How does the narcissist Really feel about you? It may seem like the narcissist hates you They're always really angry There always seems to be something Troubling them about you they're always pointing out something that is wrong There's always a problem.  They do realize Your worth to some degree, but they're also very envious So it's all about downplaying your worth Making you seem like you're nothing because they secretly admire Who you are and what you do They just don't want to acknowledge it They don't want you to see that they Think that about you. So instead They give you hate They insult you they put you down, but deep down they do actually admire a lot of things about you and That is their driving force to do what they do. They're always trying to extract from you They're always trying to keep you down Because really the narcissist's greatest fear is That you do Realize your worth because if you do realize it You're not going to want anything to do with them because someone of your worth Does not belong with them.  They don't want to do the work They'd rather just sit back with their feet up While you're doing everything for them. That's their ideal scenario. So yeah, it's It's really a mixture of love and hate They secretly admire a lot of things about you Even though they may never tell you this but they may have revealed this to you in the love bombing phase They may have told you Some of the things that they admire about you, but then once you go for the devaluation You may forget about all of that You may think that it was just fake But there is actually some truth to what they say in the love bombing Sometimes they are actually telling you how they see you How they feel about you narcissists are not Stupid Not completely They know when something is good and that is why Many victims of narcissists that I've seen are very attractive Successful people There's a reason for that Narcissists want the best They think they deserve the best The problem is They don't think that they should have to do anything a return To have that. So yeah at some level The narcissist does admire you They do love a lot of things about you, but at the same time they hate it Because it's not them They feel like you're stealing the spotlight away from them. You're taking the attention That was meant for them And that's why they turn against you That's why they later begin to resent you. It's not so much that they Hate Something about you. It's more The effect the negative effect that everything good about you has On them How it takes the spotlight away from them It makes them feel inferior It makes them feel like they're less than you That's what makes them Haters, but of course they'll never tell you this they will just Pick you apart Point out Your faults and mistakes Your flaws and the perfections But deep down this is what they're thinking This is really how it is When it all comes down to it The hate they have for you Is really just the hate they have for themselves and they project it on to you and even the Love sometimes It's just a projection of their false self The narcissist sees you as an extension of them and that could either be something good or something bad But either way it isn't real It's just in their imagination But as I said, there are some truths to what they say in the love bombing phase some things you may identify with Because it's true if they they say they like something about you They say you're good at something That may be what they actually believe There may be what they actually Feel but I wouldn't really Read into it too much about what they feel about you Whether it's good or bad Narcissists are not a credible source One minute they hate you the next minute they love you it changes all the time But it changes based on Something to do with them their feelings can change at any moment so it really Doesn't have much to do with you anyway how they see you it all depends on their perception How they're feeling in that moment They had a bad day So just focus on how you feel about yourself On how you see yourself give yourself the validation That you're looking for Instead of expecting it from them, that's all I have to say for this video I just wanted to touch on this. I haven't talked about it for a few years now When I made the original video And I wanted to do a live version of it So yeah, please give the video a thumbs up to support our community And leave your thoughts in the comment section. I read the comments every morning Thank you all for joining me And I'll talk to you again soon


So let me show you a couple of small drugs that are actually on the market and being used to treat disease. There are five of them, I think, yes. All of these are small, quite hydrophobic drugs, there are some aromatic rings in all of them. There are hydrogen bond donors here, some NH groups, and acceptors, that's the oxygen. All of these have chemical names that don't tell us a whole lot, but for some of them I'll tell you the marketing names too. Agonine is a so-called neuropharmacological drug that is something that's treating our nervous system, in this case schizophrenia, the so-called indication. This particular one is an antagonist that's targeting a whole range of receptors in the nervous system. Pelocarbin is another, this is an agonist instead of an antagonist. It's interesting because it's 100 years old. I'll come back to that on the next slide, but it's related to where do we find these drugs in the first place. This one occurred in nature, it's used to treat glaucoma in your eyes.  Autravene on the bottle, that's just a marketing name for Xeulomethasoline. Again, nasal decongestion is the indication, and this targets adrenergic receptors. It's an agonist too. And then we have two more here, Symmetidine and Cypracidone. Symmetidine is targeting ulcer or heartburn, just like AstraZeneca's locik drug, and Cypracidone is another drug targeting the nervous system. In this case, use is an anti-psychotic, and both of them are antagonists, just to give you some taste of it. Historically, the usual place for us to find drugs was simply nature, even rainforests. And this could be that either folklore or indigenous population or something, they knew that if you're having a bit of pain or something, you should usually eat a bit of this drug and then it goes away. That's how we discovered cocaine, for instance, that the Indians would eat cocaine when they were tired or something. They would chew the leaves of the cocoa bush, right? And then eventually we were able to purify that and get the compound cocaine in pure form. There are several examples of that. Turbicurine is a muscle relaxant, Cortison is used for birth control, Quinine is used for malaria. I could probably find 20 more if I looked them up. But the one on the previous slide, Pillow Carpene is fun. So over a hundred years ago, people realized that a certain plant had the property that it helps against glaucoma in the eyes. I think it was in 18, let's see, yes, 1874 this was isolated from the small plant called Pillow Carpese, and that's what it looks like. And of course, since then, today we know what the structure of the receptor is. We know exactly how it's worked molecularly and everything. The patents on this drug has long since expired. It's an example that today we understand the molecular basis, while 100 years, 150 years ago, even things were more phenomenological. Understanding the molecular basis is good in many ways, but it also means that we tend to have much higher requirements that it can't be toxic and it must be efficient today, which poses some challenges for us.


He's the director of the Mises University, and he's the editor of the quarterly journal of Austrian economics. He's kind of like the godfather of the Austrian school. His subject of his lecture this morning is the origins of the Austrian school, Joe. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really honored to be here to talk to you about the birth of the Austrian school, which, without which, we would not have this institute, obviously. So the Austrian school has a single founding father. His name is Carl Menger. He wrote in the 1870s. And what we'll do is we'll go through the background in which Menger initially learned economics and which he wrote, and then I'll go through his doctrines. The Austrian school was founded during a period called the Marginalist Revolution, which is sort of a misnamed event in the history of economics. It would be better named the subjectivist revolution or the subjective value revolution. But to begin with, what does a Marginalist revolution mean? What is it? What is the significance of the participants and so on? Let me just give you an outline of how it's generally defined in the history of economic thought books. The Marginalist Revolution is the simultaneous and independent discovery of the principle of margin utility by three different economists, sort of like the discovery by two different people of Newton and Leibniz of calculus. They did not communicate before discovering this principle. But as I'll show you, the principle was stated by Carl Menger, which was much different than the way it was conceived by the other two participants in the revolution. Who were they? They lived in different countries. Carl Menger lived in Austria, hence the name the Austrian school. He published the book, The Principles of Economics in 1871. William Stanley Jevons was a British economist. In the same year, he published The Theory of Political Economy. And three years later, a French economist that had more or less been exiled by other French economists because he was a mathematical economist to Switzerland, Leon Ball Ross, published his book. Now, not all of them use the term marginal. In fact, Menger didn't have any term for the concept he was setting out. It was Menger's student, Friedrich von Wieser, who used the term Grungsnurzen, which means marginal utility. And I'll get to the meaning of the word marginal utility in a moment. Jevons used the term final utility. And Ball Ross used the term rarité. As I said, on the surface, superficially, they seem to be the same concept. But when you went a little bit more deeply into the different doctrines, Menger's was much different than the doctrines of the other two. Actually, let me give you a picture so you can bear in mind what they look like. While Ross is on the left, and the seeming villain in a Batman movie is Jevons on the right, the great Austrian founder. Oh, I'm sorry. I got it. Delusions of grandeur. Here's Menger, a picture and a portrait. Now let me just talk about the subtle differences in the doctrines as they were presented. Jevons and Ball Ross were both mathematical economists. Ball Ross wasn't a very good mathematician, as it turns out, as later economists pointed out. And they conceived of marginal utility as a quantity of satisfaction, an actual quantity that it could be measured. It could be added up. It could be compared between individuals. Unfortunately, their vision infuses economics today. But Menger conceived it as something much different. He thought it was, he looked at it as sort of the outcome of an individual actor's judgment about the importance of concrete wants and satisfying his, of concrete goods and satisfying his wants. So Menger's focus was on human wants. And this was the beginning of Austrian economics. But he discovered much more than the principle of marginal utility. Actually, he created a whole theory of price based on individual human wants. That is, he put human beings at the center of economics. And in so doing, he did found the Austrian School of Economics. He was a genius in a certain sense. Now, he was a genius in the sense that he created something new under the sun. The French economist J.B. Sey corrected economists in 1802 when they said that production was the creation of goods. He said, well, nobody could produce anything in the world. Everything in the world is always in the world. You could only transform it. You can transform matter into different forms. So since Sey, we talk about production as being a transformation of things into other things that are more useful to human beings. But the only thing that human beings can create, they can create something new under the sun. And that is ideas. And what Menger did, even though he had many, many influences, he put together a system of ideas that gave us an overall economic theory. And this was new. Many economists, prior to Menger, had seen that, in fact, human wants, subjective value were the most important causes in economic phenomena. But they did not weren't able to construct the theory of price, of how things were priced, based on these insights. And that's where Menger's genius lay. Now, he was recognized by some of the greatest economists and historians of thought, that is his contribution. I'll just put up a few quotes. Joseph Schumpeter, who was an Austrian by birth, but was not really a follower of Menger, but was a great historian of thought, wrote that, nobody's principal is nobody's pupil, excuse me, and what he created stands. Menger's theory of value, price, and distribution is the best we have up to now. And now he's writing in the mid-1920s. Ludovan Mises, who was a Mengerian, and was taught by Menger's student, Bumbaver, wrote, what is known as the Austrian School of Economics started in 1871, when Karl Menger published a slender volume under the title, that's the German title, Principles of Economics, until the end of the 70s, there was no Austrian school. There was only Karl Menger. And he influenced a number of brilliant minds, two in particular, who were quite brilliant. But his influence spread over the world. By the 1880s, he had many, many followers in Austria and German-speaking countries. And then by the 1890s, the Austrian school was known internationally. And the Austrian school was built on Menger's foundations. In fact, that's what Hayek tells us. Hayek, who also is no mean historian of thought, says that the Austrian school's fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to Karl Menger. What is common to the members of the Austrian school what constitutes their peculiarity and provided the foundations for their later contributions is their acceptance of the teaching of Karl Menger. So we can't emphasize Menger's brilliance too much. Can't be overstated. But prior to Menger's writing, the most popular school or the school that was the most influential in the world was the British, what was called the British Classical School. And they said some very good things, but they also made some very profound errors in their reasoning. The British Classical School consisted of three men, David Hume, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the so-called founder of economics, though he certainly was not, and David Ricardo, who systematized Smith's system and made it more abstract in a bad way, made it bloodless in some sense. But they were all very brilliant men. How did they see the price system? What did they say about prices and values and so on? Well, let me tell you some of the good things they said. They said, you know what, prices are not random. They're not determined by power. They're not determined by whim or historical accident.  Prices that we see are determined. Not only are they determined, and we'll see just how in a moment, but they also regulate all production and decisions and how resources are allocated. In the short run, that's through supply and demand. And in the long run, it's because of cost of production. It's the cause of value. So for example, if we take a quick look at how they thought prices regulated production was fairly straightforward, they point out, look, if demand goes up, now they never explain what demand was. But if there's an increase in demand, prices will go up above average cost. So if there's an increase in demand for, let's say, smaller hybrid automobiles, then suddenly the price of those things will rise above their average cost. That will drive up the profits. Above some normal level, that is, everyone is earning some normal level of 5% or 10% in the economy as it's going along. And now suddenly, in this one industry, you have huge profits. And that will inspire entrepreneurs who know their costs of production and see that prices are rising to increase supply in response to the higher profits. But over the longer run, when supply increases, then the price will begin to fall back towards the natural or long run price. So for example, as the price of oil has gone up because of greater demand on the part of China and India and other developing countries, and because of supply side problems with the US Sabre rattling at Iran and so on, we find that suddenly we have this new phenomenon of fracking. That is, of using a new technology to determine or to produce more of a substitute for oil as natural gas. So that was an accidental, that was a result, or that was a response to the profits, as a classical school would say, that are above normal in the area of fuels and so on. And on the other hand, if the demand for product collapses, if the demand for large gas guzzling automobiles collapse, then the prices will fall below average cost. And suddenly you'll have losses in that industry, and related industries. Supply will fall. And as supply falls, then prices will go back up toward some normal level that keeps some people in the industry. Though some of the resources have moved out into the production of hybrid autos. So that sequence of events shows that really the classical school had what was called the theory of calculable action. That is, they believe that resources were allocated by the conscious calculations and decisions of businessmen. They also, in the short run, held that supply and demand was a principle that held not only in England or Scotland, but all over the world. It was an immutable principle, and it was a universal principle. And finally, actually, Menger agreed with all of this. Menger thought that all of this was correct. But he did find some problems with the classical school. And in fact, there were a number of flaws. So let me just quickly go over the flaws. Then we'll talk about how Menger addressed these flaws. The first and greatest flaw was that the classical school reasoned in terms of abstract classes of goods, not in concrete units, but abstract classes. They would ask the question, why is it that diamonds are more expensive than bread? Why is it that coal has a certain price, and that price might be less than the price of diamonds? So they talked about goods as abstract classes. When you talk about goods as abstract classes, you suddenly lose the human being involved. So the result of all this, the upshot, was the so-called paradox of value. The paradox of value, which we'll talk about more when we come to Menger, was the puzzle that, look, something like diamonds, which is really just a good that allows people to conspicuously express how wealthy they are, or it's used for mere ornamentation. But yet, it has a much higher exchange value than bread. Bread is a staff of life. Bread is what, back in certainly England of that era, kept the bulk of the population alive. Why is it then, if bread has such greater use value than diamonds, its price per unit of weight, let's say, is so much less than that of diamonds? That's the paradox of value. And the classical economists never really resolved it. They did an end run around the paradox of value. What they did was to say, well, economics is about exchange value. Economics is about prices on the market, explaining prices on the market. We'll just put use value over to the side. They didn't make that, yes, anything that has a price has use value, but they didn't treat use value in any greater depth than that. So subjective use value, and therefore, the important role of consumers in price determination just dropped out. Now, this also led them to focus on the businessman. The businessman then was the central character in economics. He was the one who paid the costs and responded to the prices in allocating resources. So their explanation then of price, at least in the long run, was that prices were determined by their costs of production. The higher the costs of production that businesses had to pay, the higher the price would be. One variant of the theory was called the labor theory of value, which was put forth by David Ricardo. And basically what he said was that, really it's the ratio of the amount of labor in a good to another good that determines value. So for example, if a plasma TV has embodies five times the amount of labor, then let's say an older generation television, then its price is gonna be five times as high. Others stuck to a money cost of production. And they didn't just focus on labor. Okay, now, what was the problem with this theory? One problem was, well, for example, the song I Am the Walrus, the lyrics to that song sold on eBay for $40,000 a few years back. Did that cost $40,000 for John Lennon to produce that? Another example is that there was one of the biggest diamonds in the world, the most expensive diamond that ever sold at auction. It's called the graph pink. It's a pink diamond, a 25 carat diamond. It sold for $46 million. Did it cost that much to produce that diamond? In fact, no one probably even knows. It may have been picked up somewhere at very little effort or it could have cost something to go down and mine it. But that's irrelevant from the point of view of modern Austrian economics. So how did, or by the way, famous paintings, the Mona Lisa and so on, which would have a huge price was ever auctioned off, those things, the price of those things could not be explained by the classical school. So what did they do? They said, well, those are monopoly goods. They're scarcity goods. It's just the scarcity of those things that determine their price. So what they did was they had a bifurcated or two-part value theory. Reproducible goods like coal, bread, diamonds, the cost of production determined their prices. And other goods, collectibles and so on, goods that could not be reproduced, their prices were determined by scarcity. And now, of course, land, since land is not produced, though it's a very important factor of production, cannot be explained by the cost theory. It can only be explained by a scarcity theory. So they came up with a monopoly theory of land. Land is inherently a monopoly, because it cannot be reproduced. So these are all the problems with the classical school. What these propositions implied was first that value is inherent in goods. In some sense, the more the laborer sweats overproducing a good, the higher its value is. So one historian of thought, Whittly, called it the embodied sweat theory of value. Or to think of it another way, at some point a price is stamped on the good when you produce it, and that's the price. That's the price that's sold to consumers at and so on. And when goods are exchanged for money, so for example, this bottle of water exchange is for $2, and that implies that this bottle of water has a value equal to the $2. Or if this is $2 and this case of pens up here are $2, well then they were produced at equal costs. So exchange, according to the classical economist, shows inequality of value. And as we'll see, that is wholly rejected by menger. And also the cost of production theory of value does not explain really, cannot accommodate huge losses that firms suffer. For example, GM lost $6 billion in the first quarter of 2009. For all of 2008, for example, lost $30 billion. Lost $37 billion in 2007. That's very difficult to explain from the cost of production theory of value standpoint, right? Because why don't they just raise the price so that's higher than the cost? Shouldn't the cost determine the price? AIG, the big insurance company, lost $62 billion in one quarter in 2008, okay? And 99 billion for all of 2008. And that's inexplicable by the classical theory. Now they could say, well, it's a short run and so on, but the point is that this takes a long period of time. These firms were losing money. And finally, what tended to happen was that they focused on the long run. The long run in which there were no profits and losses. And in which cost of production dominated. They thought that the cost of production was the main determinant of prices. Okay, so now let's talk a little bit about menger. How do you react to all of this? He was an economic journalist in the late 1860s before he wrote his book. He did cover the markets. He did see that prices were changing on commodities markets and other markets day-to-day or even hour-to-hour. So in his notebooks, he wrote to himself that he didn't say the classical theory, but the classical theory or the prevailing theory does not explain prices. And so he set himself the task of explaining prices in a way that takes into account human wants. Now he was very comfortable with saying that prices are determinant, that we could explain how prices are determined, and that prices indeed do guide production and allocation of resources. He was very, very happy with all of that. Now in his notebooks, prior to writing his book, he wrote some notes to himself. And in those notes, he said the following. So he's writing these notes to himself. As men himself is the beginning and the end of every economy, beginning and the end. So economics is about man, about human beings. He then said, in another note, our science is the theory of a human being's ability to deal with his wants. And finally he said, all things are subject to the law of cause and effect. That's actually the very first line of his book. Now, that meant something, very specific to Mender. What Menger saw, and again, this is from his notebooks, was that human beings were involved at two ends of the economic process. They're involved at the beginning, if you look at these trinities that he's written down here. He says that ends, human ends, cause means, cause the production of means, and the means that satisfy ends, we call goods in economics. And then the means themselves cause the realization of the ends. So there's double causality there. Human wants cause economic production, and production of ultimately of consumer goods satisfies human wants. So causality runs throughout his system. He also said, man, external world subsistence. In other words, human beings have wants, they look to the external world for things that can satisfy those wants, they transform those things, and then from those things, they get their subsistence, that is the things that satisfy their wants. And finally, wants, goods, satisfaction, that's clear. Wants cause goods, that is cause the economic activities that bring about goods, which in turn brings about the satisfaction of the wants. So causality and human centeredness is the gist of his system. And this actually comes from many older economists that did recognize the central importance of human being. Those we'll see, they did not have the marginal concept. So the mid-19th century French economist, great free market economist, Frederick Bastiat, entitled the chapters to one of his treatise, one of the chapters to his treatise, wants, efforts, and satisfaction. And Menger was very, very familiar with this tradition because Bastiat had an influence all over the continent, including in Germany. There were subjective value theorists in Germany that believed that subjective value was the most important determinant in determining prices. So what did Menger set out to do? What he did was, he wrote this in the preface, he says, I have devoted special attention to the investigation of the causal connections between economic phenomena involving products and the corresponding agents of production, okay. Not for the purpose of establishing a price theory, not only for the purpose of establishing a price theory based upon reality and placing all price phenomenon, and includes interest, wages, ground rents, okay. All of these are gonna be unified. There wasn't gonna be different value theories. Let's place them all together under one unified point of view, okay. But also because of the important insights we thereby gained into many other economic processes here to for completely misunderstood. He believed that all of economics could be reduced to the human striving to satisfy their wants. So that's what Menger was all about. That's what his book was all about, and now we'll get to some of the doctrines in his book. Okay, so one of the first doctrines that Menger talked about was the theory of goods. And what he said was that to have goods, you need a certain things that exist in the real world. The first is that there should be a human need, and I have this written out someplace to show you. I'll just go through it. There has to be a human need. There has to be such properties as render the thing capable of being brought into causal connection with the satisfaction of this need. Meaning simply that the thing must be able to satisfy that need. In other words, if you make a ham sandwich, then that ham sandwich, you have to have in mind that that can satisfy your hunger, okay? That is the want for satisfying hunger. And then there has to be a human knowledge of this causal connection. And finally, let me just push this up for people in the back. There has to be a command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need. So those were the four properties or preconditions of a good. And now, that's not completely correct, okay? Mengu is later corrected by Mises because if you take these as the preconditions, then things like psychics get paid a lot of money or goods that are sold just for vanity and so on, and that really don't satisfy a need in some absolute sense, in some objective sense. The price of those things cannot be explained. So Mengu said that those things are just imaginary goods, but he admitted they were goods. So Mises replaced numbers two and three by saying that there must be an opinion by human being that this thing is capable of being into causal connection with the satisfaction of this need. In this case, you can explain people going to quacks, you can explain people going to consulting psychics, you can explain people purchasing goods that make them look ridiculous rather than make, you know, improve their appearance. You can, in other words, subjective value must be actually pervades the preconditions. So we could also point out that number four, if you don't have control of a thing, that thing's not a good, okay? For example, the sun. The sun might satisfy a need for a nice day at, let's say, a baseball game, but you have no control over whether the sun is going to be out. In other words, the weather, let's say, whether you're gonna have some sort of a sunny day or not, if it's gonna be pleasant or it's not gonna be pleasant, that can't be controlled. So in that case, we don't consider that a good. All of these preconditions must be present. Now, Manger then wasn't just satisfied with talking about a good, because Manger considered a good something like air, okay? Air is a good in Manger's view because it satisfies the human need to stay alive, to keep one's vital organs working. So he went a step further and he said that he wanted to talk about economic goods and he added something for economic goods, okay? So another precondition that's necessary to be added to these preconditions in order to get an economic good is that they have to be scarce in relation to human wants. That is, there can't be enough to satisfy all human wants for the good. So that was Manger's analysis of economic goods and it was economic goods that was the subject of economics and this is where he brought in the law of marginal utility, which I promised before I would explain and explain it in a way that does not look on utility as a quantity that can be added up, compared and so on. So what Manger did was to set out, to solve the so-called paradox of value and he did so by setting up an example, example of something like what I'm gonna give you. He assumed an unrealistic situation in which there's only one human being and you can think of Robinson Crusoe on an island, shipwrecked, with only his own labor power and the natural resources available on the island. Now, Robinson Crusoe has many wants, one of which is for food and for food products to satisfy various ends, he has many different ends. So let's assume that he can eke out some sort of a harvest from the grain on the island. He finds that there's land there that grain is growing wild and that he can harvest that grain. So he must use it to serve his most important wants and to determine which wants are more important, he ranks them, okay? You can, there are many, many wants for grain so in order to use it for the highest ranked ends, there has to be a choice and in order for there to be a choice, there has to be a ranking. So he ranks them as follows, assuming we the external observers know this. The first is for bread for sustaining life. The first sack of grain will sustain his life, will allow him to live for another year, okay? Then the second would be for maintaining health and vitality. If he has a second batch of bread produced from this grain, then that will enable him to satisfy other ends. He won't just have to lie around in a very weakened state, he'll be healthy and he'll be able to achieve other ends. The third is seed for the next harvest, for next year's harvest, that is that will keep him alive and healthy for another year. And let's say there's a fourth one available, that would be for, may use whiskey, I prefer vodka. So he would produce a beverage to go along with his meals. The fifth would be for feeding farm animals, let's say there's chickens and there's let's say other types of cows or goats or whatever yield milk and meat and so on. He's lonely, so he needs a parrot to talk to him, at least it can repeat words. There's some sort of companionship there. And so let's say if he had 20, he could use up to 20 sacks. Beyond that, it would be no longer an economic good. And let's assume that he initially has only five sacks. So Menger then asks the question and he was very insightful in asking certain questions, questions that would lead to advances in economic theory. So the question he asked is, let's assume that this guy has five sacks of grain. What is their value to him? What is the value of each sack? Are they all different? But then how could that be? Each sack is exactly like every other sack. Each sack is interchangeable, can be used for all the same ends. So the fifth can be used for all the same ends as the first sack, for example. Are they equal in value to some average of those five? And then how do you average out the importance of those sacks? There is no unit of measurement. So Menger said, imagine the following situation. Imagine that there's some rodents that burrow into the barn and eat the second sack. Okay, they devour the second sack. So the next morning when the farmer, when Ramta Crusoe enters the barn, he finds only his four sacks. Does he give up the second end? Okay, does he use the sacks for his first, third, fourth, and fifth end? Well, of course not. They're interchangeable. What he will do is reallocate sack number five to the use that would satisfy the second one. The second ranked one. So no matter which sack is lost, the end that's not fulfilled is the fifth end. Therefore, every sack is valued at the importance or value of the fifth end. Now, this is where margin utility comes in. Utilities, in other words, for satisfaction. Marginal to Menger means dependent or relevant. What is the relevant end that is lost no matter which one of those sacks is destroyed? You lose the satisfaction utility from the fifth end. From the lowest ranked end that can be supplied or that can be satisfied by the given supply of the good. So Menger came up with the rule that the law, that the value of a unit of a good is always equal to its margin utility. So every single one of those sacks is equal to, is equal in value, that is attached to the satisfaction of the fifth ranked end. Now, if he fortuitously comes upon a sixth sack, okay, he's able to harvest a sixth sack of grain, then what happens? Well, now he can satisfy a lower ranked end, the sixth end, and that means that the margin utility has dropped. So the more you have, so the corollary law is that as the supply of a good that an individual possesses increases the margin utility and therefore the value of the good falls. On the other hand, if he were to lose the fifth or one of those sacks, then the margin utility rises. So the smaller the supply, the greater the value of each unit. So that was Menger's derivation of the law of margin utility. Notice, it doesn't talk about quantities of anything, it doesn't add anything up. It focuses on human wants. So how did he solve the paradox of value with that? Well, what Menger pointed out then was, very simply, in a normal situation, diamonds are very, very scarce in relation to human wants. Water is not very scarce. So if we're talking about the water diamond, the diamond water paradox is sometimes cold. So the margin utility of diamonds on someone's value scale is much higher than the margin utility of the last gallon of water. If you wanna compare a diamond to a gallon of water. And that's why it's much more valuable and that's reflected in a market economy in which you have exchange in the much higher price of the diamonds. It has nothing to do with their costs, okay? Diamonds could be just as scarce as they are today, they could have all been found at little cost on beaches and so on, and their price would be the same. The cost is totally irrelevant to diamonds, and to the price of diamonds. Now, change all that around. Imagine a situation in which someone has that $46 million pink graph diamond that I was talking about in their pocket and they're in the middle of the desert and they haven't had water in three days. Would they trade that diamond for a gallon of water? What does it matter? They paid $46 million for that diamond, of course they would. At that point, after the third day, their organs begin to shrivel and their vitals begin to deteriorate and they die.  Which gallon of water will allow them to sustain with the best use of that diamond and the diamond has a little margin utility in that case. Because now water is more scarce. So it's a question of how scarce the good is. The same thing is true in a normal situation. Air is not a free good, okay? Or air is a free good. Today we would say following Von Mises that it's a general condition of human welfare. It's not a good, we don't think about producing it and so on. However, if you're a deep sea diver or if you're in a space capsule, you certainly do attach a high utility to air and therefore the air that's produced for deep sea diving and for taking off and going into space does have a price on the market, okay? To go back to what determines the good, the preconditions and so on. Certain things such as the malaria fungus are very, very rare, okay? But they're not goods, okay? They're not even scarce because there are no human wants for them. So no matter how rare something is, if there's no want for it, then there's no value to it. So let me just see if you get the idea of margin utility and how it determines value. Let's say there's a farmer who has a supply of three horses and a supply of two cows and they are not interchangeable. Horses can only be used for certain ends and the cows can be used for other ends. And so let's say the farmer would use the first horse for plowing his field and the second most pressing use of a horse is also to hook them up as and make the plowing more productive and then the third end is milk that the first cow can give. The fourth end is the cheese and butter that can be made from the milk that the second cow produces and then the third horse would be for pleasure riding. So in this situation, which animal would be more valuable? Well, when I give this to undergraduates, they always pull out the horses. The horse would be more valuable because it's plowing the fields higher end. No, that's absolutely wrong, okay? If, again, we can use a mangarian experiment. You have these horses and cows in a barn together. The barn catches fire. You can only save four out of the five animals. Which four do you save? Obviously two horses and two cows. What animal do you leave in there? You leave the horse in there, okay? So the horse has, because the horse has the lower margin utility. So with this situation of supply, then the value of cows are higher. However, once that changes, once, let's say, the animal is destroyed, the horse is destroyed in the fire, then what happens? The values are reversed. It's a question of the supplies in relation to the wants. The horse now has the second end as its margin utility whereas the cow has the fourth end. Okay, so the cow becomes a less valuable animal, okay? And in real life, you have this situation where, let's say, there are three cars in a family. They're pretty interchangeable. And let's say one is for the primary breadwinner, the other is for the spouse who may have a part-time job in due errands. So the car is allocated to that. And then the third end is a junior can drive the car. Okay, it's just got his license, a hard license. So what happens if the old man cracks up his car? Does he go out without the car? Of course not, okay? It's reallocated from junior, okay? Now, junior has to ask for the keys. The point is then, now with two remaining cars, the margin utility is higher and the car has a higher value to the family. So that's how Manger solved that problem. Now, he addressed another problem that we wanna talk about. And that is weird, once you get in, this is just talking about really consumer's goods. Once we get into production, how are the value of goods or factors of production determined? And remember the dual causality. What the classical school said was that if you're gonna produce bread, let's say you must first grow the wheat, then you mill the wheat into flour, then you bake the flour into bread, then you send the bread to the retailer and the retailer sends it. So production definitely moves from what we call the higher stage, the stage further away from consumers, to the lower stage. The classical school would have put a second arrow along on that side going in the same direction on the value side, okay? Where I have value written on the right side. That is, it's because the wheat is expensive or because the wheat costs something that the flour which is made out of the wheat has a price and so on. So the price of bread depends on the price of wheat, okay? Manger said, no, that's not true, okay? In fact, the bread causes the satisfaction or provides services to satisfy human wants. The ultimate cause of any value lies in the human wants being satisfied. So value travels up from the consumer to the wheat. So the bread is only valuable, okay? It's not value, even as a consumer's good, it's value lies in the fact that it can satisfy human wants. The value of the bread at the wholesaler is only valuable because the bread is valuable at retail. And the bread at the wholesaler bestows or imputes, it's called the fear of imputation, it imputes value back to the flour. The only reason why the flour is valuable is because it causes the production of the bread, okay? So value causality travels upward, production causality travels downward toward the consumer, but what precipitates the whole process? What precipitates the whole process is human wants. That causes the value of the various stages of production. So for Manger then, this was the ultimate refutation of the cost of production theory of value. Because if you have land up there, okay, the only reason when I put that stage up there, the only reason why the land is valuable is because it can cause the production of wheat. So one example I give, it's kind of dated now to drive this point home, is the case in which, well actually, if you've seen the movie Witness starring Harrison Ford, which takes place in the Amish country, the Amish people are sometimes called the plain folks. They don't wear any sort of ornamentation.  So needless to say, they don't wear any diamond jewelry. Now let's assume that all Americans adopt that moral code, that type of value system. What happens to the price of diamonds? Assuming they don't have an industrial use for the moment, fold to zero. What happens to the high wages, the high salaries of expert appraisers of gems? And to the craftsmen who fashion fine jewelry? Those wages fall to zero. What happens to the value of diamond mines? Zero. Manger used a similar example, he used tobacco products. So if people suddenly feared for their health and stopped smoking cigars, cigarettes, chewing tobacco and so on completely, what would happen to the value of prices of cigarettes and cigars and so on? They would fall to zero. The prices of specific cigar and cigarette rolling machines would fall to zero. And if it didn't have any other use, the price of, or in rent, of land on which tobacco is grown would fall to zero, okay? So prices determine cost and values determine prices, subjective values. In 1776, a great economist, not Adam Smith, Kandiyak, made the following observation. He said that men, pearls are not expensive because men spend a lot of time and effort diving for them. But rather, men spend a lot of time and effort diving for pearls because they are valuable, okay? So they incur those costs because of the high value. So there's an imputation backwards from consumers. So the paradox of value is completely resolved by Menger. He also shows the correct way which the value of the factors of production are determined, including labor, including land. He has one theory of price for everything. Now, he's repaired that bifurcation of the dichotomy and value that the classical school has. Also, he's gotten rid of the cost of production doctrine so that even in the long run, prices determine costs, okay? In the long run, when profits are wiped out, and that will be another topic this week, prices are equal to costs in the long run. But not because, in some sense, costs determine prices, but because prices will determine costs throughout the economy, okay? But there was another thing to settle. And that was, and that is, look, okay, so I've explained why the price of, let's say, flour and ovens and so on, why they have prices, okay? But Menger went a little bit further and he said, is there a way to separate out the value of each specific factor of production? Because remember, at every stage, there's many different factors of production, not just one, as I put there, okay? There's labor of various different kinds. At the lower stage, at the intermediate stages, there's a lot of capital goods, all different from one another. How do we explain the value of any of these things? And there, Menger came up with what was later to be called the law of margin of utility. He didn't do it in quite a definitive manner, but he suggested the solution. And again, it was by asking an important question. And then answering the question. And let's take the following. Let's say that if I had 90 units of labor, two horses, one plow, piece for plow, 40 acres of land and 500, let's say, pounds of fertilizer, okay? That's called a production function. If I can combine all those things, remember, man can't create anything. We can only transform some things into more useful forms. I can transform all of those things under the direction of the entrepreneur, under my direction, let's say I'm the owner and the entrepreneur, into 1,000 horses of wheat, okay? 1,000 W. So there's all these different factors of production involved in this production process. How do we determine the value of any of them? That is, what's one pound of fertilizer worth? What's one acre worth? Now, Mayer did not go into a fully developed economy with a price system. He was still talking on the level sort of of a single individual. But you can see the solution that he suggested. He said let's, so those are all those 500, those are units of fertilizer or 100 sacks of fertilizer, 100 pound sacks. So it's 500, 100 pound sacks of fertilizer. So let's ask the question then. What is the value of a 100 pound sack of fertilizer? And so he said how much would the total product decrease? This is the question. How much would the total product decrease if a unit of the factor of production was subtracted from the process of production? Again, just like subtracting one animal or subtracting one sack of wheat, he posed the question in a manner that was easy to see the problem and to solve the problem. He said, well, let's say that if we changed fertilizer, if we subtracted from the process, 100 pounds of fertilizer left everything else alone, 100 of those 500 pounds, then what would happen to the wheat? So the delta sign is simply the change. Wheat would fall by 40 bushels, okay? So instead of 1000 bushels, if you took away 100 pounds of fertilizer, you would only get 960 bushels of wheat. So then what becomes the value of the fertilizer of 100 pounds of fertilizer? Well, the marginal product, meaning the amount that depends on the use of that extra 100 pounds is 40 bushels of wheat, and therefore the value of the marginal product of that 100 pounds of fertilizer is the value to the farmer of the 40 bushels of wheat. It's the marginal utility of the 40 bushels of wheat to the farmer, okay? And you can put prices in there and you can modernize the example. So he's still talking about a single person. So if you want to just stick value in there from Enger, then you would find that if each bushel of wheat was worth, it could be sold on a market of $5, then the marginal product of the 100 pounds of fertilizer was 40, then that 100 pound bag would cost $200. We'd have a price of $200. We'd tend to have that price, okay? So in any production process, factors of production tend to earn their marginal product, okay? And that marginal, or the value of their marginal product, all of that again depends on prices which depend ultimately on consumer demand. Finally, I think I have a few minutes. Yeah, how did Enger think of the theory of exchange that was proposed by the classical school? That is that things exchange were equal in value. Well, what Enger said was that in fact, that's completely wrong. In fact, he pointed out every exchange indicates or reveals a double inequality of value, okay? So let's just take a horse and a cow. A has a cow, B has a horse, okay? The animals that I put in parentheses represent what they don't have, what they would like to have. So if indeed this exchange takes place, that is what is revealed, okay? If A and B exchange a cow for the horse, then it must be the case, according to Enger, that the horse has a greater value to A than the cow did that he gave up, okay? What each individual gives has a greater value than what it's given up. So notice that neither value the cow or horse equally, and in fact, both of them value them in reverse order. That's called the reverse valuation of wants. So in fact, far from showing that exchange reveals equality between the goods exchanged, when you focus on human wants and human action, you find that there's a double inequality. Every time two parties make an exchange, and that includes a labor exchange, it includes consumer goods, capital goods, whatever's exchanged, the implication, the logical implication is that each party is getting what they value more and giving up what they value less. Otherwise the exchange would not take place, there'd be no rationale for the exchange. Does that mean that people are always happy after every exchange they make? Of course not. Enger in his book has a section on uncertainty, okay? And once you talk about uncertainty, as Van Mises shows, you talk about regret, because not all your expectations are gonna be fulfilled. So let's say somebody buys a motorcycle and initially, before the exchange, foresees himself riding along on this road and in the sunny road through the mountains and so on, and attracting women and so on and so forth. Well let's say two days after he gets the bike, he's caught in a rainstorm, he skids out, he's almost hit by a few large trucks and it's not such a pleasant experience. Well the point is, well he regrets that exchange, but that does not mean that at the moment of making the exchange, he didn't value what he was getting more than what he gave up, okay? We all have regrets in life. We all make mistakes in our market activities. In fact, entrepreneurship, people who are entrepreneurs are those people who, from very young ages, are ones that anticipate the future better than other people. That is, they themselves know what they want. I mean, we've heard that expression. He knows what he wants, but she knows what she wants. Those are the budding entrepreneurs. People who know what they want plan to get it and are happy when they get it, okay?  We all have friends like that. They're not good entrepreneurs in their own life and they probably would not be good entrepreneurs in the business world. So, just to one last point here. The sellers and the buyers, I mean, you can update this to a BMW 550 and again, there's an exchange that takes place. And that can come from Germany or it can come, this holds across borders, okay? So it's absurd to say, for example, that buying a good from a foreign country somehow hurts the American economy or has a negative impact on the American economy. The American economy are the individuals that compose that economy. Anybody who buys a foreign good is doing so because they anticipate that that would have a higher value than the money they're paying for it. So everybody wins in that situation, okay? The fact that some people that are producing goods that have higher prices or lower quality here in the US now don't get their business is just another component of entrepreneurship. I mean, it's just, that happens. That happens when somebody shifts from a barber to a hairstylist, okay? That happens domestically. It happens when a new technology comes in. A new technology destroys more jobs in industries than foreign trade ever did. But at every step of the way, the people involved in the exchanges are all gaining from those exchanges. The fact that you exchange with one seller and not another seller, whether or not that seller be located on one side or another side of some mythical border does not make any difference, okay? All right, I'll stop there. It's a long way to go, Manger, thank you.


I'm just like sliding in these old schools, man. They just hit different. All right, so what you like about riding in the set, what you said, 72? Yeah, this is 72. So what you like about the 72? Riding wide. It's big and commanding, and it's right, you know? But it don't ride like an aggressive car, you know what I mean? It's big and it's floaty. You know, like your grandpa could have one of these. Right, right. Like if you hit it, it could be that. But if you cruise it, it could be that. Right, right, right. It's really all in and about. This bag with cars, they was going for that size. They was going for that, you know what I'm saying? Love seat, max seat, cross country trips. Yeah, man. Oh, I don't know him. Old man. I don't know him. Old man. He was looking at it too, like he knew the car too. Oh, homo. I'd chase some niggas in a car like that.


Good afternoon. My name is Professor Michael Kerr from the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, and it is a great privilege and a pleasure to offer you a very warm welcome to the launch of Dr Stacy Gatkowski's excellent new book, Religion, War and Israel's Secular Millennials. Being reasonable, question mark. This has just been launched by Manchester University Press, and it questions how Jewish-Israeli millennials who came of age in the shadow of the Oslo peace process, the questions how they feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today by focusing on their lived experiences and the collective memory of this generation. Dr Gatkowski is a co-director of the Center for the Study of Divided Societies and Senior Lecturer in Conflict Studies in the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, where we have been fortunate enough to have her as a colleague since 2011. Stacy is also the co-director of the Non-Religion and Secularity Research Network, and she is co-editor of the book series Religion and its Others, Studies in Religion, Non-Religion and Secularity, and she also sits on the Academic Advisory Board of the Cambridge Center for Palestinian Studies. Prior to joining Kings, Stacy was an ESRC postdoctoral researcher in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict in Arizona State University and a research associate with the Religion and Ethics in the Making of War and Peace program at the University of Edinburgh. Stacy's research interrogates broadly the various relationships between war, peace, religion and the secular, setting up the crossroads in Middle Eastern Studies, political sociology, religious studies and critical security studies. Her current research focuses on theorizing intersections between emotion, violence and the secular, host war spirituality and self-making in the Middle East, analyzing moderation as a political category, interreligious pluralism among Syrian refugees and their hosts in Jordan and Lebanon and interreligious pluralism and youth-based peace building in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. She holds a PhD in international studies from the University of Cambridge and then fill in international peace studies from Trinity College Dublin and a BA in philosophy from Wellesley College. Stacy is the author of several books and numerous articles and book chapters on politics, security, religion and secularism in Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, the United States and the United Kingdom. A native of Arizona, she recently added to her long list of achievements this year by becoming a pretty citizen and it is my pleasure also to welcome our special guest who's going to be discussing Stacy's new book and he is Ian Black and currently he is visiting senior fellow at the Middle East Centre at LSE. We'll read very little introduction for those of you who are Middle East watchers as he appears regularly on international television and radio channels commenting on current affairs. Ian was formerly Middle East editor, European editor, diplomatic editor and Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian newspaper and he has also written The Washington Post, New York Times and The Economist. He is author of several books the latest of which is Enemies and Neighbours, Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel in 1917 to 2017. This book launch is being recorded and we will stream it immediately afterwards onto YouTube and Stacy has also compiled a war studies podcast on the book and we'll put a link to that in the chat so you can access that in your own time. After Ian and Stacy have discussed the book in the last 20 minutes of the event we will have a Q&A where you can pick your questions to Dr Bob Kowsky and I'd ask you to please put those into the chat box and Ian will pick these up and put them to Stacy then. Okay, like further ado I'll hand over to Ian. Thank you Ian. Okay, unmuting, can you hear me? Yes? Good. Okay, I think that Michael was wrong to say that the questions should be posed in the Q&A box, in the chat box, could you put them in the Q&A box I think? Yes. Okay, so very pleased to be asked to interview or have a dialogue if you like with Stacy's, with Stacy about her impressively researched new book. For me the overwhelming, the overriding impression if you like was a generational difference. So I was the correspondent in Jerusalem between, it seems like, you know, a long time ago between 1984 and 1993 and I left with impeccable timing just before the Oslo agreement of September 1993. So my experience is of a very different generation and that's what I'd like to focus on because of course the title of your book is Religion, War and Israel's Secular Millennials and the Millennials, the generation of Millennials begins in 1980, 1981. So my experience is completely different. So I want to ask you about that and the changes that have taken place. I very much like the concept of generational memory. I think it's from Karl Mannheim. So what was your impression based on, you know, an impressively empirical evidence of the generational memory of the Millennials or secular Millennials over to you. Thanks very much Ian. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to speak to you as well. So this is really great. I might just talk a little bit about the kind of the background to the book, background to the social group, give a little bit of context about their generational memory as you say and then I think talk about what I think is the key finding about their generational memory. So for about 15 years I've been interested in how people who describe themselves as secular or not especially religious understand war and violence. And for 12 years I co-ran a research network which investigated what this meant in different contexts for people who in their given context say I'm not really all of that into religion. In the academic world there's a lot of really great research about religion and how religious and ethnic symbols help fuel and can also be used to end national conflicts. But there's hardly anything at all about this other realm of human experience where people have quite mixed feelings about the majority religious tradition in their society. Now Israel is an interesting case study for studying these things, not least because it's experienced repeated wars, but also because Judaism is so central to social life, politics, and state law. There are about 40% of the society who claim to be largely non-absorbent, Himani. This term Himani translates imperfectly into English as secular Jew. But importantly I don't think of this exclusively as a religious group, but a religio class. They're largely middle class, two-thirds Ashkenazi of European descent, one-third Miss Rahi descended from Middle Eastern Jews, but they're important for the reasons that you talked about about the time that you were there previously. These are the former and to some extent still the current elites within the state. They are culturally, sometimes literally descended from the generations of European settlers who founded the state and who ran it for 30 years, who ran the army, and who also importantly started the peace movement in the 1980s and 1990s. One thing that Charles Liebman and others have pointed out is that Judaism is fundamentally intertwined in people's everyday lives in society, in Israel, even among Jews who say, oh, I only celebrate the holidays. Israel is a state where Judaism is privileged as part of law, reinforced by the 2018 changes to its basic law, to its constitutional structure. But I argue in the book that we can still study what Talal Assad calls the power of the secular in Israel, but we need to recognize that it has this, as Rezaam calls it, this Jewish valence to it. As you say, since the 1980s, Israel has changed a lot and not just because there's been this shift in this political elite, a diversification from the secular Ashkenazi group who ran the state for its first 30 years. Israel has become a capitalist liberal economy with high levels of consumerism and individualism. It's been impacted by globalization, by inward immigration, which has brought new ideas, including new spiritual, non-Jewish spiritual ideas, which I talk about in the book. But at the same time, Jewish beliefs and practices have become more prominent in public life and politics, what some people call religionization or hadrapah in Hebrew. Of course, Israel has also experienced a failed peace process, repeated wars with the Palestinians, as well as the strengthening of the security, political and economic apparatus of occupation. As a result, the population has shifted to the right politically, and the peace movement has grown very small since the period when you were there. All these trajectories have intensified for this generation in the 2000s and 2010s. They predate them, but they intensified, have intensified during this period when millennials became adults, when they sort of came to their political awakening after Oslo in the 2000s and 2010s. Now, Almag and Almag published a large study of this generational group with about 1,000 people, both the social group and their teachers, their employers, their parents. It attracted a lot of attention in Israel. I did my field work in the two years after the 2014 Gaza War. I built on their work, but I looked more closely at the dynamics of religious nationalism, which I think are important, but somewhat still understudied. There's a perception in this period I'm talking about, post Oslo, that Israel's Jewish Israeli society is growing more religious and more right wing, but what does that really mean? How do we unpack that? I asked two questions in the book, one to do with the case study, and then one comparative. I asked, as a young secular Jew, what has it felt like to come of age during the phase of national conflict when some Palestinian and Israeli government leaders, not just fringe figures, have used ethno-religious symbols to motivate and divide? And I asked the comparative question, what do violent political conflicts look and feel like to people who claim to somewhat distance themselves from the majority religious tradition in their given context, but are fundamentally embedded within it? Now there are a lot of interesting books you could write about this social group. I focused on four case studies, which I think allow me to interrogate that long-term interest in the relationship between violence, religion, and the secular. So I, in the book, look in detail in attitudes towards Jihad and Islam, towards what the IDF calls Jewish consciousness education, towards attitude, I looked at attitudes towards the Haram El-Sharif Temple Mount, and also what it feels like to live through a violent attack. And I tried to tell stories that would be of interest both to people who are interested in comparative study of religion and violence, but also Jewish Israelis who know a great deal about their society. But there's a lot still, of course, to write about this group and to write about how Jewishness and Zionism are involving among millennials. So that's the context, but what was the main finding? What I found, and this touches on what you said about generational memory, is a new way of understanding why Halani millennials across the political spectrum from right to left and including all their subgroups think continuing on occupation indefinitely is regrettable, but reasonable. Now when you study aspects of the Israeli Palestinian conflict as I did, you can't help but bump up against something which is widely recognized in Israel that the country is moving politically to the right on the question of maintaining occupation, as well as becoming quote-unquote more religious. But regular people and researchers usually understand stronger attachment to Jewish identity and practice in Israel as associated with right-wing politics. So they assume that if religiosity increases, naturally right-wing conservatism will increase and support for occupation and the settlements. I'm not disputing that this happens, but I'm arguing that the explanation is too simplistic and it misses a key point. Not everyone is becoming more religious. Not everyone is swept along with a rising tide of hatha-pah for legionization, but left-wing progressive politics on occupation has grown increasingly niche. So we need a better explanation for this and I tried to do that in the book. So my research, as I said, with Halani millennials across the spectrum from right to left, this was the group who wore the backbone of the peace process in the 80s and the 90s but today are fairly evenly split, a third, a third, a third across the political spectrum. And what I found was that these discourses and these sort of feelings and sentiments were shared even among the left-wing, that the people who described themselves as left-wing, that continuing the occupation for now is reasonable and regrettable. Now that they would feel this way isn't surprising and the popular explanation emphasizes a combination of conflict fatigue, people feeling unhappy about the direction of the economy and domestic politics and political corruption and also the impact of immigration from the former Soviet Union which swelled the ranks of the Hinonim within Israel. Now this is the generation who fought for, if we count 2019, five wars against Hamas and Islamic jihad and one against Hezbollah and they also grew up on the other side of Israel's various separation barriers, separation walls separated psychologically and also physically from Palestinians. At the same time that mainstream politicians have been emphasizing the exclusively Jewish character of the state. They've absorbed politicians' messages that while there's no Palestinian partner for peace, it's best to concentrate on the economy and their own lives and their own futures. Popular explanations also emphasize that Hinonim from the former Soviet Union have swelled the right wing among Hinonim, making this group a larger one than those from this veteran background and that those veteran descendants have stuck to the left, but that's an overgeneralization. I found something to add to this explanation that we have because the explanation leaves out agency. People aren't just puppets who are part of larger social trends and they do what they see reflected in the media and they do what the politicians tell them. So we need to look more carefully and look beyond public opinion polls and so in my research I'm taking a feminist approach looking deeply at how people talk about themselves and their lived experience because as feminists have told us the personal is political. These things matter. So to understand what's going on in the book I argue that we need to think more deeply about two things. First how secular Judaism is evolving in Israel and also the extent to which secular Jewish Israeli millennials are influenced by a globalized youth culture. In particular I think we need to start thinking more creatively and more expansively about what secular Jewishness in Israel is, that it's not just for example keeping Kashrut or an ethnic identity with religious symbols mobilized by the early secular Zionist settlers. So what I observed is what I call a neo-romantic sensibility among Hellenium I interviewed. I'm developing something that Talal Assad, a point he makes in his book Formations of the Secular. I say this is similar. There aren't clear you know there aren't direct historical connections between the 19th century romantics and my group but there are a couple of things they share in common. Most importantly this emphasis on personal intuition and emotional experience, greater self-expression but also greater attachment to one's nation. Jewish thinkers were influenced by romanticism as well. In Europe they were excited about how creative individuals could interpret Jewish tradition and develop new ways of being meaningfully Jewish for themselves beyond rabbinical authority. Like the romantics and also millennials around the world my interviewees had a commitment to self-expression. They emphasized sincerity and critically personal experience. We talked about philosophical exploration within and beyond Judaism. Hellani culture has also evolved beyond the secular Ashkenazi model that influenced earlier generations. But the important thing is like the romantics, like other millennials around the world, this group emphasized relying heavily on their personal experiences as providing a personal moral compass to help them make decisions. Personal experience included what happened to them, also what they went out and researched themselves. And they are looking at facts, at evidence, but they read the evidence in a particular way. I call them in the book fulcrum citizens. I saw deep commitment to the state and drawing on their personal compass they see themselves as the most moderate among moderates trying to balance out the extremes within their own society and among Palestinians. And this is something I saw across the political spectrum. But it's important to remember that they came of age under deepening conditions of separation from Palestinians and Oslo. So their personal experience is largely focused within Jewish Israeli society. And this shapes their views. So for example, for leftists who want to do something to improve society during the 1990s, this might have been advocating against occupation. But now socioeconomic activism is largely focused within Green Line Israel. And I call this a kind of Green Line liberalism. Can I ask a question? Yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry. So in your conclusion, you talk about connecting the personal and the political. So I have various questions that flow from that overarching concept. So for example, I was interested, I'd be interested to hear your view about, obviously, based on your interviews, about attitudes to settlers. Settlers now form 600-something thousand. They're the primary reason for the increasing unviability, if you like, of a two-state solution. There are other factors as well. But of course, for the last 20 odd years, the number of settlers has expanded. What did you perceive as the attitudes of the generation of millennials that form the heart of your work to the settlement enterprise? Do they make distinction, for example, between extremists and the hilltop youth, for example? Is there a relevance of the contribution of the settler community to the death of the two-state solution, which their parents' generation often believed in as the only solution to whatever you will agree is one of the world's most divisive and toxic conflicts? So there are a couple of questions. Thank you. Thanks, Ian. Let me start with a couple of those things. The generationally pivotal experience, I thought, was being involved in the disengagement from settlements in Gaza and also some in the West Bank. I used Karl Mannheim's generational memory. Mannheim observed, and other people have, I guess, provided the empirical data to back this up, is that multiple generations can live through a pivotal experience, something like, for example, 9-11. But those pivotal experiences that happen when people are in their early 20s really shaped how they see the world. And this experience really shaped how they saw the settlement project, either because they themselves were taking people out of their homes or involved in that, or they had a family or close friends who were involved in that. And I found a real, it had an impact in their concern for the cohesiveness of Jewish Israeli society. It had been a generational trauma, the ideas that had been circulating at the time that potentially this could lead to civil unrest among Jewish Israelis. For those who had been involved in the disengagement, as they saw it carrying out their jobs, as sent by the IDF, the experience of being called names to their face, being told they were like the Nazis to their face, and close proximity had had a seismic impact. So, I mean, we know what's been happening in Israel afterwards that there's been a reinvigoration among the religious Zionist circles within society. And so my group have lived through that. They see that group as a rising group within society. They don't see them as the other. The other are, as you say, the hilltop youth who are also millennials. They see them as the extremists. They see their own role as balancing that out. They widely condemned violence against Palestinians and Palestinian property in the West Bank. And for, you know, they used the language, those who believed in a two-state solution still used the language of the two-state solution, but said, we're stuck. There's nothing that we can do about this now. And they felt quite powerless to change things. These are my observations. This is, of course, a group that can speak very well for themselves within, within the public space. I'm just, you know, providing that as far as the academic perspective. But did you see, did you encounter anybody who believed in the, the idea of one state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs between, to use the increasingly fashionable phrase between the river and the sea? Did you encounter any, anybody who spoke of that goal with any kind of hope? Yes, certainly. I mean, it's a complicated society, right? So if you're going to, you know, do this properly, rigorously, academically, or you try to get everybody. So, yes, I certainly spoke to, spoke to a few people, you know, who held these views, who spoke about a one-state solution, potentially, who spoke about the potential for a confederation, who could imagine something like a consociational democracy in these lands, who spoke about what a, what a democratic state would look like that wasn't just a Jewish democratic state. So it's, it's not all, it's not all doom and gloom, but we know from public opinion polls and from this research that there's also plenty to be pessimistic about as well. But did you encounter, for example, people, millennials, who were interested in promoting Jewish-Arab current operation within the Green Line, at least. The Green Line is the 396-7 borders for those who don't know. Yeah, thank you. So I had, I spoke to people who were involved in that. I also spoke to others who were involved in promoting projects, also with Palestinian activists in Ramallah in the West Bank. Again, a generational issue and, you know, there's definitely more research to be done on Palestinian millennials and the interaction between the two. But they talked about, you know, the difficulties of the BDS movement, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, which had, in their view, narrowed opportunities for cooperation that Palestinians didn't want to cooperate with them. I found, you know, of course, you can find a few people who support the BDS, even within Israel. So that's what I found among activists. I've observed in recent times, of course, Israel may be facing the fourth election in less than two years. In recent elections, I've noticed that quite a lot of Israeli Jews vote for the joint list, which is the combined list of basically Arab parties. Did you encounter that at all? On the argument that the left has failed, the Labour Party has now less seats than ever before, merits has shrunk. So the Jewish Israelis have crossed the line in breaching the taboo, if you'd like, previously held taboo of voting for Arab parties. Have you come across that at all? I mean, my research was primarily either side of the 2015 election. I saw there was a lot of discussion about the demise of Labour, the demise of merits. Interesting to see merits constructed as an extremist group by at least one of my interviewees. You know, they said this is the hard left. This is beyond the bounds of, you know, the reasonable middle, the reasonable middle. In terms of voting for the joint list, I mean, among those I happen to speak to within this research, that was largely a bridge too far for them. But, you know, I mean, we have seen within the past three elections, which took place after this research, that the left has seen that as something credible to vote for the joint list.  That I mean, one thing I would say generally, speaking, and again, you know, I didn't speak to everybody in the entire country, but there was more understanding about the Palestinian Authority and that dimension of Palestinian politics, than there was about Palestinian politics within the state of Israel. But again, you know, this, I didn't speak to everyone, but this was, you know, when people talk about the state, they're talking about the majority. So you completed your research in around 2016, right? I guess. So we've had four years since then of the most openly biased American president since 1948, whose name escapes me. I don't want to mention him by name, of course. But things presumably will have accelerated since then. The direction of travel that you observed in your research up to 2016, presumably has only got worse, no? Yeah, I mean, I think, of course, I've been watching the past four years very, very carefully. And I don't think the direction of travel has changed in any seismic way. I mean, in terms of Israeli politics, you know, seeing the swelling of the center, blue and white and Gantz as an alternative to the Netanyahu government, that seemed to me an outgrowth of the things I found about what was happening in the political center among this group. And then in terms of the new American plan and the subsequent, you know, the Abraham Accords that we have seen signed between Israel and Arab states in the region, I mean, I saw this again as an outgrowth that the Palestinian side of things is, you know, the two state solution is dead or at least paused. But if we can make peace with the Arab world, then this would be acceptable. And this is something that I, you know, they did, many interviewees did raise was the possibility of making agreements with other Arab states alliances bearing in mind the Iranian threat to all actors involved. And they thought that this was perhaps the way forward because this is peace. But of course, you know, I'm not the first person to make this observation, but it's clearly attractive for Israeli Jews to be able to fly to Dubai and Abu Dhabi and even Khartoum and Sudan. But if you can't go to Ramallah or Nablus or Bethlehem safely, it's surely not a solution to the world's most divisive conflict, is it? No, I mean, I think we agree on that point.  And, you know, it very much fits with this kind of hellony neo romanticism that I that I talk about here. But certainly, that's not a solution to the long term problem. So we're coming to the end of our dialogue in order to allow people to ask questions. So what do you what do you see the main implications of your research for the future? I think in terms of the political future, I think I've found a deep reason why there will be paralysis politically on on the occupation and on Palestinian Israeli conflict and long term peace. Because if you see these things not just as a matter of who you vote for, but who you who you are deeply as a reasonable person, then those things we know from political psychology and personal psychology are very, very difficult to to change. So I mean, I think I've just found for the future another dimension of what we know about about paralysis. And, you know, something that one of my interviews talked about what I've quoted in the conclusion is, you know, about the need for a real seismic change. But that is the only thing that is going to bring about something a shift in Palestinian Israeli relations. So I think those are the future implications. I, you know, I talk in the future, I talk in the book about what else, you know, we could study about this group or, you know, what the implications are for the study future study of religion and violence. But, you know, I think the big most important story is about the continuing political paralysis around the possibility of a two state solution and a Palestinian state. But do you see any possibility of change in that current paralysis with in terms of its effect on the millennial generation that are the focus of your research? Well, one of the things that I focus on a great deal, and it comes out in various places in the book, and it comes out in chapter five, I think, is about empathy and about feelings of feelings of empathy for Palestinians, even among those who were on the right. So even if they were simply just imagining what these other people would be like rather than necessarily meeting them, they still, when when asked, maybe pressed, expressed, you know, expressed empathy for a shared common humanity. So maybe then we should be slightly optimistic if the political star is alone. But I mean, I'm sorry, I'm maybe being annoying here, but surely you understand, don't you? I would have thought you do understand that the level of human contact between millennial Israelis and millennial Palestinians, particularly those who live in the occupied territories, is very limited. No. I mean, I make a distinction, of course, between Palestinians who are also Israeli citizens, but that's a different story. Surely, surely it's a factor of the other dehumanization lack of empathy. Yeah, no, I agree with you. I'm trying to, you know, pull out the, you know, the little bits of positivity to this. But as long as separation continues, it's hard to see. You know, I think one of the most poignant things was when asking people to imagine who the other, you know, imagine the other to put themselves in their shoes and having little basis to imagine besides what's in what's in the news or indeed, you know, outright failures of the contact hypothesis where Israelis and Palestinians had met abroad and it hadn't been all, you know, a wonderful experience where suddenly they understood each other. So, you know, I think as I see it, separation is the real key. So I'm going to ask a few questions that have appeared in the chat box. So how much of the current population Jewish Israelis presumably are Sephardic, Sephardim? Ah, right. So this is about 30%. Oh, so I presume they mean Sephardim is Rahi, non Ashkenazi, but 50%. Okay. Okay. So another question is, could you expand a little on the commodification of Arab culture in the Israeli millennial interest in consuming Arab culture? I would add food actually also without engaging with the Palestinians themselves. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I didn't research this, you know, in great detail. So I can't tell you more than probably you already know about, but this is a there's been, I think, under this generation, even greater commodification of Palestinian culture, of food, of appropriation of these things. And probably separation is also also a part of it that this generation cannot just, you know, doesn't go to East Jerusalem or visit the West Bank largely for, I think, maybe tourism and leisure rather than much, you know, deep interaction. And that this is the results. You know, there's lots of really fascinating things that are written, for example, on Yafo and on sort of the appropriation of Arab life in Yafo and the, I think, the implications for secular millennials.  So another question is, do you think that the way the media portrays the ongoing conflict adds to the fire and increases the passions of both parties leading to the exacerbation of those confrontations? So the role, the role of the media. I mean, I think we have, we can talk about different, different forms of media here, right? So the media was something that my interviewees liked to talk about a lot, because this is after the 2014 war. So they were spending a lot of time looking at not only how the Israeli media was portraying Israel's actions in the 2014 war, but also the global media. And there was substantial anger at the portrayal in the European media, certainly, that they had not taken an even-handed approach to the portrayal of the 2014 war. So we have to ask ourselves, you know, what, what kind of media are there possibly neutral media sources? One thing my interviewees, a couple of them talked about with, you know, growing kind of media hopping and trying to find all these different perspectives on, on Israel to try to, to try to understand their own society beyond, beyond the media. But, you know, certainly the media in, in Israel portrays its own side as, as the Palestinian media portrays, portrays its own side as well. The real and slammatory thing rather than the traditional media really was, was social media, Facebook, the role of Facebook in Hebrew. That was something when I wanted to talk about after the disengagement. So now a lot of these intra-Jewish Israeli arguments among millennials are happening, you know, on Facebook and they happened on Reddit. And so there's this, for millennials, this whole other world, which is just as real, which is the virtual world on social media, and that's where the really inflammatory stuff happens. Not just between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, but within young Jewish Israeli society. This, I don't think we can, you know, we can blame the media for framing a discourse. We can blame politicians for flaming a dis, for framing a discourse, but actually what's making it inflammatory is the way people are interacting in this virtual space. I would like to ask a question of my own again. Do you, obviously I read your book and was very impressed by the efforts that you went to capture genuine voices. Maybe I've forgotten, but did anybody address the concept increasingly popular of explaining the Zionist enterprise and Palestine and Israel as an example of settler colonialism? Do you find that helpful as a concept? I mean, I find the frame helpful in understanding Israel as a, as a settler society that we can think of in conjunction with other settler societies like my own in the United States. But this is not something that was discussed among my group at all. I think I had some conversations fairly on about, about post-Syanism. I needed to explain what post-Syanism was, which, you know, kind of goes to show how what a, you know, elite intellectual projects, maybe it's become not something that, you know, resonated with young people. I mean, there were definitely frustrated leftists who said, you know, we need, we need a new way forward. Now, you know, many of them are also working within a, in a hegemonic Zionist frame. But in terms of talking about the country as a, as a settler society, I mean, that was, I don't think I saw that, you know, a very minority view again, like amongst, you know, activists who are talking about the possibility of a, of a secular state and of a truly democratic politically plural state where Palestinians are equally represented. So the next question is from the participant and indeed it's highly relevant to what we just been talking about. Could a one state solution that is inclusive of all, to all parties, is it possible considering the deep fragmentation of the two sides? Oh, I mean, this is, this is the million dollar question, isn't it? You know, and we can, I mean, there are people who are far better placed to talk about the one state solution than me. What I can say is that among this group, there was still, the discussion was still framed in terms of the two state solution, if they were on the left, or if they were in, in the center. So I suppose that's why it feels, why it came across that they were stuck in terms of, in terms of a one state solution. Again, this was articulated by people on the, you know, very, very far left and not in any great detail. I would say that overall there was a stronger, stronger feeling that the Palestinians should, should have their state, that they should have a state constructed in, in their own image rather than a, a one state democracy.  And I tend to think history moves very slowly. And, you know, and why, and is that the optimum answer? I don't think that's, that's clear that Palestinians or Israelis think that's the optimum answer, even if you see greater discussion about a one state solution among Palestinians now. You see the IDF, Israel Defense Forces, as being a secularizing or religionizing force in Israeli society. You talked a lot about Hadatah, religious, religionization. What's the role of the, of the IDF in that? Yeah, so I wrote a chapter on this in the, in the book, talking about these two competing, I think, cultures within the IDF. That really, this is a generationally significant matter, because the two cultures take on greater parity at the time when this generation is serving. They're, they're conscripted service and then also their, their reserve duty. So you have this kind of the, the secular, which was overall the, the main culture in the army, even, you know, through the, through the 2000s, and people, I think, would still say that it's a largely secular culture that's trying to accommodate religious diversity, including, including the Orthodox. What I, I found, and I talk about competition in Jewish consciousness education, that part of the IDF's activity is also what I say is a traditional, a Jewish traditional culture within the IDF. So this is not just officers who are religious Zionists, of course, with their growing numbers, or indeed, you know, the largely religious Zionist character of the, the military rodent, but, you know, an overall kind of shift within, within the culture, from the top down, which is more, I suppose, inclined to an open to Jewish religious interpretations of, of the state of the land. And what I think we see are two, two competing cultures. I don't think the IDF is religionizing the state. I think the state is having an impact on the character of the IDF. And then I think there are controversial instances where it appears that some officers may attempt to religionize the conflict with the Palestinians. But what I saw was resistance within that millennial class of commanders to largely two attempts to bring religion into the conflict. Okay, I think we have time for one more question, maybe. I can't find it. Oh, yes. How and whereabouts in Israel were your interviews conducted? I guess inside Israel there's a huge difference among cities when it comes to religious inclinations, presumably the, the difference between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I guess. Yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely. If the person who asked wants to know more detail about the method, drop me an email. I'm really happy to talk about that more. So the interviews are all carried out with people who are within the Green Lai. Kelly Madoff has written some, a really wonderful PhD about Hulani who live across the Green Lai in the settlements. Mine were conducted within, within the Green Lai. And I tried to get a balance of people who lived in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, lived on Kibbutzim, Masha'vim, people who lived, who lived in the south, trying to get a balance of, you know, people who grew up in rural areas versus growing up within, within the city. You know, and you just, in this kind of project try to get, I suppose, some sort of balance. But, you know, in terms of the, you know, all of the assumptions that we have about things were there and they weren't there, you know, secular Jews and Jerusalem were annoyed by however that just the city is becoming. Haifa people had more contact with, with Arabs. Tel Aviv was more, you know, sort of, I call it the, you know, the beating heart of the, of the Hulani culture. But it, you know, the thing I want to say about the geography as well as, you know, any different sub-sectors within this population is the thing that, you know, there were very strong commonalities.  Something I'll make an albumic point out, and I found it as well as there's a bit of a difference between the older part of this group who might have served in the Second Intifada at the very end and the very young members of this group. But very strong commonality. Okay. Thank you very much. I've managed to answer quite a few of the questions. So thank you very much Stacey and good luck with the book. Thank you so much. Thank you Ian for joining me. It's been a really great privilege. Thank you everybody who joined. It was really wonderful to have you and hopefully in 2021 we can do more things in person. Thank you so much for coming. Bye bye now. Take care.