Council of the Canceled with Eric Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya and Mike Benz (X Content)

	Council of the Canceled with Eric Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya and Mike Benz
Information
Host(s)	Nicole Shanahan
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein; Jay Bhattacharya; Mike Benz
Length	01:32:40
Release Date	7 August 2024
Links
YouTube	Watch on YouTube
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Council of the Canceled with Eric Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya and Mike Benz was a discussion with Eric Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya, and Mike Benz hosted by Nicole Shanahan on X on August 7, 2024.

Description[edit]

The scientific method—and the very notion of "expert consensus"—once thrived on fearless inquiry and open debate. In the US today, dissenting ideas are systematically silenced, stifling progress and threatening trust in our institutions.

Nicole Shanahan is joined by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford professor and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration; Eric Weinstein, mathematician and creator of “Geometric Unity”; and Mike Benz, a leading advocate for internet freedom.

They explore the fragile state of free speech, and the weaponization of “cancellation” to enforce conformity.

Originally aired: Wednesday, August 7th

Formation and Purpose of the Council of the Canceled

Nicole Shanahan introduces the Council of the Canceled as a platform designed to unify and amplify the voices of those who have been silenced or marginalized. The council's current goal is to create a decentralized, multi-nodal reseating of representative experts, providing a space where dissenting opinions can challenge the status quo.

Erosion of Trust in Institutions

The conversation highlights how the self-destruction of trust in institutions, particularly those that control public discourse, has become a significant issue. Institutions like scientific bodies, media, and governmental agencies have increasingly labeled dissenting voices as "fringe" or "anti-science," which has led to widespread skepticism and a decline in public trust.

Government and Institutional Collusion

The discussion delves into the collaboration between governments and institutions to suppress dissent. This includes tactics such as cognitive vaccines and strategic labeling of individuals to discredit their work and marginalize them from public discourse.

Censorship and the Role of Social Media

Participants explore how social media platforms, in coordination with government directives, have been used to censor and de-platform individuals who challenge dominant narratives. The conversation emphasizes the need for transparency and accountability in these practices.

Legal and Political Remedies

Jay Bhattacharya and others discuss legal challenges, such as First Amendment cases, aimed at curbing government overreach in censorship. They emphasize the importance of decentralizing power and promoting radical transparency to ensure that dissenting voices can be heard.

Intelligence Operations and Public Discourse

The conversation reveals how intelligence operations intersect with public discourse, particularly in shaping narratives around public health and national security. The participants suggest that many of these efforts are part of a broader strategy to maintain control over public opinion.

The Role of Expertise and Consensus Building

The panelists advocate for reforming how expert consensus is built, stressing the inclusion of dissenting voices in critical decision-making processes. They argue that institutions should genuinely represent the public's interests and not merely the interests of a select few.

Examples of Institutional Manipulation

Specific examples, such as the suppression of alternative theories in Alzheimer's research and the government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrate how institutions manipulate consensus and stifle innovation and debate.

Proposed Solutions and Future Actions

The participants propose several solutions, including creating new institutions based on principles of transparency and representation. They also advocate for the continued work of the Council of the Canceled to challenge existing power structures and promote a more open dialogue.

Glossary of Terms[edit]

In this conversation, there is a discussion about the need for a glossary of terms to help clarify and demystify complex concepts and organizations mentioned throughout the dialogue. The speakers suggest that creating such a glossary would serve as a valuable resource, ensuring that terms are clearly defined and accessible to a wider audience. This would help avoid misunderstandings and allow for a more informed discussion around the topics being addressed.

Here we provide an index of named individuals, organizations, and concepts mentioned in this Council of the Canceled discussion:

Transcript[edit]

00:00:00:00 - 00:01:01:17

Nicole Shanahan: Okay. All right, guys, we're live.

00:01:01:20 - 00:01:02:14

Mike Benz: Hello.

00:01:02:16 - 00:02:23:26

Nicole Shanahan: Welcome to the Council of the Canceled, a idea that has been born, from several of these conversations and realizing that there's very much a trend at hand and that there's enough of us that maybe it's time for us to have these conversations in larger groups than one on one where we just are being interviewed, telling our story from our own personal standpoint. I think we now realize there's a wider issue, not just nationally, but globally. And many, many expert voices have been silenced. Many parents have been silenced. There's a whole mechanism that we're realizing is at play, to silence opinions that are dissenting against the status quo. And these are very serious things, but I want us to set a vibe for this, and I think the vibe should be light and joyous and productive, because we've been in the middle of it in our own lives for quite a while. And there's some joy now in sitting together in a group and actually talking about what we're going to do next.

00:02:23:29 - 00:02:51:22

Nicole Shanahan: So here I am in our first, council with Jay Bhattacharya, Eric Weinstein, Mike Benz. Many of you know them, follow them. They have been incredibly inspirational. They have been up against the odds. They have been deplatformed, and thankfully replatformed thanks to X. And so today we're going to share live a conversation where we are going to unify some of the common threads that we've been talking about. This is being described right now as a decentralized, multi-nodal reseating of representative experts. So here we go guys. I mean how are you feeling right now? How many times have you been told you're anti-science today?

00:03:13:13 - 00:03:30:26

Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, what I want, Nicole, is that there should never have to ever be another Council of the Canceled. We can have society run in a way so that our institutions welcome the kinds of dissident voices that have been shunned aside during the pandemic.

00:03:30:26 - 00:04:04:00

Eric Weinstein: It is also kind of funny, I don't remember people using the words "grifter" and "charlatan" outside of, like, I don't know, an 1880s vibe that, you know, those were fighting words, or you'd fight a duel. And somehow whenever I hear that somebody's a grifter or a charlatan, I now have a positive sense of, oh, what did they say? What's their perspective? Have they written anything I can read? And I don't think that that was the initial intent of these campaigns against such people, but it is backfiring in kind of a humorous way.

00:04:04:03 - 00:05:58:28

Mike Benz: Right. It's the same thing with science. I mean, when someone's called anti-science, I think, oh, they they must know their stuff. What can I learn from this anti-science person? Because if the science establishment is against them, then they clearly have ideas or research that are not being allowed in for a for a reason. And this gets to something I think we were talking about before, which is about, really, the self-destruction of trust in institutions that do the gatekeeping of ideas that provide, you know, sort of the consensus-building architecture that ends up being implemented in policy or being implemented in public health or censorship decisions or government decisions. And the fact that we're all talking about these labels as being badges of honor, that they must be right because the institutions are opposed to them, I think gets to this question about what is the role of these institutions in our country, how they developed, how they lost that trust, what can be done now? And we hear this term democracy a lot. And they always say these terms together, "democratic institutions". And we were talking about before that there's—I see there being two parallel tracks with the role of institutions in censorship and cancellation, which is you have the social media side, which is people being gated out of Instagram or Facebook or YouTube. And then there is the institutional side, which is people not being allowed to publish in, you know, the National Academy of Sciences or in magazines or, you know, in journals or in government agencies. And so those two things, I think, intersect with each other and they're each their own sort of problem for reseating institutions to represent the people rather than a cloistered set of interests.

00:05:59:01 - 00:06:00:09

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. Go on.

00:06:00:14 - 00:06:01:24

Jay Bhattacharya: No, no, please.

00:06:01:26 - 00:07:34:13

Nicole Shanahan: So the way that I think we can start with this conversation and Jay, you said let's just have one council and then hopefully we don't have to have it again. In our brainstorm for this live session, we already started talking about how deep and how powerful these mechanisms are. And I just want to propose that I think we must continue these councils. It'll be different people, different voices, different backgrounds, different opinions that we will be convening until there is a proper reseating of experts. And so, I want to lay that groundwork that we're trying something right now in this format. That is my hope being is something that last, and many different iterations were open sourcing this format if others want to engage in it. But the ideal is, is that we either invite the institutions to reform themselves, in the way that they ought to be reformed or we will be starting our own institutions, and our institutions will be based on principles, on how we reach expert consensus and infrastructure for reaching expert consensus. So, Eric, I want to turn this one over to you. We talked about what this infrastructure should look like, it how it has looked in previous formats, and the risk of what happens if we don't.

00:07:34:15 - 00:09:03:17

Eric Weinstein: Sure. I mean, one of the things that I think I was most moved by was your concern that, by creating consensus in this new way of taking the dissenting portion of the expert community and deciding that they suffer from some strange psychological malady, or incompetence, or that they're bizarrely self-serving, the institutions have been running their own credibility into the ground. And you can see this across different disciplines, in different fields through the polling data. How much confidence do you have in medicine, in journalism, etc., even science in particular, with disastrous Public Health under Covid. I think that what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, "each time you buy a consensus by doing character assassination against dissenters, you're actually destroying the long-term respect in that institution". How many people still feel the same way about UPenn, Harvard and MIT, my three universities, after those disastrous testimonies before Congress? So what you what you're seeing, I think, is—I think this is your plan—your plan seems to be to offer the institutions a way back by saying, "here's how we would come up with a protocol for figuring out who are the stakeholders and the representatives of the public in the expert community that are being silenced, or being maligned or prebunked" or whatever crazy terminology we'll get?

00:09:03:17 - 00:09:06:11

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, we'll talk about cognitive vaccines in a minute.

00:09:06:11 - 00:09:47:09

Eric Weinstein: Right. So that's, in essence, what I see. And this is your suggestion—maybe you're too modest to sort of make it—is let's try to use the campaign to push the experts back into the institutions from which they were ejected. We know who these people are, and they're quite good. They were trained in our institutions. And if that fails, then we have a plan B, which is that you grow the camp. So either kill it or grow it, and you kill it by reseating the experts inside of the institutions. And if you can't kill it, you grow it and you make sure that you have an alternate plan B.

00:09:47:11 - 00:10:13:09

Nicole Shanahan: The thing that I'm realizing is that it's actually already quite big, but it's fragmented and not united, and that we're still in the storytelling, information collection phase. And what I was really inspired by, Jay, you said 30,000 qualified doctors and epidemiologists and public policy experts signed your Great Barrington Declaration. I did not realize it was that many people.

00:10:13:11 - 00:10:39:16

Jay Bhattacharya: Yeah. I mean, almost a million regular people signed it. But of many of the regular people are tremendously impressive. But, with the particular expertise in epidemiology medicine, I think like 30, 30 or 30,000 people, signed it. What that tells me, Nicole, is that, that the center which basically labeled the Great Barrington Declaration as a fringe idea was not actually a fringe idea.

00:10:39:18 - 00:10:40:07

Nicole Shanahan: Exactly.

00:10:40:13 - 00:10:45:03

Jay Bhattacharya: And in fact, I have to tell you, I myself was fooled about this point when we when I wrote it.

00:10:45:05 - 00:10:45:26

Nicole Shanahan: I think if you.

00:10:45:29 - 00:10:46:03

Jay Bhattacharya: Like.

00:10:46:10 - 00:10:47:00

Nicole Shanahan: The individual

00:10:47:03 - 00:10:48:06

Jay Bhattacharya: Wait, am I fringe?

00:10:48:09 - 00:10:51:06

Nicole Shanahan: Fringe that they don't find each other.

00:10:51:09 - 00:11:05:21

Jay Bhattacharya: Yeah, exactly. So so like I, you know, I wrote this thinking, okay, I'm not I'm not really representing the, the majority opinion, but a really respectable minority opinion at the time. and now when I look back, I'm not so. Sure that that's true

00:11:05:23 - 00:11:52:26

Eric Weinstein: Well they’re projecting. I mean, I really feel like, in general, when somebody says “fringe” or “charlatan” or “grifter” or “guru” or “ne'er-do-well” or whatever, what they're really doing is, is that they're, they're telling you about the weakness of their position and trying to make sure that they strike first. To be honest, can we all admit that there's a little part of our brain that sits around saying, gosh, you know, so many bots said this terrible thing about me. Maybe it's true. And it's weird because we know that this is a psychological defect, that our brains weren't trained for an era in which you could buy 10,000 accounts that, you know, all screamed the same thing. And yet, we're sitting here looking metacognitive at our own minds, doubting ourselves and the power to convene these things. We're sharing the same story, "Oh, they got you too. They got me on this. And here's how they use that language." But it's only by creating an aggregate set of information that we learned what the techniques.

00:12:02:21 - 00:13:07:08

Jay Bhattacharya: Kind of pick up on. One thing you said, I think is. So super important. the, the experts that we're talking about, what, what's really what we're talking about is making sure that the people are represented in these institutions. These dissenting voices often represent regular people, regular, you know, that are hurt by the majority decisions. And so receiving these institutions with experts, really what it means is it's it's it's putting the representation, the people, the representatives of the people in the halls of power when the discussions are being made. I mean, that's partly my thinking with the Great Barrington, that all these people were being hurt by these lockdowns, by the school closures at scale and their voices were nowhere near the centers of power they deserve to be. And to me, I was I was a representation of that group rather than just myself. That's why it was, you know, I despite thinking, okay, maybe I'm in the minority, I thought, nope, no, there's these people. Regular people have a right to be heard in these when these decisions are made. And so that's why I was I was you know, quite, quite still quite proud of it.

00:13:07:11 - 00:15:44:10

Mike Benz: But this labeling has a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect about it. You know, there's a there's a technique in markets where if a hedge fund wants to you know, short a stock, you know, they'll work with PR companies to create bad press about it, which will drive down the stock price, and then everyone will see the volume moving into shorts. And so other people will start to, you know, think the company is bad or they will start to short it themselves because everybody else is shorting it. And so it becomes a short where the company because everyone's shorting it. And I think there's the same thing with terms like fringe or even the nature of cancellation itself is people who are not yet deemed fringe or not yet canceled by being by the public record, saying that they are canceled. They are fringe. They sort of become fringe because they were called fringe, not because they were at the start of it. And, you know, frankly, I think that's that's part of the framing of saying that someone is a disgraced scientist or something, and it's like they weren't disgraced until you called them disgrace. And then everybody looked around and said, oh, they're disgraced. They're probably disgraced. And then by virtue of that, now you're disgraced. And so I think, though, there is this collective immune system response that's starting to happen, when those labels are thrown around, because it's they've abused that so much. And every time they do, they lose institutional trust because some new disaffected group says, well, that's not really true in this case. And then they look around and they say, actually, I don't I don't trust the National Science Foundation anymore. I don't trust the National Academy of Sciences, I don't trust Tony Fauci. And and this idea on expertise. I mean, I think it's embodied almost in this sort of Great Barrington Declaration versus Tony Fauci type thing, where Fauci publicly declared that he was the science, you know, that it was not a collection of experts. It was not people represented from all these different beliefs. It was all like all the energies were just poured, you know, from this one Sun Ra god who's come down to us in Egypt and is in there saying, “I am the science. And any scientist around me who opposes this is anti-science.” And that works to pull off an emergency operation to, to to ram through something in the short term, but almost like a, like cancer, like the tumor cells spread from there in the institutions and people. It rules through fear and resentment. But that resentment builds and and and it starts to crack institutions. And I think we have an exciting moment in history now where the opportunity to change that course is, is here.

00:15:44:12 - 00:16:28:01

Eric Weinstein: You know, was this this thing with an adjective, a profession and then a proper name. So like “fringe epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya”, you had “controversial Professor Jordan Peterson”. And when I figured out that this was, a formula because everyone who reads the New York Times knows the formula, I then did a search on "controversial professor Paul Krugman". There was not a single hit on all of Google, because even though he was a professor and he had been controversial, that formula is never applied to people who aren't in the crosshairs of the thing. So yeah, we are dealing with this much more developed, eco, architecture to take out dissidents.

00:16:28:06 - 00:16:31:06

Mike Benz: Yeah. You do have the coolest one, “dangerous woman, Nicole”.

00:16:31:12 - 00:18:07:18

Nicole Shanahan: Well, so I have a few new tags, and, they didn't start showing up until after I announced I was leaving the Democratic Party, ironically, but, uncorrelated. There's now these databases in which your name will be associated with all these tags, and those tags will be “fringe”, “conspiracy theorist”, “dangerous”—Daily Beast—Yeah, pseudoscientist, very common one. Grifter, we talked about that one, but I don't I don't think that that's like an official Google tag yet. But, you know, I've seen articles in which I'm in that have these tags under them and I'm like, oh, this is a database. This is preempted. This is not something extracted from a, general algorithm. Somebody has my name on a list, and that name is being associated with these tags. And those tags are going out with these major mainstream news articles. And, I never seen this before. And I was like, this is so this is such an odd way of open of running an open internet. But it's the reality we live in. And you had described it as a digital scarlet letter in which you're walking around the real world, but everyone's looking at you, and they, they not only it's not a visual tag, it's something deeper. It's a cognitive tag. And so let's get into that. Because, Mike, you had shared with the group before we went live, this idea of not just reactively labeling individuals, but you can now preemptively do so through cognitive vaccines.

00:18:07:18 - 00:20:00:00

Mike Benz: Yes, yes. So yeah. So this is this whole mad science. There's a whole field of the science of censorship. And it's totally rejuvenated the social sciences. You know, the the social sciences have always had a little bit of an envy, I think, of the, of the hard sciences in the sense that, you know, physics can be very accountable. And chemistry, a lot of people associate it with real science and that there are sort of real social scientists, but a lot of it is, you know, just so stories are it's not really it's hard it in accountable. And that has started to change as in the in the post 2016 environment, when misinformation and disinformation became really sort of a government public policy initiative, it started to infuse all the universities and academics and researchers with with hundreds of millions of dollars of grant funds that come from everywhere. They'll come from the National Science Foundation, they'll come from the the Department of Defense or DARPA. They'll come from the State Department. They'll come from even USAID grants and Department of Homeland Security grants. And and this is nominally about about stopping the spread of misinformation online, which is sort of gets to the direct censorship side. But then there is a secondary field of research around the psychology of belief in, in wrong, in wrong thoughts, which is, if there is a government policy around public health, for example, vaccines might have adverse side effects, and the government and the Department of Health and Homeland Security will now fund, together with the National Science Foundation, will fund tens of millions of dollars to a coterie of universities who specialize in psychology, sociology. They'll work with data scientists to, to to sort of, you know, do the, the AI side of this—

00:20:00:06 - 00:20:00:27

Eric Weinstein: Linguistics.

00:20:00:27 - 00:21:10:08

Mike Benz: Yeah, linguistics. Computational linguistics is a big part of this. And and the, the design is that so that if you can't censor everything, you can collectively inoculate people from believing opinions the government doesn't want you to believe. This is not all that. You know, I, I sometimes jokingly refer to it as digital MKUltra because it's sort of like this psychological control program, but it's laundered with government dollars into universities. In the case we were talking about, it was a University of Cambridge social decision making laboratory, which is, you know, the study of how humans make decisions. Now they're funded by Google Jigsaw, which has its own sort of dark history, but they have direct partnerships. This is a British psychology lab that's partnered with the Department of Homeland Security here in the U.S., CISA, the notorious agency that that was putting out videos telling children to report their own parents and family for disinformation if they questioned Covid orthodoxies. Our Department of Homeland Security CISA office and also with our State Department Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was busted during the Twitter files for mass censorship and mass flagging of thousands of accounts.

00:21:10:11 - 00:21:29:27

Mike Benz: But they are laundering, in the same way that during the Russiagate affair, you had U.S. intelligence laundering things out to Christopher Steele and the MI6 networks out there. You have the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security laundering out to a British lab whose ultimate goal is to create a psychological vaccine against back, against fake news.

00:21:30:03 - 00:21:31:28

Nicole Shanahan: Do they use those words?

00:21:32:01 - 00:23:10:26

Mike Benz: They use those words they have they have glitzy ten minute promo videos. They have. They have you can go on their website and you can see the, you know, hundreds of studies they've done. They just put out one. They call it the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST), which in two minutes you can you can deduce how prone an individual is psychologically to believing false headlines. And it's the most ridiculous, politically rigged. You know, it would be a great joke if it, you know, it'd be a comedy movie if it wasn't a horror, you know, slasher horror to our democracy. But then they launder this as a scientific finding, saying certain groups of people are more prone to believe false headlines. Well, that means the government now needs to swarm around them with a Truman Show of different grant of, you know, grant programs to influence the news. They believe they can then use this to put pressure on the tech companies to say these are more psychologically vulnerable groups. And so we need to put harder trust and safety filters on them. But but this is like a this is the sort of thing that we used to call intelligence work. You know, when we're trying to go into a region and psychologically primed people to believe news narratives coming out of the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, we would pump money into the university system. We'd get researchers to sort of validate something scientifically. That would be picked up by CIA proprietary media like Voice of America, and then that would create this surround sound ecosystem within the country, and people would believe that, and it would redound the U.S. interest. But now it's our own government doing it to ourselves. And that's also preventing experts from even publishing in the field, because the moment you cross that tripwire, you're now interfering with a government operation.

00:23:10:29 - 00:25:18:07

Nicole Shanahan: Well, and it's preventing it. And we've talked about the collusion as well. It would be one thing if it was just the government acting alone, but the speed at which the government and institutional partnership is moving right now, it truly blows me away. And I'll just share my story with with Stanford Law School. a few weeks after I announced publicly I was running for Vice president with Bobby Kennedy, I get an email from from sweet Charlie Munger from Stanford Law School, who has a big conference center dedicated to him because he's such a lovely, wonderful guy. I've sat in multiple meetings with him. We talked about, you know, how are we going to use, the law school to work with all of these innovative new technologies in energy and ecology? Very excited. And I get this mystery email from him saying, I think you should sit out your conference this year. This is a conference that I helped design. I built, I built from nothing called Future Law. And, it's it has sold out the last many years. it's a legal AI conference that has is now like the gold standard. And, and I have the same role every year, where I go in and I help host a segment called the Lex Talks. but, you know, just very casually, out of nowhere, you should just sit this one out. And I said, no, I'm not sitting at my conference. That's silly, Mr. Munger. I will be there. And he's like, well, no, no, you can't. And and then he offers me a few alternatives. He says, well, we'll take you off the agenda. You are not to tell any members of the press you were to be here. You know, we don't want anything political. I don't keep in mind this is Stanford University who has Obama, you know, Condoleezza Rice regularly on campus. So, the speed at which that message gets down into actionable form, it makes me wonder if this preemptive cognitive vaccine is already been at play, because how else would you move that quickly?

00:25:18:10 - 00:25:49:05

Mike Benz: Yeah, well, I'm fascinated at that interplay between the government and institutional favors for favors relationship. We were we were talking earlier about this bizarre set of twin programs at the National Science Foundation. One of them is called the Convergence Accelerator Track F Program. The other one is called the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program. And, you know, in the charter documents for these programs, which distribute $100 million to to this web of universities. Stanford, for example, got again.

00:25:49:07 - 00:25:50:10

Nicole Shanahan: Stanford's like the heartland.

00:25:50:17 - 00:26:30:09

Mike Benz: Yeah. You got a joint $3 million grant for just for for scanning and banning online, you know, misinformation which was in the public health space and in the political speech space. But, you know, in, in the doc, the documents the structure in a really cute way, which is to say misinformation is an it is an attack on democracy. It's a threat to democracy. Democracy is defined not as the will of the people and how they vote, but as the consensus of democratic institutions. And so anything that is misinformation, you know, which is basically defined as something that goes against that consensus of.

00:26:30:09 - 00:26:45:09

Nicole Shanahan: Defining it as people you. So you could say 99% stuff that they're accepting of, but if you hit that 1%, your total being censored, your total being an identity is missing.

00:26:45:12 - 00:29:01:19

Eric Weinstein: But they'll also tell you that, like in my case, we're going to do origin stories. I at some point got the phone call, “you should—your research is correct. But if you don't lay off of that, you will never have a career in academics again.” And it's just it's remarkable when the soft indications that you should stop aren't working because the person is convinced. Oh, no. No, I'm. It's good. I'm a scientist. I was trained to think critically. I'm allowed to consider all possibilities and all hypotheses. And then when you're told, well, actually, science doesn't work that way at all. And strangely, you're told and it's just sort of almost in pain listening to this. But the National Science Foundation misinformation, democracy. Am I right that at some level, the people are the greatest threat to democracy? The official misinformation, disinformation and malinformation is what is being protected, because that's what goes around consensus. That subset of the science that supports certain conclusions is labeled “The Science” and everything else is not. So you have this language problem, which is we've got to protect democracy from the electorate. We've got to protect, what we're calling “The Science” from science. We have to protect, free speech from people who want to share their opinions. And the language is now so completely crazy that we don't know how to have a discussion. I don't know, like, I did not know until recently, that malinformation was the technical term for information that doesn't go in the direction of the institutional consensus. And I known about debunked but prebunked. I mean, that was instantaneous because I've been debunked 18 times because that's what I do. I thought I was getting into a game to do dissenting, responsible, analytic work with these fancy degrees. And the fact is, is that that used to be something you could do. We used to have Serge Lang at Yale, who was one of these great dissenters. We had Noam Chomsky, William F Buckley from the conservative side. We had all of these great dissenting voices that gave America power through cowboy intellectualism. And now that's gone.

00:29:01:24 - 00:29:47:25

Jay Bhattacharya: You know what I've seen firsthand? The mechanisms, at least within science, how this works. Right. So, the NIH, is responsive for funding, a huge amount of biomedical research in the United States and around the world. But it's not even the money that they confer. What they confer is social status. All right. So I have a I'm a professor with full tenure Stanford University in the School of Medicine. One of the main reasons I was able to get that position is because I was successful getting NIH grants. Right. It's a social marker. And the, the what they do is they send out the heads of these institutes, Tony Fauci will send out request for proposals with like essentially telling you what they want from you. that's, that's the normal way.

00:29:47:25 - 00:29:49:24

Eric Weinstein: If you mean like in conclusions.

00:29:49:27 - 00:30:26:25

Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, they won't explicitly say what they want, but but you said up the set of ideas that you're allowed to like to say in order to, like, get, have any chance of getting, getting funding. And then the signal goes out wide and clear. Right. So, so, and it's very directed. It's, it's, it's, it's, and it didn't I don't think it always used to be like this, but like the very top of the institution says, here's the kind of science we want you to here's the kind of inquiries we want. We want, and, and so and then that essentially constrains the set of things that scientists are allowed to ask, because I don't want to not get tenure. I mean, I don't want to be on the outside.

00:30:27:00 - 00:30:28:20

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, maybe qualified queries. Yeah.

00:30:28:23 - 00:30:54:14

Eric Weinstein: Maybe if we tease that out to to let's see if it dovetails with might say, am I reading you correctly that the NIH might put out a proposal saying, current, misinformation about public health threatens the lives of Americans with a request for proposal. we want to study how disinformation propagates online that undermines confidence in our medical institutions.

00:30:54:17 - 00:31:13:24

Eric Weinstein: And the argument is subsumed in the request. It's saying, how should we do this as opposed to maybe there's actually a lot of dissent, and we should be talking about why why have many experts lost confidence in these products, in these protocols?

00:31:13:27 - 00:31:33:27

Jay Bhattacharya: It's that's exactly what the what happens. And it has real consequences for the health of the American people. Yeah. But the American people have invested millions and millions, tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. For instance, on prevention of Alzheimer's disease. And for decades, the NIH only permitted, hypotheses were from a very narrow range of thinking.

00:31:33:27 - 00:31:34:20

Eric Weinstein: Amyloid plaques.

00:31:34:27 - 00:31:43:29

Jay Bhattacharya: Amyloid plaque, and it turns out very likely that's not the most like it's got. It's not the proximate cause of, of of Alzheimer's disease that we need. We need other kinds of thinking.

00:31:43:29 - 00:31:49:20

Nicole Shanahan: Well, the publishing paper turns out, was fraudulent.

00:31:49:22 - 00:31:55:23

Jay Bhattacharya: But for for a decade or more, if you were in this field, you could not get an NIH grant unless you took that as the main hypothesis.

00:31:55:23 - 00:32:02:02

Eric Weinstein: You took it. So next you're going to be questioning the food pyramid or, what causes ulcers.

00:32:02:04 - 00:32:04:14

Nicole Shanahan: Or saturated fat?

Eric Weinstein: Nerd humor!

00:32:04:16 - 00:32:21:16

Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, but that's the that's the problem, right? So science needs to have people you can't put a scarlet F for fringe on every single scientist had a different idea. it makes no sense. it just kills science, and it hurts the health of the American people.

00:32:21:19 - 00:34:13:25

Nicole Shanahan: Well, yeah, we're we're in a tough situation, so maybe this is a good time to talk about remedies, because I think each one of us have been really focused on what are the tools available to us to reset our standing. I personally, you know, represent a lot of these moms who have intuition about the chronic health issue in the United States. And, moms have been under such and and dads and dads, too. It's it's usually the mom that smells it first, but like, you know, the parents, let's talk about well-meaning parents, looking for remedies. I know that parents out there are very, very desperate to figure out how to break free, of this suffocating environment in which they can't access real science, or if they find a scientist who has written a paper that says, this is what happened to my kid, but that scientist has been, quote, debunked. they haven't. They're left with nothing. They're left with more of these unexplained illnesses. you know, oftentimes you'll hear unexplained infertility. You know, unexplained GI issues, unexplained neurological disorder. Everything is now going unexplained. And anytime you try to explain it, you're criticized. I mean, this is this is absolutely. Well, so let's talk about all the remedies that you have, found successful or pending success. I, you know, you've had a huge one, Jay, Supreme court case. You're a plaintiff. you are bringing a First Amendment issue. So First Amendment is one that we're all looking at very closely. constitutional right. That seems to be not taken very seriously today, but is that is this a is this a path forward for us?

00:34:13:28 - 00:35:54:17

Jay Bhattacharya: I think that the two major principles are we need to decentralize the powers of the power of the institution so that it allows other voices that are on the now are on the outside in, you know, voices that have some expertise. But for whatever reason, it's expertise that's a challenge in the center of power. And then we need radical transparency. Right. And so free speech is of a piece of that of a, of a, of a part of like a fundamental part of that. Right. So what happened to me was that the government decided that what I was saying was so, so wrong or dangerous or whatever inconvenient, that it sent messages to social media companies saying, if if you have people saying the kinds of things Jay says, label them, throw them off, makes them make them into fringe figures. Don't let them. Don't let them have a voice. And don't tell them, by the way, that that they've been you just so they'll think that they're just they're seeing things when they're not. the idea that the government can tell social media companies who and what to censor, that was the heart of that case. And unfortunately, Nicole, we, we had some really good rulings in the lower courts and in the Supreme Court. Supreme court ruled it was a very interesting ruling. It said that I lacked standing to sue. For this case. which meant that because I couldn't show an email directly from the government to the social media kind of things and censor Jay. Therefore, it was okay that they went to the from the social media government told social media companies censor the the kinds of ideas. Jay says, so you're running me Bobby Kennedy. He's he also has a case, a very similar case. And he very certainly has that he meets that standard for for stand it like he.

00:35:54:20 - 00:35:57:12

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. He was just granted an injunction.

00:35:57:14 - 00:36:19:23

Jay Bhattacharya: In that case, which is fantastic news, which but what it does is it says the government can't tell social media companies who to censor, but the government can now still, under current law, under the current rule, a sort of ruling Supreme Court can tell social media companies what ideas to censor. And there's no one will have stand it because there won't be a that.

00:36:19:24 - 00:36:23:13

Nicole Shanahan: When you eliminate a whole person for one idea, they might.

00:36:23:15 - 00:36:25:23

Jay Bhattacharya: Yes.

00:36:25:26 - 00:36:32:21

Nicole Shanahan: What are the other cases? What? I mean, we need remedies. We need case law. We need direction. We need guiding light.

00:36:32:23 - 00:36:37:22

Jay Bhattacharya: I think this is one for this. We need Congress to act. We I mean, because of some.

00:36:37:24 - 00:36:38:24

Jay Bhattacharya: I've sort of lost a little.

00:36:38:24 - 00:36:46:00

Nicole Shanahan: Hope in them. Well, how do we get what party right now do we vote for if we expect Congress to act or what?

00:36:46:02 - 00:39:20:23

Mike Benz: But and you know, that case still has a lot of life in it in the sense that, who knows? After full marriage discovery, I could see it very easily going back up into the Supreme Court, although it might take two years. but for my part, you know, we've been talking about institutions and receding institutions and the role of trust in that. And I do think that institutions actually sort of naturally reform, as trust breaks down and the, the reformation of the institutions is part of the trust. Re you know, re re infusion process, but that is being stopped right now because the government has capacity, built this coterie of thousands of different outside organizations to artificially preserve that what's left of their trust by cancellation tactics and censorship tactics of anyone who amplifies so-called distrust. And so what we were just talking about with the National Science Foundation, with these two programs that they had there, you know, they defined democratic institutions as government agencies and the media. The media is actually listed as a democratic institution that misinformation endangers, which means anyone who questions official media narratives is, you know, is in the crosshairs of $100 million in taxpayer spending to Stanford University, to the University of Washington, to the University of Cambridge for these psychological vaccines. And I do think if you were to get rid of the government's gargoyles, that that defend the artificial remnant of trust and the state of play would just be how people feel about these institutions, there would be an organic, you know, social media wave. There would be an organic response by elected representatives being responsive to seeing that. I've seen this personally, dozens of times where, you know, change doesn't start in Congress. Congress never doesn't take action until it's already on the tip of everyone's tongues, and they know they will be made a hero by sponsoring this bill or by by forming this investigation committee, which means the onus is on the people to to put it on the tip of everyone's tongues. But that can't be done while you have, you know, a North Korea style mercenary censorship army being capacity built, subsidized by the US federal government to do this. And so I do think if you were to tear down those gargoyle firms, you know, these institutions like NewsGuard and these university centers that we're talking about in these in this, this NGO soft power swarm army, that, that those institutions would, would naturally receive, you know, receipt in a much more organic way. So that's what my area of focus.

00:39:20:25 - 00:39:41:15

Eric Weinstein: So I want to get into the remedy stuff, but I think it would be. And this is something I very much appreciated. Mike saying on his Tucker Carlson interview, one of the things that you have to do is you have to understand what's motivating this from the perspective. Nobody gets up in the morning and say, how can I be evil and censor good people on the internet the way this starts?

00:39:41:18 - 00:39:43:13

Mike Benz: Right? So I'm no, I'm very good.

00:39:43:16 - 00:42:45:18

Eric Weinstein: This is something like NATO. And the idea is that the people in that permanent class inside of Washington DC and in Brussels say, look, there's certain things that are so important to the functioning of the world that they cannot be, endangered when you take a pulse every four years of a country like the United States and say, well, where are where are we at the moment? Because what they call a populist is somebody who has not been pre-vetted by the two vetting organizations. The old model of democracy, from Millard Fillmore and to the present is that there are two parties. Those two parties are supposed to nominate people who are broadly acceptable to the institutions. And then all of us get a binary vote, which is supposed to express our hearts, dreams, and hope for the future. That model is in the process of crashing. Now you have three candidates who are leading the field, two of whom do not appear to be signed up for the institutional consensus at the level that, let's say the Atlantic Council, wants them to be. So their perspective is, is is kind of funny. It's like, look, we're all for democracy as long as it doesn't actually threaten the brittle limb on which the Western world sits. And that means that what you're supposed to be doing is explaining NATO as you see it, explaining NAFTA as you see it, explaining, you know, trade rounds as you see them or the W.H.O. And then you have to put it in front of the people. And the people may say, yeah, I didn't follow that NAFTA reasoning. I understand the NATO reasoning, but I'm not up for the NAFTA thing. And the W.H.O. seems to be under control that I don't trust. Then you have to go back and say, look, we're losing the people on some of these key institutions. What do we do? That is not happening. And I think that, you know, in large measure, what we have to say if we want to solve this is to talk to the thing that doesn't even want to show itself, the thing that doesn't want to show itself is sitting there saying that these people go on and on about democracy, and they don't even understand how dangerous the world is. Just let us do our job. We have just seen in the Democratic Party a process that is not explained on Schoolhouse Rock, where a person suffering from dementia, clearly visible to people who have televisions or, and who can get YouTube, that those that this person has walked away from, from the race, leaving us with the vice president that nobody seemed to want, dropped out super early because she couldn't raise money. That's what she said. There was also that Tulsi Gabbard thing that suddenly nobody can remember. And whatever that process is, is being told to us that democracy is on the ballot. Well, what happens if it's actually democracy and oligarchy that are both on the ballot at the moment? Right.

00:42:45:18 - 00:42:47:23

Mike Benz: Great Schoolhouse Rock episode, by the way. But

00:42:47:26 - 00:43:01:10

Eric Weinstein: Well actually I went back to Schoolhouse Rock. And they say that the two parties choose the candidates. So you have to be very, very careful, because a lot of the sense that we have of democracy is actually post, Democratic Convention in 1968.

00:43:01:10 - 00:43:03:05

Nicole Shanahan: Schoolhouse Rock might be canceled after this.

00:43:03:12 - 00:45:59:24

Mike Benz: Yeah. That's right. Let's update the episode. You know, of the obvious lack of that. But, you know, it's funny that you mention that. So, for example, with NATO, you know, we're talking about public health and, you know, the government's role in funding these censorship awards. So about a month ago, Doctor Peter Hotez was giving an interview where he called on NATO to intervene online and to and to censor vaccine skeptics, all in on all the different NATO countries and a lot of people were saying, how is this possible? What the heck? Why? Might as well invoke, you know, with, you know, Martians or some alien horde to come in from another galaxy. But the fact is, is NATO is part of this, this, this coterie of rules based international institutions, you know, democratic institutions that uphold the, you know, the Rules-based International Order. But people part of this change process, in this reforming process that we're talking about, like legal solutions, like what Jay is involved in and I'm talking about sort of like civil society and government reform institutions and, and part of reforming from government and getting a coalition within government involves making the public aware of it. So the public talks about it, so the government actors feel motivated to do it. And that involves educating actually people about the institutions that they've heard of, but they don't fully under understand. And so these are institutions like NATO. A lot of people think that this is the western world's transatlantic military alliance, but they don't appreciate that that institution has gone horribly awry in interfering in domestic civilian politics, which they view as a domain of war, because the opinion of the population impacts their war funding, it impacts all sorts of policies. And they played a very, very nasty role in Covid censorship. NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence, based in Latvia. It was a group set up after the Ukraine coup in 2014 and the counter coup that involved the Crimea annexation. They set up this this NATO office to control the, you know, to censor disinformation in East Europe. That was capacity. But you can understand you can say, okay, that's a war 5000, 7000 miles away. We have this institution that the American People fund here, and we don't really care what the institution is doing, you know, on the on the front of that war to influence the hearts and minds of people's news distribution there. Maybe you do, but that institution, that center of excellence, ended up doing a partnership with a company called Graphika, which is a which got $7 million from the U.S. Pentagon. It was a part of the Minerva Initiative, which is our psychological warfare research center of the Pentagon to do a trans NATO study. As soon as Covid broke out in January 2020, Graphika and NATO's Stratcom Center of Excellence surveyed all of social media to to catalog mis- and disinformation about the origin of the virus. They broke down political groups in the U.S, in the UK in—

00:45:59:26 - 00:46:01:24

Eric Weinstein: Their claimed mis- and dis-.

00:46:01:26 - 00:46:04:24

Mike Benz: Right right and malinformation, as you noted, which is even true,

00:46:04:24 - 00:46:06:14

Eric Weinstein: but I just I don't want to give them—

00:46:06:17 - 00:46:07:00

Mike Benz: Of course.

00:46:07:00 - 00:46:16:08

Eric Weinstein: That that's what they were studying because anybody who thought it might involve the Wuhan Institute of Virology was sort of engaging in what was being claimed to be mis-, or dis-.

00:46:16:11 - 00:47:15:05

Mike Benz: Totally. Yeah. But there's so many unanswered questions about the role of The Pentagon, which administrated the Covid epidemic, which subsidizes, as Jay was discussing, the gain-of-function research because these are you are super-juicing viruses in order to create a vaccine on it. But that's a military dominion. But you had the military doing the censorship response of anyone who questioned whether the military may have been responsible for the virus, but we're supposed to have a civilian run government, we're supposed to have a civilian run media. But it's so who answers to who here? But but that is I think that sort of education is what elevates people on social media. People who do public speaking to. This is a process that happened with the New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This is how we got reform from the Church Committee. We have a Senate Intelligence Committee now only because it took the intelligence agencies operating domestically, infiltrating left wing student movement groups who were opposed to Vietnam.

00:47:15:07 - 00:47:33:03

Mike Benz: And it took this whole collective consciousness raising. It took 60, I'm sorry, 15 years, for a coalition to form around the Noam Chomsky types that ended up making its way into Congress, and that's what ended up establishing a whole new structure of oversight now that we now need new oversight. But that is a process of

00:47:33:03 - 00:47:40:26

Eric Weinstein: It required a break-in in 1971, in Media, Pennsylvania, to the FBI office, I think during a Super Bowl.

00:47:40:26 - 00:47:41:11

Mike Benz: Yeah. COINTELPRO.

00:47:41:11 - 00:47:56:07

Eric Weinstein: To get COINTELPRO as a word that nobody knew what it meant. And then it was under FOIA that we had to pry open the information about our own government, because our own government has a very strong sense of state secrets.

00:47:56:07 - 00:48:52:09

Eric Weinstein: And I think that we have to be like, for example, I think the average American doesn't know that. They know about spousal privilege, and they know about, attorney client privilege and, physician patient privilege. Do they know about State Secrets Privilege, which came from the U.K.? They probably don't. There's an entire parallel architecture in the intelligence community and in the NatSec world, which the average American doesn't know. And so part of the problem that we're having here is, is that we're having a one-sided conversation where one group says, we are so important that we can't talk about things in an open society, and that by allowing that idea to progress unchecked—You said originally this, it's like almost somebody said it was almost like an intelligence operation. This is an intelligence operation against our own people. We had the Smith-Mundt Act that was supposed to keep us from being propagandized.

00:48:52:10 - 00:48:54:12

Nicole Shanahan: There was yeah, there was.

00:48:54:14 - 00:48:55:09

Eric Weinstein: We have social.

00:48:55:15 - 00:48:57:25

Nicole Shanahan: Very specifically, no domestic dissemination.

00:48:58:01 - 00:49:00:04

Eric Weinstein: No—right, of, like, VoA stuff.

00:49:00:06 - 00:49:00:13

Nicole Shanahan: Yep.

00:49:00:16 - 00:49:45:21

Eric Weinstein: And right now what you have is you have spy companies that are called things like search companies or social media companies that have dossiers on us that have backdoors. And the back-of-house of these companies is not shared with us. We don't know that we're the subject of an intelligence operation because we don't think of ourselves—I'm not a spy. I'm not trying to sell, you know, arms to Belarus or something like that. How is it that I am in your crosshairs? How have I wandered into your crosshairs, because I know some statistics or I know something a about genetics. It doesn't really make sense. And I think the way that you get there is you start from this perspective of, we need a secret architecture, which I believe that we do need.

00:49:45:24 - 00:50:17:22

Eric Weinstein: But if you believe in a secret architecture, you also have to believe in civilian oversight. And if none of us are permissioned, to look into your dark corners and dark places, if effectively you can't let us in because it's too dangerous, then you've developed a second government. It is a Shadow Government at that point. Now, I don't know whether we have a shadow government, but I definitely know that the world's smartest people in the areas that I care about have essentially zero comprehension, what the national security people are doing in the areas that are relevant.

00:50:17:25 - 00:50:45:08

Nicole Shanahan: Well, and again, like we're associated with some of the biggest organizations on the planet. And if we don't know, through our massive networks who's running this show, I, I mean, that's that means it must be a pretty small group of very, very influential folks who are all hiding behind something. And and I think we all have a sense of who these people are.

00:50:45:10 - 00:50:52:02

Nicole Shanahan: And I don't think our goal is to, you know, go out and put them on trial necessarily.

00:50:52:04 - 00:50:53:12

Eric Weinstein: Get them to talk!

00:50:53:15 - 00:51:16:20

Nicole Shanahan: We want to identify who they are. We want transparency. We like accountability. But most importantly, I think we'd like to restructure consensus building, so that there is qualified governance, there's governance that represents the people. There's disclosures. We we know how to—go on—

00:51:16:20 - 00:52:28:03

Jay Bhattacharya: Sorry, Nicole, can I can I give you an example of this? Because what you said is so important that it's the people's interests need to be represented in these decisions, right? So let me just get a very concrete example. Right. It's very likely that this pandemic was caused by, a kind of research that essentially turned viruses that were they went out into the wild places, got viruses that would never have seen the light of day, brought them into labs. And the civilian excuse was, well, we need to study these viruses to see if they might make the leap and then develop countermeasures vaccines, before they make the leap. Right. and so they're doing these dangerous experiments. And a very small number of people signed off on them. Tony Fauci signed off on these experiments; in 2012 he wrote a paper where he explicitly wrote that even if these experiments result in a worldwide pandemic, it'll be worth it because of the the knowledge gained. Right? Well, who is he to make that decision of such a risky activity that impacts every single person on the face of the earth, by himself or with it, with a small group of people? The expertise, that would have represented those people needed to be at the table when those decisions were made.

00:52:28:10 - 00:52:28:17

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.

00:52:28:23 - 00:52:45:18

Jay Bhattacharya: And it shouldn't have just been that small group of people making it, making decisions that very likely caused the pandemic. This kind of like true democratization, the representation of the people via expertise, dissenting expertise. I think that's the that's the path forward.

00:52:45:20 - 00:53:26:09

Eric Weinstein: I yeah, if you think about what Jay is saying, the the idea behind the, what was being done at the EcoHealth Alliance in its partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was this theory that to this day, nobody is discussing called “One Health” and One Health was this idea that you can't work on human health alone. We're all part of this. Like, you know, Gaia ecosystem is very hippie dippy and what does it mean? It means you have to go out into all of the world's most dangerous, Virus reservoirs and bring this stuff back to labs and populated places and work on them and see whether you can humanize these things.

00:53:26:09 - 00:53:36:00

Jay Bhattacharya: It's funny because that that that phrase was, coined by, this group, actually, I think I thought had like, actually good intentions in mind. It does make sense to understand how animals—

00:53:36:00 - 00:53:36:24

Eric Weinstein: Up to a point.

00:53:36:27 - 00:53:56:13

Jay Bhattacharya: But it was it was essentially stole like grabbed by people who just essentially used it to like, put this nice aura of like, let's understand how the world works into this very, very dangerous set of experiments that very likely cause the harm to the health and well-being of every single person on the face of the earth.

00:53:56:18 - 00:55:52:11

Eric Weinstein: But do we even know in a certain sense, whether this was a workaround to get around the Biological Weapons Convention of the 1970s and the Geneva Convention? In other words? Yeah. My concern about this is, we're talking about a phenomenon that I call Jessupization. If you think about the interchange between Colonel Jessup and Lieutenant Kaffee in A Few Good Men, it's not the way we remember it. These are two perspectives. The NatSec perspective and the democracy perspective. And Jack Nicholson has a much stronger point, until he occasionally veers into this thing where he says, I provide the freedom, right, which is Moses's sin, that he points to himself rather than realizing that he's part of a greater structure. And I believe that in some sense, what we're seeing is a group of people were saying, that deep down at a place that we don't like to talk about at parties, we're glad that they're there. And I'm actually not sure. And I'd like to get to the part of, “You're under arrest, you son of a bitch.” And it's not necessarily just—I don't want to punish anybody. I want this stuff to appear in a forum where I can trust that if I can't see the data because it's too dangerous, let's say the weaponization of anthrax or something like that. I want to know that somebody who holds my general concerns, who is highly competent, feels that they 100% were part of it. The consensus building before we got to how do we push it out and that those people are representing the interests where I cannot like I'm not a virologist. I'm not an epidemiologist. I need to have an expert, and the great danger about this is, is that if you don't want to play with the dissenting experts, just wait a decade and you're going to be taking this from internet figures who were, you know, until recently, gamers who were streaming on Twitch.

00:55:52:13 - 00:56:04:28

Nicole Shanahan: And these labs, I mean, Wuhan is not unique, unfortunately. There's several of them. And it's possible some of this work is being done here in the United States too as well.

00:56:05:01 - 00:56:12:26

Jay Bhattacharya: Even. This certainly is. Yeah. That's the 100% certainty. The American, the U.S. NIH publicly funded American Labs to do some of this work.

00:56:13:02 - 00:56:15:21

Eric Weinstein: When when did Plum Island shut down or is it still going?

00:56:15:21 - 00:57:05:18

Jay Bhattacharya: I don't know, I think it's now shut down. But like with, you know, like 22, I think it was 2011, there was the H1N1 virus that was essentially weaponized by in the, in the Netherlands, and funded by U.S taxpayers, the Rocky Mountain Lab, too, in Montana and has a lot of. So I just I mean, again, these the work being done at these places may or may not be worthwhile, may or may not be scientifically interesting. So on. But I think we should have at the table representatives of the people to say, look you you think you scientists think that this is worth the risk to the entire world? Well, you know, I don't I don't I don't think that's true. Like, maybe we shouldn't we shouldn't invest in you, right? Instead, what we have is the scientists themselves regulating whether those risks take

00:57:05:18 - 00:57:06:18

Eric Weinstein: Some scientists.

00:57:06:23 - 00:57:19:00

Jay Bhattacharya: Yes, a very few scientists themselves who stand to gain in this in the ladder of scientific respectability or whatever from doing this work, taking risks that may impact the health of every single human being.

00:57:19:02 - 00:57:20:19

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.

00:57:20:21 - 01:00:54:19

Mike Benz: Can I make one more one. Know this, because I always refer to the field of disinformation studies as being censorship gain-of-function, because it's basically the same sort of, you know, mad science that could destroy the world, you know, on the on this sort of, you know, free speech and democratic society side that could literally, you know, physically destroy the world on, on this sort of, virus side where, what they, what they do is they are they're juicing up censorship techniques and they do this in this sort of One Health style way. And this is what the Convergence Accelerator Track F Program is at the National Science Foundation, which is for, for trust, you know, in online news. And you know, so it's a convergence accelerator. It, it converges all these different disciplines who don't normally talk together and interact, you know, the, the, the linguistics people, the psychology people, the sociology people, the, the computational data science people, so that they're all working together to build this psychological vaccine. And so they're sort of taking that approach. But then the whole field itself is also cloistered in the same sort of intelligence, national security cloak that gain of health gain, gain of function work is, you know, these people always have someone from the CIA or someone from the military, you know, on their side. Now, oftentimes it won't be CIA operations. It'll be a CIA analyst in the CIA on the on the on the analyst side, will often recruit professors who are specialists in a particular language or region or cultural group when they are doing an operation in that, in that, or they'll have it basically bookworm types and they'll, they'll then when they leave the CIA, they now have a new track career to be an academic at the University of Stanford or MIT or Cambridge. And then they themselves will have partnerships with DARPA. They themselves are partnerships with NATO. And they they will effectively have a little bit of a public facing light, like you might read in The New York Times that there was funding to this gain-of-function thing, but you're not going to really look behind the hood. You may read on the National Science Foundation grant page that this university got a disinformation grant to study, you know, anti-NATO narratives circulating in NATO countries. But there's this whole cloistered national security underworld iceberg that they effectively, you know, do that Jack Nicholson thing where it's it's listen to the native because one of the funniest moments in my journey in learning all of this was, you know, there was this German Marshall Fund meeting and it was like 2019. And it was I think it was General John Allen who was, I think the Supreme Allied commander of NATO, or he ran the Afghanistan forces, and he had just become the head of Brookings Institution with the largest think tanks. And he was asked to give, you know, he gave a talk at one of the panels at the top three geopolitical threats to the world order. And the third one was online hate speech. It was very—it's not like Russian aggression. And what he said is, you know, you have this situation where, you know, hate speech gives rise to ethnocentrism, which gives rise to nationalism, which gives rise to opposition to the rules based international world order. This is what gave rise to Brexit. It'll give rise to Frexit and Italexit and Spaixit and Grexit and and so then the EU will come undone. And then that means NATO will come undone. That means the IMF and the World Bank will come undone. So the whole Rules-based International Order will collapse if we allow the civilian class—and this is a four star general—if we allow the civilian class to speak freely online.

01:00:54:19 - 01:02:44:15

Eric Weinstein: I'm so glad we're doing this. So different version of this is in my work in economics with my wife, Pia Melaney. We solved a problem called the “Changing Preference Problem”, that you couldn't allow people's tastes to change over time or all the models stopped functioning. And unfortunately, we found out that there was a structural paper written by Gary Becker and George Stigler, two Nobel laureates in economics, that states and baldly, “we believe that you don't argue over tastes because tastes are the same to all men and don't change over time”. Now, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in an academic journal, but it's they go in great detail as to how this works. And I'm sitting there fighting this thing. You know, we we have a mathematical solution to this problem, but this paper solves it by fiat, by just positing something that we know isn't true, that humans never change their tastes and we all have the same tastes. And I get this email saying, “I can't stand to watch you fighting this. You have to understand that when we set up the University of Chicago Economics Department, the reason it's so powerful and so famous is in part, that it was a bulwark against totalitarian communism, funded from inside, the intelligence world.” And then the person says to me, well, so I say, “I don't understand how how can anybody believe that all tastes are constant?” And what comes back is “we forgot to tell our descendants that this was being set up as a bulwark against totalitarian communism, so that when the end of the Cold War came, the grandchildren intellectually of this period have no idea that they're actually carrying out a long dead intelligence program so that the field can't progress.” And I was just flabbergasted by this, that—

01:02:44:18 - 01:02:45:21

Nicole Shanahan: That's wild!

01:02:45:24 - 01:03:03:05

Mike Benz: It’s funny, cause the Chicago School of Economics was used as the justification for the the, you know, the military takeover and international redevelopment of countries in Latin America. This is part of fighting Marxist Liberation Theology, was this idea that we're bringing market capitalism to them. And we're so the Chicago School of Economics—

01:03:03:09 - 01:03:40:11

Eric Weinstein: This was a piece of Kryptonite. In other words, the Changing Preference Problem gave anyone the opportunity to say, I appreciate all this work in neoclassical economics that you've pushed out to the planet, but are you telling me the whole thing collapses if we have tastes that change over time? So, in other words, they just they shoved in a fix with paperclips and masking tape and then, you know, and 50 years later, I think it was a 1977 paper called De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. We're still living in a world in which you can't innovate in economics mathematically because we're still fighting the Cold War.

01:03:40:14 - 01:03:48:29

Nicole Shanahan: Wow, that undermines also so many principles of how we think about capitalism and democracy and these very basic structures around.

01:03:49:05 - 01:03:50:06

Eric Weinstein: Oh my God, did you see.

01:03:50:06 - 01:04:00:05

Nicole Shanahan: That undermines a lot if you accept that it is too basic of a structure that doesn’t actually match to reality.

01:04:00:10 - 01:05:15:29

Eric Weinstein: So did you see your neighbor Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s podcast where they talked about going to the white House and the issue of AI, and they said, these visitors say, well, you can't bound math. And the White House says, oh, yes, we can. We had to do it. We had to do it for theoretical physics. In theoretical physics, you've got something called “Restricted Data”, which sounds completely innocuous, which means that there are it's the only category of intellectual property that is “Born Secret”. That means that if you're working at a cafe, you have no job with the federal government—you're not under any restrictions—if you write down something that can potentially impinge upon nuclear weaponry, it is already Q-classified just at the table—no government agency has to come in. Then we have another concept called the Deemed Export, which is intellectual, like, ideas that you can't share with foreign nationals. You don't understand how much NatSec infrastructure lives inside of these places. And Jay, you know, one of the most meaningful things you ever said to me was something like, “I've been at Stanford for 30+ years, and I had no idea how the place even worked!”

01:05:16:02 - 01:06:32:28

Jay Bhattacharya: Yeah, I mean, not for me. I, I wandered into this in 2020. Right? I was a professor for two decades at Stanford. I've been at Stanford now almost 40 years as a student and as professor. The world I thought I inhabited was a world that, there are ideas that people fight over, with with the kinds of, weapons the, you know, the I say what I believe, you say what you believe, Mike comes up with data, and you turn out to be right. And then, you know, I take you to dinner and say, okay, next time, right? That's the that's the world I thought we fought, and that's what I inhabited. The world that I've seen since 2020 is just it's very it's so, it's so unlike that world because it's instead of that spirit of dissent and open mindedness, reliance on data, real logic, a desire to, like, make sure that people, like regular people's lives are not harmed by what we do. Instead, what we have is this, world of power, power and control, where people tell themselves stories that if they let people have their say, if they let dissent in, that all hell will break loose. But in fact, all hell has and broken loose.

01:06:33:00 - 01:07:11:25

Nicole Shanahan: All hell has broken loose. And I think there's a misconception amongst this group that dissent is an attack on their character or an attack on their credibility. That's how they behave when you dissent and that's problematic because where did the foundations of debate actually go? And how did they devolve so quickly into character, an assumption of a character assassination. I mean, it's it is one sided. It's it's largely because they've undertook that culture. But we haven't undertaken that culture by any measure. And I think that's a culture that we're very much hoping to preserve.

01:07:11:28 - 01:08:39:16

Eric Weinstein: But it's also the case that how did how did the US as a young country end up with, like, the lion's share of the world's great research institutions? And the short answer is dissent, is that cowboy culture, “Yeehaw”, is all about challenging each other and going out for a drink afterwards. And when this came in and, you know, I again, I'm old, so I really saw this coming in in the 80s and 90s, and it got to other things like Public Health at this level much later, because we have we've been blessed not to have serious pandemics. So it wasn't tested. But if you were trying to do immigration work in the late 80s and early 90s, this is Industrial Strength Personal Destruction, destruction of reputation. It basically destroys your ability to earn a living as a Credentialed Expert. And it's been there for a long time, but it hasn't gotten to each of us personally at the same moment. And it's gotten much, much worse in the last, oh, I don't know, the last ten years. I think since the Dear Colleague Memo of Russlynn Ali in the Obama administration, that's when the universities really start to go crazy, and then their products start emerging into, let's say, the New York Times or the The Atlantic or some of these, new organizations for policing the internet, and that the products of that have been absolutely terrifying.

01:08:39:17 - 01:10:51:11

Nicole Shanahan: And it coincided with other things that happened to the Smith-Mundt Act. That was the changing of the domestic dissemination ban. They lifted it. They said now the USAGM, which is a massive, massive media agency owned by the government, which used to disseminate this information just overseas, could now be allowed to disseminate to the American public effectively U.S. propaganda. There was—there's still a restriction on targeting individuals, but we've found, Weston Sager, a young, independent attorney, filed a FOIA request and found that they had, in fact, used social media to target. So there's many of these underpinnings that are required. They're prerequisites for the slippage that has amounted to where we are in 2024 today. You talk about it a lot, Mike, and, you know, I think that there's plenty of evidence. But I want to make sure we get back to solutions because we're a little bit on our back foot, all of us right now, and we're fighting from our back foot. We've got to figure out how to get on our front foot. What are—congressional legislation, you know, vote for individuals that are talking about free speech. It's just really simple. These are constitutional defenders. If anyone is anti-free-speech, or has spoken about misinformation, they're likely bought into this regime. So that's one solution. But we've got to get on our front foot somehow, and I think we've got to get on our front foot quickly. So, you know, we're not disclosing like our master plan by any measure. But, you know, what are some of the things that we should be thinking about to get on our front foot? Obviously, X has been a blessing to many of us. Being re platformed has been a blessing to many of us. we still have hope in our institutions. Jay, you have a conference on the Great Barrington Declaration at Stanford, which I think is wonderful. Kudos to Stanford for doing that. Any anything else we should be?

01:10:51:14 - 01:12:02:16

Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, I, okay, so I've, said to tell you, look, I've gone from despondent to, like, hopeful in many ways. And I think—part of it is like, I was at one point in my life and even in 2020, I was convinced that we didn't need politics to solve this. We could just do this. If we just had people, good people, talking to each other. And I think actually there's a, there does actually need to be a political movement around this, but it's because it's people's interests that are not represented. That's why I'm so glad to see you and Bobby running, because you're putting injecting into the conversation things that the American people need to talk about and think about. It's absolutely vital. and I think that, that really that political angle actually is, I don't mean vote for person A or person B, I mean the political angle of telling the people, here's what's happening. What do you really want? What do you want from these institutions? They they have their legitimacy base be cut based on the people. Mike you were talking about this earlier. I thought that was really powerful. If they're not representing the people then what are they for? Who are they representing?

01:12:02:17 - 01:12:22:29

Nicole Shanahan: Well, they're representing the corporations who have now multiple interests. Mike, you just posted the other day and I didn't even know the extent of this, but that, Google is a major investor in vaccines. Yeah. So so they're both censoring dissenting opinions while cashing out financially.

01:12:23:02 - 01:16:10:26

Mike Benz: That's it. That's a great job. If you can get it, you know, to be in control, you've invested in a product and you can control every and how everyone thinks about the product. I mean, that's a that's a dream. But you know, you see this now with entities like NewsGuard too who will, you know, work with certain companies. And then it just so happens the things that they censor happen to be anything that opposes that particular, you know, company or ad agency who's got these portfolio companies who are benefiting from the rigged searches or the suppression of anyone who criticizes this. I mean, but, I do think that there is this issue with, you know, Eric, you mentioned this this term, you know, “Credentialed Expert” and, you know, talking about, you know, the science in the financial economy of of doing science work is so much about grants. Most secondary research—the National Science Foundation is the single largest funder of grants in secondary education. It's not really even a private, you know, university research ecosystem. The government grants dwarf it, and know I almost think of it like the McKinsey analogy, where, you know, companies will want to fire, you know, lay people off, but they don't want to get sued over doing it. So what they need is an outside validator, an independent consultant company like McKinsey. And they will hire McKinsey not to get, you know, a dispassionate third-party opinion about whether or not they should go through with the restructuring. But they give the wink wink, nudge nudge/informal, you know, golf course conversation with their liaison at McKinsey, “we need this report to say that we need to fire these people, because we're going to hold that up so that we don't get, you know, hit with laws; that'll make it go down easier.” And that is the role of this sort of mercenary science in a lot of places. And I think it's hard to change that simply on the basis of ideology, because you have the financial interests, right? Like people do not want to lose their livelihoods. Well, where else am I going to get the money from if I decline to do this research? And now I'm a pariah in Tony Fauci's eyes or whatnot. And I think this gets to this kind of whole society framework that I think is necessary on this, which is, you know, and again, I'm also hopeful, like Jay is even you look at the, you know, the Murthy-Missouri Decision where Jay is a plaintiff, with these great lower court rulings, Supreme Court, you know, made, in my view, a disastrous blunder. But the very next day, in I think it was Washington Post, but it may have been another, you know, sort of comparable no less than Nina Jankowicz, the disinformation czar, you know, the head of the disinformation governance board who sued Fox News for defamation for calling her a censor. And then the court just last week said, actually, we're dismissing the lawsuit because you were a censor. But she wrote an article the very next day or two days after the decision, saying that she was not optimistic about the ruling. And I think that the title of it was something like, you know, “The Murthy Scotus decision cannot undo the damage wrought against disinformation studies”. And I think that's true. but that is because everyone activated from all of the different areas. You had multiple different congressional committees, you know, from judiciary to house to house. You had state attorney generals taking action. You had private sector lawyers taking action. You had media and tons of media on it. And you had civil society watchdog organizations and nonprofits all. So you had this sort of whole society freedom alliance, which everybody sort of was able to do their part. That is how they actually established the censorship apparatus was through a whole site—so I think that whole-society-eye view is, is the way to look at solutions on it. And it's already racked up a lot of and—

01:16:10:29 - 01:16:42:08

Jay Bhattacharya: There's a practical thing that everyone, every person listening to this can do. Every single person you can ask your Congress, congressional candidates, where do you stand on free speech? Where do you stand on the censorship complex? What do you stand on regulation of science. What do you stand on corporate ownership of the of these kinds of, these these decisions about health, like, where do you—what is your position? Why are you not taking a position? Like every single person, Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter, should be asked these questions before. They before they adopt, accept power.

01:16:42:10 - 01:17:06:12

Nicole Shanahan: And then reform of the journals possibly as well, because the censorship is happening at the institutional scientific journal level. You talk a lot about this. And it's, we are due for a new model of publishing and reviewing scientific literature.

01:17:06:14 - 01:17:40:26

Eric Weinstein: The one of the strangest things is that you can talk to 100 randomly chosen professors at the top research universities in the country, and none of them know the history of peer review. So you have a very interesting situation that the people who are responsible for peer review do not know where it came from, do not know what happened in 1972 in medicine, and what happened in 1975 to stop something called the Bauman Amendment. One of the things that we find is, is that people are living in a world that they have no idea how it actually works. So, I got into a very public fight—

01:17:40:28 - 01:17:42:13

Nicole Shanahan: I think people are starting to get an idea.

01:17:42:17 - 01:17:42:25

Eric Weinstein: Well—

01:17:42:25 - 01:17:43:13

Nicole Shanahan: That's the good news.

01:17:43:14 - 01:18:14:02

Eric Weinstein: Okay, but in terms of what you're saying, solutions. One of the things that I think that you, Nicole, can do given your multiple hats, right. So you're wearing a science philanthropy hat, a law hat, and a candidate hat. I think that the idea that we were talking about earlier, about releasing the glossary of terms that, like Mike has uncovered when he says “Rules-based International Order”, people have no idea that that's like a set phrase and that you have to really understand what it actually means.

01:18:14:02 - 01:18:16:14

Nicole Shanahan: We will be releasing a glossary of terms after.

01:18:16:21 - 01:19:33:19

Eric Weinstein: Brilliant, hearings, the Church and Pike hearings. I think Gary Hart is still alive, who was on the Church Committee? People have to—why don't we reach out to Gary Hart and say, well, what actually happened when we had to look at what the intelligence community was, that we found out there was something called Section A of the Reserve Index, which was people to be rounded up in times of national emergency. And who are these people? Are they criminals? Are they gang leaders? No, they're the independently wealthy, TV newscasters, labor leaders, professors, anyone who could sway hearts and minds. We don't even know that there's a secret history of the McCarran Act, which sought to take the success as it was understood by the NatSec complex of the Japanese incarceration and set up prospective camps for communists that then they were disallowed when Daniel Inouye led a fight against this because he was in a position to do so. That reoccurs under FEMA, you have this entire history of the United States. Think about Howard Zinn on lots and lots of steroids. There is a NatSec history of the United States that to know about it means that you're a crazy person. And I think that this—

01:19:33:26 - 01:19:35:23

Mike Benz: More like Howard Zinn on on Hallucinogenics.

01:19:35:29 - 01:20:51:12

Eric Weinstein: Hallucinogenics. And, you know, the interesting thing is, is that most people don't know what the CIA does. They think it's Central Intelligence Agency, but it's also the covert operations. Some people say, oh, covert that just means silent or quiet. No, it means deniable. It means we have a plan for gaslighting you if you trip over this, which is called “Deconfliction”. So one of the things we can do is we can get all of the terminology. Like, how many Americans understand that there are three separate Deconfliction systems to prevent blue-on-blue, two teams of good guys running into each other. You've got an undercover guy pretending to be a Mexican drug lord, and he's going to be busted, by local police. And they have a system for figuring this out. We don't understand our own lives, our own government, until we understand the National Security complex. But to take an interest in the national security complex is to court this term Conspiracy Theorist, which is a fascinating term. We all know the conspiracies exist. We have RICO Acts, after all. But to posit a conspiracy in front of the government or in front of one of the political parties before they get to it—if you're reading ahead in the script, that's one of the worst crimes you can commit.

01:20:51:14 - 01:20:54:15

Nicole Shanahan: It hasn't turned out great for people who have taken that course.

01:20:54:17 - 01:22:22:03

Eric Weinstein: Well, what I would say is, and this is the bitter pill for us, I know it's supposed to be light and fun, but there's one thing that I think we really have to look at. National Security is a really strange thing to be tasked with. You actually do have to do some dirty stuff. You have to do some stuff that's quiet, and you've got to do some stuff that's in the national interest that you can't bring to a vote. What we need to do is we need to talk to these people and say, listen, we understand what you're saying about NATO. We understand what you're saying about public health. We understand the game theory of it all. Right now, what you're doing is going to destroy everything you've built. If we just took our hands off and went to the beach, you would destroy it in short order. Is there anything that you want to tell us? Do you, instead of going after us, would you prefer to work with us? Because we have the credibility. Because we stand up. I will stand up again if the NatSec complex decides to go after ordinary human beings and torture them. Like we didn't talk about Human Terrain and the subject of Cultural Anthropology. They've weaponized fields like Cultural Anthropology so that you can do a study of how people think and treat it as if it's terrain. If we don't know the terminology, if we don't know the history, then we are effectively just clueless rubes who’ve gotten off the bus in a very dangerous part of town, and we have no idea where we are. We have to arm ourselves with the information, the terminology, and the history.

01:22:22:05 - 01:23:17:17

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. One of the individuals that I think inspired this conversation, I wasn't actually previously aware of her until you shared prior to us going live is, Frances Kelsey, who was the scientist that prevented Thalidomide from coming to the United States, which was prescribed to pregnant women to help offset morning sickness. Later Frances, alone, rang the alarm bells that this was responsible for horrible birth defects. She came to the United States, worked very, very hard to prevent it from coming into the United States, thus saving many, many children here from the fate that hundreds of thousands of children suffered in Europe.

01:23:17:19 - 01:23:22:10

Jay Bhattacharya: Yeah. So, actually, it was it was Erica that brought this up. And it's such a really important story.

01:23:22:12 - 01:23:34:19

Eric Weinstein: Because your story sort of echoes this, and we need to get these inspiring stories out because you're not a crazy mom if what you're trying to do is to say, I will stand up to absolutely anything that comes after my child.

01:23:34:22 - 01:24:51:20

Jay Bhattacharya: Can I say one point about her? She's an absolute hero to me, right? So she worked for the FDA and she wasn't like the top of it, but she was just an honest scientist inside the FDA bureaucracy. And she just, she looked at the data and said, “look, there's not enough information here to guarantee the safety of this drug, show me more”. And in the meantime, the FDA equivalent in Europe had already signed off on it. And all these moms took this drug with the assurance it was safe, based on what their version of the FDA was telling them. And it wasn't safe. It led to their babies, many of their babies being born with no limbs. It was it was just absolutely heartbreaking. A huge—and so for her to stand up as a as a scientist in favor of the truth, and then to have the institution so that that it would listen to this dissenting voice. That protected all these moms and dads and babies in the United States, when in Europe, they'd failed, they let Thalidomide into the public with a promise it would stop you from getting morning sickness. But it just makes your baby have no limbs, or have these major birth defects. That's a model for how our institutions need to be. It's not that we don't need institutions. We need people inside the institutions that speak for the people.

01:24:51:27 - 01:25:26:27

Eric Weinstein: And think about how many of the people who have these characteristics passed through the University of Chicago. So one thing in terms of positive things to do, is to hold a conference at the University of Chicago, which I think has gotten somewhat beaten up during this time, but it's gotten a lot less beaten up than everywhere else. And we need to realize that we have to repopulate from the places that did the best job of standing up. I believe that if you go to the University of Chicago, you learn very quickly, it's in your blood, it's in the ethos, it's in the DNA—this is a place of scholarship.

01:25:26:29 - 01:25:28:22

Nicole Shanahan: My favorite economist came from there.

01:25:28:26 - 01:25:55:01

Eric Weinstein: Who is that? Oh, Coase! This is one of the great stories of all time. And, you know, in, in understanding which of our institutions have fared better, we have we have to recognize that, you know, okay, I'm sure there are times when it's been Princeton or Stanford or Berkeley, but right now, I think we need to look to the University of Chicago and ask, what did these tiny numbers of individuals do?

01:25:55:01 - 01:26:17:22

Eric Weinstein: When you believe in individuals like Dean Boyer or President—who was it—Bob Zimmer, you know, these are pivotal individuals. And just picking up on Frances Oldham Kelsey, we need to get back to the point where one person standing up is sufficient to turn back a tide of tens of thousands.

01:26:17:25 - 01:26:50:26

Nicole Shanahan: And that was one of the most beautiful thoughts, was that we are part of a tradition and we don't even know it, that this is not actually new, it's just ongoing. It crops up throughout history and there's an opportunity to recognize that we walk in the steps of those individuals like Frances Oldham Kelsey and, you know, JFK, when he was president, acknowledged that, acknowledged Frances and gave her a medal of honor, I believe.

01:26:51:03 - 01:27:11:16

Eric Weinstein: Absolute beautiful, beautiful moment. Can you imagine, can you imagine a government and, you know, the uncle of your running mate being able to say that the woman who stood up to pharmaceuticals is the one who should be getting our praise, and that tradition of courage is something we need to reinfuse.

01:27:11:17 - 01:27:14:01

Nicole Shanahan: And it gave us trust in the FDA.

01:27:14:03 - 01:28:14:23

Jay Bhattacharya: Well, I mean, and there was a law passed in 1962 actually giving the FDA the power to regulate the efficacy of drugs, right. And it revamped the FDA. As I recall, it was a major accomplishment of the of the Kennedy Administration. And I think, you know, the kinds of institutions that have at their heart the good of the people that have the people represented automatically will have these kinds of dissenting ideas allowed, permitted, even sometimes honored as part of them, it will never have the structures you're talking about, Mike, where like, the goal is to silence. The goal is to suppress. The goal is to get to, like, hammer down and label with, you know, with the Scarlet Letter, anyone that disagrees, that's so fundamentally un-American. I think to me then the solution is, let's empower the people to speak up again and ask for those institutions back.

01:28:14:26 - 01:28:53:03

Mike Benz: And that will require a renegotiation of the balance of power between civilians and the national security state, the the secrecy state, you know, the under iceberg of it. You know, I sometimes use the analogy that the national security state, if you go back to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, you know, Adam eats the, you know, the apple and gets cast out of Eden. And I can almost, you can almost think of that like cancellation for eating the apple. But you know, what's interesting about that is, you know, that apple is from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and not just the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

01:28:53:08 - 01:28:53:14

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.

01:28:53:16 - 01:29:10:26

Mike Benz: So you have this structure, which has grown and subsumed all these divisions. Jay, you didn't want anything to do with The Pentagon, I bet. I bet you didn't, like, it’s the farthest thing from your practice. But yet you saw it descend over your field.

01:29:10:29 - 01:29:11:03

Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.

01:29:11:06 - 01:29:42:08

Mike Benz: You know, people have a, you know, we're spending $300 billion in Ukraine. It'll probably go up to a trillion, you know, in a couple of years. And this is something we all have opinions, but we're finding our opinions are being censored by a military class when we're supposed to have a civilian one. But you have this class where, because it's a secret, it's this, you know, it's a classified apple. If you if you eat it and you learn this knowledge, you are cast out of Eden and you join us in the Council of the Canceled.

01:29:42:14 - 01:29:48:03

Nicole Shanahan: It’s scary at first. But there's a lot of us out here and it actually is really grounding.

01:29:48:06 - 01:29:48:26

Mike Benz: Right. But they—

01:29:48:26 - 01:29:49:13

Nicole Shanahan: It’s very nice.

01:29:49:14 - 01:31:02:16

Mike Benz: They've set themselves up as the God figure in that anecdote. And that's not the way it was supposed to be. This in a civilian run government, the civilians, you know, are the spirit, the, you know, the Holy Spirit of it, if you will. It is, you know, they this the military, the national security state, the intelligence agencies and all of their proxies in the NGO world, in the university world are supposed to be answerable to the civilians. And I think one thing that's actionable in all of this is we understand that there's military work and national security intelligence work, you know, for things in foreign countries and, you know, where the troops are moving, the secret military bases, whatnot. But the fact is, there's so much of it. And, Eric, you know, hit on this phrase, it’s "Hearts and Minds" work. And the issue is, is that hearts and minds work is effectively classified. And we become casualties of a proxy war playing on, playing out above our heads. Because with the end of the Smith-Mundt Act, now hearts and minds work that's done by the U.S. State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) can now come back, because that Global Engagement Center now is a partnership with the University of Cambridge for their psychological vaccine to stop Fake News, which is designed to prevent—

01:31:02:16 - 01:31:15:12

Eric Weinstein: And the Five Eyes Agreement, where the idea is, we can't spy on our own people, so we agree to spy on the people of other Anglophone countries. It's like, how many of us are aware of these sort of bizarre arrangements and we can't talk about them—you want to—?

01:31:15:18 - 01:31:22:26

Nicole Shanahan: I have a proposal because we're at time, that we reconvene in Chicago at some point in the near future.

01:31:22:27 - 01:31:23:26

Eric Weinstein: Done.

01:31:23:28 - 01:31:24:12

Nicole Shanahan: Sound good?

01:31:24:13 - 01:31:25:16

Jay Bhattacharya: Absolutely, great.

01:31:25:16 - 01:31:43:17

Nicole Shanahan: And and we'll invite more. I know there's several on this live stream that ought to be a part of this conversation. and let's get back to it soon. And I really think I feel like we could keep going for hours and hours and hours. I'm sure we'll continue our after I. Yeah, we will after we go, off the live stream.

01:31:43:17 - 01:31:54:15

Nicole Shanahan: But thank you, everybody, for joining us, to the very, very first Council of the Canceled. I hope it was helpful. Leave your questions in the comments.

01:31:54:17 - 01:31:55:26

Eric Weinstein: And suggestions.

01:31:55:28 - 01:32:09:17

Nicole Shanahan: And suggestions in the comments. I do love all the suggestions I've been getting on X, and many of them have actually led to this convening, so keep it up. Thank you so much, Jay, Eric, Mike, it's been a real pleasure.

01:32:09:18 - 01:32:11:24

Eric Weinstein: Nicole, thanks for making this happen. Wow.

01:32:11:27 - 01:32:39:28

Nicole Shanahan: Wow. Thank you. Take care. Bye guys.