Are We On The Brink Of A Revolution? - Eric Weinstein - #833

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Eric Weinstein. He's a mathematician, economist, former managing director of Thiel Capital and a podcaster. It feels like the world is reaching a fever pitch from deep fakes to cheap fakes, AI girlfriends to senile presidents. We've never had more access to information, and yet it's never been harder to work out what is true. So what do we do about it? Expect to learn Eric's thoughts on the 2024 presidential election, whether we are being gaslit on a global scale by the media, the future of string theory and what's next for theoretical physics, why we have canned humour and what that means as a society, Eric's thoughts on Joe Rogan, what my biggest weakness is as a human are, and much more. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed, and that means you will miss out on episodes over the next few weeks which will make you trez sad. We have Robert Greene, the one and only coming on. Chris Bumstead is back for his second episode plus a ton more guests and you don't want to miss them. And the only way you can ensure that you won't is by hitting the follow button in the middle of the page on Spotify or the plus in the top right hand corner on Apple podcasts. It helps to support the show. And it means that you don't miss episodes and it makes me very happy indeed. So go and do it. Thank you. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Eric Weinstein.
When we spoke at the start of the year, I said, it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.

**Eric Weinstein** (1:52)
Beginner's luck.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
You said, what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November, including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above, that I don't think you know whether he's even going to make it to November? Debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event.

**Eric Weinstein** (2:12)
I purposely left it vague and I didn't say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is, I don't know whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become president.

**Chris Williamson** (2:31)
What do you mean by that?

**Eric Weinstein** (2:35)
I think that there's a remarkable story and we're in a funny game, which is, are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don't understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don't understand why it's in the shadows. We don't understand why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let's just set the stage, given that that was in February.
There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It's an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open.
And there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, it says that the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a face-off are both acceptable to that world order. So what you're trying to do from the point of view, let's take it from the point of view of, let's say, the State Department, the Intelligence Community, the Defense Department, and major corporations that have to do with international issues from arms trade to, oh, I don't know, food. They have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn't agree with them and the mood of the country was, why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren't we a free people? So what the two parties would do is they would run primaries. You have populist candidates and you'd pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order, that is that they aren't going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you. We called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what's called magician's choice, where the choice is not actually, pick a card, any card, but somehow magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows. In that situation, you have magician's choice in the primaries and then you'd have the duopoly field, two candidates, either of which was acceptable and you could actually afford to hold an election. And the populace would vote and that way the international order wasn't put at risk every four years because you can't have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites. So under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016 And then the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor position in government in the history of the Republic to enter the Oval Office. Donald Trump broke through the primary structure. So then there was a full court press, okay, we only have one candidate that's acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure that he's a loser, he's a wild man, he's an idiot, and and he's under the control of the Russians. And then he was going to be, you know, a 20 to 1 underdog. And then he wins, and there was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson. You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem. So I don't have a particular dog in this fight. I one believe in democracy. I also believe in international agreements. And it is the job of the State Department, and the intelligence community, and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the American people and say, we have a problem, you don't know everything that's going on. And if you start voting in populist candidates, you're going to end up knocking out load-bearing walls that you don't understand.