WBD466 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin & the Culture Wars with Eric Weinstein

Interview date: Wednesday 23rd February

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Eric Weinstein. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to the managing director of Thiel Capital and podcaster Eric Weinstein. We discuss media fact-checking, colonising other worlds, physics beyond Einstein, intelligent design, narrative wars, modern fascism, and economic deception amidst the rise of Bitcoin.

“There’s something about the way in which money, and China, and law, and the US government, and technology interact…every institutional player, at some level it seems of any size, capitulates; everybody’s recording a hostage video at the institutional level.”

— Eric Weinstein

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Eric, hi, good to see you again.

Eric Weinstein: Peter, pleasure.

Peter McCormack: Thanks for coming in.

Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me.

Peter McCormack: I would always talk to you if I had the chance, especially after the last one.  That had a profound impact on me in two ways.

Eric Weinstein: Tell me.

Peter McCormack: I think the first one is, I became a little bit more serious about this as a job, and if you want to be good at a job, you have to work at it.  I think I'd been coasting, so me and Danny spent a lot of time discussing the future of the show and how we make the best show, both production and quality of interview, because I didn't prepare for it in the right way.  So, that was the other one.  And also, something that stuck with me and Danny, we talked about it a lot, was this message of, "What the fuck are we doing here?" and we talk about that a lot.

Eric Weinstein: I'm really glad.  I have seen that you've taken a certain amount of abuse over my previous appearance and I just want to say something to the people who want to seize on anything that they felt went wrong, or gotchas, "Cut it out, these are conversations", and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you, to the Bitcoin community.  It's led to various interactions that have been positive in my life, and it's not about gotcha and it's not about lack of preparation, it's about trying to figure out what we're all doing and leading more purposeful and more meaningful lives. 

So, I feel like you were treated by some people unfairly online, and I wanted to put this at the beginning so that they can buzz off if they want to try it again.  I'm just interested in having conversations with people who want to evolve.

Peter McCormack: Me too, and I think what it was is, a lot of the comments came quite a time after the interview.  And I think what happened was, lots of people had different perspectives on it.  But I think after the tail of bitcoiners had heard the show, I think there were a lot of people discovered it just by searching for you and didn't understand the Bitcoin community, didn't know me and then judged it.

I've got this tweet I put out once, I said, "There's three types of conversation podcast.  There's a smart person and a smart person", and I used an example of your show with Werner Herzog as an example of that, "there's a moron and a smart person", which is like me interviewing you, "and then there's two morons". 

Eric Weinstein: Stop it!

Peter McCormack: No, I think what it is, and when I say a moron, I mean just a normal non-university-educated person.  And I think all three are important types of conversations, you need different hosts and guests.

Eric Weinstein: I appreciate that, as a university-educated person, I can tell you, let's not synonymise smart with pieces of paper; probably a mistake.

Peter McCormack: Probably now.  But also, look, the art of conversation and the meaning of these types of conversations is big in the news right now.  There are lots of people discussing it and personally, even with my small audience, one of the things I've been wrestling with -- it's two things actually.  Firstly, I feel in the middle of culture wars, and I fear for my own exposure to audience capture.  And secondly, what responsibility do I hold or have with the information that goes out, and I've been thinking about this a lot.

Eric Weinstein: Well, let's piss off your audience.

Peter McCormack: Okay, let's do it!

Eric Weinstein: No, I'm not kidding.  Let's think about the things that you worry about with audience capture, and then let's make really crisp, clear statements to get rid of the bad people, because they're not worth it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: So, you could give away 10% of your audience and lead a much better life.

Peter McCormack: I'm happy to do that. 

Eric Weinstein: Let's do that.

Peter McCormack: Let's do that.  But it does weigh on me, Eric, what responsibility.  Do you ever consider about the responsibility that you maybe have when you make a show?

Eric Weinstein: All the time.

Peter McCormack: Does it weigh on you?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, because I'm failing constantly.  I mean, no, I'm not kidding.  I don't know how to do this, there's no manual for it, and I'm a lightning rod for crazy people.  I'm interested in crypto, I'm interested in physics, I'm interested in governments out of control in respect to the exercise of emergency powers.  Everything that I care about is cared about by people who are holding onto sanity by their fingernails, and I worry about them.  I want better mental health, I want insulation for my own family from people who think that there's a beacon.  So, I worry a lot about how we're heard.

But on the other hand, we can't risk saying nothing, because then that means that that vacuum is then filled by other voices who maybe aren't really trying to find the truth, or a better way, or how to elevate each other.  So, I think there's no way of shouldering this responsibility.  We just have to do the best we can, and some self-kindness and self-acceptance for when we stumble and fail, realising that nobody in human history has ever done this before.  This is the Wild West, it's a new world, so let's go to whatever topics you want.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is a topic I want, because one of the things we're considering is, how do we be more responsible about the content we put out?  Should we, after we've had an interview, for example, should we be running through the key points; should we be trying to factcheck; should we be supplying information in the show notes that help people find further information?  We know while mainstream media's largely failing, a lot of mainstream media still has factchecking departments, they just tend to put a corporate spin on it to keep their advertisers happy.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, well they do a lot worse than that, they do what I call "straw checking", where you assert proposition A, then you see a news story appear that says, "Factcheckers say that A-prime is not true".  And you're like, "But nobody ever said A-prime, we said A".  "But A-prime sounds like A, and we've checked that A-prime is true".  Well, that's the straw man.  A-prime is what they wanted to check to indicate that A wasn't true, but A was true.

So for example, the lab leak is the perfect example of this.  The claim was that this virus may have come from a laboratory in Wuhan.  The debunked claim was, no individual authored this virus.  That's not the same as saying it didn't come from a lab.  You could use natural selection to let evolution design a virus for you by, let's say, selecting for which viral particles in a bad coronavirus are closest to being able to infect humans by using pulmonary tissue, or something like that.  That replacing of a question A with A-prime, and then debunking A-prime is far worse than misinformation. 

So, I think we have to recognise that we do have obligations to try to figure out what's true, but I don't want to use corporate factchecking, which is often straw checking, as a gold standard.  We should come up with our own system for what we think we should put out.  And the other thing is, I feel if I'm misinformed about something and I talk to you, I'm similar to most of us.  I'm not perfectly informed about everything, I've got things in my head that aren't true, and I don't want to lie to your audience in a way that causes them harm, but it's definitely the case that if I say to you, "I'm sorry I'm a little bit late, there was traffic on the way over", it may be that there was actually a dispute in my household that I had to deal with.  I don't necessarily want to tell you that, so I'm going to tell you, "Yeah, there was traffic".

Peter McCormack: I'm not going to factcheck that!

Eric Weinstein: I'm just trying to say, if we want to be more authentic and more truthful, we have to not fetishise authenticity and truth.  I think we have to recognise what is possible, what is decent, and give yourself a budget for screwing up, "I want to make sure that 95% of the statements are true.  When I know that a statement isn't true, maybe I'll put something into the show notes". 

But I also think that this idea that free speech should not be enjoyed by ordinary individuals without factchecking departments effectively says, "Okay, you want corporate media".  I think it's really important that people who are wrong or incorrect, who are mistaken, be allowed to speak.  Freedom of speech can't end in speakers' corner or in a public park.  Digital speech is the only speech that matters, and all of it seems to run on corporate assets.  So, the new move to get rid of free speech is just to say, "Oh, well, if it's involving private companies, they can do whatever they want.  That's not censorship".

Peter McCormack: You disagree?

Eric Weinstein: In the strongest possible term, because I'm not a moron, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I mean, our traditional process has been that we understand that these shows don't exist in isolation.  It's kind of like an ongoing series, because one conversation leads to another, and sometimes we jump from topic to topic.  But sometimes, we'll come back, and what happens is we'll have a show, you know, I made a show the other day with a chap called Vijay Boyapati, and we were discussing, "Will there be a post-democracy world where we have, say, city states?"  This is something he's a fan of, I'm not, I want to strengthen democracy, he thinks monarchies were better.

We had the conversation, I read the YouTube comments, I was referred to a book I bought, Radical Markets, I think, and so from that, we're going to listen to that in the car on the way later, and that will lead to another conversation.  And one of the things I do hope is that that kind of process of having conversations, seeing the feedback, and making further conversations hopefully leads people to find the right answers for them.

Eric Weinstein: Maybe, but maybe we're going to end up having people on our shows who have secret agendas, people who are highly mistaken.  I just think we have to do a good job, and we have to not take on all of the burden that's being foisted upon us by corporate news agencies; because what they're really doing is they're using the fact that they can work at a higher level of production value, and that they can maintain a -- and they often do have factchecking departments, which narrowly factcheck.  The entire story can be completely misleading, but the facts in it are not technically wrong as stated.

We have to do our own thing.  Let's try to be good people, let's try to figure out what the evolving standards are, and let's go.

Peter McCormack: And what about with regard to technology censorship?  We've obviously seen a lot this week with Spotify, historically Twitter over the last couple of years has certainly increased the amount of people it's removing from its platform, Facebook is similar.  I listened to a show recently about surveillance and censorship within Google and how they manipulate people by manipulating search results.  Do you think much about how we deal with that whole area?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what do you think?  Is it something that has to be solved with regulation, or education?

Eric Weinstein: Well, it's very confusing.  The key thing is that there is something that has to retard bad people doing bad things for bad reasons, and I would prefer that that not be law.  I'd prefer that that be culture, I'd prefer that that have to do with the consequence of being a bastard on media, and what we've lost is any sense of the word "mustn't".  So, I think mustn't tends to come from religion.  It's not that you shouldn't do it, "I really shouldn't have another drink, but I kind of want one!"

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've got some whiskey if you want!

Eric Weinstein: Mustn't is like, "Yeah, you can do that, there's no law against it, but it's not on".  So for example, flag burning, "You mustn't burn the flag.  You can, it's a free society, but you mustn't".  "Well, there's no law saying I can't", yeah, because you're an idiot.  There's a culture saying you can't do it, and if you absolutely believe that your country is the worst country on earth, you know, I can imagine somebody burning a Nazi flag, but that should be an enormous statement, that when a proud German family burned a Nazi flag, everyone would take notice.  You don't casually burn an American flag or a British flag, even though both of our countries have done really dumb, horrible, evil things.

Mustn't has to have a form on the internet; we don't know what it is yet.  It's like the internet needs its own version of a religion.  It doesn't have to be a God, but it has to be something that has the word "mustn't" in its vocabulary, because right now what we have, if the API permits it, it's like somebody saying, "Well, if you didn't want me to take all your stuff, I presume that you would have had a laser system to detect any kind of intrusion or motion and you would lock the door with triple police locks or something.  But you left the door open, so you must have wanted me to steal all your stuff".

That kind of thinking is rampant on the internet, "Well, if you didn't want to be abused and stalked, then you shouldn't have put your house in your own name, and you shouldn't put your own name in the internet".  F-off, you stupid gamer morons.  I don't know how to speak about this.  It's like, if you're in a gaming environment, it's an exploit, "Hey, I noticed that your door was unlocked so I walked through it".  Really?  There's no part of your brain that said, "Maybe I shouldn't be doing this"?

Peter McCormack: Do you think this comes down to a kind of breakdown, or a lack of leadership, a lack of trust, a breakdown in society?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: How do we rebuild that though, because directionally we're going one way?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.  We built up a tremendous amount of order at the end of World War II.  And right now, it's like you're watching an enormous sandcastle get progressively eroded by each successive wave of stupidity.  So, it was an enormous sandcastle, but the waves are lapping at it, and sooner or later, there isn't going to be enough sandcastle left to save.

Peter McCormack: I worry about it a lot.

Eric Weinstein: Me too.  Hopefully, Bitcoin fixes this.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah.  I'm just about to release a film that I made about Bitcoin where I'm like, "Bitcoin doesn't fix everything"!

Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the issue, and I think we handled this last time.  But when your aunt keels over in the middle of a cardiac incident and somebody says, "Don't worry, Bitcoin fixes this", you just want to punch that guy in the face.  It has to be a non-reflexive response.  Bitcoin fixes a lot potentially, and there's a lot it doesn't fix, so we've got to get wiser and smarter.  I mean, this is really what I'm hoping for.  I was pretty heartened by the number of people who took something away from our interview that was positive, that said maybe…

 I want to be very clear that I am pro-Italian, exotic cars.  I do think that having fun and getting rich and enjoying its fruits is a good thing.  But hopefully, my hope is that you guys get rich enough that we get to think about really romantic things, and that's one of the reasons, for example, when Bitcoin gets slammed, I try to show up in the Bitcoin rooms and make sure that when people know that I'm a critic, when people are as high as a kite on their net worth looking at their Bitcoin holdings, when they feel suddenly humbled and beaten up, I want to play the opposite role.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think people sometimes misunderstood your criticism.  It's not a criticism similar to the likes of Senator Warren, who clearly has an agenda and hates on Bitcoin and wants to destroy it.  Your criticisms come from a place of wanting to make Bitcoin stronger and make the Bitcoin community stronger in its output.

Eric Weinstein: And, I haven't limited myself to Bitcoin.  Whatever this new technology is, again we have to separate out there's a technology, there's a money, there's an extent to which you can say that Bitcoin is successful because it's a technology that is a money, that doesn't try to do too many things; we can go through all that or not.  Something new was invented, and I don't think anyone's an expert in this.

People say, "In the Bitcoin culture, this and that".  There hasn't been enough time, we don't really know what we're dealing with.  And I think it's one of the most exciting intellectual developments around, certainly of our time.  Somebody once said that, "A start-up is a business in search of a model", or something like this, that you don't really know what you're doing when you create a start-up.  And in a certain sense, I don't think anyone really knows what Bitcoin and its associated technologies is ultimately meant to be for us, we have to keep an open mind.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, because originally it was designed as decentralised money the government can't switch off.  But increasing new use cases have been found.  We've learnt about how mining within Texas is stabilising the grid, we've also seen cultural influences on how people live their life from Bitcoin, which I don't think was ever expected to come from it, and I'm increasingly interested in seeing these individual use cases, which help where there's a centralisation of power.

I think a great example, an amazing example this last week, has been the truckers in Ottawa.  Now, I understand there's probably people in Ottawa right now who are frustrated by it, because their city's been brought to a gridlock.  But at the same time, I would always support people's free choice to protest and demonstrate against a government they think is overreaching.  And GoFundMe, I think, essentially stole their money, whether or not they've given it back.  They stole the output of that money being able to support their cause.  Step forward a bitcoiner, and they're now collecting the funds in Bitcoin, which cannot be touched.  To me, that is a great use of Bitcoin.

Eric Weinstein: Well, you can change two letters in GoFundMe and get something else.

Peter McCormack: GoFuckMe, we said this, yeah!  But it's really sad that something like GoFundMe can --

Eric Weinstein: It's really now, we've got to get it together.  Every institutional player bends the knee to the new stupid, and we're watching it, to some extent, with Spotify, we've watched it with commercial banking, Operation Choke Point.  We have to recognise that the conduit, the vector that is delivering us into abject human stupidity is our institutional class, and we don't know exactly why.

I know some of the smartest people in the world in Silicon Valley, and I am so disappointed.  There's something about the way in which money and China and law and the US Government and technology interact, where you have somebody who's high at a kite at Burning Man talking about the road to serfdom and Austrian Economics and freedom, and a bunch of stuff that I don't really believe.  And then they go into some sort of corporate context, and they come out a zombie, and they'll stop talking to me.  Because, every institutional player, it seems, of any size capitulates.  Everybody's recording a hostage video at the institutional level.

Peter McCormack: Is it just a lack of courage when it matters?

Eric Weinstein: I think it has to do with when you care too much about money, you lose the plot of life.  You have to care about money, because without money there is no freedom, and I think I've cared about money far too little, so it's a self-critique.  But when you care about money too much, you become a dick.

Peter McCormack: I think Enes Kanter at the Boston Celtics is a great example.  We've seen a lot of the pressure coming from China with regards to the NBA.  We saw the NBA capitulate, whereas Enes Kanter came out and said no and he's stuck to his guns, and he has been a vocal voice against China in support of the Uyghurs.  That is an example of courage, but it's an isolated person.

Eric Weinstein: Well, it's courage in the sense that we can't imagine anyone giving up money and putting themselves at risk in this corporate world.  And actually, "No, this my only time on this planet", and the marginal difference between flying economy and flying private is not worth your soul.  And if it is, maybe you didn't have much of a soul to begin with.  So, that's kind of the problem.

I think we also just have to be really honest and open.  Our super-wealthy and our institutional class do not deserve the word "elite".  We're talking about a world without an elite, which is much more terrifying than a world with an elite.  I don't even understand who these people are.  They have an idea that they're going to escape the apocalypse that they're working to bring about, by moving to another country.  Maybe they don't understand the way the atmosphere works, or radioactive particles, should there be an exchange.

I think we have to consider the idea that the people that are referred to as "the elite" are actually missing a few cards from their decks.  They're not intellectually capable of understanding the world that they are about to bring into reality.  And by "about", I mean it could be hundreds of years.  Certainly, I expect really bad things to happen within a few decades.

Peter McCormack: Is it like those situations like, I used to be a smoker and it's always like, "I can give up tomorrow, or I can give up a week, or at the end of the year.  I'll give up at the end of the year and then it won't affect me, because cancer's something I'll get 10, 20, 30 years later"; do you think some people maybe do realise, but they just think, "If I get that one more promotion, or if I do that one more deal, I can get myself financially to that position", and they essentially constantly trade their soul?

Eric Weinstein: Well, I think in those terms, I'm that moron, and so are you.

Peter McCormack: I am that moron.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I'm that moron too.  I had to have a conversation inside of my own head, that I can't wait to -- I mean, look, I've been choosing not to do my show, to give up on certain speaking things, so I am taking a fair hit.  But I am also the guy who coined the term "audience capture", and I'm really worried that our audiences are now crazy.  People are just not well, and I don't want to be hooked up to the 10% of my audience who's lost it, and who starts to think in terms of these internet frames of reference, or in terms of…

Look at this beautiful location you have.  Everything's great.  I'm having beverages brought to me by magical people, credit cards work, the cars are nice in the driveway when I walked here, and there's no indication of just how much has eroded and where we may be headed.  So, the surface layer's fine.  It's like we're in the movie set that used to be a city, and we've been hollowing out everything other than the fronts of the houses.  At what point do the house fronts start to collapse?  I don't know.

But I am very worried that incrementally, we are deferring, "If I can just get to that next level, then I'll worry about the future.  It's nobody's job to worry about the future at the moment, so I am very worried, and I've stopped doing that.  I was deferring certain things until I got to some level of stability, and I'm realising this is my only life and I'm not that far from my own death.

Peter McCormack: Do you feel a sense of responsibility to help improve things, perhaps having conversations which people listen to and inspire them; or, is there part of you that's, "Oh, crap, maybe I just need to enjoy my life, because there's nothing I can do"?

Eric Weinstein: No, I fantasise about that actually, I would love that.  My problem is that as a young person, I had the same thoughts, and I had one thing that I felt like I had to do, and now my entire life is based on the delusion that somebody has to figure out how to keep humanity from a shared fate.  I know that if I have to share my fate with Putin and Xi and Biden and Fauci and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump, that's not going to work long term.  My descendants will not exist because of these morons.

So, I would like us to be able to spread out.  And if you believe that CNN is responsible media, and if you believe that Anthony Fauci doesn't know anything more about the origins of this virus, you believe all sorts of things like this, lockdowns are for good people and that the cloth masks work, I want you to have your own world, and I want you to experiment with that and I wish you the best of luck; I don't want it to fail.  But I don't want my children hooked up to your idiocy and madness, and that's really where I feel.  I want to give my children an option to not live in that world, to choose a world, and that involves physics.

There's nothing I can say.  I've now come to understand that no one seemingly on Planet Earth, other than me, believes this in the simple terms that I do, which is that this place is going to blow.  You have many people who believe that.  You have a small number of people, like Bezos and Musk, who believe that we have to diversify off of one surface.  This goes back to the ideas of a physicist named Gerard K O'Neill and others.  But nobody understands that you can't really get that much diversity unless there are new laws of physics, and no one is supporting this, and I've now given up in a certain sense.

I've been on podcasts, everybody's heard the idea, and it doesn't work.  People don't understand that, for example, the issue about faster-than-light travel, there is no faster-than-light travel.  In you're in relativity, that's not going to happen.  If you want to diversify, we're going to have to get out of the solar system, and I guess the responsibility, to meet your question, is if I'm the only person on Planet Earth who actually believes that we need to do theoretical physics so that we can survive long term, I don't feel like the rest of my life is just playing blues guitar and travel and learning languages and things that I love doing.  I really feel like, if I had a group of people, I would like to do more of that.  But right now, so far as I know, I'm the only person who believes this.

Peter McCormack: Can you explain to me a bit more about what this belief is and the physics side?  I might struggle with it, but…

Eric Weinstein: No, I don't think so, it's a very quick story.  To recapitulate it at lightning speed, 1952, 1953, within six months, we achieved Godlike powers over both DNA, knowing its three-dimensional structure, and over the ability to fuse nuclei, and this sets off effectively a Doomsday Clock.  We don't know when the Doomsday Clock is going to go off, but we now know that we have Godlike powers with our Godlike wisdom, and we have shared fate.  So, my whole thing is, I don't want shared fate.

I'm not a libertarian, but I'm deeply sympathetic with the goal of libertarianists, so I'm an anti-libertarian who believes that I don't want a shared fate with you if you're stupid, and if you're crazy, and if you're just completely captured by love of money and status and all that kind of stuff, because that will end now with certainty in worldwide destruction.

Then the question is, how do we avoid shared fate?  Do we have islands that we can go to?  I'm famously focused on St Helena Island in the South Atlantic, which I think we should all move to and Bitcoin should take a stake in and make it a wonderful place.

Peter McCormack: I'm in.

Eric Weinstein: Okay, it's got an airport and now it has fibreoptic.

Peter McCormack: Great.

Eric Weinstein: Shoutout to all my St Helenians, they call themselves Saints.

Peter McCormack: So funnily enough, the town I live in, Bedford, the most, I don't know if I would say the most popular, but the most well-regarded restaurant is called St Helena.

Eric Weinstein: Is that right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: Fishcakes?

Peter McCormack: The best thing I ever had there was a blue-cheese-injected steak. 

Eric Weinstein: It sounds pretty good.  I don't know that that's a Saint's specialty!  But that's one of the hopes, right.  They don't have a COVID case yet.  That doesn't work, then you start thinking about, "Okay, well what about the Moon and Mars?"  Yeah, the Moon you can get to, Mars you can get to, but it's pretty tough to think about.  Then you have to think about terraforming it, it sounds like science fiction.  Bezos weirdly may be a little bit better.  He's talking about orbital space stations, but if you ask me, you have some super-fragile, brittle, spinning Ezekiel's wheel to give you centripetal gravity, or something like that.  That's not going to work. 

The real diversity comes from getting beyond Einstein.  We don't know whether it's possible.  It's possible that the ultimate theory beyond Einstein doesn't allow you to leave either.  So right now, we're in Einstein's prison and what we need is an Einsteinian prison break.  The way to do that is to ask, "Can we do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton?" which is that you render Einstein an approximate rather than a fundamental theory.  At the moment, it's the most fundamental theory that we have, along with what's the Standard Model or quantum field theory.

My goal is to say, "Is the theory that does to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton, does that have a new feature, which is that what previously seemed like faster-than-light travel becomes possible?"  That should be the question obsessing everyone.  But Bezos doesn't seem interested, Biden doesn't seem interested, Musk doesn't seem interested, the Silicon Valley people don't seem.  Everybody wants to go on an Ayahuasca retreat, or build DeFi.  I just look at them and I just think, "You have no effing idea where you are".

Peter McCormack: Are there any clues towards this is possible?

Eric Weinstein: Well, that's my life's work.  That's why I've given up so many weekends.

Peter McCormack: So, you're working on that?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: On your own?  Have you got any support?

Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean I have colleagues and people I talk to, and Peter Thiel is behind me and all that kind of stuff.  But no, it's a one-man project.

Peter McCormack: How far have you got?

Eric Weinstein: I mean, effing far, like really far.

Peter McCormack: And you think it's possible?

Eric Weinstein: I know what I'm seeing.  I could be deluded, it wouldn't be the first time.

Peter McCormack: How do you even do this kind of work, this is way beyond me?  I got a C at physics at GCSE!

Eric Weinstein: I got a B-minus in my final grade in high school.  There's a language.  There's a beautiful mug that I think you can buy from CERN in Switzerland, which has the ingredients of everything other than gravity on one mug in one formula, called a Lagrange.  We're almost at the end of this process that we began in the 20th century, and whether that's a chapter or a book or the whole thing, we don't know. 

But what we have is we have sort of a cookbook and a recipe with sort of ingredients and procedures, and it's unbelievable how much we know, and we have these mysteries that we can't solve, like why are there three copies of the particles of matter?  So, everything that you see in this room is made out of what we would call "the first generation of matter".  But there's a heavier version of the Lego that was used to assemble this room, and there's a heavier version of that Lego still.  So, imagine one version's plastic, one version's made of wood, one version's made of tungsten.  If you don't know about that, you can't puzzle over it, you can't ask yourself, "Why are there three?"

So, you learn what the mysteries are and then you learn what the techniques are, and then you try to say, "How does this come from a natural structure?" so that's the thing that obsesses me, which is getting rid of shared fate, by making sure that we have multiple terrestrial surfaces, so that if we lose what I think will be the majority of them, I think most worlds won't make it, but as long as you have new places to diversify to, we have hope.  And nobody's working on it.

Peter McCormack: Hopefully the James Webb Telescope will point to a few!

Eric Weinstein: No, I mean James Webb might tell us something that will be a clue, but I think people don't really understand that nobody's really doing fundamental physics anymore.  We failed at it for so long, that people are turning it into quantum information theory, they're turning it into various forms of geometric mathematics.  The core community that is in charge of this has walked off the job.

Peter McCormack: Explain to me fundamental physics versus quantum theory, so I understand the difference.

Eric Weinstein: Quantum theory would be part of fundamental physics, but quantum information theory might not be.  It could turn out that it would have an impact.  Fundamental physics is the sort of physics you would use to replace religion, "Why are we here?  What is this place?"  Higher level physics would be, "How do I make carbon fibre more efficiently with fewer defects?" 

Fundamental physics is who are we, what is this place, what are the laws, and I've analogised it to a newspaper story.  You have to say who and what, which is called "bosons and fermions", force and matter more or less.  Then you have where and when, which is space and time; and how and why, which would be Lagrangians and equations.  So, that's what physics really is at its fundamental level: what are the ingredients; what are the rules?

I didn't know, until I released a draft of my own work, nobody's out there.  I think that the entire planet -- I read everybody who's halfway competent and they release some new idea, even if I think it's total nonsense, because you never know, right?  When somebody proposes a new physics theory, you should be very frightened if they're at all competent.  I was making this point recently.  The American Civil War took place in the 1860s, and we dropped a fusion device in the 1950s; that's less than 100 years.  So, in a certain technical sense that I think no one's really appreciated, the American Civil War was almost a thermonuclear war.

Now, what's the difference between the 1860s, which looks like a bunch of antiquated -- it looks like people from another world.  What changed was science.  We did not know that neutrons existed until around the time that my father was born.  But the Queen of England, for example, or Lata Mangeshkar, who just died in India.  These people were born --

Peter McCormack: More than just an Indian singer.

Eric Weinstein: I mean, we should go on a whole thing about how much this woman meant to so many people, it's unbelievable.  I mean, she was also a monopoly, I should point out, that she basically ran Indian playback singing, at least for a female vocalist, with her sister.

Peter McCormack: Have you been to India?

Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I love it.  I'm taking my daughter this summer.

Eric Weinstein: Where are you going?

Peter McCormack: Non sure.  I've only been once, I've been to Mumbai and Goa and loved it, and I wanted to take both my children and my son just had zero interest.  But he's going away with his friends, because he's 18 now.  So, I said to my daughter, "We're going to India".  I think I want to go to Kerala, because it's my favourite food.

Eric Weinstein: Okay.

Peter McCormack: But I also want to go to Delhi, because I haven't seen it.

Eric Weinstein: Delhi's pretty intense.  I haven't been to Kerala.  Forgive me, I have to say Bombay, otherwise my wife will be very angry.

Peter McCormack: Okay!

Eric Weinstein: So, just getting back to it, the Queen and Lata Mangeshkar, both were born, I think, when there was no knowledge of neutrons.  So, that's what distinguishes, in some sense, the American Civil War from World War II at its end, and the years immediately following it; science changed. 

If we have a new scientific theory of fundamental physics, you should be very hopeful and very afraid.  I can tell you, I tried to contact the government, for example, and said, "Just be aware that I'm going to come out with some ideas", and people have the funniest reaction to this.  It's like, "You're so arrogant, you think the government would care about your work, dude?"  It's like, take everyone with a PhD of the type that I have from the kinds of institutions I do, you should be monitoring every last one of them, you fucking idiots.

Doesn't matter you think that guy's a poser or you think that guy's washed up, it's a tiny collection of people who could potentially change the leverage of the world, just like with CRISPR-Cas9, or PCR.  These are simple ideas that change everything, so you have to be very careful that somebody's going to invent a longbow.  For example, the RNA Tie Club, the 20, 25 top people trying to understand what turned out to be the genetic code, none of them got it.  It was a different guy, named Marshall Nirenberg, in 1963.  He wasn't in the RNA Tie Club.  You should be very careful abandoning your maths and physics portfolio, specifically differential geometry, quantum field theory and general relativity.  All of those people are potentially pivotal. 

Think about the World Wide Web, it comes out of CERN; think about the communications technology, think about semiconductors.  To not watch your scientists, to not make your scientists fat, happy, patriotic, it requires the idiocy of a pseudo elite.  And I'm just telling you right now, I would take these UFOs also far more seriously than people take them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, talk to me about that.  I've had another long conversation with somebody recently who wanted to talk to me about The Great Filter, and we wrestled with the idea of us being a fluke, one existence across an entire universe, or whether life is ubiquitous.

Eric Weinstein: It's a beautiful story.

Peter McCormack: Well, if we are the one, what a fucking bunch of idiots we are to ruin this, because we get to see it.  Otherwise, it's just this huge, vast, dead space that nobody ever knew existed.

Eric Weinstein: I mean, don't you want to preserve this?

Peter McCormack: Absolutely.

Eric Weinstein: I do, God, okay, keep going.

Peter McCormack: And so, we kind of just debated between us, do we think -- and you can probably help me with some of my questions, as somebody who does have more of a scientific background; I'm sometimes in the place where I think we're just a fluke, because I don't understand the details of things like DNA and how you go from single-cell life to multi-cell life, and I don't understand all these things.  How can something be sparked to have something like a DNA; I don't understand all these things?  It almost feels like design, rather than a fluke.

Eric Weinstein: Well, it's not almost design.  I mean, this is hard, because we've weaponised the term "design", because it's like what I've called "Jesus smuggling".  I know that this is going to be a conversation about Jesus as soon as you say the word, design.  We design.  My brother points out that a dachshund is a wolf that has been domesticated to have the form of a weasel.  I think that they were used to hunt weasels in holes, or something.

The fact is, we make designer dogs all the time; we are designing the dogs.  We can design a mule by having a donkey and a horse procreate.  That's intelligently designing a mule.  So, nature is always designing, in part when you have perception-mediated procreation.  My brother has a term that I love, "perception-mediated selection".  Dinner and a movie is part of intelligent design.  What does your bank account look like?  What does your figure look like?  That's a very weird thing for two people to be asking each other, but that's what dinner and a movie are often about.  And when we're doing that, we're engaged in intelligent design, we're trying to design our children.  Now, we design our crops.  So, there's part of this endogenous design that's present. 

Your question is about origins.  We've never solved any of these things: where does consciousness come from?  Where did life begin?  Probably the answers are really funny, like where did the bilipid layer originate in the cell to divide chaos from order?  That may not be the question that motivates you, but maybe that's a beginning for meaningful life question, the one that would crack things open.

Peter McCormack: Well, it just seems that the origin of life, the makeup of life, organic life, seems to be too complicated to have come from a spark in a primordial soup; it seems too complicated and I just don't understand it.

Eric Weinstein: If I can actually have a plea here?  I think people have to recognise when they're engaged in recreation and when they're actually thinking about things trying to make progress.  If we were to have a free-will conversation, I would get so effing bored, you have no idea, because it would never involve Hermitian operators and Hamiltonian symplectic geometry, it's going to be this thing about, "I don't think free will actually exists, man".  Then, "I don't feel like it has to exist, because I choose".  Those conversations to me are boring.

Peter McCormack: That's not the conversation I want.

Eric Weinstein: Okay.

Peter McCormack: I don't understand origination.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but let's not ask that, because we're not close to that question.

Peter McCormack: Therefore for you, I guess you believe, because you are considering these UFOs and considering what they are --

Eric Weinstein: I'm considering the Pentagon.  I've never seen anything that's compelling as a UFO, I haven't seen data.  I'm looking at a world that sounds like the dumbest, strangest, most moronic thing I've ever heard.  And then the Pentagon puts this report out, and then I start talking to all sorts of people, and I realise I don't know how you would fake this.  Clearly, we've lied.  We were either lying when we concluded Project Blue Book, or we're lying now, so the question about conspiracy and lying is settled.  We're clearly engaged in conspiracies and we're clearly lying.

What I don't know is if this is a SIOP, where we're trying to freak out Iran and Russia and China; I don't know what we're looking at.  Whatever we're looking at, we should be very concerned if the federal government is taking this seriously.  And the reason -- it's hard to know how to even talk about this stuff.

If we have a hope of long-term survival, in my opinion, it's either because we've figured out how to do something crazy, which I can't believe, like live in Silicon, etc, or we've figured out how to diversify.  I don't think we're going to become wise stewards of the world.  Too many of us are too dumb with too much power.  What we do have a hope for is potentially escape and diversification in the cosmos.  If we can leave, others can visit; that's the key takeaway.

So, if you believe that humanity has a long-term future, you probably believe that Einsteinian speed limits aren't the last word, because you can visit the world through time dilation and things that we know, but it's not really serious.  If others can visit, are you telling me that the entire universe has chosen not to show up; or are you telling me that life is so rare that we're barely noticed?  I don't know, but you should worry about visitors if you believe that humans survive long term, and that's a weird syllogism that I've never heard anyone else say. 

I'm not saying that nobody else says it, I'm just not aware of anyone who's put together that long-term human survival and the probability of alien visitation are probably linked.

Peter McCormack: Could it not be domestic visitation?

Eric Weinstein: Well, it could be time travellers from future.

Peter McCormack: Or, could it be, I mean you talk about investment and support for science and physics, do we, or are you aware how much, say, China invests in this and supports it?

Eric Weinstein: China's not very good at physics historically.  I believe that we're going to get our asses kicked, because in the period of time that we're not worrying about China, China are getting better and better and they're throwing real money and inviting people over.  But the world's great universities are still in the West, and Japan; Japan has great universities.  But it's very hard to find great universities outside of the western world.  India's tertiary education and research institutions, like TIFR, are a counterexample, China has some things going on.

Yeah, I'm not really worried about the fact that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians have had 12th generation craft from the 1940s and 1950s.  I think we actually just have to grow up and say we need to be worried about alien visitation.  We need to be worried about it, because if there is no alien visitation, it probably means we die on this planet fairly soon.  And, if there is alien visitation, we'd better figure out who's out there, because we're about to join a club that may think that we're not clubbable.

Peter McCormack: But we're likely to be the youngsters of the club, significant youngsters.

Eric Weinstein: I wouldn't walk into a Mafia bar, twirling a piece, talking shit.  And my guess is that when you explode thermonuclear weapons on a terrestrial surface, if there's anyone there to observe it, they probably take note and they say, "Uh-oh".  You have kids, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: There's a moment when you find the kid that you put in a crib outside of the crib, often following a loud thud.  I remember when my son figured out how to break out of his crib.  It's a frightening experience in every parent's life.  My guess is that we have broken out of our crib, and we don't even recognise it.  And our parents, in this metaphor, are probably saying, "Oh, what do you know about that?"

Peter McCormack: I mean, I remember the first time my son rolled off the bed, it wasn't the crib, it was the bed.  You used to be able to put him down in the middle, go downstairs, make a cup of tea.

Eric Weinstein: We had to put netting over the top, or something.  We put a structure so that he couldn't --

Peter McCormack: Have you ever seen that video of those two little kids and the night that they get out and they're running around!

Eric Weinstein: Total mischief, I love it!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and then they leave home.  That's the next one I've got, Eric.

Eric Weinstein: Dude, I'm about to lose my second.

Peter McCormack: Do you have two?

Eric Weinstein: I have two, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, you're going to have the free house, it's going to be a quiet place.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, for one week, I'm going to walk around in my underwear playing my Les Paul, but then I'm going to miss them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I'm already missing him in advance, I'm thinking about it.

Eric Weinstein: This is really badly designed.  I should have forced him to sign contracts!  I want my kids home, I realise that I'm just not a modern person.  You raise them and they're the best people in the world, they carry your culture, they give you a little lip, put you in your place.  I do think it's really dumb the way we allow our children to move away from home.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  They also, for me, they raise my conscience to consider things.  And when you talk about we're in the end days, and I don't know the timescale, whether you think it's a decade, five decades, a century --

Eric Weinstein: Probably less than 300 years, but I'm not saying, "By next Tuesday".  I think I could potentially finish out my life without major incident.  I don't think I will be able to.

Peter McCormack: But there's different types.  There's complete apocalyptic end to the planet, but there's also such a breakdown in the structures of society, or more war, that our kids don't get to live in a world like we did, which has been fairly stable, fairly.

Eric Weinstein: Let's put it this way, I would be very surprised if we went 30 years, which would take me into my 80s, without a 9/11 incident two orders of magnitude above that.  Too many idiots are getting too much leverage through science and technology, and we are starting to play with things that we don't understand.  But bring it back to the kid point.  Do you consider yourself an atheist-ish?

Peter McCormack: Well again, funny, because we had a guest the other day, Nik Bhatia, and his wife was here and she's from India.  And I am an atheist, but I said, "India's the one place where I felt very spiritual".  Something there just changed me and I can't explain what it was, but I felt different.

Eric Weinstein: It's interesting.  I think spirituality is really important for us atheists.  It's a brain process, and you're either open to the transcendent spirit or not.  It doesn't need to come from God, it can be biochemical, but there is something that we feel.  And the funny thing about it is, I think of Bombay as being one of the last spiritual places around.

Peter McCormack: This was Goa.

Eric Weinstein: Okay, we can get into a whole thing on Goa.  You should check out the song Dum Maro Dum, have you ever heard it?

Peter McCormack: No.

Eric Weinstein: The thing that I think is really interesting about India is that the spirituality is woven into everyday explanations.  And outside my wife's family's apartment, old apartment, there was a root from a tree that somebody had decided was Hanuman's toe, the monkey god's toe, and people would bring garlands and offerings and all sorts of things.  Yeah, I think spirituality's woven into culture and life there.

But the point I was going to get to about atheism is that children allow us to care, as atheists, about the world after we die.  I seldom meet a hard-core atheist with kids, who's also a solipsist and says, "I don't care what happens to my children.  When it's over for me, it's lights out for the world".  We have to care about the world after our deaths, and I think we're becoming a legion of assholes who don't.

Peter McCormack: I agree on many levels.  Often, I'm fighting people online with regards to, for example, the climate and global warming.  There are many people, and I understand why -- there's a thing you have to pull off.

Eric Weinstein: It's an IQ test!

Peter McCormack: It is an IQ test!

Eric Weinstein: And I appear to have failed, Peter!

Peter McCormack: I think maybe this is one of the subjects I can hold my own with you, in the opening of bottles.

Eric Weinstein: Bitcoiners fix this.

Peter McCormack: Yeah!  And, there is outright denial that there are climate issues, within the community of Bitcoin.

Eric Weinstein: Hang on.  Can we agree both that climate is a huge issue, and that the governmental bodies that want us to care about climate the way they want us to care about climate are often full of it?

Peter McCormack: Oh, no, that's where I was going, but I think there are others who, it's not that they don't believe it, they worry how it will be used, like COVID was, to manipulate and separate us.

Eric Weinstein: I'm worried about that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And I think both issues, they're separate issues, but they're intrinsically linked.

Eric Weinstein: Agreed, but the problem is, when you spot somebody lying, you often don't know whether they're lying to help you or lying to hurt you.  I know that Anthony Fauci lies to cover up what we were doing in Wuhan, in gain of function research.  I don't know whether he lies about COVID and vaccines to help me or hurt me, or something different; I just don't know why he's lying, and they're two different lies.

So, the issue with climate change is, I'm very worried about climate, super-worried about climate.  Then I hear that it's settled science, and we've got these models.  People are trying to make fun of Jordan Peterson.  I mean, let me say it technically accurately.  We can barely do the three-body problem, or approach it with point masses and gravitational interactions, it's very hard to do.  To take a world with oceans interacting with clouds interacting with sun cycles and to say, "We've solved this", no you didn't. 

What you can say is, "We've run a huge range of models, and it appears to be a conserved feature across all of these different types of models, that certain observables are within our grasp".  And whenever I meet somebody who's doing this, I always ask this question of, "What's your model of cloud formation?" because when clouds form, they have an effect on the amount of radiation that's bounced back away from Earth.  I don't know what people mean when they say this is settled science, I don't know what they mean that, "We know this, we have this many years". 

All of these super-crisp statements are taking place in an interface between actual science and policy.  You find this in economics, you find this in epidemiology and virology, you find this in climate.  Somebody will say, "I appreciate that you fancy boys in the ivory towers, and you ladies and gentlemen in the Halls of Congress don't speak the same language.  How do we get the crisp statement so that we can act?" and then you have to lie, "We have 15 years before we reach the tipping point.  How we spend those 15 years will determine the fate of the universe". 

I get it, you want to do the hot, heavy breathing thing, and it's making science have an effect in Washington DC.  We need people in Congress who can actually solve equations, we need technical people; and what we've got is lawyers and rich people, and we need smart people, we need lots.  Send more smart people, make them rich and get the F out of the labs.  We need our smart people to be our leaders, our technical people.

Peter McCormack: Are there any politicians that give you a hope?  Is there anyone you look to and think, "Oh my God, that one person"?

Eric Weinstein: You know, it's funny.  I was a huge Obama supporter for the first go-round, because his optics were amazing.  Smart, caring, seemingly open about drug use, otherwise scandal free.  I was a believer.  I don't see anybody like that.  I think what I really want is I want 10% of Congress and the Senate to have STEM PhDs, and I want scientists rich.  I don't know why this is offensive to people.

Peter McCormack: It is offensive?

Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's absolutely offensive.

Peter McCormack: Why?

Eric Weinstein: Because, people want to subordinate everything to the market.  They think it's wining.  My feeling is your entire life is built on things you don't understand that were developed under an agreement that you've been welching on.  I remember the great Raoul Bott.  He was a mathematician, arguably the greatest theorem of the 20th century, I could make a case for.  I used to visit him on Martha's Vineyard at his summer place.  He was a sun-worshipper and we'd skinny dip in the Atlantic.  That was normal.  It was normal that a Harvard professor would have a summer place on Martha's Vineyard and be socialising with people at the very top echelons of society.

Now, a cousin of mine has two PhDs, and his step-father, who has one PhD, has three homes.  The guy with two PhDs was struggling, and the old professor with the single PhD was living this life of real comfort and security.  My feeling is that what we've done is, we've taken away academic freedom and we haven't replaced it with FU money.  I was personally very happy with the academic system, where you'd have a pension, you'd have a lifelong commitment, you'd have a culture that expected things from you, and you had an institution that had been around so long that it guaranteed that you could speak your mind.  But we've lost that.

Now we've got to replace academic freedom with FU money, it's that simple.  If your scientists cannot tell you to go fuck yourself, they're not going to be scientists.

Peter McCormack: Well, we know of a fuck-you money.

Eric Weinstein: Well, let's hope Bitcoin fixes this, and the thing that I want to do is to point out, we have to celebrate wealth.  But that's not really my thing.  I believe in luxury, but I believe in it very differently from most of the rest of you; I don't like luxury as status.  I think the great sin with money is not really understood.  There's nothing wrong with luxury and there's nothing wrong with wanting status.  The great crime, when it comes to personal wealth, is using money to generate your status.

Having been around, in the last ten years particularly, some very wealthy people, it's the number one indicator of whether I'm bored instantly, or whether or not I want to keep having the conversations: does the status come from something other than the money?  There is no plane or island or house you can show me where I'm going to say, "Wow, you're an interesting person".  The thing that generates interest is, "Well, how did you amass all this money, tell me your story". 

I love the story of fortunes, and too often I think what we do is, we show off.  I want to see you showing off, I just don't want to see you showing off what you've bought.

Peter McCormack: It's funny, because in the Bitcoin world, there are some people who've got fabulously wealthy and they want to completely hide.

Eric Weinstein: That's smart, that's a different thing.  But I think people also don't understand the real benefit of luxury.  The importance of luxury to me, I have never heard anyone say, "Luxury is a signal to your brain that you can afford to take risk".

Peter McCormack: We talked about that, didn't we?  Me and Danny talked about that.  For me, it's slightly different.  For me, luxury is having complete control of time and space, and what I mean is that I can control my time, I can use it for whatever I want.  At any point, in the middle of the day, I can go and watch my kids play sports, and I can do that because I'm not stuck in a cubicle somewhere.  And when I say space, it means I can afford at any point to get whichever plane ticket I need to go wherever I want.  That's complete luxury for me.

Eric Weinstein: This is what I love.  This is the thing.  One of the things that's been great about not only working for and with Peter Thiel, but also I tend not to talk about him too much, he's a real close personal friend of mine.  I love him as a person.  And that's not the cartoon character that all the rest of you know.  He does such great things for people.  He covers up the good that he does.  I'm sure he'd be angry at me, because he would rather be a cartoon villain than be known for being a secret good guy.

But the thing that I find really interesting is, there was a physics book that I needed to order, or I wanted to, and I was deliberating over it.  And I thought, "No, this is actually what Peter wants me to be doing.  I'm just going to order a $150 book that shouldn't be $150".  That freedom is everything to me, the ability to just say, "I need to go from here to there and I don't want to think too hard about it.  I want to be able to meet with somebody".  That's really the most important part of money; that's the money that I actually just fetishise.  But that might include hiring lawyers and private detectives to keep your family safe.

The thing you can't do is personally, it's almost a mistake to generate your status from your toys and your lifestyle, that's the great downfall.  The great meaning of luxury is, it's an input to creativity, okay.  So, you have the beach house, you have the Lambo, all this stuff, tell me what it helped you do next.  This thing right here, I feel like if we were in a compressed, little room and it was dingy and there were ceiling tiles hanging down and you were like, "Sorry, it's the best I could do", we wouldn't be having the same conversation.

Peter McCormack: No.

Eric Weinstein: I feel like you're a master of the universe and I'm lucky enough to be here in Malibu.  Let's have a conversation about UFOs.

Peter McCormack: This is a real luxury for us.  When I first started the podcast, I always wanted to do the interviews in person.  I detest remote interviews.

Eric Weinstein: I detest remote interviews.

Peter McCormack: I hate it.

Eric Weinstein: That's one of the reasons I really started thinking, "Maybe I don't want to do this podcast during this crazy situation".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I hate it.  You cannot get the same conversation in person, multiple things.  Firstly, that five or ten minutes before you start, and you get the feel for each other, the crew get the feel for you, Danny also helps me prep, Jeremy helps me prep.  And then there's the specifics of what technology takes away.  The latency in the technology means you can't spot the moment where you want to interject without breaking them, because the latency always means you talk over each other.  Then you say, "Oh, you finish", there's that.  I absolutely prefer it in person.

But we also have the luxury, because my podcast has been relatively successful, we got all new equipment, because we want better quality.

Eric Weinstein: That's beautiful.

Peter McCormack: But then, also the fact that we can do it in this nice environment.  We will probably spend this year at least £500,000 on doing remote interviews, and that's a significant part of our turnover, but the product is so good.

Eric Weinstein: Well, the thing is that I also just don't trust stuff that is too technological.  The fact that you and I can look into each other's eyes and read micro-expressions in real time is necessary so that we don't end up as enemies, so that we can calibrate.  If I start to get boring and I start to see your eyes drift, I can course-correct.  It's hugely important that we retain this very human layer, but I really want to say something about this.

You guys ask, "What do you want to drink?"  I said, "A cup of coffee, ginger tea or a sparkling water".  I get this cold, pressed juice from Erewhon, which as a dyslexic, I always read as "Nowhere", because it's almost that backwards!  How much was this?

Peter McCormack: I think it was something ridiculous like $11!

Eric Weinstein: $11?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, something like that!

Eric Weinstein: This makes us both total douchebags.  Now, I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this.  It's like, you guys really spent $11 on a bottle of green liquid.

Peter McCormack: I think it's the leek in it that makes it nice.

Eric Weinstein: Is it?

Peter McCormack: I think it's leek, I'm sure there's leek in it.

Eric Weinstein: Ginger and leek.  Well, whatever it is, the key point is, we're going to get a different conversation, because of the fact that you overspent like idiots on this beautiful bottle of green juice.

Peter McCormack: Well, we want you to be comfortable.  But we set a goal this year.  Out of the pandemic, we started travelling again doing the podcast in person, and we set a goal.  The goal is 100% in person.  Now, we don't always get there, we're probably at, what, 80%, Danny?

Danny Knowles: If not more, maybe 90% now.

Peter McCormack: But tell Eric what I'm like in remote interviews now.

Danny Knowles: About 40 minutes in, you see the eyes drift, you see him checking the clock, and it's just an entirely different conversation.

Eric Weinstein: It's a different conversation, yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's a job.  Remote interviews, it becomes a job.

Eric Weinstein: Well, this is a pleasure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is entirely different.  I don't think about the time, I'm learning and I'm enjoying it, it's like hanging out with a friend.  It's just I really enjoy it, but that's luxury.

Eric Weinstein: This is why physics summer schools take place in beautiful locations.  This is why the physical plants of universities are gorgeous often, right.  The feeling I get when I wander round Cambridge or Oxford, goosebumps.  And that luxury, those wine cellars.  You have relatively poorly paid academics who have the right to pull some bottle of wine that's been sitting there for 30 years with the tannins breaking down, from Bordeaux.  That's a big deal, and I think we've got to -- I hate redistribution of wealth, because it tends to be violent and petty and all of these things.  I totally believe in a redistribution of luxury and FU money.

We need to be getting luxury to our artists, to our scientists.  We need people to be taking more chances.  Like, what's going on right now as we're doing this thing, with Joe Rogan.  That's terrifying.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, terrifying.

Eric Weinstein: I don't use the word "fascist".  It's overused.  People use fascist like --

Peter McCormack: For stuff they disagree with.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, "You're a fascist, dude".  You utter morons.  Fascism is a technical concept.  When the White House leans on a communications company like Spotify to label its critic, who brought up Joe Biden's cognitive decline as an advanced septuagenarian, he's about to be 80, and you want to label the programme that had the cajones to bring that up, on an episode with me, where he said, "I'd rather vote for Trump than Biden, because Biden's losing it and too old". 

We're talking about literal, actual fascism now.  Using medicine as a stalking horse, "We're going to hide behind vaccines and hide behind COVID to say the guy who pointed out Joe Biden's cognitive decline is a racist, moronic, pseudo-science-promoting, anti-medicine whackadoodle"; who are you trying to fool, you effing fascist?  This is the moment where you actually realise where we are.

Peter McCormack: Well, my interpretation of what's going on here is, I'm a huge fan of Joe Rogan.  I not just listened, I studied him to try and learn from him, because I think of this as a career, how do I become a better interviewer, what does he do well, what's his approach?  And I've done that with multiple interviewers, and there's a few I've learnt a lot from, but I'm a big fan.  I listen to a lot of shows, I usually do one or two a week, and there's times I'm listening where I think, "I don't agree with this, I think this is wrong, I think this is --"

Eric Weinstein: He spreads misinformation, he does.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think perhaps he does.

Eric Weinstein: But, do you know what, so do you and me.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's what I talked to you about at the start.  But what I do believe is he doesn't do it intentionally, and he is trying to pursue the truth.

Eric Weinstein: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: And, what's happened with Joe Rogan is, I think he's become so popular, because people understand that's what he's trying to do, and he's built, in a world of corporate media and corporate bullshit, which you talked about before, he's building an army of free and independent thinkers.  And free and independent thinkers are a threat.

Eric Weinstein: Yes, but look, let's steel man the opposition to Joe.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Eric Weinstein: A lot of these so-called independent thinkers aren't capable of really rigorous independent thought.  You pull them out of an understanding of evolution, like let's say you say, "I don't think the neo-Darwinian synthesis is as rigorous as is claimed".

Peter McCormack: I've been thinking about this!

Eric Weinstein: Somebody goes from saying, "Yeah, sure, I believe in science, I believe in evolution" three minutes later to, "Dude, the aliens brought us here and I think evolution's not true, that they just have weird ways of psychically communicating and changing things".  Okay, well you just went from being a science believer who didn't really understand the science, to being a science sceptic, to being a lunatic.  And I'm not saying there isn't a panspermia theory about depositing life from somewhere else, but you're not a critical thinker, you're not a freethinker, you're unhinged.

So, there is a real problem with what happens on the Joe Rogan programme, just as there's a real problem with what happens on your programme and my programme.  And it's a different real problem than what happens on CNN or a White House press conference.  So, Joe is liberating people to think freely, and a lot of those freethinking people are not getting it done.  And the White House is sort of saying, "We have the right to misinform and disinform".  We're saying, "Well, you're complaining about Joe doing it.  He's not trying to disinform.  Sometimes he misinforms".  I've never seen Joe ever, not once, try to disinform, likes weapons of mass destruction coming from the White House and the Pentagon.

I think what they're really angry about isn't misinformation.

Peter McCormack: Control?

Eric Weinstein: They believe they have a right to a narrative, "We are a conductor, everybody's got a hymnal from which they're supposed to sing, you've got the sheet music in front of you, we want to conduct and now you're doing something else.  We're trying to do Ave Maria and you're blasting You Shook Me All Night Long".  My feeling is, "First of all, there is a time for Ave Marie, you abused it.  And yeah, I don't necessarily want to hear You Shook Me All Night Long at 4.00am when I'm trying to sleep, but honestly, I'd rather a little bit of AC/DC than your goddam disinformation".

Peter McCormack: Hell, yeah!  Well, I am an AC/DC fan.

Eric Weinstein: You know that I wasn't?

Peter McCormack: You weren't?

Eric Weinstein: I was an idiot, because I saw Angus Young in his schoolboy pants and all of these ridiculous songs, like Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and I was like, "This is the most juvenile nonsense".  What was I thinking?

Peter McCormack: Do you know, the first time I went to San Francisco with my ex-wife, where we're going up to today, we went straight for the Golden Gate Bridge, and the radio was playing and it was Nickelback playing, and I stopped the car and I said, "We are not driving across the Golden Gate Bridge listening to fucking Nickelback", and we put on Highway to Hell and went straight across it.

Eric Weinstein: Awesome!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: Can I tell you, I have a different version of the same story.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Eric Weinstein: I think I was with Sean Lennon, who's a good buddy of mine.

Peter McCormack: He's a bitcoiner.

Eric Weinstein: You should really have him on.

Peter McCormack: I've tried.  So, he followed me and I was like, "Huh?" because you must have those moments where you get somebody like a hero or an idol following you, and I was like, "Wow!"  I messaged him and I said, "Can you come on the show?" and he was like, "No, I'm not interested".  Maybe you could help.

Eric Weinstein: Oh, that's funny.  He is unhinged and creative.  He is smart as an effing whip.  He stays in my son's room when he comes to visit, so he'll be going from the finest hotels to sleeping on an air mattress in our house!  Anyway, we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, and he had the wrong song on or something.  I said, "Okay, we have to play the Kominas".  One of my favourite songs is called Sharia Law in the USA.  Have you ever heard it?

Peter McCormack: No.

Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's awesome. 

Peter McCormack: We'll listen to it after this.

Eric Weinstein: So, I'm in the car with Sean Lennon blaring, "Sharia Law in the USA", and it's satirical, but also we're getting these crazy looks from people.  So, I could have done Highway to Hell, but there's something about the Golden Gate Bridge that really requires the right soundtrack.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, I'm glad you talked about the Rogan thing, because like I say, I wrestle with it a lot, and going back to the audience capture, it's very easy to make this podcast and be very right-leaning or libertarian-leaning, be an anarchist, want to burn down the state, think that Bitcoin fixes everything.  But I don't think that, and my audience is primarily American, but I'm British, European and we're very different.  And it always felt like it was a lot of risk, but me and Danny, we've always stuck to our guns and said, "We're always just going to be truthful about what we think and the questions we want to ask and where we see the world".

It has brought with it a lot of pressure at times.  People aren't the friendliest, they call me a statist cuck, a term I particularly hate, because I think it's a coercive term.

Eric Weinstein: Well, because you're not burning all the F down.

Peter McCormack: No, I'm not.

Eric Weinstein: Because you have a brain on your shoulders.

Peter McCormack: Well, I just wish for stronger democracy and stronger institutions, and I understand though why people don't believe it anymore.  But I don't think you fix it by burning down -- even the libertarians don't want the big red button, they understand the consequences.

Eric Weinstein: Well, this is very dangerous.  We can't point to any functional institutions right now that we want to support.  I can't.  I should be able to say that I really think the BBC does a great job.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think they do a better job than a lot of them.

Eric Weinstein: They do, but I'd like to be able to say national public radio, which I grew up listening to, is still doing a great job.  It isn't.  I can't point to the institutions I want to support, because of this across-the-board change in leadership.

Peter McCormack: But we have this changing of the guard with the growth of independent content creators, and you can point to some of those.  And my worry for them, or even myself, is that they become victims of the same problem.

Eric Weinstein: But you've got to piss off your own audience, Peter, it's so important.  Let's go after the part of your audience that you don't want.

Peter McCormack: All of them, all fucking leave, we don't want any of you!

Eric Weinstein: No, I'm serious.  What can we say on this programme to get rid of the 10% of the people whose voices are in your ear, because I know what this feels like, right.

Peter McCormack: It sucks.

Eric Weinstein: I'm standing up for the idea that because we hate the current hermit crabs that are in these shells, that we should break the shells.  No, the institutions are important to keep, we need to change the occupants.  So, burn it all the F down, "I'm an anti-natalist, I don't think that humans should perpetuate themselves", all of these things.  There's a category of simple, dumb answers, including Bitcoin Fixes Everything, not Bitcoin Fixes This, when it's done with specificity, or Bitcoin Might Fix This, or Let's Make Bitcoin Fix This.  We need to take that box of bot-level answers, where you can't tell whether you're dealing with a bot or a human.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well I mean, we can piss them off by titling this show, Bitcoin Doesn't Fix This!

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, let's do that.  Okay, what else do we have?

Peter McCormack: I've already done it quite successfully over the last two years with my opinions on COVID and vaccines.  I've always felt it's nuanced in that, originally I was supportive of the lockdowns when I didn't know what we were dealing with.  Then I realised they were stupid and I apologised.  But I'm very clear, I don't believe in mandates and passports, but I think the virus is real and depending on who you are, there's some people mathematically should probably take the vaccine, and some that certainly shouldn't and then there's a grey area in between.  That's lost me a lot of people.

Eric Weinstein: Goodbye.

Peter McCormack: See you.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but that's one of the reasons I'm back here and I'll come back for more, if you want, is that you change your mind and you evolve and you grow.  And doing that in public requires --

Peter McCormack: A thick skin!

Eric Weinstein: And testicular fortitude, sir.  I mean, I think at some level, it's very embarrassing to say, "Yeah, I got that wrong".  Like, I got UFOs wrong, I really got UFOs wrong, I was such a jerk about UFOs to people, because I just never wanted to listen.  With respect to the virus, I think my first tweet about it is, "No, I don't have a take on what's going on in Wuhan, China".  It really bothers me that people have a take instantly on everything.  It's like, "I'm not knowledgeable, I don't know", so I didn't make strong statements about, "People, we have to wipe everything down [or] cloth masks work [or] they don't work".  I do think that this virus has been weaponised against us --

Peter McCormack: I agree.

Eric Weinstein: -- by people who want control.  And, I can't say whether somehow they know something about this virus that we don't, but my feeling is if you know that this virus has some sort of ten-year cycle, where you'll find out the real devastation much later, like HIV had that weird profile.  I understand if you know something about this virus that I don't, and you're trying to tell me without telling me, "Take the vaccine, it's a big deal, it's not as safe as you think, but it's a lot safer than what's on the other side", well then I want to be informed. 

If this is some sort of bioweapon screw-up of the EcoHealth Alliance as a cover, funded through the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, first of all, if you guys are so good at all this clandestine cloak and dagger stuff, really you're going to fund it through the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, DTRA?  Some British zoologist just happens to get $50 million in grant?  Come on!  We signed some conventions back in the 1970s, or ratified them, or whatever we did.  There was the Geneva Convention. 

My guess is that Anthony Fauci is well understood to have biowarfare responsibilities, and they may be defensive, and they may even be within the letter of whatever agreements.  But stop making him into America's kindly doctor.  Stop lying to us, because if you want my compliance, I want information.  Otherwise, I'm thinking we need to move towards civil disobedience.  You cannot have the abuse of emergency powers like this.  You have emergency powers in times of war, in times of pandemic, and national emergency; and abusing emergency powers over a population like this is itself an act, I think, we're talking about near treasonist behaviour.

We have to be not afraid to say this.  We're talking about actual fascism, whereas you have the White House Press Secretary from the Executive Branch defending Anthony Fauci, who's also sitting in the Executive Branch, his disinformation and misinformation, going after my friend who has a podcast.

Peter McCormack: Be careful, you're going to get me kicked off Spotify.  I'm with you.

Eric Weinstein: Suck it up.  No, seriously.

Peter McCormack: I know, I'm with you.  I'll take it.

Eric Weinstein: Seriously, forget the audience.  If the audience leaves, fuck them.  If the sponsors leave, fuck them.  If the technology platforms won't have us on, fuck them.  There was an old commercial called What are you Saving the Chivas for?  People supposedly buying Chivas Regal and not opening it because it was too special, "No, come on, these are your friends, you should open that bottle".  Now, I don't know that Chivas Regal is really that high a beverage, but I love the expression, "What are you saving the Chivas for?" 

At what point do you just say, "Enough".  I'm an anti-libertarian, and I'm saying freedom.  Let's just chant the word "freedom" at these people.  We need Anthony Fauci removed, and my guess is we need Joe Biden removed, and I would prefer that we do it legally and peacefully.  I don't know whether we can do this through impeachment, I don't know whether we can do it through the ballot box.  We cannot have an octogenarian, soon to be, in a state of cognitive decline, with nuclear football, supporting some sort of medical fascist, who believes that he has the right to run our lives by denying us information, and labelling all of us who question him "anti-science".  This is dystopia already, and it's not going to get better.

So, I think it's super-important that we actually just recognise, maybe we're going to lose our livelihoods, maybe we're going to lose money, maybe China's not going to allow me to buy the car I've always wanted.

Peter McCormack: Well, look, the truckers in Canada I think are a great flag for us all, what people are willing to give up.  Obviously, they're not earning any money right now.  They've given up their income to protest against a government who is equally terrible.

Eric Weinstein: And it's so far non-violent.

Peter McCormack: It's non-violent, they're partying, we were watching them earlier dancing.

Eric Weinstein: Remember, every non-violent protest has a violent component.  If everyone behaves themselves perfectly, what they're saying is, it's like a demonstration of power.  Here's a gun, here's some bullets.  The bullets aren't in the magazine, the safety's on, but it's still a gun and some bullets.  That's what a peaceful demonstration is.  It says, "We're here this time to work with you peacefully.  We may be back peacefully, we may be back peacefully after that.  But I come from a country that celebrates the Boston Tea Party", no offence.

Peter McCormack: A little taken.

Eric Weinstein: I know, but Peter, we'll get through this.

Peter McCormack: Listen, I've been coming here for 20 years and the tea is shit!

Eric Weinstein: The thing is, we have a situation whereby we need to remove certain people from office.  Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, none of these people should be there.

Peter McCormack: Trudeau.

Eric Weinstein: I don't want to comment.

Peter McCormack: I will.

Eric Weinstein: I try to be very careful.  It's not that I never comment.  I'll say things about Erdoğan in Turkey.

Peter McCormack: Well, he's an easy target.

Eric Weinstein: But I would prefer to focus on what's going on at home.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Eric Weinstein: But I think people need to recognise that we're talking about an invasion into personal lives that is intolerable.  And if we are a free people, we are going to remove these people.

Peter McCormack: And it's not the principles that America was built on and the reason.  I mean, there's no country I've travelled to more than America, I love coming here.

Eric Weinstein: It's a great place, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is, but it's a very different place, but it's a very different place because of a very small group of people, who are causing that.  Before we finish, because we haven't talked too much about Bitcoin, I do want to ask you something.  What's it been like for you; what's your experience been; what have you learned; what are your observations?

Eric Weinstein: With Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what are your observations, as a community and things?  Because, like I say, last time really stuck with me, what the fuck are we doing?  I don't have my laser eyes, I don't tweet black Lambos, I do fuck about sometimes, just because I'm British, but it really had an impact on me.

Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, I'm pro-Lambo, you?

Peter McCormack: I'm pro-Aston Martin.

Eric Weinstein: Okay, Aston Martin, it doesn't matter, but fun cars are fun cars.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: I've tried to do this thing where I take the abuse of the community and then I come back, and I just call it what it is, "You guys have got to drop the abusive stuff, it's childish and it's dumb.  Get your big-boy pants on, we've got work to do, you guys are the grown-ups, you're going to be the big dogs", and then I try to make sure that I go into those rooms when there's a big loss in value, which is like, "I'm here to tell you not to be assholes when you're saying Number Go Up, because you're riding high".  And when you get kicked in the teeth, I'm here to say, "Don't take this as indicative that you were wrong about everything".  This is a super-weird asset.

I asked Robert Breedlove to come with me to the University of Chicago, when I went to the Milton Friedman seminar.  Robert is trying hard, he's going to put in work and he may not come from the same sort of milieu that I do, but he was in the room.  Let's talk about real concerns that I have.  I want the Bitcoin community -- let's just geek out for a second.

Hey, you guys, I want you to watch something called C CPI-U, the experimental Chained Consumer Price Index for Urban consumers.  This thing is lower than the regular CPI-U, and it's going to be rotated in in its place at some point.  They've built up a 20-year or so track record based on the Boskin Commission.  This thing is a danger to everybody, because it's going to cut your benefits and it's going to raise your taxes when it comes in.  And it's going to do that cryptically, because your tax brackets are indexed, so a lower rate of inflation will mean that less of your assets are at lower tax rates, and more of them are at higher tax rates, because of the progressive tax structure.  Furthermore, it's going to cut your benefits because of cost-of-living adjustments.

Bitcoiners, wake up to C CPI-U.  This is the scandal from the future, and I'm going to predict it here on your show.  There's going to be a move, at some point in our lifetimes, maybe yours, not mine, I don't know, but my guess is I will live to see this, where the economics community will come out in favour of C CPI-U, which is really a cryptic way of raising taxes and slashing benefits.

The person who developed the technology on which this is based is a guy named Erwin Diewert at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  I don't think he understands what a price index is.  He's the leading person.  You can't get peer-reviewed in this area if the leading people are confused about what a price index is.  Price indices are not about price levels, and what we're worried about, what you and I should be worried about, is what happened with something like M1, monetary aggregates.

Now, what happened is unclear.  Why?  These guys are so effing devious.  At the same moment that they pumped a tremendous amount of money into the system, they also changed the reporting requirements.  Now, people don't appreciate what a genius level move this is.  Everyone with a PhD is running a bunch of programmes, a STEM PhD, that sound like this, "Correlation does not imply causation.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", etc.  This is a self-enervating programme. 

All those things are true, but what happens when you change the reporting requirements on a time series at the exact same moment that you commit a crime?  All the PhDs say, "Well, you can't infer what happened, because actually there was a discontinuity in the data collection".  Okay, genius, now I've got it.  The next time I'm going to commit a crime, I'm also going to make a change in the time series reporting, then every PhD will raise their hand waiting for a cookie saying, "You can't infer that, because there were two changes.  There was what changed in the money supply, and the change in the rule reporting".  Yeah, nice try, guys.

They pumped an enormous amount of money into the system, leading to seigniorage.  That is the devaluing of the fiat currency.  And what is the universal denominator in the market?  You've got all these different equities supposedly.  Those are your longs.  What are you holding short?  The dollar.  So, if I devalue the universal denominator, because it's the numerator, all the risk assets appear to go up, and all the poor slobs who work for a living get hurt.

Now, it's extremely important that those of us on the CPI, "What's wrong with economics?" side, and those of you on the, "Bitcoin Fixes This" side, "Fiat is dead, fix the money, fix the world", get together.  Because right now, the most important thing is that the bad elements, and it's not universal, the bad elements of the economics profession need to go into intellectual receivership.  They've got an entire language about lying to us, the public.  I think Dani Rodrik called it something like "seminar voice versus public voice".  Strauss called it "esoteric versus exoteric".  It's what do you say behind closed doors and what do you say in front of the world.

The economists who are practising this duplicitous two-faced approach, where they claim that they can tell us, "Inflation was 6.8%.  Now it's 7.0%", it's a lie.  It's like saying, "The temperature in America was 72.38°F".  Really?  0.38°?  The temperature in America?  Are you hearing yourselves?  America has a map.  It's very easy to fake a number, you can just change the methodology.  When you have to fake a changing map, can you imagine meteorologists, maybe they can fake a global temperature, "The average temperature in 2019 was this".  But if you actually have to put together detailed maps and models and isotherms and dynamics, suddenly lying becomes very difficult.

The reason that they're lying is in part because they know what answers they want.  I don't want you who assembles my thermometer to have a detailed notion about what Exxon wants, or what Lockheed Martin wants.  I just want to know, what's the temperature?  I don't want you making up different thermometers from different companies to do different things.  I want instruments that tell me what's going on.  Those require maps.  In other words, it's a field concept, it's not a number.  Temperature is a field, pressure is a field.  6.8 is a number, 7.0 is a number, and the point is a lie, because the actual spread, in terms of prices, some items are up 50%, some items are up 2%, some items have fallen in price.  There is no price level.

This idea that CPI and inflation is a price level is for children, it's for people who believe in Santa Claus.  It's not a price level, it's a field, it's a field concept.  Now, I don't want to live in their managed world, so what I really have been hoping for the Bitcoin community is, after you get done joking about what I'm saying about gauge theory and you pull your pacifier out of your mouth, you'll recognise that we both recognise that we're under attack.  I'm doing a one-man show, you guys have an army.  We should get together and have some fun.

By the way, I've accepted a speaking engagement, and I've insisted that the honorarium be paid in Bitcoin, so that I go through whatever pain or pleasure with you guys, because I think it's immoral for me to ask to be paid in fiat.  So, I am definitely moving in the direction of trying to say, all of us who are taking risks and trying to think outside the box and trying to figure out constructive ways of avoiding our institutions are natural allies.  We just have to get over this sort of cartoon level of tribalism.

Peter McCormack: Amazing, I love this.

Eric Weinstein: Peter, until next time.

Peter McCormack: Until next time, yeah.  I don't know when I'll be here next, but yeah, I really enjoyed this.  Thank you so much for making the time.

Eric Weinstein: Hopefully, it will be soon, Inshallah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, thank you so much.  Take care, see you soon.

Eric Weinstein: You're welcome.