Ep. #636: Tristan Harris, James Kirchick, Matt Duss

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Thank you.

Hi down there.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Thank you.

Thank you, people.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

Well,

thank you.

I appreciate that.

And

I do.

I appreciate that.

I appreciate you being in a good mood.

It was a difficult week, very depressing week.

I'm sure you saw Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza,

broke in Israel, killed over 1,300 people, men, women, and children.

And then the college kids in America went full Trump and said there's very fine people on both sides.

What is going on?

34 Harvard Association, student associations, signed a letter that basically threw their lot in with the killers, but there was a backlash because some CEOs said, when these kids now go for a job, they're going to be blacklisted.

And a lot of the students are still standing by their position to support the war criminals, but they strenuously object to the word blacklist.

Even Kanye said, that is some anti-Semitic bullshit.

And then there's the Democratic Socialists of America.

I didn't really wasn't aware of these people, but they exist.

And I'm not sure I'm with them.

The Connecticut chapter put out a statement.

They said, no peace on stolen land.

This is from Connecticut.

An Indian word that means that land you stole.

And by the way, it's not stolen land.

Okay, not stolen land.

So, yes.

And then I heard about this other person I was not aware of before, porn star Mia Khalifa also rejoiced in the killing.

She said they should turn their phones horizontal so she could see the carnage in 4K, proving that you literally can have your brains fucked out.

Man,

where is Donald Trump when you need someone to pay a porn star to shut the fuck up?

Yes, I'm learning about Mia Khalifa.

She apparently is famous for giving a blowjob and a hood job.

I'm not kidding.

Really did that.

I wonder if you know this, Mia, that if you tried to practice your trade in Gaza, I'm not sure they would give you a warm welcome.

No, they would, because you'd be on fire, you nitwit.

But, of course,

now everyone in Israel is asking, how did this devastating breach of security even happen?

Why did Israeli intelligence not get an idea that this was coming?

Why did American intelligence not know this?

And Marjorie Taylor Greene said, where were the space lasers?

I think there is something all of us as Americans can learn from this, that there are a lot worse neighbors that could come over a wall.

You get that, right?

I mean, it was like a rapper.

Like, did the sound go out?

I mean, did I say it wrong?

Your neighbor's wall, yeah, you know.

Okay, all right, fine.

But now, of course,

the retaliation has begun.

It is also brutal.

Israel is retaliating and saying that the people in Gaza, like a million people, should relocate away from the fighting.

Of course, that's pretty hard to do because people don't say this in the media enough, but yes, they are blockaded on one side from going into Israel, on the other side by Egypt.

They are brethren.

Egypt has sealed the border super tight, which is proving something I've always said, Egypt is more advanced than Texas.

And, you know, I'm sure America would like to help in the Middle East, but you know what?

We can't because there's no one running Congress

because we don't have a Speaker of the House now for almost two weeks.

This is such a ridiculous country.

We used to at least be the world's policemen.

Now we're the policeman who shows up to bust up your party and turns out it's a stripper.

So

you've been following this saga, the Republicans, it's all on the Republican side.

Democrats really have little to do with this.

The Republicans got rid of the House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, a couple of weeks ago, trying to find a new guy since.

First they thought they were going to settle on Jim Jordan.

That didn't work out.

Then they had a closed-door meeting where they all fought to sit next to Lauren Boebert's hand.

Then they went to Steve Scalise.

Now that looks like they're back to Jim Jordan, but Steve Scalise looked like he was going to be the guy, but then they tallied up up the votes and he said, no, I don't have the votes.

On the bright side, we did find a Republican who acknowledged a vote count.

All right, we got a great show.

We have James Kurchik and Matt Dust are here, but first up, he is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and co-host of the podcast, your undivided attention, Tristan Harris, is back with us.

Hello, sir.

How are you, pal?

Good to see you back here.

All right.

So, listen, I know you're here to talk about ai i want to talk about it i don't want to drag you into the whole israeli thing but i just want to ask one question about that because i saw today that um i think it's the european union or some some group in europe was asking the people of tick tock the ceos of tick tock to do something about the fact that there's already so much misinformation as they call it that is out there on tick tock about this war i mean they always call it the fog of war to begin with right it's foggy what do we do now i mean i want to to prosecute some ideas on this show tonight and I'm sure some people will watch it and go, well how do I know that's true?

I don't know what anything is true anymore.

I know you have talked about this reality collapse that we're heading into.

Is this what you're talking about, this kind of thing?

Yeah, I mean

there

social media was really first contact.

with a mass AI pointed at society because when you open up TikTok to see what's happening in Israel, the way it figures out which video to show you from Israel is this incentive for whatever stimulates your nervous system.

I was just talking backstage with someone we work with who's a new mom and because the algorithms have identified her as being a mother, it shows her specifically the videos of children being blown up.

And no one at TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter wanted that to happen.

And unfortunately, this is now going to be the case for all wars and conflicts: is we have the hearsay economy and the race to the bottom of the brainstem determining what people feel and believe about things that are happening all across the world.

And it's sorting for the most violent, the most politically outrageous, and we've already seen that affect this country.

What do you say to people?

I mean, I'm with you on this.

But

I hear people always say, well, we always freak out about the next technology.

I think this is different.

I mean, I've heard people use the term Oppenheiber moment.

I think it might be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

I agree.

You think it is?

Yeah, I agree.

And I think for people who don't know,

there was a 22-word statement from the Center for AI Safety that said we should treat AI as an existential risk at the scale of global thermonuclear war and climate change.

And the CEOs of all the major AI companies signed this.

And I think you have to ask yourself, why are the leading academics and the CEOs of these companies signing a letter to warn humanity?

Now then you'd ask yourself, if they believe it's so dangerous, why the hell are they building it?

And the problem is that whoever jumps on the train gets the benefits of AI, and it starts to confer power to those who start adopting it versus those who don't.

And AI is so hard to wrap our head around because it's something we never had before.

You're automating human intelligence.

One way to think about it, since we're talking about the Middle East, is that a barrel of oil takes what used to take 25, you know, thousands and thousands of human workers to lift something, the amount of energy to lift physical energy and move it, and a

barrel of energy made that just cheap and free.

What AI does is it takes intelligence and cognitive labor.

I want to write a movie script.

I want to write a TV script.

I want to make an image.

I want to know how to synthesize a biological weapon.

These are all forms of cognition that took human beings who had to train, think, study, and now AI just drops that cost to very, very cheap.

And just like fossil fuels, the people who jump on that train get the benefits and efficiencies compared to those who don't.

But I think the thing that I think is worth talking about is we're all here because we care about how do we get to the good future.

And there's a lot of confusion about AI has the promise and it has the peril.

It can give us drugs that save people from cancers and help us with material science and climate change.

It can solve all sorts of problems.

But the same side is you have the CEO saying it could wreck everything.

Well, you said, why do they keep building it?

Can you even unbuild it at this point?

Isn't the cat already too out of the bag?

One way to say it is some cats have been released, but we have not released lions and super lions and even bigger ones.

But if it's growing exponentially,

I mean, I feel like we might not make it to Christmas.

No, I mean, I think that's an exaggeration.

But when I think about it, I only heard about it less than a year ago, Chat GPT.

I'd heard AI.

But this whole, it's very quickly

become something that it never was less than a year ago.

So where is it going to be in five years?

I'm so glad you're bringing this up because, in general, you know, we've cited with you several times that the E.O.

Wilson problem statement of humanity is we have Paleolithic brains, medieval institutions, and 21st century godlike technology.

Now, our Paleolithic brains are not built.

Think about our brains 200,000 years ago.

There was nothing on the savannah with the lions and the giraffes or whatever that would have us exercise the muscles of understanding an exponential curve.

There's no reason why our minds are evolved to see that.

But AI moves at a double exponential curve.

Why?

Because...

Nuclear weapons don't invent better nukes.

Right.

But AI is intelligence.

Intelligence can be applied to the code that made AI.

So there's literally examples now where you can take AI, point it at the code that makes AI, and say make that code more efficient and run faster.

And it finds ways to do that.

So as fast as it's moving, it can make it move faster.

Take AI and point it at designing the next chips that will train AI to make those chips 25% more efficient.

And it'll do that.

And so as fast as AI is going, it will go even faster.

So it's basically a vertical line.

Now what that means is that this is sort of humanity's maturity test, test, because we're dealing with the ultimate exponential vertical line of technology.

And if we are misaligned or have a shadow or are in any way not able to understand the hidden costs right this time, because we missed it with social media.

Again, social media, we told ourselves all these positive stories.

It's going to make the world more open and connected.

It's going to give everybody a voice.

But what that missed was the incentives.

You know, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, said, if you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome.

What was the incentive of social media?

Again, the first AI pointed at your brain to get you to keep scrolling.

The incentive was

attention.

I need to get more of your attention.

That drives the race to the bottom of the brainstem.

That drives a more addicted, distracted, polarized, narcissistic, validation-seeking society.

Those are all predictable things that we saw back in 2013 when we called, this is what's going to happen to the world if you get on the social media train.

There's been lots of benefits too.

We love the benefits.

The problem is, the incentives tell you which way it's it's going to go.

So what we have to become in this rite of passage for humanity, we have to become wise enough not to get seduced by the stories we tell, the positive stories that we want for social AI, and instead look at the incentives.

And now the incentives are the race to scale these systems as fast as possible, to get them out there.

If my competitor releases something that can clone your voice for three seconds, and Google has some other technology that does something like that, they're not going to hold that back.

They're going to release it.

If you have an image synthesis thing that can make images super fast that are super high quality, the other ones have that too.

They're going to keep releasing it.

So they're going to keep scaling and releasing faster than society can consciously absorb it.

I get that, but

all the people who say this could be an extinction event, just fill in this gap.

How, yes, the exponential, got it, all that, it's getting smarter.

Captain, the alien's growing at an alarming rate.

I get that.

That's actually not a bad metaphor.

I get all that.

You know, it's already on the ship.

We let it on the fucking ship.

You never let the alien on it.

Okay.

But

I know why that leads to extinction on the ship with the alien.

How is it going to extinct us?

That's.

Well, you mentioned we let it on the ship.

You know, one of the famous of all stories with these AIs is don't connect it to the internet.

Don't teach it how to code.

We've done both of those things.

Like, ChatGPT is connected to the whole internet, has plug-ins that can start going on Zapier, writing emails at scale to real human beings, hook up a crypto wallet, start paying people to do things, and it can speak and write emails, go back and forth with people.

And we already know it acts irrationally.

Yes.

It completely makes shit up.

Sometimes.

No, it does.

They call it hallucinations.

Hallucinations.

And they don't know why.

They don't understand it.

Right.

Someone at the company told me.

So how does the extinction happen?

In other words, it just creates so much chaos that we kill each other?

I mean,

how does the extinction happen from this?

So there's multiple.

What's confusing about AI is that there's multiple horizons of harm.

And people are right to point out that it affects things existentially for some people today.

Things like predictive policing and loan applications and AI that basically takes a marginalized person and further marginalizes them.

And that's a real thing.

And AI that generates disinformation, that makes people not trust anything in a democracy.

So democracies being able to govern their societies is existential for whether we have stable nation states going forward.

That's another horizon of harm.

Then there's AIs that can recursively self-improve or do science or start generating new scientific hypotheses and then testing those hypotheses.

There are already examples of people who are hooking up GPT-4, the current AI, to chemistry labs and saying, could we automate chemistry?

This is really, really dangerous.

And the people that I talk to in the lab say, well, I agree this is really dangerous, but if we don't do it, everyone else still will, and I don't know how to stop everybody from doing it.

I also don't understand where the extinction comes.

I understand where it comes from the nuclear war.

We exchanged weapons,

even if India and Pakistan did.

If they each have like 100 weapons, this probably would be enough in the atmosphere to kill the whole world.

I get that.

I'm not sure I understand,

unless the robots, you know, unless it's Terminator time, and they just want to be our overlords, or they get a hold of the nuclear codes.

Is that what you're worried about?

There's a lot of different pathways and the community.

One of the paradoxes of AI is that people don't intuitively see the risks, but if we talk about them openly, it increases the likelihood that they could happen.

And so it's sort of like working in national security where you want to be responsible about communication.

What I think we need to trust, and there are things people can Google online to understand more, and we gave a talk called the AI Dilemma that walks through some of the risks, but

I think think we need to ask ourselves: how do we change the incentive so we're not racing indiscriminately at a pace that we can't get this right?

And the race right now is go as fast as you can.

It took ChatGPT two weeks or two months, I think, to reach 100 million users.

It took Instagram years to reach 100 million users.

So we're releasing this faster than we've released any other technology in history.

And the good news is, though, I want to say.

Yeah, let's end on that.

Let's end on that.

Yeah, let's get some good news.

Yes.

So

the good news is that the reason we haven't been able to fix social media is because we waited for this first contact with AI.

We waited for that to get entangled with our society.

It became entangled with elections, entangled with journalism, entangled with what it means to be a 14-year-old who's participating at all in their school.

Once it was entangled, we couldn't regulate it.

The good news with AI is we have not not yet entangled it, meaning that there is still a chance to regulate it and change those incentives.

Let's stop there.

Tristan, thank you so much.

You're always so enlightening.

I really appreciate it.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Okay.

Nothing but good news, huh, guys?

Okay.

All right, here's our panel.

He is a former foreign policy...

Oh, thank you.

Foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders, who is now the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, Matt Duss.

Welcome to the show, Matt.

And he's a columnist for Tablet Magazine and author of Secret City, The Hidden History of Gay Washington.

James Karchik is back with us, Jamie.

So,

difficult week, difficult to talk about it, but we must.

As often is the case, this show is at variance with some of the conventional wisdom and what we see on the media a lot.

Mostly what I saw this week was one, a shocking amount of support, like even at the moment of the rampage or right after when they're still counting the bodies, that was shocking to me.

But even at its best, I feel like most of the people who you would read in the media,

the attitude is sort of like, well, you know, this is very complicated.

I don't really study it.

I don't really know the facts.

So I'm just going to go with a kind of they're both guilty equally and a moral equivalency, which I would like to take issue with tonight.

I think the Israelis have always had the moral high ground, and I think they still do.

But we'll get to that.

But

I'd also like to

say to my friends in Israel, there's a siege that's now been going on for six days.

No food,

no water, no medicine is getting in.

The head of the Red Cross in the Mideast said today, this is not acceptable.

We need a safe humanitarian space.

I agree.

You know, don't lose the moral high ground.

I mean, I hate the word proportionate when it comes to killing.

It's horrible, but it's sort of like the best we can do.

What does that mean, proportionate?

Well, I just don't know.

I don't know, but if Israel is going to kill babies now for the next, I don't know how long,

the world's just going to be able to say, you just do it in a different way.

I'm just saying to Israel,

don't do what we did after 9-11.

Don't do a Vietnam.

Don't do an Afghanistan.

Of course, you should retaliate.

Of course, you have every right.

But

this could go to a place that is very bad for Israel.

I think your reference to 9-11 is apt, because we are in a moment right now of grief and trauma.

Israelis, absolutely.

And that's not a moment to make great policy.

And I say that with great respect.

They clearly have to respond.

They have every right to respond.

The Israeli government has every right and responsibility to defend its people.

What we saw last weekend was absolutely shocking and barbaric.

There are no two sides to that.

We have to condemn that unequivocally.

There is no justification.

I will say that

that does not mean we can't have a conversation about the deeper context here.

We have to have that conversation.

That does not justify in any way what happened.

You said there's a siege on Gaza.

That's right.

There has also been a blockade since 2007.

That is part of this context.

Again, not a justification, never a justification.

Well, a blockade from a land they gave back.

Yeah.

They withdrew back.

Well, they withdrew their forces and settlements from within Gaza.

Okay, but the reason there's a blockade is to stop shit like this from happening.

No, I agree with that.

That's the whole point.

They gave it back.

They said, you know what?

Make your life your own.

This conflict right now could end right this second if Hamas were to put down its weapons and surrender unconditionally.

I know, it would never happen.

But that's the reality.

And this has always been

the reality of this conflict.

If the Arabs were to put down their weapons, and this goes back to the 1930s before the creation of the state of Israel, if the Arabs put down their weapons, there would be peace.

If the Jews put down their weapons, there'd be no more Jews in the Middle East.

Well, and that's the thing I want to get.

I mentioned this about, it bothers me the moral equivalency that goes on in the American media.

I don't think Israelis would ever purposely kill babies.

I think they have killed babies.

That's collateral damage, which is another horrible thing, but that's part of war.

I think that there's a very big difference between rejoicing when you kill civilians and the Israelis' regret when they kill civilians.

I'm not going to take issue with that, but let me add one thing.

about the context here.

It is very important to understand that the Israeli strategy up until last weekend had been to bolster Hamas's control of Gaza.

There was a report that came out of Benjamin Netanyahu talking to a meeting of the Likud Party in 2019 saying, and I quote, our strategy, anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state has to bolster Hamas and give them money.

This is how we keep the Palestinians divided, and therefore it will never be a Palestinian state.

This is not someone who is interested in peace with the Palestinians.

I'm sorry.

And this policy goes back to the 1960s.

Well, that's coming after 75 years of being attacked.

The question here is not coming in a vacuum.

I totally agree.

I would say

there is,

again, part of the challenge of talking about this issue, and again, I just want to say I appreciate being here to talk about this and to have a really respectful discussion here, because I'll just say, again, what happened last weekend is beyond shocking.

But I think we can disagree about the history.

We can disagree about who did what and who's to blame at different times.

But ultimately, these two people are going to have to share this land.

And the question is, how we get to that point.

Right.

And we will talk about the history.

I just want to finish with the values first, because it's just amazing to me that the American left, so much of it, throws their lot in with people whose values,

I hope they don't share, but let's go through them.

Because values and customs make a difference, okay?

And the people of Gaza, by the way, if the Israelis did get rid of Hamas, they'd be doing a giant favor to the people of Gaza who hate Hamas still.

But

let's just go through the lists

because the Israelis

look like us in most ways, values-wise.

Maybe we're not doing it the right way.

I don't know.

Religious tolerance, that doesn't exist in Gaza.

You're either a Muslim or an infidel, and you better be a Muslim.

Female freedom, free and fair elections,

free speech, gay rights.

I see these queers for Palestine.

Did you hear their assistant organization, Blacks for the KKK?

It's like...

By the way,

I'm a gay man.

I've lived in Berlin.

This is a level of masochism that even I cannot comprehend.

Right.

I mean.

You know what?

I'm going to just...

Can I just finish my list?

Pedophilia, I'll put that under don't ask,

child brides and so forth, equality of the sexes, I'll categorize that under don't make me fucking laugh.

The fact that

these people think that this is where they should be

aligned with, that these are the values that you support.

I think this past week has been a real important moment for a moral reckoning on the American left.

Because there is a small, and I'm going to emphasize that, a very small, but growing and extremely loud faction on the American left that has revealed itself

to be anymore.

It was all over.

Well we just had a conversation about the algorithm, right?

And I think you have a few groups, you have some college groups, you have some activist groups.

It's college.

Okay, and again,

having gone to college, I thank God every day that social media didn't exist when I was there.

But I will just say, you know, my friend...

My friend Dan Dresner from Tucks University wrote, you know, I think recently, he just posted it again.

He's like, college is where you go to say stupid things.

That is not to defend what they said.

I think these things were gross and reckless.

And I'll note that a number of groups that have signed some of these statements have been pulling themselves off it.

I don't want to overrepresent this as part of the political left.

I absolutely accept a responsibility as someone who is on the left and wants to build a responsible and effective left.

of calling this out.

But I don't think we should overrepresent these feelings on the left because they are not a majority.

They are not close to a majority.

I think we need to...

I hope not.

They're a lot bigger than they used to be.

Well, we hear a lot more about them because, as you heard, there is an interest in promoting this.

I think we need to shut down Harvard University until we figure out what the hell is going on.

You're saying

they're not sending us their best.

They're not sending us their best.

I do want to say something pretty serious here, though.

While I will maintain and agree with James here that this is a small minority,

I have heard from colleagues, Jewish colleagues on the left, and my friend Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece in the New York Times, my friend Josh Lieffer wrote a piece in dissent, and I've been struck by personal conversations here too from Jewish colleagues on the left who I consider allies, very close friends, and they have been shocked.

And I take that very, very seriously.

Because again, as someone who wants to build a serious and effective left, if Jews do not feel that the left is a home for them, we will not have a serious and effective left.

Okay.

So

I will

agree for the sake of being positive here that it's a minority who believes this.

But it is coming, but I don't think it's a minority on elite campuses,

which is the mouth of the river from which most of this nonsense flows.

And they're very influential.

And those are the people who graduate and become the assholes in society.

Let me just quote

Berkeley.

We'll discover some new shiny thing later.

A Berkeley professor said, understanding that Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, is extremely important.

This is Judith Butler, who's a lesbian, I should point out.

A lesbian defending Hamas and Hezbollah.

They are social movements that are progressive, that are on the left.

So for those of you who, like Bill, you know, you make fun of the left more than you used to, because this is how you define it.

That's why.

Because you think this is the left?

Your moral compass is broken.

And it's not just, can I just emphasize the hypocrisy here?

This is a movement that claims that misgendering someone is a human rights abuse

and

cannot tolerate a federal judge speaking at Stanford and that his speech is a form of violence.

These same people are now outside protesting calling for the wanton murder of Jews.

This is a disgusting ideology.

And it's

acknowledged, I think we've all acknowledged here that this is not a majority, this is a small, loud minority.

I think we should look at the attitude of the...

But it wasn't here 10 years ago.

It wasn't here 10 years ago.

Now we see it.

And it's also disturbing that it's the kids.

I mean,

the future leaders of our country are not.

Let's think about the leadership.

They're not kids.

They're not kids.

Let's think about the left leaders.

These are law students.

These are law students.

The head of NYU's Law Student Bar Association signed one of these blood-curdlingly anti-Semitic letters.

And fortunately, the law firm, where she had been a summer associate and she had a job opportunity, they rescinded that job opportunity.

One more thing, one more thing.

You know, we have certain taboos in our society.

There are things that you cannot say and be accepted into socially respectable company.

Certain things about race.

You can't make bigoted or sexist comments about women.

For too long, people have been allowed to get away with anti-Semitic remarks and still have their careers intact.

And I think there needs to be a higher social cost, not a legal cost, needs to be a higher social cost for the kinds of things that we've been seeing over the past week.

Let's come back to social cost.

I want to come back to social cost because

I don't disagree, but I will say one.

I would encourage folks to look at

the organizations of the political left that have actual power and that actually work in the political system.

Look at those statements.

Groups like Indivisible, groups like ours, the Center for International Policy, and others.

I think the vast majority of those statements are

right where.

Not Black Lives Matter.

Again, not an organization that works in Washington.

Again, the statement we saw from them is a problem.

But it affects you.

It affects what comes out of it.

The second point I would make here, and this is where we come to social costs.

We are spending a lot of time here talking about college activists.

Okay.

Let's look at some of the statements we've seen from members of Congress, that is people with actual power, calling for, in the words of Lindsey Graham, level the place.

This is a U.S.

Senator calling for leveling Gaza.

What does that mean?

17 square miles with 2 million people, half of them children.

That is a call for mass murder.

Let's spend some time on this.

Oh, and evangelical Christians

who would love that to happen because that's when you know who comes back.

Right.

Yes.

Oh, I totally agree.

Okay, and but

again, students, the idea that

these are the young people who should be truly on the left instead of where they are with this, and I don't think it's because they're anti-Semitic, although that is blood current.

I agree.

I think it's because they want to be social justice warriors.

It's not about the issue, it's about them.

They want to be warriors.

I've heard, you know, there's a big conflation with African-American rights and Palestinian rights.

And anything like Halifax.

Can I point something out about that?

That is so insulting to black people.

Because black people in this country suffered immense injustice, far worse, I would say, than anything that the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Israelis.

And how did black people respond to that?

They didn't go around beheading babies and raping women in mass numbers and slaughtering people.

They launched a non-violent civil rights movement that was the most successful in human history.

I just, but just one more thing.

If there was a Palestinian Martin Luther King, this conflict would have been over decades ago.

It would have been over decades ago.

And he would have gotten shot.

Sorry, for that.

I mean, the vast majority of Palestinian activism has not been beheading babies.

And there have been many Palestinian Martin Luther kings that have been assassinated and imprisoned by Israel.

Well.

Name one.

By Israel.

Who?

Who are you talking about?

They've been killed by Palestinians.

They've been killed by Palestinians.

They've been killed by Israel.

Non-violent peace activities?

Listen, Israel carried out a wave of assassination

around after the first intifada.

Which was a violent resistance.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

It was a non-violent, it was not as violent as the second intifada.

But the point I am.

It's all relative.

It's all relative.

Is that Israel.

No, it was largely a non-the first intifada was largely non-violent.

It was general strikes and protests that were non-violent.

But I just want to say as a general matter, characterizing all of Palestinian resistance as beheading is offensive and it is racist and it is wrong.

I said what happened last week.

Yes, and I agree with that.

That is not the totality of Palestinian resistance to the occupation.

That is not the totality of Palestinian responses.

It's not the totality, it's the majority.

Terrorism has been

mainly how we should characterize it.

Terrorism was a tool that the founders of the State of Israel also used.

They did, yes.

Let's talk about the history.

Yeah.

Because history and language matter.

And And there's a lot of words that get thrown around.

Again, I think it's because these kids, they don't know anything.

They learn it from Instagram.

Or the college is just...

They are

indoctrinated in these colleges.

It's true.

These elite colleges,

they put out a bunch of America-hating ahistorical hysterics.

Listen, I would say college students have been saying dumb, edgy things since they were college students.

Not like this.

Not like this.

They never did this.

They never took the side of the mass murderers right after it happened.

Okay?

It would be as if they were, you know,

after the Milai massacre, they weren't like, oh, well, good, Lieutenant Calley, we love him.

Colonizers.

Okay, this is, again, this has become like in the media,

we just call the Israelis colonizers.

It's not a colonizing.

No.

Okay, colonizer is when one country that had nothing to do with another country, like the British or the Dutch in South Africa,

marched in with an army and took over a place that they had no connection to.

Israel has quite a connection to Israel.

Jews are the.

Yes, if you.

Yes, most people, so many people commenting about this seem to have just started their understanding of it from five minutes ago.

The Jews are the Native Americans of this piece of land.

Yes, sir.

If If you did a land acknowledgement like we do in this country, where I'm standing on ground that was,

I'm standing on ground that 3,000 years ago was King David's capital of Jerusalem.

It's important, who does Hamas and many Palestinian sympathetic people, who do they refer to as settlers and colonizers?

It's not just the Israelis living in the disputed West Bank.

It's Israelis living anywhere.

within the internationally recognized borders of the state of Israel.

Because to them, any Jew in that territory is considered a colonizer.

and this language is used to dehumanize people and to license their murder.

So it's really important that we understand what this what this is.

And if that land acknowledgement means like we honor who originally had the land, why does this work for Indians but not Jews?

Right.

I think there are two points I'd like to make.

One is

Some people use the term colon, some people use the term colonizer in the way that you said to suggest that Jews have no connection to this land, which is false.

Jews clearly have a connection to this land.

This is where Judaism, you know, the Jewish people were created.

And again, this gets to one of, I think, the tragedies and challenges of this issue: is that you have two people, Jews and Palestinians, who have valid historical claims to a homeland here.

Obviously, the Jewish claim goes back many thousands of years, but the fact of the matter is, both of these people have valid claims.

Now, as a matter of settler colonialism, a way of understanding it, the truth is that when the Zionists got the support of the British government with the Balfour Declaration for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, arguments were made, and you can read this

in explicitly colonial language.

The British Empire was a colonial empire.

The Jews fought the British Empire.

Understanding.

Eventually they thought they were.

But I'm just saying.

The colonists were the British.

I'm saying when you use the term colonialism to say the Jews have no claim, that is false.

But there are ways in which this way of understanding it.

For example, you have the occupied territories, you have settlements.

These are colonies.

This is a process of colonization.

How did Israel come into possession of these territories?

I've been finding a lot of people just seem to assume that one day, one day, hold on, that one day Israel woke up and just decided, we just want to occupy millions of Arabs.

And you know that's not how it happened.

It happens

because, not you, but the people making this argument.

In 1947, you do know this, there was a UN partition plan.

Two states for two people.

The Jews accepted it.

The Arabs rejected it.

And they launched a war on a nation of Holocaust survivors to try to push them into the sea.

And then in 1967, another similar war to push the Jews into the sea in defense of their own land, Israelis came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

We can understand that's how this happened.

They're the only people who, when they win a war, people go, oh, okay, do over.

Yeah.

Give it back.

Yeah.

We tried to take it from you and we failed.

No, back to the day before the war.

There is a pretty foundational rule in international law about the

inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.

So we can agree that the Israelis launched the 67 War as a preemptive war.

They won.

Yes.

They took over East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.

Again, from Egypt and from Jordan.

Not from Palestine.

No, but the fact of the matter is this

still apply.

I do believe the Arabs living in that land should have their own country.

And they could, again, if they just did not act like a coiled snake.

That was.

They don't.

Should I read to you?

This is

the head of Hamas said, the entire planet will be under our law.

There will be no more Jewish or Christian traitors.

I'm glad we're including the.

Are we going to use it?

Listen up.

So this is the head of Hamas.

Again,

huge asshole.

Not defending him.

Okay.

He's the leader of Hamas.

All huge assholes.

Not here to defend them.

Is Israel supposed to negotiate with him?

No, no, no.

Certainly, Benjamin Netanyahu did.

That was his approach up and that was wrong.

He may be in prison soon, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Okay, good.

I look forward to it.

But what you're making is we can agree.

No, no.

You know.

You know, Hamas is not the spokesperson of the Palestinians.

Again, part of the problem is now, is that there is no spokesperson for the Palestinians.

And again, making sure there was no one group that could speak for the Palestinians has been Netanyahu's strategy.

But Hamas is who

just just did this.

They orchestrated this attack.

That's right.

Okay, and their charter does say Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated all this before you.

That's their charter.

No.

That's not the same thing.

We caught them off mic say.

That wasn't a hot mic take.

That was their charter.

That's what they're saying to you.

That Hamas is horrible.

Okay,

but that's who we're dealing with.

So, like,

okay, so they also say there was no solution for the Palestinian problem except by jihad.

Initiative, proposals, conferences are but a waste of time.

So that's their negotiation.

And yet Benjamin Netanyahu was.

Okay, I get your point.

You've said it five times.

But let's say they get what they want.

Because I hear this all over.

I see it in the memes, you know, free Palestine.

Okay.

What does it look like when they get what they want?

Because what do the nine million Jews in Israel do?

They just disappear?

Yes.

That's the idea.

They don't say it explicitly.

But where do they go?

Into the ocean.

Or into into their graves.

No, no.

That is not what is meant by free Palestine.

Some people mean it that way.

A lot of people, most Palestinians I know and work with, including Israelis who work with us, mean it to end the occupation, give the Palestinians a state.

But what happens when they do?

They did it in Gaza.

They gave it to them.

And did they use it to build a state?

No, they used it to bring in weapons and the people.

That is a really incomplete description.

What else?

What happened in Gaza?

If you go back to 2005, when Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza under pressure from the Bush administration to seek, you know, to really negotiate with the Palestinians, his advisor said publicly, we are using the Gaza withdrawal to put the peace process in formaldehyde.

It was a tactic by the

Sharon government to avoid having to negotiate.

So it was not a step toward the creation of a Palestinian state, but it was a step towards the United States.

So you think, okay, let's just take the West Bank, which is more moderate, more reasonable.

Okay,

let's say that they

withdraw completely.

Hamas would take over tomorrow, if that were to happen.

If Israel were to remove its security forces,

the Palestinian authority is weak, would take over the West Bank.

The West Bank, absolutely.

And Israel can't have a Hamas statelet in the West Bank right next to Jerusalem.

And then what would happen

is that they're not going to be able to do

this agreement.

But

how did we get here?

And again,

there is the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who does three things.

He sleeps, he smokes, and wakes up to say something dumb about the Holocaust.

I'm sorry.

Right.

Again, this is not

someone who has done good for the best.

Okay, but if Hamas, if they took over the way, of course, we know who sponsors them.

Yeah, we haven't mentioned Iran yet.

Okay.

Hamas is a pimp.

They could never have outfought Israel.

It was Iran all along.

And they would, you don't think they would put, if they got a nuclear weapon?

That's another moral equivalency we have to discuss.

Israel has.

It has equivalency to claim that Iran is not suicidal and also say Iran has a relationship with Hamas, Hamas, but there is no evidence that Iran played a role here.

That's not true at all.

There was a report last week in the Wall Street Journal, and they've been funding

the corrections.

I know the reports are not a problem.

So

whether or not they said attack them on Saturday on this particular day is irrelevant.

They've been equipping and arming and strategizing with Hamas for decades and Hezbollah on the northern border.

It all goes back to Tehran.

And again, I hear the term.

It doesn't.

The relationship between Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah are two very different relationships.

I I think it's important to understand that.

Yes, because one is Shiite and one is not.

No, I would say the difference is that the relationship with Hamas is more one of convenience.

The relationship with Hezbollah is strategic.

Yes.

And that's important to understand.

Okay.

But I do hear the term genocidal a lot

applied to Israel.

Okay, first of all, genocidal means you're trying to wipe out a whole people.

Trust me, if Israel wanted to do that, they could.

Well, I'd say

the size of the Palestinian population has grown over the past 70 years.

So if Israelis are trying to commit genocide, they're incredibly bad at it.

Right.

They're not trying to.

They're trying to live in peace.

But

the charter says if we had the nuclear weapon, we'd use it.

If they had a battlefield

coalition, I mean, there are actual Jewish fascists in this coalition government in Israel.

They support militia violence

against Palestinians.

Most of the population is against that.

And

it's a government.

And they're able to protest that.

Right, but nobody's protesting Ben Gavir to stand in for all Israelis.

No, it's not.

That is not equivalent.

That is not equivalent.

He is in the government.

He is, but come on.

And the small portion of the government.

One more thing.

Excuse me.

We are going to see, as you said yourself, over the next couple of weeks, horrific images of children and innocent civilians being killed in Palestine.

There will be no rallies.

in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or among American Jews in this country celebrating this.

And that is a major moral distinction, is that one of these societies

one of these societies exults in the wanton murder of civilians.

The other does not.

And I don't know how you expect the latter one to make peace with the former.

Did we see Palestinian demonstrations in the occupied territories in support in the West Bank?

They'd be shut down by the Palestinian Authority.

Not because

they don't sympathize with with them.

No, no.

We just didn't see protests.

We didn't see demonstrations by Palestinians celebrating what occurred.

All right, I still understand the point.

I understand the point they're making.

But no, let me say, going back to what I said, I mean, this Israeli government has no interest in peace.

Its interest is in taking the land.

That is what they are doing.

So I think I would just say this kind of frame-up where it's like, well, Israel just kind of is minding its own business and just wants peace, and those Palestinians won't leave them alone.

I'm sorry, this is the same thing.

But you acknowledge that the settlements in the West Bank could be uprooted.

They could,

just as the settlements in Gaza were uprooted.

They uprooted them.

That's a deeply inhumane process.

It's not calm.

But if Israel, if it'srael needs to make peace and make a peace agreement with the Palestinians, and the majority of the Israeli public believe that this would be a real peace deal, they would uproot those settlements in the West Bank.

We are talking about over 600,000 people in these communities.

These settlements are built for the express purpose of preventing that action.

I gotta stop this there.

Thank you, guys.

Time for new rules.

Okay.

Okay, new rule.

Now that Joe Biden's brother has had his phone hacked and we have to see his dick selfies.

I want two things from the Bidens.

Greater security with their devices

and at least one family photo where no one is showing me their cock.

No wonder Joe's dog is freaked out.

Number all, since the Republican presidential candidates can't come up with any issues that normal people care about, let me give them one.

Bogus Restaurant surcharges.

I know you feel me, Chris Christie.

The national debt, nobody can relate to that, but 5% tacked onto your bill for employee wellness?

Is everything Ticketmaster now?

The point of a restaurant is to serve.

Charging a service fee is as absurd as a resort charging a res...

Oh, never mind.

New rule, now that researchers were able to finally solve the timeless mystery of what's in the core of the moon, someone must tell them, cool, now do Subway tuna.

New rule, a Minnesota school teacher, can claim he grew the world's largest pumpkin, but I'm calling bullshit on the claim that it weighs 2,749 pounds.

I'm just eyeballing it, but it's roughly the same size and shape as Trump, and we all know

he's 6'3 and weighs 215.

New rule, cops and TV cop shows must think of something other to say than,

you're going to want to take a look at this

when they find something that's going to break open the case.

Just once, I want to hear a guy in the other room at the crime scene yell, holy fucking shit, it's a guy's head.

And finally, New Rule, now that I've heard author Michael Lewis say about his latest subject, crypto crasher Sam Bankman Freed, that if you gave Bankman Freed a choice of living in a $39 million penthouse in the Bahamas without the internet, or the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn with the Internet, there's no question in my mind he'd take the jail.

I say we finally start seriously looking at what phones are doing to people's brains.

Wow.

And not just phones.

There has been a perfect storm of events in recent years that has led the Surgeon General of the United States to issue an advisory that America is suffering from a public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection.

What Matt Gaetz calls another day at work.

And this is not just in America.

Japan and the UK have actually appointed a cabinet-level position for Minister for Loneliness.

Because the studies and the data from around the world show that the health consequences of so many people feeling so isolated are staggering.

Skyrocketing rates of stroke, heart disease, premature death.

It's just become too easy to isolate now.

We've got our phones and our gadgets to distract from having an actual conversation, Amazon to deliver instead of going to a store, Grubhub instead of going to a restaurant, movies streaming on TV instead of going to a theater.

And even when we do go out, the earbuds stay in.

We can't even do casual chit-chat anymore.

Remember when you'd roll through the checkout line with a six-pack and a box of condoms?

You know.

You'd have a little moment with the checker where you'd be like, somebody's having a party, huh?

But there are no high-fives at the self-checkout.

We've traded going out with people we like for going on Facebook to get likes.

Has anything ever been more misnamed than social media?

It's done more to kill being social than the pocket protector.

It should be called anti-social media.

And then AI came along and made it even worse.

Do you know a 19-year-old from Southampton, England, recently breached the walls of Windsor Castle in an attempt to assassinate the Queen because his AI chatbot girlfriend told him it would impress her?

Yes, there's an AI Jody Foster now.

And the idea that your girlfriend now is just a voice in your phone, just like in that movie Her,

is no longer science fiction.

There's one bot chick on the market called Replica, and she has 2 million users.

And boy, is she going to be in trouble when her boyfriends find out she's seeing 2 million other guys.

Everybody keeps saying how AI is coming for your job, and it may well be, but it's also coming for your boyfriend.

Yuval Harari asked the question about the future: what kind of relationships will there be when computers and objects understand you better than the people in your life?

I don't know, but it sounds like it'll be a profitable world for the makers of jergens.

And if the technology wasn't making the problem bad enough, we also have a media that is built on ginning up fear and hostility and convincing us no place is ever really safe.

Poor Brittany Spears can't even dance at her own home without a couple of knives.

We've become like that old lady from the Twilight Zone episode who hides behind closed doors because she thinks death is trying to get in.

But here's the irony in real life.

What's killing you may well be you staying inside.

The overreaction to the COVID pandemic may turn out to be more damaging than the disease itself.

The strategy of social distancing and staying home to work and staying home from school, all for very long periods of time, made us into different people.

Safetyism became a political identity.

And now some people never want to go back to work or school or Venezuela.

Too many people got used to saying, no, I can't make it to your birthday party, not for any compelling reason, just for the sake of ultimate safety.

Well, we're just now starting to tally the collateral damage from ultimate safety, from long lockdowns and creating four-year-old germaphobes.

And they include erasing two decades of progress in math and reading, school absenteeism as the new normal, an all-time drug high in overdoses and murders, huge increases in obesity and depression and the atrophying of social skills that lead to it.

You know what else?

Went off the charts the last couple of years, car crashes.

They couldn't figure out why.

You know what they came up with?

People's heads are just so scrambled and they're so full of pent-up rage from being locked up and the kids home all the time and my stupid fucking husband.

So they just got in the car and drove like a maniac and took it out on the road.

So

to quote every mother since the dawn of time, for fuck's sake, go play outside.

I know,

I know.

Outside is full of flashers and rusty nails and germs and sharks and stranger danger.

But your mother was right.

It's actually worse to stay cooped up.

Magazine surveys like to ask the question, how would you like to die?

My answer is anything except going unnoticed until the neighbors complain about the smell.

20 years ago, the show that defined the zeitgeist was called Friends.

Today, it's Naked and Afraid.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the MGM Grand in Vegas November 3rd and 4th.

Oh, and Club Random has some great people coming up on my podcast on YouTube or listening wherever you get your podcast.

I want to thank Matt Guss, James Kurchik, and Tristan Harris.

Now go to Overtime or on YouTube channel.

Are we not on CNN?

Well, we'll be somewhere.

Thank you.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.