17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”

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Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”
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Information
Guest Anna Khachiyan
Length 02:20:04
Release Date 20 December 2019
YouTube Date 6 February 2020
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Somewhere on the road between Stalingrad and Forever21, something essential got misplaced amidst the bathos. Eric works through a bottle of Red wine on air with social, literary and artistic theorist Anna Khachiyan (co-host of the explosive and popular Red Scare podcast) to find out what is brewing on the anti-woke Left among the intellectual daughters of Camille Paglia. Anna takes us through her project of the reconstructed feminine combining irreverent intellectual dominance with a return to valuing motherhood informed by her claims on Soviet & American heritage. The intellectual foundation of the intersectional “oppression Olympics” and reparations discussion is further dissected amidst the twin specters of the Armenian & Jewish genocides which mysteriously appear not to register at all with today’s progressives.

No puppies were eaten during this podcast, but an ambient trigger warning is otherwise in order for those with exquisite sensitivities. Caveat emptor and welcome to the Grand Finale of the inaugural year of “The Portal.”

Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Anna Khachiyan (left) on episode 17 of The Portal Podcast

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Relevant Links[edit]

Red Scare podcast[edit]


Non-English Translations[edit]

Hebrew[edit]

l'dor v'dor
  • Hebrew spelling:
  • Alternative English spellings:
  • Definition:


verklempt
  • Hebrew spelling:
  • Alternative English spellings:
  • Definition:


schtupped
  • Hebrew spelling:
  • Alternative English spellings:
  • Definition:

Russian[edit]

Na zdorovie
  • Russian spelling:
  • Alternative English spellings:
  • Definition:


matryoshka
  • Russian spelling:
  • Alternative English spellings:
  • Definition:


Phrase/Term mentions[edit]

  • Intersectional shakedown
  • Social justice warriors (SJWs)
  • Neoliberal
  • Generations in the Western World
    • Generation Z (Gen-Z) (1997-2012)
    • Millienials / Generation Y (Gen-Y) (1981-1996)
    • Generation X (Gen-X) (1965-1980)
    • Baby Boomers (Boomers) (1946-1964)
    • The Silent Generation (1928-1945)
    • The Greatest Generation (1901-1927)
    • The Lost Generation (1883-1900)
  • Antinatalism
  • Vocal fry and uptalking
  • Stoicism
  • Soma
  • "Rome wasn't built in a day"
  • Ginger Rogers principle
  • Co-dependence vs Interdependence
  • Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)
  • Disrespect for the institution of motherhood
  • Lost Generation in Russia
  • Empathy templates
  • Stiob
  • The Gated Institutional Narrative
  • MILF
  • Non-player character (NPC)
  • Jouissance
  • Russian avante-garde
  • The Socialist Realists
  • Midas touch
  • Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)
  • Nihilism
  • Bushwick, Brooklyn
  • Vice signaling
  • Contract Bridge
  • Convex polytopes
    • 24 cell
    • 120 cell
  • Oxbridge system
  • Hypernormalization
  • Marvel-ization and Disneyfication of film
  • Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI)
  • Klein bottle
  • Glendale Galleria
  • Oxygen mask rule for air travel
    • "Please place the mask over your own mouth and nose before assisting others."
  • Modern gender and sexuality classification language
    • Non-binary
    • Polyamory
    • Bisexuality
    • Heteronormative
    • Cis-gendered
  • Non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
  • Negging
  • Phone trees
  • Psychological transference

People mentions[edit]

  • Blake Masters
    • Peter Thiel's co-author for Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
  • Mariah Carey
  • Leonid Khachiyan (Anna's father, Soviet-American mathematician and computer scientist)
  • Rachel Dolezal
  • Otis Blackwell
  • Elvis Presley
  • Bokeem Woodbine
  • Katy Perry
  • Miley Cyrus
  • Kim Kardashian
  • Quentin Tarantino
  • J.D. Vance
  • George W. Bush
  • Jordan Peterson
  • Quentin Crisp
  • Christopher Lasch
  • Amy Winehouse
  • John Denver
  • Beyonce
  • Woody Allen
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Ronald Fisher
    • Fisher's Principle
  • Ginger Rogers
  • Fred Astaire
  • Peter Thiel
  • Andrew Yang
  • Tulsi Gabbard
  • Donald Trump
  • Jon Stewart
  • John Oliver
  • Stephen Colbert
  • Sigmund Freud
  • Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu (Romania)
  • Hillary Clinton
  • Kamala Harris
  • Pete Buttigieg
  • Sam Harris
  • Joe Rogan
  • Greta Thunberg
  • Pamela Karlan
  • Barron Trump
  • Melania Trump
  • Jackson Pollack
  • Bret Easton Ellis
    • Less Than Zero
      • Clay
  • Michel Houellebecq
    • Serotonin
  • Honoré de Balzac
  • Gustave Flaubert
  • Joan Didion
  • Philippe Petit
  • Dan Bilzerian
  • Howard Stern
  • Andrea Long Chu
  • Valerie Solanas
  • Harvey Weinstein
  • Anna Pavlova
  • Garry Kasparov
  • Adam Curtis
    • Hypernormalisation
  • Alexei Yurchak and Dominic Boyer
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder
    • World on a Wire
  • Edgar Allen Poe
    • The Tell-tale Heart
  • Camille Paglia
  • Erich Fromm
  • Ruth Westheimer (Dr. Ruth)
  • Aziz Ansari
  • Caitlin Flanagan
  • John Berger
  • Kristen Roupenian
  • Syliva Nasar
    • A Beautiful Mind
  • Rebecca Goldstein
    • The Mind-Body Problem
  • Karen Uhlenbeck
  • Lisa Jeffrey
  • Angela Nagle
  • Amanda Fielding
  • Vitalik Buterin
    • Etherium
  • Lev Landau
  • Sergei Rachmaninoff
  • Hedy Lamarr
  • Marie Curie
  • Madame Wu

Historical mentions[edit]

  • Collapse of the Soviet Union
  • Twin genocides of Jews and Armenians
    • The Holocaust
    • Armenian Genocide
  • Slavery in America
  • Kristallnacht
  • Serfdom in Russia
  • "Light slavery" in America
    • Appalachia and hillbillies
    • Company towns and private armies
  • The Cold War
  • Pan-Am stewardesses in the 1960's
  • The Barbell Society
  • Education and athletics in the Soviet Union
  • Decline in IQs
    • Flynn Effect

Pop Culture references[edit]


  • Cornrows hairstyle
  • Reddit
  • Human Centipede
  • Sugar Baby University
  • American Collegiate University system and student loan debt
  • University of Phoenix
  • The Daily Show
  • Saturday Night Live (SNL)
  • "In the Hall of the Trumpian King"
  • Chauncey Gardner
  • World Wildlife Federation
  • Time Magazine
    • Person of the Year award
  • Mad Men
  • The Love Boat
  • Game of Thrones
  • William Tell
  • Ulysses
  • Serafin
  • Krokodil
  • The Caine Mutiny
    • Captain Queeg
  • Star Wars
    • Obi-Wan Kenobi
    • Yoda
    • Order 66
  • The Matrix
    • Bullet time
  • Passover
  • Babe.net
  • Coffee, Tea, or Me?
  • The Handmaid's Tale

Transcript[edit]

00:00:00
[intro music]

Eric Weinstein: Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm lucky to be here tonight with Anna, and here it comes, Khachiyan.

00:00:13
Anna Khachiyan: Thanks for having me.

00:00:14
Eric Weinstein: Oh, did I, did I screw that up unforgivably?

00:00:16
Anna Khachiyan: No, no, no, no, no. That's right.

00:00:18
Eric Weinstein: And Anna is half of the up and coming podcast, Red Scare, which has everyone talking.

00:00:25
Anna Khachiyan: Everyone. I don't know about everyone.

00:00:26
Eric Weinstein: Not everyone.

00:00:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:00:27
Eric Weinstein: I'm exaggerating slightly.

00:00:28
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:00:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But it's, uh, I just got introduced to you-

00:00:33
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

00:00:33
Eric Weinstein: ... by, uh, a colleague of mine, Blake Masters-

00:00:36
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

00:00:36
Eric Weinstein: ... who's Peter Thiel's co-author.

00:00:37
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:00:38
Eric Weinstein: And I've been addicted to your podcast, not quite understanding why. It's one of the strangest things I've ever found. Can you say more about what induced you to do it, and why you think it might be working?

00:00:49
Anna Khachiyan: Um, I have no clue why it's working. I know that it's probably due to some sort of, uh, alchemical, inarticulable thing that's totally out of my control, um, that has something to do with my chemistry with my h- cohost, who's an actress called Dasha Nekrasova. Um, but, uh, I think maybe it struck a chord. I, I know that it consistently infuriates all the wrong people, which was never my intention.

00:01:19
Eric Weinstein: So innocent.

00:01:20
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:01:20
Eric Weinstein: And that's so beautiful.

00:01:21
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah.

00:01:21
Eric Weinstein: But it's also not entirely believable, because it does seem like what you're doing is you're crowding out a certain kind of piousness. And we, we had an epic lunch the other day.

00:01:35
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, we did. We had a, what they call a power lunch.

00:01:37
Eric Weinstein: Is that a power lunch?

00:01:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah.

00:01:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I think I had that-

00:01:41
Anna Khachiyan: I, I just learned at the last minute that this podcast is being filmed, because I was telling Eric here that, uh, the way that we run ours is, like, a bunch of wires and crap strewn on the floor, like chain-smoking. Uh, Dasha s- literally sits on the ground objecting- objectifying herself at every turn, and I, uh, sit on my disgusting, stained, and cigarette-burned couch. Um, but this is my bad side, and I wish I was more of a diva like Mariah Carey and could demand that we switched seats.

00:02:12
Eric Weinstein: S- really?

00:02:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. No, I'm kidding. I'm being hyperbolic.

00:02:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, and, and we always pick up the syringes before the guests come.

00:02:18
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Um, anyway, what was the question?

00:02:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, the question surrounds, uh... What I was gonna get at is that we had this bit of a riff where I've said that I'm trying to be long good and short nice.

00:02:34
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:02:35
Eric Weinstein: That nice doesn't really have a future, because nice is really this kind of-

00:02:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:02:38
Eric Weinstein: ... performative version that crowds out good.

00:02:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:02:41
Eric Weinstein: And you seem to have, have mastered this form- formula, where I detect, uh, a deeply buried good, and there's a, an attack on nice at all times.

00:02:52
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. I mean, I think that, um, nice, on some level, is a futile position. I mean, e- even you look at, like, female social politics, right? And there's always kind of, uh, irrepentant bitches masquerading as nice girls, and then there's nice girls masquerading as irrepentant bitches. And I, I think, I would like to think that I'm the latter.

00:03:15
Eric Weinstein: Remains to be seen.

00:03:16
Anna Khachiyan: Uh, yeah. I don't know that I have any sort of earnest, or s- let's say, let's put it this way. I don't know that I have kind of a sustained political vision that I would like to enact. It's kind of out of my control, as... You know, my father always used to say, "You're but a crumb floating on the face of the earth." But-

00:03:32
Eric Weinstein: Was that to build your confidence and self-esteem?

00:03:33
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. The, the s- the Russian way of parenting. It's like Russian self-esteem. Um, but at the end of the day, I th- I have kind of a very earnest ethical agenda that I'm hoping, uh, to populate the minds of my young girl and gay listeners with.

00:03:51
Eric Weinstein: I would've said infect, but okay. Populate.

00:03:53
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:03:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:03:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Infect is a, another good one, yeah.

00:03:56
Eric Weinstein: Wonderful. Um, so let's, let's just [laughs] get d- into a little bit of your background as you're mining it-

00:04:03
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:04:03
Eric Weinstein: ... for the kind of motif that even though it's an intrinsically American show, it's informed by this sort of broad Slavic soul.

00:04:12
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:04:12
Eric Weinstein: And you were born in...

00:04:15
Anna Khachiyan: In Moscow.

00:04:16
Eric Weinstein: In Moscow.

00:04:16
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. In 1985. Um, the internet and my Spanish Wikipedia says that it's 1986. I... Every year I'm aging backwards on the internet.

00:04:27
Eric Weinstein: Nice. Yeah.

00:04:27
Anna Khachiyan: Next year I'll be 32. Yeah, it's great.

00:04:29
Eric Weinstein: Great.

00:04:29
Anna Khachiyan: Um, yeah, I'm like the Benjamin Buttons of neoliberal critique. And, but, uh, I was born in, in 1985 at the tail end, uh, you know, right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there's no way that that experience, along with the kind of, uh, inevitable trauma of immigration doesn't inform your worldview.

00:04:56
Eric Weinstein: So if I understand correctly, not only, uh, are you coming with this sort of, uh, tail end, uh, Soviet influence-

00:05:06
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:05:06
Eric Weinstein: ... but it is also the case that you've got access to, uh, to the, the twin genocides of Jews and Armenians.

00:05:14
Anna Khachiyan: That's true, yeah. It... I always say on Twitter, it's very depressing that, you know, my ancestors survived the Armenian genocide and then the Holocaust. So, uh, their, uh, descendant could become a podcaster [laughs] in Brooklyn, now Manhattan.

00:05:31
Eric Weinstein: And, uh, no doubt, because, uh, you're white of hue, you are going to be labeled as privileged because-

00:05:36
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

00:05:36
Eric Weinstein: ... you come from these two-

00:05:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

00:05:38
Eric Weinstein: ... ethnic groups, which s- for some reason [laughs] we can't actually locate in human history or what these groups have been through, which I find also-

00:05:45
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:05:45
Eric Weinstein: ... weirdly amusing.

00:05:46
Anna Khachiyan: This is a very... I mean, this is an, a very interesting point. I don't know if we wanna... I'm not drunk yet, so maybe we should get into the, um, uh, intellectual-

00:05:54
Eric Weinstein: Can, can we toast to sobriety?

00:05:55
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Let's toast to sobriety.

00:05:56
Eric Weinstein: To sobriety.

00:05:57
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Um, na zdorovye.

00:05:59
Eric Weinstein: Na zdorovye.

00:05:59
Anna Khachiyan: Um, you, I don't... So I'll get into all the kind of like, um, heavy-handed intellectual stuff in the first half, let's say, but this is one of, I think, my central projects or critiques that I'm interested in. Uh, I, I don't, obviously, I don't dispute the- Completely gross, horrific legacy of American slavery, right? It existed. It plunged an entire population into poverty, into, uh, social fragmentation. The, the legacy is still alive and well today. Um, what I object to, I think, is the wholesale export of the American, uh, view of race relations to elsewhere in the world, to people who don't have the similar experience.

00:06:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, I guess from my perspective, what I find very odd about all of this is that having been close to people in the Armenian and Jewish communities, there's a tremendous amount of intergenerational trauma-

00:07:03
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

00:07:04
Eric Weinstein: ... because there has to be.

00:07:05
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Well, my sister and I call, call it hand-me-down trauma.

00:07:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:07:08
Anna Khachiyan: It's something you inherit, you know, like a, a broach or like a necklace.

00:07:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, I would say it's also a set of behavior patterns-

00:07:16
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:07:16
Eric Weinstein: ... for detecting when things are starting to get really dicey.

00:07:20
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:07:20
Eric Weinstein: It's sort of like you have to know that, um... It's not that the generation that goes through these things is the only one that has a claim. The longevity of these populations is about saying, "We don't know whether there's gonna be another one of these episodes in your time."

00:07:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:07:36
Eric Weinstein: "So everyone always has to be ready."

00:07:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:07:38
Eric Weinstein: There's no state of not being ready, like, "We've made it. We finally-

00:07:42
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:07:43
Eric Weinstein: ... we're, we're orthodontists. We're gonna be fine."

00:07:45
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. I mean, you-

00:07:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:07:46
Anna Khachiyan: ... you can't rest on your laurels effectively. And I think-

00:07:49
Eric Weinstein: You have to sleep with one eye open in some sense.

00:07:51
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Well, yeah, the, you know, y- with a knife under your pillow.

00:07:56
Eric Weinstein: You gonna give away all of our secrets?

00:07:57
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs] Yeah. Um, I have so many dark family secrets. But, um, the, I think the basic correct, uh, principle, the, the basic critique of, um, certain, I guess, leftist intellectuals in the United States is this idea that, okay, well, uh, somebody like me is not only white, not only would be associated as white or would consider herself white, but is essentially white-passing, so therefore even if I was not hypothetically white, I could rake in the certain white privilege that, for example, or a, a black or Latino person couldn't.

00:08:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is what I've called the intersectional shakedown.

00:08:36
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:08:37
Eric Weinstein: And the, the populations that are f- [laughs] are maximally irritating to the inter- inter- uh, intersectional shakedown artists are the populations with recent claims to oppression that are nevertheless making it economically, because really what it is is an attempt to take a real history of oppression-

00:08:56
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:08:56
Eric Weinstein: ... and to turn it into cash.

00:08:58
Anna Khachiyan: Yes. Well, yeah, I tweeted literally today moments before I, um, came here that the kind of idea of cultural pro- appropriation, that debate makes perfect sense in a, a culture where, uh, identity is viewed as a form of capital. Because it becomes then a zero-sum game. If somebody like, uh, Rachel Dolezal, right-

00:09:21
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:09:21
Anna Khachiyan: ... uh, perpetuates this myth that she's a Black woman, she is basically taking food out of the mouth, power out of the hands of an actually Black woman.

00:09:31
Eric Weinstein: Right. So there's that absurdity, but then we actually have to contend with the weird aspect. For example, if you look at the exploitation of Black musicians-

00:09:39
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:09:40
Eric Weinstein: ... who very often, you know... At some point you had a lot of, uh, illiterate, um, genius musicians in the Delta-

00:09:47
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:09:48
Eric Weinstein: ... who were brilliant enough to produce great music but weren't capable of defending themselves in a legal structure.

00:09:53
Anna Khachiyan: Right, exactly.

00:09:53
Eric Weinstein: And so you actually had cultural exploitation of one group by another through appropriation, so you would get... You know, I, I think at some point I saw Otis Blackwell performing in New York City-

00:10:04
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

00:10:04
Eric Weinstein: ... and, you know, he had to say, "Look, I'm the guy behind Elvis Presley."

00:10:08
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:10:08
Eric Weinstein: And the idea is that when Elvis sang it, it was acceptable to a market that he couldn't sell into.

00:10:13
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:10:14
Eric Weinstein: So there is a real aspect to cultural appropriation, and there's a totally fake aspect-

00:10:21
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, yeah

00:10:21
Eric Weinstein: ... which is this sort of... A- and they're coexisting, and so-

00:10:25
Anna Khachiyan: I think-

00:10:25
Eric Weinstein: ... it's very tempting for people like us just to point at the bullshit.

00:10:29
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:10:29
Eric Weinstein: But there actually is this unfortunate reality that's braided with it.

00:10:34
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, absolutely. No pun intended. Um, [laughs] sorry.

00:10:37
Eric Weinstein: Oh, braids?

00:10:38
Anna Khachiyan: Braids, yeah. In the Box braids. Um, no, but it's-

00:10:40
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:10:40
Anna Khachiyan: ... it's, uh, absolutely true. I mean, you can give the example of, like, Hesh in The Sopranos, right? We talked about The, The Sopranos at our power lunch. Um, who's, uh, this guy who's kind of this, like, kindly, sensible Jewish grandfather-

00:10:52
Eric Weinstein: Within a mafia context

00:10:54
Anna Khachiyan: ... within a mafia context, is war- so warm and loving and steadily, and this is a guy who has historically stiffed Black musicians for royalties, right? And there's that famous reparations episode with, uh, I think it was Bokeem Woodbine playing the, the rapper, Mini Gark guy.

00:11:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's a question about whether he's gonna visit violence upon him, but it turns out he's gonna visit a lawsuit or something.

00:11:15
Anna Khachiyan: Yes. Yeah.

00:11:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

00:11:16
Anna Khachiyan: Exactly. But then you have, like, these, um, cultural examples of, like, you know, like Katy Perry or, uh, uh, Miley Cyrus wearing cornrows, like Kim Kardashian wearing cornrows in a, um, Kardashian, like, beauty photo shoot, which I find completely preposterous. No one owns cornrows. [laughs]

00:11:40
Eric Weinstein: I don't know enough about-

00:11:42
Anna Khachiyan: Well, nobody-

00:11:42
Eric Weinstein: ... female hairstyle

00:11:43
Anna Khachiyan: ... there's no direct line of monetization, right?

00:11:46
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:11:47
Anna Khachiyan: Uh, I don't see it that way. And so that, that's a, a discourse that I think, yeah, you're right, exists as, like, a proxy discourse because people are afraid to confront the deeper, more complex issues.

00:11:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think that, and you have one set of legitimate issues acting as the stalking horse for this, uh, infernal shakedown. And my, my hatred of this comes from the fact that i- if American Jews who have made it-

00:12:12
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:12:12
Eric Weinstein: ... financially in one generation are somehow safe and secure, and therefore privileged-

00:12:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:12:18
Eric Weinstein: ... something is entirely broken with your cosmology.

00:12:20
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. Well, how do you mean?

00:12:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's just like, uh, I assume that the German Jews in the, you know, before Kristall- the, the two nights before Kristallnacht were privileged-

00:12:29
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, yeah

00:12:30
Eric Weinstein: ... and should be worried about their privilege. It's just this is stupid.

00:12:33
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, it's a silly argument. And I think you know, I get into spats about this and I'm, I'm frequently [laughs] accused of, like, being racially insensitive. And I you know, as Quentin the, the late great Quentin Tarantino said, "I reject that hypothesis." It's patently false. W- what I've always said is not I'm not in the business, I'm not interested in having an oppression Olympics and saying like, "Well, okay, look, I come from a, a historically oppressed background on two sides, but yet I, you know, grew up in a-

00:13:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I see

00:13:06
Anna Khachiyan: ... totally middle class milieu and you know, but I'm gonna u- use this kind of identitarian card. I'm gonna play the card to be oppressed." That's not at all what I'm interested in. Um, what I'm saying is that as a person who comes from a, a different culture, I can view the legacy of American slavery at a critical distance in a way that American people may not be able to. Right? Because in, in Russia you have a parallel system called serfdom.

00:13:34
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:13:34
Anna Khachiyan: The s- the slaves and the serfs were emancipated within, I think-

00:13:38
Eric Weinstein: Oh

00:13:38
Anna Khachiyan: ... a year of each other.

00:13:40
Eric Weinstein: Right. But I mean, I just had, uh, J.D. Vance in your chair.

00:13:43
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:13:44
Eric Weinstein: Uh.

00:13:44
Anna Khachiyan: I've heard only horrible things about him.

00:13:46
Eric Weinstein: Oh.

00:13:47
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:13:47
Eric Weinstein: I'll introduce you.

00:13:48
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:13:48
Eric Weinstein: I like him quite a bit. Um, he you know, his family of course, is coming from Appalachia.

00:13:54
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:13:54
Eric Weinstein: And hillbillies were de facto enslaved, uh, maybe a s- s- form of light slavery if you will.

00:14:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:14:01
Eric Weinstein: Just serfdom is a different form of enslavement.

00:14:03
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:14:04
Eric Weinstein: Um, with company towns, company script, company stores, company housing, private armies of detective agencies.

00:14:11
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:14:11
Eric Weinstein: So you know, the idea that that is seen through the lens of white privilege shows you the em- mental impoverishment of the current woke ideology.

00:14:22
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:14:22
Eric Weinstein: And my claim is that we, we cannot afford to dispute it. We must ignore it just because it, it sort of shouldn't qualify intellectually. Like, it didn't make, uh-

00:14:32
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, as, as, uh, George Bush II said, "You don't negotiate with terrorists." And this is, I think, my big opposition to it is that woke ideology by and large is an emo- is, um, an emot- like, an emotional hostage situation. It really is. It's a, it's a hostage crisis.

00:14:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, you s- you seem to n- you seem to be ignoring the credible threat to your reputation. In fact, it's making your reputation.

00:14:57
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but that's-

00:14:57
Eric Weinstein: So you're metabolizing this kind of, um, weird resentment and hatred, um, that people are experiencing through fear because these are reputational attacks. As in general-

00:15:09
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

00:15:09
Eric Weinstein: ... they, they're attacks that say, "I'm going to make it impossible for you to earn a normal living by atta- by at- making an attack on your reputation, which, which you need to negotiate-

00:15:19
Anna Khachiyan: Right

00:15:19
Eric Weinstein: ... the institutional world."

00:15:21
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. And it's like, you know, it's, uh, th- Jordan Peterson famously said, like, "I've figured out a way to monetize the SJWs," and you know, you could possibly say that about Red Scare. But the, uh, it's not kind of-

00:15:35
Eric Weinstein: No, I think you guys are doing something much more bizarre and interesting.

00:15:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. But it's not intended in that way. But that, that was never the premise or the interest. It was kind of this earnest, it was truly kind of an earnest frustration with liberal mainstream feminism and liberalism.

00:15:56
Eric Weinstein: I don't even know whether it's liberalism. I mean, like, e- everything is so watered down and, and metastatic and bizarre-

00:16:01
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:16:02
Eric Weinstein: ... that it's the vague whiff of the left gone mad.

00:16:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:16:08
Eric Weinstein: Right? Like, it's not liberal. It's not progressive. We don't even know what it is. It just sort of technically-

00:16:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, it's not-

00:16:14
Eric Weinstein: ... resides to the left

00:16:14
Anna Khachiyan: ... conservative either, right?

00:16:16
Eric Weinstein: No.

00:16:16
Anna Khachiyan: You can't rightfully call it that. Um-

00:16:19
Eric Weinstein: Self-hatred is obviously a very large part of it.

00:16:22
Anna Khachiyan: I think, I... Yeah, self-hatred. I mean, this is a- another kind of, you know, I repeat myself loudly and often, um-

00:16:30
Eric Weinstein: Well done

00:16:30
Anna Khachiyan: ... according to the advice of my hero, Quentin Crisp, who said that that was kind of the way to be- make yourself memorable. And um, the, it, the problem with the left, and I'm talking about kind of primarily the online left, is that these are people who are thoroughly infected with the virus of, uh, the neoliberal ethos. They're completely, they play completely within the terms of the system. And you know, it, this brings to bear a very important point that I also like to repeat loudly and often by the new left critic Christopher Lasch. Um, and I'm gonna paraphrase it because I don't know it verbatim because my synapses have been, uh, zapped by being too extremely online, you know? Um, but he said, like, "Hey, you know, all the kind of traditional, uh, bedrocks, all of the traditional values and institutions of liberal society," um, we're talking about monogamy, marriage, uh, the gender binary, um, any number of other kind of traditional values, have already been, been dealt a serious blow by advanced capitalism itself long before the social justice activists got their hands on them, before they mounted a fight against them. And that's a very important point to remember.

00:17:53
Eric Weinstein: So the way I see it, and, and you'll let me know if this dovetails or in fact conflicts or maybe it's just-

00:17:59
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:17:59
Eric Weinstein: ... a total miss, is that the family and the religion-

00:18:05
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:18:05
Eric Weinstein: ... or culture-

00:18:06
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:18:07
Eric Weinstein: ... provide many of the same things that the market provides, like let's say an insurance policy.

00:18:12
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:18:13
Eric Weinstein: Right? So for example, um, if you're trying to smooth your income stream over a lifetime and you have recessions, a family might take in some members who are out of work and-

00:18:26
Anna Khachiyan: Right

00:18:26
Eric Weinstein: ... put them to work in portions of the family business that are still functioning or work inside the home-

00:18:32
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:18:33
Eric Weinstein: ... um, in a way that sort of socializes some of the risk. And at the same time, you might buy some kind of a- A policy to try to smooth things out, you know, or y- or you'll, you'll try to save, uh, in an institutional context. As these things conflict, um, the market has denatured some of these older structures. When people talk about American families are weak-

00:19:03
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:19:04
Eric Weinstein: ... what they usually mean is, is that American markets have been regular and strong enough-

00:19:08
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:19:09
Eric Weinstein: ... that people have leaned less on the-

00:19:11
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:19:12
Eric Weinstein: ... pathologies of their mishpocha-

00:19:14
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:19:14
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, in order to try to get cleaner expressions within the market-

00:19:19
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:19:19
Eric Weinstein: ... for, for their various needs. Like, instead of having, you know, a mother, uh, come and be with a child when a new baby is born-

00:19:26
Anna Khachiyan: Do your laundry, yeah [laughs].

00:19:27
Eric Weinstein: What?

00:19:28
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:19:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:19:28
Anna Khachiyan: To do your laundry, yeah

00:19:29
Eric Weinstein: ... that you hire somebody to do it.

00:19:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:19:31
Eric Weinstein: And the idea is if the market is working in some sense-

00:19:35
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:19:35
Eric Weinstein: ... the family starts to fall apart because you don't need it.

00:19:39
Anna Khachiyan: Right, exactly, yeah. And, you know, people are smart. They know that, like, seven, eight years of psychoanalysis is a very tall price to pay for having your mother come every week and do your laundry.

00:19:50
Eric Weinstein: It's an interesting period.

00:19:51
Anna Khachiyan: And they'd rather be... Yeah. Um, and there's this, you know, whole, uh, rhetoric now about a work-life balance, whatever, and I think that the, the, the market, part of the kind of psycho, let's say, like, the, the psychological anima of the market is that it provides people, yeah, with a, a scaffolding and, and infrastructure through which to relieve themselves of their family.

00:20:15
Eric Weinstein: Right. So one of the, um... One of the things that's interesting to me is is that you're coming from a background which is very familiar to me, where you have a Jewish-Armenian, uh, parentage, and your father is a famous mathematician working in linear programming-

00:20:39
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:20:39
Eric Weinstein: ... sort of optimization science-

00:20:42
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

00:20:42
Eric Weinstein: ... and came up with, um, this amazing algorithm that changed our picture for how things could be o- optimized using smaller and smaller ellipsoids.

00:20:52
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:20:53
Eric Weinstein: And your mom, how did she figure into this story?

00:20:57
Anna Khachiyan: Um, I, I... My, my dad, uh, his whole kind of, uh, level o- of achievement is way over my head, obviously. Um, but, uh, my m- my mom and my dad, I mean, they met when they were very young, and they got married quite a bit later. My mom, I think, uh, would probably be very, uh, irate and disappointed if I described her like this, because, you know, she's gonna listen to this. Um, she is an artist, but a, who became a housewife, basically.

00:21:26
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:21:27
Anna Khachiyan: And I think that she is the great genius of the family. She's the, the great kind of organizing and destructive force in my family.

00:21:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's interesting. Very often, um, in... So I, I have to say that when we had this lunch, which you're describing as a power lunch-

00:21:42
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:21:42
Eric Weinstein: ... yet I drunk no alcohol during it.

00:21:44
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:21:44
Eric Weinstein: So I'm not positive that it qualified.

00:21:47
Anna Khachiyan: Well, uh, I mean, are you supposed to drink alcohol during it?

00:21:50
Eric Weinstein: I don't really know.

00:21:50
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

00:21:50
Eric Weinstein: It would be my first power lunch.

00:21:52
Anna Khachiyan: Oh, right. I have to... Uh, it's just, you know, a stupid, uh, girl bossy hyperbolic term.

00:21:57
Eric Weinstein: I see.

00:21:57
Anna Khachiyan: I have to, I have to drink-

00:21:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, very good

00:21:59
Anna Khachiyan: ... and smoke at all lunches. I didn't smoke.

00:22:01
Eric Weinstein: You didn't smoke.

00:22:02
Anna Khachiyan: But I'm such a neurotic. I'm so shy. I was telling you that I can't... You know, I have to constantly occupy, uh, my-

00:22:08
Eric Weinstein: Is that because you're reveling in your neuroticism?

00:22:11
Anna Khachiyan: No, no, no. I'm not like a Woody Allen person.

00:22:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:22:13
Anna Khachiyan: I don't get off on it.

00:22:14
Eric Weinstein: Oh, you sure?

00:22:15
Anna Khachiyan: It's something that I hope to, to shed with a-

00:22:17
Eric Weinstein: Okay

00:22:18
Anna Khachiyan: ... uh, the kind of accumulation of experience, like habituation.

00:22:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:22:23
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, that's not something I think you should look up to in yourself.

00:22:26
Eric Weinstein: I don't know.

00:22:26
Anna Khachiyan: Um, but yeah, I think that, uh, my mom is kind of like a bizarre, freewheeling, artistic genius, um, a true eccentric, and I think that I derive a lot of my personality and my tendency toward critique from her. I mean, she's always spinning paranoid polemics about the world. It's really quite impressive, and she's right most of the time.

00:22:53
Eric Weinstein: I think it's very strange that, I mean, this really actually echoes your earlier point, that we tend to [laughs] see accomplishment only if it shows up in the workplace.

00:23:03
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:23:03
Eric Weinstein: And for a lot of us coming from kind of ethnic families, for lack of a better word, very often people who were inside the home were well known to be the local genius-

00:23:14
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:23:14
Eric Weinstein: ... or the eccentric or the life or the whatever.

00:23:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:23:17
Eric Weinstein: It was not clear in any way that, uh, if you were the schmatta salesman, that that was really the higher expression-

00:23:24
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:23:24
Eric Weinstein: ... of the two people in a marriage.

00:23:26
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:23:26
Eric Weinstein: And it happens that your father did something very creative-

00:23:29
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

00:23:30
Eric Weinstein: ... in a very analytic context.

00:23:31
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah.

00:23:31
Eric Weinstein: But it's hardly surprising. Like, there's nothing at all surprising to me that your mom might mostly be at home with the family and be the major force of the family.

00:23:41
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, and I think, like, you know, my, my dad probably gets all the credit for, um, be- [laughs] for, uh, being kind of the genius. Um, my haters like to point out that I'm coasting off of my father's accomplishments, which is not true, because I'm actually way more famous than him on Reddit.

00:24:00
Eric Weinstein: So there, Dad.

00:24:00
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, there you go. Um, [laughs] he would be so, uh... I, I'm here to disgrace my family name. Um, but basically, I, I think that it's a very interesting... This r- this kind of old breakdown of my parents' marriage is a very instructive example of the way that women wield unofficial power through the domestic sphere.

00:24:23
Eric Weinstein: Again, it's like unofficial. Like, the, the language is even wrong to me. It's like, in what world do we not... Like, I guess the idea is that it, it's official if it shows up in Wikipedia, and it's unofficial if it only shows up in family lore?

00:24:39
Anna Khachiyan: I, I, I think it's official if you're getting officially compensated for it, right?

00:24:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, this is-

00:24:43
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:24:43
Eric Weinstein: ... the issue of kin work that I would-

00:24:44
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:24:45
Eric Weinstein: ... bring up, which is that I think that a lot of the, um, wage gap work is extremely weak and manipulative, but I think it's also the case That the real wage gap is that you have to figure out how to compensate, uh, for kin work-

00:25:00
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:25:00
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, taking care of, uh, of elders, r- relatives or young children.

00:25:04
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:25:04
Eric Weinstein: And that you can arguably say that women should be paid more on average because that is uncompensated work-

00:25:11
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:25:11
Eric Weinstein: ... and it has to show up somewhere. And sometimes it would show up in, like, prestige. The matriarch of a, of a, of a large family is kind of a pr- an impressive position to hold.

00:25:20
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:25:20
Eric Weinstein: And that with smaller families, it's no longer so cool to be grandma.

00:25:24
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Sure. And I think that there's a general disrespect for the institution of motherhood that's-

00:25:31
Eric Weinstein: Let's, let's talk about that

00:25:32
Anna Khachiyan: ... afoot-

00:25:32
Eric Weinstein: What the hell is that?

00:25:33
Anna Khachiyan: ... in the culture at large, particularly on the left. Um-

00:25:36
Eric Weinstein: So that, this is something which I totally resonate with. Like, when did the left go... And, and they, they're gonna claim, "Oh, we're not anti-family," but there is some weird anti-family thing.

00:25:47
Anna Khachiyan: Um, I think that that's absolutely a kind of collective defense mechanism, because we're talking about people much like myself, who are millennials in their late 20s, early 30s. Um, you know, my father always used to say, like, "Well, Anna, you can't really ascend in class," you know, contrary to the myth of the American dream, "but you can't really fall in class either." And now we're faced with a generation that's quite a bit like the lost generation in, in Russia, my father's generation, all of whom, who drank themselves to death by the age of, you know, 52, um, uh, which is this millennial generation of people like myself, who-

00:26:24
Eric Weinstein: So your dad was two years younger than I am now when he died of a heart attack.

00:26:28
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, yeah. Um, and, you know, he died in, in the United States, but I think that he is part of the same generational trend.

00:26:35
Eric Weinstein: What year was that?

00:26:36
Anna Khachiyan: In, uh, 2005. Um, but, uh, there are a lot of people my age who are confr- male and female, who are confronting for the first time the reality that they will actually, um, fall in class, in, uh, especially relative to their parents. They will-

00:26:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:26:56
Anna Khachiyan: ... never own property. They will never pay off their student debt. They will never have a, a safe and dependable healthcare situation. They will never be able to afford children. And I think the kind of a- broadly anti-natalist trend on the left is a psychological defense mechanism, because you have to reframe, I think in the neoliberal framework, you have to reframe all adversity as opportunity. And, uh, what they're saying to themselves-

00:27:25
Eric Weinstein: We don't, I don't have to be burdened by babies.

00:27:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:27:28
Eric Weinstein: My, my breasts will be undeformed by breastfeeding.

00:27:30
Anna Khachiyan: Yes. I'm a girl boss. I don't need a man.

00:27:33
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:27:33
Anna Khachiyan: I'm an independent, strong, independent woman.

00:27:35
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:27:36
Anna Khachiyan: Um, uh, so they've had to kind of recalibrate.

00:27:39
Eric Weinstein: By the way, this will work out for a minority of the people who claim this to be true.

00:27:44
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:27:44
Eric Weinstein: It's not BS.

00:27:46
Anna Khachiyan: It's not.

00:27:46
Eric Weinstein: What's BS is how broadly this plan is likely to work.

00:27:50
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, how applicable it is across. I mean, I started noticing, I actually got a lot of flack for this, and I, I still don't know why. I started noticing in the pop lyrics of the last two decades or so, kind of minute shift. Um, you can go back as far as actually the 1960s. I remember this interview with Amy Winehouse where she's like, "You know, I much, I, I much more prefer, I gravitate toward the music of the '60s, uh, uh, the '50s, '60s, whatever, uh, as opposed to the music of the 2000s." Because in the kind of female vocalists of the '60s, they expressed kind of a, a longing, a d- a yearning for companionship and love, a desire to subordinate themselves to the will of others, or of something greater than themselves, let's put it that way, that feminists have interpreted as a fundamentally kind of misogynistic or sexist outlook. Whereas now, you know, with the, the coming of somebody like Beyoncé, you have these lyrics that literally are like, "I don't need you. I don't need a man. All men are trash. I'm gonna keep stacking my bills." And it's, it's this form of feminism that I find to be very callous and cretinous, and ultimately counterproductive.

00:29:12
Eric Weinstein: It's actually... I mean, let's, let's take what you just said. It was actually weirdly, uh, on both sides of the gender aisle. For example, um, let's say John Denver, um, when he sings about, uh, you know, it's like, "Kiss me and smile for me. Tell me that you'll wait for..."

00:29:31
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:29:32
Eric Weinstein: He talks about, um, "When I come back, uh, I'll bring your wedding ring."

00:29:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:29:36
Eric Weinstein: Like, he's excited about the fact that he's screwed up in this relationship.

00:29:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:29:41
Eric Weinstein: He says, "I've played around," and then he says, uh, "But I realize how important this is and I'm gonna make it right."

00:29:48
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:29:48
Eric Weinstein: "And I'm excited about becoming betrothed to you."

00:29:52
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:29:52
Eric Weinstein: I-

00:29:52
Anna Khachiyan: "I'm gonna make amends."

00:29:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, not only make amends. I, you know, like when Beyoncé, I mean, just to, to, to connect these two data points, she's saying, "If you like it, you should put a ring on it."

00:30:02
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:30:02
Eric Weinstein: Like she, that's really what she wanted.

00:30:04
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:30:05
Eric Weinstein: But like, "You didn't, you didn't exercise your options," very transactional.

00:30:10
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:30:10
Eric Weinstein: "So now I'm up, I'm up in the club getting jiggy with this other guy. You shouldn't be upset."

00:30:15
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah, sure. It's, it's... It is a very kind of transactional ethos that permeates all m-... Like, there was this, like, kind of stupid trend on Twitter where people w- or, or that people were mocking because, um, other people were tweeting out kind of empathy templates. So, you know, somebody texts you and they're like, "Hey, I'm, like, really going through a hard time, you know, I'm having a d- get- getting a divorce, my mom's dying of cancer," whatever. You fire back with like, "Hey, I'm currently at capacity. Do you know somebody else who slash I'm going through some personal problems too slash." And it's like a kind of prefabricated template for how you should respond to a person in need.

00:30:55
Eric Weinstein: Wow.

00:30:55
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, the, the sort of thing.

00:30:56
Eric Weinstein: The, I, I didn't know. And this is how we do it now?

00:30:57
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, you're so lucky. You're, you're so lucky that all this stuff is way over your head. I have to live with this every day, and it shrinks my will and libido to live. But it's like this kind of thing that, um, is hyper-transactional. All relations have become so transactional.

00:31:15
Eric Weinstein: All relationshi- I mean, look, my take on this is that all relationships have an aspect of exchange.

00:31:22
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:31:22
Eric Weinstein: But that what distinguishes the transactional from the rich relationship is how many layers of indirection separate, uh, the people involved-

00:31:33
Anna Khachiyan: Right

00:31:33
Eric Weinstein: ... from the exchange.

00:31:34
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:31:34
Eric Weinstein: So dinner and a movie is a lot more abstract than turning a trick on a street corner.

00:31:40
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:31:41
Eric Weinstein: And then you, you go further. You know, with courtship, it's, it becomes incredibly distant-

00:31:47
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

00:31:47
Eric Weinstein: ... in terms of the number of layers. And what we don't recognize is, is that those layers of indirection are essential to a rich life.

00:31:56
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. And a, a rich emotional life. And what we're dealing with now are, are people who, if they are not economically, uh, impoverished, are spiritually impoverished because they have no institutions or values, uh, uh, on which to depend.

00:32:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so this gets me back to, like, your crazy podcast-

00:32:19
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:32:19
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and your persona. So first of all, I mean, you're playing with all sorts of associations and breaking them in ways that the indicia and the underlying, like, the proximate and ultimate are separated.

00:32:32
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:32:33
Eric Weinstein: So I normally associate vocal fry and uptalking with stupidity.

00:32:36
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:32:37
Eric Weinstein: I don't associate it with your level of insight and commentary.

00:32:41
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:32:41
Eric Weinstein: You guys sound stoned out of your minds.

00:32:43
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:32:44
Eric Weinstein: And there's a tremendous amount of vocal fry. But what it speaks to is this, like, crazy metacognitive distance that you and your co-host have-

00:32:53
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:32:54
Eric Weinstein: ... from the topics that you're discussing.

00:32:56
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:32:56
Eric Weinstein: And you're sort of, you're constantly bemused by this sort of very weird period of the human condition. Is that wrong?

00:33:05
Anna Khachiyan: Um, I think bemused is a nice way of putting it. I think that we're-

00:33:11
Eric Weinstein: Might be nice

00:33:11
Anna Khachiyan: ... we're very frustrated.

00:33:13
Eric Weinstein: What do you want?

00:33:16
Anna Khachiyan: I, I don't know. We're w- like all women, we don't know what we want. No, I mean, I think what I want-

00:33:20
Eric Weinstein: I think you do know what you want

00:33:22
Anna Khachiyan: ... I think I want ... I mean, on a, on a kind of broad social level, I think that we have to take kind of the old Nietzschean adage, God is dead, right? Um, people always interpret that as, um ... You know, I think people have a tendency to interpret it as God is dead, and therefore we can get, like, weird septum piercings and tattoo sleeves and go fucking and sucking in polyamorous arrangements, and that's not at all what he meant. He meant God is dead, and now it, it is up to secular humanity to replace the value system that was evacuated with the death of God with an equally viable one.

00:34:00
Eric Weinstein: Do you think that's possible?

00:34:01
Anna Khachiyan: No. I don't know, but I ... You know, what else can, uh, we do? You know, Josh always says to me, like, "You have to stay cheerful in the face of adversity, like the Greeks."

00:34:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, all right. So I mean, in part, uh, and I don't know how long the show is gonna get away with it-

00:34:19
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:34:20
Eric Weinstein: ... but, um, ultimately, it's about, for me, recognizing what the religious impulse was. It was a load-bearing structure of our civilization because it caused you to think in intergenerational terms. Like, in our, the shared part of our tradition, the Jewish tradition-

00:34:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:34:41
Eric Weinstein: ... the concept of generation to generation goes under the name l'dor v'dor-

00:34:45
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:34:45
Eric Weinstein: ... from generation to generation. And that thing about you have to be seeing yourself, you have to subordinate and submit, and, like, this is against the ethos of our time, but it, it, it occurs everywhere because our soma-

00:35:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:35:01
Eric Weinstein: ... the, the parts of us that are non-reproductive are finite.

00:35:05
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:35:05
Eric Weinstein: They always die.

00:35:06
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:35:06
Eric Weinstein: And if you do not link yourself in a chain with others, then Rome has to be built in a day-

00:35:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:35:13
Eric Weinstein: ... because there's nothing more.

00:35:14
Anna Khachiyan: It's over for you hoes, as, [laughs] as we say. Uh-

00:35:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, that was far more eloquent-

00:35:18
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:35:18
Eric Weinstein: ... than I'd said.

00:35:19
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but I, I mean, it's true. And look, I mean, investing or kind of honoring posterity is a means of investing in the future. It-

00:35:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:35:29
Anna Khachiyan: ... it, it's a means of envisioning yourself in a greater human chain, a human centipede of drudgery and debauchery. No, but, uh, and what's lost now, I mean, this is, like, the, the cardinal sin, right, uh, in kind of neolib- uh, in neoliberal discourse, is subordinating your will to somebody else.

00:35:49
Eric Weinstein: It's bizarre.

00:35:50
Anna Khachiyan: And to see this kind of ethos then flourish on the so-called left is profoundly dispiriting.

00:35:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's, it's such a simplistic version of empowerment.

00:36:02
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:36:03
Eric Weinstein: And it's, it, you know, it's ... One of the things that I've advocated repeatedly, so in terms of, uh, I, I'm gonna take your adage and start-

00:36:09
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

00:36:09
Eric Weinstein: ... repeating myself loudly and often.

00:36:11
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:36:12
Eric Weinstein: I keep saying that magic happens when people pass power back and forth.

00:36:16
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:36:16
Eric Weinstein: If you retain all your power, then you don't get to the magic of giving your power to somebody else and having them give you an equal amount w- you know, of a different kind back.

00:36:26
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:36:26
Eric Weinstein: And so we never actually build those super powerful relationships, um, when we're hoarding our power, saying, "I'm not gonna give anything up."

00:36:35
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:36:35
Eric Weinstein: Um, you're interested in motherhood, like, for yourself.

00:36:40
Anna Khachiyan: For myself, of course, but in general.

00:36:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well-

00:36:43
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, I think this is the most kind of noble, honorable institution on the planet.

00:36:48
Eric Weinstein: And it really matters. I mean, this is one of the things that, um, a, a family friend who's very dear to me took me aside at some point and said Um, you wanna know something magical? Look at your children. That's what happens when a PhD stays home to raise them.

00:37:04
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:37:04
Eric Weinstein: You know? And it's just like-

00:37:05
Anna Khachiyan: Are you getting a little verklempt? That's beautiful.

00:37:07
Eric Weinstein: I get too, I get-

00:37:08
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

00:37:09
Eric Weinstein: I get way too verklempt on this show.

00:37:11
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:37:11
Eric Weinstein: This is... Yeah.

00:37:11
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:37:12
Eric Weinstein: But it's... You know, my wife is out of the workforce for, like, 10 years or something.

00:37:18
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:37:18
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, she came back, you know, with, with, with mentally guns blazing.

00:37:23
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:37:23
Eric Weinstein: But I think that this hatred of motherhood, uh, has to be acknowledged. First of all, it's denied.

00:37:31
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:37:31
Eric Weinstein: "Oh, we don't hate motherhood."

00:37:32
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:37:32
Eric Weinstein: "We just think it's about choice."

00:37:33
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:37:33
Eric Weinstein: But you look at it, the mommies who work and the mommies who don't.

00:37:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:37:38
Eric Weinstein: One gender is built to reproduce our species.

00:37:42
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:37:42
Eric Weinstein: And I just, I can't stand what we've done to, to it.

00:37:48
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, and it, there's a kind of no honoring also among men or women of the gender difference which exists. It's very real and palpable. And, um, I think, uh, uh, feminists, uh, uh, have this idea that, um, if we acknowledge that we're different, we're acknowledging that we're unequal, and that's not at all the case.

00:38:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, w-

00:38:13
Anna Khachiyan: We're differently equal. We're differently abled [laughs] I think.

00:38:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, so this is the weird thing. If you try to make this argument at the level of, like, racial groups-

00:38:21
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:38:21
Eric Weinstein: ... or geographically separated groups, there really isn't a great way of saying that there should be equality because there's no reason that-

00:38:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:38:30
Eric Weinstein: ... separated groups should have variables having common means.

00:38:34
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:38:34
Eric Weinstein: Within a group, there actually is this weird principle of, of Fisher, the, the biological theorist-

00:38:42
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:38:42
Eric Weinstein: ... which says that it is as good to be female as male from the perspective of the fitness of the two genders' strategies.

00:38:50
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:38:51
Eric Weinstein: And the problem with it is, is that you have to, you h- what, what fails is what you might call, um, the Ginger Rogers principle.

00:39:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:39:01
Eric Weinstein: So the old j- as the joke goes, Ginger Rogers could do everything Fred Astaire could do, but backwards and in heels.

00:39:06
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:39:07
Eric Weinstein: And the feminist version of this is women are as good or better at everything men can do except peeing standing up.

00:39:13
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:39:14
Eric Weinstein: And that can't possibly be the case if Fisher's, uh, theory is to hold.

00:39:20
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:39:20
Eric Weinstein: Because then women would simply be better.

00:39:23
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:39:23
Eric Weinstein: Unless peeing standing up was, like, the be all and end all, which, I mean, it's, it's pretty good-

00:39:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah

00:39:27
Eric Weinstein: ... but it's not that great.

00:39:28
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:39:28
Eric Weinstein: Um, that's part of the problem, which is if you, if you claim that you're better at something, biology tells you you have to be worse at something else.

00:39:37
Anna Khachiyan: Right, so that there's a kind of an implicit trade-off, right? Or, or, or balance, let's say.

00:39:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, then it gets to this really, like, here's, here, let's get into trouble with psychologists and psychiatrists.

00:39:47
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

00:39:48
Eric Weinstein: Um, the whole co-dependence concept, yes, there is something which is really dysfunctional.

00:39:54
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:39:54
Eric Weinstein: But a lot of interdependence is labeled as co-dependence.

00:39:57
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:39:58
Eric Weinstein: And the modern notion that you should be a completely functional person who can do everything and able to walk out on a moment's notice-

00:40:04
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:40:05
Eric Weinstein: ... that completely destroys the concept of coupling.

00:40:09
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I mean, I think this all goes back to the atomizing logic of the market, and all s- my big issue, I think, uh, my big critique, kind of the central organizing theme of my, my work, right, is this idea that, uh, progressive activism is now effectively marching in lockstep with the very-

00:40:30
Eric Weinstein: The market

00:40:31
Anna Khachiyan: ... market imperatives that they are opposed to on the face of things. It's maddening.

00:40:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, and it's so in- it's so intellectually incoherent. It's kind of amazing that it's still hanging together as a pseudo-philosophy.

00:40:43
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:40:44
Eric Weinstein: All right. So now, like, I feel like y- you're revealed. You're somehow reveling on your podcast in this, like, really dangerous kind of memes-

00:40:54
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:40:55
Eric Weinstein: ... um, which suggest, you know, uh, royalty plunged into, uh, boredom and cocaine-

00:41:03
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:41:04
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and, and wanton sexuality.

00:41:05
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:41:05
Eric Weinstein: But in fact, underneath it, you're coming from an academic tradition-

00:41:09
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:41:10
Eric Weinstein: ... and, you know, embracing very traditional values.

00:41:13
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:41:14
Eric Weinstein: And there's no reason to leave left of center thinking because traditionally, what i- what has the left been? It's been about empowering working families.

00:41:22
Anna Khachiyan: Right. And that's what I'm interested in. It's funny that so many of my critics and I, if you really look at us, it's like, you know, the narcissism, the narcissism of small differences, like, we are c- completely indistinguishable to, like, an Afghani fig farmer.

00:41:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:41:35
Anna Khachiyan: You know? Uh, 99% of our politics are equivalent.

00:41:40
Eric Weinstein: Are they?

00:41:40
Anna Khachiyan: I'm sure. I mean, like-

00:41:42
Eric Weinstein: Who are you pissing off, Anna?

00:41:45
Anna Khachiyan: I think, uh, I think people that kind of are self-identified as leftists, um, but are basically, and I say this with the most em- like, the, the most empathy possible because I understand their position, uh, feel completely insecure and precarious in the market. They feel that they have no future. I, up until a year or two ago, felt that I have no future. It was really a toss-up, you know?

00:42:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so you ta- what happened when you got a future?

00:42:11
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, I started this podcast, and it, it, it-

00:42:13
Eric Weinstein: I know, but I mean, what, what happened to you? Did you f- have a physiological change?

00:42:17
Anna Khachiyan: Um, physiological? I mean, I-

00:42:19
Eric Weinstein: Like, when I've, when I've been shit out of luck-

00:42:21
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:42:22
Eric Weinstein: ... and then I get some luck, I'm... The chemicals that are running through my body are totally different.

00:42:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I mean, you start to even, like, look more, like, resplendent and wonderful and whatever, but-

00:42:32
Eric Weinstein: You get plumage.

00:42:33
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, you get plumage. I think, like, but this is the first time. I mean, I'm 34 years old. I'm kind of like an old geezer by millennial achievement standards, you know? It's like you have to be, like, 23 when you peak or something. Um, and e- but again, I'm merely an individual, right? And there's a, a whole generation of people who are, like, now left behind.

00:43:00
Eric Weinstein: Do you know my friend Peter Thiel at all?

00:43:03
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, not personally.

00:43:04
Eric Weinstein: So he's got a great quote. I don't know whether he said it publicly-

00:43:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:43:07
Eric Weinstein: ... probably has. But he says things to me, and I just, I kick myself for not having thought of them first. He says, "A Boomer's, uh, golden era is in his or her 20s."

00:43:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:43:18
Eric Weinstein: "A Gen X-er's in his or her 50s."

00:43:20
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:43:21
Eric Weinstein: And then he looks at me and he says, "And we're just getting started."

00:43:25
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

00:43:26
Eric Weinstein: It's been... It's like I didn't get suddenly interesting, like, in the last few years because I ate a mushroom.

00:43:33
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:43:34
Eric Weinstein: It was y- there's this thing I've called the distributed idea suppression complex-

00:43:39
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

00:43:39
Eric Weinstein: ... or the DISC.

00:43:39
Anna Khachiyan: Is, is this your coinage?

00:43:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, coin lots of stuff.

00:43:42
Anna Khachiyan: You, yeah, you coin a lot of... Yeah.

00:43:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But then y- the weird thing is you watch it in the world, and it, it only works if you're coining something [laughs] that people actually recognize-

00:43:51
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:43:51
Eric Weinstein: ... as real. It's not like you can make up anything and it, it just goes.

00:43:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:43:54
Eric Weinstein: But the, there is this thing that tried to suppress all i- it's still working. Like, they're trying to make Andrew Yang not appear on MSNBC on any of the graphics-

00:44:04
Anna Khachiyan: Okay

00:44:04
Eric Weinstein: ... or Tulsi gets, you know, dropped at e- every opportunity.

00:44:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:44:08
Eric Weinstein: This thing just doesn't wanna hear that there's a massive intergenerational transfer where the two vampiric generations of the Silence and the Boomers transfuse the X-ers and the Millennials in order to allow them to live in the style to which they've become accustomed.

00:44:25
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:44:25
Eric Weinstein: And, like, the most obvious place that you see this is the university system.

00:44:30
Anna Khachiyan: Explain that.

00:44:31
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's a pyramid-

00:44:32
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, expand on the-

00:44:32
Eric Weinstein: It was a pyramid scheme that was expanding.

00:44:35
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:44:36
Eric Weinstein: And when, when the growth that was natural in the system ran out-

00:44:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:44:41
Eric Weinstein: ... the, there was no way to give people professorships who had been s- contributing their youth to the research of those above them.

00:44:51
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:44:51
Eric Weinstein: And so what the universities did, almost every top university loaded up on administrators and then made tuition insanely expensive-

00:45:00
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:45:00
Eric Weinstein: ... and made it impossible to, to get rid of the debt in bankruptcy-

00:45:03
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:45:04
Eric Weinstein: ... so that you can die, uh, you know, getting a Social Security check and still paying your student loans.

00:45:09
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:45:10
Eric Weinstein: Um, I, I'm gonna do a show hopefully with, uh, Sugar Baby University, which is a program inside of, uh, Seeking Arrangement-

00:45:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:45:17
Eric Weinstein: ... sugar dating.

00:45:18
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

00:45:19
Eric Weinstein: Where it would appear that, uh, the appeal is that young women who are, and some men, um, burdened with student debt can graduate debt-free-

00:45:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:45:31
Eric Weinstein: ... by dating older, successful people and getting an allowance every month.

00:45:34
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

00:45:35
Eric Weinstein: Which I think is just, like... It's weird to imagine a generation sort of selling its daughters into borderline commercial sex work.

00:45:44
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I mean, it's monstrous. And-

00:45:46
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:45:46
Anna Khachiyan: ... the idea that you would institutionalize this-

00:45:50
Eric Weinstein: Well-

00:45:50
Anna Khachiyan: ... with, like, a degree. It's like the University of Phoenix-

00:45:53
Eric Weinstein: And then you, then you deal with people like, "Well, why don't you-

00:45:54
Anna Khachiyan: ... for hookers

00:45:54
Eric Weinstein: ... why don't you get a, why don't you get a job, um, bussing tables to pay off your student loans-

00:46:00
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:46:00
Eric Weinstein: ... when student tuition has gone, you know, above medical tuition, which is above regular tu-

00:46:05
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:46:05
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, reg- regular inflation. I mean, sorry.

00:46:07
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:46:07
Eric Weinstein: Medical inflation is above regular inflation-

00:46:10
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:46:10
Eric Weinstein: ... and tuition inflation is above medical.

00:46:12
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:46:13
Eric Weinstein: It, it, the whole thing is mad, but the system couldn't be kept together.

00:46:17
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:46:17
Eric Weinstein: And so that is an intergenerational transfusing.

00:46:20
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I, one of the most, b- one of the biggest rackets in this country after management consulting is the idea that all people should go to college. I think Germany has it right. They send most of them to vocational programs.

00:46:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:46:34
Anna Khachiyan: The idea that you should even be paying, you know, $40,000 a semester in tuition to get a communications degree as a super senior for five years is preposterous. Nobody needs to be saddled-

00:46:47
Eric Weinstein: You're gonna blow it

00:46:47
Anna Khachiyan: ... huh?

00:46:47
Eric Weinstein: You're gonna blow it for these generations.

00:46:49
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, why?

00:46:50
Eric Weinstein: Because [laughs] it's a scam, man. They turned the most amazing part of our, of our country into this wealth transfer scam. It's just a... It's, it's funny, but it's painful.

00:47:01
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I mean, it, and it's horrible. I was thinking about, you know, uh, the kind of, the idea of, uh, uh... You, are you familiar with this concept stob, the Russian parody genre?

00:47:15
Eric Weinstein: [speaks foreign language]

00:47:16
Anna Khachiyan: Stob, stob. We can get into this later because it's a whole-

00:47:20
Eric Weinstein: Don't know it

00:47:21
Anna Khachiyan: ... it, it's a, I think that this is, like, to, to really understand the Trump era, for example-

00:47:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:47:26
Anna Khachiyan: ... you have to view it through this particular lens.

00:47:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, give it to me.

00:47:30
Anna Khachiyan: It's a, it's a late Soviet parody genre or style that involves an, a over-identification so extreme that it's unclear whether you're, uh, endorsing, authentically endorsing a position or perpetuating an elaborate troll.

00:47:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:47:49
Anna Khachiyan: So it's basically a post-ironic gesture. If you look at, like, the golden age of, uh, liberal entertainment as, you know, uh, John Stewart, The Daily Show, right? Uh, which was kind of characterized by... This is a, the really long-winded digression. I didn't mean to go here.

00:48:06
Eric Weinstein: Drink up. Let's do it.

00:48:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah. I'll keep going. Um, as characterized by, um, you know, uh, this kind of snarky, implicitly moral su- morally superior ironic posture, right? Um, that was, I think, supplanted eventually by this kind of stob over-identification, right? Uh, where it's unclear, for example, with people like me and Dasha, it's unclear what position we're actually endorsing, right? And Trump, for example, is the master of this strategy. And so he plays-

00:48:43
Eric Weinstein: So we, do we both acknowledge that Trump has some crazy genius to him?

00:48:46
Anna Khachiyan: I think he's a total genius.

00:48:48
Eric Weinstein: All right, good.

00:48:48
Anna Khachiyan: But I think that he's an artistic genius, not a political genius.

00:48:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, he's an artistic genius.

00:48:52
Anna Khachiyan: I think that he's an artist. He's a Gemini, just like my mother. My mom hates Trump with, like, a fire because they're the same person, down to the kind of miserable, cunty expression they, uh, kind of emote when they're in a irritated mood. It's really stunning.

00:49:08
Eric Weinstein: How is that Kantian?

00:49:09
Anna Khachiyan: Huh?

00:49:09
Eric Weinstein: How is that Kantian?

00:49:10
Anna Khachiyan: Kantian, Kantian, Kantian.

00:49:12
Eric Weinstein: True.

00:49:12
Anna Khachiyan: Am I... Oh, okay.

00:49:13
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:49:14
Anna Khachiyan: Um, but I'm very gullible Uh, which is why I'm not a troll. But you take somebody like, uh, Trump, the guy i- is so over-invested

00:49:22
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:49:23
Anna Khachiyan: in performing his own incompetence that any parody of him by an outsider-

00:49:28
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:49:28
Anna Khachiyan: ... reads as cringey and overdetermined, which is why SNL has sucked for the last, I mean, it's sucked-

00:49:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but in part you have to get something right before you can parody it, right?

00:49:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:49:38
Eric Weinstein: And, um, I don't know if y- if you ever saw this video. It, it, I think it's called something like In the, uh, because of the music, In the Hall of the Trumpian King.

00:49:48
Anna Khachiyan: Mm, no.

00:49:49
Eric Weinstein: Oh, okay. So it's all of these liberal comedians from this golden era that you're talking about-

00:49:54
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:49:55
Eric Weinstein: ... in the most knowing and oppressive way possible saying, "Buddy, you're not [laughs] gonna win."

00:50:02
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:50:02
Eric Weinstein: "Come on."

00:50:03
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:50:03
Eric Weinstein: "We all know it."

00:50:04
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:50:04
Eric Weinstein: And everyone saying like, "Oh, please run."

00:50:07
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:50:07
Eric Weinstein: "Oh, it'll be so entertaining." Like, there's no concept that this is real.

00:50:12
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, yeah. And-

00:50:13
Eric Weinstein: And-

00:50:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:50:14
Eric Weinstein: ... every single one of those people who appeared on this, including John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, became unfunny to me in just about everything that they did after. They went so over the top-

00:50:25
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, momentarily, yeah

00:50:27
Eric Weinstein: ... that they showed that they didn't understand. Like, you can't mock this stuff.

00:50:32
Anna Khachiyan: And what a p- betrayal, like, on a Freudian level, what a collective betrayal of p- you know, parental authority that was. We really believed [laughs] in these guys, that they could be, that they could parse, like, uh, sarcasm.

00:50:44
Eric Weinstein: They believed in them.

00:50:45
Anna Khachiyan: They, yeah.

00:50:46
Eric Weinstein: Because but this is this thing I've called the gated institutional narrative.

00:50:49
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:50:50
Eric Weinstein: It was protected against reality. I mean, I don't know whether y- because of your-

00:50:54
Anna Khachiyan: You, you have to publish, like, a coffee table book of, of your, like, uh, coinages and neologisms.

00:50:59
Eric Weinstein: I'd rather you make fun of them-

00:51:01
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

00:51:01
Eric Weinstein: ... on Red Scare. Um, that could actually be fun.

00:51:04
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:51:05
Eric Weinstein: Um, one of the things that I, again, this is, this shows you how twisted my soul is, but as a pastime I sometimes watch the last days of the Ceausescus-

00:51:14
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

00:51:14
Eric Weinstein: ... in Romania.

00:51:15
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

00:51:16
Eric Weinstein: Because, like, right up until the end-

00:51:18
Anna Khachiyan: Go on, on, uh, Pornhub [laughs] and Google the, uh, the execution?

00:51:23
Eric Weinstein: Right. Uh, [laughs] under Slavic MILF.

00:51:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. [laughs]

00:51:27
Eric Weinstein: Um, it's, uh, it's very much, like, there's a rally, and somehow the rally goes out of control.

00:51:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:51:37
Eric Weinstein: And order has to be restored, and the cameras have to break the filming-

00:51:41
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

00:51:41
Eric Weinstein: ... of what's going on.

00:51:43
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:51:43
Eric Weinstein: And so right at the end, they've got this s- shrinking group of loyalists who are still terrified that these people are going to, you know, regain power because that's the way it's always been. But everywhere the spell is broken.

00:51:56
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:51:57
Eric Weinstein: And I guess that's sort of what I saw, is that this thing was just, it was an American version of, um, propaganda that had been so believed that when it started not to be true, the organs just kept pumping out all of this encouragement that, y- you know, think Hillary's going to win. There's no question.

00:52:22
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:52:22
Eric Weinstein: She's inevitable.

00:52:24
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, even now they're running, you know, Kamala's out, so they're really going whole hog with Buttigieg. But it's, yeah, there's a certain, there's a certain lag between the progressive and, uh, Trumpian, and, uh, between kind of like, uh, traditional Democrats and conservatives and the Trump administration. And I think, like, Trump, uh, uniquely among world leaders possibly in the history of the world, has been able to do this thing. I mean, I wrote a whole essay about it. He was, he was able to do what the, um, Russian avant-garde and the s- the, the socialist realists had been trying to do, these two kind of, uh, s- uh, sequential propaganda, like, arms of the culture industry in the Soviet Union, which was, uh, maintain, which was achieve a total syn- synthesis of the material and the imaginable or the imaginative. What, you know, p-

00:53:24
Eric Weinstein: Sounds really good.

00:53:25
Anna Khachiyan: I mean-

00:53:25
Eric Weinstein: Slow it down, give it to me.

00:53:26
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, what p- you know, it, it's kind of like the typical, like, Soviet avant-garde idea that we were creating a total synthesis of art in life, like a, a single kind of, uh, art political project. And Trump alone has been able to do this, th- though crucially under a, a very capitalist, not communist regime. He's been able to marry, um, what we, uh, can ima- like, what we imagine and what is materially possible.

00:53:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It, he's been very ineffective in bringing in, uh, an entire... Like, there is no theory of Trump-

00:54:09
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:54:10
Eric Weinstein: ... because almost no one e- either on his side or on the opposition side actually understands how much method he brings, and it's cryptic. So it looks-

00:54:20
Anna Khachiyan: Right

00:54:20
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, it's a little-

00:54:20
Anna Khachiyan: There's a lot of indirection. He understands indirection.

00:54:22
Eric Weinstein: He does.

00:54:22
Anna Khachiyan: He's, he, he does.

00:54:23
Eric Weinstein: But he's got these formulas that I, I, I can't tell you how bizarre it is. I mean, y- you, you probably know my friend Sam Harris, who was sitting here, and we were having this argument.

00:54:33
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:54:34
Eric Weinstein: Uh, friendly, but an argument nonetheless.

00:54:36
Anna Khachiyan: I'm gonna rub the seat for good luck. [laughs]

00:54:38
Eric Weinstein: A lot of weird stuff has happened in that chair.

00:54:40
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:54:40
Eric Weinstein: Um...

00:54:41
Anna Khachiyan: Ha- has Joe Rogan ever sat in this seat?

00:54:43
Eric Weinstein: Not yet.

00:54:44
Anna Khachiyan: I have a crush on Joe Rogan.

00:54:45
Eric Weinstein: Really?

00:54:45
Anna Khachiyan: I know he's married, but people-

00:54:46
Eric Weinstein: I think everyone does.

00:54:47
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, everybody does, yeah.

00:54:48
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:54:48
Anna Khachiyan: I think that he really could be the guy who r- could run and win against Trump.

00:54:52
Eric Weinstein: He does not want me to talk about this.

00:54:54
Anna Khachiyan: He does... Okay.

00:54:54
Eric Weinstein: Because-

00:54:55
Anna Khachiyan: Okay, you can edit it out

00:54:56
Eric Weinstein: ... it, it brings... Well, no. Because he, he's not in... He's got a great life.

00:55:01
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:55:02
Eric Weinstein: And the fact that everybody loves him causes people to sort of do weird things in his presence. He just wants to be a regular guy. He's also-

00:55:09
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:55:09
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, and I, I don't mind saying this behind his-

00:55:11
Anna Khachiyan: Average Joe, yeah.

00:55:12
Eric Weinstein: He, he-

00:55:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:55:13
Eric Weinstein: ... that he is not.

00:55:14
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs] Yeah, yeah.

00:55:15
Eric Weinstein: I mean, he, he's running an incredible operation.

00:55:18
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:55:18
Eric Weinstein: But whatever it is, it- There's a lot of method there

00:55:22
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:55:23
Eric Weinstein: 'cause if you think about how difficult it is to churn these shows out and to keep them fresh, it's almost impossible.

00:55:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm.

00:55:28
Eric Weinstein: So there's a ton of genius going on in Joe's front. Um, he has not come yet, but he- we agreed to do each other's podcasts.

00:55:34
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

00:55:35
Eric Weinstein: Um, what Sam did-

00:55:37
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:55:37
Eric Weinstein: ... was to say that he, Sam, thought that Trump was the evil Chauncey Gardiner, that that was his theory of mind.

00:55:44
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:55:45
Eric Weinstein: And I thought, "That is insane." I mean, it's not that Sam and I tried to have it out. We can't see each other's point.

00:55:51
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:55:52
Eric Weinstein: And I'm not saying that Sam is wrong, but I see so much method to Trump's, uh, trolling.

00:55:58
Anna Khachiyan: And he doesn't. He thinks that this is all kind of like

00:56:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think what he does, you know, I- another thing I say is is that Sam is more focused on honesty and I'm more focused on meta-honesty.

00:56:09
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

00:56:10
Eric Weinstein: Trump is not an honest person, but in a weird way he is meta-honest.

00:56:13
Anna Khachiyan: Right. So he's right when he says he's an honest, honest person.

00:56:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm trying to find-

00:56:17
Anna Khachiyan: Because on some level he is, yeah.

00:56:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so but what we care about is that like for example, Trump knows the, the liberal mind is automated.

00:56:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:56:31
Eric Weinstein: And as soon as you break through one of its shibboleths-

00:56:35
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:56:35
Eric Weinstein: ... it has an automated non-thinking reflexive reaction.

00:56:39
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:56:39
Eric Weinstein: And he can map that and then he can say, "Okay, I'll do something that will cause the reflexive reaction-

00:56:45
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:56:45
Eric Weinstein: ... but I will put something in place which is totally different so that when you have that reflexive reaction, you will be shown to be a non- an NPC."

00:56:53
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. Well, what's the, am I, am I allowed to look at my phone? There was that hilarious tweet, uh-

00:56:57
Eric Weinstein: I will stall for you.

00:56:59
Anna Khachiyan: No, that's okay. I don't even have to, but the, I have to look at my phone every 10 minutes or else I die. Um, there's that tweet that he had today about Greta Thunberg and how she needs to get her like anger issues under control-

00:57:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, she is

00:57:09
Anna Khachiyan: ... which was hilarious. It's so wrong.

00:57:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, okay

00:57:11
Anna Khachiyan: But it's so, I mean-

00:57:12
Eric Weinstein: But

00:57:12
Anna Khachiyan: ... the man has like the Midas touch when it comes to Twitter.

00:57:15
Eric Weinstein: But let's talk about that-

00:57:16
Anna Khachiyan: I'm jealous of his game

00:57:16
Eric Weinstein: ... let's talk about that tweet.

00:57:17
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:57:17
Eric Weinstein: So, um, so Greta is this, uh, self-described autistic girl who's-

00:57:24
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:57:24
Eric Weinstein: ... mad as hell about climate and who is being, um, even if she has authenticity to her, there's an entirely inauthentic, uh, complex-

00:57:35
Anna Khachiyan: Around

00:57:35
Eric Weinstein: ... that has settled her on her, th- wants to use her the way the World Wildlife Federation used-

00:57:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:57:40
Eric Weinstein: ... the panda bear-

00:57:41
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:57:42
Eric Weinstein: ... as charismatic megafauna. So in some sense, Greta the actual human is also the charismatic megafauna of a propaganda campaign which is lying in order to probably tell the truth.

00:57:54
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

00:57:54
Eric Weinstein: So you've got this real climate emergency.

00:57:56
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:57:57
Eric Weinstein: You should be able to do a truthful campaign.

00:57:59
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:57:59
Eric Weinstein: But that can't work, so you have to do a lying campaign-

00:58:02
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

00:58:02
Eric Weinstein: ... and you use an actual human being as your mascot.

00:58:04
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:58:05
Eric Weinstein: So it's like layers and layers of confusion.

00:58:07
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

00:58:08
Eric Weinstein: And the idea of course is that you can't attack an autistic child, particularly a female one-

00:58:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:58:15
Eric Weinstein: ... and because she's angry.

00:58:16
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

00:58:17
Eric Weinstein: And so Trump's, Trump sees opportunity.

00:58:19
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

00:58:20
Eric Weinstein: And he's gonna go at the layer where he's gonna say she has anger management issues. She should get it [laughs] under control.

00:58:27
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

00:58:27
Eric Weinstein: Go to an old-fashioned movie with friends. And then he uses, "Chill, Greta, chill."

00:58:32
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:58:33
Eric Weinstein: Where chill is both an admonition in terms of chill out-

00:58:39
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

00:58:39
Eric Weinstein: ... but also a reference to global cooling.

00:58:41
Anna Khachiyan: Right, yeah. And al- you know, and also keep in mind all of this, um, just days after, on the heels of the Pamela Karlan remark about Barron Trump that prompted Melania to tweet in her little baby daddy voice, "Do not talk to my minor son that way." You know, I love when I read everything in her like sexy baby voice.

00:59:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:59:06
Anna Khachiyan: And so okay, so-

00:59:08
Eric Weinstein: By the way, I'm so jealous of you 'cause I can't say anything like that-

00:59:11
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

00:59:11
Eric Weinstein: ... because you have the XX going.

00:59:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

00:59:13
Eric Weinstein: You can get away with murder.

00:59:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Uh, the XX and like advanced, uh, what's it called, like wet brain [laughs] from my like years of being a Russian alcoholic. But it's, you know, okay, so this woman who's a, like a state witness for the, the impeachment proceedings insult, uh, ostensibly insults Trump's kid and that's not kosher, but, uh, he can insult a 16-year-old climate change activist.

00:59:40
Eric Weinstein: Because well, but this is this, th- this whole thing. So if you look at how complex this, this troll is, he is appealing to all of the people who see the manipulation of the real Greta-

00:59:56
Anna Khachiyan: Right

00:59:56
Eric Weinstein: ... for this fake campaign, which in my opinion is actually crowding out the real campaign that should be there because climate is an issue, but it's misportrayed because it has to be done in a simplistic fashion.

01:00:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, yeah.

01:00:08
Eric Weinstein: So you've got like millions of layers there, and Trump is finding his support in the people who see through part of it.

01:00:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

01:00:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay? The other thing is is that he does have this thing where he knows that because his own child has been brought in-

01:00:23
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:00:23
Eric Weinstein: ... as a combatant, that he should be allowed to do something like this.

01:00:28
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

01:00:28
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:00:28
Anna Khachiyan: He should be able to use somebody else's child as a human shield

01:00:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, particularly one-

01:00:32
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:00:32
Eric Weinstein: ... that is being pushed forward by Time-

01:00:34
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:00:34
Eric Weinstein: ... as Person of the Year.

01:00:36
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

01:00:36
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:00:37
Anna Khachiyan: Oh, God. Are we there? Yeah.

01:00:38
Eric Weinstein: Oh.

01:00:38
Anna Khachiyan: We're there. Okay.

01:00:39
Eric Weinstein: That happened, didn't it?

01:00:41
Anna Khachiyan: Oh, I thought Lizzo was the Person of the Year.

01:00:43
Eric Weinstein: I thought it was Greta.

01:00:44
Anna Khachiyan: Oh, I don't know. They should just mud wrestle and get it over with. Um, anyway, go ahead.

01:00:49
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:00:49
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:00:49
Eric Weinstein: So in any event, um, that was a perfect version of-

01:00:56
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:00:56
Eric Weinstein: ... this isn't Trump the child. This is Trump the master strategist.

01:01:00
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:01:00
Eric Weinstein: It's a trap.

01:01:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:01:02
Eric Weinstein: Because the, the, the liberal or left of center mind just says, "Whoa, Trump attacked an autistic girl."

01:01:07
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs] Yeah.

01:01:08
Eric Weinstein: And if that was the simplicity of it, they'd be right.

01:01:12
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:01:12
Eric Weinstein: And it's in no way, shape, or form the simplicity of it.

01:01:14
Anna Khachiyan: Right, right. But he's, he's really kind of a genius at doing that and it's so sad that he, there is no- Avant-garde art. It's, I, I mean, I said this on my podcast Avant-garde art today is the sum of the Trump PR team's social media output and, uh, coupled with the kind of unintentional comic fallout of woke ad campaigns.

01:01:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, for example, you used the word retarded.

01:01:43
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

01:01:44
Eric Weinstein: If I were to say I, I'm really offended. I, I have a developmentally, uh, challenged relative-

01:01:51
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:01:52
Eric Weinstein: ... you might respond, "Oh, I don't think retarded people are retarded."

01:01:56
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:01:57
Eric Weinstein: Right? And, and they wouldn't understand that it's a comment on an overloaded term.

01:02:02
Anna Khachiyan: Right. Well, it's a, it's a commentary, it's a critique, it's a mockery of, of people who disingenuously oppose the use of the word. It's not actually a commentary or a mockery [laughs] of actually disabled people.

01:02:16
Eric Weinstein: But you could see that there was a reason. I mean, as somebody who, um, developmentally struggled in school-

01:02:25
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:02:25
Eric Weinstein: ... I have a certain-

01:02:26
Anna Khachiyan: Wait. Uh, oh, we're talk- I was like, are you talking about [laughs] you or me?

01:02:29
Eric Weinstein: Me.

01:02:29
Anna Khachiyan: I was like, you don't know me. You can't judge me. Anyway, go on.

01:02:32
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Well, as somebody who struggled in school, I'm, I, I have some sensitivity around-

01:02:37
Anna Khachiyan: Right. Okay

01:02:38
Eric Weinstein: ... like, being, you know, s- having somebody say, like, if they see my handwriting-

01:02:42
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:02:42
Eric Weinstein: ... people say like, "Are, are you a, are you a, a, an ax murderer?"

01:02:46
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:02:46
Eric Weinstein: You know? It's like a-

01:02:47
Anna Khachiyan: What's your handwriting?

01:02:48
Eric Weinstein: I'm, it's, it doesn't look like anything.

01:02:50
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:02:51
Eric Weinstein: It looks like Jackson Pollock.

01:02:52
Anna Khachiyan: It looks like prisoner scrawls. Yeah.

01:02:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:02:55
Anna Khachiyan: I love, I love that Trump's handwriting, by the way, is very bubbly and girlish. You can almost see him-

01:02:58
Eric Weinstein: Very

01:02:58
Anna Khachiyan: ... drawing a heart be- above the I-

01:03:00
Eric Weinstein: Oh, definitely

01:03:00
Anna Khachiyan: ... like they did in high school.

01:03:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Uh, it's very, very like angular and swoopy.

01:03:05
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Yeah.

01:03:06
Eric Weinstein: Um, but I can see how it started.

01:03:11
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:03:12
Eric Weinstein: But then it became like the language police, and it's completely out of control.

01:03:16
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. I mean, look, and I object to, to being, I resent being policed by people who were guilty of the same crimes, you know, just-

01:03:23
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:03:23
Anna Khachiyan: ... 18 months ago or whatever.

01:03:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:03:27
Anna Khachiyan: Um, I, I resent in general, not people, but how, uh, the, the culture, the system or whatever you wanna call it, um, has become so callous, so transactional, um, so interested in meting out kind of punitive justice and so incapable of giving people, uh, the benefit of the doubt. There's no largesse of spirit. Nobody believes that anything, anybody does anything out of like humor or jouissance anymore.

01:03:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, because in many, in many ways it's become like a scavenger hunt where you have to collect, do you have the head of a, a racist? Do you have the head of a misogynist? Do you have the head of a-

01:04:03
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:04:04
Eric Weinstein: ... an antisemite? And so you're, you know, and then you get bingo if you, if [laughs] you call out all of these-

01:04:09
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah

01:04:10
Eric Weinstein: ... people. So partially it's a reward structure. I think one of the ways which it was called out, and I hate that term, but there you are, um, really well by Joe, is that he had a, um, he was... I watched him work up a routine over several nights-

01:04:25
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:04:25
Eric Weinstein: ... on wrestling is gay.

01:04:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:04:28
Eric Weinstein: And he starts off with wrestling is really gay.

01:04:31
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:04:32
Eric Weinstein: And because gay is an epithet in some cases, people made the association, okay, wrestling is stupid.

01:04:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:04:41
Eric Weinstein: That's not what he said. He said wrestling is gay. So they f- they, they take the bait.

01:04:45
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:04:45
Eric Weinstein: This is very Trumpian-

01:04:46
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:04:46
Eric Weinstein: ... but this is Joe doing it as a comic.

01:04:48
Anna Khachiyan: Right. Right.

01:04:48
Eric Weinstein: And he says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You just completed that in your mind."

01:04:53
Anna Khachiyan: Yes. Yeah.

01:04:53
Eric Weinstein: "I didn't say what you think I said." And then, and then now you're, now like you're in the pitcher plant or the Venus fly trap is closed.

01:05:01
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:05:01
Eric Weinstein: And he says, "Let's think about this. You got two guys in gold shorts with lace-up booties rolling around in sweat-"

01:05:07
Anna Khachiyan: Rubbing each other's bodies together. Yeah

01:05:10
Eric Weinstein: ... Yeah. If this isn't gay-

01:05:12
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:05:12
Eric Weinstein: ... what is?

01:05:13
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:05:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, when, when he starts doing it that way, you realize that you took the bait. You had a, you had an automated reaction-

01:05:21
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:05:21
Eric Weinstein: ... as opposed to a thoughtful one.

01:05:23
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:05:24
Eric Weinstein: Um, and that shows off the comic's skill, um, by laying the trap. I mean, you saw another one of these with Dave Chappelle-

01:05:33
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:05:33
Eric Weinstein: ... where he says, "I'm gonna do an impression of the audience."

01:05:35
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:05:35
Eric Weinstein: "And the audience is insufferable."

01:05:37
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:05:37
Eric Weinstein: Or no, he says, "I'm gonna do an impression. I'm gonna ruin your life, and I'm gonna make it impossible for you to earn a living."

01:05:43
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:05:43
Eric Weinstein: And like people thought it was Trump, and he says, "No, it's you."

01:05:45
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:05:46
Eric Weinstein: So the fourth wall is broken, the finger is pointed.

01:05:48
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

01:05:49
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:05:50
Anna Khachiyan: And, uh, yeah, I mean, look, and that's on some level, I feel like I shouldn't, uh, be fully confessional because that'll take away some of the allure and the mystique, but this is what I do with my Twitter. I set things up in such a way that people always inevitably take the bait, and it's not because I like to-

01:06:07
Eric Weinstein: Those people don't watch this program. Don't worry

01:06:09
Anna Khachiyan: ... Yeah. That, they don't. Yeah. And, um, this is true. And the thing that, that, that's so kind of, um, it's eternally amusing and yet disheartening. My, my on- my only goal, you know, now that I'm like a, a, a glass of red deep, is to get people to think and to draw their own conclusions. And when, but when they do think, this is why, you know, democracy on some level isn't possible, when they do, um... Now we're getting into the ASMR portion. This, now this sounds like my podcast where like pouring-

01:06:44
Eric Weinstein: Good

01:06:45
Anna Khachiyan: ... um, popping bottles, pouring wine. I'm gonna light up in the studio. Just kidding. Um, but when people do, uh, kind of get their little engines a-turning, they always somehow, or the people that I'm used to dealing with at any rate, always somehow, uh, draw the worst possible, least mutually flattering conclusion. That speaks volumes about where the culture at large is at.

01:07:14
Eric Weinstein: But when you look at yourself metacognitively-

01:07:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:07:17
Eric Weinstein: ... like I have this thing that I call the robot, which is the thing-

01:07:20
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

01:07:20
Eric Weinstein: ... that I, I observe making these automated decisions And then I have another thing I call the metacognitive perch where I watch my robotic self and I'm just horrified-

01:07:31
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:07:31
Eric Weinstein: ... by what decisions [laughs] it makes, how it conducts itself.

01:07:35
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:07:35
Eric Weinstein: I see you as having this distance as an intrinsic part of your personality, and the person I'm talking to is really sitting on the metacognitive perch.

01:07:43
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I mean, but this is the, the, the kind of, um, uh, blessing and burden of being a dysfunctional [laughs] traumatized Russian person. It sucks being Russian. You, you see-

01:07:57
Eric Weinstein: What are you talking about?

01:07:57
Anna Khachiyan: No, you see the chess board.

01:07:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:08:00
Anna Khachiyan: Which is a... It, it's more of a burden than it is a blessing because you... It makes life very difficult to live. I sym-

01:08:07
Eric Weinstein: Say more.

01:08:08
Anna Khachiyan: I, you know, I sympathize with people like Bret Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq, who are my two favorite novelists. People will laugh, uh, because I'm not reading, like, Flaubert or Balzac, but, um, because they have their... They have this metacognitive perch. Their, their books are about meta commentary. It, it's social commentary disguised as fiction, which to me is kind of the most elite form of writing.

01:08:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, Bret... You know, so Bret sat in your chair, and we talked about this issue that I had accused him of privatizing our mutual childhood since we-

01:08:46
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:08:46
Eric Weinstein: ... came from the same milieu.

01:08:47
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:08:48
Eric Weinstein: And he talked about the importance of the narrator, I guess Clay in Less Than Zero-

01:08:55
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:08:56
Eric Weinstein: ... who's detached from the horrors of what he's seeing. He's weirdly drawn-

01:09:02
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

01:09:02
Eric Weinstein: ... just the way we are to look at an auto accident, but he's also just clinically kind of detailing, "Well, this is what happened."

01:09:11
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:09:12
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, somehow I brought up Joan Didion-

01:09:19
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:09:20
Eric Weinstein: ... in that session, and he confessed that this was his favorite author.

01:09:24
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:09:25
Eric Weinstein: And I think about her detachment, where she was watching the sort of '60s debauchery and he was watching the '70s debauchery.

01:09:32
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:09:33
Eric Weinstein: And just the sense of having a traditional sensibility, viewing the destruction of traditional... Like, y- you can see that this is a very long unraveling of the fabric of society.

01:09:51
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. And that's... I mean, that's my beef with all of these critiques of Houellebecq, right? Um, the primary one being that he's kind of a nihilist and, and a misogynist. Um, and in my mind, especially with this new book, Serotonin, which I don't know if you've read, but if you haven't, you should read it, um, it's j- you know, a, a, a giant eulogy for the decline of Western civilization and the moral failure of liberal consensus. Um, uh, but the main question, the kind of principal organizing theme of his work in my mind has always been, is love possible under advanced capitalism? What kind of nihilist is it that concerns himself with a, a question as meaningful and significant as the possibility, the question of love?

01:10:38
Eric Weinstein: Why do you think that comes up?

01:10:40
Anna Khachiyan: What? What-

01:10:41
Eric Weinstein: In order for that to... book to be interesting, that question has to be interesting.

01:10:44
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:10:45
Eric Weinstein: What makes that question interesting?

01:10:47
Anna Khachiyan: Uh, whether love is possible under advanced capitalism? I, be-

01:10:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, if, if I said, uh, is, uh, is au- transportation by automobile, uh, possible under advanced capitalism-

01:10:59
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:10:59
Eric Weinstein: ... it wouldn't be an interesting question.

01:11:01
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:11:02
Eric Weinstein: So why is it even a question, is love possible?

01:11:06
Anna Khachiyan: Because I think, [laughs] you know, a vast, uh, kind of significant, uh, majority of people, at least people who are kind of in, kind of inoculated in, into some sort of intellectual society or professional society, professional class, believe that it's not or suspect that it's not.

01:11:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, but what is it-

01:11:28
Anna Khachiyan: And I, I-

01:11:29
Eric Weinstein: Like what... For example, if I were to ask you the... Go ahead.

01:11:32
Anna Khachiyan: No, I suspect that, um, they actually want it to be true that love is not possible under advanced capitalism because then that offloads their own, uh, say in the matter, their own responsibility, uh, to the system or whatever.

01:11:53
Eric Weinstein: If I asked, are novels possible to read? Like, uh, are great novels possible to read in the age of Twitter?

01:12:02
Anna Khachiyan: Um, sure. Yeah, they're possible to read. I don't know that they're possible to write.

01:12:06
Eric Weinstein: Or to feel?

01:12:07
Anna Khachiyan: Or to feel, yeah.

01:12:08
Eric Weinstein: I'm not even po- I'm not positive that they are.

01:12:09
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:12:09
Eric Weinstein: Many of us have noticed a bizarre inability to plunge into a book. We, we think of ourselves as book people.

01:12:16
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:12:17
Eric Weinstein: But we don't... We feel that our brains have been rewired. Much the way porn has changed the way in which, um, we find our lovers, I think that Twitter has changed the way we find our novels.

01:12:31
Anna Khachiyan: Right. On some level, yeah. And I mean, there's no, there's no longer a need or, uh, I don't know about a desire, but there's no longer kind of a necessity for a long f- uh, for, for a work of art that has a long form expository narrative structure.

01:12:48
Eric Weinstein: I totally disagree.

01:12:49
Anna Khachiyan: You think that... I mean, I think most people don't sense that, or, or-

01:12:54
Eric Weinstein: Television got so weirdly good out of... Nobody was expecting that.

01:12:59
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:12:59
Eric Weinstein: But TV came out of nowhere. Modern TV has longer narrative arcs than any movie.

01:13:06
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, because the movie industry was completely eroded, right?

01:13:10
Eric Weinstein: Or because The Sopranos and Mad Men and all that figured out something we didn't understand.

01:13:16
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but I think TV is also... Like, watching is meaningfully different from reading.

01:13:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, I guess what I'm trying to say is, is that if you think about this from a evolutionary perspective-

01:13:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

01:13:28
Eric Weinstein: ... there's kind of an adaptive landscape for various forms of memetic dissem- dissemination of story narrative information.

01:13:37
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:13:38
Eric Weinstein: Some of them have gotten terrible but like if you, if you looked at 1970s television-

01:13:43
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:13:44
Eric Weinstein: ... I went back to look at, uh, The Love Boat from my youth.

01:13:48
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:13:48
Eric Weinstein: It's unwatchable.

01:13:49
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:13:49
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:13:50
Anna Khachiyan: I can imagine, yeah

01:13:50
Eric Weinstein: ... but Game of Thrones is weirdly, strangely compelling.

01:13:53
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, it is. Yeah.

01:13:54
Eric Weinstein: And the way in which movies, like there was just this transfer of wealth from cinema into the idiot box.

01:14:02
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:14:04
Eric Weinstein: And that's fascinating because everything else tells us where long form podcasting is a very strange parallel structure. Where are attention spans getting really long? They're getting long somewhere.

01:14:19
Anna Khachiyan: Somewhere, yeah. It's being transferred. I mean, you know, I had this thought earlier today in my hungover state where it dawned on me... I had a little bit of um, kind of like a feminine imposter syndrome moment and I was like, "This is ridiculous that I'm like going on this guy's podcast. I'm some hostess from Bushwick," you know? And then I thought-

01:14:37
Eric Weinstein: And whose podcast? Mine

01:14:38
Anna Khachiyan: ... yeah. And I was like, "You know, this is retarded. It's gay," whatever. It's all this kind of bevy of ridiculous words. It was the completely-

01:14:44
Eric Weinstein: By the way, to all the advertisers who just left the program, it's been a great run.

01:14:48
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah [laughs].

01:14:49
Eric Weinstein: Thank you.

01:14:49
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah. Um, but, uh, then I think about it and I, uh, see that with podcasting there is the possibility of a revival of the era of the public intellectual, which is something that people crave also. Like th- the new cl- as undignified as it sounds, the new class of like podcasting personas are possibly, will possibly be able to revive something like that, uh, image or social role, which is important I think.

01:15:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think you could also look at this a little bit like William Tell.

01:15:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:15:28
Eric Weinstein: Um, or, you know, Philippe Petit, uh, walking the tightrope between the Twin Towers. Part of what makes long form podcasting exciting is the idea that we could screw up at any moment-

01:15:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:15:40
Eric Weinstein: ... and destroy our names and reputations.

01:15:43
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:15:44
Eric Weinstein: And I think that that-

01:15:45
Anna Khachiyan: Should I do it for you now? I can. I'm-

01:15:47
Eric Weinstein: Well, you started

01:15:47
Anna Khachiyan: ... I'm, yeah, I'm a little wind up now.

01:15:50
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?

01:15:50
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah.

01:15:51
Eric Weinstein: Um, that... Well, but, but you see, you're a vice signaler.

01:15:56
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh. You said this to me during our power lunch. You have to re- I, I say this to the audience with no hint of sarcasm. I really like when men mansplain things to me. I think that it's fun and cool.

01:16:11
Eric Weinstein: So vice signaling, um, I think more people are talking about it now, but I originally started talking about it because it came out of the theory for me of contract bridge-

01:16:21
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:16:21
Eric Weinstein: ... where you have to say what it is you're going to do and then you're judged by whether or not you accomplished that which you said you were gonna do.

01:16:27
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:16:28
Eric Weinstein: So what I view modern society as being is a game in which you're fitted with a white suit that you did not ask for.

01:16:37
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:16:37
Eric Weinstein: And then the key question is: Do you keep it clean-

01:16:41
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

01:16:41
Eric Weinstein: ... or does it become soiled?

01:16:43
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:16:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, my first belief is you're crazy to accept a white suit because that's not gonna work out well.

01:16:50
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:16:50
Eric Weinstein: So I picked Dan Bilzerian as my example.

01:16:54
Anna Khachiyan: Mm. Right.

01:16:54
Eric Weinstein: And your fellow Armenian.

01:16:55
Anna Khachiyan: Another fellow Armenian, yeah.

01:16:57
Eric Weinstein: So his thing is guns, drugs-

01:17:01
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

01:17:01
Eric Weinstein: ... and automatic weapons.

01:17:02
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:17:03
Eric Weinstein: And that's-

01:17:03
Anna Khachiyan: And don't forget the-

01:17:04
Eric Weinstein: And money

01:17:05
Anna Khachiyan: ... don't forget the hoes.

01:17:07
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, gun... Sorry, guns? I s- It's the wine.

01:17:11
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:17:11
Eric Weinstein: Girls-

01:17:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:17:13
Eric Weinstein: ... guns-

01:17:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:17:15
Eric Weinstein: ... and drugs, and money.

01:17:18
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:17:18
Eric Weinstein: Those, those are his four big things.

01:17:19
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:17:21
Eric Weinstein: You can't, um, embarrass him by saying, "Hey, you just took a bunch of chicks out into the desert and gave them automatic weapons after you coked them up."

01:17:31
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:17:32
Eric Weinstein: Or gave them weed because like yes, that's my business model.

01:17:35
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:17:36
Eric Weinstein: And as a result, there's no industry trying to take down Dan Bilzerian.

01:17:40
Anna Khachiyan: Right. I mean, I mean, I think I said this to you. I don't remember because I was wind up then too. Um, I said, "You know, it's the same thing with somebody like Howard Stern or Donald Trump. They never promised to respect women, so they can't get taken down for not respecting women. Meanwhile, all these guys who are playing like the virtue game, uh, get at least, they at least get their reputations tarnished."

01:18:04
Eric Weinstein: That's not true, actually, though. The two cases that you talked about, Howard Stern's original, uh, gambit was that he wanted to be lashed to the mast-

01:18:13
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:18:14
Eric Weinstein: ... and be surrounded by, uh, TNA and-

01:18:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:18:17
Eric Weinstein: ... and just as much cleavage as, as, as was possible, and then he would do nothing.

01:18:23
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:18:23
Eric Weinstein: And so that was his, that was his game was that he was Ulysses. And so it was a promise.

01:18:28
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:18:29
Eric Weinstein: And he was married throughout and then his wife would call up while he was surrounded by temptation.

01:18:33
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:18:34
Eric Weinstein: In the case of Bilzerian, he's got a different promise. The promise is, "I will not lie to you and you will not lie to me. I'm not telling you that you have to be monogamous with me. I'm not telling you any one of a number of things. I will be straight with you. You will be straight with me, and if we can't have honesty, then you have to leave."

01:18:53
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:18:54
Eric Weinstein: So those are incredibly weird gambits.

01:18:57
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:18:57
Eric Weinstein: You have to give both of these men their due. It's, they're very unusual.

01:19:01
Anna Khachiyan: Right. They're socially engineering something.

01:19:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, my favorite Dan Bilzerian, um, post on Instagram-

01:19:09
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:19:10
Eric Weinstein: ... is he's there, I think, with no shirt, 'cause he, he's also, uh, kind of a confection. He serves himself up as, uh, he self-objectifies.

01:19:18
Anna Khachiyan: A snack, yeah.

01:19:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And he's reaching out to this woman who's more clothed than he is-

01:19:23
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

01:19:23
Eric Weinstein: ... to come up a step somewhere in Greece.

01:19:25
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:19:25
Eric Weinstein: And the caption is, "Come with me. I'll ruin your life, but you'll have fun."

01:19:30
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:19:31
Eric Weinstein: And like I really think that's his proposition.

01:19:34
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. I, I really have to hand it to Armenian men because they alone among men are, are just as vain as women.

01:19:41
Eric Weinstein: Are they?

01:19:42
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, they really like to objectify themselves.

01:19:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, but you see- In my opinion, women are really the males of the human species because as the adorn-

01:19:53
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

01:19:53
Eric Weinstein: ... as the adorned gender-

01:19:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:19:54
Eric Weinstein: ... I don't know, take it seriously.

01:19:56
Anna Khachiyan: As the adorned gender. You, you are now echoing a, a thesis proposed by this woman, Andrea Long Chu, who's like a, a transgender writer, um, uh, who was also echoing Valerie Solanas, um, who may, who has the same hypothesis. It's interesting to hear Eric Wein- it's, you say Weinstein.

01:20:15
Eric Weinstein: Weinstein.

01:20:15
Anna Khachiyan: Weinstein.

01:20:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:20:16
Anna Khachiyan: I think the power move-

01:20:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:20:18
Anna Khachiyan: ... the power move, Eric-

01:20:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:20:20
Anna Khachiyan: ... if I may say so, is to have Harvey on, in this chair.

01:20:24
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:20:25
Anna Khachiyan: No, you can't.

01:20:27
Eric Weinstein: No. Well, no. I mean, there are, there are people who've been canceled-

01:20:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:20:31
Eric Weinstein: ... who I'm interested in.

01:20:33
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:20:34
Eric Weinstein: And there are people who have been canceled that I'm perfectly happy that they are canceled.

01:20:37
Anna Khachiyan: That they ... Yeah.

01:20:39
Eric Weinstein: And this is part of, part of my problem, which is that... Well, I mean, this is a difference between us-

01:20:44
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:20:44
Eric Weinstein: ... too, which is the way I view it-

01:20:46
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:20:47
Eric Weinstein: ... is, is that you have accepted the game, but you're gonna behave really badly within it.

01:20:53
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:20:53
Eric Weinstein: I haven't accepted the game.

01:20:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:20:55
Eric Weinstein: I've rejected the game.

01:20:56
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:20:56
Eric Weinstein: And I understand the motivations for how this woke stuff got started.

01:21:02
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:21:03
Eric Weinstein: And I'm sympathetic with them to a point, and I'm completely unsympathetic with how non-self-reflective and shallow and mean-spirited-

01:21:13
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:21:13
Eric Weinstein: ... it is while pretending that it cares.

01:21:15
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:21:16
Eric Weinstein: And I'm gonna carry that tension. So you and I are on slightly different missions.

01:21:20
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah. You're gonna carry the tension of-

01:21:24
Eric Weinstein: I'm, I'm, I'm okay being earnest. Like, my answer-

01:21:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah, but it-

01:21:27
Eric Weinstein: My answer to your Nietzsche point-

01:21:28
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:21:29
Eric Weinstein: ... is around you. So for example, you know, this is a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional convex polytope.

01:21:38
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:21:38
Eric Weinstein: And I find it transcendent.

01:21:41
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

01:21:41
Eric Weinstein: So I'm holding up, uh, what is this? 120 cell, uh, which is the name of the convex polytope, which is a generalization of the dodecahedron to four-

01:21:49
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:21:49
Eric Weinstein: ... dimensional space.

01:21:50
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:21:51
Eric Weinstein: Um, and you have one over there that's-

01:21:53
Anna Khachiyan: Yes, I do

01:21:54
Eric Weinstein: ... the 24 cell-

01:21:55
Anna Khachiyan: But it's a different cell, yeah

01:21:55
Eric Weinstein: ... which is the unique one that doesn't correspond to one of the platonic solids.

01:21:59
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:22:00
Eric Weinstein: I look at that one by you-

01:22:02
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

01:22:02
Eric Weinstein: ... and I just marvel at it, and I think about it the way people think about, like, seraphim.

01:22:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:22:08
Eric Weinstein: It's like I don't have religion in my life at the same level that my ancestors did.

01:22:12
Anna Khachiyan: Right. But you have some equivalent.

01:22:13
Eric Weinstein: But I have, I have the, the wonder of mathematics and physics and biology-

01:22:19
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

01:22:19
Eric Weinstein: ... that, that plugs the same religion-shaped hole in my soul.

01:22:23
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:22:24
Eric Weinstein: And so that's how I've solved the Nietzsche problem. That's why I remain earnest, much to the chagrin of some of my listeners.

01:22:30
Anna Khachiyan: I know, but I think, I actually think that we're, uh, fundamentally at the end of the day on the same page about the-

01:22:34
Eric Weinstein: I think we're very close to being.

01:22:36
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:22:36
Eric Weinstein: And I think this is one of the reasons why I covertly brought up your father-

01:22:40
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

01:22:40
Eric Weinstein: ... because this, I, I, I think that the Jewish and the Soviet and the Armenian, um, you know, all of these things, uh, these are very old tradition that feel very deeply, and they, they're, we're naked about caring.

01:22:59
Anna Khachiyan: Right. And I guess we're b- actually we're back to where we started.

01:23:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:23:02
Anna Khachiyan: It's improv, baby. But, um, the, there's this i- idea, I think the kind of... In America, there's this very reductive idea of, like, white people, right? White people. There's, uh, there are all these different non-white ethnicities and cultures, but white people are a singular block. And-

01:23:21
Eric Weinstein: Through the magic of this country only.

01:23:23
Anna Khachiyan: Right. But I've, uh, but, you know, I mean, I don't know if you have the similar kind of experience. I've always felt, for example, very alienated from, uh, Nordic non-Jewish whites, right? Or just to give you an example.

01:23:39
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:23:39
Anna Khachiyan: I, I don't, you know, have any beef with them, but those people are not my people on some level.

01:23:44
Eric Weinstein: You'd think that, and then one of my largest constituencies, um, abroad are Sweden and Norway.

01:23:52
Anna Khachiyan: Your demos.

01:23:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:23:54
Anna Khachiyan: That makes sense because they're, they're also actually very earnest people.

01:23:57
Eric Weinstein: And they're also weirdly having their idealism that has worked very well, and is in fact-

01:24:03
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

01:24:03
Eric Weinstein: ... crowded out by the left, abused against them-

01:24:07
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:24:07
Eric Weinstein: ... so that they are now starting to feel like WTF.

01:24:10
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:24:11
Eric Weinstein: Why can't we talk about some of the tensions that we're experiencing?

01:24:14
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:24:14
Eric Weinstein: Like, there is something that it means to be Swedish or Norwegian-

01:24:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

01:24:18
Eric Weinstein: ... or Icelandic.

01:24:19
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:24:19
Eric Weinstein: And to be told, "Well, this, your identity is just that you're European," and even that is-

01:24:26
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:24:26
Eric Weinstein: ... only... Like, this whole question about software nationalism versus hardware nationalism, you have lots of people in the UK, for example, from South Asia, who by going through the Oxbridge system sound entirely like the British upper crust.

01:24:42
Anna Khachiyan: Exactly. Yeah.

01:24:44
Eric Weinstein: And, and, and further b- sometimes they come from the c- the high castes that the British favored working with-

01:24:50
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:24:50
Eric Weinstein: ... in India or Pakistan. Now, the idea that Enlightenment ideas or Anglo-Saxon ideas can run on any hardware, it's like boot camp where you've got an Apple machine that's running Windows.

01:25:04
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:25:04
Eric Weinstein: You know? Uh, I don't really care too much about the hardware. I care a great deal about the software.

01:25:10
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:25:11
Eric Weinstein: And the idea that everybody of European descent or who are interested in European cultures should apologize, I'm having none of this.

01:25:20
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:25:20
Eric Weinstein: I mean, there's so much music and science and architecture and, you know, the, all the terrible things that happened too. I will not have that watered down. That's an authentic experience. So the thing that bothers me about it is, and this is another one of my riffs, um, you have this problem with vanilla-

01:25:39
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:25:39
Eric Weinstein: ... where vanilla has two meanings.

01:25:41
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:25:41
Eric Weinstein: One is boring, flavorless-

01:25:44
Anna Khachiyan: Okay

01:25:45
Eric Weinstein: ... bland. And the other is like the most flavorful of spices-

01:25:49
Anna Khachiyan: Okay

01:25:49
Eric Weinstein: ... and flavorings and tastes.

01:25:51
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:25:52
Eric Weinstein: And somehow they're both vanilla. Well, white is the same thing. White is the most bland, boring... It's like a canvas that has been gessoed but not painted upon.

01:26:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:26:02
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, if you look at European culture, is there anything richer and spicier and more intricate and interesting? [laughs]

01:26:08
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

01:26:08
Eric Weinstein: And somehow our minds are just bananas over these two descriptions.

01:26:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I mean, it's... But it's, it's always, it's very offensively, uh, reductive on a way that personally strikes me because the kind of, the only thing, uh, uh, keeping me from being, becoming like a typical Welbeckian, uh, protagonist or one of these like horrible millennial girl bosses who's fundamentally empty inside is the great deal of kind of like honor and respect that I feel for my ancestors and the cultural, kind of the amniotic fluid that we all came out of.

01:26:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, but it's worse f- I mean, you're in a very funny position. You are culturally... Like, your, your podcast is called Red Scare.

01:27:02
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:27:03
Eric Weinstein: And you are culturally very Russian, Soviet, Jewish, Armenian.

01:27:11
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:27:13
Eric Weinstein: But if you really look at it, you can see that it's fading.

01:27:16
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:27:17
Eric Weinstein: And you're not going to have grandchildren that relate to you.

01:27:22
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. And that's, uh, that's really a terrifying thing, and it's actually a terrifying thing on two levels because, right, A, you're not gonna have grandchildren who relate to you on like a practicable level. Um, but B, to even acknowledge that you want grandchildren, uh, to relate to you kind of flies in the face of this very leftist doxy that, um, a culture is relevant, and it makes me think of like, you know, the idea of, um, narcissism that somebody like Lash was so kind of brilliant at i- identifying, diagnosing. Uh, and at the time he was writing in, in the '60s and '70s, uh, he billed it as kind of the generational pathology of our time, the, the kind of liberated persona. Uh, but even at that time, narcissism was still at the very least a system of positive affinities. So you identified through affinity, right? Uh, o- originally, maybe you identified with your ethnicity or your religion, and then later you came to identify with your lifestyle markers. You know, you did yoga or, uh, composting or recycling or whatever, and gradually over time, that's yielded to kind of a nar- negative narcissism where people at large, uh, identify with their oppression and their adversity.

01:28:49
Eric Weinstein: But Russians identify with their oppression and their adversity in a very strong way that doesn't look anything like what we're doing in the US.

01:28:56
Anna Khachiyan: Okay. See, I've never heard this one before.

01:29:00
Eric Weinstein: Oh, really?

01:29:01
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:29:03
Eric Weinstein: Oh.

01:29:03
Anna Khachiyan: I just thought we were kind of miserable, melancholic people. I think there's a general kind of, you know, uh, Anna Pavlova, the great Russian ballerina, said that the Russian soul is marked by melancholy.

01:29:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:29:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:29:15
Eric Weinstein: I think that it's... Well, you know, the, the, um... It's very interesting. I- When I had Garry Kasparov on the program-

01:29:26
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:29:27
Eric Weinstein: ... he [laughs] there were some very odd moments.

01:29:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:29:31
Eric Weinstein: So I, I tried to do a, a, an intro in Russian where I said that he was, uh, uh, in- unclear that he was, if he was Garry Kasparov or Gary Weinstein because that was-

01:29:41
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:29:42
Eric Weinstein: ... his first name.

01:29:43
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:29:43
Eric Weinstein: And he immediately just didn't bite on that.

01:29:45
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. I'm jealous that you didn't do the Russian language intro for me.

01:29:48
Eric Weinstein: Really?

01:29:48
Anna Khachiyan: You know, my chopped liver. Just kidding. No, go on.

01:29:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, I, I felt that, uh, in order to... Uh, well, I mean, we actually didn't even talk about it. Almost no one reacted to it.

01:29:58
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah.

01:29:59
Eric Weinstein: One of my hopes was for the program was to start personalizing it to all of the cultures that I care the most about.

01:30:06
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:30:06
Eric Weinstein: And so I did this thing about, um, ""Because in the Moscow subways and the subways of other cities, there's this thing which says, you know, "Warning, doors are closing. The, the next stop,"""

01:30:21
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:30:22
Eric Weinstein: ""You know?"

01:30:23
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:30:23
Eric Weinstein: Like that-

01:30:23
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:30:24
Eric Weinstein: ... that thing. I always thought it'd be cool that The Portal was like the Moscow doors-

01:30:28
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

01:30:29
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, opening and closing, and he just didn't react at all to it.

01:30:33
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:30:33
Eric Weinstein: The one weird thing where there was like a shiver of recognition-

01:30:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm

01:30:37
Eric Weinstein: ... was I talked about, um, the Russian satirical magazine, Crocodile.

01:30:43
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:30:43
Eric Weinstein: And how dissent and irreverence existed within the Soviet Union but in this very specified way so that there was a valve to let things, to let off steam.

01:30:57
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:30:57
Eric Weinstein: And it wasn't the American picture where nobody could say anything at any time-

01:31:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:31:01
Eric Weinstein: ... because that would never work.

01:31:03
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:31:03
Eric Weinstein: The Russian system was much more sophisticated.

01:31:05
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:31:05
Eric Weinstein: And that was the one moment at which he sort of gave me a little bit of a nod, like, "Wow, you really know your stuff." And the thing is, it's very hard for an American to connect to the broad Slavic soul.

01:31:18
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. And for us to connect to the broad American soul. Um, I think I said this to you, you know, the kind of idea that Russians are basically optimists masquerading as cynics and Americans are cynics masquerading as optimists. I mean, that's like broadly on some level like stereotypically true. Um, and I also remember saying that, uh- Russians, unlike Americans, you know, if you have a classroom of American kids and you ask them, like, "Who's done X or who is Y?" Uh, the hands shoot up because, uh, in America it's mus- much less dangerous historically to identify yourself. And Russians are in the business of indirection-

01:31:58
Eric Weinstein: Inaction

01:31:58
Anna Khachiyan: ... misdirection, non-identification, because it, it was at some point a political problem that had, uh, kind of material real world consequences, but has been handed down to successive generations as a behavioral c- quirk that's actually really problematic if you're trying to have, like, a, you know, a romantic relationship with, like, an American man, for example. But, uh, yeah, we're c- very weird, damaged people. I mean, I said this, I tweeted about this, um, that conversation with Kasparov was really weird because it was, like, an insight into all of my communication impasses with American people.

01:32:35
Eric Weinstein: Say more about that.

01:32:36
Anna Khachiyan: Well, in, to the degree that I don't like to disclose or identify myself.

01:32:41
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:32:41
Anna Khachiyan: I like to misdirect by saying a great deal of stuff that seems kind of superficially very confessional and personal, but actually nobody knows anything about me.

01:32:49
Eric Weinstein: People know a lot more about you than you think they know about you.

01:32:52
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but only b- through kind of, um, non-verbal or, or subconscious, uh, means.

01:33:01
Eric Weinstein: I think that's right.

01:33:02
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, not through anything th- th- that exists on the verbal register, the things I've-

01:33:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I think that, y- you know, I don't know how many podcasts you've done like this.

01:33:11
Anna Khachiyan: D- Probably none.

01:33:13
Eric Weinstein: Probably none.

01:33:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:33:14
Eric Weinstein: Um, and I do think that you're gonna find that your mystique, uh, coexists with your revelation. They're not as rivalrous as you might imagine.

01:33:26
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, that's, that's possibly a good point, but I, I think, like, uh-

01:33:30
Eric Weinstein: But what did you hear in the Kasp- like, so you, so you listened to that podcast?

01:33:34
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:33:35
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:33:36
Anna Khachiyan: Well, because-

01:33:36
Eric Weinstein: We, we famously tried to talk over each other. He's very forceful.

01:33:40
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:33:41
Eric Weinstein: I would like to think that I've been far less forceful with you than I was with him. Uh-

01:33:46
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but I'm also easier to get along with.

01:33:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, I view you, you as potentially more dangerous.

01:33:53
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but that's only because I'm a woman. It... Kasparov and I have the same, uh, ethnic breakdown basically, which in Russia is called grymochysmyys.

01:34:01
Eric Weinstein: Grymochysmyys.

01:34:02
Anna Khachiyan: A, like, explosive mixture.

01:34:04
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:34:04
Anna Khachiyan: So it's like, um-

01:34:06
Eric Weinstein: A binary weapon that when combined-

01:34:07
Anna Khachiyan: It's like dynamite

01:34:08
Eric Weinstein: ... it's much more, yeah.

01:34:08
Anna Khachiyan: The kind of like, uh, when Armenians and Jews join forces-

01:34:12
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:34:12
Anna Khachiyan: ... in a single person. It's basically a- an incredibly [laughs] difficult, combative, categorical personality, and I think that's probably what he ha- he is. I mean, I don't know a ton about him, but I'm kind of obviously interested because-

01:34:28
Eric Weinstein: He's cheated of his meaning because there's something about the fact that Putin, to him, is this unrecognized master menace-

01:34:37
Anna Khachiyan: Oh

01:34:37
Eric Weinstein: ... and that we're running a clown show while the fate of the world spins out of control. He has very much of a cold... I mean, I have much more of a Cold War, uh, overlay in my mind than most of my contemporaries, and certainly than my millennial audience. I can't believe that we have nuclear weapons, that they haven't been used in a long time, and that we imagine that this will go on forever.

01:35:03
Anna Khachiyan: And that they're laying kind of dormant for now. Um, I mean, but this brings me back to the whole concept of stoyb, which dovetails very nicely with the idea of hypernormalization, right? Which, uh, um, the documentarian Adam Curtis took the-

01:35:16
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:35:16
Anna Khachiyan: ... title for his famous documentary from this term, which was coined by this guy Alexey Yurchak. Um, Yurchak, um, who's a, an anthropology professor, uh, who did a, a lot of kind of, uh, research, uh, on stoyb with this guy Dominic Boyer, a, a fellow anthropologist. Uh, and I guess the basic principle of hypernormalization as I understand it in my feeble female brain is that, you know, there was kind of an elite guild of experts, uh, technologists, financiers, uh, uh, politicians who kind of g- con- if not conspired, then agreed to, uh, invent kind of a fake world a- atop the real world that we inhabit because the real world had grown so complicated that it was, that they had to model it into, you know, in simplified terms. It's almost like Fassbinder's World on a Wire, where you're living in, like, a successive n- uh, nesting doll of, like, successive simulation.

01:36:19
Eric Weinstein: Matryoshka.

01:36:20
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, matryoshka. Yeah. Um, and, uh, I forgot what we were going, where we were going with this, but, um-

01:36:27
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:36:27
Anna Khachiyan: We, we now live in this, like, kind of, like, hypertrophied [laughs] hyperreal reality where, you know, you said to me it's like very few people can see that they're a part of the simulation. I don't know if I actually agree with that because I, I like to think that people are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

01:36:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, uh, see I don't think it comes down to smart. I think it comes down to our self-blinding.

01:36:56
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:36:56
Eric Weinstein: And so one of the-

01:36:57
Anna Khachiyan: Illusion

01:36:57
Eric Weinstein: ... reasons I was asking you what you had heard in the Garry, uh, Kasparov podcast was I, I wasn't sure what happened during it.

01:37:08
Anna Khachiyan: I think that he... I mean, I don't know if you want me to psychoanalyze. This is, like, very meta podcasting. Um-

01:37:14
Eric Weinstein: We've gone pretty meta.

01:37:15
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:37:15
Eric Weinstein: The wine doesn't hurt.

01:37:16
Anna Khachiyan: I think that he was deflecting your earnest attempts, uh, mutual identification, which is, like, the basis of all kind of bonds, right? I'm so excited, right, when I meet, um, kind of a fellow traveler-

01:37:29
Eric Weinstein: Self

01:37:29
Anna Khachiyan: ... in any capacity.

01:37:30
Eric Weinstein: You find self in the other.

01:37:31
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, and I told you this during our lunch. I was like, "Oh my God. We're like, you know, relatives," right? There's something very familiar-

01:37:35
Eric Weinstein: I feel like I've known you for-

01:37:36
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:37:36
Eric Weinstein: ... forever, and I've met you twice.

01:37:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, and there's something very familiar in meeting other people from a kind of a similar cultural background. Um, and I tend to collect them.

01:37:45
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:37:45
Anna Khachiyan: And, you know, if that's racist, let me know.

01:37:48
Eric Weinstein: It's very racist.

01:37:49
Anna Khachiyan: But, [laughs] but, um- So I think the Russian tendency, which I've tried to, for example, uh, minimize, mitigate in myself to adapt better to American society is to deflect any such attempts and to, uh, kind of not to, to not give anybody an inch, to not let anybody get to know you and to stay kind of distant.

01:38:16
Eric Weinstein: Are you open to being the unreliable narrator?

01:38:19
Anna Khachiyan: Uh, I'm not sure what that question means.

01:38:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, sometimes, like, I forget if maybe if it's Edgar Allan Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, where you're telling a story about the self and the story reveals something to the audience. Maybe Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny would be a better example.

01:38:37
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:38:38
Eric Weinstein: Where he's talking about the strawberries and the men-

01:38:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:38:40
Eric Weinstein: ... and like really he's discussing his own paranoia in a way that's leaking out into the testimony he's giving.

01:38:48
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:38:48
Eric Weinstein: So th- what I see with you is that you are Russian post-Soviet enough-

01:38:55
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:38:55
Eric Weinstein: ... but that you're very worried that it's not really a sustaining quality in this homogenizing sea. Like your mother, you can see there's no way she can get away from it. I, I have never met the woman-

01:39:08
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

01:39:08
Eric Weinstein: ... but I can feel her, her presence as being intrinsically Soviet. And your podcast is called Red Scare, but first of all, that's a, uh, an invocation of, like, the 1950s or earlier.

01:39:26
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, and menstruation.

01:39:28
Eric Weinstein: And menstruation-

01:39:29
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:39:29
Eric Weinstein: ... and the thong, and there's a tramp stamp.

01:39:32
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:39:33
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, there's this whole aspect of, um, you're worried that you can't actually keep it together. You can't hold the information back. You can't keep the identification with Eastern Europe because it's starting to fray.

01:39:53
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, on some level, but I, uh, also on another level, I feel kind of like a complete dinosaur. I'm relatively young. I'm young-ish, but I feel, uh, like, uh, that sometimes I feel kind of insane, right? Because I'm the only one who has in my, you know, circle, for example, has kind of an at- an attachment to some- to certain religious or ethnic-

01:40:21
Eric Weinstein: I took-

01:40:22
Anna Khachiyan: ... cult

01:40:22
Eric Weinstein: ... an Ivy League admission at the University of Pennsylvania, and when everyone else went into investment banking or law or medicine, I went to math grad school-

01:40:32
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:40:32
Eric Weinstein: ... like your father-

01:40:33
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:40:33
Eric Weinstein: ... because there was something ancient about-

01:40:36
Anna Khachiyan: And respectable about it?

01:40:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, but the, in the, it's respectable in the sense of like yichus.

01:40:41
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:40:41
Eric Weinstein: Like a Jewish concept.

01:40:42
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:40:43
Eric Weinstein: It was a very Jewish and self-destructive thing to do-

01:40:46
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:40:47
Eric Weinstein: ... to take this fantastic opportunity and say, "Okay, I'm gonna try to achieve something for all eternity that seven people are really gonna deeply understand."

01:40:55
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:40:55
Eric Weinstein: Something like that. And there's an aspect to this which is this is what animates Star Wars.

01:41:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:41:02
Eric Weinstein: The idea that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda m- mysteriously survive.

01:41:09
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:41:10
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I'm not a fan of the orig- the Star Wars pictures that are supposed to come chronologically early.

01:41:17
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:41:17
Eric Weinstein: But there is one scene which is precious to me, where the emperor says, "Execute Order 66," and all the Jedi are killed except two-

01:41:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:41:28
Eric Weinstein: ... one of which lives by accident.

01:41:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:41:31
Eric Weinstein: That's Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda intuits, "Ah, shit," you know, "this is the genocide and I'm gonna be all that's left."

01:41:39
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:41:39
Eric Weinstein: So you are that thing that carries the seed.

01:41:42
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:41:44
Eric Weinstein: That's a huge responsibility. That's why you have a podcast, but it's also the case that you're corroding in this extremely, um, alkaline environment.

01:41:54
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. That's, like, really beautiful and poetic and, and also [laughs] a horribi- a horrifying reality to ponder, but it, yeah, it's true on some level.

01:42:03
Eric Weinstein: First of all, that's a gift to a Russian. If I gave you a horrifying, tragic mission-

01:42:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I know. We'll, we'll eat it right up. Yeah.

01:42:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:42:10
Anna Khachiyan: But look, I remember-

01:42:11
Eric Weinstein: No, you're kind

01:42:11
Anna Khachiyan: ... uh, Camille Paglia, I think I'm supposed to say Paglia, really kind of re-, um, changed my thinking on S- on the Star Wars franchise, which I've always thought to be kind of like the nail in the coffin of the golden age of American cinema. Uh-

01:42:27
Eric Weinstein: Oh, say more. I really want to hear this.

01:42:28
Anna Khachiyan: Uh, you know, it, it was kind of like, uh, it, it really opened the door. It paved the way for these mega franchises, the, the Marvelization, the Disneyfication of film. Um, and her, her feeling about it was that it was a kind of epic, eternal legend saga story that was, uh, fulfilled or produced by means of the most cutting edge technology and that this is where art resides now in kind of the technological capacity of the Hollywood industry.

01:43:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, because transcendence is difficult to manufacture, and when you first see what a technology can do, The Matrix would be an excellent, uh, other example-

01:43:12
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:43:12
Eric Weinstein: ... to, to, to discuss. Uh, in that case, and I'm very partial to giving this example, there were multiple innovations. There was the wire work. There was bullet time with using still and moving, uh, camera images and, and interplaying between them, and then there was CGI.

01:43:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:43:28
Eric Weinstein: And so the mind was never sure what it was seeing.

01:43:31
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:43:31
Eric Weinstein: And so you'd, you devote extra cognitive resources to the legend and, and archetype that's being explored when you're opened by transcendence.

01:43:41
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:43:41
Eric Weinstein: And that's why we litter the set, for example, with Klein bottles often because, you know, to have, to have a glassware from the fourth dimension that d- defies the laws of inside and out-

01:43:53
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:43:54
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, opens people up to, well, what, what are these people gonna be discussing? Is this a way out? Because I think everybody wants escape.

01:44:02
Anna Khachiyan: Yes.

01:44:03
Eric Weinstein: And I think that if you go back to our Jewish tradition, the entire concept of, like, what is the, what is the epic that we tell? Every year is our Star Wars. It's the Passover epic of-

01:44:14
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:44:14
Eric Weinstein: ... es- the Jews escaping.

01:44:16
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:44:17
Eric Weinstein: Now is the time when we understand why we tell that story, because we need to get out of here.

01:44:24
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I, I think the kind of, uh, flattering, uplifting version is escape. I think the cynical, not so flattering version is offloading your responsibility in the way that l- somebody like Erich Fromm described foisting the responsibility for your life onto another.

01:44:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Can I ask you sort of a final set of questions-

01:44:47
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:44:48
Eric Weinstein: ... before I invite you back to the podcast-

01:44:49
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:44:49
Eric Weinstein: ... when you're next in LA?

01:44:50
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:44:50
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause I hope you'll move here.

01:44:52
Anna Khachiyan: I wanna move here.

01:44:53
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:44:53
Anna Khachiyan: It's so horrible

01:44:54
Eric Weinstein: ... it's so horrible

01:44:54
Anna Khachiyan: I'm meant to be an Armenian Jew slut who hangs out at the Glendale Galleria. I'm not a New York girl. Anyway, go ahead.

01:45:01
Eric Weinstein: I'm gonna pass on that one.

01:45:02
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, yeah.

01:45:02
Eric Weinstein: Um, where are we in gender space? I have the feeling that men and women of heterosexual mindset needed to put their own mask on before helping everybody who was trying something different.

01:45:20
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. I like that. That's like the plane annou-

01:45:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:45:22
Anna Khachiyan: ... the oxygen mask. Yeah, that's very cute.

01:45:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, and then at the moment we're trying to like solve 12 million things that have all been lumped under trans.

01:45:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:45:30
Eric Weinstein: And I, I always give the analogy that strokes occur from excessive clotting and thinning.

01:45:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:45:36
Eric Weinstein: So you can't say something about strokes in general-

01:45:39
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:45:40
Eric Weinstein: ... because you don't know which type of stroke, so we don't know which type of trans.

01:45:43
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:45:44
Eric Weinstein: But if you just say, "Look, okay, we've got all these things about polyamory and bisexuality, homosexuality, non- non-binary relations, et cetera," very complicated. Let's assume we have the best of intentions to everybody as a soul.

01:45:58
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:46:00
Eric Weinstein: We are now neglecting male, female, heterosexual, procreative relationships. [laughs]

01:46:06
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:46:06
Eric Weinstein: It's like an afterthought. We gotta do something where our concerns for all of these other variations don't obliterate the major workhorse of societal perpetuation.

01:46:19
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

01:46:19
Eric Weinstein: What are your thoughts?

01:46:20
Anna Khachiyan: Well, what's the question?

01:46:22
Eric Weinstein: The thoughts are, the question is, are we getting dragged into a world in which we can't focus on the fact that the major workhorse of perpetuation needs its own care? Like for example, if you and I both opt in to heterosexual, heteronormative-

01:46:45
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:46:46
Eric Weinstein: ... cisgendered, et cetera, uh, i- ideas, we can't really continue to focus on our subset of people-

01:46:55
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:46:56
Eric Weinstein: ... because immediately the point is, well, you just excluded 12, [laughs] 12,000 other categories.

01:47:03
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:47:03
Eric Weinstein: I see you as trying to-

01:47:04
Anna Khachiyan: Just excluded .01. [laughs] Yeah.

01:47:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I see what you're, I see what you're, you're trying to do in some sense-

01:47:10
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:47:11
Eric Weinstein: ... is reestablishing feminine mystique. Is that a fair comment?

01:47:15
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, absolutely.

01:47:17
Eric Weinstein: What do you see the role of mystique being in heterosexuality?

01:47:21
Anna Khachiyan: The role of mystique, that's a good question. You see, I'm so, I'm so kind of instinctive and non-intellectual on some level that I don't even think about this. Um, I think the, uh, the ab- I, I would answer it in the negative way. I think the, the absence of mystique kills libidinal energy.

01:47:40
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely.

01:47:40
Anna Khachiyan: You can't be taken seriously as a woman-

01:47:43
Eric Weinstein: The frequency

01:47:43
Anna Khachiyan: ... if you disclose everything about yourself, if you publish naked photos of yourself at all times. I mean, that's, that's a statement of fact, not of value.

01:47:55
Eric Weinstein: But we, we used to, for example, teach women to send mixed messages.

01:47:58
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:47:59
Eric Weinstein: And we used to teach men and women to play games.

01:48:02
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:48:03
Eric Weinstein: And now increasingly there's a sort of Dr. Ruth-ification of male-female relations-

01:48:08
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:48:08
Eric Weinstein: ... where it's just like people should learn how to communicate, be direct, say everything that you want.

01:48:12
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. Safe sex, affirmative consent, um, all these things that-

01:48:16
Eric Weinstein: Has anyone ever achieved enthusiastic consent?

01:48:20
Anna Khachiyan: Right. I know. Who, like who are these people? Like you pull out an iPad when you h- like, "Can I touch your breast?" What's the... It's, it's a really weird-

01:48:26
Eric Weinstein: I want you so much we should call our lawyers immediately.

01:48:29
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. And sign an NDA, a- an NDA. It's like, um, every time Buttigieg has sex with his husband, he signs an NDA.

01:48:37
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:48:37
Anna Khachiyan: Um, but it's m- maddening because the whole allure of sex is precisely the unsafe, the unconse- the unconsensual. I'm not talking obviously about rape or coercion, but women like mixed messages. They like giving them, they like receiving them, i- because it's correct that they, on some level, don't know what they want. Uh, not because they're stupid or weak, but because it's an evolving communicative process that unfolds in the course of the-

01:49:12
Eric Weinstein: Do you know me well enough to order for me?

01:49:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, right.

01:49:15
Eric Weinstein: Like maybe I would do a slightly better job of choosing my dish.

01:49:19
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:49:19
Eric Weinstein: But if you do 90% as good as I would've g- done ordering my dish and you can show me that you actually grasp me-

01:49:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. The, not only do you, uh, get to enjoy the benefit of having a dish that you wanted, but you get to enjoy kind of the meta benefit of knowing that your partner knows you. I got in trouble for a tweet where I said that I like when my boyfriends or- o- or order food for me.

01:49:43
Eric Weinstein: That's so hot.

01:49:44
Anna Khachiyan: I know, it's so hot. W- w- why would any woman not want that?

01:49:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think because, I can answer that from the guy's perspective. We've all thought we knew somebody well enough and we ordered just exactly the wrong thing-

01:49:57
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:49:58
Eric Weinstein: ... which shows that we have no concept of-

01:49:59
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:49:59
Eric Weinstein: ... we think we're on top of it and we- we're just not.

01:50:02
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Okay, cool.

01:50:03
Eric Weinstein: So, so, there's no, but this is-

01:50:04
Anna Khachiyan: But there's some baked in disappointment that, that potential disappointment.

01:50:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, remember the Aziz Ansari thing where like he didn't understand which wine she wanted and that was cause for humiliation. He gave her the wrong-

01:50:12
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, for her to write a, yeah, Me Too-

01:50:15
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:50:15
Anna Khachiyan: ... medium, uh, she, it was a Times expose.

01:50:19
Eric Weinstein: It was babe, babe dot net.

01:50:20
Anna Khachiyan: That was babe dot net.

01:50:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:50:21
Anna Khachiyan: Oh, God

01:50:22
Eric Weinstein: But the, um, the, the key point would be that in order to handle certain edge cases, we deranged the general case.

01:50:33
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:50:34
Eric Weinstein: You know, like, the world's most predatory men have to be kept away from the world's least agentic females.

01:50:41
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:50:41
Eric Weinstein: So in, in order to handle that case, we gave nuclear weapons. I think Caitlin Flanagan had a beautiful observation.

01:50:48
Anna Khachiyan: I love Caitlin Flanagan, yeah.

01:50:49
Eric Weinstein: I can't get over her.

01:50:50
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, she's great.

01:50:51
Eric Weinstein: She's great.

01:50:52
Anna Khachiyan: The one that got away anyway. [laughs]

01:50:53
Eric Weinstein: Anyway, she, uh, she said something to me to the effect of, uh, what's new is that all sexuality proceeds on exclusively female terms.

01:51:04
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:51:05
Eric Weinstein: The idea being that men have to be completely non-agentic-

01:51:08
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh

01:51:09
Eric Weinstein: ... because whatever the woman says happened or should happen-

01:51:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yes

01:51:14
Eric Weinstein: ... is the law of the land.

01:51:15
Anna Khachiyan: And this is precisely what women don't want. It's almost like a prisoner's dilemma type situation where you end up with the, the most suboptimal outcome.

01:51:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, if you guard against the thing that you fear the most, you'll never get the thing that you want the most.

01:51:31
Anna Khachiyan: Right. Yeah. And it's, it, it's a really kind of like bleak thing because no women, no heteronormative women want a man who lacks agency. I mean, you said this to me. Women want... They don't want a guy who's an asshole. They want somebody who's credible, and the, the easiest, shortest way to display that-

01:51:51
Eric Weinstein: Credibility

01:51:51
Anna Khachiyan: ... is by, yeah-

01:51:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is-

01:51:52
Anna Khachiyan: ... being an asshole

01:51:53
Eric Weinstein: ... this is a reference to a conversation we were having in which I, I claimed that many men learn a terrible lesson, which is women want you to be an asshole.

01:52:02
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:52:03
Eric Weinstein: And the real lesson is women do not want to be told how beautiful and brilliant and this and that they are without some of that energy being spent on credibility.

01:52:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah-

01:52:14
Eric Weinstein: Because-

01:52:14
Anna Khachiyan: ... without some of it accruing into reliable, dependable material action

01:52:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, but sometimes you have to say, "You look very nice. It's not my favorite dress."

01:52:23
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:52:23
Eric Weinstein: But... And that sounds a little non-positive, but it goes a long way to saying, "Okay, I'm actually getting real feedback."

01:52:31
Anna Khachiyan: Are you describing the, the art of neg? You have to neg a little?

01:52:34
Eric Weinstein: No. I'm saying that that happens naturally.

01:52:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:52:37
Eric Weinstein: Negging is where you actually create-

01:52:40
Anna Khachiyan: Like actually a-

01:52:40
Eric Weinstein: ... kind of a hole in the person's soul

01:52:42
Anna Khachiyan: ... an artifice. Yeah. [laughs]

01:52:43
Eric Weinstein: No, it's exactly not negging.

01:52:44
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:52:45
Eric Weinstein: This is the thing... I mean, it's a beautiful example. It's a miscommunication.

01:52:48
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:52:50
Eric Weinstein: In the process of giving somebody... You can give somebody very positive, constructive feedback, and the slightest whisper of, "That wasn't exactly my favorite thing," will be heard as a shout.

01:53:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:53:02
Eric Weinstein: Because that's how we human beings process criticism.

01:53:05
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:53:05
Eric Weinstein: And so you have to spend some... People would much rather that you spend some of your time building credibility so that whatever you do say that's positive is actually a credible indicator of something.

01:53:17
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:53:17
Eric Weinstein: Because, you know, traditionally the key question is, is, very often what women are asking is, "Is there something you find in me that is so rare that it would outweigh all other temptations?"

01:53:32
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:53:33
Eric Weinstein: "And c- can you please tell me a story in which that's true?"

01:53:36
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. The answer is no, ladies. The answer is no.

01:53:39
Eric Weinstein: No, I think-

01:53:39
Anna Khachiyan: Run for the hills. I'm kidding.

01:53:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:53:40
Anna Khachiyan: I'm just being a sarcastic little bitch, but, um...

01:53:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, don't do that, man.

01:53:43
Anna Khachiyan: Why not?

01:53:44
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. I mean, if it's your shtick, but I do think that there's some aspect to this where we have to struggle with this for... Like, you're an older millennial.

01:53:53
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I'm an elder millennial.

01:53:55
Eric Weinstein: You're an elder millennial.

01:53:56
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:53:57
Eric Weinstein: Y- Yeah.

01:53:57
Anna Khachiyan: The guys in the studio are, like, going to get snacks. They're so tired. They're like, "Enough of this."

01:54:03
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:54:04
Anna Khachiyan: No, I'm an elder millennial, John.

01:54:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Um, I do think that in part, you know, you probably knew more life before the apps.

01:54:13
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Well, I'm-

01:54:13
Eric Weinstein: That's gonna be a big transitional issue.

01:54:17
Anna Khachiyan: Well, it's gonna be a huge issue. I don't... I mean, I don't know what's gonna happen to the next generation after me. I'm kind of afraid for them. I mourn for them because they have no... I mean, all social relations. It's like, you know, going back to those kind of, uh, uh, empathy templates that I was talking about.

01:54:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:54:34
Anna Khachiyan: Uh, all social relations and, you know, on some level particularly, uh, sexual relations have become very Aspergian. They've become autistic. People can't read nuance, and they are completely incapable then of the art of seduction. And so everything operates according to, like, templates and consent forms.

01:54:58
Eric Weinstein: Phone trees.

01:54:59
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. And yeah. And, and it's terrifying because I think, like, what... It, it's not just women who desire credibility. What each sex desires from the other is credibility manifested in different ways. You know, like I made this joke. I started seeing a shrink recently.

01:55:20
Eric Weinstein: You went there?

01:55:21
Anna Khachiyan: I went there because k- I guess my, my Jewish side, uh, finally, uh, overwhelmed my Russian side that's, like, profoundly hostile and suspicious of therapy. Um, I did it primarily to appease my boyfriend, but that's another story. Um, and it occurred to me, it dawned on me, uh, d- during the process of seeing this shrink, it's like, you know, go, you know the old, the kind of psychoanalytic concept of transference.

01:55:50
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

01:55:50
Anna Khachiyan: I mean, everybody does, right? Um, and I think transference for men is this-

01:55:55
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I saw this. This was wicked.

01:55:56
Anna Khachiyan: What?

01:55:57
Eric Weinstein: The tweet you're about to quote.

01:55:58
Anna Khachiyan: Oh, yeah. The, uh, you know, transference for men is, is telling the shrink, "I wanna fuck you." Transference for women is asking the shrink, "Do you wanna fuck me?" And semantically it's a slightly different configuration, but it comes down to the same thing. And it's like that John Berger quote that I quote all the time ad nauseam to the point that it's become annoying and my friends don't speak to me because it's all I do is quote this quote all day. Um, "Men- Watch women watch themselves being watched. That's the nature, right, the kind of old traditional basis of female or male versus female sexual arousal, right?

01:56:40
Eric Weinstein: And then-

01:56:40
Anna Khachiyan: You said this to me which I thought was very astute. I've never heard anybody else put it this way. Um-

01:56:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, we both c- come to some version of this independently.

01:56:48
Anna Khachiyan: Of the same thing. Yeah, it's men are aroused by the woman, the presence of the woman. Women are aroused by the kind of picture of themselves arousing the man.

01:57:02
Eric Weinstein: Or the, the man some, in some ways metaphorically acts as a mirror, and the better the man, the better the quality-

01:57:09
Anna Khachiyan: Right

01:57:09
Eric Weinstein: ... the more flattering the quality of the reflection.

01:57:11
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

01:57:12
Eric Weinstein: And that's not to say that women are completely indifferent to male looks and the like, but that to an enormous extent we've demonized narcissism when in fact we find narcissism to be an extremely beautiful trait in a future spouse-

01:57:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

01:57:28
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, as men.

01:57:30
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

01:57:30
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:57:31
Anna Khachiyan: And this is, this is a very important point too because I'm very much a critic of like kind of narcissism as a generational pathology, but, uh, that's s- uh, that I, I'm critical specifically of kind of the maladjusted pathological manifestations of narcissism-

01:57:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, the maladaptive version-

01:57:50
Anna Khachiyan: ... the maladaptive version

01:57:51
Eric Weinstein: ... that doesn't attach properly to the partner.

01:57:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, not the p- not the positive kind of credible, um, and this was really wonderfully... You know, sometimes I feel so awful about myself because I misjudge the situation. I'm so used to like people and our, and ideas being kind of low density and low nutrition, and I'm g- kind of starved for stimulat- stimulation in that way. And sometimes I'll read or see something that I find really remarkable, and I always have to ask myq- uh, myself the question like, "Hey, like, have my standards plummeted so much or have I grown more tolerant?" Which at the end of the day is the same question, but, uh, there was a, a very viral short story on The New Yorker by this woman, Kristen Roupenian, also an Armenian by the way, um, who... It was called Cat Person, and in it she describes kind of a, a classic Me Too type situation where a young college coed gets into a relationship with like a kind of older, washed up 38-year-old guy, and there's this-

01:59:03
Eric Weinstein: Did you say older and 38?

01:59:05
Anna Khachiyan: Well, it, for her because she's like 21.

01:59:07
Eric Weinstein: That's fine.

01:59:08
Anna Khachiyan: It's okay. You know.

01:59:09
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:59:09
Anna Khachiyan: I think, I think, I think a man... Okay, look-

01:59:11
Eric Weinstein: Don't-

01:59:12
Anna Khachiyan: My personal-

01:59:12
Eric Weinstein: No, don't backpedal

01:59:13
Anna Khachiyan: ... I'm not backpedaling.

01:59:14
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:59:14
Anna Khachiyan: Uh, I, I think, um, kind of the peak manhood is 35 to let's say 55, right? That's a good window. That's when the, the, the male race peak-

01:59:24
Eric Weinstein: I'll get you a shovel-

01:59:25
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

01:59:25
Eric Weinstein: ... and you can try to dig yourself out of the hole.

01:59:26
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, I'll dig my own grave. That's real- what I really want. I'm like, um, you know, uh, that guy, uh, fundamentally I identify with the, the Russian guy in The Sopranos in the Pine Barrens episode.

01:59:37
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my gosh.

01:59:38
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

01:59:38
Eric Weinstein: No, don't even get into that.

01:59:39
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. [laughs]

01:59:39
Eric Weinstein: It's fantastic.

01:59:40
Anna Khachiyan: But, um, basically th- Roupenian, she ha- she crafts this whole sex scene where this girl is like having sex with this guy that she finds profoundly unattractive and undesirable, but what gets her off at the end of the day is her imagining his arousal at her like nubile young body writhing around for him. Uh, and I thought that that was like a, a really brilliant glitch that was... I'm shocked that like, you know, a, a liberal paper of record would publish.

02:00:11
Eric Weinstein: It's very odd what gets through these sessions.

02:00:12
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:00:13
Eric Weinstein: Like I watched your description of the wasted opportunity of sexualizing stewardesses.

02:00:19
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:00:20
Eric Weinstein: Where everyone has this sense of, "Oh my God," you know, Pan Am stewardesses in the '60s.

02:00:25
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:00:27
Eric Weinstein: It's a universal kind of weird beauty norm, but there's now this very strong sense of like, "And wasn't that horrible?"

02:00:33
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:00:34
Eric Weinstein: And so this sort of the two-dimensional fantasy of coffee, tea or me-

02:00:38
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:00:39
Eric Weinstein: ... versus the abject horror of, okay, well, you weren't allowed to compete on price because of the regulation of the airways.

02:00:46
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:00:47
Eric Weinstein: And so people competed on the se- sexualization-

02:00:50
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:00:51
Eric Weinstein: ... of the flight crews, and then some of the flight crews were s- like actually being oppressed, and some of them were self-sexualizing like people-

02:00:57
Anna Khachiyan: Right

02:00:58
Eric Weinstein: ... do on Instagram-

02:00:59
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

02:00:59
Eric Weinstein: ... because they wanted the attention. And there's no language to pull these things apart.

02:01:04
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm. Well, as usual, people missed the point of that tweet, which was not about stewardesses. They made it into a labor issue because every, increasingly, um, the culture has kind of dried up so much that people increasingly see things through the lens of politics. That tweet wasn't about l- labor at all. It was, uh, actually kind of a very s- rather subjective indictment of the way that American women behave relative to women elsewhere. Women in Italy, in Thailand, in Spain, in Brazil, in the Middle East understand that their unofficial power is garnered through indirection, as you say. American women understand no such thing. I mean, Camille Paglia again has been beating this drum for decades now. Uh, so th- this was, had nothing to do with... It wasn't like a labor-

02:01:57
Eric Weinstein: But it is and it isn't. I mean, this is the, this is the very difficult thing coming from an American context, which is that very often the cultivation of exclusively womanly power-

02:02:08
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:02:10
Eric Weinstein: ... took place because women did not have alternate options.

02:02:14
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:02:15
Eric Weinstein: And sometimes We've gone too far in American culture by giving away power that is, uh, you know, entirely functional. So we, you and I both discussed having economics and mathematics in our background.

02:02:28
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:02:29
Eric Weinstein: The brilliance of Sylvia Nasar's book, A Beautiful Mind.

02:02:32
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:02:32
Eric Weinstein: I did not see the film and-

02:02:34
Anna Khachiyan: You haven't seen the film?

02:02:35
Eric Weinstein: No, I refused.

02:02:35
Anna Khachiyan: Well, we'll get back to that in a minute, but-

02:02:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay

02:02:37
Anna Khachiyan: ... yeah.

02:02:38
Eric Weinstein: But a- and then we talked about Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem.

02:02:42
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:02:42
Eric Weinstein: In both of these books, you see this very strong hand-

02:02:45
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:02:46
Eric Weinstein: ... of the community of wives of the mostly male mathematicians and economists directing the field, who should collaborate with who, who should make up with who, who's having a spat, who should be hired-

02:02:58
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:02:59
Eric Weinstein: ... who should be invited to the conference. And that kind of, there's a question about when women stopped wanting that role in the United States context, no one took the role over.

02:03:14
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:03:15
Eric Weinstein: And so it was like a load-bearing role that was now vacant.

02:03:20
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:03:21
Eric Weinstein: Um, there are ways in which I think it's terrible that nobody's fulfilling that role, and there's ways in which I think it's terrible that women were expected to fulfill that role, having now seen fantastic contributions in mathematics, you know, of people, um, like Karen Uhlenbeck or Lisa Jeffrey, the, any one of a number of female mathematicians who've, who've put structural things in our world that I can't live without.

02:03:50
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

02:03:50
Eric Weinstein: And so I think that there's a re- there's a really interesting and rich conversation-

02:03:55
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:03:56
Eric Weinstein: ... about how much power from the old ways should be retained-

02:04:00
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:04:01
Eric Weinstein: ... and how much of it should be seated so that more standard professional accomplishment can occur. And because we're having this very simplistic conversation, we're not getting to the really rich conversation, which is what should be the renegotiation of male and female roles around it. Shouldn't be that women are trying to be a substitute copy of men.

02:04:25
Anna Khachiyan: Right.

02:04:26
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, it can't really go back to women hold power-

02:04:31
Anna Khachiyan: Barefoot and pregnant with kids. Yeah

02:04:32
Eric Weinstein: ... well, I wouldn't say that, no. It's also the terrifying matriarch that the hell that daughters-in-law are put through in many cultures.

02:04:39
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:04:40
Eric Weinstein: You know, it's, it's, it's a very re- the, the key issue, and I think this comes through with everything you talk about, the war that we have to wage is the war on simplistic, easy answers as opposed to nuanced richness.

02:04:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, and well, and this goes back to this question of hypernormalization where we are grafting, we are affect... I mean, Angela Nagle talks about this, who I think, uh, Angela's a, a friend of mine, but I think she's also, like, the, the most brilliant young intellectual around now, and she gets kind of pilloried all the time for also being, like, a reactionary, a conservative, whatever. Um, Nagle talks about this idea that we, i- in her critique of The Handmaiden's Tale, or The Handmaid's Tale, sorry, um, that we are kind of left fighting the simpler battles of the past that we've grafted this kind of Cold War, binaristic analogy, you know, the East versus the West, conservative versus progressive or liberal, uh, that no longer computes because we live in a bizarre nonlinear world with a kind of profusion, a superfl- a superfluity of information that makes anybody's brain short-circuit.

02:05:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, this is like, um, what, uh, our friend, uh, Amanda Feilding, the psychedelic countess, uh, who extols the virtues of psychedelic chemicals.

02:06:08
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:06:09
Eric Weinstein: Her point is that the default mode network is this thing that suppresses our brain from experiencing too much.

02:06:16
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:06:17
Eric Weinstein: And that sanity and, um, a well-functioning mind, for the most part, is attached to not perceiving everything that's going on around you.

02:06:27
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:06:28
Eric Weinstein: And-

02:06:28
Anna Khachiyan: It's selectively kind of s- maybe subconsciously cherry pi- cherry-picking things that are-

02:06:33
Eric Weinstein: Because it has to

02:06:34
Anna Khachiyan: ... flattering to your narrative.

02:06:34
Eric Weinstein: Can't other... You know, the, the, the, the quantum soup that you and I are currently swimming in can't be perceived.

02:06:39
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:06:40
Eric Weinstein: We need to perceive a simplified classical world in which, you know, you are a unified person rather than all sorts of subroutines running, you know, simultaneously, some of them-

02:06:48
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

02:06:48
Eric Weinstein: ... conscious, some of them not.

02:06:51
Anna Khachiyan: And this is, I think this is the difference between, on some level, again, this is all very, like, improv-y [laughs] and stuff, but it, it all kind of goes back, like, folds back on itself. The difference between Russians and Americans is that, uh, Russians think that they're at an intellectual and moral advantage because they perceive all the meta processes. They see the chessboard, but they're actually at a disadvantage fundamentally because they're kind of overly hyper-

02:07:16
Eric Weinstein: They see too much, they feel too much.

02:07:17
Anna Khachiyan: They see too much, they feel too much, and they're overly not only critical of th- th- the outside world, but they're hypercritical, and they're fundamentally a self-defeating lot on that level.

02:07:28
Eric Weinstein: You know, I, I have to say, I have a sadness about some of your views on, on Russia. You, oddly, and I didn't think about this, you are the third out of, I don't know, what is this? My 16th-

02:07:40
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:07:40
Eric Weinstein: ... interview at, at this point.

02:07:42
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:07:42
Eric Weinstein: Um, I don't know when you'll debut, but of, of a Russian background. I had, uh, Vitalik, uh, of Ethereum fame.

02:07:51
Anna Khachiyan: Ethereum, yeah.

02:07:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Gary and you.

02:07:54
Anna Khachiyan: Th- this I knew. I, the, I made a quip to my boyfriend. I was like, you know, I, I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna do the Eric Weinstein, Stein, Weinstein podcast." And, uh, it's funny, uh, that he chose, you know, Kasparov and Buterin. It's like a, a... You have also some sort of, like, a psychic Freudian compulsion to draw, to-

02:08:18
Eric Weinstein: I care about meaning.

02:08:19
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:08:20
Eric Weinstein: To, to be honest, Russia and the Soviet I mean, there are places that just are pregnant with meaning.

02:08:27
Anna Khachiyan: With meaning, yeah.

02:08:28
Eric Weinstein: And there's a ton that I hate about that world, and I think I talked to you about it, the barbell society with the lowest of the low and the highest of the high.

02:08:38
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:08:39
Eric Weinstein: Um, b- but I chose to retain this culture. I mean, you know, it was my grandparents on one side and my great-grandparents on another-

02:08:47
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:08:48
Eric Weinstein: ... who came over. So I'm a little bit deeper in this thing than you are-

02:08:52
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:08:52
Eric Weinstein: ... because you were born there.

02:08:54
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:08:56
Eric Weinstein: I don't want to give it up, and I work, I work my ass off to retain it-

02:09:00
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:09:00
Eric Weinstein: ... even to the point of learning a tiny bit of Russian just to deal with Russian relatives that, who were rediscovered when the Soviet Union came apart that we thought had all been wiped out in the Holocaust.

02:09:10
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:09:10
Eric Weinstein: You're gonna have to work your ass off to keep that connection.

02:09:14
Anna Khachiyan: I know.

02:09:14
Eric Weinstein: And I intend to have many more Russians, many South Asians, many people from very particular places. I have the utmost reverence, for example, for the UK and the genius of Spain and Italy.

02:09:30
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:09:30
Eric Weinstein: There are these particular places that are just incredibly pregnant.

02:09:37
Anna Khachiyan: Well, Spain and Italy, I mean, are wonderful because they're, you know... Every once in a while I'll go to Italy or Spain, and you'll be, like, at a little cafe, like an outdoor cafe, and they'll serve you, they'll give you some free shit with your coffee. They'll give you, like, a little biscuit or a croissant. It's a, a really weird model because the thing that makes them economically unviable, that makes them kind of fundamentally obsolete to a neoliberal system, is also the thing that makes them morally redeemable.

02:10:11
Eric Weinstein: But it's also an unabashed... Look, Russia's a genius-based culture.

02:10:19
Anna Khachiyan: In what way?

02:10:21
Eric Weinstein: That you revere, um, the Lev Landaus. You revere, you know, the Rachmaninovs. You re-

02:10:31
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but this is... I think that this is, um, a, a thing that is dying now because, uh, the, the last 30 or 40... How long has it been? It's been 40 years now since the Soviet Union collapsed, the la- 30 something years. The l- the last several decades of privatization I think have been much harder on the Russian psyche than the 70-odd years or so of, like, communist-

02:10:56
Eric Weinstein: But we're all getting worse at this.

02:10:58
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, but it, I think that this is slowly waning. You know, Russia was, was known basically for its educational system, for its, uh, athletic programs, and no more, right?

02:11:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but some of these things were bizarre. Um, everybody's getting less genius.

02:11:17
Anna Khachiyan: That's true and also not true.

02:11:20
Eric Weinstein: Who's getting more in a really profound way?

02:11:23
Anna Khachiyan: In a profound way. I mean, that's a good question. Uh, I have to... I'll get back to you on that.

02:11:29
Eric Weinstein: I'm just saying everybody's taking a huge hit at the moment. It's like we, we, we started belching out l- lead exhaust from leaded gasoline. The, the IQ of the world functionally is getting dumber and dumber and dumber.

02:11:42
Anna Khachiyan: Like, since the medieval era. I mean, people-

02:11:45
Eric Weinstein: No

02:11:45
Anna Khachiyan: ... frown upon the Middle Ages as, like, s- you know, they're not called the Dark Ages for nothing, but people reached a r- a really high pinnacle of achievement. And, and this-

02:11:54
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I listen to music from back then.

02:11:56
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. [laughs]

02:11:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:11:57
Anna Khachiyan: I do too, and I don't even like music. I mean, I do, but I have, like, a very kind of, uh, one-dimensional hobbyist's sensibility. I'm not, like, a musician or a composer.

02:12:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:12:07
Anna Khachiyan: But yeah, I think the whole... But I think this is due kind of to the proliferation of information technologies, uh, th- the triumph of, of the internet.

02:12:18
Eric Weinstein: Well-

02:12:18
Anna Khachiyan: And you look at Me Too. Me Too is the nexus of, uh, kind of the imperatives, the market imperatives of the internet and the triumph of feminism. It wouldn't have ha- feminists are very fond of saying that we live in a patriarchy. If we lived in a patriarchy, there would be no viral online movement called Me Too. The fact is, you know, now in this day and age, women are the cultural brokers and gatekeepers.

02:12:50
Eric Weinstein: And they're not doing that great of a job. I mean, like-

02:12:52
Anna Khachiyan: And they're not, like, uh-

02:12:52
Eric Weinstein: ... I want Hedy Lamarr back. I w-

02:12:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah, and it has-

02:12:55
Eric Weinstein: You know?

02:12:56
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:12:56
Eric Weinstein: I, I w- I was gonna write this book about Marie Curie called Radium Slut.

02:13:00
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:13:00
Eric Weinstein: And it was about the, it was gonna be about the prohibition of her to come to Stockholm for her second Nobel 'cause she was getting shtupped by a married guy.

02:13:09
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:13:10
Eric Weinstein: Um, I'm, you know, my favorite story in physics is Madame Wu, who figured out the asymmetry of the weak force in the cobalt-60-

02:13:19
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:13:20
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, beta decay in an, an electromagnetic field. I want those amazing, hot, sexy, brilliant chicks back.

02:13:30
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:13:30
Eric Weinstein: And-

02:13:30
Anna Khachiyan: They don't exist. That's why, that's why, you know, there's a cultural fixation on Russian women, because only in Russia or, like, in the Russian amniotic fluid can you find a woman who has, like, a PhD in philology or linguistics but looks like a supermodel and is great in the sack and knows the powers of seduction.

02:13:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's-

02:13:55
Anna Khachiyan: Which is a, a concept that doesn't need-

02:13:56
Eric Weinstein: This is, like, the super dangerous thing

02:13:57
Anna Khachiyan: ... in-

02:13:58
Eric Weinstein: There's a way of saying it that's a little bit less fun than what you said.

02:14:01
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:14:01
Eric Weinstein: I lo- I love listening to you, but I also like not being nailed to a cross when, when, when it-

02:14:05
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

02:14:05
Eric Weinstein: ... when, when it, this debuts to the audience.

02:14:07
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:14:07
Eric Weinstein: Which is to say that the cultures that, where women enjoy f- self-feminizing-

02:14:16
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:14:16
Eric Weinstein: ... but don't see this as competitive with intellectual achievement-

02:14:23
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm

02:14:24
Eric Weinstein: ... yes, Russia, and to some extent Eastern Europe, is one.

02:14:27
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:14:29
Eric Weinstein: But East Asia is also in this idea.

02:14:31
Anna Khachiyan: Yes. I think those are the two big ones, yeah.

02:14:34
Eric Weinstein: Um, Anna, I would love to talk to you about all manners of dangerous, disgusting, horrible, vile-

02:14:40
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

02:14:40
Eric Weinstein: ... and illegal things.

02:14:42
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:14:42
Eric Weinstein: Um, but I hope you'll accept an invitation to come back through The Portal-

02:14:47
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

02:14:47
Eric Weinstein: ... when you're, uh, next out in LA.

02:14:49
Anna Khachiyan: Uh-huh.

02:14:50
Eric Weinstein: And, um, thank you for showing up and just bringing a side-

02:14:54
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah

02:14:54
Eric Weinstein: ... that maybe not everybody's seen before.

02:14:56
Anna Khachiyan: That's horrifying. I'm very happy to do it. I'm happy to chat. Anyway, thank you for having me.

02:15:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm sorry to horrify you. It was wonderful to ha-

02:15:02
Anna Khachiyan: No, did, wait, do you get a buzzer that tells you when the time-

02:15:06
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:15:06
Anna Khachiyan: Okay.

02:15:07
Eric Weinstein: I'm just sort of thinking that you've got this happening party to go to.

02:15:10
Anna Khachiyan: Oh, okay. That's right. This debuts.

02:15:11
Eric Weinstein: And I want to be respectful-

02:15:12
Anna Khachiyan: Okay. Yeah, yeah

02:15:12
Eric Weinstein: ... of your time because I, otherwise I'd completely monopolize you till the cows come home.

02:15:15
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it's fine.

02:15:17
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:15:17
Anna Khachiyan: Yeah.

02:15:18
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] You've been through The Portal-

02:15:20
Anna Khachiyan: [laughs]

02:15:20
Eric Weinstein: ... with Anna [whooshes] Khachiyan.

02:15:23
Anna Khachiyan: Kh- Khachiyan.

02:15:23
Eric Weinstein: Khachiyan. Uh, please check out the Red Scare podcast. Come with an open mind, uh, and, uh, hopefully don't give her too much grief unless that's good for building her audience.

02:15:34
Anna Khachiyan: Mm-hmm.

02:15:35
Eric Weinstein: Um, with respect to The Portal, uh, please subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, and also navigate over to our YouTube channel where, uh, if you'll subscribe and click the bell, you'll be notified of any upcoming episodes. And, uh, dasvidaniya, vsego khoroshego, all the best. Be well. [outro music]

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