Daniel sent us this one — and it's a prompt that, I have to admit, taps into something I've been quietly curious about for years. He's asking about the think tanks of Israel. Not the foreign-funded NGOs we've discussed before, but the homegrown policy institutes that sit around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, shaping how the country thinks about security, democracy, economics, and society. We've all heard the names — Van Leer, the Israel Democracy Institute, INSS, Kohelet, Taub, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs — but what do they actually do day to day, who funds them, and how much influence do they really have?
This is exactly the kind of prompt I love digging into, because these institutions operate in what I'd call the semi-visible layer of Israeli public life. They're not government, they're not academia proper, they're not media — but they feed all three. And the specific list Daniel gave us is actually a great cross-section. You've got everything from the venerable liberal-academic institute to the hard-nosed security think tank to the ideological policy shop that's shaped actual legislation. Let's start with the one that prompted the question: the Van Leer Institute.
Right, because that's the one where you walk past it in Jerusalem — it's near the President's residence, if memory serves — and you think, that building looks important, and I have no idea what happens inside.
The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute was founded in 1959 by the Van Leer family, Dutch philanthropists and industrialists. The founding idea was to create a center for interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences, with a specific focus on issues that matter to Israeli society and the broader region. Unlike a lot of the other think tanks we'll discuss, Van Leer is genuinely more academic. They run research clusters, publish books and journals, host lectures and conferences. Their work spans philosophy, gender studies, science and technology studies, political theory, and Israeli social issues.
It's closer to, say, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton than it is to a Beltway policy shop.
That's a fair comparison, though Van Leer has a more explicit social mission. They frame their work around what they call "critical discourse" — aimed at contributing to a more just and democratic society. They've been particularly influential in certain intellectual currents. For example, their project on "racism and the nation-state" generated significant debate. They've also done major work on secularism and religion, on gender and feminism, and on science policy. But here's the thing: Van Leer occupies a particular ideological space broadly associated with the Israeli center-left intellectual establishment. It's not a partisan organization, but its scholars tend to come from what you might call the post-Zionist or critical Zionist tradition.
That's a useful lens for understanding the whole landscape, because think tanks in Israel, like everywhere, cluster around ideological poles. But Israel's ideological poles are unique — they don't map cleanly onto left and right in the American or European sense.
And it's one of the reasons the tapestry is so confusing from the outside. Let me give you the rough lay of the land. On one end, you have institutes broadly aligned with the liberal-democratic tradition — Van Leer, the Israel Democracy Institute, parts of the Taub Center. These are places that worry about the quality of Israeli democracy, about civil rights, about inequality, about the relationship between religion and state. On the other end, you have institutes that are more conservative, more nationalist, more focused on security and Jewish identity — the Kohelet Policy Forum, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and in certain respects INSS, though INSS is harder to categorize because its security focus cuts across ideology.
Then there are the ones that claim to be purely empirical and non-ideological, though I'm always skeptical when anyone makes that claim.
As you should be. But let's take the Israel Democracy Institute, probably the most prominent of the liberal-democratic cluster. IDI was founded in 1991, and it's been a major force in Israeli policy debates for three decades. Their stated mission is to strengthen the structural and normative foundations of Israeli democracy. In practice, they produce research on electoral reform, on the relationship between the branches of government, on minority rights, on religion and state, on the legal system. They've been deeply involved in constitutional debates — Israel, famously, doesn't have a formal constitution, and IDI has been one of the leading voices pushing for one, or at least for a clearer constitutional framework.
They've had real legislative impact, haven't they?
IDI researchers were instrumental in drafting parts of what eventually became the basic laws that govern Israel's electoral system. They've also been central to debates about judicial reform — which, given the events of the last few years, is about as consequential as policy work gets. The judicial overhaul controversy of 2023 and 2024 was essentially a fight over the very questions IDI has been working on for decades: what are the limits of judicial review, how should the Supreme Court's power be balanced against the Knesset's, what does it mean for Israel to be both Jewish and democratic. IDI came down firmly on the side of preserving judicial independence, which placed them squarely in opposition to the government's reform agenda.
Which brings us to the other side of that fight — the Kohelet Policy Forum.
Kohelet is a fascinating case study because it's the think tank that people love to hate or hate to love, depending on where they sit. It was founded in 2012 by Moshe Koppel, an American-born Israeli computer scientist and Talmud scholar who also happens to be a professor of mathematics at Bar-Ilan. The forum is explicitly conservative and libertarian in orientation. Their core argument is that Israel's judiciary has arrogated too much power to itself, that the legal system is dominated by a narrow elite that doesn't represent the broader Israeli public, and that the balance needs to shift toward the elected branches of government.
They were the intellectual architects of the judicial reform, weren't they?
To a significant extent, yes. Kohelet researchers developed detailed proposals for changing the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee, for limiting the Supreme Court's ability to strike down legislation, for introducing an override clause. These weren't just academic papers; they became the legislative agenda of the government. That's think tank influence in its most direct and consequential form. Kohelet is funded primarily by private donors, and there's been considerable controversy about the opacity of that funding. They've been linked to American donors associated with conservative and libertarian causes in the United States, and they've been relatively guarded about disclosing their full donor list, which has fueled a lot of the suspicion around them.
The funding question is actually a through-line for this whole discussion, and I want to come back to it after we map out the rest of the institutions. But first, let's talk about INSS — the Institute for National Security Studies — because this is the one that I suspect most people are confused by. It sounds like it should be part of the defense establishment, but it's not.
INSS is, in many ways, the heavyweight of the Israeli think tank world. It was founded in 2006, but it's actually the successor to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, which was established at Tel Aviv University in 1977. So its institutional lineage goes back almost fifty years. INSS is headquartered in Tel Aviv and dedicated entirely to national security and foreign policy. They have research programs on Iran, on the Palestinian arena, on cyber security, on military strategy, on China, on the United States relationship. Their roster includes former senior military and intelligence officials — former generals, former Mossad directors, former National Security Council heads.
It's a revolving door between the security establishment and the think tank, which is a dynamic we see in Washington with places like CSIS or Brookings.
And that revolving door is both a strength and a critique. On the one hand, it means INSS researchers have genuine operational knowledge — they've been in the room, they understand the classified realities behind the public debates. On the other hand, it raises questions about whether INSS functions as an independent analytical body or as a quasi-official echo chamber for the security establishment's views. I think the reality is somewhere in between. INSS does produce independent analysis, and they've published things critical of government policy. But their institutional culture and personnel are deeply embedded in the national security apparatus.
They're influential in a different way than Kohelet or IDI. They're not primarily trying to shape legislation — they're trying to shape strategic thinking, to frame how policymakers and the public understand threats and opportunities.
INSS runs the annual "Strategic Survey for Israel," a comprehensive assessment of Israel's security environment that's widely read in the defense establishment, the diplomatic corps, and allied governments. They also do a lot of Track Two diplomacy — informal meetings with counterparts from countries with which Israel doesn't have formal relations. And their annual conference is a major event where the prime minister, the defense minister, and the chief of staff typically speak. That's a measure of their access and influence.
Let me add one more to the security-policy cluster: the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs — JCPA. This one sits at a different point on the ideological spectrum than INSS.
Yes, and JCPA has a distinctive history. It was founded in 1976 by Daniel Elazar, a prominent political scientist at Temple University and a major figure in the study of federalism and Jewish political thought. The Jerusalem Center has always been more identifiably conservative and more explicitly Zionist in its orientation than INSS. They've done a lot of work on Jerusalem, on international law as it relates to Israel's security, on the Palestinian arena, and on anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of Israel. Their publication program has included detailed legal analyses arguing for Israel's rights under international law in disputed territories — work that has been influential in certain political circles.
They're the ones behind the "Defensible Borders" concept, if I'm not mistaken — the argument that Israel must retain certain territorial assets for strategic depth.
That's right, and that concept has been central to Israeli strategic thinking for decades. JCPA has also been involved in Track Two diplomacy and in fostering ties with policymakers in the United States and Europe. More recently, they've done work on the Abraham Accords and regional cooperation. They're smaller than INSS, but they occupy a specific niche — conservative, security-focused, and deeply engaged with the legal and diplomatic dimensions of Israel's position.
Far we've got the liberal-democratic cluster — Van Leer and IDI — the conservative-legal cluster — Kohelet — and the security cluster — INSS and JCPA. But there's another important category that the prompt specifically called out: the socioeconomic think tanks. And this is where I get personally interested, because as Daniel noted, the affordability of life in Israel, the cost of housing, the concentration of wealth — these are existential issues that don't get nearly enough attention relative to security and identity.
The Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel is the premier institution in this space. Founded in 1982, the Taub Center is a nonpartisan research institute that focuses exclusively on socioeconomic issues: education, health, welfare, labor markets, and — crucially for our earlier discussion — housing and the rental market. They're the ones who produce the data that everyone else cites. Their annual "State of the Nation Report" is the definitive statistical portrait of Israeli society, covering everything from poverty rates to educational outcomes to health disparities.
They're empirically rigorous in a way that makes them hard to dismiss, regardless of your ideological priors.
That's their brand. Taub researchers are economists, sociologists, public health experts — they come from academia, and their work is peer-reviewed and data-driven. They've been sounding the alarm on housing affordability for years. They've documented the growing gap between income growth and housing prices, the declining rate of homeownership among young Israelis, the regressive nature of Israel's property tax system, and the failure of government policy to address the supply side of the housing market.
When we did that episode on the broken rental market, a lot of the underlying data we were drawing on probably originated at Taub.
And what's interesting about Taub is that they've managed to maintain credibility across the political spectrum precisely because they don't take explicit ideological positions. They'll publish findings that are inconvenient for the left and findings that are inconvenient for the right. For example, they've documented the ways in which Israel's welfare state has eroded over time — a finding the left uses to argue for more social spending. But they've also documented the inefficiencies and perverse incentives in some of Israel's social programs — findings the right uses to argue for reform. They're the closest thing Israel has to something like the Congressional Budget Office — a neutral analytical body whose numbers everyone argues about but nobody successfully discredits.
There's also the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, which Daniel mentioned. How does that fit in?
The Jerusalem Institute is interesting because it's geographically focused in a way the others aren't. It was founded in 1978 by Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem's legendary mayor, and its original mission was to provide data and policy analysis specifically for the city of Jerusalem. Over time, it's expanded to cover broader national issues — environmental policy, urban planning, demographics — but Jerusalem remains its core focus. They're the go-to source for data on Jerusalem's population, its neighborhoods, its economic dynamics, the relationship between its Jewish and Arab residents. If you want to understand why East Jerusalem is the way it is, or what's happening with the ultra-Orthodox population, or where the city's tax base is going, the Jerusalem Institute has the numbers.
Jerusalem is unique in Israel — it's the largest city, it's the capital, it has a complex demographic mix, and its economy is weirdly structured compared to Tel Aviv or Haifa. So having a dedicated institute for Jerusalem actually makes sense.
It does, and they've been involved in some of the most contentious policy debates around the city — the security barrier, settlement in East Jerusalem, the relocation of the US embassy, the development of the city's infrastructure. But they've done it in a relatively low-key, data-driven way that hasn't attracted the same kind of political fire as some of the more explicitly ideological think tanks.
Let's step back and talk about the structural questions that the prompt raises. The first one is funding. Who pays for all of this?
This is where the tapestry gets complicated. Israeli think tanks are funded through a mix of sources: the government, private philanthropy, foreign foundations, and in some cases, fee-for-service research contracts. The balance varies enormously. Van Leer was established with an endowment from the Van Leer family and continues to receive support from the Van Leer Foundation, plus Israeli government funding and research grants. IDI receives significant funding from North American Jewish philanthropists and foundations, plus some Israeli government support. Kohelet is almost entirely privately funded, with much of its support reportedly coming from American donors, though the specifics are opaque. INSS receives funding from private donors, foundations, and some government contracts for specific research projects.
The foreign funding question is politically sensitive, which is where this connects back to our earlier discussions about NGOs. There's a recurring debate in Israel about whether foreign-funded think tanks and advocacy groups are legitimate participants in democratic discourse or vehicles for foreign influence.
The Knesset has legislated on this repeatedly. The most famous example is the so-called "NGO Law" passed in 2016, which requires NGOs that receive more than half their funding from foreign governments to disclose that fact in their publications and in their interactions with public officials. The law was controversial — critics argued it targeted left-wing human rights organizations while leaving right-wing groups, which tend to be funded by private donors rather than foreign governments, unaffected. But the broader debate it reflects is real: in a small country with a highly permeable public sphere, where do you draw the line between legitimate philanthropic support for policy research and problematic foreign interference?
It seems to me that the think tanks we've been discussing sit in a somewhat different position than the advocacy NGOs that the NGO Law was aimed at. These institutes are, for the most part, producing research and convening discussions, not running campaigns or filing lawsuits.
That's a fair distinction, though the line can blur. Kohelet, for example, doesn't just produce research — it actively advocates for specific policies and has close ties to lawmakers. IDI runs major public campaigns around constitutional issues. So the distinction between "research" and "advocacy" is more of a spectrum than a bright line. But I take your point: these are not, for the most part, the kind of organizations that NGO Monitor has been most critical of.
Let's talk about influence. We've established that Kohelet had direct legislative impact through the judicial reform. What about the others? How much does a research paper from IDI or a Taub Center report actually change what the government does?
The answer varies, and I think it's important to be honest about the limits of think tank influence. Most of the time, think tanks don't directly drive policy — they shape the intellectual environment in which policy is made. They provide the conceptual frameworks, the data, the arguments that policymakers and their staffs draw on. A Knesset member doesn't read a Taub Center report and then immediately introduce legislation. But over time, the Taub Center's findings about housing affordability become part of the conventional wisdom, they get cited in committee hearings, they inform the positions that parties take in elections, and eventually they influence policy.
It's more like slow-drip influence than a direct pipeline.
And the pace varies by domain. In national security, the influence can be faster and more direct because the policy community is smaller and the think tanks are staffed by people who were recently in government. An INSS paper on Iran's nuclear program can land on the prime minister's desk within days and shape the agenda for the next security cabinet meeting. In socioeconomic policy, the influence is more diffuse and takes longer to materialize — but it's no less real. The growing public awareness of Israel's housing crisis has been driven in no small part by years of Taub Center reporting.
There's a third dimension of influence that we haven't talked about: the media. Think tanks in Israel are major suppliers of commentary and analysis to the press. When a journalist needs an expert to quote on a story about Iran, or housing prices, or the judicial system, they call someone from INSS or Taub or IDI.
And that's a deliberate strategy. They cultivate relationships with journalists, they put out press releases, they make their researchers available for interviews. It's a form of influence that's harder to measure than legislative impact but arguably just as important, because it shapes how the public understands issues. And in a democracy, public understanding ultimately constrains what policymakers can do.
If I'm a listener who's been hearing these names for years and wondering what distinguishes them, what's the one-sentence version for each? Let's do a quick taxonomy.
Van Leer: critical humanities and social science, left-liberal, more academic than policy-focused. Israel Democracy Institute: democratic governance and constitutional reform, center-left, significant legislative footprint. INSS: national security and foreign policy, centrist-establishment, deep ties to the defense community. Kohelet: conservative and libertarian, focused on legal reform and economic freedom, highly influential on the right. Taub Center: socioeconomic data and analysis, nonpartisan, empirically rigorous, the go-to source for numbers on inequality and housing. Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research: originally Jerusalem-focused, now broader, data-driven, relatively low-profile. JCPA: conservative security and foreign policy, legal advocacy for Israel's position, engaged in Track Two diplomacy.
That's helpful. And what's missing from that list? The prompt acknowledged there are probably twenty or thirty more we could add.
The Shalem Center, which eventually became Shalem College, was a major conservative think tank that drove a lot of intellectual energy on the right — they published the journal Azure, an important platform for conservative Zionist thought. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, known as the BESA Center, is another significant player in the security space, generally more hawkish than INSS. The Reut Institute does innovative work on national resilience. The Molad Center is a smaller progressive think tank. The Adva Center focuses on social inequality from a left-wing perspective. The Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies works on governance and planning. I could go on.
The density is remarkable for a country of nine million people. Israel punches well above its weight in the think tank world, just as it does in tech and in security.
There's a reason for that, and I think it goes to something deep about Israeli political culture. Israel is a country where ideas matter intensely. It's a society that was built by ideological movements — Zionism wasn't just a political project, it was an intellectual project, with its own thinkers and journals and debates. That tradition has carried forward into the state period. Israelis argue about everything, and they take ideas seriously. The think tank ecosystem is an institutional expression of that.
There's a structural factor too. Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a fragmented party system and relatively weak bureaucratic capacity compared to, say, Northern European countries. That creates demand for external policy expertise. Ministries are often understaffed and under-resourced; they rely on think tanks and research institutes to do the analytical work that in other countries would be done by the civil service.
That's an excellent point, and it's one that Toby Greene has documented in his research on Israeli policy-making. The Knesset, in particular, has a very limited research capacity compared to the US Congress or the UK Parliament. Individual MKs have small staffs and limited analytical support. So they turn to think tanks, to academics, to NGOs for the information and analysis they need to do their jobs. It's a form of outsourcing that has real consequences for who gets heard in the policy process.
Which brings us back to the funding question. If think tanks are effectively providing a public service — supplying the analytical capacity that the state itself lacks — then who pays for them matters enormously. If the funding comes from ideologically motivated donors, the analysis is going to reflect those ideological commitments, even if the researchers are operating in good faith.
I think that's right, and it's one of the reasons the opacity around some of these institutions is a legitimate concern. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with private funding of policy research — there isn't — but because the public has a right to know who is shaping the ideas that end up influencing their government. Transparency about funding sources should be a baseline expectation for any organization that wants to participate in the policy process.
Yet, as you noted, the NGO Law only requires disclosure from organizations that receive more than half their funding from foreign governments. A think tank that's entirely funded by private foreign donors — but not foreign governments — has no disclosure obligation under that law.
That's the loophole, and it's one that Kohelet, in particular, has been criticized for exploiting. To be fair, Kohelet has argued that donor privacy is important, especially in Israel's highly polarized political environment, where donors to controversial causes might face harassment or boycotts. There's a genuine tension between transparency and privacy here. But my own view is that the presumption should be in favor of disclosure, especially for organizations directly involved in shaping legislation.
Let's pivot to something the prompt gestured at but didn't fully develop: the question of which think tanks are focused on the "pragmatics of life in Israel" — the economic and social issues that, as Daniel put it, are "grossly underexplored" relative to the big discussions about security and identity. I share that frustration. Israel's public discourse is dominated by the existential questions — Iran, the Palestinians, the nature of the state — and the mundane but crushing realities of housing costs, food prices, and wage stagnation get treated as secondary.
Yet these are the issues that determine whether people can afford to live here, whether young families can stay in the country, whether the social contract holds. The Taub Center has been documenting this for years — the cost of living in Israel is among the highest in the OECD relative to wages, housing prices have more than doubled in real terms over the past two decades, and the middle class is being squeezed in ways that are unsustainable.
Which institutions are actually working on these issues?
Taub is the leader, as we've discussed. The Adva Center does important work on inequality and social policy from a left-wing perspective. The Aaron Institute for Economic Policy at Reichman University produces regular analyses of economic trends. The Koret-Milken Institute, affiliated with the Jerusalem Institute, does work on economic reform. But I want to flag something: the relative underrepresentation of socioeconomic issues in the think tank landscape isn't just an oversight — it reflects a deeper feature of Israeli political economy. The major political cleavages in Israel have historically been about security and identity, not class. The left-right divide isn't primarily about the size of the welfare state; it's about the future of the territories, the role of religion, and the nature of the state. Economic issues get subsumed into those larger debates.
Which means the think tanks that do focus on economics are swimming against the current. They're trying to make economic justice and affordability into salient political issues in a system that's structured around other questions entirely.
And they've had some success — the cost of living protests of 2011, the largest social protests in Israel's history, were a moment when economic issues briefly broke through to the center of the political agenda. The Taub Center's data was central to the public conversation at that time. But the momentum dissipated, and security concerns reasserted themselves. The pattern is persistent.
If we're evaluating the think tank landscape as a whole, what's the verdict? Is it healthy? Is it serving Israeli democracy well?
I think the Israeli think tank ecosystem is, on balance, a significant asset. It produces high-quality research, provides a pipeline of ideas into the policy process, offers a home for serious intellectual work that doesn't fit neatly into the university system, and enriches public debate. But there are structural weaknesses. The funding model creates dependencies and potential distortions. The ideological clustering means that some perspectives are better resourced than others. And the influence of these institutions is not evenly distributed — they're read by elites, not by the broader public, which means their impact is mediated through journalists and policymakers who have their own filters and agendas.
There's a risk of epistemic closure, isn't there? If everyone at INSS comes from the same security establishment background, and everyone at Kohelet shares the same conservative priors, and everyone at Van Leer operates within the same critical paradigm, then each institution becomes very good at refining its own arguments and very bad at questioning its own assumptions.
That's the challenge, and it's not unique to Israel — it's a feature of think tank ecosystems everywhere. The best defense against it is intellectual pluralism: having multiple institutions with different perspectives, and ensuring that they actually engage with each other rather than talking past each other. And I think, on the whole, Israel does reasonably well on that score. The major think tanks do debate each other, they participate in the same conferences, they appear on the same media panels. The conversation is adversarial but it's a conversation.
One last question, and then I want to wrap with some forward-looking thoughts. The prompt asked about think tanks that are "centered in Israel and looking from within." But we also mentioned, in passing, the influential Jewish organizations based overseas that have thoughts to offer. How does that trans-national dimension interact with the domestic think tank scene?
It's a significant factor. Organizations like the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America, and various pro-Israel advocacy groups in the United States and Europe are part of the broader intellectual ecosystem in which Israeli policy is debated. They fund research, host conferences, publish reports, and have relationships with Israeli think tanks. In some cases, the funding flows from overseas donors to Israeli institutions — we've touched on that with Kohelet and IDI. In other cases, the overseas organizations have their own research arms that produce analysis feeding into Israeli debates. It's a complex web, and it means that the "Israeli" think tank conversation is never purely domestic — it's always embedded in a larger Jewish and pro-Israel discourse that spans the diaspora.
That's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it brings resources and perspectives that a small country might not otherwise have. On the other hand, it means that the policy conversation in Israel is shaped, in part, by people who don't live here, don't pay taxes here, and don't bear the consequences of the policies they advocate for.
That's the tension, and it's one that generates a lot of the suspicion around foreign funding that we've discussed. I don't have a simple resolution to offer — the diaspora relationship is fundamental to Zionism and to the Jewish people, and it would be strange and probably unhealthy to wall it off entirely. But the asymmetry is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
Alright, let's bring this in for a landing. If I'm a listener who's been hearing these names for years and wondering what distinguishes them, I now have a mental map. Van Leer is the humanities institute — critical, academic, left-liberal. IDI is the democracy shop — constitutional reform, governance, center-left. INSS is the security heavyweight — ex-generals, strategic surveys, centrist-establishment. Kohelet is the conservative legal powerhouse — judicial reform, libertarian economics, opaque funding. Taub is the numbers people — socioeconomic data, nonpartisan, empirically driven. JCPA is the conservative security-and-diplomacy institute. The Jerusalem Institute is the urban policy specialist.
That's a good summary. And I'd add that these institutions, collectively, form something like the intellectual infrastructure of Israeli public life. They're not as visible as the Knesset or the Supreme Court or the IDF, but they're part of the machinery that makes those institutions function — generating ideas, training personnel, framing debates, providing the analytical raw material that policy is made from.
The prompt asked what these bodies actually do on a day-to-day basis. The answer, it turns out, is that they do a lot — research, writing, convening, advising, advocating, networking. They're not just academic ivory towers, and they're not just lobbying shops. They sit in between, in that semi-visible layer, doing the slow, unglamorous work of thinking about the country's problems and proposing solutions. Some of those solutions are wise, some are dangerous, and the only way to tell the difference is to pay attention.
Which is, I suppose, the meta-point of this entire exercise. The think tank world matters because ideas matter. And understanding who is producing which ideas, with whose money, and to what end — that's not a niche concern. It's a basic requirement of democratic citizenship in a country where policy is shaped as much by research institutes as by party platforms.
And on that note —
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1840s, explorers near Lake Baikal in Siberia reported hearing a strange, low-frequency hum carried on dust storms that had traveled thousands of kilometers from the Gobi Desert. The acoustic property was caused by dust particles of a particular size resonating in unison as they passed over the lake's cold, dense air — effectively turning the entire storm into a giant, moving organ pipe.
Lake Baikal was, briefly, the world's largest and least intentional musical instrument.
A dust organ. I have so many questions about the physics of that, but I suspect Hilbert has already moved on to something else entirely.
Hilbert always has. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop, our producer, for that — and for everything else. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps. We'll be back soon with more questions, more research, and more of whatever that was.
