Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect Ben Shapiro's debate loss to Gavin Newsom, arguing Newsom wins by avoiding semantic traps while exposing hypocrisy in conservative Israel advocacy. They condemn Israel's Gaza campaign as genocide, citing indiscriminate civilian targeting and aid blockades, and criticize war propaganda including AI-generated corpses. Ultimately, they assert that moral consistency demands opposing genocide regardless of political alliances or anti-Semitic accusations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Canceling Shows for Two Weekends00:03:22
What's going on, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He, he is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
How are you doing today, sir?
I'm doing well.
Had a nice calm weekend.
How about you, my friend?
Same.
Same.
Had a nice calm weekend.
Sorry, Portland.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I will, I will get it.
Yeah, I guess I got to talk about this briefly.
I mentioned this on the last show we did, but that was a members-only show.
So not everybody saw it.
By the way, if you guys don't know, we do four shows a week, not three.
But the only way to get access to the fourth is to sign up over at partoftheproblem.com.
Thank you to all the fine people who do.
And then you also get to watch the shows live, ad-free, uncensored.
You get to be a part of the live chat.
We get a whole bunch of perks that you get for signing up at various different levels.
So please do if you can.
Yes.
Unfortunately, as I had mentioned, we did, we had to cancel two weekends.
We had to cancel Portland, which was supposed to be coming up next weekend, I guess.
And then we had to cancel St. Louis.
It was like, I'm going to try my best here.
I was a little bit more, I gave my honest thoughts on the members only stream, but you know, there are here's the positive thing.
In our personal lives, we're not pushovers.
Well, yeah, that's right.
Look, there's, there's moving pieces to this too.
And I know I heard that the club wasn't very happy with what I said or whatever.
I was right.
I was just telling the truth.
But of course, my agency.
Well, my agency represents other people who also, you know what I mean?
Like my agents also have other clients that they want to work at the club.
And so it's like, look, the bottom line is that it was a bit funky what we got paid, which was drastically less than we should have been.
The club Helium, great club, great staff of people, really fun comedy room.
Don't think the ownership handled it the right way.
They were paying something that is really, I think, wrong to pay a comedian who sold out their weekend.
And they essentially essentially I was tricked into the agreement.
And when confronted about this, they were like, no, that's just our deal, even though it's not.
And so yeah, anyway, I had to cancel these two weekends.
It was over a business thing.
I really feel bad about it.
I hate ever having to cancel shows.
It's particularly just because like I'm very grateful to our fans.
I really appreciate, you know, when people buy tickets and come out to a show, I appreciate that that means something.
I know how weak the dollar is these days.
I know that like people have to work very hard to make their money.
I know, you know, I know what hiring a babysitter and taking a night off and doing all of it is.
And so I hate, hate to ever cancel shows.
It was one of those things where I had no other option.
I really had no choice for these two weekends.
And it was not anything that I did wrong or that Rob did wrong.
It was on their end.
And anyway, also, I just think really stupid business on their part.
But I am making sure I've told my agent, I'm making sure we will book dates in Portland and St. Louis this year.
I will come back out for those of you guys who wanted to come see the show.
And I hope the club is giving out refunds.
Iran Regime Change Propaganda00:15:42
They should be, although I'm not sure they're doing the right thing these days.
But I really hope everybody does get a refund who wanted to come out.
Anyway, so that's kind of a bummer, but we got a whole bunch of other digs.
We are coming all around the country this year, comicdave Smith.com for any of those ticket links.
All right.
Oh, and the other thing I wanted to mention is that I did the, for any of you guys who may have missed it, I did the debate with Dinesh D'Souza the other day, which was my first debate of 2026.
It was one I was really excited about and I was really happy with the way it went.
So go check that out if you haven't already.
It was probably, and I've had some pretty big blowouts, but it was probably up there, I think, with in terms of like the response from the audience, it's probably up there with my most kind of dominant ways.
They put a poll up and I took 95% of it.
So it was a good, I thought it was a good, it was, I just thought it was a really interesting, really important discussion or debate.
And I will say, really, I give props to Dinesh D'Souza because not only does he show up to do the debates, but he's also, he's agreed to come on the show.
Like we're going to have him on in a few weeks and like continue the conversation.
And I do, it just, even when you really disagree with somebody, it's hard to not respect that.
Well, he lives in the real world.
And he likes to remind you of that in every sense.
Yes, yes, yes.
This is always the Warhawks always live in the real world.
Well, here in the real world, I got to say, I do think that we're going to be attacking Iran soon.
And I know that there's, I think there's almost like a little bit of an unjustified moment of feeling like it's not going to happen.
You know, Donald Trump obviously was deliberating about bombing Iran last week and by all indications was going to do it.
He then backed off.
But everything I'm hearing is that it's just backed off for now.
And that essentially, from what I'm hearing, I didn't think this was true at the time, Rob.
If you remember during the last members only show, we had talked about the New York Times was reporting that Netanyahu got on the phone with Donald Trump and told him not yet because we needed, you know, he wasn't ready for the Iranian response that they feared would come.
And at first I was like, yeah, that doesn't sound right to me.
But then I heard that from a couple of sources who I really do trust.
And then I saw that it was reported just the other day that we've mobilized the USS Lincoln to put in the Middle East.
So it actually does seem plausible right now that they realize that like, oh, we need more backup to be able to shoot down the missiles that come back toward Israel.
And I think, honestly, I'm guessing a little bit here.
I'm going off the sources that I have and the news and what seems most likely to me.
But it seems that perhaps even that Ben Shapiro is right, not when it comes to the American people as he was claiming, but that with Donald Trump, it does seem in some way that like this Venezuela thing convinced him that he can do these things fast and easy.
And they can do them without making all the mistakes that Bush and Obama made or something like that.
Of course, the issue with that is that we didn't do anything really in Venezuela other than capture the guy.
Like there is no, it's so, it's so interesting, man, because I see this because now I'm like, you know, after the last year, more so than ever, I'm like one of the targets of the hawks, you know, like they're, they pretended for a while to not be super aware of me, but they don't pretend that anymore.
But it's like all of them, like the way they view things is like, if shit blows up and it's not a catastrophe, then they win.
Like we got him.
Okay.
Like, what is that actually?
What win is that for me and you, Rob?
Or like a guy who, you know, drives a truck to a work site.
How did he win from Maduro being captured?
Well, that's not, it doesn't really matter.
We don't have to talk about that ever.
It's like, oh, and then there's, we liberated the people, but we're keeping the same regime.
Like, oh, so in other words, you didn't liberate the people.
Anyway, I think that, you know, I have a feeling that this is still, that this is going to happen.
I think that as I've been saying for, I don't know, into a microphone in front of a camera for like 15 years.
This is all about regime change in Iran.
That's what all of the major principles want out of this.
And they're just continuing to find excuses for how to do it.
And the main driver of this, of course, is Israel and the Israel firsters.
And they don't care if it turns into Libya or if it turns into Syria.
They're quite happy with that.
That's kind of the point.
They'd rather that than a strong Iranian government that opposes them and funds Hezbollah.
So my guess here is just that, you know, this is, they're all saying it to us, Rob, in their own words.
So why not trust them?
This is an Adelson-run administration.
Her number one priority is what's best for Israel.
And they, the rulers in Israel, have determined that what's best for them is regime change in Iran.
And so I do think that's still going to happen.
So what we can do at this point, essentially, is just try to do what we always do and just tear apart the goddamn propaganda like only we can do, Rob.
Well, I heard that the fentanyl is actually coming from Iran.
So that's the news.
Yes.
We have to liberate the people of Iran from the fentanyl that's covered.
Yeah, something like that.
Whatever it is.
The chatter from Iran is pretty incredible.
Supposedly, both Israel and Iran reached out to Russia to both agree that they weren't going to shoot each other now.
I was joking on Run Your Mouth that it was basically a call to the promoter that they don't, they need a little more time to sell the fight, that they need a longer training camp.
And then supposedly Trump convinced himself, which I'd love to see what that conversation is, that he was fully going to do it.
It's not that anyone gave him other intelligence or any other information.
He just convinced himself it wasn't a good idea.
Yeah, it's really, you know, he just says shit like this.
So you just like kind of can't ever take him seriously.
But yeah, that was a weird one.
It's, you know, I've seen one of the things that's, I guess, of value to me is when these things happen, as I always say, when we're in a storm, as I like to say, you just, people get revealed for who they are.
And you figure out like who actually has some principles and who abandons them as soon as things start blowing up and it's your, you know, dear leader in there doing it.
You know, as you could imagine, Rob, right?
Like how many people, and don't get me wrong, because there's some who are, don't fall into this camp.
Like many of the worst of the worst, I guess, don't.
But like, let's just say it was Barack Obama or it was Joe Biden saying the exact same thing about Iran right now.
There's like a serious chunk of like right-wing pundits who would oppose the thing.
But because it's Trump, they just won't.
And I think it's useful to just learn who those people are, if nothing else.
Sometimes my eyes will get opened.
I'll be like, oh, shit, I thought that guy was better.
You know, like, I figured that guy would be better on this.
But, you know, with this stuff in Iran, I saw, I mean, there's so much, the amount of just lies and war propaganda.
I don't know if you've like seen on social media, Rob, but like pictures of corpses.
And then you're like, this is AI generated.
This is, this is, then, you know, because the internet sleuths do their thing.
Then it's like, oh, this is from Sudan five years ago or something.
You know what I mean?
Like it's just like, this isn't even, it's just total lies.
I saw one.
Oh my God.
I can't remember who it was.
Scott brought it up on the Tom Woods show.
I can't remember who it was, but it was one of the guys that was like a think tanker or something like that.
But so he posted a thing about because the president of Iran was out there in one of the big, you know, marches.
And so he posts a whole thing about how, look, the president's hedging his bets.
He's going to sell out the Ayatollah if the regime change comes and try to be a part of the new government.
Except what he missed is that that was the pro-regime march.
That wasn't the protests.
He was out there like people just getting it completely wrong.
Like, oh, you don't even know what the fuck you're talking about.
You don't know the basics of this, this conflict at all.
You know, you're not even aware.
It's like all the reporting where they almost, they almost make it sound, Rob, like what?
It's like, okay, so the whole dynamic here is that there's people out on the streets protesting and the Iranian government's murdering them.
And that's the story.
Nothing else.
That's the story.
But they totally leave out the part that there were also huge pro-regime demonstrations.
They totally leave out the part that the Mossad is bragging that they have people on the ground in the street there.
They totally, you know what I mean?
Like they just leave out all those other parts and you're not supposed to think about or play with that at all.
Also, they just, you know, leave out all the parts about like, you guys said this wasn't about regime change.
It was only about the nuclear threat.
This has nothing to do with the nuclear threat.
What about the last six times we've done it in this region and it's been a catastrophe every time?
Just leave all of that out.
And then just me is just, we're just humanitarians, Rob.
Like I always say, all of a sudden, all the hawks become humanitarians in service of selling a war.
The only time they're ever humanitarian.
It's just too much.
But anyway, so there's been a lot of this propaganda going on.
And I think it's, you know, the best thing we can do is just keep tearing it to shreds.
And here was a good, there were a few interesting examples of this, but not even, not specifically related to Iran, but just to the broader kind of Israel support.
I loved, I don't know if you saw this, Rob, but Ben Shapiro sat down with Gavin Newsom.
Now, I just find this to be so interesting on so many levels because it's like, here you have like essentially, I guess in Ben Shapiro, the guy who was once kind of like the conservative champion of the internet in a very inorganic sense, but nonetheless, he ruled, you know, Ben Shapiro ruled the day when all right-wingers were getting kicked off of social media sites and demonetized and shadowbound and all of that.
Ben Shapiro never was.
He was always the guy YouTube was recommending to you.
And he also just happens to be an Israel firster.
Coincidence, I'm sure.
But so him and Gavin Newsom sitting down.
Is it just so, there's just something about it where it's like, okay, so here's Gavin Newsom, like in some ways, the face of the kind of progressive democratic establishment with the worst track record, you know, in the country, just presiding over our richest, most beautiful state and making it our poorest, most unlivable state.
And so he wants to run for president, obviously.
And so here he's going to come deal with Ben Shapiro, the guy who's just totally losing credibility in the conservative world.
But anyway, this meeting of the minds is just kind of interesting.
And it's also just interesting, Rob, as, and, you know, I'm not trying to make this about me.
And I probably do that more than I should.
It's hard not to.
It's a little bit weird when you're like in this world, but not even making it about me, but like, obviously I'm one of the people who's been challenging Ben Shapiro to debate for a long time.
There's many others.
Ben Shapiro has never debated a competent critic of Israel ever.
What?
The Mr. Debate guys, never.
And one of the things that, you know, of course, people have noticed, particularly over the last year, but it's been true for many, many years.
This was my introduction to Ben Shapiro was him calling Ron Paul a Jew hater.
He called him an alt-right Jew hater for being a non-interventionist.
But the level of contempt that Ben Shapiro has for me, for Tucker Carlson, for Candace Owens, for Nick Fuentes, for Megan Kelly, the contempt for Megan Kelly just for not having contempt for the rest of us.
That's Megan Kelly's crime.
She just kind of likes us.
We're all cool.
Like that's essentially what she's doesn't, not that she even agrees with us.
In fact, she'll say the opposite.
She still claims to be an Israel supporter.
You know what I mean?
Like, but, but she's just a nice person or whatever, or she's, she's, has friends, whatever.
So he's got all this contempt for all of us.
He does not have this contempt for Gavin Newsom.
Like, I mean, I'm not saying he doesn't disagree with him on some issues, but he doesn't think he's like a horrible person.
He'll sit down and have a conversation with him.
This is the guy who passed into law that teachers can socially transition your kids without telling you.
I don't think it's the contempt factor.
I think it's that he thinks he can win a debate with Gavin Newsom.
Well, that might be true as well.
But I'm just saying he does not speak about him or speak to him in the way that he would with any of the rest of us.
Like it's just not.
And I'm just saying, like, you claim to be Mr. Conservative.
He is the epitome of everything you've supposedly been against for the last 15 years of your career.
And yet you'll sit down with him.
Now, you make a fair point there, Rob.
Part of it also is that like he thinks he can handle this situation, although he doesn't handle the Israel part very well at all.
But anyway, so there was this weird kind of spectacular moment where like Ben Shapiro is pressing Gavin Newsom about Israel and Gavin Newsom is desperately trying to not take a position.
There's a very, there's a very strange dynamic with Israel.
We've talked about it a lot.
That's, you know, like what you say, like there was that one poll where support for Israel had fallen off 50%, 50 points down from where it had been before October 7th.
And so now you have this thing.
Now it's particularly true amongst Democrats, but it's a real dynamic within the Republican base as well, where like it's going to be true for JD Vance.
It's already true for Gavin Newsom.
Like you want to be president.
Okay.
Well, a majority of your base views Israel as a genocidal regime.
So what are you going to do?
Say you support them?
Okay.
But then 100% of the levers of power class are pro-Israel.
So like you've, who do you choose, Rob?
Your voters or your donors?
I mean, you have to try to choose both.
You can't really say no to either one of them.
So anyway, that's kind of the dynamic that Gavin Newsom's in.
Or you just have to figure out how to try and pull a Trump or you lie to your base and then you end up going for the donor class.
Anti-Semitism and Factual Arguments00:13:02
Yeah.
I mean, really the obvious answer here is you got to go to the donor class first and go listen.
You got a partner.
I'm going to say some shit.
I'm going to say some shit out there.
Okay.
I don't mean any of it.
And this is just what I got to say to get elected.
Okay.
Be cool.
And then really make sure you convince them that you mean it.
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Um, anyway, let's play uh, some of this clip from this podcast.
Yeah, it seems to have become a sort of debris requirement for Democrats who are running for office to now suggest, for example, Scott Wiener just did this, he's running for Congress, that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza.
That is, forget about anti-Semitism discussions of it, because I think that those have become really loose and people don't have a consistent definition of anti-Semitism.
Let's just talk about what's true.
That's true.
I think it's true about the definition.
I mean, we, as you know, have been struggling with that in California as it relates to a lot of laws and lately.
Of course, anti-Semitism is a fundamentally different cat than, for example, racism.
It's basically a conspiracy theory about Jewish power in the world.
And it makes me sick to my stomach.
And I say that clearly.
And not just, of course, I mean, we've tried to lead in terms of our response and we've called out and called balls and strikes in terms of the outrage.
So I would, you know, in my own framework of anti-Semitism, I think that saying overtly false things about the Jewish state is a form of anti-Semitism.
But I don't think that that is really important as much as it is.
Is it true or not?
So Democrats have now been dragged into this conversation, some drag, some run with, you know, flags waving into the conversation.
Yes.
I mean, look, Israel did not commit a genocide in Gaza.
There is no standard by which Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, just on a factual level.
Just as illegal and factual.
Let's pause it.
What is your opinion of this?
Yeah, let's pause it right here.
Okay.
Yeah.
We'll come back to this in a second.
But already, there's just so much here.
I mean, just like, first of all, again, don't you, don't you see how interesting it is to me, right?
Well, they spent all these last two years trying to get this woke right thing to stick.
It's so right here in front of your face, dude.
You're talking to Gavin Newsom.
And when you start talking about anti-Semitism, you realize you both have the exact same framework.
You both have the exact same thing.
Oh, yeah.
And we led on that.
Oh, yeah.
And we, he's talking about as a government dealing with an accusation of bigotry, claiming he led on that.
And Ben Shapiro has no problem with it whatsoever.
Like, yeah, that's right.
Ben Shapiro also, he's saying, I'll drop the anti-Semitism thing now.
You know, it's funny that he's saying he'll drop that after 20 years of ramming it down everybody's throat because it's not working anymore.
So he's trying to move to something else.
But he does let in there that his under his conception of anti-Semitism is lying about the Jewish state.
So, like, first of all, nobody's lying about what they're doing here, but getting into that in a second, that's just think about that.
That's bigotry now.
Like, if I, if I were to lie or get something wrong, like, because you can't prove everyone, like, obviously, a lot of people believe Israel is committing a genocide.
So, let's just say they're wrong about that.
Like, you get that wrong.
That makes you a Jew hater.
That makes you hate the people because you said something that's wrong about a government.
Like, imagine claiming that if I said, like, uh, if I said, you know, uh, France has a tax rate of 35%, and you were like, that's wrong.
It's not 35% or something.
And then you go, so that makes you a hater of French people.
Like, if you got something wrong about, or even if I lied about the government, how does that, how does it follow logically?
How are you not just a hysterical leftist to jump toward that means you're a bigot of some sort?
This is very bizarre.
But then, like, Ben Shapiro, and I've seen this, and this is part of why he won't ever actually debate anybody because he'll just say it like a like as if it's a factual claim that, well, it's just not true that Israel is committing a genocide.
Well, that, first of all, claim whether you call this a genocide or not isn't exactly a factual claim.
Like, it's not, it's not like if you let's say you're arguing over the number of people who have been killed.
Okay, that's a, there is an answer to that.
Um, that that doesn't, you know, mean we know the answer.
And in fact, I don't know, there was just one new study out there that put the estimate in the 600,000s people have been killed.
I've seen others that have estimated it's like 400,000.
And then the official number is like, I don't know, like close to 100,000 or something like that.
But that's just like the bodies that they've like, I guess, pulled out.
And then the questions are how many more are in the rubble somewhere.
Anyway, but that's like a fact.
Whether Israel is committing a genocide or not, the international law definition of genocide is like something like the deliberate destruction of in whole or in part of a specific ethnicity, nationality, racial, or religious group.
I'll say this, Rob.
The leading, I know this for a fact, right?
I can't remember their name, but it's the lead, it's the biggest organization of genocide scholars in the world came out this last year and said Israel is committing a genocide.
So like there's like hundreds of genocide scholars, many of whom studied the Holocaust, because that's a thing that genocide scholars pay attention to, who have come out and said, yes, this is a genocide.
Now, I don't know exactly if that proves that, you know what I mean?
Like I'm not saying like, I'm not making an appeal to authority here.
I'm not saying that means it's a genocide.
It certainly demonstrates that a lot of people who study this stuff for a living have concluded that.
And essentially, Rob, I don't know.
I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, but this is why I look, I, if you remember, Rob, I stayed out of the genocide conversation for like a year and a half of this thing.
For a year and a half, I said, I'm not calling it a genocide, because then it just gets into a whole debate about what a genocide is.
Now we're just debating semantics.
So I'd rather just argue this is clearly wrong and grotesque.
So we should be against it.
But it was after, and it must have been, I don't know, like 18 months of the thing had already happened.
Like Gazans were just getting slaughtered.
And then it was when they did the food blockade, when Smotrich was out bragging that not one grain of wheat will get into Gaza.
And they had a full blockade on all aid for like three months.
And this was after like 18 months of destroying the place that I just went, that's a genocide, man.
I don't know.
You're not fighting war at all.
You can't even claim to be fighting war against Hamas.
You're fighting a war against the civilian population.
And it's a war of destruction.
It's a, it's, you know, like, I don't know.
That's a good term for it, genocide.
And so, again, for look, South Africa way early in the conflict brought a whole case to the UN where they basically the whole case was just quotes of what the Israeli leaders were saying about them.
Look at what the Israeli leaders are saying.
They're saying that they're Amalek.
They're saying that the goal here is to destroy the people.
They're saying that they're going to make Gaza unlivable.
They're saying that the women and children are fair game too, like all types of quotes.
And not just from like random IDF soldiers, although there's a lot of that, but from ministers and prime ministers and Knesset members, all types of people with power.
And then, Rob, you just look at the aerial pictures of Gaza and you go, yeah, they did what they said they were trying to do.
They said they were trying to make it unlivable.
And they did.
They destroyed the entire place.
I'm like, anyway, I guess at the very least, Ben Shapiro does not, you know, facts don't care about your feelings thing here.
You don't have an objective fact claim here.
This is like, yeah, there's a pretty strong argument that that is the correct word.
And then obviously, people also like using the word because it's intentionally needling and provocative.
And it's, it's holding a mirror up to the supposed, you know, the Zionists and going like, oh, your whole goddamn story is that you people are the victims of genocide.
But look at what you're doing to this other powerless group of people.
I don't know.
Any thoughts, Rob?
Yeah, I definitely don't think it's anti-Semitic to say that what Israel's doing is a genocide, particularly against the backdrop of everyone calling Donald Trump a Nazi for forever.
So like speaking to your point, people use bold words to convey their outrage towards behavior.
I very rarely agree with Gavin Newsom or agree with his tactics.
But in this case, the genocide conversation, it's just too academic for me.
I'm in the lane of, hey, listen, what they're doing is wrong.
I can condemn them for what they're doing is wrong.
Once you start trying to like apply words to it, it's a little bit like if you go, oh, you know, Rob, you're a feminist.
Well, what do you define feminism?
All right, I guess I meet that definition, but I don't really think that's what you're conveying with the word.
So I hear the word genocide, I think of six million people being shoved into ovens.
Now, I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what happened.
Numbers on the Rwanda genocide or the Armenian genocide to go, oh, you know, there are much lesser genocides.
We use that term over here.
I don't, I don't want to sit down and do the academics of what a word is and how it applies.
So like, I don't care.
What they're doing is wrong.
Well, also because it's tedious and it's pedantic and kind of irrelevant in a way.
Like if it's, if it's wrong and horrible and horrific and why do I care that it's not a genocide?
Like, yeah, right.
Whatever.
Like, it's just, you're trying to get to the argument that actually matters, which is in a sense, like, I think I know what you mean, but like for non-academics like us, it's like, yeah, dude, we're not like, we're not going to a university to just work on the muscle of arguing.
You know what I mean?
Like, we're here to get to the bottom of this in the real world.
So let's skip all that bullshit and get to what matters.
So yeah, I agree with that.
But of course, the idea even that, I mean, what Ben Shapiro, what facts don't care about your feelings really has here is that people call a really horrible thing a name of an even more horrible thing.
And that's wasist.
That's what Ben Shapiro is bringing here.
Like, it's just, you can't, and, and look, I mean, this is why the guy will always avoid any of these fights.
And I do think it's kind of, I mean, it's, it's, look, I'm not saying, because people like accuse me of saying this.
I'm not saying that like, oh, Ben Shapiro's running from me.
That means he's a coward or something like that.
It's like the fact that he's running from anyone, like, especially in a time where, like, dude, everybody, everybody, including like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh, have at least like faced down Tucker or face down someone else talking about this and had to like be in a Piers Morgan has the most high-profile debates like four times a week or something like that.
The debate, the debating scene has like exploded.
Everyone's kind of doing this now.
This is kind of the thing.
Like it's like, okay, it's a big component to like kind of being in this in this world is like, okay, you give your thoughts, you, you, you tell people what your take is, but then we want to see you getting some pushback on that.
Superpower Com New Year Reset00:02:38
And how do you deal with that?
And how do you deal with this criticism or this criticism?
And the fact that he hasn't done it with anyone, like there's holes, I mean, there's like, it doesn't have to be a right winger or something like that.
It doesn't have to certainly have to be like a white nationalist type or something like that.
But there's just like Norman Finkelsteins and people who it's like, how come you don't sit down with one of them and have the debate?
You were supposed to be the guy who brought the argument to people.
Instead, you'll sit down with Gavin Newsome, you know, who you know won't go far enough.
You know what I mean?
In calling you out on your bullshit.
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Proportionality in Killing Claims00:10:32
Anyway, all right, let's play the rest of this clip.
My opinion is I understand the tendency for people to make that to assert that.
Why?
On the basis of the images and just pause it right there.
Pause it right there.
And you can even bring it back just a few seconds to get that.
So even Gavin Newsom here, right?
Like you can just imagine, imagine if Ben Shapiro were to like bring this question to one of us.
You know, what?
You know, like Gavin Newsom says, hey, look, I can understand the tendency to call a real horrible thing a word that's a more horrible thing or from, you know, their framework here.
And he goes, well, why?
Why can you understand that tendency?
And what Gavin Newsom gives him is the images and the proportionality.
Okay.
Now, that is the answer of somebody who doesn't read the news because that's what these politicians do.
They don't read the news.
He's vaguely aware that a lot more Palestinians have been killed.
And he's vaguely aware that there's a lot of images on social media about those babies dying.
But like, he doesn't really know anything beyond that.
Like, he's not like us.
Like, he's not like every day reading the news every day following.
This is, you know, we've talked about this a lot in the past.
There's this dynamic.
Politicians don't really read the news like that.
That's just not the world they're in.
Like me and you, our job is to do this show four times a week.
So what do we do in the morning when we wake up, Rob?
We have some coffee and we read the news because you got to know what's going on in the world.
And so that's our job.
But Gavin Newsom's job is to like be at a photo op and then go to like a shovel ready job project and then go to a fundraising cocktail party.
And then it's just a different thing.
You know what I mean?
Like it's not his job is to is to meet with lobbyists.
This was the great thing when our buddy Liam Crossgrove went down to DC and asked them all about what they thought about the fact that Netanyahu had been propping up Hamas for all these years and no congressman's ever heard of it.
They go, I'm unfamiliar with that report.
What are you talking about?
And the report is the news.
You have to, anyway.
So like if you do read the news, then you'd go like, well, what's with the tendency for people to call it a genocide?
You'd be like, okay, well, there's about, you know, a couple dozen doctors in Gaza who have reported treating multiple targets who have been, multiple toddlers who have been used as target practice, that they're shooting babies in the groin and in the head.
Multiple doctors reporting this, including two American doctors.
There was the example I just gave where they cut off food for three months to a war-torn, impoverished area.
There is the, you know what I'm saying?
Like there's like example after example after example.
There's the fact that IDF soldiers have gone on record and confessed that they were ordered to shoot into crowds of desperate civilians trying to get a little bit of food.
This was after the three-month blockade when they finally reopened it and these desperate people are pouring into these food sites and they would just shoot live ammo at them for crowd control.
Ended up killing several hundred of them.
You know, anyway, if you do read the news, it would be like, oh, how?
Like just pull up anti-war.com.
Read Dave DeCamp's last thousand articles.
And there's just example after example after example where they're just going after civilians, intentionally targeting civilians.
Forget my whole meta argument about how it's always intentional.
You know what I mean?
It was, which is true.
But like, no, actual examples where it's not like even the claim is that a Hamas guy was in there and we had to get him.
So it's acceptable that there's collateral damage.
No one was even claiming that a Hamas guy was in the crowd of people trying to get food.
They're just saying as crowd control, we use live ammo.
And they admitted it.
There's a major piece in Horetz about this.
It was called like It's a Killing Field, something killing field was the title of the piece.
And they had like, they had one IDF soldier on record and then a bunch anonymous who said it just in that piece.
So anyway, you know, there's like a lot of examples like that.
So again, whether you want to get into the semantics, like I think, Rob, you said this, this is fine.
This is a debate for genocide scholars to have, whether you call this a genocide or not.
But that's why people are calling it that.
All right.
You want to?
I like this next moment a lot.
Let's roll a clip.
Okay, let's roll it.
And the proportionality.
It doesn't mean genocide.
No, no.
And by the way, I agree with you.
And international and proportionality doesn't mean that if you kill my child and I then kill seven criminals, that I've been disproportionate.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think the intendancy on the basis.
You got to pause it already right there.
Because isn't that, isn't it?
Look, look how much he just falls apart.
Look how terrible he is at just arguing this.
So see, even in your analogy there, Ben, they were all criminals, right?
That's kind of the whole point right there.
That you view them all as criminals.
You know, Jews, I remember this was the thing.
It was that guy, Joel Berry from the Babylon B.
And this is what makes things like this so amazing to me, right?
Because this isn't like, it's not as if like I brought up a line of argumentation that you weren't expecting.
And you kind of said something that like doesn't really make sense.
And then you were like, okay, well, let me think about that.
Cause that happens to all of us, right?
But this has been the argument for two years now.
That's the backdrop.
This has been the thing that is, you know, the big issue that the big issue of the last two years that people have been debating about what Israel is doing to Gaza, Israeli control over our government, all this stuff.
And people like the Babylon B guys, they've been, this is, they've been in this fight.
So this is after all this time of thinking about it, this is where their mind state is.
They still haven't like grappled with what the argument is.
So he goes to me.
If you remember, it was when the when the peace deal first went through and phase one had been carried out.
And phase one, you know, included like an increase in some aid going into Gaza, cutting back on the number of Gazans that Israel's killing.
They're still killing Gazans, by the way, this whole time, but in substantially lower numbers.
And so that's good.
And there were some prisoner swaps.
And so I said that.
I said something, I had a tweet something like that, where I just went like, well, I'm not so optimistic about the long term here.
And we'll see if this thing holds, but at least there's some prisoner swaps.
There's some more aid getting in and less people are dying right now.
That's at least better than where we were a week ago.
And he responded back irate that I had said, or I think I said hostage swaps.
He was irate that I had said hostage swaps.
He goes, no, Dave.
He goes, Israel got back 20 hostages or whatever the number was that time, but they, the Palestinians, got back 2,000 terrorists.
Now, of the 2,000 hostages that Israel had given back, 1,700 of them were held without charges.
They were just people rounded up during the war.
They didn't even face a military tribunal.
They had nothing.
But he referred to all of them as terrorists.
And you're like, yeah, that's the point, dude.
That's the genocide claim right there that we see 2 million people here.
You don't get to just decide they're all terrorists.
That's the genocidal claim where you go, this entire group is evil, and therefore we have a right to kill all of them.
That's the thing.
So like in Ben Shapiro's mind, well, yeah, that does kind of work, Rob, right?
If you said, hey, someone killed one of my family members, but then I killed seven criminals.
Who the fuck cares that it's seven?
But that's because they're criminals.
We're talking about the three-year-old girl.
I'm sorry.
That's the whole debate right there.
No, I do not look at a three-year-old girl as a fucking terrorist.
I don't look at a little kid.
Like that.
I'm sorry.
So that's that's where your analogy falls.
You're not acknowledging the innocent people, the innocent children, which I think is what most of the outrage is about with this.
All right.
Let's go.
That's what I picked up on was just even his usage of the word criminals in the proportionality.
That's well, you're kind of admitting, oh, so if they weren't criminals, then there would be a problem with it.
Well, then that's what people are objecting to.
And there's like, and there's another weasel trick that he's pulling here of he tried to assert you're anti-Semitic if you call this a genocide.
And Newsom is basically responding to, well, I understand why people would be calling it a genocide based off of what they're seeing and why like that might be wrong in them to say so, but it's a reasonable.
And then basically Shapiro's dropping like the first claim and now he's just going to the second claim of, well, you're calling it a genocide and it's not supposed to be called a genocide.
He's like, no, but there's enough here that it's not anti.
It's a different argument to say, is this a genocide or are people anti-Semitic for calling it a genocide?
Those are two separate arguments.
And so Newsom's defending the secondary one of, I don't think people are being anti-Semitic by calling this a genocide because there's enough happening here.
And then Ben Shapiro is trying to fight him on, well, it's not a genocide.
Well, that wasn't really your claim.
Your claim was people are anti-Semitic if they call this a genocide.
So that's the first weasel move.
And then his second weasel move is this pivot of, well, the proportionality is against criminals.
Yeah.
Well, it's not against criminals, which is why it's not anti-Semitic if people are calling the action a genocide.
Because Israel's not just going after criminals.
Even at the beginning of the war, when you guys claimed, oh, well, these are all military targets, really?
Go look at the footage of all the destroyed rubble now and tell me all that was just intended to help to hit military targets.
Yeah, the thing is that you come back to being genocidal.
I mean, it's like, cause if you're going to say they're all military targets, you're essentially telling me that 2 million people, including their children, are all legitimate military targets.
What?
Reframing Genocide Debate Logic00:09:59
I mean, it's crazy.
Listen, I mean, it's crazy to hold children accountable for the sins of their parents.
Like, if I were to go out and kill someone, the idea that you would then think you could bring violence to my four-year-old or my seven-year-old, you know what I mean?
Like, that'd be insane enough.
And I'm their parents.
These, most of these kids just like just happened to be born in the same strip as the guys who did October 7th.
It wasn't their dad or their uncle or even their uncle's friend.
For the vast majority of them, it was just like the relationship is like what you have to like a gangster in Chicago or something like that.
It's like you're, it's like if, I mean, I guess you don't live in Chicago, but like pick, pick someone who lives in Chicago.
You'd be like holding them responsible for what the bloods do.
You're, they did a, they committed violence, therefore we could kill your kids.
It's like, I don't know if you, if that's your logic, then like, yeah, it's kind of reasonable when people compare that to genocide.
Seems like where I would, you know, like seems like where any reasonable person would go with that.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing of trying to reconcile the proportionate nature of how the war was ultimately conducted.
I question, why do you feel the need to create a permission structure for that sort of stuff?
I mean, meaning it's not true.
Why not just say it's not true?
Yeah, look, I don't know the definition.
I don't know the legal threshold.
That's not my opinion.
So I don't, I don't share any opinion as it relates to genocide.
I do not agree with that notion that you do understand that if you accuse Israel of committing a genocide, that now puts Israel in the position of it should be a pariah state because states that commit genocide should be pariah states.
So granting legitimacy to that position inherently.
I'm not granting legitimacy.
I'm just saying the devastation in Gaza at the human level.
You've got four.
Of course it's terrible.
No, but I think it's also important to absorb that a little bit more, just as it was sick and we were clear in our condemnation, these people like me, as it relates to what Hamas did in that act of barbarism and terrorism.
Yeah, there's crystal clear that's terrorism and wartime collateral damage, of course.
And if we refuse to acknowledge that according to your definitions and we end up fighting it collateral.
Yeah, I guess if you want to put fancier terms on the activities, then sure, there's a clear, it's the same as when you want to go after anyone in America because you declare them a terrorist.
You can throw a term on anything and then justify the action.
You know, again, this is something I've been arguing now in debates for two years and pretty overwhelmingly just dominating in these debates because this is just such an indefensible position.
Now, first of all, I should, before I even get to the indefensible position, and I know, you know, like, look, I mean, I know we've, we've talked about this stuff before, guys, but like, this is the dominant kind of fight.
So we got to keep shredding this stuff.
Number one, wasn't it kind of fascinating there at the beginning how Ben Shapiro almost reveals that he's arguing from his conclusion?
Like he's going like, yeah, but if you call it genocide, then Israel's the bad guy.
And if Israel's the bad guy, that can't be right.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's always like, wait, what?
So you can't, the reason you can't say they're committing a genocide is because, well, if they were committing a genocide, then the right thing to do would be for us to stop supporting them.
Okay, but that's only if you take it as a given that the right answer can never be that we're to stop supporting them.
Maybe that is the right answer.
What a thought.
And so, you know, like Ben Shapiro going, why are you giving permission?
Why are you giving this a safe?
It's just so it's like all of them kind of pretending that they don't know what's really going on here.
Like, is Gavin Newsom really giving any of us permission?
What would happen if Gavin Newsom said, stop?
You don't have permission anymore.
Nothing, right?
In fact, Gavin Newsom would be going along with Ben Shapiro.
He's just simply making a political calculation here, Rob.
Obviously, that's all he does.
And that's what he's doing.
Like, I can't, I can't say anyone who said this is genocide is bad because that's like 70% of my voters.
So I can't say they're bad for saying that.
That's not going to work.
But he's got a pretty solid little argument here to say, well, I certainly can understand it.
I mean, it is horrible.
And I do love, I did love the moment that he had there where he goes, look, dude, you think, think about how horrible what's being inflicted on the people of Gaza is.
And Shapiro goes, yeah, of course.
And then he goes, no, absorb that.
Actually, liked that moment a lot because that is the thing that they do try to like yada yada over.
You know, I remember, and I think it was one of the things I watched back like parts of my interview on the trigonometry podcast.
I don't really like watching my own stuff that much, but I watched part of that.
And it was there was one moment in it where I was like, oh, yeah, I really let them off the hook there and I should have pressed more.
And it was something like that.
Like, I started getting into the details of how gruesome the way Israel is conducting the war is.
And they went, Yeah, okay, we're not arguing with that.
But anyway, and then I just let them kind of move on.
And I was like, No, I really should have like pressed on that.
And been like, No, come on.
Like, what if you started talking to me about how gruesome October 7th was?
And I just went, Yeah, no, obviously, but get to that.
It's like, no, sit there and take that for a second like that.
And as soon as you start doing this, what's interesting is even as Gavin Newsom is just trying to ride the fence here, right?
Or sit on the fence, he's trying his best to be like, Let me just going up his butt and he likes it.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's right.
Uh, and he's, and that's legal in California.
You can do it right there on the sidewalk.
Um, but there is, he's just trying to ride the he's just trying to be like, let me just say enough that it doesn't piss off either side here too much.
He's just trying to be a politician.
But even as he starts coming up with something, what does he immediately do, right, Rob?
He immediately goes, Well, look, what's happening?
You got to admit what's happening to these people is fucking terrible, right?
Like, you at least got to admit that.
This is really, really awful.
What's happening to a whole lot of like real human beings.
But then he goes, and look, same thing on October 7th.
It was really, really awful.
What happened to all these human beings?
And then Ben Shapiro has to retreat into this like construct of like, no, but it's different because this one was collateral damage and this one was intentionally targeting civilians or something like that.
But think about the point I guess I'm making first of all is that look what Gavin Newsom's already done.
This is what happens when you just start thinking logically.
You become a human and you go, I don't know, dude, it's so horrible what's happening to some little girl in Gaza.
And it's so horrible what happened to somebody at a rave concert in outside of Gaza, you know?
And already, what are you doing when you become a human being?
You're just putting them on an equal level.
You know, you're going, they got people and you got people.
But that is kryptonite to the Zionists.
You're not allowed to do that.
It can't be like, oh, we look at them as humans and us as humans.
So we got to reframe this into this.
And then, of course, the thing, Rob, is I think what you were kind of getting at at first, which is the thing I've been saying in these debates for years now, is that, so you're going to go, yeah, but that's different because it's collateral damage.
Like, is it really, though?
Because, like, in a lot of ways, it's not.
Even if you want to argue, like, even if we just left out all the examples I used where they're deliberately targeting the civilian population.
But if you just look at, I don't know, like, you know, you, you blow up a building and there was, there was a bad guy in the building.
And then also in the building were like a couple eight-year-olds.
And then there's like an eight-year-old who's crushed under the rubble and is screaming for his mother.
And the mother's outside with no bulldozers or excavators or whatever.
And, you know, they're just sitting there like while their eight-year-old gets crushed to death, hearing them scream with that not being like, I'm saying, in effect, that was still done to those people.
You know, that's the part that you really can't get away from.
And if you took that action knowing that that was what was going to happen, as Israel did over and over and over again, then it was intentional, or the word intentional doesn't mean anything.
And so, like, yes, you took an intentional act that results in a real mother and a real eight-year-old going through the most miserable thing your mind can like even conceive of the stuff of nightmares, you know?
Letting Go of Political Anger00:11:24
And so I don't know.
Like, Rob, if that were to happen to you or your, you know, your family, I know you got little nieces and nephews and stuff like that.
Like, if that were to happen to your family, I think to me, if that were to happen to my children, does it matter?
Would it mean a whole lot to you if you went to don't if it's any consolation, it was collateral damage.
This wasn't like, don't worry.
I know you just went through that.
I know that was just done to you, but just so you know, it wasn't towel heads breaking over a fence and shooting people with guns.
It was, it was done by an IDF fucking, you know, fighter pilot or something.
Why does that change it so much?
Like, I don't think it really does.
And like, you know, people, I think that the argument, people take it as a given that that's somehow different because we have a fancy name for it.
We call it collateral damage.
But again, like, if any, if any group of criminals ever used that, like, just imagine if, if Hamas broke out of Gaza and just, you know, let's say they, they got some, some, their hands on some sophisticated missiles, which they never seem to have.
But let's just say they did and they just started like bombing IDF bases in Tel Aviv and also blew up a whole bunch of like apartment buildings.
You think they'd be saying that's not terrorism?
It's just collateral damage.
It's a, it's a totally ridiculous like standard that you'd only hold one side to and never the other.
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By the way, they did kill a bunch of IDF soldiers on October 7th.
I mean, yes, clearly they didn't, they weren't like aiming at them and then hit the kids in the concert.
They killed a lot of civilians as well.
But like, I don't know.
It just doesn't.
I think it's, it's, I just think this argument on a basic human level completely falls flat.
But he said fancy words really quickly.
Yeah.
Well, that is what he does.
Here, let's let's finish this clip.
I just, I have stronger opinions.
It wasn't just collateral.
You know, really, you think it is right?
I think some of the double tapping issues.
I have a lot of issues with how BB ultimately conducted the war.
I personally do.
And I have a lot of issues that are also painted on the basis of the conversation I had with him a few weeks later after October 7th, the way he talked about the Palestinians.
I kept talking about Amas.
He kept talking about the Palestinians.
I kept coming back to Hamas and then ultimately how the war was conducted.
Not saying it was a genocide.
I'm not.
But I have issues.
What is the thing that he's?
Yeah.
So again, what's just kind of revealed there, Rob, what is it like?
Kevin Newsom doesn't read the news.
He doesn't know stuff.
The best he could come up with was double tap and the way the war is conducted, but has no specifics to like point out.
But make no mistake about it here, because this is kind of what's so interesting about this.
Israel has become, it's kind of like, you know, in those, like, in like an old timey, like pirate movie, Rob, where they'd make you like walk the plank and then you'd have like an anchor like tied to your leg.
Okay.
Israel's become the anchor, but it's not tied to your leg.
You're just holding on to it and you're drowning because you're holding on to this anchor.
And it's like, you could just let go and rise up to the top and go take a nice breath.
But these people are like, I can't let go of this thing.
But just think of it.
Zoom out for a second here, Rob, and go, Ben Shapiro, who Ben Shapiro was billed as 10 years ago.
Okay.
Ben Shapiro, the fucking wizard, the highest verbal IQ, fastest talking, best debater, gunslinger in the conservative world.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
He'll go up against any leftist and tear them up, tear them to shreds like that, Ben Shapiro.
And then think about all the years of wokeism and the years of COVID.
And now you got like the lockdown governor.
I mean, I guess Cuomo, but he's defeated, you know, the lockdown governor who's left standing.
And he's, and Ben Shapiro is coming in to battle that guy.
And he's losing.
He's losing.
Ben Shapiro is getting smoked by Gavin Newsom right now.
Anybody who looks at that, I mean, you could obviously, you know, knock Gavin Newsome for trying to, you know, you know, basically not take a position or something like that.
But anyone who's looking at that right now goes, ah, dude, I mean, Ben Shapiro's grasping for straws and Gavin Newsom's making at least a few undeniably good points.
And just think about that.
Like it used to be, these guys used to be the ones who could go out and win any debate.
Like that was the whole, the whole aura, remember?
That it was like, it was like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and these guys, like the Steven Crowder type guys, change my mind, you know, blah, blah, blah.
We'll go out.
I'll debate all you guys.
We'll take on all of you.
We'll win because we have our ideas have merit and you guys just have woke scolding and all this.
And now Ben Shapiro comes in and tries to woke scold Gavin Newsom.
That's like his angle to go to start with like, it's anti-Semitic and you're opening the door for bigotry or something like this.
And just and just has nothing.
It's like they gave up on the fact that they could win the debate and win over the American people because they just won't let go of support of this obviously indefensible thing.
Like it's just crazy.
And I understand it.
Believe me, me and Rob are both Jewish.
We both got Jewish friends and family and stuff.
I understand supporting Israel is all tied into a lot of people's Jewish identity.
But it's like what's happening almost in a way is that you're just so like, like I said, you're just so committed to holding on to this anchor that you're going to drown yourself.
You could just let it go.
You could just let it go and go, yeah, I don't support this shit.
It's crazy.
Are you fucking kidding me?
I mean, yeah, it was a bad terrorist attack, but like, Jesus, man, reinforce your border.
Do some facial recognition.
Even if you're going to do some strikes, some precision strikes or something, do something.
But like, even my God send the military in and occupy the place and, you know, whatever.
I mean, you do, but you just fucking destroyed it.
Are you out of your mind?
And for those people saying like, yeah, okay, fair enough.
Maybe, maybe I would have been critical of the military occupation too.
Fair enough.
But like.
At least you'd have a leg to stand on going, we had to go in there so that we could bring these people to justice so that we could take them.
But to just like carpet bomb the place into non-existence and then turn around and think you're going to win an argument with anybody, that that's defensible.
You tell me, Rob, how does this work?
Well, with all that said, it feels like Newsom's holding the exact same anchor.
Well, he won't exactly let go of it.
Yeah, like Newsom's kind of like, well, maybe if like I drop it for a minute and then I could like come back and get it again.
And then I kind of, no, I mean, look, Newsom is, and again, I don't, I guess that's, that's actually a good point too, because I should, you know, I'm too focused on trying to trash Ben Shapiro.
Cause the other thing, and this is partly why we did this for the episode here today, is that I just think there's, it's, it was a very interesting meeting of like the collapsing Israel lobby and the Democratic hopeful who still is, even though I've been on record saying I think AOC is more likely than Gavin Newsom at this point, probably still, my guess is the odds on favorite, like on betting sites and stuff.
I check Calci, but I bet Gavin Newsom is the favorite to be the nominee right now.
That would be my assumption.
And so the other thing that's really interesting here is that you're having him kind of test run how he might talk about this issue.
But like I, you know, I've talked about this with JD Vance, but a very similar dynamic is true on the Democratic side.
In fact, a more stark dynamic, where I just don't think this is going to be good enough.
I think this is one of these issues.
It's kind of like abortion's kind of like that, although abortion's never exactly been the central issue of American politics.
But like you kind of can't halfway this.
I mean, I guess you can a little bit with abortion.
Like you could have your like 10 week rules, but even that's pretty goddamn pro-life at that point.
Like if you're telling pro-choicers that abortion is illegal for, you know what I mean?
Like for the entire rest of the pregnancy, you know, like if you say there's 10 weeks, you're still saying 30 weeks are illegal or something like that.
I don't know.
I think with this thing, it's just if people are, if there's people who view something as a genocide, this isn't going to be good enough.
You have to oppose the thing in order to win them over.
And for the Zionist crazies, this is way too much already.
You know, like you've kind of, so you're in this situation where by trying to walk the tightrope, you actually repel both groups.
So he's not, he's not winning in that sense.
Like this isn't a political winner, but he did fuck up Shapiro in this exchange.
All right.
Any final thoughts, Rob?
Well, man, we're going to have a stack next episode because there was a ton of shit that we didn't get to.
So back tomorrow.
Check out the Run Your Mouth podcast.
I just did a great episode with Gene Epstein along with the solo pod and porching episode one and two are still out there.
So if you haven't checked them out already, please go check them out.