Eric Weinstein joins Ariel Whitman to explain why Western sympathy for Israel after October 7th evaporated almost instantly — and how revolutionary movements, media strategies, and historical forces helped turn global opinion against Israel faster than ever before.
In this deep conversation, Eric explores how modern hybrid warfare isn’t just fought with weapons, but with perception, emotions, and shame. He warns that Israel’s success made it vulnerable, that the revolutionary left understands this war better than many governments, and that the death of civilians has become a media weapon in ways the world refuses to admit.
Topics discussed:
• How the West abandoned Israel
• Hybrid warfare and perception management
• Hamas’ true strategy after October 7th
• The revolutionary left’s alignment with terror
• The collapse of moral clarity in the West
Transcript
00:00:00
Ariel Whitman: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Western Spirit. Today we have a very special guest, Eric Weinstein. I don’t even need to introduce you because everyone probably knows who you are. So I’m just gonna start by saying, Eric, it’s great honor to have you with us and, uh, I know you were just here. We couldn’t make it with you when you were here, so it’s from far it’s the same. So thank you for being with us today.
00:00:21
Eric Weinstein: I’ll come back. Thanks for having me.
00:00:23
Ariel Whitman: [chuckles] So Eric, um, I just wanted to, before we get into all the stuff that I prepared, I asked you if you can say a little bit about how you felt. There’s been a big uproar after the Joe Rogan episode with Douglas Murray and Dave Smith. Uh, you know, everyone has their own views, and you said they’re both your friends, so give us a little bit how you felt about the episode itself and about the reaction after.
00:00:49
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t love it. Um…
00:00:51
Ariel Whitman: [laughs]
00:00:52
Eric Weinstein: It’s just me. Look, I think it was an awkward episode. My guess is that there’s a backstory, which is, um, that Douglas was promoting a book. The book was about Israel. Joe has, uh, a set of feelings that-
00:01:07
Ariel Whitman: Mm-hmm
00:01:07
Eric Weinstein: … uh, are shared with, uh, other people in his world, particularly my guess is that Dave Chappelle is influential. Uh, and Joe is probably influential on Dave Chappelle. Uh, and he said, you know, that he believes that Israel is engaged in barbarism, so he has that lens and that view, you know. And my, my view is that, uh, Israel, as many people have heard, is engaged in a monk house and by proxy, uh, scenario with, uh, the dead Sinwar. So that’s not my view. But my guess is that he didn’t want to have Douglas promoting Douglas’ book about Israel. And as a result, um, he said, “Look, I’m not equipped to handle this. I wanna bring in somebody who I view as an expert.” He chose Dave Smith. Um, and that put Douglas in an uncomfortable spot where he had to begin, uh, as I see it, finding a frame. Does he accept that this is a debate? Uh, in which case maybe it’s two on one because he doesn’t feel that the, the referee is neutral. Uh, is it a discussion? It– can the backstory be told? I don’t even know whether it is the right backstory or was told to Douglas. So the whole thing was a, was a mess at the beginning. And my feeling is that then the result of that is that we’re all discussing, um, effectively bad positions taken with inadequate knowledge, you know?
00:02:38
Ariel Whitman: Yeah.
00:02:38
Eric Weinstein: Is Douglas Murray, uh, you know, saying that he is an expert and that no one else, uh, you know, can debate him if they’re not similarly the expert? I didn’t even hear it that way. I heard it as Douglas wasn’t necessarily saying he was an expert. He was saying, “You should really have a, a scholar who has studied the history of all of this, who’s responsible for the totality of documents.” You know, the, the old sort of notion of scholarship.
00:03:03
Ariel Whitman: Mm-hmm.
00:03:03
Eric Weinstein: And I think that we’re– what we’re doing is we’re working this out in real time, where nobody quite knows what, um, what an expert is or what constitutes intelligent opinion, or what does it mean. Like, you know, in a certain sense, I don’t really feel like I have a position on l- all sorts of things in Israel because I’ve, I’ve been gone for 30 years. It would be very strange in a place where things matter, you know, matter minute by minute, week by week, uh, if somebody, you know, coming back was in any position to say, “Oh, well, let me tell you about Israeli society.” And so in a certain sense, um, I just think that everyone around is digging themselves farther and farther in, beginning in a bad place that wasn’t properly set up. That’s it.
00:03:48
Ariel Whitman: Yeah. Um, so you were here not too long ago, which is, uh, how I got to you, and you, you had a few events. You met people here. Can you give us– You– Like you said, you were 30 years you weren’t here, you came here for a few days. What is the… D- did you see a big change from when you were here last time? How do you, how do you, uh, see the time that went by?
00:04:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, uh, yeah, I did see. Look, it, it, you know, it’s, it’s of course funny, um, to, to be commenting on this, but I can give it a shot as long as people realize that there’s a lot of epistemic humility here, since I don’t really have enough time logged in, uh, modern Israel. I think the first thing that I see is that Israel’s balance between its, um, intellectual class, its, uh, political class, its military class, and its business class is wildly out of balance towards business. And I’m very concerned that the pride of Tel Aviv, which is all of these tech companies and startups and things, is hollowing out the talent that’s needed for diplomacy, strategy, um, inventing things that are not right around the corner. And I don’t know what to do about that. It’s the same thing here, where effectively we don’t a- Income inequality is starting to have effects that we’d never imagined, which is the unbalancing of the, the cognitive portfolios of nations. And I think that that’s really a very serious challenge for Israel, that it’s got to have better people in its military if it doesn’t wanna be surprised again. Um, it’s gotta have better people in its, uh, long range strategic planning group within government if it wants to be secure in its region. I just don’t see how you can have everyone go into tech. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
00:05:56
Ariel Whitman: And everyone wants to go into tech here, so they even go to the army in order to learn how to go into tech. [laughs]
00:06:03
Eric Weinstein: It’s enough already. I mean, it, it, at some level you have to realize that the market is not going to be able to see your long-term survival. There are, there are unpriced externalities, there are market failures, and Israel cannot afford the delusion that it is a market first and a country second.
00:06:28
Ariel Whitman: So one of the things that I, looking here from, uh, to, into the United States, and I was there a few times, is that when October 7th happened, we thought, at least I thought that, you know, people would see what’s happening and would be so sympathetic to Israel and would understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and be so nice to us. And then my dad lives in New York, and a day later you have in Times Square people, I think maybe even the same day, is protesting for, against Israel. I’m not– I don’t know, for Hamas, against Is- some of them for Hamas at least. And so how do you explain… So it wasn’t even– Israel didn’t even respond yet, and it already started. H-how are we s- like how did you look at, how do you look at all this?
00:07:14
Eric Weinstein: You never met revolutionaries before? Somehow we have, uh, a revolutionary left that got respectable and it got in-in-intertwined with the Democratic Party. Um, just the way you’ve got sort of a, you know, a Nazi adjacent right that is not yet thrown out of the Republican MAGA tent. So you have the normalization of very far out views that are pretty well organized and funded. And, you know, the, the thing that I really don’t like saying to Israelis is you got outsmarted. You know, your cousins are, are no joke, and you cannot, uh, take pride in your intellect and allow yourself to be bested by the likes of Sinwar. And I hate to say it, but I cannot stand… It’s one thing to be dealt such an incredibly brutal blow. It’s another thing to set yourself up for the same thing in perpetuity because you just can’t grant enough, um, strategic intellectual. Um, you, you know, there’s this moment where you have to say kol hakavod to people that you don’t– people that you detest, [chuckles] you know? Where you realize that they pulled off something, and Nasrallah has done such things, you know, and Sinwar has done such things. And so my feeling about it is, um, one thing that they understood better than you did was that a lot of people are just excited about the death of Jews, and that finally somebody had the guts to do it. Um, and so a lot of the stuff about, you know, queers for Hamas confu- well, no, it confuses people. It’s like, “Don’t you understand that if you were in Gaza City, you’d be strung up or, uh, thrown off of a building?” And the answer is no, they’re not confused at that level. They’ve agreed to walk the first few steps towards the revolution together. They know they’re going to part company. But the key point was Hamas was the first group of people, from their perspective, who finally had the courage to do what needed to be done, who got the paragliders together, made sure that they videotaped it, and sent it, uh, as a poison love letter to Israel saying, “You’re gonna have no choice but to come after your hostages in our tunnels, and our tunnels are now crosshairs.” And each, each tunnel is a qu- you’re still working on human [chuckles] shields, imagining the hospital’s supposed to stop you from going after the tunnel. No, no, no. The tunnel’s there to make sure that you have to hit the hospital. And once you hit the hospital, you’re gonna find out what hybrid war is, and hybrid warfare is gonna h- be on TikTok, and it’s gonna be on Instagram. And you’re still thinking, “Hey, do you, you don’t realize we have these precision munitions, and do you realize how much, uh, collateral damage we minimized?” And they’re thinking, “Oh, you have no idea how this looks in 4K.”
00:10:14
Ariel Whitman: [chuckles] Yes, it’s true. And o- one of the things that I saw that you wrote was, [clears throat] we’ve been speaking a lot about the changing media, like what you said. That Israel, it– I think, I don’t– most people before the war, they didn’t even understand what they were trying to do. I think, what, a few days after the war started, you wrote about the Munchausen. I’m not– I don’t even know what the… You see how bad I am? I don’t even know the exact phrase. But you, you basically said what is happening now. You understood in a way, I think a lot– people– you instinctively understood, I think from your tweet, that they were u- this was part of their plan to use all these deaths in Gaza to beat Israel at its own game, right?
00:10:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I mean, because otherwise it’s nonsensical. And so you see all these other people saying, “Don’t they realize that they’ve [chuckles] signed their own death warrant?” I’m thinking, you know, I remember the region that pe-people commit suicide as a resource. Uh, and, um, you know, it’s very interesting when, when somebody, uh, in Gaza says, uh, “We will win because we love death more than you love life.” I listen to Americans and they say, “No, nobody really means that.” And I’m just thinking, “Oh, you haven’t met them. They’ll explain it to you o-o-over, over tea.” And, and they’ll be as rational as, as can be. They’ll explain the whole thing. And I don’t think– I think it just breaks the Western mind to realize that, um, we, we have sort of everything wrong in a weird way. And as a result of that, we’re trapped in these ideas. For example, uh, if you go to Google Ngrams, I think it’s fascinating to look up, um- Both the phrase the Palestinian people, which doesn’t seem to occur before January of ’64 when the first Arab Summit is held, because it’s anathema to pan-Arabism. And the idea that the Arab people are a people is very important because if no people would do this. You see, if there were a, the Palestinian people, you couldn’t afford to do what’s being done in Gaza. This is a flake and a flavor of Arab. You know, this is very much a regional Arab group with deep ties to the region. I don’t claim that they don’t have claims on the land. They do, and they, they have ties to the region. That’s absolutely clear. But it’s, you know, there’s no such thing as I’ve pointed out as the Mizrahi people and the Satmar people, you know. And, and the idea is that you could flake off every form of, uh, you know, the Lit, the Litvak people, uh, and it would not be a serious strain of thought. And in part, the reason that the sacrifice play actually works is because it isn’t… You know, the Arab people would never commit suicide, but a particular group can be induced to commit suicide. And I think that that’s what’s terrifying about it, and it’s also diabolical. So as, you know, as much as I will praise the genius of the, of the implacable enemy, um, I, I’m not gonna lie that part of that genius is going to such depravity that no one will follow you because no one can imagine that you would sign your own child or wife, uh, up for a horrific death because that’s the, that’s what looks great on video.
00:13:59
Ariel Whitman: Eric, one thing that I saw that you said of, and maybe you can just expound on it a little bit, is the fact that the America at least has been so… The, the reality that’s shown to Americans is very sanitized. So you said that during, when you were a child, during the Vietnam War, your parent, your father, I think you said, shut off the TV when he show, they showed American soldiers… I forgot what you said. It’s like stake, severed heads. Uh, and today we refuse to show Americans, you said like basically anything, even from the Twin Towers, there was things that Europeans saw and Americans didn’t see. Um, how does that play into the way young people, you think in America, they see all these suddenly bodies in Gaza, something they never even thought of? Does that… And then they get scared. They don’t realize that that’s war.
00:14:51
Eric Weinstein: It’s not just that. Um, I don’t think that a lot of Israelis have the stomach for this anymore, to be entirely honest. And what did Israel do with its, uh, film of October 7th, which it only show… I’ve never seen this film, you know. And so in part, Israel is complicit in sanitizing this. And so you have all of these… Uh, my understanding is, is that the video shot by Hamas in Israel on October 7th clears up many of the claims of, “Well, that never happened. That’s a lie.” And so the, “Okay, well, you didn’t show it in any way, shape, or form, and now people are calling you liars for the video footage you withheld.” I- we, we can’t afford this level of weakness. I mean, in some sense, if you’re going to order the veal or the lamb, you should probably step into the abattoir once every five years to remind yourself of what you’re actually ordering. And, you know, if you don’t want to defend your people in this region against these tactics, you can never let this happen. I mean, once the hostages are in the tunnels, you’ve lost in a big way. Now, would I prefer that Israel do something absolutely brilliant with a lidar system that I’ve never heard of? Would I prefer that it gathered the smartest people to say, “We need crazier ideas because this is how we live miracle to miracle”? I mean, we are a miracle-driven people. I hate to say it, but the state of Israel is a miracle, and Tebby was a miracle. All sorts of things have been miraculous, and miracle-based people fail a lot. A lot of times when we try to do something ingenious, it doesn’t really work. Um, so my feeling about this is I don’t know what Israel is doing. It certainly, it didn’t gather th-the people in my sectors. It didn’t ask for help. It didn’t think about, how is this going to play in the West? I could have told it about 70 to 75% of what was coming, um, having talked about anti-Semitism before it was cool. I mean, things are really bad out there, and my feeling about this is Israel had one moment above all others which it should focus on, which is the spectacle of Arabs and Druze passing out sweets to celebrate the death of Nasrallah. And my feeling is, is that that told every American lefty who claimed that somehow Israel was a regional, uh, occupier sent from Europe or who knows what, “Oh, no, this is a fluid region you don’t understand whatsoever.” And an alliance today is enemies tomorrow, and there’s a calculus of fear and what you expect somebody to do in retaliation. I mean, I’ve, I have Muslim friends who say, “I can’t believe Israel isn’t retaliating more.” Uh, that weakness will cost them
00:18:12
Ariel Whitman: Yeah. [coughs] Um, I wanna switch to something else. Uh, it’s not really something else. It does have something to do. I saw that you wrote this week or last week, I’m getting confused with weeks, but you said that, um, X/Twitter has become unbelievably anti s- the, the– if it’s bots, if it’s people that any Jew who’s on X, I notice it. Anyone who’s looking for it sees it. Just any J- any– maybe what’s happening there?
00:18:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, you’ve got a situation in which people are confused about how free speech ever worked. The first thing is it doesn’t work with anonymous people. You cannot have tons of people be anonymous and then feel free to shout whatever the heck they like at all times in restaurants, on the street. You wouldn’t be able to live your life if that’s– if, if, if, uh, X or Twitter, whatever you wanna call it, uh, had these rules. Um, also super important that, um, culture be used to restrain bad… And by sa- when I say bad, I don’t mean like, uh, ill-informed. I mean like really dangerous ideas. Uh, because really dangerous ideas can be fit. So this whole concept of the marketplace of ideas doesn’t actually work because marketplaces have market failures, and very fit, dangerous ideas can’t be simply rebutted by better ideas. This is, uh, some, I don’t know, liberal fantasy. Uh, what you need is you need culture to use shunning judiciously. And what happened with the woke is, is that they created cancellation, which was frivolous shunning. And when frivolous shunning was created, I just thought, okay, do you have any idea 10 years from now what hell you will create? Because what you will do is you will lose the ability to load the restraint of dangerous ideas onto culture, and then you’re gonna have to start thinking about law. And every American who’s worth his or her salt, uh, has a very special place in their heart for the First Amendment. We don’t want to make rules about what people can say and not say. And so it’s, it’s super important to make sure that culture, uh, retards our worst, our worst impulses. And failing that, um, y- I think you’re seeing a new movement, which is let’s use the fact that the Democratic National Committee wasted shunning on cancel culture, and the fact that we have free speech to finally deal with this problem that we’re all controlled by the Jews. And you find this everywhere on Twitter, and I quite honestly find it bizarre that so many people feel that their entire lives are controlled by the Jews. I mean-
00:21:30
Ariel Whitman: We’re so powerful, it’s unbelievable. [laughs]
00:21:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, we’re not powerless.
00:21:35
Ariel Whitman: Yeah, well-
00:21:36
Eric Weinstein: It’s not true that we don’t have any influence. It’s not-
00:21:38
Ariel Whitman: Right
00:21:38
Eric Weinstein: … not true that we don’t have any success. It’s not true that Israel doesn’t have a powerful military. So I wanna, I wanna push back and say, look, it’s not the case that Jews have no influence. But a lot of that is just like, “Hey, we wanna survive.” You have no idea how much Jewish energy is put into the question of how do we not-
00:22:03
Ariel Whitman: Yes
00:22:03
Eric Weinstein: … get killed. And y- y- you know, when you say, “Wow, you’re trying to control speech.” Mm, not much. We– It’s just really important that we don’t tar and feather and string people up and, you know, have pogroms and, and, and whatnot. And you, you know, you saw from October 7th, i- if you can do that to kids at a music festival and people will say, you know, “Too bad, but boy, the resistance is strong [chuckles] in Gaza,” of course, we’re gonna wanna con- con-control that because that’s, I mean, that’s pathological madness. It’s just as bad as it gets.
00:22:42
Ariel Whitman: Yeah. So [coughs] is there any– Like, what would you… If you were Elon Musk or someone who controls these types of things, ’cause until then, until he bought Twitter, X, they would shut up anyone who had even a mild conservative opinion a lot of times, and now it’s totally open. So is there– What would– How– What– Like, where is the balance?
00:23:04
Eric Weinstein: I– This I don’t understand. I, I, I gotta be honest. You’ve got an, you’ve got an AI product, right? And you have a, a theory which he’s stated, which is that you’re entitled to speech but not reach. Why can’t I set the Grok AI product to recognize people who have the word groiper all over their profile, that have 1488 as their favorite number, that constantly talk about noticing, that repeat the phrase every single time with periods? I mean, this is not an AI level question. This is a regular expression level question. I could probably write a, a Python script to do 90% of the heavy lifting. The fact is, is that nobody has decided to put the power of Grok and AI in the hands, um, of people to say, “Look, this is super dangerous. We can use community notes. We can use, um, AI. We can use patterns of speech.” And I don’t need to wade through this. Why, why do I need to, to, um, if I’m checking replies to see if there’s anything I should be engaging, why do I have to, to, you know, wade past a frog standing next to an open oven saying, “Let’s finish the job from Groyper1488”? Is, is this Qatar? Is this some kid in a basement in Omaha or Almaty? I, I have no idea, but I don’t need to see it.
00:24:50
Ariel Whitman: Right. Yeah. Um, okay. Turning now to business because we’re a business paper. So, uh, and we’re doing this for, um, uh, our Independence Day, uh, edition, and we’re getting towards the Day of Remembrance. I wanna talk about the– is you were here, you met also with a lot of people in business in Israel. You talked about Tel Aviv and the fact that they’re taking all of our, um, I guess, bright minds from places where they might be needed. [chuckles] No, well, yeah. Most– How would you, uh, characterize just on an impressionable level, obviously you’re probably not studying the Israeli economy every day, but what do you think about the Israeli economy from what you saw here?
00:25:34
Eric Weinstein: Y- you know, my feeling about this is, um, I love the fact that the startup, uh, world has kept alive that cowboy pioneering spirit that we saw in the US and that we saw in the generation of ’48, uh, in Israel. And so in part, uh, irreverent, super smart, badly behaved, um, geniuses who are creating new ideas and trying new things is amazing. ‘Cause in a small country with very r- little room for error, it’s incredible how much tolerance there is for failure. And I think that that’s absolutely astounding to me, that, um, in a country where there’s no room for error, there’s tremendous room to fail. Who knew? Uh, it’s a miracle. Um, so that really impressed itself upon me. I think that, um, you know, it was very interesting, we were staying right next to Carmel Market. I never spent that much time in Tel Aviv when I was living in Israel. I’d spend one or two nights at a time maximum. And when I went to the northern suburbs where things are very chichi, uh, you know, as opposed to gritty and hippie, uh, it’s interesting to, to just sort of see the extent to which some people are catching the tech wave, and I’m gonna see– I’m gonna say you’re gonna see tremendous, uh, inequality in a country that has socialism sort of in its founding DNA. Um, it sort of reminds me a little bit of some of the things that China has struggled with, which is, um, there’s a socialist substrate and then a need to harness the power of capitalism and outsize returns for those willing to take risks with the skill to manage it. Um, so I guess I found, I found it surprisingly dynamic, very bizarrely fault– you know, failure tolerant. Um, the in- inequality was very pronounced between the yuppies and the hippies. Um, but I think that people are still in an October 7th haze, which has worn off in part where there was a sense of, okay, whatever our differences that were on October 6th, on October 8th, we can’t afford them. My guess is that October 6th is coming back as people are just not able to continue to hold on to that kind of what the Arabs would call asabiyya, that kind of social cohesion.
00:28:14
Ariel Whitman: Also, what do you think about, like, one of the things that after October 7th, uh, people in high tech, a lot of them went to reserves, and then a lot of the companies here, people that worked for companies internationally, um, were concerned that maybe they won’t be able to work for them. But then they came back and be- in between sirens, they’re running back in and forth to go back to work. They’re taking the laptops to the safe room. Is that something that maybe you as, for example, an investor, when you look at these types of people that are able to work under such weird conditions, let’s just put it that way, where you’re working for an hour, a siren goes off, you take the laptop to the safe room, you continue working, go back to your place. Is that something that maybe actually you think could help people be in– better in business?
00:29:02
Eric Weinstein: I mean, it’s like, uh… It’s very funny because startup people analogize, uh, founding a s- a startup. It’s like every day is a new battle, like, you know, figurative battle. And, uh, having been at a conference where we got herded into a, uh, a shelter, um, you know, people didn’t stop talking about blockchains. They, you know, they don’t miss a beat. Uh, or y- you know, a friend of mine’s daughter, um, uh, decided to leave the US and serve in the IDF, and while we were meeting her for tea, we were, uh, ushered into a shelter. And, you know, it’s just like it, it took me a while to really realize that we always talk about the death cult surrounding Israel. But Israel is also guilty of being the world’s most pathological life cult. It is so alive that even, even the shelters and the bombs and the missiles don’t stop people from, uh, business, from laughing, from high energy. And my feeling about this is this is the pressure cooker that everybody wants people to be aware of in startups. I mean, it’s, it’s also a startup country. It’s not just the nation of startups. Israel is itself, uh, in its modern incarnation, a startup. And quite honestly, I think you need more of that. I, I think you popped the cork a little prematurely before this, and, uh, we’re back to remind– re-remembering where you guys actually are. But yeah, it’s super inspiring.
00:30:41
Ariel Whitman: Okay. I wanted to ask you also about, um, Peter Thiel. So he’s someone who we all read about, we all wanna know about him. He seems an amazing person just in the dec- business decisions even that he’s made over the years. Can you give us a little bit about behind the scenes about your relationship with him, how it is to work for someone like that, and what… Just give us a little-
00:31:07
Eric Weinstein: No. [chuckles] No, no, no. Well, let me, let… Yeah, let me say what I can s- Let me… Yeah, yeah. L- Well, look, P-Peter is, um, somebody I’ve worked with, uh, one of my closest friends, one of the most brilliant people that I get the chance to, to, to talk through ideas with. My feeling about this is you should just become nudniks and get him over to Israel more often because it’s not that hard. Just tell him what you wanna talk about and make sure that it’s worth his while, that people are, are thinking in different ways. Because quite honestly, I’ll, I’ll tell you something that’s really important to know about the, the best of our billionaire class, because I didn’t know any of these guys 15 years ago. Um, they’re starved for great ideas. On-once you’ve bought the planes and the toys and the homes and the vacations and all that kind of stuff, um, if you’re really smart, y-you use your resources to try to find new ideas, and you try to turn new ideas into money to find more new ideas, but you’re addicted to ideas. And my feeling about this is that Israel has so much to offer the Peter Thiels of this world. You should just become nudniks and let them know that you hang on the specificity of their, of their words and their thoughts. And, and this is just something I will say to– I can always tell whether somebody is looking at Peter’s wallet rather than talking to me or listening to his ideas, and that’s not gonna work. Uh, first of all, they’re richer people than Peter, so, you know, if you, if you’re gonna go for the big, uh, the big pots, go for somebody with hundreds of billions. I don’t know. My feeling is if you wanna talk to Peter Thiel, you’re want– you’re trying to talk to one of the smartest people on Earth, and he says all sorts of stuff that no one picks up on. For example, that whole book, “Zero to One,” the, the central idea in it is don’t start a business if you don’t have a secret. And then he gives one example of a secret, and he says, “You can’t major in nutrition at Harvard.” And he’s like, “That’s obviously stupid.” Nutrition is basically health. And in a certain sense, um, the idea that we think of nutrition the wrong way, he’s giving you, in that book, you know, one idea, which is, here’s a secret that most people haven’t thought about. Now, most people didn’t understand what that meant. They didn’t seize on it. They didn’t focus on it. They just wanted to ask him, “What are three books that changed your life?” Or, “What was it like founding PayPal and working with such talented people?” You know, it’s the same stupid questions over and over again. So my feeling is, is that Israel can attract all of the best minds by just paying attention to what people say and picking up on the nuances.
00:34:11
Ariel Whitman: Mm-hmm. Um, so first of all, thank you ’cause I know you didn’t want to talk about that, so that was nice. Uh [chuckles]
00:34:17
Eric Weinstein: What did you think of the deflection? Not bad.
00:34:19
Ariel Whitman: Yes. You’re good at it. Um, [chuckles] I wanted to ask you about the economy. So we– President Trump has, before he paused his tariff plan, put a 20-something percent tariff on Israel, even though the numbers on his chart seem to be very weird and wrong. They were based on, I think, the– It wasn’t the amount of tariffs that we had, uh, or other countries had on the US, but the trade imbalance, so they made this weird concoction of… I don’t know. I don’t even understand it. Like it– But the point is that they wanted to put an extra tariffs above the 10% on Israel, and then he paused it for 90 days. So just as someone who lives in the US and maybe knows Pres-President Trump and his circle, how would you… His circle, I guess, more than him himself. What do you th- do you think the 90 days is really meant for, um, negotiations? Will we see the tariffs come back on most of the countries if there is no deals in 90 days? It’s very difficult to have deals with everyone in 90 days. So should be we be ready for the tariffs to c- to actually be implemented?
00:35:32
Eric Weinstein: You know, look, first of all, um, you have me in an awkward situation, which is that, um, I’m an American, and even though I’m highly skeptical of what [chuckles] President Trump is doing with tariffs, uh, I am on Team USA, and so I am loathe to undercut the Oval Office. That said, let’s say some things that should be generally obvious. One, Trump benefits in his own mind from causing chaos. Why is that? Because he’s the only one who knows how he is going to resolve the chaos. And so when you’re the big dog, y-if you create a steady stream of chaos which only you know how it’s going to resolve, you constantly have one Edge over everyone else. Now the problem is, is that you’re gonna piss off all of your friends. You’re gonna piss off everyone who depends on stability. And so while you are, you know, doing unprecedented things every four seconds causing the world to talk about you and which side of the bed you got up on and whether or not you liked your tea or if it was too weak or too strong, there’s a lot of negative externality with this strategy. I would assume that Trump is constantly negotiating and that he is constantly negotiating because he has a credible threat that he will do something so crazy that the rest of you will not be able to anticipate it correctly or handle it. And a lot of it is, you know, uh, I can stay, I can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. So, you know, my feeling about it is obviously a lot of this has to do with quiet issues that aren’t talked about much. And one of them is that there was an idea that we could have permanent thermonuclear peace through interdependence. And if we just became too dependent upon each other to ever go to war, we could potentially live on this planet indefinitely as if we didn’t have thermonuclear weapons. That required devitalization. A lot of people don’t like living in a devitalized world, and they don’t put together the idea that a vital world, a world filled with, you know, new technological mar- marvels, uh, new markets, new opportunities might be a very dangerous world. As a result, my take on it is that Trump is going to renegotiate everything from the point of higher vitality and less interdependence. That means that he’s got to say from his perspective that having a supply chain that stretches all the way into the hinterlands of China is a negative because it means that you’re vulnerable to China. Whereas the old view of this is that this is positive because neither China nor you can afford to go to war. And I think Trump has rationalized this and said, “You know, I think China’s in a better position to go to war having taken the low value stuff like actual manufacturing and made sure that it has the ability to convert its factories on a moment’s notice to munitions or to other, you know, uh, tools of, uh, uh, of military conflict.” As a result, I think that part of the tariffs has to do with what each side sees as the unincorporated negative and positive externalities of trade. And I think what Trump views is that we’re too interdependent. We, we cannot afford to have China strike us and then find out that we are more dependent on them than they are on us. So I think what you’re seeing in part is that he’s willing to pay tremendous costs to do things that are not stated, one of which may be tanking the stock market to help, um, Rust Belt America destroying NAFTA, which was negotiated by people who have since ripped off their masks and said, you know, that the purpose of NAFTA was never Ricardian equivalence or comparative advantage. Uh, it had to do with a, an esoteric set of beliefs held by economists, like the fact that presidents aren’t smart enough to engage in trade negotiation through tariffs. Um, so that you pushed for, uh, no tariffs, free trade, and there was a, you know, an incredibly complex system that was set up after World War II that the US benefited from, and the architects of that system didn’t leave any smart heirs in government. So people were operating a system that was smarter than they were. Nobody actually knew how the thing worked. And as a result, y- you know, in part, there’s no one here to explain to Trump, “Here’s the system you’re destroying. Here’s how it really worked,” because those architects are long since…
00:41:06
Ariel Whitman: Eric, so you think that there’s a chance that my– I’m, my p- pension and my stuff, as in the American S&P, for example, is there– Do you think there’s a, there’s a chance, a good chance that he’s looking to tank the stock market and I’m gonna lose all my money, at least in the meantime?
00:41:24
Eric Weinstein: I don’t think he wants to tank the stock market, but he probably recognizes that the Gini coefficients of the US are not sustainable. And I do think that it’s very difficult… I don’t know if you’ve ever heard what billionaires do when you try to take things away from them. They get very, very upset. They feel morally indignant and, um, they’re smart, and they can hire the best talent to explain legally why that’s wrong, economically why that’s wrong. Um, so I think that in part, one of the things that he’s doing is that this is some version of a new deal. And we don’t understand what the new deal is because the whole thing is done through crypsis. And as far as, um, you know, whether he wants to tank the stock market… Look, I think he wants to be prosperous and strong, but my guess is, is that he, he has to go through a valley. Were I him, and I, I’m, I’m just not, I’m not at his level of political talent, I would imagine I would’ve told everybody to brace for a very, very difficult time When he had as much mojo behind him as possible, so then he could keep pointing to that and say, “I told you.” Um, but these guys just seem to wanna run wildly uncontrolled experiments. And I, I think it’s strange because there’s this belief that, uh, Trump and Elon are magical people who know what they’re doing. And I– Well… But they can’t, right? Like, no one on Earth, with the best supercomputers available, can simulate a system with that many moving parts and that many nonlinear interactions between various sectors. There’s no way on Earth you could know what you’re doing by playing games at this level. And I, I don’t think I’m undercutting my country to break the spell that says, um, we can’t solve the three-body problem so easily. You know, we– There are trivial math problems that are insoluble. To claim that you can know [chuckles] the future of a strategy like this that’s never been tried, with all of these actors doing whatever the heck they want… Look, I hope it works, but assume that it works and we’re all popping the champagne corks and, and, and priding ourselves on the fact that Donald Trump pulled it off. It will not have been the case that he knew what he was doing after the fact. Y- you know, ex post, you can say kol hakavod, but it’s not gonna be that it was positive expected value. Nobody can take these risks, not Elon, not Trump, not Einstein, not Newton, not Plato, not Aristotle. We’re– Th- this is just beyond anything anyone can compute.
00:44:26
Ariel Whitman: So you’re saying that Trump is not playing 3D chess knowing w- everything that’s happening, like some of his supporters are saying?
00:44:34
Eric Weinstein: Yes. Um, you know this. Ta- take a look at a double pendulum a- and, and tell me from an initial starting configuration where it’s going to be a minute from now, and Elon and Trump can use all of their brainpower. Go. I, I’m sorry, these are not magical beings. You’re, you’re on a fragile thermonuclear planet playing with every knob and dial and lever in the control room, and I promise you, nobody can compute that.
00:45:09
Ariel Whitman: Yeah. So knowing what you just said now, how do you look at someone who’s like me or one of our readers and listeners and viewers who’s… How, how are we to look at the stock market, for example? Are we to– Like, how would you look at it? How do you look at what’s happening in terms of where should we put our money? Just in general, what do you do?
00:45:32
Eric Weinstein: First of all, everything is an exchange rate, right? When, when, when– I always tell people that, um, we bury the m- relative movement of the dollar by making it the numerator, right? So the correct way of reporting a stock market crash is today the dollar surged against equities. Why? Because you have a universal short and everything else is long. So you, you’ve done this beautiful job [chuckles] diversifying your portfolio i- in the numerator, but the denominator that’s paying for it is all the dollar. And for you, with the shekels, you, you’re gonna want a quanto to make sure that y- you take care of the exchange rate as well. Okay. So in that situation, everything is an exchange rate. When people say, “Oh, Bitcoin is up,” they really mean Bitcoin’s exchange rate relative to the dollar. They’re still fiat addicts, which is the funny part. They’re, they’re not thinking in BTC terms. Okay. So right now, you, you’ve got gold, you’ve got the Swiss franc, the euro, the yen, the dollar, the various bond and stock markets, and all of these things are moving relative to each other. So what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to figure out a purely relative game. And the, the thing that I would, I would say first is figure out at least two numeraires if you can. One is the currency in which you i- intend to live and die. For you, it might be the shekel. For me, it might be the dollar. And second of all, try to figure out a basket of currencies which y- you think of as a personal numerator. Um, because again, not– It’s impossible for everything to go down, you know? I- if the stock market becomes stagnant, let’s say, uh, you can still s- you can still sell straddles and strangles, uh, against it as a means of making money. So in other words, you’ll have a positive trend, uh, in terms of being short vol. Um, y- there’s all sorts of things you can do. You just have to have a belief about what you think is coming and what you think is mispriced. And the problem that most of us have is that we have an idea that more or less the stock market just goes up, housing prices just go up, um, bonds are boring. Yeah. May- maybe you lived through that, and maybe this isn’t that era.
00:48:09
Ariel Whitman: Yes. [clears throat] So I have a few more questions, and then we’ll– I wanna ask you about the… So you were here for a conference on B- uh, I guess, what were the– The conference was on crypto, right? And, or what do you see, and you mentioned just now that [chuckles] the way that they all look at it, a lot of people look at it as a way to go away from the fiat, and this is not fiat, but then they base it on the dollar, which is fiat, so it’s basically also fiat. But- Yes. [laughs] So exactly. So you’re running away from the central bank, but you need the central bank to say that you’re okay and we v- we’re– Yeah. So-
00:48:51
Eric Weinstein: There are very few real pilot– pirates out there. So pirate, pirate crypto, um, you know, is in general still the same shady thing that it always has been, uh, where you can meet a guy in a parking lot and get a hard drive and, um, you know, it’s, it’s your keys, it’s your crypto. Then there’s this, you know, idea of crypto as an asset class, which is sort of neutered and spayed, um, where somebody else holds the keys and you’re just exposed to it, much the way, you know, you say, “I bought gold,” but you actually have paper gold, you don’t actually have physical gold or something like that. But you were gonna say something. I cut you off.
00:49:29
Ariel Whitman: No, I was going to ask, what do you think actually of the crypto market? Is it– ‘Cause when– I remember when Bitcoin came out, everybody was like… There was a debate whether Bitcoin… Some people were so into it, they were like– They came to me, “You have to buy. You have to buy.” And I didn’t believe in it, and now I guess I lost tons of money. But other people were like me and said, you know, “Let’s wait. I don’t know. I don’t even understand the concept.” Where is it going, you think, at this point?
00:49:59
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. You know, I don’t know whether, for example, quantum computing is going to change, uh, the crypto- cryptological algorithms and that, um, while everybody’s trying to figure out, um, what role crypto should be having that suddenly, uh, we have a problem. Just the same way I don’t know whether somebody’s gonna be able to fuse g- uh, nuclei into gold cheaply, you know? Everything has a, a possible downside. I think that the most salient aspect of crypto is that it’s the solution to an astounding problem. Um, and because it created money out of that solution, it’s very hard to think about the intellectual achievement in the face of people inviting you to their islands on their private jets because they saw in 2010 what you did not, right? And so what did they see? Um, I see the double spend problem as being a physical conservation law imported into the computer so that instead of being able to take one copy of your favorite song as an MP3 and run off 10,000 copies, uh, for everybody so that they can enjoy the same song, you can create a world in which just the way you had to give up your record album for your friend to borrow it over the weekend, uh, back in the ’70s, um, if you no longer– If you ha- if you give something to someone, you have to no longer have it in order for conservation to be, uh, an aspect. And conservation is absolutely fundamental to physics. So what I really feel like the future of crypto is, is the beginning of porting the physical universe into a, a digital environment, and money is going to be one aspect of that. Uh, do I think that, um, it’s found its best use case? Absolutely not. Uh, part of the problem is, is that it made a lot of people a lot of money, and then so it, it came with a culture that, uh, in particular the Bitcoiners are weirdly intellectually anti-intellectual. That is, they all have a– the hardcore maxis, so to speak, have this belief structure, which is, you know, Bitcoin is trying to just be money, and if it can just be money, that’s the smartest thing because the invisible hand of Adam Smith is really the invisible mind. And once enough people transact, uh, you have a supercomputer, which is a market that can figure out allocation decisions that nothing else can. So if we just know how dumb we are and how dumb Bitcoin is, we know that the market that Bitcoin will create as, as actual hard money will be fantastic. We’re not gonna try to be smart contact- contracts. We’re not gonna try to be everything to all people. Now, of course, then you get into the question about why don’t, why doesn’t this write to the chain more quickly, and can I have a private transaction that isn’t published, um, even if I have an anonymous wallet I don’t want anyone to know? And so then you start wanting more and more out of it, and you get this ecosystem around it. And then you have, of course, different things like, um, proof of stake versus proof of work and, um, other, other areas like smart contracts. My guess is that we are going to see AI figure out new use cases for crypto, and we are going to see the physics of conservation laws, uh, go well beyond the double spend problem.
00:53:41
Ariel Whitman: Speaking of AI, one of the things– Not that I understand a lot about AI, but before– One of the… When it st- when I started hearing the words AI, it was like not too long ago when in the general public we started hearing it, and then there started a debate about whether we’re all going to be taken over by the robots. And so then you had people like even we mentioned Elon Musk, who said in different interviews, “Not too long, the robots are gonna take over. The AI is gonna be smarter than us.” It could even– I think he even said at one point it could even destroy us all. It could like really kill us all, basically, as I understood it. And then there were other people that said, “No, it’s for the good. It’s a good thing.” What should– In your opinion, should we be really worried that the AI will actually, I guess, kill us all? [chuckles] Thank you. That’s very calming and reassuring.
00:54:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, what do you want? You’re asking a direct question.
00:54:40
Ariel Whitman: So how many years? I guess the question is how long do I have or do me and- Both of us have to contend with trying to, I guess, stop them from killing us.
00:54:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, what do you mean by killing you?
00:54:51
Ariel Whitman: No, I’m– what I understa– well, I guess f- literally killing us. That’s what I understood from him. But maybe in a general sense, what do you think is the danger of what’s going to happen?
00:55:01
Eric Weinstein: You’re asking me?
00:55:02
Ariel Whitman: Yeah. What do you think is gonna happen?
00:55:05
Eric Weinstein: I honestly think that the first thing that you need to worry about is the collapse of the invisible mesh we call the market, um, because we don’t really have a good, uh, way of directing human activity absent the market. We’ve all gotten used to the idea that an invisible mesh tells us what to do when we get out of bed, how much leisure to take on the weekend, uh, whether to invest in our children or our portfolio, what have you. Uh, it’s going to destroy the K versus L model of, um, of the macroeconomic production function, you know? That– What is AI? Is it, is it labor? Is it capital? Um, basically, it’s something that, uh, we’ve never seen anything go after all repetitive tasks at once. So as long as you can build up a data set from something that’s, uh, repetitive, like you and I may think we’re having an amazing conversation, but I can see from your microphone that this isn’t your first rodeo. You probably have a lot of people in my spot, and temporarily the person in my spot is interesting until the person shoots their wad, and then you have to go on to somebody else. So that’s a repetitive thing. You may not realize that there’s a word cloud of all the words that you’ve spoken, and that you can be simulated to pretty high order. Now, the question is, once you see your simulation, which says, “I am, for the most part, a large language model that just repeats the same stuff day in and day out,” um, what is left if that’s not what I wish to be? What is the one-off stuff that I’ve never said, that I’ve never done? Like, I can tell you that you have crazy thoughts that you’ve never shared with your public, and that your public would probably hate and love you for, for sharing with them. You’re probably gonna have to dip into your wilder self if you wanna remain relevant in this period that my wife has referred to as the golden age of AI complementarity. But that’s gonna come to an end too, and I don’t know what to do about that. I mean-
00:57:21
Ariel Whitman: Yes. I’ll tell you something, Eric, if I can just interject with– ’cause you said about me, and I think it’s interesting because I, five years ago, lost all my eyesight. So I may look like I’m seeing you, but I have a mitochondrial disease where I basically, I can, I, I can see the screen in front of me, and I can see that it’s lighted, and I can see that you’re there, but I can’t see any of your features. So I always tell my guests before, even though I forgot to tell you, that if you’re angry at me or if you’re happy with me, it’s all the same, so you can make all the faces you want. I won’t know the difference. And for me, a lot of the software that I use to– I’m an editor at a written newspaper, so [chuckles] you know, it’s without seeing. And so a lot of this new software in the past few years has a lot to do with AI, and it’s making my life and people like me, ’cause I’m in a lot of groups, uh, that I organized after I got the sickness of people. It’s a very rare disease, so we made groups of, like, the 10 people in Israel that have this, uh, more or less. And we all know that without the technology that AI has brought in a lot of different small things, but it’s very helpful. So in a way it’s a blessing, but every time I hear, “Oh, this is gonna continue and be more and more,” so it’s like, it’s like, yeah, it brought a lot of good for me personally even. But what you’re saying is it’s going to maybe bring a lot of hardships not too long from now.
00:58:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, the key thing is we’re– we’ve got to adapt, and this is one of the things that I remind, uh, my fellow Jews, that we are nothing if not the masters of adaptation and survival. And so we, we can… How long have we been worried about the Golem? A long time. No, it’s true. You know, this is, this is something that we’ve thought about quite a bit, um, because it was always going to come. [lip smack] And, you know, my feeling is whatever this is, we’re gonna have to roll with it and just, you know, sort of the same thing I was saying about Sinmore. If you get beat, you’ve gotta reach your hand out over the chessboard and say, “Good game,” if you want not to get beat every single time you sit down. You have to, you have to lose. And if you’ve lost to AI or if you’ve gained from AI, um, [lip smack] like for example, I don’t know whether, uh, you know the name She-Sheila Nirenberg, who’s a neuroscientist in the US. She was the one who told me that she was working on retinas as computers, and the idea is that a lot of the computation, uh, of what we call eyesight takes place actually in the eye as precomputation before you ever get to the brain. And, um, [lip smack] you know, my feeling is that the ability to test hypotheses cheaply, um, by talking them through with an AI that can take your ideas and say, “Okay, well, if that’s true, then what– Here’s five ideas. What do you think of them?” Use the period of AI complementarity to remediate all these problems that you can. But the big point ultimately is going to be when you are chased out of every repetitive activity, because a robot can always do a repetitive activity better than a human. What, what are you? And I think it’s a little bit, you know, I’m partial to H- Hillel’s questions. Um, what am I? This is sort of like a Hillel question that didn’t need to be asked in his time. If I am associated with my creativity, my brilliance, my intelligence, and that has just been superseded, what am I? Um, my dog doesn’t ask that question. And, you know, I, I just– I guess I, I, I am of the opinion that this is coming one way or the other.
01:01:29
Ariel Whitman: Eric Weinstein, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. I’m leaving it off at that question because it’s so– [chuckles] I have nothing to add and it’s, it’s, it’s in a way depressing, but also, it’s also in a way, tell me if you think just if– it’s maybe even optimistic ’cause it will m- it makes people think maybe, maybe there’s something more to us than just… I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t, and then we’re all depressed. But maybe there is, so, [chuckles] so look for that.
01:01:56
Eric Weinstein: You know, I, I had some amazing malawah in Yahad when I was in Israel.
01:01:59
Ariel Whitman: [laughs]
01:01:59
Eric Weinstein: And I thought to myself, you know, there’s some things that we’ve done that are really quite good. Um-
01:02:05
Ariel Whitman: Yes
01:02:05
Eric Weinstein: … so I think that we need to spend more time playing music, uh, raising children, uh, and trying to figure out what challenge are we not taking on as a human species. Given everything that we’ve done, we seem to be much less ambitious than even our great-grandfathers.
01:02:25
Ariel Whitman: Yes. And-
01:02:26
Eric Weinstein: I would like us to just get back into the business of saying, “Okay, we could be afraid ’cause things look quite bad.” But if they were going to be awesome, if they were going to be absolutely fantastic and wonderful for us, what would we be doing? What is-
01:02:41
Ariel Whitman: Yes
01:02:42
Eric Weinstein: … what is worthy of all of our tradition? Is it Wordle? Probably not, you know?
01:02:48
Ariel Whitman: It, it’s-
01:02:49
Eric Weinstein: Is, is, is it making a, a new app that you can, uh, you can order cannabis and have it delivered via drone? It’s cool, but I don’t know that that’s the bee’s knees. I think we need to get back into the-
01:03:00
Ariel Whitman: [clears throat]
01:03:01
Eric Weinstein: … into the habit of being the astounding creatures that we are and figuring out how are we gonna live with this thing.
01:03:06
Ariel Whitman: Yes. And by the way, you mentioned, uh, children. We Israelis have tons of kids, and it’s one of the most weirdest things ever when you look even secular Israelis, even atheist Israelis have, have over the replacement rates of kids. And, um, and then you look at Western countries, including the US, you, you don’t have the replacement rates of children. And it’s very… I, I never– I still don’t understand it.
01:03:34
Eric Weinstein: Have you looked at those young men and young women in uniform? Not too shabby. Not, not too shabby. I mean, they’re attracted to each other, so my feeling is, uh, the, the only thing that’s missing in many cultures is for some reason grandparents and uncles aren’t saying, “So, are you getting married? Have you found a girl? Is there a boy that’s, uh, currently in your life?” I, I personally think more old people need to meddle, uh, to help young people know that it matters, that we, we wanna go to more weddings, we wanna go to more, more brises, we wanna go to more barn bat mitzvahs. So get busy. And, uh, I think that, you know, quite honestly, uh, young Israeli men and women are inspiring to each other. And I think that that’s the dirty little secret of Israel, which is you gotta raise two genders that in different ways that inspire the heck out of each other, and that’s the magic. And you gotta push them to get married and, uh, and to date. Do I have the girl for you?
01:04:34
Ariel Whitman: Exactly. And it’s, uh, two genders. I won’t say you’re a racist, but we– I think we’re over, we’re over that. [laughs] So Eric Weinstein, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Really a true honor, and I really appreciate your time. And so thank you so much for being with us.
01:04:49
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me, and I’ll see you on my next trip.
01:04:51
Ariel Whitman: Thank you. Er-
