Eric Weinstein and Dave Rubin dissect the Evergreen State College protests, framing them as evidence of an institutionalized "cult" where identity politics function as a protection racket. They critique mainstream media for suppressing dissenting narratives while praising Trump's disruptive role, despite concerns over his governance plan. The conversation defines the "anti-expert" phenomenon and the "dupe army" that enforces simplistic labels to neutralize nuance. Ultimately, they warn that failing to establish semi-reliable communal sensemaking risks discarding the 20th century's greatest social experiment, urging a reboot of society through direct alliances rather than relying on depoliticized institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
If Lacy Green wasn't enough for ya, well, we've got more.
We are once again live on the YouTube and on Facebook, and joining me now, with only a half hour break, I am the hardest working man not in showbiz.
Joining me today is a mathematician, an economist, the managing director of Teal Capital, and now a man that I call my friend and confidant, Eric Weinstein.
I'm glad you're here on a day that I'm doing two live streams and a show later this afternoon that's not live, because I feel like this is a perfect metaphor for life right now.
It's happening so fast, the worlds that we exist in, the political world, the economic world, the philosophic world, all of these things feel like they're upside down.
You know, we're having Chipotle with Lacey and Chris Reagan 10 minutes ago, now we're sitting here doing this.
Like just worlds are colliding, so much is happening at once.
Well, so there might be a bit of a wormhole where things wind up on Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or Sam Harris, but I do think that One of the great things is the ability to do what you do is you get out of the way and you let people either explain themselves, hang themselves, it's up to them.
So that's what's so terrifying about being here on a live stream.
Yes, well I'm going to be letting you hang yourself right now.
Okay, so first what I want to talk about, so there's a ton that we're going to talk about, and not only, what I think is great about this is that we've become very good friends, but even beyond that, you're one of the people that when I know something is up, I had an issue earlier in the week related to some professional stuff, I knew I could get you on the phone and that, you know, You can get advice from anybody, but there's only so many people in life that you go, oh, their advice is the advice I'm supposed to listen to, and you've become one of those people for me.
So now let's get into some stuff.
See, what I did there was I paid you a compliment so that now I can give you the rope I really appreciate the false sense of security.
Okay, I want to talk about your brother first, because your brother is Brett Weinstein from Evergreen State College, who's a former guest of the Rubin Report and apparently a vile, hateful racist.
Everyone knows the story already, so we don't have to reclaim the story or even retell the story.
But I want to know from you, watching your brother go through this incident, for those that You want to give a one-minute recap for those that may not know the story?
More or less, the world found my brother in his sleepy hideaway in Olympia, Washington, where he has been taking this very unconventional college called the Evergreen State College, and he effectively hacked it and turned it into something it was never before, which is a tiny little Harvard of the Northwest where he pretends in some sense
that his undergraduates are graduate students. He gets them right
into the heart of evolutionary theory
and he's a guy if you know him who is just so profoundly and deeply compassionate, ethical and thoughtful
that when his campus decided to explore sending
a message that white faculty, staff and students who wish to show solidarity
with students of color, most particularly black students, that they were invited
to leave campus for a day, he objected.
And the real problem with this story is that he...
His letter of objection, a protest that followed where he was protesting against segregation, and strangely the black students and students of color were protesting for segregation.
But the big problem is I don't think anybody's actually gotten to the heart of this story, which is something far more disturbing than is what's usually covered.
And that is that There is one place that is left in which open racism can be practiced institutionally in the U.S.
Diversity, equity movement, in which it appears to be you can be openly anti-white, openly anti-straight, openly anti-male, and that this is considered progressive.
And of course this extends to being anti-West.
You're allowed to be openly anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, not from the perspective of is there nothing to criticize, but just getting to levels which You have a cult, effectively, that has redefined words like racism or sexism, so that particular groups can never be sexist or racist, and other groups can never be anything but.
Yeah, and I like that you mention words there, because one of the things that I think you're really good at, because you operate, I think, in two levels.
You operate at a very sort of high mathematical physics level, And then you operate in a level where you're trying to communicate some of those ideas through words, often through Twitter, in a more simple way for regular people such as myself to understand.
And you've come up with some great phrases that we're gonna knock out.
I used one of your phrases, the thinkquisition.
You were the first person that mentioned it to me, and I thought, I like this word.
It captures something going forward.
But before we get to that, so just on your brother real quick.
Forgetting the story of your brother, just to stand with your brother going through something.
Hearing that your brother, who you know is not racist, who has fought racism in his life, knowing him from birth, what was that like to stand with him in the midst of this haywire storm?
Because you find out, okay, so suddenly your brother's the most famous racist on some particular day in American history.
And you're trying to think, okay, I understand I'm supposed to recoil in horror.
And a friend of ours, Nassim Taleb, has this wonderful word, anti-fragile.
And the anti-fragile thing to do is to say, no, you're not going to scare me off.
Why don't you just assume that I'm every name that you want to call me?
Do you want to call me xenophobe?
Do you want to call me sexist, racist?
Do you want to call me a bigot, a pig, et cetera?
So why don't you empty your arsenal?
And then we can have a conversation because those words are just intended to scare everyone off.
The thing about Brett, I mean, It's really painful to have to spar with a guy your entire life and then you have to say really nice things about him.
But it's true.
First of all, the guy's got a ton of integrity.
He's been He sacrificed his own career and his own trajectory to stand up for people less powerful and less fortunate.
This guy walks the walk, he talks the talk.
They couldn't have picked a worse target.
He's absolutely the nightmare that they didn't understand.
They didn't know that he'd left college to stand up for black women who were being exploited.
And because he has no fear or concern that he's a racist, These words don't really mean the same thing.
It's not like he's thinking, well, I did have those three bad thoughts, you know, over the last five years.
He's just never had them.
And, you know, his evolutionary theory informs his worldview.
And one of the things people haven't found out about him, and I hope he's not watching this, but he's pretty much a straight up genius of evolutionary theory.
He's not just some random guy who got picketed.
And I don't know, whether that story is going to come out.
He was the leading student of a guy named Dick Alexander, who was one of the absolute top four or five evolutionary theorists in the world.
And because that field came under such pressure in the seventies, when people didn't want to apply the insights that come from evolutionary theory to humans, the field has been in a terrible state.
And that's in part why you find him at this crazy place.
But this is the top student of one of the, or at least two of the top living evolutionary theorists.
So he's going to blow the world away on several topics that have nothing to do with protests or politics or anything like this.
So not only did they pick on the wrong guy, but it exposed not only what was happening at Evergreen in terms of the administration, but in terms of everything, the stuff that I really care about beyond the college stuff is the media stuff.
And I think it exposed something else related to the media.
It got virtually no coverage for the first couple of weeks.
Then it got a little bit of something.
But really, Tucker was the first big piece he did, Tucker Carlson on Fox News, which was the only offer he got of the big three cable news things, as far as I know.
Then he did my show, and a couple of laters he did Rogan.
That kind of put his piece on the map.
And then slowly there were some stories, but they were all written by conservative sites.
There was virtually nothing.
I can't swear that there was nothing.
I think eventually HuffPo did touch it and maybe a couple others, but it was all, all the defense of this man was coming from the things that are thought of as right or far right or alt-right, like that scary Joe Rogan.
I mean, that's how stupid the thing is.
So what does that say about the state of the media?
Well, that's what, that was my original point, which is, um, We just saw the best demonstration we're ever likely to get, that the New York Times will not cover a story like this in real time if it is exactly counter-narrative.
And the problem with this, it's a little bit like sailing, where you're trying to go backwards relative to the way the wind is blowing and you haven't figured out tacking yet.
This narrative is exactly counter to the mainstream narrative.
This is terrible racism on campus and it's black racism against whites.
The mind immediately explodes because, for example, people are experimenting inside of this cult with the idea that racism is no longer how the law defines it or how your dictionary defines it.
No, It's power plus privilege, and since the underprivileged have no power, they can't be racist, QED, one side is always good, the other side is always bad.
This kind of intellectual sleight of hand is in danger of being exposed.
And so what I think was happening is that they were waiting for him to footfault.
Fundamentally, you're so sheltered in your bubble that, look, Fox News does a lot of propaganda.
It does a lot of hit pieces.
It does lots of things I don't like, as does the New York Times.
But the idea that we're going to say that Tucker Carlson is beyond the pale, and the New York Times, which won't even report the story after I think they did three op-eds before they actually sent a reporter to To write about it?
Yeah, and it's so interesting because I know, I can feel it as you're saying it, I know that a certain amount of people who like you, who like me, are gonna hear what you just said, maybe understand it at an intellectual level, but then go, whoa, whoa, whoa, he's comparing the New York Times to Fox News.
And that's so counter to the way we're supposed to think about these things.
I sat down at my mother's dining table this morning, and I looked at the font, and that font has this mystical hold, the New York Times, and it's all the news that's fit to print.
I mean, is he embattled Professor Brett Weinstein?
Is he controversial Professor Brett Weinstein?
Is he heroic Professor Brett Weinstein?
Is he mild-mannered?
Is he progressive?
Is he a racist?
You're constantly giving me all of these cues, and if I just turn off your audio, if I screen out the emotional instructions, Here's a guy who did absolutely nothing wrong.
In fact, he did the right thing.
He stood up.
He did everything we want in a professor.
And the fact is that this is terrifying to the administrators because what happened was there's a trend, there is a cult, and there is a movement.
The trend is for administrators to displace faculty in terms of their autonomy.
This is why the administrations are all Exploding and the costs are going up.
There's a cult which is this postmodern cult that's coming out of the humanities where the relativism becomes some kind of Marxism and suddenly the only thing we know is that everything is oppression and then you have a movement which is you've got a bunch of kids who Feel that they should be active.
They shouldn't be complacent.
They want to see a better world.
They do detect structural inequities and They want to get active and do something, which is to be applauded.
The big problem isn't the movement.
It was the trend figuring that it could count on the cult to achieve an end.
And the end was to attenuate the power of the faculty.
And so if the president could simply push through this equity proposal and That would eliminate some freedom in hiring and force diversity targets in terms of how many people of color, how many people of the right gender, how many homosexuals, etc., etc., which is in general not something that is thought to be very good to do on the outcome end.
You might want to have equality of opportunity, but the last thing you want to do when you're trying to find the best mathematician, the best physicist, the best biologist, is to consider any of that stuff.
And even the way, it's funny, the way you said homosexual instead of gay there, I think it sounds a little Nazi-like then.
You know what I mean?
I know that wasn't your intention to make it sound Nazi-like, but when you say it that way, like we should have a certain amount of women and a certain amount of homosexuals, there's like a Nazi connotation to it.
Well, I just find that the part of it that's so offensive is that This will happen naturally if we fundamentally are just more decent.
We take the time that we need.
I mean, we didn't know how many, let's say, gays we had in mathematics.
When I was in math departments, very often I would think the entire department was straight, and I only found out later, no, no, no, gays have been represented for some time.
Absolutely, you know, I mean there's even this question of course about a couple extra IQ point advantage that has come up.
But I think that what they were trying to do is that this president wanted to change the nature of the college and he couldn't have done that with the faculty's help.
I mean, sorry, with the faculty's resistance.
And so Brett was the only guy who said, I'm standing up.
Why aren't there more Brett Weinsteins?
Why aren't there more Jordan Petersons?
Why can't I count the number of these people on one hand, two hands, three hands?
So in a weird way, by giving professors tenureship, you've put now this undue pressure on the administration to bend when they shouldn't, because the professors aren't going anywhere.
They're still protecting their own butts in many cases.
All right, so I was gonna say, I know you've got a good analogy for this.
That part has been the part that I have focused on that I think is good.
It's immeasurably good.
This corruption that you're talking about, this endless sucking up to power, the way they use words, the way they trick us to think, all of these things I see as a net good of the Trump thing.
None of that has anything to do with, do I wish we had a president that I trusted more, or that I felt had a moral center that I understood, or didn't tweet as much, or was elevating dialogue, or all of those things.
And again, I didn't even vote for the guy.
But that thing I think is really damn good about him.
So first off, do you agree with that premise in the first place?
I think that the problem is that he's not a clean enough wrecking ball and that this is backfiring.
So the idea is that I view the Democratic Party and the Associated Media, whether it's CNN, NPR, or the New York Times, as electing Donald Trump, more or less It would be impossible to produce him without this kind of institutionalized corruption.
Whether or not the corruption is legal or illegal doesn't matter to me.
And at worst, we have a group of people who had no plan for governance.
Because the only plan that.
I mean, you know, this is something I got wrong.
I definitely thought anyone smart enough to win the White House using this crazy strategy, which I felt I understood some, would have some plan for governance.
And then it had to have a certain component, which is they were going to fill up government with the loyalists first, They were going to give less important positions to the less competent loyalists, and then they were going to have to broaden their circle and go to non-hostile, left-leaning competence because there just wasn't enough pro-Trump stuff.
So when you look at guys that were thought of as the loyal attack dogs, Chris Christie didn't get a job in the administration, Rudy Giuliani didn't get a job in the administration, Mike Huckabee didn't get, you know, all these old school politicians, but who were very effective for him.
Do you think that that was part of the plan in a way?
You know what I mean?
Like you use them as long as you need them and then you toss them out?
Or do they provide some other cover by not being part of the government?
I worry that I had a better handle on Trump's odds than Trump had on Trump's odds.
Because I don't think I don't think any of this was not foreseeable.
I always thought it was going to be a closed election.
If they were going to govern, this had to shift.
You have to spin your chrysalis because a campaign is not an administration.
That message has not happened.
So, you know, the question about where I am with Trump, and I brought this up to you the other night, why don't you and I criticize Trump more in the public sphere?
I thought it was a good question for us because I noticed that I'm not doing it very much, but I also noticed that I've been absolutely unambiguous in my old tweeting, saying, you know, I view this as an existential risk.
And, you know, so to answer it for me, one, I'm very troubled that the one guy who snuck through is so complicated and noisy and unclean
in terms of signal to noise ratio that we're not getting the message
that people voted against something and they didn't have a none of the above category.
But I also think, you know, I've had a few people say this to me privately lately, which is sort of what you just said, that I don't mind the wrecking ball, I saw all this horrible stuff, but I wanted it to be a little softer.
You know, I wish instead of having the bull charge through the china shop, couldn't have been, you know, like a panther that would have smashed a couple things but been slick around other things and whatever.
And to me, it's like that just, That's a nice idea, but it could have never broke through.
So to your point, maybe it wasn't possible, but I can't believe That we're going to lose this much infrastructure and we're going to double down just to get rid of this administration?
That's the plan?
More identity politics?
More laughing about economic nationalism?
As if economic nationalism isn't the reason for the Democratic Party in large measure.
They abandoned it and Steve Bannon picked it up.
We're not going to get the pendulum swinging through a central point.
The pendulum is going crazy and chaotic because nobody can interpret what just happened.
So is that what happens after this no matter what?
Is that almost preordained at this point?
That the sides have now gone so bananas that Whether they impeach him or something with Russia, or they just relentlessly destroy him for four years, or he does something great and then that makes them go even more crazy, that the pendulum, I like that, it's supposed to go like this and instead it's gonna just, like we've almost entered this new phase now where it's just gonna go in directions that it shouldn't go in.
I know if I want to hear that things are as bad as can be with Trump and treason, I know exactly which outlets to go.
If I want to hear that everything is absolutely fine, it's a witch hunt, there's never anything there, I know which outlets to go to.
What I'm looking for is for some group of people To look at this independently and come up with a relatively narrow cluster of, you know, this part is really bad, this part is a little bit bad, but it's more or less a footfall, this got blown out of proportion.
Somebody help me understand.
You know, you have experts who understand the rules of parliamentary procedure.
So help me understand the laws.
You have somebody who has an idea of history.
Help me with the history.
Nobody is doing that without using the opportunity to push an agenda.
So the big problem here is who would put that pressure To turn something that is functioning very effectively as a pseudo-newspaper that advances a narrative into a newspaper, that's very hard to see.
How do you get the Democratic Party donor class to effectively go against their own interests?
Because their only interest in that party, for example, may be protecting their particular exemption that allows them to profit.
So you mean in this case, you mean having the donor class go against the identity politics stuff, and go against all that stuff that you see as so destructive, that they'd have to just say, we can't fund this anymore, and we don't know what it's gonna leave us with here.
Right, so I'm very concerned that we not lose compassion for people who are hurting and expressing themselves terribly.
You know, they may not be expressing themselves well through identity politics, but people are hurting, and they're afraid, and growth is lousy, and people don't have confidence that everything's going to be okay, and I think they have reason to worry.
So we have to get into touch with that, and I think that we also have to You know, to try to be just tasteful and moderate.
Like, look, we're not getting rid of wealth.
Some people are more successful than others.
Some people work harder.
Some people manage risk better.
On the other hand, we can't just claim that every fortune that makes no sense came about because those people contributed more to the economy.
Clearly, there's a ton of rent-seeking.
So if we don't understand that decency is a little bit like a fire extinguisher, you know, In a case of emergency, use decency.
So one hope is that the institutions that are largely internally different than their exterior would suggest, that you hope that CNN, Harvard, Brookings, etc., all the things I usually pick on, Become de-potemkinized.
The other thing is that you look at non-standard places like the Rubin Report, like the Waking Up podcast, like Sargon of Akkad, all these crazy lunatics who you're assembling in some sense, and that becomes something truly new, because this is the only place that I can come to think, and to your point, When I feel like I'm not understanding what's going on, I can't plug in with a relative who's still in the old world.
And so we're dependent upon each other and our back channel is like, hey, something really weird happened on Twitter.
Seven people started with the exact same point.
I'm thinking that that's not real.
Those are sock puppets.
But if somebody's never heard of astroturfing, They have no idea what you're talking about.
You sound like a conspiracy theorist, whereas somebody else would say, yeah, I've got seven sock pocket puppets and I'm trolling you.
I don't know how many times I've called you just in the last three months and started the conversation with.
Eric, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole.
Eric, I don't want to be too conspiratorial here.
But I find that talking with someone about some of the crazier, you know, we're all having thoughts all day long, especially in an upside down time.
We're all having all sorts of crazy thoughts.
And I think having that core group of whoever it is for anyone watching this, but having a group that will allow you to express your thoughts without jumping down your throat or allow you to You know, mention something that sounds a little weird.
It's so important right now.
It's probably, this is as important as it could possibly be right now.
I think that they do, and I think that, you know, democracy dies in darkness, you know.
I hope somebody got a chuckle when they were thinking about whether to bring that back, you know.
They see themselves in this incredibly sanctimonious heroic capacity, and quite frankly, they're not taking, you know, like you and I are taking real risk doing this stuff.
I don't think they're taking real risk. I don't think that they're breaking a sweat. They're phoning it in
They're doing what they've always done. But now there's a slight uptick in the demand. Where's the resistance?
We will rid ourselves of this terrible. Well Whatever you think about him, you obviously were willing to
dance with the devil During the campaign to bring this in. Yeah
Nobody told you you had to put illegal aliens on stage at the DNC.
Even if you think that there should be an amnesty program, you're just specifically sticking your finger in people's eyes.
Dave, I'm so nervous that we've broken something really deep.
That this is not... But I think maybe subconsciously we all intended to break it, perhaps.
I wanted to get out of that rut.
I believe that between the end of the Carter administration and 2008, I call it the extended Reagan administration, it was pretty bad, it was pretty consistent.
The major players had been playing these games for long before the internet allowed us to catch them at it.
And to say, hey, did you see that weird thing that they did?
Which is a lot of what gives us strength.
But I think if you look at the desperation to exit that structure, I don't think many of us would put at risk what we just put at risk.
Because the institutions aren't safe.
And the big difference between Trump, in my opinion, and the institutions is that Trump is representing a very bizarre presentation of the individual.
This guy is a contrarian.
He doesn't listen to other people.
He goes his own way.
All these maverick sensibilities.
But there's only one Trump.
It's not like there's a hundred Trumps ready to take over from him.
He can't even pawn things off to Jared or Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller.
The bigger issue is, is Trump really the existential risk because we're going to get into something with North Korea that we should be avoiding because he doesn't know how to do this?
Or is the existential risk that we are sitting here waiting for our institutions to rot from the inside as we never tire of putting failed baby boomer ideology So I think I probably fear that more in the long term.
I think I probably fear that these things were crumbling, or not only crumbling, the way I've described it is that to me a vote for Hillary, and again I voted for Gary Johnson, but a vote for Hillary would have just tightened the screws against all of us.
All of us that were seeing the things that you're talking about.
It would have been a tightening of that against us, a choking, a taking the air out of the room for us.
Now we've got something that may end up destroying all of the institutions But here we are.
Alright, here's what we're going to do, because I really want to get to this, what we have sitting on the desk in front of us.
But you have come up with, you know my policies, I like to not look at my notes when I'm talking to somebody.
So obviously we're failing here.
You've failed me miserably.
But you've come up, as I mentioned before, you kind of play in two worlds.
You play in the sort of mathematics, Physics, economics world, and then you play in the Twitter world, too, and you try to get some of those ideas out there to be understood in a more palatable way, I think, for sort of regular people, so to speak.
So I just want to go up with a couple things that I've seen you tweet out lately, and we'll just spend a couple minutes on each.
And it also fits beautifully with this very strange phenomena that a lot of people who have
always identified left or progressive or with the Democratic Party are finding themselves
weirdly hanging out with people on the right.
And I think, why is this?
And so I thought about this situation, like during the Inquisition in Spain, where, you know, Turkey said, you know, Spain's problem with the Jews is Turkey's advantage, welcome.
And so, in large measure, a lot of us have been treated much better On the right.
And I believe that the right is actually softening and changing as a result of them taking in this influx of people who, you know, I've never voted Republican yet.
I'm not, I don't even think I'm on the fence necessarily, but I do know that I am treated respectfully, thoughtfully.
People say, well, I'll disagree with you, Eric, on that.
And then we find out that maybe we're not in so much disagreement.
So the quality of the conversations on the right.
Has become weirdly better than what I used to, you know, I often refer to as the thinking left.
And it's watching the expulsion of one group into territory traditionally held by another.
And I do think we have to be really appreciative to our friends on the right for their decency.
And at some point when the right, you know, Starts chucking out people who dare to think for themselves.
I hope to offer them a home when we've regained our own territory.
Yeah, and I love that because it does show the fluidity of all of this and the rhythm of all of this
and the things that were right become left and the balance and all that.
But I think you hit something really interesting there, which is that I think you said they've been softening
and I've consistently seen that.
So when I've sat across in this very room from people on the right, the scary right,
so Prager and Shapiro and Glenn Beck and all these other people,
well, they know that I'm not only for gay marry, marriage, but I'm gay married.
They know that I'm pro-choice.
They know that I'm for single payer health care.
They know that I'm for euthanasia and I'd like to reform prison systems and I'm not for nation building and all this other stuff.
And I think by being human around them, just by being human, I'm not even talking about what we've done on air, but when I've hung out with some of them privately, I've seen them sort of Ease up on some of these issues, where people would, oh, they're all homophobes.
And it's like, no, they're not.
And if they relate to the party on gay marriage, I mean, look, Republicans don't really care about gay marriage anymore.
They may not be thrilled about it, but Trump ran saying it's okay, and it's gonna be all right, and that's it.
And that sort of softening of an ideology, I think we have to acknowledge that when it happens.
It's important for us to say, okay, we wanted something for a long time, we thought it was right for a long time, They wave the white flag on this one.
Doesn't mean they've come around on everything else that I want them to come around on.
Well, you know, sometimes they'll say, you know, I really object to a lot of what you say, and it's offensive to my moral system, but I really like the way you presented it, and I thought you were fair.
You've given me food for thought.
I don't think I'll change my mind, but thank you for stimulating me to think.
Wow, I haven't heard anything like that from people I've disagreed with on the left for quite some time.
I don't know what's causing it.
I think part of it may be that They were in an invisible war that people couldn't see between these mainstream publications, and they would specifically address this issue and not that issue.
And now, as the Internet culture has broken this game open, maybe they don't feel quite as embattled, and they could choose to continue in the previous trajectory, but they're actually saying, no, this pays a dividend.
If you're not going to be so potent in hunting us and making us feel like pariahs, That's really interesting that they've been hunted for so long and mocked by mainstream for so long that now the internet caused a crack, people are really able to look at them a little bit differently, and they're showing a little humanity right now because they realize that there's an opportunity to be treated a little different.
It's self-preservation by them, but I'm fine with that.
I believe in rational self-interest and self-preservation.
So is that the direct connection to their outrage?
That they've owned the narrative for so long because of mainstream accepting and pushing these ideas, academia, media, politically what was okay to say and what isn't okay to say, that the internet came in, blew it apart, and now the reason that they're so hysterical is because they're finally under scrutiny.
So if you look at affirmative action and the old decisions in the 1970s, you could make the claim that the world had been so unequal that maybe we needed to do something very radical.
But you've now had these various corrective measures for so long that even if we haven't gotten rid of lots of structural problems, Things have gotten a lot better on many more fronts, and I think if you look at something like, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center, what does it choose to do when it runs through actual, you know, Klan meetings because there aren't enough Klansmen to watch?
Okay, well, you know, now we have to find some growth industry, so let's find, like, some of the most enlightened, helpful people around, like, you know, Majid Nawaz, and we're gonna go after him and paint a bullseye.
Well, God damn you.
No, you're not going to do that silently.
It's not cute, it's not funny.
You're gonna get people killed and you clearly don't care.
And thankfully, Majid is not taking it lying down.
He's now preparing, I think he's preparing a legal defense against, or he may go on the offense with them, but they did it to Ayaan, they did it to Brigitte Gabriel, who I've had on the show, who I was a little nervous about having her on the show because so many people say she's this right-wing evil, I had her on the show.
It was one of the most enjoyable hours I've ever had of the most decent person sitting across from me telling me their story and their humanity.
I'm looking for an apology from you, and I'm looking for concessions.
And what do I hold?
I hold the ability to call you names.
And if you don't do as I say, if you will not surrender your agency, surrender your individuality, take on this junior status, which I'm going to call ally.
White people, get me some water.
This is food for black people, in case black people are hungry.
No.
What you're doing is you're basically just baiting everybody with the one tool you have, which is, if you don't toe the line, we're gonna call you names.
And it's gonna limit your ability to move around the institutional universe.
It's a protection racket where fundamentally you take the weakest people who are embarrassed about their own culture, they're embarrassed about their own height, and look, everyone should look at their own ethnic group and see what it does well, see what it does poorly.
There's a guy, you know, we do this fan show that we do, we've done a couple of them where I interview 20 people from all over the world and the first one that we did I interviewed a guy by the name, I think he's about 25, by the name of Kushal in India and I follow him on Twitter now and he messages me a lot.
And he constantly is saying to me, how are you guys giving it up?
Do you realize you guys are giving it up?
I'm so concerned for what's happening in your country right now.
Do you realize what's happening?
It's started to happen here.
There's a lot of different things we could talk about with India.
That's a whole other thing.
But every time he says it, I could feel it.
I can feel it through the direct message, like somebody that sees so much what we're just wasting away here.
I go to India a lot, and I have a one rule, which is if I wanna make contact, With India and its real culture, I never allow myself to become the honorary Indian, because I'm a terrible Indian.
When I go over there, I usually bring a harmonica.
I sometimes bring a baseball cap.
I amp up the American, because that says I'm not coming to the potluck empty-handed.
I'm bringing my own culture, and I'm not trying to be a junior version of you.
And people show up at the potluck and man, you know, are they giving of the crown jewels of their cultures.
And you get that appreciation when you show pride in yourself because otherwise you won't be able to receive the pride that they show and the things that they want to tell you.
So we worry a lot about artificial intelligence, but it turns out that there are lots of species that use the intelligence of the target species that they're parasitizing.
and make the victim do the thinking in the service of the predator.
And so we haven't worried about evolving through artificial life, because computer programs are about the only thing that humans can manufacture where we can build in the reproductive system.
As soon as it involves atoms, you can't get two glasses to make a third tumbler.
I believe that almost all of the prerequisites needed to build a system that hijacks the intelligence of the prey and mimics an intelligent system using the intelligence of the victim are in place.
And you can look at a video that I did on Big Think that focuses on this very Quixotic, but probably near-term prospect.
So long before we get to artificial intelligence, we're going to get to systems that use us to fool ourselves and are directed from a computer, which will do most of the heavy lifting of what we fear from artificial intelligence gone bad.
Well, going back to Nassim Taleb again, Nassim Taleb at some point was the best person to get in front of the House Committee on Finance, but it was blocked because it had been sort of captured by outside forces.
I tried to get him on to the House Science and Technology Committee to tell us why the world had blown up during the 2008 crisis.
And they launched every objection to our friend Nassim.
It turns out that he has all of the right credentials, but he doesn't follow the conclusions that the field has followed and so his conclusions are different, but the
problem is is that he's got much of the credentials that that terrify the community because it's like having
somebody say I'm a climate scientist. I have completely different models
than you do Let's talk technically and we'll see where we're discordant
and somebody said well no no no that's this is settled right well
You know maybe I have a different perspective on it So an anti-expert is somebody who has all of the same credentials as an expert but has reached radically different conclusions than their community and still wants to remain in that kind of dialogue to find out whether they're right or they're wrong.
And that person is usually somebody who has to be shoved off to the side because nobody in the field wants to have the argument live with scorekeepers because it will generally show
that the conclusions are not nearly as strong ground as they might be.
Okay, so on Sam's Waking Up podcast, which I'm sure most of my audience probably listens to, you described this four quadrant method, really, for looking at the world, and there's a great video of it on YouTube, but we're gonna have you re-explain it, and maybe you can do it a little better this time, we shall see.
So we're looking at it on the screen so the audience can see it there.
We've got copies in front of us so that we don't have to extend our eyes too much.
Talk to me about the four quadrants because this made a lot of sense to me, but I can't tell you that I understood every piece of it the first time you explained it.
So it came out of a frustration with left versus right thinking, which I think we all share.
We still use it because it's slightly useful, but it's getting worse and worse as an approximation all the time.
And I think what I was trying to figure out is a particular dynamic that is being used over and over again that we fall for just the way Charlie Brown never manages to kick the football from Lucy.
And so the idea is that you've got a collection of people that I want to concentrate on as living in the quadrant labeled first principles thinkers and contrarians.
Now, these are people who are thinking for themselves and are not buying baked cakes.
They're buying the ingredients.
And they're saying, well, I want more of this ingredient.
I don't like that ingredient.
So they're attempting to avoid having any pre-baked idea put in front of them.
What you see on the x-axis... So we're in the upper left quadrant for those that are following along.
What you see on the x-axis is some visible support for a policy initiative.
Are you for the DREAM Act?
Do you believe in No Child Left Behind?
Do you want the U.S.
to accept more refugees?
These are things that we can measure Whether you're supporting or opposing a particular policy prescription.
On the vertical axis, what you have is some implied moral virtue or vice.
So let's start with somebody like Brett.
So Brett, I think, lives in the second quadrant.
On the X axis, I'm going to put support for the equity agenda advanced by his college.
So he clearly opposed that.
On the other hand, I'm going to put absence of racism on the y-axis.
So I would say Brett is a guy with like almost zero racism and completely opposed to this equity agenda sneak attack.
Now what they want to do is to say, ah, we can infer from your opposition to the equity agenda That your real Y value is extremely negative.
That is, you are a racist.
And you oppose these people because you singled out black females, strong black women who are trying to advance a good cause.
And so that is the attempt to map from quadrant three Sorry, Quadrant 2, First Principles, Thinkers, Contrarians, into Quadrant 3, and you see this line, Actual Position, Perceived Position.
So that's what they tried to do.
They tried to create Brett the troglodyte, Brett the racist, and in fact, that narrative, which is, you can tell how good or bad somebody is on racial or gender issues, depending upon how much they go along with the agenda.
And that is the media narrative.
And that's what broke, right?
Which is that the New York Times probably would say, look, this is part of identity politics.
This is part of the Democratic Party.
This is how we do things.
We can't have people dining a la carte buying ingredients.
This is a baked cake.
Take it or leave it.
You either support the initiative and you're virtuous on race, or you oppose it and you're a bastard.
So Sam Harris would normally live in Quadrant 2, along with Brett.
But here, for example... Freethinkers.
Freethinkers.
You know, Sam might oppose opening our borders for refugees coming out of failed states, particularly with Muslim majority populations.
You would like, if you're part of the control structure, to say, well that could only be because you're an Islamophobe.
But my guess is, and I got Sam to admit this on his podcast, he seems to be a bit of an Islamophile.
He's aware of the poetry, he's aware of the music, he's aware of the culture, he's got very close friends and collaborators who are active practicing Muslims.
And so the idea is that Sam is a non- I think he's probably an Islamophilic guy
who's worried about the same thing his Muslim friends are worried about.
And so the dupe army is going to come after you relentlessly for breaking ranks and saying,
I wanna dine a la carte.
Right?
And so, for example, I don't see you as a Trump supporter.
So if I did this, which would be like support for... How would I do you?
So in this case, I might say, Dave is somebody who is opposed to the mainstream news narrative.
Absolutely.
But he is extremely intellectual and very analytical in trying to figure things out for himself, and we would like to say that he's actually slid right.
So you'll see a ton of stuff.
Dave Rubin refuses to criticize X, Y, and Z. He's actually a right winger.
He's not a liberal.
Blah, blah, blah, nonsense.
Now what is this?
Again, they're angry at you for, in some sense, dining a la carte.
And over and over again, it's one trick, which is, We want to break out these long-short positions, which is to say, I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Yahoo, versus somebody else who says, no, you can only be long tech, or you have to be against tech.
You can't actually have a view that one Tech companies on the way up and one tech companies on the way down.
And so I believe that this diagram, we all need to understand it because what's happening is that we're being attacked individually.
Each one of us has a custom one of these fitted to us as to what's wrong with us.
What's wrong with Eric that he's ragging on the New York Times?
I feel like journalism is so important.
Well, of course I feel like journalism would be important.
Somebody should invent it.
I just don't see much of it.
Right?
And so it's not against that.
It's a point of saying, I hold a long, short, nuanced position, and what are you going to try to do?
The easiest way to neutralize me is to try to map me to the troglodyte.
And how are you going to do that?
It's always the same game.
We have the right to infer what you're really up to from some bit of observed behavior.
Thank you very much.
Your words mean nothing.
The nuances are all lost.
We've got your number.
Next, please.
The only way that works is that some of us are still dependent on institutions.
So the institutions are still playing that game.
But here, and this was my point to you earlier, here we are in a non-network.
We're in somebody's very professional studio, able to reach people so that I get recognized in airports and coffee shops.
And the fact is we're out of control.
And that's why they're coming for us now, is because they're starting to understand, well, what happens if Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein and Sargon of Akkad and Lacey Green And Philly D, all these people, actually start saying, are you seeing the same craziness I am?
Whether it's on demonetization, whether it's on Facebook, thankfully, making sure that fake news is out of my feed.
Well, what you're really going to start doing is filtering a bunch of stuff that isn't fake news.
It's just stuff that's off your narrative.
Or Google is going to bury it in their algorithm.
So it's going to be there, but it's going to be seven pages in.
Well, we've got two possible ways out so far as I can see it, or we can just start up history in earnest and try to see whether we land safely.
But I would certainly take either of the first two options.
Either depotemkinize the institutions or reboot from a ragtag collection of kids who look something like the Bad News Bears but might be able to get the job done.
Well, I'm here for the second time, and that should tell you something about how I'm voting.
I wish we could do it the other way because it'd be easier, but there's no time to lose, and semi-reliable communal sensemaking is the number one crisis.
If we do not learn how to come up with a narrative that we can share,
where we can have small differences, but everybody more or less agrees