Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.
00:00 Introduction
00:40 We Don’t Know If This Will Be A Disaster Or A Golden Age
09:18 Is Trump Really Going To Pull The US Out Of NATO?
13:06 Do We Need A Disrupter At This Moment In Time?
20:18 ExpressVPN Advert
21:26 There Is A Lack Of Understanding Of Iran
26:38 The Media Just Lies
32:06 Will The Left Face Reality?
44:17 Where Are The Men In The Democrat And Republican Parties?
49:47 Anonymity On Social Media
01:01:04 Are You Hopeful For America?
Transcript
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [instrumental music] What’s really exciting to me is we don’t know if this is gonna be a disaster or whether this is gonna be a new golden age. He’s really the most anomalous politician we’ve ever had, and I think that a lot of the discomfort comes from people trying to put him in one box or another. He just won’t fit.
00:00:18
Konstantin Kisin: So what’s your concern?
00:00:20
Eric Weinstein: This is really dangerous stuff. What he’s about to do, in my opinion, is renegotiate the world. We needed to shake this up, for sure, but this is, uh, this is going up to 11. The, the Cold War is forever. I don’t think that the level of imagination needed to imagine nukes is very high anymore.
00:00:41
Konstantin Kisin: Eric Weinstein, welcome back.
00:00:42
Eric Weinstein: Good to be with you guys.
00:00:43
Konstantin Kisin: It’s good to have you. Uh, listen, the election is, is over. It’s happened. Uh, Trump is the president. He’s got a clear mandate to govern. Uh, you were somebody who took a lot of flak in the run-up to the election from people, uh, who felt that you were, I don’t know, fence-sitting or whatever the term might be.
00:01:00
Eric Weinstein: We’re not gonna start there. That’s ridiculous. We can get to that. What we should be talking about, first of all, is is that this is a stunning result.
00:01:07
Konstantin Kisin: It is.
00:01:08
Eric Weinstein: And it’s… w- because that just allows the trolls to determine the, the narrative.
00:01:13
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:01:14
Eric Weinstein: Um, w- we have a new situation that has not occurred probably since Ronald Reagan.
00:01:21
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:01:22
Eric Weinstein: And I think this is a dramatic moment, and I- I’m just… I guess I’m mostly thinking about all the things that can happen now, as a guy who was trying to do all sorts of, um, policy adjustments from, like, the, the 1980s through about, I don’t know, uh, the second Obama term. And so what’s really exciting to me is, um, we don’t know if this is gonna be a disaster or whether this is gonna be a new golden age. It’s kind of a huge variance.
00:01:51
Konstantin Kisin: Well, that’s what I was gonna ask you, ’cause I… And it’s somewhat a, a confession for me. Like, I w- what I was gonna ask you really is, are you unhappy with the result?
00:02:02
Eric Weinstein: I don’t think it’s the right question. I mean, I think that the idea is that this is a pretty desperate situation, and it could go horribly wrong or amazingly right. And I think the wide variance is what’s confusing people.
00:02:16
Konstantin Kisin: Okay, that’s very interesting. So a lot of people just feel like finally the… You know, we just had Rob Snyder on, and his, his line was, “The left went so far to the left, they left the country behind.” So a lot of peal- people feel, well, that’s kind of… we’ve arrested that slide, right? And therefore, a lot of people are happy, even people who were in the middle like us. But you are concerned?
00:02:40
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I’m very concerned.
00:02:43
Konstantin Kisin: Why?
00:02:44
Eric Weinstein: Um, because y- you’re, you’re, you’re basically breaking, um, a lot of structure. That’s what I think is about to happen, and that could go horribly wrong. Um, but a lot of that structure was really diseased, and so as a result, you know, you have a load-bearing wall, and you’ve got a contractor who’s got an i- a bold plan to, you know, knock out load-bearing walls. You don’t know whether they’re capable of doing it, and the whole apartment build- building’s gonna come down, or whether finally, uh, we’re gonna get a solid foundation. So I think, I think people just aren’t understanding that this is not the continuation. This is, first of all, not the first Trump administration, where I c- I, I knew the error he was gonna make. He, he thought he was going to be governing, and you can’t govern in Washington unless you have a giant team, and there are only two giant teams, and Trumpism didn’t exist. So it wasn’t like Trump could hire a bunch of Trumpists, because Trump just made stuff up that was totally idiosyncratic and, uh, of the moment, and he’s the only person who can do Trump, right? It’s just this completely erratic drunken boxing routine. Uh, Elon is another version of this. He just constantly comes up with new weird things. You never know what he’s gonna do next. So that’s a terrible, um, situation if you have to hire 10,000 people to run a town that runs the country that, you know, influences the world. I think this time around he knows that.
00:04:08
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:04:08
Francis Foster: Mm.
00:04:09
Eric Weinstein: But, you know, Trump was the only president, as… according to my research, who’s never held, uh, government or military office, um, previous to getting into the Oval. So he- he’s really the most anomalous politician we’ve ever had, and I think that a lot of the discomfort comes from people trying to put him in one box or another. He just won’t fit.
00:04:32
Konstantin Kisin: So what’s the load-bearing wall?
00:04:35
Eric Weinstein: Uh-
00:04:35
Konstantin Kisin: Or what are the load-bearing walls?
00:04:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, I, I think it’s the international agreements, NATO, NAFTA, um, you know, uh, trade rounds, and anything that basically requires huge coordination with other countries is a hu- is a problem in a democracy because the democracy can always r- revisit these things every four years. And so in essence, we have a permanent, uh, foreign policy establishment that plays keep-away ball with the American public to try to make sure that you always get two candidates who are going to continue the agreements so that our allies don’t think that we’re wobbly, um, and our foes know that we mean business, and it’s not going to be put at risk every four years with a populist. And Donald Trump, uh, was particularly hated in 2016 for different reasons. The reason Washington freaked out about him, in my opinion, was that nobody knew whether he was gonna continue the agreements.
00:05:30
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:05:31
Francis Foster: Do you think that the election of Trump is in many ways a sign that America is in crisis, that the ordinary party, the ordinary ways of doing things simply don’t work, so we need to go to Trump as a l- almost as a last-ditch resort?
00:05:53
Eric Weinstein: It’s a good question. I don’t know how to answer it exactly. Clearly, if you go out into the street, um, even in a place like Los Angeles, you’ll always hear people say, you know, “California has fallen. Los Angeles is, is history.” It’s still mostly Los Angeles. Uh, the crisis in general isn’t at that level. Now we’ve had riots, of course, with George Floyd. Um, the bigger issue is just that we have a stale series of agreements that came off of World War II. And I would say that in a certain sense, the last time the United States of America absolutely existed in the sense that we think of it might have been around World War II. We have a decaying function where we had a lot of coherence, uh, not only among the military, the regular government, the branches of government, but also, uh, pivotal, you know, industry sectors or let’s say communications where America worked as one towards a common goal. So we’ve been decaying for a very long time, but we had a spectacular win in 1945. That thing is coming to an a- end, and so what we consider to be normal life is nothing of the kind. The period between 1945 and the present is the most anomalous thing that will never occur again.
00:07:03
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:07:03
Eric Weinstein: And it’s over.
00:07:05
Konstantin Kisin: What- why is it the most anomalous thing that will never occur again?
00:07:08
Eric Weinstein: Uh, in part because of thermonuclear weapons, which was November of 1952 with Ivy Mike in the Pacific. That was a big deal. And because of the side… s- sorry. The… Because of the size of Damocles’ sword, uh, it confuses the Steven Pinker types into thinking, wow, this is just a marvelously peaceful era. But everything is potential destruction, so everybody was very well-behaved. Now in 1962, uh, or maybe it was 1963, we had the Test Ban Treaty, and so people haven’t been exploding these fantastic weapons, uh, in ways that people can see and feel them for a very long time. And as a result, we don’t really th- we… well, for a while we didn’t think that nuclear weapons were a part of our world. We thought that that was, uh, you know, banished in the early 1990s with the demise of the Cold War.
00:07:58
Konstantin Kisin: So what’s changed? You’re saying it’s over, but I don’t see people using nuclear weapons.
00:08:03
Eric Weinstein: Um, I don’t think that the level of imagination needed to imagine nukes, uh, is q- is very high anymore. For some reason, the American mind got quite stupid when we declared [laughs] victory and a peace dividend, and Bill Clinton said a lot of things that weren’t true. Um, the, the Cold War is forever. There is no end of the Cold War. And it, it may become a multipolar Cold War, it might be a safer Cold War, but if you look at, you know, the, the, uh, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock, the last time I looked it was the closest to midnight it h- it had ever been at 90 seconds. Um, you have a multipolar situation with, uh, Tehran and Moscow and Kiev and, uh, Jerusalem and potentially, you know, the Taiwan Strait, India and Pakistan could go. You have one giant policeman with a relatively small number of carrier groups. You have alliances that haven’t really been tested. Um, I think a lot could happen. I think you have a lot of unskilled players. And un- you know, very dangerous skilled players are probably safer than nicer unskilled players.
00:09:18
Konstantin Kisin: And what is the dynamic with Trump? Because you say it puts certain big international things at, at risk, but is he really gonna pull America out of NATO? It seemed to me like he was just using that threat to get the Europeans to pay for themselves, right?
00:09:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, that, that’s just the thing. His vari- I g- it’s the same point again. His variance is high. He knows that… It, it’s two different styles, let’s put it that way.
00:09:43
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:09:43
Eric Weinstein: Trump’s style in business is to become uncertain.
00:09:46
Konstantin Kisin: Mm. Mm-hmm.
00:09:47
Eric Weinstein: You don’t know what he’s gonna do. Um, very few people, you know, like our, our friend, mutual friend Sam Harris, thinks he’s an idiot. Now, clearly he isn’t. He’s got multiple different ways of playing certain games if you study him carefully. He keeps selecting, um, permutations of the tricks he knows, but it’s a, it’s, it’s a large combinatorial set of possibilities when he communicates. And he’s still very effective in trapping people. You know that thing that he did with the Liz Cheney, um, issue about, you know, he slips in that hand her a rifle because he’s t- he’s trying to get at the chicken hawk issue. But he knows that the news media will mishear it, and that way, um, they will jump on him, and then he will be in a position to play the next move where he corrects them and shows that they’re completely non-trustworthy. So I think in part in negotiations you don’t know what he’s gonna do next. In governance, you don’t know what he’s gonna do next. He’s very creative, very unpredictable. He’s the most interesting politician of our time.
00:10:47
Konstantin Kisin: So that then comes back to ultimately in that situation, if you think that someone’s predictable, I guess most people would seek to judge what that person’s likely to do based on their perception of that person’s skill set, intention, and character, right? Do you trust this guy to have America’s interests in heart, or at heart?
00:11:07
Eric Weinstein: I-
00:11:07
Konstantin Kisin: That, that would be the, the way to assess it, right?
00:11:09
Eric Weinstein: I trust that he has a- America’s interests at heart. I don’t think… For a guy who supposedly has Trump Derangement Syndrome, I don’t think I have the usual variant.
00:11:17
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs] I don’t think anyone’s ever accused you. Have people accused you of having Trump Derangement Syndrome?
00:11:20
Eric Weinstein: Well then the problem is is that everything is quantized now, so we try to snap everyone to grid.
00:11:25
Konstantin Kisin: Mm. Mm.
00:11:25
Eric Weinstein: So it’s like, do you love him or do you hate him? The point is I, I very clearly appreciate him, and I don’t… I would not trifle with that man. That is a very skilled, very unusual life form. And that… the question in my mind isn’t does he love America. I think he, he really cares about legacy and greatness.
00:11:46
Konstantin Kisin: Mm. Mm.
00:11:46
Eric Weinstein: Um, and I think he really loves his children. I think that’s one of the things that you really have to go by is is that those children are really devoted to their, to their father, and that tells me a lot. I believe that he really loves America. He’s never been given his due.
00:12:03
Konstantin Kisin: So what’s your concern?
00:12:06
Eric Weinstein: That- This is really dangerous stuff. What he’s about to do, in my opinion-
00:12:13
Francis Foster: Is?
00:12:13
Eric Weinstein: … uh, renegotiate the world. But one of the things that he, he excels at is if you have a tradition, he’s not excited to be the nth person to carry the tradition on. He’s very excited to be the first person to break it, you know, like moving the embassy in Jerusalem. Um, throwing out the first pitch was a, was a, an easier one to do. I think he’s gonna do all sorts of stuff that haven’t, hasn’t been done before, particularly with the game theory that he’s not seeking re-election, and he, he knows what happened, like the last time around, and his, uh, the bench in the Democratic Party is so weak. These people have not been able to field, um, new recruits of high talent because you– there’s no room to move in that party.
00:13:07
Francis Foster: I think it’s a really good analysis of what you’ve said, because I think Trump is a natural disruptor.
00:13:12
Eric Weinstein: Mm.
00:13:12
Francis Foster: He’s a natural disruptor. That’s what he does. That’s essentially what populism is. But cometh a man, cometh a moment. Don’t we need a natural disruptor now because the natural order of things no longer works? That’s what we talk about all the time.
00:13:27
Eric Weinstein: Did you mean to reverse the order of that? It’s usually cometh the hour, cometh the man.
00:13:30
Francis Foster: Yeah, sorry.
00:13:30
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, because it was interesting to-
00:13:32
Francis Foster: Yeah
00:13:32
Eric Weinstein: … to think about it the other way.
00:13:33
Francis Foster: Yeah. Yeah, and he– it’s a– he– that’s what he’s… He– That’s what he’s been put in place to do is to disrupt, is to challenge. The status quo isn’t working. We all acknowledge that. So actually, what we need is someone like him, and we have no other choice. So we need to roll the dice and just see what happens.
00:13:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, but you’re rolling the dice squared. Elon, for example, is the other person [chuckles] I would associate with… I, I mean, I guess my, my view of Elon, I’ve, I’ve really never met him. I’ve, I’ve started minor correspondence with him. Um, I view Elon as being like the only adult on planet Earth at the moment. He’s a completely chaotic… Like your friend’s crazy dad, but definitely dad. So I think Elon, uh, has the long-term [chuckles] view of humanity. He’s absolutely brilliant. He’s totally chaotic, and you’re s– you’re– it’s basically Trump times Elon equals lit.
00:14:36
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:14:36
Eric Weinstein: It’s gonna be lit.
00:14:37
Francis Foster: It will, absolutely. But if you look at what’s going on in the Middle East, isn’t chaos a good thing? Isn’t chaos where they can’t predict which way they’re gonna go– wh- Iran can’t predict which way America is gonna go. Isn’t that good if we look at it as a term of these people are our enemies, we have pandered to them for too long, we need chaos, we need disruption, and we need to put them on the back foot?
00:15:06
Eric Weinstein: That’s pretty bold, Francis. I, uh– too rich for my blood. I’m out. Uh, I don’t know what to say. Y- okay, the problem is this thing I’ve talked about before, maybe with you guys, can’t remember, message violence.
00:15:18
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm.
00:15:18
Eric Weinstein: Message violence is incredibly important, and the way most people learn about message violence is from The Godfather, where the, the vest, uh, is put on the table, and there’s a fish in it, and nobody knows what it means. Somebody says, “Oh, it’s an old Sicilian message.”
00:15:31
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm.
00:15:31
Eric Weinstein: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. Iran just practiced message violence, and it did it in Gaza coming across the border. It did it with Hezbollah. It did it with the Houthis in Yemen. And most importantly, it did it with hypersonic ballistic missiles killing almost no one in Israel. And what was the, what was the point of that? It was to say, “You have no Iron Dome.”
00:16:01
Francis Foster: Hmm.
00:16:02
Eric Weinstein: And Tel Aviv has no Islamic holy sites. It’s got really good hummus and falafel in, in Jaffa, but there is no… What percentage of the Earth’s Jewish people live in Greater Tel Aviv completely unprotected from a ballistic barrage sent with love from Tehran? I don’t know. It’s, it’s not small. You’re talking about… You ever been to war? I have.
00:16:33
Francis Foster: No.
00:16:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Even our military, uh, in the US mostly hasn’t been to war. It’s been to all sorts of operations. It’s been to, uh, you know, conflicts. W- war is serious stuff, and most of us who are… You know, the world’s in the middle of a masculinity crisis. People are talking tough because they’re trying to remember what it’s like to be male. But I just think we’ve forgotten about how dire the consequences of a miscalculation. And when you have so many people who have not learned how to speak violence… Like one of the things in message violence is you make the killing that you do do so completely, I don’t know, picturesque, disgusting, horrible, like what ISIS would do with those videos with the 4K production values and all that. That is intended to say a small amount of violence goes the longest distance. And so we don’t really think about this stuff very accurately because we don’t speak this as our native language. And I just worry that we can say all these things, and we have no idea what we’re actually viscerally buying when we say, “Yeah, we got to shake things up.”
00:17:48
Francis Foster: Yeah. And look, because there is an element of risk, but I think we can all agree that the way that the Democrats handled Afghanistan, the Middle East, wasn’t working.
00:17:59
Eric Weinstein: I’m with you.
00:18:01
Francis Foster: So there needs to be something else.
00:18:04
Eric Weinstein: I’m– Yep, y- you have me there too. My, my point is- There, there was a lot of room between the bizarre be- behavior of the Democrats and business as usual
00:18:15
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm
00:18:16
Eric Weinstein: … and this wild improv troupe loaded with talent, but that doesn’t have a traditional, um, power base. You know, there’s a lot of skill in Washington, DC, and I, I think this is something that we don’t talk enough about.
00:18:32
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:18:34
Eric Weinstein: Washington, DC is, is largely filled with geeks, people who… You know, if you’re in the FDA, you really know your nutrition stuff. And, you know, if you’re, um, in the Department of Energy, you’ve gotta know about nuclear weapons and blast radii, and all this kind of stuff. People… Very often the, the, the permanent class in Washington, DC, is just incredibly skilled and very geeky, and I worry that this new team, I don’t know who’s coming. I have no idea-
00:19:09
Konstantin Kisin: Mm
00:19:09
Eric Weinstein: … if they know how to staff this thing, and how the political appointees are going to work-
00:19:15
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm
00:19:16
Eric Weinstein: … with the permanent class. So it’s exciting. I mean, I, I think you can probably see from my demeanor, it’s super exciting. It’s just, it’s also terrifying.
00:19:27
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:19:28
Eric Weinstein: We, we needed to shake this up, for sure, but this is, uh, this is going up to 11.
00:19:34
Konstantin Kisin: So, uh, just sticking with Iran. Uh, w- we’ve had a lot of people on the show recently who feel that given that the source of the threat to Israel is Iran, inevitably that clash is going to manifest itself in some way. Now-
00:19:49
Eric Weinstein: Why?
00:19:49
Konstantin Kisin: Uh, because if Israel’s pur- Their argument would be if Israel’s purpose is to eliminate the threat to Israel, given that that threat is emanating from Iran, it would mean the necessity of having to degrade their nuclear facilities, destroy their oil reve- oil revenues. The, th- their argument is y- you can, you can sl- you know, destroy Hamas and Hezbollah as long as you want, but ultimately that’s not where the threat is coming from.
00:20:19
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00:21:27
Eric Weinstein: This is why I worry about podcasts. Um, let me f- first say that I don’t speak Farsi, my Hebrew is in terrible disrepair, um, and I don’t speak Arabic. In order to say such things, you really should know something about the region.
00:21:43
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm.
00:21:44
Eric Weinstein: And I worry that what you have is a lot of us jawing off as if we know what we’re talking about when we don’t.
00:21:50
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm.
00:21:51
Eric Weinstein: I would like to think that we know enough to realize that the population of Iran is not necessarily on the side of the mullahs. And you only have this issue that eventually Israel and Iran will come, uh, to some massive conflagration if you don’t believe that regime change inside of Iran is possible. I, I personally [chuckles] think, and, and this could be completely wrong, that Tehran is, is home to very modern, very progressive people who-
00:22:28
Konstantin Kisin: Mm
00:22:28
Eric Weinstein: … are living under tyranny, that there isn’t a profound hatred of all things, uh, Jewish or Israeli. And I, I just seriously think that we need to make sure that the people making the decisions don’t have a simplified picture of what is or is not inevitable. Back in the days of Shimon Peres, he was always upset that the Palestinian Arabs were occupying the Israeli mind.
00:22:52
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:22:52
Eric Weinstein: And he was saying, “Look, we have a nuclear… We have a potential nuclear theocracy.” Nobody knows what a potential nuclear theocracy is. It’s a very strange game theoretic structure-
00:23:04
Konstantin Kisin: Mm
00:23:04
Eric Weinstein: … particularly, uh, if you have a culture of death and paradise.
00:23:07
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:23:07
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, my feeling about this is, um, it would be better if we had people who were true experts in the region making these pronouncements. I worry that there’s a lot of hot talk because it’s fun, and I worry that, um, there are a lot of men with masculinity issues who like talking about this stuff in ways that could be very, very dangerous.
00:23:33
Konstantin Kisin: Well, and not men. There’s lots of people. But, uh, that’s why I was putting an argument to you. I certainly wouldn’t give any, uh, super credibility to it. But the logical conclusion of what’s been happening so far is that, which is why I think a Trump presidency has the potential to change things, because I don’t think we want things to go in that direction.
00:23:54
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. I mean, th- this is a lot of [laughs] just… It’s very weird. Everybody knows stuff, you know?
00:24:02
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:24:03
Eric Weinstein: People said, “Well, is it gonna be Biden or Trump?” I said, “I didn’t know whether Biden would make it to November.” And then they said, “No, this is going to be a nail-biter.” And I, I would say, “How do you know that? Doesn’t seem like a nail-biter.” I, I worry that there’s this epidemic of certainty that the internet brings out in us.
00:24:21
Francis Foster: Mm.
00:24:21
Eric Weinstein: And that-
00:24:21
Francis Foster: Mm
00:24:22
Eric Weinstein: … more or less I keep saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” and I still think I’m outperforming almost everybody in terms of, uh, a lot of these predictions. And I don’t know what to do about that because I’m not very [laughs] very confident, uh, of this stuff myself, and I’ve just seen this wall of, of very certain people. The same people, you know, who tell me that Putin will never use nuclear weapons because he has so much to lose are the same people who told me that Putin will never invade Ukraine. It’s exactly the same people. [laughs]
00:24:54
Francis Foster: Which is-
00:24:55
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know what to make of it.
00:24:57
Francis Foster: It’s, it’s a, it’s a profound point, and it’s, it’s a position that comes with a lot of integrity, and actually it’s brave to say, “I don’t know.” Because now we live in a world where everybody’s on a team, everybody has a particular worldview, and what world w- views give you is certainty because it gives you a lens to see the world.
00:25:17
Eric Weinstein: You guys are not a team. Are you? You weren’t on a team the last time I checked.
00:25:21
Francis Foster: No, no, we’re not on a team.
00:25:23
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:25:24
Francis Foster: But it’s saying most people.
00:25:25
Eric Weinstein: No, I just…
00:25:26
Konstantin Kisin: We’re better than most people.
00:25:27
Francis Foster: Yeah.
00:25:28
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:25:29
Francis Foster: Purer, virtuous.
00:25:30
Konstantin Kisin: Yeah, just, you know, just better.
00:25:32
Eric Weinstein: Oh, okay. Be that as it may. Um…
00:25:34
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:25:35
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs]
00:25:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know what to do about this. I’m, I’m… You know, my… I always try to tell people that the objectivists in Ayn Rand were collectivists because they had a, they had a team and a name.
00:25:47
Francis Foster: Mm.
00:25:48
Eric Weinstein: You know? To me, I… The thing I’m most interested in is what system will allow radical individualism, and I mean profoundly radical individualism, to thrive. And my concern is, is that the teams are taking up all the oxygen.
00:26:02
Francis Foster: Mm.
00:26:04
Eric Weinstein: Wokistan versus MAGAstan. Okay, most of us aren’t really either. For all the talk about blue-haired people, mostly I don’t see people with blue hair, and I’ve… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a MAGA hat despite having been in Florida and Texas over eight years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody wearing a MAGA hat just in the street. So I, I really think that we have this completely flawed impression of who we are because our online selves aren’t even really tied to our real selves.
00:26:37
Konstantin Kisin: Mm. And that there… As we’ve discussed with many people, there is a lot of bots, and there’s a lot of foreign influence, and all sorts of things going on there.
00:26:45
Eric Weinstein: Completely.
00:26:46
Konstantin Kisin: Which are amplifying, in my opinion, quite deliberately the divisions that may or may not exist. And actually, if you look at policy-wise, I don’t think… You know, we, um… This– your interview will probably go out before the interview with Batya, but when we had Batya on, she made this point very well that I… That, that most people agree on, like, 80% of the policies. Uh, but, you know, the one thing I’ve really taken away from this trip to America, you know we come here regularly, is I used to think that the media embellish and exaggerate and, you know, they’re sort of, like, a little bit directionally accurate, but they exaggerate and they…
00:27:33
Eric Weinstein: That’s, that’s adorable.
00:27:34
Konstantin Kisin: I know. Thank you.
00:27:35
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:27:35
Konstantin Kisin: Thank you for that. That’s amazing.
00:27:37
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:27:37
Konstantin Kisin: In condescending me.
00:27:38
Eric Weinstein: I’m sorry. I just… I, I’ve been around for too long.
00:27:40
Konstantin Kisin: However, you see, I, I, I also think that actually the vast majority of people, especially outside America-
00:27:46
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
00:27:47
Konstantin Kisin: … but actually many, many people inside America also think like that.
00:27:50
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:27:50
Konstantin Kisin: That’s been my experience, right? I saw this in New York Times, therefore, you know, it is, you know… He’s not Hitler, but he’s kind of like, you know, 20% towards Hitler type of thing. And this trip, having… You know, we went to a Trump rally to see it with our own eyes, and we, we… Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:08
Eric Weinstein: Did you get the hat?
00:28:09
Konstantin Kisin: No.
00:28:10
Francis Foster: No.
00:28:10
Konstantin Kisin: No.
00:28:10
Francis Foster: But we did see Hulk Hogan do a speech, so…
00:28:14
Konstantin Kisin: Yeah. And what I took away from it now is they’re not embellishing and exaggerating. They’re just lying. So it’s not just bots on social media and people on Twitter. It’s the entire information space that is completely distorted.
00:28:33
Eric Weinstein: They’re maxing out. The… This is an old structure in its dying throes.
00:28:38
Konstantin Kisin: Right. Mm-hmm.
00:28:39
Eric Weinstein: And so, you know, as the, uh, old advertisement goes, what are you saving the shivas for? There’s a point where you liquidate whatever you have left-
00:28:47
Konstantin Kisin: Mm
00:28:47
Eric Weinstein: … because you’re losing. Um, yeah, the lying isn’t working as well. In particular, you know, I think Elon used Trump getting shot and the actual bravery to say, “Oh, perfect moment to jump out of the Democratic Party because at least we know that was authentic.” Right? And then the idea is that you have these preference cascades, and Timur Kuran’s theory of how you foment a revolution is, is that you get brave people like Elon to say, “This I believe,” you know, and then the question is, is there a slow clap of the next person-
00:29:25
Konstantin Kisin: Mm
00:29:25
Eric Weinstein: … and does the slow claps spread? And I think that partially what you’re seeing is a giant exodus from the Democratic Party-
00:29:34
Konstantin Kisin: Mm
00:29:34
Eric Weinstein: … and the mind control of mainstream media. Now, mainstream media, in large measure, the gated institutional narrative is traded between institutions. If nobody was watching CNN, Pfizer would still need it in order, uh, to talk to its regulators, you know? And in a certain sense, um, more and more people don’t believe it. You do have to keep track of it because it’s a set of instructions as to what you’re allowed to believe while at work-
00:30:03
Konstantin Kisin: Mm
00:30:03
Eric Weinstein: … or what you’re allowed to believe if you still wear a suit and tie and go to meetings, uh, and you’re in that class. So it’s very important that you receive your instructions on an almost daily basis as to How to coordinate your points of view. And I always give this example of Tahrir Square when Mubarak was overthrown, and The New York Times was not using the word revolution. People would say, “Oh, the demonstrations, uh, seem to have, uh, resulted in Mubarak’s departure.” I said, “You mean the revolution?”
00:30:32
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:30:32
Eric Weinstein: They’re like, “No, no, no. It wasn’t a revolution.” I said, “What are, what are you talking about?” Well, I wasn’t hooked up. I was, I was using Arabic, uh, accounts that tweeted half in English, and so they were using the word revolution, but we weren’t using the word revolution. So it’s amazing how mind control actually works. It was also the case that our minds are divided. You have a part of your brain that knows that The New York Times is more or less lying, and you have another part that agrees to believe it.
00:30:59
Francis Foster: Hmm. Yeah. It… And it’s that part of the brain that agrees to believe it, it’s so powerful. And I find myself, even now, when I see a New York Times headline or I see a, a, a mainstream media headline, I immediately go, “Oh, that’s what’s actually happened,” before I actually have to check myself.
00:31:22
Eric Weinstein: I believe both in different parts of my brain. You know, it’s like… I- I used to talk about having a jihadi sandbox in my mind so that I could understand how jihadis think.
00:31:34
Francis Foster: Hmm.
00:31:35
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, you have a place in your brain. Y- y- do you do accents ever when you’re a kid?
00:31:39
Francis Foster: Yeah. I still do them now.
00:31:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Um, we frown on this officially.
00:31:43
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:31:45
Eric Weinstein: You know, the, the part of your brain that suddenly knows how to talk Cockney or, you know, with a Gujarati accent or whatever is a different module, and we have a bunch of different modules. And I, I, I just find it funny that we still talk, “Well, do you believe this? Do you not believe this?” Very often, I believe something intellectually that I don’t believe viscerally.
00:32:07
Konstantin Kisin: But reality is still reality. There still is a reality, which is why if you make trades based on a false narrative, reality will slap you in the face, right? So the whole conversation in this moment really is about whether the left and the Democrat Party is going to face reality, which is that the, the way they talk and the things they say and the way they operate are not popular with Americans. Or they can continue to imbibe a narrative that isn’t accurate and that does not reflect the reality of what their fellow citizens think. Isn’t that the issue here?
00:32:46
Eric Weinstein: I think that you’re talking about something that’s hopefully about to happen, which is that a certain kind of base reality is too difficult to deny.
00:32:53
Francis Foster: Hmm.
00:32:53
Konstantin Kisin: Well, if you keep losing elections, it’s too difficult to deny, right?
00:32:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, they’ve lost, they’ve lost one just now, but this is gonna be a very consequential one. First of all, it puts JD Vance, who I, I consider a friend-
00:33:06
Konstantin Kisin: Hmm
00:33:07
Eric Weinstein: … on deck. Man, is that guy smart.
00:33:11
Francis Foster: Yep.
00:33:11
Eric Weinstein: And good. Combines all sorts of aspects of progressivism. I think he ran a campaign with Donald Trump as a loyal number two, but JD is a powerhouse in and of himself. I think he could run a, a campaign that would just be irresistible to all sorts of people. So I would like to just point out that you could easily have 12 years, um, coming off of this election-
00:33:37
Konstantin Kisin: Hmm
00:33:37
Eric Weinstein: … and you could have a Supreme Court that was completely dominated, uh, by Donald Trump and JD Vance, and it will transform the country. So this is a very consequential [laughs] election to have screwed up. It’s not just that they lost an election. It’s also the end of something.
00:33:54
Konstantin Kisin: Hmm.
00:33:54
Eric Weinstein: Because, you know, Obama, doesn’t matter what you think of him and whether he was a disappointment to you in office, that was real star power, and you watched him degrade himself as he threw his support behind Kamala Harris. Um, the Clintons are highly degraded. Gavin Newsom could not keep a straight face with the switch when, uh, Kamala was put forward. He’s, “Oh, yes, it was a top-down inclusive affair. Ha ha ha ha.” This was such a bad story that no one knew how to defend it. And I also think that, you know, Kamala Harris’ apparent drop in IQ is, um, due to the fact that nobody can explain the Democratic Party. It’s a series of horse trades and intellectual half measures, and nobody knows how to… It, it doesn’t have any coherence. You’re, are you, are you the party of, uh, sweetness and light? Are you the party of the working class, or are you really the party of, um, you know, the transgendered and, uh, financial billionaires worried about the carry int- carried interest exemption? It just didn’t make any sense, and there was no way to defend it, and still got close to 50% [laughs] of the popular vote.
00:35:10
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:35:12
Eric Weinstein: Because so many people are dependent on these narratives.
00:35:15
Francis Foster: To me, the Democrat Party, and we’re talking about reality, they’re so divorced from reality in so many different ways. Like, they talk about being democratic, but Kamala Harris didn’t go through the, any primary. They just appointed her.
00:35:30
Eric Weinstein: This is a great point because I think people didn’t really update as to what happened after that point got made. So I started talking to my academic friends, and I said, “You can’t say democracy is on the ballot-
00:35:43
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:35:43
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] … if there’s no primary.” And immediately, all of my, like, poli sci aware academic friends said things like, “Oh, no, no, no. A political party is free to, uh, choose whoever it wants. And democracy is… You know, we’ve only really had these primaries since the ’68, uh, convention, uh, in Chicago of the Democratic Party, and the real thing is called the invisible primary, and everybody in the Beltway knows it.” Like, this whole thing, and you’re saying, “Oh, cool.” So you just pulled the mask off and says democracy is a binary choice between two parties that have given you every single president since Millard Fillmore, and that’s democracy? Nobody’s gonna send their son with a rifle- … uh, to fight for this vision of democracy. The thing that inspires us, that gets us to put our right hand over our heart, is the idea of a government by, of, and for the people not perishing from this earth. The idea of… Y- y- you know this concept of perfectly legal? Something is legal, uh, means that you’re allowed to do it. Something’s perfectly legal means somehow there’s a loophole in the law-
00:36:49
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:36:49
Eric Weinstein: … [laughs] and you can’t get tagged for it, even though it’s completely wrong. Well, it’s perfectly legal-
00:36:54
Francis Foster: Mm
00:36:54
Eric Weinstein: … perfectly permissible-
00:36:55
Francis Foster: Mm
00:36:56
Eric Weinstein: … uh, to just select a candidate, and it was an abomination. And it’s kind of just fun, because the same people had this tagline, “Democracy is on the ballot.”
00:37:07
Francis Foster: Mm.
00:37:08
Eric Weinstein: Like, those T-shirts were already printed figuratively. And so yes, you’ve installed a candidate who was the worst candidate available until she became America’s sweetheart, and the whiplash from that period of time, uh, just forced the machinery to, to reveal itself.
00:37:27
Francis Foster: And it, it seems like that’s one of the logical fallacies within the Democrat Party, but it’s just one after another, after another. And look, I know, not… Nobody’s fully coherent, no political party, blah, blah, blah. There are always inconsistencies. But you look at the… You know, they talk about being the party of minorities, yet when Black men don’t go out to vote for them, they admonish them as a group and go, “Well, how dare you? All you Black men. Well, I mean, you’ve done this.” And you’re going, “Is, is that anti-racist?”
00:37:55
Eric Weinstein: You know what we’re doing? We’re doing therapy. We’ve been through, like, a North Korean brainwashing experiment.
00:38:02
Francis Foster: Mm.
00:38:02
Eric Weinstein: And we can’t believe-
00:38:03
Francis Foster: Mm
00:38:04
Eric Weinstein: … that this happened. It’s just, it’s so bad. And every single person of any kind of originality of thought or independence of mind, um, rejects it. Now, why did this ever work? I, I learned, in part, a lot about the US from having a podcast, and it was very popular with people I didn’t expect. Truck drivers, who really care about physics. Um, electricians, who care about the Middle East. There are all sorts of people who solve puzzles every day. General contractors. And these people are in a creative field, because every day is different. You never know what house you’re gonna show up, or what-
00:38:49
Francis Foster: Mm
00:38:50
Eric Weinstein: … trucking route, or who knows what. And they’ve got time on their hands, and they’re not beholden… Nobody cares whether your electrician is MAGA or woke, as long as they get the job done and they leave your house in decent order, and they don’t charge you too much.
00:39:03
Francis Foster: I would argue, Eric, that it’s impossible to be a bricklayer and be woke, because to be woke is to be disconnected from reality, and to be a bricklayer is to be very much grounded in reality.
00:39:15
Eric Weinstein: I agree. And so in general, most of the, the… The point I was trying to make-
00:39:19
Francis Foster: [laughs] Sorry, Eric.
00:39:20
Eric Weinstein: That’s all right. It was very forceful and, and commanding.
00:39:22
Francis Foster: Yeah.
00:39:22
Eric Weinstein: I kind of, kind of enjoyed it.
00:39:23
Francis Foster: [laughs]
00:39:24
Eric Weinstein: Um, the way I saw it-
00:39:26
Francis Foster: Yeah
00:39:26
Eric Weinstein: … is that these people, by and large, were America’s secret brain trust.
00:39:32
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm.
00:39:33
Eric Weinstein: And they’re not having it, because there’s no reason. Now, if you take that and you compare that to the very highly educated… One of the arguments that the Democratic Party likes to make is, “You know, all the people with master’s degrees and PhDs and JDs and MDs vote for us.”
00:39:48
Francis Foster: Mm.
00:39:49
Eric Weinstein: And the answer is, “Because you’re an interest structure.” And the workplace in a… If you’re in a woke workplace, particularly large institutions that have to… I forget, what is it? Above 15 employees, you have to follow the civil rights, you know, legislation about inclusion, all this kind of stuff. Those workplaces are constantly demanding fealty to this woke parchment, and that’s what’s going to have to collapse. Um, the, the contractors in general, they might vote Democrat or they might vote Republican, but they’re not easily taken in, because they have a relationship with the unforgiving. An electrician who starts to believe in crazy ideas, uh, is gonna encounter 110 or 220 relatively quickly. It’s a short ride.
00:40:42
Francis Foster: Mm. And that’s, that’s the beauty of talking to these people, because m- exposing yourself to reality encourages a simplicity of thought. It-
00:40:52
Eric Weinstein: You keep s- you keep saying reality.
00:40:54
Francis Foster: Yeah. Okay, physics, for example.
00:40:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I call it a relationship with the unforgiving.
00:40:59
Francis Foster: Yeah.
00:40:59
Eric Weinstein: When you try to fudge something that isn’t fudgeable. Like, you see this, uh, very often if you take somebody who doesn’t go hiking, uh, into the mountains. At some point, they’ll just sit down and say, “I’m tired.” And you say, “Okay.” “I want to go home.” “Well, it’s 8.7 miles down that way. We’ve got 45 minutes of daylight, so how does that work?” The person just has no idea that they have to actually negotiate the unforgiving. So, you know, do something in your life. Play an instrument, climb a rock wall, do electrical work. You, you’ll very quickly figure out whether you have a, a positive relationship with the unforgiving.
00:41:44
Konstantin Kisin: We recently reached a huge YouTube milestone, with a million subscribers. Amid the celebrations, however, there have been a few cynical voices too.
00:41:52
Francis Foster: Some people are asking, how do two guys with weird hair and no obvious talent manage to create some of the most sensible, balanced, non-partisan conversations on the internet? How do they attract massive guests? Some people have even gone as far as to ask, who funds you?
00:42:12
Konstantin Kisin: And the time has come to confess the truth. For the last six years, we’ve only been able to produce the show because of financial support from some nefarious, problematic people of highly questionable moral integrity.
00:42:25
Francis Foster: You. Many thousands of you. That’s why the show no longer looks like a Beatles tribute act doing a séance.
00:42:32
Konstantin Kisin: Now it looks like this This and this. The guests keep getting bigger, the conversations keep getting better, and this is just the beginning. We’re excited to announce that we will be moving our locals community, including all bonus content, to our new home at Substack. If you’re already a supporter, your subscription will be moved over automatically. As for the rest of you, this is your chance to step up and join us as we go to the next level. Give me money. Chill out, mate. We need a bit of finesse here. What he’s trying to say is that the show will only keep getting bigger and better with your help. You already know about the bonus content we have for supporters. For just $7 a month, or $70 a year, you get ad-free extended interviews with a chance to ask our incredible guests your questions. But with Substack, you’re gonna get a lot more. Insightful articles on upcoming guests, a weekly newsletter, the ability to chat with each other on the app, both privately and in threads. You’ll also be able to connect your podcast listening app, like Spotify or Apple Music, and enjoy the extended ad-free interviews on the go. Your support will mean that we will be able to do more incredible US and other overseas trips with bigger and better guests. That means more phenomenal extra content for you as we get the best minds in the world to talk about the issues that truly matter. No bullshit, no fudging, just an honest conversation with a fascinating person. Plus, I’ll be able to afford a proper haircut. He’s not gonna get one, but at least he’ll be able to afford one. Good point. Click the link and join 40,000 people like you to make the show you love better again. So you mentioned that this is… What, what we’re doing is therapy because, um, the fake worldview, let’s say, that we’ve had or been im- had imposed on us is shattered. Is that why a lot of people who may not have been huge fans of Trump are nonetheless relieved and happy that he’s been elected? Because it, it, it has demonstrated that they’re not insane.
00:44:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. You, you know that scene in the Terminator series, “Come with me if you want to live”?
00:44:43
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs]
00:44:45
Eric Weinstein: He’s what’s available. Love him or hate him. Not… You know, then the next thing you’d, you get is you get the… Once people say, “I am pro-Trump,” they start to excuse all of his excesses and the MAGA movement’s excesses, and so people need this kind of cognitive consonance, and so they get rid of their Democratic dissonance, and then they become cognitively consonant with the idea that everything is great on the MAGA side.
00:45:13
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:45:13
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, this is very hard to avoid.
00:45:17
Konstantin Kisin: Yeah, especially if you’re a public figure because people will then try to tag you with that. Like, uh… And, and this comes back to the criticism that we were discussing because ultimately I think what it comes down to is y- you are an independent thinker, and that’s why we like you. But every four years there’s an election.
00:45:36
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.
00:45:36
Konstantin Kisin: And you have to condense all that complexity into a binary choice.
00:45:41
Eric Weinstein: Two binary choices. Um, well, actually, one quaternary choice and one up to quaternary choice. There’s who you vote for-
00:45:53
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm
00:45:54
Eric Weinstein: … and what you recommend. So I went to the v- polling place. I may have voted one way or the other. I may have thrown away my vote. I may have not voted in that particular race, but the question is can I recommend something to my first cousin once removed? And if I looked at the am- amount of hatred that came my way, there was no way you could ask me to tell some sweet 75-year-old gal, um, “Hey, get into this car with these people.”
00:46:31
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs]
00:46:32
Eric Weinstein: “Stupid Jew.”
00:46:34
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs]
00:46:34
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my God. And, and, you know, this, this gets to my frustration with both the Democratic and Republican m- movements. Are there no men? A- and I hate to say it this way, but it’s like are there no men who stand up and say, “You cannot talk that way”? I just watch these pile-ons and, and this, uh, these incited online mobs and this vitriol and, and hatred. It’s like somebody stand up as an individual. Y- we can’t do that in the MAGA movement. We’re not going to be going after individuals like that.
00:47:15
Konstantin Kisin: Y- well, no, the… See, the problem with the r- what, what the right did is, during the left’s ent- control over the entire system, the right made free speech, um, a sacred value, and they con-
00:47:28
Eric Weinstein: Thank God.
00:47:28
Konstantin Kisin: Uh, y- of course. But what they’d also did is they confused the freedom for people to speak with the necessity of, um, accepting all speech as being equal essentially, right? So, so, so we can’t say to somebody, “Stop, stop attacking somebody online,” ’cause it’s just rude-
00:47:49
Eric Weinstein: Uh, well-
00:47:49
Konstantin Kisin: … and there’s no need to do it-
00:47:50
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no
00:47:51
Konstantin Kisin: … ’cause that viol- well, “Are you trying to shut down my speech?” That’s what people say.
00:47:55
Eric Weinstein: 100% I’m trying to shut down your speech. Peop- uh, I can’t believe this isn’t taught in civics. The easiest part of public parks is building public parks.
00:48:08
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:48:08
Eric Weinstein: The hardest part is keeping the syringes and the gang members and the sex in the bushes away from the swings and the toddlers.
00:48:16
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:48:17
Eric Weinstein: The easiest part of free speech, and I very much appreciate Elon for doing this, is opening the pipe and keeping it open.
00:48:24
Konstantin Kisin: Mm. Mm-hmm.
00:48:25
Eric Weinstein: The hardest part is the culture so that it never occurs to anyone to act like this except for a tiny fringe few. Free s- the culture of free speech is absolutely about the social restraint Of dangerous, bad speech. This idea that the cure for bad ideas is good ideas is nonsense. Ideas compete on fitness. We have a fitness landscape where a really bad idea can easily out-compete good ideas, better ideas.
00:49:03
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm.
00:49:03
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm.
00:49:03
Eric Weinstein: The only thing that works is if people of good character use something that precedes cancellation. Cancellation is a terrible concept, I don’t know where it came from. But shunning, social shunning of bad speech in a free speech environment is not the same thing as saying you cannot say that. There’s an important concept, and I don’t know why this isn’t taught, I don’t know where it went, it’s mustn’t. Mustn’t isn’t shouldn’t, and mustn’t isn’t can’t. You must not say or do certain things in a free speech environment, because if free speech doesn’t pay a dividend, gentlemen, it’s going to go away. The whole key to free speech is the culture of self-restraint, decency, and prosperity so that people feel that they’ve got a lot to lose.
00:49:55
Konstantin Kisin: Yes. The problem with that is the internet is anonymous, and for very good reasons, and we would want to protect some anonymity, I think. But an anonymous environment, because of the way human beings are, we’ve all been in a car behind a windscreen, the, but human beings don’t seem to be capable of behaving in that way without the threat of repercussions, right? And if you’re anonymous, there is no threat of repercussions ’cause you’re anonymous.
00:50:25
Eric Weinstein: So you’ve made us some assumptions that-
00:50:28
Konstantin Kisin: I have
00:50:29
Eric Weinstein: … we should have, uh, this very high level of anonymous speech, and that the real problem is coming from anonymous accounts.
00:50:38
Konstantin Kisin: Well, so look, Jordan’s talked about this. Jordan Peterson’s made this point, that the, the anonymous trolls on the internet behave in the way that they behave because they’re anonymous. So his shortcut was, “Well, we gotta end anonymity.” And a lot of people, I think rightly, said, there are some problems with this because anonymity is actually highly valuable. It’s valuable for journalists in Iran, it’s valuable for this, it’s valuable for that, right? It’s valuable for people to be able to retain their anonymity in certain situations. You’re frowning at me. I’m just laying out the argument, right?
00:51:09
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m just… I wanna make sure we don’t build in assumptions.
00:51:14
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:51:14
Eric Weinstein: I, I don’t think that we know that Jordan Peterson is wrong. I don’t think we know… I, I-
00:51:19
Konstantin Kisin: Well, wrong and right are the, these are very simplistic concepts. The point I’m making is there are trade-offs to everything.
00:51:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:51:24
Konstantin Kisin: You could ban anonymity on the internet, and that would have lots of positive benefits. It would also have lots of terrible consequences.
00:51:31
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:51:31
Konstantin Kisin: Right? You could also not ban anonymity on the internet, and then you’d get what we have now.
00:51:36
Eric Weinstein: So those are the two Schelling points.
00:51:39
Konstantin Kisin: Yeah.
00:51:39
Eric Weinstein: And then you have all the interesting stuff in between them. And, uh, as a guy who’s never open borders or closed borders, or never pro-life or pro-choice, et cetera, et cetera, I don’t know how the Schelling points completely derange us. But you can have anonymous accounts in which you have to become known to the platform in order to open one with-
00:52:00
Konstantin Kisin: Which will get hacked, and then-
00:52:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:52:01
Konstantin Kisin: … the government of Iran is gonna find out where you live.
00:52:04
Eric Weinstein: So I’m gonna continue with this.
00:52:06
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm.
00:52:07
Eric Weinstein: There are all sorts of technical, technological measures and countermeasures, and it’s not clear to me that if you choose to use anonymity, that you shouldn’t bear some risk. Because the risk that you’re putting other people at, it, it’s what you just said before. It’s, it’s about constraints, it’s about trade-offs-
00:52:25
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
00:52:26
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm
00:52:26
Eric Weinstein: … a- and it’s about objectives. What we have now, I, I’m concerned, is not going to deliver us free speech in the long run.
00:52:34
Konstantin Kisin: No, I agree.
00:52:34
Eric Weinstein: The ability to, to ruin lives using these tools is too easy. The friction for ruining a life… You know, even sometimes what you have is you have a situation whereby, um, it’s very hard to catch anybody, but if you do catch them, the pe- the penalties are so dire that the expected return of that strategy has turned negative. I, I think that what I’m very concerned by is that we have a group of people who are used to being controlled who’ve decided that they want no controls whatsoever. And clearly, the right thing to do is to get the controls as far away from law and restriction-
00:53:11
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm
00:53:11
Eric Weinstein: … as possible, and as much towards mustn’t. And we-
00:53:16
Konstantin Kisin: How do we do that?
00:53:19
Eric Weinstein: I would say the question is, how did we do that? And in large measure… You know what? I, I don’t mean to give you a big ego, but you did say something at the Arc Conference that I wish I could remember exactly. You said, “I’m not a conservative, but I will tell my conservative friends that if they want their culture conserved, they’re going to have to deal young people in.”
00:53:42
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm.
00:53:43
Eric Weinstein: People need a stake. People need to feel that they have a lot to lose. And you’re not going to be able to preserve the West, and whatever that means, if people don’t feel that this is a glorious place and we are so lucky to have it. The whole thing is about the returns to decency. You know, I, I can’t tell you how, how dispiriting it is when you see, um, these discussions about, you know, nice guys never get the girl. You’re like, well, maybe not nice guys. But what about good guys, or good guys despite themselves? You know, my, I’ve always said that the, the secret is not the pickup artistry, but is the Han- Han- Han Solo character. He was a good guy despite himself. And you know, the, the, the vibe is always, “Tah, do I have to save the world again? I really was hoping to make some money this week. Okay.” [laughs] You know. Extreme altruism and decency has to pay a dividend. And I just don’t know how to get all of this fake masculinity out of the equation. You know, if you, if you’re worried about whether or not you’re a man, try standing up for a friend. Try standing up to a mob. Try standing alone. You know, that’s, that’s like… It’s terrifying. I find it really unpleasant [laughs] in many ways, but at least I’m not worried about being a coward. Though the word coward is the one word I think that I really just doesn’t land. I- I’ve had to do so much unpleasant stuff. The thing that really makes me sad is I don’t feel like I’ve inspired people. I don’t feel like I’ve inspired people to stand up for their friends. You know, I have a policy that says there’s n- if you’re a friend of mine, there’s nothing you can come after my friend with that will cause me to repudiate him, and the thinking behind it is, is that I don’t want to set up an incentive structure. “Do you condemn or condone?” You, you see all these… I neither condemn or n- condone my friend. I, I don’t know what he did. Eight… Was it 8.5 years ago? I didn’t know him yet. You know, like that kind of weakness. Men deal with things in private, and, you know, I might be entirely supportive of you, of you in public, and then I might, you know, take you out behind the woodshed and say, “What the F?” Men need friends, and men need to know how to stick together, and men need space to be male. Um, deciding that every group of men is a, is a threat to women is a disaster. If, if men are [laughs] going to stand up for women, they need space to work out th- their stuff. So, you know, my, my feeling about this is we need a culture that creates mustn’t.
00:56:37
Konstantin Kisin: Yes, but I asked you how you do that on the internet, and we’re not closer.
00:56:42
Eric Weinstein: Well-
00:56:43
Konstantin Kisin: Because it’s the internet you’re talking about. That’s where this happens, right?
00:56:49
Eric Weinstein: So my claim is, is that most of the time I don’t see in the street… Like, you see these videos where people are doing horrible things.
00:56:58
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
00:56:58
Eric Weinstein: Like there’s some old woman and some guy will just, like, clock her. You know, what do they call it? Happy, happy-
00:57:05
Konstantin Kisin: Happy slapping or something at the end
00:57:06
Eric Weinstein: … happy slapping, something like that. Um, and we’re just aghast because we can’t believe that that kind of internet level behavior exists on, uh, in the real world. We need, at some level, to recognize we are partially solving this already in the real world. For all the talk about how terrible the streets in Los Angeles are, you can sit out at a cafe and not have any, an expectation something horrible is gonna happen to you. We need to figure out how to return costs to bad actors.
00:57:39
Konstantin Kisin: Well, that’s why I’m ask… Sorry, Frances, just to fin-
00:57:41
Francis Foster: Yeah, no.
00:57:41
Konstantin Kisin: That’s why I’m asking about the online environment, because-
00:57:43
Eric Weinstein: So I keep, I keep saying things, and you guys keep saying, “Well, we have to protect this person in Iran.”
00:57:48
Konstantin Kisin: W- hold on. No, no, no. I’m just asking you how it gets solved online because your argument of the real world is very different. In the real world, in the physical realm-
00:57:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:57:56
Konstantin Kisin: … there are very clear material potential consequences to bad behavior.
00:58:01
Eric Weinstein: So you post a bond, and the idea is that if you’re found to be misbehaving, it’s under the sole discretion of the platform whether to confiscate money that you put up, or you have some sort of a series of cryptographic, uh, signatures where in general you need multiple agents in order to figure out whose account it is, but you actually have to have, uh, an ID. I, I could probably generate 13 different ideas, but if you decide that anonymity is sacred, and it… And I should be able to create 10,000 accounts for free-
00:58:35
Konstantin Kisin: No, you shouldn’t be.
00:58:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:58:37
Konstantin Kisin: But I think this is the conundrum and, and the ideas you listed don’t seem to me like they’re particularly workable. Um-
00:58:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, you didn’t like my idea of solving the Middle East problem last time either. I thought it was a lot better than you thought it was. [laughing]
00:58:51
Konstantin Kisin: Well, I, I’m sure it was a lot better than I thought it was, but my, my point-
00:58:54
Eric Weinstein: You were being nice to Sam. I appreciate that.
00:58:56
Francis Foster: [laughs] Yeah.
00:58:56
Konstantin Kisin: Uh, my, my point is that I think, uh, the dilemma for social media companies is, is massive, and, uh, the problem you’ve identified is totally true. Uh, people… There, there is a culture, particularly on Twitter, where everyone performatively acts like a dick, and you can’t say, “Why are you being a dick?” Because then you’re being a pussy. That’s kind of how it works. That’s the dynamics of the, of the conversation.
00:59:25
Eric Weinstein: So then, you know, you have this current situation where you drive out every regular human being, and the, only the monsters, uh, have their ball. I… Guys, I, I’m sorry. I, I’ve dealt with this before. I’ve watched Jordan… In my opinion, Jordan wanted to get rid of anonymity. I don’t necessarily want to get rid of anonymity. I want to come up with a schedule to return cost. The key point is, you know, get 100 super smart people who understand economics, who understand technology, cryptography, into a room and task them, how do we return cost to bad actors without banning bad speech? How do we create mustn’t? It’s a puzzle.
01:00:08
Konstantin Kisin: Mm.
01:00:08
Eric Weinstein: Have an X pri- XPRIZE. You know, come up with scenarios where you have speech simulations, and you try to figure out, you know, in general do we have type one error where, where we create a decision boundary as to what must and, and mustn’t correspond to. Um, must you allow this, mustn’t you allow this. How do you return the cost? And let’s get busy. Let’s have fun. I j- I just… The conversation is trapped in the old terms of service free speech versus censorship thing. Anytime you see that kind of polarization, tr- try to push it off to the side because, in general, what it’s saying is is that Schelling points are going to determine, you know… When does life begin? Let me guess. Viability, moment of conception, birth. Nobody says, you know, I don’t know, uh, let’s look at the embryology and figure out where neural tube formation is, something like that
01:01:04
Francis Foster: Eric, are you, are you hopeful for America as we’re sitting here?
01:01:09
Eric Weinstein: I mean, if you want to get into radical hope, I’m the most hopeful person. I mean, like, I, I have hope at levels that would, uh, be offensive to you guys.
01:01:22
Francis Foster: Mm.
01:01:23
Konstantin Kisin: But also terrifying.
01:01:24
Francis Foster: Yeah.
01:01:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, because I don’t understand what the hell the rest [laughs]
01:01:29
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs]
01:01:31
Francis Foster: [laughs]
01:01:31
Eric Weinstein: To me-
01:01:32
Francis Foster: [laughs]
01:01:32
Eric Weinstein: … I’m having an illusion, which is that I’m the only sane person on planet Earth, and that’s never a good sign psychologically.
01:01:38
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm.
01:01:38
Konstantin Kisin: Mm-hmm.
01:01:38
Eric Weinstein: Um, but, but-
01:01:39
Francis Foster: You do live in Los Angeles.
01:01:40
Eric Weinstein: What?
01:01:41
Francis Foster: You do live in Los Angeles.
01:01:42
Eric Weinstein: A- and I am… Yes. A- and I, I am narcissistically the center of my own world.
01:01:45
Francis Foster: [laughs]
01:01:46
Eric Weinstein: Um, the really exciting thing is, is, uh, Elon is the other guy talking about it, is, um, interplanetary diversification so that we don’t have all of our human eggs in one basket. And there’s basically two routes, either chemical rockets or not chemical rockets. So Elon’s on chemical rockets. I don’t think that’s what happens next. I think that what happens next is that the string theory juggernaut that is blocking the exit is about to die, and there are huge things happening right now. Uh, there was a tremendous podcast of Curt Jaimungal on Theories of Everything interviewing Leonard Susskind, where for the first time, a string theorist totally misgauged the quality of the interviewer because normally an interviewer can’t push back. So you have interviewers who are string theorist cheerleaders like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sean Carroll or Brian Greene but suddenly there was a guy who seemed to be running a normal channel who knows way too much about theoretical physics and mathematical physics and he started pushing back on one of the fathers of modern string theory. And during the interview, the guy goes… Leonard Susskind goes from saying, uh, “You should always follow the conventional wisdom because it’s almost always right. Don’t go with the weirdos,” to… And Curt says, “Well, what… Do you think string theory is the only game in town?” He’s like, “More or less, yes.” And string… A- and Curt says, “Well, what about the other theories?” He says, “What other theories?” So Curt starts listing the theories that Curt is aware of and Leonard Susskind was forced to spin on a dime. First time in 40 years somebody got an answer to the question, how do you know that string theory is the only game in town if you don’t know anything about what’s going on outside of string theory? It’s the dumbest question and for 40 years nobody’s been able to crack it. Curt Jaimungal just figured it out. Um, the interview is there for all time and Leonard Susskind suddenly becomes a much better version of himself. I called him an asshole on Chris Williamson because that’s what he is. You know, he, he’s asked on this p- on this program, it’s very funny. He said, “Well, what do you think about Eric Weinstein?” He says, “I don’t know who that is.”
01:04:06
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs]
01:04:08
Eric Weinstein: I, I was sitting next to him after having talked to him at Natty Seiberg’s lecture at Stanford in 2017. I have a picture where he’s right next to me. It’s ridiculous. Something huge is about to happen, gentlemen and that is, is that we are about, I think, to go beyond the standard model in general relativity and if you think about Richard Nixon as putting in the speed limit of 55 miles an hour around 1974, something like that, which lasted until the mid-’90s. We’ve had the speed limit being the speed of light or C since 1905 until the present and just imagine if the successor theory to Einstein’s general theory of relativity doesn’t have the same restrictions. Instead of fantasizing about wormholes or time dilation or generation ships, you may find that there are new degrees of freedom and if you want to talk to me about what I’m really excited about, what I’m really optimistic about is I’m hopeful that we’re gonna recapitulate within physics something that happened in technology. Now, I don’t know that this is true or possible but I… Here’s the hope. In the early 2000s, there was a demonstration at a TED Talk and you can see it online where this guy says, “Here’s our new interface,” and I’m touching the screen and moving pictures around and then he takes a picture and he goes like this. It’s called a multi-touch gesture and in that particular case it’s called pinch to zoom.
01:05:39
Francis Foster: Mm.
01:05:39
Konstantin Kisin: Hmm.
01:05:42
Eric Weinstein: The biggest hope that I have is that the next theory has something like pinch to zoom and that the entire concept of being limited by the speed of light and this Einsteinian moat where it would take us over 100,000 years to get to the next star, let alone the optimal star, going as fast as man has ever traveled before, um, there’s no way you can do that. You know, the… My people are like a bit over 5,000 years old. I guarantee you you’re not gonna get along on a generation ship for 100,000 years. The idea of not having the speed-
01:06:18
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs] Israel and Hamas on, on a spaceship. That would-
01:06:21
Eric Weinstein: Guys, we have to get along.
01:06:22
Konstantin Kisin: [laughs]
01:06:24
Francis Foster: [laughs]
01:06:24
Eric Weinstein: Um, what about possible free energy? What about the idea of dark chemistry? Physics has been the, the provider of our economy. The World Wide Web comes from it, the semiconductor, all of molecular biology was founded by physicists and physicists has been… Physics at its highest level has been dead since 1973. The thing that governs it is called the Lagrangian. The Lagrangian of our world has not moved in 51 years. And 40 of those years have been taken up by string theory blocking the exit. I am so hopeful that with Elon, that with new talent at the National Science Board, the National Science Foundation, OSTP, PCAST, all of the science agencies, and the Department of Energy, which by the way, is really the department of physics, uh, it came out of the old AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission. The hope that the US could restart cowboy science, that we could drive a wooden stake through the heart of DEI which devitalizes us, that we could bring back the great man theory of physics, which is just a belief in the individual rather than the committee or that something is in the zeitgeist or the volksgeist. Um, it could build us the most fantastic weapons we’ve ever seen, but it’s now time to, to, to risk it all. Uh, the thing that I’m really excited about, uh, is the end of the stagnation in theoretical physics, and in particular, I have an entrant in that which is called geometric unity, which has been completely misunderstood because nobody has actually really gone into it and taken it seriously. And it’s going to be hysterically funny if for 40 years I’ve been trying to have the conversation with a community that refuses to have the conversation openly and honestly. There’s like all this backstabbing and skullduggery and interference competition, all that. It’s for the same time that string theory has taken up all the oxygen, geometric unity has been available. And if I’m correct, um, there’s so much great work to be done and there’s so much hope and there’s so much possibility because if we can start believing that the stars are a vacation destination, that we can homestead in, in the cosmos, it’s going to be that moment with Ferdinand and Isabella on a scale that we’ve never seen. And I think it’s just… It’s, it’s hard to talk about because nobody has a– There are very few unprecedented things. If you think about the hydrogen bomb in ’52, nobody had ever seen a thermonuclear explosion on planet Earth. That’s the kind of thing that only happens in the sun. This is one of the only things that’s never happened before, and the other one is AI. And you can just tell how bad this campaign was by how little AI figured in it.
01:09:22
Francis Foster: Mm.
01:09:24
Eric Weinstein: It should have been all about AI. And the one person who had a really interesting new idea about AI was barely heard, and that was Nicole Shanahan. You could like barely hear it. It was a whisper. Um, AI, AI is going to require something that isn’t UBI, and it’s called Coasean analysis, and the economists know all about it. It’s the deepest idea to come out of economic theory, potentially. And in order to keep AI from destroying the world’s labor market and destroying capitalism itself, uh, I’m very excited that Coasean analysis is going to be able to restructure, uh, the way in which AI crashes over our labor market.
01:10:10
Francis Foster: So, um, so what does that involve, Eric?
01:10:13
Eric Weinstein: The idea being that… Here’s the crazy idea. Assume that you and I are at odds with each other. You’re a polluter, and I need the environment pristine in order to fish in a lake.
01:10:25
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm.
01:10:25
Eric Weinstein: The question is, how should we figure out how much pollution you should be allowed for your furniture factory and how much pristine water I need in order to feel comfortable about selling my fish? What Coase figured out, and it was a complete shock when he introduced it at the University of Chicago in the Money and Banking seminar of Milton Friedman, was that if you assign rights to pollute the lake, we can either give you the rights as the furniture guy and then I could buy them away from you as the fishing representative, or you can give them to the fishermen and the furniture, uh, factory can buy the rights. Now, if we give them to you, you’re gonna get rich, and if we give them to me, I’m gonna get rich, and if we distribute them, we’ll get something else.
01:11:06
Francis Foster: Mm-hmm.
01:11:07
Eric Weinstein: But the weird thing is that the lake gets used the same way because the market figures out the s- the same efficient allocation of the underlying resource.
01:11:15
Francis Foster: Mm.
01:11:16
Eric Weinstein: I wrote a paper in, I don’t know, 2002 called Migration for the Benefit of All, um, where the, the whole problem was that the conservatives were for open borders. Nobody remembers that The Wall Street Journal was leading the charge for a five-word constitutional amendment. There shall be open borders. And so we were trying to figure out how to get around it. Somebody at the UN named Manolo Abella saw me give a crazy talk. Nobody liked the talk except for Manolo. He said, “This is great. Why don’t you write it up?” So I wrote up a thing that said that the workers in each field should have the Coasean rights and license them to the employers to bring in foreigners if all of the costs are incorporated. And what that did was say… Imagine you’re the only American cab driver in New York City. You don’t want to have a restriction. You want a ton of people to come in and drive cabs. But then you’re gonna get licensing income as your wage income goes down. So your wage income goes down, your licensing income goes up, and you’re not gonna make a deal unless you’re made Pareto improved or better off. So imagine you do that with AI. Imagine the idea is, is that the workers license the right to use the AI that is trained on this corpus of human knowledge and that their wages will go down and their licensing income will go up and the underlying market will not be destroyed. We have to try to keep AI from destroying the market because otherwise we’re in command and control, and then you have UBI, and UBI is cancer when it comes to dignity. Here. Here’s some money. Go amuse yourself. You’re, you’re now useless. This is terrible. But if you’re an owner, you’re saying, “Look, I have a right to my labor market.” I’m gonna allocate so many, uh, licenses to use AI. They’re gonna beat up my wage, but I’m gonna make money from the licensing, and you’re gonna make money from the product and the gain in efficiency. So it’s super, super exciting that Nicole was talking about this, and Jay Bhattacharya, Pia Malaney, myself, and Nicole, um, started, you know, ideating about it, and then we got overwhelmed with the drama of the election. Let’s get the drama behind us. Let’s fix CPI, which was broken by the Basquin Commission, um, appointed by Patrick Moynihan and Bob Packwood in order to artificially, uh, represent the inflation rate as lower. That way, taxes would go up because they’re shielded by tax brackets, and entitlement payments would go down because they’re cost of living adjusted. That’s super important. Let’s reverse the whole H-1B nonsense, which was the thing created by Peter House and Eric Block at NSF and the National Academy of Science as a conspiracy to pass the Immigration Act of nineteen ninety. I’ve been tracking all of these adulterations to the US code. We’ve been getting farther and farther from what worked by making laws. And what I hope and pray, and I don’t care whether I get a job in Washington or not, is that somebody calls and says, “Eric, what do you know about unfucking the United States of America?” Because we have made so many bad laws, whether it’s the Bayh Dole Act, the Mansfield Amendment, the Eilberg Amendment, Immigration Act of nineteen ninety, the Smith Munt Modernization. We’ve got to know how we screwed ourselves over historically. And, uh, I don’t know whether you guys even know this, but I used to be the co-founder of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project, uh, at Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research. I was– conducted, um, a giant survey of cell biology for the American Society of Cell Biology in order to show that people were exploiting their graduate students and that China was getting a periscope into everything we were doing. So for a long period of time, I was very focused on policy, but there was nothing to do because basically the Dick Morris innovation was that the Republicans and the Democrats would compete to steal the silver and sell it rather than keep the American machine hum- humming. So what I hope and pray is that Elon and Trump and company just ask, how did we get into this terrible spot? How can we start fixing our official statistics, our laws, our re– Code of Federal Regulations, and getting rid of all of the rot of the last thirty-two years?
01:15:49
Konstantin Kisin: Eric, thanks for coming back on the show. Uh, head on over to Substack where we’re gonna ask Eric your questions.
01:15:55
Francis Foster: [rock music] This is from Phil Morrissey. If asked by the Trump administration what role you would be best suited to fulfill and what could you achieve in said role? [rock music]
