If you think America’s divisions are just heated rhetoric, you haven’t been paying attention, and you haven’t heard from someone who watched his own country collapse from the inside. Guy Paul Nohra was fifteen in Beirut when the Lebanese Civil War turned neighbors into enemies. He put down a school uniform, picked up a rifle with the Christian militia, and fought to keep his neighborhood from being wiped out.
After surviving that slaughter, his parents got him out to the United States. He became a citizen in 1983, earned a degree from Stanford and an MBA from the University of Chicago, and went on to co-found Alta Partners, raising more than two billion dollars across eight funds and investing in over 180 healthcare and life-sciences companies. He made the Forbes Midas List, later ran for governor of Nevada, and now hosts the podcast In Layman’s Terms. He is not a theorist.
He is a man who lived the consequences of political rhetoric turning into civil war, and he sees the same patterns taking root here, dehumanization of opponents, the steady advance of political Islam in Europe and parts of the United States, and the refusal to confront either one. His new book, Not On Our Watch: A Young Soldier’s Warning to America, draws the direct line between what destroyed Beirut and what is fracturing this country now. He is here. We’ll talk about Lebanon, the midterms, Iran, Nigeria, and whether we still have the will to stop this before it stops us. We value your privacy
