality and self-congratulatory propaganda rarely meet. In actuality, only 2% to 4% or 3% of Hamas's fighting force and tunnels have been destroyed. Yes, you've heard correctly, 2% to 3%. Hamas is even more present in the south, near the Egyptian border. It is more present there than in the much bombarded and invaded North. So let's say that's accurate that Israel has only killed 2% to 3% of Hamas's total number of fighters. Does that make Israel's invasion and Israel's retaliation pointless or worthless? Doesn't to me. I mean, normally, don't you have to commit an average of like eight felonies before you ever get caught and convicted of one? So the US punishment for people who commit felonies, there is fairly, on a fairly similar level to what's purported to be Israel's level of punishment of Hamas here. Hamas is still firing rockets on Israel. Hamas is still holding on to hostages. Hamas is negotiating brazenly for the release of the women and the children among the hostages in exchange for what amounts to a... How exaggerated is the Gaza body count by the Gaza Department of Health? I don't think it's a vast exaggeration, right? I would say probably 50% would be the max, but I don't think it's vastly exaggerated. It is fine. In short, Hamas is far from being intimidated or definitely far from capitulating. Hamas is taunting Israel daily. Why is Hamas taunting Israel daily? Because it can, right? When you hate someone and you have the ability to taunt them daily, you will. Hamas has the stronger hand in these hostage negotiations because Hamas has Israeli captives and Israel doesn't have any Hamas captives that it can trade. So the strong take what they want, the weak endure what they must. In this particular bargaining, Israel is in the much weaker position. International diplomatic support for Israel is being solely tested by what is beginning to be widely perceived as Israel's campaign of collective punishment. A war crime, may I remind you. Antisemitism? So it's thrown around all the time that Israel's committing war crimes in Gaza. It's by no means definitive that is happening. All right, just having a disproportionate body count is not a war crime. But it's not at all clear that Israel's committing war crimes. Now, I absolutely believe you can make a strong case that Israel's committing war crimes in Gaza. And I believe that you can equally make a strong case that Israel's not committing war crimes in Gaza. I'm just making the point that those who definitively proclaim either way that Israel is or isn't committing war crimes in Gaza, I don't think they have a solid ground to stand on. Israel globally, in public opinion, is decidedly from Palestinian. The underdog is always favored. Hamas' own offenses, Hamas' own crimes are swept under the social media collective carpet. So what is Israel to do? Having backed itself into a corner, the only thing Israel can do and should do is to declare victory and negotiate a ceasefire, replete with the release of all the civilian hostages held by various militant and Islamist groups in Gaza, extending the war. So I enjoy Sam Vakhton. Sam Vakhton is fundamentally a man of the left. I am fundamentally a man of the right. So my right wing impulses are that you should punish people who do bad things and that that's a worthy goal in and of itself. Sam Vakhton has a much more therapeutic approach. He doesn't believe that punishment in and of itself is a worthy thing. Hence, he is much more hostile to Israel's war in Gaza. To the southern part of Gaza, may net a few dead Hamas leaders. Yes, many Hamas leaders would die. But this has been tried before. This has been tried before multiple times and it never worked. It never led anywhere. It never worked. Well, if you're right wing and you believe that punishing bad people for doing bad things is a worthy goal in and of itself, then you are fulfilling your hero system. You are acting out of your view of the world and how it should work by punishing people who are doing evil things and that works for that right wing hero system. Sam Vakhton has a left wing hero system and so he is much more hostile to the entire idea of punishment including collective punishment. Now, the world overwhelmingly operates in a collective fashion. If I walk down the street wearing a yarmulke, people will tend to associate me with everything that they know and feel about Jews. Even though I'm an individual, right? I'm primarily an individual. I'm not primarily a representative of the Jewish people. I could try to hold to that Anglo point of view but the way the world works is that we see people collectively. We don't primarily see black people or Jewish people or Muslim people or Christian people or white people as individuals. We primarily see them as representatives of groups and we then transfer onto them everything that we think and feel about the group that they are a member of. Now, maybe it'd be better if we saw people as individuals. There are many advantages to that but it's not how the world works, right? The way the world works is that we're not primarily individuals born within alienable rights. We are primarily born as members of tribes and whatever rights and responsibilities, whatever assets and deficits that come with belonging to our tribe, those are automatically transcribed onto us. Obitrating Hamas is meaningless because it grows a new head. There's a fair chance of cool heads prevailing, unfortunately. It's inevitable that there will be Hamas-like groups coming out of the Gaza Strip as long as the Gaza Strip is essentially ruled by Israel. But at the same time, that doesn't mean you don't go in there and try to kill those who murdered your people in southern Israel. You believe that punishment is a good thing in and of itself. Now, even if you believe punishment is a good thing in and of itself, that does not mean you should ignore what are the consequences of what you're doing. So the consequences of what you're doing is more pain and suffering for your side with no accompanying benefit than you need to rethink your strategy. So even if punishment is good in and of itself, it doesn't mean you automatically pursue it if the end result is bad for your team. Israel is led by a kleptocracy. Kleptocracy of grandiose malignum nostasis. And pecking criminals in mjord and fantasies. And they're led. So when my sister bought me this shirt and I started wearing it, I got so many compliments. I got so many compliments that I immediately went on to Amazon and I bought this shirt in other colors. So pretty much every time I wear a collared shirt, I'm wearing this type of shirt just in different colors. I've never gotten compliments on any other of my shirts. It's only this shirt and this color. I consistently get compliments for this shirt and this color. I never get compliments for any other color of this type of shirt. So the chat says, know that when Luke wears a blue shirt, it makes him appear more open and trustworthy. Know that he also knows this. But Benjamin Netanyahu, whose only priority is and always has been Benjamin Netanyahu. The political echelons in Israel are estranged from the people and much hated and resented. Israel is actually in the throes of a slow-motion, simmering, civil war. The military arm of... Well, right now Israel appears amazingly united. All right, say with Iran. Iran might look like it's in a slow-motion civil war, but if the U.S. was to directly attack Iran, Iran would suddenly become united. So when you attack a nation like Hamas did against Israel on October 7th, you simultaneously unite that nation. Hamas, on the other side of the equation, which we are talking now about, can we find any reasonable, rational, cool-headed person to stop this madness? Well, not on the Israeli side. What about Hamas? The military arm of Hamas is a fanatical and tyrannical death cult, death cult headed by arch psychopaths and serial killers who propagate their own brand over. Is it true that there's absolutely nobody in Israel who can lead the country in a positive direction? I find that hard to believe. I don't think that, you know, Israeli is just constitutionally incapable of finding a positive direction forward. Fake for Islam. One example, Sinwar. The political leadership is saner, but it is equally trapped in fantasies of revenge and restoration. Both sides live in fantasy land. Both sides have lost their reality testing. And yet, unlike Al Qaeda, unlike ISIS, and much like Hezbollah, Hamas is supported by 31 to 53% of the Palestinian population, who have little left to lose. Okay, that's a very interesting perspective. So unlike ISIS and unlike Al Qaeda, I had Hamas and Hezbollah enjoy significant popular support. I hadn't heard it phrased that clearly. If that's true, that's significant. Okay, so the type of shirt that I'm wearing is a Van Houston men's dress shirt fitted poplin solid. So I've got it in about 10 different colors. Additionally, both Hamas and Hezbollah are numerous, about 150,000 warriors, fighters combined. Both outfits are well-trained and well-equipped. I think that Hamas and Hezbollah combined are a definite match to the IDF's best. They're definitely going to give the Israeli Defense Forces a run for their money. It is therefore impossible to exterminate Hamas the way the West has dealt with ISIS, for instance, because ISIS had no support in the population. It imposed itself on the population. That's not the case with Hamas, which is essentially a grassroots operation. Many on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict now say that the only solution to the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a conflict that has been going on since 1882, by the way. So many voices in both camps are now saying that the only solution is ethnic cleansing. One of these two peoples has to ethnically cleanse the other. Either the Jews ethnically cleanse the Palestinians or the Palestinians ethnically cleanse the Israelis. So that sounds absolutely horrible, but it might also be true. A lot of absolutely horrible things are also true. There was a modern Orthodox professor in Israel who made an off-handed remark that the only way to stop terrorism would be to, as a matter of routine, find the relatives, the closest friends of terrorists and then rape them. And knowing that this would be the fate of your family and friends, that would be a significant deterrent to terrorists. Now, that professor was shamed and ostracized and condemned. It might be he also spoke the truth. So there are a lot of harsh, harsh, awful sounding truths in life. And it may be true that such a rape program is the only way to deter terrorists. I'm not saying it is, but I'm just saying it may be. And ethnic cleansing may be the only way to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. I'm not saying it is, but it may be. And if these things are true, then we should embrace truth in all its forms, even the ugly expression. Ladies, there's no other solution. So the revived idea of transfer on the Israeli side and Palestine from the river to the sea on the Arab side, these are the expressions, genocidal expressions of desperation. Because what have you? The two states solution is a pipe dream. It's totally non-implementable, deranged. Any name, just look at the map. There's no way to connect the West Bank with Gaza without dissecting and disemboweling Israel. Israel will never agree to this. There's 700,000 settlers in the West Bank. What are we going to do? What is Israel gonna do with them? Yes, there are dangerous truths. So there can be all sorts of truths that one should be perhaps very reluctant to say publicly. Also, depending upon your social position, the more prestigious your social position, all right, the more precarious, the more careful you have to be in what you say. So I agree with the chat, there are dangerous truths. And how can Israel safeguard against terrorism once these two parts have combined into a state? So the two state solution is again a pipe dream, an American pipe dream probably. The one state solution is of course totally untenable because if Israel were to agree to the incorporation of all Palestinians as equal citizens, it would cease to be Jewish. And if it would not agree to their incorporation, it would cease to be democratic. So it seems the only solution is to throw all the Jews to the sea as the Palestinians have been demanding since 1936, actually, or to transfer all the Palestinians to Jordan or a similar country as many Israelis have been suggesting since 1948. Both parties maintain maximal positions and victimhood grievances. Both parties insist on possessing 100% of the territory of Palestine or Israel depending which camp you belong to. And Curious Gazelle notes that Sam Backman is a self-confessed narcissist and a narcissist researcher, yes. So you can have personality disorders and still make contributions to public discourse. I certainly hope so, because I've got my share of personality disorders, more than my share of personality disorders. I sure like to hope that even in my highly flawed state that I can still make a contribution to public discourse. And currently Israel is poised to exact revenge on Gazelle's for the October 7th atrocities. It fervently wishes to destroy the Hamas. But even if implausibly Israel were to succeed, Hamas is the symptom. Hamas is not a disease. The disease is the Israeli occupation. Yes, Hamas is the symptom, but sometimes it's worth it just going after a symptom. If you've got a bad headache and a cup of coffee, cure is it. Or if you're having problem sleeping and say a gram of magnesium at night helps you to overcome this problem or a new pillow, helps you to overcome this problem. Yes, I totally agree that Hamas is the symptom more than the problem, but it is worth it many times to go after symptoms. Territories with millions of Palestinians. If he's really successful at eradicating Hamas, another Hamas will come forth. Without a doubt, right? If Israel eradicates Hamas, another Hamas-like organization will come about. That doesn't mean that it is useless eradicating Hamas. If you believe that punishment for bad behavior is in and of itself a good thing. Another resistance or terrorist organization will take its place. Hamas is a new phenomenon. It's been established in the 80s. It's an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It's been long preceded by the likes of Fatah and others. So it's just one in a long chain of organizations. The first one of which can be traced back to the 1930s. So the same applies to Hezbollah, of course, even more so. There's no way to eradicate the popular wish of the Palestinians is ratified in this organization. Okay, there does seem to be evidence that Hamas enjoys a great deal of support. But what is its overall standing with the Palestinian people? I also see a lot of polling evidence that overall in Gaza, Hamas has a much more negative reputation than positive. I suspect it's also true in Lebanon that Hezbollah overwhelmingly has a more negative reputation than positive. So both Hezbollah and Hamas enjoy significant support, but they enjoy also more than significant levels of opposition. Palestinians regard the Israelis as colonizing invaders, as the modern reincarnation of the crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries. So the Palestinians say, most Palestinians say that Israel has been created in sin, the sin of colonialism. Is there any nation that is not being created in sin? Probably, all right, Australia and New Zealand emerged out of the second enlightenment. They didn't have to fight a war for their own independence, but dozens upon dozens of nations have been created through conflict. Does this make them illegitimate? If so, there are probably 60, 80, 100 different nation states in the world that you'd have to say are illegitimate, including Pakistan, right? Pakistan emerged out of a civil war within India. So it's very common to have nations created in sin. And if you have, say, a classical Christian understanding that lust is sin, then almost every single human was created through lust, right? I suspect that most people are not thinking about God when they conceive their children. So it may well be that most nation states are conceived in sin, that 99% of human beings are conceived in sin. Does this make 99% of people and 80 different nation states illegitimate, simply because they were conceived in sin? I don't think so. Now, out of expediency, some Palestinians have accepted Israel's right to exist. But deep inside, they perceive this as a temporary pause in a war that may last for centuries and that will end inevitably with an Arab victory. Many people say that this is a religious war. It's partly true, the vast majority of operators. Now, will the Arab-Israeli conflict inevitably end in an Arab victory? Maybe because Israel only has to make a mistake once, right? It's such a tiny country with a literal strategic depth that it just takes one mistake. So imagine if you had to live your life where if you made one significant mistake, your life was over, right? You would not be expected to have a long lifespan. So this may well be correct. Obviously as a strong Zionist, I hope it's not true. Steris, activists, politicians, thinkers are Muslims. But there's been a hefty and consequential presence of Christian Arabs, especially among the terrorist groups in the 70s. So it wouldn't be 100% correct to cast it in terms of a religious conflict or a clash of civilizations. No, it's a simple war over resources. It's a conflict over territory. The Jews, the Israelis feel that they are with a back to the wall, having endured the Holocaust in Europe. They have nowhere to go, nowhere left to go. Israel is the lost stand. Israel is the modern Masada. And the Palestinians feel that it is unfair that they have been rendered in. And Curious Gazelle makes a great comment. Yes, but Sam Vakhton's narcissism is blinding him. He's acting like his proposal is brand new when they are a common, well-known existing strategy. Well, I mean, I'm sure my own narcissism blinds me. I get up and do all sorts of live streams where I probably contribute very little, if anything, to the public discourse, but I have an exaggerated sense of the importance of what I'm saying. I have an exaggerated sense of the profundity, the novelty of my own insights, right? I come to these live streams and I think that I've got something to do provocative important to say when it's very likely being said by 5,000 people wiser and smarter than me. So there is probably some level of narcissism in certain contexts, which is adaptive, right? It enables me to get up and do a live stream, convinced that I've got something important and valuable and beautiful and truthful to give to the world. And I am undoubtedly, frequently, usually, greatly exaggerating the novelty and profundity and beauty and truth of my own insights. I'm sure that's true for Sam Vakhton as well. I'm sure it's true for most live streamers. They're internally displaced, wrongly called refugees, by the way. Technically, they're not refugees. They're internally displaced. There have been some of them, not all of them. Some of them have been expelled from their own villages and have had to give up on their lands and houses. Others, left voluntarily, it's important to mention. I refer you to the Magisterial Works by Benny Morris. Israel is a paper tiger. And curious, Gazelle corrects me. She said, not true, look forward. Civil war led to the creation of Pakistan as a democratic vote. As a consequence of partition, violence did take place. Well, hundreds of thousands of people were killed as a result of the partition of Pakistan and India. So I'll just leave it at that. I'll take it for granted that you are accurate that the creation of Pakistan was the result of a democratic vote rather than a civil war. Maybe we're both true. Maybe there's both an element of civil war and a democratic vote. And they both had a profound impact on the creation of Pakistan. The Israeli defense force is in bad shape, having endured budget cuts and worse, internal strife between left and right, religious and secular. So I often have people ask me that you wish you had more viewers. Yes, I wish I had more viewers, but I'm not willing to sell out, generally speaking, to get more viewers. And I've experimented with that in the past, by giving people what they want, going for the easy, controversial, attention-grabbing, visceral type of streams filled with trash talking and blood sports. So the more visceral the debate, the more trash talking and blood sport on your channel, the more views you get. But the longer I've been doing this, the more I want to minimize the chances that what I say and do and offer and create and broadcast on this stream hurts people's lives, but it maximizes the opportunities that what I have to say, if it has any effect on someone, it's a positive effect and it's more difficult to create a widely watched stream that's good for you than a trashy stream that's bad for you. So what's the highest number of live viewers several times I've had around a thousand, including for the Jim Goad Saturday Night Massacre? It's in bad shape, similar to the Russian Army. These are paper types. Should Israel be confronted with aggression on several fronts? Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, Gaza, Israel will be defeated. It does not have the capacity to prevail. And the Americans are- Is that true? Right, is Israel as weak as he says? I suspect Israel's in a stronger position than this. But he's saying that, Sam Vakdon has said several times over the past six weeks that Israel cannot win a two front war, let alone a three front war. I suspect Israel could simultaneously defeat Hamas and Hezbollah. But maybe he's correct. Maybe the IDF is weaker, maybe Israel is weaker than I expected. I find this a provocative point of view here by Vakdon, which is why I'm playing it. It's something that I think about. It's an open question for me. Is Israel as weak as Sam Vakdon describes here? So we're aware of this fact. They are aware of Israel's frailty. And this is why the Americans are moving military assets, substantial military assets into this region, rather than, for example, into the South China Sea. Iran's potential involvement may lead to an escalation of this local conflict to a regional one akin to Vietnam. Both parties are committing war crimes against civilians habitually. Acts of terrorism, on the one hand, are met with acts of state terrorism. So neither side is a saint. There is a chance, but there is a chance that Israel's actions may force Hezbollah to get involved in Israel's disproportionate reactions to Hezbollah's initial measured provocations was unwise. The idea that this is the time to get rid of all of Israel's enemies is based on a delusional, fantastic, grandiose, inflated, extreme misperception of Israel. Wait, what if Israel can use this time to dramatically diminish Hezbollah, right? Is it really in Israel's best interest to live with Hezbollah? It's got something like 150,000 to 200,000 missiles aimed at Israel when this might be an opportunity to destroy Hezbollah. Israel's real power. I don't know what these political and military leaders are on, but whatever they're on, they should stop taking it because it is distorting seriously the judgments and ability to gauge reality properly. Syria may also support Hezbollah sporadically. So I often hear rhetoric that you can't negotiate with terrorists, you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists. I think Israel's probably doing the right thing here, negotiating the release of hostages in exchange for a ceasefire with Hamas. I mean, the most valuable deals you can make are with your keenest enemies. So yeah, there's a time and a place to negotiate with your enemy and to negotiate with terrorists. And this is, seems to me, an adaptive negotiation with terrorists as Israel, you know, reaches some kind of a chord here with the Maas via Qatar. As mine, the Iran-backed militias there and in Iraq. I personally doubt that this conflict will involve any other actors. The Palestinians have alienated literally all their supporters over the years. Quite a feat, if you ask me. The Palestinians... Yeah, that's an interesting point. I mean, the Palestinians have overwhelmingly alienated all their potential backers. And so this conflict may not escalate, right? I mean, Egypt and Saudi Arabia probably hate Hamas and have contempt for Gazans more than Israel does. India is a political, diplomatic and military offense. There are pawns in the hands of the likes of Qatar or Israel or Iran. But luckily for Hamas, it's conflict with Israel is just the latest piece in a much bigger political realignment. With China's acquiescence and then with China's help, directly and indirectly through North Korea, Russia has transformed its invasion of Ukraine into a proxy war with the West. And this led to an escalation in conflicts along the fault lines between East and West all over the world, including the Middle East and of course, shortly Taiwan. We are in the throes of a global reordering of power. Similar to the period in the 1950s and 1960s when the West tried to contain both the USSR and communist China. But now the United States is a much diminished and spent force. It is polarized. Its democracy is threatened from within. It doesn't even have a regular budget, only stock gap ones. The USA can scarcely provide military aid to more than two allies or proxies at any given time. So is this true? This is a trope I constantly hear among pundits that the West is an unreliable ally as opposed to whom? As opposed to Russia, as opposed to China, as opposed to Guatemala or Canada or Mexico or Pakistan, like who's a more reliable ally? I mean betrayal, the experience of betrayal is inevitable in all relationships, including international ones between nation states. As soon as you form any connection, whether it's with another individual or one state with another state, you then generate fantasies about the other party and their priorities, fantasies that will inevitably be dashed. It's built into the human condition to imagine that the world and other people and that oneself is more stable than we really are. So to reduce our anxiety, we believe all sorts of things that are not true, such as the world is a much safer place than it really is, that our friends are better people than they really are, that we are more reliable than we really are. We like to believe that there's an essential nature to ourselves and to others, that there's a true self. When in reality we're all different in different circumstances, often the situation will have much more influence on our behavior than our supposedly innate personality. We will always tend to explain away our friends' bad behavior and our own bad behavior as being not truly reflective of who we really are. We all tend to be quite quick to make excuses for ourselves and for our friends to avoid having to change our minds because changing our minds is embarrassing and taxing. So betrayal is simply the hyperbolic term that we give to others having different priorities for what we expected. If your best friend sleeps with your wife, you may well call that a betrayal of your friendship, but for your friend, he was not primarily betraying your friendship in all likelihood, in all likelihood he was placing his relationship with your wife as a higher priority, as a higher level of importance for him than his relationship with you. His priorities were different from what you expected. You can knock yourself out at work, you can do the work of three men and then you might get fired because in the process of trying to accomplish so much, in the process of your zeal for productivity, you may not have crossed all the T's and dotted all the I's and your employer may decide as a result that wants to get rid of you and you feel betrayed because your employer has different priorities than what you expected. So the United States is changing its relationship with Ukraine and Israel. This is widely reported over the past few weeks that the U.S. is becoming less supportive of Ukraine and Israel. If true, this is not primarily an indictment of the fickleness of America or the fickleness of the West. It's simply a painful acknowledgement of reality that previous levels of American support for these countries was not aligned with America's best interests, right? When America withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in August of 2021, it looked bad, but it's still probably in America's best interests, right? There are many times in life when it's best to leave in a shambolic way than to try to hang around and preserve your dignity, right? America's influence does not ultimately depend upon appearances rather America's influence springs from America's military and economic might. So I think the Biden administration has been absolutely reckless by vastly increasing our chances of getting into war with Russia, war with Iran and war with China, right? But even the Biden administration and its voluminous support for Ukraine is seeking to dial that back in the face of harsh reality. Joe Biden has long been a very strong supporter of Israel, but now circumstances are changing so that he has to recalibrate and re-adapt that. So I don't agree with Sam Vakhtin here that the West is a particularly fickle ally. I think everybody has to constantly reassess their priorities when circumstances change, right? When we are in a different situation, we behave differently. NATO is underfunded and under-trained. As Ukraine and Israel, I'm gonna find out very soon the West is not a reliable or long-term ally. The axis of resistance, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Hamas, the axis of resistance is becoming aware of the fact that the West is not what it used to be, that it is a facade, a Potemkin force, power. In any fight, in this fight between West and East, taking place on multiple fronts all over the world is the only thing that is still sustaining phenomena such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The emergence of the BRICS, a group of countries, BRICS used to be China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil. Now they've invited Iran to join, imagine, to slap the face of the United States. So, exactly as the United States will not let Israel fall, the axis of resistance, backed by the likes of China and Russia and so, will not let its own soldiers, Hamas, Hezbollah, it will not let them fall. This is a war by proxy. And Israel found itself, perhaps, for the first time in its existence, a total, unmitigated, utter pawn in a chess game, not able in effect to influence its fate and destiny, not able to make independent decisions, almost at all. Okay, I enjoyed the provocation of that Sam Backman video. And looking at the chat, Curious Gazelle says, Luke, you aren't a narcissist. Come off it, the only narcissist you've demonstrated using a personal analogy to defend others. A true narcissist would defend oneself using an analogy to others. If they can do it, why can't I? So, for most people, including myself, narcissism is a state more than a condition. Dr. Craig Malcolm from Harvard Medical School said that. I really like it. All right, there are certain states that I get into where I'm just particularly needy of admiration and, you know, come look at me, listen to me, pay attention to me. And for most people, that's what narcissism is. It is a state, it is a state in a particular circumstance. It's not their overall condition. So, if you have a narcissistic response to certain conditions, all right, you want people to look at you, such as when you're doing a live stream, that's probably a healthy adaptive response to reality. If you're doing mundane work and you really need people to pay attention and praise your mundane work, then that would be a maladaptive expression, narcissism. So, I've had the painful experience often of breaking into conversations where I was not wanted. They didn't want me around and they didn't want me interrupting or interjecting or ejaculating into their conversation. And so, to the extent that I was driven by narcissism, that was maladaptive. Maybe it was my ADHD and verbal impulsivity, but for me, it's one of the most sickening feelings to realize that I have ejaculated into a conversation where my ejaculations are not considered worthy, where people don't want me to ejaculate my thoughts all over them, all right? That is like, oh no, I just hate that feeling where I've interposed myself into a conversation where I'm not wanted. It's just like, how could it be that needy? How could it be that socially maladroit? It's like, oh, it's such an icky feeling. It's like, when you ask out a girl who's never shown any interest in you and she just immediately rejects you, right? The why is the thing is to see if, you know, she has any interest in you. She's displayed what is in IOI's indicators of interest. Does she ask you questions beyond what is polite and ordinary? Does she touch you when she speaks to you? Does she angle away from other people towards you? Does she crimp when she's listening to you? Does she, you know, apply makeup or crimp with her hair, right? Is she touching you unnecessarily? All right, if she's showing some indicators of interest, then it's worth trying to escalate this situation. But if people don't want you and you're interposing yourself all over them, that's just humiliation. It just feels absolutely awful. And let's have a look at the chat. Curious Gazelle says, the global sympathies toward the Palestinians are coming from universal leftists. If you negotiate with Hamas, no longer will be criticized by the international left. And Curious says, a two-state solution could be manifested. Gaza could be the Palestinian state run by rich Sharia compliant leaders. Crash says, US-Ukraine proves that Europe must develop its own strategic initiative. Curious says, the IDF Israel establishment stuck in Iraq, convincing them to shake hands with Hamas for a long-term goal would be hard short-termism is the bane of all things. So I read an article in the Washington Post, yesterday that blew my mind. Now, I'm a strong Zionist, right? I believe very strongly in the right of Jews to a Jewish state in their historical homeland. And one of the major talking points that I've heard from my side is that the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, is a particularly righteous defense force. And one example of this is that they rarely rape. But then in this Washington Post article, I read yesterday, apparently prior to the October 7, Hamas attack on Southern Israel, Palestinians have rarely raped Israelis. I didn't know that. So here's the Washington Post article. So some forces in the Middle East, including those of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State have used systematic rape as a weapon, Islamic State means ISIS. But many armed groups consider the act taboo even in war. The practice has never been used systematically in the Arab-Palestinian conflict according to experts. Did you know that? I would have expected both sides to have raped. Many pundits routinely proclaim the non-rapey nature of the IDF, but I don't recall any of these pundits noting the Palestinians have largely abstained from this behavior as well in their battle against Israel. And when I mentioned this to my Zionist friends, they tend to angrily deny this, that Palestinians have also rarely committed rape against Israeli. So Sam Vaknen claims that the Hamas fighters who attacked Israel on October 7th were highly disciplined and that the atrocities and the rapes were not committed by Hamas soldiers. Instead, they were committed by the Ghazans who just followed Hamas into southern Israel and then went on to rape and commit torture. So my intuition says that higher IQ people are more capable of empathy because empathy is a form of abstract thought. IQ essentially measures your capacity for abstract thought. So while not all high IQ people are empathic, they just have a greater capacity for empathy. And when you've got a large enough group of people with the advanced capacity for empathy, I would expect more of them to engage in empathic behavior than low IQ groups who have less capacity for abstract thought, including less capacity for empathy. So I would expect on average, higher IQ groups will be less likely to commit rape than lower IQ groups. That's my bet. Tucker Carlson is still producing some good shows. Tucker Carlson may well be an essential part of a balanced media diet. Now, I have tons of criticism of Tucker Carlson. I think half the stuff he does is crap. I think he often pushes things that is just simply not true. But I agree with many of the criticisms of Tucker Carlson by his critics. I just read Brian Stelter's new book about Tucker Carlson in Fox News. It's called A Network of Lies. And Brian Stelter has 70 odd, very accurate criticisms of Tucker Carlson, which I think are fair and important. Tucker Carlson is a demagogue, but he's highly entertaining, highly amusing, and he also makes some important points. And this is a recent Tucker Carlson show with Glenn Greenwald. And there's some really good material in there. Two defining tragedies of our age, the war on Ukraine and the presidency of Joe Biden, are finally both inevitably coming to an end. Both have outlived their usefulness. To assess what this means for the rest of us, and who should be taking a victory lap, Glenn Greenwald, host of System Update on Rumble, joins us now. Glenn, thanks a lot for coming on. So the war on Ukraine, which some have pointed out for nearly two years now, was never going to be won by Ukraine, since Russia is a population of over 100 million more people, is finally, apparently, headed for peace talks. NATO seems to have acknowledged that this is not actually going to work. What do you make of that? I think it's important to go back in, remember what was said at the beginning, the propagandistic framework, not to take credit or assign blame, but to realize how often we're deceived by exactly the same emotionally manipulative tactics. We were told by the people who wanted the US involved in this war, not just involved in it, but to fuel it, to prevent diplomatic negotiations from taking place with the possibility of ending the war very early on. We were told by those people that they were so concerned about Ukrainians and so concerned about Ukraine that the United States had to send tens of billions of dollars over there in all sorts of weaponry and flood the country with arms in order to protect Ukrainians. And anybody, like the two of us and other people, who stood up and said, this isn't a good idea, this is going to be counterproductive, we were accused of not caring about the Ukrainians, of cheering for the Russians. When none of that was true, all along the point was that there was no way Ukraine could possibly win a war against Russia, a country way larger with a much better military, even if NATO is behind it. The only thing that is going to happen is that this war will be prolonged. Huge numbers of young Ukrainians and then older Ukrainians, not people who volunteered, but who are conscripts, the Lenskiy has been... So I think I agree 100% with the ideas expressed in this discussion between Tucker and Glenn. And fighting with the conscript army since the beginning are going to die. And at the end, there's going to be a negotiation that says that Russia will end up being able to protect the part of Eastern Ukraine that believes had people in it who are largely Russian, Russian speaking, ethnic Russians, who are being oppressed by Kiev. They will keep Crimea. There's no way for these maximalist war aims ever to be achieved. And now here we are two years later, in part because the West is just tired of funding this war, the counteroffensive that we were all told would change everything was a tremendous disaster. They barely have any people left to fight. They're now dragging 45 and 50-year-olds off buses and sending them to the front. And the United States has a brand new word that it seems more excited over. And now they're finally telling the Ukrainians, and so is NATO, look, the gig is up. It's time for you to sit down at the negotiating table and we're now in a position where NATO has to beg Russia to be happy to keep 20% of Ukraine, which is what they've controlled pretty much without any change for the last year or even year and a half as tens of billions of dollars were wasted and thousands upon thousands of lives were extinguished. And I would argue it's even worse than that since the Biden administration and our European allies provoked this war on purpose. They've known for 20 years that the red line for Russia was NATO expansion onto its borders. And they sent the vice president, Kamel Harris, to the Munich Security Conference two Februarys ago to tell Zelensky we want you and NATO knowing that this would provoke a war. I mean, I don't see any other way to read it. Yeah, I mean, this idea that if you talk openly about providing a security relationship with Kiev or especially talk openly about allowing NATO to go right up to the most sensitive part of the Russian border by including Ukraine in the alliance, the idea that would provoke an automatic war with Russia between Russia and Ukraine is something that Washington has known for decades. There's a famous memo in 2008 written by the current head of the CIA, Bill Burns, who wrote to Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials who at the time were excited about expanding NATO eastward about putting Ukraine in NATO. And he said, look, it's not just Putin. It's every single person in Moscow. Even the people who hate Putin, all Russians are united around the idea that any attempt to put Ukraine into NATO is an existential threat to Russia. And they will have no choice but to invade Ukraine if we try. And they knew that. Yeah, this is a point made most eloquently and originally by John Mirsheimer and completely agree here with Len Greenwald's analysis. All right, interesting story out of the University of Southern California here. So here's the headline. Jewish professor at USC criticized Hamas while confronting pro-Palestinian students. He's now barred from campus. So until recently, USC professor John Strauss was mostly known for his research on the economics of developing countries with decades of fieldwork in Indonesia and China. That changed November 9 when John Strauss stopped before students staging a walkout and a protest calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, hoarding a memorial to thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israel-Hamas War. The economic professor's interactions with students that day ended with the 72-year-old Strauss who is Jewish declaring Hamas are murderers. That's all they are. Everyone should be killed, and I hope they all are killed. And for that, he's been banned from the USC campus, has to conduct all of his classes by Zoom. I don't see anything reprehensible about those comments. What is so awful about wishing that every member of a terrorist organization is killed? After 9-11, would it be considered Hamas for Americans to say, I want every single member of Al Qaeda dead? I don't see a problem in that remark. Now, the more prestigious your position, such as university professor, that's a highly prestigious position, all right, the more vulnerable you are to cancellation. If he'd been a plumber or a landscaper or an independent businessman, he wouldn't be as vulnerable. So I think his comments were ill-advised. I don't think it's a good idea to get into arguments with people on the Middle East when you're walking around on a college campus, particularly when you're a professor there. I think you should get into arguments in your workplace about hot-button issues. So I think his words were ill-advised, but completely defensible, right? I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with wishing for the deaths of all members of a terrorist organization. I think it's outrageous that he's been banned from USC, but you can be 100% right and still be ill-advised, all right, there's a basic California driving law, don't be dead right. So you can have the right of way, but sometimes if you insist on having the right of way, you and other people will end up dead. I remember once I was listening to pop music, maybe as the fourth of my ADHD, I was having such a good time, loudly listening to the music in my car that I went through a red light at about 70 miles an hour and there were all these cars lined up to turn in front of me from the freeway in the state 80, to turn on to Rockland Road, I think it was. But luckily they did not insist on being dead right because if they turned out in front of me and I was barreling down at 70 miles an hour, now I could have killed a whole bunch of people, including myself. So insisting on being dead right is a really bad idea, but his point just strikes me as completely defensible. Oops. Okay, here we go. And they ignored those threats and I absolutely think, Tucker, that one of the things that is I think the greatest fraud of this war is that the people who kept claiming they were so concerned about Ukrainians were in fact totally indifferent to the Ukrainians. They were willing to sacrifice Ukrainians and Ukraine at the altar of getting back at Russia. I think in large part because they wanted to extract vengeance against Russia for what they perceived to be Russia's role in helping Donald Trump win the 2016 election and causing Hillary Clinton to lose and they were willing to sacrifice an entire country and to wipe out tens of thousands of lives of young people who didn't want to fight in order to fulfill their political goal of extracting vengeance against Russia, weakening Russia. And they kept saying for the last several months as American support for this war is eroding. Oh, look at how great this war is. We don't have to lose any of our lives. We're just having Ukrainians die and we're just spending a bunch of money but Americans are dying, only Ukrainians for this goal of weakening Russia. They were the ones who didn't care about the Ukrainians. They saw Ukrainians as pawns that they were willing to sacrifice and that's exactly what they did. It's really obscene. This is almost rhetorical question but isn't this the point in the story where we pause and the people who behaved in the way you just described which is grotesque, where they apologize for what they did and apologize to the people they maligned by calling them Putin apologists or tools of the Kremlin or disloyal Americans. Isn't that kind of a necessary step?