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

'''Eric Weinstein''': I really like that first option so much better. You know, violence is a language, and the Iranians are nothing if not gifted. And they speak it beautifully. And they sent you a message with a lot of ballistic missiles that fell.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Okay. But the key point is that there wasn't a catastrophic loss of life.

'''Eric Weinstein''': I think that the Persians are some of the most gifted people, and I think that Shimon Peres’ old concern was we do not know how to do the game theory of a nuclear theocracy. Right? Just like you guys, your guys are messing around with the Palestinian Arabs and you're missing the bigger picture that the game theory of a potentially thermonuclear theocracy is completely unknown, particularly one with an advanced concept of heaven.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yes, but not everybody speaks it well. I remember Ariel Sharon, translated into English saying something beautifully. He says, "What is this murderous frenzy that has descended over our Arab neighbors," right? He divorced the concept of the frenzy from the actual humans that he would have to deal with over time. Arab diplomacy is one of the wonders of the world. I worry that we don't have enough skilled players and that people are being quite crude and that in part that's dangerous. When you have unskilled players, you're not necessarily safer if they're a little bit less brutal, because you just don't have an ability to read each other's moves. I believe that Iran was speaking to you in a very skilled fashion. I could be wrong.

'''Eric Weinstein''': We don't know that you really have a defense if we decide to do this thing in earnest, and you should not take comfort from your ability to shoot things down launched from Gaza to think that that is going to work if this is—

'''Eric Weinstein''': I'm not in the position, having been here for two days for the first time in 30 years, to tell you what to say.

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': C’mon, Eric—

'''Eric Weinstein''': I absolutely refuse. It is—I have not picked up a gun. I have not sent my children here to fight in your army. And it would be absolutely irresponsible for me to say what you should or shouldn't do. I will say this. You are also endangering the diaspora and the planet with a very dangerous conflict that can easily spread. One of the great nightmares for the US is that suddenly we have too many theaters in play. We've got one going on in Russia and Ukraine. We've got another one with the Taiwan Straits, we have one with the Middle East, and there are only so many bases, so many carriers. And the fact is, if the US retreats into the sort of Christian national isolationist movement, which I think is very bizarre, the idea that these two oceans will protect us indefinitely, and even to take the words "America First," which we associate with people who did not feel that America was threatened by Hitler.

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': Yeah. Well, it took a while until they, I mean, until Pearl Harbor, they didn't really go in in earnest.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, but Pearl Harbor is a very mysterious situation—

'''Eric Weinstein''': If you look at the McCollum memo, you will find that the US was trying to figure out how to get attacked in the Pacific, and—you don't know about this?

'''Eric Weinstein''': So the US has to sometimes manufacture casus belli, cause for war. And so, in fact, starving Japan for resources because Japan is resource poor was definitely something that the US was interested in. Just like "Remember the Maine" or the Gulf of Tonkin solution. So part of the problem is that we're having a child's discussion of conflict, and we are suddenly now all capable of reaching many people on social media. Most of us don't know anything, myself included. And—

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': I would love to get Joe Rogan here. Can we let you do that for us? I'll organize it. Let's get him here.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Look, I'd love to offer it to him if he hasn't been here. And, you know, potentially, I think that there are other names. You know, you should just keep in mind Joe doesn't know—I don't think Joe has a very strong sense of this place. I don't know if you were all following the Daryl Cooper story. Here's something many of you probably don't know. Daryl Cooper reached out to me before almost anyone was aware of him and said, "Hey, Eric, Jocko Willink and I want to meet with you because you keep talking about Witold Pilecki, the great hero, Polish hero, who dressed up as a Jew to get taken into Auschwitz to organize resistance and reconnaissance, smuggled himself out, told the world, and got executed after the war. And you keep talking about this great hero of the Jewish people, saying that we should have an entire month devoted to him"—sorry, I'm going to get emotional—"we'd like to do a series with you." You don't know how these people are actually thinking—they're having—you can be angry at him. You can be very worried about him. But he's a much more complex and interesting person than many of you know. Candace Owens was the one who invited me to meet Kanye on the first day she met her hero. It's important—I keep threatening to do this series, which I don't know whether it's a totally bad idea. I don't know whether I fully said this in public, but—called "My Friends the Anti-Semites."

'''Eric Weinstein''': So the idea being that people have all sorts of ideas about what the Jews are and what the Jews do—the Jews, the Jews, the Jews. My feeling is, for God's sake, if you have a Shabbat table, it's a miracle that you know, every week people who have no tradition who’ve lost their sense of themselves, people who are connected to us through the Judeo-Christian thinking, invite them in, invite in people who are not Jewish to see who we actually are so that these crazy ideas are nullified, you know, because to us, it seems like, so you think we use the blood of your children to make mozza? Well, that’s quickly dispelled once you're a part of it—I often—sometimes people will say to me this thing about, "Eric, it sounds like you think that there's a problem with violence in Islam." And I always say, "Oh, you don't know what you just told me." And the person doesn't expect that reaction. They say, "Well, what did I just tell you?" And I say, "You have absolutely no close Muslim friends, because otherwise you'd be at their dinner table, and that's what they're discussing, because they are frequently the most frequent targets of that violence." And the fact is that the Islamic world knows that it's got a problem. And, you know, in part, getting to know each other at that deeper level is really important. And I think every Shabbat table, my wife and I used to worry that we would offend people to come in and pray because they're not religious or they're not in our tradition. It doesn't work at all like that.

'''Eric Weinstein''': They love it, they love knowing, okay, is this what Christianity is derived from? And you sing and you get together with family, and this is a tradition. You do this 50 weeks out of a year and screw up two weeks? Yeah, more or less. Absolutely. We should have a service in which we list our Shabbat dinners, and we invite people who are curious or afraid or don't know better, come.

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': That’s probably those bold ideas that you're talking about teaching the world. In the book "The Genius of Israel" by Dan Singer and Saul Singer, they call Shabbat Thanksgiving once a week. When you see in American culture where the whole family get to meet with Thanksgiving, we do this once a week. And this is part of the reason why we appreciate family. Well, we want to have a lot of kids. It's all part of that puzzle that you believe we should be exporting in a big way.

'''Eric Weinstein''': But the holiday that I really care about beyond that is, I don't think people understand Passover well enough. And it's a weird thing to say, but it's a survival manual. It's not a dinner, it's a survival menu. It's not a dinner. Right now, we have to contend with the idea that the Israelites who survived were the ones who left when there was nowhere to go, and my claim is, and this is, you know, again, an unpopular one, we cannot all be on a thermonuclear planet sharing one atmosphere. It is time to leave, time to spread out. And there is nowhere to go. Elon is talking about Mars. And at least Elon is talking about Mars and the moon, which is insane. Those are very barren planets. Yeah, but quite honestly, my claim is—and this is just it'll discredit me so you don't have to listen to any of the previous stuff I said—Earth is Mizrahim, humanity is the Jews, and we're waiting for the bread to rise and we gotta stop.

'''Eric Weinstein''': When we figure out whether or not the restriction placed on us by a man offered the presidency of the state, Albert Einstein, told us, you can't go faster than the speed of light and the nearest star is four light years away. We are so far away from anywhere else to go other than the moon or Mars. The only two rocks that are really reachable with chemical rockets. We have to dream bigger. We are very good at physics. Let's at least admit we are very good at physics. I was two years here, in part because I wanted to push the Einsteinian limits that are placed on us by General Relativity to some place—are there any cheat codes? Are there any ways around this that aren't involving wormholes or violating differential geometry, which are not going to happen? So one of the things that I'm really excited about is that we're about to revitalize. We have a very brief period of time to figure out how to do the impossible. We're a miracle-based culture. We have to lead and we have to get humanity so that it's not sharing one atmosphere. The landmasses aren't the big issue. The problem is that there's no Israeli atmosphere or Jordanian atmosphere or Chinese atmosphere. If you lose the atmosphere, which is where pestilence, you know, pathogens travel in the atmosphere, radiation travels in the atmosphere and climate travel in the atmosphere. We cannot afford to be this powerful. The stupid and all crowded onto one planet with one atmosphere is the craziest thing I'll say tonight, so everything else will be much more normal than that.

'''Eric Weinstein''': You know, there's an old joke, which I hope you know, I'm not going to tell the joke, just the punchline, because that's what we do in this culture. "Jews, you've got 23 minutes to learn how to live underwater." See, this man knows it. It's time to do the impossible again. And that's what we do. So my feeling is that in part, scientific leadership is incredibly important. Our notion of physics, our fundamental understanding of ourselves, hasn't advanced in 52 years, since 1973. And it is time to restart that.

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': Well, God bless you, Eric Weinstein, for leading that charge, for leading that conversation. And I will be remiss if I don't open up to some questions because I think there's a lot of people here, but we'll try and keep it.

'''Lasha''': Hi. So I'm a lecturer of Yiddish, Talmud, and Torah. And I'm not Jewish. I was raised by an Ashkenazi Jewish nanny who brought me and my brother into so much love about the Jewish world. I'm from the country of Georgia. I love your nation very much. I'm a big Zionist. I'm happy to be here. And one thing that really causes pain in my heart is that Israel is not doing enough to recruit non-Jewish friends.

'''Eric Weinstein''': And Lasha, if I could ask you, where do I get good Khinkali, Tachun, and some of that great Georgian wine when I'm in Tel Aviv? What? I’ll come to Georgia?

'''Speaker 4''': Sorry, it's—I’ve listened to, like, 100 hours of you talk, so limiting myself to just one question—

'''Speaker 4''': Yeah. Say hi to Brett and Heather for me. But so James Lindsay labels the Christian woke right and the woke left as two sides of the same psyop. Or put in your language, memetic weapons and hybrid warfare. Who are deploying these idea weapons? Are they the same group of people that locked away the branches of physics? Are they the people hiding the UFOs? Is it Qatar? China? Are we dealing with the remnants of a KGB op like Yuri Bismuth? Is it some combination of other factions? If you had to guess, who are these people and what do they want?

'''Eric Weinstein''': So this is the big problem with conspiracy theories, and why they have such a terrible name, is that people don't realize the princess cannot feel whether it's a pea or a golf ball or even a watermelon if there's too many mattresses. So my point is that you have to learn when things don't make sense without immediately filling the hole. We don't really know. I can tell you with almost certainty that the US has had quiet and highly classified UFO programs where nobody has any idea that I know whether they're actually UFOs or aliens anywhere near them. And so, in part, I have an equation called UAP=SAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena equals Special Access Programs. The US, when it chooses to do something cool, always does something fake. So Operation Overlord was the invasion of Normandy during World War Two, but Operation Fortitude and Operation Bodyguard were the fake operations to disguise Operation Overlord so that nobody would understand what the troop buildup was about. So, in part, we don't know, for example, whether, let's just take the UFOs, whether there's any UFOs in this thing, and it's just a cover for super advanced aerospace or to try to get the Chinese and the Russians to invest precious treasure in the wrong programs. When it comes to all of these things that don't add up and don't make sense, we have to recognize that the Jews are very vulnerable because we will be viewed as a secretive organization. And one of the reasons I've been extremely vocal about Jeffrey Epstein, having met him once, is that it's very important, I mean, this is a completely disgusting human being—it’s possible that he was an intelligence construct because he certainly didn't behave like a financier. "Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Assume for the moment that he was a joint CIA, Mossad project. It's very important to recognize that the Jews wouldn't have put him up to that or the Americans wouldn't. It would be a couple of operatives in a super secret place that made a terribly catastrophic decision to destroy the lives of young girls with a psychopath. And as a result, we have to understand that we are entitled to covert operations, but it is also a great danger to do too much through covert operations, because what that does is it creates a sense that the world doesn't add up and it doesn't make sense. And I guarantee you it'll always be the same seven groups of people who are suspected as being the hand behind it. I don't know, I can tell you many things don't make sense. Most of them have to do with tacit and quiet agreements. That's the age we're living in. I personally believe that Anthony Fauci knew that the 77 Nobel laureates who claimed that the EcoHealth Alliance had to be defended, that that was complete nonsense. I think Jeffrey Sachs was put in charge of this. And he found out that he had appointed all of the foxes to guard the henhouse. We have a problem that we're not being honest with people at a level that we can't afford. Governments can't afford to be honest. This idea of "transparency is everything," and "sunlight is the best disinfectant"—anybody who knows medicine knows that Brucella is an infection that gets worse with sunlight. You can't just open everything up. The mania for transparency is a mania. The key point is we have to bring these down to appreciable levels. We need more honesty, if not total honesty. And I don't know what to do about all of the things that don't add up, because in the late stages of the post-World War Two era, many of the people in charge of these programs don't understand how they work.

'''Speaker 5''': Hey, Eric, so based on your worldview, it sounds like we are either doomed to destroy ourselves as a vitalized society or to die out as a devitalized society that does not reproduce and pursue our biological drive. So is there an in-between place, or are we going to destroy ourselves one way or the other?

'''Speaker 5''': Aren't we currently—we're in a transition from a vitalized time to a devitalized time, and the in-between part—

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': Devitalized to—

'''Eric Weinstein''': We were somewhat vital from ’45 to early ‘70s. Then we've had approximately 50 years of really radical devitalization, okay? We are now revitalizing. There's a race. You know, the phrase "you can just do things" is no joke. What I believe is you—choose to use this moment wisely. There is no post-Cold War, the post-Cold War is forever. Your neighbors are going to have thermonuclear weapons in short order. You cannot keep nuclear proliferation from happening forever. I could explain why there's no real secret behind the Teller-Ulam design. The only thing you can do is gate the amount of weapons-grade radioactive material. We are in a very temporary situation. Can you use this time to do anything—and this is the project of my life—to restore an indefinite human future? That is the problem post November of 1952, which is when Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear weapon, was explored in the Pacific. So the key question is, up until 1952, that's really the BC-AD moment. November of ’52. We lost that. We have a temporary peace that Steven Pinker has totally misunderstood, where we have potential violence that stops the realized violence and what the question is now, what are you going to do with the short period of time before the world gets really crazy at levels that we've never seen and none of us have any experience with? And my claim is that the project for great people and rich people and smart people is the restoration of an indefinite human future, which was lost in November of ‘52. And nobody knows quite what that means. And that's why the Passover thing is so potent and people don't understand it, except here. You have to decide that you're leaving your dangerous situation with nowhere to go. If you said, "Look, there's no way across the Red Sea," you didn't get to the Promised Land. Right now, there's nowhere to go. We've lost our indefinite human future. The courageous thing to do is to admit it and then say, "Okay, now what?" And we're not doing that. And I don't know why it's so—I think people are so frightened of that question that they don’t realize that our survival manual, the seder, tells us you leave before there is an option. There was no option out. And they left anyway. You start working on this problem now. There is no peace dividend. There is no peace dividend in the US. What we were supposed to do is to take this time and run like hell to try to come up with the solution. And nobody is paying—what is the entire budget of planet Earth for interstellar travel? My guess is it’s zero. Think about that. It's not even a small allocation. It's dead zero. I've tried to talk to Elon about this. Like, what are you doing? You're not going to get anything with the moon and Mars. It's barely any diversification at all, and it's very difficult. Right now the key question is do you have a governance strategy for an indefinite human future? Do you have any kind of technological strategy for keeping people good? Does that mean that you're going to have a spying society that knows when anybody starts to do something dangerous? Are you going to innovate some new form of economics? Nobody knows. But you have to work on a problem which seems to have no answer before there is an answer, and no one's working on it and no one's putting money towards it. And I have no idea what we're doing.

'''Eric Weinstein''': I bet my whole life on it. You come to Hebrew University, Givat Ram, and—

'''Speaker 6''': Sort of. Mine had to do with the Western civilization collapse and you sort of answered it in a way. You're optimistic that we haven't passed inflection point, right?

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yes. But Douglas Murray cannot be the only person in Europe fighting this good fight. You know, you can't—I love Douglas, but the fact of the matter is, we've got to find—it’s one of these great problems. How do you find a decent solution to revitalization, to renewing our faith in ourselves that doesn't become jingoistic? That doesn't become insufferable? That speaks to our best tendencies when you have allowed certain sorts of things to happen? So one of the things is you've got to stop focusing on Islam. You have to focus on totalizing ideologies. The problem with Islam is not, you know, that their hummus is better than ours or who knows what. The problem is totalizing. We cannot afford totalizing ideologies in open societies, particularly thermonuclear open societies, because if somebody gets control of that society, then you've got a new world of problems. And so my feeling about this is nobody has figured out how to have a vital European society that doesn't need to rely on immigration rates to protect its dependency ratios, to take care of the elderly, etc., etc., etc. What we did is we started trying this experiment, which was the United States of Europe, and the United States of Europe was an idea that you could get fiscal union without getting political union. Then you allowed everybody to issue their own debt, but nobody could issue fiat currency to print their way out of their debt. That would cause economic crisis, which is what we had in the European debt crisis. And then you would backdoor European Union to people who didn't want it.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So this is what, like, this concept of these paternalistic architects had—genius plan, but then it took way too long, nobody remembered the plan when the crisis actually happened. It's not clear that Europeans want to be homogenized, and so, in part, you know, one of the things that's happening in our time is the repudiation of these grand 20th-century plans. So, for example, India is repudiating Gandhi-Nehruism. Turkey is repudiating Ataturkism. We're repudiating the Great Society Programs like the Immigration Act of 1965 in the US. We're returning to the blood and soil speech in the UK. You have all of these repudiations of grand, idealistic visions that didn’t quite work out. And that's really what this time is about, in part, you know, it might be, for example, the repudiation of Ben-Gurion's vision, but it's not happening here in the same way, the rest of the world is sick of the idealisms that went on for too long and didn't deliver on the promises. And that's why you’re experimenting with authoritarianism everywhere. And people are looking at Hungary and saying, "You know, I used to think you guys were crazy. Now tell us more about how you're getting this done," or, "What’s going on in Poland? You seem to have an effective border patrol." That's what I see happening. And the key question is how to not lose our soul trying to just remember, what does it mean to be Swedish? It shouldn't be a huge conversation. What does it mean to be male or female? What does it mean to be decent and welcoming, but not just leave the door open and be a doormat for anybody who wants to walk all over you? Nobody's figured this out.

'''Speaker 7''': So this kind of relates to what you just said. And birth rates in Europe. You mentioned that our birth rate is kind of the envy of the Western world, but isn't it a bit more nuanced than just being connected to family? Because if you look closely at the demographics in Israel, you actually have a declining birth rate in the secular community and a rising birth rate in the religious community, both Jews and religious Arabs, Muslims, and Christians, so wouldn't it—?

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': Like, not according to many statistics. In fact, we have the highest birth rate, even take out the Haredim, of the OECD countries without the Haredim.

'''Speaker 7''': I'm talking proportionately within Israel, not in comparison to the Western world. Obviously, we have, you know, four kids as opposed to two, like in most of Europe, but proportionately. So if you look at the Western world, which has kind of had a bit of a decline in religiosity, wouldn't it make sense that if they go back to the roots of religion, Christianity or whatever it is, that they would have an incline in the birth rate? Because if you look at Islam, they do.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So, you know, again, my feeling is that there's a differential in the birth rate and certainly, you know, my great-grandmother Bunya was named Fabrika, factory in Russian, because she just kept churning them out at numbers you couldn't even believe. First of all, there's two-way traffic between the religious and the secular. When the religious life is just too cumbersome and burdensome, people leave religion, and then when people feel too empty and hopeless, they welcome that structure that they realize that they've been missing. It's very hard to stay at the sweet spot of just enough religiosity. So the thing about Israel that is kind of special is that, you know, as people used to say when I was here, "I don't go to synagogue because my country is a synagogue." Okay. So you sort of can fall in love with somebody in your own tradition by accident without having to make a point of it. One of the least woke things you can say in the world is, "I want my son to marry a nice Jewish girl." You can see how many things you violated in pushing that upon your child. We are both very religious and secular, and as you can see by the number of kippahs in the audience, people are sitting side by side and having lives, which are—how many times have you seen a person in a hijab walking next to somebody in a mini skirt? It happens all the time. We have to recognize that we are not as divided, no matter which religion you're in. We go back and forth between religiosity and secular nature and these are not permanent groups. So if the religious have a huge number of children, I would expect that some of those children will be DJs in Tel Aviv in short order. And if there's way too much, you know, weed smoking and debauchery, I imagine that the knit kippahs will multiply, you know, somewhere around Jerusalem. I don't know.

'''Speaker 8''': And thank you, Fleur. Thank you, Pia. Burn his passport. You should both stay, Eric. Welcome home, Ladache. And thank you all from the Tel Aviv International Salon. Thank you, Building Blocks and Ilan, Kol Yisrael. Guys, have a great night.