Verdict with Ted Cruz - A Portal Into the Progressive Mind ft. Eric Weinstein

00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

00:00:04.620 2020 has been a year of surprises. Impeachment, riots, plague, murder hornets, and perhaps

00:00:13.180 most shocking of all, a progressive is joining Verdict. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict

00:00:20.440 with Ted Cruz.

00:00:21.440 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz. Such a pleasure to be here, as always, with the

00:00:32.320 senator and our progressive guest. Actually, I don't know that that term totally encapsulates

00:00:38.360 our guest, Eric Weinstein, mathematician, managing director of Teal Capital, founder of the intellectual

00:00:45.680 dark web, and the title that you suggested to me, imposter.

00:00:51.520 Guilty.

00:00:53.060 Thank you very much for being with us.

00:00:55.200 Michael, great pleasure to be here, and thank you, Senator, for inviting me.

00:00:58.360 Thank you for joining us. So you suggested imposters. That leads to the natural question. Imposter

00:01:03.980 at what?

00:01:04.940 Just about everything. I mean, I think that part of the problem is that credentialism has

00:01:09.320 given us a culture of silos, and therefore, because everyone's terrified of violating

00:01:15.380 the Dunning-Kruger principle, effectively, we don't have people roaming around the cabin

00:01:20.460 or with all-access passes.

00:01:23.620 So assume, theoretically, that there's one listener out there who may be a lawyer and an elected

00:01:31.260 member of the Senate who doesn't know what the Dunning-Kruger principle is.

00:01:33.700 The idea that people, in general, when they're not very talented, tend to overestimate their

00:01:39.720 competence in various fields.

00:01:41.260 Explain why I didn't know what it was.

00:01:43.500 Well, it'll show up in the comments of the YouTube version.

00:01:45.840 That's right, right.

00:01:46.420 All right, all right. So how does Dunning-Kruger compare to the Peter principle?

00:01:49.840 Well, I think that the Peter principle has to do with systems of selective pressures,

00:01:53.480 so that in a previous world where corporate ladders and the like actually function, which many

00:01:58.180 of our younger viewers won't know anything about because the corporate ladder hasn't worked

00:02:01.980 for a great deal of time, people would advance by merit to the point at which they would find

00:02:08.060 that they were first incompetent and then they would stop there. And effectively, you would go

00:02:11.680 one step beyond where your competency lay. I think that the Peter principle really doesn't

00:02:18.800 function because what you right now have is an insane situation whereby people like myself,

00:02:24.260 who are about 55 years old, 54 technically, have never even started our careers because of the

00:02:30.220 holding pattern that we find having to do with a tremendous number of people in the silent and

00:02:36.240 boomer generations. And given that we, you know, holding, holding the important chairs and at least

00:02:42.060 in, for example, in academics, when we get rid of things like mandatory retirement, you have a very

00:02:46.940 interesting situation whereby lots of talented people never had the chance to come up. And so in

00:02:51.580 terms of progressivism, one of the things that's really important to understand is that in many ways,

00:02:56.040 the market is not actually functioning to promote talent and that there's a great deal of skepticism

00:03:02.500 about whether meritocracy can continue to be a part of the American story. And then what we're

00:03:07.340 finding is, is that in the absence of a functioning meritocracy, Maoism is becoming incredibly important

00:03:13.120 and is being embraced by one of our two major parties. And I think Maoism is very distinct from

00:03:17.300 progressivism.

00:03:18.060 Yeah. So, so I definitely want to get it, get there, but I'm, I actually want to pause on something you said

00:03:22.680 because it's, it's interesting. So you've had extraordinary academic career, you have a PhD

00:03:27.420 in mathematics.

00:03:27.860 No, I haven't had an extraordinary academic career.

00:03:30.080 You have an extraordinary credential.

00:03:31.940 My credentials are quite acceptable.

00:03:35.720 And, and you're now managing partner, Teal Capital in, in, in at least most external worlds,

00:03:42.620 that would be, so you said you had not yet started your career. I'm fascinated what that.

00:03:48.060 Well, you're descended from mathematicians and computer programs. Am I correct?

00:03:50.960 I am. Both, both my parents are, are mathematicians.

00:03:53.260 Right. Your mother was a mathematician from Rice, if I'm not mistaken. 0.97

00:03:56.880 Class of 56 from Rice. My dad, class of 61 from Texas.

00:04:00.460 Very impressive.

00:04:00.580 And they both became computer programmers at, and really the dawn of the computer age.

00:04:05.460 So.

00:04:06.220 And until I was about 15, um, I, I thought the path I was going to go was electrical engineering

00:04:12.580 and computer science.

00:04:13.820 So as interesting as making money and, um, you know, getting to advise one of the world's

00:04:19.560 most brilliant venture capitalists and investors, uh, is I really still think of myself as an

00:04:27.300 academician. And I happen to find myself in the business world, like many people who come

00:04:32.140 from academics and found that the, uh, the university system was absolutely, uh, unworkable

00:04:38.560 as we're currently seeing. And so effectively, I'm always interested in getting back to mathematics,

00:04:45.200 physics, and economics, uh, finance risk in a theoretical level. And there simply really

00:04:50.820 isn't a career path.

00:04:52.260 Is your love of teaching of research, of writing when you view a fully formed and blossomed academic

00:05:00.760 life, what would it entail?

00:05:02.760 Well, the great danger is that I love teaching and it's important not to teach, um, because

00:05:07.960 research is far more important, far more frustrating. And because we've housed both teaching and

00:05:12.800 research in our universities, people are very confused. And I frequently compare it to the

00:05:17.320 biathlon. I remember as a child, when I learned that there was an Olympic sport that combined

00:05:22.100 cross country skiing and shooting, I thought it was about the dumbest and funniest thing I'd 0.98

00:05:25.640 ever heard. And in part, we are very confused about the research university because we keep 0.95

00:05:31.760 thinking that universities are principally about teaching, but I don't think that that's their

00:05:35.740 most interesting aspect. I think if you look at, for example, Rockefeller university, uh,

00:05:40.440 which has, uh, no undergraduates, uh, use university of California, San Francisco, fine, uh, biomedical

00:05:47.160 university, no undergraduates, the Institute for advanced study doesn't even have graduate

00:05:51.440 students. It's very important that we learn that previous generations put our research and

00:05:57.120 our teaching in the same place. And the teaching is what's getting us into tremendous trouble.

00:06:01.020 So, so I have to admit, I always thought the biathlon was an Olympic sport designed for

00:06:05.580 James Bond. Well, it seems like that, but if you think about the winter war, uh, Finland versus

00:06:11.260 the Soviet union, uh, the reason that tiny Finland was able to hold off the giant bear was, is that

00:06:17.700 they particularly excelled, uh, at skiing and shooting. Not only that they did have the good

00:06:22.820 idea that you probably should wear white if you're going to be against snow and ice so that

00:06:28.260 the enemy finds it harder to see. Well, and I got to say, there's not a great historical pedigree

00:06:32.760 between behind people fighting wars in and around Russia in the wintertime. So the, so that's,

00:06:38.540 that's all the more impressive. Yes, that, that is, well, I'd like to pick up on this point of the

00:06:43.320 Academy and camouflage as a matter of fact, because, because you have not fit in very well in the

00:06:49.160 Academy. And this is very odd to me. You have a degree.

00:06:52.260 Which is a damn fine point. Michael and I today did a book podcast on Aldous Huckley's brave new 0.96

00:06:58.660 world and not fitting in, I have to say, particularly after discussing that this afternoon,

00:07:03.180 not fitting in maybe about as high a compliment as one can give to an individual in this brave

00:07:10.020 new world who dares think for himself. So what is it? What, what went wrong in, in the universe?

00:07:15.600 Well, the universities are the system, which has the, um, the biggest problem with egos.

00:07:22.700 Now people don't understand what an ego is. So you see the U S had an exceptional run of it between

00:07:29.800 1945 and about 1971 through 73, where we had broadly distributed, very stable, technologically led

00:07:37.580 growth. And this high level of growth caused us to predicate our institutions on an expectation of

00:07:43.320 growth. Now that expectation mysteriously changed around 1971 through 73. And this is the important

00:07:51.100 singularity that we went through that many people don't even know existed. In fact, there is now a

00:07:56.640 website, um, which I'm very relieved to, uh, to be able to point to, which is called WTF happened in

00:08:02.160 1971. So I recommend that to all of your, your, uh, your viewers. I suppose I should be really

00:08:07.820 disappointed since I was born in December of 1970. Yes. You know, correlation is not causation.

00:08:14.240 That's one of the few things I learned in college, but I can hang our hat on that.

00:08:17.600 So what happened was that all of our institutions, and I think this is one of the most important

00:08:23.040 stories that very few people know, um, all of our institutions have an expectation of growth that

00:08:28.800 you have so many years that you spend as an associate before you become the partner in a law firm

00:08:33.120 or in a medical practice, or you're an associate professor before you're given tenure. Now, what

00:08:38.720 happened, uh, was that those growth expectations couldn't be met in the same way that a plane has

00:08:45.320 a stall speed. And so when all of these institutions stalled out at once, because there was an implicit

00:08:50.980 expectation of growth in the university systems, one professor might hope to leave between 20 and 30

00:08:56.740 students who would also hope to become professors. Yeah. Now that had to do with the fact that the

00:09:01.500 university system was expanding from approximately educating 8% of the population at post-secondary

00:09:07.160 level to over to around 50%, um, that was possible for a brief period of time to actually use the

00:09:15.340 contributions of apprentice labor. And what happened was, is that the universities had the most aggressive,

00:09:21.880 uh, stall speed or ego. So if they didn't move fast enough, they became pathological before other

00:09:28.500 institutions became pathological. Now, the problem that we're having, the very few people understand

00:09:33.340 is a universal failure of institutions to be able to provide for the people who buy into the idea of

00:09:41.880 contributing in and getting something out. That could be a pension, uh, that could be an expectation

00:09:47.600 of permanent employment and being a shareholder inside of such an institution. What happened was,

00:09:53.460 is that the universities were the first to need emergency assistance. And they effectively got

00:09:59.300 that during the Reagan era, sorry to tell you the bad news. It was a conservative era, um, where the

00:10:04.920 National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences had to team up in order to effectively

00:10:10.720 rescue the universities if they weren't going to put in more money. And so what we came up with was a

00:10:15.460 brilliant idea. We would lie about American scientists and engineers. We would say that they were lousy

00:10:20.300 and that they weren't interested in contributing to this very demanding profession. And by the way,

00:10:25.320 we have a universe, a universe filled with the best and the brightest in four countries in Asia.

00:10:29.300 And we should just bring them over in large numbers because what we'd always done is we had a labor

00:10:33.480 force that was based on apprentice labor. So the students are actually the workers, but by calling

00:10:38.820 them students, you don't have to pay them, right? You don't allow them to unionize. And then by doing

00:10:42.820 this on foreign visas, you talk about educating the world, but you don't actually admit that what's going

00:10:48.460 on is, is that you're coming up with people who are willing to accept visas as payment because

00:10:54.000 there are no professorships for most people to take over. Now you consider yourself a man of the

00:11:01.000 left. Yes. It is interesting. The view you're laying out of, of immigration posing a threat to 1.00

00:11:09.820 American jobs, because that at least in today's political world is a view most associated, not

00:11:15.840 exclusively, but most associated with the right. And in fact, associated with Trump to some extent.

00:11:20.360 Well, unfortunately, what this really is, is it's closer to Agatha Christie's murder on the

00:11:24.340 Orient Express. You had the wall street journal proposing, um, a constitutional amendment. There

00:11:30.000 shall be open borders. You have, uh, people on the, you know, the, the Sierra club used to oppose

00:11:35.820 immigration, maybe Cesar Chavez, uh, not typically associated with the right would have been an

00:11:41.660 opponent, uh, of immigration. It has nothing to do. Well, it has nothing. What you have to

00:11:48.060 understand is that the idealism of every era is usually the cover story of a theft. I want to,

00:11:54.280 I want to pause there for a moment. Say that again, because that strikes me as an important

00:11:57.660 point. Okay. The idealism, uh, and the sloganeering of every era is typically the fig leaf that is put

00:12:06.880 over the greed of one party, uh, goring the ox of another. So what, what would be an example?

00:12:13.780 Well, for example, in the eighties, you'll remember that competitiveness was, uh, was a rallying cry

00:12:20.160 and competitiveness was about trying to get American unions to give up hard won advances,

00:12:26.720 uh, for the, for the national good. So it was a patriotism that was associated with understanding

00:12:32.160 we're going to have to tighten our belts. We're going to have to get into fighting shape and that

00:12:35.080 was going to be painful, but we were all going to be better off on the other side.

00:12:38.280 So after Patco was destroyed again, problem of, of the Reagan, uh, time, uh, what you then had was

00:12:45.220 the next phase, which was, we are the world and the, we are the world globalization narrative was

00:12:50.360 about breaking the bonds that, uh, tie our fellow ourselves to our fellow Americans. So the idea is if

00:12:57.740 we could just get rid of the rights of hillbillies and appalachians of blacks, uh, of various people 0.91

00:13:04.280 inside of the U S what we could then do is relocate all of these factories and various opportunities

00:13:10.880 overseas to get access to other labor. And then when, uh, Bill Clinton and Dick Morris figured out

00:13:17.360 that the Republicans had this great thing going, they wanted to get in on the act. So they got

00:13:21.260 really aggressive about it. And then we have things like NAFTA. And one of the really interesting

00:13:25.740 things that you have recently is people like economist Brad DeLong was one of the architects of

00:13:31.100 NAFTA admitting, you know, tearing off the mask and saying, you do realize that, um, what we were

00:13:36.840 optimizing was a social, social wealth, welfare function that was intrinsically social Darwinism

00:13:42.520 because it actually benefited you by the cube of your wealth. And then his point was, I don't

00:13:47.480 understand why we're getting so much hate. Look at all the good we did for peasants in Mexico,

00:13:51.140 which is a little bit of a weird thing to say when you trick American voters into voting something.

00:13:56.240 And then after the fact you say, sure, it may have, may have made some of you worse off

00:14:00.980 in Ohio and Michigan, but look at all the good. It's good for the other country that we did in

00:14:05.420 Nairito. So let me ask your view, assume for the sake of argument that the objective is to benefit

00:14:13.120 Americans in the United States, to benefit jobs, to benefit their economic welfare,

00:14:18.420 to make their lives better. In your view, what would be the optimum immigration and or trade regime

00:14:26.300 that, that would maximize the economic condition for Americans? Well, first of all, it's a great

00:14:30.900 question. Uh, I have to show that I'm not, there's nothing xenophobic about this. So I've written a

00:14:37.540 paper called migration for the benefit of all peer reviewed, uh, economic paper about how you can open a

00:14:43.620 border ethically by using COSE in immigration. That is most Americans, most valuable possession 0.63

00:14:48.780 is actually asymmetric access to their labor market. And we don't realize that that is actually the

00:14:55.120 source of our wealth. Now the, again, if you wouldn't mind, put that in layman's terms.

00:15:00.200 Sure. You have the right to your own labor market, given that your country maintains a right to conscript 0.90

00:15:06.780 you to tax you. Yes. Part of the social contract is that you get a share in your country's wealth

00:15:13.380 through having a right. Now, the interesting part about it is if we can just get your right

00:15:18.680 declared red tape or an impediment to the free market, then I can take your right without having

00:15:25.800 to pay you anything for it. Now, this is in fact, a violation of free market economics.

00:15:31.280 So let me ask, what, what does it mean to have a right to a market? I understand something called

00:15:37.020 labor certification. So when you get labor, when you have labor certification, you have to go through

00:15:42.500 a certain amount of high tech worker to come in, there has to be a certification that there's not,

00:15:47.260 there are not U S to fill that need. Yes. And in fact, uh, we should not make labor certification

00:15:53.200 easy because part of what forces us to renew is putting our businesses under pressure. So what,

00:16:00.400 one of the things that I find very interesting, so I'm not going to say something pro-right after

00:16:04.140 I've been anti-right. Yes. I, cause I, just for, for those who are struggling to keep catch up as I

00:16:09.140 am, you've just come out and criticized the Reagan era. You, you've built up your left-wing

00:16:14.340 bona fides. He's criticized the Reagan era for too much big government, which I'm actually perfectly

00:16:20.620 fine with that criticism. And then Eric, you've gone back and attacked the left for, or at least I

00:16:26.420 suppose we would call it the modern left for its open borders or, or advocation, uh, advocacy of

00:16:32.520 high, high skill immigration. It didn't advocate for high skilled immigration. It lied effectively.

00:16:38.400 What you did is you got the national science foundation and the national academy of sciences

00:16:43.580 to stab American scientists in the back on behalf of scientific employers. And so all of the sloppy

00:16:50.380 talk about best and brightest, um, you know, you're so, if Tim Cook were sitting here, Tim Cook would

00:16:55.800 argue that they need access to, to Chinese and Indian engineers and computer scientists never sit 0.95

00:17:01.300 here. If I'm on set, let's imagine the hypothetical or tell me why you would have to chain him to a

00:17:07.720 radiator or you would have to wheel. We have those tools in this podcast. That's true. That's part of

00:17:13.500 our Hollywood setup here, but it's very important. And it's one of the reasons why people won't invite me

00:17:17.580 to talk about, I mean, there is essentially no, no one, uh, at my level that I know of who's openly

00:17:25.860 against high skilled immigration is the worst part of our immigration. Yes. This has struck me as a

00:17:30.640 position you can't say, or you can say it on things like podcasts, which is why I think you have a

00:17:34.920 successful podcast and why people listen to this show too. And let's segue, this is fascinating, but I

00:17:39.800 don't want to miss a major portion of this topic, which is you, and I told you we'd get back to this.

00:17:44.360 You made reference to, to the modern left to, to, to some, or even many becoming Maoist. Yes. And,

00:17:51.600 and, and for the listeners, I think I know what you mean, but tell us what you mean by that.

00:17:55.440 Well, you have a very weird coupling on, on the, on the technical left. So with Dick Morris and Bill

00:18:03.260 Clinton effectively becoming a second Republican party, you then had a problem with, which is how do I

00:18:09.800 replace organized later labor as a voting bloc? And my wife, Pia Malani's great insight here was,

00:18:16.080 she's an economist with the Institute for new economic thinking, a Soros funded, uh, Institute.

00:18:21.480 Now we've got the left wing bona fides again. All right. I'm reoriented.

00:18:24.960 Her point was that, uh, you need something cheaper than labor because labor makes economic demand. So

00:18:31.000 there's always a search for who's willing to accept the least. And the thing that you can actually

00:18:35.980 get voters with for people who are willing to accept very little has been identity politics.

00:18:41.520 So the idea is that identity politics is the, is the electoral substitute for organized labor that

00:18:47.720 was lost after Bill Clinton and Dick Morris decided that you had to have two Republican parties in order

00:18:54.360 to not have more than 12 years of continuous one party rule. And one sees memos going around the

00:19:00.220 internet, for instance, from mega corporations that, that actually show executives at some major

00:19:04.840 corporations have relied on identity politics to divide up labor in the hopes that they wouldn't

00:19:11.020 unionize. So an identity politics, but by that you mean my characteristics, whether it is that I am a

00:19:17.880 male, whether it is that I am Cuban American or Irish or Italian, or whether it is that I am straight or,

00:19:24.400 or, or, or whatever other categories we can slice ourselves into demographically. It is

00:19:32.140 thinking of ourselves in those pigeon holes. And then I suppose you mean also perceiving by virtue of

00:19:40.760 those characteristics that you were victimized and need to, uh, need protection, need, need,

00:19:48.320 need something to prevent that victimization from others. Is that, is that what you mean? Or tell me

00:19:53.040 what you mean. It's well, it's exactly right. I mean, what you have as a situation, I think that this,

00:19:57.300 uh, in some sense ties back to probably the 2010 midterm elections, where I think that Barack Obama,

00:20:04.980 who had not been interested in identity politics, particularly, and it wanted more unity, uh, saw

00:20:11.500 an opening, which I think was coming from the observation of the Colorado Senate election,

00:20:16.800 if I'm not mistaken. And shortly thereafter, you had a dear colleague letter that went out

00:20:21.800 from the Obama administration, warning universities to be on their best behavior, um, with respect to,

00:20:29.020 uh, safety issues, because I think, uh, feminist issues were part of what made, uh, Colorado the 1.00

00:20:35.120 bright spot for the Democrats in a Republican, uh, election. And so effectively what you did is you

00:20:41.280 started a search for a very aggressive demographic for, which for a period of time, uh, people were

00:20:48.160 satisfied with simply being recognized and being the thrill of reflection. And by the way,

00:20:52.820 you know, the Maoists have lots of points that are correct. It's not that they're wrong about

00:20:58.720 everything. So for those not experts on Chinese history and, and political theory, what is a Maoist

00:21:06.360 in, in a sentence or two? Well, what I'm really interested in is the experience of the red guard,

00:21:10.440 where we just, you know, there's a point where you have to get rid of the intelligence,

00:21:14.040 the intelligentsia in order to have a blank slate for a new world. So effectively what you do is you

00:21:20.240 go after the professors, the doctors, the professionals, and you, you have to have some

00:21:25.680 way of clearing, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to build something very often,

00:21:30.260 you have to raise whatever trees and houses are previously there.

00:21:32.980 Now you also have personal experience, both yourself as an academic, but, but your brother

00:21:41.060 was also an academic and, and paid a real price from the victimization culture. I think,

00:21:50.180 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

00:21:58.420 Republicans have heard of my brother. Yes. And this has to do with the fact that the

00:22:02.460 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,

00:22:15.920 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

00:22:26.900 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

00:23:11.380 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 0.56

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. 0.99

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 0.99

00:23:44.020 and in our politics and in our media, which is between Maoism or Marxism, this hard radical left

00:23:50.080 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 1.00

00:24:22.320 spectrum. That should be a mental condition. So I'll tell a story. When I was a first year 1.00

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.

00:24:50.960 And that's true.

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. 0.54

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 1.00

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 0.97

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 0.99

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 1.00

00:34:09.120 minute. Antifa is a bunch of lunatics, but here, but here's, here's a difference just in the 0.72

00:34:14.900 political world. And I get that you're coming from the academic and, and, and, um, and podcast 0.91

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 1.00

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?

00:39:45.580 Yeah.

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? 1.00

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 0.96

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 0.83

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 0.88

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, 0.98

00:49:29.800 even though they're the same person. Now, Frank Luntz, uh, Frank is a friend. I know. I went to 0.85

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. 0.75

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 1.00

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 0.76

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 1.00

00:54:40.660 to the American public, which degrades our faith in government, in data, in science, and in reason. 0.99

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.

00:55:28.040 We were believing the first guys instead of...

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,

00:56:00.720 where we have a triage situation.

00:56:03.340 And we saw that in Italy, tragically.

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

00:56:48.160 point and see if there is...

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

00:57:03.800 Night's Dream?

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 Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations,

01:04:41.660 and candidates across the country. In 2022, Jobs Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to

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Verdict with Ted Cruz - July 23, 2020

A Portal Into the Progressive Mind ft. Eric Weinstein

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