w/Jonas Sota | the key is belonging

TheJewFunction Podcast — Episode Transcript Hosts: Lio and Seth Guest: Jonas Sota Jonas (00:00): In 2016, I had just graduated university. ISIS was rampaging through Iraq and Syria, and I somehow fell into a series of conference calls with intelligence officials—number ones and number twos of CIA, MI6, Mossad. I went to a summit in Palo Alto, probably about 20 people. We had a former jihadi. We had a guy by the name of Arno Michaelis, who started the largest white supremacist group in the United States before becoming a peace activist. Something everybody said—the intelligence officials, these guys who started and participated in extreme violent groups—was that people were drawn to these groups for belonging. You had kids who grew up in France and the UK who never felt that they belonged there. Muslim kids, Muslim parents, never felt that they belonged there. They traveled all the way to Turkey and into Syria to join ISIS. People are starved for belonging, and they will do crazy things to get it without realizing what they're doing. Seth (01:17): The Jews saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was. All things are mortal but the Jew. All other forces pass but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? Lio (01:31): Welcome, Seth, to TheJewFunction. Good to see you. Seth: Good to see you too. Lio: It has been, what, now a week since the ceasefire? It was eerily quiet the past few days here. Everyone is still playing very nice to one another. Even Netanyahu had a few warm words to say about the opposition. There's still a lot of craziness happening around his trial and everything, and even Trump's little nudge didn't—I don't know if it did much besides angering his opposers and emboldening his supporters. But it was interesting to see how the minute Trump was like, "Hey, it's terrible what you're doing to Bibi," everybody's like, "Oh, it's terrible. Well, why is another country intervening with that?" And then, like, six months earlier, or two years earlier, whenever the war started, and Biden was, like, basically running the military and the government from a distance, everybody's like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. We welcome American intervention." In short, when it's the guy you like, you're willing to tell yourself all kinds of stories, right? It's kind of like with us, with the Jews, right? If you like the Jews, then you're going to find all the reasons to love them. And if you hate the Jews, you're going to find all the reasons to burn them at the stake, right? That's kind of how it works, isn't it? Seth (03:03): There's some fundamental psychological things that I think are—by the way, isn't it weird also that last week was World War III and it's over already? It was, like, the fastest World War ever. Lio: It was a warm-up to World War III. Don't spoil it. I think God, you know, in his typical— Seth: —style, you know, like in the Egypt stories: "I want to show my signs and wonders. I'm gonna harden his heart so I can show my signs and wonders." I don't think he's gonna let Trump be the star of the show. He usually likes to— Lio: Don't tell Trump. You don't want to hurt his feelings. Seth (03:35): So, what is becoming super clear right now is when we see things, we should realize that they're features of the system, not flaws of the system. For example, we noticed that everybody is a sheep, right? Like, they'll just do whatever they're told. But that's not a flaw. At first, when you were younger, we saw, "It's terrible, everyone's a sheep." It's actually a great feature if you could have a good shepherd—so everyone will go do the right thing. Lio: Everybody's sheep, yes. Seth: The Western—I dare someone to try and prove me wrong—how the Western mind looks at the war is incapable of understanding the Eastern mind. We have now a situation that's becoming more and more clear, more and more publicized throughout the world. And it's making its way into Western Europe, and it's making its way to the United States and New York City now with the mayoral candidate. It's not like we have two sides. Like with Iran, for example, can't we just make peace? Or with Hamas, can't we just—you guys get a little something and we get a little something? It's two opposing worldviews that cannot exist together. It's like fire and water. They can exist in heaven, fine, like it says, but they don't exist on earth together. So both of these forces, spiritually, there's a way to blend them together, but on earth, there's no some happy thing. We're going to get all the Muslims and all the Jews to just agree if these ones need to kill these ones and these ones are hoping for some other vision of the world. There is a psychological reckoning that needs to happen before the problem can be solved. If you're playing basketball rules on a soccer field, it doesn't matter how good you are—you can't win because you're not playing by the rules of the game. I hope that this is where these conversations are going to start to go: to recalibrate ourselves to not looking at situations and wars and different kinds of people as little anomalies, but recalibrating ourselves and understanding what are the actual forces that are operating now and what is the correct approach to view them. Because if we don't view them correctly, it doesn't matter how great a basketball player is—if we're playing soccer, we're never going to win. And that's where I hope these conversations start going. Lio (06:17): I hope so, too. I think we might still see the unification of Christians and Muslims against the Jews at some point. That might happen. But you're right—I think it's slowly becoming clear that if you look at enough steps into the future, you'll see that there's a big issue. It doesn't matter how many peace treaties you sign, and trade deals, and this and that and the other. There are some fundamental chasms that happen between big worldviews, but also, more importantly, between everyday people. If you really try to get close to your neighbor with whom you share a lot of things, and you may fight over where the fence goes through the yard—so seemingly, oh, it's a tiny thing, we have more in common than we have in opposition. That's an illusion. Actually, the deeper you dig, the more you'll see that you have a ton of things that separate you. And you have to do a lot of work, a lot of inner work, to overcome that and to sort of care for him—dare I say, love him, even if you don't like him. Kind of like how our last guest, Ashira, was saying, right? Something that she learned. So I think we're at a very interesting time. People have to do a lot of internal scrutinies and psychological overcoming. I also think that we're seeing somewhat of the death of the Freudian approach to life and psychology and maybe the rise of the Adlerian approach, which is close to us. There's another Jew—but basically they split. Freud was like, "You're a victim, and just talk to someone forever. Nothing will help." And Adler was like, "No, take ownership of your life. You're not a victim of anything. You can be a contributing member of society, and you can change everything." So I think we're starting to make some changes, and I think it's going to be really interesting to hear from the younger generation. Every time we have a younger guest, I feel like my mind opens up. So before we invite our guest—and we have a very special guest; he's not a guest, he's really a friend by now. I met him when we had Gary Wexler on the show. It was a great episode. Seth (08:54): We had him twice here. Lio: And we talked to him right after October 7th, 2023. Seth: He told us he was going to vote for Kamala. Lio: Yeah. We're forgiven about that. He wrote a really poignant article about the need to win the media battle, and that got him a lot of attention. A lot of people gathered around him, and one of the people that found him was this friend of ours, Jonas, that we're going to invite in a moment. I started to talk to him and immediately it became clear to me that this guy is a little different than everyone else—all the other big influencers and influential people. He had, like, just a fresh view on things. And it was interesting. He does have a degree in philosophy from UCLA. He started to write about the issues Jews will be facing as early as 2017. Not as early as us, but early enough for someone who really grew up and matured in America. He's from the West Coast, which makes him an even more interesting human to speak to. And he writes about what's happening right now about Jewish revivalism. We'll hear from him: what does that mean to him? And he's just a great guy all around. So let's just invite him—enough with our little chit chat. Let's do it. Jonas. Jonas: Hey, guys. Seth: Hey. Jonas: Good morning. Lio: By the way, he's got an amazing story. I don't know if we'll have time to hear the entire story, but he was kind enough to tell me his genealogical background, and his grandma, and Argentinian and the rebels and—was that Argentina or Bolivia? Jonas: Chile. Lio: Chile, yeah. Other side of the mountains. Jonas: Yeah, exactly. Chile. Lio: I mean, you can hear the story—at least in an abridged version. Okay, fine, fine. Seth: All right, so let's hear the story. And then you will elegantly help him find his way toward Jewish revivalism, which is where we are now. I think they're connected, these stories. Lio (10:57): So tell us, where do you come from, Jonas? Jonas: Where do I come from? I think I come from a pretty unique mix. My mother was born in Poland in 1947, I want to say. Lio: That's a good year to be born in Poland. Jonas: Great, great time. Great time for Jews. I still don't know why my grandparents went back to Poland. I don't know what choice they had. During the war, they ended up in Uzbekistan and then made their way back to Poland. Other Jews—some went to other European countries, some went to Israel, some somehow got to the US, some went to Latin America from Uzbekistan. I don't know why they went back to Poland, but they did. Lio: Let's give the Poles another chance. It's like Homer Simpson: "Let's try the red wire again. It's fine." I'm sure they had good reasons. Go on. Jonas (11:56): So anyways, my mother had a very challenging childhood being a Jew in Poland. There's a lot to say about that. When she was about 17, 18, the Jews were exiled from Poland. Now, the way that the Soviets were framing this, it wasn't a problem with Jews, it was a problem with Zionists. Lio: We've seen what's happening in Western countries before. Right. Jonas: And let's put a pin in that to discuss, okay, where do things go when anti-Zionism is institutionalized? Meanwhile, my father, not a Jew, was born in Chile. That side of the family has been there since sometime in the 1800s. Lio: Maybe Jews? Jonas: Well, we did a 23andMe, and I don't think there's any Ashkenazi in them, no more than the average non-Jew. Seth: Yeah, there's a lot of Jews that ended up over there—that Columbus situation and all that. Jonas: Well, none of that came up. But there's a fair amount of indigenous Latin American blood in them, so I get to use that talking point with the woke mob. Indigenous. So anyways, as some viewers might know, there was a coup in 1973. There was a socialist president of Chile at the time; the country was getting quite cozy with the Soviets. My grandparents were in government. My grandfather was— Lio (14:00): They were exiled from Poland and they chose Chile? Jonas: No, no. They're separate families. Lio: Oh. Jonas: So my family that was exiled from Poland went to the US. They went to Boston, 1968. Lio: Cut to the other family in Chile. Go ahead. Jonas: So my grandfather was in Congress, not in the same party as the president. He was one of the founders of the Christian Democrats in Chile, so they were in an allied party of the president. My grandmother was slated to be the first Minister of Women's Affairs in the country—this is a new institution about to be created. And then there was a coup. General Augusto Pinochet initiated a coup, took over the government. The president committed suicide using a Kalashnikov gifted to him by Castro—Fidel Castro. My grandmother has a photo with Fidel Castro at a conference. Maybe it was in Cuba, maybe elsewhere in Latin America, shortly after the revolution in Cuba. She tells me he liked to flirt with women and was feeling very good about himself having won the revolution. So my grandparents were really in it in the political scene in Latin America. They weren't communists, but they were exiled. There's a kind of long story there, but my grandfather was arrested. My grandmother went into hiding. She hid in a few different monasteries in the hills. My father snuck her to the French embassy. My father's six younger siblings joined her at the embassy, and the French got them a plane out. From France, she was able to convince a French diplomat to apply pressure on the Chilean government to release her husband, who was imprisoned. And this is a time before social media. The Chilean government didn't want international attention on what they were doing, so they figured, okay, they'll stop making noise about this guy if we let him go. So eventually they let him go. They lived in France for a while. Point being, both of my parents in separate incidents were political refugees, which certainly gives me perspective—not in the way people would think—about what does it mean to lose your home, and what kind of life are you able to build afterwards. Funnily enough, both of my parents, as a result of losing their homes, were able to build, in a way, richer lives than they would have otherwise been able to. So that's my familial history. I think the reason why I think the primary— Lio: Hold on, where did your parents meet then? Just tie that loose end. Jonas (17:09): Yeah, so that ties into what I was about to say. I grew up in Berkeley, California. That's where they met. They were working for the same employer in Berkeley, California. And so I grew up in a house with multiple cultures and narratives. From a young age, I learned how to jump, not just from one culture to another, but from one narrative to another. I think most of my peers in the US really only know how to be in the Western narrative and the narrative that they were brought up in. At a young age, I learned the ability—I gained the ability—to go learn other narratives and jump into them and understand how to be in another narrative. Lio: Is that a genetic thing, or is this an environmental thing? Jonas: Beats me. Lio: Okay, now we're trying to replicate it. Maybe, because I feel like more people need help. Seth: You know, also with other ideas—you know, someone wants chicken and someone wants fish. That's two different kinds of narratives. Were the narratives ever competing at such a primal level or such an essence level that you couldn't resolve things? Jonas (18:28): I would say not up until recently—not up until the war. Because my family in Chile—one, not Jewish; two, they're leftists—and they've fallen into the same pattern of dehumanizing Israelis as we've seen elsewhere. Lio: So what do they make of you? Jonas: I can only guess. My guess is they think that I am so caught up in trauma that I am blind to what is obvious. Lio: And what is the trauma? Jonas: The Holocaust and being attacked and yada, yada, yada. Lio: See, that's a Freudian approach. Jonas: Sort of smoke that we're hallucinating these threats. Seth: So you said you're so caught up in trauma that—what? That you're blind to what is obvious? Jonas: Like, you know, what is happening is obvious, and what's happening in Gaza—some of my cousins would use the language "genocide." Some of my younger cousins are more leftist. Seth (20:14): I was gonna say, when people say things like that, when you look at, for example, population numbers, it's clear it's not a genocide. Jonas: Of course, right. Seth: So it's not really about facts then, right? Jonas: No, of course not. Seth: So what's it about, if it's not about facts? Jonas: Well, Latin Americans—and let's talk about Chile in particular—Chileans have a conflicted relationship with the US. This isn't really about Jews for them, it's about the US. Because the coup that happened in 1973 was supported by the CIA. They see the US as the empire. I've had this conversation with my cousins since I was a teenager. It's a very emotional issue for them. At the same time, they consume American music and American film. The political movement there for the past 15, 20 years—there's been a lot of student protests, there's been a burgeoning political movement. It's mostly borrowing from the American left. They're heavily influenced by American culture. I would say actually Chile, more than any other country, doesn't seem to have—it has much less of its own homegrown culture, and they adopt a lot of American culture. At the same time, a lot of people there are still angry about the coup. They're still angry about what they feel is American influence. The left there feels part of the Global South, this sort of victim masses of the world, and they view the US as— Lio: They should all be pissed off at Spain. Jonas: Well, so here's the thing in South America. I've had many over the years, several conversations—literally me against all of my cousins. And I have 18 cousins. So me against a room full of people, and aunts and uncles looking on. Lio: High cousins. Sign from above. Jonas (22:45): I asked them, "Well, if you had to choose between the Soviet Union and the US being the dominant power in the world, who would you choose?" All of them were silent, except for one shyly admitted, "Okay, I get your point." Their response is not rational. It's purely emotional. Seth: So our salute is so critical, what you're saying, because it doesn't matter how many facts we have at the end of the day. Jonas: Right. Seth: So you can lay all the facts out. Lio: But just to advance this already, because this is going in a good direction—I think the question is not, like, we already established in this show that facts are, you know, in a post-truth world, as Fred Menachem said here. But the question is, what is so appealing about the ideology, the idea, the pure idea that was exported by communist Russia that appealed to so many people? Maybe if you all understood what is the yearning, the desire, and then we can ask, okay, well, can we get there? Seth: What's stopping us? What's our story? What's our—we needed to tell the greatest story. Lio: Well, hold on, that's a big, big ask. I'm asking first—let's try and start with what's the problem with that story. Because everybody, as Jonas said, and I think we all know, if you talk to people who are open enough and you look at the facts, you can see that every communist country failed at the same point. They all start great and then it deteriorates very quickly. Something is not letting humans live in a commune, right? Like in a true altruistic commune where people give everything they can and they receive what they need and they help each other. What's the fuel for getting the person out of bed in that place? Jonas (24:55): I have a couple of things to say. First of all, they don't all start good. They start bloody. Lio: You can say the transition is bloody, and some are—you could argue, you know, what's the best way to try to remove a Band-Aid, right? Nice and slow, or quick and painful? That's a change. Let's leave the change aside for a second. Jonas: Sure, sure. That was just an aside. Lio: Yeah. Jonas: I think you're kind of getting at, at least, one of the fundamental points here when you said "commune." People want to live in the commune. They want community. People want unity. I was thinking a few weeks ago, I realized: what is it that anti-Zionist Jews, what is it that they want? They want unity with the world. And the Jewish community at large has not been making our narrative of unity with the world accessible. There is a narrative there. Lio: But it's not—my friend, it's not unity. They want to feel included. That's been always the Jewish story, has always been, especially in modern times. It was always there. But back in the day when Jews had a very strong ghetto and a strong—I'll call it faith, just to put it out there, but it's a different concept. Let's just say that the strong faith, something that bound them together, a certain relationship with something deeper, higher, more meaningful, let's call it—they were more or less protected. They were always outliers, but the core was there. Once that opened up, especially moving into Russia and getting the Jews out of the ghetto, and human rights and revolutions and Zionism and all that, that's when the problems really started. Because that attempt to—we want to belong—that has been driving Jewish decisions, Israeli political decisions, so many things are decided. Jonas: I think that's happening too. But if there's a sort of higher-level philosophical desire, right, there's a very, like, sort of animalistic desire for safety and to be included. But from an ideological perspective, they see Zionism, they see Jews being separate in any way, as counter to their ideology, their vision for unity of humanity. And this is why progressives are against a whole host of ways of dividing people, religion being one of them—not just the Jews. I don't consider Jews to be a religion or a religious group, but that's why they're against Christians or Christianity. They want everybody to be the same, which is actually, in a way, a common theme amongst Christians and Muslims. Lio: Which is retarded, because people are not the same. Jonas: I agree. Lio: And they're willing to kill everyone who doesn't see the same as they are. I mean, it's the worst possible approach to any sort of liberalistic, humanistic— Jonas: Absolutely. It's a deeply flawed look. But the point I'm making here is they're chasing a narrative about unity of humanity. The Jewish tradition has a narrative. It includes unity of humanity. But we don't talk about it, and they've never been exposed to it. So, you know, what's the appeal of communism? I think it's because communism is like, "Oh, we're all going to be together and we're all going to be united." Of course, that's not what happens, but I think that's part of what appeals to people. The other thing that I think appeals to people is it's a narrative that justifies their desire to not take responsibility for their own decisions. Lio: Oh, laziness. Jonas: You could describe it as laziness. I think it's more so fear. It's fear of taking that responsibility. And I think this is actually the narrative to be pushing—for Jews in particular, but for humanity as well—is empowerment. What is empowerment? Empowerment is taking responsibility for your decisions. Seth (29:42): When you go to a sports event, like a big sports event—I don't really care for sports that much—but if you go to the Super Bowl, for example. Like, for example, running track—I don't care about track. But if you go to the Olympic thing, everybody's into it. I don't care at all about swimming, but if you went and you watched the US competing for the gold medal, there'd be a fever in the room. There are, like, so many geniuses behind this whole "support of Palestine" situation that we have now. First of all, the chant is great. Second of all, the keffiyeh—he probably couldn't do better. I was taking my son to some college visits last year, and we saw some guy looking at himself in the mirror of a car. He was wearing, like, Ralph Lauren, and he was making sure that the keffiyeh just fell just perfectly. You could do it on the hair, you could do it over the neck. There are many ways to do it. It's like a perfect way. The reason I brought up the sports—people have this thing in them that once there's a fever in the air, like if there's nobody watching a musician playing on the street, almost no one will stop. But if the first 20 people are there, everyone else is going to come and see what's going on. And when there is this thing that's happening, and it gives people—first of all, everybody feels upset inside, everybody feels empty inside—and if we have, first of all, "I can look cool," second of all, "I can feel included," third of all— I mean, if you've been to a Shabbat meal or anything, when you sing together... We live near a university, a big university. I saw people in the quad last year playing their guitars, you know, a whole encampment. I'm sure for this generation of kids—I mean, how old are you? Jonas: 32. Seth: Still a kid. You're an old head, as my kids would say. For these 18, 20-year-old kids—I'm sure who grew up on Instagram—it was probably the first time in their life that they sat on the lawn with an acoustic guitar and sang a song together. So many things about this movement! Like, for Spiegler and I, how many times did we skinny dip and take drugs and play acoustic guitars? Lio: He just did it. He came from the river. For the podcast. Seth: From the river to the sea. So for them, it fulfills so many of the needs that people have to belong to. Keyword: belong. Lio: Yeah. That's the keyword. Seth: They got the good songs. They got the good fashion. They got the good chant. They got the good sense of community. It's almost as if—you see these videos, excuse me for going on so long, but you see these, like, "man on the street" kind of videos. A guy shows up at the graduation at NYU and he's like, "What do you think about the—did you even know October 7th?" "No, I'm not really sure what happened on October 7th." The people were wearing the keffiyehs at the graduation. "What do you think about—" "Well, I didn't really know about that." People don't even know the details, and the details aren't even important. Jonas (32:59): So the keyword there is belonging. In 2016, I had just graduated university. ISIS was rampaging through Iraq and Syria, and I somehow fell into a series of conference calls with intelligence officials—number ones and number twos of CIA, MI6, Mossad. Seth: They added you to the Telegram chat? Jonas: Long story short, I'm not going to get into how I ended up in this. I went to a summit in Palo Alto, probably about 20 people. I'm sitting there next to the former head of MI6. We have a former jihadi. And we have a guy by the name of Arno Michaelis, who started the largest white supremacist group in the United States before becoming a peace activist. Seth: Talk to this guy. You've talked to him? Jonas: No, we should. Seth: Okay, great. Let's make it happen. Jonas: Something everybody said—the intelligence officials, these guys who started and participated in extreme violent groups—was that people were drawn to these groups for belonging. You had kids who grew up in France and the UK who never felt that they belonged there. Muslim kids, Muslim parents, never felt that they belonged there. They traveled all the way to Turkey and into Syria to join ISIS for belonging. People are starved for belonging, and they will do crazy things to get it without realizing what they're doing. Lio: That's what we said. Seth (34:49): What in our story does—I mean, Jews—you go on Birthright, right? The main thing you feel is, like, "This is my place. These are my people. I belong." You come to Chabad on Friday night, even if you have tattoos all over yourself—like, "Whoa, they accept me. I belong here. This is my thing." What are we missing? What are the Jews missing? Why is this not missing? For who? For Jews? Jonas: What is the Jews community? But it's not, you said, like, this unity thing. It's not really part of our story, like this belonging— Seth: Well, it's not belonging with the rest of humanity. Jonas: So you don't belong with the rest of humanity, though. That's the issue. Seth: In a sense, we do. Jonas: Of course, in a sense, we do. I mean, if you think about the Jewish narrative, right? We're supposed to build the Third Temple, and the Third Temple is not supposed to be just for Jews. It's supposed to be for everybody, right? We're supposed to be the model for other people for how to live in alignment with Hashem. That's where the unity comes from, right? In some ways, yes, we're separate, but in some ways we're all dust, just like everybody else. What you have in the US right now is you have a lot of Jews. First of all, the winds of assimilation have been blowing for a long time in the US. American Jews have progressively become more and more assimilated. You have a lot of Jews of my generation, millennials, who—okay, they went to a Reform synagogue growing up a little bit. Maybe they had a bar mitzvah. Reform synagogues in and of themselves are very assimilated. In adulthood, they might have a lot of Jewish friends by happenstance, but they don't really engage in the community very much. And then in October 7th, in the aftermath of that, they have a decision to make in their social circles: do they go towards the Jews or do they go towards their progressive friends? A lot of them don't—they didn't feel that kind of belonging that I'm guessing the three of us feel with the Jewish community. I don't think this is a mistake. I don't mean, you know, from the perspective of what Hashem is doing. Seth: You don't think it's a flaw in the system? Jonas: No, no, I don't think it's a flaw at all. In fact, I had a big epiphany when I was in Colorado a few weeks ago. Seth: Did you have a Molotov cocktail situation? Jonas (37:37): That's right. So on that Sunday, I got a call from a friend, a longtime friend. I've known him since I was a kid—20 years. He gives me a call, which, you know, my generation, it's weird—usually you send a text. He gives me a call. He says, "Hey, I hope your mom is okay." My mom lives in Boulder, Colorado. And I say, "What are you talking about?" Like, I know something is up. He said, "There was an attack on Pearl Street Mall. There was some sort of Jewish demonstration, Israeli demonstration. I know your mom goes to those things." And I realized, yeah, my mom goes on this march. She's been going every day pretty much since October 7th. This is the pro-hostages march. She's going on the march for the hostages every Sunday. So I say, "Okay, I have to call my mom. Thanks for telling me." I call my mom, she picks up, I say, "Mom, are you okay?" She says, "Yeah, I'm fine." It turns out she was at the attack. She was actually standing right next to Karen Diamond, who's the 82-year-old woman who was completely engulfed in flames and recently just died a few days ago after a month. My mother was right next to her, immediately adjacent to her. Somehow she got out of—she didn't get physically injured. So I flew there the next day. I spent the week with her. I met people who are part of the marching group. I met the leaders of the group. I met with Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL. I met with different leaders of the community. And while I'm there, midway, a few days into it, I have an epiphany. Maybe some context here: especially since October 7th, but over the past five, ten years, despite having grown up in a secular environment, I have become fairly observant. I have this epiphany that Hashem willed this event. I've been seeing the impact this event was having in the Boulder Jewish community. Boulder has a lot of Jews. I think it's something like 12% of the city has Jewish heritage. Seth: All those cool progressive places are filled with Jews. Jonas (40:40): That's right. But I think actually, per capita, Boulder might have the most per capita people of Jewish heritage. This event hit close to home for those Jews. Those Jews have been, for the most part, pretty disconnected from the tribe. And I think the events—October 7th and the ensuing events—have been reawakening people and calling people back to the tribe. What really dawned on me here is, the way that assimilation was going in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if probably between 30 and 50 percent of millennial Jews who grew up in a sort of progressive, secular environment such as myself—their grandchildren would not functionally be part of the tribe. So assimilation here has been really picking up steam, and Hashem is saying, "It's time to come back now." A lot of Jews are saying, "No, no, I want to be American. I want out from this story." Lio: Cancel my membership. Jonas: That's right. Because this decision's being forced upon them over the past 20 months or so, those guys were already—they were already going to be lost. But the number of Jews in the US that I think were on the path of being lost and their bloodlines being lost, but have now come back—we're talking minimum several hundred thousand, but it could be a couple million. They say there's six million Jews in the US, but I don't know who they're counting. Are they counting, like, people who have one Jewish parent and they don't have any connection to the tribe and to the tradition? I think so. So it's hard to say what the different demographics are. Seth (43:03): Liquid has a saturation point. If you start putting sugar or salt into water, at a certain point the water can't hold any more, right? There are these natural laws in the rest of the world, and there are also these laws with Jews. At a certain point, the system—you could say Hashem willed it—the system, if the Jews are falling out too much, the system does something that naturally somehow pushes the thing back. This guy may not even have known what compelled him that morning to do that. What Spieg and I have been going through in the last couple of years through this process is—when this podcast began, we looked at our whole history. And we just kept seeing this kind of thing, like how nature just keeps stretching and squeezing and stretching and squeezing. All the costumes change and all the scenery changes and the calendar changes, but that same process keeps happening. We're now, like, in the book—this is just like the next, this is just like what happened in the Inquisition or whatever else. We're in the story. Lio: Now it's different characters, different places, but we're in the story. Not that different, by the way. Just the Thursday right before the Americans attacked Iran—it was just time in the story of Purim, that the Jews rose and the Persians fell, right? Seth: So coincidence. The cycle—it's not new. We can study it, we can see it happening over and over again, and we know what's next. What's next for us is another Holocaust, another expulsion, another shitty situation, unless—at this point now, it's inevitable. At some point, there's never been a time in the Jewish people's history since the beginning that it didn't happen. So at some point it will happen again, unless we can proactively—instead of going in a circle, we can spiral this thing up and proactively bring that unity without the system needing to force it on us again. Like the Holocaust came and then we resettled in the Land of Israel. Or, "They're gonna execute all the Jews," and then Purim—and then the Jews unite and they're saved. So we have an opportunity now to hopefully—people like you, who know a lot of people and are active in social media—to present this unity, this situation, so that the natural system doesn't have to squeeze the hell out of us again to get us to... Jonas (46:15): Maybe that's what needs to happen. Seth: It will happen, you know. Jonas: And maybe it's not. Yes, there are terrible elements to it. There are a lot of unknowns, but I have a hunch that—I use the framing of Hashem. Hashem is jabbing, in particular, American Jews right now, jolting. There are a few things I think Hashem wants. He wants Jews to come home, and I mean that in a few different senses. One sense is to our ancestral homeland. Another sense is coming home to the tribe. And the third sense is coming home to him. I'm not saying with certainty that Hashem or the system wants every Jew to go back to Israel. But those are generally the three things he wants. He wants also Jews to be empowered, to take responsibility, to accept the world as it is, take responsibility for their decisions for it. Israeli Jews are doing the best model in humanity right now for an empowered society. American Jews aren't. I was just in Boulder. American Jews still don't want to take responsibility for their own safety. They're still complaining about, "Oh, how people want to attack them and how the police aren't protecting them." Hey, they have the ability to go learn how to use firearms and protect themselves. I mean, the only reason why the attack in DC and Boulder were not mass-casualty events was because these attackers were amateurs. There was nobody preventing—not a single person prevented these events from being mass-casualty events. American Jews are, by and large, completely incapable of protecting themselves. There's not a single Jewish leader in the United States that's saying—we fail their own people by allowing these attacks to happen. Lio (48:36): I will just say, I can't get into details, but I'll just say that I have two clients right now that see an exactly opposite picture, and they are taking matters into their own hands legally within the framework of the law. Seth: But that's something that people know about, though? Lio: Right. It's not becoming public yet. No, no, no. But my point is, if it's something that's already like an active startup—people who are raising money—it's happening, and it will change. Jonas: I'm not saying it can't happen, but I'm saying to date, right? Lio: No, no, no. Listen, I'll speed it up with your permission. It's no question that the big organizations, the Jewish organizations in whom Jews entrusted their well-being and safety, are not only not functioning—they're probably helping to perpetuate the problem because it helps them stay in business. If there was no hate in the world, the ADL would be unemployed. And I don't want to speak badly about the ADL. We had on the show a few people from the ADL—great people. But that is the reality. These big systems tend to self-perpetuate, usually not with the best interest of the people that they're supposed to protect and serve. But again, that's a second-circle story. What we're interested in is in that inner story, the inner-circle story. What do we need to do to help people overcome these two things that you brought up? You kind of, like, just kind of threw them into the conversation, but they were big things: accepting—well, accepting that you don't know everything and that you can't control everything. That's a tall order from a logical, Western mind, right? "We can do with our own, you know, roll our sleeves. Look what we've done." That illusion of control is very, very powerful. Jonas (50:45): So I have a few thoughts here. We do have models for empowered leaders who started global movements. We have Gandhi. We have Martin Luther King Jr. And at least in the Jewish world, we have the early modern Zionists who reestablished sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. Lio: Don't forget Moses. That was a big one. Jonas: I'm talking about contemporary. Lio: Contemporary. Jonas: Of course, definitely Moshe. Lio: All these people that you mentioned—they were relinquishing control. That was the whole point. And yet people didn't see that in their— Jonas: They accepted what was outside of their control. Lio: Which was mostly— Jonas: They decided to live according to their values and principles, knowing full well that they could be imprisoned, they could have their liberty taken from them, they could be killed for it, they could lose their friends, whatever. So they accepted the consequences for it. They decided to do it anyways. The difference between empowerment and power, or the primary difference, is: power can be given and taken away from you. Empowerment cannot be given to you, and it cannot be taken from you. So there's only so much you can do to help people walk that path to empowerment. Ultimately, it's a path that every individual has to take on their own. Lio: That is true. You have to inspire people to empower themselves. Jonas: The consequence for having a greatly disempowered society is self-destruction. That's what happens, and that's why communism ends in self-destruction. Lio: Correct. Jonas: The West is, by and large, disempowered, and the radical Islamists are super empowered. Lio: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Jonas: Well, in a sense, in a sense they are. In another sense, they're not, because they blame all their problems on other people. Lio: Oh, yeah, that's a chronic problem with the Arab world. Jonas: That's why the Arab world has mostly fallen apart in a destitute situation, because they blame all of their problems on the United States and on Jews. It's always somebody else's fault. So they're active, but they're actually quite disempowered, which is why they're leading themselves to their own destruction. Lio (52:54): Well, if it's not the Big Satan, it's the Little Satan, you know. So—but again, that's a big thing. That's something that some people would say verges on the spiritual awakening. If you ask people about spirituality, people who have a genuine spiritual experience—it always involves this sort of humbling of a person. But there's a lot to it; again, we're not going to completely unpack it. It's almost like a precondition for embarking on any sort of serious, meaningful spiritual path—this humbleness, surrendering. It's a big thing. And it's not the same as letting go and just getting swept by—there is a place of free choice, but it involves a great deal of, as you said, surrender on the one hand, and a great deal of responsibility. Seth: This is—you're talking, this is not a remedy for the masses, though. You're talking about— Jonas: No, no, no. Seth: Only for the Jews. Jonas: Only for the Jews. Seth: Even amongst the Jews, it's very, you know, people who are ready and capable. Lio: Listen, we got to aim somewhere. There aren't that many Jews, Seth, and we're not growing in numbers. We got to work with what we got. 15, 16, whatever, 17 million. I looked at the numbers when Jonas was speaking. Optimistic estimates, I put it, would be like seven and a half million in America—pessimistic, or if you want very strict religious Jews, you know, 5.9. That's the number. There are about—Israel is growing nicely. We're having more kids, even more than the Arab population right now. So, but all in all, it's still around the 15 mil. We haven't broken that glass ceiling, and probably the Creator is going to keep it always in check. Jonas (55:06): I actually think it's critical for us to be part of, and maybe really be the creators of, a movement for empowerment that includes non-Jews. Lio: That's a different story. If you want to talk about it, we could talk about it. We have a bit more time. But I think that's a big fork in the road. For me and Seth, it's always like, okay, if I have to look at just the pyramid of how things are structured—not in terms of salary or benefits, but just in terms of influencing the system, because every system is a pyramid—then if you don't fix what's happening at the top of the pyramid, working with the bottom is going to be, you know... Jonas: I agree. Seth (55:51): The feeling also is that, the way the system—like we talked earlier about this law of nature, like the saturation point of water and what happens with Jews—there's also some weird thing that in every industry, in every place, there are these Jews that are these hubs. In entertainment, in law, in politics, wherever, in finance. So also, if something happens strong enough within the Jews, it'll 10x. It'll flow through the system. Just even porn—every single place you go in the world— Lio: There's some Jew. Seth: There's always some Jew at the heart of it. So it doesn't matter what it is. So if we can get— Lio: It's Reuben—he's German. Seth: By the way, who is it? Lio: Reuben Sturman. Seth: He's the guy, wears a religious— Lio: Religious guy. Seth: Who runs Pornhub or something? Lio: He started pornography. Seth: Oh, and the guy who started it also is a Jew. Okay, that's another story. I'm talking about the guy who's banking on it today. Lio: Those pesky Jews. Seth: So the point is that, in every place we look where something spreads, there's some hub there. So the concept here is, the goal is for everyone. The goal is peace and love for everyone. Spiek and I both have day jobs. We have to find: where is that point to push on to get the maximum leverage? And the feeling is—and we're both surrounded by non-Jews—well, he's in Israel, so not surrounded by as many non-Jews as me. But the point is that in this kind of work right here, if we're trying to find this circle of Jews, because if we can do that, then amongst us, it will flow through. Like, you go back out into your network and I go back out into my network. It'll flow through the system. Jonas (57:51): That's right. I think that's right. First, it starts with the individual, with the self, and it emanates from there. We definitely have a synergy as a community. I'm much more potent with my community, even here in San Francisco and the broader community. So I think that's right. And there's a chronic problem of American Jews—a very capable group of people as a whole, but most of American Jewry at large is disempowered, and there are going to continue to be shocks in the system, and we're moving in that direction. Seth: It's also not their fault, by the way. You know, they grew up in a very—let's say it's nobody's fault. Jonas: Sure, it's not about fault. Seth: What do we do from here? What do we have to offer? Jonas: Aside from being empowered and, you know, walking the streets with my head high and being part of the community and talking about it, I don't know what I personally can do. Because at the end of the day, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make the horse drink. And people don't—there's still a lot of cognitive dissonance. Less so, I mean, I'm noticing especially in the Jews in New York with this Mamdani winning the primary. That's been a jolt to them, and they're spurring to action. But if you look at—I mean, in contrast—there are over a million Jews in New York. The community didn't produce a single candidate for the primary. Not a single one. They didn't put their weight behind a single candidate. They were completely uninvolved in this. And then Mamdani happens. Okay, that's the contrast. Now they're spurred. There are countless WhatsApp groups organizing, whatever. But I will say that Mamdani winning the primary election is actually the smaller story, in my opinion. The bigger story is that the Democratic establishment of the Democratic Party has been endorsing him. That, to me, is a significant step to the institutionalization of anti-Zionism. Lio: That's the step. There were so many other steps before that one. Jonas: Yes, right, but this is a particularly notable step. Seth: Obama, Clinton, all those guys came out and congratulated him. Lio: These guys are—I'm sorry to say. I mean, I don't want to— Jonas: Schumer, the Democratic Party, their official Twitter profile of the Democratic Party. I mean, there's been some pushback. But even after his comments on the globalized—the Intifada slogan—there was no pushback on him. Lio (01:00:48): I'm surprised, you know, as a New Yorker, Seth, and maybe as a future New Yorker, Jonas—I'm surprised nobody came out with a campaign just showing the state of garbage on the street, the subway, the traffic, versus some country in the Middle East. Who cares? You're the mayor of New York. Take care of this. Clean the streets, man. Who cares about some other country? Seth: No, it's exactly the same thing. It's not about the garbage on the streets. It's totally about giving everybody a sense of belonging and giving everyone—making everyone feel that they're part of the city. Lio: Okay, no, but it's a big city. I mean, I understand that there's a population that he identified and he speaks to, but a lot of people—and we know that, you know, that there's a great silent majority that tries to live life and commutes back and forth and tries to raise a family in Brooklyn and in Queens. And life is—you know, when I moved to New York in the late '90s, it was just coming out of the slums, and it was picking up. It was still shooting in my neighborhood, but then it became really, really good. Then there was, like, this golden era until the depression, but even still people rode it out, because you could, and things were great until COVID. And then after COVID, it just started to—you know, the tower of cards started to come down, and everything was people leaving the city and criminals released into the—I mean, quality of life. So I'm just—I'm asking myself out loud, what's going on here, and if just the story of this belonging and whatnot, if this is accounting for all the other millions that are supposed to—but again, that's a side story now we care about. Jonas (01:02:36): But that's interesting, though. There's something I think really intriguing about that. Maybe what's going on is, you have a relatively small contingent of people—you know, the Democratic Socialists of America, the sort of communists and Islamists. Relatively, they're a small minority, but they're very potent because they've created this environment of belonging that's attracting a lot of people who know nothing about either. Most people are just trying to get along and go along in their daily lives. They're not paying attention to the policy of any candidate. They probably can't even list the name of any of the candidates. But what they do notice is this environment of belonging. So you have a relatively small group of people; they're making a lot of noise; they offer people belonging. They're able to have a huge amount of influence as a result of that. And the American Jewish community can totally do this, because at the end of the day, the values and principles of American Jewry are highly aligned with that of the average American. Seth: Besides the religious Jews, I think, in general, a lot of Jews are ashamed of these things, though. Jonas: Ashamed of this alignment with the rest of American society? Seth: No, to these values that you're talking about, these Jewish values. They're ashamed to come out and talk about being Jewish. Jonas: Yeah, I don't think "ashamed." Seth: Or afraid—combination. Jonas: Because they're disempowered, they're afraid of the consequences, and they're not willing to live by their principles and values regardless. Lio (01:04:24): I think it's deeper than that, and we touched on it many times. I think people have, you know, for all these reasons that we listed in the past hour, they have disconnected from the general trajectory of the system, of life, of where it's going—the endgame, which is a lot bigger than most people can imagine. It's bigger than simply a house and a job and a car and three kids, right? There is something deeper and bigger lurking. They forgot. They disconnected from that. They forgot what it means. They don't have that. And so, why would they espouse any values that sort of make them stand out and be singled out? For what reason? Give me that illusion of safety and anonymity—which is the same reason, by the way, that I came to New York. I left Israel. I had some problems here, and I was young, and I was like, "I'll just go become anonymous." And that's great. That's life. But the Jewish role calls for the opposite of anonymity. It calls for service, for rising to the occasion, for responsibility, for hard choices, for carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. And most people, they don't see the endgame. So why even get into these hot waters? So that, I think, is the problem. That's what we need to solve. And if you solve that, if you show— Seth: What—a big enough goal for everyone? Lio: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The big goal in life, the Third Temple, if you want to call it. Seth: Okay, we can't define it as that, so how would we define it? Lio: I don't know. Something at the end of the rainbow. You need a new image, a new picture like that. I don't know what it is. By the way, for evangelicals, it is a Third Temple. They like that picture. For Jews, if they don't understand the internality of that concept, then I don't know. Something. I'm not sure. I think that's why we're inviting people here to talk about it. Jonas (01:06:31): So getting to it, there's a practical point here. Because I grew up in Berkeley and I grew up secular, going to a Reform synagogue. When I was at UCLA, I lived in a Jewish co-op. We were 20 Jewish students. Half the house was from the LA Orthodox community. That was my exposure to traditional Jewish life, and it had a profound impact on me that changed the trajectory of the rest of my life. I'm now part of that community. It is very difficult once you get to young adulthood to enter that, because of the base of knowledge that you need to have to really participate competently. And that is enormous. And in the US at least, the observant Jewish community is doing a pretty abysmal job, in my opinion, of making the environment welcoming and accessible to Jews who don't have that background. And I think that's really key here, because you have these Jews who grew up in a secular background, they feel a strong connection to the Jewish tribe, but they don't really understand what the tribe is. Seth: We can offer more than Shabbat dinner and learning the parsha. It has to be more than sitting and learning the parsha and coming for Friday night. There has to be— Jonas: Well, they have to learn the fundamentals. How do you make sense of the parsha? You have to learn Jewish history. Who are we? Who are we coming from? What have Jews done before? There's a lot to learn, and as an adult, outside of Jewish day schools, where do you go learn that stuff? Seth: TheJewFunction Podcast. Jonas: Exactly. Lio (01:08:16): First of all, I think we need to start another, maybe another pod, just on that. Seth: It's all in there. We just need to make little clips, maybe. Lio: I still feel like a lot of it is, like, a nice—like, the warm-up band, you know, the guys who open for the big show, right? All these things are just the opening act, and it's not the main show. The main show is that we are called to rise above our nature. There's no other way of saying it. That's what all these things— Seth: To break the cycle. Lio: To break the cycle that's been playing out time and again over millennia. To really stop being animals, because right now we're behaving like animals. Most of us, most of the time, are animals. We're led by our desires. We're controlled by our desires, and we have very little choice in the matter. We think we choose—it's just an illusion. If we knew where the bigger pleasure is, we would just go there. There would be no choice. Nobody would choose against feeling pleasure. We just don't know sometimes. So we call it free choice. That's not free choice. That's just blindness, groping in the dark. Seth: It's imprisonment. Lio: Yeah. I mean, it's just animals—except animals are still connected to the system. They're guided. They don't make mistakes. Like in the wild, in nature, animals are really doing perfectly fine. We've already left that. We were disconnected from that. Truth, you put a Jew in the jungle, he'll be dead in five minutes. But he's already much closer to the degree of the human, Adam. Someone who resembles—Adam from the word domeh, resembling. Resembling already a higher example of what it means to be human. Resembling the upper force, some would say, right? Someone who goes above their nature, above their egoistic desires, their immediate short-term desires for fulfillment, and looks for a different source. Jonas (01:10:22): I know people who figured out how to, so to speak, jailbreak people's minds. Lio: Yeah. Who are those people? Give us the names and addresses. Jonas: I will give you names. So there's this guy named Joe Hudson. He lives in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. His day job is, he's an executive coach for mostly, I think, tech executives and other Fortune 500 companies. But his true mission is really to jailbreak as many people as possible. He's built a team around him over the past decade or so. He's got a team of very competent coaches, but he's the most visible. If you go look up Joe Hudson, you'll find him on social media. The past year or so—18, 24 months—he's been building a presence there. And I can say this because I've gone through their workshops, and one of the coaches is a mentor of mine and I'm continuing to work with them. They have a repeatable model for showing people the path—the path they have to walk on their own, but showing them the path and giving them functional support for realizing how they're responding to the world, how they're blaming the world for their own state of affairs. And once people get awareness of that, they want out. They want to take responsibility. They start accepting, "Oh, I really want A, and A has the potential consequences of B and C, which I really don't want, but I'm going to do it anyways. I'm going to take that risk." Lio (01:12:19): Should we break this little picture now or give him another few minutes? This is a great first step. But it's almost like someone who's working on getting out of prison. You know those stories we've seen in the movies, right? They find someone in jail who knows how the guards are and everything, and how to dig a hole with a spoon through the wall and cover it with the poster. But then they come out, they emerge, but then they realize they're in a bigger prison. They've never left. They left the little prison; they're now in a bigger prison. The escape that we're talking about, the freedom we're talking about, the prison we're talking about—is not something you can break out of on your own. And this is really the key. This is why Jews are important in this juncture. And this is where it kind of leaves the logical—I mean, there is logic behind it, but it leaves the intuitively logical understanding of the world and it goes into a different place. If you really want to break free, you have to break free of your own self. And to do it, you need the force that created that self. You can't do it on your own. You can do it with the help of friends—friends can help you on the path, but the path has to connect you to that force. If you're not connected to that force, everything else is just an illusion. Another illusion. Jonas: Say more about that force. Say more about connecting to this force. Lio (01:13:59): Well, I'll say the reverse of that first. It's like trying to—I'll give the metaphor, which is not mine, it's brilliant, it's by a Kabbalist that we study with. So these concepts are all in the Jewish tradition, by the way. Jonas: Of course, of course. No, a lot of them. And there's a lot of similarities. Everything I'm talking about— Lio: Trying to do it on your own is like chasing a thief in the market. Everybody's running, "Hey, the thief, thief!" And he's also yelling, "Thief, thief!" Right? That's exactly what's happening. And again, it's not a bad thing. The fact that people are engaged in that is great. They're already more advanced on this ladder than the sheep that Seth was talking about in the very beginning. They're already trying to break out of it. That's an important first step. And there's a force—you know, a force of love. It's called the upper force. It's called the Creator. It has all these fancy names, but it's simply a force above all the other forces. That's the force that Judaism talks about—that, really, the internality of Judaism. Kabbalists have been talking about—they're describing only that force. It's love. It's bestowal. It only has one direction, which is positive. And it created something. The meaning of "creation" means to create something that doesn't exist, did not exist before. It's not that I took some stuff from here and I made it here. That's not creativity. That's divergent thinking. That's not the same. To create means it wasn't there before, right? So if I'm all plus, I made a minus. That was the big startup, right? That's what was created. That force created a negative pulling, an egoistic quality, a desire for self. You want to break out of that? You got to go to the craftsman who made me, as they're saying. Jonas (01:15:46): I agree. And I think when you're connected to that, you know it. It's self-evident. I think it's currently—it's critical that the Jewish community has enough leaders who have done at least the first step. And we have a critical lacking, a gross lacking of that, especially in the United States. That's where I think that's a preliminary step for an American Jew. Lio: Even more. I think Seth will agree with me—I think if we can get people to realize that we're at war. Seth: Absolutely. Lio: It's not only this external war where people are getting Molotoved or whatever in the street and pushed and hit and all. That's part of it. There's a physical aspect to it, yeah. There's a physical aspect to it, but there's a much greater war. And that is the war on this. It's the slow realization that there's something that's preventing us from uniting, from rising, from all those fears and doubts and insecurities and all the stuff that you talked about. It can all be traced back to that tiny egoistic desire for "just give me—where's that little thing that I can fill, and you know, and take it under the blanket with me?" That is the thing. Jonas: Yeah. People—and this is Jews and also Americans—don't want to acknowledge that there is a war on American streets, because then they'll have to do something about it. And they don't want their comfortable life to be disturbed. Lio: Well, guess what? It's been disturbed. Jonas: Right. I'm ignoring it. One of my favorite principles that Joe talks about—he calls it the golden algorithm. If you make decisions in fear of something, if you're trying to avoid something, those decisions are going to actually bring to fruition exactly what it is you're afraid of. You know, a lot of people like to talk about—thinking about romance and marriage and whatever, I think, is a really good place to show it. If you're afraid of telling your partner that something in the relationship isn't working for you, you're afraid that that's going to lead to disconnection. And so you avoid telling them. That avoiding of telling them what's going on—that's going to lead to disconnection in the relationship. Lio (01:18:37): People don't leave an abusive relationship because of the effort that it will take to leave and then to find someone new. "I'm staying with an abusive partner." Right. We hear these stories all the time. What we're saying is that this war on the outside is actually happening because you're afraid—or you refuse—to wage the war on the inside. That's our big message. That's what TheJewFunction is trying to say. Wage the war inside. Get up and do the war on the inside, on that egoistic inclination that's been governing you, that's natural. Rise to the supernatural degree that you're being called to. And we're not inventing it. People have been writing about it. Jewish texts are full of that. If you just know how to read it, if you have a teacher, it's there. It's ours. And we're saying, get up and go to war on that. And then you'll solve the war on the outside. Because you won't be able to win the war on the streets. You're 15 million. There are 350 million in America, and how many ever billions in the world. We can't win that war through sheer individual—you know, "by my own, I'm going to do it." You can't. The odds are against you. Jonas (01:19:58): Yeah. So just to reiterate my thesis here: the very seed of that—the very root of transformation there—is empowerment, is taking responsibility for your decisions. And with that, you can start to see reality more clearly, because you start seeing how you're avoiding reality—because you're avoiding things you're afraid of, you're avoiding states of affairs that scare you. Lio: Seth, any wise words before I give Jonas a beautiful quote that I found to read for our listeners? Seth (01:20:42): The thing that's bothering me—and that I think is our next step to clarify, or to figure out, I don't know, we'll solve it now—we talked about belonging a bunch of times. We also described all of these wonderful things that naturally come out of being a Jew, of what it means to be a Jew. We need to discover how to disseminate God's message, the Creator's message. If unity is in there, and—like you said—the Temple's not for us, it's for everyone. The goal is that everyone will belong, that everyone will have what they need, that everyone will have people looking out for them. That sounds wonderful. And there are people running into the street chanting for that who hate us. This doesn't make sense. So, Jonas, good luck figuring it out, and count on us as a resource to figure out how to—I mean, you're out there talking to a lot of people. We need some upper guidance, is what I think has to happen. Like you said a few times during our talk here, "I had an epiphany, I had an epiphany." We need an epiphany. Through this yearning to solve this, we need to have some kind of upper understanding of how we can communicate this. And we need the Creator to flip that switch so that this love can pour down for people. Lio (01:22:24): So I have a very beautiful quote for you. It's from a book called Meshivat Nefesh. Give it a read. Out loud, of course, for everyone to hear it. If you don't mind. Jonas: "Our sages said, man's inclination overcomes him every day. Were it not for the help of the Creator, he would not overcome it. Rather, man must only commit to strengthening himself each time anew and not retreat from this war or cause oneself despair under any circumstances. Certainly in this war it is impossible to evidently see who is the winner, since the war is still long, the exile is intensifying, and each one experiences what he experiences. Yet as long as we are holding our weapons in our hands—and our main weapon is the prayer—and as long as we do not cause ourselves to despair from this war and keep gripping to our weapons, we are winning for sure. Since as long as one strengthens oneself in prayer and outcry to the Creator, He is winning the war, as this is essentially the victory." Lio: Wise people said a lot of wise things way before us. So maybe, if you open some books, that would be a great addition to that journey of empowerment, I think, I hope. Jonas, thanks for joining us. Jonas: Thank you for having me. Lio: It was unexpected, but, you know, I had an epiphany a few—you know, just last week, I'm like, "I gotta check on Jonas. What's going on?" Seth: Very happy to talk to you, man. I'm wishing you tons of success. And just in the short conversation, we heard about a lot of stories. You're connected between intelligence officers in South America and Jewish leaders, so you're a hub. And, count—you know, rely on us if there's anything we can help you with. But wishing you a lot of success to get to flow this out there into the world. Jonas: Absolutely. Well, our collaboration will continue, I'm sure. I've only just begun. Lio: We are TheJewFunction. Please like, follow, subscribe, leave a comment, leave a review. We actually got an influx of subscribers this past week. I don't know why, what we did, but thank you, everyone, for joining. Follow us on X and everywhere else, because of the crazy shadow ban we keep losing followers, so follow back. And just spread the word—that's the best help you can do right now: just get these conversations in front of more people. And listen to the first season if you haven't already. A few great episodes are on their way as we speak, so stay tuned, and we'll see everybody next week.