“We Are Being Manipulated On A Massive Scale” - Eric Weinstein (4K)

1. 0:00 – 5:41

   Eric’s First Holiday for a Long Time

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

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

   2. EWEric Weinstein0:05

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

   3. CWChris Williamson0:10

      How was that?

   4. EWEric Weinstein0:11

      Uh, astounding. Um, really, uh, very good to see what's going on in the rest of the world at this particular moment. Um, we had previously gone to India, uh, in the year to visit family. This was to go back to Turkey and to go to Portugal, but also to the Azores Islands. And, um, I can't tell you how meaningful it was for me to be back traveling.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:39

      Why?

   6. EWEric Weinstein0:40

      Well, (smacks lips) I mean, partially, it's reacqui- Y- you, when you have children, and children change your game for about two decades, you have to realize that that's a transient period. It felt like it was gonna go on forever. And so this was sort of trying to figure out what is it like to go from traveling in your 20s and 30s without kids to traveling with your kids at the last moment that you still have them at home, um, (smacks lips) and now you're gonna have the rest of your life without them again. But you can't go back to backpacking and doing certain s- other things that were easy for you. So you have to figure out how to rejoin your previous life that has been in progress without you actually-

   7. CWChris Williamson1:17

      Pending for a long time.

   8. EWEric Weinstein1:18

      Exactly.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:19

      A sabbatical from life, almost.

   10. EWEric Weinstein1:20

       The other thing is that, um, you forget about parts of yourself. Like I forgot that, that I spoke Turkish, not well-

   11. CWChris Williamson1:28

       (laughs)

   12. EWEric Weinstein1:29

       ... but I spoke rudimentary Tarzan Turkish 30 years ago. And to be back in Istanbul and to suddenly have words and phrases and things come back, um, and be talking to cab drivers and, and just people in the street, seeing the change. Obviously, there's been an enormous amount of change in Turkey. Um, Portugal is fascinating, seeing certain things, uh, at the end of their lifecycle. We were at a synagogue in Bursa where the sort of the home of the Ottoman Empire, uh, where they were down to, like, their last 50 people, which is a common enough thing, uh, when we visit diaspora Jewish communities, sort of at the tail end with the embers still glowing hot, but no, no chance for a rebirth. And then in the Azores, um, I was not prepared for the level of beauty that we encountered. Uh, there is a level of beauty that I've only experienced two, maybe three times in my life, that sort of leaves you physically sick, like, ill. It's so beautiful that your, your body is the weak link. Like you, you might think that sugar is tasty, but if you were to eat a bag of sugar, you'd probably be sick to your stomach, and I would say this was, like, so much beauty that it was at an almost pathological level and more than, more than I think my family could really take in. We were just so moved.

   13. CWChris Williamson2:57

       I've heard you say before about how a lot of the time you don't realize the last time you're going to do a thing-

   14. EWEric Weinstein3:03

       Right. Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson3:03

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

   16. EWEric Weinstein3:32

       I'm on the ethnic program. We don't believe in this stuff. Um, my, my children don't become adults at the age of 18. I don't care about the laws of the United States or the state of California. I think we do family wrong in the States. Uh, you, you send them off to college and then you tell them, "Go follow your dream." And they bounce into some locality that you aren't in, and you don't get the benefit of these very strong families because the market has been so strong in the US for so long. And the market more or less took over all sorts of duties that were assigned to families historically. And so the reason that people always say, "Oh, your families are weak," was because our markets were strong, right? And so insurance and opportunity, all of these things that, um, could be, uh, handed over to the market were, and as a result, when we find out that the markets are not safe, we, we realize that we've abandoned the structures that we needed to retreat to, that our families are quite small, below replacement rate very often, and we don't live in the same place. And so, you know, I married a woman from India and I basically carry a lot of Eastern European norms. And so my feeling is that my children are my children forever, and I'm not letting go of them. And this idea that it's your life and you can do what you want is only true up to a point. Uh, you also have a continuity issue. And this is normal, by the way, and it may sound weird in an American context, but I think that the world recognizes that we're links in a chain and there's a certain amount that you get to do that's just yours because it's your life, but never go full Billy Joel.

   17. CWChris Williamson5:14

       Yeah. Pan-generational housing is something, being in Austin, people getting ranches, starting even comm- you know, ten-family mini villages with a bunch of other people.

   18. EWEric Weinstein5:23

       This is normal.

   19. CWChris Williamson5:23

       Yeah. I- I- It's something that I'm seeing occur more and more. And, you know, in a atomized, like mass solipsism, mass individualism society, this doesn't sound like a bad redress.

   20. EWEric Weinstein5:35

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

2. 5:41 – 12:53

   What Normal People Misunderstand about Elite People

   1. CWChris Williamson5:42

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

   2. EWEric Weinstein5:45

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

   3. CWChris Williamson5:50

      Thi- that's quite a while-

   4. EWEric Weinstein5:51

      All right, all right.

   5. CWChris Williamson5:51

      ... in many people's lives.

   6. EWEric Weinstein5:52

      All right.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:53

      What do you think that most normal people would be surprised to know about the powerful and the rich individuals' worldviews, the way that they hold themselves, what is and isn't true?

   8. EWEric Weinstein6:09

      ... they feel powerless. (laughs) That's one of the craziest things, is that very often you're at a table of people of immeasurable wealth, and they're talking about the rich or the hyper-connected. They don't see themselves in these terms.

   9. CWChris Williamson6:30

      Why?

   10. EWEric Weinstein6:31

       Uh, I think there's different kinds of rich, to be, to be honest. I think that if, for example, you got rich from arms, uh, from, let's say, uh, arms manufacturing, you've been entwined with government your whole life. Or if agriculture, something that's highly regulated that's, um... extraction, uh, oil and gas. Those people, I think, have always been close to power. A lot of the dream of tech, for example, was, "We don't need the government, we'll just build stuff in our garages, and if it's cool, th- it'll take care of itself, and therefore, we're minimally dependent on the traditional ecosystems." So, a lot of tech money felt disenfranchised. They didn't know how to play the game, and that was both to its credit, and, uh, a huge danger. But I- I think one of the things that I find very interesting is that when people are not rate-limited by money, they're rate-limited by all sorts of other things. Like they may- they may not want their number to d- to go down, so they go from six billion to four billion would be a huge blow, i- even though it doesn't seem to impact normal things. Um, another thing is, is that most of them have given up on the retail notion of reality.

   11. CWChris Williamson7:52

       What's that?

   12. EWEric Weinstein7:53

       Whatever mainstream media... You know, if- if you have a worldview that allows you to listen to National Public Radio, to- that, uh, then reads The Wall Street Journal and- and The Times and The New Yorker, whatever that point of view is, most of the very powerful rich people I know have- have checked out at a level, um, that is astounding. They don't believe that they can afford to depend on normal institutions.

   13. CWChris Williamson8:22

       How does that show up in their lives?

   14. EWEric Weinstein8:24

       Weird ways. Um, you know, th- they don't have a regular doctor, they have concierge medicine. Their fire policy comes with a private fire department that will fight for their home but won't necessarily fight for th- uh, homes next door unless it's justified.

   15. CWChris Williamson8:38

       I didn't know that that was a thing, okay?

   16. EWEric Weinstein8:40

       Yeah. Um, you know, uh, it's not until you travel with some of these people that you- y- you realize that there's a secret corridor in the airport or a way of getting onto the plane. There's just a l- there's a lot of infrastructure built for a very small number of people, and, um, for the most part, they can't figure out what to do with the money, and i- i- it's my belief. So, they... If you believe that the (laughs) world is headed towards an apocalypse, you're very unlikely to wanna contribute money, because that's the only fungible thing you have in an emergency. And so I think that a lot of the sort of apocalyptic thinking of- of very powerful people is very destructive, because they're- they're trying to figure out how to survive a mild apocalypse, like a six months of your... You know, "If I have six months of- of canned goods and I've got four ex-Navy SEALs u- on my property in a remote-"

   17. CWChris Williamson9:39

       With shock collars on. (laughs)

   18. EWEric Weinstein9:40

       "... in a remote location in Montana, can I- can I weather the storm with a few diesel generators?" So, if it's a very mild apocalypse, maybe they've got six months planned. Um, but a lot of... I think that there's a lot of thinking that, uh, you should husband your resources because you don't know what's coming, given that things are gonna have to collapse. And I think it's very sad, because those are the people who could shore up the system.

   19. CWChris Williamson10:07

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

   20. EWEric Weinstein10:24

       It really does, uh, particularly if you've been deprived early in your life. There's something that happens where y- you're nervous 'til your dying day that you're gonna die under an overpass, right? I'm not kidding. Um, one thing that I highly recommend, people never take me seriously, is a, uh, video game called a tower defense game of Plants versus Zombies. And Plants versus Zombies ends in a situation where you win all the things you can inside of the game, but somehow you still have the ability to continue to earn even though there's nothing left to purchase. And the reason that I find this fascinating is you get to watch your own psychology, which is, now that you've given yourself the ability to earn, you can't bring yourself to stop earning, even though earning has lost meaning. And so, if you can't get to that in real life, you can at least get to that inside of Plants versus Zombies (laughs) , and I highly recommend it, because you have to give yourself some idea of, "We have to cross finish lines as they come." If you decide, "Okay, when I get to $10 million, that's when I can afford to become a philanthropist," then you're gonna get there, and you're gonna realize, no, th- the goals are gonna m- you know, the goalposts are gonna move. So, think about how a waitress sees this. Waitresses do philanthropy almost from- from the beginning. They'll- they'll over-tip somebody who gives them good service, and they can't afford it. And, uh, you know, it's sort of, it's a poverty trap when you're at the very low end of the earning spectrum. But I- I think there's something to take from that, which is practice a little bit of philanthropy and a little bit of kicking your shoes up and not always deferring, um, taking- taking profit, in some sense, on your success. So, make sure that all throughout your life, you're treating yourself to some luxury, even when you can least afford it, and you're-... just exhibiting a little bit of goodness, even though you feel like y- y- y- you desperately need to build yourself up, because otherwise, you'll always push it out.

   21. CWChris Williamson12:24

       There's a Morgan Housel quote where he says, "The best way to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts." And he's wrote this great book called The Psychology of Money, and it's true that most people treat their goals... Their relationship to their goals is like the horizon, that for every step toward it they get-

   22. EWEric Weinstein12:43

       Right.

   23. CWChris Williamson12:43

       ... i- it then moves one step further away, which is probably more like the horizon on a spring or on a rubber band, that it gets a little bit closer and then it bonk, it snaps away

3. 12:53 – 16:04

   Balancing Your Scarcity Mentality & Abundance Mentality

   1. CWChris Williamson12:53

      from you. And, um, I've been around a lot of people that have got chunks of wealth, and it's a rare thing to see someone who doesn't still have that scarcity mentality, despite the fact that they've acquired it.

   2. EWEric Weinstein13:08

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

   3. CWChris Williamson13:19

      Talk to me about the tension between those two.

   4. EWEric Weinstein13:21

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

   5. CWChris Williamson13:56

      (laughs)

   6. EWEric Weinstein13:56

      Come on. (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson13:58

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

   8. EWEric Weinstein14:10

      Yes and no. I mean, there's teeth, there's throats. A- a- anything somebody who does combat s- sports knows has to be regularly-

   9. CWChris Williamson14:16

      Is gonna try and attack. Right.

   10. EWEric Weinstein14:17

       Right?

   11. CWChris Williamson14:17

       Yeah.

   12. EWEric Weinstein14:17

       Small joints, whatever it is.

   13. CWChris Williamson14:19

       Yeah.

   14. EWEric Weinstein14:19

       There are plenty of ways to, to get yourself into real trouble.

   15. CWChris Williamson14:21

       Yep.

   16. EWEric Weinstein14:22

       The key thing that you're trying to use childhoods for is to go through the mistakes that are n- not permanently disfiguring.

   17. CWChris Williamson14:31

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

   18. EWEric Weinstein14:36

       Right.

   19. CWChris Williamson14:36

       Uh, is facilitated almost exclusively by fathers.

   20. EWEric Weinstein14:38

       Hell, yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson14:39

       And you learn the limits of your strength. You learn the limits of your body. You learn how high of a tree you can jump off and how high of a tree you can't jump off.

   22. EWEric Weinstein14:49

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

   23. CWChris Williamson15:05

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4. 16:04 – 32:23

   When Eric Met Jeffrey Epstein

   1. CWChris Williamson16:04

      You met Jeffrey Epstein once.

   2. EWEric Weinstein16:08

      Yep.

   3. CWChris Williamson16:09

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

   4. EWEric Weinstein16:16

      (laughs) Whatever that means. Um, well, one thing is that there is a physiological reaction that corresponds to this phrase that, you know, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Like, that's a real physiological feeling. I don't know whether the hair actually does that, but it's exactly what it feels like. You're meeting somebody who is unholy, and you know, one of the most interesting things is that he was beckoning into a world that didn't seem to exist but for him as the, as the door, as the doormat. I think that's one of the things that freaked out a lot of these rich people is, is that he, he felt rich in a movie sense, which is not something that you find among actually rich people.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:10

      What do you mean?

   6. EWEric Weinstein17:13

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

   7. CWChris Williamson18:06

      So you had a...... felt sense and embodied sense of discomfort?

   8. EWEric Weinstein18:13

      Oh, hell yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson18:15

      And where did that come from?

   10. EWEric Weinstein18:17

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

   11. CWChris Williamson19:04

       That sounds like a script from a movie.

   12. EWEric Weinstein19:06

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

   13. CWChris Williamson19:33

       Sounds menacing.

   14. EWEric Weinstein19:34

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

   15. CWChris Williamson19:42

       How'd you... What's that mean?

   16. EWEric Weinstein19:43

       If you're scary enou- uh, look, rich people can get sex, but they can't necessarily get people to shut up afterwards. So my take on it, and my take on it instantly was this is not an actual human. This is a construct of someone's. Someone has created a fake human being called Jeffrey Epstein, who's a mysterious currency trading financier with crazy rules so that no one would ever invest with him. And I think that was to keep people from seeking his investment services. I mean, he, you know, (laughs) he's labeled disgraced financier, but nobody has a record of trading with him. He was sitting there, and he comes into the meeting, and he says, you know, "Well, Eric, I was just doing some currency trading." And I, I thought about that scene that you sometimes see and is a meme with Steve Buscemi with a skateboard over his shoulder saying-

   17. CWChris Williamson20:45

       Hello, fellow kids. Teenagers. Yeah, "Hello, fellow financial traders."

   18. EWEric Weinstein20:49

       Exactly. (laughs) So I'm thinking, "You don't really look like a rich guy who trades in markets."

   19. CWChris Williamson20:59

       The thing that's intere- that I'm finding myself intrigued by here is, it takes a moderate amount of cognitive horsepower to be able to piece together this theater that you sat down at...

   20. EWEric Weinstein21:15

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson21:18

       ... deployed in a nefarious, malicious, manipulative way.

   22. EWEric Weinstein21:23

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CWChris Williamson21:24

       But it's smart.

   24. EWEric Weinstein21:27

       Wh- what do you mean it's smart? Say more.

   25. CWChris Williamson21:28

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

   26. EWEric Weinstein21:34

       Do you think he did it?

   27. CWChris Williamson21:35

       Oh, he has a team of manipulators?

   28. EWEric Weinstein21:38

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

   29. CWChris Williamson21:46

       Oh, so you think he was a plant?

   30. EWEric Weinstein21:49

       No, I think he was a construct.
5. 32:23 – 38:50

   The Response from the Recent UFO Whistleblowers

   1. CWChris Williamson32:23

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

   2. EWEric Weinstein32:34

      I wasn't even in this game when it was UFO, so I-

   3. CWChris Williamson32:36

      Okay, okay.

   4. EWEric Weinstein32:37

      ... you know.

   5. CWChris Williamson32:37

      So what do you make of the recent UAP stories and attention and response and subsequent response?

   6. EWEric Weinstein32:44

      Um, I'd like to ask you first.

   7. CWChris Williamson32:49

      So I had a look at the, uh, first whistleblower from about two months ago, quite closely, with Andy Stumpf-

   8. EWEric Weinstein32:57

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson32:57

      ... who used to have pretty high level security clearance, and he explained to me about how unimpressive that particular type of security clearance is, how very common.

   10. EWEric Weinstein33:05

       Which one? This is David...

   11. CWChris Williamson33:07

       Yes, David-

   12. EWEric Weinstein33:09

       ... Gersh?

   13. CWChris Williamson33:10

       No, not, not David Fravor, who was the-

   14. EWEric Weinstein33:12

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

   15. CWChris Williamson33:14

       Correct.

   16. EWEric Weinstein33:14

       This is, uh, David Grusch?

   17. CWChris Williamson33:16

       Yes.

   18. EWEric Weinstein33:17

       Okay.

   19. CWChris Williamson33:17

       Um, very common level of security clearance, uh, that, uh... Using that as some sort of, uh, "Oh, this is a legitimate credential," doesn't really wash too much. That it was second auth- it was third-hand information mostly, second-hand information kind of. "I heard from a person who saw-

   20. EWEric Weinstein33:37

       Right.

   21. CWChris Williamson33:37

       ... or who heard."

   22. EWEric Weinstein33:38

       Right.

   23. CWChris Williamson33:39

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

   24. EWEric Weinstein33:47

       I see.

   25. CWChris Williamson33:49

       What did you think? (laughs)

   26. EWEric Weinstein33:51

       Well, like I've been telling everybody, um, these are highly conserved stories. This is not the only person I've heard this story from, I've heard this from multiple people. There, there are various versions of this secret world which play out as space opera, you know, that... Then MJ-12 became the real government that only, even the present cou- couldn't understand, you know? And it's like, "Okay." So, that's the weird part about it until y- you start realizing (laughs) how sober many of the people are who believe this, and who claim to have had direct contact with him, and then you don't know what to do. I mean, in other words, whatever this is, there is a thing, it's not necessarily little green men. It could be, for example, that they mock up a floating spaceship in a hangar, and then they, uh, drag people past it and say, "Whatever you do, do not look to the, to your left or right or you'll be shot." And then, of course, people look and then, like, mission accomplished. Now people will say, "Oh my God, you have no idea what we... The US has incredible technology." And then maybe the idea is you've got a cover story.

   27. CWChris Williamson35:11

       Yeah.

   28. EWEric Weinstein35:11

       Maybe you, you've got the, your, your adversary investing in things that don't make any sense. I don't know. But there's not, nothing here. This is not about Mylar balloons and seagulls anymore.

   29. CWChris Williamson35:26

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

   30. EWEric Weinstein35:33

       Yeah.
6. 38:50 – 45:38

   How to Defend Against Manipulative Uncertainty

   1. CWChris Williamson38:50

      I wonder about this. Uh, how would you say, epidemic of uncertainty?

   2. EWEric Weinstein39:01

      Brilliant. Speaking my language.

   3. CWChris Williamson39:06

      And I wonder ... how, first off, how as an individual you are supposed to put up any kind of effective defense, so just take some sovereignty, be an, you know, an agentic individual.

   4. EWEric Weinstein39:29

      Right.

   5. CWChris Williamson39:31

      And secondly, I wonder what the end goal is. I, I understand why uncertainty would be useful for manipulation, because if people can't discern truth from untruth, it can be easy to poke them and prod them and, and float them in particular directions.

   6. EWEric Weinstein39:48

      Sure. Right.

   7. CWChris Williamson39:48

      But it also seems like a, I don't know, kind of also useless as well that some people w- um, a non-insignificant, uh, large cohort of people will just reject it entirely, which actually-

   8. EWEric Weinstein40:00

      That's what they're doing.

   9. CWChris Williamson40:01

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

   10. EWEric Weinstein40:09

       Right.

   11. CWChris Williamson40:10

       ... this epidemic of uncertainty, maybe the outcomes were predicted but haven't manifested in the way that was intended. Maybe there's more of a rebellious streak in-

   12. EWEric Weinstein40:21

       Say more about that. I'm try- trying to understand you.

   13. CWChris Williamson40:23

       That if people who, if you make the public very uncertain about most things by overloading them-

   14. EWEric Weinstein40:29

       Right.

   15. CWChris Williamson40:29

       ... with information, or by even the, uh, i- it doesn't even need to be coordination, it could be a byproduct of having 24/7 access to the entire world's population through Twitter and Instagram Stories and blah, blah, blah.

   16. EWEric Weinstein40:39

       Right.

   17. CWChris Williamson40:40

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

   18. EWEric Weinstein40:46

       Right.

   19. CWChris Williamson40:48

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

   20. EWEric Weinstein41:07

       Right. Or anything.

   21. CWChris Williamson41:07

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

   22. EWEric Weinstein41:20

       First of all, I'm really glad to get a question about this as a seat change, which is that our lives have become wall-to-wall uncertainty. We can't discern, if the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor today, we would spend 10 years discussing whether it was a false flag, whether it was actually the Japanese, whether there was any attack, whether it was a sound stage, whether it was a PSYOP, whether it was a f- you know? Right now, the main institutions of our society have abdicated their role for public spirited adjudication of what is true based on expertise. And so what you're seeing is people coming to hate experts and coming to hate institutions because they're realizing that these institutions lie to them at a level that they've never considered unless they were Alex Jones fans to begin with. And so you're, you're, what you're having is you're having a large number of people waking up to the idea that-Yeah, there really are (laughs) organizations and working groups that determine what you hear from a multiplicity of venues. It's the same message relentlessly.

   23. CWChris Williamson42:42

       Do you think people are overly pattern-matching that now?

   24. EWEric Weinstein42:45

       Say more, b- by what you mean?

   25. CWChris Williamson42:47

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

   26. EWEric Weinstein42:52

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

   27. CWChris Williamson43:15

       For believing them?

   28. EWEric Weinstein43:16

       "... they're un- for when they're, when they're unearthed?" Um, what you're seeing is a complete destruction of bedrock reality that if you weren't actually physically there... How do we know that these people actually met in a warehouse? Is this really a table or is it just-

   29. CWChris Williamson43:35

       (laughs)

   30. EWEric Weinstein43:36

       ... you know, CGI? Was it green and we could superimpose wood onto it? Nobody knows what's true. And, you know, if you w- if you ask me, "Well, h- Eric, how are you dealing with this?" I would say, "I'm failing. I'm just flat out failing." A- as are all of you, I, I'm just more honest about it. Some of you have an idea that you've got one lens, which is, "Fix the money, fix the world. Bitcoin, that's the answer." Yeah, Bitcoin, rock on. But no, that's not the answer. Or somebody else says, you know, "I really think that we just need to be open and tolerant, and realize it's a big world, and we just have to give people their due." Well, that doesn't work either. You can't just let everything run riot, or, "We have to go back to our institutions." With these people at the helm? Are you kidding? "We have to abandon our institution." Wait, what are you saying? We're gonna abandon our institutions? Are, are y- a- d- do you know what that looks like? Nobody has an answer.
7. 45:38 – 48:56

   Where Eric Differs from Sam Harris

   1. CWChris Williamson45:38

      Your, th- the conversation is moving in a similar direction to one I had with Sam Harris recently.

   2. EWEric Weinstein45:43

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

   3. CWChris Williamson45:47

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

   4. EWEric Weinstein46:01

      Sam also tried to say, "I can see the problems on the..." I say, "Can see the problems on the right, and I can see the problems on the left," and there is a group of people who have allowed their irritation with the left to color their thinking to the point that they now are in a right wing situation without understanding the dangers on the right. I think Sam is discounting the idea that once people wake up to the i- to the concept that they were living in an orchestrated Truman Show, that they did not understand, they're not going to have the idea of like, "Oh, sure, the vaccines were a little bit more dangerous than claimed, and maybe a little bit less effective, and maybe we knew a little bit more about the lab leaks." No way. You spat directly in my face and told me, not only that it was raining, but that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face and you piled up how many Nobel laureates t- to defend, uh, the idea that any inquiry into the origin of this virus was racism? It's like, you're dead to me. And I think that that's what people are not understanding in the Democratic Party, and... Increasingly, the basic attitude is, whoever this class of people is that crawled into our elite institutions is just dead. Like, there's nothing Anthony Fauci could say at this moment that I wanna hear. It's not that I don't think that he doesn't know virology or epidemiology. I know I can't trust him because of the way in which he looked into my eyes. And then, you know, when Stephen Vec- uh, Colbert is dancing with syringes singing the vaccine song, and Ariana Grande, you know, is in a super highly produced number from, like, Hairspray but converted to vaccines, uh, with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and everybody's celebrating like it's a mayday celebration, um, I get it. I live in a completely fake world and I wrote an article about this in 2011 on kayfabe, which is the system of lies that undergirds professional wrestling. So now you're, (laughs) you've woken up to the idea that you've spent your life watching something like Major League Baseball or Premier League Soccer or whatever it is, and it's all fake. And now you don't know who you are, you don't know what your country is, you don't know what a ballot box is, you have no idea what news is or media, you don't know what a university is actually teaching.You've got people running around who are calling themselves scholars, who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats, and you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong and it's directly in their area of expertise.

   5. CWChris Williamson48:54

      So, the thing about pattern matching that I said

8. 48:56 – 1:03:32

   Have We Become Too Sceptical of Institutions?

   1. CWChris Williamson48:56

      was, there are still many people who are scholars, who are in positions of authority inside of high-faluting institutions that presumably do want to do good and do want to deploy their skills in a way that does this. Is it a case that every single institution is completely wrong? Or is this reflexive skepticism-

   2. EWEric Weinstein49:23

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson49:24

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

   4. EWEric Weinstein49:32

      Okay. So we have to talk about the institutions that are fighting back. Twitter, which has become X, is not on the same standard that the, uh, Facebooks are or Google is. Elon is doing something different. We can talk about what. The University of Chicago is still fighting. Uh, my daughter just graduated from the University of Chicago.

   5. CWChris Williamson49:58

      Congratulations.

   6. EWEric Weinstein49:58

      So, I d- yeah, I never mentioned where she was while she was there. Um, i- it is... It needs s- it needs support. We have to support th- the schools that fought back, for example. I believe Ohio State fought back, and there's a school in Oklahoma that fought back. And leading that charge is the University of Chicago. We have organizations like FIRE, uh, that promote free speech. Uh, we have professors who are taking on some risk, like Jonathan Haidt. But we're not seeing the Noam Chomsky effect, where you do amazing research and they have to put up with every crazy idea that comes through your mind. Right? That's important. Look up a person named Serge Lang in mathematics, and something called The File, to understand how dangerous it is to screw with real scholars.

   7. CWChris Williamson50:52

      What happens? Give us a 30,000-foot view.

   8. EWEric Weinstein50:55

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

   9. CWChris Williamson51:39

      Tim Pool referred to it as the IDW's walking corpse phase-

   10. EWEric Weinstein51:44

       Oh.

   11. CWChris Williamson51:44

       ... at the moment.

   12. EWEric Weinstein51:45

       Well, my point is, this... Personal destruction is the coin of the realm. And some of the personal destruction that you see that looks organic is, is orchestrated as well. And we're just in this thing where, in my opinion, what you're looking at is something called deconfliction, but people don't know what that is. Deconfliction is supposed to stop what are called blue-on-blue incidences. So a blue-on-blue incidence is you have two branches of government that don't know that w- they're operating covertly. So maybe you have an investigative team and an undercover team, and the investigative team is about to blow the cover thinking that they've got a target, but is actually an undercover agent. So what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to check in with these centralized systems and say, "Do you have any assets in this arena we're about to move?" "Yes, we do." "Oh, okay." So, they find out. And this is supposed to stop blue-on-blue. The interesting thing is, even though there are three systems called Safety Net, RISSafe, and Case Explorer, you can't use them unless you are an official part of the government. So I called up one of them, had a half an hour conversation before I started asking about Jeffrey Epstein, and then they immediately said, "This call will be terminated in five seconds," uh, for... I, uh, maybe it was Case Exp- Case Explorer for South Florida, something like that. What happens when you have a civilian that's not signed up for nondisclosure under no rules? You're an American citizen with full right to free speech, and you s- stumble on something that you're not supposed to know about. That is a deconfliction problem that nobody has ever solved. So, the first thing I'd like to throw out is if we have three separate systems to keep, like, the intelligence community and local police departments from tripping over each other, what do you think we do when ordinary citizens get wind of something amiss that's some super secret operation? And my claim is we discredit them. We prebunk them, in the language of the GEC, I believe. You see, we're all familiaring- we're all familiar with debunking misinformation and disinformation. You've got some disinformation that's spreaded around and we debunk it by giving you the truth. What happens when somebody is spreading the truth in a way that is unhelpful to a statecraft-level narrative? Well, we didn't know what the words were, but we just found out, and it's you prebunk the malinformation. Now, if you didn't grow up knowing what malinformation is, here's a quick refresher. Malinformation is actual information, but it's harmful-

   13. CWChris Williamson54:42

       Right. The equivalent of politically incorrect incarnation.

   14. EWEric Weinstein54:45

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

   15. CWChris Williamson55:18

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

   16. EWEric Weinstein55:23

       Stay in school, kids.

   17. CWChris Williamson55:24

       (laughs)

   18. EWEric Weinstein55:24

       Um, so-

   19. CWChris Williamson55:25

       (laughs)

   20. EWEric Weinstein55:25

       ... the point is, I've got all of these friends who are pre-bunked mal-informers. That's what I-

   21. CWChris Williamson55:31

       What a club. What a club to be in.

   22. EWEric Weinstein55:32

       That's what I do. I'm a pre-bunked mal-informant. I s- I, I-

   23. CWChris Williamson55:37

       There's never been a sexier title, actually.

   24. EWEric Weinstein55:38

       I spread mal-information.

   25. CWChris Williamson55:40

       Yeah.

   26. EWEric Weinstein55:40

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

   27. CWChris Williamson56:02

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

   28. EWEric Weinstein56:11

       There's an emergent part.

   29. CWChris Williamson56:12

       Yes.

   30. EWEric Weinstein56:12

       There's a non-emergent part.
9. 1:03:32 – 1:28:53

   How the Human Race Becomes Multi-Planetary

   1. CWChris Williamson1:03:32

      Are you familiar with Toby Ord's analogy of The Precipice?

   2. EWEric Weinstein1:03:35

      No. Tell me.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:03:36

      Really cool. So his book, The Precipice, that everybody should go and read. It's my best primer on existential risk. Toby Ord's from the Future of Humanity Institute, uh, at Oxford with, uh, Nick Bostrom, and he's a- a colleague of William MacAskill, long term is MEA, et cetera. And, um, he uses this example of... You can imagine, uh, on a journey-

   4. EWEric Weinstein1:03:55

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:03:56

      ... uh, a particular individual getting to a beautiful, lush, abundant meadow would have to take a treacherous mountain path. And along this mountain path, there is a particularly thin, small, steep, sharp, uncertain, unstable part of it. That's the precipice. And he talks about... You could... I- I- I like to think about it like an hourglass.

   6. EWEric Weinstein1:04:21

      Okay.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:04:21

      You have width with room, and then you have a choke point. And at that choke point, things can get dicey. And it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice, you broaden out-

   8. EWEric Weinstein1:04:34

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:04:34

      ... and you have the meadow, uh, you are a multi-planetary species, you have redundancy, genetically, redundancies, uh, civilizationally.

   10. EWEric Weinstein1:04:42

       Yep.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:04:42

       Uh, you have overcome some of the limitations of the, uh, cast-offs from your energy production and consumption. Uh, you don't have value lock-in in a bad way that means that it's despots all the way down or it's ty- tyrants all the way down-

   12. EWEric Weinstein1:04:55

       Assume that I hear you.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:04:57

       Yep.

   14. EWEric Weinstein1:04:59

       Where do you think we are?

   15. CWChris Williamson1:05:02

       It feels very precipice-y.

   16. EWEric Weinstein1:05:04

       Yeah, doesn't it?

   17. CWChris Williamson1:05:05

       Yeah.

   18. EWEric Weinstein1:05:06

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

   19. CWChris Williamson1:05:17

       From who? I'm interested.

   20. EWEric Weinstein1:05:20

       Hmm. Are you?

   21. CWChris Williamson1:05:21

       Fuck yeah. Don't I count, Eric?

   22. EWEric Weinstein1:05:23

       Well, all right.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:05:24

       Am I not legitimate-

   24. EWEric Weinstein1:05:25

       I don't know.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:05:25

       ... in the future of this civilization's direction?

   26. EWEric Weinstein1:05:27

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

   27. CWChris Williamson1:05:36

       Stories or strategies?

   28. EWEric Weinstein1:05:38

       Yeah. Stories about how we get to be interplanetary.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:05:41

       I'm not sure what you mean by story.

   30. EWEric Weinstein1:05:44

       Tell me a story by which we have 10 planets that human- humans have settled.
10. 1:28:53 – 1:35:49

    Explaining How Good Albert Einstein Was

    1. CWChris Williamson1:28:53

       a couple of times today, the most famous physicist of all time. How different do you think the landscape of physics would be had Einstein lived for another decade? Just how good was he?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:29:09

       He was that good. It was a... the rare situation in which the man and the myth are roughly at the, the right level, the same level. I don't think you could solve the puzzle of theoretical physics in a final theory before the mid-1970s. We just didn't know enough, um, in particular, quarks in 1968. You needed confirmation because they're not obvious in the world. They're stuck inside of protons and neutrons, and if you thought that protons and neutrons were fundamental, you wouldn't be in contention. I would say that the first time you could really guess the answer would be around 1975, and I don't think Einstein was in a position to guess the answer. I think he was very caught up in a Riemannian framework, which is that you deal only with length, angle, and the curvature of the space in which you live. There is sort of a more modern viewpoint on this that he could've understood, and I don't know to what extent he showed any recognition of it, but a lot of his thinking was really well-suited for the world in which he lived, where he could do these thought experiments in his mind about falling elevators or train cars or whatever. Um... You know, Dirac was every bit Einstein's equal. We don't know how to interact with Dirac because Dirac was so strange, and he... you know, Einstein kept throwing off wisdom at an incredible rate. If you read Ideas and Opinions or Out of My Later Years, you, you have an idea of just what a sage this person was. Even when he's screwing things up and making mistakes, he's... it's, it's all sage-like. Dirac was the singular human being a- and occasionally he says something about life, like I think in... when he was given a Nobel Prize, I think shared with Schrodinger, he's given two speeches, and he uses his lunchtime speech to talk about the bond market and the importance... it's crazy, uh, and the importance of using the toolkit of physics within any sphere that is numbers-based.... um, but th- we don't really know much about Dirac's views on humanity. We know about his bea- beautiful aesthetic of, of the quantum. He gave the quantum poetry. And... I, I think that right now, it's up to us. They're not here right now. It's time to make guesses. I'm very partial to an example which happened on the Wheel of Fortune program.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:31:58

       Fold this into-

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:31:59

       Chris, Chris.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:32:00

       ... the cutting edge of physics.

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:32:01

       All right.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:32:01

       Come on.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:32:02

       Sure.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:32:02

       I'm waiting.

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:32:03

        Okay. There's a guy named Ken Wilson who's discouraged all modern physicists from making guesses about the ultimate theory.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:32:11

        Right.

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:32:11

        Because he taught us that you can only observe the world at the energy scale that you're at, so you and I are in a classical world-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:32:17

        Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:32:17

        ... we don't see the quantum much.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:32:19

        Yep.

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:32:20

        On Wheel of Fortune, there was (laughs) there was a puzzle, and it said, okay, phrase or expression, there's one apostrophe in the first word with three letters, and it's a long answer, and person guesses R, and there are no Rs. And, um, then I think that it goes to the next woman, I think she guesses N. And oh yes, there's one N, and she says, "Okay, I'd like to solve." And the host looks at her incredulously, like, "Well, uh, it's, uh, I, I guess you could try to solve." And she says, and, and I will always remember this, "I've got a good feeling about this." And it was right. Okay? You'd never guess that there was enough information for a solve. Whatever we have is what we've got. It's time to solve the puzzle.

Episode duration: 3:13:35