The Leverage Economy: The 285th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss Epstein, Trump, MAGA, and how we know what we think we know. The actual economy exists, as does the attention economy; now Bret introduces a new term: the leverage economy. This implies that there is a commodity that we cannot see, which can be used to coerce players to act in certain ways. We see evidence of this in academia, in the news, and in politics. Discussion includes data mining, conspiracy, and whether Trump will pick up neocons as he loses some of his base. ***** ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 285, if I'm not mistaken.
285, here we go.
285, it is.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Haing.
Very strange moment here on planet Earth.
I don't know if that extends further into the galaxy, but it's weird and getting weirder.
I mean, I think from our perspective, it's probably always been strange on Mars, Venus, Mercury, the outer planets for sure.
It just gets weirder from our perspective the farther out you go from the conditions in which we evolved.
Yeah, I take that.
This is a rate of change issue, though.
It is the level of weirdness per hour, which as far as I know doesn't change very much on the other planets.
Yeah, no, I think both you and I had a substantial and totally separate interest in Jupiter, for instance, when we were growing up.
And as far as I know, Jupiter, while that massive storm continues to roil, I don't think that there are accelerations in the rate of change on Jupiter.
Maybe I'm wrong.
We'll be corrected if so.
Yeah, total obsession with Jupiter.
In my case, I guess you had a similar phenomenon.
Yeah, I mean, I think you've seen in service of that, in part, the piece of art that my mother and I drew of Jupiter, which was just an excuse to continue thinking about Jupiter sort of endlessly.
It's quite the place.
I wouldn't know.
Well, I think actually probably the reason we were all gaga over Jupiter, all two of us, was that it was very much in the news because of the Voyager space probes, which gave us a close-up look.
And in my case, I was totally obsessed with volcanism on Io, which was not expected.
And as Voyager passed by, Io, one of the Galilean moons, was just erupting enough that there were like multiple eruptions captured, like sticking off the side of the moon.
Anyway, totally fast.
So actually, the rate of change on Io, now, you know, whatever that was, 45, 50 years ago, was accelerating.
Yeah, it's a constant level of dynamism, I would imagine.
Do you think that level of volcanism was happening then and has been happening forever on Io?
I mean, forever is a long time.
But yeah, I don't think that was a special moment.
I mean, unless they were like celebrating the arrival of Voyager, which is so tiny relative, even to the littlest moons that I would have imagined.
No, it was their version of drawing in the sand.
Help me.
Right.
We're down here.
Yeah.
Forget Mars, Elon Musk, whoever you may turn out to be.
They, I promise you, they were not speaking to Elon.
No, they probably weren't.
All right.
Well, so we have some rent to pay.
Yep.
And then we're going to get to an exercise in campfire.
And we are going to try to see if we can't make sense of a lot of things that don't.
I was just taking that away from the Beetle.
I was just like, got all this beautiful stuff.
There's no reason to put random people next door.
Dung Beetle.
A little dung over it.
Yeah.
Why would you, why would you, and you're not first.
And we're not actually going there yet because we have to say a few things about we're going to do a Q ⁇ A this week, which we didn't last week on account of a late start, on account of I crashed myself into concrete.
I'm doing fine, seems.
Still have stitches, but you know, those will dissolve.
And next week, we are actually coming back to you early on Monday.
So we'll be here on Monday next week.
And as always, we appreciate you.
So join us on locals right now where the watch party is happening.
And you can join the chat there.
But for now, as always, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
And our first sponsor this week is brand new to us.
It's Everyday Dose.
Everyday Dose, which comes in packages that look like that, is coffee and more.
This is not a coffee alternative.
It's coffee with functional mushrooms, collagen, and no tropics.
That's how you say it.
I never know how to say it, actually.
I would say nootropics.
It's N-O-O.
Yeah.
More like zo.
No tropics.
I think it's no-tropics.
No tropics.
But is it no tropics?
No, I think it's no-tropics.
It's like zoologist.
Well, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
See, now, and these people, Everyday Dose, whom we really appreciate and appreciate their products, actually gave pronunciation cues on two words that I already knew how to pronounce.
Watch me butcher them now.
Arabica.
Coffee.
Yeah.
And L-theanine.
Theanine?
Theanine.
But did not help with no tropics.
So I'm going to go ahead and say no tropics.
All right.
Ebrididose is coffee and more.
This is not a coffee alternative.
It's coffee with functional mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics added.
See, once more, here's the prop.
It is delicious, as coffee is, if you like that sort of thing, which I do.
And it's got even more goodness in it than coffee already does.
Ebrididose comes in a mild roast and a medium roast.
The mild, which is what I've been showing you here, is light and smooth with a mellow energy and low acidity that is easy on sensitive stomachs.
The medium roast is robust and full-bodied but smooth, providing an extra boost of energy.
Both roasts use 100% Arabica coffee, which is certified to be mold-free.
Actually, surprisingly an issue in coffee that many coffees that are on the market today are actual coffee, unlike the problem with things like honey and maple syrup and olive oil and such, but have often been suffered from mold at some point in the process.
The 100% Arabica coffee that everyday dose uses is certified to be mold-free.
Everyday Dose not only has that delicious Arabica coffee in it, but also contains collagen, L-theanine, and their unique mushroom blend that includes extracts of lion's mane and chaga.
And of course, there are no artificial additives, no GMOs, no herbicides or pesticides, no artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, or sweeteners.
Maybe you love coffee but want something more.
Try Everyday Dose.
You won't get jitters with Everyday Dose, but you will get daily collagen, which is supportive of skin, hair, nails, and joints.
Maybe there are some supplements that you want to take, but you keep forgetting.
With Everyday Dose, you get delicious coffee plus a bunch of other benefits in the form of vitamins and minerals.
And Everyday Dose is offering a fantastic offer to Dark Horse listeners.
Get 45% off your first subscription order of 30 servings of coffee plus mild roast or coffee plus medium roast.
You will also receive a starter kit with over $100 in free gifts, including a rechargeable frother and gunmetal serving spoon by going to everydaydose.com slash darkhorse or entering Dark Horse at checkout.
You'll also get free gifts throughout the year.
That's everydaydose.com slash Darkhorse for 45% off your first order.
Very exciting.
It is.
Yes.
With no jitters.
Exciting without jitters.
Right.
It's, what would you say?
It's a well-regulated excitement.
Sounds much less exciting that way.
All right.
You're into jitters?
We'll just flatten your curve.
No.
Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is our second sponsor this week.
We love these guys so much, and of course, they're olive oils too.
Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious.
It's actually good for your heart, helps prevent Alzheimer's, is high in antioxidants.
The list of health benefits from olive oil goes on and on.
It is a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets, but if you've never had excellent fresh olive oil, you may wonder what all the fuss is about.
Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of T.J. Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Hunter.
What have you called him?
Oh, many things.
All kind.
All intended with kindness.
With ultra-kindness.
I believe olive oil messiah was on the list, so.
Really?
Yes.
Okay.
The oom.
Also known as the olive oil hunter I'm going to stick with, TJ Robinson.
He brings the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient-rich olive oils from harvest to your door.
TJ's farm fresh oils are incredible.
We have received several different varietals now, all with noticeably different flavors, and have used them in all the usual ways.
A light dressing on a capressse salad, marinade for grilled chicken, tossed with carrots and coarse sea salt before roasting.
We've made olive oil cake.
We drizzled steaks with TJ's fresh olive oil before adding a nice dose of salt and letting them sit for several hours before grilling the meat.
I did that with some tri-tips this morning.
They're sitting waiting for us to grill them later tonight.
Yum.
Yep.
I used one of the olive oil varietals to fry onions as a base for a chicken curry soup.
Another varietal to start off a pot of lamb and beef chili.
This week I used it raw along with some amazing Sundry's Fonguous garlic in two different green sauces, a mostly classic Italian pesto.
The mostly classic is just the replacement of walnuts for the usual pine nuts on which we may speak later.
And a Venezuelan green sauce that is rich in cilantro, both of which use a fair bit of olive oil and it's delicious.
I put some olive oil with garlic on some ling cod and grilled it.
That was very good.
Oh, that's what you did to ling cod last night.
That was good.
That was really good stuff.
You will not believe how good this olive oil is and how many uses there are for it.
Olive oil is a succulent, delicious food that, like pretty much all fats, is best when it's fresh.
but most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid.
The solution is to have fresh-pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest, when the olives...
And they've now got amazing vinegars too.
These are just as surprising, fresh, and vibrant as their olive oils with a wide range of flavors and histories.
We add a splash of fresh vinegar to bone broth and to roasted vegetables and so much more.
As an introduction to TJ Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, he will send you a full-size $39 bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils, fresh from the new harvest, for just $1 to help him cover shipping.
And there's no commitment to buy anything now or ever.
Get your free $39 bottle for just $1 shipping and taste the difference freshness makes.
Go to getfreshedhorse.com.
That's getfresheddarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 shipping.
Addictive, I will tell you.
What'd you say?
It's addictive.
It is.
It's so good.
It's just a lot of varietals.
You've just become obsessed.
And I forgot.
I was going to bring, there was one that we opened this week that was so dark green.
Yes, and so aromatic.
And so with each month's shipment so far, I think we've had three, maybe four shipments, each of which have had three varietals in them.
There's a mild, medium, and a bold.
And they really are, not only are the milds from shipment to shipment different from each other, but the mild, medium, and bold are noticeably, I mean, even if you think you don't really have the nose for this, you're not going to notice.
You will.
You'll notice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's enjoyable to taste the differences.
All right.
Our final sponsor this week, Maddie, is one of our longest continuous sponsors, and it is Heather's all-time favorite.
See, at the point that I had swapped Maddie in here for you, where I was alerting you that this is our final sponsor, I figured I ought to swap you in for Maddie.
So I'm just going to go with it.
It's Sundays.
Sundays makes extraordinary dog food.
You love your dog, of course you do, so you want to make them happy and keep them nourished and healthy.
Sundays helps you do all of those things.
Sundays makes dry dog food, but this is not like any dog food you've encountered before.
Standard high-end dry food is fine and dogs like it well enough.
But even our Labrador Maddie, who is a lab and will basically eat anything, discriminates.
She loves the food that Sundays makes.
Seriously loves it.
Sundays is the only human-grade air-dried food on the market.
Air-drying combines the best of cooked and raw approaches.
Air-drying preserves nutrients and taste, just like raw food does.
Better than raw, though, Sundays' unique air-drying process includes a kill step, which kills pathogens.
So unlike raw dog foods, there's no food safety or handling risk with Sundays.
It's also not gross.
It's also not gross, which I believe we will get to here shortly.
But you'd know because you wrote this.
And Sundays has no artificial binders, synthetic additives, or other garbage.
All of Sunday's ingredients are easy to pronounce and healthy for dogs to eat.
It's far better for your dog than standard dry dog food.
And apparently, it's delicious.
I don't need to say apparently.
I know.
Even Fairfax, our epic tabby likes it.
And Brett, that's me, claims it's not bad too.
See, here's the part where you can tell you wrote it.
When we were first introduced to Sundays, Brett tried it for himself.
Made for dogs, tested by cats and husbands.
See, very clear who wrote it.
Sundays is an amazing way to feed your dogs.
There's no fridge, no prep, no cleanup, no wet dog food smells.
See, covered that part.
It's a total pleasure for humans interacting with it, which is a bonus.
In a blind taste test, Sundays outperforms leading competitors 40 to 0.
When we feed Maddie, she bounces and spins and when we feed Maddie her Sundays, she bounces, Leaps and spins in anticipation of a bowl, way more than for her previous food.
Do you want to make your dog happy with her diet and keep her healthy?
Try Sundays.
We've got a special deal for our listeners.
Receive 35% off your first order.
Go to sundaysfordogs.com/slash darkhorse or use the code darkhorse at checkout.
That's S-U-N-D-A-Y-S F-O-R-D-O-G-S dot com forward slash dark horse.
Switch to Sundays and feel good about what you are feeding your dog.
I'll take that.
Okay.
You've done enough damage.
I've done enough damage for one lifetime.
All right.
So we are going to try an exercise in campfire.
And just to bring people up to speed on what that term means for us, we in our book deploy a model of consciousness in which when there are important problems to solve, like your niche has changed, people gather around campfires when the light is failing and they therefore wouldn't be productive out in the world finding resources.
And they plug their minds into each other and pool their cognitive resources, everybody bringing different stuff to the table, in order to bootstrap emergent, superior answers to important questions that they have on their minds.
So the idea here is I have been wrestling.
I've been continually wrestling for many years with, but in recent weeks, been wrestling with the various developments surrounding the Epstein story.
We've talked about it a couple times here on Dark Horse, and I had a glimpse of what I think might be an important insight, but the insight is not well flashed out.
I don't even know that I believe it yet.
And so the thought here is we will sit by our little campfire, and I will try to wrestle it to clarity enough that you can pick up the idea and tell me what I don't get about it, what doesn't compel you, what I haven't seen yet, all of those sorts of things.
Can we first, though, just go back and rest for a moment on this wonderful thing that you just said, which is I have this idea, I want to talk about it.
I don't even know if I believe it yet.
This, I think, is something that is missing from almost all discourse now.
The grace that we need to give to other people when they say things who may be trying things out, who may be experimenting.
But it is harder once you have said something aloud not to believe your own thing.
It is especially hard to start questioning your own thing once the people around you assume that because you said it, you must not only believe it fully, but be willing to defend it against all discourse that comes your way.
And rather, what the act of trying to figure out what is true in the world and what should be right requires is a flexibility, an embrace of uncertainty, and a willingness to sit in the liminal space of maybe this, maybe that.
And it's an art that one has to cultivate because it involves certain counterintuitive steps.
You know, as you see an idea and you think it's good, you sort of want it to be right because you're proud to have thought of it.
And you have to go through some stage where you kind of build up all of the evidence that suggests it's right.
And that's a very natural thing.
And then the ability to step outside of it and look at it and say, well, you know, what would a critic of this idea see that I'm not seeing because I'm excited about the idea?
So that ability to, you know, to debate with yourself is, I think, uniquely human.
Certainly at a conscious level, I would say it's going to turn out to be uniquely human.
I think we can't know, but I think that's likely true, yes.
And the fact that humans can partner with others in the process, right?
I can take on the pro-ideia role, and I can give you the anti-idea role, and we can switch back and forth.
But anyway, it is an important thing to be able to do, and it's something that you have to train yourself to do because once you decide that you really love an idea, going after it as if you really don't like the idea is just not standard.
Well, actually, just one more thing before you actually get to the ideas in question.
We haven't heard this as a political accusation in the last decade or two or even or more.
But do you remember, you will remember, that I think it was John Kerry who was Democratic nominee for president at know exactly which election it was, or he didn't make the nominee.
Gosh, I don't even remember.
He was accused widely of being a flip-flopper.
Yep.
Right.
And maybe that was in 92.
I don't know.
Maybe he was running in the Democratic primary against Clinton.
Apologies.
I did not look this up in advance.
But the thing that I think largely degraded him in the American public's eyes were the accusation that he had changed his mind.
And changed his mind was framed as flip-flop.
And that was somehow anathema.
That what we needed in our leaders, we were led to believe, was someone who knew what was true, knew what was right, had always known that, had never changed his mind.
It was just staunch in keeping the path, keeping the faith, keeping the everything.
And that was insane then.
And yet I don't think, if memory serves, like he had no good thing to say to it.
He was on the back foot from the beginning.
He was in this defensive posture.
And maybe there were some things on which he had changed his mind that in retrospect, maybe he hadn't investigated them sufficiently in the first place.
But we all, and we should hope even more so in our politicians, need to be able to go deeper into things about which we think we are certain and say, oh, wait.
Oh, wait.
Yeah.
Now, in Kerry's case, I have come to understand him as a more villainous figure than I understood him at the time.
And so my guess is that the process of switching sides had very little to do with what he had come to believe.
However, the idea that it was leveled as an accusation, flip-flop, well, change your mind, it's one of these things that the framing is, it predisposes the mind to view things as positively or negatively.
But anyway, we will come back to that because one of the things that's important in this story is President Trump's radical shift of position on Epstein.
And so the question of what the heck is going on that might cause that and what is the shift that is taking place in and around MAGA, what is the meaning of it?
So that's where the idea lives.
Why don't we start with President Trump's Truth Social post, quite remarkable, after the Department of Justice, or was it the FBI, released a statement saying that there was nothing to see with respect to the Epstein case and there would be nothing more coming?
All right, that's a little hard for me to read, but I will try.
Yeah, would you do it?
This is President Trump on Truth Social.
The radical left Democrats have hit pay dirt again.
Just like with the fake and fully discredited Steel dossier, the lying 51 intelligence agents, the laptop from hell, which the Dems swore had come from Russia, no, it came from Hunter Biden's bathroom, and even the Russia-Russia-Russia scam itself, a totally fake and made-up story used in order to hide crooked Hillary Clinton's big loss in the 2016 presidential election, these scams and hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at.
It's all they have.
They are no good at governing, no good at policy, and no good at picking winning candidates.
Also, unlike Republicans, they stick together like glue.
Their new scam is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein hoax, and my past supporters have bought into this bullshit, hook, line, and sinker.
They haven't learned their lesson and probably never will, even after being conned by the lunatic left for eight long years.
Do you want me to stop?
No, keep going.
I've had more success in six months than perhaps any president in our country's history, and all these people want to talk about with strong prodding by the fake news and the success starved Dems is the Jeffrey Epstein hoax.
Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats' work.
Don't even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success because I don't want their support anymore.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Make America great again.
I haven't seen that before.
Yeah.
Okay.
There has never been that.
But that came out in the last couple of days?
Yeah.
A few days ago.
So I don't want to get caught in bubble thinking, but I do think it is important.
Can we put up Bridget Fetisi's tweet?
She tweeted something, and I think it's important, and then we'll proceed from there.
So Bridget Fettesey is a good friend, and she tweeted, everywhere I go in real life, I'm asking Trump voters I know how much they care about Epstein.
And one quote really stood out.
The quote is, people who talk for a living are overestating how much people who don't talk for a living care about this.
And then she says, beware the bubble.
So there is a question about whether or not Trump's reversal of his position, he was elected saying that he would release the Epstein materials.
There is, of course, that's interesting because Trump is famously photographed with Epstein, knew him pretty well.
And so for President Trump to have pursued the release of that information suggested that he was not compromised by whatever his relationship with Epstein had been.
And this reversal is throwing people.
Go ahead.
Well, I have been not on social media.
I have been less linguistic for a while now out of choice.
I just want to be outside in nature, watching, observing.
And so there's a way in which what Bridget says there very much resonates with me.
I am not paying attention to this.
But I feel like there's something in there.
You're bringing it up here for a reason.
I think there's a potential conflation, not necessarily in what she has done, but why it's coming up here, which is that what people care about is one thing.
And what it is that is actually important in underlying how the world is working and what is driving things is something quite different potentially.
And so we can assume, often naively, that what people care about are the right things.
And therefore, what people care about are the important things to be thinking about and talking about if that's what you do for a living.
But that is often going to, those things are often going to be unhooked from one another.
And so the fact that the proposed fact, as indicated by her observation from talking to people, that people who aren't making a living talking about things are not paying attention to this.
They don't care.
Okay.
I believe that.
I feel that myself.
But that is not the same thing as arguing, therefore it doesn't matter.
Right.
And I will say that there are a lot of things for me where I care about them at the level that I know that they are important, but I don't feel particularly well built to think about them.
I'm not insightful about them.
And so I don't spend my time thinking about them.
so there is a question about what it means for people not to care about it.
And, you know, I think a lot of people don't want to think about it because it's How am I going to make sense of it?
It's another thing that confronts me with a Cartesian crisis.
I have no idea what's real.
And even if I did, what then?
Well, it's also repulsive.
It's grotesque and frightening.
And so I have nothing to add on this story.
I don't like thinking about the content of it and it's not productive.
It can cause you to default to something else.
And that's not.
Frankly, that's often a healthy.
I feel like that's a healthy choice for Most people.
Sure, absolutely.
So anyway, I just thought, you know, Bridget's a wonderful person.
She's doing a good faith job, which is trying to figure out how much people actually care about this story.
And she's discovered something that I think just belongs on the map here.
And it may be very much on President Trump's map, right?
If he thinks people don't care about this story as much as I might think they do care about it, then he might make a very different decision in light of whatever we can't see that is going on behind the scenes.
Yeah, although that Truth Social post that I had never seen before that you had me read then of Trump's was in one way just exactly what the man used to sound like, you know, six, eight, ten years ago.
But I'm surprised at the denigration of his own supporters.
Yep, so we will get to that.
Finger in the eye of the people who have supported him, have been lauding his successes.
And, you know, any disagreement is seen as so disrespectful that he doesn't care anymore.
Well, that's not a good way to consider.
It's not a good look.
And many of us think that he has miscalculated in a way that is likely to be disastrous.
But maybe we're wrong and he's right.
Don't know.
Can we put up the Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times?
I got a text this morning that suggested that I was mentioned in the New York Times and I thought I better know what that's about.
You can give me the article, actually.
So the article is by Michelle Goldberg.
Sorry, Deborah Goldberg is another person.
It's too small to read.
I can if you want to read.
You can read it?
Okay, you want to start reading?
So this is today.
Show me the date, Zach, just so I can read the title as well.
This is an opinion.
July 14th, two days ago, Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times.
Trump's fans forgive him everything.
Why not Epstein?
And she begins the piece thus.
Over the past squalid decade, many of us have let go of the hope that Donald Trump could do or say anything to shake the faith of his ardent supporters.
They have been largely unfazed by boasts of sexual assault and porn star payoffs, an attempted coup and obscenely self-enriching crypto schemes.
They cheered wildly at his promises to build a wall paid for by Mexico, then shrugged when it didn't happen.
The BBC reported on a 39-year-old Iranian immigrant whose devotion to Trump endured even after she was put in ICE detention.
I will support him until the day I die, she said from lockup.
He is making America great again.
So it's been fascinating to watch a vocal part of Trump's movement revolt over his administration's handling of files from the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficking financier who died in jail in 2019 and what was ruled a suicide.
Running for president, Trump promised to release the Epstein files, which some thought would contain evidence of murder.
Yet another good reason to vote for Trump, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, wrote on social media.
Americans deserve to know why Epstein didn't kill himself.
Some of the influencers who now staff Trump's administration built their followings by spinning wild stories about the case, promising revelations that would lay their enemies low.
Epstein's client list, quote, is going to rock the political world, Don Bongino, now deputy director of the FBI, said in September.
Appearing on Fox News in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked whether her department would release a, quote, list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
She responded, quote, it's sitting on my desk right now to review.
Okay.
So anyway, you can see this is, you know, exactly what you would expect from the New York Times and from Deborah Goldberg.
Michelle Goldberg.
Jeez.
Man, I feel like I hit my head somewhere.
That's not.
You did not.
I did not.
Okay, can you put up the screenshot with the paragraph that has me in it?
Because although the article or the opinion piece is more or less what you would expect, I do think she asks a good question in here, and I'm going to try in good faith to answer it.
So, okay, so you go ahead.
Okay, so this is a paragraph from the middle of the op-ed we were just reading from by Michelle Goldberg on July 14th in New York Times.
Having nurtured conspiracy theories for his entire political career, Trump suddenly seems in danger of being consumed by one.
In many ways, it's delicious to watch, but there's also reason for anxiety, because for some in Trump's movement, the setback is simply proof that they're up against a conspiracy more powerful than they ever imagined.
What we just learned is that dealing with the Epstein operation is above the president's pay grade, posted Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist and podcaster.
An important question going forward is who they decide is pulling the strings.
Okay, so I'm, of course, a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, no surprise to anyone, and it wasn't Yes, but her point is that having seen Trump say there's nothing to see there, I'm leaping to the conclusion that it's even bigger than I ever imagined, which is not true.
This was always a possibility on the table, and that the only question is to figure out who's pulling the ultimate strings.
So anyway, I don't want to get bogged down.
I do think she's asking a reasonable question.
She's taking a lot of victory laps, but the reasonable question is, why is this different from the point of view of a coalition of people who have supported the president and have looked past a great many failures to deliver?
Why is this issue a line in the sand issue for many of us?
And why is the president behaving as if it's just another issue?
And what's more, it's uninteresting.
It's old news.
It's not significant.
And everybody wants to move on.
And there's a small number of us trying to keep it alive or something like that, which is nonsense.
Why would he be in that frame of mind?
So now I want to wrestle together a couple of observations.
One observation is that I think I've come to understand something about President Trump himself.
That President Trump is we all have built into us at the biological core this in-group-out-group phenomenon.
We see certain people as the ultimate in-group, family, we view as extensions of self, and we will defend them as such.
We may feel a kinship to our nation or our lineage.
This is all built in at a biological level.
I've argued elsewhere that this is being modulated by, why am I blanking on the name of the hormone typically oxytocin, right?
Oxytocin, which not only cultivates feelings of love for those who are in the in-group, but also feelings of repulsion for those in the out-group.
So I'm going to argue that President Trump is actually, he has an in-group, out-group phenomenon like anybody, maybe even more exaggerated, but that the way it functions is different.
In President Trump's view, I believe he will actually in-group anybody who supports him, and he will exile anybody who doesn't.
And frankly, I don't see that as a characterological strength.
I think it's a terrible vulnerability.
But it does reflect some strengths.
I don't think he has in him bigotry that will cause him not to resonate with a black guy who supports him.
I think he'll resonate just as well as he would with anybody else.
Nor will he apparently resonate with a white guy who doesn't support him.
Right, exactly.
And so I think one of the things we have to understand is if that is your mindset, then titanic shifts are possible that would not make sense for those of us trying to understand what's going on in his mind, because in our world, it wouldn't be like that.
You couldn't swap one group out for another.
Right?
Okay.
So most of us try to be forgiving slash attempt to understand what is going on in the minds of others when we make a decision that many of those who have agreed with us in the past say, whoa, hold up.
What is that?
And so obviously it's different when you're the leader of the United States.
But there is a, it almost seems like a trivialization of the value of dissent in the tone, at least, and I think the content as well of that Truth Social post from Trump.
Yes, we can also see it in, I hope I'm reporting all of this accurately, but Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson are both close with President Trump personally.
Speak to him a lot.
They've gone in opposite directions in the aftermath of the revelation by the Justice Department that they wouldn't be further pursuing the Epstein matter.
Charlie Kirk has said essentially that he trusts the president.
If the president says it's time to move on, it must be time to move on.
And Tucker Carlson released a podcast with Sager and Jetty in which they delve deeply into the disturbing significance of this very story.
So they've gone in different directions.
But the point is, if I were in the president's shoes, and these two guys are my friends, but if I was in the president's shoes and these guys were in my circle, I wouldn't be thinking of throwing one out because he's not willing to go along with me on this issue.
So anyway, there's a vulnerability there that comes from if the president clearly likes to feel loved and popular, but if the idea is that that's really kind of an issue of magnitude, how many people are there that love him?
And the fact that the people who love him this week might be very different than the ones who loved him last week, but as long as it's the same large number or larger, it might be just as good to him.
That's a vulnerability.
Okay, now the big idea that I think I've glimpsed that begins to make sense of what I'm seeing in the world, and not just on this story, this is the story that sort of led to the glimpse, is something I want to call the leverage economy.
Now, we are all familiar with the actual economy.
The actual economy isn't really about dollars.
Dollars are a proxy for power, access to energy and resources that can make things happen in the world.
But nonetheless, let's shorthand it to, we've got the dollar economy.
We're also all familiar with the attention economy that, you know, this is an idea that was invented as behavior on large-scale social media began to be a studiable phenomenon.
And the idea is, well, your attention is a limited resource and you have people competing for it.
And that competition results in a kind of economic behavior surrounding how you are manipulated into spending your time, you know, in one way versus another, right?
It functions like a limited resource, like a mineral or energy or something like that.
So the leverage economy is, in my opinion, a terrifying idea, if it is true.
And the leverage economy basically says that there is a commodity that we cannot see that constitutes the ability to force or coerce important players in the space of power to do one thing rather than another.
And so this isn't the first time I've thought about this.
People who are longtime viewers may remember me wrestling with the idea that we were in danger with, it may even have been Epstein-related.
I've now forgotten what the exact topic that had me make this argument, that we were in danger with people who came into public and started promising to reveal compromising information, you know, like when Musk was talking about Epstein during the election.
The problem is that if you can create a credible threat, right, if there's some entity that does not want the story of Jeffrey Epstein explored because it arranged the story of Jeffrey Epstein and because the compromise that was collected by Epstein has a value in the world,
then one thing you could do if you wanted to become powerful is you could raise the specter of getting to the bottom of the Epstein affair, and then you could trade a willingness not to follow through on that for something that you wanted that those in control of it had, right?
So one reason that it's like Lucy with the football from Charlie Brown, people, maybe everybody's familiar with this, but Lucy famously would put the football where Charlie Brown was supposed to kick it, and Charlie Brown would come running to kick the football, and she'd pull it away at the last minute, and he would fall on his back.
Every single time.
Every single time.
Right.
So one reason that there are certain stories that don't break may be that once you are in a position to force the breaking of that story, you have a very valuable something.
And the question is, are you more interested in getting the public to be cognizant of what's going on in this world?
Or are you interested in trading that for something else you might like?
So if we imagine, leverage exists, I'm not inventing that concept.
But if we imagine that effectively all policy, from domestic policy to international relations, is being managed through this economy of coercion, then you start to expect very different entities to emerge.
You know, you've got a niche, which is, well, how can I generate a bunch of leverage?
What you should expect is the evolution of creatures that cultivate leverage by their very design, right?
So one such thing I would point to is the NSA.
What is the NSA?
I mean, the joke even at the NSA, the joke at the NSA is that the acronym stands for no such agency, right?
It's like an invisible something.
Well, what do they do?
Well, they collect information.
Why?
Oh, so that we can spot problems, you know, we can understand who's going to attack us.
Well, maybe.
On the other hand, if you wanted to win in the leverage economy, one thing you might do is you might say, well, look, let's just figure out everybody's vulnerabilities, right?
Let's just collect them.
We don't even need to, we don't have to process them.
We just collect them.
And then the point is, at the point somebody rises up and threatens you, the question is, well, all right, what do we have on them?
You know?
So you might imagine an NSA emerging because basically what it is, is a leverage mine, right?
Yeah.
Well, it's mine is exactly the right word because what you have me thinking as you're talking is within science, the difference between being data-driven and hypothesis-driven.
And data mining, which emerges at the same time that all these so-called scientists are advocating for data-driven science, which to our mind isn't science at all, requires that you have a bunch of stuff that you can just go into and say, okay, what does it mean?
It's like, well, actually, you need to start with the question, or else what you have that emerges from the stuff that you already had is mere observation still and you haven't tested anything.
And yet, with regard to the leverage economy that you are postulating, how valuable, how much more quickly an agency, an operator, could stop someone or something in its tracks if what they have already is information on,
who knows, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, such that at the point that someone arises to the point of becoming a problem, they can just pull out of the data that they've already got.
Mining the data they've already got as opposed to, oh my goodness, now we're going to have to go through the normal justice process and get a warrant and do a FOIA request and do all of these things to basically unnerth and figure out what might be going on.
Well, that's awfully inefficient, isn't it?
Right.
And I agree with you completely that it is the same kind of mindless collection of material.
It is the data mining phenomenon.
But I would also point out another connection, which is when you are actually an adherent to the philosophy of science, as we have inherited it from Bacon and Popper and the Greeks, right?
When that's really what you do for a living, when that's mentally how you're structured, I'm going to formulate a hypothesis based on an observation, make some predictions, and then I'm going to test it.
You have a tool that actually allows you to call fouls.
When somebody's screwing up the job of thinking, you have a tool that allows you to spot what's actually true and to point it out.
And the funny thing is, when you're young and naive and you go to graduate school in science and you are truly scientific in your worldview, you think, oh, they're going to love that.
And they don't.
what happens is you find yourself in trouble all the time.
And it's very bewildering because you think every single person in this building went into this in order to do this job.
And it seems that nobody's actually interested in doing it anymore.
What happened?
And so that's actually the next thing on my list here of weird phenomena that are probably best explained by the leverage economy.
The leverage economy does not like things that are not responsive to leverage, right?
Like reality.
It does not like the idea that somebody can say, you know, I don't care how much political power you've amassed behind the idea that sex is a continuum.
You're still not right.
And I can prove it on the back of this envelope, right?
It doesn't like that at all.
The point is there are certain things it wants to be able to do.
It wants to be able to exert leverage.
And somebody who can say, no, wrong, violation of the scientific method, right?
Really doesn't dig that.
So my point is not that the universities were created as part of the leverage economy.
I really think they weren't.
But what happened is you had this big, dangerous object that could actually, it contained an antidote to leverage in it, right?
It contained the ability to figure out what was going on and to prove it.
And that wasn't going to be tolerated.
And so part of the transition that these institutions have made from, you know, faculty heavy to admin heavy, well, what is admin?
Admin is a control structure for faculty.
Yeah.
I mean, this, I didn't expect to be going here today.
I think the sort of, you know, the history of universities is long.
We have lived in it during one horrible transformation that is still going on within the university system, within academia.
But when I have gone back and looked at American universities beginning around the time of the Industrial Revolution, around the late 19th century, at that point we were still very much within the kind of German model of universities, which was very much more about sage on the stage.
We've already figured it out.
The authorities know what they're doing.
And what the authorities have to do is just, it would be great if we could just open up the mind, the tops of the brains of the young men almost entirely who were at the universities and just put in the information and then let them go on their way because been there, done that, we've all got everything figured out.
There's almost nothing new under the sun.
It's real easy now to look back on, you know, 150 years later and say, haha, isn't that cute that they thought that everything was discovered already and they had everything and they knew what was true and right in the world.
And of course, we forget that we are living at a moment that is 150 years distant from hopefully a human future that exists where people will look back on us and realize how little we knew and how wrong we were about so many things.
But it was somewhat attributable, actually, to the otherwise not very helpful to the United States, the sort of the robber barons of the turn of the 20th century who went like, hold up, like we actually need innovation.
We need creativity and analysis in the universities.
And so began a somewhat long, but by, I think, and I'm not totally sure on the timing here, but by sort of the 40s, 50s, and certainly into when we were in school, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, the universities, at least in the United States, were really bastions of inquiry, of actual seeking of truth.
And was there crazy stuff going on?
Of course.
Was there uninteresting and banal research going on?
Of course, there's always going to be a mixture, which is what happens when you actually let people be free to follow their pursuits and interests.
But why the flip back?
And it's not a flip back to like a German model by any means, but it's a, so flip back is actually the wrong framing, but why a movement away from inquiry and freedom of thought and of expression and embrace of both creativity and analysis as two different modes by which humans explore and discover what is true?
Well, I think then we have, in part, a potential explanation of what you're talking about with regard to the leverage economy.
Yes, it's a lobotomizing and a homogenizing.
And as I pointed out last week, there is something very odd about the fact that just like McDonald's, you get a fancier version of the same old, same old from Harvard as you do from Ohio State, right?
The version of biology that is presented is not wildly different because the mindset of the person at the front of the room is mildly different, but wildly different.
In fact, it's the same.
Yeah.
Right.
It's the same thing.
And at the point that, you know, some grand narrative structure decides it's got something wrong, then they will all update simultaneously.
But it's not what you would expect from a ferocious culture of, you know, intellectual investigation in which people disagree on all sorts of things all the time, right?
They, you know, not a single university stood up and said there are only two sexes, not a single medical school.
It's so homogenized.
So we've got the control structure of the admin is involved in this.
And then more importantly, you have peer review and tenure, which if you think about it, are pretty good mechanisms for testing your willingness to be leveraged.
And if you're not willing to be leveraged, you don't survive as an academic.
You don't end up with tenure.
You don't end up with an enviable CV.
And so those structures, how did a university system with hundreds, thousands of institutions become homogenized so they all believe exactly the same stuff, even where it's dead wrong?
Like that happened through a process.
And I'm not arguing that this isn't largely emergent.
You know, you specify the niche, that tells you what creature you're going to get.
The leverage economy was always going to exist at some level, but I'm arguing it became dominant and it took over everything.
And so somebody generates an NSA, whatever it is that runs the NSA has a tremendous amount of leverage at its disposal.
There's no telling how much that explains about our world, but it's bound not to be zero.
Similarly, you got the NSA, you got universities, but you've also got things like the news, right?
The news was never great.
It was never super high quality, but there was a culture of journalism in which annoying people sought out the stories that embarrassed the powerful.
That culture is largely gone.
Now it is a team sport.
At the same time that you find these odd phenomena, like the evening news is drenched in pharma ads.
It's drenched in pharma ads that the viewer can't simply go out and even buy.
Right?
You can't buy the products.
Right.
Can't go out and buy the products.
You've got to ask your doctor if such and such is right for you.
And the sophisticated interpretation of late has been that actually those ads are not designed to sell pharmaceuticals, that those ads are designed to create a narrative control architecture so that the news can't report the news.
Because if the news ever did report the news about human health and the impact of pharmaceuticals, the public would be absolutely shocked, terrified, and would revolt.
Well, when we first started reading ads ourselves on Dark Horse, and we were very resistant to it at first, I shared some of the thinking that Gloria Steinem, who at the time I thought was fantastic,
and I think she has suffered from a number of errors in her thinking since, but in the early 90s, when she is one of the founders of Ms. Magazine, decided to take Ms. Magazine ad-free, which meant a very different economic model and it meant the subscribers were going to have to pay more and really annie up.
And what she revealed in the essay, at least revealed to me and presumably many others who read it, was how much editorial control advertisers had on the content.
And specifically, she was talking about glossy magazines and specifically glossy magazines that were understood to be for women.
And her argument, and I have not fact-checked this, I'm not even sure how I would, was that actually sponsors, advertisers, felt that they could and therefore demanded that they have more control over editorial content in, at that point, publications directed to women than for publications for everyone or publications for men.
I don't know if that part is true, but at the time it felt particularly egregious and important because the idea was maybe we can publish what we want, but if it's going to be on a page facing an ad for X product that has to do with, say, female reproductive capacity, then we can't publish anything about, say, a choice or abortion on that page.
I don't remember if that was one of her examples, but it's certainly a plausible one given Ms. Magazine.
What we are seeing now and what you are pointing to with regard to the sophisticated understanding of what those ads for products that the people viewing the ads can't even buy with regard to pharma ads on the evening news is we've gone way beyond editorial control, which is obviously critical.
That if we can't hear stories because the people who are sponsoring the show don't want us to hear those stories, that's huge.
But if the idea is actually I'm the sponsor and you would not exist but for the fact that I put an ad on, I don't even have to say anything more than that.
If I am investing so much in sponsorship of your show that the lion's share of the funds that are coming into your show are from a single industry or sponsor, you are going to censor yourself.
And so it's the self-censorship through the economic model of the leverage economy that you're talking about that actually does the heavy lifting, does the dirty work, and keeps their hands clean-ish.
I mean, they're not clean at all, but it keeps their fingerprints off of having to say, actually, don't do that.
We don't approve of that.
Yes.
And it creates also a kind of self-disciplining, which I think exists in all of these systems, where you don't find people responsive to the leverage economy while railing against it.
It would be counterproductive.
And so the point is, once you've surrendered to the leverage economy, then you also kind of become its champion.
You know, it's like, well, randomized controlled trials, you know, subjected to fierce peer review are the gold standard of Western thought.
It's like, really?
They are?
Because I think they're really easy to fake.
That's the only kind of evidence we accept.
It's the only kind of evidence.
Right.
Wow.
So, okay, so it's kind of a self-propagating issue.
Leverage plays a role in every structure, but once it becomes clear that the returns on the investment for leverage actually beat everything else in the system, it kind of takes over the system and then it takes over the people in the system and it turns them into leverage zombies who, you know, then deride those of us who are allergic to it.
We end up outside the system.
Fine.
Sometimes we end up figuring out how to make a living.
Fine.
But we are forever tarnished with the idea that we have lost our rigor, when in fact it's rigor that drove us out of the system in the first place, right?
The fact that you will not surrender in the face of leverage.
I mean, frankly, if you even think about just how you and I came to public attention, right?
It was just a stark refusal to capitulate in the face of, yes, substantial enough leverage to get rid of two very popular tenured professors, right?
That's how much leverage there was.
It was very real.
And some among those who were behind it never expected us to stay standing.
They literally, I mean, this is going to sound self-congratulatory, but I actually just believe this is the analytical description.
They literally cannot comprehend the person who doesn't capitulate in the face of leverage because they've lost any such instinct.
And so just as we all naturally look into ourselves and try to understand, and if somebody does something sufficiently far off the map, right, you know, the suicide bomber blows themself up and you think, why would anyone do that?
I can't find the thread that would cause me to do that.
So anyway, they look at people who stare down leverage and they think like, do you not, do you not get it?
Right?
Do you not get that we have a tremendous amount of power?
Why would you say that's not true?
What does truth have to even do with it?
Right.
So, okay, so it is, there must be some threshold.
Every system has some leverage in it, and there are systems that are not overwhelmed by the leverage economy, or at least there have been examples.
And then there must be some threshold that gets crossed that causes it to just take over and drive out all of those who aren't responsive because, of course, they're in danger of revealing it.
Okay.
So now I want to bring this back to the Epstein question and to the question that Michelle Goldberg asks in the New York Times.
Her question is, why is this issue different than all of the other ebb and flow in Trump's coalitions where people have looked past all sorts of things, but there seem to be many of us who won't look past this one?
But I want to start going down that thread by talking about another couple ideas.
This next little piece started in a discussion that I'm in.
I'm not going to, I think I shouldn't name the people in the discussion.
If I had talked to them beforehand, I would be willing to.
They're welcome to say that some of this began with that discussion if they wish.
But here's an idea for what may be going on that caused Trump's flip.
Imagine for a second that the world is as conspiratorial as some of us believe it is, that we've seen enough of these things.
You know, we looked inside of what happened over COVID and we see, you know, collusion to prevent revelation of where the virus came from, to demonize useful therapies, to promote dangerous therapies as if they were safe and effective.
All of that.
We've seen a tremendous amount of collusion.
So with respect to what happened, you had Trump on the campaign trail saying that he wanted to reveal whatever was going on with Epstein so that we could root out the corruption that it implied, right?
The network, the library of Compromont and whatever impact it's having.
And then he reverses course at the point that he's got his own people in positions of authority in the DOJ, in the FBI.
He's in a position to do what he said.
And suddenly he's sounding crazy to us, right?
He's sounding, you know, petty and he's saying Epstein was never important.
Like, how could he be saying that?
Well, the question is, I don't know what the Epstein files would look like.
I don't know that there is a list.
I don't think I've ever said, you know, release the list because I don't know that there's a list.
But whatever is true of the information that existed about Jeffrey Epstein and his activities, it has existed under the control of people who have not been releasing it or acting upon it under an administration that, you know, as President Trump points out in his True Social post, manufactured all sorts of nonsense about Russian collusion, steel dossier, all of these things.
So you had flat-out liars in charge of this evidence for a very long period of time.
You also have now a wild card of AI.
And I've said before, I don't think that the public is necessarily playing with the cutting-edge stuff.
I would imagine that there's a generation or two ahead and that the elites have maintained control.
I will tell you that some, I've made that argument to Alex Marinos, who is a very deep thinker on AI.
He thinks I'm wrong on this.
So it's not a slam dunk that I would be right.
But nonetheless, you've got AI, which is increasingly able to create compelling forgeries, right?
We're not quite at the level where the video forgeries are perfectly compelling, at least not in public.
But we're getting there.
And so forgeries of all sorts of other things are now well within range.
So the question is, again, this is an idea that came out of a discussion with other people.
I don't want to minimize their contribution to it.
What if things were introduced into the Epstein materials, the pile of evidence about Jeffrey Epstein?
What if things that were not true, things that are out of left field?
And the Trump administration has now seen what the file looks like.
And what if the problem...
Is that what you're saying?
Well, let's create a black box and let's say, is it possible to create a pool of evidence that would cause Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino, and Donald Trump to reverse course because the hazard it poses in releasing it is much greater than the benefit of releasing it from the point of view of satisfying their base.
I would also point out, again, longtime viewers will have heard me talk about this before, but there is an important chapter in history when George W. Bush was running for office and was endangered by the idea that he had gotten out of fighting in Vietnam with a cushy job in the Texas Air National Guard for which he didn't even show up.
So he was given the right to fly fancy fighter jets in no danger of being shot down, and he wasn't even showing up for work.
He was a slacker and a drunk and whatever.
And Dan Rather came up with some evidence from George Bush's superior officer detailing just how bad George Bush had been, you know, his dereliction of duty.
And Dan Rather went to press, I think it was 60 minutes, but he went to, he took it on the air, this piece of evidence, and the internet almost immediately figured out that what Dan Rather had was a forgery because the type was not consistent with modern, was consistent with modern type, not.
The font.
Yeah, so it was like a letter from a superior officer, and it was not, it was clearly not done on a typewriter.
It was done on a computer, and there would have been no computers.
So anyway, Dan Rather lost his job over this.
But the important piece of information to track is that what was reported is consistent with all of the evidence about George W. Bush.
It was not, what was forged did not report something untrue.
It reported something true.
But the public couldn't track.
Presumably.
There was a lot of other evidence.
And it may even be the case that the exact letter in question had a real version.
I don't think you want to muddy this.
Yeah, I don't want to muddy.
You're right.
The point is, whatever dereliction of duty may have been disappeared from being an important issue because the forgery made people think it was false.
The story about Bush's dereliction of duty was gaining steam.
More and more people were upset about the prospect of this having been true.
Fraudulent evidence was placed in the hands of a big mainstream newscaster who went to air with it.
And at the point that it was clear that the particular story that he went to air with was fraudulent, that became the story.
That replaced the story, and somehow, as subservient to that, in the mind's eye, not only did the other story disappear, but if you were asked, oh, well, wasn't Dan Rider lying about that?
As if any piece of evidence that is fraudulent means that the entire story is fraudulent.
There is a flaw in logical thinking in what happened there that probably has a name and I don't know the name for it.
Right.
So anyway, I think actually we've seen a bunch of things that exploit this exact flaw.
And I agree with you.
It must have at least a general name.
I don't know it either.
I think we've seen a bunch of things that function like this.
But what it suggests is, of course, in the world of the leverage economy, people have leverage.
How do you unhook somebody's leverage so your leverage is more compelling?
Well, one thing you can do is you can get evidence to not work.
How do you get evidence to not work?
Well, maybe you introduce a bunch of phony evidence nearby it, and then those things get falsified and people are like, oh yeah, wasn't there a lot of phony evidence that said that?
So, you know, we saw that a lot during COVID.
Didn't hypermection fail to work?
Is there lots of evidence of that?
Yeah, exactly.
So the question is, given that custody of the materials in whatever Epstein files exist was under the control of people who were absolutely hostile to Trump and aware that he might well be elected, at least, you know, after he'd been elected the first time, they knew this was a real danger and they threw everything at him.
So what are the chances?
And again, I'm borrowing from my friends here, but what are the chances that something was introduced into that file that made it so that the appetite for releasing it vanished?
And let me give you one possible, this is not necessarily what I think happened, but this is just a sort of proof of concept that there's something you could introduce that would cause a reversal of course.
And it would sound a lot like what Trump was doing, trying to drive his followers away from this.
Like, no, you don't want that.
Look at all of the other great stuff I'm doing.
You don't want that.
That's nothing, right?
What would cause him to do that?
Well, let's just imagine, not President Trump, just some normie.
Let's suppose some normie is cheating on his wife and the story is about to emerge that he has been cheating with a minor.
And his position is, I don't want to acknowledge I was cheating, but that wasn't a minor, right?
Now he's got a problem, right?
Does he out his cheating in order to avoid that it wasn't a criminal act?
Right, exactly.
So you can imagine that there's stuff in there where President Trump might have to very carefully say, well, that's true, but that never happened.
And, you know, you could imagine putting him in a predicament that would not be a win and that his sense would be, just make it go away.
The guy's been dead a long time.
Yada, yada, yada.
Right.
So would that explain it in the world of the leverage economy?
And what many of us in the coalition that supported President Trump are thinking is, oh my God, he's putting himself in tremendous danger.
He's going to get clobbered during the midterms because the base won't put up with this.
Now, let's go to.
Well, they're not going to vote blue.
They just won't show up.
Right.
But he would get clobbered then.
Yeah.
But let's go to Michelle Goldberg's overarching question, which I think is a good one.
Why is this issue not like the others?
Okay.
Here's what I think as somebody who will look past a certain amount of stuff and has looked past a certain amount of stuff, even some big stuff.
I mean, I don't ignore it, but I will tolerate it.
The question is until we get to the bottom of what happened with Epstein, we have no idea how big an influence this is on all of the other things that we prioritize, right?
We have no idea what role this plays in, you know, the story of, you know, safe and effective mRNA vaccines and the story of water fluoridation, all of the stories that are galling to us where something terrible has happened.
The question is, well, who is exerting leverage and of what kind?
And here we've seen pretty strong evidence that this one character was tied into all kinds of important things and presumably collected a lot of very powerful leverage on a lot of very important people.
So the point is we don't know if this is a minor factor in our national story or the dominant factor.
We have no way of knowing until you get to the bottom of it.
And so you can imagine that for people who have come to that conclusion, that it's like, well, this is like the issue that potentially explains all of the others and may free us, right?
If the Compromont bomb can be detonated and the people who have been acting against us because they have shameful stuff that will emerge on them are driven from power, we might live in a whole different world or we might not.
But the point is, why is this issue different than the others?
Because if our intuition about what lurks here is right, then of course it would be exactly different than all the others.
This is a control issue.
This is like a central repository of illegitimate leverage, right?
People who were involved in sexually abusing children who now live in fear of that and have become subordinate to some force that has its own desires.
Of course, this would be a different issue because that's the nature of the conspiracy that appears to exist here.
And so anyway, I would hope that Michelle Goldberg and others would make eye contact with that.
That part of the problem here is that you are so interested in mocking the idea that you cannot, that conspiracies are inherently low quality allegations, that they are, you know, they are illusions.
If you imagine that this is an illusion, then yeah, why would anybody be attached to it?
Who cares?
We'll move on to the next thing.
President Trump has asked us to.
On the other hand, if you believe that there are a certain number of these conspiracies that have disproportionate importance, then of course you would be focused on this that way.
So really, I think, Michelle, the problem is it's your own prior with respect to conspiracies that causes you not to understand why this issue is any different.
Yeah, there's been success in creating immediate suspicion of anyone who invokes conspiracy.
Yep, right.
It is reflexive.
And in fact, that is something if you if you take what I said about the universities and the fact that the leverage economy gets past some threshold and it takes over not only the entire structure of the university,
but then it takes over the mindset of the people who remain in the university, that same thing would, in the larger leverage economy, would of course create the impression that anybody who believes that they see conspiracies is delusional, right?
Because the point is, what is a leverage economy?
Well, it's an economy of collusion.
Yeah, it's smoke and mirrors.
Right.
It's smoke and mirrors and nothing's real and you don't know what's going to happen.
Definitely don't look at the man behind the curtain.
Right, exactly.
So the point is, if you're a player in the leverage economy, then conspiracy theorists are, you know, we can't help them.
They've, you know, their minds have turned to mush.
On the other hand, if you have retained your ability to think, then actually you do see an awful lot of collusion because guess what?
There's an awful lot of collusion.
And, you know, every so often we see a piece of it, like the pharma ads that control the stories on the news.
So I mean, on their side, what they have going for them, and I think we maybe started here, is the inherent psychology of humans that don't want to think about things that overcomplicate their lives.
And so what the leverage economy people offer is, again, certainty.
Just accept our story.
Just like it is how it appears.
Conspiracy?
Really?
What are the chances?
Come on, those people are crazy.
Do you see how often they flip-flop?
Do you see how often they change their minds?
Like, they go new evidence.
Yeah, like that's going to change anyone.
And, you know, they do this thing with tone and with language and with eye rolls and by, you know, making those of us who are trying to figure out what is true in a world where it is ever more difficult to actually know unless you have directly experienced something like you are a real human being sitting here with me.
And for everyone watching, you don't know.
You simply don't know for sure at this point what has been generated by something that is not human and what is actually real.
And so we all live in that world all the time now, except when we are in the physical presence of other people.
And of course, many people would say, oh my God, just give me a model by which to run the 90% of the world that is, I don't even care if it's complicated or complex.
I don't know.
I don't care.
Not paying attention.
Well, it's actually the character of Cipher in The Matrix, who, having lived outside The Matrix, decides he doesn't care.
The illusion is good enough.
He knows the steak isn't real, but it's juicy.
And he wants to go back in.
So people don't get there.
Most people never escape the phony world.
And so they don't get a chance to decide whether they'd rather be free and endangered or a slave and happy enough.
But people certainly fear what happens if they leave.
And actually, you know, COVID is the story that tells you how all of this stuff works.
But what happened was many of us were coerced in the strongest possible terms.
The attempt was made to coerce us, and a small number of people stared it down, which felt like it was going to be fatal.
It felt like you'd never be welcome in polite society again.
And the fact is what happened then is that we coalesced into a community of people who had all, you know, fled the same enemy.
And that was so reifying that it actually allowed you to feel good.
Like, actually, that wasn't such a crazy thing to do, which is a very important lesson.
Side note, because you invoked the matrix, I was reminded of being a literature major in the first two years of college, as I was, because I wanted to be a science fiction writer.
You know this.
And being faced in my literature classes and I guess it was the literature classes rather than the writing classes, with some lunacy.
And this would have been the late 80s.
Enough that I was like, forget it, I'm going to be a scientist instead.
I took the reading list and left those people.
But one of the enduring discussions, as anyone who has thought carefully about literature will probably be familiar with, that showed up time and again, whether or not we are reading Dostoevsky or Atwood, was do you take the piece of fiction entirely on its own merits, because that is the creation?
Or can you or must you include in your understanding of the created piece something of the creator and both who they were, you know, not both, like who they were, what they intended, whether or not they achieved what they intended, you know, all of this.
And I always felt fairly strongly, this is one of these positions in these literature seminars, which otherwise drove me a bit crazy, that I actually felt fairly strongly, you must take the created piece on its own.
And while I may be interested in who the creator was and what they were otherwise experiencing, sometimes in more cases than others, but like literally one of my first quarter courses in college was on Solchenitsen.
It's actually right there in the thing.
You know that he was in the gulag, but you have to internalize your understanding of him with what he has written there.
Of course, that wasn't a piece of fiction.
I say that, having felt very clearly that actually it should not matter who the creator was.
And yet, for me, the Matrix is inherently sullied now.
I cannot think of the Matrix without thinking of the creators, men, brothers, who apparently through descent into porn and anime or something, are now living some disgustingly misogynistic lives pretending that they are women.
I don't even remember their last name.
I always forget.
Wachowski.
Wachowski, sisters.
No.
And when you invoke The Matrix now, I think, if I were to go back and watch that movie now, and I've seen it a few times, would I be able to see in it the germs of cognitive dissonance to use the nicest possible framing in it that clearly existed in the minds of the creators?
And I don't want that piece of art to be contaminated that way, but it is.
Well, it absolutely is for me.
I have the same concern, but I, you know, the movie's imperfect, but too important to allow it to be sullied.
And anyway, I'm not sure what to do with that because I think your instinct is right and there's, you know, there's just nothing to be done.
Does that say no antioxidants?
No, it's just no antidotes.
Yeah, the reference to the idea that the leverage economy is allergic to any truth-seeking that would constitute an antidote to leverage.
But, okay, one final piece here.
I wonder if you are a reality-focused person, and I don't mean that you understand reality.
I mean that's your that's what you're trying to do.
You're not signed up for the leverage economy.
You recognize that there's some leverage out there, but if you're signed up to figure out what's actually going on, it is not intuitive that everything might be negotiable in this world, right?
Yes.
And in fact, part of the thing that's so jarring about the Epstein story is like, okay, I think we can be pretty sure that Epstein was not a rogue element, that he was connected to something powerful that facilitated his doing this from the financing of it to the covering to the getting him out of trouble in Florida in 2008, all those things.
Well, that means there has to have been a discussion about you know luring people into these compromising situations with trafficked minors.
And it's very hard for a normal person to fathom that such a conversation could even happen, right?
Like imagine somebody tried to propose something in some group that you were in.
You'd be like, what the hell are you saying?
Right.
So the point is, somehow conversations that we don't understand happen regularly enough that they have impacts on the world.
And I guess my point is, if you are surrendered to the leverage economy, then this is a much more natural conversation.
The point is, this is all about leverage.
You know, the NSA has got a pretty good gig.
They just collect information.
They just tapped into all the wires that we use to talk to each other.
Well, here's another, you know, it's like, you know, Epstein was a startup of some kind, right?
Here's a way we could generate a whole lot of leverage, you know, concentrated on certain important people.
And like, yeah, a normal person isn't going to fathom it, but in the leverage economy, you would imagine somebody would come up with this and some group of people who were, you know, amoral enough to see that as a reasonable proposal would allow it to happen.
Okay, so final thing.
Is the president going to get crushed in the midterms?
And does he not understand the danger he is putting his own presidency in here?
Well, one hand, that's possible.
The other possibility, if you go back to what I said at the beginning, Trump's people are the people who like him.
And it needs to be, he needs not to take a major hit in that regard, but he can swap out large elements of the people who used to like him for a bunch of people who now like him.
And that could potentially, in his mind, work.
And it could also rescue him at the ballot box.
Who do you think was ready to like Trump except for his position on Epstein?
Well, I feel like that's close to an empty set.
Yeah, but it isn't because the developments in the Middle East have taken a whole lot of people who were not its champion and turned them into champions of a sort.
Now, I've got a few things to say on this topic, but maybe let's start here.
Do you want to put up the free press article that I sent you?
So here's an article.
Barry Weiss tweeted about it.
This is just the beginning of the article.
This is not her work.
I've forgotten who the author is.
It says, when President Trump ordered B-2 stealth bombers to fly 37 hours from Missouri to the Middle East and back to drop bunker-busting bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities last month, he wasn't merely backing up Israel's war or demonstrating superpower military competency.
He was also rejecting the growing clamor from a visible faction of the MAGA coalition that sees the use of American power abroad as fundamentally illegitimate and a danger to the American people.
So my point here is a couple things.
One, I just want to take a moment to respond to that article.
There's been a lot of crowing amongst people who were in favor of the attack on Iran and a lot of triumphalism around the fact, hey, World War III didn't start.
I guess all you who were opposing this were panic.
And first of all, that is some really goddamn sloppy thinking, right?
You can play Russian roulette five times in a row and have nothing bad happen and think you were clever, but you weren't.
Even the first time you pulled the trigger, you were taking an unacceptable risk.
So there's a difference between risk and harm, and this was an unacceptable risk.
Further, I would point out that history has a cautionary tale to tell on this very front, because you will remember at the after Iraq invaded Kuwait, there was a dirty run-up to a war on Iraq, the First Gulf War.
And the First Gulf War was very frightening.
The run-up to it was very scary.
And you will recall, you and I were at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
At the bottom of campus, a large wall was erected to look like the Vietnam Memorial.
And the idea was as soldiers were killed, their names were going to be put on that wall because you could see it coming.
Right?
I don't remember that.
The protest of that war had that.
The protest did feel like a throwback to a time that we weren't cognizant of, but had heard plenty about.
And for those who are murky on the history, that first Gulf War that started out as Operation Desert Shield and became Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military and a coalition of 30-plus other countries rolled over the Iraqi military.
The Iraqi military was surrendering in droves.
I think there were only a thousand coalition casualties in the whole war.
And famously, George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush's dad, proclaimed.
He was president at the time.
Yeah.
Proclaimed that this, he was giddy about the fact that this was the end of what had been called Vietnam syndrome.
Vietnam syndrome was the reluctance of the American public to sign up for wars because they had been so traumatized by the quagmire of Vietnam.
And you can see in my story about the wall that was put at the base of campus at Santa Cruz that there was the expectation that this was another Vietnam.
And it didn't turn out to be, much as these bunker-busting bombs didn't turn out to start World War III.
However, you will notice that the attack on Iraq had a second chapter, and that that second chapter was an absolute quagmire that may have killed as many as a million Iraqis, spent a huge amount of American wealth.
It was ruinous.
So it's roulette.
And all of those of you who think, oh, you know, we're pussies for worrying about attacking a sovereign nation.
Okay, this time it went reasonably well for whatever reason.
It doesn't make it the least bit safe.
But anyway, the answer to your earlier question is the group of people who might come over to Trump's side and rescue him from the loss of his coalition partners who can't look past the Epstein fiasco is people who want American military might use.
I don't even want to say on behalf of Israel, because as I've said a thousand times, I don't think this is in Israel's interest.
I think Israel is behaving very stupidly under the direction of some diabolical people who are beyond foolish.
I mean, isn't it exactly the neocon agenda?
Yeah, it's the neocon agenda.
So anyway, the point being.
Right.
And, you know, the New York Times is slow to come along, right?
You can see Michelle Goldberg still sniping at President Trump.
You can see the free press is, you know, farther ahead in this.
But I would also just point out that if you imagine a leverage economy that we don't know that Epstein was connected to Israeli intelligence, but there's certainly a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest it.
So the fact that these two stories both point in the direction of new coalition partners for President Trump that might substitute for the people he's going to lose by angering them over the failure to address Epstein is at least worth considering in a game theoretic sense.
Yep.
Yep.
That sounds, I mean, as soon as you read that piece, that paragraph from the free press piece, that became clear.
So it's not the framing that I thought you were aiming for, that there's been some group of would-be Trump supporters who just couldn't tolerate his take on Epstein.
That doesn't make any sense.
No, that doesn't make any sense.
But this, you know, what's going on, what's going on with the warmongering is a much bigger change.
Much bigger change.
Much bigger change, indeed.
All right.
All right.
Well, maybe we'll stop there.
Yep.
We'll be back in five days and I'll discuss.
I'll start with what I had in mind to talk about today, which will hold.
It has a great shelf life.
It has a great shelf life, yeah.
And it doesn't turn out to be topical exactly right now, which is also part of the story.
So with that, without saying anything about what we're talking about, I think we will stop there.
But we're going to be back in 15 minutes or so with a Q ⁇ A for OnLocals, for our local supporters.
Please consider joining us there if you want to hear more from us today or want to go back and look at past Q&As.
We do all of our Q&As on...
I don't know.
We do all of our Q ⁇ As on Locals now, and they're all available up there.
And we have a good time with that.
We've got a great group of supporters there.
Check out our sponsors this week, which were Everyday Dose and boy, Fresh Press Olive Oil and Sundays.
With the dog snoring in the background, having had a delicious meal this morning.
Thinking about Sundays probably right now.
She won't say, we don't know for sure.
But a reminder, too, that we are supported by you.
We appreciate you.
As we discussed last week, we are actually re-bonetized by YouTube now, and it's creaking slowly back into motion.
But it has always been about us trying to figure out what is true with each other in front of you without being beholden to, well, the leverage economy.
And if you want to do us a big favor, go make sure you're subscribed and click the bell over on YouTube.
Indeed.
So again, we'll be back next Monday and we'll also be back on locals in 15 minutes or so with a Q ⁇ A. Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
