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The following is a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, currently serving his sixth term in office.
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He s one of the most influential, powerful, and controversial men in the world, leading a right-wing coalition government at the center of one of the most intense and long-lasting conflicts and crises in human history.
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As we spoke, and as I speak now, large-scale protests are breaking out all over Israel over this government s proposed judicial reform that seeks to weaken the Supreme Court in a bold accumulation of power.
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Given the current intense political battles in Israel, our previous intention to speak for three hours was adjusted to one hour for the time being, but we agreed to speak again for much longer in the future.
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I will also interview people who harshly disagree with the words spoken in this conversation.
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I will speak with other world leaders, with religious leaders, with historians and activists, and with people who have lived and have suffered through the pain of war, destruction, and loss that stoke the fires of anger and hate in their heart.
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For this, I will travel anywhere, no matter how dangerous, if there s any chance it may help add to understanding and love in the world.
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I believe in the power of conversation, to do just this, to remind us of our common humanity.
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I know I m underqualified and underskilled for these conversations, so I will often fall short, and I will certainly get attacked, derided, and slandered.
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but I will always turn the other cheek and use these attacks to learn, to improve, and no matter what, never give in to cynicism.
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This life, this world of ours, is too beautiful not to keep trying, trying to do some good in whatever way each of us know how.
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I love you all.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we re always hiring.
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Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
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And now onto the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will too.
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This show is brought to you by Numerai, a hedge fund that uses machine learning to make investment decisions.
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It s basically a really difficult data set, a really difficult competitions with real world testing, with a test set.
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were the highest of stakes.
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As I talk about in this conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, he s a big believer in the power and the efficiency of the market.
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That s the cleanest signal you can get in the interaction of a very large number of people competing purely with good information.
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and to step into that world as a machine learning algorithm to see what you can do with past data and how to make predictions such that you can outperform other humans or other algorithms, that s super interesting.
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I m just a big fan of real-world datasets and large-scale real-world machine learning benchmarks, both as a way to learn of what works and what doesn t, and just the fun, the fun of competing.
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The fun of competition is a good catalyst for learning and taking steps on the long journey towards mastery.
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Head over to numeri.ai to sign up for a tournament and hone your machine learning skills.
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That s numeri.ai for a chance to play against me and win a share of the tournament s prize pool.
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This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
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In my early teenage years, when I first started reading the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, I dreamed of becoming a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, because I thought that is a way to explore the human mind.
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in some funny kind of way.
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The journey I took through computer science and the development of robots and machine learning systems, artificial intelligence systems, all of that took me to a podcast called Artificial Intelligence that was then renamed to just my name.
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This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system that manages all kinds of stuff, financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, all that kind of messy stuff that nobody really thinks about when they launch a company.
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That s what excites me.
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I don t think about.
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Go sell some cool stuff.
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It has thousands of integrations and third-party apps.
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Again, highly, highly, highly recommend you try out Shopify.
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Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Benjamin Netanyahu.
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You re loved by many people here in Israel and in the world, but you re also hated by many.
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In fact, I think you may be one of the most hated men in the world.
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So if there s a young man or a young woman listening to this right now who have such hate in their heart, what can you say to them to
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one day turn that hate into love?
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I disagree with the premise of your question.
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I think I have enjoyed a very broad support around the world.
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There are certain corners in which we have this animosity that you describe and it sort of permeates in some of the
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the newspapers and news organs and so on in the United States, but it certainly doesn t reflect the broad support that I have.
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I just gave an interview on an Iranian channel, 16 million viewers.
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I gave another one, I just did a little video a few years ago, 25 million viewers from Iran.
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Certainly no hate there, I have to tell you.
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Not from the regime, okay?
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And when I go around the world, and I ve been around the world, people...
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want to hear what we have to say, what I have to say as a leader of Israel, whom they respect increasingly as a rising power in the world.
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So I disagree with that.
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And the most important thing that goes against what you said, is the respect that we receive from the Arab world.
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And the fact that we ve made four historic peace agreements with Arab countries, they made it with me, they didn t make it with
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or anyone else and I respect them and they respect me and probably more to come.
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So I think the premise is wrong, that s all.
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Well, there s a lot of love, yes.
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A lot of leaders are collaborating.
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Respect I said, not love.
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Okay, all right, well it s a spectrum.
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But there is people who
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don t have good things to say about Israel, who do have hate in their heart for Israel.
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And what can you say to those people?
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Well, I think they don t know very much.
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I think they re guided by a lot of ignorance.
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They don t know about Israel.
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They don t know that Israel is a stellar democracy, that it happens to be one of the most advanced societies on the planet, that what Israel develops helps humanity in every field of medicine and agriculture and the environment and telecoms and
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Talk about AI in a minute, but changing the world for the better and spreading this among six continents.
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We ve sent rescue teams more than any other country in the world, and we re one-tenth of one percent of the world s population.
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But when there s an earthquake or a devastation in Haiti or in the Philippines, Israel is there.
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When there s an earthquake, a devastating earthquake in Turkey, Turkey, Israel was there.
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When there s something in Nepal, Israel is there, and it s the second country.
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It s the second country.
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After, in one case, India, or after, in another case, the United States, Israel is there.
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Tiny Israel is a benefactor to all of humanity.
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So you re a student of history.
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If I can just linger on that philosophical notion of hate, that part of human nature.
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If you look at World War II, what do you learn from human nature from the rise of the Third Reich and the rise of somebody like Hitler and the hate that permeates that?
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Well, what I ve learned is that you have to nip bad things in the bud.
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You have to, there s a Latin term that says, obsta principi, stop bad things when they re small.
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And the deliberate hatred, the incitement of hatred against one community, it s demonization, delegitimization that goes with it.
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is a very dangerous thing.
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And that happened in the case of the Jews.
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What started with the Jews soon spread to all of humanity.
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So what we ve learned is that s what we should never, and I never, sit aside and say, oh, they re just threatening to destroy us.
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They won t do it.
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If somebody threatens to eliminate you, as Iran is doing today, and as Hitler did then, and people discounted it, well,
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If somebody threatens to annihilate us, take them seriously and act to prevent it early on.
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Don t let them have the means to do so because that may be too late.
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So in those threats underlying that hatred, how much of it is anti-Zionism and how much of it is anti-Semitism?
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I don t distinguish between the two.
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You can t say, well, I m okay with Jews, but I just don t think there should be a Jewish state.
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It s like saying, I m not anti-American, I just don t think there should be an America.
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That s basically what people are saying vis-a-vis anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
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When you say anti-Zionism, you re saying the Jewish people don t have a right to have a state of their own.
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And that is a denial of a basic principle that I think completely unmasks what is involved here.
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Today, anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism.
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Those who oppose the Jewish people oppose the Jewish state.
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If we jump from human history to the current particular moment, there s protests in Israel now about the proposed judicial reform that gives power to your government to override the Supreme Court.
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So the critics say that this gives too much power to you, virtually making you a dictator.
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Well, that s ridiculous.
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The mere fact that you have so many demonstrations and protests, some dictatorship, huh?
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There s a lot of democracy here, more ambunctious and more robust than just anywhere on the planet.
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Can you still man the case that this may give too much power to the coalition government to
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the prime minister, not just to you, but to those who follow?
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No, I think that s complete hogwash, because I think there s a very few people who are demonstrating against this.
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Quite a few, quite many don t have an idea what is being discussed.
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They re basically being sloganized.
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You can sloganize, you know something about, not mass media right now, but the social network.
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You can basically feed
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deliberately with big data and big money.
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You can just feed slogans and get into people s minds.
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I m sure you don t think I exaggerate because you can tell me more about that.
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And you can create mass mobilization based on these absurd slogans.
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So here s where I come from and what we re doing, what we re trying to do, and what we ve changed in what we re trying to do.
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I m a 19th century
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Democrat in my, small d, yes, in my views.
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That is, I view, I ask the question, what is democracy, okay?
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So democracy is the will of the majority and the protection of the rights of, they call it the rights of the minority, but I say the rights of the individual, okay?
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So how do you balance the two?
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How do you avoid mobocracy?
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And how do you avoid dictatorship, the opposite side?
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The way you avoid it is something that was built essentially by British philosophers and French philosophers, but was encapsulated by the founding fathers of the United States.
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You create a balance between the three branches of government.
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The legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.
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And this balance is what assures the balance between majority rights and individual rights.
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And you have to balance all of them.
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That balance was
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maintained in Israel in its first 50 years and was gradually overtaken and basically broken by the most activist judicial court on the planet.
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That s what happened here.
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And gradually over the last two, three decades, the court arrogated for itself the powers of the parliament and the executive.
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So we re trying to bring it back into line, bring it back into line into what is common in
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the
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in judiciary, but not in all-powerful judiciary.
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That balance does not mean bringing it back into line, doesn t mean that you can have the parliament archnists that override any decision that the Supreme Court does.
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So I pretty much early on said, after the judicial reform was introduced, get rid of the idea of a sweeping override clause
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that would have with 61 votes, that s majority of one, you can just nullify any Supreme Court decision.
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So let s move it back into the center.
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So that s gone.
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And most of the criticism on the judicial reform was based on an unlimited override clause, which I ve said is simply not going to happen.
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People are discussing something that already for six months does not exist.
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The second point that we received criticism on was the structure of how do you choose Supreme Court judges, okay?
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How do you choose them?
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And the critics of the reform are saying that the idea that elected officials should choose Supreme Court judges is the end of democracy.
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If that s the case, the United States is not a democracy, neither is France, and neither are just, I don t know, just about every democracy on the planet.
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So there is a view here that you can t have the sordid hands of elected officials involved in the choosing of judges.
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And in the Israeli system, the judicial activism went so far that effectively the sitting judges
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have an effective veto on choosing judges, which means that this is a self-selecting court that just perpetrates itself.
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And we want to correct that.
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Again, we want to correct it in a balanced way.
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And that s basically what we re trying to do.
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So I think there s a lot of misinformation about that.
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We re trying to bring Israeli democracy to where it was in its first 50 years.
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And it was a stellar democracy.
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It still is.
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Israel is a democracy, will remain a democracy, a vibrant democracy.
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And believe me, the fact that people are arguing and demonstrating in the streets and protesting is just, is the best proof of that.
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And that s how it ll remain.
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We spoke about tech companies offline.
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There s a lot of tech companies nervous about this judicial reform.
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Can you speak to why large and small companies have a future in Israel?
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Because Israel is a free market economy.
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I had something to do with that.
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I introduced dozens and dozens of free market reforms that made Israel move from $17,000 per capita income
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to within a very short time to $54,000 that s nominal GDP per capita according to the IMF and we ve overtaken in that Japan, France, Britain, Germany.
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How did that happen?
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Because we unleashed the genius that we have and the initiative and the entrepreneurship that is
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latent in our population and to do that we had to create free markets so we created that.
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So Israel has one of the most vibrant free market economies in the world and the second thing we have is a permanent investment in conceptual products because we have a permanent investment
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in the military, in our security services, creating basically knowledge workers who then become knowledge entrepreneurs.
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And so we create this structure.
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And that s not going to go away.
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There s been a decline in investments in high-tech globally.
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I think that s driven by many factors, but the most important one is the interest rate.
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which I think will fluctuate up and down.
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But Israel will remain a very attractive country because it produces so many, so many knowledge workers in a knowledge-based economy.
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And it s changing so rapidly.
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The world is changing.
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You re looking for the places that have innovation.
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The future belongs to those who innovate.
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Israel is the
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preeminent innovation nation.
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It has few competitors.
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And if we would say, all right, where do you have this close cross-disciplinary fermentation of various skills and areas?
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I would say it s in Israel.
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I ll tell you why.
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We used to be just telecoms.
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because people went out of the military intelligence, our NSA.
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But that s been now broad-based, so you find it in medicine, you find it in biology, you find it in agri-tech, you find it everywhere.
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Everything is becoming technologized, and in Israel, everybody is dealing in everything.
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And that s a potent reservoir of talent.
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that the world is not going to pass up and in fact is coming to us.
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We just had Nvidia coming here and they decided to build a supercomputer in Israel.
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I wonder why.
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We ve had Intel coming here and deciding now to invest 25 billion dollars just now in a new plant in Israel.
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I wonder why.
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I don t wonder why, they know why.
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Because the talent is here and the freedom is here, and it will remain so.
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So you had a conversation about AI with Sam Altman of OpenAI and with Elon Musk.
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Yeah.
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What was the content of that conversation?
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What s your vision for sort of this very highest of tech, which is artificial intelligence?
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Well, first of all, I have a high regard for the people I talk to, okay?
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And I understand that they understand things I don t understand, and I don t pretend to understand everything, but I do understand one thing.
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I understand that AI is developing at a geometric rate, and mostly in political life and in life in general, people don t have an intuitive grasp of
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geometric growth.
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You understand things basically in linear increments.
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And the idea that you re coming up a ski slope is very foreign to people.
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So they don t understand it, and they re naturally also sort of taken aback by it.
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Because what do you do?
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Okay?
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So I think there s several conclusions from my conversations with them and from my other observations.
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that I ve been talking about for many years.
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I m talking about the need to do this.
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Well, the first thing is this.
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There is no possibility of not entering AI with full force.
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Secondly, there is a need for regulation.
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Third, it s not clear there will be global regulation.
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fourth, it s not clear where it ends up.
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I certainly cannot say that.
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Now, you might say, does it come to control us?
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Okay, that s a question.
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Does it come to control us?
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I don t know the answer to that.
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I think that is
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as one observation that I had from these conversations, is if it does come to control, that s probably the only chance of having universal regulation, because I don t see anyone deciding to avoid the race and cooperate unless you have that threat.
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Doesn t mean you can t regulate AI within countries, even without that understanding.
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But it does mean that there s a limit to regulation because every country will want to make sure that it doesn t give up competitive advantage if there is no universal regulation.
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I think that right now, just as you know, 10 years ago, I read
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I read a novel.
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I don t read novels, but I was forced to read one by a scientific advisor.
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I read history.
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I read about economics.
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I read about technology.
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I just don t read novels, okay?
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On this, I followed Churchill.
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You know, he said, fact is better than fiction.
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Well, this fiction would become fact.
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And it was a book.
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It was a novel about
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a Chinese-American future cyber war.
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And I read the book in one sitting, called in a team of experts, and I said, all right, let s turn Israel into one of the world s five cyber powers, and let s do it very quickly.
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And we did, actually.
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We did exactly that.
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I think AI is bigger than that and related to that.
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because it ll affect, well, cyber affects everything, but AI will affect it even more fundamentally.
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And the joining of the two could be very powerful.
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So I think in Israel, we have to do it anyway for security reasons, and we re doing it.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I think, what about our databases that are already very robust on the medical records of 98% of our population?
1
SPEAKER_00
Why don t we stick a genetic database on that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Why don t we do other things that could bring magical, what seem are seemingly magical cures and drugs and medical instruments for that?
1
SPEAKER_00
That s one possibility.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have it in, as I said, in every single field.
1
SPEAKER_00
The conclusion is this.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have to move on AI.
1
SPEAKER_00
We are moving on AI just as we moved on cyber.
1
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And I think Israel will be one of the leading
1
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one of the leading AI powers in the world.
1
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The questions I don t have an answer to is, where does it go?
1
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How much does it eat, chew up on jobs?
1
SPEAKER_00
There s an assumption that I m not sure is true, that all previous, the two big previous revolutions in the human condition, namely the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, definitely produced more jobs than they consumed, okay?
1
SPEAKER_00
That is not obvious to me at all.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I could see new jobs creating, and yes, I have that comforting statement, but it s not quite true, because I think on balance, they ll probably consume more jobs, many more jobs than they ll create.
1
SPEAKER_00
At least in the short term.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we don t know about the long term.
1
SPEAKER_00
No, I don t know about the long term, but I used to have the comfort, being a free market guy, I always said, you know, we re going to produce more jobs than, you know, by, I don t know, limiting certain government jobs.
1
SPEAKER_00
We re actually putting out in the market, we ll create more jobs, which obviously happened.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, we had one telecom company, a government company, when I said, we re going to, you know, we re going to create competition, they said, you re going to run us out, we re not going to have more workers.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they had 13,000 workers, they went down to seven, but we create another 40,000 in the other companies.
1
SPEAKER_00
So that was a comforting thought.
1
SPEAKER_00
I always knew that was true.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
Not only that, I also knew that wealth would spread by opening up the markets completely opposite to the
1
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socialist and semi-socialist creed that they had here.
1
SPEAKER_00
They said you re going to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
1
SPEAKER_00
No, and made everyone richer and actually
1
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the people who entered the job market because of the reforms we did actually became a lot richer on the lower ladders of the socioeconomic measure.
1
SPEAKER_00
But here s the point, I don t know, I don t know that we will not have what Elon Musk calls the end of scarcity.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you ll have the end of scarcity, you ll have enormous productivity,
1
SPEAKER_00
you know, very few people are producing enormous added value.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re gonna have to tax that to pass it to the others, okay?
1
SPEAKER_00
You re gonna have to do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s a political question.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m not sure how we answer that.
1
SPEAKER_00
What if you tax and somebody else doesn t tax?
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SPEAKER_00
You re gonna get everybody to go there.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s an issue, an international issue that we constantly have to deal with.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the second question you have is, suppose you solve that problem.
1
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and you deliver money, okay, to those who are not involved in the AI economy, what do they do?
1
SPEAKER_00
The first question you ask somebody whom you just met after the polite exchanges is, what do you do, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, people define themselves by their profession.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s gonna be difficult if you don t have a profession.
1
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, people will spend more time self-searching, more time in the arts, more time in leisure.
1
SPEAKER_00
I understand that.
1
SPEAKER_00
If I have to bet, it will annihilate many more jobs than it will create, and it will force a structural change in our economics, in our economic models, and in our politics.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I m not sure where it s going to go.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s something we have to respond to at the nation level and just as a human civilization.
1
SPEAKER_01
Both the threat of AI to just us as a human species, and then the effect on the jobs, and like you said, cyber security.
1
SPEAKER_01
And what do you think?
1
SPEAKER_01
You think we re going to lose control?
1
SPEAKER_01
No, first of all, I do believe, maybe naively, that it will create more jobs than it takes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Write that down and we ll check it.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s on record.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you know, we don t say we ll check it after our lifetime.
1
SPEAKER_00
No, we ll see it in a few years.
1
SPEAKER_01
We ll see it in a few years.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m really concerned about cybersecurity and the nature of how that changes with the power of AI.
1
SPEAKER_01
And in terms of existential threats, I think there ll be so much threats that aren t existential along the way that that s the thing I m mostly concerned about versus AI taking complete control and becoming sort of superseding the human species.
1
SPEAKER_01
although that is something you should consider seriously, because of the exponential growth of its capability.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s exactly the exponential growth which we understand is before us, but we don t really, it s very hard to project forward.
1
SPEAKER_00
To really understand.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s right, exactly right.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, I deal with what I can and where I can affect something.
1
SPEAKER_00
I tend not to worry about things I don t control because at a certain point, you know, there s no point.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you have to decide what you re spending your time on.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I think in practical terms, I think we ll make Israel a formidable AI power.
1
SPEAKER_00
We understand the limitation of scale, computing power.
1
SPEAKER_00
and other things, but I think within those limits I think we can make here this miracle that we did in many other things.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, we do more with less.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t care if it s water, the production of water, or the production of energy, or the production of knowledge, or the production of
1
SPEAKER_00
cyber capabilities, defense and other.
1
SPEAKER_00
We just do more with less and I think in AI we re going to do a lot more with relatively small but highly gifted population, very gifted.
1
SPEAKER_01
So taking a small tangent, as we talked about offline, you have a background in Taekwondo.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we mentioned Elon Musk.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve trained with both.
1
SPEAKER_01
Just as a quick question, who are you betting on in a fight?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, I refuse to answer that.
1
SPEAKER_00
I will say this.
1
SPEAKER_00
Such a politician you are.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, of course.
1
SPEAKER_00
Here I m a politician.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m openly telling you, then I m dodging the question, okay?
1
SPEAKER_00
But I ll say this.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, I actually, I spent five years in our special forces, in the military, and we barely spent a minute on martial arts.
1
SPEAKER_00
I actually learned Taekwondo later when I came to
1
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t even at MIT.
1
SPEAKER_00
At MIT I think I did karate, but when I came to the UN I had a martial arts expert and he taught me Taekwondo, which was kind of interesting.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, the question you really have to ask is, why didn t we learn martial arts in this special elite unit?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the answer is,
1
SPEAKER_00
There s no point if you saw Indiana Jones, you know, there s no point.
1
SPEAKER_00
You just, you know, pull the trigger.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s simple.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, I don t expect anyone to pull the trigger on this combat, and I m sure you ll make sure that doesn t happen.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, martial arts is this kind of, it s bigger than just combat.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s this kind of journey of humility and it has, it s an art form.
1
SPEAKER_01
It truly is an art, but it s fascinating that these two figures in tech are facing each other.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I won t ask a question of who you would face and how you would do, but... Well, I m facing...
1
SPEAKER_00
Opponents all the time.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s part of life.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m not sure about that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Are you announcing invites?
1
SPEAKER_00
No.
1
SPEAKER_00
Part of life is competition.
1
SPEAKER_00
The only time competition ends is death.
1
SPEAKER_00
But political life, economic life,
2
SPEAKER_01
cultural life is engaged continuously in creativity and competition.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem I have with that, as I mentioned earlier just before we began the podcast, is that at a certain point you want to put barriers to monopoly.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you re a really able competitor, you re going to create a monopoly.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what Peter Thiel says is a natural course of things.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s what I learned basically in the Boston Consulting Group.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you re a very able competitor, you ll create scale advantages that give you the ability to lock out your competition.
2
SPEAKER_01
And as a prime minister, I want to assure that there is competition in the market, so you have to limit
2
SPEAKER_01
limit this competitive power at a certain point.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that becomes increasingly hard in a world where everything is intermixed.
2
SPEAKER_01
Where do you define market segments?
2
SPEAKER_01
Where do you define monopoly?
2
SPEAKER_01
How do you do that?
2
SPEAKER_01
That is very, that actually conceptually I find very challenging.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because of all the dozens of political, of economic reforms that I ve made,
2
SPEAKER_01
The most difficult part is the conceptual part.
2
SPEAKER_01
Once you ve ironed it out, you say, here s what I want to do, here s the right thing to do, then you have a practical problem of overcoming union resistance, political resistance, press calumny, opponents from this or that corner.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a practical matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you have it conceptually defined,
2
SPEAKER_01
You can move ahead to reform economies or reform education or reform transportation.
2
SPEAKER_01
Fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the question of the growing power of large companies, big tech companies to monopolize the markets because they re better at it.
2
SPEAKER_01
They provide a service, they provide it at lower cost, at rapidly declining cost.
2
SPEAKER_01
Where do you stop?
2
SPEAKER_01
Where do you stop in a monopoly power is a crucial question, because it also becomes now a political question.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you amass enormous amount of economic power, which is information power,
2
SPEAKER_01
you know, that also monopolizes the political process, which creates these are real questions that are not obvious.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t have an obvious answer.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because as I said, as a 19th century Democrat, these are questions of the 21st century, which people should, should begin to think, do you have a solution to that?
2
SPEAKER_00
The solution of a monopoly is growing arbitrarily, unstoppably in power.
2
SPEAKER_00
In economic power and therefore in political power.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, some of that is regulation, some of that is competition.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know where to draw the line?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not breaking up AT&T, you know, it s not that simple.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I believe in the power of competition, that there will always be somebody that challenges the big guys.
2
SPEAKER_00
Especially in the space of AI, the more open source movements are taking hold, the more the little guy can become the big guy.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you re saying basically the regulatory instrument is the market?
2
SPEAKER_01
in large part, in most part.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the hope.
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe I m a dreamer.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s been in many ways my policy up to now.
2
SPEAKER_01
The best regulator is the market.
2
SPEAKER_01
The best regulator in economic activity is the market.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the best regulator in political matters is the political market.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s called elections.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what regulates.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, you have a lousy government and people make lousy decisions.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, you don t need, you know, the wise men raised above the, you know, the masses to decide what is good and what is bad.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let the masses decide.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let them vote every four years or whatever, and they throw you out.
2
SPEAKER_01
By the way, it happened to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s life after political death.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was actually political.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was reelected five or six times, and this is my sixth term.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, I believe in that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m not sure.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m not sure that in economic matters, in the geometric growth of tech companies, that you ll always have the little guy, the nimble mammal that will come out and slay the dinosaurs or overcome the dinosaurs.
2
SPEAKER_01
which is essentially what you said.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I wouldn t count out the little guy.
2
SPEAKER_01
You wouldn t count out the little guy.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I hope you re right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me ask you about this market of politics.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you have served six terms as prime minister, over 15 years in power.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask you again, human nature.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you worry about the corrupting nature of power on you as a leader, on you as a man?
2
SPEAKER_00
Not at all.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because I think that the, again, the thing that drives me is not, is nothing but the mission that I took to assure the
2
SPEAKER_01
the survival and thriving of the state, the Jewish state.
2
SPEAKER_01
That is, its economic prosperity, but its security and its ability to achieve peace with our neighbors.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I m committed to it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think there s still, there are many things that have been done.
2
SPEAKER_01
a few big things that I can still do, but it doesn t only depend on my sense of mission, it depends on the market, as we say.
2
SPEAKER_01
It depends really on the will of the Israeli voters, and the Israeli voters have decided to vote for me again and again, even though I wield no power in the press, no power in many quarters here, and so on.
2
SPEAKER_01
Nothing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I am probably, I m going to be very soon the longest-serving
2
SPEAKER_01
prime minister in the last half century in the Western democracies, but that s not because I amassed great political power in any of the institutions.
2
SPEAKER_01
I remember I had a conversation with Silvio Berlusconi, who recently died, and he said to me about, I don t know, 15 years ago, something like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
He said, so, Bibi, how many
2
SPEAKER_01
How many of Israel s television stations do you have?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I said, none.
2
SPEAKER_01
He said, do you have none?
2
SPEAKER_01
I have two.
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you have?
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you have?
2
SPEAKER_01
I said, none.
2
SPEAKER_01
I have two.
2
SPEAKER_01
He said, no, no, but what do you mean?
2
SPEAKER_01
you don t have any that you control. 
2
SPEAKER_01
I said, not only do I have none that I control, they re all against me.
2
SPEAKER_01
So he says, so how do you win elections?
2
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, with both hands tied behind your back, and I said, the hard way.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s why, you know, I have the largest party, but I don t have many more seats that I would have if I had a sympathetic voice in the media.
2
SPEAKER_01
And Israel is, until recently, was dominated completely by
2
SPEAKER_01
one side of the political spectrum that often vilified me, not me because they viewed me as representing basically the conservative voices in Israel that are majority.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the idea that I m an omnipotent authoritarian dictator is ridiculous.
2
SPEAKER_01
I would say I m not merely a champion of
2
SPEAKER_01
of democracy and democratization, I believe ultimately the decision is with the voters.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the voters, even though they ve had, you know, they have constant, constant press attacks, they ve chosen to put me back in.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I don t believe in this thing of amassing the corrupting power.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you don t have elections, if you don t have, if you control the means of influencing the voters,
2
SPEAKER_01
I understand what you re saying, but in my case, it s the exact opposite.
2
SPEAKER_01
I have to constantly go in elections, constantly, you know, with the disadvantage that the major media outlets are very violently sometimes against me.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it s fine, and I keep on winning.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I don t know what you re talking about.
2
SPEAKER_01
I would say the concentration of power lies elsewhere, not here.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, you have been involved in several corruption cases.
2
SPEAKER_00
How much corruption is there in Israel?
2
SPEAKER_00
And how do you fight it in your own party and in Israel?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, you should ask a different question.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s happened to these cases?
2
SPEAKER_01
These cases have basically are collapsing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And before our eyes, there was recently an event in which the judges, the three judges in my case, called in the prosecution and said, you know, you re flagship.
2
SPEAKER_01
bribery charts, so-called bribery charts, you know, it s gone, doesn t exist.
2
SPEAKER_01
Before a single defense witness was called, and it sort of tells you that this thing is evaporating.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s quite astounding.
2
SPEAKER_01
Even that, I have to say, was covered even by the mainstream press in Israel because it s such an earthquake.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, a lot of these charges are not a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
These charges will prove to be nothing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I always say, listen, I stand before the legal process.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t claim that I m exempt from it in any way.
2
SPEAKER_01
On the contrary, I think the truth will come out, and it s coming out.
2
SPEAKER_01
We see that not only that, but with other things.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, I think it s kind of instructive that, you know, no politician has been more vilified, none has been put to such, you know, what is it, about a quarter of a billion shekels were used to scrutinize
2
SPEAKER_01
Me scour my bank account sending people to the Philippines into Mexico into Europe into America And looking at everybody using spyware the most advanced spyware on the planet against my associates blackmailing witnesses Telling them, you know, think about your family think about your wife, you know, you better tell us what you want All that is coming out in the trial
2
SPEAKER_01
So I would say that most people now are no longer asking, including my opponents, it s sort of trickling in as the stuff comes out.
2
SPEAKER_01
People are not saying, what did Netanyahu do?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because he apparently did nothing.
2
SPEAKER_01
What was done to him?
2
SPEAKER_01
That s something that people ask.
2
SPEAKER_01
What was done to him?
2
SPEAKER_01
What was done to our democracy?
2
SPEAKER_01
What was done in the attempt to put down somebody who keeps winning elections despite the handicaps that I described?
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we can nail him by framing him.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the one thing I can say about this court trial is that
2
SPEAKER_01
things are coming out, and that s very good.
2
SPEAKER_01
Just objective things are coming out, changing the picture.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I would say the attempt to brand me as corrupt is falling on its face, but the thing that is being uncovered in the trial, such as the use of spyware,
2
SPEAKER_01
on a politician, a politician s surroundings, to try to shake them down in investigations, put them in flea-ridden cells for 21 days, invite their 84-year-old mother to investigations without cause, bringing in their mistresses in the corridor, shaking them down.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what people are asking.
2
SPEAKER_01
That corruption is what they want corrected.
2
SPEAKER_00
What is the top obstacle to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians?
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s talk about the big question of peace in this part of the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think the reason you have the persistence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which goes back about a century, is the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state, a nation state for the Jewish people in any boundary.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s why they opposed the establishment of the state of Israel before we had a state.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now that s why they ve opposed it after we had a state.
2
SPEAKER_01
They opposed it when we were, we didn t have Judea and Samaria, the West Bank in our heads and Gaza.
2
SPEAKER_01
They opposed it after we have it.
2
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t make a difference.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s basically their persistent refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundaries.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think their tragedy is that they ve been
2
SPEAKER_01
commandeered for a century by leadership that refused to compromise with the idea of Zionism, namely that the Jews deserve a state in this part of the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
The territorial dispute is something else.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have a territorial dispute if you say, okay, you re living on this side, we re living on that side, let s decide where the border is, and so on.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s not what the argument is.
2
SPEAKER_01
The Palestinian society, which is itself fragmented, but all the factions agree there shouldn t be a Jewish state anywhere, okay?
2
SPEAKER_01
They just disagree between Hamas that says, oh, well, you should have it, we should get rid of it with terror, and the others who say, no, we should also use political means to dissolve it.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that is the problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
So even as part of a two-state solution, they re still against the idea?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, they don t want a state next to Israel.
2
SPEAKER_01
They want a state instead of Israel.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they say, if we get a state, we ll use it as a springboard to destroy the smaller Israeli state, which is what happened when Israel unilaterally walked out of Gaza and effectively established a Hamas state there.
2
SPEAKER_01
They didn t say, oh good, now we have our own territory, our own state, Israel is no longer there, let s build peace, let s build economic projects, let s enfranchise our people.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, they turned it basically into a terror bastion from which they fired 10,000 rockets into Israel.
2
SPEAKER_01
When Israel left Lebanon, you know, because we had terrorist attacks from there, then we had Lebanon taken over by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
2
SPEAKER_01
And therefore, every time we just walked out, what we got was not peace.
2
SPEAKER_01
We didn t give, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
territory for peace, we got territory for terror.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what we had.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s what would happen as long as the reigning ideology says we don t want Israel in any border.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the idea of two states assumes that you d have, on the other side, a state that wants to live in peace and not one that will be overtaken by Iran and its proxies in two seconds and become a base to destroy Israel.
2
SPEAKER_01
And therefore, I think that most Israelis today, if you ask them,
2
SPEAKER_01
They d say it s not going to work in that concept.
2
SPEAKER_01
So what do you do?
2
SPEAKER_01
What do you do with the Palestinians?
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, they re still there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I don t, unlike them, I don t want to throw them out.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re going to be living here and we re going to be living here in an area which is, by the way, just to understand, the area, the entire area of
2
SPEAKER_01
so-called West Bank and in Israel, is the width of the Washington Beltway, more or less, just a little more, not much more.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can t really divide it up.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can t say, well, you re going to fly in.
2
SPEAKER_01
Who controls the airspace?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, it takes you about two and a half minutes to cross it with a regular, you know, 747, okay?
2
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With a fighter plane, it takes you a minute and a half.
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Okay, so you re not, how are you going to divide the airspace?
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Well, you re not going to divide it.
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Israel is going to control that airspace and the electromagnetic space and so on.
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So security has to be in the hands of Israel.
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My view of how you solve this problem is that it is a simple principle.
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The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten Israel.
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which basically means that the responsibility for overall security remains with Israel.
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And from a practical point of view, we ve seen that every time that Israel leaves a territory and takes its security forces out of an area, it immediately is overtaken by Hamas or Hezbollah
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or jihadists who basically are committed to the destruction of Israel and also bring misery to the Palestinians or Arab subjects.
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So I think that that principle is less than perfect sovereignty.
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because you re taking a certain amount of powers, sovereign powers, especially security, away.
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But I think it s the only practical solution.
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So people say, ah, but it s not a perfect state.
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I say, okay, call it what you will, call it, you know, I don t know, limited sovereignty, call it autonomy plus, call it whatever you want to call it.
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But that s the reality and right now if you ask Israelis across the political spectrum, except the very hard left, most Israelis agree with that.
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They don t really debate it.
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So a two-state solution where Israel controls the security of the entire region?
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call it quite that.
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I mean, there are different names, but the idea is, yes, Israel controls security in the
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It s the entire area, it s this tiny area between the Jordan River and the sea.
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I mean, it s like, you know, you can walk it in not one afternoon, if you re really fit, you can do it in a day.
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Less than a day, I did.
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So the expansion of settlements in the West Bank has been a top priority for this new government.
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People, many harshly criticized this as contributing to escalating
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Israel-Palestine tensions.
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Can you understand that perspective, that this expansion of settlements is not good for this two-state solution?
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Can you describe that?
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Yeah, I can understand what they re saying, and they don t understand why they re wrong.
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First, most Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria live in urban blocks, and that accounts for about 90% of the population.
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And everybody recognizes that those urban blocks are going to be part of Israel in any future arrangement.
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So they re really arguing about something that has already been decided and agreed upon really by Americans, even by Arabs, many Arabs.
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They don t think that Israel is going to dismantle these blocks.
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You look outside the window here.
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and within about a kilometer, a mile from here, is you have Jerusalem.
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Half of Jerusalem grew naturally beyond the old 1967 border.
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So you re not going to dismantle half of Jerusalem.
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That s not going to happen.
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And most people don t expect that.
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Then you have the other 10% scattered in tiny, you know, small communities.
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And people say, well, you re going to have to take them out.
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Why?
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Why?
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Remember that in pre-1967 Israel, we have over a million and a half Arabs here.
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We don t say, oh, Israel has to be ethnically cleansed from Arabs in order to have, from its Arab citizens, in order to have peace.
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Of course not.
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Jews can live among Arabs and Arabs can live among Jews.
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And what is being advanced by those people who say that we can t live in our ancestral homeland, in these disputed areas, nobody says that this is Palestinian areas,
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And nobody says that these are Israelis.
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We claim them, they claim them.
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We ve only been attached to this land for, oh, 3,500 years.
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But it s a dispute, I agree.
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But I don t agree that we should throw out the Arabs, and I don t think that they should throw out the Jews.
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And if somebody said to you, the only way we re gonna have peace with Israel is to have an ethnically cleansed Palestinian entity, that s outrageous.
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If you said the only way,
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You know, you shouldn t have Jews living in, I don t know, in the suburbs of London or New York and so on.
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I don t think that will play too well.
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The world is actually advancing a solution that says that Jews cannot live among Arabs and Arabs cannot live among Jews.
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I don t think that s the right way to do it.
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And I think there s a solution out there.
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But I don t think we re going to get to it, which is less than perfect sovereignty, which involves Israeli security, maintained for the entire territory by Israel, which involves not rooting out anybody, not kicking out, uprooting Arabs or Palestinians.
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They re going to live in enclaves in sovereign Israel, and we re going to live in probably in enclaves there.
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probably through transportational continuity as opposed to territorial continuity.
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That is, you know, for example, you can have tunnels and overpasses and so on that connect the various communities, and we re doing that right now.
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We re doing that right now, and it actually works.
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I think there is a solution to this.
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It s not the perfect world that people think of, because that model, I think, doesn t apply here.
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If it applies elsewhere, it s a question.
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I don t think so.
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But I think there s one other thing, and that s the main thing that I ve been involved in.
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You know, people said, if you don t solve the Palestinian problem,
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You re not going to get to the Arab world.
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You re not going to have peace with the Arab world.
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Remember, the Palestinians are about 2% of the Arab world.
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and the other 98%, you re not gonna make peace with them, and that s our goal.
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And for a long time, people accepted that.
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After the initial peace treaties with Egypt, with Prime Minister Begin of the Likud and President Sadat of Egypt, and then with Jordan, between Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein,
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For a quarter of a century we didn t have any more peace treaties because people said you got to go through the Palestinians and the Palestinians they don t want a solution of the kind that I described or any kind except the one that involves the dissolution of the state of Israel so we could wait another half century
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And I said, no, I mean, I don t think that we should accept the premise that we have to wait for the Palestinians because we ll have to wait forever.
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So I decided to do it differently.
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I decided to go directly to the Arab capitals and to make the historic Abraham Accords and essentially reversing the equation, not a peace process that goes inside out,
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but outside in.
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And we went directly to these countries and forged these breakthrough peace accords with the United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, with Morocco, and with Sudan.
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And we re now trying to expand that in a quantum leap.
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with Saudi Arabia.
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What does it take to do that with Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman?
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You know, I m a student of history and I read a lot of history and I read that, you know, in the Versailles discussions after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson said, I believe
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in open covenants openly arrived at.
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I have my correction.
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I believed in open covenants secretly arrived at.
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So we re not going to advance a Saudi-Israeli peace by having it publicly discussed.
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And in any case, it s a decision of the Saudis if they want to do it.
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But there s obviously a mutual interest.
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So here s my view.
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If we try to wait for the 2% in order to get to the 98%, we re going to fail, and we have failed.
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If we go to the 98%, we have a much greater chance of persuading the 2%.
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You know why?
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Because the 2%, the Palestinian hope to vanquish the state of Israel and not make peace with it is based, among other things, on the assumption that eventually the 98%, the rest of the Arab world will kick in and destroy the Jewish state, help them dissolve or destroy the Jewish state.
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When that hope
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is taken away, then you begin to have a turn to the realistic solutions of coexistence.
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By the way, they require compromise on the Israeli side too, and I m perfectly cognizant of that and willing to do that, but I think a realistic compromise
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will be struck much more readily when the conflict between Israel and the Arab states, the Arab world is effectively solved.
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And I think we re on that path.
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It was a conceptual change, just like, you know, I ve been involved in a few, I told you, the conceptual battle is always the most difficult one.
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And, you know, I had to fight this battle to convert a semi-socialist state into a
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a free market capitalist state.
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And I have to say that most people today recognize the power of competition and the benefits of free markets.
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So we also had to fight this battle that said you have to go through the, you know, the Palestinian strait.
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S-T-R-A-I-T, to get to the other places.
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There s no way to avoid this.
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You have to go through this impassable pass.
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And I think that now people are recognizing that we ll go around it and probably circle back.
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And that, I think, actually gives hope not only to have an Arab-Israeli peace,
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but circling back in Israeli-Palestinian peace.
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And obviously this is not something that you find in the sound bites and so on, but in the popular discussion of the press.
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But that idea is permeating.
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And I think it s the right idea, because I think it s the only one that will work.
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So expanding the circle of peace, just to linger on that, requires what?
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Secretly talking man to man, human to human, to leaders of other nations.
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Theoretically, you re right.
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Theoretically, okay.
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Well, let me ask you another theoretical question.
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On the circle of peace,
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as a student of history, looking at the ideas of war and peace, what do you think can achieve peace in the war in Ukraine?
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Looking at another part of the world, if you consider the fight for peace in this part of the world, how can you apply that to that other part of the world between Russia and Ukraine now?
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I think it s one of the,
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the savage horrors of history and one of the great tragedies that is occurring.
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And let me say in advance that if I have any opportunity to use my contacts to help bring about an end to this tragedy, I ll do so.
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I ve had, I know both leaders, but I don t just jump in and assume.
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You know, there would be a desire at a certain point, because the conditions have
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created the possibility of helping stop this carnage, then I ll do it.
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And that s why I choose my words carefully, because I think that may be the best thing that I could do.
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Look, I think what you see in Ukraine is what happens if you have territorial designs on a territory by a country that has nuclear weapons.
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And that, to me, you see the change in the equation.
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Now, I think that people are loathe to use nuclear weapons, and I m not sure that I would think that the Russian side would use them with happy abandon.
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I don t think that s the question.
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But you see how the whole configuration changes when that happens.
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So you have to be very careful on how you resolve this conflict so it doesn t
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Well, it doesn t go off the rails, so to speak.
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That s, by the way, the corollary is here.
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We don t want Iran, which is an aggressive force with an just aggressive ideology of dominating first the Muslim world and then eliminating Israel and then becoming a global force, having nuclear weapons.
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It s totally different when they don t have it than when they do have it.
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And that s why one of my main goals has been to prevent Iran from having the means to, the means of mass destruction, which will be used, atomic bombs, which they openly say will be used against us.
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And you can understand that.
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How to bring about an end to Ukraine?
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I have my ideas.
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I don t think, I don t think it s worthwhile discussing them now because they might
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they might be required later on.
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Do you believe in the power of conversation since you have contacts with Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, just leaders sitting in a room and discussing how the end of war can be brought about?
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I think it s a combination of that, but I think it s the question of interests and whether you have to get both sides to a point where they think that that conversation would lead to something useful.
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I don t think they re there right now.
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What part of this is just basic human
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ego, stubbornness, all of this between leaders, which is why I bring up the power of conversation, of sitting in a room realizing we re human beings and then there s a history that connects Ukraine and Russia.
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Yeah, I don t think they re in a position to enter a room right now, realistically.
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I mean, you can posit that it would be good if that could happen.
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But entering the room is sometimes more complicated than what happens in the room, and there s a lot of, you know, pre-negotiation on the negotiation.
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Then you negotiate endlessly on the negotiation.
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They re not even there.
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It took a lot of work for you to get to Handshake in the past.
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It s an interesting question.
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How did the piece, the Abraham Accords, how did that begin?
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You know, I mean, we had, you know, we had decades, 70 years, or 65 years where these people, you know, would not meet openly or even secretly with an Israeli leader.
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Yeah, we had the Mossad making contacts with them all the time and so on.
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But how do we break the ice to the top level of leadership?
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Well, we broke the ice because I took a very strong stance against Iran.
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And the Gulf states understood that Iran is a formidable danger to them.
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So we had a common interest.
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And the second thing is that because of the economic reforms that we had produced in Israel, Israel became a technological powerhouse.
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And that could help
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their nations, not only in terms of anything, just bettering the life of their peoples.
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And the combination of the desire to have some kind of protection against Iran or some kind of cooperation against Iran and civilian economic cooperation came to a head when I gave a speech in the American Congress.
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which I didn t do lightheartedly.
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I had to decide to challenge a sitting American president on the so-called Iranian deal, which I thought would pave Iran s path with gold to be an effective nuclear power.
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That s what would happen.
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So I went there.
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And in the course of giving that speech before the joint session of Congress,
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Our delegation received calls from Gulf states who said, we can t believe what your Prime Minister is doing.
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He s challenging, you know, the President of the United States.
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Well, I had no choice.
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I mean, because I thought my country s own existence was imperiled.
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And remember, we always understand through changing administrations that America, under no matter what leadership, is always the irreplaceable and indispensable ally of Israel, and will always remain that.
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We can have arguments as we have, but in the family, as we say, in the mishpocheh, you know, it s the family.
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But nevertheless, I was forced to take a stand.
3
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That produced cause
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from Gulf states that ultimately led to clandestine meetings that ultimately flowered into the Abraham Accords.
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And I think we re at a point where the idea of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict can happen.
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I m not sure it will.
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It depends on quite a few things, but it could happen.
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And if it happens, it might open up the ending of
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the Israeli-Islamic conflict.
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Remember, the Arab world is a small part, it s an important part, but there are large Islamic populations and could bring about an end to an historic enmity between Islam and Judaism.
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It could be a great thing.
3
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So I m looking at this larger thing now.
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You know, you can be hobbled by saying, oh, well, you know, you ve had this, you know,
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this hiccup in Gaza or this or that thing happening in the Palestinians.
3
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It s important for us because we want security.
3
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But I think the larger question is, can we break out into a much wider peace and ultimately come back and make the peace between Israel and the Palestinians rather than waiting to solve that?
3
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and never getting to paint on the larger canvas.
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I want to paint on the larger canvas and come back to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
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As you write about in your book, what have you learned about life from your father?
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My father was a great historian.
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He taught me several things.
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He said that the first condition for a living organism is to identify danger in time.
4
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Because if you don t, you could be devoured, you could be destroyed very quickly.
4
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And that s the nature of human conflict.
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In fact, for the Jewish people, we didn t, we lost the capacity to identify danger in time, and we were almost devoured and destroyed by the Nazi threat.
4
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So when I see somebody parroting the Nazi goal of destroying the Jewish state, I try to mobilize
4
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The country and the world in time because I think Iran is a global threat not only a threat to Israel That s the first thing the second thing is I once asked him Before I got elected.
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I said well.
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What do you think is the most important?
4
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quality for a prime minister of Israel and He came back with a question.
4
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What do you think and I said well you have to vision and you have to have the flexibility of navigating and working towards that vision you know be flexible, but understand where you re heading and
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, well, you need that for anything.
4
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You need it for, you know, if you re a university president, or if you re a leader of a corporation, or anything.
4
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Anybody would have to have that.
4
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I said, all right, so what do you need to be the leader of Israel?
4
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He said,
4
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He came back to me with a word that stunned me.
4
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He said, education.
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You need a broad and deep education or you ll be at the mercy of your clerks.
4
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Or the press, or whatever.
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You have to be able to do that.
4
SPEAKER_01
As I spend time in government,
4
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being re-elected, you know, by the people of Israel.
4
SPEAKER_01
I recognize more and more how right it was.
4
SPEAKER_01
You need to constantly ask yourself, where s the direction we want to take the country?
4
SPEAKER_01
How do we achieve that goal, but also understand that
4
SPEAKER_01
new disciplines are being added.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to learn all the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to learn all the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to add to your intellectual capital all the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
Kissinger said that, he wrote that once you enter public life, you begin to draw on your intellectual capital and, you know, it ll be depleted very quickly if you stay a long time.
4
SPEAKER_01
I disagree with that.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think you have to constantly, constantly increase your understanding of
4
SPEAKER_01
things as they change because because my father was right you need to broaden and deepen your education as you go along you can t just sit back and say well I studied some things in university or in college or in Boston or at MIT and that s enough you know I ve done it no learn learn learn learn learn never stop and if I may suggest
4
SPEAKER_00
As part of the education, I would add in a little literature, maybe Dostoevsky, in the plentiful of time you have as a prime minister to read.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I ve read him, but I ll tell you what I think is bigger than Dostoevsky.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no.
4
SPEAKER_01
Who s that?
4
SPEAKER_01
Not who s that, but what s that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Dan Rather came to see me with his grandson a few years ago, and he asked me, the grandson asked me, he was a student in Ivy League College,
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, he s 18 years old and he wants to study to enter politics.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, what s the most important thing that I have to study to enter a political life?
4
SPEAKER_01
And I said, you have three things you have to study, okay?
4
SPEAKER_01
History, history, and history.
4
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That s the fundamental discipline for political life.
4
SPEAKER_01
But then you have to study other things, study economics, study politics, and so on, and study the military.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had an advantage because I spent some years there, so I learned a lot of that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I had to acquire the other disciplines, and you never acquire enough.
4
SPEAKER_01
Read, read, read, and by the way, if I have to choose, I read history, history, and history.
4
SPEAKER_01
Good works of history, not lousy books.
4
SPEAKER_00
Last question.
4
SPEAKER_00
You ve talked about a survival of a nation.
4
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You yourself are a mortal being.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you contemplate your mortality?
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you contemplate your death?
4
SPEAKER_00
Are you afraid of death?
4
SPEAKER_00
Aren t you?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Who s not?
4
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I mean, if you re a conscience, if you re a being with conscience, I mean, one of the unhappy things about the human brain is that it can contemplate its own demise.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so we have to, we all make our compromises with this.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I think the question is, what lives on?
4
SPEAKER_01
What lives on beyond this?
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think that you have to define how much
4
SPEAKER_01
of posterity do you want to influence?
4
SPEAKER_01
I cannot influence the course of humanity.
4
SPEAKER_01
We all are specks, you know, little specks.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that s not the issue.
4
SPEAKER_01
But in my case, I ve devoted my life to a very defined purpose, and that is to assure the future and security and
4
SPEAKER_01
I would say permanence, but that is obviously a limited thing, of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t think one can exist without the other.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I ve devoted my life to that and I hope that in my time on this earth and in my years in office I d have contributed to that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well you had one heck of a life.
4
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starting from MIT to six terms as prime minister.
4
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for this stroll through human history and for this conversation, it was an honor.
4
SPEAKER_00
Thank you, and I hope you come back to us so many times.
4
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Remember, it s the innovation nation.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a robust democracy.
4
SPEAKER_01
Don t believe all the stuff that you re being told.
4
SPEAKER_01
It ll remain that.
4
SPEAKER_01
It can t be any other way.
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And it s, I ll tell you the other thing, it s the best ally of the United States.
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And its importance is growing by the day because our capacities in the information world are growing by the day.
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We need a coalition of the like-minded smarts.
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This is a smart nation, and we share the basic values of freedom and liberty with the United States, so the coalition of the smarts means Israel is the sixth eye, and America has no better ally.
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All right, now off mic, I m gonna force you to finally tell me who s gonna win, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, but that s a good time to end.
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We ran out of time here.
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I ll tell you outside.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi.
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An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.