Jan. 6, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| As we kick off 2017, I thought my first direct message of the year should offer up at least one solid prediction | ||
| for the next 12 months. | ||
| While 2016 was the year of fake outrage, I suspect that this year will be the year of misdirected anger. | ||
| Before I get into this misdirected anger, I want to take just a moment and share with you guys how I ended 2016 by taking a digital shutdown for about 10 days, which basically seemed like the perfect way to end such a crazy year. | ||
| Going off the grid was truly the only way I could recharge the batteries after the haywire 2016 we had here at The Rubin Report. | ||
| Not only did we take The Rubin Report independent, creating a fully fan-funded show back in June, but we started a production company, we built a studio, then we moved into a home, we built another studio inside our home, and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| Let's just say that if I never drive another U-Haul in my life that it'll be too soon. | ||
| Of course, on top of all this commotion, we had to actually put on the show that we do every week, and yeah, there was that whole American presidential election thing. | ||
| Add this all up and toss in the constant beeping, vibrating, and buzzing of this little device, and I think a little time off the grid was well-deserved and probably beyond needed. | ||
| I spent the last ten days with friends and family, eating, drinking, laughing, arguing, and most importantly, not staring into this black mirror. | ||
| A couple times I went into my pocket to reflexively look at Twitter when I had a moment of nothingness, but even the desire for that lessened after a couple days without it. | ||
| I felt calmer and more present, and actually slept better. | ||
| I also ate food without taking pictures of it and filtering it. | ||
| I didn't tweet about Carrie Fisher's death, may the force be with her, or wish anyone a happy new year on Facebook. | ||
| About a week into my digital hiatus, I had a friend over and I was telling him about how I felt about being off the grid. | ||
| While I was really impressed by what I was doing, he looked at me wryly and said, so basically you're just living like it's 1996? | ||
| This off-the-cuff remark by my friend really framed why an online shutdown is so important to do now and again. | ||
| All I did for these last 10 days of the year was live life without the constant access to video, audio, information, and interaction that we're so obsessed with these days. | ||
| While it seemed like a huge thing for me to do, I was just living the exact same way we all lived only 20 years ago and for millennia before that. | ||
| It was only a couple years ago when we were talking about how the 24 hour news cycle was too fast. | ||
| Now it seems as if the news cycle is virtually minute to minute and you can be as engaged in it as the very people who are making the news in the first place. | ||
| All of this really does go a long way in explaining why so much of our political discourse seems so awful now even compared to just four years ago. | ||
| There's no thinking, no nuance, and no honesty anymore. | ||
| We've traded those vital tenets of a healthy society for reaction, generalization, and spin. | ||
| Add a mainstream media pumping out fake news and an online media that is fueled by clickbait garbage, and our ability to find the truth in the noise is becoming more difficult by the day. | ||
| This is the Catch-22 of any new technology. | ||
| With the incredible advances we get, like you right now watching this in any part of | ||
| the world, we also get parts that drag us backwards, like the misinformation and time | ||
| wasting nonsense. | ||
| This all leads me to where I want to go with the Rubin Report in 2017. | ||
| One of the reasons that I focus so much on the false cries of racism and bigotry, which now mostly come from the left, is not only because it stifles conversation and honest debate, but also because of what it leaves us with without these two vital components of a free society. | ||
| Once you've removed rational conversation and open debate, you aren't left with much more than anger and violence. | ||
| Since the election, I've been saying how much I had hoped the left would take a look at its tactics and do some introspection after Trump's win. | ||
| Unfortunately, I haven't seen much of this happen. | ||
| The left's lack of self-awareness, coupled with the righteous indignation that their intellectual opponents are bigots, can only be a recipe for disaster. | ||
| Let me give you two possible ways that I think things could shake out this year. | ||
| Let's say the Trump presidency is an absolute disaster. | ||
| The economy crumbles, we get involved in some intractable war, and he makes terrible appointments to the Supreme Court. | ||
| In this case, virtually everyone will be against him, and rightfully so. | ||
| The media, which obviously already hates him, will call him out. | ||
| The left, which also already hates him, will continue to do so. | ||
| And the right, which is playing along with him, but still weary of him right now, will see that the ship is sinking and that they have to find some new blood. | ||
| Even the dreaded alt-right will fall into line if the country is heading in the right direction. | ||
| In short, what should happen when a president is doing a bad job will happen. | ||
| Now let's look at the flip side of all that. | ||
| Let's say that under Trump the economy takes off, we don't get involved in any crazy military adventures, and Trump governs mainly from the center. | ||
| The media is still going to go from outrage to outrage and tweet to tweet, the right will be thrilled with him, and the average person in the center will be happy that there's a little more money in their pocket. | ||
| The left, however, will have an impossible dilemma on their hands. | ||
| If the economy is good, and we aren't at war, and most of Trump's policies are centrist, how can you give credit to someone who you've spent the last two years calling Hitler? | ||
| They'll have painted themselves into an intellectual corner which can only lead to misplaced anger. | ||
| But I suspect that instead of looking at their own policies and behaviors that led us there, we know that they'll only double down on those very same tactics. | ||
| After all, even if the economy is great and the country is going in the right direction, how can you give credit to a racist, homophobic bigot? | ||
| And even if you were to acknowledge that the country was going in the right direction, then your own side would turn those tactics on to you. | ||
| Trust me, I should know. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Nobody likes being called gross and racist. | ||
| It's this name-calling instead of honest reasoned debate that got us here in the first place. | ||
| All that said, I have high hopes for 2017 and I plan on putting those hopes into action by making the Rubin Report more relevant and engaging than ever before. | ||
| I think we can take the fake outrage of last year and the misplaced anger that's heading our way this year to continue to build this new center. | ||
| It'll mean talking to people we disagree with and, as Ben Shapiro says, putting facts over feelings, but I believe that it's a worthy cause to fight for. | ||
| Either that or we can just forget the whole thing and join the Bigoteer Brigade. | ||
| The choice is yours. | ||
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me this week is a mathematician, an economist, and the managing director | ||
| of Teal Capital, Eric Weinstein. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, it's great to be here. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Economist, mathematician, managing director. | ||
| These are big words that I'm throwing at you. | ||
| So is imposter. | ||
| And imposter! | ||
| You're not supposed to say that at the beginning. | ||
| No, I got over my imposter syndrome by embracing the imposter quality. | ||
| In fact, I learned this from Jim Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. | ||
| He had this brilliant insight, which was... | ||
| If you're going to do anything big, you are by definition unqualified to do it. | ||
| So that just opened up a huge swath of new territory. | ||
| Oh man, I may have to change my bio on my website after hearing that. | ||
| There's so much I want to talk to you about and we're gonna do it in parts because there's a lot between math and economics and I want to talk public policy with you and politics and all of that stuff. | ||
| But let's start with the math thing because I was never good at math. | ||
| I was not a math science guy. | ||
| That's why I bring on people to discuss those things. | ||
| I was always an English social studies guy. | ||
| What do you have in your brain that the non-math person doesn't have? | ||
| This is a really interesting question because I also was not good at math. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I would say that in fact somewhere buried in my tweet stream is the claim that if you didn't major in math you have no idea whether you're good at it or not good. | ||
| And what I found was that when things got supposedly more advanced, they actually got simpler, because mathematicians started revealing what was powering all of the math that you'd previously learned. | ||
| And so if you're really good at thinking fundamentally, as I think you are, and many people who come on the show are particularly gifted at that particular thing, they would find, in my opinion, That higher level math might actually be easier because it's more honest and it's more complete and there are no gaps and nobody's pulling the wool over your eyes. | ||
| So when was that moment for you that you went from, I'm not into this or I'm not good at it to now, oh now I see this other deeper thing? | ||
| I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and they had a language requirement. | ||
| I tried taking French and I found that I had no ability to complete it. | ||
| So I figured I wouldn't graduate from college. | ||
| And as a result I just said if the language of the universe is written in mathematics, in particular in differential geometry, it would be crazy if I'm not going to be able to graduate from college not to at least learn the language of reality. | ||
| And so I just took all upper level math classes. | ||
| The language of reality, I like that. | ||
| Do people say that's what math is? | ||
| To me, you could hope to read classical Arabic or Hebrew or some ancient language to get closer to creation, but for me, I believe that were there a creator, his book is written, or her book, in the language of differential geometry and its consequences. | ||
| And so that's the way I approached it. | ||
| And then I found, quite to my surprise, that I was really good at something that I had never previously been good at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was there a specific moment, I mean, do you remember sitting there, pen to paper, that you thought, this is it? | ||
| Well, there was a terrible course in abstract algebra, which is, algebra always sounds elementary, but it's arbitrarily difficult and interesting. | ||
| It sounds elementary depending on who you're talking about. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I wasn't, what is that, like, in 11th grade I did not do well? | ||
| So this is the algebra, let's say, of symmetry, and I was taking a course, and I was infatuated with a young woman, and I found that I didn't show up to class as much as I should, and I did very poorly on a midterm. | ||
| And my friend who was taking the class told me that the professor had a problem that if you could solve that problem you could get an A plus in the class and not have to take the final exam. | ||
| And since I was bombing, I tried my luck at that and it yielded. | ||
| And that was a shock because I had been a pretty good student to age 10 and I had a period between 10 and 16 when I went off to college where I was Lost because of various learning issues. | ||
| I was not a standard student. | ||
| And then this was sort of redemption and regaining this kind of power and ease and love of the beauty of mathematics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it tough to sort of view the world through the mathematical prism when we live in a time when that seemingly is so not rewarded? | ||
| Having facts and knowledge and evidence is not rewarded and your brain operates in that space? | ||
| Well, that's a great question. | ||
| I think that the weird part about it is, of course, that there is this layer underneath this social layer. | ||
| So we're talking about politics and we're talking about ...entertainment and how many clicks and all these things. | ||
| But if you look at the technology that's supporting all of this, mathematics and completely rigorous thinking is underpinning the infrastructure. | ||
| And if you're willing to dig a little bit more deeply, I think that what you find is mathematics and rigorous thinking has never been more important. | ||
| But the problem is Computers and technology have sort of provided us with what I call a half-silvered mirror effect. | ||
| So if you sit down at a computer, you are no longer usually programming on it. | ||
| You're just serving up apps and information. | ||
| But there is a layer underneath or behind this, and that's where people like me are active. | ||
| Providing the very rigorous technical support in order to make the rest of the social reality possible. | ||
| So do you weep for the state of math in America right now? | ||
| Just the public state of it? | ||
| Oh, I have a totally different impression. | ||
| I think we are unbelievable. | ||
| That's nice to hear. | ||
| At science and engineering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that what we are actually in is a multi-year, multi-decade conspiracy effectively. | ||
| To deny just how good our educational system can be, just how good some of our people are. | ||
| And this has to do with the economics of staffing the STEM workforce, science and engineering. | ||
| So in order to get the money, get the labor, We've had to continually pretend as if Americans are terrible at mathematics, when I think we're actually really good. | ||
| We have a very heterogeneous K-12 system, and some schools are terrible, but there are lots of terrific ones. | ||
| And you know, we have high schools. | ||
| Multiple. | ||
| Bronx Science Stuyvesant, Far Rockaway, which is now closed, which have produced multiple Nobel Prize winners, | ||
| and yet we pretend that we are somehow lagging, we are incapable and incompetent, | ||
| and it really has to do with labor market issues where scientific employers are always looking | ||
| to get lower cost labor, and they prefer usually to import talent | ||
| and effectively poverty from relatively less well-off countries | ||
| to staff our science and engineering workforce. | ||
| So I actually think we're doing terrifically well. | ||
| I think math is in very good shape. | ||
| I think physics is, theoretical physics, has been having a much harder time of it for the last 40 odd years. | ||
| So I'm pretty, pretty happy with mathematics. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| So I never heard of it framed in a, in a labor sense. | ||
| So you're saying basically that if a kid goes through our school system, is a real genius, great at math, science, etc, etc, that the, that the workforce still would look to someone from another country just basically because they could pay them less. | ||
| Well, I think there's a big critique, which is that sometime around 1970, the engines of authentic growth within the American economy and the world economy sort of mysteriously started to sputter. | ||
| So if you think about post-war, post-World War II, anything that is built on a growth expectation Is going to have the characteristic for example a law firm where a partner is going to have several associates under them, under him or her, trying to become partners. | ||
| So while you're growing that's possible, but when you hit steady state every one of these institutions with an embedded growth hypothesis becomes a Ponzi scheme. | ||
| And so the problem is we absorbed this throughout our country and the universities function just like that law firm where one professor is hoping to train 20 future professors over a lifetime. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we had about 8% of the country educated post-secondarily after high school, before World War II, and then we got up to about 50%. | ||
| And so that expansion Fueled a golden age, because you could do all sorts of things with promising people a future, while having them contribute their youth into a system. | ||
| And then when that stopped, between 1970 and 1980, there was sort of a panic. | ||
| And then we had to restart as-if growth, fake growth. | ||
| And you did that by offshoring, you did that by mergers, you did that by playing around with numbers. | ||
| And so the universities got caught up in that. | ||
| And that's really the problem, is that we've learned how to play the science and engineering shortage card. | ||
| There's no such thing as a long-term labor shortage in a market economy, because the wage level There's no job an American won't do. | ||
| I will literally clean your bathroom with my toothbrush if the price is right. | ||
| If the price is right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's the same way I have a Steinway shortage in my apartment. | ||
| Not because there's no Steinways to be had, but because I don't feel like shelling out for the The grand piano that I've always dreamed of. | ||
| Not cheap for a Steinway. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| What are we looking at, 25 grand or something? | ||
| Must be. | ||
| At least, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's very obvious to me that you, all of these, now we're talking about sort of social stuff, but it's all framed within a mathematical perspective. | ||
| Yeah, I sort of, I've been accused of running a social program in emulation, but doing it from a fundamental perspective, that's how I think. | ||
| Yeah, is there any part of your brain that doesn't operate in that way? | ||
| Which part? | ||
| Well, like love, for example. | ||
| Let's go deep. | ||
| You're married, you have kids. | ||
| Did you look at the prospect of love and family and all that through some sort of analogue? | ||
| No, the felt sense. | ||
| You feel tingles and shivers. | ||
| Then you can have somebody, like Bob Trivers, who I hope you'll have on the program at some point, actually officiated my brother's wedding. | ||
| He did a beautiful ten minute story of the evolutionary Basis of love and he did it very respectfully so that you | ||
| could see love emerging from the extreme needs for child care | ||
| So you can understand love And its origins in what we would call | ||
| Case selected species which have to put a huge amount of care into the offspring | ||
| However, that's not how it feels to be in love. | ||
| And so, arbitraging between the analytic and the felt sense is part of what it means to lead an examined life. | ||
| And I think that It's very strange that people expect you to choose. | ||
| Yeah, you think people don't do that well? | ||
| I feel like maybe the choice is the hard part. | ||
| So people just go to one or the other. | ||
| So you have a certain amount of people that are just purely driven by the emotion part, and we see a lot of that these days. | ||
| Or you see a certain amount of people purely driven by the analytical part. | ||
| I think you see less of them, although obviously plenty of them exist. | ||
| But that choice is one of the key things there is in life, right? | ||
| I think it is, and I think that Very often the problem is that we don't accept the compartmentalized mind. | ||
| That I don't want the space of my mind that marvels at my children to be the part of my mind necessarily that thinks about my need to out-compete the neighbors next door with my genes over there. | ||
| Right, these are separate things and should remain separate. | ||
| Right, and so that having a partition I think is usually really part of sanity that when the partitions go out most minds find that the rooms are talking to each other and you get a lot of sort of crazy interference and then you have people who are incredible at it and so our mutual friend Sam Harris I think does as good a job of anyone having | ||
| A decompartmentalized mind, but one which has a sort of grace and humanity about it and this unfailing analytic consistency. | ||
| So there are a small number of people who can do that game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm in a slightly different game. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And for those people, it does make it a little harder to act in the public space, right? | ||
| Because there's a cavalcade of craziness that they're going to have to deal with. | ||
| I think that the problem when you have a mind that doesn't mirror the construction of sort of the default, the neurotypical mind, you always have to have a shim because you're going to say things that are going to be surprising, shocking. | ||
| And in particular, one of the things I think you and I are both looking at is there is this mania for telling people what they're really thinking, what's really going on behind the eyes and between the ears. | ||
| And very often, I don't think people do a great job of modeling these more subtle constructions. | ||
| And so you just get nonsense, you get all of these accusations. | ||
| You don't understand what love is. | ||
| You think this need to know everything all the time is sort of a new need? | ||
| Are you actually less informed about love because you're talking about its evolutionary basis | ||
| or are you actually more sensitive? | ||
| And does that heighten and deepen the experience? | ||
| You think this need to know everything all the time is sort of a new need? | ||
| It seems like it's been ramped up in the last couple years where there's just so many people. | ||
| And maybe this is just a function of that we're all connected now and constantly on our phones | ||
| and all that, but just where there's so many people who are constantly, the way religion used to constantly | ||
| preach that it had the truth, I feel like now it's either politicians or demagogues | ||
| or just online personalities, just whatever, that just constantly will tell you | ||
| they know what's going on, really. | ||
| And it's like, no, you don't. | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| Well, this is the whole essence of, do you believe that life is about answers | ||
| And so, you know, it's funny, we have two people who come from the Rubinchik line, my family, the strongest analytic tradition is the Rubinchiks. | ||
| Just to clarify that for people that may understand, we did a little digging, and it seems like we may have some ancestor possibly somewhere in Eastern Europe, somewhere, something or other. | ||
| We haven't confirmed it. | ||
| Maybe Azerbaijan and Baku, we don't know. | ||
| There may be something somewhere, yeah. | ||
| Coming from the sort of Ashkenazi Eastern European Jewish background, I think that struggle is absolutely baked into the analysis. | ||
| Whether it's the dialectic, whether it's Talmudic reasoning, But, you know, walking around an object from multiple perspectives because even though you and I are both looking at the same bottle, we're not actually seeing the same object because we have different viewpoints on it. | ||
| And I think that what you and I Talk about a lot, is the need to struggle decently and gracefully in public so that people can see the thought process. | ||
| And some of those thoughts might be somewhat frightening, but they may be counterbalanced by a different thought, which actually attenuates whatever the risk is. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Well, I think that's a good segue to your boss for just a moment. | ||
| I'm not gonna make you sell him up a river, don't worry. | ||
| But you work for Peter Thiel, and he, right now, is sort of one of The few people in the public space that he went all in with Trump, he gave what I think was a spectacular speech at the RNC and talked about being openly gay and proud and he got an applause break from these people. | ||
| You know, and he's now on Trump's transition team, so obviously supporting Trump. | ||
| You publicly supported Hillary, I think somewhat begrudgingly. | ||
| I've heard you talk about it a little bit, but you supported Hillary. | ||
| That must have been an interesting spot to be in, as a public person and an intellectual, really going against your boss's very public decision. | ||
| If I can sort of unweave that frame a little bit. | ||
| Go nuts, yeah. | ||
| Fix that for me. | ||
| I actually I didn't see Peter as necessarily going all in on Trump. I saw him as | ||
| seeing novel opportunities, seeing some really great things. | ||
| I think I saw some really great things in Trump in Bernie in Hillary And I saw very dangerous things or things. | ||
| I didn't know how to interpret in all of these candidates and so I'm not I can't speak for Peter, but I think that Peter and I spent almost no time between us in anything testy or unpleasant or awkward For people who don't really know Peter personally, the media portrayal of Peter is just incredible. | ||
| There's certain topics that attract fake news. | ||
| Peter Thiel and String Theory are two topics. | ||
| We're going to get into both of those a little bit more. | ||
| But it's remarkable to me that, you know, this is a guy who I probably felt that I was 90% aligned with on most every topic. | ||
| And so I think that part of the problem is that we have this idea of, you're a Hillary supporter. | ||
| I couldn't have been more upset about Hillary as a candidate. | ||
| And what really scared me about Trump wasn't particularly some of the terrible comments or the sense that he was this incredibly divisive figure, because I actually didn't believe that he was speaking literally. | ||
| I think that what I saw was that we had built this cognitive prison Where it was very difficult to break out of it without somebody calling you a bigot, an idiot, a traitor. | ||
| There's just this incredible language and this head of steam so that if you try to think in a way that is not compatible with the New York Times or CNN or Fox even, that you're immediately swatted down as if you're a eugenicist and a Nazi. | ||
| Gordian knot with which we've been tying people I have been trying to carefully untie and I've been in a losing battle Because the New York Times can tie the knot faster than I can untie it And so what Trump came through is he just said well, you know You tell me how you're going to imprison me and then you're gonna lose that because I'm gonna slash it. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that Peter intuited that The worst fears about Trump were probably not going to be realized. | ||
| What are the odds that a guy who's lived a full life in New York City, you know, is secretly a Klansman? | ||
| It just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| So what Trump did was he trolled the hell out of the country and what we will find out now is How much of that was real, but all signs are that he wasn't taking it very seriously. | ||
| Right, which, that may say something very perverse or painful about the state of the country, but understanding it is a key part of how you move forward, right? | ||
| Like, I still see people, I think you just laid it out pretty much exactly how I think it is, whether we want it to be or not, and I still see people railing against the same You know, doing the same things that led us here. | ||
| So they get outraged over the tweet, and they're still using all the racist language, and all the homophobic language, and all this, and it's like, I still see people saying, well, Trump's a homophobe. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's a picture of him and Peter shaking hands at the table during the transition, and Peter speaking at the RNC thing, or was he secretly a white supremacist living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan all these years? | ||
| But Trump was excited about the, About getting homosexuality normalized. | ||
| I think that the Republicans... It's a belief thing, right? | ||
| Who in 2017 wants to be homophobic? | ||
| I mean, you know, I have a certain amount of homophobia from having grown up and been hit on while I was, you know, a developing young man and it turns out that really what you need is you need more dudes kissing so that everything gets normalized. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We can get some dudes in here kissing. | ||
| If it would ease the, you know. | ||
| Not before five. | ||
| It's a little early for that, yeah. | ||
| So what do we do then? | ||
| Because I agree with you that there was this sort of, there was this archetype and Trump said, | ||
| "Well, now I'm gonna play your game. | ||
| "I'm gonna blow it up." | ||
| In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that a year ago, most of us thought he probably wasn't gonna | ||
| at least win the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. | ||
| Because in retrospect, it's like, now it seems so obvious, doesn't it? | ||
| Well, I think that we actually did know that he was going to do pretty well. | ||
| And I think what we have is we have this overlay in our mind which says, if I say that I think he's going to do well, if I recognize that his energy is extreme and everyone else is kind of lackluster and frightened, Right then I'm gonna be in the Ann Coulter position where she gets asked who's gonna win and she says Donald Trump and she's a laughingstock So we do this look-ahead function where we pre-compute if I want to stay in the good graces of my group I better not say what I'm actually feeling and I think that's what actually happened. | ||
| We we knew that there was excitement and energy behind Bernie and But there wasn't reification because the New York Times, Washington Post weren't reporting on Bernie the way they were reporting on Trump. | ||
| So Trump was getting a lot of airtime because they thought he'd hang himself if they would just give him enough rope. | ||
| With Bernie they thought if we starve him for it, for coverage, the phenomenon will go away. | ||
| And I think that, you know, Peter did this amazing thing at last year's retreat where he put up a photo from Davos with Bono and maybe it was Bill Clinton and somebody dressed in African dress and he says look at the globalists and notice how dated this feels. | ||
| He said this isn't what this time is about. | ||
| He said I could be in Davos and I wanted to be here instead in the US with our team because it's gone from global to local. | ||
| And so Peter was very in touch With his feelings. | ||
| And as great of a chess-playing strategic genius as this guy is, he's also emotionally very aware. | ||
| And he realized that the feel was off, that all of this sort of Clinton Global Initiative stuff feels stale. | ||
| In fact, if globalism is going to succeed, it's probably going to be built By nationalists, because you have to have the support of where people live in order to build it, just the way peace often gets brokered by butchers and not by peaceniks. | ||
| Right, you make peace with usually some pretty bad dudes. | ||
| Yeah, if you've got blood on your hands, that's a huge plus, particularly in the Middle East. | ||
| We can do a little Middle East stuff. | ||
| But before we get there, so what do we do with all of this? | ||
| For those of us that have the trepidations about Trump, that's still, you know, I still, even though I think I'm trying to be as fair as I possibly can to him, and I think there's incredible opportunity here. | ||
| I don't think he's a white nationalist. | ||
| I don't think he cares about the gays. | ||
| I don't think he's gonna care about weed. | ||
| I think he actually might do some reforming of the prison system. | ||
| I think there's some really good opportunity here to lower taxes, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But for those of us that, for the people that are watching this that are going, well, I don't like the troll game. | ||
| I don't like this game that's being played. | ||
| What, how do you, is there any comfort in there? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| First of all, if you have... Again, this is as someone that voted for Hillary. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I'm asking you for the comfort. | ||
| Well, so, but I've been predicting, so I look, when, And I looked at a 2011 essay that I wrote on professional wrestling, about kayfabe, which is the system of deceptions. | ||
| First order, second order, tertiary, quaternary deceptions take place in wrestling. | ||
| Trump is very aware of professional wrestling, not as cheap entertainment, but as deep human psychology. | ||
| How many layers of deception and self-deception a lie within a lie, a story, persuasion, etc. | ||
| And this is why somebody like Scott Adams was able to recognize Trump's genius and Michael Moore was in touch | ||
| with this. | ||
| Trump is a next-level player and the problem is is that if you're used to to | ||
| thinking that someone is speaking literally to you, which I think in general most of us would be shocked | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| at how little speech is actually literal. | ||
| Yeah, even Obama, right? | ||
| Sure, I mean my son and I were driving to his school and Obama was talking about gun control. | ||
| My son didn't recognize the voice. | ||
| He said, I don't know who this is, but I hate him. | ||
| And I said, really? | ||
| That's a very strong emotion. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| He said, well, I don't disagree with what he's saying. | ||
| He says, but I can't stand how coercive his language is. | ||
| He's pushing me to the conclusions that I would have come to naturally. | ||
| And I find this false and I just, can you please turn it off? | ||
| And then my son went into this huge impression of Obama, which was spot-on. | ||
| How interesting. | ||
| How old is your son? | ||
| 11. | ||
| Wow, that's wild. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because I saw a little of that very early on with Obama, that he used the word notion a lot whenever he was describing his opponent's ideas. | ||
| The notion that this, the notion that the economy could work this way, or the notion... And I always thought it was such an interesting wordplay because when you say that something's just a notion, you're basically saying that ridiculous thing that that person keeps saying. | ||
| So it's like it's not allowing you to come to your conclusion, it's tipping you off before you've even gotten to where you're supposed to be. | ||
| And I love the study of language and shading. | ||
| So you have this content layer. | ||
| At the moment we're in this crazy narrative over fake news, where fake news is supposed to be limited to things that are just made up and untrue. | ||
| But the problem is they've opened this Pandora's box, which is how many different ways does their news manipulate us Into thinking something that isn't true or shading our feelings or emotions or presenting us some sort of fait accompli and not giving us any ability to get out of the deal. | ||
| And that's what's fascinating to me is that it's backfiring. | ||
| And now you even have the New York Times writing about, can you believe it? | ||
| Conservative media is calling us fake news. | ||
| And the point is, well, you correctly identified that you do fact check. | ||
| But that is not sufficient. | ||
| You cannot fact check your way to real news. | ||
| And so I think that we're going to get a lot of people a lot more sophisticated about neuro-linguistic programming, about systems of deception, about non-literal speech. | ||
| What I'm hoping this is going to converge on is an understanding that you cannot expect the truth from your government. | ||
| What you can expect is what I call adult-level fiction. | ||
| And adult-level fiction is an ability to check that somebody who's supposedly acting on your behalf is in fact acting on your behalf even if they're not able to tell you the truth. | ||
| So I don't want the CIA or the NSA to be an open book and say here's all the stuff that we're doing because that's not right. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| But I do need to know that my government isn't Using its ability to access my phone calls, to store them, and then, you know, target me if one administration doesn't like my political viewpoint. | ||
| Right, so the key question isn't, why is our government lying to us? | ||
| The government has to lie to us. | ||
| But the government should be lying to us in a way that a smart person can say, okay, I understand that I can't know what's going on, but it's not hostile to me. | ||
| It is consonant with our values. | ||
| And that's what we're missing. | ||
| We're being given, you know, Hillary was just serving up this childlike fiction. | ||
| I was thinking, nobody can possibly believe this. | ||
| You know, you have the Pulse nightclub shooting, and people are talking about gun control. | ||
| No make or descenso. | ||
| All right, I'm not done with the fake news thing yet, though, because this thing has been just sticking in my brow. | ||
| I can't get over it. | ||
| So it's pretty obvious to me that over the course of the election, we saw fake news. | ||
| We saw real fake news constantly being slammed at us. | ||
| And, you know, from leaks that were going from the Clinton campaign that were run with by CNN and, you know, with Donna Brazile, all of this stuff. | ||
| That was obviously fake. | ||
| Then the election happens, but no one said the word, the phrase fake news. | ||
| Nobody was coming up with that. | ||
| Then the election happens, and three days later, everybody, everybody, every outlet, every cable channel, everybody, everywhere is running with this idea of fake news. | ||
| Not authentic. | ||
| Not authentic. | ||
| But that synchronized effect. | ||
| Yes, so that's what I want to talk about. | ||
| So tell me about that. | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
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We don't know. | |
| When suddenly everyone across the board starts doing the same thing. | ||
| So this is a skill that we have to get very good at. | ||
| What conspiracy theorists do that gives them a bad name is they fill in the details. | ||
| We don't know what caused this inauthentic thing. | ||
| We don't know if it was a decision inside of the deep state, if it was Suddenly everyone's talking about the exact same thing. | ||
| and saying we have a credibility crisis, but there was some decision somewhere | ||
| that mushroomed out as if suddenly fake news had always been the issue. | ||
| Suddenly everyone's talking about the exact same thing. We don't know what or we don't know where it came from. | ||
| But you think it had to have coordinatedly come from something? | ||
| I don't believe that it had an authentic source. | ||
| I believe that it could mushroom and then people started reacting to it. | ||
| But I do believe that it was an inauthentic, sudden anomaly. | ||
| And it wasn't that nobody brought up fake news. | ||
| I think if you do a search you can find fake news as an issue before this. | ||
| But I believe that what happened is that there was a huge credibility crisis. | ||
| I don't believe that Donald Trump ever had a seven or sub ten percent chance of being elected. | ||
| And so this is one of the things that I was talking to Peter about, that I'm a huge fan of this Turkish economist named Timur Kuran, whose theory of preference falsification tries to understand when you're going to get a revolution, when you're not expecting it. | ||
| And so when you tell everybody, you know only The only people who support Donald Trump are backward, misogynistic, bigoted, troglodyte KKK members. | ||
| And who are you voting for? | ||
| So when you do that, of course you're going to skew the polls. | ||
| Of course nobody wants to admit because the social cost, the look-ahead function again, is very extreme. | ||
| So I knew that the election was going to be close, but I don't think anybody could have actually called It was close. | ||
| That was the best you could do. | ||
| But the media was wildly off. | ||
| Even Sam said this thing about, well, I'm going to go back to the polls and the data because what else can you do? | ||
| Well, there are a very small number of people who are able to do a bit better. | ||
| And I think that we shouldn't fault ourselves if we weren't among that group. | ||
| But after the fact, The pressure is to divert attention away from the obvious cheerleading for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| This was a foregone conclusion. | ||
| The narrative, and I think narrative-driven news, I had this tweet about the four kinds of fake news, so there was narrative-driven, algorithmic, institutional, and false news. | ||
| So let's break all those down. | ||
| So narrative is just, they're all pumping out just this, Hillary's gonna win. | ||
| That's the narrative. | ||
| Hillary is inevitable. | ||
| Okay, so that's one version. | ||
| Now the algorithmic. | ||
| Algorithmic means that I no longer have my news in the same form that you do because we're both getting it off of Twitter, off of Facebook, and those things are pointing us maybe to the traditional articles. | ||
| But it's being curated and rearranged algorithmically. | ||
| Just by how we've clicked in the past and what we've liked and all that. | ||
| So now we're getting our news From literally catered to us. | ||
| Right, but how does Facebook figure out, for example, what should go above the fold? | ||
| The analog of the first story you see when you log in. | ||
| Well, usually that's somebody's getting married, or the birth of a child. | ||
| You know, Facebook is very good at recognizing what should be in that position. | ||
| But when it comes to news stories, the key question is what does their algorithm tell them to put in front of our eyeballs? | ||
| And so you can fake the world, if you'd like, by de-emphasizing. | ||
| It's the analog of what would have previously been called burying the lead. | ||
| So that, you know, it's 12 stories deep in your feed when you're already starting to feel a little fatigued and you're just scrolling through. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So let's go to the other two and then we'll follow up on the algorithms. | ||
| So we've got narrative-driven news, we've done algorithmic There's institutional news where if you happen to be Harvard or the Institute for Advanced Study or the Brookings Institution, you can sort of release what you claim to be objective fact and you're given this extremely | ||
| Courteous reception. | ||
| And very often that news isn't really news, it's just some construct that somebody's decided that they're going to suppress some findings and accentuate others and filter reality and then do it from some perspective where it's very difficult to disagree with MIT on a topic of some technical basis. | ||
| And then you have fake news of the type that All of these other institutions would like us to synonymize. | ||
| With everything up. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And so that is just, you know, somebody's making something up and it could be in the Kremlin, it could be some teenager yucking it up, coming up with a hoax. | ||
| But they can't actually, they're not going to be able to keep fake news to just things that don't fact check. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the interesting thing is that, so wherever this started, because, you know, as I quote Carl Sagan every week on this show, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. | ||
| So I don't go to the conspiracy part. | ||
| We don't know where it started. | ||
| I'm with you on that. | ||
| But something happened where everyone starts talking about this thing. | ||
| And what I thought was interesting was how they were pinning so much of it on Breitbart. | ||
| Now Breitbart, I don't actually click Breitbart that often, every now and again someone sends me something or I see it on my Twitter feed, I don't even follow Breitbart. | ||
| But what I thought really was, what they're upset is that they lost control here. | ||
| And all Breitbart is doing is the same thing that they've all been doing. | ||
| Breitbart's just skewing things a little more either to the right or to Trump really is the... | ||
| It's not really to the right, it's really to Trumpism. | ||
| Versus what you've all been doing to the left. | ||
| You've all been doing this for so long, now you see something coming along and getting clicks, and now of course you have to say it's fake. | ||
| But it really, they weren't even doing anything different. | ||
| Well this is, the issue is you want monopoly power over fake news. | ||
| You're okay with fake news as long as it's the one that... What's our fake news? | ||
| We're faking it in a fact-checked way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're faking it by doing something that we don't know how to control and I also think it's quite possible that we were being readied for a change in the algorithms that in essence Google and Facebook and again I'm here speaking just as myself not as a representative of my company but I don't know what the relationship is between the intelligence services and these giant tech companies. | ||
| They obviously have to have a relationship. | ||
| Now the question is, is there any agreement that we're going to bury certain kinds of news sources using the algorithms so that you can't actually understand how your world is presented? | ||
| Is the algorithm open? | ||
| Or is the algorithm effectively, we'll tell you, don't call us, we'll call you. | ||
| Right, and I'm pretty sure it's the latter in almost every case. | ||
| I mean, is there anyone, do any of these big companies, as far as you know, have an open algorithm that publicly are telling us the changes as they make them? | ||
| I think we're not there yet, and I think the idea is that this is a future battle, which is how much are we allowed to know about the algorithms that construct our world for us. | ||
| For people that don't get any of this, and even when you say algorithm, I think it confuses people at a certain degree, What is the reason for an algorithm, as opposed to just the raw information constantly? | ||
| Meaning, why does Facebook do it? | ||
| Is it purely, at the end of the day, because of money for them? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, they have to give preference to certain things because they need certain things to get clicks. | ||
| Like, why not just remove the algorithm from the equation? | ||
| Everyone's got their feeds. | ||
| If you remove the algorithm, you're still left with an algorithm. | ||
| Something has to be first. | ||
| Something has to be at the top of your feed. | ||
| Right, but where you just did it by time, let's say. | ||
| Okay, so then the idea is, hey, I just had a baby, and you didn't say anything positive. | ||
| Well, I didn't see it. | ||
| Right, so we want an algorithm, I guess, is your point. | ||
| We need some sort of unifying principle to this. | ||
| And you may have something you can click to say, just give me the time order of the stories by timestamp. | ||
| But the odds that you're gonna use that are gonna go down. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| if it doesn't actually match what you want to do. | ||
| So if there were a high trust environment, which I don't think there is at the moment, | ||
| you would want your world curated as intelligently as possible for you. | ||
| But of course, how much are you paying for your Facebook subscription? | ||
|
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Well I only have a fan page, but no, I don't pay anything. | |
| Right, neither do I, and so therefore, we are not really the customers of Facebook, where the product has been repeated so many times. | ||
| And so, why should Facebook care about catering to us? | ||
| It would be much better to cater to whoever they have to make peace with, and get the minimal amount of buy-in. | ||
| Now, that's not anything against Facebook, it's just, it's a company, it's got a bottom line, and it has to figure out exactly who it's serving in order to remain profitable | ||
| and to keep growing. | ||
| Yeah, so is that part of the problem here, that we expect these social media giants to respect us, | ||
| but we are not paying them? | ||
| And thus, we have a backwards relationship. | ||
| So you see this all the time. | ||
| People say, well, Facebook took down my post about this. | ||
| And usually, I find it to be something that I'm for. | ||
| I see this a lot with ex-Muslim stuff or something like that, where they take these posts down. | ||
| Many people I've had on this show, from Faisal and Melissa Chen and others, Agad and a few others, have had posts taken down that were doing the right thing, trying to help people, try to empower free speech, all of that stuff. | ||
| But at the end of the day, Facebook is doing whatever it's doing, and you're their bench, pretty much, right? | ||
| The question is, where are you going to go? | ||
| So there's always, every year or so, there's a new Facebook competitor, maybe there'll be a new Twitter competitor. | ||
| So at the moment, none of these alternate efforts have been successful in taking the eyeballs away, because people are mostly not riveted by what you and I are riveted. | ||
| They want their world presented to them in a pleasant fashion and they're not terribly focused on mind control. | ||
| I think that's the quote of the whole episode for sure. | ||
|
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Right there. | |
| So this is directly related to what you said earlier about that you want your government to, you accept I think is what you said, that your government is not going to tell you everything. | ||
| But you want it done to you in a sort of mature, sensible way that you can make sense of. | ||
| But when you take, now, social media companies and Twitter and all that, and you take the relationships that they have with the government that you just referenced, now we're starting to get into some other stuff, right? | ||
| Because where is the honesty there? | ||
| How do we even know who to go to to filfer some honesty out of that? | ||
| Well, I think that this has to do with, are you getting a fiction That befits your level of sophistication. | ||
| So, you know, the princess cannot necessarily feel the pea when something is wrong. | ||
| Maybe it's a pea, maybe it's a golf ball, maybe it's a watermelon. | ||
| So she doesn't usually have that kind of acuity. | ||
| But many of us can tell something is wrong in my news. | ||
| This story is not being reported the way I would expect. | ||
| I'm not seeing, let's take Twitter. | ||
| Milo did some stuff that I wasn't thrilled with, but I was getting death threats on Twitter, and Twitter wasn't terribly worried about really sick stuff. | ||
| So you're not defending the specifics of what Milo may or may not have done? | ||
| All I know is that something is bananas about singling out Somebody, you know, Milo's playing a half intellectual, half troll, chimeric game. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know why he and his ilk choose to do that. | ||
| There's a part of this movement which says that free speech is best advanced by being outrageous and offensive. | ||
| And there's a different wing of it, which I think I relate much more to, which says free speech, there's so many controversial things that need to be said and discussed. | ||
| Why would you pick You know, trolling somebody about their weight, you know, or their attractiveness. | ||
| I don't get that. | ||
| Now, with that said, I'm trying to back out, well, what is Twitter really worried about? | ||
| I don't think it's safety. | ||
| There's a lot of unsafe stuff that they won't clean up. | ||
| So then what is it? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| And this is the point, which is I hope what we're going to learn is how to make less extraordinary claims. | ||
| I know something is wrong. | ||
| I don't know what exactly is wrong. | ||
| I know enough to say this is unnatural. | ||
| I don't know enough to say the problem is that Jack had a meeting at the NSA and they read him the Riot Act. | ||
| That's where you get into territory that I'm just not comfortable with because I don't know. | ||
| Knowing is kind of important. | ||
| But assume that you can know about an abstraction, but you can't know about the specifics. | ||
| And I think this is a place where computer scientists and mathematicians feel very comfortable, which is that very often we deal with an abstraction that can't be constructed. | ||
| So I know that there's a problem. | ||
| I don't know what the nature of the problem is, just the way I know that fake news came out too quickly, too unified. | ||
| You know, John Stewart used to do this. | ||
| I remember a particular moment where he went and took video from each of the Sunday | ||
| morning talk shows and There were like ten Republicans and each of them used the | ||
| phrase I think he's running away from the top of the ticket | ||
| He seems to be running away from the top of the ticket He might be running away from the top of the ticket. Yeah, | ||
| when you hear the same weird phrase Yeah, ten times out of ten mouths | ||
| You don't need to know Exactly that there was a talking points memo that it came | ||
| out from this email address It was broadcast to these people and that they fanned out | ||
| and then use Perseveration by just repeating and repeating to make | ||
| something as if true - Mm-hmm. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| But it's enough to know something is artificial. | ||
| So I think it's really important that we all get very good at saying, I can tell that this is artificial and I don't know what caused it. | ||
| So basically what you're saying is we're in the Matrix here and a few of us are kind of starting to see a little bit of the code shaking out because it's kind of, it's gotten, it's gotten, it got fat on itself I guess. | ||
| We were watching a magic performance that has been performed every four years since 1980 at least, which is when I sort of have my first adult memories of politics. | ||
| And suddenly somebody threw on the lights, and we see trap doors, and we see wires, and we see false bottoms of boxes, and everybody's looking at this saying, you're kidding me, right? | ||
| So with the lights off, it was a believable show for many people. | ||
| Now some of us who had slightly better night vision were looking at the wires in the dark, but now I feel like I've mostly lost whatever special edge I had. | ||
| That's scary, I suppose. | ||
| No, it's actually, it's wonderful. | ||
| I've never had so many people to talk to about the obvious inauthenticity of what are considered to be the pillars, you know, in particular of the Fourth Estate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that the irony? | ||
| Is that we have to use all of these things? | ||
| This very show is on YouTube. | ||
| There's an algorithm involved. | ||
| Well, we may be demonetized. | ||
| I mean, we could be. | ||
| I mean, look, I've said, you know, this YouTube does this demonetization thing. | ||
| They demonetized all of the videos that I did with John McCain. | ||
| John McCain, who is a senator, who is on every cable news show every week, so the networks deem him worthy of monetization. | ||
| YouTube decided to demonetize that. | ||
| YouTube demonetized our videos with Douglas Murray. | ||
| I think it's inauthentic. | ||
| It's inauthentic and it shows political bias because there's certain topics that they don't want you to be talking about. | ||
| Well, that's what they say. | ||
| I don't know, it's possible that that's really what they're doing, and it's possible that it's something else. | ||
| And again, it's the same basic pattern. | ||
| Don't speculate to the point where you're making an extraordinary claim with requiring proof that you don't have. | ||
| But I would not, let's put it this way, it is not inconsistent with the weirdness of demonetization, in particular your situation with John McCain, let's say, that it's not really about For the record, we did contact them after the McCain thing and they did re-monetize our videos. | ||
| so the princess feels an X, solve for X. | ||
| Yeah, for the record, we did contact them after the McCain thing, and they did re-monetize our videos. | ||
| So that, to me, shows either a fault in the algorithm or a fault in-- | ||
| Or they're driving your costs, where the idea is that you can't afford | ||
| to do that repeatedly with every single video. | ||
| Yeah, right, because we can't put the manpower in-- | ||
| So we don't know. - To check that. | ||
| Well, what do you think about that also, that there's a level of censorship | ||
| that's a newer level, I think, which isn't that you can't say these things, | ||
| because there's virtually nothing that right now we can't say. | ||
| I certainly would let you say whatever you wanna say, and people know my policy, I let my guests hang themselves, so feel free. | ||
| Is that what I'm doing? | ||
| Maybe you've done it already and you don't even know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that the new level of censorship is actually that they're showing us ways to silence ourselves. | ||
| So they'll say, all right, if you talk about ISIS or radical Islam or whatever, we're gonna not monetize it. | ||
| They're not censoring you, but you're gonna self-censor if you have to make a living doing it. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why we're on Patreon. | ||
| I'm beholden to people of a gajillion different political views and not just to the algorithm. | ||
| If I was beholden to the algorithm, maybe I would have to do things a little bit differently. | ||
| Or in the case of Twitter, it's like, well, we got rid of Milo. | ||
| Because of hate, or whatever they eventually said, but they verified Richard Spencer, who's the white supremacist leader of the alt-right, and they verified the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated goal is worldwide jihad, basically. | ||
| So there's some odd thing that none of us can grasp here. | ||
| Right, and I'm just going one extra step beyond that, which is I think a lot of this is some kind of decision making that is not adult level fiction. | ||
| I think you've said it beautifully. | ||
| Censorship, if it has to be done with the heavy hand of the state or through the fascia that binds media to universities to government, is going to be very inefficient relative to self-censorship. | ||
| So the key thing that has been relied upon is that you are always looking at self-neutralization. | ||
| You're going to take yourself off the chessboard if you attempt to lead an authentic life, if you attempt to observe things that you're supposed to not be observing. | ||
| And, you know, as long as you're willing to not have an income, And be called every dirty name in the book and put your personal relationships at risk. | ||
| Of course, it's a free country. | ||
| What's exciting is the idea that many of us are saying, yeah, I don't think you're going to be able to carry this. | ||
| I'm just looking at my watch. | ||
| This is a losing game for you. | ||
| So all of us, you're going to call us all out as being creeps and weirdos and conspiracy theorists and nutcases. | ||
| Well, there's nothing Remotely nutty about this conversation. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the irony and I said this in the direct message at the top of the show It's like now what a lot of these people have done is painted themselves into a corner because if you're if your Rationale is that everyone who disagrees with you is a bigot or a racist or some other sort of weirdo or blah blah blah well if they start doing good things How can you say that? | ||
| Racist or a bigot is now doing good things So you have to then either turn to violence or some other nefarious thing because you can't. | ||
| If you called Trump Hitler for two years and then things start getting better under Trump, well now you're in a real intellectual box that is of your own doing. | ||
| This is what's so exciting. | ||
| So this is what Scott Adams was talking about. | ||
| Is that what you would say when he kept talking about the opportunity that will present itself after this? | ||
| And I think that that's where the focal point of a Peter Thiel or a Scott Adams or a Donald Trump was, | ||
| which is, or you know, another name, which there's nobody I get more flack for | ||
| than saying anything positive about Mike Cernovich for me. | ||
| And you know, I talk to Mike because he is a new phenomenon. | ||
| So whether you like him or you hate him, to ignore him is to mispredict the election, right? | ||
| Because he was on to something about what has changed. | ||
| And I've said that publicly many times, and I had him on the show, which was... And I find a lot of the stuff that he's done troubling, and he's very respectful. | ||
| He says, like, I understand that this isn't your cup of tea and you wouldn't carry this out, but, you know, I don't believe for a minute that he ever expected to really play with the alt-right past the election. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so you're starting to see him say, OK, that was then, this is now. | ||
| Trump is doing the same thing. | ||
| Lock her up. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| A lot of these people had a focal point that was past the election, was non-literal. | ||
| And it was a question of how do we put together some crazy coalition that does not naturally exist in the minds of a consultant so that we can win, and then once we've won, then we'll settle out all of these problems. | ||
| And so that was kind of a buried feature of the terrain, so you had all of these people who said, this is just disingenuous. | ||
| We're trying to win here. | ||
| We're trying to get a clean slate, and that's what Trump got. | ||
| So in a way, The Cernoviches of the world, and maybe the Milos to a certain extent, and the Trumps, they used the white supremacists. | ||
| I don't believe that there are a lot of them actually, certainly not that have any institutional power, but my suspicion all along was that Trump was just using whatever the wink he was giving to that group was just a use to get power, and now I don't think he's going to be throwing any favors to the white supremacists. | ||
| I go into a little bit more dangerous territory. | ||
| So, you know, as a Jewish American, I don't relate to the European Christian identity. | ||
| However, I think it's absolutely fascinating that you have this identity politics game, which every group can play with the exception of Christians of European descent, particularly male and if they're doing well. | ||
| And then if that group tries to have an identity - Now they're evil. | ||
| They're white nationalists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, so if you're white, that's one thing. | ||
| If you're a nationalist, that's okay too. | ||
| If you're both white and nationalist, you're the living embodiment of evil. | ||
| And so this deranged the conversation. | ||
| We could not actually talk through it because in particular, the left was very focused | ||
| on the idea that identity politics is compensatory for the wrongdoings of one particular group. | ||
| And then there was this like ordering, as you say, about the victim Olympics. | ||
| Yeah, the oppression Olympics. | ||
| And that is part of our problem, which is I'm not particularly threatened by somebody who says, I come from a European tradition, I'm proud of the Enlightenment, I feel great burden for wrong things that we did during the colonial era, but this is who I am, and if that person wants to hear Merry Christmas, if that person wants to hear all of the positive things done by Christians of European descent, I think it's | ||
| It's dangerous and stupid to keep poking this tiger in the eye saying bigot, racist, whatever. | ||
| What do you think it's going to do? | ||
| Is it just going to sit there infinitely? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, well look, obviously I agree, and that's why I heard, you know, when Cernovich was first starting, I thought, I don't know exactly what he's saying. | ||
| Some of it seems kind of nuts, but this is someone that's relevant, so let me talk to him. | ||
| And then I talked to Milo, and I talked to Scott Adams, and I thought they were all addressing this group of people. | ||
| And now, look, now Trump's in power, so now When January 20th rolls around and people are rightly mocking the Trump administration, when they're fighting the power, will these guys be so against political correctness? | ||
| We shall see. | ||
| I guess what my take on it is that I think Trump had a brilliant idea about how to put together a demographic that could win. | ||
| And if you think about it, it's a little demography, whether it was Lee Atwater or Karl Rove who found the excerpt, and nobody knew that there was something between rural and suburban that you could actually play to. | ||
| So Trump found something that was the analog of the excerpt. | ||
| And now the thing is, okay, how do I swap out the least pleasant parts of that demographic And replace it with people who are newly converted, who say, you know, I was worried that there was going to be a Holocaust, and now I see that this is actually potentially Israel's greatest supporter. | ||
| You know, whether that's evangelicals or the small but powerful Jewish group. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So as Trump starts to accumulate some wins or some losses, he will find out whether he can afford to replace the least savory parts of the coalition. | ||
| And you know, Hillary wasn't right, I think, about it. | ||
| Half, you know, being deplorables. | ||
| That was an idiotic statement on her part. | ||
| But there was some tiny portion of out-and-out deplorables who thought they'd found their savior in Donald Trump. | ||
| I think it's probably going to be a very rude awakening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My thing with Trump all along was I kept saying, I don't know what his moral center is. | ||
| I get the troll game. | ||
| I get the, he saw this new coalition, all of that stuff. | ||
| How do you View his moral center. | ||
| Do you have a sense, and does that scare you if you don't know what it is? | ||
| To the extent that I don't know how much we know about any of these. | ||
| No, no, absolutely. | ||
| So if you go back to why I was so angry at Hillary throughout the campaign, but still voting for her, and I said very little that was really against Trump, the issue was just that Trump's variance, the possible things he will be able to do, This is a guy who is quite likely to be a mixture of the best and worst president we've ever had. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so it's not that he's just bad or that, you know, because he is disingenuous and he's playing this next level game with persuasion. | ||
| But the problem is, is that the variance is so large and the tolerances are so small that that's what's terrifying to me. | ||
| It's just, I have no idea what this guy's going to do. | ||
| He's kept his cards very close to his chest. | ||
| By the way, family run businesses can keep secrets about how to do business that if you're a public company, it's effectively impossible or illegal to do. | ||
| And so I believe that one thing that's happened is that a lot of the world's most powerful knowledge is held by groups that are traditionally very insular. | ||
| And we have this idea that the world's knowledge is available, but I think that actually a lot of very subtle voodoo is held closely, either by family businesses, or the Parsis in India, or Orthodox Jews. | ||
| So these very insular clans, including organized crime, have some knowledge about how the world works that can't be shared in public. | ||
| And I think that Trump shows all evidence of being a family business kind of a guy, and they've kept certain truths and certain moves, and some of those may be ethical, some of them may be sub-ethical, I don't know. | ||
| But you're looking at a new kind of object, and the number of people who haven't updated to say, this is no clown, this is no fool, this is no idiot, this is a next level player, pay attention. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the thing, it's like I keep seeing people say the same, oh he's an idiot, he just says whatever he thinks. | ||
| You'd have to be insane actually. | ||
| To really think that's what's going on here at this point. | ||
| Well, this is the thing I always deal with with Peter, where one of our most frequent conversations is, is this thing in the office a bug or a feature? | ||
| And you think it's just a bug, we're doing something wrong, we should institute a meeting or a policy. | ||
| It turns out that a lot of the things around the office are features, not bugs. | ||
| And, you know, I often liken Trump to intellectual drunken boxing. | ||
| You've got some guy who's kind of bobbing and weaving and he should be really easy to hit and then, you know, suddenly you've got a boot on your thorax and you're thinking, oh, he got lucky. | ||
| How many times do you want to play? | ||
| Right, how many times in a row? | ||
| I think we are over an hour in. | ||
| We're gonna keep going here. | ||
| I have not looked at these ones, which I always say is the sign of a good interview, but I have to look at them because I wanna talk some math stuff that's probably gonna go over my head, and some of these phrases, by the way, are spectacular. | ||
| Let's start with the E8 and Titz-Freudenthal magic square. | ||
| I googled that. | ||
| Titz-Freudenthal, very funny to me. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| I was in math for a long time. | ||
| Nobody ever made the obvious joke. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| And it was all male group. | ||
| I swear to God. | ||
| What does that say about? | ||
| Math people and humor. | ||
| That we can be trusted. | ||
| Apparently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, all right, so I want to knock out just a couple just interesting mathematical theories and some other stuff, and I have a few here. | ||
| Let's start there, because I want to impart some of this, because as I said at the top, this is not my department, knowing about this kind of stuff. | ||
| So what in God's name is the E8 in Titz, Freud, and Thal magic square? | ||
| You're already looking around because you want an example of something. | ||
| So you have these, you have these Origami! | ||
| Very symmetrical origami shapes. | ||
| Yeah, my grandma made them. | ||
| So this is living in three dimensions, and we would call its symmetries a group. | ||
| And the problem is that there are very strange isolated sets of symmetries that don't act in three dimensions, but act in very high dimensions. | ||
| So 52, 133. | ||
| The largest of these strange objects is called E8. | ||
| And it acts in 248 dimensions. | ||
| So it's like the monolith in 2001. | ||
| It shows up. | ||
| We have no knowledge of why it's there. | ||
| The average human being is never worried about it because they don't know it exists. | ||
| We have no idea what it's symmetrizing because it only seems to symmetrize itself. | ||
| And the Titts-Freudenthal Magic Square is this collection of symmetries that are generated by some procedure and it's almost as if it's a message from pure design, from pure order and nobody knows what it means. | ||
| And so this is something that we should be worrying about. | ||
| This is like, you know, if I were running the NSF I would say why are we not putting money into these four very strange objects called F4, E6, E7 and E8 to try to figure out what They are telling us. | ||
| We know that they're at the center of mathematics and at another level they're like the platypuses to mammals. | ||
| They're so different and so strange that we have effectively no understanding of them. | ||
| This is gonna maybe sound like a stupid question, but, so this is understood purely at a theoretical level, or this is understood at a literal level? | ||
| Like, this idea has been proven? | ||
| We can construct them. | ||
| Oh, okay, that's what I'm asking. | ||
| Mathematically, but we can't fit them in here. | ||
| So we can't build, I can't build you a model. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we don't know, all indications are that these should be absolutely central To mathematics, and maybe even to physics. | ||
| A friend of ours, also a rival who lives in Maui, has built a theory of everything around this object E8. | ||
| We know that the symmetries of our universe seem to generate all four of the fundamental forces. | ||
| And so symmetries and physics are closely intertwined. | ||
| Now the question is, Does physics somehow come out from these very strange objects? | ||
| So do you start with the most complicated, simple objects of a type and then try to recover our world? | ||
| Or do you try instead to start with an extremely simple object and have the complexity of our world emerge? | ||
| I've taken that route, trying to think about physics. | ||
| These are things that people should at least know exist, and with your viewer base, hopefully a couple of kids are going to Google these things and say, Holy crap. | ||
| And spend the rest of their life trying to bring it home for us. | ||
| Or they're gonna go, man, Dave's looking at him like he has no freaking clue what he's saying. | ||
| Nobody does. | ||
| You're in the same boat as I am. | ||
| I mean, all I can picture as you're talking about this, I can understand what you're saying in a certain sense, but I am picturing the monolith from 2001. | ||
| So it's the idea of something that is packed with itself or something. | ||
| Something is so perfect and strange and with no, it doesn't come with an instruction manual. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We just, we can prove that it's there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So for example, Plato had these five solids, Platonic solids. | ||
| Turns out that in dimension four, all of them have an analog, but there's a new one that had never been thought of and wasn't understood until the 1800s that it existed mathematically, called the 24 cell. | ||
| So these are these puzzles Where, you know, if you were a religious-minded person, you might think that these are messages from a creator that have not been decoded. | ||
| And if you're a different sort of person, you think, well, these are undoubtedly structural elements that have not been tied together with the major themes of mathematics. | ||
| So probably they unlock something amazing. | ||
| And if you were Indiana Jones, you would try to find them, but you wouldn't necessarily... That's beautiful, I hadn't thought of that. | ||
| ...believe in them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think he kind of believed in a lot of this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, and so that's one of the things is that it takes a certain level of confidence to say I'm going to pursue this because there's no indication, you know, what are you going to get from the monolith? | ||
| Is it going to make better toast? | ||
| Right, or do you become one with the universe? | ||
| Exactly, you just end up in a bed as an old man and somewhere beyond the Sirens of Titan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You mentioned The Theory of Everything, which was a movie last year, but also is beyond just the movie. | ||
|
unidentified
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What the hell is The Theory of Everything? | |
| Well, it's the source code. | ||
| You and I are talking in something that I'm referencing, The Matrix, called The Construct. | ||
| And The Construct isn't some Fake computer program. | ||
| It's the geometric underpinnings of what we would call quantum field theory and the theory of gravity. | ||
| And these two theories are known to be flawed in some sense. | ||
| And so they're not complete. | ||
| And yet there's no way that we currently have of having a single graceful and elegant theory that particularizes to both of these That is what obsesses me, which is we are the artificial intelligence that lives inside of this differential geometric construct. | ||
| And our job is to figure out what is our own source code. | ||
| So we sort of did this at one level with let's say DNA or the theory of selection from Darwin. | ||
| So humans have been trying to figure out progressively, okay, what is this place? | ||
| Where are we having this conversation with the Rubin Report? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You mean it's not just LA, it might be deeper than that? | ||
| Oh, it's deeper. | ||
| Yeah, it could be Simi Valley, you don't know. | ||
| But I think that what it is, is it's the greatest puzzle ever. | ||
| This is the main story. | ||
| Can we understand each level of our source code right down to the machine code? | ||
| Do you think we can actually get there? | ||
| Well, that's an awkward question because I think that I'm I'm I'm gambling that I've broken through something which could could put me pretty close So let's talk about that thing. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
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This was about three years ago Three and a half. | |
| Oh, I said about three. | ||
| Yeah, I know you're a mathematician has to be very precise So, can you explain what you did about three years ago that flipped some of Einstein's stuff? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So when I was a young guy I watched string theory start to bubble up. | ||
| In 1984 there was a discovery and there was a lot of desperation because for about 10 years theoretical physics had been stalled and I looked at string theory and I said, this is fascinating, it's really interesting, it doesn't feel right. | ||
| And I bet the whole field is gonna go down this path. | ||
| Give me String Theory 101, just for... String Theory 101 says that your concept of the world is not a theory of waves built on idealized little balls, but instead you imagine some sort of rubber band-like geometric structures, and then you build waves in some sense on top of that rather than on point particles. | ||
| And very quickly it starts to get greedy and it demands, I want to live in 26 dimensions or I want to live in 10 dimensions, maybe 11. | ||
| I want to have these super symmetric aspects, which has to do with a symmetry between force and matter. | ||
| And the problem is, is that it feels intellectually like a check kiting scheme where you're constantly repairing something, but you're opening up a new can of worms. | ||
| And I don't think that's solvent at the moment. | ||
| Nobody's figured out how to get this game to close and to rejoin what we think of as experimentally verified physics. | ||
| So I think I was early saying this is madness and I went into mathematics in order to avoid what I saw as like the tulip bubble of string theory. | ||
| And so what I believed was that actually the hardest thing is to unthink Einstein. | ||
| Because Einstein laid the groundwork. | ||
| When we talk about string theory, we still think about space and time as space time. | ||
| And there's something wrong at that level, but there's nothing to correct. | ||
| It's so elementary. | ||
| That it's as if there's no room to fix him. | ||
| You'd have to untie a gajillion other things, basically. | ||
| Or so it seems, right? | ||
| And so what I did was I tried to spot a couple of things that people had, in my opinion, misthunk about the geometric underpinnings. | ||
| There were some discoveries in the mid-1970s By Jim Simons, the world's most successful hedge fund manager, and C.N. | ||
| Yang, arguably the greatest living theoretical physicist, where they figured out a dictionary between mathematics, particularly geometry, and theoretical physics, which has spawned a revolution that is now 40 years old, right? | ||
| And so some of the equations that came out of that I saw as capable of of replacing Einstein's field equations, which are very elegant and again have this feature of locking out any attempt to play with them. | ||
| So if you think about the world that we see around us as currently understood by physics, there are three main equations. | ||
| Einstein field equations, there's the souped up Maxwell's equations called Yang-Mills, and then there's something called the Dirac equation for matter. | ||
| Those three equations are, in some sense, provably the simplest equations in their classes. | ||
| So we're a little bit stumped because it feels like, OK, there's nowhere to go. | ||
| We've searched the room for our keys. | ||
| We cannot find them. | ||
| And we can almost say that they can't be here. | ||
| But that's not quite true. | ||
| So the way I saw it is that physics conceived of a battle between Einstein and Bohr, relativity and quantum mechanics. | ||
| And in fact, what we found was that Einstein was derived from a kind of geometry called Riemannian geometry. | ||
| And only recently, in the 1970s, did we find out that quantum mechanics seems to come from a different geometry, from a guy named Erichsmann, so Erichsmannian geometry. | ||
| And so what I did is I said, I don't think it's a battle between Einstein and Bohr. | ||
| I think it's a battle between Riemann and Erichsmann. | ||
| And the question is, is there any geometry known That can incorporate the advantages of both of these two different kinds of geometries. | ||
| And generically there isn't. | ||
| But in a very special case, you can marry them and get something new. | ||
| And when I was in graduate school, we thought there were only 16 particles in what we call a generation that mostly makes up this construct. | ||
| But it turned out that neutrinos had a little bit of mass, and that meant that there was an extra possible particle from 15 to 16 particles. | ||
| So we thought 15, now 16. | ||
| And if you have 2 to the n particles, so in this case 2 to the 4th, there's a new kind of geometry that combines Erismanian geometry and Riemannian geometry. | ||
| That might govern our world. | ||
| And so what I believe is that physicists have an economic incentive to study the generic cases, because that's what you can build a career on. | ||
| But our world may be the most particular of cases. | ||
| And so it's sort of a one-way suicide pact. | ||
| Either it's going to work or it isn't. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And so I went a non-economic route, which was sort of self-destructive. | ||
| But then I wound up Eric, I am not going to pretend that I fully understood all of that, but I got some of it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That's a start, right? | ||
| You got to start somewhere. | ||
| I'm doing like the Einstein thing. | ||
| You got to start somewhere. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And we'll go from there. | ||
| All right, so I got one more for you. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The EDGE question, which is a question that goes out to about 200 public intellectuals per year. | ||
| Is public intellectuals fair to say? | ||
| It's always kind posers, fakers, and blowhards. | ||
| A bunch of schnooks get this question. | ||
| John Brockman does a beautiful job of assembling some of the more interesting minds, and I somehow snuck in, and I've remained in every year but one for the last seven or so years. | ||
| So every year, at the end of the year, he sends out this question to all of these people, and he asks them to respond, and then they post all their answers publicly. | ||
| You were one of the 200 or so people. | ||
| I want to get the question absolutely right. | ||
| The edge question of the year of 2016 was what scientific term or concept should be more widely known? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What was your answer to that? | ||
| So I deliberated. | ||
| It's very similar to the question he asked in 2011. | ||
| What would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit? | ||
| And I said professional wrestling and kayfabe because my wife told me I might as well take the risk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But so this year what I did... You were definitely right about the professional wrestling thing because you explained it with Trump. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| In 2017, I chose Russell Conjugation. | ||
| And Russell Conjugation was, so we were talking privately before about the need to push out new language to understand our world. | ||
| Okay, I'm glad you're ending with this. | ||
| I was going to do a bonus thing with you, so we'll do it right now. | ||
| Okay, so the thing that I was searching for was what word should I use that sounds like synonym Where two words are content synonyms, but maybe emotionally antonyms. | ||
| So a good one is think and whistleblower. | ||
| And so I asked this question on Quora, and people said, oh, it's loaded speech. | ||
| I said, no, no, no, that's too general. | ||
| Finally, somebody, I think in Florida, wrote in and said, you're looking for emotive conjugation or Russell conjugation. | ||
| Turns out Bertrand Russell had been here earlier. | ||
| And in 1948, he was on the BBC, and he said, let's look at the construction, I am firm, you are obstinate, he, she, or it is a pig-headed fool. | ||
| And that was just a moment where I said, oh my gosh, I don't realize that I have been given no extra information about the three conjugations that he's gone through, and yet I feel differently. | ||
| I like the fact that somebody is firm and steadfast, and I dislike the fact that somebody is pig-headed. | ||
| And then I realized that this could actually be weaponized as part of an arms race. | ||
| That maybe the newspapers were in fact conjugating President Strongman Dictator. | ||
| And so I remembered this very strange phrase from years past. | ||
| Panamanian Strongman, Manuel Noriega. | ||
| And I thought, who would come up with a construction that awkward And always invariant. | ||
| And then everyone repeats it. | ||
| And then everyone uses it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Hawkish, he's hawkish. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or a controversial businessman was applied to a friend of mine, Declan Ganley, who had fought the Lisbon Treaty in the EU. | ||
| And at some point they removed controversial businessman, so he just became businessman Declan Ganley. | ||
| And so what I came to understand is that the big boys don't play around with faking the facts. | ||
| What they realized is that we have multiple opinions on everything. | ||
| But our emotional state selects which opinion. | ||
| And the person who figured this out is Frank Luntz. | ||
| And Frank Luntz is a Republican pollster. | ||
| There's a video of him where he asks people, you know, what do you think about Undocumented workers. | ||
| Oh, you know, they're doing a great job and we have to recognize their contribution. | ||
| Well, do you support illegal alien? | ||
| No, no, no, they should be deported. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In an instant. | ||
| And then you see that the mind doesn't see itself. | ||
| It's having two reactions to death tax and estate tax. | ||
| It's the same object. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And so we are both for and against everything. | ||
| And so while we're watching information, They're not looking at information. | ||
| They're looking at the emotional shading because our emotions pick out which of our multiple opinions we're actually going to act on. | ||
| And so what I'm pointing to here is that this is the language that you need to get underneath the constructed world that you're presented with. | ||
| And what I hope is that this essay is going to show people that you can code up a computer program to crawl text against the table of Russell conjugates to figure out what the exact bias is of any new source. | ||
| I don't need to know about Breitbart is conservative. | ||
| Let me crawl it. | ||
| Let's just look at the buzzwords. | ||
| Let's look at the language. | ||
| Write a Python program, use regular expressions, grab the text, match it against the table, and I'll tell you Exactly what you're being told to feel. | ||
| Irrespective, you can be trusted with the knowledge. | ||
| What you can't be trusted with is your feelings. | ||
| Because the feelings determine the opinion. | ||
| And so this is the great binary weapon. | ||
| The information superhighway had very little effect relative to what we were expecting. | ||
| Because it needs the second emotional component. | ||
| There's no emotional superhighway to go next to it. | ||
| This is so fascinating because it's so everything that's happening right now, and it actually does, maybe this is the unifying principle of our entire conversation, because it fits within the fake news thing. | ||
| It fits within the algorithm thing. | ||
| It fits within trying to talk about, talk about honestly, talk honestly about difficult issues. | ||
| I mean, it's all, it's all right there. | ||
| Well, think about it like this. | ||
| If you're going to trust somebody like a physician to put you under and operate on you, you want to have a lot of previous discussion so that you feel that person is aligned with you. | ||
| What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get The power tools into the hands of the people who've not been trusted with them. | ||
| And to say, hey, I wanna upgrade my relationship. | ||
| I don't really wanna kill the New York Times. | ||
| I want the New York Times to learn how to respect people who are as smart or smarter than the editors who drive the narratives, than the reporters who go out and report. | ||
| And I want them to come to see themselves as part of the problem and part of the story. | ||
| Which is, please stop with the editorial headlines. | ||
| Yeah, everything's editorialized now. | ||
| Right and stop with the narratives and you're going to have to be in partnership because you don't have the gatekeeping ability anymore. | ||
| And previously we democratized information but we kept turning to the New York Times. | ||
| Please tell me how to feel. | ||
| Those aren't revolutions in Tahrir Square. | ||
| Those are demonstrations. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so I was the one who was off of social media. | ||
| I was saying, I'm watching a revolution. | ||
| But in New York, when I went to a party, people would say, what are you talking about? | ||
| It's a demonstration. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so these conjugates... Then they realized after Mubarak went down that it was a revolution. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| No? | ||
| This is the amazing part about it. | ||
| It's only when you actually hear the authoritative source that you've empowered to switch the language that you actually feel safe. | ||
| Because what happens is if you just take what you see and then you go into your social group, You will find that you will be instantly ostracized. | ||
| And so what we've been, we've been depending on the New York Times, not for information, we've been depending upon it for to tell us what's safe to feel. | ||
| With whom should I empathize? | ||
| Who should I consider a pariah? | ||
| Who should I hug to my bosom? | ||
| And this is the thing that we're now going to break through. | ||
| So 2016 was the year when that started to crumble. | ||
| Yeah, so let's just go through a couple words that we've discussed and that you've been part of. | ||
| So first off, the word bigotier. | ||
| I had Tim Ferriss on and I think he came up with the phrase when you were on his podcast. | ||
| And basically it was this idea of what these social justice warriors are doing is not good. | ||
| They are finding bigotry everywhere and they are cheering bigotry because that is the ultimate virtue signaling goodness. | ||
| Well, it's a hunting license for people that you disagree with, right? | ||
| Anybody I can label a bigot, I'm allowed to hunt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I love the fact that I've been pushing it out a little bit now and I see it starting to gain a little traction. | ||
| So that's one. | ||
| And then one that you actually came up with. | ||
| On Sam Harris's podcast was steel manning, which I thought was not mine. | ||
| Oh, that's not no no no. | ||
| Oh, I'm giving I'm giving you who no no no that comes from Sort of the rationality community that I run with I'm a huge on attribution. | ||
| I think it's important. | ||
| Oh absolutely They taught it to me the tribute. | ||
| Oh all right, so do you know who actually came up with it? | ||
| I think I first heard it The first person I heard use it powerfully was Jan Tallinn who is a brilliant Estonian who coded up Skype and just an all-around very deep thinker. | ||
| Well now I know you're very honest because I was attributing it to you. | ||
| Much as I wish I could claim credit. | ||
| I think that, for example, one thing I've been focused on is long-short positions, so the idea that your long support for Muslims and your short support for Islamists, where those things sound very similar to most people, but the idea of pulling apart Something that's good from something that sounds similar to it, but is in fact very dangerous, is something that we are going to be doing. | ||
| And that's, I think, one of the things that we're going to give as our gift to the dialogue. | ||
| How do you hold these nuanced positions? | ||
| And we've talked before, but there seem to be about 20, 25 people who can try to do this in public without falling off the A-frame roof where they're dancing on rationality. | ||
| and if you fall this direction you end up as a troglodyte, and if you end up this direction, | ||
| you end up with political correctness. | ||
| So almost no one can manage to do this because the forces are making it impossible. | ||
| So I think that long short thinking, which is taking the marketplace of ideas | ||
| and treating it as we treat the marketplace of investment. | ||
| Of anything else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, all right, I love that. | ||
| I'm gonna start using that. | ||
| Let's just backtrack though to steel manning real quick, even though you didn't come up with it. | ||
| But I think it's such an important piece of what's going on here, | ||
| because we know that in the public space, there are so many people who do the reverse of that. | ||
| They straw manning. | ||
| But this is-- | ||
| And steel manning is basically laying out your opposition's ideas in the clearest, most concise ways | ||
| so that you can attack them properly, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the idea. | ||
| You are steelmanning their position so that you can then disassemble it fairly and honestly, as opposed to what we see so many people doing these days, which is making up a person's position and then attacking the nun. | ||
| Right, so I talk about liberal clairvoyance, where a lot of the left believes that if you state even a little bit of your position, oh, I know why you hold that position, because you secretly dislike this and you're for that terrible thing. | ||
| So in this idiom, one of the things is that I look at very smart people. | ||
| I think Glenn Greenwald is a very smart guy. | ||
| I like a lot of stuff that he's done. | ||
| I think Reza Aslan could be very impressive. | ||
| And what happens with these folks is that they strawman repeatedly and they try to find the most powerful argument for their readership. | ||
| And you look at Sam and Sam, whatever you think his faults may be, is frequently trying to steelman somebody who is strawmanning his position. | ||
| And that is the sine qua non of, that's the ante to get into the higher level conversations. | ||
| And I know I'm going to take a tremendous amount of guff on Twitter for that, but that's what I'm signed up for because I believe that fundamentally it's not just about attacking your opponent's position. | ||
| Sometimes I'll steelman somebody's position. | ||
| I'll say, you know what? | ||
| I don't think they had the best version of that. | ||
| But now that I see what they may be saying, maybe I'm even moved. | ||
| And I think that it's really important to sort of extend that as a courtesy, as a grace. | ||
| What do you do, though, when that courtesy is not extended back to you repeatedly? | ||
| So without getting into Glenn and Reza, who I think most of my audience knows their bad intentions. | ||
| I could even think of other examples where, just in the last couple of days, I saw Judd Apatow and Sarah Silverman. | ||
| Both of them, I really like. | ||
| Judd's from the same town as me, went to the same high school. | ||
| I like both of their work. | ||
| I saw them tweeting about how Simon & Schuster should get rid of Milo's book. | ||
| Now, these are people who are comedians, that are supposed to be getting to the edge, and crossing it, and being edgy, and all of this stuff. | ||
| And I tweeted at them, and I said, I have Milo coming on in a couple weeks, I'd love to have you guys sit down, we'll have a conversation. | ||
| I didn't mean it as a debate, I'm not attacking. | ||
| I like Milo, I like Judd, I like Sarah, all this stuff. | ||
| Now, they didn't respond to me, and I suspect that they won't respond to me, but that does make our job, as people willing to extend the fig leaf a little more. | ||
| The fig leaf? | ||
| Is it a fig leaf? | ||
| I would say olive branch. | ||
| The olive branch, the fig leaf, that's something else. | ||
| But yeah, I was going with the fig leaf for some reason. | ||
| But for those of us that are willing to extend that, willing to have those conversations, willing to do the intellectual work to make the world better, if it's not handed back to you, and I'm giving a bit of a stretch with my position on the two of them, maybe they've responded to me while we're talking right now. | ||
| But it does make our work a little bit harder, right? | ||
| Well, let's try to steel them in their position, which is a sign of good faith. | ||
| I think that in part we haven't pushed out the language. | ||
| We haven't pushed out the toolkit. | ||
| And as a result, everybody is fumbling around with language that was barely adequate in the 1980s. | ||
| It totally doesn't make sense now. | ||
| And I'm not positive that all of these people will stay where they are. | ||
| I think that it's quite possible that when we stop focusing just on the intellectual, and of course I'm guilty of intellectualizing everything, but we start to come more into contact with our own humanity and pushing out some of the empathy and emotion. | ||
| When I was on Sam's podcast, for example, he started talking about the beauty of the poetry of Rumi and the The Call to Prayer is being one of the most beautiful songs that one hears all the time in the Middle East, which is central to Islam. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty horrible, I think. | ||
| The Call to Prayer? | ||
| I'm extremely moved by it. | ||
| Yeah, I heard you say that. | ||
| I thought it was pretty obnoxious in the middle of the day four times. | ||
| It's just annoying. | ||
| We have a different reaction. | ||
| I lived in Jerusalem for a couple of years, but what I find is that when we show that we are empathic, that we understand, you know, Rez | ||
| is in a tough spot. | ||
| And that's hard for me to say because I really don't like the way he savages, but he's in | ||
| a tough spot. | ||
| And you know, Glenn Greenwald probably thinks at some level that he's doing the right thing. | ||
| And I'm pretty unhappy with the biasedness of some of those arguments, but I find that | ||
| when I extend a certain amount of just, I muster any grace I can to listen and to not | ||
| react. | ||
| Once people feel a level of security in the conversation, they say, you know, I can climb | ||
| down from these battle positions. | ||
| I thought you were saying this, and so I had to make this move. | ||
| I don't think you're going to get everybody that way. | ||
| But I think part of what the problem is is that we have to be more willing to be emotionally vulnerable, which is not the easiest thing for a middle-aged, hard-charging male, but I'm trying, and I'm trying to do it on Twitter, and I'm finding that I'm able to say things that are quite difficult with, so far, a minimal amount of blowback, in part By just being slower on the draw, not thinking about these as enemies, thinking that we are in some confused state, and that it's the language and the impoverished nature of the language that's keeping us trapped here. | ||
| So I'm up for a good fight if I'm really looking at the enemy, but some of these people, like you were saying about Sarah Silverman, she's making some bad calls in my opinion. | ||
| And I just think the world of some of the comedy and the insight and the decency and the bravery. | ||
| So something has gone wrong. | ||
| And I think it's up to us in part not to fight it out, but to try to figure out, well, what went wrong logically? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's exactly why I even phrased the tweet in a specific way where I didn't say debate. | ||
| I said conversation. | ||
| Because I wouldn't make it a debate. | ||
| I think at the end of the day, Milo and Judd and Sarah could all sit down and actually be okay, I really do, even if they don't agree on every political this or that. | ||
| Well, this is one of the reasons that I was so excited to come here because, I forget what the original title of Casablanca was, but it's like everybody comes to Rick's or something like that. | ||
| And I feel like, strangely, this particular home studio is the crossroads of this new emerging sensibility, which is that you have a lot of people on, some of whom should be You know, allied, some of whom should be antagonistic. | ||
| And what you're doing is you're providing a substrate where it is safe to hash some of these things out. | ||
| Now people are going to interpret what's going on here very differently. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| He had Milo and Cernovich. | ||
| You know, he's gone completely crazy alt-right, right-wing. | ||
| But I don't think that's what's happening. | ||
| I think that what's happening is that the world is going to wake up. | ||
| to the fact that we're having an inauthentic conversation and this is the germ of a new way of being | ||
| which dovetails with older ways of being that have been lost. | ||
| You might say that this very room is the tits, fruit and ball of the thing. | ||
| You might say that. I can't get away with it. | ||
| I might say it because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you, of course. | ||
| And I got a whole bunch more here, but we'll do this again. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Love to. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| On that note, you can check out more of Eric's work. | ||
| Oh, you know what we'll do? | ||
| We'll put his answer to the Edge question. | ||
| We're going to link to it right down below. | ||
| And can I pimp out your website? | ||
| You said it was a throwback, so I don't want to pimp out something. | ||
| I think, well, maybe my Twitter feed. | ||
| He's on the Twitter, it's just at Eric Weinstein, right? | ||
| At Eric R. Weinstein. | ||
| At Eric R. Weinstein, and thanks for watching. |
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