#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a debate between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz on the topic of Iran and Israel. Scott Horton is author and editorial director of ntwar.com, host of The Scott Horton Show, and for the past three decades, a staunch critic of US foreign policy and military interventionism. Mark Dubowitz is a chief executive of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown Podcast, and he has been a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor, check them out in the description or at lexfreeman.com. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Hampton for a private, highly vetted community for founders and CEOs, Notion for team collaboration and note-taking, Shopify for selling stuff online, Oracle for cloud computing and Element for your health. Choose well as in my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. They're all here in one place. I try to make them interesting by talking about some random things I'm reading or thinking about, but if you do skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, an incredible community called Hampton. It's a private, highly vetted community for high growth founders and CEOs. It is lonely to be a leader. Every CEO I know, every founder I know, especially in the early days, are truly on an emotional roller coaster. So Hampton provides a great community for the founders to meet. Every month, eight founders, face to face, having real conversations about daily struggles, entailed in being a founder and entailed in being human quite frankly. Groups are forming in New York City, Austin, San Francisco, LA, Miami, Denver, and other top cities nationwide. I'm going to be more and more part of this community because there's very few things that will make me happier than building a company that does something useful in this big world of ours. If you're a founder who's tired of carrying it all alone, visit joinhampton.com/lex to see if it's a fit for you. That's joinhampton.com/lex.
This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool that is super powered by AI. It integrates AI into the note-taking process is better than basically anything I've tried. That's certainly true in the case of teams. It's doing things like collecting all the information from the meeting you just had. It captures everything, can make it searchable, summarized, there's transcriptions, all of that. It's all automatically saved in Notion. They do search across multiple apps, so across the whole Microsoft ecosystem, Google, like Gmail Drive, everything. And by the way, they integrate many of the latest language models, Claude, GPT. If you wanna try a piece of software, they integrate AI extremely well. Like I've said many times, it's not just about the intelligence of the model. It's about the integration of that model into a system, into an interface that actually allows you to maximally leverage that intelligence for a particular set of tasks. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I have a store on there, lexfridman.com/store. I'm probably going to be doing an episode on the Silk Road, history of the Silk Road. The actual Silk Road, not the modern-day digital kind. Any history that gives us an inkling of the transformation between the very early humans to the more modern, advanced technology humans. Any of that, Silk Road is one of those technologies that gives you a glimpse of what it was like in the tribal life before, and what was it like in a fully integrated network of cities after, into the transformational periods of human history, all of that. I love studying it. But humans interacting, whether it's through conflict and war, or peacetime trade, that has always been fascinating to me. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Oracle, a company providing a fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platform services. More and more of the digital intelligence that has taken over our lives and the functions of society is going to be taking up more and more compute. Of course, a large fraction of that, especially for the smaller players, will be in the cloud. It's great to have companies like Oracle who are delivering a huge amount of compute and storage in the cloud and doing it affordably. Cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI, that's Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Offers for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify at oracle.com/lex, that's oracle.com/lex.