Eric Weinstein - Why Can No One Agree On The Truth Anymore? - Modern Wisdom 676 (YouTube Content)

Eric Weinstein - Why Can No One Agree On The Truth Anymore?
Information
Host(s)	Chris Williamson
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	03:13:35
Release Date	04 September 2023
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Eric Weinstein - Why Can No One Agree On The Truth Anymore? | Modern Wisdom 676 was a discussion with Eric Weinstein hosted by Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom podcast.

Description

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, managing director of Thiel Capital and a podcaster.

The last 3 years has been a time of massive confusion. No one can agree on what is real, or true, or who is good faith, or a grifter. No matter what you believe in, we can all agree that this epidemic of uncertainty can't continue.

Expect to learn what you learn from being around the most rich and powerful people in the world, what it was like to meet Jeffrey Epstein face to face, what Eric thinks about the recent surge in UFO disclosures, his thoughts on Sam Harris’ recent episode with me, whether the downfall of physics and academia is the nail in the coffin for humanity, the biggest issues with having easy access to porn, how women could take a bigger role in the crisis of masculinity and much more...

Transcript

00:00:00:04 - 00:00:04:09 Chris Williamson You just came back from your first holiday in.

00:00:04:11 - 00:00:05:02 Chris Williamson Quite a while.

00:00:05:03 - 00:00:07:10 Eric Weinstein Well, my first holiday of, say, three.

00:00:07:10 - 00:00:10:12 Eric Weinstein Weeks or more in quite a while.

00:00:10:14 - 00:00:12:16 Chris Williamson How was that?

00:00:12:18 - 00:00:39:01 Eric Weinstein Astounded. Really? Very good to see what's going on in the rest of the world at this particular moment. We had previously gone to India in the year to visit family. This was to go back to Turkey and to go to Portugal, but also to the IS or his islands. And I can't tell you how meaningful it was for me to be back traveling.

00:00:39:03 - 00:00:40:16 Chris Williamson Why?

00:00:40:18 - 00:00:42:01 Eric Weinstein Well, I mean.

00:00:42:01 - 00:01:03:14 Eric Weinstein Partially it's rare. When you have children and children change your game for about two decades, you have to realize that that's a transient period. It felt like it was going to go on forever. And so this was sort of trying to figure out what is it like to go from traveling in your twenties and thirties with our kids to traveling with your kids at the last moment that you still have them at.

00:01:03:14 - 00:01:05:19 Eric Weinstein Home and.

00:01:05:19 - 00:01:17:05 Eric Weinstein Now you're going to have the rest of your life without them again. But you can't go back to backpacking and doing certain other things that were easy for you. So you have to figure out how to rejoin your previous life that has been in progress without you.

00:01:17:05 - 00:01:20:19 Chris Williamson Actually ending for a long time. A sabbatical from life almost.

00:01:20:20 - 00:01:26:15 Eric Weinstein The other thing is that you forget about parts of yourself. Like I forgot that. That I spoke.

00:01:26:16 - 00:01:28:24 Eric Weinstein Turkish. Not well.

00:01:29:01 - 00:01:36:02 Eric Weinstein But I spoke rudimentary Tarzan, Turkish 30 years ago. And to be back in Istanbul.

00:01:36:02 - 00:01:37:09 Eric Weinstein And.

00:01:37:11 - 00:02:05:02 Eric Weinstein To suddenly have words and phrases and things come back and be talking to cab drivers and and just people in the street seeing the change. Obviously, there's been an enormous amount of change in Turkey. Portugal is fascinating seeing certain things at the end of their lifecycle. We were at a synagogue in Bursa where the sort of the home of the Ottoman Empire where they were down to like the last 50 people, which is a common enough thing.

00:02:05:04 - 00:02:31:07 Eric Weinstein When we visit Diaspora Jewish communities, sort of at the tail end with the embers still glowing hot. But no, no chance for a rebirth. And then in the Azores, I was not prepared for the level of beauty that we encountered. There is a level of beauty that I've only experienced two, maybe three times in my life that sort of leaves you physically.

00:02:31:07 - 00:02:34:15 Eric Weinstein Sick like Bill.

00:02:34:17 - 00:02:47:09 Eric Weinstein It's so beautiful that your body is the weak link. Like, you might think that sugar is tasty, but if you were to eat a bag of sugar, you'd probably be sick to your stomach. And I would say this was like so much beauty.

00:02:47:13 - 00:02:48:20 Eric Weinstein That.

00:02:48:22 - 00:02:55:01 Eric Weinstein It was at an almost pathological level and more than more than I think my family could really.

00:02:55:03 - 00:02:57:08 Eric Weinstein Take in. It just so moving.

00:02:57:10 - 00:03:12:17 Chris Williamson I've heard you say before about how a lot of the time you don't realize the last time you're going to do a thing with a person. And a lot of friends, especially ones that have fathers, have told me the same thing the last time, that you'll bounce your daughter on your knee. You don't know when it's going to happen, but it's going to happen.

00:03:12:19 - 00:03:32:17 Chris Williamson There's also a really strange realization when you get deeper into adulthood and work out that probably by the age of 18 or 20, you've spent 97 or 98% of the time you're going to spend with your parents. And all that you wanted for the last four years was to be away from them. And now all that you want is to have a little bit more time and it's all gone and you squandered it while it was there.

00:03:32:18 - 00:03:47:22 Eric Weinstein I'm on the ethnic program. We don't believe in this stuff. My my children don't become adults at the age of 18. I don't care about the laws of the United States and the state of California. I think we do family wrong in the states.

00:03:47:24 - 00:03:48:15 Eric Weinstein So.

00:03:48:17 - 00:04:09:10 Eric Weinstein Yes, you send them off to college and then you tell them go follow your dream and they bounce into some locality that you aren't in and you don't get the benefit of these very strong families because the market has been so strong in the U.S. for so long. The market more or less took over all sorts of duties that were assigned to families historically.

00:04:09:10 - 00:04:38:23 Eric Weinstein And so the reason that people always say, oh, your families are weak was because our markets were strong. Right. And so insurance and opportunity, all of these things that could be handed over to the market were. And as a result, when we find out that the markets are not safe, we realize that we've abandoned the structures that we needed to retreat to, that our families are quite small, below replacement rate very often, and we don't live in the same place.

00:04:38:23 - 00:04:52:09 Eric Weinstein And so, you know, I married a woman from India and I basically carry a lot of Eastern European norms. And so my feeling is that my children are my children forever and I'm not letting go of them. And this idea that it's your life and you can do what.

00:04:52:09 - 00:04:53:11 Eric Weinstein You want.

00:04:53:13 - 00:04:54:21 Eric Weinstein Is only true up to a.

00:04:54:21 - 00:04:55:14 Eric Weinstein Point.

00:04:55:16 - 00:04:58:07 Eric Weinstein You also have a continuity issue. And this is.

00:04:58:07 - 00:05:00:04 Eric Weinstein Normal, by the way, and.

00:05:00:06 - 00:05:03:11 Eric Weinstein It may sound weird in an American context.

00:05:03:13 - 00:05:04:06 Eric Weinstein But I think.

00:05:04:06 - 00:05:14:02 Eric Weinstein That the world recognizes that we're links in a chain and there's a certain amount that you get to do that's just yours because it's your life, but never go full. Billy Joel.

00:05:14:04 - 00:05:35:14 Chris Williamson Yep. Generational housing, something being in Austin, people getting ranches starting, even coming in a ten family, many villages with a bunch of other people. Yeah, I it's something that I'm seeing occur more and more and you know, in a atomized, like, mass solipsism, mass individualism, society, this doesn't sound like a bad.

00:05:35:16 - 00:05:36:22 Eric Weinstein End of it.

00:05:36:24 - 00:05:37:23 Eric Weinstein We got to the end of that.

00:05:37:23 - 00:05:41:20 Eric Weinstein Dream and that it didn't it didn't work.

00:05:41:22 - 00:05:45:04 Chris Williamson You've been around a lot of very powerful, very rich people throughout your career.

00:05:45:06 - 00:05:50:02 Eric Weinstein No, no, that's not true. Only relatively recent. Only in the last decade and a half.

00:05:50:04 - 00:05:52:07 Chris Williamson That's quite a while in in many people's lives.

00:05:52:09 - 00:05:52:14 Eric Weinstein All right.

00:05:52:20 - 00:06:09:03 Chris Williamson What do you think the most normal people would be surprised to know about the powerful and the rich individuals, worldviews, the way that they hold themselves, What is and isn't true.

00:06:09:05 - 00:06:13:08 Eric Weinstein They feel powerless.

00:06:13:10 - 00:06:15:00 Eric Weinstein That's one of.

00:06:15:00 - 00:06:30:08 Eric Weinstein The craziest things, is that very often you're at a table of people of immeasurable wealth and they're talking about the rich or the hyperconnected. They don't see themselves in these terms.

00:06:30:10 - 00:06:31:18 Chris Williamson Why?

00:06:31:20 - 00:06:32:13 Eric Weinstein I think there's different.

00:06:32:13 - 00:06:40:16 Eric Weinstein Kinds of rich to be, to be honest. I think that if, for example, you got rich from arms from, let's say.

00:06:40:18 - 00:06:42:09 Eric Weinstein Arms manufacture ring.

00:06:42:11 - 00:07:06:00 Eric Weinstein You've been entwined with government your whole life or agriculture, something that's highly regulated, that's extraction on oil and gas. Those people, I think, have always been close to power. A lot of the dream of tech, for example, was we don't need the government. We'll just build stuff in our garages and if it's cool, it'll take care of itself.

00:07:06:00 - 00:07:11:21 Eric Weinstein And therefore we're minimally dependent on the traditional ecosystems.

00:07:11:23 - 00:07:12:06 Eric Weinstein So a lot.

00:07:12:06 - 00:07:37:02 Eric Weinstein Of tech money felt disenfranchized they didn't know how to play the game and that was both to its credit and a huge danger. But I think one of the things that I find very interesting is that when people are not limited by money, they're limited by all sorts of other things, they may they may not want their number to go down.

00:07:37:02 - 00:07:52:06 Eric Weinstein So they go from 6 billion to 4 billion would be a huge blow, even though it doesn't seem to impact normal things. Another thing is, is that most of them have given up on the retail notion of reality.

00:07:52:08 - 00:07:53:00 Eric Weinstein Whatever.

00:07:53:02 - 00:08:03:13 Eric Weinstein Whatever mainstream media, you know, if you have a worldview that allows you to listen to National Public Radio to that then reads The Wall Street.

00:08:03:13 - 00:08:05:05 Eric Weinstein Journal and and.

00:08:05:07 - 00:08:20:09 Eric Weinstein The Times and The New Yorker, whatever that point of view is, most of the very powerful rich people I know have have checked out at a level that is astounding. They don't believe that they can afford to depend on.

00:08:20:11 - 00:08:20:24 Eric Weinstein Normal.

00:08:20:24 - 00:08:22:01 Eric Weinstein Institutions.

00:08:22:05 - 00:08:24:12 Chris Williamson How does that show up in their lives?

00:08:24:14 - 00:08:25:21 Eric Weinstein Weird ways.

00:08:25:23 - 00:08:35:04 Eric Weinstein You know, they don't have a regular doctor. They have concierge medicine. Their fire policy comes with a private fire department that will fight for their home.

00:08:35:08 - 00:08:35:19 Eric Weinstein But won't.

00:08:35:19 - 00:08:38:01 Eric Weinstein Necessarily fight for homes next door.

00:08:38:01 - 00:08:42:12 Chris Williamson And I didn't know that that was a thing. Okay.

00:08:42:14 - 00:08:43:24 Eric Weinstein You know.

00:08:44:00 - 00:08:51:21 Eric Weinstein It's not until you travel with some of these people that you realize that there's a secret corridor in the airport or a way of getting onto the plane. This is.

00:08:51:23 - 00:08:52:13 Eric Weinstein All there's a.

00:08:52:13 - 00:08:55:11 Eric Weinstein Lot of infrastructure built for a very small number of.

00:08:55:11 - 00:08:56:18 Eric Weinstein People.

00:08:56:20 - 00:09:01:23 Eric Weinstein And for the most part, they can't figure out what to do with the money.

00:09:01:23 - 00:09:03:24 Eric Weinstein And it's my belief.

00:09:04:00 - 00:09:25:24 Eric Weinstein So they if you believe that the world is headed towards an apocalypse, you're very unlikely to want to contribute money because that's the only fungible thing you have in an emergency. And so I think that a lot of the sort of apocalyptic thinking of very powerful people is very destructive because they're.

00:09:26:01 - 00:09:26:07 Eric Weinstein They're.

00:09:26:07 - 00:09:52:19 Eric Weinstein Trying to figure out how to survive a mild apocalypse, like a six months of your you know, if I have six months of canned goods and I've got four X Navy SEALs on my property in a war zone in a remote location in Montana, can I can I weather the storm with a few diesel generators? So if it's a very mild apocalypse, maybe they've got six months plan.

00:09:52:21 - 00:09:53:23 Eric Weinstein But a lot of.

00:09:54:00 - 00:10:01:16 Eric Weinstein I think that there's a lot of thinking that you should husband your resources because you don't know what's coming given that things are going to have to collapse.

00:10:01:18 - 00:10:02:05 Eric Weinstein Now, I think.

00:10:02:10 - 00:10:07:02 Eric Weinstein It's very sad because those are the people who could shore up the system.

00:10:07:04 - 00:10:24:10 Chris Williamson It's interesting to think about helplessness at the top end of the wealth distribution, given that a lot of people feel like they are restricted by their material possessions. But it seems like despite there being a lot of abundance, at least monetarily, the scarcity mentality scales all the way up.

00:10:24:13 - 00:10:29:23 Eric Weinstein It really does it, particularly if you've been deprived early in your life, there's something that happens.

00:10:30:00 - 00:10:31:11 Eric Weinstein Where you're.

00:10:31:11 - 00:10:35:03 Eric Weinstein Nervous till your dying day, that you're going to die under an overpass.

00:10:35:05 - 00:10:37:13 Eric Weinstein Right? I'm not kidding.

00:10:37:15 - 00:10:47:16 Eric Weinstein One thing that I highly recommend people never take me seriously is a video game called the Tower Defense. Game of Plants versus zombies and Plants versus Zombies.

00:10:47:16 - 00:10:49:00 Eric Weinstein Ends.

00:10:49:02 - 00:11:12:08 Eric Weinstein In a situation where you win all the things you can inside of the game. But somehow you still have the ability to continue to earn, even though there's nothing left to purchase. And the reason that I find this fascinating is you get to watch your own psychology, which is now that you've given yourself the ability to earn, you can't bring yourself to stop earning, even though earning has lost meaning.

00:11:12:10 - 00:11:31:10 Eric Weinstein And so if you can't get to that in real life, you can at least get to that inside of plants versus zombies. And I highly recommend it because you have to give yourself some idea of we have to cross finish lines as they come. If you decide, okay, when I get to $10 million, that's when I can afford to become a philanthropist.

00:11:31:10 - 00:11:34:06 Eric Weinstein Then you're going to get there and you're going to realize no.

00:11:34:08 - 00:11:34:13 Eric Weinstein The.

00:11:34:13 - 00:11:52:19 Eric Weinstein Goals are going to you know, the goalposts are going to move. So think about how a waitress sees this. Waitresses do philanthropy almost from from the beginning. They'll they'll over tip somebody who gives them good service. They can't afford it. And, you know, it's sort of it's a poverty trap when you're at the very low end of the earnings spectrum.

00:11:52:21 - 00:11:53:24 Eric Weinstein But I.

00:11:53:24 - 00:12:04:18 Eric Weinstein Think there's something to take from that, which is practice a little bit of philanthropy and a little bit of kicking your shoes up and not always deferring.

00:12:04:20 - 00:12:06:04 Eric Weinstein Taking taking.

00:12:06:04 - 00:12:10:13 Eric Weinstein Profit in some sense on your success. So make sure that all throughout your.

00:12:10:13 - 00:12:11:12 Eric Weinstein Life.

00:12:11:14 - 00:12:15:03 Eric Weinstein You're treating yourself to some luxury, even when you can least afford.

00:12:15:03 - 00:12:17:16 Eric Weinstein It, and you're just.

00:12:17:18 - 00:12:24:07 Eric Weinstein Exhibiting a little bit of goodness, even though you feel like you desperately need to build yourself up because otherwise you'll always push it.

00:12:24:07 - 00:12:45:13 Chris Williamson Out. There's a morgan Housel quote where he says, The best way to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts. And he's wrote this great book called The Psychology of Money. And it's true that most people treat their goals, their relationship to their goals is like the horizon that for every step toward it they get right. It then moves one step further away.

00:12:45:16 - 00:13:08:10 Chris Williamson It's probably more like the horizon on a spring or on a rubber band, and it gets a little bit closer and then it bonk. It snaps away from you. And I've been around a lot of people that have got chunks of wealth and it's a rare thing to see someone who doesn't still have that scarcity mentality despite the fact that they've acquired.

00:13:08:10 - 00:13:19:13 Eric Weinstein To keep this scarcity mentality. It's not a mistake. The problem is, is that you also need an abundance mentality and then you need to selectively access them in different circumstance.

00:13:19:15 - 00:13:21:09 Chris Williamson Talk to me about the tension between those two.

00:13:21:10 - 00:13:26:01 Eric Weinstein Well, it's just this regulated expression idea that we keep trying to find settings where we.

00:13:26:01 - 00:13:27:00 Eric Weinstein Don't, you know, like.

00:13:27:02 - 00:13:53:08 Eric Weinstein Just let me set the air conditioner at 68 and then I'll be happy forever. In reality, more or less, you need contradictory facilities and you need to know when to pull one in and let the other out. And you know, this is the hard thing. Anybody with multiple children knows that. You know, with one kid, you're saying you cannot afford to take these risks if you jump off something like that and you don't look below, think what you could do.

00:13:53:10 - 00:13:55:01 Eric Weinstein The other kid needs this.

00:13:55:03 - 00:13:58:15 Eric Weinstein Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Come on.

00:13:58:17 - 00:14:09:18 Chris Williamson You have heard? I've heard your brother say that him and his wife's advice to the children was, As long as you don't do anything to your eyes that you can kind of take the risks that you want.

00:14:09:20 - 00:14:15:06 Eric Weinstein Yes. And no. I mean, there's teeth, there's throws, anything. Somebody who does combat sports is.

00:14:15:06 - 00:14:17:08 Eric Weinstein Going to try and regulate. Right? Right.

00:14:17:12 - 00:14:31:16 Eric Weinstein Small joints, whatever it is. There are plenty of ways to get yourself into real trouble. Yeah. The key thing that you're trying to use childhood for is to go through the mistakes that are not permanently disfiguring.

00:14:31:18 - 00:14:48:22 Chris Williamson It's one of the importance of having fathers around, the importance of rough and tumble play, right? It's facilitated almost exclusively by fear. And you learn the limits of your strength. You learn the limits of your body. You learn how high of a tree you can jump off and how high of a tree you can't jump off.

00:14:49:00 - 00:14:51:06 Eric Weinstein You also learn to lose.

00:14:51:08 - 00:14:52:01 Eric Weinstein I mean, I really.

00:14:52:01 - 00:14:57:00 Eric Weinstein Hate some of this winter talk where basically people have no plan to lose.

00:14:57:02 - 00:14:57:11 Eric Weinstein And then.

00:14:57:11 - 00:15:01:05 Eric Weinstein When they actually experience loss, they tend to throw everything.

00:15:01:05 - 00:15:02:17 Eric Weinstein Away to say, I didn't.

00:15:02:17 - 00:15:04:23 Eric Weinstein Lose. You know, that's very interesting.

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00:15:59:03 - 00:16:08:08 Chris Williamson That's Shopify dot com slash modern wisdom to take your business to the next level. Today you met Jeffrey Epstein once.

00:16:08:09 - 00:16:10:16 Eric Weinstein Yep. Talk to me.

00:16:10:18 - 00:16:16:07 Chris Williamson About what that's like coming face to face with somebody of that caliber.

00:16:16:09 - 00:16:19:20 Eric Weinstein Yeah, whatever that means.

00:16:19:22 - 00:16:21:12 Eric Weinstein Well.

00:16:21:14 - 00:16:31:03 Eric Weinstein One thing is that there is a physiological reaction that corresponds to this phrase that, you know, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

00:16:31:05 - 00:16:33:24 Eric Weinstein And that's a real physiological feeling.

00:16:33:24 - 00:16:39:13 Eric Weinstein I don't know whether the hair actually does that, but it's exactly what it feels like. You're meeting somebody.

00:16:39:13 - 00:16:45:21 Eric Weinstein Who is unholy and, you know.

00:16:45:21 - 00:16:52:05 Eric Weinstein One of the most interesting things is that he was beckoning into a world that didn't seem to exist, but for him is as the.

00:16:52:05 - 00:16:53:14 Eric Weinstein Door.

00:16:53:16 - 00:17:00:22 Eric Weinstein Is the doormat. I think that's one of the things that freaked out a lot of these rich people is is that he.

00:17:00:24 - 00:17:01:21 Eric Weinstein He felt.

00:17:01:21 - 00:17:10:12 Eric Weinstein Rich in a movie sense, which is not something that you find among actually rich people.

00:17:10:14 - 00:17:14:22 Eric Weinstein What do you mean?

00:17:14:24 - 00:17:17:10 Eric Weinstein Well, a lot of.

00:17:17:10 - 00:17:19:00 Eric Weinstein Very wealthy people don't own.

00:17:19:00 - 00:17:22:11 Eric Weinstein An island.

00:17:22:13 - 00:17:26:05 Eric Weinstein Islands are really tough to maintain.

00:17:26:07 - 00:17:27:00 Eric Weinstein I'm obsessed.

00:17:27:00 - 00:17:33:20 Eric Weinstein With islands. And, you know, in general, I have to be obsessed with islands that have airports run by other people because, you.

00:17:33:20 - 00:17:36:13 Eric Weinstein Know, they have populations on it.

00:17:36:14 - 00:18:01:07 Eric Weinstein But every rich person starts to wonder, can I afford it? Can I afford an island? Or how many jets? And if you look at Jeffrey Epstein's wealth, it was beaten. Labor is like gold beaten into gold foil so that it could cover a vast area and leave the impression of a solid gold life. But it was really probably on a mid nine figure fortune that had been used to buy islands and places.

00:18:01:07 - 00:18:02:10 Eric Weinstein Does not when any nine.

00:18:02:16 - 00:18:05:17 Eric Weinstein Figure person is going to.

00:18:05:19 - 00:18:06:18 Eric Weinstein Do.

00:18:06:20 - 00:18:13:14 Chris Williamson So you had a felt sense and embodied sense of discomfort.

00:18:13:16 - 00:18:15:01 Eric Weinstein Oh, hell yeah.

00:18:15:03 - 00:18:19:09 Chris Williamson And where did that come from?

00:18:19:11 - 00:18:52:17 Eric Weinstein The fact that he had a lipstick camera pointed at me from an art object that he laid a table that was preposterously long and thin with a tablecloth made of an American flag to make it look like a coffin so that I would spill my coffee on the flag of my own country. I mean, the fact that he looked like a mutant, Ralph Lauren, with this kind of laborious quality and he's talking all of the science and market stuff and nothing adds up and there's an heiress bouncing on his knee to get her boobs to jiggle to see whether it can distract.

00:18:52:18 - 00:18:53:21 Eric Weinstein I mean, it's like.

00:18:53:23 - 00:18:56:22 Eric Weinstein One of these crazy scenes where.

00:18:56:22 - 00:18:58:02 Eric Weinstein Nothing about it.

00:18:58:07 - 00:19:03:23 Eric Weinstein Was normal. There was just no there was no trace of a normal world.

00:19:04:00 - 00:19:06:00 Chris Williamson That sounds like a script from a movie.

00:19:06:02 - 00:19:15:11 Eric Weinstein Yeah. I mean, I think part of it, John Travolta is like putting a gun to your head and forcing you to drink and break a code in a minute. Yeah. That part of it.

00:19:15:13 - 00:19:16:16 Eric Weinstein And then there.

00:19:16:16 - 00:19:17:23 Eric Weinstein Was some sort of.

00:19:18:00 - 00:19:19:19 Eric Weinstein Like, you know.

00:19:19:21 - 00:19:27:01 Eric Weinstein I remember that story, the most dangerous game where a man invites you to his island so he can hunt you.

00:19:27:03 - 00:19:31:06 Eric Weinstein You know, this was scary.

00:19:31:08 - 00:19:33:03 Eric Weinstein And it was. It was meant to be scary.

00:19:33:04 - 00:19:34:18 Chris Williamson Sounds menacing.

00:19:34:20 - 00:19:40:08 Eric Weinstein Well, I think his product was silence. People think that his product was sex or finance, but it was.

00:19:40:08 - 00:19:42:07 Eric Weinstein Silence, I'm pretty sure.

00:19:42:09 - 00:19:43:13 Chris Williamson How'd you. What's that mean?

00:19:43:15 - 00:19:44:18 Eric Weinstein If you're scary enough.

00:19:44:23 - 00:19:45:10 Eric Weinstein Look.

00:19:45:12 - 00:20:17:05 Eric Weinstein Rich people can get sex, but they can't necessarily get people to shut up afterwards. So my take on it and my take on it instantly was this is not an actual human. This is a construct of someone's someone has created a fake human being called Jeffrey Epstein, who's a mysterious currency trading finance buyer with crazy rules so that no one would ever invest with him.

00:20:17:07 - 00:20:23:04 Eric Weinstein And I think that was to keep people from seeking his investment services.

00:20:23:06 - 00:20:25:24 Eric Weinstein I mean, you know, he's labeled.

00:20:26:01 - 00:20:29:07 Eric Weinstein Disgraced financier, but nobody has a record of.

00:20:29:07 - 00:20:33:20 Eric Weinstein Trading with him. He's sitting there. He comes into the meeting and he says, you know.

00:20:33:22 - 00:20:37:12 Eric Weinstein Well, Eric, I was just doing some currency trading.

00:20:37:14 - 00:20:39:22 Eric Weinstein And I.

00:20:39:24 - 00:20:45:12 Eric Weinstein I thought about that, seeing you sometimes seen as a meme with Steve Buscemi with a skateboard over.

00:20:45:12 - 00:20:46:24 Eric Weinstein His shoulder. Hello, fellow kids.

00:20:47:01 - 00:20:49:10 Chris Williamson You know, just you. Hello, fellow financial traders.

00:20:49:15 - 00:20:55:01 Eric Weinstein Exactly. So I'm thinking you don't really look like a rich guy who.

00:20:55:02 - 00:20:59:02 Eric Weinstein Trades in markets.

00:20:59:04 - 00:21:15:15 Chris Williamson The thing that's interesting that I'm finding myself intrigued by here is it takes a moderate amount of cognitive horsepower to be able to piece together this theater that you sat down at.

00:21:15:18 - 00:21:18:07 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

00:21:18:09 - 00:21:22:22 Chris Williamson Deployed in a nefarious, malicious, manipulative way.

00:21:23:01 - 00:21:24:13 Eric Weinstein Mm hmm.

00:21:24:15 - 00:21:26:14 Chris Williamson But it's smart.

00:21:26:16 - 00:21:28:06 Eric Weinstein What do you mean? It's smart? Similar.

00:21:28:08 - 00:21:34:00 Chris Williamson It's. It's not something that could be done by a simple mind.

00:21:34:02 - 00:21:35:16 Eric Weinstein You think he did it?

00:21:35:18 - 00:21:38:10 Chris Williamson Oh, he has a team of manipulators.

00:21:38:12 - 00:21:46:18 Eric Weinstein No. When I say I think he was a construct, I literally mean that. I think he was constructed, like, fitted with a story.

00:21:46:20 - 00:21:49:10 Chris Williamson Oh, so you think he was a plant?

00:21:49:12 - 00:21:50:19 Eric Weinstein No, I think he was a construct.

00:21:50:20 - 00:21:54:23 Chris Williamson What's that? Okay, you're going to have to dig in, I think.

00:21:55:00 - 00:22:08:02 Eric Weinstein Jeffrey Epstein, super genius financier, was not a thing that existed. Where did the money come from?

00:22:08:04 - 00:22:31:06 Eric Weinstein In a mumble Lex West questionnaire. Okay, so that's what you mumble. But then, you know, there's this missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and the fortune of Jeffrey Epstein that we don't can explain. Are those the same fortune? And it's like a conservation of of money principle that if you have a fortune that's missing and you have a fortune that can't be explained and they're connected by Ghislaine Maxwell.

00:22:31:08 - 00:22:33:21 Eric Weinstein I don't know.

00:22:33:23 - 00:22:35:00 Eric Weinstein Why is it that.

00:22:35:00 - 00:22:36:17 Eric Weinstein No hedge.

00:22:36:17 - 00:22:37:24 Eric Weinstein Funds? What is it?

00:22:37:24 - 00:22:39:17 Eric Weinstein They file form.

00:22:39:19 - 00:22:40:22 Eric Weinstein I forget it. It's 13.

00:22:40:22 - 00:22:41:19 Eric Weinstein F There.

00:22:41:24 - 00:23:00:09 Eric Weinstein Are certain forms that you have to file. Nobody's ever asked for these things. Where? Who's his prime broker? Where? Somebody's gone over the prime brokerage, his Twitter, his trades. He would have to move the market if he was, you know, doing a yard of euros or Swiss francs or who knows what.

00:23:00:11 - 00:23:05:13 Eric Weinstein Like a billion that would move the market. So there's no way you can.

00:23:05:13 - 00:23:08:14 Eric Weinstein Fake retroactively a hedge fund.

00:23:08:16 - 00:23:09:10 Eric Weinstein Of.

00:23:09:12 - 00:23:15:18 Eric Weinstein Immeasurable size that trades currencies. I don't think he was a currency trader. He told me he was a currency trader.

00:23:15:22 - 00:23:20:13 Chris Williamson So when you say a construct, who constructs who's the builder?

00:23:20:15 - 00:23:26:00 Eric Weinstein I don't know. I would imagine some version of the intelligence community.

00:23:26:02 - 00:23:26:19 Eric Weinstein You know.

00:23:26:21 - 00:23:54:05 Eric Weinstein Sometimes somebody is covered, gets blown. We have a very famous unfortunate story of Elie Cohen with the Mossad, where Elie Cohen was an Egyptian Jew who was fitted with a back story that he was an Argentinean playboy who had made a fortune in Argentina but was Arabic in origin. And then he moves to Damascus and he takes out an apartment where he holds orgies.

00:23:54:07 - 00:23:56:11 Eric Weinstein And.

00:23:56:13 - 00:24:04:04 Eric Weinstein Becomes the best friend of Hafez al-Assad. Right. And so that's an example of a story.

00:24:04:04 - 00:24:04:15 Eric Weinstein We know.

00:24:04:19 - 00:24:11:17 Eric Weinstein We know how the intelligence communities of the world create people who don't really exist.

00:24:11:19 - 00:24:38:12 Chris Williamson Construction of. I know that this is just a one time thing here that you got to see, but the construction of the coffin, looking American flag, the spelling of the coffee, this weird power play thing that's going on that seems now that you say that it wasn't him even pulling his own strings, perhaps it makes a lot more sense.

00:24:38:12 - 00:24:46:01 Chris Williamson But even that that degree of sophistication. I learned this from Daniel Trachtenberg. We sat down and he's spent some time with particularly powerful people.

00:24:46:05 - 00:24:46:21 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

00:24:46:23 - 00:25:28:23 Chris Williamson And he told me this really harrowing story of somebody who has both the desire and the means to treat themselves like an apex predator against their own kind. And they said so they broke the fourth wall about this and said, Apex predators don't care about the prey, but they saw their own kind of prey. And I asked Daniel, how does it feel to sit opposite somebody who isn't right, limited by the resources, who can not only dream to have this plus have the motivation or lack of virtue or integrity to go ahead and consider doing it, and then has the capacity, the assets, to be able to enact.

00:25:29:01 - 00:25:41:22 Chris Williamson Sure. And it's reminding me it's giving me the same something. It feels like it feels like it's up on the top of my head. It's giving me some sort of a sense like that.

00:25:41:24 - 00:25:59:14 Eric Weinstein This was intended to be terrifying. It wasn't an accident. It was intended to be as fascinating as it could possibly be, which it was. And terrifying at the same time. And it achieved both. It achieved both objectives. I mean, I was given an opportunity to.

00:25:59:14 - 00:26:06:01 Eric Weinstein Meet him again. I didn't know what to do. I mean, the other thing.

00:26:06:06 - 00:26:07:11 Eric Weinstein I just found really weird is that he.

00:26:07:11 - 00:26:08:10 Eric Weinstein Knew about.

00:26:08:10 - 00:26:12:16 Eric Weinstein My research and it turned out that he was connected to my graduate department.

00:26:12:18 - 00:26:14:12 Eric Weinstein At Harvard.

00:26:14:14 - 00:26:27:23 Eric Weinstein So he had a connection to the Harvard Math Department, unbeknownst to me. I don't know when that began. I know two of the professors he was connected through.

00:26:28:00 - 00:26:31:04 Eric Weinstein But this is some unholy story.

00:26:31:05 - 00:26:35:13 Eric Weinstein It has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.

00:26:35:15 - 00:26:36:01 Eric Weinstein It has to do.

00:26:36:01 - 00:26:37:15 Eric Weinstein With whatever this thing was.

00:26:37:16 - 00:26:45:07 Eric Weinstein We tripped over a thing, but we tripped over a structure.

00:26:45:09 - 00:26:51:03 Eric Weinstein We named the structure. Jeffrey Epstein.

00:26:51:05 - 00:27:07:01 Chris Williamson It must be very unfortunate in some regards for whoever it was, if that's true, that was in charge of this construction that it became that people got T-shirts with his name printed on them.

00:27:07:03 - 00:27:17:23 Eric Weinstein This was already going wrong in the early 2000s. You see, my sense of this is that this was a pre-Internet.

00:27:18:00 - 00:27:18:18 Eric Weinstein Plan.

00:27:18:18 - 00:27:26:21 Eric Weinstein That lived into the Internet age and couldn't survive contact with the Internet age.

00:27:26:23 - 00:27:32:11 Chris Williamson What did the Internet bring in that didn't allow it to survive? Eyeballs discussion level of surveillance?

00:27:32:12 - 00:27:39:02 Eric Weinstein Well, you know, there's a claim that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein because it's this many years later and we've all moved on.

00:27:39:04 - 00:27:40:03 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

00:27:40:05 - 00:27:46:03 Eric Weinstein That's completely untrue. And we know that it's true because if you start talking about Jeffrey Epstein, the.

00:27:46:05 - 00:27:48:08 Eric Weinstein Engagement goes up.

00:27:48:10 - 00:27:51:01 Eric Weinstein So you have these fictions.

00:27:51:01 - 00:27:53:00 Eric Weinstein Like, you know, that are.

00:27:53:02 - 00:28:20:02 Eric Weinstein Put out by mainstream media or traditional news desks, which is nobody cares about that story. Well, that you can see from social media that that's not true from the Internet. So the Internet is constantly providing an ability to check whether or not these claims from inside the structure to Jeffrey Epstein is an example of what I call in an anti interesting phenomenon.

00:28:20:04 - 00:28:21:00 Eric Weinstein What's that?

00:28:21:02 - 00:28:40:24 Eric Weinstein Well, an anti interesting thing is something that would normally be fascinating. Imagine, for example, you had a story where you could get a Pulitzer Prize for breaking it. Everybody cares. You sell papers like hotcakes, blah, blah, blah, and nobody wants to report on it. And it's like, right there. You could just ask the dumbest questions.

00:28:40:24 - 00:28:43:05 Eric Weinstein And it would be like.

00:28:43:07 - 00:28:45:14 Eric Weinstein New York Times says disgraced financier.

00:28:45:16 - 00:28:47:05 Eric Weinstein Well, tell me.

00:28:47:07 - 00:29:01:22 Eric Weinstein Did you find his prime broker? Did you find the forms? Did you go to his offices in Vollard house? No. Nobody does ever. The story is anti interesting, and it's very different than being uninteresting.

00:29:01:24 - 00:29:08:00 Chris Williamson Which would suggest more collusion, more coordination.

00:29:08:02 - 00:29:11:23 Eric Weinstein Hello. I mean.

00:29:12:00 - 00:29:24:09 Eric Weinstein See, this is this is one of the most uncomfortable things. I think there was a time when mostly when people said collusion or coordination, the presumption was, well, that's kind of that's pretty far out there.

00:29:24:11 - 00:29:27:23 Eric Weinstein We now know, like post Elon Musk's.

00:29:27:23 - 00:29:38:24 Eric Weinstein $44 billion adventure at Twitter that there are these coordinating groups, coordinating coordinating social media with the intelligence community or with the Department of Homeland Security or with the State.

00:29:38:24 - 00:29:41:00 Eric Weinstein Department. We now.

00:29:41:00 - 00:29:42:24 Eric Weinstein Know that we're living in an orchestrated.

00:29:42:24 - 00:29:44:00 Eric Weinstein Quiet, you know.

00:29:44:00 - 00:29:50:22 Eric Weinstein Curated, choreographed world, and we can't know it officially, but we all know it.

00:29:50:23 - 00:29:53:00 Eric Weinstein If we want to know.

00:29:53:02 - 00:29:57:15 Eric Weinstein Which is hysterical now, we have to talk about, well, are you a conspiracy theorist?

00:29:57:16 - 00:30:01:22 Eric Weinstein Like I read, I read the Slack.

00:30:01:22 - 00:30:03:03 Eric Weinstein Messages, I read the.

00:30:03:03 - 00:30:08:14 Eric Weinstein Emails. What? What are you even talking about now?

00:30:08:16 - 00:30:14:20 Chris Williamson Sam Bankman-fried. Yeah. Currently being re charged. Yeah. With witness tampering. Yes.

00:30:14:20 - 00:30:15:24 Eric Weinstein Well.

00:30:16:01 - 00:30:40:03 Chris Williamson That to me, fresh charges is releasing. Even though he's told he couldn't get in touch with the press. I think hundreds of phone calls to the press leaked his ex-girlfriend allegedly leaked his ex-girlfriends, diary entries, so on and so forth. And, you know, this is a guy that some of my friends were flown to go and see on his island.

00:30:40:05 - 00:30:41:10 Chris Williamson His portion of an island. Yeah.

00:30:41:10 - 00:30:42:06 Eric Weinstein His portion is very.

00:30:42:06 - 00:31:07:02 Chris Williamson Different here for very different reasons. It's there seems to be an issue hear about if they believe they're above the law. There was this really cool documentary on Netflix called the Murdoch murders and it was this small town, big family, lots of money. And the kids run rampant. Right. Classic like silver spoon aristocracy bullshit. But when it gets scaled up, this much more.

00:31:07:08 - 00:31:30:04 Chris Williamson Sam Bankman-fried the biggest financial crime, alleged financial crime since May. The Bernie Madoff. Okay. Yeah. Allegedly tampering with witnesses, allegedly leaking his ex-girlfriends diary entries. And did the rules not apply to everybody?

00:31:30:06 - 00:31:39:20 Eric Weinstein Certainly they don't. Why? We stopped prosecuting.

00:31:39:22 - 00:32:02:17 Eric Weinstein All sorts of types of people. You know, look, we stopped holding hearings. I grew up in a world where we had the Church committee, the Pike Committee, looking at our own intelligence services. We had Watergate hearings. We had tobacco hearings, we had Iran-Contra hearings.

00:32:02:19 - 00:32:03:21 Eric Weinstein Do you know how many hearings.

00:32:03:21 - 00:32:04:08 Eric Weinstein We need right.

00:32:04:08 - 00:32:09:20 Eric Weinstein Now? Where are these things? It's ridiculous. We've got weird stuff about UFOs with.

00:32:09:20 - 00:32:15:04 Eric Weinstein People making the craziest allegations.

00:32:15:06 - 00:32:19:05 Eric Weinstein Look, this is just not normal. We're in.

00:32:19:05 - 00:32:20:16 Eric Weinstein Totally weird, uncharted.

00:32:20:16 - 00:32:23:15 Eric Weinstein Territory.

00:32:23:17 - 00:32:34:12 Chris Williamson What do you make of the recent uaps? I think is the new term. Eric, you need to get up with the times here. They're not UFOs anymore. That's the old.

00:32:34:14 - 00:32:36:19 Eric Weinstein I wasn't even in this game when it was UFOs.

00:32:36:21 - 00:32:44:20 Chris Williamson Okay. Okay. So what do you make of the recent UAP stories and the tension and response and subsequent response?

00:32:44:22 - 00:32:45:22 Eric Weinstein Well.

00:32:45:24 - 00:32:48:21 Eric Weinstein I'd like to ask you first.

00:32:48:23 - 00:33:05:04 Chris Williamson So I had a look at the first whistleblower from about two months ago, quite closely with Andy Stumpf, who used to have pretty high level security clearance. And he explained to me about how unimpressive that particular type of security clearances, how very common.

00:33:05:10 - 00:33:07:01 Eric Weinstein Which one this is, David?

00:33:07:03 - 00:33:12:08 Chris Williamson Yes, David, you know, not not David Fravor, who was a no no.

00:33:12:09 - 00:33:13:24 Eric Weinstein David Fravor was the tic tac.

00:33:14:00 - 00:33:14:16 Eric Weinstein Correct.

00:33:14:18 - 00:33:15:22 Eric Weinstein This is Dave.

00:33:15:22 - 00:33:16:12 Eric Weinstein Gersh.

00:33:16:14 - 00:33:17:02 Chris Williamson Yes.

00:33:17:05 - 00:33:18:23 Eric Weinstein Okay.

00:33:19:00 - 00:33:38:11 Chris Williamson Very common level of security clearance that you're using. That is some sort of oh, this is a legitimate credential. Doesn't really wash too much that it was second off. It was thirdhand information, mostly secondhand information, kind of. I heard from a person who saw who heard.

00:33:38:14 - 00:33:39:16 Eric Weinstein Right.

00:33:39:18 - 00:33:47:08 Chris Williamson It just seemed to me to be rather, on the face of it, unimpressive, that release.

00:33:47:10 - 00:33:49:01 Eric Weinstein I see.

00:33:49:03 - 00:33:51:08 Chris Williamson What did you think?

00:33:51:10 - 00:34:07:18 Eric Weinstein Well, like I've been telling everybody, these are highly conserved stories. This is not the only person I've heard this story from. I've heard this from multiple people. There are various versions of this secret world.

00:34:07:20 - 00:34:08:13 Eric Weinstein Which.

00:34:08:15 - 00:34:11:10 Eric Weinstein Play out as space opera.

00:34:11:12 - 00:34:16:08 Eric Weinstein You know, the then MJ 12 became the real government that only even.

00:34:16:08 - 00:34:31:13 Eric Weinstein The president could didn't understand, you know? And it's like, okay, so that's the weird part about it, until you start realizing how sober many of the people are who believe this and who claim to have had direct contact with.

00:34:31:13 - 00:34:33:12 Eric Weinstein It.

00:34:33:14 - 00:34:42:15 Eric Weinstein And then you don't know what to do. I mean, in other words, whatever this is.

00:34:42:17 - 00:34:45:11 Eric Weinstein There is a thing.

00:34:45:13 - 00:35:08:20 Eric Weinstein It's like there's a little green men. It could be, for example, that they make up a floating spaceship in a hangar and then they drag people past it and say, Whatever you do, do not look too to your left or right or you'll be shot. And then, of course, people look and then like, mission accomplished. Now people will say, Oh my God, you have no idea what The U.S. has incredible technology.

00:35:08:22 - 00:35:16:00 Eric Weinstein And then maybe the idea is you've got a cover story. Maybe you've got your adversary investing in things that don't make any sense. I don't.

00:35:16:00 - 00:35:18:15 Eric Weinstein Know. But there's not nothing here.

00:35:18:19 - 00:35:25:21 Eric Weinstein This is not about Mylar balloons and seagulls anymore.

00:35:25:23 - 00:35:44:01 Chris Williamson I'm trying to come up with a word for it, but it's like a it's like recursive false flags, you know, in a way where the goal is not to give or hide truth. The goal is a firehose with information so much that the truth can no longer be discerned.

00:35:44:02 - 00:35:50:21 Eric Weinstein It's a haystack of bullshit to make sure that any needle is very difficult to find.

00:35:50:23 - 00:35:52:18 Eric Weinstein It is? Yes.

00:35:52:20 - 00:35:54:03 Chris Williamson Bullshit. Haystack.

00:35:54:05 - 00:35:55:14 Eric Weinstein Right? Yeah. Okay.

00:35:55:14 - 00:36:23:17 Eric Weinstein So they haystack the crap out of this thing. I have no question that there was something that was used to develop U.S. aircraft like the B-2 bomber and the S.R. 71 Blackbird. So if you see something crazy in the sky, better that you think it's a UFO from outer space than some advanced thing from Lockheed. I have no question that we use this to deal with things like the Chinese balloon shootdown, where we shot down several things in a week and we couldn't recover debris from any of them.

00:36:23:19 - 00:36:28:01 Eric Weinstein I mean, come on, guys. You know.

00:36:28:01 - 00:36:39:17 Eric Weinstein Maybe the idea is that this is a had faked to our adversaries to develop the wrong things and to use their treasure and things that won't work. Maybe is a secret program.

00:36:39:19 - 00:36:40:16 Eric Weinstein Where some.

00:36:40:16 - 00:36:57:12 Eric Weinstein Of this stuff is actually real and true and we're not allowed to know it because it would be too mind blowing. Maybe there's a cult inside of our government that has replaced angels with saucer shaped aircraft.

00:36:57:14 - 00:37:02:10 Eric Weinstein Whatever this thing is, it's being used for.

00:37:02:10 - 00:37:05:00 Eric Weinstein Many different purposes.

00:37:05:02 - 00:37:11:01 Eric Weinstein There's something here we just don't know what you know. This is.

00:37:11:01 - 00:37:31:10 Eric Weinstein The problem. The princess can't feel a pea because that would be impossible. The princess feels a disturbed and you can't say what the disturbance is. Maybe it's a golf ball, maybe it's a cantaloupe, maybe it's a banana. But whatever it is, there's something wrong with the mattress.

00:37:31:12 - 00:37:36:04 Chris Williamson Yeah, It seems to me this fire hosing the goal of uncertainty.

00:37:36:06 - 00:37:38:24 Eric Weinstein Hmm. Right.

00:37:39:01 - 00:37:45:17 Eric Weinstein How do things muddle out? Who wins in a muddle is a great question. We're not taught to ask. Sorry to jump in on love.

00:37:45:19 - 00:37:47:17 Eric Weinstein You know.

00:37:47:19 - 00:37:51:12 Eric Weinstein Always look for who is trying to muddle to win.

00:37:51:14 - 00:37:52:05 Eric Weinstein It's very.

00:37:52:05 - 00:38:00:12 Eric Weinstein Often you're in a dispute with entrenched status quo and somebody else say, well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this.

00:38:00:12 - 00:38:06:05 Eric Weinstein One. I'm like, Oh, well, who wins if we agree to this? Oh, it's you, right? Yeah.

00:38:06:06 - 00:38:14:05 Eric Weinstein This is like an old principle of mine, which is that you can always tell who's guilty by who first declares a time of healing.

00:38:14:07 - 00:38:16:02 Chris Williamson Why? Why is that a razor to use?

00:38:16:08 - 00:38:29:23 Eric Weinstein Oh, because if you do something wrong and the public is clamoring for for your blood, you say there's been too much blame and finger pointing on all sides at me.

00:38:30:00 - 00:38:32:07 Eric Weinstein It's I think what we need.

00:38:32:09 - 00:38:34:23 Eric Weinstein Is to come together and declare a time of.

00:38:34:23 - 00:38:37:11 Eric Weinstein Healing for me. Right.

00:38:37:13 - 00:38:43:15 Eric Weinstein So I believe that in general, whoever declares a time of healing is suspect number one.

00:38:43:17 - 00:38:50:05 Chris Williamson That's a very nice razor to use.

00:38:50:07 - 00:39:01:07 Chris Williamson I wonder about this. How would you say epidemic of uncertainty?

00:39:01:09 - 00:39:05:20 Eric Weinstein Brilliant. Speak in my language.

00:39:05:22 - 00:39:14:03 Chris Williamson And I wonder.

00:39:14:05 - 00:39:15:09 Eric Weinstein How.

00:39:15:11 - 00:39:29:02 Chris Williamson First off, how is an individual? You are supposed to put up any kind of effective defense to just take some sovereignty, be in, you know, in a gentle individual.

00:39:29:07 - 00:39:30:23 Eric Weinstein Right.

00:39:31:00 - 00:39:56:07 Chris Williamson And secondly, I wonder what the end goal is. I understand why uncertainty would be useful for manipulation because if people can't discern truth from untruth, it can be easy to poke them and prod them and float them in particular directions. But It also seems like a no kind of also useless as well that some people are not insignificant.

00:39:56:09 - 00:40:00:13 Chris Williamson A large cohort of people will just reject it entirely, which.

00:40:00:13 - 00:40:01:14 Eric Weinstein Actually they're doing.

00:40:01:16 - 00:40:09:06 Chris Williamson Which actually makes it more chaotic and more unruly. So it makes me think, well, maybe if this is case, if the fire hosing is happening.

00:40:09:07 - 00:40:10:00 Eric Weinstein Right.

00:40:10:02 - 00:40:21:24 Chris Williamson This epidemic of uncertainty, maybe the outcomes were predicted but haven't manifest in the way that was intended. Maybe there's more of a rebellious streak in say more about that.

00:40:21:24 - 00:40:23:01 Eric Weinstein I'm trying to understand.

00:40:23:04 - 00:40:48:13 Chris Williamson That if people who if you make the public very uncertain about most things by overloading them with information or by even the it doesn't even need to be coordination, it could be a byproduct of having 24 seven access to the entire world's population through Twitter and Instagram stories and blah blah, blah. Right. There is so much I can no longer discern, even due to a multiplicity of opinions that's not coordinated to be a multiplicity that go in opposite directions.

00:40:48:15 - 00:41:08:01 Chris Williamson If it was coordinated, the outcomes that are occurring at the moment, a lot of the time seem to be happening with people just, Oh, roll over. Tell me exactly what to do. There is a massive, non insignificant cohort of people that say, I'm checking out. I now no longer trust anybody at all and that doesn't mean anything. Yes.

00:41:08:01 - 00:41:20:05 Chris Williamson And that doesn't seem to be if the goal was ease of control, that doesn't seem to be effective for the person that wanted that or the group that wanted that to be the outcome.

00:41:20:07 - 00:41:26:07 Eric Weinstein First of all, I'm really glad to get a question about this as a sea change, which.

00:41:26:07 - 00:41:27:15 Eric Weinstein Is that.

00:41:27:17 - 00:41:29:14 Eric Weinstein Our lives have become.

00:41:29:16 - 00:41:30:05 Eric Weinstein Wall to.

00:41:30:05 - 00:41:45:14 Eric Weinstein Wall uncertainty. We can't discern. If the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor today, we would spend ten years discussing whether it was a false flag, whether it was actually the Japanese, whether there was any attack, whether it was a soundstage, whether it was a psyop, whether it was a.

00:41:45:16 - 00:41:51:07 Eric Weinstein You know.

00:41:51:09 - 00:41:53:18 Eric Weinstein Right now.

00:41:53:20 - 00:42:25:02 Eric Weinstein The main institutions of our society have abdicate ceded their role for public spirited adjudication of what is true based on expertise. And so what you're seeing is people coming to hate experts and coming to hate institutions because they're realizing that these institutions lie to them at a level that they've never considered unless they were Alex Jones fans to begin with.

00:42:25:04 - 00:42:42:01 Eric Weinstein And so what you're having is you're having a large number of people waking up to the idea that, yeah, there really are organizations and working groups that determine what you hear from a multiplicity of venues. It's the same message relentlessly.

00:42:42:03 - 00:42:45:06 Chris Williamson Do you think people are overly pattern matching that.

00:42:45:06 - 00:42:47:06 Eric Weinstein Now say more about by what you mean.

00:42:47:08 - 00:42:52:12 Chris Williamson That they think conspiracy where there isn't because the lack of faith in institutions.

00:42:52:14 - 00:43:05:21 Eric Weinstein Same person is saying that they see a conspiracy and they see no conspiracy. They have part of their head that remembers that conspiracy theorists are crazy people and they've got part of their brain that remembers the normies who don't believe in conspiracies are crazy people.

00:43:05:23 - 00:43:08:02 Eric Weinstein And they can't integrate those things.

00:43:08:04 - 00:43:15:24 Eric Weinstein Right? They cannot figure out how are these things being coordinated? Am I a crazy person for seeing these patterns? Am I a crazy person for ignoring.

00:43:16:01 - 00:43:16:08 Chris Williamson Them.

00:43:16:08 - 00:43:20:17 Eric Weinstein For when they're when they're unearthed?

00:43:20:19 - 00:43:21:04 Eric Weinstein What you're.

00:43:21:04 - 00:43:24:13 Eric Weinstein Seeing is a complete destruction.

00:43:24:15 - 00:43:25:10 Eric Weinstein Of.

00:43:25:12 - 00:43:36:02 Eric Weinstein Bedrock reality, that if you weren't actually physically there, how do we know that these people actually met in a warehouse? Is this really a table or is it just.

00:43:36:04 - 00:43:36:12 Eric Weinstein You know.

00:43:36:15 - 00:43:39:12 Eric Weinstein CGI? Was it green and we could superimpose.

00:43:39:12 - 00:43:40:21 Eric Weinstein Wood on to Nobody.

00:43:40:21 - 00:43:42:12 Eric Weinstein Knows what's true.

00:43:42:14 - 00:43:45:24 Eric Weinstein And, you know, if you.

00:43:46:02 - 00:43:52:00 Eric Weinstein If you ask me, well, Eric, how are you dealing with this? I would say I'm failing.

00:43:52:02 - 00:43:54:17 Eric Weinstein I'm just flat out failing.

00:43:54:19 - 00:43:56:10 Eric Weinstein As are all of you.

00:43:56:12 - 00:43:58:11 Eric Weinstein I'm just more honest about it.

00:43:58:13 - 00:44:07:07 Eric Weinstein Some of you have an idea that you've got one lens, which is fix the money, fix the world Bitcoin. That's the answer. Yeah, Bitcoin rock on.

00:44:07:07 - 00:44:11:02 Eric Weinstein But no, that's not the answer.

00:44:11:02 - 00:44:13:20 Eric Weinstein Or somebody else says, you know.

00:44:13:22 - 00:44:15:10 Eric Weinstein I really think that we just.

00:44:15:10 - 00:44:31:18 Eric Weinstein Need to be open and tolerant and realize it's a big world and we just have to give people their due. Well, that doesn't work either. You can't just let everything run riot or we have to go back to our institutions with these people at the helm. Are you kidding? We have to abandon our institution. What do you say?

00:44:31:20 - 00:44:39:04 Eric Weinstein We're going to abandon our institutions. Do you know what that looks like? Nobody has an answer.

00:44:39:10 - 00:44:56:14 Chris Williamson We'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about Gymshark. Gymshark makes the best training kit on the planet. This shirt that I've been falling in love with and traveling in for a very long time is phenomenal. And these shots, the studio shorts that they make, are the best men's training shorts on the planet.

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00:45:10:23 - 00:45:33:09 Chris Williamson I highly, highly recommend that you go and check out everything that I use and recommend from Gymshark. They've updated my product page with everything that I use and recommend for men and women, and you can get 10% off everything sitewide with no minimum order and they have 30 day free returns worldwide. Head to bit.ly slash shock wisdom. That's be it Alyssa Shock wisdom and use the code.

00:45:33:09 - 00:45:42:21 Chris Williamson M-W ten a check out. You're sounding an awful lot parallel the conversation is moving in a similar direction to what I had to Sam Harris recently.

00:45:42:23 - 00:45:46:23 Eric Weinstein I would think it's very different, but happy to hear more.

00:45:47:00 - 00:46:01:10 Chris Williamson He identified on an episode that I did with him not long ago the fact that we have lost trust in our institutions and yet abandoning them is also wholesale is also not an option.

00:46:01:12 - 00:46:27:22 Eric Weinstein Sam also tried to say, I can see the problems on their AI. Sam can see the problems on the right and I can see the problems on the left. And there is a group of people who have allowed their irritation with the left to color their thinking to the point that they now are in a right wing situation without understanding the dangers on the right.

00:46:27:24 - 00:46:47:10 Eric Weinstein I think Sam is discounting the idea that once people wake up to the AI, to the concept that they were living in an orchestrated Truman Show, that they did not understand, they're not going to have the idea of like, oh, sure, the vaccines were a little bit more dangerous.

00:46:47:12 - 00:46:47:19 Eric Weinstein Than.

00:46:47:19 - 00:46:52:06 Eric Weinstein Claimed and maybe a little bit less effective, and maybe we knew a little bit more about the lab leak.

00:46:52:06 - 00:46:54:10 Eric Weinstein So no way.

00:46:54:12 - 00:47:05:06 Eric Weinstein You spat directly in my face and told me not only that it was raining, but that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face and you piled up how many Nobel laureates.

00:47:05:08 - 00:47:07:06 Eric Weinstein To defend.

00:47:07:08 - 00:47:23:16 Eric Weinstein The idea that any inquiry into the origin of this virus was racism? It's like you're dead to me. And I think that that's what people are not understanding in the Democratic Party. And increasingly the basic attitude.

00:47:23:16 - 00:47:25:00 Eric Weinstein Is whoever.

00:47:25:00 - 00:47:36:18 Eric Weinstein This class of people is that crawled into our elite institutions is just dead. Like there's nothing Anthony Fauci could say at this moment that I want to hear. It's not that I don't think that he doesn't know.

00:47:36:18 - 00:47:41:04 Eric Weinstein Virology or epidemiology. I know.

00:47:41:04 - 00:47:43:15 Eric Weinstein I can't trust him because of the way in which he looked into.

00:47:43:15 - 00:47:45:15 Eric Weinstein My eyes and then.

00:47:45:15 - 00:48:17:12 Eric Weinstein You know, when Stephen Colbert is dancing with syringes, singing the vaccine song and Ariana Grande de, you know, is in a super highly produced number from like Hairspray, but converted to vaccines with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and everybody celebrating like it's a may Day celebration. I get it. I live in a completely fake world. And I wrote an article about this in 2011 on kayfabe, which is this system of lies that undergirds professional wrestling.

00:48:17:14 - 00:48:28:05 Eric Weinstein So now you've woken up to the idea that you've spent your life watching something like Major League Baseball or Premier League Soccer or whatever it is.

00:48:28:07 - 00:48:31:05 Eric Weinstein And it's all fake. And now you don't know who.

00:48:31:06 - 00:48:40:18 Eric Weinstein You are, you don't know what your country is, you don't know what a ballot boxes. You have no idea what news is or media. You don't know what a university is actually teaching.

00:48:40:20 - 00:48:43:00 Eric Weinstein You've got people running around who are.

00:48:43:02 - 00:48:43:22 Eric Weinstein Calling themselves.

00:48:43:22 - 00:48:45:02 Eric Weinstein Scholars.

00:48:45:04 - 00:48:53:20 Eric Weinstein Who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats. And you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong, and it's directly in their area of expertise.

00:48:53:22 - 00:49:22:23 Chris Williamson So the thing about pattern matching that I said was there are still many people who are scholars who are in positions of authority inside of high falutin institutions that presumably do want to do good and do want to deploy their skills in a way that does this. Is it a case that every single institution is completely wrong or is this reflexive skepticism?

00:49:22:23 - 00:49:23:23 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

00:49:24:00 - 00:49:32:11 Chris Williamson Being tuned up too highly to the point where there is skepticism about things that don't deserve it? And how do we determine between the two?

00:49:32:12 - 00:49:39:19 Eric Weinstein Okay, so we have to talk about the institutions that are fighting back. Twitter, which has become ex, is not on the same.

00:49:39:21 - 00:49:43:12 Eric Weinstein Standard that the.

00:49:43:14 - 00:49:49:04 Eric Weinstein Facebooks are or Google is. Elon is doing something different. We can talk.

00:49:49:04 - 00:49:50:08 Eric Weinstein About what.

00:49:50:10 - 00:50:15:18 Eric Weinstein The University of Chicago is still fighting. Uh, my daughter just graduated from the University of Chicago and she had never mentioned where she was while she was there. It is. It needs it. It needs support. We have to support the schools that fought back. For example, I believe Ohio State fought back. And there's a school in Oklahoma that fought back.

00:50:15:20 - 00:50:35:13 Eric Weinstein And leading that charge is the University of Chicago. We have organizations like Fire that promote free speech. We have professors who are taking on some risk like Jonathan Haidt, but we're not seeing the Noam Chomsky effect where you do amazing research and they have to put up with every crazy idea that comes.

00:50:35:13 - 00:50:38:17 Eric Weinstein Through your mind, right?

00:50:38:19 - 00:50:51:21 Eric Weinstein That's important. Look up a person named Serge Lang in mathematics and something called The File to understand how dangerous it is to screw with real scholars.

00:50:52:02 - 00:50:54:23 Chris Williamson What happens? Give us the 30,000 foot view.

00:50:55:00 - 00:51:20:18 Eric Weinstein I know they put people tried to put like, say, Sam Huntington into the National Academy of Sciences, who was an architect of the Vietnam War. And Sears Lang just said, I look through his papers, I find the following mathematical statements This is not science. Why is this person in the academy and then they fight back. And I fought back with Serge Lang when he was at Harvard, where we tried to engage Sam Huntington on that topic.

00:51:20:20 - 00:51:35:20 Eric Weinstein You can't have these dangerous people running around. That's why all of us are discredited. Maybe you haven't noticed this, but like Jordan Peterson is discredited, Sam Harris is discredited. Joe Rogan is discredited. Brett Weinstein is discredited. Ben SHAPIRO is discredited. Barry Weiss is discredit.

00:51:35:22 - 00:51:39:04 Eric Weinstein Everybody is discredited.

00:51:39:07 - 00:51:45:09 Chris Williamson Tim Paul referred to it as the ID WS walking Cops phase at the moment.

00:51:45:11 - 00:51:47:05 Eric Weinstein Well.

00:51:47:07 - 00:52:10:05 Eric Weinstein My point is this personal destruction is the coin of the realm and some of the personal destruction that you see that looks organic is is orchestrated as well. And we're just in this thing where, in my opinion, what you're looking at is something called de-confliction. But people don't know what that is. Deconfliction is supposed to stop what are called blue on blue.

00:52:10:07 - 00:52:30:18 Eric Weinstein So blue on blue incidents is you have two branches of government that don't know that they're operating covertly. So maybe you have an investigative team and an undercover team and the investigative team is about to blow the cover thinking that they've got a target but is actually an undercover agent. So what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to check in with these centralized systems and say, do you have any assets in this arena?

00:52:30:18 - 00:53:02:14 Eric Weinstein We're about to move. Yes, we do. Oh, okay. So they find out and this is supposed to stop blue on blue. The interesting thing is, even though there are three systems called safety net RSA and Case Explorer, you can't use them unless you are an official part of the government. So I called up one of them, had a half an hour conversation before I started asking about Jeffrey Epstein, and then they immediately said this call will be terminated in 5 seconds.

00:53:02:16 - 00:53:03:16 Eric Weinstein For.

00:53:03:18 - 00:53:40:22 Eric Weinstein Maybe it was Casey's case explorer for South Florida, something like that. What happens when you have a civilian that's not signed up for non-disclosure under no rules? You're an American citizen with full right to free speech and you stumble on something that you're not supposed to know about. That is a deconfliction problem that nobody has ever solved. So the first thing I'd like to throw out is if we have three separate systems to keep, like the intelligence community and local police departments from tripping over each other.

00:53:40:24 - 00:53:43:15 Eric Weinstein What do you think we do.

00:53:43:17 - 00:54:01:15 Eric Weinstein When ordinary citizens get wind of something amiss? That some super secret operation? And my claim is we discredit them. We pre bunk them in the language of the GEC, I believe.

00:54:01:17 - 00:54:04:19 Eric Weinstein See, we're all familiar.

00:54:04:21 - 00:54:31:06 Eric Weinstein We're all familiar with debunking misinformation and disinformation. We've got some disinformation that spread it around and we debunk it by giving you the truth. What happens when somebody is spreading the truth in a way that is unhelpful to a statecraft level narrative? Well We didn't know what the words were, but we just found out and it's you pre bunk the mal information.

00:54:31:08 - 00:54:39:23 Eric Weinstein Now, if you didn't grow up knowing what mal information is, here's a quick refresher. Mal information is actual information.

00:54:40:00 - 00:54:42:17 Eric Weinstein But it's harmful, right?

00:54:42:19 - 00:54:45:11 Chris Williamson The equivalent of politically incorrect incarnation.

00:54:45:14 - 00:54:46:12 Eric Weinstein Well, or.

00:54:46:13 - 00:55:03:19 Eric Weinstein You know, you're trying to make sure that there's support for the war in Ukraine and somebody actually realizes that things are much more desperate than than they thought. Well, that would be deleterious to our our efforts if the objective is to get Putin to capitulate. So now.

00:55:03:19 - 00:55:06:19 Eric Weinstein You have to pre bunk.

00:55:06:21 - 00:55:17:09 Eric Weinstein The mal information, which means destroy the reputation of the person, spreading the information that's countering the official disinformation and misinformation.

00:55:17:11 - 00:55:18:15 Eric Weinstein So I can't.

00:55:18:15 - 00:55:23:03 Chris Williamson Work out why anybody's confused and why they're having trouble existing and stay.

00:55:23:03 - 00:55:27:19 Eric Weinstein In school. Kids, The point is, I've got all of these.

00:55:27:19 - 00:55:30:20 Eric Weinstein Friends who are pre bunked mal informers.

00:55:30:22 - 00:55:31:23 Chris Williamson That's what a club. What a.

00:55:31:23 - 00:55:36:18 Eric Weinstein Club. That's what I do. I'm a pre bunked mal informant.

00:55:36:20 - 00:55:38:06 Chris Williamson There's never been a sexy a title I.

00:55:38:07 - 00:55:39:00 Eric Weinstein Spread mal.

00:55:39:00 - 00:55:40:04 Eric Weinstein Information. Yeah.

00:55:40:05 - 00:55:45:23 Eric Weinstein And I need to be pre bunked so of course I'm going to be a grifter. I'm going to be I don't know Charlotte.

00:55:45:23 - 00:55:49:03 Eric Weinstein And I'm going to. Well, he's over.

00:55:49:05 - 00:55:53:07 Eric Weinstein Can we stop trying to make. Eric won't say anything. Blah blah blah. And there's, you know giant.

00:55:53:13 - 00:55:54:04 Eric Weinstein Farms.

00:55:54:04 - 00:56:02:00 Eric Weinstein Of of people and bots that are dedicated to spreading bad feelings about anybody who's going to contradict narrative.

00:56:02:01 - 00:56:11:01 Chris Williamson But don't forget as well that the coordination doesn't necessarily need to be there because the incentives align online.

00:56:11:03 - 00:56:13:13 Eric Weinstein There's an emergent part. Yeah, there's a non-emergent.

00:56:13:13 - 00:56:14:17 Eric Weinstein Part, right?

00:56:14:19 - 00:56:17:11 Eric Weinstein I will not agree with anyone who tells me it's all one.

00:56:17:11 - 00:56:18:22 Eric Weinstein Or the or all the other.

00:56:18:24 - 00:56:21:20 Eric Weinstein But part of this is actually coordinated.

00:56:21:22 - 00:56:39:09 Chris Williamson Yeah. So close that loop on the edge. Antique sovereign individual existing in the world. Holy fuck. I'm getting cockeyed with this total awfulness of of information here.

00:56:39:09 - 00:56:42:07 Eric Weinstein Look, you just mean splattered in Japanese.

00:56:42:09 - 00:56:44:21 Chris Williamson That's why it's not a terrible term to use.

00:56:44:21 - 00:56:45:12 Eric Weinstein Yeah, absolutely.

00:56:45:15 - 00:56:50:14 Chris Williamson Thank you. It's actually been appropriated by the adult industry in a way that I think the Japanese should reclaim.

00:56:50:14 - 00:56:57:00 Eric Weinstein Actually, Melissa Chen has probably done more to popularize this in intellectual circles than anyone else. So shout out to Ms.. Melissa Chan.

00:56:57:00 - 00:57:00:16 Chris Williamson Melissa Chan and but Corky in the same sentence. Everything that we weren't expecting today.

00:57:00:20 - 00:57:05:04 Eric Weinstein She I think there was a period of her life where she use it in every public appearance.

00:57:05:04 - 00:57:06:24 Eric Weinstein Just sneak it in. Right?

00:57:06:24 - 00:57:09:24 Chris Williamson Okay. The Bukowski of the gaps.

00:57:10:01 - 00:57:12:02 Eric Weinstein So anyway, you have a situation where.

00:57:12:02 - 00:57:13:07 Eric Weinstein Nobody knows what's going.

00:57:13:07 - 00:57:14:03 Eric Weinstein On.

00:57:14:05 - 00:57:17:19 Eric Weinstein And I don't think Sam is comfortable, by the way, being here like you're in.

00:57:17:19 - 00:57:19:02 Eric Weinstein Open water.

00:57:19:04 - 00:57:26:16 Eric Weinstein And you have all of these instructions about what to do when you're swimming near land, which is, you know, try to align yourself with the shore, don't fight the current and.

00:57:26:18 - 00:57:28:04 Eric Weinstein Like that's not where you are.

00:57:28:05 - 00:57:38:11 Eric Weinstein You're just in open water and you're treading water and you don't know whether there are oceanic white tips around and you don't know whether you can keep this up for much longer.

00:57:38:13 - 00:57:42:19 Eric Weinstein But there is no land.

00:57:42:21 - 00:57:45:22 Eric Weinstein There's a big difference with Sam.

00:57:45:24 - 00:57:50:02 Chris Williamson Go a little deeper. Make that a little plainer for me.

00:57:50:04 - 00:57:58:01 Eric Weinstein You cannot trust Harvard or nature. You cannot trust the Office of Management and Budget.

00:57:58:03 - 00:57:59:05 Chris Williamson Or the Lancet.

00:57:59:07 - 00:58:30:15 Eric Weinstein Or the Lancet or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You cannot trust any newspaper that I'm aware. You cannot trust the CDC or the NIH or the W.H.O.. Now, people will hear that and I'll say, Oh, my God, Eric, you're spreading distrust and fear. It's like I'm a pastor. Shoot the messenger all you want. All of those institutions are out of control.

00:58:30:17 - 00:58:32:23 Eric Weinstein And we all know it.

00:58:33:00 - 00:58:35:12 Chris Williamson And it's entirely out of control.

00:58:35:17 - 00:58:37:07 Eric Weinstein No, mostly out.

00:58:37:11 - 00:58:45:13 Eric Weinstein I did this on trigonometry. We have this anti institutional point. How is it that the airlines can't keep my.

00:58:45:15 - 00:58:48:02 Eric Weinstein Seat clean.

00:58:48:04 - 00:59:13:01 Eric Weinstein And can't make sure that I'm able to recline it properly or that the wi fi doesn't go out and then their planes never crash? So the institutions are all functioning and not functioning. They're lying and telling the truth. They're getting it done and failing outright over and over again. And it's even worse because if if, if the planes crashed all the time, then you'd say, okay, well, these people are incompetent.

00:59:13:03 - 00:59:38:08 Eric Weinstein But it's like the selective incompetence and madness. And what I think is, is that Sam wanted to treat this as, look, it's pretty annoying what's going on on the left and it's pretty annoying what's going on with the institutions. But let's not let's not lose sight of the fact. Jan six people don't feel, though, people feel like, wait a minute, I don't know which end is up.

00:59:38:08 - 00:59:56:08 Eric Weinstein I don't know who's telling me the truth anymore. I can spot these lies that are so transparent. And this is the theory of lies as a checksum. So when you get a binary for a computer program that you want to install on your computer, you want to know what is this what came from Microsoft? Or did somebody adulterated?

00:59:56:08 - 00:59:58:22 Eric Weinstein And when I click on this thing, it's going to install ransomware.

00:59:58:22 - 01:00:00:04 Eric Weinstein On my machine.

01:00:00:06 - 01:00:12:17 Eric Weinstein So there's something called a checksum, which is generated by how the program was compiled. And it would be almost impossible to come up with a second program that would generate the same checksum verification.

01:00:12:19 - 01:00:15:16 Eric Weinstein Yeah, if the checks.

01:00:15:16 - 01:00:19:00 Eric Weinstein Sum is off, I don't install the thing and the check sums are.

01:00:19:00 - 01:00:20:06 Eric Weinstein All off.

01:00:20:08 - 01:00:29:18 Eric Weinstein And that's why people are going crazy. And that's why to your earlier point, isn't it interesting that we're not talking about the level of uncertainty?

01:00:29:20 - 01:00:31:11 Eric Weinstein Right? This is.

01:00:31:11 - 01:00:38:08 Eric Weinstein Not sustainable. So Sam is 100% correct on a lot of things that people are making fun of him for. And I assume that I will be.

01:00:38:10 - 01:00:39:03 Eric Weinstein Killed.

01:00:39:03 - 01:00:43:17 Eric Weinstein All over Twitter for saying this. You cannot have a world without institutions.

01:00:43:17 - 01:00:46:24 Eric Weinstein We're not built for it. We're just there's no part.

01:00:46:24 - 01:00:55:01 Eric Weinstein Of you that is prepared to generate all your own electricity and, you know, kill all your own game and get your own clean water.

01:00:55:01 - 01:00:59:11 Eric Weinstein And you need an army.

01:00:59:13 - 01:01:29:08 Eric Weinstein You need a police department. You can only play Frontier in a wild West so long before you realize that modern life can't be supported. This and we can't go with the institutions we have. So we need institutions. We can't go with these institutions, not because the institutions are wrong, but because the inhabitants are wrong to a person they've been selected for by this ability to lie because growth evaporated.

01:01:29:08 - 01:01:49:15 Eric Weinstein That's one of my main riffs. We don't have to go into it, but basically that in the absence of real growth, everything turns pathological. And so it's just heartbreaking to see some of these people saying, Look, we've always known that the institutions were wrong. We finally have the ability to prove that. Let's tear them all down. So that's a very popular perspective at the moment.

01:01:49:17 - 01:02:03:21 Eric Weinstein Other people want to claim, let's cling to the institutions because we know we need them and we'll look past the fact that they're obviously lying about almost everything of importance That's not really tenable. We can't vote these people out because, like Dianne Feinstein could.

01:02:03:21 - 01:02:05:08 Eric Weinstein Beat me easily.

01:02:05:10 - 01:02:10:08 Eric Weinstein In a run, you know, for for Senate. I don't know why because the.

01:02:10:08 - 01:02:11:18 Eric Weinstein Machine.

01:02:11:20 - 01:02:15:16 Eric Weinstein Is stronger than actually the the vision we had for democracy.

01:02:15:22 - 01:02:16:24 Eric Weinstein So we've got.

01:02:17:01 - 01:02:34:19 Eric Weinstein You know, Mitch McConnell having a temporary, you know, this gimmicky attack on camera. We've got somebody post-stroke in Pennsylvania, having defeated Mehmet Oz. We've got Dianne Feinstein, we've got Nancy Pelosi trading up a storm.

01:02:34:21 - 01:02:38:11 Eric Weinstein But we can't get rid of any of these people. Joe Biden is.

01:02:38:11 - 01:02:41:21 Eric Weinstein Way too old for this job and has been in government since he was.

01:02:41:21 - 01:02:44:10 Eric Weinstein 29 in 1972 when he won.

01:02:44:10 - 01:02:45:21 Eric Weinstein His Senate seat.

01:02:45:23 - 01:02:48:24 Eric Weinstein This is a joke. It's beyond preposterous.

01:02:49:01 - 01:02:53:12 Eric Weinstein And by the way, it comes out of not loving your children.

01:02:53:14 - 01:02:56:02 Chris Williamson As a.

01:02:56:04 - 01:02:59:22 Eric Weinstein People who love their children don't drill holes in their children's.

01:02:59:22 - 01:03:03:07 Eric Weinstein Life after in the modern.

01:03:03:07 - 01:03:14:03 Eric Weinstein World post-World War two as a life raft to get us to the next stage and the number of older people I see.

01:03:14:05 - 01:03:18:01 Eric Weinstein Liquidating everything.

01:03:18:03 - 01:03:25:11 Eric Weinstein So that they can live out their final days in the same style to which they've become accustomed is impossible. In a world where people love their children.

01:03:25:13 - 01:03:29:08 Chris Williamson It's cavalier with the future.

01:03:29:10 - 01:03:32:02 Eric Weinstein Yeah, I don't think they care.

01:03:32:04 - 01:03:35:05 Chris Williamson You familiar with Toby Ward's analogy of the precipice?

01:03:35:06 - 01:03:35:22 Eric Weinstein No. Tell me.

01:03:35:22 - 01:03:55:08 Chris Williamson Really? Cool. So his book, The Precipice, that everybody should go and read my best Primer on Existential Risk. Toby Oates from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford with Nick Bostrom, and he's a colleague of William MacAskill, long term as MBA, etc.. And he uses this example of, you can imagine on a journey.

01:03:55:14 - 01:03:56:11 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

01:03:56:13 - 01:04:24:16 Chris Williamson A particular individual getting to a beautiful, lush, abundant meadow would have to take a treacherous mountain path. And along this mountain path there is a particularly thin, small, steep, sharp, uncertain, unstable part of it. That's the precipice. And he talks about you. Could I like to think about it like an hourglass. You have width with room and then you have a choke point.

01:04:24:16 - 01:04:52:07 Chris Williamson And at that choke point, things can get dicey and it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice, you broaden out and you have the meadow. You are a multi-planetary species have redundancy, genetically redundancy. These civilizations, you have overcome some of the limitations of the castoffs from your energy production and consumption. You don't have value lock in in a bad way.

01:04:52:07 - 01:04:55:11 Chris Williamson That means that it's despots all the way down or it's tyrants.

01:04:55:11 - 01:04:56:21 Eric Weinstein Assume that I hear you.

01:04:56:23 - 01:05:02:08 Eric Weinstein Yep. Where do you think we are?

01:05:02:10 - 01:05:04:00 Chris Williamson It feels very precipice.

01:05:04:02 - 01:05:04:18 Eric Weinstein Yeah, doesn't.

01:05:04:18 - 01:05:08:11 Eric Weinstein It? Yeah. What's more.

01:05:08:13 - 01:05:16:01 Eric Weinstein As one of the only people who are really seriously hitting this multi-planetary note, there is no interest in.

01:05:16:01 - 01:05:17:08 Eric Weinstein This.

01:05:17:10 - 01:05:20:01 Chris Williamson From who I'm interested.

01:05:20:03 - 01:05:22:12 Eric Weinstein Mm. Are you? Fuck yeah.

01:05:22:14 - 01:05:27:14 Chris Williamson Don't I count Eric? All right. I'm not legitimate in the future of the civilizations direction.

01:05:27:14 - 01:05:30:12 Eric Weinstein What? What?

01:05:30:14 - 01:05:36:07 Eric Weinstein What are your best stories for how we become interplanetary? I say it because you brought it up.

01:05:36:09 - 01:05:38:10 Chris Williamson Stories or strategies.

01:05:38:12 - 01:05:40:23 Eric Weinstein Stories about how we get to be interplanetary.

01:05:41:00 - 01:05:43:20 Chris Williamson I'm not sure what you mean by story.

01:05:43:22 - 01:05:54:06 Eric Weinstein Tell me a story by which we have ten planets that human humans have settled.

01:05:54:08 - 01:05:59:06 Chris Williamson Well, if you only do ten, we're going to have to go to planets that are outside of the solar system. Right.

01:05:59:08 - 01:06:08:19 Eric Weinstein So there's this one which is really troubling. Mars is really screwing up this whole story because Elon has gotten everybody.

01:06:09:00 - 01:06:09:10 Chris Williamson Fixate.

01:06:09:10 - 01:06:13:05 Eric Weinstein Focused on Mars. And it's the only it's a marginal.

01:06:13:05 - 01:06:14:17 Eric Weinstein Planet.

01:06:14:19 - 01:06:32:18 Eric Weinstein That would be very difficult to get to using chemical rockets. And it's not a stepping stone because once you master Mars, if if, if if we're going to do it doesn't really gets you anywhere. It's just Mars.

01:06:32:20 - 01:06:34:09 Chris Williamson So. Avi Loeb.

01:06:34:11 - 01:06:35:02 Eric Weinstein Yep.

01:06:35:04 - 01:06:53:16 Chris Williamson New book that recently came out. Interstellar spoke to him last week about it. I asked him about this. I said, Do will we ever visit other galaxies? And he made this copout answer of saying, Well, Andromeda is going to crash into the Milky was like, That doesn't count, Avi. We can't blend two together and say that we've been there.

01:06:53:16 - 01:06:54:16 Eric Weinstein Right?

01:06:54:18 - 01:07:21:10 Chris Williamson And he's talking about interstellar travel right from here to Proxima Centauri. Pick. Pick your other star. Right. They are trying at some point in the not too distant future to do the lightsail laser pointed thing. Maybe we can. And this was me asking him. My conception was generation ships. You know, you and the next five generations of your progeny.

01:07:21:10 - 01:07:39:19 Chris Williamson You condemned them to be locked in this tin box. And it's group sacks and and plants and CO2 for the next however long until you get to Proxima Centauri. Hope that it's not totally right. His point was lightsail. Uh, desktop DNA sequence.

01:07:39:21 - 01:07:41:11 Eric Weinstein Artificial womb.

01:07:41:13 - 01:07:41:24 Chris Williamson Sun.

01:07:41:24 - 01:07:44:08 Eric Weinstein These are being ridiculous.

01:07:44:10 - 01:07:51:10 Chris Williamson It's it's a thought, but this is my story. I know this is my story. Okay? This is my story. And I'm allowed to tell my story.

01:07:51:15 - 01:07:52:19 Eric Weinstein But it's.

01:07:52:19 - 01:07:55:16 Eric Weinstein Exactly why I wanted it. If I it just to reflect it.

01:07:55:17 - 01:07:56:15 Eric Weinstein Okay.

01:07:56:17 - 01:07:57:21 Eric Weinstein It's an enervating.

01:07:57:24 - 01:07:59:17 Eric Weinstein Story.

01:07:59:19 - 01:08:04:06 Eric Weinstein What's it? We're not energized by this story.

01:08:04:08 - 01:08:05:02 Eric Weinstein I'm sympathetic, but.

01:08:05:04 - 01:08:08:00 Eric Weinstein Except for the group sex and the plants, right? Yep. So the.

01:08:08:00 - 01:08:08:12 Eric Weinstein Issue is, if.

01:08:08:12 - 01:08:12:10 Chris Williamson We could sprinkle some books in there, everybody would get on board. And Melissa moving.

01:08:12:12 - 01:08:15:19 Eric Weinstein Moving it Lightspeed.

01:08:15:21 - 01:08:46:24 Eric Weinstein What we're doing is, is that we're telling people we've crawled inside our modern theories, and our modern theories make our imaginations our enemy. We're not excited about the we don't really believe that we're going to open a wormhole. We don't really believe in multi-generation ships. We don't believe that we're going to reboot from Tardigrades. We don't believe that we're going to scan all of our synapses and reconstruct the brain from the beginning.

01:08:47:01 - 01:08:50:12 Eric Weinstein Einstein is the problem.

01:08:50:14 - 01:08:51:07 Eric Weinstein Now.

01:08:51:09 - 01:08:57:20 Eric Weinstein I know of a decently well an RV for the Galileo project that he's.

01:08:57:23 - 01:08:59:17 Eric Weinstein Heading up doesn't.

01:08:59:17 - 01:09:04:11 Eric Weinstein Want people to consider new physics. So whenever I speak.

01:09:04:13 - 01:09:05:06 Eric Weinstein At, all.

01:09:05:12 - 01:09:13:23 Eric Weinstein As somebody affiliated with the Galileo Project with wearing that hat, I don't think about new physics at all. I accept the constraints of the physics we know.

01:09:13:23 - 01:09:16:07 Chris Williamson Yes, Yes, yes.

01:09:16:09 - 01:09:19:21 Eric Weinstein When I take that hat off.

01:09:19:23 - 01:09:24:23 Eric Weinstein It's all about new physics. It's not about new technology. Using old.

01:09:24:23 - 01:09:28:10 Eric Weinstein Physics. And the way.

01:09:28:10 - 01:09:40:24 Eric Weinstein You can measure whether people are serious about interplanetary is how much they're focused on new physics. Anybody who isn't focused on new physics is not serious about interplanetary.

01:09:41:00 - 01:09:46:23 Chris Williamson Is this because with the current conception of physics that we have, it's going to be essentially impossible for us to go.

01:09:46:23 - 01:09:52:19 Eric Weinstein Interplanetary and in the word essentially is doing some work there. And so you what you get is you get these innovating.

01:09:52:23 - 01:09:53:17 Eric Weinstein Workarounds.

01:09:53:17 - 01:09:57:19 Eric Weinstein Like, Oh, if we use time dilation, if we went really fast, then it wouldn't be that fast.

01:09:57:21 - 01:10:01:13 Chris Williamson So explain the word innovating, please. You mean as an innovation or is this.

01:10:01:15 - 01:10:03:04 Eric Weinstein You know, innovating.

01:10:03:04 - 01:10:03:15 Chris Williamson What that.

01:10:03:18 - 01:10:18:21 Eric Weinstein Means to to lesson in potency, to decrypt to, to to sort of discourage and you know, as long as I have to do things that don't involve me cruising to new planets and taking in the visit.

01:10:18:23 - 01:10:19:09 Eric Weinstein Is like.

01:10:19:14 - 01:10:26:09 Eric Weinstein Oh, it would be a great Gregory to the 12,000th power grandchild who actually sees a new planet.

01:10:26:11 - 01:10:27:06 Eric Weinstein That's not going to work.

01:10:27:10 - 01:10:36:12 Eric Weinstein Are you going to open a wormhole or you're going to have an alcubierre drive all of these sorts things discourage us and we know that we're telling lies about.

01:10:36:12 - 01:10:39:10 Eric Weinstein It and so we don't work on it.

01:10:39:12 - 01:10:50:10 Eric Weinstein We want to know how to work on this. We're abandoning the one field that has the chance of making us interplanetary. And I don't know what to do about it because nobody sees this as the emergency. I do.

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01:11:50:19 - 01:12:00:07 Chris Williamson Okay, so let me see if I can get the topology of what you've said, right? The fact that Mars is within reach broadly.

01:12:00:09 - 01:12:01:18 Eric Weinstein And chemical.

01:12:01:20 - 01:12:07:12 Chris Williamson Correct of current technology, of current physics. And we do it all right.

01:12:07:18 - 01:12:09:13 Eric Weinstein Super hard. We did it.

01:12:09:15 - 01:12:10:23 Chris Williamson Into planetary.

01:12:10:23 - 01:12:11:20 Eric Weinstein Right.

01:12:11:22 - 01:12:34:04 Chris Williamson But your point is that it seems like that is insufficient and also kind of like a false duck type scenario where we did it, but we didn't actually do the thing we needed to do. So we may have even been better off had the nearest planets being two light years away.

01:12:34:06 - 01:12:38:06 Eric Weinstein So Mars didn't exist, Correct. I assume that Elon was still the visionary.

01:12:38:09 - 01:12:41:03 Eric Weinstein That we want him to be.

01:12:41:05 - 01:13:06:13 Eric Weinstein And he didn't have a chemical rocket company. I'd like to think that he would be focused on physics. I would like to think that any of these people would be focused on physics. Take anybody with 11 figures. What is your allocation to building a life raft to get humans out of here? You don't. You haven't even thought about it immediately.

01:13:06:15 - 01:13:09:15 Eric Weinstein You're going to think technology. Well, what kind of a whole what I need?

01:13:09:15 - 01:13:13:08 Eric Weinstein It's like, No, you need a blackboard.

01:13:13:10 - 01:13:24:05 Eric Weinstein You need blackboards. And physicists were not afraid to do physics. Right now we are destroying the fundamental physics community at a rate you could not believe.

01:13:24:07 - 01:13:27:07 Chris Williamson What's happening. Give me the gossip from inside.

01:13:27:09 - 01:13:39:15 Eric Weinstein For 39 years, we have been dominated by one community's madness. And that community is called quantum gravity. String theory or m-theory.

01:13:39:17 - 01:13:42:04 Eric Weinstein It changed what we were researching.

01:13:42:05 - 01:13:58:00 Eric Weinstein Its cardinal sin is not about string theory, it's not about quantum gravity. It changed the questions that define and what it meant to be a fundamental physicist. So if I say to you, how many generations of matter are there?

01:13:58:02 - 01:13:59:05 Chris Williamson I don't know.

01:13:59:07 - 01:14:01:07 Eric Weinstein You don't know that it's three.

01:14:01:09 - 01:14:17:05 Eric Weinstein Because we don't talk about that all the time anymore. Or if I say, do you know why it why is matter chiral? You wouldn't know about that. Or if I said, what's the nature of the cortex potential for the Higgs field? Or why is there a Yukawa coupling in one case, in a minimal coupling somewhere else.

01:14:17:07 - 01:14:18:08 Eric Weinstein All of the real.

01:14:18:08 - 01:14:20:14 Eric Weinstein Physics questions.

01:14:20:16 - 01:14:25:02 Eric Weinstein That would cause progress got.

01:14:25:04 - 01:14:38:09 Eric Weinstein Suddenly replaced between 1984 and like 1987. And then we had questions like, how do we quantized gravity? And that became this. All that is the ultimate question. Well, it's.

01:14:38:11 - 01:14:41:19 Eric Weinstein It's not that it's just wrong.

01:14:41:21 - 01:15:01:07 Eric Weinstein This comes out of Bryce DeWitt. This comes out of a guy who in 1952 with his wife to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, then wrote an essay for something called the Gravity Research Foundation that was about antigravity. And they he was supposed to write an essay and then he said, Well, to get antigravity, what you'd really need to do is to do quantum gravity.

01:15:01:09 - 01:15:08:05 Eric Weinstein And for 70 years we've been trying to do quantum gravity, and it's an abject failure. And the physicists at that at the.

01:15:08:05 - 01:15:09:24 Eric Weinstein Helm changed the.

01:15:09:24 - 01:15:33:22 Eric Weinstein Questions. The official questions should sound something like this Why are the three generations of matter, why is it flavor chiral? What is the nature in the origin of the Higgs mechanism? Why are we in one comma, three dimensions? And what is with Sue three cross sue to cross you one which is a bunch of symmetries? And why does it seem to represent on a six dimensional space with the observed quantum numbers?

01:15:33:24 - 01:15:34:14 Eric Weinstein That may not.

01:15:34:14 - 01:15:46:14 Eric Weinstein Mean a lot to you, but I guarantee you, if there are physicists in the audience, they're getting pissed off right now because they allowed their subject to be dragged away from our real questions for reasons that are.

01:15:46:14 - 01:15:47:21 Eric Weinstein Unclear and.

01:15:47:21 - 01:15:58:05 Eric Weinstein Put in the service of these questions that can't be answered and we can't even question them. 39 years into this complete train wreck, that is the community that could build the life raft.

01:15:58:09 - 01:16:01:14 Chris Williamson What is so seductive about quantum everything?

01:16:01:15 - 01:16:02:12 Eric Weinstein Quantum gravity?

01:16:02:12 - 01:16:04:16 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

01:16:04:18 - 01:16:08:20 Eric Weinstein It for toy problems so that you can not do.

01:16:08:20 - 01:16:12:03 Eric Weinstein Your work on.

01:16:12:08 - 01:16:27:18 Eric Weinstein The world that we have. And you can say, well, world that we have is too complicated. So I created this fake world over here that's not in four dimensions. It's in two dimensions. It's not in Lorenz and signature. It's an Euclidean signature. It's not the full gauge group, it's just CO2.

01:16:27:20 - 01:16:29:15 Eric Weinstein And I've changed all the parameters.

01:16:29:16 - 01:16:36:14 Eric Weinstein And then I say, and I've made some minor incremental progress in that fake world. And then claps.

01:16:36:16 - 01:16:38:07 Eric Weinstein And meanwhile.

01:16:38:09 - 01:17:02:21 Eric Weinstein Ten years later, you don't even remember what the particles are that are present in the universe. You don't even remember that the standard model of particle theory, and this is a very real effect. Today's physicists, a lot of the young ones, are completely ignorant about the physical world. They cannot find the men's or women's room at CERN if their life depended on.

01:17:02:23 - 01:17:22:00 Chris Williamson Yeah, so it seems like a hijacking of attention and focus from difficult problems to from useful, difficult problems to useless or less useful, easier problems. But if you.

01:17:22:00 - 01:17:41:03 Eric Weinstein Try to talk about the real problems, you can't get engagement and they will say it as well. Maybe people just aren't interested in your ideas. I was like, Yeah, but you're not listening to it. So far as I can tell, everybody who comes from outside with an interesting new ideas and being listened to, it's not personal. And we also have a responsibility.

01:17:41:03 - 01:17:42:00 Eric Weinstein This is like this.

01:17:42:01 - 01:18:09:00 Eric Weinstein Really crazy part. We doomed humanity like Francis Crick, who was the co-discoverer of the three dimensional structure of DNA, was a physicist. Edward Teller was a physicist, and Aslaug Ulam was a geometry. We doomed humanity on earth and then we're treating as if.

01:18:09:02 - 01:18:11:17 Eric Weinstein Oh, it's a series of puzzles. Well.

01:18:11:19 - 01:18:16:20 Eric Weinstein What do you want to work on today? Well, I don't want to be arrogant. I'll just work on this tiny little problem.

01:18:16:22 - 01:18:21:15 Eric Weinstein And I'm just thinking, like, do you do you not feel any.

01:18:21:17 - 01:18:28:21 Eric Weinstein Responsibility after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and COVID?

01:18:28:23 - 01:18:29:08 Eric Weinstein Just how.

01:18:29:08 - 01:18:30:07 Eric Weinstein Crazy are you.

01:18:30:09 - 01:18:54:11 Chris Williamson Is that? You know, we've spoken about the interplanetary challenge, right. And the fact that physics needs to make some progress in order to facilitate that if we're going to do it. Yeah. Is, in your opinion, forgetting the fact that chemical rockets right limitations, all that sort of stuff is going into planetary as useful? Is it the highest priority?

01:18:54:11 - 01:19:02:12 Eric Weinstein The highest priority? You cannot stabilize this place.

01:19:02:14 - 01:19:07:23 Eric Weinstein Just imagine every communal lost dream came true.

01:19:08:00 - 01:19:27:03 Eric Weinstein We turned away from fossil fuels a the greenest new deal you could possibly imagine. All billionaires realize the errors of their ways and contributed their money to bring up the of the poor. I was as beneficial as it could be and only helped humanity to live it stripped.

01:19:27:06 - 01:19:29:16 Eric Weinstein Just go full while.

01:19:29:16 - 01:19:30:10 Eric Weinstein Old Pollyanna.

01:19:30:10 - 01:19:34:10 Eric Weinstein Optimism. You still can't stabilize it.

01:19:34:12 - 01:19:41:02 Eric Weinstein Why too many people.

01:19:41:04 - 01:19:43:10 Eric Weinstein Too much Never say more.

01:19:43:11 - 01:19:46:24 Chris Williamson Not for long. Population rates Birth rates at the moment.

01:19:47:01 - 01:19:52:13 Eric Weinstein We're talking a totally different skills. I'm telling you that.

01:19:52:15 - 01:19:54:04 Eric Weinstein With.

01:19:54:06 - 01:19:58:17 Eric Weinstein CRISPR-Cas9, with the teller alarm design.

01:19:58:17 - 01:20:00:11 Chris Williamson IVIG.

01:20:00:13 - 01:20:02:12 Eric Weinstein IVIG.

01:20:02:14 - 01:20:10:02 Chris Williamson You know, IVIG, IVF, but being able to use from any other. Sure. Yep.

01:20:10:04 - 01:20:12:07 Eric Weinstein I was trying to I was trying to think.

01:20:12:09 - 01:20:12:15 Eric Weinstein In a.

01:20:12:15 - 01:20:12:23 Eric Weinstein Different.

01:20:12:23 - 01:20:26:08 Eric Weinstein Context. You are going to have people.

01:20:26:10 - 01:20:31:09 Eric Weinstein What happens when you distribute the coronavirus because everybody's had it. You've had it.

01:20:31:11 - 01:20:36:05 Chris Williamson I got an antibody test and I had it, but I've never felt it. Okay.

01:20:36:07 - 01:20:54:01 Eric Weinstein So you have this this platform, this virus, viral platform, the spread all over the world, and you have the ability to edit it. Are you telling me that people aren't going to figure out how to come up with fun viruses and gain of function projects and people are going to be able to do these.

01:20:54:03 - 01:20:56:02 Eric Weinstein You know.

01:20:56:04 - 01:21:00:10 Eric Weinstein Polymerase chain reaction, I think was taught in my daughter's high school.

01:21:00:12 - 01:21:05:01 Chris Williamson Are you familiar with Nick Bostrom is from the Earn analogy?

01:21:05:01 - 01:21:06:05 Eric Weinstein Yeah, vaguely, yeah.

01:21:06:05 - 01:21:25:06 Chris Williamson So for the people that don't know, you can imagine that you you have an urn and each time that you make technological progress, you pick a ball out and you don't know what color some a white perfectly good Yeah some a gray but a good bit of bad and some all the way down to black and black is permanent unrecoverable collapse right.

01:21:25:08 - 01:21:27:00 Chris Williamson And the unrecoverable bit is important.

01:21:27:01 - 01:21:28:06 Eric Weinstein No.

01:21:28:08 - 01:21:31:19 Chris Williamson And each time we just keep picking up balls.

01:21:32:00 - 01:21:38:22 Eric Weinstein So my take on it is there's already too much leverage. Too much leverage, too little wisdom, too many people.

01:21:39:02 - 01:21:43:21 Chris Williamson What is it that you once said? We are gods, but for the wisdom of just shitty gods?

01:21:43:23 - 01:21:48:08 Eric Weinstein I don't know if it's the second part, but you know.

01:21:48:10 - 01:22:02:13 Eric Weinstein I guess when I heard the story about this kid who scavenged the americium from all of these smoke detectors in Brooklyn and built a self-sustaining nuclear reactor from this tiny little radioactive strip, you don't know what people's creativity is.

01:22:02:15 - 01:22:04:19 Eric Weinstein You know.

01:22:04:21 - 01:22:18:24 Eric Weinstein I found it fascinating when I was growing up that I was the only kid who knew that gunpowder, black powder was 75% potassium, 10% sulfur, and 15% carbon. Like, you could just make it.

01:22:19:01 - 01:22:28:02 Eric Weinstein You know, and that, you know, that's the recipe. And that that just blew my.

01:22:28:02 - 01:22:56:05 Eric Weinstein Mind that the rate limiting step was that people didn't know that potassium nitrate was saltpeter or where to get it like meat tenderizer. But mostly we're saved from the stuff because nobody so sociopath and confident that they go for these high leverage attacks that's going to end. You know, that was like what happened on 911. I always wanted to know why were little kids allowed to go into the cockpit of a plane, used to be able to meet the pilot.

01:22:56:05 - 01:22:57:08 Eric Weinstein I remember meeting the pilot.

01:22:57:08 - 01:22:58:06 Chris Williamson I remember doing it. Yeah.

01:22:58:11 - 01:23:12:10 Eric Weinstein So that's where we are now is is that we've got all this high leverage stuff and you're going to see nuclear proliferation eventually. You're going to get some desperate backed into a corner who says, Well, this is my only move.

01:23:12:12 - 01:23:14:12 Eric Weinstein Well, I mean.

01:23:14:14 - 01:23:19:07 Chris Williamson For the nuclear concern out there, at least what I know, wouldn't that.

01:23:19:07 - 01:23:20:02 Eric Weinstein Be all of us?

01:23:20:04 - 01:23:44:17 Chris Williamson Everybody is concerned. But for the people that a nuclear war is a genuine X risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse, you can set them all off unless there's like 10 to 100 times more than we think that we have, which that very well could be. It seems difficult for it to be permanent unrecoverable collapse. So as a true, true, true, true x risk.

01:23:44:17 - 01:23:53:06 Eric Weinstein May I say something? Yeah. This is it's bad enough that it would completely transform life as we know it.

01:23:53:06 - 01:23:57:10 Eric Weinstein You would agree with that? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's time.

01:23:57:12 - 01:24:13:12 Eric Weinstein It's time to get serious about things we can actually do. And the most interesting thing is that nobody is interested in interplanetary physics. I just I've never seen anything like it.

01:24:13:14 - 01:24:21:08 Chris Williamson Interplanetary physics would be physics in service of us becoming interplanetary. Or is there something specific about the way that planets figure together?

01:24:21:08 - 01:24:21:21 Eric Weinstein No, no, no.

01:24:21:21 - 01:24:32:17 Eric Weinstein It's about. Well, let me give you an analogy that's more than an analogy. Assume that somebody hands you a physical paper map.

01:24:32:19 - 01:24:35:14 Eric Weinstein An enormous one from A.

01:24:35:16 - 01:24:38:15 Eric Weinstein And you're trying to navigate it on this table that.

01:24:38:17 - 01:24:39:22 Eric Weinstein We have here.

01:24:39:24 - 01:24:49:00 Eric Weinstein You're starting to do motions like this where you're moving the paper across the table, you know, to get from Los Angeles to Fresno, California, if it's at the right scale.

01:24:49:02 - 01:24:49:19 Eric Weinstein And it might take.

01:24:49:19 - 01:24:50:04 Eric Weinstein You a long.

01:24:50:04 - 01:24:52:18 Eric Weinstein Time to do that. Okay.

01:24:52:18 - 01:25:00:00 Eric Weinstein But now you have somebody trained on an iPad, what are they going to do? Well, they might do that, but that's not the key thing they're.

01:25:00:00 - 01:25:03:13 Eric Weinstein Going to do. They're going to do what.

01:25:03:13 - 01:25:19:23 Eric Weinstein Is called multi multitouch gestures. And the one that you're thinking of should be pinch to zoom. So the most natural to do this is to treat it not as if it's a paper map, but a stack of paper maps. And you want to go to the one with a different scale.

01:25:20:00 - 01:25:21:18 Eric Weinstein If if you.

01:25:21:18 - 01:25:32:22 Eric Weinstein Were doing this on an iPad that was mirroring this. The key point is, is that the paper map doesn't have an extra dimension to play with. But the pinch to zoom dimension.

01:25:32:24 - 01:25:34:16 Eric Weinstein Is a scale dimension.

01:25:34:18 - 01:25:39:21 Eric Weinstein So imagine what you did instead was you looked at your house, you pinch to zoom.

01:25:39:21 - 01:25:42:02 Eric Weinstein Out, you.

01:25:42:02 - 01:25:57:02 Eric Weinstein Then do this motion or whatever it is to get to your friend's house. And then when you land there, you expand it again. Imagine that you only know about paper maps, but your adversary has an iPad.

01:25:57:04 - 01:25:59:08 Eric Weinstein That's what I'm worried about.

01:25:59:10 - 01:26:02:13 Eric Weinstein We're looking for pinch to zoom.

01:26:02:15 - 01:26:06:13 Chris Williamson What would that be in this?

01:26:06:15 - 01:26:10:09 Eric Weinstein Well, I claim that there are going to be ten extra coordinates.

01:26:10:11 - 01:26:12:02 Eric Weinstein And.

01:26:12:04 - 01:26:37:08 Eric Weinstein Four of them are pinch to zoom and six of them are what I would call sheer to tilt. So imagine that you have a copy of a picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on your iPad. You should be able to do something in which changes the angle, right? So if you go to make paint, there's this little thing that allows you to change by.

01:26:37:08 - 01:26:38:19 Eric Weinstein A particular thing, but you.

01:26:38:19 - 01:26:39:22 Eric Weinstein Could do that as a gesture.

01:26:39:24 - 01:26:42:05 Eric Weinstein Where.

01:26:42:07 - 01:26:56:17 Eric Weinstein So my claim is if you have four dimensions of time, an X, Y, and Z of space, you have pinch to zoom on all of all four of those. And then for any two dimensions like X and Z.

01:26:56:19 - 01:27:00:23 Eric Weinstein You have sheer to tilt.

01:27:01:00 - 01:27:29:21 Eric Weinstein So the first are the four rulers and the next are the six pro tractors. And that's something called a symmetric two tensor or a metric, which Einstein knew about, but he only chose one through his equations and he let all the other ones lie fallow. And my claim is, I don't think that's where we are. I think that interplanetary physics is to involve moving from what we called space time to something called the observer verse, which contains pinch to zoom and share to tilt.

01:27:29:23 - 01:27:46:24 Eric Weinstein And you want to get off this planet. You're not going to get there using general relativity and you're not going to get there using the Standard Model. It's time to take your pacifier out of your mouth and go back to real physics. I think if we were serious about this, we would be struggling with the physics of the world in which we live, not toy models.

01:27:46:24 - 01:27:58:15 Eric Weinstein We'd be taking massive risks and listening to people from various perspectives who haven't failed or have not been invited to fully explain their ideas. And we'd be looking for things that would be.

01:27:58:17 - 01:27:59:07 Eric Weinstein New.

01:27:59:07 - 01:28:26:11 Eric Weinstein New variables, new ways of working with the world that allowed us to do things that were previously considered inconceivable. So if you if you look at 1911, which is when I think Rutherford first starts talking about the neutron as a hypothesis, it's 41 years later, we have the hydrogen bomb. We can do incredible things that are not possible.

01:28:26:13 - 01:28:29:10 Eric Weinstein Yet because we don't know the framework.

01:28:29:12 - 01:28:51:17 Eric Weinstein And my claim is if you imagine somebody used to paper maps being put on an iPad and not knowing about multitouch gestures, that is pretty much an exact analogy of what happens when you do too much general relativity is that you start to think in general relativistic terms as if that's the last word. Einstein would never have put up with that.

01:28:51:19 - 01:29:07:08 Chris Williamson That's a question. You've mentioned Einstein a couple of times today, the most famous physicist of all time. How different do you think the landscape of physics would be had Einstein lived for another decade?

01:29:07:10 - 01:29:09:05 Chris Williamson Just how good was he?

01:29:09:07 - 01:29:41:01 Eric Weinstein He was that good is the rare situation in which the man and the myth are roughly at the right level, the same level I. Don't think you could solve the puzzle of theoretical physics and a final theory. Before the mid 1970s, we just didn't know enough. In particular quarks. In 1968, you needed confirmation because they're not obvious in the world.

01:29:41:01 - 01:30:09:06 Eric Weinstein They're stuck inside of protons and neutrons. And if you thought that protons and neutrons were fundamental, you wouldn't be in contention. I would say that the first time you could really guess the answer would be around 1975. And I don't think Einstein was in a position to guess answer. I think he was very caught up in a Romanian framework, which is that you deal only with length, angle and the curvature of the space in which you live.

01:30:09:08 - 01:30:20:11 Eric Weinstein There's sort a more modern viewpoint on this that he could have understood, and I don't know to what extent he showed any recognition of it, but a lot of his thinking was.

01:30:20:13 - 01:30:22:15 Eric Weinstein Really well.

01:30:22:17 - 01:30:46:11 Eric Weinstein Suited for the world in which he lived, where he could do these thought experiments in his mind about falling elevators or train cars or whatever. You know, Dirac was every bit Einstein's equal. We don't know how to interact with Dirac because Dirac so strange. And he, you know, Einstein kept throwing off.

01:30:46:13 - 01:30:47:07 Eric Weinstein Wisdom.

01:30:47:07 - 01:31:04:06 Eric Weinstein At an incredible rate. If you read ideas and opinions or out of my later years, you have an idea of just what a sage this person was. Even when he's screwing things up and making mistakes, it's all sage. Like Dirac was the singular human being.

01:31:04:06 - 01:31:07:16 Eric Weinstein And occasionally he says something about life.

01:31:07:16 - 01:31:33:18 Eric Weinstein Like I think when he was given a Nobel Prize thinks shared with Schrodinger, he's given two speeches and he uses his lunchtime speech to talk about the bond market and the importance. That's crazy and the importance of using the toolkit of physics within any sphere that is numbers based. But we don't really know much about Dirac's views on humanity.

01:31:33:18 - 01:31:34:20 Eric Weinstein We know about his.

01:31:34:20 - 01:31:36:19 Eric Weinstein Beautiful.

01:31:36:21 - 01:31:41:23 Eric Weinstein Esthetic of of the quantum. He gave the quantum poetry.

01:31:42:00 - 01:31:47:18 Eric Weinstein And I think that right now it's.

01:31:47:18 - 01:31:58:14 Eric Weinstein Up to us. They're not here right now. It's time to make guesses. I'm very partial to an example which happened on the Wheel of Fortune program.

01:31:58:16 - 01:32:02:21 Chris Williamson Fold this into the cutting edge of physics. All right, Come on. Sure. I'm waiting.

01:32:03:00 - 01:32:04:04 Eric Weinstein Okay.

01:32:04:06 - 01:32:18:07 Eric Weinstein There's a guy named Ken Wilson who's discouraged. All modern physicists making guesses about the ultimate theory. Because he taught us that you can only observe the world at the energy scale that you're at. So you and I are. In a classical world. We don't see the.

01:32:18:09 - 01:32:25:01 Eric Weinstein Yet on Wheel of Fortune. There was it was a puzzle and.

01:32:25:02 - 01:32:33:07 Eric Weinstein It said, okay, Fraser, expression, there's one apostrophe in the first word with three letters and it's a long answer and person guesses.

01:32:33:07 - 01:32:41:19 Eric Weinstein Are and there are no R's and then I think that.

01:32:41:21 - 01:33:02:03 Eric Weinstein Goes to the next woman. I think she guesses N And oh yes, there's one N. And she says, okay, I'd like to solve. And the host looks at her incredulously like, Well, I guess you could try to solve. And she says, and will always remember this. I've got a good feeling about this.

01:33:02:05 - 01:33:07:02 Eric Weinstein And it was right. Okay.

01:33:07:04 - 01:33:17:19 Eric Weinstein You'd never guess that there was enough information for a solve. Whatever we have is what we've got. It's time to solve the puzzle.

01:33:17:21 - 01:33:20:20 Chris Williamson What would that look like?

01:33:20:22 - 01:33:37:16 Eric Weinstein Ask somebody else. So I try to solve this. I've got a theory, but Peter White has a theory. I'd like to hear what the string theorists think their theory is. I'd like to understand where asymptotic safety is. Everybody who's got a theory, whether it's David Deutsch or Julian Barber.

01:33:37:18 - 01:33:37:23 Eric Weinstein Or.

01:33:37:23 - 01:33:40:12 Eric Weinstein Garrett Lisi needs to come a conference.

01:33:40:12 - 01:33:42:08 Eric Weinstein Somebody needs to hold a.

01:33:42:08 - 01:33:59:06 Eric Weinstein Conference and say, Who can solve this puzzle? Let's put the sword in stone and let's let everybody try to pull it out, because now is the time. And the idea that we're not doing this and that we're letting this community that is run itself into the ground continue to adjudicate what is physics.

01:33:59:08 - 01:34:00:20 Eric Weinstein It's like you boys.

01:34:00:20 - 01:34:03:07 Eric Weinstein Haven't really done anything.

01:34:03:09 - 01:34:05:01 Eric Weinstein In in years.

01:34:05:07 - 01:34:22:01 Eric Weinstein You're not the arbiters of what is science and what isn't. You've allowed this madness to creep into your university departments. You're signing loyalty oaths. I have physics professors telling me that their boss is some dean who writes to them about what they what they posted on social media.

01:34:22:06 - 01:34:24:16 Eric Weinstein It's like, No, you're the boss.

01:34:24:18 - 01:34:36:01 Eric Weinstein You the professors are the soul of the university. Stop sucking your thumb. Stand up for what it is that you're supposed to be standing up for, which is excellence and research. Kick the people out who don't belong.

01:34:36:01 - 01:34:36:19 Eric Weinstein There.

01:34:36:21 - 01:34:39:12 Eric Weinstein And invite the people in who do, and let's get on.

01:34:39:12 - 01:34:40:22 Eric Weinstein With it. It's just.

01:34:40:24 - 01:34:43:02 Eric Weinstein I couldn't be more angry about anything else in.

01:34:43:02 - 01:34:43:23 Eric Weinstein The world.

01:34:44:00 - 01:34:51:19 Eric Weinstein How can you how can you take the lifeboat community, the only community that can get us a way out of here and run it into the ground?

01:34:51:21 - 01:34:55:04 Chris Williamson I like the term the lifeboat community.

01:34:55:06 - 01:35:08:13 Eric Weinstein It's time to save everybody. And we've got huge responsibilities. We carry a lot of responsibility for getting everybody into this mess. And now we've got to offer everybody a way out.

01:35:08:15 - 01:35:23:19 Chris Williamson Yeah, it seems I don't know. I don't know the inner workings of the machinations of the physics world, but the first time I ever spoke to Sabine Hossenfelder, she explained to me that physics is as much about politics as it is about physics.

01:35:23:21 - 01:35:48:00 Eric Weinstein In bad areas. That becomes more true, Yes. Sabine His entire career has taken place inside of the stagnation, and she's like one of these truth telling people. I think she's basically truthful. I disagree with a lot of stuff that I don't like that she I think she does, which is a disservice to the community. But she is truthful that this community is off the.

01:35:48:02 - 01:36:01:01 Chris Williamson Moving from physics to something that you mentioned there. Poetry. Share your cover photo on Twitter was the first thing that we actually ever connected about long, long, long time ago. And I'd just been to the Sagrada Familia.

01:36:01:01 - 01:36:01:18 Eric Weinstein Tell me.

01:36:01:20 - 01:36:25:00 Chris Williamson So I went for the first time to a wedding, friend's wedding that he was holding on the outskirts, and it was very enjoyable and I had known about this building, I had read about it, I had seen all of the videos and it's your cover photo. First off, why? And then secondly, what does it mean to you? What does this Sagrada Familia mean to you?

01:36:25:02 - 01:36:35:07 Eric Weinstein I'm dying to hear. Obviously, we know it's important in my life. I don't know whether it had an importance in yours beyond beauty.

01:36:35:07 - 01:36:53:20 Chris Williamson No, it has no greater meaning to me than that. But one of the lessons that I did learn was there's that quote about the humanity will flourish when men plant trees under which they will never sit, something along those lines. And that's the first time that I've ever.

01:36:53:22 - 01:36:54:16 Eric Weinstein A.

01:36:54:18 - 01:37:14:03 Chris Williamson Purely joyful expression architecturally, artistically, that was created with the intense intent purpose, that that would be the end goal, that this is a robot now in construction, 70 years nearly hundred. Now how many?

01:37:14:05 - 01:37:17:15 Eric Weinstein I don't know, but it's still going Yeah.

01:37:17:17 - 01:37:20:00 Chris Williamson So and it's not done. And I think we.

01:37:20:00 - 01:37:24:14 Eric Weinstein Can't even figure out what his vision is. So we've allowed other people to put their voice.

01:37:24:18 - 01:37:25:04 Chris Williamson In and.

01:37:25:08 - 01:37:25:18 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

01:37:25:20 - 01:37:35:20 Eric Weinstein Because there's only one of him. Gaudi The ceiling of that thing to me is transcendence.

01:37:35:22 - 01:37:36:12 Eric Weinstein You can't even.

01:37:36:12 - 01:37:39:07 Eric Weinstein Believe it's real.

01:37:39:09 - 01:37:44:00 Eric Weinstein You know.

01:37:44:02 - 01:37:52:02 Eric Weinstein There are things in this world that remind you of the transcendent in all of us. That is.

01:37:52:02 - 01:37:58:06 Eric Weinstein Possible. You know.

01:37:58:08 - 01:38:15:12 Eric Weinstein I can think of particular pieces of music or poems or pieces of architecture. I was just inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, which is, you know, a few feet from Aya, Sophia. And the interior of these two structures just.

01:38:15:14 - 01:38:18:04 Eric Weinstein Are mind.

01:38:18:06 - 01:38:27:08 Eric Weinstein And Sagrada Familia. I mean, these are religions that I'm not a part of. If you're talking about the sacred family and you have.

01:38:27:08 - 01:38:28:01 Eric Weinstein A.

01:38:28:03 - 01:38:38:14 Eric Weinstein Skylights to heaven, how better to honor the creator, whether the creator exists or not.

01:38:38:16 - 01:38:41:13 Eric Weinstein Than with genius and.

01:38:41:13 - 01:38:48:04 Eric Weinstein And and grace and humility and arrogance and everything that went into that ceiling. That ceiling is like nothing.

01:38:48:04 - 01:38:49:01 Eric Weinstein Else.

01:38:49:03 - 01:38:52:09 Eric Weinstein I've ever seen.

01:38:52:11 - 01:38:54:03 Eric Weinstein And, you know, you can touch you know.

01:38:54:03 - 01:39:00:03 Eric Weinstein Sam Harris is famous for saying that you can either learn how to meditate or I can give you a few micrograms of the substance.

01:39:00:03 - 01:39:04:21 Eric Weinstein And you're going to have profound experience. Well, okay.

01:39:04:23 - 01:39:08:02 Eric Weinstein Just getting back from San Miguel in the IS or is.

01:39:08:04 - 01:39:08:22 Eric Weinstein The you.

01:39:08:22 - 01:39:14:09 Eric Weinstein Could take LSD or DMT or or could go to San Miguel. I mean, it's just crazy.

01:39:14:12 - 01:39:15:18 Eric Weinstein That that that.

01:39:15:18 - 01:39:17:00 Eric Weinstein There is that much beauty on.

01:39:17:00 - 01:39:17:10 Eric Weinstein Earth.

01:39:17:16 - 01:39:44:15 Eric Weinstein And I guess that space is something that I wanted people to understand when I named the show the portal and people did not understand, it wasn't intended to be a show. It's intended to be a search for the actual portal out of here. It's an attempt to find pinch to zoom. I believe that we are not doomed here, but that we have developed this very weird focus on psychology.

01:39:44:15 - 01:39:47:19 Eric Weinstein We want to challenge Einstein is.

01:39:47:19 - 01:39:49:11 Eric Weinstein Almost seen.

01:39:49:11 - 01:40:07:23 Eric Weinstein As arrogance. And yet, if Einstein is to survive as a legacy, it's only going to be because somebody basically undermines general relativity status as a fundamental theory, because we're not going to make it.

01:40:08:00 - 01:40:12:10 Eric Weinstein And I'm trying to remind people.

01:40:12:12 - 01:40:21:00 Eric Weinstein In a world that now, like you can look up on Twitter, say lone genius theory, people don't believe in the.

01:40:21:00 - 01:40:25:21 Eric Weinstein Lone genius theory.

01:40:25:23 - 01:40:48:03 Eric Weinstein Well, then what was Goudy? What was Dirac, What was Einstein, What was yangu? What was I mean, somebody tell me why I have all of these lone geniuses in my life and aren't we supposed to be doing that and thinking that that's admirable I think we're supposed to be building.

01:40:48:05 - 01:40:51:01 Eric Weinstein This the theory that can.

01:40:51:03 - 01:41:09:19 Eric Weinstein Realize that the ceiling of looking at a familia is a portal. We're supposed to inspire ourselves with beauty and luxury. We're not supposed to consume it to pig out for status reasons. We're supposed get ourselves into a state where we can dream at an interplanetary level.

01:41:09:21 - 01:41:40:15 Chris Williamson A lot of the things that we've spoken about today are to do with cerebral horsepower cognition. Yeah, that difficult things that need to be done in the head. And yet you're talking here about the transcendent, you're talking about something which is embodied, which is spiritual by whichever definition of the word you want to use. Do you find in yourself as somebody who does rely on cerebral horsepower, a lot of the things that you tried to do and presumably takes pride in your ability to have work out problems, have thoughts.

01:41:40:17 - 01:41:53:20 Chris Williamson Do you feel the tension in yourself between the the transcendent, the relinquishing, the embodied and the cerebral, the cognitive, the purposeful on that side?

01:41:53:22 - 01:41:54:18 Eric Weinstein You know, I have a.

01:41:54:18 - 01:41:57:24 Eric Weinstein Dumb expression which I don't use in public, and I'm sure I'll be and I'll.

01:41:57:24 - 01:41:59:02 Chris Williamson Be castigated for.

01:41:59:02 - 01:42:01:05 Eric Weinstein It. Yeah, brilliant.

01:42:01:07 - 01:42:12:17 Eric Weinstein But it's heart and loins. If it doesn't speak to your head, Heart in your loins, leave it for someone else.

01:42:12:19 - 01:42:15:07 Chris Williamson What's that mean? How do you an actor.

01:42:15:09 - 01:42:15:21 Eric Weinstein You have to.

01:42:15:21 - 01:42:18:21 Eric Weinstein Try to realize that these things have to be balanced and.

01:42:18:21 - 01:42:24:09 Eric Weinstein Tempered. You don't want to live by your heart. You just every time you.

01:42:24:09 - 01:42:43:05 Eric Weinstein Know, you see a daffodil blowing its seeds into the wind, you'll be transported and you'll stop paying your electric bills and you want to be led around by your loins. That's not going to end well. And you don't want to be led around by your head, too, because then you'll get yourself into one of these cul de sacs and you won't even realize that you can't think your way out of it.

01:42:43:05 - 01:42:46:00 Eric Weinstein You were given all of these facilities and motivations.

01:42:46:02 - 01:42:49:18 Chris Williamson How do you pull yourself from head to heart?

01:42:49:20 - 01:42:55:08 Eric Weinstein Well, you.

01:42:55:08 - 01:42:57:10 Eric Weinstein Brought this guitar.

01:42:57:12 - 01:43:04:12 Chris Williamson Guitar lately. A guitar that's just on your right. Grab it, show it to everybody.

01:43:04:14 - 01:43:06:16 Eric Weinstein So I don't I do not.

01:43:06:16 - 01:43:08:05 Eric Weinstein Play the guitar lately.

01:43:08:07 - 01:43:11:00 Chris Williamson I don't think anybody actually technically does it.

01:43:11:01 - 01:43:13:09 Eric Weinstein So It's like a guitar that's too small for your fingers.

01:43:13:09 - 01:43:17:01 Chris Williamson Yes. You've got your pixel in.

01:43:17:03 - 01:43:22:00 Eric Weinstein So you take some piece of music that actually means something to you.

01:43:22:02 - 01:43:26:04 Eric Weinstein Right. And one thing that I remember.

01:43:26:04 - 01:43:48:19 Eric Weinstein Hearing when I was growing up was this. So this the Asturias of Isaac Albéniz, it was originally written for piano. And you see sort of these things on Ood where you have a tremolo.

01:43:48:21 - 01:43:50:14 Eric Weinstein You've got two.

01:43:50:16 - 01:43:57:16 Eric Weinstein Two fingers playing the open B string, and then you've got this melody which is played with the thumb.

01:43:57:18 - 01:44:02:12 Eric Weinstein And then.

01:44:02:14 - 01:44:23:24 Eric Weinstein So the combination of these things produces this different effect. I can't really get my fingers in there. And then then I started thinking about, okay, well that's a great effect. What if we tried to write and to create using the same idea I started.

01:44:24:01 - 01:44:48:07 Eric Weinstein It so that that that's.

01:44:48:09 - 01:45:05:22 Eric Weinstein Not the same song, but it's using some of the same techniques about just getting these things to ring out and to get the melody going on the baseline. And then you have to forget this. Now, you know, if I was able to play this properly and I'm sorry if I'm embarrassing myself, you're trying to do this thing.

01:45:05:22 - 01:45:08:16 Eric Weinstein Where you're.

01:45:08:18 - 01:45:13:21 Eric Weinstein You're recognizing that the transcendent lives.

01:45:13:23 - 01:45:15:05 Eric Weinstein In.

01:45:15:07 - 01:45:45:24 Eric Weinstein Particular structures that they elicit this feeling and that we have this opportunity to go back and forth between the analytic description. If I'm thinking about this, I can't really feel it. And if I'm feeling it, I can't really figure out how to use it or think about it or compose with it. And so, you know, to me what we're trying to do is we're trying to camp in de camp.

01:45:46:01 - 01:45:56:04 Eric Weinstein Well, that spoke to my head in my loins, but it didn't speak to my heart or that spoke to two out of three. We need ultimately to be fully embodied.

01:45:56:06 - 01:45:57:18 Eric Weinstein And that's a challenge.

01:45:57:20 - 01:46:16:08 Eric Weinstein And we have to we either accept the challenge or we don't accept the challenge. And we have to go back and forth between these lenses. You can't necessarily be in the same you know, if you see your child and you're a physician, a surgeon, you could see your child as a bunch of tissue hooked up to itself. You know, and that's important.

01:46:16:10 - 01:46:26:24 Eric Weinstein If you're hiking and you're in a bad spot, you actually have to do an operation on your child. But it's a terrible way to put your child to sleep when you're reading a bedtime story.

01:46:27:01 - 01:46:27:24 Chris Williamson Is there.

01:46:28:00 - 01:46:32:01 Eric Weinstein A.

01:46:32:03 - 01:47:10:09 Chris Williamson Is there a challenge that people are facing at the moment with an overreliance on a brain based economy, a unlimited amount of information at your fingertips with Wikipedia and Chartbeat for them to struggle to find something transcendent when it can be broken down into its component parts and explained by somebody who understands the child as a connection of ligaments, organs and blood vessels as opposed to as the beautiful progeny of the person looking at them.

01:47:10:11 - 01:47:11:18 Eric Weinstein Well.

01:47:11:20 - 01:47:32:02 Eric Weinstein Keep in mind that there are people who can weave poetry through. Their description of something very technical. Herman Vile, for example, wrote in a very Olympian fashion about abstract algebra. We talked about the homosexuality of certain symbols affiliated with themselves, you know, completely crazy.

01:47:32:04 - 01:47:33:17 Chris Williamson Arithmetic.

01:47:33:19 - 01:47:48:09 Eric Weinstein And, you know, there are people who just write beautifully. I think that Jim Watson, who may be a son of a bitch on many fronts, is one of the great writers in the English language. If you read The Double Helix, it's an incredible.

01:47:48:11 - 01:47:50:12 Eric Weinstein Narrative from.

01:47:50:12 - 01:47:54:08 Eric Weinstein The most one of the most memorable first sentences. The to the.

01:47:54:08 - 01:47:59:12 Eric Weinstein Conclusion we need the Carl.

01:47:59:12 - 01:48:04:03 Eric Weinstein Sagan's to animate our head and our.

01:48:04:03 - 01:48:05:11 Eric Weinstein Hearts.

01:48:05:13 - 01:48:07:15 Eric Weinstein At the same time.

01:48:07:17 - 01:48:12:11 Chris Williamson Do you think there is an overreliance on head at the moment?

01:48:12:13 - 01:48:18:17 Eric Weinstein I'm worried that our head, heart and loins are all disengaged.

01:48:18:19 - 01:48:20:24 Chris Williamson So what do you use if you're not using any of those?

01:48:21:01 - 01:48:21:17 Eric Weinstein I use them.

01:48:21:17 - 01:48:22:07 Eric Weinstein All.

01:48:22:09 - 01:48:25:00 Chris Williamson But what are the people using who are not using those?

01:48:25:02 - 01:48:38:17 Eric Weinstein They're not watching what's happening to them. They're being denatured by their phones. Your phone is not a phone. It is a very it's an environment. You know, you pick it up and suddenly you're.

01:48:38:19 - 01:48:39:19 Eric Weinstein You're.

01:48:39:21 - 01:49:02:07 Eric Weinstein Someplace that you don't realize isn't relative to your physical surroundings. Like you get very angry that you get a text message while you're driving and you try responding to it. Well, you're going 45 miles an hour in a several hundred pound or £1,000 vehicle. You've lost track of where you are. Our phone.

01:49:02:07 - 01:49:05:19 Eric Weinstein Is, you know, and I talk.

01:49:05:19 - 01:49:15:14 Eric Weinstein To people about the crisis in pornography. The only fans movement, the pornographic stuff that you're seeing.

01:49:15:16 - 01:49:17:11 Eric Weinstein People are not getting easily.

01:49:17:12 - 01:49:46:02 Eric Weinstein Excited and aroused inside of any kind of context. Like the erotic is taking it on the chin. I think I think that's really important to remember that eroticism, for example, is at least the combination of the loins and the head. And at the heart as well. What you're starting to see is people can't actually derive excitement from normal stimuli.

01:49:46:02 - 01:49:51:03 Eric Weinstein That has to do with falling in love or having children or, you know.

01:49:51:05 - 01:49:56:13 Chris Williamson So you're talking about an ever escalating stimulus that people require to get the same arousal response.

01:49:56:13 - 01:49:57:19 Eric Weinstein And they can't.

01:49:57:21 - 01:50:07:21 Chris Williamson Yeah. Mary Harrington calls this one of her three laws of porno dynamics. It's the law of fap entropy that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more extreme over time.

01:50:07:23 - 01:50:33:07 Eric Weinstein Well, what's the cure for that? Something high end. You could just try to do it all in loins. Show me something where my psychogenic arousal gets greater and greater because I've never seen that. And holy cow, is that Fara? Or you could say, Yeah, it's more like a Cobb Douglas utility function.

01:50:33:09 - 01:50:36:13 Chris Williamson You're going to have to bring this down to my level multiple inputs.

01:50:36:13 - 01:50:38:18 Eric Weinstein In other words, if I could offer you only food.

01:50:38:18 - 01:50:43:20 Eric Weinstein Or only water, that would not work.

01:50:43:22 - 01:51:06:13 Eric Weinstein You'd rather, if you have a lot of food, have a little water to complement it, because that water becomes that much more valuable, or if you have a ton of liquids and you have no nourishment, you probably won't really value a little bit of food. Well, in my opinion part of what we need is we need more, more things that reward us when we're integrating rather than we're when we're extremism.

01:51:06:15 - 01:51:31:14 Chris Williamson Get back to the discussion about technology, sort of not only fracturing our attention, but also fracturing our experience, That seems to be a wistfulness not just in the dating realm, but in the experiential realm for a bygone time where we felt connected to the things that we do. Yeah, and it's interesting. For someone of my age, I'm 35, so I'm like slap bang in the middle of the millennials, right?

01:51:31:14 - 01:52:06:11 Chris Williamson So I remember a time before ubiquity of iPhones, before Internet, but there was a like there's a whimsy of childhood in any case. And me being able to tear those two apart is kind of difficult. But definitely think that when I read history, when I read Ryan Holiday, for instance, and I think about Zeno of Citium walking around the Stone, poetically, where I've been And I'm there and I, I think about the degree of connection to the experience, what is technology and what are our smartphones doing to our ability to connect.

01:52:06:12 - 01:52:15:05 Eric Weinstein They're changing our our web where we're not. If you can have 12.

01:52:15:07 - 01:52:18:22 Eric Weinstein Life changing experiences in the space of a minute and none of them are.

01:52:18:22 - 01:52:21:00 Eric Weinstein Yours, what do you think that's.

01:52:21:00 - 01:52:46:16 Eric Weinstein Going to do to your mind? You know, at some point I was in an Oculus situation. I was deep underwater and a blue whale swam past me. None of that actually happened, but it felt like it did. Or, you know, you can do this nuclear explosion on Henderson Island in the Oculus. It's just a more immersive phone.

01:52:46:18 - 01:52:53:13 Eric Weinstein And look, you have to be you know, that's.

01:52:53:13 - 01:53:03:17 Eric Weinstein One of the things about La Sagrada Familia. You go in there and it's real. You see the Grand Canyon and it is actually grand.

01:53:03:19 - 01:53:05:08 Eric Weinstein You know.

01:53:05:10 - 01:53:30:07 Eric Weinstein There's certain things that don't easily live up to their billing. I think I went to Pamukkale in Turkey years ago, which Pamuk means cotton and color, I guess. Castles of the cotton, castles of mineral deposit. And they form these pools and there weren't enough pools and there were way too many people. So it was like one of those moments where the tourists have totally destroyed the natural traction.

01:53:30:09 - 01:53:36:19 Eric Weinstein Okay, But I went into the Blue Mosque and it was every bit as mindblowing as it was the last time I was there 30 years ago.

01:53:36:21 - 01:53:41:14 Chris Williamson It's the same way that I feel every single time I step into the Vatican, every single.

01:53:41:14 - 01:53:44:03 Eric Weinstein Every single time. And I've been there three times now.

01:53:44:03 - 01:53:44:23 Chris Williamson I've been there three times.

01:53:45:02 - 01:53:50:23 Eric Weinstein And it's just, holy cow. Well, I shouldn't have said that anyway.

01:53:51:00 - 01:53:56:04 Eric Weinstein Very good. I didn't mean to. Yeah, you have to.

01:53:56:10 - 01:54:09:02 Eric Weinstein There have to be things that you actually viscerally relate to that stop. You like the Bach Cello Suites. How many times have I heard the Bach chopped or whole lot of love could do it either way or You shook me all night.

01:54:09:02 - 01:54:14:07 Eric Weinstein Long, You know that's holy. You shook me all night long.

01:54:14:09 - 01:54:23:08 Eric Weinstein Is is a transcendent song.

01:54:23:10 - 01:54:28:21 Chris Williamson It's less transcendent if you see it as part of a 62nd ticktock montage.

01:54:28:23 - 01:54:34:03 Eric Weinstein No, because Shimmer is transcendent and that'll fit right in there.

01:54:34:05 - 01:55:04:19 Eric Weinstein And mine is right here. I don't like the alu. Hey, Nu, I don't like it, huh? Yeah. You shook me, hon. And now that's prayer. Yes, you shook me. Oh, no, no. You know, if that doesn't move, you, you need to check.

01:55:04:19 - 01:55:05:06 Eric Weinstein Into some.

01:55:05:06 - 01:55:11:09 Eric Weinstein Place. Those four notes recur in all of.

01:55:11:09 - 01:55:18:01 Eric Weinstein These songs that matter. It's basically Mary had a Little lamb with fire thrown in as well.

01:55:18:03 - 01:55:20:03 Eric Weinstein You know, and I bring.

01:55:20:03 - 01:55:33:04 Eric Weinstein Up this example. My wife was watching a film I didn't want to watch. It was some chick flick. And it all hovers around this one scene where this guy drags this girl into a a music store because he can't afford a piano.

01:55:33:06 - 01:55:49:07 Eric Weinstein You know, I don't know you, but want you going up to that fourth of the mall for that. And I just I was transfixed. I couldn't could.

01:55:49:07 - 01:56:13:24 Eric Weinstein Not continue to do my calculations like, what the hell is this movie? So Those four notes is a great place to ground yourself. And there's a reason that they work. The second note brings up in your mind the thing called the fifth, the dominant chord. The first note is spread between the the tonic and the sub dominant. The third note belongs to the tonic.

01:56:13:24 - 01:56:39:02 Eric Weinstein Only in the fourth note only belongs to the sub dominant. And so this idea that Western harmony revolves around these ideas of the tonic, the sub dominant, the dominant are carried by these notes. So even if you're not playing it on a chordal instrument, this pattern of four notes that keeps recurring grabs us because we know what the chords are behind it.

01:56:39:04 - 01:56:42:13 Eric Weinstein And it's basically Mary had a Little LAMB or Proud Mary.

01:56:42:15 - 01:56:44:20 Eric Weinstein You, but.

01:56:44:22 - 01:56:46:04 Eric Weinstein That's a great place to start for.

01:56:46:04 - 01:56:47:17 Eric Weinstein Transcendence.

01:56:47:19 - 01:56:52:18 Eric Weinstein Just check on something really simple, whether you're feeling it.

01:56:52:20 - 01:56:54:08 Chris Williamson Or and dread.

01:56:54:10 - 01:56:54:19 Eric Weinstein Hmm.

01:56:55:00 - 01:57:03:07 Chris Williamson To emotions that I miss in my life. Say more So when I look up at the night sky, I get it in equal dosages.

01:57:03:11 - 01:57:04:14 Eric Weinstein Know good.

01:57:04:16 - 01:57:13:00 Chris Williamson You know when it's good. I've been out to Joshua Tree taken an edible didn't need the edible at all That was unnecessary amplification.

01:57:13:00 - 01:57:16:24 Eric Weinstein You know we're having this discussion in the middle of the Perseus meteor shower.

01:57:17:01 - 01:57:18:14 Chris Williamson No.

01:57:18:16 - 01:57:28:16 Eric Weinstein I highly recommend get yourself to a place where there's no light pollution. Lay on your back right before Daniel. You'll have a blast or an But the on the dread is is very much there.

01:57:28:16 - 01:57:39:06 Chris Williamson Yes. And I don't know. It makes you feel insignificant in a way. I think that keeps your ego small and helps to reason to your.

01:57:39:08 - 01:57:45:07 Eric Weinstein Do you want your ego small? Have you been told that was a good thing?

01:57:45:09 - 01:58:10:08 Chris Williamson I've been told that it's a good thing. I would say for me, remembering finitude and not insignificance, but the temporary nature of our time here, the vastness of what is going to go on, the things that have come before, the things that will come after the scale.

01:58:10:08 - 01:58:11:05 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

01:58:11:07 - 01:58:34:03 Chris Williamson I Think that that it grounds me. I struggle to get into my head to describe the thing that is almost exclusively in heart and loins and it makes me feel good when I do that. And yet I find myself I've got emails to do. I had this term the other day, John Level Warrior Poet Society said the tyranny of the urgent.

01:58:34:05 - 01:58:40:01 Chris Williamson Hmm. And fuck. I love that. The tyranny of the urgent.

01:58:40:03 - 01:58:42:03 Eric Weinstein You're familiar with this concept of bathos?

01:58:42:09 - 01:58:43:12 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

01:58:43:14 - 01:58:47:16 Eric Weinstein The alternation between the transcendent and the mundane and the pressing. You know.

01:58:47:16 - 01:58:52:03 Eric Weinstein Like, okay, we will conquer the cosmos.

01:58:52:05 - 01:59:19:04 Eric Weinstein But I have to pick up my dry cleaning. Yeah, I think that there is that that tyranny. But I also want to just talk about arrogance and humility. I Meet too many people who have one without the other. And I see all these discussions online about so-and-so has this beautiful epistemic humility or somebody else is, you know, preposterously arrogant or whatever.

01:59:19:06 - 01:59:24:13 Eric Weinstein And I sort of sit and wonder at this discussion.

01:59:24:15 - 01:59:28:13 Eric Weinstein You want both.

01:59:28:15 - 01:59:33:07 Chris Williamson What is humility without arrogance?

01:59:33:09 - 01:59:37:05 Eric Weinstein Well, you know who I think.

01:59:37:05 - 01:59:47:17 Eric Weinstein Actually had this kind of pretty decent balance that was on display for the world to see was Khabib Nurmagomedov.

01:59:47:19 - 01:59:50:02 Chris Williamson What an unbelievably good example.

01:59:50:06 - 01:59:51:24 Eric Weinstein Right? So tell me, tell.

01:59:51:24 - 01:59:53:20 Eric Weinstein Me how it lands for you.

01:59:53:22 - 01:59:58:23 Chris Williamson Khabib is very, very on the list of people that I would love to speak to and you hear.

01:59:58:23 - 02:00:00:24 Eric Weinstein That could be Listen Khabib.

02:00:00:24 - 02:00:05:13 Chris Williamson If anybody in Dagestan has got Khabib's email address, please tell him to get in touch.

02:00:05:15 - 02:00:06:16 Eric Weinstein Okay.

02:00:06:18 - 02:00:07:24 Eric Weinstein This is fascinating to me.

02:00:08:01 - 02:00:11:24 Eric Weinstein So the more I'll.

02:00:12:01 - 02:00:35:20 Chris Williamson Do a timeline of it. So Conor McGregor Very seductive, very obviously seductive working class. The Irish hate to be told that they're a part of the UK. They're not that near, you know, close enough. It's like an adopted son type thing, okay? And I'm thinking, God, this guy's like a savant of war and artistry as he's coming up.

02:00:35:22 - 02:01:01:14 Chris Williamson And then he beats Chad Mendez and it's a war as a fight, and then he's crying, and then he does the other side of it and he's doing with a Patel he's balancing in the middle of maybe Vegas or California somewhere on a walking rail on a side rail. And he's I think Nate Diaz accused him of taking a plane touch.

02:01:01:14 - 02:01:23:20 Chris Williamson But with that dog in the park and doing handstands and he's got this sort of fluidity to him. Right. And then there's this amazing interview that was clipped and put in perfectly of a journalist reciting back to Conor what he said before the Aldo fight. And he said at the press conference, I saw his right hand shaking. That was a subtle.

02:01:23:20 - 02:01:40:09 Chris Williamson Tell for me he's going to overload with that right hand. And when he thinks I will be, that I will not, I will create gaps within the Octagon. He will fall into those gaps and that is when I will strike. And then there's a clip of him backstage before he's about to fight and he's bouncing backwards and forwards in that sort of long karate stance that he does.

02:01:40:11 - 02:01:45:08 Chris Williamson And he steps back and he throws out left hook practicing and placed it in time with the fight.

02:01:45:08 - 02:01:45:21 Eric Weinstein Amazing.

02:01:45:21 - 02:01:53:07 Chris Williamson And it's the same move. And this guy says, You said these things, recites that thing post-fight.

02:01:53:09 - 02:01:55:09 Eric Weinstein How'd you do that?

02:01:55:11 - 02:02:14:03 Chris Williamson How'd you do that? And Conor talks about if you have the bravery enough to speak it and the courage enough to be able to pursue it, then that the data and I'm just fucking enthralled by this guy. I got put onto a reality TV show in my twenties that we had no internet, no contact with friends or family or any sort of news.

02:02:14:05 - 02:02:38:06 Chris Williamson And it turned out that while I was there, I think it was Rafael Dos Anjos was injured, so I was terrified I was going to miss McGregor's because that's how inspiring it was to me. And then there's this there's talk of this guy, this other fighter, unbeaten, undefeated kid, and it's the Bane Batman type scenario, or at least that's the model that I had in my mind.

02:02:38:09 - 02:02:39:19 Eric Weinstein I'm like, Fuck.

02:02:39:21 - 02:02:46:07 Chris Williamson You know, you've got the Almost the Rocky verses. He was the Russian guy that he's training for in the fight.

02:02:46:13 - 02:02:48:12 Eric Weinstein No.

02:02:48:14 - 02:03:18:24 Chris Williamson He's the Russian guy that kind of fights the rocky fight. Sorry. Yes. Ivan Drago. So it's almost that, right? You've got this training in the mountains and chopping wood and then there's the dolly. Conor throws the dolly and you start to see. That was the first time I really took notice of Khabib. And you remember that video? Send me location.

02:03:19:01 - 02:03:33:22 Chris Williamson Send me location. Just tell me where. Send me location. And there's a number of tribute videos called Location Spot with AK about Khabib. I'm like, fucking hell. Like this is this guy is something else.

02:03:33:24 - 02:03:35:13 Eric Weinstein Sky is real.

02:03:35:15 - 02:03:39:01 Eric Weinstein Correct? So Conor McGregor was.

02:03:39:01 - 02:03:47:02 Eric Weinstein Spread between real and fake, right? The showmanship was was a part.

02:03:47:04 - 02:03:48:08 Eric Weinstein Of.

02:03:48:10 - 02:03:56:13 Eric Weinstein It was backed up, particularly by his striking by his ability to sense his opponent sort of almost using your.

02:03:56:17 - 02:04:01:02 Eric Weinstein Right and then telling Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:04:01:04 - 02:04:22:18 Eric Weinstein But I really believe that in part trying to get into your opponent's head with somebody. I really wonder whether Westerners have any idea of what happens in places like Central and Eastern Europe when you start talking about somebody's mother, you know.

02:04:22:20 - 02:04:27:01 Eric Weinstein Like you to I.

02:04:27:03 - 02:04:31:21 Eric Weinstein I had this really bad cultural reaction, which is that there are people who are bought into the.

02:04:31:21 - 02:04:38:01 Eric Weinstein Whole trash talking thing. You know, And.

02:04:38:03 - 02:04:43:11 Eric Weinstein If it had been like, I don't know, Conor McGregor versus an entrepreneur as a child son or something like.

02:04:43:11 - 02:04:46:05 Chris Williamson That. Shell son Yeah, same.

02:04:46:07 - 02:04:47:20 Eric Weinstein Yeah, they're both they're both.

02:04:47:22 - 02:04:54:23 Eric Weinstein Accepting the game. Could be. But I just had this other thought of, like, have you never met anyone from Dagestan before?

02:04:55:03 - 02:05:02:23 Eric Weinstein Yeah, like anyone from Dagestan. It's not just Khabib or it's just, you know, it's so bad.

02:05:02:23 - 02:05:04:02 Chris Williamson Have you ever done improv?

02:05:04:04 - 02:05:07:20 Eric Weinstein No. Well, inadvertently, the.

02:05:07:22 - 02:05:10:24 Chris Williamson In improv classes, there's something called punking the game.

02:05:11:04 - 02:05:11:22 Eric Weinstein Okay?

02:05:11:24 - 02:05:29:13 Chris Williamson And let's say that were in a circle and we're supposed to woosh, we pass energy round, whoosh. And you can go boing. And it goes back the other way and you can send it across stuff. There's only one rule. One rule is don't punk the game. Punking the game is like not playing by the rules.

02:05:29:15 - 02:05:31:12 Eric Weinstein Game rejection.

02:05:31:14 - 02:05:38:15 Chris Williamson And what you see is kind of playing a game of tennis and he keeps on serving this ball across and.

02:05:38:17 - 02:05:41:07 Eric Weinstein The balls are 100% from Khabib's perspective.

02:05:41:07 - 02:06:02:21 Chris Williamson Not only does the ball not come back across the net, he doesn't even have the racket in his hand. You know he's there. He's got to be that there's obligations to be done. And it was that series of press conferences. Yeah, that really made me fall in love with Khabib and then how it gets me emotional thinking about you, thinking about his tribute to his father.

02:06:02:23 - 02:06:04:16 Eric Weinstein I'm telling you, I can't.

02:06:04:16 - 02:06:07:12 Eric Weinstein See it from Conor's perspective.

02:06:07:14 - 02:06:09:13 Chris Williamson Of why you would behave in that way.

02:06:09:15 - 02:06:17:24 Eric Weinstein Like 2 seconds facing this guy. It's not a question of fear. It's a question of respect.

02:06:18:01 - 02:06:21:22 Eric Weinstein Well, maybe I just don't get it. But I spend enough time.

02:06:21:24 - 02:06:44:10 Eric Weinstein I have spent enough time in, I don't know, the north of India or the center of Turkey or places in Egypt or Ukraine or Russia or wherever. You don't I can tell the Internet's going to completely tell me, I don't get it. You don't do this stuff. You just don't. It's like.

02:06:44:12 - 02:06:45:01 Eric Weinstein I can't.

02:06:45:01 - 02:07:02:16 Eric Weinstein Explain to people who are convinced that the Internet is the gift to prove that dunking and dragging is man's highest function. There's so much stuff you don't do in this whole move towards like anonymity and let's make fun of everybody and everything because mockery is good.

02:07:02:21 - 02:07:07:00 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

02:07:07:02 - 02:07:11:11 Eric Weinstein This way. This. This is the direction to madness.

02:07:11:13 - 02:07:21:24 Chris Williamson I certainly think that Peterson said this a while ago. One of the main problems with Twitter is it's driven the proximate price of being a prick down to zero.

02:07:22:01 - 02:07:26:19 Eric Weinstein Sure. In the combination of real people and unnamed accounts and bought.

02:07:26:19 - 02:07:30:11 Chris Williamson Farms and the inability to work out whether it's been set in earnest or set in a.

02:07:30:11 - 02:07:48:16 Eric Weinstein Or whether it's been coordinated so that 100,000 people go off at once. And the exactly the same point, getting back to the issue of arrogance and and humility, what is be competent.

02:07:48:18 - 02:07:55:12 Chris Williamson Unwavering, humble.

02:07:55:14 - 02:07:57:01 Eric Weinstein He's both arrogant.

02:07:57:03 - 02:08:01:18 Eric Weinstein And humble. And you have to look.

02:08:01:18 - 02:08:02:15 Eric Weinstein At the move that he.

02:08:02:15 - 02:08:04:03 Eric Weinstein Does.

02:08:04:05 - 02:08:05:07 Eric Weinstein When you compliment.

02:08:05:07 - 02:08:11:22 Eric Weinstein Him, what does he do? Humble alone, right.

02:08:11:22 - 02:08:19:15 Eric Weinstein Or Mahalla or something with the name Allah in it. It's like I give you this praise. Oh, no, no.

02:08:19:17 - 02:08:20:08 Chris Williamson It's not for me.

02:08:20:11 - 02:08:21:22 Eric Weinstein It's for the God.

02:08:21:24 - 02:08:23:06 Chris Williamson Awful my father.

02:08:23:08 - 02:08:24:06 Eric Weinstein Or for my.

02:08:24:06 - 02:08:25:17 Eric Weinstein Father. Right.

02:08:25:19 - 02:08:47:17 Eric Weinstein And so this issue about this is a this is a thing when you when you have Muslim friends is that they learn to deflect all of this positivity out. If they're getting it, they deflect it so that they don't keep it and they don't become insufferable.

02:08:47:19 - 02:08:49:05 Eric Weinstein On the other hand.

02:08:49:07 - 02:08:59:23 Eric Weinstein If they're extraordinary what they do, they know that they're extraordinary at. What they do to me is under no illusions as to how good is he set the higher standards for tomorrow.

02:08:59:23 - 02:09:01:08 Chris Williamson Night, I'm going to smash your.

02:09:01:08 - 02:09:06:07 Eric Weinstein Boy. He is.

02:09:06:09 - 02:09:08:17 Eric Weinstein Simultaneously.

02:09:08:19 - 02:09:09:07 Eric Weinstein Complete.

02:09:09:09 - 02:09:11:24 Eric Weinstein You said competent. It was just wasn't fair to him.

02:09:12:01 - 02:09:20:07 Eric Weinstein It is way beyond confident and, you know.

02:09:20:09 - 02:09:29:23 Eric Weinstein I guess I just want people to realize that you need arrogance to stand up against insuperable odds.

02:09:30:00 - 02:09:30:13 Eric Weinstein And you need.

02:09:30:13 - 02:09:35:14 Eric Weinstein Humility to stop your arrogance from driving you insane. And to keep asking that people be.

02:09:35:14 - 02:09:37:12 Eric Weinstein Constantly humble.

02:09:37:14 - 02:09:52:17 Eric Weinstein Is an affront to what we are as humans. I really don't grasp it. You need that deep humility 100%, but so many people need in order to take on the challenges that they could.

02:09:52:20 - 02:09:53:21 Eric Weinstein If you took the world.

02:09:53:21 - 02:09:57:19 Eric Weinstein Seriously, you'd never take on those challenges if you were just humble.

02:09:57:21 - 02:10:21:24 Chris Williamson MM Yes, Yes. There's my favorite clip, one of my favorite clips of Khabib post fighting Post-career. He's doing an interview and talking about the training camps, the gym that he looks after, and some of the fighters that are there. And I think they train six days or six and a half days a week, and he tells them they need to get up.

02:10:22:00 - 02:10:36:09 Chris Williamson And some of the guys complain and he says, it's okay, you can you go home. Your mum, she'll talk you into bed at night, she will cook you dinner and tomorrow you'll be comfortable. But that's not why you're here.

02:10:36:11 - 02:10:42:15 Eric Weinstein Put that coffee down. Do you know coffee is for closers?

02:10:42:17 - 02:10:44:22 Chris Williamson Yes, Yes. Good reference.

02:10:44:22 - 02:10:45:18 Eric Weinstein You're your name's.

02:10:45:18 - 02:10:47:05 Eric Weinstein Livy.

02:10:47:07 - 02:10:51:18 Eric Weinstein You call yourself a salesman, You son of a bitch.

02:10:51:20 - 02:10:52:07 Chris Williamson I just.

02:10:52:07 - 02:10:52:23 Eric Weinstein Love.

02:10:53:03 - 02:11:08:05 Chris Williamson I really, really love this. I had a conversation last week, and I was told a, quote, Self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anybody else.

02:11:08:07 - 02:11:08:18 Eric Weinstein You know.

02:11:08:21 - 02:11:11:23 Eric Weinstein I'll be honest with you I get tired of these things.

02:11:12:00 - 02:11:12:15 Eric Weinstein I think that.

02:11:12:19 - 02:11:20:09 Eric Weinstein There's a lot of men in particular looking for simple answers and all of these things fall flat.

02:11:20:09 - 02:11:22:14 Eric Weinstein For me that.

02:11:22:16 - 02:11:28:02 Eric Weinstein They're front loaded because they simplify things. Right. I imagine that that's what all that self-love was.

02:11:28:04 - 02:11:28:23 Eric Weinstein Mm hmm.

02:11:29:00 - 02:11:31:02 Eric Weinstein Well, then I'd have have a definition.

02:11:31:05 - 02:11:32:05 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

02:11:32:07 - 02:11:49:05 Eric Weinstein But it's not going to work. And I think that this is one of the things that I don't know how to fight exactly is that we're in a world convinced that the truth must be simple. And all of these simple truths don't survive the collider that is modern social media.

02:11:49:08 - 02:11:57:05 Chris Williamson So I don't disagree. The problem with a truth, which is boundlessly complex, is that functionally it's useless.

02:11:57:07 - 02:12:00:15 Eric Weinstein So that's what that is. And I'm so glad you made this point.

02:12:00:17 - 02:12:04:00 Eric Weinstein That's the puzzle. We're now in a world where.

02:12:04:00 - 02:12:21:18 Eric Weinstein To do the nuance is to get yourself tangled because the internet is not friendly to nuance. On the other hand, to say something simply and crisply leads you into disappointing everyone who's believed in you. And, you know, we were talking before a little bit about Christopher Hitchens.

02:12:21:24 - 02:12:30:13 Chris Williamson Yes. Tell me about your thoughts on Hitch. I asked Sam this question. Some spent a good bit of time with him. What would the modern culture like if Hitch was still alive?

02:12:30:15 - 02:12:41:01 Eric Weinstein Hitch, I think, would have been forced to either self incinerate or adapt. And I'm not sure what you would have done.

02:12:41:01 - 02:12:43:21 Chris Williamson What's self incineration in this context?

02:12:43:23 - 02:12:51:06 Eric Weinstein One of the things that makes Christopher Hitchens a hero to so many people, almost oddly, a secular saint, if you will.

02:12:51:08 - 02:12:51:22 Eric Weinstein Is that he.

02:12:51:22 - 02:13:02:16 Eric Weinstein Held the promise that one could simply stand in some place that was reasonable and hold forth from that simple perspective.

02:13:02:16 - 02:13:04:06 Eric Weinstein Like, no.

02:13:04:08 - 02:13:42:19 Eric Weinstein There is nothing to Islam, it is nonsense. It might be something he would say or you might say, you know, free speech is absolute and you have every right to say anything you want and I have every right to say, and the better ideas will prevail. They watch what's happened with Sam and this question of Trump. Sam perceives Trump to be an asymmetric, existential threat and was willing to go and back the idea that the Hunter Biden laptop story might not have benefited the election.

02:13:42:21 - 02:14:05:05 Eric Weinstein And he's lost an enormous number of people who otherwise agree with him. And so what's the reasoning and the reasoning and something oddly, I first time I met Sam, I went on his show to warn him that you can't just optimize for truth, you have to optimize. I said, I have four variables. I can't live without truth, meaning fitness and grace.

02:14:05:07 - 02:14:19:01 Eric Weinstein So Trump is a fitness puzzle to Sam, which is if we allow Trump to destroy the country in Sam's mind, then we've lost fitness. There's no there's no point in being truthful. And then there's a question about what is the.

02:14:19:01 - 02:14:20:00 Eric Weinstein Meaning.

02:14:20:02 - 02:14:59:11 Eric Weinstein Do you destroy the meaning of a democracy when you hold back information? Maybe you do. Maybe it's no longer feels like it's an actual democracy. And what is the graceful thing to do. What is the just and right thing to do? I am convinced that some of Hitchens positions were attractive because he was using his big brain to suggest that life could be lived simply if we were just strong enough of character, if we were clear enough of thought, we could espouse something like free speech or reason and it would be.

02:14:59:11 - 02:15:03:16 Eric Weinstein Enough.

02:15:03:18 - 02:15:07:20 Chris Williamson Without requiring that we hold it up to a higher power.

02:15:07:22 - 02:15:08:04 Eric Weinstein Or.

02:15:08:04 - 02:15:08:19 Eric Weinstein That, you.

02:15:08:19 - 02:15:10:23 Eric Weinstein Know, you get caught in some very serious.

02:15:10:23 - 02:15:12:18 Eric Weinstein Situation where.

02:15:12:20 - 02:15:46:07 Eric Weinstein You're in an edge case. Free speech does not exist in an absolute form in under American law. It just doesn't win. You know, we mentioned Miller versus California, which was a sort of a follow decision to memoirs versus Massachusetts. You don't have a right to broadcast pornography because pornography does not enjoy First Amendment protection. Now, how do you discern that pornography doesn't?

02:15:46:12 - 02:15:58:06 Eric Weinstein Well, the justices claim that it doesn't. And there's a, you know, a three factor test for what is pornography, which was, I believe, attenuated under something called memoirs versus Massachusetts.

02:15:58:06 - 02:15:59:10 Eric Weinstein But that was.

02:15:59:10 - 02:15:59:22 Eric Weinstein Not allowed to.

02:15:59:22 - 02:16:00:19 Eric Weinstein Stand.

02:16:00:21 - 02:16:15:04 Eric Weinstein You're not allowed to necessarily troop movements by blabbing information in a war. You're not able to slander or libel. They're all sorts of adjustments to free speech.

02:16:15:06 - 02:16:16:18 Eric Weinstein And when you when.

02:16:16:18 - 02:16:21:09 Eric Weinstein You come out, one of these perspectives from an absolutist frame of.

02:16:21:09 - 02:16:24:06 Eric Weinstein Mind, you have to hope.

02:16:24:06 - 02:16:40:10 Eric Weinstein That you're not going to meet the edge case. A good example for me was the Second Amendment. I noticed that many second Amendment types took an absolutist perspective, saying the right to keep and bear arms will not be infringed. And don't bother me about a well-regulated.

02:16:40:10 - 02:16:42:22 Eric Weinstein Militia and say, okay.

02:16:42:24 - 02:16:52:06 Eric Weinstein I'm not going to talk to you about a well-regulated militia. My question is, should the Davy Crockett be sold at K-Mart? And they would often say, well, what's the Davy Crockett? And I said, Well, it's about a one.

02:16:52:06 - 02:16:53:08 Eric Weinstein Hundred pound.

02:16:53:10 - 02:16:53:24 Eric Weinstein Personal.

02:16:53:24 - 02:16:58:12 Eric Weinstein Nuke. Well, first of all, I was very.

02:16:58:14 - 02:17:19:00 Eric Weinstein Flabbergasted that a lot of gun enthusiasts did not know that was a personal nuke developed by the United States. But then immediately many of them saw where this was going, which is, okay, if we're going to restrict personal nukes at Kmart, then you've got your your foot in the door. The camel has its nose under the tent.

02:17:19:02 - 02:17:21:12 Chris Williamson It's a difference of degree and a difference of kind all the way down.

02:17:21:12 - 02:17:38:18 Eric Weinstein Exactly. So I think that personal nukes have to be sold at Kmart because the American population needs to keep parity with the American military. And then I say, well, do you realize what you just said? Do you realize that you've bounced out of your very simplified framework?

02:17:38:20 - 02:17:39:23 Eric Weinstein They don't.

02:17:40:00 - 02:17:44:11 Eric Weinstein And this is partially the problem, which is that if you can't talk about taste.

02:17:44:13 - 02:17:47:05 Eric Weinstein And tradeoffs and balance.

02:17:47:07 - 02:17:57:18 Eric Weinstein Because it's all squishy, then you have all of these people running to these different ultra simplifications, none of which work.

02:17:57:20 - 02:18:18:15 Chris Williamson There's a quote from one of my smartest friends, Gwenda, A dilemma of tweeting is that you're aware of exceptions and conditions to your statements but can't include them without turning an elegant aphorism into a clunky mess. So you must choose between writing tenured garbage or getting torn apart by pedants and replies in quote, tweets.

02:18:18:17 - 02:18:21:04 Eric Weinstein I've chosen to fail and a.

02:18:21:06 - 02:18:25:03 Eric Weinstein No. But this is this is really important.

02:18:25:05 - 02:18:27:19 Eric Weinstein I'm failing. How about you?

02:18:27:21 - 02:18:29:05 Chris Williamson It depends what your goals are.

02:18:29:07 - 02:18:29:21 Eric Weinstein Well, but.

02:18:29:21 - 02:18:33:19 Eric Weinstein My point to you is I don't think we're meant to succeed.

02:18:33:19 - 02:18:34:11 Eric Weinstein Here.

02:18:34:13 - 02:18:39:20 Chris Williamson What's that mean? What's the criteria?

02:18:39:22 - 02:18:41:10 Eric Weinstein Was that a her?

02:18:41:12 - 02:18:42:10 Chris Williamson What's the criteria?

02:18:42:16 - 02:18:43:15 Eric Weinstein Sorry? The person who just.

02:18:43:15 - 02:18:44:15 Chris Williamson Said, you know, a guy.

02:18:44:15 - 02:18:45:13 Eric Weinstein Guy.

02:18:45:15 - 02:18:48:17 Eric Weinstein What he said was.

02:18:48:19 - 02:18:49:08 Eric Weinstein That you're.

02:18:49:08 - 02:18:52:07 Eric Weinstein Aware of the trade off and there's no way out of the.

02:18:52:07 - 02:18:58:20 Eric Weinstein Trade off. I believe that there are ways out.

02:18:58:22 - 02:19:26:05 Eric Weinstein But they have their own problems. Once you start to understand all of the different forces that arrayed against you, you realize that if somebody chooses to hyperfocus on various things, they can effectively your credibility in general. And you brought up Wikipedia and I wanted to talk about that. An interesting thing that's happening with Wikipedia is the difference between individual Wikipedia entries.

02:19:26:07 - 02:19:27:07 Eric Weinstein And Wikipedia.

02:19:27:07 - 02:19:29:05 Eric Weinstein Entries on like a subject.

02:19:29:05 - 02:19:30:19 Eric Weinstein Or a plant.

02:19:30:21 - 02:19:45:07 Eric Weinstein Or a geographic place. So isn't it strange that if you were to look up, for example, pneumatic drill on Wikipedia, there'd be a huge, technically accurate article, pneumatic drills?

02:19:45:07 - 02:19:47:13 Chris Williamson What constitutes it, Who invented it?

02:19:47:15 - 02:19:48:18 Eric Weinstein Right?

02:19:48:20 - 02:19:55:03 Eric Weinstein And then you look up Jordan Peterson, and I guarantee you it's going to be a war zone.

02:19:55:05 - 02:19:57:07 Eric Weinstein And now you fuze these two.

02:19:57:07 - 02:20:01:18 Eric Weinstein Things together, which is weaponized Wikipedia.

02:20:01:19 - 02:20:06:08 Eric Weinstein And factual Wikipedia.

02:20:06:10 - 02:20:14:00 Eric Weinstein And this is like some really dangerous new object. And I always knew that Wikipedia, the genius thing it was, had a.

02:20:14:02 - 02:20:14:19 Eric Weinstein Finite.

02:20:14:19 - 02:20:15:04 Eric Weinstein Shelf.

02:20:15:04 - 02:20:15:22 Eric Weinstein Life.

02:20:15:24 - 02:20:31:08 Eric Weinstein Because it made the fatal flaw of using authoritative sources as bedrock truth. What happens when trolls access to bedrock sources? What happens when the State Department or the Department of Homeland Security or the intelligence community or people who hate.

02:20:31:08 - 02:20:32:09 Eric Weinstein You.

02:20:32:11 - 02:21:01:04 Chris Williamson That the headlines that happened after my episode on Joe's show were it was the weekend that somebody had nudged the definition of recession on Wikipedia to no longer be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth and this was a monday and it happened over the weekend. I mentioned it and all hell broke loose, broke loose. It had already broken loose over the weekend.

02:21:01:04 - 02:21:04:15 Chris Williamson And then obviously anything Joe touches gets amplified too.

02:21:04:17 - 02:21:05:01 Eric Weinstein Right?

02:21:05:01 - 02:21:21:12 Chris Williamson High Heavens, you like. Okay, so the the definitions that we use, SHAPIRO calls it semantic overload. That's the battleground ultimately almost always.

02:21:21:12 - 02:21:21:23 Eric Weinstein Tell me the.

02:21:21:23 - 02:21:26:01 Eric Weinstein Frame and I'll tell you the argument. Like somebody will.

02:21:26:01 - 02:21:30:13 Eric Weinstein Say, you know.

02:21:30:15 - 02:21:34:19 Eric Weinstein Is it worth stopping Donald Trump by suppressing stories? Yes or no?

02:21:34:19 - 02:21:38:12 Eric Weinstein Go is like, well.

02:21:38:14 - 02:21:50:17 Eric Weinstein First of all, the question was designed to subsume that we have to stop Donald Trump. Now, I might agree that with that, I believe maybe we should stop Donald Trump.

02:21:50:19 - 02:21:51:09 Eric Weinstein But you did.

02:21:51:09 - 02:22:05:15 Eric Weinstein Make that the argument and then you piled on a question on top of it. You subsume that within frame. And so more or less, this is everything at the moment, which is if you can if you can define misgendering and dead naming, you've won.

02:22:05:19 - 02:22:24:09 Chris Williamson Arguing presupposes a world in which. Yeah, So I'll give you an example for the fledgling podcasters out there. When you first start doing a podcast, you're nervous that the guest doesn't like you. You're nervous that the guest isn't interested in you, that your question sucks, that your question doesn't make sense and you're terrified of silence among millions of other things.

02:22:24:09 - 02:22:26:04 Eric Weinstein Did any of those in this episode.

02:22:26:10 - 02:22:49:14 Chris Williamson Oh, you've been very welcoming. How could I not? After you serenaded me with you get to lately? It was a perfect aphrodisiac. So what you do, and what I notice with a lot of young new podcasters is they do what a multiple choice offering. So they'll ask you a question. Eric Mm. Trump 2024 What do you think's going to happen?

02:22:49:16 - 02:23:13:00 Chris Williamson Is it going to be and as soon as you say is it and you then create either a binary or a binary of options? Yeah, you have now not only you've restricted for the entire universe of different things that you could have come up with, I don't know, whatever you're going to say, I've given you two choices, so it makes it difficult for you to take a third because you need to say no and why no and why and then take right.

02:23:13:02 - 02:23:18:14 Chris Williamson So You often offer up this very narrow, very unique, dimensional landscape.

02:23:18:14 - 02:23:19:07 Eric Weinstein Exactly.

02:23:19:08 - 02:23:23:06 Chris Williamson And it ruins the conversation.

02:23:23:08 - 02:23:49:17 Eric Weinstein It's funny, Lex makes assumptions and so many of his frames that I own, we've but I think he gets like some of the best out of me as a guest. And there's something about weaving Lex's questions, which I hate doing to him because I want to just answer questions. But on the other hand, there's something about the process of weaving the assumptions that actually benefits some of our interaction.

02:23:49:17 - 02:23:52:08 Eric Weinstein So I think that there's a lot of.

02:23:52:08 - 02:23:57:07 Eric Weinstein This just grooming us.

02:23:57:09 - 02:24:01:16 Eric Weinstein Grooving us to only think about certain possibilities.

02:24:01:16 - 02:24:02:11 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

02:24:02:13 - 02:24:09:08 Eric Weinstein And what I don't know is how do you get.

02:24:09:10 - 02:24:11:22 Eric Weinstein Nuanced thought.

02:24:11:24 - 02:24:13:02 Eric Weinstein To propagate at the.

02:24:13:02 - 02:24:14:06 Eric Weinstein State of meme.

02:24:14:08 - 02:24:15:16 Chris Williamson To make it sexy.

02:24:15:18 - 02:24:37:02 Eric Weinstein Well, you know, to an extent I do this with acronyms, and the acronyms have taken off. But then there's a different population that gets very angry, which is why are you allowed to create we're allowed to create these memes, the distracted boyfriend, you know, but you're not allowed to create an acronym to make a concept sticky.

02:24:37:04 - 02:24:38:14 Eric Weinstein So what we're.

02:24:38:14 - 02:24:39:11 Eric Weinstein In is some sort.

02:24:39:11 - 02:24:41:10 Eric Weinstein Of warfare.

02:24:41:10 - 02:24:43:02 Eric Weinstein For mindshare.

02:24:43:04 - 02:24:52:11 Eric Weinstein And I'll be honest, I'm not seeing high level.

02:24:52:13 - 02:24:54:16 Eric Weinstein Interactions the way I was five years.

02:24:54:16 - 02:24:56:07 Eric Weinstein Ago between people.

02:24:56:07 - 02:24:58:01 Chris Williamson What's happened?

02:24:58:03 - 02:25:11:11 Eric Weinstein I think that they've done a pretty good job of disconnecting us. You remember the old data and society report where you looked at chains of association and the whole game was to tie everyone back to Milo Yiannopoulos or something.

02:25:11:11 - 02:25:31:23 Chris Williamson I So I got to interject. I go to Qatar to, do this debate about masculinity about six months ago, and they put up I'm one of the segments I was pro-traditional masculinity and there was a gentleman on the other side and they said here is a montage of some unspeakable people that represent masculinity. And it was Joe Rogan and John Peterson and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:25:32:01 - 02:26:00:20 Chris Williamson But the first person was Milo Yiannopoulos. I said, Look, if you have brought me to the Middle East to defend Milo Yiannopoulos, did you have brought the wrong person? I'm like, You know that we need to shift that, get that to one side. Milo can go over there. Do you see his debate with destiny that, you know, a couple of weeks ago, maybe three months ago now, Milo looked like a old touring singer in a rock band, still doing the shows but can't hit the high notes anymore.

02:26:00:22 - 02:26:31:19 Chris Williamson And he the whimsy yeah. And that sort of playful jester joker kind of game gamesmanship had been abandoned in place of bottom of the barrel backbiting and genuine emotional sniping. And then Dustin he said after he's been pushed and pushed and pushed for 90 minutes. Yeah he says to Destiny, Uh, back in the olden times, they would have left your kind on the side of a hill to die.

02:26:31:21 - 02:26:46:21 Chris Williamson And Destiny said, Well, I think that the gays would have been left there first. Milo said, Well, I don't think that you can tell whether a baby's going to like Dick when it comes out or not. Dustin He said, Well, you'd know all about young boys liking, wouldn't you?

02:26:46:23 - 02:26:48:03 Eric Weinstein Wow.

02:26:48:05 - 02:27:02:13 Chris Williamson And it broke Milo. It broke his brain. So what? Sorry. What was that? A no one had any sympathy because for 90 minutes he called Destiny's wife, a public flashlight. He'd said everything under the sun.

02:27:02:15 - 02:27:05:22 Eric Weinstein Why are we dealing with these people?

02:27:05:24 - 02:27:19:15 Chris Williamson Because it is entertainment. It is mental masturbation. It's a story about people will always be more seductive to a broader group than a story about ideas.

02:27:19:17 - 02:27:25:10 Eric Weinstein Got it. I think Mara, I don't know. I just.

02:27:25:14 - 02:27:26:09 Chris Williamson Despairing so.

02:27:26:09 - 02:27:27:22 Eric Weinstein Much stuff.

02:27:27:23 - 02:27:30:02 Eric Weinstein So much beauty in this world.

02:27:30:04 - 02:27:30:19 Eric Weinstein And I just.

02:27:30:19 - 02:27:33:03 Eric Weinstein I wonder at what point does middle school lunch.

02:27:33:03 - 02:27:41:19 Eric Weinstein Table when you compare it to amino.

02:27:41:19 - 02:27:48:19 Eric Weinstein Acids, you compare it to.

02:27:48:21 - 02:27:52:21 Eric Weinstein Oh, you go scuba diving.

02:27:52:23 - 02:27:54:07 Chris Williamson I have done I suck.

02:27:54:07 - 02:27:55:18 Eric Weinstein What's the most beautiful place you've gone?

02:27:55:18 - 02:28:01:14 Chris Williamson Scuba dive gili ti off the coast of Bali.

02:28:01:17 - 02:28:03:08 Eric Weinstein Okay.

02:28:03:10 - 02:28:19:08 Eric Weinstein I remember scuba diving off Jungle Island and Bali and amazing. But the Red Sea totally blew my mind. I can't tell you how little I care about Yiannopoulos and how much I care about scuba diving in the Red Sea.

02:28:19:10 - 02:28:24:13 Eric Weinstein I don't know. Maybe I'm just wrong. There's something wrong. It's just to get.

02:28:24:13 - 02:28:24:23 Eric Weinstein Back to.

02:28:24:23 - 02:28:26:00 Eric Weinstein It. We all used to.

02:28:26:00 - 02:28:28:05 Eric Weinstein Talk to each other.

02:28:28:07 - 02:28:28:21 Eric Weinstein And then this.

02:28:28:21 - 02:28:30:04 Eric Weinstein Thing started dividing.

02:28:30:04 - 02:28:32:23 Eric Weinstein Us.

02:28:33:00 - 02:28:41:18 Eric Weinstein You know, he started seeing all these message. Oh, your boys said this. Your boys said that. Time to come collect your boy. It's like, who talks like this?

02:28:41:20 - 02:28:42:10 Chris Williamson The Internet.

02:28:42:10 - 02:28:48:13 Eric Weinstein And then we stop seeing each other in our feeds.

02:28:48:15 - 02:28:49:11 Eric Weinstein And I said.

02:28:49:11 - 02:29:00:13 Eric Weinstein Well, oh, this is vagina. Got a under Jack Dorsey. Jack had gotten some system whereby he took his hands off it because he knew that terrible things had to be done.

02:29:00:13 - 02:29:01:14 Eric Weinstein I think.

02:29:01:16 - 02:29:26:06 Eric Weinstein And he just had this idea, well, if I have to intercede at Twitter, then something has gone wrong with the system. Then you had this person who was just very happy bringing health to the the Internet, but it disconnected all of us. It was very clear that our engagement just dropped. And then if you complained about it, it was because you actually sucked and nobody cared about your tweets and you had no idea where you were.

02:29:26:08 - 02:29:33:06 Eric Weinstein And so all of this kind of good feeling evaporated in part because people didn't know how to fight as a as a team.

02:29:33:06 - 02:29:35:08 Eric Weinstein And this is just.

02:29:35:10 - 02:29:43:03 Eric Weinstein I would love to get back to the mascot masculinity riff a little bit. I don't think men how to fight as groups.

02:29:43:05 - 02:29:46:08 Eric Weinstein And it's a key part.

02:29:46:10 - 02:29:59:21 Eric Weinstein About masculinity and it really makes me upset to see all of these people in individual masculine space. Like if you're ever faced with three attackers, two of whom have knives and one of whom has a gun.

02:29:59:23 - 02:30:02:01 Eric Weinstein Here's your best. It's like like.

02:30:02:01 - 02:30:02:13 Eric Weinstein You know.

02:30:02:16 - 02:30:03:15 Eric Weinstein You don't know.

02:30:03:17 - 02:30:04:23 Eric Weinstein You've never faced this, which.

02:30:05:04 - 02:30:08:10 Chris Williamson Is the best move to have a group of five friends with you.

02:30:08:12 - 02:30:13:04 Eric Weinstein Well, first of all, yes.

02:30:13:06 - 02:30:16:14 Eric Weinstein And having people's back.

02:30:16:16 - 02:30:34:03 Chris Williamson And so there's a there's a this is something that I've spent an awful lot of time over the last couple of years filming about. The definition of addiction is that you can find fulfillment alone is something that I heard a few weeks ago.

02:30:34:04 - 02:30:38:05 Eric Weinstein Okay.

02:30:38:07 - 02:30:57:18 Chris Williamson The atomization of everybody, the generalized risk aversion syndrome that we are seeing, something called extended adolescence, a slow life strategy from Jean Tanguy talking about young people are getting the driver's license, don't.

02:30:57:18 - 02:31:01:08 Eric Weinstein Know it but like it immediately from the title.

02:31:01:10 - 02:31:39:22 Chris Williamson People getting their driver's licenses later, they're partying less. They're drinking less, They're leaving home later, they're getting occupation, starting jobs later. Could this have been contributed to through COVID? Yeah, probably. But it was catalyzed was already a trend that was happening. It's affecting men, particularly because male friendship groups are more fragile in some regards than women's. In 1990, the number of men who said they had zero close friends was around about 3%.

02:31:39:24 - 02:31:41:24 Chris Williamson 2020, that number was 15%.

02:31:42:05 - 02:31:43:00 Eric Weinstein That's insane.

02:31:43:01 - 02:32:05:09 Chris Williamson The most common answer to the question How many friends could you call on in an emergency is zero the most common? It's not the average, but it's the most common. More people have zero friends to call them than have any other number. The challenge of modern masculinity relates to that addiction. Quote the belief you can find fulfillment alone.

02:32:05:09 - 02:32:17:16 Chris Williamson And you see this in the sigma male mean sigma male grind set, you know? No, no, no. So you have, you know, alpha, beta, the sort of red pill, the blue pill, the purple pills halfway between the two.

02:32:17:22 - 02:32:18:18 Eric Weinstein I don't know either.

02:32:18:18 - 02:32:44:13 Chris Williamson Okay. So the sigma male steps outside of the existing hierarchy. He doesn't try to lead. He doesn't try to do anything. He is a lone Ranger law unto himself over the top of a lot of this matter. Mine, which is being created, is a guy called Chris State, who is a three time, four time classic physique champion. Mr. Olympia Classic physique is they have weight limits, which means that they have much more Arnold esque.

02:32:44:13 - 02:33:13:12 Chris Williamson It's all about shape and sculpture. Massive, but not a mass monster. Phil Heath was sat in that seat not long ago. Mass Monster. I sit down with Chris, this guy who is the face of the Sigma male mean. Okay, perhaps the one of the driving forces behind young male belief at the moment. And I asked him how much of what you've done and achieved in business, in personal life and in your sport could you have done on your own zero?

02:33:13:14 - 02:33:38:06 Chris Williamson I could have done none of it. I couldn't have gotten through the difficult times emotionally without my fiancee. I couldn't have built my personal brand to do my best friend and videographer Calvin. I couldn't have run my business without Vaughn and my other business partners that are here. I couldn't have done any of this stuff. And this is the guy that he's the ice tub as there's dubstep music over the top of him saying You don't need anybody else, and so on and so forth.

02:33:38:08 - 02:34:18:00 Chris Williamson The belief that you can find fulfillment alone is a lie. It is a lie that people who have been hurt and scorned and by the world retreat into their is a safety blanket of cynicism that people can use it sour grapes at an existential level. The belief that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure and the generalized risk aversion, the extended adolescence, the slow life strategy permits that to seep evermore into people's lives.

02:34:18:00 - 02:34:26:23 Chris Williamson In a world where we have hyper convenience, why should I feel discomfort?

02:34:27:00 - 02:34:31:03 Eric Weinstein So what's going on with the modern masculinity movement?

02:34:31:05 - 02:34:48:15 Chris Williamson It's fractured. So there is the manosphere, which is the broad term that describes people talking to men. I've never identified with it. I'm not a part of it. Okay. In as much as speak to men about things that I struggled with and they listen. Perhaps someone could put me in it, but I, I, I don't think that they help.

02:34:48:17 - 02:35:23:22 Chris Williamson I think fundamentally at the moment, the masculinity sees women as adversaries and competitors rather than compatriots. I think that they are they treat women largely like an enemy to be avoided or a resource to be used and discarded. I think that largely much of men's advice benefits some men at the expense of most others, that if being a high value man means sleeping with as many women as possible, but a low value woman is a woman that slept with many men, what you are doing is creating a wake after you that other men have to pick up the pieces of.

02:35:24:02 - 02:35:41:20 Chris Williamson If your goal is to be this high value, many high body count male. I think that let me give you this. So this is actually going into a paper, my first academic paper that I've ever been a part of. All right, So this is the male sedation hypothesis.

02:35:41:22 - 02:35:43:03 Eric Weinstein Okay?

02:35:43:05 - 02:36:03:10 Chris Williamson There's a an effect called young male syndrome. You heard of this? Now, if you have a large number of dispossessed, sexless men throughout all of history, bad things happen. Yeah, testosterone drops when you get in relationship, It drops again once you have kids. This means in large part that women domesticate, men in some.

02:36:03:10 - 02:36:05:15 Eric Weinstein Regard, they have to.

02:36:05:17 - 02:36:33:16 Chris Williamson You don't want to take risk taking behavior when you've got a newborn at home. Don't jump off that fucking cliff, okay? Like, let's be go home up. So when you have large numbers of dispossessed young men who aren't having sex, what's their reason for integrating into society? They take a brilliant study is done of men crossing the road and the difference between when they cross and the distance from the nearest car with or without the presence of women.

02:36:33:18 - 02:36:56:24 Chris Williamson You put a woman there, the distance closes massively. No women that they're not bothered. Risk taking behavior is a show. Look at my access Fitness. Yeah, look at of these risks that I can take. Look at the plumage on the back of my of my tail. Right. So throughout all of history, it seems like they set cars on fire and push over granny and caused havoc in Portugal 1700s.

02:36:57:01 - 02:37:19:06 Chris Williamson They the first son there was a disparity in the sex ratio. Not sure why the first son was allowed to marry. Every subsequent son was put on a ship. Go explore the new world. Don't burn our home was what they were saying. There is a question. We have very high rates of sex, lawlessness, and we have very low rates of integration amongst young men at the moment.

02:37:19:08 - 02:37:36:13 Chris Williamson Why are we not seeing them going around and setting up, setting Shazam! Fine. There is a Jordan Peterson was featured as the Incel God in it. He inspired a movie by Olivia Wilde, starring Harry Styles. A little while ago I brought it up to Jordan and.

02:37:36:15 - 02:37:37:19 Eric Weinstein The Incel Guide.

02:37:37:23 - 02:37:40:06 Chris Williamson He was the king of the Incels. Yes, that's insane.

02:37:40:06 - 02:37:44:08 Eric Weinstein I am so pissed to hear this.

02:37:44:10 - 02:37:46:15 Chris Williamson John laughed it off in classic hymn fashion.

02:37:46:15 - 02:38:16:22 Eric Weinstein Yeah, but as a guy who who opened for Jordan Peterson on harmonica, I've been to some of his shows. Jordan Peterson recognized this demographic early, and he had the courage to speak directly to it. And if you want to see something, you want to see me break out in tears, have me tell you the stories about the people who went up to Jordan Peterson and said I was smoking weed masturbating in my parents basement.

02:38:16:24 - 02:38:25:05 Eric Weinstein And six months later, I've got a job, I've got prospects, I've got a fiancee, etc., etc..

02:38:25:07 - 02:38:26:07 Eric Weinstein And to turn.

02:38:26:07 - 02:38:35:07 Eric Weinstein Him into the Incel King or whatever. Now Jordan Peterson tried to become the one person answer to the uncle shortage.

02:38:35:09 - 02:38:37:01 Eric Weinstein Okay?

02:38:37:03 - 02:39:10:11 Eric Weinstein And I just have no patience for dismissing that much good. If if some of his message seemed off to you, it's because you didn't need it. You didn't understand what clean your room was about. You laughed it off because you weren't screwed. And he gave people a pass just the way Sam gave people a path from that abusive religious household where they didn't know to escape and, you know, to to an extent, all of these people spoke to people at different stages in their lives.

02:39:10:13 - 02:39:13:08 Eric Weinstein A lot of this female behavior, which is, oh, you.

02:39:13:08 - 02:39:14:08 Eric Weinstein Know, I'm.

02:39:14:08 - 02:39:20:24 Eric Weinstein On only fans, I'm going to get my this, I'm going to get my that. Well, good luck to you. I hope it works out.

02:39:21:01 - 02:39:25:11 Eric Weinstein But the gold digging or the misogyny.

02:39:25:13 - 02:39:32:10 Eric Weinstein It's of a piece. People are listening to each other's strategic conversation and saying why would I want that for my life?

02:39:32:12 - 02:40:01:15 Chris Williamson So I'll round out the sedation hypothesis. You have this large cohort dispossessed young men, high tech, high risk taking. They cause problems. There's a question to be asked, although many of the almost all mass shooters, including the ones that hit all of the headlines, were sexless. Young men. Given that we have the highest rates of senselessness amongst young men that we've seen in a very long time, there is a question why have we not seen an in-kind increase anti-social behavior?

02:40:01:17 - 02:40:15:02 Chris Williamson It's my belief that young men specifically are being sedated out of their status, seeking and risk taking and reproductive behavior through a combination of social media, porn and video games.

02:40:15:04 - 02:40:17:00 Eric Weinstein I was waiting for it.

02:40:17:02 - 02:40:19:04 Chris Williamson So there is an idea from Diana's sorry.

02:40:19:07 - 02:40:31:12 Eric Weinstein Social porn and video games does not include weed. I think ubiquitous weed.

02:40:31:14 - 02:40:37:00 Chris Williamson The motivation killer.

02:40:37:02 - 02:40:37:16 Eric Weinstein We don't have a.

02:40:37:16 - 02:41:00:04 Eric Weinstein Ton of culture around open weed. We have a lot of culture around open alcohol about open coffee. We used to have culture around open nicotine. We don't have a lot of culture around open. We do have culture around closed weed, surreptitious weed. Yeah, but I do think that in part the video game thing is an absolute as if drug.

02:41:00:06 - 02:41:02:06 Chris Williamson What's a.

02:41:02:08 - 02:41:02:19 Eric Weinstein You meet.

02:41:02:19 - 02:41:17:00 Eric Weinstein People who come from the gaming community or social media and they have an idea that life permits you to do certain things that are absolutely not tolerated in civil society, like a lot of the people.

02:41:17:02 - 02:41:17:20 Eric Weinstein Yeah, an.

02:41:17:20 - 02:41:42:05 Eric Weinstein Interesting feature of social media is the difference critics and trolls who call you name and people who actually try to find a way to ruin your life offline. There's A huge connection between the gaming community and certain sort of bulletin boards and this freak game about how can we destroy people offline.

02:41:42:07 - 02:41:43:13 Eric Weinstein Yeah, yeah.

02:41:43:15 - 02:42:00:22 Eric Weinstein So and once you meet these people and you and you read their messages to each other, they're talking about, oh yeah, I've got a cool exploit where going to invite somebody to so-and-so's house because I think that person might be dangerous. You realize it's a video game.

02:42:01:02 - 02:42:02:12 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

02:42:02:14 - 02:42:27:16 Chris Williamson Yeah. So I had this idea specifically about Jordan, but it would apply to yourself. It applied to Joe after a while. There is a particular threshold of exposure, notoriety that people cross, and when they do, they are no longer treated like a human. It's easy online to dehumanize because you don't see any. They're there, you don't see that.

02:42:27:21 - 02:42:49:00 Chris Williamson But there's something specific about crossing a particular threshold where you're no longer a person, you're a representation of ideas, you're a conglomeration of viewpoints. And I think that really allows people to dehumanize the other side. Really. There is no one reading these tweets. You think Jordan Peterson's reading these tweets about the Incel God thing?

02:42:49:02 - 02:42:50:24 Eric Weinstein Yeah. Is he I don't know.

02:42:51:01 - 02:43:14:13 Chris Williamson I think he is. I think Jordan Spence, I would I would love Jordan. Spend less time on Twitter. Okay. I think that would be I think that that would be good. But even if they're not, there is a person there that is the representation of the person. And I don't know, like saying something to somebody online that wouldn't say to their face to me seems like a coward's way of.

02:43:14:13 - 02:43:15:02 Eric Weinstein Communicating.

02:43:15:02 - 02:43:27:10 Eric Weinstein Or you view it as an adaptive landscape, which is new exploits have been created. I mean, if I explained to you a mosquito life cycle, okay, you're going to find somebody with excess blood, you're going to steal some for yourself.

02:43:27:12 - 02:43:30:05 Chris Williamson That's my video guy. He's been eaten alive since been in L.A..

02:43:30:08 - 02:43:30:21 Eric Weinstein Is that right?

02:43:30:22 - 02:43:31:17 Eric Weinstein Yeah. Okay.

02:43:31:17 - 02:43:36:01 Eric Weinstein But you see the same cookie cutter sharks do the same thing for large.

02:43:36:03 - 02:43:36:20 Eric Weinstein Marine.

02:43:36:20 - 02:43:59:23 Eric Weinstein Wildlife. They'll just take a plug of flesh out. It's like can't afford to go after cookie cutter sharks when you have those kinds of strategies. Am I going to sit around in the ocean and say, No, that's not a legitimate strategy. You're a parasite. It's like, yeah, like, like that's my whole game where I'm a predator. I just murder things for a living.

02:44:00:00 - 02:44:09:10 Eric Weinstein It's really what predation is about. And in a certain sense, what you've done is you've changed the adaptive. And these are the new exploits.

02:44:09:12 - 02:44:17:16 Chris Williamson Yes. So they to get back to the video games, porn and social media, Diana Fleischman has idea she calls uncanny vulvas.

02:44:17:18 - 02:44:18:15 Eric Weinstein And tell me why.

02:44:18:18 - 02:44:48:18 Chris Williamson She says that porn has been able to hijack the meat seeking behavior specifically of men by giving a very titrated dose of what it is that they would usually get, which means that part of that motivation to go out and do the risk taking behavior has been tuned down. But what you get from video games, you get camaraderie, you get progressive overload in terms of your achievements.

02:44:48:24 - 02:45:06:16 Chris Williamson You get a sense of belonging, you get dopamine when you achieve something, you may even get some serotonin because you feel like you're lumped together with a group of friends. Okay? And then what you get on social media. With social media, we've gamified the status hierarchy. It's that there's a number right in front of you and there are levels that you can get to.

02:45:06:16 - 02:45:36:23 Chris Williamson That's your silver plaque on YouTube. That's your gold plaque, that's your blue tick. Look who followed me today. Elon Musk followed me today. Whatever, whatever. I got a retweet from Paul Graham. It has been able to and I don't necessarily think that this was by design. It could be by by side effect. It has been able to specifically for men, maybe also for women give a titrated dose of most of the key drivers that got people out of the house to go and do things.

02:45:37:00 - 02:46:07:12 Chris Williamson Scott Galloway trended earlier on for saying that unless you're asleep as a young person, you shouldn't be in the house. And his point is, is for living. There is lots for you to learn outside. Fuck off, go out, Come on. And he got tons and tons of pushback and maybe he's wrong, but when I get advice sometimes on Q&A, people will say young guys and girls will message and say, I'm 13 and I love your podcast.

02:46:07:14 - 02:46:24:18 Chris Williamson What the fuck you? Fantastic. You are in a growth period that is unbelievable and the people that you're getting exposed to. I wish that I'd been I'd had access to it. 13. What should I do if I want to improve myself? What books should I read? What practices should I do that I don't mean to be patronizing, but just go outside and live life.

02:46:24:24 - 02:46:57:24 Chris Williamson There is so much low hanging fruit from knowing what it's like to have an argument with your friend and having to cycle home with a flat tire. You just things. There is so many life experiences that I think you will gain massive amounts. Huge, huge amounts of benefit from over and above a two day lessons. I mean, my friend George had this conception of two day lessons and three D lessons, so a2d lesson would be reading about Warren Buffett's wealth through an autobiography or watching it a3d lesson would be hanging out with Warren Buffett in his house for an afternoon.

02:46:58:01 - 02:47:18:06 Chris Williamson And no matter how immersive we try and make learning, three D lessons are always going to win because you can't. You can't forget them. They're so visceral. And in a world where most of our time an increasing proportion of our time is spent online, the in-person D lessons become more, more and more powerful. So this is my conception of the male cetacean hypothesis.

02:47:18:08 - 02:47:26:01 Eric Weinstein Hmm. How do you how do you judge.

02:47:26:01 - 02:47:30:05 Eric Weinstein Our sperm counts and testosterone over time?

02:47:30:07 - 02:47:37:12 Chris Williamson Yeah. So there's some evidence, Andrew Human showed some evidence that although sperm counts are decreasing, penis length is increasing, which.

02:47:37:14 - 02:47:38:09 Eric Weinstein But that's.

02:47:38:09 - 02:47:38:17 Chris Williamson I don't.

02:47:38:17 - 02:47:41:00 Eric Weinstein Know if if I recall.

02:47:41:00 - 02:47:41:16 Eric Weinstein Correctly.

02:47:41:16 - 02:47:42:22 Eric Weinstein And I.

02:47:42:24 - 02:47:43:11 Eric Weinstein Hesitate.

02:47:43:11 - 02:47:46:03 Chris Williamson To get in get into your penis literature. Eric Yeah.

02:47:46:05 - 02:47:48:05 Eric Weinstein Well.

02:47:48:07 - 02:48:01:06 Eric Weinstein There is some tradeoff in various reproductive systems between things that we would classically associate with with masculinity. So for example, dung beetles have weaponry, their head called antlers.

02:48:01:08 - 02:48:03:13 Eric Weinstein Giant hook and.

02:48:03:13 - 02:48:08:08 Eric Weinstein Their copula tree apparatus and their antler is in inverse proportion.

02:48:08:10 - 02:48:10:15 Chris Williamson It's the gorilla and chimp thing again, right.

02:48:10:17 - 02:48:29:07 Eric Weinstein That one of them has lots of testicles and very little penis length and the other one has the reverse. So you have a lot of these conserved systems where somehow reproduction says you can have this many total resources, but you have to figure out how to budget between various things that appear to be strongly masculine.

02:48:29:09 - 02:48:54:18 Chris Williamson So I think that declining testosterone is a big concern. I would say that it certainly contributes to a generalized change in male behavior risk taking. You know, it is it talk about, oh, and women that take birth control can impact the local ecology of male testosterone by basically making it feel like they're around infertile women when they're not.

02:48:54:18 - 02:49:08:04 Chris Williamson They're just artificially suppressed women. That impacts a man's testosterone, men that are around weapons. If you walked past a table of guns, yeah, testosterone would go up. We walk up, there's a chain saw over there. So perhaps it's already high. I'm not sure.

02:49:08:06 - 02:49:12:22 Eric Weinstein And we'll see how many volleys we can get.

02:49:12:24 - 02:49:13:24 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

02:49:14:01 - 02:49:38:13 Chris Williamson Do football, freestyle. The issues of sperm count, the issue of testosterone production, I think contributes to this in a large way. What it is that's causing this, is it phthalates in the water? Is it women peeing out their birth control and we've got estrogens in the water supply. Is it the foods that we're eating it, seed oils? Is it the lack of time outside?

02:49:38:13 - 02:49:55:16 Chris Williamson Is it grounding? Is it you know, there are a whole host of things that are contributing to this. But I started working with a blood testing company, Marine Health, about six months ago and had my blood stem for the first time. The testosterone was about 500 and I'm 35 and I think it should be higher than that. So what should I do now?

02:49:55:16 - 02:50:22:06 Chris Williamson Give me some lifestyle interventions and some boron that frees up free from sex hormone binding globulin and blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, non-pharmaceutical interventions. But they gave me a ton of lifestyle ones. I had my bloods done a couple of weeks ago and it was 900 over the last six months. There's been a some minor noticeable changes to my demeanor, one of them being I'm more aggressive, like my frustrations come to the fore of it.

02:50:22:08 - 02:50:27:21 Eric Weinstein And so, I mean, I'm dying to ask, are you first of all, you married?

02:50:27:23 - 02:50:28:18 Chris Williamson No. In a relationship?

02:50:28:19 - 02:50:31:01 Eric Weinstein In a relationship.

02:50:31:03 - 02:50:33:24 Eric Weinstein Do you find that women.

02:50:34:01 - 02:50:55:16 Eric Weinstein Heterosexual women, respond to classical masculinity have to be very careful as I ask, because they certainly respond more than they're supposed to according to modern rules of femininity. But my guess is that it's greatly decreased out from the market for masculinity in the sixties, let's say.

02:50:55:20 - 02:50:57:09 Eric Weinstein So look.

02:50:57:11 - 02:51:40:20 Chris Williamson Again, inter and intra sexual something I've spent an awful lot of time learning about. I'm writing a book at the moment with David Buss, evolutionary psychologist on this in the early 20 tens after the success of 50 Shades of Gray, there was a proliferation of dark romance novels, and they there was a pushback from the feminism movement saying that the portrayals of men as dominant, masculine, bearded, big chested in a loincloth or a plaid shirt wielding an ax wasn't what women wanted.

02:51:40:20 - 02:51:42:05 Chris Williamson They wanted a softer, more of.

02:51:42:05 - 02:51:44:07 Eric Weinstein The brawny guy or the Marlboro Man.

02:51:44:08 - 02:51:45:01 Eric Weinstein Right?

02:51:45:03 - 02:51:53:10 Chris Williamson They wanted a softer version of this. So they started putting more agreeable, more feminized men on the front cover of books that didn't sell.

02:51:53:12 - 02:51:57:09 Eric Weinstein Right. But I wouldn't guess that either of those would be where modern women's heads would be.

02:51:57:14 - 02:51:58:18 Eric Weinstein Now.

02:51:58:20 - 02:52:12:19 Chris Williamson In the space of ten years. So I think that there's a there's massively a difference between stated and revealed preferences. Sure. Right. And also to, you know, to caveat that the thing that you may sexually fantasize about is not necessarily what you want to get into a relationship with. Guys will say.

02:52:12:19 - 02:52:13:24 Eric Weinstein Say more.

02:52:14:01 - 02:52:20:01 Chris Williamson That what you optimize for in a one night stand and what you optimize for in a marriage partner aren't always necessarily the same. I would.

02:52:20:01 - 02:52:21:23 Eric Weinstein Think they would be wildly disparate.

02:52:22:00 - 02:52:22:09 Eric Weinstein Tracked.

02:52:22:15 - 02:52:36:07 Chris Williamson Which means that the front cover of the romance novel is not necessarily the partner that you want long term, that the one that you want to fantasize about. Most of these stories are driven by sex rather than driven by love.

02:52:36:09 - 02:52:40:15 Eric Weinstein So I have this hypothesis and I wonder if you have names for all sorts of things that.

02:52:40:21 - 02:52:46:11 Chris Williamson Leapt before you give me a I just need to punch this up. Your acronym. You're a penchant for acronym acronyms.

02:52:46:12 - 02:52:47:09 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

02:52:47:11 - 02:53:06:15 Chris Williamson And a friend Mary says meme first. Explain later. And I think that some of my favorite episodes, they rely on aphorisms. They rely on creating memes. Sure. Small, quippy razors and so on and so forth. First off, because it makes it easy to remember, but secondly, because that's what gets the hooks into you. This is how make things.

02:53:06:20 - 02:53:24:23 Chris Williamson So if you are somebody that's listening, that has an idea that really loves that idea, give it a name, give it a name and give it a cool name. Yeah. I came up with the same Cecil the other day, which is that on your way up, people want to support you because you remind them of their dreams. When you're at the top, they tell you down because you remind them of what they gave up on.

02:53:25:03 - 02:53:35:10 Chris Williamson Yeah, yeah. Cecil Beautiful. And not even if it's fucking wrong. You can't forget it. So it's good right now. As you were saying.

02:53:35:12 - 02:53:37:15 Eric Weinstein That when women.

02:53:37:17 - 02:53:58:12 Eric Weinstein When heterosexual women realize that they have several possible life cycles and they don't have a clear sense of which one they will actually live. Am I going to get married and raise children and be at home with the children? Am I going to get married and have one child, maybe two, and be a career person? Am I never going to couple but have children?

02:53:58:18 - 02:54:03:07 Eric Weinstein Am I going to have no children whatsoever? Am I going to do that in a coupled situation.

02:54:03:09 - 02:54:05:01 Eric Weinstein Now.

02:54:05:03 - 02:54:09:06 Eric Weinstein Their decision trees blow out as to what it is that they're actually.

02:54:09:06 - 02:54:11:05 Eric Weinstein Looking for.

02:54:11:07 - 02:54:14:23 Eric Weinstein And one of my strong senses.

02:54:15:00 - 02:54:17:10 Eric Weinstein Is that women.

02:54:17:12 - 02:54:43:11 Eric Weinstein Encountered something they weren't expecting, which is that they might even be smarter than the guy at work who they're competing with. But he's happy to come in all of Saturday, all of Sunday and work hours that are completely psychotic. And so then the idea of, well, we need work life balance. We don't want people coming in on Friday and Saturday because that's sort of an unfair advantage that somebody who wants a healthy life.

02:54:43:13 - 02:54:43:21 Eric Weinstein Is.

02:54:44:00 - 02:55:25:17 Eric Weinstein Different from somebody who wants an extreme life. And so now you have this problem, which is I'm attracted to the sort of man I wouldn't want to compete with at work if I'm going to be in the office, I want to know that I'm not going to have to deal with the guy who's willing to give up every weekend and work hours that I'm unwilling to work because that's not how I'm set at the factory versus I want that guy as the go getter while I'm pregnant and incapacitated and raising children to make sure that not only he can shepherd our family through anything because he's highly capable, but can also get me back into

02:55:25:17 - 02:55:47:03 Eric Weinstein the workforce when I'm done raising children and this is somewhat what I believe is responsible for the sort of incoherent messages that men and women are sending to each is that when we don't know what life cycle we are going to be inhabiting, our eroticism.

02:55:47:05 - 02:55:47:17 Eric Weinstein And our.

02:55:47:20 - 02:55:51:22 Eric Weinstein Romance and our desire is unstable.

02:55:51:24 - 02:56:16:03 Chris Williamson One of the most uncomfortable correlations that I've found over the last few years is that as gender inequality, pay inequality between the genders increases relationship satisfaction for both men and women increases as well. So it decreases the more egalitarian, the more equal the pay, the less satisfied both sexes are with relationships.

02:56:16:08 - 02:56:17:14 Eric Weinstein Hmm.

02:56:17:16 - 02:56:51:22 Chris Williamson Men who are in relationships where the woman is the primary breadwinner are 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication, where a woman is contributing more than 70% of the household income, the marriage is twice as likely to end in divorce. Women for a man sorry for a woman to move herself the same distance on a ten point scale in terms of attractiveness that a man can, by increasing his income by $100,000, she would need to 10,000 times increase in income.

02:56:51:24 - 02:57:06:03 Chris Williamson In short, women are interested socioeconomically in the status of their partner in a way that men aren't. Now, the problem that you have is that women now have access to education and employment in a way that they never have done before, so they're no longer financially dependent on men. Sure.

02:57:06:03 - 02:57:41:03 Eric Weinstein But you're seeing something which is particularly heartbreaking in my group of females, which would be women in their mid to late fifties. I have to be honest, I've seen some the women I was most impressed by never coupling. And when when you talk to them, there's some very uncomfortable things that get said. One of which was I was looking for a man I could look up to and the pool was just so small and and, you know, you're thinking, well, okay, it's illegal to say I'm looking for a man that I could look up to, Right.

02:57:41:03 - 02:57:47:05 Eric Weinstein Because that's not in accordance with modern feminism egalitarianism. But on the other hand, this idea.

02:57:47:05 - 02:57:48:15 Eric Weinstein That when.

02:57:48:21 - 02:57:58:00 Eric Weinstein Are, you know, one of the world's leading chemists or something, there's just not that many men that are going to be in that position.

02:57:58:01 - 02:58:14:08 Chris Williamson I got another main theme. Yeah, this is I got in a lot of trouble for this. It's called The Tall Girl Problem. So if you stand atop your own status hierarchy, it's very difficult to find somebody else across in a book for meals. And if you're a six foot one girl without heels, you're looking at professional athletes and two women.

02:58:14:08 - 02:58:23:09 Chris Williamson For every woman completing a four year U.S. college degree by 2030, between the ages of 21 and 29, women earn £1,111 more on average than their male counterparts.

02:58:23:14 - 02:58:23:20 Eric Weinstein Right.

02:58:23:21 - 02:58:37:02 Chris Williamson But women still have this vestigial attraction to the man who is across in a book from them. That's high polygamy. And this means that as you rise up through your own dominance hierarchy, it amounts to a opportunity of diminishing returns.

02:58:37:02 - 02:58:41:13 Eric Weinstein But then why are we not allowed to build better men? I mean, this is the really this.

02:58:41:13 - 02:58:46:10 Eric Weinstein Is this thing that just floors me I'm now through.

02:58:46:11 - 02:58:54:21 Eric Weinstein Through being a father, looking at the subset of young men who are absolutely.

02:58:54:21 - 02:58:55:05 Eric Weinstein Looking.

02:58:55:05 - 02:59:00:22 Eric Weinstein To crush it. And the advice they're being given is so horrific.

02:59:01:02 - 02:59:09:01 Eric Weinstein What like? Well, that doesn't seem mentally healthy. And, you know, I.

02:59:09:01 - 02:59:12:24 Eric Weinstein Think it's much better for you to sort of enjoy this time with everyone.

02:59:12:24 - 02:59:21:02 Eric Weinstein Else. And, you know, it's just like watering down raw ambition and.

02:59:21:04 - 02:59:24:01 Eric Weinstein You know, is it ludicrous? Who said get out the way.

02:59:24:03 - 02:59:26:16 Eric Weinstein You know, get out of the.

02:59:26:16 - 02:59:27:10 Eric Weinstein Way of these.

02:59:27:10 - 02:59:30:07 Eric Weinstein People? These people want.

02:59:30:09 - 02:59:36:11 Eric Weinstein To invest and blow your socks off and just do amazing things. And there's some administrator.

02:59:36:13 - 02:59:44:10 Eric Weinstein Or nanny or Nurse Ratchet who's like well, that would be arrogant. We can't have that. And you're saying, I don't.

02:59:44:10 - 02:59:45:09 Eric Weinstein Think you understand.

02:59:45:09 - 02:59:48:13 Eric Weinstein It, but ambition.

02:59:48:15 - 02:59:51:00 Eric Weinstein Is a necessary input for certain.

02:59:51:00 - 02:59:52:11 Eric Weinstein Humans.

02:59:52:13 - 03:00:09:21 Eric Weinstein And if you sit there and say, why do you have a right to innovate when nobody else has innovated? Or don't you realize that your go getter personality during the COVID situation was based on your privilege? And in fact, a lot of other people are suffering from mental health issues just.

03:00:09:23 - 03:00:10:20 Eric Weinstein Why am I.

03:00:10:20 - 03:00:27:17 Eric Weinstein Taking the most promising people and tying them to the most damaged people? Why not instead take the most promising people and have them get a PhD by the age of 2021 and study what to do for their for their fellow souls who are struggling.

03:00:27:19 - 03:00:31:14 Chris Williamson Do you remember when Elon took over Twitter and he started to rip out the tech team?

03:00:31:15 - 03:00:32:07 Eric Weinstein Yeah.

03:00:32:09 - 03:01:05:00 Chris Williamson And he said, I want to make Twitter a place where the people who want to work the hardest on the biggest problems come and work. And people said they looked at that and said, this is going back to an archaic form of Silicon Valley where people are forced to sleep under desks and it's a blah, blah, blah. Those people do not have theory of mind to understand what it's like to be someone who's as it takes to look at that from Elon, not as modern day slavery.

03:01:05:02 - 03:01:06:19 Eric Weinstein But it was say it can.

03:01:06:19 - 03:01:16:05 Eric Weinstein Be modern day slavery, or it could be the person saying, for God's sakes, I'm burning to solve this problem. Let me sleep under my desk and unhook.

03:01:16:07 - 03:01:40:03 Chris Williamson Unhook the leash and let me go with this. And there is a there is a cohort of people out there for whom that's their calling. They didn't want to work at Twitter if they got frappuccinos and mindful Monday afternoons off to be able to play ping pong for half the week and whatever it was that was going on, they want to go and they want to feel like they're contributing to an astronomically sized goal and an unreasonable goal.

03:01:40:05 - 03:02:03:14 Chris Williamson And they want to feel the the rush of of going toward it. And I think you're right. I think that there is a dampening of ambition. And since being in America, since moving to America 18 months ago, it's the fuel that I've had from, the enthusiasm from the people I've been around has fueled me and powered me in a way that I didn't I wasn't it was alien.

03:02:03:16 - 03:02:07:00 Chris Williamson I was 33 years old and I'd never felt it before.

03:02:07:02 - 03:02:09:13 Eric Weinstein I want to look.

03:02:09:15 - 03:02:29:20 Eric Weinstein There's so much to do. And it requires ambitious people. And those people have to be both arrogant and humble it's a complicated thing. It involves mentorship. It's I want to say also something about elitism. Elites ism is incredibly unfair.

03:02:29:22 - 03:02:31:05 Eric Weinstein You know, I've hung out with.

03:02:31:05 - 03:02:37:21 Eric Weinstein Stanley Jordan and I am never going to play any instrument the way Stanley Jordan plays the guitar.

03:02:37:23 - 03:02:39:12 Eric Weinstein He's an elite object.

03:02:39:15 - 03:02:41:15 Eric Weinstein I am not going to be that guy.

03:02:41:17 - 03:02:46:06 Eric Weinstein You have to learn how to let elite people do.

03:02:46:06 - 03:02:48:03 Eric Weinstein Elite things that where you can't.

03:02:48:03 - 03:02:53:17 Eric Weinstein Compete with them. I don't know what to do about this.

03:02:53:19 - 03:03:05:02 Eric Weinstein The idea that we are turning against the concept of elite because we've got this sort of pretend elite that sits in these chairs that, screws everything up, and you've got all of these ambitious people.

03:03:05:04 - 03:03:12:03 Eric Weinstein Who are being destroyed by enforced helplessness. You know, how do we get how do we.

03:03:12:03 - 03:03:18:13 Eric Weinstein Fire the administrators necessary to return universities to being universities?

03:03:18:15 - 03:03:22:00 Eric Weinstein How do we.

03:03:22:02 - 03:03:25:01 Eric Weinstein Explain that some people are built to fly wing.

03:03:25:01 - 03:03:26:17 Eric Weinstein Suits?

03:03:26:19 - 03:03:30:10 Eric Weinstein You know, it's a super dangerous activity.

03:03:30:12 - 03:03:32:05 Eric Weinstein But somebody needs.

03:03:32:05 - 03:03:35:14 Eric Weinstein That. Russia, they're not alive.

03:03:35:16 - 03:03:36:07 Eric Weinstein You know.

03:03:36:09 - 03:03:41:05 Eric Weinstein People need danger. They need risk. They need to be able to create and they don't need you. And they're in their.

03:03:41:05 - 03:03:43:14 Eric Weinstein Way all the time. I guess I.

03:03:43:14 - 03:03:46:12 Eric Weinstein Just I have this very strong sense.

03:03:46:14 - 03:03:48:15 Eric Weinstein That school.

03:03:48:19 - 03:03:58:06 Eric Weinstein Become the most dangerous place that we're pushing so many people through school. And school is basically.

03:03:58:08 - 03:04:01:15 Eric Weinstein It's destroying vitality.

03:04:01:17 - 03:04:10:09 Eric Weinstein By the time you get through this education that is so laden with administrators and people telling you things that are wrong.

03:04:10:11 - 03:04:14:23 Eric Weinstein Like, I don't know how to say this, but when when a friend of mine.

03:04:15:00 - 03:04:28:20 Eric Weinstein Gets a call as a chaired professor in a technical discipline from a dean, it says, we have a little bit of a problem with some of your current tweets, like, what did I say? So it's not what you said, but it's that you liked somebody else's.

03:04:28:20 - 03:04:34:04 Eric Weinstein Tweets and you're thinking, I don't care who you are. You'd never.

03:04:34:04 - 03:04:35:14 Eric Weinstein Talk to a professor like.

03:04:35:14 - 03:04:37:19 Eric Weinstein That, you cannot.

03:04:37:19 - 03:04:51:06 Eric Weinstein Have these people. We need the University of Chicago to spread its middle finger across country and get rid of these people.

03:04:51:08 - 03:05:08:14 Eric Weinstein You can't talk to them that they're a plague from hell on. Thought you can't tax all thought by making it nice. And you know something? I.

03:05:08:16 - 03:05:47:19 Eric Weinstein I really don't know how to communicate, but I saw you got Sam Harris a certain amount of trouble, so maybe I'll buy a little bit of trouble for myself. You can't have terrible ideas circulating everywhere leading to pogroms and riots and killings. And I was just in Istanbul, one of maybe my favorite city on earth. And I was reminded of the Turkish Kristallnacht that happened in the Blue coat ugly area of Istanbul, where there was a rumor about the desecration, I think of the birthplace Ataturk.

03:05:47:21 - 03:06:05:16 Eric Weinstein And people died as a result, you know, and ethnic minorities could not be protected. You cannot allow free speech to circulate every dumb idea infinitely until people are killed in pogroms or holocausts or whatever you do.

03:06:05:18 - 03:06:07:15 Eric Weinstein You've got two options.

03:06:07:17 - 03:06:19:09 Eric Weinstein You either constrain speech by rules or by culture. And this is the reason that I was so against Milo Yiannopoulos.

03:06:19:11 - 03:06:19:24 Eric Weinstein You want a.

03:06:19:24 - 03:06:26:22 Eric Weinstein Culture in which everyone is allowed to burn the flag, and it doesn't even occur to you that that's something you would want to do.

03:06:26:24 - 03:06:28:03 Eric Weinstein That's culture.

03:06:28:05 - 03:06:58:13 Eric Weinstein You've got to load the the inhibiting factor on culture. And people say, Well, that's what cancellation is about. It's like, Well, but if you misuse the concept of shunning, let's call it by something older than cancellation, if you shun people for good questions, if you shun people for speaking truthfully and decently as if they had done something horrible, then you lose the ability to control bad behavior through social norms.

03:06:58:15 - 03:06:59:01 Eric Weinstein And one of the.

03:06:59:01 - 03:07:05:16 Eric Weinstein Things that I've now come to understand is we are either going to a culture.

03:07:05:16 - 03:07:07:05 Eric Weinstein Which shuns.

03:07:07:05 - 03:07:10:23 Eric Weinstein Only when shunning is really the correct course of action.

03:07:11:00 - 03:07:11:13 Eric Weinstein Or we are.

03:07:11:13 - 03:07:17:11 Eric Weinstein Going to have rules that prohibit what you can and cannot say and I am absolute, and that we should not have.

03:07:17:11 - 03:07:18:04 Eric Weinstein Rules.

03:07:18:06 - 03:07:27:14 Eric Weinstein We've got to put this on culture and we've got to get a culture in which in general you are very careful about the negative things that you say.

03:07:27:16 - 03:07:28:18 Eric Weinstein And one of the things.

03:07:28:18 - 03:07:31:05 Eric Weinstein That Milo did that I really disliked was he said.

03:07:31:08 - 03:07:32:08 Eric Weinstein Well.

03:07:32:10 - 03:07:35:16 Eric Weinstein The purpose of free speech is to protect outrageous speech.

03:07:35:16 - 03:07:39:06 Eric Weinstein And the answer is not really yes.

03:07:39:08 - 03:07:57:07 Eric Weinstein If I'm forced to stand up for your right to say horrible things, I can do that. If the culture generally retards horrible things. But if the culture now starts to encourage it, we can't have terrible ideas being the precursor of communal violence, let's say.

03:07:57:09 - 03:07:59:21 Eric Weinstein And we really be.

03:07:59:21 - 03:08:09:21 Eric Weinstein Having rules, determine what we can and can't say. It should be that when somebody starts to say something that is the beginning of an incitement to madness.

03:08:09:23 - 03:08:10:21 Eric Weinstein That the cultural.

03:08:10:21 - 03:08:32:16 Eric Weinstein Prohibition against that is very strong. In my recent travels, I've been shocked. I've been in Bombay, I've been in Istanbul I've been in Lisbon, Porto in the islands of the Azores. None of these cities has fallen as far as San Francisco. And Bombay is.

03:08:32:16 - 03:08:36:22 Eric Weinstein Madness, but it's not. We don't have a.

03:08:36:22 - 03:08:56:04 Eric Weinstein Homelessness problem in San Francisco. We have a zombie apocalypse problem. We have a dysfunctional government problem. When you can't say we cannot have this in Union Square, we just can't. We cannot have a zombie apocalypse in Union Square. When that becomes controversial in and of itself.

03:08:56:06 - 03:08:57:24 Eric Weinstein You've lost the plot.

03:08:58:01 - 03:09:21:19 Eric Weinstein And partially what's happened is that we've given up on high trust societies where we more or less share each other's values. That's the concept of the loyal opposition. We both know what the goal is. You have an idea of how to get there. I have a different idea. I agree that we're going to have a contest and one of us will win and one of us begrudgingly go along with the other person's idea.

03:09:21:21 - 03:09:43:20 Eric Weinstein When when your idea about what a just society is, well, let's vindictively punish successful people. Pretend that male and female have no difference. Are all the difference. According to some set of rules on alternate Tuesdays, let's decide that we can redefine what a recession is or the Consumer Price Index. Let's decide that we don't need masks. Yes, we do.

03:09:43:20 - 03:09:51:17 Eric Weinstein No, we don't. Yes, we do. Because of the science. Science, science. Can somebody get rid of these people?

03:09:51:19 - 03:09:53:00 Eric Weinstein We need to.

03:09:53:00 - 03:09:55:24 Eric Weinstein Be in a society that makes some semblance of.

03:09:55:24 - 03:10:01:24 Eric Weinstein Sense and we cannot.

03:10:01:24 - 03:10:07:23 Eric Weinstein Go in these opposite directions. As far as I'm concerned. When you say we don't want no more police.

03:10:08:00 - 03:10:08:16 Eric Weinstein You and I.

03:10:08:16 - 03:10:10:14 Eric Weinstein Cannot be the loyal opposition to.

03:10:10:14 - 03:10:15:00 Eric Weinstein Each other. You're not you're not the kind.

03:10:15:00 - 03:10:31:10 Eric Weinstein Of a person I even understand. Somehow that idea got into your head and it made sense to you. And it's now carrying the day. I have always supported some amount of reasonable gun control.

03:10:31:12 - 03:10:34:09 Eric Weinstein I changed on a dime with that.

03:10:34:11 - 03:11:01:01 Eric Weinstein Abolish the police. We don't want no more police. Defund the police. Are you telling me that people are not going to be allowed to own a weapon and you're going to get rid of the thing that was supposed to centralize the violence on behalf of the state and make it follow rules? There's no coming back from that. And I think that one of the things that we've just have to learn is that many of the voices that we've been listening to because they got jobs in our organs, whether it was The New.

03:11:01:01 - 03:11:02:01 Eric Weinstein Yorker or The.

03:11:02:01 - 03:11:28:22 Eric Weinstein Washington Post or a professorship at Duke, we have to stop listening to these people wholesale. We have to stop being tolerant of the intolerant. If you come from a position that is sufficiently extreme and your whole point is to try to use and weaponize democracy, to weaponize free speech, to weaponize good faith, to weaponize, it means to hold a debate.

03:11:28:24 - 03:11:30:16 Eric Weinstein You need to not.

03:11:30:18 - 03:11:32:02 Eric Weinstein Really have a voice at the.

03:11:32:02 - 03:11:37:06 Eric Weinstein Table because we don't have a solution.

03:11:37:08 - 03:11:59:16 Eric Weinstein If you say that I am entitled to sit at this table as a member of the suicide bombing community strapped with a vest filled with high explosives, the presence of C-4 in your vest invalidates you being at that table that's trying to come up with a solution. If you say fundamentally, I don't believe that we should be having children because humans are evil, and we need to bring this all to a to a close.

03:11:59:18 - 03:12:04:05 Eric Weinstein It's very important that you not be on the city council.

03:12:04:07 - 03:12:04:21 Eric Weinstein Because that.

03:12:04:21 - 03:12:08:05 Eric Weinstein City is a thing that is a generational.

03:12:08:07 - 03:12:10:15 Eric Weinstein Endowment and you hand.

03:12:10:15 - 03:12:12:13 Eric Weinstein It to the next generation and eventually you.

03:12:12:13 - 03:12:14:11 Eric Weinstein Don't live there anymore.

03:12:14:13 - 03:12:25:24 Eric Weinstein We are somehow seating people who are so nihilistic and so freakishly divorced from anything that we should be able to assume as a default.

03:12:26:01 - 03:12:26:23 Eric Weinstein Like certain.

03:12:26:23 - 03:12:29:11 Eric Weinstein Positions that probably had ten adherents.

03:12:29:13 - 03:12:36:00 Eric Weinstein Appear to have millions of adherents. And if we don't get rid of these.

03:12:36:05 - 03:12:50:23 Eric Weinstein Self extinguishing theories, we are going to self extinguish. So I believe that civil society has an obligation to stop listening to positions that are avowedly self extinguishing.

03:12:51:00 - 03:13:01:09 Chris Williamson Eric Weinstein Ladies and gentlemen, Eric, I really appreciate you. What's next? What can people expect from you? Have you got anything interesting coming up?

03:13:01:11 - 03:13:20:15 Eric Weinstein More than anything, remember that? The whole point is when you see a person with a shirt that says there is no planet B. Look at the night sky and remember that the only way to get to Planet B is to change what we understand about physics. And so look for me on that front.

03:13:20:17 - 03:13:21:20 Chris Williamson Thank you. Cheers, Eric.

03:13:21:21 - 03:13:23:09 Eric Weinstein Thanks. Be Well.

03:13:23:11 - 03:13:32:06 Chris Williamson Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode with Eric, you will love this one with Jordan Peterson. Go on. Press it.