 Get out of May 40 here, and I have an exciting Moral crusade for you. It's not gonna actually make much difference in the real world But you're gonna feel great and isn't that what's important, right? We're all about the feels but first of all I exciting news just bought a new Nerellco electric shaver. So I spent about $40 and Pretty good close shave wouldn't wouldn't you say it's a kosher electric shaver So you're not allowed to use a razor according to the Torah, but you can use the Nerellco shavers There are kosher electric shavers. So I just got this for 40 bucks about 90 95% effective there are a little white hairs that it's not quite picking up, but That's what I got. So this is the Nerellco. I bought nine years ago So so I'd say this because I never got it sharpened I'd say this is you know 300 times more effective than what I've been using So you get you get the pleasure of seeing this fresh face here and then even more exciting news for me You wouldn't believe what I found on Amazon.com. These are so delicious not harvest not add chocolate All right, it's oh you it's it's kosher. It's certified by the Orthodox Union. It's got peanuts chocolates raisins almonds and cashews not and chocolate This is so delicious and I found this for the dick ridiculously low price of like $3.70 on Amazon fresh So I bought like 10 of these because I can get like 10 meals out of this So normally I spend about five six seven dollars a meal But with not in the harvest not in chocolate on Amazon fresh. I'm spending I'm spending about 40 cents a meal All I need is a little almond milk to wash it down but I mean it's so delicious and So three tablespoons a hundred fifty calories. So I get a meal with one cup So I am fueled. I am doing this show With this one cup of nut chocolate and so here's what it provides with with three tablespoons 150 calories, so I assume with with one cup that that's about what a thousand calories and as I'm walking or Running my bike about 10 miles a day. So I'm burning up the calories. So three tablespoons you get 10 grams of fat you get 12 grams of carbs and You get four grams of protein. So All I know is I feel great after I eat my nut chocolate prop Amazon. I can't believe just Just $3.70. I mean this is unbelievable because normally when you when you buy this on Amazon is between 15 and $20 I'm getting these for $3.70. It's it's amazing Okay, great great exciting moral crusade for you. I've been reading a lot of books this week And I think my favorite book this week is of the last utopia human rights in history by this left-wing Yale historian of the law named Samuel Moyn and Just a lot of insights into this book on things I didn't know before such as that Why we got this explosion of human rights in the late 1970s There was prior to that very little discussion of human rights the the rights of man that we got at the end of the 18th century With the American French revolutions this was With regard to rights that are secured by a nation-state, but human rights Things that are extolled up and above nation-states that nation-states are judged on the basis of their ability to Secure and to provide our human rights. Here is this author is named semi as Ben said it's a tough transition, but I'm gonna Ask what the problem is with human rights what progressives or socialists should think about them and As he said I'm I'm gonna suggest they're good things, but not good enough not enough on their own So let me start in the past since I'm basically a historian with the beginning of the human rights phenomenon and movement as we know it which occurred in the 1970s and I like to start with a speech that a Czech dissident Named Dana Tominova gave She was born in Prague and she grew up as a child under the new communist regime starting in in the mid 40s and yet she became a dissident and indeed she helped co-found Really the the one of the most famous new human rights outfits of the 19 Okay, so why have we had this explosion in human rights? and Insights that I would not have had this author points out that the human rights crusade merged out of the distrust of utopia Together with the desire to have one anyway So the human rights crusade emerged out of the failures of all the other utopias such as anti colonialism Marxism all that good stuff like all the other utopias and pretty much all utopias are on the left they all failed and human beings have a desire for utopia and people on the right are more often Religious and so they get their utopian desires met in in their religion So every religion has is filled with utopias But what do people who are secular on the left do they need a utopia? But they recognize belatedly that all attempts at achieving utopia in this world have failed miserably so The smarter ones realize we can't trust utopias anymore, but we desire to have one anyway right, so You have groups like amnesty international which emerged out of a connection with British intelligence in the 1960s and Also out of Christian responses to the Cold War and then it made this slow awkward transformation into being a celebrated human rights Organization so it's founder was Peter Benenson who had all these ties to British intelligence and He improvised this path along with all the Christian peace movements because why did he do this? He wanted to provide a new outlet for idealists disappointed by Cold War stalemate So it's not It's not really about making a difference in this world. It's not really about making this world a better place It's not really about being effective It's about providing an outlet for idealists very much like this show So the rest of your life may be disappointing But you can come onto this show and in the chat you can idealize or you like so the whole Point of the human rights crusade in amnesty international is to provide an outlet for idealists disappointed by Cold War stalemate by the failures of socialism and communism and anti-colonialism After the failure of all these left-wing utopian experiments Okay, here's an outlet here is something you can get excited about here is something that you can wrap yourself in So politics has let you down so you can wrap yourself in the moral And it's really easy to do so so the whole This is this is what Benenson said in 1961 that the underlying purpose of this campaign Which I he says I never gets published is to find a common base from which the idealists of the world can cooperate So that's what human rights are all about It's a common place where all the idealists of the world can cooperate people who are disappointed by politics And so they can embrace the moral But it is designed in particular to absorb the latent enthusiasm of great numbers of such idealists who have since the eclipse of socialism Become increasingly frustrated Similarly, it is geared to appeal to the young Searching for an ideal. Okay, my mic is scratchy. Sorry about that In 70s that was invoking that concept She Suffered for it. She had her head smashed into the pavement By secret police and as a result She was invited by the regime to take a vacation that later became permanent and at that time around 1980 She gave a talk in Dublin and she surprised her listeners there because She Didn't denounce Communism exactly and definitely not socialism She said that it was terrible that A socialism had become an alibi for the denial of some basic human rights like the right to free speak speak freely and and organize But she also recalled what It had meant to be taken beyond a class society in her childhood of the 1940s and in particular to feel what it was like to Uh have the same privileges as everyone else No more than anyone else, but also okay, let's uh, let's see how I do now with uh, just a few adjustments to my audience setup okay, so Whole purpose of the human rights crusade is to provide a place for idealists who have otherwise been frustrated particularly the young searching for an ideal and so mnc international The the whole outlet that mnc international would provide according to its founder was to a home for idealists and Its effects on victims unimportant Unimportant the actual effect on the victims Is unimportant wow So he said it matters more to harness the enthusiasm of the helpers right much more important than making a difference in the real world The real martyrs prefer to suffer And as I would add the real saints are no worse off in prison than anywhere on this earth So what's happening in the real world not particularly important But at least it provides an outlet for idealists and I think this is a great insight into a lot of political activism And social activism it's not really and religious activism is not really about making a difference in this world. It's about Doing something that makes me feel amazing. So think about many of the people in the american foreign service Many americans who go into diplomacy Right for them to feel important Right it helps to have an activist america that's just Poking its beak, you know all over god's green acre. That's very exciting. That makes them feel important That gives them a you know raison d'etre to get up in the morning But not necessarily in the best interests of the united states so Number one the whole point of the human rights crusade is not to make a difference in the real world It's not to make a difference on the ground. It's not part of some larger process of constructing international laws or international norms What human rights crusades do first of all and primarily and what they do best is to give meaning To engaged lives to give a home to idealists Right and chat says luke tied this into status So yeah people want status and so being in the foreign service and intervening all over god's green acre That can be a source of status Being a human rights campaigner among many groups is a source of status so Not a lot required to become a human rights campaigner Right its minimalism was its enabling condition And its source of power was that all the other post 1960s alternatives were dying So there was this woman gerry labor who would go on to found hell sinky later human rights watch But she recorded in the early 1970s. She never heard the phrase human rights She was trained in russian studies But it was not soviet activism that hooked her but a searing december 1973 new republic essay Written by amnesty international activist on the renaissance of torture around the world It led her to want to do something about it now Did she actually do something about it and make a practical difference in the real world? No, but really She had been a part-time food writer for the new york times So now she placed an op-ed in the new york times based on amnesty international information And she found a successful formula which she noted in her memoir always helps to have a formula So I have a formula. I wait until I get excited about something All right, it takes a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm To to do a stream it takes even more energy and more enthusiasm that may come to me naturally to do a good stream so prior to doing this stream I was out on a walk I was listening to the last part of the new book aftermath about Germany in the 10 years after world war two and as I was listening to the book I suddenly got excited about ideas. I thought I'll do a show and I want to when I share some some of these thoughts And so that's my formula. Usually I wait until I'm excited about something and then I also have backed up Copyright-free talks usually by academics in the background that I can play if my might get scratchy or I get tired Or I need to play off something and I don't have a guest Then then I have a formula for doing the show and people in human rights activism. They have a formula too So she began with a detailed description of a horrible form of torture Then she explained where it was happening Then she explained the political context in which it occurred And then she ends with a plea to show the offending government that the world is watching But that's the formula for human rights activism So if human rights made any historical difference It was in their competitive survival as a motivating ideology, right in the confusing tumult of the 1960s 1970s Have all these left-wing utopian social movements and all the others pretty much fail All the others become an embarrassment And so There's this widespread desire in the human heart for utopia people on the right tend to get it in religion people on the left Need some sort of secular cause So this is a desire to drop utopia and have one anyway It is the substitution of a plausible form of morality for failed politics So today it seems self-evident that the whole purpose of international law Is to protect individual human rights but Prior to the 1970s that was not much of a concern in international law. It was absent from The concerns of people practicing international law So now post the 1970s post the human rights revolution It's no longer the laws of nations. It's no longer really international law as traditionally conceived That has their attention. It is the law of human rights It's one of the most striking transformations in modern law and legal history And it really only began in the late 1970s while the international law part only began in the 1990s So nothing in the prehistory of international law through world war two up through the 1970 provides a ground For this development of making its primary focus human rights So there would be no way to believe or even to guess in 1975 that human rights would become the touchstone of international law So this development did not draw from the humane spirit of our american founder centuries ago Did not develop out of a recoil against the holocaust or other war atrocities human rights for international law Lawyers are rooted in a startling in recent departure. Here's an opportunity for status is an opportunity to Reach for utopia Without getting embarrassed And another fascinating testament to the breakthrough of human rights is the response of philosophers. So philosophers don't tend to base their work on The The developments of other disciplines philosophers tend to base their work on a feeling and then they reason About their feelings that they have so philosophers that usually philosophers and ethicists are usually lost to the game So philosophers They were initially confused by this new development of human rights and And then they just assimilated them to their natural law natural rights principles that that they revived and they just called them human rights, but natural law and The rights of man prior to the 1970s. This was conceived as something that can really only be brought about by a nation state and still to this day human rights really in Meaning in daily life or only something can be brought about by the nation state But the human rights movement sets up human rights up Against the nation state and judges nation states of their abilities or lack thereof to fulfill Ever-changing notions of human rights. So I know you love Samuel Moyn. No fewer She was an illusioned about what communist rule was like, but She said it would also be terrible if we let the idea of human rights Replace socialism and become a kind of alibi for the abandonment Of socialism and especially the redistribution of income and wealth and all the good things that we get from having them Well that Hope that she expressed that we could get human rights and socialism together Now that there was a movement trans-nationally defending human rights is not what happened In fact, if you look at just the history of language, okay, let's have a look at the chat Look tie this into status Right status is the highest status form of pronouncing status Left wingers love to intellectualize why their core political beliefs always fail. Well, I think we all intellectualize why our core beliefs fail I don't think it's more prevalent on the left So they take backhanded compliments as religion provides utopianism and community It is a cope and a cognitive dissonance. Well, you could say the same thing about religion or many other movements You still get to feel supercilious even though you're wrong. Well, everybody not just people on the left We're all built to find ways that we can favorably compare ourselves to others Now you could look at my life objectively and you'd say look in the following seven Key ways you are failing your peers But my mind works in ways that I keep Keep rotating in my mind until I can find an angle a perspective by which I'm better than my peers That's just part of the human condition. Now This this need to feel superior to everyone else can be stronger or weaker So if basically if you're connected with other people Then your need to feel superior to them I think will be diminished compared to if you're largely isolated and failing and humbled and humiliated by life Then you will have a much greater necessity for coping With your failures. And so you'll have a much more extreme need to Think yourself superior. You'll be much more vulnerable to believing in superstitions conspiracy theories Because you're failing at human connection. You'll have to intellectualize a meaning in life And you'll be coming to it from a place of desperation, which will not usually lead to Good results Let's send all human rights activists to mars to bless those bigoted Martians with progress Human rights is another form of environmental utopianism We need some chat heckling to get back in the groove of live streaming has fallen upon me to do the mitzvah At the chart, I want to show you you have to imagine this check dissident saying basically oh shit Just when she was speaking the idea of socialism in language in english But google allows us to check all languages or at least a lot of them That idea of socialism was peaking now All that means is that people were saying the word way more often than ever before and now even They could have been for against it, but socialism the word was was was prominent in language human rights So remember about a year ago. I was doing all these videos about hans fryer Because he had a trajectory that was incredibly typical of 20th century german intellectuals So like car schmidt, he grew up religious Except that hans fryer. I believe grew up in a protestant home Then he went to university still believing in god But after a year in university, he stopped believing in god and he needed a substitute. So he looked for Substitute for guiding historiography the story of history And so he developed philosophies about the stories of history and German and french intellectuals they tend to generalize from the the general to the specific so They tend to engage in deductive reasoning So french and german intellectuals come up with a ton more theories than anglo intellectuals Anglos tend to engage in inductive reasoning from the specific to the general so in a typical Paper by some french or german intellectual they'll present some grand theory and then they'll provide some Examples of evidence pointing towards their theory in a typical anglo paper They will provide example after example after example after example after example and then very tentatively and In very few words, you know start to inch towards a possible theory So hans fryer grew up religious. I believe a protestant in germany went to University lost his faith replaced it with A faith in history that history was unfolding in certain ways He became quite close to national socialism Then when the national socialist finally took power he fell out with national socialism after world war two The only jobs really available for him were at christian printing presses. And so he kind of Came up with did he abandon this deductive, you know grand theory approach to his scholarship? No, he then came out with new grand theories kind of rooting the european experience in christianity So this is a common Common journey. I think karsh mitz said that the the 15th and 16th centuries Maybe into the 17th century were ages of religion the 18th century the age of theism or deism 19th century the age of Lazy fair economics and 20th century 19th and 20th centuries of the ages of nationalism So the meaning that many people used to get from religion They now get often from national identity Had never been And yet at that very moment when she spoke socialism was about to tank and human rights was about to skyrocket And my generation since i'm assuming that most listeners are much younger than me really surfed on that way Of enthusiasm for human rights talking a lot about them and a lot more about human rights than about socialism And that change as you see occurred in in the 1970s. Um, so why did that happen? I mean not to basically what I want to ask and give you some ideas It's a complicated a story, but I think it was a loss now that that data I showed you only goes up to around 2008 And we know that a lot this guy's a socialist that that That doesn't kind of reflect what's happening in our time with bernie and basker and all the rest who have made socialism Something live again. It wasn't in my youth And it's an extraordinary thing and yet I think we can say that We're still living in a kind of age of human rights where lots of people focus their reform aspirations and energies if they mobilize Around some set of basic rights, which they define in some way or other So i'm going to tell a little story about what happened in that recent period But we should obviously acknowledge that even if that phrased human rights Really were some of the only people who use it in kind of the broad sweep of of history the idea of rights is old You know what we say about human rights depends has to depend on how we define that idea What content we give it? At the very least we would say that there's a very old idea that individuals Because they're human have some non-negotiable entitlements that their community and state can't right so you can find this in the Torah and you can find this in The declaration of independence, but again, these are always rights that are contingent favorite academic word and a favorite word of mind Upon a particular people. So there are two Common approaches to understanding rights One approach is the classical liberal approach that we're born with certain inalienable rights Which you hear that language in Declaration of Independence And then there's the national approach that says whatever rights that we have or born with Entirely dependent upon the state of the nation the circumstances that you're living in And whatever rights that the nation can afford to you So one is an individualist approach that individuals are born with certain inalienable rights The other is a national approach a tribal approach a group Approach and so I think it's much more useful to look at people as being born into a tribe or a nation And then their rights will depend upon the circumstances of that nation. So for example, many of the rights that we've taken for granted Or disappeared during during covid right because rights like everything else are contingent And wokeism that is also contingent, right? You may think that, you know, your friend Schmorel is woke or your friend, uh, rachel is is woke And that just defines them but wokeism like many things else is dependent on context so you could have looked at, uh, europe as being incredibly woke and, uh, crazed about green energy and unable to meet their energy needs, uh, through Through their green energy schemes And now you see europe turning away from the woke approach to energy and becoming incredibly pragmatic They're extending the life of nuclear power plants in germany. They are looking to import a lot more coal they are you know looking to fossil fuels to meet their Emergency energy needs now that they're no longer going to be getting liquid natural gas Or getting it in as many much quantity as they expected from from russia You change the situation and the wokeism with regard to the european approach to energy just drops off And it's that way for many many people you may think your neighbors work But in la there's a substantial recall against the uh, george soros backed, uh left-wing district attorney gas gone And this recall is being led by hollywood and you think oh hollywood is work. Yeah, but even work people don't want to be inundated by rising crime rates and astronomical rates of homelessness and seeing people you know get away with abhorrent behavior So many people who are who are liberal are supporting and funding this recall against the district attorney So they were woke until circumstances changed right the district attorney was elected Then came the summer of george floyd then came the the massive increase in Crime rates and so many people who are quite liberal and left-wing with regard to crime have now changed due to circumstances And so in england between world war one and world war two There was a discussion at oxford university Would you be willing to sacrifice your life to save or to fight for your country and many of the The leading english intellectuals at oxford university voted no But when the time came when the second world war rolled around they awoke from their woke utopia And they went to war and they fought and they died so You may think of yourself as shy and introverted, but in certain situations you you could be extroverted and outgoing And I may think of myself as extroverted, but when i'm lacking in confidence or in certain awkward situations, i'm introverted You may think of yourself as an honest person But there are going to be lots of situations where you're going to be downright dishonest You may think of yourself as kind and considerate, but there will be lots of circumstances where you'll be No harsh and selfish. So there are no global moral traits The most that you can say That morals tend to be domain specific. So maybe with regard to your taxes, you're consistently honest Maybe with regard to business, you're consistently honest Maybe with regard to sexual fidelity, you're consistently honest But even if those are all true, there are going to be other domains of your life where you're not so honest And so too with political stances, you may be for less government or you may be for, you know, a left-wing work approach Whatever your type of politics when the circumstances change or when you change Then your political inclinations will often shift along With the change in circumstance. Okay. What are the implications for taiwan? For from this invasion of the ukraine So number one the big difference is that taiwan is 100 miles away from china so Sending sending troops on ships to invade a place is very challenging and 100 miles is a long way the us is committed To defending taiwan. There isn't really the strategic ambiguity We are committed to defending taiwan. And so it would take several hours for chinese troops to cross the 100 miles of open ocean to get to taiwan and They would be highly vulnerable to american planes and missiles and planes and missiles coming from taiwan So that's a big big difference. I don't think china is capable of invading taiwan right now. Also Chairman she has a big conference where he wants to be re-elected. And so he's not going to risk that But maybe later this decade i've heard i've heard what peter zion say probably at one in three chance That china may try to distract from its problems by invading taiwan So here's steven cocken talking with peter robinson at river institute steven china Let me an event and then a quotation. Here's the event Taipei 101 Which is the tallest building in taiwan? illuminated in blue and yellow The colors of the ukrainian flag now that of course if you're in the middle of taiwan You don't illuminate your tallest building in blue and yellow just to support ukraine You do that as an act of defiance Against the people's republic of china second. Here's the quotation This again comes from an email by a certain steven cocken of a couple days ago The implications for dealing with taiwan fight back kick china out of the global financial system Close your airspace to its plane sanctions top officials. What do you know? An entire playbook close quote now again. You were being impish in that in that email But you were suggesting that what has taken place already in these first few days gives us Something that we can use in parallel if china moves on taiwan your zhijing ping you see blue and yellow On taipei one on yes taipei 101 is the name of the skyscraper You have an intellectual like steven cocken saying look at this How does zhijing ping respond how should he respond? Very interesting peter And it's the biggest part of the story 95 of this right now is about ukraine and russia 95 of this long term is about taiwan and china War is tragic and the ukranians are paying a very high price And we must admit that many people in russia Including russian conscripts, but their families back home are also paying a very high price for this war And would rather the war didn't happen and are against the war Some are courageous enough to protest And others don't have not everyone can be let's say andre sakharov in a crisis So this tragic but tragedy is also opportunity and it's also opportunity in multiple directions So in a war you get to test out your weapons You get to test out stuff and see how it works not in a tabletop exercise Not in a computer simulation, but in the real world Can you sanction the central bank of a very large economy and not destabilize your own international financial system? We're just right. What what if russia starts cutting our under undersea cables I mean russia could retaliate against us in in ways that Aren't aren't reaching public discussion and could be absolutely devastating to our economy Experimenting with that right now and we're learning the answer to that And so many of the techniques that we're now employing against russia Potentially could be employed against china and we know that and the chinese know that Moreover shijing ping is now a dictator an autocrat like put And right so 90 plus of our communication goes through undersea cables Right russian submarines can go around and cut those cables If we're going to cut off russia from the rest of the world From the rest of the world's banking system and commercial system Then why would russia not retaliate if they cut those undersea cables? Our economies would be wrecked And it takes very little effort to cut undersea cables takes a great deal of effort to reconstruct Undersea cables and then very little effort again to cut them and you can't protect thousands and thousands of miles of undersea cables Effectively if russia wants to cut those cables they can and life as we know it would come to a halt And he may not get Information delivered to him that he doesn't want to hear We don't know what it looks like on the inside in china But we do know what happens retrospectively with autocracies that fall That they get narrower and narrower People don't bring Bad or negative information to the ruler and the ruler begins to make even more mistakes The corrective mechanisms aren't there So the important thing about ukraine Is its implications for taiwan because taiwan is 10 times more important to us than ukraine 93 percent of the world's most important computer chips are manufactured in taiwan The the most powerful part of the world right with the the most powerful economies and militaries is no longer europe it's northeast asia and so The west coming together to cripple russia's economy it's Its importance is largely in what it signals to chairman shi and china This is what we will do to china if it tries to attack taiwan China would be cut off from the international banking system and commercial system And it wouldn't take many destroyers to completely end china's ability to import energy And to import anything else that it needs right the goods like energy to get into china They have to go by sea they have to go usually past india past indonesia past singapore past australia The japanese navy is is capable of ending china's ability to import energy and other goods Australia could do it India could do it the united states could do it As they are in collective rule even under an authoritarian system And so the chinese elites can see this And they can ask them and uh chat says we have satellites look if they cut the cables under water Can we not just use satellites? Well the internet that i'm relying on right now and that you're using right now is not coming from satellites It's coming from undersea cables. So no you can't replace 90 percent of our communication Mechanisms just by satellites right it primarily comes from underground cables solves the question Well, is it possible shijin ping miscalculates because he's Making decisions by himself without consulting and without considering the full range of information Is it possible the west is not a paper tiger? But is actually pretty strong And that the west can do things that we didn't fully understand they could do and moreover they have the results To do that Is it possible that taiwanese might not capitulate but might resist an invasion? Is it possible that that resistance by the taiwanese? Might galvanize the rest of the world and so yeah, this is an opportunity a lesson for everyone in real time There are some differences though peter Ukraine is a 40 million taiwan is a 20 something million population Ukraine is connected by russia as well as belarus Crimea by land And so this is a land invasion. We're seeing here Taiwan is an island And so you're talking about an amphibious landing Which is a much different proposition Than just rolling across someone's border tanks and artillery and armored personnel carriers amphibious landings Fighting on the water is the hardest thing to do and we know that not just from world war two We think normandy was easy and went really well because it succeeded But if you were involved in the planning and if you were there on the beaches You know how difficult to pull off something like that is And so there are differences. We don't we want to be careful not equating the situation Ukraine's economy was maybe 180 billion Prior to the invasion Taiwan's is over 800 billion Taiwan supplies 93 of high-end chips Globally 93 share of the high-end chips Ukraine doesn't have an industry like that to compare it to Taiwan is very far from poland Which is stood tall From germany, which as you said is transformed And I could go on And so It may not be the same But it does give a lot of food for thought In washington and beijing It's very important that taiwan's Freedom be defended but the status quo is our power The status quo is failing for beijing, but it's working for the free world Because the mistake that we made That we would integrate china communist china economically and it would transform them politically Modernization style which of course didn't work There's still the communist chinese regime The communists in beijing made the same mistake vis-a-vis taiwan We'll integrate them economically and they'll get to love us and want to be part of us And in fact the opposite has happened and this is even before The crushing of freedom in hong kong Which we've all witnessed and the taiwanese have witnessed Living right there even before that the polls had indicated that on the island of taiwan Fewer and fewer people identified as chinese Fewer and fewer people identified as chinese taiwanese combination And more and more identified as solely taiwanese And wanted to have nothing to do with mainland china And so this the chinese thought time was on their side And they were exactly wrong Time was moving against them in taiwan is that correct? Yes, what what shijing ping did in beijing Is what putin did in moscow putin made ukraine more nationalists Less pro-russian for the first time in its history putin created a consolidated ukrainian idea across all of ukraine In ways that had been ambivalent before And split divided partly pro-russian and shijing ping's repressions have done the same on taiwan He's done the opposite of what he intended and so peter my point is this he's made taiwan more taiwanese And so the status quo is working for us Strategic ambiguity is working for us It's the communist chinese who need to change the status quo, which is failing for them They want to be revisionist They want to get back taiwan We want taiwan to continue to be self-governing and continue to be moving farther and farther away so The importance of status quo Is the equivalent of fighting on offense or defense so Clausewitz the the great russian war strategist He made the point you need need to succeed on offense probably at least three times as many troops As the defense has so the u.s. Is able and the west in general are able to fight on defense Because the status quo favors them from association With beijing and so let us not upset the status quo Let us defend the status quo And let's accuse beijing of being the ones that want to absence It's like you want to make a change to your life. It takes a lot of energy Right, it takes three times as much energy to make some kind of dramatic change in your life change jobs change spouse Move right one reason I didn't move to sydney australia even though I absolutely loved it when I was in sydney australia It takes so much energy and strength Uh and and you have to work through your fears to move to the other side of the world And so it's so much easier just operating on the status quo rather than on Upending the status quo whether it's in your personal life or in international relations status quo back to ukraine steven And now we come we're on day eight Everything's are changing hour by hour Okay, let's get something here from john miersheimer. So miersheimer has become Very widely viewed over the past couple of months his lectures on why the ukraine crisis is the west fault Are getting millions of views. He's getting over a thousand emails a day And his is a very lonely position. All right, not many People in the west or in america want to say that ukraine is america's fault that the The invasion by russia of ukraine. How is that america's fault? Well, that's the the whole argument that john miersheim has been making for over 15 years A real war. This is not just a civil war in eastern ukraine, which is what we had before february 24th We now have a real war So this brings us to the question of what is the conventional wisdom? And this is john miersheim speaking yesterday much third on this subject And how do I think about the opposing argument? The opposing argument is that this has nothing to do with nato expansion It's really quite remarkable when you listen to people in the administration speak and when you read editorials in the washington post Words like this are spoken. This has absolutely nothing to do with nato expansion I don't know how anybody can say that the russians have been saying since april 2008 that this is all about nato expansion that nato expansion into ukraine is an existential threat to them But americans simply refuse to believe that not all americans But many americans and certainly the policy elite in this country and instead what they have done is they've created a story That is not american policy It's not nato expansion that's driving this train Instead it's vladimir putin and it's the fact that vladimir putin is either bent on recreating the soviet union Or he's interested in creating a greater rusher, but whichever one of those two outcomes you take He is ultimately an expansionist. He's on the march and thank god We expanded nato because if we hadn't expanded nato, he'd probably be in berlin by now if not paris. This is the basic argument Uh, he is an aggressor. There are a number of problems with that argument. First of all before february 22nd 2014 nobody was arguing that he was aggressor Nobody was arguing that nato expansion was required for the purposes of containing russia before february 22nd 2014 Uh, we didn't think he was a problem And in fact when the crisis broke out on february 22nd 2014 we were actually shocked if you go back and look at the newspapers at the time The obama administration with caught with its pants down Why because they didn't think that the ukraine to be that the russians were aggressive But of course we had to invent the story after the crisis broke out so that we weren't blamed for what happened We had to blame the russians. So we created the story Second reason you want to doubt this is that it's really easy to create a story where you're not to blame So just think about this is a mistake you've made now often You've immediately come up with a story. It just that's just the natural way that our mind works whether as individuals or as groups, right? Jews blacks homosexuals Ukranians russians nobody wants to primarily think about to what extent am I responsible for my own problems Putin has never said that he is bent on recreating The soviet union or he's bent on creating a greater russia. He's never and john mishima did a long interview in the latest new yorker Said he was bent on conquering Ukraine and integrating it into russia. There's no question that in his heart. He thinks that It would be appropriate for ukraine to be part of russia in his heart. He's made it clear He'd love back to bring back the soviet union, but he's also explicitly said that in his head He fully understands that this is a bad idea So if you look at what he said There's no reason to think he's bent on recreating the soviet union or creating the greater russia to take this a step further He doesn't have the capability. He doesn't have the capability for two reasons. First. Well, he doesn't have a big enough military This is a country whose gross national product is smaller than texas, right? This is not the former soviet union in its heyday furthermore The russians understand that occupying country and occupying countries or occupying territory in eastern europe is a prescription for big trouble Most of us on this call are old enough to remember the cold war and all the trouble that the soviets had Think east germany 1953 hungary 1956 check of sevaki in 1968 Constant trouble with the poles and one could argue that the romanians and the albanians were the biggest pain in the next day ever faced Russians are surely sophisticated enough to know that not only do they not have the capability But that occupying ukraine occupying the boltik states would be like swallowing a porcupine. This would be crazy So I think there's hardly any evidence to support that and the final point I'd make is if you look at what the russians are doing militarily in ukraine at the moment It does not look like they're bent on conquering the country and occupying it and integrating it into a greater russia But anyway, here we are and I think everybody is very interested in the question of where we go from here So let me say a few words about that. First of all, let me start with us policy US policy is to double down. That's what we're going to do. This is what we did after 2014 So mishima makes the point that emotionally, of course, latimer putin wants russia to be powerful To have power akin to what the soviet union had it doesn't mean that he wants to Recreate the soviet union, but he certainly would like that power And so where exactly he he stops after ukraine is not clear But putin doesn't really have the resources to occupy ukraine in an ongoing basis So putin has to reach some kind of accommodation with ukraine and putin doesn't have the resources to to take over Europe, all right. It's not like the soviet union Instead of reevaluating and saying maybe nato expansion is not such a good idea We went in the opposite direction. This is why I'm telling you that by 2021 the russians understood That we were turning ukraine into a de facto member of nato. They understood that So what we did after 2004 so the conventional wisdom is ukraine's not a part of nato But ukraine was becoming a de facto part of nato. All right, there's de jour and de facto Right. De jour is what's literally true by the law and de facto is what is in essence true and in essence ukraine was rapidly becoming essentially unofficially a part of nato And when mishima talks about how we just keep doubling down doubling down in the west It just reminds me so much of my own life Right when when I get rattled say when I've been rattled at work Then I get more nervous more fearful and I make more mistakes and that leads to a downward spiral where I get scared I make more mistakes. I get even more scared and things just spiral down So When I've offended people in my real life, then I've been much more likely to offend someone else It's like when you're swiping through tinder or jay swipe if you if you swipe yes on someone All right, you're much more likely to swipe. Yes on the next person just by habit Right. So things spiral in life There are virtuous spirals and destructive spirals the west is in a destructive spiral piece of Russia Over ukraine 14 is double down and what we're going to do now and what we're doing now is doubling down And what does that mean? We're encouraging the ukrainians to resist We're not going to fight for them. You understand. We're going to fight for the last ukrainian But we're not going to do any of that Right. So the media emphasis is on how brave the ukrainians are and essentially the underlying Emotional ethos isn't a great how the ukrainians are fighting for their country But by fighting for their country Thousands of ukrainians are dying and the cities are going to get destroyed as opposed if they simply surrendered Then they wouldn't have had this loss of life when Ukrainians have surrendered a city didn't fight over a city Then russia was able to take that city and they didn't destroy it So i'm not telling the ukrainians what they ought to do But there's a big downside for the ukrainians fighting and there's a downside for them simply surrendering too but Russia is not looking to make major civilian casualties like russia has been fairly careful try to minimize civilian casualties, but if the war drags on Russia would be less and less discriminating And more and more likely to just absolutely destroy everything in their path. That was The russian approach in world war two is to just lay down A tremendous amount of artillery to simply destroy everything in their path and they have the capability of doing the same thing today Fighting they're on their own in that regard, but we're going to arm them and do what we can to train them at this late date And hope that they and rodney martin says yes, putin can occupy ukrain put will use ukrainian resources to govern ukraine The main resource that he will need to occupy ukraine are fighting troops And he can't use ukrainians to to do that work Rodney says western economies are taking huge hits in terms of fuel costs and inflation western markets are taking a huge hit too They can hang in there And and duke it out with the russians and nobody believes they're going to defeat the russians But maybe you'll get a stalemate now the question you have to ask yourself This is really the key question is what are the russians going to do right? It seems to me that a lot of people in the west think that uh, if the ukrainians provide enough resistance The russians will roll over and play dead Or maybe latimer putin will throw his hands up. He'll surrender. He'll say this was all a bad idea I regret doing it or maybe there'll be a coup in moscow He'll be overthrown and they'll bring in leaders who will work out a deal with us And ukraine will live happily ever after we will live happily ever after and the russians will be chasing I've spent my entire adult life studying great power politics This is not the way the world works and it is certainly not the way the russians work You want to understand going back to what I said about the april 2008 decision the russians said at the time This is an existential threat. This is an existential threat Right So even before the current war ukraine and ukraine becoming part of nato was viewed as an existential threat Now you're talking about a situation where you defeat the russians in ukraine This is a much worse outcome for the russians than what happened in april 2008 and a much Have you ever backed someone into a corner in real life? I've known people who are just perfectly nice perfectly polite And then either inadvertently or inadvertently I backed them into a corner and they turned into absolute tigers Right they they came out, you know spitting and kicking and flailing Right you backed someone into a corner. That's a very dangerous thing and to back russia a nuclear power into a corner Very very dangerous much worse outcome that would happen in february 2014 And the russians are not going to roll over and play dead In fact what the russians are going to do is they're going to crush the ukrainians They're going to bring out the big guns. They're going to turn places like Kiev and other cities in ukraine into rubble They're going to do fluges. They're going to do Mosul's And you don't hear this this perspective on any of the mainstream media I mean, yeah, the new yorker ran an interview with him, but this guy is not being interviewed on fox or cnn or any of the networks They're going to do grasnings You know what happened in world war two when the united states was faced with the possibility of having to invade the japanese home islands in early 1945 The idea of invading the japanese Okay, let's welcome eliot blad onto the show eliot. What's going on, bro? eliot speak man speak Home islands after what happened to divo jima and then later what happened in okinawa really spooked us So, you know what we did we decided to burn japanese cities to the ground starting on march 10th 1945 We killed more people the first night we fire bombed tokyo then we killed it either hiroshima or nagasaki And we were systematically burning japanese cities to the ground. Why because we did not want to invade I stand with ukraine eliot. How about you What's my take on you today? No, I said I stand with ukraine. Oh, yes, too. I'm draped in I have like this uh bathrobe it's like half light blue and half yellow And I do these exercises to sort of leave the tension in my back. So I go over the couch And I sort of do this motion that sort of looks like I'm pumping the couch And that's the way That's working. Is it working? That's yes. I think you're making a spiritual difference in the universe. Yes, I feel I am So Uh, sorry, you know, I'm not going to give you any sort of mere shame or tear Geopolitical analysis. No Should I hang up now or Do you use an electric shaver or a blade eliot I use a blade only men use blades How about what did you think about me getting this whole thing of uh chocolate not harvest just for three dollar 70 It's like 10 meals there So these are like liquid meals This is trail mix and it's and it's kosher not chocolate mix with peanuts chocolate raisins almonds and cashews So it's like 10 meals for three dollar 70 Luke You eat like a teenager That's true Not but but that these these nuts and chalkies they fueled this fantastic stream that I'm providing right now That's the type of stuff you take hiking Luke. You don't eat it in the um I No, I'm okay. Yeah No, when you thought you'd lost me and you just saw what two, you know two feet in the sand That was trying to I'm trying to I'm trying to look at the youtube output And there's a little bit of delay so therefore I thought That was me carrying you in your darkest times. That's me trying You got a beautiful voice bro So, I don't know I was thinking about um the idealism you talked about earlier. Oh, yeah human rights and Yeah, I really remember that day when I sort of got hit with all of that You know, like I'd grown up in this sort of really small town mayberry type town and You know never where an area was heard a scourging word and you know And then I get to the big bad city. I get to san francisco And there's all this street activism going on Right and I learned about all these terrible things happening in central america It was my duty to do something about it, you know and uh I went through this huge depression And then all these people were telling me this were socialists, you know And that's when I sort of got seduced into thinking, you know So, you know, socialism wasn't wasn't as bad as people said, you know So I really got sucked into that and these people really pray on the the idealism of children And this is what sort of keeps it going or children are I should say young adults, you know that that Late adolescence early adulthood It's sort of the time of peak adolescent adolescent idealism And these people pray on that and that's where they get their converts and that's where they get You know woke tarts. This is the uh seed bed of woke tarts. And so So I thought it was an interesting observation Right, but what do you do with your own utopian impulses? You just like, you know, let them off for five minutes in the evening right before you go to bed Or do you just like take them out on weekends? Like what do you do with your utopian impulses and where do you put them? I don't think I have them anymore. Luke is sad as that may sound Wow, you don't have any utopian impulses No, maybe you're just not in touch with them. Have you explored yourself to see if you might have some You know that that's thinking that had thinking as folly and I I think I'm not growing them Maybe you're just not in touch with your impulses maybe Maybe you need a safe space to explore them Have you ever been to a bathhouse? Have you ever been to a gladiator movie? Yeah, I saw gladiator many times. Love that movie No, no It's a live from here. Oh, sorry Do you remember that sign from uh Do you remember did you see airplane? Yes So remember when kareem abduldjavar is in He's in the in the flight deck Yes, and then he the kid comes up and then The captain starts asking the little kid a bunch of the question. Yes homosexual I think it's the funniest brand of humor the funniest like sub The funniest style of human there's like that is like the homosexual double on time Yeah Like I made the other game, which It's because we're so anxious and and because we've constructed this this heterosexuality and and and yet There's there's always this homosexuality lurking in the background that we're trying to deny and so anything that that Makes jokes to relieve the tension that we feel about this, you know great cavern of homosexual homosexual possibilities that you know lay out there That uh, we we always love Yeah, yeah, it's so yeah the subject is so intrinsically like off-putting and destabilizing to the male psyche that yeah Any any joke it's just Yes, like when a man's pants fall down in a movie Exactly or it gets yeah, it gets clubbing the nuts But seriously, I'm trying to think I got I got utopian impulses that uh, I guess I explored when I was researching the pornography industry What do you mean by utopian impulses? What do you where you actually mean when you say utopia? Well, just like this wonderful wonderful world out there I mean, don't you ever like look at other people and sometimes think oh, they must have like a great life Don't you ever see someone who's like got a hot wife and a good job And they they seem happy all the time that you ever think oh, man. I want some of that Well, that's not utopian. That's just envy. Oh, yeah, I guess well Utopian is like we'll all you know that john went in we'll all Imagine there are no no borders or no heaven Above us only sky that's utopian I went back to sydney for two months and I saw like three homeless people in my whole time in sydney And there was virtually no crime. So compared to la sydney seemed very utopian Hmm So, uh, so you're gonna remain american in the in the land of the free Uh, probably I mean, but there was a great article in the usa today this week about how some, you know Major catastrophe is gonna it's likely to hit the west coast in the next 30 years Like we do for some massive massive earthquakes And so if something like that hits and and I survive I just Then then I'd probably go to sydney for a while. But yeah, I'll tell you what I did some prepping This uh this week and I bought you got some uh some chocolate mix Yeah, I bought 10 chocolate mixes and Did you leave the house or did you get it by amazon? By amazon, of course But I also bought this like thing that you can crank for um power like Uh, here it is Foss power 2000 emergency weather radio portable power bank with solar charging hand crank and battery operated So it was for 30 dollars so I could power my phone just by cranking it or Uh connecting it to solar power So when the when the big one hits and electricity goes out I'm I'm prepared. So I did some prepping. What about you? Are you prepped for the big one? um No, but I should be well I did some research and Apparently I'm on uh bedrock So I'm really not at risk I bet you could what do you mean? You can still lose your electricity. You could still be without running water That's true. Well, then I'll just jump in the ocean Like I'm not afraid of cold water Well, you can't drink the ocean and how you're gonna power your phone I think you need a portable power bank with solar charging At that point if I don't have phone, no one's gonna have a home. Who am I gonna call? Most of the world will still have phones. You can lease text people. Oh, okay. Hello sos come get me What what preparation have you done for the big one bro? The big one's coming whether you like it or not you can deny it, but it's coming Bro, what yeah, it could be a hundred years. I don't like it could be. Yeah, right um I'm just going to um, you notice I have this faith that um I'll get a tip So do you have five gallons of water set aside? Uh I have about two gallons Okay, and do you have some trial mix? No, I have a lot of rice though. How are you gonna cook the rice? Good point Luke. You're really exposing The weaknesses of my plan um Oh boy So well, you know what I had some charcoal briquettes So I could go to the beach and I could light a fire and then I could make some rice at the beach, I guess Then I have a few cans of beans so I could uh Look, I'm totally unprepared told you Maybe it's time to start getting prepared bro So is this just I think it's just an expression of your sort of general level of anxiety that you always have What to to be prepared for a disaster which there's a significant chance it'll happen and you're turning it into some kind of uh psychological weakness on my part bro Well, let's put it this way everybody that I know that's into prepping They have a few personality ticks, you know and I don't know. I just have an association with You know, it's not I don't want to like diss anybody but you know They're a bunch of losers They're the same people that are prone to uh conspiracy theories Yeah, it's the same cohort You know what I mean? But these people who have been losers all their life in a moment of emergency they will become the winners And they'll have their choice of women and they will be proven right have been proven right And they'll have been proven right bro Like you could be part of the solution like a disaster hits and you could be out there with your first aid kit And and your knowledge you could be sewing up wounds. You could be setting legs You could be you could be the solution or you could be part of the problem I guess I'm just not a good person But uh Maybe maybe back to utopia. So I mean as a religious person there's a Utopian impulse that is fulfilled through they're believing that the messiah will come or if you're christian believing that That jesus will come there's a much better world out there I think utopian needs get met that way and then did you ever have a communist phase? I was yeah I had I had like a pretty heavy communist phase for like a year a year and a half to maybe even two years Well, it was really intense for like a year and then it took me Took me like maybe sort of like leaving a cult it took me maybe another year a year and a half to sort of completely program myself There's definitely a cultic aspect to it Right. Um, similar to Scientology. I mean I've been I caught a few Scientology podcast Louie Louie Theroux. Did you see the Louie Theroux? I saw him interviewed by Rogan. So I listened to that Conversation And so that got me on to this Scientology Jag which comes like every two years I think about that for a couple of days and then I forget about it but um The cultic mind, you know the cult The the cult mind is deaf. There's there's definitely a strong strand of utopianism in it Right. Yeah, I mean there's got to be some kind of payoff, right? Yeah But but but there's the tenet the ferocity that the The fervor That people bring to you being in a cult and they're called beliefs You know Is it's all bound up with fixing the world saving the world Making the world a better place all this kind of thing right, yep, and So And there is a certain loss of self in that You know what I mean? Yes And you get to slough off your miserable life and dissolve yourself in humanity. Yeah. Yeah So, uh, so that's why it that's why it took me so long to leave, you know communism Even though when it was just painfully, I knew it was absurd, you know, I felt like this moral duty to sort of keep the faith and I think Um, otherwise the whole world would go in flames, you know, and I would be at fault And uh, when were you a communist? Uh, right around the first girl go for so, um What was that how old were you? I was 19 19. Yeah So kind of 1920 ish um You know, and I saw the marxists they basically seize on any sort of any sort of, um Issue or crisis, right? They're like crisis magnets and whatever the crisis is marxism is a solution Right, it's like a religion like it's a bad one as when I was raised in that every every crisis was interpreted by scripture Right, and then like there's this radio show up here. I used to listen to you like years ago uh, just to sort of hate listen to it and I have this woman. I forgot her name, but she's always using the word crisis. What about the homelessness crisis? What about the environment crisis like crisis is like they're they're sort of go-to word and When you hear the word crisis your next thought is well, something should be done Right, there's a crisis. Something should be done. Ukraine's been invited. Something should be done the premium crisis crisis crisis, right and, uh Once people believe in crisis, they don't like to hear that there is no crisis or what's perceived as a crisis is not a crisis There's something else that keeps them bound to the notion because it does, you know, like the term immortality project Some philosopher who it was but he he called all these obsessions Immortality projects. So if you're a human rights campaigner the way to become immortal is to become a really zealous human rights campaigner and this gives you the sense of both loss of self, but also Make let's allow you to not think about death You know allows you to transcend yourself Yeah, because you're part of something eternal and redemptive So And you haven't had much need for this over the past what? 28 years No, because so once I sort of got clean I went clear does it work? I developed like this toxic allergy this like this reflexive allergy to any of that type of That's maybe why I'm here Lou. That's maybe why I'm And and you haven't been seriously religious either, huh? Oh, not in sort of the way that you're religious now. So you uh, I wouldn't say But I'm not you're religious or a religious either Why do you think about eating bugs that they can be a good source of protein and they can be quite tasteful if they're prepared properly? You bring me back the coast of KMG Can you imagine KMG having to eat a bug? I was at yoga and uh, yoga is wonderful because they're usually about three times as many women as guys And I started talking to this attractive Jewish woman And I find out more and more about her and it turns out her life is devoted To teaching people how to eat bugs and how to prepare bugs and how to cook bugs And so I was impaired on the horns of a dilemma because she was slim And she was attractive and she was Jewish and to turn a lump On the other hand, I was kind of grossed out by the bug thing Yeah, and and so I didn't I didn't I mean, I thought I would but I didn't Really? You got that shot. You got bug shot. I got bug shot, bro I mean, she was like a seven and I was like 43 44 at the time. So now I was fading You know and and when you get older like, of course, you're only gonna get you know a young attractive woman who's mentally ill Right, and it's just you know, how many degrees of mental illness can you handle? right And I tried I tried to overcome my bug phobia But I couldn't Like how hot would a woman in her late 20s have to be for you to To romance her if she was her life was primarily devoted to preparing and cooking bugs We're talking like the upper nines, bro. Whoa Like I was impaired on a seven Yeah I'm really like I have you know, I have like this Lots of things I'm like easily disgusted, you know I can't many things disgust me and so Oh, yeah I um I can't even fathom things like that So I was writing for this website Uh a porn website. I was writing the news Oh, porn website. No kidding. Yeah, this is this is uh This is like 18 years ago And one of my my co-workers was this attractive and busty Young model and she had it. She had a degree in English So we had lots to talk about, you know, we both loved English literature and so Once I I started working with her she She invited me out for dinner and then she was inviting me back to her place to jump in the jacuzzi And so I thought wow I'm gonna get lucky and then we we meet for dinner and And she has like a bacon salad And no matter how attractive she was that just ended up for me I mean, I went through with the dinner and I got into jacuzzi, but I did not lay a hand on her And because you don't dig on swine, bro I was just I was just repulsed It wasn't even a choice And uh in uh in the um and work 1950s novel marjorie morning star It's only after the female protagonist eats eats tray feeds non kosher food for the first time that she then loses her virginity But but for me the prospect of that tray that that that pig on the plate and I couldn't I just couldn't So I I think I have a disgust reflex too Yeah, but yeah, but yours You know yours is sort of ideologically driven or religiously driven It wasn't like blood when I see blood I just couldn't I'm sorry. I'm like when I see blood in real life I can't I freak out like I just uh, that's not a turn on for you It's not a turn on bro. It's like uh Like horror movies I can never watch horror movies because of the blood and gore just uh Never worked I remember there was this woman I was quite interested in And we were doing calculus together And she knew the answers And I didn't and I was learning from her and it just completely destroyed my My yearning for her. I was like so Upset and humiliated that she knew the answers and I didn't that I no longer felt like a man So really women that do math are It wasn't a rational decision I just like it just hit me like this has happened like a woman will hit on me And if I'm not in the right space to handle it, I just run away and Like I may think, you know, I'm a strong confident person You know respect the cock, but yeah, but Suddenly I'll get insecure because she knows more math than me or she's eating pig or You know something else that that just gives me the the willies Oh, let me tell you this Luke. So, um, so you take this thing like you have these these dietary, um You know restrictions and so I was a vegetarian for a while, you know And a big part of my self-esteem came from the fact that I was a vegetarian other people worked, right? So, um I um When the chips were down You know, I could always console myself by knowing that I was a vegetarian and other people work Feeling good about myself. Wow during which which years of your life? This was the same years of the communist years. Okay so um uh, so that these types of Observances do that they have this, you know, it's very it's very well known phenomenon. You know vegetarians are insuffitable Are recently converted vegetarian. Oh, yeah So, um, so you got that going for me So, yeah, so they all ties together it all ties together So do you find that? Did I lose you? No, I'm okay Do you find that that your uh, your observance of of jewish dietary law Even subtly makes you feel, uh, you know better than other people Uh, I'm not sure but it certainly It certainly affects me. I mean it certainly Certainly shapes me. I mean it because I only eating in kosher restaurants Or to the extent that I've only eaten in kosher restaurants that reduces my intercourse with non-juice But if you, you know, won't eat with non-juice, you're less likely to sleep with them Uh, I don't drink alcohol, but Laws about kosher wine make it less likely that you'll get drunk with a non-juice. Therefore, you'll be less likely to sleep with one And look, I I I've got a meeting I gotta get ready for I I didn't realize the time of just flew by lukas I gotta drop. All right. Thanks. All right. Peace. Bye. Okay blessings to elliot and elliot When you walk through a storm bro, hold your head up high and don't be afraid of the dark Now at the end of a storm, there's a golden sky and the sweet silver song of a lark Walk on through the wind Walk on through the rain Though your dreams be tossed and blown walk on walk on with hope in your heart and you'll never walk alone The japanese main islands when a great power feels threatened when The russians are going to pull out all stops in ukraine to make sure that they win and then there's the nuclear dimension to this The russians have already put their nuclear weapons on high alert This is a really significant development because what they were doing was sending us a very powerful signal as to how Seriously, they take this crisis and what's going on So again, if we start winning and the russians start losing You want to understand that what we're talking about doing here is backing a nuclear armed great power That sees what's happening as an existential threat into a corner. This is really dangerous go back to the cuban missile crisis I don't think that what happened in the cuban cuban missile crisis was as threatening to us as this situation is to the russians But if you go back and look at how american decision makers thought at the time, they were scared stiff They thought that soviet missiles in cuba was an existential threat And they were willing many of kennedy's advisors to use our nuclear arsenal against the soviet union That's how serious great powers get when they think they face existential threats. So in my opinion, we are in a very dangerous situation I think the likelihood of nuclear war is very small But the likelihood doesn't have to be high for me to be really scared because of the consequences associated with nuclear use So we better be extremely careful here regarding what we do in terms of pushing the russians into the corner But again, I'm not sure that's going to happen because I think what's going to happen here Is that in a competition between us and the russians the russians will win now you're saying to yourself Why is he saying that I think that if you Think about this you want to think about who has the greater resolve Who really cares more about this situation the russians or the americans the americans do not care that much about ukraine The americans have made it clear. They are not even willing to fight and die for ukraine So it's not that important to us for the russians. They have made it clear. It's an existential threat So the balance of resolve I believe favors them So as we walk up the escalation ladder moving forward My guess and it's just my guess is that the russians will prevail not the americans and the russians will prevail because the balance of resolve favors them Now the question is Who loses this war? I think it doesn't matter much to the united states if we lose in the sense that the russians prevail in ukraine I think the real losers in this war are the ukrainians And I think what's happened here is we have led the ukrainians down the primrose path We have pushed very hard to encourage the ukrainians to want to become part of nato We have pushed very hard to make them part of nato We have pushed very hard to make them a western bulwark on russia's borders Despite the fact the russians made it clear that this was unacceptable to them We had a fact and here i'm talking about the west We took a stick and we poked a bear in the eye And as you all know if you take a stick and you poke a bear in the eye That bear is probably not going to smile and laugh at what you're doing That bear is probably going to fight back and that's exactly what's happening here And that bear is going to tear apart ukraine that bear is in the process of tearing apart ukraine And again, we go back to where we started who bears responsibility for this do the russians bear responsibility for this I don't think so. There's no question. The russians are doing the dirty work I don't want to make light of that fact But the question is what caused the russians to do this and in my opinion the answer is very simple The united states of america. Thank you Thank you john j meersheimer now what will russia do about our undersea cables? All right, they could just cut them devastate the internet the world just a quick word from our sponsor I don't need that Man, oh man, just trying to get uh Just trying to play play an article on newsweek and they're they're dropping it dropping a bloody ad on me Okay, so what else have I been reading? Just read a terrific 2010 book uncle sam once you world war one and the making of the modern american citizen One thing we know is that the word obligation was very much on their minds during world war one when americans discuss the state They use terms such as duty Okay world's communications networks the head of britain's armed forces has warned Admiral sir tony redock in 56 told the times of london about his fears over the phenomenal increase in russian submarine and underwater activity over the last two decades Which he warned was more than about submarines He said russia's underwater program intended to put at risk and potentially exploit the undersea cables that provide the world's real information system That is where predominantly all the world's information and traffic travels He told the paper russia has grown the capability to put it threat those undersea cables and potentially exploit those undersea cables When asked of an attempt by russia to cut the cables would be an act of war he replied potentially Yes Modern underwater lines carry thousands of miles of optical fiber cables to carry digital data including internet services In his first interview since since taking over the role redocken A former head of the royal navy was echoing a warning made in 2017 by his predecessor Ayr chief marshal sir steward peach who earlier warned seabed communication cables were vulnerable to russian military assets British ships have been protecting underwater cables from russian submarines in areas like the north atlantic A collision between a british type 23 frigate hms northumberland and a russian submarine in 2020 was reported this week Sparking speculation about the extent of russian cable mapping activity The collision was filmed in newly released footage by a documentary crew Redocken also pointed to russia's ever-growing hypersonic and long-range missile capability In december russia test fired about 10 new zircon hypersonic cruise missiles from a frigate and two more from a submarine russian state agencies reported this week north korea claimed to have successfully tested a hypersonic missile while china has also tested a Number of hypersonic missiles redocken said that the uk lagged behind other countries in missile capability telling the paper We haven't got them and we must have His comments come amid escalating tensions between russia and nato of which the uk is a member the uk has joined the us in sounding the Okay, so russia could and and life as we know it if they decide to cut undersea cables back to Play a little bit more here from on mere shimmer Hi, it's ron max will hear can you hear me Money on that, but i would note that even if the russians lose in the process They will destroy ukraine and from ukraine's point of view. That's not a good thing This is why my view is that ukraine should have long ago divorced itself from the united states and worked out a modus vivendi with russia My view is if you're a reasonably small power in the international system and you live next door to a gorilla You have to go to great lengths to accommodate that gorilla And the last thing you want to do is poke that gorilla in the eye because the gorilla will do great damage to you And it probably will never forget. I don't know if you're old enough to remember When fidel kastrow came to power in 1959 but shortly thereafter we put sanctions on fidel kastrow and on cuba And those sanctions are basically still on cuba. We've never gotten over the fact that cuba Behaved in ways that we considered to be unacceptable And I think you have a similar situation here and my view is yes, the ukranians have agency But if they were smart they divorced themselves from the united states and Try to work out a modus vivendi with russia I guess i'm It's just whatever putin wishes to the attitude of taiwan towards being absorbed into mainland china, which also Has lawlessness and everything is dictated by presidency. Are those situations comparable or not you think? I i'm not in a position to judge. I know so little about taiwan You know, aside from reading the economist type thing So i'm really not in a position to judge, but I would have guessed from what little I do know that Yeah, what's happened in hong kong is deeply deeply Worrying to taiwan and not the least bit surprising to them. So yes, they have they're in they're in a similar situation of This larger entity has a political and legal culture that we do not want for ourselves I'll take the liberty now since i'm uh in the the chair as a first outs for john henry I wanted to raise with uh with the john mirshimer you made some comparisons to Russia's reaction ukraine and the us and cuba fidel castro And uh how we viewed cuba and castro as a threat to our our security interest and existential threat and Response, you know, we had the bay of pigs that attempted assassinations of castro without operation mongoose We even had plans after the failed um bay of pigs to invade. Um, do you think those? responses of the united states were Morally or legally legitimate responses that that we made, you know that were an example that Other countries should and can't follow or they something that ought not to be followed This is a great question And of course it follows on one of your three initial points as well as adam dixon's comments Which have to do with the subject of rights and and what's morally or legally permissible in the international system I think that in international politics states Usually pay attention to international law and they pay attention to moral precepts as long as they're in their strategic interest But if there's a conflict between international law and a country's strategic interests The country will always privilege its strategic interest and international law and human rights will be pushed off the table This is why I think it's not very helpful to talk about rights Uh when you talk about whether russia has the right to have a buffer state Or ukraine has the right to have its own foreign policy These are concepts that in my opinion get you into all sorts of trouble in the international system might make right And the united states would never tolerate a situation where canada or mexico Invited in a legal way china to bring military forces into toronto or mexico city We have a monroe doctrine which is in our strategic interest and our monroe doctrine says no distant great power is allowed to put military forces In the western hemisphere period end of story What the russians are doing here is they're basically articulating their own version of the monroe doctrine They're saying you cannot turn ukraine into a western bastion on our border has nothing to do with rights Right, it doesn't matter whether ukraine has the right to do this or that We're saying they can't do it just like we're saying cuba can invite the soviets to bring military forces into the western hemisphere So for me when you talk about great power politics rights in the final analysis Just don't matter might makes right and the united states is a mighty powerful country It's a mighty powerful country on purpose and it does whatever it thinks is in its strategic interest And if the rights say that's okay to do good But if the rights are at odds with what's in our strategic interest, we do what's in our strategic interest Right, so we can't get confused between the things that a nation state says and what it actually does So united states has attended in foreign policy to act in a strategic interest But as often cloak that in the language of rights interest Well, let me let me offer this uh john uh the declaration of independence Now it may be departed from it, but it certainly spoke in terms of rights You know men and women they're they're born with unalienable rights And they also articulate a right and a duty to rise up and throw off a tyrannical government Now maybe the declaration of independence is quaint But actually it's what gave birth to this nation now that we're residing in right now It may well be that as a descriptive matter, uh, we're still living with uh Thucydides the strong do what they can the weak suffer what they must And it may well be that uh as a practical matter, maybe things don't change But I don't think we should necessarily view as irrelevant as you're saying assigning responsibility Maybe there's in peri delicto uh and responsibility means making a moral judgment Even if the moral judgment has no immediate practical significance Don't you think the declaration of independence is worth admiring and aspiring towards? I think the declaration of independence is of enormous importance I thank my lucky stars. I was born in a liberal democracy, right? And I I think like you regret the fact that liberal democracy is at Is under threat at home But my view and i'm probably different than you bruce in this regard is that international politics is a different domain Than domestic politics and in international politics that Thucydides Way of thinking about the world where might makes right is what applies I'm not in favor of going around and beating up on other states And i'm not in favor of wanton violence and so forth and so on and I do think that what is happening in ukraine is absolutely horrible It makes me sick to my stomach But on the other hand, I think it's very important to understand basic realist logic And the reason it's important to understand realist logic is because at least in this case, that's what informs Putin Putin is thinking like Americans have a terribly difficult time Putting themselves in Putin's shoes And this is because americans tend to think in terms of rights and in terms of american exceptionalism and all these other ideas That I think get us into trouble I think you know going back to the film clip that ray put up there where Putin Talked about in that new york times off ed the trouble america causes by thinking of itself as an exceptional nation is correct I just don't want to think that way in ir and I don't want to think about rights when it comes to international relations Um, ray. Did you want to add your thoughts? Thank you for the Why don't we just organize it john? Why don't you respond first and then ray you chip in and then we're going to call it to a close Yeah, those are two great questions and uh I think that the question Really on the table here is whether or not with sanctions And the costs of war just the cost of losing people and fighting in ukraine that coupled with economic sanctions can inflict enough punishment on The russian people and the oligarchs that they rise up against Putin right this is this is the question And I think there are two reasons that's not going to happen. I'm not saying i'm right You're wrong, but I think that what the scenario that you two described will not prove to be correct And let me tell you why the first is nationalism states are able to sustain huge amounts of punishment And the population does not rise up against the ruler You want to think about what we did to japan in world war two? You want to think about what we did to germany? You want to think about the literature on sanctions economic sanctions. Look at iran It's amazing what we've done to iran. Look at cuba. There've been sanctions on cuba forever, right? And these countries don't throw up their hands So the first point I would make to you is nationalism is a very powerful force And I think that the russian people will rally around putin second point I would make to you is as a result of this uh This talk that I gave that's ricocheting all over the internet plus the new yorker piece I get I get like a thousand emails every day. I can't even open up all the emails I get But I've gotten a number of emails from russians. These are educated people Who are not hostile to me in any way? And I read those emails to say that you want to understand that you americans are threatening mother russia And what's going on here is not simply a case of putin misbehaving and us liking the americans And what's going to happen here is we're going to overthrow putin the emails i'm getting and this is not a scientific example But it is consistent with my general point of that nationalism Is that the more we push against the russians in ukraine and the more we threaten the regime The more that people will rally around putin now again I could be proved wrong on that But my bet is that he'll be able to withstand the sanctions and by the way this gets to raise point Raise point is the chinese are going to help them. We know the indians are going to help them We've heard that the mexicans are going to help them So it's not clear that we'll be able to punish them that much over the long term But then again, even if we do punish him, do you think that's going to bring the russian people to their knees or putin to his knees? I wouldn't bet a lot of money on that Okay, this is a cnn report from six years ago But tonight some are questioning if putin is now doing more than just putting on a show under the sea A new report from the new york times cites more than a dozen unnamed us officials raising concerns russian submarines and spy ships Are aggressively patrolling near important undersea cables Massive fiber optic lines spanning from continent to continent carrying the bulk of the world's internet communications Their goals are to humiliate the united states and show that it can't defend itself and to project naval power into the atlantic Thus showing the united states and europe we're here You have to deal with us and take us seriously and we can propose a threat to your most vital interests According to the times officials are concerned that if a larger conflict between russia and the west broke out A russian ship could locate an internet cable on the seafloor Lower a submersible down to it and either attach a wire tap to eavesdrop on it or worse sever the cable cutting off a crucial data pipeline They're extremely vital. They're they're the core of our communications infrastructure So we hear a lot of talk about the cloud for example Uh, and we think of it as something nebulous something in the sky Well, the cloud is really Under the ocean jonathan yembo works with a company which monitors telecom infrastructure He says there are hundreds of these cables stretching across the ocean floors enough He says to span the globe at the equator 15 times Yembo says if multiple undersea cables were cut at once It could harm american business and government interests and could have even more catastrophic effects on europe Tonight the pentagon won't confirm the concerns raised in the new york times One us official says while the russians could tamper with the cables The us hasn't seen a significant increase in russian activity where the cables are located There's also been no evidence of any actual cable cutting But newspaper reports say the russian ship the yantar which is equipped with submersibles capable of cutting undersea cables Has been spotted cruising in the atlantic on its way to cuba not far from where at least one cable is located All right, so this is a story from six years ago, but particularly relevant in a time of great conflict You can't just impose sanctions on russia and think that russia is not going to get their revenge Right, so the latest book i've been reading was the book on el choppo terrific book on el choppo That just came out last year 2020 very exciting read Just went through it in a little over two hours and before that i read uncle sam once you world war one And the making of the modern american citizen So we hear a lot more about rights these days and obligations, but it used to be Prior to the 1920s You heard far more about obligations than about rights So historian writes in 2010 one thing we know is that the word obligation back in world war one was very much on Their minds bring world war one and americans discussed their relationship to the state they used terms such as duty Sacrifice and obligation. You don't hear those terms very much anymore I think michael medved talked about how liberals Have an ethos of follow your bliss and conservatives have an ethos of do your duty Language was everywhere in congressional debates about the war on the posters of military Recruiters during the conflict even in the parades that marked the war's end political obligations energized mobilized and divided americans during world war one So looking at the history of a liberal society like the united states might seem that americans have never really had to think about their political obligations let alone act on them in the later wars of the 20 20th and 21st centuries liberal individualism Economy of consumption nationalized culture legally protected civil liberties and expanded federal state Or played more prominent roles in public life, but even so throughout american history a citizenship of obligation As always coexisted with one of rights So how much of a citizenship of obligation do we have anymore? Wow, rodney mountain. Thank you so much Luke what were your kinsmen down under do they have their hands full with china putting the squeeze on them? I think The the australians are pretty well situated So they are strongly aligned with the united states and japan. I think uh china is very much a declining power They're undergoing the most drastic demographic Decline that we have ever measured. So I didn't think the united but china will even exist in its current form in in 10 years so Australia is deeply embedded with various nations such as japan and india who are concerned about the rise of china I think australia is going to do well Now australia has had some problems with chinese corrupting australian institutions Chinese corrupting australian politicians and people in power So it's not a black and white matter, but Three of the two of the three major sea lanes on the way to china go past australia, so Australia is vitally important to china And the australian economic boom of the past 20 years has been Largely on the basis of china buying so many of our raw materials but now With this new deal with orcas, which is australia united states japan and india australia is not only getting nuclear submarines. They're also developing Missile technology and so australia could completely disrupt could completely disrupt china's supply chain And china has to import all its oil all its energy right china is completely dependent on importing Petroleum and australia and india and japan and the united states and singapore and indonesia Any of those countries could put two destroyers out into the indian ocean and the the pacific ocean and destroy china's ability to import energy and china would just starve So china is incredibly vulnerable and ronnie mom. Thank you so much. $10 super chat does australia buy russian oil Uh if they do it's very minor So australia produces oil So australia produces the commodities and natural resources So generally speaking when america has been hurt by high commodity prices the australian economy has boomed so australia May not be 100 energy self-sufficient, but it's pretty close to that it also Has so much sunshine down under that solar power is important australia has a lot of natural gas I think australia produces more natural gas than any other nation on earth I'll look at the sydney mourning herald Now how are you guys dealing with the death of shane war right the greatest spin bowler in in all of history Is uh is now dead died of a heart attack at age 52 On a vacation in thailand Suspected heart attack. He was just 52. So he retired back in 2007 So putin's energy shock is becoming a world food crisis Grace for rationing. Well, australia doesn't have to worry about this. The united states doesn't have to worry about this europe should be okay, but uh africa in the middle east And parts of asia are going to be in trouble So the world was facing a grain supply crunch even before putin's invasion of ukraine United nations food price index was already higher in real terms than at the height of the global hunger crisis a decade ago When you had the hour of spring You have a tight global market for grains vegetable oil and fertilizer Probably one of the many reasons why putin chose this moment to strike calculating that the west would not try to squeeze in too Hard So the world faces a commodity black swan across the gamut of primary resources So australia's uh coal production is just booming like the prices for for coal or astronomical the Wheat futures are shot up So oil gas coal and agricultural products are all spiraling higher together. This is great news for australia And it's by news for the united states Not so good news for europe Not so good news for japan and china middle east and africa Metal prices are rising. We have a systemic stagnation shock. We have an intractable problem for central bankers So the world is running out of safety buffers tradeable commodity is critically low So we're going to have non linear price increases China is prepared. It's been stocking out that holds 84 percent of the world's copper 70 percent of its corn 51 percent of its wheat So record food commodity prices are an ideal by fire for 45 of the poorest countries that rely heavily on food imports so Hundreds of millions of people are very likely to starve places like africa bangladesh and afghanistan So the whole production chain for food is under pressure from every side the worst in in our lifetimes Energy and farm commodities are interlinked natural gas is a feedstock for fertilizer production in europe russia and belarus together account for a third of the world's exports of potash, which is vital for Agriculture of fertilizer rocketing oil prices right oil now 110 plus a a barrel So these are driving a switch to biodiesel in southeast asia for the tightening the global market for vegetable oils Third of the world's exports of barley come from russia and ukraine 29 percent of wheat 20 percent of maize 80 percent of sunflower oil. Usually this is shipped through the black sea But uh, you're not going to do much shipping through there right now Insurance rates of prohibitive banks are refusing letters of credit Even though grains fertilizers and energy products are exempt from sanctions against russia So shippers everywhere are scrambling to find out what it means for a counterparty to be connected with russia Everyone is wary of the u.s. Treasury sanctions police known as ofak o f a c us office of foreign assets control So every transaction has to be screened to the finest detail russian and ukrainian wheat is not being offered critical corn flows to the world Stymied ukraine farmers do not plant substantial quantities of corn next month. The supply chain will be very tight Luke could be the next youtube boxer Putin underestimated the power of social media virtue signaling Small farmers in russia have just been shut out of the domestic credit market just before planting season so loans in russia are now at 27 percent chicago wheat futures have hit an all-time high and uh We also must contend with intense la niña weather patterns and drought in brazil and argentina So grain shortfalls are going to be pronounced Primary commodities today are more expensive in real terms than any time over the past 20 years much higher in europe and africa So we are entering a raw material shock of early 1970s proportion And how will russia retaliate will they exploit their lock hold over the global supply chain for titanium palladium and neon which are needed for The western aerospace and semiconductor industry okay, so Let's have a look one of my favorite channels these days is geopop With nato now sending significantly more troops to their eastern flank and russians closing in on ukraine's capital What can we expect to see in the next few weeks? Let's bring in the author of the absent superpower peter zion. All right, peter. Give us the next three weeks your projections Hey, jesse well first on the military side. There's the push to kiev There's the move from the eastern provinces to link up crimea and then the troops that are in crime You're going to be moving west to take the capital the economic capital of oden Oh, wow another super chat from ronnie martin. He says if putin freezes the 500 thousand barrels of oil Usa buys each day. How much do you think the average low IQ american would tolerate paying higher gasoline prices biden Went restore pipelines and energy leases So yeah, some definite challenges for joe biden and our gasoline prices keep going up and up and up Rodney says luke russia doesn't need tankers to supply china. They share a border. Ah I think you're wrong not much petroleum is going to cross the the border It is about 10 times cheaper to Ship things like petroleum via ships or any good right in general It's like 10 times cheaper to ship things via the ocean or via a river than via road transport Let alone then airline transport is another 10 times more expensive on top of that so China imports its oil along the ocean and they do this for reasons because it's just far more Economically efficient than importing things over land. So I just don't know How much China could import russian oil over land, but if they do the expenses will be Will be very likely to be prohibitive So if you do that you basically can start really show. Yes, unless there's a pipeline. So I don't know what kind of pipeline China and russia have for petroleum But I do know that China has to import 90 percent of their energy via the ocean So if they have to turn to rely on other sources will be prohibitively expensive And Rodney says China can build a pipeline in less than a year hundreds of millions of chinese would starve to death if Oil imports via the ocean were cut off. They would starve to death in less than a year right in in six months after Prevention of China importing oil hundreds of millions of chinese would be dead from starvation and A half a dozen countries could ensure this with just a couple of destroyers in the indian and pacific ocean Looking at the ukrainian system both from a population point of view an economic point of view and then finally from a governmental point of view And that is what they're working on right now That is when things get really brutal Because once they have Kiev and odessa they can move through whatever portions of the country at any time as they see fit That's when we're going to see the pogroms. That's when we're going to see the quiz leans That is when we're going to see them going rank and file through the population Looking for folks who are willing to fight. They're going to find them When the united states went into an iraq in afghanistan It wasn't nearly as difficult as the job is what the russians are trying to do in ukraine right now And this is going to be a very bloody conflict But from the american point of view, it's all about europe Because once the russians control some of these key pieces of infrastructure They're going to be able to lord that over the germans the italians the poles and say look you can either stop Or you can go without russian energy And that's the fight that we're about to have So they'll seize odessa and they'll get to the capital And then they control the country and then hunt people down village by village town by town And then threaten The western european nations To shut down the energy pipeline that flows through ukraine and say, you know what i dare you to do something about this Is that what the next step is Think about it from oska's point of view Either the russians shut down the pipelines in ukraine or the ukranians bomb their own pipelines once they are losing their country And when that happens russians can say, hey, look, we've got this lovely project called Nord Stream 2 Why don't we ship some gas through that? So once we get to this point The russians will really be taking pry bars to the european relationships With one another and with the united states because at the end of the day ukraine isn't the end of the game for russia It's just the next step on the road this started in georgia. It went to Crimea went to kazakhstan now It's in ukraine. We're not done. The next steps are estonia, latvia, lithuania and poland and for that to work You have to break the nato alliance They can do that with ukraine So you break the alliance through germany Is that right if you threaten germany and you turn off that pipeline that goes through ukraine and you say It's time to restart Nord Stream 2 or you guys are going to be reading in the dark for the next couple months Does that move germany in the right direction or not the right direction, but you know away from nato Absolutely, and I would underline. It's not just germany. It's germany and italy the italians have done a great Job of being very quiet this whole time. Yeah, they have they're letting germany be the bad guy But they're right behind them. So you're saying also the Baltics are in play What kind of move would that look like because those are nato countries? Are you saying Moscow is not afraid of triggering article five Today they certainly would be that's one of the reasons why they have to hide nato apart first If they can get to a position where the europeans are not on the same page and the americans for a mix of reasons Might not trust the european partners anymore Then they combine population of the Baltics is under eight million people They would be far simpler to conquer than ukraine And do you think that well, I think at that point we'd know the germans and the italians would be willing to sacrifice the Baltics But would the british would the french and would the americans allow a split in nato to do that That is absolute absolutely the right question From Moscow's point of view Bush did nothing against georgia. Obama did nothing against crimea Trump did nothing against general moves across the entire eastern front And now the biden administration is finding that after 20 years of malinvestment in the nato alliance It's not able to do anything in ukraine. So from Putin's point of view This is actually getting easier and easier rather than harder and harder from a geostrategic point of view So if they can break those relationships specifically between washington and europe Then it really doesn't matter what the brits in the french do excellent and your new book comes out when peter We're looking at june assuming that there's not another paper shortage. Okay sounds good and the new book is called aptly The end of the world is just the beginning All right, you predicted it. Thank you so much Okay, a little uh, peter zion there. So I was just reading this terrific book on uh, el chapeau This called the books called El hefe meaning the boss the stalking of chapeau guzman So here's just a little bit from the book. You can read it in two hours The day before the raid donovan got an email sitting at his desk in virginia He saw it had come from a colleague in customs who was writing to alert him One of the subjects of his chapeau guzman case was about to leave an airport in vernais california On a private jeff mexico subject in question the mexican actress kate Del castillo was according to the flight report traveling with three other passengers Scrolling through the email donovan clocked two of the passengers as argentinean film producers The third however was an american and a disaster. It was the actor john penn Donner was familiar with the strange events that have placed the star in the middle of his capture operation Earlier that winter while chapeau guzman was still in prison. He had asked his lawyers To contact del castillo the actress with yet another plea to make his movie And she had finally relented the project had been in turnaround nearly a year Everyone associated with it was either in custody or was running away from the kingpin for their life Unaware that a new business partner tried to kill both his writer And the assistant he had assigned to the project Del castillo reached an agreement with el chapeau To buy his life rights along with the two argentinian film producers After el chapeau escaped from out of plano and was front page news for days. Sean penn joined the team While del castillo was convinced the involvement of a hollywood celebrity would make the film more viable penn was non-committal He ended up hooking up with Del castillo on this adventure He was interested. Sean penn was interested in meeting el chapeau having made his own arrangements to interview the kingpin for rolling stone magazine So third strike was the day of the operation to capture el chapeau and intersected with this three-ring circus not long after the operation started So near the end of september 2015 two months after guzman's escape del castillo flew to guadalajara Sensibly for the birthday party of a friend to also to meet with guzman's lawyers Coalition had been spying on the lawyers for weeks and intercepted the actress chatting with them through with their boss so When el chapeau first heard about uh, sean penn wanted to come meet him El chapeau didn't know who sean penn was so he had to google sean penn And donovan says it all goes back to our el chapeau's mind works Kate del castillo was in touch with him the actress when he was still in prison now that he was out He was a big man again. He's always been the same arrogant cocky narcissistic wanted to be bigger than escobar Who wanted to tell his story The uh, the mexican marines their attitude was f sean penn the raid goes on as planned But then there are great bolts of lightning. And so the strike teams black orcs never left the ground Okay, uh, certainly martin and invite uh, he gets that Play a little bit more of that trample And there's a long history of of of that idea It was a big deal in the american revolution and the french revolution But as we know those rights tended to be natural rights described very narrowly Not a long list and only a narrow set of people got them white men for the longest time It was in part because the whole idea of rights was so closely connected to the defense of free contract and property Which has helped, uh, you know those who had and not those who didn't that The one of the first socialists carl marz could dismiss the whole idea of a human rights But we also know yes, uh carl schmidt and carl marz were both equally dismissive of human rights individual rights Natural rights because they thought that the these rights If they were taken seriously and made of first importance would reduce the realm of the political That long ago in the 19th century there were early versions because that's the american And that's the classical liberal anglo approach that the whole purpose of government the whole purpose the nation state Is to protect our private pleasures to protect our property that the only reason for government Is to ensure and protect our rights Of workers rights workers movements and common people's movements did define things like a right to work to employment Um, lots of of rights. We know about that the labor movement brought us that Humanized the workplace provided any limited hours excluded children from from work Never perfectly or enough and in the 20th century, especially we saw lots of what we call welfare rights basic entitlements Not just to speak or to to associate but to things like Food health care sanitation and it's really since the 1970s that What we call that the history of economic and social rights has seen a kind of major development movements focus on it mainstream human rights movements Especially today And there's human rights law and so what I want to talk about in in my last half is sort of what we should say about all that relative to You know the a broader progressive politics or socialist movement one topic I'm going to skip in the history of human rights that you may be interested in is um Whether they're an imperialist concept because in my youth They were associated with and and cited in justification of some interventions by great powers in places like kosovo Or iraq and in jacobin among other places There's been lots of discussion of what the left should think about human rights given the their potential for being taken in an imperial direction Especially their connection with us imperialism and i'm really glad to talk about that topic And and would love to pursue it with you what i what i want to focus on now For the for the the lecture itself is economics kind of what are the what are the distributive? Implications of the human rights movement today and what should progressives or socialists think about it Okay, let's uh get a little bit more from another youtube partner here I've made a severe and continuous lapse of judgment and I don't expect to be forgiven I'm simply here to apologize about everything that I said in the last week about russia ukraine You know, I realized that I was losing a lot of subscribers You know, I had been ratioed I was losing money friends money subscribers and the money and the money is just so important I mean the lives are just so important to me about the money about the russian people or the ukrainian people In the city of donbass or donbass and so when my livelihood my money hood is on the line I need to fight for and defend my duty for monetization You know ukraine lives can't matter until all lives matter which can't matter until black lives matter You know those despicable russians born from the deaths of hell descendants of putin himself If you have russian neighbors or friends Just go burglarize them go take their stuff take their houses take their yachts steal their stuff If you have russian colleagues get them fired and replace them with a ukrainian instead And if you are a service person then refuse to serve the russian people or charge them a surtax Maybe if you're a restaurant waiter charge them an additional 20% Simply as an economic sanctions that you will personally place on them yourself And you know what actually I have an announcement of my own to make today I'm announcing that I am also joining nato because I too am fighting for my independence for my dad He's a dictator and he's been telling me what to do the next time he yells at me I'm going to be launching nukes at him because I'm going to try to get nato support for me I'm going to need anti air support because he just walks around ammo and bitcoins I need ammo not a ride and we're going to send all of this support to ukraine as well knives guns chainsaws axes hammers nails staplers aircrafts Maybe our homeless people as soldiers drugs and even I think we should send them nuclear weapons too Let's just give them our nuclear weapons and have them launch an all-out offensive against russia And you know what it's just going to be all out nuclear war between these two people They're just blow each other up and we're going to uh, we'll go clean up afterwards You know afterwards we can go take their stuff We'll take their ships their yachts their houses whatever's left over there Maybe their gas and oil that might be kind of nice and we'll send them our testosterone supplements as well Just to beef up the machoism culture there such that people don't ever back down This is a fight to the death and I encourage everybody to just go all out and you know Just don't give up never give up ever that's cowardice because I don't want any of you guys around here I don't want to see anybody alive when I come in and take your stuff later on And you know, I know you're worried and concerned but it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay And Zelensky, well, he's a good-looking guy, isn't he? I think he's a man worth to dying for don't you? He looks like a hero I mean, he can certainly act as one he can portray a hero He's got all the training we need to make a hero out of him I mean, I even saw on tiktok Zelensky may just be the second coming of jesus christ Which we don't know that right like he's pretty good looking He's kind of masculine more masculine than me. This guy may be somebody worth laying down your life for I know many people many women would lay down their lives for a guy like this And you know what maybe you should too right a lot of people are going to die But it's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make And you know what else while we're at it. Let's let's buy some million token too you guys Let's just buy some million token go out there get it million token. Or check that out And Vitalik Butrin, let's seize his Ethereum because he's a russian gas oligarch And I've got another plan as well We've been trying to censor everything right across social media all of the russian propaganda Well, let's just blind ourselves There are these human blinders we can use and ensure that we never waver from that path of democracy freedom liberty machine learning react native JavaScript computational AI virtual reality AR web 3 crypto diversity racial justice Steve jobs and justice for all and so here's what changed my mind You see the other day a fire actually broke out at nuclear power plants in Ukraine And so Zelensky has threatened a total nuclear warfare catastrophe on all of Europe calling your politicians immediately Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors if there's a nuclear explosion This will be the end of everybody the end of Europe if we don't go and help out this poor man This this victim mentality minor complex crybaby of a man who is refusing to take 100 ownership accountability for the outcomes that he has Resulted this country and not able to ensure the success of his own people But rather casting blame on everybody by himself and his perhaps inability to resolve conflict build consensus If you even look at him the wrong way He would threaten you with all out the nuclear catastrophic consequences And you know conflict prone people well They typically can't get jobs at places like google or facebook where you need that cross functional teamwork skills So we have to support this person as an actor comedian in government And by the way, have you ever read that negotiation book never split the difference by the fbi hostage negotiator? You think that these sort of automatums work in the hostage negotiation scenarios as well with terrorists Maybe someone like that would be quite useful in a scenario like this And by the way, that fire at the nuclear power plant was actually at the training facility And as twitter states here Zelensky and the ukrainian government essentially just lied about an imminent meltdown at the nuclear power plant The fire was at a training building next door in order to call for nato to set up a no-fly zone and draw the west into war And what perhaps should be concerning for all of us is that Zelensky would rather wage war over a nuclear power plant and destroy it Causing radioactive fallout to all of europe rather than just give up the nuclear power plant It is a if we can't have it and no one can mentality now There's this thing called a proxy war where the west gets other countries to fight their wars for them because Hey war's expensive and so what we really want to do is outsource that to other countries to do the dirty work for us Which is why i'm so in favor of this war and wow that was The democracy now democracy now dot org the war and peace report I'm emi goodman with nermin sheikh as we spend the rest of the hour with author and Yale university history professor samuel moine Of course we're brutal in the extreme and there were no rules for inhibiting brutal conduct. Well, that's by design Uh, what happened after 2001 is that in the midst of an extremely brutal war on terror A new kind of war emerged and it was one in which really for the first time Uh, it was important to americans to see their wars fought more humanely in conformity with International rules that prohibit torture that limit civilian debt and the worry is that even though this represents a kind of progress It also helped american sustain war and helped make the war on terror endless even though Joe biden has withdrawn troops. He's promised to continue the war on terror in other ways Uh, someone you also make the argument that uh, a more humane war this idea of a more humane war Has accompanied an increasingly interventionist foreign policy So if you could elaborate on that and also the fact that you detail in the book of the role of human rights organizations In uh advancing this view human rights watch for example, which you say initially, uh, didn't take any position on war Uh, but then came to support certain humanitarian interventions So I would start the the story with vietnam, which was a much more brutal war illegal in the international system But also in blatant violation with lots more torture than the war on terror and a lot more civilian death And there was an anti-war movement in response to it And the revelations of the mealy massacre, which were so horrifying added fuel to the fire of that anti-war movement But then george mcgovern the peace candidate really the last peace candidate We've had in this country lost badly and democrats came to learn the lesson I think the wrong lesson that they needed to be as interventionist as the republicans Uh, uh, whom they were fighting for power And so we see across the later years of the cold war and into the 1990s High-minded rationales for american intervention Even though many of these interventions like the kosovo bombings violated the international rules that prohibit the use of force And the question i'm posing is whether we've forgotten about those rules Even as we've come to focus on the rules that say once you go to war You you can't fight brutally human rights watches an excellent example of of of these let's say imbalanced priorities So when it began monitoring wars in the 1980s and 90s It promised never to take a stand on whether the wars themselves are unjust or indeed illegal Um, but they did say they would monitor whether wars are conducted illegally whether there's torture whether there's excess Collateral damage now it's also true as you mentioned or mean that human rights watches sometimes strayed from that commitment And endorse some great power wars But my question is whether alongside groups like human rights watch that we need monitoring the conduct of wars how they're fought Whether we need to get back some of the anti-war sentiment that was present in american history at least Intermittently before after all the laws of war are incredibly permissive What they allow states to do once war begins is extraordinarily violent even when it's supposedly humane And also remember that soldiers die not just civilians on both sides And so our ancestors sometimes said we really need to keep war from happening And it's that lesson that we've stopped learning in the age of the war on terror when we've let the humanity of our wars Compensate for the fact that they just keep on going Well sam one of the other arguments you make is that and also this is a continuation of the effect of the vietnam war That once the draft was ended in the u.s. The military here embraced humanitarian laws of war In an unprecedented fashion you write quote a self humanization of armed force without precedent in the history of any great power Could you elaborate on that and explain why that was the case? So this period of the later 60s in the 1970s was pivotal for the morality of how War is fought around the world partly there were all kinds of new states after decolonization And they were made up of peoples who'd been the victims of brutal american and european wars for centuries And they demanded more humanity europeans had stopped their you know empires and relied on the united states to protect them And so they were in position to Ask for more humane wars now that they were no longer fighting them americans Including in the military understood that military force had to be inflicted in in in a more ethical or at least more Optically humane way because yeah, come on guys. Let's keep things optically humane. I think when you're waging war But most important is that we keep things optically humane And again a little bit more here is steven kotkin talking about the possibility that russia will start slashing under ck We used to rubble which we're watching in real time now And which breaks everyone's hearts and is killing all those civilians could just be the beginning of it You know, we shut down their banking system We say you can't bank well, peter We talk about how communications are in the cloud the internet's in the cloud It's actually in the ocean 99 of all communications are in the ocean And those undersea cables Are mapped And russia has a submarine force And so i can't bank You can't bank They can escalate they can cut those cables Between europe and the east coast of the us And asia and the west coast of the us And the ocean is a big place and you can cut the cables in many areas And then when they're fixed which takes a lot of time You can recut them And so short of nuclear exchange god forbid We have the problem that russia has tools that could really hurt really damage us The international financial system is worth a lot more to us peter than it is to the russians european energy security the energy security of our allies And the second largest economy in the world That's worth a lot more to us than it is to the russians So we need a diplomatic process Somehow which does not compromise ukraine But allows us to get out of a mutual maximalist escalation We need stability more than putin needs stability Of course everything in the short term is dependent on the heroism of the ukrainians But we need a process here That acknowledges that heroism But also acknowledges the potential damage that being caused to us I see a couple of scenarios if you'll permit me. Yes, of course Um people talk about putin occupying ukraine He cannot successfully occupy a country that big When stalin took only western ukraine in 1939 When he forcibly annexed it from poland eastern poland became western ukraine Tens and tens of thousands of functionaries had to be shipped in to run western ukraine And now we're talking about not just western ukraine, but all of ukraine When the nazis Conquered much of ukraine They didn't really administer it You know you and uh super chat from rodney martin five dollars. Thank you rodney Realistically, do you think any country will sink or attempt to impound a chinese or russian tanker? I think not especially a chinese tanker Well, I Yeah, I think it's possible. I'm not sure how likely See these maps on the territory when russia forces took territory and they color it in as russia That's actually not russian control. That's the penetration level of russian activity military activity But they don't control that territory. They're not administering that territory That territory is subject to Rearguard action like happened to the nazis the nazis took kiev They grabbed all the luxury hotels It was fabulous. They were a little juriating and three days later The booby traps began to go off and started killing them In kiev and in fact hitler decided he wouldn't take leningrad Because of what happened the booby traps going off and killing the nazi Hierarchs in kiev that instead they would surround leningrad and start it to death and the same plan for moscow And so you're an administrator in an occupied territory and you have a beautiful office And you don't know if it's safe And you don't know if the woman making your tea Is putting something in your tea and you don't know if you walk out on the street If there's something underneath your car That may not be friendly towards you if you turn the ignition And so you have a situation where there's no way for russia to successfully occupy ukraine Absolutely excluded because of the scale the size of it We know this from the iraq war you can knock over a regime But occupying and running a country is a different proposition Sadly and so we're not going to have that What I fear is the outcome Is putin says Well, I can't have ukraine. You can't have it either I'll just break it. I'll just shatter it. I'll just smash it I'll keep the black sea littoral that beautiful coastline All the way through odessa and that piece of moldova known as transnistria and then a little bit beyond even the danubian basin the danubian delta the denieper delta land bridge to crimea All the way through to eastern ukraine the so-called danyets gluhansk trash canistans That putin recognized Maybe he keeps that Maybe he tries to kill the ukrainian government And then he just shatters everything and says, okay, you can have it back now Except for the parts that are really valuable That coastal area on the black sea making ukraine landlock I fear that kind of outcome peter because he doesn't need to reconstruct it He doesn't need to own it. He just needs to shatter it unfortunately. And so we need a situation Where we not only can reverse any gains they have on the ground But we can reconstruct or disincentivize the russian troops The big stuff that they're watching are defections I see defections in russia It's one thing when an artist defects When a filmmaker defects When a literary critic defects But what happens if a general defects gets on a plane And flies to brussels and has a press conference And says, you know what? We don't all support putin This is a bad war and we're against it and many people in the military feel the same way i do Or in the security services The the areas he cares about so right now putin is Clamping down watching really closely his own security and military officials To prevent that kind of defection Which would be a massive blow to his regime and potentially emboldened others And so the the game now is Not just over ukraine But it's over the potential defections on the inside from putin's regime And just a handful even one defection Can be devastating for the image of a strong man regime And as People get courage from those who step out first The first one to show courage can potentially Make the others Remind the others of their courage Okay, one thing that has surprised me in this crisis is how unified and strong europe Comes across steven wertheim the author of tomorrow the world the birth of us global supremacy It's got an article here in the washington post europe is showing that it could lead its own defense In the long run the united states can't contain both russia and china europe's resolute opposition to putin's war Europe is showing that it could lead its own defense In the long run the united states can't contain both russia and china europe's resolute opposition to putin's war provides an opening for a strategic shift Perspective by steven wertheim When a great power takes a gamble the world shakes By ordering an attack on ukraine russian president vladimir putin has unleashed a chain of reactions whose end point no one can yet foresee Already a parent however is one consequence for the united states Overstretched to begin with america has just seen its strategic burden increase Just as suddenly however a new solution is coming into view europe is ready to take on greater military duties Before the war many americans including some political leaders had determined to be more realistic about their country's strategic ambitions in an increasingly competitive world Sensibly president biden had sought to stabilize relations with russia and reduce us warmaking in the greater middle east while turning attention and resources toward managing a rising china But putin's russia has refused to be sidelined By invading ukraine it has caused natos eastern flank with four countries bordering russian territory to demand reinforcements and the united states has risen to the task biden has sent 14 000 american troops to europe since the crisis began bringing the total to 100 000 Providing temporary reinforcements is the right decision today in the face of russia's bald aggression But the united states should resist the inclination to revive its role as the military protector of europe Especially since europe is awakening to its responsibilities britain is sending troops to the baltic states and poland france is pushing strategic autonomy for the european union And days after halting the nord stream two pipelines supplying natural gas from russia germany reversed a long standing ban on providing military assistance and sent weapons to ukraine germany also vowed to spend more than two percent of its economy on defense finally committing to meet natos target German chancellor olaf scholes declared his country and europe to have reached a historic turning point Both americans and europeans would benefit the scholes's words prove true In the coming years european states should move to take the lead in their collective defense and the united states should do everything possible to encourage them To stake the defense of europe on the united states over the next decade and beyond would be to answer putin's rash gamble with a slow moving gamble of our own It might seem as though the united states will remain able and willing to protect all of natos 28 european countries far into the future After all america has orchestrated europe's defense for the past eight decades Yet it did so under two markedly different conditions During world war two and the cold war the united states sought to stop totalitarian powers from conquering the region An axis or sylvia takeover of europe would have closed off the entire continent to liberal Interaction and influence and put the western hemisphere on the defensive all right, so i don't think europe needs united states And us can instead concentrate on their biggest peer competitor, which is china That is a little bit more from yaml historian samuel moin Now the united states abandoned peace and reinvented because me lie was such a public relations disaster for the military People were shocked before it was permissible to Inflict the most kind of brutal violence on enemies, especially if they were non-white enemies around the world and americans celebrated When that violence was perpetrated after me lie the military realized it needed to accept some constraints on the way it fights In the name of being able to claim that it was it was a moral force And so it was utterly important that even as humanitarians in human rights watch and other groups stopped caring about whether there was American war and focusing on how it was fought so to the military which wants to keep its missions going Was willing to accept some constraints on how those missions are conducted I wanted to turn uh professor moin to president obama's nobel prize speech. It was december 10th 2009 When president obama received the nobel peace prize in oslo norway. This is a clip from his acceptance speech We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes There will be times when nations acting individually or in concert Will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified where force is necessary We have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules I believe the united states of america must remain a standard bear in the conduct of war That is what makes us different from those whom we fight That is a source of our strength That is what makes us different from those we fight that is a source of our strength You repeatedly referenced professor moin this Nobel acceptance speech in your book. Can you talk about the significance of this and the intensification of the drone wars? So what what what fascinates me about barack obama is that he was a public moralist and he thought publicly About the moral significance of law in particular And he talked about it in that extraordinary address as well as the one Four years later defending the use of drones now obama famously wanted to see himself as an heir of martin luther king jr And in certain ways he was he claimed or Repeated the the belief that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice But where king had disputed the use of force when it's immoral Going to war in the case of vietnam not just how American force was used obama ignored the first issue or justified eternal war as you heard and focused on the second As if how americans fight Would guarantee the moral propriety of the endless wars They're still fighting today when it came to 2013 He gave an equally remarkable speech at the national defense university. Let me go to that clip because we happen to have it Yes in may of 2013 National defense university the one that the well-known peace activist media benjamin of code pink interrupted. This is president obama When when we we went He he went on to we went on We're addressing that man, you know, I think that the uh, and i'm going off script as you might expect here The voice of that woman Is worth paying attention to Obviously, obviously Obviously, I do not agree with much of what she said And obviously she wasn't listening to me in much of what I said But these are tough issues And the suggestion that we can gloss over them Is wrong and that audience member I dare say he knew exactly who she was code pinks media benjamin If you had trouble hearing saying thousands of muslims that got killed will you compensate the innocent families? That will make us safer here at home. She said I love my country drone strikes are making us less safe keeping people in Indefinite detention is making us less safe samuel mine Again, it's it's a such a morally dramatic moment not least because you might wonder after hearing that exchange Which one of them really deserve the nobel peace prize But what I write about in my book because I think that moment was in a way the the climax of obama's presidency At least, you know judged as a moment when he was morally reflecting on his deeds He he he conceded That that that there there needs to be some control on war And if you listen to her mainly what she's asking is for and let's be realistic a major reason that Barack Obama droned so many people and killed so many people And with the bad guys that he was killing so many innocents were killed was to shore up his political standing He did it to get reelected. He did it in large part for his own political interests not necessarily america's interests No different than many other politicians such as john f. Kennedy Who got us into the cuban missile crisis in large part to shore up the standing of democrats heading into the mid-term elections Less inhumanity. What's amazing is that obama himself goes on in the speech to say Maybe the problem is not so much the brutality of the drones But that we're fighting endless war at all because he says These kinds of wars will have effects not just on our victims But on the perpetrators too and he anticipated I think in that address if you read it the coming of donald trump as as a kind of you know A kind of consequence of what happens when nations fight endless war and sadly we're still doing it Okay We just have a second sam but could you elaborate on that? Why is trump ineffective that endless war? Well, so as as spencer ackerman and so many others have written and talked about on your show Wars fought are never without consequences for the states that fight them Even though of course we should be concerned first and foremost about those who die or those who are merely surveilled and haunted By drones and special forces this really matters because it's essential that when biden gave his two speeches the other Week defending the pullout from afghanistan. He made utterly clear that while giving up on failed counter insurgency He's turning to and maybe will intensify himself the the real fruit of 9 11 Which is kind of endless counter terror No matter what the constraints of international law say unless they require the drones to strike or the special forces to visit With care for the victims samuel moine want to thank you for being with us his new book humane. How do you Okay, so samuel moine. He's on the left and uh, you may you may not like his leftism, but So plenty of interesting critiques Okay So most youtubers use 30 to 50 percent of viewers within the first 30 seconds of their video starting This can kill video performance So what's at stake one of the problems number one instant title and thumbnail delivery When people click on a video they want to see what they came for the best intros give instant delivery To jumping into a storyline the earlier the first storyline challenge point can begin the better You look at a typical retention curve the best holds during these moments You don't need two minutes of build to get there three cutting down on unnecessary context Biggest mistake I see is way too much context people feel the need to over explain What's about to happen show don't tell wherever possible putting your best foot forward A lot of people are stuck in the mindset of saving their best moment No, that's why I started today with my electric shaver review and then transitioned to noton chocolate from Excellent trail mix from not harvest just three dollars seventy. I got this on amazon fresh Put the best clip first and number five set the stakes beyond just action Intros need a compelling reason to keep watching Is there a challenge an enemy a problem you need to overcome? Could you add a forfeit reward sex flow into the rest of the video the best intro doesn't feel like an intro Don't use highlight reels Fancy transition sequences the data from thousands of videos show These moments placed right after an intro lead to heavy retention falloff number seven Set a goal intros are heavily influenced by how many views a video gets the niche the content format So this tip needs to be taken with context okay Few tips there on how to succeed on youtube Maybe I should listen all right back to a book I read this week uncle sam wants you world war one in the making of the modern american citizen So it talks about how a hundred years ago americans had much more of a sense of obligation than of rights an american sense of obligation During world war one came from many places from political traditions of republicanism Value of the common good over individual liberty Topian visions of community christian beliefs that made of duty a virtue paternalist notions that legitimated social hierarchies and demanded obedience to them So in the years before world war one voluntary associations such as club schools churches party Parties unions much more powerful in american life than they are now they organize much of american public life These groups provided social services. They regulated the economy. They policed crime in many community norms So schooled in this world of civic volunteerism americans formed their social bonds and their political obligations first to each other And then to the state so in the absence of formal federal institutions These voluntary associations acted as the state. They organized public life. They helped americans feel a Sense of collective identity. They carried out much of the practical work So americans of the early 20th century owed allegiance to an overlapping array of authorities of which uncle sam's federal government was only one Perhaps not even the most important Then as world war one rolled along and we entered the conflict the state made ever stronger claims on the citizens More time events prompted one of the 20th centuries broadest Most vigorous and most searching public discussions about the meaning of american citizenship And you had the rise of barbed violence and vigilantism and lawless violence These things characterized 19th century american political culture But when they were reduced they also helped to wipe away that era's vibrant political culture of association or life So they faced the multiple authorities of pre-war life And thus they diminished the multiple loyalties that operated there So americans articulated their political obligations not to many things but increasingly to just one the state When they imagined government rather than people as the source of rights americans unwittingly Handed over to the state an array of coercive powers have matters previously governed by voluntary associations So the progressives people who brought america direct elections of senators Direct taxation initiative and referendum and a philosophy of participatory democracy should have turned away from the people is ironic But not surprising so as angry wartime crowd silenced pacifists labor radicals and small town ministers The idea of appealing directly to the people locating democratic legitimacy in their associations lost its lost it So the state even the seemingly tyrannical state of the 1920 palmer raids the civil libertarians despised Appeared the better option in a devil's bargain progressives faith in the people became for many a post-war fear of the mob and of the crowd So for much of the early 20th century rights talk was only talk Civil liberties would never be sustained by the rich institutional networks of everyday life that undergo to the culture of obligation And so the lived experience of rights proved far weaker than the culture of obligation that preceded it Reftive institutions at the local or national level to create a nourishment meaningful culture of rights american political culture Limped into the 1920s with a contestant and fractured Sense of the obligations of citizenship, but with no real alternatives in place So on the home front americans proudly called themselves vigilant citizens vigilant good vigilante bad And they believed that they were doing work that was needed and explicitly requested by the national government So leading public figures drawing on long-standing traditions equating citizenship with Obligation did call on americans to stand vigilant during the war So appealing to habits of voluntary association They supported the organization of vigilance movements nationwide Ministers of safety women's vigilance leagues home guards And the government depended on the voluntary work of such groups For the success of the nation's war mobilization effort So one justice department official boasted this country is being policed more thoroughly and successfully than ever before in its history So as long as of americans have claimed the right to rule themselves They've also insisted on the authority to police each other So in the early republic they tied vigilance to concepts of popular sovereignty The vigilance was also a political practice whereby collective policing by private citizens contributed to the community defense These days some americans wish for obligations They want to renew among americans a sense of commitment for our fellow citizens 90 years They tell us to put rights and not obligations at the center of our political life Individualism has corroded our common culture and our civic associations so that we even bowl alone From such a perspective the sense of volunteerism and obligation in a political culture of early 20th century america must astound People sacrificed For and even died because of commitments to a common political life that americans seem no longer to share They created those obligations in their everyday institutions Places where they express their understandings of citizenship and fairness membership and belonging And they came to consensus about their obligations in face-to-face meetings Must have been comforting to see a familiar face at the draft board hearing from the doorstep selling liberty bonds Or being able to negotiate the terms of political obligation in the lodge or the club Okay, let's get a little bit more here from uh, some new wine It was an outline of the better world the war was supposed to bring about So, uh, my country's president franklin roosevelt Some months ago my country nearly intervened militarily in syria And explaining why in a very dramatic address before the american people Barack obama. So this is a speech at harvard in 2015 not to whom you gave the Nobel prize Raised memories very specific memories of world war two gas was used to kill the jews and now bashar alasad Had crossed a line a red line by using a similar weapon The security council might be deadlocked, but protection of human rights demands a response anyway Shouldn't the u.s. congress authorize one in the face of The rule never again Well, I don't know I'm just a historian I don't know what ought to happen in the face of the syrian tragedy now that so many are dead and isis has arisen But I want to investigate The origins of this commonplace our commonplace that the idea of human rights is deeply related to the immediate memory after world war two of the holocaust because I haven't found any evidence for this proposition And so I want to look further into post war history And see when these two things did get belatedly entangled. What were the circumstances? for our immediate ancestor in remembering the holocaust and thinking of human rights as what Our ideals are going to be in response to its memory So i'm gonna give a typology of three stages in let's say the conceptual evolution of human rights since the 40s brutally simplify to do so and label those three stages the welfarist stage The anti-colonialist stage and the humanitarian stage Human rights were sometimes invoked already in the 40s The udhr makes that clear, but originally it was in a welfarist paradigm Which gave a rise later to an anti-colonialist paradigm before the humanitarian paradigm emerged Start with the first phase I think it's clear now that the public meaning of the idea of human rights in the 1940s Immediately after world war two was one synonym for a project of national welfarism Whose acceptable forms world war two had been about clarifying The phrase human rights you can see on your chart had not been unprecedented in the 1940s, but experience increased use Because anglo-american politicians invoked it before the holocaust had crystallized as a german policy Human rights for those politicians were a set of promises for why the war was worth fighting It was an outline of the better world the war was supposed to bring about So my country's president franklin roosevelt whose interest in the fate of the jews was negligible Began invoking human rights as the purpose of a future war Before japanese bombs had allowed him to bring the country into the conflict And as the war progressed it became clear that what was mostly at stake for the people who fought it Was the new form of citizenship it would allow Once hitler had been put down And that was going to be a revision of 19th century citizenship with its minimal state In the name of a new kind of state a welfarist state providing social protection And so it's no surprise whatever that the universal declaration features social and economic entitlements Like the right to work health even paid vacations added to the lists of rights inherited from the 18th century Now the basic idea of a social right was not new in fact within the history of the french revolution in the jacobin Declaration of the rights of man and citizen the rights to public relief and education had already been propounded But now they became a consensus view And more broadly the welfarist consensus was probably at its height compared to any time before and any time since You find examples in great britain's breverage plan FDR stated the union address for 1944 when he offered a second bill of rights to the american people The international labor organization Reinvented itself in 1944 in philadelphia and offered something called the philadelphia declaration which said its goal in the post-war years was going to be human rights for workers Because the u d h r's main addressy at this point was not the victims of atrocity, but the industrial proletariat of the transatlantic space Okay, that's um your mind there professor of international law So another book i have been reading Is an anthology by jerry z muller one of my favorite authors. He wrote a terrific biography of hans fryer He's written books on jews and capitalism He's got a book coming out on the scholar of religion jacob talb's And in 2020 published conservatism an anthology of social and political thought from david hume to the present It was published by princeton university And here's a little bit from chapter seven which Contains a lengthy excerpt from carl schmitt. So jerry z muller introduces Conservatives have always been hostile to democracy in its original meaning of direct rule by the people toward representative democracy. They have been suspicious Intensity and implications of that suspicion have varied across time and national context My conservatives have accepted democratic institutions is usually being with skepticism toward the claims of democratic theory Now people on the left have their own problems with populism and direct democracy too Conservatives have maintained that normally democratic institutions are most likely to work when they are restrained and counterbalanced by non democratic elements which allow for the formation and influence of decision making elites Though the degree of their statism has varied from one national context to another Conservatives have on the whole emphasized the importance of the state as a guarantor of property and order And is necessary to provide national defense against external military threats Now the following selection by the 20th century german legal and political theorist carl schmitt argues that under some circumstances parliamentary liberal democracy Is incapable of creating a government strong enough to carry out the necessary functions of the state His analysis of the political institutions The later stages of the weimar republic has implications beyond this immediate context schmitt's analysis drew upon criticisms of parliamentary democracy Already voiced at the turn of the century by the french radical right The dilemmas which carl schmitt analyzed to resurface more recently in the language of public choice theory In the attempt to explain why the pursuit of self-interest by plurality of social groups may result in unfavorable collective outcomes And yet the u d h r was ignored in its time And already i think we can see why By 1948 we are already late in the day of moving states towards welfareism in the global north There was a debate about how much welfareism what form of welfareism ought to be provided under what model of political economy Should there be reform liberalism as in my country social democracy as in britain or this region christian democracy As in much of western europe communism what there was not debate about a few malcontents aside Was that the state had to be updated to provide welfare Now this welfareist moment was nationalist It was part of a project of creating welfare state by state or even nation by nation And in fact the universal declaration tells us that it's a template for nation states It says it's a common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations Few and far between were those who inferred from the document The premise that there would be inter or super national rights protection the document doesn't tell us Really and few wanted it to occur Few saw it as far as i've been able to locate them To be about the problem of state atrocity that our goal is now to stigmatize or even criminalize You can put this another way very abstractly and it's to say that the 1940s kicks off the apex of the idea of sovereignty And the globalization of nationalism in world history Now what was the status of holocaust consciousness in the 1940s? As i've mentioned already it's conventional to assume that the world just responded to the holocaust with human rights But we can't find anyone who says so in the 40s themselves I think it's much more plausible to see the u d h r as a response to depression and war not atrocity and genocide Actually there's a whole field of history called the history of holocaust memory Which has unveiled how spotty and selective the knowledge of german barbarism Was in the immediately proceeding period So it's hard to imagine that human rights could have been a response to the jewish tragedy per se And by the way the nirnberg trials really weren't either Because the allies and especially the americans and the soviet union wanted the nirnberg trials to be most about interstate aggression Which they wanted to ban in the post war world And even to the extent they confronted war crimes they didn't thematize the a german conduct we now consider to Okay, how about a little uh news you can use Many eyes only ever moved within the confines of a screen these days The muscles evolved eventually lose their tone like under trained legs get weak Your focus drops and your head starts to ache So one thing that I do is I periodically try to expand My field of awareness and when I do I feel my muscles relaxing and unnecessary tension dropping away and another Avenue that I get to expanding my field of awareness is to periodically let go of everything that I think I know So let go of all my preconceptions Let go of everything that I think I know and when I do that I feel my my back relax and unlock and my breath comes easier so when you're Focused on on a screen your body tightens and compresses around the object of your focus So right now instead of being focused on the screen. I'm looking at both sides of the room simultaneously So when I sit up and down and I've got that expanded wheel field of awareness My body moves much more smoothly and gracefully So here's a little twitter thread How to exercise your eye muscles for the 21st century basic movements You have 12 eye muscles to expand your visual experience. These basic motions will ensure They're active if you look at a screen for a living Do these at the end of the day Don't let zoom meetings and Netflix ruin your vision and stress your brain Tracking exercises train your eyes to follow a moving target without losing focus And then go outside you'll read about this one a lot on twitter because it's important Your body needs the sunlight and outdoor landscapes much more stimulating than a confined room alternate your focus between near and far targets And then I eight ball training Muscles work like crazy and you feel a lot of blood flow the eye the The eyes of the windows to the soul To have been the core of the destruction of european jewelry in eastern europe So I conclude disconcertingly and I am surprised by this myself still That human rights were not really could not have been in the 1940s a concept linked very strongly with atrocity in particular Or the holocaust even more specifically It doesn't seem to have correlated well with the supranational protection of individuals, which only a few advocated There were a few but as I say The main international function of the udhr in real time seems to have been as a template For states updating their promises from a 19th century to a 20th century model It wasn't a contribution to international law At the time it was internationalist and source but as a template for national welfare citizenship Conversely if we do look at innovations and international law in the same era I think we have to put the universal declaration to one side You will know that the nuremberg trials took place, which I've already mentioned The genocide convention was passed which have a much closer relationship to world war two and the expectation that war would A prompt atrocity and the geneva convention Conventions were also updated in 1949 and yet if we play the children's game Of comparing these four pillars of postwar innovation the udhr the nuremberg trials the genocide convention of the geneva convention It seems quite difficult to associate the udhr with the other three and not just because none of the other three So much as mention the notion of human rights in real time I think that's because our ancestors in the 1940s worked in a sophisticated way with a kind of Background set of assumptions about a causal chain Of course, they cared about the worst that could go wrong and they passed a genocide convention Which had to do with the destruction of european jewelry in 1941 through four chiefly They were concerned about the conduct of war the treatment of pow's The killing of civilians generally, which is why they updated the geneva conventions They cared about the commission of aggressive war starting in 1939 And that is why they held the nuremberg trials But what they cared most about was looking back very far in the causal chain to the great depression Which in their minds had caused the rise of dictatorship in 1933 and later the war and atrocity So if you think of it this way, you begin to think that the udhr is the boldest But also the most distant attempt to respond to the war because it tries to intervene earliest in the causal chain By providing the kind of welfare citizenship that would keep the 1929 to 1933 dynamic from recurring Now you may know that the preamble to the udhr mentions that It is propounded in part In the face of quote disregard and contempt for human rights that have resulted in barbarous acts which have out raided the conscience of mankind So I have to be very clear that i'm not trying to totally untether human rights from its companions or indeed from the outcome of war But did that phrase mean the holocaust specifically? Well, I think there's reason to doubt it every nation had had its horrors the nazis were Responsible for many terrible things in the lives of most peoples The most famous outrages on humanity in the 1940s were leningrad and lidice not belzec or treblinka, which were basically unknown at the time And not surprisingly if this is your way of thinking about the situation No diplomats of any nationality mention the jewish fate in particular in the un debate in any of its committees or in the general assembly In the year up to december 10th When the universal declaration was propounded So I spent a lot of time on this earliest moment just because I think People are most scared about my views about it And I think it's important to be nuanced about the ways in which the udhr was and wasn't related to the war And the reasons why it's doubtful to think it had any connection to the to the jewish tragedy per se Hey, let's get a little something here from Ian bremer Hi everybody, Ian bremer here And as we head to the weekend, we are sadly into the second week of this russia war in ukraine And no end in sight You of course if you're in russia, you're not supposed to call it a war. It's actually illegal to call it a war It's a special military operation if you call it a war or otherwise Describe fake news on the war as is Considered by the russian government You face up to 15 years in prison The level of brutality that the russians are exerting upon innocent ukranians Who have done nothing wrong other than Elect an independent and democratic government and want to just determine their own future As well as the brutality that the russians are increasing the exerting against their own russian citizens Is horrifying and has met with revulsion With most of the world, uh, there was a General assembly u.n. General assembly resolution condemning the russian invasion And four countries in the world Voted with the russians eritrea Syria Belarus and north korea It is an astonishing level of opposition Strong opposition and strong opposition that is willing to pay a serious price In order to be in strong opposition that we're seeing from countries around the world. Here's the problem Um, the russians. Yes, they will win militarily. They will be able to capture kiev They will be able to remove zolensky from power in kiev But i see no circumstance Under which putin emerges from this crisis In anything but a dramatically worse position Both politically inside his own country economically in terms of how russia is doing As well as geopolitically and russia's position particularly as it relates to european security There is no circumstance under which i can see That putin wouldn't have been radically better off If he just hadn't invaded ukraine And on the one hand you can say that's good because it means he's losing And you want someone to lose when they Okay, that guy's a mistake That putin is a problem But the russians have 10 times the army that the ukranians do and is so long as no one else launches an invasion Of russia proper or sends regular troops into ukraine. They will win this What about putin's remark? I think on sunday Using nukes if anybody interferes Well, it doesn't feel great, but the russians have done this off and on for 70 years Uh, and so all the people in the west who nuclear policy is a responsibility They all perked up They all looked at it very very closely and they're like, okay, nothing's really changed. It's just rhetoric All of the I think that the term they use is muscle memory within the nuclear force is nothing has moved This is just putin being a bit of a prick It's not something you should ignore, but it's also not something you should overly worry about What do you think putin wants on a personal basis? Is he just an evil tyrant? Is he looking to make a name for himself? In a really bad way or or is he desperate because he knows his time is up Right, I think those are the kind of the top three categories here. Okay He is an evil tyrant. He is a dictator and now everybody but tucker carlson admits it Even tulsi gold gabard and the bernie sanders have switched sides finally Second, he is desperate for his country because he realized that demographically they're in collapse They have very little time left and yeah, he wants to be remembered as the next peter the greater katharine the great Somebody who remade the russian condition and allowed the country to coast on those successes for decades to come It's our job to make sure he fails it all three Are we going to be able to do that and how the United States will not be intervening directly because Ukraine is not a nato ally. Have you seen the reports of that massive 40 plus mile long convoy? Yes, of course. I was thinking that one of our drones could easily take care of that, but I would take more than one That's kind of a good example of how the russians suck at logistics So if it came to a direct head-to-head fight between the united states and the russians one our military is brilliant logistics It's like it's disneyland the military everybody else And the only thing they're better at is taking out a large number of vehicles that are in a line So if it did come to a regular war between russia and the united states We would wipe the floor with them in terms of the armored warfare and the artillery battle And then they would feel that they would have no choice but to consider nukes There's no reason to expect the united states to directly intervene We will play favorites. We are playing favorites Congress is going to be asked tonight to send at least six billion dollars in direct military equipment To the ukrainians. I have I figured that'll pass in a matter of seconds We have sent a whole lot of javelins We don't know how many probably at least a thousand launchers by this point and every country in nato is sending everything they have One of the fun things about nato Is that during the cold war there were different tiers of military equipment because some countries were more advanced when The cold war ended Everyone spent 15 years upgrading their equipment and they handed the older stuff To the new allies in central europe and turkey Now all of those countries have upgraded their equipment and they're sending all their hand to be downs to ukraine Okay, let's say hello to elliot blatt Hello, kajun blessings my meeting's over. It was a doozy Blessings. Yeah, thanks for the blessings. Love is all around us. You never meet alone, bro Okay, so I got some physiologic problems there after the meeting. Okay. Talk to me Well, I just have this like creeping tension that goes sort of up my back and shoulders and into my head And um It's like I don't even know how to get rid of it now. It just sort of happens. It's it's a very familiar feeling to me and so You know, what would you recommend out zander technically for us? I remember a few weeks ago I was suddenly under a lot of pressure and my neck just seized up Ah so Acutely like enough to make you yell like that. No, no, I didn't I didn't yell I didn't say but it It wasn't acute. It was uh, But it was more the moderate but less than acute I grabbed it like I grabbed it and tried to so so I I don't have you know 100% Direction over my body, but I think one thing that always helps is to lie down And with the head a little bit supported and then another thing that I find helps is to Let go of everything that I think I know To try to get into a space where I'm simply an awareness rather than judgment So are you in a lot of judgment right now? Yeah, yeah, I'm feeling acutely judgmental Um And you know, I guess the problem is with me But it's not like I have control over here like Is there a way to sort of short circuit that's reaction? So it just doesn't happen Yeah, let go of everything you think you know Just be in the present. Just like just be purely whatever happens. Surprise me. Just take me by surprise Well, even though you think you're just trying to get a very basic basic point across And then people react to you as if that you're speaking some strange language Just say oh They're not dumb. They're just Speaking a different language Yeah, I mean, what is your love language? Elliot? Maybe they weren't speaking your love language No, it certainly wasn't a love language. They were speaking um So, I don't I don't know why call them. This is my first redux call Like two calls within one show But you're in pain bro, and I'm here to help I feel your pain But uh, it feels like this basic phenomenon this Frustration with life, you know this There was a period in my life when things seemed to go really really smoothly, right And now every day brings with it an obstacle that I must surmount You know, there's never been like a clear sailing day. I can't remember the last time I have completely clear sailing day Now at least just a property. This is just because of childhood you get these in childhood And once you become adult you just never have an easy day again Yeah, well, I think a lot of it does have to do with childhood So it's both certain circumstances again to trigger Uh responses that you had in childhood Does that make sense? I mean not not every circumstance, but certain circumstances will bring bring up a response that you used a lot in childhood Yeah, I guess I was using childhood as a time when you know It was completely carefree, you know really just carefree every day was like a new day and new discoveries and fun things to do and you know It's just a joyous period The next day brought something very similar and now every day has this little Mountain that I must climb this mountain of frustration and anger and drudgery That I thought would just be temporary, you know And it's basically been the case for the last 30 years Wow Do I need a vacation? May I just need a vacation? When did you last take a vacation? I can't even remember A long time ago. I went skiing like four years ago Then covid hit I was about to have him in covid hit and then things got jumbled up I don't know. I didn't call into a wine about my plate. Look. I was no it's it's interesting. So Yeah, I think if you're in a state of awareness rather than judgment that you'll be less likely to have physical pain Your body will be less likely to lock up if you're simply Oh Aware of what's happening and aware of what other people are saying or thinking or feeling As opposed to judging them for what people are thinking thinking saying doing It's a lot easier to be free and easy in your body Now when you had your little lock up in your neck, were you thinking you're feeling or was it purely physical? No, it was it was It was a combination of circumstance Taking me back to childhood feelings of you know, I'll never be able to figure this out So I sometimes I spiral and make a mistake I get anxious. I make a mistake Then I get more anxious and then I make more mistakes and then I get increasingly anxious and fearful and it's just a downward spiral And then do you do things that compound the mistakes? Yeah, well when when I beat myself down for making the mistake I get more anxious and uh Yeah, I I'm quite familiar with downward spirals Well, all right um So what is your take on? How is this Ukraine thing going to play out in your mind? Do you have a theory? Yeah, I don't think that Putin is going to occupy the Ukraine indefinitely and I don't think he's going to try to take over Europe Uh, he's going to wreck Ukraine and then think he's going to probably pull out of most of the most of Ukraine Pull out, okay. Yeah, I think what it's going to do is um Sort of take over half of it or install You know, if you look at the map of Ukraine like there's the the eastern half and then the western half Eastern half is mostly russian speaking. It's probably ethnically more russian and then on the western half it's less russian so there'll be some sort of partition and they'll kick out I ever got his name already The prime minister of Ukraine Zelensky. So yeah, like kick out Zelensky put in a russian puppet and um, everyone will be like, okay Yeah, they'll figure out some way to phrase it as though, you know, it's a win-win or everyone both sides gets a safe face And you know, we all live happily ever after. Yeah, I think something like that I think it is more likely that Putin gets his way than Ukraine or the west or the United States gets their way in this Okay, that's good. So no no nuclear holocaust. Yeah, I hope not. Well, what's what's your analysis of What's going on for you physiologically after the meeting? um I guess I um I figure out I I repress my frustration with the ineffective communication And I store it as tension somewhere in my body. Yeah so it's like I know there's you know, there's a definite connection between your mind your body your emotions and But it's because I really you know I'm used to conversations like ours being pretty crisp and relatively efficient where we have a point to make we make it really rather relatively economically we sort of Rock where each other's going And the conversation as a whole is more or less a pleasant experience, right? And so there's not these roadblocks these obstacles like if you're dealing with somebody's really low IQ About you know on the street, let's say they bring a raccoon and they put it in the mcdonalds or something And you're like, hey bro, don't put a raccoon in mcdonalds Um, and they're like why not? You know having to explain that as intrinsically a frustrating experience, right? Yeah and So I feel like I'm in that situation where I'm trying to explain to people why um Bringing a raccoon in mcdonalds is a bad idea Yeah You know I don't know Luke. Okay. Look, I have a question for you another topic. You mind if I ask? Okay, do you think they're the whole industry of screenwriting? Are you tapped into that world at all? A little bit So, do you know like they you know the general contours of that, uh world? Yeah Is that a viable uh career path or is that just completely impossible? Like being a screenwriter for either movies or television Yeah, it's uh, I mean there are hundreds of people who make their living doing it Right, but I'm sure there's thousands of people that would like to right It's uh competitive. It's not It's not as easy as being a secretary Right now is it um I should say locked up, you know, is it is it a merit-based thing or is it a sort of uh Internal note you got to know someone type of thing. I think it's as merit-based as anything else I mean not as merit-based as a hundred meter dash, but uh fairly close Okay, so, um Could could you make like a substantial living or would you just be scraping by? It would depend. Uh Some people do really well, uh It's it's not easy Yeah Yeah, it's just curious because um with all these like you know with netflix and Amazon and apple Everyone getting into this entertainment game. Yeah, it seems like there'd be a lot bigger market for uh Writers yeah, there is I mean there's more scripted tv now than ever before yeah, and um Okay, that was just yeah, I was curious I had an idea, you know, I had an idea, but I didn't even want to like See even think about it seriously if I knew that it would be complete dead ends. I don't have any time for dead ends, but um I'll think more about it Okay, great. Yeah So but so do you know screenwriters like yes in your daily life? Yes, and um Are they good company? Yeah, I mean they tend to be very smart very funny. Yeah Writers, you know are funny people So And they know how to tell a story. I mean they're really good at structure Yes, yes, I feel like I've developed that through software Being able to structure a story right I used to like really freak out not not be able to prioritize like Scene a and scene, you know, which comes first scene a how to do a Establishing scene, you know all that type of logic used to be very difficult Uh, but now I can almost like see things Uh As if they're on a tv screen, you know, I could see the entire structure in my head Which is sort of like a hard one battle for me So anyway, I'll uh, I'll uh I'll do some research. So is it all now Is all the entertainment centered in LA or is it is there some in the Silicon Valley now? It's uh Dominantly in LA, but it's spread out across the country and across the world because often states and cities give Tax deductions and they compete to get a movie shot there. So for example breaking bad wasn't set in the place that uh That the the story was because of tax incentives and I was just watching the dropout the the hulu series about the Theranos girl and The stanford scenes were obviously shot at UCLA So I know the stanford campus. I know the UCLA campus and I'm watching that was like, wow Why are you shooting at UCLA? It's obviously UCLA not stanford, but there'd be reasons of convenience Yeah, I remember that show Reno 911. Mm-hmm. That was shot in LA. I remember being very devastated to learn that But wait like breaking bad so didn't it so you're saying it wasn't shot in New Mexico. It was shot in LA I it wasn't shot either shot somewhere else, but uh The power of the dog that netflix Movie that was shot in New Zealand, but the story is set in Montana Wow So, um, we can't even make our own movies, huh? depressing We got to drill our own oil look we got to do we got to start becoming like a real country Do our own things Keep it local Well, there are many things at stake if you can shoot something really cheaply somewhere else then Yeah, but is it is it that it's sounding it blows my mind like Isn't it me? Oh, so breaking bad foolish me breaking bad was filmed primarily in albuquerque Oh, they were gonna set it in a different state I think they were gonna set it in california, so they moved it to new mexico for the tax reasons Yeah, I see So what did you think of that series? Oh, I thought it was great. I watched it twice Second time through I I got commentary on it So that I could deeper understand each episode Yeah, you know, I liked it. I like as well. I got one scene with the um, and if you remember it went the plane crash Yeah, I remember that that there's a junkyard and he's hidden inside of a Uh, like a trailer in a junkyard I forgot the context, but then they started playing this mariachi music. Yeah Uh, it was a hilarious show I was probably the best scene I've ever seen. I laughed at well Uh, anyway, so I don't know strange time One set of remember lumber. Okay. Remember like three weeks ago. We're all freaking out about neil young and spotify That's not seem innocent days Like just completely petty. Yeah. Yeah, it's like before 9 11 before 9 11 Los angeles times and la magazine. They're all working on major profiles off me Yeah, and then 9 11 hit and those profiles went up and smoke Is that true? Yeah No, I spent hours with these reporters Oh, so you were you were on the ascent and then you got taken down like the towers, huh? Yeah Times change priorities change I remember when those towers came down man, that was a sight Where were you that day? Tell me it walked me through. Where were oh, yeah. Okay. So I'm uh So I was living in Boston then Uh, is that work? So I remember walking to work that day. It's like a You probably remember it was a brilliant brilliant day. It was like a nice crisp Sunny autumn day. Yeah, like with a gentle breeze. You know, so I walk to work. It's like a mile and a half and I was thinking about Pedro Martinez The baseball pitcher. Yes. So he was you know, he was the sensation back then in Boston And I was thinking about the curve ball and the motion on the curve ball and all these, you know Details about sports and pitching and I just kind of mulling this as I'm walking, you know, then And then I you know, I get to work and then Uh You know happened to run around I think it's like 9 20 right pretty early in the morning right more or less at the start of the day boss comes over and says Uh Can't send some joke like Yeah, looks like somebody missed the runway at La Guardia I mean shows me a picture of the whole the gaping hole in one of the buildings and um There were a bunch of guys so the company I was working for was in the process of being taken over by IBM So there were all these IBM people walking around Now these are the old school IBM people and old school IBM people had this thing where they always dressed in blue Everything it would IBM used to be called big blue And so there was a corporate culture of only wearing blue Right just different shades of blue but it was blue blue blue. He's got blue pants and shirt blue blue You know, so all these people from IBM like grown adults are walking around And they're all noticeable in the office because they're the people wearing just strictly blue. It was bizarre so I was mowing that over and And they were just dumb people, you know, they're just kind of career corporate types That didn't really do much. They just showed up at work and marked time And so this guy starts opining opining about oh, there's no way One of these IBM people is like there's no way. This is a terrorist attack. No way. It's no possible way This is an accident. You know, he's just opining into the into the air And I'm like, are you kidding me? She's totally attack a terrorist attack And then he's like, no way and then boom second plane hits You know, there's like a mic drop moment for So anyway, uh, then you know, they uh, you know Like the next hour quickly unfold what was happening and so we got and they let us out of work early And I walked back. I walked back home You know and all my thoughts about Pedro Martinez And all that other stuff had just gone completely out the window and then I'm nearly home And I see this guy now with whom I've had lots of crazy business deals. He's a colorful character. I won't go into the details now, but he's um You know, he he's sort of like a kramer figure And I see him and he's loading up his Jeep And I go, you know, gee, where are you going? He says, oh, I'm moving to New York Completely oblivious about what has happened He had just decided to move to New York on that day and was like loading up his truck And going to drive to New York to live there And he wouldn't believe me when I told him what had happened, you know, he was totally incredible And then to make matters worse he goes anyway Sorry and how did it work out for him, you know, I would imagine poorly everything Nothing ever worked out for this guy because he was so lazy. He's one of these guys that Had big dreams But he just expects everyone else to do the work Right all the hard bits that he doesn't want to think about he just expects other people will do Right, it'll just happen. He just sort of indulges in these fantasies where he'll just You know, introduce Someone else who will know someone else who can do it, right? And all his job is to do is dream up an idea and then put the right people together This is this fantasy that he lives in and this is why he's always basically scraping along the bottom You know, he'd never really get it in a year, but he had lots of connections, right? So that's um That was his his survival strategy was He thought he could just leverage his connections all the time And and how did 9 11 change you? If it did, oh it changed me a lot, you know, like, uh, stop thinking about sports I had no interest in sports after that I did sort of go on like a prepper thing like a prepper kick. Yes I I thought maybe, you know, this was it Um I had that it was time to prep Um So I went I would drove to home depot and I bought a lot of storage containers and things and then And then I plan to buy lots of supplies like we were talking about earlier about comparing for an earthquake I was sort of thinking about all these things. I was going to stock up on and basically by the next day I'd sort of settled down and figured out overreacting But yeah, it was I was uh, I was terrified for a second. I thought what you're going down And where you are we've got to invade these countries and bombing the smithereens I was more confused than that. I didn't understand I didn't know if there was I didn't know what the solution was, you know, um And when the whole idea of invading Afghanistan that came first I thought it was just simply a military mission Right, I didn't think it would turn into 20 year occupation. So I'm like, yeah, whatever. Sure. I, you know, I believe in there I wasn't really that politically attuned back then and I just sort of believed what I heard on the news and I figured well, yeah, we got to fight him there. So we don't fight him here that kind of stuff and so, um I certainly wasn't opposed to it uh, but Boy, I had no idea what the future hadn't stored, you know I didn't know what all the consequences of that And uh, how long till you flew on a plane? Um For me it was like a year or two later that I flew on a plane a year. Yeah, and I forgot to report my Laptop, I didn't take my laptop out as I was getting through security and as I said, you're now a person of suspicion and Oh, really? Yeah, you were the person of suspicion because of I, um I've never a big flyer. I don't really I'm not much of a traveler So I don't travel that often like other people do. I see traveling isn't an immense ordeal Like I don't enjoy it at all So I didn't really I would only travel on a sort of as needed basis So it didn't affect me that much. So I I'd sold uh lookboard.com about Uh three weeks prior and then just on a spur. I thought I need to get away and so Two weeks prior to 9 11. I just went went to nearby a car rental And and took off rented a car and just started. No. No. No. I didn't rent a car I just drove my van at a one ton van. So I just started driving north There was a girl I'd met on the internet in Vancouver and so I I also had an advisory committee like a group of people that I'd trade emails with Uh pretty much every day and so I remember the advisory committee in the san francisco Bay area So I went went all the way up to Vancouver and then uh Was it was coming back and I was meeting a member of my advisory committee in san jose On monday evening and so we we met at a sizzler had dinner And then went back to his place and I decided to sleep in my van rather than at his place And so I was sleeping in my van and I heard people Saying did you hear the pentagons being hit? And someone said yeah, we're at war and so I I I was just waking up at about 7 30 a.m and I turned on kgo radio and Heard what was happening And so I went inside banged on the door woke up my friend turned on the the telly And you know we watched the pictures of the towers coming down And how or the airports were closed and then I thought because the airports were closed and all the flights were getting grounded I then thought the driving back to la would be an absolute nightmare I thought okay. I'm just going to risk it. I'm just going to go do it now and there was very little traffic and So I was able to fly back to you know fly along the road right back to la in about six hours And I was surprised how little traffic there was and I did have a strong feeling of I wanted to be home I wanted to be at home with all this Instability in the world I wanted to be at home and that was the first time that I started watching fox news So I prided that I never really watched fox news But I got home and I just wanted to turn on the tv and find out what was going on and Yeah, I turned on fox news And uh, there I was uh And so What did you think about this? What did you think about the afghanistan campaign when it was proposed? Uh, I thought it was a good idea, but I didn't think about it too too deeply There was an explosion of war blogs And so I'd been blogging for four years at this time now suddenly blog was the word of the year in 2001 And a lot of my journalist friends were starting war blogs and so they were much more gung-ho I think I was emotionally gung-ho like emotionally. I wanted to see the terrorists smashed But I didn't think too deeply. I thought it'd go like the the gulf war in 1991 against saddam I thought we'd just go in there and smash everyone and uh, we'd show the might of the u.s. military and Yeah, I thought that was I didn't have any Big problems with it on the other hand. I wasn't arguing for it either because I was busy enough I was blogging on the point industry and then I was blogging on Los angeles journalism and the jewish journalism things like that And so I didn't I wasn't really thinking about international issues But I did not foresee the absolute disaster that those two occupations became No, right. Yeah I remember those days. Um, you know, it was laura ingram Yeah, she was on the radio a lot and she was the one screaming about the necessity to go into iraq and I think even an colter too. She was very much on this train and um It was it's weird, uh, how, um I don't know. I took that I took You know, it was like if you were if it wasn't the chicken hawk not chicken hawk that Yeah, the chicken hawks with those who didn't want to fight Right, but if if you didn't, um What was it surrender monkeys surrender monkeys? Yeah, yeah, the french remember how the french was suck Something something surrendered monkeys, right? Yeah, and I didn't want to be called a surrender. Yeah. Yeah And so how they basically shamed me into supporting that war. Yeah, and um Uh It's sort of never really to get a laura ingram for that Yeah, I I think the whole experience made me realize 2004 2005 How how little I knew and then I started reading Steve sailor regularly in 2006 and I realized that america was in insoluble situation in iraq and afghanistan and uh I was able to shift from being a conservative to Someone who's more biologically based right winger, but I saw by by 2004 2005 the the problems with conservatism and uh By by 2006 it was really Steve sailor that helped me get clarity There was a humbling experience because I was I didn't think deeply about how to conduct the war and whether it was a Good idea, but I suddenly emotionally behind Now smashing the the terrorists and going to war with the terrorists and and then by 2004 I just saw how What a disaster and what quicksand we were in Yeah, that's for sure. It was good to learn that I didn't know much that that my basic instincts were not necessarily helpful and understanding the world around me Yeah Yeah, but the thing is is now both of them are uh ingram ingram and uh Also, yeah, they've learned their lesson. Yeah, and then now basically Not not interventionists. Yeah. Yeah, they're trumpians now. Yeah, and I think that's been a journey a lot of us have taken I guess yeah Yeah, it was it was a humbling of America and for me it was a humbling of my own Ability to understand the world realize that I didn't understand it nearly as well as I thought I did Yeah But oh also I was lucky I was I was still very much a dentist prager acolyte and he did not support the invasion of iraq in 2003 So oh interesting. So I was not as gung-ho as your average republican Maybe even your average politically involved person because lots of democrats were very much on board with invading iraq So so listening to prager over the years. He would often recount a conversation He had on a bus in the middle east And he's someone I think an iraqi told him. Oh iraqi is the cruelest people in the world and so prager saw that trying to occupy And build this nation up was not likely to succeed and so I mean, I remember hearing prager say that from like the late 1980s from the first time I heard it So I think I was more skeptical of foreign intervention than than your average gung-ho american Interesting now I hadn't really heard of prager Wasn't was he that big back then when yeah, he was nationally syndicated starting in something like 2009 or 2000. He probably wasn't as big as he is now, but he's still hearing about until after like 2010 ish um So he wasn't early on I don't know. I would I wasn't a big am Was he mostly am listener. There was one like talk station that was FM. He wasn't on that station. So I didn't I guess I didn't hear about it. But I do you have any favorite talk show hosts? Back then yeah um I like savage Yeah, because my mother actually likes He she got me into savage believe it or not um You know, uh, and I still like him, um But I you know, I don't really listen to the radio anymore except the bone which I actually don't listen to anymore anymore because It's too repetitive, you know, I was listening to this hard rock station for a while and uh After after a few months. I just the amount of repetition That goes on a commercial radio. Yeah is unbearable. It's just simply unbearable You know, I was trying to appreciate it in a sort of ironic way And I simply couldn't it was just so unbearable It was so much of just the same thing over and over and then like half of these hard rock songs Are completely unlistenable, you know, that's like this hair metal kind of stuff. It's just terrible. There's no air supply I was I'm all out of love for the yard rock Someone hit me up on facebook and said I was just listening to air supply last night And I thought of you and it was a bloke. He said not romantically but he had tickets to an air supply concert in something like uh 2004 and uh I'd often helped him out. So he gave me the tickets and so I took a date so In in 2004 I was 38 and my date was uh, 24 She'd never heard of air supply and she said it was the first uh rock concert She'd been to where people didn't get up and dance the whole time uh I uh, I've only been to uh, two rock arts. It's my whole life And I don't I'm very comfortable in uh uncomfortable and good crowds But you know who my very first rock concert was No AC DC Wow You're ready to rock The for those about to rock we salute you Which is idiotic, uh, but I couldn't believe how disgusting it was like, uh It was in the old boston garden, which you probably don't remember He's in the early part of boston, but sort of the old sport stadium, you know, and It was just a super loud and peak people everyone was smoking pot and like certain percentage were just puking It's terrible Well russia has blocked twitter and facebook Yeah, the information war, huh? Is that gonna keep you up at night? Yeah, I'm really worried about it So you never spent time in boston boston has a very uh interesting culture Never been never even been to boston Yeah I almost went I was I was invited to speak at an american jewish journalism conference But uh, they weren't paying my way Uh, so or putting me up. So I thought about going briefly, but then it was like nah I was back in 2004 when I read a book on american jewish journalism interesting Now I wouldn't recommend living there, but it does have a certain It's it's a distinctive place, you know, it's got um You know certain places have a very distinct feel and boston does have a distinct feel because it's dominated by universities There's so many universities such a small area that everyone feels like a student everyone's good high percentage of the people are students and all the buildings are either, you know universities or hospitals just a lot of public Institutions there crammed into a relatively small uh geography and It's kind of interesting But is it is a little bit like uh, san francisco versus la Oh, it is. It is. They're very comfortable the same same thing, right? Yeah, same idea dense. It's dense uh strong attention to our uh architectural detail. Yeah And as you know, uh Yeah, it's a walkable place. It's very walkable and accessible by public transport Which is true of new york, but I don't think that's true of la And how much do you miss it? What do you miss? Uh, I don't miss it much at all now. I do miss a certain There was a period of time before the internet where It was a very much in person place Right, so there would be there was a large group of us and we would always meet the same place and you know around the chess scene and We would socialize and it was just understood you everyone showed up at rep in the early evening and It was just such a really enjoyable style like style of life um Being able to meet and joke with people in person, you know, uh Which I don't doesn't really happen anymore At least for me maybe for you it's synagogue, but uh that type of in-person thing has been replaced by the internet And how good were you at chess were you as good as do the top 2000? I'm not as good I'm pretty good when I'm not as good as do but I never You know, I had these really you know adolescent aspirations, but then when I really became clear how much How hard it is to really get good at a high level and how much time you have to put into it And then how little you get paid and you know You have to be ultra good to get anything approximating a living I abandoned it. I just played very casually in recreation So playing chess isn't a reliable way to make a living It's uh, it's less than that, you know, it's a colossal waste of time It's fun and enjoyable and uh, but yeah, it's it's it's tantamount. It's it's equivalent to playing video games You know, um So I wouldn't recommend it for people but There's people that play chess Have a lot of interest. There's just it attracts a certain eccentric type person that's got A lot going upstairs and so they usually have other aspects and other talents that just make them sort of interesting curious people and very fun to talk to uh, so If for no other reason, I think Chess players are just fun people to know Um, but they're also incredibly diverse to work In fact Their whole game, I think because they can play chess they can sort of outsmart the system, you know, so um You know, they get into any sort of scheme They're they're schemers, you know Like uh card counting blackjack you've heard about that Yeah, so there's a lot of that going around a lot of people were involved in these card counting teams and And that's sort of a caper in and of itself and it's the source of like Some of the most the funniest stories you can imagine the most incredibly entertaining situations that you could Think about, you know, trying to outsmart a casino and all of the All of all of the uh theater that goes along with it It's just some of the funniest stories ever ever told So I had a relationship and it's uh excitement and eroticism had pretty much peed it out by The six month we we stopped having sex and then she urged me to take out playing chess And so I started reading all these books on on chess because I wanted to beat her And playing chess extended our relationship another six months. So instead of having sex we played chess He's sublimated those feelings. Well, I didn't have those feelings anymore They died I think like I think we went the last six months and I didn't I think we had sex Then after we broke up And like a year or two later, you know got back then we had a lot of sex but You didn't break out the chess board, huh? But yeah having having a common commitment and enjoying that of playing chess That doubled the length of the relationship It's funny a lot of people do take an interest in chess and they they have a um I've got a lot of respect for playing chess that I really didn't deserve right if people see it and they imagine this Great, you know high powered intellect must be involved and so they have this respect for it and um I've been able to trade on that I don't I've I've really made off well because of that like uh, uh, it's benefiting me greatly How how's it benefit of you? Well, they'll say You know, you know, we'll we'll chit chat and it'll be um Maybe a job interview and like, you know, what do you happen? So, yeah, I like to play our uh, chess down the square You play chess Really chess and though you're one of those guys that's awesome. That's really and you can tell that they're genuinely impressed um, so I think I've Gotten jobs um People were just basically overestimated my abilities Just on that basis. I think like do that like, um He plays chess, right? And uh, he's quite good. I think he's almost master level. Yeah, um I mean, I can't take that away from him. He's a very very skilled chess player We played I don't know if you were a part of that stream We were on some live streaming. We were playing one another like an hour. It's kind of fun It was in the Babs cast days and who won Uh, duvet won the majority, but I won I won a good percentage. You took some boards You traded you traded your your rock in your night and you got a pawn Yeah, exchange sack. Yeah now duvet duvet, uh, uh Yeah, he beat me pretty handled I have to say But he wasn't uh undefeated, but he was also firing on a conversation. He would bundle fly at the time. So, uh Yeah I have to put my rent my win my victory's in parentheses Get it Yeah Okay, all right. So, uh, yeah, I don't know. I just figured I'd try a double call Thanks, man. All right. All right. All right. Good job. All right All right, peace. Okay, some uh important news here ukrainian ukrain museums. They're desperately trying to preserve the priceless hunter biden paintings latest news here from the Babylon v The shells have begun exploding in the heart of key Museums of rush to protect their most prized valuable pieces the original artwork of a once in a generation talent hunter biden The louver may have van go and the Mona Lisa, but here we have coke on coke by hunter biden I will never forget when he sold us this piece. He said to me Ivan I don't know how I got here or where my pants are, but can you get me to the airport? Ah, but an artist he is Most of the paintings were initially purchased for the barisma boardroom The tacit understanding that then vice president Joe Biden would look out for ukraine Museum owners wage huge bidding wards to acquire the pieces Knowing that beyond the remarkable art each painting came with the assurance the United States would have their back We were lucky to get our hands on hooked by hawkers quite a popular piece But more importantly, we know it means that president biden will take care of ukraine in our time of need I hear the planes overhead the air raid sirens. I do not panic. No united states Will come to help CNN have you ever heard of it? Apparently it's still on the air even though nobody really watches it However, those that do watch it are under the dangerous impression that they're actually a real news channel Which might put them in a precarious situation You've allowed accusations against me and millions of law-abiding americans as child murderers Please follow what i'm saying. You allow the accusations to stand. I don't believe you. I don't believe you I don't believe you child murderers Here are some signs you might be watching too much cnn sign number one You think the pandemic is still going on If you find yourself saying when the pandemic is over or the new normal You're probably watching too much cnn You still think one of these investigations is going to get trump the walls are closing in any day now The walls are closing in the walls closing in on president donald trump. You still haven't left your house in over two years It's time to turn off the cnn go outside and get some fresh air You haven't heard of any of biden's foreign or domestic failures And you think the president's doing a pretty good job. What does the press get wrong? When covering biden's agenda, just don't google biden vatican. What happens next? Here's one you still call iver mechton porsty warmer iver mechton Apparently given to deworm animals. You walk by a fiery riot and think to yourself Ah, what a mostly peaceful protest if this is your immediate instinct You may have an over saturation of cnn. You're at the airport a lot This is less of a symptom and more of a root cause But if you're at the airport, you're probably watching a lot of cnn You drop to the floor and convulse anytime you see a maga hat Now there's a direct correlation with how much cnn you watch and how long you spend in the fetal position Okay, how effective are the vaccines? Um, well, you know, I think I can tell you where I was when the cnn became that it was 95 effective on the vaccine So many of us wanted to be hopeful. So many of us wanted to say, okay, this is our ticket out Right now we're done. Um, so I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism For some good things that came our way. I really do. I think all of us wanted this to be done Nobody said waning when when, you know, this vaccine's gonna work. Oh, well, maybe it'll work. It'll wear off Nobody said well, what if the next variant doesn't it doesn't it's not as public against the next variant It could we've improved Um, and then maybe the other thing I'll say is this area of gray, um, I have frequently said You know, we're gonna lead with the science science is going to be the foundation of everything we do That is entirely true. I think public heard that is science is full proof science is black and white Science is immediate and we get the answer and then we, you know, make the decision based on the answer and the truth is science is gray And science is not always immediate and it sometimes it takes months and years to actually find out the answer But you have to make, you know decisions in a pandemic before you have that answer It's interesting how it's very end Okay, I think uh I think that's about it time to get ready for Shabbos I mean the cities that never close down from new york to rio and old london town But no matter how far or how wide I roam I still call australia home I'm always traveling. I love being free so I keep leaving the sun and the sea But my heart lies waiting over the phone. I still call australia home All the sons and daughters spinning around the world away from their families and friends As the world gets older and colder. It's good to know where your journey ends Someday we'll all be together once more and all the ships come back to the shore Then I realize something I've always known. I still call australia home. Bye. Bye