In this episode, Dr. Eric Weinstein joins host Alex Blumberg to discuss the importance of having conversations with people who don't agree with you, and why it's so important to have them on the show. Dr. Weinstein is a theoretical physicist who has a Ph.D from Harvard and a degree in physics. He's also the brother and co-founder of the intellectual dark web, which is a group that started and coined the term "The Intellectual Dark Web."
00:00:00.000Today's guest puts the intellectual into the intellectual dark web, literally his brother and he are the ones that actually started and coined that term, the intellectual dark web.
00:00:14.880But also because he has a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Harvard, he came up with a theory in physics that many people now compare him to Einstein because of that theory.
00:00:28.200This is a podcast that I have looked forward to for a very long time, literally probably two years.
00:00:34.860He was on a very short list at the very beginning of this podcast, and I've tried to get him and his brother over and over and over again.
00:00:41.840I continually have received a no, and that's one of the things I have to ask him right off the bat.
00:00:48.600You know how I feel about political outlooks and differences in political outlooks.
00:00:53.840I don't think it's a weakness. I think it's a strength, and I think America needs to get back to being able to have a conversation with people who don't agree.
00:01:04.020We learn so much from each other when we do that.
00:01:08.060You, I think, are going to hear and learn and question and disagree or perhaps really agree like very few podcasts will push you to.
00:01:51.700Taser has a line of non-lethal self-protection devices that are small enough and lightweight enough for you to carry in your glove compartment or your purse,
00:02:01.500yet they are powerful enough to incapacitate an attacker.
00:02:05.980Guns carry unnecessary risks for you and those around you.
00:02:10.240Even pepper spray can harm you as much as the attacker, and it's often ineffective.
00:02:15.260Taser products are safer and easy to use.
00:02:19.880They use an electrical charge to immobilize attackers for up to 30 seconds.
00:02:24.100That's enough to get them to drop the knife or the gun.
00:02:29.040It'll also send an emergency dispatch to the GPS location that is in your Taser device.
00:02:35.280They come loaded with features like laser-assisted targeting, emergency dispatch, which will send those teams to that GPS location upon firing.
00:02:44.840More than 237,000 lives have been saved with the Taser network of devices, the apps, and personnel.
00:02:52.980So protect yourself, protect your family with Taser's line of smart self-defense products.
00:02:59.920Taser, it's available without a permit in most U.S. states.
00:03:03.800Get the Taser Plus, Taser Pulse Plus, or Taser Strike Light at taser.com with the promo code BECK, and you'll save 15%.
00:03:12.980Now at taser.com, use the promo code BECK, T-A-S-E-R.com, promo code BECK.
00:03:21.040Restrictions apply, see site for all the details.
00:03:23.380Eric, I think I've tried to have you on this podcast.
00:03:39.500Well, I mean, you were part of the original short list of maybe eight, ten names that I wanted to talk to.
00:03:45.160And we've always been told no, and I'm wondering why and why now, trying to have conversations with people that we clearly don't agree on an awful lot,
00:03:59.140but we have some principles in place that allow us to have decent conversations.
00:04:51.300The real reason that I don't casually hop on over to talk has to do with a strategy that's being employed to make sure that we cannot come together.
00:05:21.260You want to call us a conservative right-wing propaganda network, which is in large measure how I've seen them over the years, although I do think that they may be changing a bit.
00:05:28.460Then their point is they're not scared of that.
00:05:32.560The real problem has to do with the center-left media, which still controls, in some sense, the official version of events for the country and the affiliated institutions, universities, the party, what have you.
00:05:46.340So they used to talk to me all the time.
00:05:48.340I would be invited on to the news hour, for example, at PBS, or I would be invited on to NPR, or I would be asked to supply information to the New York Times, Washington Post.
00:06:00.140That all changed maybe around eight years ago.
00:06:03.820And the reason for that is that what they've done is to make a situation – sorry, there's a little bit of feedback again.
00:06:15.000The problem that we're facing is that they've figured out that if they will all plug their ears and just say la, la, la, la, and pretend that their critics don't exist on the left-hand side of the aisle, that long-form podcasting doesn't exist.
00:06:29.260If they can pretend that everyone who disagrees with them is alt-right, far-right, neo-Nazi, et cetera, et cetera, then they can avoid the deep criticism that the people on the left and progressives would be leveling at the terrible change in the business model of the Democratic Party, its affiliated media, and educational institutions.
00:06:50.900And so every time I go on a conservative program, as I did with Ted Cruz, as I have with Greg Gutfeld, as Tucker Carlson has invited me on and declined, the key problem is that they're counting on the idea that they can say, Eric only appears on right-wing media, ergo Eric is right-wing, QED, we don't have to listen to him.
00:07:17.260But my point is that it's an active program to make sure that anyone who's invited by only right-wing media and accepts only right-of-center media, that person can be portrayed as if they were conservative.
00:07:34.800So every time I appear on conservative-affiliated media because NPR, MSNBC, CNN would never dare have me on,
00:07:45.660because I'm a critic from their side of the aisle, they have the increased ability to pretend that I am conservative because they can say, well, you only appear, let's say, if I did it on Tucker Carlson, Fox, Breitbart, Daily Caller, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:00.920And so that's why, at some level, it's not personal to you.
00:08:04.340It's that I understand their strategy for trying to make sure that they never have to listen to anything I have to say.
00:09:30.600There is a story here that wends its way from 1945 into the present, which would be sort of the upgraded secret history of modern America that I think nobody is really told, which is why everything is falling apart.
00:09:44.640And yet nobody even seems to be looking for the explanation of how we moved so quickly into madness on both left and right.
00:09:52.560And that has to do with economics, geopolitics.
00:09:55.880I think I've been one of the only people I know even looking to tell a relatively simple story with a through line.
00:10:02.900I think what you're talking about really happens after, strangely, the 2010 Colorado midterm Senate elections, which is the latest chapter.
00:10:13.540I mean, if you think about this in terms of chapters, I can break it down from you for you.
00:10:17.560But, you know, the problem is, is that this isn't a story that I think most people know.
00:10:21.600And instead, they're content to be subservient to this story because they don't know it and they are actors in it.
00:10:28.900So can you take us back to wherever you need to?
00:11:34.320And this technologically led growth became an expectation between, I would say, 1945 and it lasted probably until about 1971 through 73.
00:11:43.800During this period, a guy named Derek DeSola Price, who was at Yale, wrote an incredible book called Science Since Babylon and gave some lectures in which he pointed out that all technological progress was on an exponential curve.
00:11:59.220If you plotted any indicator, scientific and technological progress was moving ahead so that pretty soon every man, woman, child on earth would have two PhDs in order for the trend to continue.
00:12:12.400And he said, therefore, that the trend cannot continue.
00:12:14.640And I believe that the Derek DeSola Price breaking of that trend happens in the late 60s, early 70s, and the growth pattern of the United States changes.
00:12:24.700So what happens if you look at median male income, for example, and GDP per capita, they're in lockstep from 1945 until about 71 through 73.
00:13:30.460So I'd like you to explain what he was saying a little bit clearer.
00:13:34.180And does it also, this theory, include things like, you know, we had the Great Society, which promised war and an end to poverty, which led us to the end of the gold standard and the switching with Bretton Woods and promising the world that we'll buy their stuff.
00:14:00.240I mean, there was a huge change there.
00:14:02.180Dual incomes became, you know, a thing.
00:14:06.160We added women into the workforce, really, for the first time.
00:14:18.960I believe that Derek DeSola Price is somewhat north of things like the change in the gold standard.
00:14:24.880That if, in fact, we had been growing at an incredible rate, if, in fact, things were getting better and better and that more people educated led to more technology, we could accommodate not only women into the workforce, which we'd been lousy on before this, but other underrepresented communities.
00:14:46.000The problem is that there's so many distractions that nobody's trying to figure out why did so much happen between 1971 and 73.
00:14:53.800So every time you have a conversation, somebody will say, I think it's the pill.
00:14:57.020I think that, you know, it's the gold standard.
00:15:18.160We kept progressing scientifically, but the ability to plow certain sorts of discoveries back into technologies and creating new industries and all these things, very few things continued from that time.
00:15:32.900Now, two huge exceptions have been communications and semiconductor technology.
00:15:38.080So everything from the World Wide Web and the way in which you and I are speaking to each other continued.
00:15:43.860There's, you know, isolated things that happen, maybe fracking.
00:15:46.800But in general, part of the problem is this idea of the embedded growth obligation or ego.
00:15:53.320If you believe that 1945 to 1971, 73 is normal, you built your organization with the idea that it would always grow.
00:16:04.140And what you did, you might, like, work people very hard at the beginning and promise them a career and a future as a reward for their hard work.
00:16:12.960You didn't understand that if growth ever ran out, that would become a Ponzi scheme.
00:16:17.120So where we are now is, is that we're in a situation in which Derek DeSola Price pointed out that exponentials can't continue.
00:16:26.140And if the technology, if the science led the technology and the technology led to the economic growth and everything was on an exponential curve, and that was based on some ideas of how you plow the fruits of your labor back into your system, that was always going to change and shift.
00:16:42.660And that change and shift happened in the, like, if you, if you subtract off the screens in your room, how can you tell you're not in 1971 through 73?
00:16:52.520You know, it's very tough for most of us because most of, mostly what happened was, is that semiconductors and communication kept going and the rest of society didn't, didn't move to the Jetsons.
00:17:02.100That caused this problem where you have this strange graph between median male income and GDP, where men can no longer expect that their career trajectories will grow.
00:17:16.440So all of us look back to people from before this time and say, wow, how did, how did a paper route and some student loans, which were quickly paid off, lead to a second home in your twenties, if you, in your thirties, if you just worked hard?
00:17:27.820I don't know how to do that stuff. I just bought my first home in my fifties. I think I bought one car my entire life. I have a PhD from Harvard. Something really broke down in a very serious way.
00:17:40.360And, you know, I think what, what people don't understand is, is that this thing happened and, you know, maybe a third of economists should be trying to figure out what happened between 1971 and 73.
00:17:53.140We should all be talking about Derek de Sola Price and the original singularity. In fact, nobody seems to know about it.
00:17:58.460So we start this problem of the egos. Every organization and institution has effectively an embedded growth obligation. How fast does it have to grow in order for it to keep from becoming sociopathic?
00:18:14.000Because when it becomes a Ponzi scheme, it will have to be headed by somebody who was willing to lie to new entrants about the nature of that scheme.
00:18:22.340Right now we've just elected, for example, a 78 year old president, um, eight years older than the oldest president ever elected. Uh, almost no commentary from it. Um, you know, Nancy Pelosi, what Ann Feinstein was conceived during the Hoover administration.
00:18:39.500Mitch McConnell, uh, is not a spring chicken, uh, whatever this leadership class in the 1940s, it's an illusion. They are not a leadership class. They are peacetime kleptocrats.
00:18:49.520And the reason that peacetime kleptocracy is so important is because we are a high growth country that hit our stall speed.
00:18:56.240And like any plane, you can't keep a fixed wing aircraft in the sky if it's not traveling at an appreciable speed relative to the air mass.
00:19:04.780So that's what is the central idea of how we started falling apart. We were a rich family, if you will, with a family business that had built up a tremendous amount of wealth in the family business.
00:19:17.300The engine was sputtering. So what do most rich families do when you have such a situation? The first thing they do is they try to fix the business. They try to plow it back in. And I believe that probably Ronald Reagan and his cohort had this idea that they were going to stimulate the country back into productivity.
00:19:32.880We've gone through Watergate. We've gone through the church and Pike committee hearings. We've gone through, uh, you know, inflation and whip inflation. Now we were a very dispirited, naval gazing society that couldn't even get our own hostages back from Iran.
00:19:46.660Ronald Reagan came in and with his kitchen cabinet from California filled with certain ideas about, uh, supply side economics.
00:19:56.080And they tried, I believe in earnest to restart the American miracle. And you had people like Paul Volcker who, you know, wrung inflation out of the system, uh, by scaring the living crap out of, out of us.
00:20:07.840And it played in, you know, as a Jew, I'm going to say something a little bit, uh, edgy. Uh, there's a Christian meme called daddy's home.
00:20:17.100And you know, the idea is you're, you're misbehaving now, but when your father gets home, order will be restored.
00:20:22.960And Ronald Reagan played right into the idea of daddy's home. And so daddy came in and the red tape went away. We stopped enforcing antitrust. We started experimenting with all of these different things. Now it's very important to communicate something to your audience.
00:20:37.540In general, the idealism of every age is the cover story of its thefts. So for example, manifest destiny, you can figure out what the idealism of white man's burden is all about.
00:20:50.100You have land that isn't yours. Now you have an obligation to take in the eighties. Our idealism was about competitiveness. And in part, that was about taking from organized labor in order to make sure that management had the ability to restart the engines of growth.
00:21:06.820And of course, what we found out was that all of these techniques didn't work the way I believe the earnest supply siders expected they would. And the baby boomers were watching. And in particular, the Democrats had watched 12 years of Republican rule.
00:21:19.260And they were thinking that it was going to be a permanent Republican situation, permanent conservative rulership leadership. And so Bill Clinton decided to create a second Republican Party and the Democratic Party shifted away from labor after PATCO was destroyed and organized labor was attenuated.
00:21:38.380And so the idea is that that idealism of competitiveness had now worked its way through. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89, we started a new idea, which is sort of the United Colors of Benetton. We are the world Davos idealism of globalization, you know, and that effectively allowed us to break the bonds to our fellow countrymen and to attenuate the idea that a guy like me sitting in Los Angeles is bound to somebody in
00:22:07.980in Eastern Kentucky coming out of a coal mining background. If I can just free myself of my fellow countrymen, I'm free to move our factories to East Asia or to, in fact, import our scientific labor force from abroad in order to get effectively slave labor paid for by visas so that scientific employers don't actually have to pay our own people.
00:22:34.300So that's when we start pretending that Americans are bad at science and technology, when, in fact, I think we have the best educational system in the world and we've got all sorts of incredibly creative people who are not preferred by our system because they're not obedient.
00:22:48.420So Americans aren't obedient. I'm not obedient. If you train me to get a Ph.D., you think I'm going to listen to you just because you tell me exactly what to do? I'm not I'm not your hired hand. I'm your colleague. I'm your fellow citizen.
00:22:58.740I'm your fellow citizen. That period goes through. And effectively, the rich family starts a kleptocracy in which the center left and the center right kleptocrats start selling off all of the wealth of the family.
00:23:12.900And it becomes sort of a race, if you will, to pocket as much as you possibly can.
00:23:20.140This goes through up until, you know, the 2000s. We have the dot com bubble. The dot com bubble is replaced by a beautiful bubble about housing.
00:23:29.800Everyone deserves a house and the American dream. But of course, it's financed by nonsense.
00:23:34.260This is called the great moderation by the supposed grownups in the room.
00:23:38.880And you start to see the guys. You start to realize that Alan Greenspan goes from being an oracle to a guy who just doesn't even get the basics.
00:23:46.060So people like me, 2001, 2002, start talking about mortgage backed securities were laughed out of the room repeatedly.
00:23:52.480Nassim Taleb, by the way, super dangerous person. Have him on your podcast. Great friend.
00:23:57.400What's his what's his name again? And tell me a little bit about him.
00:24:03.140Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a former trader turned author.
00:24:10.520And his basic point has been that the establishment constantly minimizes the risks, the tail risks in favor of looking at what generally happens in market.
00:24:22.400Right. Really, what happens in markets is determined by extreme events.
00:24:26.360And so if you throw out the outliers, you throw out the entire story.
00:24:29.480Nassim's point is that all of this is understandable and that what we have is a world of financiers who, through financialization, have figured out how to get all of us, the citizenry, to act as the insurer.
00:24:41.980And they simply help themselves to the profit and stick us with the tail risk.
00:24:47.700I think this is one of the biggest problems.
00:24:50.420And I mean, look, I'm not a I'm a self-educated guy.
00:24:56.360And and in 2006, I was looking at the the the the mortgage system and saying to my friends who all were on Wall Street and all bankers.
00:25:09.100And I'm like, guys, this is not this doesn't work.
00:26:14.620And we blurred the distinctions in financialization.
00:26:18.000We talked to their group and they told us about how massive they were and how they were able to extend services to us.
00:26:25.500And we started asking them questions before the crash.
00:26:28.720And they told us about how they tranched all of their exposure and that in order for them to get hurt, it would have to go through all of these levels.
00:26:36.820And, you know, we asked the question, OK, so what happens if it cascades through all those levels?
00:26:41.040And the answer they gave should be known to everyone.
00:27:30.840You know, the public didn't even understand what a non-recourse loan was.
00:27:34.860So in essence, basically, our financiers take advantage of our financial inadequacy.
00:27:41.600And I don't know why we don't hire the world's best lawyers, the world's best accountants, and the world's best financiers.
00:27:48.720Pay them enormous bonuses to take care of the American people.
00:27:52.360Well, you know, effectively, we're in there defended by, you know, a few guys with good hearts and, you know, to be attacked by the most sophisticated players in our society.
00:29:46.280It's kind of cool the first time you do it.
00:29:48.380And it always feels a little, you know, but it's just, there's nothing in this money game that appeals to me as much as having my country and being able to focus, uh, with freedom on the things that I care about.
00:30:13.760Um, I'd, I'd, I'd be penniless and start over if we could restore actual accountability, responsibility, and freedom.
00:30:23.020Um, yes, um, that's what we would, I would like to think we would do.
00:30:32.920Um, but I think a lot of people aren't in that game.
00:30:36.280I think that a lot of people, uh, are desperate to feel that they've succeeded inside of the American story.
00:30:42.860So if, if we can pick up the main thread, I'll try to finish it out as quickly as I can.
00:30:47.580We'll go from the 1980s through Bill Clinton.
00:30:49.760So Bill Clinton, the idealism of that age was we are the world and the sort of Davos pluralism of globalization, uh, that was about breaking the bonds to your fellow countrymen.
00:31:00.320Then we have the, uh, idealism of the technology changes everything with the dot-com bubble.
00:31:07.000Then the idealism becomes everyone needs a home.
00:31:10.260Uh, it allows the financiers to concentrate the gains.
00:31:13.460We, we, uh, are caught holding the bag in 2008, the world's financial system falls apart, right?
00:31:20.240And then we have the idealism of stimulus and a very strange thing happens in 2010 around, uh, which is the Colorado midterm Senate elections.
00:31:31.320And I believe that the Democrats really have a tremendous amount of pain and they have a bright spot in Colorado and the Obama people say, what happened in Colorado?
00:31:39.880That was different. And it turns out that identity politics, um, played a big role in that election.
00:31:45.820If I have my story right at that point, Russell and Ali writes a 2011 letter to the universities called the dear colleague letter.
00:31:54.320The dear colleague letter puts the university system on notice, which is of course beholden to the federal government because, uh, effectively it's not, it's a seemingly private system.
00:32:04.300The private universities that is entirely dependent on the federal government.
00:32:07.360And it says, by the way, people, if you don't get your stuff in order, uh, with respect to title nine and women's rights and the terrible problem of attacks on women on campus, et cetera, et cetera, uh, you're going to be in a situation which you may not like because the federal government may withdraw its support.
00:32:24.400So the universities scramble towards, um, making sure that they are as compliant as they can be, uh, responsive to the dear colleague letter.
00:32:35.120And that starts a chain of events whereby, um, um, we start pumping out people who have spent four years coked up in an indoctrination camp, um, believing things that have always been present in the university system, but have been relatively small.
00:32:50.340You have to appreciate that intersectionality comes out of UCLA.
00:32:53.240Uh, the concept of unexamined privilege comes out of Wellesley, Peggy McIntosh and Kimberly Crenshaw as the UCLA law professor.
00:33:02.220These ideas become supercharged after Russell and Lee's dear colleague, the democratic party goes hard and to quote, uh, my wife and the economist Pia Malani, uh, the democratic party had to search for the cheapest alternative to organized labor.
00:33:20.880So now you've swapped out organized labor destroyed by Pat Cohen competitiveness and the previous, uh, you know, idealism that was cloaking a theft.
00:33:30.120And suddenly the democratic party is the party of identity because it's the cheapest substitute and it buys time for the claptocracy to continue looting the country, uh, which gives birth birth to MAGA.
00:33:49.500America has two twin aspirations, that of being a great society and that of being a good society.
00:33:56.380And the left of center tends to over-focus on being a good society.
00:34:00.420And the right tends to over-focus on being a great society by great.
00:34:04.620I mean a massive power and by good, I mean a moral power.
00:34:08.940So when you have people like the Dulles brothers or J Edgar Hoover, uh, you have a situation in which the U S perfectly well knows how to throw an election.
00:35:20.340You're about to lose being great and being good.
00:35:24.760And so now what's going on is, is that in the modern era, post Russell and Ali's letter, you've got all of these kids were hired in order to generate sales and clicks and ads for legacy media, which the old line thought they could control.
00:35:40.780This is the idea that you're going to have a tiger cub and at the beginning, the tiger is going to be adorable or a lion cub, you know, and then that thing starts growing and growing.
00:35:49.460And so if you look at the Harper's letter, that was an attempt to say, Hey, all of us who hired the, uh, extremely radical, uh, woke products of the university system.
00:36:00.920Um, we have, we, we are now being threatened by our own, by our own attack, uh, squad.
00:36:07.380We tried to let them loose on everybody else, but we thought they wouldn't turn on their, on those who hired them.
00:36:18.900So now this is what we have to recover from.
00:36:21.360And it's almost impossible because none of us can get access to institutional media, which is what the only thing that our institutions have to listen to.
00:36:29.880They don't listen, they won't listen to the blaze unless we screw up and then, then they'll take whatever we said wrong and they'll put it in an infinite cycle.
00:36:37.700But right now, the problem is, is that Magistan is creating Wokistan.
00:36:47.540The two of them drawing each other into existence.
00:36:51.020The kleptocrats are busy stealing everything that isn't nailed down.
00:36:54.100And the tiny number of people who are outside of this system, uh, as long as they don't really have any effect inside what I've called the gated institutional narrative or gene, um, we have no ability to reach the unit.
00:37:11.320I have a PhD from Harvard and MIT postdoc.
00:37:13.780I've been funded by the Sloan foundation.
00:37:15.440It is absolutely important to portray me as if I'm insane or I'm a complete winger or a Nazi with my Jewish surname.
00:37:22.480That is how desperate this thing is that I've called the, uh, the, the, the disc, the distributed idea suppression complex right now.
00:37:31.380There are crazy ideas that may be dangerous.
00:37:33.440And I understand that we've always had adjustments to free speech, but there are also ideas, unifying ideas, ideas that bring us back from the brink.
00:37:42.340And the system isn't as worried about going over the edge of the brink because that will generate clicks and sales.
00:37:48.180It's much more worried about unification.
00:37:50.180It's much more worried that Eric Weinstein can speak to Glenn Beck and that you and I can disagree on a million things.
00:37:57.120And we can say, I love you, care about you.
00:38:03.400And right now we have to free ourselves from institutional media.
00:38:06.740We are coked up on our own institutions.
00:38:08.820They used to be the ones who told us to how they would call balls and strikes.
00:38:12.780You know, we don't have that anymore right now.
00:38:17.340Everything we're listening to almost is outside of the institution and don't have to listen to us while we sit in these chairs.
00:38:25.400So the through line, the reason it's all falling apart has to do with a powerful theory.
00:38:30.460Richard Dawkins said that the power of a theory is what it explains divided by what it is.
00:38:37.860In essence, the engine of this is we built a society around growth between 1945 and the early 70s, which was unsustainable.
00:38:48.560And then when the growth point came out, every institution became holding to its ego, its embedded growth obligation.
00:38:57.360That meant it had to be headed by somebody who could pretend the future that our brightest days are still in if we just stuck with the model.
00:39:05.500And that would have been possible if we'd found new growth.
00:39:08.680But effectively, in this orchard, we picked all the low-hanging fruit, except for maybe patients fracking and semiconductors.
00:39:21.900He is both going back and going forward to find new orchards so that there's more low-hanging fruit, because there's a financial concept called beta.
00:39:31.020And in general, when we have something like electrification or digification or any kind of anification that changes everything, then everybody can get some exposure.
00:39:43.220Your local laundromat can get exposure to a digital era by broadcasting when the washing machines are free, let's say.
00:39:51.360You know, they don't have to be in the technology business.
00:39:54.520Right now, we can't operate our society in a high-growth mode.
00:39:59.160And when you lose growth, the only growth that's left is not from growing the pie, but from eyeing your neighbor's slice.
00:40:05.380And so right now, we're each looking at each other's slices of the pie.
00:40:09.140And instead of seeing a brother or comrade, a fellow countryman, we see a source of protein.
00:40:14.080And that is the terribly concerning thing, which is we have got to stop eating each other to get back to the business of innovation, because this entire nation won't work until we return to growth.
00:40:26.560And what we're doing is cannibalizing the very people who are capable of producing growth.
00:40:37.560We can't seem to produce growth because we're being told to stay home.
00:40:42.300We're being told to shut down our business.
00:40:43.820We're being told all through regulation that is coming under this new administration.
00:40:49.300We are we're also not the ones getting the bailouts, the big business, the connected business, the global business.
00:41:00.440And at the same time, many of us are being called horrible names and they're putting us out of business now because of who we support or how we vote or what we believe.
00:41:15.640You with the technological boom that is coming, just just just the impact on truck drivers in the next few years with driverless trucks that are already on the road.
00:41:29.100You start changing the the model and you start changing and have this almost cotton gin kind of turnover.
00:41:40.320You can't add on top of that distrust, abuse and theft and survive.
00:41:49.220There's a problem here, Glenn, which is that there is a moral basis for the market and there is a moral basis for citizenship and they're different.
00:42:02.780It's sort of the way we used to have courts that would execute the law and courts of chancery that would focus themselves on fairness.
00:42:11.020One is as a soul and one is as a mind and pair of hands and in essence, when I work hard, if I don't have the ability to benefit from my own labor, that destroys the moral basis of the market.
00:42:27.040If I see handouts being or bailouts and handouts being given to large corporations, if I see laws that force me to shutter my business while Jeff Bezos is celebrated in terms of how many billions Amazon, et cetera, et cetera.
00:42:41.880What we're doing is we're undermining the moral basis of the market and you cannot shove that onto efficiency.
00:42:49.300It's the it's it's it's it's moral sentiments.
00:42:53.660It's I mean, everybody concentrates on wealth of nations.
00:43:34.440That's why Piketty suddenly runs, you know, roars into into view with our exploding Gini coefficients that measure our inequality.
00:43:41.540So the economics profession is completely corrupted by the idea that it is effectively serving the concentration of wealth as if efficiency and growth are the only two things that matter.
00:43:53.320And distribution, of course, is not an issue of economics that pass over this idiocy and silence after this.
00:43:59.540Now, that is a huge problem, is that we created a world of people who don't have to talk about reality.
00:44:08.380They don't have to talk about the fact that souls have a claim on our nation's wealth as well.
00:44:14.720It's trying to restore some kind of basis, moral basis to the market and saying a rich country can afford to make sure that nobody goes hungry and nobody has is wanting for a roof over their head.
00:44:28.540And at the same time, we can't destroy the incentives to hard work and pretend that everything is egalitarian.
00:44:45.240No, because you're a smart guy and you know that market failure exists.
00:44:48.920So, for example, if I produce a public good and it is both inexhaustible and inexcludable, do you want me to produce something of incredible value and to recapture none of the value that I create?
00:46:04.820And a tiny sliver of it were public goods and services, which constitute market failure.
00:46:09.000What if everything that I could produce almost can be turned into a small, copyable file?
00:46:16.620So I replace, you know, the calculator on my desk, et cetera, et cetera.
00:46:20.240Also, suddenly that little slice of the pie that represents market failure due to public goods starts growing.
00:46:27.380And imagine in a future world, crazy world, the part of the free market that your thinking applies to is a tiny sliver.
00:46:34.540We haven't gotten there yet, but we could.
00:46:37.580Your point is, in a world in which most things are well seen by the market and few things are not, we should do almost everything through the market.
00:46:47.100And then we should do the little bit that we can't do through the market through taxing, like raising an army.
00:47:18.280The best parts of capitalism, free market ideology in the current era is not going to cut it because, like, just what we've seen.
00:47:28.060But doesn't that include I mean, assuming you're you're very well aware of the Great Reset, which is the public private partnership, you know, and almost a Chinese kind of model in some ways.
00:47:41.600That that requires angels to run the countries and the system that have never existed.
01:00:37.220However, we had the foresight to have an abstraction because some of some people figured out how to do this so that we could grow into the country that I think we were always meant to be.
01:00:46.780And there's a very important concept that came out of France that was taught to me by, I believe, a person who taught Bill Clinton history at Oxford, Earl Jamie and Wayne.
01:01:00.200I can't pronounce his last name, which is a nation is defined to be a group of people who have agreed to forget something in common.
01:01:07.800In part, we are supposed to remember a lot of the horrible things in our beginning to forget them later so that we can become who we were always meant to be without being tied back to 1619.
01:01:21.900The way Nicole Hannah-Jones wishes to tear us apart and to refound us.
01:01:26.020We have absolutely very strong obligations, in particular to African-Americans, but also to women who were denied the vote, you know, even in the beginning of my grandfather's life.
01:01:36.720But we also have to realize that we have the blueprint for a country that can accommodate our best selves and that this is the gift of a patriarchy.
01:02:23.020But look, the other thing is, we've got to talk about the two major cults and what cults are, because I don't think people understand what a cult is.
01:02:31.320In general, cults are not simply made up of crazy people.
01:02:35.080Whatever the dominant society is, always has to throw certain items of truth over the walls that it represents.
01:02:47.480You have to pretend that certain things that are true aren't true.
01:02:50.140And in so doing, when you have a situation like that, there is always the basis to begin a new civilization based on the idea that the society always has to lie.
01:03:02.140If the society lies very little, it's not worth joining the irregulars outside the city walls.
01:03:08.680But it is true that our culture has been throwing more and more truth over the city walls.
01:03:13.860And that has been the basis for the cults that have formed around Wokistan and Magistan.
01:03:18.560And we have to talk about the fact that both of them have a point and both of them have become cult-like.
01:03:23.800And now, therefore, they're similar to our system.
01:05:18.000He accomplished some amazing things, like the Middle East peace stuff, like getting a race theory out, like not starting new wars.
01:05:25.920Before his presidency, I said he will be a superposition, probably of the best and worst president we've ever had in our country.
01:05:32.020And you've got a group of internet hyenas who, whenever they hear anybody trying to promote a nuanced position, a long, short position, whatever you want to call it, immediately say, what about ism or both sides ism?
01:05:46.020Like, can you imagine if physicists looked at Schrodinger's cat and said, oh, it's both sides ism, you know?
01:05:56.060The key point is Donald Trump represents something to many people who hate him.
01:06:01.740He represents something standing in the way of a news media that cannot report that the mayor of Portland is, in fact, coordinating with an organization it doesn't think, it pretends doesn't exist to firebomb our own federal courthouse in a completely bizarre, largely performative ritual of showing us what a breakdown of law and order is.
01:06:23.480I mean, no smart person talks about getting rid of the police.
01:06:31.080And by the way, there is no minority community in the country that can say, we're so oppressed that you have to understand we have a right to get rid of the police.
01:06:38.620Well, I guarantee you, people with my surname, what will happen if you get rid of the police?
01:07:23.120On the other hand, let me tell you something that I'm very, very clear on.
01:07:28.760Assume all of your worst nightmares are true.
01:07:31.360Assume that you have an incredibly talented intelligence complex that views Donald Trump incorrectly as a puppet of Vladimir Putin and decided that it had to win the election through fraud.
01:08:02.840There are nine dudes and chicks like you and me who are assigned to be the last word.
01:08:09.660And we as Americans agree to abide by the Supreme Court's decisions even when they're wrong.
01:08:17.540So if you want, if you tell me I don't get it and I haven't looked at Benford's law and all of this stuff and you don't understand the Epstein conspiracy reached the court, okay, fine.
01:08:27.240But you're not talking about the United States anymore.
01:08:34.920And what we need to say to our MAGA brothers and sisters, just like our woke brothers and sisters, is you began around a system of truths that were excluded from the gated institutional narrative.
01:08:49.460Yes, structural oppression really does exist.
01:08:51.640You know, yes, it is absolutely true that there are so many irregularities to explain that Antifa is denied, not reported upon, that you're having the idea that you're bigots and chauvinists shoved down your throat.
01:09:13.420There's no shortage of reality that you have been denied.
01:09:17.580And now you've attacked the Capitol building of the United States, and I can spin it either way.
01:09:24.720I can decide that it's a failed insurrection, or I could say it's a mostly peaceful protest, right?
01:09:31.400The key point is the culture of the United States of America.
01:09:34.500And as I said recently to Sagar and Marshall over at the Realignment, the magic and genius of this country is the way in which the, what I've called the oral and written tour of the United States, the Constitution and our culture interacts.
01:09:47.580And what I love about this country is, is that I'm absolutely free to burn a flag in protest, and I have zero desire to do it.
01:10:04.860And so part of it is, is that even though this country came after my family in 1953, I stand when the national anthem is played.
01:10:13.900I'm sure I would not have wanted to hang out with Francis Scott Key.
01:10:17.760But I heard Jose Feliciano sing his Puerto Rican version at Candlestick Park and Jimi Hendrix, and I heard Marian Anderson do it and Whitney Houston.
01:10:28.700We took that song, and we made it something absolutely incredible.
01:10:34.440And I stand whether I feel like it or not, not because I have to.
01:10:39.200I support the right to go down on one knee.
01:10:42.440By the way, a genius move, if I may say so, because sitting on the bench was a terrible move.
01:11:26.960Baby boomers do not like to be told to leave the workforce when it's time.
01:11:32.460We got rid of mandatory retirement in all sorts of places in the 80s.
01:11:37.060And in part, that's because the boomers didn't have enough wealth.
01:11:41.580And as a result, everybody else is in a holding pattern.
01:11:45.080And right now, the principal emergency is that we've got a ton of young men and young women who need to form families and homes.
01:11:52.120And I don't care whether it's two dudes raising a kid or two chicks or two people who are non-binary.
01:11:57.520But a continuing society is all about babies and creating the preconditions where people wish to keep their society going so that people will care enough to sacrifice in their life for a legacy.
01:12:13.840When you start taking down all statues, not just the statues that were put up as a finger in the eye of somebody else, and there were statues that were put up in that way.
01:12:22.880But when you start a statue of an elk or Stevie Ray Vaughan, because you're trying to make sure that nobody has a future, that there is no history of who cared and who did and who won for you.
01:12:34.960So, what you're doing is you're stopping the loop of sacrifice.
01:12:38.500You need to make sacrifice worthwhile, maybe not directly, but at least indirectly.
01:12:44.140And the future has collapsed for these people.
01:12:46.500There's this thing I've called metastatic maternity, where when women realize that they're not going to have a baby that they're going to care for, they have to care for something else.
01:12:54.440And remember, the lesson of the wild is that mothers love their babies in a way that is violent.
01:13:03.180If you've ever seen a mother having a child's attack, you have not seen what violence is, incredible violence.
01:13:12.800And in effect, we have a lot of young women who are trying to take care of something, who may not be able to have kids because the market is completely taking away the ability to form families.
01:13:52.960We are talking about a world of technically incompetent people who grew up in an era, generally speaking, before the great society programs, born in the 1940s, who are not capable of living in a 21st century technological world with all this change.
01:14:10.840And we need different people in the leadership position.
01:14:13.080I was just saying on the radio today or yesterday, if it wasn't unconstitutional, I would vote for somebody like Elon Musk.
01:14:25.360And not because I agree with everything he has to say.
01:14:28.700I think he'd be, you know, a nightmare to me in many cases.
01:14:31.780But he at least is looking at a new world.
01:14:35.860It's like we've got a group of people that want to keep us packed into the systems of 1950 that don't work.
01:16:23.280The key problem, we're engaged in live action role play.
01:16:26.260And if you see the woman who got shot in Capitol Hill, very clear that she walked right into a gun in which the officer who shot her had his finger along the barrel of the pistol.
01:17:17.020If you believe effectively that the court system didn't hear the evidence and it just didn't give standing and that the corruption has gone all the way to the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts, it may have.
01:17:29.580But there is no opportunity to save the United States if what you're going to do is to talk about something above the Supreme Court.
01:17:36.820What you're talking about right now is you're talking about a new country that you're hoping to find.
01:17:41.820And that new country is not the United States.
01:17:46.160And I'll tell you, I am fighting very hard as I can using every tool in my arsenal to try to get people's consciousness up that MAGA is not completely insane.
01:18:10.620Tell me that I'm not wrong about that.
01:18:12.800Tell me that the fact is that he used the old Henry II tool of saying, well, nobody rid me of this quarrelsome priest, which is called direction through indirection.
01:18:24.520He told people to be peaceful, but there's no way to overturn this election the way Donald Trump wanted to.
01:18:30.580There's no way to go around Justice Roberts.
01:18:33.280You have to wait and take it on the chin.
01:19:03.980If you believe in zip ties and you're going to take back the Capitol, you're coked up on an ideology.
01:19:10.580And if what you're trying to save is the United States, your United States can only be saved by waiting it out.
01:19:16.940And I want to point something out to all of you.
01:19:19.220In 1971, a group called the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI created an incredible act of civil disobedience and broke into an FBI office.
01:19:31.920And they stole a bunch of documents because they were willing as patriots to pay their freedom to expose the fact that the FBI was out of control.
01:19:41.900And that turned into the Church and Pike Committees in the mid-1970s.
01:19:45.440And for the first time, we investigated our own intelligence services and found out that the United States government was illegally harassing and assassinating American citizens who were trying to behave politically in a way that was anathema to J.I.
01:19:59.980The next thing we need to do is to look at the leader of that group.
01:20:04.020I believe his name was William Devedon, a student of Rie Gelman and a professor of physics at Haberfield.
01:20:10.260So, those guys disciplined, organized, they found the word COINTELPRO, they created FOIA requests, they forced, I believe the York Times wouldn't run their findings, and they forced the Washington Post to have to investigate us.
01:20:25.520Right now, we need a redo of the Church and Pike Committees so that we know what our intelligence groups are up to.
01:20:31.040We need to inflict people who are actually progressive inside of center-left media, which is demonizing everybody.
01:20:39.620And what I need from MAGA is I need, I've got an outstretched hand and it's been outstretched for four years.
01:20:47.260And I've waited now, hopefully strategically, to talk to Glenn, because hopefully this is somewhat electrifying.
01:21:04.220You guys are a part of what makes America great.
01:21:07.120There are certain aspects that I can't do because my left of center-ness doesn't allow me to do it.
01:21:12.980But we benefit from being a great country and a good country.
01:21:16.840And I've tried to do both, but we have to have a conscience, and we can't go down this route.
01:21:21.260And you have to realize that the cult-like aspect of Donald Trump may have been necessary to break the cabal that has been denying all kinds of truth.
01:21:35.100The Donald Trump thing has to mutate into something that is pro-America, that is not based on a cult of personality.
01:21:43.000I know that many of you hate him and support him because he was the only way to stop the denial that Antifa was attacking the federal courthouse, for example.
01:21:51.960All of these people born in the 1940s are going away because of Father Time.
01:21:58.340They don't have much time left on this planet.
01:22:00.500And we are going to have to figure out how to unseat them legally, and with apologies to Malcolm X, we need to remove them by any legal means necessary.
01:22:08.080I apologize for the word legal, but it really does matter.
01:22:11.700What we need to do is to recognize that Magistan and Wokistan are two cults founded on reality.
01:22:26.700What we did at the Capitol was disgusting, and we, in a mob mentality, that woman who died from San Diego, larped her way to an early grave because of the contents of her mind.
01:22:38.560The software she was running told her that she was as if she was in the Boxer Rebellion, that she had supernatural powers, that nothing would happen.
01:22:46.420You look at that video, you look at all of the heavily armed officers behind her who could have stopped her.
01:22:51.100We have entered non-reality, and we are a thermonuclear nation with responsibilities to the entire planet.
01:22:58.120I keep hearing from black Americans that it's finally our time.
01:23:10.320And, you know, I appreciate that the killing of George Floyd had the optics of a police lynching, and that it plays into the denied reality of black Americans.
01:23:21.960Yes, your history has been denied, just as my history has been denied, just as everybody who understands Howard Zinn's history has been denied.
01:23:29.060But on the other hand, I want to come back to one image.
01:23:33.080I had an idea that I was going to get the two guys on my show who engaged in an incident where Donald Trump said to rough up protesters and that he would pay legal bills.
01:23:42.600And a 78-year-old man, a white guy, threw an elbow, sucker-punching a black protester being led out of an arena.
01:23:50.400And what I found was that they had reconciled, and they'd hugged, and they'd put it behind them.
01:23:58.500And there were 20,000 views on the video over four years.
01:24:02.260I think there were fewer than 20 likes.
01:24:04.320And just by pointing out that that video existed, I think it went to 30,000 likes from my account alone.
01:24:13.720And we have to stop speaking through our media, and we have to stop speaking through our politicians,
01:24:18.300and we have to stop speaking through people who are pretending to be progressive or pretending to be conservative.
01:24:23.420You can't conserve the United States by going over and above the Supreme Court.
01:24:27.180And if you want to think that I'm soft on Jeffrey Epstein, take a look at the episode that I did specifically.
01:24:32.000Hey, news media, you have to ask the question, was Jeffrey Epstein attached to any intelligence service?
01:24:38.540And if you get shut down and said we don't discuss sources and methods, that's fine.
01:24:42.600But the fact that you won't ask the question about whether or not Jeffrey Epstein is attached to an intelligence service creates a vacuum.
01:24:50.380And that vacuum is going to be filled by, I believe, fantastic things, the worst excesses of Alex Jones or QAnon or the Nation of Islam or whatever.
01:25:01.740Right now, the problem is we have no adults.
01:25:04.100I'm pretending to be an adult on Glenn's show.
01:25:07.460Maybe Glenn is pretending to be an adult.
01:25:09.040But those of us pretending to be an adult are at least trying because we've had a 75-year nap since the end of World War II.
01:25:18.020And it's coming to an end no matter what.
01:25:20.500Whether that descends to bloodshed or violence or authoritarianism, whether we lose the right to speak to each other on social media because they take a power grab given when things happen in the Capitol.
01:25:55.300Nancy Pelosi is not the right person to bring impeachment proceedings.
01:25:58.540The fact is, whoever brought impeachment proceedings should have been talking about Mayor Wheeler and Mayor Jenny and their abominable performance as public services, allowing lawlessness, people to die.
01:26:32.960And if you don't want to do that, if you wanted to say, oh, I'm a free market or my structural oppression, you're not part of the American experiment.
01:26:42.040And quite frankly, we've got to fight the kleptocrats in center left, center right, Wokistan and Magistan and get back to the business of innovation.
01:26:50.760I've tried to give you a history that you probably didn't know involving a through line that is incredibly simple that explains why everything is falling apart and try to use as few assumptions as possible.
01:27:01.080And it's been an honor to do it on Glenn's program.