It’s been a surreal few weeks, from the Epstein files disappearing, to President Trump’s F-bomb over the situation in the Middle East – and even Elmo’s X account getting hacked to spew antisemitic filth. So, what should Trump’s next steps be? Should the Epstein files be released? And what about the ongoing conflicts with Russia and the Middle East? Joining Piers Morgan to make sense of it all is author and host of No Spin News Bill O’Reilly and Harvard mathematician and founding member of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’, Dr Eric Weinstein. \
Outline
00:00 Introduction
01:15 Bill O’Reilly talks Epstein conspiracy
09:57 AD: Incogni
11:04 Trump on ‘stupid Republicans’
21:41 AD: Birch Gold
22:37 Eric Weinstein joins
34:02 AD: Dr Gundy MLT Oil
34:51 Weinstein on meeting Epstein
44:11 Trump’s F-bomb significance
Transcript
00:00:00
Piers Morgan: You met Epstein. Was he weird? Was he unusual?
00:00:04
Eric Weinstein: I will remember it f- you know, for the rest of my life as being terrifying. He knew things about my work that were essentially known to no one.
00:00:12
Piers Morgan: A lot of the MAGA, uh, crowd, Dan Bongino and others, saying, “We’re gonna have full transparency. We’re gonna get to the bottom of this. We’re gonna get all this stuff out there.” But they’re the ones leading the shutdown.
00:00:23
Bill O’Reilly: You can’t put out names associated with, uh, a heinous criminal like Epstein unless those people are under investigation.
00:00:33
Eric Weinstein: Some percentage of America feels so strongly about state abuse and feeling that we are not getting to the bottom of this, that if they suspect state-sponsored pedophilia, they will go to the ends of the earth to push it into the light.
00:00:48
Piers Morgan: It’s been a surreal few weeks to say the least for President Trump’s F bomb, to end the real bombs in Israel, to Sesame Street’s Elmo going full Kanye in a series of anti-Semitic rants. He was hacked. Few things have been more fascinating than the schism among US conservatives about the Epstein files and the increasing muddle the president finds himself in over who is to blame. We’re gonna unpack all this in a moment with two big thinkers. Eric Weinstein will be joining me shortly. But first, the host of No Spin News on YouTube, author and legendary commentator, Bill O’Reilly. Bill, great to have you back on Uncensored.
00:01:22
Bill O’Reilly: Thanks for having me on, Piers.
00:01:24
Piers Morgan: Are we going through a period of sustained madness, or has it always been like this, but without the fuel of social media?
00:01:33
Bill O’Reilly: Are you talking about the Epstein case or just in general?
00:01:35
Piers Morgan: Just general.
00:01:38
Bill O’Reilly: Yeah, I, I think there’s a little hysteria, uh, around the world at this point because the, uh, uh, iPhones are available 24/7 and people read the most outrageous garbage in the world. And unfortunately, some of them believe that, so that, uh, they’re in a perpetual state of, uh, chaos and hysteria. That didn’t happen 10 years ago-
00:02:00
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm
00:02:00
Bill O’Reilly: … and, and it is now, particularly among younger people who don’t know anything. So that’s a danger, but you know, we live in a society where we have freedom of speech and, uh, we can consume what we want.
00:02:12
Piers Morgan: There’s a lot of, um, fascinating splits developing on the conservative right in America over the Epstein files, and I’ve been really keen to get your take on this. A, first of all, what do you make of the Epstein scandal and where we’ve got to with it?
00:02:32
Bill O’Reilly: I think it’s a contrived scandal at this point, but I could be wrong. Um, you know, I’m a linear thinker, uh, A leads to B, leads to C, leads to D, and I’m also an evidence seeker. So when Epstein, uh, killed himself in 2019, I talked to my New York City sources, uh, in the car, in his office, and they’re honest people. They wouldn’t do, uh, any fake stuff, uh, like say it was, uh, a suicide when it was a murder. It’s impossible. They wouldn’t do it. There’s no way. Um, so we put that to bed pretty quickly. Now, was there collusion in the hospital to make it easy for Epstein to hang himself? Could be, and that’s up to the, uh, federal prisons to investigate. And then you go on to, uh, the case itself that William Barr prosecuted under, uh, Donald Trump, the attorney general, and that whole file was passed along to the Biden people for four years, Merrick Garland, okay? They had everything. So if there were any, you know, big name Republicans or, or anybody like that, it would’ve been out.
00:03:41
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:03:41
Bill O’Reilly: It would’ve been leaked by the Biden people to the New York Times. That’s the, uh, pipeline. But that never happened, and there wasn’t any outrage on the part of the left that the, the Garland, uh, people didn’t put out a summation. Enter Donald Trump. Uh, the game of Trump is to get him no matter what. Get him. If it doesn’t matter if it’s true, Russian collusion, we all know that game. And uh, when Attorney General Bondi made her mistake that said, “Oh, I got this file right here and I’m looking it over and you’re all gonna get it,” uh, people went, “Okay, good.” But then it didn’t happen, and boom, this is America. So immediately people try to use it to hurt the opposition, and that’s where we are.
00:04:26
Piers Morgan: I mean, it struck me that probably the most incendiary part of the last few weeks in relation to this was when Elon Musk had his massive falling out with President Trump, and he went on late night on his own X social media platform and posted, you know, the biggest bombshell, uh, is that President Trump is in the Epstein files. And then just a few weeks after that, three weeks or whatever it may be, uh, the whole thing gets shut down. The conspiracy theorists are having a field day with that axis of the timeline. You know, Elon Musk says that right at the point that many in the administration, Alina Habba came on my show, could not have been more like, “This is big and scandalous and there’s gonna be names and details and everything else.” And then the Elon post, and then it all gets shut down. You know, you don’t actually have to be a mad conspiracy theorist to think that’s all a bit weird.
00:05:23
Bill O’Reilly: Yeah, you can be a conspiracy person. I mean, uh, weird is a good word, but how does Alina, uh, and Elon know what’s in the file? They don’t know.
00:05:33
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:05:33
Bill O’Reilly: And I think Elon Musk repudiated that, uh, X posting, did he not? Did he not repudiate that?
00:05:38
Piers Morgan: I think he deleted it. I don’t think he’s repudiated it. I think he just deleted it.
00:05:43
Bill O’Reilly: Yeah, I, I, I mean, I don’t think he’s pushing that now. Let’s- I think that’s accurate. But look, I don’t know what’s in the file. You don’t know what’s in the file.
00:05:52
Piers Morgan: No.
00:05:53
Bill O’Reilly: The only people that know, uh, uh, here’s who knows what’s in the file, okay? The FBI chiefs under Biden and Trump-
00:06:00
Piers Morgan: Yeah
00:06:00
Bill O’Reilly: … they know.
00:06:01
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:06:01
Bill O’Reilly: Okay? Merrick Garland, he knows. Bondi knows. Okay? And you would assume Biden and Trump themselves know. Well, it’s in the file. Well, if it is a file. Might not be a file, might be a page of paper, might be 100 pages of paper. That’s it. So to me, as a journalist, anybody else commenting on it is a bunch of hooey. They don’t know.
00:06:23
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:06:23
Bill O’Reilly: And they’re just trying to stoke it up. You know, Piers, you’ve been in the game long enough to know how much money conspiracy people make.
00:06:30
Piers Morgan: Oh, sure.
00:06:31
Bill O’Reilly: I mean, I wrote Killing Kennedy and knocked them all out of the box. But people made millions of dollars on these hare-brained, uh, this person killed JFK, you know? And then when I got the primary source material from the FBI, it just said, this is what it was. And, you know, conspiracies make money, and they draw attention to people who peddle them. We don’t ever play that game here.
00:07:00
Piers Morgan: The problem, it seems to me… I interviewed Alan Dershowitz this week, who of course acted for Epstein, and he said that he knows of, uh, a few names of men who have been directly implicated in this, and he believes that they should all be rev- everything should be revealed. And so part of the problem here is that a lot of the MAGA, uh, crowd, who, uh, listen to a lot of people, Dan Bongino and others, before they came into power, saying, “We’re gonna have full transparency. We’re gonna get to the bottom of this. We’re gonna get all this stuff out there.” When they’re the ones leading the shutdown, and you’ve got people like Dershowitz saying, “Well, actually, there are names. I’ve seen them, and this should be made public,” that’s the problem. You can’t just… I don’t think you can just dismiss it all as, actually we looked today and there’s nothing to see here, gov. We had a, we had a bloke trafficking hundreds of potentially, you know, in criminal acts, of underage girls, and there’s nothing to see here.
00:08:01
Bill O’Reilly: Well, number one, Dershowitz said there’s no big names involved. He wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that said that. So that takes out any kind of real scandal.
00:08:09
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:08:09
Bill O’Reilly: Uh, number two, there’s only one guy, only one that can, um, provide an exposition here, and that’s President Trump.
00:08:19
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:08:20
Bill O’Reilly: Now, it’s interesting because on, uh, St. Patrick’s Day, I was in the Oval Office with, uh, Donald Trump, and, uh, talking about a number of things. And w- this came up.
00:08:30
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:08:30
Bill O’Reilly: But not just Epstein. The Kennedy file-
00:08:33
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:08:33
Bill O’Reilly: … Epstein, and a Martin Luther King file.
00:08:35
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:08:35
Bill O’Reilly: Which I’d very much like to see. I wanna know how James Earl Ray got financed after he shot Dr. King to death.
00:08:42
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:08:42
Bill O’Reilly: Uh, that file is still being held by the US government, and I’d like to see it.
00:08:46
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:08:47
Bill O’Reilly: Now, I said to him, because he asked me, I, I, I don’t intrude on the president unless he asks me. Uh, I said, “Look, I understand, you understand, you can’t just put out the massive, uh, unredacted report on Epstein because somebody might’ve had a cup of coffee with him, and, uh, that person’s life would be ruined. You know what the press does. There’s no context. So you can’t put out names associated with, uh, a heinous criminal like Epstein unless those people are under investigation.”
00:09:17
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:09:18
Bill O’Reilly: And Dershowitz has not said anybody specifically is under investigation. I don’t know of anybody who is at this point.
00:09:26
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:09:27
Bill O’Reilly: Maybe there is. Then you could put that name out. Trump agreed. He goes, you know, a lot of people… But I said, “What you can do, and what I would do, would be hold a press conference with the attorney general, generally outline what the government knows.”
00:09:43
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:09:43
Bill O’Reilly: That’s it.
00:09:44
Piers Morgan: I agree.
00:09:45
Bill O’Reilly: Get Bondi, get Bondi and get Merrick Garland. Get them both.
00:09:50
Piers Morgan: But he’s-
00:09:50
Bill O’Reilly: Press conference, here’s what we know.
00:09:53
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:09:53
Bill O’Reilly: That’s it.
00:09:56
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00:11:16
Bill O’Reilly: It’s a hoax. It’s, uh, started by Democrats. It’s been run by the Democrats for four years. You had Christopher Wray and these characters, and Comey before him. And, uh, it’s a bad group. It started… Actually, look at the Steele dossier, that turned out to be a total hoax. The 51 agents, the intelligence, so-called intelligence agents, it was a hoax. Uh, it’s all been a big hoax. It’s perpetrated by the Democrats. And some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net, and so they try and do the Democrats’ work.
00:11:48
Piers Morgan: Now that, that clip blew up massively online, Bill. Uh, was Donald Trump wise to use some of that language attacking fellow Republicans?
00:11:59
Bill O’Reilly: [laughs] I only… Look, you have to understand who he is, all right?
00:12:04
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:12:04
Bill O’Reilly: He’s gonna say what he wants to say.
00:12:06
Piers Morgan: [laughs]
00:12:06
Bill O’Reilly: What he says on Wednesday is different than what he’s gonna say on Thursday. I always say, if you’re gonna try to analyze President Trump by what he says, you’re just gonna hit your head against the wall. Watch what he does. That being said by me, thi- is an easy sol- solve. It’s not a hard solve.
00:12:26
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:12:27
Bill O’Reilly: If you just take my advice and hold that press conference and put everyth- it’s never gonna go away.
00:12:32
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:12:33
Bill O’Reilly: But what Americans are particularly sensitive to, and this is the most important point I’m gonna make on your program tonight, they don’t want rich and powerful people getting preferable treatment.
00:12:46
Piers Morgan: No.
00:12:47
Bill O’Reilly: They don’t want it.
00:12:48
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:12:49
Bill O’Reilly: And particularly in a criminal area.
00:12:51
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:12:51
Bill O’Reilly: And that’s what’s being sold here.
00:12:54
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:12:55
Bill O’Reilly: That there’s some nefarious thing, some big names, you mentioned Prince Andrew.
00:13:00
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:13:00
Bill O’Reilly: Okay? And they’re not getting prosecuted because they got money and power. Americans just recoil at that.
00:13:09
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:13:09
Bill O’Reilly: You gotta put that to bed. Dershowitz put it to bed. My point about Merrick Garland and Biden having this material for four years and nothing came out, I think is pretty overwhelming evidence.
00:13:23
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:13:23
Bill O’Reilly: But Trump’s gotta do that, too. His people have got to do that.
00:13:27
Piers Morgan: Let’s just pivot quickly, Bill, to, to Vladimir Putin. Uh, you called him one of the worst of the worst in your new book. Um, on your YouTube channel, you said that Trump did really think he would get a quick ceasefire on account of the others. I know that. He said that to me. And I do think he’s been genuinely so distressed by the sheer number of young men being slaughtered in the battlefields of, of Ukraine, uh, and is desperate to bring it to an end. But it seems to me what’s happened in the last week is that Putin’s just pushed this too far with Trump, to an extent where he appears to be openly mocking him, has a long conversation with him one day. That night, he launches the biggest barrage of bombs on Kyiv since the war began, and that’s triggered Trump using much more aggressive language about Putin, giving him 50 days now to, uh, to sort of deal or face, uh, you know, whatever punishment Trump has in mind for him. W- what’s your take on this wh- as to where we are?
00:14:29
Bill O’Reilly: Well, if you read Confronting Evil, out September 9th, you’ll know who Putin is. He’s a psychopath. He enjoys killing women and children. Since he’s been a little boy, he’s done that. It’s shocking. We went way, way back into Putin’s background. Okay? And so when you’re dealing with a psychopath w- who enjoys inflicting pain on other people, all right? It’s a whole different thing. President Trump didn’t get that, and I told him in the, in the interview in 2016 that went all over the world, “Watch out for Putin. Watch out for this man.” Okay? He idolizes Joseph Stalin.
00:15:15
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:15:15
Bill O’Reilly: Do I gotta say more than that? All right. So now Trump did two things. He wanted to believe that Putin would deal with him upfront-
00:15:27
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:15:27
Bill O’Reilly: … and the Ukraine war would stop. He campaigned on that, and he did that because in his four years, his first term, Putin cooperated with Trump, mostly. He didn’t have t- a lot of trouble with Putin. So he felt that Vlad would continue that relationship.
00:15:45
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:15:45
Bill O’Reilly: But Vlad has deteriorated mentally s- in a very dramatic way. He’s now almost a lunatic. That’s what you’re dealing with here.
00:15:55
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:15:55
Bill O’Reilly: So any responsible president has got to give every benefit of the doubt before you get into any kind of real upgrade of this conflict, because it’ll be a worldwide conflict, and that’s what Trump did. He gave Putin six months.
00:16:14
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:16:14
Bill O’Reilly: You know, because Putin would lie to him on the phone. Say, “Oh, yeah, we’ll do it. We’ll work it out. Don’t worry about it.” In the meantime, as you rightly pointed out, Putin’s lobbing, uh, bombs to kill babies, women, and blow up hospitals. I mean, just think about this. Uh, he’s a war criminal, uh, uh, Putin. There’s no way out for him, by the way, and that might be in, in Putin’s thinking. There’s no way out. He can’t rehab himself. All right, so now, uh, Trump is gonna take action against him, and he did a very shrewd thing by selling American weapons, big-time weapons-
00:16:48
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:16:48
Bill O’Reilly: … to NATO, and then NATO ships them into Ukraine, which gives Ukraine a fighting chance.
00:16:55
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:16:55
Bill O’Reilly: And the next drop is gonna be, I think, sanctions on the banks that do business with Moscow, which will break the Russian economy. Anyway, that’s what should happen.
00:17:06
Piers Morgan: What do you think may happen?
00:17:10
Bill O’Reilly: I, my scenario, I think, is, is gonna come true, but I don’t have anything… It’s a guess. I, I haven’t talked to the president about it. I’ve talked to him about Putin. He knows how I feel about Putin, um, that you cannot [laughs]… This is almost a madman now at this point. When you read that book, I sent it to you, I hope you got it.
00:17:30
Piers Morgan: I did. Thank you.
00:17:30
Bill O’Reilly: When you read the violence that this man, every single day of his life-
00:17:37
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:17:37
Bill O’Reilly: … and he’s the richest man in the world.
00:17:39
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:17:39
Bill O’Reilly: He’s the wealthiest human being in the world, and wait till you see how he made his money. But now he can’t spend it.
00:17:45
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:17:46
Bill O’Reilly: I mean, you know, that’s karma. But anyway, I, I’m, I’m praying, literally, I’m praying. I go to mass every Sunday, that somehow some miracle happens and Putin draws back.
00:17:59
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:18:00
Bill O’Reilly: Because how many more people have to die? For what?
00:18:03
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:18:03
Bill O’Reilly: For what? So that’s where we are.
00:18:08
Piers Morgan: W- talking of way too many people dying, what’s your assessment of where we are with the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza? And I, you know, cards on the table, I was very supportive of Israel’s right to defend its citizens from further attacks, uh, at the first few months of this war. But I’ve gotta say, the last few months have been unbelievably disheartening for the people that have backed Israel, uh, stridently because- The slaughter of innocent people as they go after Hamas just seems to me to be completely disproportionate now to what happened on October the 7th. What’s your take?
00:18:48
Bill O’Reilly: You know, I don’t think I’m where you are on it. Uh, obviously Netanyahu and his government want to eliminate Hamas so they can’t come back.
00:18:58
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:18:59
Bill O’Reilly: And because Hamas hides behind the civilians, uh, just as, uh, Tojo and Hitler did in World War II, and we had to wipe out, uh, millions of civilians in Germany and, uh, Japan to defeat those heinous people. I’m not justifying it because I don’t know the extent of it. What I do know is that Hamas should release the hostages and it will not. So there’s a balance here that you have to say, you know, sometimes there’s no right and wrong. Sometimes it’s both wrong.
00:19:32
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:19:34
Bill O’Reilly: This is a very, very complicated issue.
00:19:37
Piers Morgan: L- let me end, Bill, just with a quick fire on two raging stories which are disconnected to the major news events. One, do you think Brigitte Macron is male or female?
00:19:51
Bill O’Reilly: [laughs] I wish, uh, Macron and his wife, uh, the best. I hope they have a nice vacation in the south of France, and I have no blinking idea about anything else [laughs] in that regard.
00:20:04
Piers Morgan: I mean, Candace Owens has been pro- promoting this ridicul- I think ridiculous conspiracy theory that-
00:20:10
Bill O’Reilly: Piers, you get, you, you know me long enough to know I don’t go into that swamp.
00:20:15
Piers Morgan: No. [laughs]
00:20:15
Bill O’Reilly: I’m never in the swamp. I don’t do the internet thing. I don’t deal with the swamp creatures. I mean, I w- I’m the best-selling historical author in the world.
00:20:26
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:20:26
Bill O’Reilly: All right? I think I’m the most successful internet news purveyor in the world, and there’s a reason. I don’t do this kind of stuff. But I’ll mock it with you. If you and I wanna mock ’em-
00:20:37
Piers Morgan: Yeah
00:20:37
Bill O’Reilly: … I’ll be happy to mock ’em.
00:20:39
Piers Morgan: [laughs] I just think it’s ridiculous. She had three kids, for God’s sake. It’s absurd. Um-
00:20:43
Bill O’Reilly: It is ridiculous.
00:20:44
Piers Morgan: It’s ridiculous. Uh, finally, um, do you have any thoughts, Bill, on Elmo-gate? Elmo’s account on X was hacked and began to spew-
00:20:53
Bill O’Reilly: Yeah
00:20:54
Piers Morgan: … anti-Semitic thoughts.
00:20:57
Bill O’Reilly: You know, uh, all I know is I’m happy that I’m not gonna have to be paying for Elmo’s lunch or salary any longer.
00:21:05
Piers Morgan: [laughs]
00:21:06
Bill O’Reilly: That’s what I’m ha- I like Elmo personally.
00:21:08
Piers Morgan: [laughs]
00:21:09
Bill O’Reilly: I don’t think Elmo’s, uh, anti-Semitic ’cause he’s a puppet, see?
00:21:13
Piers Morgan: [laughs]
00:21:13
Bill O’Reilly: Puppets really don’t have the capacity to be anything like that. But I don’t wanna pay for PBS and NPR, and Trump’s knocked that out, and I’m very happy.
00:21:24
Piers Morgan: [laughs]
00:21:25
Bill O’Reilly: Let them compete in the open marketplace with you and me, Piers.
00:21:28
Piers Morgan: Yes.
00:21:29
Bill O’Reilly: Uh, come on, Elmo. Bring it on.
00:21:30
Piers Morgan: [laughs]
00:21:30
Bill O’Reilly: I’m ready for you, man. Let’s go.
00:21:33
Piers Morgan: [laughs] Bill O’Reilly, great to have you back on Uncensored.
00:21:38
Bill O’Reilly: Thanks for having me on.
00:21:39
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00:22:45
Eric Weinstein: Piers, good to be with you.
00:22:47
Piers Morgan: Epstein files. Talk to me.
00:22:52
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I’ve been, uh, talking about this since his original, uh, since before his original arrest in, uh, Florida.
00:23:00
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:23:00
Eric Weinstein: So I think if you wanna narrow the question, I would, uh, just like to say that, you know, this is much bigger than, um, Trump. And, uh, I think that one of the things that Trump is figuring out right now with the Epstein issue is that, uh, MAGA has outgrown Trump. MAGA is now, uh, something that was created by Trump, but, uh, it, it, it is a, uh, broncing buck that could buck anyone off who is seen as not being perfectly aligned with the idea that the people have to take back the country. Now, I’m not saying pro or, or against, I’m just describing-
00:23:40
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:23:40
Eric Weinstein: … that, uh, I think that anyone who thinks that they control MAGA will find out that they do not.
00:23:45
Piers Morgan: Y- you’ve done a lot of stuff on, on Epstein, as you said. You know, it seems to me, you know, you go back 15-odd years to the conviction of Epstein for being a pedophile. You know, he, he, he was indisputably convicted of a crime which made him a pedophile, and yet after that, people, including Prince Andrew over here, continued to consort with him. Um, he continued to be wined and dined by the rich and famous. And when this all came out, and when the full scale of his abuse of so many, uh, underage girls came out, um, it was being seen as a genuinely gigantic potential scandal in America. And that was fueled, the sense of that, by a lot of people now at the top of the Trump administration. And indeed, even after the inauguration, they, many of these people had c- had continued You kind of lead the media to the water’s edge, promising them, promising them the ultimate drink, if you like, of the full dirt in the Epstein files, including naming and shaming people and holding them to account. And then suddenly, out of nowhere a week ago, everything stops. The shutters come down, and now you’ve got a kind of civil war raging, uh, on the conservative right. And, as you say, you know, Trump slightly ostracized from many of the MAGA voters on this. Uh, and I think probably compounded by the strike on Iran, um, helping Ukraine. These are things that the MAGA base do not feel comfortable with. So talk to me about where you think we are with the, the shutting down of this scandal. Do you think it’s possible for Trump to shut it down? He’s begin- he started attacking, you know, the, the Re- the Republicans who don’t agree with him as stupid and so on, but can he shut this down, or is that genie out of the bottle, and will it continue to damage him?
00:25:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, nobody can shut it down. I mean, the, the issue is, is that many of us are parents, and in our hierarchy of identities, uh, those of us with children very often, uh, are mom and dad before we are anything else. That is, before we are Americans, before we are Jews, before we are Republicans, before we are Christians. There’s just this sort of sense that, uh, one has to protect those who cannot protect or speak for themselves, and there’s a gradation. You know, there’s a question about, uh, is there something magical that happens, uh, when someone turns, uh, y- a young person turns 18 on their birthday? And then there’s an issue about are we talking about 12-year-olds, 14-year-olds? Like, it just gets sicker and sicker as, as you go farther and farther from, uh, that date in the law. And as people come to understand, um, that the, the allegations, uh, go into 14-year-olds, 12-year-olds, who knows where this stops, um, the rage on the part of parents, uh, escalates. And I think that, um, you know, at some point the FBI called me in, uh, for unrelated reasons, and the first thing I told them before I cooperated with them, um, is, “Just, just to let you guys know, if I ever find out that, uh, you were complicit in running a covert operation that used children to do anything in terms of statecraft, all bets are off-
00:27:25
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:27:25
Eric Weinstein: … because, uh, I’m a human being before I’m an American.” And it, you know, the, the oath that we will fight all enemies foreign and domestic means that those of us who are worried about a state-sponsored pedophile or a state-protected pedophile who is using pedophilia as part of what the intelligence or really the covert operations group would call tradecraft, um, breaks all rules. It breaks all agreements. It supersedes absolutely everything. And at, you know, at, at a certain level, um, citizenship in this society is about surrendering to the monopoly on violence that is the state, and if the state refuses to remediate this, uh, I think there are a lot of people… I mean, we’ve all seen a, a parent, you know, kill someone in a courtroom when a, uh, a murderer and a rapist laughs because they’ve used the justice system to evade on a technicality. And, you know, there’s a question about will juries convict a parent who’s done such a thing? I think that what you’re talking about is a mismatch in scale. This is an issue where some percentage of America feels so strongly about state abuse and the feeling that we are not getting to the bottom of this, that if they suspect state-sponsored pedophilia is part of covert operations tradecraft, they will go to the ends of the earth to shut this thing down and to push it into the light. And what we don’t know is where, whe- whether when people get into office… Let, let us imagine for the moment a, a placeholder theory. A placeholder theory was that, um, Epstein faked, uh, some sort of involvement with children because you get the same bang for your buck by taking somebody who’s 22 years old, portraying them as if they’re 14, and compromising someone, you know?
00:29:13
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:29:13
Eric Weinstein: So then you have this issue of sources and methods. We know, for example, that the US years ago, uh, may have directed a pornographic film featuring an actor in Los Angeles, uh, who was given the likeness of Sukarno as head of the Indonesian state, and that was from a photograph that we had gotten from, uh, Sukarno in Moscow. So we are p- perfectly willing to use… Hollywood used all sorts of crazy things to create incontrovertible evidence for things that never occurred. So one of the things that may have happened is is that Trump and company, once they actually got the information, may have said, “Oh my gosh, it’s, it’s something quite different than we imagined.” But I believe that this is, uh, either this hap- happened with, uh, the non-knowledge of our intelligence services, in which case there was a giant failure, uh, of us to know what was going on inside of our own borders, or most, almost certainly, uh, this was a product of some amount of the s- some portion of our covert operations group and maybe covert operations groups, uh, in other countries. Uh, obvious candidates are the UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, what have you. And, uh, whatever this is, you have this giant collision between people who are not supposed to take an interest in covert operations and people who do this kind of stuff for a living. There’s an entire giant legal infrastructure around the collision between an open society- And covert operations and shielding them. I mean, there’s something called, uh, uh, SSP, State Secrets Privilege, like attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege, where, to keep things out of the courts. There’s clandestine back channels where there are tacit agreements that the Department of Justice is supposed to hold off. There are national security letters that can get sent. You know, we have secret internet called JWICS and, uh, other things for communication. There, there’s a giant infrastructure of secrecy, and what you can see right here is almost certainly what you can, um… The, the collaboration of the press, and this is the thing that I’ve been highlighting. You have a hedge fund that almost certainly didn’t exist in the terms that it was claimed. When I met with him, he was supposedly running a multi-billion dollar FX hedge fund, foreign exchange hedge fund. That thing would have to leave a wake in the data. It would have to have filings. It would have to have employees. My recollection is, is that he told me that he only employed Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn to, uh, because they were the only ones trustworthy, um, to run such a, a secretive operation. My guess is that this was all nonsense, and there’s even a concept called dummy compliance, where you file forms, you know, you get things blessed by, uh, cooperative a- auditors, but there’s no way to fake a trail in the markets, and I think that this is the, the interesting thing. I can tell that this is a fake story because it sells papers, and no one wants to cover it. And when I say no one, it’s not the journalists. The journalists wanna cover it, and they always come to me and they say, “This is amazing. I’m gonna follow all this up.” And I tell you, and I s- I tell them, “Two weeks from now, you’re gonna have a really weird conversation with your editor, where they’re gonna tell you everyone’s moved on and no one cares, or there’s not enough to go on.” This is controlled at the editorial layer, not at the journalistic layer, and there’s something called negative contrast imaging, where if you have an environment in which you have a stealth object and everything else reflects, you can actually map the stealth object by trying to bounce things off of it and realizing that it’s the only thing that doesn’t bounce any signal back. So if lidar, sonar, radar, what have you. Basically, you can see the outline of an intelligence operation because at some level, you have the world’s juiciest story with no interest from editors and tremendous interest from journalists. So you can piece together exactly what this is more or less from negative imaging or silhouette imaging, if you will.
00:33:13
Piers Morgan: Do, do you believe that he was an Israeli agent of some sort?
00:33:21
Eric Weinstein: I, I, I don’t have any knowledge of that. The only thing that I’m, I’m confident of is that he was almost certainly doing this with the backing of a state and the, uh, cooperation of our own services because there’s no way he could operate inside of the US, uh, in this fashion. And, and th- this is clearly a joint project of us and potentially others.
00:33:48
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:33:48
Eric Weinstein: But it had to involve the FBI and CIA as a joint project.
00:33:54
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00:34:55
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:34:55
Piers Morgan: I met Ghislaine Maxwell briefly at a book launch once, and had no inkling of the stuff that was going on. But d- when you met him, was he, was he weird? Was he unusual, or was he just a good actor, was able to come across in a perfectly normal manner?
00:35:15
Eric Weinstein: Uh, if you’ve seen any of my interviews, uh, it was the one of the most bizarre interactions I’ve ever had.
00:35:20
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:35:21
Eric Weinstein: I will remember it, you know, for the rest of my life as being terrifying. Uh, this is not a… You, you, you didn’t sit down with him and think, “Wow, what a, what a great guy.”
00:35:32
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:35:32
Eric Weinstein: You, you thought, “Holy cow, this is, uh, the weirdest, um, doorway into e- an alternate reality.” And, you know, in particular, he was absolutely more interested in my science than he was in anything I was doing, uh, with hedge funds and risk management-
00:35:48
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:35:48
Eric Weinstein: … which is how nominally I came to be in his orbit. Uh, he was very connected, um, to a major, uh, you know, book agent. He was, uh, funding all sorts of scientists. He was obsessed by gravity. Uh, he knew things about my work that were essentially known to no one. He was very connected through, um, at least one Harvard mathematician, who I think became a dean of some kind at Harvard University. So he was connected to my graduate department. I never heard his name while I was there. Um, and I was not only there until 1992. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT, so in the same ecosystem for years after that. Then I came back to Harvard. He was, uh, a very strange object, and the connection between Ghislaine’s father, who really had an enormous impact on scientific publishing and had the ability to sort of-
00:36:46
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:36:46
Eric Weinstein: … look at all science before it’s published because of peer review, he ran Pergamon Press.
00:36:52
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:36:52
Eric Weinstein: Uh, there is no question that there is some transmission that is likely between Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press and Jeffrey Epstein’s science obsession, particularly with gravity.
00:37:03
Piers Morgan: Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. How, I mean, in terms of the, the alleged crimes that Epstein was accused of committing, how guilty do you think he was likely to have been? In other words, are we talking a small-time abuser, a gigantic serial abuser? What’s your gut feeling about that side of him?
00:37:32
Eric Weinstein: Um, my sense of it is, is that somebody lost control of an agent, and that this person, uh, they, you know, was supplied with an enormous, you know… Uh, backstories are typically called legends, I believe, in this-
00:37:44
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm
00:37:44
Eric Weinstein: … in, in tradecraft.
00:37:45
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:37:46
Eric Weinstein: So he was, he, he was a mythical creature who was supposedly so intelligent that, you know, he could, uh, discern, you know, the slightest tremor in the markets, et cetera, et cetera. He, he believed his own mythology, almost certainly. And, you know, my sense of it is that somebody lost control of a monster, and that the, the actor that they hired to play this was, uh, not, not well in the head. Now, that’s my gut feeling.
00:38:12
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:38:12
Eric Weinstein: The other thing that really concerns me is the, uh… People are bad at conspiracy theory.
00:38:18
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:38:18
Eric Weinstein: You know, we have a tremendous amount of background data on what conspiracy theories look like. There’s a precedent before Epstein called Craig Spence that we almost never hear about.
00:38:27
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:38:28
Eric Weinstein: Um, I don’t know if that’s something you know about, Piers, but, uh-
00:38:32
Piers Morgan: No.
00:38:33
Eric Weinstein: W- yeah, so th- th- this is not the first operation of its kind, and I think it’s very important to recognize that once somebody set this thing up at great expense… Imagine that this is a nine-figure fortune that was beaten into, you know, gold beaten into gold file to look, uh, gold foil to look like a 12-figure fortune or something remarkable. So he was acting rich in a way that even rich people don’t act rich.
00:38:56
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:38:56
Eric Weinstein: And he was acting smart in a way that smart people don’t act smart. So the whole thing was likely having a bunch of different activities funneled through it. So for example, he seemed to be giving tax advice that would also potentially entrap people in ways that the IRS could get them, potentially. That was something that he was giving, uh, away. He was also, um, my guess, is providing, uh, non-pedophile, uh, sexual opportunities with young women who were over the age of 18, because I think his real product was silence, and I think people don’t get that sex is readily available. Um, sex is always embarrassing, but I think the, the key issue is, is that Epstein was able to guarantee silence when no one else could guarantee silence, and that’s why people came to him. And I, you know, I also think that, um, there’s something about the way in which people have to agree to be compromised, in some sense, to enter the elite, because otherwise you’re not considered trustworthy.
00:39:55
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:39:55
Eric Weinstein: So you have to surrender something so that there’s a kill switch on you, and I think that he, in part, specialized in installing the kill switch.
00:40:03
Piers Morgan: How do you think he died? Do you think he did kill himself, or, uh, are you, at, at the very least, uh, you know, not oblivious to the theory that maybe it was more de feris, that somebody arranged it?
00:40:20
Eric Weinstein: Uh, w- why do you believe that he’s dead? Why do you believe that he killed himself? Why… I, uh, I certainly don’t think that he experienced shame the way normal people did, so I think the idea that he was so embarrassed that he took his own life is probably the only thing I feel I have anything to add. But, you know, let me just caution your, your listeners. All of this fun that people have with conspiracy theories is absolutely deadly when it comes to actually getting justice.
00:40:48
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:40:48
Eric Weinstein: And calling this pedophile island and Lolita Express, and talking about E- Epstein didn’t kill himself, is a joke. Li- like, any of you know? None of you know.
00:40:58
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm.
00:40:58
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, if you were serious about this and you, you… As a parent, just let me specialize to all the moms and dads out there. If you’re serious, as a parent, of wanting this sort of thing absolutely excised from our society, don’t go after the children, don’t go after the memes. Focus on one issue, one issue alone. Why will the press not report on the multi-billion dollar foreign currency hedge fund, which even if it has dummy compliance, I guarantee you any forensic accountant could determine whether this thing was real or fake. And my guess is, is that there are no former employees employed from the yeshivas of Brooklyn. This thing, I think, is a will-o’-the-wisp, it’s a figment of our imagination, and it’s a product of statecraft. And the fact that our, you know… We have very long-standing relationships with our major news organs, that they agree to have liaisons to the covert operations group so that we don’t constantly report. This is an issue called deconfliction. Many people don’t know that word. This is a situation which escaped our deconfliction systems, almost certainly, and it has the hallmark and the outline. The person you should have on, not me-
00:42:06
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:42:07
Eric Weinstein: … is the person who is an expert in all of the legal aspects of having a free society with covert operations group. In particular, there’s a case of something like El-Masri versus Tenet-
00:42:18
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:42:19
Eric Weinstein: … uh, which establishes that when somebody has a legitimate case in the courts and there’s state secret privilege, that person may not be entitled to exculpatory evidence and information, that state secrets trump justice. And I think it’s absolutely imperative that you have a lawyer on who’s competent to talk about this so this doesn’t enter into the realm of conspiracy theory. So I’m gonna decline to speculate.
00:42:41
Piers Morgan: Fascinating. Elon Musk, um, fell out spectacularly with Donald Trump, and, uh, posted on X, you know, bombshell, Trump’s in the Epstein files. I know you’re very close with, uh, Peter Thiel, Elon’s old boss. What, what do you make of what’s happened there?
00:43:05
Eric Weinstein: Um, you have, uh… How do I put this? It, it would appear that Elon is very disappointed that we are not radical enough to understand the threat to the country. He has a very clear idea about what has to be surmounted. He, I believe, then apologized for that-
00:43:25
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:43:26
Eric Weinstein: … which I found interesting.
00:43:27
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:43:28
Eric Weinstein: Much the way, you know, Amy Robach had the famous hot mic incident and then said, “Oh, that was nothing.” Something in these files, something in the situation causes people to reverse course, and I think that what you have to assume is, is that, um, the public will never, ever, ever let this go, and that there is some equal and opposite pressure which says that the elite will do every- absolutely anything to keep it, ah, secret. And by elite, I don’t mean people who are actually elite, I mean people who are in the ch- in the chairs that should be reserved for the elite, but have a lot to lose.
00:44:05
Piers Morgan: Let’s just, uh, pivot, uh, Eric, if we can, just to foreign policy. Um, you said of the 12-day war with Iran that the West still hasn’t fully understood the implications of what happened, and that it didn’t actually, uh, illuminate Iran’s apparent weakness. Um, you also, uh, said this about, uh… Well, I’m gonna play you what, what the clip was. This is Trump’s F word rant, and then get you to explain why you think the significance of that has been understated, too.
00:44:36
Donald Trump: You know what we have, we basically have two countries that have fi- been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Do you understand that? Do you have 200 [crowd noise] … fighters in Lebanon?
00:44:48
Piers Morgan: So first on that, Eric, wh- why do you think we’ve understated the significance of that moment?
00:44:56
Eric Weinstein: Uh, this goes back to my grandfather, who I never heard swear-
00:45:00
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:45:00
Eric Weinstein: … except for potentially once when a car might sideswipe me in Westwood, Los Angeles. And I said, “You know, Harry, y- you have a, a very strong sense that one should never use profanity.” And he turned to me and said, “I absolutely disagree with you.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “The reason I never swear is because when I need it, you will notice that I’m swearing.”
00:45:19
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:45:20
Eric Weinstein: “If I used it all the time, you’d never notice.” The fact is that Trump almost always appears in a suit with a tie, and he doesn’t usually use the F bomb.
00:45:30
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:45:30
Eric Weinstein: And he was trying to send a message, which is, “This is so dangerous. This involves China. This may involve Pakistan. This may involve India.” What is going on in the Middle East is the beginning of World War III, with Iran, I think, very carefully calibrating, uh, a message of violence, where the, the, the threat to Tel Aviv was calibrated. And my belief is, is that the amount of damage that could’ve been inflicted on Tel Aviv far exceeds what was. And that Iran is trying to speak violence, uh, as the most skilled, um, speaker of that language, with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin, and that unfortunately, people, uh, as a result of being relatively long at peace, people have forgotten what violence means as a language. And so when Iran origin- originally sent hypersonic missiles into the ground of Israel, uh, killing almost no one, many Israelis responded by saying, “Ah, you see how incompetent they are? They couldn’t kill any of us.” And the Iranians must’ve just been shaking their heads and saying, “My gosh, you, you guys have no idea. We, we’re sending you a message that Iron Dome doesn’t work, uh, fully for hypersonics.” I think what’s going on is, is that you’re looking at the beginning of, uh, of the end. This, you know, once those things are loaded with nuclear weapons, um, you are talking about a completely different world, and you just saw the beginnings of it. This is the, the slow roll into a d- new world where we watch hypersonic missiles slam into a populated metropolis.
00:47:08
Piers Morgan: I mean, that’s a terrifying prospect. I mean, is it really realistic that somebody would wanna be the first to do that?
00:47:20
Eric Weinstein: You know, I lived in Israel for two years, and, uh, Har means mountain, and there’s a place called Megiddo where there’s a mountain. And Har Megiddo is where we get the word Armageddon. So Armageddon is just a, a turnoff in Israel. Um, yeah, this, you’re, we’re on the clock. I mean, I, I… Look, I, I get tired of being the only one saying this.
00:47:41
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:47:41
Eric Weinstein: But, uh, there is no fourth turning principle after 1952 when, when we have thermonuclear weapons. So the way it goes is, uh, hard times make strong men. Strong men, uh, make good times and nuclear weapons. Uh, good times make weak men. Weak men and nuclear weapons make end times, and that’s the end of it. And so we’ve been in this stasis for a really long time, and, you know, the world has never, uh, civilization’s never ended due to thermonuclear warfare, so it’s in no one’s data set. So everyone who’s data-driven says, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry so much about it,” because they’re just not getting it.
00:48:19
Piers Morgan: Let’s just talk about Israel briefly, uh, Eric. Obviously, the war with Hamas continues. The scenes in Gaza are, are appalling. Um, you know, a lot of people say to me, Jewish people, friends of mine, say there was a really disturbing escalation in anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of October the 7th. It really kind of lifted a scab off anti-Semitism, and I remember it in my high street in London, where the next day, thousands of people gathered, I thought to… outside the Israeli embassy, to, I thought, support Israelis, but in fact, they were there to cheer and celebrate what had happened. It was the most disgusting thing to, to witness. But there’s also, I think, a real danger that the Israeli government’s, uh, conduct in the last few months in Gaza will increase the danger of, of rising anti-Semitism against Jewish people. Because most- … moderate-minded people looking at it think this is now completely disproportionate what is going on. There’s no apparent end game. They’re listening to people like the Finance Minister Smotrich talking openly about cleansing Gaza of all Palestinians. And, uh, most people are coming around to the conclusion that this, this is just unacceptable what is happening, and that the danger is it makes people hate Israel, and therefore increases antisemitism. You’re, you’re Jewish. What do you feel about that?
00:49:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, um, first of all, as a strong Israel supporter, uh, I’ve been upset with Netanyahu from the beginning for not understanding that he’s doing Sinwar’s bidding.
00:49:59
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:49:59
Eric Weinstein: So in some sense, I see Sinwar from the grave commanding Israel, saying, um, “We think we can trick you into attacking our hospitals, our mosques, our people.”
00:50:10
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:50:10
Eric Weinstein: And that, uh, Israel, not knowing how to, uh, counter hybrid warfare is, uh, trying to go after this in a kinetic fashion. And when Palestinian Arabs say, “We love death more than you love life,” my, my feeling is nobody takes them seriously. I do.
00:50:27
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:50:27
Eric Weinstein: Uh, that said, you know, the issue is that, um, this is largely a, an issue of, um, who you, who you ascribe this to. My feeling is Sinwar was trying to generate video using the deaths of his own people, and he was willing to give his own life and the life of his family. It’s a calculus that most, I don’t know, Americans and, and people in the UK just can’t understand, uh, that you would actually think that it’s a huge win in which everyone you, you care about perishes. Uh, but the calculus in the Middle East is totally different. So in a certain sense, you know, my feeling about this is that right after October 7th, I said, “This is, uh, suicide by IDF.”
00:51:10
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:51:11
Eric Weinstein: And IDF is dutifully playing that role. So I think you’re just wrong, and I don’t mean to be harsh about it.
00:51:17
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:51:17
Eric Weinstein: But I think you, uh, to your credit, are, are gut-wrenched by the, the disgusting visual images of, uh, you know, just destruction and, and, and death and, uh, severed limbs, everything. The issue is that those accrue to Hamas, and what I’m upset with is is that Netanyahu is not smarter, uh, in recognizing that he had to do different things. I, my feeling was that Israel needed to establish a calculus where every life was avenged with a change in the borders, um, in which land, uh, which is far more important to many of the, uh, the terrorists in Gaza, uh, w- was annexed day by day until the hostages were released.
00:52:04
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:52:04
Eric Weinstein: And that would’ve been far more effective. And the other thing that, you know, it’s just very interesting is that, uh, Western Europe, uh, has taken a phrase I think originally came from the Romanian language, it’s very recent in ori- origin, called ethnic cleansing.
00:52:18
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:52:19
Eric Weinstein: Uh, particularly if you look in Google Ngrams, it spiked during, uh, the Balkan Wars. And, you know, it used to be that we understood that sometimes you have to move people who cannot live in peace. So this is why the Sudeten Germans, for example, were moved in Europe, uh, so that we didn’t get into another European world war, um, after the Potsdam agreements. So in part, what we have is we have a world that thinks in very simplistic concepts, forcing a two-state solution down the throats of Palestinian Arabs, who are unequivocal that this is just not something that they’re interested in. And the, when they’re chanting, “From the river to the sea,” the idea is we’re not listening to the will, uh, of the Palestinian Arabs. And it is very clear that many of them have no idea, uh, a two-state solution, uh, is absolutely, uh, anathema and far less desirable than death and destruction. So partially the problem is is that the Western mind has to upgrade for things that it has never considered, a calculus that is far different than when people are willing to give their lives. Um, people believe in something beyond the ordinary calculus of incentives. And, you know, as a friend of mine who, uh, watched the end of the troubles i- uh, in Ireland said, “There’s, comes a moment when you stop, um, making wall murals and singing songs to those killed, that people who are focused on the life beyond, uh, where their legend lives forever, uh, are motivated by very different things.” So I just, uh, uh, with all due respect, sir, my feeling is is that the best of your nature causes you to be gut-wrenched. I absolutely agree with you that Netanyahu’s doing the wrong thing. But ultimately, this bill, uh, is, I don’t send to Israel. I sel- I send it to the genius that is Sinwar.
00:54:12
Piers Morgan: Let’s just end, Eric… And that was fascinating answer, by the way. Um, you said this, we seem to live in the age of conspiracy, but you said this: “We have too much information. Th- this is the problem. We’re deranging ourselves, and we’re completely undoing all the superstructure of the world.” I, I feel that. Like, you talk about the Israel Hamas war, talk about Ukraine, you talk about all these things. The constant overload of incredibly depressing, haunting imagery on our phones that people are consuming on a minute-by-minute basis was never available when I was young. You just, you had no access to stuff like this. You had a sanitized version of the news in newspapers, and you had certainly a sanitized version on television. There was no other way, short of actually being there, to see real horror. And yet every minute I look at my phone, there’s some new horror that is flashing in front of me. And if you’re a young, impressionable mind, it must be so damaging. You know, as Jonathan Haidt’s book, um, a- about the, the sort of anxiety epidemic in the world. God, it’s so right. Since phones turned smart, yes, they brought lots of smart things, but they also brought access to so much damaging imagery. I- is that kind of what you were getting at with that quote?
00:55:36
Eric Weinstein: It’s a, it’s an interesting point. Uh, you and I, I believe, are almost exactly the same age. And, um, I grew up in a world in which the imagery came right through the evening news.
00:55:48
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:55:48
Eric Weinstein: The Vietnam reporting was unlike anything that Americans had ever seen.
00:55:52
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:55:52
Eric Weinstein: If you think about all the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, uh, from that era, a monk on fire, a street execution, children, uh, naked in the street from napalm, et cetera. We were a much tougher people, Piers.
00:56:08
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:56:08
Eric Weinstein: And that seems to have been lost. The other thing that was present when we were young was a world of adults-
00:56:15
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:56:15
Eric Weinstein: … people who had been hardened in World War II, people who understood the stakes of the Cold War, and there’s something about the trivialization of war. I can tell you that one of the things that really bothered me is that I was in touch… I had just been in Tel Aviv, and when I was talking to people in Tel Aviv, they could not actually c- uh, synthesize a particular, I don’t know, seriousness of purpose.
00:56:39
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:56:39
Eric Weinstein: They were on the beaches during the day, in the shelters during the night. Um, they couldn’t figure out that this was, in some sense, on the clock.
00:56:49
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:56:49
Eric Weinstein: They were having these hypersonic missiles slam into their city, and they were also continuing life as if it wasn’t happening.
00:56:57
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:56:57
Eric Weinstein: The phone appears to be a different object than we understood it. What it does is it not only gives us information, but it gives our lives a fictional video game feel, and at some level, we, we aren’t taking seriously the gravity of the situation. Even if we are living through it, we’re simultaneously watching it out our window and on our phone, and somehow our brain is prioritizing, “Oh my God, this will make a great Instagram story.”
00:57:25
Piers Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. You’re spot on. Eric, uh, I could talk to you for hours. Sadly, we’ve run out of time. Brilliant to have you back on Uncensored. Thank you very much. [upbeat music] Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate, and entertain, and we’ll do it all for free. Independent uncensored media has never been more critical, and we couldn’t do it without you. [upbeat music]
