Renewing our Belief in the Future of Humanity with Eric Weinstein (YouTube Content)
| Creating Renewing our Belief in the Future of Humanity with Eric Weinstein | |
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| Information | |
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| Host(s) | Nicole Shanahan |
| Guest(s) | Eric Weinstein |
| Length | 01:38:35 |
| Release Date | 24 July 2024 |
| Links | |
| YouTube | Watch |
| Portal Blog | Read |
| All Appearances | |
Renewing our Belief in the Future of Humanity with Eric Weinstein was a discussion with Eric Weinstein hosted by Nicole Shanahan on the Back To The People podcast.
Description[edit]
Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, science policy expert and a frequent public speaker on a variety of subjects within the sciences. Dr Weinstein was formerly a co-founder of the Sloan Sponsored Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research, a co-founder and principal of the Natron Group in Manhattan as well as a visiting research fellow at Oxford University in the Mathematical Institute. Since completing a PhD dissertation in the Mathematics Department at Harvard in 1992, he has held research positions in Mathematics, Physics, and Economics departments (at MIT, Hebrew University, and Harvard respectively). He delivered the Special Simonyi Lectures at Oxford University in 2013 putting forth a theory he termed “Geometric Unity” to unify the twin geometries (Riemannian and Ehresmannian) thought to ground the two most fundamental physical theories (General Relativity and the so-called Standard Model of particle theory, respectively). He has been asked to address the National Academy of Sciences on five occasions on the future of scientific and academic research at elite institutions within the United States.
Transcript[edit]
00:00:01
Nicole Shanahan: I'm Nicole Shanahan, Bobby Kennedy's running mate. Welcome to Back To The People Podcast, which highlights the growth of a movement uniting America where our government is free from corporate capture and where we give voice back to the American public.
00:00:18
Eric Weinstein: You cannot afford to have scientists not participate in the wealth of the nation that they made wealthy.
00:00:26
Nicole Shanahan: So, you know, what's really fascinating is that everything you just said was what gave birth to the World Economic Forum initially.
00:00:34
Eric Weinstein: But the modern academicians are screaming at the people who founded their subjects.
00:00:41
Nicole Shanahan: It's kind of a scientific exploratory retainer.
00:00:44
Eric Weinstein: This is mind control at scale.
00:00:48
Nicole Shanahan: You live in a world with these forces. We have to be in the middle. And that's where sanity and humanity has to be in order to move forward.
00:00:55
Eric Weinstein: I'd like to go on CNN and MSNBC, NPR, PBS, and I want you to tell me why I can't. Thanks.
00:01:08
Nicole Shanahan: Eric, thanks so much for joining me today.
00:01:10
Eric Weinstein: Great to be here, Nicole.
00:01:11
Nicole Shanahan: Okay. It's 200 years from now. We've somehow convinced humanity in 2024 that this exercise is worthwhile and worth protecting.
00:01:24
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:01:25
Nicole Shanahan: But somehow we find ourselves in 2024, in a situation that's somewhat anti-human, that are—the establishment—the things that are necessary for human evolution are under attack.
00:01:39
Eric Weinstein: That's true. It feels to me like that scene in the original Matrix where Trinity's talking to herself after surviving a gun battle and being chased by the bad guys, and she says, "Get up, Trinity," like at some level, the question is, we've got antinatalism, we've got nihilism, we've got incredible partisan bickering. We clearly have more or less global peace with a couple of hotspots that point out to us how fragile this moment is. We're highly demoralized. We can't see past the coming AI because we don't even know what form it's going to take. So the way I'm reading it is this is like a really bad moment for profound decision making.
00:02:28
Nicole Shanahan: But it's a moment requiring profound decision making.
00:02:31
Eric Weinstein: That's the rub is that we have to make these decisions now. And, you know, it's like drunk and tired is no time to operate heavy machinery, but there's no ability to wait either. And that's the paradox of this moment. And boy, did we just get handed a couple of curveballs.
00:02:51
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. Before we get to those curve balls, you said something. We were chatting earlier today. You said something that really could only get through to me from someone who is a theoretical physicist, such as yourself. You said to me that in order for humanity to survive 200 years from now, we need a back propagation of a belief in the indefinite future of humans.
00:03:17
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely.
00:03:18
Nicole Shanahan: And you said that, and it had a real profound. I mean, I've spent some time in the rabbit hole of quantum physics where this idea of time is different than how we think about time.
00:03:30
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:03:30
Nicole Shanahan: It's not necessarily linear, right? So this idea that there's this backward reverberation.
00:03:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:03:39
Nicole Shanahan: To 2024 from 200 years from now, there's this backward reverberation, this back propagation.
00:03:45
Eric Weinstein: Now you're talking about retro causality.
00:03:46
Nicole Shanahan: Okay.
00:03:47
Eric Weinstein: But—
00:03:47
Nicole Shanahan: But where this indefinite human future. We don't have the groundwork for it right now.
00:03:57
Eric Weinstein: No. In fact, we are losing our belief in an indefinite human future I think, year by year. I think it was very clear to people around the time of the fission devices in 1945, followed by the hydrogen bomb in 52, that we were in danger of permanently losing. This is when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set up the Doomsday Clock. It was very clear to people that these things were very powerful. Then we stopped doing atomic tests with the Test Ban Treaty in the early 60s. And that sense that there might be an indefinite human future if we hadn't killed ourselves by the early 60s, maybe detente and the end of the Cold War could usher in the end of history, and we'd all live peaceably. I think that's clearly not true. And essentially we took a Big Nap for a long time, and we are now waking up to what the expiry date of the post-World War II order is likely to mean.
00:05:05
Nicole Shanahan: This post-World War II order has been really defined by America holding this moral authority overseas and at home, and the American public assumed it as an almost birthright that we would have this moral authority overseas. And for the first time since World War II, we are seeing a block of powers coming together that are actually showing us more restraint than we are showing them. And, you know, I think about BRICS constantly. I think about what's going on in the Middle East constantly. Just this last week, China made an unprecedented statement. China usually doesn't make statements this big, but it said that peace in the Middle East requires us to acknowledge the formation of Palestine as a sovereign. I was blown away by this statement. And, you know, whether or not that's, maybe we don't want to unpack that, but I think the significance of China saying that is a really big deal.
00:06:17
Eric Weinstein: You mean because they are assuming that mantle of speaking on behalf of the world community?
00:06:24
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:06:24
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.
00:06:25
Nicole Shanahan: And typically they haven't made these grand statements and gestures for the prerequisites of global peace before.
00:06:33
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:06:34
Nicole Shanahan: And so the United States could right now at this moment look at where it is and be realistic about it and be, you know, just readily accept that we have worn out this post-World War II identity.
00:06:51
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.
00:06:51
Eric Weinstein:
00:06:52
Nicole Shanahan: And it and we, I think many of us feel it. Many of us feel that these dynasties from the Democratic Party and these dynasties from a Republican Party are going into retirement like a final retirement. Joe Biden stepping out of the race yesterday signals that, you know, you and I unpacked a little bit about understanding what the future of the RNC might look like in four years. And it does strike me that this era is coming to an end, which means that we have a great opportunity before us because perhaps, you know, the winding down of this era gives opportunity for these two possibilities to happen. One of those possibilities is that 200 years from now, humans are nearly unrecognizable. And the other one is that we have gotten through this. We've weathered it. We've made some of the big decisions, and we're to talk about what those big decisions are.
00:07:56
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:07:56
Nicole Shanahan: We've made those big decisions for our culture and society that are going to lead us to a human future that is recognizable because it's the thing of our dreams.
00:08:08
Eric Weinstein: I'm super excited about that. And the key question is, how does the US need to morph? So one of the things that I thought was really interesting about what you said is that the post-World War II order gave America some moral authority, but it was net. It wasn't simply because the US were the good guys. We were the guys in Chile with Operation Condor. We were the guys in Iran with Operation Ajax. We did a lot of things, particularly under the Dulles brothers, that were very muscular, not necessarily known to the US. And in part, they were tolerated because the sense was that America was net positive, not positive in everything that it did right and not necessarily honest in everything that it did, but that ultimately it was about spreading freedom, spreading free trade, spreading prosperity, rebuilding Europe.
00:09:04
Nicole Shanahan: And a cultural example.
00:09:05
Eric Weinstein: And being good to the defeated, you know, trying to be good to Japan, trying to be good to Germany, and trying to show some sort of leadership was a mixed activity. I think that in part, what's gone on is that we have slipped in terms of we're not contributing enough positively to disguise the ways in which America has worked in the post-World War II era in a very muscular, very often non open, cryptic fashion. So in order to get to an indefinite human future, we have to get back to being a net positive moral authority in the world. And I think, you know, that's a beautiful point that you're making. How do we get back to the optimism? I'm concerned that fundamentally, it has to do with being excited about things that have never happened before. So for example, we all know how to be terrified of AI, but we also have an idea that the future may be terrifying, but it's also going to be unbelievably cool.
00:10:15
Nicole Shanahan: My initial relationship with AI was not terror. It was really based upon solving humanity's partnership and innovation challenges. And so for me to hear the hysteria about AI, I understand it, but I've already endeavored into a positive relationship with it and seen what can happen, you know, using Ronald Coase's economics and transaction cost theory and using AI to achieve these optimal transactions, which allow for the unlocking of innovation, and all of these other, you know, very humanistic goals.
00:10:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's interesting that you mention Coase, because one of the ways of saving capitalism from the destruction that AI might wreck on, let's say, labor markets, might be to grant the population property rights that have to be purchased by the technology innovators, you know, because obviously it's using a lot of our general data. It's going to be effectively moving things that were labor tasks into the capital pile in a K and L model. So in part, I think what you're really talking about is Coase is the bridge from the economics we know to the economics we don't.
00:11:35
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:11:35
Eric Weinstein: And isn't it amazing that we're not talking about post-capitalist post-Communist economics? I don't think that Hayek and Marx and Adam Smith have the solutions for a world with AI. And so why is it that we're not forming institutes and conferences that say capitalism is not going to survive AI, and that could be a great thing?
00:11:59
Nicole Shanahan: Well, I think people are really terrified about talking about life beyond capitalism because that then sounds Marxist. So—
00:12:06
Eric Weinstein: Why?
00:12:08
Nicole Shanahan: I, you know, that's a really good question. I think because nobody knows anything other than the two.
00:12:15
Eric Weinstein: So that's my claim is that at what point did we lose the ability to break out new space and say, I want to fill this with something that hasn't existed without being back referenced to failed ideas? So, you know, if you think about like we had wheeled luggage before 1989, but it all sucked. It was like these tiny castors and long leashes that fell over because of high centers of gravity that didn't work.
00:12:43
Nicole Shanahan: Right.
00:12:44
Eric Weinstein: Now, if you said, hey, I have an idea, as Robert Plath did. Four wheeled luggage. Somebody might have just said, yeah, yeah, yeah, it always falls over.
00:12:52
Nicole Shanahan: Right? And the ball bearings were like too sticky.
00:12:54
Eric Weinstein: Exactly. So my claim is that what's really fascinating is that we can't even get an institute or a conference that says, we obviously need a new economics. It's an emergency. What economics is this going to be? Because we have this idea that if we give up capitalism, communism will fill the vacuum.
00:13:15
Nicole Shanahan: So, you know, what's really fascinating is that everything you just said was what gave birth to the World Economic Forum initially, right? Because that was the initial motivation was that we are going to think about the future and we're going to think about it, you know, in a world with limitless innovation. But something got co-opted in that mission in a very dark way. And the agenda that came out of that is not necessar—I think that agenda takes us to the left. And I said, we're either going to the left or the right. We're going to go either left to 200 years from now or humans are like virtually unrecognizable, or we're going to go to the right into this like dream world of utopian humanity, where humans are still organic.
00:14:02
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:14:02
Nicole Shanahan: Maybe we unpack that, because I think if we unpack that, we can begin to, you know, set up the foundations for it. So WEF gets us to the left. Humans are unrecognizable. There's this, you know, transhumanist relationship between machines, organic nature is fully controlled by man and computer.
00:14:26
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:14:27
Nicole Shanahan: The right. Let's talk about going right. Humans are incredibly connected to nature, to a degree that we could only dream of. We've figured out all of our energy challenges. Energy is virtually free. We understand metabolic health in a way that we could have never understood. We understand how to harness sun and travel.
00:14:55
Eric Weinstein: Wait, this is the right?
00:14:56
Nicole Shanahan: Is it?
00:14:56
Eric Weinstein: I don't know.
00:14:57
Nicole Shanahan: This is how I would define it. I mean, we have healthy humans. We have organic, natural childbirth. We have an ability to manage disease in a very elegant way without putting our biology in a blender and adding assays. But we have, like, a whole new paradigm for medicine. I mean, you're looking at me suspiciously.
00:15:23
Eric Weinstein: Well no, no, no, can I riff with you?
00:15:24
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. Riff. Jump in.
00:15:25
Eric Weinstein: All right. So I think what you're saying, and I haven't really heard or thought about this before, is that the first one is an organizational viewpoint on the world that the wise women and men of the World Economic Forum need to guide us to do things that are unnatural, that have never happened before, but we will be so happy once we finally do them and realize that the organizational benefit of coming together, through these enlightened elders, that this just brings wonderful benefits to humanity. The thing on the right that I think what I'm hearing from you is an idea of let's accept our nature and the nature around us and live with it as being very difficult to take over from. And as a result, there's the, you know, there's all these cautionary states. If we just start changing our genders and eating bugs and not owning anything, that we're somehow fundamentally repudiating what it means to be human. So if I hear because, you see, I come from the left and basically we spend all of our time in the Sierras growing up hiking and trying to be one with nature. So I don't relate to this concept of the left.
00:16:31
Nicole Shanahan: Sorry, by left and right I don't mean political spectrum.
00:16:34
Eric Weinstein: Oh!
00:16:34
Nicole Shanahan: Hahaha. But it turns out that actually there are some interesting similarities—
00:16:42
Nicole Shanahan: What did you mean?
00:16:42
Nicole Shanahan: And I could see—I was just talking about a mere fork in the road.
00:16:45
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I see.
00:16:46
Nicole Shanahan: But now that you're actually talking about it within the perspective of a political spectrum, that's kind of where the globalists have landed. They're—They have kind of co-opted the movement of left leaning politics. But—
00:17:01
Eric Weinstein: It is interesting, I think that, you know, the great third way to an extent that I see is if you think about the Bitcoin community, they're very tough to understand initially because one of their ideas is Bitcoin is stupid and it's smarter than you are. And the idea being is Bitcoin is not trying to be smart contracts. It's not trying to be everything to all people in the crypto world. It's saying ultimately the world is stitched together through money. And if all we did was create new money that humans couldn't interfere with, we would have done a great thing. And that is the ethos that is in essence a good world emerges. It's sort of closer to the Adam Smith invisible hand, that as long as we don't start dumping our politics into Bitcoin, what the world needs is the money supply of which cannot be adulterated by central bankers, cannot be mismeasured by statisticians. And what we really need to do is to get humans out of money to the extent possible, that kind of view is repugnant to people who believe that fundamentally human wisdom is what's needed to guide the world. And it has to do with sort of top down wisdom versus bottom up wisdom, the wisdom of the market versus the wisdom of highly educated people who've been put in positions of power. Unfortunately, I do think you kind of need both. And this both thinking is increasingly hard to find, because the internet tends to convince people of one set of prejudices or another.
00:18:45
Nicole Shanahan: It's true. And I, you know, I'm reading some Rudolf Steiner right now that talks about that as well as he wrote a number of essays talking about the balance between Lucifer and Ahriman and that, to, you know, live in a world with both of these forces—because it's inevitable, we live in a world with these forces—we have to be in the middle. And that's where sanity and humanity has to be in order to move forward. And so it's really fascinating because, you know, I see us in this time as well. And it's funny that we confuse this left and right fork with like left and right political spectrums. Because it's, they're all that like layered on each other in almost this microcosmic way, right? And you just talked about Bitcoin, which I think is a really important way for us to think beyond sovereign nations. And if we're rethinking money and we're rethinking sovereign currency, Bitcoin has already proven to us what that looks like. Decentralization. So now what does that look like in fields like science? Because we have talked about this a number of times where science and academia have been corrupted, and decentralizing science is going to be necessary in order for us to get to this better humanity. That, you know, we can't be producing middle of the road consensus without that liberty of voice.
00:20:34
Eric Weinstein: We've got to get very suspicious about consensus, right? And I make this point, there's no arithmetic consensus because everyone uses arithmetic or they're out, right? So you don't need a consensus because we all agree that two plus three equals five or we go to jail when we file our tax returns. Okay? Consensus is what you get when you have some political thing you're trying to get done and you've got not enough evidence to really say, well, this is rock solid. And so then you start having to, like, intimidate dissidents and you have to put statements in front of people, will you sign, with implied threats. So any time I hear about a scientific consensus, I'm very worried. I never hear about an Einsteinian consensus or a Newtonian consensus or a DNA consensus, because those things don't need a consensus. We need to start getting very nervous when we start hearing about a scientific consensus, particularly one that can't be discussed openly without the words crackpot, crank, nutter being thrown around. And that's really the death of science when everyone who has a different idea has to start the conversation back footed as if they learned science from the back of a crackerjack box. That's nonsense.
00:22:03
Nicole Shanahan: Wait, what is the Bitcoin model of science?
00:22:06
Eric Weinstein: We don't have it yet. Unfortunately, the previous model of science was an elite one, and it was a model in which you pretty quickly figured out who the smartest people were, and you gave them an ungodly amount of power and influence over the field, and you put a lot of pressure on people to behave well. And so it was an elite, largely gentlemanly. There were not enough women in it, but collegial. It was largely European to an extent. I think that we feel very uncomfortable with, I would say only Japan really has first rate universities outside of North America and Europe, for the most part. This was a world with problems, but it was a world run by people of high integrity who could say that they were wrong, who would listen to their colleagues, who would hear people out and effectively, when we lost that civility, it wasn't just a question of office niceties, that civility was life itself. It was the lifeblood of science.
00:23:09
Nicole Shanahan: Does admitting one is wrong a requirement for that civility?
00:23:16
Eric Weinstein: I don't think you should have people in science who can't admit that they're wrong. It's too expensive, even if they're really smart and they're frequently right, we can't afford it.
00:23:25
Nicole Shanahan: I oftentimes talk about this in the context of Covid, that many of these experts just are absolutely refusing to admit that they got some things wrong. And if we continue on in this environment, we're going to end up losing a lot of the core values of Western civilization.
00:23:54
Eric Weinstein: Amen.
00:23:56
Nicole Shanahan: So how do we bring back that example? I'd really like to figure out what the Bitcoin model for science looks like. You often talk about the issues with peer review, the history of peer review. Maybe we can recap some of that real quickly to think about how we might evolve beyond the system of peer review, which hasn't really worked for us for a while.
00:24:30
Eric Weinstein: So peer review is an incredibly contentious subject, in part because the world's most authoritative voices, the professors, basically don't know what the history of peer review is, even though it's the lifeblood of their own lives. And this has to do with the way in which we divide science. We have some scientists who go to Washington, DC and spend time around the National Mall in the 202 area code, and we have others that basically sit in their labs and do work. And the people who do the work of science have no concept about how the science and government interface actually works. So more or less, if you do a search on the words peer review as a phrase, you'll notice that it crops up right in the middle of the 1960s. This has to do with the fact that Ghislane Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, revolutionized the academic and scholarly publishing industry. He created a huge number of journals in science. It was very profitable for him, but he sort of destroyed science in the process by diluting the power of great editors in journals that could be trusted. Also in the mid 1960s, we started nationalizing to an extent the payment for health care. And in the US, that meant Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. And immediately the American taxpayers said, why are we paying for all of these procedures if we can't ask the doctors why are they unnecessary? So what happened was in 1972, a guy named Wallace Bennett, who was a senator from Utah, said, we have a small program that should be the model for the country in our family medicine practice. And he pushed out peer review, which was the idea of please don't let the population review what they're not capable of reviewing, which is what requires a medical degree to understand. Let doctors be the reviewers of other doctors. So it was a defensive measure to keep the American taxpayer from using their elected representatives to question all of these procedures that were being paid for by the government.
00:26:35
Nicole Shanahan: By the government.
00:26:36
Eric Weinstein: Exactly. Then in 1975, you had two programs called MACOS and ISIS that were an early version of the Culture War. And the National Science Foundation was funding things like, I don’t know, anthropologists and weaker sciences, which had a political nature to it, talking about sexuality to fourth graders in the case of ISIS and talking about cannibalism, I think, in other cultures, in the case of MACOS. And what happened was that small government conservatives, I think represented by Conlin, evangelicals and then William Proxmire in Wisconsin—who took over from McCarthy's seat, I think—these people started saying we need to review all of science because we don't like what's going on. And the National Science Foundation came up with peer review as a defensive mechanism, saying, you don't need to worry, we will have scientists review everything. So it wasn't a question of outside reviewing which had been used in the sciences before. It was a compromise that we would subject all of these proposals to review, and it would no longer be the case that editors or program managers would have such individual power. The average scientist knows nothing about the history of peer review. They attribute it, I think, to the 16-, 1700s because of sort of faulty work of Merton. And as a result, we don't realize that this peer review thing is basically an attempt to keep the populace out of elite scientific conversations.
00:28:19
Nicole Shanahan: You know, one of the ways that I've been chatting with a few people about restructuring science and scientific information, so it's more accessible, is allowing people to discuss their n-of-one experiences in the context of available research papers, which just doesn't happen today. We have a peer review system that's pretty limited, and then it becomes pretty much the word of God. It becomes dogma. And if you were rejected from that peer review process or your paper is redacted from one of these publications, it becomes blacklisted oftentimes. And, you know, in a world in which we have now social media people are getting medical information from online medical influencers, it strikes me that there's this whole variety of ways that we could think about restructuring review or qualification of science capture data. We haven't tried to capture much of this n-of-one data from people's testimonials. Even when you think about drug trials and even the best, most well funded drug trials are still so limited in scope for on what information you can get back from the participants. There's been talk of wearables collecting—you know, there's this, let's just put wearables on all of our trial participants. And then we have all of this objective information. And then we'll have even more data. And that data is going to give us real information about what is going on. So, you know, I see people really trying and grasping.
00:30:17
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:30:18
Nicole Shanahan: But fundamentally like the more and, you know, I talked about Rudolf Steiner and Ahriman and it, you know, Ahriman is represented by this grasping right of more data, more information, more confidence and truth and the concern that Rudolf Steiner and he made this at the beginning of the 1900s this assessment and he well predicted this. He was like he said, effectively, humanity is going to misunderstand itself because it's going to have these false idols of science and it's going to take the humanity out of science. And when you take the humanity out of science, that's when you lose all connection to what's behind humanity, which is a spiritual experience. And I think about that constantly when I think about, well, you know, we figured out currency with Bitcoin. But science is much harder because it really is how we think about and define what is right and wrong for the direction of humans. And human experience and human biology and the direction of human evolution. It's a big deal to get this right. And it's also equally a big deal to get it wrong.
00:31:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's so powerful, you see, I mean, I think one of the things—let's take 23andMe—do you know some of these stories where somebody sends off their 23andMe and they find out that they've been lied to their entire life about who they are?
00:32:01
Nicole Shanahan: Yes.
00:32:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So my claim is that this is pretty weird that a company that takes your spit in a tube and sends you back some pieces of paper completely changes your life because you find out all sorts of things that your parents told you just have nothing to do with reality. That is how dangerous and powerful and beautiful science is. We tell people that science is good for you, like granola. You should eat your science. And—
00:32:33
Nicole Shanahan: Well, 23andMe also is trying to make predictions about what kind of diseases you'll contract in life. And that is life.
00:32:42
Eric Weinstein: Do you want to know whether you have a BRCA gene that predisposes you towards cancer?
00:32:47
Nicole Shanahan: Right. And quite frankly, that narrative, you have a BRCA gene that predisposes you cancer could mean a whole number of things that we don't even have a science for yet.
00:32:54
Eric Weinstein: That's right. Because we don't need to understand it. We don't—Sorry, we need to understand it but we don't have the ability.
00:33:00
Nicole Shanahan: We don't have the ability to understand it.
00:33:01
Eric Weinstein: If I think back to the weird things that are under the same tent as science at the moment. So if I just take, let's just say in biology, if I take Marshall Nirenberg's 1963 description of the genetic code with 64 words, spell out 20 amino acids and a couple of directions. Unbelievable that we did that! How cool are we! How inspiring. And at the same time, I'm supposed to take a tweet yelling at people for asking about ivermectin as horse paste. "Come on, you're not a horse." I mean, these things are not—they're not of a piece. They're not the same.
00:33:43
Nicole Shanahan: They're not.
00:33:44
Eric Weinstein: What we're doing is we're extending science, the name "science", to all sorts of things that are fundamentally unscientific. And this is now become institutional. And all the scientists are precarious. And I want to stress this. You cannot afford to have scientists not participate in the wealth of the nation that they made wealthy. It is an abomination that we ask questions about why should a scientist have a second home? It's like, shut up! Seriously, it's time to be quiet. You've got a world in which you've taken scientists out of the ability to patent and protect their discoveries because you can't protect nature—discoveries about nature. You can protect technologies, but not nature itself. And you've taken their compact that was called the Endless Frontier, which came out of World War II, penned by Vannevar Bush, and you've made them precarious. And now you're angry that they're not standing up to the Faucis, to the Collins of the world. They're not telling you the truth because they're acting as what? They're acting, the experts are acting as expert witnesses, and an expert witness is somebody that you pay to make the best technical argument for whatever it is that you're paying them for.
00:35:03
Nicole Shanahan: I think what I hear you say is that we've made almost like a scientific peasant class that doesn't have the wherewithal to stand up to lies.
00:35:18
Eric Weinstein: They want to protect the population. They can't—when I visited a bunch of universities in the East Coast in the last couple of years, people would pull me into their offices so they wouldn't be seen with me. They closed the door and then they would tell me how much they hate their lives in STEM departments as professors at American universities.
00:35:40
Nicole Shanahan: I've seen this—look, I've been a funder of science for a number of years. And finding scientists who have the truth, who are protected to say the truth, protected enough because their institutions won't protect them. They don't have money to afford their own legal bills to protect themselves, and they risk their entire career. And some of them are clinicians. And that means that they risk being able to not be able to serve the populations that they have worked so hard to serve and to be in service to, and in some cases to heal. And so I hear it. I see it from the donor angle. You know, you and I were talking a little bit earlier about an experience I had when I was setting up a regrant program through the Buck Institute, which is this institute in Novato, California, dedicated to research and longevity medicine. And I wanted to set up a reproductive longevity center. And it was very clear early on that doing so at a university was a terrible idea, that I was not going to get good science, that the scientists were going to get capped at how much they could take, that the overhead from the university and the burdens that the University were going to put on the researchers was too high. And so I decided to do a regrant program through a nonprofit, which is what Buck is. And even so, it's gridlock in this country.
00:37:15
Eric Weinstein: Lawyers, guns, and money is what we have to get our remaining scientists ASAP.
00:37:21
Nicole Shanahan: Lawyers, guns, and money.
00:37:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. You need to be able to defend your lab, your ability to share your ideas. If you're in the elite, why are we policing you with gatekeepers?
00:37:35
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:37:35
Nicole Shanahan: And—
00:37:35
Nicole Shanahan: And is it guns? Because if the FBI or like, what were the guns for?
00:37:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, what are—
00:37:41
Nicole Shanahan: They're like metaphorical guns?
00:37:42
Eric Weinstein: It's a reference actually to Weber, that a government is a monopoly on violence. We have got to get the government on the side of science rather than telling scientists, "Here's what you'll need to find if you—" you know, "it's a lovely little career you have, it'd be a shame if anything had to happen to it. By the way, sign this petition."
00:38:01
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:38:02
Eric Weinstein: Or make sure that you include these attestations in your grant application. And if a scientist can't say—and I don't know whether you speak French, but if a scientist can't say fuck you to somebody—
00:38:14
Nicole Shanahan: I do know that one.
00:38:16
Eric Weinstein: —to somebody who's asking for a DEI affirmation, a claim about their work, with respect to what it will actually produce, in terms of translation, I mean, you're pushing people to lie constantly. It's unbefitting of our government. It's unbefitting of our institutions. And the idea that the institutions can then say, "Well, anybody who doesn't agree with this is a crackpot or crank"—I had to coin the word knarc, which is crank spelled backwards, and a knarc is an official crank. So if—in other words, if the head of NIAID or the head of the NIH have an email exchange in which they decide that they need "quick and devastating takedowns" of their colleagues' perspectives, who have to be considered fringe despite being highly trained, credentialed, and employed at the top institutions, I mean, these are knarcs. Our number one problem is not cranks and crackpots. It's not charlatans. It's not any of these claims. The problem is that we have academicians who have acquiesced. We left them too long. We need to get the government—
00:39:31
Nicole Shanahan: We left them too long. We made them too desperate.
00:39:33
Eric Weinstein: We made them precarious. And the concept of the Precariat is that you've got a bunch of people who are more or less paycheck to paycheck. I know academics who thank their lucky stars that they're raising two kids in adjacent states because they were able to get jobs, you know, in large states that share a border, "that's not too far." That's ridiculous. This is a rich country. These are the people who created your security and your prosperity. And what you've done is you've said, you know, bring me another peeled grape. And at some point the scientists should say, this ends, you will pay us. You will allow us to live and to prosper. This is a rich and prosperous country. And by the way, the dissident scientists are the most important because they feel a strong pull to taking care of the population that can't necessarily understand every study.
00:40:31
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. And they're some of the best people we have. And if we're making their lives hell, which, you know, we have been—this nation has made a dissident scientist a complete—
00:40:46
Eric Weinstein: Pariah!
00:40:47
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. And untouchable. It's just been so alarming for me to see the extent of it. And I'm somebody that, you know, I come from the field of intellectual property law. I looked at the patent corpus as this individually animated oracle.
00:41:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:41:08
Nicole Shanahan: And I would look at all of these trends, and I developed an AI to help me see where the future of innovation was going. And you could see where there were holes. And you see—Theranos was actually a really interesting example of a portfolio that didn't follow the normal human trend of evolution, of innovation.
00:41:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:41:32
Nicole Shanahan: So you could see parts of their portfolio that trended. So there's clusters and they cluster around all of these scientists that have been working together in these similar fields, finding similar pieces of breakthrough and information, something worthy of a patent, something truly novel. And they cluster together. And then there was Theranos, which had this big hole between the cluster of science and the cluster of their finger prick diagnostics and there was this big hole where there was really nobody clustering around this part of the Theranos portfolio. And that's when you know there's frauds, right? And so, you know, when I looked at what was happening with the mRNA vaccine and there were clusters of scientists all around it, mRNA and then around CRISPR as well, and gene editing and there were clusters, but nothing looked like it was ready for human deployment. And so, you know, what I see happens to science when you silence the dissidents and financially reward the frauds is you break the organic nature of human evolution.
00:42:48
Eric Weinstein: Yes.
00:42:49
Nicole Shanahan: You break it down.
00:42:50
Eric Weinstein: Yes.
00:42:51
Nicole Shanahan: And when you break it and these holes exist, that's where the greatest threats to humanity emerge. Because that's when you begin to sell lies.
00:43:03
Eric Weinstein: So let me see if I understand this, because it's a beautiful—if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that science is a system of selective pressures. And if you tell me who advances and who does not based on whether or not somebody is principled in their dissent or whether they muffle themselves, what you're going to do through that system of selective pressures is you're going to produce relatively docile people willing to go along with things that they shouldn't, who are not highly innovative.
00:43:31
Nicole Shanahan: And the way science works is it works in clusters and it doesn't have to be perfect consensus or overlay, but they have to be close enough together. And they all have to move together, because when they don't move together, that means something is wrong. That means that it's, I mean, you understand physics, like, it's there, there's this physics of innovation, and the physics of innovation requires a multitude of people to find independently, find similar things that work off of the works of previous generations of scientists.
00:44:16
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:44:17
Nicole Shanahan: That's always how innovation and evolution have worked together. So when you see, like, Anthony Fauci creating a consensus.
00:44:30
Eric Weinstein: Yes.
00:44:30
Nicole Shanahan: And then pointing out dissidents and saying, go away dissidents. But those dissidents are part of the clusters of the natural evolution of science. You then break apart the fabric of science.
00:44:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is like Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union where we had a situation in which the government decided that Lysenko knew what was going on and everybody else didn't. And the only way that that got undone, if I recall the story correctly, is that Stalin had to keep around his theoretical physicists because his power derived from nuclear weapons. And so at the time—
00:45:08
Nicole Shanahan: And the nuclear weapons working.
00:45:09
Eric Weinstein: And the nuclear weapons working. So somebody asked, why didn't Stalin get rid of his dissident physicists? And the answer was, well, Stalin was always crazy, but he was never stupid. Which is a great line. The issue is that it then fell to the physicists to go save biology from the Soviet biologists who had been trained in Lysenkoism. So in part, we have to purge ourselves of our American Lysenkoism. And this is coming in large part from public health, from large pharmaceutical corporations that have the ability to pay for things when other people can't.
00:45:47
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:45:47
Eric Weinstein: And that, roughly speaking, we're in a terrible spot where we're being incentivized in science to destroy our own credibility. And I think it's absolutely—
00:45:57
Nicole Shanahan: And to destroy the credibility also of your peers.
00:46:02
Eric Weinstein: Sure, to, well, any dissenting peers have their—
00:46:05
Nicole Shanahan: Dissenting peers.
00:46:06
Eric Weinstein: But then the aggregate effect is people trust the remaining peers—
00:46:11
Nicole Shanahan: Yes.
00:46:11
Eric Weinstein: —less than they ever have.
00:46:13
Nicole Shanahan: Interesting.
00:46:13
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so in a certain sense, what's going on is that the universities and the professors still have the ability within the field to create pariahs, but science is becoming increasingly less trusted as a result.
00:46:29
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:46:30
Eric Weinstein: And so in part, the emergency that we have is why is there no institution anywhere for all of the people who are highly credentialed, elite level humans to go and dissent? Why is it that we effectively have a hegemony? We have a lot of different universities, but they're all basically the same.
00:46:56
Nicole Shanahan: They're, I mean, they're all very similar in how they're structured and how they manage IP portfolios and how they think about fundraising.
00:47:04
Eric Weinstein: I want to say one thing on IP.
00:47:05
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:47:05
Eric Weinstein: Go ahead. We've gotten very focused on technology where we, when we say science, we often now really just mean biology. And we really just mean the part of biology that's close to technology, that's close to deployment in terms of—and—
00:47:20
Eric Weinstein: Translation.
00:47:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. If we don't drop the focus on translation to product, we're not going to understand that the reason that there's been so much to do on that front is that—I represent a community of people who are completely invisible. I just watched Donald Trump say that we have smart people like Elon. We have to make sure that the smart people are happy. And my feeling is, okay, I want to talk about the lab scientists. I want to talk about the bench scientists. I want to talk about the coders. I want to talk about the people who are actually at a blackboard solving partial differential equations. These people have become invisible because the power players only think in terms of money, technology, and Q3. And we've got to fundamentally remember that all of this stems from a different class of people. And no, we don't just have to make Elon happy. We have to make people who are employed by Elon happy. We have to make sure that the people who come up with the innovations that Elon will use in his company happy—and happy, generally speaking—I want to say this in the most offensive way possible—I think you should be able to put three kids through a home and a second home, in private school, all the way through college with a retirement as a scientist and not feel poor. And if you think that that's an outrageous and disgusting ask, I don't want anything further to do with you. These are some of the most important people, and we've gotten used to the idea that there are, they're somehow valets for us that we should "get me three PhDs". No, that's not how it works. What we really need is we need a highly muscular science with Feynmans, with Oppenheimers, with Tellers, with all sorts of crazy characters who are free enough to express themselves.
00:49:13
Nicole Shanahan: Well, let's talk about Feynman and Oppenheimer and that generation of scientists, because they were venerated. They weren't rich by any measure, but they had nice homes, families. They certainly, you know, not hurting economically or financially or spiritually or in dignity. They were seen and so I wonder how we get back there without increasing the current incentive model, which actually is hurting science.
00:49:50
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:49:52
Nicole Shanahan: You know, we could make it easier to get academic positions or reward those academic positions. We could rethink an alternative model of translation of these discoveries. We could create a blockchain that, you know, financially incentivizes publications. I'm wondering if you've talked to anybody who has come up with a new financial incentive model.
00:50:26
Eric Weinstein: Here's the old financial incentive model. We need to get the military back into science. We need a military we can be proud of. And I don't like the idea that, as Americans, we're embarrassed about military funding. I myself went to graduate school with an ONR fellowship, Office of Naval Research. The military is not something that science should be in bed with, to the extent that it's simply rubber stamping everything that the military wants, nor should we be shying away from it. I believe that our universities, we taught them to see themselves as international and beyond nationhood. And I don't think that that's right. I think that our universities are our universities. I think that the Mansfield Amendment that happened in the late 60s, early 70s basically cut off the supply of funding from the military to do Blue Sky Research. And that was the golden age that we're talking about. The Feynmans and the others of that era benefited hugely from the fact that scientists put the, you know, put an end to World War II.
00:51:33
Nicole Shanahan: Right. And these were the physicists that we're talking about. I, you know, I will say computer scientists are still actually getting quite a few military contracts.
00:51:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, you can still get military contracts.
00:51:45
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:51:45
Eric Weinstein: We're not allowed to get contracts unless there's an express military purpose. And what the military used to do was to fund Blue Sky research, saying, we understand you're Seal Team Six of the human mind. You guys are the Green Berets. You're Delta Force. We get it. We want you happy so that when we occasionally have to call on you, you understand that we have a relationship and not acknowledging that relationship is, frankly, dangerous.
00:52:15
Eric Weinstein: It's almost like a retainer.
00:52:16
Eric Weinstein: It's almost like a retainer.
00:52:18
Nicole Shanahan: So it's kind of a scientific exploratory retainer.
00:52:22
Eric Weinstein: Yes. But it's also the case that, while you're paying away that retainer, you're getting this huge benefit, which is, that's the seed corn that ends up as translation. And so while you're paying the retainer for people to investigate nature as we understand it, which is absolutely what I want to do, I would much rather spend my time, you know, researching fundamental physics than hanging out at San Trapei. I've done San Trapei. It's fun, it's rich, it gets boring real fast. You know, more or less what we need to do is we need to recognize that there was a huge benefit from keeping science also as a check on the military.
00:53:06
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, in some ways, academic positions worked as that retainer.
00:53:12
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:53:13
Nicole Shanahan: Because you would teach, you would give back to the academic institution, and then you would also have your research lab.
00:53:19
Eric Weinstein: Which was a huge increase in the funding. And so what happened was that you took a relatively boutique field that was capable of, you know, weaponizing the neutron effectively, and then you spread that—it wasn't just physics during the 50s and 60s—biology grew up, it was fabulously dynamic. One of the things people don't realize, look at the RNA Tie Club, that was going after the genetic code. The names in that are George Gamow, Edward Teller, Richard Feynman. It's physicists working with biologists.
00:53:55
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. Creating the field of biophysics.
00:53:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, and molecular biology was largely created by physicists. So in part getting back to what we know how to do that works has to do with funding Blue Sky research, which is all about not controlling your scientists.
00:54:14
Nicole Shanahan: Right. And without the end goal of translation into a product or a therapy, or something immediately commercialized.
00:54:25
Eric Weinstein: That changed with the Bayh-Dole Amendment in 1980, because that said that instead of universities being the only thing that can pursue that which cannot be funded by the market, it said, and if you do research that can be rewarded by the market, you can put in for the university to reap that reward. So suddenly, the universities abandoned their Blue Sky and started doing things that were translation oriented. The other thing I wanted to point out with the dissidents, imagine that I told you that some crazy guy went into his backyard and started taking pus out of his farm animals and injecting his employees and his family with pus to guard against deadly diseases. You'd think, well, that guy sounds like a whack a doodle, but I've just described Benjamin Jesty in the beginning of vaccines, where he went to his cows for cow pus to protect his family against smallpox.
00:55:24
Nicole Shanahan: Wow.
00:55:25
Eric Weinstein: Because he noticed that his milkmaids weren't getting smallpox. So, in part, we have this crazy system where the modern academicians are screaming at the people who founded their subjects, that the idea of not experimenting during a pandemic and asking questions the way Benjamin Jesty did with smallpox is the death of science.
00:55:50
Nicole Shanahan: I think it still happens in certain fields, but again, the motivation always gets to how do we cross the chasm into a clinical trial or how do we cross the chasm into, you know, getting the kind of hospital partnership that's going to allow us to get this into patients as quickly as possible?
00:56:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, let me try flipping something on you because you're in this political game, and one of the things that we're dealing with in science is mind—well, I don't know how to say—brainwashing at scale.
00:56:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:56:30
Eric Weinstein: Where you cause people to see something, they know it's not true, but they know that somehow to say, well, that's not true. And I wonder what is true is to cross a chasm into opening all sorts of questions that they're not prepared to deal with. Now, right now, you and I are living through the crumbling of a crazy narrative that got pushed out: Joe Biden is absolutely fine, he's completely in command of the situation.
00:57:00
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:57:00
Eric Weinstein: And it makes no sense. He's now abandoning his reelection campaign to focus on the presidency, which he does not appear to be able to carry out.
00:57:09
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:57:10
Eric Weinstein: I want to turn this and ask you how are we living through something this mind blowingly stupid? This is basically a confession that everybody who was told that you're crazy, you're a Trumper, you don't understand reality, the president is absolutely fine—
00:57:32
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:57:32
Eric Weinstein: All of us who've been told we were nuts have suddenly been told you're not nuts, but the machine is going to continue to go on and lie to us. And furthermore, there was no primary.
00:57:46
Nicole Shanahan: The majority of Americans see it. They feel it—and when I say the majority, I think it's 70%—very clearly see this and feel it, and they're not okay with it. And then you have 20% that will vote blue no matter who, because they are so deeply programmed to. And, you know, we don't have to get into the power of modern day programming and mind control, but that exists.
00:58:14
Eric Weinstein: But it exists in me! So for example, I can't get over the idea that I'm still a crazy person because for four years I've been saying that Biden is not fit cognitively to be in the Oval Office.
00:58:29
Nicole Shanahan: But that's the risk of this technique, is that you disenfranchise the individual's capacity to trust themselves.
00:58:40
Eric Weinstein: All of us.
00:58:41
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
00:58:42
Eric Weinstein: And so what I'm looking—
00:58:43
Nicole Shanahan: That's what's at play right now.
00:58:45
Eric Weinstein: But how is it that I'm still under this spell? I mean, I've clearly broken from this thing. I've been talking about this for four years. There is no vindication. There is no absolution, there's no apology. The system is simply going to try to go in and anoint Kamala Harris as if there was a democratic process in place, which, I want to get into this: this is mind control at scale!
00:59:14
Nicole Shanahan: It's mind control—well, it's making mistakes, showing your hand at making the mistake, and then offering no redemption to the people.
00:59:24
Eric Weinstein: Zero!
00:59:24
Nicole Shanahan: That have known the truth all along. And that's, you know, we talked about this concept of redemption, that if we were going to really restore the heart of this country, and if we were really going to set up the conditions for a prolific endeavor in it, human future.
00:59:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:59:43
Nicole Shanahan: Redemption is a key piece of.
00:59:45
Eric Weinstein: Redemption, but also exoneration, because a lot of people—I don't require redemption in this case. I require—
00:59:54
Nicole Shanahan: I think you do though, but go on.
00:59:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, because I don't think I did anything wrong. In other words—
00:59:58
Nicole Shanahan: But you were made—
01:00:00
Eric Weinstein: But this is what I'm trying to say, a person—
01:00:01
Nicole Shanahan: Every effort was to make you feel wrong—
01:00:03
Eric Weinstein: A person wrongly accused needs to be exonerated.
01:00:07
Nicole Shanahan: Yes.
01:00:08
Eric Weinstein: And my—
01:00:09
Nicole Shanahan: But who is going to offer you that exoneration?
01:00:11
Eric Weinstein: So this is my question, which is, what do I make of institutions—think about the level of collaboration needed for no psychiatrists, no geriatric medicine specialists, Parkinson's specialists, no neurologists, nobody in the inner circle—I mean, more or less, it's like Murder on the Orient Express where all of the experts were colluding to pretend that the bad people were the people speaking the truth, who worried about not having a functioning president while we're in a half proxy war with Russia with a thermonuclear capacity, I mean, I can't—
01:00:59
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:01:00
Eric Weinstein: How is this guy staying in office till November?
01:01:02
Nicole Shanahan: I hear you and, you know, this idea—okay, let's go to exoneration. I exonerate you, and part of what I do—
01:01:12
Nicole Shanahan: Hey, Nicole, thank you!
01:01:13
Nicole Shanahan: —with this podcast is highlighting that we should have never gotten in this situation to begin with. And this is why people are saying—
01:01:20
Eric Weinstein: By the way, I exonerate you as being a spoiler.
01:01:23
Nicole Shanahan: Thank you very much. And for whatever other number of things.
01:01:27
Eric Weinstein: Other imagined crimes.
01:01:28
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, other imagined crimes I've been held accountable for. But, so the thing is, this should not be the environment that we're in with qualified voices. I keep going back to qualified voices and they've become known as dissident voices. And from there they've become absolutely canceled. And you know who has the power to exonerate all of us? I think it's not Donald Trump, although he really, that's, he's winning over a lot of hearts and minds by offering that because he's holding himself up as the martyr that has always self exonerated. But I don't actually think he's the answer for a number of reasons. One, in that his version of exoneration includes a bit of revenge. We're not, this is not the population that I think we're talking about is just really wanting fairness and people to do their jobs well. It's really simple. And it's wanting progress, and it's this real desire to move on from this moment that we're in right now. And I think that the gift, the things that—the lessons that we can learn from Donald Trump are how to self exonerate. But we have to do it in partnership. And, you know, one of the other themes we were talking about that I want to discuss now is this idea that the people in this group may agree 80% of the time, or even less, and there might be 20% of the things that we absolutely disagree on. You know, one of the things is I, I've never actually thought about military as being the ultimate partnership for science, but I can see how historically that was the case.
01:03:22
Eric Weinstein: You'd hear me out.
01:03:23
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, I would hear you out on that. And I think that there's this neuroplasticity that if we save 20% of our intellectual capacity for, we would be definitely better off. And if we didn't seek revenge for the parts of us that have been so shamed and canceled and excluded from the conversation, and replace that with thinking through, you know, a blockchain for science, you know, putting it to real productive use. I see us doing that as a community, but I also see us deeply hurt.
01:04:04
Eric Weinstein: Say more about that.
01:04:06
Nicole Shanahan: So I think the thing is that there's this hopelessness that this culture has left many of us with, this hopelessness that the institutions that we all once trusted, that we gave ourselves to—
01:04:25
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
01:04:26
Nicole Shanahan: —in big ways, have sold us out.
01:04:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:04:31
Nicole Shanahan: It's one of the worst feelings.
01:04:33
Eric Weinstein: I don't think you and I have had this discussion. I'm dying to hear more of it.
01:04:36
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. The worst part of being a dissident is feeling very alone and ostracized and your reality stripped from you in every single way. It's a form of psychosis, right? It's intentional to, like, actually inflict this psychosis on somebody that is a dissident and that you're trying to silence is, you make them out to be somebody who is untrustworthy. And if you are that individual, you begin to question your own sanity. And I think that we got to dig ourselves out of this.
01:05:21
Eric Weinstein: I didn't know that you actually experienced this, and I don't know that I had the presence of mind to talk about it in these terms. Are you familiar with the psychologist in Oregon by the name of Jennifer Freyd?
01:05:32
Nicole Shanahan: No.
01:05:33
Eric Weinstein: She has a theory called Institutional Betrayal that deserves to be much better known. And what it says is that the trauma that we experience when an institution that was specifically entrusted with our care, when we are betrayed by such an institution, like a hospital or a university or a daycare or whatever, that the trauma is of a particularly special nature, that it leads to a long term inability to trust, because that thing is in some sense in loco parentis. It's some form of parental authority. And it's like your parent telling you you're a charlatan.
01:06:12
Nicole Shanahan: Wow.
01:06:13
Eric Weinstein: Right? Or you're untrustworthy. You're a bad child.
01:06:16
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:06:18
Eric Weinstein: You're not worthy of life saving care or whatever these things are. And so what I'm—
01:06:25
Nicole Shanahan: You're not worthy of the dignity everybody else is.
01:06:27
Eric Weinstein: That's right.
01:06:28
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:06:28
Eric Weinstein: And so I have this question, for example, with Harvard. Now Harvard, through one particular professor, told me that I had to not live in the state of Massachusetts for a year to continue in my program. There is no law in the US code that entitles a university to tell somebody what state they can and cannot live in. It was an absolute betrayal of the relationship. Yet Harvard has gone on for hundreds of years. And so I have this question, well, why would Harvard get into a problem with you? And I can say, well, did you see the Claudine Gay thing? It doesn't matter. There's something about the institutions that no matter how many scandals, how many failures, how many exposures, they still retain this sort of place in our lives and it can speak to us. And if your institution turns its back on you and says you are particularly horrible, we experience a kind of shame of trauma, of othering, which we can't—you effectively are being disowned by a parent.
01:07:35
Nicole Shanahan: Wow.
01:07:36
Eric Weinstein: And—well, no, I'm sort of getting it from you!
01:07:38
Nicole Shanahan: I, no, that's exactly what it feels like, and it feels like it is a pattern. I mean, it and then it feels like some kind of personality flaw, that somehow having a different opinion from everybody else makes you intrinsically unlikable. I know what this—I mean this goes back to just, you're right, being a child and being disowned. It affects people at a psychological and spiritual level that is really deep and significant.
01:08:15
Eric Weinstein: Really deep and significant. And I think, quite honestly, that a lot of us are experiencing some version of this with the Democratic Party. We didn't grow up in a world in which you couldn't dissent.
01:08:30
Nicole Shanahan: Or even a relationship with our country.
01:08:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing—I went with my son to see Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue turns 100 this year. We went to the Hollywood Bowl, and I can't think of anything more American than, like, a summer evening with Gershwin at the Hollywood Bowl. And they played the National Anthem, and there were all these people who were sitting and, you know, some of them, I understand, you're in a wheelchair or whatever, but this was many more people than that was true for. And I think what we need to teach people is that you've got to have reverence for your country, even though you know it's done many things that you don't approve of, that ultimately, you revere the officers, you revere the flag, you revere the culture of your country, because—and this is something I've never been able to explain, and maybe the first time I'm talking about it publicly—one of the greatest things about this country is that there is a shared imagined United States of America, that even though we find out the truth, it isn't the country we thought it was, what's amazing about this place is that we all have a pretty common concept of lots of people, of different looks and hues and beliefs coming together for the purpose of liberty, strength, standing up for people who don't have anywhere else to turn. And think of that as like a movie set, or a Potemkin village. It's not real because it doesn't have the depth that we would associate with it. But the crazy thing is, what if we realized that it was a movie set and we said, you know what, let's build out the city behind this very two dimensional front that it suggests. And I think that that's part of what the American Plan has been. And one of the reasons I was so aghast at The New York Times and its 1619 Project, which is, we're in the process of building that country where all men are created equal, whether or not they are men or women, or whether they're black or white or Inuit, it doesn't matter. To interfere with that process, to go back and just, you know, air these grievances that can never be addressed or really worked with or anything like that is madness, because we've gotten pretty far along the path of building out that country that we had imagined, and to give up on it right now seems insane. So I, in part, think that it is the imagined United States of America that causes you to come to your feet when the national anthem is played. And if you don't have the imagination for that better place, then that explains why you're sitting.
01:11:03
Nicole Shanahan: The existential threat of corrupted science—
01:11:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:11:08
Nicole Shanahan: We saw that play out during the pandemic. We're still seeing it play out.
01:11:11
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:11:13
Nicole Shanahan: If we really protected the First Amendment throughout the pandemic from beginning to end, it would not be the situation that we're in today. We probably wouldn't have had lockdowns. The children would have been able to go to school with, you know, certain criteria in play.
01:11:32
Nicole Shanahan: We may have even evolved a new model for transmission management. And then, you know, other existential threats related to military, like if you think about the power of AI when combined with military and then the fact that individuals don't have the right to bear equivalent arms—
01:11:57
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:11:58
Nicole Shanahan: That's existential. The Second Amendment anticipates that. So if you track all of these big existential threats that this technological innovation boom are going to present, if you lead first with the core values of the Constitution, we overcome each of these existential threats time and time and time again. I mean, you could create a list of a thousand of these incidences.
01:12:23
Eric Weinstein: So it's an interesting puzzle, which is, I think the way I'm hearing you and correct me if I'm wrong is that the Bill of Rights is in some sense thematic. It speaks to you should have the freedom to share your ideas. You should have the freedom to defend yourself and your country. You should have the freedom against unwarranted search and seizure. You shouldn't have to bear witness against yourself. All of these sorts of things.
01:12:49
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:12:51
Eric Weinstein: The problem becomes how do you instantiate them as opposed to what were they spiritually trying to say. So for example, if I have a server that has my email and it's inside of my physical house, you might say that it's protected against unwarranted search and seizure. On the other hand, if it's outside my house, but I have a password, do I extend the perimeter of my house to include that server? Because it's really part of—
01:13:20
Eric Weinstein: Or does the password serve as—
01:13:21
Eric Weinstein: That's what I'm trying to say. So, you know, in part what we have is we have a group of technical people trying to divorce us from our rights as they are spiritually understood. And, you know, this goes back to—
01:13:36
Nicole Shanahan: And even as they're doctrinally understood.
01:13:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But I think that there is a question of—how do I put this exactly? We lost two ideas that I think you can't afford to lose both of them. One of them is that nature is almost impossible to take over from because things are very, very complicated in nature, and somehow nature finds equilibrium. So you can do it, but it's no walk in the park, and it often fails. The other idea is some version of religion. And when you talk about the naturalistic fallacy, very often that is become the idea that just because something is natural, it doesn't make it better. And the idea of getting rid of religion says, well, who is to say? And I think about the, and I talk about the Declaration of Independence quite a bit, that the most important words are "endowed by their creator" and "self-evident."
01:14:35
Nicole Shanahan: Yes.
01:14:35
Eric Weinstein: Because if you did not stop the infinite regress into quibbling and caviling and pettifogging and all this kind of nonsense, you would never get a country. You have to basically assert, we believe these are self-evident, and we believe that these come from something greater than ourselves, so we're not going to mess with it. And if you don't agree, there are plenty of countries all over the country. Go find yourself one, because you don't belong here.
01:15:03
Nicole Shanahan: Yep, I think you just said it better than I could have. And I'm going to contextualize that into where we are in transhumanism. And this idea of self-evident is being tested every—
01:15:20
Eric Weinstein: Everywhere.
01:15:20
Nicole Shanahan: I mean, that is where most science has gone, actually, is redefining what is and isn't self-evident. Even, you know, and I hate getting into cultural wars, but this idea that a trans man is a woman, right? And again, I don't want to bring this up because it's just one of these things that the left is so fixated on right now. But is it self-evident that a trans man is a woman and, like, is with a capital I? Right? It's, that's the piece that I believe is up for interpretation right now. And I'm not saying that it is that we're redefining what a woman is. I'm saying that there's a group that is trying to redefine what a woman is. But I'm saying that science has kind of lost its motivation around self-evident. And we have been, as we test that piece of the foundation of this nation, we begin to test all pieces of the foundation of this nation. And it is, and it's what is causing this sense of deep, deep instability into the fabric of who we are as a country.
01:16:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, but—
01:16:49
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:16:49
Eric Weinstein: Look, let's take the two points I tried to make just before you played the trans card.
01:16:55
Nicole Shanahan: Right.
01:16:56
Eric Weinstein: So the point I was trying to make was some version of "that's unnatural" versus "that's immoral or wrong". Those were the two things that we had before. So if you take a normally functioning XY individual and you say, well, that individual is now, for all intents and purposes, XX—
01:17:17
Nicole Shanahan: Yes.
01:17:17
Eric Weinstein: —that is an unnatural thing by most standards. And we should be able to say that that is true. If we want to say that moralistically speaking, we believe that our creator believed that there was something sacred about the propagating family. That's another place. Now, the problem is that neither of those work entirely comfortably in a modern context. For example, what if somebody is born with ovo-testes? What if somebody is born in an intersex category that defies easy description?
01:17:50
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:17:51
Eric Weinstein: Do we want to be jerks about that? That's part of the problem with the Right's answer to this, which is a man is a man as a woman is a woman. Don't tell me otherwise.
01:17:58
Nicole Shanahan: Right, and—
01:17:59
Eric Weinstein: Because—
01:17:59
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, and that's the thing liberals have a hard time with.
01:18:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, no—right, but the liberals then say, "so we should potentially put an unprecedented number of our children that we've raised into a situation in which they're considering permanent reproductive mutilation", which is insane.
01:18:21
Nicole Shanahan: I know!
01:18:21
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so my claim is that what we need is a bunch of adults to model the idea is that we want to keep things more or less boys and girls, and compassion for the tiny number of people who fall into the edge category, and we don't want to grow that edge category by normalizing it in cases where it had no basis to begin with. Somehow the complexity of that thought is too much, and I can count on 10,000 people yelling at me on social media like "you're the worst person ever, because you didn't either say a man is a man or a woman is a woman, or—
01:18:58
Nicole Shanahan: A trans man is a woman.
01:19:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:19:01
Nicole Shanahan: Right.
01:19:01
Eric Weinstein: And my claim is you should all go to bed without supper, and we can meet tomorrow morning and try to grow out of this.
01:19:07
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah. You know, it's really refreshing to be able to talk about this within that context because, you know, we both come from this world of compassion and of science. And I think that—and of intellectual discourse, and civility. And I think that there's still a world for us to do this work well, to be these kinds of people.
01:19:39
Eric Weinstein: There's got to be beer at the end.
01:19:41
Nicole Shanahan: Okay. Right and celebration, right?
01:19:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah!
01:19:44
Nicole Shanahan: I mean, you know, it's been this Cold War of like, almost going underground, if you are somebody who is not picking a side between Wokeism and MAGA and everybody is stuck between this—
01:20:03
Eric Weinstein: We need to reclaim our institutions, Nicole.
01:20:06
Nicole Shanahan: And if we can reclaim our inst—do we reclaim them or create new ones?
01:20:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, we should do both. But like, I'm going to try something just to see where it goes.
01:20:15
Nicole Shanahan: Okay.
01:20:16
Eric Weinstein: I would like to go on CNN, NPR, or MSNBC. I'd like to talk about what just happened with Joe Biden. I'm a lifelong Democrat. I've never voted Republican. And if I can't go on any of those shows—because I can show you that I can generate ratings for you, that'll be no problem—I want to know why you will no longer talk to me. We used to talk all the time between, oh, I don't know, 1980s and I would say around 2012, 2013. Something discretely different happened. I can no longer be interviewed by the NewsHour. I can't be a source for NPR. I was shocked when the New York Times had me in an obituary of a friend of mine, and I thought, what a strange thing, and then I realized that they always write their obituaries years before the person dies, and so it had been in the files, even though the New York Times will no longer talk to me on most stories. I want to understand from your perspective why it's impossible to have people who represent the independent podcasting world on mainstream corporate media, because it seems like a total disconnect. It's very clear that you're avoiding almost all of us, almost all of the time. Why is that? Why are we in two separate ecosystems? It doesn't really make any sense. I want to know, for example, why, let's say Robert F. Kennedy or Nicole or Tulsi or any one of these people who've been traditionally associated with the Democratic Party are somehow no longer welcome. Who in the Democratic leadership is doing this? What are their names? Is this Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her legacy? Who created the structure that says that we don't have primaries and we anoint people? That, you know, if Obama and Schumer and Pelosi decide who the next person is, that's the candidate for president of the United States. What are we doing with this crazy structure that says who can appear in a debate? I think, if I recall correctly, Tulsi told me that multiple primary candidates couldn't appear on a podcast because of the rules. Can we get all of these secret rules by which the leadership puts its dirty little thumb on the scales of democracy? And can we have them put in front of us, so we have an idea of what are the ingredients in this process? Just imagine that you're eating a piece of food like a Hostess Snowball, I want to know what's in it. What are the preservatives? What are the colorings? Will you please just tell me all of the rules that you've put in place, so that you can't have Joe Rogan interviewing candidates, you can't have independent media in this? It feels like a rigged game. And I want to know, and I just want to begin with, I'd like to go on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, and I want you to tell me why I can't. Thanks.
01:23:24
Nicole Shanahan: Well, I, I'm sure we can clip that and send that around.
01:23:28
Eric Weinstein: But my point being, we're in a situation in which we don't know why this door is locked. I look at the number of people—you can have a—you can be a convicted felon and be in the Democratic Party. You can be, you know, some of the most self-interested billionaires and be in the Democratic Party. You can't be independent and be in the Democratic Party. Where did that begin?
01:23:57
Nicole Shanahan: You know, speaking as a millennial and I think on behalf of millennials, I am, I believe, it happened probably around the time that Bernie Sanders kind of sold out his base and went back to the party. You saw him coming out of the party, doing his thing, doing it very well, attracting all of these young people behind him that made him, that built him up. That wasn't his vision. He didn't have that media skill and talent and he didn't know how to fundraise, to be setting up the guerrilla marketing campaigns that his millennial supporters set up for him. Bernie Sanders selling out his base and going back and side-kicking for Biden is one of the things that I think has betrayed my generation in ways that we will never even seek to go back to the institutions as a result of.
01:25:08
Eric Weinstein: Say more about that.
01:25:10
Nicole Shanahan: It's why the Democratic Party has devolved into a single issue, Hating-Donald-Trump platform.
01:25:21
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:25:22
Nicole Shanahan: Because that's all they have left to offer Millennials, progressive Millennials and Gen Zers is, you know, if you don't want Donald Trump, we're your only other option.
01:25:34
Eric Weinstein: I heard there was another ticket running actually.
01:25:35
Nicole Shanahan: There is another ticket running that we have, a very strong independent candidacy. And I think this is where the nation needs to be right now in order to heal. And this is not something that is hyperbole. We're not, it's not branding, it is actually mechanically necessary.
01:25:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:25:58
Nicole Shanahan: If we refuse to accept that everything you just mentioned is okay—
01:26:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:26:05
Nicole Shanahan: Go independent, officially declare it by re-registering as an unaffiliated.
01:26:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:26:15
Nicole Shanahan: We send a signal to what is the DNC today, that we want our institution back, and that's what that is. It's not—this is not permanent. This is not anarchist. This is a message because we haven't been heard in any other forum.
01:26:35
Eric Weinstein: So are you open to people just parking themselves with you temporarily for this election cycle, or—?
01:26:41
Nicole Shanahan: Yes. And again, let's go back to the 80/20 rule. If we agree on 80% of our ambitions for the United States, we have space for us to have open debate about the remaining 20%. And we're not offering this as, you know, don't vote for Trump. If you want to vote for Trump, vote for Trump. But if you can't bring yourself to voting for Trump, go independent. Give this ticket a shot. This ticket is a completely different paradigm. It's a completely different structure of thinking. We are the angry moms. We are the dissident scientists. We are the white men that feel confused and betrayed. We are the people of color who don't—
01:27:38
Eric Weinstein: And the black men and women who support them and will not stand for any more of this anti-whiteness racist nonsense, because the black community has suffered more from racism, and it's better able to identify racism.
01:27:50
Nicole Shanahan: Yes!
01:27:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah! Right, okay.
01:27:51
Nicole Shanahan: Precisely. We are the Asian immigrants and children of immigrants who don't understand the vitriol, who have just silently worked away to earn our way in this country with the American Dream and American Spirit in mind because of the desire to learn freely, without the fear of having to actually join a party, right? Without the pressure, without being disowned by your country if you don't subscribe to a political ideology. So that's what this is right now. These are American values of freedom and, you know, it is. And it's okay. It's very powerful.
01:28:43
Eric Weinstein: But it's more than okay. Come on.
01:28:45
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:28:45
Eric Weinstein: I mean, one of the things that really—I'll tell you something. My most prized possession—and this is ridiculous is an electric guitar from Michigan. And it looks like a Les Paul, but it's not a Gibson. It's produced by a company called Heritage. The most important thing about Heritage is that Heritage is the factory at 225 Parsons Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where the Gibson Magic began.
01:29:13
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:29:14
Eric Weinstein: And so, in a certain sense, Gibson's legacy split between the company that moved to Tennessee and the people who stayed behind in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And to me, in part, what you're talking about is the Democratic Party split in two, the legacy of the Democratic Party that comes from, let's say, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts is riding with your ticket and the new relocated Democratic Party is this thing that we associate with Nancy Pelosi, and they're not the same party. And so, in part, when I hold up my electric guitar, am I holding up the Heritage of the Les Paul legacy at 225 Parsons Street? You bet I am. And the point is that the headstock doesn't happen to say Gibson. It says Heritage. And that's because there was a split. And I think in part what you're talking about is which part of the split are you—the Pelosi side of the split?
01:30:15
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:30:16
Eric Weinstein: Or are you the Kennedy-Roosevelt part of the split?
01:30:19
Nicole Shanahan: Or Reagan even.
01:30:20
Eric Weinstein: Or Reagan even.
01:30:21
Nicole Shanahan: Because I have to say, like, Reagan Republicans don't have a home right now either.
01:30:27
Eric Weinstein: Sure. And what—I wasn't a huge Ronald Reagan fan, but there are great things about Donald Trump, and there're great things about Ronald Reagan that we're not allowed to acknowledge. I can say that as a Democrat, we were definitely too much in the self-hating idiom of the 70s. That sense of malaise that the US couldn't do anything right. There was something about a telegenic individual stepping up and saying, daddy's home, that was extremely exciting. And that's why also the angry mom energy, "wait a minute, I'm trying to figure out whether to inject my child with the vaccine, and I'm looking at the—somebody explain this to me. This doesn't make sense." And so the idea of righteous moms, I think I've said to you before, growing up hiking in the Sierras, I was never cautioned about male bears, it was always, "never get between a female bear and her cubs".
01:31:27
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:31:27
Eric Weinstein: And—
01:31:28
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, we've gutted that maternal might because it is so powerful. Like it is such a threat to institutions. It is probably one of the most powerful substances we have as a human species, is that maternal connection between mother and child. It is an endless commitment that is endlessly resourced by chemistry and spirit. It's so powerful.
01:32:05
Eric Weinstein: Do you know my favorite version of this story?
01:32:06
Nicole Shanahan: What?
01:32:07
Eric Weinstein: The Rosenstrasse protest from the mid 1940s. A bunch of German women with, I think, half Jewish husbands and the fathers of their children, decided that they were going to stare down Adolf Hitler in the height of Nazi Germany. And they went to Rosenstrasse, and they started protesting and they would not be shut up. And they got their husbands taken back from the camps, and reinstated at home because ultimately, standing up to mothers is always a losing battle. This is what Mothers Against Drunk Driving figured out, which is, anytime—
01:32:46
Nicole Shanahan: Mothers took on tobacco and won.
01:32:50
Eric Weinstein: Mothers are the most powerful force in the universe because all love comes from maternal love. And I think that in part, one of the things that we have to recognize is that if moms are not going to stand up against anti-scientific nonsense paraded as science.
01:33:11
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:33:12
Eric Weinstein: Then we're lost.
01:33:13
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah, yeah. Or the perversion of science.
01:33:16
Eric Weinstein: Or pretending that Public Health is science, when in fact it is a hybrid of things that are true and things that must be said in the eyes of some, that are untrue. And the culture and the cult of the noble lie. It is very important that science disavow Public Health, if public health does not want to play by the rules of science.
01:33:39
Eric Weinstein:
01:33:42
Nicole Shanahan: Well, amen to that. I think that, you know, I think there's space for civility to come back into politics. It's not going to happen, you know, within the Democratic Party this cycle. We can let that one go. And you know, I'm sad to say I don't think Trump is changing who he is. So I don't think that we that, you know, this, I don't want to call it the cult of Trump, but I think that—
01:34:14
Eric Weinstein: It's a cult.
01:34:15
Nicole Shanahan: Okay.
01:34:16
Eric Weinstein: It's a cult.
01:34:17
Nicole Shanahan: You know, I don't—I—it is this belief that cult is—that Trump is a savior of some sort.
01:34:24
Eric Weinstein: He may be a savior of some sort. I don't know, he could be, he could be our undoing. There's a lot of energy and power behind him. He is neither as evil as his detractors claim, nor as good as his strident supporters claim.
01:34:39
Nicole Shanahan: Well said.
01:34:39
Eric Weinstein: He's a wild card. He remains a wild card. I think that the problem is why are we dependent on a wild card—
01:34:49
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:34:50
Eric Weinstein: —at a time when we need something much more dependable.
01:34:53
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:34:54
Eric Weinstein: And you know, the thing that really soured me on Trump was the moment at which he started inducing people at one of his rallies during the earlier cycle, saying, I'll pay your legal bills if you want to rough up the protesters. He just—well, because he flirts with that violence, he flirts with that violence and he flirted with it on January 6th.
01:35:16
Nicole Shanahan: Yeah.
01:35:17
Eric Weinstein: And January 6th is not what the Democrats portray it as being, nor is it what MAGA claims it is. And the issue of being forced into this paradigm in which we've constantly got to overlook some huge set of negatives in one candidate or the other, because we're always fighting the worse of two evils. This doesn't work. I do want to push back on one thing you said about the millennials never going back to the institutions.
01:35:44
Nicole Shanahan: It is the only thing that makes sense for us right now. But go on.
01:35:50
Eric Weinstein: People often say, "why are you so focused on CNN?", because CNN isn't pulling in great ratings. The answer is it's the institutions that watch PBS and NPR and CBS and CNN like a hawk. You've got a group of institutional media voices that are listening to each other. And what you have in the system is a failure to understand that the importance of what gets said on CNN isn't a question of whether it draws huge ratings or whether people believe it. It's a fig leaf, very often, for the story that's being pushed out and that even if you don't watch any of that stuff, I watch as it creeps into social media. Because so many different outlets say more or less the same thing, people will repeat anything that comes from that. If you don't either build new institutions or reform the institutions and reinsert the dissidents inside of them, you've got a terrible situation. So it may be that you've never seen a good version of the institutions, because during the time that you were growing up, they were already so far gone. But as somebody who's a little bit older and not quite a Millennial, I'm the oldest of the Xers. I would say you're going to have to accept institutions one way or the other. And it's a lot cheaper to kick out the people who crept in in the last ten years, than burn everything to the ground. But if we have to and we have to start afresh, that's up to them. I do think that, quite honestly, if you'll just wait five more years, these people will be dead or they will be retired. They will not be able to keep self reinforcing. This is really the last hurrah.
01:37:49
Nicole Shanahan: I can buy that. And I would say, you know, even though in the moment it seems like Millennials have lost all trust in institutions, one thing I have noticed about my generation is a willingness to come back to the table as well.
01:38:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, so if you have to walk away, you have to walk away.
01:38:09
Nicole Shanahan: For the time being. Thank you, Eric.
01:38:11
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me.
01:38:12
Nicole Shanahan: That was awesome.