In this episode, we talk to intellectual dark web creator Eric Weinstein about his new group, the "Intellectual Dark Web" (IDW), and what it means to be an "intellectual dark web" creator. We also talk about how the IDW came about, and why it's important that there are so many independent voices on the internet. And, of course, we have a special guest on the show this week: the founder of the New York Times bestselling book, "Woke" by Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and more. Eric Weinstein is a Harvard-trained PhD in mathematics, who somehow found himself as the creator of the intellectual darkweb, which you ve read about in the pages of the NY Times amidst photos of people like Eric standing in the trees, and Sam Harris standing among the cacti. What's more, he s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSOA), a group dedicated to fighting against immigration, high-skilled immigrants, and other economic and political issues that have long been championed by the right-wing media. We talk about the founding of the group, what it's all about, how it got its name, and how it came about. Plus, we get to know more about what it s like to be a "woke" in the 21st century, and what that means to him, and to the rest of the left. Thanks to Eric Weinstein for joining us on the Sunday special, and for being a part of the conversation about all things intellectual darkwealthrough the internet, and social justice, and all things that matters. This is a must-listen Sunday special! Thank you to Eric for coming on to the show, and we hope you enjoy it. Ben and Ben for being on the podcast, Ben for making us all feel like we re all woken up to the idea of what's going on in the world, and making sense of it all. -Ben and Ben, and thanks to you for making it all possible. If you like it, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, and don t forget to tell a friend about it on iTunes, and tell us what you think of it on your social media platforms, and share it to a friend who's listening to us about it. We'll be listening to it on the pod, and sharing it with a friend. Timestamps: 1:00 - What do you think about it? 3:30 - What is a woke network? 4:20 - What does it mean to be woke? 5:40 - What kind of woke network is it about? 6:10 - Why is it important to you?
00:00:00.000Bad diversity is where you have two people who grow up in countries that drive on opposite sides of the road, and you decide that everybody's entitled to drive on the side of the road that they grew up of and feel comfortable with, and all you get is auto accidents.
00:00:19.000So we are here with intellectual dark web impresario Eric Weinstein.
00:00:23.000We're going to get started talking to him in just a minute.
00:00:25.000One of the most fascinating guys around.
00:00:26.000But first, I want to talk to you about your internet security.
00:00:29.000With all the recent news about online security breaches, it's hard not to worry about where my data goes.
00:00:33.000Making an online purchase, simply accessing your email, it could be putting your private information at risk.
00:00:38.000Because you are being tracked online by social media sites and marketing companies and your mobile or internet provider.
00:00:43.000Not only can they record your browsing history, they often sell it to other corporations who want to profit from that information, which is why I've taken back my privacy by using ExpressVPN.
00:00:51.000So ExpressVPN, they have easy to use apps.
00:01:32.000Okay, Eric Weinstein, thank you so much for joining me here on the Sunday special.
00:01:42.000For those who don't know, Eric Weinstein is a Harvard-trained PhD in mathematics who somehow found himself as the creator of the intellectual dark web, which you've read about in the pages of the New York Times amidst photos of people like Eric standing in the trees with Sam Harris and Joe Rogan standing among the cacti.
00:02:04.000And second of all, how did you, who started off and still work in the world of physics and mathematics, end up creating at least the name for the intellectual dark web?
00:02:12.000You did it, I know, we were on stage together when it happened.
00:02:16.000Well, I think it's actually sort of an interesting one.
00:02:19.000I have been tracking various political and social issues since the 1980s and have inserted myself or fought through a number of topics including high-skilled immigration, mortgage-backed securities,
00:02:37.000And various issues having to do with my concerns over the loss of objectivity in the major press organs.
00:02:46.000So in some ways this is not my first rodeo.
00:03:03.000Have been really one or two people like Nassim Taleb was a co-fighter in the mortgage-backed security question and a guy named Norm Matloff was one of the few people who was really a critic of high-skilled immigration from an intelligent position.
00:03:19.000So what's really interesting about this is that this is the first time that there's a large number of interesting voices with a few new technologies and wrinkles to explore.
00:03:29.000And I think the best thing I could think to do with so many independent voices was to try to use language to identify what was already occurring
00:03:41.000And have the language sort of help people see what was already happening and that would allow us to direct this a little bit for more powerful aims.
00:04:04.000And, you know, obviously your brother Brett, who's a member of the IDW in good standing, he also is on the left.
00:04:10.000People like Sam Harris are on the left.
00:04:12.000And then I may be the only overt conservative in the group, actually.
00:04:15.000It's been actually perceived as this wild right-wing group.
00:04:19.000And as far as I know, I'm the only registered Republican in the group.
00:04:21.000So far as I know, and I think that has to do with the fact that something very peculiar happened on the left.
00:04:28.000And so in many ways, this is a response from an older left to what is viewed as almost certainly a very brief, very intense, and very crazy bout of bad judgment, I would say, from the American left.
00:04:46.000It's not that these strains haven't been present before, but what's really new to me
00:04:51.000Is the idea that this new sort of woke network, which practices something which I've called left-cartheism, has invaded the major organs of civil society.
00:05:04.000And the most important examples of this, I would say, first and foremost, is not the universities, but the major media companies that form our sense-making network, so news bureaus, let's say.
00:05:16.000The next thing that's infected, in my opinion, is the tech companies that are public-facing, which are under constant pressure to show that they are sufficiently in line with what are called progressive values, but I think most of us with a longer timeline would say are very regressive values.
00:05:41.000You know, Scares Me No End almost certainly has a relationship with these tech companies, given that we deposit all our secrets into our Gmail accounts and our browsing histories, as you were just talking about in your latest plug.
00:05:53.000You know, all of these things come together in what I call TIM, technology, intelligence, and media.
00:06:00.000Universities are certainly a serious problem, but I think the most important problem
00:06:05.000is that we can't trust our sense-making organs.
00:06:08.000Because, you know, as we just, I tweeted out today, the New Yorker, you know, ran a tweet saying, conservative orators like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Richard Spencer, and then dot, dot, dot.
00:06:58.000And, you know, that was not fair to do to you.
00:07:00.000So if the New Yorker's not going to apologize to you, uh, I prefer not to apologize.
00:07:04.000I'm just going to fight back because it's just not right.
00:07:07.000Well, you didn't do it, so you shouldn't apologize, obviously.
00:07:09.000But let's talk about how you fixed these particular institutions and what is the exact problem with the institutions.
00:07:13.000So, there have been a couple of solutions proposed with regard to the media from the right.
00:07:17.000One is the sort of restoration of the idea that there is an objective journalism to be found and that everybody should go back to this aspirational idea that supposedly existed before where there were the facts
00:07:28.000Checkers and the people who reported the facts and then there were the opinion makers and there were two separate groups of people.
00:07:32.000And then there are folks like me who tend toward a sort of legal realist perspective when it comes to media, which is all these folks have their political point of view.
00:07:39.000We know they'll have their political point of view.
00:07:41.000Why don't they just be honest about their political point of view?
00:08:00.000I think both of those techniques can work just fine.
00:08:03.000So, you know, Gonzo was the idea that if we just open what it is that we're thinking and doing, we insert ourselves into the story, that that allows the consumer to unspin whatever it is that they're doing.
00:08:15.000Or you can have warring, you know, a left-wing media and a right-wing media.
00:08:19.000That's not what the problem is at the moment.
00:08:21.000I think that the problem is that a lot of this stuff is just actually disingenuous.
00:08:27.000People know that you are not a Nazi, and they know that Richard Spencer is very close to being one.
00:08:32.000That he's really flirting with stuff that's absolutely dangerous and crazy.
00:08:39.000The key point is, as somebody said to me recently, progress is messy.
00:08:45.000And the idea is that if certain lives have to get ruined on the way towards some imagined egalitarian society, then that's just too damn bad.
00:09:30.000You can either try for objectivity or you can be honest about your biases.
00:09:34.000Both of those are much more similar to each other than this other thing is, which is we know what the right answer is for society and it doesn't really matter how we get there.
00:09:45.000So what we're going to do is we're going to propose ideas that are, in an analogy, they're almost like suicide ideas.
00:09:52.000They're ideas that are simply meant to be highly destructive.
00:09:56.000So if I say to you, well, clearly a white man can't understand anything, then what I've just done is I've taken two of your attributes and I've shut you up or forced you to deal with this completely irrelevant argument for the next 90 minutes.
00:10:11.000So this style of argumentation is something that actually has to be excluded.
00:10:16.000If you want a diversity of opinion, of opinions that actually matter, it's very important not to seat people who think in these terms at the table.
00:10:24.000And this is what we talked about, I think, maybe on the Rubin Report, or maybe it was just before you got there, there's good diversity and there's bad diversity.
00:10:33.000Good diversity is when you have people who are of good character trying to puzzle through something, fighting very hard for their perspective.
00:10:39.000Bad diversity is where you have two people who grow up in countries that drive on opposite sides of the road, and you decide that everybody's entitled to drive on the side of the road that they grew up on and feel comfortable with, and all you get is auto accidents.
00:10:52.000And so it's very important to drive bad diversity out of the system because otherwise you never get to experience the benefits of the highly multicultural and interesting diverse society that we managed to build for ourselves.
00:11:03.000So you've spent an awful lot of time in the tech community also.
00:11:05.000So you mentioned three specific areas.
00:11:06.000You mentioned media and technology in the intelligence community.
00:11:08.000I want to go through each one of those.
00:11:10.000So tech, you've spent a lot of time in because you work closely with Peter Thiel, who obviously is deeply involved in everything Silicon Valley has to offer.
00:11:17.000I've been complaining for a long time about the inherent biases of places like Facebook and YouTube, and it's pretty obvious to folks, including Dave Rubin, that YouTube has a biased algorithm that demonetizes particular points of view.
00:11:29.000Facebook has, on occasion, really punished people on the right for, I believe, political reasons.
00:11:35.000Is there anything that can be done about this in any real sense, or are we just at the whims of what are essentially monopolies?
00:11:40.000I mean, Facebook has the closest thing to a monopoly that I've seen in modern American life.
00:11:44.000And I'm not an antitrust guy by nature, but the fact is there's no competing service that even comes close to the sort of control that Facebook has over social media.
00:11:53.000And people have spent millions of dollars promoting material on Facebook to have Facebook gobble that up and then turn back an algorithm that is dishonest and disingenuous in many cases.
00:12:02.000Is that something that can be dealt with or is the only answer regulation or the building of alternative methods of distribution?
00:12:10.000Yeah, I think that this is a really interesting and difficult problem.
00:12:15.000I believe that there's actually a set of new problems that came about from the fact that this technology, giving everybody the power of their own newspaper, let's say, to publish their own newspaper, is a new feature of the world.
00:12:28.000It's not clear to me that free speech can just go on as before because of how big of a shift this particular new idea is.
00:12:49.000So I think that there are actually a new suite of problems that are probably going to have to change jurisprudence if we're going to keep the spirit of the Constitution alive.
00:12:58.000And I don't know what that's going to be, but I think that that's going to be a change.
00:13:02.000When these companies found that they had these problems, that people didn't want to be on the networks because everything was so unpleasant when everyone was getting all information all the time,
00:13:12.000I think that they tried to get community policing, whoever the people were, complaining the loudest.
00:13:21.000If you were complaining loudly, you might become a Truth and Safety Commission member.
00:13:26.000And so, effectively, all of the most noisy, most upsettable folks ended up in these positions of some power and influence.
00:13:37.000And a lot of the suggestions that they've made have been lousy to people who have a very strongly rational
00:13:42.000Perspective, nobody's perfectly rational, but the idea being that lots of things that we talk about that should be discussable by adults in an adult fashion, you know, if let's say my brother mentions genotype and phenotype as a biologist and someone has a freak out session because they think that that's evidence of his bigotry,
00:14:02.000That person who's freaking out needs to be down-regulated and not listened to.
00:14:08.000So it's very important that we not overvalue the loudest and shrillest voices.
00:14:15.000But the tech companies, I don't think, figured out how to do that.
00:14:18.000Furthermore, I think that what I don't understand is the extent to which what I call the gated institutional narrative, or JIN,
00:14:28.000Dependent upon there being very few outlets to check or challenge what the major thematic narratives would be.
00:14:37.000And I think that there's a real difficulty with people who came up in the previous world before the internet and before social media trying to figure out how to exert enough
00:16:18.00071% of people say they need life insurance, but only 59% of people have coverage, which means at least 12% of people are procrastinating, and 29% of people are stupid, because all of you need life insurance.
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00:17:35.000Civil libertarian objection to the intelligence community.
00:17:38.000What is your chief objection to the intelligence community?
00:17:41.000And how do we draw the balance between an intelligence community that does what it needs to to protect us from terrorist attack and an intelligence community that is gathering up every bit of data that it can, possibly for use against undesirable people or for targeting of particular viewpoints?
00:17:57.000So I think it has to do with how much history you're aware of.
00:18:01.000And in particular, one of the most disturbing things about our intelligence community is what we found out in the mid-70s from the Church and Pike Commissions, when we really thoroughly investigated what was going on, not only in the FBI, but in particular in the division known as COINTELPRO.
00:18:20.000And one of the things that I point people to so that they understand just how bad the situation can get is the situation in which Jean Seberg, one of Hollywood's leading actresses, was destroyed by misinformation taken from the FBI and placed in the Los Angeles Times by a woman named Joyce Haber, later repeated by Newsweek, suggesting that she had cuckolded her white husband with a Black Panther's child.
00:18:47.000She then, under stress, miscarried, had an open casket press conference displaying a dead white fetus, and went crazy, eventually killing herself after attempting to do so on every anniversary of her child's death.
00:19:11.000Just as we experimented with the idea of getting La Cosa Nostra to kill Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King's right hand man, the letter from Sullivan trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself by his own hand, and we actually assassinated Fred Hampton in his bed in Chicago.
00:19:28.000So if you have a left of center perspective,
00:19:31.000You're very well aware that the intelligence community has previously been out of control.
00:19:36.000Now, I have no reason to think that it is out of control at the same level now.
00:19:40.000I don't know if there's an analog of Operation Mockingbird, but the idea that we should simply trust our intelligence community when we have not publicly vigorously investigated it for many years in a new era in which it's possible to hoover up all sorts of data from our simply our daily
00:19:59.000Given that all of us carry tracking devices, microphones and video cameras at all times.
00:20:04.000This is patently insane and we need a new level of oversight so that we can trust our intelligence community with our secrets.
00:20:15.000What concerns me is that I don't know who to trust at base.
00:20:21.000I don't know if we can trust the intelligence community.
00:20:29.000What is it that we are going to do in the modern era with all of this extra sensor data to make sure that we are not being tracked completely?
00:20:38.000How did, so I started off by asking you, you know, you start off as a guy doing mathematics at Harvard.
00:20:44.000How did you go from there to politics?
00:20:51.000Well, so you have a path to God through the synagogue.
00:20:56.000My family, while Jewish, was always committedly atheist.
00:21:00.000And I figured if I was ever going to figure out what the universe was, probably reading differential geometry rather than Hebrew was the way to find God in his original language.
00:21:09.000So I thought I would try to figure out how physics unifies.
00:21:13.000And in the process of that, I responded to a call from the scientific community
00:21:19.000That said that we were gonna have a massive shortage of scientists and engineers back in the nineteen eighties and that the job prospects were gonna be limitless and very well remunerated.
00:21:29.000What happened in fact is that we had a disaster and in trying to figure out why the golden era immediately disappeared in the early nineteen nineties.
00:21:40.000I discovered that there had been a conspiracy in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Policy Research and Analysis Division, and the Government-University Industry Research Roundtable, all outside of the National Academy Complex and the National Science Board.
00:21:55.000What shocked me was that they were, in fact, trying to figure out how to avoid letting the free market determine the salaries of scientists and engineers and letting them rise to bring the needed Americans into the STEM sector.
00:22:09.000And so when I was the person who discovered a secret study from 1986 studying how to, in fact, lower the wages of Americans by flooding the market with foreign scientists and engineers, I couldn't believe it.
00:22:25.000I had always thought that immigration was basically a pure positive.
00:22:29.000I was excited, as all of us are, that we live in such a vibrant nation of immigrants.
00:22:34.000And then to find out that the very people who are supposed to be guarding the national science endeavor
00:22:40.000We're the ones who are stabbing in the back.
00:22:42.000It was like finding an Agatha Christie, whodunit, where it was murder on the Orient Express and everyone had a hand in pushing the knife in.
00:22:50.000So that broke trust to such a remarkable extent that I ended up testifying in front of, or presenting in front of the National Academy of Sciences four separate times.
00:23:01.000And I watched as the news media refused to cover the story, effectively everybody buried it, and then I realized, my gosh, we're not living in the free society that I thought.
00:23:11.000Because the story went counter-narrative, because in my sector of the world, all of us were pro-immigrant, and this indicated that immigrants weren't the problem, but that the visas were being used to flood the market.
00:23:23.000Because this was a story of betrayal by the government against the workers because the claim was that Americans couldn't do science and engineering when I think we are absolutely one of the very best systems for educating people in science and engineering.
00:23:40.000And I think that that institutional betrayal was the thing that hooked me on the idea that I didn't know how deep the rabbit hole went.
00:23:48.000So when it comes to that issue, so let's talk about high-skilled immigration for a second, because we may have a difference of opinion on this.
00:23:53.000I've always been an advocate for high-skilled immigration.
00:23:56.000You obviously oppose high-skilled immigration, at least in certain sectors.
00:24:00.000What is the downside of high-skilled immigration?
00:24:03.000Is it just the people are being promised jobs that aren't materializing in the United States, or is there a net detriment to the United States with people bringing in high-skilled immigrants to fill jobs in sectors where they want to lower the price?
00:24:16.000I mean, first of all, I don't even know where to begin.
00:24:18.000A certain amount of high-skilled immigration has always been present, and we do benefit from getting the absolute top talent in the world, but that's not really what we're looking at.
00:24:27.000What we're looking at is a bunch of systems that depress the markets so that we lose top talent that doesn't choose to go into science and engineering, but goes into investment banking or management consulting or some other sector because these salaries are so low.
00:24:46.000Technical edge, which we use to power our own economy and our own defense structure finds its way to the four or five countries in Asia which supply us with most of the cryptic labor that we call graduate study but is in fact a labor market to staff the labs.
00:25:04.000You can even, most people have never even done the thought experiment,
00:25:09.000Imagine that, let's say, Leibniz lives in Germany, Newton and Clark live in the UK, and Newton is better than Leibniz, but you open one border and not the other, and Germany pays better.
00:25:25.000Well, then Newton displaces Leibniz, Clark takes the space that would have been left for Newton, and you get Clark in the UK and Newton in Germany, rather than Newton in the UK
00:25:57.000And I think the biggest discoveries, the ones that really move the needle, are done by people who are incredibly irreverent and very disagreeable.
00:27:02.000I think that the problem was is that we didn't have something like the IDW before this.
00:27:06.000So the first person to break through and say look the institutions are out of control in a way that could actually gain power was Trump.
00:27:14.000And so as a result we associate this kind of high level of skepticism with Trump rather than with the people who might be doing it from a completely responsible and analytically sound perspective.
00:27:25.000So if I take three issues, you can take three issues where we have what I call the checksum theory of politics.
00:27:31.000If I can see that you're lying without doing any work, I lose trust very quickly.
00:28:03.000If you believe that fundamentally immigrants are simply the best of us, they work harder, they're smarter, they have all these positive traits and they cause no problem and no disruption, that is patently absurd.
00:28:16.000It doesn't mean that immigration isn't good,
00:28:19.000The representation being made is completely childlike.
00:28:23.000If you claim that there is absolutely no connection between terror and Islam, when you have mass murders and people shouting Allahu Akbar at the end, people know that you're lying.
00:28:38.000To protect our Muslim community by pointing out that the problem isn't Muslims and I will say the problem is not Muslims, but the problem is connected to Islam in a way that it's not connected to any other group at the moment.
00:28:51.000The only two other groups that have practiced suicide bombing in the modern era have been the Tamils in Sri Lanka, I think, and the Kurds in Turkey, if I'm not mistaken.
00:29:04.000So, in these situations, the population can clearly see that the news media, the political parties, are not representing things accurately.
00:29:16.000They want to believe that at least the fictions that they're being fed are adult level and that they suggest that whatever is being done behind the scenes, even if people can't be straight with the population fully, is still in the best interests of the country.
00:29:29.000And so I think Trump was willing to say things in his crass and very direct and brutal fashion that indicated that we felt that we were being betrayed by our institutions.
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00:32:41.000So with all of this said, the suggestion before the ad was basically that both sides are now slapping each other with these bricks, with these blunt instruments.
00:32:50.000Neither is representing the issue fully.
00:32:52.000And so you can't have an actual honest debate about these issues without people recognizing the upsides and downsides of these particular policies.
00:33:09.000I thought that when we finally had Trump, that the Democratic Party, who knows what's wrong with all of these perspectives, would cry uncle and say, look, we have to be straight with people because we cannot have Donald Trump in office.
00:33:22.000So if they really think that this guy is the second coming of Hitler and that he's the greatest threat to world peace that we've ever seen and he's destroying the country, why not admit that the economists know
00:33:32.000That it's not a Pareto improvement where everybody gets better off, that it's only Caldor Hicks and that you need to tax some winners to pay some losers, or to do more in terms of relocating people in different sectors of the country when you do have an open trade situation.
00:33:45.000Why not instead, when it comes to immigration, be honest with people that fundamentally the big issue
00:34:08.000Why not be open about the fact that we actually have a pretty good situation with the Muslims in the U.S.
00:34:13.000where we don't have a highly radicalized population and that they are in fact helping us in our intelligence work because they speak languages like Pashto and Farsi that we don't speak, but that there is some sort of a problem.
00:34:24.000Why is it that when they had the opportunity to take the power away from Trump and say,
00:34:33.000We need to be more honest with people so that we don't get this reaction.
00:34:37.000I thought that they would take that opportunity.
00:34:39.000The fact that they doubled down on this kind of crazy intersectional identity stuff is what's terrifying.
00:34:45.000Because it seems to indicate to us that there is no bottom.
00:34:49.000There's no way in which things get so bad that we start leveling with people.
00:34:54.000And I don't know what to do about that.
00:34:56.000I think that's part of why we're in this IDW thing.
00:34:58.000Because what we're doing in microcosm is we're saying, look, I also agree that trade can be a good thing.
00:35:04.000Maybe you want a little bit more trade than I do.
00:35:06.000Maybe you want a little bit more immigration than I do.
00:35:09.000I actually published a paper that suggested how to do open immigration
00:35:14.000Using the securitization of rights to have a true free market so that workers benefit alongside of capital.
00:35:19.000There is zero interest in corporate America in that because the interest is in taking something that belongs to labor and handing it to capital.
00:35:26.000So my feeling is that if you and I were to model what a debate like that looked like it would look absolutely nothing.
00:35:34.000And, you know, this was interesting for me.
00:35:35.000When you just went on Bill Maher, after you had been in Dave Rubin's studio with me, what I saw was the level of distortion that happened when you went into a formatted program.
00:35:47.000Bill Maher is about the best thing on standard television there is, and there's no way it can compete with this long format discussion where we actually get into things and we don't sit here and just beat our partisan drums.
00:35:59.000So even though I've been handed a mug that says, leftist tears,
00:36:03.000The fact of the matter is that I would much rather have a full-on, drag-em-out discussion about trade, immigration, and terror with an honest conservative than somebody trying to win an election inside of the DNC.
00:36:17.000Which is why I think that you're more of a liberal than you are a leftist.
00:36:19.000And I don't mean liberal in the sense that Dave Rubin means liberal.
00:36:21.000As in classical liberal, I mean that there are people who disagree with me on economics but agree with me that we have to actually have honest conversations about this stuff.
00:36:53.000And what does that mean in material terms, in terms of policy?
00:36:56.000Well, the short answer is that we don't know and that we better come up with an answer quickly.
00:37:00.000What if capitalism was a pretty terrific solution for the 19th and 20th centuries, but that in the era of, let's say, machine learning and robots and world labor markets, that if you actually just let the machine run, it doesn't deliver enough stability in the
00:37:19.000It's not at all clear to me that if you let the wheels of capitalism run in the current era,
00:37:34.000That markets will clear in a way that we're happy with the way in which our resources are distributed.
00:37:39.000Many people may become very disenchanted.
00:37:42.000And these are souls that need purpose, they need sustenance, and they need activity with dignity that the market may have provided very well in the past.
00:37:53.000So we're not going to disagree with you about the past.
00:37:56.000I think this is one of these paradoxes where conservatives tend to be very right about the past,
00:38:02.000And progressives, if they are right, tend to be right about the fact that things may need to be very different on a going forward basis.
00:38:09.000Well, it'll be interesting to see as far as, I mean, there are people on the right, including Charles Murray and Milton Friedman, who've proposed some form of universal basic income as a solution to the rise of artificial intelligence and the fact that you are having a lower skilled population that is just not going to be able to compete in this market where machines take over all the truck driving, for example, and all of the repetitive labor has been taken over by...
00:38:32.000That's true too, although I think that diagnosis seems to be better, at least from what I can see, diagnosis seems to be better when it's a combination of machine learning and human input.
00:38:45.000What we define as low-skilled is gradually inching upward.
00:38:50.000Yeah, I think that the fact is that we all acknowledge that it has to be some kind of a hybridized system.
00:38:56.000But what I think is also true, and this is good news for you, is that those few people who can actually manage these incredibly complicated enterprises to deliver really profound innovation and growth may need to be freed from burdensome regulation that's completely inappropriate
00:39:57.000Some guys that you know and it's not clear that they have a job they just sort of meet people and they sign pieces of paper and they make tremendous amounts of money what are they doing there opportunistically searching the landscape for things that are not repeatable but that actually are very well compensated most people are not going to be in a position to do that i think it's very important to actually
00:40:15.000Get hyper capitalistic because we have to deregulate certain sectors in order to get the innovation and it's also important to realize that we're gonna have to do something sort of hyper socialistic because of what you were saying and you know if the Milton Friedman's of the world have understood that one of the things that's most meaningful to me about these conversations is if we get hyper specific about what these alterations are.
00:40:38.000Then perhaps we can get the conservatives to stop worrying quite so much about the kind of envy-driven desire to tax where we want to punish success because it's not fair that certain people are doing so much better.
00:40:51.000And the conservatives can come back and say, you know what, we do have a nation of souls.
00:40:56.000And it's not good enough to just say, well, the market meets at harsh justice, so suck it tough.
00:41:01.000Well, this is why I think that the idea for a lot of conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, is that there always has to be a balance between liberty and virtue.
00:41:08.000That you have to have freedom in the markets, but that can't exist unless you actually have a social fabric that's fostered by, if somebody at my synagogue needs a hand, then that person gets a hand.
00:41:16.000And that's always the way that it's been in religious communities particularly.
00:41:19.000One of the great tragedies in my view of government growing beyond its boundaries is that people have stopped giving as much.
00:41:25.000People have stopped relying on their local community or their family as much.
00:41:27.000You see this particularly with social security where people have stopped relying on... The idea was you had a lot of kids because your kids were going to support you when you got old and that your kids knew that going in.
00:41:36.000And now it's I'm supporting your mother through social security because she paid 50 bucks in and now she's getting 2,000 bucks a month out.
00:41:42.000And so the idea of you saving until you're really old and making plans for that, savings rates have gone down.
00:41:47.000People have stopped worrying about it because the government's going to take care of it.
00:41:50.000It creates all of these, not only inefficiencies, but perverse incentives that result in a lot of worse outcomes.
00:41:56.000But there's another element here that I think is worth discussing, and that is, let's say that one of the things that's happening technologically is we are coming closer and closer to sort of the Star Trek replicator.
00:42:06.000Where we've got a machine that just makes anything, right?
00:42:09.000Like it's easier to buy cheap things now than it ever has been in human history.
00:42:13.000Most people can buy those things in the United States of America.
00:42:15.000The number of people who are in extreme poverty by any global standard in the United States is below 2%.
00:42:20.000The vast majority of people in the United States by global standards are upper class and above, middle to upper class and above by global standards, not American standards, by global standards.
00:42:29.000And so we're reaching the point where prosperity
00:42:32.000At least in any sort of absolute sense, historically, has grown to magnificent proportions.
00:42:39.000I mean, the person who's middle class now is living better than the person who was unbelievably wealthy in 1880, who's still going outside to pee.
00:42:47.000But this is the real problem, is that UBI doesn't solve the biggest problem of all, I think.
00:42:52.000Which is, you sort of mentioned it, but the need for human fulfillment.
00:42:57.000is not going to be filled by a government check or by a redistribution of income.
00:43:02.000And people, so far we've filled that for most of human history, we've filled that with work.
00:43:07.000But the idea was that we were going to, we don't have a lot to do today, but we have to go and we have to work because otherwise we're going to starve.
00:43:13.000What fills our days is that we go and sure, I'm doing a repetitive task at the factory, but that's what earns me the money so I can come home and take care of my kids and make a better life for them.
00:43:21.000And let's expand that slightly to not only include work for money, but also kin work, particularly, which has been the province more of women than of men, which has been a vital part of work, which needs to be recognized often happens off market.
00:43:39.000And one of the things that's happening is in the materialist, almost Marxist perspective of whatever's in your bank account is your measure of value.
00:43:46.000And that's why, you know, if you don't have enough in your bank account, then obviously the system has somehow screwed you.
00:43:53.000We are concerned with these systemic problems, and we should focus on these systemic problems, but the great majority of unhappiness, I think, that's occurring in modern American society, and I think in the West particularly, which is historically prosperous, is a poverty of values, a poverty of meaning, a poverty of purpose, and I'm not sure that that can be filled.
00:44:08.000People are trying to fill that with political action.
00:44:10.000Instead of trying to look at their own lives and say, what can I do to make myself better?
00:44:15.000And if I were on a desert island, what would I do to make myself a better person?
00:44:37.000Well, I agree with that, Ben, but I also think that one of the things that we have to do a better job on is, just as I have to defend, coming from a left of center perspective, the right of people who have contributed extraordinary levels to all of us to retain extraordinary reward, I think it's hyper important for the right to acknowledge that a lot of the reward that has occurred has come from non-productive activities through rent-seeking.
00:45:05.000So, if some meeting takes place in an investment bank, which allows them to privatize gains and socialize whatever security is necessary to keep those banks afloat, and I wasn't party to that, that's going to make me livid and furious when it reorders the social order.
00:45:41.000At least the people in the government are elected.
00:45:43.000You want to shatter that paradigm, you're actually going to have to go after elected officials, as opposed to yelling at bankers who don't give a crap as they drive away in their Mercedes.
00:45:50.000Yeah, I'm actually more upset about the people who, both left and right, refused to talk about the problem of rent-seeking.
00:45:59.000So I believe there was a speech that Hillary Clinton gave at some point, if I'm not mistaken, where she said, come on, we all created the great financial crisis.
00:46:08.000And I thought, no, we really didn't all create the great financial crisis.
00:46:13.000And whether that is the heads of investment banks or politicians or the rating agencies, whatever it is, we did not return costs in an appropriate fashion.
00:46:26.000And that is the problem why there is such a loss of trust.
00:46:30.000When we have the Savings and Loan Scandal, when you have situations where people go to jail, when people do jail time for bad deeds,
00:46:37.000You have a public trust that people can see that the high and mighty can be laid low.
00:46:43.000What was astounding, and this is one of the things where I learned to distrust the New York Times, is I appeared in an article called, They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street, which tried to make the case that it was not the investment bankers, but the quants who came from mathematics and physics who caused the crisis.
00:46:59.000When from my perspective, we were the guys who tried to sound the alarm and say, hey, the models are out of control and this is nuts and nobody listened to us.
00:47:07.000So it's very important to realize that the media gets into the act, the regulators, the ratings agencies, the politicians.
00:47:14.000There's this entire industry of people that ordinary Americans do not
00:47:19.000Understand, cannot fathom, that is allowing rent-seeking to undermine the basis of wealth.
00:47:25.000And it's important that wealth be something we can understand.
00:47:28.000I always watch Jackie Chan when he does a reel of the stunts in his film that didn't go well and he slides down live electrical wire and breaks through glass and I think
00:47:40.000There's no way in the world I want to tax this guy at a high level and take his money because I know exactly why he got paid because I would never do anything like that.
00:47:48.000I want to be able to point to fortunes and say, I know what this person created and thank you.
00:47:54.000It's very important that we restore confidence that rent-seeking is not the primary modality by which wealth is created through transfer.
00:48:04.000Alright, so let's talk a little bit about how people find fulfilling lives, because this is one of the other elements of the IDWs.
00:48:10.000We all start off talking about these sorts of political issues and how to solve systemic problems, and one of the things that's fun about it is that we discover that we have so much common ground on a lot of these issues.
00:48:18.000But some of the most interesting conversations have happened over even deeper issues.
00:48:24.000So you and I and Sam Harris were all on stage together in San Francisco and we ended up in a two hour long conversation about everything from free will to morality and values.
00:48:34.000And the argument that I've been making is one of the things that's broken in the West is that there is not a common sense of values anymore.
00:48:40.000That that has basically been shattered.
00:49:07.000I think that the reason, in my perspective, that we argue about this stuff is because I think that Sam's perspective on values, while I agree with his values, is unsustainable in the long run.
00:49:17.000That it's not sustainable beyond the people who really like Sam and follow Sam, whereas I think that at least trying to appeal to some source of objective morality that's beyond my own reason is replicable and has been replicable throughout human history.
00:49:43.000But I had a very different take, I think, than both of you.
00:49:45.000And I came at it from sort of an evolutionary biology perspective.
00:49:50.000From my perspective, the key issue is that Sam begins with some concept which he calls human flourishing, which I don't know is ever fully fleshed out.
00:49:59.000And from what I can tell, the great danger with humans is that we can wake up and look at theories of selection and say, oh my gosh, this is the game that brought us here.
00:50:10.000And even if evolution is the engine that created us, we don't need to keep playing that game.
00:50:16.000So, for example, we don't need to have children because we have birth control.
00:50:19.000So even if we want to have sex, we can get involved in
00:50:23.000And these are things that have to do with the way in which the human body is constructed.
00:50:28.000We think about proximates and ultimates.
00:50:30.000A proximate is thirst, but the ultimate is dehydration.
00:50:34.000A proximate is hunger, but the ultimate is lack of nutrition.
00:50:40.000So what happens is, is that what happens if the mind suddenly wakes up and decides that it wants to pursue proximate pleasure?
00:50:48.000And if you break the body into two kinds of tissue, soma and germ, the germ is your lineage, what contributes to your having children, and that is the thing that is immortal.
00:51:00.000But the soma is disposable, and so we're all in danger that the soma that is our mind
00:51:07.000can wake up and say, hey, I just want to have fun and I want to have pleasure.
00:51:11.000I'm going to define human flourishing to be whatever it is that I particularly enjoy.
00:51:15.000Now it's not true that every atheist is going to go crazy like this.
00:51:19.000But the problem is that it doesn't necessarily scale.
00:51:23.000So I'm in the odd position of basically being an atheist who is very sympathetic to religion and who in fact attends services and has a temple.
00:51:33.000In large measure because I believe that the brain has a sort of Chomskyian pre-grammar of religion.
00:51:39.000And that is that what sustained us was a belief in something longer than our somatic lives.
00:51:47.000We all feel that usually in terms of our children, even atheists.
00:51:50.000But the key question is, let's imagine that you don't have any children.
00:51:54.000Are you going to make investments that are going to benefit future generations if you don't believe that there's anything that happens after you die and there's no purpose and there's no meaning?
00:52:02.000So the way in which it comes down for me is that the reason religions out-compete rationality, which is quite surprising if you think about it, is this issue that the religions keep Soma from waking up and redefining human flourishing to be somatic.
00:52:18.000And that is probably the thing that I think Sam has not fully addressed.
00:52:24.000Now, Sam is unusual because he is the atheist who sees the value in religion clearly and says, I think we can accomplish all that religion does well.
00:52:36.000So it's not that we have to convince him that religions do many things well.
00:52:42.000What we have to convince him of is that it may be the case that certain aspects of atheists seeing human flourishing as intergenerational, lineage-level behavior
00:52:53.000Maybe that doesn't scale and it only scales when you actually believe that there's some meaning and purpose that's larger than yourself.
00:52:59.000Obviously I agree with a lot of that and I think that this is the flaw in Sam's reasoning is not his questioning of faith per se it's his faith in reason alone and the idea that by reason alone you can achieve whatever values Sam wants you to achieve and that I find deeply problematic especially because we had 200 years where people were basically trying this and it did not work out particularly
00:53:20.000Well, but it may be that, for example, that religion served us better in the past, but that Sam is right about our future, even if we don't have an atheist-scale plan.
00:53:29.000I mean, it could be that we could institute rituals that are actually devoid of a belief in the supernatural that take over the Chomskyan pre-grammar.
00:53:37.000I'm not saying that that's foreclosed.
00:53:39.000It's possible, but it was a giant fail for 200 years, right?
00:53:45.000We had essentially a communist ritual system.
00:53:47.000And I don't believe the argument that we should treat Russia, Soviet Russia, as a religion and therefore it's not an experiment with the failure of atheism.
00:53:57.000I think that there's great danger in religion, there's great danger in an absence of religion, and what's really necessary is to move that conversation
00:54:06.000In which our values are embedded, even if we're atheistic, because we're benefiting from the fact that we come from a substrate that was a largely Judeo-Christian system.
00:54:49.000The thing that really gets me about some of the conversations that we're having is that you have a very large number of people
00:54:57.000I think everybody in the group, basically, if they were willing to admit it, would
00:55:17.000If they're willing to admit it, I think pretty much everybody who we're talking about is essentially a natural law theologian.
00:55:22.000The only question is whether you're cutting God out of the picture or not.
00:55:24.000Because Sam is basically making a natural law argument.
00:55:26.000He's saying the universe calls us to essentially forward human flourishing, and then I just have a problem with his definitions.
00:55:36.000But the problem would be, and I don't want to have to ask you about this on camera, but if I said, how sure are you about the truth of the revelation at Sinai?
00:55:46.000I'm not entirely sure that you could give me a basis for that, nor would I want to.
00:55:50.000No, I can't give you a rational basis for Revelation and Sinai.
00:55:53.000The best that I can do is sort of Maimonides' explanation, which is that something happened at Sinai and I'm not sure quite what, and people got from that is what he says in Guide for the Perplexed.
00:56:01.000And what people got from that is there is a God and there shouldn't be idolatry, which human reason can bring you to.
00:56:07.000Moses was a particularly inspired logical figure who was able to access higher modes of thinking and brings the Torah down from Sinai through direct communication with God.
00:56:20.000So in some sense, if I am feeling sick and I go to the drugstore and I say, don't you guys have a placebo you can give me that can cure my ailment?
00:56:29.000If I'm really in on the conceit that I don't have to fully believe something, it's not clear to what effect
00:56:37.000You know, it may be that you really get the benefit from being certain that there was a revelation at Sinai.
00:56:42.000And so the question of self-deception and its efficacy in human flourishing is a very interesting one.
00:56:50.000Now this is, and I think this is a key question that's sort of broken out, is you have to believe in the reality of revelation or just the importance of revelation?
00:56:56.000And my belief is that you sort of have to believe
00:57:00.000I think that's the ante that gets you in, and then you have a situation in which you probably need a superposition of belief and lack of belief in order to
00:57:22.000That's probably always existed, but one of the things that's so odd about this is that it's hard to talk about without destroying the efficacy.
00:57:28.000And these sort of questions of self-contemplation when you're trying to solve this ought-from-is problem may have something to do with the limits of discourse.
00:57:38.000And I think that this is something that would be much more interesting to model than the usual dorm-level discussions about whether there's a God.
00:58:06.000Regular investigation of the intelligence community so that if they're in fact doing a fantastic job, we can all rely on them because I think that they provide a vital service and I'm not against them.
00:58:21.000We need to pay journalists a great deal more.
00:58:25.000I don't know where that money is going to come from.
00:58:27.000And then we need to fire them at the drop of a hat when they really break trust by pursuing ideology as part of their psychic payment stream at the expense of truthful and meaningful reporting.
00:58:40.000And I think that it's absolutely imperative that the scientific apparatus of the United States be restored through academic freedom so that we can have
00:58:49.000Crazy dangerous, highly agentic people once again take back the labs and kick out all of the safe and
00:59:02.000Ideologically driven alterations so that we can create the new sectors of the economy to get growth back on track.
00:59:10.000And this is one of the things that I think Peter Thiel and I share deeply, which is people don't worry enough about what happens in the absence of growth.
00:59:19.000And the US absolutely needs, and the world at large, to find non-fossil fuel led technological, broadly distributed, stable growth in order to avert
00:59:33.000War and maybe the fourth and most crazy suggestion if you don't mind me sneaking it in is once in a blue moon I think we need to explode an above-ground Nuclear weapon because I'm terrified that what's happened is is that we've all fallen under a spell of magical thinking that it doesn't matter who we elect and it doesn't matter how bad things get that somehow the world is bizarrely stable and safe and it absolutely is not and I think maybe we need to actually
01:00:00.000Activate the amygdala and remind everybody with what is hanging in the balance and how unstable this is so we can get on to the business of making a really beautiful planet for generations to come.
01:00:14.000Eric Weinstein, thanks so much for stopping by.