In this wide-ranging conversation, Jay Shapiro sits down with political economist Radhika Desai to unpack the war with Iran — how we got here, who is driving it, and whether we are drifting toward World War III. We examine the deeper crisis beneath the headlines: the senile phase of capitalism, the instability of a declining American empire, Israel’s regional ambitions, and the dangerous psychology of leaders who treat war as a solution to structural decline. We also discuss China’s long strategic horizon, the illusions of “anti-war” Trumpism, and why empire cannot be disentangled from the violence it produces.But this isn’t only about geopolitics. We talk about moral collapse — from Epstein to elite impunity — and what it reveals about power at the top. We explore patriarchy and feminism globally and within Iran, the contradictions of Western liberal narratives, and why economic crisis so often turns outward into war. If we are on a path toward wider conflict, the real question is not just how it started — but who benefits, and whether the public can still interrupt the machinery of empire before it’s too late.00:00 Coming Up00:01:54 Intro on Radhika Desai, Epstein, and Iran00:06:07 Checking on the Anti War Trumpers00:11:43 Who Wanted War? Israel and AIPAC and Others?00:14:00 What the America Firsters Missing?00:19:21 America Was Never a White Society00:23:44 Where Does China Fit In?00:30:31 BRICS or Other International Orgs?00:35:05 World War III?00:41:59 But Isn't Iran Immoral and Anti Women?00:54:04 Zionism and the Dominos That Must Fall00:59:19 On Religion and Secularism01:03:11 The Epstein and Judaism Question01:11:49 More to Come on Epstein and JudaismBECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

Is Israel entering a period of irreversible transformation?In this conversation, I sit down with Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé to discuss his latest book, Israel on the Brink. Instead of looking backward, Pappé looks forward — imagining what the collapse of political Zionism could mean and what might replace it.We talk about the growing rift he describes as the “State of Judea” vs the “State of Israel,” the reported 270,000 Israelis who have left, the possibility of a one-democratic state by 2048, and whether international pressure — from the U.S., Europe, or the Global South — could fundamentally shift the trajectory.We also tackle difficult territory: U.S. politics, lobbying power, accusations of antisemitism, the Epstein discourse, and whether Israel’s strategic alliances are becoming more cynical and less moral.Is this a slow reform? A violent rupture? Or something no one is prepared for?This is a serious, nuanced discussion about power, legitimacy, and what history tells us about how states unravel — and rebuild.00:00:00 Coming Up...00:02:02 Intro: Israel on the Brink00:05:54 State of Judea vs State of Israel00:12:23 22 More Years... Really!?00:20:33 The United Nations and the Board of Peace00:26:55 Changing American Support00:33:15 Epstein, Israel, Judaism00:45:40 Antisemitism and Antizionism00:52:47 Annexation of The West Bank and War with IranBECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

After watching The Voice of Hind Rajab, I started thinking about doctrine — not religious doctrine, but cinematic doctrine. For decades, Hollywood films like True Lies and Rules of Engagement helped script a moral universe where Arab violence was irrational, Western violence was justified, and Israel existed inside an unquestioned frame of necessity. Drawing on Jack Shaheen’s work in Reel Bad Arabs, this essay argues that blockbuster filmmaking became a kind of modern scripture — more powerful than any ancient text in shaping how we see good and evil. But that narrative monopoly is breaking. And when the story collapses, power gets nervous.00:00 Intro00:28 Part 1: Holy Doctrines04:55 Part 2: The New Mythmakers13:38 Part 3: Preimagined Terror22:20 Part 4 The Turning Tide31:34 Part 5 The Desperate StrategyBECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

The Case of Steven Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, John Brockman and Sam Harris and a culture of "accepting" the culture...00:00 Clearing up the Brockman Point02:55 Allergic to Conspiracy05:07 Moral Questions are not Legal Questions10:40 Morality and Opportunity of Association12:50 The Case of Steven Pinker15:01 Alan Dershowitz Asks Pinker for Advice23:58 What Could Pinker Know?28:36 What Can We Do?32:00 It's Not About YOU33:11 MeToo Again?34:17 Influence, Power, Men, and SexFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

My thoughts on complicity and what it means to be "in the files"00:00 Intro02:19 Going Through Circles of Complicity09:05 The Intellectual Sphere (John Brockman)18:28 Sam Harris is "in the files"25:05 Just One Playground33:16 The Gatekeepers are Gross Men with Money33:54 If Elon Musk Offered Me Money?39:19 Buying Gatekeepers and Buying Distribution Channels42:58 The Jewish Elephant in the RoomBECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

What if our most “rational,” science-minded moral frameworks are quietly justifying violence, domination, and erasure? In this video essay, I trace David Hume’s is–ought problem and follow a secular, compassionate, scientific worldview to its unsettling conclusions — from free will skepticism and utilitarian ethics to the “quarantine model” of justice, effective altruism, and systems that treat human suffering like a technical problem to be optimized. Along the way, we confront hurricanes, checkpoints, drowning children, colonialism, capitalism, Zionism, Palestine, and the limits of treating human beings like weather systems.This isn’t a rejection of reason or science — it’s a critique of how scientism, ascended in many popular thinkers like Sam Harris, Peter Singer, and even Sam Bankman-Fried, can be captured by power. We examine how good intentions, clean logic, and abstract models can end up endorsing moral nightmares. The question isn’t whether these arguments are smart — it’s what gets lost when suffering becomes a math problem, tragedy becomes an acceptable cost, and rational people stop asking who pays the price.00:00 Intro to Scientism01:27 Part 1: Imminent Danger02:34 Part 2: Consciousness & Moral Concern08:47 Part 3: Taking Action12:12 Part 4: The Problems12:33 Problem 1: Causality15:14 Problem 2: Distal & Systemic18:45 Problem 3: Entrenching Power23:34 Problem 4: Genuine Flourishing28:13 Part 5: ConclusionsALL MUSIC BY https://michigan25yearsago.bandcamp.com/BECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

Michael W. Green is a successful Wall Street strategist, a frequent Fox Business guest, and—unexpectedly—the author of one of the most viral economic essays of the year. In his Substack series Yes... I Give a Fig, Green argues that the official U.S. poverty line is so artificially low that it functions less as a measurement of hardship and more as a form of political gaslighting. People are told they’re doing fine, while privately feeling like they’re drowning.In this wide-ranging conversation, we unpack why Green’s argument struck such a nerve—and why it provoked such intense backlash. We explore the origins of the poverty line, the idea of a “precarity line,” and what happens when economic metrics lose touch with lived experience. From housing and dignity to inequality as a moral problem, this is a rare exchange between an economist steeped in markets and a philosopher deeply skeptical of their assumptions.The second half of the discussion widens the lens even further: capitalism and democracy, Trump, Venezuela, Gaza, global resource extraction, and whether economic systems require endless expansion to survive. Where Green believes the system can still be fixed, I push on whether some failures are structural—and whether people will ultimately reject material comfort if it comes at the cost of moral legitimacy. 00:00 – Coming Up...01:44 – Who Is Michael W. Green? Wall Street Viral Dissent05:04 – “My Life Is a Lie”: Why the Poverty Line Feels Fake12:26 – Poverty as Politics, Why Did this Hit Now?17:40 – Is Inequality a Moral Failure or Just a Stability Risk?23:06 – Morality within Markets24:45 – Precarity vs Poverty30:34 – Capitalism: Structural Failure or Corrupted System?37:17 – Democracy, Markets, and the Revolving Door43:20 – Trump, Business Logic, and Political Nihilism53:46 – Venezuela, Gaza, Ukraine & Resource Extraction01:05:34 – Can Countries Opt Out of the Global System?01:11:18 – Hobbes, Human Nature, and Competing Worldviews01:13:47 – Third Worldism and the Echo of the 19th Century01:20:00 – Talking Across DisciplinesFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

Robert Sapolsky makes one of the strongest cases against free will on offer today—but this conversation doesn’t stop at whether free will exists. It asks what follows. If no one could have done otherwise, what happens to morality, justice, dignity, and meaning? Hosted by Jay Shapiro, this episode begins with Sapolsky’s core argument against free will and moves quickly into its consequences: shame, pride, punishment, and the temptation to replace moral responsibility with clean, mechanistic explanations. The question isn’t whether determinism is true—it’s whether we actually know how to live with it.Shapiro presses Sapolsky on an inverse worry often missing from incompatibilist debates: not the fear of losing free will, but the fear of escaping it. Drawing on Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, the conversation explores whether rejecting free will can feel less like a tragedy and more like a cosmic relief—an escape from ambiguity, moral difficulty, and the burden of judgment. From there, the discussion turns to narrative, illusion, and meaning, engaging Wilfrid Sellars’s famous distinction between the scientific image and the manifest image of humanity. Are we making a mistake by treating narrative, responsibility, and moral language as expendable “illusions,” rather than as real features of human life that still matter even if they aren’t metaphysically ultimate?The conversation culminates in hard political and ethical cases—power, punishment, and the danger of focusing on proximal threats while ignoring distal causes. Using examples ranging from criminal justice to Israel–Palestine, Sapolsky and Shapiro debate the limits of the “quarantine model” and whether determinism risks being quietly hijacked by existing power structures. Can science describe causality without erasing dignity? Can morality survive without free will? And if humans are, as Sapolsky argues, recursive biological machines—what kind of responsibility, humility, and restraint does that actually demand of us?00:00:00 Coming up…00:01:22 Intro My Gripes with the Incompatibilists00:05:30 The Elevator Pitch Against Free Will00:07:52 Do We Really Want Free Will?00:12:43 Are Illusions Real?00:16:07 Meaning Without Free Will00:19:29 Replacing God with an Indifferent Universe for the Same Reasons?00:23:01 A Giant Naturalistic Fallacy?00:26:12 What to Quarantine? The “IDF” or a Palestinian Teenager?00:31:39 Proximal versus Distal Causes, the Palestinian Knife or Ideologies Like Zionism?00:34:43 Does the Quarantine Model Fizzle Out or Get Hijacked?00:42:19 Sellars, Philosopher and Scientists, And The Pact of Forgetting00:51:54 The Scientism and Utilitarianism’s Failure on Palestine, Sam Harris’s Mistakes00:54:58 Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau on Human Nature01:00:33 Free Enough Will, The Human Condition, and Engineering our Nature01:05:05 Walls as Quarantines and the Worry of Palantir01:10:56 Be Suspicious of The Desire for a Simple Diagnosis01:17:36 Connecting On Palestine and Escaping Through The Maze of UtilitarianismReferences…Wilfrid Sellars. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man https://danielwharris.com/teaching/380/readings/Sellars.pdfRebecca Newberger Goldstein. The Philosophers and the Scientists Should be Friends https://secularhumanism.org/2017/12/cont-the-scientists-and-the-philosophers-should-be-friends/Johann Hari. Chasing the Scream. https://chasingthescream.com/Johann Hari. Lost Connections. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921573-lost-connectionsThomas Hobbes Levitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso. Just Desserts https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Just+Deserts%3A+Debating+Free+Will-p-9781509545759Robert Sapolsky Father Offspring Conversations (that Warthog Story) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WhXs8_-kqU BECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

In this conversation, Jay Shapiro sits down with Rory Fanning, a former U.S. Army Ranger who served alongside Pat Tillman before becoming a war resister, educator, and outspoken critic of U.S. empire. Rory recounts his journey from elite military training and the mythology of manhood sold through recruitment. What began as a rite of passage, a test of courage and loyalty, slowly revealed itself as something else entirely.They talk about standing up to bullies, and what happens when you realize the bully wears your own uniform. The conversation ranges from the lies of the War on Terror to Israel–Palestine, from Pat Tillman’s legacy to Johnny Got His Gun, and from obedience to conscience. At its core, this is a story about transformation and redefining masculinity outside of domination and figuring out who the real freedom fighters are.00:00 Coming Up…01:35 Dilemma Podcast in 202603:17 Intro to Rory Fanning - Pat Tillman and Military Ads07:28 The Military and Ideas of Manhood09:24 Fathers, Sons, and Being Tough11:45 9/11 and Joining the Rangers13:33 Going To Afghanistan16:16 Confidence and a Military Recruitment Ad20:49 Doubting the Mission24:14 Addicted to The Rush28:07 Rory Meets Pat and Kevin Tillman29:29 Becoming a War Resister33:00 Religion and Resistance37:42 The Costs of Resisting40:40 The “B!tch” of the Unit and Pat Tillman Coverup45:16 The Brothers in Arms and the Cult50:44 Walking Across America54:00 The Original Question, Why Did 9/11 Happen?57:53 The Hypocrisy of the Empire and The Israel Issue1:06:53 Resisters Around the World1:09:21 What Aaron Bushnell Meant to The World1:12:57 War versus Resistance to War1:20:12 So, How Do You Become a “Man” and What’s Next?1:26:17 The Ancient Ritual of Walking to Find Yourself1:29:20 Johnny Got His Gun and The Palestine Baseball TeamCollection of military recruitment ads:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0JGV0RYwsshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tnJtLBQzQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_OCDJIT344https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqL_dRwRGXghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4hKXrgLH9Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xClLofqNYYchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkwSbamEbqEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6xFB6lPlpQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OQ2KGiOuW0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMkLWNh37cIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B_TlHJq1-4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edykj6fpRm4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVOdAPWxvz4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpmgPuidFb4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuSqpMnXvv8Palestine Baseball Team:https://www.baseballunited.com/teams/national/palestinehttps://www.instagram.com/baseballpalestine/?hl=enhttps://x.com/PalFedBaseballhttps://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/amid-death-and-destruction-palestines-baseball-dreams-survive/BECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

In this episode I speak with Melani McAlister, professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University and author of the remarkable new book Promises Then the Storm — a journal she began on October 5th, 2023.This conversation moves through her life story: • growing up an evangelical Christian in North Carolina • discovering Amnesty International, human rights work, and the Middle East in 1982 • learning Arabic in Cairo • joining Mobilization for Survival in the late 1980s • working with queer and feminist organizers • being listed by the ADL as a “hate group” simply for recognizing the PLO • teaching the U.S. as an empire to a changing generation of students• Palestinian Poetry as ResistanceWe discuss Christian Zionism, the shifting landscape on American campuses, the rise of the alt-right, the weaponization of antisemitism, and why Palestine now resonates with Black, South Asian, Latino, and other marginalized communities.Melani argues that the human rights era has collapsed, that Gaza revealed the hypocrisy at the center of the old world order, and that what comes next must be a planetary consciousness rooted in ecology, sustainability, and the dignity of all people.At the end, Melani reads from one of the most powerful entries in her book — a passage I’ve set to original music from a close friend. Please stay for that.Melani’s book: Promises Then the Storm https://www.amazon.com/Promises-Then-...Music: https://michigan25yearsago.bandcamp.com/00:00 Coming Up…01:08 Palestine Exhaustion and McAlister’s Book06:55 Growing Up Evangelical to 1982 Israel Invasion of Lebanon10:45 The Christian Zionism Puzzle Piece13:40 McAlister Drops Messianic Christianity14:53 On Being a “Good Girl” and Religiosity17:57 Obiedence of Suicide Bombers19:02 Media Sources as American Zionist “Doctrine”21:52 The Next Wave of Protests23:53 McAlister’s Activist Path through Amnesty, MOBE, Academia31:59 Addressing Antisemitism, Living in Berlin, the Collapse of the Right36:04 The Legacy of the Jewish Left39:05 Judaism from Zionism and Israel40:35 A Journal Passage on Antisemitism44:04 Forgetting about Antisemitism and Weaponizing Antisemitism47:22 Palestinian Poetry, Darwish, and Anger50:03 “Identity Card”50:38 How Students Have Changed After Gaza57:00 Self Determination Beyond the Nation-State1:02:17 Oppressor-Oppressed Narratives1:06:05 Palestine is the Symbolic Center of the Decolonizing Struggle1:16:38 The End of the United Nations?1:20:25 We Should All Write Diaries1:22:30 October 14th. Free Palestine.