Ep. 89 Transcript: Eric Weinstein, Reckoning with Capitol Chaos and How to Save America

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Full Transcript:

Note This is a rough transcript, lightly edited for clarity.

Saagar Enjeti: Dr. Eric Weinstein. Welcome back to The Realignment.

Eric Weinstein: Careful with the doctor. I don't want to be confused with somebody preparing to do surgery.

Saagar Enjeti: That's true.

That's also a pun Eric. My parents are both PhD doctors themselves, so ever since the whole scandal, Jill Biden, I've been calling them both doctors.

So I just think that it's an honorific that we should try to please, everybody.

Eric Weinstein: I'll be entirely honest. I really don't think MD's should be called doctor. If anyone should be called doctor, it should be PhDs, but I figured we should let it slide.

Saagar Enjeti: See, we're already got such good content, Eric.

We wanted to bring you back to the show because you've been putting out some really just, I think, profound thoughts about where we are at the state of the country. I think you recently tweeted, you're having trouble sleeping as a result of the Capitol riots and so much of what we saw. And I just want to give you the opportunity to just give us your thoughts, and break down this terrible week in America and how you think that we can [00:01:00] get out of this.

What can we do?

Eric Weinstein: I want to even go, I think it is a terrible week, but I don't think it's a terrible week for the same reasons that everyone else seems to think it's a terrible week. One of the things that's going on is that we have a very strange selective memory and the selective memory doesn't remember the fact that we've had a bombings in the Capitol building. We've had a, I think a Jewish suicide bomber in the Capitol building in previous times,

Marshall Kosloff: Puerto Rican occupiers. Yeah. It goes deeper than that.

Eric Weinstein: So the fact is that the optics of this week are absolutely horrendous. We had a police, law enforcement officer beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, which, I don't, I really don't even have words for that.

But I also think that in part we're not really capable of having the discussion about what really happened, [00:02:00] what maybe we could let's start with the Viking. We had a Viking, taking pictures, playing around, I don't know, in the Senate or the House. And I think that this really gets to the heart of what's going on, which is that we are LARPing our way into Armageddon and the seriousness of this. All of the talk of civil war and all this kind of stuff, is weirdly not getting our opportunity to find the off-ramp. In large measure, what we've got is two teams of live action role players, or so-called LARPers. And they're engaging in something that I was worried about in, I think, 2013.

And I wrote an article, for the edge annual question and they asked what is the scientific theory that everyone should have in their cognitive toolkit. And I had several ideas. I was going to write about regulated expression in genetics. [00:03:00] And I said to my wife, the thing I really want to write about is kayfabe.

And that is the system of lies and deceptions found inside of professional wrestling. Now, of course, that's not going to be seen as an academic theory, but professional wrestling and the intelligence community are the two places that understand nested levels of deception, better than any other two groups.

And they're light years ahead of psychology departments. So part of what's going on is that we've got two national LARPing complexes that are engaged in what I would call kayfabe. So we have Vikings, people are posing, stealing the lectern from the house of representatives. I'm thinking that they're at some kind of a rave or a party, maybe it's burning man for politics.

Not clear. That situation can go [00:04:00] completely insane and become real in a way that I don't think people appreciate. So I often pose the question, which is more real,  mixed martial arts or professional wrestling. And I would say professional wrestling by a long shot. If you look at the list of deaths associated with professional wrestling, it doesn't get more real than that.

I don't think UFC has had its first fatality yet. And in essence, what we have is we have a mock national conversation, one around stop the steal, which has rejected the United States justice system, which has refused to give Donald Trump, much comfort. And the idea that you're going to save America from its own justice system is pretty interesting by going around the will of the courts.

So I think what we have here is we have a national meaning crisis where there are people who have very little future, and there are people who still [00:05:00] have a future. And the people who still have a future are selling LARPing to two teams. One of which is wokeistan. And the other of which is magastan.

And so we now have a war, mostly on the internet, mostly through kayfabe of magastan versus wokeistan, which have to be two of the most intellectually crippled theories you could have. Not because they don't contain seeds of truth, but because they fill in what is missing with total nonsense. And I think that what's going on, did you guys take a look at the video of the woman being shot in the Capitol? How closely did you study it?

Saagar Enjeti: I think I saw it three or four different angles, but I saw this woman literally leap towards a gun and I just couldn't stop thinking. I'm like, what really compels somebody to do that?

It's pure and genuine belief.

Eric Weinstein: That's exactly it. This is like the boxer rebellion in China, where you had people who were convinced that they had [00:06:00] supernatural powers or you get kids on some powerful drug and you turn them into child warriors and you make them wear dresses and you tell them that the dress will make, give them, make them invincible or, I forget what, general.

Butt naked or whatever it was in Africa, there's supernatural beliefs about what's going on. And one of the angles, on the woman being killed, shows the gun emerge first pointed at the window that they're trying to break through. And you clearly hear on the audio, he's got a gun, right?

So that's clear warning. You see that the finger that is to pull the trigger is properly not on the trigger. It's not inside the trigger guard. It's along the barrel of the pistol. It comes inside the trigger guard and then it goes back out. This is not somebody who is looking to discharge a weapon.

This is somebody looking to [00:07:00] not discharge a weapon and the idea that this woman was climbing up on this right into a gun is bolstered by the idea that right behind her is immediately after she's shot. You see all sorts of law enforcement officers armed to the f-ing teeth who are clearly behind her, who were not stopping this thing.

We are not going to have an accurate discussion, but we're going to have is a political football and the political football is going to be used by anyone and everyone who has a partisan ax to grind in an attempt to divide the country into these warring factions. And we can't get at these two insane mimetic complexes because the center is actually sponsoring the lunatics.

So figure that the center of the left and the right, the establishment is busy, looting the United States government stealing as much silver as it can [00:08:00] cutting the paintings out of the frames. And they're distracting the people with no future. As the people who still have a stake in the game and can hollow us out, keep amping us up.

And I posted something on social media. If you recall, Donald Trump was encouraging people to rough up the protesters and beat them up in back in the 2016 election. And one guy was 78, threw an elbow into the eye of an African-American and sucker punched him with an elbow. And I went looking for those two guys thinking I should get them on my podcast.

And I found that they'd reconcile and they hugged in a courtroom and they put this behind them. And in four years, the video had fewer than 20,000 views and fewer than I think, 20 likes. And I posted this and immediately just posting it caused a 50% increase in the viewership over four [00:09:00] years in a single day.

We are being kept from coming together. We are being kept from getting rid of these people. And right now the most important thing is that by any, with apologies to Malcolm X, with any, by any legal means necessary, we have got to remove our current lead leadership period. The end, there is no more.

Marshall Kosloff: So a question that comes to mind, because it came up a couple of times during your statement there, LARPing, there's a portion of the audience, which isn't online.

If you're not on Twitter, this won't make as much sense for you. So can you just describe the phenomenon of LARPing? What is it and how does it manifest itself on the wokeistani side or the magastani side? If you will.

Eric Weinstein: If you ever go to a let's say, if you go to golden gate park in San Francisco, many of the most nerdy and spectrum kids are engaged and by the way that I say that with zero disrespect, I'm proud to be part of that group. [00:10:00] Engage in live action versions of Dungeons and dragons, and they've got foam, swords and mesas and all sorts of things. And there very clear rules and you get to play in a fantasy medieval or situation, let's say, okay, now, in some sense, it's like the Stanford prison experiment.

Zimbardo where you tell people your guards, your prisoners, and sure enough theater becomes real. There's a limited ability to suspend the distance between our characters and ourselves. Our characters are in some sense, real, and what's interesting is that live action role playing can become immersive.

You can forget that you're in a game and in kayfabe, which is professional wrestling system of deceptions. You break things into work or shoot. Work is a scripted activity in, taking place by the way, kayfabe is carnival speak for fake [00:11:00] and, so work would be is if, we agreed to have a fight on this podcast to, to drive your ratings through the roof.

At 10 minutes.

Marshall Kosloff: And I have some words for you, Dr.

Eric Weinstein: Marshall, I've had about enough of your backtalk.

Saagar Enjeti: Let's not call out CNN too hard here.

Eric Weinstein: So then, shoot would be the spontaneous occurrence of reality in a scripted event. And then tertiary deception occurs where you think you have a work where everyone's in on it, by the way, if you don't understand the professional wrestling is fake, you're called a Mark.

If you understand that it's fake, you're called a smart Mark or a smart. And one of the reasons I love this stuff is that I can't get the language that the espionage community uses to talk about deception, like false flags and stuff like that. They're very advanced, but professional wrestling by now is known to all.

So the smarts understand that it's all fake. But then when you can have a [00:12:00] situation where the fourth wall appears to break and the people who are in on the idea that it's a deception are suddenly freaked out to find out that it's spilled over into reality, but that spill over into reality can in fact, be encased by another fourth wall.

And that would be called a work to shoot. So what's going on right now is that we don't have language for the levels of theater, deception, fantasy and we're struggling. So what we do is we keep finding meaning. And if you'll notice very carefully, what we're doing this week is that we're finding weekened meaning. These are the darkest days of America. We thought it could never happen here, but in shocking footage released from Capitol Hill, we see the destruction of everything good about this country, that kind of mock seriousness is preposterous. This has been visible for the entire time that we've been engaged in this.

And [00:13:00] nobody cares about the fact that we are a thermonuclear nation trifling with the very dangerous business of degrading the customs of the United States, which are used to evade the need for putting restrictions into law. Our culture has allowed us to be free. And right now what you're seeing is the degradation of our culture, which will necessitate rules, right?

The old magic of America is it's the country in which you have no desire to burn the flag. You have every right to burn. And when you lose that culture, you're going to see a call to restrict free action. So the magic of the United States is not its constitution. I've compared that to the written Torah of the United States.

But the written Torah is complimented in a [00:14:00] duality by the oral Torah. And the written Torah doesn't really work on its own. You need the oral Torah and the culture to animate the document. The document can't do anything. What we're now seeing is a complete degradation. The great attack of Donald Trump was on the oral Torah and culture of the United States.

And a lot of people who found that very restrictive it's like, why can't I, why can't I tell Polak jokes? When was the last time anybody told a Polak joke? I grew up. And that there were books of Polak jokes. We don't do that anymore. And that kind of behavior is something that we can do. We just choose not to.

So we're talking now about the degradation of our culture, where Donald Trump has pioneered the idea that if everyone is thrown out the first baseball, every president is thrown at the first baseball of the season. He realizes that there's a huge win to be gotten by not going along with tradition every time [00:15:00] there's a tradition or a custom, you can always just decide that you're going to disobey it to show how independent, the fact let's imagine it had been going on for 200 years, which it hasn't.

Yeah. Cool. I'm the first person in 200 years to think for myself. And that's what Donald Trump has been doing. He's been degrading the oral Torah of the United States which was holding things together. So we didn't need rules and the people who didn't like the oral Torah and wanted to be completely free to be their horrible  selves, were super enthusiastic about the idea that Donald Trump has finally freeing us.

And guess what's going to happen next. You're going to see a move to shutdown speech on the internet. You're going to have the major tech platforms refusing to host. You're going to have financial harassment. I'm already, I've been making the joke for years though. Should Republicans be allowed to use the streets?

That's not a joke. I start seeing calls that Republicans shouldn't be able to buy groceries. So [00:16:00] I think that the problem is, I think this is a grave week as Marshall says, I really am on no sleep, but I don't think it's serious for the same reasons. I think that the problem is that this LARPing can become reality.

It can convert to reality. It's a rehearsal for something and effectively it's like, if you're waving a gun around with no intention of firing and it suddenly goes off, you've just transitioned into a different world. And you see this all the time. And right now, what people are doing is that they're like they're dancing on the eaves of a building, and somebody is going to fall sooner or later.

And the whole thing is going to convert in seconds.

Marshall Kosloff: How does the leadership class distinguished between the LARPing and they actual danger moments? Because I think we've mentioned this, I'm from Portland, Oregon, and you see the example of this and the treatment of Antifa back in July, back in June, mayor, Ted Wheeler, leadership class of [00:17:00] the city say that it doesn't exist.

It's not real. Anything that has happened. Anything that does exist is basically referred to as LARPing. Come November predictably, as soon as Donald Trump is no longer in the presidency, the mayor of Portland gives a very strong, very aggressive statement about Antifa, not following the law, all these sorts of things.

So that's the center left, left wing version. The right wing version is okay. And a lot of

Eric Weinstein: The center left, left wing version. That's so Ted Wheeler is an abomination unlike anything that we've ever seen on the center left. I don't know what that is.

Marshall Kosloff: My point is that I, here's, what I more mean by that.

I suspect that most mayors of most Democratic cities would have operated in the sense that Ted Wheeler operated. What I want to do is bring this back to the, what happened last week. If you went to most Republicans, Republicans who have now turned very aggressively against what's happened.

What happened at the Capitol. They would probably say there's protesters. It basically doesn't matter if there's going [00:18:00] to be some maga people. There's going to be a couple of groypers, whatever. It doesn't really matter. Now it matters. So from my perspective, on both sides of the aisle, you see a leadership class that doesn't seem able to navigate the LARP to real-world dangerous scenario.

How, from your perspective, should they think about that?

Eric Weinstein: I don't think we have a leadership class and Marshall, I don't mean to say that I can't understand your question. I mean to say that we should reject your question. And I don't, the frame is the problem, I don't, let me make a more provocative statement and then attempt to back it up because the provocative statement is going to obviously sound insane.

I don't think the United States government really exists at the moment. I don't think that there is a leadership class. I think what happens is that, just the way you have an army during peace time, which developed certain habits, you get peace time, generals, people play war games. It's not really an army.

And then you have a live action situation. And the thing has to convert [00:19:00] into a fighting force. Um, I think we don't have a government. And I don't think we've had a government for a long time. I think in some sense, the last time the United States clearly existed may have been 1945 and then it has been degrading in various fashions from that.

So that was pretty functional, the thing we put together during world war II and, we were able to do the space program and, the 1950s were an era of an incredible scientific progress. And unfortunately also incredible military progress when both us and the iron curtain behind the iron curtain.

But I don't think that you understand how little the government actually exists now. And when Donald Trump got elected, I went to visit a colleague at the old Eisenhower office building off the West wing. And as I was walking the halls, I noticed how many offices were empty [00:20:00] that seemed to have very important plaques on their doors.

There was no Trump intellectual movement that you could staff the government with. And I think this goes back to something that Saagar and Krystal said  beautifully on Joe Rogan, right at the beginning. I recommend everybody the beginning of that episode, that there are these two teams that get rotated in and out of government.

And either you go into the think tanks or you go into the office buildings, in the government office buildings. Trump did not have an intellectual movement to put in. And so as a result, it's the dream of the anti-tax movement that you want to government so small, you can strangle it in the bathtub.

And I think that in part, he wasn't able to staff because Donald Trump really was the only thing behind Trumpism. It was a completely idiosyncratic drunken boxing movement where Donald Trump [00:21:00] understands a few things very well better than anyone else. And many things much worse than anyone else, or he's just a horrible human being, but he's at his best when he's sticking it to the left, the institutional organized, left, which again, isn't really left at all. Based on its hypocrisy, he's very effective at that. He's the only, if you include military and administrative appointments, I don't think we have had another president with zero government experience. And that's an incredible achievement.

And many people said we're never going to get another shot. Let's get on this train. Even though we can see the danger, even though we despise him, because the main thing is to stop the insiders from selling us out to China, from selling us out to Davos that the major business post the fall of the Berlin wall has been selling out those Americans too weak to defend themselves in order to get wealth, by globalization let's say, or financialization or anything like that.

So [00:22:00] we've been in a suicidal spiral clearly since Bill Clinton and arguably before that in such a situation I don't think we have a leadership class. And I think that the people who are sitting in those seats are children and their children who are in general at the national level. Many of them are born in the 1940s.

Somebody pointed out that, one way of saying it is Diane Feinstein was conceived in the Hoover administration. Most of these people were conceived in the Truman  administration. This is not a way to lead a technologically advanced society into the 21st century. These people can't code, they've never used a pipette.

They basically, they don't know what the teller ulam design is. They don't, they're not technically capable people. They're professional peace time [00:23:00] kleptocrats. And the extent to which Ted Wheeler and mayor Jenny, destroyed confidence in the willingness to enforce the law created this thing that I got really attacked on social media for which is that we created the never Trump, Trump voter people who hate Donald Trump with a passion who voted for him in desperation to stop mayor Ted Wheeler and mayor Jenny, and their obvious attempt to allow a criminal element into the city for the purposes of provocation, allowing in particular in Portland, attacking the federal courthouse with, do you guys remember the shaggy song? It wasn't me. That was the strategy. What Antifa? Yeah. There's no Antifa, doesn't exist. And Jerry Nadler was asked about this directly and I posted this clip where, you see the [00:24:00] court as being firebombed and the claim is that the group during the firebomb doesn't even exist.

It's a myth. And, okay. This is why, for example, black Americans believe in chem trails. Because the Tuskegee medical experiment lets them know, Hey, we do anything. We're so crazy. Given what we've already done to you, you have no reason to believe that chem trails aren't real. It's what we would call Bayesean priors.

You're tutoring, people's Bayesean priors that you're completely full of shit. You have absolutely no integrity. You're willing to engage in madness and keep in mind that the one thing we know about LARPing is that the body count in Portland is so low because this is an agreed upon theatrical battle.

Marshall Kosloff: Quick thing, Eric, I have to ask you this. I'm not asking you this in the woke sense. So let me, finish the thought here. I'm from Oregon, as I said before, so. I only mostly know white people, so everyone I knew growing up who believed in chem trails was white. So I get your point about why, [00:25:00] black people.

Why do white people believe in chem trails?

Eric Weinstein: Oh, that's a little bit different. The Pacific Northwest because of its history of labor, activism and communism, in part shares a lot of the history of black America. So one of the reasons that people see me as conspiratorial is because I come from a progressive family.

And so when the government has spied on your family, when it's, we locked Paul Robeson in the country by taking his passport. We locked Charlie Chaplin out of the countries so that he left and we wouldn't let him back in to go to his house. Once you've been the target of the United States government.

You realize that the mainstream belief of all of that's all science fiction and you go to too many movies is complete nonsense. So I would say everybody who shares the history of being, just being lied to and having their history completely denied. Remember the weather underground was a response to the [00:26:00] assassination of Fred Hampton at the hands of the cook County Sheriff's department, as directed by the Federal Bureau of investigation for the crime of introducing the rainbow coalition to decrease black fighting between gangs to create a political movement. We are that crazy. And because we are that crazy, everyone who's plugged into the Howard Zinn version of our history is not quite so sure that all elections are free and fair. If you take operation Ajax in Iran, we clearly know how to turnover in government.

Marshall Kosloff: That was the overthrow of the Shah, right? Yeah.

Saagar Enjeti: Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh.

Marshall Kosloff: Yeah. Too many operations. It's hard to keep track

Eric Weinstein: Operation condor in Chile. The issue is if you don't know your history, maybe all this sounds like conspiracy theory. If you do know your history, you know what we're capable of.

And there's no question that we're capable of throwing an election and then now the problem is okay. He said that. It's a little bit like saying I don't believe vaccines are [00:27:00] 100% safe. Now that's clearly true. Vaccines are not 100% safe. However, there's an expectation that nobody will speak reality. If you're part of, if you're like me and you have advanced degrees in something you're supposed to deny reality the way everybody denies reality. We're now at the point where the public, so many members of the public have caught on to the fact that the national official narrative is total nonsense and they're willing to believe anything at this point.

Saagar Enjeti: This is something I really want to focus in on with you, Eric. And I want to turn it into where we are today and something I've talked a lot about on rising and we're talking about tomorrow is about impeachment and a point that I've been trying to make. And I'm curious to get both your guys' thoughts on this is that in the context of impeachment, the way I look at is impeachment is you have to have.

This is essentially the most extreme act that you can go through as a democratic society invalidating the election, the previous, removing the [00:28:00] democratically elected president of the United States. And I looked at the recent polling to the extent that we even have polling. And I don't know if I even believe it, but what we have is this 56% of polls, 56% of Americans say that Trump should go and you could say that's a lot.

But to me, I'm like, wait, so there's still a sizable majority of the country that says that he shouldn't go. And then he look within Republicans and you say 73% or whatever, still approve of Trump still think of the job he's doing. Some of even justify the Capitol violence. And I'm not saying any of this with a qualitative judgment.

What I'm saying is, if your goal is to unite the country, if your goal is to move on, which is what Joe Biden and many of the case for him was this seems to me the worst possible thing that you could do, but then the other side to impeach Trump either right now, or to impeach and bar him from office in the future.

Because the way I look at it is that would be one of the single biggest instances of trying [00:29:00] to basically not even invalidate votes, but to tell a sizable majority or sizable minority of this country, 44% or so that the person that you have immense faith in is no longer allowed to represent you as president.

And it seems to me that it could be, I'm not saying it's intentional, but it's a cover. For not wanting to address the reasons that Trump was elected in the first place. Number one, and this is what I said today, too, is look, if you're Joe Biden or the Democrats, and you want to make sure that Trump has never elected again, you don't have to impeach him.

Do you know, distributed vaccine properly and pass $2,000 checks for all Americans. You will win the presidency. It's actually not that hard. I just, I want to get your thoughts on impeachment about the legitimacy of democracy. I, no, it's fine. If you disagree, it's fine. Because my goal, what I know is that you're trying to operate in good faith towards, trying to be a more harmonious country.

[00:30:00] And it seems to me that a lot of this, a lot of impeachment talking more is about punishment. It's about penalizing and I have to try and take Trump out of it because I find what he did so odious and all that, but we still have to live with many of the people who voted for him in this country. And we have to channel those concerns and more, go ahead.

Eric Weinstein: We don't have to live with them. They're us. Yeah. Those are my brothers. Those are my brothers and sisters. And let me tell you something. You guys have kids? Okay. Let me imagine. You're my kids. Okay. You get involved in a cult. You think I'm not coming back, I'm coming in for you to get you the hell out of there.

You think that I'm not, that I'm just gonna, just dismiss you and say, Oh my God, they're now part of a cult and they're beyond the pale and I've just, I have to cut ties and I'm going to disavow them. Yeah, of course. Fuck that shit. Okay. Maga [00:31:00] is our responsibility. Those are my brothers and sisters.

I'm not running away from, I'm not interested in that. I'm not demonizing them, but a cult it is. I'm not going to say it. Isn't a cult. I'm also not going to say that woke isn't a cult. It's a cult. These cults are incredibly powerful and some of us have been noticing that there is no class of break glass in case of emergency people in our country.

This is sometimes what a monarchy is supposed to do. I was hanging out with a Royal family in Europe, which will remain nameless and just

Marshall Kosloff: There's like three so someone can figure this out.

Saagar Enjeti: No, there's more than that. There's more than that.

Eric Weinstein: It's more than that. Yeah. And a Prince was saying, you have to appreciate we're in a very bad situation.

No one, there's no justification for monarchy anymore. So we're really hanging on by a thread. I said, look, I'm anti [00:32:00] monarchy. But you should at least be able to steal man the case. He says, what do we do? What is our function? And I said, you've had 75 years of peace since the end of world war II.

How often do you use a fire extinguisher? Almost never. Does that mean that you just get rid of the fire extinguisher because you haven't used it? No. You check in on it. And when you need it, it's there and what's the purpose. You're supposed to walk the rubble when the bombs are falling, on a city, for example, you're supposed to give the people something to rally around.

And I don't believe in doing that through monarchy cause I'm an American. We reject that, but I do believe in Buzz Aldrin. Right? I do believe that there are people who are apart, like when killer Mike spoke in Atlanta, He seemed to be apart, I don't know who that guy is. I'm not really a hip hop fan, but I was really impressed with [00:33:00] him.

And in particular, I am a huge fan of black oratory. The skill involved in black oratory coming out of the black church, is it's a really it's its own thing. And it's one of the things I'm proudest of as an American. There are times when you have to address a mob or a crowd, the times you have to do what James Brown did after Martin Luther King, I'm going to get through this.

We have got a situation in which we don't believe in seating anybody who has those characteristics in the chairs, the reason that I want to do rising more than I want to talk to the two of you is not anything against Marshall. It's about the optics. Rising looks like adulthood. It looks like it comes from the institutional complex and the optics is the [00:34:00] adults.

The institutions don't listen to anyone outside of a closed system. And effectively they've put up this barrier where they call everything alt-right or far right that doesn't have the right characteristics, which is on the take. And right now the important thing is to seat the people who have tried to call both balls and strikes for four years and had been torn apart.

Who've had their families torn apart. Look, I work for a guy who supported Donald Trump in 2016. It was noticeably absent in 2020. My entire ability to speak freely comes from my good friend's money. And the fact that I disagree with him and I love him so much that I trust that he will not for me because I'm [00:35:00] undermining his political, this, you know my brother for example, is ejected from evergreen state college because he was willing to stand against racism, even if it comes from blacks.

Yeah. The number of people who've tried to call balls and strikes for four years is tiny. And right now, what I want to do is I want to take Brian Williams and Mara Gay, and I want to give them a huge vacation, let them go to Tulum. And I want to see different people in those chairs. If those people can't figure out even how to add and subtract, speaking of their crazy idea that Bloomberg could have given everyone a million dollars with his campaign investment.

There is no commentary class that's competent that sits in those chairs. It's, the problem, as I've said is that the system isn't broken it's fixed. And until you actually see your critics, until you do what we used to do, which is to seat the Noam [00:36:00] Chomsky's at a place like MIT, so that the conscience of MIT lives inside of MIT so that the ombudsman can say that the paper is out of control.

At the New York times or the wall street journal, when you don't seat your critics inside of the organization, you are on the road to self extinguish. And right now the most important thing is to realize that we don't have time to put everything on the blockchain to build new institutions, the most important thing right now is to get the tiny number of people who've been calling balls and strikes who were born after 1964 into those effing chairs to tell the system you're over, it's over and you're done you people from the forties you're failed. You don't understand where you are. You're not technically competent. You don't have the country's best interests at heart.

You've sold us to China. You've created incredibly [00:37:00] deep fake stories about the intelligence complex taking over the world, or, something about the desire to destroy America, all of these crazy stories that we've built around wokeistan and magastan have to go and they are responsive to each other.

Woke creates maga, maga creates woke, the snake is eating its own tail. The whole way we get out of this is that we put the people we trust more that, let me give you a very simple rubric, take anyone where the official description of that person is maximally divergent from the actual description of that person.

Ben Shapiro is a Nazi. Okay. An Orthodox Jewish Nazi. That's pretty interesting. Sam Harris is an incredible Islamophobe. No he [00:38:00] isn't. I know Sam he's my good friend. All of these things, Bret Weinstein is the far right. Seek the people where the description of them inside the gated institutional narrative or the gin is maximally divergent from the reality, because that's the place that the system showed you, let the system tell you who it fears and seat the people in the chairs who are feared most who are maximally misportrayed and then you'll have it.

You'll have a solution.

Saagar Enjeti: But here's the question, Eric, which is that,and oh, and for the record, Eric is coming on rising. So don't everybody worry about that. He will be there and it's going to be great, but here's the problem, Democrats and democratic primary voters in particular who select our possible next president.

They love Brian Williams and Mara gay, and they love MSNBC and the MSNBC lineup and Republican, but they do, they trust them if you serve the same. Let's see. I don't know.

Marshall Kosloff: So I wouldn't say, I [00:39:00] wouldn't say, Saagar let's specify a certain, very influential and powerful part of the Democratic party. People who live in Northern Virginia, people who live in the long Island suburbs, the park Avenue reference in everything.

They certainly do like those people

Eric Weinstein: Which long islands suburbs. The hamptons?,

Marshall Kosloff: We're reaching the Lake, but we're reaching the limits of

Saagar Enjeti: Our conventional wisdom, but I want to make just one second. I want to make this point too, because the Republican party does deeply trust Fox as well. And so to the point of the media actors who look, I would love nothing more than to be seated, but I can tell you, I go on Fox.

There is a character that they want me to play. Increasingly I have been doing a lot less because they will ask me to come on and all they want me to do is smack the left, smack the left, smack the left, or talk about culture war issues. And I'm like, no, because this is ripping this country in half. And I've increasingly turned down a lot of appearances unless it's to talk about an economic system,

Eric Weinstein: Do you know what my [00:40:00] condition is for going on Fox,

Saagar Enjeti: Go ahead.

Eric Weinstein: I've done this like the last time. I think it was probably Greg Gutfeld. I said, if I come on Fox, I'm telling you. I'm telling your audience that I view Fox as a propaganda network, but he says sure. And I said, we got a deal. 

Saagar Enjeti: Great. Yeah, that's good.

Eric Weinstein: No, but I'm telling you, this is part of the deal, which is, what's going on is not quite correct.

So let's take long Island. The Hamptons loves Kamala Harris. Yeah. The Kamala Harris that is loved in the Hamptons is not the Kamala Harris that we see. In other words, it's like a developer looking at a computer program. They see the code, we see the binary, we see the finished product without being able to see what's actually going on.

They specifically love Kamala Harris because they know who she is and what she's going to do for them. And we see the front end, which is what she's going to do to us. So, first of all, no, I don't think that they love [00:41:00] Brian Williams. And if you think that they love Brian Williams, please allow me to go on opposite Brian Williams and Mara Gay. They're going to love him a lot less because it's a little bit like thinking that the professional wrestlers, no, it's like the Gracie challenge. We used to talk about karate and Kung Fu and all of these things. And Brazilian jujitsu wasn't on anybody's list of coolest martial arts back in the 1970s.

Right. It's only when you actually start putting these things against each other, that you stop believing that somebody is the coolest or the best. Steve Vai seems to be the greatest guitarist in the world until somebody named Guthrie Govan shows up and then check out what happens there.

At some level, they live in a protected world and in professional wrestling, it would be called a promotion. They're not actually fighting there. Brian Williams is scripted to win. He's a designated winner. So we have a designated [00:42:00] winner system and we can't get away from them. But are you telling me that people wouldn't, weren't getting frustrated about what was done to Tulsi Gabbard.

When Tulsi went after

Marshall Kosloff: There was like two people, Eric, there's like two people who actually feel like, I want to tell a quick story about this because it reflects, I think a danger in over valorizing rising, no offense Saagar. When I was doing rising panels back in January and February, every week we were doing the polls, everything like that.

I thought Andrew Yang and Tulsi were just crushing it because you'd say something nice about Andrew and you would get, I would get all these really nice comments that talk about how smooth my skin looked. Or I would say something about Tulsi and her foreign policy. People would say this young guy is the smartest young guy you've ever seen, but then the actual election happens and they get four and two and 3% of the votes.

Eric Weinstein: That's not my point,

Marshall Kosloff: But my point though, is that if we're talking about, here's a better way to put this. Brian Williams represents far bigger of a [00:43:00] constituency, at least for right now, at least for the subsequent future than anything Tulsi Gabbard's putting up there, Tulsi Gabbard bless her.

I'm not using the Texas sense, but Tulsi  Gabbard is a, she's this weird former Republican who's conservative in many socially conservative ways. She's progressive in different ways, but that's not an actual viewpoint, which has a serious constituency. So I just can't accept the idea that she and a person who represents her ideology is the inverse of Brian Williams. That's my concern.

Eric Weinstein: Let, me be very clear about this. I don't think necessarily that Andrew or Tulsi would have won. I'm not claiming that they were set to win. What I am claiming is that when you starve people for airtime and when you publish like the ugliest picture of them and the most attractive picture of somebody else, you do all the media tricks that we do every time.

And you drop people from your graphics. That has the effect of letting somebody know that person isn't going to win. [00:44:00] And we tend to take the message. We know that I knew that Andrew and Tulsi weren't going to do very well. That causes me not to want to invest in them. And so I know I don't necessarily, I wasn't, I never signed on to Andrew or to Tulsi.

What I am trying to say is that many of us face this accumulated thumb pressure on the scales of justice and the justice in this case has to do with the primary. There was no primary. My claim is that the primary didn't exist. It was not free and fair. It's sealed in a particular way. I don't think that the candidates are allowed to assemble unless the event is sanctioned.

The events that are given are given out to legacy media structures. The time given to the candidates is wildly asymmetric. There are all sorts of ways in which the rules are built to make sure that there has to be an appearance that anyone can enter, but that will not actually happen.  [00:45:00] In a way in which the general election is threatened and insider will always prevail for the general.

And that's what Donald Trump snuck through on the Republican side, Bernie almost knocked through it in 2016, and we don't really know what would have happened with Tulsi and Andrew,

Saagar Enjeti: See Eric, I did, this is where I want. There's my question too, though, which is with, even within this premise, which is that within the gin because what you're supposing is that if you were allowed to go on Brian Williams, but then we both know that they're not going to invite you. So this is part of what I want to get at, which is that with, and I think your concept of the gin is incredibly important to anybody who's actually trying to think about systems, because when you thinking about systems, that's when you're actually going to think generally on a much more structural level as to why incentives work and the way that people respond to those incentives within them, which is that.

At a bare at a base level, your success, my success at me, the reason people were [00:46:00] even tuning into this conversation is because Brian Williams will never invite you on. It's that, they're not gonna have me on MSNBC anytime soon. And it's within that closure of the system. What my greatest fear is, I used to think, they have to eventually relent because they're losing market share or whatever.

But it's just not true. The truth is that they got the result that they wanted in the primary. And they've, they're more profitable than ever. They actually have more viewers than ever by doubling down on the strategy. How, can we, is there a solution to that? That's, my question because I'm not sure if there is right now.

Eric Weinstein: What I'm trying to get at is, this is the Jaipur effect.

If you know Indian history during Gandhi's emergency, all, most of the founding fathers of modern India had moved on from the independence movement and had become bureaucrats, had become wealthy by, [00:47:00] getting in on the spoils of a new nation. And there was this one guy, Jaipur, or Ryan who is the patron Saint of lost causes whose heart was too pure to actually profit from the good work that he did.

And when Indira Gandhi declared the state of emergency, as she did, which was highly unpopular, the cry went out in the darkness. There was one light Jayaprakash, is the word for light, right? Prakash. And, the slogan was some point in the Corinthia of not a high, but via task. Hamada high, total root, total revolution is now the slogan.

Future history is ours, and that's how this game works. You're pushing the world towards the Jaipur Karsner Ryan moment. He didn't matter except once, but when you need Jaipur, Karsner Ryan, you're not going to reach for Brian Williams. You're not going to reach for Sean Hannity. You're going to want to, there are people, [00:48:00] people I have not even set up a Patreon page and I won't do it until after the inauguration or something.

People have no ability to contribute to me. And it's probably an empty gesture, but the point is you need people who are planning only for that one eventuality.

Marshall Kosloff: I want to build on something here real quick, Eric, because this is interesting. It goes back to your earlier comment about leaders who are equipped.

The dynamic that Saagar's speaking about with MSNBC and rising insert Rogan, Sam Harris, and even the Patreon economy is the idea that we no longer have big institutions. No, one's getting 30 million viewers. We instead see a dissemination of audiences. So the business model for you, if you're doing a Patreon, as you get thousand people who love you the most to give you $10 a month.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's a lot more valuable than getting 50,000 people who are giving you YouTube revenue clicks. The problem here is that the skill set that's [00:49:00] selecting for is a skill set of appealing to niche audiences, if Saagar and I wanted to blow up The Realignment right now, what we would do is say.

We think the DNC was stolen in a sort of conspiratorial way. We would do all these little dynamics that wouldn't necessarily be honest, but they would appeal to that niche audience. So how do we have a set of leaders of how do we create leaders or how do we fill people in different spaces? When what they haven't been selected for is integrating their group into other groups or articulating their perspective so other people find out what they're doing.

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. The time hasn't come. Look, I love money. Everybody says that they don't care about money. I don't know what they're talking about. I just love it because I can buy, I could buy Navy seals to protect my house, given what I'm about to say and do, I can boost my signal. I could hire assistants. Right now I do everything myself.

My problem is that I don't love money enough. And I don't think you guys love money [00:50:00] enough. I'm not kidding, but hopefully you do, you love money. It's just not enough. And your time isn't now it becomes very clear. Why don't I love money? Cause I have things.

Money is very expensive. Most of the very wealthy people I know spend almost all of their time talking about money and I don't want that life. My time is too valuable. If time is money, my time is precious and there's not usually enough money to buy my time. What I believe is that nobody really believes that at the moment, we're still caught in the old system about power and money and who's on top and all of this stuff.

I want my children to survive in a country that I deeply love, and I don't see anybody fighting for this. The concept of being a Patriot, I can tell you everything wrong with this country. This country has been horrible to my family. [00:51:00] I love this country. And the idea that I get to push out a sophisticated version that is not immediately intellectually insulting the idea that, I've given up huge amounts of income by quieting my podcast, because I knew that these cancellations were coming.

And I did not want to give people the excuse to come after me. Our time isn't yet gentlemen. That's what I'm trying to tell you for 75 years, something hasn't happened. And that's so long that people can't remember that something is about to happen. We are.

Marshall Kosloff: Could you define 75? So do you mean like war?

What do you mean by something? Nothing has happened

Eric Weinstein: In the fall of 1945 we dropped some atomic devices in Japan and with the exception, in some sense of maybe the great leap forward in China, we didn't have 20th century level tumult. So we've been through this incredibly [00:52:00] quiescent period, and we are the children of the great nap we grew up in a, even with the cold war.

The storm clouds were always on the horizon, the Cuban missile crisis. They stayed on the horizon. So as a result, we don't really know what reality is. We've been in a prolonged state of unreality. And when you look at what happened at the Capitol building and you compare it to what happened at Stalingrad, you're not even, these aren't the same parts of speech.

The future is coming. And it's going to come pretty violently because nobody knows how to hold this thing together. And I don't mean violently necessarily in terms of blood in the streets, it could be the disruption of our legal system. It could be any one of a number of things, but what's happened is we've held the future at Bay.

This is my wife, Pia Malaney's observation, and the COVID accelerated the future because the [00:53:00] future has been held back by the people born in the 1940s. The fact that all five of the major candidates left at the end of the election were all born in the 1940s. All of them would be the oldest person ever to take office tells you something because it was not even remarked upon effectively.

What you're looking at is the pre great society world attempting to hold back the future. And this is their last. When you corner a beast at the end of its life, it is maximally ferocious because it has no reason to hold back. And what we're seeing is a maximally ferocious group of septa and octogenarians, clinging to power, which is about to give way.

And what I'm trying to tell both of you is your time isn't quite yet. All that you're doing right now is you're getting yourself set for what comes next. And the key question will be. How do we get rid of Brian Williams? How do we get rid of Mara Gay? How [00:54:00] do we get rid of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump and Joe Biden and get technically capable, social media savvy people who live in the modern world into the chairs that are needed to direct the institutions.

If the institutions only listened to institutional media, what we're doing is whatever Winston Churchill was doing before world war II. And what I highly recommend gentlemen is look at Chamberlin speech of resignation. We always talk about Chamberlain, waving the paper about peace in our time and go home and get some sleep and all this kind of stuff.

That was his low point. Want to know What his high point was? His resignation speech, it'll give you chills. What he did was he said, Hitler. I dunno, invaded Holland. Maybe I can't remember exactly. And he says, Hitler is counting on our division and you want to know what he doesn't count on what I'm about to do [00:55:00] next I'm resigning.

I'm resigning to back Winston Churchill and Winston Churchill has asked me to stay on. So fuck you. Joe Biden, if he was an American Patriot would resign at this moment because he can't give the speech that you just said, Joe Biden cannot give the unity speech. Killer mike could give the unity speech.

I could give the unity speech. You guys could give the unity speech. Joe Biden can do the Neville. Try to imagine not being up to the level of Neville Chamberlain. If Joe Biden resigns. And she should resign, right? This is my thing. People used to do this stuff. People used to understand that the commitment to country was a real thing and that hanging on to power, like for what purpose is Joe [00:56:00] Biden hanging on to power he's 78.

What's he going to get from this? He can't lead. He's so tarnished. He's so tainted. Maga's tainted, everybody who only called balls and strikes for four years is tainted. And my claim is that those of us who are untainted have this idea of, oh, we can't sit down in the chair, the fuck, we can't sit down on the chair.

Gentlemen, we can sit down in those chairs. What degree from what university does Brian Williams have that makes, is it his hair? He's got better hair in some sense for television than any of us. Okay. Is that the qualification? Let me ask you guys a question. If he was doing a radio, a podcast that wasn't institutionally affiliated, what do you think his numbers would be?

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, it would be low, but the whole point  is that he's just been around forever. He's actually a pretty good interviewer. Whenever it comes [00:57:00] to some, news segments, I didn't say he was perfect, but look, this is the thing is

Marshall Kosloff: I do have to cut in for something, Eric. Yeah. I really disagree with what you said about Joe Biden and mind you, he can disprove all of this, but looking at the Democratic party of today, Looking at the terrible reality of what, and obviously we started this conversation talking about how we should look to history and this wasn't Stalingrad, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think Joe Biden is basically the only person within the institutional Democratic party who a, has an actual constituency that really matters that b, has the capacity to make the unifying decisions that he has to make. He could totally fail to do that. He can make the wrong calls, but the fact that during the height of everything, Joe Biden has the confidence to say, no, I'm not for defunding the police or no. I actually know that most [00:58:00] Democrats and people in this country don't support Medicare for all, but that matters.

That's the judgment. If he resigns, there is no Churchill waiting in the wings. That's the problem here. And the difference is. Churchill by that point too was what he was 65 years old. So it wasn't as if there was these like young whippersnappers who were ready to go. I just don't think the historical analogy works here.

Saagar Enjeti: I guess the question is why would Joe Biden seems to be at least within the Democratic party, the only person of even wanting to do while you are alluding to there, Eric, what is to be done? Why should he resign?

Marshall Kosloff: I think at everything you're critiquing Kamala Harris would be worse on every single count that we're talking about. I genuinely believe that Kamala Harris would be worse.

Eric Weinstein: I don't want him to resign so that Kamala takes over. What I'm trying to say is the entire class is tainted. Okay. And I was saying also, Marshall, what you were saying is that we haven't [00:59:00] created break glass in case of emergency people.

And I want to be very clear about something. I am not interested in a political career. I would be a disaster. So let me destroy any hope.

Saagar Enjeti: Too honest.

Eric Weinstein: No, it's not just too honest. There's are certain, their executive decisions. I'm a thinker. I'm not, the ability to make a strong decision on limited information, commit to it and lead people is a special skillset and I'm not embarrassed that, that, isn't my skill set.

I'm fricking terrific at all sorts of things. I'm not terrific at that. I am not running for office. I am not trying to get power. I'm not trying, this is not part of a grab. There's this old Bill Hicks routine about marketing and sales that once you start thinking in marketing and sales team, terms, and somebody tells you that they hate marketing and salespeople.

Marketing and salespeople say, oh great. You're going after the anti-marketing and sales dollar. That's good dollar. You can't get out of the mindset of everybody's grasping for power. Power is fucking boring. I want to do math and physics. [01:00:00] I don't want to push out all sorts of amazing things to my audience and delight the world.

I want to go play the mandolin. I'm not interested in government. What I am saying is I'm interested in making sure that the break glass in case of emergency people get into a position where they can take over from the corrupt people. And I think that the problem to be honest is that you guys have Stockholm syndrome from living in DC.

What we need currently. And I understand what you're saying about Biden and he threads some line, but he voted for the 2005 bill to make student debt, non dischargeable in bankruptcy. I can go through a million things that Joe Biden has done badly. To tell people that, he's gonna prioritize everybody who doesn't look like him for help with their business.

Well, lord knows what a Hunter Biden sells, to make his millions. Enough. And I think that part of the problem is that we're used to selecting from a pull-down menu. I would [01:01:00] recommend that all of your listeners go to a Starbucks and ask for a short coffee because you'll notice it's not on the menu.

And when you ask for the short coffee, they will give you the short coffee. There are things that are not on the menu that you have to know to ask for. And so right now, the point is I don't want to Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren. Or any one of these people? I want the short coffee, give me the short coffee.

I don't want the Mara Gay. I don't want, Nikole Hannah-Jones. I don't want Sean Hannity. None of these people. And the problem is that most of us have the idea. If not a then the other thing, then be my point is no, I want 37, queue. And you're just talking about AB test.

Marshall Kosloff: So here's a question that builds into everything you're saying here.

What cause despite our DC Stockholm syndrome, which is definitely a real thing in [01:02:00] many respects, we do largely agree with your critique. We frankly don't want to run for office either. That's the dynamic here, but that being said, there are people who do want to run for office. There are young people who show up in DC.

I'm not going to name names here, but who big build, very big social media followings, and then come into office. I won't name a name here, like Madison Cawthorn, who has been a frustrating experience from my perspective, because on the one hand he starts out and he talks about how he wants to fix healthcare and be his generation's leader, X, Y, Z thing.

And then on the day of his election, he's tweeting and he's apologized for this name, you, but, owned lib or just whatever he's falling, cry more lib, he's falling back into the trap of that previous system. So what would you, what would your advice be for young people who are trying to not be, who want to be that break class figure, but every single incentive is to push them the opposite direction.

Everything is telling you to go speak at the DSA convention or to go speak at the turning point [01:03:00] USA conference.

Eric Weinstein: First of all, if you speak at turning point USA, I don't think there's anything wrong with speaking at turning point USA. Just make sure that Charlie Kirk knows that you're going to say something that isn't so charitable about turning point USA, and that you're going to thank him for the opportunity, the same way I do it on Fox news.

So the first thing is that you can absolutely go on Fox news and tell them that Fox news is a propaganda network. And once you've done that, that's fine. If you listen, I went on Ted Cruz's podcast, the verdict, but you gotta be disagreeable. You can't get swept up in the desire to make nice.

You can't sell your hosts out. I'm not gonna go on Ted Cruz's podcast to stick it to Ted Cruz. I really appreciate the fact and I was polite as could be on the other hand. I'm no pushover and don't be a pushover. Have your own independent sense of reality and make sure that you carry it with you when you get onto that stage and make sure that you try to call balls and strikes and be prepared that you're going to be called.

The [01:04:00] amazing thing that in the internet era is that there's a name for every ready-made argument. Oh, bothsidesism. Ooh, that's just, whataboutism? Okay. You're going to get the automated bot level arguments. Dude, I thought you had integrity. And I realize you're just a grifter, like blah, blah, blah.

These are the hyenas of social media and they just nip at you to try to wear you down. Okay. What you need, you ever watch hyenas going after a lion, you got 20 hyenas on one lion until the rest of the family shows up. And that's one of the reasons why I'm doing the show. You guys are break glass in case of emergency people.

You know, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and I can appear together if you want to see unity. Glenn Beck just reached out to me, said we need unity  now. And, I was never a Glenn Beck fan, but I just wrote one letter. I think I just wrote one word in now, what do you need?

[01:05:00] Let's do this thing. So my claim is lead by example. And you don't have to be perfect. I lashed out at Kyle Kashuv, you know, when he was like saying, I tried to warn you about this, enjoy your new Biden administration. And I deleted the tweets, cause I was on edge. You don't have to be Jesus Christ or some kind of a Saint.

You don't have to be mother Teresa. The key thing is. People eventually get that you really care and that you're decent and that, maybe you want power or fame. You want to be thought well of, I know that I want status, blah, blah, blah. It's not a big sin. What we've got to do is recognize our time isn't yet.

And we're on the doorstep of our time and we have to get there. And so what I would say to those young people is don't screw up your future, playing in the present while the present is unraveling better to forgo it. Take a few years. You're not going to get there necessarily. Maybe this whole thing blows up before you ever get there, in which case, I'm sorry, but your best bet is not [01:06:00] to play in the present.

The thing to do is to get the damn septagenerians and octogenarians who do not come from the modern era, come from the pre great society universe. Off the stage, replaced them with technically capable people who are better adapted to the modern era. And you can find these people by the people who are maximally demonized relative to their reality, because those let the system tell you who it fears most.

Go scan the list of alt right people. Every person called a Nazi with a Jewish surname should be somebody that you're probably interested in talking to. Every person who's never voted Republican who's called the far right is somebody you should be interested in talking to. Everyone with an advanced degree in virology who says the Wuhan lab hypothesis should not be off the table because we don't do science by putting our politics first, before we examine all of the evidence, all of those people. It's very hard when you can't trust the CDC. The surgeon [01:07:00] general Anthony Fauci or the WHO to know what you're doing locked at home while your business is crumbling.

Not sure whether in fact this is actually a very serious pandemic or a bad version of the flu, because I can tell you, I can't figure it out. I'm a pretty smart guy. I can't figure it out. There are times when I hear that the hospital beds are overflowing and we can't, we don't have space in the ICU and we're, we have triaged deaths and there are other reports I hear that we've got all of these beds ready and that nobody's inhabiting them. None of this makes any sense. So my claim is that if you feel like you can't figure out COVID, you can't figure out what just happened in the election, you don't understand why the election is disputed in this way, join the club.

I don't know how much voter fraud there was in the election. What I do know is that our courts didn't find any of this persuasive. And so if you're going to claim well, okay, no, the courts are actually under Russian control. If you keep adding epicycles [01:08:00] to your conspiracy theory, where the Donald Trump appointed justices, aren't affirming Donald Trump.

There's some point at which you've got to realize that you've been engaged in a massive LARP. Then the LARP is based on a certain amount of reality. And right now what we need to do is to have a place to come back. And I just want to talk about this one woman in Texas. I saw on social media, she adores me.

She says, you're my favorite person, blah, blah, blah. And it's very touching. And I see her wrapped in a Trump cape. And she's at this January 6th rally. And I knew to fear the January six rally and two days before it put it out, the tweet stream did you did? Yeah, I called her up and she was like, I can't believe you're calling me.

And I just said, look, you're in college and you going to something like a rave and you're having great conversations and you're having fun. And you're trying to explain your patriotism. And you're worried that you saw all of the thumb on the [01:09:00] scales from media, and you're worried that it extends to the election.

And the person who got shot could have been you. And she immediately talked to me about, I can't, how do I go towards Biden? It's no, neither, get off that spectrum, go to your studies, go get drunk. And I said, be young, wild, and free. That's your job right now. Get away from these old people.

These are crazy old people and they have no future. This is all going to be taken care of by father time in 20 years, Bill Clinton is in all likelihood going to be dead. Hillary Clinton, very few of these people are going to be around. You are still going to be here. Stop investing in these old people.

They've gotten control of our society in any previous era before the 1980s, before we started messing around with mandatory retirement, which was [01:10:00] allowing our society to renew who itself, these people would be embarrassed to be seeking office. I mean it, when was the last time, an octogenarian showed up for a sports illustrated swimsuit photo shoot at some level it's not appropriate.

It's just, I appreciate that they want to stay engaged, there's a reason that Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale didn't run in 2020. And it's because they have better sense to realize it's not their time anymore. And I probably would rather have had Jimmy Carter than Joe Biden.

Saagar Enjeti: That's when you know, things are really bleak. Eric I want to end it there because I think that's such an inspiring and important point. And I can say too, from personal experience, that you're 100%, right. Just small story, whenever I was choosing between [01:11:00] rising, which remember at that time there was no rising, I didn't know.

It was like me. It was just Krystal. There was this show at the Hill. Which was at 6,000 subscribers on YouTube, it was like literally nothing, not something people knew anything about. And I had another job offer as a white house correspondent with a large news organization here in DC.

And everybody in DC told me to take that white house correspondent job. Every single one.

Marshall Kosloff: I remember this. People talked a lot of shit. It was a real thing. What's Saagar doing was a whole thing,

Saagar Enjeti: I didn't do it. They were like, take the DC de correspondent job. They're like, who knows about this thing? Stay within your path, keep doing these three minute Fox news appearances, right over and over again.

That's the  cachet Saagar don't you  understand? What are you doing? And I self exited from the system before I got to it, I hit the red button and I was like, no, Enough. I don't care enough about Fox. I don't care about being in the white house all the time. I don't care about doing these Trump interviews.

I don't care about all of the traditional things [01:12:00] in Washington media that we care about and that we are supposed to care about in terms of your career, what happens a year later? Holy shit. You're on the Joe Rogan podcast, right? It was like this, it was like me colliding with a world that they knew tangentially, but didn't value.

And they didn't understand the success of the program or the growth, and they minimize it basically until they couldn't, until they couldn't reckon with the fact about how big it had gotten. And my ability to have you here to talk to you. I know people were like, I listen to Eric Weinstein to, to figure out what's going on and I'm like, oh yeah. I've talked with Eric, he's been on my Pod. They're like, oh my God, you actually know him. And it's just this, it's this self-defeating problem that we have here in Washington and all establishment media in particular, where they're always going to tell you to take the safe route and the only way to succeed.

And this happens with politics, anybody who's young, is you have to [01:13:00] self exit and say, it's like you said, you have to look to where the future is going and you have to play that game instead of doing what some like boomer executives want you to do and play within the role that you're assigned yourself.

So I just want to say again, thank you for underscoring that, and really in a time like this, I just, we had to talk to you because you're one of the few people here who in good faith is trying to reach. We want to live in a more harmonious country. And I genuinely know that whenever I talk to you, I don't know that whenever I talk to a lot of people.

Left, right? All of it is about punishment. All of it is about exacting a cost from your enemies. I don't know many people who would say about maga people like these are my brothers and sisters. We have to talk that way more again.

Marshall Kosloff: I know we just said, we're going to finish up, but I thought of a question that came up here.

This is totally random, apologies for that, but ever thinking about punishment and cults, [01:14:00] right? The use of cult was applied to Trump. I don't know what you think about this though Saagar within Eric's framework of what would you do if your kids were kidnapped by a cult, you go the fuck in. You do all that stuff.

You almost certainly would support the punishment of the cult leader. Especially if that punishment prevented of doing that to other people's kids. So how do you think about the punishment framework within the contract you've created for Eric because it's unclear which direction it goes.

Saagar Enjeti: I agree with that.

I would say, and this is what I said on my show this morning, which is that he lost the election, that's the punishment like he lost, that's the real price. He was humiliated on a national stage and lost States, that he won previously. Eric, I'm curious before we go, what do you think about that.

Eric Weinstein: I have a very, people will not understand this.

I'm hesitant to say it, but I think I, I probably should. I believe in smacking some people to the curb and being the [01:15:00] first to make sure that you offer them a hand back up. And my feeling is that right now, Donald Trump needs to be smacked to the goddamn curb. And I also believe that at some level you need to potentially offer if not him, certainly people around him, a hand back up and a way back and the vengeance that the problem with social justice theory  is that justice is actually sometimes a euphemism for vengeance. A lot of us feel very humiliated. We feel very jealous and Donald Trump is going to be built back up by overreach of the Democratic party because the Democratic party is not without its own blood on his hands.

And in essence, the democratic party created the presidency of Donald Trump in my opinion, by saying, oh, how do we get somebody to irradiate themselves? We'll give them cancer and then they'll need to irradiate themselves. Inside of that [01:16:00] framework, I don't think that the Democratic party is in a position to do this.

I do think that the tiny group of misfits to which you guys belong and, I can't tell you how touched I am that you guys think in these terms. Let me just say that for all future appearances on anything you, do you have a general yes. I don't give out a general. Yes, but I so admire what you guys are doing that, just don't even ask me to come next time, whenever you want.

What I'm really thinking is that at some level you do need to smack some people to the curb. But you also need to recognize that religions that are around for thousands of years have forgiveness and grace and redemption. And this passion for the destruction of the individual, the cancellation of an entire human being and the social isolation from de platforming is a recipe for creating people with nothing left to lose, who have access to fertilizer and potassium, nitrate, and [01:17:00] worse.

And my claim is that most of us need love and admiration and trust. And look at my timeline, the number of people who say, Eric, I always politically disagree with you, but I never feel that you're condescending, never use words like knuckle draggers or make fun of the inability of people to spell.

I talk a lot about the fact that my IQ is a bit lower than most people imagine because of my learning issues. I talk about the fact that, I am disgusted with the tote bag conspiracy. If you have Karl Cassell on your answering machine, that you're so proud of the fact that you're not like those other people in the center of the country who, by the way, all those farmers actually know genetics probably better than you do, because I just don't even understand what's going on in Kansas or Montana or whatever, ranchers. We need to basically realize that the rest of our [01:18:00] country is being driven insane by its media, but that person to person human, to human, most of us are better. And one of the things that I really think, the cure for anti-Semitism is getting to know more Jews as friends. The cure for anti-black prejudice is hanging out in black spaces and experiencing the warmth and hospitality. Part of the problem is that we've learned to distrust each other and to look down on each other.

And if you will just come forward with an open heart and an outstretched hand, almost everybody immediately realizes that they're coked up on institutional media. And once that kind of haze and fog lifts we get back to the business of being who we are, because frankly, if we're going to be, we're great and the other side is horrible. That's not America, you've already given up on your country. And so I just want to say what a pleasure it is to be in a position where whatever [01:19:00] our differences are. I know you guys have your hearts in the right place. I just view myself as a supporting actor. You guys are the future and anything I can do to help you to get you there would be my honor.

Marshall Kosloff: Thanks Eric.

Saagar Enjeti: Likewise Eric. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

Eric Weinstein: Thanks guys.