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July 22, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:45
Eric Weinstein | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 11
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- Bad diversity is where you have two people who grow up in countries that drive on opposite sides of the road, and you decide that everybody's entitled to drive on the side of the road that they grew up of and feel comfortable with, and all you get is auto accidents. - So we are here and all you get is auto accidents. - So we are here with intellectual dark web impresario, We're going to get started talking to him in just a minute.
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Okay, Eric Weinstein, thank you so much for joining me here on the Sunday special.
For those who don't know, Eric Weinstein is a Harvard-trained PhD in mathematics who somehow found himself as the creator of the intellectual dark web, which you've read about in the pages of the New York Times amidst photos of people like Eric standing in the trees with Sam Harris and Joe Rogan standing among the cacti.
So, Eric, First of all, welcome.
Thanks for coming.
Thanks for having me.
And second of all, how did you, who started off and still work in the world of physics and mathematics, end up creating at least the name for the intellectual dark web?
You did it, I know, we were on stage together when it happened.
So what's the backstory here?
Well, I think it's actually sort of an interesting one.
I have been tracking various political and social issues since the 1980s and have inserted myself or fought through a number of topics including high-skilled immigration, mortgage-backed securities, And various issues having to do with my concerns over the loss of objectivity in the major press organs.
So in some ways this is not my first rodeo.
There have been a few before.
And what's been really interesting for me is that this is the first one where I've had great company.
So a lot of these previous iterations Have been really one or two people like Nassim Taleb was a co-fighter in the mortgage-backed security question and a guy named Norm Matloff was one of the few people who was really a critic of high-skilled immigration from an intelligent position.
So what's really interesting about this is that this is the first time that there's a large number of interesting voices with a few new technologies and wrinkles to explore.
And I think the best thing I could think to do with so many independent voices was to try to use language to identify what was already occurring And have the language sort of help people see what was already happening and that would allow us to direct this a little bit for more powerful aims.
What do you think has changed?
I mean, what sort of brought all of this together?
Because obviously it's a pretty politically disparate group.
You're on the political left.
You voted Democrat, I believe, virtually all the time, no?
I don't think I've ever voted Democrat.
Oh, you've never?
Okay, so you're on the left.
And, you know, obviously your brother Brett, who's a member of the IDW in good standing, he also is on the left.
People like Sam Harris are on the left.
And then I may be the only overt conservative in the group, actually.
It's been actually perceived as this wild right-wing group.
And as far as I know, I'm the only registered Republican in the group.
So far as I know, and I think that has to do with the fact that something very peculiar happened on the left.
And so in many ways, this is a response from an older left to what is viewed as almost certainly a very brief, very intense, and very crazy bout of bad judgment, I would say, from the American left.
It's not that these strains haven't been present before, but what's really new to me Is the idea that this new sort of woke network, which practices something which I've called left-cartheism, has invaded the major organs of civil society.
And the most important examples of this, I would say, first and foremost, is not the universities, but the major media companies that form our sense-making network, so news bureaus, let's say.
The next thing that's infected, in my opinion, is the tech companies that are public-facing, which are under constant pressure to show that they are sufficiently in line with what are called progressive values, but I think most of us with a longer timeline would say are very regressive values.
And the intelligence community, which You know, Scares Me No End almost certainly has a relationship with these tech companies, given that we deposit all our secrets into our Gmail accounts and our browsing histories, as you were just talking about in your latest plug.
You know, all of these things come together in what I call TIM, technology, intelligence, and media.
Universities are certainly a serious problem, but I think the most important problem is that we can't trust our sense-making organs.
Because, you know, as we just, I tweeted out today, the New Yorker, you know, ran a tweet saying, conservative orators like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Richard Spencer, and then dot, dot, dot.
And I thought, wow.
I mean, you just put Ben Shapiro next to Richard Spencer as if none of us are going to notice what you just did.
This has gotten really dirty, really negative, and conservatives have complained about excesses on the left.
for a long time, and I think that's been fair.
But I also think that there have been a lot of excesses on the right.
What we're seeing is something really, really new.
The new left is much more dangerous.
And I think those of us on the old left who weren't happy with some of these strains before take it upon ourselves to say, how do we clean this up?
This is, in some sense, our problem.
And, you know, that was not fair to do to you.
So if the New Yorker's not going to apologize to you, uh, I prefer not to apologize.
I'm just going to fight back because it's just not right.
Well, you didn't do it, so you shouldn't apologize, obviously.
But let's talk about how you fixed these particular institutions and what is the exact problem with the institutions.
So, there have been a couple of solutions proposed with regard to the media from the right.
One is the sort of restoration of the idea that there is an objective journalism to be found and that everybody should go back to this aspirational idea that supposedly existed before where there were the facts Checkers and the people who reported the facts and then there were the opinion makers and there were two separate groups of people.
And then there are folks like me who tend toward a sort of legal realist perspective when it comes to media, which is all these folks have their political point of view.
We know they'll have their political point of view.
Why don't they just be honest about their political point of view?
I run a right wing website.
The Huffington Post is a left-wing website.
I have less of a problem with MSNBC than I do with CNN for exactly this reason, because MSNBC is clear about its biases.
How do you think this gets solved?
Is it people being upfront about their own biases or attempting to remove their own biases in doing the reporting?
Is that even possible?
I think both of those techniques can work just fine.
So, you know, Gonzo was the idea that if we just open what it is that we're thinking and doing, we insert ourselves into the story, that that allows the consumer to unspin whatever it is that they're doing.
Or you can have warring, you know, a left-wing media and a right-wing media.
That's not what the problem is at the moment.
I think that the problem is that a lot of this stuff is just actually disingenuous.
People know that you are not a Nazi, and they know that Richard Spencer is very close to being one.
That he's really flirting with stuff that's absolutely dangerous and crazy.
And they don't care.
The key point is, as somebody said to me recently, progress is messy.
And the idea is that if certain lives have to get ruined on the way towards some imagined egalitarian society, then that's just too damn bad.
That's terrifying.
Well, literally the language of Stalinism.
I mean, that is breaking the eggs to make the omelette.
That is legitimately the quotes being used by people who are Stalinists.
Yes, and sometimes certain bad things have to happen, but we're talking about the actual destruction of interesting and important lives.
Because the people who see this collectively view this as a hive.
If a few bees in a hive die, it's not like the hive actually collapses.
So because of the collectivist framework, they actually don't see damages to individual lives as particularly worthy of empathy.
So what is going on, I think, is very important.
You know, you bring up two models.
You can either try for objectivity or you can be honest about your biases.
Both of those are much more similar to each other than this other thing is, which is we know what the right answer is for society and it doesn't really matter how we get there.
So what we're going to do is we're going to propose ideas that are, in an analogy, they're almost like suicide ideas.
They're ideas that are simply meant to be highly destructive.
So if I say to you, well, clearly a white man can't understand anything, then what I've just done is I've taken two of your attributes and I've shut you up or forced you to deal with this completely irrelevant argument for the next 90 minutes.
So this style of argumentation is something that actually has to be excluded.
If you want a diversity of opinion, of opinions that actually matter, it's very important not to seat people who think in these terms at the table.
And this is what we talked about, I think, maybe on the Rubin Report, or maybe it was just before you got there, there's good diversity and there's bad diversity.
And so what I analogized is Good diversity is when you have people who are of good character trying to puzzle through something, fighting very hard for their perspective.
Bad diversity is where you have two people who grow up in countries that drive on opposite sides of the road, and you decide that everybody's entitled to drive on the side of the road that they grew up on and feel comfortable with, and all you get is auto accidents.
And so it's very important to drive bad diversity out of the system because otherwise you never get to experience the benefits of the highly multicultural and interesting diverse society that we managed to build for ourselves.
So you've spent an awful lot of time in the tech community also.
So you mentioned three specific areas.
You mentioned media and technology in the intelligence community.
I want to go through each one of those.
So tech, you've spent a lot of time in because you work closely with Peter Thiel, who obviously is deeply involved in everything Silicon Valley has to offer.
I've been complaining for a long time about the inherent biases of places like Facebook and YouTube, and it's pretty obvious to folks, including Dave Rubin, that YouTube has a biased algorithm that demonetizes particular points of view.
Facebook has, on occasion, really punished people on the right for, I believe, political reasons.
Is there anything that can be done about this in any real sense, or are we just at the whims of what are essentially monopolies?
I mean, Facebook has the closest thing to a monopoly that I've seen in modern American life.
And I'm not an antitrust guy by nature, but the fact is there's no competing service that even comes close to the sort of control that Facebook has over social media.
And people have spent millions of dollars promoting material on Facebook to have Facebook gobble that up and then turn back an algorithm that is dishonest and disingenuous in many cases.
Is that something that can be dealt with or is the only answer regulation or the building of alternative methods of distribution?
Yeah, I think that this is a really interesting and difficult problem.
I believe that there's actually a set of new problems that came about from the fact that this technology, giving everybody the power of their own newspaper, let's say, to publish their own newspaper, is a new feature of the world.
It's not clear to me that free speech can just go on as before because of how big of a shift this particular new idea is.
You know, if I get a hold of some very dangerous secrets, before anybody knows it, I can have published it on Instagram or Facebook or who knows what.
So I think that there are actually a new suite of problems that are probably going to have to change jurisprudence if we're going to keep the spirit of the Constitution alive.
And I don't know what that's going to be, but I think that that's going to be a change.
When these companies found that they had these problems, that people didn't want to be on the networks because everything was so unpleasant when everyone was getting all information all the time, I think that they tried to get community policing, whoever the people were, complaining the loudest.
If you were complaining loudly, you might become a Truth and Safety Commission member.
And so, effectively, all of the most noisy, most upsettable folks ended up in these positions of some power and influence.
And a lot of the suggestions that they've made have been lousy to people who have a very strongly rational Perspective, nobody's perfectly rational, but the idea being that lots of things that we talk about that should be discussable by adults in an adult fashion, you know, if let's say my brother mentions genotype and phenotype as a biologist and someone has a freak out session because they think that that's evidence of his bigotry, That person who's freaking out needs to be down-regulated and not listened to.
So it's very important that we not overvalue the loudest and shrillest voices.
But the tech companies, I don't think, figured out how to do that.
Furthermore, I think that what I don't understand is the extent to which what I call the gated institutional narrative, or JIN, Dependent upon there being very few outlets to check or challenge what the major thematic narratives would be.
And I think that there's a real difficulty with people who came up in the previous world before the internet and before social media trying to figure out how to exert enough party-level discipline in order to have these sort of long narratives that we remember from the era of Walter Cronkite and Eric Severod.
And that's gone away.
It's never coming back unless somebody does something drastic.
So I think it's very important to understand there were some problems, and we haven't had good solutions.
But what is terrifying me is that I don't know what part of this might be directed and what part of this is emergent.
I don't know if there have always been people behind the scenes looking to manipulate the media.
And what I don't know is if those hands are currently using the power of these algorithms in a way that has nothing to do with providing a more engaging and pleasant product.
So it's necessary, and almost certainly, we need control over the algorithms.
I need to be able to experiment and flick a switch and say, I want to see things in the order that they were published.
I want to see things without you prioritizing this or up-regulating and down-regulating that.
Give me the toggle switches and the control so that fundamentally I can catch you if I see that you are politically manipulating.
So for example on Twitter I never know which of these accounts are authentic.
If I tweet something and 20 accounts have very similar statements like ha ha ha what an idiot.
OK.
That's going to make me feel a particular way.
What if those accounts are all owned by one person and then they're programmed to do that.
We don't know which percentage of this is authentic.
So in a second, I'm going to ask about the intelligence community.
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Okay, so now let's talk about the third leg of the stool that you're having problems with here, and that is the intelligence community.
So obviously, President Trump has been incredibly critical of the intelligence community.
I think some of that is disingenuous.
I think that the president doesn't like when the intelligence community comes up with answers he doesn't like.
He doesn't have sort of a natural civil libertarian objection to the intelligence community.
What is your chief objection to the intelligence community?
And how do we draw the balance between an intelligence community that does what it needs to to protect us from terrorist attack and an intelligence community that is gathering up every bit of data that it can, possibly for use against undesirable people or for targeting of particular viewpoints?
So I think it has to do with how much history you're aware of.
And in particular, one of the most disturbing things about our intelligence community is what we found out in the mid-70s from the Church and Pike Commissions, when we really thoroughly investigated what was going on, not only in the FBI, but in particular in the division known as COINTELPRO.
And one of the things that I point people to so that they understand just how bad the situation can get is the situation in which Jean Seberg, one of Hollywood's leading actresses, was destroyed by misinformation taken from the FBI and placed in the Los Angeles Times by a woman named Joyce Haber, later repeated by Newsweek, suggesting that she had cuckolded her white husband with a Black Panther's child.
She then, under stress, miscarried, had an open casket press conference displaying a dead white fetus, and went crazy, eventually killing herself after attempting to do so on every anniversary of her child's death.
This is the way in which the U.S.
has previously played.
This is not a conjecture.
It's not speculation.
This is proven fact.
Just as we experimented with the idea of getting La Cosa Nostra to kill Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King's right hand man, the letter from Sullivan trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself by his own hand, and we actually assassinated Fred Hampton in his bed in Chicago.
So if you have a left of center perspective, You're very well aware that the intelligence community has previously been out of control.
Now, I have no reason to think that it is out of control at the same level now.
I don't know if there's an analog of Operation Mockingbird, but the idea that we should simply trust our intelligence community when we have not publicly vigorously investigated it for many years in a new era in which it's possible to hoover up all sorts of data from our simply our daily Given that all of us carry tracking devices, microphones and video cameras at all times.
This is patently insane and we need a new level of oversight so that we can trust our intelligence community with our secrets.
What concerns me is that I don't know who to trust at base.
I don't know if we can trust the intelligence community.
Maybe we can.
Maybe they're doing an absolutely brilliant job without infringing on our rights.
Or maybe they're out of control.
What is it that we are going to do in the modern era with all of this extra sensor data to make sure that we are not being tracked completely?
How did, so I started off by asking you, you know, you start off as a guy doing mathematics at Harvard.
How did you go from there to politics?
How did you get into this world?
Like, what's your personal story?
First of all, how'd you get into math?
Tell me kind of how you got here.
Well, so you have a path to God through the synagogue.
My family, while Jewish, was always committedly atheist.
And I figured if I was ever going to figure out what the universe was, probably reading differential geometry rather than Hebrew was the way to find God in his original language.
So I thought I would try to figure out how physics unifies.
And in the process of that, I responded to a call from the scientific community That said that we were gonna have a massive shortage of scientists and engineers back in the nineteen eighties and that the job prospects were gonna be limitless and very well remunerated.
What happened in fact is that we had a disaster and in trying to figure out why the golden era immediately disappeared in the early nineteen nineties.
I discovered that there had been a conspiracy in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Policy Research and Analysis Division, and the Government-University Industry Research Roundtable, all outside of the National Academy Complex and the National Science Board.
What shocked me was that they were, in fact, trying to figure out how to avoid letting the free market determine the salaries of scientists and engineers and letting them rise to bring the needed Americans into the STEM sector.
And so when I was the person who discovered a secret study from 1986 studying how to, in fact, lower the wages of Americans by flooding the market with foreign scientists and engineers, I couldn't believe it.
I had always thought that immigration was basically a pure positive.
I was excited, as all of us are, that we live in such a vibrant nation of immigrants.
And then to find out that the very people who are supposed to be guarding the national science endeavor We're the ones who are stabbing in the back.
It was like finding an Agatha Christie, whodunit, where it was murder on the Orient Express and everyone had a hand in pushing the knife in.
So that broke trust to such a remarkable extent that I ended up testifying in front of, or presenting in front of the National Academy of Sciences four separate times.
And I watched as the news media refused to cover the story, effectively everybody buried it, and then I realized, my gosh, we're not living in the free society that I thought.
Because the story went counter-narrative, because in my sector of the world, all of us were pro-immigrant, and this indicated that immigrants weren't the problem, but that the visas were being used to flood the market.
Because this was a story of betrayal by the government against the workers because the claim was that Americans couldn't do science and engineering when I think we are absolutely one of the very best systems for educating people in science and engineering.
The whole thing was topsy-turvy.
And I think that that institutional betrayal was the thing that hooked me on the idea that I didn't know how deep the rabbit hole went.
So when it comes to that issue, so let's talk about high-skilled immigration for a second, because we may have a difference of opinion on this.
I've always been an advocate for high-skilled immigration.
You obviously oppose high-skilled immigration, at least in certain sectors.
What is the downside of high-skilled immigration?
Is it just the people are being promised jobs that aren't materializing in the United States, or is there a net detriment to the United States with people bringing in high-skilled immigrants to fill jobs in sectors where they want to lower the price?
I mean, first of all, I don't even know where to begin.
A certain amount of high-skilled immigration has always been present, and we do benefit from getting the absolute top talent in the world, but that's not really what we're looking at.
What we're looking at is a bunch of systems that depress the markets so that we lose top talent that doesn't choose to go into science and engineering, but goes into investment banking or management consulting or some other sector because these salaries are so low.
It means that a lot of our Technical edge, which we use to power our own economy and our own defense structure finds its way to the four or five countries in Asia which supply us with most of the cryptic labor that we call graduate study but is in fact a labor market to staff the labs.
You can even, most people have never even done the thought experiment, Imagine that, let's say, Leibniz lives in Germany, Newton and Clark live in the UK, and Newton is better than Leibniz, but you open one border and not the other, and Germany pays better.
Well, then Newton displaces Leibniz.
Clark takes the space that would have been left for Newton, and you get Clark in the UK and Newton in Germany rather than Newton in the UK and Leibniz in Germany.
So you get an inferior outcome.
So I think people haven't really thought through this idea.
They have an intuitive sense of, wow, we're getting an incredible bargain.
We're getting the best minds in the world.
What could possibly be going wrong?
The last thing I'm going to say is that I think we do a better job with our crazy heterogeneous educational system raising irreverent scientists.
And I think the biggest discoveries, the ones that really move the needle, are done by people who are incredibly irreverent and very disagreeable.
And that's what our system excels at.
If you get a Richard Feynman, he's dangerous, he's like an outside cat, you can't bring him inside.
But the fact is, what we're getting is we're getting client labor.
People who don't really rock the boat, who are extremely regular, rather than people who are confident, who know that their careers are assured, and who can flip the middle finger to anybody who gets in their way while they're exploring ideas.
So it sounds a lot like, if you take all the elements that we've been talking about so far, it sounds a lot like you understand why Trump came to the fore.
Because we've now been talking about high-skilled immigration and its downsides.
We've been talking about distrust of the media and distrust of the tech companies and distrust of the intelligence community.
And President Trump embodies a lot of these particular elements.
So what do you make of the Trump phenomenon?
Is it pure reaction to these things?
Does he have a point on some of these elements?
Or are we watching just essentially the country go mad on all sides?
What do you make of the Trump phenomenon?
Well this comes full circle.
I think that the problem was is that we didn't have something like the IDW before this.
So the first person to break through and say look the institutions are out of control in a way that could actually gain power was Trump.
And so as a result we associate this kind of high level of skepticism with Trump rather than with the people who might be doing it from a completely responsible and analytically sound perspective.
So if I take three issues, you can take three issues where we have what I call the checksum theory of politics.
If I can see that you're lying without doing any work, I lose trust very quickly.
Those three issues are as follows.
First question, do you believe that trade is a rising tide that raises all boats?
It clearly is not.
That doesn't mean it doesn't provide a net benefit, but it certainly is not the case That nobody gets hurt and everybody's made better off.
The representations on trade made by economists were patently false, and as Paul Krugman has said, it's basically a scam by the elites.
Second one would be immigration.
If you believe that fundamentally immigrants are simply the best of us, they work harder, they're smarter, they have all these positive traits and they cause no problem and no disruption, that is patently absurd.
It doesn't mean that immigration isn't good, The representation being made is completely childlike.
The last one.
If you claim that there is absolutely no connection between terror and Islam, when you have mass murders and people shouting Allahu Akbar at the end, people know that you're lying.
And this is part of the problem.
It may be very noble, To protect our Muslim community by pointing out that the problem isn't Muslims and I will say the problem is not Muslims, but the problem is connected to Islam in a way that it's not connected to any other group at the moment.
The only two other groups that have practiced suicide bombing in the modern era have been the Tamils in Sri Lanka, I think, and the Kurds in Turkey, if I'm not mistaken.
I could be wrong.
So, in these situations, the population can clearly see that the news media, the political parties, are not representing things accurately.
And I think that made people crazy.
They want to believe that at least the fictions that they're being fed are adult level and that they suggest that whatever is being done behind the scenes, even if people can't be straight with the population fully, is still in the best interests of the country.
And so I think Trump was willing to say things in his crass and very direct and brutal fashion that indicated that we felt that we were being betrayed by our institutions.
Well, do we have a problem, though?
You make a claim that all these claims about trade and immigration and terrorism, that they're oversimplified.
And I agree with all of that, obviously.
Trade, I believe, is a net benefit, as you say.
But clearly, there are people who are going to go out of business because of free trade.
I mean, there are certainly towns in the Midwest that have gone completely out of business.
They've gone defunct because of free trade.
And that is one of the costs of free trade that has always existed.
And when it comes to immigration, obviously, certain immigration is good, and not all immigrants are created equal.
They're not all the same in terms of the qualities that they bring to the table or in terms of the culture that they're bringing across our borders.
All of that is true.
And then on the flip, but when you get to the flip side, then there's a similarly simplistic misrepresentation that's being promulgated.
So when it comes to trade, for example, you have people like President Trump saying that trade is not only a – it's not just that it's a net benefit that has downsides.
It is a net loss.
That trade itself – trade wars are easy to win and good.
Or when he says that immigration itself is of no benefit, essentially, that immigration, he wants to curb legal immigration, not just illegal immigration, and he doesn't really want to vet anybody.
He just doesn't want to have a lot of immigrants come into the country.
He's pretty anti-immigration, generally speaking.
Or when he says, with regard to the other issues that you're talking about, when he says with regard to Islam, for example, well, the solution is let's just ban all Muslims from entering the country, as opposed to there are problems within Islam that have to be dealt with within Islam, and we have to vet people coming in with a certain level of strictness, he eventually comes around and we have to vet people coming in with a certain level of That's not the original position that he's espousing.
When you have two blunt instruments slapping each other.
Right.
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So... I'm suddenly totally paranoid about my lapel.
Okay, yeah, your lapels look very nice.
I mean, but I think a no chino would make them look better.
Let's be straight about this.
So with all of this said, the suggestion before the ad was basically that both sides are now slapping each other with these bricks, with these blunt instruments.
Neither is representing the issue fully.
And so you can't have an actual honest debate about these issues without people recognizing the upsides and downsides of these particular policies.
Is there a way forward from that?
Or are we so ensconced in the battle that we're just basically So this is what you and I are engaged in.
This is what's so fascinating.
This is what I got completely wrong.
I thought that when we finally had Trump, that the Democratic Party, who knows what's wrong with all of these perspectives, would cry uncle and say, look, we have to be straight with people because we cannot have Donald Trump in office.
So if they really think that this guy is the second coming of Hitler and that he's the greatest threat to world peace that we've ever seen and he's destroying the country, why not admit that the economists know That it's not a Pareto improvement where everybody gets better off, that it's only Caldor Hicks and that you need to tax some winners to pay some losers, or to do more in terms of relocating people in different sectors of the country when you do have an open trade situation.
Why not instead, when it comes to immigration, be honest with people that fundamentally the big issue is not the tiny efficiency gain, which economists call the Harberger Triangle, but the enormous thing below it called the Borjas Rectangle.
And it's an attempt to use immigrants cynically to transfer wealth from American labor to American capital.
At some level, why not be open about the fact that we actually have a pretty good situation with the Muslims in the U.S., where we don't have a highly radicalized population and that they are in fact helping us in our intelligence work because they speak languages like Pashto and Farsi that we don't speak, but that there is some sort of a problem.
Why is it that when they had the opportunity to take the power away from Trump and say, Okay, we oversimplified it.
We need to be more honest with people so that we don't get this reaction.
I thought that they would take that opportunity.
The fact that they doubled down on this kind of crazy intersectional identity stuff is what's terrifying.
Because it seems to indicate to us that there is no bottom.
There's no way in which things get so bad that we start leveling with people.
And I don't know what to do about that.
I think that's part of why we're in this IDW thing.
Because what we're doing in microcosm is we're saying, look, I also agree that trade can be a good thing.
Maybe you want a little bit more trade than I do.
Maybe you want a little bit more immigration than I do.
I actually published a paper that suggested how to do open immigration Using the securitization of rights to have a true free market so that workers benefit alongside of capital.
There is zero interest in corporate America in that because the interest is in taking something that belongs to labor and handing it to capital.
So my feeling is that if you and I were to model what a debate like that looked like it would look absolutely nothing.
Like, what's going on?
And, you know, this was interesting for me.
When you just went on Bill Maher, after you had been in Dave Rubin's studio with me, what I saw was the level of distortion that happened when you went into a formatted program.
Bill Maher is about the best thing on standard television there is, and there's no way it can compete with this long format discussion where we actually get into things and we don't sit here and just beat our partisan drums.
So even though I've been handed a mug that says, leftist tears, The fact of the matter is that I would much rather have a full-on, drag-em-out discussion about trade, immigration, and terror with an honest conservative than somebody trying to win an election inside of the DNC.
Which is why I think that you're more of a liberal than you are a leftist.
And I don't mean liberal in the sense that Dave Rubin means liberal.
As in classical liberal, I mean that there are people who disagree with me on economics but agree with me that we have to actually have honest conversations about this stuff.
Rather than trying to shut this down.
That's why when we actually looked at making these tumblers, the original suggestion was liberal tiers.
And I said, I don't want liberal tiers, I want leftist tiers.
Well, this is why I see you as a conservative and not as a right wing.
I appreciate it.
So let's talk about your proposal for sort of fixing capitalism.
So I obviously am a very laissez-faire, free market oriented guy.
You have proposed something called anthropic capitalism.
So what exactly does that term mean?
And what does that mean in material terms, in terms of policy?
Well, the short answer is that we don't know and that we better come up with an answer quickly.
What if capitalism was a pretty terrific solution for the 19th and 20th centuries, but that in the era of, let's say, machine learning and robots and world labor markets, that if you actually just let the machine run, it doesn't deliver enough stability in the In fact, jobs may go away because while opportunity may be plentiful, stable, repetitive activity that's lucrative may be, in fact, quite scarce.
It's not at all clear to me that if you let the wheels of capitalism run in the current era, that markets will clear in a way that we're happy with the way in which our resources are distributed.
Many people may become very disenchanted.
And these are souls that need purpose, they need sustenance, and they need activity with dignity that the market may have provided very well in the past.
So we're not going to disagree with you about the past.
What I'm worried about is the future.
I think this is one of these paradoxes where conservatives tend to be very right about the past, And progressives, if they are right, tend to be right about the fact that things may need to be very different on a going forward basis.
Well, it'll be interesting to see as far as, I mean, there are people on the right, including Charles Murray and Milton Friedman, who've proposed some form of universal basic income as a solution to the rise of artificial intelligence and the fact that you are having a lower skilled population that is just not going to be able to compete in this market where machines take over all the truck driving, for example, and all of the repetitive labor has been taken over by...
That's true too, although I think that diagnosis seems to be better, at least from what I can see, diagnosis seems to be better when it's a combination of machine learning and human input.
What we define as low-skilled is gradually inching upward.
Can change quite a bit.
Right.
Yeah, I think that the fact is that we all acknowledge that it has to be some kind of a hybridized system.
But what I think is also true, and this is good news for you, is that those few people who can actually manage these incredibly complicated enterprises to deliver really profound innovation and growth may need to be freed from burdensome regulation that's completely inappropriate to is that those few people who can actually manage these incredibly complicated enterprises to deliver really
At the same time, if those windfalls occur, we may need radical ways of redistributing some of that if, in fact, jobs are affected in some new way where instead of machines having traditionally chased us from repetitive jobs are affected in some new way where instead of machines having traditionally chased us from repetitive behavior of low value to repetitive behavior of higher value, the new paradigm may be that all repetitive behavior is not lucrative and that the reason that the huge windfalls
There'll be an actual IQ hierarchy, essentially.
Well, it's not just IQ hierarchy.
It may be that what's going on is that these are one-off special situations.
So if you, you know, there are always some guys that you know and it's not clear that they have a job, they just sort of meet people and they sign pieces of paper and they make tremendous amounts of money.
What are they doing?
They're opportunistically searching the landscape for things that are not repeatable, but that actually are very well compensated.
Most people are not going to be in a position to do that, and I think it's very important to actually...
Get hyper capitalistic because we have to deregulate certain sectors in order to get the innovation and it's also important to realize that we're gonna have to do something sort of hyper socialistic because of what you were saying and you know if the Milton Friedman's of the world have understood that one of the things that's most meaningful to me about these conversations is if we get hyper specific about what these alterations are.
Then perhaps we can get the conservatives to stop worrying quite so much about the kind of envy-driven desire to tax where we want to punish success because it's not fair that certain people are doing so much better.
And the conservatives can come back and say, you know what, we do have a nation of souls.
And it's not good enough to just say, well, the market meets at harsh justice, so suck it tough.
Well, this is why I think that the idea for a lot of conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, is that there always has to be a balance between liberty and virtue.
That you have to have freedom in the markets, but that can't exist unless you actually have a social fabric that's fostered by, if somebody at my synagogue needs a hand, then that person gets a hand.
And that's always the way that it's been in religious communities particularly.
One of the great tragedies in my view of government growing beyond its boundaries is that people have stopped giving as much.
People have stopped relying on their local community or their family as much.
You see this particularly with social security where people have stopped relying on... The idea was you had a lot of kids because your kids were going to support you when you got old and that your kids knew that going in.
And now it's I'm supporting your mother through social security because she paid 50 bucks in and now she's getting 2,000 bucks a month out.
And so the idea of you saving until you're really old and making plans for that, savings rates have gone down.
People have stopped worrying about it because the government's going to take care of it.
It creates all of these, not only inefficiencies, but perverse incentives that result in a lot of worse outcomes.
But there's another element here that I think is worth discussing, and that is, let's say that one of the things that's happening technologically is we are coming closer and closer to sort of the Star Trek replicator.
Where we've got a machine that just makes anything, right?
Like it's easier to buy cheap things now than it ever has been in human history.
Most people can buy those things in the United States of America.
The number of people who are in extreme poverty by any global standard in the United States is below 2%.
The vast majority of people in the United States by global standards are upper class and above, middle to upper class and above by global standards, not American standards, by global standards.
And so we're reaching the point where prosperity At least in any sort of absolute sense, historically, has grown to magnificent proportions.
I mean, the person who's middle class now is living better than the person who was unbelievably wealthy in 1880, who's still going outside to pee.
By material standards.
By material standards.
But this is the real problem, is that UBI doesn't solve the biggest problem of all, I think.
Which is, you sort of mentioned it, but the need for human fulfillment.
is not going to be filled by a government check or by a redistribution of income.
And people, so far we've filled that for most of human history, we've filled that with work.
But the idea was that we were going to, we don't have a lot to do today, but we have to go and we have to work because otherwise we're going to starve.
And that's what fills our days.
What fills our days is that we go and sure, I'm doing a repetitive task at the factory, but that's what earns me the money so I can come home and take care of my kids and make a better life for them.
And let's expand that slightly to not only include work for money, but also kin work, particularly, which has been the province more of women than of men, which has been a vital part of work, which needs to be recognized often happens off market.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
And one of the things that's happening is in the materialist, almost Marxist perspective of whatever's in your bank account is your measure of value.
And that's why, you know, if you don't have enough in your bank account, then obviously the system has somehow screwed you.
The reality is that We are concerned with these systemic problems, and we should focus on these systemic problems, but the great majority of unhappiness, I think, that's occurring in modern American society, and I think in the West particularly, which is historically prosperous, is a poverty of values, a poverty of meaning, a poverty of purpose, and I'm not sure that that can be filled.
People are trying to fill that with political action.
Instead of trying to look at their own lives and say, what can I do to make myself better?
And if I were on a desert island, what would I do to make myself a better person?
Just me and my family, what would I do?
Other than going and chopping down trees or grabbing a coconut.
We're so focused on either how we rail against the system, which sometimes deserves railing against, but we spend all of our time worrying about how to rail against the system.
And that, I think, makes us susceptible to politicians who lie to us about these very simplistic situations.
Well, I agree with that, Ben.
But I also think that one of the things that we have to do a better job on is just as I have to defend, coming from a left of center perspective, the right of people who have contributed extraordinary levels to all of us to retain extraordinary reward.
I think it's hyper-important for the right to acknowledge that a lot of the reward that has occurred has come from nonproductive activities through rent-seeking.
So, if some meeting takes place in an investment bank, which allows them to privatize gains and socialize whatever security is necessary to keep those banks afloat, and I wasn't party to that, that's going to make me livid and furious when it reorders the social order.
No, we fully agree on this.
This is why we have to model this.
Well, the Tea Party and Occupy were on the same side of this particular battle.
Our problem with Occupy... I was a Tea Partier.
Our problem with Occupy was not their argument that the big banks were in bed with the government.
It's, why are you protesting at the big banks?
Go protest at the government.
Right?
The big banks are not elected.
At least the people in the government are elected.
You want to shatter that paradigm, you're actually going to have to go after elected officials, as opposed to yelling at bankers who don't give a crap as they drive away in their Mercedes.
Yeah, I'm actually more upset about the people who, both left and right, refused to talk about the problem of rent-seeking.
So I believe there was a speech that Hillary Clinton gave at some point, if I'm not mistaken, where she said, come on, we all created the great financial crisis.
And I thought, no, we really didn't all create the great financial crisis.
And whether that is the heads of investment banks or politicians or the rating agencies, whatever it is, we did not return costs in an appropriate fashion.
And that is the problem why there is such a loss of trust.
When we have the Savings and Loan Scandal, when you have situations where people go to jail, when people do jail time for bad deeds, You have a public trust that people can see that the high and mighty can be laid low.
What was astounding, and this is one of the things where I learned to distrust the New York Times, is I appeared in an article called, They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street, which tried to make the case that it was not the investment bankers, but the quants who came from mathematics and physics who caused the crisis.
When from my perspective, we were the guys who tried to sound the alarm and say, hey, the models are out of control and this is nuts and nobody listened to us.
So it's very important to realize that the media gets into the act, the regulators, the ratings agencies, the politicians.
There's this entire industry of people that ordinary Americans do not Understand, cannot fathom, that is allowing rent-seeking to undermine the basis of wealth.
And it's important that wealth be something we can understand.
I always watch Jackie Chan when he does a reel of the stunts in his film that didn't go well and he slides down live electrical wire and breaks through glass and I think There's no way in the world I want to tax this guy at a high level and take his money because I know exactly why he got paid because I would never do anything like that.
I want to be able to point to fortunes and say, I know what this person created and thank you.
It's very important that we restore confidence that rent-seeking is not the primary modality by which wealth is created through transfer.
Alright, so let's talk a little bit about how people find fulfilling lives, because this is one of the other elements of the IDWs.
We all start off talking about these sorts of political issues and how to solve systemic problems, and one of the things that's fun about it is that we discover that we have so much common ground on a lot of these issues.
But some of the most interesting conversations have happened over even deeper issues.
So you and I and Sam Harris were all on stage together in San Francisco and we ended up in a two hour long conversation about everything from free will to morality and values.
And the argument that I've been making is one of the things that's broken in the West is that there is not a common sense of values anymore.
That that has basically been shattered.
That even though Sam and I hold a lot of values in common, the place we get those values is very different.
And I frankly don't understand how Sam gets to his values from his own perspective as basically a materialist neurobiologist.
It doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.
So how do we find that set of common values?
Or should we just stop asking the question?
Basically, should I just be happy that Sam and I agree on this stuff?
And then we sort of let it go at that.
I'm happy to do that, but I'm not sure that...
I think that the reason, in my perspective, that we argue about this stuff is because I think that Sam's perspective on values well, I agree with his values, is unsustainable in the long run.
That it's not sustainable beyond the people who really like Sam and follow Sam, whereas I think that at least trying to appeal to some source of objective morality that's beyond my own reason is replicable and has been replicable throughout human history.
This is an interesting question.
I mostly stayed out of it because I think that the audience probably wanted to see the atheist and the guy in the mask.
Right, some claws go at it, exactly.
But I had a very different take, I think, than both of you.
And I came at it from sort of an evolutionary biology perspective.
From my perspective, the key issue is that Sam begins with some concept which he calls human flourishing, which I don't know is ever fully fleshed out.
And from what I can tell, the great danger with humans is that we can wake up and look at theories of selection and say, oh my gosh, this is the game that brought us here.
And even if evolution is the engine that created us, we don't need to keep playing that game.
So, for example, we don't need to have children because we have birth control.
So even if we want to have sex, we can get involved in And break that linkage.
And these are things that have to do with the way in which the human body is constructed.
We think about proximates and ultimates.
A proximate is thirst, but the ultimate is dehydration.
A proximate is hunger, but the ultimate is lack of nutrition.
So what happens is, is that what happens if the mind suddenly wakes up and decides that it wants to pursue proximate pleasure?
And if you break the body into two kinds of tissue, soma and germ, the germ is your lineage, what contributes to your having children, and that is the thing that is immortal.
But the soma is disposable, and so we're all in danger that the soma that is our mind can wake up and say, hey, I just want to have fun and I want to have pleasure.
I'm going to define human flourishing to be whatever it is that I particularly enjoy.
Now it's not true that every atheist is going to go crazy like this.
Of course not.
Far from it.
But the problem is that it doesn't necessarily scale.
So I'm in the odd position of basically being an atheist who is very sympathetic to religion and who in fact attends services and has a temple.
In large measure because I believe that the brain has a sort of Chomskyian pre-grammar of religion.
And that is that what sustained us was a belief in something longer than our somatic lives.
We all feel that usually in terms of our children, even atheists.
But the key question is, let's imagine that you don't have any children.
Are you going to make investments that are going to benefit future generations if you don't believe that there's anything that happens after you die and there's no purpose and there's no meaning?
So the way in which it comes down for me is that the reason religions out-compete rationality, which is quite surprising if you think about it, is this issue that the religions keep Soma from waking up and redefining human flourishing to be somatic.
And that is probably the thing that I think Sam has not fully addressed.
Now, Sam is unusual because he is the atheist who sees the value in religion clearly and says, I think we can accomplish all that religion does well.
from the perspective of reason.
So it's not that we have to convince him that religions do many things well.
What we have to convince him of is that it may be the case that certain aspects of atheists seeing human flourishing as intergenerational, lineage-level behavior Maybe that doesn't scale and it only scales when you actually believe that there's some meaning and purpose that's larger than yourself.
Obviously I agree with a lot of that and I think that this is the flaw in Sam's reasoning is not his questioning of faith per se it's his faith in reason alone and the idea that by reason alone you can achieve whatever values Sam wants you to achieve and that I find deeply problematic especially because we had 200 years where people were basically trying this and it did not work out particularly
Well, but it may be that, for example, that religion served us better in the past, but that Sam is right about our future, even if we don't have an atheist-scale plan.
I mean, it could be that we could institute rituals that are actually devoid of a belief in the supernatural that take over the Chomskyan pre-grammar.
I'm not saying that that's foreclosed.
It's possible, but it was a giant fail for 200 years, right?
We had a cult of reason in France.
We had essentially a communist ritual system.
And I don't believe the argument that we should treat Russia, Soviet Russia, as a religion and therefore it's not an experiment with the failure of atheism.
I think that there's great danger in religion, there's great danger in an absence of religion, and what's really necessary is to move that conversation In which our values are embedded, even if we're atheistic, because we're benefiting from the fact that we come from a substrate that was a largely Judeo-Christian system.
And I agree with you.
And by the way, I really appreciated your willingness to forego any appeal to Torah or Bible In favor of a really appeal to reason for religion.
And I think that was really interesting.
I mean, there's because otherwise we have no common frame of reference for the conversation.
So I may find that stuff inspiring and meaningful, but Sam clearly doesn't.
So if I'm quoting him from the Bible, who cares?
I mean, he's not going to, he's not going to resonate to that.
And it's not going to be an argument that's, that's necessarily worth winning with his audience because how do I win by citing Leviticus?
Like that's, that's just not a, it's not a winning argument.
Well, particularly Deuteronomy really loses me.
The thing that really gets me about some of the conversations that we're having is that you have a very large number of people in our network, I would say Brett Weinstein, you, me, Jordan, maybe Douglas Murray, who I think are quite sympathetic to religion without making arguments from religion.
I think everybody in the group basically, if they're willing to admit it, I think pretty much everybody who we're talking about is essentially a natural law theologian.
The only question is whether you're cutting God out of the picture or not.
Because Sam is basically making a natural law argument.
He's saying the universe calls us to essentially forward human flourishing, and then I just have a problem with his definitions.
But the problem would be, and I don't want to have to ask you about this on camera, but if I said, how sure are you about the truth of the revelation at Sinai?
I'm not entirely sure that you could give me a basis for that, nor would I want to.
No, I can't give you a rational basis for Revelation and Sinai.
Right.
The best that I can do is sort of Maimonides' explanation, which is that something happened at Sinai and I'm not sure quite what, and people got from that is what he says in Guide for the Perplexed.
And what people got from that is there is a God and there shouldn't be idolatry, which human reason can bring you to.
And then that Moses was a particularly inspired logical figure who was able to access higher modes of thinking and brings the Torah down from Sinai through direct communication with God.
That's essentially Maimonides' argument.
And I'm worried about even that.
So in some sense, if I am feeling sick and I go to the drugstore and I say, don't you guys have a placebo you can give me that can cure my ailment?
If I'm really in on the conceit that I don't have to fully believe something, it's not clear to what effect You know, it may be that you really get the benefit from being certain that there was a revelation at Sinai.
And so the question of self-deception and its efficacy in human flourishing is a very interesting one.
Now this is, and I think this is a key question that's sort of broken out, is you have to believe in the reality of revelation or just the importance of revelation?
And my belief is that you sort of have to believe At minimum, you have to believe in the importance.
If you believe in the reality, so much the better, because then you have it easier.
But believing in the importance is the minimum of understanding the evolution of Western civilization.
I think that's the ante that gets you in.
And then you have a situation in which you probably need a superposition of belief and lack of belief in order to have a decent life.
That's probably always existed, but one of the things that's so odd about this is that it's hard to talk about without destroying the efficacy.
And these sort of questions of self-contemplation when you're trying to solve this ought-from-is problem may have something to do with the limits of discourse.
And I think that this is something that would be much more interesting to model than the usual dorm-level discussions about whether there's a God.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
All of this is really fascinating.
So let's finish up because we're getting close to the end here.
Let's talk for just a second about if you could make three changes to the country, what would those three changes be?
Wow.
Probably.
That's the Barbara Walters, what's your favorite kind of tree question?
That's all right.
Regular investigation of the intelligence community so that if they're in fact doing a fantastic job, we can all rely on them because I think that they provide a vital service and I'm not against them.
We need to pay journalists a great deal more.
I don't know where that money is going to come from.
And then we need to fire them at the drop of a hat when they really break trust by pursuing ideology as part of their psychic payment stream at the expense of truthful and meaningful reporting.
And I think that it's absolutely imperative that the scientific apparatus of the United States be restored through academic freedom so that we can have Crazy dangerous, highly agentic people once again take back the labs and kick out all of the safe and
Ideologically driven alterations so that we can create the new sectors of the economy to get growth back on track.
And this is one of the things that I think Peter Thiel and I share deeply, which is people don't worry enough about what happens in the absence of growth.
And the US absolutely needs, and the world at large, to find non-fossil fuel led technological, broadly distributed, stable growth in order to avert
War and maybe the fourth and most crazy suggestion if you don't mind me sneaking it in is once in a blue moon I think we need to explode an above-ground Nuclear weapon because I'm terrified that what's happened is is that we've all fallen under a spell of magical thinking that it doesn't matter who we elect and it doesn't matter how bad things get that somehow the world is bizarrely stable and safe and it absolutely is not and I think maybe we need to actually
Activate the amygdala and remind everybody with what is hanging in the balance and how unstable this is so we can get on to the business of making a really beautiful planet for generations to come.
Eric Weinstein, thanks so much for stopping by.
It's always great to see you.
It's always fun to talk with my friends and it's cool to have a friend in here.
here.
Eric, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thanks, man.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
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