The Feudal Future Podcast .
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Feudal Future Podcast . I'm Marshall Teplansky , I'm Joel Kotkin and today we are delighted to have George Gilder with us . George is just one of the most broad-ranging thinkers and doers in society .
He is the author of the Gilder Technology Report and has recently written a book called the Israel Test how Israel's Genius Enriches and Challenges the World , and it's a fascinating book that looks at a very , very timely topic . George , thank you so much for joining us .
Well , it's great to be here , I still around , friends , you are .
You are amongst friends .
Well , so tell us about the Israel test . What was the genesis of this book , if you don't mind the pun ? What's the genesis of this book that got you going on the Israel topic ?
I saw Easy Chip . I discovered Easy Chip . Saw on easy chip , right I I discovered easy chip and uh , before it really had a product or anything , I heard , uh , ellie brooke what was the proctor ?
uh give a speech and and I started writing about easy chip and easy and tell us about easy , because for the people who don't know it , EasyChip uses network processors , which and Migdal HiMac in Israel and I visited there and EasyChip got absorbed by Mellanox which in turn , five years ago got absorbed by NVIDIA .
And when NVIDIA absorbed Mellanox and they'd been collaborating with Mellanox before then , before that they were a several hundred million dollar company and now they're a punitively three trillion dollar company and they also animate all the technologies of all the other leading AI-based artificial intelligence , spearheading the stock market and our economy and our prospects and
our defenses and our and just occurred to me that I went and discovered that Intel , which is the . I'd written a whole book about Intel and without focusing on its real origins . In a way its origins are in Silicon Valley , but Dov Froman invented the non-volatile memory and made it possible and produced all its profits .
80% of its profits for the first 10 years came from Israel and their big way for them was that Curiat got and after it moved from Jerusalem and the Haifa Design Center produced the microprocessor in the IBM personal computer which ignited the whole computer age in the United States .
So I just it seems to me that great illusion in Washington that somehow Israel is a claimant or dependent on the United States , and I think we're dependent on Israel .
We're at least as dependent on Israel , as Israel is in the United States and today , with our politics being debauched and our universities corrupted , I think Israel , we're yet more dependent on Israel .
Israel is the real leader of the West and I showed Ronald Reagan his first microchip and explained it to him and said it would enable a strategic defense initiative that he was anti-missile systems . That he was then entertaining and how the case against that is missiles was wrong because chips were coming , but the US never really did it very well .
Patriot missiles failed against guns , but Israel created the Iron Dome , the David Sling , the Arrow 3 , and now the Iron Beam is zapping missiles out of the air with laser beams . That's kind of experimental , but Israel probably leads the world in that .
So beyond defense . You know ? Just a quick stop for our listeners and our viewers . What George is talking about are really core , fundamental R&D innovations that Israel is talking about . The fact that you have a computer on your desk is largely due to the innovations that George is talking about .
That George is talking about the fact that we have AI and the growth of the scale of AI , which is really what Israel has created , is all part of what George is talking about . But , George , it seems to me that it's even beyond computing technology or data processing technology that Israel has been leading in other areas of society as well .
What are some of those areas ?
Well , you know the agriculture Joel was talking about . I mean the amazing fact about Israel when they talk about now stealing somebody's land or something .
The land was almost worthless , it had been completely degraded , it was a desert and Jordan was richer in the mid-19th century when Jews first came , not first came 19th century when Jews first came , not first came , but amount of land four-fold , just the vast waterworks , all kinds of new construction and made the desert bloom while reducing total water consumption ,
fresh water consumption by 10% . So you get 16-fold expansion of the economy and agriculture booming . Israel now is a big agricultural exporter $2.8 billion a year , I think , of agricultural exports .
Amazing what do you think ?
With a 10% decrease in the use of water , and people talk about a water crisis in California or a water crisis in the planet , but Israel shows that it's a totally spurious crisis . It's perfectly possible to have a desert and make it bloom and support a hugely increased population .
Arab population rose from 200,000 to 300,000 to 5.5 million in the Palestine area , with longevity increasing from 35 years to 77 years during this period . I mean it's astounding . Israel really is a key , is absolutely a spearhead of the world economy is a key , is absolutely a spearhead of the world economy .
What are the cultural reasons for this ? I mean , obviously Israel doesn't have natural resources , it's in a precarious situation , it spends an enormous amount of its budget on defense . What are the cultural issues ? Because it seems to me that a lot of the anti-Israel agitation is really based on sort of a rejection of certain sort of cultural factors .
What is your sense on that ?
Well , I think you know , Israel is really the source of Western civilization , and a lot of people want to bring down Western civilization . They take wealth for granted but somehow imagine that they must have been stolen from somebody else . And it's just the great , delusionary cultural suicide that's being perpetrated in our universities .
Our lavish , overwrought universities are teaching just a suicidal theme , a real nihilist theme , and Israel's a source of monotheism and a universe that makes sense . And thus there really was the fount of science . The crucial assumptions of science were spearheaded by Jews . I mean , john von Neumann is really the paramount figure in the modern era .
I mean , people talk about Einstein and all the other great figures , but John von Neumann really is the paramount mind . The game theory and economics , as well as this monotheistic assumption of an intelligible universe that led him in the end to become a Catholic on his deathbed , believe it or not .
John von Neumann sort of subsumes all the themes of Western civilization and Israeli , but he persuaded the or the Weizmann Institute , I can't remember which by the first big computer , weizack was , and also persuaded Israel , the first big computer , wisac , and also persuaded Israel to acquire nuclear weapons , both against Einstein's advice .
So they're , von neumann really prevailed and , uh and uh , he was driven out austria by the nazis .
His family was yeah and as you look at um , you know it's interesting . You should talk about the university issue because obviously we've been through um , you know , a year of uh , kind of renewed upheaval and I have a daughter who's at sarah lawrence , so I've gotten the front row seat .
Yeah , well , and we , you know , a year of kind of renewed upheaval , and I have a daughter who's at Sarah Lawrence , so I've gotten a front row seat . Yeah Well , we've seen protests everywhere . We've seen it . We've even had at Chapman a small protest group that had an encampment which is no longer around .
But you have been an observer of the political , economic and social world for quite a while . How do you place this in context of where we're at today ? How different is this , say , from the 60s or from the ? You know ?
And before you answer , one thing I find is when I went to Berkeley in the early 70s , I never thought of anti-Semitism as an issue . The fact that I worry about it for my daughter in 2023 , 2024 is a shock to me .
No , it is a shock . Well , I think the 30s found us demented , or more demented , I mean the 1930s . We've heard a stock market crash into a 10-year depression , with communists dominating our government widely , and you know the amazing discovery which really to people of our generation infiltration by deceitful power grabbers and nihilists of the left .
It's an amazing fact and it's what we're facing today . But we survived the 30s , although only with a war .
Yeah , at high cost .
But , George , let me ask you this my father . When I look at who's funding some of the really crazy stuff out there , I find it's your tech guys . Your tech bros are right at the front line . They're the ones who , if you go to , who funds the PLO ? You know the Palestinian protests . Who funds the most extreme transgender stuff ? Who funds Black Lives Matter ?
When they were in business ? It's your tech bro . So what the hell is wrong with your guys ?
I think one of the things people don't understand is intensely competitive businesses that are heavily regulated have to defer to . They're trying to fend off attacks .
So you see it as defensive .
Their instinct is to buy them off . I mean , I I don't know how come they don't buy us off . I don't know what Zuckerberg thinks , but he evidently was received messages from government that made him think that Facebook would be jeopardized if he didn't control information on disinformation , as they call it .
As they call it , in other words , the revelation of the truth on Facebook , and Zuckerberg was sort of poignant having him confess last week that this had occurred and he regretted it . It's you know , that COVID thing was very hard to deal with . I mean , trump got completely gulped by Fauci and Birx . He really did .
He got over it , but he shut everything down and mandated masks and he just really . It's amazing how hard it is to resist arrays of experts coming to you . Well , it's a tidal wave .
It was a tidal wave of information and information , and it's interesting because you could make the argument that the pandemic demanded that right , leaving all of the political and social aspects aside , just from the way in which pandemics should be handled .
You need to sanitize , right , you need to create some kind of layer , and you could see how that core of logic then just gets compounded and with social media and the ability to cascade , that it just went crazy , yeah , but we're at a totally different level now .
I mean , look what's happening with X in Brazil , what's probably going to happen with Telegram . I mean we're really seeing this sort of attempt by the state to take over the or to sort of merge with the tech sector . And that's one of my biggest concerns is that that combination as Huxley said , a technologically driven dictatorship can never be overthrown .
Well , let me hold on a second , though I want to get George's take on this , because this is very relevant to the Israel test . The secret weapon that the Israelis have had is that they have a very tight relationship between the state and the private sector when it comes to technology and capitalizing on technology . Right ? They ?
Basically this is what Startup Nation is all about . Isn't this the same thing ?
I would just say Israel was doing it for survival and to move things forward . I don't think that the people who are trying to shut down X are interested in technological innovation . Yeah .
Well , israel , you know , almost died in 1985 . It was approaching socialism had failed . It was approaching 1,000% inflation . It was .
They had to create an emergency joint government and Bibi Netanyahu came into the government back then , into the government back then and a million Russian Jews immigrated who understood socialism didn't work and those forces are what created modern Israel .
1985 was this kind of exhaustion and collapse of the socialist Israel and since then they've really understood that you've got to emancipate business and enterprise and technology in order to succeed . And the transformation is unprecedented in human history , just factors of 100 and the increase of venture capital and technological advance .
So what do you , as we sort of try to get to a conclusion , where do you see Israel going ? I mean , it's clearly got the technological advantage , but it's sort of being attacked on social media . It's being attacked on the political class . I mean , as a you know , I've been a Democrat most of my life .
You know to find the fact that a Jewish candidate for vice president can't even be nominated because of the presence of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party . Where is Israel going to go under these circumstances , and is there any way of reversing the trend that we're seeing ?
Well , you know , I think I may be , you know I could be wrong here , but my sense of it is that Israel really is the center of the world economy .
Its resources , its capabilities feed what is apparent and they got fooled with various primitive attacks , but they know what they're doing and I think they're increasingly a source , source and precious trove of sanity and visionary leadership in the world economy .
Now , really , with Netanyahu is the Churchill of our era , the Churchill of our era , and I think he can also , I also . They maneuver internationally . We've got , I believe , a lot of crazy illusions about our military and foreign exploits and interventions and it's all chaotic and largely misconceived .
Military and foreign exploits and interventions and it's all chaotic and largely misconceived , I think . And Israel gives the kind of center of sanity for the West and I hope they will . You know it's a crisis . We've surmounted crises before .
You have a wrap-up question , I do wrap-up question .
I do , I just , you know , I think about how your point is that Israel has a tremendous amount of intentionality about its strategy and how it's executing it and , as a result , it's been able to create really the core basis of capital , not just capitalism but capital , right , If you think of technology , innovation as capital in the world .
In the past , their opponents in the Middle East have been largely , I would say hapless . Right , They've been more emotionally driven and I'm seeing a level of intentionality in the competition . Now the PR campaign that's being spun by Iran in its proxies by the Palestinians is at a much higher level of finish than what we've seen in the past .
What do you think is going on there and how does Israel compete with that ?
Well , I think it's the gullibility of you know all these messages get amplified by American political leadership and university voices . I just think it's really a moment of derangement and we've seen them before and we've lived through them . I'm 84 years old . There have been a lot of terrible— the 1970s weren't too great and the 30s you know it's .
I think we'll get beyond that . I believe polarizing the world and driving Iran and Russia and China together China doesn't have any interest really in Iran . It gets an awful lot of natural resources and commodities from Russia . But to make China into a kind of target for military demonstrations in the Taiwan Strait , so I think it's just insane .
And so I think we're going to get beyond that and I I think we can . The enlistment of Bobby Kennedy with uh Trump is , I think , a good sign . I think there , I think that that might be a real team that can uh , can win and plan , rush and the derangement . It was pretty brutal when Trump first took over . He was better than I expected .
I mean to move the embassy to Jerusalem , kaboom , to withdraw from the nonsense , and you know , he really just has a kind of practical dynamism . That may be just what we need . We'll see .
Do you have a sense if , on the other side of that , if Harris were elected , what do you think the outcome would be for Israel ?
I think Israel will have to be more independent . I think Israel might be driven to . You know , netanyahu can talk to Putin and to Xi in a way that none of the American politicians really can , and you know it's . We'll see . I don't know , it's going to be a treacherous phase .
A treacherous phase is a good way of putting it .
Yeah Well , George , thank you so much for sharing your perspective with us . I have to tell you this is just wonderful to get your perspective to tap into your incredibly vast career and knowledge , and so thank you for being part of the Feudal Future podcast . Thank you Well thank you .
I hope the Israel test can counteract the feudal future .
I hope so too . Right , and again , it's the Israel . Test how Israel's genius enriches and challenges the world . By George Gilder . George , thank you again , Thank you .
Thank you so much . I really appreciate it . Great interview , thank you .