Scott Galloway - One Year Since October 7
As we reflect upon one year since 10/07, we continue our dedicated series in which we take a longer horizon perspective, asking one guest each week to look back at this past year and the year ahead. If you are listening to this episode on a podcast app, please note that this episode was filmed in a studio and is also available in video form on our YouTube channel.
For the sixth and final episode in our series, we sat down with Scott Galloway, who is a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business where he teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing. He’s the host of the Prof G Podcast and the Pivot podcast, which he co-hosts with Kara Swisher. He is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, including “The Four”, “The Algebra of Happiness”, “Adrift: America in 100 Charts”, and most recently, “The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security.”
Scott has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company and the Berkeley School of Business.
Scott’s books: https://tinyurl.com/5f9uhpmz
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
SG: The largest missile barrage in history happened against Israel. But the narrative isn't, my gosh, the Islamic Republic in Iran have escalated this war. It's, no, wait and see what Israel does. Will they escalate? Folks, the escalation train has left the station. But I think Americans have suffered from so much prosperity and so much blessing that we don't understand that there is a time for war. As Cersei in Game of Thrones said, you know, I choose violence. And that is a terrible thing to say because we've been taught to grow up and say that peace is always the way. There is a bad peace. And I believe that America and the West owe Israel a tremendous amount of gratitude for going in and quite frankly, doing the dirty, dangerous, shitty work. Israel's doing our work for us.
DS: It is 3:30 PM on October 14th here in New York City. It is 10:30 PM on October 14th in Israel as Israelis are winding down their day. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, my longtime friend, Scott Galloway, professor at NYU Stern, podcaster, writer, bestselling author, entrepreneur. We'll list all his recent books in the show notes. Scott, thanks for having us.
SG: Always good to see you, Dan.
DS: So, as you know, we've had a series of episodes reflecting on the one year anniversary of October 7th, and they're less focused on the news of the day and more reflective, kind of have a long term look back and look forward. And some folks that you and I are big fans of like Sam Harris and Douglas Murray—
SG: Literally heroes of mine, heroes.
DS: So you're wrapping up. You're the last installment.
SG: Save the worst for last.
DS: No pressure. So I want to talk to you about stories and the role of coverage of stories have had in this conflict. But before I do, just to sort of set the table, I want to go back to October 7th. with you and not only with you, but also where we are in lower Manhattan, you and I are both old enough to have been in Manhattan in and around September 11th. Or certainly we remember vividly that day, as I think most people our age, regardless of where they were, remember it. Can you compare, I'm just curious, your recollections of how you felt as September 11th was playing out to how you felt as October 7th was playing out?
SG: Wow, that's a really interesting question. So I was here and my girlfriend called me and said, can you come over? The World Trade Center's on fire. And I went over and she had a penthouse apartment and I saw the second plane hit and I saw it come down and you could feel the heat. It was something out of Star Wars. I remember thinking, I'll never see anything like this again. And you saw the sea of people coming uptown and sirens everywhere. And a couple of things that impacted me the most, that I remember the most, was for the next couple of days, it was quiet in the city. There were no horns unless it was like an emergency vehicle. There were just nothing. Because the reality was you were either killed or you were fine. Like there was no one in the hospitals.
DS: That's right. Because it took days for people to get in. Right.
SG: That's right.
DS: Wow. I had not thought about that.
SG: So it was eerily quiet. And I used to see people just walking along the street crying. And then the most dramatic moment I remember was, and I get emotional just thinking about it, was this little, this tiny couple came up, we're in Union Square and they were walking around passing out leaflets like lost dog. And it was a picture of their son, right? And this is like five days post, you know, September 11th, thinking there was still a chance her son was alive. And it was just, just devastating. And we lost 2,800 Americans. Right? Our response was to go on and we killed what 400,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq?
DS: Something like that, yeah.
SG: And a small segment of our society would call it a war crime. And by the way, we executed that war with quote unquote less precision in terms of the ratio of mortality among civilians to combatants than Israel has prosecuted their war. Yet there was an entirely different frame on our right to respond to that. And when you look at the percentage of the population that was taken out on October 7th, that would be the equivalent of September 11th that happened, but they'd taken out 30,000 people. And so, and we've talked about this, what would our response have been? Would we have gone on to kill a million, four million people?
DS: And if the enemy that waged that attack was just like in Staten Island, like they were just right there and they were hunkered down there in tunnels with thousands, 5,000, if you want to extend the proportional scale, with 5,000 Americans hostage.
SG: The analogy, we've used this one before. A Jihadist cartel takes control as elected democratically in Mexico and they have a narrative, a story that look what they did to our children locking them up in cages at the Texas border. These white evangelicals in Texas hate us. They were terrible people. They've been unfair to us and we take all of our aid or most of our aid and we build tunnels and we plan an attack and on a per capita basis go in and kill everyone at the University of Texas, all the faculty, all the alumni, all the students, the preschools and nursery schools around it, everybody. And on the way back, we take the freshman class from SMU hostage and we place them underground somewhere in Monterey, Mexico. Would we have listened to calls to save the Playa del Carmen hospital? Mexico would have been the great radioactive Sonora parking lot after we got done with it. 2,200 servicemen killed at Pearl Harbor. We go on to kill a million and a half Japanese, including a hundred thousand in one night. So there's just an entirely different standard. The world is shaped by an army attacking or seeing an opportunity and the superior military infrastructure responds and reshapes the world. That has kind of been how the world is what it is. And what's clear though is that the response that most Western nations are afforded is off limits for Israel.
DS: So I want to take you to October 7th, right there. So I remember as October 7th was playing out, in real time, I was thinking, in addition to it being gut wrenching, I thought the outrage of the world would be directed at those who were massacring Jews. As I soon learned, the outrage of the world was being directed at Jews for objecting to being massacred. Can you just talk about what you were thinking as the whole thing was playing out? Like, do you remember where you were? Do you remember how you were processing it? Do you remember what impression it made on you? Like those impressions you had of 9/11 are very vivid.
SG: But for the first 48 hours, the correct response or the response that we expected the first 48 hours, it did feel like there was empathy and outrage at the horrors. The only thing I really remember was I have an aunt living in Israel and I got forwarded WhatsApps from her saying right when it was all unfolding and she was scared, she didn't have a safe room. So she went to a neighbor's safe room. And, you know, she basically said, my life is in the hands of the IDF now. Like her family couldn't get to her. And you think about, you think about your 80 something year old aunt hiding and just that kind of fear at that age. So that kind of sort of brought it home to me. But I was like you. The first couple of days, it seemed like the response is what you would expect. It's in the few weeks after that things seem to kind of come off the rails. The first thing that really just sort of horrified me was there was a student at NYU Law School. And there was actually some faculty at NYU and I obviously have proximity bias. I see the stuff that happens at NYU. They were saying things like that they were inspired by what had gone down. And you thought, okay, there's always going to be crazies or people at different viewpoints. I want to say things that are provocative or playing to the social media algorithms. But when there was support for their statements, it just, I would have never, I was totally flummoxed and I've said this to you. You're one of those guys who said antisemitism is the poltergeist that never gets exercised from our society. If you had asked me what the state of antisemitism is a year and a half ago in corporate America, my answer was, I don't think it exists. As somebody… I don't identify with Judaism, but my mother's Jewish, so I consider myself a Jew. I'm an atheist. I've never been the victim of antisemitism. I have never visibly registered it in America. I would have said, if you had told me what you believe, I would have said you're being paranoid and that it's for the most part, we've moved beyond that. And what was so shocking to me is I could not have been more wrong. I've never seen this level of both side-ism. I've never seen this level of anti-American behavior towards an ally. It just flummoxed me more than… you know, I moved to London and I remember thinking I'm moving back to potentially to an America I don't recognize. That the support… if any ally in the world had been this brutally attacked, I just don't think there would have been any both side-ism to it. And what I saw on campus, I'm not teaching this year, one because I'm living in London, but quite frankly, I'm just so turned off by higher education right now that I find the whole thing just sort of distasteful and hard to cope with. But my first reaction was just worrying about my aunt. It was the weeks unfurling after that just got more and more sort of almost unbelievable what was going on.
DS: So just parenthetically, my mother who lives in Jerusalem, so she's like the equivalent of your aunt, she's 86. she has the same, everything you just described, that sense of vulnerability on her behalf I was feeling. She lives in Jerusalem and she was just in New York for the High Holy Days. And we went to synagogue and the rabbi's sermon was telling Jews, if you wore yarmulke inside synagogue tonight, this was on Kol Nidre, on Yom Kippur, challenge yourself. when you walk out of this building, keep it on. Keep the yarmulke on. Try walking one block, just one block wearing that yarmulke, meaning external expression of your Jewish identity. And so that were… my mother was shocked. She's been living in Israel for the last 10 years. She said, things are so bad here that that's the challenge, that Jews have to be challenged to not hide their Jewish identity. And so to your point, like being floored by, like, this is happening in America. That we have to be that self-conscious is jarring. You, I just want to come back to your own Judaism. So you say born Jewish, you are an atheist. Describe how you thought about Judaism before and then after October 7th.
SG: Well, I think that's, I'd like to think that's a ray of light and a positive thing here. And that is, you know, that podcast 10% Happier. I feel 100% more Jewish and I still don't feel like I can lay claim to being a Jew because I'm not religious.
DS: There's still time for you. You and I. I'm going to work on you.
SG: But I'm a full blown Zionist and that is and I don't even see my advocacy and support of Israel as being necessarily pro-Israel. I think it was being pro-America. The values represented by Israel. You know you had Sam Harris on. I love what he says. If you want to know which side you should be on, imagine they're in charge. Alright, the Knesset and the IDF get control of our military and our Congress. Next day, what do we have? Jury trials, no cruel and unusual punishment, a reverence for education, peer-reviewed research, court system, democracy. You wouldn't know any difference. You put Hamas in charge. A lot of my friends get thrown on roofs. I get asked to convert or executed. Women lose their rights. This just isn't a difficult one. So if we have one center, one landing point, one beacon of American values in a region that is incredibly hostile or unstable, but incredibly important, just selfishly, it seems to me that we should be, to think of Israel as… I go to Canada and it's a toss up. Canada and Israel feel like the 51st state to me. I don't know who's more American, Canadians or Israelis. They don't like that because they want their own identity. But I'm in Tel Aviv, I went after the October 7th attack and I'm like, this is a kind of a combination between Chicago and Miami. You know, this feels very American to me. A very commercial, big emphasis on success. Young people out drinking, partying.
DS: Diverse.
SG: Yeah, it just feels right. This feels kind of like the American experiment. So for me, it was more not even an insult to my Jewish roots, but an insult to my kind of American roots. I just saw this as do we believe in our way of life? That means we have to be steadfast with our partners to promote American values. And there's an absence of that in that region, except there's one huge shining kind of American beacon for us, you know, our sister Israel. And also it's a bit of a nod to my mom. And I felt a little bit guilty about it. My dad's Presbyterian, mother Jewish. My mom in 1939, when the war broke out, was a four-year-old Jew living in London. And she had to leave her house and she would sleep in bomb shelters where they passed out gas masks in the shape of Disney characters so the kids would put them on .But they'd sleep underground and then she was shipped to the countryside. But her older sister was killed in what I would consider a war death. She was run over by an army truck during an air raid. And I like to think, look, a nine mile strip of ocean called the British Channel, the RAF, Russian blood, American brawn and British intelligence saved my mother's life, and that's why I'm here. So to have some level of empathy, to have some level of support for Israel and Jews is just quite frankly, is just an overdue nod to, you know, the people who push back on fascism. And they didn't push back on fascism to save my mom. But towards the end of the war, there was a recognition that we need to be in this because this virus of antisemitism has popped up again. And so, you know, had there not been the kind of American commitment and quite frankly, this total lack of backbone, this total both side-ism, this age of grievance, I don't know if my mom would have survived. My mom's life would have ended with a train ride if we had been less resolute in understanding evil and pushing back on it in no uncertain terms. So this is like, I feel like this is just an overdue nod to all the people who made sacrifices such that my mom could survive.
DS: After the last time we spoke, Ilan and I were struck by the feedback we received by the kind of people who weren't our typical listeners. Hyper secular Jews, very liberal Jews, assimilated Jews or non-Jews, but also very secular, modern. And your episode spoke to them because what all these people had in common in spite of everything else I just said was that they all consider themselves to be strong Zionists. And in other circles that they're in, they were made to feel that they had to justify how they were going to reconcile these two things, being modern liberal, secular, and Zionists. Like those two spheres don't work together. And they listened to you in our conversation and they felt that they could breathe a little bit like, okay, he's everything he's, we didn't know, Jewish, this October 8th Jew that springs out, but still pretty secular, but unapologetically Zionist. Have you been surprised by the reaction you have received? I’d mentioned this to you, we were inundated after that episode by people who felt hurt.
SG: There's points in your life where you get an opportunity to weigh into something where you, you know, maybe incorrectly. I just have moral clarity on this issue, which is a little bit dangerous, but I feel like so many issues I talk about, I struggle with the nuance. And this one I just saw as incredibly easy. And you interviewed Sam Harris. He has this wonderful statement that if you have economic security and you have people who love you unconditionally, you have a moral obligation to speak your mind. And I've just found it really rewarding because I've heard from a lot of people on both sides who I want to have a civil conversation but it's really put me back in touch with a lot of my Jewish friends who quite frankly just feel the same way. Aren't that religious, but who took for granted some of the freedoms we had been enjoying. And just, quite frankly, it's made me just feel closer to the Jewish community. And I've heard from people, including the parents of some of the hostages, and it's nice to have clarity around an issue. And it's nice to think, okay, if you have a platform, run into the fire, because most people can't.
DS: So I want to talk about the stories. are a master storyteller, not only in your books, but you're an expert in marketing, which is a form of storytelling. It seems that Israel has lost control of the story of the plot. We've talked about this, even talked about it last time we were on the podcast. I think part of the challenge is this is the most covered war by the media. I can't think of another war that's been covered remotely close to this war. The only comp is Vietnam. The Vietnam War was intensely covered. But imagine the Vietnam War with TikTok, just like endless embeds everywhere. I mean, you can't even imagine. It was already covered and was covered in a very conventional, traditional media way and was already heavily covered. You take the Vietnam War and you turbo charge it with all of these tools. But one of the frames that critics of Israel in this environment that seem to adhere to is the reasonable ones. Yes, what happened on October 7th is horrible. It's horrendous. And then the but comes in. And the but is but the Palestinians one way or another, whether it was before October 7th or since October 7th, we're now a year into this, have it just as bad. As one senior official from the Arab world said to me. Yes, October 7th was terrible, but you need to understand every day is October 7th for the Palestinians.
SG: Israel's lost the narrative. They've gone from being the David to the Goliath. I think some of it is Israel's fault. It doesn't nearly justify or warrant anything resembling what's happened, but you have, I believe, a government that has given too much oxygen, as many governments have, to far-right bigots. I think there's been over-settlements. Israel has gone in the court of world opinion from being the good guys to the bad guys. So there's this immediate reaction that they're no longer the heroes of our generation and the little guy, they're the oppressors. Right? In addition, because my generation feels very pro-Israel, young people have a healthy gag reflex to anything our generation believes. They question it. Right? And I also think there's an incredibly incorrect conflation of civil rights and the struggles that people of color have endured in this country with the Palestinians, from people who find virtue and find kind of the moral high ground in feeling empathy for people they perceive as non-white, not as terrorists, not as religious fanatics, but as non-whites. And over here, we have the oppressors in Israel. They have absolutely lost the narrative. If you wanted to talk about a story or a frame, if I were to take all of the media coverage in time to distill it down. One, this is the first TikTok war. I mean, you were a senior advisor to the Bush administration, right? So a fairly Machiavellian, even mendacious move is you got a media blackout, right? Because you realize there's no elegant way to kill someone. And bombing a city is going to involve civilian death and horror. And the Bush administration decided we just don't need everyone to see that. It's not going to serve us all because they had learned the lessons of the Vietnam War with those, you know, that amazing picture, of the girl running from an Agent Orange attack. And I was okay, people don't just float away in combat, right? There's no controlling it here. And unfortunately, I believe that now the media platforms that control the perception… You are where you spend your time. My son spends all his time at school playing football and on TikTok. So when I'm—
DS: European football.
SG: Yeah, European, of course, the real football. So when I'm taking my 13 year old to sushi and we're walking and he says to me, dad, when did they take their land away? And immediately I go, oh my gosh.
DS: Is he like staring at his phone?
SG: Well, I know where it's come from. And then a little bit of research that's come out on TikTok shows that there's 52 pro-Hamas videos for every pro-Israel video. So what are kids going to believe? And you think, well, what is the CCP's interest in doing that? I don't, I'm not even sure they're antisemitic, but they have strategic relevance in deprioritizing American interests. They can't beat us kinetically. They can't beat us economically. So it doesn't make sense to devise internally. And I believe we're going to look back and just be horrified at how incredibly naive we were. Americans, it's much easier to fool Americans than convince them they've been fooled. And I think across the media outlets that dominate young people's viewpoints, there is a strategic interest on part of our adversaries of creating a polarization and a dichotomy between what young people believe and what old people have come to believe. So I believe our platforms have been weaponized. TikTok and YouTube have more dominance across young people than NBC, ABC and CBS had in the 60s. Israel has not wrapped itself in glory, losing the script, if you will. And then a younger generation who I believe is on platforms that have been weaponized by bad actors who see gain in polarizing or setting young people against old people. But if you were to reduce all of the world's opinion around the Israel or the Jewish story right now, I would reduce it to distill it to the following thing. The world likes a slaughtered Jew. They're comfortable with a slaughtered Jew. They want to feel sorry for you, Dan. They want to feel sorry for my aunt. They like that. They like us as victims. They're comfortable with us getting attacked and being slaughtered. They have empathy for Israel. They don't want Jews dead, but they're—
DS: But they know how to react. They can be empathetic.
SG: That's it. We want to feel sorry for you. Right? We want you to be the victim. We want to feel sorry for you. We like Israel when you're the victims. What the world is not comfortable with is a fighting Jew. That is unacceptable. And it's interesting, in America, we would not tolerate us being slaughtered and not fighting. We win. We come back. We hit back much, much harder. Jews, we like you. We have empathy for you. We respect you when you're the victims, but you're not allowed to hit back. You can fight back to sort of a draw. That's okay. We get it. But if you go on offense, no, no, no, no, only we're allowed to do that.
DS: Yeah. When Saul Singer and I wrote Startup Nation, which is well over a decade ago, I remember we went around to American Jewish organizations before the book was published to brief them on it, let them know it was coming, hoping that they could support us in the promotional efforts, which many of them ultimately did. But their first reaction to the book was quite negative because it threw their script off because what Startup Nation ultimately was, was a story of strength. It was Israel as a story of strength and creativity and resourcefulness and self-dependence and independence. And many of these Jewish philanthropic organizations were back then structured around a frame that was, Israel as a charity case rather than Israel as this source of strength and punching back and advancing and leading parts of the world. Again, they ultimately came around, but I was thinking about that in recent weeks, which we've been watching this extraordinary response by Israel to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, because in a sense, while Israel, I think, has done a better job in Gaza, Israel felt stuck in Gaza. But southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, that does look like 1967 or Entebbe, like all over again, where you see obviously the pager attack, which everyone, I mean, everyone I know, all my friends in the Gulf, government officials in the Gulf were messaging me saying, wow, that's impressive. They need to keep going. That's the Israel we knew, the military juggernaut, not the Israel we saw completely stampeded on October 7th. This was the Israel of ‘67. And then that was followed by Israel systematically taking out a lot of these rocket and missile launchers and these various munitions and just degrading what was thought to be Hezbollah's unstoppable arsenal of 200,000 rockets and missiles and precision guided capabilities. And then taking out Nasrallah and taking out, oh by the way, the high command of Hezbollah. The most dangerous job to be today is being thought of as a candidate to be a successor to Nasrallah. So it's been extraordinary. It's Israel on offense, yet it undercuts this people want dead Jews or people love dead Jews. Do you think it's binary? Like Israel has to choose, we're either gonna be the narrative of October 7th, or we're gonna be the narrative of the fall of October 7th, 2024, the one year anniversary where Israel's on the march in Lebanon? Because Israel is being aggressive. Now they're being clever and they're being targeted, but they're being aggressive. And just from a storytelling standpoint.
SG: The narrative shifted. It's gone from one of people fairly or unfairly saw Israel's response in Gaza as overdone and unfair and overreaction, inhumane, whatever you want to call it. The activities in Lebanon have sort of emboldened this notion of strength of Israel. It does feel like the narrative has changed. Even if you look at the protests on campus have died down. And I think people just have an enormous amount of respect for what Israel has been able to pull off. I mean, in about a six week period, Israel took out more terrorists on the US's most wanted list than we've taken out in the last 20 years. So when you think about how much time we spent trying to hunt these folks down, I mean, to a certain extent, Israel's doing our work for us. And the criticism early in the war in Gaza was you're not being precise enough. There's too much collateral damage. And then when they go in and pull off what is the most precise anti-terrorist operation in history, they put five grams of explosive. They put 10 grams in, they would have blown the person in half. I mean, this thing was so calibrated and they somehow managed to interject into the supply chain several months earlier out of time. I mean, this is the stuff of movies. And I think it is impossible. One, the world at the end of the day, and I think this is what Americans struggle from, the moment someone can spend more money on their military and feels like they can come and take our Netflix and espresso, they're coming for us. Don't be stupid. So the world respects and responds to strength and Israel's showing that type of strength. But just the level of precision, the level of intelligence, the level of quite frankly, just balls doing this. It's just impossible not to respect it. And what you see kind of a little bit is the impression or brand of this ferocious fighting army out of Russia that kind of got defanged with a well-armed and supported Ukrainian army has sort of really hurt the perception, but also I've been taught to believe over the last 10 years that Hezbollah was this incredible fighting force. So be careful. Hezbollah is much bigger than Hamas. And then the IDF goes in there with this anti-terrorist operation and takes these… I mean, this has got to be pretty bad for morale at Hezbollah. Everybody's got to be looking at their phone and the computers with a different viewpoint right now. And the way they took out so many key operatives that quickly, I think it's entirely changed the narrative. But these folks weren't planning a pride parade. They weren't operating soup kitchens, right? These are terrorists and the world is a safer place. The other thing that has been so disappointing for me, and I do fault the Biden and Harris administration for this, although I actually think the Biden and Harris administration has been, for the most part, really good on Israel, but this constant American notion that peace is always the best answer. There's always… we got to move to peace. Stop the war. Stop right now. There is such a thing as a bad peace. And when you think about, we have a chance to negotiate a deal now, let's just stop the fighting. It's going to be huge destruction. This threatens a world war. Negotiate now. That was the advice of the war cabinet and members of parliament to Churchill. And he's like, this is a bad piece. We can't let this guy take most of Europe and just hold on to our island and think this is going to work out well. And so the constant American viewpoint of just stop all fighting, it's like, well, maybe this is a bad peace. Maybe this is an opportunity to make sure this doesn't happen in a worse way in 12, 24, 36 months. And by the way, it isn't imported here. So everyone is always calling for a ceasefire. My attitude is, well, if they called for a ceasefire in late 1944 on us against Germany, we'd won the war. We kept dropping bombs on Hamburg. We'd won the war. killed 40,000 civilians and like 400,000 enemy combatants. And by the way, I'm not saying that's the right thing, but Eisenhower and the general said, when asked, why do you keep bombing? He said, they need to know they lost. And that is a brutal, ugly frame. And it is how the world is shaped. And I believe any opportunity that we give to these terrorist organizations to rearm and regroup in pursuit of a peace is just kicking the can down the road which will get bigger and more dangerous. So I'm a bit of a war hawk on this. And I believe that America and the West owe Israel, a tremendous, tremendous amount of gratitude for going in and quite frankly, doing the dirty, dangerous, shitty work that we have not been able to pull off or for whatever reason, the far left or the far right, who want to be isolationist or tend to have more sympathy for any organization that sees rape as resistance. I mean, all this bullshit on the far left that does not understand what would happen if this organization got control of your neighborhood in Short Hills or Brooklyn. So I think this has been actually good for the West. I think Ukraine's response in Russia has been good for the West. And while I don't in any way want to diminish the devastation and the horror on both sides, the key, our leaders are supposed to make difficult decisions that involve death, quite frankly, in the short run, that will ultimately make the world a safer place. And I think this war, and this again goes back to some of the positives, I think it has reignited kind of these non-Jews, Jew-Jews, but also I think the Middle East is gonna be a safer place. Everyone keeps talking about, don't escalate, don't escalate. Even the term escalation is so loaded. Israel goes in, the IDF or the Mossad going with the most precise anti-terrorist operation in history. It's an escalation. Were they calling it an escalation when from October 8th on there was 8000 rockets into Israel?
DS: In civilian neighborhoods and 60 to 70 thousand Israelis, they were refugees in their own country. They couldn't even live in their own towns.
SG: The largest missile barrage in history happened against Israel. But the narrative isn't, my gosh, the Islamic Republic in Iran have escalated this war. It's, no, wait and see what Israel does. Will they escalate? Folks, the escalation train has left the station. But I think Americans have suffered from so much prosperity and so much blessing that we don't understand that there is a time for war. As Cersei in Game of Thrones said, you know, I choose violence. And that is a terrible thing to say because we've been taught to grow up and say that peace is always the way. There is a bad peace. And Israel, in my opinion, is engaging in a good war and cauterizing and reducing the likelihood we have a much bigger war further down the road.
DS: When I look at the history of these wars or many wars that Israel has fought, both in the south and Gaza and with Hezbollah in the north, that every one of these ended with a point at which the international community, often led by the US and the UN saying, Israel, now you've gone too far. All right, stop. You know, a building where a lot of civilians were located in southern Lebanon in 2006, after 34 days. Why 34 days of Israel being allowed to fight versus 54 days? The difference was that 34 days, X number of civilians were killed and the international community, you know, intervened. And so the war is just frozen and you got a forced ceasefire in every one of those situations. I think what's happening now for the first time is Israel is more or less being allowed, or at least can't be stopped, from finishing the war. There's no timer. It's not like the war starts and we turn this and we say, when it reaches down, you gotta stop. There's no fixed time. Israel is fighting this war and is, for the duration of what it takes, and as Douglas Murray has said on this version of a conversation you and I are having, he said, when you choose to start a war, you do not get to choose—
SG: When to stop. Right. Well, the history of American wars, other than maybe Korea, we lost Vietnam. But other than Korea, it's the only war we fought to a truce. We were never satisfied with the truce. And typically speaking, truces don't work. So if you think about, I mean, it's a real question. Are we better with the truce or are we better with wars where there's a winner and a loser? In America, and it's worked out well for us because we're almost the winner, arguably, we're the loser in Vietnam, did it make sense to have a truce in North Korea? Did it make sense to have some sort of truce, if you will, around how to split up Germany, right? So people have said the problem with the Middle East is there's never a winner. And I wonder if at some point it makes sense for there to be a winner. And what I think there is… the difference between the conflict in Gaza and what's happening in Lebanon is that Hezbollah, I mean, is this bad for Lebanon? Is this bad for the Lebanese people if Hezbollah is seriously diminished? Or is Lebanon going to be a safer, more prosperous place?
DS: I know you're very focused on the state of young men. As you mentioned, Sebastian Junger, journalist, war journalist, we interviewed him for our most recent book, for The Genius of Israel. And he has this fantastic quote where he says, people don't mind hard work. What people fear is feeling unnecessary.
SG: Well, men are four times as likely to die by suicide than women. A man after he gets divorced is eight times more likely. And the reason I bring that up is if a man no longer has a role as a father, as a spouse, loses touch with his church, with his community, with his temple, the two words you hear most in suicide notes are worthless and useless. And that is, I'm no longer adding value in the house. I'm no longer needed, valued as a financial provider. I'm no longer valued as a father, a spouse. I have no longer value in my church. I have no worth. I have no utility. I had no surplus value. And I think that the reason why one of the things that I think Israel has really benefited from is I think people feel a sense of I'm here in the agency of something bigger. I love what your previous guest said. I watched the episode, that we need to move from an age of grievance to an age of heroism. And I think some of that is recognizing that nobody owes you peace. Right? In the US, we have a lot of really brave young men and women who serve in uniform, take huge risks. We pay a ridiculous amount of money to our military and it's worth it. And occasionally, occasionally we strike back. Occasionally we go on the offensive. And if you think that we can just give peace a chance, you don't understand history.
DS: Yeah. A close friend of mine, Daniel Bonner, who just had a baby boy, he named his baby boy, he has many names, but one of the names is Anar, which is named after a young man named Anar Shapira. Anar was best friends with Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was with him at the Nova Music Festival. Anar and Hersh hid in this shelter, this bomb shelter with, I don't know, 20 some other kids, people their age, and they were hiding in there and the Hamas terrorists surrounded the place and they threw in a grenade. And Anar picked up the grenade and threw it back. And they threw a second grenade and he picked it up. A third grenade, fourth grenade, fifth grenade. I mean, just think about this. He's just… six, seven. Any one of these grenades can blow him up. And at some point, the Hamas terrorists figured out we should throw the grenade. We should wait a little longer before we throw the grenade in so he has less time to pick it up so it explodes. And sure enough, that's what happened. It blew up. He was killed. Many of the people in the bomb shelter were killed, but many survived. And because of what he did, some of them hid under other bodies and obviously we know that Hersh was taken hostage and then ultimately executed, I was thinking about that because as brutal as what happened at the Nova site, the memorial you were at, it was a killing field, right? As brutal as it was, I think how many lives were saved because most of these kids partying at the Nova festival, having a good time, like it could have been a music festival here, most of them had been trained in the military. So they could actually… so we don't even appreciate there could have been two or three times the number of casualties at the Nova site.
SG: Yeah. And a lot of policemen gave their lives. I got to be honest with Dan. I did have it when I went to Israel to see for myself what had happened when I went into Kibbutz Kfar Aza?
DS: Kfar Aza, yeah.
SG: And you see the horror up close. The first thing you feel is horror. Almost immediate second reaction was how the fuck did they let this happen? Because what I saw was this wide open empty field between the kibbutz and Gaza. And I know enough about technology to know motion sensors, dirigibles. My understanding is the IDF knew that they were switching out SIM cards…
DS: SIM cards the night before.
SG: And I thought, you know, Netanyahu's deal was always you may not like my politics, but I'll keep you safe. These people were not kept safe. And I hope similar to the way Golda Meir came to power because it was a reckoning. I do hope that there's, and I'm sure there will be a reckoning around how badly they screwed up. It's easy for me to say I'm not in the military, but I had trouble understanding why there weren't helicopter gunships in about seven minutes—
DS: A couple of Apaches just showing up, right.
SG: So I found it really disappointing that an army and a recognition they were surrounded by enemies hadn't protected its people. I really do think that there's going to need to be a reckoning and I do think they let down, they let down their people.
DS: The state was non-existent on October 7th. Here, Jews have wanted the states to protect Jews from violence against Jews. The Jews have had a state from the end of, a modern state, from after the Holocaust until… I mean, the state still exists, but the state was invisible that weekend. And that was a window into what it's like when the Jews don't have a state, which was not part of the deal. So, yes, I think the reckoning is coming.
SG: And I want to blame the victim, but if Cuba had managed to come into Florida and take and terrorize Miami for a little while, there would be hell to pay for our military and elected leaders here.
DS: Right. Yeah. I think Israel is ruthless about these commissions of inquiry after wars. So I think one is coming. I want to just wrap with two questions. One is there's about 13 million Jews in the world. And about two billion Muslims. Israel is one one hundredth of one percent of the globe, of the landmass of the world. You're a marketing professor, you’re a marketing guru, what should the story be?
SG: So at the end of the day, prosperity and economic growth is sort of the key. The secret sauce of a successful society is attracting human and financial capital. And Israel has been so successful, it's arguably the second most successful technology hub in the world. So that alchemy of education, risk taking, capital, a sense of community that comes together to create economic prosperity. It sounds crass, but that's just hugely important. I'm actually quite hopeful and it's also disappointing. I think there's less antisemitism in certain nations in the Gulf right now than there is in the US. I'm really hopeful that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia normalizes relations with Israel.
DS: I think they want to.
SG: And I think a lot of that, quite frankly, is not necessarily they empathize of the Jews or Judaism, but because they see the economic opportunity. They're sick of getting on planes to come get their AI software in Silicon Valley. They see real opportunity there. So one, continued economic prosperity. Two, I do think there has to be a reckoning around what happened. And obviously, as well as the sovereign nation, they have to decide what they do, what they want to do, what they're going to do with their leaders. It sounds really passe. Exchange programs between American students. If you go to Tel Aviv, you can't help but feel pretty good about Israel. You just can't help it. If you like Miami, you like Berlin, you like Chicago, you're just gonna go to Israel and you think, you know, this feels, the things I like about America are kind of, you know, in spades here. So how do we get more people to Israel? Also, if we want Judaism to survive, I think a lot of us here in the US, and I take this on, we have to be better Jews. We have to speak out. And there's some very helpful things. Two members of “the squad” that were very anti-Israel voted out of office. I haven't seen anyone voted out of office for being too pro-Israel. That's a really solid signal, right? But there's too many people like me who took for granted the cultural benefits I recognize for being a Jew, who have taken for granted the blessings and the commitment of what it means to me and American and have Western values and those freedoms we all enjoy and the prosperity we all enjoy, and not living up to the sacrifice and how important it is that we speak out and when this shit happens, not engaging in both side-ism ,not engaging in self hate, not finding some sort of empathy and terrorism, but to push back, to push back and demand that there is a resolution and we have a full throated support of our allies. And I do think a lot of it falls on Jews in the West who've been complacent. And I'm one of those. I'm guilty of that. No, we don't have a right to exist. We fight to exist. Right? And every day, we're committed to, you know, American values overseas. If we're committed to the survival of Jews and Israel, you know, guys like me, we got to get in the fight.
DS: Very last question. And it really will be the last question. I've heard you mention to me that I don't think you've ever mentioned it in the conversation that when you were a kid, you would go to temple sometimes with your mother?
SG: Yeah.
DS: And you guys would listen to the sermon and the service on Shabbat?
SG: Yeah. You know, I was raised in West LA. I think Temple Isaiah was our temple. It just wasn't anything that really stuck with me, resonated with me. At a very, very early age, I got turned off of religion. I've never been someone who believes in the afterlife. And as soon as I got really into academia and science, I sort of saw religion as sort of being almost anti-science. So I've always been turned off of it. But what you recognize as you get older, you get more thoughtful and you think about what were the influences that really stuck with me? And the emphasis on education and the emphasis on success, that it was okay to be successful, and the emphasis on identity and understanding where you came from, all of those things were present. Community. And also, I gotta be honest, Dan, I feel like Jews have been central to every major civil rights movement or every movement to restore women's rights, the rights for black people. And quite frankly, sometimes the rights for gays and quite frankly, sometimes right now, I don't feel like they've been there for us. I feel like that bridge we walked down with them hand in hand, Jews at the fronts fighting for these special interest groups, and this is a reductive statement because there's been some wonderful people from these groups who've come forward, whether it's Hakeem Jeffries. I mean, there's been Wes Moore. There's been just some outstanding support. But I don't feel like our commitment to the rights of other special interest groups, I feel like sometimes that's been a one way road. And I think it's okay to call, hold ourselves accountable and hold each other accountable. But going to temple, I liked it because it was more educational than anything for me. But I have totally lost touch with my Judaism. I think it's too late for me on that part. I think at some point I'm going to look into my kids eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end. And I find my atheism actually quite empowering. But this has stirred something in me. I think it's done a lot for Jews and people who love America to realize these are American values. These aren't Jewish values. These aren't Israeli values. These are American values. And it's been enlightening and empowering to know that you can make a difference. You can get involved. You can speak out. And that we shouldn't take our right to exist and America's right to promote its values in the Middle East for granted. This requires a commitment. We were reminded of that and I'm actually very hopeful. I think that the actions that these… You know, you always, I love what you say the Jewish term or the Israeli term, may your life be a blessing. I think the sacrifices and the horror of the last year are gonna make it safer for American values in the Middle East and safer for Jews and increase the likelihood of a prosperous and loving Israel over the next century.
DS: Beautiful. Thanks for doing this, Scott,
SG: Thank you, Dan. Thanks for your good work.