Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Eric Weinstein. He's a mathematician, economist, former managing director of Teal Capital, and a podcaster. It feels like the world is reaching a fever pitch. From deepfakes to cheap fakes, AI girlfriends to senile presidents, we've never had more access to information, and yet it's never been harder to work out what is true. So what do we do about it? Expect to learn Erics thoughts on the 2024 presidential election, whether we are being gaslit on a global scale by the media, the future of string theory, and whats next for theoretical physics, why we have canned humor and what that means as a society. Erics thoughts on Joe Rogan what my biggest weakness is as a human are and much more. Dont forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. And that means you will miss out on episodes over the next few weeks, which will make you Trez sad. We have Robert Greene, the one and only coming. Chris Bumstead is back for his second episode, plus a ton more guests and you don't want to miss them. And the only way you can ensure that you won't is by hitting the follow button in the middle of the page on Spotify or the plus in the top right hand corner on Apple Podcasts.

It helps to support the show and it means that you don't miss episodes. And it makes me very happy indeed. So go and do it. Thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Eric Weinstein. When we spoke the start of the year, I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong. Beginner's luck, you said, what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November, including death? So he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that I don't think you know whether he's even going to make it to November. Debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event.

I purposely left it vague and I didn't say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is I don't know whether I don't know whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become president.

What'd you mean by that?

I think that there's a remarkable story, and we're in a funny game, which is, are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don't understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is, we don't understand why it's in the shadows. We don't understand why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let's just set the stage. Given that that was in February, there is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules based international order. It's an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. And there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly. It says that the purpose of the two american parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a face off are both acceptable to that world order. So what you're trying to do from the point of view, let's take it from the point of view of, let's say, the State department, the intelligence community, the Defense department, and major corporations, that have to do with international issues, from arms trade to, oh, I dont know, food.

They have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didnt agree with them. And the mood of the country was, why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why arent we a free people? So what the two parties would do is they would run primaries. You have populist candidates, and you'd pre commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries, as long as that took place. And you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order, that is, that they aren't going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you. We called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what's called magicians choice, where the choice is not actually, you know, pick a card, any cardinal, but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows. In that situation, you have magicians choice in the primaries, and then you'd have the duopoly field, two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election, and the populace would vote.

And that way the international order wasn't put at risk every four years because you can't have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites. So under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016. And then the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor position in government in the history of the republic to enter the Oval Office, Donald Trump broke through the primary structure. So then there was a full court press, okay, we only have one candidate thats acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure that hes a loser, hes a wild man, hes an idiot, and hes under the control of the Russians. And then he was going to be a 20 to one underdog, and then he wins. And there was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson. You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem. So I dont have a particular dog in this fight. I one believe in democracy. I also believe in international agreements. And it is the job of the State Department, the intelligence community, and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the american people and say, we have a problem.

You dont know everything thats going on. And if you start voting in populist candidates, youre going to end up knocking out load bearing walls that you dont understand.

But Trump was in office for four years. Did he turn the entire table upside down?

He risked doing that.

Say more.

You remember that there was this uncomfortable accommodation given to the central intelligence agency at the beginning of his actual term. There was a question about, was he going to question the, I have a very different point of view than most of my friends who are also at least nominally democrats, which is, it was a very immoral thing that was done to him. The question will you pre commit that you will accept the results of an election? Now, if you were going to rig an election, you would ask somebody that to begin with. And that's part of the game. And he says, well, you know, we'll see. So you have this very strange thing going on where democracy is the greatest threat to democracy. Now, how can that be? It's two different concepts of democracy. One concept of democracy is the will of the people. You hold plebiscites, and even if you do it with an electoral college or political parties, the idea is that the people are buying oven for the people. The other idea of democracy is that democracy is about institutions that sprang from democracy once upon a time, and that those institutions have to be kept strong.

Those are two completely different concepts that are overloaded to the same word. Under that circumstance, we have a paradox, which is, how do we keep the electorate from overturning the, you know, the type a democracy from overturning the type b democracy? And that's the unsolved problem that they will not bring in front of the people so what you have is a situation in which I believe that there are many people in Washington, DC who think that Donald Trump cannot become president because he can now go for broke. He's also not going to try to run for reelection. He's relatively unconstrained. He's wealthy. He's learned how to play a lot.

Of these games and maybe got a little bit of an ax to grind as well after the, the last six years.

No kidding. And he's a wild card. There are three people who are doing amazing versions of the drunken boxing game. Kanye, who's probably the first one to really fail, Elon and Donald Trump. And all three of them tried to do something where you couldn't pin them down. You couldn't figure out what they were going to do next. And that's what the order keeps trying to do. Will you commit to this? Will you say this? Will you mouth these words? And none of these people would play the game. I find this all you ever see. Emmanuel Augustus, this boxer who actually, you know, I think Floyd Mayweather said was his toughest opponent because he just, he wouldn't fight in the style that anyone could recognize.

Probably unpredictable.

Yeah. And the most entertaining boxer I've ever seen in my life. I mean, just check out any highlight reel and you won't even believe this is real. It doesnt seem possible. So thats what Donald Trump is. Hes a guy whos got formulas that confuse people like Sam Harris. Sam and I have been debating this for years. I think that Trump is an incredibly intelligent man and that theres incredible method in his tweets of old. You could put them into a dataset and you say that there are five or six different types of tweets and that the left falls for every one of them every time. So in the situation, you have a question. How is it that Donald Trump and RFK junior cannot possibly reach the Oval Office and we have to have a candidate who is pre subscribed to perpetuating these institutions, these agreements, and these orders. And there's only one out of three who has that character and that person is not one of primary. Right now. We have no idea whos running the United States of America. I just came here at Tesla and I did not steer once and I would say Americas in full self driving mode.

And we dont know what the AI is thats running the Oval Office. And thats really bizarre, given that we have something like six minutes to make a decision about nuclear launches. We have no idea what the United States government in the executive branch actually is, but it can't be Joe Biden.

Every time it seems that an election has happened over the last decade or so, it's always been, this one is different. This is the most important. This is the most important. Is there something different about the one that we're about to go into? How should we think about this election.

As World War Two, unraveling the order that has produced the illusion of peace for this length of time? Imagine that you were, let's say, in the two thousands that you had this thing called the great moderation, and it was a story that we had finally banished volatility from the markets. None of that was true. What you were doing was you were going farther and farther into a regime without understanding that sooner or later, the Njinga Tower has to collapse. The order that was put in place at the end of World War Two, none of its architects are still alive. Very few pieces of information were passed down about what it actually is or how it functions, because it's secret. And I think what you can say is that we are now living on the fumes built from that victory. That is what is unraveling. You're about to head towards a multipolar world where the game theory in a dyadic game of two players doesnt look remotely like the game theory in a five or ten player game. So Kamala is essentially the youngest boomer possible, and shes tied to the last silent generation president will ever have, which was a bizarre thing to begin with.

And she's pre committed to trying to continue that order in the guise of an alternatively woke, Wall street friendly, indian, black, folksy. I don't even know what she is. To quote the great Chris Williamson, she's a meme of a meme of meme. That was from our last talk. And I would say this is probably the most insane election we've ever seen by a comfortable margin. I would say that there's no one in second place. I can't think of another election that is even close to this bizarre, including the attempted assassination on Donald Trump.

Yeah, there's so many things all coalescing at the same time, from what's happening with the mediaev, to AI, to discontent, to fake news and cheap fakes and construed, constructed.

Sorry. Fake news was a fake story. If you look at the Google trends, fake news was a tiny story during the 2016 cycle that blew up immediately afterwards. It was the placeholder as the intelligence community or the blob figured out what it was going to do next to try to take control of the Internet, you have to realize that that's the first real surprise in presidential history where they lost control of the process.

Well, I've got a surprise for you. I told you not to watch this before we get to do this.

I actually listened.

Did you? I told you not to do it.

I know. It's like pouring sugar on a picnic. To keep answer.

Okay. Okay. So for the people who haven't seen it, we'll just do a quick recap.

MSNBC was exposed today for yet another set of lies. They deceptively edited together this video of different Joe Rogan comments to make it appear that he was singing the praises of Kamala Harris. Who's gonna win. No, she's not. She can win. She is a strong woman. She is a person who served overseas twice in a medical unit. She was a congresswoman for eight years. Yeah, she is a person of color. She's everything you want. She's gonna win.

No, she's not.

She can win. They just want no trump no matter what.

What do you make of that? That's the most brazen cutting together of something that millions of people have seen.

They don't really, whatever it is, is not really trying to fool you. It's trying to instruct you. You're allowed to see the truth. They can make it difficult to find the truth, but it's hard to shut up. Joe Rogan. They've settled for something else, which is think about MSNBC and CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, AP, etcetera, as a set of instructions for how to keep your job. You're allowed to disagree. We'll set the boundaries of the disagreement. We'll set the topics of the disagreement. You may not even watch any of these things, but we'll make sure that it filters through to the people that you are watching so that they're outraged and you're given a choice. You can choose to understand whatever you want, and you can choose to say whatever you want. But if you say what you understand to be true, you can know what the consequences are. You may lose your marriage, you may lose your job, you may lose your friends. And so, in essence, we all know that if you question the war in Ukraine or if you say, look, I detest Donald Trump, but I'm voting for him because what's going on in the democratic party is unholy and insane.

You're signing up for whatever Thanksgiving dinner we have planned for you. We're talking to your uncle. We're talking to your spouse. And in essence, this is a lot like Caligula installing his horse as a senator, no one's fooled that the horse is an ordinary human senator. The choice is. Do you wish to say something?

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That's drinklmnt.com modernwisdom. I'd been trying to find this term for a while that I'd learned through film critics online, people like critical drinkers, a sweary scottish film critic, and retroactive continuity.

Retcon.

Yeah, but I didn't know what retroactive continuing. I didn't know that that's what retconning. I just knew it as retconned. So retroactive continuity is a literary device in which facts in the world of a fictional work that have been established through the narrative itself are adjusted, ignored, supplemented or contradicted by subsequently published work that recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former. So the question is, is what we're seeing just the Star wars cinematic universe?

Yeah.

Equivalent.

Yeah. This is Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty.

Where falls off a ledge.

And yet here he is again.

It's every episode of South park when Kenny's died.

So it's very important to understand the back of house in everything that you're doing. So, you know, when you go to a hotel, there's an entirely secondary structure of floors, elevators, entrances, cafes, that are necessary to support the front of house, which is the illusion of the hotel that you're staying at. And the same thing is true for screenwriting and the creative arts. I think everyone should, for example, read save the cat. It's a book on screenwriting that points out that films aren't broken into scenes so much as they're broken into beats. There are about 40 beats in a film, and the beats have names. And so if you read this book, one is called the bad guys close in, and another beat is called all hope is lost. And these are mainstays, and you're programmed client side, at a subliminal level, to be able to follow a film based on the idea that your brain is already tooled to absorb this stuff. There's a concept called Spackle in Hollywood, where it costs a couple of lines to make something that makes no sense. Makes sense. I think it's referenced in thank you for smoking, where they're smoking in space.

And there's an issue with product placement. How does it make sense to have cigarette smoking in space after sex? Whatever. Oh, it'll cost us two lines of spackle. Every once in a while, the craft pokes through. And so this is the back. Retcon is a back of house concept, and the issue, again, really comes back to professional wrestling. The smark is a smart mark, a person who is being duped and agrees to be duped, but has a metacognitive perch from which to watch his or her own deception. So you're both a consumer of the story. When you go to a movie, you know it's fictional, and you don't sit there saying, this is such BSD. Yes. The old thing I used to say is you don't scream. Don't you understand? It's just photons projected on a wall. We are complicit in our own deception, otherwise we'll never be seduced. And there's nothing more wonderful than a seduction to which we are willing and eager. This is an unwanted seduction. This is coercive. This is based on a lot of carrot being taken away. And more or less all of what you have is stick.

It's strange in a world where everything that everybody does and says on the Internet is permanently recorded on some version of a blockchain that's kept in screenshots, even if it's not actually, even if it then gets deleted from Twitter. It just seems odd to me that there is so much retconning of this. You spoke about managed reality last time. You know, a good example. A nice simple example of this is, Kamala Harris was never called the border czar like we have. They went back and changed the old articles from three years ago.

Here's my question. When did you wake up to this? Because in my situation, Peter Thiel, who I used to work for, said this to me, like, Eric, how did you get there earlier? And I said, well, I was in the university system, and academics has a faster glide path into the ground than everything else. You could see it there in the 1980s.

I don't know. I think it has taken a little bit of time. Maybe moving to America, seeing these things closer up has been part of it. I have a strong non conspiratorial disposition, so I will always attribute to incompetence or negligence or fear of losing your job. Cowardice.

You're running the packet. There's the lefty enervation packet, and it's something that you're sort of obligated to run if you're going to be a member in good standing of the american left. So one part of it would say that correlation does not imply causation. Data is not the plural of anecdote. Never explain by malice what can be understood through incompetence. There's a large sequence of things that you're expected to say if you want the pat on the back from your colleagues, a random walk down Wall street, nobody can beat the market. You know that. There are rich people three doors down who got that way from investing, but they're simply lucky idiots. All of these things you're expected to run if you're part of the expert class, so that the expert class doesn't turn on their masters. And what it is, you see, I was about to do, the double copula, is. Is I always do that. What it is, in my opinion, I'm gonna have to do it. I can't hit it. Get out of it. What it is is a yemenite, a collection of safeties, so that you don't use the tools of data, let's say, on your masters, and attempt to convict them.

Give an example.

For example, let's imagine that you have a high number of deaths around a vaccine or injuries that could lead to questions about under what legal regime the vaccine manufacturers achieved immunity. And so you say, oh, no, no, that's just. Correlation does not imply causation. Of course there are going to be runs in poker. Of course there are going to be clusters of data. This is what being fooled by randomness is all about. So if you think about what those things, how they function inside of your mind, they tend to keep you from seeking remedies. You're not going to put somebody in jail if you believe all these things. You're not going to go poking into the intelligence community. If a conspiracy theorist makes you think about a lunatic, you're not a lunatic. You're a grown up. It's first order sophistication. Do you ever see a film called Victor Victoria?

No.

Victor Victoria's. I think the tagline on the poster was the story of a woman playing a man playing a woman. And so it was a female impersonator who was actually Julie Andrews.

Right?

Right. Now, if you saw Victor behind Victoria, you certainly saw one level deep. That's one level of counterintuition. And most people, when they get to one level of counter intuition, stop, pat themselves on the back. And at least they're not like the poor fools who only see Victoria because Victoria is the female being impersonated. But what happens if you see Sally? And let's imagine Sally is the person playing Victor, playing Victoria. Now you've got a problem, which is you say, that's a woman. So everybody who sees Victor says, you poor bastard, you are fooled. And Reddit is great for this, by the way. The average Reddit post is, huh. I see through that thing that you're taken in by, but have fun with it. It's a superiority context contest. At one, at first order, counterintuition. So at first order, counterintuitive, counterintuition. Conspiracy theorists are losers in their mothers basements who posit a new world order where the flat Earth society of lizard people controls the cosmos. And the funny part about it is the atlantic council exists.

Whats that?

That would be Sally playing Victor, playing Victoria. I mean, in other words, of course, there are conspiracies everywhere. We found a million conspiracies, I could tell you. Various operations, Operation Condor, Operation Sea Spray, where we sprayed bacteria on all of San Francisco. We all know about the Tuskegee medical experiment, Operation Northwoods, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Ajax in Chile. We know the conspiracies are the lifeblood of the world. Every trade group is a conspiracy. The Twitter files are about conspiracy. So we're living in a world. Hopefully you've achieved a point in your life where you've been invited to many conspiracies. And if you haven't, I'm really sorry, but they're everywhere. Now. What is a conspiracy theorist? It's somebody trying to figure out what these things are from outside. That's what you've got to stop. And how do you do this? Well, there are a lot of bad conspiracy theorists, there are a lot of losers and a lot of morons and a lot of idiots who imagine that lizard people are controlling everything. And so you try to make it look like the people who. Well, let me give you an example. The moon landing and the JFK assassination are not in the same category.

It's quite probable that something funny is going on around the JFK assassination. And it's highly improbable that the moon landings are fake. You know, TWA flight 800 seems very strange, or what is like 300 missing manpads from the afghan theater. A bunch of people saw something streaking up to a plane, and the explanation doesn't exactly add up. Now you have a problem, like, let's. You know, the famous one that I like, which is just so dangerous. It's funny. You can just watch the radioactivity. If you can agree that nothing like building seven's collapse has ever happened in structural engineering, you can say, well, that is interesting. It's just interesting that no building has ever collapsed like that. No steel building of this height from flame, whatever. And the instant you say that, some member of a group of ten friends will say, oh, yeah, I bet it was a bunch of thermite placed by Israelis, right, Einstein? And you're thinking, wow, gosh, that seems like a really high penalty to pay for just noticing no building has ever collapsed like that. I'm not saying I don't believe that.

So it's this kind of pattern match of any type of skepticism with a slippery slope down to the most extreme conspiracy.

And, yeah, you're just in error. You took first order counterintuition so that you became superior to the flat Earth society. But you're not the guy who's going to figure out the Iran Contra scandal. Because if I told you the Iran Contra scandal, it doesn't matter how many documents you look at, you'll still never believe that that was true. It's so insane.

This retconning, this mass lighting, gaslighting at global scale. It is mind blowing to me that this is done on the Internet when everything is held together.

Why?

Because the. The entire Internet is obsessed with pointing out hypocrisy. If.

No, no, no, it's not the entire Internet.

A large portion, a very vocal large.

Portion of very small accounts, a large portion of right of center accounts. Almost no one, in what I considered my world does anything remotely like this. In other words, if you walk into a physics department good luck finding a Republican. And good luck finding anybody who will believe almost anything that you tell them or will do so publicly. I took a tour through the east coast, the corridor of great universities from Massachusetts down to Philadelphia. And you know, I have many friends and colleagues in these departments. And they take me into their offices and they'd all close the door and they'd say, you have no idea how bad it is in here. And these are mathematicians and physicists, and they are living in a world in which it is simply too dangerous to dissent to ask questions.

We'll get back to talking to Eric in 1 minute, but first I need to tell you about nomatic. I know what you're thinking. What you're thinking is, what backpack does Eric Weinstein use? Let me tell you, it's the nomatic 20 liter travel pack. And the reason he uses it is because it's the best backpack on the planet. I use it. All of the team use it. Literally everybody that turns up does, because there is nothing better. There are pockets for everything. Your sunglasses, your laptop, your phone. It's like the Marie Kondo of luggage. An absolute swiss army knife that will make your entire life better. Best of all, their products will literally last you a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee. There's international shipping, free us shipping on any orders over $49. And if you don't love your purchase for any reason, you can return or accept exchange it within 30 days. Right now you can get a 20% discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com modernwisdom and using the code MW 20 at checkout. That's nomatic.com modernwisdom and MW 20 at checkout. I did some research. Tech company employee donations to midterm candidates by party.

Well over 90% in favor of Democrat. There is a 33% gap between Republicans and Democrats in self described party affiliations of us journalists in 2022. And there was this recent Google furor. They're being popped for monopoly, unfair competition practices on top of. Are they putting their finger on the scale and editorializing? If you search for Donald Trump's name, you get negative stories about Donald Trump and positive stories about Kamala Harris. If you search Kamala Harris's name, you just get positive stories about Kamala Harris.

Okay, but how, how many? How many?

Let me, let me, let me, let me keep going. So I don't think. I'm not saying that Google isn't, but I don't think that Google needs to editorialize the search results. If there is such an unbalanced original content pool that they're pulling from. If you have this huge sway in terms of tech, if you have this huge sway in terms of the people that are writing the articles, I don't think you need Google to put their finger on the pulse. It's 90% in one direction. If you take from that poll representatively, it's going to move in that direction.

So that you've now once again evidenced the same basic idea, which is we'll just chalk it up to emergence. These are all emergent effects. That way you never have to posit intent. You never have to say that there's a finger on the scale. Great, you're out of it. Well done. That's insane.

Chris pulled the ripcord and got out of it. So here's the thing that I thought that was really interesting, but I want to understand something.

How do you think you get to these levels of bias among employees? Do you think that something about being in tech makes you Democrat friendly?

I think my working hypothesis is that it's cowardice that say more, in order to keep your job, you need to toe the party line, and the party line is somehow dictated top down, not bottom up.

Maybe it's emergent from the great society programs of the 1960s. Maybe the idea that the hiring practices not being allowed to discriminate in various ways, and the interpretation through the courts means that the HR departments have to do things that make it impossible to be, almost impossible to be a vocal Republican in a large workplace.

So one of the interesting things about that graph, the 33% gap between Democrats and Republicans, if you go to about 1970, is when it really begins to diverge. But what you also see is that self described independents move at almost the exact same rate as Republicans going down. So you get a bit of a gain for Democrats, a large loss for Republicans, and also a gain for independents. So how many of these people are Republicans masquerading as independents when they do their self report? What if this gets picked up by my colleagues?

This is Timor Kharan's theory of preference falsification, that you have two sets of preferences. You have the preferences that you keep at home and the preferences that you show the world. And this is the engine of revolution, because there's always one guy like a James Damore working at Google, who's so autistic that he's going to spectrum himself right out of the workplace and say what he actually thinks, doesn't see the.

Social mores that he's supposed to adhere to.

And this is why what happened, one of the gifts of the Ceausescus in Romania is that they gave us this amazing footage of their undoing. And Nikolaj Ceausescu is at a rally in Bucharest, and he's on whatever balcony, and he's saying his stuff and there's some noise in the back. What's that noise? He keeps going. Somehow the noise starts growing louder and people are discontent and they're just not willing to lie anymore. And each person emboldens those around them. And you see the revolution spread like a tumor.

Did you read that uncommon knowledge article that I mentioned, the Ben Hunt? Yes. Yeah, yeah. I thought that was very interesting.

I live this, right? I mean, like, if you look at my kayfabe article, it's 2011, because I'm worried that professional wrestling is going to determine the presidency. If you look at my article on the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Science, conspiring against american scientists, that's from the early two thousands. I was canceled in the early 1990s for pointing this out long before being canceled was cool. This is, I don't know what to call it. It's like an ether in which we swim. It's all around. It's water to fish that we can't see. Our entire lives are bathed in this. You know, youve always had Howard Zinn types, lets say, on the left, who were willing to point to issues. And your parents would say, well be very careful with that book, because if you do know the truth, you cant participate in polite society if youre not part of the intelligence community or part of the inside group. And the idea is that the truth can be made unfit so that to understand the world is to remove yourself.

From the chessboard, thinking about whether it's finger on scale editorially, whether it's drawing from a pool which is disproportionately represented from one ideology or another. Everybody is saying, I don't know what's going to happen in November, but it's going to be a nail biter. And it does make me think, well, given that we have what appears to be a disproportionate amount of mainstream accessibility to stories leaning in one direction positively as opposed to in another, I wonder what would have happened had that not been the case. It makes a nail biter actually seem kind of like an interesting who are.

These people who know all this stuff? Why am I out of this club? Everybody knows stuff about what's happening in November. I mean, the last time I was on the program, I said, it's a million years. Donald Trump was almost killed by an AR 15. Joe Biden has been suffering with some level of dementia thats been progressing through his entire term in office. When was the last time you saw MSNBC? With five geriatric neurologists watching his gait, his speech, and telling you their professional opinions from publicly available data. You're in the magic show, baby. And the funny part about it is, the reason I don't want to hybridize with anyone else is that responsible conspiracy theorizing is very much an adult activity. Responsible conspiracy theorizing is not based on saying, well, I've got the certainty over here and I've lost it because I know I'm being lied to. So I can tell you exactly what is going on. It's the lizard people responsible conspiracy theorizing says, I know that the story makes sense and I know that I don't know how to correct it, but naval ravicant once pushed me to do a Twitter thread called the invisible world is first discovered in the visible world's failure to close.

So the idea is we find out that there's a neutrino because a neutron has a certain amount of energy, and a proton and an electron into which it decayed doesn't have that same amount of energy. So something was lost. So there was a hypothesis, due to both Pauli and Fermi, that there must be some particle that is diabolically neutral, undetectable by almost any means possible, that is carrying away this extra energy. And so the idea is the visible world, that is, the charged particles or the neutron, which you could detect. That world didn't close. Therefore there had to be something else. Well, you know, when Kamala goes from being incredibly unpopular to the loved candidate with no primary, the visible world just failed to close. The idea that nobody ever convenes a bunch of geriatric neurologists to analyze Joe Biden. Is the visible world failing to close? This is the origin of anti influence interesting. These are all anti interesting events. And you can measure the control of journalism by its desire to report on what everybody wants reported and is absolutely, pathologically uninteresting, not to the journalists, but to the editors who tell the journalists what can and cannot be featured in print.

How do you think this is being justified to and by the people inside?

Well, I think I tried to come at that as frontly as anyone as you've ever heard. What if, let's just steel man their perspective rather than making them the evil baddies twirling their mustaches? What if the idea is that an outbreak of truth and democracy would destroy NATO and the world order. Let's imagine that that would undo the markets, that would spread nukes. What happens if ending the control of social media would mean that weaponized anthrax plans could be spread frictionlessly? If four amino acids lead to worldwide lockdowns, the amount of leverage in this system should frighten you at the same time that the shadowy figures are frightening you. And the problem with the heterodox is, like we mentioned Ben Hunt. I think I've spoken to him once or twice. And what's his famous tagline? Something like burning all the f down.

I didn't know that.

Okay, well, this is part of the problem when you wake up and you realize that your entire life is embedded in a lie.

Managed reality.

Managed reality, you say, I don't want to live in managed reality, Mandy. It's like, are you crazy? I don't want to live in managed reality if it's badly managed. But I can't live in direct reality either, because maybe that's just too dangerous. And so I highly recommend that everyone learn the lesson of the United States versus the progressive, which is a court case that would be famous but for the fact that we're determined to forget it. It was a streisand effect case where a magazine decided that it would be an excellent idea to point out that there are no nuclear secrets. And they said, why don't we get. I think his name was Howard Borland, a reporter who had no physics background to figure out the redacted portions of the Stanislav Ulam Edward Teller paper that had been declassified but redacted, that explained how you get a chemical reaction to start a fission reaction as the detonator for a fusion reaction. And so he figured it out. They had charted the information. It was scattered throughout libraries. Do you know this?

No, no, no. This story's great. Oh, my God. You need a little bit more power. And you had that in nuclear next time, tequila, dynamite.

There were two cases in the 1970s, one at Princeton and one at the progressive magazine. I probably should have done the Princeton one first. There was a guy named, I think it was like, john Aristotle. He was the Princeton mascot, like the tiger.

Illustrious.

And he was a shitty physics student. And he said, you know what? I'm going to use the fact that I'm a shitty physics student, below average at Princeton's one of the greatest physics departments of all time. And he said, I'm going to approach Freeman Dyson at the Institute for Advanced study and see whether I can work out how to make a fission bomb that would actually work. So Freeman Dyson said, I will give you no information that is classified, but I will tell you whether whatever you come up with will work or not. Guy did it, and as a result, he turned it in. That is not to be found in the Princeton archives, where all the junior theses are kept. And page 20 of it, I believe, is redacted because it was a working design for a fission bomb. And then the much more dangerous one was the progressive magazine versus the United States. Where the United States, do you know about the atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954?

Perhaps surprisingly, no.

Welcome to my world. There is a category called restricted data that is almost never discussed, which is the only place in law where if you and I were to work at a table at a cafe and I were to show you something that could influence nuclear weaponry, the government doesn't need to classify it. It is born secret the instant my pen touches the paper and writes it down.

How is it defined?

Anything that impinges on nuclear weapons, including just information. So you don't have acute clearance? I don't have acute clearance. We don't work for the government. All we're doing is physics.

Wow.

Yeah. And this has been around since, I don't know, 46, 54. It's the only place in law. It's never been tested in courts. And if you couple that to the 1917 Espionage act, which carries capital punishment, I believe that it is illegal to seek information at a q level if you don't have an access to it. So there is a question, which is, if you're any good at physics, are you potentially committing a capital crime by advancing the field? If it could influence nuclear weapons, we have no idea whether it would be found constitutional. But what happened was when the progressive magazine showed that at least a reporter, through basically archeology in Los Alamos library and things, could find this and put it together, then the only thing keeping the proliferation of weapons is the difficulty of producing fissile nuclear material. There is no nuclear secret per se. You can say what it is. You've got a chemical sphere that implodes radioactive material that reaches critical mass. You have a fission explosion. And now the problem is you're using a nuclear bomb like Hiroshima, Nagasaki level bomb as just the detonator trigger.

Yeah.

So it's going to rip apart this casing. How do you keep it from destroying the mechanism that's supposed to do the fusing? Well, the only thing faster than the other particles is light. You've got to use light from this reflector to actually do the fusion in the final stage.

Wow.

And that's what he figured out. Now, the reason you haven't heard about this is that we've been undoing the streisand effect. We've been making physics boring. Physics isn't interesting. Physics isn't scary. We've got tons of, I don't know, Chinese, Iranians, people from all over the world studying irrelevant theories that aren't going to go boom. How did that happen? We don't know. And I don't know whether you've seen the Marc Andreessen Ben Horvitz video where they're talking about their visit to the White House in AI.

Tell me.

I really wish we were doing this over negronis or old fashions.

I'm sure that we could get one ordered.

Wait, no, no, that's too rogan.

Okay, all right, all right, all right. We'll just stick to experimental nootropics and high doses of caffeine.

Fantastic. So they're doing a podcast, and they say that, well, they met with the White House, and there's this question about, should we regulate AI? Now, I don't know if you've been. Undoubtedly you haven't, but you might have talked to somebody who's really been through the transformer architecture and the attention mechanism. It's basically just linear algebra, and it's not very sophisticated linear algebra. So they said, well, you can't ban math. And the White House said, oh, yes, we can. We did it. We've banned entire regions of theoretical physics. And they said, what? So we don't know what that means. We don't know. The most narrow reading of that is that you've banned some kinds of nuclear physics.

I was going to say, you're the physicist. If you were to make a couple of bets, what do you think that they're talking about?

This is the big question. We don't know whether that we're talking about the stagnation of theoretical physics or just nuclear physics.

You're okay with speculating? Let's speculate.

I'll do the decision tree. One possibility is that they're simply saying that they made nuclear physics very, very difficult to do, and that has to do with not very sexy physics, the physics of protons and neutrons and nuclei. So that branch exists. The other branch says, we used string theory to cock block actual progress in theoretical physics and derailed an entire field, at least in public.

I can see where this is going.

Well, I'm trying to say, I didn't put Mark and Ben up to this podcast. You go take a look at that footage, and you tell me what they're talking about.

But it draws a very interesting line between what we were talking about last time, which is this seeming theoretical dead end which everybody has been obsessed by.

But before we get to that, let me point something out. You have never heard the phrase deemed export?

No.

So you've never heard of restricted data? You've never heard of deemed export. You've never heard of United States versus progressive? You've never heard of the Princeton mascot? All of these things can be looked up. These are all in a memory hole. The deemed export is information that is like a sensitive gyroscope for a targeting system for. For a weapon. You can't give sensitive centrifuges and gyroscopes to rogue regimes like North Korea or Iran. Deemed export is the information equivalent of it. You cannot share that theory or that insight. It's the extension to intellectual matters, to ideas. There are ideas you're not allowed to share with foreigners. And my point is, you don't know about any of this stuff. How is it then, that you immediately say, well, surely we're not doing x? Surely we're not doing y. And my point is, do me a favor. Research the history of the government attempts to keep the Manhattan projects secret. You may not know that Harold Urey, the very famous chemist, I believe, published falsehood on misleading academic papers. There's an entire complex that you're not supposed to see, which is, how do we keep all of these things from providing advantage to adversaries?

And if that structure exists and you've never heard of it, and you've never thought about it, and you don't know the history, why are you so sure that you know that this is all nonsense.

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That's a very good point. I think the implication, which is pretty interesting for me, that you were hinting at there, is that there is a potential of the obsession with string theory being a red herring. Very tempting. Shiny, sparkly red herring. Popular one that has curtailed physicists from looking elsewhere for quite a while. You're giving me that look. You're giving me a look as if I'm close, but not close enough.

No, no, no.

When I say shiny, what I mean is popular, shown out front, dangled and made to be glitzy and to the public, but also internally, it seemed to me. Did Ed Witten, did you not tell me the last time that you were on here, there are no other theories, just words. Is that not the guy from which everybody else is downstairs?

It's not shiny. That is saying everything else is crap and dangerous. In other words, string theory can't sell itself as physics by any telling of the story. String theory is the most failed theory in the history of physics. If you look at the number of papers, the amount of money, the number of people, the number of PhDs, number of conferences, achievements in physics proper per investment or size of effort, it is the most failed theory in the history of physics. And the way in which it survives is by hunting and destroying its enemies and making its enemies dependent on them. We all have a circuit in our brain that we're going to run to the string theorists to talk about the problem with string theory because of peer review. It's like when I want to report the police department for being corrupt, you should go to the police with that. Wait, you're not understanding. So that's the problem.

I think we're on the same page.

Okay.

I think we are.

I think I'm just trying to say it's the problem with string theory, not the equations, not the shininess, not the advertising campaign. The problem is, look at how they treat everyone else. Everyone who is not a string theorist, who is trying to do stuff that could end up as a deemed export or as restricted data is covered and splattered in shit.

Lawrence Krauss and Leonard Susskind caused quite a ruckus with this not long ago. I didn't know that it had happened. In my defense, I hadn't seen this podcast, and it only came out, like, a few days ago.

Absolutely.

So, this is Lawrence Krauss and Leonard Suskind. Susskind being one of the best theoretical physicists ever. No, no. Why? Is he somebody worth listening to, then?

He's very, very smart, and he's one of the most important string theorists ever, and he writes exceptionally clear and correct introductory books. Okay, but he is not a leading physicist.

But is somebody at the forefront of string theory?

Absolutely.

And he said, quote, I can tell you with absolute certainty string theory is not the theory of the real world. I can tell you that 100%. My strong feelings are exactly that. String theory is definitely not the theory of the real world. Is that taking it out of context? Is that him framing it somewhere else? Or does that encapsulate the fact that he thinks string theory is a dead end that doesn't describe the world?

He's playing a game that I would say is logomachy, an argument over words, where he says that big s string theory is not the theory of the real world, which is the theory that was used to destroy all of its competitors, and that little s string theory exists. I don't. This is basically the attempt to take a school massacre and plead to a parking ticket. And no, I think that the prosecution should decline the offer from the good doctor Susskind and say, no, no, no. You have 40 years of the destruction of your colleagues to answer for. You've chosen to be Wirtz family, an asshole to just about everyone who came up with a competitor theory. And I've dealt with Leonard directly. He can be charming. Hes a great raconteur. Hes very brilliant, and he chooses to be a Wolfgang Pauli without achievement. Hes taken a massive advance on a future career, which he will never have at age 85. So this is a person who wishes you to think of him as the leading physicist. He absolutely, categorically, by the standards of physics known to our elders, is not. And Leonard Susskind is playing a game.

He's saying, you saw kill Bill? One of the great romantic scenes of all time is filmed between Beatrix kiddo and Bill at the very end of the film, he's absolutely destroyed her life. He's killed her husband, fiance, the father of a child, forced an abortion. She's been raped. Every indignity on earth has been suffered by this woman. And in the end, she wants to know, how could you do that to me? And what are his words? I overreacted. And you see, in the film, if I recall correctly, she leans forward and she says, you overreacted. Is that your explanation? Like, how can that be? That my life has been turned upside down and your offering to me is I overreacted? So these people, and I want to specifically call out the most aggressive of them. Lubosz model, Michio Kaku, Leonard Suskind, Jeff Harvey, Michael Duff, Andy Strominger, Kumar, and Waffa have been on a tear that nothing else exists, destroying 40 years of competitors. And what does the bride say to Bill? Said, you and I have unfinished business. That's where we are right now. Your explanation to me, Eric Weinstein, is you overreacted. Leonard Suskin, you and I have unfinished business.

What happens next?

Oh, that's going to get interesting. You're watching the beginning of the collapse. You're watching people running for the exits. We're not yet at the Lehman brothers September 15 moment with AIg looming in the background, but right now, all of these guys are trying to plead to, oh, well, it's not string theory proper. We meant. Ha ha ha. We meant something related to string theory. Yeah, that's it. It's like that moment comically when somebody is caught red handed. We're in the middle of Shaggy's. It wasn't me.

It's theoretical retconning.

Yeah. And, you know, there's this beautiful offering that Hector makes to Achilles. We will give each other the honor of a proper burial. Achilles isn't interested. Let's do this thing.

What does that mean?

Well, hopefully, somebody will come up with some money to hold a conference to get these people in the same room with the people they've tormented, whose careers they've ended, whose funds they've stolen, the stolen valor of actual achievements in real attempts to change physics. And wouldn't it be delicious and fun to see Michio Kaku, Ed Witten, Lenny Susskind, Michael Duff, Jeff Harvey, actually have to face people who know what they're talking about and have a discussion of, what did we just do for 40 years? Are we protecting the american public from restricted data? I have no idea. But I can tell you this. Nobody in their right mind gives a startup 40 years of Runway with never a call with investors nor a, yeah, even a basic mvp, most, you know, minimal viable product. We've been playing weekend at Biden's, and now we're also playing weekend at Lenny's. This is really funny.

Who else would you want to have a chat with the guys on the string theory side of the world?

Well, I think Peter White would be fun. He's got two new theories. Again, I don't agree with either of them. I have my own theory and I'm happy to fight with Peter, but Peter and I have been friends for all these years. I would love to have Nima Arkani Hameda and Ed Frankel and others judge this. People who aren't really string theorists, who appreciate the best parts of string inspired mathematics, let's say, or string inspired mechanisms. In physics, the equations are not without interest or merit. It's the sociology should be hunted and removed with extreme prejudice. It's anti science.

So I don't know much or anything really about the inner workings of string theory, but Sabine Hossenfeld has been on the show, Brian Greene's been on the show, Sean Carroll's been on the show.

Oh, let's get them, all of them.

And I saw a tweet saying that somebody had been to a string theory convention and had asked the question, what is string theory? And the best string theorists on the planet came up with the answer, we kind of don't know what string theory is.

And the other answer is, whatever it is that we're doing, whatever it is that the string theory community is doing, even if they did something that had nothing to do with string theory, they've now tried to say, how about this? And I don't know if you remember Maxwell Smart and get smart. So he was a comic version of James Bond, an american bumbling secret agent who somehow solved cases and stopped terrible plots, but always by making accidents. And wherever he was caught, he would say, I'm not worried because right now we're surrounded by the third battalion of the Marine division, said, I don't believe that. Would you believe twelve police officers? No, mister smart, I don't believe that either. Two Cub scouts with slingshots. So this is a. This is a very old pattern.

Yeah. Is this too far gone for string theory now, is it? The mask is beginning to slip to the point where even Ed Dutton is going to have to eat his words within the next decade.

They'll never eat their words. They'll just keep lying. Lying as a way of life, lying to the public, as I think Susskind somewhere else in this interview says something like, we have to keep interest in physics high. Look, science is fine. What we have now learned to call the science TM is an abomination. And one of the things people don't learn about from regular investing. Retail investing is what's called relative value trades. People say, oh, I'm bullish on tech. I'm staying out of the tech market. If you don't have the ability to go short, you don't know what a relative value trade is. Relative value trade says, I think Microsoft has the right idea over at OpenAI, and Google's Gemini has too much political encumbrance. So I'm going to go long Microsoft, and I'm going to fund it by going short Google, and therefore whatever tech does, they'll both go up or both go down within the sector as the sector rises and falls. But you're betting on the trade hedge.

Kind of.

Exactly. The right trade at the moment is go long science because it's been beaten up with its association with the science TM. So short. The science TM, long science, I think, is the multibillion dollar trade for smart countries at the moment. And you have to hunt out the science TM, which lives inside of the journals, lives inside of the funding agencies, lives inside of the departmental Defense mechanisms, lives inside of the CIA Ditra, all of these sorts of blob related agencies that get their paws into science. And by the way, I absolutely want the military to pick up the funding of basic research. We have to overturn something called the Mansfield amendment, which a previous generation was obsessed by and modern academicians dont even know exists. That was when the military was funding basic research. They were our best friends. They stayed out of our hair. They were just paying a retainer so that they could call on us in times of emergency. And we stupidly gave away that funding source. And it's time to get it back. And it's probably time to allow physicists, mathematicians, biologists, intellectual property rights over basic research, not just technologies.

Because what right now what we're doing is you're impoverishing the people who provide your safety and your prosperity. You're not letting them participate in the very society that they're funding.

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Is this indicative of a broader problem in all of science? Is physics the tip of the spear, or is there anything even further down?

Science used to be dominated by physics and mathematics in a certain sense, after the atomic weapons proved their mettle, and then the physicists showed that they could do things that nobody could imagine. For example, molecular biology is basically founded by physicists. World wide Web comes out of Cerna, semiconductors come out of Stanford, the actual silicon that was in Silicon Valley. So then it became biology focused. So right now, when you say science, most people think biology rather than in previous years, where most people thought the physicists who could do everything. We need hearings and we need to basically rid the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science foundation, the National Science board, the National Research Council, the journals, Lancet, Nature Science, publishing houses of all of the science. We've got to get rid of the science. The science is infecting us. We need lawyers, guns, and money.

It does seem like a fantastically asymmetric trade. I think I hear this all the time. In the world of trading, look for limited downside and unlimited upside.

I think we could make fantastic progress within theoretical physics within five years. And I can promise you, nobody's interested in funding it. What does it mean when academicians go after Harvard, MIT?

Is it academicians, though?

Yeah. Oh, it's trolls with PhDs. There's an entire community of trolls hunting people who dissent. I bet Sabina Hassenfelder has people who are just sitting around trying to destroy her. And the same was true.

It's magnified, I think, not just by the dissent, but also by the platform.

Same, more exposure.

People got jealous of exposure.

I don't think it's that.

Oh, I think that it is very, very obvious that if somebody gets attention and someone else feels that it's undeserving in one form or another, that guy's a phony. And look at all of the. Whatever they get.

I think there's some of that, but I think to think that that's what it is is mistaken.

Not entirely, but I think that it's a really big leverage function on top of it.

I don't think that's true. Right now. We have a country with no president, and we've moved on. And what's Taylor Swift doing? Right, so my claim is that anti interesting, once you understand what anti interesting is like, assume that you actually wanted just to humiliate people. You'd give them a talk. If you can't play the piano, and I want to humiliate you because you say you're a piano player, away you go. I'll get you a grand piano and a stage in an audience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, this isn't that. This is something really interesting. And because it's also. It's cheap, it's free. Why don't we find out whether somebody has something to say? I'm telling you right now, I believe I can explain where the particle spectrum comes from. I can explain the origin of. This is my claim. The 16 particles that make up the first generation of matter, not coming from particle theory, but coming from general relativity. The most natural thing in the world is to say, that's a really bold claim. There's no known explanation for the particle spectrum in terms of general relativity. What is that guy talking about? Let's get him in here. Let's get him on video. We'll humiliate him. This will be fun. We'll take away his audience. Never happens. Instead, what it is is that there's this constant sort of whisper campaign against somebody like Sabina. Oh, she's a popularizer. She's not serious. She doesn't know her stuff. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They sold out of pop musicians. I like their old stuff.

Well, did you see this thing with Sean Carroll and Kurt Jaimangel?

I know Kurt. Theories of tow, theories of everything. I didn't see what him and Shawn got into. This is. This is spicy. This is like the Kardashians for physicists. I love it.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

So Kurt says, well, what do you think of Lee Smolin, Stephen Wolf from Eric Weinstein and Peter Woight? And Sean Carroll very deftly says, oh, I wouldn't put Lee Smolin in with them. The others are amateurs. Lee Smolin is a serious physicist. Peter White just wrote one of the greatest books in physics and mathematics I've ever seen. A comprehensive guide to the role of group theory within the quantum symmetry within the quantum. Nobody knew that this guy had this in him. He was running this blog, and it was an excellent blog. Everybody in the community reads it, and many people pretend that they don't because it's very critical of string theory. But he's very, very good. Then he writes a book like this. Nobody saw it coming. Then he comes up with two theories, both of which I think are wrong, but are really, really clever, about the nature of the strong force, what would be called weaker hypercharge, and what would be called weak isospin and the origin of the left right asymmetry of the universe called chirality. And when I ask these critics, they have no idea what these theories are. It took me, like, 15 to 45 minutes to get the basic idea of both.

This is preposterous for Sean Carroll to claim Peter White is considerably better than Sean Carroll. And if you don't believe it, let's have the two of them on stage with each other. It's very funny.

I would love to see KUrTz moderate that conversation.

Yeah.

So I had an idea that I really wanted to teach you about, and.

I think I love this part of our interaction.

Well, here's something I prepared earlier, so you'll be familiar with the term audience capture, which is when you begin feeding red meat to your audience, you start to say what they want or expect you to say, rather than what you truly believe, because you've been positively reinforced to do so by plays and comments and potentially money. There is a.

You know that I brought that up in the article on the international on the intellectual dark web that Barry Weiss.

No, I didn't. So there is a new idea, which I love called criticism capture.

Tell me about it. I don't know about it.

So this is Ethan Strauss, and I'm relating this to your idea of an accuracy budget as well.

Okay.

And I think this maybe pieces together. So let's see what you think. Criticism capture is more dangerous than audience capture. Most people have occupations where they get criticized in private. To have it take place in public, as happens in media, is a different dynamic, especially in this era. I happen to think one's response to criticism is important and almost defining. In this field, the game isn't just what you do, it's what you do after what you're doing gets defined by people who hate it. I've contemplated, hypothetically, ideal replies when getting ripped at scale. Some are cruel, some are nice, some are strategic, some are impulsive. In a way, they're almost all dishonest. Nearly everybody in this situation attempts to seem above the fray. They're fighting like the wojack of the happy face in front of the rage tears. That's why you see so many public figures on the Internet starting off with lol when what they really mean is fuck you. In most instances, whatever you come up with is only marginally better than I know you are. But what am I? The basic theory is that people are more unhinged when addressing their criticisms, not their compliments.

I call this the streisand squeeze in a slightly different context. So the idea is that a low value human becomes obsessed with you, because what they get out of it is if you react to them, they want the attention and the portion of your audience that dislikes you to become their audience. And if you answer the criticism like intellectually, you're fundamentally playing into a gambit. So you try not answering the criticism, and then it becomes why won't he answer his critics? And then you're saying, well, are you applying this criticism uniformly? Are you an absolutely diabolical situation?

So the point that I find interesting is not, although it is, what is the motivation of the criticizer is interesting to me. But what is the response of the criticized is much more interesting to me.

What are the options? I'm actually just interested. What do you see as the options that are possible? Because I can't. This is a problem that I can't solve.

I understand. I think there's a great point that Ethan makes where he says that the unraveling usually starts as a rebuttal to some criticism, not the embrace of some inspired followers.

Say more about that.

The impact of criticism isn't the impact. Yes, people fear the professional, social, and financial consequences of reputation harm. But often in Mediaev, that's not what kills you. Instead, it's your own unforced errors in response to the criticism. Some people some people change their messaging to avoid the blowback. Like a wide receiver shying from necessary contact over the middle, some disagreeable personalities get their backs up and overcorrect. Their content starts to match the fevered pitch of their most aggressive detractors. They almost mirror the derangement regarding criticism itself as a positive indicator. So I think we've all seen over the last five years, people lean into almost being a meme of a meme, being a caricature of themselves. And I know that you had a I think you were disheartened by what you didn't see your audience do for you. When some criticism came for the portal, there wasn't criticism.

I can handle criticism. Youll notice that I have a very strong civility issue. I have an anti stalker, anti troll policy. For example, I really like Michael malice as an individual. But when Jay Leno had a bunch of hot oil or something scald his face, Michael chose to make a joke, and he said, well, Jay Leno hasnt been this hot in years. And it's not like I don't understand the joke, but it's like, I don't know Jay Leno and the guy just had scald. I just don't do this. I don't like getting energy from hurting people. I just did this Terrence Howard thing with Joe Rogan, and I told Joe, I will not go on a show as a debunker.

I texted you and said how impressed I was with your patients.

It's not just patience. Terrence has a couple things that are really worthwhile. Wait, wait, wait. It entitles me to say a lot of what you're doing is just very, very low quality. But this thing that you're doing over here, I'll vouch for. I'll put my name behind that. That's really clever, really good. If I can't find one jewel, one gem, one positive thing to say, it's for somebody else. And part of this is, I'm trying to indicate this is what criticism actually is. I'm modeling what criticism. I wasn't weak. I didn't shy away from what I considered to be the sort of uninformed or pseudo scientific or historically inaccurate stuff in that. But I also had no desire to hurt Terrence. And, in fact, I wanted to elevate.

Him and help him to make him feel silly or, you know, there's a.

Time to hurt somebody, and I don't. Terence hadn't done anything. He's confused about things, and he knows that he has something and he doesn't know where it comes from and all that kind of stuff. And then to hear some giant portion of the Internet say, oh, my God, this is the way. This is the genius. And another portion say, this guy is an idiot and has nothing. Neither of these things are true. To get back to your point about criticism capture, I can't solve this problem because the critics are mostly stalkers. I'll answer a critic. Anybody who's the first thing I'm going to do, if you call me, like, cult leader, I'm going to say, well, tell me something. What did you call Ed Whitney? What did you call Lenny Suskind? Because that's a cult. You want to talk about a cult. I mean, that's a serious cult. There's no way that you can say, well, this tiny cult down the street has a problem with pedophilia. Well, did you check out the catholic church? Well, no, we're not doing that. That's a religion. Oh, okay, I understand. So you're going to go after small fry.

As long as you go after everybody evenly and fairly and academically, you're not a troll.

I saw a great quote the other day that said, cult, failed religion. Religion, successful cult.

They're interrelated at a very important level. But redemption is part of all religions usually. And very often some of these minor cults are just about expulsion and destruction. I think that what we have to realize is that civility wasn't some sort of nicety among 18th century gentlemen. It's absolutely essential to high trust activities like science that have incredible power over our lives. And I am not aware of my critics. I have trolls, I have stalkers, I have people I fear physically, and I think about legally, and I think about protection from them. But I'm not aware of a single critic of my theories. If you ask anybody who jumps up and says, oh, I'm a critic of Eric's theories, I would say ask that person. Has that person tried to hunt down your previous connections and written to your friends and tried to dig up dirt? And if they answer honestly, because I actually have the letters and emails that these people engage in, these people are character assassins posing as critics. And I think that this is actually the big problem. We don't have debates. We have street fights. We have people pulling a knife in a boxing match or plaster bandages in their boxing gloves or whatever is going on.

We need fights, we need critics. We need debates that are refereed, that are ethical, where people shake hands at the beginning and hug at the end, touch gloves. We don't have that, and we're dying from that. You'll notice that, for example, the string theory and the string theory critics, they basically don't appear on the same stage ever. And this has to do with wrestling versus MMA. You notice that? You don't see if wrestling is so effective, why don't we try it like professional wrestling inside of an MMA thing where you're jumping up on the cage and coming down and all this stuff. It's because one thing is an actual sport and one thing is a simulated sport. And I think that what we need is we need Queensberry rules. Queensbury rules is how you avoid kayfabe. You have ideas you can't gouge eyes. You can't use small digit manipulation where you break fingers. You can't go for the throat or the genitals you put your finger on. I've never heard of this criticism capture, and I love it. And that's why I developed the concept of the Streisand squeeze. Either you allow us to whittle away at you or you respond to us.

You boost us, and you become part of the trap. If you ever watch David Attenborough naturalism, you'll see pack animals, whether it's orcas or hyenas, doesn't matter. They do this thing where they nip at their target. And then there's this weird voiceover, which I don't understand at all, which says the hyenas are trying to trick the animal into expending its energy to fend off these nips. The nips don't actually do much damage, but they do exhaust the animal so it won't be able to fight later. Okay, so imagine that you don't respond to the nips. Do you live? No, no, no. You. Then the hyenas become emboldened, and then you die a different way. So my point is that evolution would certainly have figured out not to respond to the nips if that was a winning strategy.

Everybody's concerned about their social status.

Isn't it interesting that everybody pretends that they aren't? I am. Of course I'm concerned about my social status because it's my ability to walk into a department and talk to a colleague. I think what we're going to do is we're going to solve this problem, because to not solve this problem is to effectively dead end our most important scientific endeavors, to say nothing of other forms of criticism. But just in science right now, the critics don't exist. The stalkers are everywhere. And the lengths to which the stalkers will go, particularly in my case, PhD level stalkers, people who write to my wife's thesis advisor. You're talking about a level of insanity that I think these people are emboldened because what they do in the shadows just isn't known.

Can you see my kitty's playpen, pink, fluffy version of your terrorism capture? Can you see the line that I would draw between that and the idea that you have of an accuracy budget and how one could become perverted by the other?

Oh, sure. Look.

But I love the accuracy budget thing, and I've not heard of it before, which is why I wanted to give.

You the hypocrisy budget. The accuracy budget. All of these budgets. Totally to human life. The inconsistency budget.

Yeah. Can you explain? Because it's one of the coolest things that I've learned.

I really appreciate that.

Recently.

In order to live a life in public, you're going to opine on a million different things. You're not going to be giving full footnotes. You're not going to be giving, oh, I don't know, bibliographies and counters. And so in essence, there's sort of a good faith level of hypocrisy and inaccuracy and self kindness and all of these things that every human being exhibits. And if the idea is that we're going to hold everyone who's expressed inconsistent opinions or who's found a self serving opinion now and again, and we're going to call that person a hypocrite or a liar or whatever, we're going to torch all of our best people. What if we took Gregor Mendel and his pea pods, where we found out about mendelian genetics, and we said, well, you faked your data, so everything you did is crap because he did fake his data. But he's also a genius who advanced the field.

Newton and his alchemy.

Yeah, for sure. And all of in order to keep good people in the public sphere. The key question isn't, have you ever exhibited inconsistency? Have you ever been cruel when you shouldn't have been self kind? Like, for example, you made the statement in our last meeting, it's way too close to November for anyone to leave the race. Does that mean that we should never listen to Chris Williamson again? Horseshit. In fact, the most important thing is that you own that in the first part of the interchange. And so my feeling is that not only do you have a budget for making strong statements that turn out not to be true, but we also know that you're like a really good faith actor. And I would listen more to you the next time you say something like, oh, come on, Eric, there's no question that whatever it is. So how do we get this idea of, no, no, that was hypocritical, but he's way under budget on hypocrisy. She got that wrong. But on the other hand, she's told us so many things that are right, her budget doesn't go to zero. I think Neil degrasse Tyson is really, really wrong on gender.

On the other hand, so much of what he says is just true. And there's a move. Like, I'm very critical of Neil, but do you want to cancel a guy who's this good at explaining science? Sean Carroll is an absolute ass when it comes to critics of mainstream theory, and a diabolical one. But hes civil. Hes a great explainer. He really knows physics at a very deep level that many people do not currently. And I dont want to see Sean Carroll removed from science explanations. I want to dance with him on a stage. That would be fun. But that is not a person that needs to be removed, because he's got a really bad, nasty streak to him when it comes to the criticism of mainstream physics. I just don't understand this desire for personal destruction.

There's no principle of charity, Evan.

Well, there are people who don't. No, I should say it differently. I've become aware that in that community, to show any kind of mercy or charity or generosity. Let's take the debunking community, the people who are always telling you, don't worry, I will warn you about the bad people on the Internet you're consuming. They work at the level of the human, and that's how you know that there's something wrong with them. I can't think of an individual who always gets everything wrong. You know, Donald Trump has done a lot. Right.

Broken clocks.

What? No, it's not broken clocks.

Yeah.

Do you think Adolf Hitler got to be the leader of Germany because he got every single thing 180 degrees wrong? That you could set your clock to him how wrong he was? No, he had to get things right. But he's absolutely diabolical. So what do we do? We put a perimeter around him and say, look, that thing is so dangerous that we are going to act as if everything it says is wrong. And that's what this comes from. It comes from a strategy where you can't afford to do fugu with certain people. Fugu, japanese puffer fish served as sushi, where the neurotoxin produces a delightful tingling sensation on the tongue if carved correctly and if served improperly, kills the patron. So you have fugu chefs, and you can't afford to let an unlicensed chef serve fugu. And so in part, the strategy is, you say, well, puffer fish is just too dangerous to eat, and therefore puffer fish bad. I think that that's what we do too often. We've just decided that, effectively, the debunking community wants to go after people wholesale. It's much more efficient to destroy the humanity.

Well, efficiency was sort of what was front and center there, that we all look for shortcuts. Right. We have heuristics. We have a reputation. This person has been wrong x number of times. Therefore, we can accurately predict that. Dot, dot, dot. But it seems like any inconsistency, any hypocrisy, any failure is often magnified and scrutinized and, and blown up out of proportion with their accuracy budget. One of the interesting things that I've been talking about recently is that content creators, like a podcast or a youtuber or whatever, will get criticized for the videos that they made or the guests that they brought on, but they never get complimented for the guests that they didn't bring on.

Give me an example. Like, you've never had Alex Jones on, have you? No.

So, for instance, the number of guests that get offered to us get suggested that we should bring them on, that I should bring them on, and I say no to, because of me not believing that they're a good actor, that I don't want to speak to them, that I'm not interested in them. But very few people know the people that you said no to. Almost nobody does. So you don't get any bonus points.

Because it's very confusing. Like, for example, I might have Alex Jones on my show. I would never do infowars. Right. And so the idea is you're trying to figure out the context. Alex Jones has many interesting things, and he's been right about many interesting things, and he's gotten things really dangerously wrong. You have to take into. And by the way, I've talked to Alex Jones, which is interesting. The funniest part about it is he uses Alex Jones as sort of an adjective. Like, that guy is way more Alex Jones than I am, which is really disconcerting. Like, intellectually, James O'Keeffe does some good work, and he does some work that I can't stand, and I had him on, or I had the woman who plays Riley Reed, the pornographic actress, as a guest on the portal. And I'm very disturbed by some of the things that she's engaged in, but I find her absolutely a charming soul. And we talked about things that did not, that were not inguinally exciting because we were talking about the context of the work. So the issue of serving Fugu is really important, and I think that it has to do with, in what context does it occur?

Does the host push back and sort of warn people about some of the issues that are dangerous? And is the host, is that person good enough to serve fugu?

So when we balance criticism, capture, and how that feels for the creator, the people that people are fans of that. Me and you are fans of. We are both. This is the funny thing about content, that Elon Musk's jet is delayed. I imagine he's got lots of things to do, but one of those things will probably be, if he's tired, I'll open up YouTube and I'll see what's on there. Everybody is a fan of somebody on the Internet, whether it's writing, reading, hearing, whatever it might be. And when you combine that with this idea of an accuracy budget, and basically the fact that everybody's accuracy budget starts in a deficit, that the principle of charity is very rarely given to anybody on the Internet, I had this idea of the peak hate rule, similar to the peak end rule, that every content creator, every sort of public person is known for their biggest and most recent sort of run in with something that people find reprehensible. Okay, so Jordan Peterson, best known for Bill C 16, he's a transphobe. And also, Jordan Peterson is a zionist, pro Israel. Maybe that's the most recent thing that he's done, or he mansplains to Cathy Neumann.

I don't know, whatever his most recent thing is. Lex tweeted recently, I think that neither Trump nor Harris will destroy America if elected president. Call me crazy, but I think that Trump is not a fascist and Harris is not a communist. I think this is a reasonable, rational position, but according to the Internet, it's insane either way. Getting attacked by both sides has been mentally exhausting for me. Perhaps that's the design of the current political climate. Anybody with moderate open mindedness needs to be pushed out in favor of a battle between dogmatic extremes. This doesn't seem like the right path toward truth has been mentally exhausting for me, was the point that I made. And the thing that I've realized now, kind of seeing both sides of the fence, being both a creator and a consumer, is that this lack of principle of charity, this over magnification from the creator side in terms of how it feels from a criticism capture perspective, that your criticisms are more deleterious than your compliments are enthusing, and the fact that the accuracy budget doesn't exist basically means that that apart from the most staunch, I don't give a fuck, Tim Kennedy, Joe Rogan style, or I don't read the comments style approaches.

Almost everybody that you like to watch on the Internet is on this very slow descent where they begin to run out of fuel. That anybody that's, anybody that decides to play with ideas that needs to push the accuracy budget, right? Anyone that decides to actually push up against. I'm not too sure here, but I'm going to give this a crack.

Okay.

They are going to be disproportionately criticized online. That is going to be deleterious, and it's going to derogate their motivation. And that basically means that everybody is on this sort of slow, and it's essentially a fight against digital entropy.

Well, look, I'm learning something from our conversation in real time. Like, for example, I cannot. I don't have a good response to stalking. And what I realized is that my discomfort with the people who are coming after me is a stalking based discomfort. And now I'm suddenly understanding why Joe Rogan is saying, like, don't read the comments, which is like a, don't let the critics live rent free in your head. That's not my problem. So, in part, if I understand what you just said, I think Kamala has some communism in her appeal. I may not be native to her, but I know that the under 30 crowd is playing with neo marxian ideas and that I've been told by the Democratic Party, we need their vote. Don't worry. They won't get anywhere inside the party. We just let them mouth off and they don't get any legislation, like I've been told. Here's the plan. We need you to stop coming after us. Of course, we're hypocritical. We're courting communists because we need the votes to win. But I guarantee you they won't be able to do any damage if we are elected. So now you say something about Kamala, and somebody says, I can see the communists.

Equity is communism. It's equality of outcome. The support for October 7 is revolutionary. You're not talking about liberalism or progressivism. You're talking about calling the murder of parents in front of their children resistance. These sorts of things are confusing us because we have these very strange amalgams. I can tell you that part of Kamala is the appeal to the Hamptons crowd that she will continue the carried interest exemption in the tax code. That doesn't feel very communistic. Another part of her is speaking to radical Islamists saying, don't worry, we're going to be portraying this as bigotry and islamophobia. You're just another religion like any other, and you're being subjected to prejudice. So how do you deal with an amalgam where you can't go long and short? I can tell you that there are parts of Donald Trump that I very much appreciate and there are parts of Donald Trump that make it impossible for me to imagine voting for him when he was at a rally and there was a protester being let out. And he said, you know, back in the day, we all have our bad Trump. We know how to take care of such people.

And if anybody wants to rough these people up, I'll pay your legal bills. And I thought, wow, you have no idea what you just unleashed. And you're comfortable with it? I don't want that person with a nuclear football. My discomfort with Donald Trump isn't a class issue or whatever. I saw a temperament that shouldn't be anywhere near that. Kamala Harris shouldn't be anywhere near the nuclear football. I have no idea who's on top of the nuclear fitball because it can't be Joe Biden. I promise you that. And I've been assured, by the way, that what's really going on is that there's a team that is governing because Biden cannot. And that I should feel if I knew who these people were, I would be pleased as punch because they're far better than Joe Biden. Can you imagine being told that as an american, we're not going to come, we're not going to invoke the constitution and rid ourselves of a president who's incompetent. We've instead installed a great team that you can't see. So don't worry. So in all of these situations, Chris, I think what's happening is we don't have the ability to slice and dice the average person.

I don't know if you've seen this poll that I'm running right at the moment, still live. I decided to try to make pro choice and pro life the same category. And I asked the question. You want to pull it up on my Twitter feed and read it? By the way, anytime you do a poll on Twitter, you will always be told, you don't realize that this is biased because it's your audience and you don't realize that your language is prejudicial. But it's funny that those complaints aren't levied at AP or Harris or because every poll is subject to something like this. This one's really instructive.

Is your position on abortion, whatever. It is exactly the same for the day after conception as it is for the day before full term birth? Yes, of course. 33% no, of course not. 67% 25,507 votes. There's a bit of time left. I don't think it's going to reverse, though.

Well, here's my question, first of all, is that already an interesting result because pro life and pro choice, in their most staunch form are now sharing a position that it is either my body, my choice, or this is a life and it's always murder. So both of those are now grouped, and about one third of the respondents hold a pro life or pro choice position. The comments are dominated by people saying, of course it's a life. This is a monstrous question. How can you even think about this? I don't believe in murder. So in other words, it's not even the pro choice people, but the pro life people who are dominating the comments. And it goes back to Yates with the idea that the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best lack all conviction. It's not right, but it's the people within a clear ideological position feel very comfortable speaking. And the people who have a nuanced position have learned their lesson to shut.

Up the quiet middle.

And this is why mere negative stuff on the Internet doesn't have a lot of effect on me. I just say, oh my God. I've learned my lesson about the Chihuahua effect. The Chihuahua effect is that the annoying voices that just yap all day long have time because they're not doing anything productive. They're mean people. They're not that important. So I basically just block on civility. If you start using loaded language about clown, lol. You know that stuff, I just block you because I can't afford to have that person in my head. What I don't know what to do with is the fact that people don't realize that neither pro life nor pro choice, as an example, captures an average thinking person's response to the complex embryology of pregnancy and cessation.

I've always said that. What is a position that you, you know, that famous Peter question, what is a position that you hold that most people would disagree with? I don't actually know if this is the truth, but it's certainly one that people don't talk about. And mine is that both pro life and pro choice sound like the right answer to me. I can be. I've got permanent recency bias based on whoever the most, like the closest proximity last guy was if I've just watched Shapiro. Right, I. Oh, yeah. Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

That's exactly the opposite. My feeling is that the, the only two positions I don't listen to in immigration theory is open borders and closed borders because they're both. Exactly. This is my get a room position. Closed borders and open borders, people should get a room. Pro life and pro choice, people should get a room. The rest of us are trying to solve problems. I don't know what you guys are doing. And it's not like I don't have absolutes in my life. I do. It's just that they're few and far between, and they have to be carefully chosen. And I think this has to do with shelling points, if you know that concept.

Ashima don.

So if you don't believe that conception or birth is the right limit point for interceding in a pregnancy, then you're looking for some point that is much less well defined. Is it a particular Carnegie stage? Is it viability? If it's viability, what happens when the technology changes? What about frozen embryos, et cetera, et cetera? So we have this penchant for clear positions that are wrong over nuanced positions that are right but lack a good shelling point.

And that always been the case. I noticed this so long ago, that certainty is a proxy for expertise.

It's a good version of it.

It is the example I use all of the time. I don't know why it's the case, but Peter Zion, geopolitics guy Rogan actually brought this up and Sam Harris, both separately. And it was so funny. It was this thing that I'd had after I'd spoken to him, that I then heard Rogan say in an episode, and Sam say on the intro to the episode with Peter, this is the most certain man I've ever spoken to in the world. I don't necessarily have the chops or have done the research to be able to work out the veracity of what he's saying. But, my God, it's convincing, because this isn't caveated. It's not. It seems to be. So the evidence would suggest that. So on and so forth. This is exactly what's going to happen with nitrogen balance in the soil in Russia over the next five harvests. This is what we know is going to occur with the chinese battleships in the South China Sea.

Which is. So I'm exactly the opposite guy. My feeling, and I wish, I would love to just push this out, is pay the tax on the way in. So, for example, of all the free speech people, I am the only one I know who says categorically I'm not a free speech absolutist. And I've watched my friends who said they were free speech absolutists fall tax.

On the way out.

Well, the problem is, is that, you know, you're going to meet a situation in which you have to realize that that's simplistic. So the key thing is there are a lot of things that generate applause. You know? And you've got to forego the applause lines of. Right. Because those applause lines are there because people are saying, finally, somebody's said it. They just. I appreciate the clarity. There wasn't a lot of wiggle words.

Can I give you a physics term that we've been playing about with me and a couple of my friends? Love to learn thinking in superpositions.

Yeah.

Before collapsing it down. But there's some people who can't bear the uncertainty 100%.

I mean, I really believe that that is probably the one concept of quantum mechanics that actually. The Heisenberg stuff, where people say, well, if you look at a system, you interfere with it. That has nothing to do with Heisenberg. The superposition is actually pretty much a tight pairing between quantum mechanics and what it is that we need to do. Another version of this, by the way, is some giant percentage of the population says, I don't understand your argument. When they say. When, they really mean. I don't accept your argument. For example, you could ask me. You could say, eric, I don't understand anti Semitism. Jews do so much. They contribute to society. I would say, I understand anti Semitism. Now, there's a question. Wait, wait, wait a second. We're trying to label anti semites as lunatics, and you're saying you can actually. Yeah, I can run it in emulation. I have a sandbox in my brain. I've got a little anti semite in my jewish brain.

I'm sure he's loving it. He's having a great time up there.

He wants to know why so many of your guests are jewish. We've got to stop doing that. We've got to stop saying, I can't understand x when we mean, I understand x. Find x very, very dangerous and wrong.

It's almost like a weakness or a fragility to not allow yourself to try and play that other side. What was that? You need to be able to explain the other side's argument better than they can.

Yeah, this is the steel manning thing that I think I actually forget who I heard it from first. I used it on Sam Harris, and.

The first time I ever heard it be used was Sam and Jordan was how they opened up that Pangbone debate.

So I think he got it. I think you can hear on something called faith in reasons. Where Sam asks me to clarify what that means. It wasn't original to me, but it's a really important concept.

Very cool.

And.

It'S outrageously civil.

Well, thank you. Part of the reason, something I don't know how to deal with, is that I coin a lot of acronyms, concepts, etcetera. And people say, why do you do that? It detracts from your message. It's a lot of clutter, and I don't know how to respond. Exactly. We're missing a lot of concepts. And one of the things that I know is coming from you, is a book in which you take all of the things that you pepper these conversations with, these concepts which are necessary for modern life, but haven't been embedded in our education. Right. So, like, the streisand effect, before you get to the Streisand squeeze, is actually something that's very important to understand in our media age. And if that wasn't pushed out, it would be very confusing as to why somebody wouldn't respond to something when they do have an answer. Our cognitive toolkit got hit with a lot of stuff having to do with the Internet, then the web, then social search and mobile. That is so much change that a brain that came before those five things cannot function in the modern world. And what we need to do, of course, and this is why I was suspicious that we're going to be in this criticism issue forever, is we haven't yet invented the concepts that make modern life tolerable.

And I think that you and I and a bunch of people in podcasting land are casting about for what are the missing concepts? And I give this example of the word selfie because it was the best example I've ever seen. Why did hot chicks in restaurant bathrooms take pictures of themselves in mirrors? Nobody knew. Didn't make any sense. And at some point, somebody coined the word selfie, and it was instant. We'd all seen this phenomenon, but nobody had a concept.

He was word of the year in one year.

Yeah. And the reason is, is that you needed it because it was there everywhere, but until it had some place where it could nucleate around.

This is good. So this has just tied me in to. This makes an awful lot of sense. So your idea of an accuracy budgethouse. Okay, I think I need to request a meme budget.

Yeah.

Because I. One of the criticisms that people have for me and a bunch of my friends, like George or whoever, why does everything need a fucking name? Why does everything need to be an analogy? Why does it have to be that? Why does it have to be a yogurt? Lid moment, as opposed to, why can't you say you just saw some? And I'm like, for a few reasons. Firstly, this is great. Firstly, remembering concepts is hard and essentializing something, taking it from this big long story, the parable of the mexican fisherman. If you've heard the story a couple of times, you remember what it is. You don't need to hear the story again. You just hear the parable of the mexican fisherman. Oh, yeah, of course. It's the guy that overcomplicates his life and ends up coming back to the place where he began. It's the same stories you get in the alchemist by Paulo Coelho, et cetera, et cetera. Fantastic discharge. Ego it pick whatever it is of choice, and then it takes this huge, big concept and synthesizes it down.

And if you don't know it, then you can click on that and the hyper, the phrase or the fails over to a bumper sticker, the bumper sticker, to a summary paragraph in abstract to a short essay, to a book. And so the idea is that the more you need of these things, you can keep clicking through to expand out.

To expand out.

The funny thing is, have you noticed that canned humor disappeared?

What's that mean?

Three guys go into a bar. That thing that your uncle used to do doesn't happen in our world at all. And almost all of the jewish wisdom that had been in the Talmud, in my experience, my father had 35 jokes, which, if you understood all of them, was a blueprint for life. And, like, I'll just say, the punchlines knew he had a hat. Keep your goddamn jack. $5,000 plus legal expenses. Now, by killing canned humor, you killed off the encapsulation of thousands of years of talmudic study about the very difficult trade offs and constraints that human beings are under. And so you say, yeah, I don't tell corny jokes. You sound like you from the Catskills, like, well, no shit, Sherlock. You just basically took the human endowment and flushed it down the toilet. Now, something else I want to play with, if I can. The stuff that comes back at you on the Internet. If you had to pick and choose what you think is fair and what you've learned from versus what you think is just a distraction, I wonder if that would be something we could play with. What have you learned from your critics?

Where do you think there's validity? Where do you have an unsolved problem, and where do you just have the idea of, I can't have that in my head. It's the worst thing in the world.

The most accurate, I think, is that my difficulty in discomfort, pushing back my people pleasing nature is in me everywhere that I go. Actually, apart from when I'm in a restaurant dealing with waiters, I'm pretty good at making my sort of needs known there. But outside of that, sitting with discomfort, disappointing people, making them upset or angry, I often feel like other people's emotional states are my responsibility. This is something that I have across the board, and that means that I have a particular vector of weakness when it comes to the podcast, because a lot of the time I need to push back against ideas, I need to stress test. And if you say something, good example of this, Abigail Schreier wrote a book, bad therapy.

Yeah.

And I fundamentally disagreed with a lot of the ideas in it. So I thought, and I messaged a friend before I was going to do it and said, this is my plan for the episode. I want to make my positions known and not step in and throw a life buoy to try and fix the problem. And the perennial recovering people pleases out there may sort of feel the same, that you say a thing which is going to induce some discomfort or something which stops, it's got a harsh end to it or whatever, and then you say you sort of bring this thing into land by offering. So how can it be the case that therapy, all therapy is bad because it allows you, or it causes you to focus on yourself and your issues, but you also include in that CBT, something which is unbelievably practical and shows up as an evidence based intervention for lots of people's disorders. Is it that? And then it's. Is it that you step in to soften the blow?

I see.

So throughout that episode in particular, I had to ask these questions. And then as I watch the guest get to this point, which is exactly the reason that you ask a difficult question, as opposed to there is this compulsion inside of me, I'm dragged forward to go, well, what I mean, and throw this sort of lifeboy to them, because sitting with that discomfort, so that is by far, I think, the most valid criticism. Now, one of the things that nobody gets to see is how hard it is for people to achieve the things that they achieve. So apart from in sports, if you got a guy that's got the world bench press record with long arms, and you go, oh my God, look at the length of his arms, look at his bench press record. That's phenomenal. The dude that's five foot ten, that's in the NBA. Oh my God, look at his height. He's in the NBA. See, there's physical characteristics. But then if you were to see Douglas Murray and Malcolm Gladwell on stage together or Ben Shapiro and anybody, and you go, they're able to be disagreeable. So seamlessly. For me to get even 5% of the way there, I need to do the equivalent of a one rep max to ask Abigail Schreier about CBT.

That's, for me, just an obvious area where hypertrophy and noob gains can be accrued most easily. So I think that's the fairest of the criticisms.

Anything else that you think is something you find in the comments where you feel like you're pointing at something that's true but you're not getting it right? Or.

Certainly, I mean, one of the, and one of the criticisms that comes up relatively frequently is I'm both a misogynist, a red pill right wing misogynist, and also a blue pilled left wing cuck at the same time.

Superposition.

Super. Absolutely thinking in the superposition. But you'll see the comments on the same video. Yeah, you'll see them underneath the same video. And that is one of the things as somebody who not fears criticism capture, but certainly would be a poster boy for criticism capture being warping. And it's something that I need to account for. I do particularly well with positive reinforcement, with enthusiasm, with excitability.

Can I give you my take on this? Because I think this is one of the most interesting things you just put your finger on. What you're talking about are cognitive clusters. So, for example, when I was on, this is the first time I learned about it, I was on stage with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris. And if you look at the clusters of comments on that video from the masonic theater in San Francisco, they were like, thank God Eric was there, because otherwise we'd be hearing about, is there a God? Yes. No. Which is boring as hell. Why is Eric on stage? We're all here just to hear the atheist debate, the orthodox Jew. So what you learn about is that the cognitive clusters have no awareness that they're part of this dyadic relationship of what you are and how they process. So, for example, I'm colorblind, as is my brother.

Are you really?

Yeah.

Well, the first thing that everyone says to a colorblind person, what color is that over there? You go. I don't fuck with.

It's very interesting being colorblind because the terminology is bad. You see color, but you don't have the same. It's not like, the world is black and white. It's just yellow or green. I can't tell. So depending upon what colorblindness you have, you see different numbers in the pebble tests that they give you. So the question of what is the pebble? It's basically. It's basically mindstorm versus green needle or the dress or any one of these things where people factor themselves out of the equation and they imagine that they are in a universal position as consumers of whatever it is that you just said. It's like, why does he spend so much time on the stuff he's discussed on every other podcast? Podcast? Why does he just jump in? Assuming everybody knows exactly what this is about? Your audience is unaware of the fact that they've been cognitively clustered. And so when you read these things, you're not reading about you. You're reading about dyadic relationships with different cognitive clusters, and you'll find the same. Like, one of the things that I know is that a lot of people don't agree with the dialectic. They believe that there's a thesis and there's an antithesis and there's no synthesis.

There's just people sitting on the fence who are pussies for not having a position. And so every time I attempt to synthesize things because things are in a superposition, and I'm trying to talk about the nuance they have an idea of, he never says anything. Because to them, to that person, saying something is to say, Trump is the man. You gotta go with Kamala. Otherwise you're just, you know, those sorts of people in that poll, for example, the cluster that believes that pregnancy doesn't change in any meaningful way relative to abortion, are a metacluster, including pro life and pro choice. What we need to do more of is to understand what it is that we're reading as feedback. I know, for example, that many people find me overbearing, and it's not that I don't see that in myself, but nobody ever asks me, do you see in yourself that you can be overbearing? A conversation? Totally. Well, if you can see it, why do you do it? Interesting question. In general, I find that sometimes I try not to be overbearing at all, and I feel like most conversations end up in a conversation I've already been in.

I'm old enough, and I'm just bored because I think that humans in general are a large language model.

That's one of the reasons naval hasn't done another podcast properly since Rogan said, I don't want to say the same things twice.

Maybe. But I guess what I find is that people don't ask about other people's levels of self awareness.

Oh, I love asking that. I love asking that. That's one of the reasons that your question was so interesting. There's a concept similar to what you were talking about before called tilting at windmills. An online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack you, they're really just attacking their own imagination. And there is no need to take it personally.

My brother has a version of this that I think is brilliant, where he says that the person who's just cut you off in traffic, all you know about them is that they cut you off in traffic. You don't know about their work in pediatric oncology. And so until you actually have a fuller position, you don't realize that you've cut somebody off in traffic and been cut off in traffic. And the only data point you have represents the entire human.

Of course. Yeah. Combination of fundamental attribution error and a bunch of others. An equivalent that I learned from Instagram, of all places, which I think sort of shows this relativity, or our assumption that our position is the correct one. Every guy that fancies girls with bigger boobs than mine is a chubby chaser. Every guy that fancies girls with smaller boobs than mine is a pedophile. That basically you have yourself as the reference point, and then anything outside of that, on either side, is. Is some perturbment.

Why do you think this is? Why do you think that we don't? Actually, I'll be honest, almost no conversation in my life moves above the level where I could set a large language model to have it.

Good question. So I think we have these social mores dynamics, typically, that we follow by not wanting to look silly or play outside of an area that we know. A lot of the time, it causes us to go back to scripts that we've run before that we knew kind of worked. So I think confidence, sort of social confidence has a lot to do with it. Thinking is expensive, and it's hard, and genuinely trying to be generative during a conversation is tough. A lot of the time, people are uncomfortable with silence, which causes them to push answers out when sort of sitting back would have maybe allowed them to come up with something new. If you're trying to. If you're trying to go quicker, your direction can be less precise, and you can move in a less agile way. You're just trying to get the things out as opposed to giving yourself a little bit of a beat. And this is why the best definition of a best friend is who can you spend time in silence with without it feeling uncomfortable? And who can you be around with the least filter? I think those two together are a really good example of who are your people.

Present company excluded, just, just for the obvious reasons. Who are the guests who bring out the best version of you as an interviewer?

George Mack, who's one of my best friends, phenomenal writer Rob Henderson, Gwinda Bogle, Rory Sutherland, Douglas Murray. On the guesting side, Rogan.

So you've interviewed Rogan.

No, on the guest, me as a guest guessing side, but I don't do that that much. I don't have a particularly big pull to pull from. But those are the guys that I get to play with ideas, and I know that we're focused on the idea. I know that Tim Ferriss was a really great example of this, just such a great conversationalist. If I'm imprecise with a question or if I'm trying to get to something, he takes the best version of the thing that I said as what he, and he infers what I meant to say, and it's absolute best. So he almost, as such a great interviewer, makes you a better interviewer by turning your hopefully quite good question into the best question by his answer. Sometimes reframes it, sometimes moves it in the direction. It's really great. It's like a multiplicative environment.

Do you feel like you know things about Joe Rogane or Lex Friedman or Douglas Murray that most people don't know that make them so successful?

Yes, and Tim Ferriss and certainly Rogan and certainly Douglas.

Okay, so let's take Rogan, because a lot of people are mystified.

All right, so let me open up the Joe Rogan's superpower as a podcaster is that he can ask a question with a statement. Nobody else, nobody else has landed on this. And I realized this the first time that I got to sit down with him. So news to me, it's for a couple of reasons. Joe is able to say a statement in response to a statement. So you as the guest or some dusty academic author that's got a new book out and you're telling him about your David bus, talking about evolutionary psychology, and it's all interesting, and these are new concepts. And you finish up explaining about how sex ratio hypothesis works, and Joe says it's so interesting, because in New York, you have this sort of abundance of women. And the guest then goes, ah, so Joe doesn't make a conversation feel like an interview because he answers statements with statements. If you actually listen, a lot of the time, Joe doesn't ask that many questions in his podcast. He's not a big question asker. When compared with most other podcasters, he makes statements. And the reason is, if you listen to most conversations, normal conversations between friends, statement, statement, it's back and forth.

One of the reasons that Joe's show feels so naturalistic is that he asks questions with statements. It's very rare, super rare. I've been trying to do it ever since I went on a show two years ago for the first time. I've been trying to cultivate that because I think it makes for such a beautiful conversational flow. One of the problems that you have is as you start to push the guest's expertise, the delta between yours and the guest's expertise, your ability to answer statements with statements becomes lower. You need to say, what do you mean by that? Or how's that the case? Or what would you say is this thing? But that's what makes him, that's one of the reasons that makes him so great, and that's why it's so enjoyable as a guest on the show.

I don't immediately resonate with that because I think that sometimes he has different dynamics with different guests. But it's very. It's certainly, at a minimum, adjacent to something that I experience with him, which is he's really less egoic than just about anyone I deal with. And the way that you see this, like, you know, an interesting thing happened, and it's happened a couple of times between you and me, where, when you said this thing, do you know what audience captures like, ugh, I don't. I'm straining because it wasn't much discussed before I brought it up, but I don't want to say, that's mine. Right. I just. I want to let it go, but I don't want to suddenly lose my claim on it. And that has to do with, like, ego and insecurity and. Yep. And whatnot.

Wanting to be recognized.

Yeah, well, just. And trauma from having had things taken away from you that you can never get back. Joe could take the shot himself, and instead he serves it up to you. And maybe you can't even do as good of a job as he would have done, but his job, like, until you piss him off, he's trying to make you the best version of you.

And this is where I come into tension with my people pleasing nature that a combination of give someone a rope and they'll show themselves for who they truly are in any case. That asking questions that it gives people the opportunity and the room to step on the landmines that they're going to lay for themselves in any case. But also, I want a guest that comes on the show to just have a good time. I see it as my job to basically be a trampoline. So they're going to jump up and down and it's my job to be as springy as possible and make them seem as acrobatic and as great as they can. And a lot of the time that means taking something that someone said and as opposed to trying to tear it down to. Is this what you mean? How about this? Or that's an interesting idea. I've got this. That's build, build, build. Oh, that's so interesting. So on and so forth. And it can seem like pandering. I can see how it could seem sort of sycophantic in some ways. But for me, as far as I can tell, the job of a podcaster is to make the guests ideas as good as is possible.

This is the best light that they could be seen in and this is how they relate to me. And this is what I think about them. And this is what I thought that you meant. And that's why it's fun. That's what fires me up.

Do you know why I do your podcast? It's like three in a row when I am really trying to do less podcasts.

I keep bringing you out over time.

Well, no, but it has to do with the fact that this is how I get a chance to see you when you're in LA.

True.

And we don't go out to a bar. So this is my chance to hang out with you for a couple of hours. And in a way, it's sort of sad. We have this dynamic where it's like, also, save it for the podcast. Save it for the podcast. It's frustrating because in part, I have lots of friends that I don't podcast with who I have great conversations with. One of the things about Joe, for example, that I really, I don't know how to tell people it. He's obviously like this thing about he's a meathead, is a great troll, that meathead reads so much, he knows so much, he's interested in so much that a lot of what's happening is that he's actually infusing the guest with an idea he could take credit for himself, but he would rather that the guest looks good and it doesn't come across as people pleasing. And I'll be honest, I don't really see this criticism. Maybe it's because I see you principally in your interactions with me. I don't like the gotcha style. You saw this with Don Lemon and Elon Musk, where somebody comes from the gotcha style of interviewing.

It's like, well, just softball after softball, you idiots. What do you think life is? Do you think it's like you did the gotcha question that fouled the person up on air, and you got to see them sweat and break down and lose? That's not what makes great podcasting. You want repeat characters that you keep coming back to and you watch their development. So I just want to say that from my cognitive cluster, I'm not positive that these criticisms of you are valid. It may be with other guests, but in general, I feel like you can establish an evolution of thought without going through that sort of competitive nonsense.

I appreciate that. It's something I'm working on. So, one of the most important personality traits that me and my friends have tried to cultivate in ourselves is agency. It's what we're obsessed by. It's what we talk about. Essential intentionalism, which is a subset. It is necessary but not sufficient, in order to be able to build out agency, something else that we really love talking about. And upon reflection, I realized that all of us had first learned about the word agency from you. So I wondered whether there is a.

From my first podcast, whether there is.

A tension to navigate between wanting to maximize agency, wanting to have control over the outcomes in your life, basically believing that I will win the video game, sort of, no matter what's in front of me, and I will also treat life in that sort of playful manner as well, which I think is an element of agency. How do you navigate the tension between wanting to live a hopeful, agentic existence and all of the doom and gloom that you're permanently embroiled in?

This is an amazing question, and it's strange to me that it didn't get followed up by almost anybody. High agency is a lifelong commitment for me. And you know the song Boy named Sue by Johnny Cash?

Can you play it on the harmonica?

It's mostly a. It's a patter song before. It's like rap country.

No, not familiar.

Well, met my dad. I left home when I was three. Didn't leave much for me. Mom, me. But this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. I didn't blame you. Ran and hid. But meanest thing that he ever did was before he left, he went and named me sue, the guy. You must have thought it was quite a joke. Got a lot of laughs from a lot of folks. That seems I had to find my whole life through some guy. Some gal would giggle, and I'd get red. Some guy would laugh, and I'd bust his head. I tell you, life ain't easy for a boy named sue. Anyway, it goes on. And basically, this guy has to become tough and agentic, and he swears that, you know, he'll search the honky tonks and saloons until he finds his father and kill him. And finally, he chances upon a saloon, and there at a table, deer deal instead was the dirty, mangy dog who named me sue. And he gets into a fight with his father. The father cuts off a piece of his ear, and finally, sue gets the better of his father, and he says, you have the right to kill me.

I don't blame you if you do. But before I die, I want you to thank me for the spit in your eye, because I'm the dirty, mangy dog who named you sue, or whatever. And they reconcile. That song, to me, is about dyslexia. It's about dysgraphia. It's about the torture of school for being smart and not even having a high iq, because one of the four components of IQ is something called processing, which I just think is an abomination that that somehow gets into intelligence. I was a B high school student in mathematic, mostly because I was charming or the grade would have been even lower. One of the things that, weirdly, I'm most proud of in my life and sort of the origin story that people don't ask enough about because it has to do with dyslexia is that somehow a B high school student limps out of high school and three years later, at 19, has a master's degree in mathematics, headed for, arguably, the top department in the world as a graduate school at Harvard. And that's not a story about I'm so smart. It's a story about agency. It's about doing the thing that you're not good at like that you're really, really bad at.

And, you know, my son, who's currently. He's finished all of his physics courses in the theory portion of his major as a freshman many years ago, he broke my heart, and he came to me and he said, dad, I know I'm not a good student, but you'd think of all the things, I'd at least be good at math, because he was very analytical. And then suddenly he, you know, during the pandemic, he wanted to get out of the school he was in because it was a bad fit in the science department. And he was stuck at home between 10th and 11th grade. And he said, dad, I want to know if it's okay if I use this time when I'm stuck at home to study for the graduate record exam. As if he was a graduating senior in physics. And he says, I want to take it in the fall. And I said, well, let's review this. You've never taken calculus. You've never taken a course in physics. You're struggling in all of your technical subjects. Why do you want to take the GRE in physics? And he said, I listened to you very carefully, and you said that we should get around college by using the graduate record exam as a college equivalency degree, just the way we have a high school equivalency degree.

And he said, I've looked at all of the universities as to what their physics requirements are in the top ten, and it's very uniform because they have to be interoperable. I've reduced it to basically four books that I have to know. I know what the prerequisites are, and there's a test to see if it works so I can hold myself accountable. I've noticed that the only place holding the GRE in physics is in Arizona. Can we fly to Phoenix and take the gre in physics as if I'm completing a four year college? I thought about it. I said, this means you're going to be ruining your summer. He says, no, no. For me, it's fun. Let me try. Will you back it? So I bought him the books, bought the plane ticket, and the kid sat at the table for, like, two and a half months. We fly out and he takes the exam, but the kid's never taken any relevant class whatsoever. And he proves that he's at least at that level. Life is filled with these opportunities. They're cheat codes everywhere. There are panic rooms where if you know which book to pull, the bookcase just swings open for you.

Both my kids graduated a year early. Because all you have to do is ask your high school, hey, I really want to graduate a year early. And it's possible I don't know how to teach people that. No is the beginning of a conversation. You know, one day I was having a steak dinner, I think, with Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson. And it came to the big five personality inventory, which Jordan swears bye. And he was discussing, he can read off your Myers Briggs like that. And he says, but that's not really as good as the big five. So he gave Dave his big five. I was terrified. I didn't say anything. He says, you, Eric, are particularly interested. I said, why? He said, well, you're very high in trade openness, but what really distinguishes you is you're the most disagreeable person I've ever met. Or something close to him. It. And I think cultivating disagreeability even sounds bad, while he's very disagreeable. But it's trait disagreeability rather than that. It has to do with non acceptance. Somebody says, there's nothing we can do. Well, is there really nothing you can do? Are you sure? Very often, for example, I can get Chet GPT to tell me things it's not supposed to.

By figuring out how to do prompt engineering, there's almost always a way to do anything that seems like it should be possible. And cultivating this trait, macgyvering, everything or finding the cheat code, is a way of life. And if you don't have that as a dyslexic. My grandfather was probably the most brilliant of four people in his generation. And the four families that came west to make mayonnaise for, that's how we ended up in California. And he wasn't equal to it. Couldn't graduate from college, couldn't get beyond his intelligence, couldn't get beyond the deficit. And one of the podcasts that nobody listens to me on, that I'm proudest of, is a podcast called something like teach me teacher, where I basically go after educators, and I say, you guys are the most dangerous, horrible people to the neurodivergent. Every second of my life spent in your classrooms before college, before university, is the second I want back. Is trauma, is pain. All you did is instill in me that I'm an idiot, I'm a moron, I'm not good enough. I should go away. I'm bad. I'm aberrant. I got it. I really got it. You don't like me, I don't like you.

You're bad people. To me, you can think that I'm the student who's just disagreeable, but the fact of the matter is, life depends on disagreeable people.

What would you say to the people who feel like they didn't fit in when they were younger? They still don't fit in now. Like life happens for other people, and they're on the outside sort of watching.

It's an interesting question. I don't know how to give everyone advice, but is there something that you're best at? Is there something that you don't suck at that isn't valued by the world? You know, that's kind of the beginning of, you have to make some room for self esteem. One of the things that, I'm not positive my grandfather ever said it, but I remember it as if he said it. It is. You owe the world your eyes. Maybe your eyes aren't that good. Maybe what you see isn't true. Maybe you're confused. Maybe you're clouded. Maybe you're egotistical. Maybe you're a narcissist. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But whatever your eyes are, they're yours. And you have a right to process the world and say what you see. And one of the quotes that I like best of myself, which is not oft repeated, is most of us die never having heard our own inner voice even once. It is so shocking to speak with your voice. The first time I understood anything about male female romance, something slipped out of my mouth that clearly was a lack of impulse control. And it worked.

It was charming, and it shouldn't have worked. It should have been crash and burn. But some point, you'll have an accident where something will sort of work out better. Do you know the Tom Petty song even the losers? Oh, if I ever get invited on the Tonight show, that's what I want to come out to. So it's the song. And, well, it was near, sort of like a Bob Dylan voice. It was nearly summer and we sat on your roof and we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon and I showed you stars you never could see. Couldn't have been that easy to forget about me. And it goes into the story in which a guy who clearly is a lower status guy is on a roof, and in my mind, he says, I showed you stars you never could see. Like, maybe he's an astronomy geek, and somehow he's got the hot chick on a roof and they're smoking cigarettes, and he seems cooler than he is, and he says, you know, something about you kissed like fire, so it doesn't tell us about sex. Doesn't get into, like, a notch on his cane.

And I love songs that talk about kisses as proxy for whatever happens. And in that story, he has an accident where he's above his station in the world as he perceives it. It somewhere you have an accident where you had your best day ever. Even the person who's the most shit out of luck has their best days ever. And they have to ask themselves, well, what happened on that day? What was it that you did? Start building on that. And by. You also have to realize that certain kinds of criticism has to be ignored. You can't process all criticism because a lot of criticism is designed to hold you back as opposed to help you get better. And your obligation is only to process constructive criticism. Now you can turn negative criticism and destructive criticism into something you can do, but stop processing the criticism that's actually poisoned so that the other person can get ahead of you in the world. And I think the. That thing about high agency is try to find the cheat codes. The one I've given before that I love because I don't need it anymore, is that in Penn Station in New York, you're intermediate between Washington DC and Boston, so you're not guaranteed a seat on the train.

And there's a giant board which says which track you should meet your train, whichever direction you're going. That means everybody runs to try to get a seat on that train. But there's a much smaller screen that says arrivals for people meeting trains, since mostly trains are never met. And there's a tiny number of people who crowded around that screen, and they always knew what platform the train was coming in ten minutes earlier than everybody else, and you'd go to that platform and you'd see everyone else who figured out that cheat code. And so my claim is that somebody's winning. Try to figure out what it is that they're doing. You can even pay them. Like, just give me half an hour of your time. Tell me what you do. Let me watch you. If you're not good in a bar, whether you're male or female, meeting people, somebody's good. Befriend that person. Buy them a drink, do something kind.

Breaking the fourth wall. The exact solution that I found to be able to punch above my own weight when we wanted to start this cinema series for the show was I realized that really big name guests, like the sort of top flight ones that are in the most demand, you can get them to be more likely to come on the show if you just go to them. If you find out where they are, and you often send a car for them and you show up there, because the likelihood of catching Jordan or you or Jocko or goggins when they're through Austin is essentially zero. But say, look, I'm going to remove all of the different bits of friction. I'm going to come to you. Can we make it work? That was one of the things that worked. So again, George has this question he uses to work out who is the highest agency person in your entire life. Tell me you're trapped in a south american prison. I. You know what this one is? It's absolutely. It's one of those awful 5000 people in there. It's a hundred people per room. There's half the number of bunk beds.

Everyone's got a skinhead. You have 24 hours to get out and you've got one phone call. Who'd you ring?

It's hard in my case.

Why?

I happen to be the brother of Bret Weinstein. I happen to have worked for Peter Thiel. My wife is a total supermind. I've got no shortage of these people.

You only get one phone call.

I know. I can't figure out who most people. The thing that I worry about is that most people have no one.

Yep.

But, you know, it has to do with people who are extremely generative and high trust and can readjust their thinking because no solution is clear. But, yeah, I think a different version of that question is, is your problem which call to place or that you have no one you can even think of? And then another version of the question would be, if you could call anyone and you don't happen to know them personally is there anyone that you would think would be the best person?

And another insight for this would be for how many people would you be that phone call?

It's an interesting question.

We want to cultivate agency in ourselves. And every time that I've asked this question at dinner or on a podcast.

So what's the most impossible situation you've gotten, you've macgyvered your way out of?

I've managed to prepare myself pretty well. Typically, it's not much MacGyvering, but I came off a moped in Bali and managed to lose the skin on basically the entire left hand side of my body. Balinese road versus me in a tiny pair of swim shorts. And I lost. Lost. First round tko. And I needed to come up with a solution to be able to get myself looked after while I was out there in terms of sort of healthcare. I needed to kind of manage my own, the protocol that I was going through. And then I also needed to make the call about when to come home. And it wasn't like I had a ton of money to be able to get myself back. So did that. Spent a week laid up trying to get better. Realized I wasn't going to get better. Also realized that Indonesia versus the NHS, for all the problems the NHS has, I'd rather be in the UK. So I managed to do that. But that involved. Oh, actually, that was an interesting one. On the way back, one of the things I didn't want to do was not be able to have my foot elevated, but I had no one near enough money to be able to fly business class, so flooded my eyelashes at the male flight attendant and they took pity on me and put me in premium economy and a couple of other things.

So that's one that comes to mind. But no south american prisons or anything like that. Yeah. How about you? Is there anything that comes to mind?

Yeah, not all of which I can discuss.

Not at liberty to say publicly.

Well, no, I mean, some of it is. I also have two children to shepherd through this world. And there's a lot of technology, just in terms of problem solving, that I love sharing with my audience, but there's some that I reserve for my family alone. And, you know, I would say there are lots of things that I'm not good at. To have Jordan Peterson come after you on conscientiousness, I think it's because he's asked me several times to do his show and I've never really gotten back to him. I don't know if that's so. Jordan, I totally apologize. Love you. I think that in general, the thing that I'm most valued for in my family is when you need an elephant or two pulled out of a hat. That's what I'm really good at, pulling rabbits out of the hat. Not so much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very much so. I hope that I'm the same, too.

But, you know, actually, probably geometric unity is I have only two claims. No, sorry, I should say differently. I have only three claims on immortality. My children is my first. Geometric marginalism, which I did with my wife, which is rebasing economics on the differential calculus, not of ordinary calculus, but of gage theory is the second. And that is dwarfed by geometric unity. And the image I have when I think about this is of a person cradling a flame in a hurricane for 40 years against all odds. Like it is without question, the most brilliant thing I've ever done, ever will do. Whether it is right or wrong, whether it is fool's gold or real gold, has not been determined by the outside world. I'll be stunned if it's fool's gold, but I cannot believe. I don't even know how to live with it. It's so outside of ordinary. I can't answer questions. People are like, hey, what are you up to? What are you thinking about? What are you doing? And it's like, if I told you, why does the conversation will always go south? And I think lex asked me this. What are you proudest of?

It's like trying, not giving up, not listening to every voice in the world which says, let go of that thing. It's like, now, I'm betting that 10,000 of you are wrong and I'm right. And I pretty sure I will win in the end, and you will lose. But I will probably have to wait for this generation of humans to die or retire.

What did you bring? What's that?

Which one?

The little things. What are those?

Well, I mentioned this woman when I was on Joe Rogan, Bathsheba Grossman, and she's a national treasure. What you're holding in your hand is a three dimensional projection of the four dimensional platonic solid corresponding to the dodecahedron. I think that's called the 120 cell. So that's a four dimensional object projected in three dimensions, and it's the analog of the dodecahedron. There are five platonic solids in dimension four. You'll give me that one. This is the thing that you can't even believe exists. That is called the 24 cell. It is a platonic solid projected into dimension three that has absolutely no analog, that was only discovered in the end of the 18 hundreds, I think by Schafley. Almost no human knows it exists. And because of the fact that you and I have been able to do millions of views, more people are going to know about Bathsheba Grossman. And we're going to take care of our mathematical artists who are able to transmit the most profoundly bizarre features of the world. This has to do with something called an exceptionally group called f four. It's 52 dimensional. It has a. Its next analog is 78 dimensions called e six.

E seven has 133. And the granddaddy of them all, e eight, has 248 dimensions. Nobody knows why they're there. It's like a mathematical platypus from outer space with no context. And I brought them sort of for no reason because I didn't know where we were going. When I did the Terrence Howard thing at Joes request, it generated a lot of interest and a lot of heat. I got a ton of criticism. Why would you sit down with a pseudoscientist? You're normalizing this behavior. Terrence Howard is actually playing with all sorts of geometric shapes and dualities between geometric shapes that even professional mathematicians couldn't figure out. Neil degrasse Tyson says, I don't know where these come from. I didn't know where the conversation would head. You always throw curveballs. And so I just want. I brought a couple of toys, things in case they. They came up.

Have you ever read escaping Flatland?

Oh, how can I not even know about this?

So it's a book from the 18 hundreds, and it is about a sphere that goes to visit a two dimensional world, a flatland. So in the two dimensional world, you have different shapes and the shapes denote the class.

Well, this is Abbott's book Flatland.

Yes.

Is this beyond that?

No, but it's also referred to as escaping Flatland.

I see. I didn't understand.

Sorry. So, yes, Abbott's book, but I always think about that. I still really don't understand tesseracts. And what are those vases that loop back on themselves? What are they, bottles? Yeah.

Hey, shout out to Clifford stoll in Berkeley, California, who produces them at Acme Klein Bottle. Somebody I did a commercial for who never asked for it. We have to help these businesses so people are aware you can order a Klein ball. Go on. Sorry about that.

It's just cool. But Interstellar is my favorite ever movie, and they tried to represent a 4d tesseract in three dimensional shape, three dimensional space, and that's kind of hard to wrap my head around, but Flatland is an interesting equivalent, just one down into a place that we can. So for the people that haven't read it, this sphere is able to make itself shrink and grow at will in front of. And it amazes the inhabitants of Flatland, because obviously, as it moves up and down through its third dimension, it just grows and shrinks in the two dimensions.

Always fear passing through a plane you see in the cross section, correct?

Yeah. And it gets bigger and it gets smaller. And the flatland inhabitants are absolutely amazed at this ability that has to do. And it's just great. It's a really, really cool way to think about. And I also think about the challenges that people have of orthogonal thinking. You know, if you are trying to play with ideas that break against whatever the sort of the current flow is, maybe it's with subtlety or complexity or nuance or charitability. And. Yeah, I like thinking about that sphere. I like thinking about him.

It's a very odd thing that you bring up, because that example, and when you said the title escaping flatland, I was goosebumps. I have not gotten back to Sam Altman, who asked me for a proposal, because I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to help Sam now, Sam is a friend of mine, and I think very, very highly of Sam Altmande, despite all the machinations and whatnot. I know him to be a person deeply concerned with humanity, who will not be understood, even maybe he has to do machiavellian things in order to take care of humanity. It's a very confusing situation in a certain sense. Large language models are flatland. All it can do is read what we've already done and extrapolate. And so, to the extent that we haven't extrapolated everything from what we've already can connect things that we didn't connect. Example I like to give is guns, germs, and steel may have been one of the great books of all time, but it was Jared diamond taking things that were in the literature scattered. And without doing real original research, he came up with a thesis that was spellbinding. The key question is, how do you break out of Flatland?

And there's a tool that is not understood because you learn about it in, I don't know, middle school, and you don't realize what it is. And that's the square root operation. The square root is how you escape Flatland. You ask for the square root of two, which is an integer, and you wind up in algebraic numbers that are irrational. You ask for the square root of negative one, and you add end up in purely imaginary numbers that you learn in school, and you don't know why they're there. Even mathematicians don't really fully understand how to apply them in everyday life reasons we can get into in another podcast. You can apply it to the determinant of a matrix if it's anti symmetric, and get something called the fafion that nobody who's taken ordinary linear algebra has even heard of. It's sort of reserved for the priests of mathematics. The square root is an example of a question that you can ask inside of the reality that you're aware of. So, for example, the light between you and I is photons, and those are examples of bosons. But the matter here is sort of the square root of the light, if you will.

And this is what we would call fermionic. Once you understand that the square root is the psychedelic of mathematics, that breaks you into the panic room that you did not know was even present in the house that you bought. I mean, it's your house. At some point, I realized that there was a space behind a wall in our house. And I said, break it open. And the contractor broke it open and found all sorts of things that had been, like, hidden there since the 1970s in a compartment that could be opened up. And people had lived in the house. They had no idea that the. This thing existed.

That's what therapy's like. That's what therapy is like. Therapy is inviting somebody into a house that you've lived in your entire life and them showing you rooms that you didn't know.

With that, it's also the case that most of the really important programs in your brain have never run. Like, I don't know if you've ever experienced real hunger. I don't know whether you've ever. I've only once in my life gotten to a level of hygiene that was so low that my risk taking suddenly changed. It's an emergency program that says you cannot afford to not take massive risks if you're this dirty. I was in the himalayas in the north of India, and I cannot even believe the risks I took when I was that dirty. It's an astounding thing that we live in our own bodies and have no idea what's internal to us, and in particular, in our own mind. The issue about tesseracts. I could teach you to see four dimensions. If you take that Klein bottle, and for people who don't know what it is, they can google it. Imagine that in clear glass, you take an ordinary bottle with a punt, that little thing at the bottom that goes up, and you pull the punt through the wall, and you bend the neck and you fuse the two. Now, okay, you say, well, it has to go through the wall of the bottle.

But if the bottle is clear and you make the neck increasingly blue as it goes into the punt, and then it goes back into the clear. If the amount of blueness is a fourth dimension, you can see that it's not actually intersecting itself, because the wall of the bottle is clear, but the neck is highly blue. So you are actually literally seeing four dimensions. Now, I can increase that to five dimensions by changing the texture, six dimensions with respect to the opacity, and you can more or less see six dimensions visually. Once you train your mind, I mean, it's like, it's not a particular trick. Above that, you really don't have the benefit. Like, the entire back of your head is your visual cortex, and you can't use it directly. Then you have to start doing incredible things where you allow low dimensional sort of sketches to stand for higher dimensional objects, and you have to lean on the crutches of algebra. But if the question is that before you shuffle off this mortal coil, you want to see four dimensions, it's entirely possible.

We'Ve got an even more intense couple of months coming up than the last time that we spoke. You kind of hinted at it earlier on. This velocity of stories and forgetfulness, either done on purpose, done by accident, done due to sheer random access, memory limitations. How do you. Well, first off is the speed of meme and news velocity that we're seeing now just classic election year. And I've not been here seeing this up close before.

No, no. The. I want you to think about the number of times you've seen a Mona Lisa. Me? The Mona Lisa had to be the Mona Lisa for many years before it was worthy of so many memes. That Trump photograph where he's pumping the air with blood on his face had about 4 seconds before it was a meme. The concept of the sacred and the archival is being lost because of the novel environment provided by the Internet and the tools of editing. The distracted boyfriend meme or hoc tua. Right. These things are so fast that they are robbing us of the sacred. And you don't need to believe in God, the reverence. If you've ever been to Florence and seen Michelangelo's David.

I'm going in a week and a half.

Oh, boy. The Botticelli room at the Uffizi gallery. The David in particular, because you see the studies when you go to the academy, you're walking through the studies for the David, and then you actually see this thing. You've seen it a million times before, and you still can't believe it. It's so different. It's so different than everything else. Like, I was just playing Jules Holland and Jeff Beck doing drown in my own tears, and I was thinking, I am the same species as Jeff Beck. I am the same species as Michelangelo. I'm the same species. Species is Gaudi and his ceiling of la sagrada familia. These are things that are just beyond anything. How did I get onto this? Oh, the sacred. The reverential speed of memes. The speed of memes. We can't afford it. We too are entitled to the archival. We too are entitled to something that isn't a joke, you know, the cringe of vacation, of everything. Everything is being performative. Everything has been done. God damn it.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I know exactly what you mean. The exhaustion that you have with it, I feel as well, I like. Sorry. I like earnest people.

I like cringe. You want to talk about something really contrarian, like, I was just listening to Tim McGraw's something like that. Do you know the song, I had a barbecue stain on my white t shirt. She was killing me with that miniskirt, you know? Never heard this. The whole song is. It's cringe. You know, like, Shania Twain's man, I feel like a woman is a bit cringe. I like it a lot. The Tim McGraw song is the setup for a heterosexual romance between what must have been a 16 year old girl and a 17 year old boy who meet at a county fair. And it's perfectly constructed. And the reason that it's cringe is because it's so clearly perfectly constructed. It introduces the boy buying gasoline and a Coke. He drives to the county fair. He sees a girl in line. Instant attraction. They skip stones together. So it's not just animalistic. There's a sweetness. And whoever wrote that song, I'm assuming it's Tim McGraw, but maybe it was somebody else realizes that every woman has this question, why aren't you going to leave me as I age? What is so special about me? Right?

And so they're singing along about, she's got red lipstick and a mini skirt and all this stuff. Like, she's above, he's below. I work so hard for that first kiss, not about sex. You don't know whether anything went beyond that kiss. You probably don't remember me. So you think that they don't have sex. It's very well constructed, and it's basically a song for men and women at the same time. We used to know how to do this, and part of the reason it's emotional is that we really blew it with LGBTQ. I really appreciate that we screwed up with gay men. We did not do a good job by then. Being gay and being male is a very strange, different thing from the point of view of heterosexuality. It's a huge evolutionary puzzle, and we needed to make accommodations, particularly for that community. But it is also true that heterosexual families are as flawed as they are with the fighting, with the recrimination, et cetera, et cetera, are the mainstay of a society that will last. And I have an enormous number of gay friends. It's not. Some of my best friends are gay. It's like, way too many of them are gay.

So I spent a lot of time in gay space, and what I've learned from that is that you can go about 85% of the distance talking about relationships, sex in the abstract, hopes, dreams for the future, attraction and then the last 15% is really different. And I don't want to be in your business at all. And it's constructed that way because we freak each other out. We don't really want the specifics of the details beyond a certain point. And I think that that last 15% can't be shared between straights and gays. We can go 85% of the distance. But the heterosexual community is now much more in need of help than it ever has been before. And the idea that as soon as you say something about boys and girls and fallen in love and just these assumptions about masculinity and femininity that you immediately have to acknowledge every other type is one of the things that I think is absolute poison for a society. There is special stuff about men and women that isn't shared with the rest of the rainbow. And boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in. This song is about rekindling the ability to say, I have a right to sing about boys and girls without bringing in every other thing that can happen.

We've got to get back to romance. If you think about songs that mention marriage, right, there are all sorts of songs where men and women sing along together, old songs that appeal equally to both groups. And if you think about this, the concept of a man putting a woman on a pedestal and a woman looking up to a man, both of these things have to happen for the magic to occur. I think we've stopped instructing our young as to what this is and why it's worth working for, and why being single and racking up spectacular body counts is not an answer the way you think it's going to be. When you start out, you know, it's important not to keep changing everything every 4 seconds. There are novels. Think about when the sopranos came out and the length of those storylines. Think about the development of Tony Soprano versus, let's say, a beautifully drawn character like Michael and the Godfather. Tony Soprano is drawn at some level that puts a great film like Michael Corleone, you know, Michael Corleone's odyssey to shame. How do we come up with something that's archival? And one of the things that I say that nobody, I don't think anybody's picked up on it.

I have a line that great art is the reflection of our time in real time, for all time. You have to accept that if you're Shakespeare, you're writing in England in a particular era. You can't try to write universally. It has to be performed in that time to feed back to the people who are living it with you. And it has to be archival so that nobody says, wherefore art thou? In our modern context. But we're going to work our asses off so that we can go back. I can still recite the first lines of Chaucer because my high school knew that it was important to know something in middle English. Where is that? How do we stop this memeification? I get it. Everything's a joke. But now the idea is that the guys throwing spitballs in the back of the class are the Professors and the class is not functioning. You know, at some level Cringe Earnest. The hardest thing to say is, I believe in this person. Like, you know, Douglas Murray is a mutual friend of ours. I don't know everything Douglas has said. I don't know. They haven't said some really horrible things, nor does he know whether I've said those things.

But I saw him attacked Online. That's an archival friendship. I want to be friends with Douglass forever. I really admire that guy, and I think it's important for us in the podcasting universe to be earnest and to say, I care. You want to talk about something radical? It's not Reddit. The average Reddit post that I read has one point, and it's, wow, you fell for that thing that I saw right through. Really? You're going to use your time on Planet Earth to convince people that you see through everything and that everybody who fell for something? There's this brilliant moment that Brett Easton Ellis had when I was podcasting with him, where he started talking, we were talking about seduction. It was like, can you imagine never falling for a seduction? Like never being seduced your whole life, man, are you missing out. How do we get people to be able to hold the illusion? So with respect to the next couple of months, I don't know that anything crazy is going to happen. It's still a million years. Kamala was not elected through a normal primary system that we've had since 1968, when everything fell apart in Chicago.

For the Democrats, Donald Trump, the assassination story is a very, very bizarre one. I don't think Donald Trump is acceptable to the international order. I'm not saying that they will take him out with a bullet, but they will certainly take him out with memes, tweets, data analytics, skullduggery. And I'm actually most interested in this other campaign of Bobby Kennedy. But more importantly, at the moment, Nicole Shanahan was just up with Nicole Shanahan in the Bay Area, and I haven't endorsed her and she hasn't asked for an endorsement, which she wants to work on is incredible. I wrote a paper on Kosian labor markets and immigration and how to actually redo immigration properly. And Nicole is thinking about AI and Ronald Coase and his very deep theories of economics. Do you know about coase?

I listened to the episode you did with her, so I know that much.

To take Kamala, who is currently vice president, and the ridiculous things that she says that make no sense at all, and to talk to somebody who wants to talk about protecting the labor market the way Andrew Yang, Sam Altman and now Nicole Shanahan are thinking about, you're talking about people who don't even seem to be like the same species.

I need to ask you this. Can you please try and explain to me what you interpret by what can be unburdened by what has been? What does that mean?

I don't know if I should say. I don't know if I should say. There's a line in Marx where sometimes you hear certain phrases like a world to win. AOC uses the phrase we have a world to win, which comes from the end of the communist manifesto. Originally written in German. It was the name I used to hang out in the revolutionary bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the communists because they print everything in every language. So if you're trying to learn multiple languages, they'll print the same text in all of these languages and you can compare. It basically says you have to wipe out what has been to arrive in.

The new and where's it from, what can be unburdened by what has been.

It's not a direct translation, but it occurs in Karl Marx. I wasn't expecting this. I could find you the exact reference. If you think about what Mao had to do to wipe out chinese history, what Pol Pot had to do, you're trying to wipe out memory because the memory has all of this burden. Why is it important to go after doctors and lawyers and teachers and professors? Because in some sense, they are going to resist the new order that you're about to impose. You're looking for a blank slate, like.

A tether to the past.

Okay. I'm going to tell a story I don't know that I've ever told anyone. Maybe I have, maybe I haven't. Can't promise it's original to you, but I was in Hoi an in Vietnam, and I'm gonna lose this one. Hoi an is one of the only beautiful places that I found, like Hue and Hoi An. A lot of things were really ripped up in that war. And there is an unbelievable and difficult instrument, which the vietnamese language is very hard. So I'm going to say it wrong. Called. It would be written as Dan Bao. It's one string and a giant lever, and you pluck the harmonics. And it's supposed to be an intimate instrument, I think sometimes played by the blind, where only the person who's intended is the recipient of the music. Okay. I see this in a window in Hoi an, and I become transfixed by it. And a woman says, I see you looking at this in English. Would you like to come in? I said, I don't want to impose. She says, no, no, no, it's not mine. So she invites me in, and there's this guy who appears to be brain dead.

He's, like, deformed. I'm not going to get through this. And he's speaking very haltingly, and I don't know who he is. And something about music, something about journalism, something about a professional. I can't really make out what's happening. I'm asking about the instrument. And this woman brings him a guitar. And this deformed man starts playing some transcript, like Chopin or some piano concerto on the guitar at some incredible level. And I can't even imagine that his body can do it. And so I have no idea where I am or what's happening. And then he motions for, like, a book, and she brings a book. And it has all of these articles about this man tortured for his principled stand against communism. This man has been destroyed, mind, body, to the point where it's just painful to watch him. And I realized that basically he just, do you know what a nail house is? If you google nail house under Google images, do it. Well, you can't do it or you are off the Internet.

No, I can do it. But.

Tell me what you see.

It's a tall building, an individual standalone structure in the middle of a road.

There are these people who will not give up their homes when a shopping mall goes in or a road is put, and for some reason they'll build a highway to screw over the person who stands up and says, I will not move. And the idea is that that road is the future, unburdened by what has been. And then there's some holdout who won't go along with the program.

If Kamala Harris is as unsophisticated as we think she is, do we really believe that she is quoting from the dark depths of why do you believe.

She is as unsophisticated as you have just claimed. What did her father do?

I don't know.

Look it up. And by the way, I am assuming that I will end up on the open skies watch list as a result of this podcast.

That is crazy. By the way, what happened to Tulsi? The trip? The quade s on her boarding pass. Donald J. Harris, the father of Kamala Harris, jamaican american economist, professor emeritus at Stanford University, originally from St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica.

What kind of economics?

Known for applying post keynesian ideas to development economics. What's post keynesian?

I don't know.

Post keynesian economics is a school of economic thought with its origins in the general theory of John Maynard Keynes. Subsequent development influenced to a large degree by a name I can't pronounce.

I think that there was a lot of marxist thought, and as a man whose family comes from the far left, you recognize certain sorts of commonalities. I'm sure she would see them in me. The democratic party is not communist. I don't think that's right. That's the critique of many of my right wing friends. But it is welcomed in a lot of neo marxian thought. I would say AOC is straight up marxist. I don't know. I think Kamala is everywhere between crony finance and Marxism. You're talking about things for which you do not have language.

So the reason that I said I don't think that Kamala can be as sophisticated as perhaps this obscure reference said a hundred times, apparently, according to the archive.

Who's Charles Mingus?

I don't know.

Kamala is a lot smarter than you're given her credit for.

I mean, this is your point about how many levels through it do you go? This is the first one. This is the second one. This is the third one. But in order to be able to do the Ukraine is a country, it is a small country. Russia is a big country. They are a bigger country. This is bad. Time is all around us. In order to be able to do that self referentially with agency, knowing what you're doing, the metacognition, to be able to do that and play a role, to me, seems that's like 200 IQ stuff, to be able to do that.

I don't think so. So I think it's 130 IQ stuff. I think you could do it better than you think. We could have a pretend. All right, I'm going to talk to you in a way you haven't heard before. Son, I'm going to school you on a few things. You can stop that silly grin and wipe it right off your face. We can sound like however we want. I could affect some sort of Oxbridge accent or I could do Cockney. It doesn't matter. You're looking at characters. This is why I wrote the 2011 Kayfabe essay, because you're looking at professional. Do you imagine that the iron Sheik, who is the Iron Sheik, who is Triple H, who is the undertaker? Do you think he actually works in a mortuary? These are characters. George W. Bush, as a debater in Texas for the governorship, was really, really smart. And suddenly he got real dumb and folksy. And do you imagine he actually says nuclear? He knows it's nuclear. You know, I would learn to say nuclear. I could say nuclear. I got to be careful with that nuclear physics. And I can get democrats to correct me and look like assholes every time.

This is. There's an old FDR line, which is, nothing in politics happens by accident. Don't get taken in at level one. Look, you know, a friend of mine, Dan Barkay, has a beautiful thing where he says when someone looks at the window and one person sees the reflection and the other person is looking through the window and what's on the other side, they don't realize that they're seeing different things. I believe that, in part, this is a superposition of signals to Wall street, to antifa, to organized labor, to women in the workforce worried that they're never going to find mates and have children. These are ridiculous things crafted to appeal to many different people and to be decoded by different groups. Kamala really is scary for very reasons, for very different reasons than Donald Trump is scary. It's a weird election for me because I know three of these people. I know JD Vance and I know Bobby Kennedy a little bit and Nicole Shanahan a little bit better. And I dont at all know the democratic ticket, nor do I know Donald Trump. But Donald Trump isnt who he seems to be. Donald Trump is much more methodical, much better at business, and very shady techniques at that.

I think. I remember hearing a story about how he bought a bunch of pianos for his hotel and didn't want to pay full price and then explained, I don't know if the story is true. So I'm going to be very clear about that.

Allegedly.

Allegedly. And I talked to people who are in business with them, and one of whom did serious business with him, said to me, he's a very good businessman who you wouldn't want to do a second deal with. These are complex life forms, and I don't know what I'm watching. I do know that I had a meeting, sort of by accident, with a person in the democratic party who really tried to explain to me, Eric, can you hold off on the anti democratic party tweeting? You need a higher level briefing about how we're actually conducting ourselves. I just don't think that the surface is worth very much. We're in a lot of danger. And one of the things that I don't love about myself in podcasting space is that I don't get to talk about why I'm so worried about existential risk. It doesn't come out of needing gloom and doom to energize me. I am so head over heels with this planet, with all of its wonder and beauty, that I can't imagine that people who. Who've never been to Glacier National park, who've never been to a hindustani classical music concert, who've never had great durian or cavalierly putting it all at risk because it's fun to posture on issues like Ukraine or Iran.

And that's, like, a major distortion about who I am. Most of what I am is about just waking up every morning and saying, my God, I'm still here on this wonderful spinning orb. And what are all these completely empty suits doing just to maximize profit that is putting everything at risk. And that's why I think this election is a catastrophe. I have no idea what Donald Trump or Kamala Harris represent. I have a very good idea about what Nicole Shanahan represents, and I have a pretty good idea about what Bobby Kennedy wants to represent, whether he does it, the job. You know, he's a complicated guy with a complicated past, and I'm not signing on for, but he's got a real pure heart and he listens, and he's unafraid to take on. Look, the man is willing to die. I wanted to be very clear about this. Bobby Kennedy is willing to die to take on the intelligence community like his uncle. This is a person of extraordinary courage, of extraordinary intelligence and ability, who's had a very complicated life. And, yeah, there's, you know, like, with anybody, there's a lot of stuff that I don't want to sign on for, but I'm definitely working with that campaign, which is not asking me to endorse it, and I'm parking my interest with them.

And I want to explain what the calculation is, because usually the question is, who are you for? Who are you against? It's not that if more people will answer Kennedy Shanahan until November 1, you will get the maximum amount of leverage over the other two campaigns at a bare minimum. But if you throw your lot in with Donald Trump or Kamala, the duopoly has won every election since Millard Fillmore. That's 42 straight elections. If we do not break the duopoly, it will break us. And the Kennedy Shanahan ticket is sophisticated in realizing that campaigning could be something different. It's trying to figure out what should campaigning be. But it's crazy to be an all day session trying to figure out how to save the labor market from AI. And I also want to say something about JD Vance without naming names. And I hope JD doesn't get angry at me for this one. JD invited me out years ago to Ohio to a room in which I was the only Democrat, the only person probably had ever voted Democrat, or lots of prominent people. And we sat in an oak paneled room for three days in the middle of Ohio.

And I swear to God, it was like talking to progressives who were worried about coal miners. It was people talking about the working poor. And unless you're going to believe that all of these luminaries in the republican party were there to fool Eric Weinstein so that he would leak something from this meeting, these people actually cared about shit out of luck Americans who were hurt by NAFTA, who had been betrayed by the democratic party. And watching jdehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe. Like he's campaigning, however he's campaigning. I don't totally recognize that person. But I can tell you this, that in his off moments, where he's just dealing with me, human to human, there is no question in my mind that he cares about the working poor and middle Americans and people under a squeeze, and he cares about hillbillies. And it's not a joke. You know, black Americans are famous for contributing culture to the United States of America. Whether it's dance or music or oratory or writing. Hillbillies are much more invisible. But hillbillies have been central to providing culture for our country. One of the most generative populations out there in west Virginia and kentucky. And I think people forget that we had slavery in the 20th century, lots of it white.

You had. You had alternate money, like bitcoin, except it was script issued by companies. People lived in towns that were owned by companies. They had private armies that were called detectives, like Pinkerton. There was war. Look up the battle of Blair. Mountain or the Harland county coal wars. JD Vance is an heir to, like, listen to, you know, the song. Which side are you on? Oh, my God. Pete Seeger. There was a union organizer. Sorry, I come from very left. Like, far, far left. There was a union organizer whose house, I think was shot up by a detective agency to intimidate him into not organizing the workers. And his wife stayed in the house and penned the song. Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on? They say in Harlan county there are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or thug for JH Blair. Pete Seeger took that song and made it almost like an anthem. The democratic party abandoned these people. If you look at the statistics for voting, it's Democrat in blue, right up until Al Gore. And then it goes hard, hard, red. These people were hurt bad.

And while Hillary was calling them deplorables, people like JD Vance on the right were saying, what do they need? We're not afraid of their bible thumping. We recognize the culture, the endowment, the contribution to american society. And I wish the Democratic Party were doing this. They're right there. Go speak to them. Stop spitting on them and shitting on them and pissing on them. But somehow we've got this sort of NAFTA coked up on NAFTA intellectual elite that says, hey, we helped people in Mexico, so some coal miners got hurt. Boo hoo. Look at the suicide statistics. If you look at suicide statistics, the group that you think is on top, middle aged white men, are killing themselves at a level that nobody else is. And that's a very clear marker of who's actually in distress. Young black women are not in the amount of distress that middle aged white men are. And I think that that's one of the things that's going on in these campaigns that's so confusing, which is that I can tell you for sure that JD Vance, Nicole Shanahan and Bobby Kennedy are 100% sincere, no matter how they're campaigning or what you're upset about in their off moments.

And I've been with all of them. These people deeply care about the shit out of luck. They're. They're interested in taking on real power. I don't know, Trump. Look, you can tell it's not. There's no allegiance. I can't imagine voting for Trump. JD Vance is not the person being portrayed as weird. You want to talk about weird? Take one look at the democratic party and the bizarre stuff that's going on with, I don't know, gender affirming. Care where you're cutting off penises and breasts, giving it new names for radical mastectomies or reproductive mutilation. That's weird to try to do that at scale. A tiny number of people need that in their lives. And by the way, you and I talked about this last time. This Olympics was a real wake up call for me. The number of people who can't deal with the idea that there are. Are people with who've been raised female who may have xy chromosomes. And this is treating this as if it's trans or if it's weird behavior. I mean, I was just sickened by the Republicans. I was sickened by the conservatives who are so adamant about trans that they don't have decency and compassion for a soul who might be in an ambiguous category.

Now, that said, I also think that if you're xy karyotype, you should never be entering a boxing competition and using that leverage against somebody else. It's also the case that even if you're shit out of luck, you have responsibilities in something like a combat sport. And I felt like we tried to have a complex discussion, and I got hit with all of these people on the conservative side. You're making this out to be so complicated to the tiny category. Well, show me the love in your soul first, and then we'll have a discussion.

Yeah. It was an incorrect pattern matching, don't you think? I thought it was a real foot in mouth moment for a lot of people on the right. I thought that they could have.

All.

Of the talking points that were being used about trans people were being applied to this, which just made it sound like people on the right are the bigots for somebody that doesn't fit into one category that everybody had always accused them of being. But it's another superposition, right? How can you hold the. Need some care, especially for an athlete? Oh, my God. But how do you also say to this person, guess what? I know that your love for boxing is this thing, and it's your pursuit that's carrying you through life. I just. Unfortunately for you, this is maybe a.

Sport that you can't do it. You know, if. If that's what's going on. And there's a lot of, you know, there's also a question. If you take, like, Mike Tyson, you know, if you take Mike Tyson's fast twitch muscle, somebody had to ask the question, is that great athlete athleticism, or is that just too much power to be firing at a human head? I don't know the answers. To these things. Joe invited me to combat sports to see UFC. It's remarkable how, like, I think nobody's been killed in the UFC ever, right? It's very important to actually ask these really tough questions, and I think that. And, you know, part of the reason that I wouldn't take the question about. About Brett is that the last time we had a discussion, I found myself being discussed on my brother's podcast. And I don't want to be pitted against Bret and Heather. I love them. I think the world of them. They're brilliant. Their hearts are in the right place. But if we get into an argument about ovo testes, they're going to lose as two biologists, and I'm going to win. It's not all about motility of gametes.

The world will keep throwing curveballs at you, and you have to begin from a heart open place to say, some of us are shit out of luck because we fallen edge cat. And so I stand by everything that you and I did last time. It's a difficult place to be, and if you have to simplify it as to boys or boys, women or women, you're not getting it. On the other hand, we have to stop normalizing what is effectively a reproductive Holocaust against children who we trusted, to schools where people are allowed into recruit into reproductive mutilation. And you've got to combine these in the superposition, or you're just not getting it.

Eric Weinstein, ladies and gentlemen. Eric, I really appreciate you. Every time that we get to sit down, it gets easier and more fun and appears to go for longer as well.

Chris, you're one of the best out here, and I really appreciate. Maybe next time we just get a beer. We don't have to have too much.

I tried to do it. I tried to get that. The line of cocaine you said you didn't want when we went to the bathroom. Look, I'm trying to embody my old club promoter world, but, dude, I really do appreciate you. I look forward to making sense of what happens over the next couple of months at some point next year.

We look forward to doing it soon with.