Abe Interviews John

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast

"Abe Interviews John"

Date: November 28, 2025
Host: Abe Greenwald, Executive Editor
Guest: John Podhoretz, Editor of Commentary

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Episode Overview

In this special episode, executive editor Abe Greenwald turns the tables and interviews Commentary’s editor (and regular podcast host) John Podhoretz. Their conversation explores the perpetual nature of ideological and political fights, the changing landscape of argument and persuasion in the social media era, the cyclical rhythms of history and despair, Israel’s "information war," personal ideological growth, and a lighthearted closing on television classics. The tone is thoughtful, candid, and familiar, with forays into both weighty analysis and pop culture reflection.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Political and Ideological Fights Are Never Settled

[02:34]

• John reflects on how even issues that appear settled—such as the rejection of communism and socialism after the Soviet collapse—resurface with new life in subsequent generations.
  • "If that wasn't disproved fully and conclusively the way flat earth, flat eartherism was [...] And of course, socialism is back." — John Podhoretz [04:41]
• He compares this to cycles in history, noting that new generations, unscarred by old battles, are drawn back to ideas once thought vanquished.
  • "The people who saw the evil over time get old and wither and die [...] and are tempted by the same fantasies that gave rise to its power in the first place." — John [06:41]

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2. The Waning Power and Changing Nature of Argument

[07:15]

• Abe questions whether argument has lost influence compared to personality, tribalism, and sensation.
  • "Arguments [...] don't seem to sort of penetrate the way other factors do." — Abe [07:53]
• John agrees, but notes that arguments over first principles were always elite concerns—now democratized (and diluted) by social media:
  • "Now, of course, everybody on earth can pop up on social media and make an argument." — John [09:08]
• Illustrates with how viral ideas can arise and disappear in hours; argues that while democratization makes suppression harder, it also magnifies noise and ephemerality.

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3. Sensationalism vs Substance

[15:49]

• The pair discuss how “sensation” (akin to pornography) captures attention better than reasoned debate, a dynamic always present but intensified in a social media world.
  • "Art is an effort to explore things. And pornography is an effort to, you know, basically stimulate your basest [...] impulses. And they coexist." — John [16:03]
  • "Does sensation have the upper hand? Yeah, sure it does. I mean, look at the President of the United States." — John [16:27]

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4. History’s Cycles: Despair, Renewal, and Progress

[17:17]

• Abe asks if cycles repeating can give hope that today’s extremes may eventually give way to better eras.
  • "Is there not [a] silver lining [...] does that mean there's reason to think that there would be a pre Trump [...] rhyming period?" — Abe [18:17]
• John responds with examples from 20th-century poetry (Yeats’s "Second Coming"), industrialization, and technological shifts—emphasizing that change can bring unexpected renewal.
  • "There are these periods in history where things go haywire and then reformation occurs, or there's some advance that changes the dynamic." — John [19:50]
• He reflects on how the collapse post-WWI appeared like the end of civilization, but was not, and points out the limits of prediction.

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5. On Not Counseling Despair

[30:08]

• Abe: "When I first got to Commentary, I was made to understand that we do not counsel despair, which was very valuable for me because I am by nature more pessimistic than most." [30:08]
• The duo discuss whether there are moments when pessimism or alarm is more appropriate than optimism—referencing the Flight 93 election essay and reactions to cultural trends.
• John: "Despair is a form [of] giving up. [...] It's like, I can't even, I can't. I don't even know. I don't even want to talk about this because, you know, it's all over anyway." [32:34]
• They agree that while anger and action are justified responses to injustice, ultimate despair is paralyzing, and history can surprise with reversals (e.g., backlash against the trans movement).

Memorable Quote:
"At least if you think... there's a fight to be waged, that at least gives you a purpose [...] when you're low, it gives you a sense of [...] something you need to do to save yourself or save other people." — John [38:01]

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6. Israel’s Messaging and the ‘Information War’

[39:18]

• Abe questions whether criticism of Israel's PR strategy in war is valid; John says the "information battlefield" was long prepared by opponents funding academia and activism, making PR counter-efforts nearly futile.
  • "Israel's only hope rested in victory and seeing what victory was going to bring, because we already knew what defeat would bring." — John [43:27]
• On accusations of Israel as a “white colonial settler” nation:
  • "You walk in Israel and it is the most, in terms of skin tone, variegated country I have ever seen." — John [44:55]
• They agree anti-Israel sentiment is often impervious to facts or argument; personal experience in Israel trumps propaganda, but not everyone can be “schlepped” to Tel Aviv.

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7. Personal Evolution: Rethinking on Immigration

[49:54]

• Prompted by Abe, John acknowledges that his major view to have shifted in the last decade concerns immigration.
  • He was formerly “dovish,” motivated by Jewish history and the tragedies arising from restrictive immigration.
  • Now, overwhelmed systems and experiences with populations resistant to integration (e.g., Somali settlement in Minnesota) force a more tempered, less idealistic view.
  • "Some of the things that I believed were good [...] has had knock-on consequences that I did not anticipate." — John [52:15]

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8. High Culture & Television: The Odd Couple & The Twilight Zone

[53:44]

• Abe asks John why he names "The Odd Couple" the greatest show ever.
  • John: "It is the last... gasp of a certain type of Jewish humor that doesn't really exist anymore, which is sardonic... locked in this battle together, living in this one apartment." [54:25]
  • Highlights its uniquely New York sensibility and influence via syndication.
• They both reminisce on "The Twilight Zone," noting its genre-mixing, strong short story roots, and biblical sense of justice.
  • "To me, Twilight Zone morality was: you're a guy, you're in a hurry, you park in a handicapped parking space, and at the end of the 22 minutes you will be in a wheelchair... — John [58:08]
  • Discusses why these stories endure, contrasting tight, theme-driven fiction with the later rise of meandering literary short stories.

Memorable Exchange:

• John: "A purposeful existence can get you through things that believing your existence has no purpose can't." [39:06]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On argument’s waning influence:
  "Argument over first things... was always a very elite conversation." – John [08:32]

• On the cycles of history:
  "What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Jerusalem to be born." – John quoting Yeats [19:00]

• On Israel and propaganda:
  "Could you tell that story? You can. Nobody seems to want to hear it..." – John [47:11]

• On despair and fighting on:
  "Despair is a form giving up [...] things happen that are very surprising." – John [32:38]

• On changing views:
  "Some of the things that I believed were good... has had knock on consequences that I did not anticipate." – John [52:15]

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Engaging/Memorable Moments

• The vivid metaphors and asides (e.g. the “gunslinger” analogy for social media personalities [14:08], "western movie," or the compare-and-contrast of art with pornography [16:03]).
• Personal anecdotes, including their mutual "moment of despair" about the trans movement, and watching people they knew become activists [34:35].
• The generational and media nostalgia at the end, linking “The Twilight Zone,” classic short stories, and the changing face of American fiction.

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Never-ending battles of ideology: [02:34–07:15]
• Argument vs. sensation/role of social media: [07:15–17:17]
• History's cycles, despair, and hope: [17:17–23:16]
• Israel and the information war: [39:18–48:45]
• Personal ideological evolution: [49:54–53:44]
• High culture/the Odd Couple and Twilight Zone: [53:44–65:32]

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Recommendations & Closing

• Contemplate “The Odd Couple,” “The Twilight Zone,” Yeats, Bamber Gascoigne, and Viktor Frankl’s "Man’s Search for Meaning."
• The episode closes with gratitude and encouragement to keep the intellectual flame burning—even when arguments seem to circle endlessly.

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Summary prepared for listeners who want a thorough grasp of the conversation’s scope, key arguments, and most memorable exchanges.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[C]

Some preach and pain some diapers no way of knowing which way it's going.

[B]

Hope for the best, expect the worst welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is November 28th. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We're going to do something a little different today. We're going to throw you guys a curveball. This is Abe Greenwald, the executive editor of Commentary and I am joined by the regular host of the Commentary Daily magazine podcast, the editor of Commentary and my boss, John Podhoritz. Hi John.

[C]

Hi Abe.

[B]

And I'm going to interview him.

[C]

Oh boy.

[B]

So I want to start off with something that speaks to our politics at the moment, our mission, I think things that are on our listeners and readers minds and certainly what's on my mind. And I will of course I'm going to sneak in some questions about things I also want to know just for my own benefit. So something you've said on several occasions, this has come up over and over again on the podcast and in articles is that fights, political fights, ideological fights are never settled. First, can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean when you say that the debates are never over and second, if they are ultimately never settled, why do we keep fighting?

[C]

So it seemed to me that there are a few things in the course of my lifetime that would have seemed to have been settled and over. I guess the biggest one is the is that communism and socialism had failed. That was demonstrated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and by the fact that most of the world rejected socialism, meaning the leftist version of socialism nationalization idea that the state should own most, private enterprise, should own most enterprises, should run the economy from the top down and work to level the population into a single class. So that's Marxism or communism is that with some other more extreme elements. And it failed and the Soviet Union collapsed and China essentially abandoned its commitment to ideological socialism and communism in favor of some new hybrid thing. So there we have the two largest countries in the world pursuing socialism, most of Europe that the socialist parties In Europe in the course of the 1990s and the 2000s, either lost their socialist coloration or were defeated soundly. And. And that all just seemed to be a reaction to reality. It was. Though it underwent a real world test for 70 years, the world realized that not only didn't it work, but that it caused immense and unimaginable hardship, suffering, monstrousness, cruelty, and that it was therefore done the way flat earth belief in flat earth was done. That there people used to believe the earth was flat. It was proved it wasn't. Now only lunatics think the earth is flat. If anybody thinks the earth is flat. And of course, socialism is back. The mayor of New York is now a socialist, proudly calls himself a socialist. The term socialism is viewed favorably by maybe not a plurality of Americans, but a great number of Americans. The one country in which, I think it's fair to say, among a lot of the democracies that never even attempted genuine socialism, didn't really have a socialist party that was ever in power. And yet here we are, 30, 35 years, 34 years after the Soviet Union literally folded up shop and ceased to exist, and we are back having to demonstrate that, or we are back in a world in which people think that its solutions or the solutions that were pursued by the Soviets and socialist countries and communist countries are worth trying again. So if that wasn't disproved fully and conclusively the way flat earth, flat eartherism was, or let's say, child sacrifice, the way that child sacrifice pursued routinely in the ancient world by ancient civilizations was not conclusively turned, viewed by, I think, even now, you know, but as a. The most monstrous thing that you can possibly imagine. And yet here we are. So in that sense, nothing is ever resolved because the people who saw the evil over time get old and wither and die. And the people leaving behind generations that never lived through it and are tempted by the same fantasies that gave rise to its power in the first place. So in that sense, no political fight is ever resolved. And therefore the conversations, the arguments have to be renewed, revitalized, new light has to be shed. And though it may seem incredibly boring to have to have these conversations that seem settled, particularly if you're older, you have to have them, because when you don't have them, people forget them.

[B]

As you were speaking, it occurred to me, I'm wondering if. And this could just be a product of my having come to political and ideological awareness when I did, but I'm so. I want to know if what you think about this has the Power of argument itself lost some of its oomph in, in political debate, as opposed to, say, personality, charisma, tribal feeling? Or was it kind of always, ever thus? Because to me now it feels like arguments, they need to be made for the reasons you say and for other reasons just, just to say, just to have. Be on the record and say, hey, what you think, you may be in a bit of a bubble. It's not, it's not, it's not conventional wisdom, so slow down, buddy. But they don't seem to sort of penetrate the way other factors do. Was that always the case? Is it more like that now or, or, or some, or some other.

[C]

I mean, it's a tough. That's an incredibly deep question because you. One could argue that argument over first things over like philosophical concerns and all of that was always a very elite conversation. It's not the way most people live. Most people aren't conversant with abstract ideology or what one thing means versus what another thing means. And the course of the last two decades of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century have so democratized our conversation that conversations that used to take place pretty much at the elite level in the pages of small magazines like Commentary, in books that were read by 25 to 50,000 people, that kind of thing. This was something that was viewed as extraordinarily important by the people who conducted it. And there were relatively few venues for these kinds of conversations. And so they were argued there. Campuses where they're, you know, think about like the Ivy Leagues. I mean, you know, if you actually total up the number of people in the Ivy Leagues when I was a student, they're a bunch, they're larger than they are now, but you're talking about seven schools or something like that. 80,000 people, baby, 85,000 people out of an entire nation where these kinds of fights, the people, people would have them all that were sort of all congregated, living taking place. And now, of course, everybody on earth can pop up on social media and make an argument. And the only times that we ever heard from the mass of people there were two times. One was polling and the other were elections. So it could come often as an extraordinary shock to people in these elites when it turned out that, say, Ronald Reagan and the views that he held were vastly more popular than anybody in the elite precincts of universities could ever have imagined, that he would win 40 states in 1980, that he would win an outright majority of the vote in 1980 with three candidates in the race when the polling in the last weekend suggested that he and Jimmy Carter were tied. Suddenly the voice of the people is heard. It's unassailable. It's the only time everybody gets together and says, this is how we feel. And then politics shifts to take account of this. And now we have plebiscites every 10 minutes. I mean, literally every 10 minutes as we're talking. There was a piece of that somebody wrote on his substack that I think the Free Press picked up that makes a transparently preposterous argument, which is that we've misunderstood poverty and food because somebody miscalculated what it meant to be able to have enough money to feed yourself. And that number was set in 1963, and it was set wrongly. And in fact, if you figure out where that is, the truth is that everybody in America who does not make 100 to $140,000 a year is poor. And this piece comes out, it kind of goes viral because it seems to offer a ready explanation. It's all a mistake. The understanding of how much people need to live is a terrible mistake. It's been a mistake for 60 years. Things were miscalculated. So I'm not an economist. So I like contact. I contact a friend of mine who's both in finance and as a thinker about finance, and I'm like, could this be true? And he's like, I mean, it can't really. I'm pretty sure it can't be true, but I need to go through his numbers and figure it out. I'm going to go ask my friend at a think tank. And my friend at the think tank says, no, no, it's not true. He's making. He made some mathematical error here and that, blah, blah. And so for two days now, there's been a kind of argument about whether or not you're poor if you don't make 100 to $140,000 a year. And now everybody is attacking this guy whose name is Green, Matt Iglesias is on the left, people are on the right, and we'll forget about it. But the point is that for 48 hours, suddenly there's this floated, this idea that everybody in America is actually poor. And that's the truth. And the truth is that we're all poor and most people are poor, and that's life. So that never would have happened in a previous era before, you know, somebody's like, interesting but dumb idea that was said set in a Dorm room at 1 o' clock in the morning. And then they had an argument about it, then you all went to bed and you forgot about it the next morning. Somehow is amplified on social media. People pick it up, people go, that's interesting. And then it's sort of like all over the place. And then we have like a two day news cycle that about a stupid idea like that. Like that wouldn't have happened before. On the other hand, you know, sometimes the news and important stories have been suppressed over time by, by when the gatekeepers were so powerful and there were so few venues to discuss things and discuss unconventional ideas and that. And so the fact now is that anything can sort of emerge from this, you know, giant lake in which we're all swimming. And that's also good because that means it's very hard to suppress things that used to be suppressed. But I don't know, that argument has died out. It's more like.

[B]

I didn't mean died, I just mean.

[C]

Sort of, you know. Right, yeah, but it's more like aphis. So then who succeeds in this world? Is the noise made, the people who can get amplified the best? And on the other hand, will any of it endure? I don't think so. I mean, I think the noise, the noise makers emerge and then, you know, it's sort of like a western movie and then come along. Which is what's sort of happening with the podcast, bro. Right. Like then another. But a gunslinger comes into town who's like, I'm gonna take you on, you know, scariest guy in the west, let's go duel in the street and I'll shoot you in the head. Then I'll be the top guy. And you know, so that's Tucker establishes the furthest right position. And then Nick Fuentes comes on and goes to his right and Candace Owens, who goes to his right. And so you know that, that in theory, that process can be never ending. All that will happen is that each of them is a corpse in the other's wake eventually. So.

[B]

So sort of, I mean, among the things I mentioned that that may threaten to sort of overtake the power of argument is sensation.

[C]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. And I guess that, well, it's like.

[C]

Pornography and art, right? Like what people, it's all conversation from the 18th century onward. Like Diderot, the French philosoph was a pornographer. He actually wrote pornography and was jailed several times for both having, you know, like wrong headed ideas and for being a pornographer. And I bring that up only to say that there's always been art and sensation. Right. So art is an effort to explore things. And pornography is an effort to, you know, to basically stimulate your basest or your most, you know, animalistic impulses. And they coexist and they're, you know, and they. It's a fight forever. It's like the ID and the ego or whatever. And so sensation. Does sensation have the upper hand? Yeah, sure it does. I mean, look at the President of the United States. I mean, that's. He's a. He's a creature of sensation. And so that's. But just like no argument has ever won, the battle between those two is never what you think it is. You think like, well, if you start crumbling into sensation, you'll never climb back out into a world of greater sensibility.

[B]

That's. That's. It's. So. It's great that you say that because I had a. There's a. My next question before I got, you know, sidetracked by my follow up. There is about, you know, it has to do with, with both of. Both of the first questions, which is. So if there is this cyclical nature to the fights and the sides and the, you know, in some sense that seems dispiriting, we have to have these fights again. But is there not silver lining there in the sense that, you know, Mark Twain often quoted as saying, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. Can we expect. I don't know when a. Because right now it feels as if we're headed for an endless ramping up. You know, it feels as if things are getting crazier, more extreme. Everyone's going to. Everyone's right flank and everyone's left flank and everyone's going to. That may be just a feeling, right? I mean, can we expect. If the old fights come up again and again and again, does that mean there's reason to think that there would be a pre Trump? You can never go back. We know you can't go back. But a right that rhymes with a pre Trump. Right, a liberalism that rhymes with a pre 2020 liberalism, that should happen too, at some point.

[C]

I mean, it should. If you think about the last hundred, 120 years, right? When did Yates write the Second Coming? Right. The Second Coming is basically the greatest home of the 20th century. And it is about how civilization is collapsing, right? The World War I, you know, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Everywhere the blood Tim died is loosed. And it ends with the, you know, the famous lines like, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Jerusalem to be born or Such as Bethlehem to be born. What is that? That's there? Surely there will be a second coming. Like, it's not gonna. We're not ending here. And, you know, that was the First World War. That was after the First World War, and we didn't even know what horrors. We didn't know we weren't alive. But Yates didn't know what horrors were to come. The First World War was nothing compared to the Second World War. But the idea that civilization is going to end and that something. But that. That means that it will be replaced by something else. The rough beast, Arakoma, Is that. Is that rough beast evil? Or is that rough beast simply unformed and good? Is it the. Is it the second coming of Christ? Is it the second coming of evil? We don't know. But the idea. I only, you know, not to be pretentious about it, but it's like obviously in every generation, people think that the world is coming to an end in some fashion or other, that the culture is going to collapse and the, you know, everything is going to be destroyed. And there are these periods in history where things go, hey, you know, go haywire and then reformation occurs, or there's some advance that changes the dynamic. And the. Or. Or. Looked even further back. A lot of the things that have happened are all examples that you can't see until it happens of a gigantic civilizational change, like the industrial. You know, the first 40 years of the Industrial Revolution were a horror, a horror show, a monstrous. You know, the countrysides in England were emptied out. Children are working in factories 14 hours a day. People are getting killed in industrial accidents. There are no rules. You know, it's. It's, it's. It's like a nightmare. It's the dark satanic mills that. That William Blake wrote about and all of that. And then. But it turns out, pulled back. This was the beginning of the greatest progress humankind had ever known. Economic progress, you know, scientific progress, medical progress, all of that. But the. But the. But the opening gambit was nightmarish. And it could be that everything we talk about, about smartphones and AI and all that and everything that's so terrifying about that, viewed from 2100, it'll be like, well, that was all part of the growing pains of the third industrial age or something like that. That's what I don't. I'm not going to live to see that. I don't know if I'm right about that. Obviously, you know, AI could destroy everything or it could fix everything, or it's just another tool, I don't know. But that's, that's why arguments never end also, which is like the terms, the bases change, you know, if you haven't. I mean this is like what we do for a living. So we publish articles in a magazine. So 50 years ago you commissioner for a magazine and two months later somebody sent you a typescript of the article and they had to put it in the mail and they mailed it to you and it took five days for it to get to you and then you had to edit it and then you had to retype it and then you had to send it back to them for comment and then they would send you back a version and all of this. And so the article on whatever was happening in the world came out three months after the event that it was being written about. And that was fine because that's how the pace was for everybody. And now all of that can happen in seven minutes.

[B]

But that also I think pushed say monthlies like us to be Less news cycling.

[C]

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[B]

Have Trump, you know, the most important man in the world operates at a speed faster than the news cycle.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. So the news cycle and everything, it's more like, you know, it's like you're standing somewhere and it turns out you're a thing in a shooting gallery. You know, you're like, you're like, you're like one of those things that goes across, well, someone and you, you know, you have to keep yourself from getting shot. All these things are flying by your head. What should you pay attention to? What shouldn't you pay attention to? But, but I think like talking about what it means to be human, which is ultimately what all this is about. Obviously it's a much different conversation in 2025 than it was in 1955, when people were still recovering from, you know, having fought the most, the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history. And what was going to come out of that? We look back and we think, oh, how idyllic. Oh, look, here in America, you know, one couple family, they had a house and they could this, and they were having children and they were living in new, newly built suburbs, and there was solidarity, and it was so amazing. What an amazing thing. And of course, you know, like, 5 million Americans had been in battle and had come home with scars and wounds and having seen things that no human being should ever see. And, you know, had. Had been tested as no one had ever been tested. And there were all kinds of social dislocations that came out of that. And we sort of forget that stuff while we're thinking, oh, if we could only go back to that time. And now every. Our lives are so terrible because we, we now they could own homes and we couldn't own a home. And then it's like, do you know what those people went through? They lived through the Depression and then they went off to war and they were like, on a battlefield for three years, and then they came back. It's like they were just licking their. They were licking their wounds.

[B]

And so much of that data is manipulated. Like, yeah, they talk about owning homes with those. The sizes of the homes, the prices of the home.

[C]

You know, levittown home was 700 square feet.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Two bedrooms, one porch, living room, dining room, one bathroom. You know, and then suddenly someone's got a family of four living in, you know, with each person having 100 square feet. Like, I'm just saying, like, it's just we, we. We. We're constantly fantasizing that what we're going through, no one else has ever gone through. And it's the worst ever. And there's stuff where it's. Things are pretty bad. I'm not saying that it's not.

[B]

Well, that, that, that, that, that's. That's a good segue into my Yates and Roughbees in the center. Not holding. When I first got to Commentary, I was made to understand that we do not counsel despair, which was very valuable for me because I am by nature more pessimistic than most.

[C]

And.

[B]

I have no doubt, sometimes unwisely, but I'm. I have to. You know, certainly in the past two.

[C]

Years.

[B]

This, this, this idea has been tested within me and I think sort of generally, and I'm wondering, is there A time when it is more effective and, and moral to sort of sound the alarm and say, look, this is it, we're in big trouble now. I don't mean obviously when we're on the very precipice of a disaster, of course you have an obligation, but I mean, In a sort of 50, 50 situation, things could go this way or they could go this way, where the, the fallback of the happy warrior would be to say, we're going to get through this because we've gotten through other things before. But might, and I don't know the answer, might there not be more efficacy in saying, no, no, no, you don't understand. This is, this is, by my lights, this is going to go very, very bad. And you need to be awake and scared and motivated. And I'm think, I'm thinking of the Flight 93 election essay, right? And whatever you think of its arguments and whenever you think of Michael Anton, its resonance was undeniable. And so, yeah. Is it always right in a sort of 50, roughly 50, 50 situation not to counsel despair?

[C]

And I struggle with this, I think. I mean, you should be angry when things are going wrong and bad things are happening and bad things are happening to people, you know, or bad things are happening in the world that you're seeing. Injustices are popping up all over the place. You know, people are defaming our cops or our military, they're defaming Israel, they're defaming the West. Ken Burns makes a documentary about the American Revolution in which he says that the. The Declaration of Independence was cribbed from the Iroquois Confederacy. And therefore, you know, they, they. Which is a, which is a preposterous claim that is obviously designed merely to sort of remove Western civilizational efficacy from the greatest triumph of human politicking ever. Does this, should that make you angry? Yes, like all that should make you angry and should make you. It should stimulate your argumentative side or which is similar, our argumentative side. Despair is a. Is a form giving up. Like, it's like, I can't even. I can't. I don't even know. I don't even want to talk about this because, you know, it's all over anyway, you know, and that things happen that are very surprising, that this is not like meliorism or like happy talk. I mean, would we have expected in 2015 or something like that that the, the blowback against the trans revolution would be as widespread and effective and serious as it has become? I certainly didn't. I sort of, you know, you End up very hard to imagine things not sort of moving in a straight line and that it's just everyone is going to eventually come to accept this and we're going to be living in a world in which people are cutting things off their children and all of that. You know, we started talking about this years and years and years ago, you and I, because we know, we know somebody who announced on Facebook, somebody that we both dated actually, that her four year old son was a girl. And we watched as she became the mother, not the, not the son, became a sort of celebrity of openness and giving speeches, places and all this. And she'd been an actress and she'd been a writer. Like she'd failed at all kinds of things. A person with a lot of money and suddenly she found herself as a heroine in her own drama, using her child as her weapon. And it was one of the most evil things I've practically ever seen. And it did almost fill me with despair in the sense that I didn't understand how we were going to develop antibodies against this. And I was wrong. Like civilization or just simply human nature was just too strong. Not for ordinary people. Again, the ordinary people who aren't mostly heard of were going, no, that boy is not going into my daughter's locker room. He's a boy. I don't care whether he's wearing a skirt or not. And he's wearing a skirt, maybe because he wants to ogle my daughter and it's all a fake and he's a pervert and he's not coming into this bathroom. I don't care how he feels. What about my daughter? You know, so even there, that moment that you and I had of high despair about our civilization, like the survival of the human species, we overreacted to. But I don't think we were wrong to react because you really didn't know how this was gonna go.

[B]

Right. Which is why I think it's important not to cancel despair. Because when you're in those moments, you can't imagine the bounce back, this boomerang that's gonna happen. And then when it happens, you're like dumbstruck.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, it's like depression in general. Like if. If I don't suffer from clinical depression, but I know people who do. And obviously depression is a cyclical thing. It's people, you know, have come in out of it and stuff like that. And when people are in the depths of it, they cannot sort of like pain, like if you're really, really, really sick or something, really Hurry of like, I mean, I used to have this with streps or what I used to get really, really bad cases of strep throat, which of course doesn't last that long. It can last a week, but it's about as painful as anything. You probably. Or kidney stones, which I've also had. And you're like, I will never feel good again. I will never. I don't remember what it felt like not to be in pain. I have no memory of it. And then, of course, you wake up something. You emerge like human. Whatever, you, you, you get better or your kidney stone passes, or the depression. You know, your body chemistry equalizes itself. But, you know, it's at those deepest moments that people who have bad impulse control can do the worst possible thing to themselves simply to escape that pain or that despair. So at least if you think, oh my God, well, you know, I have a. There's a fight to be waged that at least gives you a purpose in your, you know, in your. When you're low, it gives you a sense of like. Yeah, purpose, destiny, something you need to do to save yourself or save other people or save your children or whatever that can keep you going.

[B]

I mean, it's, it's the, the Victor Frankel thing, you know? Yeah, it's. Anyone with someone with a why can. Can achieve any how or whatever.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. Remember, he says that's not even a moral thing. Like Frankel says, the people that didn't survive the Holocaust, chances are they were morally superior to those of us who did. Like, this is not a judgment of who was good. Like some of us did what we had to do to survive. And the people who were unable to do that should not be judged. Maybe they were better than we were and simply couldn't do what was necessary to be done. But a purposeful existence can get you through things that believing your existence has no purpose can't. Right.

[B]

Well, this is a good opportunity to move on to Israel. There's a lot of criticism. Well, we know that there's a lot of criticism about Israel. I'm talking in particular about the, not the crazy criticism, but the criticism about Israel lacking a successful messaging strategy or any messaging strategy, and that it's lost the so called information war. I know. For example, our contributing editor Jonathan Schanzer believes that. Do you think there was a real missed opportunity on Israel's part throughout this war to communicate and in some way that would have had a significant impact on the Western public, on the American public, or that more or less the war so sanely scrutinized, so wildly distorted and brutal, necessarily brutal, was going to turn people off no matter what.

[C]

I'm pretty much with you on the second. I mean, I, I don't, I look back and I don't see what on earth Israel could have done that the information battlefield as we now understand it was set up was in place. Not just the Hamas spending 10 years digging the tunnels to help fight the war, but sort of the 10 or 20 years spent digging the tunnels of America inside American public opinion that, you know, created this, you know, people popping up out of nowhere by the thousands or hundreds of thousands to protest this and do that and do this on campus and do that on campus. All of which was part of a coordinated long term strategy that began with funding certain types of professorships and departments and universities that began at the, really right after 911 as some kind of effort to figure out how the Islamic world could protect itself against American rage. After 9 11. Were there things that could be done to ameliorate the public relations disaster that had that, that, that the hijackers and Al Qaeda had done to them? And one of the ways they did it was by spreading money around in elite circles. And it was wildly successful. And Israel didn't do that because it was busy doing other things could. So what's amazing is that under other circumstances, in other administrators, at other times, that kind of blowback to Israel would have panicked the Israeli government, would have forced it almost unilaterally to concede in some fashion or kind of lose the war that it was fighting rather than lose Western public opinion. And simple fact of the matter is, even if Bibi Netanyahu had wanted to do that, he would not, he could not, because Israel is itself is not gutter. It's a country with a vibrant democracy and free press and public and he head of a fractious coalition and all of that. And he could, he could not cede to Biden, he could not give up the fight. The country would not have allowed it. And so Israel made a kind of conscious, deliberate decision that it was going to have to suffer the slings and arrows of Western public opinion to do what it had to do. And in fact, even the people who loathe Bibi and hate everything he does and want to blame him for everything, had he done otherwise, they would have come at him from the right and said that he had chickened out, that he wasn't protecting, that he had hadn't protected the country before, not before October 7th. And he wasn't protecting it now, and he was just trying to save his own skin. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, as we kept saying on the podcast, you and I, throughout this entire battle, Israel's only hope rested in victory and seeing what victory was going to bring, because we already knew what defeat would bring.

[B]

And, you know, to me, the joke of this line of argument, that's not a joke, and there are serious people who say it, but the irony of this line of argument is that, you know, in the past, whenever Israel tried to launch a friendly PR campaign for anything, everything was labeled as Hasbara, pink washing this, washing that, washing that. So now, now people are saying, where was the washing? You know? You know, where was the. You know.

[C]

Yeah, well, look, there are certain things that are said about Israel are so manifestly, insanely untrue that if you know anything about, it's like, almost impossible.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Talk about counseling despair. Like, it's a white colonial settler. You know, it's a white colonialism. So, you know, walk down a street in Israel as opposed to walking down a street almost anywhere else on Earth. And the, it just so happens, because Jews were scattered across the globe and there were Jews and there were Ashkenazim up in Europe and there were Sephardim and Mizrachim around the Middle east and, you know, around the Indian Ocean and places like that. And there were Ethiopians and there were this. There are Jews of all kinds, and they are. And you walk in Israel and it is the most, in terms of skin tone, variegated country I have ever seen. I mean, I haven't been to India, so maybe India is similar. But I mean, it is not white. It is many things, but it is not white. It's brown, it's, it's tan, it's, it's blonde, it's, you know, jet black. It's a, you know, and so when people use this argument about Israel being a kind of white colonial settler nation, and you have spent more than three hours on a street in Tel Aviv, you're like, what? I don't even, I, I don't even have a vocabulary in which to tell you how preposterous you are. And so some of the hasbara stuff is like, hey, come to Tel Aviv. We have great beaches. And they do. And the beaches in Tel Aviv are amazing. You know, but that's not what's amazing about Israel. Like, you should go. Tel Aviv is a fantastic city, but, you know, it is the world's most astounding mix of insanely ancient places that are central to the entire planet's story. And this entirely new country that has emerged over about 120 years. And they're coexisting side by side, as are extraordinarily religious Jews who live in a very hermetic kind of bubble, and highly cosmopolitan people who don't have any religion at all and all that. It's like. And it's all crammed into a space the size of, you know, the 1967 borders were about the size of Rhode Island. So, you know, imagine Rhode island with, you know, the most variegated culture that you can imagine. And of course, then 20% of the population being non Jewish and Arab and Druze. You know, it's. So could you tell that story? You can. Nobody seems to want to hear it because the people. The people who are arguing against it, they don't care what's true or false about it. They just want Israel to fall into the sea.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's. That's certainly a case where argument is.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Is. Is. Is kind of pointless.

[C]

Well, I mean, it's not pointless in the sense that, like, there is this whole idea. There's an idea like if you could somehow schlep everybody in America to Israel, get them on a plane and go to Israel for a week, which is what's been going on with politicians for, like, 40 years. Just bring them. Bring them to Israel. They'll meet people. They'll go to the beaches. They'll go to Yad Vashem. They'll do this. And, you know, when they leave, they'll know this is a formidable place that shouldn't be so easily dismissed, and that's been very successful. The problem is, you know, that. That, you know, you can't do that with 300 million Americans.

[B]

Right. Right. Yeah. Well, inculcating an experience is a different.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Do you have time for two, I think, quick questions.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

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[C]

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[B]

Going back to fights never end arguments. Is there any major issue on which you've changed your position dramatically in let's say the last 10 years? You can think about it for a second.

[C]

I the only issue that I feel like the sorts of things that I said in 2015, I would not say in 2025 relates to immigration. So I very dovish on immigration based on my own Jewish experience and the knowledge that the immigration laws of 1924 that you know, sort of brought up the you know, basically built a wall to prevent large scale further Jewish immigration to the United States had the inadvertent effect of a million more people would still would have been alive that are now that were murdered during World War II had had circumstances been different and that with that knowledge and my own feeling about it that I was in no position to say that immigration law should, you know, should not be as liberal as possible. And I don't think my view was all that controversial actually even on the right like politicians from the early 90s onward were pushing tough on immigration lines and they were not successful. You know, Pete Wilson in California they're very like it was not, it was not a winning message. And in Texas, Texas, which had the longest border with you know, with Mexico, Texas was very liberal and happy seemed to have a very comparable. And then whatever happened had very complicated set of circumstances beginning really around 2014 when this just massive flow started coming over the border during Obama's second term and that you know, the border border patrol was overwhelmed. The ability to, the ability to police the border became impossible. And our system was apparently incapable of dealing with an inadvertent set of, you know, incentives that were overwhelming us. And add to that some other deeply uncomfortable things I had to admit. Like you know, when we let in 250,000 Somalis because of the war in 1994 and Bill Clinton in humanitarian terms said these people had a reasonable fear of progress persecution that should come into the United States. We then imported the wholesale this population largely into Minnesota that is clearly hostile to the American experiment and isn't, is, is not being, I don't know, matured into becoming part of the American experiment. And Ilhan Omar is there as one end result of this and that's really bad. And so some of the things that I believed were good, like the idea that we were a, we were a refuge nation for people who were, you know, under threat of genocide or whatever has had knock on consequences that I did not, not anticipate.

[B]

Yeah, I've tempered my, my enthusiasm along. Yeah, similar lines. Okay, finally, we, we're going to end on a, on a moment of high culture.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

John, you famously say the greatest show ever is the Odd Couple.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Why? See, do you want to say? I remember the Odd Couple. To me, like it. Channel 11 was the odd Couple channel growing up. It was sort of always on and it was a comfort to me.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

But I never, I never got into it the way you did.

[C]

Well, okay, so the only other person I know who holds this view on ambiguous. There are two Cliff Asness, our 2025 commentary, roastee and Jonah Goldberg. And we all grew up in the sort of New York metropolitan area as you, as you did. And, and, and yes. So the Odd Couple was on for five years. It wasn't particularly successful as the net worth sits on. But then when it went into syndication, and it is one of the most New York shows ever, and it went into syndication and it was a big success in syndication, but nowhere was it as big a success in syndication as it was in New York City. And it did float this like one major television station which showed it four times a day for 20 years. And so I don't know if it's the best. It's my favorite. I don't think it's the best. I'm sure there are many things that are, that are, are better, but it's. It is it in some ways it's the last. It was the final gasp of a certain type of Jewish humor that doesn't really exist anymore, which is sardonic, kind of one very hopeful, hysterical, ridiculous person and one bitter, pessimistic voice of reason. And they're both incredibly comic figures, each of them wrong in their own way about everything on earth and locked in this battle together, living in this one, one apartment. And so, yeah, they're almost like you. I. Let me ask you now I'm gonna ask you a question because you and my son, who is 15, have been having the same experience over the last couple of months, which is. You both been watching the Twilight Zone. Yeah, you re watching it, him watching it for the first time. And you like, it was like you said, it was your comfort food over the last couple of months. So what is it about the Twilight Zone that is so. That was so compelled the first twilight zone. The first, the five season, 100 episodes or something. 120 episodes. What is it about the Twilight Zone that made you compulsively watch it?

[B]

What I love about the Twilight Zone at its best best is that to me Serling sort of blended sci fi ideas and this isn't really talked about a lot but almost sort of crime fiction dialogue and settings. There's a lot of that. You know, there's, there's gangsters going, you know, going through time and, and you know, thieves, you know, getting their comeuppance in the next world and all that stuff. And so it makes sense that these two pulpy genres at the time were sort of blended in this. I mean it's sci fi, it's not a, it's not a crime show but, but he took the mood, it's the mood of crime fiction often and it actually makes for a really wonderful blunt. There are also whimsical episodes and sentimental episodes and purely comic episodes and some very brilliant inventive episodes using Buster Keaton in silent movies and you know, it was very experimental, which I also appreciate, appreciate but also have to say, you know, at the end of the day what they thought there's most daring shows look so innocent now, you know.

[C]

So I've been watching a little bit with, with, with my son who was only in the first season and he's a completist, so he'll watch the whole thing. And what I, what I have found striking, what I always thought was that it, it had a very Rod Serling, a Jew from upstate New York, had a very old Testament moral quality. In other words, it was like to me, Twilight Zone morality was you're a guy, you're in a hurry, you park in a handicapped parking space and at the end of the 22 minutes you will be in a wheelchair for having. This is the episode I wrote in my own head. But like the world of Rod Serling.

[B]

There'S a lot of come up.

[C]

You have a sin, you indulge in it and the universe comes down on your head. And for a kid, when I was a kid, I found this immensely compelling because it was like it could be brutal and it could be heart rending or something, but it always seemed fair. It was like nobody ever really didn't get what they deserved somehow. I mean some of the really dark episodes are, you know, the one that I watched the other day, which was so striking to me, as I told you, is called not enough time or time and I can't remember what it's and it's Burgess Meredith is this henpecked husband and a dreamer. And all he wants to do is read. And then he's in. He goes into the. He's a bank teller. He goes into the vault to read at lunchtime and the vault shakes and he comes out and the entire world has been destroyed, obviously, in a thermonuclear blast. And he doesn't know what to do with himself. And then he comes upon the public library and he realizes this is actually a paradise for him because he can spend the rest of his life without being henpecked and without being yelled at by his boss, just reading. Just read and read and read. But he has these very thick glasses, sets up all the books he's going to read over the next year. And, you know, he. And every. Everything is destroyed. And he is about to get ready to start sitting down and reading and his glasses fall off his head and shatter and he cannot see a thing. And then he sits down and bursts into tears. And that's the end of the show. Why does he get it? Because he's happy that everybody was killed because now they're all out of his way and he can just, you know, he can just indulge himself in his own sybaritic pleasures and he deserve. He deserves what happened to him. Right. When I was a kid, it was sort of horrifying, that episode, but like, I could. It's brilliant. Like.

[B]

No, there's a biblical logic to it.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[B]

Interestingly enough, because I've just seen them all.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

He appeared in a later episode as a librarian who. In an episode called the Obsolete man, who is a librarian in the future who has to make the case to the state as to why he shouldn't be put down as obsolete.

[C]

Right. Anyway, it was a. You know, obviously the thing about the odd. The thing about the thing about the Twilight Zone was it was an anthology series and did not have to follow. You know, it wasn't like a sitcom or an ordinary television show where you followed, you know, the same characters over. Over. Over many years. And I was struck watching this. I had this flash of revelation about why the short story has gone the way of all flesh. Like basically half these things on the Twilight Zone were based on short stories published in magazines like Astounding and Other Places and Colliers. And, you know, most famous episode was this occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is bait one a French, which was actually made in France and won an Oscar and then was put on this short story about a civil War. A guy who comes, escapes the noose and comes home to his family and has a wonderful moment. And it turns out that everything you're seeing is the fantasy that he has as he's being hanged in the second between the moment that the panel opens up before his feet and he lands and is. And dies of hanging. And I was thinking about how the short story was so popular in the first half, two thirds of the 20th century. All magazines published them. They were hugely popular. People writers got paid a lot of money for short stories. Playboy published short stories, the New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, everybody. This was like a real rich thing. And what was it about them that was so. That made them. And like writers like John Cheever became famous for being short story writers and Shirley Jackson and all this. It was that rather than being kind of slices of life that went nowhere, which is what. The stories that I grew up reading as a kid, like Anne Beatty and other writers like that, these were concentrated, plotted things about a single thing that happened in a single person's life. And they end with a bang. Like they. A classic short story that you can remember ends with like a. Oh, my God, like a kind of shock M. Night Shyamalan, you know, surprise ending. Even if it's a literary short story, even, you know, they all have to come to a point and hit the theme in the last sentence. And therefore they were more exciting than novels. They were more exciting than, you know, a t than a radio show. They got you and they nailed you. And. And then the fashion changed and the Iowa Writers Project writers all started writing, you know, ex hippies who were depressed, smoking dope. And then they sat around, they were like, why didn't we ever get married? I don't know. Here, have another hit of my joint. And then the story would end and those stories dominated. And then it was like, well, I don't need to read that anymore. But like, it was. It was like addictive. Like the way Twilight Zone is addictive. And the world of the American fiction writer ruined. Killed the golden goose, right? So which you can see on. On. On the Twilight Zone, which still is like the last is a thing you can watch that reminds you of that world.

[B]

Yeah, toward. Toward its end, it kind of lost its way too. But.

[C]

Oh, yeah, like all, like all. All sure shows have their own lives. Well, so we have recommendations here. You can watch the Twilight Zone. You can watch. You can read Yates, you can watch. Read Amber, you can read. You can read Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. A lot of commentary recommends on this.

[B]

Yeah. Have a. Have a. Have a feast.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, thanks, John, for letting me do this. Dave, it was a pleasure. And for you and for all our absent co. Panelists. Keep the candle burning.

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?

[C]

Cut the camera.

[B]

They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail]. liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.