Thirty-Three Minutes He Cannot Remember

When news of the October 7 attacks arrived, Bassem Youssef's first reaction was not a talking point. It was, he tells Lex Fridman, "Oh, shit." He hid for three or four days. Piers Morgan's producers called two times, then three. Youssef kept saying no: how do you go on television and answer for rape and "decapitated babies"? Then he started watching the coverage, and he started hearing claims that, as an Arab and a Muslim from the region, he was sure were not true. On the third ask, he said fine, put me on.

He calls the booking a figurative suicide mission. Hollywood managers pleaded with him not to do it. If he performed badly, or not fiercely enough, his own community would treat him as a traitor. Whatever he said would never be enough, and whatever he said would never be good enough. For 33 minutes he felt himself go into a trance. The earpiece kept falling and then disconnected; he could not see his hosts, only the camera lens, and he expected at any second the line "Okay, Bassem, thank you." He fought for every remaining second to get words in.

The push was personal and political at once. His wife's family is Palestinian; they had always been in relatively safe places when Gaza was hit. This time there was no safe place. Cousins and uncles had already lost homes, and one cousin, a doctor Youssef used to joke was a "loser," made the family stare at their phones whenever a hospital was bombed. He had never met most of these relatives. He also watched the one-sided reporting until, as he puts it, his blood boiled. He had left Egypt so he could speak. Now, in the land of the free, he had found another list of things he was not supposed to say.

What bothered him was both the lies and the unequal accounting of suffering. That is how he arrived at the bit that later traveled: a chart, treated like a crypto ticker, asking what the exchange rate of a life was today, and which year had been a good year to invest. 2014, he said, was a good year. The darker joke sat on top of a sentence he had heard his whole life: Israel warns civilians before bombing them, and Israel tries to minimize civilian deaths while killing them anyway. One day the indoctrination stopped sounding like common sense. Warned, therefore legal. Minimized, therefore fine.

Fridman puts the hard hypothetical on the table: Bibi calls, he is a fan, what would you do? Youssef would take the call, he laughs, because that is material. Then he answers through a story from Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. At a West Bank checkpoint, a Palestinian ambulance sat for an hour and a half. Levy asked the soldiers why they would not let it through; they shrugged and said, let them go. Then he asked them to imagine the patient was their father. The soldiers stood up. These are pigs, they said. These are not humans.

Before you can ask what Israel should do, Youssef argues, you have to ask how Israel sees Palestinians. He cites a Holocaust survivor who said that a dominant group must dehumanize itself before it can dehumanize another. If he were Israel, he would do what Israel is doing now, because no one is holding him accountable, no one is stopping him, and history has taught him that violence gets him what he wants. Fridman pushes back that this is "a tiny bit slightly exaggerated": not every official, soldier, or citizen sees Palestinians as less than human. Youssef grants the point and narrows the target. When he says Israel, or America, or Egypt, he means the people who have the power. You cannot talk about eleven million Israelis, or a hundred million Egyptians, as a single mind.

He still thinks Israeli society as a whole has moved right, and that extremism breeds extremism. Hate, he adds, is not a fixed percentage in anyone's heart; it tracks living conditions. A Palestinian in Gaza or the West Bank sees checkpoints, demolished homes, and family members taken. An Israeli, living under a government and without that daily power, often sees only the rockets. "As humans, we are selfish. We see what really affects us." Then he stops talking about the twelve thousand children killed in Gaza, a number he says is too large to feel, and reads a week-by-week list from the West Bank instead.

March 4: Amr al-Najjar, ten, shot in a car beside his father. March 3: Mohammed Zayed, thirteen, shot in front of a UN school. March 2: Mohammad Ghnaim, fifteen, shot during a night raid. Then Saeed Jaradat, killed by drone fire; Fadi Suleiman, killed in front of a Red Cross building; Nihil Ziad, shot in the head leaving school on Valentine's Day; Mohammad Khdour, a U.S. citizen, killed in a parked car. What is the IDF's justification? Terrorism, Youssef says, or throwing rocks. A father of a U.S. citizen went on Chris Rock's show and was told his son was throwing rocks, so they killed him. Youssef pauses on the sentence. Even when they were throwing rocks, you kill him?

Because Fridman works in tech and Youssef does not, the guest did homework. He points to *The Lab*, a film by Israeli director Yotam Feldman, about a military industry that tests weapons in the field, in urban areas, on Palestinians. As a doctor, the comparison hits him viscerally. A pill needs discovery, preclinical work, clinical trials, market approval, and post-market review. Five stages for a tablet. Where did you test the weapon? In the field. A knife killing one person is called terrorism, he says; flying a $64 million F-16 and dropping a bomb is not, because it is remote. Distance is the moral trick.

In the West Bank, he says, people often do not see other humans. They see towers, screens, and biometric systems tied to companies such as HP, Google, and Amazon through Project Nimbus. He describes an AI system called Gospel that can generate a target list and score it green, yellow, or red. "AI is not just disrupting the market, it's disrupting our humanity." Killing becomes a dating app: swipe, boom, five hundred people. You sit in air conditioning, blow up a university, then one day the screens fall away and you meet the Frankenstein you created. Fridman supplies the image of leaders swiping "invade" and "puppet government" before turning the phone off and going to sleep.

Fridman has been to the West Bank. He talks about a refugee-camp official who was shot by an IDF soldier, and about eyes that did not look repairable: a foundation of pain with hatred stacked on top. You kill one person, he says, and this is what you create. Youssef pivots to the craft he used in Egypt: propaganda is the use of words. "Decapitated babies" was not a random phrase. A baby can smile, cry, and poop; it is no threat. Tell people forty infants were beheaded and you have planted animalism, a blade through trachea and spine, a very specific hate.

Then comes the Gish gallop: what is a proportionate response, can Israel defend itself, do you condemn Hamas, does Israel have a right to exist, beheaded babies, raped women, why don't Arab countries take them, Muslims kill Muslims, look at Yemen and Syria and Iraq, UNRWA, October 7, October 7, October 7. The pile, he says, is stalling. It pulls you into side arguments so you stop talking about what is happening now. Fridman adds a further cut: the most over-the-top claims also desensitize people to ordinary war crimes, which are usually a child shot, not a child beheaded. Youssef links the method to blood libel, the old rumor that Jews drank the blood of children, a smear now turned, he says, on someone else.

Fridman has just finished a long historian debate on Israel and Palestine. Asking for hope got him nowhere; both sides sounded hopeless. He looks to Youssef. The guest starts with Barack Obama's summary: the conflict is chronic because one side has so much power and the other has none. Israel, in that telling, does not have to listen to Washington, because it is backed by people bigger than a president. Compromise means I give something and you give something. Israel, Youssef says, is not giving, and then projects the refusal onto Palestinians who supposedly walked away from four, five, seven chances.

He rejects the story that Yasser Arafat simply left Oslo. On television, he recalls, Joe Scarborough put that claim to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who called it "embarrassingly shallow." In Youssef's version, the accord was stacked with catches, Arafat said he agreed but needed Arab capitals, talks moved toward Sharm El-Sheikh, Ehud Barak then lost an election, Ariel Sharon arrived, and the deal died. "Facts don't matter as much as what is the narrative that has been controlled." Each time Israel has given land back, he adds, it was after force: 1973, the intifadas, the casualties in Gaza. Why would a state with that military, and an open check from the United States, volunteer to shrink?

Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett have said there will be no Palestinian state, Youssef notes, and the West Bank is being cut into "a bunch of little Gazas" by settlements. Thirteen thousand babies killed cannot all have been military targets hiding in diapers. The real media trick, though, is scale. Numbers become numbers. Contrast that with Mila Cohen, the Israeli ten-month-old killed in her crib, a story with a name. Palestinian children, he says, almost never arrive that way. Humans need context and a three-dimensional person. A statistic leaves nothing behind.

Fridman asks whether Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel all want perpetual war to stay in power. Youssef agrees that Arab regimes have used Palestine as a prop, and that Israel has used the conflict too, but he will not accept a symmetry of power, weapons, or U.S. backing. Hamas, in his account, is a product: no apartheid, no ANC; no Nazis, no French Resistance. He says he does not want to be put in the position of defending Hamas. He still asks why the first November hostage exchange freed about four hundred people, three-quarters of them women and children, including minors held in solitary confinement, which he calls torture under international law. Arab states, he adds, may have leverage they refuse to use, because the suffering is useful at home. The core problem, for him, remains displacement: seven million Palestinians in the diaspora, and 1.7 million people in Gaza who, he says, were pushed there from somewhere else.

Youssef shifts, promising something lighter, and tells the story of a book he chased for seven years. He optioned *The Muslim and the Jew*, by Ronen Steinke, in March before October 7, then bought the permanent rights after. The English edition is *Anna and Dr. Helmy*. In Weimar Berlin, Arabs arrived as doctors, engineers, and journalists: school was cheap in the inflation, and nationalists did not want to send children to British or French occupiers. Mohamed Helmy, an Egyptian medical student, could not find a room, so he lived in the Jewish ghetto, and could not find a hospital, so he worked in a Jewish one.

When the Nazis beat and removed Jewish doctors, they made Helmy head of the department because he was an Arab they wanted to court. The Nuremberg laws, Youssef notes, were renamed from anti-Semitic to anti-Jewish so as not to insult Arabs, who are also Semites. Helmy watched neighboring apartments fill from one family to seven. He began treating Jews at home, then took a girl named Anna, put a hijab on her, taught her Arabic, called her Nadia, his own daughter's name, and hid her as his nurse for seven years. After prison he built a network with other Arabs that, in this telling, saved three hundred Jews. The point is not that Jewish life in the Arab world was paradise. It is that this relationship existed before Israel was founded in 1948, after which Jews were recast as a fifth column.

That is why he calls Joe Biden's line, that Jews will not be safe anywhere without Israel, dangerous twice. First, he says, the United States has historically been safer for Jews than Israel, without Europe's pogroms. Second, a president who tells a minority they are only safe because of a foreign state is feeding the fifth-column charge. He analogizes to a Russian constitutional claim that Moscow protects Russians everywhere. Tell Russian-Americans they belong to that homeland and it is a threat, not a comfort. Israel, he adds, is a foreign client country that the United States sponsors, and it should be held accountable for what it does.

Fridman asks how the Holocaust enters the moral math of 1948 and the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians. Youssef calls the Nazi annihilation a carefully engineered evil, then notes that Otto Frank's refugee visa was rejected by the United States, and that much of the West pushed survivors toward Palestine. Arabs are asked to absorb Europe's crime. Why, he asks, is that their bill? Hatred of Jews, in his sketch, went viral because it had a plot: they killed Christ; the Church banned usury, so Jews became lenders and then rich; ghettos and banned guilds left them those trades; the First Crusade killed Jews before it reached Jerusalem. *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, popular in the Arab world, is plagiarism from a satirical play, *Conversation in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu*. The stickiness is the story. Humans, he says, need somewhere to park hate, insecurity, and failure. A person is good. A group is better.

Fridman puts numbers on the dread: about sixteen million Jews worldwide, perhaps 1.8 billion Muslims, a hundredfold gap. Do Israeli Jews not have a right to existential fear? They do, Youssef says, after everything they have seen and been told. Smallness is still not a warrant to take what is not yours. The live conflict, as he frames it, is not 1.8 billion versus sixteen million. It is Palestinians under a specific occupation, while many Muslim-majority publics live under U.S.-backed dictators whose tenure depends on Washington. People and palaces, in that world, do not want the same things.

On 1948 itself, he rejects the David-and-Goliath cartoon. Many of the Jewish fighters, he says, were seasoned World War II veterans with more planes, tanks, and artillery than the Arab forces combined. Several of those Arab states were not even fully independent and sent cavalry. Egypt did much of the actual fighting. Israel won, he says, because it planned and "we didn't," not because a handful of farmers improvised a miracle against seven nations. Fridman notes that wars over land are the human default. Youssef agrees, then draws a distinction. Britain conquered India and could go home. What is happening, he says, is closer to Australia and the United States: not an empire that expands and shrinks, but a replacement of the people on the ground.

The other difference is the audience. After 1948 came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The promise was that humanity would stop taking land and displacing people. Israel, he says, is giving that promise the middle finger, in public, on phones. Stéphane Hessel, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and co-author of the declaration, was later branded antisemitic for joining BDS and speaking about Palestine. Maybe, Youssef laughs, the West was false advertising. Then Fridman reads a tweet calling Youssef an "Islamo-Nazi comedian" who denies October 7. In Egypt he had already been a CIA operative, a Mossad spy, a secret Brother, a secret Jew, a Freemason, an infidel, a Knight Templar. He collects the degrees, he jokes, then notes the part that is not a joke: the people who hear those labels are the ones who threaten theaters.

Cairo, in his memory, was middle-class and unflashy: a judge father, a business-professor mother, a Fiat, money routed into school. Catholic elementary, then an expensive international school in 1986 where he felt poorer at once, modest clothes, no matching outings. He compensated with grades and sports, good enough to be picked for the team, never boyfriend material. The residue, he says, is a feeling of not being good enough. Medical school flipped the costume. Public-school classmates were brilliant in Arabic; he was the sissy from the private school. In residency he taught salsa, so at the hospital he was the dancer who did not care about medicine, and in the studio he was the respectable doctor. Third time as the outsider.

The salsa years are almost a separate sitcom. He saved for Miami to learn rueda de casino; his return ticket was September 12, 2001; he ran out of money ten days early and changed the flight. On 9/11 his mother woke him to the towers, grateful he was not in the air. He had been in Miami near the flight schools. "I had 9/11 written all over my face," he jokes. He made more money teaching salsa, sometimes seventy people in a class, than he did as a cardiothoracic resident. Why medicine at all? In the Middle East, he says, you become a doctor, an engineer, or a disappointment. He hated math. He became a doctor. Years later he is, in his own joke, a disappointment.

Two weeks before the taping he had an epiphany. Classmates went to the American University in Cairo, a social world he could not afford. Maybe he chose the hardest faculty so he would never have spare time he could not fill. He calls it self-sabotage: an excuse that he was studying, that he had exams. Standup arrived late. He still feels he skipped the foundation other comics built, that luck is temporary. Egypt proved the theory: the peak, then everything taken. He cannot roll his Arabic R's; a producer asked if they were really putting a man with a lisp on television. He was the first. Lisp and a big nose, bullied for both. If you are pretty, he tells Fridman, you do not have to do as much.

In 2003, on a treadmill, CNN's global feed showed a studio he did not recognize. He stopped the machine and stood for twenty minutes. He did not know Democrats from Republicans or what Fox News was. He caught the rhythm anyway, the way you catch a song in a language you do not speak. He binged every episode he could find and asked whether Egypt could have this. Never, people said. In 2011 a YouTube partner wanted internet sketches; Youssef wanted Jon Stewart. A fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, had set himself on fire in Tunisia. Eighteen days later Hosni Mubarak, president for thirty years, was gone. Youssef's joke: in the Middle East that is a short first term. You still need to plan vacations, careers, and jail time.

He was waiting on clearance for a pediatric heart-surgery fellowship in Cleveland and figured a few videos might become a writing job when he returned. Five weeks later he had a television contract. Within two or three years, thirty to forty million people watched each episode. Sudden love felt toxic. Strangers wanted photos; he felt unworthy of being someone's souvenir, and the stiffness read as arrogance. Political satire, he says, is taking what people already think about politicians and handing it back with a laugh. Then the ceiling drops. Under the Muslim Brotherhood he had one hour a week against five channels running around the clock. Stewart's line, as he remembers it: we say shit, you say shit, we just say it better. He was interrogated for six hours by a prosecutor reading his jokes aloud while a junior judge tried not to crack up. He made the interrogation into standup, went back on air, and was later blamed when the street turned lethal, as if his mockery had made killing easier.

He supported the army's removal of the Brotherhood at first; he had been getting daily threats. One episode against the army and he was canceled the next day. A second channel, sixteen more episodes, canceled again. The production office was raided. On November 11, 2014, his lawyer told him to leave immediately over a case dressed as arbitration. There is no jail in arbitration, Youssef said. Tell that to the judge, the lawyer said. Verdict at noon; he was on a plane at five. He has not returned. The stress was such that some mornings he wished a bullet would finish it, because he was, in his words, too much of a chicken to do it himself. Spy, secret Jew, Islamo-Nazi: all bullshit. "You're not funny" is what leaves a mark, because it touches the suspicion he already has.

After the coup, the army was more sacred than religion. At the Gezira Club, the same rich fans who had cheered him under the Brotherhood pointed and said, do not speak about Sisi, we love you now, but don't. He called Stewart, who told him safety came first. Youssef said he could not vanish on a team that had spent two years with him. Stewart's reply is the line he kept: if you are afraid of something, make fun of the fact that you are afraid of it. They built an episode that never named Sisi; the comedy was the avoidance. Authoritarians, he says, run on fear and propaganda. Hit the propaganda, including a machine that supposedly cured AIDS and hepatitis C, and they have nothing else to stand on.

Exile was a dark room. In America he was a nobody, forty-five or forty-six, with a family to feed, bombing in rooms of twenty-one-year-olds for fifteen or twenty dollars. Egyptian fans would appear, adoration curdling into pity; he could read the thought that he would be driving Uber in two weeks. He went home and cried. The other chorus said he had sold out, that he should throw rocks from the safety of YouTube. He did not want to be an activist, and he still had family in Egypt. He coped by deleting memory. There are gaps. People tell him to go to therapy; he is afraid of opening the floodgates. If he is functional and not killing anyone, he figures he is okay.

Bit by bit the craft improved, tickets sold, even theaters. Then he wanted it faster: Netflix, now. The Piers Morgan hits arrived and he sold out everywhere. If that blast had come two years earlier, he says, audiences would have walked into an unfinished hour. The show they get is not October 7. It is five years of origin story: Egypt, immigration, Trump, a gun rally, a bombing, citizenship. A Dubai anchor told him he flourishes in revolutions and wars. He objected: that makes him sound like a bad omen. Fridman jokes that the timing of October 7 is suspicious. Please don't, Youssef says.

In June, an hour before a Dubai trip, his manager sent a Superman script. A dictator invades a neighbor; Superman intervenes politically for the first time. Russia and Ukraine would not fit him, so he played a blend of Trump and Mubarak, sent a tape from the airport, and heard that James Gunn loved it, fast. The actors' strike froze the process. After October 7, two Piers Morgan appearances, and an Australian tour, the manager called: the part was gone. He was sad for three days. On Chris Cuomo's show, off the record, he heard himself sounding angry. At home he asked why. The role was never his to keep, and life was already good.

The next day, on the BBC, he told a cooler version. If he were Warner Bros. and Muslim, he might not cast a Zionist either; criticizing Israel did not make him a threat to Jews. The internet went after Gunn, including Snyder-verse factions Youssef barely understands. Publicists told him to stay quiet. Gunn called: there were still camera tests, the script changed, the strike got in the way. Youssef recorded a video laying the timeline out, because he did not want to be famous for the wrong reason, and because he knows what that pile-on does to a day and a life. Fridman calls the refusal to play victim a kind of wisdom. Youssef says it is greed's opposite: the wish to stand in the center and be loved for suffering. In the dark years he was detained in an Arab airport and heckled by people he believes were sent by Egyptian consulates. He did not tell those stories then. If he is going to be good, it will be because of the work.

The English hour and the Arabic hour are different shows. English had the jokes early and not the music; once he found the American cadence he could not easily switch back. English standup has a century of library. Arabic standup, especially in Egypt, is still, he says, pre-Lenny Bruce: no swearing, conservative, careful. He kicked the door and became, in his own comparison, Bruce and George Carlin, with fifteen forbidden words instead of seven. English is a unifying language even for a mixed Arab audience of Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, and Saudis. Arabic is a dividing one: twenty-two dialects, Maghrebi almost another language, Gulf street talk opaque even when Egyptian soap dialect is understood.

A large stretch of the Arabic set is about language itself. The word for iron is iron everywhere until Saudi Arabia, where it means ass; he builds whole sentences out of those collisions. If he says fuck and shit in English, the room laughs. One Arabic swear and people scream. Is that shame about the language? The Arab diaspora in America, he says, is among his best audiences. He will tour Jordan, Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain; not Egypt. He has a U.S. passport now, but the block is personal. Forty years of memory, fame, love, hate, and rejection. The Egypt he misses is not there. Immigrants live here while staying there, then go back on vacation and find the picture gone.

Would he perform in the West Bank? No. He would have to pass an Israeli checkpoint, and he does not want a soldier telling him what to do. Palestinian-American friends describe humiliation as daily weather. He tells the story of Qusra on October 11: settlers surrounded the village and messaged on Facebook, calling people rats to come out of their sewers. Nearby Esh Kodesh, he says, trains a paramilitary of settlers, one co-founder a Brooklyn disciple of Meir Kahane, not even Israeli. The vignette, for him, contains the whole problem. Someone from Brooklyn can claim land because he is Jewish. They use technology to intimidate. They have unchecked force, and they are settlers, not IDF. This is the West Bank's ordinary day, not Gaza's war.

He wants to speak to Israelis. What the state is doing, he says, is unfair to Palestinians and also to Jews, because Israel has fused itself to Judaism the way ISIS and al-Qaeda were fused to Islam in the public mind. People are simple; they do not do nuance. Rising antisemitism, in this argument, tracks a government's conduct, not a people's essence. Jews do not have to stand with apartheid. He cites Ronnie Kasrils, the South African Jewish ANC figure who wrote that he knew apartheid when he saw it. You cannot call every critic an antisemite and every Jewish critic a self-hating Jew. Islamists called Youssef a self-hating Muslim and an infidel for the same move. His own ledger, offered as a joke and a point: Stewart is his idol, he voted for Bernie Sanders, and Sara Taksler, who made the documentary *Tickling Giants*, is Jewish and married to an Israeli Jew.

Fridman brings up Sam Harris on jihad and martyrdom as a story that can wreck a people from the inside. Youssef agrees that nobody wakes up volunteering for death; the life has to be already miserable. He notes that some of the first Palestinian suicide bombers were Christians, a fact that sits awkwardly with a purely Islamic thesis. His quarrel with Harris is the nitpick. Every religion has ugly texts. He can quote Talmudic casuistry about a man tied to a tree who dies of thirst, or Buddhist violence in Myanmar, or Mormon "soaking" as a sexual loophole. Pull scripture out of political context and nobody looks good. It is another distraction from the living conflict.

If religion did not exist, he says, humans would have invented it. Early people watched family die and refused to perish like a gazelle. Consciousness made death feel too important to be an accident. The desert was chaos; chaos is terrifying; there had to be a reason, a purpose, a cause, so you would not die like a cockroach under a shoe. Ego is in the design. Fridman praises the other half: kneeling before something larger than yourself. Youssef says it would be fine if it stopped there. The trick is that humility becomes a ranking. I surrender, therefore I am closer to God, therefore you should die. Muslims, Christians, Jews, the extreme versions all run the same oxymoron: I am a piece of shit before God, and that is why I am entitled to kick you.

He loves the United States as a new home and says he criticizes it the way he criticized Egypt, out of love. What scares him is the shrinking power of the little man. It no longer matters whom you vote in; they listen to whoever paid for the seat. Democracy, in his view, is turning rapidly into oligarchy. Millions do not vote for the NRA, AIPAC, pharma, or the military-industrial complex, yet those are the loyalties that survive Election Day. In Texas everyone is armed, Fridman notes. What do those guns do against tanks, Youssef asks. He cites a *60 Minutes* piece on Pentagon price gouging: a valve from $329 to $9,000, five contractors setting the market, the Apache fleet in Iraq grounded in 2006 over one part, Stinger missiles from $25,000 to $400,000, 130,000 Defense Department staff cut, including engineers and negotiators. You spend more by firing the people who knew how to bargain. What is left is speech, and when you use it they call you antisemitic. "You see why I'm angry?"

Western press, once a beacon, looks to him like a mouthpiece. He recalls the *New York Times* publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and Nixon hunting the leak instead of the lie, the seed of Watergate. Now, he says, the paper ran a rape story he calls a hoax, written by Anat Schwartz, then investigated who leaked rather than correcting the record. In 2003 the *Times* amplified WMD; now he sees it amplifying a foreign government. Fridman insists both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps lie. Youssef will not equalize a TikTok account with the BBC, the *Times*, and the *Washington Post*. Fridman says the little man now has disproportionate power, and that dopamine rewards beheaded-baby fictions. Youssef says both sides of TikTok exist, including debunkers, but a paid newsroom that will not even air Israeli reporting that undercuts a claim has failed the job. Long form, Fridman hopes, is the way out. Youssef reads the resentment on his face.

He would love to work Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership. Rogan, in his view, is what the internet is for: other people's lives at your fingertips, and a room where the comic who has eaten shit everywhere else is treated as a saint. Then Fridman asks about Trump versus Biden. Youssef sees a demagogue and a man who is "gone," two people whose ages add up to a hospice. He is a Democrat who backed Bernie Sanders and still does Obama bits, including the joke that Obama was the first Muslim president who killed Muslims, which is a thing Muslims do. Biden calling himself a Zionist is one thing; saying Jews are unsafe anywhere but Israel is another. Why would Biden listen to Arab voters, Youssef asks, after raising $145 million in California from pro-Israel groups? He calls Biden the highest-paid politician from Israeli lobbyists, $4.6 million over the years. Great leaders buck that. The country, he thinks, also needs term limits below the presidency, so Congress does not become a ward where tenure is a synonym for corruption.

Alexei Navalny's death does not surprise him as a Russian event. He gives Vladimir Putin a grim credit: the man is staging the Middle Ages, poison and falling planes, *Game of Thrones* as policy. The West does similar things, he says, behind better production design. Zoom out, and will there always be war? Yes, but not for long, because the last fifty years changed the tools. Swords and catapults kept the slaughter medium-sized. A button can now take the planet. The question is not whether war continues. It is when the tipping point of self-destruction arrives. Fridman notes how few people it takes to end billions of lives, including by false alarm. Youssef adds the 24-hour news cycle that keeps everyone on edge, and then religion.

Radical Islamists talk about the end of days, he says, but most of them lack state power. Christian Zionists sit at the top of the American order and have pushed the conflict to escalate. He names Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Reagan-era dispensationalism, Scofield's Bible, *The Late Great Planet Earth*, the *Left Behind* novels, and a 1998 book, *Forcing the Hands of God*. In that current, some Christians love Israel and hate Jews, because Israel is a prop in Armageddon. Israel, he says, is happy to be used. Weapons and troops pile into the Middle East for a nuclear holocaust that pastors such as John Hagee describe as brimstone instead. People so despise life that they want death. Revelation is a hobby until you also have the weapon. He worries the end will be delivered by someone who wants to meet God a little early. Fridman offers a multiplanetary species, maybe Elon Musk. Youssef wonders if Musk is a secret lizard. Fridman had asked him, off-air, not to mention the lizard people.

Suppose he is wrong, Fridman says, and humanity flourishes. Why? Younger people. The TikTok cohort Fridman dislikes. There is plenty of garbage, Youssef admits, twerking where we were promised knowledge. There is also information, and some people use the platform to learn. They are not the majority, because that content is not exciting, but there might be a tipping point that returns power to the small man. Legacy media and legacy politicians have already been shaking, because people are calling them out from in front of the desk. It will not happen this year or next. He will not give those young people advice; their inputs are not his. What he learned from Egypt is that a revolution is not an event. Toppling a government is not the thing. It is a long process. The Arab Spring opened conversations that had been unthinkable in the Gulf. Maybe the beginning of any change is that people start saying what they were not allowed to say. For example, he laughs, Israel. Fridman closes with Jon Stewart: the press can hold a magnifying glass to problems, or it can use that glass to light ants on fire and then host a week of shows on the flaming-ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.