Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

The central flaw in Israel's strategy is not a failure of tactics or the imposition of constraints on military force, just as the failure of the US's military strategy in Vietnam had little to do with the technical proficiency of its troops or political and moral limits on the uses of military power. Rather, the overarching failure has been a gross misunderstanding of the sources of Hamas's power.

The polls have found Hamas support and support for violence against Israeli civilians both surging after October 7th.

cult of martyrdom, increasing the allure of Hamas membership

It's an excellent book. I really recommend it.

It's about how the supply chain went completely haywire during COVID, getting down to the granular specifics of trucking and ports and shipping and all of that.

I just gave my little synopsis, but why don't you talk about why you wanted to write this book? Because you were covering all of these major backups, snafus, shortages, et cetera, as they were unfolding.

It's true that time and again, I mean, this, this to me is sort of reminiscent of how, you know, the subprime mortgage crisis gets blamed or really the derivatives crisis that then trashes the financial system, that trashes the regular economy that all of us depend on. That gets blamed on poor people, you know, who were greedy about buying houses instead of the Wall Street players who gorged on synthetic derivatives.

I just want to say to people, it is a wonky subject. It's a very readable book. You take us through a small businessman in what was it, Mississippi? Mississippi, yeah. He's trying to get his product manufactured in time for Christmas. And you use that as a story to go through each of these pieces of the supply chain, which completely collapsed during COVID and help us make sense, retrospectively, of some of the things we were experiencing in our own lives and draw some lessons from the future.

You've written one of the best books on contemporary media problems, hating people should read it if they haven't.

And I also wrote Hate Inc. there first. And I thought this is going to work better just in general if I just leave Rolling Stone and do this for a living.

I think Substack is a great thing.

I love it.

I Wonder how true that is if if Biden does lose re-election in November.

I think the entire country would forgive him at that point for doing so just on a human level like I think most people would almost think it was kind of cruel and callous if a parent had the opportunity on their way out

To pardon their son it and didn't take it at be almost weird.

But like Bill Clinton and his brother. Am I remembering that was a bill Clinton's book?

Yeah, that was Roger Clinton which the fascinating story like Bill Clinton was informed when he was

She wrote a book. She got a Pulitzer for this thing, Problem from Hell, America and the Age of Genocide, talking all about, you know, why the problem of genocide persists and how America becomes complicit and ignores these problems, etc., etc. Now here you are, here you are, suppressing a report on the horrors being inflicted on women, mothers and children in Gaza.

Have you ever read Project 25?

I'm going to endorse the Riot Act by Sonny Hostin.

I'm the author of the 2021 book "Smoke Screen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn't Want You to Know."

Kevin Sabat, who is the author of the 2021 book Smoke Screen, What the Marijuana Industry Doesn't Want You to Know.

Kevin Savage is the author of Smokescreen with the Marijuana Industry Doesn't Want You To Know.

I'm going to read from Mother Jones right here, John. Just a little bit. They were writing an article in Alex Berenson's book on weed at the time.

I was just reading this book called The Supreme Commander by Stephen Ambrose. It's a history of Eisenhower and World War II.

I think it was what James Carville wrote this book, 40 More Years, based on this concept of these young people that are growing up and there'll be a bulk of the voting population and then it's over for the Republicans.

There was a book written by Bill Bishop, The Big Sort.

In a way that, you know, Matt Taibbi really tracked this quite well in his hating book in a way that has been, that division is very profitable for cable news industry who can just pick out one random person and, you know, use them to say this is what everybody who disagrees with you has these terrible views and they're these terrible people or they're evil, they're the biggest threat to the country, etc.

I believe by, I think Finkelstein himself said, or might have been Rabbani, that this is a crack team of Israeli snipers, but apparently their rifles only worked up to 100 meters.

If you open more of their Ficklestein book and read what actually happened or watch any of the footage that actually happened.

Pagan America is an argument that there's really only one alternative to Christianity and it's not secularism, it's Paganism, right?

Pagan morality, and this holds true across vast expanses of time in geography and cultures, is that if you are not part of my group then it's my moral duty to take what you have or subjugate you for the benefit of me and my people, right?

Why should I think that all men are created equal when clearly in many ways people are not equal? We see inequality all around us and why shouldn't we adopt a pagan morality that says, you know, and this is the ancient Aristotle said this, you know, the ancient pagans they understood inequality means that some people are naturally slaves and some people are naturally rulers and if you're poor, that fate has decided that you should be poor and that's your lot.

Christianity brought a moral revolution to this pagan morality and this pagan cosmology and posited a radically new way of understanding the world in our relations and it launched a radical shift in human civilizations that had never before been seen and so America is one expression of that, right?

The Nazis were pagan. Their god was sort of the pagan volk, right? Very clearly harkening back to a pre-Christian, even in their aesthetics. It was Nordic, yeah. There's no sense in which the Nazis were a manifestation of Christian cosmology, right? This was very clearly post-Christian.

There's a great series of books called The Parting of the Waters. Three series I highly recommend people read it.

A misreading of history is to think that Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma, Alabama, March is the only thing that mattered.

We wanted to ask him actually about he wrote a whole book that he was here to promote about big tech and how big tech is too big.

And it is anti competitive, but he's super opposed to Lena Khan.

Have your father's book right behind me actually. That's an original that I found very interesting.

I mean devil's chest board by David Talbot a lot of that is like new reporting that but came out what in 2019 I mean I've got a couple years ago.