Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Intellectual Dark Web" with Eric Weinstein

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"The Intellectual Dark Web" with Eric Weinstein · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, I first met Eric Weinstein.
• 0:10
  Before the pandemic, he came to Sydney and he did a big day long event with his brother
• 0:18
  Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris and Marjord Nawaz and Douglas Murray.
• 0:27
  I was the moderator of these intellectual dissidents from scattered portions of the global community
• 0:36
  of near-to-wells and troublemakers for what ended up being a failed and controversial event
• 0:45
  run by a huckster who never paid us.
• 0:50
  Nonetheless, Eric was fascinating.
• 0:53
  He is the man who coined the term the Intellectual Dark Web to try to kind of put his arms
• 0:59
  around this phenomenon of people who were interested in talking about controversial
• 1:06
  political and cultural issues in a heterodox way, meaning a way that doesn't align
• 1:11
  neatly with left or right, with the institutional biases of mainstream media and polite company
• 1:19
  and conventional thinking, and that moniker, that grouping, that intellectual kind of idea
• 1:30
  of there being a cohort of such people has collapsed completely and disintegrated because
• 1:36
  some of those people have gone spinning and spiraling off into what you might think
• 1:42
  of as crazy town, into intense COVID conspiracy thinking, anti-vaccine beliefs, stride and
• 1:51
  see about politics, gone down the Trump rabbit hole, whether or not people like Dave Rubin
• 1:59
  or Ben Shapiro, wherever part of this group is open to question.
• 2:03
  Eric Weinstein's brother, Brett Weinstein, who was, I suppose, a friend of mine and
• 2:11
  ours and part of the same intellectual cohort has subsequently become quite possessed and
• 2:19
  obsessed with what I would call vaccine misinformation.
• 2:26
  He thinks he's just digging into the truth of the various anomalies about vaccines, but
• 2:32
  he has ended up in a place where he produces a podcast that persistently pushes one point
• 2:38
  of view, the skeptical point of view, about the pandemic and vaccines.
• 2:44
  And I ask Eric during this about his thoughts about what's happened to his brother during
• 2:50
  this period, nonetheless, Eric remains one of the smartest people I've ever met.
• 2:58
  So smart, he's hard to keep up with at times, I try to keep him under control here.
• 3:03
  I mean, he's, he has a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard.
• 3:10
  Like do I, if you tried to combine a bunch of words to make a person sound smart, it would
• 3:16
  be PhD, mathematical, Harvard physics.
• 3:22
  He's now the managing director of Teal Capital, which is Peter Teal's financial concern.
• 3:31
  Teal is a, a Trump sort of conservative, multi-billionaire co-founder of PayPal and other Silicon
• 3:41
  Valley giants.
• 3:44
  Eric is politically completely different from Peter Teal from his boss.
• 3:50
  Eric is more of a Bernie Sanders bro, frankly.
• 3:56
  But politics is the least important and least interesting thing about him.
• 4:01
  And in this conversation, we try to get our arms around what's important for us to understand
• 4:06
  about the fate of the world, why everything has gone bizarrely, wildly wrong, whether
• 4:14
  the media is rigged, what the future will hold and how to keep your head on straight.
• 4:20
  Oh, by the way, there's just one thing that I should explain before you listen to this,
• 4:25
  because there are many things that Eric will drop into the conversation that we can let
• 4:28
  slide.
• 4:29
  But one thing when he's talking about the origins of the coronavirus and why we were so
• 4:36
  reticent to consider man-made explanations, like the lab leak hypothesis, is he talks
• 4:43
  several times about the the fur and cleavage site on the virus, the haven't heard of
• 4:49
  the fur and cleavage site.
• 4:52
  That is a bit of the spike protein of the coronavirus that causes COVID, which seems
• 4:59
  to be different from other coronaviruses, researchers say that this could have occurred
• 5:06
  by random mutation or recombination or insertion in a lab.
• 5:13
  People who are suspicious that the virus came accidentally from animals will point to this
• 5:19
  fur and cleavage site and say that the possibility of random mutation is too low, the likelihood
• 5:25
  to explain the origin of the fur and cleavage site.
• 5:28
  So when you hear him talking about that, he's basically saying there's an aspect of the
• 5:32
  virus that is not amenable to likely explanation as an accident of evolution are not informed
• 5:41
  enough as a virologist who want to know how to adjudicate that so I just let slide.
• 5:45
  But that's what that means.
• 5:46
  I hope you enjoy this conversation with the one and only Eric Weinstein.
• 5:58
  But now we're sticking with it, all right, then just imagine me wearing a sport coat.
• 6:07
  I'll imagine you're wearing a sport coat, I mean, I'll imagine you're wearing all kinds
• 6:11
  of things, a groucho, marks, disguise, a silly hat, a common Miranda hat with a pineapple
• 6:16
  on it.
• 6:17
  Who knows?
• 6:18
  The erotic tension is palpable.
• 6:19
  Exactly.
• 6:20
  As long as you're pantless, Eric pantless.
• 6:22
  I don't do it or use any other way, sir.
• 6:25
  Excellent.
• 6:26
  I actually did that sometimes when I was back on HuffPost Live just for a lock, you know,
• 6:32
  the cliche of the anchor with no pants.
• 6:35
  I think it's a marvelous thing, but in the post-tuban era, I must caution you, sir.
• 6:43
  Wow.
• 6:44
  What did you make of the whole?
• 6:45
  I mean, just look, we can talk about anything and everything.
• 6:47
  But just while we're on the subject of looking at people's faces and zooming and all that,
• 6:53
  a few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who I hadn't caught up with in a long time.
• 6:58
  And she lives in a part of Sydney that's about 50 minutes, 50 years ago, and I do have to
• 7:03
  ask.
• 7:04
  Yeah.
• 7:05
  We haven't begun yet, have we?
• 7:06
  Oh, yeah.
• 7:07
  We'll just fade in wherever.
• 7:10
  Were you thinking that maybe the quality of the conversation wasn't quite up to par yet?
• 7:14
  Well, I was thinking that beginning with an anecdote about a CNN distributor.
• 7:22
  Eric Weinstein already in studio.
• 7:25
  That's right.
• 7:26
  Good to be with you.
• 7:27
  Yes.
• 7:28
  Thank you, Eric.
• 7:29
  There's no walk on here.
• 7:30
  We don't go.
• 7:31
  We don't do.
• 7:32
  Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Eric Weinstein and then the band plays, yeah, the roar of the
• 7:38
  crowd.
• 7:39
  I'm walking on.
• 7:40
  So I was speaking with a friend of mine and I hadn't seen her in a while.
• 7:43
  She lives almost an hour away from me and I was trying to coordinate when we'd be able
• 7:47
  to get brunch.
• 7:48
  And she said she texted, well, we could just do zoom, you know?
• 7:52
  And I was like, are you fucking insane?
• 7:55
  After we'd put up with two years of looking at your pixelated, stupid faces on my computer
• 8:01
  screen, you think I'm ever going to willingly go back to looking at someone on a screen instead
• 8:07
  of face to face?
• 8:08
  I'd rather just talk to you on the phone or text you.
• 8:11
  Like for me, for me, Zoom never added anything unless you were in a meeting with like five
• 8:17
  plus people and you had to see them all and wrangle them all.
• 8:20
  I was like, why are we bothering with the face at all?
• 8:22
  Call me.
• 8:23
  Yeah, I don't think we're ourselves anymore.
• 8:28
  What does that mean?
• 8:31
  I think we have now integrated so deeply with this dystopic, electronic experience that
• 8:38
  people who did not spend an enormous portion of their life prior to this fusion of technology
• 8:46
  and wet wear.
• 8:50
  I think that in general, people have just accepted an extremely degraded concept of what it
• 8:55
  means to be a human being because it is always more convenient.
• 9:00
  Is that because of the zoomification of life during the pandemic or because of social
• 9:05
  media and devices in our pockets all the time or just in question?
• 9:09
  I think that the phone has made certain changes in our brains that have nothing to do with
• 9:18
  what we would expect.
• 9:21
  We might expect that it would make us more sedentary, which it did.
• 9:25
  We might expect that it does something with our dopamine.
• 9:30
  But I think what we didn't really realize is that it destroyed the character of being
• 9:36
  a human being as we scroll and graze and shout at each other and switch contexts in between
• 9:44
  apps.
• 9:45
  I think it really ended up reprogramming our minds to be things that have never existed
• 9:50
  at any point in history.
• 9:52
  That sounds like you're saying something has already happened, which a lot of futurists
• 9:56
  are sort of saying will happen in like the 20 to 50 year time frame when I talk to people
• 10:04
  who identify as book people, particularly older people.
• 10:09
  Can I ask, what was the last time you read, how long has it been since you read three books?
• 10:15
  They haven't really computed that they haven't read books and ages.
• 10:22
  That strikes me directly in my heart, Eric, because it's one of those things where during
• 10:27
  the pandemic, I'm not blaming the pandemic for this, I'm saying during the window of time
• 10:31
  in which the pandemic was taking place, I lost the ability or inclination to finish a
• 10:37
  novel.
• 10:38
  I can still read nonfiction, but I can't finish.
• 10:42
  I've finished one novel since the pandemic, so that's in 12 months I've managed to, I've
• 10:47
  tried about four and I've finished one and I used to read a novel a month.
• 10:54
  So let's imagine that we start taking that across different art forms.
• 11:00
  I am a music person.
• 11:03
  To say I live for music is slightly too strong, but it's close.
• 11:08
  I don't feel music anymore the way I used to.
• 11:13
  It's not that I don't know where the great music is and it's not like I don't know which
• 11:16
  symphonies matter to me or which jazz ensembles I view as being brilliant or the blues that
• 11:23
  animates me.
• 11:25
  I just don't register music remotely similarly to the way that I used to and I know that
• 11:35
  that's true because occasionally I can find a piece of music that for a period of time
• 11:40
  proves to me that I'm still capable if I find something, but I think it's spread out
• 11:46
  over a couple of different issues.
• 11:47
  One issue is that the phones and the availability and the way in which we interact with music has
• 11:55
  changed.
• 11:56
  The other thing is that our artists have no idea what world is happening and so their
• 12:02
  reflection of it back to us is really much more meaningless than say the artists of the
• 12:07
  1960s who seem to have their finger on the pulse of the time and you're almost listening
• 12:13
  to music as if it was a news report because it was telling you what was happening.
• 12:18
  Maybe there's less of a pulse of the time though.
• 12:21
  Like maybe there is less of a single pulse than there was then because we're all consuming
• 12:25
  so many different streams of information and we're living in an increasingly fractalized
• 12:30
  pixelated world of information bubbles.
• 12:33
  I don't know.
• 12:34
  Are you having some experiences I am that can be refracted to you through music?
• 12:38
  Not really.
• 12:41
  I started writing music and I just played a song for my son and went through the lyrics
• 12:48
  and things and he said, wow, that really does reflect our time and I now understand
• 12:54
  better what you mean that our music doesn't reflect our time.
• 12:56
  I would say that in, oh geez, it's hard to even feel, but if you look at my explanation
• 13:04
  for why everything has gone wildly bizarrely wrong.
• 13:10
  It attempts to find almost a single ideology which is that we had a free society particularly
• 13:17
  in the Anglophone nations built on expectations of very high broadly distributed technologically
• 13:25
  led stable growth and that when that equation was shown not to be an eternal fact of capitalism
• 13:33
  or democracy, you had an entire system that hungered for growth that could not get itself
• 13:39
  fed.
• 13:41
  And that single explanation of what I've called embedded growth obligations which is the
• 13:47
  stall speed for an institution, it has to grow at a certain rate because of what it has
• 13:53
  promised everyone that it will do or it becomes so as the apathic.
• 14:00
  That one explanation I think is pretty terrific in terms of the first pass at why everything
• 14:05
  has gone nuts.
• 14:07
  But the interesting thing to me is there really isn't a great market for trying to find
• 14:14
  explanations of why things are so screwed up.
• 14:17
  In fact, one of the things that will happen is if you start to have that conversation,
• 14:21
  somebody will say, well, are things really any different than the way they were before
• 14:25
  and somebody else will muddle it out with, oh, people have always been nostalgic for
• 14:29
  previous eras and it's very clear that this is an anomalous era.
• 14:34
  I think you can, you know, going back to music, you can look at it in terms of musical complexity
• 14:40
  or attention spans or, you know, what it is that we're consuming, you can measure things.
• 14:45
  I don't think we're looking for explanations.
• 14:48
  Things have gone mad and one of the most interesting things is that we're entirely
• 14:52
  disinterested.
• 14:54
  Let me just pick some of those interesting bits out there, Eric, I'll grant that this
• 14:58
  is anomalous.
• 14:59
  I don't think we need to dwell on whether or not this era is unusual.
• 15:05
  There are so many metrics by which it is, but let me ask you to defend the claim that
• 15:10
  everything's gone nuts because the, you know, I'd recently spoke to James Lindsay on this
• 15:15
  show.
• 15:16
  I don't know whether we'll release that before this episode or how it'll come up around
• 15:19
  this time.
• 15:20
  And James is the kind of person who will articulate a worldview in which he's quite convinced
• 15:26
  that everything has gone truly, truly nuts in a way that is being orchestrated and choreographed
• 15:32
  by malign forces who are hell bent on destroying Western civilization.
• 15:37
  And then on the other end of the spectrum, you'll have your Stephen Pinkers who will say,
• 15:42
  yeah, this is an anomalous era.
• 15:44
  But on the whole, the people who say that it's gone nuts are people who are spending
• 15:48
  way too much time online fighting culture wars.
• 15:51
  And that the lived reality of most people's lives is that they're living longer and they're
• 15:57
  freer from life-threatening diseases and, you know, birth problems and all kinds of health
• 16:04
  issues and malnutrition than they were in the past.
• 16:07
  And so generally, we're kind of chugging along and doing better than our forebears were.
• 16:13
  So why do you think things are nuts?
• 16:15
  Where are you on that spectrum?
• 16:18
  Well, Pinker is just wrong.
• 16:23
  Carry on.
• 16:23
  I mean, he claims he's not wrong about this.
• 16:26
  Let's take a maternal mortality rates.
• 16:29
  He's not wrong about that.
• 16:30
  Grant Pinker, every observation that he has, right?
• 16:34
  He's still wrong.
• 16:36
  I don't even understand people who believe Pinker has a point.
• 16:41
  Well, his point is that if you look at the data that we claim to care about,
• 16:44
  it's the granted live and how healthy that is.
• 16:47
  Yeah, granted.
• 16:48
  Granted all of them.
• 16:49
  Yeah.
• 16:50
  He's still obviously wrong.
• 16:52
  And this is, you know, if I took a weight on a spring, simple harmonic oscillator, right?
• 17:03
  Yeah.
• 17:03
  And I look at it, it goes at its top and at its bottom as having zero kinetic energy,
• 17:11
  but either having gravitational potential or a spring potential energy in the system,
• 17:18
  in the middle where it would be at rest, it's 100% kinetic energy.
• 17:23
  It trades off between kinetic and potential energy.
• 17:27
  What the good doctor Pinker is looking at is he's looking at a world awash in potential
• 17:32
  violence, right?
• 17:35
  So effectively, he's looking at a spring in which the kinetic violence is zero or very
• 17:43
  slight or as little as it can be.
• 17:46
  And he's declared that there's no energy in the system.
• 17:49
  Well, to be fair to Pinker, I don't think he's making prognostications about how things
• 17:53
  will be in the next 20 years.
• 17:55
  He's saying as a snapshot now, but he would be willing to be corrected.
• 18:00
  So you're basically saying that the events of the next 20 years are going to determine
• 18:04
  whether or not his factual data-driven approach to health data in about 20 years.
• 18:11
  I'm talking about Armageddon, an obvious Armageddon, and this is the problem of Putin and
• 18:15
  Ukraine and, you know, g-reacting to Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan and the eco-health alliance,
• 18:24
  really needing to get their grants in China to save us from the viruses that they intend
• 18:30
  to humanize.
• 18:31
  I mean, whether it's 20 years or not, Eric, the spring has to, the spring has to unload
• 18:38
  at some point in order for you to be validated.
• 18:42
  Right.
• 18:44
  Yep.
• 18:45
  What does that look like?
• 18:47
  It looks like what everybody knows it looks like, in other words, I'm making a different
• 18:52
  point.
• 18:53
  I'm making the point that Pinker's analysis is just trivially wrong.
• 18:58
  It's not that it's a point.
• 19:00
  Pinker doesn't have a point.
• 19:03
  Well, I don't want to get too stuck to bog down in, like, I appreciate what I'm trying
• 19:09
  to say is that-
• 19:10
  His point would be we all always think that everything's going to hell in a hand
• 19:14
  basket, but when you ask people what kind of hell in a hand basket looks like, they
• 19:18
  give you a bunch of things like political violence, people dying from disease, people dying
• 19:24
  in childbirth, people not having their rights respected and so on.
• 19:27
  And then when you actually look at the measurement of where those things stand in comparison
• 19:32
  to history, we're doing a great-
• 19:34
  Right.
• 19:35
  Now, you're saying that is insufficient because, well, you're saying more than it's insufficient,
• 19:39
  you seem to be saying that's incorrect, but I would, I would, I think you're on strong
• 19:42
  time.
• 19:43
  No, no, no, I'm trying to say something stronger.
• 19:45
  Right.
• 19:46
  I'm trying to say something stronger.
• 19:48
  I think we've got to stop including people as having points who don't have points and
• 19:53
  then force, like, pinkers point to the extent that he has one, has been focal for all
• 20:03
  of these discussions.
• 20:04
  It's like he's hijacked every discussion about what do we do about the obviously terrible
• 20:09
  situation we're in.
• 20:10
  And it's like, well, you know, Stephen Pinker sees it differently and I've never heard
• 20:15
  him not come up.
• 20:18
  My question is, you know, if I were talking about dark matter, right, in physics or dark
• 20:25
  energy and somebody said, well, you know, you're aware that Professor Wilcheck says it's
• 20:32
  angels.
• 20:35
  And every conversation I had to have about dark matter, we spent 45 minutes at the beginning
• 20:41
  discussing whether angels were a viable candidate.
• 20:44
  It would paralyze all ability to make progress on what is dark matter.
• 20:48
  Right now, the imperative is we've got Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.
• 20:54
  We've got Zelensky and Kiev calling for, I'm going to botcher the Slavic language, preventive
• 21:01
  Nidudari, preventative strikes.
• 21:03
  That's pretty good.
• 21:04
  Okay.
• 21:05
  American as a man who has no understanding of Slavic languages.
• 21:11
  Good on you.
• 21:12
  Yeah.
• 21:13
  By the way, Eric, you sound, you're sounding a little bit hot.
• 21:16
  Do you have a volume knob at your end because I can hear you very well, but I'm worried
• 21:20
  that you're going to sound a little bit distorted when you're excited.
• 21:24
  Well, I'll try to calm down.
• 21:25
  No, you can speak loudly, but I just don't know if you have an input volume.
• 21:30
  I don't, I have a mute, unfortunately.
• 21:36
  This is your sound.
• 21:37
  I don't want to mute you.
• 21:38
  I don't want to mute you.
• 21:39
  No, no, no, go for it.
• 21:40
  Don't worry about it.
• 21:41
  People can handle it.
• 21:43
  Continue the thought.
• 21:44
  You're the Putin.
• 21:45
  I think it's extremely important to exclude many perspectives from discussion because
• 21:53
  of their catastrophic effect on the culture of ideas and the ability to use the intellectual
• 22:01
  discussion to motivate action that is protective and preventative.
• 22:05
  The problem with pinker is that what he's doing is having the effect of making people
• 22:12
  feel very sophisticated when they become maximally complacent.
• 22:16
  It's a first-order counterintuitive point.
• 22:19
  Somebody says, wow, things are really screwed up.
• 22:21
  Then you have, well, actually, if you look at it, all the major trends point to the fact
• 22:25
  that things have never been better, and then you have to say, okay, the cost of my making
• 22:34
  the obvious point about why that is irrelevant is going to be 45 minutes of muddle, and it's
• 22:40
  going to have me as an overbearing voice, like, who are you to exclude Harvard professors
• 22:45
  Steven Baker?
• 22:47
  I just, I look at it as simple as Hooke's Law and a weight on the spring, and that is
• 22:53
  not a point that should be in the conversation when we're in an obviously dire situation.
• 22:58
  All right.
• 22:59
  Talk the inevitable and very enticing, upcoming, jelly-wrestling competition between Eric
• 23:05
  Weinstein and Steven Pinker, which I will moderate at Caesars in Las Vegas, and I think
• 23:11
  that'll be a world-defining event.
• 23:13
  You tell me about Joa.
• 23:14
  Go ahead.
• 23:15
  You tell me about the spring, then.
• 23:19
  Let's forget about how good things are and talk about what is the tension in the spring
• 23:25
  right now.
• 23:26
  Right now, what you have is the end of the post-World War II era, which was largely bipolar
• 23:33
  between the U.S. and its sphere of influence in Russia as the Soviet Union and its sphere
• 23:39
  of influence, and the cost of catastrophic technologies, like bio-weaponry, like fission
• 23:48
  and fusion devices, is going to continue to go down, and it's going to spread, and you're
• 23:54
  going to have a multipolar game-theoretic world in which all major human civilizations
• 23:59
  will be linked by their atmospheres, and the atmospheres carry the three greatest dangers
• 24:05
  to life on this planet, which is radiation, pathogen, and climate.
• 24:15
  And those are the three reasons why libertarianism doesn't make any sense, because there is nowhere
• 24:21
  to hide from your neighbor's effect on the atmosphere.
• 24:24
  We have a shared atmosphere in one terrestrial surface, so you can live in different places
• 24:27
  and have borders, but you can't have your own atmosphere.
• 24:32
  And those three things, because of our power, the power is gone way up, the destructive
• 24:38
  power is going to become far more widespread.
• 24:41
  We have a market that we can't turn off because it basically directs activity that could
• 24:45
  never be put under central command.
• 24:49
  And we are not figuring out what is after communism versus capitalism.
• 24:56
  We are not figuring out what is, is there a long-term solution to the human condition
• 25:02
  so that we can regain an indefinite future, which is what we had before catastrophic advances
• 25:07
  in 1952 and 1953?
• 25:09
  And, you know, I'm tired of hearing myself say this, I say this a lot.
• 25:14
  I would love to talk about all the reasons that I would like to save us in this planet,
• 25:20
  but until I say, we are clearly waiting for a very close call that is so dramatic, that
• 25:28
  it shakes us out of our fascination with the Kardashians.
• 25:32
  Why was COVID not that?
• 25:36
  Because we were cheated of the really interesting story, which is probably where it came from,
• 25:43
  and what the hell was going on in the conflict as to whether or not people had sovereign
• 25:49
  rights over their own body in the face of a public health epidemic.
• 25:54
  And the origin story of COVID, if we had held hearings that were very deep and painful,
• 26:01
  would have been fascinating.
• 26:02
  We had American verologists and epidemiologists who were very familiar with the situation
• 26:09
  of the Wuhan.
• 26:10
  I mean, think about it from a different point of view.
• 26:12
  The Wuhan Institute of Virology happened to be right next to the outbreak.
• 26:18
  And that could have been a very positive thing.
• 26:21
  You'd have the best verologists in China with its only biosafety level four laboratory right
• 26:27
  on top of wherever this thing came from.
• 26:30
  So we should have had an amazing scientific who done it where we tried to figure out where
• 26:36
  it came from.
• 26:37
  Instead, we immediately decided that it was absolutely 100 percent pure positive that
• 26:45
  it came from a zoonotic origin and likely only the wet market down the road.
• 26:52
  And anybody who questioned that was a racist and that was backed up by, I don't know, 60
• 26:57
  Nobel Prize winners and the Lancet, one of the most respected journals of all time.
• 27:02
  So that really killed.
• 27:06
  It forced us all into this very bizarre paradigm of, are you a lunatic who believes in anti-vax
• 27:15
  ideology or are you a lunatic who believes in the perfect benevolence of the government
• 27:19
  and the coincidence that the virus came out of Wuhan right next to the lab and that we
• 27:26
  happen to have an organization in the U.S. where zoologist happened to get $50 million
• 27:32
  in funding to study exactly such things like putting fear and cleavage sites into coronavirus.
• 27:39
  I mean, everybody became a crank.
• 27:44
  You were either a pro-government pro-establishment pro-medicine crank or you were an anti-government
• 27:51
  anti-establishment anti-medicine crank.
• 27:55
  And that completely innovated us.
• 27:59
  I mean, my worry is that that trend, that extremification is happening across so many different
• 28:05
  dynamics at the moment in culture.
• 28:07
  I mean, part of what I'm trying to do with this podcast and with all of my media existence
• 28:13
  and I think part of what you were doing with your podcast in 2019 and 2020, the portal,
• 28:17
  which I loved and I miss, is an attempt to have conversations that lie in the No Man's
• 28:23
  land between those two phony binaries that people expect us to reside inside of.
• 28:28
  But every other instinct and every other trend and every other incentive seems aligned at
• 28:36
  the moment.
• 28:37
  And I don't know whether this is driven by social media, whether this is driven by the sort
• 28:42
  of stratification and self-sorting of classes and ideologies in society, I don't know what
• 28:48
  to blame it on, but it does seem that there are incentives for people to fall in line
• 28:53
  with their cohort and become less and less curious about the No Man's land in between
• 29:00
  those two ideas.
• 29:01
  What's going on there?
• 29:04
  We're destroying everyone who takes an interest.
• 29:09
  Right.
• 29:13
  Raising the cost of taking an interest in not playing the binary game.
• 29:17
  I mean, everyone who's actually trying to figure out what's going on is under some form
• 29:25
  of relentless attack.
• 29:32
  From both sides?
• 29:34
  Nope.
• 29:35
  No, no, no, I think that what we have, let's take a very simple one, right?
• 29:46
  Well, no, let's go a little bit more abstract.
• 29:50
  We know that we have a problem that any time the intelligence community or the State Department
• 29:57
  and the United States is involved with a story that gets out of hand, there's an issue
• 30:02
  called sources and methods.
• 30:06
  What happens when you take an interest in something that turns out to be the Iran contra
• 30:10
  affair?
• 30:11
  Right?
• 30:12
  You know, some crazy story where the government is involved in selling drugs and arms and
• 30:19
  hostile regimes and some, you know, death squads and the official dem, the state craft wants
• 30:28
  to claim privilege by saying sources and methods cannot be discussed.
• 30:32
  Well, what if the covert virus involves sources and methods?
• 30:39
  What happens if you take an interest?
• 30:40
  What happens if you say, look, I want to talk about the fear and cleavage site.
• 30:45
  We have four nucleotides.
• 30:47
  The odds of a transposition, you know, of these four nucleotides in those locations is,
• 30:55
  you know, one in some ungodly large number.
• 31:00
  We do note that the proposals like inserting a fear and cleavage site to increase the
• 31:08
  virality of a, of a coronavirus, you know, was discussed previously, I have this very
• 31:17
  strong sense that we know the answer is don't ask those questions, right?
• 31:27
  And then we have this very weird thing with, we have the Fauci Collins emails.
• 31:35
  And we have this reference to three epidemiologists at Stanford Harvard and Oxford, which are last
• 31:42
  time I checked relatively establishment organizations that, these are fringe epidemiologists.
• 31:50
  I just spent some time with Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford.
• 31:54
  And you could disagree with him, you could, you could take issue with him, but he's hardly
• 31:57
  a fringe professor at the epidemiology at Stanford is not a fringe epidemiologist.
• 32:04
  You know, you're seeing in the emails that call for a swift and devastating take down
• 32:09
  of these positions, the orchestration of professional destruction.
• 32:17
  And we've now just uncovered at the Department of Homeland Security that they have a program
• 32:24
  for pre-bunking malinformation, where malinformation is truth.
• 32:30
  It's truth that's destructive.
• 32:34
  And they can pre-bunk it by inoculating people to not believe true information that they've
• 32:39
  you to be destructive.
• 32:41
  So my feeling about this is always look where people are artificially incurious.
• 32:49
  And I've called this something that has this characteristic anti-interesting.
• 32:54
  Something is anti-interesting if it involves sex and drugs and power and corruption and
• 32:59
  abuse and nobody wants to look at it.
• 33:03
  Because people will always want to look at those things.
• 33:06
  So in general, we know Jeffrey Epstein is incredibly anti-interesting to our press.
• 33:14
  Our press is so uninterested in Jeffrey Epstein.
• 33:18
  And I've spoken to reporters who put together these stories.
• 33:22
  And then their editors tell them, nobody knows who that is, nobody cares who that is.
• 33:26
  It's water under the bridge, you're beating a dead horse.
• 33:28
  It's like, if you put out anything on Jeffrey Epstein, the world will retweet you to high
• 33:33
  heaven.
• 33:34
  Well, I don't know what journalists you're surrounding yourself with Eric, but let me
• 33:39
  articulate a problem that I think is part of this coming from the perspective of someone
• 33:44
  who works inside journalism, mainstream journalism, that there is an area that falls short of fact,
• 33:54
  that is a space that you love playing in, that is difficult for journalism as it's currently
• 34:01
  constituted to explore, because I know that there's a lot of criticism of journalists, but when I talk
• 34:10
  about old school traditional kind of cronkite, you know, descendants of the cronkite's legacy,
• 34:18
  and you can laugh, but places like where I work at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
• 34:23
  and places like I would still include for all of its faults on its op-ed page, places like the
• 34:28
  New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, where you need to have at least three sources.
• 34:33
  And if you come back with two and a half kind of sources, your editor is going to kick you
• 34:38
  in the ass and go, go back, I need more, we haven't got it yet, we haven't got the story yet.
• 34:42
  And you will go digging and digging and digging, and you will take, you know, you have to be able
• 34:47
  to take it to the bank, and there are procedures, layers of editorial verification. This doesn't mean
• 34:53
  that the mistakes don't get made, this doesn't mean that the editorial point of view isn't skewed
• 34:58
  towards a certain bias, you're always making decisions about what is newsworthy and what is not,
• 35:03
  and those are reflections of your own world view. Nonetheless, things have to cross a certain
• 35:08
  threshold in order to get on the front page of the New York Times. And, you know, when they
• 35:13
  fuck up, they then have to own it. This is not my concern of it just tweeting something. This is
• 35:18
  a publication that has systems in place to hold themselves to a certain standard. And so exploring
• 35:26
  the question of Jeffrey Epstein beyond what's provable, exploring the origins of the coronavirus,
• 35:35
  beyond what the World Health Organization and the Communist Party in Beijing will allow you to
• 35:41
  explore or to verify becomes this really tricky zone. And the liability of having your level of
• 35:50
  curiosity as a widespread thing, I mean, you can cope with it because you're a fucking genius,
• 35:55
  but if we were to extrapolate your level of curiosity and skepticism to the population at large,
• 36:02
  my concern as a gatekeeper would be that we would live in a fucking
• 36:05
  asthma of total chaos and conspiracy thinking. I really appreciate that. It's also not true.
• 36:12
  If you simply took the angle, why are we not holding hearings into the eco-health alliance
• 36:18
  and its role in Wuhan, China? Like, in other words, the story isn't the coronavirus origin.
• 36:26
  Why are we not holding hearings into Peter Dajic, Ralph Barrick,
• 36:34
  the Wuhan Institute of Irology, the Defense that Reduction Agency, DITRA?
• 36:45
  You could just do a story on that. You could do a story on where are the records of Jeffrey
• 36:51
  Epstein's multi-billion dollar currency trading hedge fund. He assured me that he was a currency
• 36:56
  trader when I met him one time, okay? That he had an enormous hedge fund. He'd just been doing
• 37:02
  some currency trading when he came into the meeting. No one I know seems to have traded with him.
• 37:07
  Nobody knows who his prime broker was and there is no way of faking a multi-billion dollar currency
• 37:13
  trading hedge fund because the tick data is available historically. So just ask the question,
• 37:19
  where is the data? Where are the SEC filings? Where is the official interaction with the outside
• 37:25
  world? And print whatever comes back, including somebody saying no comment or that's classified.
• 37:35
  My point is we're having that conversation that's similar to the Stephen Pinker conversation.
• 37:43
  I'm now defending the idea that this is trivially easy. It's trivially easy. All you need to do is
• 37:50
  to ask questions to people on the record and get a no comment. That's a news, that's a news item.
• 37:57
  Not very sexy news item. It doesn't last for a week and I'll take point.
• 38:02
  Is Jeffrey Epstein known to be connected to any intelligence community
• 38:09
  and was the federal government interested in monitoring his activities or did he somehow slip
• 38:16
  completely below the radar? So the story becomes the federal government denies that there was
• 38:23
  any relationship between its intelligence services and Jeffrey Epstein. That's one possibility.
• 38:28
  The federal government refuses to comment, citing sources and methods. The federal government
• 38:35
  agrees that it had a massive intelligence failure, that it could not detect a massive
• 38:40
  trafficking operation of 12-year-old girls, indicating that we need to somehow have a better
• 38:49
  alert system. There's no non-interesting story that just begins with saying why is there no story?
• 38:59
  There's no non-interesting story that begins with saying why isn't there a story?
• 39:04
  If I ask how many negatives there? Sorry, it's the dog that didn't bark a problem.
• 39:10
  Right. Okay. So the question is, maybe it takes three sources on the record blah, blah, blah to
• 39:17
  confirm something that you'd like. We'll don't begin there. Begin with the question of why are the
• 39:22
  dogs not barking? What is causing the, just ask the questions and record the answers.
• 39:32
  If the answer is no comment, that's fascinating.
• 39:41
  I guarantee you can sell papers by saying we asked why there were no hearings into the
• 39:47
  eco-health alliances, activities in Wuhan, China. We were told that was privileged or there is no
• 39:58
  comment or journalism has disappeared. You could see this, for example, with the bombing of the
• 40:09
  federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon. It was denied, I think by Jerry Niedler, that there was
• 40:18
  an antifa, you know, fire bombing of the courthouse. This was during the protests. Was this in 2020?
• 40:26
  I think so. I mean, everything's running together. Yeah, but during the protests that were
• 40:30
  initially sparked by the George Floyd. Well, the protests, you know, the famous line inside the US
• 40:36
  is mostly peaceful. It's like nobody came up with more peaceful. Right, you know, it's just
• 40:40
  to explain that to people who didn't know that mean. Well, you're looking at footage of businesses
• 40:48
  burning to the ground. And people are saying, oh, you know, perhaps there was some excessive
• 40:57
  enthusiasm people had cooped up for a long time. Mostly peaceful. It looked right, it's man.
• 41:02
  There was one that it was one notorious CNN thing where like the, you know, the reporter is
• 41:07
  standing in front of like burning buildings and people smashing each other in the face and
• 41:11
  everything. And the crawl across the bottom of the screens is mostly peaceful protests as
• 41:16
  people are getting curiosity has become a crime. Right. And my point is I don't know that
• 41:23
  Jeffrey Epstein didn't tell himself. I don't know that this virus didn't come from
• 41:28
  Pangolin. I don't know that Jeffrey Epstein didn't run a currency trading hedge fund.
• 41:33
  I don't know that there's lots of stuff I don't know. I do know that the reporting is as bizarre as
• 41:44
  we've ever seen in the history of journalism. It's like forced incuriosity at a level where we
• 41:52
  can't even ask where is the story. So I wonder, I think that makes me think about something
• 41:59
  you said earlier about not reading books and you not appreciating music the same way in the sense
• 42:05
  that we don't spend time wasting time anymore. And it's possible that all of this has a similar
• 42:15
  cause and that the cause is less about institutions which I know you frequently attribute it to
• 42:22
  and more about our attention. I mean, I know a lot of journalists who just spend a lot of time
• 42:28
  churning through the hamster wheel of stories that are in front of them. And I know a lot of people
• 42:37
  who relate to their lives that way and to the input of what's going on in the world scrolling
• 42:42
  through their feed chatting about the same kinds of things. Not having the scope to just be bored
• 42:48
  and neutral on curious questions. I appreciate all of these things. I want you to take everything
• 42:54
  that you can possibly come up with that would innovate the allegation that I'm making. Okay. So
• 43:01
  maybe we're bored. We don't have the attention spans. Maybe the idea is that there's a lot of
• 43:08
  emergence and we're only now noticing it because we have phones and so there's a lot more coincidence
• 43:12
  to be explained. Let's just come up with, you know, just like with Stephen Pinker, come up with the
• 43:18
  giant list of explanations that don't have to do with something that's actually really disturbing.
• 43:26
  You could still look at any one of these things. If I look at only the reporters who come and contact
• 43:32
  me who try to get information about a story. And then they spend three weeks on the story and they're
• 43:37
  putting it together. This is incredible. This is amazing. Why has nobody ever covered this? And I'm
• 43:42
  like, I'm telling you where this is going. You're about to have a conversation with your editor.
• 43:47
  And your editor is about to tell you, sorry, nobody cares. Nobody's interested.
• 43:53
  Not enough on it. I'm putting you on this other story that's really important. I'm just thinking,
• 43:59
  I can set my clock to this. I, for example, happen to know, soup to nuts,
• 44:06
  what happened to pass the Immigration Act of 1990 with its infamous H1B program,
• 44:13
  which keep in mind that there is no such thing as a long-term labor shortage in a market economy
• 44:18
  because the wage mechanism always finds the equilibrium. I have a Steinway shortage in my
• 44:24
  living room only because I'm not willing to pay for one. Right? There's a Lamborghini shortage in
• 44:29
  my garage. I have one of those too. Yeah. Brother, we should, we should drink and commiserate.
• 44:36
  Unfortunately, I have a good Scotch shortage as well. We have a, there's no shortage of articles on
• 44:43
  labor shortages. But it's not a, it's not a feature of market economics. Right? So you have a
• 44:50
  completely fictitious concept, which is long-term labor shortages. You have changes in law.
• 44:55
  And every reporter who ever gets at this, runs all the stuff down and they get to the editorial level.
• 45:03
  The editor says, I'm sorry, we can't run this because of XYZP or Q.
• 45:10
  Look at the Amy Robock, hot mic thing where she's saying that she had all of the sources and all
• 45:16
  of the data on the Jeffrey Epstein thing. What you're doing is you're doing the same thing
• 45:20
  Pinker is doing. You're innovating your audience. You know, Eric, couldn't it be? And it's like,
• 45:27
  no, it isn't. We know that nobody's really asking these questions.
• 45:37
  And by nobody, I mean, there's no reporter editor paper unit that's able to break these stories.
• 45:44
  Including stories that indicate that Jeffrey Epstein really killed himself, that the coronavirus
• 45:52
  came from a Pangolin having sex with a bat and, you know, whatever else. But we're not asking
• 45:59
  the questions and that the message of this Josh, and this is really important, is don't be curious.
• 46:10
  Well, now I'm curious about how a Pangolin has sex with a bat.
• 46:13
  And I want to see that as the sequence of Stephen Pinker, Eric Weinstein, jelly wrestling competition
• 46:21
  in Las Vegas. I mean, look, everything you say makes sense. And I don't want to be the guy who's
• 46:30
  always going, yeah, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but this over here and this over here.
• 46:35
  You are. And because we're all doing it. It's not you, Josh.
• 46:39
  But the, I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll cop to it to the extent that it's somehow more
• 46:46
  parsimonious as an explanation. There's an, there's an often raise of, like, neatness
• 46:53
  to my explanation in a strange way, which is that human beings are group thinking mammals
• 47:02
  who aren't very good at alienating their cohort in suit of truth. I know.
• 47:09
  And that is just simpler than I'm not sure what the thesis that you're making is that editors
• 47:14
  would be actually getting instructions from on high. I want to know certain stories.
• 47:21
  Is there on liaison at the New York Times, for example, that has a direct line to the
• 47:28
  Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community where they say, hey, we're,
• 47:34
  we're understanding that you may be running down a story with the following features we need
• 47:38
  you to hold off. Is that a thing that exists? I mean, yes. And the history of the way that that
• 47:43
  thing gets used is instructive as well. I mean, we, so, you know, people who've left the times
• 47:50
  and who have left these organizations will tell us thrilling stories about how they're about to
• 47:55
  publish something. They get a call. I mean, I'm thinking specifically of, I can't remember what
• 48:01
  it was in the lead up to the Iraq war or just after the Iraq war, but Chinese office was basically
• 48:07
  pressuring the times and was in a negotiation about what can be published when and the times was
• 48:12
  like, we're going to, we're going to publish this. And the White House was like, just give us a day
• 48:19
  to get people out and give us a data like get our ducks in a row. And there was a willingness on
• 48:24
  the part of the times to accommodate those requests. So it's not like you need to be not in contact
• 48:29
  in order to, first of all, none of that is defined. Is that well known to the public? Like, in other
• 48:35
  words, let's imagine you just had aggregate statistics, which is we feel that the following
• 48:41
  large number of requests, it was an uptick in the number of requests not to publish things.
• 48:48
  Let's just take Cassus Belli, right? We were pretty sure that the McCollum memo pre-dated the
• 48:54
  attack on Pearl Harbor, which said that we could enter World War II if we could get the Japanese to
• 48:58
  attack us by starving them for resources. Now, I'm not saying that that's what caused the attack
• 49:04
  on Pearl Harbor, but it's very clear that we were interested in getting into World War II by getting
• 49:10
  our nose bloody. We had similar issues with the Gulf of Tonkin. Remember the main from a different
• 49:16
  era? Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So in general, we have a history of state craft in
• 49:23
  which it's very important that we have a reason to enter because we're the big dogs, right? If we
• 49:30
  just went in and said, hey, that's a lot of oil and we're interested in it, it wouldn't be good.
• 49:35
  So am I opposed to state craft? No. I understand that countries have interests and that those interests
• 49:41
  are sometimes somewhat unsavory. What I'm trying to say is the level of contamination of our own
• 49:51
  news with respect to things like sources and methods is now through the roof. We don't even know
• 49:56
  what's happening in our own lives because the people who are supposed to, in some sense, keep the
• 50:04
  intelligence community away from us. We're not supposed to stumble on things that we're not supposed
• 50:10
  to know about and it's also the case that you can't take over every aspect of our lives. What
• 50:16
  did I breathe into my lungs? Have you had COVID? Yeah. Okay. Was that part of a work around to get
• 50:25
  around the biological weapons convention passed in the 1970s along with the Geneva Convention?
• 50:31
  It was in my lungs. I want to know what was in my lungs. If you screwed up, let me even grant,
• 50:38
  for example, that maybe we had a reason to use a hippie charity with a bizarrely high-powered board
• 50:45
  when a zoologist who gets nothing but money from the Defense Department to protect all our health.
• 50:52
  Let's assume that there was a legitimate work around that we don't understand for the biological
• 50:58
  weapons convention. When that virus gets loose to the entire planet and it kills your grandfather
• 51:06
  and you can't go to his funeral, you've lost the right to say sources and methods.
• 51:12
  Because the screw up on the work around, if that's a biological weapons program which is now gone
• 51:20
  defensive because we've forced sworn the ability to have an offensive program. When you screw up,
• 51:26
  you lose the right to quote sources and methods. But who is quoting sources and methods on the
• 51:32
  basis of the claim that COVID was a biological weapon? I mean, I don't hear anybody responding to it.
• 51:38
  I hear almost no one asking the question. What happened when we passed the Geneva and biological
• 51:44
  weapons conventions with respect to a work around to make sure that we were not unprepared
• 51:50
  for an adversary like the Soviets who had advanced biological weapons capabilities?
• 51:57
  It would be horrible if we just decided that we were going to be boy scouts and played by the
• 52:03
  letter of the law and just say, okay, we're not going to do any bio weapons research. What we did,
• 52:08
  I think, is that we did defensive research and defensive and offensive are sort of one click
• 52:14
  away from each other. They're adjacent. I want to know when you screw up and when you have a
• 52:20
  spillover event that shuts down the world for two years and you kill, you know, under 20 million
• 52:26
  people, why do you continue to get to not hold hearings? I just don't understand it. Like,
• 52:32
  you're after the fact you've lost your program if that's what it is and if that's what it isn't,
• 52:38
  why aren't we asking questions about it? What role do you think that the, I suppose what we
• 52:46
  used to call intellectual dark web and now we might call the dissident intellectual players
• 52:53
  at the edge of the mainstream are playing and will play in helping us get to the truth. I mean,
• 53:02
  are you torn between the, are you torn about the, the risks of a chaotic conspiratorial
• 53:10
  worldview as much as you're exercised by the risks of institutionalization of thinking?
• 53:20
  I don't want to see conspiracy theories that are bad. Like bad conspiracy theorists run right.
• 53:26
  Like QAnon is certainly very dangerous. But the problem is that the world is filled with false
• 53:36
  conspiracy narratives and true conspiracy narratives. Some of the true ones we shouldn't know about
• 53:41
  because they would, you know, like you, you don't want to know why are so many Americans close
• 53:49
  to the beaches of Normandy before D-Day? It would be really, that was, you know, D-Day was a
• 53:54
  conspiracy. It was very important that we not reveal that conspiracy. So there are times when you
• 54:01
  need to hold a conspiracy back. The problem that we're having is we have a completely unsustainable
• 54:08
  claim, which is that the world is effectively free of conspiracies and that they all require
• 54:13
  completely extraordinary proof when it's very evidence that conspiracies are kind of mundane.
• 54:19
  They're everywhere. They're, yeah. But that's a straw man claim sholey Eric. I don't know anyone
• 54:24
  who says that the world is free of conspiracies unless they're completely silly. I don't think so
• 54:29
  because when somebody says, well, you're a conspiracy theorist, I would say, aren't you?
• 54:36
  And I say, oh, well, did you believe that in the Russian collusion narrative with the
• 54:41
  respect of the world? I think that's, that's a, that is a, it's a, let's avoid that term because
• 54:45
  it's a silly term conspiracy theorist. As you say, well, we'll believe in certain conspiracies.
• 54:50
  Like, for example, I have no idea whether the vaccines were really a great thing or really
• 54:56
  a terrible thing. I just don't know. And I don't know what the real origin of COVID was. So
• 55:02
  in all of these circumstances, what you're looking to do is to decrease the scope for speculation
• 55:10
  by giving people real insight. You know, I grew up with watergate hearings, hearings into the,
• 55:18
  of the church and pipe committees into evil doings by the FBI through dirty tricks campaigns.
• 55:24
  I ran contra hearings. There was the silkwood case. We investigated power. We're not doing that now.
• 55:33
  And, you know, I'd like to get off this so we can get up to other topics. But Josh, the really
• 55:38
  important point is I want you just to notice that it's a no end situation. I don't want to talk
• 55:46
  and I don't, my thing is hearings. Just give me data and information to fill the void so that we
• 55:52
  don't have like a god of the gaps problem. This is sort of the conspiracy of the gaps problem.
• 55:57
  Yeah. Moving massive gaps, which is an invitation to say, you know, what the hell's going on? If I
• 56:05
  can't call a radical mastectomy being pushed on little girls, a radical mastectomy and they have
• 56:12
  to say top surgery and I have to celebrate it, that's so unnatural. There's another term now.
• 56:20
  I heard John Oliver use it or maybe it was John Stuart. I think it was John Oliver. It's not
• 56:24
  even top surgery. It's chest construction or chest affirmation or something like that.
• 56:33
  I was talking with a trans man who was a acquaintance of mine the other day who has a bushy
• 56:38
  beard that I could only dream of. And his point was I don't want people following me into this life
• 56:45
  who don't need to be here. And it was breaking his heart that the tiny cohort of people who
• 56:56
  actually have these radical dichotomies between what their minds says and what their chromosomes tell
• 57:03
  them. Look, this is coming for our families. It's madness. I just heard about the QAnon mass delusion
• 57:13
  on national public radio inside of the US. And we need to talk about the trans mass delusion.
• 57:19
  We need to talk about the Trump mass delusion but also the Epstein mass delusion. We're talking
• 57:28
  about so many mass delusions that we're not fully human beings anymore. And what I'm advocating
• 57:35
  is that you take that urge to say isn't it just coincidence? Isn't it just emergent? Isn't it
• 57:41
  just isn't it just isn't it just give it a year off and say, I mean, Eric, you're one second.
• 57:47
  Well, one second. Give it a year off and instead say why don't we have more primary data to plug
• 57:56
  the gaps so that we don't need to speculate like this? This is ridiculous.
• 58:03
  You're making it sound like I'm more comfortable with my world view than yours. In actual fact,
• 58:08
  I would be more, I would find it more reassuring if there was a more concrete villain.
• 58:16
  Like I actually find it, I find my world view more, more portentous and full of foreboding
• 58:24
  than yours in the sense that mine is more, mine is more difficult to fix. I think I mean,
• 58:30
  if this is all a problem of human psychology, tribalism, and the interplay between
• 58:37
  social media, digital technology, the hive mind, and human biases, then I don't know how to fix it.
• 58:45
  If it's a problem of the editor of The New York Times is too chummy with the Director of Homeland
• 58:51
  Security, then we have a potential fix.
• 58:57
  Good news. Go on.
• 59:02
  It's a mixture of the two, but the component that's due to orchestration
• 59:09
  is almost certainly far, far larger than we are allowed to discuss and we're in polite company.
• 59:19
  I mean, I have enough information from private sources to say
• 59:24
  and everything from UFOs to the gauge of inflation. People behind the scenes, come on Eric,
• 59:32
  you know this is a public secret that we use the CPI to raise taxes and slash benefits.
• 59:42
  Yes, and the way they calculate the CPI is rigged in that as well, but that is an open secret.
• 59:47
  Yeah, well, but when I bring that up, I mean, I've done real work in CPI construction.
• 59:54
  My real work can't be acknowledged because this is a secret tax and benefit-flashing mechanism.
• 1:00:03
  For people who don't know what we're talking about, when the government calculates what the
• 1:00:08
  right inflation is, there are various different baskets of goods that it can look at to try to
• 1:00:12
  figure out what inflation is. Some of them will yield higher inflation numbers, some lower inflation
• 1:00:17
  numbers, and because many of the things that the government spends money on will be
• 1:00:20
  pegged to inflation, it's in their interest to keep those expenditures under control by
• 1:00:25
  low-balling inflation for some purposes and high-balling it for other purposes. So there's some
• 1:00:30
  some game playing that goes on at the edges there. But I mean, are you trying to seduce me?
• 1:00:37
  You're not wearing any pants, so that's not. But that's just before we get off COVID, but when
• 1:00:44
  you were talking there, I was reminded of the conversation. Just, I want to put a button in this
• 1:00:49
  conversation about conspiracy theories versus not conspiracy theories. What's your, I haven't heard
• 1:00:54
  you talk about what your brother's role has been in COVID. Are you proud of his, of what he's
• 1:01:00
  been doing? I try to stay silent about it. Let me say some things that will allow people to
• 1:01:08
  understand. I try not to give legal, financial, or medical advice on the internet. And why,
• 1:01:16
  if you've heard my take, it's that I believe that he has misstructured his point.
• 1:01:24
  I also think the world of Brett, I think he's a person of tremendous integrity. I think he has
• 1:01:29
  a great deal of biological insight. And this has been an extremely difficult period where I've
• 1:01:38
  been relatively silent. But my feeling about this is what we needed was information. This is
• 1:01:47
  something I can say more, more generally about what you've said about the historic IDW.
• 1:01:52
  Heterodoxy is not capable of taking over from the orthodoxy. You cannot ask a bunch of rag tag
• 1:02:05
  public intellectuals to explain the world to you if they're starved of information.
• 1:02:11
  And what Brett needed and what we all needed was not to be playing detective work,
• 1:02:19
  we needed to be the PhDs in the room who are very often the White House will bring in influencers
• 1:02:28
  because they want to get a message out to the country. Well, why not bring in the PhDs? Oh,
• 1:02:33
  we can't have the PhDs in the room. We're doing a vaccine rollout, so let's get a bunch of
• 1:02:38
  Instagram models and give them some swag and a tour of the West Wing and shake the hand of the
• 1:02:45
  president maybe. But we don't want the PhDs in the room. Brett needed information that he didn't
• 1:02:52
  have. And my feeling is it was a no-win situation and he chose one of the no-win paths. I chose a
• 1:03:01
  different one. I am vaccinated. I've even boosted. I'm not sure if I did the right thing. I do not know
• 1:03:11
  because there was no way to know what was actually going on. And if you take, for example,
• 1:03:16
  the issue of therapeutics, Washington, D.C. has a workaround culture. Let's imagine, for example,
• 1:03:23
  that you say we've got to get these vaccines out, but we've got this pesky little thing that we
• 1:03:28
  don't have enough time to get good data on their effects. So we'll use the emergency use.
• 1:03:35
  And somebody will say, well, we can't use emergency use because if there are any therapeutics,
• 1:03:39
  you can't use it. Okay, let's just make sure there aren't any therapeutics. And that way we'll
• 1:03:44
  work around the EUA restrictions. That's normal to people who live in Washington. In other words,
• 1:03:51
  it's a lie. It's fake. It's a conspiracy. It's convoluted. It may be disastrous. But it's also normal
• 1:04:00
  to them. I have no idea what you're talking about there. You cannot use a therapeutic if the vaccine
• 1:04:06
  was emergency. But you can't use a vaccine if therapeutics are available. Oh, I see. Right.
• 1:04:14
  So it says a way of fixing the disease once you get it, then you can't experimentally use a
• 1:04:22
  vaccine to prevent it. Right. In other words, you should only be having an experimental
• 1:04:28
  remedy if there are no normal remedies available. Got it. Right. So you survived the
• 1:04:34
  disincentive to take antibiotics. Typical way of work around culture works is that somebody will
• 1:04:40
  say, okay, well, we've got to make sure that there are no therapeutics. And then you'd have a
• 1:04:46
  campaign, which is like, you don't want to take horse dewormer. Now do I know that Ivermectin
• 1:04:53
  works or didn't work or how well it worked? I mean, I couldn't tell. I thought it was very
• 1:04:58
  strange to hear that it was a perfect therapeutic or prophylactic, which I don't think that it is.
• 1:05:05
  But, you know, in essence, I think that when non-Washington people encounter Washington work
• 1:05:11
  around culture, particularly if they're of a scientific or rational or first principles been,
• 1:05:16
  they have an idea of like, you sons of bitches are lying and Washington is like, wow, drama queen
• 1:05:23
  much. Right. And those two cultures, it's like the science versus science. When Fauci says you
• 1:05:30
  have to trust the science or I am the science, it's this unholy fusion of public health, science
• 1:05:39
  and public policy, which is in part meant to deceive. And if you look at the literature in public
• 1:05:44
  health, you know, there's a lot of stuff around the noble why. And so you get a bunch of people who
• 1:05:50
  are not party to the the culture of the noble lie or the work around. And like, well, why are you
• 1:05:56
  all lying? This must mean you know something horrible. I'm in Washington so that, you know, I'm
• 1:06:05
  I'm aware that people in Washington think that a behavior is normal, which I think is, you know,
• 1:06:11
  pretty close to evil. Yeah. I mean, I've spent a lot of time in newsrooms where the same group think
• 1:06:18
  happens, you know, like how you get to the demonization of either mect and so early. And I,
• 1:06:25
  you know, I'm off the other mect and train completely. I don't think there's any good evidence
• 1:06:29
  anymore that it works. But at the time, there was a lot about, well, I was on the why we call,
• 1:06:36
  yes, I mean, I was, I was, I was anti calling it horse dewormer or whatever they were calling it.
• 1:06:42
  You know, I was like, this is something that hundreds of millions of people take safely around the
• 1:06:45
  world. So I mean, why wouldn't you throw in the early days of COVID? Why wouldn't you throw
• 1:06:50
  everything at it that you can? Why are we demonizing people who are speculating about this?
• 1:06:56
  So I, so that was enough to get me on the crank side of, you know, the equation because I wasn't
• 1:07:04
  enthusiastically pillering everyone who wanted to try edge before we had any good data about whether
• 1:07:10
  it worked. And that group think is the kind of it, what happens Eric is that you're sitting in a
• 1:07:15
  pitch meeting and you raise something. I mean, this happened recently with transgender,
• 1:07:21
  with a transgender story where in the UK, the Tabestock clinic, their biggest gender clinic was
• 1:07:26
  closed, was shut down after a damning inquiry. And I pitched this as a story to do. And there's
• 1:07:33
  just that four second awkward silence as the producers sit there looking at you going,
• 1:07:41
  I don't really see it. Like how do you do it exactly? How do you avoid the backlash? How do you
• 1:07:50
  not sound like you're a bigot? How do we shore ourselves up against, you know, the perception
• 1:07:56
  thing? Do we want to be on the side of these far right assholes who are passing anti-trans bills?
• 1:08:03
  And all of that stuff is flooding through their heads. And that's the roadblock as much as anything.
• 1:08:09
  It's the ocean that we're swimming in. It's the water that we're breathing, so to speak.
• 1:08:15
  But that's why, you know, like I'm pretty sure that official dumb lied about the origins of
• 1:08:23
  COVID, which is that anybody who thinks it had a synthetic origin of any kind must be a racist.
• 1:08:29
  That's clearly a wrong idea. What I don't know about is whether we were lied to about the vaccines
• 1:08:35
  for our own benefit, because we really needed them in our most vulnerable or whether we were lied
• 1:08:41
  to about the vaccines for other reasons that are more nefarious. I just don't, I, Eric, literally don't
• 1:08:47
  know. And I'm confident that it was the former, because I know at least in a place like Australia,
• 1:08:53
  because I have enough connections with, for example, the health minister where people were really,
• 1:08:58
  really, really committed to getting up to what the epidemiologists were saying was a take it to
• 1:09:03
  the bank level of vaccination before opening the international borders and allowing everybody to go
• 1:09:09
  out and get COVID. And that was seen as the priority and any narrative that diverged from that.
• 1:09:16
  Australia is very different. Well, Australia, Australians seem to have a much higher level of trust
• 1:09:22
  with their government. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm actually writing a piece about this for an
• 1:09:26
  American publication, trying to explain that curious phenomenon. It is curious. And I think that
• 1:09:33
  Australia's, for example, had a very different experience with immigration and modernization,
• 1:09:38
  which we could talk about it at another time. But what I don't understand is, for example, the need
• 1:09:45
  to push the vaccines on the people who seemed least vulnerable. If you know something about the virus
• 1:09:50
  that the rest of us don't, it could be that the vaccine actually carried a cost, as we saw,
• 1:09:58
  may have included my carditis. But the idea is that it might have been the lesser of two evils.
• 1:10:05
  I have no idea. What bothers me about this is just keeping the option open to say, isn't it weird
• 1:10:13
  that we don't have better information? Isn't it weird that China doesn't seem to want us to know
• 1:10:17
  what's going on? Isn't it weird that we don't hold hearings? That thing has become tantamount
• 1:10:24
  to some sort of weird right wing pro-Trump madness. And as a guy who would never vote for Trump
• 1:10:31
  under any circumstance I can imagine, my feeling is this all comes down to your level of disagreeability.
• 1:10:40
  Jordan Peterson over dinner once said to me, he said, Eric, what's bizarre about you is that you
• 1:10:46
  combine two traits, trait openness and trait disagreeability. You may be the most disagreeable person
• 1:10:54
  I've ever met. And I think it's very important. That's a great question. Well, I don't know,
• 1:11:00
  it's not so fun at parties at all. But the issue being that you have to be, if you're going to be a
• 1:11:08
  real journalist, you have to think about how you're going to tell 100 people in the room that they're
• 1:11:13
  wrong. And every time we do this we get called arrogant. In other words, when one person says,
• 1:11:18
  I've listened to all of you and I'm convinced that you're all wrong. That comes out as like,
• 1:11:26
  you know, either tall poppy syndrome or what does that guy's attitude problem or arrogance,
• 1:11:29
  et cetera, or why aren't you a team player? And my feeling is which part of journalism didn't you
• 1:11:34
  understand? Ultimately, it's about Huevos. And the great thing about the work Huevos is that it
• 1:11:41
  works in Spanish to mean eggs. Yeah. Right. So whether it's balls or you're ovaries,
• 1:11:52
  we need we need reporters who are not out to destroy individuals, but who have the Huevos to
• 1:11:58
  disagree with a 10,000 people where they're the only one who holds their position. If you don't
• 1:12:04
  have that character trait, there's so many other professions that you may be very much better suited
• 1:12:09
  well. And the media is attracting people who don't have that character trait because it's
• 1:12:13
  attracting people who want to be part of a club. And that, you know, your articulation of that
• 1:12:18
  concern about being lumped in with a Trump voter is really like that that's keenly observed.
• 1:12:25
  I mean, that is that is the main thing I think that's impeding that's impeding all of this.
• 1:12:33
  Let's get to something sunnier because like I really enjoy you. And yeah, yeah, this is just
• 1:12:43
  it's not bleak. It's just that I need company. I need I need hundreds of people who are echoing
• 1:12:48
  the same things to hear one person saying it starts to sound like he's a lunatic and the thing is
• 1:12:53
  all I am is disagreeable. And it's not even arrogance. It's just like I want my children to survive,
• 1:12:58
  get the hell away from this propaganda stuff, give me the information that we need and let the
• 1:13:03
  heterodox co correct the orthodoxy so that we can all get on with our lives, but that's not happening.
• 1:13:10
  Yeah. What are you most excited about?
• 1:13:15
  It's a good question. I guess I'm most excited about what I think is about to happen in
• 1:13:21
  testing the possibility of interplanetary and interstellar travel.
• 1:13:38
  I think that we've been stagnant for so many years in physics that we've forgotten how much a
• 1:13:46
  tiny physical discovery can change the world. So semiconductors is an easy one or telecommunications
• 1:13:56
  with the electromagnetic radiation. Any time physics moves, the world is transformed.
• 1:14:05
  And I think we're due for the demise of the baby boomer string juggernaut, which has basically
• 1:14:13
  stalled all physical progress that are deepest level with something called quantum gravity which
• 1:14:18
  doesn't work. And I think that I've famously apologized to the UFO community who I thought were
• 1:14:26
  a bunch of lunatics and I don't know, people who were caught up in a mass delusion. And then I'm
• 1:14:35
  more and more convinced that something profound is happening in that sector. And that could be
• 1:14:43
  horribly a psychological operation, the likes of which we've never seen because it involves so
• 1:14:49
  many people in so many years, or it could be something really profound. And I think that we've
• 1:14:55
  just gotten divorced from understanding how much can change. And I give this example recently
• 1:15:04
  that there were people who fought in the civil war who lived to see a thermonuclear weapon
• 1:15:10
  exploded in the Pacific. And you know, that's pretty disturbing. But the rate of change when
• 1:15:19
  something moves in physics is incalculable. If you think about powered flight in like 1902
• 1:15:27
  and then 1903 somewhere around there. And then we actually have a photograph from the surface
• 1:15:35
  of Titan, which is this moon of Saturn, that was beamed back, right? Within a hundred years or so.
• 1:15:43
  Unbelievably, or around a hundred years, the idea that things can move has been forgotten.
• 1:15:52
  I think that the distance between 1902 and 1952 was like 10,000 years. And I think the difference
• 1:15:58
  between 1973 and the present is like one or two years. Yeah. I mean, my grandma was born in 1915
• 1:16:07
  during the Gallipoli campaign. And yeah, and she died on the eve of her 100th birthday in 2015.
• 1:16:16
  And I was coming back to the States through Greece of all places. I was visiting a friend,
• 1:16:21
  a buddy of mine who was living in Athens. And I came back and I did Joe Rogan's show after
• 1:16:27
  getting back to the States. And I relayed this story to him about how I'm wandering around the
• 1:16:33
  the Athenian Agora, you know, the birthplace of democracy where people first started coming together
• 1:16:38
  and realizing that they should hammer out their differences by talking to one another instead of
• 1:16:43
  slaughtering each other. And I'm beholding the sheer age of this thing. 4,000 years,
• 1:16:51
  4,000 years. And then I think, well, my Nana just lived 100, right? So if you put my Nana back to
• 1:16:59
  100, what 100? It's only actually 40 of my grandmother's life spans that takes you back to the
• 1:17:09
  birthplace of democracy. It's only 20 that gets you back to Jesus Christ. It's only a couple that
• 1:17:17
  gets you back to the enlightenment. And everything has been accelerating so quickly. And as you say,
• 1:17:24
  what 100? I mean, starting from 1915 and going through the space age, the development of the
• 1:17:34
  automobile becoming widespread, when she was a little girl, they would remark on the car going past
• 1:17:40
  the town car, you know, oh, there's the car. There's the guy who has the car. The antibiotics
• 1:17:48
  and frozen food. I mean, it's just mind boggling. And you know, what is next? Because what normally
• 1:17:55
  when I ask people with gigantic universe science brains, what's next? They talk about something to
• 1:18:00
  do with what you started out talking this conversation about, which is the interface between technology
• 1:18:05
  and the human mind and, you know, the singularity or blah, blah, but you're going to plan it.
• 1:18:10
  That's because it's because they're being pushy. I mean, look, we have to get out of here.
• 1:18:19
  We have to spread out the challenge of our era with all of this crazy technology that we have that's
• 1:18:28
  so destructive is that we've got to find multiple worlds so that if we lose one, we're not all
• 1:18:35
  the eggs in one basket. You know, and like, just take what you said about, you know, that lyric from
• 1:18:43
  that song, year after year, moral men disappeared until there's no one to march anymore. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:50
  Right. So the implied Waltzing Matilda classic. Well, I try, I try to be sensitive to my audience.
• 1:18:58
  This issue of forgetting is important.
• 1:19:04
  Gallipoli doesn't carry the same punch today as it did because of the twilight of living memory.
• 1:19:14
  And there are now only eight particle theorists who walk the earth,
• 1:19:20
  who have been recognized by Stockholm as having contributed to our notion of reality.
• 1:19:30
  And they're all over 70 and all the work is 49 years old or older. They're only four people
• 1:19:35
  to have walked on the moon still alive. Right. So in part, we're in this process of
• 1:19:42
  galipolizing a lot. And there's a lot we can forget that we need to forget. But one of the things
• 1:19:49
  that we've forgotten is how, how dramatically everything can change and how, how much we need to
• 1:19:56
  separate. I need to not be on the same planet as G Putin, Biden, and Trump. No, no, it's incredibly
• 1:20:03
  important to me. I've never met any of these people. Yeah. I don't care about what they think. They
• 1:20:09
  don't seem to be distinguished intellects. It's not a question of capitalism versus communism
• 1:20:14
  or totalitarian versus freedom. It's like, we don't even understand what's going on in Lugansk.
• 1:20:21
  Have you ever been to Lugansk? Have you ever cared about the Don Baskard Don Esk? I mean,
• 1:20:26
  what we're talking about is Armageddon over nothing. And the thing that I'm excited about
• 1:20:33
  is the only thing that's really holding us here is Einstein. And I want to go beyond Einstein,
• 1:20:42
  because Einstein has only been for 100 plus years. It's a restriction on what is easy to do
• 1:20:50
  before in the Newtonian time. You could dream of reaching the stars. In the Einsteinian time,
• 1:20:56
  I believe if you take man's top speed ever achieved, it would take us what is over 100,000
• 1:21:03
  years to reach the nearest neighboring star. It's like, we're really far from everything.
• 1:21:11
  And what I think is is that there's a hope that if we can just make progress in theoretical
• 1:21:17
  physics, get back to basics and do science, we can potentially do to Einstein what Einstein
• 1:21:23
  did to Newton. And that's what I spend my time on is that I want to give those of us who want
• 1:21:29
  to stay here, the option to stay here. But the idea that we can only go to the moon or Mars
• 1:21:35
  is so innovating. It's so depressing. I mean, I appreciate that Elon has pioneered this,
• 1:21:41
  discussing this in polite company. But right now, we need thousands and thousands of different
• 1:21:48
  experiments because the odds that we're going to screw this one up are extraordinary.
• 1:21:54
  And this is why Steven Pinker is, you know, I need to win him over in this jello wrestling match
• 1:22:01
  because he's innovating people from doing right now, this is the time to be spending on figuring out
• 1:22:09
  how to keep indefinite human survival as the focal point. This is the project that is worthy of
• 1:22:16
  our best minds that's worthy of the funding, that's worthy of international cooperation. Our
• 1:22:23
  task is to recognize that this is that moment in the Bible where the Lord tells Moses, it's time to
• 1:22:32
  get out of town. You got to go, don't wait for the bread to rise. Now, this is it. And so what I'm
• 1:22:39
  optimistic about is that maybe, maybe if this reaches somebody else out there who understands
• 1:22:46
  what I'm saying, we have a hope of coming up with a confederation of people who actually understand
• 1:22:52
  what the job of our time is. The only other job, as I see it, is stabilize this place for as long
• 1:22:58
  as possible so that we can figure out if we can spread out or not. That's the counter-argument,
• 1:23:06
  isn't it? I mean, I hear people say that all the time that, you know, why should we be investing in
• 1:23:10
  getting off this planet because, until we can actually resolve the problems that we have with
• 1:23:15
  this one, we're only going to throw up the next one as well. Josh, it's important to start
• 1:23:20
  excluding certain people from conversation. We have this passion for inclusion. There's the
• 1:23:26
  disagreeableness again there. Well, no, it's not that. It's love. In other words, if you're freaking
• 1:23:33
  out in a lifeboat, right? You're endangering everybody else in the lifeboat. You know, they're
• 1:23:40
  oceanic white-tips circling around. So somebody's, you know, administer as a sedative and just like,
• 1:23:46
  you can't freak out here. Right now, this is super dire, super exciting. This is the time for heroism,
• 1:23:53
  for science, for people who understand what time it is. It's important that we stop,
• 1:23:58
  start excluding the voices from conversation that innervate us from saving ourselves.
• 1:24:04
  Eric, will you play first-date questions with me for my subscribers at the end of each episode?
• 1:24:12
  I ask you a bunch of questions like we're on a first date. Total just sort of raw shark test
• 1:24:18
  questions that you can answer in any way you wish. I'm not really great at home or
• 1:24:22
  oticism, but let's go for it. Okay. If you're not a paid subscriber to the show, then I hope
• 1:24:29
  you've enjoyed Eric Weinstein. And if you want to join, then you can go to uncomfortable
• 1:24:33
  conversations, substack.com or send an email to uncomfyconvose at gmail.com. And my producer will put
• 1:24:40
  you on the list. Okay. First-date questions with Eric Weinstein. What's the worst movie, Eric?
• 1:24:48
  Do you say? Fisher King. Excellent. I really didn't understand why people loved, I couldn't
• 1:24:56
  watch it. What's the best ice cream flavor? Probably alfonso mango. What's alfonso mango?
• 1:25:07
  Western India has a mango that only is available in May. I should not be talking about this because
• 1:25:13
  I'm going to create a shortage. But it's the king of fruit. And if you've never had an alfonso mango,
• 1:25:20
  you can probably find the pulp anywhere, but you're in for a real treat. Wow. Well, next time you're
• 1:25:25
  in Australia, I have some Queensland mangoes to show you because it's one of the things that I
• 1:25:30
  truly missed in the United States was having to endure. We have the worst thing. We have the
• 1:25:35
  Tommy Acquins. And not Tommy Acquins. It's terrible. I could never find a real mango.
• 1:25:42
  Particle Florida from the 1920s. Retailers love them because they're gorgeous and they never
• 1:25:46
  spoil, but they're inedible and they have the consistency of double flaws.
• 1:25:50
  That was just a little case to our first day questions, which you'll be able to hear all of if
• 1:25:56
  you subscribe to uncomfortable conversations, not just the questions, but of course all of our
• 1:26:00
  banter around them, which become a subsequent little episode of themselves. If you do subscribe,
• 1:26:06
  you will not only hear that, but you'll also hear no ads on any episode ever. And you'll get
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  additional content, including opportunities to connect directly with me. You can subscribe at
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• 1:26:24
  I'll see you next time on uncomfortable conversations.