Bitcoin and the Culture Wars with Eric Weinstein (YouTube Content)

Bitcoin & the Culture Wars with Eric Weinstein
Information
Host(s)	Peter McCormack
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	01:39:33
Release Date	23 February 2022
Links
YouTube	Watch
Portal Blog	Read
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Bitcoin & the Culture Wars was an interview with Eric Weinstein by Peter McCormack on What Bitcoin Did.

Description

In this interview, Peter McCormack and Eric Weinstein discuss media fact-checking, colonising other worlds, physics beyond Einstein, intelligent design, narrative wars, modern fascism, and economic deception amidst the rise of Bitcoin.

Transcript

00:00:03
Peter McCormack: Eric, hi. Good to see you again.

00:00:04
Eric Weinstein: Peter, pleasure.

00:00:05
Peter McCormack: Thanks for coming in.

00:00:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, thanks for having me.

00:00:07
Peter McCormack: Hey, um, I would always talk to you if I had the chance, especially after the last one, um, that had a profound impact on me in two ways. Uh-

00:00:16
Eric Weinstein: Tell me.

00:00:18
Peter McCormack: Um, I think the first one is I became a little bit more serious about this as a job, and if you wanna be good at a job, you have to work at it, and I think I'd been coasting. And so me and Danny spend a lot of time discussing the future of the show and how we make the best show, both production and quality of interview, uh, because I, I didn't, I didn't prepare for it in the right way, so that, that was the other one. And also something that stuck with me and Danny, we talked about a lot, was this, this message of, "What the fuck are we doing? What are we doing here?" And we talk about that a lot.

00:00:51
Eric Weinstein: I'm really glad. I, ma- I, I have seen that you've taken a certain amount of abuse over my previous appearance.

00:00:58
Peter McCormack: Uh-huh.

00:00:58
Eric Weinstein: And I was really... I just wanna say something, uh, to the people who want to seize on anything that they felt went wrong or gotchas or dragging or... Cut it out. These are conversations.

00:01:10
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:01:10
Eric Weinstein: And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk, uh, to you, to the Bitcoin community. It's led to various interactions that have been positive in my life, and, um, it's not about gotcha and it's not about lack of preparation. It's about trying to figure out what we're all doing and leading more purposeful, more meaningful lives. So, uh, I just, I feel like you were treated by some people unfairly online, and I wanted to put this at the beginning so that, uh, they can buzz off, uh, if they wanna try it again. I'm just interested in having conversations with people who want to evolve.

00:01:44
Peter McCormack: Me too, and I think what it was is a l- M- A lot of the comments came quite a time after the interview, and I think what happened was, uh, lots of people had d- different perspectives on it. But I think what happened is after the Tale of Bitcoin, as it heard the show, I think there were a lot of people who discovered it just by searching for you and didn't understand the Bitcoin community, didn't know me, and, uh, and then judged it. And, uh, there's that... I've got this tweet I put out once. I said, "There's three types of conversation podcasts. There's a smart person, a smart person," and, uh, I used your ex- example of your show with Werner Herzog as an example of that. There's a moron and a smart person, which is like me interviewing you, and then there's two morons. And I think the three-

00:02:25
Eric Weinstein: Stop it.

00:02:26
Peter McCormack: No, no. I think what it is, is... A- and when I say a moron, I mean just like a normal, non, uh, university-educated person, and I think all three are important types of conversations. You, you need different hosts and guests.

00:02:37
Eric Weinstein: I, I appreciate that. As a university-educated [laughs] person, I can tell you.

00:02:41
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:02:41
Eric Weinstein: Let's not, let's not, um, synonymize smart with, uh, pieces of paper.

00:02:46
Peter McCormack: Well-

00:02:46
Eric Weinstein: Probably a mistake.

00:02:47
Peter McCormack: Probably now. But also, look, the art of conversation and the meaning of these types of conversations is big in the news right now. There is, uh, lots of people discussing it, and personally, even with my small audience, one of the things I've been wrestling with is two things, actually. Firstly, I feel in the middle of culture wars.

00:03:09
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:03:10
Peter McCormack: And I fear for my own exposure to audience capture. And, uh, secondly, what responsibility do I ha- hold or have with the information that goes out? And it's... I'm thinking about this a lot.

00:03:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's piss off your audience.

00:03:25
Peter McCormack: Okay, let's do it.

00:03:26
Eric Weinstein: No, no, I'm not kidding.

00:03:27
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:03:27
Eric Weinstein: Um, let's think about the things that you worry about with audience capture, and then let's make really crisp, clear statements to get rid of the bad people because they're not worth it.

00:03:37
Peter McCormack: Yep.

00:03:37
Eric Weinstein: Right? So y- you don't... You, you could give away 10% of your audience and lead a much better life.

00:03:44
Peter McCormack: I'm happy to do that.

00:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Let's do that.

00:03:45
Peter McCormack: Let's do that. Well, but it, it, it does, it does weigh on me, Eric. It... The res- what responsibility... Do you ever consider about the responsibility that you maybe have when you make a show? Do you-

00:03:56
Eric Weinstein: All the time.

00:03:56
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Does it weigh on you?

00:03:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, because I'm failing constantly.

00:04:00
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:04:00
Eric Weinstein: I mean, no, no, I'm not kidding. Uh, I don't know how to do this. There's no manual for it.

00:04:04
Peter McCormack: Nope.

00:04:05
Eric Weinstein: And I'm a lightning rod for crazy people. Um, you know, I'm interested in crypto. I'm interested in physics. I'm interested in, uh, governments, uh, out of control with respect to the exercise of, uh, emergency powers. Everything that I care about is cared about by people who are, you know, holding onto sanity by their fingernails, and I worry about them. I want better mental health. I want insulation from my... for my own family, from people who think that there's a beacon. So I, I worry a lot about how we're heard. But on the other hand, we can't risk saying nothing because that means that that vacuum is filled by other voices that, um, maybe aren't really trying to [laughs] find, uh, the truth or, or a better way or how to elevate each other. So I, I, I think there's no way of shouldering this responsibility. Um, we just have to do the best we can and try to... m- some self-kindness, uh, and self-acceptance for when we stumble and fail, realizing that nobody in human history has ever done this before. This is, this is the Wild West. It's a new world. So let's go to whatever topics you want.

00:05:18
Peter McCormack: Well, th- this is a topic I, I want. This i- Because one of the things we're considering is how do we, how do we ensure there's... How do we, how, how do we be more responsive about the content we put out? Should we... After we've had an interview, for example-

00:05:36
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:05:36
Peter McCormack: ... should we be running through the key points? Should we be trying to fact check? Should we be supplying information in the show notes that help people find further information? We know while mainstream [laughs] media's largely failing, a lot of mainstream media still has fact-checking departments.

00:05:53
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:05:53
Peter McCormack: They just tend to put a corporate spin on it to keep their advertisers happy.

00:05:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. They, they do a lot worse than that. They do what I call straw checking, where, uh, you assert S- uh, proposition A, and then you see a news story appear that says, uh, fact-checkers say that A prime is not true. And you're like, "Well, but nobody ever said A prime. We said A." Well, but A prime sounds like A, and we've checked that A prime isn't true. Well, that's the straw man. A prime is what they wanted to check to indicate that A wasn't true, but A was true.

00:06:27
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:06:28
Eric Weinstein: Right? So for example, the lab leak is the perfect example of this.

00:06:32
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:06:33
Eric Weinstein: The claim was that this may have come from a laboratory, this virus may have come from a laboratory in Wuhan. The debunked claim was no individual authored this virus. That's not the same as saying it didn't come from a lab. You could use natural selection to, um, let, let evolution design the, a virus for you by, let's say, selecting for which viral particles in a bat coronavirus are closest to being able to in- infect humans by using pulmonary tissue or something like that. That replacing of a question A with A prime and then debunking A prime is far worse than misinformation. So I think we have to recognize that we do have o- obligations to try to figure out what's true, but I, I don't want to use corporate fact-checking, which is often straw checking-

00:07:29
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:07:29
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, as a gold standard. We should come up with our own s- system for what we think we should put out in the air. The other thing is I feel like if I'm misinformed about something and I talk to you, I, I'm similar to most of us. I'm not perfectly informed about everything. I've got things in my head that aren't true, and I don't wanna lie to your audience in a way that causes them harm. But it's definitely the case that, um, you know, if I say to you, uh, "I'm sorry I was a little bit late. Uh, there was traffic on the way over," there m- may be that there was actually a dispute in my household that I had to deal with, you know? I don't wanna, necessarily wanna tell you, so I'm gonna tell you, "Yeah, there was traffic."

00:08:07
Peter McCormack: I'm not gonna fact-check that. [laughs]

00:08:08
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] I'm just trying to say, I, I think we're also... If we wanna be more authentic and more truthful, we have to not fetishize authenticity and truth. I think we have to recognize what is possible, what is decent, uh, and give yourself a budget for screwing up, you know? I, I wanna make sure that 95% of the statements are true. When I know that a statement isn't true, maybe I'll put in something into the show notes. But I also think that this idea that free speech should not be enjoyed by ordinary individuals, uh, without fact-checking departments effectively says, "Okay, you want corporate media." I think it's really important that people who are, who are wrong, who are incorrect, who are mistaken be allowed to speak. Uh, freedom of speech can't end, uh, in Speaker's Corner or in a public park. Digital speech is the only speech that matters, and all of it r- seems to run on, on corporate, uh, corporate assets. So the new move to get rid of free speech is just to say, "Oh, well, if, if it's involving private companies, they can do whatever they want. That's not censorship." Uh-

00:09:13
Peter McCormack: You disagree.

00:09:14
Eric Weinstein: In the strongest possible terms-

00:09:16
Peter McCormack: Mm

00:09:16
Eric Weinstein: ... because I'm not a moron, yeah.

00:09:19
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I mean, our, our traditional process has been that we understand these shows don't exist in isolation.

00:09:25
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:09:26
Peter McCormack: It's, it's kind of like, um, it's kind of like a ongoing series because one conversation leads to another.

00:09:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:09:32
Peter McCormack: And sometimes we jump from topic to topic, but sometimes we come back, and what will happen is we'll have a show, and you know, I had a... made, I made a show the other day with a, a lad, a chap called Vijay Boyapati, and we're discussing will there be a post-democracy world where we have, say, city-states. This is something he's a fan of.

00:09:49
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00:09:49
Peter McCormack: I'm not. I'm a... I wanna strengthen democracy. Uh, he thinks monarchies were better. We had the conversation. I read the YouTube comments. I was referred to a book. Uh, I bought, uh, Radical Markets, I think. And so from that, we're gonna listen to that in the car on the way later-

00:10:04
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:10:04
Peter McCormack: ... and that will lead to another conversation. And one of the things I do hope is that that kind of process of having conversations, seeing the feedback, and making further conversations hopefully leads people to find, uh, the right answers for them.

00:10:19
Eric Weinstein: Maybe.

00:10:20
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:10:20
Eric Weinstein: But maybe, maybe we're gonna end up, uh, having people on our shows that are promoting... have secret agendas, and people are highly mistaken. I, I just think we have to do a good job, and we have to not take on all of the burden that's being foisted upon us by corporate, um, news agencies because what, what they're really doing is they're, they're using the fact that they can work at a higher level of production value and that they can maintain a... And they, and they often do have fact-checking departments which narrowly fact-check. The entire story can be completely misleading, but the facts in it are not technically wrong as stated. Um, we have to do our own thing. Let's try to be good people. Let's try to figure out what the evolving standards are. Let's go.

00:11:03
Peter McCormack: And what about with regards to technology censorship? We've obviously seen a lot this week with Spotify. Uh, historically Twitter over the last couple of years has certainly increased the amount of people it's removing from its platform. Facebook is similar. Um, I, uh, listened to a show recently about, uh, surveillance and censorship within Google and how they manipulate people by manipulating search results. Do you think much about how we deal with that whole area of-

00:11:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:11:33
Peter McCormack: Yeah. What do you think? Uh, uh, is it something that has to be solved with regulation or education?

00:11:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's very confusing.

00:11:41
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:11:42
Eric Weinstein: The, the key thing is, is that there's something that has to retard bad people doing bad things for bad reasons, and I would prefer that that not be law. I'd prefer that that be culture. I'd prefer that that h- have to do with the consequence of being a bastard on, uh, on media. And what we've lost is any sense of the word mustn't. So I think mustn't tends to come from religion. There's something that you... It's not that you shouldn't do it. Like, I really shouldn't have another drink, but I kinda want one.

00:12:20
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:12:21
Eric Weinstein: Um.

00:12:21
Peter McCormack: We've got some whiskey if you want. [laughs]

00:12:24
Eric Weinstein: Mustn't is like, yeah, you can do that. There's no law against it, but it's, it's not on. So for example, flag burning. You mustn't burn the flag. You can, it's a free society, but you mustn't. Like, well, there's no law saying I can't. Yeah, because you're an idiot. Um, there's a culture saying you can't do it. And if you, if you absolutely believe that your, your country is the worst country on earth, you know, I could imagine somebody burning a Nazi flag, but that should be an enormous statement that when a proud German family burned a Nazi flag, everyone would take notice. You don't casually burn an American flag or a British flag, even though both of our countries have done really dumb, horrible, evil things.

00:13:08
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:13:09
Eric Weinstein: Mustn't has to have a form on the internet. We don't know what it is yet. It's like, it's like asking for, um... The internet needs its own version of a religion. It doesn't have to be a god, but it has to be something that has the word mustn't in its vocabulary because right now what we have, if the API permits it, you know, it's like somebody saying, "Well, if you didn't want me to take all your stuff, uh, I, I presume that you would've had a laser system to, to detect, uh, any kind of intrusion or motion, and you would lock the door with, you know, triple police locks or something. But you left the door open, so you must have wanted me to steal all your stuff." That kind of thinking is, is rampant on the internet. Well, if you didn't want to be abused and stalked, you know, then you shouldn't have put your house in your own name, and you shouldn't use your own name on the internet. It's like F off you stupid gamer morons. I don't know how to speak about this. It's-

00:14:06
Peter McCormack: Hmm

00:14:06
Eric Weinstein: ... it's like if you're in a, if you're in a gaming environment, it's an exploit. Hey, I noticed that your door was unlocked, so I walked through it. Really? There's no, no part of your brain said, "Maybe I shouldn't be doing this"?

00:14:19
Peter McCormack: Do you think this is, comes down to a kind of breakdown or a lack of leadership, lack of trust, breakdown in society?

00:14:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:14:30
Peter McCormack: And how do we rebuild that though? Because-

00:14:32
Eric Weinstein: Um, we're-

00:14:33
Peter McCormack: Directionally, we're going one way.

00:14:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. We built up a tremendous amount of order at the end of World War II, and right now what you're watching, it's, it's sort of like watching a, an enormous sandcastle get pro- progressively eroded by each successive wave of stupidity. So it was an enormous sandcastle, but the waves are lapping at it, and sooner or later, there isn't gonna be enough sandcastle left to save.

00:14:59
Peter McCormack: I worry about it a lot.

00:15:00
Eric Weinstein: Me too.

00:15:01
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:15:02
Eric Weinstein: Hopefully Bitcoin fixes this.

00:15:03
Peter McCormack: Well, yeah. I'm just about to release a film that I made about Bitcoin where I'm like Bit- well, Bitcoin doesn't fix everything. [laughs]

00:15:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the issue, right?

00:15:11
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:15:11
Eric Weinstein: You know, the, the... and I think we, we handled this last time, but you know, w- when, when your aunt keels over, uh, in the middle of a cardiac incident and somebody says, "Don't worry, Bitcoin fixes this," you just wanna punch that guy in the face.

00:15:24
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:15:25
Eric Weinstein: It has to be a non-reflexive response. Uh, Bitcoin fixes a lot potentially, and there's a lot it doesn't fix, and so we've gotta get wiser and smarter and think... I mean, this is really what I'm hoping for, which is, um, I was pretty heartened by the number of people who took something away from our interview that was-

00:15:43
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:15:43
Eric Weinstein: ... positive that said maybe... Like, you know, I wanna be very clear that, uh, I am pro Italian exotic cars. I do think that having fun and getting rich and enjoying-

00:15:55
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:15:55
Eric Weinstein: ... its fruits is a good thing. But hopefully, uh, you know, my hope is that you guys get rich enough that we get to think about really romantic things, and that's, you know, one of the reasons, for example, when Bitcoin gets slammed, uh, I try to show up in the Bitcoin rooms and, uh, make sure that when people know that I'm a critic, when people are, are high as a kite, uh, on, on their net worth looking at their, their Bitcoin holdings, when they feel suddenly humbled and beaten up, um, I wanna play the opposite role.

00:16:29
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think people sometimes have misunderstood your criticism. It's, it's not a criticism similar to the likes of Senator Warren, who clearly has an agenda and hates on Bitcoin and wants to destroy it. Uh, your criticisms come from a place of wanting to make Bitcoin stronger and make the Bitcoin community stronger in its output.

00:16:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, and I, I, you know, I haven't limited myself t- to Bitcoin. This is, you know, whatever this new technology is, again, we have to separate out there's a technology, there's a money, there's an extent to which you can say that Bitcoin is successful because it's a technology that is a money that doesn't try to do too many things. We can go through all that again or, or not.

00:17:06
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:17:06
Eric Weinstein: Something new was invented, and I don't think anyone's an expert in this. People say, you know, "Well, in the Bitcoin culture, this and that." There hasn't been enough time. We don't really know what we're dealing with, and I think it's one of the most exciting intellectual developments around. I mean, certainly of our time. So trying to... Somebody once said that a, a s- a startup is a business in search of a model or something like this. You know? That you don't really know what you're doing when you create a startup. And in a certain sense, I don't think anyone really knows what Bitcoin and its associated technologies is ultimately meant to be for us, and we have to keep an open mind.

00:17:50
Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, because originally it was designed as decentralized money the government can't switch off, but increasing new use cases are being found. We've learned about how mining within Texas is stabilizing the grid. Uh, we've also seen cultural influences on how people live their life from Bitcoin, which I think, I don't think was ever expected to come from it. Uh, and I, I'm increasingly interested in seeing these individual use cases Which help where there's a centralization of power. I think a great example, an amazing example this last week has been the truckers in, uh, Ottawa.

00:18:26
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

00:18:26
Peter McCormack: Now I, I understand there's probably people in Ottawa right now who are frustrated by it because the city's been brought to a gridlock, but at the same time, I would always support people's free choice to, um, pro- uh, protest and demonstrate against a government they think, uh, is overreaching. And GoFundMe I think essentially stole their money. Whether or not they've given it back, they stole the output of that money being able to support their cause. And step forward a Bitcoiner, and they're now collecting the funds in Bitcoin, which cannot be touched. To me, that is a great use of Bitcoin.

00:19:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, you can change two letters in GoFundMe and get something else.

00:19:06
Peter McCormack: Go fuck me, we said this.

00:19:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:19:08
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's really sad that something like GoFundMe can-

00:19:14
Eric Weinstein: No, it's really now we've gotta get it together. Every institutional player bends the knee to the new stupid. And we're watching it to some extent with Spotify. We've, we've watched it with commercial banking, Operation Chokepoint. Um, we have to recognize that the, the conduit, the vector that is delivering us, uh, into abject human stupidity is our institutional class. And we don't know exactly why. I know some of the smartest people in the world in Silicon Valley, and I am so disappointed in them. There's something about the way in which money and China and law and the US government and technology interact, where you have somebody who's high as a kite at Burning Man spouting... You know, talking about the road to serfdom and, uh, and Austrian economics and freedom and a bunch of stuff that I don't really believe. And then they go into some sort of corporate context, and they come out as a zombie, and they, they'll stop talking to me because every institutional player, it seems, of any size capitulates. Everybody's recording a hostage video at the institutional level.

00:20:39
Peter McCormack: Is it just a lack of courage when it matters?

00:20:42
Eric Weinstein: I think it has to do with when you care too much about money, you lose the plot of life. You have to care about money because without money there is no freedom, and I think that I've cared about money far too little, so that's a cr- self-critique. But when you care about money too much, you become a dick.

00:21:04
Peter McCormack: I think Enes Kanter, the Boston Celtics, is a great example. We've seen a lot of the pressure coming from China with regards to the NBA.

00:21:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:21:11
Peter McCormack: We saw the NBA capitulate, whereas Enes Kanter came out and said no, and he's stuck to his guns, and he has been a vocal voice against China in support of the Uyghurs, and that is the example of courage, but it's an isolated person.

00:21:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, it's courage in the sense that we can't imagine anyone, uh, giving up money and putting themselves at risk in this corporate world, and it's like, no, actually, this is my only time on this planet, and the marginal difference between flying economy and flying private is not worth your soul. And i- and if it is, maybe you didn't have much of a soul to begin with. So that's kind of the problem. I, I think we just ha- also have to be really honest and open. Our, our, our super wealthy and our institutional class do not deserve the word elite. We're talking about a world without an elite, which is much more terrifying than a world with an elite. I, I don't even understand who these people are. They have an idea that they're gonna escape the apocalypse that they're working to bring about by moving to another country. Maybe they don't understand the way the atmosphere works or, like radioactive particles should there be an exchange. I, I think we have to consider the idea that the people that are referred to as the elite are actually missing a few cards from their decks. They're not intellectually capable of understanding the world that they're about to bring, uh, into reality. And by about, I mean could be hundreds of years. Uh, certainly I expect really bad things to happen within a few decades.

00:22:50
Peter McCormack: Is it because people... Is it like these situations like I used to be a smoker, and it's always like, "I can give up tomorrow," or, "I can give up in a week," or even a m- or at the end of the year, "I'll give up at the end of the year because... And then it won't affect me because cancer is something I'll get 10, 20, 30 years later." Do you think some people maybe do realize, but they just think, "If I get that one more promotion," or, "If I do that one more deal-"

00:23:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:23:09
Peter McCormack: ... "I can get myself financially to that position," and they essentially constantly trade their soul.

00:23:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I, I, I think in those terms.

00:23:16
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:23:16
Eric Weinstein: I'm that moron, and so are you.

00:23:18
Peter McCormack: I am that moron.

00:23:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, I'm the moron too. Um, I had to have a conversation inside of my own head that I can't wait to im- I mean, look, I, I've been choosing not to do my show, to give up on certain speaking things, so I am taking a fair hit, but I am also the guy who coined the term audience capture, and I'm really worried that our audiences are now crazy.

00:23:44
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:23:44
Eric Weinstein: The peop- people are just not well, and I don't wanna be hooked up, um, to the 10% of my audience who's lost it a- and who starts to think in terms of these internet frames of reference or in terms of... But look at this beautiful, uh, location you have.

00:24:07
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:24:08
Eric Weinstein: Everything's great. I'm, I'm having beverages brought to me by magical people. Um, credit cards work. Uh, the cars are nice in the driveway, uh, when I walked here. And there's no indication of just how much has eroded and where we may be headed. So the surface layer is fine. It's like the last... It's like we're in a movie set that used to be a city, and we've been hollowing out everything other than the fronts of the houses. And at what point the h- the house fronts start to collapse, I don't know. But I, I am very worried that incrementally we, we're, we're deferring. "If I can just get to that next level, then I'll worry about, uh, the future." And so it's nobody's job to worry about the future at the moment. So I, I am very worried, and I've stopped doing that. I was deferring certain things until I got to some level of stability, and I'm realizing this is my only life, and I'm not that far from my own death, so...

00:25:00
Peter McCormack: Do you feel a sense of responsibility to help, uh, improve things, uh, perhaps having conversations which people listen to inspire them? Or are you... is there a part of you that's like, "Ah, crap, maybe I just need to enjoy my life 'cause there's nothing I can do"?

00:25:14
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I... No, I, I fantasize about that, actually.

00:25:17
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:25:17
Eric Weinstein: I would love that. Um, my problem is, is that a young person, I had the same thoughts, and I had one thing that I felt like I had to do, and now my entire life is based on the delusion that somebody has to figure out how to keep humanity from a shared fate. I know that if I have to share my fate with Putin, and Xi, and Biden, and Fauci, and Mitch McConnell, and N- Nancy Pelosi, and Donald Trump, that's not going to work long term. My descendants will not exist because of these morons.

00:25:55
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:25:56
Eric Weinstein: So I would like us to be able to spread out, and if you believe that, uh, you know, CNN is responsible media, and if you [chuckles] believe that Anthony Fauci doesn't know anything more about the origins of this virus, and you, you believe all sorts of things like lockdowns are for good people and that the cloth masks work, I want you to have your own world. And I want you to experiment with that, and I wish you the best of luck. I don't want it to fail. But I don't want my children hooked up to your idiocy and madness, and that's really where I feel. I want to give my children an option to not live in that world, to choose a world, and that involves physics. And I... You know, there's nothing I can say. I, I've now come to, uh, understand that no one seemingly on planet Earth other than me, um, believes this in the simple terms that I do, which is that this place is gonna blow. You have many people who believe that. You have a small number of people like Bezos and, uh, Musk who believe that we have to diversify off of one surface. These go back to the ideas of a physicist named Gerald K. O'Neill and others. But nobody understands that you can't really get that much diversity, uh, unless there are new laws of physics, and no one is supporting this. And I just find... I've now given up in a certain sense. Like, I've been on podcasts. Everybody's heard the, the idea. And it doesn't work. It... People don't understand that, um, like for example, the, the issue about faster than light travel. Uh, y- there is no faster than light travel. If you're in relativity, that's not going to happen. Uh, if you wanna diversify, we're gonna have to get out of the solar system. And I guess the responsibility to meet your question is if I'm the only person on planet Earth who actually believes that we need to do theoretical physics so that we can survive long term, I don't feel like the rest of my life is just playing blues guitar and, uh, and travel, and learning languages, and things that I love doing. I really feel like if I had a group of people, I would like to do more of that. But right now, so far as I know, I'm the only person who believes this.

00:28:21
Peter McCormack: Can you, can you explain to me a bit more about what this belief is and-

00:28:25
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:28:25
Peter McCormack: ... the physics side?

00:28:26
Eric Weinstein: It's very... Look-

00:28:26
Peter McCormack: I, I might struggle with it, but...

00:28:28
Eric Weinstein: No, no, I don't think so. It's a very, it's a very quick story. To recapitulate it at lightning speed, 1952, '53, within six months, we, we achieve godlike powers over both DNA, kn- knowing its three-dimensional structure, and over the ability to fuse nuclei, and this sets off effectively a doomsday clock. And we don't know when the doomsday clock is gonna go off, but we now know that we have godlike powers without godlike wisdom, and we have shared fate. So my whole thing is I don't want shared fate. Um, I'm not a libertarian, but I'm sort of deeply sympathetic with the goal of libertarianism, right? So I'm an anti-libertarian who believes that I don't want a shared fate with you if you're stupid, and if you're crazy, and if you're just completely captured by love of money and status and all that kind of stuff because that, that will end now with certainty in, in, uh, worldwide destruction. Then the question is, how do we avoid shared fate? Do we have islands that we can go to, right? I'm famously focused on Saint Helena Island in the South Atlantic, which I think we should all move to, and Bitcoin should take, uh, a, a, a stake in and make it a wonderful place.

00:29:42
Peter McCormack: I mean...

00:29:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay. It's got an airport, and now it has fiber optic, so-

00:29:45
Peter McCormack: Great

00:29:46
Eric Weinstein: ... um, shout out to all my Saint Helenian, uh, they call themselves Saints.

00:29:50
Peter McCormack: So funnily enough, the, uh, the town I live in, Bedford, the most, uh, I don't know if you'd say the most popular, but the most well-regarded restaurant is called Saint Helena.

00:30:00
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?

00:30:00
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:30:01
Eric Weinstein: Fish cakes?

00:30:02
Peter McCormack: Uh, the best thing I ever had there was a blue cheese in- injected steak.

00:30:07
Eric Weinstein: Sounds pretty good. I don't know that that's a Saint Helenian, uh, Saint specialty. Um, but that's one of the hopes, right? They don't have a COVID case yet. Um, that doesn't work. Then you start thinking about, okay, well what about the Moon and Mars? Yeah. The moon you can get to, Mars you can get to, but it's pretty tough to think about, and then you have to think about terraforming it. It sounds like science fiction. Um, Bezos weirdly may be a little bit better. He's talking about orbital space stations, but if you ask me, um, you know, you have some super fragile, brittle, spinning Ezekiel's wheel to give you centrifugal, centripetal gravity or something like that. That's not gonna work. The real diversity comes from getting beyond Einstein. We don't know whether it's possible. It's possible that the ultimate theory beyond Einstein doesn't allow you to leave either. So right now we're in Einstein's prison, and what we need is an Einsteinian prison break, and the way to do that is to ask, can we do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton? Which is that you, you render Einstein an approximate rather than a fundamental theory. At the moment, it's the most fundamental theory we have, along with what's called the standard model, quantum field theory. My goal is to say, is the theory that does to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton, does that have a new feature, which is that what previously seemed like faster than light travel becomes possible? And so that's, that should be the question obsessing everyone. But Bezos doesn't seem interested, Biden doesn't seem interested, Musk doesn't seem interested, the Silicon Valley people don't seem... Everybody wants to go on an ayahuasca retreat or build DeFi, and I just look at them and I just think you have no effing idea where you are.

00:32:01
Peter McCormack: Are there any clues towards this is possible?

00:32:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's, that's my life's work.

00:32:06
Peter McCormack: Hmm. And-

00:32:08
Eric Weinstein: That, that's, that... That's why I've given up so many weekends.

00:32:12
Peter McCormack: So you're working on that?

00:32:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:32:14
Peter McCormack: On your own? You got any support?

00:32:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I have colleagues and people I talk to and, you know, Peter Thiel is behind me and all that kind of stuff. But no, it's a one-man project.

00:32:26
Peter McCormack: How far have you got?

00:32:28
Eric Weinstein: I mean, effing far. Like, really far.

00:32:34
Peter McCormack: And it's... You think it's possible?

00:32:36
Eric Weinstein: I know what I'm seeing. I can be deluded. Wouldn't be the first time.

00:32:43
Peter McCormack: How do you even do this kind of work? This is way beyond me. I got a C at physics at GCSE. [laughs]

00:32:48
Eric Weinstein: I got a B- as my final, uh, final, um, grade in high school. Y- y- there's a language. I mean, you know, th- there's a beautiful mug, I think, that you can buy from, uh, CERN, uh, in, in Switzerland, which has the ingredients of everything other than gravity on one mug, in, in one sort of formula called a Lagrangian. Um, we're almost at the end of this process, um, that we began in the 20th century, and whether that's a chapter or a book or the whole thing, we don't know. B- but what we have is we have a, a sort of a cookbook and a recipe with ingredients and, uh, procedures, and it's unbelievable how much we know, and we have these mysteries that we can't solve, like why are there three copies of, uh, the particles of matter? So everything you see in this room is made out of the, what we, we would call the first generation of matter. But there's a heavier version of the Lego that was used to assemble this room, uh, and there's a heavier version of that Lego still. So s- imagine one version has plastic, one version is made of wood, one version is made of tungsten. If you don't know about that, you can't puzzle over it. You can't ask yourself, why are there three? So you, you sort of learn what the mysteries are and then you learn what the, what the techniques are, and then you try to say, how does this come from a natural structure? So that's what I'm... That's the thing that obsesses me, uh, which is getting rid of shared fate by making sure that we have multiple terrestrial surfaces so that if, if we lose what I think will be the majority of them, I think most worlds won't make it. But as long as you have new places to diversify to, um, we have hope, and nobody's working on it.

00:34:44
Peter McCormack: Hopefully the James Webb, uh, telescope-

00:34:46
Eric Weinstein: Hope's done

00:34:47
Peter McCormack: ... will, will point to a few. [laughs]

00:34:48
Eric Weinstein: No, no, the James Webb might tell us something that would be a clue.

00:34:52
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:34:52
Eric Weinstein: But I think people don't really understand that nobody is really doing fundamental physics anymore. Like, we failed at it for so long that people are turning it into quantum information theory, they're turning it into, um, various forms of geometric mathematics. The core community that is in charge of this has walked off the job.

00:35:17
Peter McCormack: Well, explain to me fundamental physics versus quantum theory so I understand the difference.

00:35:23
Eric Weinstein: No, quantum theory would be part of fundamental physics.

00:35:26
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:35:26
Eric Weinstein: But quantum information theory might not be. I mean, it could turn out that it would have an impact. Fundamental physics is the, sort of the physics that you would use to replace religion. Why are we here?

00:35:36
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:35:36
Eric Weinstein: What is this place? Right? Higher level physics would be, you know, how do I make, uh, carbon fiber, um, more efficiently with, with fewer defects? Fundamental physics is who are we? What is this place? What are the laws? And I, I've, I've analogized it to a newspaper story. You have to say who and what, which is, uh, we- what's called bosons and fermions, force and matter, more or less. Then you have, uh, where and when, which is space and time, and how and why, which would be Lagrangians and equations. And so that's what, that's what physics really is at, at its fundamental level. Like, what are the ingredients? What are the rules? And I didn't know until I released a draft of my own work, um, nobody's, nobody's out there. I, I think that the entire plan-- I, I, I read everybody who's halfway competent, and they release some new idea, even if I think it's total nonsense, um, because you never know, right? You never know when somebody... When somebody proposes a new physics theory, you should be very frightened if they're at all competent because if you-- You know, I was making this point recently.

00:36:55
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:36:55
Eric Weinstein: This-- The American Civil War took place in the 1860s, and we dropped a fusion device in the 1950s. That's less than 100 years. So in a certain technical sense that I think nobody's really appreciated, the American Civil War was almost a thermonuclear war.

00:37:17
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:37:19
Eric Weinstein: Now, what's the difference between the 1860s, which looks like a bunch of antiquated, you know... It looks like people from another world. Um, what changed was science. You know, we did not know that neutrons existed until around the time that my father was born. But, you know, the Queen of England, for example, uh, or Lata Man-Mangeshkar, who just died in India, um, you know, these people were born-

00:37:50
Peter McCormack: More than just an Indian singer?

00:37:51
Eric Weinstein: More th-- Oh, it's-- I mean-

00:37:54
Peter McCormack: I know

00:37:54
Eric Weinstein: ... we should go on a whole thing about how much this woman meant to so many people. It's just unbelievable. I mean, she was also a monopoly, I should point out, that she basically ran, uh, Indian playback singing, at least for female vocals and with her sister.

00:38:06
Peter McCormack: Have you been to India?

00:38:08
Eric Weinstein: What? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:08
Peter McCormack: Yeah, love it. I'm going-- I'm taking my daughter this summer.

00:38:10
Eric Weinstein: Where are you going?

00:38:11
Peter McCormack: Not sure. I've only been once. I went to Mumbai and Goa and loved it. Um, and I wanted to take both my children, and my son just had zero interest. Uh, but he's gone away with his friends 'cause he's 18 now.

00:38:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:38:21
Peter McCormack: So I said to my daughter, "We're going to India." So I think, I think I want to go to Kerala-

00:38:26
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yeah

00:38:26
Peter McCormack: ... because it's my favorite food.

00:38:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:38:28
Peter McCormack: But I also wanna go to Delhi 'cause I've not seen it.

00:38:31
Eric Weinstein: Delhi's pretty intense. I haven't been to Kerala. Um, forgive me, I have to say Bombay because otherwise my wife-

00:38:37
Peter McCormack: Okay [laughs]

00:38:37
Eric Weinstein: ... will be very angry. Um...

00:38:39
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:38:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So, so just getting back-

00:38:43
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:38:43
Eric Weinstein: ... to it, the Queen and Lata Mangeshkar both were born, I think, when there were-- wh- there was no knowledge of neutrons. So that's what distinguishes, in some sense, the American Civil War from, uh, World War II at its end and then the years immediately following it. Science changed. If we have a new scientific theory of fundamental physics, you should be very hopeful and very afraid. And I can tell you, you know, I tried to contact the government, for example, and say, "Just, just be aware that I'm going to come out with some ideas." And people have the funniest reactions to this. It's like, "Oh, you're so arrogant. You think the government would care about your work, dude?"

00:39:25
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:39:25
Eric Weinstein: It's like, actually, take everyone with a PhD of, of the type that I have from the kind of institutions I do. You should be monitoring every last one of them, you fucking idiots. Doesn't matter. You think that guy's a poser, you think that guy is washed up, it's a tiny collection of people who could potentially change the leverage in the world. You know, just like with, with, uh, CRISPR-Cas9 or, or PCR, you know. These are simple ideas that change everything, and so you have to be very careful that somebody's gonna invent a longbow. You don't know that the long... You know, you know, for example, the RNA tie club, like the, you know, 20, 25 top people trying to understand what turned out to be the genetic code, um, none of them got it. It was a different guy named Marshall Nirenberg in 1963. He wasn't in the RNA tie club. Uh, you should be very careful, uh, abandoning your math and physics portfolio, specifically differential geometry, quantum field theory, and general relativity. All of those people are potentially, uh, pivotal. They can ch-- they... You know, think about the World Wide Web, comes out of CERN.

00:40:40
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:40:40
Eric Weinstein: Think about the communications technology. Think about semiconductors. To not watch your scientists, to not make your scientists fat, happy, patriotic, it requires the idiocy of a pseudo elite. And I'm just telling you right now, um, I would take these UFOs also far more seriously than people are taking them.

00:41:05
Peter McCormack: Yeah, talk to me about that. What, what... I've, um, I had a, another long conversation with somebody recently who wanted to talk to me about the Great Filter, and we talked about... We wrestled with the idea of us being a fluke-

00:41:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:41:18
Peter McCormack: ... one of a-- one existence across the entire universe or whether, you know, life is-

00:41:23
Eric Weinstein: What a beautiful story

00:41:24
Peter McCormack: ... is, is life ubiquitous.

00:41:25
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:41:25
Peter McCormack: Well, if we are the one, what a fucking bunch of idiots we are to, to, to ruin this.

00:41:29
Eric Weinstein: We're, we're... Well, yeah, sure.

00:41:30
Peter McCormack: Because we get to see it.

00:41:32
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:41:32
Peter McCormack: Otherwise, it's just this huge, vast dead space that nobody ever knew existed.

00:41:35
Eric Weinstein: I mean, don't you wanna preserve this?

00:41:37
Peter McCormack: Absolutely.

00:41:37
Eric Weinstein: I do. God, okay. So keep going.

00:41:39
Peter McCormack: It's beautiful. And so we, we, we kind of just debated between us, do, do we think, um... And you can probably help me with some of my questions as somebody does have more of a scientific background. Um, I, I'm sometimes in the place where I think we're just a fluke because I don't, I don't understand the details of things like DNA and how, uh, you go from single-cell life to multi-cell life, and I don't understand all these things. How can something be sparked to have something like a DNA? I don't understand all these things. It almost feels like design rather than a fluke.

00:42:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's not almost design. I mean, this is hard because, uh, we, we've weaponized the term design.

00:42:24
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:42:25
Eric Weinstein: Right? 'Cause it's like what I, what I've called Jesus smuggling. I know that this is gonna be a conversation about Jesus as soon as you say the word design. We design We design. You know, my brother points out that a dachshund is a wolf that has been domesticated to have the form of a weasel. I think that they were used to hunt weasels in holes or something, right? The fact is we make designer dogs all the time. We are designing the dogs. We can, we, we, we can design a, uh, a mule by having a donkey, uh, um, and a horse procreate. That's intelligently designing a mule. So nature is always designing, in part when you have perceptual- perception-mediated procreation. My brother has a term that I love, per- per- perception-mediated selection. Dinner and a movie is part of intelligent design. You know? Some- somebody... What's your bank account look like? Well, what does your figure look like? You know? I mean, that- that's a very weird thing for two [laughs] people to be asking each other, but that's what dinner and a movie are often about, and when we're doing that, we are engaged in intelligent design. We're trying to design our children. Now, we design our crops. So there's part of this endogenous design that, that, that's present. Um, well, your question is about origins.

00:43:56
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:43:56
Eric Weinstein: We've never solved any of these things. Like, where does consciousness come from? Where did life begin? Probably the answers are really funny, you know? Like, where did the bilipid layer, uh, originate in the cell to divide chaos from order? Um, that may not be the question that motivates you, but maybe that's a beginning of meaningful life, uh, question, the one that would crack things open.

00:44:20
Peter McCormack: Well, it just seems that the, the origin of life, it seems the, the, the makeup of life-

00:44:26
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

00:44:26
Peter McCormack: ... organic life seems to be too complicated to have come from some spark in a primordial soup. It seems too complicated-

00:44:33
Eric Weinstein: See, but-

00:44:33
Peter McCormack: ... and I just don't understand it.

00:44:35
Eric Weinstein: I- I- if I can actually have a plea here.

00:44:37
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:44:38
Eric Weinstein: I think people have to recognize when they're engaged in recreation and when they're actually thinking about things, trying to make progress. Like, if we were to have a free will conversation, I would get so effing bored, you have no idea, because it would never involve, like, I don't know, Hermitian operators and Hamiltonian symplectic geometry. It's gonna be this thing about, "I don't think free will actually exists, man." And then, you know, you'd say, "I, I don't feel like... It do- you know, it has to, it has to exist because I choose." Those conversations to me are boring.

00:45:12
Peter McCormack: That's not the conversation I want.

00:45:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:45:14
Peter McCormack: I just, I just... I don't-

00:45:15
Eric Weinstein: So let's-

00:45:15
Peter McCormack: ... understand origination.

00:45:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but let's not ask that.

00:45:18
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:45:18
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause we don't... We're not close to that question.

00:45:21
Peter McCormack: Therefore, for you, do you, do you believe, uh... I guess you believe that 'cause you are considering these UFOs and-

00:45:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:45:28
Peter McCormack: ... considering what they are, uh-

00:45:29
Eric Weinstein: I'm considering the Pentagon. I've never seen anything that's compelling as a UFO. I haven't seen data. I, I'm looking at a world which w- it, it sounds like the dumbest, strangest, most moronic thing I've ever heard, and then the Pentagon puts this report out, and then I start talking to all sorts of people, and I realize I don't know how you would fake this.

00:45:56
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:45:57
Eric Weinstein: Uh, clearly we've lied. We were either lying when we concluded Project Blue Book, or we're lying now. So I'm... The, the question about conspiracy and lying is settled. We are clearly engaged in conspiracies, and we're clearly lying. What I don't know is if this is a PSYOP where we're trying to freak out Iran and Russia and China. Um, I don't know whether... I, I don't know what we're looking at. Whatever we're looking at, we should be very concerned if the federal government is taking this seriously, and the reason... You know, it's hard to, it's hard to even know how to talk about this stuff. If we have a hope of long-term survival, in my opinion, it's either because we figured out how to do something crazy, which I can't believe, like live in silicon or, you know, or we figured out how to diversify, right? I don't think we're gonna become wise stewards of the world. Too many of us, too many of us are too dumb with too much power. What we do have a hope for is potentially escape and diversification in the cosmos. If we can leave, others can visit. That's the key takeaway.

00:47:11
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:47:12
Eric Weinstein: So if you believe that humanity has a long-term future, you probably believe that Einsteinian speed limits aren't the last word 'cause you can visit the world through time dilation and things that we know about, but it's not really serious. If others can visit, are you telling me that the entire universe has chosen not to show up, or are you telling me that life is so rare that, you know, we're, we're barely noticed? I don't know, but you should worry about visitors if you believe that humans survive long term, and that's a weird syllogism that I've never heard anyone else say. I'm not saying that nobody else says it. I'm just not aware of anyone who's put together that long-term human survival and the probability of alien visitation are probably linked.

00:48:01
Peter McCormack: Could it n- not be domestic visitation?

00:48:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, it could be time travelers from the future, but, you know-

00:48:07
Peter McCormack: Or could it be... I mean, you talk about, uh, investment and support for science and physics.

00:48:14
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:48:14
Peter McCormack: Um, do we or do you... Are you aware how much, say, China invests in this and supports this? Because-

00:48:20
Eric Weinstein: China's not very good at physics historically.

00:48:23
Peter McCormack: Okay. So-

00:48:23
Eric Weinstein: I believe that we're going to get our asses kicked because in the period of time that we are, uh, not worrying about China, China's getting better and better, and they're throwing real money and inviting people over. But, you know, the world's great universities are still in the West, and- And Japan. I mean, Japan has great universities, but it's very hard to find great universities outside of the Western world. Uh, India's, uh, tertiary education and in research institutes like TIFR, uh, are, are a counterexample. China has, has some things going on. Um, yeah, I'm not really worried about the fact that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians have had, uh, you know, 12th generation craft from the 1940s and '50s. I, I think we actually just have to grow up and say we need to be worried about alien visitation.

00:49:17
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:49:17
Eric Weinstein: And we need to be worried about it because if there is no alien visitation, it probably means we die on this planet fairly soon. And if there is alien visitation, we better figure out who's out there because we're about to join a club, uh, that may think that we're not clubbable.

00:49:36
Peter McCormack: Well, we're likely to be the, the youngsters of the club [laughs]. Significant youngsters.

00:49:44
Eric Weinstein: You know, I wouldn't walk into a mafia bar twirling a piece talking shit, and my guess is that when you explode thermonuclear weapons on a terrestrial surface, if there's anyone there to observe it, they probably take note, and they say, "Uh-oh." You know, the... You had kids, right?

00:50:04
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:50:05
Eric Weinstein: There's a moment when you find the kid that you put in a crib outside of the crib, often fol- you know, following a loud thud. I remember when my son figured out how to break out of his crib. It's a frightening experience-

00:50:20
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:50:20
Eric Weinstein: ... in every parent's life. My guess is that we have broken out of our crib, and we don't even recognize it. And our parents in this m- metaphor, uh, are probably saying, "Oh, what do you know about that?"

00:50:39
Peter McCormack: I mean, I remember the first time my son rolled off the bed [laughs]. It wasn't the crib. It was the bed. You used to be able to put him down in the middle, go downstairs, make a cup of tea.

00:50:46
Eric Weinstein: We had to put netting over the top or something. We put a structure so that he couldn't... You-

00:50:52
Peter McCormack: Have you ever seen that video of those two little kids?

00:50:54
Eric Weinstein: Uh.

00:50:54
Peter McCormack: In the night, they get out, and they're running [laughs] around.

00:50:57
Eric Weinstein: Total mischief. I love it.

00:50:58
Peter McCormack: [laughs] Yeah, and then they leave home. That's the next one I've got, Eric.

00:51:02
Eric Weinstein: I'm s- Dude, I'm about to lose my second.

00:51:05
Peter McCormack: Oh. Do you have two?

00:51:07
Eric Weinstein: I have two, yeah.

00:51:08
Peter McCormack: You're gonna have the free house. It's gonna be a quiet place.

00:51:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, for one week, uh, I'm gonna, you know, walk around in my underwear playing my, my Les Paul. Uh, but then I'm gonna miss him.

00:51:18
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I'm, I'm already missing him in advance. I'm thinking about it.

00:51:23
Eric Weinstein: No, this is, this is really badly designed. I should've forced him to sign contracts.

00:51:27
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:51:28
Eric Weinstein: No, I want my kids home. I realize I, I, I'm just not a modern person. I, you, you raise them, and they're, they're, like, the best people in the world. They know... They carry your culture. They give you a little lip, put you in your place. Uh, I, I, I do think it's really dumb the way we allow our children to move away from home.

00:51:46
Peter McCormack: Yeah. They also bring... They also... Well, for me-

00:51:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:51:50
Peter McCormack: ... they, they, they raise my conscience-

00:51:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:51:53
Peter McCormack: ... to consider things.

00:51:54
Eric Weinstein: Well-

00:51:54
Peter McCormack: And when you talk about, like, we're, we're in the end days, I don't, and I don't know the timescale whether you think it's a decade, five decades, a century.

00:52:02
Eric Weinstein: Probably less than 300 years, but it doesn't... I, I'm not saying, you know, by next Tuesday.

00:52:08
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:52:08
Eric Weinstein: I, I, I think I could potentially finish out my life without major incident.

00:52:13
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:52:13
Eric Weinstein: I don't think I will be able to.

00:52:15
Peter McCormack: But there's different types. There's, there's complete apocalypic, apocalyptic end-

00:52:19
Eric Weinstein: We-

00:52:19
Peter McCormack: ... to the planet, but there's also such a, a breakdown in the structures of society that, uh, or, you know, more war that our, our kids don't get to live in a world like we did, which has been fairly stable.

00:52:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:52:32
Peter McCormack: Fairly.

00:52:32
Eric Weinstein: Let's put it this way. I would be very surprised if we went 30 years, which would take me into my 80s, without a 9/11 incident two orders of magnitude above that.

00:52:47
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:52:47
Eric Weinstein: Too many idiots are getting too much leverage through science and technology, and we are starting to play with things which, which we don't understand. But, you know, to bring it back to the kid point-

00:52:57
Peter McCormack: Hmm

00:52:59
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, you consider yourself an atheist-ish?

00:53:03
Peter McCormack: Well, again, funny because we, we had, um, we had a guest the other day, Nick Bhatia, and his wife was here, and she's from India.

00:53:09
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

00:53:09
Peter McCormack: And I, I am an atheist, but I said India's the one place where I felt very spiritual.

00:53:14
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:53:14
Peter McCormack: Something there just changed me, and I can't explain what it was, but I felt different.

00:53:19
Eric Weinstein: It's, it's interesting. I, I think spirituality is really important for us atheists.

00:53:26
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:53:28
Eric Weinstein: Um, it's... You know, it's a brain process, and you're either open to the transcendent spirit, uh, or not. It doesn't need to come from God. It can be biochemical. But there is something that we feel.

00:53:40
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:53:40
Eric Weinstein: And the funny part about it is, you know, I think of Bombay as being one of the least spiritual places around. Um, you know, it's-

00:53:48
Peter McCormack: It's just Goa.

00:53:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Okay, well-

00:53:50
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:53:50
Eric Weinstein: ... we, we can get into a whole thing on Goa. Um, you should check out the song "Dum Maro Dum." Have you ever heard it?

00:53:59
Peter McCormack: No.

00:54:01
Eric Weinstein: The, uh, the thing that I think that's really interesting, um, about India is is that spirituality is woven into, like, everyday explanations. Um, and outside my wife's, uh, family's apartment, old apartment, you know, there was a root from a tree that somebody had decided was Hanuman's toe, like the monkey god's toe, and, you know, people would bring garlands and offerings and all sorts of things. Yeah, you... I think spirituality is woven in- into culture and life there. But the point that I was gonna get to about atheism is that children allow us to care as atheists about the world after we die. I, I, I-

00:54:43
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:54:43
Eric Weinstein: ... seldom meet a hardcore atheist with kids. Who's also a solipsist and says, "Yeah, I don't care what happens to my children. When it, when, when, when it's over for me, it's lights out for the world." Uh, we have to care about the world after our deaths, and I think we are becoming a legion of assholes who don't.

00:55:04
Peter McCormack: Uh, uh, I agree on many levels. Um, often I'm, uh, fighting, uh, people online with regards to, for example, the climate-

00:55:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:55:14
Peter McCormack: ... and, uh, global warming. There are many people who... [bottle clanks] And I understand why, but they're, um... There's a, there's a thing you have to pull off this.

00:55:23
Eric Weinstein: It's an IQ test.

00:55:24
Peter McCormack: It is an IQ test. [laughs]

00:55:25
Eric Weinstein: And I appear to have failed, Peter.

00:55:27
Peter McCormack: [laughs] I think maybe this is one of the subjects I can, I can hold my own with you in the opening of bottles.

00:55:33
Eric Weinstein: Bitcoiners fix this.

00:55:34
Peter McCormack: [laughs] Bitcoiners fix this. Yeah. Uh, and, and there is, um, there is outright denial that there is climate [bottle clanks] issues within the community of Bitcoin. Not everyone-

00:55:45
Eric Weinstein: Whoa, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Can we agree both the climate is a huge issue and that the governmental bodies that want us to care about climate the way they want us to care about climate are often f- they're full of it?

00:55:59
Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah. No, no, that's where I was going.

00:56:00
Eric Weinstein: Right. Okay.

00:56:00
Peter McCormack: It's like, uh... And I... Th- but I think there are, uh, there are, there are others who it's not that they don't believe it, they worry how it will be used, like COVID was, to manipulate-

00:56:10
Eric Weinstein: Uh, uh, I'm worried about that

00:56:10
Peter McCormack: ... separate us. Yeah. And, and, and I think both issues are... I think they're separate issues, but they're intrinsically linked.

00:56:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, agreed. But the problem is when you spot somebody lying, you often don't know whether they're lying to help you or lying to hurt you.

00:56:24
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:56:24
Eric Weinstein: Like I kn- I know that Anthony Fauci lies to cover up what we were doing in Wuhan in gain-of-function research. I don't know whether he lies about COVID and vaccines to help me or hurt me or something different. I just don't know why he's lying, and they're two different lies. And so the, the issue with climate change is I'm very worried about climate.

00:56:45
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:56:45
Eric Weinstein: Super worried about climate. And then I hear that it's settled science, and we have got these models, and people are trying to make fun of Jordan Peterson. I mean, let, let me say it sort of technically accurately. We can barely do the three-body problem or approach it, you know, with point masses and gravitational interactions. This is very hard to do. To take a world with oceans interacting with clouds interacting with sun cycles and to say, "Well, we've solved this," no, you didn't. What you can say is, "We've run a huge range of models, and it appears to be a conserved feature across all of these different types of models that certain observables are within our grasp." And whenever I meet somebody who's doing this, I al- I always ask this question about what's your model of cloud formation? Because when clouds form, um, they have an effect on the amount of radiation that's bounced back, you know, away from Earth. I don't know what people mean when they say this is settled science. I don't know what they mean th- th- that we know this, and we have this many years. All of these super crisp statements are taking place in an interface between actual science and policy, and you find this in economics, you find this in epidemiology and virology, you find this in climate. Somebody will say, "I appreciate that you fancy boys in, in the, uh, ivory towers, uh, and you ladies and gentlemen, uh, in the halls of Congress don't speak the same language. How do we get the crisp statement so that we can act?" And then you have to lie. You know, we have 15 years before we reach the tipping point. How we spend those 15 years will, will determine the fate of the universe. Okay, I get it. You wanna do the h- heavy breathing thing, and it's making science have an effect in Washington, DC. We need people in Congress who can actually solve equations. We need technical people, and what we've got is a pro... We've got, like, lawyers and rich people, and we need smart people. We need lots... Send more smart people, make them rich, and get the F out of the labs. We need our smart people to be our leaders, our technical people.

00:59:17
Peter McCormack: Uh, uh, are there any politicians that give you a hope? Is there anyone you look to and think, "Oh, my God, that per- that one person"?

00:59:22
Eric Weinstein: You know, it's funny. I was a huge Obama supporter for the first go-around-

00:59:26
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:59:27
Eric Weinstein: ... because his optics were amazing. Smart, uh, caring, seemingly op, you know, open about drug use, otherwise scandal-free. I was really... I was, I was a believer. I don't see anybody like that, and I, and I... You know, I think what I really want is I want 10% of Congress and the Senate to have STEM PhDs, and I want scientists rich. I, I, I don't know why this is offensive to people. Like your entire world is-

01:00:01
Peter McCormack: It is, it is offensive.

01:00:02
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's absolutely offensive.

01:00:04
Peter McCormack: Why?

01:00:04
Eric Weinstein: Because people wanna subordinate everything to the market. They think it's whining. My, my feeling is your entire life is built on things you don't understand that were developed under an agreement that you've been welching on. Like, you know, I, I remember the great Raoul Bott, um, who was a, a mathematician, arguably the greatest theorem of the 20th century. I could make a case for it. I used to visit him on Martha's Vineyard at his summer place, and you know, he, he was a sun worshiper, and we'd, we'd skinny dip in the, in the Atlantic, and that was normal. It was normal that a Harvard professor would have a summer place on Martha's Vineyard and be You know, socializing with people, uh, you know, at the very top echelons of society. And now, you know, a cousin of mine has two PhDs. Um, and his stepfather, who has one PhD, you know, has like three homes. And the, the guy with two PhDs, like, you know, was struggling, and the old professor with a single PhD, you know, w- was living this life of real comfort and security. And my feeling is, is that what we've done is we've, we've, we've taken away academic freedom, and we haven't replaced it with F-you money. And I personally was very happy with the academic system where you'd have a pension, you'd have a lifelong commitment, you'd have a culture that expected things from you, and you'd have an institution that had been around so long that it could guarantee that you could speak your mind. But we've lost that, and so now we've got to replace academic freedom with F-you money. It's that simple. If your scientists can't tell you to go fuck yourself, they're not going to be scientists.

01:01:58
Peter McCormack: Well, we know of a fuck-you money [laughs].

01:02:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is... Let's hope Bitcoin fixes this, you know. And, and the, the thing that I want to do is to point out that, um, we have to celebrate wealth.

01:02:11
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:02:11
Eric Weinstein: But that's not really my thing.

01:02:13
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:02:14
Eric Weinstein: I believe in luxury, um, but I believe in it very differently from most of the rest of you. I don't like luxury as status. I think the great sin with money is not really understood. There's nothing wrong with luxury, and there's nothing w- wrong with wanting status. The great crime when it comes to personal wealth is using money to generate your status. Having been around, in the last 10 years particularly, some very wealthy people, it's the number one indicator of whether I'm bored instantly or whether or not I wanna keep having the conversations. Does the status come from something other than the money? There, there is no plane or island or house you can show me where I'm gonna say, "Wow, you're, you're an interesting [laughs] person." The, the, the thing that generates interest is, "Well, how did, how did you amass all this money? Tell me, tell me your story." I love the story of fortunes, and too often I think what we do is we, you know, we, we show off... I, I wanna see you showing off. I just don't wanna see you showing off what you've bought.

01:03:25
Peter McCormack: It's funny because in the Bitcoin world, there's some people who've got fabulously wealthy, and they want to completely hide, hide their status.

01:03:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's, that's smart.

01:03:33
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:03:33
Eric Weinstein: Right? That's, that, that's a different thing. But I think people also don't understand the real benefit of luxury. Like, the, the importance of luxury to me, I, I've never heard anyone say it. Um, luxury is a signal to your brain that you can afford to take risk.

01:03:52
Peter McCormack: We talked about that, didn't we?

01:03:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:03:54
Peter McCormack: Yeah. We, me and Danny have talked about that. For, for me, it's slightly different. For me, luxury is having complete control of time and space, and what I mean that is-

01:04:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:04:02
Peter McCormack: ... I can control my time. I can use it for whatever I want.

01:04:06
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:04:06
Peter McCormack: At any point, I can... In the middle of the day, I can go and watch my kids play sports and I can do that 'cause I'm not stuck in a cubicle somewhere. And when I say space, it means I can afford at any point to get whichever plane ticket I need to go wherever I want.

01:04:20
Eric Weinstein: This is what I love.

01:04:21
Peter McCormack: That's complete luxury for me.

01:04:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing, you know, um, one of the things that's been great about not only working for and with Peter Thiel, but also just, you know, I, I, I tend not to talk about him too much. He's a really close personal friend of mine.

01:04:35
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:04:35
Eric Weinstein: I love him as a person, and that's not the cartoon character that all of the rest of you know. He, he does such great things for people. He, he covers up the good that he does. He... I'm sure he'd be angry at me because he would rather be a cartoon villain than known for being a secret good guy. But the thing that I find, uh, really interesting is, you know, there was a math book that I needed, a physics book that I needed to order, or I wanted to, and I was, like, deliberating over it, and I thought, "No, this is actually what Peter wants me to be doing. I'm just gonna order a $150 book that shouldn't be $150." That freedom is everything to me. The ability to just say, "Yeah, I need to go from here to there, and I don't wanna think too hard about it," right? Uh, "I wanna be able to meet with somebody." That's, that's really the most important part of money that, um... That's the money that I actually just fetishize. Um, but that might include hiring lawyers and private detectives to keep your family safe. It, you know-

01:05:43
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:05:43
Eric Weinstein: The thing that you can't do is you, you, you just... Personally, it's always a mistake to generate your status from your toys and your lifestyle. That's the, that's the great downfall. The great meaning of luxury is as an input to creativity, okay? So you ha- you have a, you have the beach house. You have the Lambo, all this stuff. Tell me what it helped you do next. Like this thing right here, I feel like if we were in a compressed little room, and it was dingy, and there were ceiling tiles hanging down, and you're like, "Sorry, it's the best I could do," we wouldn't be having the same conversation.

01:06:19
Peter McCormack: No.

01:06:19
Eric Weinstein: I feel like you're a master of the universe. I'm lucky enough to be here in Malibu. Let's have a conversation about UFOs.

01:06:26
Peter McCormack: This is, um, this is a real luxury for us. Uh, I used to... When I first started this podcast, uh, I always wanted to do the interviews in person.

01:06:34
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

01:06:35
Peter McCormack: I detest remote interviews.

01:06:37
Eric Weinstein: I detest remote interviews.

01:06:39
Peter McCormack: Me too.

01:06:39
Eric Weinstein: It's one of the reasons that I, I really started thinking maybe I don't wanna do this podcast during th- this crazy situation.

01:06:46
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I, I, I hate it. Uh, you cannot get the same conversation in person. Multiple things. Firstly, that 5, 10 minutes before you start-

01:06:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:06:54
Peter McCormack: ... and you get y- the feel for each other, the crew get the feel for you. Danny also helps me prep. Jeremy helps me prep. Um, we... And then there's, like, the specifics of the, what technology takes away. The latency in the technology means you can't spot the moment where you want to interject-

01:07:13
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:07:14
Peter McCormack: ... without breaking them, 'cause the latency always means you talk over each other. And then, then you say, "Oh, you finished," so there's that. I absolutely prefer in, in person, but we also had the luxury of buying... 'Cause the podcast has been really relatively successful, we got all new equipment 'cause we want better quality.

01:07:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, that- that's wonderful, but that-

01:07:30
Peter McCormack: But, but, but bear with me. But then also the fact that we can do it in this nice environment, like, we, we would make this... We will probably spend this year at least half a million pound o- on doing remote interviews, and that's a significant part of our turnover, but the product is so good.

01:07:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, uh, the thing is is that I also just don't trust stuff that is too technological.

01:07:55
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:07:56
Eric Weinstein: I mean, the fact that you and I can look into each other's eyes and read microexpressions in real time is necessary so that we don't, we don't end up as enemies, that we can calibrate. If I start to get boring and I start to see your, your eyes drift, I can, I can course-correct. Um, it's hugely important that we retain this very human layer.

01:08:16
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:08:16
Eric Weinstein: But, like, I, I realize I wanted to say something about this.

01:08:18
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

01:08:18
Eric Weinstein: You guys asked, "What do you want to drink?"

01:08:21
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:08:21
Eric Weinstein: And I said, like, a cup of coffee, a ginger tea-

01:08:24
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:08:24
Eric Weinstein: ... or sparkling water. I get this cold press juice from Erewhon, which as a dyslexic I always read as nowhere-

01:08:33
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

01:08:34
Eric Weinstein: ... um, 'cause it's almost that, uh, backwards. The, uh... How much was this?

01:08:39
Peter McCormack: I think it was something ridiculous like $11.

01:08:41
Eric Weinstein: It's a ridic- Uh, is it $11?

01:08:43
Peter McCormack: Yeah, something like that. [laughs]

01:08:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay. This makes us both total douchebags. Now, I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this.

01:08:51
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:08:51
Eric Weinstein: I, I just... It's like you guys really spent $11 on a bottle of green liquid.

01:08:59
Peter McCormack: I think it's the leek in it that makes it nice.

01:09:01
Eric Weinstein: Is it?

01:09:01
Peter McCormack: I think it's leek. I'm sure there's leek in it.

01:09:03
Eric Weinstein: Ginger and leek. Well, whatever it is, the key point is we're gonna get a different conversation because of h- the fact that you overspent like idiots-

01:09:12
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

01:09:12
Eric Weinstein: ... on this beautiful bottle of green juice.

01:09:14
Peter McCormack: Well, we want you to be comfortable, but d- we set a goal this year. Out of the pandemic we started traveling again, doing the podcast in person, and we set a goal. The goal is 100% in person. Now, we don't always get there. We probably have, at the... We're probably at what, 80%, Danny? If not more. Maybe 90 now. Bring your mic up. But, but tell Eric what I'm like in remote interviews now. About 40 minutes in, you see the eyes drift.

01:09:36
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

01:09:37
Peter McCormack: You see him checking the clock, and it, and it's just an entirely different conversation remotely.

01:09:41
Eric Weinstein: It's a different conversation?

01:09:42
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It's a job. It's a job. Remote interviews, it becomes a job.

01:09:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is a pleasure.

01:09:46
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:09:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:09:46
Peter McCormack: This is, this is entirely different. This is... I don't think about the time. I'm learning and I'm enjoying it. It's like hanging out with a friend. It's just... I, I, I really enjoy it.

01:09:55
Eric Weinstein: But this-

01:09:55
Peter McCormack: That, that's luxury

01:09:56
Eric Weinstein: ... this is why physics summer schools take place in beautiful locations. This is why the physical plants of universities are gorgeous often, right? The feeling I get when I wander around Cambridge or Oxford, uh, goosebumps.

01:10:12
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:10:13
Eric Weinstein: And that luxury, those wine cellars. You have relatively poorly paid academics who have the right to, you know, pull some bottle of wine that's been sitting there, you know, for 30 years, uh, with the tannins breaking down from Bordeaux. That's a big deal. And I think we've got to... Yeah. I hate redistribution of wealth because it's, te- tends to be violent and petty and all of these things. I totally believe in a redistribution of luxury and FU money. We need to be getting luxury to our artists, to our scientists. We need people to be taking more chances, like what's going on right now as we- we're doing this thing with Joe Rogan.

01:10:55
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:10:57
Eric Weinstein: That's terrifying.

01:10:59
Peter McCormack: Terrifying.

01:11:00
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I don't use the word fascist. I hate... It's overused. People use fascist like-

01:11:06
Peter McCormack: For stuff they disagree with

01:11:07
Eric Weinstein: ... that guy's a jerk. Yeah, you're a fascist, yeah.

01:11:09
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

01:11:10
Eric Weinstein: Like, you utter morons. Fascism is a technical concept. When the White House leans on a communications company like Spotify to label its critic who brought up Joe Biden's cognitive decline as a, an advanced septuagenarian. He's an old... He's about to be 80. And you wanna label the program that had the, the cojones to bring that up on an episode with me, where he said, "I'd rather vote for Trump than Biden because Biden's [laughs] losing it and too old." We're talking about literal actual fascism now. Using medicine as a stalking horse. We're gonna hide behind vaccines and hide behind COVID to say the guy who pointed out Joe Biden's cognitive decline is a racist, moronic, pseudoscience promoting, anti-medicine wackadoodle. Who are you trying to fool, you effing fascists? That's, that's sort of i-i... This is the moment where you actually realize where we are.

01:12:18
Peter McCormack: Well, you know what's go- well, my interpretation of what's going on here-

01:12:21
Eric Weinstein: Please

01:12:22
Peter McCormack: ... is I'm a huge fan of Joe Rogan. I, I not just listened, I s- I studied him to try and learn from him-

01:12:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:12:28
Peter McCormack: ... to, to... because I think of this as a career. How do I become a better interviewer? What does he do well?

01:12:34
Eric Weinstein: What does he, what does he know?

01:12:34
Peter McCormack: What, what's his approach? Um, and I've done that with multiple interviews, and there's, there's a few I, I've learnt a lot from. But I'm a big fan, and I listen to a lot of shows. I usually do one or two a week, but... And there are times where I'm listening and I think, "I don't agree with this. I think this is wrong."

01:12:50
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:12:50
Peter McCormack: Uh, I think maybe some of the info-

01:12:51
Eric Weinstein: He spreads misinformation.

01:12:52
Peter McCormack: Perhaps.

01:12:53
Eric Weinstein: He does.

01:12:53
Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah. I think perhaps he does. Um-

01:12:55
Eric Weinstein: But you know what? So do you and me.

01:12:57
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, that's what I talked to you about at the start. But, but what I do believe is he doesn't do it intentionally and he is trying to pursue the truth.

01:13:05
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.

01:13:06
Peter McCormack: And what- What's happened with Joe Rogan is I think he's become so popular because people understand that's what he's trying to do, and he's built... In a world of corporate media and corporate bullshit, which you've talked about before, he's building an army of free independent thinkers, and free independent thinkers are a threat.

01:13:26
Eric Weinstein: Y- yes, but l- look, let's, let's steel man the opposition to Joe.

01:13:29
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:13:30
Eric Weinstein: A lot of these so-called independent thinkers aren't capable of really rigorous independent thought.

01:13:35
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:13:37
Eric Weinstein: You know, you pull them out of, um, an understanding of evolution. Like, let's say you say, "I don't think the neo-Darwinian synthesis is as rigorous as is claimed."

01:13:48
Peter McCormack: I've been thinking about this. [laughs]

01:13:49
Eric Weinstein: All right. Um, somebody goes from saying, "Yeah, sure, I believe in science, I believe in evolution," you know, three minutes later to, "Dude, the aliens brought us here," and, "I think evolution is not true, that they just have weird ways of psychically communicating and changing things." Okay, well, you just... You went from being a science believer who didn't really understand the science to being a science skeptic to being a lunatic. Um, and I'm not saying that there isn't a, you know, a panspermia theory, uh, about depositing life from somewhere else, but you're not a critical thinker. You're not a free thinker. You're unhinged. So th- th- there is a real problem with what happens on the Joe Rogan program, just as there's a real problem with what happens on your program-

01:14:41
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

01:14:41
Eric Weinstein: ... and my program, and it's a different real problem than what happens on CNN or a White House press conference. So, you know, Joe is liberating people to th- think freely, and a lot of those free-thinking people are not getting it done, and the White House is sort of saying, "No, no, we have the right to misinform and disinform." We're saying, "Well, you're complaining about Joe doing it." He's not trying to disinform. Sometimes he misinforms, but I- I've never seen Joe ever, not once, try to disinform, like weapons of mass destruction coming from the, you know, the White House and the Pentagon.

01:15:15
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:15:18
Eric Weinstein: Um, I think that what they're really angry about isn't misinformation.

01:15:22
Peter McCormack: Control?

01:15:23
Eric Weinstein: They believe that they have a right to a narrative.

01:15:25
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:15:26
Eric Weinstein: We are the conductor. Everybody's got a hymnal from which they're supposed to sing. You've got the sheet music in front of you. We want to conduct, and now you're doing something else. We're trying to do Ave Maria, uh, and you're blasting You Shook Me All Night Long, right?

01:15:43
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:15:43
Eric Weinstein: And my feeling is, first of all, there is a time for Ave Maria. You abused it, and yeah, I don't necessarily want to hear You Shook Me All Night Long at 4:00 AM when I'm trying to sleep. But honestly, I'd rather a little bit of AC/DC than your goddamn disinformation.

01:16:00
Peter McCormack: Hell yeah.

01:16:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:16:03
Peter McCormack: Well, I am an AC/DC fan.

01:16:05
Eric Weinstein: You know that I wasn't.

01:16:06
Peter McCormack: You weren't?

01:16:07
Eric Weinstein: I was an idiot because I saw Angus Young in the schoolboy pants and, you know, all of these ridiculous songs like Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and I was like, "This is the most juvenile nonsense." What was I thinking?

01:16:22
Peter McCormack: Do you know, the first time I went to San Francisco with my ex-wife, we, um... Where we were going up to today, we went straight for the Golden Bridge, and the radio was playing, and, uh, it was, uh, Nickelback playing, and I stopped the car, and I said, "We are not driving across the Golden Gate Bridge listening to fucking Nickelback," and we put on Highway to Hell and went straight across it.

01:16:39
Eric Weinstein: Awesome.

01:16:40
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:16:40
Eric Weinstein: Can I tell you what? I have a, a different version of the same story.

01:16:42
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:16:44
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I think I was with Sean Lennon, who's a good buddy of mine. He's-

01:16:48
Peter McCormack: Oh, he's a Bitcoiner.

01:16:50
Eric Weinstein: He's the... You should really have him on.

01:16:53
Peter McCormack: I've tried. I... So he followed me, and I was like, "Huh?"

01:16:57
Eric Weinstein: Oh.

01:16:57
Peter McCormack: 'Cause you must have those moments where you get somebody like, uh, like a hero or an idol follow you, and you're like, "Wow." And I messaged him, and I said, "Can you come on the show?" And he was like, "No, I'm not interested." Maybe you could help.

01:17:07
Eric Weinstein: Oh, that's funny. He is o- one of the... He's, he's, like-

01:17:11
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:17:11
Eric Weinstein: ... unhinged and creative. He's smart as an effing whip. Um, he stays in my son's room, uh, when he comes to visit, so he'll, he'll be going from, like, the finest hotels to sleeping on an air mattress in our house.

01:17:25
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

01:17:25
Eric Weinstein: Anyway, we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, and I said... You know, he had the wrong song on or something. I said, "Okay, we have to play The Comenas." One of my favorite songs is called Sharia Law in the USA. You ever heard it?

01:17:39
Peter McCormack: No. [laughs]

01:17:40
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's awesome.

01:17:40
Peter McCormack: Man, I'm gonna listen to it after this.

01:17:42
Eric Weinstein: Um, so I'm in the car with Sean Lennon blaring, "Sharia law in the USA," and, like, it's satirical, but it's also... You know, we were getting, like, these crazy looks from people.

01:17:55
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

01:17:56
Eric Weinstein: So I, I could've done Highway to Hell, but, but, uh, there's something about the Golden Gate Bridge that really requires the right soundtrack.

01:18:02
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you talked about the Rogan thing 'cause, like I say, I wrestle with it a lot, and I... D- and going back to the audience capture, it's very easy to make this podcast and be very right-leaning or libertarian leaning, be an anarchist, wanna burn down the state, think that Bitcoin fixes everything, but I don't think that. Uh, and my audience is primarily American, but I'm British European, and we're very different. And, uh, it always felt like it was a lot of risk, but me and Danny, we've always stuck to our guns and say we're always gonna just be truthful about what we think-

01:18:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:18:38
Peter McCormack: ... and the questions we want to ask and where we see, see the world. And it has brought with it a lot of pressure at times. Uh, people aren't the friendliest when they... You know, they call me a status cuck, uh, a term I particularly hate because I think it's a coercive term.

01:18:54
Eric Weinstein: Oh, because you're not burning all the F down?

01:18:57
Peter McCormack: No, I'm not. I, I, like I say, I, I-

01:18:59
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause you have a brain on your shoulders.

01:19:00
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, I just wish for, uh, stronger democracy and stronger institutions, and I understand, though, why people don't believe in it anymore.

01:19:07
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:19:07
Peter McCormack: But I, I don't think you fix it by burning it down. Even the libertarians don't want the big red button. They understand the consequences of-

01:19:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is very dangerous. We- We can't point to any functional institutions right now that we want to support. I can't. I should be able to say that I really think the BBC does a great job.

01:19:28
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I think they do a better job than-

01:19:30
Eric Weinstein: I assume that they do

01:19:31
Peter McCormack: ... a lot of them. Yeah.

01:19:32
Eric Weinstein: But I'm trying to say I, I'd like to be able to say National Public Radio, which I grew up listening to, is still, um, doing a great job, but it, it isn't. I can't point to the institutions I want to support because of this across the board change in leadership.

01:19:49
Peter McCormack: But we have this change in of the guard with the growth of independent content creators, and you can point to some of those.

01:19:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:19:55
Peter McCormack: And my worry for them or even myself is that they become victims-

01:20:00
Eric Weinstein: Of-

01:20:00
Peter McCormack: ... of the same problem.

01:20:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but you've got to piss off your own audience, Peter.

01:20:03
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:20:04
Eric Weinstein: It's so important. Let's go after-

01:20:05
Peter McCormack: Pissed off

01:20:05
Eric Weinstein: ... the part of your audience that you don't want.

01:20:08
Peter McCormack: All of them. All fucking leave. We don't want any of you. Uh-

01:20:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay. No, no, no, but I'm serious.

01:20:12
Peter McCormack: Uh.

01:20:12
Eric Weinstein: Like, what can we say on this program to get rid of the 10% of the people wh- whose voices are in your ear? Because I know what this feels like, right?

01:20:20
Peter McCormack: Yes. It sucks.

01:20:21
Eric Weinstein: Like, I'm standing up for the idea that because we hate the current hermit crabs that are in these shells, that we should break the shells. No, the institutions are important to keep.

01:20:33
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:20:33
Eric Weinstein: We, we need to change the occupants, and so burn it all the F down. Um, and, oh, I'm, I'm an antinatalist. I, I don't think that humans should perpetuate themselves. All of these things... There's a category of simple, dumb answers, including Bitcoin fixes everything.

01:20:50
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:20:50
Eric Weinstein: Not Bitcoin fixes this when it's done with specificity, or Bitcoin might fix this, or let's make Bitcoin fix this. We need to take that box of bot level answers where you can't tell whether you're dealing with a bot or a human.

01:21:05
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, we can piss them off by, uh, titling this show Bitcoin Doesn't Fix This.

01:21:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Let's do that.

01:21:11
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

01:21:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay, what else do we have?

01:21:13
Peter McCormack: Uh, I, I've already done it quite successfully over the last two years with my opinions on COVID and vaccines. Uh, I've always felt its nuance in that I don't... Originally, I was, uh, supportive of the lockdowns when I didn't know what we were dealing with, and I've realized it was stupid and I apologized, but I'm very clear I don't believe in, uh, mandates and passports, but I think the vac- uh, the, uh, the virus is real. And, uh, depending on who you are, there's some people mathematically should probably take the vaccine, and some that, uh, certainly shouldn't, and then there's a gray area in between.

01:21:45
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:21:45
Peter McCormack: And that's lost me a lot of people.

01:21:48
Eric Weinstein: Goodbye.

01:21:49
Peter McCormack: See ya.

01:21:49
Eric Weinstein: No, but that's-

01:21:51
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:21:52
Eric Weinstein: ... one of the reasons I'm back here, and I'll come back for more i- if, if you want, is that you change your mind.

01:21:59
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:21:59
Eric Weinstein: And you evolve, and you grow, and doing that in public requires, um... You need, you need, you need to-

01:22:07
Peter McCormack: Thick skin. [laughs]

01:22:09
Eric Weinstein: And, and testicular fortitude, sir. Um, I mean, I think at some level it's very embarrassing to say, "Yeah, I got that wrong." Like I got UFOs wrong. I really got UFOs wrong. I was such a jerk about UFOs to people because I just never wanted to listen. With respect to the virus, my, I think my first tweet about it is, "No, I don't have a model. I don't have a, a take on what's going on in Wuhan, China." It really bothers me that people have a take instantly on everything. It's like, I'm not, I'm not knowledgeable. I don't know. So I didn't make strong statements about people we have to wipe everything down or cloth masks work or they don't work. I do think that this virus has been weaponized against us-

01:23:00
Peter McCormack: I agree

01:23:00
Eric Weinstein: ... by people who want control. And I can't say whether somehow they know something about this virus that we don't, but my feeling is, is that my compli- like if you know that this virus has some sort of 10-year, um, cycle where you'll, you'll find out the real devastation much later, like HIV had that weird profile.

01:23:23
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:23:26
Eric Weinstein: I understand if you, if you, if you know something about this virus that I don't and you're trying to tell me, uh, without telling me, "Take the vaccine. It's a big deal. It's not as safe as you think, but it's a lot safer than what's on the other side." But then you better... I want to be informed. If, if this is some sort of bioweapon screw up of the EcoHealth Alliance a- as a, as a cover and then, you know, funded through the Defense, uh, Threat Reduction Agency. First of all, if you guys are so good at all this clandestine cloak and dagger stuff, really you're going to fund it through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DTRA? You're gonna come up... Some British zoologist just happens to get $50 million in grant. Come on.

01:24:08
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:24:09
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, we signed some conventions back in the '70s or ratified them or whatever we did. There was the Geneva Convention, further one. My guess is that Anthony Fauci is well understood to have biowarfare responsibilities. Then they may be defensive, and they may even be within the letter of whatever agreements. But stop making him into America's kindly doctor. S- you know, stop lying to us because if you want my compliance, I need information. Otherwise, I, I'm thinking we need to move towards civil disobedience. You cannot have the abuse of emergency powers like this. You have emergency powers in times of war, in times of pandemic and national emergency, and abusing emergency powers over a population like this is itself an act... I, I think we're talking about near treasonous behavior. We have to be not afraid to say this. We're talking about actual fascism, whereas, you know, you have the government, the White House press secretary and the executive branch defending Anthony Fauci, who's also sitting in the executive branch. His disinformation and misinformation going after my friend Who has a podcast

01:25:23
Peter McCormack: Be careful. You're gonna get me kicked off Spotify. [laughs] I'm with you.

01:25:29
Eric Weinstein: Suck it up.

01:25:29
Peter McCormack: I know. No, I'm with you.

01:25:30
Eric Weinstein: No, no, seriously.

01:25:31
Peter McCormack: I take it.

01:25:32
Eric Weinstein: Forget the audience.

01:25:33
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:25:34
Eric Weinstein: If the audience leaves, fuck 'em. If the sponsors leave, fuck 'em. If the technology platforms won't have us on, fuck 'em. They... You know, there, there was an old commercial called, "What are you saving the Chivas for?" People supposedly buying Chivas Regal, uh, and not opening it because it was too special. And then you go, "Come on. These are your friends. You should open that bottle." Now, I don't know that Ch- Chivas Regal is really that high a, a beverage, but I love the, the expression, what are you saving the Chivas for? At what point do you just say, "Enough"? I'm an anti-libertarian, and I'm saying f- you know, freedom. Let's just chant the word freedom at these people. We, we, we need Anthony Fauci removed, and my guess is we need Joe Biden removed, and I would prefer that we do it legally and peacefully. I don't know whether we can do this through impeachment. I don't know whether we can do it through the ballot box. We cannot have an octogenarian, soon to be, in a state of cognitive decline, with a nuclear football, supporting some sort of medical fascist who believes that he has the right to run our lives by denying us information and labeling all of us who question him anti-science. This is dystopia already, and it's not gonna get better, right? So I think it's super important that we actually just recognize maybe w- we're gonna lose our livelihoods. Maybe we're gonna lose money. Maybe, maybe China's not gonna, you know, allow me to buy the car I always wanted.

01:27:06
Peter McCormack: Well, the... Look, the truckers in Canada, I think are a great flag for us all of what, what, you know, people are willing to give up. They're obviously not, they're not earning any money right now. You know, they've given up their income to protest against a government who is equally-

01:27:22
Eric Weinstein: And, and it's-

01:27:22
Peter McCormack: ... terrible

01:27:23
Eric Weinstein: ... so far not violent.

01:27:24
Peter McCormack: It's nonviolent. They're partying. We were watching them earlier, dancing.

01:27:27
Eric Weinstein: But remember, every nonviolent protest has a violent component. If everyone behaves themselves perfectly, what they're saying is it's like a demonstration of power. Here's a gun. Here's some bullets. The bullets aren't in the magazine. The safety's on, but it's still a gun and some bullets. That's what a peaceful demonstration is. It says, we're here this time to work with you peacefully. We may be back peacefully. We may be back peacefully after that. But I, I come from a country that celebrates the Boston Tea Party. No offense.

01:28:06
Peter McCormack: [sighs] A little, a little taken.

01:28:08
Eric Weinstein: I know. Well, Peter will get, will get through this.

01:28:10
Peter McCormack: A little taken. Listen, listen. The, the-

01:28:11
Eric Weinstein: But, but-

01:28:12
Peter McCormack: ... I've been coming here for 20 years, and the tea is shit.

01:28:15
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] The thing is, we have a situation whereby we need to remove certain people from office. A- Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, none of these people should be there.

01:28:31
Peter McCormack: Trudeau.

01:28:33
Eric Weinstein: I don't wanna comment.

01:28:34
Peter McCormack: I will.

01:28:35
Eric Weinstein: All right. I try to be very careful. It's not that I never comment on, you know... I, I'll say things about Erdoğan in Turkey and-

01:28:42
Peter McCormack: Well, he's, he's an easy tar- target.

01:28:45
Eric Weinstein: But I would prefer to focus on what's going on at home.

01:28:49
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:28:49
Eric Weinstein: Uh, but I think people need to recognize that we're talking about an invasion into personal lives that is intolerable, and if we are a free people, we are going to remove these people.

01:29:01
Peter McCormack: And it's not the, uh, the principles that America's built on and, and the reason... I mean, there's no country I've traveled to more than America. I love coming here. Um-

01:29:09
Eric Weinstein: It's very closing.

01:29:10
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is. It, but it's a very different place. But it's a very different place because of a very small group of people-

01:29:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:29:16
Peter McCormack: ... who are causing that. Before we finish-

01:29:20
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

01:29:21
Peter McCormack: ... because we haven't talked too much about Bitcoin, I do wanna ask you something.

01:29:24
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

01:29:25
Peter McCormack: Um, what's it been like for you? What, what, what's your experience been? What have you learned? What are your observations?

01:29:32
Eric Weinstein: With Bitcoin?

01:29:32
Peter McCormack: Yeah. And what are your observations, um, uh, w- uh, as a community and things? Because, like I say, last time it really stuck with me, what the fuck are we doing? I've, I don't have my, uh, uh, laser eyes. I don't tweet bl- Lambos. I do fuck about sometimes just 'cause I'm British, but, like, it, it really had an impact on me.

01:29:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, w- I'm pro-Lambo. You?

01:29:53
Peter McCormack: I'm pro-Aston Martin.

01:29:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay, Aston Martin. Doesn't matter. But fun cars are fun cars.

01:29:57
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:29:59
Eric Weinstein: I've tried to do this thing where, like, I take the abuse of the community, and then I come back and I just call, I call it what it is. Like, you guys gotta drop the abusive stuff. It's childish, and it's dumb. Get your big boy pants on. We got work to do. You guys are the grown-ups. You, you're gonna be the big dogs, you know? And then, like, I try to make sure that I go into those rooms when there's a big loss in value, you know, which is like, I'm here to tell you not to be assholes when you're saying number go up because you're riding high. When you get kicked in the teeth, I'm here to say, "Don't take this as indicative that, uh, you know, you were wrong about everything." This is a super weird asset. Um, uh, you know, I asked Robert Breedlove to come with me to the University of Chicago when I, when I went to the Milton Friedman seminar. Robert is trying hard. He's, he's gonna put in, he's gonna put in work and, you know, he may not come from the same sort of milieu that I do, but he was in the room. Let's talk about real concerns that, that I have. I want the Bitcoin community... L- Let's just geek out for a second. Hey, you guys, I want you to watch something called CCPIU, right? The, the experimental chained consumer price index for urban consumers. This thing is lower Than the regular CPI-U, and it's going to be rotated in in its place at some point. They've built up a twenty-year or so track record based on the Boskin Commission. This thing is a danger to everybody because it's going to cut your benefits and it's gonna raise your taxes when it comes in. And it's gonna do that cryptically because your tax brackets are indexed. So a lower rate of inflation will mean that less of your assets are at lower tax rates and more of them are at higher tax rates because of the progressive tax structure. Furthermore, it's gonna cut your benefits because of cost of living adjustments. Bitcoiners, wake up to see CPI-U. This is the, the scandal, uh, from the future, and I, I'm gonna predict it here on your show. There is going to be a move at some point in our lifetimes, maybe yours not mine, I don't know, but I... my, my guess is I will live to see this, where the economics community will come out in favor of CCPI-U, which is really a cryptic way of raising taxes and slashing benefits. The person who developed the technology on which this is based is a guy named Irwin Diewert or Diewert at the University of, um, British Columbia in Vancouver. I don't think he understands what a price index is. He's the leading person. You can't get peer-reviewed in this area if the leading people are confused about what a price index is. Price indices are not about price levels. And what we're worried about, what you and I should be worried about, is what happened with something like M1, monetary aggregates. Now, what happened is unclear. Why? These guys are so effing devious. At the same moment that they pumped a tremendous amount of money into the system, they also changed the reporting requirements. Now, people don't appreciate what a genius level move this is. Everyone with a PhD is running a bunch of programs, a STEM PhD, that sound like this: Correlation does not imply causation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, et cetera, et cetera. This is a self-enervating program. It-- all those things are true. But what happens when you change the reporting requirements on a time series at the exact same moment that you commit a crime? All of the PhDs say, "Well, you can't infer what happened because actually there was a discontinuity in the data collection." Okay, genius. Now I've got it. The next time I'm gonna commit a crime, I'm also gonna make a change in the time series reporting, and then every PhD will raise their hand waiting for a cookie saying, "You can't infer that because there were two changes. There was what changed in the money supply and the change in the rule reporting." Yeah, nice try, guys. They pumped an enormous amount of money into the system leading to seigniorage, that is the devaluing of the fiat currency. And what is the universal denominator in the market? You've got all these different equities, supposedly. Those are your longs. What are you holding short? The dollar. So if I devalue the universal denominator because it's the, it's, it's the numerator, all the risk assets appear to go up and all the poor so-slobs who work for a living get hurt. Now, it's extremely important that those of us on the, [chuckles] uh, CPI, what's wrong with economics side, and those of you on the Bitcoin fixes this side, fiat is dead, fix the money, fix the world, get together. Because right now the most important thing is that the bad elements, and it's not universal, the bad elements of the economics profession need to go into intellectual receivership. They've got an entire language about lying to us, the public. I think Danny Rodrik called it something like seminar voice versus public voice. Strauss called it, uh, esoteric versus exoteric. There's what do you say behind closed doors and what do you say in front of the world? The economists who are practicing this duplicitous two-faced approach where they claim that they can tell us, "Oh, inflation was six point eight percent. No, now it's sev- seven point zero," it's a lie. It's like saying the temperature in America was, uh, seventy-two point three eight degrees Fahrenheit. Really, point three eight? The temperature in America? Did-- are you hearing yourselves? America has a map. It's very easy to fake a number. You can just change the methodology. When you have to fake a changing map... Can you imagine if meteorologists, um, maybe they can fake a, a, a global temperature. The average temperature in, you know, twenty nineteen was this. But if you actually have to put together detailed maps and models with isotherms, uh, and, and dynamics, suddenly lying becomes very difficult. Well, the reason that they're lying, um, is in part that they know what answers they want. What we want is I don't want, I don't want you who assembles my thermometer to have detailed notion about what Exxon wants or what Lockheed Martin wants. I just wanna know what, what's the temperature. I don't want you making up different thermometers from different companies to do different things. I want instruments that tell me what's going on. Those require maps. In other words, it's a field concept. It's not a number. Temperature is a field. Pressure is a field. Six point eight is a number. Seven point zero is a number. And the point is a lie because the actual spread in terms of prices is, you know, could some items are up 50%, some items are up 2%, some items have fallen in price. There is no price level. This idea that CPI and inflation is a price level is for children. It's for people who believe in Santa Claus. It's not a price level. It's a field. It's a field concept. Now, I don't want to live in their managed world. So what I really have been hoping for the Bitcoin community is after you get done joking about what I'm saying about gauge theory, uh, and you pull your pacifier out of your mouth, you'll recognize that we both recognize that we're under attack. I'm doing a one-man show. You guys have an army. We should get together and have some fun. Oh, by the way, I've accepted a speaking engagement, and I insisted that the honorarium be paid in Bitcoin so that, um, I go through whatever pain or pleasure with you guys because I think it's immoral for me to ask to be paid in fiat. Um, so I am, I am definitely moving in the direction of trying to say, uh, all of us who are taking risks and trying to think outside the box and trying to figure out constructive ways of avoiding our institutions are natural allies. We just have to get over this sort of cartoon level of tribalism.

01:39:00
Peter McCormack: Amazing. I love this.

01:39:02
Eric Weinstein: Peter, till next time.

01:39:03
Peter McCormack: Till next time. Uh, yeah, I hope it's, uh, I don't know when I'll be here next, but yeah, I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for making the time.

01:39:11
Eric Weinstein: Hopefully it will be soon, inshallah.

01:39:12
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Thank you so much. Uh, take care. See you soon.

01:39:15
Eric Weinstein: Be well, Peter. [upbeat music]