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

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': Post. A very cryptic [https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1714029814968189120 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_warfare 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''': 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Republic 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Arabism 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System 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.

'''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.

'''Eric Weinstein''': No, because in part—so I have a different concept called Weaponized Shabbat, where every—I didn't think that was a funny line, but good to know.

'''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.