Eric Weinstein – Sunday Special Ep. 11 (YouTube Content)
| Eric Weinstein | |
| |
| Information | |
|---|---|
| Host(s) | Ben Shapiro |
| Guest(s) | Eric Weinstein |
| Length | 01:00:52 |
| Release Date | 22 July 2018 |
| Links | |
| YouTube | Watch |
| Portal Blog | Read |
| All Appearances | |
Eric Weinstein – Sunday Special Ep. 11 was an interview with Eric Weinstein by Ben Shapiro on The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
Description
Eric Weinstein joins Ben from the shadows of the intellectual dark web to discuss the lack of free thinking on the Left, the costs and benefits of low skilled vs. high skilled focused immigration, and how the Facebook monopoly negatively affects online publishers.
Transcript
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: Bad diversity is when two people grow up in countries that drive on opposite sides of the road, and you decide that everybody is entitled to drive on the side they grew up with and feel comfortable with. All you get is auto accidents.
00:00:19
Ben Shapiro: So we are here with intellectual dark web impresario Eric Weinstein. We're going to get started talking to you in just a minute—one of the most fascinating guys around. But first, I want to talk to you about your internet security.
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00:00:35
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00:00:51
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00:01:08
Ben Shapiro: Okay, Eric Weinstein, thank you so much for joining me here on the Sunday Special. For those who don't know, Eric Weinstein is a Harvard-trained PhD in mathematics and somehow found himself as the creator of the Intellectual Dark Web, which you've read about in the pages of The New York Times—you know, the photos of people like Eric standing in the trees with Sam Harris and Joe Rogan standing among the cacti.
00:01:27
Ben Shapiro: So, Eric, first of all, welcome. Thanks for coming in.
00:01:59
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me.
00:02:03
Ben Shapiro: Second of all, how did you—who started off and still work in the world of physics and mathematics—end up creating, at least, a name for the Intellectual Dark Web? You did it. I know we were on stage together when it happened. So what's the backstory here?
00:02:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think it's actually sort of an interesting one. I have been tracking various political and social issues since the 1980s and have inserted myself or fought through a number of topics, including high-skilled immigration, mortgage-backed securities, and various issues concerning my concerns over the loss of objectivity in the major press organs.
So, in some ways, this is not my first rodeo—there have been a few before. What's been really interesting for me is that this is the first one where I've had great company. A lot of these previous iterations were really just one or two people, like Nassim Taleb, who was a co-fighter in the mortgage-backed securities question, and a guy named Norm Matloff, who was one of the few critics of high-skilled immigration from an intelligence position.
What's really interesting about this is that this is the first time there are a large number of interesting voices, with a few new technologies and wrinkles to explore. The best thing I could think to do, with so many independent voices, was to try to use language to identify what was already occurring and have the language help people see what was already happening. That would allow us to direct this more powerfully.
00:03:52
Ben Shapiro: What do you think has changed? I mean, what sort of brought all of this together? Because, obviously, it's a pretty politically disparate group. You're on the political left. You voted Democrat, I believe, virtually all the time, right?
00:04:01
Eric Weinstein: I don't think I've ever voted Republican.
00:04:02
Ben Shapiro: Oh, you've never? Okay. So you're on the left, and, you know, obviously your brother Bret, who's a member of the IDW in good standing, is also on the left. People like Sam Harris are on the left. And then, I may be the only overt conservative in the group. Actually, it's been perceived as this wild right-wing group.
And, as far as I know, I'm the only registered Republican in the group.
00:04:18
Eric Weinstein: So far as I know. And I think that has to do with the fact that something very peculiar happened on the left.
In many ways, this is a response from an older left to what is viewed as—almost certainly—a very brief, very intense, and very crazy bout of bad judgment from the American left. It's not that these strains haven't been present before, but what's really new to me is the idea that this new sort of woke network—which practices something I’ve called Left Carthyism—has invaded the major organs of civil society.
The most important examples of this, I would say, first and foremost, are not the universities but the major media companies that form our sense-making network—news bureaus, let's say.
The next thing that's infected, in my opinion, is the tech companies that are public-facing and under constant pressure to show that they are sufficiently in line with what are called progressive values—but I think most of us with a longer timeline would say these are very regressive values.
The intelligence community, which, you know, scares me no end, almost certainly has a relationship with these tech companies. We deposit all our secrets into our Gmail accounts and our browsing histories—as you were just talking about in your latest plug—all of these things come together in what I call TIM: Technology, Intelligence, and Media. The universities are certainly a serious problem, but I think the most important problem is that we can't trust our sense-making organs.
Because, you know, as I just tweeted today, The New Yorker ran a tweet saying: "Conservative orators like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Richard Spencer..." And I thought, wow, I mean, you just put Ben Shapiro next to Richard Spencer as if none of us are going to notice what you just did.
This has gotten really dirty, really negative. And conservatives have complained about excesses on the left for a long time. And I think that's been fair. But I also think that there have been a lot of excesses on the right.
What we're seeing is something really, really new. The new left is much more dangerous. And I think those of us on the old left, who weren't happy with some of these strands before, take it upon ourselves to say: How do we clean this up?
This is, in some sense, our problem.
And, you know, that was not fair to do to you. So if The New Yorker is not going to apologize to you, I prefer not to apologize. I'm just going to fight back—because it's just not right.
00:07:06
Ben Shapiro: Well, you didn't do it, so you shouldn't apologize. Obviously.
So, let's talk about how you fix these particular institutions and what is the exact problem with the institution. There have been a couple of solutions proposed with regard to the media.
From the right, one is the sort of restoration of the idea that there is an objective journalism to be found and that everybody should go back to this aspirational idea that supposedly existed before—where there were the fact-checkers and then the people who reported the facts, and then there were the opinion makers, and there were two separate groups of people.
And then there are folks like me who tend toward a sort of legal realist perspective when it comes to the media, which is: all these folks have their political point of view.
We know they'll have their political point of view. Why don't they just be honest about their political point of view?
I run a right-wing website, The Huffington Post is a left-wing website. I have less of a problem with MSNBC than I do with CNN for exactly this reason—because MSNBC is clear about its biases.
How do you think this gets solved? Is it people being upfront about their own biases or attempting to remove their own biases in doing the reporting? Is that even possible?
00:07:59
Eric Weinstein: I think both of those techniques can work just fine.
So, you know, Gonzo was the idea that if we just open what it is that we're thinking and doing, we insert ourselves into the story. That allows the consumer to unspin whatever it is that they're doing.
Or, you can have warring media—one left-wing media and one right-wing media.
That's not the problem at the moment. I think the problem is that a lot of the stuff is just actually disingenuous.
Like, people know that you are not a Nazi, and they know that Richard Spencer is very close to being one. You know, that he's really flirting with stuff that's absolutely dangerous and crazy, and they don't care.
The key point is, as somebody said to me recently, Progress is messy. And the idea is that if certain lives have to get ruined on the way towards some imagined egalitarian society, then that's just too damn bad.
That's terrifying.
00:08:56
Ben Shapiro: Well, that's literally the language of Stalinism. I mean, that is breaking the eggs to make the omelet.
That is legitimately the quote being used by people who are Stalinists.
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