“We Are Being Manipulated On A Massive Scale” - Eric Weinstein (4K)

You just came back from your first holiday in quite a while.

Well, my first holiday of, let's say, three weeks or more in quite a while.

How was that?

Uh, astounding. Um, really, uh, very good to see what's going on in the rest of the world at this particular moment. Um, we had previously gone to India, uh, in the year to visit family. This was to go back to Turkey and to go to Portugal, but also to the Azores Islands. And, um, I can't tell you how meaningful it was for me to be back traveling.

Why?

Well, (smacks lips) I mean, partially, it's reacqui- Y- you, when you have children, and children change your game for about two decades, you have to realize that that's a transient period. It felt like it was gonna go on forever. And so this was sort of trying to figure out what is it like to go from traveling in your 20s and 30s without kids to traveling with your kids at the last moment that you still have them at home, um, (smacks lips) and now you're gonna have the rest of your life without them again. But you can't go back to backpacking and doing certain s- other things that were easy for you. So you have to figure out how to rejoin your previous life that has been in progress without you actually-

Pending for a long time.

Exactly.

A sabbatical from life, almost.

The other thing is that, um, you forget about parts of yourself. Like I forgot that, that I spoke Turkish, not well-

(laughs)

... but I spoke rudimentary Tarzan Turkish 30 years ago. And to be back in Istanbul and to suddenly have words and phrases and things come back, um, and be talking to cab drivers and, and just people in the street, seeing the change. Obviously, there's been an enormous amount of change in Turkey. Um, Portugal is fascinating, seeing certain things, uh, at the end of their lifecycle. We were at a synagogue in Bursa where the sort of the home of the Ottoman Empire, uh, where they were down to, like, their last 50 people, which is a common enough thing, uh, when we visit diaspora Jewish communities, sort of at the tail end with the embers still glowing hot, but no, no chance for a rebirth. And then in the Azores, um, I was not prepared for the level of beauty that we encountered. Uh, there is a level of beauty that I've only experienced two, maybe three times in my life, that sort of leaves you physically sick, like, ill. It's so beautiful that your, your body is the weak link. Like you, you might think that sugar is tasty, but if you were to eat a bag of sugar, you'd probably be sick to your stomach, and I would say this was, like, so much beauty that it was at an almost pathological level and more than, more than I think my family could really take in. We were just so moved.