Humanity Needs a Plan B for Survival (YouTube Content): Difference between revisions

'''Lior''': You shall call building blocks for this collaboration with Tel Aviv International Salons and colleagues in the General Zionist faction and the World Zionist Organization. You are in for a treat tonight with two amazing thinkers, doers, and speakers. I often use the term not losing the forest for the trees. The trees are important. You can't lose sight of the details, but it's the forest. It's the big picture we got to keep our eye on and not get caught up in the details. It's the vision and two of our speakers today I surely our speaker is. And in conversation with. Then I want to welcome. Has anyone ever heard of Eric Weinstein? Because I mean I look them up just to see what I might say. And I got to tell you, there's lots. So I'll keep it brief for the sake of this conversation. Eric Weinstein, an American investor and financial executive, as of 2021, managing director for the American venture capital firm Thiel Capital. Weinstein hosts the podcast called The Portal and is a big time thinker who, as far as I can understand and I just said, does not lose the forest for the trees, cares and loves. I'm still concerned with the future of the State of Israel and by extension, the region and by extension, global citizenship in the world that we all live in. We all have to play in the sandbox with everyone. And my friend Flor Hassan Nahum who you might know. Anyone know Flor? Don't not shake your head at me. Israeli politician, media expert, served as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, in charge of foreign relations, Israeli international economic development and tourism.

'''Lior''': Also the co-founder and founding member of the UAE Israel Business Council and is our Secretary General of Israel, the General Zionist faction of the World Zionist Organization. Before I bring them up, I just want to point out and set this up for a moment. I'm Israel and by extension, humanity stands at the intersection of history. These are very telling and interesting times. And the question we ought to ask ourselves is, what is the future going to say about us? Their ancestors? What in 100 years from now will they say about all of us? What were the decisions we made, the actions we took? What kind of ancestors are we going to be for our future? Very important. And as we enter this stage, I want to welcome our speakers in conversation with one another. Please. Nice round of applause for Eric Weinstein and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': "I want to hold your hand."

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

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

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

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

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

'''Eric Weinstein''': It's a devitalizing force.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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