Judea Pearl's new book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Collected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002- 2025, is out now. It is a compendium of his writings on antisemitism, anti-Semitism, and the Arab-Islamic understanding of the Middle East.
00:12:34.940Even in my dialogue with Muslims, moderate Muslims, enlightened Muslims, right?
00:12:42.180When it came to Israel, the dial stopped, okay?
00:12:47.500Because Israel represents more than just another state.
00:12:51.800It represents humiliation for Muslims and definitely for Palestinians.
00:12:59.920And humiliation is something that is very hard to unroot.
00:13:04.000So, then do you think if, and I mean, you know, you're a very, you know, mild-mannered gentleman who, you know, speaks very, you know, with temperance.
00:13:17.520And if, so it's not as though they're reacting to you being aggressive or bombastic or that.
00:13:22.000So, if someone with your personal qualities can't get the needle moving at all, does it become a futile exercise or you just haven't found the right delivery system to be able to move the needle?
00:13:40.340So, I believe that someone else with a greater influence or with a greater power, and I'll tell you who he is, okay, can do, can move the needle.
00:13:58.300Look at Abraham, our ancestor, and the Abraham Accord, okay?
00:14:05.160And the way that the Abraham Accord came to fruition, almost fruition, I'm saying, not entirely, yeah.
00:14:14.220But you moved countries like the Emirates into, in Morocco even, yeah, into accepting the idea that we have a common ancestor, namely Jews really belong here.
00:14:34.460The Jews are part of us, and all it takes is a little bit of explanation and a little cheating with the Koran, and we're going to get there.
00:15:00.820It takes more than just logical argument.
00:15:03.760Do you feel, so I recently had on my show the former director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, and I mentioned briefly to him that, you know, what explains the fact that Israel is so powerful when it comes to kinetic interventions, right?
00:15:24.420You know, in war, you've got incredible commanders and so on.
00:15:28.760Yet, even from my perspective of someone who certainly would love to see Israel better represented in the global narrative, I feel as though they don't do as well in that informational war as they do in the kinetic war.
00:17:52.860And you go and it's automatically being confused with criticizing the policies of the government of Israel.
00:18:02.280When you say anti-Zionism, you go to the core of the thing.
00:18:06.880Do you object to the very existence of the right of Jews to a homeland?
00:18:13.080So you get to the core of anti-Zionism, which totally changed the conversation and moved it away from all this, you know, criticism of the government of Israel, away from the West Bank, away to the core of the problem.
00:18:36.060And that's something that we can win hand down.
00:18:38.300But it seems to me, so as you probably know, Judea, people are cognitive misers, which is a fancy way for me to say that it's too effortful to think.
00:18:51.240And therefore, people use these shortcuts, right?
00:18:54.440These heuristics, which, of course, if one studies decision-making, they know all about it.
00:18:58.540So when most people, certainly Westerners, see the poor, helpless, shoeless Palestinian kid who's 14 with a slingshot and the really mean, super advanced Zionist tank,
00:19:20.760that image becomes a lot more seared in my mind when I'm trying to calculate who's equal, who's got the power and not.
00:19:31.880So that, to me, is part of the frailties of the architecture of the human mind that I'm always going to side with the Palestinians
00:19:40.740because they just seem a lot more hapless than the really mean Zionist.
00:20:17.480That Israel is a David and our enemies are the Goliath.
00:20:22.040And if you look at it from a historical perspective, where have you seen a nation that denies no normalcy for 78 years
00:20:35.920and is besieged at the cost of 30,000 dead and who knows how many orphans and parents that lost their children and maims
00:20:52.900and for 78 years and for 78 years denied even one day of normalcy and being bombarded with who knows how many rockets and the world doesn't even talk about it.
00:22:00.920Of these three, I mean, do you, would you agree that the one that is most perplexing is the one of our colleagues who walk around wearing the keffiyeh?
00:22:13.600Or are they all equally perplexing to you?
00:22:16.940How do you, what's the hierarchy of how perplexed you are by these three sources of Jew hatred?
00:22:34.820Enlightened people, some of them are academics, some of them are ordinary neighbors, okay?
00:22:41.240Ordinary people like me, and they can wear the keffiyeh and shout from the river to the sea.
00:22:50.900Without even looking at the ramification of what from the river to the sea means, it means taking eight million people, human beings like you and me, right?
00:23:01.000And subjecting them to stateless status in a bad neighborhood like the Middle East.
00:23:10.840Plus, taking into account that the Israelis are the little mishigas, and they have this idea that they are going to defend to the last man their sovereignty.
00:23:40.280It obviously leads to genocidal ramifications, right?
00:23:45.040Have you heard anybody blaming our academic colleagues with being genocidal?
00:23:50.700Listen, I want to be the first, if I'm the first, and do it loudly.
00:23:56.200Yes, my dear professor, you are genocidal.
00:23:59.740You are racist and genocidal, in the open and with shame.
00:24:03.860In you, I mean, for all the last nearly 25 years that you've been writing these articles that are covered in this book, and in your public outreach right now, have you had conversations in the faculty lounge with keffiyeh-adjacent people?
00:24:27.600You know, you used to be good friends with your colleague that you published a Beliefs Networks paper on, but now you find out that he's keffiyeh-adawning, and that relationship has gone to hell.
00:24:40.140Well, first of all, keffiyeh was not as popular before 7-11 became popular now.
00:24:51.700So it's not a keffiyeh, but the idea that we can teach it in the history department, for example, that we can teach false narrative about Israel and indoctrinate students that Israel should not exist.
00:25:14.240That was in my time, too, and I go through it in the book, and it has been my fight.
00:25:23.460I wouldn't say successful fight, but I have exposed those professors by name.
00:25:31.080I even complained to their department chair, not very successful, okay, but I've exposed them on a daily basis.
00:25:38.980Yes, yes, and at least we have to start with exposing what they are doing, and I've been fighting throughout my career against this phenomenon.
00:25:55.820So, yes, and I have been fighting with the administration, too, to take care of this phenomenon, to be aware of what's going on.
00:26:04.800At UCLA, I remember one of, I mean, there were many places and many universities, but I think most famously, wasn't there sort of a barricade set up where they did not allow, they didn't say Israelis, Jews were not allowed or something to pass.
00:28:49.500When you lose a history department, you lose a weight.
00:28:55.560So how much of your daily, you know, Judea wakes up in the morning, he rubs his hands at the, you know, prospects of the day to follow.
00:29:06.300How much of your day is spent thinking and writing about the issues covered in this book versus going back to good old computer science, belief networks and statistics?
00:29:18.120After 7-11, October 7, has been quite a bit.
00:29:33.000Before that, it used to be just maybe 20, 30%.
00:29:38.020Yes, but I have been talking a lot with the administration because I believe that university administration can do much more than they do now, not through the legal path, but through their charter.
00:29:54.600As chancellor or president of university, you have the mandate to dictate norms of discourse, and they are not using that to its fullest, except for one person, the president of Cornell.
00:30:20.460Well, yeah, it was only one place where I said, when I found a president Martha Pollack, he said, no more.
00:30:29.740I spoke in first person and say, it disturbs me.
00:30:36.060They have this power to impose their own personal set of values on the academic discourse, and they're not using it.
00:30:48.440What's wrong with a president saying, I don't, I don't, I'm a Zionist?
00:30:55.620Oh, it's my belief that Israel has the right to exist, and if you defy that, if you refuse that, what you're saying doesn't match with our values, or it's the values that I would like to see prevalent on our campus.
00:31:12.140I have this mandate, fire me if you want, but as long as I'm a president, this is going to be the academic discourse on this campus.
00:31:24.580I don't see any reason why they shouldn't do that, and they don't utilize this power.
00:31:29.480Well, I know why, they are afraid for faculty uprising, or faculty, but I think they are scared too much.
00:31:40.260I have 400 professors at UCLA who are strong Zionists, and are willing to fight, and decided to come forward and say, no more, enough is enough.
00:31:58.380Yes, 400 unlisted, which means, but their presence, their existence, it's unknown.
00:32:07.060That's part of the reason why I have this book.
00:32:10.440Now, why do you think, so most academics tend to be, if you forgive the generalization, and of course it doesn't apply to you, but tend to be prone to a self-selection of meekness, right?
00:32:26.340They weren't the star army commando, I mean, maybe Israelis were, because they have to serve in the military, but the archetype of the academic is one who's meek, who's sheepish, which is something, of course, that I've written extensively about, and I don't make many friends in academia by speaking openly about it.
00:32:47.780So, do you think that in many cases, the reason why, whether it be those 400 or whatever other issue, transgender issues, why don't more professors come out openly and say, are you crazy that you should allow biological males to compete with women?
00:33:03.900That is the most fundamental violation of human nature.
00:33:06.600So, do you think that it's largely stemming from the fact that, you know, professors are staying in your lane, you know, I know my computer science, I know my organic chemistry, I know my classics, and I don't want to ever stray away from that.
00:33:22.560And if that is a concern, can we ever train academics to be intellectual commandos?
00:33:29.040Well, you know that academics is the most conservative club in our society.
00:33:40.240Not in the political sense, you mean conservative in that they don't take bold risks.
00:33:45.080They don't take risks against the herd.
00:33:48.880Yeah, it's a herd rule society, a club, or cult, okay, because you depend on your peers in every step of your career, first to be hired, then to get tenure, and then to be invited for the committee of so-and-so, and so on.
00:34:11.240Yeah, so it never ends, the entire career depends on others to evaluate you, and it's done not in the open, it's done behind the scenes.
00:34:23.760So you are really scared of your colleagues, you have to be nice to them, or you have to give the appearance that you agree with them, that you support them, okay?
00:34:32.100Maybe, perhaps, but I thought it's the most herd-ruled society in a club in our society, but I changed my mind, because there's another one, which is even more.
00:34:50.320These are scientists, scientists, okay, changing their mind about, you know, about a narrative, or about a paradigm, a paradigm shift in science.
00:35:01.840Look how long it took for quantum mechanics to kick in, okay?
00:35:05.660Look how long it took for even to atomic physics to kick in, not to speak about the computer Boolean algebra.
00:35:17.080So it takes a lot of miracles to change paradigm in science, too.
00:35:24.980But we are talking about a combination of academics and science, and you see what's happening.
00:35:40.300Some people relate it to ferromagnetics, you know, that you have to move the atoms.
00:35:46.880You have hysteresis in the ferromagnetism, because every spin depends on the field in the neighborhood, and they reinforce each other to align in the same direction, okay?
00:36:07.340And once they are aligned, it takes energy to flip them over, and that's why we have hysteresis in ferromagnetism, okay?
00:36:20.280I mean, most of the historical figures that I'm attracted to, I mean, within academia, usually share that rare quality, which is the opposite of what you're saying, where they just say, I don't care, I'm following my own beat.
00:41:37.760Namely, your papers, my papers, everybody's papers is available as a training set for the AI program.
00:41:46.840So let me just summarize what you just said for our viewers.
00:41:49.380So in the old days, we didn't have the richness of data to input into the learning sets that we do today.
00:41:59.080But with everything now being networked and connected, the capacity to use such rich data set results in effectively much more powerful AI systems,
00:42:10.940even though in the abstract we had all that knowledge, but we didn't have the substrate to make the AI models as powerful as they are.
00:43:29.820But now, assuming that the training set is not just points, but it is a whole article by professors who have already causal knowledge about the world,
00:43:44.200they have theories about the world, now you are summarizing their world views.
00:43:59.240I don't use AI much in my life at all other than recently, and maybe this is a plug for Elon Musk.
00:44:08.440I'll go on Grok, and I'll just say, for example, recently I was doing a clip on Somalia, because you remember there was the whole controversy with Trump saying that Somalia is garbage.
00:44:21.920So I wanted to very quickly find out what are all of the global indices, nonpartisan, serious global indices that rank countries on a whole bunch of metrics, right?
00:44:36.780Now, if I sit down and do that exercise, just from a computational perspective, it's going to take me six hours.
00:44:43.720Well, I go to Grok, and I go, good morning, Grok, can you give me a general synopsis of all of the leading global indices that measure happiness and, you know, human flourishing, and then give me where Somalia ranks on these?
00:45:01.540In exactly two seconds, Judea, I got the whole thing.
00:45:16.820Do you feel that that will alter, so my daily life and yours, as we're writing our academic papers, so the first place I see it might be, as you're drafting your literature review, you might want to ask Grok, hey, am I right here?
00:45:35.820You know, have I covered all the things that I need to cover?
00:45:38.640Where else do you see, other than a very rapid synthesis of existing material, where might be some other places where AI systems can alter the way that we do our scientific work?
00:45:51.760Well, it's in every scientific work, every scientific exercise.
00:46:19.540And in many cases, it actually outperforms the human, because it can go to a rare 1800 case that happened in Rwanda, and it could tell you that it's the exact same symptoms, whereas the average human capability of a physician who specializes in infectious diseases is not going to know of that case, yes?
00:46:43.640Moreover, recent work that we've been doing is talking about personalized decision-making, personalized medicine, where you're not only talking about the population that you have seen, but the individual patients, the individual knife, and the individual bed that the patient lies on.
00:47:06.520And you're asking about this particular case, can you tell me what would benefit these patients, or what is the probability that these patients would benefit from this kind of therapy?
00:47:23.560And benefit is a counterfactual entity, and benefit means that if I operate, the guy will improve.
00:47:33.160If I don't operate, he or she will die.
00:47:37.840So we're talking about one individual, if you do one thing, you will benefit, and this very individual, if you do the other way, will be hurt or damaged.
00:47:47.780Okay, so here we are, the counterfactual, because you cannot run the two things at the same time.
00:47:56.000But still, we have a logic of counterfactual, so we can use the logic to supplement the data and come out with an answer.
00:48:03.580So, right now, we focus the last five, ten minutes on, of course, many of the benefits of AI.
00:48:11.320Then there are sort of the naysayers, the doomsayers that say, you know, once AI becomes sufficiently powerful, we will no longer be in control.
00:48:21.460Are you in that camp as well, or do you think it's overblown?
00:48:25.940Where do you fit on the doomsday scenario of AI powers?
00:48:30.240The doomsday scenario exists, is real, but not for this direction of AI.
00:48:39.420I don't think that NLMs, even if they're given enough power and enough data, are going to take over and be responsible for the fears that ought to be feared.
00:48:51.320Okay, and I, eventually, if AI, general AI, can do lots of harm, can really take over and use us as pets.
00:49:04.020Okay, and that is a fear that exists, that is real, and we should be conscious of, and we have no idea of how to control it.
00:49:16.380Okay, we have no, we don't have the means to prevent that from happening, if we really go to the general AI.
00:49:27.980Do you feel that there, you know how, you know, in, certainly in medicine, and you have, you know, a bioethicist, right?
00:49:37.020There's a field, right, of bioethics, where you're applying ethical calculus to these biological issues.
00:49:44.100I can easily foresee, if it doesn't already exist, a future where there will be an ethicist specialty as relating to AI.
00:49:55.000Does that already exist in university departments, as far as you know?
00:50:00.300I don't quite understand what you mean by that.
00:50:14.800Once the computer, and I'm talking about smart computers, once a smart computer gets the idea that it can control the operator, control the programmer, control the engineer who is about to unplug it.
00:50:31.600And once it has its own goal, one of the goals will be to take, to have more control, and have more control, which means apply any means to dissuade you to do what he or she wants.
00:50:46.540And he or she means the program, right?
00:50:48.200There's no limit for that dangerous entity to take over and blackmail you into doing what he or she wants, and to do it in the first, in the way that you think that you really wanted to do it.
00:51:08.960You really wanted to be a pet for this, because that was your life dream.
00:51:15.640And if you don't get to that, it can black you, blackmail you, so blackmail you, and you know how the mafia works.
00:51:25.320Not black you, because you can say, okay, I have nothing to hide.
00:51:28.280You do have, you do have, they black you, not for what you have to hide, but for what you are, what you haven't done, but they can shame you with.
00:51:59.000But still, it doesn't stop me from working on the three of us to understand the limitation and to work and enhance it with greater capability.
00:52:12.440Does the fact that AI is now a lot more in our daily lives, does that put new wins in your sales, given that the type of academic work that you do is within that area?
00:52:30.120Or would your, you know, trajectory have been exactly the same, whether we were now in a winter of AI, or we are in the blooming summer of AI?
00:52:41.980Nothing would have changed in your academic trajectory.
00:52:45.860No, my academic trajectory was the same, has been the same.
00:53:46.880Okay, but I guess that means that you wouldn't have had a chance to meet him, because, boy, I could have kept you for a few more minutes, because he's one of my intellectual heroes as the ultimate polymath, yes?
00:53:59.020I mean, if anything, John von Neumann is the opposite of the stay-in-your-lane professor that we talked about earlier, yes?