Eric Weinstein – Sunday Special Ep. 11 (YouTube Content)

Eric Weinstein
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Host(s)	Ben Shapiro
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	01:00:52
Release Date	22 July 2018
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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.

00:09:03

Eric Weinstein: Yes. And, you know, sometimes certain bad things have to happen, but we're talking about the actual destruction of interesting and important lives.

Because the people who see this collectively view this as a hive. If a few bees in a hive die, it's not like the hive actually collapses. So, because of the collectivist framework, they actually don't see damages to individual lives as particularly worthy of empathy.

So what is going on, I think, is very important. You know, you bring up two models. You can either try for objectivity or you can be honest about your biases.

Both of those are much more similar to each other than this other thing is, which is: We know what the right answer is for society, and it doesn't really matter how we get there.

So what we're going to do is propose ideas that are, in an analogy, almost like suicide ideas—ideas that are simply meant to be highly destructive.

So that, you know, if I say to you, Well, you know, clearly a white man can't understand anything, then what I've just done is taken two of your attributes and shut you up—or forced you to deal with this completely irrelevant argument, you know, for the next 90 minutes.

So this style of argumentation is something that actually has to be excluded.

If you want a diversity of opinions that actually matter, it's very important not to seat people who think in these terms at the table.

And you know, this is what we talked about on, I think, maybe on The Rubin Report, or maybe it was just before you got there.

There's good diversity and there's bad diversity.

And so what I analogized is: good diversity is when you have people of good character trying to puzzle through something, fighting very hard for their perspective.

Bad diversity is where you have two people who grow up in countries that drive on opposite sides of the road, and you decide that everybody's entitled to drive on the side of the road that they grew up with and feel comfortable with—and all you get is auto accidents.

And so it's very important to drive bad diversity out of the system, because otherwise, you never get to experience the benefits of the highly multicultural and interesting, diverse society that we've managed to build for ourselves.

00:11:02

Ben Shapiro: So you've spent an awful lot of time in the tech community also.

So you mentioned three specific areas: media, technology, and the intelligence community. I want to go through each one of those.

You've spent a lot of time in tech because you work closely with Peter Thiel, who obviously is deeply involved in everything Silicon Valley has to offer.

00:11:16

Ben Shapiro: I've been complaining for a long time about the inherent biases of places like Facebook and YouTube. And it's pretty obvious to folks—including Dave Rubin—that YouTube has a biased algorithm that demonetized his particular points of view.

Facebook has, on occasion, really punished people on the right for, I believe, political reasons.

Is there anything that can be done about this in any real sense, or are we just at the whims of what are essentially monopolies?

I mean, Facebook has the closest thing to a monopoly that I've seen in modern American life, and I'm not an antitrust guy by nature. But the fact is, there's no competing service that even comes close to the sort of control that Facebook has over social media.

And people have spent millions of dollars promoting material on Facebook, only for Facebook to gobble that up and then turn back an algorithm that is dishonest and disingenuous in many cases.

Is that something that can be dealt with, or is the only answer regulation or the building of alternative methods of distribution?

00:12:09

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I think that this is a really interesting and difficult problem.

I believe that there's actually a set of new problems that came about from the fact that this technology—giving everybody the power of their own newspaper, let's say, to publish their own newspaper—is a new feature of the world.

It's not clear to me that free speech can just go on as before, because of how big of a shift this particular new idea is.

You know, if I get ahold of some very dangerous secrets, before anybody knows it, I can have published them on Instagram or Facebook or who knows what.

So I think that there are actually a new suite of problems that are probably going to have to change jurisprudence if we're going to keep the spirit of the Constitution alive.

And I don't know what that's going to be, but I think that that's going to be a change.

When these companies found that they had these problems—that people didn't want to be on the networks because everything was so unpleasant when everyone was getting all information all the time—I think that they tried to get community policing from whoever the people were that complained the loudest.

If you were complaining loudly, you might become a trust and safety commission member.

And so, effectively, all of the noisiest, most easily offended folks ended up in positions of some power and influence. And a lot of the suggestions that they've made have been lousy to people who have a very strongly rational perspective.

Nobody's perfectly rational, but the idea being that lots of things that we talk about—things that should be discussed by adults and in an adult fashion—get completely drowned out.

You know, if, let's say, my brother mentions genotype and phenotype as a biologist, and someone has a freak-out session because they think that's evidence of his bigotry, that person who's freaking out needs to be downregulated and not listened to.

So it's very important that we not overvalue the loudest and shrillest voices.

But the tech companies, I don't think, figured out how to do that.

Furthermore, I think that what I don't understand is the extent to which what I call the Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN) depended upon there being very few outlets to check or challenge what the major thematic narratives would be.

And I think that there's a real difficulty with people who came up in the previous world—before the internet and before social media—trying to figure out how to exert enough party-level discipline in order to have these sorts of long narratives that we remember from the era of Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid.

And that's gone away. It's never coming back unless somebody does something drastic.

So I think it's very important to understand that there were some problems, and we haven't had good solutions.

But what terrifies me is that I don't know what part of this might be directed, and what part of this is emergent.

I don't know if there have always been people behind the scenes looking to manipulate the media.

And what I don't know is if those hands are currently using the power of these algorithms in a way that has nothing to do with providing a more engaging and pleasant product.

So it's necessary. And almost certainly, we need control over the algorithms.

I need to be able to experiment and flick a switch and say: "I want to see things in the order that they were published. I want to see things without you prioritizing this or upregulating and downregulating that."

Give me the toggle switches and the control so that, fundamentally, I can catch you if I see that you are politically manipulating.

For example, on Twitter, I never know which of these accounts are authentic.

If I tweet something and 20 accounts have very similar statements like, Hahaha, what an idiot, that's going to make me feel a particular way.

But what if those accounts are all owned by one person, and then they're programmed to do that?

We don't know which percentage of this is authentic.

00:16:10

Ben Shapiro: So in a second, I'm gonna ask about the intelligence community.

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00:16:26

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00:16:42

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00:16:58

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00:17:15

Ben Shapiro: Okay, so now let's talk about the third leg of the stool that you're having problems with here.

And that is the intelligence community.

So obviously, President Trump has been incredibly critical of the intelligence community.

I think some of that is disingenuous.

I think that the president doesn't like when the intelligence community comes up with answers he doesn't like.

He doesn't have a natural civil libertarian objection to the intelligence community.

What is your chief objection to the intelligence community?

And how do we draw the balance between an intelligence community that does what it needs to do to protect us from terrorist attacks, and an intelligence community that is gathering up every bit of data that it possibly can for use against undesirable people or for targeting of particular viewpoints?

00:17:55

Eric Weinstein: So I think it has to do with how much history you're aware of.

In particular, one of the most disturbing things about our intelligence community is what we found out in the mid-70s from the Church and Pike Commissions, when we thoroughly investigated what was going on—not only in the FBI but in particular in the division known as COINTELPRO.

One of the things that I point people to, so they understand just how bad the situation can get, is the case of Jean Seberg.

She was one of Hollywood's leading actresses, and she was destroyed by information taken from the FBI—misinformation, rather—that was placed in the Los Angeles Times by a woman named Joyce Haber, later repeated by Newsweek.

The story suggested that she had cuckolded her white husband with a Black Panther’s child.

Under stress, she miscarried, held an open-casket press conference displaying a dead white fetus, and went crazy—eventually killing herself after attempting to do so on every anniversary of her child's death.

This is the way in which the U.S. has previously played.

This is not conjecture. It's not speculation. This is **proven fact.**

Just as we experimented with the idea of getting La Cosa Nostra to kill Dick Gregory—Martin Luther King's right-hand man.

Or when the FBI sent a letter from Sullivan trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself by his own hand.

Or when we actually assassinated Fred Hampton in his bed in Chicago.

So if you have a left-of-center perspective, you're very well aware that the intelligence community has previously been out of control.

Now, I have no reason to think that it is out of control at the same level now.

I don't know if there's an analog of **Operation Mockingbird,** but the idea that we should simply trust our intelligence community when we have not publicly, vigorously investigated it for many years...

... in a new era where it's possible to **hoover up all sorts of data**—from our simple daily behavior—given that all of us carry **tracking devices, microphones, and video cameras at all times?**

This is patently insane.

We need a new level of oversight so that we can trust our intelligence community with our secrets.

What concerns me is that I don't know who to trust at base.

I don't know if we can trust the intelligence community.

Maybe we can. Maybe they're doing an absolutely brilliant job without infringing on our rights.

Or maybe they're out of control.

What are we going to do in the modern era with all of this extra sensor data?

How do we ensure that we are not being tracked completely?

00:20:37

Ben Shapiro: So, I started off by asking you: you started off as a guy doing mathematics at Harvard.

How did you go from there to politics?

How did you get into this world?

Like, what's your personal story?

First of all, how did you get into math? Tell me kind of how you got here.

00:20:50

Eric Weinstein: Well, so you have a path to God through the synagogue.

My family—while Jewish—was always committedly atheist.

And I figured that if I was ever going to figure out what the universe was, probably reading differential geometry rather than Hebrew was the way to find God in his original language.

So, I thought I would try to figure out how physics unifies.

And in the process of that, I responded to a call from the scientific community that said we were going to have a massive shortage of scientists and engineers back in the 1980s, and that the job prospects were going to be limitless and very well remunerated.

What happened, in fact, was that we had a disaster.

And in trying to figure out why the golden era immediately disappeared in the early 1990s, I discovered that there had been a conspiracy in the:

- National Academy of Sciences - National Science Foundation - Policy Research and Analysis Division - Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable

All inside the National Academy Complex and the National Science Board.

What shocked me was that they were, in fact, trying to avoid letting the free market determine the salaries of scientists and engineers—and instead, suppress them.

So when I discovered a secret study from 1986 studying how to lower the wages of Americans by flooding the market with foreign scientists and engineers, I couldn't believe it.

I had always thought immigration was basically a pure positive.

To then find out that the very people who were supposed to be guarding the National Science endeavor were actually stabbing it in the back—was like finding an Agatha Christie whodunit where it was Murder on the Orient Express and everyone had a hand in pushing the knife in.

So that broke trust to such a remarkable extent that I ended up testifying in front of or presenting for the National Academy of Sciences four separate times.

And I watched as the news media refused to cover the story.

Effectively, everybody buried it.

And then I realized, My gosh, we're not living in the free society that I thought, because the story went counter-narrative.

Because in my sector of the world, all of us were pro-immigrant.

And this indicated that immigrants weren’t the problem, but that the visas were being used to flood the market.

Because this was a story of betrayal by the government against the workers.

Because the claim was that Americans couldn’t do science and engineering—when I think we are absolutely one of the very best systems for educating people in science and engineering.

The whole thing was topsy-turvy.

And I think that institutional betrayal was the thing that hooked me on the idea that I didn't know how deep the rabbit hole went.

00:23:46

Ben Shapiro: So when it comes to that issue—let’s talk about high-skilled immigration for a second, because we may have a difference of opinion on this.

I've always been an advocate for high-skilled immigration.

You obviously oppose high-skilled immigration, at least in certain sectors.

What is the downside of high-skilled immigration?

Is it just that people are being promised jobs that aren't materializing in the United States?

Or is there a net detriment to the United States, with people bringing in high-skilled immigrants to fill jobs in sectors where they want to lower the price?

00:24:14

Eric Weinstein: I mean, first of all, I don't even know where to begin.

A certain amount of high-skilled immigration has always been present, and we do benefit from getting the absolute top talent in the world.

But that's not really what we're looking at.

What we're looking at is a bunch of systems that depress the market—so that we lose top talent.

That talent doesn’t choose to go into science and engineering but instead goes into investment banking or management consulting or some other sector.

Because the salaries are so low, it means that a lot of our technical edge, which we use to power our own economy and defense structure, finds its way to four or five countries in Asia that supply us with most of the cryptic labor that we call graduate study—but is, in fact, just a labor market to staff the labs.

Most people have never even done the thought experiment:

Imagine that Leibniz lives in Germany, while Newton and Clark live in the UK—and Newton is better than Leibniz.

But you open one border and not the other, and Germany pays better.

Well, then Newton displaces Leibniz—Clark takes the space that would have been left for Newton.

So you get Clark in the UK and Newton in Germany, rather than Newton in the UK and Leibniz in Germany.

You get an inferior outcome.

So I think people haven't really thought through this idea.

They have an intuitive sense of: Wow, we're getting an incredible bargain! We're getting the best minds in the world! What could possibly go wrong?

The last thing I'm going to say is that I think we do a better job—with our crazy heterogeneous educational system—raising irreverent scientists.

And I think the biggest discoveries—the ones that really move the needle—are done by people who are incredibly irreverent and very disagreeable.

And that's what our system excels at.

If you get a Richard Feynman, he's dangerous. You can't really—he's like an outside cat. You can't bring him inside.

But the fact is, what we're getting is pliant labor—people who don't really rock the boat, who are extremely regular—rather than people who are confident, who know that their careers are assured, and who can flip the middle finger to anybody who gets in their way while they're exploring ideas.

00:26:27

Ben Shapiro: So it sounds a lot like—I mean, if you take all the elements that we've been talking about so far—it sounds a lot like you understand why Trump came to the fore.

Because we've now been talking about:

• High-skilled immigration and its downsides
• Distrust of the media
• Distrust of tech companies
• Distrust of the intelligence community

And President Trump embodies a lot of these particular elements.

So what do you make of the Trump phenomenon?

Is it pure reaction to these things? Does he have a point on some of these elements? Or are we watching just essentially the country go mad on all sides?

What do you make of the Trump phenomenon?

00:26:59

Eric Weinstein: Well, this comes full circle.

I think that the problem was that we didn't have something like the IDW before this.

So the first person to break through and say: "Look, the institutions are out of control in a way that could actually gain power."

That person was Trump.

And so, as a result, we associate this kind of high-level skepticism with Trump, rather than with the people who might be doing it from a completely responsible and analytically sound perspective.

So if I take three issues—where we have what I call the checksum theory of politics—if I can see that you're lying without doing any work, I lose trust very quickly.

Those three issues are as follows:

1. Trade: Do you believe that trade is a rising tide that raises all boats? It clearly is not. That doesn't mean it doesn’t provide a net benefit, but it’s certainly not the case that nobody gets hurt and everybody's made better off. The representations on trade made by economists were patently false. As Paul Krugman has said, it's basically a scam by the elites.
2. Immigration: If you believe that immigrants are simply the best of us, they work harder, they’re smarter, they cause no problems and no disruptions. That is patently absurd. It doesn't mean that immigration isn't good, but the representation being made is completely childlike.
3. Terror & Islam: If you claim that there is absolutely no connection between terror and Islam when you have mass murders and people shouting "Allahu Akbar" at the end, people know that you're lying, and this is part of the problem.

It may be very noble to protect our Muslim community by pointing out that the problem isn’t Muslims—and I will say, the problem is not Muslims.

But the problem is connected to Islam in a way that it’s not connected to any other group at the moment.

The only two other groups that have practiced suicide bombing in the modern era have been:

• The Tamils in Sri Lanka
• The Kurds in Turkey (if I'm not mistaken—I could be wrong).

So in these situations—when the population can clearly see that the news media, political parties are not representing things accurately—I think that made people crazy.

They want to believe that at least the fictions they’re being fed are adult-level fictions.

And that whatever is being done behind the scenes—even if people can't be straight with the population—at least the folly is still in the best interest of the country.

And so, I think Trump was willing to say things in his crass and very direct and brutal fashion that indicated that we felt betrayed by our institutions.

00:29:37

Ben Shapiro: But do we have a problem though?

You make a claim that all these claims about trade, immigration, and terrorism are oversimplified.

And I agree with all of that.

Obviously, trade—I believe—is a net benefit, as you say.

But clearly, there are people who are going to go out of business because of free trade.

I mean, there are certainly towns in the Midwest that have gone completely out of business.

They've gone defunct because of free trade.

And that is one of the costs of free trade that has always existed.

And when it comes to immigration—obviously, certain immigration is good, and not all immigrants are created equal.

They're not all the same in terms of:

• The qualities that they bring to the table
• The culture that they're bringing across our borders

All of that is true.

But when you get to the flip side, then there's a similarly simplistic misrepresentation that's being promulgated.

So when it comes to trade, for example, you have people like President Trump saying:

• Trade is not only a net benefit with downsides, but rather that trade itself is a net loss.
• Trade wars are easy to win and good.

Or when he says that immigration itself is:

• Of no benefit.
• That he wants to curb not just illegal immigration—but all immigration.
• And that he doesn’t really want more people coming into the country.
• He’s pretty anti-immigration, generally speaking.

Or when he says—with regard to Islam—that the solution is Let’s just ban all Muslims from entering the country, as opposed to:

• There are problems within Islam that have to be dealt with within Islam.
• And we have to vet people coming in with a certain level of strictness.

Eventually, he comes around to that position.

But that’s not the original position that he’s espousing.

So when you have two blunt instruments slapping each other—

Is there any sort of plausible solution-making that can occur?

And I know it’s a long question, which is why I’m going to pause here before you can think about that one.

00:31:19

Ben Shapiro: So first, let's talk about your suit. Your suit is probably ugly. You probably got it off the rack. You probably look like a schlub. Let's be straight about this.

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00:32:30

Eric Weinstein: So I'm suddenly totally paranoid about my lapel.

00:32:33

Ben Shapiro: Okay, yeah, your lapels look very nice. But I think Indochino would make them look better. Let's be straight about this.

Before the ad, the suggestion was that both sides are now slapping each other with these bricks, these blunt instruments. Neither is representing the issue fully. And so you can't have an actual honest debate about these issues without people recognizing the upsides and downsides of these particular policies.

Is there a way forward from that, or are we so ensconced in the battle that we're just basically saying, "This is it"?

00:33:02

Eric Weinstein: This is what you and I are engaged in, and this is what's so fascinating. And this is what I got completely wrong.

I thought that when we finally had Trump, the Democratic Party—who knows what's wrong with all of these perspectives—would cry uncle and say, "Look, we have to be straight with people because we cannot have Donald Trump in office."

If they really think this guy is the second coming of Hitler, the greatest threat to world peace we've ever seen, and is destroying the country, then why not admit that the economists know it's not a Pareto improvement, where everybody gets better off, but only a Kaldor-Hicks improvement, where you need to tax some winners to pay some losers or do more in terms of relocating people in different sectors of the country when you have an open trade situation?

Why not, when it comes to immigration, be honest that the big issue is not the tiny efficiency gain economists call the Harberger Triangle, but the enormous thing below it called the Borjas Rectangle? It's an attempt to use immigrants cynically to transfer wealth from American labor to American capital.

Why not be open about the fact that we actually have a pretty good situation with Muslims in the U.S.—that they aren't highly radicalized, that they are in fact helping us in intelligence work because they speak languages like Pashto and Farsi that we don’t? But at the same time, there is some sort of a problem.

Why, when they had the opportunity to take power away from Trump and say, "Look, okay, we oversimplified it. We need to be more honest with people so that we don't get this reaction," didn’t they take that opportunity?

The fact that they doubled down on this kind of crazy intersectional identity stuff is what's terrifying—because it seems to indicate to us that there is no bottom. There's no point at which things get so bad that they start leveling with people.

And I don't know what to do about that.

I think that's part of why we're in this IDW thing, because what we're doing in microcosm is saying, "Look, I agree that trade can be a good thing. Maybe you want a little bit more trade than I do. Maybe you want a little bit more immigration than I do."

I actually published a paper suggesting how to do open immigration using the securitization of rights to have a true free market so that workers benefit alongside capital. There was zero interest in corporate America—because the interest is in taking something that belongs to labor and handing it to capital.

If you and I were to model what a real debate looked like, it would look absolutely nothing like what’s going on.

And this was interesting for me when you just went on Bill Maher after you had been in Dave Rubin’s studio with me. What I saw was the level of distortion that happened when you went into a formatted program.

Bill Maher is about the best thing on standard television there is, and yet there's no way it can compete with this long-format discussion—where we actually get into things and don’t just sit here beating our partisan drum.

So even though I’ve been handed a mug that says Leftist Tears, the fact of the matter is that I would much rather have a full-on, drag-out discussion about trade, immigration, and terror with an honest conservative than someone trying to win an election inside the DNC.

00:36:14

Ben Shapiro: Which is why I think that you're more of a liberal than you are a leftist. And I don't mean liberal in the sense that Dave Rubin means liberal, as in classical liberal.

I mean that there are people who disagree with me on economics but agree with me that we have to actually have honest conversations about this stuff rather than trying to shut it down.

That's why when we actually looked at making these tumblers, the original suggestion was "liberal tears." And I said, I don't want liberal tears—I want leftist tears.

00:36:34

Eric Weinstein: This is why I see you as a conservative and not as right-wing.

00:36:37

Ben Shapiro: I appreciate it. So let's talk about your proposal for fixing capitalism.

I obviously am a very laissez-faire, free-market-oriented guy. You have proposed something called anthropic capitalism. So what exactly does that term mean, and what does it mean in material terms and in terms of policy?

00:36:54

Eric Weinstein: Well, the short answer is that we don't know, and we better come up with an answer quickly.

What if capitalism was a pretty terrific solution for the 19th and 20th centuries, but then in the era of machine learning, robots, and world labor markets, if you actually just let the machine run, it doesn't deliver enough stability?

Jobs may go away. While opportunity may be plentiful, stable, repetitive activity that's lucrative may, in fact, be quite scarce. It's not at all clear to me that if you let the wheels of capitalism run in the current era, markets will clear in a way that leaves us happy with the way in which our resources are distributed.

Many people may become very disenchanted. And these are people who need purpose, sustenance, and activity with dignity—something the market may have provided very well in the past.

So we're not going to disagree with you about the past. What I'm worried about is the future. And I think this is one of these paradoxes where conservatives tend to be very right about the past, and progressives, if they are right, tend to be right about the fact that things may need to be very different going forward.

00:38:06

Ben Shapiro: Well, it'll be interesting to see. As far as the people on the right—including Charles Murray and Milton Friedman—have proposed, some form of universal basic income as a solution to the rise of artificial intelligence and the fact that you are having a lower-skilled population that is just not going to be able to compete in this market where machines take over all the truck driving, for example, and all of the repetitive labor.

00:38:27

Eric Weinstein: Radiology may now be low skill compared to a machine.

00:38:30

Ben Shapiro: I mean, that's true too, although I think that the diagnosis seems to be better. At least from what I can see, diagnosis seems to be better when it's a combination of machine learning and expert systems.

00:38:40

Eric Weinstein: Fair enough, but I'm just trying to say that—

00:38:43

Ben Shapiro: What we define as low-skilled is gradually being redefined.

00:38:45

Eric Weinstein: Quite a bit, right? Yeah, I think that the fact is that we all acknowledge that it has to be some kind of a hybridized system.

But what I think is also true—and this is good news for you—is that those few people who can actually manage these incredibly complicated enterprises to deliver really profound innovation and growth may need to be freed from burdensome regulation that’s completely inappropriate to creating new sectors of the economy.

At the same time, if those windfalls occur, we may need radical ways of redistributing some of that.

If, in fact, jobs are affected in some new way where instead of machines traditionally chasing us from repetitive behavior of low value to repetitive behavior of higher value, the new paradigm may be that all repetitive behavior is not lucrative.

And the reason that the huge windfalls occur is that those people who...

00:39:44

Ben Shapiro: There will be a natural IQ hierarchy as well, it's—

00:39:46

Eric Weinstein: Not just IQ hierarchy. It may be that what's going on is that these are one-off special situations.

There are always some guys you know, and it's not clear that they have a job—they just sort of meet people, sign pieces of paper, and make tremendous amounts of money. What are they doing? They're opportunistically searching the landscape for things that are not repeatable but that are very well compensated.

Most people are not going to be in a position to do that. And I think it's very important to actually get hyper-capitalistic because we have to deregulate certain sectors in order to get innovation. At the same time, we have to realize that we're going to have to do something hyper-socialistic because of what you were saying.

If even Milton Friedman understood this, one of the things that's most meaningful to me about these conversations is that if we get hyper-specific about what these alterations are, then perhaps we can get conservatives to stop worrying so much about the kind of envy-driven desire to tax as a punishment for success—because it's not about fairness or resentment.

In return, conservatives can acknowledge that we have a nation of souls, and it's not good enough to just say, "Well, the market metes out harsh justice, so tough luck."

00:40:59

Ben Shapiro: Well, this is why I think that, for a lot of consumers, particularly religious conservatives, there always has to be a balance between liberty and virtue.

You have to have freedom in the markets, but that can’t exist unless you actually have a social fabric. If somebody at my synagogue needs a hand, then that person gets a hand—that's always been the way in religious communities.

One of the great tragedies, in my view, of government growing beyond its boundaries is that people have stopped giving as much.

00:41:22

Ben Shapiro: People have stopped relying on their local community or their families as much. You see this particularly with Social Security, where people have stopped relying on their relatives.

You had a lot of kids because they were going to support you when you got old, and your kids knew that going in. But now, it’s, "I’m supporting your mother through Social Security because she paid fifty bucks and now she’s getting two thousand bucks a month out."

So the idea of saving for when you're really old, of making plans for that—savings rates have gone down, and people have stopped worrying about it because the government's going to take care of it.

It creates all of these inefficiencies and perverse incentives that result in worse outcomes.

But there's another element here worth discussing. Let's say one of the things that’s happening technologically is that we are coming closer and closer to something like the Star Trek replicator—a machine that just makes anything.

It’s easier to buy cheap things now than it ever has been in human history. Most people in the United States can afford these things.

By global standards, the number of people in extreme poverty in the U.S. is below two percent. The vast majority of people in the United States, by global standards, are upper-class or at least middle-to-upper-class.

We're reaching a point where prosperity, at least in an absolute historical sense, has grown to magnificent proportions.

I mean, a middle-class person today is living better than an unbelievably wealthy person in 1880—who was still going outside to use an outhouse.

00:42:42

Eric Weinstein: By material standards.

00:42:43

Ben Shapiro: Material standards.

But this is the real problem. UBI doesn't solve the biggest problem of all. I think you sort of mentioned it—the need for human fulfillment is not going to be filled by a government check or by redistribution of income.

For most of human history, we’ve filled that need with work. We didn’t have much to do, but we had to work—otherwise, we’d starve.

That filled our days. Sure, I’m doing a repetitive task at the factory, but that’s what earns me the money so I can come home and take care of my kids.

00:43:17

Eric Weinstein: And let’s—

00:43:18

Ben Shapiro: Make a better life for them.

00:43:19

Eric Weinstein: And let’s expand that slightly to include not only work for money but also work—particularly the work traditionally done by women—which is a vital part of society that often happens off-market and needs to be recognized.

00:43:34

Ben Shapiro: But, you know, that's exactly right. One of the things that's happening is this materialist, almost Marxist perspective where whatever is in your bank account is your measure of value.

That’s why, if you don’t have enough in your bank account, then obviously the system has somehow screwed you. The reality is that we are concerned with systemic problems, and we should focus on them.

But the great majority of unhappiness, particularly in modern American society and historically prosperous Western nations, is not material. It’s a poverty of values, a poverty of meaning, a poverty of purpose.

And I'm not sure that can be fixed. People are trying to fill that void with political action instead of looking at their own lives and asking, "What can I do to make myself better?"

If I were on a desert island, what would I do to make myself a better person? Just me and my family—what would I do, aside from chopping down trees or grabbing a coconut?

We’re so focused on railing against the system—which sometimes deserves it—but we spend all of our time on that. And that, I think, makes us susceptible to politicians who lie to us with very simplistic answers.

00:44:34

Eric Weinstein: Well, I agree with that, Ben. But I also think that one of the things we have to do a better job on is acknowledging where the wealth comes from.

Just as I, coming from a left-of-center perspective, have to defend the right of people who have contributed extraordinary things to society to retain extraordinary rewards, I think it’s equally important for the right to acknowledge that a lot of those rewards have come from nonproductive activities through rent-seeking.

If some meeting takes place in an investment bank that allows them to privatize gains while socializing whatever security is necessary to keep those banks afloat—and I wasn’t part of that—that’s going to make me furious.

00:45:22

Ben Shapiro: Now, we fully agree on this.

00:45:26

Eric Weinstein: This is why we have to model this.

00:45:26

Ben Shapiro: Well, the Tea Party and Occupy were on the same side of this particular battle.

I was a Tea Partier. My problem with Occupy wasn’t their argument that the big banks were in bed with the government—it was that they were protesting at the big banks. Go protest at the government.

The big banks are not elected; at least the people in the government are. If you want to shatter that paradigm, you actually have to go after elected officials instead of yelling at bankers who don’t care as they drive away in their Mercedes.

00:45:47

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I'm actually more upset about the people on both the left and the right who refuse to talk about the problem of rent-seeking.

Hillary Clinton once gave a speech where she said, "Come on, we all created the great financial crisis."

And I thought, no, we really didn’t all create the great financial crisis.

Whether it was the heads of investment banks, politicians, or rating agencies, we did not distribute the costs appropriately. That’s the problem.

That’s why there’s such a loss of trust.

When we had the savings and loan scandal, people went to jail. When people do jail time for bad deeds, the public sees that the high and mighty can be held accountable.

What was astounding about the 2008 financial crisis is that almost nobody went to jail.

This is one of the things that made me distrust The New York Times. I was in an article called *They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street*, which suggested that it wasn’t the investment bankers who caused the crisis, but the "quants"—the mathematicians and physicists working in finance.

From my perspective, we were the ones trying to sound the alarm, saying, "Hey, the models are out of control, this is nuts!" And nobody listened to us.

It’s very important to realize that the media, the regulators, the ratings agencies, and the politicians all played a role.

There’s this entire industry that ordinary Americans do not understand, and that allows rent-seeking to undermine real wealth creation.

It’s important that wealth be something we can understand.

When I watch Jackie Chan, and I see him slide down a live electrical wire and break through glass, I think, "There’s no way in the world I want to tax this guy at a high level and take his money."

I know exactly why he got paid—because I would never do what he does.

I want to be able to look at fortunes and say, "I know what this person created, and thank you for that."

It’s very important that we restore confidence that rent-seeking is not the primary way by which wealth is created and transferred.

00:48:01

Ben Shapiro: All right. Let’s talk about how people find fulfilling lives.

One of the other elements of the IDW is that we start off talking about political issues and systemic problems, but we often discover how much common ground we share.

Some of the most interesting conversations happen over deeper issues.

You, Sam Harris, and I were all on stage together in San Francisco, and we ended up in a two-hour-long conversation about everything from free will to morality and values.

My argument has been that one of the things broken in the West is that there is no longer a common sense of values—it has been shattered.

Even though Sam and I hold many values in common, the places we get those values are very different. And I frankly don’t understand how Sam gets to his values from his materialist, neurobiologist perspective.

So how do we find that set of common values?

Or should we just stop asking the question? Should I just be happy that Sam and I agree on these things and let it go?

I think the reason we argue about this is that I believe Sam’s perspective on values—while I agree with his values—is unsustainable in the long run.

It’s not sustainable beyond the people who really like Sam and follow him.

Whereas I think that at least trying to appeal to some source of objective morality that’s beyond my own reason is replicable and has been throughout human history.

00:49:30

Eric Weinstein: This is an interesting question. I mostly stayed out of that discussion because I think the audience wanted to see the atheist and the religious guy go at it.

00:49:37

Ben Shapiro: Right, Sam and I, clashing—

00:49:40

Eric Weinstein: But I had a very different take than both of you, and I approached it from an evolutionary biology perspective.

From my perspective, the key issue is that Sam begins with a concept he calls human flourishing, which I don’t believe has ever been fully fleshed out. From what I can tell, the great danger with humans is that we can wake up, look at theories of selection, and say, "Oh my gosh, this is the game that brought us here."

And even if evolution is the engine that created us, we don’t need to keep playing that game.

For example, we don’t need to have children because we have birth control. So even if we want to have sex, we can engage in it while breaking that evolutionary linkage.

We think about proximate versus ultimate needs. The proximate is thirst, but the ultimate is dehydration. The proximate is hunger, but the ultimate is starvation.

So what happens if the mind suddenly wakes up and decides it wants to pursue proximate pleasure?

If you break the body into two kinds of tissue—soma and germ—the germ is what contributes to having children and is therefore immortal. The soma is disposable.

We are all in danger that the soma, meaning our minds, will wake up and say, "Hey, I just want to have fun and pursue pleasure. I’m going to define human flourishing to be whatever it is that I particularly enjoy."

Now, it's not true that every atheist is going to go crazy like this—far from it. But the problem is that this approach doesn’t necessarily scale across generations.

So I find myself in the odd position of being an atheist who is very sympathetic to religion. In fact, I attend services and belong to a temple largely because I believe that the brain has a sort of Chomskyan pre-grammar for religion.

What sustained us as a species was a belief in something beyond our somatic lives. We all feel that, usually through our children—even atheists.

But here’s the key question: If you don’t have children, are you still going to make investments that will benefit future generations?

If you don’t believe that anything happens after you die and that there is no ultimate purpose or meaning, why would you?

The reason religions outcompete rationality—which is quite surprising if you think about it—is that religions keep the soma from waking up and redefining human flourishing in purely individualistic, pleasure-seeking terms.

That’s probably the thing I think Sam has not fully addressed.

Now, Sam is unusual because he is an atheist who clearly sees the value in religion. He says, "I think we can accomplish all that religion does well from the perspective of reason."

So it’s not that we need to convince him that religions do many things well. What we have to convince him of is that some aspects of atheists seeing human flourishing as intergenerational, lineage-level behavior may not scale across society.

It may only work when you actually believe that there’s some meaning and purpose larger than yourself.

00:52:56

Ben Shapiro: I obviously agree with a lot of that.

I think the flaw in Sam’s reasoning isn’t necessarily his questioning of faith, but his **faith in reason alone**—the idea that by reason alone, you can achieve the values Sam wants you to achieve.

That I find deeply problematic, especially because we had 200 years where people were basically trying this, and it did not work out particularly well.

00:53:17

Eric Weinstein: But it may be that religion served us better in the past, while Sam is right about the future, even if we don’t currently have an atheist-scalable plan.

It could be that we could institute rituals that are actually devoid of the belief in the supernatural while still tapping into that Chomskyan grammar.

00:53:35

Ben Shapiro: That’s possible, but as a historical experiment, it was a giant failure for 200 years.

00:53:39

Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:53:40

Ben Shapiro: In France, they created a "Cult of Reason." Essentially, they tried a communist ritual system.

00:53:44

Eric Weinstein: And I don’t buy the argument that we should treat Soviet Russia as a religion and therefore exclude it as an experiment in atheism.

There’s great danger in religion, and there’s great danger in an absence of religion.

What’s really necessary is to move the conversation to a space where values are embedded—even if we’re atheistic—because we’re still benefiting from a cultural substrate that was largely built on a Judeo-Christian system.

And I agree with you.

By the way, I really appreciated your willingness to forego any appeal to Torah or the Bible in favor of a reason-based argument for religion. That was really interesting.

00:54:24

Ben Shapiro: Otherwise, we have no common frame of reference for the conversation.

I may find that stuff inspiring and meaningful, but Sam clearly doesn’t. So if I start quoting the Bible to him, he’s not going to resonate with that.

And it's not going to be an argument worth making with his audience—because how do I win that argument? By citing Leviticus? That’s just not a winning strategy.

00:54:42

Eric Weinstein: Well, particularly Deuteronomy really loses me.

The thing that gets me about some of these conversations is that we have a very large number of people in our network—Bret Weinstein, you, me, Jordan Peterson, maybe Douglas Murray—who I think are quite sympathetic to religion without making arguments from religion.

00:55:09

Ben Shapiro: I think everybody in the group, if they were willing to admit it, would—if they were willing to admit it—I think pretty much everybody we’re talking about is essentially a natural law theologian. The only question is whether you're cutting God out of the picture or not. Because Sam is basically making a natural law argument.

00:55:23

Ben Shapiro: He's saying, "This is what the universe calls us to do—to forward human flourishing." And then I just have a problem with his definitions.

00:55:32

Eric Weinstein: Well, but the problem would be—I don't want to have to ask you this on camera—but if I said, "How sure are you about the truth of the revelation at Sinai?" I'm not entirely sure that you could give me a basis for that, nor would I want to.

00:55:47

Ben Shapiro: I can't give you a rational basis for revelation at Sinai.

00:55:49

Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:55:49

Ben Shapiro: So the best I can do is sort of Maimonides' explanation, which is that something happened at Sinai, and I'm not sure quite what. Maimonides says in Guide for the Perplexed that what people got from that experience was: There is a God. There shouldn’t be idolatry—which human reason can bring you to. Moses was a particularly inspired, logical figure who was able to access higher modes of thinking and bring the Torah down from Sinai through direct communication with God. That's essentially Maimonides' argument.

00:56:13

Eric Weinstein: And I'm worried about even that. So in some sense, if I am feeling sick and I go to the drugstore and say, "Don't you guys have a placebo you can give me that will cure my ailment?"—if I'm really in on the conceit that I don't have to fully believe something, it's not clear what the effect will be. It may be that you really get the benefit from being certain that there was a revelation at Sinai.

00:56:39

Eric Weinstein: And so the question of self-deception and its efficacy in human flourishing is a very interesting one.

00:56:47

Ben Shapiro: Now, this is it. I think the key question that breaks out is whether you have to believe in the reality of revelation or just the importance of revelation. My belief is that, at a minimum, you have to believe in the importance of revelation. If you believe in the reality of revelation, so much the better—because then you have it easier. But believing in the importance of revelation is the minimum for understanding the evolution of Western civilization.

00:57:08

Eric Weinstein: I think that's the ante that gets you into the game. Then you have a situation in which you probably need a superposition of belief and lack of belief in order to have a decent life. That has probably always existed. But one of the odd things about this is that it's hard to talk about without destroying its efficacy. These questions of self-contemplation—when you’re trying to solve this thought-form problem—may have something to do with the limits of discourse. I think this is something that would be much more interesting to model than the usual dorm-level discussions about whether there's a God.

00:57:41

Ben Shapiro: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Well, all of this is really fascinating. So let’s finish this—we’re getting close to the end here. Let’s talk for just a second about this: If you could make three changes to the country, what would those three changes be?

00:57:56

Eric Weinstein: Well, probably—

00:57:59

Ben Shapiro: That was a Barbara Walters "What’s your favorite kind of tree?" question.

00:58:01

Eric Weinstein: That’s all right. Regular investigation of the intelligence community. If they’re doing a fantastic job, we should be able to rely on them. I think they provide a vital service, and I’m not against them. We need to pay journalists a great deal more. I don’t know where that money is going to come from. But we also need to fire them at the drop of a hat when they break trust—when they pursue ideology at the expense of truthful and meaningful reporting.

The scientific apparatus of the U.S. needs to be restored. We need to bring back crazy, dangerous, highly genetic people to take back the labs. We need to kick out the safe, ideologically driven alterations in research. This will allow us to create new sectors of the economy to get growth back on track. This is one of the things that I think Peter Thiel and I share deeply. People don’t worry enough about what happens in the absence of growth. The U.S.—and the world—needs to find non-fossil fuel-led technological growth, broadly distributed stable growth, and growth that can avert war.

And maybe a fourth, crazy suggestion—if you don’t mind me sneaking it in. Once in a blue moon, I think we need to explode an above-ground nuclear weapon. Because I’m terrified that what’s happened is that we’ve all fallen under a spell of magical thinking—that it doesn’t matter who we elect, and it doesn’t matter how bad things get. People assume that somehow the world is bizarrely stable and safe. It absolutely is not. I think maybe we need to activate the amygdala and remind everybody what’s hanging in the balance—and how unstable this is—so that we can get on to the business of making a really beautiful planet for generations to come.

01:00:10

Ben Shapiro: Now, Eric Weinstein, thanks so much for stopping by. As always, great to see you. It’s always fun to talk with my friends, and it’s cool to have a friend in here. Eric, thanks so much for stopping by.

01:00:16

Eric Weinstein: Thanks, man.

01:00:24

Ben Shapiro: The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special was produced by Jonathan Hay.

• Executive Producer: Jeremy Boren
• Associate Producers: Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens
• Edited by: Alex Segarra
• Audio Mixed by: Mike Carmina
• Hair & Makeup: Jess Wall
• Title Graphics: Cynthia Angulo

The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire / Forward Publishing production.

Copyright Forward Publishing, 2018.

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