Dr. Eric Weinstein, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, sits down to discuss the fall of his once cherished Democrat Party. With days to go until the election he shares his frustration at what the party has become. He shares his deep contempt for the mainstream media and how they attacked him for his association with JD Vance, Trump’s VP pick. Dr Weinstein shares his anger at the farcical nature of the election.
He tells me about his deep love for England, his admiration for British physicists, and his love of music, even pulling out his grandfather’s mandolin.
All this and much more…
Transcript
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: I just think that these questions are radioactive. They’re too dangerous to talk about. I want to make this very clear. We’ve lost control of our journalists, and we’ve lost control of our major news media. The Democratic Party is driving away men in droves.
00:00:13
Winston Marshall: You clearly are rightly upset, and I think-
00:00:15
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no. That’s to psychologize this. The Democratic Party has seemingly lost its mind, and I don’t know how to say this because it’s my party.
00:00:24
Winston Marshall: What does the future look like for that party?
00:00:26
Eric Weinstein: Both of these parties are functioning in separate universes. These are two different planets. We have a very brittle system, and we cannot afford for populists, scientists, journalists to go poking around and asking questions.
00:00:43
Winston Marshall: You sound like a populist intellectual. You are, this is-
00:00:46
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m, I’m an intellectual.
00:00:49
Winston Marshall: And you’re a populist.
00:00:50
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:00:50
Winston Marshall: This is def– this is by definition-
00:00:51
Eric Weinstein: No
00:00:51
Winston Marshall: … a populist. You have a problem with elite failure across the board. Jour-
00:00:54
Eric Weinstein: Do me a favor, Winston. Think about it. You should be able to know that something is wrong by how little we’re discussing AI in this election cycle. AI is a tsunami that is about to crash over our world.
00:01:11
Winston Marshall: Before you hear from Dr. Weinstein, I ask if you want to support the show, all you have to do is press subscribe. If you press subscribe, I can have more phenomenal guests like Eric exploring the issues that you want to hear about and the mainstream media won’t cover. But without further ado, here he is, Eric Weinstein. So Eric, thank you, of course, for s- sitting with me to talk on the show. And it’s great-
00:01:37
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for coming to LA.
00:01:38
Winston Marshall: It’s great to be here. I know how time– uh, how precious your time is, so it means a lot to me that you would take the time to speak with me. I wanted to ask, I’m gonna try and find a question ’cause you said before we started rolling, you get asked all the same questions, and you don’t want to be asked all the same questions. I hope that you haven’t been asked this question before. What I wanted to discuss with you first is cuck culture, and I’m gonna try and make the case why I think it’s important. I don’t know if you saw Trump’s speech at the Al Smith dinner. He made a joke. Have you seen the White Guys for Harris movement?
00:02:12
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:02:13
Winston Marshall: I’m not worried about them because their wives and their wives’ lovers are all voting for me. But not only that, we have Elon Musk regularly on Twitter making fun of the cuck chair in hotel rooms. At the same time, the Democrat Party, uh, the whole campaign seems to be littered with anti-testosterone, anti-male sentiment. Dana Bash at the DNC was saying, “We’ve got to appeal to lower T men.” Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz appear to me to be men who are, I would say, beta male. And the failure, and we see this in the voting, is that they’re struggling to get the male vote, and at the same time, the Republican Party, uh, are more masculine and perhaps not doing so well with white women or women and white women specifically. I wanted to know what you think if this represents anything in America. What– why is cuck culture suddenly come out of nowhere to be something that our former pr- or your former president is literally joking about at dinner parties?
00:03:24
Eric Weinstein: Uh, it’s a perfectly unique, wonderful, awful, terrible question to begin with, so thank you for that.
00:03:30
Winston Marshall: Great. [laughs]
00:03:31
Eric Weinstein: Um, where to even begin? Uh, first of all, the, the issue, I think, of co-constructed masculinity and femininity is very much, uh, on the table. And trying to define the masculine in the absence of the feminine doesn’t work, and in general, nobody wants these things clearly defined. So were we to say what is masculine and what is feminine, no doubt the, the comment section of your video would be littered, uh, with people taking shots at both of us. How dare they think this? They, they fancy themselves that. So it’s an area that’s too hot to touch. And in a certain sense, what this gets at is, uh, two different co-constructions of male and f- uh, masculine and feminine. Uh, in one case, I would say based around the Republican Party, you have an idea of a traditional division of labor where men and women accentuate their differences, and the idea of almost the fa- family as pin factory, the male as protector, breadwinner, the woman, uh, as nurturer. Um, they can both be quite tough. You know, a- anybody who’s spent time on a farm knows that the women on a farm can handle a shotgun, uh, quite well and, uh, know how to do things that no man in a city, uh, would find easy. So if, you know, if you have the idea that if there’s an intruder in the house, the man goes towards the danger with his gun, and the woman goes towards the nursery with hers, and everybody’s spending time protecting the castle.
00:05:09
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
00:05:10
Eric Weinstein: So I think it’s not a question of weak women and strong men. It’s a question of strong men, strong women, but clearly delineated roles that are sort of inherited from our biology and from antiquity. And I think that the Democratic Party is much more about the idea that there was an in- intrinsic unfairness built into the world. And to quote the great James Brown, “It’s a man’s world.” Uh, so this has to do with the fact that women’s work in the, in the home was traditionally denigrated. Men who wished to, uh, work at home, um, raising the family if, if the woman in the, in the relationship was a more successful breadwinner, let’s say, um, that that was seen as a, a terrible state of affairs and, and embarrassing to the Republican side of the world. But this was seen as progressive and, in fact, uh, an advanced idea that men and women are free to redefine their roles at will. And then we have the question about redefining gender and sex, uh, itself. So where does this all lead? It, it really leads to two different concepts, um, of how we should balance things. And if you think about your country as, uh, driving on one side of the road and my si- my country as driving on the other side, you could attempt potentially to base society around either one of these two models. But it’s very difficult to combine the two. And so what you see is that the conservatives are basically saying, uh, to the Democratic men, um, “You’re weak, and the reason that you’ve accepted this bargain is, is that you’re not strong enough and you’re not male enough to negotiate a better one for you.” And it’s, it’s ugly, for sure. But on the other hand, it rings true when you see, for example, Tim Walz not being able to find his way easily around a, a shotgun or-
00:07:04
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm
00:07:04
Eric Weinstein: … or a rifle or… Um, and it’s one thing to say, “I don’t, I don’t hunt.” It’s another thing to claim to hunt and to claim to own firearms, and then not really be able to load them, clean them, uh, behave safely with them. Um, that just looks ridiculous. And so in certain sense, it’s like making your bid in bridge, uh, if you’re going to claim that you’re just as masculine as the other party, and then you fail your own test, that’s really a terrible turn of events. And I-
00:07:33
Winston Marshall: Did you see the video? A- there’s been two ads, one I think by the Lincoln set and one by, I believe it was actually the Democrats. But the motto, it’s you have a series of men saying, “I’m not scared of women,” which to me screams that they’re scared of women. It’s totally bizarre appeal to masculinity, like the Democrat conception of what masculinity is, if they think it’s appropriate. Did you see those ads?
00:07:57
Eric Weinstein: So it was, I believe it was not an official ad of the campaign, but it was a sort of, um, a writer for one of the late night talk shows perhaps showing men, uh, you know, on a, sitting on the back of a pickup truck-
00:08:11
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm
00:08:12
Eric Weinstein: … uh, or I don’t know, baling hay or doing supposedly masculine things, saying, “I’m so masculine, I don’t need to worry about you or pigeonholing me.” And of course it backfired because it looked ridiculous.
00:08:24
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
00:08:25
Eric Weinstein: You know, in fact, and I hesitate to, to enter this into the discussion, the, the concept of cucking comes from cuckold. And in fact, the, um… There’s a more dangerous term that is not in broad usage from older English, which is wittol. And a wittol is the willing cuckold who in fact has a fetish and gets off on the idea, uh, of the introduction of, of the lover.
00:08:55
Winston Marshall: Yeah, I actually think that’s what people mean when they say cuck now.
00:08:57
Eric Weinstein: I know.
00:08:58
Winston Marshall: It’s, they say w- they mean wittol.
00:08:59
Eric Weinstein: They mean wittol.
00:09:00
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
00:09:01
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, this is, this is just terrible politics. This is really a dangerous moment because, um, this just invites in all of the worst aspects of th- these two conceptualizations of, uh, where we should be going. I, I, i- in part, both men and women have been moving towards each other. A, a woman can now egg broadcast, where before men could s- only, m- men were the o- were the only ones who could sperm broadcast, right? So a, a woman who contributes eggs through, uh, egg donation could be the mother to many more children than any woman in history, right? Because if you have to go, uh, pregnancy by pregnancy, it certainly slows you down. Genghis Khan could not be matched by any woman. So in part, what you’re seeing is you’re seeing men and w- women moving towards each other in earning potential. They’re moving towards each other in style of dress. Uh, in general, everyone wears pants. Um, very few people wear heels. And I do-
00:10:12
Winston Marshall: And some more men are wearing dresses.
00:10:16
Eric Weinstein: That’s still an oddity. If y- I, I, I can go an entire week in Los Angeles and not see a man i- in a dress on the street. So we can talk about the fact that, that these things are claimed.
00:10:25
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:10:26
Eric Weinstein: But m- much more what’s happening is is that the genders are con- verging into an amorphous blob, and there’s two sort of sets of feelings around it. There’s the more conservative feeling, which is we need to accentuate that which is male and that which is female, versus the, “Hey, everybody do your own thing. It, it just doesn’t matter.”
00:10:47
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:10:47
Eric Weinstein: And the concern of course is that really all this is about children. It’s about the ability to raise families, the ability to, um, figure out how to get everyone into some sort of an arrangement. For example, if I encounter you on the road and you’re driving English and I’m driving American, we have a, we have a really serious diversity problem because those things are incompatible.
00:11:12
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
00:11:12
Eric Weinstein: And I don’t… I’ll tell you what I find the most interesting thing in this discussion that you’re bringing up is I don’t think Democratic women understand the pressure that men are under when a man wants to pick up a check, a, a man wants to pull out a chair, uh, a man wants to do all sorts of traditionally male things, and then only to find himself ridiculed as if he’s a throwback to a previous era. Um, the Democratic Party is driving away men in droves who do not relate to the Democratic’s Party’s concept of male. It’s just, it’s tone deaf.
00:11:59
Winston Marshall: Well, I can give you statistics on it.
00:12:00
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:12:00
Winston Marshall: This is from a Balaji article that he wrote. It’s not just that men and women, women are being split, but it’s-
00:12:07
Eric Weinstein: Married and unmarried?
00:12:08
Winston Marshall: It’s married and unmarried.
00:12:09
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:12:09
Winston Marshall: And so unmarried women are the only demographic where more than 50% are … voting Democrat-
00:12:17
Eric Weinstein: But like wildly, like 63% or something.
00:12:19
Winston Marshall: Yeah, 68%.
00:12:20
Eric Weinstein: 68.
00:12:20
Winston Marshall: And that’s according to the Wa- he cites the Washington Examiner on that. There, there’s an recent article I’d like, love to read if you don’t mind-
00:12:28
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:12:28
Winston Marshall: … from UnHerd, which is… Well, there’s two actually, and the, but the first one’s a little provocative. The point I wanna make, though, is that what you’ve already described is that there’s the, they’re playing politics, and they’re using the male/female languages against each other-
00:12:43
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:12:43
Winston Marshall: … like I’ve cited Trump already has done so. But there’s a, there is, at the base level, a split, a divergence in politics between men and women, and we can s- we’ve seen this in my country with Farage’s Reform UK appealing to, to younger men. The Alternative for Deutschland in Germany, they also have young men who are increasingly voting right-wing. Meanwhile, women and young women are increasingly progressive. So there is a split in the politics of-
00:13:08
Eric Weinstein: Which is a disaster
00:13:09
Winston Marshall: … d- d- a disaster. And the, well, uh, uh, one obvious way this is a disaster, and this is from an UnHerd, recent UnHerd article, only 4% of marriages in America today are between Democrats and Republicans, um, with the increase in gender divide for the parties. In the ’50s, 10% of Americans expressed a partisan preference for their daughter’s spouse. That figure has since climbed to 60%. Parents need to not be concerned. Only 4% of marriages are now between Republican and Democrat. So if men and women are increasingly diverging on politics-
00:13:42
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:13:43
Winston Marshall: … and only 4% are having bipartisan marriages, that means fewer and fewer marriages, which we know is also true. More provocative still is this UnHerd piece by-
00:13:53
Eric Weinstein: By the way, I, I just wanna make clear what you just said-
00:13:55
Winston Marshall: Yeah
00:13:55
Eric Weinstein: … because I think if… I wanna make sure I understand it, first of all.
00:13:58
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
00:13:58
Eric Weinstein: I think what you’re saying is, let’s take as a given that the parties are successfully figuring out how to divide men from women in the unmarried pool. Given that, and given the fact that marriage between these perspectives is seemingly not very attractive and not working, just at a statistical level, what we’re doing is making sure that families will have a very difficult time forming by getting to these two groups early and making it difficult for them to, uh, harmonize with each other later in life.
00:14:29
Winston Marshall: Hmm. So here’s a, here’s a, from a piece by David Samuels from August in UnHerd again. “Harris, Kamala Harris is a flesh and blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic, never married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45. Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who are embrace, who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protection of fathers, brothers, boyfriends, and husbands. In so doing, they have become the Democrat Party’s most enthusiastic, enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these, quote-unquote, ‘brides of the state’ support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72 to 24%, providing the party with its entire advantage of both national and most state elections.” So this is a really profound, it’s not just happening on the-
00:15:27
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely
00:15:27
Winston Marshall: … on the-
00:15:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:15:28
Winston Marshall: … and, and it, and it, it’s, it seems like it bodes very badly for the future.
00:15:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, but then again, does the future even matter? So f- um, if there was a rallying cry to the wom- to the women who will never have children, I would say it’s no F’s left to give. You hear this over and over again. “I’m running out of F’s to give. I’m, I’m all out of F’s.” And you think, “Well, what is that about?” Everyone I know who has children has plenty of F’s to give. We’re never out of F’s to give.
00:16:00
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
00:16:01
Eric Weinstein: I will, uh, I have two kids. I will never stop caring about the world, you know?
00:16:05
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:16:06
Eric Weinstein: And this idea also begs the question… Well, how do I even put this? What are your interests later in life as you come to see yourself as female, very often having maternal instincts, but nothing to alight upon? Uh, I think what happens is you start taking on causes, and I, I bring up this example of Mother Jones, where before there was a magazine, there was a actual labor leader named Mother Jones who we seemingly have forgotten. And I believe her backstory was something like she lost her actual sons and basically adopted the coal miners and steel workers.
00:16:47
Winston Marshall: Oh. What period is this?
00:16:48
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I don’t know. Uh, late 1800s, early, early 20th century, something like that.
00:16:53
Winston Marshall: Uh-huh.
00:16:54
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, we, we haven’t, like, there, there is no knowledge of the coal wars and the fact that we had, you know, essentially slavery in Appalachia into the 20th century with, um, companies owning entire towns, having their own armies that, they were called detective agencies, issuing their own money, which was called script. Um, so we have a really violent history of labor, and it was led in part by a woman who, after losing her own children, adopted these, uh, extremely masculine, uh, workers. And, you know, the Battle of Blair Mountain, I believe a, a million rounds were fired before the government stepped in. So, you know, we, we had, we have a history that is somehow not known. It’s known to people like JD Vance, but it’s not known more broadly. And oddly, um, JD Vance sort of has picked up the progressive, uh, streak of labor that was present in Appalachia as the Democratic Party abandoned coal miners.
00:17:55
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:17:55
Eric Weinstein: Um, and started spitting on them as deplorables and Bible-thumpers and backwards people. So this concept of, um, what is it that has been discovered in this demographic Elections tend to be won by demographers. That’s why, if you recall in years past, we had the concept of the soccer mom. Soccer mom was the discovery of a demographic that had been neglected and had particular sets of interests.
00:18:21
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
00:18:21
Eric Weinstein: So if you can find in the data some group of people that is large pivotal in, in terms of tipping an election but has unmet needs and doesn’t hear itself reflected, uh, that’s a way to win an election. So after the soccer mom, I think the exurbs was the next great demographic discovery, that there were urban people, there were suburban people, and there were rural people. But nobody knew that there was somehow a group of people who were more distant from cities than suburban but not yet rural. And this was called the exurb. And so there was an attempt to say, “Okay, well, what does the exurb want, and how do we get there before the other party so that we can win an election?” I believe, in part, this, the concept of women who will never bear their own children is the, the, the great demographic discovery of this cycle.
00:19:13
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
00:19:14
Eric Weinstein: And-
00:19:14
Winston Marshall: Well, and that’s the, what is derogatory, well, termed in a derogatory sense as the crazy cat lady.
00:19:21
Eric Weinstein: Interesting, because I believe that peak millennial births were in the early 1990s, and so that the, the really important cohort here may not be, um, women who are in perimenopause or post-menopause, or they may be, in fact, women who are starting to realize that their marriage prospects in their mid-30s are dim and are just hearing terms like geriatric pregnancy, which kicks in around 35, for the first time, and this mania about freezing eggs and embryos. And the question of, um, you know, for this demographic, one of the biggest questions is, will I ever find a stable relationship and a family, or will I be forever on my own with a series of partners? In which case, it’s important that the state recognizes my need to compete in the workforce, and I wish to neutralize male advantages like, yeah, you know, work-life balance can be seen through this lens.
00:20:19
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
00:20:19
Eric Weinstein: That if women find that men want to come and live in their office and stay up, you know, through all hours and come in on weekends, uh, they may view that as an unhealthy behavior because it results in an unfair advantage as perceived by those women at work. And so to a certain extent, there’s this question about the life cycle. Am I going to have to fend for myself throughout my life? In which case, the state might need to make sure that I’m protected. Or am I going to be able to drop into a situation in which, um, there are two breadwinners and there’s shared interest, and I can afford to change my politics.
00:20:57
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:20:57
Eric Weinstein: And so I just think that these questions are radioactive. They’re too dangerous to talk about. Every time you attempt to talk about it, uh, you, you just find that there’s a group of people who’s trying to make sure that it can’t be discussed.
00:21:10
Winston Marshall: And you had such a scenario, I believe, with JD Vance. Am I right? You, you, I don’t know this story, as I’d love to know what happened, but it was a couple of months ago where they dug up some old conversation that you’d had with JD Vance about the grandmother hypothesis. Does this tie in with, with what’s going on? Do you think this, this deliberate attack on you, strawmanning or, or rather what is– isn’t it, the, the grandmother hy- hypothesis about why menopausal women are unique to humans and a couple of other species, this is kind of common, and yet this has been tied in, brought into the political war, the polit- the campaign war. Is it, uh… What do, what do I, uh, need to understand about this? What do you think is the relevance of it?
00:21:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, you’re talking about the weaponization. So, so we have to talk about something which is very difficult to discuss, which is, uh, I’ve called journo-paigning, where you’re campaigning-
00:22:04
Winston Marshall: Painting. Painting
00:22:05
Eric Weinstein: … painting. It’s a portmanteau of, of journalism and campaigning, where you’re actually functioning as a political operative under the guise of journalistic immunity. “I, I’m merely reporting the news,” but in fact, what you’re doing is you’re advancing one side. Now, we, we, we know the situation in, in this case because, um, all of these news organs have historically, once every several years, revisited something called the grandmother hypothesis. And the grandmother hypothesis has to do with a guy named George C. Williams, who’s eminent evolutionary theorist puzzling over this question of why so few mammalian species have long life after reproductive viability for females. So I think it’s orcas, humans, it may be like right whales. Some people have claimed chimpanzees, but it’s very, very rail, rare to have menopause in any species. And so that’s been a big evolutionary puzzle. Now, in evolutionary theory, you take shorthand, um, shortcuts, if you will, uh, in talking about this, and you say, “What is the purpose of a post-evolutionary female?” That’s not s- human specific. It says that basically, uh, you know, uh, the theory of evolution is predicated on three separate issues: uh, heritability, variation, and differential success. Now, it’s very clear that when the Democratic Party says that it is the pro-science party, th- nothing like this is true. In fact, the Democratic Party will fight tooth and nail to unhook all our understanding of evolutionary theory. And why is this? Well, in part, if you think about it, uh, heritability is privilege.
00:23:52
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:23:53
Eric Weinstein: Variation is diversity, and differential success is inequality, right?
00:23:59
Winston Marshall: Wow.
00:23:59
Eric Weinstein: And so the three elements that are necessary for the theory of natural and sexual selection to be operative are tied in with the Democratic Party’s understanding of the social context of the human species. Now, humans are extremely bizarre. Um, we There are about 5,000 mammalian species. I think we are the only ones with persistent mammary glands. Uh, in some sense, males and females are reversed. If you think about, you know, in nature, very often the brightly adorned, if you think about peacocks and peahens i- in avians, uh, peacocks, uh, the brigh- are, are male. Peahens are bland and female. And yet, if you had to assign who is more brightly adorned, eh, between males and females, uh, human females are much more eye-catching than human males.
00:24:48
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:24:48
Eric Weinstein: And why is this? Because they’re, we are a very unusual species. We’re one of the only ones with concealed ovulation, where it’s not clear, uh, when a female is ovulating. Um, so with that as context, in the late ’50s, George C. Williams came up with a discussion of what’s called antagonistic pleiotropy of, uh, trying to figure out why we senesce, why we, wh- why we age. And, um, this theory emerged, I think actually later, called the Grandmother Hypothesis out of the University of Utah perhaps, which said that kin work was actually the key to understanding the phenomena. So if you look at orcas, for example, which I tend to think of much more than humans because they’re a cleaner example, uh, old female orcas past their r- reproductive prime, if they have, um, offspring, tend to get outcompeted by the offspring of their own daughters. And so at some point, it switches to being more advantageous for what is called K-selected species, uh, where there’s a tremendous amount of parental care and teaching for the older females to stop producing offspring of their own and to contribute their wisdom, protection, and care to their own grandchildren. So I made a point like this in an interview with JD Vance when we were both celebrating the fact that we are married to Indian women, and that one of the unadvertised benefits that I was not aware of when I got married is that it is common for Indian, uh, women’s mothers to drop whatever they’re doing and spend half a year to a year caring for their daughters’, uh, children.
00:26:36
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:26:37
Eric Weinstein: And in JD’s cam- case, I believe that he’s married to an Indian woman w- whose mother is a very, uh, well-known biologist, professor at one of the UC campuses, who dropped everything and culturally just started caring for their kid. And, you know, in my case, we, we got kicked out of our bed. We happily slept on the sofa couch for months, and we were taught how to care for a child by my mother-in-law, uh, Esther Milani.
00:27:07
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:27:08
Eric Weinstein: As, you know, a- an expert thing. So we were both remarking on this. Now, what, what, what’s fascinating is that all of these news outlets found this thing at once and said, “Far right-wing host,” which is me, who’s never voted Republican-
00:27:24
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
00:27:26
Eric Weinstein: …um, makes claim that the only purpose of, uh, and, and I, I think I said, uh, post-menopausal females, where they said, “Why can’t you say women?” But I was not thinking about women. I was thinking about orcas, to be entirely honest, because that’s what’s normal, uh, in evolutionary theory. And I said, essentially, the only function known is to take care of offspring, which might be called kin work or inclusive fitness or something like that.
00:27:56
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:27:58
Eric Weinstein: My God, all of these papers found this to be absolutely outrageous. But the funny thing is, is that they’d already published their own articles on the Grandmother Hypothesis, and their quotes were far more salacious than anything I said.
00:28:12
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:28:12
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, you have the same news organ taking as a privilege the ability to pr- be provocative about what is the purpose of post-menopausal females. And then when it becomes politically advantageous, what they’re really doing is they’re doing campaigning under the guise of reporting on how outrageous JD Vance is and how extreme he is.
00:28:34
Winston Marshall: And this would be pre- predominantly, if not all, progressive mainstream media outlets.
00:28:39
Eric Weinstein: No, not even progressive.
00:28:39
Winston Marshall: Were conservative, were conservative media outlets, but painting you the same way?
00:28:42
Eric Weinstein: Uh, well, the Washington Post, I wouldn’t call it progressive. I would say that this is the absolute core. Can you find, um, The Washington Post’s, I don’t know, it’s 2016, 2017 article on the Grandmother Hypothesis?
00:28:57
Winston Marshall: How human society was built by grandmas. This is September 10th, 2015. Grandmothers, they feed you, they spoil you, they constantly needle you about your relationship status. And according to anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, they might be the driving force behind the evolution of much of human society.
00:29:13
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I wish I could find the actual quote because it says, “What is the purpose of post-menopausal females?” Roughly speaking, and I wanna make this very clear, uh, we’ve lost control of our journalists, and we’ve lost control of our major news media. This is absolutely abominable. You target me as a, uh, private American citizen running a podcast as if I’m a far right extremist. I am– I have a Harvard PhD in a STEM field. I’m exactly within the mainstream of evolutionary thought.
00:29:42
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
00:29:43
Eric Weinstein: You publish articles on the same thing, and you attempt to destroy me in order to get to JD Vance, and you claim to be the science party. No, you are the anti-science party, and I wanna be very clear about this. You’ve crossed the line.
00:29:55
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:29:56
Eric Weinstein: You are anti-intellectual. You are anti-science. You have not read the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics. You are in flagrant violation of everything that the, that the field of journalism depends upon for its immunity to represent the public interest. You’re supposed to be bending over backwards to get all points of view. You don’t bother to contact me. You don’t offer me a chance to point out your own hypocrisy within your own pages. And you have, what, 25 different outlets. I have a spreadsheet It’s very clearly coordinated. There used to be something called Journolist, which coordinated, uh, the political, um, left-leaning journalists that I think Ezra Klein began. I have no idea who coordinated this, but my claim is, is that you cannot have the Democratic Party of the United States, which I am a– [laughs] my party, targeting individuals for personal destruction just for the benefit of campaigning from behind the diplomatic immunity, if you will, granted to journalists in issues, uh, of adjudicating truth. These are bad and horrible people. They are anti-science. They are claiming to be pro-science. Their hypocrisy needs to be called out. There is no one to report on them because they are the reporters themselves. And what we’re talking about is we are talking about a form of journalistic evil.
00:31:23
Winston Marshall: Hmm. You’re clearly and rightly upset, and I’ve had-
00:31:28
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no. That’s to psychologize this. I am clearly and rightly aggrieved because of a grave injustice visited upon me for the purpose of getting to J.D. Vance. And what’s more, I will tell you this, J.D. Vance, uh, called me as the only Democrat to meet with him in secret in Ohio, where many of the most illustrious names in the conservative sphere met in quiet and in private to try to figure out how to help all of the people injured by NAFTA, by our various trade agreements negotiated with Democratic administrations. Effectively, J.D. was doing the work, and I hate to say this, of progressives, who have traditionally trumpeted the interests of those without college education, with limited prospects, p- lower middle class working families, and they did so without s- trying to seek any kind of financial advantage. They did not advertise this from the point of view of, um, getting political advantage. The Democratic Party has seemingly lost its mind, and I don’t know how to say this because it’s my party.
00:32:43
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:32:43
Eric Weinstein: I’ve never voted Republican. Um, who do you think you are? From what planet did you descend? Have you no concept of what the Democratic Party was before its evil turn towards Dick Morris after the era of Mike Dukakis? Did you just wake up one day and decide that you were gonna be nothing but complete evil to people who are good, hardworking American– even your own party members? You’re, you’re just gonna abandon all journalistic standards?
00:33:12
Winston Marshall: If I may…
00:33:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:33:14
Winston Marshall: You, you say that you s- moved that s- s- to the– you– the Democrat party. Are you encompassing the-
00:33:21
Eric Weinstein: I wouldn’t even call it Democrat party because that’s, uh, intended to get the word rat to sound at the end. Call it the Democratic Party. I don’t– I, I’m a Democrat, okay?
00:33:30
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
00:33:30
Eric Weinstein: I call it the Democratic Party. It’s my party-
00:33:33
Winston Marshall: But you’re including the journalists in that-
00:33:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:33:36
Winston Marshall: … as part of the same sort of blue machine.
00:33:38
Eric Weinstein: I mean, it’s, it’s the universities, it’s the think tanks, it’s the late night talk shows. It’s this giant juggernaut that’s wall-to-wall coordinated campaigning. And it’s journo-paigning, and it’s comedipaigning, where, you know, you just have Stephen Colbert making joke after joke. All, all the late night comedians. You know? It, it– clearly, this thing is basically, um… It used to be that a comedian w- in an election year would make jokes on both sides. They’d, they’d poke fun at the candidates. This isn’t that. Some, some unholy thing has happened on one side of the aisle. Now, I have plenty of problems with the Republicans. I’ve said that Donald Trump is too old. I have real questions that I think what happened on January 6th was a disaster. Uh, I don’t think it’s a small thing. Um, I’m not carrying water for the Republicans. I just keep looking at my own party and saying, “H-how c- how, how can we not recognize each other?”
00:34:49
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:34:51
Eric Weinstein: Do you realize that you have left a sitting president in the Oval Office with apparently six or seven minutes of a window to respond to a nuclear attack, who is clearly suffering various forms of dementia, has probably had Parkinson’s for years? Um, you can ask any geriatric neurologist, w- where is Joe Biden in his stage of degeneration? If he can’t campaign, why is he the person with a nuclear football by his, by his bedside who might have to respond to Putin in the case of a half proxy, uh, war with a thermonuclear rival?
00:35:24
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:35:24
Eric Weinstein: I mean, something, something completely mad and insane has happened on one side of this aisle.
00:35:30
Winston Marshall: Hmm. And not only Biden, but they’ve put forward Kamala, who’s clearly, although she might not have dementia, she’s clearly cognitively not up to scratch to be-
00:35:40
Eric Weinstein: See-
00:35:40
Winston Marshall: … leader of America
00:35:41
Eric Weinstein: … I don’t necessarily agree with that, and, and again-
00:35:43
Winston Marshall: Yeah, why not?
00:35:43
Eric Weinstein: … this is gonna be an unpopular point of view. She sounds completely batty when you hear her answering questions. What is that exactly? One possibility is, is that she’s just not cognitively capable. Another possibility is that the party doesn’t actually make sense anymore. And if, if you ask a question, you ask it to defend itself, to explain itself, it doesn’t have a coherence. It’s not a party that says, “We’re for the working poor. We’re for the environment. We believe in free speech. Um, we wanna make sure that, uh, world trade is free and that shipping lanes are open.” It’s, it’s some bizarre, convoluted series of compromises with various groups. Why, why are they so focused on the carried interest tax exemption? Why is it so important- Uh, to privilege a small number of people who have serious gender dysphoria issues over the enormous number of people who go through puberty, are temporarily confused as your body changes, and encouraging them towards irreversible choices that will forever, uh, lead to their reproductive mutilation. I mean, how, how do you defend that? How do you defend the policy on the southern border of the United States? And by the way, I can turn that on the conservatives. The conservatives are to blame for the open border mania, and nobody remembers that. And why is that? Because The Wall Street Journal, never known as a bastion of progressive thought, campaigned four years for a five-word constitutional amendment.
00:37:25
Winston Marshall: When was this?
00:37:26
Eric Weinstein: 1990s.
00:37:27
Winston Marshall: Uh-huh.
00:37:28
Eric Weinstein: “There shall be open borders.” So if you wanna talk about the madness in the southern border of the United States, that was a conservative problem. People so eager to push out the labor supply curve so that when you took supply and demand, the cost, the price point of labor would fall. The mania for open borders came from the desire to destroy the American worker’s ability to bargain, uh, for wages at the negotiating table. So, you know, a- as far as people saying, “Are you conservative? Are you liberal? Are you leftist? Are you, are you reactionary?” No, you’ve all lost your mind. Um, the Democrats have lost their mind somewhat more than the Republicans, but the Republicans are incredibly incoherent, and the Democrats have just– They’ve gone into a, a space where they cannot be understood. So when Kamala speaks, we don’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. But w- would you do a better job? Like, if, if I put you, Winston, as an American, at the head of the Democratic Party running for president, and I forced you to answer my questions, you’d be tangled like a pretzel. You’d have no ability to respond. So we don’t know whether Kamala is stupid, inarticulate, um, unprepared-
00:38:53
Winston Marshall: Or the problem is too big for anyone to really-
00:38:56
Eric Weinstein: Because it-
00:38:56
Winston Marshall: … be able to-
00:38:57
Eric Weinstein: It doesn’t make-
00:38:58
Winston Marshall: … weave through
00:38:58
Eric Weinstein: … that party does not make sense.
00:39:01
Winston Marshall: Hmm. What does the future look like for that party? Does it– If Kamala wins, she’s got to continue that balance for the next four years. Or is it an opportunity if they lose to rebuild completely? I mean, maybe it should be a po- you as a-
00:39:21
Eric Weinstein: We’re courting disaster. Let’s just be clear about it. Both of these parties are functioning in separate universes.
00:39:32
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:39:33
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so in essence, we’re not having an election year this year. I don’t know what you’d [chuckles] call this thing, but it’s not an election. Uh, these are two different planets, and I spend time in both Democratic and Republican space, and I’m aghast at both. You know, the Republicans completely close their eyes to the problems of January 6th. They consider Donald Trump’s, uh, degradation of the norms and standards of the United States to be, “Oh, you know, you’re complaining about mean tweets.” It’s not mean tweets. It’s about bullying. Quite honestly, I don’t like bullies. Donald Trump is a bully. Now, the, the sense is, well, we have to bully because we have to win, and then once we get into the Oval Office, you know, then, then, then we’ll govern properly. Well, no. Th- this is a Mercutio moment, a plague on both your houses.
00:40:22
Winston Marshall: Yeah. Not, not to play what aboutry, but just the way you describe your terrible experience with the press, and I’ve had similar things, and it’s a horrible experience, and it feels like– It actually feels like a spiritual war when you, when you get tangled up in it on the individual level. But do you not think with someone like Kamala, this week, for example, they’ve been hammering this Trump is literally Hitler line, just to tie in with your earlier point about the journos, the journalists all getting round-
00:40:50
Eric Weinstein: Journo painting
00:40:51
Winston Marshall: … journo painting. They all coalesce around certain ideas, and they bang them out together. And this week it’s been Hitler. Last week it was testy. Uh, it was, uh-
00:41:00
Eric Weinstein: Remember when JD Vance was weird? Everybody said weird.
00:41:02
Winston Marshall: Everyone said weird. They said joy all at the same time. But also your– But just you say you don’t like Trump being a bully. Them saying that he’s literally Hitler, is that not another t- form of bullying? That’s-
00:41:15
Eric Weinstein: Oh, of course it’s bullying
00:41:16
Winston Marshall: … it’s a bully. Yeah. So it’s-
00:41:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, they just bullied me. I’m not saying that the Democrats aren’t bullies, but the idea of we need a bully to beat a bully bu- You know, it’s like I just wanna send all these people to their room without supper. S- spare the rod, spoil the child. W- who the heck gave us such low quality candidates? And of course, that means I won’t get a position in any coming administration, like you’re gonna ask me to begin with. At some level, this is just a very non-adult campaign.
00:41:46
Winston Marshall: I think everyone would agree [chuckles] with you on that.
00:41:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, frankly, the world needs adults, and it needs America to take on an adult role. And we have to look at ourselves. We have to be very muscular, but we have to not be evil. And we have to, you know, we have to set an example for the world as to what free speech means, and what democracy is, and what differences of opinions should be, and what it means to be scientific, and not to turn our back on our traditions and spirituality, and, and, and to use the magic of this land that we have to get people of different backgrounds to sit down and be decent to each other. This is a magical country.
00:42:29
Winston Marshall: Yeah. Do you take any optimism from the so-called unity project of Trump putting behind him Musk, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, obviously JD as his veep, this- long group of majo— m-mainly former Democrats coming around to-together to clear out the deep state. There’s this clear up of government-
00:43:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:43:01
Winston Marshall: … inefficiency. E-eh, yes, I agree with you on a surface level, Trump is, I mean, almost acting like a comedian rather than a president. But scratch a little bit, the… For me, that’s quite exci- I’m personally excited by them and that group of people.
00:43:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, there’s an exciting idea. I believe my brother sees this as a unity party, and I’m maybe har-hearkening back to the team of rivals perspective th-of, of Lincoln. Um, I, I would ask somebody who subscribes to that point of view that same question. I don’t view that this way. Uh, I view it instead as an, it’s an innovation to me that hasn’t been tried. So we k- we keep trying to make everything sound like something that happened before. I think what Trump realized is that he… Well, he’s an innovator. He will take a tradition, he’ll see that everybody’s always done that tradition, and rather than be the nth person, like throwing out the first pitch at a baseball in the baseball season, he’ll take the opportunity to say, “No, I don’t wanna do that.” He’d rather be the first person not to continue a tradition, and I think that the tradition is that you put out a lawn sign with exactly two names in your front yard. And what happens if, for example, you create a new concept, which I’ve called the Traveling Wilburys, uh, strategy. So you, you know, you get Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and George Harrison in the same band and, uh, now if you think about it, if you have six names, you have six factorial possibilities to order those names on a lawn sign. They… I don’t think that they did this. Maybe Trump’s ego wouldn’t put up with it. But imagine that your lawn s- lawn sign said, “Tulsi, RFK, Elon, Vivek, Vance, Trump.” Like you have Trump at the very bottom of that list.
00:44:54
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:44:56
Eric Weinstein: That says to your neighbor, “Look, I’m not supporting Trump. I see the same problems with his behavior, his age, what have you, but I am supporting the idea that this is a super ticket, and it doesn’t stop at president and vice president.” Why did anyone have the idea that you only run as a two-person ticket and then you subtr- you, you, uh, you f- you, you choose your team after you’ve been elected? So I think it’s a genius idea that is incompletely instantiated. I think it’s a new idea. I don’t think it’s a team of rivals or… I think what it is, is it’s a super ticket, and it allows people who cannot vote Trump to vote Trump.
00:45:35
Winston Marshall: Hmm. And within it, the ideas that they’re talking about, let’s say Musk clean– the government efficiency program, although… And RFK Jr. and Nicole Shanahan talking about making America healthy again, they might all have their own fan bases, but those also exci- are they not exciting things? Could they– should they be pulled off?
00:45:57
Eric Weinstein: They’re great ideas in general misinstantiated from my perspective. So for example, uh, let’s take vaccines. In general, there is a perspective that says everybody has to get on the vaccine bandwagon. This only works if we all do our bit. We know that it’s uncomfortable to get jabbed, but vaccines are a pure good. They’re safe, they’re effective, they work. And the idea is stop questioning. Do your duty.
00:46:24
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:46:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay. The idea has now arisen, maybe they aren’t as safe as we’ve claimed. Maybe they have more downsides than they’ve claimed. Maybe we haven’t studied them enough. Maybe there’s, uh, legal immunity for the producers of vaccines because we know that they can’t be done as safely as claimed. So people are now waking up to the idea that that is a propaganda campaign. That’s different than saying we know vaccines cause autism. Now maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. And I don’t know where we are. But I can tell you this, there’s certainly enough evidence that we are kept from asking scientific questions because of reasons of, uh, I would say ar-around the security state. I can tell you we were not encouraged to question whether or not the Wuhan Institute of Virology might be involved in a novel coronavirus [chuckles] coming out of Wuhan, China. Um, the security state has a clear idea that it is allowed to control the narrative, because if it doesn’t control the narrative, scientists are gonna ask questions. Why is there a furin cleavage site on spike protein in these coronaviruses? That’s a very unusual thing. I think it’s four amino acids, 12 nucle- nucleotides in the primary sequence. It’s a very strange thing to just suddenly crop up, which is the, the difference between having a coronavirus be, you know, extremely, uh, transmissible among humans and not. We were not encouraged. In fact, they, they assembled 77 Nobel laureates to be outraged that the EcoHealth Alliance, which itself makes no sense as an extension of the department, uh, DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, um, headed by a Ukrainian zoologist who seems to attract, you know, $50 million in funding for crazy operations according to something called One Health, which almost certainly looks like a bioweapons convention workaround.
00:48:29
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:48:30
Eric Weinstein: Um, w- basically that what they’re saying is, you know that thing that killed, uh, your great aunt and that got your kids sick and that forced you to get vaccinated and lose your business is be above your pay grade to ask about. And sa- the same thing with food. Can I ask about what’s going on with Archer Dan- Daniels Midland? I mean, can I ask, uh, about Monsanto? Can I ask about the legal liability around vaccines? What we have is we have a group of people in Washington who say we have a very brittle system, and we cannot afford for populists, scientists, journalists to go poking around and asking questions. And so more or less, the Democratic Party of the United States is up for keeping that thing going, and these other people are up for questioning it. However, in my opinion, um, there are a lot of claims that are being bandied about on the Republican side which are not fully substantiated. And what we really need is we need scientific investigation. We need scientists with a lot of money and a lot of autonomy, and we need the security state to F off. It, it… If you just got, you know, tens of millions of people killed because of your science experiment i- in China, you kinda lost your portfolio. We, we, we don’t necessarily keep running cover for you, claiming that, uh, you know, you’ve, you’ve got a hippy-dippy charity in, in New York City, which is with a wildly overpowered board, tons of money, a Ukraine and, and, uh, China connection that makes no sense, all of these Nobel laureates. It’s obvious that you’re hiding something. We don’t know what you’re hiding, but you can’t spit in all of our faces and tell us that we’re all, um… What was the word they used about Jay Bhattacharya? Fringe epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya.
00:50:26
Winston Marshall: Did they really?
00:50:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:50:28
Winston Marshall: How dare they?
00:50:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, that’s-
00:50:29
Winston Marshall: That’s-
00:50:29
Eric Weinstein: See, but I’m not gonna psychologize you. We are indignant for a reason. We’re not having a bad hair day. Who the hell left our security state this incompetent and this much in charge? You’re supposed to be good at what you do. You’re bad at what you do. The only reason that the rest of us are in your business is that you can’t keep your business in your business.
00:50:50
Winston Marshall: Mm.
00:50:51
Eric Weinstein: If you kept it in your pants, none of- nobody would be trying to pry into what’s going on at CIA or Department of Homeland Security or whatever. You’re bad at what you do. The security state is bad. It’s just not talented, and it’s trying to control the rest of us by telling us, “Don’t ask reasonable questions.”
00:51:10
Winston Marshall: Mm. You sound like an intellectual, a populist intellectual. You are… This is-
00:51:15
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m, I’m an intellectual.
00:51:17
Winston Marshall: And you’re a populist.
00:51:18
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:51:18
Winston Marshall: This is def- this is by definition-
00:51:20
Eric Weinstein: No
00:51:20
Winston Marshall: … populist. You have a problem with elite failure across the board. Jour-
00:51:23
Eric Weinstein: Do me a favor. Listen. Think about it. I come from the top high school in Los Angeles. I went to an Ivy League undergraduate school. I have a PhD from Harvard, postdoc at MIT, further postdoctoral work at Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research. No, I’m the elite. They don’t want the elite. I don’t know who’s in these chairs. I, I, I did not come, uh, from a populist channel. What happened is Harvard, for example, uh, selected a plagiarist to be its president. My three universities, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT, all could not figure out how to condemn what was being done, uh, to endanger and threaten Jewish students on their campuses. Um, those are th- my three universities. Do, do we have a level above this? No, no, no. I’m an elitist. I’m trying to restore a public-spirited elite. If that’s what you mean by populist, then I think you have a very bad definition of an elite.
00:52:39
Winston Marshall: I do, I actually-
00:52:40
Eric Weinstein: The elite, the elites exists to serve its country. If you… Y- if you have a situation in which you need, um, hostage-taking gunmen in a school taken out, you better get an elite sniper to make sure nobody else gets hurt. If your child is suffering with pediatric oncology and needs to have a tumor removed, you want an elite surgeon.
00:53:08
Winston Marshall: Excl-
00:53:08
Eric Weinstein: The elite, i- the elite class of a country is supposed to be in service. It’s not supposed to be-
00:53:15
Winston Marshall: Exactly
00:53:15
Eric Weinstein: … feeding its mouth with both hands at the trough.
00:53:19
Winston Marshall: Totally agree, but-
00:53:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:53:20
Winston Marshall: … to be populist isn’t to be against there being an elite at all. That’s communist, I would say, even though the communists end up having their own elite. The populist is that the elite class, the current elite class, are failing. We… Everyone agrees-
00:53:35
Eric Weinstein: There is no-
00:53:35
Winston Marshall: … that there needs to be leadership
00:53:36
Eric Weinstein: … the elite are not. We don’t have an elite. I will plant my feet here till the cows come home. We need an elite. The elite exists to serve the populace.
00:53:53
Winston Marshall: Exactly.
00:53:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:53:55
Winston Marshall: Agreed.
00:53:56
Eric Weinstein: That i- that is normal elite behavior.
00:54:00
Winston Marshall: To serve.
00:54:02
Eric Weinstein: Yes.
00:54:03
Winston Marshall: And the, yes, and the current behavior is-
00:54:05
Eric Weinstein: You can go full, full Marie Antoinette if you like. If that’s what you wanna call the elite, I am certainly not the elite. We need an el… Look, the reason that we bust our ass and we study morning, noon, and night for years and years, and we learn our stuff, is to serve. And there are great perks being in the elite. I’m not gonna claim that there aren’t. But the perks don’t really make up the difference in what it takes. When you, when you’re a surgeon, it, it might be great that you have a second or a third home, but you’re playing God every day, and people live and die as to whether you screw up. That’s not something most people want on their soul. So if you meet an elite surgeon, and the person’s acting like a bit of an ass and very commandeering and very, you know… I don’t know how to, how to put it. Like a, a very v- w- with a very commanding personality That person is that way because any screw-up potentially kills a person on his table who is completely defenseless. And my claim is, is that people just don’t understand what an elite is supposed to be. An elite is supposed to be in service. And are there tons of perks? You better believe there are tons of perks, because the amount of work, and the amount of risk, and the amount of sacrifice that it takes to get into that position is absolutely enormous.
00:55:29
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:55:30
Eric Weinstein: And what we have is we have an undeserving group of people that we keep calling the elite, who think that the purpose of those chairs is to feed themselves and to stuff their faces. And I just, I wanna see those people out of those chairs. I wanna see our elite restored.
00:55:44
Winston Marshall: And the trust in the elite, because-
00:55:46
Eric Weinstein: The trust will come.
00:55:47
Winston Marshall: You think it’ll come? Do you think it’ll be quick to come back?
00:55:50
Eric Weinstein: When you, when you have a commando unit like our Delta Force, and they make the bad guys go away, and they put themselves in harm’s way, you immediately trust those guys, right?
00:56:05
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
00:56:06
Eric Weinstein: When the Israelis rescued their hostages at Entebbe, y- y- it’s, you know, it’s very hard to pull something like that off. That’s what builds trust.
00:56:15
Winston Marshall: That’s actually… Netanyahu’s polling in Israel over the last year is really a good example of that.
00:56:20
Eric Weinstein: And his brother was the only person to be killed at Entebbe.
00:56:23
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:56:24
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, just, just think about this in terms of sacrifice. Elite is usually about people who have gone through extraordinary sacrifice to be where they are. It’s not about people who happen to land in a chair through nepotism.
00:56:42
Winston Marshall: Earlier, forgive me for going back one step. When you describe your personal experience with the jour- with the journalistic attack-
00:56:50
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:56:50
Winston Marshall: … on your name, of course, it’s bad for America that people don’t trust the media or mainstream media, but it is the case that people, particularly Republicans, do not trust the mainstream media, and there’s various polling on this. Does that, is that any consolation to you, that even though the journalists came after you, most people recognize the bullshit that it is?
00:57:14
Eric Weinstein: No, because we need journalists. In other words, the tear it all down perspective that you now find in the Republican Party is very dangerous. We need papers of record, and we need them to be patriotic. In other words, in a war, you don’t want… The only way we kept the secret of the Manhattan Project was through voluntary censorship, because we were a country at war with a political aim to defeat, uh, the Nazis and Japan. And the abuse of that, the abuse of journalism, is something that needs to be remediated. We need these institutions. We need universities. We need think tanks. We need, uh, news desks. And the fact that these things are all self-discrediting, very often what you see in the Republican Party is just this glee. Oh my God, this is wonderful. Have you, have you seen your popularity and your trust in the polls plummet? Um, and what is it, what’s that filled by? That’s filled by nonsense in podcast space, you know? So podcasts bring real truth, BS, nobody can tell what’s what. Our standards have plummeted.
00:58:33
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:58:33
Eric Weinstein: You know, this is, by the way, what Bari Weiss was on about a long time ago. She was saying, “Look, it’s wonderful that you guys are able to do what you’re doing in podcast space, but you’re not enforcing standards.”
00:58:42
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:58:43
Eric Weinstein: And so in a weird way, the idea is you have the Wild West of podcast space where there are no standards, and you have very professional, uh, journalism, which is in fact infected with journal painting.
00:58:54
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
00:58:56
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, where the security state has a free hand. Right now, Michael Shellenberger, uh, and Mike Benz, you know, are two names that I think are doing extraordinary work pointing out what’s actually going on by giving you names, dates, storylines. And what you see is, is that the NPRs, and the New York Times, and the Washington Posts of the world won’t really touch their work. And so this is what’s discrediting them. But somebody needs to build an institution that does journalism. We need journalism. And in fact, the Society of Professional Journalism’s code of ethics would fix journalism if it was enforced.
00:59:35
Winston Marshall: Hmm. Your criticism of the podcasting space, which I, uh, share, there’s a, there’s a huge variety, but obviously I’m part of the game. I’m very much in that space-
00:59:47
Eric Weinstein: And so was I
00:59:47
Winston Marshall: … that’s what we’re doing right now. How much was what you’ve just described influenced you stopping your show on The Portal?
00:59:57
Eric Weinstein: Look, I don’t know what I’m doing, let’s, to be entirely honest. I seem to have outlived my world. I, I come from an institutional space. I believe in standards of decency and civility. I now find myself in a world that talks about the dirt bag left or tone policing or… We have to be civil and decent to each other, and we have to make sure that we’re not constantly pushing our own perspective and our own agenda. Um, what I see is basically people talking their book. They know where their bread is buttered. And I don’t know how to be with all of this. If I look at the thumbnails on which I appear, it’s always, you know, “The world will end unless we do this.”
01:00:48
Winston Marshall: Yeah. [laughs]
01:00:48
Eric Weinstein: And-
01:00:49
Winston Marshall: “You won’t believe this.” [laughs] Yeah.
01:00:51
Eric Weinstein: “His jaw dropped when Eric said…”
01:00:53
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
01:00:55
Eric Weinstein: And I just, I’m embarrassed. If you don’t do that, then the algorithms will starve you If you speak the truth, the algorithms will cheat you of your income, will demonetize-
01:01:09
Winston Marshall: Yeah
01:01:09
Eric Weinstein: … as they say your ability to feed your family. Um, I, I come from a different planet. It wasn’t perfect, it was never fair, but it was so much better than this.
01:01:24
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:01:24
Eric Weinstein: We were on the right path. We were decent enough people. You know, th- life has become like a schoolyard with all the schoolyard bullying and the taunts, and our music, you know, sounds like schoolyard taunts, and-
01:01:39
Winston Marshall: Hmm
01:01:40
Eric Weinstein: … everybody’s just insulting each other’s masculinity or femininity, or you’re ugly, or you’re failed, or you’re, you’re a grifter, or you’re a charlatan, you’re a this or that. This is my only chance to be on planet Earth, and there’s so much that I love about this place.
01:01:55
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:01:55
Eric Weinstein: And I’m just disgusted with us, and I d- I’m not smart enough to figure out how to undo it.
01:02:01
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:02:01
Eric Weinstein: I don’t wanna be part of this just-
01:02:04
Winston Marshall: The war
01:02:06
Eric Weinstein: … it’s such a waste of my life. I mean, I can define male and female in about two minutes, and I can tell you that we have to be good with to each other. I can tell you that we got male homosexuality wrong for years, and that we’ve over-corrected, and we’re making a tremendous decision, a tremendously terrible decision about initiating a h- reproductive holocaust against our own children. I want us to be decent to each other, and I wanna make sure that our, our younger people have a stake in the future. You know, Constantin Tison said something, and I forget exactly how it goes, but he was a… I think it was at ARC. Something like, “You know, I’m not a conservative, but I can give my conservative friends a piece of advice. You can’t ask young people to conserve something that they’re not allowed to participate in.”
01:02:55
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
01:02:59
Eric Weinstein: There are a lot of 33 and 34-year-old millennials who need to get married, and need a future, and need a house, and need a baby in their arms, and I don’t wanna be told that I’m backwards. I know what I’m talking about. This is just human nature. Um, we need inspiring young men with futures and careers. We need to more or less stop entertaining politicians over the age of 70. We need to gradually phase them out because they don’t have that much time left, you know? We never had a president this old.
01:03:39
Winston Marshall: Why does that matter that they’re old? I mean, I understand if they’re in cognitive decline like Biden, but, you know.
01:03:47
Eric Weinstein: Why does it matter if you can code? Why does it matter if you understand the physics of, uh, ballistic missiles that deliver thermonuclear warheads? Why does it matter if you understand, uh, markets and Black-Scholes-Merton, and option pricing? This is a demanding world, and it should be filled with public-spirited, very capable technical people. It should be… Y- you should be able to know that something is wrong by how little we’re discussing, uh, AI in this election cycle. AI is a tsunami that is about to crash over our world, and the amount of time we’ve been spending talking about Arnold Palmer, and who’s cucked, and who called who a name last week, y- you’re talking about a technology that can probably replace 85% of the jobs out there without even any improvement.
01:04:54
Winston Marshall: I wanna talk about AI, but I just wanna make one-
01:04:57
Eric Weinstein: Sure
01:04:57
Winston Marshall: … pushback on my last comment, was that y- you are wiser now, I imagine you would say, than you were when you were 25 or when you were 35. So there’s nothing wrong necessarily being the age itself, right? Presumably older people are wiser.
01:05:14
Eric Weinstein: You get wiser, but you al- see, I’ve also been in a bubble my entire life. The entire period of my life from e- 1965 until the present has been lived within an anomalous bubble that will never occur again. If you like, post-1945 or certainly post-1952, which is when we had the hydrogen bomb, the world has been abnormally quiet.
01:05:41
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:05:42
Eric Weinstein: This is not real life. Real life is just getting started.
01:05:46
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:05:47
Eric Weinstein: You know, one of the things that I talk about is, is that Vesuvius used to erupt in Europe all the time. And I think its last eruption grounded planes in World War II, and then it stopped erupting. So the entire jet age took place without ash plumes to be negotiated, which is when Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland blew, um, nobody knew whether the planes were safe. Like, it’s just been a quiet time.
01:06:13
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:06:14
Eric Weinstein: We haven’t had a major pandemic. I mean, I grew up with the Hong Kong flu in the late ’60s where I think Woodstock was held during the Hong Kong flu.
01:06:21
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:06:21
Eric Weinstein: It’s a forgotten pandemic.
01:06:23
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:06:23
Eric Weinstein: Um, but by the st- you know, by the standards of the Black Death, or the Spanish flu, or all these sorts of things, w- this has been a walk in the park. The only really great disaster by earlier standards has been Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
01:06:38
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:06:38
Eric Weinstein: So one thing is, um, I’m old. Now, I try to be with it and try to be up with the technology. I think I’m a pretty good late life learner. But if, i- if I gave a pop quiz to Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and I said, “Describe the transformer architecture in the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need,” and it’s, “Describe what an attention head is and why it changed everything,” do you think they’d have a clue?
01:07:07
Winston Marshall: But you think they need to?
01:07:10
Eric Weinstein: Hello? Are you going to ban linear algebra? Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had a podcast where they talked about a meeting at the White House, where the question is, do you regulate the technology or do you regulate the science that produce the technology? People are talking about banning linear algebra. They claim that the White House said, “We will ban the math if we need to. We made entire fields of theoretical physics disappear.”
01:07:36
Winston Marshall: Huh.
01:07:37
Eric Weinstein: We’re not talking about that, are we?
01:07:38
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:07:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, Winston, the, the questions are wrong. This is a technological age. We’re about to have a technological collision. I need a president who understands why the CPI was broken by two senators named Moynihan and Packwood in the mid-1990s using five academics, including Zvi Griliches, Dale Jorgenson, um, uh, I can’t remember, Ellen, can’t remember her last name, Robert Gordon, and Michael Boskin. Who the hell is the Boskin Commission? Why are we not revisiting, uh, chained indices, seasonal adjustments, looped preferences, unstable prefer- Trillions of dollars go back and forth over this. I’ve been trying to talk about this since the 1990s. You can’t talk to anyone about the fact that the CPI was used to raise taxes and slash benefits because tax brackets are indexed to it and Social Security and Medicare are indexed to it.
01:08:41
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:08:41
Eric Weinstein: You know, it’s like a perfect crime. You’re stealing trillions of dollars. Everybody’s experiencing higher prices. It’s not being reflected in the gauge, and you can’t get into the game to have the conversation because anyone, uh, who’s an expert, uh, is compromised. No, you need technical political people. And I hope that it– I don’t know anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle. It’s my party, and I, you know… They never reach out. They don’t ask questions. I know three of the six, uh, or if you include Nicole Shanahan, I know four out of the seven on the Republican side. And you better believe I’m going to Bobby, Tulsi, um, J.D. Vance, uh, Nicole, and now Elon and I have started corresponding, which is nobody’s business as to what we’re saying. But yeah, you need smart people who are not compromised by this. You need an elite class of technically-minded people who know where the bodies are buried, and you need to throw these people who have been running the show from inside the Department of Homeland Security, inside of the State Department, in, in, in the intelligence communities, the various law enforcement agencies. We cannot harass Americans to a brighter, freer future.
01:10:01
Winston Marshall: Hmm. So you mentioned AI, and I think this ties in with some of the thinking I’ve been had rec- having recently, which there’s the famous quote by Andrew Breitbart, which is that politics is downstream from culture. And it seems to me that politics and culture are downstream from tech. And so I, I share your concern for AI. Although, actually, I probably don’t know AI well enough, but I share the o- o- uh, opinion that AI is extremely significant thing for us to be discussing-
01:10:34
Eric Weinstein: Hmm
01:10:34
Winston Marshall: … and it’s not given nearly enough airtime.
01:10:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:10:39
Winston Marshall: I’m curious to know why you think AI… And forgive me, I– maybe this is something you’ve talked about a lot, but it’s not, it’s something I’ve, I’ve heard you-
01:10:45
Eric Weinstein: No, please.
01:10:45
Winston Marshall: Why, why do you think AI is as– I mean, the way you put it there seemed dangerous to me. Um, what, what, what’s-
01:10:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, without going all Skynet, you know, and talking about it taking over in that respect, our labor market… Think about the importance of markets. We have an invisible web that directs our actions. It tells us how we should devote our time and our energy on this planet. And if that delicate filigree of markets were to break down, you would need command and control. You would need somebody telling you, “Wake up, go to this quarry, you know, and, and mine, uh, this limestone,” or whatever. We don’t want that. We want markets. But markets are predicated on certain assumptions, and one of which is that the marginal product of labor, whatever determines the wage, is sufficient for a standard of living that’s consistent with dignity. What is AI? We have a model of production, it’s most boring terms, where you have two inputs, one called K and one called L, capital and labor. What you’re talking about is you’re talking about a technology that does not allow labor to move to a more productive place. Like if you’re washing dishes, you say, “Look, I, I’m also writing poetry in my head. I’d rather spend more of my time doing something elevated rather than doing something that’s purely mechanical.” So you get a dishwashing machine. You say, “Okay, my labor is free. Now I can become an accountant or a poet, or I can be– I can start a company,” or who knows what. What happens when you have a technology that replaces all repetitive behaviors? Anything that can be done repetitively, uh, like writing news stories, can be replaced by an AI.
01:12:35
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
01:12:36
Eric Weinstein: Now what are you doing? You’re chasing people out of expertise, because that’s what we know how to do. We know how to educate for people to do something over and over again. We know how to make you, um, a tax lawyer. We know how to make you an accountant. We know how to teach you how to be a surgeon. What we don’t know how to do is teach people how to do one-off things that have never occurred, right? And so in a certain sense, AI is threatening to completely decimate L and the input of the production function. So you have something that behaves not as a complement, and my wife has coined this very important concept, the golden age of AI complementarity for a brief period of time, the AI is not going to be good enough to do all of its work on its own, and so you’ll have a prompt engineer as a human being directing the AI so that it can check whether the AI is hallucinating, whether it’s actually putting together the right series of tasks, whether it’s misinterpreting a, a, a command. Um, but that’s gonna come to an end. You know, there’s something called cyborg chess, where first you had humans who played chess, and then all the humans were better than a computer. Then you had computers that could beat the humans sometimes. Then you had computers that could beat the humans all the time, but it was still better to have a human together with a computer. At some point, the human is just an albatross around the neck of a computer. Computer does not need my help adding numbers. I just get in the way, right?
01:14:14
Winston Marshall: So what is the danger for everyday Americans in that sense? Because just as the dishwasher meant that women were freed up in time-
01:14:25
Eric Weinstein: Mm
01:14:25
Winston Marshall: … so they could do other things a-around the house, they could spend more time with children, and all this tech has, has actually helped humankind. Why is this tech different? Doesn’t it mean that human labor will be freed up, human time will be freed up so that it could be applied to things that humans deem more important?
01:14:46
Eric Weinstein: Sure. If the idea is that you can allocate resources so that humans can enjoy their time doing things that they value more. But if they have, i-if you have no one with an ability to earn a living, but their time is their own, that’s not a very dignified existence. In fact, you know, of all people, the only person who’s really come up with a great idea around this, um, isn’t being listened to.
01:15:14
Winston Marshall: Who’s that?
01:15:14
Eric Weinstein: Nicole Shanahan.
01:15:15
Winston Marshall: Oh, and what’s her idea?
01:15:17
Eric Weinstein: Nicole Shanahan’s idea, and this is dovetails with work that I’ve been doing with, with, uh, Pia Malaney, and also talked to Jai Bhattachary about, is Coasean solutions to the coming AI, uh, tsunami crushing our labor market. And effectively, um, if you think about the AI as foreign labor, I wrote a paper, uh, years ago, uh, through the International Labor Office of the United Nations in Geneva, which said that if you want to import labor into a country, you should have to pay the workers licensing income because their wages will go down in that area. But it has to be offset by the licensing income that would go up, which would put workers in control of how much they wished to have their labor market invaded. If you applied that here, you actually have a solution that dwarfs, uh, UBI, which is an extremely crude tool in terms of efficiency. And you would give the workers who are about to be displaced the right to license their employer’s right to use AI to displace them. And what you’d get is you’d get what would be called a Pareto improvement in the labor market.
01:16:34
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:16:35
Eric Weinstein: Nobody’s talking about this. UBI is going to just decimate workers and give them a pittance of what they’re owed. And the only person in this campaign to raise this got completely ignored.
01:16:48
Winston Marshall: Nicole.
01:16:49
Eric Weinstein: Nicole.
01:16:51
Winston Marshall: But she is still part of– she’s lo-still loosely affiliated now with the Trump campaign through RFK Jr., so she’s not-
01:16:58
Eric Weinstein: Let, let’s put it this way. Nicole… I’m a huge fan of Coasean analysis. It’s the most profound th- idea to come out of economics that I’ve ever encountered.
01:17:08
Winston Marshall: I don’t know what that is. Sorry.
01:17:11
Eric Weinstein: Ronald Coase, uh, came up with a crazy idea, which is that if you have a lake, for example, and you have the need of a furniture factory which, uh, pollutes into the lake, and you have fishermen who need to fish the lake, that you can assign rights to pollute the lake and, uh, give them either to the fishermen to sell to the furniture factory or give them to the furniture factory and allow the f-fishermen to buy them back. And no matter what you do, you get the same use of the lake, although it d- it will affect whether the fishermen become rich or the furniture factory becomes rich. So the idea is it’s an efficient solution through the assigning of property rights to use market solutions that do not necessarily benefit the elite. You can give the rights to the poor-
01:17:59
Winston Marshall: Hmm
01:17:59
Eric Weinstein: … and have the rich purchase them, and therefore you decouple efficiency from inequality, and Nicole is the only person who got it.
01:18:08
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:18:09
Eric Weinstein: So I was working on this shortly after the turn of the century, uh, to try to stop the conservative movement to open borders, and Nicole, uh, is, is entirely correct that this is the right approach, uh, to AI. It’s not UBI. It’s Coasean analysis.
01:18:30
Winston Marshall: But sorry, just maybe I’m being slow here, but you earlier showed some annoyance that no one in the political k- ele- presidential election was showing any concern for this, but you’ve now said that Nicole is.
01:18:47
Eric Weinstein: Bobby, Bobby is showing concern about health, as is Nicole. Elon is showing concern about government efficiency.
01:18:54
Winston Marshall: And AI.
01:18:55
Eric Weinstein: And AI. My concern, though, is the instantiations are all wrong. Obviously, you’re not supposed to have a department of government efficiency, which spells out DOGE as an acronym, where you hold a position in a meme coin.
01:19:11
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
01:19:12
Eric Weinstein: No, you guys all think it’s funny. It is funny. [laughs]
01:19:17
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:19:17
Eric Weinstein: It’s totally unethical. It’s brilliant. We love Elon, but that’s a bad thing, ’cause it, it erodes, it erodes our norms.
01:19:31
Winston Marshall: Now, is it because the concerns of the pe- like AI isn’t on, high on the hierarchy of-
01:19:36
Eric Weinstein: That’s what I’m trying to say
01:19:37
Winston Marshall: … concerns of the people? Yeah.
01:19:38
Eric Weinstein: You know, Nicole is barely in this group of six. She’s the seventh person in, in this six-person group. There are many other people who are not being named, and I’m, I’m, I, I’m just trying to use our time here to say somebody said something really important. And people think Nicole Shanahan, oh, she’s the money behind Bobby Kennedy. You know, she’s, she’s, she’s where she is through marriage. I’m telling you something different. You know, you’re getting something wrong. Somebody said something profound about AI, and I agree with her, and I was on the same page with her 25 years ago, because this is what’s supposed to fix the border.
01:20:25
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:20:26
Eric Weinstein: Nobody’s listening. My, my guess is, is that e- even if Nicole is part of this group of people who get into power, we’re gonna get UBI rather than COS.
01:20:37
Winston Marshall: Why so?
01:20:39
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. There’s something about… We do things that are… Like UBI has a name.
01:20:45
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:20:46
Eric Weinstein: Nobody knows what COS is. UBI is dumb. COS is brilliant.
01:20:51
Winston Marshall: But UBI is a household name.
01:20:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:20:54
Winston Marshall: Hmm. Do you think there’d be appetite for UBI even amongst conservatives?
01:20:59
Eric Weinstein: I think that nobody wants a revolution, who’s smart. Do you wanna throw everybody out of work?
01:21:05
Winston Marshall: I guess you could say when, for the brief period that Trump was governing on, during COVID, he did a, sort of, so he gave everyone, what was it, $500, 1,000 bucks, or something like that.
01:21:16
Eric Weinstein: Th- this is the kind of stuff that flies in Washington. No, we, we need smart people. I, I, I, I don’t mean to be rude about it. COS is smart. UBI is like a knuckle-dragging.
01:21:35
Winston Marshall: Why don’t you like UBI?
01:21:39
Eric Weinstein: Because you’re taking something with the dignity of a human being, and you’re saying, “Here’s a handout.” You’re not saying, “Here’s an owner,” and you’re asking to purchase that person’s rights as a citizen, and that person is fully capable of figuring out how much they wanna sell to you. You’re taking a person, a citizen, and turning them into a child. “Here, you’re useless. Here’s five bucks. Go powder your nose.” No thank you. I’m an owner.
01:22:08
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:22:08
Eric Weinstein: Meet me at the bargaining table. Let’s negotiate. How much I- AI do you wanna bring into this workplace?
01:22:17
Winston Marshall: As a, a progressive, if you don’t mind me saying that, but you, or at least a former Democrat or a liberal, may- uh, for, for-
01:22:24
Eric Weinstein: I’m right now arguing on behalf of [laughs] the-
01:22:26
Winston Marshall: Yeah
01:22:26
Eric Weinstein: … workers, and nobody-
01:22:28
Winston Marshall: But, but-
01:22:28
Eric Weinstein: Everybody’s lost their minds
01:22:28
Winston Marshall: … against UBI, which is very popular amongst liberals. And what-
01:22:32
Eric Weinstein: I, I can’t do this one, Sid. Look, UBI is popular because nobody’s ever heard of COS.
01:22:41
Winston Marshall: Where would you draw the line between these and other welfare? Your problems with, let’s say, UBI, why, why is, would that be a problem and not other forms of welfare be a problem?
01:22:52
Eric Weinstein: I don’t like welfare. I like markets. The core of progressive means progress. It means elevating people. It means making the world a better place. If you’re not pro-market, you’re not a progressive.
01:23:08
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:23:10
Eric Weinstein: Being pro-communism isn’t progressive. It means like I didn’t pay attention to what happened in the 20th century.
01:23:17
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:23:18
Eric Weinstein: The point is to lift people up. You wanna know what lifts people up? Markets, dignity, the ability to profit, to win, to gain wealth. The people who claim to be pro-free market are not. They are pro-corporate handout.
01:23:35
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
01:23:36
Eric Weinstein: They are socialists. I wish to defeat socialists everywhere I can find them, and I’d love to start with corporate America.
01:23:43
Winston Marshall: Or worse, fascist. I mean, that’s, that’s closer to the fascist ph- than the socialist, uh, definition.
01:23:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know what they say, true fascism has never been tried.
01:23:51
Winston Marshall: [laughs] You know, my country right now, young people, socialism has a popularity rating of something like 66, 67%. It’s, it’s exactly where the future-
01:24:04
Eric Weinstein: So deal people into capitalism and watch that fall away.
01:24:07
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:24:07
Eric Weinstein: But when you don’t deal people into capitalism-
01:24:09
Winston Marshall: As Constance has said, yeah.
01:24:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. That’s, but, but this is what I’m trying to say. What you call progressives, I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know which mental disease they picked up. The blue hair, the strangeness, I have nothing to do with those people. And y- I’m worried about your country a great deal.
01:24:28
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
01:24:30
Eric Weinstein: What’s going on over there?
01:24:31
Winston Marshall: It’s a total disaster. What’s going on over there?
01:24:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, snap out of it.
01:24:37
Winston Marshall: What significance is England to the American mind?
01:24:45
Eric Weinstein: Oh, this is like asking what importance are Jews to Christians, you know? You have this relationship between things that are older and things that are younger, and sometimes things that are younger are more vital, and they get huge. So just the way Christianity is Judaism’s, uh, larger, more successful, uh, younger sibling, so I would like to say the US, uh, is to the UK. And the UK is very important to the US. It’s essential to the US. We may not like to admit it. There’s a rivalry. We’re kind of pissed off about some stuff you guys did in the 1700s, but-
01:25:26
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
01:25:26
Eric Weinstein: … we’ll let it slide. But, um- It is a special relationship, and you guys are supposed to provide certain things to the potluck that we’re supposed to provide others. You’re in charge of the language more or less.
01:25:44
Winston Marshall: There’s a-
01:25:44
Eric Weinstein: You’re, you’re in charge of, uh, of certain sensibilities. That stiff upper lip thing is really important as a cultural touch point. Uh, there are all of these essential things that the UK provides to the world, and it increasingly looks like you’re not interested or willing to provide it anymore, and I guess we’re confused.
01:26:13
Winston Marshall: There’s a movement on the, what I see on the right of American politics, which m- you might say the libertarian right or the m- m- and protectionist America first right.
01:26:24
Eric Weinstein: Mm.
01:26:24
Winston Marshall: And this, it’s with regards to Ukraine, Israel, but I think it might apply in this conversation more abstractly to England, which is that, so what about the rest of the world? So what about the rest of the West? It’s not our business. Let them… And I, I let them get on with it. And I think there’s, this is ki- you could actually probably trace it back to the sort of history of neo-reactionary, the neo-reactionary conservative movement in this country.
01:26:51
Eric Weinstein: You mean the, in the US, we have two beautiful oceans, so we should ignore everything, uh, that doesn’t concern us directly?
01:26:57
Winston Marshall: Why give our money to this far off war-
01:27:00
Eric Weinstein: Sure
01:27:00
Winston Marshall: … that we don’t care about? That, this is what I, I, I, I believe our mutual friend Douglas Murray is, his new book is about the significance of Israel. If Israel falls, does the West fall? I, I wonder what your opinion on this, that how is it important is Europe to America? How important is Israel? How important is England to America? If England falls, which might sound ludicrous if you’re hearing it, but actually-
01:27:27
Eric Weinstein: Define England falling. That’s really important. In other words, we have a group of people who say things like, uh, “Wisconsin is lost.”
01:27:37
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
01:27:39
Eric Weinstein: Um, I don’t know what that means. So it’s-
01:27:42
Winston Marshall: Yeah. You might say it’s just, England’s just changing. So what? It’s just changing. England’s always been changing. That’s-
01:27:46
Eric Weinstein: That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying define what it means for England to fall. I have a very clear idea of what we need from England. Whether you wish to provide it or not, that’s your own business in some sense, but I would like to think you have responsibilities. We depend upon you for wit, ingenuity, brilliance, tolerance of idiosyncrasies, particularly in science. You better keep Cambridge and Oxford humming. Make sure you, you know how to speak your own language.
01:28:20
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:28:20
Eric Weinstein: Teach it to us. You’re better at it than we are. There’s an English tradition of letters. If we need to be corrected, we’re looking to you. Not often, but sometimes we get out of our minds, you know? There’s a really important, rich relationship.
01:28:37
Winston Marshall: So actually it’s cultural.
01:28:40
Eric Weinstein: Usually.
01:28:40
Winston Marshall: Yeah. It’s-
01:28:41
Eric Weinstein: But it’s also technical.
01:28:44
Winston Marshall: How technical? What do you mean?
01:28:45
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. Where does DeepMind come from?
01:28:48
Winston Marshall: What does DeepMind mean?
01:28:49
Eric Weinstein: The, the company, the, the AI company.
01:28:52
Winston Marshall: Right.
01:28:53
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. Look, as an academic, we depend on the UK hitting and punching above its weight, and we expect you to be elitist, and we expect you to succeed and to do the impossible. You know? British special forces are ranked where in the world? Way up at the top. You guys are great at what you do in so many ways. And what we’re talking about is a potential cultural Suez Crisis to follow the original Suez Crisis, and we don’t want that.
01:29:35
Winston Marshall: Hmm. I mean, I think that’s already underway.
01:29:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, then stop it. Bring, bring back the wit of Monty Python and Flanders and Swann and Gilbert and Sullivan. Bring back the science of Michael Atiyah and Paul Dirac. Give us more Roger Penrose.
01:29:55
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:29:56
Eric Weinstein: What are you, what are you doing?
01:29:59
Winston Marshall: You mentioned be- sorry.
01:30:00
Eric Weinstein: I mean, just look, look, let’s just talk about wine and blues for the moment. You guys didn’t come up with the blues, and when you first got your hands on the blues, it sucked. It was called skiffle.
01:30:14
Winston Marshall: Skiffle did not suck, but we’ll put a pin on that for later. [laughs]
01:30:17
Eric Weinstein: I look forward to it.
01:30:18
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
01:30:20
Eric Weinstein: Um, and you can’t make wine because your climate is lousy for it. Unless there’s big climate change, you’re not making your own wine.
01:30:26
Winston Marshall: We’ve got plans for climate change.
01:30:27
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:30:27
Winston Marshall: But we’ll come back to that a little as well.
01:30:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, the point is the French knew how to make wine, but they basically consumed it locally. And when those bottles found their way across the channel, the Brits started, you know, turning it into a parlor game. Could you guess what year? You know, could you guess which vineyard? And how oaked were the barrels? You know, all, uh, all of these sorts of things, you know, about the fine points of wine or whatever it is. And the same thing was true for the blues. I mean, we got up to Buddy Guy, I would say, right? And that came over, and the Brits said, “Oh, this is interesting. Maybe this is a virtuosic art form, and we’re gonna give it to, uh, John Mayall and have him teach, uh, or Alexis Korner, and teach Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page and of, of all these people, Jeff Beck.”
01:31:21
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:31:22
Eric Weinstein: And then it took Jimi Hendrix coming over to the UK to actually get appreciated.
01:31:26
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:31:27
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so in both, just as an example, in both the case of wine and the blues- England plays this incredible role by taking something that people hadn’t been valuing, curating it properly and elevating it, you know, to the level of the highest art.
01:31:43
Winston Marshall: Mm. There’s something about… It, it’s easier to identify what another nation is from the outside, and I think with the blues, part of it, it’s, it’s a complex thing, but part of it is that from the distance of not being part of American culture, perhaps those early British bluesmen were able to identify the, the essence, the most significant essence of it, and then it went through the British system. Another aspect of it is that British music is a lot more song orientated than American music, and part of that is because you can’t tour England that long before you run out of towns, whereas America you can tour endlessly, so you have this band culture and vibe, whereas in England it’s more song. So there’s a kind of a change there in, uh, in the, in the processing of the blues.
01:32:35
Eric Weinstein: But it’s also brilliance, and you guys are ashamed about this.
01:32:40
Winston Marshall: Yeah, I think that’s probably true.
01:32:41
Eric Weinstein: So-
01:32:42
Winston Marshall: You have the opposite problem in America.
01:32:45
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
01:32:47
Winston Marshall: No, we have tall poppy syndrome. It’s a classic thing.
01:32:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so-
01:32:49
Winston Marshall: This is why people are leaving Britain now in flocks. They’re coming… They’re leaving to-
01:32:52
Eric Weinstein: Okay. All right, but get over it. You know, Newton did not come from Colorado, you know? A- and by the way, Michael Atiyah, the name Atiyah is not a classically… It’s not Wigglesbottom or something crazy like that. It’s an Arabic name. You know? Dirac is a French name. All sorts of people who came from somewhere else found a permanent place in human history in the UK.
01:33:21
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:33:22
Eric Weinstein: And it just bothers me. I, I went to a, a meeting at Ditchley. Have you ever been to Ditchley?
01:33:27
Winston Marshall: No. Where’s that?
01:33:28
Eric Weinstein: Some estate outside Oxfordshire-
01:33:30
Winston Marshall: Oh
01:33:30
Eric Weinstein: … that Winston Churchill was associated with, and there were a lot of British foreign service people. They were all fabulously educated, they were very conversant in everything, and they all were moping about, you know, somehow the loss of empire. If you think about James Bond, James Bond was coping with the l- the loss of empire. It was saying, “Okay, maybe we’re no longer that thing, uh, that rules the world, but at least we have class and ingenuity, and we can do things that no one else can do.” And you know, Felix in the CIA was always kind of trying to help James, but James could do it all on his own, right? And that kind of cowboy, British cowboy culture, uh, embodied in James Bond was really important. And I just love that stuff. You, you guys tolerate eccentrics like nobody else.
01:34:25
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:34:25
Eric Weinstein: It’s just such a genius way to be. You know, thank you for Freeman Dyson. Guy didn’t have a PhD in math or physics, and he was both a mathematician and a physicist. Se- send us more eccentrics and receive more of our people, you know? We, we-
01:34:43
Winston Marshall: Our eccentrics tend, tend to thrive better in your country because we’re not good to eccentrics.
01:34:48
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. We sent a guy from Missouri who turned out to be able to write some poetry-
01:34:52
Winston Marshall: Yeah
01:34:52
Eric Weinstein: … over in the UK. I don’t know.
01:34:55
Winston Marshall: That’s a good point.
01:34:56
Eric Weinstein: It’s a good relationship, and it’s back and forth, and I just feel like we’re not, we’re not ourselves. And you, you guys don’t have… I- in my opinion, you don’t have the right to screw this thing up as badly as you’re screwing it up.
01:35:12
Winston Marshall: Might sound dramatic, but… And in fact, this is not might, it will definitely sound dramatic to some listeners. It could be that we’re looking at a period where, like the Rome, like Rome fell, but then we s- we saw a, the empire continue in Constantinople for another thousand years. It could be that sort of period for the West, where some of these countries in Europe are really struggling, and it might be that it, the, the spirit of the Western, the West-
01:35:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:35:44
Winston Marshall: … continues in America. Does that sound ridiculous to you?
01:35:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. You guys got to get over yourselves. Shake it off. Get back in the game. Th- this is enough. You know, it’s funny. I… Somehow, um, we got, um, Douglas Murray and Andrew Doyle to Saint Helena for a week. So here we are on, like, the second most remote, uh, inhabited island in the world, um, continuously for some long period of time, and I’m just listening to these two guys who we know from Titania McGrath in the case of Andrew Doyle, and Douglas Murray for all his being a war correspondent and all of this, uh, sort of cultural commentary. And I just got a chance to listen to these guys discuss Bartók and Milton and, you know… Oh, gosh, um, Sondheim’s lyrics, poetry, food. They’re just such delightfully educated, thoughtful, funny… Getting, getting drunk with the two of them is, you know, one of the, one of the best… Douglas has to be my favorite drinking buddy-
01:36:59
Winston Marshall: Good
01:36:59
Eric Weinstein: … on earth.
01:37:00
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:37:00
Eric Weinstein: These are incredibly courageous, really deep people, who are motivated by their cultural canons. They know their history, and we’ve got like, in the case of Douglas, we’ve got precisely one-
01:37:12
Winston Marshall: Yeah
01:37:12
Eric Weinstein: … of this human being, and we need an army of them. Send us more.
01:37:17
Winston Marshall: Well, they are once in a generation, but it… Great example, Douglas spends a lot, maybe most of his time in America, and-
01:37:24
Eric Weinstein: If not Israel
01:37:25
Winston Marshall: … if not Israel. So our best, our once in a generation talents like these people are moving to-
01:37:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, they, they shouldn’t be once in a generation talents. I mean, the first thing I’m gonna say is as brilliant as Elon is, if Elon’s doing all of this- It’s not because it’s Elon, it’s because the rest of us are just failing. And if you only have one Douglas Murray to send us, that’s unforgivable. You need to send us a large number of these people, and they should have political disagreements among themselves, right?
01:37:57
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
01:37:58
Eric Weinstein: I would love to hear a more w- left-wing version of Douglas Murray debating a more right-wing version of Douglas Murray.
01:38:04
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
01:38:05
Eric Weinstein: You know, i- we can’t just have one Douglas Murray carrying the banner of the West. You guys have to figure a- out also how to stand up for the West in an attractive fashion. The-
01:38:18
Winston Marshall: You think it’s unattractive at the moment?
01:38:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, my claim is that the Rivers of Blood speech was an attempt to talk about something, and to do it in a fashion that was so controversial and so polarizing, that it didn’t get at the reasonable parts of what it was trying to address, which is i- it’s meaningful for Britain to be British, and England to be English, and Wales to be Welsh. It can’t be that it’s some sort of, you know, genetic blood and soil thing, because there’s always been a lot of cross-pollination, to the point we were just talking about it, you know, Attia or Disraeli or Dirac or what have you. Um…
01:39:00
Winston Marshall: It’s… No, it can’t be a genetic blood and soil thing.
01:39:03
Eric Weinstein: But it can be a software thing.
01:39:05
Winston Marshall: I thi- that’s exactly the word I was gonna use.
01:39:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:39:06
Winston Marshall: It’s a software thing.
01:39:07
Eric Weinstein: It’s a soft-
01:39:07
Winston Marshall: It’s a culture, culture thing. Unfortunately, at the moment, even conservatives can’t have the courage to say that, to say there is, there is a software that is English-
01:39:17
Eric Weinstein: Because the hardware part of it is ugly.
01:39:21
Winston Marshall: I mean, there’s a hardware part as well. In, in just as th- there-
01:39:25
Eric Weinstein: But genes are genes
01:39:25
Winston Marshall: … there’s ethnically Jews, there’s ethnically English. Like, if you co- come to America, there are people here who are, you know, the Anglo-Saxons. It’s a, it’s an eth- it’s considered an ethnicity here.
01:39:33
Eric Weinstein: I understand that, but nobody’s going to… Look, the part of the UK that’s worth defending is this genius culture. And if you don’t know what it is, like we were talking before about, I said everyone should know a little bit of Middle English, and everybody’s supposed to know the first- the opening lines of Chaucer. And-
01:40:02
Winston Marshall: Which amazingly you know.
01:40:06
Eric Weinstein: But to me, that was normal. That was part of what we, we, in the provinces, we [laughs] in the colonies, know that it’s important to know something about UK history and culture, and so we learn it. And, you know, I made the comment that if you, if you don’t know the first lines, which, r- you know, refer to what, what’s happening in the month of April, you can’t understand the first lines of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, because that’s what he’s referencing. And so there’s this, this web of cultural references that are necessary to have something to protect. And I think one of the reasons that Douglas, for example, is so effective in standing up for the UK and, and, and British culture, is that you need to know what it is you’re protecting.
01:40:59
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:41:00
Eric Weinstein: You know, so this comment that I made to you that when Nat King Cole, uh, does a swinging jazz version of a song called Summer Is Coming In, he’s referring to the oldest song that’s extant in the English language, which is Summer Is a Cummen In, you know, and it’s just like sweetly sings cuckoo. That thing, um, Nat King Cole, you know, who is a Black American, is referencing, um, some sort of, I don’t know, I assume Anglo-Saxon ancient song.
01:41:32
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:41:32
Eric Weinstein: And I, you know, I think I was playing for you in the car ride over, one of my favorite songs in the world, um, is the song We Be Soldiers Three from Ravenscroft in 1609. And, you know, I grew up thinking about the Deller Consort as this amazing, you know, musical ensemble. I don’t meet people from the UK who are even aware of that. Or I mentioned Flanders and Swann. You know, if I said, “Have some Madeira, Madeira,” does that reference mean anything? Or, “The hippopotamus is no ignoramus.” You know, all of these things that inspired Tom Lehrer i, in the States, you know, to comparable levels of, of, of musical comedy and brilliance.
01:42:12
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:42:13
Eric Weinstein: We don’t know our own history, so we’re not defending it. We don’t have a canon. And I think you guys are responsible for some of that degradation. That’s on you. I don’t know why you let it happen.
01:42:24
Winston Marshall: There’s been an absolute failure of education. Although, I’m not totally convinced when you, y- you s- you s- used the, the, the pronoun we there. I don’t think it’s typical, your knowledge of the English canon, to most Americans, certainly not even to most English. So where did that come from? It didn’t come from school. That’s c- come from your own-
01:42:44
Eric Weinstein: Some of it comes from school
01:42:44
Winston Marshall: … you’re an Angri- Anglophile.
01:42:46
Eric Weinstein: No. No, no. Some of that comes from school. Everyone who graduated my high school can say, “Wan that the prille with the sorgestote, The droghte of March hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur, Of which vertu engendred is the flour.” We all had to learn that.
01:43:01
Winston Marshall: What high sc- I mean, that, that’s an unbelievable education if you got that. What high school was that?
01:43:05
Eric Weinstein: It doesn’t matter. I-
01:43:06
Winston Marshall: But that’s not a regular high school.
01:43:10
Eric Weinstein: It was important. It was important that we understood that we were part of a tradition. It was important that… We are connected to you, and the less you are connected to yourselves, the less appealing it is to continue to be connected to you, right?
01:43:31
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:43:31
Eric Weinstein: Because there’s always the possibility that when a brash 20-something like Jim Watson goes to England and encounters a bizarre 35-year-old Francis Crick That a great partnership could mean something. You know, and I, I tell this story, and it’s really important to me, that I had Jim Watson, who’s now a bit of an ass, but [laughs] the legacy of Jim Watson is far too important to be entrusted to Jim Watson. And he was in my office, and I, I said, “Look, we’ve been hanging out for a few days. I wanna play you some video of Francis Crick.” And I hit the play button, and I watched him go into rapture. You know, it was just like he had met his old friend again on my monitor. And I’d been saving up this question, which was very dangerous. So I could see that he was, you know, just in a state of reverie, lost hearing Francis’ voice. And it was, it was kind of odd because I was in the room, and I, I felt like I didn’t belong there. I said, “Jim, do you mind if I ask you a question?” He says, “No, go ahead.” I said, “What are you experiencing?” He said, “It, it’s just wonderful to hear Francis’ voice again.”
01:44:47
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:44:48
Eric Weinstein: And I said, “I read your book very carefully.” I said, “It’s probably one of the greatest books written in the English language. It just happens to be written by one of the greatest scientists in the, uh, in the world. You’re very clear that you figured out the complementary relations between the nucleotides when a guy named Gerry Donahue told you that all of the books were wrong and that there was a hydrogen ati- atom in the wrong place, and you figured out the equimolar relations of Chargaff, and you came up with the pairing. Didn’t you really discover the secret of DNA, and you e- enlarged it to Watson and Crick?” And he looked at me. He said, “Oh, no.” He said … I said, “Did I get that wrong?” He said, “No, you’re exactly right. The inside of DNA was all me.” He said, “But the sugar phosphate backbone on the outside that twirls around is all Francis.” And I thought about that. The world’s greatest partnership is visually lost on us. The inside of it is Jim Watson. The outside of it is Francis Crick, and it’s the US and the UK intertwined forever.
01:46:01
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:46:03
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, if you talk about pilgrimages, there are a couple pilgrimages that are really worth doing. One is the Eagle Pub where they burst in and said, “We’ve discovered the secret of life.” You wanna talk about great science tourism, that’s ce- certainly one. The other-
01:46:22
Winston Marshall: And where would that … Where is that?
01:46:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it’s in … It’s … I guess it’s in Cambridge.
01:46:27
Winston Marshall: Oh, okay.
01:46:27
Eric Weinstein: I don’t, I don’t remember where. And the other one is this, uh, clock, which, um, is sort of garish. I think it has a grasshopper on the top of it. And I don’t know, it was made for a million dollars or a million pounds, but what it is is it’s the grasshopper escapement of Harrison, who won the Longitude Prize because it … you needed to tell what time of day it was to navigate at sea so you didn’t have to use dead reckoning. But all of the grandfather clocks with their pendulums were thrown off by the rocking of a boat.
01:47:01
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:47:02
Eric Weinstein: And so it’s the invention of a timepiece that allows you to navigate using the stars at sea. Um, I’m in love with the UK, and I’m really disturbed that you guys don’t value yourselves, and I don’t know what to do about it. I think you need somebody to kick your ass from outside.
01:47:21
Winston Marshall: Yeah. Things might get a lot more desperate, and that’s, that’s tends to be … I mean, that’s what happened before Maga- Mar- Maggie Thatcher came to power, so maybe that’s what’s ha- what will happen again.
01:47:30
Eric Weinstein: You guys have to be decent about whatever comes, and it’s not going to be easy.
01:47:36
Winston Marshall: You have, forgive me, actually, you wanted to talk about fashion. Apparently, you’re a great lover of fashion.
01:47:42
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. You can’t do it that way.
01:47:43
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
01:47:45
Eric Weinstein: No, I said no one … That’s not fair. I said, “No one ever asks me about fashion.”
01:47:49
Winston Marshall: It was a very sweet moment in the car. I think it was in the car, or maybe it was when we arrived here, that you said people never ask you about fashion. But that’s very curious. I would never have expected you to make a statement like that. And why is fashion important to you?
01:48:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think it, I think it’s emblematic of the fact that everything important should be of interest. And what I was trying to get at was actually just that I get asked the same set of questions because people say, “Oh, you’re a mathematician. We can talk to you about math,” or, “You’re a cultural commentator. We can talk to you about what’s going on in politics.” But people don’t ask questions like, you know, “Do you have opinions on, uh, interior design?” or, uh, “What do you think about is wrong with child-rearing?” or anything like that. So you get, you get locked into the same set of questions.
01:48:36
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:48:37
Eric Weinstein: And oddly, um, one of the things I find fascinating is that we are sheepish about fashion. Everyone clearly cares about it, but it’s a guilty pleasure as opposed to something that you can measure in terms of the economic activity that’s devoted to it or the amount of time and bandwidth that we devote to it. And what’s fascinating to me is that we don’t recognize that it’s, um … Great fashion houses are, tend to be founded on engineering breakthroughs.
01:49:09
Winston Marshall: This is my thesis from earlier.
01:49:11
Eric Weinstein: Say more.
01:49:13
Winston Marshall: Culture and politics are downstream from tech. The b- big example, the famous example will be, uh, Martin Luther k- following the printing press and then the bloody wars that followed that. In music, for example, 1951, the Telecaster was invented. Before the Telecaster, do you know what the biggest selling instrument was in America?
01:49:35
Eric Weinstein: Mandolin?
01:49:36
Winston Marshall: It was the banjo.
01:49:37
Eric Weinstein: Banjo.
01:49:38
Winston Marshall: The banjo was the biggest selling instrument ahead of guitar because it was the loudest. The Teleca- Ca- Telecaster comes along. Not only does it wipe out banjo sales, but look at the charts. It all becomes electronic music. The same thing happens in the ’80s with the synthesizer It’s not that the music needed the syn- pop culture wanted a synthesizer, it’s that the synthesizer came up and then influenced the music that followed. And I could give many other examples of this.
01:50:03
Eric Weinstein: So-
01:50:04
Winston Marshall: But tech, uh, fashion, sorry. Fa- yeah, fashion, culture, politics are all downstream from tech. That’s g- that’s-
01:50:11
Eric Weinstein: So my understanding was that the original problem was is that a guitar couldn’t stand up to the rest of a band. It would get drowned out.
01:50:18
Winston Marshall: Exactly right.
01:50:19
Eric Weinstein: So then the idea was we want to amplify the guitar, and in the process of that you found that you had a feedback problem. So the hollow bodies had a problem, and you had to put in a, a block, and so you got the semi-hol- hollow bodies. And then Leo Fender had a crazy idea. And Leo Fender’s crazy idea was, I think, referred to by the Gibson company as the plank guitar.
01:50:44
Winston Marshall: Huh.
01:50:44
Eric Weinstein: Where the idea is it was just a slab of wood with pickups because you didn’t really need it to be a guitar in the standard sense. So what started off as the Broadcaster became the Telecaster. Still sort of regarded as kind of the most universal of electric guitars. And then after some period of time when Fender was focused on getting the cleanest tone possible, it gradually came to be understood by Dave Davies of The Kinks and, uh, Jimi Hendrix, that dirt in the sound was actually magical.
01:51:16
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:51:17
Eric Weinstein: And so Dave Davies apparently slashed the cone of his amp on You Really Got Me to get that kind of, you know, the guttural, uh, driven sound because violence of course is, um, what’s necessary for creative birth. And then Hendrix, uh, requested that his amps be built with the high gain and distortion into it because he viewed the amp as the most important part of the guitar system. It was the, the guitar was the controller and the amp was the instrument.
01:51:51
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:51:52
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, that evolution from Charlie Christian through, uh, you know, and Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass into Dave Davies and, uh, and Jimi Hendrix, you know, that’s like an, an amazing story. But the odd part about it is that, um, the mandolin which is what Gibson, uh, originally produced-
01:52:13
Winston Marshall: This is your grandfather’s mandolin
01:52:15
Eric Weinstein: … this is my grandfather’s mandolin. [mandolin being played] And the, the Italians have these beautiful bowl-back ribbed mandolins. The problem is, is that it rotates out from under you. And so Gibson I think was the original-
01:52:31
Winston Marshall: Right
01:52:31
Eric Weinstein: … uh, innovator of the flat-backed mandolin. I could have that wrong. And there was a group I think called like the, the Spanish Students who toured the US and women would swoon for their, uh, mandolin virtuosity. And there was a war sort of between the mandolin and the guitar for preeminence.
01:52:48
Winston Marshall: Huh.
01:52:49
Eric Weinstein: And that the guitar in some sense is the great compromise instrument. But there’s always a sweetness to the mandolin. And when I found out that you actually compose and, and write on mandolin-
01:53:00
Winston Marshall: Yeah
01:53:00
Eric Weinstein: … uh, because we associate you with the banjo, and if not the banjo then with the guitar, I was just fascinated. What, what’s your feeling about the mandolin?
01:53:08
Winston Marshall: I- it was a very practical instrument for writing because it’s so small, so it’s easy to travel around. The banjo, lugging a banjo around is a pain in the ass. It weighs a ton. It annoys everyone and it invites ridicule. The mandolin-
01:53:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:53:21
Winston Marshall: … by contrast, very, you can literally fit it in your suitcase. But also the, the register of it, uh, for me, for my voice, I always found it easy to sing with. So I was [mandolin being played] I, I sort of love this. This is, this is part of the … You said it was 1930s.
01:53:36
Eric Weinstein: I think so.
01:53:38
Winston Marshall: So this would’ve been the beginning of mass, um-
01:53:41
Eric Weinstein: I think
01:53:41
Winston Marshall: … production instruments the same time as the Stella guitar in America.
01:53:45
Eric Weinstein: M- Ming Quock who owns Heritage and Harmony said that the brand in the, in the A-hole, um, sorry, it’s an A-style manda-
01:53:56
Winston Marshall: Excuse me [laughs]
01:53:56
Eric Weinstein: … A-style mandolin with a, with an oval hole.
01:53:59
Winston Marshall: Orpheus mandolin.
01:54:00
Eric Weinstein: That Orpheus was a rebrand of a Harmony product, and my grandfather played that, and that was his principal instrument. And the odd thing about it is that because it has no sustain really because of the short, uh, strings, the tremolo that you get from just sitting on one pair of doubled strings and going back and forth sustains the note rather than letting the note ring out, uh, only to gradually decay.
01:54:31
Winston Marshall: Mm.
01:54:31
Eric Weinstein: So in, in some sense what you’re doing is you’re replacing the bowing motion-
01:54:35
Winston Marshall: Mm
01:54:35
Eric Weinstein: … um, with very fast back and forth.
01:54:38
Winston Marshall: Staccato versus legato.
01:54:39
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:54:39
Winston Marshall: Yeah, yeah. So why, why do you, what do you know about your grandfather playing this instrument?
01:54:44
Eric Weinstein: Oh, well he just-
01:54:46
Winston Marshall: Was he, was, w- was he playing it, was he a proper player or was it, you know, a fun thing or?
01:54:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, he just … I don’t know, he would, he would do things … See, I don’t really know how to, how to play it. [mandolin being played] But he would do, you know [mandolin being played] You know, and he would play like old, uh, Italian songs, Come Back to Sorrento or he would sing, “Oh Patty did and did you hear the news that’s going around? The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.” And it was a means of transmitting, um … You know, in fact there’s one thing he would c- do. He’d go [mandolin being played] We n- never knew what that was. Some Russian thing. [mandolin being played]
01:55:50
Winston Marshall: Huh.
01:55:51
Eric Weinstein: And like I’ve never known what that is a fragment of, but- He would sit and he’d play any song. He could pick out a tune. It was great because if you’re melodically oriented, you- y- it’s not like the guitar where you’re just plucking one note at a time. It- it sort of, it lends itself because it’s a manual violin, if you will. Um, it is largely a monophonic instrument the way a violin, aside from occasional double stops, is largely one note at a time. And I’m just sad in some sense that I don’t see more people falling in love with it. You know, when we have these great recording artists like Sierra Dawn Hall, you were talking about Chris, I don’t know how to pronounce his last name, Tilly?
01:56:31
Winston Marshall: Chris Tilly, yeah, from Nickel-
01:56:33
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:56:34
Winston Marshall: … Creek and, not Nickelback, Nickel Creek-
01:56:35
Eric Weinstein: N-
01:56:35
Winston Marshall: … and then the Punch brothers, yeah
01:56:37
Eric Weinstein: … um, or David Grisman and, you know, all of these genius mandolin players. I’m just always sad that we don’t talk about mandolin, the mandolin family, the mandola, the octave mandolin, the Irish bouzouki.
01:56:51
Winston Marshall: Bouzouki, yeah.
01:56:52
Eric Weinstein: Uh, the difference between F-style and A-style mandolins, archtop, you know, things that look like guitars. Um, and I- I- I chanced upon this, you know, group of sort of troubadours when I w- I was going to the, um, Festival of Arts, Institute for Arts and Ideas in Hay, in, in Wales. And, you know, I saw this beautiful archtop carved guitar, and I realized too many strings, and it’s not a 12-string guitar. And I said, “Holy cow, I’m looking at something like an archtop mandocello.”
01:57:25
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:57:27
Eric Weinstein: And the octave mandolin and the mandocello are just … They’re like the oud. They’re somehow exactly in this resonant range that’s, you know, you could hear like the Bach cello suites on them, or you could hear, um… They just speak directly to the soul, and these instruments are totally neglected. It’s, I can go a lifetime without running into an octave mandolin or a mandocello.
01:57:54
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
01:57:55
Eric Weinstein: And if you’ve never seen a man- did you ever see a mandolin orchestra where all of the violins are replaced by mandolins-
01:58:00
Winston Marshall: No
01:58:00
Eric Weinstein: … and mandolas replace the violas and-
01:58:03
Winston Marshall: Wow.
01:58:04
Eric Weinstein: Oh, so many beautiful things that just somehow got lost.
01:58:07
Winston Marshall: Is mandolin a big part of Jewish music?
01:58:10
Eric Weinstein: It’s interesting. Uh, in India, in Bollywood, I believe the Jews brought the mandolin to Bollywood. Um, I think it lends itself if you’re trained in violin, that you can easily convert what you, what you know to mandolin.
01:58:33
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:58:33
Eric Weinstein: But, um, yeah, I was, I was plugging in with the Indian Jewish heritage of Bollywood, and there’s a, there’s a wonderful film called, uh, Dilwale… uh, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, DDLJ, in which the main character played by Shah Rukh Khan, uh, plays the mandolin, and it just has this kind of, uh, it’s a great love story, and it, the mandolin figures prominently in it. And it was one of these places where wherever the mandolin is heard, whether it’s in, I don’t know, Maggie May, uh, with Rod Stewart or the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris, you know, um, every place it occurs, it just carries a sweetness to it.
01:59:22
Winston Marshall: Yeah.
01:59:24
Eric Weinstein: Will you play something for me?
01:59:25
Winston Marshall: Well, no, I don’t. [laughs]
01:59:27
Eric Weinstein: Uh, you should. No, no, no.
01:59:28
Winston Marshall: But I, uh, you said earlier that your grandfather was playing a Russian tune. Was he Russian? Was he-
01:59:34
Eric Weinstein: His family came from, uh, from Riga in Latvia-
01:59:42
Winston Marshall: Oh
01:59:43
Eric Weinstein: … and from places in Russia and-
01:59:47
Winston Marshall: Was he born in America?
01:59:48
Eric Weinstein: Yes, he was.
01:59:49
Winston Marshall: But that, that culture came with him.
01:59:51
Eric Weinstein: Sure. But, you know, and it also came with, uh, German was the language of erudition because, uh, in Riga, you know, German schools were at the highest levels of achievement.
02:00:02
Winston Marshall: Oh. Yeah.
02:00:02
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, so Yiddish and Russian and, uh, Latvian and, um, all of these things were just in a kind of a great potent mix.
02:00:13
Winston Marshall: Yeah. Huh. Wow.
02:00:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, you have some Jewish heritage. Did you have any s-
02:00:18
Winston Marshall: I have some Jewish heritage, yeah. My grandmo- grandmother was Jewish. Uh, but they had a complicated story, and she would deny that she was Jewish.
02:00:27
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.
02:00:27
Winston Marshall: That’s part of a protective mechanism, I think, that was quite common after the Holocaust.
02:00:32
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
02:00:33
Winston Marshall: ‘Cause she, she lost so much of her family and tried to deal with that sort of losses. Unimaginable, really. Unfathomable. So I don’t really have Jewish culture at all.
02:00:46
Eric Weinstein: You might have more than you think.
02:00:48
Winston Marshall: Well, if you’re English, I would say that w- and this is go back to a, a earlier part of the conversation, I think that J- Judaism and, and Jewish culture is hugely important for English. It’s fo- our, our, our moral system is founded on the Jews’ moral system.
02:01:02
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Well, this is, you know, one of these relationships which it’s very important that Jews not think they can get by without Christianity, and Christianity needs to stop trying to rid itself [laughs] of its, uh, Jewish foundation. I mean-
02:01:18
Winston Marshall: Do you think it is?
02:01:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sometimes.
02:01:21
Winston Marshall: How so?
02:01:24
Eric Weinstein: I think when you look at the anti-Jewish sentiments that are cropping up now everywhere on social media-
02:01:30
Winston Marshall: Hmm
02:01:30
Eric Weinstein: … you see this, this sort of terrible thing, which is imagine that you lost a, a nickel in a $10,000 couch, and you become obsessed with trying to get the nickel out of your couch, and you tear the couch to shreds-
02:01:45
Winston Marshall: Hmm
02:01:45
Eric Weinstein: … you know, just for the privilege of getting rid of the nickel. I think that in some sense that’s what we keep doing with culture. You know, that sometimes there’s a dream that we’re going to purify ourselves, that the Ch- Christians You know, really got things right, and the Jews are somehow an adulteration of Christianity. That will never work. And on the other hand, if Jews have any kind of ideas that they can possibly succeed without a Christian substrate in the world, they’ve got another thing coming.
02:02:13
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:02:13
Eric Weinstein: And this idea of learning what these relationships are. Like the US is not the UK, and the UK is not the US, but it’s really important that they reinforce each other. And I don’t know what to do about that, because the, the dream of purity is, is usually a dream that has to be resisted. It will result in madness.
02:02:33
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:02:34
Eric Weinstein: Because things that are somewhat doped with each other tend to be much stronger through hybrid vigor. But somebody will say, “Well, of course you would say that. You’re, you’re hawking your evil ways.” We have to be very concerned about what’s about to happen where Christians are not going to church, they’re not singing their own songs, they’re not living their own traditions, their own theology, their own philosophical traditions. And I think what we need is a much more vibrant, uh, spiritual, cultural life, even if people are atheistic. As an atheist who prays, and as an atheist who goes to houses of worship, and not only my own. You know, we were just in church with Douglas in Saint Helena. Um, I think it’s very important to attend each other’s houses of worship.
02:03:26
Winston Marshall: Hmm. An atheist that prays. What, what do you mean an atheist that prays? ‘Cause I certainly… So the church I go to in London is famous that it attracts a lot of atheists. Whether or not they’re praying, I couldn’t possibly say. So I understand the idea of m- maintaining the ritual of going to houses of worship and sharing each other’s places of worship, but the act of prayer itself, it’s such a personal thing. I mean, if you are praying, aren’t you by definition believing?
02:03:58
Eric Weinstein: W- Winston, if you’re honest with yourself, your faith is not uniform. It is tested at some points. It is stronger at others. And, you know, I really think that we have this blockage whereby we have what I call a Chomskyan pre-grammar of religiosity. Chom-
02:04:21
Winston Marshall: What does that mean?
02:04:22
Eric Weinstein: We have a facility for language whether we know it or not, and something is going to attach to that.
02:04:27
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:04:27
Eric Weinstein: Whether it’s Arabic or Farsi or Spanish. In the same way, we have a basic facility for religiosity and, and prayer, and so something’s gonna bind to that.
02:04:44
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:04:45
Eric Weinstein: You know? If you recite the Pledge of Allegiance, that’s somewhat close to a prayer. It’s a national prayer, if you will. You know, but whether you say, “I pledge allegiance to the flag,” or you say, “Our Father who art in heaven.” Um, all of these things are attaching to the same thing, and it’s not gonna go unbound.
02:05:05
Winston Marshall: Yep.
02:05:05
Eric Weinstein: You know. So I make this point, a- a- as you may have heard, about, um, about AC/DC, and, uh, and You Shook Me. All Night Long. You know. And, uh [playing guitar]. What key you in?
02:05:30
Winston Marshall: G.
02:05:38
Eric Weinstein: [singing] She was a fast machine. She kept her motor clean. [singing] So the part that goes out into this, [singing] yeah, you shook me-
02:05:57
Winston Marshall: [singing] All night long
02:05:58
Eric Weinstein: … okay.
02:06:00
Winston Marshall: Yeah. [laughs]
02:06:01
Eric Weinstein: So that’s so close to [singing] Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu-
02:06:09
Winston Marshall: Ah
02:06:10
Eric Weinstein: … Adonai ehad. The Shema is this very holy prayer with four notes, really. Do, re, mi, and fa. And, you know, [singing] yeah, you shook me all night long. It has that pow- that power, and I think that what we don’t realize is that there’s no way of escaping prayer. It’s going-
02:06:43
Winston Marshall: Hmm
02:06:43
Eric Weinstein: … whether it’s profane, um, you know, whether or not it’s recognized as prayer, you’re going to end up praying, and you’re gonna end up talking to something. You know, do, do, do you talk to the dead?
02:06:59
Winston Marshall: Yep.
02:06:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So do I. It’s kinda crazy that you know somebody so well that you can conjure their voice. You know, everybody has a Donald Trump impression at this point.
02:07:08
Winston Marshall: [laughs]
02:07:08
Eric Weinstein: And if Donald Trump had been taken by this bullet, you’d still have enough information about him to conjure him, about what he would say and how he would act. And so I find it very strange that people don’t wanna talk to the dead even though really talking to the dead is just talking to your client side, um, model of somebody you’ve lost.
02:07:31
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:07:32
Eric Weinstein: And I think it’s weird not to, not to want to pray just because you don’t think that there’s anybody on the other end of the phone.
02:07:39
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:07:40
Eric Weinstein: You know, think of it, if you’re in cu- with customer service, you start bargaining. “Please, somebody pick up the phone.” You know, “I’ve been on hold for 20 minutes.”
02:07:48
Winston Marshall: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]
02:07:48
Eric Weinstein: “Is there no one there to hear me?” You know, that’s, that’s a lot of what prayer is. It’s just-
02:07:54
Winston Marshall: Hmm
02:07:54
Eric Weinstein: … it’s hope that there is somebody on the other end, whether you believe that there’s no one there at all or not.
02:08:02
Winston Marshall: So you’re a praying man?
02:08:04
Eric Weinstein: Every week. Without fail almost. I mean, you know, we try to take Shabbat dinners fairly seriously. And my wife used to be very uncomfortable about the fact that we would invite people over, because she’d say, “Well, you know, people aren’t comfortable,” and we got over it. And quite honestly, everybody wants it in their lives. People say, “You do this every week. I’ve never seen anything like that.” There are no traditions. Nobody’s keeping these things up. But imagine that you have, like, a dinner every week with f- your favorite people in the world, or strangers who have no place to go, and, you know, for three hours you’re just gonna eat good food, you’re gonna talk about what’s going on in the world, you’re gonna sing songs. It’s so good for the soul. There’s no reason… And, and this is something that I, you know, I really wish Christians would take seriously. You don’t have to have a Shabbat dinner, but nobody’s telling you you can’t.
02:08:57
Winston Marshall: Mm.
02:08:58
Eric Weinstein: And if you wanna really get involved in your history and where Christianity came from, I’d highly recommend it. Uh, you know, I gr- I grew up going to a school with an Episcopal church on, on campus, and we went once every two weeks to, you know, hear sermons and, and lift our voices in prayer, whether we were Jewish or Episcopal or Muslim or Hindu. Doesn’t matter.
02:09:22
Winston Marshall: Mm.
02:09:23
Eric Weinstein: You know, I just think people need to get over themselves a little bit more and open their hearts and try to, try to use this as a commonality rather than as a dividing line.
02:09:32
Winston Marshall: Mm. I’ve seen, I don’t know if this is happening society-wide, but there’s been a definite, in the intellectual space, there’s been a definite res- response against the new atheist movement. The prominent people being Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, her recent conversion to Christianity from being one of the most prominent new atheists. Jordan Peterson’s been at the front of that, a lot of that stuff, and where he is exactly with his faith, he’s always a bit ambiguous. Russell Ba- Brand, although rather theatrical, is definitely a, a prominent example of someone converting to Christianity publicly recently. There seems to be a re-engagement with the founding metaphysical and scriptural underpinnings of our civilization, which at the surface seems very encouraging and positive to me. I, I would even include myself in it. I was not a Christian five years ago, and w- w- was an atheist and came to Christ and, and have, uh, it’s completely changed everything for me and, and it’s interesting to see this, uh, across society. Is, is this something you’re encouraged by? Have you noticed this? Do you think I’m-
02:10:47
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Uh, the, the thing about it-
02:10:49
Winston Marshall: Do you think it’s real, or do you think it’s just a, it’s-
02:10:52
Eric Weinstein: I’m in a funny place about it, because, you know, I was in a situation in which I was the only non free speech absolutist, where everyone was claiming that they were free speech absolutists.
02:11:01
Winston Marshall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs]
02:11:03
Eric Weinstein: But then I didn’t deviate from my path because I didn’t have to. I saw the challenges that were gonna come up, where the edge case takes somebody out of their free speech absolutism, and I think I feel the same way about my atheism. You know, we’ve been doing this prayer thing for 20 plus years, close to 25 now. Um, so my feeling is I don’t have the same need to lurch from one side to the other. I think prayer is really good, and I think it’s really important to consider your belief and realize that nobody belie- no atheist is perfect in their, uh, certainty that there is nothing, th- there is no good argument for a god, and no devout person is unwavering. Most important thing is self-acceptance. Is what does it mean to be a human being? Tell me that you’re not built for religion and prayer. It’s like saying to me, “You’re not built for language.”
02:12:05
Winston Marshall: Mm.
02:12:05
Eric Weinstein: Or, you know, y- this marvelous opposable thumb that we have has no function. So it’s there, and it’s gonna get used. I would far prefer that it be used by something that’s been around for centuries and that brings us together and that we know the dangers of it, so that we don’t get divided by it, and we don’t try to purify ourselves and try to find the, the heretics and the apostates to be burned at the stake. But, you know, e- even the, the tough one for me is Islam, because I have a quote which is that, “I love everything about war except for death and destruction.” Um, I love everything about Islam except for its propensity for oppression and violence. Uh, but the beauty, you know, of architecture, the, uh, call to prayer, the concern for the poor, the strength of families, the quality of the food. You know, the, the tough part is getting rid of the madness. And we’ve had Jewish madness, we’ve had Christian madness, we’ve had Muslim madness, we’ve had Hindu madness. It’s really important to recognize that we’re all responsible for pruning ourselves of the madness so that we can be good neighbors to each other.
02:13:28
Winston Marshall: There’s a tricky thing with Islam, which let’s, I don’t know if, how I can tie in the J- the Jewish scripture with this, but certainly if you compare Muhammad to Christ. Muhammad, uh, Christ is infallible and untouchable, like he is the perfect human. Certainly the story that we know about him. Muhammad was a warmonger and spread that religion by the sword, and so this propensity to violence that you name, I think ultimately goes down to the, the f- the founder of that religion. So I, I’m not sure it’s, it’s that obvious to me how it can be… Now, there’s some brilliant Muslims, and geopolitically, I, I’ve said this regularly on the show, what the Emiratis have done for peace in the Middle East, their Hope their willingness to trade and work with Israel gives me great hope for the future of the region, particularly if Israel can be successful in this war. But one of the problems we’ve had in Britain is this, this, uh, intensity and tension between M- ah, British Muslims and non, uh, British non-Muslims. That seems to be, uh, this- one of the crucial questions for our co- country
02:14:48
Eric Weinstein: No pluralistic society can afford totalizing ideologies. If you had totalitarian Prius owners who felt that the only car was the Prius, and everyone else was, uh, you know, heretical, that wouldn’t work. And we’re down to very few totalizing ideologies. Um, the problem is not any particular religion. The problem is totality, right? When you get to totalizing, then no argument can come from outside. And, you know, in part, n- not, not to make a point of it, but you mentioned two historical figures. What would be the comparable figure in Judaism? Moses.
02:15:43
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:15:45
Eric Weinstein: Moses was pretty imperfect.
02:15:47
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:15:48
Eric Weinstein: He doesn’t wanna talk directly to God at the beginning. You know, “Why me? Why am I gonna go talk to Pharaoh? I have a stutter.” He’s, uh, he’s sort of induced by God into too close of a relationship. He then screws up when he’s tapping the, uh, the rock with his staff, and he says, “I will bring you water.” Lord says [laughs], “What do you, what do you mean you? I thought I was bringing the water. You were just tapping the rock with the staff.” Um-
02:16:20
Winston Marshall: He screws up again when he doesn’t circumcise his children, and, uh, God almost ends it for him that period.
02:16:27
Eric Weinstein: So my claim is-
02:16:29
Winston Marshall: There’s a big difference, though. Sorry to… Well, let, m- make your claim, and then I’ll push back.
02:16:33
Eric Weinstein: My claim is that perfection is terrifying. And if we Jews have something to contribute to the potluck, it might be that if you think you understand the will of God, and if you think you understand exactly what you’re supposed to do and what everyone else is supposed to do, you probably missed a meeting, and you need to have some epistemic humility. And, you know, in the case of perfect figures, you should say, well, if those perfect figures are unique in your ideology, then no human is capable of divining exactly what he or she is supposed to do. I don’t know how to soften it. There’s a very strict interpretation of some of these religions in which, you know, everything is divine and known, and I don’t know how to unhook that. But I think it… The, the key issue is that totalizing is the problem. The reason communism is so dangerous is that it’s a totalizing ideology.
02:17:44
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
02:17:44
Eric Weinstein: North Korea has a totalizing ideology. Now, we’re not in danger because North Korean, you know, whatever, Juche, or whatever their, their theory is, hasn’t spread. But we’re now down to very few totalizing ideologies, and the problem isn’t the religions. It’s totality.
02:18:02
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm. The problem that Islam has on that specific issue is that unlike… So Christ is perfect and infallible, but his, uh, actual behavior was perfect and infallible. Moses, though a prophet, was human, made mistakes, and God punished him. Muhammad, though a prophet, whether he’s fallible or not is in contention, and throughout the Quran, it does say you have to take this literally. You have to take this word exactly-
02:18:31
Eric Weinstein: I think I’ve said what I mean to say.
02:18:33
Winston Marshall: Mm-hmm.
02:18:33
Eric Weinstein: The problem is perfection. The problem is totalizing behavior and totalizing ideology. We err when we attempt to single out particular totalizing ideologies. The problem is totality.
02:18:49
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:18:53
Eric Weinstein: Anybody who’s not subscribed to a totalizing ideology is reachable. Anybody who is subscribed to any totalizing, like vegans. If you had a totalizing vegan ideology, there would be no way of reaching that person. The problem isn’t where totality alights.
02:19:13
Winston Marshall: Hmm.
02:19:13
Eric Weinstein: The problem is totality.
02:19:19
Winston Marshall: Hmm. On that note, Dr. Weinstein, thank you so much for your time.
02:19:24
Eric Weinstein: Winston, a great pleasure.
02:19:25
Winston Marshall: I feel very lucky to have, uh, the chance to speak to you for so long, and even better to have your grandfather’s instrument and talk so many topics. That was fascinating. Is there anything that you’ve… Any loose ends you feel that you’d r-
02:19:39
Eric Weinstein: Many, and I look forward to-
02:19:40
Winston Marshall: That’s a thing
02:19:40
Eric Weinstein: … dealing with, dealing with them, uh, with you on a future conversation.
02:19:45
Winston Marshall: I would love that. Thank you, Dr. Weinstein.
02:19:47
Eric Weinstein: Thank you, sir.
