Kol Yisrael and Tel Aviv Salon host mathematician & investor Eric Weinstein. He sits down with/ Fleur Hassan-Nahoum to discuss the complex interplay between conflict, identity, and leadership in shaping societies. The conversation also delves into the strategic threats facing Israel and the urgent need for a plan B of survival for humanity and Israel.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to the Speakers and Themes
03:50 Eric Weinstein’s Return to Israel
06:47 Understanding Hybrid Warfare and Its Implications
18:43 The Role of Media and Narrative in Conflict
26:55 The Historical Context of Jewish Resentment
32:28 Israel’s Leadership Role in the Middle East
35:36 Cultural Dynamics and Gender Roles in Society
45:01 The Role of Conflict in Vitality
47:04 Ethnic Identity and Historical Context
48:20 The Impact of Leadership on Global Dynamics
49:57 Understanding Iran’s Strategic Position
51:09 Skilled vs. Unskilled Players in Conflict
52:54 The Dangers of Covert Operations
01:00:01 The Need for a Plan B for Humanity
01:02:12 Revitalizing Scientific Leadership
01:10:43 Navigating the Future of Society
01:20:06 Demographics and Cultural Identity

Transcript

Introduction to the Speakers and Themes

00:00:03

Lior: You shall call Building Blocks for this collaboration with Tel Aviv International Salons and colleagues in the General Zionist faction and the World Zionist Organization. You are in for a treat tonight with two amazing thinkers, doers, and speakers. I often use the term not losing the forest for the trees. The trees are important. You can’t lose sight of the details, but it’s the forest. It’s the big picture we got to keep our eye on and not get caught up in the details. It’s the vision and two of our speakers today I surely our speaker is. And in conversation with. Then I want to welcome. Has anyone ever heard of Eric Weinstein? Because I mean I look them up just to see what I might say. And I got to tell you, there’s lots. So I’ll keep it brief for the sake of this conversation. Eric Weinstein, an American investor and financial executive, as of 2021, managing director for the American venture capital firm Thiel Capital. Weinstein hosts the podcast called The Portal and is a big time thinker who, as far as I can understand and I just said, does not lose the forest for the trees, cares and loves. I’m still concerned with the future of the State of Israel and by extension, the region and by extension, global citizenship in the world that we all live in. We all have to play in the sandbox with everyone. And my friend Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who you might know. Anyone know Fleur? Don’t shake your head at me. Israeli politician, media expert, served as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, in charge of foreign relations, Israeli international economic development and tourism. Also the co-founder and founding member of the UAE Israel Business Council and is our Secretary General of Israel, the General Zionist faction of the World Zionist Organization. Before I bring them up, I just want to point out and set this up for a moment. I’m Israel and by extension, humanity stands at the intersection of history. These are very telling and interesting times. And the question we ought to ask ourselves is, what is the future going to say about us? Their ancestors? What in 100 years from now will they say about all of us? What were the decisions we made, the actions we took? What kind of ancestors are we going to be for our future? Very important. And as we enter this stage, I want to welcome our speakers in conversation with one another. Please. Nice round of applause for Eric Weinstein and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.

Eric Weinstein’s Return to Israel

00:03:23

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: All right. Good evening, Tel Aviv. Yeah. I mean, thank you so much Lior, but I don’t think anybody’s here to listen to my thoughts. But I’m a pretty good interviewer, and we have a fantastic subject. And I want to start by respecting the way this incredible gentleman pronounces his name, because I’m very sensitive about the topic. It’s Eric Weinstein. Am I right? Okay. Thank you very much. So we have this wonderful, wonderful genius scientist, thought leader, I can’t say enough superlatives, but I’ve got one very simple question. We’re not going to over-techify this session. You’ve had your tech day. I want to ask you, Eric, you haven’t been in Israel for 30 years. Why now?

00:04:20

Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the first time in 30 years anyone called me and said, “Hey, do you want to give a talk in Tel Aviv?” And, you know, I’m sort of not kidding about that. In a certain sense, I was always expecting that I was going to have a lifelong relationship with this place. I lived here for two years.

00:04:40

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: You did? When?

00:04:41

Eric Weinstein: ’91 to ’93. I was at the Hebrew University in Givat Ram and in the math and physics departments, and one of the most amazing experiences of my life, my wife was here for a year before, and then we traded places and it was absolutely transformative. By the way, I should just say, I’m not here in any capacity. I’m not representing anyone else. I don’t even know what this General Zionist organization is, I’m not sure if I’m for it or against it. I just wanted to come. I wanted to come back badly. And this is really, literally Eylon asked, “Would you come?” And I said, “Sure.” That’s why.

00:05:31

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Kolah kovod to Eylon from the Building Blocks conference. Where are you? There you go. It takes one guy to say, “Why don’t we bring Eric Weinstein to Israel.” So there’s so much that I want to unpack. But first of all, I want to start with a lot of gratitude because I honestly think you are one of the most positive advocates for Israel. And you go, you are, I think, the only staunchly pro-Israel advocate who is regularly on Joe Rogan and you educate him. So I think we—I think he deserves a clap for that. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And now I want to ask you something that we saw from you right after October 7th. And I hate to start with something a little depressing, maybe, or tragic, but I want to read out a very cryptic tweet—you don’t call it tweet anymore, right? X? What do we call it?

00:06:34

Eric Weinstein: Post.

Understanding Hybrid Warfare and Its Implications

00:06:35

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Post. A very cryptic post from you on the 17th of October 23. So essentially ten days after the most tragic thing to happen to our people and our country since the Holocaust. And you write this: “IDF-assisted Suicide, Zugzwang, Munchausen by Proxy”—line—”Something terrible is about to happen to innocent people in Gaza. It will be horrific to watch. Make sure you fully familiarize yourself with the concepts above the line.” IDF-assisted suicide, Zugzwang, and Munchausen by Proxy, those are the concepts. “I’m not leaving this here for you. It’s for me.” Explain to us what you meant. And this is way—I think a few weeks before Israel even went into Gaza and you wrote essentially a prediction.

00:07:41

Eric Weinstein: Well, I knew—it took me a little while to realize that Sinwar was actually innovating. And part of the problem with innovation in the Middle East is that it’s not necessarily something wholly new. But there are moments—we used to have the golden age of airline hijacking in the 70s, and that gave way to the age of suicide bombing with the marine barracks in Lebanon, which was really a technique that was imported from the Tamil Tigers, separatist movement in Sri Lanka. There’s no history of suicide bombing, I think, in the Middle East before that. And what I realized is that—I was trying to figure out why would Sinwar do this crazy thing? Doesn’t he know what’s about to happen? And then I realized, oh, no, no, no, he knows exactly what is about to happen. And he is figuring out how to force Israel’s hand in something that is not widely known in the US, at least, called Hybrid Warfare. And the concept of Hybrid Warfare is that kinetic war, which is what we traditionally think of as the majority component of war, is not necessarily the major component, and the major component, in fact, was video. And he was desperate for video. And then what was the video that he was desperate for? The video he was desperate for was the IDF killing his own people. And that was the plan. The plan was to force Israel’s hand. And I don’t know how many chess players we have here, but there’s a very important—I’m not really much of a chess player myself. There’s a very important concept—it’s a little subtle—called zugzwang, and the idea is that you put your opponent in a position where they’re begging not to move. Every move puts them in a worse position. But there’s nothing called “I don’t want to move, I pass my turn” in chess. It doesn’t exist. And so you put somebody in zugzwang when they have to act and their action hurts them. So the options were that either the IDF could do nothing and look weak in a region where you cannot afford to look weak or respond to a situation in which you’ve gone beyond human shields. We have language for human shields, but we don’t have language for what Sinwar did. And I thought about this in terms of this concept of suicide by cop. I don’t know how many people are familiar with suicide by cop, but it didn’t exist, I think, until the 1990s. And the reason that the language came about is we had a spate of instances nobody could explain. Some moron would pull a gun, a toy gun, on a policeman and get shot and killed. And so you keep thinking like, who’s dumb enough to pull a toy gun on a policeman until you realize that that’s the objective. And in fact, this was going to be IDF-assisted Suicide. And in IDF-assisted suicide, the whole game is to make sure that the video corresponds to a pre-written narrative, which is that the Israeli people and by extension the Jews were genocidal maniacs who wanted to kill Arab children. And—

00:11:00

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: So can I just push back a little? They also videoed themselves committing those murders. Why is that not something he wouldn’t have wanted? Why do that?

00:11:13

Eric Weinstein: Well, I think people don’t understand in some sense why the world is behaving the way it is. In part because we’ve lost an appreciation for revolutionary thinking and revolutionary ideology. Right now we have a situation in which nobody can figure out what Queers for Hamas means. It seems like—do these people not get it? In fact, the radical queer agenda is part of a general revolutionary agenda. And the key point about revolutions is that it’s not that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet where an egg is a head. It’s that we want to make omelets because you get to break eggs. And in some sense, one of the things is finally somebody had the courage to kill Jewish children, Jewish families, and do the unthinkable, whereas everybody else is in general too much of a coward to do that. And thank God Hamas finally rose to the challenge. And this is thinking that’s very hard to think about. But I have a jihadi sandbox in my head. I unfortunately used to read Dabiq when ISIS was putting out that, and I saw the amazing production values they did on their murder videos and snuff films. And I came to understand that the thinking is just so repugnant and foreign to us that we don’t understand what they’re trying to do. So the idea of Munchausen by Proxy is this very strange situation. Munchausen Syndrome used to be this idea that you would do harm to yourself because you wanted attention. But Munchausen by Proxy is completely unthinkable. What happens when you’re in the hospital and you see a mother bringing a child in repeatedly with injuries or sickness, and then you can’t imagine that a mother would actually poison a child or harm a child in order to get attention. And so, by doing the unthinkable, Sinwar fooled the very dim and those lacking imagination, and those who frankly just find it too unpalatable to imagine that anyone would do this. And he went beyond human shields, which is—human shield is where you attempt to protect a military installation by putting something that you cannot imagine bombing like a hospital, a school, an old age home, an orphanage, in order to protect it. But this was different. This was the idea that you’re going to put a military target underneath as crosshairs to help your opponent inflict maximum harm to a hospital, a school, a mosque, and then take that around the world bragging about it effectively. And, of course, you know, sometimes you fake these films because the lighting is better. You can control things.

00:13:57

Eric Weinstein: So you have a very strange situation where a planet that was, I don’t know, really unprepared for war, Western Europe and the United States. I had this thing I’ve called The Great Nap that lasted from 1945 until 2025, where we forgot what war actually was, what it means to have an enemy, how you have to get your people to think about sending their children into harm’s way, what heroism is, all of these sorts of things. And in fact, Israel, to be blunt, forgot to set an alarm on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Note to self, whenever you have an anniversary of an old battle, always set an alarm. I think 9/11 was the anniversary of the Battle of Vienna where Christian Europe defeated the Muslim invaders. So you have a situation in which Israel was asleep at the wheel. It did not understand what was happening. Quite honestly—and this is, like, pretty unpleasant, the second day back in Israel after 30 years, you don’t want to be in the diaspora telling the Israelis what’s actually going on, it’s offensive—but you got outplayed, and it’s very hard to recognize that an evil genius that didn’t really care that much about his own life, and certainly not the lives of people under his care, outplayed you by figuring out that the world was in this place where it was very angry at the Jews, and it didn’t need things to make sense or add up too much. It just needed to present a general narrative of a crazy colonial power, which Israel is not, engaging in genocide, which it is not, against a people that don’t exist. And I don’t mean that the people don’t exist, the Arabs exist. And the flavor of the Arabs is the Palestinian Arabs. And they do have claims on this land. I’m not claiming that they don’t. But I am claiming that the invention of The Palestinian People, if you go to Google Ngrams, corresponds to January of 1964 and the failure of something called the United Arab Republic, which bizarrely many Israelis from today clearly do not know actually happened, that there was a union of Syria, Gaza, and Egypt as part of Pan Arabism. And the whole purpose of creating The Palestinian People, as opposed to the Mizrahi people, the Satmar people, the Bukharan Jewish people, is that the U.N. had this vague language in its charter, which was that you had self-determinations for “people”. So when Nasser’s Pan-Arabism collapsed, the imperative was to create a people to engage a charter that was purposefully vague and, by virtue of the fact that nobody seems to know the history or understand this stuff, it worked pretty well. And so Israel found itself in a situation where it couldn’t explain its actions, even though it seemed obvious to people here because the rest of the world hadn’t been at war, hadn’t dealt with something this diabolical. When I was growing up, we knew what diabolical techniques the Vietcong were doing because we were broadcasting it on the six-thirty and seven-o’clock news and, you know, as I tell people, my parents turned off the news the day that we saw American GI’s heads on pikes being proudly carried by the Viet Cong. We don’t see that anymore. 9/11, the most famous photograph is something called Falling Man, which is unknown in the US because the US papers blocked it. So, in part, Israel walked right into a situation that it didn’t prepare for. It certainly didn’t consult me or anybody else who was seeing it from this perspective in terms of laying the groundwork for what it had to do. And you got outplayed. And my concern is that I don’t think people even understand the language of Human Terrain. Look it up. It’s the weaponization of the social sciences against humans, used as if they were valleys, mountains, river crossings. And you turned the world into this thing called Hybrid Warfare, where the major component is not necessarily kinetic. It’s not necessarily somebody shooting or firing explosives or a drone. Very often it’s something like Tokyo Rose or videos with high production values or the like. And so, you know, in part it’s a lot, but Israel utterly and totally failed to explain what was about to happen, which could all be seen. The reason I left that tweet there, and I haven’t really talked about it that much publicly, is you could see this before Israel went into Gaza completely. And if you don’t give that devil his due, you will continue to lose.

00:18:43

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: But Eric, they were already demonizing us before we even went in. Even when October the 7th happened, I started doing some press and I knew we had three days, four days of grace before somebody says, “Well, what do you expect? You occupy them,” completely forgetting, of course, that we left in 2005. So the demonization happened even before we even went in and anybody was dead on the other side.

00:19:08

Eric Weinstein: First of all, I don’t think you fully had four days. Things started up more or less instantly. And according to some, there were tip offs that this was about to happen. Black Lives Matter immediately raced to celebrate the paragliders. So I don’t think you had that much as a pure honeymoon. You had a hybrid situation where many of the advanced institutions in the West that had been losing credibility came to your defense, but you mismanaged that, and, you know, look, feel free to disagree with me, but my point is that this situation should be very confusing to you that a group of people hold hostages, are chanting from the river to the sea, clearly indicating that they want to kill you. And this is highly popular with people who are young and have very little life experience, where nobody has any knowledge of what actually happened in the region. And you have a narrative where you’re saddled with being a European colonial project. And clearly, you know, we’re staying near the Carmel market. It’s kind of bizarre. This is one of the most diverse groups of people around. Somehow you have not figured out how to shake this narrative despite the advanced capabilities. You’re very bad at PR, and you’re very bad at communicating a situation. And it’s probably the more important component relative to Israel’s fearsome military might.

00:20:44

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I completely agree with you. And I’ve been shouting from the rooftops to whoever would listen to me and the government that we are fighting this Hybrid War, as you say. And we’re completely unprepared for the communications, for the PR, for the comms of this war. They’ve also got 30 years ahead of us in this. I mean, when you think about 40.

00:21:06

Eric Weinstein: I’m not sure what you’re saying. What? Why do you decide—they’re not that far ahead of you, you’re just not—

00:21:13

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Qatar hasn’t been poisoning the minds of academia and press for the last 20 years?

00:21:20

Eric Weinstein: You’re just not putting your shoulder to the wheel.

00:21:23

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I agree.

00:21:23

Eric Weinstein: You know, my feeling about this is that I know individuals who are having more effect than the state. And, you know, I kept saying, is no one going to call any of us? You have all sorts of people with very large—no, look, you just have to take it. You screwed up, period, the end, zerze. That’s it. And if you don’t admit that you screwed up and you don’t give the devil his due, you’re not going to advance. And so who—that’s not what Jews do, they—you learn from your mistakes!

00:21:57

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: You’re 100% correct. And the problem, I think, is that there’s just no strategy here when it comes to comms, at least. And many other people would say there’s no strategy at all in this country.

00:22:08

Eric Weinstein: I think that in part you got very confused on October 6th. Think about what you were arguing over on October 6th. You thought you were in Europe. You’re not in Europe.

00:22:18

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Exactly.

00:22:19

Eric Weinstein: You know, I don’t know how to explain it, but the fact is—I’m going to get myself kicked out of this country within the time that I’m here, but—

00:22:31

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Never! This is what we live for!

00:22:33

Eric Weinstein: But from my perspective, there’s just a series of catastrophic errors where Israel failed to see itself accurately and failed to use the tools that it had when it was attacked in a brutal fashion. And by the way, it’s not like I’m just blinded with love for Israel. You say you left, you know, with Ariel Sharon making the choice to exit Gaza, but you still control the borders. They don’t have the ability to freely do whatever they want. So, you know, you have to actually engage with the argument. And one of the things that I keep arguing for, which I think you’re not going to love, is engaging with the deep critique and showing that you can survive it, that you can listen to the arguments and you can say, “You know, there’s a kernel of truth here,” and “This is not without merit, but, however, and—” and that will boost the credibility because quite honestly, you’re not pure as the driven snow. But the predominant argument still favors Israel and it would be great to advance to the point where Israel can realize that all nations have a budget. You have a budget for brutality. You have a budget for failure, you have a budget for hypocrisy. And my feeling is that considering that this incredibly diverse country and one of the most dangerous and crazy regions came out of absolutely nowhere, it’s not that you’re as pure as you claim to be, it’s that you’re under your budget, which is a miracle. But you do commit very brutal acts, and you do act strategically, as all nations do. Now you’ve allowed this idea, “Well, the Jews are behaving strategically. Israel’s so tricky,” this, that and the other thing. You’re trying to minimize collateral damages so you do this pager attack, you know, okay, but you’re still getting saddled with the idea that you’re being crafty, you know, and in a certain sense, what I say is you can survive the truth. The truth is actually your friend. But the truth has to be presented in an attractive way. And I think that you’re under your budget, given how difficult—this place is a miracle. Yeah, but, you know, let’s be honest about it.

00:24:49

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Absolutely. It’s a miracle. And even though, Eric, you talk about The Great Nap as something that maybe Israel was also suffering from as well as the Western world, do you also think that Israel was suffering from The Great Nap intellectually, technologically, the way that you see other countries? Because we’ve really had a lot of advancements here beyond our size, beyond what anybody would have imagined that Israel would have become.

00:25:16

Eric Weinstein: Well, what is the appropriate number of miracles per year that Israel should be responsible—no, no, no, seriously, I hate to say it this way, but there are genius-based cultures and there are excellence-based cultures. So, for example, I always say that Black Americans are a genius-based culture. Not necessarily very high quality control, but my God, you know, you look at the fact that they created an American classical music out of nothing, you know, it’s just totally stunning. Jews and Israelis tend to be much more focused on high variance, brilliance stuff. And sometimes you pull off an Entebbe and sometimes it’s Lillehammer. Let’s be honest about it. It’s not all brilliant, but the fact is that the world has been asleep and somewhat thankfully, it’s been a thermonuclear peace. That’s what The Great Nap brought us. We got devitalized as a planet. We’re not nearly as vital as we were in the 20th century, the early part. But on the other hand, nobody’s ever used a thermonuclear weapon in anger against anybody else. It’s one of the great accomplishments of Western civilization. And with Israel being a semi Western, semi non-Western, you know, regional power. The fact is, Israel does a lot of great things, but I think it could do a lot better.

00:26:42

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: You said earlier that way before we went into Gaza, people were already angry at the Jews. Why were people angry at the Jews, Eric? Why are people angry at the Jews?

The Historical Context of Jewish Resentment

00:26:55

Eric Weinstein: How much time do we have?

00:26:57

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: We got time.

00:26:59

Eric Weinstein: I think that’s not the right question, if you don’t mind, because we’re—okay, so I think that the key question is what’s special about the anger now?

00:27:08

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Okay.

00:27:08

Eric Weinstein: And in part, I think people have a very strong sense that coming out of the Holocaust in particular, the Jews were granted certain rights and certain protections that have served them well, that as the world devitalizes, the Jews also devitalized, and Israel devitalized, but it devitalized less, and it was forced to integrate less with the outside world. So if you look at the migration patterns in Europe, many people in Europe look at Israel with envy. They say, “Why are you allowed to have an ethnic state?” Now, of course, it’s not completely a Jewish state.

00:27:53

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: It’s an ethnodemocracy, let’s say.

00:27:55

Eric Weinstein: You know what? It’s a weird Schrodinger’s state. In some ways, it’s ethnic, and there’s a Jewish star on the flag, and in some ways, you have very important citizens who aren’t Jewish at all. And some of that has to do with hypocrisies and half measures, and some of it has to do with the best traditions of being open. It’s a web of contradictions. But again, I think you’re under your hypocrisy budget, but you are hypocrites. And, you know, you have a situation—but I’m free to say this in a place like this where, you know, if I were doing this in Gaza, I’d be taking my life in my own hands. This is an advanced society. And part of the reason that we’re having a new problem is that there was a long period of time where we were—and again, I’m going to borrow this from the Orthodox, and as an atheist, I’m going to mispronounce, but there’s this concept of whomwrote.

00:28:55

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Whomwrote.

00:28:56

Eric Weinstein: Whomwrote. And the fences around the Torah, the strictures are more extreme than what the Torah actually allows. And in the period after the Holocaust, the fences got pushed far out, and you weren’t allowed to say and do certain things. And this is very similar in the US where you’re not allowed to say the N-word. You can say all sorts of ethnic slurs, but you can’t say the N-word, particularly with the hard R. So people became very resentful, “Why did the Jews get X? Why did they get Y?” Well, if you suffer, I don’t know what, the loss of a fourth third of your population, you know, the world understood that it was a very special situation here.

00:29:35

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: So people are resentful because Holocaust guilt got us… what? Got us a few—what? Got us a state? Got us a pass for people being anti-Jewish?

00:29:45

Eric Weinstein: Well, the fact of the matter is that it’s still not acceptable in American society, let’s say, to say many of the things the anti-Semites whisper privately and a lot of the anti-Semitism that you see on X, formerly Twitter, comes from anonymous accounts, you know? So you have a situation in which there is this general resentment of how far the fences are out, and there’s a move right now, like people like Dave Chappelle—I don’t know Dave Chappelle’s politics, but my guess is that one of the things that’s pissing him off as a comedian is that he feels he has a right to mock things. And I get—Joe Rogan will openly say to me that, you know, “Mockery is my business. I think mockery is good,” because he sees it as a pure positive. It’s also, you know, he’s talking his book. So in part, we don’t recognize that some of the resentment also comes from the fact that people want to know, how are the Jews doing this, and how are the Israelis doing it? Your birth rate is the envy of the world in the developed world. And, you know, I don’t know how to convey this, and this is—I said this in the last talk—there’s this misperception of the self, in my opinion, where this is a vulnerable place, it’s obviously living on a knife’s edge, and yet you still have obligations to people far beyond your land. I think Israel needs to be leading. It needs to be showing Europe a way to revitalize, to increase its birth rates. And I’ll say something that many people will find very unpopular, not necessarily in this room—make the Middle East Christian again. The depopulation of Christians from this region is a terrible thing, and they’re—Christians are being persecuted all over the world. And if I can—and I’m not saying this to praise Christians, I’m also very frustrated with my Christian brethren. They won’t stand up in the same way, because part of Christianity involves martyrdom. And my feeling is that we’ve been very lucky that one of the offshoots of Judaism can be pretty good to us. Boy, have we had our problems. Now, I’m not candy coating it, but I believe that Israel needs to, in part, help revitalize communities beyond its borders and take a leadership role that it’s quite frankly uncomfortable with.

Israel’s Leadership Role in the Middle East

00:32:27

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Uncomfortable in what? In affecting the rest of the Middle East to—

00:32:32

Eric Weinstein: Not just—

00:32:33

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: —protect Christians?

00:32:35

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I mean, I think that we need to be advocating, I think Christianity is essential to our survival as a people. And we need to recognize that we have to be—if Judeo Christianity is to mean anything, it has to mean something. And in part, what I’m telling you is they want to know what are you doing differently that your young people are falling in love and having families? What are you doing differently that you want to reproduce, to grow and to thrive? And I personally think that these are incredibly important questions because of Hillel’s question. “If I am only for myself, what am I?” You know, that’s our tradition. And you know, we take more crap for the chosen people thing. Everybody thinks they’re the chosen people. I don’t know any culture that doesn’t think they’re the chosen people. The problem is that many people suspect that maybe we’re, you know, we’re really serious. I believe it means—

00:33:38

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That maybe it’s true.

00:33:40

Eric Weinstein: I believe what it means is that we have a leadership position, at least with respect to the Abrahamic world.

00:33:47

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I totally agree with you. And that’s what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks would have said, that being chosen means that we’ve been chosen to lead and chosen to be an example—it’s actually a burden in many ways.

00:33:58

Eric Weinstein: We’ve had a rough ride at times, I mean, you know, my claim though is that right now the world wants to know, what are you guys doing differently? How did you integrate so many people from all over the planet? You have a relatively high trust society—if I can just tell a stupid story, I lost my wallet on a Danbus in Israel years ago, and everyone told me, “Oh, you’ll never see it again. It’s pointless. Don’t even bother with the lost and found, blah blah blah.” That wallet passed through, I think, 11 hands. There was some trace of it and I got all my money back, right? This is a relatively high trust society in a world where trust is plummeting, and in part, to the extent that you know how to do something, you better share it fast with the outside world and help—just think about everything that was accomplished in Italy, right? We need the Italians back full force. We need the French back and the Brits back and they are struggling with who am I and what does it mean to be British and all of these sorts of things. Get in there and help.

00:35:10

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Eric, I think we feel that we’re already doing that in terms of tech innovation and clean tech and green tech and agritech and cyber in a way. We feel that we are the country that exports solutions. That’s how we talk. You don’t see that way?

Cultural Dynamics and Gender Roles in Society

00:35:36

Eric Weinstein: So you’re hiding behind tech then? Because what is the tech that causes—American young men and young women are diverging at some level that’s completely insane.

00:35:48

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, it doesn’t help that you have 25 genders, no?

00:35:52

Eric Weinstein: That’s the female perspective. And young dudes are just saying—

00:35:57

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Where are the women?

00:35:59

Eric Weinstein: “I’m out.” They’re going to go hard right. They’re going to go right into the arms of Andrew Tate.

00:36:04

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yeah.

00:36:05

Eric Weinstein: Right? And so my claim is that there’s something that you’re doing here, which is allowing people to fall in love and to dream about homes and futures and grandchildren on their knees. And that’s not moving the needle in the outside world.

00:36:22

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: But maybe do you think that’s because we live in a high risk military and a high risk kinetic scenario? And so we appreciate the real things in life.

00:36:37

Eric Weinstein: You know, I saw some of your young people walking around in these uniforms. The men are pretty masculine and the chicks are hot, and—

00:36:47

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Simple as that. That deserves a clap.

00:36:53

Eric Weinstein: The rest of the world is trying to say, what is the masculine? What is the feminine?

00:36:57

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I know, and here we just. We are what we are.

00:37:00

Eric Weinstein: Well.

00:37:01

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: But that’s because we’re fighting for our lives, Eric. We literally are.

00:37:04

Eric Weinstein: I understand that, but it’s also not just the fact—you can hide behind—that’s the beginning of the story. Quite honestly, you know, the idea is you have to educate both men and women to want to enter the same structure. And if you think about all the song, popular songs in English that we had that talk about, you know, “We’re going to the chapel and we’re going to get married, we’re going to see the kindly Parson Brown,” you know—

00:37:33

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: “I want to hold your hand.”

00:37:36

Eric Weinstein: My grandfather claims that even back in the old days, it wasn’t just hand-holding going on, but—

00:37:42

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I can imagine.

00:37:43

Eric Weinstein: But my claim is that romance and heat is the precursor to family. And whatever you’re doing here still works. The US, we’re being educated in different directions, and I don’t know how these people are going to actually pair up.

00:38:00

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, are they making men and women enemies in the U.S.?

00:38:03

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure. Exactly. Exactly. And I can tell you that from having children go through the school system, masculinity got expanded to toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity was a real thing. I saw it growing up, went to an all boys school. And then we decided that all masculinity was toxic masculinity. And that was a disaster because all—I think we had a situation where our son was sent home from chewing a piece of bread into the shape of a gun. And, you know, little boys, they used to play with cap guns, and now it’s like sort of some sort of a disorder. And then all our young women are staring at themselves, finding their imperfections. You know, the young people here are not perfect, but the men are men, the women are women, for the most part. You know, there’s a thriving gay scene, but you’re not getting into these crazy levels of deviation where nobody knows what a gender is. And, you know, I’ll just be very clear about it. You have some magic here that everybody had a short time ago.

00:39:09

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Do you think that, I mean, I really see the way that Trump’s win as the woke lost the referendum on woke, which is part of what you’re talking about.

00:39:22

Eric Weinstein: We don’t know what woke is.

00:39:24

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: We can describe it. I see it as a—

00:39:27

Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, it may have been a tool of war—

00:39:29

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: —as a developed form of Marxism, maybe as a tool of war.

00:39:34

Eric Weinstein: It’s a devitalizing force.

00:39:36

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yeah.

00:39:39

Eric Weinstein: We don’t—you know, one of the reasons that USAID’s budget came under fire is that we started finding that we were exporting transgendered operas into countries for no reason. And, you know, I’ve analogized this to imagine that somebody did an audit of the Israeli military budget, and they said, “Can you believe we’re providing low cost pagers and walkie talkies to Hezbollah? This makes no sense.” You know, in part, we devitalized planet Earth by pushing this woke agenda, and I believe we in part pushed it on ourselves. And I don’t know whether that was a military operation.

00:40:14

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: By who? The enemy or internally?

00:40:19

Eric Weinstein: It’s very difficult to—

00:40:20

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: We will say Qatar. We all say Russia, Qatar, the Iranian, the Islamic Republic of Iran. They can’t beat America militarily. So let’s poison the minds of their kids through a terrible education and terrible academic, compromising academic freedom of thought.

00:40:37

Eric Weinstein: There’s self-poisoning, right? So in part—one of the—so I asked—I don’t know how—did anybody see this talk I gave at ARC? Okay.

00:40:47

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: The Great Nap, right? That was the—yeah.

00:40:49

Eric Weinstein: Well, they keep changing the title to keep—

00:40:51

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: The Great Nap, or The Big Nap—

00:40:52

Eric Weinstein: —to keep YouTube’s algorithm engaged—

00:40:55

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I’ve seen many naps.

00:40:56

Eric Weinstein: —I believe. Yeah. So I ask this question to the fancy version of ChatGPT, “Go back to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. What is the greatest period of peace between Western European nations between now and then?” and it said, “The 80 years between 1945 and 2025.” The great achievement of the postwar era is the devitalization of all of us so that we don’t blow ourselves up and kill ourselves. People can’t accept that. But we are far less vital than we ever have been, and we’ve been far more peaceful. So in part, one of the things that I think people just aren’t prepared for is that the entire world order is completely mis-explained. I think people didn’t understand what American democracy was. The two parties were supposed to filter out populist candidates so that both parties would throw up one candidate. And in the US that meant that that candidate would always enforce the institutional order and all of the agreements, because otherwise you can’t have allies if every four years you have a sudden radical change and shift in policy. And you’ve only had two parties switching power since Millard Fillmore. So it’s been a duopoly, and it never fails that the person is always a politician with political background or military background. Donald Trump is the first president in history of the United States to have neither a military nor a political background. He was the first failure of a political party to screen out a populist candidate. He got through the primary. Then he was supposed to lose the general, where there was a concerted effort by mysterious and shadowy forces. And then when he won, nobody knew what to do. That’s why we suddenly had this epidemic of fake news, which was never a big topic during the 2016 cycle. It was a created placeholder as the national security state tried to figure out what do we do if this one person puts the world order at risk, which is exactly what’s happening now. He learned the first time that you cannot govern in Washington as a single individual. You need to show up with a large number of people. Trumpism doesn’t exist, because nobody knows what that guy is going to do next. And he couldn’t govern. So the world order survived the 2016 to 2020 version of Donald Trump. He learned his lesson, and he’s back to renegotiate the entire world. And you can see, before he took office, my Triggernometry podcast with Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin. And I said, “Trump is about to renegotiate the world.” That’s exactly what’s happening. He’s going to take every agreement. He’s never seen a tradition that he wants to continue. He’s always going to be the guy who disrupts a tradition, and that puts everything at risk. And why is it at risk? Because the original architects of the postwar plan did not teach their descendants how all the pieces worked. Right? So you’re living in this incredibly complicated system, you know, using debt and trade agreements and tacit understandings between intelligent and covert operations groups to keep this world order with this concept of democracy that’s really a binary choice every four years, once you’ve pre-committed all of the populist candidates to have to support the party’s nomination after they lose, which they’re always guaranteed to do. And now we’re in totally new territory where we’ve woken up out of The Truman Show, and everybody wants to build the city that The Truman Show is the set of. So we’ve been living on a movie set and everybody says, “Okay, we want democracy, we want free speech.” But if you’re looking at Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, that’s what free speech really looks like. You know, we haven’t had free speech. We haven’t really had democracy.

00:44:47

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: So did we wake up from The Great Nap with Donald Trump’s election and the October 7th?

00:44:52

Eric Weinstein: We’re just getting started. And just keep in mind how exciting the early 20th century was for good and for bad.

The Role of Conflict in Vitality

00:45:00

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Do we need to have war and conflict to be vitalized?

00:45:04

Eric Weinstein: I don’t think anyone has shown how you can be super vital without conflict. And you have this also, this issue of blood and soil, which the Germans did a tremendous job on, and this idea that there are people that are connected to their land has this incredibly negative Russell conjugation. So you have self-determination—

00:45:29

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yes and no, but then you have the indigenous, the people who call themselves indigenous, which I say that about the people of Israel all the time. And that’s okay.

00:45:38

Eric Weinstein: Well, this the funny—

00:45:39

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That’s not un-PC.

00:45:42

Eric Weinstein: Well, but we don’t know what we mean by indigenous. Like, this is one place in the world where if we were to do a land acknowledgment, it would get super funny. I mean, we have to recognize that we are on ancient Jewish lands as Jews, you know? I mean.

00:45:56

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I do it in Jerusalem all the time.

00:45:58

Eric Weinstein: You do land acknowledgment?

00:45:59

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yes! I do! I’m like, “This is the city that David built 3000 years ago to unify the tribes of Israel. This is where we became a people.” As deputy mayor of Jerusalem, I always do that all the time.

00:46:10

Eric Weinstein: Kol ha-kavod, that’s great.

Ethnic Identity and Historical Context

00:46:13

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: But what I’m saying is, you’re saying that the connection to the land, the soil and blood that you talk about is seen as something negative.

00:46:19

Eric Weinstein: Yes, very negative, because that’s what, you know, “We have to annex the Sudeten land because there are ethnic Germans over there, the Donbas region and the Crimean peninsula are where the Russian speakers are.” So you have, you know, we’re waking up from the idea that we’ve said all these super simplistic things that don’t work well together. So they’re these crazy sort of drug interactions by different kinds of idealism that we’ve professed. I believe the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, which is what brought the term “ethnic cleansing” into common parlance, and we don’t remember that it didn’t exist after World War Two, where the Sudeten Germans were taken out of the Sudetenland because of the risk that that clearly posed, we have, by the way, everybody should use Google Ngrams as much as possible, because that’s how you prove that the memories that are being implanted on you happened on a particular year at a particular time. So you should look for “ethnic cleansing” and see that it’s not something that’s always been here in our vocabulary. So in part one of the reasons that things are always screwed up here is that the outside world is going to impose so many different rules on you that there’s nothing you can do. You can’t solve your own problems. You can’t move people on land that they’ve been on for a long time. You can’t have an ethnic state. All these rules are so tight that in chess, again, you would call this a closed game. You have these incredible chains of pawns. You can’t move your pieces much, and eventually you get frustrated with this stuff and you say, “Screw it. We’re going to open the game and we’re going to sacrifice pieces, because I just can’t stand the pressure and that restricted feeling”, right? That’s what Donald Trump’s doing. He’s breaking from a closed game with all the institutions having all of these rules into a wide open game where nobody knows what’s happening next, and all of our allies are freaking out.

The Impact of Leadership on Global Dynamics

00:48:20

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Don’t they need to freak out a little bit? Doesn’t he have some—

00:48:23

Eric Weinstein: The key operative point was “a little bit”. This is not going to be a little bit.

00:48:27

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Right. Look, in terms of us here in Israel, what we want to see, of course, is an end to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is an immediate risk and an immediate existential threat for us. And we have hopes here that maybe you need a meshugener like Trump to finally do it.

00:48:46

Eric Weinstein: Do what?

00:48:48

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Either through maximum pressure, through economic maximum pressure, choke them until the people of Iran arise themselves and take over… or bomb.

00:48:59

Eric Weinstein: All right—

00:49:00

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Get rid of their nuclear—

00:49:00

Eric Weinstein: I really like that first option so much better. You know, violence is a language, and the Iranians are nothing if not gifted. And they speak it beautifully. And they sent you a message with a lot of ballistic missiles that fell.

00:49:18

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Two messages. One in April and one in September.

00:49:21

Eric Weinstein: Okay. But the key point is that there wasn’t a catastrophic loss of life.

00:49:27

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Honestly, Eric, I know you’re an atheist. The last one with the ballistic missiles, even the defense air infrastructure we had could only guarantee at 90%. And it ended up being 99 point something percent.

Understanding Iran’s Strategic Position

00:49:44

Eric Weinstein: I believe that you do not know what happens when Iran decides that they really want to engage. I just don’t think you do.

00:49:53

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: And don’t think they are a Paper Tiger? No, seriously.

00:49:58

Eric Weinstein: I think that the Persians are some of the most gifted people, and I think that Shimon Peres’ old concern was we do not know how to do the game theory of a nuclear theocracy. Right? Just like you guys, your guys are messing around with the Palestinian Arabs and you’re missing the bigger picture that the game theory of a potentially thermonuclear theocracy is completely unknown, particularly one with an advanced concept of heaven.

00:50:28

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yeah. Yes. Fast track. So what do we do then? You said you don’t like the solution of bombing and getting rid of their nuclear capability.

00:50:37

Eric Weinstein: Okay, so the key issue traditionally has been that one has two different dangers that one has to worry about: skilled players and unskilled players. And I think that it is definitely the case that there were savage leaders in this region who were extremely skilled. I think Hafez al-Assad was an extremely skilled player. I think King Hussein was an extremely skilled player. You’ve had many prime ministers who were skilled players. You know, look at Saddam Hussein taking over the Baath Party. This guy spoke violence like a poet.

Skilled vs. Unskilled Players in Conflict

00:51:17

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That’s the language of the region, isn’t it?

00:51:20

Eric Weinstein: Yes, but not everybody speaks it well. I remember Ariel Sharon, translated into English saying something beautifully. He says, “What is this murderous frenzy that has descended over our Arab neighbors,” right? He divorced the concept of the frenzy from the actual humans that he would have to deal with over time. Arab diplomacy is one of the wonders of the world. I worry that we don’t have enough skilled players and that people are being quite crude and that in part that’s dangerous. When you have unskilled players, you’re not necessarily safer if they’re a little bit less brutal, because you just don’t have an ability to read each other’s moves. I believe that Iran was speaking to you in a very skilled fashion. I could be wrong.

00:52:08

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Saying?

00:52:10

Eric Weinstein: We don’t know that you really have a defense if we decide to do this thing in earnest, and you should not take comfort from your ability to shoot things down launched from Gaza to think that that is going to work if this is—

00:52:23

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: What should we say back?

00:52:26

Eric Weinstein: I’m not in the position, having been here for two days for the first time in 30 years, to tell you what to say.

00:52:32

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: C’mon, Eric—

00:52:33

Eric Weinstein: No, I—

00:52:34

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: —what’s your opinion?

00:52:35

Eric Weinstein: I absolutely refuse. It is—I have not picked up a gun. I have not sent my children here to fight in your army. And it would be absolutely irresponsible for me to say what you should or shouldn’t do. I will say this. You are also endangering the diaspora and the planet with a very dangerous conflict that can easily spread. One of the great nightmares for the US is that suddenly we have too many theaters in play. We’ve got one going on in Russia and Ukraine. We’ve got another one with the Taiwan Straits, we have one with the Middle East, and there are only so many bases, so many carriers. And the fact is, if the US retreats into the sort of Christian national isolationist movement, which I think is very bizarre, the idea that these two oceans will protect us indefinitely, and even to take the words “America First,” which we associate with people who did not feel that America was threatened by Hitler.

The Dangers of Covert Operations

00:53:31

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yeah. Well, it took a while until they, I mean, until Pearl Harbor, they didn’t really go in in earnest.

00:53:38

Eric Weinstein: Well, but Pearl Harbor is a very mysterious situation—

00:53:45

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Thank you, thank you.

00:53:47

Eric Weinstein: If you look at the McCollum memo, you will find that the US was trying to figure out how to get attacked in the Pacific, and—you don’t know about this?

00:54:00

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I’m learning a lot today.

00:54:01

Eric Weinstein: So the US has to sometimes manufacture casus belli, cause for war. And so, in fact, starving Japan for resources because Japan is resource poor was definitely something that the US was interested in. Just like “Remember the Maine” or the Gulf of Tonkin solution. So part of the problem is that we’re having a child’s discussion of conflict, and we are suddenly now all capable of reaching many people on social media. Most of us don’t know anything, myself included. And—

00:54:35

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: But everybody’s an expert now. Every panel’s on the news, on Joe Rogan, whatever it is, everybody’s an expert on everything.

00:54:43

Eric Weinstein: Joshi means, not what she says. I would love to get Joe Rogan here.

00:54:48

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I would love to get Joe Rogan here. Can we let you do that for us? I’ll organize it. Let’s get him here.

00:54:56

Eric Weinstein: Look, I’d love to offer it to him if he hasn’t been here. And, you know, potentially, I think that there are other names. You know, you should just keep in mind Joe doesn’t know—I don’t think Joe has a very strong sense of this place. I don’t know if you were all following the Daryl Cooper story. Here’s something many of you probably don’t know. Daryl Cooper reached out to me before almost anyone was aware of him and said, “Hey, Eric, Jocko Willink and I want to meet with you because you keep talking about Witold Pilecki, the great hero, Polish hero, who dressed up as a Jew to get taken into Auschwitz to organize resistance and reconnaissance, smuggled himself out, told the world, and got executed after the war. And you keep talking about this great hero of the Jewish people, saying that we should have an entire month devoted to him”—sorry, I’m going to get emotional—”we’d like to do a series with you.” You don’t know how these people are actually thinking—they’re having—you can be angry at him. You can be very worried about him. But he’s a much more complex and interesting person than many of you know. Candace Owens was the one who invited me to meet Kanye on the first day she met her hero. It’s important—I keep threatening to do this series, which I don’t know whether it’s a totally bad idea. I don’t know whether I fully said this in public, but—called “My Friends the Anti-Semites.”

00:56:38

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I think it’s a great idea.

00:56:39

Eric Weinstein: And—that scares me!

00:56:43

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Shabbat dinner with my friends the anti-Semites?

00:56:45

Eric Weinstein: No, because in part—so I have a different concept called Weaponized Shabbat, where every—I didn’t think that was a funny line, but good to know.

00:56:57

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: It is in this crowd.

00:56:59

Eric Weinstein: So the idea being that people have all sorts of ideas about what the Jews are and what the Jews do—the Jews, the Jews, the Jews. My feeling is, for God’s sake, if you have a Shabbat table, it’s a miracle that you know, every week people who have no tradition who’ve lost their sense of themselves, people who are connected to us through the Judeo-Christian thinking, invite them in, invite in people who are not Jewish to see who we actually are so that these crazy ideas are nullified, you know, because to us, it seems like, so you think we use the blood of your children to make mozza? Well, that’s quickly dispelled once you’re a part of it—I often—sometimes people will say to me this thing about, “Eric, it sounds like you think that there’s a problem with violence in Islam.” And I always say, “Oh, you don’t know what you just told me.” And the person doesn’t expect that reaction. They say, “Well, what did I just tell you?” And I say, “You have absolutely no close Muslim friends, because otherwise you’d be at their dinner table, and that’s what they’re discussing, because they are frequently the most frequent targets of that violence.” And the fact is that the Islamic world knows that it’s got a problem. And, you know, in part, getting to know each other at that deeper level is really important. And I think every Shabbat table, my wife and I used to worry that we would offend people to come in and pray because they’re not religious or they’re not in our tradition. It doesn’t work at all like that.

00:58:40

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: They love it.

00:58:42

Eric Weinstein: They love it, they love knowing, okay, is this what Christianity is derived from? And you sing and you get together with family, and this is a tradition. You do this 50 weeks out of a year and screw up two weeks? Yeah, more or less. Absolutely. We should have a service in which we list our Shabbat dinners, and we invite people who are curious or afraid or don’t know better, come.

00:59:06

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That’s probably those bold ideas that you’re talking about teaching the world. In the book “The Genius of Israel” by Dan Singer and Saul Singer, they call Shabbat Thanksgiving once a week. When you see in American culture where the whole family get to meet with Thanksgiving, we do this once a week. And this is part of the reason why we appreciate family. Well, we want to have a lot of kids. It’s all part of that puzzle that you believe we should be exporting in a big way.

00:59:32

Eric Weinstein: But everybody else can do Shabbat, too. Yeah. You know, it’s just we have to. For them, it’s a choice.

00:59:38

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

The Need for a Plan B for Humanity

00:59:38

Eric Weinstein: But the holiday that I really care about beyond that is, I don’t think people understand Passover well enough. And it’s a weird thing to say, but it’s a survival manual. It’s not a dinner, it’s a survival menu. It’s not a dinner. Right now, we have to contend with the idea that the Israelites who survived were the ones who left when there was nowhere to go, and my claim is, and this is, you know, again, an unpopular one, we cannot all be on a thermonuclear planet sharing one atmosphere. It is time to leave, time to spread out. And there is nowhere to go. Elon is talking about Mars. And at least Elon is talking about Mars and the moon, which is insane. Those are very barren planets. Yeah, but quite honestly, my claim is—and this is just it’ll discredit me so you don’t have to listen to any of the previous stuff I said—Earth is Mizrahim, humanity is the Jews, and we’re waiting for the bread to rise and we gotta stop.

01:00:39

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: When’s the bread going to rise?

01:00:40

Eric Weinstein: When we figure out whether or not the restriction placed on us by a man offered the presidency of the state, Albert Einstein, told us, you can’t go faster than the speed of light and the nearest star is four light years away. We are so far away from anywhere else to go other than the moon or Mars. The only two rocks that are really reachable with chemical rockets. We have to dream bigger. We are very good at physics. Let’s at least admit we are very good at physics. I was two years here, in part because I wanted to push the Einsteinian limits that are placed on us by General Relativity to some place—are there any cheat codes? Are there any ways around this that aren’t involving wormholes or violating differential geometry, which are not going to happen? So one of the things that I’m really excited about is that we’re about to revitalize. We have a very brief period of time to figure out how to do the impossible. We’re a miracle-based culture. We have to lead and we have to get humanity so that it’s not sharing one atmosphere. The landmasses aren’t the big issue. The problem is that there’s no Israeli atmosphere or Jordanian atmosphere or Chinese atmosphere. If you lose the atmosphere, which is where pestilence, you know, pathogens travel in the atmosphere, radiation travels in the atmosphere and climate travel in the atmosphere. We cannot afford to be this powerful. The stupid and all crowded onto one planet with one atmosphere is the craziest thing I’ll say tonight, so everything else will be much more normal than that.

01:02:12

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: What you’re saying is we need a plan B.

Revitalizing Scientific Leadership

01:02:15

Eric Weinstein: You know, there’s an old joke, which I hope you know, I’m not going to tell the joke, just the punchline, because that’s what we do in this culture. “Jews, you’ve got 23 minutes to learn how to live underwater.” See, this man knows it. It’s time to do the impossible again. And that’s what we do. So my feeling is that in part, scientific leadership is incredibly important. Our notion of physics, our fundamental understanding of ourselves, hasn’t advanced in 52 years, since 1973. And it is time to restart that.

01:02:49

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Well, God bless you, Eric Weinstein, for leading that charge, for leading that conversation. And I will be remiss if I don’t open up to some questions because I think there’s a lot of people here, but we’ll try and keep it.

01:03:00

Eric Weinstein: Can I just do one plug before you do that?

01:03:02

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Please!

01:03:02

Eric Weinstein: I think I’m going to be talking at the Hebrew University next week on April 1st, talking about moving from dark to differential geometric energy. So if you happen to be a physicist—

01:03:15

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: For those nerds out there! There’s a question at the back. Stand up for the question, please. Microphone.

01:03:26

Lasha: Yeah.

01:03:31

Lasha: Hi. So I’m a lecturer of Yiddish, Talmud, and Torah. And I’m not Jewish. I was raised by an Ashkenazi Jewish nanny who brought me and my brother into so much love about the Jewish world. I’m from the country of Georgia. I love your nation very much. I’m a big Zionist. I’m happy to be here. And one thing that really causes pain in my heart is that Israel is not doing enough to recruit non-Jewish friends.

01:04:02

Eric Weinstein: Amen.

01:04:04

Lasha: So I know there are lots of people in this audience that do a lot of important work. Please, open up your organizations, internships, scholarships, universities to non-Jews. There are many non-Jewish Zionists. Recruit them. Bring them over. Increase your pool.

01:04:20

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: What’s your name?

01:04:21

Lasha: My name is Lasha.

01:04:23

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Lasha, so I’ll just give myself a little plug now. I’m the co-founder of an organization called Campus Israel, and the whole point of that organization is to bring students from all around the world, Jewish and non-Jewish, to do academics in Israel in English. And that’s what I’m doing at the moment. So I hope you can come.

01:04:43

Eric Weinstein: And Lasha, if I could ask you, where do I get good Khinkali, Tahoun, and some of that great Georgian wine when I’m in Tel Aviv? What? I’ll come to Georgia?

01:04:58

Lasha: It’s probably the biggest supporter of Israel, especially—

01:05:01

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Georgia’s great with Israel.

01:05:04

Eric Weinstein: Fantastic.

01:05:04

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: They have lots of Georgian shops here. Okay. Yes?

01:05:08

Speaker 4: Sorry, it’s—I’ve listened to, like, 100 hours of you talk, so limiting myself to just one question—

01:05:13

Eric Weinstein: My condolences.

01:05:15

Speaker 4: Yeah. Say hi to Brett and Heather for me. But so James Lindsay labels the Christian woke right and the woke left as two sides of the same psyop. Or put in your language, memetic weapons and hybrid warfare. Who are deploying these idea weapons? Are they the same group of people that locked away the branches of physics? Are they the people hiding the UFOs? Is it Qatar? China? Are we dealing with the remnants of a KGB op like Yuri Bismuth? Is it some combination of other factions? If you had to guess, who are these people and what do they want?

01:05:52

Eric Weinstein: So this is the big problem with conspiracy theories, and why they have such a terrible name, is that people don’t realize the princess cannot feel whether it’s a pea or a golf ball or even a watermelon if there’s too many mattresses. So my point is that you have to learn when things don’t make sense without immediately filling the hole. We don’t really know. I can tell you with almost certainty that the US has had quiet and highly classified UFO programs where nobody has any idea that I know whether they’re actually UFOs or aliens anywhere near them. And so, in part, I have an equation called UAP=SAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena equals Special Access Programs. The US, when it chooses to do something cool, always does something fake. So Operation Overlord was the invasion of Normandy during World War Two, but Operation Fortitude and Operation Bodyguard were the fake operations to disguise Operation Overlord so that nobody would understand what the troop buildup was about. So, in part, we don’t know, for example, whether, let’s just take the UFOs, whether there’s any UFOs in this thing, and it’s just a cover for super advanced aerospace or to try to get the Chinese and the Russians to invest precious treasure in the wrong programs. When it comes to all of these things that don’t add up and don’t make sense, we have to recognize that the Jews are very vulnerable because we will be viewed as a secretive organization. And one of the reasons I’ve been extremely vocal about Jeffrey Epstein, having met him once, is that it’s very important, I mean, this is a completely disgusting human being—it’s possible that he was an intelligence construct because he certainly didn’t behave like a financier. “Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Assume for the moment that he was a joint CIA, Mossad project. It’s very important to recognize that the Jews wouldn’t have put him up to that or the Americans wouldn’t. It would be a couple of operatives in a super secret place that made a terribly catastrophic decision to destroy the lives of young girls with a psychopath. And as a result, we have to understand that we are entitled to covert operations, but it is also a great danger to do too much through covert operations, because what that does is it creates a sense that the world doesn’t add up and it doesn’t make sense. And I guarantee you it’ll always be the same seven groups of people who are suspected as being the hand behind it. I don’t know, I can tell you many things don’t make sense. Most of them have to do with tacit and quiet agreements. That’s the age we’re living in. I personally believe that Anthony Fauci knew that the 77 Nobel laureates who claimed that the EcoHealth Alliance had to be defended, that that was complete nonsense. I think Jeffrey Sachs was put in charge of this. And he found out that he had appointed all of the foxes to guard the henhouse. We have a problem that we’re not being honest with people at a level that we can’t afford. Governments can’t afford to be honest. This idea of “transparency is everything,” and “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—anybody who knows medicine knows that Brucella is an infection that gets worse with sunlight. You can’t just open everything up. The mania for transparency is a mania. The key point is we have to bring these down to appreciable levels. We need more honesty, if not total honesty. And I don’t know what to do about all of the things that don’t add up, because in the late stages of the post-World War Two era, many of the people in charge of these programs don’t understand how they work.

01:10:05

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Wow. Okay.

01:10:06

Speaker 4: Cool. I shouldn’t have said UFOs, my bad.

01:10:12

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Over here, this lady in the front—

01:10:13

Speaker 5: I’m gonna go next—

01:10:14

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Okay. We’ll come to you next.

Navigating the Future of Society

01:10:16

Speaker 5: Hey, Eric, so based on your worldview, it sounds like we are either doomed to destroy ourselves as a vitalized society or to die out as a devitalized society that does not reproduce and pursue our biological drive. So is there an in-between place, or are we going to destroy ourselves one way or the other?

01:10:41

Eric Weinstein: Well, in part, you’re living in it. This is kind of the sweet spot, as crazy as that sounds. I also believe that—

01:10:51

Speaker 5: But—

01:10:51

Eric Weinstein: Look—

01:10:59

Speaker 5: Aren’t we currently—we’re in a transition from a vitalized time to a devitalized time, and the in-between part—

01:11:00

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: It’s the other way—

01:11:01

Eric Weinstein: The other way around.

01:11:02

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Devitalized to—

01:11:03

Eric Weinstein: We’ve been devitalized. We were vital up until ‘45—

01:11:06

Speaker 5: Right.

01:11:06

Eric Weinstein: We were somewhat vital from ’45 to early ‘70s. Then we’ve had approximately 50 years of really radical devitalization, okay? We are now revitalizing. There’s a race. You know, the phrase “you can just do things” is no joke. What I believe is you—choose to use this moment wisely. There is no post-Cold War, the post-Cold War is forever. Your neighbors are going to have thermonuclear weapons in short order. You cannot keep nuclear proliferation from happening forever. I could explain why there’s no real secret behind the Teller-Ulam design. The only thing you can do is gate the amount of weapons-grade radioactive material. We are in a very temporary situation. Can you use this time to do anything—and this is the project of my life—to restore an indefinite human future? That is the problem post November of 1952, which is when Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear weapon, was explored in the Pacific. So the key question is, up until 1952, that’s really the BC-AD moment. November of ’52. We lost that. We have a temporary peace that Steven Pinker has totally misunderstood, where we have potential violence that stops the realized violence and what the question is now, what are you going to do with the short period of time before the world gets really crazy at levels that we’ve never seen and none of us have any experience with? And my claim is that the project for great people and rich people and smart people is the restoration of an indefinite human future, which was lost in November of ‘52. And nobody knows quite what that means. And that’s why the Passover thing is so potent and people don’t understand it, except here. You have to decide that you’re leaving your dangerous situation with nowhere to go. If you said, “Look, there’s no way across the Red Sea,” you didn’t get to the Promised Land. Right now, there’s nowhere to go. We’ve lost our indefinite human future. The courageous thing to do is to admit it and then say, “Okay, now what?” And we’re not doing that. And I don’t know why it’s so—I think people are so frightened of that question that they don’t realize that our survival manual, the seder, tells us you leave before there is an option. There was no option out. And they left anyway. You start working on this problem now. There is no peace dividend. There is no peace dividend in the US. What we were supposed to do is to take this time and run like hell to try to come up with the solution. And nobody is paying—what is the entire budget of planet Earth for interstellar travel? My guess is it’s zero. Think about that. It’s not even a small allocation. It’s dead zero. I’ve tried to talk to Elon about this. Like, what are you doing? You’re not going to get anything with the moon and Mars. It’s barely any diversification at all, and it’s very difficult. Right now the key question is do you have a governance strategy for an indefinite human future? Do you have any kind of technological strategy for keeping people good? Does that mean that you’re going to have a spying society that knows when anybody starts to do something dangerous? Are you going to innovate some new form of economics? Nobody knows. But you have to work on a problem which seems to have no answer before there is an answer, and no one’s working on it and no one’s putting money towards it. And I have no idea what we’re doing.

01:14:59

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: And, Eric, you’re quite positive and optimistic about AI. Could that—

01:15:03

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:15:04

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Could that save us?

01:15:07

Eric Weinstein: I think we’ll get to an answer before AI gets to an answer.

01:15:11

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: You do?

01:15:12

Eric Weinstein: I bet my whole life on it. You come to Hebrew University, Givat Ram, and—

01:15:17

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: You’ll find out—

01:15:18

Eric Weinstein: And you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking—I’m not talking about nothing. I’m talking about partial differential equations. I’m talking about creating new possibilities. You’ve gotten the semiconductor out of physics. You’ve gotten, you know, I can speak to somebody on the other side of the planet instantaneously out of physics. You have the World Wide Web, which came out of CERN. You’ve had miracle after miracle after miracle coming from the sciences. It’s time to go back to the well.

01:15:48

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Okay, we had a question over here. Just. Did he answer it already?

01:15:53

Speaker 6: Sort of. Mine had to do with the Western civilization collapse and you sort of answered it in a way. You’re optimistic that we haven’t passed inflection point, right?

01:16:08

Eric Weinstein: Yes. But Douglas Murray cannot be the only person in Europe fighting this good fight. You know, you can’t—I love Douglas, but the fact of the matter is, we’ve got to find—it’s one of these great problems. How do you find a decent solution to revitalization, to renewing our faith in ourselves that doesn’t become jingoistic? That doesn’t become insufferable? That speaks to our best tendencies when you have allowed certain sorts of things to happen? So one of the things is you’ve got to stop focusing on Islam. You have to focus on totalizing ideologies. The problem with Islam is not, you know, that their hummus is better than ours or who knows what. The problem is totalizing. We cannot afford totalizing ideologies in open societies, particularly thermonuclear open societies, because if somebody gets control of that society, then you’ve got a new world of problems. And so my feeling about this is nobody has figured out how to have a vital European society that doesn’t need to rely on immigration rates to protect its dependency ratios, to take care of the elderly, etc., etc., etc. What we did is we started trying this experiment, which was the United States of Europe, and the United States of Europe was an idea that you could get fiscal union without getting political union. Then you allowed everybody to issue their own debt, but nobody could issue fiat currency to print their way out of their debt. That would cause economic crisis, which is what we had in the European debt crisis. And then you would backdoor European Union to people who didn’t want it.

01:17:59

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Yeah.

01:18:00

Eric Weinstein: So this is what, like, this concept of these paternalistic architects had—genius plan, but then it took way too long, nobody remembered the plan when the crisis actually happened. It’s not clear that Europeans want to be homogenized, and so, in part, you know, one of the things that’s happening in our time is the repudiation of these grand 20th-century plans. So, for example, India is repudiating Gandhi-Nehruism. Turkey is repudiating Ataturkism. We’re repudiating the Great Society Programs like the Immigration Act of 1965 in the US. We’re returning to the blood and soil speech in the UK. You have all of these repudiations of grand, idealistic visions that didn’t quite work out. And that’s really what this time is about, in part, you know, it might be, for example, the repudiation of Ben-Gurion’s vision, but it’s not happening here in the same way, the rest of the world is sick of the idealisms that went on for too long and didn’t deliver on the promises. And that’s why you’re experimenting with authoritarianism everywhere. And people are looking at Hungary and saying, “You know, I used to think you guys were crazy. Now tell us more about how you’re getting this done,” or, “What’s going on in Poland? You seem to have an effective border patrol.” That’s what I see happening. And the key question is how to not lose our soul trying to just remember, what does it mean to be Swedish? It shouldn’t be a huge conversation. What does it mean to be male or female? What does it mean to be decent and welcoming, but not just leave the door open and be a doormat for anybody who wants to walk all over you? Nobody’s figured this out.

01:19:51

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I think one more question, and we have to end is telling me I should have ended already. One more there in the middle. Yes. The lady in the middle.

Demographics and Cultural Identity

01:20:06

Speaker 7: Hi.

01:20:08

Speaker 7: So this kind of relates to what you just said. And birth rates in Europe. You mentioned that our birth rate is kind of the envy of the Western world, but isn’t it a bit more nuanced than just being connected to family? Because if you look closely at the demographics in Israel, you actually have a declining birth rate in the secular community and a rising birth rate in the religious community, both Jews and religious Arabs, Muslims, and Christians, so wouldn’t it—?

01:20:31

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: That’s not true. There’s not a declining birth rate in the secular community.

01:20:35

Speaker 7: I just looked it up.

01:20:36

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: Like, not according to many statistics. In fact, we have the highest birth rate, even take out the Haredim, of the OECD countries without the Haredim.

01:20:45

Speaker 7: I’m talking proportionately within Israel, not in comparison to the Western world. Obviously, we have, you know, four kids as opposed to two, like in most of Europe, but proportionately. So if you look at the Western world, which has kind of had a bit of a decline in religiosity, wouldn’t it make sense that if they go back to the roots of religion, Christianity or whatever it is, that they would have an incline in the birth rate? Because if you look at Islam, they do.

01:21:10

Eric Weinstein: So, you know, again, my feeling is that there’s a differential in the birth rate and certainly, you know, my great-grandmother Bunya was named Fabrika, factory in Russian, because she just kept churning them out at numbers you couldn’t even believe. First of all, there’s two-way traffic between the religious and the secular. When the religious life is just too cumbersome and burdensome, people leave religion, and then when people feel too empty and hopeless, they welcome that structure that they realize that they’ve been missing. It’s very hard to stay at the sweet spot of just enough religiosity. So the thing about Israel that is kind of special is that, you know, as people used to say when I was here, “I don’t go to synagogue because my country is a synagogue.” Okay. So you sort of can fall in love with somebody in your own tradition by accident without having to make a point of it. One of the least woke things you can say in the world is, “I want my son to marry a nice Jewish girl.” You can see how many things you violated in pushing that upon your child. We are both very religious and secular, and as you can see by the number of kippahs in the audience, people are sitting side by side and having lives, which are—how many times have you seen a person in a hijab walking next to somebody in a mini skirt? It happens all the time. We have to recognize that we are not as divided, no matter which religion you’re in. We go back and forth between religiosity and secular nature and these are not permanent groups. So if the religious have a huge number of children, I would expect that some of those children will be DJs in Tel Aviv in short order. And if there’s way too much, you know, weed smoking and debauchery, I imagine that the knit kippahs will multiply, you know, somewhere around Jerusalem. I don’t know.

01:23:20

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: I think on that note, we’re going to thank you so much for enlightening us.

01:23:25

Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me.

01:23:26

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum: With your wisdom. Thank you.

01:23:29

Speaker 8: And thank you, Fleur. Thank you, Pia. Burn his passport. You should both stay, Eric. Welcome home, Ladache. And thank you all from the Tel Aviv International Salon. Thank you, Building Blocks and Eylon, Kol Yisrael. Guys, have a great night.