Eric Weinstein and Balaji Srinivasan discuss whether declining Western institutions should be repaired or replaced, and how new institutions might protect freedom, innovation, and dissent. Their conversation covers institutional incentives, artificial intelligence, and Weinstein’s argument for humanity’s expansion beyond the solar system.
The session, titled “Loyalty vs Exit in a time of Institutional Decline,” took place on 9 October 2026 and appeared in the original conference livestream. This standalone video was released on 10 October 2026.
Transcript
00:00:02
Balaji Srinivasan: Doctor
00:00:03
Eric Weinstein: Doctor
00:00:03
Balaji Srinivasan: Huh, uh, you know, we are technically PhDs, you know, right? We don’t r- we don’t get to flex that, but it’s a little, little thing. First of all, thanks for flying all the way out. It’s fun.
00:00:12
Eric Weinstein: It-
00:00:13
Balaji Srinivasan: Um, I think, uh… Go, go, you were gonna say.
00:00:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, I was just gonna say, what I love about this place is, is that the person representing the hidebound establishment is from Thiel Capital.
00:00:22
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Isn’t that funny?
00:00:24
Eric Weinstein: To get, to get an idea of how crazy this room is. But go ahead.
00:00:27
Balaji Srinivasan: No-
00:00:27
Eric Weinstein: And by the way, I don’t think you and I have ever had a conversation limited to th- 30 minutes.
00:00:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, that’s true. So we’re gonna do the abbreviated version. But, um, so we’ve basically had a long-running discussion on and off over the years about the state of Western institutions, especially academia, which we, you, you and I both have a personal interest in, and we also have a foot in venture capital. More than a foot, maybe couple of feet in, in venture capital. Um, and I, you know, w- what is– where is Eric currently at? Because a few years ago, I think we had a thing on the portal, something like that, and you were like, “Oh, Balaji, you’re such a doomer on Western institutions. They need to be fixed.” Where, you know, where, where are you at on that today?
00:01:06
Eric Weinstein: May I translate for your audience?
00:01:07
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, go, go. Thanks.
00:01:07
Eric Weinstein: Who don’t they see apology.
00:01:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. Okay. [laughs]
00:01:09
Eric Weinstein: He’s trying to get me to say, “I was right, wasn’t I?” Right?
00:01:12
Balaji Srinivasan: I, I, I didn’t, I didn’t say that. I, I was, I was teeing it up for you to say that. But-
00:01:15
Eric Weinstein: He did say it while we were on the phone call from-
00:01:17
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go, go, go.
00:01:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.
00:01:18
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. How am I wrong? Tell me how I’m wrong. Go, go.
00:01:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, I think that it’s an interesting [laughs] question as to, um, why it’s so difficult to found new institutions-
00:01:28
Balaji Srinivasan: Yep
00:01:28
Eric Weinstein: … because the old ones, which were extremely powerful and had reasons for being powerful, have been falling a great distance. So at some point, the thing that is not very powerful and on its way up meets the thing that was very powerful and is on its way down. Um, the key question, of course, is at what point can someone found an institution that doesn’t end up trying to restrict the speech and the behavior and the innovation of those who should be carrying the ball? So there are all these people who really… A- and just I’m not a free speech absolutist. Um, there are all sorts of ways in which you do need to have a concept of mustn’t, and that’s usually a cultural thing which allows you to be free and to have laws that are extremely permissive. But you can’t both have no concept of mustn’t and have completely free reign. So at the moment, we can’t have anyone who, let’s say, got COVID more right than wrong leading a university. We don’t know why. That person just… They, they’re not trusted by the institutions, even though they’re trustworthy on the truth.
00:02:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Hmm.
00:02:31
Eric Weinstein: So we’re in at some very strange position in which you are putting your, your heart, soul, and, and, and resources behind this idea of we’re gonna create something new that the world has never seen. So I totally applaud that, one of the reasons I’m here. On the other hand, as you are finding out, um, that logical structure is very hard to situate in a physical one because you have to worry about what is the fit between the logical structure and the place that it physically attaches. That’s one of the key challenges for your group.
00:03:04
Balaji Srinivasan: So, you know, there’s one word, and I, I mentioned this to someone earlier, which is I, I know in San Francisco we do, and actually in the Western conversation, we talk about the word “institution.” The problem is institution almost connotes old, right? Like institutional doesn’t mean… So to, to found an institution is sort of like, you know, I’m, I’m gonna IPO tomorrow. It’s kind of like presuming the consequent. It’s presuming success in a sense. But if you say an organization that does what that institution used to do well and no longer does, that feels more feasible, and then you don’t have to take on all of it, but some of it. And then, you know, so an interesting question, is YouTube an institution? It’s now twenty years old, right? Is Google an institution? Maybe Google’s an institution, but it’s only twenty-five years old. Like, you know, what would be… You know, the Pentagon-
00:03:53
Eric Weinstein: Is Blockbuster an institution?
00:03:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, exactly. Right. So, so when people say institution, they, uh, I think they typically mean either an organization like a specific one like Harvard or something, or like a, like a societal convention. What, what do you have in mind, you know, when you say that? ‘Cause some… D- different people have, you know… Actually, there’s a third definition, by the way, which is in crypto, people say the institutions are coming in. By that they meant like State Street, Fidelity, right? The older kind of Wall Street things, right? But institutional always connotes old or older. So therefore, w- what kind of happens by default, if we use that word or think in that way, is that the Chinese institutions have the edge in age, and they’re actually doing very well now in, in research and so on, as, as I’m sure you’re seeing. So by default, if, if Western institutions are failing and one can’t found organizations that replace them, the Chinese institutions have the advantage of both scale and a degree of antiquity, at least. I mean, not antiquity is not the right word. I mean, let’s say, let’s say they’re, they didn’t… They weren’t born yesterday, right? You know, they have, they have years, decades of they’ve proven themselves. Go ahead. Like Jinghua and so on and so forth.
00:05:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, I’m, I’m just like trying to think of all the things that we can’t say.
00:05:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure. Fine. Okay. It’s Singapore, so it’s… I, I mean, don’t go too crazy. But go [laughs]
00:05:14
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know what that means.
00:05:15
Balaji Srinivasan: Don’t cause a diplomatic incident, but, but other than that, go ahead. Yeah.
00:05:18
Eric Weinstein: I’m just trying to get through half an hour. But, uh-
00:05:20
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah
00:05:20
Eric Weinstein: … look, you know, o- one of the problems, uh, if you remember, let’s… I can quote Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris was fond of saying that, um, if you erase the past, no telling what can happen in the future. And, you know, th- this was a very strong idea in Marx, um, which is that you have to basically, uh, wipe the slate clean, uh, uh, implicitly. In fact, in some places he’s-
00:05:45
Balaji Srinivasan: The year zero kind of thing.
00:05:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And so, you know, in part, there’s this question about institutional memory and how do you stop the problems, uh, that were associated with the old. So I’m not really sure how to think about China. Let’s just leave it at that.
00:05:59
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. Sure.
00:06:01
Eric Weinstein: You know, what’s interesting, of course, is, is that everything is changing so radically after being so stagnant for so long that, um, we’re just waking up out of this incredible period of stagnation, that all of us grew up in a bubble, right? And, and, and we’re no longer in that bubble, but we were up until January of 2025 or, or at least COVID.
00:06:25
Balaji Srinivasan: Uh, you know, I’m gonna make a, a, you know, like a devil’s advocate-
00:06:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:06:29
Balaji Srinivasan: … for the great stagnation even.
00:06:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:06:32
Balaji Srinivasan: Which is the great stagnation, though it was frustrating for us, will probably be, be, be seen in retrospect as the great stability.
00:06:40
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it’s probably what kept planet Earth from exploding-
00:06:43
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah [laughs]
00:06:43
Eric Weinstein: … in thermonuclear war, but it was really boring.
00:06:46
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:06:46
Eric Weinstein: Oh.
00:06:46
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, so that’s the thing, is basically-
00:06:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay
00:06:48
Balaji Srinivasan: … what, you know, all the innovation we’re doing, the disruption, is awesome if you’re on the disrupting end, and not so awesome if you’re on the disrupted end, right? And so a lot of folks… Go ahead.
00:06:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, hang on. I mean, my, I cleverly chose to get my PhD in mathematics.
00:07:03
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah. That’s got disrupted yesterday.
00:07:05
Eric Weinstein: This is a hell of a week.
00:07:06
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, that’s right.
00:07:07
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I couldn’t be more excited.
00:07:09
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. Well, so I, I-
00:07:10
Eric Weinstein: But everybody else is going around with the, these long faces. My feeling is finally.
00:07:15
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. So, so that’s, you know, that’s the thing is to, to quote, “feel that one is being disrupted,” is partly a state of mind. I think you and I are relatively unusual in that, you know, it’s, I guess we’re both kind of a little bit getting up in age. But, um, but, like, you know, 20-somethings, you know that saying, like, if, if somebody is under 30, then a new development is something that they can make a living in, and it’s like 30 to 50, oh, what is this new thing? And then 50 plus, it’s an offense against the natural order. Have you heard that, that concept? No?
00:07:46
Eric Weinstein: Y- y- you know, it depends because, like, the, the quantum guys who lived through the quantum revolution, their problem was is that they wanted to do everything [laughs] through a revolution, even when they got old.
00:07:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Mm-hmm.
00:07:55
Eric Weinstein: Right? So, like, uh, if you talk to the Sex Pistols, I’m, I’m pretty sure that they would be-
00:08:00
Balaji Srinivasan: They… So, well, you know, though Metallica and Dr. Dre were doing copyright lawsuits as they got a little older.
00:08:06
Eric Weinstein: Well-
00:08:06
Balaji Srinivasan: You know? But-
00:08:06
Eric Weinstein: … look, they’re rebels. They’re not stupid.
00:08:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah. Well-
00:08:08
Eric Weinstein: But anyway.
00:08:09
Balaji Srinivasan: But fine.
00:08:10
Eric Weinstein: By, by the way, in terms of our age, c- can we just-
00:08:12
Balaji Srinivasan: No, no, sure, sure. You’re older-
00:08:13
Eric Weinstein: … compliment each other on our hair?
00:08:14
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah.
00:08:14
Eric Weinstein: It’s fantastic.
00:08:15
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, I know. I know.
00:08:16
Eric Weinstein: Thank you.
00:08:16
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, what I was gonna say is basically the, um, th- with, with respect to… Actually, you’re the older, what is it? You’re the older Gen X, and I’m the older millennial or whatever, right? Like, uh, I think the, I think it’s a way of thinking about it. There’s… What is it? Something you said, like, you, you understand, you speak boomer or something like that. Did you say-
00:08:32
Eric Weinstein: With an accent. Yeah.
00:08:34
Balaji Srinivasan: With an accent. That’s right. So the, the, the funny thing about this is people-
00:08:37
Eric Weinstein: I also hate myself for doing it after it happened
00:08:39
Balaji Srinivasan: … uh, you know, I also wanna, I wanna steelman and actually defend the boomers a little bit. Why? Because-
00:08:44
Eric Weinstein: Oh, ’cause I’m really actually going after the silent generation who really caused the problem.
00:08:47
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, okay. I was just gonna say… Or also, well, did they even cause… See, the thing is, from their standpoint, they had just seen two totally destructive world wars, and the number one priority was to stuff any ideology in the box that would cause another world war like that because there was so much killing. So they didn’t care what elder sacrifices they had to make, and so the entire post-war… I mean, that’s one way of thinking about it, right?
00:09:12
Eric Weinstein: Wow.
00:09:13
Balaji Srinivasan: Like… Go ahead.
00:09:14
Eric Weinstein: No, I, I’m l- I’ve never… This is something we do disagree on.
00:09:18
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay.
00:09:19
Eric Weinstein: No, I think they really just wanted swimming pools that, that, that they needed more than their parents had had because otherwise they felt like failures, and the silent generation were the first people that realized that you could sell off the family business piece by piece, uh-
00:09:34
Balaji Srinivasan: No, okay
00:09:34
Eric Weinstein: … and not try to restart it. But the, we-
00:09:37
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, like, here’s the-
00:09:37
Eric Weinstein: Where were you headed?
00:09:38
Balaji Srinivasan: Here’s, here’s the steelman. The steelman is when I read stuff from around that time, there are a good chunk of people, a critical mass at least, that felt nationalism and too much faith in one’s country and tribe and so on led to these insanely destructive wars where everybody’s energies… And, and after the second one of those, they said, “You know what? Let’s deracinate people. Let’s just put all the energy into consumerism. That’s safe. That’s not gonna blow up the world, and it really doesn’t matter how much people complain about it because it’s way better than having their animal spirits get ramped up with modern machine guns and bombs and nuclear weapons.” And they just had massive doses of blue pills, and then they overdosed on it to the point that that itself became dangerous, and that’s where we are today. But at least we can understand why that world was set up. It wasn’t really set up by the boomers. The boomers were born into it. And at least that’s a, that’s the steelman of, of the thing, you know? I, I don’t know. Maybe you disagree with all of that.
00:10:35
Eric Weinstein: A little bit. I mean-
00:10:36
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah
00:10:36
Eric Weinstein: … I guess from my perspective, the, uh, nobody born in the ’30s ever became president. Then you had the people who were, uh, fighting World War II who thought that they won World War II from the American side, not counting Soviet losses.
00:10:49
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:10:49
Eric Weinstein: Which I think is a f-
00:10:50
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, America-
00:10:50
Eric Weinstein: That’s a-
00:10:51
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah
00:10:51
Eric Weinstein: … very, very interesting-
00:10:52
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah
00:10:52
Eric Weinstein: … weird situation to be in.
00:10:53
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:10:54
Eric Weinstein: And then it was the silent generation who, you know, hit the, the weird discontinuity in the early ’70s that the Bitcoiners tried to monopolize as what the fuck happened in 1971, which is not right. Um, but never mind. Uh, then you had the boomers in numbers piling on to the silent generation’s idea, which is we’ll just sell stuff off so that we can keep getting richer. It’s just bad for our kids. And just a complete lack of interest in the welfare [laughs] of one’s lineage, which I think was something new and may have had something to do with drugs.
00:11:30
Balaji Srinivasan: So question for you, and you know, it’s funny, different people have a different answer to this. Lots of people agree that things have gone downhill recently. When was peak America? When was peak West?
00:11:42
Eric Weinstein: Oh, well, that’s because it was multivariate.
00:11:44
Balaji Srinivasan: Exactly.
00:11:44
Eric Weinstein: Different things peaked at… You know the problem when you have two contrarians on the stage at the same time-
00:11:48
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, yeah
00:11:48
Eric Weinstein: … and it’s just like, “Yes.”
00:11:49
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs] Right. Um-
00:11:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It, it, it, different things peaked at, in different places.
00:11:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes.
00:11:56
Eric Weinstein: And, uh, I think that the peak was at, at some time… It’s like the remembered peak is at some time that no one would want to go back to. Uh, probably like ar-around the time of the pill or Sputnik or something like that.
00:12:09
Balaji Srinivasan: Y-you know, it’s funny, I ask this question to people, and I really do get a lot of different answers. Um, you know, like some people say the ’90s. Uh, some people say, um, September 10th, 2001, you know. Some people actually place it, you know, in the ’80s or of course a lot of people say the ’50s. Other people will say the 18, you know, 18-
00:12:29
Eric Weinstein: My grandfather said the Great Depression was the best time in American history.
00:12:32
Balaji Srinivasan: Really?
00:12:32
Eric Weinstein: I said, [laughs] “How do you come up with that one?” And he said, “Well, the cool thing was you could talk to anybody about the problems because the scales had fallen from everybody’s eyes.”
00:12:40
Balaji Srinivasan: Hmm.
00:12:40
Eric Weinstein: “And so it was the realest time in American history.” And I said, “I’ve never heard that before.”
00:12:45
Balaji Srinivasan: Interesting. Well, you know, the thing is, uh, you know, the Great Depression, y- one reinterpretation of the whole 20th century is everybody went communist, but America just went the least communist because it had 90% marginal tax rates, not 100%, you know.
00:13:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:13:01
Balaji Srinivasan: And so like everything was actually centralized, you know, everything was, you know… Go ahead.
00:13:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is an ingenious way to bring it back to your original question, which is about like voice versus exit.
00:13:11
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:13:12
Eric Weinstein: Which is, is America winning because it’s getting less… It’s getting bad less quickly than everywhere else? It’s lost its mind less than other places. Like j- all you’re trying to do is outrun the other guy, not outrun the bear.
00:13:27
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so it’s funny you say that because I have a, a, a, a very simple quantitative theory of the last whatever 100 years.
00:13:33
Eric Weinstein: Go on.
00:13:33
Balaji Srinivasan: That’s it. Okay. So going into 1950, you can think of technology as centralizing because it was mass media, mass production. You had all of these wars of unification from German unification, Italian unification, you know, the major restorations and all these wars of unification going into roughly 1950, at which point you also had the fewest number of, uh, political entities ever in world history. That’s why Orwell thought it was gonna go to just down to three entities, you know, Oceania, Eurasia. So, so basically going into that time, Western liberalism, you know, free speech and the rights of individual, was a useful cultural offset to technological centralization. By contrast, Russian tsarism, Chinese collectivism was like a plus one on top of a plus one that gives you a plus two, so you get Stalin and Mao, you get the centralized fist. And whereas the minus one of decentralization and plus one of centralization, cultural decentralization, technological centralization give you a balance in the West, right? Okay. But then with the invention of the transistor, that unwound completely and in the last 80 years, we’ve gone transistor, personal computer, smartphone, cryptocurrency, so we’ve had decentralization, and now the default of the world is the anarchic internet. And Eastern cultures, like Chinese collectivists and so on, have, uh, but also Indian Dharma and others, have some cultural formula to moderate the internet to kind of smooth down chaos. Whereas in the West, especially if you go to the US, it’s the one A and two A, First Amendment, Second Amendment are completely sacred, even above the Ten Commandments, which have been lost. So, a-and so now you just have cultural decentralization on top of technological decentralization, so you get American anarchy. And I think that’s the problem of this century in America, which is not communism and fascism, but anarcho-communism and anarcho-fascism, like the, the decentralized chaotic variety that’s even… Like anarcho-communism is even worse than communism because it can’t do Sputnik. And anarcho-fascism even worse than fascism because it could never do, uh, the Volkswagen, right? It’s just people getting radicalized online and shooting each other and other people, but it can’t organize. And I think that’s what we’re actually seeing as opposed to the problems of the 20th century. Let me pause there and get your thoughts on that.
00:15:49
Eric Weinstein: No, I was, I was really enjoying that riff, but, uh-
00:15:51
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure
00:15:51
Eric Weinstein: … okay. Um, yeah, I think that this gets back to an old concept that I never was successful in selling to anyone called the USAN, or the United States of Absolutely Nothing.
00:16:02
Balaji Srinivasan: Hmm.
00:16:02
Eric Weinstein: And it was the idea that you, having won the Cold War, all you could, all you needed were institutions like the courts and a currency and the, and the army, and you didn’t have to stand for anything. You could just say, “This country is like Seinfeld. It’s, it’s a country about nothing.” And, um, that d-doesn’t work. And in part, you know, I’ll, I’ll be honest, I think that a lot of what happened in the US is that we had a brilliant administrator class, and that sounds really weird. But like Vannevar Bush type guys in World War II had a role, and then they took that brilliance and they created the most bizarre empire after World War II that nobody understood because they hid the whole structure. And then there was this really interesting thing that happened, which was they didn’t tell their successors how it worked.
00:16:53
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes. Yeah. In-
00:16:54
Eric Weinstein: Right? So you-
00:16:54
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes
00:16:54
Eric Weinstein: … have this zombie empire constructed by geniuses that… Manned by idiots.
00:17:03
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes. I-
00:17:04
Eric Weinstein: And you can try to wake the idiots up and say, “That’s not how it works.” Like if they, i-if you look at overhead on university grants, it’s not the cost of administering the grant. It’s a payoff to elite institutions from the government that is not politically tolerable-
00:17:22
Balaji Srinivasan: Right
00:17:23
Eric Weinstein: … hidden as if you’re administering the grant. Duh. Okay. But all the [laughs] all the sort of people one level above moron say, “Hey, look, I found a, a line item to strike.” So, you know, this is the problem. You can’t explain that it wasn’t a real democracy. The two political parties were supposed to screen out populists who could reverse long-running agreements like NATO and NAFTA. And okay, that was their job. Their job was to stop populists from gaining power, and then one party failed, and that party was the Republican Party and, and we got Donald Trump.
00:18:02
Balaji Srinivasan: I know.
00:18:02
Eric Weinstein: So for better or worse, suddenly you see what democracy looks like. And then you have the spectacle of all of these people who are just vote, it’s about democracy saying, “Well, you can’t vote for him.” Because they didn’t understand how their own system works. So the whole thing is comic tragic.
00:18:19
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, so I have two thoughts on that. Um, the first is that upstream of Trump was Twitter, and upstream of Twitter is the Internet, right? And the Internet led to Brexit, and the Internet led to drones, and the Internet led to AI, and the Internet led to crypto. And so Internet is the, like electromagnetism, the invisible driving force on basically all world events that was almost completely absent in the ’80s and the ’90s. And one thesis is that Western institutions were optimized for the pre-Internet order and would have remained stable indefinitely in the absence of that Internet disruption. That’s thesis number one. Let me know your thoughts on that.
00:18:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, so I’ve said this, that, that, that, uh, that Jeffrey Epstein was a deep state construct that was constructed pre-Internet [laughs] that lived into the Internet age.
00:19:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes.
00:19:08
Eric Weinstein: Right? And, and, or, or, um, public health. Uh, people thought that there was a science called public health. Like, do, do you know any people in this science?
00:19:18
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, well, so it used to be real though, right? Like the S- the Salk Polio vaccine, right? You know-
00:19:23
Eric Weinstein: No, no
00:19:24
Balaji Srinivasan: … like, uh, public sanitation, sewage, sewage treatment. Those are-
00:19:27
Eric Weinstein: There are real things-
00:19:28
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead
00:19:28
Eric Weinstein: … that were part of public health.
00:19:30
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:19:30
Eric Weinstein: But the, but it also, let’s be honest, if you know anybody in this field-
00:19:34
Balaji Srinivasan: Today it’s corrupted
00:19:35
Eric Weinstein: … it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s like saying, “I can’t believe that a foot fetishist would have a job in a shoe store.”
00:19:40
Balaji Srinivasan: I… So, so-
00:19:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay? So, a- and the pedophiles are counselors at kids camps, okay? What do you think public health people are that are attracted to telling other people what to do?
00:19:50
Balaji Srinivasan: Today, yes. But this is one of the things that is, uh, you know, we, we need a word for when a label gets gradually corrupted. It, it’s like, uh, you know, imagine, I don’t know, a, a bo- some, some box of food, okay? And it was tomatoes, and it was labeled tomatoes, and 20 years ago it was tomatoes, but it’s been in the fridge for 20 years. It’s no longer tomatoes, it’s something else, right? But still labeled tomatoes. In the same way it was a tomato once, you know, and, like, it was healthy, right? So it was public health at some point.
00:20:23
Eric Weinstein: I’ve got one for you.
00:20:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.
00:20:24
Eric Weinstein: Veritas.
00:20:25
Audience: [laughs]
00:20:26
Balaji Srinivasan: Veritas. That’s a good… Yeah. Right. No, I mean-
00:20:29
Eric Weinstein: That person has lived in the 02138 area code.
00:20:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah. So, so, so the reason I say this is, a, a lot of these things were-
00:20:35
Eric Weinstein: There’s the cutter rather. Sorry
00:20:36
Balaji Srinivasan: … I mean, they were world leading at some point, right? They were the best. And m- you know, my view is if you, if you ask that question, how did the Internet disrupt them, that’s almost like the root cause of just about every… I mean, the Internet or China. Usually it’s one of those two that’s, that was the disruptor. Go ahead.
00:20:53
Eric Weinstein: So my, my model of this, by the way, I, I, I agree with you, is that you have a North Star, and that’s the label that you put on.
00:20:59
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:20:59
Eric Weinstein: Like we’re trying to give you tomatoes. And at the equator, the difference between magnetic and true north is this tiny thing that nobody… Who knows what the name of this thing is? The angle of declination.
00:21:12
Balaji Srinivasan: Hmm.
00:21:13
Eric Weinstein: Now, it’s not that big, so anybody with a compass can tell which nor- where north is approximately. When you’re at, on, like, Ellesmere Island in Canada, magnetic north-
00:21:23
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah
00:21:24
Eric Weinstein: … and true north can po- point in opposite directions. And so the key question is, what is the angle of declination of any institution about what it says it’s trying to do, “We’re trying to stop hate,” versus what it actually has to do, “We need to manufacture enough hate so that we can keep everybody employed and have the donations come in”? So at some point, the angle of declination, uh, goes from acute to oblique. And what we’re seeing is an enormous number of institutions that were synchronized at the same time that all made this march northward, and we are growing up in an era in which, I’m sorry, it’s like an IQ test. Can you not tell that the institution is completely off its rocker? Literally, mathematicians are saying, “Who asked for all this progress?”
00:22:05
Audience: [laughs]
00:22:08
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I’m telling you, these are the leaders of my field, the people who you should be quaking in your boots if you meet a Fields medalist, and they’re sitting there saying, “Nobody asked OpenAI to do this much good work.”
00:22:19
Audience: [laughs]
00:22:19
Balaji Srinivasan: Mm-hmm.
00:22:20
Eric Weinstein: It’s, it’s bananas.
00:22:23
Balaji Srinivasan: It’s, it’s interesting ’cause, you know, there is something where the conformity of, uh, you know… Here’s, here’s like a series of things that each makes sense, and then at the end you lead to a bad result, right? Okay. So let’s take science. Science started with just gentlemen doing science and writing each other letters about their experiment and so on. And that eventually became, let’s call it the equivalent of peer-reviewed journals, but it was still something where you’re doing individual replications, and then gradually peer review and perceived citation starts to take over for and substitute for independent replication. So now it was simply sufficient to get published in science or nature or cell, and people thought it was true. And then you start to get the replication crisis where, you know, these, these papers were published and it was just prestige with nothing underneath it whatsoever. And the thing is that that kind of thing has happened within academia as well, where it started, as you say, let’s call it true north, where it did point in a direction. It wouldn’t have achieved any power or relevance if it was totally making things up from the beginning. And then gradually it went to, you know, proxies for true north, and then eventually those proxies became weaker and weaker and weaker until they started pointing in the opposite direction. And, uh, you know, I don’t know. Do, what do you think about that as a story? It’s similar to the, uh, what do they call it on the internet when it’s, uh, when a, when a metric becomes a measure? It’s like, uh, some- someone’s law. Goodhart’s law. Right?
00:23:54
Eric Weinstein: Um, I think it’s darker than that, and more fun.
00:23:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay.
00:23:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So my feeling is, is that Vince McMahon is really the, the, the central-
00:24:02
Balaji Srinivasan: The KFAB?
00:24:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:24:04
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. Okay.
00:24:05
Eric Weinstein: But his, his idea was he was gonna be taxed in New Jersey, and he didn’t want to pay taxes as a part of the sporting commission’s plan for him. So he, he marched into a meeting and he said, “You can’t tax me. There is absolutely no sport in professional wrestling. It’s all made up.” Now the key, key question is: what do you have when you’ve admitted that your entire sport is fake? And what you have is a smark in the audience. The smart mark is the person who says, “Thank you for conning me. You did a brilliant job, although let me give you a couple of pointers on how you could con me a little bit better.” Right? So, you know-
00:24:43
Balaji Srinivasan: It’s, it’s like they like to see the magician trick.
00:24:46
Eric Weinstein: Sort of. But they’re also still in the audience. I mean, my, my feeling is, is that, I think it was OJ Simpson I learned had paid for fake boobs for his beloved. You know, and you think, “Okay, is that supposed to fool you at some different level?” So what we are is we’re all consuming this fake world willingly because it’s better than the alternative. We know it’s fake, but we, we still agree that anyone like me or you who says that it’s fake, they can’t come… Like how often are you interviewed on CNN?
00:25:22
Balaji Srinivasan: See-
00:25:22
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.
00:25:23
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:25:23
Eric Weinstein: They don’t even know you exist.
00:25:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, well, well, I stay off of that stuff. Yeah.
00:25:26
Eric Weinstein: You say that-
00:25:27
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah
00:25:27
Eric Weinstein: … but like I used to, they used to have me on speed dial all the time-
00:25:30
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, I know, but I- I-
00:25:31
Eric Weinstein: None of them will talk to me because I hang out with Peter Thiel or something like that.
00:25:35
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, I… Well, see, see, this is one big difference maybe on our… I just reject interacting with Western media completely and just go pure, go direct on the internet.
00:25:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, you are under the radar.
00:25:47
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, well, that’s something… Well, we’re going to the internet. Just straight to the internet. Because the thing is, Western media in particular was so disrupted by the internet that they’re structurally hostile to us. This is something I, I know that some of our colleagues have, you know, they, they sometimes talk to legacy media and so on. I just think that’s a strategic mistake. But, but coming back, so all right. W- Coming to the original question. W- Where do you think the state of Western institutions is? Um, you know, what do you think of as a Western institution? Is there anything that’s working, and can it be fixed?
00:26:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, I do want to say merhaba, Kazakhstan. Uh, hoş bulduk. Please invite me. I really want to come.
00:26:29
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. We’re going to bring you up there.
00:26:30
Eric Weinstein: All right, fantastic.
00:26:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes. Good, good.
00:26:31
Eric Weinstein: Um, look, I don’t know if it can be fixed. I know that it’s crazier and dumber than we ever imagined, but I also know that sooner or later it has to compete with reality, and it’s going to lose because it won’t, it won’t, it won’t go to the gym. Uh, it, it doesn’t want to go to the doctor. It just wants to decay and decay and decay. I’m, I’m still watching the Democratic Party of the United States, uh, ask questions like, “Where will we ever find our own Joe Rogan?” And I’m thinking, “You had Joe Rogan.”
00:27:04
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:27:04
Eric Weinstein: “He was your Joe Rogan.” Uh, th- there’s something about a pathological commitment to stupidity, which by the way, is very common in California because it’s extremely pleasant, but for our r- government representatives, um, where you, you see just how far you can test things, how crazy, how dumb, uh, can you get? And that’s always a part of the, part of the left. I still think I’m on the left. Um, but there, there’s this performative part of the left where you can’t show what a good person you are until you sympathize with the wrong thing. Anybody can sympathize with a victim of a violent crime, but to sympathize with the perpetrator, ooh, that’s some next level stuff. All right. At some point, you actually have to get reference to reality. There is this idea about the relationship with the unforgiving, and I think what happened was is that World War II gave the West an incredible endowment, and what we are looking at is the frittering away of that endowment, the destruction of a system that kept us from being highly multipolar when it came to weapons of mass destruction, in particular nukes. We have a bunch of people who have no idea how that system ever worked, a bunch of people who don’t care, and we’re interested in rolling the dice. And so what we’re coming up on is one of the most exciting periods of human history where you can found new stuff. As they say, you can just do things, you can just say things, and there’s probably going to be a tremendous amount of innovation, death and destruction, uh, rebirth, uh, catastrophic collapse. It’s all going to happen at once, and almost nobody living has seen anything like it unless they happen to have been in China for the Great Leap Forward.
00:28:46
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
00:28:46
Eric Weinstein: Hope that was an okay thing to say. But my, my belief is, is that in general, um, if you think the period from 1945 until the present is normal life and we just need to get back to it, that was a bubble and it was a one-time gift, and it probably kept the world together, and right now it’s a race for the exits. It’s not just in, just in voice versus exit. You’re right about a lot of things. I do think that you have to think bigger on exit. We can’t afford to all share one atmosphere because that’s the one global experiment.
00:29:15
Balaji Srinivasan: Of course. We, we need Mars. We need everything else.
00:29:16
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:29:17
Balaji Srinivasan: No.
00:29:17
Eric Weinstein: Forget Mars. It’s interstellar or bust, and hopefully the open AI versus Claude versus Grok versus Gemini versus the Chinese mysterious o- uh, AIs is going to heat up, and we’re going to start working on interstellar, which is the world’s-
00:29:32
Balaji Srinivasan: Love it
00:29:32
Eric Weinstein: … most important problem that has a zero allocation. So that’s what my hope is.
00:29:37
Balaji Srinivasan: Awesome.
00:29:38
Eric Weinstein: Well-
00:29:38
Balaji Srinivasan: Great. Well, thank you. To the stars, sir.
00:29:40
Audience: [audience applauding]
00:29:44
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.
