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July 18, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:30:00
20250718_the-beginning-of-the-end-eric-weinstein-bill-oreil
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Epstein Files and Political Secrecy 00:14:44
You met Epstein.
Was he weird?
Was he unusual?
I will remember it, you know, for the rest of my life as being terrifying.
He knew things about my work that were essentially known to no one.
A lot of the MAGA crowd, Dan Bonginho and others, saying we're going to have full transparency, we're going to get to the bottom of this, we're going to get all this stuff out there.
When they're the ones leaving the shutdown, you can't put out names associated with a heinous criminal like Epstein unless those people are under investigation.
Some percentage of America feels so strongly about state abuse and feeling that we are not getting to the bottom of this that if they suspect state-sponsored pedophilia, they will go to the ends of the earth to push it into the light.
It's been a surreal few weeks to say the least from President Trump's F-bomb to end the real bombs in Israel to Sesame Street Elmo going full Kenya in a series of anti-Semitic rants.
It was hacked.
Few things would be more fascinating than the schism among U.S. conservatives about the Epstein files and the increasing muddle the president finds himself in over who is to blame.
We're going to unpack all this in a moment with two big thinkers.
Eric Weinstein will be joining me shortly.
But first, the host of No Spin News on YouTube, author and legendary commentator Bill O'Reilly.
Bill, great to have you back on our censored.
Thanks for having me in Pierce.
Are we going through a period of sustained madness or has it always been like this, but without the fuel of social media?
Are you talking about the Epstein case or just in general?
Just general.
Yeah, I think there's a little hysteria around the world at this point because the iPhones are available 24-7 and people read the most outrageous garbage in the world.
And unfortunately, some of them believe that, so that they're in a perpetual state of chaos and hysteria.
That didn't happen 10 years ago, and it is now, particularly among younger people who don't know anything.
So that's a danger, but we live in a society where we have freedom of speech and we can consume what we want.
There's a lot of fascinating splits developing on the conservative right in America over the Epstein files.
And I've been really keen to get your take on this.
A, first of all, what do you make of the Epstein scandal and where we've got to with it?
I think it's a contrived scandal at this point, but I could be wrong.
You know, I'm a linear thinker.
A leads to B, leads to C, leads to D, and I'm also an evidence seeker.
So when Epstein killed himself in 2019, I talked to my New York City sources in the coroner's office, and they're honest people.
They wouldn't do any fake stuff, like say it was suicide when it was a murder.
It's impossible.
They wouldn't do it.
There's no way.
So we put that to bed pretty quickly.
Now, was there collusion in the hospital to make it easy for Epstein to hang himself?
Could be.
And that's up to the federal prisons to investigate.
And then you go on to the case itself that William Barr prosecuted under Donald Trump, the Attorney General.
And that whole file was passed along to the Biden people for four years, Merrick Garland.
They had everything.
So if there were any, you know, big name Republicans or anybody like that, it would have been out.
It would have been leaked by the Biden people to the New York Times.
That's the pipeline.
But that never happened.
And there wasn't any outrage on the part of the left that the Garland people didn't put out a summation.
Enter Donald Trump.
The game of Trump is to get him no matter what.
Get him, it doesn't matter if it's true, Russian collusion.
We all know that game.
And when Attorney General Bondi made her mistake that said, oh, I got this file right here and I'm looking it over and you're all going to get it.
I've been, okay, good.
But then it didn't happen and boom, this is America.
So immediately people tried to use it to hurt the opposition and that's where we are.
I mean, it struck me that probably the most incendiary part of the last few weeks in relation to this was when Elon Musk had his massive falling out with President Trump.
And he went on late night on his own ex-social media platform and posted, you know, the biggest bombshell is that President Trump is in the Epstein files.
And then just a few weeks after that, three weeks or whatever it may be, the whole thing gets shut down.
The conspiracy theorists are having a field day with that axis of the timeline.
You know, Elon Musk says that right at the point that many in the administration, Alina Haber came on my show, could not have been more like, this is big and scandalous and there's going to be names and details and everything else.
And then the Elon Post and then it all gets shut down.
You know, you don't actually have to be a mad conspiracy theorist to think that's all a bit weird.
Yeah, you can be a conspiracy person.
I mean, weird is a good word, but how does Elena and Elon know what's in the file?
They don't know.
And I think Elon Musk repudiated that ex-posting, did he not?
Didn't he not repudiate it?
I think he deleted it.
I don't think he's repudiated.
I think he just deleted it.
Yeah, I don't think he's pushing that now.
I think that's accurate.
But look, I don't know what's in the file.
You don't know what's in the file.
The only people that know, here's who knows what's in the file, okay?
The FBI chiefs under Biden and Trump, they know, okay?
Merrick Garland, he knows.
Bondi knows, okay?
And you would assume Biden and Trump themselves know what's in the file.
If it is a file, it might not be a file, might be a page of paper, might be 100 pages of paper.
That's it.
So to me, as a journalist, anybody else commenting on it is a bunch of hoo-ey.
They don't know.
And they're just trying to stoke it up.
You know, Piers, you've been in a game long enough to know how much money conspiracy people make.
Oh, sure.
I mean, I wrote Killing Kennedy and knocked them all out of the box, but people made millions of dollars on these hare-brained, this person killed JFK, you know?
And then when I got the primary source material from the FBI and just said, this is what it was.
And, you know, conspiracies make money and they draw attention to people who peddle them.
We don't ever play that game here.
The problem, it seems to me, I interviewed Alan Dershowitz this week, who, of course, acted for Epstein.
And he said that he knows of a few names of men who have been directly implicated in this.
And he believes that they should all be, everything should be revealed.
And so part of the problem here is a lot of the MAGA crowd who listened to a lot of people, Dan Bonginho and others before they came into power, saying we're going to have full transparency.
We're going to get to the bottom of this.
We're going to get all this stuff out there.
When they're the ones leading the shutdown, and you've got people like Dershowitz saying, well, actually, there are names.
I've seen them.
And this should be made public.
That's the problem.
You can't just, I don't think you can just dismiss it all as actually we looked at it and there's nothing to see here, Gov. We had a boat trafficking hundreds of potentially in criminal acts of underage girls, and there's nothing to see here.
Well, number one, Dershwitz said there's no big names involved.
He wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that said that.
So that takes out any kind of real scandal.
Number two, there's only one guy.
Only one that can provide an exposition here, and that's President Trump.
Now, it's interesting because on St. Patrick's Day, I was in the Oval Office with Donald Trump and talking about a number of things.
And this came up, but not just Epstein.
Kennedy filed Epstein in a Martin Luther King file, which I'd very much like to see.
I want to know how James Errol Ray got financed after he shot Dr. King to death.
That file is still being held by the U.S. government, and I'd like to see it.
Now, I said to him, because he asked me, I don't intrude on the president unless he asked me.
I said, look, I understand, you understand.
You can't just put out the massive unredacted report on Epstein because somebody might have had a cup of coffee with him and that person's life would be ruined.
You know what the press does.
There's no context.
So you can't put out names associated with a heinous criminal like Epstein unless those people are under investigation.
And Dershowitz has not said anybody specifically is under investigation.
I don't know of anybody who is at this point.
Maybe there is.
Then you could put that name out.
Trump agreed.
He goes, you know, a lot of people.
But I said what you can do and what I would do would be hold a press conference with the Attorney General, generally outline what the government knows.
That's it.
I agree.
Get Bondi and get Merrick Garland.
Get them both.
Press conference.
Here's what we know.
That's it.
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But instead, Donald Trump's now gone on the attack, which I was expecting at some stage to happen.
And midweek, I think it was Wednesday, he said this in the Oval Office.
It's a hoax.
It's started by Democrats.
It's been run by the Democrats for four years.
You had Christopher Wray and these characters in Comey before him.
And it's a bad group.
It started, actually, look at the steel dossier.
That turned out to be a total hoax.
The 51 agents, the intelligence, so-called intelligence agents, it was a hoax.
It's all been a big hoax.
It's perpetrated by the Democrats.
Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net, and so they try and do the Democrats' work.
Now, that clip blew up massively online, Bill.
Was Donald Trump wise to use some of that language attacking fellow Republicans?
Look, you have to understand who he is, all right?
You're going to say what he wants to say.
What he says on Wednesday is different than what he's going to say on Thursday.
I always say, if you're going to try to analyze President Trump by what he says, you're just going to hit your head against the wall.
Watch what he does.
That being said by me, this is an easy solve.
It's not a hard solve.
If you just take my advice and hold that press conference and put everything, it's never going to go away.
But what Americans are particularly sensitive to, and this is the most important point I'm going to make on your program tonight.
They don't want rich and powerful people getting preferable treatment.
They don't want it, particularly in a criminal area.
And that's what's being sold here.
That there's some nefarious thing, some big names.
You mentioned Prince Andrew, okay?
And they're not getting prosecuted because they got money and power.
Americans just recoil at that.
You got to put that to bed.
Dershowish put it to bed.
My point about Merrick Garland and Biden having this material for four years and nothing came out, I think is pretty overwhelming evidence.
But Trump's got to do that too.
His people have got to do that.
Let's just pivot quickly, Bill, to Vladimir Putin.
You called him one of the worst of the worst in your new book.
On your YouTube channel, you said that Trump did really think he would get a quick ceasefire on the country office.
I know that.
He said that to me.
And I do think he's been genuinely so distressed by the sheer number of young men being slaughtered in the battlefields of Ukraine and is desperate to bring it to an end.
But it seems to me what's happened in the last week is that Putin's just pushed this too far with Trump to an extent where he appears to be openly mocking him, has a long conversation with him one day.
That night he launches the biggest barrage of bombs on Kyiv since the war began.
And that's triggered Trump using much more aggressive language about Putin, giving him 50 days now to sort of deal or face whatever punishment Trump has in mind for him.
What's your take on this as to where we are?
Well, if you read Confronting Evil out September 9th, you'll know who Putin is.
He's a psychopath.
He enjoys killing women and children.
Since he's been a little boy, he's done that.
It's shocking.
Putin as a Psychopath 00:05:41
We went way, way back into Putin's background.
Okay.
And so when you're dealing with a psychopath who enjoys inflicting pain on other people, all right, it's a whole different thing.
President Trump didn't get that.
And I told him in the interview in 2016 that went all over the world, watch out for Putin.
Watch out for this man.
Okay.
He idolizes Joseph Stalin.
Do I got to say more than that?
All right.
So now Trump did two things.
He wanted to believe that Putin would deal with him upfront and the Ukraine war would stop.
He campaigned on that.
And he did that because in his four years at first term, Putin cooperated with Trump mostly.
Didn't have a lot of trouble with Putin.
So he felt that Vlad would continue their relationship.
But Vlad has deteriorated mentally in a very dramatic way.
He's now almost a lunatic.
That's what you're dealing with here.
So any responsible president, you've got to give every benefit of the doubt before you get into any kind of real upgrade of this conflict because it'll be a worldwide conflict.
And that's what Trump did.
He gave Putin six months, you know, because Putin would lie to him on a phone.
He said, oh, yeah, we'll do it.
We'll work it out.
Don't worry about it.
In the meantime, as you rightly pointed out, Putin's lobbing bombs to kill babies, women, and blow up hospitals.
I mean, just think about this.
He's a war criminal on Putin.
There's no way out for him, by the way.
And that might be in Putin's thinking.
There's no way out.
He can't rehab himself.
All right.
So now Trump is going to take action against him.
And he did a very shrewd thing by selling American weapons, big-time weapons, to NATO.
And then NATO ships them into Ukraine, which gives Ukraine a fighting chance.
And the next drop is going to be, I think, sanctions on the banks that do business with Moscow, which will break the Russian economy.
Anyway, that's what should happen.
What do you think may happen?
My scenario, I think, is going to come true.
But I don't have anything.
It's a guess.
I haven't talked to the president about it.
I've talked to him about Putin.
He knows how I feel about Putin.
That you cannot, this is almost a madman now.
When you read that book, I sent it to you.
I hope you got it.
I did, thank you.
When you read the violence that this man, every single day of his life, and he's the richest man in the world.
He's the wealthiest human being in the world.
And when do you see how he made his money?
But now he can't spend it.
I mean, you know, that's karma.
But anyway, I'm praying, literally, I'm praying to mass every Sunday that somehow some miracle happens and Putin draws back.
Because how many more people have to die?
For what?
For what?
So that's where we are.
Talking of way too many people dying, what's your assessment of where we are with the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza?
And, you know, cards on the table.
I was very supportive of Israel's right to defend its citizens from further attacks at the first few months of this war.
But I've got to say, the last few months have been unbelievably disheartening for people that have backed Israel stridently because the slaughter of innocent people as they go after Hamas just seems to me to be completely disproportionate now to what happened on October the 7th.
What's your take?
You know, I don't think I'm where you are on it.
Obviously, Netanyahu and his government want to eliminate Hamas so they can't come back.
And because Hamas hides behind the civilians, just as Tojo and Hitler did in World War II, and we had to wipe out millions of civilians in Germany and Japan to defeat those heinous people.
I'm not justifying it because I don't know the extent of it.
What I do know is that Hamas should release the hostages and it will not.
So there's a balance here that you have to say, you know, sometimes there's no right and wrong.
Sometimes it's both wrong.
This is a very, very complicated issue.
Let me end, Bill, just with a quick fire on two raging stories which are disconnected to the major news events.
One, do you think Brigitte Macral is male or female?
I wish Macron and his wife the best.
I hope they have a nice vacation in the south of France.
And I have no blanket idea about anything else in that regard.
I mean, Candace Owens has been promoting this ridiculous, I think, ridiculous conspiracy theory.
You know me long enough to know I don't go into that swamp.
I'm never in the swamp.
I don't do the internet thing.
I don't deal with the swamp creatures.
I mean, I'm the best-selling historical author in the world.
Debunking Conspiracy Theories 00:14:02
All right.
I think I'm the most successful internet news purveyor in the world.
And there's a reason I don't do this kind of stuff, but I'll mock it with you.
If you and I want to mock them, I'll be happy to mock them.
I just think it's ridiculous.
She has three kids, for God's sake.
It's absurd.
It is ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
And finally, do you have any thoughts, Bill, on Elmo Gate?
Elmo's account on X was hacked and began to spew anti-Semitic thoughts.
You know, all I know is I'm happy that I'm not going to have to be paying for Elmo's lunch or salary any longer.
That's what I'm at.
I like Elmo personally.
I don't think Elmo's anti-Semitic because he's a puppet.
See, puppets really don't have the capacity to be anything like that.
But I don't want to pay for PBS and NPR.
And Trump's knocked that out.
And I'm very happy.
Let them compete in the open marketplace with you and me, Piers.
Yes.
Come on, Elmo, bring it on.
I'm ready for you, man.
Let's go.
Bill O'Reilly, great to have you back at Oncens.
Thanks, Jamie.
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Well, joining me now as the Harvard mathematician and host of the Portal podcast.
I'm to Eric Weinstein.
Eric, great to have you back on OnSensor.
Piers, good to be with you.
Epstein files.
Talk to me.
I've been talking about this since his original, since before his original arrest in Florida.
So I think if you want to narrow the question, I would just like to say that, you know, this is much bigger than Trump.
And I think that one of the things that Trump is figuring out right now with the Epstein issue is that MAGA has outgrown Trump.
MAGA is now something that was created by Trump, but it is a bronking buck that could buck anyone off who is seen as not being perfectly aligned with the idea that the people have to take back the country.
Now, I'm not saying pro or against.
I'm just describing that I think that anyone who thinks that they control MAGA will find out that they do not.
You've done a lot of stuff on Epstein, as you said.
You know, it seems to me, you know, you go back 15 odd years to the conviction of Epstein for being a paedophile.
You know, he was indisputably convicted of a crime which made him a paedophile.
And yet after that, people, including Prince Andrew over here, continued to consult with him.
He continued to be wined and dined by the rich and famous.
And when this all came out, and when the full scale of his abuse of so many underage girls came out, it was being seen as a genuinely gigantic potential scandal in America.
And that was fueled, the sense of that, by a lot of people now at the top of the Trump administration.
And indeed, even after the inauguration, many of these people had continued to kind of lead the media to the water's edge, promising them the ultimate drink, if you like, of the full dirt in the Epstein files, including naming and shaming people and holding them to account.
And then suddenly, out of nowhere a week ago, everything stops.
The shutters come down.
And now you've got a kind of civil war raging on the conservative right.
And as you say, Trump slightly ostracized from many of the MAGA voters on this.
And I think probably compounded by the strike on Iran, helping Ukraine.
These are things that the MAGA base do not feel comfortable with.
So talk to me about where you think we are with the shutting down of this scandal.
Do you think it's possible for Trump to shut it down?
He started attacking the Republicans who don't agree with him as stupid and so on.
But can he shut this down?
Or is that genie out of the bottle and will it continue to damage him?
Nobody can shut it down.
I mean, the issue is that many of us are parents.
And in our hierarchy of identities, those of us with children very often are mom and dad before we are anything else.
That is, before we are Americans, before we are Jews, before we are Republicans, before we are Christians.
There's just this sort of sense that one has to protect those who cannot protect or speak for themselves.
And there's a gradation.
You know, there's a question about is there something magical that happens when someone turns, a young person turns 18 on their birthday.
And then there's an issue about, are we talking about 12-year-olds, 14-year-olds?
Like, it just gets sicker and sicker as you go farther and farther from that date in the law.
And as people come to understand that the allegations go into 14-year-olds, 12-year-olds, who knows where this stops, the rage on the part of parents escalates.
And I think that, you know, at some point, the FBI called me in for unrelated reasons.
And the first thing I told them before I cooperated with them is just to let you guys know, if I ever find out that you were complicit in running a covert operation that used children to do anything in terms of statecraft, all bets are off because I'm a human being before I'm an American.
And the oath that we will fight all enemies, foreign and domestic, means that those of us who are worried about a state-sponsored pedophile or a state-protected pedophile who is using pedophilia as part of what the intelligence or really the covert operations group would call tradecraft breaks all rules, it breaks all agreements, it supersedes absolutely everything.
And at a certain level, citizenship in this society is about surrendering to the monopoly on violence that is the state.
And if the state refuses to remediate this, I think there are a lot of people.
I mean, we've all seen a parent kill someone in a courtroom when a murderer and a rapist laughs because they've used the justice system to evade on a technicality.
And there's a question about will juries convict a parent who's done such a thing.
I think that what you're talking about is a mismatch in scale.
This is an issue where some percentage of America feels so strongly about state abuse and the feeling that we are not getting to the bottom of this that if they suspect state-sponsored pedophilia as part of covert operations tradecraft, they will go to the ends of the earth to shut this thing down and to push it into the light.
And what we don't know is whether when people get into office, let us imagine for the moment a placeholder theory.
A placeholder theory was that Epstein faked some sort of involvement with children because you get the same bang for your buck by taking somebody who's 22 years old, portraying them as if they're 14 and compromising someone.
So then you have this issue of sources and methods.
We know, for example, that the U.S. years ago may have directed a pornographic film featuring an actor in Los Angeles who was given the likeness of Sukarno as head of the Indonesian state.
And that was from a photograph that we had gotten from Sukarno in Moscow.
So we are perfectly willing to use Hollywood used all sorts of crazy things to create incontrovertible evidence for things that never occurred.
So one of the things that may have happened is that Trump and company, once they actually got the information, may have said, oh my gosh, it's something quite different than we imagined.
But I believe that this is either this happened with the non-knowledge of our intelligence services, in which case there was a giant failure of us to know what was going on inside of our own borders,
or almost certainly, this was a product of some amount of some portion of our covert operations group, and maybe covert operations groups in other countries, obvious candidates are the UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, what have you.
And whatever this is, you have this giant collision between people who are not supposed to take an interest in covert operations and people who do this kind of stuff for a living.
There's an entire giant legal infrastructure around the collision between an open society and covert operations and shielding them.
There's something called SSP, state secrets privilege, like attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege to keep things out of the courts.
There's clandestine back channels where there are tacit agreements that the Department of Justice is supposed to hold off.
There are national security letters that can get sent.
We have secret internet called JWICS and other things for communication.
There's a giant infrastructure of secrecy.
And what you can see right here is almost certainly what you can, the collaboration of the press.
And this is the thing that I've been highlighting.
You have a hedge fund that almost certainly didn't exist in the terms that it was claimed.
When I met with him, he was supposedly running a multi-billion dollar FX hedge fund, Foreign Exchange Hedge Fund.
That thing would have to leave a wake in the data.
It would have to have filings.
It would have to have employees.
My recollection is that he told me that he only employed Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn because they were the only ones trustworthy to run such a secretive operation.
My guess is that this was all nonsense.
And there's even a concept called dummy compliance, where you file forms, you know, you get things blessed by cooperative auditors, but there's no way to fake a trail in the markets.
And I think that this is the interesting thing.
I can tell that this is a fake story because it sells papers and no one wants to cover it.
And when I say no one, it's not the journalists.
The journalists want to cover it.
They always come to me and they say, this is amazing.
I'm going to follow all this up.
And I tell them two weeks from now, you're going to have a really weird conversation with your editor where they're going to tell you everyone's moved on and no one cares, or there's not enough to go on.
This is controlled at the editorial layer, not at the journalistic layer.
And there's something called negative contrast imaging, where if you have an environment in which you have a stealth object and everything else reflects, you can actually map the stealth object by trying to bounce things off of it and realizing that it's the only thing that doesn't bounce any signal back.
So it's LIDAR, sonar, radar, what have you.
Basically, you can see the outline of an intelligence operation because at some level, you have the world's juiciest story with no interest from editors and tremendous interest from journalists.
So you can piece together exactly what this is more or less from negative imaging or silhouette imaging, if you will.
Do you believe that he was an Israeli agent of some sort?
I don't have any knowledge of that.
The only thing that I'm confident of is that he was almost certainly doing this with the backing of a state and the cooperation of our own services because there's no way he could operate inside of the U.S. in this fashion.
And this is clearly a joint project of us and potentially others, but it had to involve the FBI and CIA as a joint project.
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I mean, you met Epstein.
I never met him.
I met Gillet Maxwell briefly at a book launch once and had no inkling of the stuff that was going on.
But when you met him, was he weird?
Was he unusual or was he just a good actor?
Was he able to come across in a perfectly normal manner?
If you've seen any of my interviews, it was one of the most bizarre interactions I've ever had.
I will remember it for the rest of my life as being terrifying.
This is not a you didn't sit down with him and think, wow, what a great guy.
You thought, holy cow, this is the weirdest doorway into an alternate reality.
And, you know, in particular, he was absolutely more interested in my science than he was in anything I was doing with hedge funds and risk management, which is how nominally I came to be in his orbit.
He was very connected to a major book agent.
He was funding all sorts of scientists.
He was obsessed by gravity.
He knew things about my work that were essentially known to no one.
He was very connected through at least one Harvard mathematician who I think became a dean of some kind at Harvard University.
So he was connected to my graduate department.
I never heard his name while I was there.
And I was not only there until 1992, I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT, so in the same ecosystem for years after that.
Then I came back to Harvard.
He was a very strange object.
And the connection between Ghillain's father, who really had an enormous impact on scientific publishing and had the ability to sort of look at all science before it's published because of peer review, who ran Pergamon Press.
There is no question that there is some transmission that is likely between Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press and Jeffrey Epstein's science obsession, particularly with gravity.
Fascinating.
Absolutely fascinating.
How, I mean, in terms of the alleged crimes that Epstein was accused of committing, how guilty do you think he was likely to have been?
In other words, are we talking a small-time abuser, a gigantic serial abuser?
What's your gut feeling about that side of him?
My sense of it is that somebody lost control of an agent and that this person was supplied with an enormous, backstories are typically called legends, I believe, in Tradecraft.
So he was a mythical creature who was supposedly so intelligent that he could discern the slightest tremor in the markets, et cetera, et cetera.
He believed his own mythology almost certainly.
And my sense of it is that somebody lost control of a monster and that the actor that they hired to play this was not well in the head.
Now, that's my gut feeling.
The other thing that really concerns me is people are bad at conspiracy theory.
We have a tremendous amount of background data on what conspiracy theories look like.
There's a precedent before Epstein called Craig Spence that we almost never hear about.
I don't know if that's something you know about, Pierce.
But yeah, so this is not the first operation of its kind.
And I think it's very important to recognize that once somebody set this thing up at great expense, imagine that this is a nine-figure fortune that was beaten into, you know, gold beaten into gold file to look, gold foil to look like a 12-figure fortune or something remarkable.
So he was acting rich in a way that even rich people don't act rich.
He was acting smart in a way that smart people don't act smart.
So the whole thing was likely having a bunch of different activities funneled through it.
So for example, he seemed to be giving tax advice that would also potentially entrap people in ways that the IRS could get them, potentially.
That was something that he was giving away.
He was also, my guess is providing non-pedophile sexual opportunities with young women who are over the age of 18, because I think his real product was silence.
And I think people don't get that.
Sex is readily available.
Sex is always embarrassing.
But I think that the key issue is that Epstein was able to guarantee silence when no one else could guarantee silence.
And that's why people came to him.
And I also think that there's something about the way in which people have to agree to be compromised in some sense to enter the elite because otherwise you're not considered trustworthy.
So you have to surrender something so that there's a kill switch on you.
And I think that he in part specialized in installing the kill switch.
How do you think he died?
Do you think he did kill himself?
Or are you, at the very least, not oblivious to the theory that maybe it was Mordafari or somebody arranged it?
Why do you believe that he's dead?
Why do you believe that he killed himself?
I certainly don't think that he experienced shame the way normal people did.
So I think the idea that he was so embarrassed that he took his own life is probably the only thing I feel I have anything to add.
But let me just caution your listeners.
All of this fun that people have with conspiracy theories is absolutely deadly when it comes to actually getting justice.
And calling this pedophile island and Lolita Express and talking about Epstein didn't kill himself is a joke.
Like any of you know, none of you know.
And, you know, if you were serious about this, and as a parent, just let me specialize to all the moms and dads out there.
If you're serious as a parent of wanting this sort of thing absolutely excised from our society, don't go after the children.
Don't go after the memes.
Focus on one issue, one issue alone.
Why will the press not report on the multi-billion dollar foreign currency hedge fund, which even if it has dummy compliance, I guarantee you any forensic accountant could determine whether this thing was real or fake?
And my guess is, is that there are no former employees employed from the yeshivas of Brooklyn.
This thing, I think, is a will of the wisp.
It's a figment of our imagination and it's a product of statecraft.
And the fact that we have very long-standing relationships with our major news organs, that they agree to have liaisons to the covert operations group so that we don't constantly report.
This is an issue called deconfliction.
Many people don't know that word.
This is a situation which escaped our deconfliction systems almost certainly, and it has the hallmark and the outline.
The person you should have on, not me, is the person who is an expert in all of the legal aspects of having a free society with covert operations group.
And in particular, there's a case of something like Al Masiri versus Tenet, which establishes that when somebody has a legitimate case in the courts and there's state secret privilege, that person may not be entitled to exculpatory evidence and information that state secrets trump justice.
And I think it's absolutely imperative that you have a lawyer on who's competent to talk about this so this doesn't enter into the realm of conspiracy theory.
So I'm going to decline to speculate.
Fascinating.
Elon Musk fell out spectacularly with Donald Trump and posted on X in a bombshell, Trump's in the Epstein files.
I know you're very close with Peter Thiel, Elon's old boss.
What do you make of what's happened there?
You have, how do I put this?
It would appear that Elon is very disappointed that we are not radical enough to understand the threat to the country.
He has a very clear idea about what has to be surmounted.
He, I believe, then apologized for that, which I found interesting, much the way, you know, Amy Roebuck had the famous hot mic incident and then said, oh, that was nothing.
Something in these files, something in the situation causes people to reverse course.
And I think that what you have to assume is that the public will never, ever, ever let this go and that there is some equal and opposite pressure, which says that the elite will do absolutely anything to keep it secret.
And by elite, I don't mean people who are actually elite.
I mean people who are in the chairs that should be reserved for the elite, but have a lot to lose.
Let's just pivot, Eric, if we can, just to foreign policy.
You said of the 12-day war with Iran that the West still hasn't fully understood the implications of what happened and that it didn't actually illuminate Iran's apparent weakness.
You also said this about, well, I'm going to play you what the clip was.
This is Trump's F-word rant, and then get you to explain why you think the significance of that has been understated too.
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
Do you understand that?
So first on that, Eric, why do you think we've understated the significance of that moment?
This goes back to my grandfather, who I never heard swear except for potentially once when a car might sideswipe me in Westwood Los Angeles.
And I said, you know, Harry, you have a very strong sense that one should never use profanity.
And he turned to me and said, I absolutely disagree with you.
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, the reason I never swear is because when I need it, you will notice that I'm swearing.
If I used it all the time, you'd never notice.
The fact is that Trump almost always appears in a suit, a tie, and he doesn't usually use the F-bomb.
And he was trying to send a message, which is, this is so dangerous.
This involves China.
This may involve Pakistan.
This may involve India.
What is going on in the Middle East is the beginning of World War III with Iran, I think, very carefully calibrating a message of violence where the threat to Tel Aviv was calibrated.
And my belief is that the amount of damage that could have been inflicted on Tel Aviv far exceeds what was.
And that Iran is trying to speak violence as the most skilled speaker of that language, with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin.
And that unfortunately, people, as a result of being relatively long at peace, people have forgotten what violence means as a language.
And so when Iran originally set hypersonic missiles into the ground of Israel, killing almost no one, many Israelis responded by saying, ah, you see how incompetent they are.
They couldn't kill any of us.
And the Iranians must have just been shaking their heads and saying, my gosh, you guys have no idea.
We're sending you a message that Iron Dome doesn't work fully for hypersonics.
I think what's going on is that you're looking at the beginning of the end.
Once those things are loaded with nuclear weapons, you are talking about a completely different world and you just saw the beginnings of it.
This is the slow roll into a new world where we watch hypersonic missiles slam into a populated metropolis.
I mean, that's a terrifying prospect.
I mean, is it really realistic that somebody would want to be the first to do that?
You know, I lived in Israel for two years, and Har means mountain.
And there's a place called Megiddo, where there's a mountain, and Har Megiddo is where we get the word Armageddon.
So Armageddon is just a turnoff in Israel.
Yeah, we're on the clock.
I mean, look, I get tired of being the only one saying this, but there is no fourth turning principle after 1952 when we have thermonuclear weapons.
So the way it goes is hard times make strong men, strong men make good times and nuclear weapons.
Good times make weak men.
Weak men and nuclear weapons make end times.
And that's the end of it.
And so we've been in this stasis for a really long time.
And, you know, the world has never, civilization has never ended due to thermonuclear warfare.
So it's in no one's data set.
So everyone who's data-driven says, oh, I wouldn't worry so much about it because they're just not getting it.
Let's just talk about Israel briefly, Eric.
Obviously, the war with Hamas continues.
The scenes in Gaza are appalling.
You know, a lot of people say to me, Jewish people, friends of mine, say there was a really disturbing escalation in anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of October the 7th.
It really kind of lifted a scab off anti-Semitism.
And I remember it in my high street in London, where the next day, thousands of people gathered, I thought, outside the Israeli embassy to, I thought, support Israelis.
But in fact, they were there to cheer and celebrate what had happened.
It was the most disgusting thing to witness.
But there's also, I think, a real danger that the Israeli government's conduct in the last few months in Gaza will increase the danger of rising anti-Semitism against Jewish people.
Because most moderate-minded people looking at it think this is now completely disproportionate, what is going on.
There's no apparent end game.
They're listening to people like the finance minister Smodrich talking openly about cleansing Gaza of all Palestinians.
Daily Brief on Rising Anti-Semitism 00:02:40
And most people are coming around to the conclusion that this is just unacceptable, what is happening, and that the danger is it makes people hate Israel and therefore increases anti-Semitism.
You're Jewish.
What do you feel about that?
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You know, I don't think I'm where you are on it.
Obviously, Netanyahu and his government want to eliminate Hamas so they can't come back.
And because Hamas hides behind the civilians, just as Tojo and Hitler did in World War II, and we had to wipe out millions of civilians in Germany and Japan to defeat those heinous people.
I'm not justifying it because I don't know the extent of it.
What I do know is that Hamas should release the hostages and it will not.
So there's a balance here that you have to say, you know, sometimes there's no right and wrong.
Sometimes it's both wrong.
This is a very, very complicated issue.
Let me end, Bill, just with a quick fire on two raging stories, which are disconnected to the major news events.
One, do you think Brigitte Macral is male or female?
I wish Macron and his wife the best.
I hope they have a nice vacation in the south of France.
And I have no blanket idea about anything else in that regard.
I mean, Candace Owens has been promoting this ridiculous, I think ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Macron's Gender Identity Debate 00:02:07
You know me long enough to know I don't go into that swamp.
I'm never in the swamp.
I don't do the internet thing.
I don't deal with the swamp creatures.
I mean, I'm the best-selling historical author in the world.
All right.
I think I'm the most successful internet news purveyor in the world.
And there's a reason I don't do this kind of stuff, but I'll mock it with you.
If you and I want to mock them, I'll be happy to mock them.
I just think it's ridiculous.
She has three kids, for God's sake.
It's absurd.
It is ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
And finally, do you have any thoughts, Bill, on Elmo Gate?
Elmo's account on X was hacked and began to spew anti-Semitic thoughts.
You know, all I know is I'm happy that I'm not going to have to be paying for Elmo's lunch or salary any longer.
That's what I'm having.
I like Elmo personally.
I don't think Elmo's anti-Semitic because he's a puppet.
See?
Puppets really don't have the capacity to be anything like that.
But I don't want to pay for PBS and NPR.
And Trump's knocked that out.
And I'm very happy.
Let them compete in the open marketplace with you and me, Piers.
Yes.
Come on, Elmo, bring it on.
I'm ready for you, man.
Let's go.
Bill O'Reilly, great to have you back on Oncens.
Thanks, Adam.
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Well, joining me now as the Harvard mathematician and host of the Portal podcast.
I'm to Eric Weinstein.
Eric, great to have you back on OnCensus.
Piers, good to be with you.
Epstein files.
Talk to me.
I've been talking about this since his original, since before his original arrest in Florida.
So I think if you want to narrow the question, I would just like to say that, you know, this is much bigger than Trump.
And I think that one of the things that Trump is figuring out right now with the Epstein issue is that MAGA has outgrown Trump.
MAGA is now something that was created by Trump, but it is a bronking buck that could buck anyone off who is seen as not being perfectly aligned with the idea that the people have to take back the country.
Now, I'm not saying pro or against.
I'm just describing that I think that anyone who thinks that they control MAGA will find out that they do not.
You've done a lot of stuff on Epstein, as you said.
You know, it seems to me, you know, you go back 15 odd years to the conviction of Epstein for being a paedophile.
You know, he was indisputably convicted of a crime which made him a paedophile.
And yet after that, people, including Prince Andrew over here, continued to consult with him.
He continued to be wined and dined by the rich and famous.
And when this all came out, and when the full scale of his abuse of so many underage girls came out, it was being seen as a genuinely gigantic potential scandal in America.
And that was fueled, the sense of that, by a lot of people now at the top of the Trump administration.
And indeed, even after the inauguration, many of these people had continued to kind of lead the media to the water's edge, promising them the ultimate drink, if you like, of the full dirt in the Epstein files, including naming and shaming people and holding them to account.
And then suddenly, out of nowhere a week ago, everything stops.
The shutters come down.
And now you've got a kind of civil war raging on the conservative right.
And as you say, Trump slightly ostracized from many of the MAGA voters on this.
And I think probably compounded by the strike on Iran, helping Ukraine.
These are things that the MAGA base do not feel comfortable with.
So talk to me about where you think we are with the shutting down of this scandal.
Do you think it's possible for Trump to shut it down?
He started attacking the Republicans who don't agree with him as stupid and so on.
But can he shut this down?
Or is that genie out of the bottle and will it continue to damage him?
Nobody can shut it down.
I mean, the issue is that many of us are parents.
And in our hierarchy of identities, those of us with children very often are mom and dad before we are anything else.
That is, before we are Americans, before we are Jews, before we are Republicans, before we are Christians.
There's just this sort of sense that one has to protect those who cannot protect or speak for themselves.
And there's a gradation.
You know, there's a question about is there something magical that happens when someone turns, a young person turns 18 on their birthday.
And then there's an issue about, are we talking about 12-year-olds, 14-year-olds?
Like, it just gets sicker and sicker as you go farther and farther from that date in the law.
And as people come to understand That the allegations go into 14-year-olds, 12-year-olds, who knows where this stops, the rage on the part of parents escalates.
And I think that, you know, at some point the FBI called me in for unrelated reasons.
And the first thing I told them before I cooperated with them is just to let you guys know, if I ever find out that you were complicit in running a covert operation that used children to do anything in terms of statecraft, all bets are off because I'm a human being before I'm an American.
And, you know, the oath that we will fight all enemies, foreign and domestic, means that those of us who are worried about a state-sponsored pedophile or a state-protected pedophile who is using pedophilia as part of what the intelligence or really the covert operations group would call tradecraft breaks all rules, it breaks all agreements, it supersedes absolutely everything.
And, you know, at a certain level, citizenship in this society is about surrendering to the monopoly on violence that is the state.
And if the state refuses to remediate this, I think there are a lot of people.
I mean, we've all seen a parent kill someone in a courtroom when a murderer and a rapist laughs because they've used the justice system to evade on a technicality.
And there's a question about will juries convict a parent who's done such a thing?
I think that what you're talking about is a mismatch in scale.
This is an issue where some percentage of America feels so strongly about state abuse and the feeling that we are not getting to the bottom of this that if they suspect state-sponsored pedophilia as part of covert operations tradecraft, they will go to the ends of the earth to shut this thing down and to push it into the light.
And what we don't know is whether when people get into office, let us imagine for the moment a placeholder theory.
A placeholder theory was that Epstein faked some sort of involvement with children because you get the same bang for your buck by taking somebody who's 22 years old, portraying them as if they're 14 and compromising someone.
So then you have this issue of sources and methods.
We know, for example, that the U.S. years ago may have directed a pornographic film featuring an actor in Los Angeles who was given the likeness of Sukarno as head of the Indonesian state.
And that was from a photograph that we had gotten from Sukarno in Moscow.
So we are perfectly willing to use Hollywood used all sorts of crazy things to create incontrovertible evidence for things that never occurred.
So one of the things that may have happened is that Trump and company, once they actually got the information, may have said, oh my gosh, it's something quite different than we imagined.
But I believe that this is either this happened with the non-knowledge of our intelligence services, in which case there was a giant failure of us to know what was going on inside of our own borders, or almost certainly, this was a product of some amount of some portion of our covert operations group, and maybe covert operations groups in other countries.
Obvious candidates are the UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, what have you.
And whatever this is, you have this giant collision between people who are not supposed to take an interest in covert operations and people who do this kind of stuff for a living.
There's an entire giant legal infrastructure around the collision between an open society and covert operations and shielding them.
There's something called SSP, state secrets privilege, like attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege to keep things out of the courts.
There's clandestine back channels where there are tacit agreements that the Department of Justice is supposed to hold off.
There are national security letters that can get sent.
You know, we have secret internet called JWICS and other things for communication.
There's a giant infrastructure of secrecy.
And what you can see right here is almost certainly what you can the collaboration of the press.
And this is the thing that I've been highlighting.
You have a hedge fund that almost certainly didn't exist in the terms that it was claimed.
When I met with him, he was supposedly running a multi-billion dollar FX hedge fund, Foreign Exchange Hedge Fund.
That thing would have to leave a wake in the data.
It would have to have filings.
It would have to have employees.
My recollection is that he told me that he only employed Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn because they were the only ones trustworthy to run such a secretive operation.
My guess is that this was all nonsense.
And there's even a concept called dummy compliance, where you file forms, you get things blessed by cooperative auditors, but there's no way to fake a trail in the markets.
And I think that this is the interesting thing.
I can tell that this is a fake story because it sells papers and no one wants to cover it.
And when I say no one, it's not the journalists.
The journalists want to cover it.
They always come to me and they say, This is amazing.
I'm going to follow all this up.
And I tell them two weeks from now, you're going to have a really weird conversation with your editor where they're going to tell you everyone's moved on and no one cares, or there's not enough to go on.
This is controlled at the editorial layer, not at the journalistic layer.
And there's something called negative contrast imaging, where if you have an environment in which you have a stealth object and everything else reflects, you can actually map the stealth object by trying to bounce things off of it and realizing that's the only thing that doesn't bounce any signal back.
So it's LIDAR, sonar, radar, what have you.
Basically, you can see the outline of an intelligence operation because at some level, you have the world's juiciest story with no interest from editors and tremendous interest from journalists.
So you can piece together exactly what this is, more or less from negative imaging or silhouette imaging, if you will.
Do you believe that he was an Israeli agent of some sort?
I don't have any knowledge of that.
The only thing that I'm confident of is that he was almost certainly doing this with the backing of a state and the cooperation of our own services because there's no way he could operate inside of the U.S. in this fashion.
And this is clearly a joint project of us and potentially others, but it had to involve the FBI and CIA as a joint project.
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I mean, you met Epstein.
I never met him.
I met Gillet Maxwell briefly at a book launch once and had no inkling of the stuff that was going on.
But when you met him, was he weird?
Was he unusual?
Or was he just a good actor?
Was he able to come across in a perfectly normal manner?
If you've seen any of my interviews, it was one of the most bizarre interactions I've ever had.
I will remember it for the rest of my life as being terrifying.
This is not a...
You didn't sit down with him and think, wow, what a great guy.
You thought, holy cow, this is the weirdest doorway into an alternate reality.
And in particular, he was absolutely more interested in my science than he was in anything I was doing with hedge funds and risk management, which is how nominally I came to be in his orbit.
He was very connected to a major book agent.
He was funding all sorts of scientists.
He was obsessed by gravity.
He knew things about my work that were essentially known to no one.
He was very connected through at least one Harvard mathematician who I think became a dean of some kind at Harvard University.
So he was connected to my graduate department.
I never heard his name while I was there.
And I was not only there until 1992, I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT, so in the same ecosystem for years after that.
Then I came back to Harvard.
He was a very strange object.
And the connection between Ghillane's father, who really had an enormous impact on scientific publishing and had the ability to sort of look at all science before it's published because of peer review, who ran Pergamon Press, there is no question that there is some transmission that is likely between Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press and Jeffrey Epstein's science obsession, particularly with gravity.
Fascinating.
Absolutely fascinating.
How, I mean, in terms of the alleged crimes that Epstein was accused of committing, how guilty do you think he was likely to have been?
In other words, are we talking a small-time abuser, a gigantic serial abuser?
What's your gut feeling about that side of him?
My sense of it is that somebody lost control of an agent and that this person was supplied with an enormous backstories are typically called legends, I believe, in Tradecraft.
So he was a mythical creature who was supposedly so intelligent that he could discern the slightest tremor in the markets, et cetera, et cetera.
He believed his own mythology almost certainly.
And my sense of it is that somebody lost control of a monster and that the actor that they hired to play this was not well in the head.
Now, that's my gut feeling.
The other thing that really concerns me is people are bad at conspiracy theory.
We have a tremendous amount of background data on what conspiracy theories look like.
There's a precedent before Epstein called Craig Spence that we almost never hear about.
I don't know if that's something you know about, Pierce.
But Yeah, so this is not the first operation of its kind.
And I think it's very important to recognize that once somebody set this thing up at great expense, imagine that this is a nine-figure fortune that was beaten into, you know, gold beaten into gold file to look, gold foil to look like a 12-figure fortune or something remarkable.
So he was acting rich in a way that even rich people don't act rich.
He was acting smart in a way that smart people don't act smart.
So the whole thing was likely having a bunch of different activities funneled through it.
So for example, he seemed to be giving tax advice that would also potentially entrap people in ways that the IRS could get them, potentially.
That was something that he was giving away.
He was also, my guess is providing non-pedophile sexual opportunities with young women who are over the age of 18, because I think his real product was silence.
And I think people don't get that.
Sex is readily available.
Sex is always embarrassing.
But I think that the key issue is that Epstein was able to guarantee silence when no one else could guarantee silence.
And that's why people came to him.
And I also think that there's something about the way in which people have to agree to be compromised in some sense to enter the elite because otherwise you're not considered trustworthy.
So you have to surrender something so that there's a kill switch on you.
And I think that he in part specialized in installing the kill switch.
How do you think he died?
Do you think he did kill himself?
Or are you, at the very least, not oblivious to the theory that maybe it was Moldafari or somebody arranged it?
Why do you believe that he's dead?
Why do you believe that he killed himself?
I certainly don't think that he experienced shame the way normal people did.
So I think the idea that he was so embarrassed that he took his own life is probably the only thing I feel I have anything to add.
But let me just caution your listeners.
All of this fun that people have with conspiracy theories is absolutely deadly when it comes to actually getting justice.
And calling this pedophile island and Lolita Express and talking about Epstein didn't kill himself is a joke.
Like any of you know, none of you know.
And if you were serious about this, and as a parent, just let me specialize to all the moms and dads out there.
If you're serious as a parent of wanting this sort of thing absolutely excised from our society, don't go after the children, don't go after the memes, focus on one issue, one issue alone.
Why will the press not report on the multi-billion dollar foreign currency hedge fund, which even if it has dummy compliance, I guarantee you any forensic accountant could determine whether this thing was real or fake?
And my guess is that there are no former employees employed from the yeshivas of Brooklyn.
This thing, I think, is a will of the wisp.
It's a figment of our imagination and it's a product of statecraft.
And the fact that we have very long-standing relationships with our major news organs, that they agree to have liaisons to the covert operations group so that we don't constantly report.
This is an issue called deconfliction.
Many people don't know that word.
This is a situation which escaped our deconfliction systems almost certainly, and it has the hallmark and the outline.
The person you should have on, not me, is the person who is an expert in all of the legal aspects of having a free society with covert operations group.
In particular, there's a case of something like Al-Masiri versus Tenet, which establishes that when somebody has a legitimate case in the courts and there's state secret privilege, that person may not be entitled to exculpatory evidence and information that state secrets trump justice.
And I think it's absolutely imperative that you have a lawyer on who's competent to talk about this so this doesn't enter into the realm of conspiracy theory.
So I'm going to decline to speculate.
Fascinating.
Elon Musk fell out spectacularly with Donald Trump and posted on X in a bombshell, Trump's in the Epstein files.
I know you're very close with Peter Thiel, Elon's old boss.
What do you make of what's happened there?
You have, how do I put this?
It would appear that Elon is very disappointed that we are not radical enough to understand the threat to the country.
He has a very clear idea about what has to be surmounted.
He, I believe, then apologized for that, which I found interesting, much the way, you know, Amy Roebuck had the famous hot mic incident and then said, oh, that was nothing.
Something in these files, something in the situation causes people to reverse course.
And I think that what you have to assume is that the public will never, ever, ever let this go and that there is some equal and opposite pressure which says that the elite will do every absolutely anything to keep it secret.
And by elite, I don't mean people who are actually elite.
I mean people who are in the chairs that should be reserved for the elite but have a lot to lose.
Let's just pivot, Eric, if we can, just to foreign policy.
You said of the 12-day war with Iran that the West still hasn't fully understood the implications of what happened and that it didn't actually illuminate Iran's apparent weakness.
You also said this about, well, I'm going to play you what the clip was.
This is Trump's F-word rant and then get you to explain why you think the significance of that has been understated too.
You know what?
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
Do you understand that?
So first on that area, why do you think we've understated the significance of that moment?
This goes back to my grandfather, who I never heard swear except for potentially once when a car might sideswipe me in Westwood, Los Angeles.
And I said, you know, Harry, you have a very strong sense that one should never use profanity.
And he turned to me and said, I absolutely disagree with you.
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, the reason I never swear is because when I need it, you will notice that I'm swearing.
If I used it all the time, you'd never notice.
The fact is that Trump almost always appears in a suit, a tie, and he doesn't usually use the F-bomb.
And he was trying to send a message, which is, this is so dangerous.
This involves China.
This may involve Pakistan.
This may involve India.
What is going on in the Middle East is the beginning of World War III with Iran, I think, very carefully calibrating a message of violence where the threat to Tel Aviv was calibrated.
And my belief is that the amount of damage that could have been inflicted on Tel Aviv far exceeds what was.
And that Iran is trying to speak violence as the most skilled speaker of that language, with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin.
And that unfortunately, people, as a result of being relatively long at peace, people have forgotten what violence means as a language.
And so when Iran originally set hypersonic missiles into the ground of Israel, killing almost no one, many Israelis responded by saying, ah, you see how incompetent they are, they couldn't kill any of us.
And the Iranians must have just been shaking their heads and saying, my gosh, you guys have no idea.
We're sending you a message that Iron Dome doesn't work fully for hypersonics.
I think what's going on is that you're looking at the beginning of the end.
Once those things are loaded with nuclear weapons, you are talking about a completely different world and you just saw the beginnings of it.
This is the slow roll into a new world where we watch hypersonic missiles slam into a populated metropolis.
I mean, that's a terrifying prospect.
I mean, is it really realistic that somebody would want to be the first to do that?
You know, I lived in Israel for two years, and Har means mountain.
And there's a place called Megiddo, where there's a mountain.
And Har Megiddo is where we get the word Armageddon.
So Armageddon is just a turnoff in Israel.
Yeah, we're on the clock.
I mean, look, I get tired of being the only one saying this, but there is no fourth turning principle after 1952 when we have thermonuclear weapons.
So the way it goes is hard times make strong men, strong men make good times and nuclear weapons.
Good times make weak men.
Weak men and nuclear weapons make end times.
And that's the end of it.
And so we've been in the stasis for a really long time.
And, you know, the world has never, civilization has never ended due to thermonuclear warfare.
So it's in no one's data set.
So everyone who's data-driven says, oh, I wouldn't worry so much about it because they're just not getting it.
Let's just talk about Israel briefly, Eric.
Obviously, the war with Hamas continues.
The scenes in Gaza are appalling.
You know, a lot of people say to me, Jewish people, friends of mine, say there was a really disturbing escalation in anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of October the 7th.
It really kind of lifted a scab off anti-Semitism.
And I remember it in my high street in London, where the next day, thousands of people gathered, I thought, outside the Israeli embassy to, I thought, support Israelis.
But in fact, they were there to cheer and celebrate what had happened.
It was the most disgusting thing to witness.
But there's also, I think, a real danger that the Israeli government's conduct in the last few months in Gaza will increase the danger of rising anti-Semitism against Jewish people.
Because most moderate-minded people looking at it think this is now completely disproportionate, what is going on.
There's no apparent end game.
They're listening to people like the finance minister Smodrich talking openly about cleansing Gaza of all Palestinians.
War Trivialization and Palestinian Lives 00:07:26
And most people are coming around to the conclusion that this is just unacceptable, what is happening, and that the danger is it makes people hate Israel and therefore increases anti-Semitism.
You're Jewish.
What do you feel about that?
Well, first of all, as a strong Israel supporter, I've been upset with Netanyahu from the beginning for not understanding that he's doing Sinwar's bidding.
So in some sense, I see Sinwar from the grave commanding Israel, saying We think we can trick you into attacking our hospitals, our mosques, our people.
And that Israel not knowing how to counter hybrid warfare is trying to go after this in a kinetic fashion.
And when Palestinian Arabs say, we love death more than you love life, my feeling is nobody takes them seriously.
I do.
That said, the issue is that this is largely an issue of who you ascribe this to.
My feeling is Sinoir was trying to generate video using the deaths of his own people, and he was willing to give his own life and the life of his family.
It's a calculus that most, I don't know, Americans and people in the UK just can't understand, that you would actually think that it's a huge win in which everyone you care about perishes.
But the calculus in the Middle East is totally different.
So in a certain sense, you know, my feeling about this is that right after October 7th, I said, this is suicide by IDF.
And IDF is dutifully playing that role.
So I think you're just wrong, and I don't mean to be harsh about it, but I think you, to your credit, are gut-wrenched by the disgusting visual images of just destruction and death and severed limbs, everything.
The issue is that those accrue to Hamas.
And what I'm upset with is that Netanyahu is not smarter in recognizing that he had to do different things.
My feeling was that Israel needed to establish a calculus where every life was avenged with a change in the borders in which land, which is far more important to many of the terrorists in Gaza, was annexed day by day until the hostages were released.
And that would have been far more effective.
And the other thing that is just very interesting is that Western Europe has taken a phrase that I think originally came from the Romanian language.
It's very recent in origin called ethnic cleansing.
Particularly, if you look in Google Engrams, it spiked during the Balkan wars.
And it used to be that we understood that sometimes you have to move people who cannot live in peace.
So this is why the Sudeten Germans, for example, were moved in Europe so that we didn't get into another European world war after the Potsdam Agreements.
So in part, what we have is we have a world that thinks in very simplistic concepts, forcing a two-state solution down the throats of Palestinian Arabs who are unequivocal that this is just not something that they're interested in.
And when they're chanting from the river to the sea, the idea is we're not listening to the will of the Palestinian Arabs.
And it is very clear that many of them have no idea a two-state solution is absolutely anathema and far less desirable than death and destruction.
So partially the problem is that the Western mind has to upgrade for things that it has never considered, a calculus that is far different than when people are willing to give their lives.
People believe in something beyond the ordinary calculus of incentives.
And, you know, as a friend of mine who watched the end of the troubles in Ireland said, there comes a moment when you stop making wall murals and singing songs to those killed.
That people who are focused on the life beyond, where their legend lives forever, are motivated by very different things.
So I just, with all due respect, sir, my feeling is that the best of your nature causes you to be gut-wrenched.
I absolutely agree with you that Netanyahu is doing the wrong thing.
But ultimately, this bill, I don't send to Israel.
I send it to the genius that is Sinoir.
Let's just end, Eric.
And that was a fascinating answer, by the way.
You said this.
We seem to live in the age of conspiracy, but you said this.
We have too much information.
This is the problem.
We're deranging ourselves and we're completely undoing all the superstructure of the world.
I feel that.
Like, you talk about the Israel and mass war, talk about Ukraine.
You talk about all these things.
The constant overload of incredibly depressing, haunting imagery on our phones that people are consuming on a minute-by-minute basis was never available when I was young.
You just, you had no access to stuff like this.
You had a sanitized version of the news in newspapers.
You had certainly a sanitized version on television.
There was no other way short of actually being there to see real horror.
And yet every minute I look at my phone, there's some new horror that is flashing in front of me.
And if you're a young, impressionable mind, it must be so damaging.
It's Jonathan Haight's book about the sort of anxiety epidemic in the world.
God is so right.
It says phones turn smart.
Yes, they brought lots of smart things, but they also brought access to so much damaging imagery.
Is that kind of what you were getting at with that quote?
It's an interesting point.
You and I, I believe, are almost exactly the same age.
And I grew up in a world in which the imagery came right through the evening news.
The Vietnam reporting was unlike anything that Americans had ever seen.
If you think about all the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from that era, a monk on fire, a street execution, children naked in the street from Napalm, etc., we were a much tougher people, Pierce.
And that seems to have been lost.
The other thing that was present when we were young was a world of adults, people who had been hardened in World War II, people who understood the stakes of the Cold War.
And there's something about the trivialization of war.
I can tell you that one of the things that really bothered me is that I was in touch.
I had just been in Tel Aviv.
And when I was talking to people in Tel Aviv, they could not actually synthesize a particular, I don't know, seriousness of purpose.
They were on the beaches during the day, in the shelters during the night.
They couldn't figure out that this was, in some sense, on the clock.
They were having these hypersonic missiles slam into their city, and they were also continuing life as if it wasn't happening.
Inform Irritate and Entertain 00:01:03
The phone appears to be a different object than we understood.
What it does is it not only gives us information, but it gives our lives a fictional video game feel.
And at some level, we aren't taking seriously the gravity of the situation, even if we are living through it.
We're simultaneously watching it out our window and on our phone.
And somehow our brain is prioritizing, oh my God, this will be like a great Instagram story.
Yeah.
You're spot on.
Eric, I could talk to you for hours.
Sadly, we've run out of time.
Brilliant to have you back on Uncensored.
Thank you very much.
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