Sam Harris X Eric Weinstein: Israel-Palestine (YouTube Content)

Sam Harris X Eric Weinstein: Israel-Palestine
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Host(s)	Konstantin Kisin Francis Foster
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein and Sam Harris
Length	01:56:02
Release Date	20 October 2023
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Sam Harris X Eric Weinstein: Israel-Palestine was a discussion with Eric Weinstein and Sam Harris hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster on the Triggernometry podcast.

Description

Sam and Eric join Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster to discuss current events and debate the wider issues at play.

Transcript

00:00:01:02 - 00:00:11:13 Sam Harris We just have to acknowledge that there is a subset of people in the Muslim world for whom it is true, as they say of themselves, that they love death more than we love life.

00:00:11:15 - 00:00:24:16 Eric Weinstein You have groups of people who are offered a state who we are not listening to. They do not want the state that they offer. They're offered a choice between a state and a chance from the river to the sea is what they chose.

00:00:24:18 - 00:00:27:20 Sam Harris I'm just saying we have to recognize we're in a we're in a hot war.

00:00:28:02 - 00:00:36:04 Eric Weinstein I think this is the same problem that you're having with Trump and other things, which is you're being invited into the abyss.

00:00:36:06 - 00:01:01:02 Konstantin Kisin Gentlemen, welcome both. The reason I show works is neither Francis or I pretend to be experts and we ask the questions that are on the minds of most people, or at least we try. I think the questions that are on the minds of most people now is that we are in a moral quandary because we simultaneously believe many things about Israel and Palestine that are incompatible.

00:01:01:02 - 00:01:31:11 Konstantin Kisin And I'll give you a list. I don't want innocent civilians to die, and Israel has to destroy Hamas. These two are already internally contradictory, and we can keep going further and further into exploring that. But what I see is that the thing that is right to say on social media, to look smart and sophisticated and balanced and nuanced is impractical.

00:01:31:11 - 00:01:39:16 Konstantin Kisin It puts you in a position where you don't know what to do. So how do we think about this? How do we think about this issue?

00:01:39:18 - 00:02:07:06 Sam Harris Well, I'm not saying anything on social media. That's one life hack that I would recommend. I've been looking at social media and I've been seeing that it's I just think it's is poison for us, even though even the good parts are making it impossible to. I think I think it's making us ungovernable. Like in Denmark. I think. I think it's eroding the basis of democracy.

00:02:07:06 - 00:02:36:08 Sam Harris It's like even the true information, even the the virtue of it is that it's giving some kind of transparency that you fear would not otherwise exist. And that is, you know, good for error correcting on some level. But even that in surplus is toxic. And then there's all the distortions of it, the things that are performative that wouldn't be happening in the real world, but for the fact that they're going it's going to be broadcast on social media.

00:02:36:10 - 00:02:44:20 Sam Harris I just think it's, as I've said many places before, I think it is a kind of psychological experiment that is deranged as a grid.

00:02:44:20 - 00:02:54:14 Konstantin Kisin And so. But let's come to Israel and Palestine, because I think that's what people want to think about rationally. How do we think about that issue?

00:02:54:15 - 00:03:28:09 Sam Harris Well, I think, yeah, the most obvious error that people will make now is to imagine that body count is the only measure by which the moral balance swings. Right. So if Israel goes into Gaza and inadvertently kills more people than were killed on their side, they've done they've done too much by definition. Right. That's just as wrong in all kinds of ways.

00:03:28:09 - 00:03:52:22 Sam Harris But the the obvious way that it's wrong is that it completely ignores what people are actually attempting to achieve on both sides, what kind of world they're attempting to build, what their intentions actually are. What would they do if they had more power, if the asymmetric power in the region were reversed? How would the how would Hamas behave vis a vis Israel?

00:03:52:23 - 00:04:19:12 Sam Harris Right. And the one thing is obvious, Israel, for decades, if it had wanted to perpetrate a genocide against the Palestinians, could have done that on any given day. Right. It would have been trivial to tomorrow. They could kill everyone in Gaza if they wanted. They obviously haven't wanted that. They obviously don't want to do that now. If you reverse that balance of power and ask what would Hamas do?

00:04:19:12 - 00:04:44:22 Sam Harris What would jihadist organizations anywhere do? They would kill all the Jews. And they and they have told us that ad nauseum. The founding charter of Hamas said that explicitly. It looked forward to a time where where Koranic prophecy would be realized when the earth itself would cry out against the Jews, where were the rocks? And the trees would say, Oh, Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come kill him.

00:04:44:22 - 00:04:45:14 Sam Harris Right.

00:04:45:16 - 00:04:47:10 Eric Weinstein Except for one tree.

00:04:47:12 - 00:05:16:05 Sam Harris Except the one. True? Yes. Yeah, that's right. So the difference in intention, while people think intention is this is this abstraction, intention is the software that everyone is running on. The intention is the best predictor of what people will do if they're given an opportunity to do it right, if they have the power to do it, if they have the technology to do it, what will the jihadist organization do if it gets nuclear weapons?

00:05:16:05 - 00:05:54:03 Sam Harris What will the jihadist organization do if it gets a, you know, a viable bioweapon? Right. We know the answers to these questions. These people have been telling us this for as long as I've been alive and and and in isolated cases, absolutely proven to a moral certainty their commitment to nihilism and massacre. I mean, the Islamic State, if you couldn't if you knew the details of what was happening in the Islamic State and couldn't understand that these people mean what they say and believe what they say they believe, then you're you're living on another planet.

00:05:54:03 - 00:06:28:19 Sam Harris So anyone who's surprised by the only surprise here is that there was an assumption and, you know, historically understandable assumption that Hamas was not as extreme as al Qaeda or the Islamic State. And it certainly seems that some among them are prepared to be that extreme. So but I mean, wouldn't that we're we're splitting hairs. I mean, jihadism is a is a a fairly unified concept.

00:06:28:19 - 00:06:56:03 Sam Harris You know, whatever the methods, whatever the methods and the and the past behavior and we just have to acknowledge that there is a subset of people in the Muslim world who for whom it is true, as they say of themselves, that they love death more than we love life. We being free, secular people everywhere, Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims.

00:06:56:05 - 00:07:44:23 Sam Harris There are people who actually want to be martyred and have their and see their kids martyred. Right. This is not they're not bluffing. They're they're perfectly willing to die for the pleasure and opportunity of killing noncombatants, intentionally killing noncombatants. So the moral error that people are going to make now and they're already making it is to think that when Israel tells people to evacuate northern Gaza and they don't because Hamas is telling them not to do it or it becomes practically impossible and Egypt doesn't let them out, etc., and they drop bombs targeting Hamas installations that have been purposefully put next to civilian areas that will cause carnage when when Israel bombs them, like hospitals

00:07:44:23 - 00:08:10:16 Sam Harris and schools and mosques, when Israel bombs those targets and kids die, which is obviously horrible. That is the same thing as Hamas jihadists coming in under cover of rocket fire at dawn and murdering babies in their cribs. It's not the same thing and body count doesn't resolve disparity.

00:08:10:18 - 00:08:13:21 Konstantin Kisin Agreed. So we'll come to you in a sec, Eric.

00:08:13:23 - 00:08:16:13 Eric Weinstein But what's doing this.

00:08:16:15 - 00:08:41:07 Konstantin Kisin As a we all. But what does that mean? Sam, let me let me ask you this, right. The United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, two of them. And after Hiroshima, uh, I think it was Hiroshima, not Nagasaki. Uh, the US Army went in and they measured the blast impact, not the release of energy from the nuclear bombs, but the actual destructive impact.

00:08:41:09 - 00:09:06:04 Konstantin Kisin And then they measured that and said how much conventional munitions would we have to use to achieve the same destructive impact? In the last year and a half of World War Two, the Allies, the British and the Soviets and Americans dropped 50 Hiroshima as a month on Germany. We flattened it, right, because it was a death cult that took over that country.

00:09:06:04 - 00:09:30:00 Konstantin Kisin And Hitler said, We're going to make a last stand. We don't care about civilian casualties. We're going to stand till the death. What you're saying is Gaza is in the grips of a death cult of the same nature or worse. What does that mean? I don't want a million children in Gaza to die and be burned in bomb shelters like the Germans.

00:09:30:00 - 00:09:30:23 Konstantin Kisin I don't want that.

00:09:31:01 - 00:10:05:12 Sam Harris And I wouldn't defend our our aerial bombing of German cities and, you know, our dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I think there there was a calculation that and again, my I'm I don't consider myself an expert on recent scholarship on this. I know that about 20 years ago, A.C. Grayling, the British philosopher, wrote a book about the specifically the hour bomb, the Allied bombing of German cities, and concluded that it really was ethically unjustifiable.

00:10:05:13 - 00:10:40:19 Sam Harris Right. That is just we told yourself a story about how this was necessary to win the war, and it was not a compelling, compelling story even at the time. I'm not so sure what analysis is true there, but what I think I think Israel is held to a higher standard than certainly we were 70 years ago. And even we, you know, the British and the Americans are now, I think they should hold themselves to the highest possible standard.

00:10:40:19 - 00:11:12:04 Sam Harris I mean, they certainly should be alert to the difference between committing war crimes and following the international law that governs how you wage war. I you know, I think they should be as reluctant as they can practically be to to to kill innocent people. And knowing that it's impossible not to kill some innocent people when you're when you're trying to fight militants in a crowded city.

00:11:12:04 - 00:11:37:12 Sam Harris Right. As especially when those militants, based on their own completely deranged moral worldview, are committed to using their own people as human shields. Right. I mean, that disparity is as far as the moral, you know, algebra, that that can give you insight into the difference between the two sides. That disparity says everything to me. It's like, you know, this is something I recently said on my own podcast.

00:11:37:12 - 00:12:02:08 Sam Harris But if you just imagine the Israelis attempting to use their own noncombatants as human shields, right. In any conflict against jihadis, you know, let's say Hezbollah comes across the northern border and the Israelis line up with their own women and kids, you know, putting the barrels of their weapons on their on the shoulders of their children, thinking that Hezbollah is going to be reluctant to shoot through the bodies of their children to kill is IDF soldiers.

00:12:02:10 - 00:12:28:12 Sam Harris I mean, it is a completely surreal, you know, Monty Python sketch where all the Jews die is not it is laughable. It is unthinkable. It's unthinkable at every level of it's unthinkable that that the Jews would treat their own children and noncombatants that way, given what they believe about everything. And it's unthinkable that they would think that their enemies would be deterred by that behavior.

00:12:28:12 - 00:13:02:04 Sam Harris Right. But when you reverse it, as is the case in the real world, we have had to convert. We al you know, we Westerners and the Israelis have had to confront this behavior on multiple fronts in every conflict against jihadists. They routinely use noncombatants as human shields. And Hamas is doing that now. I think Israel has to figure out how to navigate around that and eradicate jihadists, you know, eradicate Hamas.

00:13:02:06 - 00:13:20:10 Sam Harris We were confounded to some degree by our terminology here. We keep talking about terrorists and we had a war on terror for, you know, the quarter of a century. Now, terrorism is a tactic. Terrorism is not the thing we're fighting. We're fighting jihad.

00:13:20:12 - 00:13:24:21 Konstantin Kisin And what's the difference? Explain to people what the difference.

00:13:24:21 - 00:13:51:00 Sam Harris Well, jihadism, jihadism is the the the radical core of Islam. It is this is this principle of holy war that can be justified in various contexts. Yes, there are many, many millions of Muslims, thankfully, who just who would who would justify it in ways that we would recognize as something we could live with. Right. Say a defensive war.

00:13:51:00 - 00:14:18:12 Sam Harris Right. A just war, you know, just war theory. Okay, great. There are other Muslims who say, no, no, no, you don't understand. Jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle. Okay, great. But historically and practically now, jihad has all a component of jihad has always been you. You convert, subjugate, kill the infidel. Right. It's like Islam. Islam is a religion of conquest.

00:14:18:13 - 00:14:55:15 Sam Harris It views itself as a religion of conquest. It expects to win these these these contests for believers, you know, at the end of time. And it has an explicitly martial ethic, which is we have to win through force. Right. And we're happy to die trying. All however long we fail, we're ultimately going to succeed. But we're happy to throw our our bodies and the bodies of our children into this because this life is a total illusion.

00:14:55:18 - 00:15:27:13 Sam Harris It it has absolutely no value. This is just a anteroom on the on the threshold of either heaven or hell. And the only thing that matters is where you go after you die. Right. And only the true believers go go to paradise. And if you kill them inadvertently, if you blow up a crowd of Muslim kids in an attempt to kill some soldiers that are handing out candy to them, as happened in our conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is no factor.

00:15:27:13 - 00:15:52:22 Sam Harris The kids, the good Muslims, the real Muslims are going to paradise. They're going to thank you. Right? No problem. And the bad Muslims are the fake Muslims and the infidels, the the idolaters. They're going to go to hell sooner and that's good as an intrinsic good. That's exactly what the creator of the universe wants. It's impossible to make a moral error when you're a jihadist, right?

00:15:52:22 - 00:16:25:09 Sam Harris If you die, it's good if your family dies, it's good if the infidels is good. This is a death cult. And we have been lying to ourselves in the secular West. That's there's some other logic, some other variable that explains this behavior is economics. It's politics. These are the assumption is that when you see people behaving in this extraordinarily destructive and, you know, psychopathic way, they must have been pushed there by some awful treatment that would explain it.

00:16:25:12 - 00:16:47:13 Sam Harris Right. This must be ordinary human, rational behavior in extremis. Right. These people have been so tortured by the occupation, by the apartheid state of of Israel, by the open air prison of Gaza. I mean, these these phrases that are now, you know, used reflexively in the media. I'm not saying I'm not saying life in Gaza isn't horrible. I'm not saying it is not intolerable.

00:16:47:14 - 00:17:15:07 Sam Harris We can talk about that. But there's a layer of this phenomenon. And in this behavior that we've been living with, you know, most clearly since September 11, 2001, but it obviously precedes that which is explained only by the religious ideology. Right. The when people are doing the unthinkable, again, you can find so many cases where they're doing it without grievance, right?

00:17:15:07 - 00:17:38:03 Sam Harris Where somebody drops out of the London School of Economics to go join the Islamic State for the pleasure of killing Yazidis and, you know, raping their women. Right. And it's just this is and this was it was happening, you know, ad nauseum. Right. You had from 100 countries. So this is what we saw Hamas do in Israel last week is a subset.

00:17:38:03 - 00:18:09:02 Sam Harris It's just another example of that same behavior. Yes, it has this local political nationalistic struggle over territory context. Yeah, but that's not the thing that explains the behavior. And we have to get our heads around that. We have we again, I'm not talking about I'm not even talking about non-Muslim. I'm talking about you all moderate Muslims. Desperately. The world waits in desperation for moderate Muslims to get their heads around the problem of jihad.

00:18:09:04 - 00:18:12:22 Francis Foster And Eric, would you agree with Sam's assessment of the situation?

00:18:13:00 - 00:18:17:17 Eric Weinstein I disagree, first of all, with Konstantin before I even get to Sam.

00:18:17:17 - 00:18:18:08 Konstantin Kisin Excellent.

00:18:18:10 - 00:18:39:14 Eric Weinstein So, you know, you phrase this immediately as what's going on in Israel and Palestine. From the perspective of Hamas, what do you mean? It's all happening in Palestine, right? So the idea is that there's a European occupier sitting in Palestine. You have an open air prison, people are oppressed.

00:18:39:20 - 00:18:53:02 Eric Weinstein It’s completely unlivable. And resistance was taken against the European oppressor in Palestine. So I don’t know what you’re talking about.

00:18:53:04 - 00:19:06:19 Eric Weinstein So that perspective, for example, has to do with the language. So as soon as the frame is in place, I can tell you what the argument is. You know, it's like looking at different opening tic tac toe moves.

00:19:06:21 - 00:19:31:09 Eric Weinstein I've got all the games memorized and so I just don't want to even participate. As soon as I hear that because of these different mindsets. Now, to Sam's point, I had a big disagreement in some sense with the way in which the New Atheists took on the problem of jihad, and that is because it comes out of totalizing, totalizing ideologies.

00:19:31:09 - 00:19:40:06 Eric Weinstein The really the problem there's a North Korean totalizing ideology. There's a jihadi totalizing ideology.

00:19:40:06 - 00:19:44:23 Francis Foster Sorry to interrupt. Just full currency for these people might not know what is totalizing ideology, meaning?

00:19:45:00 - 00:20:24:03 Eric Weinstein Well, what I mean in this case is that there's an entire worldview which solves and addresses all of your issues. How should we structure a family? What is the purpose of life? What risks may be assumed, what, when, when may one kill? You have an entire worldview that is effectively incompatible with the outside world. All notions of tolerance of coming up with, you know, two people who don't really agree but agree enough in order to serve each other coffee and maybe marry into each other's families, you know, whatnot.

00:20:24:05 - 00:20:54:23 Eric Weinstein There is a sort of way in which you're you're open through moderation and through tolerance to the points of view of others within a relatively broad but still restricted spectrum. This is outside of that spectrum. So the the issue is not Islam. To me, the issue is totalizing ideologies that provide all answers. And there aren't that many of them left, right, like Soviet communism died off.

00:20:54:23 - 00:21:06:18 Eric Weinstein It was a totalizing ideology. You see the art, the music, the cinema. You can you can spend your entire life in a Soviet mindset based on what was produced during that period.

00:21:06:20 - 00:21:24:16 Sam Harris But not not all totalizing ideologies are the same. No, they aren't. So it's like, but that's the crude. The martyrdom completely changes the game theory, right? Like, like if Putin was a martyr, yeah, we would feel differently about it. Or in Ukraine, I promise. But I'm just trying to drag you there.

00:21:24:16 - 00:21:58:19 Eric Weinstein Yeah. So the first problem I have is the totalizing ideologies are dangerous because there's no way from outside to check them. Yes. So if there's an error, then you end up with whatever that area is, you know, to the 10,000 power. Now, when you drop in this as a strategy, the next reason I can't really respond to what God said is that the the language again, that we use like both sides.

00:21:58:23 - 00:22:36:15 Eric Weinstein Oh, so what about Christian Arabs? You know, somehow they're not part of the Islamic Jihad or Hamas. But on the other hand, they may have sympathies with it or on the other hand, they may secretly hate it and say, how can we can't get better representation? Some of them may pine to live in Israel. As you know, I lived in Israel for two years and I had all sorts of crazy conversations and the spectrum of Arab perspectives or Druze perspectives or, you know, it is a much richer place.

00:22:36:19 - 00:22:55:05 Eric Weinstein And I worry already about the both sides because it ain't both sides. It's so many different factions. And then in order to get at this, because the Israeli government will have to take action against the Hamas government. Right. And so that is a both sides.

00:22:55:07 - 00:23:01:09 Konstantin Kisin So let's talk about that, because you're arguing with the frame. So give us the frame the way that you think the frame should be.

00:23:01:11 - 00:23:19:10 Eric Weinstein Well, my my first comment is, is that you're going to use words like Palestinians. You're going to use words like occupation, occupied territories. Somebody else may use Judea and Samaria, somebody else might say Palestine. As soon as I know the language, I know that the arguments are going.

00:23:19:10 - 00:23:21:04 Konstantin Kisin To be okay.

00:23:21:06 - 00:23:40:09 Eric Weinstein This is not my language and I don't believe these things. And I've agreed to be more or less silent on a bunch of things while there was a peace process. Because peace processes are about peace to a certain extent, you have to live through a peace process in order to get something at the end of it. And that failed.

00:23:40:11 - 00:24:04:15 Eric Weinstein So, you know, the first thing I'm going to say is I don't believe that this is an occupied people. I don't believe that the Arabs are under occupation. And that's going to sound crazy because you're not exposed to any perspective that sounds like that. So how how are you ever come to that conclusion? You have groups of people who are offered a state who you're not listening to.

00:24:04:15 - 00:24:38:15 Eric Weinstein They do not want the state that they're offered. They're offered a choice between a state and a chance. And if you know the chance, it's from the river to the sea. From the river to the sea is what they chose. You could have a state or you could have a chance. And they want the chance. They are the tip of the spear in the global battle against Western hegemony, against an occupying European power in holy Arab land.

00:24:38:17 - 00:25:07:14 Eric Weinstein And they're not going to give up on that as a collective political entity for a relatively modest, prosperous state, trading with with the occupier, with, you know, joint economics, joint saint. That's very troubling to us because we have this idea, why wouldn't you want a state? You can have a state, you can be prosperous, you can send your kids to Purdue.

00:25:07:20 - 00:25:40:00 Eric Weinstein You know, and that's that's not easy for us. This is basically if you think about motherhood, you don't think about Munchausen by proxy right now. What do you do with a deal? What do you do when you have a mother who comes to the hospital with a child is continuously getting sick, you know, and getting harmed? You know, you have to ask, well, is it possible that the mother is harming the child?

00:25:40:03 - 00:26:00:10 Eric Weinstein So you're about to see tiny children pulled out of rubble in northern Gaza. You're going to see it ad nauseum. You're going to see people rushing to the hospital. You're going to see mothers wailing. So we can talk about the whole thing, about the martyrdom and how everybody prays that their family will be martyred. And you know what?

00:26:00:10 - 00:26:33:18 Eric Weinstein Sometimes it's true. Sometimes you see on camera somebody saying, thank God they took my son, you know, blah, blah, blah. But those are actually much more complicated things. Sometimes you turn the camera off and the person is crying because they know what they're supposed to say and they know what they're actually feeling. So my problem with this is that this is so much more complicated than the discussion we're preprogramed to have that is guaranteed to fail the richness of this problem where Hamas is effectively the mother in a munchausen by proxy situation.

00:26:33:20 - 00:26:45:18 Eric Weinstein Right. And the children, you damn straight you're going to be pulling babies out of that rubble because that's what Hamas wants. And Israel cannot figure out how to extricate herself from this dance of death.

00:26:45:20 - 00:26:48:19 Konstantin Kisin Well, that's why we're here. That's what we're talking about.

00:26:48:21 - 00:27:36:03 Eric Weinstein Right. So what I'm trying to say is, you don't get out of this. You have a very unconventional foe in Hamas and in and in totalitarian Islam and in jihad and in ISIS and al Qaeda. And for some reason, mainstream media refuses to show us the images that they showed us during the Vietnam War through mainstream outlets. If you saw what I've seen, if you if you watched the Hamas videos, the ISIS videos, the if you read the book, if you did any of this stuff, you'd be sick to your stomach, you'd be a changed person.

00:27:36:05 - 00:27:56:01 Eric Weinstein And we don't have that. I remember the night my parents turned off the TV during the Vietnam War, So one of my earliest memories, I believe it was GIS heads on pikes carried by the North, the Viet Cong. You're watching American severed heads on sticks. If you think about all the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs from the Vietnam era, right?

00:27:56:01 - 00:28:27:20 Eric Weinstein You're watching a monk burned to death. You're watching a street execution right to the head. You're watching naked children with their children, with their clothes burned off from napalm. You didn't see Falling Man. The most famous picture from 911 was basically not shown in the United States. There is this layer that is determined to push a fiction to us, which is a transparent fiction about the general nature of Islam.

00:28:27:20 - 00:28:54:01 Eric Weinstein Islam is complicated. You have to study it. Multiple schools of thought beyond Shia versus Sunni versus Ahmadi. You know, you can just in Sunni Islam, different schools of jurisprudence, which lead to totally, radically different outcomes between the Salafists and the Hanafi adherents. And what we've done is we've come up with this this childlike concept of an oppressed people and a religion of peace.

00:28:54:03 - 00:29:11:07 Eric Weinstein And all of this stuff is unworkable and it's all mind control and it's all propaganda. And what my feeling is, again, is I don't want to start the conversation from where I think you guys want to start it from. I want to start from the fact that none of us are prepared to have this conversation because we haven't been exposed to it.

00:29:11:09 - 00:29:21:18 Eric Weinstein We don't know what the real issues are. And if we take the terms that are handed to us, we have the best and most intellectual conversation. It will still be completely morally fine.

00:29:21:22 - 00:29:46:23 Sam Harris Let me just disagree with the general thrust of what you said, because much of what you said is true but doesn't actually confound the argument that I'm making, which is that all of that complexity is true. There's the complexity of Islam as it is this very gated culture, and it interacts with cultural contingencies that have nothing to do with religion, right?

00:29:46:23 - 00:30:08:19 Sam Harris So there are things that we would object to under Islam, like, you know, female genital mutilation, which doesn't have a direct, really direct connection to theology. Right. And yet it's correlated with the Muslim world, but it's not exclusive to the Muslim world, etc., etc.. There's all this hairsplitting we can do, but there is a very simple core to this, right?

00:30:08:19 - 00:30:13:09 Sam Harris The concept of jihad, the concept of martyrdom, the very clear.

00:30:13:13 - 00:30:15:16 Eric Weinstein You know, the title is in Death, I guess.

00:30:15:18 - 00:30:25:02 Sam Harris Death to Apostates. Right. All this is this is the clearest piece of code. This is like, you know, eight lines of code that every time you run them, produce the same.

00:30:25:04 - 00:30:44:22 Eric Weinstein Piece of code, same. It's the fact that it has no repressor bound to it, to borrow a metaphor from DNA. Okay. But and so in the in Deuteronomy we have repressor found to be bad because it's a the code doesn't run. The problem is, is that all the safeties are off the gun. You've got promoter rather than repressor for some collection of people for some other collection.

00:30:45:03 - 00:30:47:17 Konstantin Kisin Placed in a different way. Sure, it's too complicated.

00:30:47:20 - 00:30:49:00 Eric Weinstein It's not that complicated.

00:30:49:03 - 00:30:56:17 Konstantin Kisin It's not that complicated for you, but it's too complicated for me to understand. And therefore for a lot of people watching. So I explain in simpler.

00:30:56:19 - 00:31:20:04 Eric Weinstein Okay, we have code in Deuteronomy. A lot of the bad code in Islam comes from Judaism. So Christianity and Islam are two of our most popular offshoots. Mm hmm. And bad code has an inheritance property that it's sometimes it permeates through the system. If everybody agrees that the Old Testament is important, right in Deuteronomy, I believe there's a passage, by the way, what you said before about it being Koranic.

00:31:20:04 - 00:31:24:03 Eric Weinstein I believe you were actually referencing a Hadith. I don't know if that's accurate about the.

00:31:24:09 - 00:31:25:22 Sam Harris Yeah, Yeah. So I want.

00:31:25:22 - 00:31:26:08 Eric Weinstein To be clear.

00:31:26:08 - 00:31:26:22 Sam Harris About yeah.

00:31:27:00 - 00:31:50:09 Eric Weinstein Yeah. In Deuteronomy there's a passage that says, for example, if somebody says, let's go worship gods unknown to our fathers, set upon them with a stone. Hmm. I don't think there's any record of Jews stoning an apostate and proselytizing a proselytizing apostate. However, how you get that code not to run is that you come up with some justification.

00:31:50:09 - 00:32:12:08 Eric Weinstein For example, to bad about the second temple to being destroyed. If we don't have the second temple, then we can't convene the Senate. Hadrian If the religious courts aren't enforced, then who decides whether this is just an unjust? So unfortunately the code can't run. So we have got bad code that doesn't get run because it's blocked from running.

00:32:12:10 - 00:32:29:01 Eric Weinstein Yeah, and quite honestly, in many places in the world you have got bad code that is blocked from running. So we don't want have a conversation about you can read it right in the text. It's true. You can read it right in the text. But you have to think about the epigenetics. What is it that determines, does this code run or is this code blocked?

00:32:29:03 - 00:33:03:23 Eric Weinstein So the problem is you have got a total izing death cult with all the safeties off the gun for some subset of people. And then we're going to have this conversation about are we going to be fastidiously accurate, in which case it'll take 17 hours and nobody will want to watch it. Or is somebody going to say, you know, the conservative thing to say while there's some something's going wrong with this law, and then you've got all the the collateral damage of reasonable, normal people, you know, a vice president for inventory at some company who happens to go to the mosque and is thinking like, what does this have to do with me?

00:33:04:01 - 00:33:33:09 Eric Weinstein And then you have got the weird issues about the sympathies, where you've got sympathies for completely insane positions from completely moderate people, including now generically, college students. College students are up for people firing automatic weapons into porta potties. Having no idea who's inside is a mother, you know, nursing a child inside the port. But who cares? And to say I stand with Palestine and show a hang glider for Black Lives Matter thing.

00:33:33:09 - 00:33:52:13 Eric Weinstein But all the Black Lives Matter signs out throughout the entire George Floyd thing. I was saying, don't support black Lives Matter. Now. Black Lives Matter was a piece of genius called Declarative Marketing. I don't know if you've ever heard it. We had products in the seventies called Jeer Here. Smells terrific or I can't believe it's not Butter was the name of the product.

00:33:52:17 - 00:34:13:01 Eric Weinstein So the name of the product is called Black Lives Matter. How can you disagree with that? You know, So save, save the adorable puppy dogs is what I would call a terrorist organization if I had to. Because how can you disagree with save the adorable puppy dogs? We're deranged by language. We're not watching things in mainstream context that would make us sick to our stomachs.

00:34:13:01 - 00:34:45:14 Eric Weinstein And we are becoming infused with a radical ideology through the Democratic Party that is as if it was liberalism adjacent. You've got radical left wing death cults that want revolution for the oppressed. They have a seat at the democratic table at the same time that somebody like Sam or myself, traditionally a Democrat, is completely unwelcome. And, you know, my my claim is is that you're seeing an echo of this madness of jihadism inside mainstream American campuses.

00:34:45:16 - 00:35:09:01 Francis Foster And there's one thing that I would like to add as well, is that my grandfather was an Arab. My grandfather was Venezuelan, but he originated from Lebanon. His surname was south and he was Coptic Christian, and he was a doctor. And when he retired, he became a historian and he his books won prizes in his third language. And we went Israel on holiday.

00:35:09:01 - 00:35:26:02 Francis Foster Now I'm a Catholic. All our family are Catholic. And they said to my grandfather, we said to my grandfather, would you like to come to Israel with us? Bear in mind, this is in story and this is a man. And he said, As long as I live, I will never set foot on Israeli soil. I will never put money in an Israeli pocket.

00:35:26:04 - 00:35:50:19 Francis Foster And I think the other aspect to this conversation that we're not addressing is the hatred that exists on both sides. And we misuse that word hatred a lot. I hate peanuts. I hate the opposition football team. This is hatred to its core. And what do you do with two groups of people, some of whom hate each other and each to a sense?

00:35:51:00 - 00:35:53:03 Francis Foster Can you resolve that.

00:35:53:04 - 00:36:19:12 Sam Harris It's worse than hatred And it's it's simpler than then. Eric, you're making it out. It's it's not granted, there's a there's a ton of complexity, but the complexity isn't the main problem here, right? So it's worse than hatred in that. And again, I really do think this is a a failure of empathy on the part of secular, rational people.

00:36:19:12 - 00:36:44:00 Sam Harris They just can't get their heads around what it would be like to actually believe in paradise. Right. They've never met it. At most they've met people who pretend to believe in paradise. They just don't know what true belief is like and therefore they don't they can't kind of sympathetically run this particular piece of code and see it's perfectly rational implications.

00:36:44:00 - 00:37:02:19 Sam Harris I mean, what would how would you live if you believed that there was nothing more important than waging war for the one true faith and dying in the process, the only straight path to paradise was to be martyred, right? It's the only thing that bypasses the resurrection and all of the uncertainty of whether you're going to get there is just this.

00:37:02:19 - 00:37:23:23 Sam Harris It's just like you're just whisked past the velvet rope and your you're you're in the bottle room with God, waiting for your friends and family to arrive right? People can't understand what it would be like to actually believe this. And so they and so they think there must be some other motive. So when you read a issue of Dabiq.

00:37:23:23 - 00:37:29:16 Sam Harris Right. You know, the Islamic State's highly professional newsletter or magazine grade.

00:37:29:16 - 00:37:30:04 Eric Weinstein Production.

00:37:30:04 - 00:37:39:20 Sam Harris Quote, it's it was shockingly good. I mean, I said when I commented on it and it was it was it was actually a very bad sign that it was well written and as well copy. I don't know.

00:37:40:00 - 00:37:40:14 Eric Weinstein What other stuff.

00:37:40:19 - 00:38:04:20 Sam Harris It was that they know. But it it's a show that shows you the quality of people they were recruiting from, from Europe mostly. But it's and I and I disagree with the the analogy the epigenetic genetics analogy. You ran because it's there's not this is a much shorter piece of code. The Koran is a much more unified code.

00:38:04:20 - 00:38:21:15 Sam Harris I mean, the Koran, there's much less self-contradiction in the Koran. And then you find in the Bible, right? I mean, the Bible is the Bible just simply does not present a unified message and is very easy to pick and choose. And why, especially if you're a Christian, you wind up with with Jesus in his in his better moods.

00:38:21:15 - 00:38:39:09 Sam Harris And you could be you could live a completely benign pacifist sort of life or you could be, you know, a religious lunatic who's who's dangerous and divisive. You can sort of have it however you want to have it. It is much harder under Islam. It's not to say this is impossible. And as I said earlier.

00:38:39:09 - 00:38:40:19 Eric Weinstein Islam is much better designed.

00:38:40:21 - 00:39:09:19 Sam Harris They absolutely need to find their repressor hardware to figure out how how to make jihad just a matter of just war and just war theory. You know, as you know, the Christians have it more or less and and spiritual struggle. That would be great. They have to figure out how to do it. It's damn hard to do it, especially when you look at the example of the Prophet Muhammad, who's not a guy who got crucified and told everyone to wait for the end of the world.

00:39:09:19 - 00:39:17:06 Sam Harris He was a conquering warlord. I mean, it's like having Genghis Khan as your as your savior. I mean, it's just it's just not a Islam.

00:39:17:06 - 00:39:18:16 Eric Weinstein As much better designs.

00:39:18:18 - 00:39:22:11 Sam Harris For jihad, for holy war as for endless conflicts.

00:39:22:12 - 00:39:49:02 Eric Weinstein Not this is not a morally normative observation. It had the opportunity to look at Orthodox Judaism and Judaism and Christianity, and it became a piece of code that is incredibly difficult to deal with, even down to the engineering of of a priority operation. So I forget how it works that you have one of the chapters, the.

00:39:49:04 - 00:39:55:02 Sam Harris Yeah, yeah. They're the last of the ones that abrogate the other ones. Yes. But the more you do it and that's where the.

00:39:55:02 - 00:40:35:00 Eric Weinstein Contradiction is, but you also have an order of operation. So it is a piece of design we can marvel at Islam, but you still have two very different traditions. One clerical, one more akin to Protestantism, have a direct relationship to the code in the in Sunni Islam, you do have multiple schools of jurisprudential thought. Hmm. What I'm trying to get at is you became fixated on the fact that normal, ordinary Americans, median American cannot figure out how to talk about the problems that come out of totalitarian jihadi ideology.

00:40:35:03 - 00:40:56:17 Sam Harris Well, worse than that is to the point you just raised about what's happening on college campuses. We've got we've got the most privileged and ostensibly well-educated people in our society, students right now today at Harvard and Stanford who are signing, you know, open letters in support of the murder of infants in their cribs and because.

00:40:56:19 - 00:41:24:05 Eric Weinstein Who are in support of message killing, let's be very specific. It's not murder and it's not the number. Message killing is different than regular killing message. Killing is when you engage in an act and you make it cinematic and you make it hurt, you make it psychologically so disturbing that you amplify the power of each death. Right. Saddam was a an incredible practitioner of message killing.

00:41:24:05 - 00:41:46:21 Eric Weinstein When you think about Luca Brasi, you know, in The Godfather, showing up with a vest with the fish in and nobody knows how to read the message. You have kids on college campuses who are supportive of message killing and you think about how do you deliver the maximum amount of to a father? Okay.

00:41:46:23 - 00:41:57:14 Sam Harris But these are the same people who are who are whingeing about micro-aggressions and they need safe spaces. They need trigger warnings. They think words are violence. I mean.

00:41:57:16 - 00:42:10:01 Eric Weinstein They don't they don't think any of that same there was no woke ideology. You could not tie your shoes if you imbibed wokeism. It's such a contradictory collection of things that don't make sense, Michael.

00:42:10:01 - 00:42:34:01 Konstantin Kisin Malice said on our show recently. Something that I think is not untrue, which is that these people don't use language to communicate. They use it to manipulate. That's right. However, one of the things that always worries me about our space is we critique others and we don't model and we don't talk about how to think. And I've asked we spend 40 minutes of our capacity to think about this issue.

00:42:34:01 - 00:42:47:03 Konstantin Kisin We are nowhere near that. So let's try you both put some ideas forward about how you see this problem. How do we think about this? How if you're right, let's just for the sake of argument, this is all about jihadism.

00:42:47:03 - 00:42:55:05 Sam Harris I have an answer for you, but I certainly preface it by saying that, one, I'm not an expert in any of the relevant areas that would give me confidence in the sense that.

00:42:55:05 - 00:42:57:04 Konstantin Kisin This is the intent. I was never stopped anyway.

00:42:57:07 - 00:42:59:06 Sam Harris So I'm not like so I'm very on.

00:42:59:06 - 00:42:59:21 Francis Foster Twitter.

00:42:59:23 - 00:43:30:17 Sam Harris Yeah, not much reasonable. So I'm I'm very happy that I'm not in charge here. Yeah. So it's like so I can I can say this knowing that I have absolutely no responsibility to actually make this kind of decision. But I what I think we in the West, in this in the West, however you want to conceive it should do is recognize that we are perpetually at war with aspiring martyrs.

00:43:30:21 - 00:43:59:06 Sam Harris Right. We're at war with jihadis. Now, how many people like that in that description actually exist in the Muslim world is as yet undetermined. Right. But it's more than we should be comfortable with. And it's and still most Muslims do not fit that description, obviously. Right. And then there are kind of concentric circles of decreasing support for the the the the project of jihad.

00:43:59:08 - 00:44:37:19 Sam Harris But we have to recognize that we're at war with jihadism. It's and in whatever guise, whatever organization or not or non organization it exists. And and we should and we should be killing jihadis. Right. We're not going to negotiate with jihadis. We're not going to live peaceful peacefully with jihadis. When you raise your hand and you say, I'm a jihadi, that should make your life much more dangerous officially from the point of view of of the Israelis, the CIA, anyone, anyone who's part of this project.

00:44:37:21 - 00:44:41:02 Konstantin Kisin But then we're back to Dresden. And this is why I brought up.

00:44:41:02 - 00:44:41:16 Sam Harris I went back.

00:44:41:16 - 00:44:42:03 Francis Foster To dress.

00:44:42:03 - 00:44:52:22 Sam Harris I think this mostly should be covered. I think this I don't think we need to take credit for this. I don't think the Israelis should say we we dealt with the problem over here and the US should say we averted.

00:44:52:22 - 00:44:55:08 Eric Weinstein You mean clandestine.

00:44:55:10 - 00:44:57:00 Sam Harris What How are you distinguishing those.

00:44:57:04 - 00:45:03:10 Eric Weinstein Clandestine means secret. Covert means deniable.

00:45:03:12 - 00:45:06:05 Sam Harris I'm not sure I understand all that you're.

00:45:06:07 - 00:45:26:08 Eric Weinstein When the CIA undertakes a covert operation. Yeah. The idea that, if discovered, it will be denied and that the links to the sponsor will be severed so that it cannot be traced back to the CIA. So other words, it's a pretty big distinction. I just didn't.

00:45:26:08 - 00:45:49:08 Sam Harris Know whether you were. Yeah, no, I don't actually. I don't know. I don't know if it's important in this case, But this is a this is this is an idea that doesn't originate with me. I think I first encountered this with the war correspondent and journalist Robert Kaplan. Maybe I think it might even be before 911. He he wrote on this.

00:45:49:10 - 00:46:15:14 Sam Harris But just the idea that we need to that all of this has to be public, all of this has to be demonstrative, all of this all of this has to be framed by speeches that we need to declare that we're going to go to war in Iraq. Right. You know, we're gonna go to war in Afghanistan. I mean, if my thinking about anything has changed since 911, the I mean, I was never I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq.

00:46:15:14 - 00:46:48:17 Sam Harris I was never a critic of the war in Iraq. I never knew what to think about the war in Iraq, except I noticed that it was it seemed like a catastrophic distraction from the war in Afghanistan, which I absolutely did support and which was, you know, a helpless failure. It certainly seems. But so if my thinking is strange about anything, is this the idea that we can do this project of nation building that like by analogy with what we did with you know, post World War Two with Germany and Japan, which are miracles of of resurrection, really.

00:46:48:17 - 00:47:11:20 Sam Harris I mean, look at the look at the enemies we had in Germany and Japan and look at the state of the world now. Right. There's just the idea that they are our friends and collaborators and have been for for virtually for as long as you know, we've been alive. It's an amazing reboot of civilization after, you know, it's near destruction.

00:47:11:22 - 00:47:37:21 Sam Harris The idea that we can accomplish that in the Middle East and accomplish that in a muslim culture just because we think everyone must want freedom on some level and must, you know, just want to run the same democratic code as we do and, you know, dye their fingers and say they voted. I'm much more pessimistic about that project ever being fulfill a in the lifetime of anyone hearing this than I was.

00:47:37:23 - 00:47:56:17 Sam Harris And so I think we should be very circumspect about owning anything because the other thing is that because all of this is seen through a religious lens on the other side, and it's all a matter of sanctities and they're their trespass as far as the eye can see. So you bring in infidel troops, even with the best of intentions, to do anything good.

00:47:56:19 - 00:48:34:16 Sam Harris And it's a it's a cynical sacrilege worthy of the murder of noncombatants. Right. So many people subscribe to this worldview beyond just jihadists that you just can't. The project is over with the best of intentions even before it starts. So I think, again, this and I say this as someone who doesn't know all that I'm getting wrong here, at least pragmatically, like I don't know terms of covert or clandestine operations, how you go about killing jihadists wherever they exist, You know, we should get as good as we can get at that.

00:48:34:16 - 00:48:42:22 Sam Harris We should get as good as we can get at that. And so so like that. So the leaders of Hamas in Qatar. Yeah, those those guy at the clock should be taking on those guys.

00:48:42:22 - 00:48:43:15 Eric Weinstein So it is.

00:48:43:20 - 00:48:52:21 Sam Harris Yeah. So that but that's so that's the most important piece from my point of view jihad as a job description. Jihadism has to be fair.

00:48:52:21 - 00:48:58:12 Eric Weinstein These people aren't cowards. These people who organized this, they're expected to die. So what they think is of the.

00:48:58:17 - 00:49:00:05 Sam Harris Way we should fulfill that our.

00:49:00:07 - 00:49:01:22 Eric Weinstein Cowardly. It's not true.

00:49:02:00 - 00:49:03:03 Sam Harris I would I would never say.

00:49:03:04 - 00:49:06:10 Konstantin Kisin Knowing that no one has said that they enlist support in Syria.

00:49:06:12 - 00:49:24:14 Eric Weinstein As the old joke goes, Sam, you know, what's the difference between a moderate Muslim and a jihadi? The harassment of a sister at an Israeli checkpoint? You know, the problem is you can't just go around killing jihadis because a lot of people express support for jihad. We're never going to pick up a gun or strap in.

00:49:24:16 - 00:49:44:05 Sam Harris So that's a distinction I'm making. I mean, there are people who in turn the other very depressing thing is that if we and we have poll results going back now decades, when you ask Muslim community is not just in the Muslim world but in the West, what's your level of support for suicide bombing in defense of Islam? Right.

00:49:44:07 - 00:49:58:14 Sam Harris The numbers are awful. Right. And so that's not what I'm talking about. The people who are actually deciding to be jihadis, you know, they're going to get they're going to get up tomorrow morning. And their goal, their job is how do I kill this was how do.

00:49:58:14 - 00:50:03:12 Eric Weinstein I make this lobster? What was that? When did suicide bombing in Islam start?

00:50:03:14 - 00:50:08:19 Sam Harris This is not we don't have to talk about the Tamil Tigers going. Yeah it's not it's a little bit Yes.

00:50:08:19 - 00:50:10:03 Eric Weinstein Beirut barracks right.

00:50:10:08 - 00:50:10:15 Sam Harris Yeah.

00:50:10:15 - 00:50:13:01 Eric Weinstein So we're talking about a relatively recent phenomenon.

00:50:13:02 - 00:50:14:17 Sam Harris Yeah, but bombs are irrelevant. You know.

00:50:14:17 - 00:50:34:00 Eric Weinstein There is the golden age of of hijacking before that. I'm not, I'm not making any excuses for it. I'm Trying to say that you're talking about something of such consequence. The idea that we should, if I take cover, that we should have a an official policy of trying to identify people who are jihadi, whatever that means, which is very cool.

00:50:34:00 - 00:50:39:09 Sam Harris That they identify themselves. Right. They they literally move in Syria.

00:50:39:09 - 00:51:01:22 Eric Weinstein I had a friend in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who you would have identified as a jihadi, and he said to me, once you go to Israel, we will never be friends again. We will never speak, I will have to hate you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He was the one who told me about the Hadith. He says, you know, remember that this is the tree that is the tree of the Jews that will hide you in the earth, cries for your blood.

00:51:02:00 - 00:51:15:22 Eric Weinstein It's an incredible mindset and you and I are allied on. It's a mindset that Americans have difficulty thinking through. But what you're talking about when you talk about the decision boundary of which jihadist to kill.

00:51:16:00 - 00:51:22:10 Sam Harris Yeah. So air on the side of conservative, right? I'm just saying we have to recognize we're in a we're in a hot war.

00:51:22:15 - 00:51:22:22 Eric Weinstein I think.

00:51:23:04 - 00:51:23:21 Sam Harris With the harm that.

00:51:23:21 - 00:51:29:21 Eric Weinstein You're having with Trump and other things, which is you being invited into the abyss.

00:51:29:23 - 00:51:52:04 Sam Harris Well, you're you're not you're not understanding. But wait, let me just clarify what I'm recommending here, because if you're not understanding it, the audience is and understand it. What I'm saying is much more conservative, at least in my view, with respect to collateral damage and the and the ethics of warfare, then what is likely to be happening? Certainly what's what what I think is likely to happen in Gaza.

00:51:52:05 - 00:51:55:03 Sam Harris Right. I think we should do a lot.

00:51:55:03 - 00:51:57:01 Eric Weinstein Of targeted surgical stuff.

00:51:57:02 - 00:52:14:18 Konstantin Kisin Two things. First of all, let's let Sam finish. And the second thing is, Eric, I want to hear a positive proposition from you because you're kind of position yourself in a critique place from which it's much easier to operate. So let Sam finish his point and then I want to hear from you what you think we should do, because otherwise it's kind of asymmetric.

00:52:15:00 - 00:52:15:08 Konstantin Kisin So go.

00:52:15:08 - 00:52:58:23 Sam Harris Sam So our progress morally as a civilization, you know, especially in the West, as a global civilization, but but especially in the West, has been on many fronts. But one crucial front is that we have become more and more uncomfortable in taking innocent life. However, defensively when we wage war, right? So because of collateral damage is that phrase is a euphemism that hides just these ghastly is outcomes where you have, you know, children orphaned and children blown up and every permutation of that that horror.

00:52:59:00 - 00:53:35:02 Sam Harris And we because we've become more and more transparent to ourselves and how we wage war, we are increasingly less and less capable of waging war the way we did in World War Two and and Vietnam. And and I think that's that's a good thing. It's a good thing until it isn't right. I can imagine us getting into a war where we have to finally say, fuck it, we have to we have to roll back our moral compass to 1945 because this enemy is hiding behind so many beautiful, blond haired little girls.

00:53:35:04 - 00:54:01:00 Sam Harris All those girls are going to die, otherwise we all die, right? So that's less conceivable to me. But we I certainly hope we don't have a future like that. And so I think we should have a biased toward being more and more compassionate, more and more scrupulous, more and more aware of how intolerable it is for, in this case, completely innocent families in Gaza to have £500 bombs dropped on their heads.

00:54:01:00 - 00:54:20:17 Sam Harris Right. It's just it's is completely unacceptable. The details are unacceptable. And I don't share your view that if we just saw more of the imagery that would help us calibrate here, because the imagery is so provocative, the imagery of a dead baby being pulled out of rubble is so provocative, it's impossible to think about what should happen in the world on the basis of that data point.

00:54:20:17 - 00:54:41:11 Sam Harris Right. That doesn't guide you, that just confounds you. And so I think what I'm what I what I'm arguing for and again, I don't understand the practicalities of this. I mean, we need to bring in, you know, Delta Force and the CIA and people who actually know how you do things on that front, too, to know what's possible.

00:54:41:11 - 00:55:12:21 Sam Harris But I think, yes. Who joins a jihadist organization who's in the business of waging jihad. Right. That should be a death sentence. That should be that should be suicide. Right. We should figure out how to make that within the within the the the the possibilities here. We should figure out how to make that so. And, I mean, we have our friend Douglas Murray, who, you know, we both love and who's who's incredibly courageous and wise on on this particular front.

00:55:12:23 - 00:55:42:02 Sam Harris He's walking around saying that anyone who supports Hamas, even just anyone who gets out on the sidewalk and stands on one of these signs, as they have in this week supporting what happened in in Israel, those people should lose their citizenship and be evict from the UK right now. Try to map that onto your free speech concerns in the U.S. How how practical is that?

00:55:42:02 - 00:55:43:15 Eric Weinstein How my free speech service.

00:55:43:18 - 00:55:51:09 Konstantin Kisin Yeah, well, just so you know, guys, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization in the UK. Therefore, to express support for it is a crime.

00:55:51:13 - 00:56:11:16 Sam Harris Okay so but but like try to map that on to the American context, right? We've got Stanford students who are effectively those people, right? Not only are we kicking them out of Stanford, which I could sort of support, I mean, there's more to talk about there. But like yeah, I mean there's a certain form of cancel culture that that would make some sense to me at this moment.

00:56:11:18 - 00:56:43:23 Sam Harris But on Douglass's account, we just send them to Gaza, right? Just drop them in Gaza and say, good luck, this is what you wanted. This is your worldview. Okay? That's when you talk about extreme derangements of our civil society and our politics and our our way of life and boundary problems. How do we like like just what sort of what constitutes support for Hamas in these last seven days, right, on social media and on the quad, It's an impossible problem.

00:56:43:23 - 00:57:05:08 Sam Harris So you can be as judicious as you want to be. I just and I and I would advocate that. But I think we have to recognize euphemisms aside that the terrorism is not our problem. Jihadism is our problem. And it's not that it's not that we don't have other problems. North Korea is also a problem. The total other totalizing dogmas are also a problem.

00:57:05:10 - 00:57:12:13 Sam Harris This is a very specific problem that is not going away. It will be with us for as long as we're alive and as long as our kids are alive.

00:57:12:15 - 00:57:20:20 Francis Foster Great. So, Eric, what is your vision for how we start solving vision?

00:57:20:20 - 00:57:49:13 Eric Weinstein So that's okay. Look, because you asked for it, I think in all of the appearances, I've never actually shared this publicly, but you're forcing the issue and I'm not hiding from it. It's just if we don't do anything different, we're going to get what Hamas wanted. So the first well, it's the level of disagreement is very weird because it's 100% agreement on all sorts of factual things that you and I agree on.

00:57:49:15 - 00:58:11:07 Eric Weinstein But no, the pictures really do matter because when you pull a baby out of the rubble, the key question is, is that rubble due to Hamas or is that rubble due to the person who dropped the bomb? Right. So we have this concept of suicide by cop. You're about to see suicide by cop or infanticide by cop or of Munchausen, by proxy via cop, where the cop is.

00:58:11:07 - 00:58:38:16 Eric Weinstein The IDF agreed. Okay, if you want a positive vision, the baseline is Israel is going to flatten north Gaza and there's going to be tons of death and destruction. And I want I would love to stop it. The right thing to have done, in my opinion, which will not be popular, to be much more hated Arabs than than the idea of killing families through collateral damage is very simple.

00:58:38:18 - 00:58:44:15 Sam Harris I know. I know where you're going. I think I've read your mind. Go ahead. Yeah.

00:58:44:17 - 00:59:08:13 Eric Weinstein Israel has a claim on a lot of land that it controls and the Arabs have a claim on the same land as two competing claims. If you take the Israeli claim, say, look, this land is ours, but we are not pigs and we are not so attached to this land and we are not so blind to your needs that we would not give you a portion of land that we consider to be ours, because it comes from our tradition.

00:59:08:15 - 00:59:37:09 Eric Weinstein We have a schedule. If you want to live as brothers in peace, you know, there are arguments between brothers and families. But if you want a prosperous state, you go this many days without any loss of life due to terror, jihad or any of these things. And we will cede this land to your future state so that guarantee that there will be a Palestine, even though we consider the land to be ours.

00:59:37:11 - 01:00:05:16 Eric Weinstein You're interested in rape. Here's how many acres we will annex. You interested in murder, You interested in blowing up families. You want to take an exit bus over a cliff, Whatever it is that you're thinking about, here's the schedule of the acreage that you will lose. We will have an annex in ceremony, and we will name it after your victims, whatever town, whatever settlement that we're going to put in that, and it'll be permanently a part of Israel.

01:00:05:18 - 01:00:29:23 Eric Weinstein And so that way, when you do something to us where you're begging us to kill you and your children, to blow up your buildings, to bulldoze your houses, we're not going to fall for it anymore. What we're going to do is we're going to have a ribbon cutting ceremony and what we're going to see is a larger and larger and larger state of Israel as your moronic death cult continues to grind against innocent life.

01:00:30:01 - 01:00:35:13 Eric Weinstein So rather than have a single death, you're going to have a transfer of acreage. Okay.

01:00:35:15 - 01:00:40:11 Sam Harris But that entails a lot of death. Right now you're taking that acreage with tanks because.

01:00:40:11 - 01:01:06:15 Eric Weinstein Every time first of all, there's a lot of land that Israel already controls that doesn't need to be taken by a tank. You have a different situation in Gaza in particular, right. So Gaza, first of all, was is not occupied. It was given. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's controlled in terms of its borders. But when you make videos showing how oh, look, you know, we dug up all these pipes, we figured out how to get over the fence with paragliders, etc., etc..

01:01:06:21 - 01:01:26:08 Eric Weinstein You understand now why the borders are being controls. So, yes, there's a certain amount that you have to do, but you can certainly minimize this. If suddenly a giant chunk of land disappeared from the West Bank. And that was the response. And nobody died, for example.

01:01:26:12 - 01:01:30:19 Sam Harris But there's there are people on that land. I mean, how does nobody die?

01:01:30:21 - 01:01:55:07 Eric Weinstein Well, first of all, people have been transferred from and second of all, there are chunks of land, you know, there are settlements and things that have not yet been formally annexed. Israel and what I'm trying to say, Sam, is that you're speaking to somebody who speaks only the language of violence. And the thing that I don't know how to communicate is I have a rule that I can't care about somebody else's children more than they care about their children.

01:01:55:08 - 01:02:06:23 Sam Harris That they speak a different they speak there's even more important language, which is language of religious symbols. And this is where I thought you were going. I was. It turns out telepathy isn't real because.

01:02:07:01 - 01:02:09:20 Eric Weinstein Actually I was going there, but I saw that.

01:02:09:22 - 01:02:30:14 Sam Harris They care much more about buildings than about their children. Right. I mean, if you really want to see the wheels come off, Israel could say, listen, return the hostages in 48 hours or we blow up the Dome of the Rock. Right. And they just rig that building to explode. What do you think happens the entire world lights up, right?

01:02:30:15 - 01:02:41:22 Sam Harris I mean, like we're talking about it's like that's that's Armageddon, right over a building. Right. This is it's completely crazy. It's all upside down. The ethics of this are clearly upside down.

01:02:41:22 - 01:02:49:00 Eric Weinstein You don't mean buildings because there are plenty of apartment buildings where Hamas has, you know, headquarters and builds rockets.

01:02:49:02 - 01:02:49:23 Sam Harris Planes, etc..

01:02:50:02 - 01:02:51:02 Eric Weinstein Yeah, yeah.

01:02:51:04 - 01:03:04:03 Sam Harris Yeah. So but like, if you can talk about emotional leverage, that's the point of emotional leverage. That's that's more than we're going to kill all your kids, that we're going to kill this one empty building. Right. Sorry.

01:03:04:03 - 01:03:05:07 Eric Weinstein I don't know where we are exactly.

01:03:05:07 - 01:03:22:23 Sam Harris I'm just saying that that that is if you're talking about this, this is where I thought you were going with that. I mean, Israel Israel does not have leverage saying we're we're going to go back and take Gaza for ourselves or we're going to take more of the West Bank. That's not leverage. The whole place is as big as his living room.

01:03:23:00 - 01:03:24:22 Sam Harris No, it's a tiny settlement.

01:03:24:23 - 01:03:37:14 Eric Weinstein If you annex land to Israel, I guarantee you the world will freak out. It won't freak out is if you threatened a locked son. I don't even want to talk about this because I don't want to get in.

01:03:37:16 - 01:03:47:10 Sam Harris And I'm not saying I recommend that. I'm saying that that is that is how upside down the situation is. That would be the most provocative thing they could possibly do. That's that's actually under their control.

01:03:47:14 - 01:04:11:03 Konstantin Kisin Let's interrogate this idea of nixing land, because I think some criticism that I hear Hassan's critique rather than I hear and agree with is that if you start announcing land, you are going to have to do it by force, which is when you're back to square one. Israel is occupiers. They flattening cities, killing babies, etc. How is that different to where we are now?

01:04:11:05 - 01:04:25:18 Eric Weinstein I'm trying to say that in the cycle of violence, what is sought by the architects of murder, misery and horror is reprised physical kinetic reprise. I'm saying deny them that.

01:04:25:20 - 01:04:36:19 Konstantin Kisin But you're not going to deny them that. You're going to make them the jihadis. If we accept that they exist, which of course they do, they are going to scupper that process with everything they have by him.

01:04:36:19 - 01:04:38:07 Eric Weinstein As they do and some that you're.

01:04:38:09 - 01:04:44:09 Konstantin Kisin And then you're going to have to annex land on which Palestinians live, in which case you're back to collateral damage.

01:04:44:09 - 01:05:10:11 Eric Weinstein Again, occupied. Look, you've got a terrible situation, okay? We all agree I'm not coming up with this as this is what to do when you have two normal foes that are in dispute over mineral resources. We know what that is. This is not that. This is I want please flatten our apartment buildings so that we can pull the babies from the rubble.

01:05:10:11 - 01:05:43:03 Eric Weinstein We have the we have the cameras and we know how to do this in 4K, Right. This is a completely different sort of an enemy. And my claim is the story of Israel exercising power over Arabs who are not Israeli citizens is a cancerous story. And if Israel does not figure out how to get out of that story, even to the point where it's got a state that it has to go up against in a war.

01:05:43:03 - 01:06:18:17 Eric Weinstein And I agree with Sam that we fetishize now a level of morality due to professional military ethics that is probably unsustainable, an actual war between between comparable rivals. We're going to have to get a lot less squeamish. People are going to die. This is what happens in war. There's always collateral damage. And the situation that I want and, you know, again, this isn't particularly good for this the 50th anniversary attack of the Yom Kippur War.

01:06:18:19 - 01:06:49:22 Eric Weinstein I wanted this in place 20 years ago. Nobody would listen. And that was you know, based much more around blowing up a pizza parlor, you know. Okay, great. So this land that we've always thought was ours and we're going to formally take it and we're not going to have a reprisal. We're not to have a bulldozer knock over a house because Israel is being induced into a game theory, according to the local rules of the Middle East, and then broadcast into a somewhat anti-Semitic West.

01:06:50:00 - 01:07:19:13 Eric Weinstein This is the strategy of the Arabs in this situation. It's just how to get Israel to play by local rules of the Middle East for exports into a sophisticated, somewhat, you know, mildly anti-Semitic west for people, particularly on the left, who don't particularly like Jews and want to be engaged in some sort of recapitulation of the civil rights era or South African apartheid.

01:07:19:19 - 01:07:27:13 Konstantin Kisin I agree with that 100%. But that does not mean that the solution you proposed works. And that's the thing that we're talking about.

01:07:27:14 - 01:07:35:21 Sam Harris We just have to imagine what happens when you grab all that land right then where then Israel just has different borders, but there's still a war with jihadists and.

01:07:35:23 - 01:07:47:16 Eric Weinstein You're going to be one of those jihadists forever. You know, that's not going to end. And to be honest, and I can't believe we're not pushing back on this, the idea of killing people with sympathies with jihadi ideology.

01:07:47:16 - 01:07:48:12 Sam Harris No, I said I.

01:07:48:12 - 01:07:48:19 Konstantin Kisin Said.

01:07:48:21 - 01:07:50:13 Sam Harris No. I said killing jihadists.

01:07:50:17 - 01:07:51:00 Konstantin Kisin Yeah.

01:07:51:03 - 01:07:54:19 Sam Harris Not selling sympathies, sympathies for jihadism, that.

01:07:54:21 - 01:07:58:11 Eric Weinstein If I join the jihadi organization, you make me a jihadi.

01:07:58:13 - 01:07:59:19 Sam Harris Well, yeah, well, I mean.

01:07:59:21 - 01:08:02:15 Eric Weinstein We've killed Majid. Let's let's. Let's make it clear.

01:08:02:16 - 01:08:05:18 Sam Harris No, he wasn't. He wasn't a that wasn't a jihadist organization.

01:08:05:18 - 01:08:06:15 Eric Weinstein He wasn't a jihadi.

01:08:06:15 - 01:08:06:23 Sam Harris No.

01:08:07:01 - 01:08:09:05 Eric Weinstein Okay.

01:08:09:06 - 01:08:32:02 Sam Harris I mean, so the book I wrote with Maajid, based on this, you know, verbal debate, we had Islam in the future of tolerance is there to be seen. And Maajid makes lots of interesting distinctions between jihadists. Islamic jihadists are a subset of Islamists, but they're also revolutionary Islamists who don't want, you know, signing up to be suicide bombers.

01:08:32:04 - 01:08:50:11 Sam Harris And there's also Islamists who are not inclined to use violence. They're inclined to use the democratic process in order to to impose Sharia law. But it's but it's they're very patient and it's they they don't support al Qaeda and they don't support ISIS, etc.. And then there are conservative Muslims who don't support any of that, but they're still way more conservative.

01:08:50:15 - 01:09:05:12 Sam Harris You'd want them to be when you're talking about things like honor killing or the rights of women or etc.. So a lot to talk about. I'm talking about the people who are to waging jihad. Who's that like? That's the that's their gig now. Right now.

01:09:05:14 - 01:09:15:22 Eric Weinstein If the idea is there's a bright line, which is that you own multiple suicide vests you know or or even though you've never put went on but you certainly.

01:09:16:00 - 01:09:21:04 Sam Harris You know but like but like the the leaders of Hamas who are terrorist sitting in Qatar. Right now right like that.

01:09:21:05 - 01:09:26:19 Eric Weinstein They do those should be the target natural lives ahead of them.

01:09:26:21 - 01:09:33:13 Sam Harris I certainly hope not. Right. But like but that's the front line for me. Is there? It's not.

01:09:33:15 - 01:09:38:10 Eric Weinstein Okay. I only assume that those people are know that they're going to die at Israel.

01:09:38:12 - 01:09:43:10 Sam Harris You know. Well, I don't know. I mean, we have we have a non assassination right in.

01:09:43:15 - 01:09:44:19 Eric Weinstein We the US.

01:09:45:01 - 01:09:49:14 Sam Harris Well, yeah, yeah. I mean democratic societies generally would say that you.

01:09:49:14 - 01:09:50:17 Eric Weinstein Know has a non assassin.

01:09:50:17 - 01:10:18:00 Sam Harris No, no, no I'm not. But, but that it would be disavowed is anathema given our current again I'm not even I'm not even sure I know the rules of war that that would govern Israel now but you need a military lawyer to talk about the details are what I'm saying is that we should recognize who the enemy actually is and what the problem actually is.

01:10:18:00 - 01:10:30:12 Sam Harris And it's not that it's a matter of people with understandable, rational grievances who've just been pushed too far. And if you could only cater to their.

01:10:30:14 - 01:10:31:12 Eric Weinstein Demand was going to be.

01:10:31:12 - 01:10:35:01 Sam Harris Killed. Yeah, well, so that would be a good thing, right?

01:10:35:03 - 01:10:36:02 Eric Weinstein Nobody's arguing that.

01:10:36:02 - 01:10:40:08 Sam Harris Okay. But there are there are jihadis in a hundred countries, right? I understand.

01:10:40:08 - 01:10:46:11 Eric Weinstein That. So I'm trying to figure out to say whether the CIA or the Mossad, because those are two very different organizations that work.

01:10:46:13 - 01:10:55:05 Sam Harris They should be unified on this front. We should recognize that jihadism is a nonstarter for the future of of a a global civil war.

01:10:55:05 - 01:11:00:20 Eric Weinstein Assuming that assume that the people in our covert agencies already know that.

01:11:00:22 - 01:11:06:07 Sam Harris Well, I, I don't know if that's a safe assumption, but that but that would be.

01:11:06:09 - 01:11:16:05 Eric Weinstein Do you remember the Abu Dhabi? I think it was Abu Dhabi video. The guy checks into a hotel and then all the Israeli teams descend and then all of them in and all of them out.

01:11:16:07 - 01:11:27:02 Sam Harris Okay. But given the failure of the IDF to to not even prevent or even respond to what happened last week, I mean, it's just.

01:11:27:07 - 01:11:29:11 Eric Weinstein Well, what do you mean failure to respond? It hasn't happened.

01:11:29:11 - 01:11:32:18 Sam Harris Yet. No, no. What happened in the first 24 hours?

01:11:32:20 - 01:11:34:09 Eric Weinstein What do you expect?

01:11:34:11 - 01:11:55:00 Sam Harris What what what was it everyone was expecting a better no one was expecting people to be hiding in their houses for 24 hours, begging to be rescued by an IDF that didn't seem not to exist. Right. I mean, this is a colossal is a colossal intelligence failure. It's a it's a failure to even know what's happening at the border.

01:11:55:04 - 01:11:57:23 Sam Harris It's a failure to respond to an emergency. Once it once it was, you know, how.

01:11:57:23 - 01:11:59:19 Eric Weinstein Degraded Israel is. Okay.

01:11:59:23 - 01:12:11:05 Sam Harris But that's that's my point also you're asking me to assume that the Mossad and the CIA have this well and this assassination program that I'm pushing for, for Christmas while in hand. I can't make that up.

01:12:11:07 - 01:12:11:20 Eric Weinstein I believe I.

01:12:11:20 - 01:12:15:18 Sam Harris Can't make that assumption. When when you have a 1500 jihadis come.

01:12:15:18 - 01:12:17:03 Konstantin Kisin Across guys, you need to know each other.

01:12:17:08 - 01:12:46:19 Sam Harris And and there's no response. Right. Because everyone, you know, because it's Shabbat and everyone's doing something, doing something else. Right. It's it's I don't think we can take for granted that we have this that, that enough people understand what the problem actually is, because there's so many euphemisms and so much political correctness and so much multicultural bullshit, confounding a very clear discrimination that relates to the power of specific ideas.

01:12:46:21 - 01:13:41:18 Sam Harris Right? You get one issue of Dabiq. You should underst and who the enemy is. Right. And in my in my but in my experience in talking to people especially, you know, over academics, you know, you talk to the anthropologists about this, you just get a wall of of confusion. Right. So hopefully, again, I don't know. I don't know how clear anyone's thinking is when in the immediate aftermath of women, of young women be you being raped and stolen and hot as hostages from a peace rave, you have their their counterparts at, Harvard and Stanford, celebrating it.

01:13:41:20 - 01:13:58:01 Sam Harris Right. Like so so I just I don't think we can assume people know what the hell is going on and what they should be motivated to pay attention to now. And so that's why if conversations like this have any value, it's in clarifying those those variables.

01:13:58:04 - 01:14:11:08 Francis Foster One thing that I wanted to touch on very quickly, you said something very interesting, which is do you know how degraded Israel? And I don't think people understand that and I certainly don't. So could you just expand on that, please, Eric?

01:14:11:10 - 01:14:29:11 Eric Weinstein Sure. It is my belief that we have an idea that the US is the superpower that won World War two, and I claim that that is not we are not the same country that won World War two. We are so different from that country. Great. We are also different from the superpower that we were during the Cold War.

01:14:29:13 - 01:15:00:03 Eric Weinstein Unfortunately, we have incredible capabilities, particularly due to our technology, and we have some sort of problem in our own ability to project power that was manifest, let's say, the pullout from Afghanistan, particularly with respect to, well, you know, abandoning the base in the wrong order of operations, the people who carry out certain who are tasked with carrying out certain operations, there are different levels of readiness.

01:15:00:03 - 01:15:31:12 Eric Weinstein Now, the big issue between 67 in Israel and the Six-Day War and the 73 Yom Kippur War is that Israel felt very, very vulnerable before its 67 and then sort of reveals its military brilliance and power in 67 and then a short six years later, it is caught unprepared, the wrong image of its foes. You know, the Arabs are always weak.

01:15:31:12 - 01:15:56:18 Eric Weinstein They'll always they don't want to fight, blah, blah, blah. They don't have the wherewithal. Okay. Well, those beliefs completely cost Israel in 73. This is a recapitulation both directly and indirectly of the 73 situation where we find out that Israel is not the Israel that we thought it was. And as a result, it's going through a psychological same.

01:15:56:18 - 01:16:20:15 Eric Weinstein You don't remember 73, do you? I do not know. I mean, so I remember, you know, I remember it a little bit. It was it was totally shocking. Right now, I think what we found is, is that parts of the IDF are greatly degraded and Israel is through incredibly stupid internal strife over Netanyahu right before this. And, you know, I hear about intelligence failure.

01:16:20:15 - 01:16:39:10 Eric Weinstein I'm sorry. It's like I am not part of the modern world. It's not an intelligence failure. You said a reminder that your grandmother is turning 97 on your calendar. So it comes up days ahead of time. So you remember to call. You don't set a reminder on the 50th anniversary of the greatest surprise in modern times in modern Israel.

01:16:39:12 - 01:17:02:13 Eric Weinstein I just it's almost to the day. It's like, you know, I think Peter Thiel was the person who pointed out to me that the Battle of Vienna, you know, happened on September 11th or something like we should have a reminder on all of these things having nothing to do with intelligence. This is a complete screw up. And it's reflective of the fact that I'm very concerned about this.

01:17:02:13 - 01:17:29:09 Eric Weinstein I don't think the U.S. is the U.S. it thinks itself to be. I don't think that Israel is the powerhouse that it thinks itself to be. It may get there in two months. It may be that it's not so degraded that it can't snap out of it. But I'm very concerned. You know, we're mostly seemingly, you know, troubled by whether or not our SEAL Team six is transgender enough.

01:17:29:11 - 01:17:54:17 Eric Weinstein We have to recognize that we have world responsibilities. We have several politicians who want us to culturally retreat into ourselves in a multipolar, thermonuclear world with new biological capabilities. I've been at the top of my lungs screaming. Sam took me to the Sydney, Australia, where I got up on stage and said, We need to be exploding rear thermonuclear weapons above ground.

01:17:54:17 - 01:18:22:02 Eric Weinstein So people remind themselves of how dangerous the world has become. But we're in some sort of complacency in which we we think Israel is this powerhouse, but it isn't. And, you know, it's also the case that the human intelligence is probably degraded because Operation Magic Carpet and the like pulled Jews out of all of these places that natively spoke all of these languages and Muslim lands.

01:18:22:02 - 01:18:43:21 Eric Weinstein So you could put, you know, an Elie Cohen and have an Egyptian Jew infiltrate the Syrian high command way back when. But how many how many Jews can you recruit? How many Jews are currently operating secretly inside of Gaza with access to Hamas? Hamas is bragging that only five people knew the date and time, you know, of this attack.

01:18:44:01 - 01:18:59:10 Eric Weinstein And so, you know, my concern is that Israel is much more vulnerable because it isn't the state it thinks itself to be, which is exactly where it was in 1973. And it's not a coincidence that they picked the exact anniversary.

01:18:59:12 - 01:19:31:02 Sam Harris Yeah, well, I certainly agree with all of those concerns. And the one thing I actually am confused about is you raised the concept once and we haven't talked about it. I'm not not confused about jihadism, and I can't pretend to be confused about it. But antisemitism I find genuinely confusing. I why just the dynamics of it. The fact that even in the immediate aftermath of something like this, it is operative in the in the places that it's operative.

01:19:31:02 - 01:19:33:07 Sam Harris I'm again at Harvard and Stanford.

01:19:33:07 - 01:19:51:06 Konstantin Kisin Sam, are you really confused about that? Yeah, because Eric actually disagrees with me on this. And I want to hear what you have to say because we had a private conversation about it that we didn't get to finish. But isn't this the thing that all four of us have been talking about and have been concerned about is woke calling?

01:19:51:06 - 01:20:04:10 Konstantin Kisin What do you want? Ideology, world view, a set of disconnected slogans, whatever the central core of it is oppressor, oppressed dynamics and Jews. Where do they land on that?

01:20:04:15 - 01:20:07:05 Sam Harris But not in this case. I mean, it's like it's.

01:20:07:06 - 01:20:13:23 Konstantin Kisin Oh, no, it's the oppressor. It's the oppressor being slain by the oppressed is the argument. Right? So it makes perfect sense that you'd celebrate that.

01:20:14:04 - 01:20:17:09 Sam Harris Yeah, it doesn't. Well, first of all.

01:20:17:14 - 01:20:18:00 Konstantin Kisin Within.

01:20:18:00 - 01:20:46:18 Sam Harris This, antisemitism was just as real. Even in America, when the crematoria of Auschwitz were still smoking. Right? I mean, literally, you have anti-Semitic speeches on the floor of the Senate. You read David Wyman's book, The Abandonment of the Jews, right? It's just it's just it's just this catalog of of some of the ambient anti-Semitism in the U.S. during the Holocaust and after.

01:20:46:20 - 01:21:16:22 Sam Harris So it's like just the the durability of this animus, whether the Jews are on top or whether they're obviously on the bottom. I mean, literally whether they're there, they're practically eradicated. I just find. Yes, I understand its its historical origins and they are actually theological. I mean, so it is Christian and Muslim theology that that that caches, caches of doubt ultimately.

01:21:16:22 - 01:21:40:13 Sam Harris But I just don't understand there are so many people are anti-Semitic and are interested in the idea that, you know, that there's some Jewish conspiracy that's controlling everything. And the Jews are, you know, like if you're if you're very far in the right, the Jews are not white, you know. So if you're a white supremacist, the Jews are not white, and therefore they're the object of your bigotry.

01:21:40:13 - 01:21:57:16 Sam Harris But if you go far enough left, the Jews are extra white, you know, extra privileged, and therefore they lose in this victimology game. It's just the fact that it's so well subscribed. Whatever changes on the landscape.

01:21:57:18 - 01:22:28:04 Konstantin Kisin I find it very good. I saw reference just this one, and here's a very good explanation. She has a chapter in black rednecks and white liberals called Ideas Generic. And he talks about middle men, minorities all over the world, always finding themselves in this situation because of the role they feel in society, of the jobs that they do, being middlemen, they're simultaneously misunderstood by the larger society.

01:22:28:06 - 01:22:29:19 Konstantin Kisin And also.

01:22:29:21 - 01:22:34:10 Sam Harris The confusion that Kanye about his his agents and managers in Hollywood.

01:22:34:11 - 01:22:36:04 Konstantin Kisin Pretty much.

01:22:36:06 - 01:22:37:20 Sam Harris Where kind everybody.

01:22:37:22 - 01:22:40:00 Francis Foster Oh, well, he's also poison gas if.

01:22:40:02 - 01:22:45:01 Konstantin Kisin You're just sitting here, this this episode would get a lot more views, let's be honest.

01:22:45:03 - 01:23:06:07 Francis Foster But but to me, it's anti-Semitism comes from a lack of control in people's lives. Now, if you look at, for instance, the far left, they would say the Jews are in control of the banking system, the Jews. That's what the Jews control. If you look at the far right now, the the new conspiracy theory is the great replacement theory.

01:23:06:09 - 01:23:21:11 Francis Foster And what is that? The fact that the Jews are in control of Muslims coming to the West because they want to eradicate white people? I mean, it's obviously completely nonsensical, but this is what these people.

01:23:21:13 - 01:23:41:23 Sam Harris But there's there's so few Jews. And so even even in an area where they're massively overrepresented, right. I mean, even among Nobel laureates in physics. Right. There's still a minority that's like it's not they're not a majority of anything. And so the idea that they're that they're they're in control, it's just.

01:23:42:01 - 01:24:01:15 Francis Foster It's moronic. But that's what these people believe. And they believe that, you know, that this group because that's a lot of conspiracy theories come down to this group are in control, whether it's a World Economic Forum, whether it's Jewish people, but it's people who feel that they have no control they have no control over their own lives. They are powerless.

01:24:01:20 - 01:24:08:01 Francis Foster Therefore, somebody else must have the power. Therefore, which Jewish people?

01:24:08:03 - 01:24:10:14 Konstantin Kisin God speaking as a Jew.

01:24:10:16 - 01:24:12:20 Sam Harris Do you understand it?

01:24:12:22 - 01:24:16:05 Eric Weinstein A But better than this.

01:24:16:07 - 01:24:16:17 Francis Foster Well.

01:24:16:19 - 01:24:18:14 Konstantin Kisin What a loving insult.

01:24:18:16 - 01:24:20:20 Eric Weinstein A not mean.

01:24:20:22 - 01:24:25:08 Konstantin Kisin I'm kidding. Yeah, go for it, please.

01:24:25:09 - 01:25:02:19 Eric Weinstein There is a spectrum of anti-Semitism and we're talking about it. We're talking about the whole rainbow at the moment. And this sort of mutant rainbow has very different origins. So the reason I'm calling woke doesn't really point to the fact that it's revolutionary, it's violent, revolutionary thinking. That's what's behind woke. Mm hmm. The idea is we have a selling, we have a campaign, and our campaign is that oppression leads to poverty.

01:25:02:21 - 01:25:36:17 Eric Weinstein Mm hmm. So now you've got a real problem when you've got a very clearly oppressed group that is not poor, because that breaks the entire syllogism that is being used to sign people up. So the radical revolutionary left has to hate Jews because they are the counter-example that gives the lie to the entire program. And so that is why they have you have to have a position on the Jews from the far from the revolutionary left.

01:25:36:18 - 01:25:38:10 Konstantin Kisin Do they hate Japanese-Americans as much?

01:25:38:10 - 01:25:44:09 Eric Weinstein Well, it wasn't to say over over overseas Chinese Parsis, you know.

01:25:44:11 - 01:25:46:02 Konstantin Kisin That's because they're middle man minorities that.

01:25:46:06 - 01:26:16:01 Eric Weinstein Were that was we can come back to this. But it was going to say then on the right you have a different situation for example people on the right who are I keep thinking about doing a show called my friends the anti-Semites because I am actually in dialog with many of them, not to name names and a lot of them are very supportive, in fact, of Israel right now because their issue is who came up ethno nationalism.

01:26:16:02 - 01:26:48:13 Eric Weinstein The Swedes caring about Sweden is ethno nationalism. If you, you know, people have a right to be in their country without somebody say, oh, that's just blood and soil like from the Nazis. So they're feeling is how can you have a state that is Jewish star on its flag and not bring up ethno nationalism. So these are the people that crowd your Twitter comments with, you know, for me, but not for the that's their that's their line.

01:26:48:13 - 01:27:16:19 Eric Weinstein So they're feeling is, hey, you should go defend yourself and get these killers and you should go back home to Israel where you belong. Right. And so that's totally different than the left wing thing. But now the question has to do with a word that needs to be taken out of our vocabulary, which is underrepresented now, underrepresented. We talk about an underrepresented minority.

01:27:16:21 - 01:27:46:19 Eric Weinstein I don't know why somebody is underrepresented between 1987 and the start of the Boston Marathon in 1897. I don't think there were any Kenyans or Ethiopians who won the Boston Marathon. And then after 1987, it's basically straight Kenyan, Ethiopian, occasionally, you know, a Japanese guy. But are they are Kenyans and Ethiopians over represented? Are the rest of us underrepresented?

01:27:46:19 - 01:28:09:19 Eric Weinstein Well, you're holding a competition that's basically anybody can start, anybody can finish. And some people seem to be better than others. All right. Now, if you look at, you know, the so-called JQ which is the Jewish question, why are there so many Jews in all of these powerful positions? If you believe in proportional representation, then Jews are overrepresented.

01:28:09:21 - 01:28:40:23 Eric Weinstein And so you have to if you believe in underrepresented minorities, you have to get rid of the overrepresented minority. So these are all these language traps and language games, and people fear. How can there be a people that look more or less like they're of European descent who often have names that don't tell you who they are? Like McCormack or something like that, who are privately subscribed to some sort of secret rhizome in a world in which nothing adds up.

01:28:41:05 - 01:28:53:04 Eric Weinstein So particularly right now, anti-Semitism is always going to get bad when people can see that they're being lied to. It's still, I don't care who's doing the lying, it's scale. The Jews will be assumed to be behind it.

01:28:53:06 - 01:29:09:19 Sam Harris You know that That part is mysterious to me. I mean, that could just be legacy code is that we had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and then that just got grandfathered in so that the people resort to that. But the idea that that would be the story that everyone reverts.

01:29:09:19 - 01:29:11:00 Eric Weinstein To say more.

01:29:11:02 - 01:29:17:18 Sam Harris Well, why the Jews under those conditions? You said you said it's just as though we could just assume this this if.

01:29:17:22 - 01:29:54:05 Eric Weinstein Look at, for example, who founded Facebook and who founded Google. My tech giants. You've got Jews in both situations if you imagine, okay, so our electronic communication with each other is largely mediated, our ability to search, for example. So if I put in American inventors and only black faces come up at Google, I know that somebody put code in there to make it appear that most of the inventors in American history are black.

01:29:54:07 - 01:30:28:00 Eric Weinstein Who would do such a thing Like it's such a it's such an obvious bad faith thing to do on a search engine. And then, of course, it's going to be. Well, Larry and Sergey Brin, you know, if Mark Zuckerberg doesn't allow story to circulate or whatever. And so in Part B and by the way, you may start to see this with Indian-Americans, there's this very quiet, you know, to use the vernacular of our day, Indian-Americans are having a moment and you're suddenly going to realize that you don't understand what's going on with the BJP.

01:30:28:02 - 01:31:04:15 Eric Weinstein You don't know who the Shiv Sena are. You have no idea what Indian-Americans care about. And suddenly they're in all these powerful political positions. So when you have a powerful minority and particularly one that's visually indistinguishable from others, there's always going to be a fear that because you have high ranking people in media banking, universities, all of these, you know, fantastically successful Jewish populations are always to be on the hook for the fact that people can see that their information is distorted.

01:31:04:17 - 01:31:07:03 Konstantin Kisin And why aren't you successful, Eric?

01:31:07:05 - 01:31:32:17 Eric Weinstein Well, you know, the old the old answer I gave Joe Rogan when he asked me about why one quarter of 1% of the world's population would get 25% of the physics Nobel Prize is that we cheated physics, but nobody believes that. You know, I think one way of answering this question is I don't know. I don't know why 99 of the top hundred chess players in open competition are male.

01:31:32:19 - 01:31:57:22 Eric Weinstein It feels like a trap to answer the question, I would say that our culture is very clear that if we want to survive, we have to do really, really well and we have to contribute back. So as a diaspora culture, in part our strategy is over, succeed over, contribute to your host society, otherwise we can't make our equation work.

01:31:58:00 - 01:32:18:14 Eric Weinstein So in part it's it's a question of anthropic. You're only asking the supposed JQ because there are still Jews after this many thousand years and strategy works and, you know, just go. If you're in the U.S., for example, go look at who donated the wings at your local hospitals and tell me what the last names are. And I guarantee you that some of them are going to be Jewish no matter where you.

01:32:18:16 - 01:32:59:01 Eric Weinstein So in part, this is how we live. We live by being a net benefit to the societies in which we reside, and we drive ourselves incredibly hard knowing that we're always going to be fighting antisemitism. So the example I was going to give is during COVID. I didn't understand that our family's reaction was use the time in, you know, indoors to learn as much as you can, push yourself as hard as you possibly can would be badly received in the outside world, which is like, of course you're doing that because you're in a position of privilege and you just have this attitude of, you know, for a sake, if you want to look at a

01:32:59:03 - 01:33:26:06 Eric Weinstein similar culture, there's a female comedian named Zarina Garde who is explaining sort of the Indian tiger mom approach to parenting her own children. You cannot major in history. You can't major in art. You're going to major in computer science. This sort of drive to do to excel and succeed is very, very costly. And I understand a culture that doesn't push their kids as hard.

01:33:26:06 - 01:33:49:17 Eric Weinstein But to be honest, if the Jews are going to survive, they have to compete. They have to do very, very well in the competition and they have to give back. And anyone who attempts to talk about proportional representation is fundamentally messing with the Jewish equation for survival. If we cannot compete, succeed and give back, we have a serious problem as Jews.

01:33:49:19 - 01:33:51:22 Konstantin Kisin What about IQ?

01:33:51:23 - 01:33:53:01 Eric Weinstein What about it?

01:33:53:03 - 01:33:55:19 Konstantin Kisin I have heard the different groups have different IQ.

01:33:55:23 - 01:33:57:02 Eric Weinstein I've heard the same thing.

01:33:57:02 - 01:34:01:04 Konstantin Kisin And Ashkenazi Jews I have heard have a higher IQ than the average.

01:34:01:04 - 01:34:28:20 Eric Weinstein You know, no offense to that. I think what you really want to say is, is there anything to Jewish genetics? And gosh, I would hope so, because otherwise we don't know anything about genetics. Why can I spit in a tube? And it tells me what my belief structure is and what language I pray on Friday night. It's, you know, clearly it's both a genetic group and a belief structure that have traveled.

01:34:28:22 - 01:34:57:08 Eric Weinstein But for IQ, I always find this really strange IQ is just not that interesting in the upper reaches. So I'm totally up for believing the Jews have a genetic advantage. But I don't think that a few extra IQ points accounts for the level of creativity and the level of contribution. I think IQ is really powerful. Below 100, it's much less powerful, above 100.

01:34:57:10 - 01:35:29:21 Eric Weinstein This is sort of something that Nassim Taleb and I, you know, have discussed the fetish about the fact that it's measurable causes this real problem because it's it's a nightmare indicator. It's good enough to suggest that something is very real that can be tracked, that has a genetic component, but it's not good enough to explain creativity. And I think that, for example, if you talk if I talk to my East Asian friends, a lot of them are confused and they say things like, where does Jewish creativity come from?

01:35:29:21 - 01:35:51:22 Eric Weinstein We also are supposed to have very high IQ and we're still in a leader follower mode. How is it that we get into this Jewish creativity mode? So I happen to think that because people are dissuaded from talking about IQ because there's dissuaded from talking about genetics, they want to focus on IQ as if it is intelligence, which it is definitely is not.

01:35:52:00 - 01:36:14:20 Eric Weinstein It has it's a component. It's it's related to intelligence, but it isn't. And then you have this problem, which is that in some sense what really matters is the creativity that that code travels. And how much of that is genetic, I don't know. But it's not a terrible thing to say that people are genetically different and that there are tradeoffs.

01:36:14:20 - 01:36:21:07 Eric Weinstein You know, the Jewish contribution to the National Basketball Association has been pretty meager.

01:36:21:09 - 01:36:22:00 Francis Foster Eric Jews.

01:36:22:02 - 01:36:24:09 Sam Harris Blame anti-Semitism.

01:36:24:10 - 01:36:25:22 Eric Weinstein Rampant. Yeah.

01:36:26:00 - 01:36:48:12 Francis Foster Do you think it's also the fact the Jews have always tended to be outsiders, And when you're an outsider of a group to a group you're always looking in, which means that it tends towards being creative because then what you are doing is you're reflecting the society in a way that people who are a member of the in-group simply cannot.

01:36:48:13 - 01:37:00:12 Francis Foster You. There's a lot of people who say comedians tend to be outsiders. Comedians are the ones who are reflecting what is happening to the society and Jews in comedy I mean, they go to comedy.

01:37:00:18 - 01:37:13:10 Eric Weinstein Trauma and Jews. I mean, it's a perfect combination. Yeah, I don't think that works because like Roma would be outsiders to and, you know, I don't think you've seen the same sorts of behavior patterns.

01:37:13:15 - 01:37:23:09 Francis Foster I haven't mentioned the Roma having to having spent a long time teaching Roma Day are much more segregated. They're not really part of society in the way that Jews are.

01:37:23:11 - 01:37:54:23 Eric Weinstein There's also a lot of creativity in that culture, but without the same, you know, in system accomplishment and the Jews tend to be in system, they tend to work within the structures that they find and, you know, my wife being from the Jewish community of India, you know, I have an opportunity to see a very different world about, you know, where the impact of, let's just say, you know, the Sassoon family or the way that the Parsis mirror the Jews inside of an Indian context.

01:37:54:23 - 01:38:18:09 Eric Weinstein So I think that, you know, there's I don't know why we're afraid of talking about genetics and cognitive ability. I don't know why we're afraid of talking about culture and cognitive ability. I don't know why, afraid of talking about culture and drive together. But the world is not uniform and there is a Jewish thread is the great part of the Jewish strategy is is that most of it is pretty much open source.

01:38:18:11 - 01:38:34:16 Eric Weinstein And if you want to push your children really, really hard to survive, and if you want to tell them you've got a dragon with fire breathing fire down the back of your neck because you've always been oppressed and you never know when you have to leave very quickly on short notice. You can duplicate the Jewish experience.

01:38:34:18 - 01:38:40:06 Konstantin Kisin Good Luck Sam, do you have any thoughts on this? Before we move on.

01:38:40:08 - 01:39:12:04 Sam Harris Please don't say, Well, I have I have zero interest in IQ. I've always said, even though I've got a lot of pain for having ever touched the topic. But my my only interest in in differences in human intelligence, as measured by IQ or otherwise between groups, is that we need to solve the political puzzle you just mentioned, which is why does anyone think that discovering these differences would be a political catastrophe?

01:39:12:06 - 01:39:34:08 Sam Harris Because we know this is what we should. We should go into the science knowing this. I'm not saying we should look for these differences, but these differences will ambush us because insofar as we understand intelligence, anything else at the level of the brain or the level of the genome, we will just you know, 23 to me is just going to tell you that there are these differences between groups in the relevant genes.

01:39:34:08 - 01:40:02:21 Sam Harris So so I'm not saying we look for these things, but we're going to be ambushed by them. And we just have to know in advance that any human trait that is governed by genetics, to whatever degree is going to be with the moment it becomes measurable, it will be at some different mean value in different populations. How ever you define those populations, I mean, even spurious populations.

01:40:02:21 - 01:40:46:21 Sam Harris You could take Yankees fans against Red Sox fans and there's it will be a miracle if the hundred traits you're interested in to inventory are have the exact same mean level across those two groups. Now, in many cases these are just going to be spurious comparisons. But insofar as there is a there has been a a genetic kind of canonization through the throughout human history where you can look at someone and give a pretty good guess that they're you know, they come from sub-Saharan Africa or from or from the Indian subcontinent continent or Japan or Norway and you can do that.

01:40:46:23 - 01:41:21:21 Sam Harris You have to expect they're going to be mean differences in traits that we find valuable and that can't matter. I mean, the thing that the thing we we know must matter is that we are committed to political equality in all of our plural, pluralistic secular societies. And we should be. And the fact that there's there's some trait that we could eventually identify and measure that is going to be, you know, a standard deviation, more or less on average in any given population.

01:41:21:23 - 01:41:56:00 Sam Harris That's just that can't matter. And what we know is that at the individual level, it it's simply it simply can't matter because knowing that I'm 50% Ashkenazi Jew doesn't tell you anything about my intelligence. Right. As an individual, I still have to demonstrate that. And it's just and I get absolutely no credit if I'm not if I'm smart and not a bit smarter, I get no credit for having been in one population versus another.

01:41:56:03 - 01:42:18:20 Eric Weinstein The interesting thing is we don't have the Persian question because Persians are going to test really high. We don't have the Irish and Scottish question. We don't have the overseas Chinese question Right, We don't have the Parsi question. So I think you have to turn it around and say, look, there's a lot of asymmetry in terms of success of groups, and we only have the Jewish question.

01:42:18:22 - 01:42:21:18 Eric Weinstein And I think that this is what I find absolutely offensive. Well, we.

01:42:21:18 - 01:42:43:17 Konstantin Kisin Have no we only the Jewish question in Western Europe. But Tommaso, his point was that there are Jews everywhere. They're just non-Jews. There's somebody else in Asia, it's overseas Chinese in the Ottoman Empire was it was Armenians. You can go down the list, right? So there are local Jews in every area. They don't all look like you. Right?

01:42:43:17 - 01:43:00:11 Konstantin Kisin That that's really the point. But I think the broader point with both of what you're saying and the reason that we're terrified of these conversations is that it violates the sacred mantra of our society, which is all we're all equal. You know, this is this is embedded in all our conversations.

01:43:00:13 - 01:43:18:06 Sam Harris So we're all political. So there's two notions of equality here that we're yes, we can be we can conflate Political equality does not at all suggest that every person is equally talented, equally kind, equally smart. I mean, they're just making equal contributions.

01:43:18:06 - 01:43:20:21 Konstantin Kisin But people don't make that distinction. And so that's why.

01:43:21:00 - 01:43:35:10 Eric Weinstein We even the communists, the aphorism of communism is what from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Yes. The idea that we are somehow a blank slate equal. Yeah. Is totally new. It's it's beyond communism. I don't know how to state this.

01:43:35:10 - 01:43:37:19 Konstantin Kisin I'm saying this is worse than communism. It's worse and.

01:43:37:22 - 01:43:38:06 Eric Weinstein Worse than.

01:43:38:06 - 01:43:56:07 Konstantin Kisin Communism. Yeah, it is. It is. And The idea that that human beings don't vary, including by group, is just demonstrably not true. And the idea of political equality seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, was invented to address that. That's the whole fucking point. Yeah.

01:43:56:09 - 01:44:34:14 Sam Harris Yeah. And we know we want a society that is fair give and that's completely independent of the differences between people like we, we want we want everyone have the opposite in terms of our ethical and political commitments. We want everyone to have every opportunity they can use. Right. And if there's some people who can't, I mean, through no fault of their there's someone right now being born from whatever population with whatever genetic endowment, whatever culture surrounding them, what you're waiting to improve their lives with brain damage based on just a pure accident of what happened during labor.

01:44:34:14 - 01:45:03:06 Sam Harris Right. So what do we do for that person? We, you know, in a in a society where we have the bandwidth to just figure out how good life can be. Right. We're not, you know, the bombs aren't falling and we're not we're not facing some existential threat. We know we want to marshal our resources to make life as good as possible for everyone to the degree that they can have their their hopes and dreams realized.

01:45:03:06 - 01:45:32:06 Sam Harris And there are some very limited hopes and dreams that we need to cater to. I mean, just look at it like a make, you know, make a wish foundation, right? It's like you got you have kids who have pediatric cancer, who've got a time horizon of six months. What does a good life look like in that case? We we we know that success politically and economically for us in our society is to have the bandwidth to cater to that compassionately.

01:45:32:08 - 01:45:42:16 Sam Harris And that's what the project is. And figuring out what the mean value for IQ is across groups is not part of that. And it's not it's not an insult to that either.

01:45:42:22 - 01:46:06:13 Eric Weinstein But if in our founding documents we have the idea that all men are created equal, and we know that at that time women didn't have the vote and people held slaves. I don't think it's the case that one part of our soul cries out for equality at this more beautiful level. And another part of our soul says, Oh my gosh, these groups are super dangerous.

01:46:06:15 - 01:46:36:02 Eric Weinstein They cannot accumulate more power. Right? And that of our soul. We don't acknowledge that we are. We have our thumb on the scale trying to figure out who really shouldn't be voting, what information shouldn't out in the public, because it tends to prejudice people. And I believe that in some sense we're just not able to be honest about our conflicts when we say things like one man, one vote, and yet Wyoming gets two senators and California gets two senators.

01:46:36:05 - 01:47:10:17 Eric Weinstein It's clearly honored in the breach, and we don't make eye contact with the fact that we are of many minds about equality and about accomplishment and achievement and what constitutes fairness. And in all of those different circumstances, we only feel comfortable with the part of the conflict that we can talk about in public without being eviscerated. And I think that we have to just be honest that we've been very uncomfortable about what is the form of equality that we are really about.

01:47:10:17 - 01:47:33:09 Eric Weinstein And one of the things I love about the American project is, is that our documents were abstract enough that things that weren't honored initially in the first instantiation are honored over time because there wasn't there wasn't an explicit clause saying that women and blacks don't count. Right. And so as a result of this, you know, we debated should only, you know, be allowed to vote.

01:47:33:11 - 01:47:57:16 Eric Weinstein The headroom in the documents is the thing that we should embrace. And it's one of the reasons why the 1619 project was so dangerous is that we happened to have the good fortune of having wonderful documents with headroom that can mean things that weren't meant when when the republic was founded and trying to figure out how to become those people that we have never been is part of the most exciting, maybe the most exciting part of the American project.

01:47:57:18 - 01:48:02:08 Konstantin Kisin FRANCIS We've got one more topic we can open up quickly. Do you have any thoughts?

01:48:02:13 - 01:48:25:00 Francis Foster Yeah. So I want to deal because I want and I want to discuss this, which is hope, because it's very easy, particularly in the landscape that we're talking about social media and all the rest of it, to become pessimistic. But let's look at hope and the grounds for hope. Are you hopeful it as to the future.

01:48:25:02 - 01:48:28:14 Eric Weinstein As to this is the one. I wish I go first. Yeah, give it to Sam.

01:48:28:19 - 01:48:30:04 Francis Foster Okay.

01:48:30:06 - 01:49:04:14 Sam Harris Well, I just this morning I read a Connor Friedrich story. I always forget his last name, The Atlantic writer. He wrote a piece today which struck a note of hope in this emergency, which I'm not sure I, I, I certainly hope he's right. So he. He said that just as Joan Didion in one of her books. I think also with the White Album, I'm not sure said that the Manson murders were the end of the official end of the sixties.

01:49:04:14 - 01:49:39:11 Sam Harris Right know, August 1969, All the idealism of the sixties just completely once you once you have, you know, mad, wild eyed hippies, murdering people, you know, killing pregnant starlets. All the ideal idealism of the sixties just evaporated. Right. So his claim and I possibly write what happened on college campuses in response to what happened in Israel was the end of the Great Awakening in his phrasing.

01:49:39:12 - 01:50:20:10 Sam Harris It's like like we all of us are waiting for the pendulum to swing back from this. This just crazily eccentric distortion of ethics and political intuitions on the far left. And he's, uh, he's arguing that that bell just rang this week, and I certainly hope that's correct, because the the, the moral not just content ability the just the, the the abomination we're witnessing where you have the same people who are equally exercised over, you know, Halloween costumes that are a cultural appropriate appropriation.

01:50:20:11 - 01:50:49:11 Sam Harris And they're defending what happened in Israel last. It's that you know that dissonance I think, is something we need to not lose sight of that culture. And and yeah, I mean, I think if that happens, if that happens, I think that would be a very a very good thing. I mean, it would it would be a very good thing for speaking locally for American politics, too.

01:50:49:12 - 01:51:10:11 Sam Harris I mean, we have we have a, you know, 15 months or so of an election cycle that many of us worry could be truly ugly and divisive. And to not have a crazy for having a decreasingly crazy far left and Democratic as a result would be would be a good thing.

01:51:10:13 - 01:51:35:10 Eric Weinstein If you ask me. Just picking up from the Joan Didion reference, if you if you look at the passage, it is the White Album, which carefully what she says is, is that there was the sense that someone was going to go too far. Right? So she's really talking about a period between 1967 and 1969. It's really only sort of two or three years when the sixties were at that fever pitch and.

01:51:35:10 - 01:52:03:09 Eric Weinstein Then she says that it ends at that moment. It's one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read about our time, but I don't think it's accurate. I think that we've been in this probably since the Russell and Ali Dear Colleague letter in 2011. It's now 2023. This has been going wrong for a long longer. It's much more deeply enmeshed in our society.

01:52:03:09 - 01:52:29:01 Eric Weinstein I don't know that the hippies at the free clinic in San Francisco were akin to the administrators in the diversity, equity and inclusion substrate that is now infesting all of our universities when it comes to hope. To be honest, one of the most hopeful things that happened, and I hate to put it in these terms, was the death of Dianne Feinstein.

01:52:29:01 - 01:52:53:19 Eric Weinstein And I don't I'm not dancing on her grave. I didn't particularly have any strong feelings except for the fact that she was clearly not able to do her job and was being propped up by the system. And so without feeling good about the fact that someone died, although she lived a long life, there is the sense that we will never get rid of Nancy Pelosi.

01:52:53:19 - 01:53:17:12 Eric Weinstein We will never get rid of Mitch McConnell. We will never be free of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee in the form of Biden and Trump. And of course, demography is going to have its way with the things that are blocking progress. We have had the same people in power for so long that we have given up, in effect, trying to make more hopeful world.

01:53:17:12 - 01:53:52:16 Eric Weinstein If you think about Joe Biden in 1972, he was 29 years old and a senator, and he's been there ever since, more or less. So hope comes from the fact that in ten years time, these people who seem like they would never leave the stage are going to be gone. And we have a one time opportunity to reorder the world around I around a different generation of leadership, around the fact that our phones really matter in a way that are far more consequential than a piece of technology would be expected to much more akin to the printing press.

01:53:52:18 - 01:54:13:09 Eric Weinstein And there are going to be a crazy set of opportunities that if we screw them up, will probably mean the end of the world and if we don't screw them up, we will be exploring the next systems, the successor systems, instead of trying to take a twin fitted sheet and put it on a king sized mattress. And, you know, one corner was always going to pop off.

01:54:13:09 - 01:54:33:18 Eric Weinstein That's what we've been doing for decades now. Sooner later, somebody is going to have to buy or manufacture a much larger sheet for this mattress to get it to stay in place. And I think that what we're seeing is I was previously hopeful that the post-World War two order would continue to hold so that the world didn't go multipolar with weapons of mass destruction.

01:54:33:20 - 01:55:05:19 Eric Weinstein I think we're about to go multipolar. And if we survive that, then whatever structures that come after this, it's not going to be capitalism. It's not going to be communism, because you can see the church and its successors are going to break capital versus labor, labor input. This is work that I'm doing with Peter Milani. We're going to have new economic systems and it's not going to be the same players from the 20th century who are already a quarter of the way through the 21st preventing progress.

01:55:05:20 - 01:55:16:02 Eric Weinstein And it comes down to what is it that people in their thirties through fifties are going to re-engineer the silent generation and boomers move on to better things?

01:55:16:03 - 01:55:24:14 Konstantin Kisin All right. Well, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to locals where we ask Eric and Sam your questions. Continue with our own.

01:55:24:16 - 01:55:26:08 Francis Foster So what you're saying is you're part of Trump's.

01:55:26:13 - 01:55:28:17 Eric Weinstein Yeah. So build a wall.

01:55:28:19 - 01:55:30:23 Francis Foster Build a wall exactly like.

01:55:31:01 - 01:55:39:20 Konstantin Kisin You have recently made the decision not to speak to some people who disagree with you. Why is that? I think Bret is one of them.

01:55:39:22 - 01:55:53:21 Sam Harris It's not because they disagree with me, but because I think they've behaved unethically. I've always thought Bret was a a an extremely ethical person. I don't know. He got so turned around...