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July 14, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
the the the the the the the the.
All right, people. We're back.
dave rubin
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.
Welcome back.
eric weinstein
Great to be back.
dave rubin
To the Rubin Report.
eric weinstein
Hooray.
dave rubin
How you doing, brother?
eric weinstein
I'm doing pretty well.
How about you?
dave rubin
I am good.
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.
There's just so much going on.
eric weinstein
Happening so fast.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
Yeah, and I come back to my earlier point.
It does feel in many ways that you found the nexus where all these things have to meet.
And so I think it's been extremely interesting watching this develop.
I mean, your progression has happened online, and I think that There's probably, in my opinion, no place I'd rather come to try to sort this out.
And I keep asking people, where do we reboot from?
What is our last safe restore point from which we can get into safe mode?
And one of the reasons I'm so excited to be here is that I think you're doing the best job of anybody on that.
dave rubin
Well, I appreciate that.
I think, as a math guy and a physics guy, you're describing me as a black hole.
Is that not what you're saying, that I exist and I'm sucking all of these things into me?
What comes out on the other side, we do not know.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
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.
unidentified
Wasn't that good?
dave rubin
I thought that was impressive.
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?
Sure.
Just a one-minute recap.
eric weinstein
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.
So it's a bit of a mind flip.
dave rubin
Yeah.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
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?
eric weinstein
It was terrible for him in many ways.
It was great for me.
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.
We just haven't gotten to his science yet.
dave rubin
Does that in a weird way show you the danger of what's happening on college campuses?
that if a guy who as a human is as decent as you say, and I've only spent about three hours with him total,
two were on camera, but strikes me as a very decent, honest, humble human being,
but who also is doing the academic work that you're talking about,
that that really shows what's happening on the college, the danger of it,
because it's a warning shot to everybody else that's doing stuff.
eric weinstein
that's doing stuff.
They're coming after our best people.
dave rubin
They're coming after our best people.
eric weinstein
They are coming after the people who are the least racist,
They are coming after the people who are the least racist, the most forward thinking, the most thoughtful,
the most forward thinking, the most thoughtful, the most nuanced.
the most nuanced.
This is no coincidence.
This is no coincidence.
unidentified
The idea is you can cow most people with this stuff, It's a warning shot to everybody else
eric weinstein
The idea is you can cow most people with this stuff.
But when a guy has literally given up an Ivy League education under death threats to stand up
for those less fortunate, he's probably not losing a lot of sleep over his own racism.
And you can say, well, everybody's racially racist.
Yeah, everybody's racially aware.
We can show the neuroscience studies that show that people identify even if you put a bracelet
around a hand to show that somebody is in your affinity group, not in your affinity group,
even if it's a rubberized hand.
You stick a fork in it, and suddenly, if you're an atheist and the bracelet says atheist, the, you know.
The reaction will spike through the roof.
So we know that there's affinity.
We know that there's some sort of latent kind of racism in everyone, including blacks, not limited just to whites.
And this is the guy who's the most aware.
He can give you the science.
He can give you the introspection.
And that's why this was also sort of hysterically funny when the dust settles and everybody's out of harm's way.
We're going to look back at this and say, wow, they picked on Brett Weinstein.
That's how crazy this got.
dave rubin
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?
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
Just waiting for a moment where he'd be on one of these shows live and accidentally... But it was perfect!
eric weinstein
And by the way, you know, We can say this is the only offer he got, but I'm tired of that, right?
Tucker Carlson came through.
dave rubin
Yeah.
eric weinstein
And, you know, I have objected to plenty of things Tucker Carlson has done, but I'm not going to apologize for where we show up.
I will go to any program I like.
I will affiliate and talk to people who I like, who I don't like, who I may think are abhorrent but are personally rather engaging.
I mean, this idea that one set of people controls how another set of people
can affiliate and associate.
What program can you be on?
The funniest story, and this is really just crazy, is Brett Weinstein endangered Evergreen
State College by going on Tucker Carlson.
dave rubin
Oh, I saw this thing written just in the last couple days about this.
Yeah.
On the alt-right Tucker Carlson.
Nobody calls Tucker Carlson alt-right.
Nobody even knows what the fucking word is.
eric weinstein
What planet are these people on?
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?
dave rubin
Which is actually kind of crazy.
I mean, that's really a crazy way for them to be exposing, so to speak, a story, right?
eric weinstein
Well, it's traditionally, right, the op-ed has been almost completely divorced from the paper by a Chinese wall.
And so it reflects the fact that it is the narrative-driven news department that is the problem.
Because it is the cryptic op-ed That's what the front page is.
It's the cryptic op-ed because it's telling you a narrative.
Please feel this way.
You are ingrouped.
You are the wise.
You are the clever.
These people are the bad.
They are backwards.
They are problematic.
They are troubled.
And so this kind of aid that nobody wants, which is how should I feel today,
indicates that this was a non-story.
It's not worthy of your attention.
So you see a story that is not showing up.
It's the dog that doesn't bark that is much more important.
So yeah, he absolutely proved out this theory, which is that's not a newspaper.
A newspaper would have covered what the op-eds spent three op-eds doing.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
But it's not just them, it's me.
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.
dave rubin
And somehow... Right, you think they could have got one story about Bretton there, all the news, come on!
eric weinstein
Not fit?
Yeah, I don't know.
dave rubin
Not fit.
eric weinstein
Right.
If you run it backwards.
But I can't shake the idea that the New York Times, because it is so close to being a newspaper, Right?
It is a hair's breadth away.
And that's what I call the uncanny valley of journalism.
Where, if you remember Polar Express, it was too realistic without being realistic.
And so because it was hyper real, you're revulsed.
It was creepy.
Right.
dave rubin
Yeah.
eric weinstein
And so that's why the New York Times is the top of my problem list.
It's because it's so close to being a newspaper.
It fact checks.
It's beautifully written.
It does do a good job of developing a story, but I don't want my story to be real-time historical fiction.
I don't want the end known by the writer before they even start writing, because the news is coming in.
It's a data stream.
dave rubin
Yeah, and this is where we should quickly throw in a phrase that you've given me, which I love, that you mentioned last time, the Russell conjugation.
Basically, that you can almost figure out what the story is just from the headline, and then often what's in the body of it doesn't quite line up.
eric weinstein
Yeah.
dave rubin
We see this all the time.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
Gays can do math too?
eric weinstein
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?
dave rubin
Because I think they've been cowed into silence, I think.
eric weinstein
Well, this is the modern university.
If tenure is supposed to guarantee freedom of thought, academic freedom, and I can't hear much of anything, what does that tell us?
unidentified
Right.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
But you can fire professors.
People don't understand this.
What you do is you up their teaching loads, you put them in crappy offices,
you make them hate their jobs, and then they'll remove themselves.
Right, and so the big problem is the administration finding the cult.
And when the trend tried to use the cult to displace the faculty and its autonomy
and go after the sciences, you know, we have on video the president of the university
talking to the people leading the protests a short time before everything, all hell breaks loose.
And they're talking about, well Brett used the word genetics and he used the word phenotype, what does that tell you?
It tells you he's a biologist, you morons!
It tells you that he's thinking about race at a very deep level.
He's thinking about it socially and he's thinking about it biologically.
But the idea is that somehow vaguely that sounds like, I don't know, some kind of weird eugenics thing to you?
dave rubin
Right.
eric weinstein
And then what they start talking about is we're going to use diversity training as a weapon We're going to bring them in.
We're going to train them.
And if that doesn't take, then we sanction.
dave rubin
Yeah.
eric weinstein
Okay.
We have that on tape.
And then the president, right, says, there are going to be people who are going to just tell us all to fuck off.
That's what he says in those words.
And then he turns right to somebody recording this and he says, don't put that in the video.
And he throws up his hands, because the kids laugh.
This is a different generation.
dave rubin
We've got everything.
eric weinstein
And so what is it?
He's owned.
This is compromise.
They've been videoing him and people can't figure out why does he allow them to tell him when he can go to the bathroom, whether he needs an escort.
dave rubin
Literally, you're not making that up.
eric weinstein
This president is still in office.
What does that tell you?
Something is wrong above president.
unidentified
Irony.
eric weinstein
It's wrong at the level of the trustees.
Irony.
We don't know what this is.
But one can infer this guy created a public hazard by telling the police to stand down.
He's now claiming that the police don't have enough guns.
dave rubin
Irony.
eric weinstein
None at all.
Irony.
Lying.
Yeah.
Right?
He created the situation, and somebody is leaving him in place.
This is the first failed college or university that we've ever had, to the best of my knowledge.
knowledge in that it was a real place.
But the failure went above the president.
The failure is now at the level of the trustees.
Like a failed state.
dave rubin
Yeah, all right.
Well, I know we could just keep going with that, because it's so relative and relatable to everything else we're gonna talk about.
But the media component of that, I think, is where I've spent most of my time.
I talk, obviously, a lot about the college stuff and the free speech stuff.
But the media component I see as directly related to so much of the Trump stuff right now.
eric weinstein
Oh, boy.
dave rubin
So let's go into that Trump stuff, because to me, I had Andrew Klavan on last week.
He described Trump as basically just running a truck through mainstream media and just blowing the whole thing up.
I've used the analogy that it's like Trump has just thrown the chessboard up.
We can figure out a zillion.
eric weinstein
I use wrecking ball.
dave rubin
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?
eric weinstein
I don't think so and I'm not even positive that you do.
So let me advance an argument as if we were talking on the phone as we do.
dave rubin
That's why I have you here.
eric weinstein
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.
It subverts the intent of the process.
dave rubin
Okay, so far I'm with you.
eric weinstein
Okay.
Now the problem is, is that they are going to protect us from all of the excesses of Donald Trump.
And there are many excesses of Donald Trump, there's no shortage.
dave rubin
Yeah.
eric weinstein
Right?
And so the problem is, is that they've both lit the house on fire and offered their services
as firemen to put out the fire that they started.
So the problem that I'm having is that I want Trump to be cleaner so that the message is actually received.
We have two new problems.
We have a host of what can at best be called non-standard presidential behavior.
And at worst.
dave rubin
Right, at best.
That was very, yeah, yeah.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
Right, you need bodies at the end of the day.
eric weinstein
If you're going to do anything scientifically based, science is going to lean heavily Democratic.
So let's just take that as an example.
I always knew that you were going to run through the number of Republican or Trump-supporting physicists, biologists, mathematicians very quickly.
All right.
Was there ever a plan to actually staff this government?
Apparently not.
dave rubin
So what does that tell you on the loyalist front?
Because I think that's an interesting spot.
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?
eric weinstein
It would appear that there was no plan.
dave rubin
So you think that's really the broader piece here?
eric weinstein
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.
Like none of the above would have won.
dave rubin
Would have won in the last fight.
eric weinstein
Right.
Just like which part of we don't want Donna Brazile coming back,
we do not want Debbie Wasserman Schultz, please do not give us Rubio or Cruz
any of these people.
Like, the whole slate, not workable.
dave rubin
But so then isn't that, so wait, so first I'm still not sure which is the part of what I said that you think I don't really believe.
eric weinstein
Well, I'm concerned that we're not actually getting a great effect of having Trump do the wrecking ball thing.
dave rubin
So that I agree with.
The whole thing is a freaking mess.
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.
eric weinstein
This is something that I've been admonished by many people that, you know, which part of bull in a china shop?
You're really thinking about some surgical.
dave rubin
Right.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
No, it's like you let a balloon go full of gas and it just goes around the room in its own Brownian motion pattern.
And I believe there is one overarching crisis, and I call it the crisis in semi-reliable communal sense-making.
It's effectively that there's no place to go to sort out what happened.
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.
dave rubin
You know, it's so interesting you say that, because just even in the last couple days when this Trump Jr.
thing has happened with the email, You know, a month ago, everybody was saying, it was Comey, these are all the gotcha moments.
We've got them this time, we've got them this time.
And Twitter blows up and everyone says, this is it, this is it, this is it.
Then basically nothing happened, nothing came of it.
There was no investigation, nothing came of all that.
Then the Trump Jr.
thing happens.
The same people who were saying, this is it, this is it, this is it, a month ago, were saying, this is it, this is it, a month ago.
Now we'll see, maybe this thing is different.
We shall see, you know what I mean?
But that sort of like, we're just waiting for the answer we want.
We're waiting for the answer we want.
we're always gonna bend things to the answer we want, is a problem.
And again, I say this as someone that did not even vote for the guy.
eric weinstein
Right.
I don't see a way out.
Here are my best hopes, and none of them are great.
One of them is that we actually push the Potemkin village into this concept which I call depotemkinization,
where you realize that you're living on the Truman Show, and you decide you're actually gonna build out the world
that is suggested by the set fronts.
So we take the New York Times.
It's not a newspaper.
We turn it into a newspaper.
It's got most of the equipment.
There's no reason it can't be repurposed.
dave rubin
Yeah, how are we going to do that?
eric weinstein
I don't know.
But we have to put pressure on it.
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 it's very hard to imagine.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
What would the French aristocracy have done if it wanted to stave off the French Revolution?
It would probably have thought, maybe we're gouging people a bit much, right?
dave rubin
Maybe it's like a little too much for you guys.
They're all out on the streets looking for bread.
eric weinstein
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.
The house is going to blow.
dave rubin
Now you're speaking my language.
eric weinstein
And then we have this other hope.
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.
dave rubin
Isn't it funny?
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.
eric weinstein
But, I mean, I feel like we are a community.
And, you know, one of the funny things about being recognized, like here we are on a totally fake TV show.
dave rubin
Well, just for the record, this is extremely professional around here.
eric weinstein
It is professional, but the point is, what is this, NBC?
ABC?
No, it's like something you dreamed up, right?
Now, that thing that you dreamed up, I can tell you how important it is because I get recognized in Trader Joe's.
People are like, Eric Weinstein!
I'm thinking, did I go to high school with you?
No.
You know, this thing is being watched by millions of people.
And it's not just you.
So I think that the 5 to 25 channels that are exploring these topics are, it's neck and neck.
Either the mainstream institutions reboot because they can't take the pain anymore,
which I don't think is happening because they're getting a lot of reinforcement.
Trump is so crazy, thank God we're here to save you all.
It's just like.
dave rubin
So in a weird way, he's given them their biggest foil and he's also given them their redemption.
And sometimes I do think that, that you guys are all in it on it together.
Trump is sort of in on it with CNN.
I'm gonna keep saying crazy shit, and you're gonna keep getting clicks because of it.
eric weinstein
Well, that is certainly happening, but I don't think that... But they must love this.
dave rubin
They must love this feeling of, we finally, once again, are your savior.
That's what they're pinning themselves as.
I don't think most people believe it, but they have to love that self-importance, right?
eric weinstein
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 rubin
What do you think about the concept that we all sort of conjured this up?
I mean it in the Matrix kind of way and a little bit of Harry Potter.
In a weird way, we all almost wanted this insanity right now.
We were all so obsessed with the election and all this stuff and we got this thing that Here it is.
We got it.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
Yeah, I think what we've done is we've unleashed a multipolar world where the U.S.
is not capable of giving strong guidance.
So what we're doing is we are now squandering what we built for decades in the post-World War II rearrangement.
And we're going to be left probably with a multipolar world, which game theoretically is going to be almost impossible to control.
I mean, the Cold War was Yeah, and now there's a lot more players.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
Terrific.
dave rubin
So, as I said, you were the one that originally said the phrase, Inquisition, to me.
I think I laid it out pretty decently in that direct message, but this idea of the attack The idea of the attack on ideas is the new inquisition that
we have going on right now.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
Right, and I think that, you know, shame on any one of us who doesn't accept a hand that's offered in the spirit of friendship and
investigation of the truth. And I've had many hands offered to me. It doesn't mean I'm becoming them. I
don't think that I've changed. But, you know, just as the point that I made to you earlier, once
upon a time we had the party of Lincoln and the Dixiecrats. And, you know, even if what all that's
happening is, is that your end goals have remained unchanged, what gets bound to those end goals?
Like, for example, interracial marriage, where I'm in an interracial marriage.
It used to be the Communist Party was the only party that would support that, right?
And so now it's, you know, every party would support it.
But the point is that the labels and the bindings change, and I'm not going to be loyal You know, just to the insignia.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
They also got more desperate.
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.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
So let's make a point.
Every time they tell us who we're not supposed to talk to, let's put that person towards the top of our list of people we should probably talk to.
We've got to reverse this thing because they need to lose that toy, right?
dave rubin
Yeah, we've given it too much.
eric weinstein
Which camera can I look into?
unidentified
You can look into that one right there.
eric weinstein
Tucker Carlson, first of all, I haven't agreed with you very much over the years.
Thank you so much for covering the story of Brett Weinstein.
I really appreciate it.
It's not a question of I begrudgingly say this.
I'm just wholeheartedly open in saying you did something that needed to be done, and it should have been done by everyone.
It should have been done by the left.
And we're not apologetic about it.
We're not apologizing left, right, and center.
You know, that was one of the huge things with Brett.
When is he going to apologize?
You watch, he's going to cave.
Well, I've watched lots of people cave.
I even watched Bill Maher cave.
You know, this is completely crazy.
And that pressure has been stood up to only on the right, so far as I know.
So credit where it's due.
Let's stop being scared.
By the way, it doesn't mean that we're moving... I'm not moving to the right in order to say this.
I'm just recognizing good work where good work is done.
dave rubin
Yeah.
Well, that's a perfect segue, actually, to another phrase that you came up with that I love.
The intersectional shakedown.
So we've talked a lot about intersectionality here.
I think most of my audience understands that.
This shakedown edition that you added, I think, has a really interesting component.
It's sort of related to everything that happened to your brother.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
So to be clear, this is really a critique of, in the case of Evergreen, this is a critique of the white students that were joining the fray, right?
Because they were sort of, to prove how not racist they were, they were doing very anti-liberal things.
So the shakedown was to take these guys and control these students, right?
eric weinstein
Absolutely.
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.
Being self-critical is a virtue, not a vice.
But self-hatred and self-flagellation and privileging the other as some sort of advanced life form, as if we can't...
I do worry, for example, do these white kids have any black friends?
Do they have any Muslim friends?
Do they have friends who immigrated from the developing world?
dave rubin
You mean in reality, not in just, you know, if you were to look, it all looks diverse.
eric weinstein
Yeah, I mean people who you'd trust to make decisions for you in a hospital.
Because let me tell you, the developing world thinks that the West would be crazy to give up on itself.
Yes, it's got More entertaining dances or better food or some rich and storied history and great narratives and art.
But the fact of the matter is that the West has probably more attraction for those people than any other place.
Our amplifier is what distinguishes us.
We have done everything more powerfully than every other group.
And so it's not whether or not what we're doing is right or wrong because every culture does right and wrong.
But our amplifier is bigger.
So if you plug in a Stratocaster to a huge stack built for a stadium and you make a mistake,
I guarantee it, they're going to hear it three counties over.
On the other hand, if you play a fantastic solo, that's there too.
And I don't understand, when did we give up on the West?
This has been terrible, it's been wonderful, but it's the best thing we have going.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
It's funny you bring up India.
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.
I'm just not very convincing.
I try to speak a little Hindi.
I care about the food, the music.
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.
dave rubin
Yeah, being as curious as you are about them, they are about you.
That's the trade-off of humanity.
eric weinstein
And we aren't empty-handed here.
dave rubin
No, we're not.
We've got some good stuff.
All right, let's do three or four, literally two minutes on each, because then I do want to get to this.
All right.
Artificial out-telligence.
eric weinstein
Yep.
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.
dave rubin
Right.
We might be doing it to ourselves right now.
You know, we'll link to that Big Think video, which I have seen.
All right, you know, we're just going to do one more of these and then we're going to jump in here.
This is probably the most appropriate one.
unidentified
What is the anti-expert?
eric weinstein
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.
And I said, well, he's not an academic.
And I said, yes, he is.
He's got a professorial position.
Well, he doesn't have a PhD.
Yes, he does.
He doesn't publish papers.
Yes, he has.
dave rubin
He's not 6'4".
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
Yeah, and everybody doesn't wanna be associated with them because then you will immediately be smeared
with the same things that they're saying.
eric weinstein
Well, this is this tarring by association.
And so you have these incredible chain links, which somebody knows somebody who met with somebody
who once said good morning, which is also something that Joseph Goebbels said.
dave rubin
He was always saying good morning to everybody.
That was his thing.
All right, we're gonna do one last thing here.
We're gonna do about 10 minutes on this because I have another interview and then we've got something later that we have to get to.
So Amira, if you could pull up the four quadrant image.
So I really wanna dive into this.
The first time I heard about this, Correct me if I'm wrong, was it the first time you had talked about it publicly, really, was on Sam's podcast?
eric weinstein
It was.
dave rubin
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.
eric weinstein
Terrific.
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.
dave rubin
So the problem is... So we sort of done one good, one bad there in traditional thinking.
eric weinstein
In traditional thinking.
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.
dave rubin
Right.
Because otherwise it's so contrary to everything else we put out there, it can't make it through the system.
eric weinstein
Right.
Now let's take somebody else.
For example, let's take Sam Harris.
dave rubin
Okay.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
Just when he needs another label.
What?
eric weinstein
Just when he needs another label.
But we're gonna drag him out.
Yeah.
Right, and so the key point is, is that the dupes are the people who say,
well, you know, I can tell, I can infer what Sam is really up to.
He just wants a first strike against Muslims in the Middle East.
Well, obviously he doesn't.
That's stupid.
Now, who's actually controlling this game?
My claim is that it's these people in the fourth quadrant, which is rent-seeking elites.
These are people who, for example, want to save a pension plan by increasing immigration because we're not reproducing in growth is it a low?
And so they, for example, may have a very kind of mercenary, self-interested view
of why they want a border opened.
Okay?
dave rubin
So as- So that's the elite level.
Where would you put like the people that relentlessly slam and smear him for their own good?
eric weinstein
Those are the dupes.
dave rubin
Those are the dupes.
eric weinstein
Those are the dupes, right?
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.
You'll never see it.
dave rubin
We've got a lot of work to do.
eric weinstein
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.
dave rubin
I'm on the reboot side.
The other one just simply doesn't seem possible to me, and I think the rebooting has begun.
Now, we need a lot of allies, we need a lot of help, but I think the Calvary is coming.
eric weinstein
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
on the general facts without turning everything into a political
contest. We're gonna take the most hopeful and best experiment with all of its flaws,
throw every bad thing that happened in the 20th century, and
we're still better off not trashing this experiment and protecting it.
And I'll come back anytime you want.
dave rubin
I love it, my friend.
You wanna eat some good food and drink some good wine tonight?
eric weinstein
That sounds like a plan.
dave rubin
And that is what we shall do.
You guys know where to find it.
But for more on Eric, follow him on the Twitter, at ericrweinstein.
I've got one more interview coming up with economist Pia Mullaney later today, but that's gonna go up in a couple weeks.
So I hope you've enjoyed the live streams that we did today.
And we did some behind the scenes stuff with Lacey.
We're gonna do something with Eric, which will also be exclusive on Patreon.
So it's patreon.com slash RubinReport.
And that's all I got for you.
I think we did all right today.
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