Transcript: Trump Will Renegotiate the World – Eric Weinstein

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What, why is it the most anomalous thing that will never occur again?

The Post-War Era and Nuclear Reality

ERIC WEINSTEIN: In part because of thermonuclear weapons, which was November of 1952 with Ivy Mike in the Pacific. That was a big deal. And because of the sword of Damocles, it confuses the Steven Pinker types into thinking, wow, this was just a marvelously peaceful era, but everything is potential disruption. So everybody was very well behaved.

Now in 1962, or maybe it was 1963, we had the test ban treaty. And so people haven’t been exploding these fantastic weapons in ways that people can see and feel them for a very long time. And as a result, we don’t really, we will, for a while, we didn’t think that nuclear weapons were a part of our world. We thought that that was banished in the early 1990s with the demise of the Cold War.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So what’s changed? You’re saying it’s over, but I don’t see people using nuclear weapons.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t think that the level of imagination needed to imagine nukes is very high anymore. For some reason, the American mind got quite stupid when we declared victory in a peace dividend. And Bill Clinton said a lot of things that weren’t true.

The Cold War is forever. There is no end of the Cold War. It may become a multipolar Cold War. It might be a safer Cold War.

But if you look at the bulletin of the atomic scientists, the doomsday clock, the last time I looked, it was the closest to midnight it had ever been at 90 seconds. You have a multipolar situation with Tehran and Moscow and Kiev and Jerusalem and potentially the Taiwan Strait, Indian, Pakistan could go, you have one giant policemen, the relatively small number of carrier groups, you have alliances that haven’t really been tested.

I think a lot could happen. I think you have a lot of unskilled players and very dangerous skilled players are probably safer than nicer unskilled players.

Trump’s Negotiation Style

FRANCIS FOSTER: And what is the dynamic with Trump? Because you say it puts certain big international things at risk, but is he really going to pull America out of NATO? It seemed to me like he was just using that threat to get the Europeans to pay for themselves, right?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, that’s just the thing. His variance is high. He knows that it’s two different styles. Let’s put it that way. Trump’s style in business is to become uncertain. You don’t know what he’s going to do.

Very few people, you know, like our friend, mutual friend, Sam Harris thinks he’s an idiot. Now, clearly he isn’t. He’s got multiple different ways of playing certain games. If you study him carefully, he keeps selecting permutations of the tricks he knows, but it’s a large combinatorial set of possibilities when he communicates. And he’s still very effective in trapping people.

You know, that thing that he did with the Liz Cheney issue about, he slips in that “hand her a rifle” because he’s trying to get at the chicken hawk issue, but he knows that the news media will mishear it. And that way they will jump on him and then he will be in a position to play the next move where he corrects them and shows that they’re completely non-trustworthy.

So I think in part, in negotiations, you don’t know what he’s going to do next. In governance, you don’t know what he’s going to do next. He’s very creative, very unpredictable. He’s the most interesting politician of our time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that then comes back to ultimately in that situation, if you think someone’s unpredictable, I guess most people would seek to judge what that person is likely to do based on their perception of that person’s skillset, intention, and character, right? Do you trust this guy to have America’s interests at heart? That would be the way to assess it, right?

Assessing Trump’s Character and Intentions

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I trust that he has America’s interests at heart. I don’t think, for a guy who supposedly has Trump derangement syndrome, I don’t think I have the usual variant.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think anyone’s ever accused you. Have people accused you of having Trump derangement?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: The problem is that everything is quantized now. So we try to snap everyone to grid. So it’s like, do you love him or do you hate him? The point is, I very clearly appreciate him. And I would not trifle with that man. That is a very skilled, very unusual life form.

And the question in my mind isn’t, does he love America? I think he really cares about legacy and greatness. And I think he really loves his children. I think that’s one of the things that you really have to go by is that those children are really devoted to their father. And that tells me a lot. I believe that he really loves America. He’s never been given his due.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So what’s your concern? That this is really dangerous stuff.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: What he’s about to do, in my opinion, is renegotiate the world. One of the things that he excels at is if you have a tradition, he’s not excited to be the nth person to carry the tradition on. He’s very excited to be the first person to break it. Like moving the embassy in Jerusalem, throwing out the first pitch was an easier one to do.

I think he’s going to do all sorts of stuff that hasn’t been done before, particularly with the game theory that he’s not seeking re-election and he knows what happened like the last time around.

And the bench in the Democratic Party is so weak. These people have not been able to field new recruits of high talent because there’s no room to move in that party.

The Need for Disruption

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think it’s a really good analysis of what you’ve said because I think Trump is a natural disruptor. He’s a natural disruptor. That’s what he does. That’s essentially what populism is. But cometh a man, cometh a moment. Don’t we need a natural disruptor now because the natural order of things no longer works? That’s what we talk about all the time.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Do you mean to reverse the order of that? It’s usually cometh the hour, cometh the moment.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no, because it was interesting to think about it the other way.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, and that’s what he’s been put in place to do, is to disrupt, is to challenge. The status quo isn’t working. We all acknowledge that. So actually what we need is someone like him and we have no other choice. So we need to roll the dice and just see what happens.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, but you’re rolling the dice squared. Elon, for example, is the other person I would associate with. I mean, I guess my view of Elon, I’ve really never met him. I’ve started minor correspondence with him. I view Elon as being like the only adult on planet Earth at the moment. And he’s a completely chaotic, like your friend’s crazy dad, but definitely dad.

So I think Elon has the longer view of humanity. He’s absolutely brilliant. He’s totally chaotic. And it’s basically Trump times Elon equals lit. It’s going to be lit.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It will, absolutely. But if you look at what’s going on in the Middle East, isn’t chaos a good thing? Isn’t chaos where they can’t predict which way they’re going to go? Iran can’t predict which way America is going to go. Isn’t that good if we look at it as a term of these people are our enemies. We have pandered to them for too long. We need chaos. We need disruption. And we need to put them on the back foot.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Pretty powerful. Too rich for my blood. I’m out. I don’t know what to say.

Message Violence and International Relations

ERIC WEINSTEIN: The problem is this thing I’ve talked about before, maybe which you guys can’t remember, message violence. Message violence is incredibly important. And the way most people learn about message violence is from the Godfather where the vest is put on the table and then there’s a fish in it and nobody knows what it means. Somebody says, “Oh, it’s an old Sicilian message. Luca Bracci sleeps with the fishes.”

Iran just practiced message violence. And it did it in Gaza coming across the border. It did it with Hezbollah. It did it with the Houthis in Yemen. And most importantly, it did it with hypersonic ballistic missiles killing almost no one in Israel.

What was the point of that? It was to say you have no Iron Dome and Tel Aviv has no Islamic holy sites. It’s got really good hummus and falafel. But what percentage of the earth’s Jewish people live in greater Tel Aviv, completely unprotected from a ballistic barrage sent with love from Tehran? I don’t know. It’s not small.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You ever been to war?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I haven’t. Okay. Even our military in the US mostly hasn’t been to war. It’s been to all sorts of operations. It’s been to conflicts, but war is serious stuff.

And most of us who are, you know, the world is in the middle of a masculinity crisis. People are talking tough because they’re trying to remember what it’s like to be male. But I just think we’ve forgotten about how dire the consequences of miscalculation.

When you have so many people who have not learned how to speak violence, like one of the things in message violence is you make the killing that you do so completely picturesque, disgusting, horrible. Like what ISIS would do with those videos with the 4K production values and all that, that is intended to say a small amount of violence goes the longest distance.

And so we don’t really think about this stuff very accurately because we don’t speak this as our native language. And I just worry that we can say all these things and we have no idea what we’re actually viscerally buying when we say, “Yeah, we’ve got to shake things up.”

FRANCIS FOSTER: And look, because there is an element of risk, but I think we can all agree that the way that the Democrats handled Afghanistan, the Middle East wasn’t working.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m with you.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So there needs to be something else.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yep. You have me there too. My point is there was a lot of room between the bizarre behavior of the Democrats and business as usual. And this wild improv troop loaded with talent, but that doesn’t have a traditional power base.

There’s a lot of skill in Washington DC and I think this is something that we don’t talk enough about. Washington DC is largely filled with geeks, people who, you know, if you’re in the FDA, you really know your nutrition stuff. And if you’re in the Department of Energy, you’ve got to know about nuclear weapons and blast radii and all this kind of stuff. Very often the permanent class in Washington DC is just incredibly skilled and very geeky.

And I worry that this new team, I don’t know who’s coming. I have no idea if they know how to staff this thing and how the political appointees are going to work with the permanent class. So it’s exciting. I mean, I think you can probably see from my demeanor, it’s super exciting. It’s just, it’s also terrifying. We needed to shake this up for sure, but this is going up to 11.

On Iran and Israel

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So just sticking with Iran, we’ve had a lot of people on the show recently who feel that given that the source of the threat to Israel is Iran, inevitably that clash is going to manifest itself in some way now. Because if Israel, their argument would be if Israel’s purpose is to eliminate the threat to Israel, given that that threat is emanating from Iran, it would mean the necessity of having to degrade their nuclear facilities, destroy their oil revenues. Their argument is you can destroy Hamas and Hezbollah as long as you want, but ultimately that’s not where the threat is coming from.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Let me first say that I don’t speak Farsi. My Hebrew is in terrible disrepair and I don’t speak Arabic. In order to say such things you really should know something about the region and I worry that what you have is a lot of us jawing off as if we know what we’re talking about when we don’t.

I would like to think that we know enough to realize that the population of Iran is not necessarily on the side of the mullahs and you only have this issue that eventually Israel and Iran will come to some massive conflagration if you don’t believe that regime change inside of Iran is possible.

I personally think, and this could be completely wrong, that Tehran is home to very modern, very progressive people who are living under tyranny, that there isn’t a profound hatred of all things Jewish or Israeli and I just seriously think that we need to make sure that the people making the decisions don’t have a simplified picture of what is or is not inevitable.

Back in the days of Shimon Peres, he was always upset that the Palestinian Arabs were occupying the Israeli mind and he was saying, look, we have a potential nuclear theocracy. Nobody knows what a potential nuclear theocracy is. It’s a very strange game theoretic structure, particularly if you have a culture of death in paradise.

So, my feeling about this is it would be better if we had people who were true experts in the region making these pronouncements. I worry that there’s a lot of hot talk because it’s fun and I worry that there are a lot of men with masculinity issues who like talking about this stuff in ways that could be very, very dangerous.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, not men, there’s lots of people. That’s why I was putting an argument to you. I certainly wouldn’t give any super credibility to it, but the logical conclusion of what’s been happening so far is that which is why I think a Trump presidency has the potential to change things because I don’t think we want things to go in that direction.

The Epidemic of Certainty

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t know. I mean, this is a lot of just… it’s very weird. Everybody knows stuff, you know, people said, “Well, is it going to be Biden or Trump?” I said, I didn’t know whether Biden would make it to November. And then they said, “No, this is going to be a nail biter.” And I would say, how do you know that? It doesn’t seem like a nail biter.

I worry that there’s this epidemic of certainty that the internet brings out in us and that more or less I keep saying, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. And I still think I’m outperforming almost everybody in terms of a lot of these predictions.

And I don’t know what to do about that because I’m not very confident of this stuff myself. And I’ve just seen this wall of very certain people, the same people who tell me that Putin will never use nuclear weapons because he has so much to lose are the same people who told me that Putin will never invade Ukraine. It’s exactly the same people. I don’t know what to make of it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s a profound point. And it’s a position that comes with a lot of integrity. And actually, it’s brave to say, I don’t know, because now we live in a world where everybody’s on a team. Everybody has a particular worldview. And what worldviews give you is certainty, because it gives you a lens to see if you’re on a team. Are you? You weren’t on a team the last time.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, no, we’re not on a team.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, but it’s saying most people know we’re better than most.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, pure, virtuous, just, you know, just better. Okay, be that as it may. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do about this.

I always try to tell people that the objectivists and Ayn Rand were collectivists because they had a team and a name. You know, to me, the thing I’m most interested in is what system will allow radical individualism, and I mean profoundly radical individualism, to thrive. And my concern is that the teams are taking up all the oxygen.

Wokistan versus Magistan. Okay, most of us aren’t really either. For all the talk about blue-haired people, mostly I don’t see people with blue hair. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a MAGA hat despite having been in Florida and Texas over eight years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody wearing a MAGA hat just in the street.

So I really think that we have this completely flawed impression of who we are because our online selves aren’t even really tied to our real selves. And as we’ve discussed with many people, there is a lot of bots and there’s a lot of foreign influence and all sorts of things going on completely, which are amplifying, in my opinion, quite deliberately the divisions that may or may not exist.

Media Distortion

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And actually, if you look at policy-wise, I don’t think, you know, your interview will probably go out before the interview of Batia, but when we had Batia on, she made this point very well that most people agree on like 80% of the policies. But, you know, the one thing I’ve really taken away from this trip to America, you know, we come here regularly, is I used to think that the media embellish and exaggerate and, you know, they’re sort of like a little bit directionally accurate, but they exaggerate and they…

ERIC WEINSTEIN: That’s adorable.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I know. Thank you. I just, I’ve been around for too long. However, you see, I also think that actually the vast majority of people, especially outside America, but actually many, many people inside America also think like that. Okay. That’s been my experience, right? I saw this in New York Times, therefore, you know, it is, you know, he’s not Hitler, but he’s kind of like, you know, 20% towards Hitler type of thing.

And this trip, having, you know, we went to Trump rally to see with our own eyes and we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get the hat?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: No. No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But we did see Hulk Hogan do a speech. So. And what I took away from it now is they’re not embellishing and exaggerating. They’re just lying. So it’s not just bots and social media and people on Twitter. It’s the entire information space that is completely distorted.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: They’re maxing out. This is an old structure and it’s dying throws. And so, you know, as the old advertisement goes, what are you saving the shivas for? There’s a point where you liquidate whatever you have left because you’re losing.

The lying isn’t working as well. In particular, you know, I think Elon used Trump getting shot and the actual bravery to say, “Oh, perfect moment to jump out of the Democratic Party,” because at least we know that was authentic.

And then the idea is that you have these preference cascades and Timur Koran’s theory of how you foment a revolution is that you get brave people like Elon to say this, I believe, and then the question is, is there a slow clap of the next person and does the slow claps spread? And I think that partially what you’re seeing is a giant exodus from the Democratic Party and the mind control of mainstream media.

Now, mainstream media in large measure, the gated institutional narrative is traded between institutions. If nobody was watching CNN, Pfizer would still need it in order to talk to its regulators, and in a certain sense, more and more people don’t believe that you do have to keep track of it because it’s a set of instructions as to what you’re allowed to believe while at work or what you’re allowed to believe if you still wear a suit and tie and go to meetings and you’re in that class.

So it’s very important that you receive your instructions on an almost daily basis as to how to coordinate. I always give this example of Tahrir Square when Mubarak was overthrown and the New York Times was not using the word revolution. People would say, “Oh, the demonstrations seem to have resulted in Mubarak’s departure.” I said, “You mean the revolution?” “No, no, it wasn’t a revolution.” So what are you talking about? I wasn’t hooked up. I was using Arabic accounts that tweeted half in English and so they were using the word revolution, but we weren’t using the word revolution.

So it’s amazing how mind control actually works. It was also the case that our minds are divided. You have a part of your brain that knows that the New York Times is more or less lying and you have another part that agrees to believe it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, and it’s that part of the brain that agrees to believe it. It’s so powerful and I find myself even now when I see a New York Times headline or I see a mainstream media headline, I immediately go, “Oh, that’s what’s actually happened” before I actually have to check myself. I believe both in different parts of my brain.

The Reality of Political Discourse

ERIC WEINSTEIN: You know, it’s like I used to talk about having a jihadi sandbox in my mind so that I could understand how jihadis think. So, you know, you have a place in your brain. Do you do accents ever when you were a kid?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I still do them now.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay, we frown on this officially. You know, the part of your brain that suddenly knows how to talk cockney or, you know, with a Gujarati accent or whatever is a different module and we have a bunch of different modules and I just find it funny that we still talk, well, do you believe this? Do you not believe this? Very often I believe something intellectually that I don’t believe viscerally. But reality is still reality.

There still is a reality, which is why if you make trades based on a false narrative, reality will slap you in the face, right? So, the whole conversation in this moment really is about whether the left and the Democrat Party is going to face reality, which is the way they talk and the things they say and the way they operate are not popular with Americans or they can continue to imbibe a narrative that isn’t accurate and it does not reflect the reality of what their fellow citizens think. Isn’t that the issue here?

FRANCIS FOSTER: I think that you’re talking about something that’s hopefully about to happen, which is that a certain kind of base reality is too difficult to deny.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, if we keep losing elections, it’s too difficult to deny, right? Well, they’ve lost one just now, but this is going to be a very consequential one, first of all.

It puts J.D. Vance, who I consider a friend, on deck. Man, is that guy smart and good, combines all sorts of aspects of progressivism. I think he ran a campaign with Donald Trump as a loyal number two, but J.D. is a powerhouse in and of himself.

I think he could run a campaign that would just be irresistible to all sorts of people. So, I would like to just point out that you can easily have 12 years coming off of this election and you could have a Supreme Court that was completely dominated by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and it will transform the country. So, this is a very consequential election to have screwed up.

It’s not just that they lost an election. It’s also the end of something because, you know, Obama, it doesn’t matter what you think of him and whether he was a disappointment to you in office, that was real star power and you watched him degrade himself as he threw his support behind Kamala Harris. The Clintons are highly degraded.

Gavin Newsom could not keep a straight face with the switch when Kamala was put forward. He said, “Oh yes, it was a top-down inclusive affair.” This was such a bad story that no one knew how to defend it.

And I also think that Kamala Harris’ apparent drop in IQ is due to the fact that nobody can explain the Democratic Party. It’s a series of horse trades and intellectual half measures and nobody knows how to, it doesn’t have any coherence. Are you the party of sweetness and light? Are you the party of the working class? Or are you really the party of, you know, the transgendered and financial billionaires worried about the carried interest exemption? It just didn’t make any sense and there was no way to defend it and still got close to 50% of the popular because so many people are dependent on these narratives.

Democracy and Party Politics

KONSTANTIN KISIN: To me, the Democrat Party, and we’re talking about reality, they’re so divorced from reality in so many different ways. They talk about being democratic but Kamala Harris didn’t go through any primary. They just appointed her.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: This is a great point because I think people didn’t really update as to what happened after that point got made. So I started talking to my academic friends. I said, you can’t say democracy is on the ballot. There’s no primary. And immediately all of my like poli sci aware academic friends said things like, “Oh no, no, no, a political party is free to choose whoever it wants. And democracy is, you know, we’ve only really had these primaries since the ’68 convention in Chicago of the Democratic Party. And the real thing is called the invisible primary and everybody in the beltway knows this whole thing.”

You say, “Oh cool. So you just pulled the mask off and says democracy is a binary choice between two parties that have given you every single president since Millard Fillmore. And that’s democracy?” Nobody’s going to send their son with a rifle to fight for this vision of democracy. The thing that inspires us, that gets us to put our right hand over our heart, is the idea of a government by, of, and for the people not perishing from this earth.

The idea of, you know, this concept of perfectly legal. Something is legal means that you’re allowed to do it. Something’s perfectly legal means somehow there’s a loophole in the law and you can’t get tagged for it even though it’s completely wrong. Well, it’s perfectly legal, perfectly permissible to just select a candidate.

And it was an abomination. And it’s kind of just fun because the same people had this tagline, democracy is on the ballot. Like those t-shirts were already printed figuratively.

And so yes, you’ve installed a candidate who was the worst candidate available until she became America’s sweetheart. And the whiplash from that period of time just forced the machinery to reveal itself. And it seems like that’s one of the logical fallacies within the Democrat party.

But it’s just one after another, after another. And look, I know nobody’s fully coherent, no political party, blah, blah, blah. There are always inconsistencies.

But you look at this, you know, they talk about being the party of minorities. Yet when black men don’t go out to vote for them, they admonish them as a group and go, “Well, how dare you? All you black men, why haven’t you done this?” And you’re going, is that anti-racist?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: You know what we’re doing? We’re doing therapy. We’ve been through, like, a North Korean brainwashing experiment. We can’t believe that this happened. It’s just, it’s so bad. And every single person of any kind of originality of thought or independence of mind rejects it.

America’s Secret Brain Trust

Now, why did this ever work? I learned in part a lot about the U.S. from having a podcast. And it was very popular with people I didn’t expect. Truck drivers who really care about physics, electricians who care about the Middle East.

There are all sorts of people who solve puzzles every day, general contractors. And these people are in a creative field because every day is different. You never know what house you’re going to show up or what trucking route or who knows what.

And they’ve got time on their hands and they’re not beholden. Nobody cares whether you’re an electrician, is MAGA or woke, as long as they get the job done and they leave your house in decent order and they don’t charge you too much.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I would argue, Eric, that it’s impossible to be a bricklayer and be woke. Because to be woke is to be disconnected from reality. And to be a bricklayer is to be very much grounded in reality.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I agree. And so, in general, most of the point I was trying to make…

FRANCIS FOSTER: Sorry, Eric.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: That’s all right. It was very forceful and commanding. I kind of enjoyed it.

The way I saw it is that these people, by and large, were America’s secret brain trust. And they’re not having it because there’s no reason.

Now, if you take that and you compare that to the very highly educated, one of the arguments that the Democratic Party likes to make is, you know all the people with master’s degrees and PhDs and JDs and MDs vote for us. And the answer is, because you’re an interest structure. And the workplace, if you’re in a woke workplace, particularly large institutions that have to, I forget, what is it, above 15 employees, you have to follow the civil rights legislation about inclusion, all this kind of stuff.

Those workplaces are constantly demanding fealty to this woke parchment. And that’s what’s going to have to collapse. The contractors, in general, they might vote Democrat or they might vote Republican, but they’re not easily taken in because they have a relationship with the unforgiving.

An electrician who starts to believe in crazy ideas is going to encounter 110 or 220 relatively quickly. It’s a short ride.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that’s the beauty of talking to these people because exposing yourself to reality encourages a simplicity of thought.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: You keep saying reality.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Okay, physics.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, I call it a relationship with the unforgiving. You try to fudge something that isn’t fudgeable. Like you see this very often if you take somebody who doesn’t go hiking into the mountains. At some point, they’ll just sit down and say, “I’m tired.” And you say, “Okay, I want to go home.” Well, it’s 8.7 miles down that way. We’ve got 45 minutes of daylight. So how does that work? The person just has no idea that they have to actually negotiate the unforgiving.

So, you know, do something in your life. Play an instrument. Climb a rock wall. Do electrical work. You’ll very quickly figure out whether you have a positive relationship with the unforgiving.

Post-Election Therapy

FRANCIS FOSTER: So you mentioned that this is what we’re doing is therapy because the fake world view, let’s say, that we’ve had or been had imposed on us is shattered. Is that why a lot of people who may not have been huge fans of Trump are nonetheless relieved and happy that he’s been elected because it has demonstrated that they’re not insane?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, you know that scene in the Terminator series, “Come with me if you want to live.” He’s what’s available. Love him or hate him.

Then the next thing you get is you get that once people say, “I am pro-Trump,” they start to excuse all of his excesses and the MAGA movement’s excesses. And so people need this kind of cognitive consonance. And so they get rid of their democratic dissonance and then they become cognitively consonant with the idea that everything is great on the MAGA side. And, you know, this is very hard to avoid.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, especially if you’re a public figure, because people will then try to tag you with that. Like, and this comes back to the criticism that we were discussing, because ultimately, I think what it comes down to is you are an independent thinker, and that’s why we like you. But every four years, there’s an election and you have to condense all that complexity into a binary choice.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Two binary choices. Well, actually, one quaternary choice and one up to quaternary choice. There’s who you vote for and what you recommend. So I went to the polling place. I may have voted one way or the other. I may have thrown away my vote. I may have not voted in that particular race. But the question is, can I recommend something to my first cousin once removed?

And if I looked at the amount of hatred that came my way, there was no way you could ask me to tell some sweet 75-year-old gal, “Hey, get into this car with these people. Stupid Jew. Oh my God.” And, you know, this gets to my frustration with both the Democratic and Republican movements.

Are there no men? And I hate to say it this way, but it’s like, are there no men who stand up and say, “You cannot talk that way”? I just watch these pylons and these incited online mobs and this vitriol and hatred. It’s like, somebody stand up as an individual. We can’t do that in the MAGA movement.

The Culture of Free Speech

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We’re not going to be going after individuals like that.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, no. See, the problem with what the right did is during the left’s control over the entire system, the right made free speech a sacred value.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Thank God. Of course.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: But what they also did is they confused the freedom for people to speak with the necessity of accepting all speech as being equal, essentially, right? So, we can’t say to somebody, stop attacking somebody online because it’s just rude. There’s no need to do it because that violates, “well, are you trying to shut down my speech?” That’s what people say.

A hundred percent I’m trying to shut down your speech. I can’t believe this wasn’t taught in settings. The easiest part of public parks is building public parks. The hardest part is keeping the syringes and the gang members and the sex in the bushes away from the swings and the toddlers. The easiest part of free speech, and I very much appreciate Elon for doing this, is opening the pipe and keeping it open.

The hardest part is the culture so that it never occurs to anyone to act like this except for a tiny fringe few. The culture of free speech is absolutely about the social restraint of dangerous, bad speech. This idea that the cure for bad ideas is good ideas is nonsense.

Ideas compete on fitness. We have a fitness landscape where a really bad idea can easily out-compete good ideas, better ideas. The only thing that works is if people of good character use something that precedes cancellation.

Cancellation is a terrible concept. I don’t know where it came from, but shunning, social shunning of bad speech in a free speech environment is not the same thing as saying you cannot say that. There’s an important concept, and I don’t know why this isn’t taught.

I don’t know where it went. It’s “mustn’t.” Mustn’t isn’t shouldn’t, and mustn’t isn’t can’t. You must not say or do certain things in a free speech environment, because if free speech doesn’t pay a dividend, gentlemen, it’s going to go away. The whole key to free speech is the culture of self-restraint, decency, and prosperity, so that people feel that they’ve got a lot to lose.

Anonymity and Accountability

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes, the problem with that is the internet is anonymous, and for very good reasons, and we would want to protect some anonymity, I think. But in an anonymous environment, because of the way human beings are, we’ve all been in a car behind a windscreen. Human beings don’t seem to be capable of behaving in that way without the threat of repercussions, right? And if you’re anonymous, there is no threat of repercussions, because you’re anonymous. So you’ve made some assumptions that we should have this very high level of anonymous speech, and that the real problem is coming from anonymous accounts.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, so look, Jordan’s talked about this. Jordan Peterson’s made this point that the anonymous trolls on the internet behave in the way that they behave, because they’re anonymous. So his shortcut was, well, we got to end anonymity, and a lot of people, I think, rightly said, there are some problems with this, because anonymity is actually highly valuable.

It’s valuable for journalists in Iran. It’s valuable for this. It’s valuable for that, right? It’s valuable for people to be able to retain that anonymity in certain situations.

You’re frowning at me. I’m just laying out the argument, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, I’m just… I want to make sure we don’t build in assumptions. I don’t think that we know that Jordan Peterson is wrong.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t think we know. Well, wrong and right, there’s a very simplistic concept. The point I’m making is there are trade-offs to everything.

You could ban anonymity on the internet, and that would have lots of positive benefits. It would also have lots of terrible consequences, right? You could also not ban anonymity on the internet, and then you’d get what we have now. So those are the two shelling points.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. And then you have all the interesting stuff in between them.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: And as a guy who’s never opened borders or closed borders, or never pro-life or pro-choice, etc., etc., I don’t know how the shelling points completely derange us, but you can have anonymous accounts in which you have to become known to the platform in order to open one with…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which will get hacked, and then the government of Iran is going to find out where you live.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: So I’m going to continue with this. There are all sorts of technological measures and countermeasures, and it’s not clear to me that if you choose to use anonymity, that you shouldn’t bear some risk. Because the risk that you’re putting other people at, it’s what you just said before.

It’s about constraints, it’s about trade-offs, and it’s about objectives. What we have now, I’m concerned, is not going to deliver us free speech in the long run.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, I agree.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: The ability to ruin lives using these tools is too easy. The friction for ruining a life… Even sometimes what you have is you have a situation whereby it’s very hard to catch anybody, but if you do catch them, the penalties are so dire that the expected return of that strategy is turned negative. I think that what I’m very concerned by is that we have a group of people who are used to being controlled, who’ve decided that they want no controls whatsoever, and clearly the right thing to do is to get the controls as far away from law and restriction as possible, and as much towards mustn’t.

Creating a Culture of Decency

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How do we do that?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I would say the question is, how did we do that? And in large measure… You know what? I don’t mean to give you a big ego, but you did say something at the ARC conference that I wish I could remember exactly. You said, I’m not a conservative, but I will tell my conservative friends that if they want their culture conserved, they’re going to have to deal young people in. People need a stake.

People need to feel that they have a lot to lose, and you’re not going to be able to preserve the West, whatever that means, if people don’t feel that this is a glorious place and we are so lucky to have it. The whole thing is about the returns to decency. You know, I can’t tell you how dispiriting it is when you see these discussions about, you know, nice guys never get the girl.

Like, well, maybe not nice guys, but what about good guys or good guys despite themselves? You know, I’ve always said that the secret is not the pickup artistry, but is the Han Solo character. He was a good guy despite himself. And, you know, the vibe is always, do I have to save the world again? I really was hoping to make some money this week.

You know, extreme altruism and decency has to pay a dividend. And I just don’t know how to get all of this fake masculinity out of the equation. You know, if you’re worried about whether or not you’re a man, try standing up for a friend. Try standing up to a mob. Try standing alone. You know, that’s like, it’s terrifying.

I find it really unpleasant in many ways, but at least I’m not worried about being a coward. The word coward is the one word I think that I really just doesn’t land. I’ve had to do so much unpleasant stuff.

The thing that really makes me sad is I don’t feel like I’ve inspired people. I don’t feel like I’ve inspired people to stand up for their friends. You know, I have a policy that says, if you’re a friend of mine, there’s nothing you can come after my friend with that will cause me to repudiate him.

And the thinking behind it is, is that I don’t want to set up an incentive structure. Do you condemn or condone? You see all these, I need to condemn or condone my friend. I don’t know what he did.

It was 8.5 years ago. I didn’t know him, you know, like that kind of weakness. Men deal with things in private.

And, you know, I might be entirely supportive of you in public. And then I might, you know, take you out behind the woodshed and say, what the hell? Men need friends and men need to know how to stick together and men need space to be male.

Deciding that every group of men is a threat to women is a disaster. If men are going to stand up for women, they need space to work out their stuff. So, we need a culture that creates mustn’t.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes, but I asked you how you do that on the internet, and we’re not closer.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, because it’s the internet you’re talking about. That’s where this happens, right? So my claim is, is that most of the time I don’t see in the street, like you see these videos where people are doing horrible things, like there’s some old woman and some guy, I’ll just like clock her, you know, what do they call it? Happy slapping or something like that. And we’re just aghast because we can’t believe that that kind of internet level behavior exists in the real world.

We need at some level to recognize we are partially solving this already in the real world. For all the talk about how terrible the streets in Los Angeles are, you can sit out at a cafe and not have any expectation something horrible is going to happen to you. We need to figure out how to return costs to bad actors.

Solutions for Online Behavior

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that’s why I’m asking, sorry for asking, that’s why I’m asking about the online environment. I keep saying things and you guys keep saying, well, we have to protect this person in Iran. Hold on.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, no, no. I’m just asking you how it gets solved online because your argument of the real world is very different in the real world, in the physical realm.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: There are very clear material potential consequences to bad behavior. So you post a bond and the idea is that if you’re found to be misbehaving, it’s under the sole discretion of the platform, whether to confiscate money that you put up or you have some sort of a series of cryptographic signatures where in general you need multiple agents in order to figure out whose account it is, but you actually have to have an ID. I could probably generate 13 different ideas, but if you decide that anonymity is sacred and I should be able to create 10,000 accounts for free.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, you shouldn’t be.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. But I think this is the conundrum and the ideas you listed don’t seem to me like they’re particularly workable.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, you didn’t like my idea of solving the Middle East problem last time either.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I thought it was a lot better than you thought it was.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, I’m sure it was a lot better than I thought it was, but you were being nice to Sam.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I appreciate that. My point is that I think the dilemma for social media companies is massive and the problem you’ve identified is totally true. There is a culture, particularly on Twitter, where everyone performatively acts like a dick and you can’t say, why are you being a dick? Because then you’re being a pussy.

That’s kind of how it works. That’s the dynamics of the conversation. So then you have this current situation where you drive out every regular human being and only the monsters have their ball.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Guys, I’m sorry. I’ve dealt with this before. I’ve watched Jordan.

In my opinion, Jordan wanted to get rid of anonymity. I don’t necessarily want to get rid of anonymity. I want to come up with a schedule to return cost.

The key point is, you know, get a hundred super smart people who understand economics, who understand technology, cryptography into a room and task them. How do we return cost to bad actors without banning bad speech? How do we create mustn’t? It’s a puzzle. Have an X prize.

Come up with scenarios where you have speech simulations and you try to figure out, you know, in general, do we have type one error where we create a decision boundary as to what must and mustn’t correspond to? Must you allow this? Mustn’t you allow this? How do you return the cost? And let’s get busy. Let’s have fun. The conversation is trapped in the old terms of free speech versus censorship thing.

Anytime you see that kind of polarization, try to push it off to the side because in general what it’s saying is that shelling points are going to determine, you know, when does life begin? Let me guess. Viability, moment of conception, birth. Nobody says, you know, I don’t know, let’s look at the embryology and figure out neural tube formation or something like that.

Hope for America

FRANCIS FOSTER: Eric, are you hopeful for America as we’re sitting here?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I mean, if you want to get into radical hope, I’m the most hopeful person. I mean, like, I have hope at levels that would be offensive to you guys. But also terrified.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. Well, because I don’t understand what the hell the rest of the world is saying. To me, I’m having an illusion, which is that I’m the only sane person on planet Earth.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: And that’s never a good sign, psychologically.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You do live in Los Angeles.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: What?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You do live in Los Angeles.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: And I am, yes. And I am narcissistically the center of my own world. The really exciting thing is, is Elon is the other guy talking about it, is interplanetary diversification so that we don’t have all of our human eggs in one basket.

And there’s basically two routes, either chemical rockets or not chemical rockets. So Elon’s on chemical rockets. I don’t think that’s what happens next.

I think that what happens next is that the string theory juggernaut that is blocking the exit is about to die. And there’s huge things happening right now. There was a tremendous podcast of Kurt Giemungel on Theories of Everything, interviewing Leonard Susskind, where for the first time, a string theorist totally misgaged the quality of the interviewer, because normally an interviewer can’t push back.

Eric Weinstein on String Theory and Scientific Gatekeeping

ERIC WEINSTEIN: So you have interviewers who are string theorists, cheerleaders like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sean Carroll or Brian Greene. But suddenly there’s a guy who seemed to be running a normal channel who knows way too much about theoretical physics, the mathematical physics. And he started pushing back on one of the fathers of modern string theory.

During the interview, Leonard Susskind goes from saying, “You should always follow the conventional wisdom because it’s almost always right. Don’t go with the weirdos.” Then Kurt says, “Well, what do you think string theory is the only game in town?” He’s like, “More or less. Yes.”

And Kurt says, “Well, what about the other theories?” He says, “What are the theories?” So Kurt starts listing the theories that Kurt is aware of. And Leonard Susskind was forced to spin on a dime. First time in 40 years, somebody got an answer to the question.

How do you know that string theory is the only game in town if you don’t know anything about what’s going on outside of string theory? It’s the dumbest question. And for 40 years, nobody’s been able to crack it. Kurt Giemungel just figured it out.

The interview was there for all time. And Leonard Susskind suddenly becomes a much better version of himself. I called him an asshole on Chris Williamson because that’s what it is.

You know, he’s asked on this program. It’s very funny. “So what do you think about Eric Weinstein?” He says, “I don’t know who that is.”

I was sitting next to him after having talked to him at Natty Seiberg’s lecture at Stanford in 2017. I have a picture where he’s right next to me. It’s ridiculous.

Breaking Through Scientific Limitations

ERIC WEINSTEIN: Something huge is about to happen, Joe. And that is, we are about, I think, to go beyond the standard model and general relativity. And if you think about Richard Nixon as putting in the speed limit of 55 miles an hour around 1974, something like that, which lasted until the mid-nineties, we’ve had the speed limit being the speed of light or C since 1905 until the present.

And just imagine if the successor theory to Einstein’s general theory of relativity doesn’t have the same restrictions. Instead of fantasizing about wormholes or time dilation or generation ships, you may find that there are new degrees of freedom. And if you want to talk to me about what I’m really excited about, what I’m really optimistic about is I’m hopeful that we’re going to recapitulate within physics something that happened in technology.

I don’t know that this is true or possible, but here’s the hope. In the early two thousands, there was a demonstration of the TED talk. And you can see it online where this guy says, “Here’s our new interface.”

And I’m touching the screen and moving pictures around. And then he takes a picture and he goes like this. It’s called a multi-touch gesture.

And in that particular case, it’s called pinch to zoom. The biggest hope that I have is that the next theory has something like pinch to zoom. And that the entire concept of being limited by the speed of light and this Einsteinian moat, where it would take us over a hundred thousand years to get to the next star, let alone the optimal star going as fast as man has ever traveled before.

There’s no way you can do that. You know, my people are a bit over 5,000 years old. I guarantee you’re not going to get along on a generation ship for a hundred thousand years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The idea of not having the speed. Israel and Hamas on a spaceship. Guys, we have to get along.

Physics and Economic Potential

ERIC WEINSTEIN: What about possible free energy? What about the idea of dark chemistry? Physics has been the provider of our economy. The World Wide Web comes from it. The semiconductor, all of molecular biology was founded by physicists.

And physics at its highest level has been dead since 1973. The thing that governs it is called the Lagrangian. The Lagrangian of our world has not moved in 51 years.

And 40 of those years have been taken up by string theory blocking the exit. I am so hopeful that with Elon, that with new talent at the National Science Board, the National Science Foundation, OSTP, PCAST, all of the science agencies and the Department of Energy, which by the way is really the Department of Physics, came out of the old AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission. The hope that the U.S. could restart cowboy science, that we could drive a wooden stake through the heart of DEI, which devitalizes us, that we could bring back the great man theory of physics, which is just a belief in the individual rather than the committee, or that something is in the zeitgeist or the volksgeist.

It could build us the most fantastic weapons we’ve ever seen, but it’s now time to risk it all. The thing that I’m really excited about is the end of the stagnation in theoretical physics, and in particular I have an entrant in that which is called geometric unity, which has been completely misunderstood because nobody has actually really gone into it and taken it seriously. And it’s going to be hysterically funny if for 40 years I’ve been trying to have the conversation with a community that refuses to have the conversation openly and honestly.

There’s like all this backstabbing and skullduggery and interference competition, all that. It’s for the same time string theory has taken up all the oxygen. Geometric unity has been available.

And if I’m correct, there’s so much great work to be done and there’s so much hope and there’s so much possibility because if we can start believing that the stars are a vacation destination, that we can homestead in the cosmos, it’s going to be that moment with Ferdinand and Isabella on a scale that we’ve never seen. And I think it’s hard to talk about because nobody has it. There are very few unprecedented things.

If you think about the hydrogen bomb in ’52, nobody had ever seen a thermonuclear explosion on planet earth. That’s the kind of thing that only happens in the sun. This is one of the only things that’s never happened before.

AI and Economic Solutions

ERIC WEINSTEIN: And the other one is AI. And you can just tell how bad this campaign was by how little AI figured in it. It should have been all about AI.

And the one person had a really interesting new idea about AI was barely heard. And that was Nicole Shannon. You could like barely hear it.

It was a whisper. AI is going to require something that isn’t UBI. And it’s called Coasean analysis.

And the economists know all about it. It’s the deepest idea to come out of economic theory potentially. And in order to keep AI from destroying the world’s labor market and destroying capitalism itself, I’m very excited that Coasean analysis is going to be able to restructure the way in which AI crashes over our labor market.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So what does that involve, Eric?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: The idea being that, here’s the crazy idea. Assume that you and I are at odds with each other. You’re a polluter.

And I need the environment pristine in order to fish in a lake. The question is, how should we figure out how much pollution you should be allowed for your furniture factory and how much pristine water I need in order to feel comfortable about selling my fish? What Coase figured out, it was a complete shock when he introduced it at the University of Chicago in the money and banking seminar of Milton Friedman, was that if you assign rights to pollute the lake, we can either give you the rights as the furniture guy and then I could buy them away from you as the fishing representative. Or you can give them to the fishermen and the furniture factory can buy the rights.

Now, if we give them to you, you’re going to get rich. And if we give them to me, I’m going to get rich. And if we distribute them, we’ll get something else.

But the weird thing is that the lake gets used the same way because the market figures out the same efficient allocation of the underlying resource. I wrote a paper in 2002 called “Migration for the Benefit of All,” where the whole problem was that the conservatives were for open borders. Nobody remembers that the Wall Street Journal was leading the charge for a five-word constitutional amendment.

“There shall be open borders.” And so we were trying to figure out how to get around it. Somebody at the UN named Manolo Abella saw me give a crazy talk.

Nobody liked the talk except for Manolo. He said, “This is great. Why don’t you write it up?” So I wrote up a thing that said that the workers in each field should have the Coasean rights and license them to the employers to bring in foreigners if all of the costs are incorporated.

And what that did was say, imagine you’re the only American cab driver in New York City. You don’t want to have a restriction. You want a ton of people to come in and drive cabs.

But then you’re going to get licensing income as your wage income goes down. So your wage income goes down, your licensing income goes up, and you’re not going to make a deal unless you’re made Pareto-improved or better off. So imagine you do that with AI.

Imagine the idea is that the workers license the right to use the AI that is trained on this corpus of human knowledge and that their wages will go down and their licensing income will go up and the underlying market will not be destroyed. We have to try to keep AI from destroying the market because otherwise we’re in command and control and then you have UBI, and UBI is cancer when it comes to dignity. Here, here’s some money.

Go amuse yourself. You’re now useless. This is terrible.

But if you’re an owner, you’re saying, “Look, I have a right to my labor market. I’m going to allocate so many licenses to use AI. They’re going to beat up my wage, but I’m going to make money from the licensing and you’re going to make money from the product and the gain in efficiency.”

So it’s super, super exciting that Nicole was talking about this and Jay Bhattacharya, Pia Malani, myself and Nicole started, you know, ideating about it and then we got overwhelmed with the drama of the election. Let’s get the drama behind us. Let’s fix CPI, which was broken by the Boskin Commission, appointed by Patrick Moynihan and Bob Packwood in order to artificially represent the inflation rate is lower.

That way taxes would go up because they’re shielded by tax brackets and entitlement payments would go down because their cost of living adjusted. That’s super important. Let’s reverse the whole H-1B nonsense, which was the thing created by Peter House and Eric Block at NSF and the National Academy of Science as the conspiracy to pass the Immigration Act of 1990.

Fixing America’s Systems

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’ve been tracking all of these adulterations to the U.S. Code. We’ve been getting farther and farther from what worked by making laws and what I hope and pray, and I don’t care whether I get a job in Washington or not, is that somebody calls and says, “Eric, what do you know about unfixing the United States of America?” Because we have made so many bad laws, whether it’s the Bayh-Dole Act, the Mansfield Amendment, the Eilberg Amendment, the Immigration Act of 1990, the Smith-Munt modernization. We’ve got to know how we screwed ourselves over historically.

And I don’t know whether you guys even know this, but I used to be the co-founder of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard in the National Bureau of Economic Research. I conducted a giant survey of cell biology for the American Society of Cell Biology in order to show that people were exploiting their graduate students and that China was getting a periscope into everything we were doing. So for a long period of time, I was very focused on policy, but there was nothing to do because basically the Dick Morris innovation was that the Republicans and the Democrats would compete to steal the silver and sell it rather than keep the American machine hunting.

So what I hope and pray is that Elon and Trump and company just ask, how did we get into this terrible spot? How can we start fixing our official statistics, our laws, our code of federal regulations and getting rid of all of the rot of the last 32 years?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Eric, thanks for coming back on the show. Head on over to Substack where we’re going to ask Eric your questions.

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