Transcript
00:00:00
David Fuller: [gentle music] So Eric, it’s a pleasure to sit down with you again.
00:00:08
Eric Weinstein: David, good to see you.
00:00:09
David Fuller: So last time we met in person, we recorded a piece that ended up being Glitch in the Matrix 2, which was the origin story of the intellectual dark web. Uh, it was, it was sort of a deep dive into your, uh, thinking and then why the intellectual dark web was… or your take on why the intellectual dark web was needed, why it was timely, why it was really important. And since then, you’ve launched The Portal. We were talking before, uh, about The Portal, before we started recording, and you said that you felt that it kind of kicked into a new gear in the recent episodes, episode 18 and episode 19. 19 was a recent episode with Bret, uh, your brother, Bret Weinstein, um, the evolutionary biologist, where you talked about, I think it was called All, All Our Mice Are Broken, which is a really fascinating story. It was a really, really fascinating episode. And you-
00:00:57
Eric Weinstein: Slight reference to one of our submarines is missing.
00:01:00
David Fuller: So you introduced a concept called the DISC in, uh, the previous episode, in episode 18, and I think you, you’ve also said that it’s relevant to what has happened with, with 19, especially the a- the aftermath, like the follow-ups or the lack of follow-ups. Do you wanna talk a little bit about what the DISC is and why you think it’s so important?
00:01:19
Eric Weinstein: Sure. If you went back to the first Matrix movie, let’s say, uh, clearly it’s a sci-fi thriller. But you have to ask yourself, was it fiction at all? Is the reason that that movie did so well and played so well that in fact it wasn’t fiction, but metaphor? And I think that there’s some point, uh, at which Morpheus starts describing the Matrix in the film as a prison that you cannot see, taste, feel, or touch, something like that. In some sense, the DISC works like this. We’ve lived our entire lives in a medium, and that medium has to do with the way in which our ideas are suppressed.
00:01:57
David Fuller: So Bret, you were recently on Eric’s podcast, The Portal, for an episode called All Our Mice Are Broken, which is a long story, really fascinating. I’ve heard a lot of people say it was one of the most fascinating podcasts they’ve ever heard. Kind of it’s a detective story. It’s a story that has kind of huge ramifications for medical testing, and it’s… Yeah, it was really, really well told, and it also has a lot of, um, really interesting dynamics between you and Eric as well. Uh, commiserations.
00:02:27
Eric Weinstein: Thank you.
00:02:28
David Fuller: I’d really urge anyone to go away and listen to, to that, ’cause we don’t wanna recap the whole story here. But I’d love to hear what has happened since, whether there’s been any, um… ‘Cause one of the other questions that it brings up is what stories are being covered by and be– are registering in sort of the, the mainstream, and which ones are sort of disappearing without trace, and why they might be disappearing without trace, um, what Eric’s called the DISC, the Distributed Information Suppression Complex.
00:02:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:02:57
David Fuller: Maybe we could talk about, like, what effect it’s had and just sort of sum- without summarizing the whole story, why this is significant.
00:03:05
Bret Weinstein: So the, um, the important piece of the story from the perspective of, uh, your audience and the rest of us is that when I was a graduate student, I, uh, was working on a question that involved cancer, senescence, and evolution. And I stumbled on a result in the literature that I had to grapple with that didn’t fit with my hypothesis or anything else. And as I wrestled with it, the, the conclusion was that all mice, or in some cases all rodents, were thought to have long telomeres. Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes, and at the point that I was doing this work in the late ’90s, they were understood to shorten every time a cell divided. So when a cell divided its DNA to copy it, a little bit of the telomere was lost each time, and there comes a point at which a cell has s- a small enough, uh, set of repeats in its telomere that it no longer divides. I was working on the hypothesis that these shortening events were actually a protection against tumors and cancer, and that the downside of that system of, uh, cancer protection was that our tissues couldn’t repair themselves indefinitely, and we grew old and feeble with age and, and ultimately die. Um, the problem was that with the conclusion that all mice have ultra-long telomeres, uh, this could not be, uh, made sensible because mice have short lives, and if they have telomeres that are 10 times as long as people, they should have the ability to replace their tissues, uh, and they should be very long-lived. So, um, the podcast recounts the story of my increasing suspicion that there was something wrong with the conclusion that all mice have long telomeres, and my contacting a researcher, Carol Greider, who then tested that hypothesis with her graduate student at the time, Mike Hemann, and they discovered that in fact mice, that is to say wild mice, don’t have long telomeres, and that it’s only lab mice that do have long telomeres, as I had predicted. Um, the most important outgrowth of that conclusion is that there’s a problem in our drug safety system, because our drug safety system utilizes laboratory rodents, especially mice, to test the safety of drugs before they’re ever tested on humans. Our mice, which have been altered by the environment in the laboratory breeding colonies from which laboratories get them, uh, our mice have been altered by evolutionary forces in those colonies so that they have effectively an infinite capacity to replace damaged tissue and a, an incredibly, uh, extreme vulnerability to cancer. In other words, they, uh, eventually get cancer, and their tissues do not grow old. Right? Because their telomeres are so long. Um, when you use those animals in order to test a drug, a new drug, uh, to see whether it’d be safe to give them to people, you get, um, a paradoxical effect. Uh, or at least the hypothesis suggests that the effect should be that the damage that is done to those mice by these drugs, unless it is so extreme in the moment that it kills them outright, will not be harmful to them because mice, unlike us, can replace their tissues indefinitely. And in fact, because these mice seem to all get cancer if you let them live long enough, a poisonous drug may actually extend their lives because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy. So, uh, the not-so-funny joke to- told in, uh, um, in chemotherapy wards is that the whole purpose of chemotherapy is to kill the tumor faster than you kill the patient, right? Tumors are more vulnerable than regular tissues because their DNA is constantly dividing, and when DNA is dividing, it is vulnerable in a way that DNA that is paired is not. Um, and so these mice are suffering from unusual cancer load, and a poisonous drug that actually, uh, damages cells that are vulnerable will actually interrupt their cancer’s ability to grow, and so they may actually live longer than their, uh, um, their non-drug, uh, counterparts. In any case, though, the result of this is that you will administer drugs in high doses to mice to see whether or not they are poisonous. Mice will not respond the way people do because of their unusual telomeres, which have evolved to be long in the laboratory colonies. And, um, then when you release the drug, uh, in, into the human population, these toxins will do damage in our bodies, which will be particularly visible when it affects the heart because the heart has a low capacity for cellular repair, and, uh, when the heart fails, it’s very noticeable. So the idea is that something like Vioxx, which turned out to be destructive of heart tissue, was released into the public, um, because our, uh, mechanism for testing whether it would be safe in mice had failed us. There are quite a number of other drugs that have shown the same pattern. We thought they were safe. They were then released. They turn out to do heart damage. They’re pulled from the market or warnings are appended to them. So the question is, have we made an error where something about our laboratory environments, um, is creating mice that make drugs look much safer than they actually are and causing us actually to, uh, to suffer pharmaceutical harm that is unnecessary? Um, you asked what the outgrowth of this, uh, podcast had been. There was tremendous interest in it, uh, online, on YouTube and on other social media outlets, and bizarrely, there’s been no reaction, uh, from anybody in the academy or, uh, in the press, um, i- in the mainstream press.
00:09:40
Eric Weinstein: There’s some very strange thing where nobody seems to want to engage the issue that there was a first principles prediction coming from evolutionary theory that seems to have radical implications both for our understanding of death and for the way in which we use the mouse model, um, to test all sorts of things. Uh, the mind reels. I just can’t, I can’t fathom that given the amount of interest in this story, and this, this video has just soared up the charts. It’s now over 100,000 views. There must be 250,000 downloads, you know, that came very quickly. Many people have heard it, and the interesting thing is how interested everyone is in the story and how the interest is least in the place that you would expect it most. I would imagine if this was a wrong story, we would be hearing, uh, n- nothing but chortling from the molecular biology community telling us how badly we’ve understood what in fact is going on. Or I would want to understand from the news media, tell me, why is this uninteresting to you? I should say that I’ve named these sorts of stories anti-interesting. An anti-interesting story isn’t really uninteresting. The more riveting the anti-interesting story gets, the less interest there is from the official channels.
00:11:08
David Fuller: And why, why do you think that’s the response from, from journalism? Or why– L- let’s start from molecular biology. Why do you think there’s that response from molecular biology or from the scientific community?
00:11:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, let’s think about it. What if you had, um, 20 years of studies that were built around a mouse model which was known to be broken? And that in fact, you had people who were trying to say that the mouse mo- model might be broken, and we need to have a discussion about this immediately. And the community had decided that it didn’t want to introduce the idea that this might have far-reaching impli- implications. Perhaps many results that we have based on the use of these mice are off. You could have a thousand strains, but if they share a common breeding protocol, you might have a situation by which all of those strains are affected because they’re all subject to the same etiology, that the, the breeding, uh, rotation is in fact an evolutionary environment and that telomeres adapt rapidly unlike protein coding regions. So my belief is, is that if you really don’t wanna shake up your own– I mean, this is the typical story. If you don’t have the ability to shake up your own institution You tend to want to throw these things under the rug and hope that nobody notices. With respect to journalism, I don’t know. I mean, journalists have gotten very bizarre. You talk to a lot of them, they’re very excited about the story so that my experience with journalists is that you still have fresh faces who hear something, they’ll tell you, oh, this is fascinating, it’s fantastic. I got to run it down. I’m getting all these partial results. And then very often you get this weird phone call, which is like my editor said to stop working on it. Well, why? They said it wasn’t of any interest. Well, it might involve drug testing. It might involve why we die. How could you say that this isn’t interesting? Well, that’s what he said. He said it wasn’t interesting to enough people. Too complicated. You’re like, are you kidding me? I mean, there’s just no way of telling this, David. I’m getting sort of almost fatigued having to go through it. Something has gone terribly wrong with journalism. And I just don’t know of anybody who’s not sensing that.
00:13:23
David Fuller: I guess trying to understand why it happened from the sort of information side, from the journalism side, journalism works by dedicated or a story like this would work, but through a dedicated investigative journalist who’s willing to sort of chase it down, to stake sort of a lot of time and a lot of energy in doing it. So it kind of, I certainly feel that one of the things that’s happened in journalism, it’s become much more of an information processing thing rather than an information sourcing thing. Like cutbacks in the numbers of journalists and like probably the skill level of journalists who used to kind of in the 70s use the phone book, make calls themselves, like those skills I think have definitely atrophied to a degree.
00:14:06
Eric Weinstein: Look, I have to be careful about it. If I wasn’t careful about it, this is a very simple story. Maybe we released a lot of bad mice and that now we’ve got health implications from the fact that our mice model is all screwed up and that we had people who didn’t want to give credit where credit was due. And so we didn’t get the hypothesis that explained what the potential ramifications are. Full stop. Right? Somebody may have figured out why we die. Is that of any interest to you? Is it too complicated? I don’t buy any of this. If you’re smart enough to watch Game of Thrones or The Sopranos, you’re smart enough to follow the story. If you really can’t follow more than one plot line at a time and you need everything in all caps and really big type, then maybe you’re not the target audience for this. But as long as people subscribe to the, I don’t know, The Economist or The Times, it would appear If we don’t have a world that’s smart enough to follow this story, we’ve got a lot bigger problems than telomeres. I don’t think this is very difficult. And I’ll be honest, I think that these excuses about budgets are absurd. I could do this in my spare time if I wasn’t actually a participant in the story.
00:15:16
David Fuller: Just to summarize, like for people who, as soon as you say the word telomere, start to kind of glaze over and like are really struggling to follow the story, which I think many of us are, like the ins and outs of it, why is this so significant?
00:15:32
Bret Weinstein: Well, it depends what you mean by this. There are two thises. There’s what goes on in a normal mammal with respect to telomeres, senescence, and cancer. And then there’s what happened in the scientific study of telomeres. Those are two very distinct stories. And I really wish that we could talk about the scientific story in isolation from the big science story. Because the big science story is a very different, it’s about human failings more than anything else. Whereas the scientific story is an absolutely fascinating story that explains who we are and why we’re built the way we are. And it really needs to be more broadly understood. The problem is you can’t really understand the scientific story unless you understand how the human story was preventing it from emerging. The two stories have become intertwined in a way that they’re almost impossible to disentangle. And so anyway, that’s one of the things that emerged on this podcast. The import of the scientific story is we do not understand that we are the beneficiaries of a system that very almost ideally balances two conflicting deadly hazards. One hazard is tumors and the other is wearing out. We have a system in which we don’t have to wear out because our tissues can replace themselves. But if you let that system do its own thing, then almost every cell in your body is in danger of turning into a tumor that will kill you. If you correct for the problem of tumors that can run away and crowd out vital organs, then you create a limit on the amount of tissue repair you can do. And understanding that human beings are actually extremely well built in this regard. We are the longest lived terrestrial mammal by far as a result of the fact that the system has been built to give us very long lives. So the entire question about extending maximum human lifespans should happen in this context. We’ve had our lifespans radically extended since our branching point with other mammals, right? Natural selection has already worked on this puzzle and it has given us a very effective adaptive balance between these two hazards. You can definitely have tissues that replace themselves better, but you’ll have more cancer risk, right? And you can definitely have less cancer risk, but then you’ll have tissues that don’t replace themselves very effectively. And the question is, could we adaptively shift that balance a little bit? We could. Would it be desirable? There are even scenarios in which it might be. For example If we got very, very good at spotting tumors when they had just started, right? Well, then you might be willing to have more tumors start and then to address them surgically in exchange for tissues that age less quickly. That’s conceivable. We could do that. Um, and, you know, if that’s what we’re gonna do, we should pursue it, but we should not pretend that what we are pursuing is an end to human aging, because that’s not going to happen, right? It can’t happen. Um, so that’s the scientific upshot. The social upshot, the scien- the science, the big science upshot is that the market has interfaced with scientific study in ways that are absolutely devastating. The way that the mouse telomere got extended had to do with market forces that rewarded the production of, um, mice at a very rapid rate. In order to produce mice at a very rapid rate, a decision was made to breed only young animals, and breeding only young animals had a dramatic selective effect in the colonies, it would appear. That was one way in which the market interfaced badly with the story. The other way it seems to interface badly with the story has to do with flourishing in an academic environment by keeping quiet with respect to hazards like this, um, and it had to do with the, um, scientific apparatus serving the interests of potentially the pharmaceutical industry, um, at the expense of the public. Uh, I’m pretty sure the pharmaceutical industry did not know that the mice were broken in a way that biased drugs in the direction of looking safe until, um, until I pointed it out. However, after that point, they did know, and they had a question. Did they wanna solve the problem at some large financial cost to their industry, or did they wanna sweep it under the rug? I have no idea whether pharmaceutical companies have actually taken action, but what I do know is that the system is sensitive to the kind of money that the pharmaceutical industry brings to bear, and that it would not be surprising if, um, they are functioning as the ghost in the machine that prevents this story from ever emerging in the mainstream press.
00:20:51
David Fuller: Yeah, I guess I’m slightly more hopeful ’cause I, I know I’ve worked with journalists who have followed particular stories at significant personal risk, uh, put their careers on the line to kind of pursue, um, especially in foreign affairs, stories of, of huge importance, so I’m hopeful that journalism is not as compromised as maybe, um, we’re kind of sketching it out to be.
00:21:14
Eric Weinstein: David, I just want to say something about that. I’ve been following this story for twenty years. We’ve intermittently tried to get interest in this story. It’s not difficult to locate reporters who find the story to be of interest. That’s not where the problem appears to be located. There is something above the level of the reporter that causes the story to die usually, and I think that the disk is much more located in the editorial layer rather than in the actual beat reporter layer. One possibility, David, is is that the editorial layer is taking into account different sorts of decisions, that the journalistic layer is still being told, “Go pursue the stories that are important, that are interesting, and bring them back to us.” And then the editorial layer filters on something else, which is, is this going to be an inexpensive story to produce or an expensive story to produce? Is this going to put the paper or the radio program at risk? Is a TV station going to be compromised if, in fact, there is a legal response from some of the participants? And so I believe that the institutional sympathies really live much more in the editorial and managerial layers than they do in the reporting layers, which causes a false sense of security with people who are well-acquainted with reporters. They tend to say, “You know, I know a lot of reporters, and I think of them as, in general, having a lot of integrity and a lot of passion.” But that’s not the issue. The issue is is that it’s the composite. The interest is there. A lot of times, the intelligence is there. The grit is there. The drive is there. What enervates the system is when certain other concerns that we know much less well enter the story. Like, for example, is there an advertiser who might be a pharmaceutical firm that might be negatively impacted by the story? Or, for example, is the legal bill going to be large in order to figure out whether or not the, the paper can actually print this? Or is it going to be expensive if the e-experts who are involved in the story, um, might have a vested interest, and so we have to figure out some way around expert vested interest? In all of those situations, you can imagine that the layer above the reporter is going to be much more important than most people think and that casual observers or even people inside the industry will tend to place too much of an emphasis on whether or not there are good reporters available.
00:23:32
David Fuller: One of the things I understood from your podcast that was preventing people reporting it before is the nature of… Like, if you look into this as a journalist, you immediately will go to certain, um, arbiters of truth to, to check it out. You’ll go to, for example, the medical association. You’ll go to various places to check out the story, and I guess one of the reasons that this can’t be reported is that effectively everyone that you go to check it with would have a vested interest in it not being true. Is that part of the, the issue? What are, what are the wider, um, I guess, informational, uh, journalistic perspectives that it shows up?
00:24:16
Bret Weinstein: Well, I know that my experience was that for 10 years, I went to everybody I could think of who would listen, and I told them what I knew, and many of them were quite interested, including quite a number of journalists who, you know, couldn’t believe the story they were hearing, and then they went to do whatever it is journalists do, and then they became very strange, and they treated me like a pariah. And I don’t know- why that was, but the implication is that something somebody on the other end of a phone said to them caused this reaction. Um, now my point would be something is synchronizing the reaction of people on the other ends of phones that journalists would call. That is to say, the establishment has a system of incentives that causes, um, certain things to be said that shut down the story. Now, I know what some of them were. We’ve looked at this, there’s no problem, um, uh, or, uh, this has been addressed, or, uh, we all know that the mice are broken, right? All of these things are easily answered if met on a level playing field. Ni- none of those are proper concerns. If the s- if the situation has been addressed, then it should leave evidence in the literature that it’s been addressed. If the situation is not a problem, that should also leave a hallmark, uh, in the literature. All the mice are broken doesn’t mean anything because, yes, mice are not perfect model organisms. No organism is a perfect model organism. But the lab mouse telomeres appear to be the result of a breeding protocol that is sensitive to being altered in order to change its effect on the lab mouse telomeres. So the fact that mice may be broken with respect to this hormone or that hormone has nothing to say about whether or not this thing that became broken on the human watch could be unbroken and they could be vastly better models. So there’s no answer that anybody, or there’s no response that anybody heard that doesn’t invite the next question. But in general, journalists are not molecular biologists who are in a position to know that what they’re hearing is actual bullshit, so they think that what they’re hearing is actually a proper response, and that that proper response therefore means that whoever is pushing this as some sort of a problem that needs investigative journalism is therefore a crank. And, um, I don’t know what we do about the fact that journalists don’t have the chops in general to figure out that what they’re getting on the other end of the phone suggests the need for more journalism, not less. Maybe it involves the vast overproduction of PhDs that we currently engage in. We produce lots of people who never get a job inside of academia. Maybe they need to become journalists so that they have the idea of what question to ask next when they’re confronted with that kind of nonsense. But at the very least, we can see not only is the scientific system broken, but the journalistic system that’s supposed to keep the scientific system honest is also broken.
00:27:36
David Fuller: One of the other stories that you’ve tweeted about quite regularly, and it’s sort of, uh, something that many memes basically kind of trying to prevent the story from dying is the Epstein case. Um, do you, do, do you get a sense of journalistic incompetence or journalistic, uh, malpractice in that story as well?
00:27:54
Eric Weinstein: Again, when you say journalistic, I mean the composite of the reporter together with the institution for whom they are reporting. It’s a little bit like a pigeon constantly flying into some sort of obstruction. It appears to be in flight, and then as the pigeon gets farther and farther across the room, suddenly it’s like it slams into some kind of a force field. Now, you and I know that that’s probably a description of a glass wall. All right, there is some glass wall that is preventing the Epstein story from being discussed properly. Everyone’s interested in it. The questions are basic, and there’s a guaranteed story to write. Simply ask the most basic questions of the officials involved and print whatever comes back. Whatever it is, there’s no possibility of an uninteresting answer to the central questions, and yet the central questions are not asked.
00:28:47
David Fuller: And what are those central questions?
00:28:49
Eric Weinstein: The first one is very simple. You have to ask every government that might be involved, was Jeffrey Epstein known to be attached to any intelligence agency anywhere in the world? Then you have to ask, were his pedophile activities known to the intelligence agencies, and was there any kind of tacit approval or understanding, or is there a categorical denial that such techniques may never be used? Now, we have not recorded the no comments or we don’t discuss sources and methods. That’s typical in these stories, where you should be able to say, “Can’t I at least get a statement that we would never condone pedophile activities to be used for intelligence gathering purposes?” All right, the next question. Jeffrey Epstein was supposed to be a hedge fund manager of some kind, and he had extensive offices at a place called Villard House, the former, uh, Helmsley Palace. This trophy building is a place that I myself dropped off materials for Jeffrey Epstein to review w- in connection to a hedge fund matter. What I wanna know is, where are the trading records from Villard House? It would be almost impossible to go back in time and fake trading records for a billion dollar plus hedge fund, and yet nobody seems to have ever recorded, uh, a trade with Jeffrey Epstein. We don’t know where he did prime brokerage. There are no financial records that explain his fortune.
00:30:13
David Fuller: Are those publicly available, or should those be publicly available?
00:30:16
Eric Weinstein: I don’t even care about that. Where are the records? If, if there are no records… I mean, presumably this person paid taxes. Presumably this person had to m- make SEC filings. I don’t know. But the key issue is I don’t think there was a hedge fund. When I met Jeffrey Epstein, uh, which might have been something like 2002, before he was, uh, charged with sex crime violations in Florida, um, I, I did not believe that Jeffrey Epstein was a hedge fund manager, and I in fact called my, uh, Wife at the time, and I said, “This man appears to be a construct.” And she said, “What do you mean by a construct?” I said, “It, it’s like they’ve hired an actor to play a hedge fund manager.” But this person didn’t behave like, uh, the super rich normally behave. He didn’t behave like a hedge fund manager behaved. He didn’t have any of the substance that you would normally associate with people of that class. I’m not saying he wasn’t smart, but he was glib, and he lived essentially like he was Gatsby. I only met him once. Uh, it was probably for about an hour or so. Um, but he was an absolutely terrifying person to encounter. It would be surprising to me if I was alone, in that I immediately had the suspicion that I was looking at somebody who had been constructed rather than something that had organically arisen within the financial community. Further questions that need to be asked: Where was Ghislaine Maxwell’s passport last sighted? Assume that she has one or more passports, and assume that governments record when passports go through a border point. Okay. We should at least be able to ascertain where was the last point where her passports, or at least one of her passports, were officially seen. I don’t know of anybody asking this question. Can we not call up Interpol? Is there no sense in which we can guess where she was last located? Where, what was the last social event at which she was recorded? We don’t seem to know anything about this person. Why are we not talking to Les Wexner? I don’t understand why these people are not being interviewed or, uh, deposed. We have a very strange situation and in all of these cases, a simple declaration of no comment would be a newsworthy story.
00:32:33
David Fuller: I mean, I’m hopeful. I mean, investigative journalism does take time. I’m hopeful there are-
00:32:37
Eric Weinstein: You’ve gotta be kidding. I r- I really… I’m gonna shut you down on this. It’s been over six months. This doesn’t take that long to get a no comment from the CIA, the NSA, State Department.
00:32:48
David Fuller: I’m not talking about the no comment. I’m not talking about the no comment. I’m… My point was going to be, I, given, given the amount of interest in the Epstein story, there must be some investigative journalist working on it. I completely agree with your points about the no comments. Like, that, that, that is not being-
00:33:05
Eric Weinstein: It’s not a question of… I’m sorry. It’s not a question of some investigative journalist. We, we tripped over some enormous structure.
00:33:11
David Fuller: Mm.
00:33:12
Eric Weinstein: We don’t know what the structure was.
00:33:14
David Fuller: Yeah.
00:33:15
Eric Weinstein: It doesn’t make any sense. The, the fortune that, uh, I think I’ve seen referenced is something like $600 million. Who with $600 million would d- make these purchases? You know, multiple jet aircrafts, uh, private islands, um, you know, a townhouse, uh, on 71st Street in Manhattan, a huge comp- complex, uh, in the New Mexico desert, uh, property in Paris. It would appear that most of this was intended for display. I mean, in other words, the behavior patterns of Jeffrey Epstein suggest an 11-figure fortune, uh, maybe high 11-figure fortune. This person appears to be, uh, somewhere in the nine figures. That’s two orders of magnitude off. Now, I know that very rich is very rich to many people, but, you know, as a person of much [chuckles] much smaller means, I can tell you that if you hang around with people who are in this stratosphere, they behave very differently depending upon which order of magnitude they’re at, and Jeffrey Epstein was at the wrong order of magnitude. He was behaving like an, a high 11-figure type guy maybe with what appears to be a nine-figure fortune.
00:34:30
David Fuller: Yeah. I mean, my, my, my point on this is that I don’t, I don’t know where the media interest is. Um, and it, it, and it doesn’t add up that there wouldn’t be media interest given the, the, the huge desire for the story that you can kind of see every time you log on.
00:34:46
Eric Weinstein: Anything, any scrap is interesting to everybody.
00:34:49
David Fuller: Yeah, especially given that we already know the links to someone like Prince Andrew, the British royal family. This is one of the biggest, potentially one of the biggest stories-
00:34:59
Eric Weinstein: Let’s talk about-
00:35:00
David Fuller: … has ever, has ever happened
00:35:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, let’s talk about the interview with Prince Andrew.
00:35:03
David Fuller: Mm.
00:35:05
Eric Weinstein: What was that? Now, I cannot believe my ears when very intelligent people watch that interview in its entirety and then say, “Well, he was unprepared,” or, uh, “It was a mistake to grant that interview.” I think that that’s not true. I think we have no idea what that repr- interview represented. I think that that interview was so bizarre and so clearly… It was almost like he was trolling the media who was asking him questions. Was he forced to give an interview, and he decided that he would rather go down with the ship and give the world’s worst interview?
00:35:42
David Fuller: Mm-hmm.
00:35:43
Eric Weinstein: Was he realizing that he was completely trapped and that, uh, his best strategy was to make fun of the entire process, um, by giving answers that were so implausible that no child would ever believe them? Whatever that interview was, it was one of the most remarkable pieces of footage anybody has ever seen on television, bar none. To not be talking about this and say, “We do not know what that interview represented.” What was a member of the British royal family, the Queen’s son, doing giving that interview? W- was it in Buckingham Palace?
00:36:21
David Fuller: Yes, I think it was.
00:36:22
Eric Weinstein: It was an insane event that happened where nobody came to a conclusion that makes that make any sense. I’d rather leave the problem open.
00:36:32
David Fuller: Mm.
00:36:33
Eric Weinstein: W- who was forced to do what by whom that that interview would ever be granted?
00:36:38
David Fuller: Yeah. I can remember when it was first announced, having a sort of double take of like, “This is not a good… This is not gonna go well.” And then the actual interview happened and it was like incredible pantomime.
00:36:46
Eric Weinstein: I think it went brilliantly
00:36:48
David Fuller: Maybe
00:36:49
Eric Weinstein: For us
00:36:50
David Fuller: For us
00:36:51
Eric Weinstein: Right? It was effectively an admission that something is so off in the world, something that’s so completely bizarre, that that thing would be produced. That was some sort of internal conflict. I don’t know whether it was between the Queen and her son, or the intelligence services, or I don’t know what. But it was, it was sort of the sense that you have, like, almost a hostage video where the person be- has to behave so bizarrely as to send a message, and the message I got is, “I’m going to lie. I’m going to fabricate. I’m going to say preposterous things in an effort to just put this to bed in the worst possible way.” Like, you want… You now all know never to ask me questions about this, because I’m simply gonna say the most outrageous and insane things that I can possibly think of.
00:37:40
David Fuller: I mean, as I said, I… It, it didn’t twig at the beginning. It l- it sounded like a terrible idea. But then I guess I rationalized it by thinking he’s clearly got no self-awareness. Maybe he did think that he could clear his name.
00:37:54
Eric Weinstein: Nobody’s that dumb, David. Those questions were entirely expected.
00:37:58
David Fuller: Mm.
00:37:59
Eric Weinstein: And the answers, if y- if you look at the amount of twinkle in the eye, I mean, he’s clearly not a happy man, but he’s saying absolutely ludicrous and preposterous things. I think that the effect is exactly the reverse. If I had to speculate, and I really don’t want to, I would say that this, this interview was given because an amount of pressure was put on a human being who decided that his life was effectively over in most senses, and this is w- the way he chose to go out, effectively making fun of the entire process.
00:38:33
David Fuller: Yeah, but what’s really interesting is… I’m, I’m sort of aware, for example, the Royal Television Society awards were two nights ago, journalism awards, and the Prince Andrew interview won Scoop of the Year and Interview of the Year. So it’s kind of been rationalized, and I’ve, and I’ve seen people talk about how they got the interview. They… The News Night producer was trying hard and was on Buckingham Palace, like, which is kind of ludicrous, the idea that it was just the, the, um, dedication of the journalist keep continuing to ask for an interview that made Prince Andrew say, “Okay, you’ve asked me so many times.” I mean, that in itself is kind of a ludicrous narrative, but it is a narrative that, that the mainstream… I’ve seen the mainstream media kind of, um, integrate that whole thing into, “Wow, this is an amazing scoop. You were dedicated, and you got the story,” which is, which is kind of ludicrous, the idea that, um… So you see what I’m, what I’m saying?
00:39:28
Eric Weinstein: I really don’t. I mean, I’m so, I’m so-
00:39:32
David Fuller: What I’m saying is that it’s already been rationalized within the mainstream media. The reason that that interview happened was because they were so dedicated, and they pursued Prince Andrew, and they asked Buckingham Palace, and eventually they, they conceded, and they gave the interview- Sure, sure … which is kind of ludicrous. I’m saying it’s ludicrous.
00:39:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, it is ludicrous. Yeah. But I guess, I mean, my expectation is is that even if, uh, the UK is no longer the world power it once was, I, I presume you still have adults with IQs over 70.
00:39:58
David Fuller: Mm.
00:39:59
Eric Weinstein: How could you possibly rationalize such a thing? I mean, we used to turn to you guys, uh, for intelligence and sophistication. This seems the height of folly.
00:40:07
David Fuller: Mm.
00:40:08
Eric Weinstein: If I had to say, this is much closer to a hostage video, where the hostage is attempting to send a message that is clearly not the ostensible message on video. The really difficult part of this story, David, is is that almost certainly we’re talking about some kind of operation that was being run with knowledge of governments that may have involved pedophilia and was not shut down. Mm. And what I can’t understand is, um, what is it that is keeping some reporter from simply asking the questions that are on everybody’s mind? Was this person connected to the intelligence services? Where was Ghislaine Maxwell’s passport last seen? Why are we not talking to Les Wexner? Where are the trading records? What is the source of the fortune? Seems to me very clear that we have a missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and an unexplained fortune of Jeffrey Epstein. Are those the same fortune? Who’s asking these questions? Did everybody go to sleep when they taught journalism in school? I just don’t understand.
00:41:13
David Fuller: I guess my sort of disconnect as well is this sense of, I worked in Channel 4 News. They had an investigative unit. These were the kind of bread and butter questions. They pushed really hard, for example, on the phone hacking scandal in the UK, the, the Murdoch Papers phone hacking scandal, that also involved networks of power. It involved, uh, shady deals. It involved corruption, and they, they pursued that quite intensely. I, I, I’m, I’m f- feeling a sense of dislocation, ’cause I agree with you. There are these questions that are not being asked, and I find it difficult to understand why that is, knowing that there are… knowing the, the public interest- The interest … and know- and knowing the, that, that these, uh, questions have been asked in the past.
00:41:54
Eric Weinstein: Let me tell you what happened. People started asking those questions, and they stopped, and that’s what idea suppression is all about. “We don’t have the resources to pursue that right now. Well, actually, I’m concerned that this is starting to reek of conspiracy theory. Uh, I think given the delicacies of the situation, I’m gonna need a lot more evidence before I give this thing the go-ahead.” These are the sorts of things that you say when you’re trying to shut down a line of inquiry, and my guess is is that whatever the story is, it represents some very powerful structure that we tripped over. And I tripped over that structure in 2002, and I was convinced at the time, before there was any knowledge about this Florida situation, um, that this was constructed. I mean, we have a very famous case of a guy named Eli Cohen, who was fitted with a backstory and became a playboy- Uh, in Damascus and held orgies, if I understand correctly, where he collected information and leverage against people in the Syrian government. If you take that situation, this looks remarkably similar. We’ve got a guy who was apparently a math teacher at a private high school, and the next thing we know, uh, he’s avoided jail in some sort of financial scandal, and he’s suddenly set up as a mystery financier, um, with connections to absolutely everyone in the top echelons of power. Something doesn’t smell right about this story given that nobody appears to have ever traded currencies with a guy who was apparently moving billions as a currency trader.
00:43:34
David Fuller: And was this kind of well known within the, within the financial industry at the time?
00:43:38
Eric Weinstein: There were two fortunes that were truly mysterious, Bernie Madoff and Jeff Epstein. In the case of Bernie Madoff, the belief was that he had a legitimate business and an illegitimate business, and he used the legitimate business as a source of profit by front-running it inside of his illegitimate business. That turned out not to be the case. Um, in fact, it was basically a Ponzi scheme, and that leaves Jeffrey Epstein. Now, I used to give talks in the world of finance about how to handle opaque hedge funds, like when they won’t give you information about what they’re doing, and I conflated Jeffrey Epstein and Bernie Madoff into one slide, and I called it, uh, as a joke, Black Arts Capital because you had Blackstone and BlackRock, and so I turned it into Black Arts, and their tagline was supposed to be, “We’d tell you what we were doing, but then we’d have to kill you.” So these were well-known anomalies in New York in financial circles because-
00:44:37
David Fuller: And when, when are we talking? What sort of era?
00:44:40
Eric Weinstein: You know, 2002 when I met Jeffrey Epstein, when he tried talking, uh, to me about currency trading.
00:44:46
David Fuller: So it w- it was well known w- w- with financial journalists, or just-
00:44:50
Eric Weinstein: It was well known that the fortune didn’t make sense. Something didn’t add up. Who is his prime broker? Who was he trading with? Under what name? Where did this money come from? Why did he seem to know everybody? I mean, it’s like somebody created a Gatsby-like character out of a Ralph Lauren lookalike who had apparently recently been a math teacher at a private high school. Nothing made… Nothing added up.
00:45:16
David Fuller: And is the sense now that, uh, even interest in this story kind of marks you out as a conspiracy theorist?
00:45:22
Eric Weinstein: You know, I don’t like the question.
00:45:24
David Fuller: But is, is, is that your sense?
00:45:26
Eric Weinstein: I don’t. Sorry. Yeah, okay. No, no, no. Yeah. I’m gonna attack the question. Would you mind? Sure. Okay. What do you mean a conspiracy theorist? So when I hear nightly on the news that maybe Russia is controlling the American elections and trying to prop D- Donald Trump up, are those conspiracy theories? Uh, when I hear that the coronavirus is, in fact, under control, and then the market falls apart, is that a conspiracy theory? I mean, where are we, um, in history that conspiracy theorizing is a privilege of the people inside the institutional class? No. That’s incompetent. We have discovered conspiracies previously in the United States. COINTELPRO is probably the most disturbing conspiracy that we’ve found within the last 50 years. In fact, conspiracies happen, and you need to be able to go after them. So I think we should make a new rule. The next person who tries to use the epithet conspiracy theorist, we figure out what conspiracy theory they’ve been pushing because, frankly, everybody inside of the gated institutional narrative is hawking one conspiracy theory or the other. It’s time for this technique of trying to intimidate people by using that epithet to die. And if you wanna come after me, be my guest. Do it in print, and let’s have some fun. We have to understand that in episode 18, which we were previously discussing, I introduced the disk. The reason for doing it right before episode 19, where I talk about the telomere situation, the Jackson Laboratory and the Greider Laboratory, was is that I didn’t want to explain what the disk was only. I wanted to show people what the disk is. In a normal world, given the amount of interest in that story, if what I’m saying is untrue or whether it, in fact, is true, whether what Fred is saying is true or untrue, every possible outcome is interesting. Every possible outcome could sell papers. Ergo, if the thing is not being followed up, and in fact, you can demonstrate the amount of interest by looking at the amount of interest on the web, you can figure out very clearly that there is a disk because nobody would c- forgo those… that large a number of eyeballs and that many clicks if they actually had a proven story. So in part, the way you understand the disk is to ask, “What doesn’t happen?” Mm. So for the moment, just imagine that you have two layers. You have a physical and legacy media layer, and you have a digital layer. What is remarkable is the extent to which the physical and legacy layer, comprised of things that exist in the world, institutions, legacy media, ignores this other layer, except occasionally you get sparks between the two layers, and when those sparks happen, you get magic. Now, what I find fascinating is the way in which the legacy media layer is pretending that very smart [chuckles] people with the same credentials that are found in the lower layer, uh, are saying interesting things, and there is almost like an agreement to treat them as vampires. That is, when they pass by the looking glass, uh, of legacy media, there should be no reflection that something interesting is being said that is gaining adherence, and I think that’s what’s fascinating to me. If, if you think about what the portal has done, it’s had people like Sir Roger Penrose, the great physicist, on. Uh, it’s had, uh, Tyler Cowen, who writes perhaps the most-read economics blog on. Peter Thiel, uh, one of the most listened-to voices in Silicon Valley. All of these people are saying interesting things, and yet there’s effectively no reflection of what’s going on outside of this legacy media, uh, arena. So what you have is you have an insular system that is the gated institutional narrative, and you have an insulating layer, which is the disk, that prevents anybody who’s not part of the institutional agreements from saying something super interesting and having it reflected inside of the institutional conversation. And I think that that’s what the point of the portal is. How do we find a way to arc between the digital and the legacy layer? Because actually the legacy layer isn’t important to me in terms of reaching people. The reach of a Joe Rogan or a Sam Harris or me or Bret or any of these people is more than sufficient to get the news out there. Mm-hmm. The real importance of the legacy layer is that there is an agreement that we are not going to take seriously that which is solely digital. And so if we can just stick our fingers in our ears long enough or pretend that everybody outside of the Citadel is Alex Jones and a mad- and mad as a hatter with a tinfoil hat, then we can pot- potentially pretend that just like in professional wrestling, um, everything is real and nothing is fake. And that’s the, that’s the new fate of the gated institutional narrative. People are increasingly taking a look at it and saying, “There is no telling of the tale that results in what you are currently calling journalism. We are all seeing this extra layer, and you guys are pretending that it doesn’t even exist.”
00:50:37
David Fuller: Do you think that insulating layer has got, uh, more intense since… ‘Cause in 2016 you did have, like, Trump effectively kind of coming out of a, the online, um, insurgency and changing and winning the election. Do you think that, that… There is more insulation between the digital layer and the-
00:50:57
Eric Weinstein: Oh my gosh. I mean, just look at all of the changes in the terms of service.
00:51:00
David Fuller: Yeah.
00:51:01
Eric Weinstein: So for example, look at the terms of service of Facebook, of Twitter, of Google between then and now. Mm-hmm. And look at all of the terms we’ve learned, right? I mean, I think Google, uh, had a leaked report called The Good Censor. Um, I believe that Twitter uses down ranked to mean shadow banning. I believe that Facebook uses de-boosting. Um, the entire conversation… We, we now have a, a, a doctrine of strategic silence coming out of the Data and Society group- Mm-hmm … about why reporters should not talk about things. I mean, the institutions had a wake-up call, which is Donald Trump proved the power of the digital layer. Mm-hmm. The people are angry. They’re sick of this stuff. Nobody believes in the institutions. I don’t think the people who man the institutions believe in the institutions. They’re all sick with the same problem. And in that en- kind of an environment, they’ve all gone to desperate measures to defend themselves by making sure that they have the means of keeping anything unwanted out of that layer. So before it was an allegation, “I’m being shadow banned,” and they would say, “Well, we don’t, we don’t do that.” Now that’s part of the terms of service. Now, I don’t think that there’s anything controlling all of the different ways that ideas are suppressed. But the central thesis that I have is that since the early 1970s, period between 1971 and 1973, let’s say, something changed in the nature of the world economy. And whatever this change is, we didn’t study it enough. We didn’t talk about it enough. People will say, “Oh, I know exactly what that is. It’s the Arab oil shock,” or, “It’s, um, the change in the relationship to the gold standard.” But in fact, something changed character, and it meant that all of our institutions that were built on an expectation of growth could suddenly no longer meet their expect- their ex- the ex- expectations that were put upon them. As a result, my belief is, is that we had a universal environmental effect, which is that all of the institutions came to be headed by people who were comfortable in one form or another with distorting the truth. And as the situation went on longer, the heads of the institutions became more aggressive in the way that they would distort the truth to hide the fact that the pyramid scheme that we discussed in your last, uh, film, um, was governing everything, that you couldn’t get enough entrance into the system in order to feed the system by telling them the truth. All right. So in this situation, what happens? We have a very thorny problem. If people start discussing the idea that things are, are patterned or built as pyramid schemes, then every single institution becomes endangered. And if one institution is more honest and another one less honest, then the w- more honest one will tend to suffer. As a result, we became more and more aggressive towards individuals on, on behalf of our institutions. Dissenters, people who would actually raise the question of, are our universities actually giving a good education and delivering value for the money that they cost, or is it likely that this law firm has a durable business model, or is this medical practice too governed by incentives coming from the pharmaceutical in- industry in order to keep afloat? All of these sorts of questions became very important to suppress. And as a result, I would say lots of different pieces started to emerge that would suppress questioning and suppress disruptive ideas. So in my, in my understanding of this, all of these different, um, complexes sort of began to interweave into a master complex. It was an emergent phenomenon, but because the ideology was universal, that is every institution was protecting itself from the fact that it could no longer meet its growth expectations, uh, unless cheating of some kind occurred, the threat that they all faced was a common threat. That is that somebody would point out that the medicine wasn’t as good as it was claimed, the, the education was overpriced and didn’t deliver enough value, that our representatives were on the take. Whatever the individual issues were, it needed to come to pass that the institutions would be defended generically against people asking difficult questions. So if you think about the period, I don’t know, still in the 1970s before this had really kind of solidified and hardened, you had institutions going after other institutions. For example, 60 Minutes and CBS News would take on a corporation that was misbehaving. And so, you know, the, the old joke is what are the most frightening words in the English language? Mike Wallace is here to see you. And the entire thrust of that was is that you would have institutional warfare. For example, the Washington Post would take on the presidency during the Watergate era. And somehow we now have a gentleman’s agreement. When we had the 2008 financial crisis, I think effectively no personnel at the investment banks went to jail. When we had a savings and loan crisis, we did have people going to jail. So as time has gone on, somehow it has emerged that there’s kind of a sensibility as the different pieces of idea suppression form a giant complex, and the general feature is always the same, which is that the dissenting individual has to be suppressed or held back by the institution because it’s not right to question an institution that can’t actually defend itself on its merits. And I think that, you know, you start to look for this everywhere and you’ll find it. For example, um, on social media you’ll see people talking about de-boosting or down-ranking. Uh, in the Me Too scandal we learn a new phrase that we never heard: catch, catch and kill. Um, whatever these things are, when you start to hear, “Well, so-and-so is disgruntled,” but why are they disgruntled? Is… Why does that discount their perspective? Maybe we should listen to disgruntled people. Um, what we have is we have an enormous complex that has arisen from different pieces that are all somehow interoperable because they’re all solving the same problem. How do we make sure that institutions that can no longer defend themselves in honest terms are protected from the individuals that would raise the questions?
00:58:01
David Fuller: And you’ve talked about before the gated institutional narrative. How is the, the DISC different from the, the gated institutional narrative or the GIN that you talked about before?
00:58:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, in the case of the, the GIN, it is a conversation. So it’s the conversation, for example, that The New York Times is having with the Democratic Party with commentary from The Atlantic and analysis provided by The Economist. So in that sort of institutional conversation, uh, all of the major players are talking. The DISC is about the layer that separates that conversation from the conversation taking place outside of this sort of rarefied exchange of ideas. So what if the person who is most knowledgeable about something isn’t attached to any institution at all? That person has no allegiances. The individual remains sovereign. As a result, it’s very important to make sure that we don’t have individuals without institutional supervision or attachment running around and stimulating thought and questions about various topics. So I would say that the GIN is the thing that is being protected by the DISC.
00:59:17
David Fuller: Eric, thank you very much.
00:59:19
Eric Weinstein: David, pleasure as always.
00:59:20
David Fuller: Well done for making it to the end. Just wanted to let you know a few things we’ve got coming up, including the biggest event we’ve ever done, the Rebel Wisdom Festival, which will be a mix of ideas and dialogues between people like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Rupert Sheldrake, John Vervaeke, and many more. And because wisdom isn’t just intellectual, it’s also about practice, we’ll be offering experiences like circling, different interpersonal dialogue, mindfulness, breathwork, and many other with world-class facilitators. We’re also running our first online course called Sense Making 101. And if you’re enjoying the content, you can help us make more by joining the Rebel Wisdom Club, which will give you discounts on the courses and the events, and also access to a load more content on the website, including all of our live events. It’ll also give you access to our growing community, which is something we wanna make a real focus for 2020, adding more meetups and other services for members. So hope you enjoyed the film, and see you soon.
