w/Gary Wexler | How goes Israel goes the rest of us

Lio: I'm talking to a lot of people lately, and on the one hand, you have a lot of people who had realizations after the 7th and throughout the war and the political thing and everything, and people are changing camps. You see a lot of that. Sadly, the more people get exposed to the horrors of the war—losing kids in battles and relatives and all the rest—I think there’s just another 12,000 people who are officially hurt in this war. So anything from panic attacks to shrapnel from interceptors piercing their abdomen or something. All of that is making people take stock of who they are, what we're doing here, all that stuff. Some of them are moving a little bit toward our message, right? They realize we have to be united. Some of them don't even know why they say it, but they say it. Talk to every bereaved parent, and I have a friend who's been to seven shivas in just the last couple of days, and they all talk about that need for unity, for uncompromising unity, and just putting up this wall of unity. At the same time, you have people who are sinking deeper into the everyday, the survival of it, and the scare tactics of the media, of Iran's supreme leader who's now tweeting in Hebrew. It's hard to get to them and talk about the internality of things and the heart and the softer things seemingly, when they feel like it's a war of survival. So this is the state that we're in here in Israel. I don't know if Jews in the U.S. are in a different place. Do you feel the same, the same kind of split?

Seth: So there was this Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, I think it was. I wasn't there, but I heard from somebody who was there. Actually, this morning—I didn't know this guy was there—anyway, we'll talk about it later. He said he saw a bunch of Hasidic Jews there, a bunch of secular Jews there, and everybody was calm and there was a feeling of we’ve got to get along between the crowd there. On the other hand, I know Jews who are very, very strong Kamala supporters. I know there’s the guy—the comedian—used to be an anti-Trump guy and now he's a pro-Trump guy, Michael something from New York. Really outspoken. Annoying. You would know who I'm talking about. Not annoying. Is he funny? Michael—what the heck's his name? I think there are people who are switching, but the people that I see in my world, it's still very polarized. Got some Jews on the Trump side, some Jews on the Kamala side. I'm not making it about Trump and Kamala. I'm kind of making it pro-Israel or against Israel. And no, I don't see any middle ground here. So, hold on, Gary, hold on.

Lio: We need to intro you. Hold on, we're doing it right now. I know you're ready to. So, it's a great thing that we've re-invited a great guest who was here. Last time he was here, it was right after the seventh; he wrote a very searing article, and he got a lot of traction and a lot of reactions, and a lot of stuff has happened consequently, which he will tell us about. And then lately, he wrote another—I think he wrote another one in between—but then he wrote another article, I'm sorry, in the Jewish Journal about specifically these two roads in the Jewish, I don't know if you want to say Jewish diaspora, in general, in the Jewish world. So I wanted him to tell us about it, tell us what's happened since he wrote that first article, and then specifically take us through this article, because I think it's really relevant to what we're talking about here. So please, everybody, let's say hi to Gary Wexler. Hello, everybody. So first, Lio, can I have—

Lio: Open the camera. You told me before. Okay, all right. Yeah, yeah. Our listeners paid for camera, Gary. They want the full experience.

Gary: First, can I deal with what Seth just said, or not?

Lio: Yeah, you can.

Gary: Okay, all right. I also am seeing people all over the place in different pockets, but I do see a shift, and I do see certain things moving in two different camps, really. But first I want to say, myself, there has been an evolution in where I stand as well. Look, I'm a guy who used to be on the international board of Shalom Achshav, of Peace Now, and today I believe very differently. But underlying all of what I believe is absolutely what you're asking about: I think one of the number one priorities between us has to be Jewish unity. And we have to be able to learn how to respect each other's different opinions and still be able to be connected to one another, just like I would hope that would happen in America between Americans right now, which you don't see happening. But I think we've got to find—I'm going to address just the Jewish world, that's enough to deal with—we must find common ground between us. We must know how to be able to be in the same room with one another and to embrace and respect one another, even though we may have very, very different opinions, particularly now.

Seth: I think it’s— In order to what, then we need to find common ground?

Gary: In order—first of all, there is an existential threat to Israel and the Jewish people at this point. One of the things that I learned after October 7th that is borne out to me more and more is the mantra: How goes Israel, goes the rest of us. All the antisemitism, which has been ginned up in America, is based right now on what is happening in Israel and what's going on in this war. We can no longer deny that we are separate from one another, existing in two different spheres. So the silver lining in all of this is that it has woken us up. It has made Israelis realize that they're Jews, where they used to be really proud to say, I'm Israeli, but I don't know how Jewish I am. If you listen to the recordings at the Nova Festival exhibit, none of the terrorists said they were killing Israelis. They said they were killing Jews. That's a real wake-up call. Jews in America are recognizing, because of what's going on, how connected we are to what's going on in Israel. It is influencing and affecting our lives. So we are learning that we are deeply connected on some very significant depths and levels that demand that we know how to be able to be with one another, with our different opinions, if we're able to thrive and survive through all of this.

Seth: There's a psychological phenomenon that we have that's becoming more and more prevalent, and that is people who seemingly are voting or supporting something that is hurting them. You have Jews who are against Israel. Not just like they don't like Netanyahu—it's like, for example, I don't know, I'm a trans Jew, and so in order to be accepted by my community, I feel that this thing is evil, this genocide is evil, right? So you would have to change the whole structure of a person's belief system. The way you're saying it is as if every Jew understands I'm a Jew and this is happening to all Jews. No, I'm not saying they understand it. I'm saying they need to understand this.

Gary: Look, there are those of us who are indeed in influential positions in Jewish life, who are very familiar with all of these things and have had engagements in all these things, that are thinking conceptually about what this means. This is a new concept. I'm not saying that all the Jews in the world feel it or understand it, but I think those of us who are deeply in this and deeply informed have a responsibility to disseminate this kind of understanding and thinking in the Jewish world at this point.

Lio: So I want to ask something. When you came here first, it was right after you wrote that first article, where you outlined what you learned 20-something years ago, and then how it unfolded. You've seen it unfold, and you've seen this almost coordinated front that was this wave rising against the Jews around the world, and how ill-prepared we are to respond to it. We're being reactive, we're not talking to each other, right? All that stuff. That was then—what, eight months ago, nine months ago when you wrote it? Yes, ten. So you looked at it as a professional, someone working in the industry, working with nonprofits, working with marketing and advertising. And I think you were talking first about the professional side of things, right? So I guess the first question to you is, has anything changed in the professional world, first of all?

Gary: Or for me in the professional world? Well, both. Okay. So let me explain to you what happened as a result of that first article. Exactly. Give us a little rundown. Okay. It's also very interesting too. I've written now four articles. That one by far had the most resonance, and it was because I told—and I realize now—the other articles were stories, but it was much more prescriptive as to what we need to do. You realize that human beings are much more interested in stories. The story went all over the place. Telling people and making suggestions from my professional perspective and experience and history is less interesting to people. They're more interested in the story than in what we have to do and how we have to change. So, and it bears out: you write a story and people love it; you start being able to say, these are the changes we have to go through in order to win this communication war and to be able to survive and thrive, and it's like, not so interested in that. So that's one of the first things I've learned, reaffirming humanity and how people think. So that first article changed my life. I was not ready for this. I'm 73 years old. I was retired, writing a novel in my backyard, happy as could be that all of that was behind me. I wrote this article because I felt I had a responsibility to tell the story and also to make these suggestions. What happened was, not only did this article go viral all over the world to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people—I can't even count it—but I ended up receiving over 500 messages through email, through WhatsApp, through LinkedIn, through social media, through my website from people all over the world saying, well, what do we do about this? And I'm thinking, I'm just writing. I'm not planning on doing anything. But then I woke up and I thought, okay, I have a responsibility here beyond the writing. I have an area of expertise here, and people are asking me. So I took all 500 people and I turned them over to somebody and I said, create a spreadsheet for me. Here's all my social media passwords. List every single one of these people, what platform they came in from, what their messages were, and do an internet search on them so I know who these people are. I was stunned. These were people in the U.S., Canada, UK, Israel, primarily. Serious communication professionals, and people who were heads of corporate marketing, owners of ad agencies. And I thought, oh my God, how else would this happen where somebody assembled communication professionals in four countries who all happened to be serious Jews and Zionists? And I thought, this couldn't come together in any other way. Now I really have a responsibility. So I picked out the top 100 people and I sent them an email and I said, I'll host a Zoom for us to meet each other. I think, Lio, you were on that Zoom. And I gave all the rules that I give from being a facilitator to make sure that this thing could be kept workable and everything else, and 60 people responded with the bios I had asked for and said that they would show up. And in the end, like 70 showed up, because people started to hear about this. What came out of it was the Global Jewish Communication Alliance. And I said to people, I'm not running this thing. This needs to be run by a new generation. And I stepped away. A few weeks later, I was in Israel because one of the people who reached out to me was the general Yair Golan and said, can you come here and work with us a little bit? And I said, sure. And one of the Israelis in the group, who Lio used subsequently, when we were at his house for dinner, got into this huge discussion-argument with him that I'm still hearing in my ears. And I didn't participate, just sat back and watched the two of you.

Lio: So Ari contacted— No, it was only the guests. It was less with Ari; it was more with Philip, the psychologist. Okay, it was Ronald Philippe. Okay.

Gary: Ari reached out to me while I was in Israel. He said, "You're going to leave this country and not meet me?" I said, "I'm so busy and I'm only here for seven or eight days." He said, "No, no, we've got to meet." So he came over, and we met and had a great conversation. In the end, he said, "I'm going on a mission." I said, "What's the mission?" He said, "Everybody in the group said, 'Go get Gary back involved.'" I thought about it and said, "Okay." Fortunately, we all bonded. This is the other thing: we're in all these countries. Through this work, we have bonded like this cabal that's amazing and gotten to know one another very well. Fortunately, a woman named Marnie Black, who was at the time head of marketing for the AMC Corporation in New York, was part of the group. She called me and said, "Are you overwhelmed by this?" I said, "Overwhelmed? That's an understatement." She said, "Can I partner this with you?" I said, "Partner it? Marnie, just take it from me." She said, "No, I'll only partner with you." So Marnie and I have now been in a partnership on this for nine or ten months. It's turned out to be the best partnership I've ever had—and I've had many—building this global Jewish communication alliance. We thought, naively at the beginning, that we'd be able to raise the money this thing needs because it's so urgent. I realized I had ignored the processes of the Jewish world, which even invaded this, and recognized how hard it was going to be to raise the money. We're still on that track, and we're getting close. We ended up building an organization here. We divided into strategic areas—research, creative, digital, partnerships—and have people working on these things. Everybody's been volunteering. We need to raise the money. People need to start getting paid if this is really going to work. We've also become the big collaborator. Other groups formed and eventually joined ours. Now the funders are starting to reach out to us to ask how we're positioned and what we're doing. Some people have been paid to work with the research person creating memes. Lio, were you one of those people too, I think?

Lio: Yes.

Gary: That's not been easy, but we are going to base what we're doing on research because we're looking at ourselves as not the Robert Kraft people who are producing immediately. We're saying we have a communication war to win. This is a long-term strategy, and we better figure out what it's going to take to do it. So I'm now in a serious situation with all of this.

Lio: So, goodbye retirement.

Seth: Is it on behalf of Israel, on behalf of all of the Jewish people?

Gary: Getting back to what I said earlier, Seth, we cannot separate. This is about Israel and—

Seth: Israel probably has a good PR department. Well, not a good one, but probably has a PR department.

Gary: Go find it for me.

Seth: No, there isn't.

Gary: Go find it for us and tell us who it is. We've got a bunch of Israelis involved now, too, because look at the Foreign Ministry and the government; they haven't been able to pull this off for years. This is how Lio and I met 25 years ago—through the Foreign Ministry.

Lio: 25.

Gary: Mine's 50—God knows—through a Foreign Ministry initiative called Brand Israel that they were so underfunding it couldn't succeed because they didn't understand what it was going to take to do at that time. And then I get to catch you up with the article that was just written. Yeah, exactly.

Lio: First of all, this was a good recap because even I was not in the loop all the time with everything that you've been doing.

Gary: You've been hard to get a hold of sometimes. You know, deliberately, but when you want me, Lio, you're right on top of me.

Lio: Look, I learn from the best. But the point is, this is an important endeavor, and there's no question it's needed. Being in Israel, I agree with Gary: nothing is happening on that front, or nothing successful. The best Israel could do was a handful of influencers who have been holding the fort and doing a decent job. But is it changing mindsets among the other side? Is it changing mindsets among us? I'm not sure. So that's a—

Gary: Wait, wait. You have asked an exceedingly important question that I want to dwell on for a second. Is it changing anything? There's all this activity happening, but is it changing the bottom-line conversation that people outside the Jewish world are having about us? I was on a panel with the now-famous Montana Tucker, the dancer and starlet who's doing all the social media and everybody's all over her. I turned to her and said, "Montana, do you know whether this is, bottom line, changing anything?" She looked at me and said, "Of course it is." I'm thinking, you have no clue. We have to figure out whether all this activity—what it's going to take to actually change. Followers do not mean that you're changing a conversation.

Lio: This is a great point. And then the follow-up question to that, which we don't have to answer immediately but maybe towards the end, is whose mind do we need to change? Is it really the people outside of the Jewish world, as you say, or is it the Jews themselves? So don't answer. Think about it. I'll say what—

Gary: I thought about this a lot.

Lio: I know. We've been going back and forth, and we'll challenge you on that. Seth, do you want to ask anything else about this chapter, or can we go to the next article?

Seth: There's plenty to ask, but I'm more interested in this next piece.

Lio: No.

Seth: One question. Where do the Dennis Pragers, Ben Shapiros—what's the guy with the English accent, Douglas Murray—where do these guys all fit into all this?

Gary: It's funny because I was listening to a Barry Weiss debate yesterday between Ben Shapiro and Harris. What's his name? Harris. I forget his name.

Lio: Sam Harris.

Gary: Yeah, which was very informative and very interesting. We haven't been in contact with these people. They're running their own world out there, and they've got their own stuff going on. Do I wish we could be involved with them? We've reached out to so many people who have rebuffed us, I can't even tell you. We couldn't even get a serious meeting with the Robert Kraft people. We can't get serious meetings with some of the foundations that we should be meeting with. This is a problem—what Lio's defining about how the Jewish world works together. We should be in contact with Ben Shapiro and with Sam Harris and with Dennis Prager. I actually know the person who runs Dennis Prager's whole organization, and I did reach out to him. It was kind of a distant thing: "Well, what do you need, Gary? Maybe I'll put you in touch," rather than "Let us jump in and talk about what you're doing and what you folks are doing." They're all very busy in their own realms. We have studied together, but it was like a distant thing.

Lio: So let's segue into that. What is this recent article you wrote, which everybody can find in the Jewish Journal, and it's called "Communication War: Unity or Diversity"?

Gary: The search has to be "Gary Wexler," and then you'll see the article. We'll put the links when we post the show.

Lio: You start this with a paraphrase of a Robert Frost poem: "Two roads have diverged in the communication war between the Jews and our enemies—like two roads have diverged in the forest—and I'm no longer certain which should be the road less traveled." Then you go on to ask: should we aim for unity or diversity? Take us from there. What was your experience?

Gary: JNF America reached out to me in June—this last June—and said, "We're bringing together all these major Jewish organizations and some campus organizations and some students. We are looking at what's going to happen come September when all these students return to campuses. What are the strategies? Are they working together?" They have not been working together, and I know this through other work I'm doing. They asked if I could facilitate this. I said yes, but I wanted a list of everybody participating and to have a Zoom with each of them individually before we do this, because I have learned in doing this kind of work that I can't naively assume I understand what they do. I needed to understand what they're facing on these campuses, what they're actually doing, and be educated by them. There was another reason: I know about Jewish resistance to collaboration, and I knew there would be resistance like, "Why is JNF hosting this? We should be hosting this." I wanted to give them a chance to get all their negativity and resistances out on me so that by the time we were in a room together, I had dealt with it and we could move forward. Sure enough, it all came up: "Why is JNF doing this? We should be doing this. This is our thing," and all this other stuff. As I wrote in the article, we are in a crisis, and it's as if they're concerned with who's making the kugel and the couscous that's bringing everybody to the table rather than saying, "We have to be at this table." That became the big thing—whose kugel and couscous is this—which is absolutely ridiculous. The first thing that happened was that the CEOs of these major Jewish organizations decided they weren't coming. Only two showed up, and the rest delegated somebody else, which already told you they weren't going to take this as seriously as it needed to be taken. If there's anything in America that needs to be taken seriously, it's the Jews on campus right now. We got to the convening and there were about 40 people in the room: about 18 organizations, some campus organizations, some students, JNF staff, and ten JNF donors. Day one was framed as the day of strategy, conceptual thinking, and creativity. We are really good at strategy and creativity; whether we implement them is another story. Day one was incredible. People spoke; they were intelligent. There were incredible strategies and incredible ideas. Day two was collaboration day—how do we collaborate with one another to make this happen? That's when it all fell apart because the organizations couldn't collaborate with one another. The egos were put on the table, the accusations—"We're the organization that should be doing this." I watched it fall apart in front of me. Since then, JNF has pulled them together, but they're saying, "Okay, we'll inform each other of what we're doing," not that we'll collaborate. One organization created a WhatsApp group so people could share best practices. This is not collaboration. It's like troops on a battlefield that are totally uncoordinated, each one running to his own hill and forgetting there's a major hill to be taken that we have to coordinate and take together. In the end, it took me several months to think this through. I thought, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm naive. Should we be collaborating? Ideally, yes. Can we collaborate? Not so sure. Maybe this should be the Startup Nation concept within the Jewish world itself: let a million initiatives blossom, and let the best ones that can get funding survive. Maybe that's the way we need to go.

Seth: I don't think anyone else is doing what we're doing. Nobody can comprehend what we're talking about. Who would even say that anti-Semites have anything valuable to say without being called anti-Semitic or self-hating Jews? But there's something that everybody's missing in this whole picture. The reason why the solution is so close is because we're not waiting for anyone else to change. We're not waiting for laws to be enacted. We're not waiting for a new politician to get elected. The answer is way closer than everybody thinks.

Lio: Like us, hit the bell on YouTube so you can get a notification when the new episode is up. This is The Jew Function, and let's get back to our guests.

Gary: I put it, in the end, in the article on the funders, because no one dares to say this who is working in the Jewish world. But because I'm retired from it and I'm not taking any money, I figured I'm putting it out there and saying, "Hey, funders, you are the folks who really make the decisions for the Jewish world. It's your money that makes it able to exist. Therefore, the responsibility sits on you to make a decision here between you folks as to which path we're going down so we have clarity as to how we're going to fight this war. Is it going to be the path of collaboration? If it's collaboration, you have the ability through your money to strong-arm these organizations and say, 'You're going to have to collaborate in order to get our money.' Or is it going to be the entrepreneurial Startup Nation path of every organization for itself? If so, you're going to have to be the ones to fund the best initiatives to make it work." You folks—it's on you to make the decision as to what direction we're going to go in. That was the article.

Lio: And by the way, it's a great article. You should read it—anyone listening here. How long has it been since that experience?

Gary: The experience was on the last day of July, the first day of August. And you published the article when? A few weeks ago. I've gotten a trickle of people who have asked me questions about it, but by and large, it's not moving the way the other one was. I got a person who called me and said, "Oh my God, I can't believe you spoke about the funders that way," because you're not supposed to. That's the holy grail you're not allowed to touch.

Seth: Is there a history of that? Maybe you could say the Rothschilds around Israel or something. Is there a history that it's the funders in the Jewish...? If we go back and look at our history, is it the funders who are calling the shots, or is it the spiritual leaders?

Gary: Beyond the Rothschilds, going back into our history, it was the wealthiest Jew in the town who built the synagogue, who made the decisions. This has been a forever thing. And one of the things that I said is October 7th has changed everything for us. We have to move into culture change and re-examine how we do everything if we're going to win this war, including what we do in America in aiding this situation. Therefore, we have to look at the whole way the structure of Jewish life has worked and say, is it still working now, or do we have to seriously make some change? So the question you're asking is, should it be that way? I don't know, but we have to examine it.

Seth: So the main question is, is the approach that we're going to all collaborate somehow, we're going to all work together somehow, or is the approach like the Startup Nation—let the market decide, and the competition will help the best ideas rise to the top? That's the main question, right? Exactly. In a human body, every cell is fighting for itself, and every organ is fighting for itself, and they must. In addition to that, though, they're constantly negotiating and working together to create a balance. You can't have them fighting against each other because then the body becomes sick. So even though each one is doing this self-sustaining thing, there's also this overall thing.

Speaker 5: What's the prognosis?

Seth: The unity, I think it's probably more the—and to Lio's question before—who do we need to speak to? Do we need to speak to the outside world, or do we need to speak to the Jews? It's the outside world. The pressure is the juice, and that's kind of how it works for us. And the unity may not be able to come just as, like, the first approach. The unity may come because, as you do this—I think because if we can zoom out, Gary, you're talking about looking at this in a new way. I think if we zoom out, you allow the Startup Nation thing to happen. You allow these organizations to do their thing, but there becomes a certain place where you can't reach your true goal unless you collaborate. Elon Musk is now talking about sending some ship to Mars, right? But he says we can't do it for two years because there's some window that has to open in order for the ship to get out. It's not like you can just build your ship and just do whatever the hell you want because you're the richest guy in the world. You also have to deal with gravity and all these other forces. So there is no one organization that's going to be able to just save the Jewish people. At some point, there will have to be some kind of unity, some kind of collaboration in order to reach the goal. So on the one hand, we have to let—like, for example, we had a break-in. I'm putting a lot of things on the table because it's not a straightforward answer here. We had a couple break-ins in my neighborhood, and it was the first time—I’ve lived there 15 years—it was the first time in 15 years that all the neighbors got together and talked. And a lot came out of it. So if this guy didn't try and break into these people's house, then all of the neighbors wouldn't have gotten together. So we have to understand all of the forces that we're talking about here and how all of these negative forces actually work in our favor, actually, and to use them and to leverage them, and to not be scared of the fact that we're separate from each other, but to somehow—even if the different Jews and all the other... like, who's bringing the kugel, who's bringing the couscous. Gary, what is the big overarching question that, no matter what organization—okay, fine, you guys want to make the couscous, you make it—but now let them run as far as they can. They're going to hit a wall. Let every organization do whatever they can. They're going to hit a wall. What is the thing that nobody will ever be able to do unless there is collaboration? Let's say everyone gets all the funding they want. Everyone has all the resources they want. Go do your thing. The way the system works, until they collaborate, they'll never even reach their own goal. So my question then is, what could be a big enough goal, a big enough blanket that can cover all of this, that as each one develops doing their thing, they won't be able to succeed unless they unite?

Gary: So are you asking, what is it that could bring them together? Just like in your paper?

Speaker 5: It could be either...

Gary: It could be that,

Lio: Or what should they try and accomplish that requires their collaboration, their togetherness? Maybe that's a better... Yeah. Like, what is it that they cannot accomplish on their own? In other words, if they were able to accomplish it on their own, they would have accomplished it already. The fact is nobody is doing it or has done it or is, you know, so something is missing. So maybe if you can define what is the stumbling block, and that's the flag that you raise—look, you can't do it because it's this and this and this and this and that—then maybe people will, you know. What's the stumbling block?

Gary: We have an enemy that appears to be so well-coordinated and so well-funded that we will never defeat them unless we figure out a comprehensive, collaborative strategy between us. I think—look, and I put it out as two roads there. I'm hoping to engender a discussion. Ultimately, do I agree with you, Seth, when you talk about the cells and then cells have to be in collaboration with one another to be able to operate the human body? I completely agree with you. Now, is it possible, is the question. Look, I was speaking with Alana Newhouse, who is the editor of Tablet, at the very beginning of this, and she said to me, she said, Gary, you're never going to get coordination, collaboration between the Jews. It's just not going to happen. Okay. So this is a very credible person telling me this. I've had other credible people say this to me, and I have to take it seriously and say, am I going to be suddenly the generator here of the discussion of collaboration that has to happen? Are there other people that believe this? Or are we just going to be defeated in the way that the Jewish world has been? And then it gets back to, is the way that it's been going to be the way of the future? And given our new reality, are we going to survive if we don't change how we actually operate? So, I mean, all I can say to you is it's a survival situation. Look, we are in two wars here. There is the war that's going on in Israel on all these fronts, and then there is the global communication war. And they are connected to one another deeply. People have said to me, why is it important that we win the communication war? It is important because right now we have a new generation that is being swayed by what our opposition is telling them, along with many Jews who are being swayed. So in 15 years, when these people are in positions of power—in government, in business, and everything else that makes the decisions that helps to fund Israel and guarantee its existence—if these people are not in our camp somewhat, we're up Schitt's Creek without a paddle. And if there's another thing that we have learned through this war: without America, Israel would not be able to survive this situation. So it's very important that there are international collaborations going on with tiny Israel in the midst of this growing, powerful sea and its alliances that surround it. So we have to be able to figure out how we win this communication war for the future. Look, we don't even know that if Kamala Harris gets elected, that that's going to continue. So, look, I think you're voting for Kamala? Yes, I am.

Lio: Oh my God, save us, Gary. Well, we don't care. We're not a political podcast. We just—we have opinions, though. But the point is, if I'm looking at history, and if you're looking at the near history, the thing that brings us together is, you know, the whip, the knife, the gun, right? The Cossacks—you know, that's what brings Jews together. That's what makes them, for a brief moment, set aside everything else and work together. You saw it in Israel. You saw it with the Jews in America. You saw it with this response to your article. By the way, it's not just because it was a brilliant article. It was the time. The zeitgeist was such that it demanded everybody just leave everything aside and start to come together. And so, as you said, October 7th made the Jews realize, oh, Jews in Israel, Jews in America—we're connected. Great. Amazing realization. We've been yelling it from the rooftops forever. But, okay, finally, you got it. But you need another October 7th to have another realization that you need Israel on the map. And then another one to realize that we need to work together. And another means, like, how many October 7ths do you need to freaking wake up to where this is pushing you?

Gary: That's the question. That's the question. I don't have the answer for you guys.

Seth: Let me ask a simple question.

Lio: We called you for answers, Gary.

Seth: Gary, you are not confident that with Kamala as president that Israel would get the funding that it needs, and yet you're still willing to vote for her? You want to get into this now? I don't even really care about her. I'm into the Jewish mind who's willing to make a decision.

Gary: Okay, look, I'm not sure about Donald Trump either. Did he create the Abraham Accords, and did he move the embassy to Jerusalem? Yes. Do I give 100% credit for that? Absolutely. But he has said some very antisemitic things, and he is associated with some serious antisemites. Do I trust him? 100% not either. And do I think the man—we're not getting into this now.

Seth: No, no, not about him. I just want to understand—forget about all the presidential thing. I'm just saying if we are now—if our main goal to solve is the existence of Israel, if that's the goal—I guess what I'm trying to get at, and maybe this isn't a good example because it's so nuanced: I see Jews who are willing to do things that are against, that put our existence at stake. I see it all the time. Jews who do things that are against Jews. Jews who do things that are against Israel. Okay? So that's... your problem is you have all these Jews that are for Israel that can't get—

Gary: And because we have differences of opinion and don't see eye to eye on everything, we therefore say we cannot collaborate with one another. Because this guy is Haredi and believes this, I don't feel connected to that person.

Seth: Is it just ego stuff that keeps the people apart? Is that what it is?

Gary: It's ideology and ego. It's ideology. Look, you've got tribes. We're a tribal people. And so today we might not have the ancient tribes, but we've got tribes of ideology.

Lio: So what are we doing? We know the material. We know it's written in the Bible that Jews don't get along and they have opinions and all that, and it usually takes some big—right, a big act of God—to make them, for a moment, forget about all their differences and then come together, like around Mount Sinai and then the Temple and all that. And I know people don't like those—I mean, not every person we speak to, but a lot of people, especially modern secular Jewish people—like, okay, the Bible is a nice story, but—but I mean, so many thoughts.

Gary: There's another side to this.

Speaker 5: Okay.

Gary: But first I want to say, I just had a terrible thought as you're talking. I thought to myself, if any of our enemies are listening to this podcast and they're hearing this part of the conversation, they're sitting there rubbing their hands. Isn't this great?

Lio: Oh, dude. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. They're already rubbing their hands. We have articles. We have recordings. We have notes by Sinwar already where he was rubbing his hands.

Gary: What, do you think people—they can't possibly get along? No. Now, there's another side of this that we need to be looking at. And I just forgot what that other side was. Hold on a second. Oh, it's about forcing. Okay. I hear what you're doing. Okay. In the Arab world, they may be fractionalized as well, but they're not a democratic world. They've got people who say, this is what we're going to do. I mean, look at Hamas in Gaza. There's no democracy going on there. You've got this terrorist organization deciding what the trajectory is in Gaza, and everybody obeys because they're scared to death.

Speaker 5: I mean, look at Assad in Syria.

Gary: Look at Erdogan in Turkey. Look at the mullahs in Iran, okay? So we're in a world that is thoroughly democratic, even though we can question the democracy at times. Among the Jews and among the organizations, we don't have a king. They basically have these leaders that say, this is the path and this is what's going to happen. We don't have that. We can't have it.

Lio: We couldn't. Ever since biblical times, every Israeli thinks they're king. Exactly.

Gary: Every Jewish organization leader thinks that they're the one who has the answer.

Speaker 5: Exactly.

Gary: And every funder thinks that they've got the answer. I've had more funders come to me and say, this is what you should be doing. And I'm thinking, you are so naive; you're not a communication specialist. Some of you might have some good ideas. But anyway, we don't have a dictator that can say, this is what we're doing, and this is how it's going to happen, for better or for worse.

Lio: Finally, we have an answer, Seth. We need a good dictator.

Seth: Yep, this is great. This actually points to the unique thing, because this is a place to rise to a new level of what it means to be human. We can get everybody to do the right thing, or do what we want them to do, through the bayonet—that is a means of doing it—but that's not what we have. So now it's like the honor system: you allow a person to walk into the store and tell them, "You can have whatever you want. No one's going to watch. Just make sure you leave enough money when you leave." Are we going to be the... that's where we are as Jews now. We can do whatever we want. This one's got this many millions, and this one's got these many millions. Each Jew is, like he says, a king—he can determine all these things. Each organization—everyone's got the internet. What then will unite us, if not the bayonet? Because the Hamas thing will happen again if we don't get this right. It's just a matter of time until another, worse thing happens. That will happen for sure, and we have no shortage of that in the history of the Jewish people, so we can count on that. But we have an alternative also, and that is for us to figure this out. We also have this situation where, going back to the biblical thing, you had 12 tribes: you guys are going to fight, you guys are going to do business, you guys are going to study Torah, and we're all going to help each other. They did have Moses, though. They had a leader. Maybe they also gave Moses a lot of shit too—Moses leads them out, they get to the mountain, and he goes away for a couple days to...

Lio: No—he has a coffee with God, and he comes back. You don't need to go so far to Moses. There was a moment: King Solomon—the best king. Not a single war, a Temple, all the nations flocked. The example is there. You have every kind of example in those stories, including the way we could do it. Even if you take the king out of that picture, still, the amount of cohesion that was in the people and the love between them. And we have an entire podcast talking about that period and everybody who came to Jerusalem and how the nations looked at us. The examples are there. The antisemites.

Seth: It was on the back—Solomon's time of peace was on the back of David's wars. It doesn't just happen.

Lio: We had a guest, Gary. We had a great guest, a rabbi who lives here, Eli Mishal, from Livingston, New Jersey, moved to Israel. And he was like, the whole thing is a living thing in the Bible. And in the Bible there was the Saul period, the David period, and the Solomon period. Saul was just war and getting the country and doing the functional thing, but not really. David was uniting the people, and then Solomon is the highest kind of... So we're in the David part of uniting the people. The Jew Function is really a desperate attempt to change something about the rise in antisemitism that doesn't seem to go away. Looking at history, it usually ends with something terrible before we reach relative quiet again, but we don't want to reach something terrible. We want to do it now. So that's why we're doing this podcast. And if you like this, also consider leaving a small contribution on our Patreon channel. We both have day jobs, by the way, so we're not hoping to make money from this. We're hoping to see some change of heart.

Seth: Any funds are used to get this out there, to get this to people. We consider this the same way you go out every day to get money to feed your family, put a roof over your head. This is also critically important to our future, to our safety, to a good world, not only for Jews, but for everyone.

Lio: This is The Jew Function. And let's get back to our guests. I have a question for you about that.

Gary: Yeah. You're interviewing on this podcast all these influential people. As far as the issue that we're discussing here—collaboration or entrepreneurial shit—with all the people that you have spoken to, what are you hearing? What are people saying? What is your sense?

Lio: Are you interviewing us, Gary? Good.

Gary: I'm trying to figure out our path. No, no.

Lio: First of all, thank you for doing that. I'll ask—Seth will go as well because we didn't coordinate. Our audiences sort of divide a little bit like the division we did in the very beginning. You have those who hear us—maybe they agree with us in principle, but it's like, whatever. Yeah, unity is good. I don't object to unity. Can it happen? There are those who are supporters, fans, champions of unity. They do amazing work. Interestingly, they lean more into the religious side, very strong Zionist values. It's this conservative, Zionist, religious side of the map. And then you have those in the middle who feel the urge to act, but they feel like there are so many things to do—enemies here and the government there and all these things on the outside—that they think, "We'll get to the unity later." They're not against it, but that's how our audiences divide. So, two thirds agree with us wholeheartedly. One third is coughing at the idea—it's a nice, naive idea. It's like, whatever, we can't make it happen. Like the people who told you, like the editor of Tablet: "I had to choose." My feeling is that this is exactly the place—this is the last bastion, the hill we need to charge. And I want to hear Seth, because I haven't heard his take on that from all the guests we had.

Seth: First of all, I don't think that big, revolutionary things happen in a minute. I don't think they happen by accident. Elon Musk, for example—we talked about him. If someone didn't already invent electricity and someone didn't already discover this and another 10,000 things, he wouldn't be able to do what he does today. So every one of these little actions, even though we have nothing in our hands to show for it—Gary, your whole career of working in this and influencing these people and this conversation and that conversation and where these articles actually go—even though you didn't get a lot of responses on this last one, it moves. I don't think we have a way to measure that pulse of how this is going. On the one hand, I think that the work we're doing, even though we really have nothing to show in our hands except a bunch of good friends, enters into the network. On the other hand, I think we just have a really loose... like the kids are in the playground, and we're just trying to loosely keep them from leaving the playground. We have no sense that we're all doing something together. My feeling is that the strategy is to start with the closest ones who agree and build concentric circles from there. I don't think we should try to convince the ones who have big objections. I think we should hear the objections—it'll make us stronger and help us understand ourselves better and maybe even help us refine our position more. But I think the main takeaway, when we see how impossible this problem is, is to start linking with magnetism. The bigger the magnet becomes, the more it can attract. A small magnet can't do much. So we need to start bringing together the ones who do agree to collaborate, who can agree on some vision. And also, Gary, you said day two fell apart. So maybe in that day one thing, just keep fine-tuning the day one thing and then flirt a little bit into day two, but don't let it go too far because we understand the wheels fall off when we get that far. Then you start to see who's willing to do this, who has the capacity to do this, who has the skills to do this. Let me ask you a question.

Gary: We're talking about a serious problem that really connects to our survival and our thriving and everything else. Is the purpose of your podcast entertainment, or are you actually trying to change something?

Lio: Has it looked like we can entertain people? Come on. You and I spoke about this when you were in Israel a lot more, but Seth and I have embarked on this path because, as Jews coming from different places—me growing up in Israel, Seth maturing in America—eventually we met and realized that we're both looking at the same dead end. There was no solution to the rising antisemitism even before October 7th. A decade and a half before that, we were already talking about it—2010, 2011. We were like, what's going on? We both found answers to a lot of our questions in the writings of Jewish sages who have this 2,000–3,000-year-old perspective on things. Not like us—we're just looking at our little last decade. You have enough of a scope—you look at two and a half decades. But how far back are people looking, really? "Oh, we have Elon Musk. That's it. All hail the king." So we were like, we're not that smart. Let's listen to really smart people who have a huge view of the world and who have attained a thing or two and have written books about it. And mind you, to write a book a thousand years ago, you ought to be worth your salt. It's not like today—you've got a ChatGPT book, right? So we looked at those people. And when they wrote about those things and they write so clearly about who are the Jewish people, where do we come from, what makes us Jewish, and what we need to do in the world—man, we have a very specific approach to this whole thing. Some people agree with it wholeheartedly, as I said. Some don't. But for me, the question is not if this is the right answer. I'm convinced that Jews must unite and show the world how to do it, and that will remove all the problems. For me, the question is how to get people to even consider this when I'm so far removed from my own tradition and history, and I don't even know why I'm called Jewish—why they call me Jewish, why Hamas is after Jews and not after Israelis. People don't know, and they don't even know what it means. All they know is that it emboldened their Jewishness. "Oh, now I really have to be Jewish because they're after all the Jews." Yeah, but what does it mean? Who are you? And Gary, 99% of the people we bring on the show don't have a clear answer to what a Jew is. We ask this question: an alien would come and ask, "What is this tiny group that makes so much noise and wields so much influence?" They have no answer. Some give good answers around the issue—it's about this, it's about that—but what is a Jew? Nobody has an answer. I think that's where we start.

Gary: All right, so let's get back to this, because we—you and I—have discussed this over breakfast in Tel Aviv. We have discussed this several times. You woke up something in me that I have actually put out to the group, and I totally agree with, and it gets back to your question of who are we talking to. We're talking to multiple audiences. We need to get out of the echo chamber, and we need to be talking to, as Marnie Black calls them, the swayables, the people who are not dug into their positions that we're never going to convince, but there are a lot of people out there—non-Jews—who don't know. We're talking to these people; we need to be able to bring them on board with us. Then we are talking from there to influencers—let's just take America—in America in general, not necessarily Jewish. We're talking to college students. But then eventually we are talking to the Jews because, as you have pointed out, Lio, if we don't have a garim in here, a strong seed in the middle from which this is all growing, it's not going to work. This gets to something else that I want to say that I have learned this year. When people say to me, "So what do you think we should be doing?" I don't have all the answers, but I have evolved to a certain answer. We're on a playing field with an enemy. The enemy owns the playing field; I've described this in my articles. We always come onto the playing field in the defensive position. Everybody thinks that this communication war is about how we answer their strong messages of apartheid and colonialism and genocide, and what's our message. We've got to go beyond that. If we start just answering those messages, we're still on their playing field, playing defense. We've got to create our own playing field where they come on in the defense. That playing field—and the only one that's going to make them defensive—is if we create an authentic Jewish playing field in some way. They can't compete on that playing field. We have plenty of content to frame a Jewish communication playing field in this war. This is what I think we have to do. I couldn't come to that without our breakfast on Nachal Lambin Yamin in Tawarim, where you started to get into that.

Lio: First of all, thank you. I'm humbled. I managed to say something. Great place. Yeah, great pastries. I think that playing field, what happens in that playing field—as you said—when they do something, we just respond. We're just passing the ball back to them on the same field, and we have to create our own. In our playing field, what matters is how much you can unite and create something. That's the challenge. And why is it uniquely Jewish? Because, in spite of all of our differences and our fragmentation, only Jews can actually come together where it matters. They can't. All these Arabs and all these—they cannot. They can unite against something. They can unite to bring something down. But to do something creative as a result of unity, as a product of unity, only Jews can do if you can excite Jews about that—look, we can build a freaking temple that the whole world will come to worship at, 2,000 years ago we can do something amazing today, and whenever we actually do it, amazing things happen; we turn the war around, we scare the enemies, we do all these amazing things as a result of unity, which is aimed at, first of all, creating that thing among us against someone else. Yes, this happens during the battle itself, but for the most part, Jews do it when they're called to do it, and it's to bring something, to birth something new. None of these Arab guys ever did it. Sorry to say, no offense to my Arab friends and all that. Never.

Gary: All right. So let me lay out several things here. Okay. One of the things that I put in this last article that I realized was also due to my naïveté was thinking that this was all about communication strategies and ideas in order to win this war. And then I woke up when I did the JNF thing, realizing that's only half the battle. The other half of the battle is changing the culture of the Jewish world in order to do this. Because if we don't do that, which gets back to what you're

Seth: saying, we cannot really effectively do the other—Changing from which culture to which culture?

Gary: The culture that we have of disunity, of the way that all the decisions are only made ultimately by the funders and the constructs and everything else. We've got to have a serious discussion between funders and serious communication people to be able to figure out how this has to happen and everything. So there has to be a change in how the Jewish world works in order for us to win this communication war. We cannot win it in the way that the Jewish world is presently working. Okay. Now, that gets back also to Lio, what you were just saying. And here's the question I'm now asking myself as you are applying these questions to me, to say, what do I really believe in the end? Do I believe that we can do a startup nation methodology culture here and still win this communication war? And I've got to think about this. On the surface, I'd say absolutely not. We've got to be unified. On the other hand, I'm thinking to myself now, given what everybody has said to me, is the unification a pipe dream and will there only be frustration? Or do we have a real job in front of us here, that we've got to be able to say, this now becomes the absolute other real job that we have to pursue, and we've got to figure this out, rather than just say, well, we try to form coalitions and they don't happen. Is there a serious job of unity that needs to be taken on here that we need to start pursuing? So these are the questions I'm asking

Seth: Myself as you're asking me things. Gary, what's the desire of the people that need to make these decisions? What do they desire? Are you talking about funders or are you talking about leaders? The people whom you say we need a new culture, those people, not the millionth one who will join,

Gary: But the first ones. What is it? Okay. So this is a really difficult question and a very controversial one. Because when I left the advertising business and I went into the nonprofit world, and it was Jewish and non-Jewish that I dealt with. I also naively thought, okay, now I'm going into a world of people dedicated to creating a better world or a better community. I'm going to meet some incredible people who are committed to this, and that's what they're committed to. Now, I did meet some of those people, and they became good friends of mine, and it changed my life in many ways. But I met an awful lot of other people in the nonprofit world and in the Jewish world, whose first commitment was to themselves and their egos, even though they would use the veil of Torah to say, this is what I'm in for. But I realized they used Torah as a weapon to be able to accomplish what they needed to for their egos. I met funders who were very dedicated to Jewish life, and I met other funders who were dedicated to the prestige of being a funder and the connections and the access it would give them and the power that it would give them and the important people that they would be able to meet through this that they haven't met through their business dealings. So it's a mixed bag of what you're dealing with, and it's always going to be a mixed bag. It's not going to be a pure situation. So you're going to have to deal with these things all the time. The good and the bad. Is the approach different for

Seth: those different groups, or it doesn't—you can use the same approach? No. Look, I'm a marketing guy.

Gary: You've got to look at each segment and say to yourself, what are the strategies, the creativity, the ideas, and the messages that you need to use for this segment? What are their hot buttons as opposed to other people's. Now, there is going to be, yes, a common thread that's going to have to come forward. But how you approach these people, what you tell them, look at you, you learned this in sales. I took a lot of sales courses being in the advertising business, recognizing, of all the things you had to, you had to have your antenna up for when you're making a sale of who the person is that's across from you that you're trying to make

Seth: Too. I think when we talk about Hezbollah or Hamas—kill the Jews—it's a good blanket strategy that can incorporate a lot. We, I still don't hear that we have,

Gary: What is our goal? So Seth, we're dealing in complexity. It is no wonder that in English, there's just the word complexity. In Hebrew, there's mesubach and murkav. Okay? So you have multiple words for complexity because we Jews are so complex. It's like we needed two words for it.

Lio: There's probably more words.

Gary: Yeah, there's probably more words.

Lio: Obviously, I think what I like about this is that this raised some good questions. Your questions to us, our questions to you. And I feel—and this is, by the way, when you asked me before what some of the influencers said—one thing that came up in many conversations is that a lot of them said, it's time for tough questions. It's time for asking and discussing tough questions. And they spoke about it on different levels: individually, within your close relationships, collectively. I think that's—that's what every existential crisis-

Seth: Hold on. Gary, it's coming to me now. You said, for example, I'm going to interview each of these people before—I'm going to have a Zoom with each of these people before I bring them together, right? Maybe, like, kind of number one question. You would know better. What is it that you want? John, what is it that you want? Miriam, what is it that you want? You need to find the question, but what are they doing here? Well, I want to come because I want to get a connection to see if I can get my son a job over there. There's probably in there some people who want this healthy future for the Jews. I think maybe if you can pull out of them through some questions, where are they aimed? And then you can start realizing, if you're managing a company, these are my marketing people, these are my salespeople. But if you're kind of just throwing them all together, the engineers and the salespeople are constantly at war with each other in a company. But you need both of them.

Gary: In an advertising agency, the creative people and the strategy people are always at war with one another. Okay. So, right.

Seth: So just throw them together.

Gary: So let me say something about this, okay? One of the courses that I was teaching at USC, and I'm now teaching at what's called the Academia in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, is a course on team creativity. When I started to teach this course at USC, after teaching nonprofit marketing and advertising, I realized I couldn't just throw students into an arena and say, create. I needed to have a philosophy and a methodology to get them into creative teams as to what they're doing. And I created something which I didn't realize at the time was consummately Jewish called the undulating space as a methodology. The undulating space was, I had to go back through my advertising history as working in advertising and saying, okay, as creative people, how do we actually create ideas? And I realized the account team would come to you with all these strategies and all of these messages and all of this research. And you put all this stuff on the wall—worked on the walls because it was much better visually to look at things. And what your job was, was to be able to identify the three to five best strategies and throw everything else away. And then your job as a creative team was to figure out what was the connection between all these disparate strategies. And we learned something, that you could find connections between the most disparate things in the universe. And we have to cabal here, Lio. Anyway, in this process, I realized you entered into this space, which undulated, which was like chaos, trying to put these things together and see where the connections were. And eventually I realized this was Bereshit. This was the beginning chapter of Genesis, where in the beginning there was heaven and earth, which were disparates, like the disparate information. And then you went into tohu vavohu, which is called chaos in English, but it's anything but chaos, out of which came man and woman and sky and darkness and all these different things came out of it. Okay? So I would teach the students, saying the tension between the disparates is the most important thing because it's what gives birth to the creative ideas that come out. So the fact that you have in a company between, what did you say, the tensions between?

Seth: Sales and engineers.

Gary: Okay, sales and engineers, or, in advertising, between the creative people and the account people—is very positive because it leads to the tension out of which comes the best ideas. So this tension is a good thing. Let me just go into something else for a second here, as long as we're on a Jewish podcast. Tohu vavohu, I realized eventually, is so mistranslated as chaos. If you just listen to it—the audio of it—tohu vavohu, tohu vavohu—there's a meaningful rhythm going on there. And it is not chaos. It's the matter, I mean, the matter of creation out of which comes the ideas. So it's very intentional. It's not as chaotic. And so we have to bring people from their different places into this tension if we want to create something extraordinary. They're a double-minded rush.

Lio: No, this is a good rush. And it brings us to a closure because we do have to close, unfortunately. I think we're just getting warmed up. But yeah, you'll come again. I mean, you're a regular by now. That's it. Two episodes, you're a regular. I think the fact that you eventually led us to these, again, these biblical thoughts is not a coincidence. And as you said yourself, things are very poorly translated, if at all. Because, what do people have to go on? What they read, the words. But if you don't understand the context, the inner meaning of things, you translate the word itself. And you get it from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English. What are you left with? Some external description of things and people moving from one place to another and a vengeful God. It's such a loss. And I think we have an inner meaning—for us, for Seth and me, and a lot of people—or I should say, as one of my guests, one of the guests that we had told me, you should know that you were part of a very large, rather very small minority that thinks this way. But I don't think we're part of a very large or small minority. I think a lot of people are waking up to it because the current translation and interpretation simply is not working. It can't be. The internality of things is what works. And for us, this whole engagement with the Torah and the Creator, this is just a movement towards love and unity. That's what this thing is about ultimately. And so put everything aside. If we can't excite ourselves about that, and that as you move in love, you get all the good friction. I mean, what is sex? It's friction. It's not like you just all agree with each other, right? It's the opposite of agreement to an outside looker, right? It's friction. It's movement. It's all those things. That's what love is about. So that's what we're about. And I want to end with, if you could do us a favor, read a quote from Baal HaSulam's article—the piece, actually—and it's a little long, but you can handle it. I think you're good. And just remember, as you're reading this, every time it says the Creator or a thing like that, it talks about this quality of love. So let's see if we can do that. Think about this quality of love as you are reading this quote for us. Here, it's in the chat—no, it's not in the chat. It's—oh, it's too long. Hold on. Is it too long? No. Possible. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Two parts, I'm putting it to you. One part and then second part. Here. Go for it.

Gary: Okay. Here we go. Okay. The tough, egoistic resistance between people, along which international relationships deteriorate, all these will not cease from the world by any human counsel or tactic, whatever it may be. Our eyes can see how the poor, sick patient is turning over in dreadful, intolerable pains, and humanity has already thrown itself to the extreme right, as with Germany, or to the extreme left, as with Russia. But not only did they not ease the situation for themselves; they have worsened the malady and agony, and the voices rise up to the sky, as we all know. Thus, we have no other choice but to accept His burden and the knowledge of the Creator, meaning that they will aim their actions to the will of the Creator and to His purpose, as He had planned for them prior to creation. Oh, there's more. Okay. And when they do that, it is plain to see that, in His work, all envy and hatred will be abolished from humanity, as I have shown above. This is because when all members of humanity unite into one body and one heart, full of the knowledge of the Lord, then world peace and the knowledge of God are one and the same thing. Very connected to what you've been saying.

Lio: Okay. When you replace those religious terms with what this is about, if you understand this is the end goal, that makes it exciting. It's interesting. It's like, how do we get there? How do we love each other? How do we make it? It's good stuff. All right.

Gary: Thank you.

Lio: Lio.

Gary: Gary.

Lio: Stay sane. I do my best. I'm already in the bomb shelter. I can't get any safer than that.

Gary: And Seth, stay safe in New Jersey.

Seth: Thanks, Gary.

Gary: Here in Los Angeles. Yeah, stay safe.

Lio: Los Angeles. It's not an easy time for Jews, but as Seth said, the pressure is bringing us together. So look at that. For 25 years, we were barely speaking.

Seth: I'm kidding. Twelve years, we were barely speaking. And now we're on the phone.

Lio: It'll be organic. You never know what it's going to be. All right. Goodbye. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. This is The Jew Function. You can find this and every other talk as well.

Seth: Big hug, everyone.