Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Jewish Culture in Germany ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I didn't know you when I was young, and this feels like a lifelong friendship that got started way late in my life. One of the things that that kind of was surprising to me is that my coming from a Jewish background, your coming from a German background, I think both of us were sensitized by the horrors of World War II, which obviously, the problem for the Jews is very clear, but the fact that Germany never really recovered its proud intellectual traditions that had gotten bound up in a level of mechanized and planned violence is a decimation of a great intellectual tradition.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things we've talked about in the past is whether the twilight of living memory of the Holocaust should be used for some more profound German/Jewish reconciliation, that these are two communities that have held somewhat similar thought processes from the perspective of mimetic competition. Maybe there was a problem, that they were doomed to run into each other, but that in some sense, there are two wounds that need to be healed now that all of the original participants are either quite elderly or gone. Do you think that that is informing our conversation?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there's certainly an element of that between the two of us. I think that there's probably a degree to which the history was so traumatic that that people still understate this aspect. There was something about late 19th century, early 20th century Germany where the Judaism was better integrated into the society than in many other places, and there was something very synergistic, very generative about that, and then getting at all these ways that it was lost are very, very hard to do.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's the sort of social democratic response to the Hitler era and the Holocaust was sort of radically egalitarian. It's everybody's equal, you shouldn't kill people, everybody's equally valuable, and yet, in some ways, Hitler killed the best people. So, there's a way in which the social democratic response to what happened doesn't even come up to the terrible thing that happened. So, in an egalitarian society, well, we don't have quite as many people. We're all equal. Nothing's really changed, but, well, maybe you have no Jewish people left in Germany, and there's a lot less dynamism in the society as a result, and that's something that people still can't say in Germany because that's-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Is that right? You feel like it's...

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, if I say it, people won't contradict it or anything, but it's sort of profoundly uncomfortable. So, I think there is a sense that there's sort of all these strange ways that Germany is still under the shadow of Hitler. Even the ways that people are trying to exercise Hitler, in some ways, have deformed the society where you can't go back to the things that worked incredibly well in pre-World War I Germany. There was probably a lot that was unhealthy and wrong with it, too, but yeah, there's a sense that something very big has been lost, and there probably are a Jewish version of this that one could articulate as well, but yeah, I think there's something about the synergy that's very powerful and that's quite missing.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, from my side of the fence, I was just listening on NPR to a description of Fiddler on the Roof being put on by Joel Grey in Yiddish, and the sound of Jewish Middle High German, there's something about it that is shocking in today's era. So, there's been a Jewish loss. I felt this a couple of times. I avoided, to be honest, going to Germany because I didn't want to run into old people and wonder where they had been, but eventually, at Soros’ invitation, found myself at a conference in Berlin, and when I checked in to the hotel, I heard my last name pronounced in impeccable German, and it was both a horrible feeling and a wonderful feeling, like somehow, weirdly, something was home. I went to a restaurant near Checkpoint Charlie with my wife, and I was missing a fork, and the person spoke no English, and I remembered from some old story of my father, and I asked for a gopl, which I guess is the Yiddish for fork, and it was close enough, and somebody brought me a fork. By uttering a word that I-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Gabel.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Gabel? Okay.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' By going through that exercise, I found that when this fork was brought to me, I realized that there was some part of my experience, in fact, that was missing, that this uncomfortable relationship, which my grandfather, when we went through Israel, driving north to south, was singing Leider. I mean, German was the language of the culture. It was the language of the intellectual, and that never left him. So, I think that weirdly, this is the first time, because I think it'll be too late if we wait for 20 more years, because there will be no one to remember, but that there is some opportunity to recognize a dual wound.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. No. Yeah. I think the challenge on the Germany side is that it's sort of... I had somewhat of a idiosyncratic background here where I was born in Germany, but we emigrated when I was about a year old, and we spoke German at home and lived in Africa, in Namibia were I went to a German-speaking school, but it was very different, I think, from the general post-World War II German experience, and so there are all these things that I can see from the outside looking into Germany that I think are... I still have a connection to it in sort of all of these ways, visited it as a child many times, and it's something that I connect with, and then it's obviously super different, and the contrast of Germany and California I always like to give is that California is optimistic, but desperate, and Germany is pessimistic, but comfortable. But from a Californian perspective, the incredibly deep pessimism is really, really striking, and even on that one dimension, I think Jewish culture is super different.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I feel like Jewish culture is, in part, starting to attenuate that we don't feel... I mean, this is crazy talk, but we never thought that there was anything positive about antisemitism, and obviously it's not a positive thing, but there were positive externalities in that it allowed us to push ourselves very, very hard because we always knew that we weren't going to get a fair shake and that at any moment you might need to flee to someplace that was less dangerous, and I feel that as we've become comfortable, we've lost some of the dynamism, which is a hard thing to admit, but I do think that that is in part true, and I see this in Germany. Germany's intellectual contribution was so profound that nothing post-World War II seems to suggest the same nation. I think that that loss is a profound loss, not to Germany, but to the entire world.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, and of course, one of the challenges is we can sort of describe these things, we can speculate on some of the causal things. I think it's somehow, we don't want to go back. We can't go back-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Can't, and don't want to. I agree.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, yeah, there is a history, and I think something's been lost in both Germany and in Jewish culture, and how one reconstitutes this is... Even if we can convince people of the causes and the losses, what you actually do about it is, is super hard to say and that's, that's sort of always the strange dynamic of this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Something I'd be open to us working on at some future point if we can find the time, but let me switch gears slightly and come back a little bit to the violence point.