A Portal Into the Progressive Mind ft. Eric Weinstein
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 4 minutes
Words per Minute
179.85002
Summary
Ted Cruz's 2020 has been a year of surprises. Impeachment, riots, plague, murder, and, perhaps most shocking of all, a progressive is joining Verdict. Ted Cruz is joined by Eric Weinstein, a mathematician, managing director of Teal Capital and founder of the intellectual dark web.
Transcript
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2020 has been a year of surprises. Impeachment, riots, plague, murder hornets, and perhaps
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most shocking of all, a progressive is joining Verdict. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict
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Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz. Such a pleasure to be here, as always, with the
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senator and our progressive guest. Actually, I don't know that that term totally encapsulates
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our guest, Eric Weinstein, mathematician, managing director of Teal Capital, founder of the intellectual
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dark web, and the title that you suggested to me, imposter.
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Michael, great pleasure to be here, and thank you, Senator, for inviting me.
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Thank you for joining us. So you suggested imposters. That leads to the natural question. Imposter
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Just about everything. I mean, I think that part of the problem is that credentialism has
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given us a culture of silos, and therefore, because everyone's terrified of violating
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the Dunning-Kruger principle, effectively, we don't have people roaming around the cabin
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So assume, theoretically, that there's one listener out there who may be a lawyer and an elected
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member of the Senate who doesn't know what the Dunning-Kruger principle is.
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The idea that people, in general, when they're not very talented, tend to overestimate their
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Well, it'll show up in the comments of the YouTube version.
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All right, all right. So how does Dunning-Kruger compare to the Peter principle?
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Well, I think that the Peter principle has to do with systems of selective pressures,
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so that in a previous world where corporate ladders and the like actually function, which many
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of our younger viewers won't know anything about because the corporate ladder hasn't worked
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for a great deal of time, people would advance by merit to the point at which they would find
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that they were first incompetent and then they would stop there. And effectively, you would go
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one step beyond where your competency lay. I think that the Peter principle really doesn't
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function because what you right now have is an insane situation whereby people like myself,
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who are about 55 years old, 54 technically, have never even started our careers because of the
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holding pattern that we find having to do with a tremendous number of people in the silent and
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boomer generations. And given that we, you know, holding, holding the important chairs and at least
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in, for example, in academics, when we get rid of things like mandatory retirement, you have a very
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interesting situation whereby lots of talented people never had the chance to come up. And so in
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terms of progressivism, one of the things that's really important to understand is that in many ways,
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the market is not actually functioning to promote talent and that there's a great deal of skepticism
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about whether meritocracy can continue to be a part of the American story. And then what we're
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finding is, is that in the absence of a functioning meritocracy, Maoism is becoming incredibly important
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and is being embraced by one of our two major parties. And I think Maoism is very distinct from
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Yeah. So, so I definitely want to get it, get there, but I'm, I actually want to pause on something you said
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because it's, it's interesting. So you've had extraordinary academic career, you have a PhD
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No, I haven't had an extraordinary academic career.
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And, and you're now managing partner, Teal Capital in, in, in at least most external worlds,
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that would be, so you said you had not yet started your career. I'm fascinated what that.
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Well, you're descended from mathematicians and computer programs. Am I correct?
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I am. Both, both my parents are, are mathematicians.
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Right. Your mother was a mathematician from Rice, if I'm not mistaken.
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Class of 56 from Rice. My dad, class of 61 from Texas.
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And they both became computer programmers at, and really the dawn of the computer age.
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And until I was about 15, um, I, I thought the path I was going to go was electrical engineering
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So as interesting as making money and, um, you know, getting to advise one of the world's
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most brilliant venture capitalists and investors, uh, is I really still think of myself as an
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academician. And I happen to find myself in the business world, like many people who come
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from academics and found that the, uh, the university system was absolutely, uh, unworkable
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as we're currently seeing. And so effectively, I'm always interested in getting back to mathematics,
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physics, and economics, uh, finance risk in a theoretical level. And there simply really
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Is your love of teaching of research, of writing when you view a fully formed and blossomed academic
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Well, the great danger is that I love teaching and it's important not to teach, um, because
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research is far more important, far more frustrating. And because we've housed both teaching and
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research in our universities, people are very confused. And I frequently compare it to the
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biathlon. I remember as a child, when I learned that there was an Olympic sport that combined
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cross country skiing and shooting, I thought it was about the dumbest and funniest thing I'd
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ever heard. And in part, we are very confused about the research university because we keep
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thinking that universities are principally about teaching, but I don't think that that's their
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most interesting aspect. I think if you look at, for example, Rockefeller university, uh,
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which has, uh, no undergraduates, uh, use university of California, San Francisco, fine, uh, biomedical
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university, no undergraduates, the Institute for advanced study doesn't even have graduate
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students. It's very important that we learn that previous generations put our research and
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our teaching in the same place. And the teaching is what's getting us into tremendous trouble.
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So, so I have to admit, I always thought the biathlon was an Olympic sport designed for
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James Bond. Well, it seems like that, but if you think about the winter war, uh, Finland versus
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the Soviet union, uh, the reason that tiny Finland was able to hold off the giant bear was, is that
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they particularly excelled, uh, at skiing and shooting. Not only that they did have the good
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idea that you probably should wear white if you're going to be against snow and ice so that
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the enemy finds it harder to see. Well, and I got to say, there's not a great historical pedigree
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between behind people fighting wars in and around Russia in the wintertime. So the, so that's,
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that's all the more impressive. Yes, that, that is, well, I'd like to pick up on this point of the
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Academy and camouflage as a matter of fact, because, because you have not fit in very well in the
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Academy. And this is very odd to me. You have a degree.
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Which is a damn fine point. Michael and I today did a book podcast on Aldous Huckley's brave new
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world and not fitting in, I have to say, particularly after discussing that this afternoon,
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not fitting in maybe about as high a compliment as one can give to an individual in this brave
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new world who dares think for himself. So what is it? What, what went wrong in, in the universe?
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Well, the universities are the system, which has the, um, the biggest problem with egos.
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Now people don't understand what an ego is. So you see the U S had an exceptional run of it between
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1945 and about 1971 through 73, where we had broadly distributed, very stable, technologically led
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growth. And this high level of growth caused us to predicate our institutions on an expectation of
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growth. Now that expectation mysteriously changed around 1971 through 73. And this is the important
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singularity that we went through that many people don't even know existed. In fact, there is now a
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website, um, which I'm very relieved to, uh, to be able to point to, which is called WTF happened in
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1971. So I recommend that to all of your, your, uh, your viewers. I suppose I should be really
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disappointed since I was born in December of 1970. Yes. You know, correlation is not causation.
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That's one of the few things I learned in college, but I can hang our hat on that.
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So what happened was that all of our institutions, and I think this is one of the most important
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stories that very few people know, um, all of our institutions have an expectation of growth that
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you have so many years that you spend as an associate before you become the partner in a law firm
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or in a medical practice, or you're an associate professor before you're given tenure. Now, what
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happened, uh, was that those growth expectations couldn't be met in the same way that a plane has
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a stall speed. And so when all of these institutions stalled out at once, because there was an implicit
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expectation of growth in the university systems, one professor might hope to leave between 20 and 30
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students who would also hope to become professors. Yeah. Now that had to do with the fact that the
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university system was expanding from approximately educating 8% of the population at post-secondary
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level to over to around 50%, um, that was possible for a brief period of time to actually use the
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contributions of apprentice labor. And what happened was, is that the universities had the most aggressive,
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uh, stall speed or ego. So if they didn't move fast enough, they became pathological before other
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institutions became pathological. Now, the problem that we're having, the very few people understand
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is a universal failure of institutions to be able to provide for the people who buy into the idea of
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contributing in and getting something out. That could be a pension, uh, that could be an expectation
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of permanent employment and being a shareholder inside of such an institution. What happened was,
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is that the universities were the first to need emergency assistance. And they effectively got
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that during the Reagan era, sorry to tell you the bad news. It was a conservative era, um, where the
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National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences had to team up in order to effectively
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rescue the universities if they weren't going to put in more money. And so what we came up with was a
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brilliant idea. We would lie about American scientists and engineers. We would say that they were lousy
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and that they weren't interested in contributing to this very demanding profession. And by the way,
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we have a universe, a universe filled with the best and the brightest in four countries in Asia.
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And we should just bring them over in large numbers because what we'd always done is we had a labor
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force that was based on apprentice labor. So the students are actually the workers, but by calling
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them students, you don't have to pay them, right? You don't allow them to unionize. And then by doing
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this on foreign visas, you talk about educating the world, but you don't actually admit that what's going
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on is, is that you're coming up with people who are willing to accept visas as payment because
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there are no professorships for most people to take over. Now you consider yourself a man of the
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left. Yes. It is interesting. The view you're laying out of, of immigration posing a threat to
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American jobs, because that at least in today's political world is a view most associated, not
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exclusively, but most associated with the right. And in fact, associated with Trump to some extent.
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Well, unfortunately, what this really is, is it's closer to Agatha Christie's murder on the
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Orient Express. You had the wall street journal proposing, um, a constitutional amendment. There
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shall be open borders. You have, uh, people on the, you know, the, the Sierra club used to oppose
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immigration, maybe Cesar Chavez, uh, not typically associated with the right would have been an
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opponent, uh, of immigration. It has nothing to do. Well, it has nothing. What you have to
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understand is that the idealism of every era is usually the cover story of a theft. I want to,
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I want to pause there for a moment. Say that again, because that strikes me as an important
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point. Okay. The idealism, uh, and the sloganeering of every era is typically the fig leaf that is put
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over the greed of one party, uh, goring the ox of another. So what, what would be an example?
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Well, for example, in the eighties, you'll remember that competitiveness was, uh, was a rallying cry
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and competitiveness was about trying to get American unions to give up hard won advances,
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uh, for the, for the national good. So it was a patriotism that was associated with understanding
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we're going to have to tighten our belts. We're going to have to get into fighting shape and that
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was going to be painful, but we were all going to be better off on the other side.
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So after Patco was destroyed again, problem of, of the Reagan, uh, time, uh, what you then had was
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the next phase, which was, we are the world and the, we are the world globalization narrative was
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about breaking the bonds that, uh, tie our fellow ourselves to our fellow Americans. So the idea is if
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we could just get rid of the rights of hillbillies and appalachians of blacks, uh, of various people
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inside of the U S what we could then do is relocate all of these factories and various opportunities
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overseas to get access to other labor. And then when, uh, Bill Clinton and Dick Morris figured out
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that the Republicans had this great thing going, they wanted to get in on the act. So they got
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really aggressive about it. And then we have things like NAFTA. And one of the really interesting
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things that you have recently is people like economist Brad DeLong was one of the architects of
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NAFTA admitting, you know, tearing off the mask and saying, you do realize that, um, what we were
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optimizing was a social, social wealth, welfare function that was intrinsically social Darwinism
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because it actually benefited you by the cube of your wealth. And then his point was, I don't
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understand why we're getting so much hate. Look at all the good we did for peasants in Mexico,
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which is a little bit of a weird thing to say when you trick American voters into voting something.
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And then after the fact you say, sure, it may have, may have made some of you worse off
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in Ohio and Michigan, but look at all the good. It's good for the other country that we did in
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Nairito. So let me ask your view, assume for the sake of argument that the objective is to benefit
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Americans in the United States, to benefit jobs, to benefit their economic welfare,
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to make their lives better. In your view, what would be the optimum immigration and or trade regime
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that, that would maximize the economic condition for Americans? Well, first of all, it's a great
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question. Uh, I have to show that I'm not, there's nothing xenophobic about this. So I've written a
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paper called migration for the benefit of all peer reviewed, uh, economic paper about how you can open a
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border ethically by using COSE in immigration. That is most Americans, most valuable possession
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is actually asymmetric access to their labor market. And we don't realize that that is actually the
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source of our wealth. Now the, again, if you wouldn't mind, put that in layman's terms.
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Sure. You have the right to your own labor market, given that your country maintains a right to conscript
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you to tax you. Yes. Part of the social contract is that you get a share in your country's wealth
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through having a right. Now, the interesting part about it is if we can just get your right
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declared red tape or an impediment to the free market, then I can take your right without having
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to pay you anything for it. Now, this is in fact, a violation of free market economics.
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So let me ask, what, what does it mean to have a right to a market? I understand something called
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labor certification. So when you get labor, when you have labor certification, you have to go through
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a certain amount of high tech worker to come in, there has to be a certification that there's not,
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there are not U S to fill that need. Yes. And in fact, uh, we should not make labor certification
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easy because part of what forces us to renew is putting our businesses under pressure. So what,
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one of the things that I find very interesting, so I'm not going to say something pro-right after
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I've been anti-right. Yes. I, cause I, just for, for those who are struggling to keep catch up as I
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am, you've just come out and criticized the Reagan era. You, you've built up your left-wing
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bona fides. He's criticized the Reagan era for too much big government, which I'm actually perfectly
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fine with that criticism. And then Eric, you've gone back and attacked the left for, or at least I
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suppose we would call it the modern left for its open borders or, or advocation, uh, advocacy of
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high, high skill immigration. It didn't advocate for high skilled immigration. It lied effectively.
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What you did is you got the national science foundation and the national academy of sciences
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to stab American scientists in the back on behalf of scientific employers. And so all of the sloppy
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talk about best and brightest, um, you know, you're so, if Tim Cook were sitting here, Tim Cook would
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argue that they need access to, to Chinese and Indian engineers and computer scientists never sit
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here. If I'm on set, let's imagine the hypothetical or tell me why you would have to chain him to a
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radiator or you would have to wheel. We have those tools in this podcast. That's true. That's part of
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our Hollywood setup here, but it's very important. And it's one of the reasons why people won't invite me
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to talk about, I mean, there is essentially no, no one, uh, at my level that I know of who's openly
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against high skilled immigration is the worst part of our immigration. Yes. This has struck me as a
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position you can't say, or you can say it on things like podcasts, which is why I think you have a
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successful podcast and why people listen to this show too. And let's segue, this is fascinating, but I
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don't want to miss a major portion of this topic, which is you, and I told you we'd get back to this.
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You made reference to, to the modern left to, to, to some, or even many becoming Maoist. Yes. And,
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and, and for the listeners, I think I know what you mean, but tell us what you mean by that.
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Well, you have a very weird coupling on, on the, on the technical left. So with Dick Morris and Bill
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Clinton effectively becoming a second Republican party, you then had a problem with, which is how do I
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replace organized later labor as a voting bloc? And my wife, Pia Malani's great insight here was,
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she's an economist with the Institute for new economic thinking, a Soros funded, uh, Institute.
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Now we've got the left wing bona fides again. All right. I'm reoriented.
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Her point was that, uh, you need something cheaper than labor because labor makes economic demand. So
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there's always a search for who's willing to accept the least. And the thing that you can actually
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get voters with for people who are willing to accept very little has been identity politics.
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So the idea is that identity politics is the, is the electoral substitute for organized labor that
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was lost after Bill Clinton and Dick Morris decided that you had to have two Republican parties in order
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to not have more than 12 years of continuous one party rule. And one sees memos going around the
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internet, for instance, from mega corporations that, that actually show executives at some major
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corporations have relied on identity politics to divide up labor in the hopes that they wouldn't
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unionize. So an identity politics, but by that you mean my characteristics, whether it is that I am a
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male, whether it is that I am Cuban American or Irish or Italian, or whether it is that I am straight or,
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or, or, or whatever other categories we can slice ourselves into demographically. It is
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thinking of ourselves in those pigeon holes. And then I suppose you mean also perceiving by virtue of
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those characteristics that you were victimized and need to, uh, need protection, need, need,
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need something to prevent that victimization from others. Is that, is that what you mean? Or tell me
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what you mean. It's well, it's exactly right. I mean, what you have as a situation, I think that this,
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uh, in some sense ties back to probably the 2010 midterm elections, where I think that Barack Obama,
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who had not been interested in identity politics, particularly, and it wanted more unity, uh, saw
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an opening, which I think was coming from the observation of the Colorado Senate election,
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if I'm not mistaken. And shortly thereafter, you had a dear colleague letter that went out
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from the Obama administration, warning universities to be on their best behavior, um, with respect to,
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uh, safety issues, because I think, uh, feminist issues were part of what made, uh, Colorado the
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bright spot for the Democrats in a Republican, uh, election. And so effectively what you did is you
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started a search for a very aggressive demographic for, which for a period of time, uh, people were
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satisfied with simply being recognized and being the thrill of reflection. And by the way,
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you know, the Maoists have lots of points that are correct. It's not that they're wrong about
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everything. So for those not experts on Chinese history and, and political theory, what is a Maoist
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in, in a sentence or two? Well, what I'm really interested in is the experience of the red guard,
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where we just, you know, there's a point where you have to get rid of the intelligence,
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the intelligentsia in order to have a blank slate for a new world. So effectively what you do is you
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go after the professors, the doctors, the professionals, and you, you have to have some
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way of clearing, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to build something very often,
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you have to raise whatever trees and houses are previously there.
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Now you also have personal experience, both yourself as an academic, but, but your brother
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was also an academic and, and paid a real price from the victimization culture. I think,
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would you care to just share what, what happened to your brother and what your thoughts are on it?
00:21:53.700
It's important because most, many Democrats have never heard of my brother, whereas almost all
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Republicans have heard of my brother. Yes. And this has to do with the fact that the
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democratic, uh, allied media mysteriously no longer reports news that is counter narrative,
00:22:08.100
which is something I associate with sort of the right wing, um, media, uh, as well. So I've,
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you know, I've gone on Fox and said that Fox is, I, I consider in large measure a propaganda machine.
00:22:21.600
Um, but the left has, has, has learned that they need to do the same thing. And so effectively they
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didn't cover the fact that there was a Maoist insurrection at, um, evergreen state
00:22:32.200
college, which is under the same governor who allowed the Capitol Hill exclusion zone where
00:22:37.780
the police were shoved out and, uh, almost immediately people died. Surprise, surprise.
00:22:42.920
Right. Um, so, you know, the Pacific Northwest is experimenting with an extremely dangerous
00:22:49.000
cocktail of this Neo or cultural Maoism effectively, um, with government support. Now I have to say that
00:22:58.820
the right behaved much more sensibly because the left has abandoned what we'd previously associated
00:23:05.400
as a progressive and liberal values with free speech, uh, going back to the sixties and the
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fifties. And I've called this reversal from right to left left car theism. So the problem of left
00:23:17.040
car theism, um, again, you know, I, I don't have any particular allegiance to one party or the other
00:23:22.240
because they're both useless to me. Um, what I see is just a completely unworkable leadership class
00:23:29.120
that has strayed from traditional American values. And whether you're progressive or conservative or
00:23:34.000
libertarian, the main thing right now is to get back to smart as opposed to stupid.
00:23:39.540
So you've drawn this distinction here. And I think it's one that we see a lot on college campuses
00:23:44.020
and in our politics and in our media, which is between Maoism or Marxism, this hard radical left
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and what we would have once called liberalism, liberal, not left. And people like Dave Rubin
00:23:56.860
and others have talked about this. You would call yourself, I suppose, a liberal or a progressive
00:24:02.380
in the old sense, a Barry Weiss, who's written about the intellectual dark web, which you founded
00:24:08.160
and talks about these things. Barry Weiss has just left the New York times because they are too hard
00:24:12.140
left for her. And she's an old school. They're not hard left. They're not. They're nuts.
00:24:16.100
Well, those are synonymous in my mind. But stupid and crazy shouldn't be a part of a political
00:24:22.320
spectrum. That should be a mental condition. So I'll tell a story. When I was a first year
00:24:28.140
law student at Harvard, my criminal law professor was Alan Dershowitz. He remains a good friend. And
00:24:33.020
I remember a couple of things he said in the criminal law class. One of the things he said,
00:24:38.360
and you were talking about people overestimating their capabilities, I remember him saying,
00:24:44.340
one thing that is true, even at Harvard Law School, is that 50% of the class is in the bottom half.
00:24:52.940
That made an impression. But he also made a point. He said, listen, by any measure,
00:24:56.840
I, Alan Dershowitz, am in the most liberal 1% of the American populace. On almost any policy issue,
00:25:03.380
my views are on the left. And yet he made the point then, which became even more true in later
00:25:08.220
years. He said, on this faculty, I'm considered in some ways a conservative or reactionary
00:25:14.140
because I believe in free speech. I believe in disagreement. I don't believe in silencing my
00:25:19.760
critics. I believe this was, would have been 90, 92 or 93. So I forget if I took criminal law in spring
00:25:27.680
or fall, but it was either fall of 92 or spring of 93. Things changed a lot between, I arrived at
00:25:34.800
Harvard in the mid 1980s. And when was Bork? 87. So I remember Alan Dershowitz talking about Bork.
00:25:43.840
And Bork is one of the most confusing aspects of a domestic dispute between the two parties,
00:25:49.640
where effectively the Democrats viewed it as, I can't believe you would betray us by putting Bork
00:25:54.340
forward. The Republicans said, I can't believe you would betray us by deciding that you were going
00:25:59.140
to scuttle this nomination. Because Judge Bork, for those who don't remember back in 1987,
00:26:03.780
was this conservative judge. He's nominated by Ronald Reagan and Teddy Kennedy leads the charge
00:26:09.460
against him. It's, it was a character assassination. It was considered the beginning of this really brutal
00:26:15.880
confirmation process that now seems to happen every time we nominate. In fact, he has the distinction
00:26:20.520
of having been verbized, which verbized, I will confess, is a term I think I've coined. I don't
00:26:26.000
know anyone else who's used it in that his name has become a verb to this day to be Borked. Yeah.
00:26:31.480
Is to go through the experience, the Clarence Thomas experience, the Brett Kavanaugh experience,
00:26:35.580
which is a confirmation hearing that is brutal. Actually, Tony Lake, Bill Clinton was nominated
00:26:41.980
for Bill Clinton. He wrote a letter withdrawing his nomination and, and, and with apologies to
00:26:46.860
Hobbs's Leviathan said that said the, the, the confirmation process is nasty and brutal without
00:26:52.880
being short and, and, and, and Bork ushered in a whole new era of nasty personal. Yeah. Well,
00:27:00.460
but this is the problem with a blood feud where if you can't agree what the, there are two stories
00:27:05.860
about what happened around Bork. And let me just say something self-critical on the left, uh, to amuse
00:27:11.380
you because I'm going to go back to bashing the right. Okay. Well, I'll enjoy this while it lasts.
00:27:15.440
Sure. All right. Um, there is a perspective on the left, which had to do with the Warren court in
00:27:22.380
the sixties, which is we can afford not to be the dominant force politically as long as we have our
00:27:28.820
own power base and the power base might be in the media and it might be in the universities and might
00:27:33.700
be in the court. So very often what you find in my circles is we can't have Trump again. Why?
00:27:39.520
Because of the court, the court, the court, the court always. Fascinating. And what that is,
00:27:43.720
is it because that's what the right says to that, that what I hear from the left is rarely as much
00:27:50.640
of a focus on the court. So I think that's, that's just an interesting insight because
00:27:54.100
our echo chambers are sometimes different. This is what causes people to say, don't experiment
00:27:59.160
with third party candidacies. Don't experiment with populism. We can never afford to actually
00:28:05.120
deal with our own values because the primary issue is making sure that they don't get nine
00:28:10.140
out of nine conservative Supreme Court justices legislating on all sorts of things that are
00:28:15.840
sacred to the left. So the left's, the thinking left's traditional perspective, flawed as it may
00:28:22.560
be, is we can afford to have democracy as long as we have very strong power bases, maybe in Hollywood,
00:28:30.120
maybe in the press, maybe in the universities, maybe in the court, we can afford to lose the
00:28:34.260
presidency and the Congress regularly. Now that concept of a second balance of power, a Mexican
00:28:41.040
standoff with apologies to our neighbors to the South, or I personally, I just think it's a great
00:28:46.100
concept. So I would be thrilled if I were Mexican. Yeah. That has not been understood. And what
00:28:53.220
effectively the, the left believed until the Reagan revolution was we have an idea that the court should
00:29:01.240
be this kind of, uh, uh, upper class, uh, very cerebral thing that is a counter to our populist
00:29:08.000
instincts. Yeah. And of course, Bork wasn't necessarily anti intellectual, but he's viewed as
00:29:14.140
an intellectual on the right, but it was viewed as a violation of a tacit understanding, which the
00:29:19.800
right didn't necessarily understood. Right. Understand. And as a result, there are two different origin
00:29:25.320
stories of the nastiness that will go on forever until we get family counseling. So the reason I'm
00:29:30.780
bringing this up on your show is, is that there's a question, can we go back and say, look, when
00:29:36.680
we're going to keep Borking everybody all the time. So I do have to, for the record, put a caveat
00:29:42.600
that only one side does the Borking. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed, I think 98 to nothing.
00:29:50.160
Steve Breyer, if you look at, at where the nasty personal attacks are coming from, I suspect the
00:29:57.720
counter-argument you'll give is Merrick Garland, but Merrick Garland was never personally attacked,
00:30:02.160
but, but he was never personally attacked. And what the Senate said with regard to the Scalia
00:30:06.580
vacancy that occurred in February of a presidential year is no Senate had filled a vacancy that occurred
00:30:12.880
in a presidential year in 80 years. And regardless of whom the president nominated, we were going to
00:30:17.680
let the election decide. I get you likely disagree with that, but it was not a personal attack on
00:30:24.960
Judge Garland who hadn't been nominated. There was no Michael Avenatti for Judge Garland.
00:30:29.340
I am furious. Or for Breyer, for Sotomayor, for Kagan, for any Democrat nominee on the court.
00:30:34.940
Yeah. Okay. So it's not that I'm sitting here. The reason I'm bringing this up is because more of us
00:30:41.200
need to understand our history because our grandparents did not correctly tell us what,
00:30:47.000
what our country is. Like the, the idea that the Warren court, for example, is a sacred thing from the
00:30:52.960
left, um, which in fact probably overreached a fair amount. And then some of that had to be rolled
00:30:59.060
back. Okay. So now you have this problem that the, the intellectual progressives of that era had
00:31:05.580
tasted something that they thought was, you know, William O. Douglas was, this is the greatest thing
00:31:09.900
that could happen. Too much got advanced. They got used to something. We then have this contentious
00:31:16.180
history. Honestly, to be blunt about it, I'm much more worried about the American project than I'm
00:31:20.640
worried about the democratic or the Republican or the conservative or the, right. And so the key
00:31:25.620
thing is it's important that we go back and like, if you will agree that maybe the Merrick Garland
00:31:32.480
thing wasn't terrific, I'll agree that the Warren thing, just for the record, I am not willing to
00:31:37.000
agree. So I'm willing to say we can, we'll agree to disagree, but, but I can dig in here and then we
00:31:44.160
can screw up the interview. It's up to you guys. I, I, I concede that, that you believe that in a
00:31:50.560
heartfelt and genuine way. This is the problem of the game theory. I'm sort of more adventurous. If
00:31:55.100
you guys don't want to play ball, I'm willing to, I'm willing to dig into, but I don't want.
00:31:58.820
So I do think that there's some other points that, that, that are fruitful that are not
00:32:03.380
going to result in as, as, as you suggested a Mexican standoff. The differential application,
00:32:08.420
for example, with judge Kavanaugh and Joe Biden of rules around the emerging me too, uh, weapon,
00:32:15.200
um, nice, nicely showcases the point that you guys should be making. But what I'm going to say
00:32:22.060
is just, just a word to the wise, to my friends on the right. If you choose not to actually see the
00:32:28.140
point of the left and you allow the left to say, Hey, maybe we didn't do something that was so
00:32:33.520
terrific. And then you take your victory lap, kiss your future appointments sailing through based on
00:32:40.960
legal merit. Goodbye. So you think you really think it, that this national divide, you know,
00:32:46.380
the family counseling that we need, it comes down to this moment in the eighties with the,
00:32:50.860
with the court specifically. So, and, and no, no, no, no, no. It comes down to the fact that we lost
00:32:56.380
growth. Hmm. So it goes back further. It goes back further than the crazies and creepies that are
00:33:02.100
roaming the American stage at the moment. Yeah. We're present in every era. The Ku Klux Klan was
00:33:07.740
present. The, the, the anarchists were present. But the, the key issue is that when you're dealing
00:33:13.120
with pathogens, if you have a functioning immune system, you don't know about the pathogens. If
00:33:18.200
you want to know who understands the pathogens in the system, it's the immunocompromised. When we
00:33:22.760
lost growth, we became immunocompromised and all the creepy crawlies are coming out from every
00:33:28.740
particular place. They're coming out from the right. They're coming out from the left. And
00:33:32.940
there's one move that can save the Republic in my opinion, which is that the, the core left and the
00:33:38.560
core right who haven't become insane have to realize that they have more interest in each other than
00:33:43.680
they do in their own wings. Right. And so the idea is if you think we have a word in Yiddish called
00:33:49.760
the starker, starker is the muscle. If the left sees Antifa is its muscle, right? And the idea is
00:33:57.660
that the right sees the proud boys or Patriot prayer, some far right group. Uh, by the way,
00:34:04.240
no one on the right sees the proud boys. They're bigoted idiots. And, and it, it, it, it's just a
00:34:09.120
minute. Antifa is a bunch of lunatics, but here, but here's, here's a difference just in the
00:34:14.900
political world. And I get that you're coming from the academic and, and, and, um, and podcast
00:34:20.880
world, but I am more than happy. I, as far as I know, I've never met a proud boy. I think they're
00:34:29.020
bigoted morons. My colleagues, if you had a democratic Senator sitting here, none of them
00:34:34.240
will condemn Antifa. So I'll condemn those guys. Those are not my guys. You have a guy who's never
00:34:39.020
going to run for the Senate. I'll condemn Antifa. Great. Wonderful. And we are agreed with that.
00:34:43.320
And I'm against anyone who's bigoted or violent. But what we're trying to do here is we're trying
00:34:46.840
to model what an American conversation is supposed to be as opposed to a partisan conversation.
00:34:52.120
Right. And what that is, is we continually check in with each other and say, you know,
00:34:56.060
we did some wrong stuff, but we did it because we thought we were reacting to you. Yeah. And then
00:34:59.960
you walk things back. But the problem is, you know, in control theory, when you have positive
00:35:04.960
feedback, when the idea is, yes, you know, I do something because you did it, but you thought
00:35:09.540
that I did, then the idea is you can just kiss your future goodbye. Well, you know, on this
00:35:13.060
point, because I think we would certainly agree every conservative I know would agree that we
00:35:18.300
care more about our country than we do about any particular partisan victory at any particular
00:35:23.800
moment. And yet we're at this moment. And actually, Michael, I'm going to now push back on you and
00:35:29.520
agree. Now, look, there may be every conservative, maybe, maybe not, but there are certainly Republicans
00:35:34.900
who are interested in partisan battles. And so, so, so there is partisanship and,
00:35:40.620
and misbehavior on both sides. And a misprioritization of where we should be thinking
00:35:48.480
of things. However, there's this difference right now where the mainstream left led by these radical
00:35:54.900
loony activists, but now this has spread to the mainstream. They seem to be disrespecting the
00:36:00.900
country itself. They will protest the flag, the symbol of the country itself.
00:36:04.580
Michael, but before we get to this, I don't, I don't want to miss what we touched on what
00:36:08.940
happened to your brother, but we didn't tell the story. And so for those who are listening
00:36:13.060
or watching, I think it'd be helpful to tell my brother was an anti-racist who left an Ivy
00:36:17.900
league education at the university of Pennsylvania because he stood up for black women being exploited
00:36:22.960
by a Jewish white fraternity. Um, and he was, you know, was, uh, got death threats, uh, got the
00:36:30.680
golden gazelle award for the national organization of women, became a professor at Evergreen state
00:36:35.100
university or Evergreen state college as a biologist, um, only to find out that effectively the problem
00:36:43.340
with racism was black racism against whites. And there was an extremely hard line sort of cultural
00:36:52.320
Marxist perspective where anti-racists in name were actually racists. They defined it so that
00:36:59.380
racism was impossible. And therefore you had this counter narrative to the, let's say the New York
00:37:05.100
times narrative driven journalism, which said that, um, these black students were in fact besieged by
00:37:12.700
racism. And so my brother is a staunch anti-racist was being attacked by, by racists who were calling
00:37:19.060
themselves anti-race. So the whole thing was incredibly confusing. And only one journalist
00:37:24.020
effectively at the New York times got in early on that. And her name was Barry Weiss who resigned
00:37:29.240
today. And I've been talking to Barry about this for some time. Um, so I don't know, Barry, tell me a
00:37:36.260
bit. I read her letter today. Sure. I thought it was extraordinary. So I'm interested in a, tell me a
00:37:42.520
little bit about her and what are your thoughts at, at, at, at what happened at the New York times and what
00:37:46.520
she said. Um, the New York times is going through, let's create a new word, evergreening, evergreening
00:37:55.620
of an institution is the point at which the people that the times probably hired thinking, Oh, well,
00:38:02.700
we have an aging readership. We're a legacy media organization. Let's get some hip kids, uh, to get
00:38:09.280
more clicks and more younger viewers. And the idea is that all those kids were supposed to become
00:38:15.580
somewhat more liberal and moderate as they acquired, uh, significant others, children and
00:38:20.720
mortgages. And that didn't happen. And in fact, what happened was, is that they began to take over
00:38:25.340
the very institution that was hoping to exploit them effectively. And for clarification, when you say
00:38:32.360
they hired young campus radicals in the hope and expectation, they would become somewhat more
00:38:38.520
liberal, um, help listeners understand on what axis, what more liberal means, because those,
00:38:44.480
those terms sometimes have, have varying meanings. Very good. There's a huge problem that we need to
00:38:49.260
get to, which is that the reason that we can't get out of our national nightmare at the moment
00:38:53.400
is, is that the center has to make a move that it refuses to do. And the center or the core,
00:39:00.180
maybe it would be a better way of saying it has to admit that it became kleptocratic.
00:39:04.520
And so the corruption of the core left and the core right, uh, means that there's nowhere to turn
00:39:12.480
from the extreme. So whenever you say no to the extremes, the thing is, oh, are you telling me
00:39:17.140
that we're going to be back to the core left and the core right and their extraction? So if you think
00:39:22.260
about the United States as a family business, yeah, the family business was sensational between 1945
00:39:28.140
and the early seventies, built up a tremendous amount of wealth, but then you have a very rich family
00:39:33.340
with a sputtering family business. The first wave of concern, probably through the middle of the
00:39:40.040
Reagan administration was how do we restart growth so that we can get back to being ourselves?
00:39:45.860
All of these supply side gimmicks and the offshoring and the downsizing and the financialization and
00:39:51.520
all of these things were not good enough to actually deal with the underlying problem because
00:39:56.040
it didn't have a diagnosis as to what actually happened back then.
00:39:59.220
What it was good enough to do was to keep some slices of the pie growing at the expense of others.
00:40:06.080
So the idea is that instead of seeing each other as a source of, um, camaraderie or military support
00:40:13.040
or innovation, we started viewing each other as a source of protein. And then we started the process
00:40:18.100
of American self-cannibalization. Okay. Well, that's part of what we did with NAFTA. That's part of
00:40:24.160
what we did with our immigration policies. That's the whole globalization stuff, uh, really amounts
00:40:30.060
to. So the idea is that right now what you have is you have certain sectors that grow by cannibalizing
00:40:36.700
other sectors. And as a result, if we call that growth, we can fudge our national statistics.
00:40:43.100
So who are the winners and who are the losers? Who are the cannibals and who's dinner?
00:40:46.800
Well, it depends. In what car did you arrive to this meeting? That would be the question.
00:40:51.520
Please don't answer that. But the idea is, is that most of us know whether we're winners or losers.
00:40:57.720
Um, you know, weirdly, um, if you're flying first class, you're probably a loser because the real
00:41:05.460
winners are in a completely different airport or terminal altogether. Right. Right. And so the idea
00:41:10.220
is we have an invisible winner class that doesn't necessarily even want to act like the winner class.
00:41:15.020
Uh, some of those people, by the way, are winners because they contributed. And that was the
00:41:21.140
traditional way. Others are winners because they figured out how to cannibalize somebody else.
00:41:26.280
And so we have this very weird thing, which is that we have so much cannibalization that we've
00:41:30.720
given up on merit because we now see merit as an excuse. And this is actually a fair point of the
00:41:35.740
Maoists who don't see, uh, a fair world. So there was an implicit sort of morality and market
00:41:42.540
mechanisms. Now, as a person on the left, I'm a huge fan of markets. Why? Because there's
00:41:48.880
nothing more progressive. The word progressive contains progress. Markets are what lift people
00:41:54.260
up. Yeah. Now, when those markets become dominated by rent seeking and political economy and capture
00:42:01.220
can't tell our listeners what rent seeking means. Well, rent seeking is an economist insult.
00:42:06.020
It means that your source of wealth is nonproductive. So it's a technical term. We can get into what a
00:42:12.820
rent is at an economic level, but just assume that the word rent is being used in a way that is
00:42:17.860
different than you, you may. It's analogous to certain other forms of rent. But the key point is
00:42:23.420
it's the debasing of market morality. There's a Judeo-Christian sort of aspect to the, the idea of a,
00:42:31.780
of a functioning meritocracy in which we are rewarded in part, not on whole, but in part based
00:42:37.540
on our contribution. The market doesn't work perfectly. Even if an honest free market economist
00:42:42.580
has to recognize that market failure is a part of every market.
00:42:46.560
So can you give people maybe an example of on the one side, productive meritocracy,
00:42:53.060
someone creating a better mousetrap that increases productivity, that benefits others
00:42:57.940
versus rent seeking and cannibalization. Is there an example you could give of the two?
00:43:04.100
Well, there's an origin story of a particular, um, particularly successful business that I
00:43:09.240
believe began, which I won't mention, um, by recognizing that the Inuit had special rights
00:43:14.900
to sell the loss, uh, to sell tax write-offs from failing businesses. So when you notice that some
00:43:21.960
group was given some right for some purpose and you say, huh, here's something I can exploit,
00:43:28.340
you know, you can arbitrage something and it's probably not the intended, intended use. Um,
00:43:35.600
but the idea, or, or for example, if I can, if I can successfully portray this man's, uh, right to,
00:43:41.660
um, access his own labor market in a, uh, in an asymmetric way, and I can successfully portray him
00:43:49.420
as a leech on society, uh, then the idea is that I can say, I'm going to take your most valuable
00:43:54.840
possession, uh, uncompensated. Um, I feel like a true victim because people do this to me all the
00:44:00.100
time when they call me a leech on society. Well, we're doing this in LA. We're doing this in LA.
00:44:05.560
Dodger Stadium, of course, is built on three towns, uh, that were Hispanic, um, that were collectively
00:44:13.460
known as Chavez Ravine. And the idea is that what we simply did, and it was, I believe Republican led,
00:44:18.400
if I'm not mistaken, uh, is that we actually took away private property by getting those towns
00:44:23.740
condemned. And by condemning those towns, we were able through, uh, this mechanism to remove a bunch
00:44:30.880
of people so that we could, uh, pave over the place and put a giant stadium in. But by the way, I, I'm,
00:44:36.800
I'm perhaps a hopeless optimist in, in that multiple things that I've heard you say,
00:44:43.660
uh, are leading to me to believe that, that deep down you're much more conservative libertarian than
00:44:51.340
you realize. And, and perhaps that we'll see what that journey lies, but I will say that particular
00:44:57.000
example, um, one major battle between left and right today, uh, particularly the legal world and,
00:45:04.880
and Supreme court world, which is the world I came from before politics, uh, concerns property rights.
00:45:10.340
And, and there's a well-known case. I don't know if you're familiar with, uh, Kelo versus city of
00:45:14.880
new London. I don't know. Um, so it concerned new London, Connecticut, a woman, uh, whose family home
00:45:21.160
had been in her family for a hundred years. She was an older woman and new London, Connecticut condemned
00:45:25.720
her home. And the reason they condemned her home is because Pfizer wanted to build a parking lot
00:45:31.420
and the city council of new London, Connecticut, they wanted Pfizer to be happy. So they condemned her
00:45:37.940
home to give it to Pfizer, to be, give it to a private corporation for their benefit. And the
00:45:43.360
case went all the way to the Supreme court and the constitution provides that, that, that private
00:45:48.220
property cannot be taken, uh, uh, without just compensation, but it also provides that it has to
00:45:55.380
be for a public use. And the question in Kelo was, is condemning private property to give it to a
00:46:02.880
private corporation, not for a freeway, not for a bridge, not for something that is for the public,
00:46:09.500
but for a, the private benefit of a corporation. Is that consistent with the constitution? The Supreme
00:46:15.040
court, unfortunately ruled five, four against, uh, the, the, the owner of, of the home.
00:46:22.180
Thank you for saying the word, unfortunately. I mean, it's, it's, it's a tragic decision. It's a
00:46:27.360
horrific decision. I decried it at the time. And I, I was actually solicitor general of Texas and I was
00:46:33.780
at a conference of the other SGs when it came down and the other SGs were celebrating. This is a
00:46:38.780
victory for government power. And I remember looking at them saying, just because you can wear a jack
00:46:43.460
boot doesn't mean you should, right? What a terrible trampling on, on, on private rights. And, and,
00:46:49.860
and, and that, and you will find, I think many on the right and certainly on the libertarian right
00:46:57.700
believe passionately in, in, in what you and I are both saying.
00:47:00.740
But I suppose, Eric, I think your analogy is so apt, this, this idea of, of devouring the other
00:47:05.940
person. You know, when we love someone, we will the good of the other. And then when, I don't know,
00:47:10.300
we lust after them, we just want to devour them, right? And there's this, there's this difference
00:47:13.760
here. And, and I totally see your points on this happening in the United States over the past
00:47:17.960
several decades. However, implicit in wanting to come back together, have this family therapy,
00:47:24.360
you know, love, love one another again, love our fellow countrymen again. We have to sort of will
00:47:28.880
the good of the country, don't we? And do you have this fear that there has been a mainstreaming
00:47:34.040
of, of not just not liking the other side, but actually not liking the country itself,
00:47:39.460
the American project. Are you familiar with, um, with Othello? Yeah, we were just talking about
00:47:46.640
today as a matter of fact. It features prominently in Brave New World, which is, it so happens we're
00:47:50.320
discussing. The problem is Iago. Now, Iago deranges the, uh, protagonist, I guess, uh, Othello
00:47:58.840
against his beloved Desdemona. And the idea is that by putting certain ideas into the head of
00:48:05.140
Othello, Othello will actually carry out the murder of Desdemona and figure out too late who
00:48:10.360
has in fact caused him to, uh, destroy that which he loves. Now, right at the moment, we have a
00:48:16.860
problem with the Iago media. Now there's the Iago media, uh, that is taking place within Fox News.
00:48:23.440
We have the second term we've coined, both of which the evergreening and the Iago media media are both
00:48:28.460
worth. This is big, but we're getting headlines. Sorry, I just had to, I like that. Not every day a
00:48:33.280
sitting senator asks me, uh, from an opposite perspective to come and, uh, it would be rude
00:48:38.940
not to. So please continue. I'm sorry for that. The, uh, the Iago media is found both on the left
00:48:44.740
and on the right. Everybody's got a narrative. When the news is narrative aligned, they report the news
00:48:50.420
when the, when the news is counter narrative, they either don't touch it at all or they lie or they
00:48:56.340
spin. There's another concept called Russell conjugation, for example. Uh, Russell conjugation
00:49:03.880
Bertrand Russell, a, uh, a Brit of some, of some note, uh, went on to the BBC and he said something
00:49:12.360
which I think is fascinating. He noticed that the word synonym does not cover certain cases very well.
00:49:18.780
For example, think versus whistleblower. Technically they're both synonyms at a content level,
00:49:23.800
right. The emotional instruction is to hate the fink and to praise the whistleblower,
00:49:29.800
even though they're the same person. Now, Frank Luntz, uh, Frank is a friend. I know. I went to
00:49:35.160
college with Frank. Um, Frank Luntz did not know the term, but he effectively reinvented and weaponized,
00:49:43.140
uh, Russell conjugation. So the idea is that we are all against illegal aliens and we are for
00:49:48.960
undocumented workers, right? We oppose the death tax, but we support in the state tax.
00:49:54.760
And the fact is language is weaponized in politics and modern discourse. Well, exactly. And so what
00:50:00.100
we're, where we are right now is we are in a situation in which our media derange us every day.
00:50:06.960
Uh, and by the way, media is going to include tech to hate each other. Yeah. And so tech has become,
00:50:12.680
and we talk about this all the time when we talk about section two 30 and the communications
00:50:15.780
decency act tech has become a sort of publisher, a participant in the media. Tech is, tech is the
00:50:21.980
new media. And in this situation with greater power than the New York times ever had. Amen,
00:50:27.800
brother. And so the problem that we're having is that what works as both business and politics
00:50:35.260
is to get Othello to murder Desdemona on a daily basis. And that is what we play out as our heads
00:50:41.800
are filled. We don't understand why we can't talk to our loved ones, why Thanksgiving dinners don't
00:50:46.620
work. We're a little bit confused as to why not only is George Washington face down, uh, from his
00:50:53.660
podium with 1619 scrawled on it. And when somebody publishes all them, the 1619 riots, uh, the de facto,
00:51:01.580
uh, head of the New York times, Nicole Hanna Jones says it would be an honor. Um, you laugh.
00:51:07.660
And that's going to be taught in schools across the country. Six, the 1619 project is an explicitly
00:51:14.160
revisionist thing is true with, with libtards. I don't know what a libtard is. Do you, I assume
00:51:21.420
a pejorative for someone on the left, although, uh, it's not a term I use. Yeah, I haven't used it
00:51:28.540
myself. My point is that what we have is, is that we have a poisoned national dialogue in
00:51:34.960
which wherever you consume your media, you are getting a constant set of emotional instructions.
00:51:41.420
That is the concept of Russell conjugation. And because we don't practice critical feeling,
00:51:47.160
we know about critical thinking, but we don't know that most of our feelings are not our feelings,
00:51:51.840
but feelings that we have inherited through daily program. And as a result, you know, for example,
00:51:56.820
I know that you're evil and you're the devil and I'm not supposed to be here, but here I am.
00:52:01.660
Well, that's a fact. I've always wanted to make a deal with the devil, but the devil never returns
00:52:08.360
my phone calls. Um, the issue is better fiddle of gold against your soul. By the way, did you see
00:52:14.780
the second one with Mark O'Connor? Oh, the greatest fiddle player. Another time. That's for the next
00:52:20.500
episode. The, um, the, the situation that we're in is that we have to realize that we are being
00:52:27.680
deranged and therefore we can't even mount a response to the COVID epidemic. That was a layup.
00:52:34.380
You just have a Manhattan project. You say, who are the smart people across virology, epidemiology,
00:52:39.920
mathematics, uh, economists who are the geopolitical theorists. You immediately, uh, expedite, um,
00:52:47.040
security clearances. You test them all. You get transport, you put them in a dorm with tons of
00:52:52.020
whiteboards, lots of coffee, and you say, you're not going to see your family for two months,
00:52:55.100
get it done. We can't even do that. Well, because so many, so many of those public health
00:52:59.600
officials were writing politicized letters in defense of leftist protests to the tune of 1200
00:53:04.880
at a time. Not just, we also had a problem with our surgeon general who decided that masks weren't
00:53:10.860
a good idea or, or Dr. Fauci or the head of the CDC. And why? Because we have a problem that we lie
00:53:17.540
about public health. Many people who go into public health believe in the public good and for the
00:53:23.560
public to engage in, um, beneficial behaviors that you're solving a massive prisoner's dilemma.
00:53:30.440
Of course, it would be better if everybody else took a vaccine and you didn't have to,
00:53:33.580
in case there's any risk with the vaccine as an example of a typical coordination problem.
00:53:38.060
So one of the problems that we have is, is that we told obvious lies. Now the lie,
00:53:43.060
the most important one is, is that the academic literature had told us to stock, um, supplies and
00:53:49.700
ICU beds and make sure that we were ready for surges because surges are situations in which
00:53:54.660
you don't have a, what would be called a Poisson process of random arrivals that determine your
00:53:59.200
needs. You have a correlated event. So if you have rioting in a city, you're going to need much more
00:54:03.160
policing suddenly. Yeah. We were completely unprepared and because we were unprepared,
00:54:08.080
we decided that what we would do is to lie to the American people and we would tell them things that
00:54:12.840
made no sense. So either we might lie to them from the democratic side about the idea.
00:54:17.400
The inconsistencies were massive and head jerking and every American noticed them at one point or
00:54:22.120
another. The idea is that Nancy Pelosi should resign. Donald Trump should resign. Anthony Fauci
00:54:27.440
should resign. The head of the CDC should resign. We should not be talking to the WHO. We need to get
00:54:33.720
the lying sons of bitches out of the chairs in which they have the ability to lie for some reason
00:54:40.660
to the American public, which degrades our faith in government, in data, in science, and in reason.
00:54:45.660
And quite honestly, it's much more important that we have faith that not all of our expert class
00:54:51.960
is psychopathic. Not all of them are on the take, that it isn't a war of the very rich and their
00:54:58.940
experts against, you know, as expert witnesses, if you will, against the rest of us pretending to be
00:55:04.040
objective, but actually carrying out the orders of somebody else. So we have a serious situation in
00:55:08.740
which our entire leadership class of both parties, no offense, sir, is unworkable. And the inability,
00:55:16.520
I mean, I was tweeting about this quite openly, which is we are lying. What we are saying about
00:55:21.620
masks not working is because we're covering for our own failure to heed our own literature.
00:55:30.540
It's a very easy speech that you give. You say, you know, ladies and gentlemen, we have to level with
00:55:35.820
the American public. We are unprepared and we can find fault and perhaps we should do so after the
00:55:41.540
national emergency. But right now we need to pull together in order to make sure that our first
00:55:46.080
responders, our medical personnel, people who are on the front lines are protected. We don't have an
00:55:49.960
inadequate supply of personal protective equipment, of ICU beds. The real reason that we need to
00:55:55.200
flatten the curve is because we're trying to avoid what we might call deaths of discretion,
00:56:05.280
Well, okay. But the point is we have a limbo bar and the limbo bar was too low. And that's why we
00:56:09.680
were flattening the curve. And the limbo bar was supposed to be higher. And I believe actually
00:56:14.180
George W. Bush did better with this and that this had then got drawn down under Obama, not replaced
00:56:19.820
under Trump. And so whatever was going on with the PPE stuff, it was a failure of government
00:56:24.560
that we then foisted onto the shoulders of the American people.
00:56:28.380
And we also had an enormous failure with testing, particularly early on rolling it out.
00:56:32.400
Well, we were completely incompetent. We'd outsourced so much of our supply chain to China,
00:56:36.800
not realizing we have a geopolitical rival because...
00:56:39.540
Massic, catastrophic, tragic mistake we've got to change. If I can sort of take it to a wrap-up
00:56:51.440
Oh, I thought we were going to do H1B, but okay.
00:56:53.180
Okay. Let's see if there is any cause for optimism. How do we get from Othello to Midsummer
00:57:04.660
Oh. Well, key issue is that we have to start talking about our own failures. And in part,
00:57:12.380
what I hope you've heard is that I'm willing to call out the left, the right, and the libertarian.
00:57:17.260
Like the libertarian problem is that it doesn't work to pretend that we're all atomistic. We see
00:57:21.940
that with respect to a contagion and masks and the like. Sure. Right? So Arnold Kling has this
00:57:27.960
beautiful description. He says that you have three groups, progressives, conservatives, and
00:57:31.560
libertarians. Libertarians are animated principally by hating coercion. Progressives are animated
00:57:38.040
principally by hating oppression. And conservatives are principally animated by needless loss of hard-won
00:57:45.380
traditions and gains over past generations. And the answer is that any sensible person
00:57:51.560
should want to make sure that they're optimizing among the three and not to become part of a
00:57:58.060
simplistic situation whereby they so hate coercion or so hate oppression that they lose sight of the
00:58:04.080
entire picture and therefore lose the plot of the American project. So what I've tried to do here
00:58:09.820
is to try to say, um, and I've just begun this exploration. I'm so sorry. We have to cut it short
00:58:15.160
is that, um, there are a couple of moves that are necessary. One, we have to agree that we have an
00:58:21.720
unworkable leadership class. The five final candidates for president of the United States
00:58:26.320
were all born in the 1940s. We have never before Donald Trump had a president who at first
00:58:32.780
inauguration. To be honest, I preferred the final candidates in the last cycle.
00:58:39.260
We had some good ones there. Let me say on that. I noticed Eric doesn't have a comment on this one.
00:58:47.240
Let me say actually on that point. Or is he making a comment on that?
00:58:51.140
No, no, no. We had a situation, quite honestly, if I'm honest, I have to be honest that, uh, one of the
00:58:57.460
things that I liked best was when, uh, you became animated, um, because of the bizarre behavior of our
00:59:05.780
current president. And I know that for political reasons, uh, you have moved closer to him, but
00:59:11.800
one of the great dangers of Donald Trump, and he's got certain benefits, which is that he's the first
00:59:16.500
person to figure out how to come up the system by not playing the game. And we almost had that on the
00:59:21.880
democratic side with Bernie Sanders in a certain sense. We have a situation whereby Donald Trump
00:59:27.580
was, um, you know, the old song about, I know an old lady who swallowed a fly. So I, uh, made a
00:59:34.220
parody of it, which was, I know a young country that voted a Trump, uh, a Clinton to bump. We voted
00:59:39.120
to Trump. We have now gone down a path where Donald Trump is a disaster with respect to the oral Torah
00:59:45.260
of the United States. We have the written Torah, which is the constitution, but in Judaism, you also have
00:59:50.400
the culture around it. And this man is so bizarre, so strange that he is destroying the relationship
00:59:56.900
that many of us have with the country, because he's actually a genius. He's an unbelievable
01:00:01.740
strategist. Those tweets, they are not haphazard. They are not brain farts. They're very carefully
01:00:06.980
designed. He knows exactly what he's doing, I believe. And in part, we have now created a culture
01:00:14.140
whereby we are weaponizing these very exotic techniques instead of doing what we're supposed to be
01:00:20.040
doing, which is being productive, trying to ensure freedom, making sure that we're taking care of the
01:00:24.820
countries that rely on us for their protection, trying to be more decent, more, more, uh, circumspect.
01:00:31.520
And I think it's absolutely imperative, for example, that we start to examine things. I mean,
01:00:36.080
I'm just racing to get to this. Um, we stumbled over this Jeffrey Epstein situation and I have not
01:00:41.500
heard our Iago media ask the question, is Jeffrey Epstein attached to the best of our knowledge
01:00:47.600
at the state department, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, to any intelligence service. And is there a reason
01:00:52.680
that you are refusing to ask this question to the point that you can get no comment onto the record?
01:00:57.980
Right. So for what it's worth, I emphatically agree with you. What Jeffrey Epstein did, at least all of
01:01:02.980
the evidence and testimony to date is grotesque. It is offensive. And maybe it is a travesty of justice
01:01:10.460
that, that he died in a cell through whatever causes led to that. And, and I think there is an
01:01:17.840
imperative that everyone involved, everyone complicit, he held accountable. And I think
01:01:23.460
the question you're raising is an important one that needs to be asked.
01:01:26.180
Why won't the New York times or the Washington post or Fox news ask the question, was this person
01:01:31.880
attached to intelligence to the point where we can either get an emphatic, of course we would never
01:01:36.740
do that or, uh, no comment. Now, if we can get either one of these things for what it's worth
01:01:42.940
in DC, my sense is most people assume he was attached to intelligence. Now I don't know of
01:01:47.640
any, any evidence to that effect. I'm, but, and, and it is a question that needs to be asked.
01:01:52.620
Now I'm called a crazy person for, you know, a conspiracy theorist for saying, why aren't we
01:01:57.840
talking more about the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Why aren't we talking? We've had whole podcast on
01:02:02.580
that. Why are we talking more about Jeffrey Epstein? Why are we not calling for a return to the church
01:02:07.360
and Pike committees of the 1970s to give us closure so that if we did nothing wrong, we can
01:02:13.500
know that we did nothing wrong. And the abuses of intelligence and law enforcement, I think are a
01:02:19.320
profoundly consequential point. But, but let me say this just, just at a time of intense division,
01:02:27.060
at a time of tribalism and you're right, atomized information, atomized news sources, partisan
01:02:34.220
propaganda, news sources, social media, where we unfriend those who disagree and only listen to
01:02:39.980
those who agree and have a constantly reinforcing ecosystem. I remain optimistic for our country.
01:02:47.460
And I think what I hope what, what has just, just, uh, uh, occurred in this podcast, which is having a
01:02:55.780
reasonable, civil, productive conversation with those with whom we disagree, at least on some issues,
01:03:02.240
uh, is, is at the heart of the American experiment, who we should be as a democracy. And I hope is the
01:03:10.140
path to emerge from tragedy in, into instead the, the, uh, what I considered to be the hero's journey,
01:03:23.520
uh, of, of our nation state and, and America's journey towards a more perfect union and a more
01:03:32.260
just society. So thank you for coming. You said, uh, beforehand into the lion's den, I hope the lions
01:03:39.840
have at least, uh, uh, been cuddly. I don't, I don't know if that would be the case. Been
01:03:44.760
hospitable and, and, and your ideas have been fascinating and it's, it's been, it's been a
01:03:49.180
great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. It was very well said, Senator. Of course, Eric,
01:03:53.640
thank you so much for being here. This point you've hit on about, uh, one practical thing we could do
01:03:58.660
to come back together is each of us where appropriate, admit a failure or two speaks to a, a key
01:04:06.040
virtue, which is humility, unfortunately, probably lacking at the moment in the country, but the
01:04:12.280
beginning of wisdom and very likely, uh, uh, at least a glimmer of hope for the future of the
01:04:17.600
country. Thank you very much. Thank you both. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
01:04:22.180
This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs Freedom and Security
01:04:36.220
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