Hey, everybody. This is James Lindsay. You're listening to the New Discourses podcast, and I just got back from Israel.

I spent nine days in Israel here at the end of October, and I had quite the experience. I could talk about a lot of things.

In fact, I may end up doing more podcasts about it as we go because there's so many different things.

We had such full days.

But in this podcast, I just kind of want to talk about maybe the two biggest things that I learned just to kind of share.

You know, people asked me, what did you get out of going

to Israel? All this. You know, I'm there. What did you see? What did you do? And really, there's kind of

two huge things that stick out. And you could talk about a million nitty gritties. And I'll talk

a little bit about those. But there's two

huge things. And the first one is that I don't know how to express this to people who haven't gone

and who aren't going. But I knew there was a distance between the reality of the circumstances in Israel and the propaganda that were fed online, but that distance is so much bigger than I thought.

As a matter of fact, I was in my hotel room on social media looking at during a short break we had at the sea of

Galilee. So I'm in this kind of beautiful hotel room. I've got this beautiful balcony.

I'm overlooking the Sea of Galilee, which is also beautiful, which is also way below sea level,

which is kind of cool. The geology of the area is also, it's totally fascinating,

though completely irrelevant, except for a lot of their security concerns, actually. But at any

right, I'm there, you know, a few days into the trip, we're at the Sea of Galilee, and I have

its break in my hotel room. It's probably sunrise. It's probably

there's no break. It's just early in the morning. And very full days we had over there. And

I'm sitting there looking at Twitter or X. And I'm looking at the things people are saying about

Israel. And I'm just like, holy crap.

Like, this is less believable than like a little kid's cartoon.

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