Eric Weinstein - Why No One Can Agree On The Truth Anymore (4K)

you just came back from your first holiday in quite a while with my first holiday of let's say three weeks or more in quite a while how was that 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 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 why well I mean partially it's really equipped 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 going to 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 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 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 pending for a long time a sabbatical from Life almost the other thing is that um you forget about parts of yourself like I forgot that that I spoke Turkish not well 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 Portugal is fascinating seeing certain things at the end of their life cycle we were at a synagogue in Bursa where the sort of the home of the Ottoman Empire where they were down to like the 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 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 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're just so moved 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 with a person yeah 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 going to 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 going to 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 I'm on the ethnic program we don't believe in this stuff um 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 well 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 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 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 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 yeah pan generational housing is something being in Austin people getting ranches starting even com you know 10 family mini villages with a bunch of other people yeah I it's something that I'm seeing occur more and more and you know in an atomized like Mass solipsism Mass individualism Society this doesn't sound like we got to the end of that dream and it it didn't it didn't work you've been around a lot of very powerful very rich people throughout your career no no that's not true only relatively only in the last decade and a half that's quite a while in in many people's lives what do you think that most normal people would be surprised to know about the powerful and the rich individuals World Views the way that they hold themselves what is and isn't true they feel powerless 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 why 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 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 uh extraction on 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 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 they may they may not want their number to to go down so they go from 6 billion to 4 billion would be a huge blow 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 whatever mainstream media you know if you have a world view that allows you to listen to National Public Radio to that then reads the Wall Street Journal and and the times in 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 how does that show up in their lives weird ways um you know they don't have a regular doctor they have concierge medicine they're fire policy comes with a private fire department that will fight for their home but won't necessarily fight for the homes next door I didn't know that that was a thing okay um you know uh it's not until you travel with some of these people that you you realize that there's a secret Corridor in the airport or a way of getting onto the plane this is oh 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 it's my belief so they if you believe that the world is headed towards an apocalypse you're very unlikely to want to 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 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 on my property in a remote location of 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 plan um but a lot of I think that there's a lot of thinking that you should husband your resources because you don't know what's coming given that things are going to have to collapse now I think it's very sad because those are the people who could Shore up the system 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 a the scarcity mentality scales all the way up it really does and particularly if you've been deprived early in your life there's something that happens where you're nervous till you're dying day that you're going to die under an overpass right I'm not kidding um one thing that I highly recommend people never take me seriously is a 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 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 dollars that's when I can afford to become a philanthropist then you're going to get there and you're going to realize no the goals are gonna you know the goal posts 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 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 to 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 you you desperately need to build yourself up because otherwise you'll always push it out there's a Mogan hassle quote where he says the best way to win the game is to stop moving the goal posts 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 right it then moves one step further away it's probably more like the Horizon on a spring or on a rubber band that it gets a little bit closer and then it bunk it snaps away 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 need to keep the stock scarcity meant on 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 talk to me about the tension between those two well it's just this regulated expression idea that we keep trying to find settings where we don't 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 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 you don't look below think what you could do the other kid needs this love nothing ventured nothing gained come on 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 you can kind of take the risks that you want yes and no I mean there's teeth there's throws anything somebody who does Combat Sports is going to try and regularly right right small joints whatever it is there are plenty of ways to get yourself into real trouble yep the key thing that you're trying to use childhoods for is to go through the mistakes that are not permanently disfiguring it's one of the importances of having fathers around the importance of rough and tumble play right is facilitated almost exclusively yeah 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 you also learn to lose I mean I really hate some of this winter talk where basically people have no plan to lose and then when they actually experience loss they tend to throw everything away to say I didn't lose you know that's very interesting in other Muse this episode is brought to you by Shopify Shopify is the e-commerce platform revolutionizing millions of 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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 as the door is 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 what do you mean 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 Could I afford it can I afford an island or how many jets 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 mid nine figure fortune that had been used to buy islands and plays which is not what any nine figure person is going to do so you had a felt sense and embodied sense of discomfort oh hell yeah and where did that come from uh 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 the 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 distract I mean it's like one of these crazy scenes were nothing about it was normal there was just no there was no trace of a normal world that sounds like a script from a movie 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 remember that that story The Most Dangerous Game where a man invites you to his Island so he can hunt you you know this was scary and it was it was meant to be scary sounds menacing well I think his product was silence people think that his product was sex or Finance but it was silence I'm pretty sure how do you what something if you're scary enough look rich people can get sex but they can't necessarily get people to shut up afterwards so I 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 Finance here 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 he's labeled disgraced financier but nobody has a record of trading with him he was sitting there 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 as a meme with Steve Buscemi with a skateboard over his shoulder hello fellow Cantina just yeah hello fellow financial traders exactly so I'm thinking you don't really look like a rich guy who trades in markets the thing that's interesting 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 yeah deployed in a nefarious malicious manipulative way but it's smart what do you mean it's smart it's it's not something that could be done by a simple mind you think he did it oh he has a team of manipulators no when I say I think he was a constrict I literally mean that I think he was constructed like fitted with a story oh so you think he was a plant no I think it was a construct what's that like okay you're gonna have to dig in I think Jeffrey Epstein Super Genius financier was not a thing that existed where did the money come from I'm gonna Mumble Lex West Lexington okay so that's what Drew mumbled but then you know there's this missing Fortune of Robert Maxwell and this Fortune of Jeffrey Epstein that we don't can't explain are those the same fortune now it's like a conservation of uh of money principle that if you have a fortune that's missing and you have a fortune that can't be explained in there connected by gillane Maxwell I don't know why is it that no hedge funds what is it they file form I forget it's 13f there's certain forms that you have to file um nobody's ever asked for these things where who's this Prime broker has somebody gone over the prime brokerage uh his what are his trades he would have to move the market if he was you know doing a yard of Euros or Swiss Francs or who knows what as like a billion um that would move the market so there's no way you can fake retroactively a hedge fund of immeasurable size that trades currencies I I don't think he was a currency Trader he told me it was a currency Trader So when you say a construct who constructs who's the Builder I don't know I would imagine some version of the intelligence community you know sometimes somebody's cover gets blown um we have we have a very famous unfortunate story of Ellie Cohn with the Mossad where Ellie Cohn was an Egyptian Jew who was fitted with a backstory that he was an Argentinian Playboy who'd made a fortune in Argentina but was Arabic in origin and then he moves to Damascus and he takes out an apartment where he holds orgies and um becomes the best friend of hafez al-assad right and so that's an example of a story we know we know how the intelligence communities of the world create people who don't really exist construction of I know that this is just a one uh time thing here that you got to see but the construction of the coffin looking American flag the spelling of the coffee this weird power play thing that's going on that seems now that you say that uh it wasn't him even pulling his own strings perhaps it makes a lot more sense but even that that degree of sophistication I learned this from Daniel schmachtenberger we sat down and he's spent some time with particularly powerful people yeah and he told me this really harrowing story of somebody who has both the desire and the means to treat themselves like an apex predator against that own kind and they said so they broke the fourth wall about this and said apex predators don't care about the prey but they saw their own kind as prey and I asked Daniel how does it feel to sit opposite somebody who isn't rate limited by the resources who can not only dream to have this plus uh have the motivation or lack of virtue or Integrity to go ahead and consider doing it and then has the capacity the assets to be able to enact it sure and it's reminding me it's giving me this same something it feels like it feels like it's up on the top of my head it's giving me some sort of a sense like that this was intended to be terrifying it wasn't an accident it was intended to be as fascinating as it could possibly be which it was and terrifying at the same time and it achieved both it achieved both objectives I mean I was given an opportunity to meet him again I didn't know what to do I mean the other thing that I just found really weird is that he knew about my research and it turned out that he was connected to my graduate department at Harvard so he had a connection to the Harvard math department unbeknownst to me I don't know when that began I know two of the professors he was connected through but this is some Unholy story it has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein it has to do with whatever this thing was we tripped over a thing we tripped over a structure we named the structure Jeffrey Epstein it must be very unfortunate in some regards for whoever it was if that's true that was in charge of this Construction that it became that people got t-shirts with his name printed on them this was already going wrong in the early 2000s you see my sense of this is that this was a pre-internet plan that lived into the internet age and couldn't survive contact with the internet age what did the internet bring in that didn't allow it to survive eyeballs discussion level of surveillance well you know there's a claim that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein because it's this many years later and we've all moved on yeah that's completely untrue and we know that it's true because if you start talking about Jeffrey Epstein the the engagement goes up so you have these fictions like you know that are put out by mainstream Media or traditional news desks which is nobody cares about that story well that you can see from social media that that's not true from the internet so the internet is constantly providing an ability to check whether or not these claims from inside the structure true and Jeffrey Epstein is an example of what I've called an an anti-interesting phenomena what's that when anti-interesting thing is something that would normally be fascinating imagine for example you had a story where you could get a Pulitzer Prize for breaking it everybody cares you'd sell papers like hotcakes blah blah blah and nobody wants to report on it and it's like right there you could just ask the dumbest questions and it would like New York Times says disgraced financier well tell me did you find his prime broker did you find the form did you go to his offices in vallart house no nobody does ever the story is anti-interesting and it's very different than being uninteresting which would suggest mole collusion mole coordination hello I mean see this is what this is one of the most uncomfortable things I think there was a time when mostly when people said collusion or coordination the presumption was well that's kind of that's pretty far out there we now know like post Elon musk's 44 billion dollar Adventure at Twitter that there are these coordinating groups coordinates coordinating social media with the intelligence Community or with the Department of Homeland Security or with the state department we now know that we're living in an orchestrated Court you know curated choreographed world and we can't know it officially but we all know it if we want to know which is hysterical now we have to talk about well are you a conspiracy theorist like I I read I read the slack messages I read the emails what what are you even talking about now some bankman freed yeah currently being recharged yeah with witness tampering as well that to me fresh charges uh releasing even though it was totally couldn't get in touch with the Press I think hundreds of phone calls to the Press leaked his ex-girlfriend allegedly leaked his ex-girlfriend's uh diary entries right so on and so forth and you know this is a guy that some of my friends were flown to go and see on his Island yes his portion of an island yeah his portion is very different yeah okay uh for very different reasons as well um there seems to be and you you hear about the if they believe they're Above the Law there was this really cool documentary on Netflix called the murder murders and it was this small town big family lots of money and the kids run rampant right classic like silver spoon aristocracy but when it gets scaled up this much more sambangman freed the biggest Financial crime alleged Financial crime since uh Bernie Madoff okay yeah allegedly tampering with Witnesses allegedly leaking his ex-girlfriend's diary entries and do the rules not apply to everybody certainly they don't why uh we stopped Prosecuting all sorts of types of people you know look we stopped holding hearings I grew up in a world where we had the church committee the pike committee looking at our own intelligence Services we had Watergate hearings we had uh tobacco hearings we had Iran Contra hearings do you know how many hearings we need right now where are these things it's ridiculous we've got weird stuff about UFOs with people making the craziest allegations look this is just not normal we're in totally weird Uncharted Territory 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 I wasn't even in this game when it was UFOs okay okay so what do you make of the recent UAP stories and attention and response and subsequent response um I'd like to ask you first so I had a look at the uh first whistleblower from about two months ago quite closely with Andy Stumpf 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 which one this is David yes David [Music] no not not David fravor no no David fravor was the Tic Tac correct this is uh Dave garoosh yes okay um very common level of security clearance uh that you're using that as some sort of uh oh this is a legitimate credential it doesn't really wash too much that it was second or it was third hand information mostly second-hand information kind of I heard from a person who saw or who heard right um it just seemed to me to be rather on the face of it unimpressive that release I see what did you think 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 they're they're various versions of this Secret World which play out as Space Opera you know that then mj12 became the real government that only even the president could couldn't understand you know it's like okay so that's the weird part about it until you start realizing how sober many of the people are who believe this and who claim to have had Direct contact with it 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 man 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 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 maybe you've got the 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 I'm trying to come up with the word for it but it's like a it's like recursive false Flags yeah in a way where the goal is not to give or hide truth the goal to fire holes with information so much that the truth can no longer be discerned it's a haystack of to make sure that any needle is very difficult to find it is yes hey stacking right yeah okay so they Haystack the crap out of this thing I have no question that there was something that was used to develop U.S aircraft like the B2 bomber and the SR-71 Blackbird so if you see something crazy in the sky better that you think it's a UFO from outer space than some Advanced thing from Lockheed I have no question that we use this to deal with things like the Chinese balloon shoot down where we shot down several things in a week and we couldn't recover debris from any of them I mean come on guys um you know maybe the idea is that this is a a head fake to our adversaries to develop the wrong things and to use their treasure on things that won't work maybe there's a secret program uh where some of this stuff is actually real and true and we're not allowed to know it because it would be too mind-blowing maybe there's a cult uh inside of our government that has replaced angels with saucer-shaped aircraft um whatever this thing is it's being used for many different purposes there's something here we just don't know what you know this is the problem the princess can't feel a p because that would be impossible the princess feels a disturbance you can't say what the disturbance is maybe it's a golf ball maybe it's a cantaloupe maybe it's a banana but whatever it is there's something wrong with the mattress yeah it seems to me this firehousing the goal of uncertainty hmm right how do things muddle out who wins in a model is a great question we're not taught to ask sorry to jump in on it yeah always look for who is trying to muddle to win like very often you're in a dispute with entrenched status quo and somebody will say well I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one like oh well who wins if we agreed it is oh it's you you're right yeah this is like an old principle of mine which is that you can always tell who's Guilty by who first declares a time of healing why why is that a razor to use oh because if you do something wrong and the public is clamoring for for for your blood you say there's been too much uh blame and finger pointing on all sides at me I think what we need is to come together and declare a time of healing for me right so I believe that in general whoever declares a time of healing is suspect number one that's a very nice uh razor to use I wonder about this oh how would you say epidemic of uncertainty brilliant speaking my language and I wonder how first off how is an individual you are supposed to put up any kind of effective defense to just take some sovereignty being you know an agentic individual right 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 Float them in particular directions but it also seems like I know kind of also useless as well that some people um non-insignificant large cohort of people will just reject it entirely which actually they're doing 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 right it's epidemic of uncertainty maybe the outcomes were predicted but haven't manifest in the way that was intended maybe there's more of a rebellious streak say more about that I'm not trying to understand that if people who if you make the public very uncertain about most things by overloading them with information or by even the 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 right 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 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 say anything yes and that doesn't seem to be if the goal was 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 first of all I'm really glad to get a question about this as a sea 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 where there was a psyop whether it was a 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 in 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 what you're having is you're having a large number of people waking up to the idea that yeah there really are organizations and working groups that determine what you hear from a multiplicity of venues it's the same message relentlessly do you think people are overly pattern matching that now say more boy what you mean the the scene conspiracy where there isn't because the lack of faith in institutions 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 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 you know CGI was it green and we could superimpose wood onto it nobody knows what's true and you know if you if you ask me well Eric how are you dealing with this I would say I'm failing I'm just flat out failing as are all of you 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 going to abandon our institutions all right do you know what that looks like nobody has an answer we'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute but first I need to tell you about gymshark gymshark make the best training kit on the planet this t-shirt that I've been falling in love with and traveling in for a very long time is phenomenal and these shorts the studio shorts that they make are the best men's training shots on the planet they have lasted me over a year now they come in amazing colors the length is perfect they're sweat wicking they're lightweight they wash and dry perfectly you don't need that many pairs of shorts as a guy but the ones that you do have need to be very good so if you need new gym kit this is where to go I highly highly recommend that you go and check out everything that I use and recommend from gymshark they've updated my product page with everything that I use and recommend for men and women and you can get 10 off everything site-wide with no minimum order and they have 30 day free returns worldwide head to bit.ly shark wisdom that's bit.ly shock wisdom and use the code mw10 a checkout you're sounding an awful lot parallel the conversation is moving in a similar direction to one I had with Sam Harris recently I would think it's very different but happy to hear more 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 wholesale is is also not an option Sam also tried to say I can see the problems on the ICM 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 loudly 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 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 on 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 want to 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 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 May Day celebration um I get it I live in a completely fake world and I wrote an article about this in 2011 on kfabe which is the system of lies that undergirds professional wrestling so now you're you've woken up to the idea that you've spent your life watching something like major league baseball or Premier League soccer whatever it is and it's all fake and now you don't know who you are you don't know who 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 so the thing about patent matching that I said was there are still many people who are Scholars who are in positions of authority inside of highfaluting institutions the 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 yeah 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 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 I never mentioned where she was while she was there um it is it needs it needs support we have to support 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 height but we're not seeing the gnome 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 what happens give us the 30 000 foot View you know they put people tried to put like say Sam Huntington into the National Academy of Sciences who was an architect of the Vietnam War and sirs 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 Sarah slang when he was at Harvard 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 as discredited Joe Rogan is discredited Brett Weinstein as discredited Ben Shapiro is discredited Barry Weiss is discredited everybody is discredited Tim Paul referred to it as the idw's Walking Corpse phase at the moment 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 Blue on Blue incidences you have two branches of government that don't know that 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 it's 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 safetynet RIS safe 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 maybe it was cases case Explorer for South Florida something like that what happens when you have a civilian that's not signed up for non-disclosure under no rules you're an American citizen with full right to free speech and you 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 at 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 some super secret operation and my claim is we discredit them we pre-bunk them in the language of the gec I believe you see we're all familiar we're all familiar with debunking misinformation and disinformation you've got some disinformation that's spread it around 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 pre-bunk the Mal information now if you didn't grow up knowing what Mal information is here's a quick refresher Mal information is actual information but it's harmful right the equivalent of Politically Incorrect Incarnation 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 thought well that would be deleterious to our our efforts if the objective is to get potent to 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 I can't work out why anybody's confused and why they're having trouble existing in the stay in school kids um the point is I've got all of these friends who are pre-bunked malinformers that's what a club what a club that's what I do I'm a pre-bunked malinformant there's never been a sexier title I spread malinformation yeah and I need to be pre-bunked so of course I'm going to be a grifter I'm going to be I don't know Charlotte and I'm gonna well he's over can we stop trying to make Eric Weinstein a thing blah blah blah and there's a you know giant Farms of of people and Bots that are dedicated to spreading bad feelings about anybody who's gonna contradict narrative well don't forget as well that the coordination doesn't necessarily need to be there because the incentives align online there's an emergent part there's a non-emergent part correct I will not agree with anyone who tells me it's all one or the or all the other but part of this is actually coordinated yeah so close that loop on the agentic sovereign individual existing in the world holy I'm getting bukakied with this total awfulness of of information here lukaki just means splattered in Japanese that's why it's not a terrible term to use absolutely thank you it's actually been appropriated by the adult industry in a way that I think the Japanese should reclaim actually Melissa Chen has probably done more to popularize this in intellectual circles than anyone else so shout out to Miss Melissa Chad Melissa Chen and bukaki in the same sentence something that we weren't expecting today she uh I think there was a period of her life where she would use it in every public appearance just sneak it in right okay the of the gaps so anyway you have a situation where nobody knows what's going on and I don't think Sam is comfortable by the way being here like you're in Open Water and you have all of these instructions about what to do when you're swimming near land which is you know try to align yourself with the shore don't fight the current and like that's not where you are you're just in Open Water and you're treading water and you don't know whether they're oceanic white tips around and you don't know whether you can keep this up for much longer but there is no land there's a big difference with Sam go a little deeper make that a little plainer for me you cannot trust Harvard or nature you cannot trust the Office of Management and budget all the Lancet or the Lancet or the Bureau of Labor Statistics you cannot trust any newspaper that I'm aware of you cannot trust the CDC or the NIH or The Who now people will hear that and they'll say oh my God Eric you're spreading distrust and fear it's like I'm a pastor shoot the messenger all you want all of those institutions are out of control and we all know it and entirely out of control no mostly I did this on trigonometry we have this anti-institutional point how is it that the airlines can't keep my seat clean uh and can't make sure that I'm able to recline it properly or that the Wi-Fi doesn't go out and then their planes never crash so the institutions are functioning and not functioning they're lying and telling the truth they're getting it done and failing outright over and over again and it's it's even worse because if if the planes crashed all the time then you'd say okay well these people are incompetent but it's like the selective incompetence and Madness and what I think is is that Sam wanted to treat this as look it's pretty annoying what's going on on the left and it's pretty annoying what's going on with the institutions but let's not let's not lose sight of the fact January 6th people don't feel that way people feel like wait a minute I don't know which end is up I don't know who's telling me the truth anymore I can spot these lies that are so transparent and this is the theory of Lies as a checksum so when you get a binary for a computer program that you want to install on your computer you want to know well is this what came from Microsoft or did somebody adulterate it and when I click on this thing it's going to install ransomware on on my machine so there's something called a checksum which is generated by how the program was compiled and it would be almost impossible to come up with a second program that would generate the same checksum verification yeah if the check sum is off I don't install the thing and the checksums are all off and that's why people are going crazy and that's why to your earlier point isn't it interesting that we're not talking about the level of uncertainty right like this is not sustainable so Sam is 100 correct on a lot of things that people are making fun of him for and I assume that I will be uh Keel hauled all over Twitter for saying this you cannot have a world without institutions we're not built for it we're just there's no part of you that is prepared to generate all your own electricity and and you know kill all your own game and get your own clean water and it's you need an army you need a police department you can only play um Frontier you know Wild West so long before you realize that Modern Life can't be supported this and we can't go with the institutions we have so we need institutions we can't go with these institutions not because the institutions are wrong but because the inhabitants are wrong to a person they've been selected for by this ability to lie because growth evaporated that's one of my main riffs we don't have to go into it but it basically that in the absence of real growth everything turns pathological and so it's just heartbreaking to see some of these people saying look we've always known that the institutions were wrong we finally have the ability to prove that let's tear them all down so that's a very popular perspective at the moment other people want to claim let's cling to the institutions because we know we need them and we'll look past the fact that they're obviously lying about almost everything of importance that's not really tenable we can't vote these people out because like Dianne Feinstein could beat me easily in a run uh you know for for Senate I don't know why because the machine is stronger than actually the the vision we had for democracy so we've got you know Mitch McConnell having a temporary you know ischemic attack on camera we've got somebody post-stroke in Pennsylvania uh having defeated Mehmet Oz we've got Dianne Feinstein we've got um Nancy Pelosi trading up a storm we can't get rid of any of these people Joe Biden is way too old for this job and has been in government since he was 29 in 1972 when he won his senate seat this is a joke it's beyond Preposterous and by the way it comes out of not loving your children also people who love their children don't drill holes in their children's life raft in the Modern World post-world War II was a life raft to get us to the next stage and the number of older people I see liquidating everything so that they can live out their final days in the same style to which they've become accustomed is impossible in a world where people love their children it's Cavalier with the future yeah I don't think they care are you familiar with Toby ord's analogy of the precipice no tell me really cool so his book The precipice that everybody should go and read it's my best primer on existential risk Toby odds from the future of humanity Institute at Oxford with Nick Bostrom and he's a colleague of William mccaskill long-termism EA Etc and um he uses this example of you can imagine on a journey yeah 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 like to think about it like an hourglass okay you have width with room and then you have a choke point and that that choke point things can get dicey and it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice you broaden out and you have the meadow uh you are a multi-planetary species you have redundancy genetically redundancy these civilizationally uh you have overcome some of the limitations of the cast Ops from your energy production and consumption you don't have value lock in in a bad way that means that it's despots all the way down or it's tyrants assume that I hear you yep where do you think we are it feels very precipice yeah doesn't it yeah what's more as one of the only people who are really seriously hitting this multi-planetary note there is no interest in this from who I'm interested are you yeah don't I count Eric am I not legitimate in the future of this civilization's direction what what what are your best stories for how we become interplanetary I say it because you brought it up stories or strategies stories about how we get to be interplanetary I'm not sure what you mean by story tell me a story by which we have ten planets the human humans have settled well if you want to do 10 we're going to have to go to planets that are outside of the solar system right so that there's this one which is really troubling Mars is really screwing up this whole story because Elon has gotten everybody fix I focus on Mars and it's the only it's a marginal planet it would be very difficult to get to using chemical rockets and it's not a stepping stone because once you master Mars if if if if which we're not going to do it doesn't really get you anywhere it's just Mars so Avi lobe yep new book that recently came out Interstellar spoke to him last week about it okay I asked him about this I said um do will we ever visit other galaxies and he made this cop-out answer of saying well Andromeda is going to crash into the Milky Way I was like that doesn't count RV we can't blend two together and say that we've been there right um and he's talking about uh Interstellar travel right from here to Proxima Centauri pick your other Star right they are trying at some point in the not too distant future to do the light sail laser pointed added thing maybe we can and this was me asking him uh my conception was generation ships you know you and the next 500 generations of your progeny you condemn them to be locked in this tin box and it's group sex and and plants and CO2 for the next however long until you get to Proxima Centauri hope that it's not totally wrecked his point was light sail uh desktop DNA sequencer artificial womb send it out being ridiculous it's it's a I thought this is my story I know this is my story okay this is my story and I'm allowed to tell my story but it's exactly why I wanted it in fact it just okay it's an innervating story what's up we're not energized by this story except for the group sex and the plants right yep so the issue is if we could sprinkle some bukaki in there everybody would get on board a Melissa moving at light speed um what we're doing is that we're telling people we've crawled inside our modern theories and our modern theories make our imaginations our enemy we're not excited about the I we don't really believe that we're going to open a wormhole we don't really believe in multi-generation ships we don't believe that we're going to reboot from tardigrades we don't believe that we're going to scan all of our synapses and reconstruct the brain uh from the beginning Einstein is the problem now I know Avi decently well and Avi for the Galileo project that he's heading up doesn't want people to consider new physics so whenever I speak at all as somebody affiliated with the Galileo project with wearing that hat I don't think about new physics at all I accept the constraints of the physics we know yes yes yes when I take that hat off it's all about new physics it's not about new technology using the old physics and the way you can measure whether people are serious about interplanetary is how much they're focused on new physics anybody who isn't focused on new physics is not serious about interplanetary is this because with the current conception of physics that we have it's going to be essentially impossible for us to go into planetary yeah and the word essentially is doing some work there and so what you get is you get these innervating workarounds like oh if we use time dilation if we went really fast then it wouldn't be that fast can you explain the word innovating please you mean as in Innovation or is this er no innervating what's that means to to lessen in um potency to decrease to to sort of discourage and you know as long as I have to do things that don't involve me cruising to new planets and taking in the VIS is like oh it would be your great great to the 12 000th power grandchild who actually sees a new plan that's not gonna work are you going to open a wormhole or you're going to have an alcubieri drive all of these sorts of things discourage us and we know that we're telling lies about it and so we don't work on it you want to know how to work on this we're abandoning the one field that has the chance of making us interplanetary and I don't know what to do about it because nobody sees this as the emergency I do we'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute but first I need to tell you about Cozy earth look we spend one third of Our Lives asleep you do not want to spend 33 percent of your existence inside of sheets that do not make you feel amazing cozy Earth has the best quality betting it's not just about what you sleep on it is what you sleep under and the quality of your sheets make a massive difference to the quality of your sleep sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer and improving your sheets will improve your Sleep Quality cozy Earth is a premium bedding and loungewear Company where they make the best quality bedware the products are made from super soft viscose from highly sustainable bamboo temperature regulating so you'll sleep cool all year round best of all they've got a 10 year warranty on all of their products that's how confident they are that they'll last you can get an exclusive 35 discount site-wide on everything from cozy Earth by going to cozyearth.com com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 35 a check out cozier.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout okay so let me see if I can get the topology of what you've said right the fact that Mars is Within Reach broadly and chemical Rockets correct of current technology of current physics and we do it hooray super hard we did it into planetary right but your point is that oh it seems like uh that is insufficient and also kind of like a false duck type scenario where we did it but we didn't actually do the thing we needed to do so we may have even been better off had the nearest closest planet been two light years away assume Mars didn't exist correct and assume that Elon was still the Visionary that we want him to be and he didn't have a chemical rocket company I'd like to think that he would be focused on physics I would like to think that any of these people would be focused on physics take anybody with 11 figures what is your allocation to building a life raft to get humans out of here you don't you haven't even thought about it immediately you're going to think technology well what kind of a hole would I need it's like no you need a Blackboard you need blackboards and physicists who are not afraid to do physics right now we are destroying the fundamental physics community at a rate that you could not believe what's happening give me the gossip from inside for 39 years we've been dominated by one community's Madness and that Community is called quantum gravity String Theory or M Theory it changed what we were researching it's it's cardinal sin is not about String Theory it's not about quantum gravity it changed the questions that met defined what it meant to be a fundamental physicist so if I say to you how many generations of matter are there I don't know you don't know that it's three because we don't talk about that all the time anymore or if I say do you know why why is matter chiral you wouldn't know about that or if I said what's the nature of the cortic potential for the Higgs field or why is there a yukawa coupling in one case in a minimal coupling somewhere else all of the real physics questions that would cause progress got subtly replaced between 1984 and like 1987. and then we had questions like how do we quantize gravity and that became this oh that is the ultimate question well it's it's not that's that's just wrong this comes out of Bryce DeWitt this comes out of a guy who in 1952 went with his wife to the Tata Institute of fundamental research in Bombay then wrote an essay for something called the Gravity Research Foundation that was about anti-gravity and they he was supposed to write an essay and then he said well to get anti-gravity what you'd really need to do is to do quantum gravity and for 70 years we've been trying to do quantum gravity and it's an abject failure and the physicists at the at the helm changed the questions the official questions should sound something like this why are there three generations of matter why is it flavor chiral what is the nature in the origin of the Higgs mechanism why are we in one comma three dimensions and what is with su3 cross su2 cross U1 which is a bunch of symmetries and why does it seem to represent on a 16 dimensional space with the observed quantum numbers that may not mean a lot to you but I guarantee you if there are physicists in the audience they're getting pissed off right now because they allowed their their subject to be dragged away from our real questions for reasons that are unclear and put in the service of these questions that can't be answered and we can't even question them 39 years into this complete train wreck that is the community that could build the life raft what is so seductive about Quantum everything quantum gravity yeah it allows for toy problems so that you can not do your work on the world that we have and you can say well the world that we have is too complicated so I created this fake world over here that's not in four dimensions it's in two Dimensions it's not in lorencian signature it's in euclidean signature it's not the full gauge group uh it's just su2 and I've changed all the parameters and then I say and I've made some minor incremental progress in that fake world and then everybody claps and meanwhile 10 years later you don't even remember what the particles are that are present in the universe you don't even remember the the standard model of particle theory and this is a very real effect today's physicists a lot of the young ones are completely ignorant about the physical world they could not find the men's or women's room at CERN if their life depended on them yeah so it seems like a hijacking of attention and focus from difficult problems to from useful difficult problems to useless or less useful easier problems but if you try to talk about the real problems you can't get engagement and they will say it is well maybe people just aren't interested in your ideas I was like yeah but you're not listening to so far as I can tell everybody who comes from outside with an interesting new idea isn't being listened to it's not personal and we also have a responsibility this is like it's a really crazy part we doomed Humanity like Francis Crick who was a co-discover of the three-dimensional structure of DNA was a physicist Edward Teller was a physicist stanislav ulam was a geometer we doomed Humanity on Earth and then we're treating science as if oh it's a series of puzzles well what do you want to work on today well I don't want to be arrogant I'll just work on this tiny little problem and I'm just thinking like do do you not feel any basic responsibility after Hiroshima Nagasaki and kovid just how crazy are you is that you know we've spoken about the interplanetary challenge right and the fact that physics needs to make some progress in order to facilitate that if we're going to do it yeah is in your opinion forgetting the fact that chemical Rockets right limitations all that sort of stuff is going into planetary as useful is it the highest priority the highest priority you'll you cannot stabilize this place just imagine every communalist dream came true we turned away from fossil fuels towards a the greenest New Deal you could possibly imagine all billionaires realized the errors of their ways and contributed their money to bring up the poorest of the poor AI was as beneficial as it could be and only helped Humanity to live it straight just go full wild Pollyanna optimism you still can't stabilize it why um too many people say more not for long population rates both rights at the moment we're talking at totally different scales I'm telling you that with crispr cas9 with the teller ulam design ivg AVG you know ivg IVF but being able to use from any other sure yep uh so I was trying to I was trying to think uh in a different context foreign people what happens when you distribute the coronavirus because everybody's had it you've had it I got an antibody test and I had it but never felt it okay yeah so you have this this pla platform this virus viral platform that's spread all over the world and you have the ability to edit it are you telling me that people aren't going to figure out how to come up with fun viruses and gain a function projects and people are going to be able to do these uh you know polymerase Chain Reaction I think was taught in my daughter's High School are you familiar with uh Nick bostrom's balls from the urn analogy yeah vaguely yeah so for the people that don't know you can imagine that you you haven't earned and each time that you make technological progress you pick a ball out and you don't know what color some are white perfectly good yep some are gray bit a good bit of bad and some are all the way down to black and black is permanent unrecoverable collapse right and the unrecoverable bit is important no and each time we just keep picking out balls so my take on it is there's already too much leverage too much leverage too little wisdom too many people suppose that you once said uh we are Gods but for the wisdom we're just shitty gods I don't know if it's the second part but um you know I I guess when I heard the story about this kid who scavenged the americium from all of these smoke detectors in Brooklyn and built a self-sustaining nuclear reactor from these tiny little radioactive strips you don't know what people's creativity is you know I found it fascinating when I was growing up that I was the only kid who knew that gunpowder or black powder was 75 potassium nitrate 10 sulfur and 15 carbon like you could just make it you know and you know that's the recipe and that that just blew my mind that the rate limiting step was that people didn't know that potassium nitrate was saltpeter or where to get it like meat tenderizer but mostly we're saved from the stuff because nobody's so sociopathic and competent that they go for these high leverage attacks that's going to end you know that was like what happened on 9 11. I always wanted to know why were little kids allowed to go into the cockpit of a plane you used to be able to meet the pilot I remember meeting them I remember doing it yeah so that's where we are now is is that we've got all this High leverage stuff and you're going to see nuclear proliferation eventually you're going to get some despot backed into a corner who says well this is my only move well I mean for the nuclear concernists out there at least what I know wouldn't that be all of us everybody is concerned but for the people that are nuclear war is a genuine X risk permanent unrecoverable collapse you can set them all off unless there's like 10 to 100 times more than we think that we have which there very well could be um it seems difficult for it to be permanent unrecoverable collapse for me as a true true true actress may I say something yeah this is ridiculous it's bad enough that it would completely transform Life as we know it you'd agree that absolutely absolutely it's time it's time to get serious about things we can actually do and the most interesting thing is that nobody's interested in interplanetary physics I I just I've never seen anything like it interplanetary physics would be physics in service of us becoming interplanetary or is there something specific about the way that planets figure together no no it's it's about let me give you an analogy that's more than an analogy assume that somebody hands you a physical paper map an enormous one okay and you're trying to navigate it on this table that we're we have here you're starting to do Motions like this where you're moving the paper across the table you know to get from Los Angeles to Fresno California if it's at the right scale and it might take you a long time to do that okay but now you have somebody trained on an iPad what are they gonna do well they might do that but that's not the key thing they're going to do they're going to do what is called multi multi-touch gestures and the one that you're thinking of should be pinched to zoom so the most natural way to do this is to treat it not as if it's a paper map but a stack of paper maps and you want to go to the one with a different scale if if you were doing this on an iPad that was mirroring this the key point is is that the paper map doesn't have an extra Dimension to play with but the pinch to zoom dimension is a scale Dimension so imagine what you did instead was you looked at your house you pinch to zoom out you then do this motion or whatever it is to get to your friend's house and then when you land there you expand it again imagine that you only know about paper maps but your adversary has an iPad that's what I'm worried about we're not looking for pinch to zoom what would that be in this um well I claim that there are going to be 10 extra coordinates and four of them are pinched to zoom and six of them are what I would call um Shear to tilt so imagine that you have a copy of a picture of of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on your iPad you should be able to do something in paint which changes the angle right so if you go into Ms paint there's this little thing that allows you to change by a particular area but you could do that as a gesture where so my claim is if you have four dimensions of time and X Y and Z of space you have pinch to zoom on all of all four of those and then for any two Dimensions like x and z you have Shear to tilt so the first are the four rulers and the next are the six protractors and that's something called a symmetric two tensor or a metric which Einstein knew all about but he only chose one through his equations and he let all the other ones lie Fallout and my claim is I don't think that's where we are I think that interplanetary physics is going to involve moving from what we called space time to something called The Observers which contains pinch to zoom and Shear to tilt and you want to get off this planet you're not going to get there using general relativity and you're not going to get there using the standard model it's time to take your pacifier out of your mouth and go back to doing real physics I think if we were serious about this we would be struggling with the physics of the world in which we live not toy models we'd be taking massive risks and listening to people from various perspectives who haven't failed or have not been invited to fully explain their ideas and we'd be looking for things that would be new new variables new ways of working with the world that allowed us to do things that would previously considered inconceivable so if you if you look at 1911 which is when I think Rutherford first starts talking about the neutron as a hypothesis it's 41 years later we have the hydrogen bomb we can do incredible things that are not possible yet because we don't know the framework and my claim is if you imagine somebody used to paper maps being put on an iPad and not knowing about multi-touch vet gestures that is pretty much an exact analogy of what happens when you do too much general relativity is that you start to think in general relativistic terms as if that's the last word Einstein would never have put up with that that's a question you've mentioned Einstein 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 he was that good it was the rare situation in which the man and the myth are roughly at the right level the same level I don't think you could solve the puzzle of theoretical physics and 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 Romanian framework which is that you deal only with length angle and the curvature of the space in which you live there's sort of a more modern viewpoint on this that he could have 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 duroc was every bit Einstein's equal we don't know how to interact with the rock because duroc 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 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 all sage-like Dirac was the singular human being and occasionally he says something about life like I think 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 that's crazy uh and the importance of using the toolkit of physics within any sphere that is numbers based but we don't really know much about duroc's views on Humanity we know about his beautiful aesthetic of of the quantum he gave the quantum poetry and I think 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 fold this into The Cutting Edge of physics all right come on sure I'm waiting okay there's a guy named Ken Wilson who's discouraged all modern physicists from making guesses about the ultimate Theory 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 we don't see the quantum yeah on Wheel Of Fortune there was there was a puzzle and it said okay phraser expression there's one apostrophe in the first word with three letters and it's a long answer and person guesses are and there are no r's 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 it's 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 never guessed that there was enough information for a solve whatever we have is what we've got it's time to solve the puzzle what would that look like uh ask somebody else I try to solve this I've Got a Theory but Peter white has a theory I'd like to hear what the string theorists think their theory is I'd like to understand where asymptotic safety is everybody who's got a theory whether it's David Deutsch or Julian Barbour or Garrett Lisi needs to come to a conference somebody needs to hold a conference and say who can solve this puzzle let's put the Sword in the Stone and let's let everybody try to pull it out because now is the tongue and the idea that we're not doing this and that we're letting this community that has run itself into the ground continue to adjudicate what is physics it's like you boys haven't really done anything in N years you're not the Arbiters of what is science and what isn't you you've allowed this madness to creep into your University departments you're signing loyalty OS I have physics professors telling me that their boss is some Dean who writes to them about what they what they posted on social media it's like no you're the boss you the professors are the soul of the University stop sucking your thumb stand up for what it is that you're supposed to be standing up for which is excellence in research kick the people out who don't belong there and invite the people in who do and let's get on with it it's just I couldn't be more angry about anything else in the world how can you how can you take the Lifeboat community the the only community that can get us a way out of here and run it into the ground I like to turn the Lifeboat community it's it's time to save everybody and we've we've got huge responsibilities we carry a lot of responsibility for getting everybody into this mess and now we've got to offer everybody a way out yeah it seems I don't know I I don't know the inner workings or the machinations of the physics World um but the first time I ever spoke to Sabine hosenfelder she explained to me that physics is as much about politics as it is about physics in bad eras that becomes more true yes sabina's entire career has taken place inside of the stagnation and she's like one of these truth-telling people I think she's basically truthful I disagree with a lot of stuff that I I don't like that she I think she does which is a disservice to the community but she is truthful that this community is off the rails moving from physics to something that you mentioned that poetry sure your cover photo on Twitter was the first thing that we actually ever connected about long long long time ago and I'd just been to the Sagrada Familia tell me so I went for the first time to a wedding a friend's wedding that he was holding on the outskirts and it was very enjoyable and I had known about this building I had read about it I had seen all of the videos and it's your cover photo first off why and then secondly what does it mean to you what does this Sagrada Familia mean to you I'm dying to hear obviously we know it's important in my life I don't know whether it had an importance in yours Beyond Beauty no it has no greater meaning to me than that but one of the lessons that I did learn was that quote about uh Humanity will flourish when men plant trees under which they will never sit something along those lines and that's the first time that I've ever seen a purely joyful expression architecturally artistically that was created with the intense intent purpose that that would be the end goal that this is a where are we at now in construction 70 years nearly 100 now how many I don't know but it's a lot long still going yeah so and it's not done and I think it's and we can't even figure out what his vision is so we've allowed other people to put their Bishop in and yeah because there's only one of him cowdy okay the ceiling of that thing to me is Transcendence you can't even believe it's real you know that there are things in this world that remind you of the Transcendent in all of us that it's possible you know um I can think of particular pieces of music or poems or pieces of architecture I was just inside the Blue Mosque um in Istanbul which is you know a few feet from Aya Sofia and the interior of these two structures just are mind-blowing um and La cigarette for me I mean these are religions that I'm not a part of if you're talking about the sacred family and you have a skylights to heaven how better to honor the Creator whether the Creator exists or not than with genius and and elegance and Grace and humility and and arrogance and everything that went into that ceiling that ceiling is like nothing else I've ever seen um and you know you can touch you know Sam Harris is famous for saying that you can either learn how to meditate or I can give you a few micrograms of the substance you're going to have a profound experience well okay um just getting back from Sal Miguel and the Azores you could take LSD or DMT or or you could go to San Miguel I mean it's just crazy that that that there is that much Beauty on Earth and I guess that space is something that I wanted people to understand when I named the show the portal and people did not understand it wasn't intended to be a show it's intended to be a search for the actual portal out of here it's an attempt to find pinch to zoom I believe that we are not doomed here but that we have developed this very weird focus on psychology we to challenge Einstein is almost seen as arrogance and yet if Einstein is to survive as a legacy it's only going to be because somebody basically undermined general relativity status as a fundamental Theory because we're not going to make it and I'm trying to remind people in a world that now like you can look up on Twitter say lone genius Theory people don't believe in the lone genius Theory um well then what was Gowdy what was the rock what was Einstein what was yang what was Emmy nerder some somebody tell me why I have all of these lone Geniuses in my life and aren't we supposed to be doing that and thinking that that's admirable I think we're supposed to be building this the theory that can realize that the ceiling of lacrada Familia is a portal we're supposed to inspire ourselves with beauty and luxury we're not supposed to consume it to pig out for status reasons we're supposed to get ourselves into a state where we can dream at an interplanetary level a lot of the things that we've spoken about today are to do with cerebral horsepower cognition yeah they're difficult things that need to be done in the head and yet you're talking here about the Transcendent you're talking about something which is embodied which is spiritual by whichever definition of the word you want to use do you find in yourself as somebody who does rely on cerebral horsepower for a lot of the things that you try to do and presumably takes pride in your ability to have workout problems have thoughts do you feel attention in yourself between the the Transcendent the relinquishing the embodied and the cerebral the cognitive the uh purposeful on that side you know I have a dumb expression which I don't use in public and I'm sure I'll be I'll be uh castigated for it yeah brilliant but it's head heart and loins if it doesn't speak to your head heart and your loins leave it for someone else what's that mean how do you enact that you have to try to realize that these things have to be balanced and tempered you don't want to live by your heart just every time you know you see a daffodil blowing its seeds into the wind you'll be transported and you'll stop paying your electric bills and you don't want to be led around by your loins that's not going to end well and you don't want to be led around by your head too because then you'll get yourself into one of these cul-de-sacs and you won't even realize that you can't think your way out of it you were given all of these facilities and motivations how do you pull yourself from head to hot well you you brought this guitar Lady it's just on your right grab it show it to everybody so I don't I I do not play the guitarle I don't think anybody actually technically does it's like a guitar that's too small for your fingers yes you've got your pixel in it so you take some piece of music that actually means something to you right and one thing that I remember hearing when I was growing up was this [Music] so this is the astorious of Isaac albanes it was originally written for piano and you see sorts of these things on Ood where you have a tremolo you've got two two fingers playing the open B string and then you've got this melody which is played with the thumb oh [Music] so the combination of these things produces this different effect foreign [Music] get my fingers in there started thinking about okay well that's a great effect what if we tried to write and to create using the same idea I started okay so uh [Music] so that's not the same song but it's using some of the same techniques about just getting these things to ring out and to get the melody going on the Baseline and then you have to forget this now you know if I was able to play this properly and I'm sorry if I'm embarrassing myself you're trying to do this thing where you're you're recognizing that the Transcendent lives in particular structures that they elicit this feeling and that we have this opportunity to go back and forth between the analytic description if I'm thinking about this I can't really feel it and if I'm feeling it I can't really figure out how to use it or think about it or compose with it and so um you know to me what we're trying to do is we're trying to um camp and D camp well that spoke to my head and my loins but it didn't speak to my heart or that spoke to two out of three we need ultimately to be fully embodied and that's a challenge and we have to we either accept the challenge or we don't accept the challenge and we have to go back and forth between these lenses you can't necessarily be in the same you know if you see your child and you're a physician a surgeon you could see your child as a bunch of tissue hooked up to itself you know and that's important if you're hiking and you're in a bad spot you actually have to do an operation on your child but it's a terrible way to put your child to sleep when you're reading a bedtime story is that a is there a challenge that people are facing at the moment with an over-reliance on a brain-based economy a unlimited amount of information at your fingertips with Wikipedia and Chachi PT for them to struggle to find something Transcendent when it can be broken down into its component parts and explained by somebody who understands the child as a connection of ligaments organs and blood vessels as opposed to as the beautiful progeny of the person looking at them well keep in mind that there are people who can weave poetry through their description of something very technical Hermann vile for example wrote in a very Olympian fashion about abstract algebra we talked about the homosexuality of certain symbols affiliating with themselves you know completely crazy arithmetic and um you know there are people who just write beautifully uh I think that Jim Watson who may be a son of a on many fronts is one of the great writers in the English language if you read the double helix it's an incredible narrative uh from the most one of the most memorable first sentences to to the conclusion we need the Carl Sagan's to animate our head and our hearts at the same time do you think there is an over-reliance on head at the moment I'm worried that our head heart and loins are all disengaged so what do you use if you're not using any of those I use them all no but what are the people using who are not using those uh they're not watching what's happening to them they're being denatured by their phones your phone is not a phone it is a very it's an environment you know you pick it up and suddenly you're you're someplace that you don't realize isn't relative to your physical surroundings like you get very angry that you get a text message while you're driving and you try responding to it well you're going 45 miles an hour in a several hundred pound or a thousand pound vehicle you've lost track of where you are um our phone is you know and I talk to people about the crisis in pornography the only fans movement the pornographic stuff that you're seeing people are not getting easily excited and aroused inside of any kind of context like the erotic is taking it on the chin I think I think that's really important to remember that eroticism for example is at least a combination of the loins in the head and and at best the heart as well what you're starting to see is people can't actually derive excitement from normal stimuli that has to do with falling in love or having children or you know so you're talking about an Ever escalating stimulus that people require to get the same arousal response and they can't yeah Mary Harrington calls this one of her three laws of pornodynamics it's the law of FAP entropy that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more extreme over time well what's the cure for that something high-end you could just try to do it all in loins show me something where my psychogenic arousal gets greater and greater because I've never seen that and holy cow is that far out or you could say you know it's more like a Cobb Douglas utility function you're going to have to bring this down to my level multiple inputs in other words if I could offer you only food or only water that would not work you'd rather if you have a lot of food have a little water to complement it because that water becomes that much more valuable or if you have a ton of liquids and you have no nourishment you probably want really value a little bit of food well in my opinion part of what we need is we need more more things that reward us when we're integrating rather than where when we're extremizing get back to that discussion about uh technology sort of not only fracturing our attention but also fracturing our experience there seems to be a wistfulness not just in the dating realm but in the experiential realm for a bygone time where we felt connected to the things that we do yeah and it's interesting for someone of my age I'm 35 so I'm like slap bang in the middle of the Millennials right so I remember a time before ubiquity of iPhones before internet but there was a Like There's A Whimsy of childhood in any case and me being able to tear those two apart is kind of difficult but I definitely think that when I read history when I read um Ryan holiday for instance and I think about Xeno obsidium walking around the stoopoe clay where I've been and I'm there and I I think about the degree of connection to the experience what is technology and what are our smartphones doing to our ability to connect so they're changing our our wet wear we're not if you can have 12 life-changing experiences in the space of a minute and none of them are yours what do you think that's going to do to your mind you know at some point I was in an Oculus situation I was deep underwater and a blue whale swam past me well none of that actually happened but it felt like it did or you know that you can do this uh nuclear explosion on Henderson Island in Oculus that's just a more immersive phone and look you have to be you know that's one of the things about La Sagrada Familia you go in there and it's real you see the Grand Canyon and it is actually Grand you know you there's certain things that don't easily live up to their billing I think I went to pamukale in Turkey years ago which pamuk means cotton and Calais I guess castles or the cotton castles of mineral deposits and they would form these pools and there weren't enough pools and there were way too many people so it was like one of those moments where the tourists have totally destroyed the natural attraction okay but I went into the Blue Mosque and it was every bit as mind-blowing as it was the last time I was there 30 years ago it's the same way that I feel every single time I step into the Vatican every single every single time and I've been there three times now I've been there three times and it's just holy cow well I shouldn't have said that anyway um very good I didn't mean to uh yeah you have to there have to be things that you actually viscerally relate to that stop you like the Bach Cello Suites how many times have I heard the Box up or a whole lot of love can do it either way or You Shook Me All Night Long you know that's holy You Shook Me All Night Long is is a Transcendent song it's less Transcendent if you see it as part of a 60-second tick tock Montage no because the Shema is transcended and that'll fit right in there all right yes [Music] yeah you who shook me all night long that's prayer yes You Shook Me All Night Long you know if that doesn't move you you need to check into some place those four notes recur in all of these songs that matter it's basically Mary Had a Little Lamb with Pho thrown in as well you know and then I bring up this example my wife was watching a film I didn't want to watch it with some chick flick and it all hovers around this one scene where this guy drags this girl into a uh a music store because he can't afford a piano I don't know you but I want you going up to that fourth all the more for that and I just I was transfixed I couldn't could not continue to do my calculations like what the hell is this movie so those four notes is a great place to ground yourself and there's a reason that they work the second note brings up in your mind the uh the thing called the fifth the dominant chord the first note is spread between the the tonic and the subdominant the third note belongs to the tonic only and the fourth note only belongs to the subdominant and so this this idea that Western Harmony revolves around these ideas of the tonic the subdominant the dominant are carried by these notes so even if you're not playing it on a chordal instrument that this pattern of four notes that keeps recurring grabs us because we know what the chords are behind it and it's basically Mary had a little lamb or Proud Mary you know but that's a great place to start for Transcendence let's check on something really simple whether you're feeling it oh and Dread to emotions that I miss in my life say more so when I look up at the night sky I get it in equal dosages oh good uh you know when it's good I've been out to Joshua Tree taking an edible didn't need the edible at all that was unnecessary amplification you know we're having this discussion in the middle of the perseids meteor shower no I highly recommend get yourself to a place where there's no light pollution and lay on your back right before Daniel you'll have a blast oh and but the ah on the dread is is very much that yes and uh I don't know it makes you feel insignificant in a way I think that keeps your ego small and helps to resend to your do you want your ego small uh have you been told that was a good thing I've been told that it's a good thing I would say for me remembering finitude and not insignificance but the temporary nature about time here the vastness of what is going to go on the things that have come before the things that will come after the scale yeah I think that that it grounds me I struggled to get into my head to describe the thing that is almost exclusively in heart and lines and uh it makes me feel good when I do that and yet I find myself I've got emails to do I heard this term the other day John Lovell Warrior Poet Society said the tyranny of the urgent and I love that the tyranny of the urgent you're familiar with this concept of bathos no the alternation between the Transcendent and the mundane and the pressing you know like okay We Will Conquer The Cosmos but I have to pick up my dry clean um yeah I think that there is that that tyranny but I also want to just talk about arrogance and humility I meet too many people who have won without the other I see all these discussions online about so-and-so has this beautiful epistemic humility or somebody else's uh you know preposterously arrogant or whatever and I I sort of sit and wonder at this discussion you want both what is humility without arrogance well you know who I think actually had this in kind of pretty decent balance that was on display for the world to see was uh khabib nurmagomedov what an unbelievably good example right so well tell me tell me how it lands for you like khabib is very very high on the list of people that I would love to speak to and you hear that khabib listen khabib if anybody in Dagestan has got khabib's email address please tell him to get in touch okay this is fascinating to me so the more I'll I'll do a timeline of it so Conor McGregor very seductive very obviously seductive working class the Irish hate to be told that they're a part of the UK they're not they're near you know close enough it's like an adopted son type thing okay and I'm thinking God this guy's like a savant of war and Artistry as he's coming up and then he beats Chad Mendes uh and it's a a war as a fight and then he's crying and then he does the other side of it and he's doing uh with Edo portal he's balancing in the middle of maybe Vegas or or California somewhere on a uh walking rail on its side rail and he's I think Nate Diaz accused him of playing touch butt with that dork in the park um and he's doing handstands and he's got this sort of fluidity to him right and then there's this amazing interview that was clipped and put in perfectly of a journalist reciting back to Conor what he said before the Aldo fight and he said uh at the press conference I I saw his right hand shaking that was a subtle tell for me he's going to overload with that right hand and when he thinks I will be that I will not I will create gaps within that octagon he will fall into those gaps and that is when I will strike and then there's a clip of him backstage before he's about to fight and he's bouncing backwards and forwards in that sort of long karate stance that he does and he steps back and he throws that left hook practicing and they placed it in time with the fight amazing and it's the same move and this guy says you said these things recites that thing post fight how'd you do that how do you do that and Conor talks about if you have The Bravery enough to speak it and the courage enough to be able to pursue it and I'm just enthralled by this guy I put got put onto a reality TV show in my 20s that we had no internet no contact with friends or family or any sort of muse and it turned out that while I was there I think it was Rafael dosanos um was injured so I was terrified I was gonna miss McGregor's fight because that's how inspiring it was to me and then does this this talk of this guy this other fighter unbeaten undefeated and it's the Bane Batman type scenario at least that's the model that I had in my mind and I'm like you know you've got the almost the rocky uh versus uh who was the Russian guy that he's training for in the fight no who's the Russian guy that kind of fights the uh Rocky fight sorry yes I'm draghav so it's almost that right you've got this training in the mountains and chopping wood um and then there's the dolly kind of throws the dolly and you start to see that was the first time I really took notice of khabib and you remember that video send me location send me location just tell me where send me location and there's a number of tribute videos called the locations but with a K uh about khabib I'm like hell like this is this guy's something else sky is real correct so Connor McGregor was spread between real and fake right the Showmanship was it was a part of it was backed up particularly by his striking by his ability to sense his opponent sort of almost using your right an antenna yeah yeah um but I really believe that in part trying to get into your opponent's head with somebody I I really wonder whether westerners have any idea of what happens in places like Central and Eastern Europe when you start talking about somebody's mother you know like are you you start I I had this really bad cultural reaction which is that there are people who are bought into the whole trash talking thing you know and it if it had been like I don't know Conor McGregor versus I don't know how to print as a child sonan or something like that yeah it's a fair game yeah they're both they're both accepting the game and with khabib I just had this other thought of like have you never met anyone from Dagestan before yeah like anyone from Dagestan it's not just khabib sorry it's just you know it's so bad have you ever done improv no well inadvertently in improv classes uh there's something called punking the game okay uh and let's say that we're in a circle and we're supposed to whoosh we pass energy around whoosh and you can go boing and it goes back the other way and you can like send it across and stuff there's only one rule one rule is don't punk the game punking the game is ah like not playing by the rules game rejection yes and what you see is uh Conor playing a game of tennis and he keeps on serving this ball across and the boys 100 From khabib's perspective not only does the ball not come back across the net he doesn't even have the racket in his hand you know he's there he's got to be there there's obligations to be done and it was that series of press conferences yeah that really made me fall in love with khabib and then how it gets me emotional thinking about you thinking about his tribute to his father I'm telling you I can't see it from Conor's perspective of why you would behave in that way like two seconds facing this guy it's not a question of fear it's a question of respect well maybe I just don't get it but I spend enough time I have spent enough time in I don't know the north of India or the center of turkey or places in Egypt or Ukraine or Russia wherever you don't I I can tell the Internet it's going to completely tell me I don't get it you don't do this stuff you just don't it's like I can't explain to people who are convinced that the internet is the gift to prove that dunking and dragging is man's highest function there's so much stuff you don't do and this whole move towards like anonymity and let's make fun of everybody and everything because mockery is good yeah this way this this is the direction to Madness I certainly think that Peterson said this a while ago one of the main problems with Twitter is it's driven the proximate price of being a prick down to zero sure in the combination of real people and unnamed accounts and bought farms and the inability to work out whether it's being said in Earnest or set in a or whether it's been coordinated so that 100 000 people go off at once on the exactly the same point getting back to the issue of arrogance and and uh humility what is khabib competent unwavering humble he's both arrogant and humble and you have to look at the move that he does when you compliment him what does he do alhamdulillah right or masha'allah or something with the name Allah in it it's like I give you this praise oh no no no it's not for me it's for the God all for my father or or for my father right and so this issue about this is a this is a beautiful thing when you when you have Muslim friends is that they learn to deflect all of this positivity out if they're getting it they deflect it so that they don't keep it and they don't become insufferable on the other hand if they're extraordinary what they do they know that they're extraordinary at what they do khabib is under no Illusions as to how good he is he set the highest standards tomorrow night I'm gonna smash your boy he is simultaneously you said competent it just wasn't fair to him he's Way Beyond competent and you know I I guess I just want people to realize that you need arrogance to stand up against insuperable odds and you need humility to stop your arrogance from driving you insane and to keep asking that people be constantly humble is an affront to what we are as humans I really don't grasp it you need that deep humility 100 percent but so many people need arrogance in order to take on the challenges that they they could if you took the world seriously you'd never take on those challenges if you were just humble um yes yes this uh my favorite clip one of my favorite clips of khabib post fighting post Korea uh he's doing an interview and talking about the training camps the gym that he looks after and some of the fighters that are there and apparently I think they train six days or six and a half days a week and he tells them they need to get up and some of the guys complain and he says is okay you can you go home your mum she'll tuck you into bed at night she will cook you dinner and tomorrow you'll be comfortable but that's not why you're here put that coffee down do you know coffees for closers ah yes yes good reference your your name's Levine he calls yourself a Salesman you son of a I just love I really really love this I I had a conversation last week and uh I was told a quote self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anybody else you know I'll be honest with you I get tired of these things I think that there's a lot of men in particular looking for simple answers and all of these things fall flat for me it they're front loaded because they simplify things right imagine that that's what all that self-love was well then I'd have I'd have a definition yeah but it's not going to work and I think that this is one of the things that um I don't know how to fight exactly is that we're in a world that's convinced that the truth must be simple and all of these simple truths don't survive the collider that is modern social media so I don't disagree the problem with a truth which is boundlessly complex is that functionally it's useless so that's what and I'm so glad you made this point that's the puzzle we're now in a world where to do the Nuance is to get yourself Tangled Because the Internet is not friendly to Nuance on the other hand to say something simply and crisply leads you into disappointing everyone who's believed in you and you know we were talking before a little bit about Christopher Hitchens yes tell me about your thoughts on hitch I asked Sam this question Sam spent a good bit of time with him what would the modern culture be like if hitch was still alive hitch I think would have been forced to either self-incinerate or adapt and I'm not sure what you would have done what self-incineration in this context one of the things that makes Christopher Hitchens a hero to so many people almost oddly a secular Saint if you will is that he held the promise that one could simply stand in some place that was reasonable and hold forth from that simple perspective like nope there's nothing to Islam it is nonsense it might be something he would say or you might say um you know free speech is absolute and you have every right to say anything you want and I have every right to say and the better ideas will prevail now you watch what's happened with Sam and this question of trump Sam perceives Trump to be an asymmetric existential threat and was willing to go and back the idea that the hunter Biden laptop story might not uh have benefited the election and he's lost an enormous number of people who otherwise agree with him and now what's the reasoning the reasoning and something oddly I first time I met Sam I went on his show to warn him that you can't just optimize for truth you have to optimize I said I have four variables I can't live without truth meaning Fitness and Grace so Trump is a fitness puzzle to Sam which is if we allow Trump to destroy the country in Sam's mind then we've lost Fitness there's no there's no point in being truthful and then there's a question about what is the meaning do you destroy the meaning of a democracy when you hold back information maybe you do maybe it no longer feels like it's an actual democracy what is the graceful thing to do what is the just and right thing to do um I am convinced that some of hitch's positions were attractive because he was using his big brain to suggest that life could be lived simply if we were just strong enough of character if we were clear enough of thought we could espouse something like free speech or Reason and it would be enough without requiring that we hold it up to a higher power or that you know you get caught in some very serious situation where you're in an edge case Free Speech does not exist in an absolute form in under American law it just doesn't really we we mentioned Miller versus California which was a sort of a follow-on decision to Memoirs versus Massachusetts um you don't have a right to broadcast pornography because pornography does not enjoy First Amendment uh protection now how do you discern that pornography doesn't well the the justices claim that it doesn't and there's a you know a three Factor test for what is pornography which was I believe attenuated under something called Memoirs versus Massachusetts but that was not allowed to stand you're not allowed to necessarily endanger troop movements uh by blabbing information in a war you're not able to slander a libel there are all sorts of adjustments to free speech and when you when you come at one of these perspectives from an absolutist frame of mind you have to hope that you're not going to meet the edge case a good example for me was the Second Amendment I noticed that many Second Amendment types took an absolutist perspective saying the right to keep and bear arms will not be infringed and don't bother me about a well-regulated militia I said okay I'm not going to talk to you about a well-regulated militia my question is should the Davy Crockett be sold at Kmart and they would often say well what's the Davy Crockett and I said well it's about a hundred pound personal nuke well first of all I was very flabbergasted that a lot of gun enthusiasts did not know that there was a personal nuke developed by the United States but then immediately many of them saw where this was going which is okay if we're going to restrict personal nukes at Kmart then you've got your your foot in the door the camel has its nose Under the Tent it's a difference of degree not a difference of kind all the way down exactly so I think that personal nukes have to be sold at Kmart because the American population needs to keep parity with the American Military and then I say well do you realize what you just said do you realize that you've bounced out of your very simplified framework they don't and this is partially the problem which is that if you can't talk about taste and trade-offs and balance because none it's all squishy then you have all of these people running to these different Ultra simplifications none of which work there's a quote from one of my smartest friends guinda a dilemma of tweeting is that you're aware of exceptions and conditions to your statements but can't include them without turning an elegant aphorism into a clunky mess so you must choose between writing tinead garbage or getting torn apart by pedants and replies and quote tweets I've chosen to fail in a particular no but this is this is really important I'm failing how about you depends what your goals are well but my point to you is I don't think we're meant to succeed here what's that mean what's the criteria was that a herd what's the Criterion no sorry the person who just said no a guy guy what he said was that you're aware of the trade-off and there's no way out of the trade-off I believe that there are ways out but they have their own problems once you start to understand all of the different forces that are arrayed against you you realize that if somebody chooses to hyper focus on various things they can effectively destroy your credibility in general and you brought up Wikipedia and I wanted to talk about that an interesting thing that's happening with it Wikipedia is the difference between individual Wikipedia entries and Wikipedia entries on like a subject or a plant or a geographic place so isn't it strange that if you were to look up for example um pneumatic drill on Wikipedia there'd be a huge technically accurate article about pneumatic drills constitutes it who invented it right and then you look up Jordan Peterson and I guarantee you it's going to be a war zone and now you've you fuse these two things together which is weaponized Wikipedia and factual Wikipedia and this is like some really dangerous new object and I always knew that Wikipedia The Genius thing that it was had a finite shelf life because it made the Fatal flaw of using authoritative sources as Bedrock truth what happens when trolls get access to bedrock sources what happens when the state department or the Department of Homeland Security or the intelligence Community or people who hate you that was the headlines that happened after my episode on Joe's show were it was the weekend that somebody had nudged the definition of recession on Wikipedia to no longer be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth and this was a Monday and it happened over the weekend I mentioned it and all hell break loose broke loose it had already broken loose over the weekend and then obviously anything Joe touches gets Amplified to right my Heavens you're like okay so the the definitions that we use I think Shapiro calls it semantic overload uh that's the Battleground ultimately almost all tell me the frame and I'll tell you the argument like somebody will say um you know is it worth stopping Donald Trump by suppressing stories yes or no go I was like well first of all the question was designed to subsume that we have to stop Donald Trump now I might agree that with that I believe maybe we should stop Donald Trump but you did make that the argument and then you piled on a question on top of it you subsume that within the frame and so more or less this is everything at the moment which is if you can if you can Define misgendering and dead naming um you've won the argument we suppose it's a world in which yeah so I'll give you an example for the fledgling podcast is out there when you first start doing a podcast you're nervous that the guest doesn't like you you're nervous that the guest isn't interested in you that your question sucks that your question doesn't make sense and you're terrified of Silence among millions of other things did any of those happen in this episode oh you've been very welcoming how could I not after you serenaded me with you get a laylee um it was a perfect aphrodisiac so what you do and what I noticed with a lot of young new podcasters is they do what uh multiple choice offering so they'll ask you a question Eric hmm Trump 2024 what do you think is going to happen is it going to be that and as soon as you say is it and you then create either a binary or a trinary of options yeah you have now not only you've restricted for the entire universe of different things that you could have come up with I don't know whatever you're gonna say I've given you two choices so it makes it difficult for you to take a third because you need to say no and why no and why and then take record so you often offer up this very narrow very uni-dimensional landscape exactly and it ruins the the conversation it's funny Lex makes assumptions in so many of his frames that I unweave but I think he gets like some of the best out of me as a guest and there's something about unweaving Lex's questions which I hate doing to him because I want to just answer his questions but on the other hand there's something about the process of unweaving the assumptions that actually benefits some of our interactions so I I think that there's a lot of this just grooming us grooving us to only think about certain possibilities yeah and what I don't know is how do you get nuanced thought to propagate at the second meme you need to make it sexy well you know to an extent I do this with acronyms and the acronyms have taken off but then there's a different population that gets very angry which is why are you allowed to create we're allowed to create these memes with the distracted boyfriend you know but you're not allowed to create an acronym to make a concept sticky so what we're in is some sort of Warfare for mindshare and I'll be honest I'm not seeing high level interactions the way I was five years ago between people what's happened I think that they've done a pretty good job of disconnecting us you remember the old data and Society report where you looked at chains of Association and the whole game was to tie everyone back to Milo ianopoulos or something I so I got to interject I go to Qatar to do this debate about masculinity about six months ago and they put up on one of the segments I was pro-traditional masculinity and there was a gentleman on the other side and they said uh here is a montage you have some unspeakable people that represent masculinity and there was Joe Rogan and John Peterson and blah blah blah blah blah but the first person was Milo yiannopoulos I said look if you have brought me to the Middle East to defend Milo yianopolis I did you have brought the wrong person I'm like you know that we need to shift that get that to one side Milo can go over there do you see his debate with Destiny that he did a couple of weeks ago maybe three months ago now Milo looked like a old touring singer in a rock band still doing the shows but can't hit the high notes anymore and he The Whimsy yeah and that sort of playful Jester Joker kind of game gamesmanship had been abandoned in place of bottom of the Barrel backbiting in genuine emotional sniping and then Destiny said after he's been pushed and pushed and pushed for 90 minutes yeah he says to Destiny uh uh back in the olden times they would have left your kind on the side of a hill a hill to die and Destiny said well I think that the gays would have been left there first Milo said well I don't think that you can tell whether a baby is going to like dick when it comes out or not Destiny said well you'd know all about young boys liking dick wouldn't you wow and it broke Milo it broke his brain so what sorry what was that and no one had any sympathy because for 90 minutes he'd called Destiny's wife a public flashlight he'd said everything under the sun why are we dealing with these people because it is entertainment it is mental masturbation it a story about people will always be more seductive to a broader group than a story about ideas got it I think am I wrong I don't know I just despairing so much stuff so much Beauty in this world and I just I wonder at what point does Middle School lunch table when you compare it to amino acids you compare it to you go scuba diving I have done I suck what's the most beautiful place you've gone scuba dive uh Gilly tea off the coast of Bali okay I remember scuba diving off menjungen Island in Bali and amazing but the Red Sea totally blew my mind I can't tell you how little I care about Milo yiannopoulos and how much I care about scuba diving in the Red Sea I don't know maybe I'm just wrong there's something wrong it's just to get back to it we all used to talk to each other and then this thing started dividing us you know he started seeing all these messages oh your boy said this your boy said that time to come collect your boy he's like who talks like this um the internet and then we stopped seeing each other in our feeds and we said well oh this is Vijaya got a under Jack Dorsey and Jack had gotten some system whereby he took his hands off it because he knew that the terrible things had to be done I think and he just had this idea well if I have to intercede at Twitter then something has gone wrong with the system and you had this person who was just very happy bringing Health to the to the internet but it disconnected all of us it was very clear that our engagement just dropped and then if you complained about it it was because you actually sucked and nobody cared about your tweets you had no idea where you were and so all of this kind of good feeling evaporated in part because people didn't know how to fight as a as a team and this is just I would love to get back to the masculinity riff a little bit I don't think men know how to fight as groups and it's a key part about masculinity and it really makes me upset to see all of these people in individual masculine space all right if you're ever faced me three attackers two of whom have knives and one of whom has a gun here's your best move it's like like you know you don't know you've never faced this is the best move to have a group of five friends with you well first of all yes and having people's back and so there's a there's a this is something that I've spent an awful lot of time over the last couple of years the definition of addiction is that you can find fulfillment alone is something that I heard a few weeks ago okay the atomization of everybody the generalized risk aversion syndrome that we are seeing something called extended adolescence or slow life strategy from Gene twangy uh talking about young people are getting the driver's license don't know it but like it immediately from the title uh people getting their driver's licenses later they're uh partying less they're drinking less they're leaving home later they're getting occupations starting jobs later um could this have been contributed to through covert yeah probably um but it was catalyzed it was already a trend that was happening it's affecting men particularly because male friendship groups are more fragile in some regards than women's in 1990 the number of men who said they had zero close friends was around about three percent 2020 that number was 15 that's insane the most common answer to the question how many friends could you call on in an emergency is zero the most common it's not the average but it's the most common more people have zero friends to call them than have any other number the challenge of modern masculinity relates to that addiction quote the belief that you can find fulfillment alone and you see this in the the sigma male meme Sigma mail grind set you know no no this so uh you have you know Alpha Beta the sort of red pill the blue pill the purple pill halfway between the two I don't know okay so the sigma male steps outside of the existing dominance hierarchy he doesn't try to lead he doesn't try to do anything he is a Lone Ranger Lauren to himself over the top of a lot of this meta meme which is being created is a guy called Chris Bumstead who is a three-time four-time classic physique Champion Mr Olympia okay classic physique is they have weight limits which means that they have a much more arnold-esque it's all about shape and sculpture massive but not a mass monster Phil Heath was sat in that seat not long ago mass monster uh I sit down with Chris this guy who is the face of the sigma male meme okay perhaps the one of the driving forces behind young male belief at the moment and I asked him how much of what you've done and achieved in business in personal life and in your sport could you have done on your own zero I could have done none of it I couldn't have gotten through the difficult times emotionally without my fiance I couldn't have built my personal brand without my best friend in videographer Calvin I couldn't have run my business without Vaughn and my other business partners that are here I couldn't have done any of this stuff and this is the guy that he's in the ice tub as there's dubstep music over the top of him saying you don't need anybody else and so on and so forth the belief that you can find fulfillment alone is a lie it is a lie that people who have been hurt and scorned and rejected by the world Retreat into there is a safety blanket of cynicism that people can use it's sour grapes at an existential level the belief that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure and the generalized risk aversion the extended adolescence the slow life strategy permits that to seep ever more into people's lives in a world where we have hyper convenience why should I feel discomfort so what's going on with the modern masculinity movement it's fractured so there is the manosphere which is the broad term that describes people talking to men I've never identified with it I'm not a part of it inasmuch as I speak to men about things that I struggled with and they listen perhaps someone could put me in it but I I don't think that they help I think fundamentally at the moment the masculinity movement sees women as adversaries and competitors rather than compatriots I I think that they are they treat women largely like an enemy to be avoided or a resource to be used and discarded I think that largely much of men's advice benefits some men at the expense of most others that if being a high value man means sleeping with as many women as possible but a low value woman is a woman that slept with many men what you are doing is creating a wake after you that other men have to pick up the pieces of if your goal is to be this high value many but high body count male I think that let me give you this so This is actually going into a paper my first academic paper that I've ever been a part of all right so this is the male sedation hypothesis okay there's a an effect called young male syndrome have you heard of this nope if you have a large number of dispossessed sexless men throughout all of history bad things happen yeah testosterone drops when you get in a relationship it drops again once you have kids this means in large part that women domesticate men in some regard they have to you don't want to take risk-taking behavior when you've got a newborn at home don't jump off that cliff okay like let's be go home go home so when you have large numbers of dispossessed young men who aren't having sex what's their reason for integrating into society they take a brilliant study is done of men crossing the road and the difference between when they cross in the distance from the nearest car with or without the presence of women you put a woman there the distance closes massively no women there they're not bothered risk-taking behavior is a show look at my excess Fitness yeah look at all of these risks that I can take look at the plumage on the back of my of my tail right so throughout all of history it seems like they set cars on fire and push over granny and and cause havoc in Portugal uh 1700s they the first Sun there was a disparity in the sex ratio I'm not sure why the first son was allowed to marry every subsequent son was put on a ship go explore the new world don't burn our home was what they were saying there is a question we have very high rates of sexlessness and we have very low rates of integration amongst young men at the moment why are we not seeing them going around and setting up setting cars I'm fine there is a Jordan Peterson was featured as the incel god in a he inspired a movie by Olivia Wilde starring Harry Styles a little while ago I brought it up to Jordan and uh the incel God he was the king of the incels yes this insult I am so pissed to hear this John laughed it off in classic him fashion yeah but as a guy who who opened for Jordan Peterson on harmonica I've been to some of his shows Jordan Peterson recognized this demographic early and he had the courage to speak directly to it and if you want to see some you want to see me break out in tears have me tell you the stories about the people who went up to Jordan Peterson and said I was smoking weed masturbating in my parents basement and six months later I've got a job I've got prospects I've got a fiance etc etc and to turn him into the incel king or whatever no Jordan Peterson tried to become the one person answer to the world Uncle shortage okay and I just have no patience for dismissing that much good if if some of his message seemed off to you it's because you didn't need it you didn't understand what clean your room was about you laughed it off because you weren't screwed and he gave people a pass just the way Sam gave people a path from that abusive religious household where they didn't know to escape and you know to to an extent all of these people spoke to people at different stages in their lives a lot of this female Behavior which is oh you know I'm on only fans I'm going to get my this I'm going to get my that well good luck to you I hope it works out but the gold digging or the misogyny it's of a peace people are listening to each other's strategic conversation and saying why would I want that for my life so I'll round out the sedation hypothesis you have this large cohort dispossessed young men high tea high risk taking they cause problems there's a question to be asked although many of the almost all mass Shooters including the ones that hit all of the headlines were sexless young men given that we have the highest rates of sexlessness amongst young men that we've seen in a very long time there is a question why have we not seen an in-kind increase in anti-social Behavior it's my belief that young men specifically are being sedated out of their status seeking and risk-taking and reproductive Behavior through a combination of social media porn and video games I was waiting for it so there is an idea from Diana sorry social media porn and video games does not include weed I think ubiquitous weed the motivation killer um we don't have a ton of culture around open weed we have a lot of culture around open alcohol about open coffee we used to have culture around open nicotine we don't have a lot of culture around open weed we have culture around closed weed surreptitious weed yeah yeah but I do think that in part the video game thing is an absolute as if drug what's up you meet people who come from The Gaming Community or social media and they have an idea that life permits you to do certain things that are absolutely not tolerated in Civil Society like a lot of the people an interesting feature of social media is the difference between critics and trolls who call you names and people who actually try to find a way to ruin your life offline like there's a huge connection between The Gaming Community and certain sort of bulletin boards and this freak game about how can we destroy people offline yeah yeah so I um and once you meet these people and you and you read their messages to each other they're talking about oh yeah I've got a cool exploit where I'm going to invite somebody to so-and-so's house because I think that person might be dangerous you realize it's a video game yeah so I I had this idea specifically about uh Jordan but it would apply to yourself it would apply to Joe after a while there is a particular threshold of exposure notoriety that people cross and when they do they are no longer treated like a human it's easy online to dehumanize because you don't see any there there right you don't see that but there's something specific about crossing a particular threshold where you're no longer a person you're a representation of ideas you're a conglomeration of viewpoints and I think that really allows people to dehumanize the other side really read there is no one reading these three well you think Jordan Peterson's reading these tweets about the incel God thing yeah is he I don't know I I think he is I think Jordan spends I would I would love Jordan spend less time on Twitter okay I think that would be I think that that would be good but even if they're not there is a person there that is the representation of the person and I don't know like saying something to somebody online that you wouldn't say to their face to me seems like a cowards way of communicating or you'd view it as an Adaptive landscape which is new exploits have been created I mean if I explain to you a mosquito life cycle okay you're gonna find somebody with excess blood and you're gonna steal some for yourself that's my video guy he's been eaten alive since we've been in La yeah is that right yeah okay but you see the same cookie cutter sharks do the same thing for large Marine Wildlife they'll just take a plug of flesh out it's like can't afford to go after cookie cutter sharks when you have those kinds of strategies am I going to sit around in the ocean and say no that's not a legitimate strategy you're a parasite it's like yeah like that's my whole game where I'm a predator I just murder things for a living it's really what predation is about and in a certain sense what you've done is you've changed the Adaptive landscape and these are the new exploits yes so the to get back to the video games porn and social media uh Diana Fleischmann has this idea she calls uncanny vulvas and tell me what she says that uh porn has been able to hijack the mate seeking Behavior specifically of men by giving them a very titrated dose of what it is that they uh would usually get which means that part of that motivation to go out and do the risk-taking behavior has been tuned down but what do you get from uh video games you get camaraderie you get progressive overload in terms of your achievements you get a sense of belonging you get a dopamine when you achieve something you may even get some serotonin because you feel like you're lumped together with your group of friends okay and then what you get on social media with social media we've gamified the status hierarchy it's there there's a number right in front of you and there are levels that you can get to there's your silver plaque on YouTube there's your gold plaque there's your blue tick look who followed me today Elon Musk followed me today whatever whatever I got a retweet from Paul Graham um it has been able to and I don't necessarily think that this was by design it could be by by side effect it has been able to specifically for men maybe also for women give a titrated dose of most of the key drivers that got people out of the house to go and do things Scott Galloway trended uh earlier on for saying that unless you're asleep as a young person you shouldn't be in the house and his point is life is for living there is lots for you to learn outside off go out come on uh and he got tons and tons of pushback and maybe he's wrong but when I get advice sometimes on Q and A's people will say young guys and girls will message and say I'm 13 and I love your podcast like what the fantastic you are in a growth period that is unbelievable and the people that you're getting exposed to I wish that I'd been I'd had access to at 13. what should I do if I want to improve myself what books should I read what practices should I do I don't mean to be patronizing but just go outside and live life there is so much low-hanging fruit from knowing what it's like to have an argument with your friend and having to cycle home with a flat tire it just things there is so many life experiences that I think you will gain massive amounts huge huge amounts of benefit from over and above a 2d lesson so me and my friend George have this conception of a 2d lessons and 3D lessons so a 2d lesson would be reading about Warren Buffett's wealth uh through an autobiography or watching it a 3D lesson would be hanging out with Warren Buffett at his house for an afternoon and no matter how immersive we try and make learning 3D lessons are always going to win because you can't you can't forget them they're so visceral and in a world where most of our time an increasing proportion of our time is spent online the in-person 3D lessons become more and more and more powerful so this is my conception of the male sedation hypothesis hmm how do you how do you judge our sperm counts and testosterone over time yeah so there's some evidence Andrew human shared some evidence that although sperm counts are decreasing penis length is increasing which but that's I don't know if I recall correctly and I I hesitate to get in get into your penis literature Eric come on well there is some trade-off in in various reproductive systems between things that we would classically associate with with masculinity so for example dung beetles have uh Weaponry on their head called antlers giant hook and their copulatory apparatus and their antler is in inverse proportion it's a derailleur and chimp thing again right that one of them has lots of testicles and very little penis length and the other one has the reverse so you have a lot of these conserved systems where somehow reproduction says you can have this many total resources but you have to figure out how to budget between various things that appear to be strongly masculine so I think that declining testosterone is a a big concern uh I would say that it certainly contributes to uh a generalized change in male Behavior risk-taking you know it is talk about oh and um women that take birth control can impact the local Ecology of male testosterone by basically making it feel like they're around infertile women when they're not they're just artificially suppressed women that impacts a man's testosterone level men that are around weapons if mean you walked past a table of guns yeah the testosterone would go up if we walk back there's a chainsaw over there so perhaps it's already high I'm not sure and do I see how many volleys we can get yeah do football freestyle um the issues of sperm count the issue of testosterone production I think contributes to this in a large way what it is that's causing this is it phthalates in the water is it women peeing out their birth control and we've got estrogens in the water supply is it the foods that we're eating is it seed oils is it the lack of time outside is it grounding is it you know there are a whole host of things that are contributing to this but I started working with the blood testing company uh Maric Health about six months ago and I had my Bloodstone for the first time the testosterone was about 500 uh and I'm 35 and I was like you know it should be higher than that so what should I do they gave me some lifestyle interventions and some Boron that frees up free tea from sex hormone binding globulin and blah blah blah blah blah no pharmaceutical interventions but they gave me a ton of Lifestyle ones I had my Bloodstone a couple of weeks ago and it was 900. over the last six months there's been a some minor but noticeable changes to my demeanor one of them being I'm more aggressive like my frustrations come to the fore love it and so I mean I'm dying to ask are you first of all are you married no in a relationship in a relationship do you find that women heterosexual women respond to classical masculinity I have to be very carefully as I ask because they certainly respond more than they're supposed to according to Modern rules of femininity correct but my guess is that it's greatly decreased from the market for masculinity in the 60s let's say so look again Inta and intra-sexual Dynamics something I've spent an awful lot of time learning about I'm writing a book at the moment with David Buss evolutionary psychologist okay on this in the early 2010s after the success of 50 Shades of Gray there was a proliferation of dark romance novels and they there was a pushback from the feminism movement saying that the portrayals of men as dominant masculine bearded big-chested in a line cloth or a plaid shirt wielding an ax uh wasn't what women wanted they wanted a softer more like the brawny guy or the Marlboro Man correct they wanted a softer version of this so they started putting more agreeable more feminized men on the front cover of books they didn't sell right but I wouldn't guess that either of those would be where modern women's heads would be at now in the space of tanyas so I think that there's a there's massively a difference between stated and revealed preferences sure right and also to you know to caveat that the thing that you may sexually fantasize about is not necessarily what you want to get into a relationship with guys will say say more not that uh what you optimize for on a one-night stand and what you optimize for in a marriage partner aren't always necessarily the same I would think they would be wildly desperate correct which means that the front cover of the romance novel is not necessarily the partner that you want long term they're the one that you want to fantasize about most of these stories are driven by sex rather than driven by love so I have this hypothesis and I wonder if you you have names for all sorts of things that I let before you give me I just need to Bunch this up your acronym your panchon for acronym acronyms yeah and a friend Mary says meme first explain later and I think that uh some of my favorite episodes they rely on aphorisms they rely on on creating memes sure small quippy razors and so on and so forth first off because it makes it easy to remember but secondly because that's what gets the hooks into you this is how you make things so if you are somebody that's listening that has an idea that really loves that idea give it a name give it a name and give it a cool name yeah I came up with Fame seesaw the other day which is that uh on your way up people want to support you because you remind them of their dreams when you're at the top they tear you down because you remind them of what they gave up on yeah yeah same seesaw beautiful and that even if it's wrong you can't forget it so it's good very nice you were saying um that when women when heterosexual women realize that they have several possible life cycles and they don't have a clear sense of which one they will actually live am I going to get married and raise children and be at home with the children am I going to get married and have one child maybe two and be a career person am I never going to couple but have children am I going to have no children whatsoever am I going to do that in a coupled situation yeah their decision trees blow out as to what it is that they're actually looking for and one of my strong senses is that women encountered something they weren't expecting which is that they might even be smarter than the guy at work who they're competing with but he's happy to come in all of Saturday all of Sunday and work hours that are completely psychotic and so then the idea of well we need work-life balance we don't want people coming in on Friday and Saturday because that's sort of an unfair advantage that somebody who wants a healthy life is different from somebody who wants an extreme life and so now you have this problem which is I'm attracted to the sort of man I wouldn't want to compete with at work if I'm going to be in the office I want to know that I'm not going to have to deal with the guy who's willing to give up every weekend and work hours that I'm unwilling to work because that's not how I'm set at the factory versus um I want that guy as the go-getter while I'm pregnant and incapacitated and raising children to make sure that not only he can Shepherd our family through anything because he's highly capable but can also get me back into the workforce when I'm done raising children and this is somewhat what I believe is responsible for this sort of incoherent messages that men and women are sending to each other is that when we don't know what life cycle we are going to be inhabiting our eroticism and our romance and our desire is unstable one of the most uncomfortable correlations that I've found over the last few years is that as gender inequality pay inequality between the genders increases relationship satisfaction for both men and women increases as well sorry decreases the more egalitarian the more equal the pay the less satisfied both sexes are with relationships hmm men who are in relationships where the woman is the primary Breadwinner of 50 more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication where a woman is contributing more than 70 of the household income the marriage is twice as likely to end in divorce women for a man sorry for a woman to move herself the same distance on a 10-point scale in terms of attractiveness that a man can by increasing his income by a hundred thousand dollars she would need a ten thousand times increase in income in short women are interested socioeconomically in the status of their partner in a way that men aren't now the problem that you have is that women now have access to education and employment in a way that they never have done before so they're no longer financially dependent on men sure but you're seeing something which is particularly heartbreaking in my group of of females which would be women in their mid to late 50s I have to be honest I've seen some of the women I was most impressed by never coupling and when I when you talk to them there's some very uncomfortable things that get said one of which was I was looking for a man I could look up to and the pool was just so small and then and you know you're thinking well okay it's illegal to say I'm looking for a man that I could look up to right because that's not in accordance with modern feminism and egalitarianism but on the other hand this idea that when you're you know one of the world's leading chemists or something uh there's just not that many men that are gonna be in that position I got another main fee yeah this is I got in a lot of trouble for this it's called the toll goal problem so if you stand atop your own status hierarchy it's very difficult to find somebody else across an above from yours you know if you're a six foot one girl without heels you're looking at professional athletes and two women for every one man completing a four-year us college degree by 2030 between the ages of 21 and 29 women earn 111 pounds more on average than their male counterparts right but women still have this vestigial attraction to the man who is a cross and a bug from them that's hypergamy and this means that as you rise up through your undominance hierarchy it amounts to a opportunity of diminishing returns but then why are we not allowed to build better men I mean this is the really this is this thing that just floors me I'm now through through being a father looking at the subset of young men who are absolutely looking to crush it and the advice they're being given is so horrific but like well that doesn't seem mentally healthy and uh you know I think it's much better for you to sort of enjoy this time with everyone else and you know it's just like watering down raw ambition and you know is it ludicrous who said get out the way you know get out of the way of these people these people want to invest and blow your socks off and just do amazing things and there's some administrator or nanny or nurse ratchet who's like well that would be arrogant we can't have that and you're saying I don't think you understand it but ambition is a necessary input for certain humans and if you sit there and say why do you have a right to innovate when nobody else is innovated or uh don't you realize that your go-getter personality during the covid situation was based on your privilege and uh in fact a lot of other people are suffering from mental health he's just thinking why am I taking the most promising people and tying them to the most damaged people why not instead take the most promising people and have them get a PhD by the age of 2021 and study what to do for their for their fellow Souls who are struggling do you remember when Elon took over Twitter and he started to rip out the tech team yeah and he said I want to make Twitter a place where the people who want to work the hardest on the biggest problems can come and work and people said they looked at that and said this is going back to an archaic form of Silicon Valley where people are forced to sleep under desks and it's a blah blah blah those people do not have theory of mind to understand what it's like to be someone is driven as it takes to look at that from Elon not as modern day slavery it can be modern day slavery or it could be the person saying for God's sakes I'm burning to solve this problem let me sleep under my desk unhook unhook the leash and let me go at this and there is a there is a cohort of people out there for whom that's their calling they didn't want to work at Twitter if they got Frappuccinos and mindful Monday afternoons off and to be able to play ping pong for half the week and do whatever it was that was going on they want to go and they want to feel like they're contributing to an astronomically sized goal an unreasonable goal and they want to feel the the rush of of going toward it and I think you're right I think that there is a dampening of ambition and since being in America since moving to America 18 months ago it's the fuel that I've had from the enthusiasm from the people I've been around has fueled me and powered me in a way that I I didn't I wasn't it was alien 33 years old and I'd never felt it before I wanna look there's so much to do and it requires ambitious people and those people have to be both arrogant and humble it's a complicated thing it involves mentorship it's I want to say also something about elitism elitism is incredibly unfair you know I I've hung out with Stanley Jordan and I am never going to play any instrument the way Stanley Jordan plays the guitar he's an elite object I am not going to be that guy you have to learn how to let Elite people do Elite things that where you can't compete with them I don't know what to do about this the idea that we're turning against the concept of elite because we've got this sort of pretend Elite that sits in these chairs that screws everything up and you've got all of these ambitious people who are being destroyed by enforced helplessness you know how do we get how do we fire the administrators necessary to return universities to being universities how do we explain that some people are built to fly wingsuits you know it's a super dangerous activity but somebody needs that Russia they're not alive you know people need danger they need risk they need to be able to create and they don't need you in their in their way all the time I I guess I just I have this very strong sense that school has become the most dangerous place that that we're pushing so many people through school and school is basically it's destroying vitality by the time you get through this education that is so Laden with administrators and people telling you things that are wrong like I don't know how to say this but when when a friend of mine gets a call as a chaired professor in a technical discipline from a Dean who says we have a little bit of a problem with some of your current tweets what did I say so it's not what you said but it's that you liked somebody else's tweets and you're thinking I don't care who you are you'd never talk to a professor like that you you cannot have these people we need the University of Chicago to spread its middle finger across the country and get rid of these people you can't talk to them that they're a plague from Hell on thought you can't tax all thought by making it nice and and you know something I I really don't know how to communicate but I saw you got Sam Harris in a certain amount of trouble so maybe I'll buy a little bit of trouble for myself you can't have terrible ideas circulating everywhere leading to pogroms and riots and killings and I was just in Istanbul one of maybe my favorite city on earth and I was reminded of the Turkish Crystal knock that happened in the baolu karakoi area of Istanbul where there was a rumor about the desecration I think of the birthplace of Ataturk and people died as a result you know and and ethnic minorities could not be protected you cannot allow free speech to circulate every dumb idea infinitely until people are killed in in pilgrims or Holocaust or whatever so you do you've got two options you either constrain speech by rules or by culture and this is the reason that I was so against Milo yiannopoulos you want a culture in which everyone is allowed to burn the flag and it doesn't even occur to you that that's something you would want to do that's culture you've got to load the the inhibiting factor on culture and people say well that's what cancellation is about it's like well but if you misuse the concept of shunning let's call it by something older than cancellation if you shun people for good questions if you shun people for speaking truthfully indecently as if they had done something horrible then you lose the ability to control bad behavior through social norms and one of the things that I've now come to understand is we are either going to restore a culture which shuns only when shunning is really the correct course of action or we are going to have rules that prohibit what you can and cannot say and I am absolute in that we should not have rules we've got to put this on culture and we've got to get a culture in which in general you are very careful about the negative things that you say and one of the things that Milo did that I really disliked was he said well the purpose of free speech is to protect outrageous speech and the answer is not really yes I if I'm forced to stand up for your right to say horrible things I can do that if the culture generally retards horrible things but if the culture now starts to encourage it we can't have terrible ideas being the precursor of communal violence let's say and we really shouldn't be having rules determine what we can and can't say it should be that when somebody starts to say something that is the beginning of an incitement to Madness that the cultural prohibition against that is very strong in my recent travels I've been shocked I've been in Bombay I've been in Istanbul I've been in Lisbon Porto in the islands of the Azores none of these cities has fallen as far as San Francisco and Bombay is madness but it's not we don't have a homelessness problem in San Francisco we have a zombie apocalypse problem we have a dysfunctional government problem when you can't say we cannot have this in Union Square we just can't we cannot have a zombie apocalypse in Union Square when that becomes controversial in and of itself you've lost the plot and partially what's happened is that we've given up on high trust societies where we more or less share each other's values that's the concept of the loyal opposition we both know what the goal is you have an idea of how to get there I have a different idea I agree that we're going to have a contest and one of us will win and one of us will be grudgingly go along with the other person's idea when when your idea about what a just Society is well let's vindictively punish successful people let's pretend that male and female have no difference or all the difference According to some set of rules on Alternate Tuesdays let's decide that um we can redefine what a recession is or the Consumer Price Index let's decide that we don't need masses yes we do no we don't yes we do because of the science science can somebody get rid of these people we need to be in a society that makes some semblance of sense and we cannot go in these opposite directions as far as I'm concerned when you say we don't want no more police you and I cannot be the loyal opposition to each other you're not you're not the kind of a person I even understand somehow that idea got into your head and it made sense to you and it's now carrying the day I have always supported some amount of reasonable gun control I changed on a dime with that abolished the police we don't want no more police to fund the police are you telling me that people are not going to be allowed to own a weapon and you're going to get rid of the thing that was supposed to centralize the violence on behalf of the state and make it follow rules there's no coming back from that and I think that one of the things that we just have to learn is that many of the voices that we've been listening to because they got jobs in our organs whether it was the New Yorker or the Washington Post or a professorship at Duke we have to stop listening to these people wholesale we have to stop being tolerant of the intolerant if you come from a position that is sufficiently Extreme and your whole point is to try to use and weaponize democracy to weaponize free speech to weaponize good faith to weaponize what it means to hold a debate you need to not really have a voice at the table because we don't have a solution if you say that I am entitled to sit at this table as a member of the suicide bombing Community strapped with a vest filled with high explosives the presence of C4 in your vest invalidates you being at that table that's trying to come up with a solution if you say fundamentally I don't believe that we should be having children because humans are evil and we need to bring this all to a to a close it's very important that you not be on the city council because that city is a thing that is a generational endowment when you hand it to the next Generation eventually you don't live there anymore we are somehow seating people who are so nihilistic and so freakishly divorced from anything that we should be able to assume as a default like certain positions that probably had 10 adherents appear to have millions of adherents and if we don't get rid of these self-extinguishing theories we are going to self-extinguish so I I believe that Civil Society has an obligation stop listening to positions that are avowidly self-extinguishing Eric Weinstein ladies and gentlemen Eric I really appreciate you what's next what can people expect from you have you got anything interesting coming up um more than anything remember that the whole point is when you see a person with a shirt that says there is no Planet B look at the night sky and remember that the only way to get to planet B is to change what we understand about physics and so look for me on that front thank you cheers mate thanks be well thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Eric you will love this one with Jordan Peterson go on press it

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 3,016,379

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, Chris Williamson modern wisdom, modern wisdom podcast, chriswillx, Chris Williamson Modern Wisdom Podcast, eric weinstein, eric weinstein chris williamson, eric weinstein modern wisdom, eric weinstein interview, eric weinstein on, Why Can No One Agree On The Truth Anymore?, eric weinstein joe rogan, eric weinstein on academia, eric weinstein reacts, eric weinstein sam harris, sam harris eric weinstein, eric weinstein idw, weinstein eric

Id: LJxBnSyH0T4

Length: 193min 36sec (11616 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023