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OUTLINE:

Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

(00:00) - Introduction

(08:22) - Hate

(14:02) - Judicial reform and protests

(22:38) - AI

(32:40) - Competition

(39:21) - Power and corruption

(46:32) - Peace

(1:01:05) - War in Ukraine

(1:05:01) - Abraham Accords

(1:09:02) - History

(1:13:48) - Survival

The following is a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, currently serving his sixth term in office.

He's 1 of the most influential, powerful, and controversial men in the world, leading a right-wing coalition government at the center of 1 of the most intense and long lasting conflicts and crises in human history.

As we spoke, and as I speak now, large-scale protests are breaking out all over Israel over this government's proposed judicial reform that seeks to weaken the Supreme Court in a bold accumulation of power.

Given the current intense political battles in Israel, our previous intention to speak for 3 hours was adjusted to 1 hour for the time being, but we agreed to speak again for much longer in the future.

I will also interview people who harshly disagree with the words spoken in this conversation.

I will speak with other world leaders, with religious leaders, with historians and activists, and with people who have lived and have suffered through the pain of war, destruction and loss that stoke the fires of anger and hate in their heart.

For this, I will travel anywhere, no matter how dangerous, if there's any chance it may help add to understanding and love in the world.

I believe in the power of conversation, to do just this, to remind us of our common humanity.

I know I'm underqualified and under-skilled for these conversations, So I will often fall short and I will certainly get attacked, derided, and slandered.

But I will always turn the other cheek and use these attacks to learn, to improve, and no matter what, never give in to cynicism.

This life, this world of ours, is too beautiful not to keep trying, trying to do some good in whatever way each of us know how.

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And now, dear friends, here's Benjamin Netanyahu.

♪♪ You're loved by many people here in Israel and in the world, but you're also hated by many.

In fact, I think you may be 1 of the most hated men in the world.

So if there's a young man or a young woman listening to this right now, who have such hate in their heart, what can you say to them to 1 day turn that hate into love?

I disagree with the premise of your question.

I think I have enjoyed a very broad support around the world.

There are certain corners in which we have this animosity that you describe and it sort of permeates in some of the newspapers and news organs and so on in the United States, but certainly doesn't reflect the broad support that I have.

I just gave an interview on an Iranian channel, 16 million viewers.

I gave another 1, I just did a little video a few years ago, 25 million viewers from Iran.

Certainly no hate there, I have to tell you.

And when I go around the world and I've been around the world People Want to hear what we have to say what I have to say is the leader of Israel whom they respect increasingly as a Rising power in the world.

And the most important thing that goes against what you said is the respect that we receive from the Arab world and the fact that we've made 4 historic peace agreements with Arab countries.

So I think the premise is wrong, that's all.

A lot of leaders are collaborating, are working.

But there is people who don't have good things to say about Israel, who do have hate in their heart for Israel.

I think they're guided by a lot of ignorance.

They don't know that Israel is a stellar democracy, that it happens to be 1 of the most advanced societies on the planet, that what Israel develops helps humanity in every field, in medicine, in agriculture, in the environment, in telecoms, and talk about AI in a minute, but changing the world for the better and spreading this among 6 continents.

We've sent rescue teams more than any other country in the world, and we're one-tenth of 1 percent of the world's population.

But when there's an earthquake or a devastation in Haiti or in the Philippines, Israel is there.

When there's an earthquake, a devastating earthquake in Turkey, Turkey, Israel was there.

When there's something in Nepal, Israel is there.

It's the second country after, in 1 case, India, or after, in another case, the United States, Israel is there, tiny Israel, is a benefactor to all of humanity.

If I can just linger on that philosophical notion of hate, that part of human nature, if you look at World War II, what do you learn from human nature, from the Rise of the Third Reich and the rise of somebody like Hitler and the hate that permeates that

well What I've learned is that you have to nip bad things in the bud You have to there's a Latin term that says up stop Pinkie stop bad things when they're small and the deliberate hatred the the incitement of hatred against 1 community, its demonization, delegitimization that goes with it, is a very dangerous thing.

And that happened in the case of the Jews.

What started with the Jews soon spread to all of humanity.

So what we've learned is that's what we should, we should never, and I never, sit aside and say, oh, they're just threatening to destroy us.

If somebody threatens to eliminate you, as Iran is doing today, and as Hitler did then, and people discounted it, well, if somebody threatens to annihilate us, take them seriously and act to prevent it early on.

Don't let them have the means to do so because that may be too late.

So in those threats underlying that hatred, how much of it is anti-zionism and how much of it is anti-semitism?

You can't say, well, I'm okay with Jews, but I just don't think there should be a Jewish state.

It's like saying, I'm not anti-American, I just don't think there should be an America.

That's basically what people are saying vis-a-vis anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

When you say anti-Zionism, you're saying that Jewish people don't have a right to have a state of their own.

And that is a denial of a basic principle that I think completely unmasks what is involved here.

Those who oppose the Jewish people oppose the Jewish state.

If we jump from human history to the current particular moment, there's protests in Israel now about the proposed judicial reform that gives power to your government to override the Supreme Court.

So the critics say that this gives too much power to you, virtually making you a dictator.

The mere fact that you have so many demonstrations and protests, some dictatorship, huh?

There's a lot of democracy here, more ambunctious and more robust than just anywhere on the planet.

Can you still man the case that this may give too much power to the coalition government to the prime minister, not just to you, but to those who follow.

No, I think that's complete hogwash, because I think there's very few people who are demonstrating against this.

Quite a few, quite many don't have an idea what is being discussed.

You can sloganize, you know something about, not mass media right now, but the social network.

You can basically feed deliberately with big data and big money.

You can just feed slogans and get into people's minds.

I'm sure you don't think I exaggerate because you can tell me more about that.

And you can create mass mobilization based on these absurd slogans.

So here's where I come from and what we're doing, what we're trying to do, and what we've changed and what we're trying to do.

I'm a 19th century Democrat in my, small d, yes, in my views, that is, I ask the question, what is democracy?

So democracy is the will of the majority and the protection of the rights of, they call it the rights of the minority, but I say the rights of the individual.

And how do you avoid dictatorship, the opposite side?

The way you avoid it is something that was built essentially by British philosophers and French philosophers, but was encapsulated by the founding fathers of the United States.

You create a balance between the 3 branches of government, okay, the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.

And this balance is what assures the balance between majority rights and individual rights.

That balance was maintained in Israel in its first 50 years, and was gradually over overtaken, and basically broken by the most activist judicial court on the planet.

And gradually over the last 2, 3 decades, the court arrogated for itself the powers of the parliament and the executive.

So we're trying to bring it back into line.

Bringing it back into line into what is common in all parliamentary democracies and in the United States doesn't mean taking the pendulum from 1 side and bringing it to the other side.

We want checks and balances, not unrivaled power.

Just as we said, we want an independent judiciary, but not an all-powerful judiciary.

That balance does not mean bringing it back into line, doesn't mean that you can have the Parliament archness it, override any decision that the Supreme Court does.

So I pretty much early on said, after the judicial reform was introduced, get rid of the idea of a sweeping override clause that would have, with 61 votes, that's a majority of 1, you can just nullify any Supreme Court decision.

And most of the criticism on the judicial reform was based on an unlimited override clause, which I've said is simply not gonna happen.

People are discussing something that already for 6 months does not exist.

Second point that we received criticism on was the structure of how do you choose Supreme Court judges?

And the critics of the reform are saying that the idea that Elected officials choose Supreme Court judges is the end of democracy If that's the case the United States is not a democracy now There is France and other are just I don't know just about every every democracy on the planet.

So there is a view here that you can't have the sordid hands of elected officials involved in the choosing of judges.

And in the Israeli system, the judicial activism went so far that effectively, the sitting judges have an effective veto on choosing judges, which means that this is a self-selecting court that just perpetrates itself.

Again, wanna correct it in a balanced way.

And that's basically what we're trying to do.

So I think there's a lot of misinformation about that.

We're trying to bring Israeli democracy to where it was in its first 50 years.

And it was a stellar democracy, it still is.

Israel is a democracy, will remain a democracy, a vibrant democracy.

And believe me, the fact that people are arguing and demonstrating in the streets and protesting is just, is the best proof of that.

There's a lot of tech companies nervous about this judicial reform.

Can you speak to why large and small companies have a future in Israel?

I introduced dozens and dozens of free market reforms that made Israel move from $17, 000 per capita income to within a very short time to $54, 000.

That's nominal GDP per capita, according to the IMF.

And we've overtaken in that Japan, France, Britain, Germany.

Because we unleashed the genius that we have and the initiative and the entrepreneurship that is latent in our population.

And to do that, we had to create free markets.

So Israel has 1 of the most vibrant free market economies in the world.

And the second thing we have is a permanent investment in conceptual products because we have a permanent investment in the military and our security services creating basically knowledge workers who then become knowledge entrepreneurs.

There's been a decline in investments in high tech globally.

I think that's driven by many factors, but the most important 1 is the interest rate, which I think will fluctuate up and down.

But Israel will remain a very attractive country because it produces so many, so many knowledge workers in a knowledge-based economy.

And it's changing so rapidly, the world is changing.

You're looking for the places that have innovation, the future belongs to those who innovate.

Israel is the preeminent innovation nation.

And if we would say, all right, where do you have this close cross disciplinary fermentation of various skills and areas?

We used to be just telecoms, because people went out of the, you know, military intelligence, our NSA, but that's been now broad based.

So you find it in medicine, you find it in biology, you find it in agri tech, you find it everywhere, everything is becoming technologized.

And in Israel, everybody is dealing in everything.

And that's a potent reservoir of talent that the world is not gonna pass up, and in fact, it's coming to us.

We just had Nvidia coming here and they decided to build a supercomputer in Israel.

We've had Intel coming here and deciding now to invest $25 billion just now in a new plant in Israel.

Because the talent is here and the freedom is here.

So you had a conversation about AI with Sam Altman of OpenAI and with Elon Musk.

What was the content of that conversation?

What's your vision for sort of this very highest of tech, which is artificial intelligence?

Well, first of all, I have a high regard for the people I talk to, okay?

And I understand that they understand things I don't understand, and I don't pretend to understand everything, but I do understand 1 thing.

I understand that AI is developing at a geometric rate.

And mostly In political life and in life in general, people don't have an intuitive grasp of geometric growth.

You understand things basically in linear increments.

And the idea that you're coming up a ski slope is very foreign to people.

So they don't understand it and they're naturally also sort of taken aback by it, because what do you do?

So I think there's several conclusions from my conversations with them and from my other observations that I've been talking about for many years.

There is no possibility of not entering AI with full force.

Secondly, there is a need for regulation.

Third, it's not clear there will be global regulation.

Now you might say, does it come to control us?

I think that as 1 observation that I had from these conversations is if it does come to control us, that's probably the only chance of having universal regulation, because I don't see anyone deciding to, you know, to avoid the race and cooperate unless you have that threat.

Doesn't mean you can't regulate AI within countries even without that understanding, but it does mean that there's a limit to regulation because every country will want to make sure that it's not, doesn't give up competitive advantage if there is no universal regulation.

I think that right now, just as you know, 10 years ago, I read a novel.

I don't read novels, but I was forced to read 1 by a scientific advisor.

I read history, I read about economics, I read about technology, I just don't read novels.

And it was a book, it was a novel about a Chinese Americans, a future cyber war.

And I read the book, 1 sitting, called in a team of experts.

And I said, Alright, let's, Let's turn Israel into 1 of the world's 5 cyber powers and let's do it very quickly.

I think AI is bigger than that and related to that.

Because it'll affect, well cyber affects everything, but AI will affect it even more fundamentally.

And the joining of the 2 could be very powerful.

So I think in Israel, we have to do it anyway for security reasons and we're doing it.

But I think What about our databases that are already very robust on the medical records of 98% of our population?

Why don't we stick a genetic database on that?

Why don't we do other things that could bring magical, what seem are seemingly magical cures and drugs and medical instruments for that.

We have it in, as I said, in every single field.

We are moving on AI just as we moved on cyber.

And I think Israel will be 1 of the leading, 1 of the leading AI powers in the world.

The questions I don't have an answer to is, Where does it go?

There's an assumption that I'm not sure is true, that all previous, the 2 big previous revolutions in the human condition, namely the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution definitely produce more jobs than they Then they consumed Okay, that is not obvious to me at all.

I mean I could see new jobs creating and yes I have that you know that that comforting statement.

Because I think on balance, they'll probably consume more jobs, many more jobs than they'll create.

No, I don't know about the long term, but I used to have the comfort being a free market guy, always said, you know, we're gonna produce more jobs than, you know, by, I don't know, limiting certain government jobs.

We're actually putting out in the market, we'll create more jobs, which obviously happened.

You know, we had 1 telecom company, a government company, when I said we're going to, you know, we're going to create competition, they said, you're gonna run us out, we're not gonna have more workers.

Yeah, they had 13, 000 workers, they went down to 7, but we created another 40, 000 in the other companies.

Not only that, I also knew that wealth would spread by opening up the markets completely opposite to the socialist and semi-socialist creed that they had here.

They said, you're gonna make the rich richer and the poor, poor, no, and made everyone richer.

And actually, the people who entered the job market because of the reforms we did actually became a lot richer on the lower ladders of the socioeconomic measure.

But here's the point, I don't know, I don't know that we will not have what Elon Musk calls the end of scarcity.

So you'll have the end of scarcity, you'll have enormous productivity.

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#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace