What the Elite Know that You Don’t - Eric Weinstein (4K)

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, managing director of Thiel Capital and a podcaster. The last 3 years has been a time of massive confusion. No one can agree on what is real, or true, or who is good faith, or a grifter. No matter what you believe in, we can all agree that this epidemic of uncertainty can't continue. Expect to learn what you learn from being around the most rich and powerful people in the world, what it was like to meet Jeffrey Epstein face to face, what Eric thinks about the recent surge in UFO disclosures, his thoughts on Sam Harris’ recent episode with me, whether the downfall of physics and academia is the nail in the coffin for humanity, the biggest issues with having easy access to porn, how women could take a bigger role in the crisis of masculinity and much more... Sponsors: Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 35% discount on all Cozy Earth products by going to http://www.cozyearth.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #media #truth #ericweinstein - 00:00 Eric’s First Holiday for a Long Time 05:41 What Normal People Misunderstand about Elite People 12:53 Balancing Your Scarcity Mentality & Abundance Mentality 16:04 When Eric Met Jeffrey Epstein 32:23 The Response from the Recent UFO Whistleblowers 38:50 How to Defend Against Manipulative Uncertainty 45:38 Where Eric Differs from Sam Harris 48:56 Have We Become Too Sceptical of Institutions? 1:03:32 How the Human Race Becomes Multi-Planetary 1:28:53 Explaining How Good Albert Einstein Was 1:35:49 Why is the Sagrada Familia So Significant? 1:41:09 Balancing the Cognitive with the Transcendent 1:46:28 Do We Rely Too Much on a Brain-Based Economy? 1:56:54 Lessons from Khabib on Arrogance & Humility 2:10:54 The Death of Nuance & Truth in the Social Media Era 2:24:47 Why People Aren’t Having High-Level Interactions Anymore 2:29:37 The Real Problems Men are Facing Today 2:44:11 How Social Media, Video Games & Porn Impact Men 2:50:30 The Consequences of Women’s Inclination Towards Hypergamy 3:01:45 The Educational System’s Biggest Flaws 3:12:52 Where to Find Eric - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You just came back from your first holiday in quite a while.

• 0:05Eric Weinstein?

  Well, my first holiday of, let's say, three weeks or more in quite a while.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  How was that?

• 0:12Eric Weinstein?

  Astounding, really very good to see what's going on in the rest of the world at this particular moment.

• 0:21Eric Weinstein?

  We had previously gone to India in the year to visit family. This was to go back to Turkey and to go to Portugal, but also to the Azores Islands. And I can't tell you how meaningful it was for me to be back traveling.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 0:40Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I mean, partially it's reacqu- when you have children and children change your game for about two decades, you have to realize that that's a transient period. It felt like it was going to go on forever. And so this was sort of trying to figure out, what is it like to go from traveling in your twenties and thirties with that kids to traveling with your kids at the last moment that you still have them at home?

• 1:05Eric Weinstein?

  And now you're going to have the rest of your life without them again, but you can't go back to backpacking and doing certain other things that were easy for you. So you have to figure out how to rejoin your previous life that has been in progress without you actually.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  Pending for a long time.

• 1:18Eric Weinstein?

  Exactly.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  A sabbatical from life, almost.

• 1:20Eric Weinstein?

  The other thing is that you forget about parts of yourself. Like I forgot that I spoke Turkish, not well, but I spoke rudimentary Tarzan Turkish 30 years ago. And to be back in Istanbul and to suddenly have words and phrases and things come back and be talking to cab drivers and, and just people in the street, seeing the change. Obviously, there's been an enormous amount of change in Turkey.

• 1:50Eric Weinstein?

  Portugal is fascinating, seeing certain things at the end of their life cycle. We were at a synagogue in Bursa, where the sort of the home of the Ottoman Empire, where they were down to like their last 50 people, which is a common enough thing. When we visit diaspora Jewish communities, sort of at the tail end with the embers still glowing hot, but no, no chance for a rebirth. And then in the Azores.

• 2:19Eric Weinstein?

  I was not prepared for the level of beauty that we encountered.

• 2:24Eric Weinstein?

  There is a level of beauty that I've only experienced two, maybe three times in my life. That sort of leaves you physically sick. Like ill. It's so beautiful that your, your body is the weak link. Like you might think that sugar is tasty. But if you were to eat a bag of sugar, you'd probably be sick to your stomach. And I would say this was like so much beauty that it was at an almost pathological level and more than, more than I think my family could really take in. We're just so moved.

• 2:57Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say before about how a lot of the time you don't realize the last time you're going to do a thing with a person. And a lot of friends, especially ones that are fathers, have told me the same thing. The last time that you'll bounce your daughter on your knee. You don't know when it's going to happen, but it's going to happen. There's also a really strange realization when you get deeper into adulthood and work out that probably by the age of 18 or 20, you've spent 97 or 98% of the time you're going to spend with your parents. And all that you wanted for the last four years was to be away from them. And now all that you want is to have a little bit more time and it's all gone and you squandered it while it was there.

• 3:32Eric Weinstein?

  I'm on the ethnic program. We don't believe in this stuff. My, my children don't become adults at the age of 18. I don't care about the laws of the United States or the state of California. I think we do family wrong in the States.

• 3:48Eric Weinstein?

  You, you send them off to college and then you tell them, go follow your dream. And they bounce into some locality that you aren't in. And you don't get the benefit of these very strong families because the market has been so strong in the U S for so long. The market more or less took over all sorts of duties that were assigned to families historically. And so the reason that people always say, oh, your families are weak was because our markets were strong. Right? And so insurance and opportunity, all of these things that.

• 4:21Eric Weinstein?

  Could be handed over to the market were. And as a result, when we find out that the markets are not safe, we realize that we've abandoned the structures that we needed to retreat to, that our families are quite small, below replacement rate very often, and we don't live in the same place. And so, you know, I married a woman from India and I basically carry a lot of Eastern European norms. And so my feeling is that my children are my children forever. And I'm not letting go of them. And this idea that it's your life and you can do what you want is only true up to a point. You also have a continuity issue. And this is normal, by the way. And it may sound weird in an American context, but I think that the world recognizes that we're links in a chain.

• 5:06Eric Weinstein?

  And there's a certain amount that you get to do that's just yours because it's your life. But never go full Billy Joel.

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, pan generational housing is something, being in Austin, people getting ranches, starting even, you know, 10 family mini villages with a bunch of other people. Yeah, it's something that I'm seeing occur more and more. And, you know, in an atomized, like mass solipsism, mass individualism society, this doesn't sound like a bad repress.

• 5:36Eric Weinstein?

  We got to the end of that dream and it didn't, it didn't work.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  You've been around a lot of very powerful, very rich people throughout your career.

• 5:45Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, that's not true. Only relatively recent, only in the last decade and a half.

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  That's quite a while in many people's lives. What do you think that most normal people would be surprised to know about the powerful and the rich individuals' worldviews, the way that they hold themselves, what is and isn't true?

• 6:09Eric Weinstein?

  They feel powerless.

• 6:13Eric Weinstein?

  That's one of the craziest things is that very often you're at a table of people of immeasurable wealth and they're talking about the rich or the hyper connected. They don't see themselves in these terms. Why? I think there's different kinds of rich, to be, to be honest. I think that if, for example, you got rich from arms, from, let's say, arms manufacturing, you've been entwined with government your whole life, or agriculture, something that's highly regulated, that's

• 6:51Eric Weinstein?

  extraction on oil and gas. Those people, I think, have always been close to power. A lot of the dream of tech, for example, was we don't need the government, we'll just build stuff in our garages and if it's cool, it'll take care of itself. And therefore, we're minimally dependent on the traditional ecosystems. So a lot of tech money felt disenfranchised. They didn't know how to play the game. And that was both to its credit and a huge danger. But I, I think one of the things that I find very interesting is that when people are not rate limited by money, they're rate limited by all sorts of other things. Like,

• 7:34Eric Weinstein?

  they may, they may not want their number to go down. So they go from six billion to four billion would be a huge blow, even though it doesn't seem to impact normal things.

• 7:47Eric Weinstein?

  Another thing is, is that most of them have given up on the retail notion of reality. What's that? Whatever mainstream media, you know, if you have a worldview that allows you to listen to National Public Radio to, that then reads the Wall Street Journal and, and the Times and the New Yorker, whatever that point of view is, most of the very powerful rich people I know have, have checked out at a level.

• 8:15Eric Weinstein?

  That is astounding. They don't believe that they can afford to depend on normal institutions. How does that show up in their lives? Weird ways. You know, they don't have a regular doctor. They have concierge medicine. Their fire policy comes with a private fire department that will fight for their home, but won't necessarily fight for homes next door. I didn't know that that was a thing. Okay.

• 8:42Eric Weinstein?

  You know, it's not until you travel with some of these people that you you realize that there's a secret corridor in the airport or a way of getting onto the plane. This is, there's a lot of infrastructure built for a very small number of people. And for the most part, they can't figure out what to do with the money. And it's my belief. So they,

• 9:07Eric Weinstein?

  if you believe that the world is headed towards an apocalypse, you're very unlikely to want to contribute money because that's the only fungible thing you have in an emergency. And so I think that a lot of the sort of apocalyptic thinking of very powerful people is very destructive because they're they're trying to figure out how to survive a mild apocalypse. Like a six months of your, you know, if I have six months of canned goods and I've got four ex Navy SEALs on my property. The shock collar's on. In a remote location in Montana, can I can I weather the storm with a few diesel generators? So if it's a very mild apocalypse, maybe they've got six months plan.

• 9:52Eric Weinstein?

  But a lot of, I think that there's a lot of thinking that you should husband your resources because you don't know what's coming, given that things are going to have to collapse. And I think it's very sad because those are the people who could shore up the system.

• 10:07Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think about helplessness at the top end of the wealth distribution, given that a lot of people feel like they are restricted by their material possessions. But it seems like despite there being a lot of abundance, at least monetarily, the scarcity mentality scales all the way up.

• 10:24Eric Weinstein?

  It really does. Particularly if you've been deprived early in your life, there's something that happens where you're nervous till your dying day that you're going to die under an overpass. Right? I'm not kidding. One thing that I highly recommend, people never take me seriously, is a video game called a tower defense game of plants versus zombies. And plants versus zombies ends in a situation where you win all the things you can inside of the game, but somehow you still have the ability to continue to earn even though there's nothing left to purchase. And the reason that I find this fascinating is you get to watch your own psychology, which is now that you've given yourself the

• 11:06Eric Weinstein?

  ability to earn, you can't bring yourself to stop earning, even though earning has lost meaning. And so if you can't get to that in real life, you can at least get to that inside of plants versus zombies. And I highly recommend it because you have to give yourself some idea of we have to cross finish lines as they come. If you decide, okay, when I get to $10 million, that's when I can afford to become a philanthropist, then you're going to get there and you're going to realize, no, the goals are going to, you know, the goalposts are going to move. So think about how a waitress sees this. Waitresses do philanthropy almost from, from the beginning. They'll, they'll overtip somebody who gives them good service and they can't afford it. And, you know, it's sort of, it's a poverty trap when you're at the very low end of

• 11:51Eric Weinstein?

  the earnings spectrum. But I think there's something to take from that, which is practice a little bit of philanthropy and a little bit of kicking your shoes up and not always deferring.

• 12:04Eric Weinstein?

  Taking, taking profit in some sense on your success. So make sure that all throughout your life, you're treating yourself to some luxury, even when you can least afford it. And you're just exhibiting a little bit of goodness, even though you feel like you desperately need to build yourself up, because otherwise you'll always push it out.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  There's a Morgan Housel quote where he says, the best way to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts. And he's wrote this great book called The Psychology of Money. And it's true that most people treat their goals, their relationship to their goals is like the horizon, that for every step toward it they get, it then moves one step further away. It's probably more like the horizon on a spring or on a rubber band, that it gets a little bit closer and then it bunk, it snaps away from you. And I've been around a lot of people that have got chunks of wealth. And it's a rare thing to see someone who doesn't still have that scarcity mentality, despite the fact that they've acquired it.

• 13:08Eric Weinstein?

  You need to keep the scarcity mentality. It's not a mistake. The problem is, is that you also need an abundance mentality. And then you need to selectively access them in different circumstance.

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the tension between those two.

• 13:21Eric Weinstein?

  Well, it's just this regulated expression idea that we keep trying to find settings where we don't, you know, like, just let me set the air conditioner at 68 and then I'll be happy forever. In reality, more or less you need contradictory facilities and you need to know when to pull one in and let the other out. And, you know, this is the hard thing. Anybody with multiple children knows that, you know, with one kid, you're saying you cannot afford to take these risks. If you jump off something like that and you don't look below, think what you could do. The other kid needs this, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Come on.

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've heard, I've heard your brother say that him and his wife's advice to the children was, as long as you don't do anything to your eyes, you can kind of take the risks that you want.

• 14:09Eric Weinstein?

  Yes and no. I mean, there's teeth, there's throats. Anything somebody who does combat sports knows.

• 14:15Chris Williamson?

  He's gonna try and attack.

• 14:16Eric Weinstein?

  Right, right. Small joints, whatever it is. There are plenty of ways to get yourself into real trouble.

• 14:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 14:22Eric Weinstein?

  The key thing that you're trying to use childhood for is to go through the mistakes that are.

• 14:29Eric Weinstein?

  Not permanently disfiguring.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the importances of having fathers around, the importance of rough and tumble play.

• 14:36Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 14:36Chris Williamson?

  Is facilitated almost exclusively by fathers. And you learn the limits of your strength, you learn the limits of your body, you learn how high of a tree you can jump off and how high of a tree you can't jump off.

• 14:49Eric Weinstein?

  You also learn to lose. I mean, I really hate some of this winner talk where basically people have no plan to lose. And then when they actually experience loss, they tend to throw everything away to say, I didn't lose, you know? That's very interesting.

• 15:05Chris Williamson?

  In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the e-commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without any expertise. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. So whether you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in-person POS or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's e-commerce platform, they have got everything covered for you. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce across the United States. Massive brands like Jim Shark still use Shopify. That's how powerful it is. So if you want to start selling something, anything

• 15:47Chris Williamson?

  online, Shopify is where to start. You can begin a $1 per month trial period right now by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom to take your business to the next level today. You met Jeffrey Epstein once.

• 16:08Eric Weinstein?

  Yep.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about what that's like coming face to face with somebody of that caliber.

• 16:17Eric Weinstein?

  Whatever that means. Well, one thing is that there is a physiological reaction that corresponds to this phrase that, you know, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Like, that's a real physiological feeling. I don't know whether the hair actually does that, but it's exactly what it feels like. You're meeting somebody who is unholy and.

• 16:45Eric Weinstein?

  You know, one of the most interesting things is that he was beckoning into a world that didn't seem to exist but for him as the door, as the doormat. I think that's one of the things that freaked out a lot of these rich people is that he, he felt rich in a movie sense, which is not something that you find among actually rich people.

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 17:15Eric Weinstein?

  Well, a lot of very wealthy people don't own an island. Islands are really tough to maintain. I'm obsessed with islands and, you know, in general, I have to be obsessed with islands that have airports run by other people because, you know, have populations on it. But every rich person starts to wonder, could I afford it? Can I afford an island or how many jets? And if you look at Jeffrey Epstein's wealth, it was beaten, it was like gold beaten into gold foil so that it could cover a vast area and leave the impression of a solid gold life. But it was really probably a mid nine-figure fortune that had been used to buy islands

• 18:00Eric Weinstein?

  and planes, which is not what any nine-figure person is going to do.

• 18:06Chris Williamson?

  So you had a felt sense, an embodied sense of discomfort?

• 18:13Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 18:15Chris Williamson?

  And where did that come from?

• 18:19Eric Weinstein?

  The fact that he had a lipstick camera pointed at me from an art object that he laid a table that was preposterously long and thin with a tablecloth made of an American flag to make it look like a coffin so that I would spill my coffee on the flag of my own country. I mean, the fact that he looked like a mutant Ralph Lauren with this kind of lubricious quality and he's talking all of the science and market stuff and nothing adds up and there's an heiress bouncing on his knee to get her boobs to jiggle to see whether it can distract. I mean, it's like one of these crazy scenes where nothing about it was normal. There was just no, there was no trace of a normal world.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like a script from a movie.

• 19:06Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I mean, I think part of it, John Travolta is like putting a gun to your head and forcing you to drink and break a code in a minute. Yeah, like that part of it. And then there was some sort of like, you know, remember that that story, The Most Dangerous Game, where a man invites you to his island so he can hunt you? You know, this was scary and it was it was meant to be scary.

• 19:33Chris Williamson?

  Sounds menacing.

• 19:34Eric Weinstein?

  Well, I think his product was silence. People think that his product was sex or finance, but it was silence. I'm pretty sure.

• 19:42Chris Williamson?

  How do you what's that mean?

• 19:43Eric Weinstein?

  If you're scary enough. Look, rich people can get sex, but they can't necessarily get people to shut up afterwards.

• 19:54Eric Weinstein?

  So my take on it and my take on it instantly was this is not an actual human. This is a construct of someone's. Someone has created a fake human being called Jeffrey Epstein, who's a mysterious currency trading financier with crazy rules so that no one would ever invest with him. And I think that was to keep people from seeking his investment services.

• 20:23Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, you know, he's labeled disgraced financier, but nobody has a record of trading with him. He was sitting there, he comes into the meeting and he says, you know, well, Eric, I was just doing some currency trading. And I thought about that scene that you sometimes see in as a meme with Steve Buscemi with a skateboard over his shoulder.

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  Hello, fellow teenagers. Hello, fellow financial traders.

• 20:49Eric Weinstein?

  Exactly. So I'm thinking, you don't really look like a rich guy who trades in markets.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  The thing that's interesting that I'm finding myself intrigued by here is.

• 21:05Chris Williamson?

  It takes a moderate amount of cognitive horsepower to be able to piece together this theater that you sat down at.

• 21:15Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Chris Williamson?

  Deployed in a nefarious, malicious, manipulative way.

• 21:23Eric Weinstein?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  But it's smart.

• 21:26Eric Weinstein?

  What do you mean it's smart? Say more.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  It's it's not something that could be done by a simple mind.

• 21:34Eric Weinstein?

  You think he did it?

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh, he has a team of manipulators?

• 21:38Eric Weinstein?

  No, when I say I think he was a construct, I literally mean that. I think he was constructed, like fitted with a story.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so you think he was a plant?

• 21:49Eric Weinstein?

  No, I think he was a construct.

• 21:50Chris Williamson?

  What's that? Okay, you're gonna have to dig into it.

• 21:52Eric Weinstein?

  I think Jeffrey Epstein, super genius financier, was not a thing that existed. Where did the money come from?

• 22:08Eric Weinstein?

  You're gonna mumble Lex Westner? Okay, so that's what you mumble. But then, you know, there's this missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and this fortune of Jeffrey Epstein that we don't can't explain. Are those the same fortune? Now, it's like a conservation of of money principle that if you have a fortune that's missing and you have a fortune that can't be explained and they're connected by Ghislaine Maxwell. I don't know.

• 22:33Eric Weinstein?

  I why is it that no hedge funds? What is it? They file form. I forget if it's 13F. There are certain forms that you have to file.

• 22:46Eric Weinstein?

  Nobody's ever asked for these things. Where who's his prime broker? Where has somebody gone over the prime brokerage? His what are his trades? He would have to move the market if he was, you know, doing a yard of euros or Swiss francs or who knows what, like a billion. That would move the market. So there's no way you can fake retroactively a hedge fund of immeasurable size that trades currencies. I don't think he was a currency trader. He told me he was a currency trader.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  So when you say a construct, who constructs? Who's the builder?

• 23:20Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know. I would imagine some version of the intelligence community.

• 23:26Eric Weinstein?

  You know, sometimes somebody's cover gets blown. We have a very famous unfortunate story of Eli Kohn with the Mossad, where Eli Kohn was an Egyptian Jew, who was fitted with a backstory that he was an Argentinian playboy, who'd made a fortune in Argentina, but was Arabic in origin. And then he moves to Damascus, and he takes out an apartment where he holds orgies, and becomes the best friend of Hafiz Al Asad, right? And so,

• 24:02Eric Weinstein?

  that's an example of a story we know. We know how the intelligence communities of the world create people who don't really exist.

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  Construction of, I know that this is just a one-time thing here that you got to see, but the construction of the coffin-looking American flag, the spilling of the coffee, this weird power play thing that's going on. That seems, now that you say that it wasn't him even pulling his own strings, perhaps, it makes a lot more sense. But even that, that degree of sophistication, I learned this from Daniel Schmachtenberger. We sat down and he's spent some time with particularly powerful people.

• 24:46Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  And he told me this really harrowing story of somebody who has both the desire and the means to treat themselves like an apex predator against their own kind. And they said so. They broke the fourth wall about this and said apex predators don't care about the prey, but they saw their own kind as prey. And I asked Daniel, how does it feel to sit opposite somebody who isn't rate limited by the resources? Who can not only dream to have this, plus have the motivation or lack of virtue or integrity to go ahead and consider doing it, and then has the capacity, the assets to be able to enact it?

• 25:29Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  And it's reminding me, it's giving me this same something. It feels like, it feels like it's up on the top of my head. It's giving me some sort of a sense like that.

• 25:42Eric Weinstein?

  This was intended to be terrifying. It wasn't an accident. It was intended to be as fascinating as it could possibly be, which it was, and terrifying at the same time. And it achieved both, it achieved both objectives. I mean, I was given an opportunity to meet him again. I didn't know what to do. I mean, the other thing that I just found really weird is that he knew about my research. And it turned out that he was connected to my graduate department at Harvard. So he, he had a connection to the Harvard math department unbeknownst to me. I don't know when that began.

• 26:23Eric Weinstein?

  I know two of the professors he was connected through. But this is some unholy story. It has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. It has to do with whatever this thing was. We tripped over a thing. We tripped over a structure. We named the structure Jeffrey Epstein.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  It must be very unfortunate in some regards for whoever it was, if that's true, that was in charge of this construction. That it became, that people got T-shirts with his name printed on them.

• 27:06Eric Weinstein?

  But this was already going wrong in the early 2000s. You see, my sense of this is that this was a pre-internet plan that lived into the internet age and couldn't survive contact with the internet age.

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  What did the internet bring in that didn't allow it to survive?

• 27:29Eric Weinstein?

  Eyeballs, discussion.

• 27:31Chris Williamson?

  Level of surveillance.

• 27:32Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you know, there's a claim that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein because it's this many years later and we've all moved on. Yeah. That's completely untrue. And we know that it's untrue because if you start talking about Jeffrey Epstein, the, the engagement goes up. So you have these fictions like, you know, that are put out by mainstream media or traditional news desks, which is, and nobody cares about that story. Well, that you can see from social media that that's not true from the internet. So the internet is constantly providing.

• 28:07Eric Weinstein?

  An ability to check whether or not these claims from inside the structure true. And Jeffrey Epstein is an example of what I called an anti-interesting phenomenon.

• 28:20Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 28:21Eric Weinstein?

  Well, an anti-interesting thing is something that would normally be fascinating. Imagine, for example, you had a story where you could get a Pulitzer Prize for breaking it. Everybody cares. You'd sell papers like hotcakes, blah, blah, blah, and nobody wants to report on it.

• 28:37Eric Weinstein?

  And it's like, right there. You could just ask the dumbest questions and it would like, New York Times says disgraced financier. Well, tell me, did you find his prime broker? Did you find the forms? Did you go to his offices in Vilarde House? No, nobody does ever.

• 28:56Eric Weinstein?

  The story is anti-interesting and it's very different than being uninteresting.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Which would suggest more collusion, more coordination.

• 29:08Eric Weinstein?

  Hello? I mean, see, this is one of the most uncomfortable things. I think there was a time when mostly when people said collusion or coordination, their presumption was, well, that's kind of, that's pretty far out there. We now know, like post Elon Musk's $44 billion adventure at Twitter, that there are these coordinating groups, coordinating, coordinating social media with the intelligence community, or with the Department of Homeland Security, or with the State Department. We now know that we're living in an orchestrated court, you know, curated, choreographed world.

• 29:47Eric Weinstein?

  And we can't know it officially, but we all know it if we want to know.

• 29:53Eric Weinstein?

  Which is hysterical. Now we have to talk about, well, are you a conspiracy theorist? Like, I read, I read the Slack messages. I read the emails. What, what, what are you even talking about now?

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 30:10Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Chris Williamson?

  Currently been recharged.

• 30:13Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Chris Williamson?

  With witness tampering.

• 30:14Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  As well. That to me, fresh charges, releasing, even though he was told he couldn't get in touch with the press, I think hundreds of phone calls to the press, leaked his ex-girlfriend, allegedly leaked his ex-girlfriend's diary entries.

• 30:31Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  So on and so forth. And, you know, this is a guy that some of my friends were flown to go and see on his island.

• 30:39Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Chris Williamson?

  His portion of an island.

• 30:41Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, his portion. It's very different.

• 30:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For very different reasons as well. There seems to be, and you hear about they believe they're above the law. There was this really cool documentary on Netflix called The Murda Murders. And it was this small town, big family, lots of money, and the kids ran rampant, right? Classic like silver spoon aristocracy bullshit. But when it gets scaled up this much more, Sam Bankman-Fried, the biggest financial crime, alleged financial crime since.

• 31:16Eric Weinstein?

  Madoff?

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  Bernie Madoff.

• 31:17Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 31:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Chris Williamson?

  Allegedly tampering with witnesses, allegedly leaking his ex-girlfriend's.

• 31:23Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Chris Williamson?

  Diary entries.

• 31:25Eric Weinstein?

  And?

• 31:27Chris Williamson?

  Do the rules not apply to everybody?

• 31:30Eric Weinstein?

  Certainly they don't.

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 31:37Eric Weinstein?

  We stopped prosecuting all sorts of types of people.

• 31:43Eric Weinstein?

  You know, look, we stopped holding hearings. I grew up in a world where we had the church committee, the Pike Committee, looking at our own intelligence services. We had Watergate hearings. We had tobacco hearings. We had Iran-Contra hearings.

• 32:02Eric Weinstein?

  Do you know how many hearings we need right now? Where are these things? It's ridiculous. We've got weird stuff about UFOs with people making the craziest allegations.

• 32:15Eric Weinstein?

  Look, this is just not normal. We're in totally weird, uncharted territory.

• 32:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the recent UAPs, I think is the new term. Eric, you need to get up with the times here. They're not UFOs anymore. That's the old.

• 32:34Eric Weinstein?

  I wasn't even in this game when it was UFOs.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay. So what do you make of the recent UAP stories and attention and response and subsequent response?

• 32:46Eric Weinstein?

  I'd like to ask you first.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  So I had a look at the first whistleblower from about two months ago quite closely with Andy Stumpf, who used to have pretty high level security clearance. And he explained to me about how unimpressive that particular type of security clearance is, how very common.

• 33:05Eric Weinstein?

  Which one? This is David.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  Yes, David.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  No, not, not David Fravor.

• 33:11Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, no. David Fravor was the Tic Tac.

• 33:14Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 33:14Eric Weinstein?

  This is David Gourish.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 33:17Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  Very common level of security clearance that you're using that as some sort of, oh, this is a legitimate credential. Doesn't really wash too much, that it was second or it was third hand information mostly, second hand information kind of. I heard from a person who saw or who heard.

• 33:38Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 33:39Chris Williamson?

  It just seemed to me to be rather, on the face of it, unimpressive, that release.

• 33:47Eric Weinstein?

  I see.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  What did you think?

• 33:51Eric Weinstein?

  Well, like I've been telling everybody, these are highly conserved stories. This is not the only person I've heard this story from. I've heard this from multiple people. There, there are various versions of this secret world, which play out as space opera. You know, then MJ12 became the real government that only, even the president couldn't understand, you know? And it's like, okay. So that's the weird part about it until you start realizing how sober many of the people are who believe this and who claim to have had direct contact with it.

• 34:33Eric Weinstein?

  And then you don't know what to do.

• 34:37Eric Weinstein?

  I mean, in other words,

• 34:40Eric Weinstein?

  whatever this is, there is a thing.

• 34:45Eric Weinstein?

  It's not necessarily little green men. It could be, for example, that they mock up a floating spaceship in a hangar and then they

• 34:54Eric Weinstein?

  drag people past it and say, whatever you do, do not look to your left or right or you'll be shot. And then, of course, people look and then like mission accomplished. Now people will say, oh, my God, you have no idea what we, the US has incredible technology. And then maybe the idea is you've got a cover story. Maybe you've got the, your adversary investing in things that don't make any sense. I don't know. But there's not nothing here. This is not about Mylar balloons and seagulls anymore.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to come up with a word for it, but it's like a, it's like recursive false flags.

• 35:32Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  In a way where the goal is not to give or hide truth.

• 35:39Eric Weinstein?

  The goal.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  To fire hose with information so much that the truth can no longer be discerned.

• 35:44Eric Weinstein?

  It's a haystack of bullshit. To make sure that any needle is very difficult to find. It is.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Bullshit haystacking.

• 35:54Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, so they haystack the crap out of this thing. I have no question that there was something that was used to develop US aircraft like the B2 bomber and the SR71 Blackbird. So if you see something crazy in the sky, better that you think it's a UFO from outer space than some advanced thing from Lockheed. I have no question that we use this to deal with things like the Chinese balloon shoot down, where we shot down several things in a week and we couldn't recover debris from any of them. I mean, come on, guys.

• 36:27Eric Weinstein?

  You know, maybe the idea is that this is a head fake to our adversaries to develop the wrong things and to use their treasure on things that won't work. Maybe there's a secret program where some of this stuff is actually real and true and we're not allowed to know it because it would be too mind blowing. Maybe there's a cult inside of our government that has replaced angels with saucer shaped aircraft.

• 36:57Eric Weinstein?

  Whatever this thing is, it's being used for many different purposes. There's something here.

• 37:08Eric Weinstein?

  We just don't know what, you know, this is the problem. The princess can't feel a pee because that would be impossible. The princess feels a disturbance. You can't say what the disturbance is. Maybe it's a golf ball. Maybe it's a cantaloupe. Maybe it's a banana. But whatever it is, there's something wrong with the mattress.

• 37:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems to me this fire hosing, the goal of uncertainty.

• 37:36Eric Weinstein?

  Hmm, right.

• 37:39Eric Weinstein?

  How do things muddle out? Who wins in a muddle is a great question. We're not taught to ask. Sorry to jump in on that.

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  No, tell me more.

• 37:45Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah. Always look for who is trying to muddle to win. Very often you're in a dispute with entrenched status quo. And somebody will say, well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Like, oh, well, who wins if we agreed it is? Oh, it's you.

• 38:05Eric Weinstein?

  Right?

• 38:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Eric Weinstein?

  This is like an old principle of mine, which is that you can always tell who's guilty by who first declares a time of healing.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why is that a razor to use?

• 38:16Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, because if you do something wrong and the public is clamoring for, for, for your blood, you say, there's been too much blame and finger pointing on all sides.

• 38:28Chris Williamson?

  At me.

• 38:30Eric Weinstein?

  It's, I, I think what we need is to come together and declare a time of healing.

• 38:35Chris Williamson?

  For me.

• 38:36Eric Weinstein?

  Right. So I believe that in general, whoever declares a time of healing is suspect number one.

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  That's a very nice razor to use.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  I wonder about this.

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

  Oh, how would you say?

• 38:57Chris Williamson?

  Epidemic of uncertainty.

• 39:01Eric Weinstein?

  Brilliant. Speaking my language.

• 39:05Chris Williamson?

  And I wonder.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  How, first off, how as an individual, you are supposed to put up any kind of effective defense? To just take some sovereignty, being, you know, an agentic individual?

• 39:29Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 39:31Chris Williamson?

  And secondly, I wonder what the end goal is. I understand why uncertainty would be useful for manipulation, because if people can't discern truth from untruth,

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  it can be easy to poke them and prod them and float them in particular directions. But it also seems like, I don't know, kind of also useless as well, that some people, non insignificant, large cohort of people will just reject it entirely, which actually

• 40:00Eric Weinstein?

  They're doing.

• 40:01Chris Williamson?

  Which actually makes it more chaotic and more unruly. So it makes me think, well, maybe if this is the case, if the fire hosing is happening.

• 40:09Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  This epidemic of uncertainty.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  Maybe the outcomes were predicted but haven't manifest in the way that was intended. Maybe there's more of a rebellious streak in

• 40:21Eric Weinstein?

  Say more about that. I'm trying to understand.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  That if people who, if you make the public very uncertain about most things by overloading them with information, or by even, it doesn't even need to be coordination, it could be a byproduct of having 24/7 access to the entire world's population through Twitter and Instagram stories and blah, blah, blah.

• 40:39Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  There is so much I can no longer discern, even due to a multiplicity of opinions that's not coordinated, to be a multiplicity that go in opposite directions.

• 40:46Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  If it was coordinated, the outcomes that are occurring at the moment, a lot of the time, don't seem to be happening with people just, oh, roll over, tell me exactly what to do. There is a massive, non insignificant cohort of people that say, I'm checking out and I now no longer trust anybody at all. And that doesn't seem

• 41:07Eric Weinstein?

  Or anything.

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and that doesn't seem to be, if the goal was ease of control, that doesn't seem to be effective for the person that wanted that or the group that wanted that to be the outcome.

• 41:20Eric Weinstein?

  First of all, I'm really glad to get a question about this as a sea change, which is that our lives have become wall-to-wall uncertainty. We can't discern if the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor today, we would spend 10 years discussing whether it was a false flag, whether it was actually the Japanese, whether there was any attack, whether it was a soundstage, whether it was a psy-op, whether it was a, you know.

• 41:51Eric Weinstein?

  Right now, the main institutions of our society have abdicated their role

• 42:01Eric Weinstein?

  for public-spirited adjudication of what is true based on expertise. And so what you're seeing is people coming to hate experts and coming to hate institutions because they're realizing that these institutions lie to them at a level that they've never considered unless they were Alex Jones fans to begin with.

• 42:25Eric Weinstein?

  And so what you're having is you're having a large number of people waking up to the idea that, yeah, there really are organizations and working groups that determine what you hear from a multiplicity of venues. It's the same message relentlessly.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  Do you think people are overly pattern matching that now?

• 42:45Eric Weinstein?

  Say more about what you mean.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  That they're seeing conspiracy where there isn't because the lack of faith in institutions.

• 42:52Eric Weinstein?

  Same person is saying that they see a conspiracy and they see no conspiracy. They have part of their head that remembers that conspiracy theorists are crazy people. And they've got part of their brain that remembers that normies who don't believe in conspiracies are crazy people. And they can't integrate those things, right? They cannot figure out how are these things being coordinated? Am I a crazy person for seeing these patterns? Am I a crazy person for ignoring them?

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  For believing them?

• 43:16Eric Weinstein?

  For when they're unearthed?

• 43:20Eric Weinstein?

  What you're seeing is a complete destruction of bedrock reality that if you weren't actually physically there.

• 43:31Eric Weinstein?

  How do we know that these people actually met in a warehouse? Is this really a table or is it just CGI? Was it green and we could superimpose wood onto it? Nobody knows what's true. And.

• 43:45Eric Weinstein?

  You know, if you, if you ask me, well, Eric, how are you dealing with this? I would say I'm failing.

• 43:52Eric Weinstein?

  I'm just flat out failing, as are all of you. I'm just more honest about it. Some of you have an idea that you've got one lens, which is fix the money, fix the world. Bitcoin, that's the answer. Yeah, Bitcoin, rock on, but no, that's not the answer. Or somebody else says, you know, I really think that we just need to be open and tolerant and realize it's a big world and we just have to give people their due. Well, that doesn't work either. You can't just let everything run riot or we have to go back to our institutions with these people at the helm. Are you kidding? We have to abandon our institution. Wait, what are you saying? We're going to abandon our institutions? Are, do you know what that looks like?

• 44:37Eric Weinstein?

  Nobody has an answer.

• 44:39Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Gymshark. Gymshark make the best training kit on the planet. This T-shirt that I've been falling in love with and traveling in for a very long time is phenomenal. And these shorts, the studio shorts that they make are the best men's training shorts on the planet. They have lasted me over a year now. They come in amazing colors. The length is perfect. They're sweat wicking, they're lightweight, they wash and dry perfectly. You don't need that many pairs of shorts as a guy, but the ones that you do have need to be very good. So if you need new gym kit, this is where to go. I highly, highly recommend that you go and check out everything that I use and recommend from Gymshark. They've updated my product page with everything that I use and recommend for men and women, and you can get 10% off everything site wide with no minimum order.

• 45:23Chris Williamson?

  And they have 30 day free returns worldwide. Head to bit.ly/sharkwisdom. That's B I T dot L Y slash shark wisdom and use the code M W 10 at checkout. You're sounding an awful lot parallel. The conversation is moving in a similar direction to one I had with Sam Harris recently.

• 45:43Eric Weinstein?

  I would think it's very different, but happy to hear more.

• 45:47Chris Williamson?

  He identified on an episode that I did with him not long ago, the fact that we have lost trust in our institutions and yet abandoning them is also wholesale is also not an option.

• 46:01Eric Weinstein?

  Sam also tried to say, I can see the problems on the, I Sam can see the problems on the right, and I can see the problems on the left. And there is a group of people who have allowed their irritation with the left to color their thinking to the point that they now are in a right wing situation without understanding the dangers on the right.

• 46:28Eric Weinstein?

  I think Sam is discounting the idea that once people wake up to the, to the concept that they were living in an orchestrated Truman show, that they did not understand. They're not going to have the idea of like, oh, sure, the vaccines were a little bit more dangerous than claimed and maybe a little bit less effective. And maybe we knew a little bit more about the lab leaks. No way. You spat directly in my face and told me not only that it was raining, but that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face and you piled up how many Nobel laureates to defend the idea that any inquiry

• 47:09Eric Weinstein?

  into the origin of this virus was racism? It's like, you're dead to me. And I think that that's what people are not understanding in the Democratic Party. Increasingly, the basic attitude is whoever this class of people is that crawled into our elite institutions is just dead. Like, there's nothing Anthony Fauci could say at this moment that I want to hear. It's not that I don't think that he doesn't know virology or epidemiology. I know I can't trust him because of the way in which he looked into my eyes. And then, you know, when Stephen Colbert is dancing with syringes, singing the vaccine song,

• 47:51Eric Weinstein?

  and Ariana Grande, you know, is in a super highly produced number from like Hairspray, but converted to vaccines, with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and everybody's celebrating like it's a May Day celebration. I get it. I live in a completely fake world. I wrote an article about this in 2011 on kayfabe, which is the system of lies that undergirds professional wrestling. So now you've woken up to the idea that you've spent your life watching something like Major League Baseball or Premier League Soccer, or whatever it is, and it's all fake.

• 48:30Eric Weinstein?

  And now you don't know who you are, you don't know what your country is, you don't know what a ballot box is, you have no idea what news is or media, you don't know what a university is actually teaching. You've got people running around who are calling themselves scholars who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats. And you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong and it's directly in their area of expertise.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  So the thing about patent matching that I said was there are still many people who are scholars, who are in positions of authority inside of highfalutin institutions that presumably do want to do good and do want to deploy their skills in a way that does this. Is it a case that every single institution is completely wrong? Or is this reflexive skepticism

• 49:22Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  being tuned up too highly to the point where there is skepticism about things that don't deserve it? And how do we determine between the two?

• 49:32Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, so we have to talk about the institutions that are fighting back. Twitter, which has become X, is not on the same standard that the Facebooks are or Google is. Elon is doing something different. We can talk about what? The University of Chicago is still fighting.

• 49:55Eric Weinstein?

  My daughter just graduated from the University of Chicago.

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 49:58Eric Weinstein?

  I never mentioned where she was while she was there.

• 50:03Eric Weinstein?

  It is, it needs, it needs support. We have to support the schools that fought back. For example, I believe Ohio State fought back and there's a school in Oklahoma that fought back. And leading that charge is the University of Chicago. We have organizations like FIRE that promote free speech. We have professors who are taking on some risk like Jonathan Haidt. But we're not seeing the Noam Chomsky effect where you do amazing research and they have to put up with every crazy idea that comes through your mind. Right? That's important.

• 50:41Eric Weinstein?

  Look up a person named Serge Lang in mathematics and something called the file to understand how dangerous it is to screw with real scholars.

• 50:52Chris Williamson?

  What happens? Give us the 30,000 foot view.

• 50:55Eric Weinstein?

  You know, people tried to put, like, say, Sam Huntington into the National Academy of Sciences, who was an architect of the Vietnam War. And Serge Lang just said, I looked through his papers, I find the following mathematical statements. This is not science. Why is this person in the academy? And then they fight back. And I fought back with Serge Lang when he was at Harvard, where we tried to engage Sam Huntington on that topic. You can't have these dangerous people running around. That's why all of us are discredited. Maybe you haven't noticed this. But like, Jordan Peterson is discredited, Sam Harris is discredited, Joe Rogan is discredited, Brett Weinstein is discredited, Ben Shapiro is discredited, Barry Weiss is discredited. Everybody is discredited.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Tim Poole referred to it as the IDW's walking corpse phase at the moment.

• 51:45Eric Weinstein?

  Well, my point is, this personal destruction is the coin of the realm. And some of the personal destruction that you see that looks organic is orchestrated as well. And we're just in this thing where, in my opinion, what you're looking at is something called deconfliction. But people don't know what that is. Deconfliction is supposed to stop what are called blue on blue incidences. So a blue on blue incidences, you have two branches of government that don't know that they're operating covertly. So maybe you have an investigative team and an undercover team. And the investigative team is about to blow the cover, thinking that they've got a target, but it's actually an undercover agent. So what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to check in with these centralized

• 52:28Eric Weinstein?

  systems and say, do you have any assets in this arena we're about to move? Yes, we do. Oh, okay. So they find out. And this is supposed to stop blue on blue.

• 52:39Eric Weinstein?

  The interesting thing is, even though there are three systems called Safety Net, RIS Safe, and Case Explorer, you can't use them unless you are an official part of the government. So I called up one of them, had a half an hour conversation before I started asking about Jeffrey Epstein, and then they immediately said this call will be terminated in five seconds. For, maybe it was Case Explorer for South Florida, something like that. What happens when you have a civilian that's not signed up

• 53:15Eric Weinstein?

  for non-disclosure, under no rules? You're an American citizen with full right to free speech, and you stumble on something that you're not supposed to know about? That is a deconfliction problem that nobody has ever solved. So the first thing I'd like to throw out is if we have three separate systems to keep, like, the intelligence community and local police departments from tripping over each other,

• 53:41Eric Weinstein?

  what do you think we do when ordinary citizens get wind of something amiss that's some super-secret operation? And my claim is, we discredit them.

• 53:56Eric Weinstein?

  We pre-bunk them in the language of the GEC, I believe. See, we're all familiar with debunking misinformation and disinformation. You've got some disinformation that's spread around, and we debunk it by giving you the truth. What happens when somebody is spreading the truth in a way that is unhelpful to a statecraft-level narrative?

• 54:23Eric Weinstein?

  Well, we didn't know what the words were, but we just found out, and it's you pre-bunk the malinformation.

• 54:31Eric Weinstein?

  Now, if you didn't grow up knowing what malinformation is, here's a quick refresher. Malinformation is actual information.

• 54:40Eric Weinstein?

  But it's harmful.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  Right. The equivalent of politically incorrect incarnation.

• 54:45Eric Weinstein?

  Well, or you know, you're trying to make sure that there's support for the war in Ukraine. And somebody actually realizes that things are much more desperate than than they thought. Well, that would be deleterious to our our efforts if the objective is to get Putin to capitulate. So now you have to pre bunk the malinformation, which means destroy the reputation of the person spreading the information that's countering the official disinformation and misinformation. So

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  I can't work out why anybody's confused and why they're having trouble existing in the

• 55:22Eric Weinstein?

  Stay in school, kids.

• 55:25Eric Weinstein?

  The point is, I've got all of these friends who are pre bunked malinformers.

• 55:30Chris Williamson?

  That's what I What a club, what a club to be in.

• 55:32Eric Weinstein?

  That's what I do. I'm a pre bunked malinformat.

• 55:36Chris Williamson?

  There's never been a sexier title, actually.

• 55:38Eric Weinstein?

  I spread malinformation.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Eric Weinstein?

  And I need to be pre bunked. So of course I'm going to be a grifter. I'm going to be, I don't know, Charlotte and I'm gonna, well, he's over. Can we stop trying to make Eric Weinstein a thing? Blah, blah, blah. And there's, you know, giant farms of of people and bots that are dedicated to spreading bad feelings about anybody who's going to contradict narrative.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, don't forget as well that the coordination doesn't necessarily need to be there because the incentives align online.

• 56:11Eric Weinstein?

  There's an emergent part.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Eric Weinstein?

  There's a non emergent part.

• 56:13Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 56:14Eric Weinstein?

  I will not agree with anyone who tells me it's all one or the or all the other. But part of this is actually coordinated.

• 56:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So close that loop on the agentic sovereign individual existing in the world.

• 56:32Chris Williamson?

  Holy fuck, I'm getting bukkaked with this total awfulness of information here.

• 56:39Eric Weinstein?

  Bukkake just means splattered in Japanese.

• 56:42Chris Williamson?

  That's why it's not a terrible term to use.

• 56:44Eric Weinstein?

  Absolutely not.

• 56:45Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. It's actually been appropriated by the adult industry in a way that I think the Japanese should reclaim.

• 56:50Eric Weinstein?

  Actually, Melissa Chen has probably done more to popularize this in intellectual circles than anyone else. So shout out to Miss Melissa Chen.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  Melissa Chen and bukkake in the same sentence, something that we weren't expecting today.

• 57:00Eric Weinstein?

  She, I think there was a period of her life where she would use it in every public appearance. Just sneak it in.

• 57:06Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. The bukkake of the gaps.

• 57:10Eric Weinstein?

  So anyway, you have a situation where nobody knows what's going on. And I don't think Sam is comfortable, by the way, being here. Like, you're in open water. And you have all of these instructions about what to do when you're swimming near land, which is, you know, try to align yourself with the shore, don't fight the current. And like, that's not where you are. You're just in open water. And you're treading water and you don't know whether there are oceanic white tips around and you don't know whether you can keep this up for much longer. But there is no land.

• 57:42Eric Weinstein?

  There's a big difference with Sam.

• 57:45Chris Williamson?

  Go a little deeper. Make that a little plainer for me.

• 57:50Eric Weinstein?

  You cannot trust Harvard or nature. You cannot trust the Office of Management and Budget.

• 57:58Chris Williamson?

  Or the Lancet.

• 57:59Eric Weinstein?

  Or the Lancet, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You cannot trust any newspaper that I'm aware of. You cannot trust the CDC or the NIH or the WHO. Now,

• 58:18Eric Weinstein?

  people will hear that and they'll say, oh my God, Eric, you're spreading distrust and fear. It's like, I'm a pastor. Shoot the messenger all you want. All of those institutions are out of control. And we all know it.

• 58:33Eric Weinstein?

  And

• 58:33Chris Williamson?

  Entirely out of control?

• 58:35Eric Weinstein?

  No.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

  Mostly out of control?

• 58:37Eric Weinstein?

  I did this on trigonometry. We have this anti-institutional point. How is it that the airlines can't keep my seat clean? And can't make sure that I'm able to recline it properly or that the wifi doesn't go out? And then their planes never crash? So the institutions are functioning and not functioning. They're lying and telling the truth. They're getting it done and failing outright over and over again. And it's even worse because if the planes crashed all the time, then you'd say, okay, well, these people are incompetent.

• 59:13Eric Weinstein?

  But it's like this selective incompetence and madness. And what I think is, is that Sam wanted to treat this as, look, it's pretty annoying what's going on on the left. And it's pretty annoying what's going on with the institutions, but let's not, let's not lose sight of the fact. January 6th. People don't feel that way. People feel like, wait a minute. I don't know which end is up. I don't know who's telling me the truth anymore. I can spot these lies that are so transparent. And this is the theory of lies as a checksum. So when you get a binary for a computer program that you want to install on your computer, you want to know, well, is this what came from Microsoft?

• 59:55Eric Weinstein?

  Or did somebody adulterate it? And when I click on this thing, it's going to install ransomware on my machine. So there's something called a checksum, which is generated by how the program was compiled. And it would be almost impossible to come up with a second program that would generate the same checksum.

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  Verification.

• 1:00:12Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Eric Weinstein?

  If the checksum is off, I don't install the thing and the checksums are all off. And that's why people are going crazy. And that's why, to your earlier point, isn't it interesting that we're not talking about the level of uncertainty? Right? Like, this is not sustainable. So Sam is 100% correct on a lot of things that people are making fun of him for. And I assume that I will be keel-hauled all over Twitter for saying this. You cannot have a world without institutions. We're not built for it. We're just, there's no part of you that is prepared to generate all your own electricity and, and, you know, kill all your own game and get your own clean water and it's, you need an army.

• 1:00:59Eric Weinstein?

  You need a police department. You can only play frontier, you know, Wild West so long before you realize that modern life can't be supported this.

• 1:01:12Eric Weinstein?

  And we can't go with the institutions we have. So we need institutions. We can't go with these institutions, not because the institutions are wrong, but because the inhabitants are wrong to a person they've been selected for by this ability to lie because growth evaporated. That's one of my main riffs. We don't have to go into it, but basically that in the absence of real growth, everything turns pathological.

• 1:01:37Eric Weinstein?

  And so it's just heartbreaking to see some of these people saying, look, we've always known that the institutions were wrong. We finally have the ability to prove that. Let's tear them all down. So that's a very popular perspective at the moment. Other people want to claim, let's cling to the institutions because we know we need them and we'll look past the fact that they're obviously lying about almost everything of importance. That's not really tenable. We can't vote these people out because like Dianne Feinstein could beat me easily in a run, you know, for Senate. I don't know why, because the machine is stronger than actually the vision we had for democracy. So we've got, you know,

• 1:02:17Eric Weinstein?

  Mitch McConnell having a temporary, you know, ischemic attack on camera. We've got somebody post-stroke in Pennsylvania, having defeated Mehmet Oz. We've got Dianne Feinstein. We've got Nancy Pelosi trading up a storm. We can't get rid of any of these people. Joe Biden is way too old for this job and has been in government since he was 29 in 1972, when he won his Senate seat. This is a joke. It's beyond preposterous. And by the way, it comes out of not loving your children.

• 1:02:53Chris Williamson?

  How's up?

• 1:02:56Eric Weinstein?

  People who love their children don't drill holes in their children's life raft.

• 1:03:02Eric Weinstein?

  And the modern world, post-World War II, was a life raft to get us to the next stage. And the number of...

• 1:03:12Eric Weinstein?

  Older people I see liquidating everything

• 1:03:18Eric Weinstein?

  so that they can live out their final days in the same style to which they've become accustomed is impossible in a world where people love their children.

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  It's cavalier with the future.

• 1:03:29Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I don't think they care.

• 1:03:32Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with Toby Yod's analogy of the precipice?

• 1:03:35Eric Weinstein?

  No, tell me.

• 1:03:35Chris Williamson?

  Really cool. So his book, The Precipice, that everybody should go and read. It's my best primer on existential risk. Toby Yod's from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford with Nick Bostrom, and he's a colleague of William McCaskill, Long Termism EA, et cetera. And he uses this example of, you can imagine, on a journey, you know, a particular individual getting to a beautiful, lush, abundant meadow would have to take a treacherous mountain path. And along this mountain path, there is a particularly thin, small, steep, sharp, uncertain, unstable part of it. That's the precipice. And he talks about, you could, I like to think about it like an hourglass.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  You have width with room, and then you have a choke point. And at that choke point, things can get dicey. And it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice, you broaden out and you have the meadow, you are a multiplanetary species. You have redundancy genetically, redundancies civilisationally. You have overcome some of the limitations of the castoffs from your energy production and consumption. You don't have value lock in in a bad way. That means that it's despots all the way down or it's tyrants.

• 1:04:55Eric Weinstein?

  Soon that I hear you.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:04:59Eric Weinstein?

  Where do you think we are?

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  It feels very precipicy.

• 1:05:04Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, doesn't it?

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Eric Weinstein?

  What's more, as one of the only people who are really seriously hitting this multiplanetary note, there is no interest in this.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  From who? I'm interested.

• 1:05:20Eric Weinstein?

  Hmm, are you?

• 1:05:21Chris Williamson?

  Fuck yeah. Don't I count, Eric? Am I not legitimate in the future of this civilization's direction?

• 1:05:27Eric Weinstein?

  What, what?

• 1:05:30Eric Weinstein?

  What are your best stories for how we become interplanetary? I say it because you brought it up.

• 1:05:36Chris Williamson?

  Stories or strategies?

• 1:05:38Eric Weinstein?

  Stories about how we get to be interplanetary.

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure what you mean by story.

• 1:05:43Eric Weinstein?

  Tell me a story

• 1:05:47Eric Weinstein?

  by which we have 10 planets that humans, humans have settled.

• 1:05:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, if you want to do 10, we're going to have to go to planets that are outside of the solar system.

• 1:05:58Eric Weinstein?

  Right. So there's this one which is really troubling. Mars is really screwing up this whole story because Elon has gotten everybody

• 1:06:09Chris Williamson?

  fixated.

• 1:06:09Eric Weinstein?

  focused on Mars and it's the only, it's a marginal planet. That would be very difficult to get to using chemical rockets and it's not a stepping stone because once you master Mars, if, if, if, if, which we're not going to do, it doesn't really get you anywhere.

• 1:06:30Eric Weinstein?

  It's just Mars.

• 1:06:32Chris Williamson?

  So Arvy Loeb.

• 1:06:34Eric Weinstein?

  Yep.

• 1:06:35Chris Williamson?

  New book that recently came out, Interstellar. Spoke to him last week about it.

• 1:06:39Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:06:39Chris Williamson?

  I asked him about this. I said, um, do, will we ever visit other galaxies? And he made this cop out answer of saying, well, Andromeda is going to crash into the Milky Way. I was like, that doesn't count, Arvy. We can't blend two together and say that we've been there.

• 1:06:53Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:06:54Chris Williamson?

  Um, and he's talking about, uh, interstellar travel, right? From here to Proxima Centauri, pick, pick your other star, right?

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  They are trying at some point in the not too distant future to do the light sail, laser pointed added thing. Maybe we can, and this was me asking him, uh, my conception was generation ships, you know, you and the next 500 generations of your progeny, you condemn them to be locked in this tin box and it's group sex and, and plants and CO2 for the next however long until you get to proxima Suntory, hope that it's not totally wrecked. His point was light sail, uh, desktop DNA sequencer, artificial womb, send it out.

• 1:07:42Eric Weinstein?

  You guys are being ridiculous.

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's a thought experiment. This is my story.

• 1:07:47Eric Weinstein?

  I know.

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  This is my story. This is my story and I'm allowed to tell my story.

• 1:07:51Eric Weinstein?

  But it's exactly why I wanted it. If I, it just to riff. Okay. It's an enervating story.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:08:01Eric Weinstein?

  We're not energized by this story.

• 1:08:04Chris Williamson?

  I'm energized, but.

• 1:08:05Eric Weinstein?

  Except for the group sex and the plants, right?

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:08:07Eric Weinstein?

  So the issue is.

• 1:08:08Chris Williamson?

  If we could sprinkle some Bukkake in there, everybody would get on board and Melissa Chan would be there.

• 1:08:12Eric Weinstein?

  Moving at light speed. Um, what we're doing is, is that we're telling people we've crawled inside our modern theories and our modern theories make our imaginations our enemy. We're not excited about the, we don't really believe that we're going to open a wormhole. We don't really believe in multi-generation ships. We don't believe that we're going to reboot from tardigrades. We don't believe that we're going to scan all of our synapses and reconstruct the brain, uh, from the beginning.

• 1:08:47Eric Weinstein?

  Einstein is the problem. Now, I know Avi decently well and Avi, for the Galileo project that he's heading up, doesn't want people to consider new physics. So whenever I speak at all as somebody affiliated with the Galileo project, with wearing that hat, I don't think about new physics at all. I accept the constraints of the physics we know.

• 1:09:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:09:16Eric Weinstein?

  When I take that hat off. It's all about new physics. It's not about new technology using the old physics. And the way you can measure whether people are serious about interplanetary is how much they're focused on new physics. Anybody who isn't focused on new physics is not serious about interplanetary.

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  Is this because with the current conception of physics that we have, it's going to be essentially impossible for us to go into planetary?

• 1:09:47Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, and the word essentially is doing some work there. And so what you get is you get these enervating workarounds like, oh, if we use time dilation, if we went really fast, then it wouldn't be that fast.

• 1:09:57Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain the word innovating, please? You mean as in innovation or is this ER?

• 1:10:01Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, enervating.

• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:10:03Eric Weinstein?

  Means to lessen in potency, to sort of discourage and, you know, as long as I have to do things that don't involve me cruising to new planets and taking in the vis, it's like, oh, it would be a great, great, great to the 12,000th power grandchild who actually sees a new planet. That's not going to work. Or you're going to open a wormhole or you're going to have an Alcubierre drive. All of these sorts of things discourage us and we know that we're telling lies about it. And so we don't work on it. You want to know how to work on this? We're abandoning the one field that has the chance of making us interplanetary.

• 1:10:46Eric Weinstein?

  And I don't know what to do about it because nobody sees this as the emergency I do.

• 1:10:50Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Cozy Earth. Look, we spend one third of our lives asleep. You do not want to spend 33% of your existence inside of sheets that do not make you feel amazing. Cozy Earth has the best quality bedding. It's not just about what you sleep on, it is what you sleep under. And the quality of your sheets make a massive difference to the quality of your sleep. Sleep is the ultimate game changer and improving your sheets will improve your sleep quality. Cozy Earth is a premium bedding and loungewear company where they make the best quality bedwear. Their products are made from super soft viscose from highly sustainable bamboo, temperature regulating, so you'll sleep cool all year round. Best of all, they've Got a 10 year warranty on all of their products. That's how confident they are that they'll last.

• 1:11:34Chris Williamson?

  You can get an exclusive 35% discount site wide on everything from Cozy Earth by going to cozyearth.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM35 at checkout. cozyearth.com/ModernWisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Okay, so let me see if I can get the topology of what you've said right. The fact that Mars is within reach broadly.

• 1:12:00Eric Weinstein?

  With chemical rockets.

• 1:12:01Chris Williamson?

  Correct, of current technology, of current physics. And we do it. Hooray.

• 1:12:07Eric Weinstein?

  Super hard, we did it.

• 1:12:09Chris Williamson?

  Into planetary.

• 1:12:10Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:12:11Chris Williamson?

  But your point is that, oh, it seems like that is insufficient. And also kind of like a false duck type scenario where we did it, but we didn't actually do the thing we needed to do. So we may have even been better off had the nearest, closest planet been two light years away.

• 1:12:34Eric Weinstein?

  Assume Mars didn't exist.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:12:35Eric Weinstein?

  And assume that Elon was still the visionary that we want him to be. And he didn't have a chemical rocket company. I'd like to think that he would be focused on physics. I would like to think that any of these people would be focused on physics. Take anybody with 11 figures. What is your allocation to building a life raft to get humans out of here?

• 1:13:03Eric Weinstein?

  You don't, you haven't even thought about it. Immediately you're going to think technology. Well, what kind of a hole would I need? It's like, no, you need a blackboard. You need blackboards and physicists who are not afraid to do physics. Right now, we are destroying the fundamental physics community at a rate that you could not believe.

• 1:13:24Chris Williamson?

  What's happening? Give me, give me the gossip from inside.

• 1:13:27Eric Weinstein?

  For 39 years, we've been dominated by one community's madness. And that community is called quantum gravity, string theory or M theory.

• 1:13:39Eric Weinstein?

  It changed what we were researching. It's, it's cardinal sin is not about string theory. It's not about quantum gravity. It changed the questions that met, defined what it meant to be a fundamental physicist. So if I say to you, how many generations of matter are there?

• 1:13:58Chris Williamson?

  I don't know.

• 1:13:59Eric Weinstein?

  You don't know that it's three because we don't talk about that all the time anymore. Or if I say, do you know why, why is matter chiral? You wouldn't know about that. Or if I said, what's the nature of the cortic potential for the Higgs field? Or why is there a Yukawa coupling in one case and a minimal coupling somewhere else? All of the real physics questions that would cause progress got subtly replaced between 1984 and like 1987. And then we had questions like, how do we quantize gravity? And that became this, oh, that is the ultimate question. Well, it's, it's not. That's, that's just wrong. This comes out of Bryce DeWitt.

• 1:14:43Eric Weinstein?

  This comes out of a guy who in 1952 went with his wife to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, then wrote an essay for something called the Gravity Research Foundation that was about anti-gravity. And they, he was supposed to write an essay. And then he said, well, to get anti-gravity, what you'd really need to do is to do quantum gravity. And for 70 years, we've been trying to do quantum gravity and it's an abject failure. And the physicists at the, at the helm changed the questions. The, the official questions should sound something like this. Why are there three generations of matter? Why is it flavor chiral? What is the nature and the origin of the Higgs mechanism?

• 1:15:22Eric Weinstein?

  Why are we in one comma, three dimensions? And what is with SU3 cross SU2 cross U1, which is a bunch of symmetries? And why does it seem to represent on a 16 dimensional space with the observed quantum numbers? And that may not mean a lot to you, but I guarantee you, if there are physicists in the audience, they're getting pissed off right now because they allowed their, their subject to be dragged away from our real questions for reasons that are unclear and put in the service of these questions that can't be answered. And we can't even question them 39 years into this complete train wreck that is the community that could build the life raft.

• 1:15:58Chris Williamson?

  What is so seductive about quantum everything?

• 1:16:01Eric Weinstein?

  Quantum gravity?

• 1:16:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Eric Weinstein?

  It allows for toy problems so that you can not do your work on the world that we have. And you can say, well, world that we have is too complicated. So I created this fake world over here that's not in four dimensions. It's in two dimensions. It's not in Lorentzian signature. It's in Euclidean signature. It's not the full gauge group. It's just SU2. And I've changed all the parameters. And then I say, and I've made some minor incremental progress in that fake world. And then everybody claps.

• 1:16:36Eric Weinstein?

  And meanwhile, 10 years later, you don't even remember what the particles are that are present in the universe. You don't even remember the the standard model of particle theory. And this is a very real effect. Today's physicists, a lot of the young ones are completely ignorant about the physical world. They could not find the men's or women's room at CERN if their life depended on it.

• 1:17:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so it seems like a hijacking of attention and focus from difficult problems to from useful, difficult problems to useless or less useful easier problems.

• 1:17:21Eric Weinstein?

  But if you try to talk about the real problems, you can't get engagement. And they will say it as, well, maybe people just aren't interested in your ideas. Well, like, yeah, but you're not listening to. So far as I can tell, everybody who comes from outside with an interesting new ideas and being listened to. It's not personal. And we also have a responsibility. This is like, this is really crazy part.

• 1:17:44Eric Weinstein?

  We doomed humanity.

• 1:17:47Eric Weinstein?

  Like Francis Crick, who was a co-discoverer of the three dimensional structure of DNA, was a physicist.

• 1:17:55Eric Weinstein?

  Edward Teller was a physicist. Stanislav Ulam was a geometer. We doomed humanity on Earth.

• 1:18:06Eric Weinstein?

  And then we're treating science as if, oh, it's a series of puzzles. Well, what do you want to work on today? Well, I don't want to be arrogant. I'll just work on this tiny little problem. And I'm just thinking like, do you not feel any basic responsibility after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and COVID?

• 1:18:28Eric Weinstein?

  Just how crazy are you?

• 1:18:30Chris Williamson?

  Is that, you know, we've spoken about the interplanetary challenge.

• 1:18:35Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:18:36Chris Williamson?

  And the fact that physics needs to make some progress in order to facilitate that if we're going to do it.

• 1:18:41Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Chris Williamson?

  Is, in your opinion, forgetting the fact that chemical rockets.

• 1:18:46Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:18:46Chris Williamson?

  Limitations, all that sort of stuff. Is going interplanetary as useful? I- is it the highest priority?

• 1:18:54Eric Weinstein?

  The highest priority. You'll, you cannot stabilize this place.

• 1:19:02Eric Weinstein?

  Just imagine every communalist dream came true.

• 1:19:08Eric Weinstein?

  We turned away from fossil fuels towards a, the greenest new deal you could possibly imagine. All billionaires realized the errors of their ways and contributed their money to bring up the poorest of the poor. AI was as beneficial as it could be and only helped humanity to live its street. Just go full wild Pollyanna optimism. You still can't stabilize it.

• 1:19:34Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:19:36Eric Weinstein?

  Um.

• 1:19:38Eric Weinstein?

  Too many people.

• 1:19:41Chris Williamson?

  Not for long.

• 1:19:42Eric Weinstein?

  Say more.

• 1:19:43Chris Williamson?

  Not for long. Population rates, birth rates at the moment?

• 1:19:46Eric Weinstein?

  We're talking a totally different scales.

• 1:19:51Eric Weinstein?

  I'm telling you that with CRISPR-Cas9 with the Teller Ulam design.

• 1:19:58Chris Williamson?

  IVG.

• 1:20:00Eric Weinstein?

  IVG.

• 1:20:02Chris Williamson?

  You know IVG?

• 1:20:03Eric Weinstein?

  Uh uh.

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  IVF, but being able to use from any other.

• 1:20:07Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 1:20:08Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:20:09Eric Weinstein?

  Uh, I was trying to, I was trying to think, uh, in a different context.

• 1:20:16Eric Weinstein?

  You are going to have.

• 1:20:24Eric Weinstein?

  People.

• 1:20:26Eric Weinstein?

  What happens when you distribute the coronavirus because everybody's had it? You've had it?

• 1:20:31Chris Williamson?

  I got an antibody test and I had it, but I never felt it.

• 1:20:35Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. So you have this, this platform, this virus viral platform that's spread all over the world and you have the ability to edit it.

• 1:20:45Eric Weinstein?

  Are you telling me that people aren't going to figure out how to come up with fun viruses and gain of function projects and people are going to be able to do these, you know, polymerase chain reaction, I think was taught in my daughter's high school.

• 1:21:00Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with Nick Bostrom's balls from the urn analogy?

• 1:21:05Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, vaguely.

• 1:21:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So for the people that don't know, you can imagine that you, you have an urn and each time that you make technological progress, you pick a ball out and you don't know what color. Some are white, perfectly good.

• 1:21:16Eric Weinstein?

  Yep.

• 1:21:16Chris Williamson?

  Some are gray, bit of good, bit of bad, and some are all the way down to black. And black is permanent, unrecoverable collapse.

• 1:21:24Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:21:25Chris Williamson?

  And the unrecoverable bit is important.

• 1:21:27Eric Weinstein?

  Yep.

• 1:21:28Chris Williamson?

  And each time we just keep picking out balls.

• 1:21:32Eric Weinstein?

  So my take on it is there's already too much lever, too much leverage, too little wisdom, too many people.

• 1:21:39Chris Williamson?

  Was it that you once said, we are gods, but for the wisdom, we're just shitty gods?

• 1:21:43Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know if I said the second part, but you know, I, I guess when I heard the story about this kid who scavenged the amareum from all of these smoke detectors in Brooklyn and built a self sustaining nuclear reactor from these tiny little radioactive strips, you don't know what people's creativity is, you know? I found it fascinating when I was growing up that I was the only kid who knew that gunpowder or black powder was 75% potassium nitrate, 10% sulfur and 15% carbon. Like you could just make it, you know? And, you know, that's the recipe.

• 1:22:24Eric Weinstein?

  And that, that just blew my mind that the rate limiting step was that people didn't know that potassium nitrate was saltpeter or where to get it. It's like meat tenderizer, but.

• 1:22:38Eric Weinstein?

  Mostly we're saved from this stuff because nobody's so sociopathic and competent that they go for these high leverage attacks. That's going to end. You know, that was like what happened on nine 11. I always wanted to know why were little kids allowed to go into the cockpit of a plane? Used to be able to meet the pilot. I remember meeting the pilot.

• 1:22:57Chris Williamson?

  I remember doing it. Yeah.

• 1:22:58Eric Weinstein?

  So that's where we are now is is that we've got all this high leverage stuff. And you're going to see nuclear proliferation. Eventually you're going to get some desperate backed into a corner. Who says, well, this is my only move.

• 1:23:12Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean,

• 1:23:14Chris Williamson?

  for the nuclear concernists out there, at least what I know.

• 1:23:19Eric Weinstein?

  Wouldn't that be all of us?

• 1:23:20Chris Williamson?

  Everybody is concerned, but for the people that are nuclear war is a genuine X risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse. You can set them all off unless there's like 10 to 100 times more than we think that we have, which they very well could be.

• 1:23:37Chris Williamson?

  It seems difficult for it to be permanent unrecoverable collapse. For me as a true, true, true, true X risk.

• 1:23:44Eric Weinstein?

  May I say something?

• 1:23:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Eric Weinstein?

  This is ridiculous. It's bad enough that it would completely transform life as we know it. You'd agree that.

• 1:23:54Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:54Eric Weinstein?

  Absolutely. It's time. It's time to get serious about things we can actually do. And the most interesting thing is that nobody's interested in interplanetary physics.

• 1:24:09Eric Weinstein?

  I just, I've never seen anything like it.

• 1:24:13Chris Williamson?

  Interplanetary physics would be physics in service of us becoming interplanetary? Or is there something specific about the way that planets figure together?

• 1:24:21Eric Weinstein?

  No, no, no. It's, it's about.

• 1:24:25Eric Weinstein?

  Let me give you an analogy that's more than an analogy. Assume that somebody hands you a physical paper map. An enormous one. Okay? And you're trying to navigate it on this table that we're, we have here. You're starting to do motions like this where you're moving the paper across the table. You know, to get from Los Angeles to Fresno, California, if it's at the right scale. And it might take you a long time to do that.

• 1:24:52Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. But now you have somebody trained on an iPad. What are they going to do?

• 1:24:57Eric Weinstein?

  Well, they might do that. But that's not the key thing they're going to do.

• 1:25:02Eric Weinstein?

  They're going to do what is called multi-touch gestures. And the one that you're thinking of should be pinch to zoom. So the most natural way to do this is to treat it not as if it's a paper map, but a stack of paper maps. And you want to go to the one with a different scale. If you were doing this on an iPad that was mirroring this. The key point is, is that the paper map doesn't have an extra dimension to play with. But the pinch to zoom dimension is a scale dimension. So imagine what you did instead was you looked at your house. You pinch to zoom out. You then do this motion or whatever it is to get to your friend's house.

• 1:25:44Eric Weinstein?

  And then when you land there, you expand it again. Imagine that you only know about paper maps, but your adversary has an iPad. That's what I'm worried about. We're not looking for pinch to zoom.

• 1:26:02Chris Williamson?

  What would that be in this?

• 1:26:05Eric Weinstein?

  Um, well, I claim that there are going to be 10 extra coordinates. And four of them are pinch to zoom. And six of them are what I would call sheer to tilt. So imagine that you have a copy of a picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on your iPad. You should be able to do something in Paint which changes the angle. Right? So if you go into MS Paint, there's this little thing that allows you to change by particular. But you could do that as a gesture where. So my claim is if you have four dimensions of time and X, Y, and Z of space,

• 1:26:49Eric Weinstein?

  you have pinch to zoom on all of all four of those. And then for any two dimensions like X and Z, you have shear to tilt. So the first are the four rulers and the next are the six protractors. And that's something called a symmetric two tensor or a metric, which Einstein knew all about, but he only chose one through his equations. And he let all the other ones lie fallow. And my claim is, I don't think that's where we are. I think that interplanetary physics is going to involve moving from what we called spacetime to something called the observers, which contains pinch to zoom and shear to tilt.

• 1:27:29Eric Weinstein?

  And you want to get off this planet, you're not going to get there using general relativity. And you're not going to get there using the standard model. It's time to take your pacifier out of your mouth and go back to doing real physics. I think if we were serious about this, we would be struggling with the physics of the world in which we live, not toy models. We'd be taking massive risks and listening to people from various perspectives who haven't failed or have not been invited to fully explain their ideas. And we'd be looking for things that would be new, new variables, new ways of working with the world that allowed us to do things that would previously considered inconceivable. So if you, if you look at 1911, which is when I think Rutherford first starts talking

• 1:28:12Eric Weinstein?

  about the neutron as a hypothesis, it's 41 years later, we have the hydrogen bomb. We can do incredible things that are not possible yet because we don't know the framework. And my claim is if you imagine somebody used to paper maps being put on an iPad and not knowing about multi-touch gestures, that is pretty much an exact analogy of what happens when you do too much general relativity, is that you start to think in general relativistic terms as if that's the last word. Einstein would never have put up with that.

• 1:28:51Chris Williamson?

  That's a question. You've mentioned Einstein a couple of times today. The most famous physicist of all time. How different do you think the landscape of physics would be had Einstein lived for another decade? Just how good was he?

• 1:29:09Eric Weinstein?

  He was that good. It was the rare situation in which the man and the myth are roughly at the right level, the same level.

• 1:29:21Eric Weinstein?

  I don't think you could solve the puzzle of theoretical physics in a final theory before the mid 1970s. We just didn't know enough.

• 1:29:33Eric Weinstein?

  In particular quarks in 1968, you needed confirmation because they're not obvious in the world. They're stuck inside of protons and neutrons. And if you thought that protons and neutrons were fundamental, you wouldn't be in contention. I would say that the first time you could really guess the answer would be around 1975. And I don't think Einstein was in a position to guess the answer. I think he was very caught up in a Romanian framework, which is that you deal only with length, angle, and the curvature of the space in which you live. There's sort of a more modern viewpoint on this that he could have

• 1:30:13Eric Weinstein?

  understood. And I don't know to what extent he showed any recognition of it. But a lot of his thinking was really well suited for the world in which he lived, where he could do these thought experiments in his mind about falling elevators, or train cars, or whatever.

• 1:30:35Eric Weinstein?

  You know, Dirac was every bit Einstein's equal. We don't know how to interact with Dirac because Dirac was so strange. And he, you know, Einstein kept throwing off wisdom at an incredible rate. If you read ideas and opinions, or out of my later years, you have an idea of just what a sage this person was, even when he's screwing things up and making mistakes. It's all sage-like. Dirac was the singular human being. And occasionally, he says something about life, like, I think, when he was given a Nobel Prize, I think, shared with Schrodinger, he's given two speeches, and he uses his lunchtime speech to talk

• 1:31:17Eric Weinstein?

  about the bond market and the importance, it's crazy, and the importance of using the toolkit of physics within any sphere that is numbers-based. But we don't really know much about Dirac's views on humanity. We know about his beautiful aesthetic of the quantum. He gave the quantum poetry.

• 1:31:45Eric Weinstein?

  I think that right now it's up to us. They're not here right now. It's time to make guesses. I'm very partial to an example which happened on the Wheel of Fortune program.

• 1:31:58Chris Williamson?

  Fold this into the cutting edge of physics.

• 1:32:01Eric Weinstein?

  All right.

• 1:32:01Chris Williamson?

  Come on.

• 1:32:02Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 1:32:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm waiting.

• 1:32:03Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. There's a guy named Ken Wilson, who's discouraged all modern physicists from making guesses about the ultimate theory. Because he taught us that you can only observe the world at the energy scale that you're at. So you and I are in a classical world. We don't see the quantum much.

• 1:32:20Eric Weinstein?

  On Wheel of Fortune. There was, there was a puzzle. And it said, okay, phrase or expression, there's one apostrophe in the first word with three letters. And it's a long answer and person guesses R and there are no Rs. And.

• 1:32:40Eric Weinstein?

  Then I think that goes to the next woman, I think she guesses N.

• 1:32:46Eric Weinstein?

  And oh yes, there's one N and she says, okay, I'd like to solve. And the host looks at her incredulously like, well, I guess you could try to solve. And she says, and, and I will always remember this. I've got a good feeling about this. And it was right.

• 1:33:05Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:33:07Eric Weinstein?

  You'd never guess that there was enough information for a solve.

• 1:33:12Eric Weinstein?

  Whatever we have is what we've got. It's time to solve the puzzle.

• 1:33:17Chris Williamson?

  What would that look like?

• 1:33:20Eric Weinstein?

  Ask somebody else. I try to solve this. I've got a theory, but Peter White has a theory. I'd like to hear what the string theorists think their theory is. I'd like to understand where asymptotic safety is. Everybody who's got a theory, whether it's David Deutsch or Julian Barbour or Garrett Lisi, needs to come to a conference. Somebody needs to hold a conference and say, who can solve this puzzle? Let's put the sword in the stone and let's let everybody try to pull it out because now is the time. And the idea that we're not doing this and that we're letting this community that has run itself into the ground continue to adjudicate what is physics. It's like you boys haven't really done anything in N years.

• 1:34:05Eric Weinstein?

  You're not the arbiters of what is science and what isn't. You've allowed this madness to creep into your university departments. You're signing loyalty oaths. I have physics professors telling me that their boss is some dean who writes to them about what they what they posted on social media. It's like, no, you're the boss. You, the professors, are the soul of the university. Stop sucking your thumb. Stand up for what it is that you're supposed to be standing up for, which is excellence in research. Kick the people out who don't belong there and invite the people in who do. And let's get on with it. It's just, I couldn't be more angry about anything else in the world. How can you, how can you take the lifeboat community, the only community that can get

• 1:34:49Eric Weinstein?

  us a way out of here and run it into the ground?

• 1:34:51Chris Williamson?

  I like the term the lifeboat community.

• 1:34:54Eric Weinstein?

  It's, it's time to save everybody and we've, we've got huge responsibilities. We carry a lot of responsibility for getting everybody into this mess. And now we've got to offer everybody a way out.

• 1:35:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems, I don't know, I, I don't know the inner workings or the machinations of the physics world. But the first time I ever spoke to Sabina Hossenfelder, she explained to me that physics is as much about politics as it is about physics.

• 1:35:23Eric Weinstein?

  In bad eras, that becomes more true.

• 1:35:26Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:35:27Eric Weinstein?

  Sabina's entire career has taken place inside of the stagnation. And she's like one of these truth telling people. I think she's basically truthful. I disagree with a lot of stuff that I don't like that she, I think she does, which is a disservice to the community. But she is truthful that this community is off the rails.

• 1:35:48Chris Williamson?

  Moving from physics to something that you mentioned there, poetry.

• 1:35:51Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 1:35:51Chris Williamson?

  Your cover photo on Twitter was the first thing that we actually ever connected about a long, long, long time ago. And I'd just been to the Sagrada Familia.

• 1:36:01Eric Weinstein?

  Tell me.

• 1:36:01Chris Williamson?

  So I went for the first time to a wedding, a friend's wedding that he was holding on the outskirts and it was very enjoyable and.

• 1:36:11Chris Williamson?

  I had known about this building. I had read about it. I had seen all of the videos. And it's your cover photo. First off, why? And then secondly, what does it mean to you? What does this Sagrada Familia mean to you?

• 1:36:25Eric Weinstein?

  I'm dying to hear. Obviously, we know it's important in my life. I don't know whether it had an importance in yours.

• 1:36:34Chris Williamson?

  Beyond beauty, no, it has no greater meaning to me than that. But one of the lessons that I did learn was there's that quote about

• 1:36:44Chris Williamson?

  humanity will flourish when men plant trees under which they will never sit, something along those lines. And that's the first time that I've ever seen a purely joyful expression architecturally, artistically, that was created with the intense intent, purpose that that would be the end goal. That this is a, where are we at now in construction? Seventy years? Nearly 100 now? How many?

• 1:37:14Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know.

• 1:37:15Chris Williamson?

  It's a lot.

• 1:37:15Eric Weinstein?

  It's a long, still going.

• 1:37:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So it's not done. And I think it's

• 1:37:19Eric Weinstein?

  And we can't even figure out what his vision is. So we've allowed other people to put their vision.

• 1:37:24Chris Williamson?

  Step in and

• 1:37:25Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, because there's only one of him, Gaudi. Okay, the ceiling of that thing to me is transcendence.

• 1:37:35Eric Weinstein?

  You can't even believe it's real.

• 1:37:39Eric Weinstein?

  You know, that

• 1:37:44Eric Weinstein?

  there are things in this world

• 1:37:48Eric Weinstein?

  that remind you of the transcendent in all of us, that it's possible. You know, um,

• 1:37:58Eric Weinstein?

  I can think of particular pieces of music or poems or pieces of architecture. I was just inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, which is, you know, a few feet from Iosofia. And the interior of these two structures just are mind blowing.

• 1:38:18Eric Weinstein?

  And Sagrada Familia, I mean, these are religions that I'm not a part of.

• 1:38:24Eric Weinstein?

  If you're talking about the sacred family and you have a skylights to heaven,

• 1:38:32Eric Weinstein?

  how better to honor the Creator, whether the Creator exists or not,

• 1:38:38Eric Weinstein?

  than with genius and elegance and grace and humility and arrogance and everything that went into that ceiling. That ceiling is like nothing else I've ever seen.

• 1:38:52Eric Weinstein?

  And you know, you can touch, you know, Sam Harris is famous for saying that you can either learn how to meditate, or I can give you a few micrograms of the substance and you're gonna have a profound experience. Well, okay, just getting back from Sao Miguel and the Azores, you could take LSD or DMT, or you could go to Sao Miguel. I mean, it's just crazy that there is that much beauty on earth. And I guess that space is something that I wanted people to understand. When I named the show The Portal, and people did not understand, it wasn't intended to be a show. It's intended to be a search for the actual portal out of here. It's an attempt to find, pinch to zoom.

• 1:39:37Eric Weinstein?

  I believe that we are not doomed here, but that we have developed this very weird focus on psychology. To challenge Einstein is almost seen as arrogance.

• 1:39:53Eric Weinstein?

  And yet, if Einstein is to survive as a legacy, it's only going to be because somebody basically

• 1:40:01Eric Weinstein?

  undermines general relativity status as a fundamental theory.

• 1:40:06Eric Weinstein?

  Because we're not going to make it. And I'm trying to remind people, in a world that now, like you can look up on Twitter, say lone genius theory. People don't believe in the lone genius theory.

• 1:40:25Eric Weinstein?

  Well, then what was Gaudi? What was Dirac? What was Einstein? What was Yang? What was Emmy Nerd? Somebody tell me why I have all of these lone geniuses in my life?

• 1:40:40Eric Weinstein?

  And aren't we supposed to be doing that and thinking that that's admirable? I think we're supposed to be building

• 1:40:48Eric Weinstein?

  the theory that can realize that the ceiling of La Crata Familia is a portal.

• 1:40:56Eric Weinstein?

  We're supposed to inspire ourselves with beauty and luxury. We're not supposed to consume it to pig out for status reasons. We're supposed to get ourselves into a state where we can dream at an interplanetary level.

• 1:41:09Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the things that we've spoken about today are to do with cerebral horsepower, cognition, they're difficult things that need to be done in the head. And yet you're talking here about the transcendent. You're talking about something which is embodied, which is spiritual, by whichever definition of the word you want to use.

• 1:41:28Chris Williamson?

  Do you find in yourself as somebody who does rely on cerebral horsepower for a lot of the things that you try to do? And presumably takes pride in your ability to have workout problems, have thoughts. Do you feel a tension in yourself between the transcendent, the relinquishing, the embodied and the cerebral, the cognitive, the purposeful on that side?

• 1:41:53Eric Weinstein?

  You know, I have a dumb expression which I don't use in public and I'm sure I'll be.

• 1:41:57Chris Williamson?

  Castigated for it.

• 1:41:59Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:59Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant.

• 1:42:01Eric Weinstein?

  But it's head, heart and loins.

• 1:42:08Eric Weinstein?

  If it doesn't speak to your head, heart and your loins, leave it for someone else.

• 1:42:12Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean? How do you enact that?

• 1:42:15Eric Weinstein?

  You have to try to realize that these things have to be balanced and tempered. You don't want to live by your heart.

• 1:42:23Eric Weinstein?

  Just every time, you know, you see a daffodil blowing its seeds into the wind, you'll be transported and you'll stop paying your electric bills. And you don't want to be led around by your loins. That's not going to end well. And you don't want to be led around by your head too, because then you'll get yourself into one of these cul-de-sacs and you won't even realize that you can't think your way out of it. You were given all of these facilities and motivations.

• 1:42:46Chris Williamson?

  How do you pull yourself from head to heart?

• 1:42:49Eric Weinstein?

  Well.

• 1:42:54Eric Weinstein?

  You brought this guitar.

• 1:42:57Chris Williamson?

  Guitarele.

• 1:42:58Eric Weinstein?

  Guitarele.

• 1:42:59Chris Williamson?

  It's just on your right. Grab it. Show it to everybody.

• 1:43:04Eric Weinstein?

  So I don't, I do not play the guitarele.

• 1:43:08Chris Williamson?

  I don't think anybody actually technically does.

• 1:43:10Eric Weinstein?

  Well, it's like a guitar that's too small for your fingers.

• 1:43:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes. You've got your pixel in it.

• 1:43:17Eric Weinstein?

  So you take some piece of music that actually means something to you, right? And one thing that I remember hearing when I was growing up was this.

• 1:43:38Eric Weinstein?

  So it's the Asturias of Isaac Albanese. It was originally written for piano. And you see sort of these things on oud where you have a tremolo. You've got two, two fingers playing the open B string. And then you've got this melody, which is played with the thumb.

• 1:44:02Eric Weinstein?

  So the combination of these things produces this different effect.

• 1:44:10Eric Weinstein?

  I can't really get my fingers in there.

• 1:44:14Eric Weinstein?

  And then I started thinking about, okay, well, that's a great effect. What if we tried to write and to create using the same idea? I started.

• 1:44:24Eric Weinstein?

  So.

• 1:44:47Eric Weinstein?

  That's not the same song, but it's using some of the same techniques about just getting these things to ring out and to get the melody going on the bass line. And then you have to forget this. Now, you know, if I was able to play this properly, and I'm sorry if I'm embarrassing myself. You're trying to do this thing where you're.

• 1:45:08Eric Weinstein?

  You're recognizing that the transcendent lives in particular structures, that they elicit this feeling and that we have this opportunity to go back and forth between the analytic description. If I'm thinking about this, I can't really feel it. And if I'm feeling it, I can't really figure out how to use it or think about it or compose with it. And so,

• 1:45:34Eric Weinstein?

  you know, to me, what we're trying to do is we're trying to

• 1:45:44Eric Weinstein?

  camp and decamp. Well, that spoke to my head and my loins, but it didn't speak to my heart. Or that spoke to two out of three. We need ultimately to be fully embodied, and that's a challenge. And we have to, we either accept the challenge or we don't accept the challenge. And we have to go back and forth between these lenses. You can't necessarily be in the same, you know, if you see your child and you're a physician or surgeon, you could see your child as a bunch of tissue hooked up to itself, you know? And that's important if you're hiking and you're in a bad spot, you actually have to do an operation on your child. But it's a terrible way to put your child to sleep when you're reading a bedtime story.

• 1:46:27Chris Williamson?

  Is there a

• 1:46:32Chris Williamson?

  is there a challenge that people are facing at the moment with

• 1:46:39Chris Williamson?

  an overreliance on a brain-based economy, a unlimited amount of information at your fingertips with Wikipedia and ChatGPT, for them to struggle to find something transcendent when it can be broken down into its component parts and explained by somebody who understands the child as a connection of ligaments, organs, and blood vessels as opposed to as the beautiful progeny of the person looking at them?

• 1:47:10Eric Weinstein?

  Well, keep in mind that there are people who can weave poetry through their description of something very technical. Herman Wile, for example, wrote in a very Olympian fashion about abstract algebra. He talked about the homosexuality of certain symbols affiliating with themselves, you know? Completely crazy.

• 1:47:31Chris Williamson?

  Auto-gyno arithmetic.

• 1:47:33Eric Weinstein?

  And

• 1:47:36Eric Weinstein?

  You know, there are people who just write beautifully. Uh, I think that Jim Watson, who may be a son of a bitch on many fronts, is one of the great writers in the English language. If you read the Double Helix, it's an incredible narrative. From the most, one of the most memorable first sentences to the, to the conclusion.

• 1:47:56Eric Weinstein?

  We need the Carl Sagins

• 1:48:02Eric Weinstein?

  to animate our head and our hearts at the same time.

• 1:48:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you think there is an over reliance on head at the moment?

• 1:48:12Eric Weinstein?

  I'm worried that our head, heart and loins are all disengaged.

• 1:48:18Chris Williamson?

  So what do you use if you're not using any of those?

• 1:48:21Eric Weinstein?

  I use them all.

• 1:48:22Chris Williamson?

  No, but what are the people using who are not using those?

• 1:48:24Eric Weinstein?

  Uh, they're not watching what's happening to them. They're being denatured by their phones. Your phone is not a phone. It is a very, it's an environment. You know, you pick it up and suddenly you're, you're someplace that you don't realize isn't relative to your physical surroundings. Like you, you get very angry that you get a text message while you're driving and you try responding to it. Well, you're going 45 miles an hour in a several hundred pound or a thousand pound vehicle. You've lost track of where you are.

• 1:49:01Eric Weinstein?

  Our phone is, you know, and

• 1:49:05Eric Weinstein?

  I talk to people about the crisis in pornography.

• 1:49:10Eric Weinstein?

  The OnlyFans movement, the pornographic stuff that you're seeing. People are not getting easily excited and aroused inside of any kind of context. Like the erotic is taking it on the chin, I think.

• 1:49:28Eric Weinstein?

  I think it's really important to remember that eroticism, for example, is at least a combination of the loins and the head and at best the heart as well. What you're starting to see is people can't actually derive excitement from normal stimuli that has to do with falling in love or having children or, you know.

• 1:49:51Chris Williamson?

  So you're talking about an ever escalating stimulus that people require to get the same arousal response.

• 1:49:56Eric Weinstein?

  And they can't.

• 1:49:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Mary Harrington calls this one of her three laws of porno dynamics. It's the law of FAP entropy, that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more extreme over time.

• 1:50:07Eric Weinstein?

  Well,

• 1:50:11Eric Weinstein?

  what's the cure for that? Something high end.

• 1:50:19Eric Weinstein?

  You could just try to do it all on loins. Show me something where my psychogenic arousal gets greater and greater because I've never seen that. And holy cow is that far out. Or you could say, you know, it's more like a Cobb Douglas utility function.

• 1:50:33Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna have to bring this down to my level.

• 1:50:35Eric Weinstein?

  Multiple inputs. In other words, if I could offer you only food or only water, that would not work. You'd rather, if you have a lot of food, have a little water to complement it because that water becomes that much more valuable. Or if you have a ton of liquids and you have no nourishment, you probably want, really value a little bit of food. Well, in my opinion, part of what we need is we need more, more things that reward us when we're integrating rather than when we're extremizing.

• 1:51:06Chris Williamson?

  Get back to that discussion about technology sort of not only fracturing our attention, but also fracturing our experience. There seems to be a wistfulness, not just in the dating realm, but in the experiential realm for a bygone time where we felt connected to the things that we do.

• 1:51:23Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:24Chris Williamson?

  And.

• 1:51:26Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting for someone of my age, I'm thirty five, so I'm like slap bang in the middle of the millennials.

• 1:51:31Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 1:51:31Chris Williamson?

  So I remember a time before ubiquity of iPhones, before internet. But there was a, like, there's a whimsy of childhood in any case, and me being able to tear those two apart is kind of difficult. But I definitely think that when I read history, when I read Ryan Holiday, for instance, and I think about Xeno Obsidian walking around the Stoa Poikle, where I've been, and I'm there, and I, I, I think about the degree of connection to the experience.

• 1:52:02Chris Williamson?

  What is technology and what are our smartphones doing to our ability to connect?

• 1:52:06Eric Weinstein?

  They're changing our, our wetware. We're not.

• 1:52:13Eric Weinstein?

  If you can have twelve life-changing experiences in the space of a minute and none of them are yours, what do you think that's going to do to your mind?

• 1:52:24Eric Weinstein?

  You know, at some point I was in an Oculus situation. I was deep underwater and a blue whale swam past me.

• 1:52:32Eric Weinstein?

  Well, none of that actually happened, but it felt like it did. Or, you know, that you can do this nuclear explosion on Henderson Island in Oculus.

• 1:52:43Eric Weinstein?

  It's just a more immersive phone.

• 1:52:46Eric Weinstein?

  And

• 1:52:50Eric Weinstein?

  look,

• 1:52:52Eric Weinstein?

  you have to be, you know, that's one of the things about La Sagrada Familia. You go in there and it's real.

• 1:52:59Eric Weinstein?

  You see the Grand Canyon and it is actually grand.

• 1:53:03Eric Weinstein?

  You know, you, there's certain things that don't easily live up to their billing. I think I went to Pamukkale in Turkey years ago, which Pamuk means cotton and Kale, I guess, castles, it was the cotton castles of mineral deposits and they were formed these pools. And there weren't enough pools and there were way too many people. So it was like one of those moments where the tourists have totally destroyed the natural attraction. Okay, but I went into the Blue Mosque and it was every bit as mind-blowing as it was the last time I was there thirty years ago.

• 1:53:36Chris Williamson?

  It's the same way that I feel every single time I step into the Vatican. Every single

• 1:53:41Eric Weinstein?

  Every single time, and I've been there three times now.

• 1:53:44Chris Williamson?

  I've been there three times.

• 1:53:45Eric Weinstein?

  And it's just, holy cow. Well, I shouldn't have said that. Anyway.

• 1:53:51Chris Williamson?

  Very good.

• 1:53:51Eric Weinstein?

  I didn't mean to.

• 1:53:55Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, you have to, there have to be things that you actually viscerally relate to that stop you, like the Bach cello suites. How many times have I heard the Bach or Whole Lot of Love? Could do it either way, or You Shook Me All Night Long, you know? That's holy. You shook me all night long is is a transcendent song.

• 1:54:23Chris Williamson?

  It's less transcendent if you see it as part of a 60 second TikTok montage.

• 1:54:28Eric Weinstein?

  No, because the schma is transcendent and that'll fit right in there.

• 1:54:34Eric Weinstein?

  Schma israel, Adonai, can't hit that. Aluheinu Adonai Eh Ha. Yeah, you shook me all night long. That's prayer. Yes, you shook me all night long. You know, if that doesn't move you, you need to check into someplace. Those four notes recur in all of these songs that matter. It's basically Mary Had a Little Lamb with Fa thrown in as well.

• 1:55:18Eric Weinstein?

  You know, and I bring up this example, my wife was watching a film I didn't want to watch. It was some chick flick and it all hovers around this one scene where this guy drags this girl into a music store because he can't afford a piano. He goes, I don't know you, but I want you. Going up to that fourth. All the more for that. And I just, I was transfixed. I couldn't, could not continue to do my calculations. Like what the hell is this movie? So those four notes is a great place to ground yourself. And there's a reason that they work. The second note.

• 1:56:00Eric Weinstein?

  Brings up in your mind, the thing called the fifth, the dominant chord. The first note is spread between the tonic and the subdominant. The third note belongs to the tonic only, and the fourth note only belongs to the subdominant. And so this, this idea that Western harmony revolves around these ideas of the tonic, the subdominant, the dominant are carried by these notes. So even if you're not playing it on a chordal instrument, that this pattern of four notes that keeps recurring grabs us because we know what the chords are behind it.

• 1:56:39Eric Weinstein?

  And it's basically Mary Had A Little Lamb or Proud Mary, you know? But that's a great place to start for transcendence. Just check on something really simple, whether you're feeling it.

• 1:56:52Chris Williamson?

  Awe and dread, two emotions that I miss in my life.

• 1:56:58Eric Weinstein?

  Say more.

• 1:56:59Chris Williamson?

  So when I look up at the night sky, I get it in equal dosages.

• 1:57:03Eric Weinstein?

  Oh, good.

• 1:57:04Chris Williamson?

  Uh, you know, when it's good, I've been out to Joshua Tree, taken an edible. Didn't need the edible at all. That was unnecessary amplification.

• 1:57:13Eric Weinstein?

  You know, we're having this discussion in the middle of the Perseid's meteor shower.

• 1:57:17Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:57:18Eric Weinstein?

  I highly recommend get yourself to a place where there's no light pollution and lay on your back right before dawn, you'll, you'll have a blast. Or and but the awe and the dread is, is very much that.

• 1:57:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes. And, uh, I don't know, it makes you feel insignificant in a way, I think, that keeps your ego small and helps to re-center your.

• 1:57:39Eric Weinstein?

  Do you want your ego small?

• 1:57:42Eric Weinstein?

  Have you been told that was a good thing?

• 1:57:45Chris Williamson?

  I've been told that it's a good thing. I would say for me.

• 1:57:52Chris Williamson?

  Remembering finitude and not insignificance, but

• 1:57:59Chris Williamson?

  the

• 1:58:02Chris Williamson?

  temporary nature of our time here, the vastness of what is going to go on, the things that have come before, the things that will come after, the scale.

• 1:58:10Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Chris Williamson?

  I think that that it grounds me. I struggle to get into my head to describe the thing that is almost exclusively in heart and loins. And

• 1:58:23Chris Williamson?

  it makes me feel good when I do that. And yet I find myself, I've got emails to do. I heard this term the other day, John Lovell, Warrior Poet Society, said, "The tyranny of the urgent."

• 1:58:34Eric Weinstein?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:35Chris Williamson?

  And fuck, I love that. The tyranny of the urgent.

• 1:58:40Eric Weinstein?

  You familiar with this concept of ethos?

• 1:58:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Eric Weinstein?

  The alternation between the transcendent and the mundane and the pressing, you know, like.

• 1:58:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:58:49Eric Weinstein?

  We will conquer the cosmos, but I have to pick up my dry cleaner.

• 1:58:56Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, I think that there is that that tyranny, but I also want to just talk about arrogance and humility. I meet too many people who have one without the other. And I see all these discussions online about so and so has this beautiful epistemic humility, or somebody else is, you know, preposterously arrogant or whatever. And I sort of sit and wonder at this discussion.

• 1:59:24Eric Weinstein?

  You want both.

• 1:59:28Chris Williamson?

  What is humility without arrogance?

• 1:59:33Eric Weinstein?

  Well,

• 1:59:36Eric Weinstein?

  you know, who I think actually had this in kind of pretty decent balance that was on display for the world to see was Khabib Nurmagomedov.

• 1:59:47Chris Williamson?

  What an unbelievably good example.

• 1:59:50Eric Weinstein?

  Right. So tell me, tell me how it lands for you.

• 1:59:53Chris Williamson?

  Khabib is very, very high on a list of people that I would love to speak to and.

• 1:59:58Eric Weinstein?

  You hear that, Khabib?

• 2:00:00Chris Williamson?

  Listen, Khabib, if anybody in Dagestan has got Khabib's email address, please tell him to get in touch.

• 2:00:05Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, this is fascinating to me.

• 2:00:08Chris Williamson?

  So the more, I'll, I'll do a timeline of it. So Conor McGregor, very seductive, very obviously seductive, working class. The Irish hate to be told that they're a part of the UK. They're not. They're near. You know, close enough. It's like an adopted son type thing.

• 2:00:27Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 2:00:28Chris Williamson?

  And I'm thinking, God, this guy's like a savant of war and artistry as he's coming up. And then he beats Chad Mendes and it's a war as a fight. And then he's crying and then he does the other side of it. And he's doing with Ida Portal. He's balancing in the middle of maybe Vegas or, or California somewhere on a, a walking rail, on a side rail. And he's, I think Nate Diaz accused him of playing touch butt with that dork in the park. And he's doing handstands and he's got this sort of fluidity to him.

• 2:01:06Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 2:01:07Chris Williamson?

  And then there's this amazing interview that was clipped and put in perfectly of a journalist reciting back to Conor what he said before the Aldo fight. And he said, at the press conference, I saw his right hand shaking. That was a subtle tell for me. He's going to overload with that right hand. And when he thinks I will be there, I will not. I will create gaps within that octagon. He will fall into those gaps and that is when I will strike. And then there's a clip of him backstage before he's about to fight. And he's bouncing backwards and forwards in that sort of long karate stance that he does. And he steps back and he throws that left hook, practicing. And they placed it in time with the fight.

• 2:01:45Eric Weinstein?

  Amazing.

• 2:01:45Chris Williamson?

  And it's the same move. And this guy says, you said these things, recites that thing, post-fight. How'd you do that? How do you do that? And Conor talks about if you have the bravery enough to speak it and the courage enough to be able to pursue it, then da, da, da, da, da. And I'm just fucking enthralled by this guy. I got put onto a reality TV show in my twenties that we had no internet, no contact with friends or family or any sort of muse. And it turned out that while I was there, I think it was Rafael Dos Anjos, was injured. So I was terrified I was going to miss McGregor's fight because that's how inspiring it was to me.

• 2:02:24Chris Williamson?

  And then there's this, there's talk of this guy, this other fighter, unbeaten, undefeated. And it's the Bane Batman type scenario. At least that's the model that I had in my mind. And I'm like, fuck. You know, you've got the, almost the Rocky versus, who was the Russian guy that he's training for in the fight?

• 2:02:46Eric Weinstein?

  No.

• 2:02:48Chris Williamson?

  Who's the Russian guy that Conor fights? The Rocky fight, sorry.

• 2:02:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I'm Dragov. So it's almost that, right? You've got this training in the mountains and chopping wood. And then there's the dolly. Conor throws the dolly and you start to see, that was the first time I really took notice of Khabib.

• 2:03:15Chris Williamson?

  And you remember that video? Send me location. Send me location. Just tell me where. Send me location. And there's a number of tribute videos called the location, it's about with a K, about Khabib. I'm like, fucking hell. Like this is, this guy is something else.

• 2:03:33Eric Weinstein?

  This guy is real.

• 2:03:35Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:03:36Eric Weinstein?

  So Conor McGregor was spread between real and fake.

• 2:03:43Eric Weinstein?

  Right? The showmanship was, was a part of, it was backed up particularly by his striking, by his ability to sense his opponent, sort of almost using your, like an antenna.

• 2:03:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Eric Weinstein?

  But I really believe that in part, trying to get into your opponent's head with somebody. I really wonder whether Westerners have any idea of what happens in places like Central and Eastern Europe? When you start talking about somebody's mother?

• 2:04:21Eric Weinstein?

  You know, like, are you still? I I had this really bad cultural reaction, which is that there are people who are bought in to the whole trash talking thing, you know? And if it had been like, I don't know, Conor McGregor versus, and I don't know how to pronounce it, Chael Sonnen or something like that.

• 2:04:43Chris Williamson?

  Chael Sonnen, yeah. It's a fair game.

• 2:04:46Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, they're both they're both accepting the game.

• 2:04:50Eric Weinstein?

  And with Khabib, I just had this other thought of like, have you never met anyone from Dagestan before?

• 2:04:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56Eric Weinstein?

  Like, anyone from Dagestan? It's not just Khabib.

• 2:05:01Eric Weinstein?

  It's so bad.

• 2:05:02Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever done improv?

• 2:05:04Eric Weinstein?

  No, well, inadvertently.

• 2:05:07Chris Williamson?

  In improv classes, there's something called punking the game.

• 2:05:11Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 2:05:11Chris Williamson?

  And let's say that we're in a circle and we're supposed to whoosh, we pass energy around, whoosh, and you can go boing, and it goes back the other way, and you can like, send it across and stuff. There's only one rule. One rule is, don't punk the game. Punking the game is, ah, like, not playing by the rules.

• 2:05:29Eric Weinstein?

  Game rejection.

• 2:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes. And what you see is Conor playing a game of tennis, and he keeps on serving this ball across, and the ball.

• 2:05:38Eric Weinstein?

  I saw it 100% from Khabib's perspective.

• 2:05:41Chris Williamson?

  Not only does the ball not come back across the net, he doesn't even have the racket in his hand. You know, he's there, he's got to be there, there's obligations to be done. And it was that series of press conferences.

• 2:05:53Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:53Chris Williamson?

  That really made me fall in love with Khabib. And then how it gets me emotional thinking about it, thinking about his tribute to his father.

• 2:06:02Eric Weinstein?

  I'm telling you, I can't see it from Conor's perspective.

• 2:06:07Chris Williamson?

  Of why you would behave in that way?

• 2:06:09Eric Weinstein?

  Like, two seconds facing this guy, it's not a question of fear, it's a question of respect.

• 2:06:18Eric Weinstein?

  Maybe I just don't get it, but I spend enough time, I have spent enough time in, I don't know, the north of India, or the center of Turkey, or places in Egypt, or Ukraine, or Russia, wherever, you don't.

• 2:06:37Eric Weinstein?

  I can tell the internet is going to completely tell me I don't get it. You don't do this stuff. You just don't. It's like, I can't explain to people who are convinced that the internet is the gift to prove that dunking and dragging is man's highest function.

• 2:06:52Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:52Eric Weinstein?

  There's so much stuff you don't do. And this whole move towards like anonymity and let's make fun of everybody and everything because mockery is good.

• 2:07:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Eric Weinstein?

  This way, this, this is the direction to madness.

• 2:07:11Chris Williamson?

  I certainly think that Peterson said this a while ago. Uh, one of the main problems with Twitter is it's driven the proximate price of being a prick down to zero.

• 2:07:22Eric Weinstein?

  Sure, and the combination of real people and unnamed accounts and bot farms.

• 2:07:27Chris Williamson?

  And the inability to work out whether it's been said in earnest or said in a.

• 2:07:30Eric Weinstein?

  Or whether it's been coordinated so that a hundred thousand people go off at once on the exactly the same point. Getting back to the issue of arrogance and humility, what is Khabib?

• 2:07:46Chris Williamson?

  Competent.

• 2:07:48Chris Williamson?

  Unwavering.

• 2:07:52Chris Williamson?

  Humble.

• 2:07:55Eric Weinstein?

  He's both arrogant and humble.

• 2:08:00Eric Weinstein?

  And you have to look at the move that he does when you compliment him. What does he do?

• 2:08:10Eric Weinstein?

  Hamdulillah, hamdulillah, right? Or Mashallah, or something with the name Allah in it.

• 2:08:16Eric Weinstein?

  It's like, I give you this praise. Oh, no, no, no.

• 2:08:19Chris Williamson?

  It's not for me.

• 2:08:20Eric Weinstein?

  It's for the God.

• 2:08:21Chris Williamson?

  Or for my father.

• 2:08:23Eric Weinstein?

  Or for my father, right? And so this issue about, this is a, this is a beautiful thing when you, when you have uh, Muslim friends is that they learn to deflect all of this positivity

• 2:08:40Eric Weinstein?

  out. If they're getting it, they deflect it so that they don't keep it and they don't become insufferable. On the other hand, if they're extraordinary at what they do, they know that they're extraordinary at what they do. Khabib is under no illusions as to how good he is. He's set the highest standards for himself.

• 2:09:00Chris Williamson?

  Tomorrow night, I'm gonna smash your boy.

• 2:09:04Eric Weinstein?

  He is simultaneously, you said competent, it just wasn't fair to him.

• 2:09:13Eric Weinstein?

  He's way beyond competent. And, you know, I guess I just want people to realize that you need arrogance to stand up against insuperable odds. And you need humility to stop your arrogance from driving you insane. And to keep asking that people be constantly humble is an affront to what we are as humans. I really don't grasp it. You need that deep humility, 100%. But so many people need arrogance in order to take on the challenges that they could. If you took the world seriously, you'd never take on those challenges if you were just humble.

• 2:09:57Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, yes, yes. There's my favorite clip, one of my favorite clips of Khabib, post fighting, post Korea. He's doing an interview and talking about the training camps, the gym that he looks after and some of the fighters that are there. And apparently, I think they train six days or six and a half days a week. And he tells them they need to get up. Some of the guys complained and he says, it's okay. You go home, your mom, she'll tuck you into bed at night, she will cook you dinner and tomorrow you'll be comfortable. But that's not why you're here.

• 2:10:36Eric Weinstein?

  Put that coffee down.

• 2:10:40Eric Weinstein?

  Do you know coffee is for closers?

• 2:10:42Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yes, yes. Good reference.

• 2:10:45Eric Weinstein?

  Your name's Levine? You call yourself a salesman, you son of a bitch?

• 2:10:51Chris Williamson?

  I just love, I really, really love this.

• 2:10:56Chris Williamson?

  I had a conversation last week and I was told a quote,

• 2:11:03Chris Williamson?

  self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anybody else.

• 2:11:08Eric Weinstein?

  You know, I'll be honest with you. I get tired of these things. I think that there's a lot of men in particular, looking for simple answers. And all of these things fall flat for me. That they're front loaded because they simplify things, right? Imagine that that's all that self-love was.

• 2:11:29Eric Weinstein?

  Well, then I'd have, I'd have a definition. But it's not going to work. And I think that this is one of the things that I don't know how to fight exactly, is that we're in a world that's convinced that the truth must be simple. And all of these simple truths don't survive the collider that is modern social media.

• 2:11:49Chris Williamson?

  So I don't disagree. The problem with a truth which is boundlessly complex is that functionally it's useless.

• 2:11:57Eric Weinstein?

  So that's what, and I'm so glad you made this point. That's the puzzle. We're now in a world where to do the nuance is to get yourself tangled because the internet is not friendly to nuance. On the other hand, to say something simply and crisply leads you into disappointing everyone who's believed in you. And, you know, we were talking before a little bit about Christopher Hitchens.

• 2:12:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Tell me about your thoughts on Hitch. I asked Sam this question. Sam spent a good bit of time with him. What would the modern culture be like if Hitch was still alive?

• 2:12:30Eric Weinstein?

  Hitch, I think, would have been forced to either self-incinerate or uh, adapt. And I'm not sure which he would have done.

• 2:12:41Chris Williamson?

  What's self-incineration in this context?

• 2:12:43Eric Weinstein?

  One of the things that makes Christopher Hitchens a hero to so many people, almost oddly a secular saint, if you will, is that he held the promise that one could simply stand in some place that was reasonable and hold forth from that simple perspective, like, nope. There is nothing to Islam. It is nonsense. It might be something he would say, or you might say.

• 2:13:12Eric Weinstein?

  You know, free speech is absolute and you have every right to say anything you want. And I have every right to say, and the better ideas will prevail.

• 2:13:21Eric Weinstein?

  Now you watch what's happened with Sam and this question of Trump.

• 2:13:27Eric Weinstein?

  Sam perceives Trump to be an asymmetric existential threat and was willing to go and back the idea that the Hunter Biden laptop story might not have benefited the election. And he's lost an enormous number of people who otherwise agree with him. And now what's the reasoning? And the reasoning and something oddly, I first time I met Sam, I went on his show to warn him that you can't just optimize for truth. You have to optimize. I said, I have four variables I can't live without. Truth, meaning fitness and grace.

• 2:14:05Eric Weinstein?

  So Trump is a fitness puzzle to Sam, which is if we allow Trump to destroy the country in Sam's mind, then we've lost fitness. There's no, there's no point in being truthful.

• 2:14:17Eric Weinstein?

  And then there's a question about what is the meaning? Do you destroy the meaning of a democracy when you hold back information? Maybe you do. Maybe it no longer feels like it's an actual democracy.

• 2:14:29Eric Weinstein?

  What is the graceful thing to do? What is the just and right thing to do?

• 2:14:35Eric Weinstein?

  I am convinced that some of Hitch's positions

• 2:14:42Eric Weinstein?

  were attractive because he was using his big brain to suggest that life could be lived simply.

• 2:14:50Eric Weinstein?

  If we were just strong enough of character, if we were clear enough of thought, we could espouse something like free speech or reason, and it would be enough.

• 2:15:03Chris Williamson?

  Without requiring that we hold it up to a higher power.

• 2:15:07Eric Weinstein?

  Or that, you know, you get caught in some very serious situation where you're in an edge case. Free speech does not exist in an absolute forum in, under American law.

• 2:15:21Eric Weinstein?

  It just doesn't. We, we, we mentioned Miller versus California, which was a sort of a follow on decision to Memoirs versus Massachusetts. You don't have a right to broadcast pornography because pornography does not enjoy First Amendment protection. Now, how do you discern that pornography doesn't? Well, the justices claim that it doesn't. And there's a, you know, a three factor test for what is pornography, which was, I believe attenuated under something called Memoirs versus Massachusetts, but that was not allowed to stand. You're not

• 2:16:01Eric Weinstein?

  allowed to necessarily endanger troop movements by blabbing information in a war. You're not able to slander or libel. There are all sorts of adjustments to free speech. And when you, when you come at one of these perspectives from an absolutist frame of mind, you have to hope that you're not going to meet the edge case. A good example for me was the Second Amendment. I noticed that many Second Amendment types took an absolutist perspective, saying the right to keep and bear arms will not be infringed and don't bother me about a well-regulated militia. I said, okay, I'm not going to talk to you about a well-regulated

• 2:16:44Eric Weinstein?

  militia. My question is, should the Davy Crockett be sold at K Mark? And they would often say, well, what's the Davy Crockett? And I said, well, it's about 100 pound personal nuke.

• 2:16:56Eric Weinstein?

  Well, first of all, I was very flabbergasted that a lot of gun enthusiasts did not know that there was a personal nuke developed by the United States. But then immediately, many of them saw where this was going, which is, okay, if we're going to restrict personal nukes at Kmart, then you've got your your foot in the door, the camel has its nose under the tent.

• 2:17:19Chris Williamson?

  It's a difference of degree, not a difference of kind all the way down.

• 2:17:21Eric Weinstein?

  Exactly. So I think that personal nukes have to be sold at Kmart because the American population needs to keep parity with the American military. And then I say, well, do you realize what you just said? Do you realize that you've bounced out of your very simplified framework? They don't. And this is partially the problem, which is that if you can't talk about taste and trade offs and balance, because none of it's all squishy.

• 2:17:50Eric Weinstein?

  Then you have all of these people running to these different ultra simplifications, none of which work.

• 2:17:57Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote from one of my smartest friends, Gwinder.

• 2:18:02Chris Williamson?

  A dilemma of tweeting is that you're aware of exceptions and conditions to your statements, but can't include them without turning an elegant aphorism into a clunky mess. So you must choose between writing tineared garbage or getting torn apart by pedants and replies and quote tweets.

• 2:18:18Eric Weinstein?

  I've chosen to fail at a particular fashion. No, but this is this is really important.

• 2:18:25Eric Weinstein?

  I'm failing. How about you?

• 2:18:27Chris Williamson?

  Depends what your goals are.

• 2:18:29Eric Weinstein?

  Well, but my point to you is, I don't think we're meant to succeed here.

• 2:18:34Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean? What's the criteria?

• 2:18:39Eric Weinstein?

  Was that a herd?

• 2:18:41Chris Williamson?

  What's the criteria?

• 2:18:42Eric Weinstein?

  No, sorry, the person who just said.

• 2:18:43Chris Williamson?

  Gwinder, no, a guy.

• 2:18:44Eric Weinstein?

  Guy. What he said was that you're aware of the trade off and there's no way out of the trade off.

• 2:18:56Eric Weinstein?

  I believe that there are ways out, but they have their own problems. Once you start to understand all of the different forces that are arrayed against you, you realize that if somebody chooses to hyper-focus on various things, they can effectively destroy your credibility in general. And you brought up Wikipedia and I wanted to talk about that. An interesting thing that's happening with Wikipedia is the difference between individual Wikipedia entries and Wikipedia entries on like a subject or a plant or a geographic place. So isn't it strange that if you were to look up, for example, pneumatic drill on Wikipedia,

• 2:19:40Eric Weinstein?

  there'd be a huge technically accurate article about pneumatic drills.

• 2:19:45Chris Williamson?

  What constitutes it and who invented it?

• 2:19:47Eric Weinstein?

  Right. And then you look up Jordan Peterson and I guarantee you it's going to be a war zone. And now you've you've fused these two things together, which is weaponized Wikipedia and factual Wikipedia. And this is like some really dangerous new object. And I always knew that Wikipedia, the genius thing that it was, had a finite shelf life because it made the fatal flaw of using authoritative sources as bedrock truth. What happens when trolls get access to bedrock sources? What happens when the State Department or the Department of Homeland Security or the intelligence community or people who hate you?

• 2:20:32Chris Williamson?

  That was the headlines that happened after my episode on Joe's show were, it was the weekend that somebody had nudged the definition of recession on Wikipedia to no longer be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. And this was a Monday and it happened over the weekend. Mentioned it and all hell break loose, broke loose. It had already broken loose over the weekend. And then obviously anything Joe touches gets amplified to

• 2:21:04Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 2:21:05Chris Williamson?

  the high heavens. You're like,

• 2:21:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so the definitions that we use, I think Shapiro calls it semantic overload. Uh, that's the battleground, ultimately, almost all.

• 2:21:21Eric Weinstein?

  Tell me the frame and I'll tell you the argument. Like, somebody will say, um, you know, is it worth stopping Donald Trump by suppressing stories? Yes or no? Go. It's like, well, first of all, the question was designed to subsume that we have to stop Donald Trump. I might agree that with that. I believe maybe we should stop Donald Trump. But you did make that the argument and then you piled on a question on top of it and you subsume that within the frame. And so more or less, this is everything at the moment, which is if you can, if you can define misgendering and dead naming, um, you've won the argument.

• 2:22:06Chris Williamson?

  I suppose it's a world in which, yeah, so I'll give you a, an example for the fledgling podcasters out there. When you first start doing a podcast, you're nervous that the guest doesn't like you. You're nervous that the guest isn't interested in you, that your question sucks, that your question doesn't make sense, and you're terrified of silence, among millions of other things.

• 2:22:24Eric Weinstein?

  Did any of those happen in this episode?

• 2:22:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you've been very welcoming. How could I know? After you serenaded me with your git-a-lay-ly, um, it was a perfect aphrodisiac. So what you do, and what I noticed with a lot of young, new podcasters, is they do what, multiple choice offering. So they'll ask you a question. Eric, Trump 2024, what do you think's going to happen? Is it going to be that, and as soon as you say, is it, and you then create either a binary or a trinary of options, you have now, not only, you've restricted for the entire universe of different things that you could have come up with, I don't know, whatever you're gonna say, I've given you two choices. So it makes it difficult for you to take a third, because

• 2:23:09Chris Williamson?

  you need to say no and why, no and why, and then take the third. So you often offer up this very narrow, very unidimensional landscape.

• 2:23:18Eric Weinstein?

  Exactly.

• 2:23:19Chris Williamson?

  And it ruins the, the conversation.

• 2:23:22Eric Weinstein?

  It's funny, Lex makes assumptions in so many of his frames that I unweave, but I think he gets like.

• 2:23:32Eric Weinstein?

  Some of the best out of me as a guest. And there's something about unweaving Lex's questions, which I hate doing to him because I want to just answer his questions. But on the other hand, there's something about the process of unweaving the assumptions that actually benefits some of our interactions. So I think that there's a lot of this just grooming us, grooving us to only think about certain possibilities.

• 2:24:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:02Eric Weinstein?

  And what I don't know is how do you get nuanced thought to propagate at the speed of meme?

• 2:24:14Chris Williamson?

  Sexy, you need to make it sexy.

• 2:24:15Eric Weinstein?

  Well, you know, to an extent, I do this with acronyms and the acronyms have taken off. But then there's a different population that gets very angry, which is why are you allowed to create? We're allowed to create these memes with the distracted boyfriend, you know, but you're not allowed to create an acronym to make a concept sticky. So what we're in is some sort of warfare for mindshare. And I'll be honest, I'm not seeing high level interactions the way I was five years ago between people.

• 2:24:56Chris Williamson?

  What's happened?

• 2:24:58Eric Weinstein?

  I think that they've done a pretty good job of disconnecting us. Do you remember the old Data and Society report where you looked at chains of association? And the whole game was to tie everyone back to Milo Yiannopoulos or something?

• 2:25:11Chris Williamson?

  I, so I got to interject. I go to Qatar to do this debate about masculinity about six months ago. And they put up on one of the segments, I was pro-traditional masculinity and there was a gentleman on the other side. And they said, here is a montage of some unspeakable people that represent masculinity. And there was Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the first person was Milo Yiannopoulos. I said, look, if you have brought me to the Middle East to defend Milo Yiannopoulos, I did, you have brought the wrong person. And I'm like, you know, that we need to shift that, get that to one side. Milo can go over there. Do you see his debate with Destiny that he did a couple of weeks ago, maybe three months ago now? Milo looked like.

• 2:25:54Chris Williamson?

  A old touring singer in a rock band, still doing the shows, but can't hit the high notes anymore. And the whimsy and that sort of playful jester joker kind of game, gamesmanship had been abandoned in place of bottom of the barrel, backbiting and genuine emotional sniping. And then Destiny said, after he's been pushed and pushed and pushed for 90 minutes, he says to Destiny, uh, uh, back in the olden times, they would have left your kind on the side of a hill, a hill to die. And Destiny said, well, I think that the gays would have been

• 2:26:34Chris Williamson?

  left there first. Milo said, well, I don't think that you can tell whether a baby's going to like dick when it comes out or not. Destiny said, well, you'd know all about young boys liking dick, wouldn't you? Wow. And it broke Milo. It broke his brain. So what? Sorry. What was that? And no one had any sympathy because for 90 minutes, he'd called Destiny's wife a public flashlight. He'd said everything under the sun.

• 2:27:02Eric Weinstein?

  Why are we dealing with these people?

• 2:27:05Chris Williamson?

  Because it is entertainment. It is mental masturbation. It, a story about people will always be more seductive to a broader group than a story about ideas.

• 2:27:19Eric Weinstein?

  Got it.

• 2:27:20Chris Williamson?

  I think. Am I wrong?

• 2:27:24Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know. I just despairing so much stuff, so much beauty in this world. And I just, I wonder at what point does middle school lunch table?

• 2:27:36Eric Weinstein?

  When you compare it

• 2:27:40Eric Weinstein?

  to amino acids, you compare it to.

• 2:27:51Eric Weinstein?

  You go scuba diving?

• 2:27:52Chris Williamson?

  I have done. I suck.

• 2:27:54Eric Weinstein?

  What's the most beautiful place you've gone scuba dive?

• 2:27:57Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Gili T off the coast of Bali.

• 2:28:01Eric Weinstein?

  Okay. I remember scuba diving off Manjungan Island in Bali. Amazing, but the Red Sea totally blew my mind. I can't tell you how little I care about Milo Yiannopoulos and how much I care about scuba diving in the Red Sea. I don't know. Maybe I'm just wrong. There's something wrong. It's just to get back to it, we all used to talk to each other. And then this thing started dividing us.

• 2:28:33Eric Weinstein?

  You know, you started seeing all these messages. Oh, your boy said this, your boy said that. Time to come collect your boy. It's like, who talks like this?

• 2:28:41Chris Williamson?

  The internet.

• 2:28:42Eric Weinstein?

  And then we stopped seeing each other in our feeds.

• 2:28:48Eric Weinstein?

  And I said, well, oh, this is Vijaya Gade under Jack Dorsey. Jack had gotten some system whereby he took his hands off it because he knew that terrible things had to be done, I think. And he just had this idea, well, if I have to intercede at Twitter, then something has gone wrong with the system. And you had this person who was just very happy bringing health to the

• 2:29:13Eric Weinstein?

  to the internet, but it disconnected all of us. It was very clear that our engagement just dropped. And then if you complained about it, it was because you actually sucked and nobody cared about your tweets. You had no idea where you were. And so all of this kind of good feeling evaporated in part because people didn't know how to fight as a, as a team. And this is just, I would love to get back to the masculinity riff a little bit. I don't think men know how to fight as groups. And it's a key part.

• 2:29:46Eric Weinstein?

  About masculinity. And it really makes me upset to see all of these people in individual masculine space. Like, if you're ever faced with three attackers, two of whom have knives and one of whom has a gun, here's your best move. It's like, like you know, you don't know. You've never faced this.

• 2:30:04Chris Williamson?

  Is the best move to have a group of five friends with you?

• 2:30:08Eric Weinstein?

  Well, first of all,

• 2:30:11Eric Weinstein?

  yes.

• 2:30:13Eric Weinstein?

  And having people's back.

• 2:30:16Chris Williamson?

  So there's a, there's a, this is something that I've spent an awful lot of time over the last couple of years thinking about.

• 2:30:27Chris Williamson?

  The definition of addiction is that you can find fulfillment alone is something that I heard a few weeks ago.

• 2:30:34Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 2:30:38Chris Williamson?

  The atomization

• 2:30:41Chris Williamson?

  of everybody, the generalized risk aversion syndrome that we are seeing, something called extended adolescence or slow life strategy from Gene Twangy, talking about young people are getting their driver's licenses.

• 2:30:57Eric Weinstein?

  Don't know it, but like it immediately from the title.

• 2:31:01Chris Williamson?

  People getting their driver's licenses later, they're partying less, they're drinking less, they're leaving home later, they're getting occupations, starting jobs later. Could this have been contributed to through COVID? Yeah, probably.

• 2:31:14Chris Williamson?

  But it was catalyzed, it was already a trend that was happening.

• 2:31:18Chris Williamson?

  It's affecting men particularly because male friendship groups are

• 2:31:27Chris Williamson?

  more fragile in some regards than women's. In 1990, the number of men who said they had zero close friends was around about 3%. 2020, that number was 15%.

• 2:31:42Eric Weinstein?

  That's insane.

• 2:31:43Chris Williamson?

  The most common answer to the question, how many friends could you call on in an emergency is zero. The most common, it's not the average, but it's the most common. More people have zero friends to call on than have any other number.

• 2:31:57Chris Williamson?

  The challenge of modern masculinity relates to that addiction quote, the belief that you can find fulfillment alone. And you see this in the Sigma male meme, Sigma male grindset, you know. I don't know this. So you have, you know, Alpha, Beta, the sort of red pill, the blue pill, the purple pill, halfway between the two. I don't know this either. Okay, so the Sigma male steps outside of the existing dominance hierarchy. He doesn't try to lead, he doesn't try to do anything. He is a lone ranger, law unto himself. Over the top of a lot of this meta meme which has been created is a guy called Chris Bumstead, who is a three-time, four-time classic physique champion, Mr. Olympia.

• 2:32:39Chris Williamson?

  Classic physique is they have weight limits, which means that they have a much more Arnold-esque. It's all about shape and sculpture, massive, but not a mass monster. Phil Heath was sat in that seat not long ago, mass monster. I sit down with Chris, this guy who is the face of the Sigma male meme. Okay. Perhaps the, one of the driving forces behind young male belief at the moment. And I asked him, how much of what you've done and achieved in business, in personal life, and in your sport, could you have done on your own?

• 2:33:12Chris Williamson?

  Zero, I could have done none of it. I couldn't have gotten through the difficult times emotionally without my fiance. I couldn't have built my personal brand without my best friend and videographer Calvin. I couldn't have run my business without Vaughn and my other business partners that are here. I couldn't have done any of this stuff. And this is the guy that, he's in the ice tub as there's dubstep music over the top of him, saying, you don't need anybody else and so on and so forth. The belief that you can find fulfillment alone is a lie.

• 2:33:44Chris Williamson?

  It is a lie that people who have been hurt and scorned and rejected by the world retreat into. There is a safety blanket of cynicism that people can use. It's sour grapes at an existential level. The belief that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.

• 2:34:09Chris Williamson?

  And the generalized risk aversion, the extended adolescence, the slow life strategy, permits that to seep ever more into people's lives. In a world where we have hyper-convenience, why should I feel discomfort?

• 2:34:26Eric Weinstein?

  So what's going on with the modern masculinity movement?

• 2:34:31Chris Williamson?

  It's fractured. So there is the manosphere, which is the broad term that describes people talking to men. I've never identified with it. I'm not a part of it.

• 2:34:39Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 2:34:40Chris Williamson?

  In as much as I speak to men about things that I struggled with and they listen, perhaps someone could put me in it, but I don't think that they help. I think fundamentally, at the moment, the masculinity movement sees women as adversaries and competitors rather than compatriots. I think that they are, they treat women largely like an enemy to be avoided or a resource to be used and discarded. I think that largely much of men's advice benefits some men at the expense of most others. That if being a high value man means sleeping with as many women as possible, but a low value woman is a woman that slept with many men. What you are doing is creating a wake after you

• 2:35:21Chris Williamson?

  that other men have to pick up the pieces of if your goal is to be this high value, many, but high body count male. I think that.

• 2:35:34Chris Williamson?

  Let me give you this. So this is actually going into a paper, my first academic paper that I've ever been a part of.

• 2:35:38Eric Weinstein?

  All right.

• 2:35:39Chris Williamson?

  So this is the male sedation hypothesis.

• 2:35:41Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 2:35:43Chris Williamson?

  There's a. An effect called young male syndrome. Have you heard of this?

• 2:35:48Eric Weinstein?

  Nope.

• 2:35:48Chris Williamson?

  If you have a large number of dispossessed sexless men throughout all of history, bad things happen.

• 2:35:54Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:55Chris Williamson?

  Testosterone drops when you get in a relationship, it drops again once you have kids. This means in large part that women domesticate men in some regard.

• 2:36:03Eric Weinstein?

  They have to.

• 2:36:05Chris Williamson?

  You don't want to take risk taking behavior when you've got a newborn at home. Don't jump off that fucking cliff. Okay. Like let's be, go home, go home. So.

• 2:36:15Chris Williamson?

  When you have larger numbers of dispossessed young men who aren't having sex, what's their reason for integrating into society? They take, a brilliant study is done of men crossing the road and the difference between when they cross and the distance from the nearest car with or without the presence of women. You put a woman there, the distance closes massively. No women there, they're not bothered. Risk taking behavior is a show. Look at my excess fitness.

• 2:36:41Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Chris Williamson?

  Look at all of these risks that I can take. Look at the plumage on the back of my, of my tail. Right? So.

• 2:36:47Chris Williamson?

  Throughout all of history, it seems like they set cars on fire and push over granny and cause havoc. In Portugal, 1700s, they, the first son, there was a disparity in the sex ratio, I'm not sure why. The first son was allowed to marry. Every subsequent son was put on a ship, "Go explore the new world. Don't burn our home," was what they were saying. There is a question. We have very high rates of sexlessness and we have very low rates of integration amongst young men at the moment. Why are we not seeing them going around and setting cars on fire? There is a, Jordan Peterson was featured as the incel god in

• 2:37:27Chris Williamson?

  a, he inspired a movie by Olivia Wilde starring Harry Styles a little while ago. I brought it up to Jordan. And uh.

• 2:37:36Eric Weinstein?

  The incel god?

• 2:37:37Chris Williamson?

  He was the king of the incels. Yes, this incel.

• 2:37:40Eric Weinstein?

  I am so pissed to hear this.

• 2:37:44Chris Williamson?

  Jordan laughed it off in classic him fashion.

• 2:37:46Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, but as a guy who, who opened for Jordan Peterson on harmonica, I've been to some of his shows.

• 2:37:55Eric Weinstein?

  Jordan Peterson recognized this demographic early. And he had the courage to speak directly to it. And if you want to see something, you want to see me break out in tears, have me tell you the stories about the people who went up to Jordan Peterson and said, "I was smoking weed, masturbating in my parents' basement." And six months later, I've got a job, I've got prospects, I've got a fiance, et cetera, et cetera.

• 2:38:25Eric Weinstein?

  And to turn him into the incel king or whatever, no, Jordan Peterson tried to become the one person answer to the world uncle shortage. Okay?

• 2:38:37Eric Weinstein?

  And I just have no patience for dismissing that much good. If, if some of his message seemed off to you, it's because you didn't need it. You didn't understand what clean your room was about. You laughed it off because you weren't screwed. And he gave people a path, just the way Sam gave people a path from that abusive religious household where they didn't know to escape. And, you know, to, to an extent. All of these people spoke to people at different stages in their lives. A lot of this female behavior, which is, oh, you know, I'm on OnlyFans. I'm going to get my this, I'm going to get my that. Well, good luck to you. I hope it works out.

• 2:39:21Eric Weinstein?

  But the gold digging or the misogyny, it's of a piece. People are listening to each other's strategic conversation and saying, why would I want that for my life?

• 2:39:32Chris Williamson?

  So I'll round out the sedation hypothesis. You have this large cohort, dispossessed young men, high T, high risk taking. They cause problems. There is a question to be asked, although many of the, almost all mass shooters, including the ones that hit all of the headlines, were sexless young men. Given that we have the highest rates of sexlessness amongst young men that we've seen in a very long time, there is a question, why have we not seen an in-kind increase in antisocial behavior? It's my belief that young men specifically are being sedated out of their status seeking and risk-taking and reproductive behavior through a combination of social media, porn and video games.

• 2:40:15Eric Weinstein?

  I was waiting for it.

• 2:40:17Chris Williamson?

  So there is an idea from Diana.

• 2:40:18Eric Weinstein?

  Sorry, social media, porn and video games does not include weed.

• 2:40:26Eric Weinstein?

  I think ubiquitous weed.

• 2:40:31Chris Williamson?

  The motivation killer?

• 2:40:33Eric Weinstein?

  Um.

• 2:40:37Eric Weinstein?

  We don't have a ton of culture around open weed. We have a lot of culture around open alcohol, about open coffee. We used to have culture around open nicotine. We don't have a lot of culture around open weed. We have culture around closed weed, surreptitious weed.

• 2:40:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:53Eric Weinstein?

  But I do think that in part, the video game thing is an absolute as-if drug.

• 2:41:00Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 2:41:02Eric Weinstein?

  You meet people who come from the gaming community or social media, and they have an idea that life permits you to do certain things that are absolutely not.

• 2:41:12Eric Weinstein?

  Tolerated in civil society. Like, a lot of the people, you know, an interesting feature of social media is the difference between critics and trolls who call you names and people who actually try to find a way to ruin your life offline. Like, there's a huge connection between the gaming community and certain sort of bulletin boards and this freak game about how can we destroy people offline?

• 2:41:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:48Eric Weinstein?

  And once you meet these people and you and you read their messages to each other, they're talking about, oh, yeah, I've got a cool exploit where I'm going to invite somebody to so and so's house because I think that person might be dangerous. You realize it's a video game.

• 2:42:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so I I had this idea specifically about Jordan, but it would apply to yourself, it would apply to Joe. After a while, there is a particular threshold of exposure, notoriety that people cross. And when they do, they are no longer treated like a human. It's easy online to dehumanize because you don't see any there, there.

• 2:42:26Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 2:42:27Chris Williamson?

  You don't see that. But there's something specific about crossing a particular threshold where you're no longer a person. You're a representation of ideas, you're a conglomeration of viewpoints. And I think that really allows people to dehumanize the other side, really, really. There is no one reading these tweets. Well, you think Jordan Peterson's reading these tweets about the incel god thing? Yeah.

• 2:42:50Eric Weinstein?

  Is he? I don't know.

• 2:42:51Chris Williamson?

  I think he is. I think Jordan spends, I would, I would love Jordan to spend less time on Twitter.

• 2:42:55Eric Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 2:42:55Chris Williamson?

  I think that would be, I think that that would be good. But even if they're not, there is a person there. That is the representation of a person. And I don't know, like, saying something to somebody online that you wouldn't say to their face, to me, seems like a coward's way of communicating.

• 2:43:15Eric Weinstein?

  Or you view it as an adaptive landscape, which is new exploits have been created. I mean, if I explain to you a mosquito life cycle, okay, you're going to find somebody with excess blood and you're going to steal some for yourself.

• 2:43:27Chris Williamson?

  That's my video guy. He's been eaten alive since we've been in LA. Yeah.

• 2:43:30Eric Weinstein?

  Is that right?

• 2:43:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:31Eric Weinstein?

  Okay, but you see the same cookie cutter sharks do the same thing for large marine wildlife. They'll just take a plug of flesh out. It's like. Can't afford to go after cookie cutter sharks.

• 2:43:46Eric Weinstein?

  When you have those kinds of strategies, am I going to sit around in the ocean and say, no, that's not a legitimate strategy. You're a parasite. It's like, yeah. Like, that's my whole game, where I'm a predator. I just murder things for a living. It's really what predation is about. And in a certain sense, what you've done is you've changed the adaptive landscape, and these are the new exploits.

• 2:44:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes. So to get back to the video games, porn and social media. Diana Fleishman has this idea she calls uncanny vulvas.

• 2:44:17Eric Weinstein?

  Tell me more.

• 2:44:18Chris Williamson?

  She says that porn has been able to hijack the mate seeking behavior specifically of men by giving them a very titrated dose of what it is that they would usually get. Which means that

• 2:44:36Chris Williamson?

  part of that motivation to go out and do the risk taking behavior has been tuned down. But what do you get from video games? You get camaraderie. You get progressive overload in terms of your achievements. You get a sense of belonging. You get dopamine when you achieve something. You may even get some serotonin because you feel like you're lumped together with your group of friends. Okay. And then what do you get on social media? With social media, we've gamified the status hierarchy. It's there. There's a number right in front of you. And there are levels that you can get to. There's your silver plaque on YouTube. There's your gold plaque. There's your blue tick. Look who followed me today. Elon Musk followed me today. Whatever, whatever. I got a retweet from Paul Graham.

• 2:45:18Chris Williamson?

  It has been able to, and I don't necessarily think that this was by design. It could be by by side effect. It has been able to specifically for men, maybe also for women,

• 2:45:29Chris Williamson?

  give a titrated dose of most of the key drivers that got people out of the house to go and do things. Scott Galloway trended earlier on for saying that unless you're asleep as a young person, you shouldn't be in the house. And his point is, life is for living. There is lots for you to learn outside. Fuck off. Go out. Come on. And he got tons and tons of pushback and.

• 2:45:56Chris Williamson?

  Maybe he's wrong. But when I get advice, sometimes on Q and As, people will say, young guys and girls will message and say, I'm 13 and I love your podcast. What the fuck you do? Fantastic. You are in a growth period that is unbelievable and the people that you're getting exposed to, I wish that I'd been, I'd had access to at 13. What should I do if I want to improve myself? What books should I read? What practices should I do? I don't mean to be patronizing, but just go outside and live life. There is so much low hanging fruit from knowing what it's like to have an argument with your friend and having to cycle home with a flat tire. Just things, there is so many life experiences that I think you will gain massive amounts,

• 2:46:39Chris Williamson?

  huge, huge amounts of benefit from over and above a 2D lesson. So me and my friend George have this conception of a 2D lessons and 3D lessons. So a 2D lesson would be reading about Warren Buffett's wealth through an autobiography or watching it. A 3D lesson would be hanging out with Warren Buffett at his house for an afternoon. And no matter how immersive we try and make learning, 3D lessons are always going to win because you can't, you can't forget them. They're so visceral. And in a world where most of our time, an increasing proportion of our time is spent online,

• 2:47:11Chris Williamson?

  the in-person 3D lessons become more and more and more powerful. So this is my conception of the male sedation hypothesis.

• 2:47:18Eric Weinstein?

  Hmm.

• 2:47:23Eric Weinstein?

  How do you, how do you judge our sperm counts and testosterone over time?

• 2:47:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so there's some evidence, Andrew Hume shared some evidence that although sperm counts are decreasing, penis length is increasing, which.

• 2:47:37Eric Weinstein?

  But that's, that's not, if I, if I recall correctly, and I hesitate to get into.

• 2:47:43Chris Williamson?

  Get into your penis literature, Eric, come on.

• 2:47:46Eric Weinstein?

  Well.

• 2:47:48Eric Weinstein?

  There is some trade off in various reproductive systems between things that we would classically associate with masculinity. So for example, dung beetles have weaponry on their head called antlers, giant hook, and their copulatory apparatus and their antler is in inverse proportion.

• 2:48:08Chris Williamson?

  It's the gorilla and chimp thing again, right?

• 2:48:10Eric Weinstein?

  That one of them has lots of testicles and very little penis length and the other one has the reverse. So you have a lot of these conserved systems where somehow reproduction says you can have this many total resources, but you have to figure out how to budget between various things that appear to be strongly masculine.

• 2:48:29Chris Williamson?

  So I think that declining testosterone is a big concern. I would say that it certainly contributes to a generalized change in male behavior, risk taking, you know, it is, talk about, oh, and

• 2:48:46Chris Williamson?

  women that take birth control can impact the local ecology of male testosterone by basically making it feel like they're around infertile women when they're not, they're just artificially suppressed women. That impacts a man's testosterone level. Men that are around weapons, if me and you walked past a table of guns, testosterone would go up. If we walked past, there's a chainsaw over there. So perhaps it's already high. I'm not sure. And

• 2:49:11Eric Weinstein?

  Do I see how many volleys we can get?

• 2:49:14Chris Williamson?

  Do football freestyle.

• 2:49:17Chris Williamson?

  The

• 2:49:19Chris Williamson?

  issues of sperm count, the issue of testosterone production, I think contributes to this in a large way. What it is that's causing this, is it phthalates in the water? Is it women peeing out their birth control? And we've got estrogens in the water supply? Is it the foods that we're eating? Is it seed oils? Is it the lack of time outside? Is it grounding? Is it, you know, there are a whole host of things that are contributing to this. But I started working with a blood testing company, Maric Health, about six months ago. And I had my blood stone for the first time. My testosterone was about 500 and I'm 35. And I was like, it should be higher than that. So what should I do? They gave me some lifestyle interventions and some boron that frees up free T from sex hormone binding globulin and a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No pharmaceutical interventions, but they gave me a ton of lifestyle ones.

• 2:50:05Chris Williamson?

  I had my blood stone a couple of weeks ago and it was 900. Over the last six months, there's been some minor but noticeable changes to my demeanor, one of them being I'm more aggressive, like my frustrations come to the fore more.

• 2:50:22Eric Weinstein?

  And so, I mean, I'm dying to ask, are you, first of all, are you married?

• 2:50:27Chris Williamson?

  No, in a relationship.

• 2:50:28Eric Weinstein?

  In a relationship.

• 2:50:31Eric Weinstein?

  Do you find that women, heterosexual women respond to classical masculinity?

• 2:50:40Eric Weinstein?

  I have to be very careful as I ask because they certainly respond more than they're supposed to according to modern rules of femininity.

• 2:50:47Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:50:47Eric Weinstein?

  But my guess is that it's greatly decreased from the market for masculinity in the 60s, let's say.

• 2:50:55Chris Williamson?

  So, look, again, inter and intra-sexual dynamics, something I've spent an awful lot of time learning about. I'm writing a book at the moment with David Buss, evolutionary psychologist.

• 2:51:06Eric Weinstein?

  Good.

• 2:51:06Chris Williamson?

  On this.

• 2:51:12Chris Williamson?

  In the early 2010s, after the success of Fifty Shades of Grey.

• 2:51:18Eric Weinstein?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:51:18Chris Williamson?

  There was a proliferation of dark romance novels and they, there was a pushback from the feminism movement, saying that the portrayals of men as dominant, masculine, bearded, big-chested in a loincloth or a plaid shirt wielding an axe, wasn't what women wanted. They wanted a softer, more.

• 2:51:42Eric Weinstein?

  Like the brawny guy or the Marlboro man.

• 2:51:44Chris Williamson?

  Correct. They wanted a softer version of this. So they started putting more agreeable, more feminized men on the front cover of books. They didn't sell.

• 2:51:53Eric Weinstein?

  Right. But I wouldn't guess that either of those would be where modern women's heads would be at now.

• 2:51:58Chris Williamson?

  In the space of 10 years. So I think that there's massively a difference between stated and revealed preferences.

• 2:52:04Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 2:52:04Chris Williamson?

  Right. And also to caveat that, the thing that you may sexually fantasize about is not necessarily what you want to get into a relationship with. Guys will say.

• 2:52:12Eric Weinstein?

  Say more.

• 2:52:13Chris Williamson?

  That what you optimize for in a one-night-stand and what you optimize for in a marriage partner aren't always necessarily the same thing.

• 2:52:20Eric Weinstein?

  I would think they would be wildly disparate.

• 2:52:22Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Which means that the front cover of the romance novel is not necessarily the partner that you want long-term. They're the one that you want to fantasize about. Most of these stories are driven by sex rather than driven by love.

• 2:52:36Eric Weinstein?

  So I have this hypothesis and I wonder if you you have names for all sorts of things that

• 2:52:40Chris Williamson?

  I let before you give me, I just need to bunch this up your acronym, your penchant for acronyms.

• 2:52:46Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:47Chris Williamson?

  And a friend, Mary says meme first, explain later. And I think that

• 2:52:53Chris Williamson?

  some of my favorite episodes, they rely on aphorisms, they rely on on creating memes.

• 2:52:57Eric Weinstein?

  Sure.

• 2:52:58Chris Williamson?

  Small quippy razors and so on and so forth. First off, because it makes it easy to remember. But secondly, because that's what gets the hooks into you.

• 2:53:05Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:05Chris Williamson?

  This is how you make things. So if you are somebody that's listening that has an idea that really loves that idea, give it a name, give it a name and give it a cool name.

• 2:53:14Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:14Chris Williamson?

  I came up with fame seesaw the other day, which is that on your way up, people want to support you because you remind them of their dreams. When you're at the top, they tear you down because you remind them of what they gave up on.

• 2:53:25Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:25Chris Williamson?

  Fame seesaw, beautiful. And not even if it's fucking wrong, you can't forget it. So

• 2:53:30Eric Weinstein?

  It's good.

• 2:53:32Chris Williamson?

  Very nice. You were saying.

• 2:53:35Eric Weinstein?

  That when women, when heterosexual women realize that they have several possible life cycles and they don't have a clear sense of which one they will actually live. Am I going to get married and raise children and be at home with the children? Am I going to get married and have one child, maybe two and be a career person? Am I never going to couple but have children? Am I going to have no children whatsoever? Am I going to do that in a coupled situation?

• 2:54:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:54:05Eric Weinstein?

  Their decision trees blow out as to what it is that they're actually looking for. And one of my strong senses

• 2:54:15Eric Weinstein?

  is that women encountered something they weren't expecting, which is that they might even be smarter than the guy at work who they're competing with. But he's happy to come in all of Saturday, all of Sunday and work hours that are completely psychotic. And so then the idea of, well, we need work life balance. We don't want people coming in on Friday and Saturday because that's sort of an unfair advantage that somebody who wants a healthy life is different from somebody who wants an extreme life. And so now you have this problem, which is I'm attracted to the sort of man I wouldn't want to compete with at work. If I'm going to be in the office, I want to know that I'm not going to have to deal with

• 2:54:59Eric Weinstein?

  the guy who's willing to give up every weekend and work hours that I'm unwilling to work, because that's not how I'm set at the factory.

• 2:55:09Eric Weinstein?

  Versus, um, I want that guy as the go getter while I'm pregnant and incapacitated and raising children to make sure that not only he can shepherd our family through anything, because he's highly capable, but can also get me back into the workforce when I'm done raising children. And this is somewhat what I believe is responsible for the sort of incoherent messages that men and women are sending to each other, is that when we don't know what life cycle we are going to be inhabiting, our eroticism and our romance and our desire is unstable.

• 2:55:52Chris Williamson?

  One of the most uncomfortable correlations that I've found over the last few years is that as gender inequality, pay inequality between the genders increases, relationship satisfaction for both men and women increases as well, sorry, decreases. The more egalitarian, the more equal the pay, the less satisfied both sexes are with relationships.

• 2:56:16Eric Weinstein?

  Hmm.

• 2:56:17Chris Williamson?

  Men who are in relationships where the woman is the primary breadwinner are 50% more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication. Where a woman is contributing more than 70% of the household income, the marriage is twice as likely to end in divorce.

• 2:56:33Chris Williamson?

  Women, for a man, sorry, for a woman to move herself the same distance on a 10-point scale in terms of attractiveness that a man can by increasing his income by $100,000, she would need a 10,000 times increase in income. In short, women are interested socioeconomically in the status of their partner in a way that men aren't. Now, the problem that you have is that women now have access to education and employment in a way that they never have done before, so they're no longer financially dependent on men.

• 2:57:05Eric Weinstein?

  Sure, but you're seeing something which is particularly heartbreaking in my group of females, which would be women in their mid to late 50s. I have to be honest, I've seen some of the women I was most impressed by never coupling.

• 2:57:24Eric Weinstein?

  And when I, when you talk to them, there's some very uncomfortable things that get said. One of which was, I was looking for a man I could look up to and the pool was just so small. And then, and, and you know, you're thinking, well, okay, it's illegal to say, I'm looking for a man that I could look up to. Right. Because that's not in accordance with modern feminism and egalitarianism. But on the other hand, this idea that when you're, you know, one of the world's leading chemists or something, uh, there's just not that many men that are gonna be in that position.

• 2:57:58Chris Williamson?

  I got another meme for you.

• 2:57:59Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:59Chris Williamson?

  This is, I got in a lot of trouble for this. It's called the tall girl problem. So if you stand atop your own status hierarchy, it's very difficult to find somebody else across and above from yours. You know, if you're a six foot one girl without heels, you're looking at professional athletes. And two women for every one man completing a four year US college degree by 2030. Between the ages of 21 and 29, women earn 1,111 pounds more on average than their male counterparts.

• 2:58:23Eric Weinstein?

  Right.

• 2:58:23Chris Williamson?

  But women still have this vestigial attraction to the man who is across and above from them. That's hypergamy. And this means that as you rise up through your own dominance hierarchy, it amounts to a opportunity of diminishing returns.

• 2:58:37Eric Weinstein?

  But then why are we not allowed to build better men? I mean, this is the really, this is this thing that just floors me. I'm now through, through being a father, looking at the subset of young men who are absolutely looking to crush it. And the advice they're being given is so horrific.

• 2:59:01Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 2:59:04Eric Weinstein?

  Well, that doesn't seem mentally healthy and, uh, you know, I think it's much better for you to sort of enjoy this time with everyone else. And, you know, it's just like watering down raw ambition. And.

• 2:59:21Eric Weinstein?

  You know, is it Ludacris who said, get out the way? You know, get out of the way of these people. These people want to invest and blow your socks off and just do amazing things. And there's some administrator or nanny or nurse ratchet who's like, well, that would be arrogant. We can't have that. And you're saying, I don't think you understand it, but ambition is a necessary input for certain humans. And if you sit there and say, why do you have a right to innovate when nobody else has innovated? Or don't you realize that your go getter personality during the COVID situation was based on your privilege?

• 3:00:05Eric Weinstein?

  And in fact, a lot of other people are suffering from mental health. He's just thinking, why am I taking the most promising people and tying them to the most damaged people? Why not instead take the most promising people and have them get a PhD by the age of 2021? And study what to do for their, for their fellow souls who are struggling?

• 3:00:27Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember when Elon took over Twitter and he started to rip out the tech team?

• 3:00:31Eric Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:32Chris Williamson?

  And he said, I want to make Twitter a place where the people who want to work the hardest on the biggest problems can come and work. And people said, they looked at that and said, this is going back to an archaic form of Silicon Valley, where people are forced to sleep under desks and it's a blah, blah, blah. Those people do not have theory of mind to understand what it's like to be someone as driven as it takes. To look at that from Elon, not as modern day slavery.

• 3:01:05Eric Weinstein?

  But no, wait, wait a second. It can be modern day slavery, or it could be the person saying, for God's sakes, I'm burning to solve this problem. Let me sleep under my desk.

• 3:01:15Chris Williamson?

  Unhook, unhook the leash and let me go at this. And there is a, there is a cohort of people out there for whom that's their calling. They didn't want to work at Twitter if they got frappuccinos and mindful Monday afternoons off. And to be able to play ping pong for half the week and whatever it was that was going on. They want to go and they want to feel like they are contributing to an astronomically sized goal, an unreasonable goal. And they want to feel the, the rush of, of going toward it.

• 3:01:45Chris Williamson?

  And I think you're right. I think that there is a dampening of ambition. And since being in America, since moving to America 18 months ago, it's the fuel that I've had from the enthusiasm from the people I've been around has fueled me and powered me in a way that I didn't, I wasn't, it was alien. I was 30, 33 years old and I'd never felt it before.

• 3:02:07Eric Weinstein?

  I want to look, there's so much to do and it requires ambitious people. And those people have to be both arrogant and humble. It's a complicated thing. It involves mentorship. It's, I want to say also something about elitism.

• 3:02:25Eric Weinstein?

  Elitism is incredibly unfair. You know, I've hung out with Stanley Jordan and I am never going to play any instrument the way Stanley Jordan plays the guitar. He's an elite object. I am not going to be that guy. You have to learn how to let elite people do elite things that where you can't compete with them.

• 3:02:51Eric Weinstein?

  I don't know what to do about this. The idea that we're turning against the concept of elite because we've got this sort of pretend elite that sits in these chairs that screws everything up. And you've got all of these ambitious people who are being destroyed by enforced helplessness. You know, how do we get, how do we fire the administrators necessary to return universities to being universities? How, how do we

• 3:03:21Eric Weinstein?

  explain that some people are built to fly wingsuits? You know, it's a super dangerous activity. But somebody needs that rush or they're not alive.

• 3:03:35Eric Weinstein?

  You know, people need danger. They need risk. They need to be able to create. And they don't need you in their, in their way all the time. I guess I just, I have this very strong sense that school has become the most dangerous place that, that we're pushing so many people through school. And school is basically.

• 3:03:58Eric Weinstein?

  It's destroying vitality. By the time you get through this education that is so laden with administrators and people telling you things that are wrong. Like, I don't know how to say this, but when a friend of mine gets a call as a chaired professor in a technical discipline from a dean and says, "We have a little bit of a problem with some of your current tweets." And I'm like, "What did I say?" So it's not what you said, but it's that you liked somebody else's tweets. And you're thinking, "I don't care who you are. You'd never talk to a professor like that. You cannot have these people.

• 3:04:38Eric Weinstein?

  We need the University of Chicago to spread its middle finger across the country and get rid of these people.

• 3:04:51Eric Weinstein?

  You can't talk to them.

• 3:04:54Eric Weinstein?

  That they're a plague from hell on thought.

• 3:05:00Eric Weinstein?

  You can't tax all thought by making it nice. And, you know, something I really don't know how to communicate, but I saw you got Sam Harris in a certain amount of trouble, so maybe I'll buy a little bit of trouble for myself.

• 3:05:18Eric Weinstein?

  You can't have terrible ideas circulating everywhere, leading to pogroms and riots and killings. And I was just in Istanbul, one of maybe my favorite city on earth. And I was reminded of the Turkish Kristallnacht that happened in the Beolu Karakoy area of Istanbul, where there was a rumor about the desecration, I think, of the birthplace of Adetir. And people died as a result, you know, and ethnic minorities could not be protected. You cannot allow free speech to circulate every dumb idea infinitely until people are killed in pogroms or Holocaust or whatever.

• 3:06:04Chris Williamson?

  So what do you do?

• 3:06:05Eric Weinstein?

  You've got two options. You either constrain speech by rules or by culture.

• 3:06:13Eric Weinstein?

  And this is the reason that I was so against Milo Yiannopoulos.

• 3:06:19Eric Weinstein?

  You want a culture in which everyone is allowed to burn the flag and it doesn't even occur to you that that's something you would want to do.

• 3:06:27Eric Weinstein?

  That's culture. You've got to load the inhibiting factor on culture.

• 3:06:34Eric Weinstein?

  And people say, well, that's what cancellation is about. It's like, well, but if you misuse the concept of shunning, let's call it by something older than cancellation.

• 3:06:45Eric Weinstein?

  If you shun people for good questions, if you shun people for speaking truthfully and decently, as if they had done something horrible, then you lose the ability to control bad behavior through social norms. And one of the things that I've now come to understand is we are either going to restore a culture which shuns only when shunning is really the correct course of action, or we are going to have rules that prohibit what you can and cannot say. And I am absolute in that we should not have rules. We've got to put this on culture and we've got to get a culture in which, in general, you are very careful about the negative things that you say.

• 3:07:27Eric Weinstein?

  And one of the things that Milo did that I really disliked was he said, well, the purpose of free speech is to protect outrageous speech. And the answer is not really. Yes, if I'm forced to stand up for your right to say horrible things, I can do that if the culture generally retards horrible things. But if the culture now starts to encourage it,

• 3:07:50Eric Weinstein?

  we can't have terrible ideas being the precursor of communal violence, let's say. And we really shouldn't be having rules determine what we can and can't say. It should be that when somebody starts to say something that is the beginning of an incitement to madness, that the cultural prohibition against that is very strong. In my recent travels, I've been shocked. I've been in Bombay, I've been in Istanbul, I've been in Lisbon, Porto,

• 3:08:23Eric Weinstein?

  in the islands of the Azores. None of these cities has fallen as far as San Francisco.

• 3:08:31Eric Weinstein?

  And Bombay is madness. But it's not, we don't have a homelessness problem in San Francisco. We have a zombie apocalypse problem. We have a dysfunctional government problem.

• 3:08:45Eric Weinstein?

  When you can't say, we cannot have this in Union Square. We just can't. We cannot have a zombie apocalypse in Union Square. When that becomes controversial in and of itself, you've lost the plot. And partially what's happened is that we've given up on high trust societies, where we more or less share each other's values. That's the concept of the loyal opposition. We both know what the goal is. You have an idea of how to get there. I have a different idea. I agree that we're going to have a contest and one of us will win and one of us will begrudgingly go along with the other person's idea. When, when your idea about what a just society is, well, let's vindictively punish successful people. Let's pretend that male and female have no difference

• 3:09:30Eric Weinstein?

  or all the difference according to some set of rules on alternate Tuesdays. Let's decide that we can redefine what a recession is or the consumer price index. Let's decide that we don't need masks. Yes, we do. No, we don't. Yes, we do. Because of the science, science, science.

• 3:09:48Eric Weinstein?

  Can somebody get rid of these people? We need to be in a society that makes some semblance of sense. And

• 3:10:01Eric Weinstein?

  we cannot go in these opposite directions. As far as I'm concerned, when you say, we don't want no more police,

• 3:10:08Eric Weinstein?

  you and I cannot be the loyal opposition to each other.

• 3:10:12Eric Weinstein?

  You're not, you're not the kind of a person I even understand. Somehow that idea got into your head and it made sense to you. And it's now carrying the day?

• 3:10:26Eric Weinstein?

  I have always supported some amount of reasonable gun control. I changed on a dime with that abolish the police. We don't want no more police, defund the police. Are you telling me that people are not going to be allowed to own a weapon? And you're going to get rid of the thing that was supposed to centralize the violence on behalf of the state and make it follow rules? There's no coming back from that. And I think that one of the things that we just have to learn is that many of the voices that we've been listening to, because they got jobs in our organs, whether it was the New Yorker or the Washington Post or a professorship at Duke. We have to stop listening to these people wholesale.

• 3:11:09Eric Weinstein?

  We have to stop being tolerant of the intolerant. If you come from a position that is sufficiently extreme and your whole point is to try to use and weaponize democracy, to weaponize free speech, to weaponize good faith, to weaponize what it means to hold a debate. You need to not really have a voice at the table because we don't have a solution. If you say that I am entitled to sit at this table as a member of the suicide bombing community strapped with a vest filled with high explosives, the presence of C4 in your vest invalidates you being at that table that's trying to come up with a solution.

• 3:11:51Eric Weinstein?

  If you say fundamentally, I don't believe that we should be having children because humans are evil and we need to bring this all to a, to a close. It's very important that you not be on the city council. Because that city is a thing that is a generational endowment. And you hand it to the next generation and eventually you don't live there anymore. We are somehow seeding people who are so nihilistic and so freakishly divorced from anything that we should be able to assume as a default. Like certain positions that probably had 10 adherents appear to have millions of adherents.

• 3:12:32Eric Weinstein?

  And if we don't get rid of these self-extinguishing theories, we are going to self-extinguish. So I, I believe that civil society has an obligation to stop listening to positions that are avowedly self-extinguishing.

• 3:12:51Chris Williamson?

  Eric Weinstein, ladies and gentlemen. Eric, I really appreciate you. What's next? What can people expect from you? Have you got anything interesting coming up?

• 3:13:01Eric Weinstein?

  More than anything,

• 3:13:04Eric Weinstein?

  remember that the whole point is when you see a person with a shirt that says, "There is no planet B", look at the night sky and remember that the only way to get to planet B is to change what we understand about physics. And so look for me on that front.

• 3:13:20Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Cheers, mate.

• 3:13:21Eric Weinstein?

  Thanks. Be well.