You just came back from your first holiday in quite a while. My first holiday of, let's say, three weeks or more in quite a while. How was that? Astounding, really.
Very good to see what's going on in the rest of the world at this particular moment. We had previously gone to India in the year to visit family. This was to go back to Turkey and to go to Portugal, but also to the Azores Islands. And I can't tell you how meaningful it was for me to be back traveling.
Why? Well, I mean, partially, when you have children and children change your game for about two decades, you have to realize that that's a transient period. It felt like it was going to go on forever. And so this was sort of trying to figure out what is it like to go from traveling in your 20s and 30s without kids to traveling with your kids at the last moment that you still have them at home, and now you'll have the rest of your life without them again.
But you can't go back to backpacking and doing certain other things that were easy for you. So you have to figure out how to rejoin your previous life that has been in progress without you actually ending for a long time. A sabbatical from life almost. The other thing is that you forget about parts of yourself.
Like, I forgot that I spoke Turkish not well, but I spoke rudimentary Tarzan Turkish 30 years ago. And to be back in Istanbul and to suddenly have words and phrases and things come back and be talking to cab drivers and just people in the street seeing the change. Obviously, there's been an enormous amount of change in Turkey. Portugal is fascinating.
Seeing certain things at the end of their life cycle. We were the synagogue in Bursa, where the sort of the home of the Ottoman Empire, where they were down to, like, the last 50 people, which is a common enough thing when we visit diaspora Jewish communities, sort of at the tail end with the embers still glowing hot, but no, no chance for a rebirth. And then in the Azores, I was not prepared for the level of beauty that we encountered. There is a level of beauty that I've only experienced two, maybe three times in my life that sort of leaves you physically sick, like ill.
It's so beautiful that your. Your body is the weak link. Like, you might think that sugar is tasty, but if you would eat a bag of sugar, you'd probably be sick to your stomach. And I would say this was like, so much beauty that it was at an almost pathological level.
And more than I think my family could really take in, it was just so moved. I've heard you say before about how a lot of the time you don't realize the last time you're going to do a thing with a person and a lot of friends, especially once that are fathers have told me the same thing the last time you'll bounce your daughter on your knee. You don't know when it's going to happen, but it's going to happen. There's also a really strange realization when you get deeper into childhood and work out that probably by the age of 18 or 20, you've spent 97 or 98% of the time you're going to spend with your parents.
And all that you wanted for the last four years was to be away from them. And now all that you want is to have a little bit more time and it's all gone and you squandered it while it was there. I'm on the ethnic program. We don't believe in this stuff.
My children don't become adults at the age of 18. I don't care about the laws of the United States and the state of California. I think we do family wrong in the States. You send them off to college and then you tell them, go follow your dream, and they bounce into some locality that you weren't in.
And you don't get the benefit of these very strong families because the market has been so strong in the US for so long. The market more or less took over all sorts of duties that were assigned to families historically. And so the reason that people always say, oh, your families are weak, was because our markets were strong. Right.
And so insurance and opportunity, all of these things that could be handed over to the market were. And as a result, when we find out that the markets are not safe, we realize that we've abandoned the structures that we needed to retreat to, that our families are quite small below replacement rate very often and we don't live in the same place. And so I married a woman from India and I basically carry a lot of Eastern European norms. And so my feeling is that my children are my children forever, and I'm not letting go of them.
And this idea that it's your life and you can do what you want is only true up to a point. You also have a continuity issue. And this is normal, by the way, and it may sound weird in an American context, but I think that the world recognizes that we're links in a chain and there's a certain amount that you get to do that's just yours because it's Your life but never go full Billy Joel. Yeah.
Pangenerational housing is something being Austin people getting ranches, starting even 10 family mini villages with a bunch of people. Yeah, it's something I'm seeing occur more and more and you know, in an atomized like mass solipsism, mass individualism society, this doesn't sound like a bad idea. We got to the end of that dream and it didn't work. You've been around a lot of very powerful, very rich people throughout your career.
No, no, no, that's not true. Only relatively recent, Only the last decade and a half. That's quite a while in many people's lives. What do you think that most normal people would be surprised to know about the powerful and the rich individuals worldviews, the way that they hold themselves, what is and isn't true?
They feel powerless. That's one of the craziest things, is that very often you're at a table of people of immeasurable wealth and they're talking about the rich or the hyper connected. They don't see themselves in these terms. Why?
I think there's different kinds of rich, to be honest. I think that for example, you got rich from let's say arms manufacturing. You've been entwined with government your whole life or agriculture, something that's highly regulated, that's extraction oil and gas. Those people I think have always been close to power.
A lot of the dream of tech, for example, was we don't need the government, we'll just build stuff in our garages and if it's cool, it'll take care of itself. And therefore we're minimally dependent on the traditional ecosystems. So a lot of tech money felt disenfranchised, they didn't know how to play the game. And that was both to its credit and a huge danger.
But I think one of the things that I find very interesting is that when people are not rate limited by money, they're limited by all sorts of other things. They may not want their number to go down. So they go from 6 billion to 4 billion would be a huge blow. Even though it doesn't seem to impact normal things.
Another thing is that most of them have given up on the retail notion of reality. What's up? Whatever. Mainstream media, if you have a worldview that allows you to listen to National Public Radio, that then reads the Wall Street Journal and the Times and the New Yorker, whatever that point of view is, Most of the very powerful rich people I know have checked out at a level that is astounding they don't believe that they can afford to depend on normal institutions.
How does that show up in their lives? Weird ways. You know, they don't have a regular doctor, they have concierge medicine. Their fire policy comes with a private fire department that will fight for their home, but won't necessarily fight for homes next door.
I didn't know that that was a thing. Okay. You know, it's not until you travel with some of these people that you realize that there's a secret corridor in the airport or a way of getting onto the plane. There's a lot of infrastructure built for a very small number of people and for the most part they can't figure out what to do with the money.
And it's my belief is that they. If you believe that the world is headed towards an apocalypse, you're very unlikely to want to contribute money because that's the only fungible thing you have in an emergency. And so I think that a lot of these sort of apocalyptic thinking of very powerful people is very disruptive because they're, they're trying to figure out how to survive a mild apocalypse like a six months of your, you know, if I have six months of canned goods and I've got four ex Navy SEALs on my property in a remote location of Montana, can I, can I weather the storm with a few diesel generators? So if it's a very mild apocalypse, maybe they've got six months plan.
But a lot of, I think there's a lot of thinking that you should husband your resources because you don't know what's coming given that things are going to have to collapse. And I think it's very sad because those are the people who could shore up the system. It's interesting to think about helplessness at the top end of the wealth distribution given that a lot of people feel like they are restricted by the material possessions. But it seems like despite there being a lot of abundance, at least monetarily, the scarcity mentality scales all the way up.
It really does. Particularly if you've been deprived early in your life. If something happens where you're nervous till your dying day that you're going to die under an overpass. Right.
I'm not kidding. One thing that I highly recommend people never taking seriously is a video game called a tower defense game of Plants vs. Zombies. And Plants vs.
Zombies ends in a situation where you win all the things you can inside of the game, but somehow you still have the ability to continue to earn even though there's nothing left to Purchase. And the reason that I find this fascinating is you get to watch your own psychology, which is now that you've given yourself the ability to earn, you can't bring yourself to stop earning, even though earning has lost meaning. And so if you can't get to that in real life, you can at least get to that inside of Plants versus Zombies. And I highly recommend it because you have to give yourself some idea of, we have to cross finish lines as they come.
If you decide, okay, when I get to $10 million, that's when I can afford to become a philanthropist. And you're going to get there, you're going to realize, no, the goals are going to, you know, go closer. So think about how a waitress sees this. Waitresses do philanthropy almost from.
From the beginning. They'll overtip somebody who gives them good service. They can't afford it. And, you know, it's sort of.
It's a poverty trap when you're at the very low end of the earnings spectrum. But I think there's something to take from that, which is practice a little bit of philanthropy and a little bit of kicking your shoes up and not always deferring, taking profit in some sense on your success. So make sure that all throughout your life you're treating yourself to some luxury, even when you can least afford it, and you're just exhibiting a little bit of goodness, even though you feel like you desperately need to build yourself up, because otherwise you'll always push it out. There's a Morgan Housel quote where he says the best way to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts.
And he's wrote this great book called the Psychology of Money. And it's true that most people treat their goals, their relationship to their goals is like the horizon that for every step toward it, they get it then moves one step further away. It's probably more like the horizon on a spring or on a rubber band. It gets a little bit closer and then it bonk.
It snaps away from you. And I've been around a lot of people that have got chunks of wealth. And it's a rare thing to see someone who doesn't still have that scarcity mentality, despite the fact that they've got. You need to keep the scarcity mentality.
It's not a mistake. The problem is that you also need an abundance mentality, and then you need to selectively access them in different circumstances. Talk to me about the tension between those two. Well, it's just this regulated expression idea that we keep trying to find settings where we don't, you know, like, just let me set the air conditioner at 68 and then I'll be happy forever.
In reality, more or less, you need contradictory facilities and you need to know when to pull one in and let the other out. That's. And, you know, this is the hard thing. Anybody with multiple children knows that, you know, with one kid, you're saying you cannot afford to take these risks.
If you jump off something like that, you don't look what you can do. The other kid needs this stuff. Nothing ventured, nothing gain. Come on.
Yeah, I've heard your brother say that him and his wife's advice to the children was as long as you don't do anything to your eyes, you can kind of take the risks that you want. Yes and no. I mean, there's teeth, there's throats, anything. Somebody who does combats, sports, small joints, whatever it is.
There's plenty of ways to get yourself into real trouble. The key thing that you're trying to use childhood for is to go through the mistakes that are not permanently disfiguring. It's one of the importances of having fathers around. The importance of rough and tumble play is facilitated almost exclusively.
And you learn the limits of your strength. You learn the limits of your body. You learn how high the tree you can jump off and how high the tree can't jump off. You also learn to lose.
I mean, I really hate some of this winter talk where basically people have no plan to lose. And then when they actually experience loss, they tend to throw everything away to say, I didn't lose. You know, that's very interesting. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify.
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You can begin a $1 per month trial period right now by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to shopify.commodernwisdom that's shopify.commodernwisdom to take your business to the next level today. You met Jeffrey Epstein once. Yep. Talk to me about what that's like, coming face to face with somebody of that caliber, whatever that means.
Well, one thing is there is a physiological reaction that corresponds to this phrase that, you know, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. That's a real physiological feeling. I don't know whether the hair actually does that, but it's exactly what it feels like. You're meeting somebody who is unholy and, you know, one of the most interesting things is that he was beckoning into a world that didn't seem to exist.
But for him as the door, as the doormat. I think that's one of the things that freaked out a lot of these rich people is that he, he felt rich in a movie sense, which is not something that you find among actually rich people. What do you mean? Well, a lot of very wealthy people don't own an island.
Islands are really tough to maintain. I'm obsessed with islands and you know, in general I have to be obsessed with islands that have airports run by other people because, you know, they have populations on it. But every rich person starts to wonder, can I afford it? Can I afford an island?
Or how many jets. If you look at Jeffrey Epstein's wealth, it was beaten. It was like gold beaten into gold foil so that it could cover a vast area and leave the impression of a solid gold life. But it was really probably a mid nine figure fortune that had been used to buy islands and plains, which is not what any nine figure person is going to do.
So you had a felt sense, an embodied sense of discomfort. Oh, hell yeah. And where did that come from? The fact that he had a lipstick camera pointed at me from an art object that he laid a table that was preposterously long and thin with a tablecloth made of an American flag to make it look like a coffin so that I would spill my coffee on the flag of my own country.
I mean, the fact that he looked like a mutant Ralph Lauren with this kind of lubricious quality and he's talking all of the science and market stuff and nothing adds up. And there's an heiress bouncing on his knee to get it, boobs to jiggle to see whether it can distract. I mean, it's like one of these crazy scenes where nothing about it was normal. There was just no, there was no trace of a normal world.
That sounds like a script from a movie. Yeah, I mean, I think part of It, John Travolta is like putting a gun to your head and forcing you to drink and break a coat in a minute. Yeah, like that part of it. And then there was some sort of, like, you know, remember that story the Most Dangerous Game, where a man invites you to his island so he can hunt you?
You know, this was scary, and it was. It was meant to be scary. Sounds menacing. Well, I think his product was silence.
People think that his product was sex or finance, but it was silence. I'm pretty sure. How do you want something if you're scary enough? Look, rich people can get sex, but they can't necessarily get people to shut up afterwards.
So my take on it, and my take on it instantly was this is not an actual human. This is a construct of someone's. Someone has created a fake human being called Jeffrey Epstein, who's a mysterious currency trading financier with crazy rules so that no one would ever invest with him. And I think that was to keep people seeking his investment services.
I mean, you know, he's labeled disgraced financier, but nobody has a record of trading with him. He was sitting there, he comes in the meeting and he says, you know, well, Eric, I was just doing some currency trading, and I. I thought about that scene that you sometimes see it as a meme with Steve Buscemi with a skateboard over his shoulder. Hello, fellow financial traders.
Exactly. So I'm thinking you don't really look like a rich guy who trades in markets. The thing that's interesting that I'm finding myself intrigued by here is it takes a moderate amount of cognitive horsepower to be able to piece together this theater that you sat down at. Yeah.
Deployed in a nefarious, malicious, manipulative way. But it's smart. What do you mean, it's smart? It's not something that could be done by a simple mind.
You think he did it? Oh, he has a team of manipulators. No, when I say I think he was a construct, I literally mean that I think he was constructed, like, fitted with a story. Oh, so you think he was a plant?
No, I think he was a construct. What's that? Okay, you'll have to. I think Jeffrey Epstein, super genius financier, was not a thing that existed.
Where did the money come from? You know, Mumble, Lex Wexner. Okay, so that's what you mumbled. But then, you know, there's this missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and this fortune of Jeffrey Epstein that we can't explain.
Are those the same fortune? It's like a Conservation of money principle that if you have a fortune that's missing, you have a fortune that can't be explained in there. Connected by Ghislaine Maxwell. I don't know.
Why is it that no hedge funds. What is it they file form? I forget. It's 13F.
There's certain forms that you have to file. Nobody's ever asked for these things. Who's this prime broker? Has somebody gone over the prime brokerage?
What are his trades? He would have to move the market. If he was doing a yard of euros or Swiss francs or who knows what, like a billion, that would move the market. So there's no way you can fake retroactively a hedge fund of immeasurable size that trades currencies.
I don't think he was a currency trader. He told he was a currency trader. So when you say construct, who constructs? Who's the builder?
I don't know. I would imagine some version of the intelligence community. You know, sometimes somebody's cover gets blown. We have a very famous unfortunate story of Eli Cohn with the Mossad where Eli Cohn was an Egyptian Jew who was fitted with a backstory that he was an Argentinian playboy who made a fortune in Argentina, but was Arabic in origin.
And then he moves to Damascus and he takes out an apartment where he holds orgies and becomes the best friend of Hafez Al Asat. Right. And so that's an example of a story we know. We know how the intelligence communities of the world create people who don't really exist.
Construction of it. I know that this is just a one time thing here that you got to see, but the construction of the coffin looking American flag, the spilling of the coffee, this weird power play thing that's going on that seems now that you say that it wasn't him even pulling his own strings, perhaps it makes a lot more sense. But even that, that degree of sophistication. I learned this from Daniel Schachtenberger.
We sat down and he spent some time with particularly powerful people. Yeah. And he told me this really harrowing story of somebody who has both the desire and the means to treat themselves like an apex predator against their own kind. And they said so they broke the fourth wall about this and said apex predators don't care about prey, but they saw their own kind as prey.
And I asked Daniel, how does it feel to sit opposite somebody who isn't rate limited by the resources, who can not only dream to have this plus have the motivation or lack of virtual integrity to go ahead and Consider doing it and then has the capacity, the assets to be able to enact it. And it's reminding me, it's giving me the same something. It feels like it's up on the top of my head. It's giving me some sort of sense like that this was intended to be terrifying.
It wasn't an accident. It was intended to be as fascinating as it could possibly be, which it was and terrifying at the same time. And it achieved both. It achieved both objectives.
When I was given an opportunity to meet him again, I didn't know what to do. The other thing I just found really weird is that he knew about my research and it turned out that he was connected to my graduate department at Harvard. So he had connection to the Harvard math department. Unbeknownst to me.
I don't know when that began. I know two of the professors he was connected through. But this is some unholy story. It has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.
It has to do with whatever this thing was. We tripped over a thing. We tripped over a structure. We named the structure Jeffrey Epstein.
It must be very unfortunate in some regards for whoever it was, if that's true, that was in charge of this construction, that it became that people got T shirts with his name printed on them, that this was already going wrong in the early 2000s. You see, my sense of this is that this was a pre Internet plan that lived into the Internet age and couldn't survive contact with the Internet age. What did the Internet bring in that didn't allow us to eyeballs discussion level of silence? Well, you know, there's a claim that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein because it's this many years later and we've all moved on.
Yeah, that's completely untrue. And we know that it's true because if you start talking about Jeffrey Epstein, the engagement goes up. So you have these fictions like you know, that are put out by mainstream media, traditional news desks, which is. And nobody cares about that story.
Well that you can see from social media that that's not true from the Internet. So the Internet is constantly providing an ability to check whether or not these claims from inside the structure. Jeffrey Epstein is the example of what I call it an anti interesting phenomenon. What's that one?
Anti interesting thing is something that would normally be fascinating. Imagine for example, you got a story where you can get a Pulitzer Prize for breaking it. Everybody cares. You'd sell papers like hotcakes, blah blah blah.
And nobody wants to report on it. And it's like right there you could just ask the dumbest questions and it would like New York Times says, disgraced financier. Well, tell me, did you find his prime broker? Did you find the forms?
Did you go to his offices in Vollard House? No. Nobody does ever. The story is anti.
Interesting. It's very different than being uninteresting, which would suggest more collusion, more coordination. Hello. I mean, see, this is one of the most uncomfortable things.
I think there was a time when mostly when people said collusion or coordination, their presumption was, well, that's kind of. That's pretty far out there. We now know, like Post Elon Musk's $44 billion adventure at Twitter, that there are these coordinating groups coordinating, coordinating social media with the intelligence community or the Department of Homeland Security or the State Department. We now know that we're living in an orchestrated, curated, choreographed world.
And we can't know it officially, but we all know it. If we want to know, which is hysterical. Now we have to talk about. Well, are you a conspiracy theorist?
Like I read. I read the Slack messages, I read the emails. What are you even talking about now? Sam bank and Freed currently being recharged.
Witness tampering as well. That to me. Fresh charges releasing even though he's told he couldn't get in touch with the press. I think hundreds of phone calls to the press leaked his ex girlfriend allegedly leaked his ex girlfriend's diary entries, so on and so forth.
And you know, this is a guy that some of my friends were flown to go and see on his island. His portion of island. Yeah, his portion. It's very different for very different reasons as well.
There seems to be. And you hear about. They believe they're above the law. There was this really cool documentary on Netflix called the Murder of Murders.
And it was this small town, big family, lots of money, and the kids ran rampant. Right. Classic like spoon aristocracy bullshit. But when it gets scaled up this much more.
Sam Bankman Fried. The biggest financial crime, alleged financial crime since Bernie Madoff. Yeah. Allegedly tampering with witnesses, allegedly leaking his ex girlfriend's diary entries.
And do the rules not apply to everybody? Certainly they don't. Why? We stopped prosecuting all sorts of types of people.
You know, we stopped holding hearings. I grew up in a world where we had the church committee, the Pike Committee, looking at our own intelligence services. We had Watergate hearings, we had tobacco hearings, we had Iran Contra hearings. Do you know how many hearings we need right now?
Where are these things? It's ridiculous. We've got weird stuff about UFOs with people making the craziest allegations. Look, this is just not normal.
We're in totally weird, uncharted territory. What do you make of the recent UAPs, I think is the new term. Eric, you need to get up with the times here. They're not UFOs anymore.
That's old. I wasn't even in this game when it was UFOs. Okay, okay, so what do you make of the recent UAP stories and attention and response and subsequent response. I'd like to ask you first.
So I had a look at the first whistleblower from about two months ago, quite closely with Andy Stumpf, who used to have pretty high level security clearance. And he explained to me about how unimpressive that particular type of security clearance is. How very common. Which one?
This is David. Yes. David. No, not David Fravor.
Who? David Fravor was the TikTok, Correct? This is David Ghorish. Yes.
Okay. Very common level of security clearance that. Using that as some sort of. Oh, this is a legitimate credential.
Doesn't really wash too much that it was second or it was third hand information, mostly secondhand information, kind of. I heard from a person who saw, who heard. It just seems to me to be rather, on the face of it, unimpressive, that release. I see.
What did you think? Well, like I've been telling everybody, these are highly conserved stories. This is not the only person I've heard this story from. I've heard this from multiple people.
There are various versions of this secret world which play out as space opera, you know, then mj12 became the real government that only even the president couldn't understand. You know, it's like, okay, so that's the weird part about it. Until you start realizing how sober many of the people are who believe this and who claim to have had direct contact with it. And then you don't know what to do.
I mean, in other words, whatever this is, there is a thing, it's not necessarily little green men. It could be, for example, that they mock up a floating spaceship in a hangar and then they drag people past it and say, whatever you do, do not look to your left or right or you'll be shot. And then of course people look and then like, mission accomplished. Now people will say, oh my God, you have no idea what the US has incredible technology.
And then maybe the idea you got a cover story, maybe you've got your adversary investing in things that don't make any sense. I don't know. But there's not nothing here. This Is not about mylar balloons and seagulls, anyone.
I'm trying to come up with the word for it, but it's like a. It's like recursive false flags in a way where the goal is not to give or hide truth. The goal is to fire hose with information so much that the truth can no longer be discerned. It's a haystack of bullshit to make sure that any needle is very difficult to find.
It is, yes. Bullshit haystacking. I like it. Yeah.
Okay, so they haystack the crap out of this thing. I have no question that there was something that was used to develop US aircraft like the B2 bomber and the SR71 Blackbird. So if you see something crazy in the sky, better that you think it's a UFO from outer space than some advanced thing from Lockheed. I have no question that we use this to deal with things like the Chinese balloon shoot down where we shot down several things in a week and we couldn't recover debris from any of them.
I mean, come on guys, you know, maybe the idea is that this is a head fake to our adversaries to develop the wrong things and to use their treasure on things that won't work. Maybe there's a secret program where some of this stuff is actually real and true and we're not allowed to know it because it would be too mind blowing. Maybe there's a cult inside of our government that has replaced angels with saucer shaped aircraft. Whatever this thing is, it's being used for many different purposes.
There's something here. We just don't know what. You know, this is the problem. The princess can't feel a p.
Because that would be impossible. The princess feels a disturbance. You can't say what the disturbance is. Maybe it's a golf ball, maybe it's a cantaloupe, maybe it's a banana.
But whatever it is, there's something wrong with the mattress. Yeah, it seems to me this fire hosing the goal of uncertainty. Right? How do things muddle out?
Who wins in a muddle is a great question. We're not taught to ask. Sorry to jump in on those. Always look for who is trying to muddle to win.
Very often you're in a dispute with entrenched status quo and somebody's like, well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Like, oh, well, who wins if we agree? Oh, it's you. This is like an old principle of mine which is that you can always tell who's guilty by who.
First declares a time of healing. Why? Why is that a razor to use? Oh, because if there's something wrong and the public is clamoring for your blood, you say there's been too much blame and finger pointing on all sides at me.
I think what we need is to come together and declare a time of healing for me. Right. So I believe that in general, whoever declares a time of healing is suspect number one. That's a very nice razor to use.
I wonder about this. Oh, how would you say epidemic of uncertainty. Brilliant. Speaking my language.
And I wonder how first off, how as an individual you are supposed to put up any kind of effective defense to just take some sovereignty, be an agentic individual. Right. And secondly, I wonder what the end goal is. I understand why uncertainty would be useful for manipulation because if people can't discern truth from untruth, it can be easy to poke them and prod them and float them into different directions.
But it also seems like kind of also useless as well that some people, non insignificant, large cohort of people will just reject it entirely, which actually they do, which actually makes it more chaotic and more unruly. So it makes me think, well maybe if this is the case, if the fire hosing is happening, there's epidemic uncertainty. Maybe the outcomes were predicted but haven't manifested in the way that was intended. Maybe there's more of a rebellious streak in say more about that.
I'm not trying to understand it, but if people who if you make the public very uncertain about most things by uploading the information or by even it doesn't even need to be coordination, it could be a byproduct of having 24,7 access to the entire world population through Twitter, Instagram stories and blah blah. There is so much I can no longer discern. Even cheap or multiplicity of opinions that's not coordinated to be multiplicity go in opposite directions. If it was coordinated, the outcomes that are occurring at the moment a lot of the time don't seem to be happening with people just oh, roll over, tell me exactly what to do.
There is a massive non insignificant cohort of people that say I'm checking out and I now no longer trust anybody at all. And that doesn't seem to. Yes. And that doesn't seem to be.
If the goal was ease of control, that doesn't seem to be effective for the person that wanted that or the group wanted that to be the outcome. First of all, I'm really glad to get a question about this as a sea change which is that our lives have become wall to wall uncertainty. We can't discern if the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor today, we would spend 10 years discussing whether it was a false flag, whether it was actually the Japanese, whether there was any attack, whether there was a soundstage, whether it was a psyop, whether it was a. You know, right now, the main institutions of our society have abdicated their role for public spirited adjudication of what is true based on expertise.
And so what you're seeing is people coming to hate experts and coming to hate institutions because they're realizing that these institutions lie to them at a level that they've never considered unless they were Alex Jones fans to begin with. And so what you're having is you're having a large number of people waking up to the idea that, yeah, there really are organizations and working groups that determine what you hear from a multiplicity of venues. It's the same message relentlessly. Do you think people are overly pattern matching that now?
Say more. What you mean they're seeing conspiracy where there isn't because the lack of faith in institutions. Same person is saying that they see a conspiracy and they see no conspiracy. They have part of their head that remembers that conspiracy theorists are crazy people, and they've got part of their brain that remembers that normies who don't believe in conspiracies are crazy people, and they can't integrate those things.
Right. They cannot figure out how are these things being coordinated. My crazy person for seeing these patterns, My crazy person for ignoring them, for when they're. When they're unearthed.
What you're seeing is a complete destruction of bedrock reality that if you weren't actually physically there, how do we know that these people actually met in a warehouse? Is this really a table or is it just cgi? Was it green and we could superimpose wood onto it? Nobody knows what's true.
And, you know, if you ask me, well, Eric, how are you dealing with this? I would say I'm failing. I'm just flat out failing, as are all of you. I'm just more honest about it.
Some of you have an idea that you've got one lens, which is fix the money, fix the world. Bitcoin. That's the answer. Yeah, bitcoin.
Rock on. But no, that's not the answer. Or somebody else says, you know, I really think that we just need to be open and tolerant and realize it's a big world and we just have to give people their due. Well, that doesn't work either.
You can't just let everything run Riot or we have to go back to our institutions with these people at the helm. Are you kidding? We have to abandon our institutions. Wait, what are you saying?
We're going to abandon our institutions? Do you know what that looks like? Nobody has an answer. We'll get back to talking to it for a moment, but first I need to tell you about Gymshark.
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The conversation is moving in a similar direction to one I've had to Sam Harris recently. I would think it's very different, but happy to hear more he identified on an episode I do with him not long ago. The fact that we've lost trust in our institutions and yet abandoning them is also wholesalers is also not an option. Sam also tried to say I can see the problems on the isam, can see the problems on the right and I can see the problems on the left.
And there's a group of people who have allowed their irritation with the left to color their thinking to the point that they now are in a right wing situation without understanding the dangers on the right. I think Sam is discounting the idea that once people wake up to the, to the concept that they were living in an orchestrated Truman show that they did not understand, they're not going to have the idea of like, oh sure, the vaccines were a little bit more dangerous than claimed and maybe a little bit less effective and maybe we knew a little bit more about the lab leads. No way. You spat directly in my face and told Me, not only that it was raining, that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face.
And you pile up how many Nobel laureates to defend the idea that any inquiry into the origin of this virus was racism. It's like, you're dead to me. And I think that that's what people are not understanding in the Democratic Party increasingly. The basic attitude is whoever this class of people is that crawled into our elite institutions is just dead.
Like, there's nothing Anthony Fauci could say at this moment that I want to hear. It's not that I don't think that he doesn't know virology or epidemiology. I know I can't trust him because of the way in which he looked into my eyes. And then, you know, when Stephen Colbert is dancing with syringes, singing the vaccine song, and Ariana Grande, you know, is in a super highly produced number from, like, Hairspray, but converted to vaccines with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and everybody celebrating, like, the Mayday celebration.
Um, I get it. I live in a completely fake world. And I wrote an article about this in 2011 on Tayfabe, which is the system of lies that undergirds professional wrestling. So now you're.
You've woken up to the idea that you've spent your life watching something like Major League Baseball or Premier League Soccer or whatever it is, and it's all fake. And now you don't know who you are. You don't know your country is. You don't know what a ballot box is.
You have no idea what news is or media. You don't know what a university is actually teaching. You've got people running around who are calling themselves scholars, who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats, and you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong, and it's directly in their area of expertise. So the thing about pattern matching that I said was there are still many people who are scholars who are in positions of authority inside of highfaluting institutions that presumably do want to do good and do want to deploy their skills in a way that does this.
Is it a case that every single institution is completely wrong, or is this reflexive skepticism being tuned up too highly to the point where there is skepticism about things that don't deserve it? And how do we determine between the two? Okay, so we have to talk about the institutions that are fighting back. Twitter, which has become X, is not on the same standard that the Facebooks are or Google is.
Elon is Doing something different. We can talk about what the University of Chicago is still fighting. My daughter just graduated from University of Chicago. I never mentioned where she was while she was there.
It is, it needs. It needs support. We have to support the schools that fought back. For example, I believe Ohio State fought back.
And there's a school in Oklahoma that fought back. And leading that charge is the University of Chicago. We have organizations like FIRE that promote free speech. We have professors who are taking on some risk, like Jonathan Haidt, but we're not seeing the Noam Chomsky effect where you do amazing research and they have to put up with every crazy idea that comes through your mind.
Right? That's important. Look up a person named Serge Lang in mathematics and something called the File to understand how dangerous it is to screw with real scholars. What happens?
Give us the 30,000 foot view. You know, people try to put like, say, Sam Huntington into National Academy of Sciences. It was an architect of the Vietnam War. And Serge Lang just said, I look through his papers, I find the following mathematical statements.
This is not science. Why is this person in the academy? And then they fight back. And I fought back with Serge Lang when he was at Harvard, where we tried to engage Sam Huntington on that topic.
You can't have these dangerous people running around. That's why all of us are discredited. Maybe you haven't noticed this, but, like, Jordan Peterson is discredited, Sam Harris is discredited, Joe Rogan is discredited, Bret Weinstein is discredited, Ben Shapiro is discredited, Barry Weiss is discredited. Everybody is discredited.
Tim Pool referred to it as the IDW's walking corpse phase at the moment. Well, my point is this personal destruction is the coin of the realm. And some of the personal destruction that you see that looks organic is orchestrated as well. And we're just in this thing where, in my opinion, what you're looking at is something called deconfliction, but people don't know what that is.
Deconfliction is supposed to stop what are called blue on blue incidences. So blue on blue incidences, you have two branches of government that don't know that they're operating covertly. So maybe you have an investigative team and an undercover team, and the investigative team is about to blow the COVID thinking that they've got a target, but it's actually an undercover agent. So what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to check in with these centralized systems and say, do you have any assets in this arena?
We're about to move. And yes we do. Oh, okay. So they find out and this is supposed to stop blue on blue.
The interesting thing is, even though there are three systems called Safety Net, RIS Safe and Case Explorer, you can't use them unless you are an official part of the government. So I called up one of them, had a half an hour conversation before I started asking about Jeffrey Epstein. And then they immediately said this call will be terminated in five seconds. Maybe it was Case Explorer for South Florida, something like that.
What happens when you have a civilian that's not signed up for non disclosure under no rules, you're an American citizen with full right to free speech and you stumble on something that you're not supposed to know about. That is a deconfliction problem that nobody has ever solved. So the first thing I'd like to throw out is if we have three separate systems to keep like the intelligence community and local police departments from tripping over each other, what do you think we do when ordinary citizens get wind of something amiss? That's some super secret operation.
And my claim is we discredit them. We pre bunk them in the language of the gec, I believe. You see, we're all familiar with debunking, misinformation and disinformation. You've got some disinformation that's spread around.
We debunk it by giving you the truth. What happens when somebody is spreading the truth in a way that is unhelpful to a statecraft level narrative? Well, we didn't know what the words were, but we just found out and it's you pre bunk the mal information. Now if you didn't grow up knowing what malinformation is, here's a quick refresher.
Malinformation is actual information, but it's harmful, right? The equivalent of politically incorrect incarnation. Well, or you know, you're trying to make sure that there's support for the war in Ukraine and somebody actually realizes that things are much more desperate than they thought. Well, that would be deleterious to our efforts if the objective is to get Putin to capitulate.
So now you have to pre bunk the malinformation, which means destroy their reputation of the person spreading the information that's countering the official disinformation and misinformation. So I can't work out why anybody's confused and why they're having trouble existing in the same school. Kids. The point is I've got all of these friends who are pre bunked.
Malinformers that's what I do. I'm a pre bunked malinformant. I spread malinformation and I need to be pre bumped. So of course I'm gonna be a grifter.
I'm going to be, I don't know, charlatan. I'm gonna. Well, he's over. Can we stop trying to make Eric Weinstein a thing?
Blah, blah, blah. And there's giant farms of people and bots that are dedicated to spreading bad feelings about anybody who's gonna contradict narrative. Well, don't forget as well that the coordination doesn't necessarily need to be there because the incentive. Align.
Align. There's an emergent part. There's a non emergent part. Correct.
I will not agree with anyone who tells me it's all one or all the other, but part of this is actually coordinated. Yeah. So close that loop on the agentic sovereign individual existing in the world. Holy fuck, I'm getting bukaked with this total awfulness of information here.
Bukkake just means splattered in Japanese. That's why it's not a term to use. Absolutely. Thank you.
It's actually been appropriated by the adult industry in a way that I think the Japanese should reclaim. Actually, Melissa Chen has probably been more to popularize this in intellectual circles than anyone else. So shout out to Ms. Melissa Chen.
Melissa Chen and Bukkaki in the same sentence. Something that we weren't expecting today. I think she was a period of her life where she would use it in every public appearance. Just sneak it in.
Right, okay. The Bukopi of the gaps. So anyway, you have a situation where nobody knows what's going on. And I don't think Sam is comfortable, by the way, being here.
Like you're in open water and you have all these instructions about what to do when you're swimming near land, which is try to align yourself with the shore. Don't fight the current. And like that's not where you are. You're just in open water and you're treading water.
And you don't know whether there are oceanic white tips around and you don't know whether you can keep this up for much longer. But there is no land. There's a big difference with Sam. Go a little deeper.
Make a little planet for me. You cannot trust Harvard or Nature. You cannot trust the Office of Management and Budget. Please, the Lancet.
Or the Lancet or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You cannot trust any newspaper that I'm aware of. You cannot trust the CDC or the NIH or the who now People will hear that and they'll say, oh my God, Eric, you're spreading distrust and fear. It's like I'm a pastor.
Shoot the messenger all you want. All of those institutions are out of control and we all know it. And entirely out of control. No, most of the other.
I did this on trigonometry. We have this anti institutional point. How is it that the airlines can't keep my seat clean and can't make sure that I'm able to recline it properly or that the wifi doesn't go out and then their planes never crash? So the institutions are functioning and not functioning.
They're lying and telling the truth. They're getting it done and failing outright over and over again. And it's even worse because if the planes crashed all the time and you'd say, okay, well, these people are incompetent, but it's like a selective incompetence and madness. And what I think is that Sam wanted to treat this as, look, it's pretty annoying what's going on in the left.
And it's pretty annoying what's going on with the institutions. But let's not, let's not lose sight of the fact January 6th people don't feel that way. People feel like, wait a minute, I don't know which end is up. I don't know who's telling me the truth anymore.
I can spot these lies that are so transparent. And this is the theory of lies as a checksum. So when you get a binary for a computer program you want to install on your computer, you want to know, well, is this what came from Microsoft or did somebody adulterate it? When I click on this thing, it's going to install ransomware on my machine.
So there's something called a checksum which is generated by how the program was compiled. And it would be almost impossible to come up with a second program that would generate the same checksum. Verification. Yeah, if the checksum is off, I don't install the thing and the checksums are all off.
And that's why people are going crazy. That's why, to your earlier point, isn't it interesting that we're not talking about the level of uncertainty? Right? Like, this is not sustainable.
So Sam is 100% correct on a lot of things that people are making fun of him for. And I assume that I will be keel hauled all over Twitter for saying this. You cannot have a world without institutions. We're not built for it.
We're just. There's no Part of you that is prepared to generate all your own electricity and kill all your own game and get your own clean water. And you need an army. You need a police department.
You can only play Frontier Wild west so long before you realize that modern life can't be supported this way. And we can't go with the institutions we have. So we need institutions. We can't go with these institutions not because the institutions are wrong, but because the inhabitants are wrong to a person they've been selected for by this ability to lie.
Because growth evaporated. That's one of my main rifts. We don't have to go into it. But basically that in the absence of real growth, everything turns pathological.
And so it's just heartbreaking to see some of these people saying, look, we've always known that the institutions were wrong. We finally have the ability to prove that. Let's tear them all down. So that's a very popular perspective at the moment.
Other people want to claim, let's cling to the institutions because we know we need them and we'll look past the fact that they're obviously lying about almost everything of importance. That's not really tenable. We can't vote these people out because, like, Dianne Feinstein could beat me easily in a run, you know, for Senate. I don't know why.
Because the machine is stronger than actually the vision we had for democracy. So we've got, you know, Mitch McConnell having a temporary, you know, ischemic attack on camera. We've got somebody post stroke in Pennsylvania having defeated Mehmet Oz. We've got Dianne Feinstein, we've got Nancy Pelosi trading up a storm.
We can't get rid of any of these people. Joe Biden is way too old for this job and has been in government since he was 29 in 1972 when he won his sentencing. This is a joke. It's beyond preposterous.
And by the way, it comes out of not loving your children. How so? People who love their children don't drill holes in their children's life raft. In the modern world, post World War II was a life raft to get us to the next stage.
And the number of older people I see liquidating everything so that they can live out their final days in the same style to which they've become accustomed is impossible in a world where people love their children, it's cavalier with the future. Yeah, I don't think they care. Are you familiar with Toby odds analogy of the precipice? No.
Tell Me. Pretty cool. So his book the Precipice, everybody should go and read. It's my best prime on existential risk to beyond the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford with Nick Bostrom and he's a colleague of William Cascaskill.
Long termism EA etc. And he uses this example of you can imagine on a journey a particular individual getting to a beautiful, lush, abundant meadow would have to take a treacherous mountain path. And along this mountain path there is a particularly thin, small, steep, sharp, uncertain, unstable part of it. That's the precipice.
And he talks about, I'd like to think about like an hourglass can you have wit with room. And then you have a choke point. And at that choke point things can get dicey. And it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice, you broaden out and you have the meadow.
You are a multi planetary species. You have redundancy, genetically redundancies. Civilizationally you have overcome some of the limitations of the cast offs from your energy production and consumption. You don't have value lock in in a bad way.
That means that it's death spots all the way down or it's tyrants all. Assume that. I hear you. Yep.
Where do you think we are? It feels very precipice. Yeah. Doesn't it?
Yeah. What's more, as one of the only people who are really seriously hitting this multi planetary note, there is no interest in this from who I'm interested. Are you fuck yeah. Don't I count?
Eric? Am I not legitimate in the future of this civilization's direction? What? What are your best stories for how we become interplanetary?
I say because you brought it up. Stories or strategies? Stories about how we get to be interplanetary. Let me show you my story.
Tell me a story by which we have 10 planets that humans have settled. Well, if you want to do 10, we're going to have to go to planets that are outside the solar system. Right. So there's this one which is really troubling.
Mars is really screwing up this whole story because Elon has gotten everybody focused on Mars and it's the only. It's a marginal planet. It'll be very difficult to get to using chemical rockets. And it's not a stepping stone because once you master Mars, if, if, if, if.
Which we're not going to do, it doesn't really get you anywhere. It's just Mars. So Avi Loeb. Yep.
New book that recently came out, Interstellar. Spoke to him last week. About it. I asked him about this.
I said, will we ever visit other galaxies? And he made his cop out answer saying, well, Android is good. It crashes into the Milky Way. That doesn't count.
Rv, we can't blend two together and say that we've been there. And he's talking about interstellar travel, right? From here to Proxima Centauri. Pick your other star.
Right. They are trying at some point in the not too distant future to do the light sail laser pointed thing. Maybe we can. This is me asking him.