Transcript: Anna Khachiyan and Eric Weinstein on The Portal podcast episode 17

The following transcript was generated by a machine and not edited by any human – so it’s full of of errors. I’m posting the transcript because the podcast is excellent and a crappy transcript is better than no transcript. Questions/comments: get me on Twitter @mgmobrien.

Eric Weinstein 0:09
Hello, I’m your host, Eric Weinstein, and I’m lucky to be here tonight with Anna, and here comes, hatchin.

Anna Khachiyan 0:17
Thanks for having me.

Eric Weinstein 0:19
Oh, did I did I screw that up?

Anna Khachiyan 0:20
No, no, no, no, that’s right.

Eric Weinstein 0:22
And Ana is half of the up and coming podcast Red Scare, which has everyone talking.

Unknown Speaker 0:30
Everyone, everyone I’m exaggerating

Eric Weinstein 0:32
slightly. Yeah, yeah. But it’s, uh, I just got introduced to you by a colleague of mine, Blake Masters, Peter Thiel’s co author, and I’ve been addicted to your podcast, not quite understanding why it’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever found. Can you say more about what induced you to do it and why you think it might be working?

anna 0:54
I have no clue why it’s working. I know that it’s probably due to some sort of l chemical in articulable thing that’s totally out of my control. That has something to do with my chemistry with my co host who’s an actress called Darshan across. But I think maybe it struck a chord. I know that it consistently infuriates all the wrong people, which was never my intention.

Eric Weinstein 1:23
so innocent. Yeah, that’s so beautiful. Yeah, it’s also not entirely believable. Because it does seem like what you’re doing is you’re crowding out a certain kind of piousness. And we had an epic lunch the

anna 1:38
other day Yeah, we did we have what they call a power lunch.

Eric Weinstein 1:41
Is that a power line? Yeah,

anna 1:42
yeah. Okay. I think I just learned at the last minute that this podcast is being filmed because I was telling Eric here the, the way that we run ours is like a bunch of wires and crops strewn on the floor like chain smoking. doshas literally sits on the ground. objecting objectifying herself at every turn and I sit on my disgusting stained and cigarette burned couch. But this is my bad side. And I wish I was more of a diva like Mariah Carey and could demand that we switched seats. Really?

Yeah, no, I’m kidding. I’m being hyperbolic.

Eric Weinstein 2:19
Well, and we always pick up the syringes before the gate. Yeah.

anna 2:25
Anyway, what was the question?

Eric Weinstein 2:26
Well, the question surrounds what I was going to get at is that we had this bit of a riff where I’ve said that I’m trying to be long good and short, nice. That nice doesn’t really have a future because nice is really this kind of performative version that crowds out good and you seem to have mastered this form formula where I detect a deeply buried good and there’s an attack on nice at all times.

anna 2:56
Yeah, I mean, I think the nice on Some level is a few tile position. I mean, even you look at like female social politics, right? And there’s always kind of repentant bitches masquerading as nice girls, and then there’s nice girls masquerading as a repentant bitches. And I think I would like to think that I’m the latter

Eric Weinstein 3:20
remains to be seen. Yeah,

anna 3:20
I don’t know that I have any sort of earnest or let’s say, let’s put it this way. I don’t know that I have kind of a sustained political vision that I would like to enact. It’s kind of out of my control, as you know, my father who used to say you’re but a chrome floating on the face of the earth,

Eric Weinstein 3:35
but to build your confidence. Yeah,

anna 3:38
as the Russian way of parenting. It’s like Russian self esteem. But at the end of the day, I have kind of a very earnest ethical agenda that I’m hoping to populate the minds of my young girl and gay listeners with

Eric Weinstein 3:55
I would have said in fact, but okay, populate.

anna 3:58
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In fact, is Another good one. Wonderful.

Eric Weinstein 4:02
So let’s, let’s just dig into a little bit of your background as you’re mining it. Yeah, for the kind of motif that even though it’s an intrinsically American show, it’s informed by this sort of broad Slavic soul. And you were born in Moscow

Unknown Speaker 4:19
in Moscow.

anna 4:21
In 1985. The internet and my Spanish Wikipedia says that it’s 1986 I, every year I’m aging backwards on the internet next year, I’ll be 32. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I’m like the Benjamin buttons of neoliberal critique. And but I was born in 1985 at the tail end, you know, right before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And there’s no way that that experience along with the kind of inevitable trauma of immigration doesn’t inform your worldview.

Eric Weinstein 5:00
So if I understand correctly, not only are you coming with this sort of talend Soviet influence, but it’s also the case that you’ve got access to, to the, the twin genocides of Jews and Armenians.

anna 5:19
That’s true. Yeah. They always say on Twitter, it’s very depressing that, you know, my ancestors survived the Armenian genocide and then the Holocaust. So their descendant could become a podcast or in Brooklyn now Manhattan.

Eric Weinstein 5:35
Yeah, no doubt. Because you’re white of hue, you are going to be labeled as privileged because you come from these two ethnic groups, which for some reason, we can’t actually locate in human history of what these groups have been through, which I find also really amusing.

anna 5:50
This is a very, I mean, this isn’t a very interesting point. I don’t know if we want to I’m not drunk yet. So maybe we should get into the into latos. Yeah, let’s see. hostess. That’ll get you. I don’t. So I’ll get into all the kind of like, heavy handed intellectual stuff in the first half, let’s say, but this is one of, I think, my central projects or critiques that I’m interested in. I don’t, obviously I don’t dispute the completely gross horrific legacy of American slavery, right? It existed, it plunged an entire population into poverty into social fragmentation. The legacy is still alive and well today, would I object to I think, is the wholesale export of the American view of race relations to elsewhere in the world to people who don’t have the similar experience?

Eric Weinstein 6:54
Well, I guess, from my perspective, what I find very odd about all of this is that Having been close to people in the Armenian and Jewish communities? There’s a tremendous amount of intergenerational trauma. Yeah. Because there has to be,

anna 7:09
yeah. But my sister and I can’t call it hand me down trauma. Yeah. It’s something you inherit, you know, like a brochure or like a necklace.

Eric Weinstein 7:18
Well, I would say it’s also a set of behavior patterns. Yeah, detecting when things are starting to get really dicey. Like, you have to know that. It’s not that the generation that goes through these things is the only one that has a claim the longevity of these populations. is about saying we don’t know whether there’s going to be another one of these episodes in your time so everyone always has to be ready. There’s no state of not being ready. Like we’ve made it we finally Yeah, we’re orthodontists. We’re going to be fine.

anna 7:49
Yeah. I mean, you can’t rest on your laurels effectively and I think you

Eric Weinstein 7:53
have to sleep with one eye opening. Yes.

anna 7:56
Well, yeah. The you know, with a knife under your pillow.

Eric Weinstein 8:00
You’re gonna give away all of our secrets.

anna 8:02
Yeah, I have so many dark family secrets. But the, I think the basic correct principle, the basic critique of certain, I guess leftist intellectuals in the United States is this idea that, okay, well, somebody like me is not only white not only would be associated as white or would consider herself white, but as essentially white passing. So therefore, even if I was not hypothetically white, I could rake in the certain white privilege that for example, or a black or Latino person couldn’t.

Eric Weinstein 8:38
This is what I’ve called the intersectional Shakedown. Yeah, and the the populations that are maximally irritating to the intellect intersectional Shakedown artists, are the populations with recent claims to oppression that are nevertheless making it economically because really what it is is an attempt to take a real history of a person Russian and to turn it into cash.

anna 9:02
Guess what I tweeted literally today moments before I came here that the kind of idea of cultural appropriation that debate makes perfect sense, in a culture where identity is viewed as a form of capital, because it becomes an a zero sum game, if somebody like Rachel dole is all right, perpetuates this myth that she’s a black woman, she is basically taking food out of the mouth power out of the hands of an actually, black woman.

Eric Weinstein 9:35
Right? So there’s that absurdity, but then we actually have to contend with the weird aspect. For example, if you look at the exploitation of black musicians, very often, you know it at some point, you had a lot of illiterate genius musicians in the Delta who were brilliant enough to produce great music, but weren’t capable of defending themselves in a legal structure. Right. And so you actually had Cultural exploitation of one group by another through appropriation. So you’d get, you know, I think at some point I saw Otis Blackwell performing in New York City. And, you know, he had to say, Look, I’m the guy behind Elvis Presley, right. And the idea is that when Elvis sang it, it was acceptable to a market that he couldn’t sell into. So, there is a real aspect to cultural appropriation. And there’s a totally fake aspect. Yes. Which is this sort of, and they’re coexisting, and so it’s very tempting for people like us, just to point at the bullshit. Yeah, but there actually is this unfortunate reality that’s braided with. With returning sponsor Skillshare. I’m in a good position to discuss it this week as I had occasion to use it for two separate ideas. In the first case, I have a mandolin in which I play some blues, but I realized that I have no understanding of bluegrass theory. I navigated over to the search bar, and sure enough found a class talking about introductory bluegrass theory on mandolin Other case, as a mathematician, I’m always curious about functional programming languages. But I’d never really dealt with Haskell before. And so I put in Haskell and sure enough, I found a series of introductory lessons all in one handy dandy video with a great navigation bar on the side. That is what Skillshare does. For me, I created like a small university I carry around in my pocket. It’s got a great app and a website that makes it very easy to navigate and find instructional videos that are perfect for wherever I am usually at the beginning of my beginner learning curve. So join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare and get two months free when you sign up at Skillshare comm slash portal. That’s two whole months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free. So get started today by heading to skillshare.com slash portal to sign up. That’s skillshare.com slash portal. I can do that with skill share. How important is your sleep? Think about it this way from evolutionary theory. Why would nature Have you sleeping for one third of your life vulnerable to predators if it wasn’t of the utmost importance for your brain? In body health, that’s where chilly sleep technologies comes in. They make a hydronic mattress pad that goes underneath two sheets, keeping you at the exact right temperature which for me is 63 degrees so that you don’t wake up in a pool of your own sweat. You’ll stay roasty on top but you’ll stay cool and comfortable on the bottom so meet deep sleep delivered chilly sleep systems manages your body’s sleep temperature using hydro power technology and you can save up to $300 on chili sleep systems with 25% off the chili pad using code portal chili or 15% off cooler using code portal cooler that’s pr ta l o l er so visit chili technology comm slash portal. It’ll increase your metabolism boost melatonin production naturally and activate muscle recovery with deep sleep. So stop fighting with your sleep partner over bed temperatures keep your mattress but upgrade your mattress pad with chilly temperature control the sleep system to say come on now rather than new Don’t be a fool. You gotta let Julian keep up. That’s chili pad and Bluetooth

anna 13:01
It’s absolutely true. I mean, you can give the example of like hash and the sopranos right, we talked about the sopranos at our power lunch. Who’s this guy who’s kind of this like kindly, sensible Jewish grandfather in

Eric Weinstein 13:13
a mafia con

anna 13:14
within a mafia context? as warm so warm and loving and steadily and this is a guy who has historically stiffed black musicians for royalties, right and there’s that famous reparations episode with I think it was bokkeum Woodbine playing the the rapper mini garch.

Eric Weinstein 13:31
There’s a question about whether he’s going to visit violence upon him but it turns out he’s gonna visit a loss. Yes, yeah,

anna 13:37
exactly. But then you have like these cultural examples of like, you know, like Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus wearing cornrows, like Kim Kardashian wearing cornrows and a Kardashian like beauty photoshoot which I find completely preposterous. No one owns cornrows.

Eric Weinstein 14:01
I don’t know enough about well, nobody male hairstyle.

anna 14:04
There’s no direct line of monetization. Right. Okay. I don’t see it that way. And so that that’s a discourse that I think Yeah, you’re right exists is like a proxy discourse because people are afraid to confront the deeper, more complex issues.

Eric Weinstein 14:19
Well, I think that in you have one set of legitimate issues acting as the stalking horse for this infernal shaped and my hatred of this comes from the fact that if American Jews who have made it financially in one generation are somehow safe and secure, and therefore privileged, something is entirely broken with your cosmology.

Unknown Speaker 14:41
Hmm.

Eric Weinstein 14:42
Well, how do you mean? Well, it’s just like, I assume that the German Jews and the you know, before Christoph, the two nights before crystal lock were privileged. Yeah, and she’s worried about their privilege. It’s just this is stupid.

anna 14:54
Yeah, it’s a silly argument. And I think, you know, I get into Spats about Listen, I’m I’m Frequently accused of like being racially insensitive. And I, you know, as Quentin, the late great Quentin Tarantino said, I reject that hypothesis. It’s patently false. What I’ve always said is not, I’m not in the business. I’m not interested in having an oppression Olympics and saying like, Well, okay, look, I come from a historically oppressed background and two sides. But yeah, I, you know, grew up in a

Eric Weinstein 15:27
white, middle class

anna 15:28
milou. And, you know, but I’m going to use this kind of identitarian card, I’m going to play the card to be oppressed. That’s not at all what I’m interested in. What I’m saying is that as a person who comes from a different culture, I can view the legacy of American slavery at a critical distance in a way that American people may not be able to write because in Russia, you have a parallel system called serfdom, right? These the slaves in the serfs were emancipated within, I think, a year have each other.

Eric Weinstein 16:01
Right. But I mean, I just had the JD Vance in your chair.

anna 16:05
I’ve heard only horrible things about him. Oh,

Eric Weinstein 16:08
yeah, I’ll introduce you in quite a bit. He, you know, his family, of course is coming from Appalachian. And hillbillies were de facto enslaved may be a form of light slavery, if you will just serve them as a different form of enslavement. Hmm. With company towns company script company stores, company housing, private armies of detective agencies. So, you know, the idea that that is seen through the lens of white privilege shows you the implemental impoverishment of the current woke ideology. And my claim is that we cannot afford to dispute it, we must ignore it just because it sort of shouldn’t qualify intellectually. It didn’t make. I mean, as George Bush the second said, don’t negotiate with terrorists. And this is I think, My big opposition to it is that woke ideology by and large as an image as an image like an emotional hostage situation. It really is. It’s a it’s a hostage crisis. Yeah. Well, you seem to not you seem to be ignoring the credible threat to your reputation fact. It’s making your reputation. Yeah. But so you’re metabolizing this kind of weird resentment and hatred that people are experiencing through fear because these are reputational attacks is, in general, their attacks that say, I’m going to make it impossible for you to earn a normal living by by making an attack on the reputation with which you need to negotiate the institutional world.

anna 17:42
Yeah, and it’s like, you know, it’s the Jordan Peterson famously said like, I’ve figured out a way to monetize the SJW and you know, you could possibly say that about Red Scare, but it’s not kind of

Eric Weinstein 17:56
No, I think you guys are doing something much more bizarre.

anna 17:58
Yeah. I agree it’s not intended in that way. But that that was never the premise or the interest. It was kind of this earnest. It was truly kind of an earnest frustration with liberal mainstream feminism and liberalism.

Eric Weinstein 18:17
I don’t even know whether it’s liberalism. I mean, like, everything is so watered down and metastatic and bizarre. Yeah. That it’s the vague whiff of the left gone mad.

Unknown Speaker 18:27
Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 18:29
Right. Like, it’s not liberal. It’s not progressive. We don’t even know what it is just sort of technically conservative either. Right now, you can’t rightfully call it that. self hatred is obviously a very large part of it.

anna 18:43
I think. Yeah. self hatred. I mean, this is another kind of, you know, I repeat myself loudly and often. Will de according to the advice of my hero, Quentin Crisp, who said that that was kind of the way to be make yourself memorable and It. The problem with the left and I’m talking about kind of primarily the online left is that these are people who are thoroughly infected with the virus of the neoliberal ethos, they’re completely they play completely within the terms of the system. And, you know, this brings to bear a very important point that I also like to repeat loudly and often by the New Left critic Christopher lash. And I’m going to paraphrase it because I don’t know verbatim because my synapses have been zapped by being too extremely online, you know? But he said, like, Hey, you know, all the kind of traditional bedrocks all of the traditional values and institutions of liberal society. We’re talking about monogamy marriage,

the gender binary

any number of other kinds of traditional values have already been been dealt a serious blow By advanced capitalism itself long before the social justice activists got their hands on them before they mounted a fight against them. And that’s a very important point to remember.

Eric Weinstein 20:14
So the way I see it, and you’ll let me know if this dovetails or in fact conflicts, or maybe it’s just total Miss is that the family and the religion or culture provide many of the same things that the market provides, like, let’s say an insurance policy. Right. So for example, if you’re trying to smooth your income stream over a lifetime, and you have recessions, a family might take in some members who are out of work and put them to work in portions of the family business that are still functioning or work inside the home in a way that sort of socializes some of the risk. At the same time, you might buy some kind of a policy to try to smooth things out, you know, or you’ll try to save in an institutional context. As these things conflict. The market has denatured some of these older structures when people talk about American families are weak. What they usually mean is that American markets have been regular and strong enough that people have leaned less on the pathologies of their Mish booka in order to try to get cleaner expressions within the market for their various needs, like instead of having you know a mother, come and be with a child with a new babies do your laundry.

Unknown Speaker 21:47
Why?

Eric Weinstein 21:49
Yeah, laundry that you hire somebody to do it. And the idea is if the market is working, in some sense, yeah, the family starts to fall apart because you don’t need it.

anna 22:00
Right, exactly. And you know, people are smart. They know that like seven, eight years of psychoanalysis is a very tall price to pay for having your mother come every week and do your laundry. It’s an interest and they’d rather be Yeah. And there’s this you know, whole rhetoric now go to work life balance, whatever. And I think that the, the market part of the kind of psycho, let’s say, like the psychological animal of the market is that it provides people with a scaffolding and infrastructure through which to relieve themselves of their family,

Eric Weinstein 22:36
right.

So one of the

one of the things that’s interesting to me is that you’re coming from a background which is very familiar to me, where you have a Jewish Armenian parentage, and your father is a famous mathematician working in linear printing. Programming sort of optimization science and came up with this amazing algorithm that changed our picture for how things could be optimized using smaller and smaller. ellipsoids. Right. And your mom, how did she figure into the story?

anna 23:18
Aye, aye, aye. I might, my dad, his whole kind of level of achievement is way over my head, obviously. But my mom and my dad, I mean, they met when they were very young, and they got married quite a bit later, my mom I think, would probably be very irate and disappointed if I described her like this because you know, she’s gonna listen to this. She is an artist, but I who became a housewife, basically. Okay.

And I think that she is the great genius of the family. She’s like the great kind of organizing and destructive force in my family. What’s interesting very often in sight I have to say that when we had this lunch which you’re describing as a power lunch Yeah,

Eric Weinstein 24:03
I drunk. No alcohol. I’m not positive that it qualified.

anna 24:08
What? I mean, are you supposed to drink?

Eric Weinstein 24:10
I don’t really know. Okay, my first power lunch.

anna 24:13
Oh, right. I have to just you know a stupid girl bossy, hyperbolic term. I said I have to drink. Okay, well, very good smoke at all lunches. I didn’t smoke. You didn’t smoke. But I’m such a neurotic. I’m so shy. I was telling you that I can’t you know, I have to constantly occupy

Eric Weinstein 24:29
is that because you’re reveling in your neuroticism?

anna 24:31
No, no, no, I’m not like a woody allen person. I don’t get off on it. Oh, sure. Something that I hope to shed with the okay. The kind of accumulation of experience like habituation. Okay. Yeah. That’s not something I think you should look up to in yourself.

Unknown Speaker 24:46
I don’t know.

anna 24:48
Um, but yeah, I think that my mom is kind of like a bizarre freewheeling artistic genius. A true eccentric, and I I think that I derive a lot of my personality and my tendency toward critique from her. I mean, she’s always spinning paranoid polemics about the world. It’s really quite impressive. And she’s right most of the time.

Eric Weinstein 25:13
I think it’s very strange that I mean, this really actually echoes your earlier point that we tend to see accomplishment only if it shows up in the workplace. And for a lot of us coming from kind of ethnic families, for lack of a better word. Very often people who were inside the home were well known to be the local genius, eccentric or the life for the whatever. It was not clear in any way that if you were the schmatta salesman that that was really the higher expression of the two people in a marriage. Mm hmm. And it happens that your father did something very creative. Yeah. In a very analytic context. Yeah, hardly surprising. Like there’s nothing at all surprising to me, that your mom might mostly be at home with the family and Be the major force of the family.

anna 26:02
Yeah. And I think like, you know, my dad probably gets all the credit for being her being kind of the genius. My haters like to point out that I’m coasting off of my father’s accomplishments, which is not true because I’m actually way more famous than him on Reddit. So there Yeah, there you go. He would be so I am here to disgrace my family name. But basically, I think that it’s a very interesting this this kind of old breakdown of my parents marriage is very instructive example of the way that women wield unofficial power through the domestic sphere again, it’s like

Eric Weinstein 26:45
unofficially, the the language is even wrong to me. It’s like, In what world do we not? I guess the idea is that it’s official if it shows up in Wikipedia, and it’s unofficial if it only shows up in family Well,

anna 27:00
I think it’s official if you’re getting officially compensated for it right, well,

Eric Weinstein 27:04
the issue of kin work that I bring up, which is that I think that a lot of the wage gap work is extremely weak and manipulative. But I think it’s also the case that the real wage gap is that you have to figure out how to compensate for kin work, you know, taking care of elderly relatives or young children, and that you can arguably say that women should be paid more on average, because that is uncompensated work and it has to show up somewhere and sometimes it would show up in like prestige. The matriarch of the large families kind of an impressive position to hold and that with smaller families, it’s no longer so cool to be grandma.

anna 27:45
Yeah, sure. And I think that there’s a general disrespect for the institution of motherhood. This let’s talk about that. Well, I tell is that in the culture at large, particularly on the left,

Eric Weinstein 27:57
so that this is something which I totally resonate with, like, when did the left go? And they’re gonna claim Oh, we’re not anti family, but there is some weird anti family thing.

anna 28:07
I think that that’s absolutely a kind of collective defense mechanism because we’re talking about people much like myself, who are millennials in their late 20s, early 30s. You know, my father’s always used to say like, well, Anna, you can’t really ascend in class, you know, contrary to the myth of the American dream, but you can’t really fall in class either. And now we’re faced with a generation that’s quite a bit like the last generation and Russia, my father’s generation, all of them who drank themselves to death by the age of you know, 52

which is this millennial generation of people like myself, so

Eric Weinstein 28:45
your dad was two years younger than I am now when he died of a heart.

anna 28:48
Yes, yeah. And you know, he died in in the United States, but I think that he is part of the same generational trend. What year was that in 2005. But there are a lot of people my age who are confronted male and female who are confronting for the first time the reality that they will actually fall in class in it, especially relative to their parents. They never owned property, they will never pay off their student debt. They will never have a safe and dependable health care situation, they will never be able to afford children. And I think the kind of broadly anti Natal list trend on the left is a psychological defense mechanism because you have to reframe, I think in the neoliberal framework, you have to reframe all adversity as opportunity.

Eric Weinstein 29:46
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anna 30:56
What they’re saying to themselves,

Eric Weinstein 30:58
don’t be burdened by business. Yeah, my breasts will be undeformed by breasts.

anna 31:03
Yes, I’m a girl boss. I don’t need a man. I’m an independent, strong independent, right? And

so they’ve had to kind of rather this

Eric Weinstein 31:12
will work out for a minority of the people who claim this to be true, right? It’s not BS. It’s bs is how broadly, this plan is likely to

anna 31:23
how applicable it is across. I mean, I started noticing I actually got a lot of flack for this and I still don’t know why I started noticing. In the pop lyrics of the last two decades or so kind of minute shift. You can go back as far as actually the 1960s I remember this interview with Amy Winehouse where she’s like, you know, I’m much I’m much more prefer I gravitate toward the music of the 60s, the 50s 60s, whatever, as opposed to the music of the 2000s because in the kind of fee Male vocalists of the 60s they expressed kind of a longing, a yearning for companionship and love a desire to subordinate themselves to the will of others, or something greater than themselves. Let’s put it that way that feminists have interpreted as a fundamentally kind of misogynistic or sexist outlook. Whereas now, you know, with the coming of somebody like Beyonce, you have these lyrics that literally are like, I don’t need you. I don’t need a man, all men are trash. I’m gonna keep stacking my bills. And it’s it’s this form of feminism that I find to be very callous and cretinous and ultimately counterproductive. I mean, let’s let’s take what you just said. It was actually weirdly on both sides of the gender. For example,

Eric Weinstein 32:54
let’s say john Denver when he sings about Yeah, that’s a kiss me and smile for me tell me that he talks about when I come back, I’ll bring your wedding ring. Like he’s excited about the fact that he’s screwed up in this relationship. He says, I’ve played around and then he says, but I realize how important this is. I’m going to make it right. And I’m excited about becoming betrothed to you,

anna 33:24
right? I make amends. Well, not

Eric Weinstein 33:26
only make amends, you know, like, wouldn’t Beyonce I mean, just to connect these two data points? She’s saying if you like it, you should put a ring on it. Like she that’s really what you wanted. Mm hmm. Like, you didn’t, you didn’t exercise your options, very transactional. Mm hmm. So now I’m up. I’m up in the club GETTING JIGGY with this other guy. You shouldn’t be upset.

anna 33:48
Yeah, sure. It’s, it’s it is a very kind of transactional ethos that permeates all there is this like, kind of stupid trend on Twitter where people were that people mocking because other people were tweeting out kind of empathy templates. So, you know, somebody texts you and they’re like, Hey, I’m like really going through a hard time. You know, I’m having you getting a divorce, my mom’s dying of cancer, whatever you fire back with like, Hey, I’m currently at capacity. Do you know somebody else who’s slush? I’m going through some personal problems to slash and it’s like, a kind of prefabricated template for how you should respond to a person in need.

Eric Weinstein 34:27
Wow, yeah, this is a new one.

anna 34:30
No lucky you’re, you’re so lucky that all this stuff is way over your head. I have to live with this every day and it shrinks my will and libido to live. But it’s like this kind of thing that is hyper transactional, all relations have become so transactional, all

Eric Weinstein 34:48
relationships. I mean, look, my take on this is that all relationships have an aspect of exchange, right, but that what distinguishes the transactional from the rich relationship is how many layers of indirection separate? The people involved from the exchange? Yes. So dinner in a movie is a lot more abstract than turning a trick on a street corner. Yeah. And then you go further, you know, with courtship, it becomes incredibly distant in terms of the number of layers. And what we don’t recognize is that those layers of indirection are essential to a rich life.

anna 35:28
Yeah, and rich emotional life. And what we’re dealing with now are people who if they are not economically, impoverished, are spiritually impoverished because they have no institutions or values

Unknown Speaker 35:45
on which to depend.

Eric Weinstein 35:47
Okay, so this gets me back to like your crazy podcast, yeah, and your persona. So first of all, I mean, you’re playing with all sorts of associations and breaking them in ways That the indicia and the underlying, like the proximate ultimate are separated. So I normally associate vocal fry and up talking with stupidity, right? I don’t associate it with your level of insight and commentary, right? You guys said stoned out of your mind. And there’s a tremendous amount of vocal fry. But what it speaks to is this like crazy metacognitive distance that you and your co host have, from the topics that you’re discussing. And you’re sort of you’re constantly bemused by this sort of very weird period of the human condition. Is that wrong?

anna 36:38
I think bemused is a nice way of putting it I think that we’re very frustrated. What do you want? I don’t know. We’re like all weapon. We don’t know what we want. No, I mean, I think I want

Unknown Speaker 36:53
you to know what you want.

anna 36:54
I think I want I mean, on a on a kind of broad social level. I think that we have to take Kind of the old Nietzschean adage God is dead, right? People always interpret that. As you know, I think people have a tendency to interpret it as God is dead and therefore we can get like weird septum piercings and tattoos sleeves and go fucking and sucking and polyamorous arrangements. And that’s not at all what he meant. He meant God is dead and no, it is up to secular humanity to replace the value system that was evacuated with the death of God with an equally viable one.

Eric Weinstein 37:32
Do you think that’s possible? No,

anna 37:34
I don’t know. But I you know, what else can we do? You know, dosh always says to me, like you have to stay cheerful in the face of adversity like the Greeks.

Unknown Speaker 37:44
Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 37:46
Well, alright, so I mean, in part, I don’t know how long the show is gonna get away with it. Yeah. But ultimately, it’s about for me recognizing what the religious impulse was was a load bearing structure of our civilization, because it caused you to think in intergenerational terms like in our shared part of our tradition, the Jewish tradition, the concept of generation to generation goes into the name Latoya vador. from generation to generation and that thing about you have to be seeing yourself you have to subordinate and submit. And like this is against the ethos of our time, but it it occurs everywhere because our Soma, the parts of us that are non reproductive, are finite, right? They always die. Yes. And if you do not link yourself in a chain with others, then Rome has to be built in the day because

anna 38:46
there’s nothing more for you hos as we say,

Eric Weinstein 38:50
Well, that was far more elegant. Yeah, that’s it.

anna 38:52
Yeah. But I mean, it’s true. And look, I mean, investing or kind of honoring. posterity is amazing. investing in the future. It’s a means of envisioning yourself in a greater human chain a human centered view of drudgery and debauchery, no, but, and what’s lost now? I mean, this is like the the cardinal sin, right? In kind of neoliberal, neoliberal discourse is subordinating your will to somebody else.

Eric Weinstein 39:22
It’s bizarre

anna 39:23
and to see this kind of ethos and flourish on the so called left is profoundly dispiriting.

Eric Weinstein 39:30
Well, it’s such a simplistic version of empowerment. Yeah. And it’s it, you know, it’s one of the things that I’ve advocated repeatedly. So in terms of, I am going to take your adage and start repeating myself loudly and often. I keep saying that magic happens when people pass power back and forth. If you retain all your power, then you don’t get to the magic of giving your power to somebody else and having them give you an equal amount, you know, have a different kind of back and so we never had actually build the super powerful relationships. When we’re hoarding our power, say, I’m not gonna give anything up. You’re interested in motherhood, like for yourself

anna 40:12
for myself, of course, but in general, yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is the most kind of noble, honorable institution on the planet.

Eric Weinstein 40:20
And it really matters. I mean, this is one of the things that a family friend is very dear to me, took me aside at some point and said, you want to know, something magical look at your children. That’s what happens when a PhD stays home to raise them. Yeah, you know, and it’s just

anna 40:38
like, are you getting a little verklempt? That’s beautiful. I get.

Eric Weinstein 40:41
I get way too very clever on the shows. Yeah. But it’s, you know, my wife is out of the workforce for like 10 years or something. And, you know, she came back, you know, with with with mentally guns blazing. Yeah, but I think that this hatred of motherhood has to be acknowledged, first of all denied. Well, we don’t hate motherhood, we just think it’s a bad choice. But you look at it the mommies who work in the mommies don’t. One genders built to reproduce our species. And I just I can’t stand what we’ve done to to it.

anna 41:21
Yeah. And there’s kind of no honoring also among men or women of the gender difference which exists. It’s very real and palpable, and I think

feminists

have this idea that if we acknowledge that we’re different, we’re acknowledging that we’re unequal and that’s not at all the case we’re differently equal or differently abled.

Eric Weinstein 41:48
Well, so this is the weird thing. If you try to make this argument at the level of like racial groups or geographically separated groups, there really isn’t a great way of saying that There should be equality because there’s no reason that separated groups should have variables having common means within a group. There actually is this weird principle of Fisher, the biological theorist, which says that it is as good to be female as male from the perspective of the fitness of the two genders is strategy, right? And the problem with it is that you have to you what fails is what you might call the Ginger Rogers principle. So the old as the joke goes, Ginger Rogers could do everything Fred Astaire could do but backwards and in heels. And the feminist version of this is women are as good or better at everything men can do except peeing standing up. And that can’t possibly be the case if Fisher’s theory is to hold because then women would simply be better. Yes, unless being standing up was like the be all and end all which I mean, it’s Yeah, but Yeah, that’s part of the problem, which is if you if you claim that you’re better at something, biology tells you you have to be worse at something else,

anna 43:09
right? So that there’s a kind of an implicit trade off right? Or balance, let’s say,

Eric Weinstein 43:15
well then it gets to this really, like, here’s here it let’s get into trouble with psychologists and psychiatrists. Okay. The whole codependence concept Yes, there is something which is really dysfunctional, but a lot of interdependence is labeled as codependent. And the modern notion that you should be a completely functional person who can do everything unable to walk out on a moment’s notice. That completely destroys the concept of coupling.

anna 43:41
Yeah, I mean, I think this all goes back to the atomizing logic of the market and all my big issue, I think, my big critique kind of the central organizing theme of my, my work, right is this idea that progressive activism is now Effectively marching in lockstep with the very market imperatives that they are opposed to on the face of things. It’s mad. And

Eric Weinstein 44:08
it’s so, so intellectually incoherent it’s kind of amazing that it’s still hanging together as a pseudo philosophy. Yeah. All right. So now, like, I feel like you’re revealed, you’re somehow reveling on your podcast and this like really dangerous kind of meems which suggests, you know, royalty plunged into boredom and cocaine and wanton sexuality, but in fact, underneath it, you’re coming from an academic tradition and, you know, embracing very traditional values. There’s no reason to leave left of center thinking because traditionally what what is the left been it’s been about empowering working families,

anna 44:54
right. And that’s what I’m interested in. It’s funny that so many of my critics and I, if you really look at us, it’s like, Like, you know the narcissism the narcissism of small differences like we are completely indistinguishable to League of Ghandi fig farmer, you know, 99% of our politics are equivalent, are they? I’m sure. I mean, like,

Eric Weinstein 45:14
Who are you pissing off?

anna 45:18
I think I think people that kind of are self identified as leftists, but are basically and I say this with the most, like the most empathy possible because I understand their position. I feel completely insecure and precarious in the market. They feel that they have no future. I up until a year or two ago felt that I have no future. It was really a toss. Okay,

Eric Weinstein 45:41
so you talk what happened when you got a future?

anna 45:43
I mean, I started this podcast and

Eric Weinstein 45:45
I know what happened to you. Did you have a physiological change?

Unknown Speaker 45:50
physiological No, but I’ve

Eric Weinstein 45:52
been I’ve been shit out of luck. Yeah. And then I get some luck. Um, the chemicals that are running through my body are totally dead. Yeah,

anna 46:00
I mean, you start to even like look more like resplendent and wonderful and whatever. But

Eric Weinstein 46:05
you get plumage.

anna 46:06
Yeah, you get plumage I think like, but this is the first time I’m 34 years old. I’m kind of like an old geezer by millennial achievement standards. You know, it’s like you have to be like 23 when you peak or something. And but again, I’m merely an individual, right? And there’s a whole generation of people who are like now left behind.

Eric Weinstein 46:32
Do you know my friend Peter teal at all?

anna 46:35
I mean, not personally.

Eric Weinstein 46:37
So he’s got a great quote. I don’t know whether he said it publicly probably has, but he says things to me and I just, I kick myself for not having thought of them first. He says a boomers golden era is in his or her 20s a Gen Xers in his or her 50s. And then he looks at me and he says, and we’re just getting started. It’s been It’s like I didn’t get suddenly interesting. Like in the last few years because I had a mushroom. Yeah, it was. There’s this thing I’ve called the distributed idea suppression complex and the disk.

anna 47:11
Is this your coinage? Yeah, coin one. coin a lot of Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 47:16
Yeah. But then the weird thing is you watch it in the world, and it only works. If your coin something that people actually recognize is real. It’s not like you can make up anything and it just goes. But there is this thing that tried to suppress All right, it’s still working like they’re trying to make Andrew Yang not appear on msnbc on any of the graphics or LC gets, you know, dropped at every opportunity. Yeah, this thing just doesn’t want to hear that there’s a massive intergenerational transfer where the two vampiric generations have the silence and the boomers transfused the Xers and the millennials, in order to allow them to live in the style to which they become accustomed and like the most obvious place that you see This is the university system.

anna 48:02
Explain that.

Eric Weinstein 48:03
Oh, it’s same here man. It was a pyramid scheme that was expanding. Hmm. And when when the growth that was natural the system ran out the there was no way to give people professorships who had been contributing their youth to the research of those above them, right. And so what the universities did almost every top university loaded up on administrators, and then made tuition insanely expensive and made it impossible to get rid of the debt in bankruptcy, so that you can die. You know, getting a social security check and still paying your student loans. Mm hmm. I’m going to do a show hopefully with sugar baby University, which is a program inside of seeking arrangement and sugar dating, okay, where it would appear that the appeal is that young women who are in some men burdened with student debt and graduate debt free by dating older successful people and getting an allowance every way. Which I think is just like it’s weird to imagine a generation sort of selling its daughters into borderline commercial sex work.

anna 49:17
Yeah, I mean, it’s monsterous. And the idea that you would institutionalize this, well, it’s like a degree it’s like the university utility

Eric Weinstein 49:25
and why don’t you get a Why don’t you get a job bussing tables to pay off your student loans when student tuition has gotten you know, above medical tuition which is above regulatory reg regular inflation I mean, sorry, medical inflation is above regular inflation and tuition inflation is above medical. It the whole thing is mad, but the system couldn’t be kept together. Right. And so that is an intergenerational transfusing.

anna 49:53
Yeah, I mean, look, one of the most one of the biggest rackets in this country after management consulting is idea that all people should go to college. I think Germany has it right. They send most of them to vocational programs. Yeah, the idea that you should even be paying, you know, $40,000 a semester intuition to get a communications degree as a super senior for five years is preposterous. Nobody needs to be saddled. Hmm.

Eric Weinstein 50:20
gonna blow it for these generations. Yeah. Why? Because since a scam it they turned the most amazing part of our, of our country into this wealth transfer scam. It’s just It’s funny, but it’s painful.

anna 50:34
Yeah, I mean, it’s and it’s horrible. I was thinking about, you know, the kind of the idea Have you are you familiar with this concept Staub, the Russian parody? Stop, stop. We can get into this later because it’s a whole

Unknown Speaker 50:52
I don’t know.

anna 50:53
It’s a I think that this is like to really understand the Trump era. For example, you have to view it through this particular lens. It’s a it’s a late Soviet parody, genre or style that involves an over identification so extreme that it’s unclear whether you’re endorsing authentically endorsing a position or perpetuating an elaborate troll. Okay, so it’s basically a post ironic gesture. If you look at like, the golden age of liberal entertainment, as you know, Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, right, which was kind of characterized by this is a really long winded digression. I didn’t mean to go Here.

Unknown Speaker 51:38
Drink up. Well, yeah,

anna 51:39
yeah, I’ll keep going as characterized by, you know, this kind of snarky, implicitly moral, morally superior ironic posture, right. That was, I think, supplanted eventually by this kind of stop over identification right. Where it’s unclear. For example, with People like me and dosha it’s unclear what position were actually endorsing. Right. And Trump, for example, is the master of the strategy. And so he

Eric Weinstein 52:14
plays to do we both acknowledge that Trump has some crazy genius Dude,

anna 52:19
I think he’s a total genius. But I think that he’s an artistic genius, not a political genius as

Eric Weinstein 52:23
an artistic

anna 52:24
I think that he’s an artist. He’s a Gemini just like my mother. My mom hates Trump with like a fire because they’re the same person down to the kind of miserable candy expression they kind of mo when they’re in a irritated mood. It’s really how is that content?

Eric Weinstein 52:41
Huh? How’s that content

anna 52:43
content? Conti? Conti? Am I Oh,

but I’m very gullible. Which is why I’m not a troll but you take somebody like Trump, the guy is so over invested in performing his own incompetence that any parody of him by an outsider, right reads is cringy and overdetermined, which is why SNL has sucked for the last. Well,

Eric Weinstein 53:06
in part, you have to get something right before you compare it, right? Yeah. And

I don’t know if you ever saw this video.

I think it’s called something like in LA. Because of the music in the hall of the trumpian. King.

Unknown Speaker 53:21
No.

Eric Weinstein 53:22
Okay, so it’s all of these liberal comedians from this golden era that you’re talking about, in the most knowing and oppressive way possible, saying, buddy, you’re not gonna win. Come on, we’ll know it and everyone saying like, Oh, please run. Oh, it’ll be so entertaining. Like, there’s no concept that this is real. Yes. Yeah. And yeah, every single one of those people who appeared on this, including john oliver and Steven Cole bear became unfunny to me in just about everything that they did after they went so over the top

anna 53:57
momentarily.

Eric Weinstein 54:00
But they showed that they didn’t understand, like, you can’t mock this stuff

anna 54:05
and what a betrayal like on a Freudian level, what a collective betrayal, you know, parental authority that was we really believed in these guys that they could be that they could parse like, sorry, I believed in them. They Yeah, because this is this thing I’ve called the gated institutional narrative.

Eric Weinstein 54:22
It was protected against reality. I mean, I don’t know whether because of

anna 54:26
your you have to publish like a coffee table book of your like, coinage as a neologisms.

Eric Weinstein 54:32
I’d rather you make fun of that could actually be fun. Yeah. One of the things that, again, this is this shows you how twisted my soul is, but as a pastime, I sometimes watch the last days of the chesh escos, Romania because like right up until the hill on

anna 54:50
Pornhub

Unknown Speaker 54:54
the execution right

Eric Weinstein 54:58
under Slavic mill Yeah. It’s, it’s very much like there’s a rally and somehow the rally goes out of control. And order has to be restored and the cameras have to break the filming of what’s going on. And so right at the end, they’ve got this shrinking group of loyalists, we’re still terrified that these people are going to, you know, regain power because that’s the way it’s always been. But everywhere the spell is broken. And I guess that’s sort of what I saw is that this thing was just, it was an American version of propaganda that had been so believed that when it started, not to be true, the organs just kept pumping out all of this encouragement that I think Hillary is going to win, there’s no question she’s inevitable.

anna 55:56
I mean, even now, they’re running you know, Kamala is out there. Really going whole hog with Buddha judge. But it’s Yeah, there’s a certain there’s a certain lag in between the progressive and trumpian between kind of like traditional democrats and conservatives and the Trump administration. And I think like Trump, uniquely among world leaders, possibly in the history of the world has been able to do this thing. I mean, I wrote a whole essay about it. He was he was able to do what the Russian avant garde and the socialist realists had been trying to do these two kind of sequential propaganda, like arms of the culture industry in the Soviet Union, which was maintain which is achieve a total synthesis of the material and the imaginable or the imaginative, what you know, sounds really good,

Eric Weinstein 56:57
so don’t give it to me.

anna 56:59
I mean, what you It’s kind of like the typical like Soviet avant garde idea that we were creating a total synthesis of our in life like a single kind of art political project. And Trump alone has been able to do this, though crucially, under a very capitalist, not communist regime has been able to marry. What we can imagine, like what we imagine, and what is materially possible.

Eric Weinstein 57:32
Yeah, it has been very ineffective in bringing in an entire, like, there is no theory of Trump. Yeah, because almost no one either on his side or on the opposition side actually understands how much method he brings. And it’s cryptic, so it looks

anna 57:52
you know, it’s a lot of interaction. He understands and he

Eric Weinstein 57:54
does he but he’s got these formulas that I can’t tell you how Art is I mean, you probably know my friend Sam Harris was sitting here and we were having this argument friendly, but an argument on the left of the seat for good

anna 58:09
luck.

Eric Weinstein 58:10
Well, weird stuff is happening that year.

anna 58:14
as Joe Rogan ever sat in the seat, not yet, I have a crush on Joe Rogan. I know he’s married, but I think everyone Yeah, everybody does. Yeah, I think that he really could be the guy who could run and win against Trump.

Eric Weinstein 58:25
He does not want me to talk about this. Okay, cuz Okay, you can bring Well, no, because he’s not he’s got a great life. Yeah. And the fact that everybody loves him, causes people to sort of do weird things in his present. He just wants to be a regular guy. He’s also, you know, and I don’t mind saying this behind

Unknown Speaker 58:43
Joe.

Eric Weinstein 58:45
Yeah, yeah. That he is not. Yeah, I mean, he’s running an incredible operation. But whatever it is. There’s a lot of method there. Because if you think about how difficult it is to turn these shows out and to keep them fresh, it’s always just impossible so there’s a ton of genius going on and Joe’s friend. He has not come yet but he we agreed to do each other’s podcast with Sam did was to say that he Sam thought that Trump was the evil Chauncey Gardiner that that was his theory of mind. And I thought that is insane. I mean, it’s not the same when I tried to have it out. We can’t see each other’s point. I’m not saying the same is wrong, but I see so much method to Trump’s trolling.

anna 59:31
And he doesn’t he thinks that this is all kind of like our Well,

Eric Weinstein 59:33
I think what he does, you know, I Another thing I say is, is that Sam is more focused on honesty and I’m more focused on meta honesty. Trump is not an honest person, but in a weird way. He is meta honest. Right.

anna 59:46
So he’s right when he says he’s an artist on a

different level. He is Yeah,

Eric Weinstein 59:51
yeah. So but what we care about is that like, for example, Trump knows The liberal mind is automated. And as soon as you break through one of its shibboleths, it has an automated non thinking reflexive reaction, and he can map that. And then you can say, Okay, I’ll do something that will cause the reflexive reaction. But I will put something in place, which is totally different so that when you have that reflexive reaction you will be shown to be not an NPC. Mm hmm.

anna 1:00:26
Well, what’s that? Am I am I allowed to look at my phone? There is that hilarious tweet, I will stall for you. Now. That’s okay. I don’t even have to but that I have to look at my phone every 10 minutes or else I die. There is that tweet that he had today about Greta Thun Berg and how she needs to get her like anger issues under control. She is hilarious. It’s so wrong, but it’s so I mean, the man has like the Midas touch when it comes to Twitter, but

Eric Weinstein 1:00:47
I’m talking about let’s talk about that tweet, you know. So gretta is this self described autistic girl who’s mad as hell about climate and who has been Even if she has authenticity to her, there’s an entirely inauthentic complex that has settled her on her wants to use her the way the World Wildlife Federation use the panda bear as charismatic megafauna. So in some sense gretta, the actual human is also the charismatic megafauna of a propaganda campaign, which is lying in order to probably tell the truth. So you’ve got this real climate emergency, yes, you should be able to do a truthful campaign, but that can’t work. So you have to do a lying campaign and you use an actual human being as your mask, right? So it’s like layers and layers of confusion. Right. And the idea, of course, is that you can attack an autistic child, particularly female one. Yeah. And because she’s angry, and so Trump’s supremacy is opportunity. Yes. And he’s gonna go at the layer, where he’s going to say she has anger management issues. She should get it under control. Go to an old fashioned movie with friends. And then he uses chill granted chill. Yeah, we’re chill is both an admonition in terms of chill out, but also a reference to global cooling.

anna 1:02:14
Right? Yeah. And, you know and also keep in mind all of this just days after, on the heels of the Pamela Carlin remark about Baron Trump that prompted milania to tweet and her little baby daddy voice did not talk to my minor son that way. You know, I love when I read everything in her like sexy, baby boys. Yeah. And

Eric Weinstein 1:02:40
so Okay, so by the way, I’m so jealous because I can’t say anything like that. Yes. You have the XX going? Yeah, get away with murder.

anna 1:02:47
Yeah, the x x and like advanced. What’s it called, like wet brain for like years of being a Russian alcohol. But it’s you know, okay, so this woman who’s a A state witness for the impeachment proceedings insult ostensibly insults. Trump’s kid and that’s not kosher, but he can insult a 16 year old climate change,

Eric Weinstein 1:03:12
because this is this this whole thing. So if you look at how complex this, this troll is, he is appealing to all of the people who see the manipulation of the real gretta. Right for this fake campaign, which in my opinion is actually crowding out the real campaign that should be there because climate is an issue, but it’s Miss portrayed because it has to be done in a simplistic fashion. Yes, you’ve got like millions of layers there. And Trump is finding his support and the people who see through part of it, yes. Okay. The other thing is, is that he does have this thing where he knows that because his own child has been brought in hmm as a combatant that he should be allowed to do something like that.

anna 1:04:00
Yes. And be able to use somebody else’s child as a human she’ll well, particularly one yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:04:05
being pushed forward by time as Person of the Year. Yes.

anna 1:04:09
So Oh God, are we there? Yeah, over there. Okay, that happened.

Oh, I thought lizzo was the person of the year

Eric Weinstein 1:04:15
I thought was gretta

anna 1:04:16
Oh, I don’t know. They should just mud wrestle and get it over with. Anyway, go.

Eric Weinstein 1:04:21
Okay, so, in any event that was a perfect version of this isn’t Trump the child? This is Trump, the master strategist, it’s a trap. Because the the liberal or left of center mind just says Whoa, Trump attacked an artist. And if that was the simplicity of it, they’d be right. Mm hmm. And it’s in no way shape or form this in play.

anna 1:04:47
Right. But he’s, he’s really kind of a genius at doing that. And it’s so sad that he there is no avant garde art. It’s, I mean, I said this on my blog. Against avant garde art today is the sum of the Trump PR teams social media output. And coupled with the kind of unintentional comic fallout of woke ad campaigns,

Eric Weinstein 1:05:13
well, for example, you use the word retarded. Yes. If I were to say, I’m really offended, I have a developmentally challenged relative. You might respond. Oh, I don’t think retarded people are retarded. Yeah. Right. And they wouldn’t understand that it’s a comment on an overloaded term. Right.

anna 1:05:36
Well, it’s a it’s a commentary. It’s a critique. It’s a mockery of people, who disingenuously oppose the use of the word. It’s not actually a commentary or mockery of actually

Eric Weinstein 1:05:49
was able to there was a reason I mean, as somebody who development developmentally struggled in school. I have a sir

anna 1:05:59
we’re talking You can’t hear me. You don’t know me. You can’t judge me anyway go on.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:05
As somebody who struggled in school I’m I have some sensitivity. Right? Okay, like being you know, having somebody say like if they see my handwriting you say like, Are you are you a an axe murderer?

anna 1:06:18
Yo, what’s your handwriting?

Eric Weinstein 1:06:21
just doesn’t look like any. Okay, it looks like Jackson Pollock.

anna 1:06:25
It looks like prisoner scrolls. Yeah, yeah. I love that Trump’s handwriting, by the way is very bubbly and girlish. You can almost see him drawing the heart above the eye. Oh, nice. Cool.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:34
Yeah. It’s very, very like Angular. Yeah. Yeah. But I can see how it started. Huh. But then it became like the language police and it’s completely out of control.

anna 1:06:49
Yeah, I mean, look, and I objected to being I resent being policed by people who were guilty of the same crime, you know, just like 18 months ago or whatever.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:59
Yeah.

anna 1:07:00
I resent in general not people, but how the culture the system or whatever you want to call it has become so callous, so transactional, so interested in meeting out kind of punitive justice, and so incapable of giving people the benefit of the doubt. There’s no largess of spirit. Nobody believes that anything, anybody does anything out of like humor, or should we silence anymore?

Eric Weinstein 1:07:26
Well, because in many in many ways, it’s become like a scavenger hunt where you have to collect. Do you have the head of a racist? You’re the head of a misogynist. You’re the head of an anti Semite. And so you know, and then you get bingo, if you call out all of Yeah, well, so partially, it’s a reward structure. I think one of the ways in which it was called out and I hate that term, but there you are. Really well by Joe is that he had a he was I watched him work up a routine over several nights on rest sling is gay and he starts off with wrestling is really gay. And because gay is an epithet in some cases, people made the association Okay, wrestling is stupid. It’s not what he said. He said wrestling is gay. So they, they take the bait. This is very trumpian but this is Joe doing it as a comment, right? And he says, whoa, you just completed that in your mind. Yeah, I didn’t say what you think I said. And then then now you’re now like you’re in the pitcher plant or the Venus flytrap is closed. And he says, let’s think about this. You got two guys in gold shorts with lace up booties rolling around having

Unknown Speaker 1:08:40
some wet bodies together. Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:08:43
If this isn’t gay, what is Hmm? Well, when when he starts doing it that way you realize that you took the bait. You had a you had an automated reaction as opposed to a thoughtful one. Hmm. And that shows off the comic skate by laying the trap I mean, you saw another one of these with Dave Chappelle where he says I’m going to do an impression of the audience. And the audience is insufferable. No, he says, I’m going to do an impression. I’m going to ruin your life and we make it impossible for you to earn a living and like people thought it was Trump and he says, No, it’s you. Hmm. So the fourth wall is broken the fingers pointing.

anna 1:09:22
Yeah, I mean, look, and that’s on some level. I feel like I shouldn’t be fully confessional because that’ll take away some of the allure and the mystique. But this is what I do with my Twitter. I set things up in such a way that people always inevitably take the bait. And it’s not because I like people don’t watch this program. Don’t worry. Yeah, that they don’t. Yeah, and this is true. And the thing that that that’s so kind of eternally amusing and yet disheartening. My my only goal you know, now that I’m like a glass of red deep is to get people to think And to draw their own conclusions. And when but when they do think this is why you know, democracy on some level isn’t possible when they do. Now we’re getting into the ASMR portion this now this sounds like my podcasts were like pouring, popping bottles pouring wine, I’m gonna light up in the studio. Just kidding.

Unknown Speaker 1:10:23
But when people do

anna 1:10:26
kind of get their little engines attorney, they always somehow are the people that I’m used to dealing with it anyway, always somehow draw the worst possible least mutually flattering conclusion. That speaks volumes about where the culture at large is.

Eric Weinstein 1:10:47
But when you look at yourself metacognitively like, I have this thing called the robot which is the thing that I observe making these automated decisions. And then I have another thing I call the metacognitive Perch, where I watch my robotic self and I’m just horrified right? By what it means how it conducts itself. I see you as having this distance as an intrinsic part of your personality and the person I’m talking to is really sitting on the metacognitive perch.

anna 1:11:15
Yeah, I mean, but this is the the kind of

blessing and burden of being a dysfunctional traumatized Russian person. It sucks being Russian. You you speaking you know, you see the chessboard. Yeah. Which is a it’s more of a burden than it is a blessing because you It makes life very difficult to live. I you know, I sympathize with people like Bret Easton Ellis and Michelle Welbeck were my two favorite novelists People will laugh because I’m not reading like Flo bear Balzac, but because they have their they have this metacognitive purge. Their their books are about meta commentary. It’s social commentary disguised as fiction, which to me is kind of the most elite form of writing.

Eric Weinstein 1:12:06
Well, Brett, you know, so Brett sat in your chair, and we talked about this issue that I had accused him of privatizing our mutual childhood since we came from the same value. Okay. And he talked about the importance of the narrator. Is clay in less than zero, who’s detached from the horrors of what he’s seen? He’s weirdly drawn, yes, just the way we are to look at an auto accident, but he’s also just clinically kind of detailing. Well, this is what happened.

And,

you know, somehow I brought up Joan Didion in that session, and he confessed that this was his favorite author, and I think about her detachment where she was wearing Watching the sort of 60s debauchery and he was watching the 70s debauchery,

anna 1:13:05
right?

Eric Weinstein 1:13:06
And just the sense of having a traditional sensibility viewing the destruction of traditional, like, you can see that this is a very long unraveling of the fabric of society.

anna 1:13:23
Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s my beef with all of these critiques of Welbeck, right? The primary one being that he’s kind of a nihilist and misogynist. And in my mind, especially with this new book, serotonin, which I don’t know if you’ve read, but if you haven’t, you should read it. It’s the, you know, a giant eulogy for the decline of Western civilization and the moral failure of liberal consensus. But the main question, the kind of principal organizing theme of his work in my mind has always been is love possible under Advanced capitalism, what kind of nihilist is it that concerns himself with a question as meaningful and significant as the possibility the question of love? Why do you think that comes

Eric Weinstein 1:14:11
up? What? What in order for that book to be interesting? That question has to be interesting, right? What makes that question interesting?

anna 1:14:20
Whether love is possible under Advanced capitalism,

Eric Weinstein 1:14:22
I love if I said is a is transportation by automobile. Possible under Advanced capitalism, it wouldn’t be an interesting question, right. So why is it even a question is love possible?

anna 1:14:39
Because I think, you know, a vast kind of significant majority of people, at least people who are kind of in kind of inoculated into some sort of intellectual society, or professional society professional class believe that it’s not or suspect that it’s not

Eric Weinstein 1:14:59
Bob What is it?

Unknown Speaker 1:15:01
And I apple?

Eric Weinstein 1:15:02
If I were to ask you to

anna 1:15:04
go ahead? No, I suspect that they actually want it to be true. That love is not possible under Advanced capitalism, because then that offloads their own saying that in the matter their own responsibility to the system or whatever.

Eric Weinstein 1:15:25
If I asked, Are novels possible to read, like are great novels possible to read in the age of Twitter?

anna 1:15:34
I’m sure yeah, they’re possible to read I don’t know that they’re possible to write or to feel

Eric Weinstein 1:15:40
or not I’m, I’m not positive that they are. Many of us have noticed a bizarre inability to plunge into a book we think of ourselves as book people, right? But we don’t. We feel that our brains have been rewired. much the way porn has changed the way in which we find our lovers. I think that Twitter has changed the way we find our novels,

anna 1:16:03
right? On some level. Yeah. I mean, there’s no, there’s no longer a need. Or I don’t know about a desire, but there’s no longer kind of a necessity for a long for a work of art that has a long form expository narrative structure.

Eric Weinstein 1:16:20
I totally disagree.

anna 1:16:22
You think that I mean, I think most people don’t sense that.

Eric Weinstein 1:16:26
Or television got so weirdly good at it. Nobody was expecting that. Right. But TV came out of nowhere modern TV has longer narrative arcs than any movie. Yes, because the movie industry was completely eroded. Right? Because the sopranos and Mad Men and all that figured out something we didn’t understand.

anna 1:16:48
Yeah, but I think TV is also like watching is meaningfully different from reading.

Eric Weinstein 1:16:53
Well, I guess what I’m trying to say is, is that if you think about this from an evolutionary point, There’s kind of an adaptive landscape for various forms of mimetic design, dissemination of story narrative information. And some of them have gotten terrible. But like, if you if you looked at 1970s television, I went back to look at The Love Boat from my youth. It’s unwatchable. Right. And imagine Game of Thrones is weirdly strangely compelling. Yes,

anna 1:17:26
it is. Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:17:27
And the way in which movies like there was just this transfer of wealth from cinema into the idiot box, Mm hmm. And that’s fascinating, because everything else tells us or long form. podcasting is a very strange parallel structure, where our attention spans getting really long. They’re getting long, somewhere,

anna 1:17:51
somewhere. Yeah, it’s being transferred. I mean, you know, I had this thought earlier today in my hungover state, where it dawned on me I had a little bit of kind of like a feminine imposter syndrome moment. And I was like, this is ridiculous that I’m like going on this guy’s podcast. I’m some hostess from Bushwick, you know? And then I thought

Unknown Speaker 1:18:09
it’s mine.

anna 1:18:10
Yeah. And I was like, you know, that’s a retarded. It’s gay, whatever. It’s all this kind of bevy of ridiculous words. Is that completely,

Eric Weinstein 1:18:17
by the way, to all the advertisers who just left the program? It’s been a great one. Yeah.

anna 1:18:23
But then I think about it and I see that with podcasting, there is the possibility of a revival of the era of the public intellectual, which is something that people crave also like the new class undignified as it sounds, the new class of like podcasting personas, are possibly will possibly be able to revive something like that

image or social role, which is important, I think.

Eric Weinstein 1:18:56
What I think you could also look at this a little bit like William Hell, or Philip petite, walking the tightrope between the Twin Towers, part of what makes for podcasting exciting, is the idea that we could screw up at any moment and destroy our names and reputations. And I think that that

anna 1:19:18
should I do it for you now I can we started I’m yeah, I’m a little wind up now is that

Eric Weinstein 1:19:22
right? Yeah, that will be but you see your advice signaler

anna 1:19:28
Ah, you said this to me during our power lunch you have to re I say this to the audience of no hint of sarcasm. I really like when men mansplain things to me. I think that it’s fun and cool.

Eric Weinstein 1:19:43
So voice signaling. I think more people are talking about it now. But I originally started talking about it, because it came out of the theory for me of contract bridge, where you have to say what it is you’re going to do and then you’re judged by whether or not you accomplish that which you said you were going to Okay, so what I view modern society is being is a game in which you’re fitted with a white suit that you did not ask for. And then the key question is, do you keep it clean? Or does it become soiled? Right? Okay. Well my first belief is you’re crazy to accept a white suit because that’s not gonna work out. Right. So I picked Dan bilzerian as my example

Unknown Speaker 1:20:26
and your fellow Armenian other fellow Armenian. Yeah,

Eric Weinstein 1:20:29
so his thing is guns. Drugs an automatic weapon.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:35
And that’s sin. Don’t forget in the money. Don’t forget the hose.

Eric Weinstein 1:20:39
Sorry, guys. Sorry, guns.

It’s the wine. Yeah, girls. Yeah, guns. Yeah. And drugs and money. Because those are his four big thing. Yeah. You can’t embarrass him by saying hey, you just took a bunch of Have chicks out into the desert and give them automatic weapons after you cook them up? Yeah. Or give them weed? Because like, yes, that’s my business model. And as a result, there’s no industry trying to take down Dan bilzerian.

anna 1:21:13
Right. I mean, I mean, I think I said this too. I don’t remember because I was wind up then too. I said, you know, it’s the same thing with somebody like howard stern or Donald Trump. They never promised to respect women, so they can’t get taken down for not respecting women. Meanwhile, all these guys who are playing like the virtue game, get, at least they at least get their reputations tarnished.

Eric Weinstein 1:21:36
The two cases that you talked about. Howard Stern’s original Gambit was that he wanted to be lashed to the mast and be surrounded by TNA and just as much cleavage as was possible. And then he would do nothing. Mm hmm. And so that was his that was his game was that he was Ulysses. And so it was a promise. And he was married throughout and then his wife would call up while he was surrounded by temptation. Yeah. In the case of bilzerian, he’s got a different promise. The promise is, I will not lie to you and you will not lie to me. I’m not telling you that you have to be monogamous with me. I’m not telling you any one of a number of things. I will be straight with you, you will be straight with me. And if we can’t have honesty, then you have to leave. Okay? So those are incredibly weird gambits. You have to get both of these men there do it. They’re very unusual, right?

anna 1:22:35
They’re socially engineering something. Well,

Eric Weinstein 1:22:37
my favorite Dan bilzerian. post on Instagram, is he’s there, I think with no shirt because he’s also kind of a confection. He serves himself up as he self inject. Yeah. And he’s reaching out to this woman who’s more closed than he is to come up a step somewhere in Greece. Yeah. And the caption is, come with me. Mi, a ruin your life, but you’ll have fun. Right? And like, I really think that’s his proposition.

anna 1:23:06
Yeah, I really have to hand a term union men because they alone among men are just as vain as women. Are they? Yeah, they really like to objectify themselves.

Eric Weinstein 1:23:17
Well, but you see, in my opinion, women are really the male’s of the human species because as the as the adorn gender, I don’t know. take it seriously.

anna 1:23:28
Jenna, you You are now echoing a thesis proposed by this woman Andrea long choose like a transgender writer. It was also echoing Valerie Solanas, who may who has the same hypothesis. That’s interesting to hear. Eric, why do you say Weinstein? Weinstein? Weinstein? Yeah, I think the power move. The power move, Eric. may say so is to have Harvey in this chair. No,

no, you can’t

Eric Weinstein 1:23:59
know well. No, I mean, there are there are people who have been canceled. Mm hmm. Who I’m interested in, right. And there are people who have been canceled that I’m perfectly happy that they are. Okay. Yeah. And this is part of part of my problem, which is that while I mean, this is a difference between us Yeah. Which is, the way I view it is, is that you have accepted the game, but you’re going to behave really badly within it. Right? I haven’t accepted the game. I’ve rejected the game. Okay. And I understand the motivations for how this woke stuff got started. Mm hmm. And I’m sympathetic with them to a point and I’m completely unsympathetic with how non self reflective and shallow and mean spirited it is, while pretending that it cares. And I’m going to carry that tension. So you and I are in slightly different missions.

anna 1:24:53
Yeah. You’re gonna carry the tension of

Eric Weinstein 1:24:56
I’m okay. Being Earnest. Like my answer my answer. You’re neat, your point, right is around you. So for example, you know, this is a three dimensional projection of a four dimensional convex polytopes. Okay. And I find it transcendent. Hmm. So I’m holding up. What is this 120 cell, which is the name of the convex polytopes, which is a generalization of the dodecahedron to four dimensional space. Hmm. And you have one over there that, yes, they do the 24 sides, which is the unique one that doesn’t correspond to one of the platonic solids. Right. I look at that one by you. Hmm. And I just marvel at it. I think about it the way people think about like serafin Yeah. It’s like, I don’t have religion in my life at the same level that my ancestors did.

Unknown Speaker 1:25:45
Right. But you have somebody I have.

Eric Weinstein 1:25:47
I have the wonder of mathematics and physics and biology that that plugs the same religion shaped hole in my soul. Yeah. And so that’s how I’ve solved the nature problem. That’s why I remain earnest Much to the chagrin of some of my listeners,

anna 1:26:02
I know but I think I actually think that we’re fundamentally at the end of the day on the same page about

Eric Weinstein 1:26:07
that. I think we’re very close to be it. And I think this is one of the reasons why I covertly brought up your father. Because this I think that the Jewish in the Soviet and the Armenian you know, all of these things. These are very old tradition that feel very deeply and they were naked about carrying.

anna 1:26:32
Right and I guess we’re actually we’re back to where we started in Prague, baby. But the there’s this idea, I think the kind of in America there’s this very reductive idea of like white people, right, white people, there’s, there are all these different, non white ethnicities and cultures, but white people are a singular block.

Eric Weinstein 1:26:54
Magic of this country only,

anna 1:26:55
right but I’ve put you know, I mean, I don’t know if you have the similar kind of experience. I will felt, for example, very alienated from Nordic, non Jewish whites, right? Or just to give you an example, right? I don’t you know, any beef with them, but those people are not my people. And

Eric Weinstein 1:27:16
I think that and then one of my largest constituencies abroad are Sweden and Norway, your demos?

anna 1:27:25
Yeah, that makes sense because they’re they’re also actually very earnest people

Eric Weinstein 1:27:29
and they’re also weirdly having their idealism that has worked very well and is in fact, yes, brought it out by the left, abused against them so that they are now starting to feel like WTF Hmm, why can’t we talk about some of the tensions that we’re experiencing like there is something that it means to be Swedish or Norwegian, or Icelandic, right. And to be told, well, this, your identity is just that you’re European and even that is only like This whole question about software nationalism versus hardware nationalism. You have lots of people in the UK, for example from South Asia, who by going through the Oxbridge system sound entirely like the British upper crust.

anna 1:28:15
Exactly.

Eric Weinstein 1:28:16
And in further, sometimes they come from the high castes that the British favored working with in India or Pakistan. Now, the idea that enlightenment ideas or Anglo Saxon ideas can run on any hardware, it’s like boot camp, where you’ve got an apple machine that’s running Windows, you know, I don’t really care too much about the hardware. I care a great deal about the software. And the idea that everybody of European dissenter, who are interested in European cultures should apologize. I’m having none of this. I mean, there’s so much music and science and architecture and know that all the terrible things that happened to I will not have that watered down. That’s an authentic experience. The thing that bothers me about it is, and this is another one of my riffs. You have this problem with vanilla, where vanilla has two meanings. One is boring flavor lis Okay, bland. And the other is like the most flavorful of spices, okay, and flavorings and tastes. And somehow they’re both vanilla. Well, white is the same thing. White is the most bland, boring. It’s like a canvas that has been Jessa but not painted upon. On the other hand, if you look at European culture, is there anything richer and spicier and more intricate and interesting? And somehow our minds are just bananas over these two.

anna 1:29:45
Just Well, I mean, it’s but it’s so it’s very offensively reductive on a way that personally strikes me because the kind of the only thing keeping me from being very becoming like a typical Welbeck in protagonist or one of these like horrible millennial girl bosses, who’s fundamentally empty inside is a great deal of kind of like, honor and respect that I feel for my ancestors and the cultural kind of the amniotic fluid that we all came at

Eric Weinstein 1:30:26
it well, but it’s worse. I mean, you’re in a very funny position you are culturally. Like your podcast is called redskin. Yeah. And you are culturally very Russian, Soviet, Jewish, Armenian. But if you really look at it, you can see that it’s fading. Yeah. And you’re not going to have grandchildren that relate to you.

anna 1:30:54
Yeah, and that’s, that’s really a terrifying thing. And it’s actually terrifying thing on two levels because Alright, hey, you’re not going to have grandchildren who relate to you on like a practical level, but be to even acknowledge that you want grandchildren to relate to kind of flies in the face of this very leftist doxy the culture is irrelevant. And it makes me think of like, you know, the idea of narcissism that somebody like lash was so kind of brilliant at identifying, diagnosing. And at the time he was writing in the 60s and 70s. He built it as kind of the generational pathology of our time, the the kind of liberated persona. But even at that time, narcissism was still at the very least, a system of positive affinities. So you identified through affinity right. Originally, maybe you identified with your necessity are your religion. And then later you came to identify with your lifestyle markers, you know you did yoga or composting or recycling or whatever. And gradually over time that’s yielded to kind of a non negative narcissism where people at large identify with their oppression and their adversity.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:22
But Russians identify with their oppression and their adversity in a very strong way. That doesn’t look anything like what we’re doing in the US.

anna 1:32:29
Okay, see, I’ve never heard this one before. Oh, really?

Unknown Speaker 1:32:33
Yeah.

anna 1:32:35
I just thought we were kind of miserable melancholic people. I think there’s a general kind of, you know, on the Pavlova, the great Russian ballerina said that the Russian soul is marked by melancholy.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:46
Yeah, yeah. I think that it’s, well, you know, the

it’s very interesting

when I had Garry Kasparov on the program, He, there was some very odd moments. So I tried to do a, an intro in Russian where I said that he was unclear that he was if it was Garry Kasparov or Garry Weinstein, because that was first name. And he immediately just didn’t buy it on.

Unknown Speaker 1:33:17
Yeah, I’m jealous

anna 1:33:18
that you didn’t do the Russian language intro for me. Really? My chopped liver. Just kidding. No, go on.

Eric Weinstein 1:33:23
Okay. I felt that in order. Well, I mean, actually didn’t even talk about almost no one reacted to Yeah, one of my hopes was for the program was to start personalizing it to all the cultures that I care the most about. And so I did this thing about us borders and the diversity of innovation because in the Moscow subways and the subways of other cities, there’s this thing which says, you know, warning doors are closing the next steps, ladies just fences. Yeah, he’s the robot. You know, that. Yeah, that thing. I always thought it’d be cool for that. The portal was like the monitor. outdoors, opening and closing. And he just didn’t react at all to it. The one weird thing where there was like a shiver of recognition was I talked about the Russian satirical magazine krokodil Mm hmm. And how dissent and irreverence existed within the Soviet Union, but in this very specified way, so that there was a valve to let things to let off steam. And it wasn’t the American picture where nobody could say anything at any time, because that would never work. The Russian system was much more sophisticated, right? And that was the one moment at which he sort of gave me a little bit of a nod like, Wow, you really know your stuff. And the thing is, is very hard for an American to connect to the broad, Slavic soul.

anna 1:34:50
Yeah, and for us to connect to the broad American soul. I think I said this to you, you know, the kind of idea that Russians are basically optimists masquerading as cynics. And Americans are cynics masquerading as optimists. I mean, that’s like broadly on some level like stereotypically true. And I also remember saying that Russians, unlike Americans, you know, if you have a classroom of American kids, and you ask them, like who’s done x, or who is why the hands shoot up, because in America, it’s much, much less dangerous historically to identify yourself and Russians are in the business of indirection mismatch and non identification, because it was at some point, a political problem that had material real world consequences, but has been handed down to successive generations as a behavioral quirk that’s actually really problematic if you’re trying to have like a, you know, a romantic relationship with like an American man, for example. But, uh, yeah, we’re very weird damaged people. I mean, I said this, I tweeted about this, that Congress session with Kasparov was really weird because it was like an insight into all of my communication impasses with American people

Eric Weinstein 1:36:07
say more about that

anna 1:36:08
well in to the degree that I don’t like to disclose or identify myself, right. I like to misdirect by saying a great deal of stuff that seems kind of superficially very confessional and personal but actually, nobody knows anything about me.

Eric Weinstein 1:36:22
People know a lot more about you than you think they know.

anna 1:36:25
Yeah, but only through kind of nonverbal or subconscious.

Means.

Eric Weinstein 1:36:33
I think that’s right.

anna 1:36:34
Yeah. Not through anything that exists on the verbal register.

Eric Weinstein 1:36:38
Well, you know, I don’t know how many podcasts you’ve done like this.

anna 1:36:44
Probably none.

Eric Weinstein 1:36:45
Probably. Yeah. And I do think that you’re going to find that your Mystique coexists with your revelation. They’re not as rivalrous as you might imagine.

Unknown Speaker 1:36:58
Yeah, that’s that’s possible. Good point. But I think like, what what did you hear in the cast like so you see, listen to that podcast? Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:37:08
Well, because we famously tried to talk over each other he’s very forceful, right? I would like to think that I’ve been far less forceful with you than I was with him. Yeah, but

anna 1:37:19
I’m also easier to get along with.

Eric Weinstein 1:37:22
Well, I view you as potentially more dangerous.

anna 1:37:25
Yeah. But that’s only because I’m a woman, it Kasparov. And I have the same ethnic breakdown, basically, which in Russia is called Green, which is Miss green, which just

Eric Weinstein 1:37:34
means explosive mixture. So it’s like, a binary weapon that when

anna 1:37:39
it’s dynamite, yeah, the kind of like, when Armenians and Jews join forces, right in a single person. It’s basically

Eric Weinstein 1:37:48
an incredibly difficult combat of the categorical personality. And I think that’s probably what he has. He is I mean, I don’t know a ton about him, but I’m kind of obviously interested. Because of cheated of his meaning, because there’s something about the fact that Putin to him is this unrecognized master menace and that we’re running a clown show. Well, the fate of the world spins out of control. He has very much of a cold. I mean, I have much more of a Cold War overlay in my mind than most of my contemporaries and certainly than my millennial audience. I can’t believe that we have nuclear weapons that they haven’t been used in a long time and that we imagined that this will go on forever and

anna 1:38:35
that they’re laying kind of dormant for now. I mean, but this brings me back to the whole concept of swab which dovetails very nicely with the idea of hyper normalization, right, which is, the documentarian Adam Curtis took the title for his famous documentary from this term, which was coined by this guy Alexi, your Chuck, your chocolate Chuck, who’s a an anthropology professor who did A lot of kind of research on straw with this guy Dominic Boyer, a fellow anthropologist. And I guess the basic principle of hyper normalization as I understand it, and my feeble female brain is that, you know, there was kind of an elite Guild of experts, technologists financier’s politicians, who kind of, if not conspired, and agreed to invent kind of a fake world, a top the real world that we inhabit, because the real world had grown so complicated that it was that they had to model it into in simplified terms. It’s almost like fast benders world on a wire. We’re living in like a success of nesting doll of like, successive simulation.

Yeah, Matryoshka.

And I forgot what we were going where we’re going with this, but We we now live in this like, kind of like hyper trophy, hyper real reality. where, you know, you said to me, it’s like very few people can see that they’re part of the simulation. I don’t know if I actually agree with that. Because I like to think that people are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

Eric Weinstein 1:40:23
Well, see, I don’t think it comes down to smart. I think it comes down to our self blinding. Yeah. And so one of the reasons I was asking you what you would heard in the Garry Kasparov podcast was I wasn’t sure what happened during it.

anna 1:40:40
I think that he I mean, I don’t know if you want me to psychoanalyze This is like a very meta podcasting. We’ve gotten pretty meta. Yeah. I think that he was deflecting your earnest attempts, mutual identification, which is like the basis of all kinds of bonds, right. I’m so excited right when I meet Kind of a fellow traveler in any capacity itself. In the end, I told you this during our lunch, I was like, Oh my god, we’re like, you know, relatives, right? There’s something very familiar.

Eric Weinstein 1:41:09
Yeah. Never met you twice.

anna 1:41:10
Yeah. And there’s something very familiar in meeting other people from a kind of a similar cultural background. And I tend to collect them. And you know, if that’s racist, let me know. It’s very, but so, I think the Russian tendency, which I’ve tried to, for example, minimize mitigate and myself to adapt better to American society is to deflect any such attempts and to kind of, not to not give anybody an inch to not let anybody get to know you. And to stay kind of distant.

Eric Weinstein 1:41:48
Are you open to being the unreliable narrator?

anna 1:41:52
I’m not sure what that question means.

Eric Weinstein 1:41:54
Well, sometimes, like, I forget, maybe Edgar Allan Poe’s tell tale heart Where you’re telling a story about the self? And the story reveals something to the artist, maybe Captain queeg and then came you knew it’d be a better example. Are you talking about the strawberries and the men really is discussing his own paranoia in a way that’s leaking out into the testimony. So what I see with you is that you are Russian post Soviet enough Yeah, but that you’re very worried that it’s not really a sustaining quality in this homogenizing see, like your mother, you can see there’s no way she can get away from it. I have never met the woman but I can feel her her presence as being intrinsically Soviet. And your podcast is called Red Scare. But first of all, that’s a an invocation of like the 1950s or earlier

anna 1:42:59
Yeah, and men Situation

Eric Weinstein 1:43:00
demonstration of the thong and there’s a tramp stamp. And, you know, there’s this whole aspect of you’re worried that you can’t actually keep it together. You can’t hold the information back. You can’t keep the identification with Eastern Europe, because it’s starting to fray.

anna 1:43:26
Yeah, on some level, but I also on another level, I feel kind of like a complete dinosaur. I’m relatively young, I’m young ish, but I feel

like that.

Sometimes they feel kind of insane, right? Because I’m the only one who has in my you know, circle, for example, has kind of an attachment to certain to certain religious or ethnic. I took

Eric Weinstein 1:43:53
an Ivy League admission at the University of Pennsylvania and when everyone else went into it investment banking or law or medicine? I went to math grad school like your father because there was something ancient

anna 1:44:08
about and respectable about it well, but

Eric Weinstein 1:44:10
the in the respectable in the sense of like, yes. Like a Jewish concept is a very Jewish and self destructive thing to do. Yeah, to take this fantastic opportunity and say, Okay, I’m going to try to achieve something for all eternity that seven people are really going to deeply understand like that. And there’s an aspect to this, which is, this is what animates Star Wars. The idea that Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda mysteriously survive. I mean, I’m not a fan of the original Star Wars pictures that are supposed to come chronologically early, right, but there’s one scene which is precious to me, where the Emperor says execute order 66 and all the Jedi are killed. Except to one of which lives by accident, that’s Obi Wan Kenobi. And Yoda. intuits shit. You know, this is the genocide and I’m going to be all that’s left. So you are that thing that carries the seat. Yeah, that’s a huge response but that’s why you have a podcast but it’s also the case that you’re corroding in this extremely alkaline environment

anna 1:45:27
that’s like really beautiful and poetic and and also a horrible horrifying reality to ponder but yeah it’s

Eric Weinstein 1:45:35
it’s a gift to a Russian if I gave you a horrifying tragic

anna 1:45:39
yeah show we’ll eat it right up. Yeah. But look, I remember you coming off ugly. I think I’m supposed to say Paulie I really kind of really changed my thinking on on the Star Wars franchise, which I’ve always thought to be kind of like the nail in the coffin of the Golden Age of American cinema.

Eric Weinstein 1:45:59
Say I really want to hit

anna 1:46:00
the you know it was kind of like a it really opened the door it paved the way for these mega franchises the the Marvel’s ation the desertification of film. And her feeling about it was that it was a kind of epic eternal legend saga story that was fulfilled or produced by means of the most cutting edge technology and that this is where our resides now in kind of the technological capacity of the Hollywood industry, because transcendence is difficult to manufacture. And when you first see what a technology can do,

Eric Weinstein 1:46:40
the matrix would be an excellent other example to discuss. In that case, and I’m very partial to giving this example there were multiple innovations, there was the wirework there was bullet time with using still and moving camera images and interplaying between them and then there was CG And so the mind was never sure what it was seeing, right? And so you, you devote extra cognitive resources to the legend and archetype that’s being explored when you’re opened by transcendence. And that’s why we litter the set, for example, with Klein bottles, often because, you know, to have to have glassware from the fourth dimension that defies the laws of inside and out, opens people up to Well, what what are these people going to be discussing? Is this a way out? Because I think everybody wants to escape. Yes. And I think that if you go back to our Jewish tradition, the entire concept of like, what is that? What is the epic that we tell? Every year is our Star Wars. It’s the Passover epic. Is the Jews escaping? Now is the time when we understand why we tell that story because we need to get out of here.

anna 1:47:56
Yeah, I I think the

flattering uplifting version is escape. I think the cynical not so flattering version is offloading a responsibility in the way that somebody like Eric chrome described foisting the responsibility for your life onto another.

Unknown Speaker 1:48:14
Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:48:17
Can I ask you sort of a final set of questions? Yeah. Before I invite you back to the podcast when you’re next in LA. Yeah, I hope you live here.

anna 1:48:24
I want to move here and so horrible to be in Armenian juice slot and hangs out at the Glendale Galleria.

Not in New York girl. Anyway, go ahead. Pass.

Eric Weinstein 1:48:33
Yeah. Where are we in gender space? I have the feeling that men and women of heterosexual mindset needed to put their own mask on before helping everybody who was trying something different.

anna 1:48:53
I like that that’s like the plane and out the pitch in Moscow. That’s

Eric Weinstein 1:48:55
it. Yeah. And then at the moment we’re trying to like solve 12 million Things that have all been lumped under trans and I always give the analogy that strokes occur from excessive clotting and thinning. So you can’t say something about strokes in general. Because you don’t know what type of strokes we don’t know which type of trans hmm but if you just say look, okay, we’ve got all these things about polyamory and bisexuality, homosexuality, non non binary relations, etc. Very complicated. Let’s assume we have the best of intentions to everybody has a soul Hmm.

We’re now neglecting

male female heterosexual procreative relationships. It’s like an afterthought. We got to do something where our concerns for all of these other variations don’t obliterate the major workhorse of societal perpetuation

anna 1:49:51
are your thoughts. Well, what’s the question?

Eric Weinstein 1:49:54
The thoughts are the question is are we getting dragged into A world in which we can’t focus on the fact that the major workhorse of perpetuation needs its own care. Like, for example, if you and I both opt in to heterosexual heteronormative Yeah, cisgendered, etc. ideas. We can’t really continue to focus on our subset of people. Mm hmm. Because immediately the point is will you just exclude 12 12,000 other categories? I see you as trying to just exclude

anna 1:50:37
it point. Oh,

Eric Weinstein 1:50:39
yeah. Well, but I see what you’re I see what you’re you’re trying to do in some sense. Yeah. Is reestablishing Feminine Mystique. Is that a fair comment? Yeah, absolutely. What do you see the role of Mystique being in heterosexuality

anna 1:50:53
the role of mistakes? That’s a good question. You see I’m so I’m so kind of instinctive and non intellectual. On some level, I didn’t even think about this. I think the the apo would answer it in a negative way. I think that the absence of Mystique kills libidinal energy. Absolutely. You can’t be taken seriously, as a woman if you disclose everything about yourself if you publish naked photos of yourself at all times.

I mean, that’s, that’s a statement of fact, not a value.

Eric Weinstein 1:51:27
But we we used to, for example, teach women to send mixed messages, right. And we used to teach men and women to play games. And now increasingly, there’s a sort of Dr. Ruth ification of male female relations, which is like, people should learn how to communicate, be direct, say everything they want.

anna 1:51:44
safe sex, affirmative consent,

Eric Weinstein 1:51:46
all these things that has anyone ever achieved enthusiastic consent.

anna 1:51:52
Right? I know who like Who are these people like you pull out an iPad when you can I touch your breasts, what’s the it’s

Eric Weinstein 1:51:59
so much We should call our lawyers immediately. Yeah.

anna 1:52:02
And sign an NDA, an NDA. It’s like, every time the Buddha judge has sex with his husband, he signs an NDA. But it’s maddening because the whole allure of sex is precisely the unsafe, the unconcerned the non consensual. I’m not talking obviously about rape or coercion. But women like mixed messages, they like giving them they like receiving them, because it’s correct that they, on some level don’t know what they want. And not because they’re stupid or weak, but because it’s an evolving, communicative process that unfold you

Eric Weinstein 1:52:45
know me well enough to order for me.

anna 1:52:47
Yeah, right.

Eric Weinstein 1:52:48
Like maybe I would do a slightly better job of choosing my dish. But if you do 90% as good as I would have done ordering my dish, and you can show me that you actually grasp

anna 1:52:59
me Yeah, no Do you get to enjoy the benefit of having a dish that you wanted but you get to enjoy kind of the meta benefit of knowing that your partner knows you I got in trouble for a tweet where I said that I like when my boyfriend’s order food for me.

Eric Weinstein 1:53:15
That’s so hot.

anna 1:53:16
I know it’s so hot. Why would any woman not want that?

Eric Weinstein 1:53:21
Well, I think because I can answer that from the guy’s perspective. We’ve all thought we knew somebody well enough and we ordered just exactly the wrong thing shows that we have no concept Yeah, we think we’re on top of it. We were just not

anna 1:53:34
Yeah. Okay, so there’s the baked in disappointment that potential remember the Aziz

Eric Weinstein 1:53:39
Ansari thing where like he didn’t understand which one she wanted. And that was cause for

anna 1:53:45
her to write a Yeah, me too. So medium issues at times expose a right babe babe? Babe dotnet

Eric Weinstein 1:53:53
Yeah, God, but the

key point would be That in order to handle certain edge cases, we’d arranged the general case. You know, like the world’s most predatory men have to be kept away from the world’s least a gigantic female. So in order to handle that case, we gave nuclear weapons. I think Caitlyn Flanagan had a beautiful observation. Lanigan. Yeah. I can’t get

anna 1:54:22
over. Yeah, she’s great. She’s great. The one that got away anyway, anyway, she

Eric Weinstein 1:54:26
she said something to me to the effect of what’s new is that all sexuality proceeds on exclusively female terms, right? The idea being that men have to be completely non agentive. Because whatever the woman says happened or should happen, yes, is the law of the land.

anna 1:54:48
And this is precisely what women don’t want. It’s almost like a prisoner’s dilemma type situation where you end up with the most sub optimal

Eric Weinstein 1:54:58
outcome. If you’re going against the thing that you fear the most you’ll never get the thing that you want them

anna 1:55:04
right yeah and it’s it’s a really kind of like bleak thing because no women no heteronormative women want a man who lacks agency I mean, you said this to me women want they don’t want a guy who’s an asshole they want somebody who’s credible in the easiest shortest way to just credibility by Yeah, well this being an asshole

Eric Weinstein 1:55:25
is a reference to a conversation we were having in which I claim that many men learn a terrible lesson which is women want you to be an asshole. And the real lesson is, women do not want to be told how beautiful and brilliant and this and that they are without some of that energy being spent on credibility.

anna 1:55:46
Yeah, without some of it accruing into reliable dependable material actual

Eric Weinstein 1:55:51
but sometimes you have to say, You look very nice. It’s not my favorite dress. Yeah, but and that sounds a little non positive, but it goes There’s a long way to say, Okay, I’m actually getting real feedback.

anna 1:56:03
Are you describing the art of neg? You have to nag a little?

Eric Weinstein 1:56:06
No, I’m saying that that happens naturally. Hmm. negging is where you actually create like a kind of a hole in the artist. So yeah, it was exactly not negative. Yeah, this is the thing. I mean, it’s a beautiful example. It’s a miscommunication. In the process of giving somebody you can give somebody very positive, constructive feedback. And the slightest whisper of that wasn’t exactly my favorite thing will be heard as a shout, huh? Because that’s how we human beings process criticism. And so you have to spend some people would much rather that you spend some of your time building credibility. So that whatever you do say that’s positive is actually a credible indicator of something because you know, traditionally, the key question is, very often what women are asking is, is there something you find in me, that is so rare That it would outweigh all other temptation. Mm hmm. And can you please tell me a story in which that’s true? The answer is

anna 1:57:09
no, ladies, the answer

is no. I run for the hills. I’m kidding. I’m just saying a sarcastic little bitch. But well don’t

Unknown Speaker 1:57:15
do that man. Why not?

Eric Weinstein 1:57:17
I don’t know. I mean, if it’s your stick, but I do think that there’s some aspect to this where we have to struggle with this for a year an older millennial.

anna 1:57:25
Yeah, I’m an elder millennial, an older millennial.

Yeah. The guy in the studio or like, going to get snacks are so tired. They’re like enough of this. Well, I’m an elder millennial on

Eric Weinstein 1:57:40
I do think that in part, you know, you probably knew more life before the apps.

anna 1:57:45
Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:57:46
Big transitional issue.

anna 1:57:49
Well, it’s gonna be a huge issue. I don’t I mean, I don’t know what’s gonna happen to the next generation after me. I’m afraid for them. I mourn for them because they haven’t I mean, all social relations, it’s like, you know, going back to those kind of empathy templates that I was talking about, yeah. All social relations and, you know, on some level, particularly, sexual relations have become very Asperger when they become autistic people can’t read nuance, and they are completely incapable than of the art of seduction. And so everything operates according to like, templates and consent for bone trees. Yeah. And yeah, and it’s terrifying because I think like, what, it’s not just women who desire credibility, what each sex desires from the other is credibility manifested in different ways. You know, like I made this joke I started seeing a shrink recently. You went there. I went there because I guess my my Jewish side, finally overwhelmed my room. Inside that’s like profoundly hostile and suspicious of therapy. I did it primarily to appease my boyfriend, but that’s another story. And it occurred to me it dawned on me during the process of seeing this shrink, it’s like, you know, go, you know, the old the kind of psychoanalytic concept of transference. I mean, everybody does right.

And I think transference for men is

Eric Weinstein 1:59:27
saying this was wicked. What the tweet you’re about to

anna 1:59:30
Oh yeah, that’s it. You know, transference for men is telling the shrink. I want to fuck you. transference for women is asking the shrink, do you want to fuck me? And semantically, it’s a slightly different configuration, but it comes down to the same thing. And it’s like that john Berger quote that I quote all the time ad nauseum to the point that it’s become annoying my friends don’t speak to me because it’s all I do is quote this quote all day. Men. Watch women Watch themselves being watched. That’s the nature right? The kind of old traditional basis of female or male versus female sexual arousal, right? You said this to me, which I thought was very astute. I’ve never heard anybody else put it this way.

Eric Weinstein 2:00:18
Yeah, we both come to some version of this independent,

anna 2:00:20
the same thing. It’s men are aroused by the woman, the presence of the woman, women are aroused by the kind of picture of themselves arousing the man

Eric Weinstein 2:00:34
or the man some, in some ways, metaphorically acts as a mirror. And the better the man, the better the quality of the flattering the quality of the reflection, right. And that’s not to say that women are completely indifferent to male looks in the light, but that to an enormous extent, we’ve demonized narcissism when in fact we find narcissism to be an extremely beautiful trait in a future spouse, as men Hmm.

anna 2:01:03
And this is this is a very important point too because I’m very much a critic of like kind of narcissism as a generational pathology, but

Unknown Speaker 2:01:12
that

anna 2:01:16
that I’m critical specifically of kind of the maladjusted pathological manifestations

Eric Weinstein 2:01:22
of the maladaptive version maladaptive or does not match properly to the partner.

anna 2:01:26
Yeah, not the not the positive kind of credible. And this was really wonderful. You know, sometimes I feel so awful about myself because I misjudged the situation I’m so used to like people and our and ideas, being kind of low density and low nutrition. I’m the kind of starved for stimulation stimulation in that way. And sometimes I’ll read or see something that I find really remarkable and I always have to ask my myself the question like, hey, like, have my standards plummeted so much. Or have I grown more tolerant, which at the end of the day is the same question. But there is a very viral short story on the New Yorker by this woman Kristen repente. And also in Armenian, by the way, who was called cat person and in it she describes kind of a classic me to type situation where a young college co Ed gets into a relationship with like, a kind of older washed up 38 year old guy and there’s an older in 38

well for her because she’s like 21 mine It’s okay.

I think I think I think a man Okay, look,

Eric Weinstein 2:02:43
don’t don’t backpedal.

anna 2:02:45
I’m not backpedaling, okay. I think kind of the peak manhood is 35 to let’s say 55. Right, that’s a good window. That’s when the mail race, shovel and

Eric Weinstein 2:02:57
you can try to dig

anna 2:02:58
your own grave That’s really what I really want. I’m like, you know, that guy fundamentally identify with the Russian guy and the sopranos and the Pine Barrens episode. Oh

Eric Weinstein 2:03:09
my gosh, don’t even get it. That’s fantastic.

anna 2:03:12
But basically repente and she had she crafts this whole sex scene where this girl is like having sex this guy that she finds profoundly unattractive and undesirable, but what gets her off at the end of the day, is her imagining his arousal or like a new vile young body riding around for him. And I thought that that was like a really brilliant glitch that was shocked that like, you know, a liberal paper record would publish

Eric Weinstein 2:03:43
it’s very odd what gets through these sites. Yeah, I watched your description of the wasted opportunity of sexualizing stewardesses. Where everyone has the sense of, oh my god, you know, pan-am stewardesses in the 60s. It’s a uniform So kind of weird beauty norm, but there’s now this very strong sense of like, and wasn’t that horrible? Hmm. And so the sort of the two dimensional fantasy of coffee tea or me Hmm, versus the abject horror of, Okay, well, you weren’t allowed to compete on price because of the regulation of the airways. And so people competed on the sexualization of the flight crews. And then some of the flight crews were, like actually being oppressed and some of them were self sexualizing. Like do an Instagram. Yeah, because they wanted the attention. And there’s no language to pull these things apart.

anna 2:04:38
Well, as usual, people missed the point of that tweet, which was not about stewardesses. They made it into the labor issue because everything increasingly, the culture has kind of dried up so much that people increasingly see things through the lens of politics. That tweet wasn’t about labor at all. It was actually kind of a very rather subjective indictment of the way that American women behave. Relative to women elsewhere, women in Italy, in Thailand, in Spain and Brazil in the Middle East, understand that their unofficial power is garnered through indirection as you say, American women understand no such thing. I mean, Camille probably, again has been beating this drum for decades now. So this has nothing to do with it wasn’t like a labor. But it isn’t. It isn’t. I mean, this is the this is the very difficult thing coming from an American context, which is that very often, the cultivation of exclusively womanly power

Eric Weinstein 2:05:42
took place because women did not have alternate options. Yeah, and sometimes, we’ve gone too far in American culture by giving away power that is, you know, entirely functional. So we You and I both discussed having economics and math cymatics in our background, the brilliance of Sylvia Nasser’s book, A Beautiful Mind did not see the film. And you haven’t seen the film? No, I will

anna 2:06:08
get back to that in a minute. Okay. Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 2:06:10
But then we talked about Rebecca Goldstein is the mind body problem. In both of these books, you see this very strong hand of the community of wives of the mostly male mathematicians and economists directing the field, who should collaborate with who who should make up with who is having a spat who should be hired, who should be invited to the conference? And that kind of, there’s a question about when women stopped wanting that role in the United States context, no one took the role over Mm hmm. And so it was like a load bearing role that was now vacant. There are ways in which I think it’s terrible that nobody’s fulfilling that role and There’s a ways in which I think it’s terrible that women were expected to fulfill that role. Having now seen fantastic contributions in mathematics, you know, if people like Karen Olin, Bakker, Lisa Jeffries, that any one of a number of female mathematicians who’ve put structural things in our world that I can’t live without, right. And so I think that there’s a, there’s a really interesting and rich conversation about how much power from the old ways should be retained and how much of it should be seated so that more standard professional accomplishment can occur. And because we’re having this very simplistic conversation, we’re not getting to the really rich conversation, which is what should be the renegotiation of male and female rolls around it shouldn’t be that women are trying to be a substitute copy of men, right. On the other hand, it can’t really go back to women hold power and pregnant? Well, I wouldn’t say that. No, it’s also the terrifying matriarch that the hell that daughters in law are put through in many cultures. Yeah, you know, it’s it’s, it’s a very key issue and I think this comes through with everything you talk about the war that we have to wage is the war on simplistic, easy answers as opposed to nuanced richness.

anna 2:08:26
Yeah. And will in this goes back to this question of hyper normalization where we are grafting where effect I mean, Angela Nagel talks about this, who I think Angela is a friend of mine, but I think she’s also the most brilliant, young intellectual around now. And she gets kind of pilloried all the time for also being reactionary conservative, whatever. Nagel talks about this idea that we in her critique of The Handmaid’s Tale or The Handmaid’s Tale, sorry, the we are kind of left fighting the simpler battles of the past that we’ve crafted this kind of cold or binary stick analogy, you know, the East versus the West, conservative versus progressive or liberal, that no longer computes because we live in a bizarre nonlinear world with a kind of profusion of super flow of super fluidity of information that makes anybody’s brain short circuit.

Eric Weinstein 2:09:29
Well, you know, this is like, what our friend Amanda fielding, the psychedelic Countess, who extolled the virtues of psychedelic chemicals. Her point is that the default mode network is this thing that suppresses our brain from experiencing too much, and that sanity and a well functioning mind, for the most part is attached to not perceiving everything that’s going on around you. Yeah.

anna 2:10:00
And selectively kind of maybe subconsciously cherry pick cherry picking things that are

Eric Weinstein 2:10:06
inherited, you know, the quantum soup that you and I are currently swimming and can’t be perceived. We need to perceive a simplified classical world in which, you know, you’re a unified person rather than all sorts of sub routines running, you know, simultaneously. Some of them are just some of them not.

anna 2:10:23
And this is I think this is the difference between, on some level again, this is all very, like improv and stuff. But it all kind of goes back folds back on itself. The difference between Russians and Americans is that Russians think that they’re an intellectual and moral advantage because they perceive all the meta processes, they see the chessboard, but they’re actually at a disadvantage, fundamentally, because they’re kind of overly hyper too much. They feel too much. They feel too much and they’re overly not only critical of the outside world with their hypercritical, and they’re fundamentally a self defeating lot on that level.

Eric Weinstein 2:11:00
You know, I have to say I have a sadness about some of your views on on Russia. Oddly, and I didn’t think about this. You are the third of what is this my 16th interview at this point? I don’t know when you’ll debut but of a Russian background, I had the batalik theory of fame. Yeah. Gary knew

anna 2:11:26
this. I knew I, I made a clip to my boyfriend. I was like, you know, I was like, I’m gonna do the Eric Weinstein Weinstein podcast. And it’s funny that he chose, you know, Kasparov and batarian. It’s like a, you have also some sort of like a psychic for it and compulsion to draw to care about meaning.

Eric Weinstein 2:11:52
Yeah, to be honest, Russia and the Soviet. I mean, there are places that just are pregnant

Unknown Speaker 2:11:59
with me. With meaning,

Eric Weinstein 2:12:00
and there’s a ton that I hate about that world. And I think I talked to you about the barbell society with the lowest of the low and the highest of the high. But I chose to retain this culture mean, you know, it was my grandparents on one side and my great grandparents on another who came over. So I’m a little bit deeper in this thing than you are because you were born there. I don’t want to give it up. And I work I work my ass off to retain it even to the point of learning a tiny bit of Russian just to deal with Russian relatives that were rediscovered when the Soviet Union came apart. We thought it all been wiped out in the Holocaust. You’re gonna have to work your ass off to keep that connection and I intend to have many more Russians, many South Asians, many people from very particular places I have the utmost reverence for example for the UK, and the genius of Spain and Italy. Yeah, these particular places that are just incredibly pregnant.

anna 2:13:09
Well, Spain and Italy I mean are wonderful because they’re, you know, every once in a while, go to Italy or Spain and you’ll be like a little cafe, like an outdoor cafe and they’ll serve you. They’ll give you some free shit with your coffee. They’ll give you like a little biscuit or croissant. It’s a really weird model because the thing that makes them economically unviable that makes some kind of fundamentally obsolete to neoliberal system is also the thing that makes them morally redeemable.

Eric Weinstein 2:13:43
But it’s also an unabashed look, Russia’s a genius based culture.

anna 2:13:51
In what way

Eric Weinstein 2:13:54
that you revere

the love land out as you reveal You’re, you know, the rough manof So,

anna 2:14:03
this is I think that this is a thing that is dying now because the the last 30 or 40 How long has it been? It’s been 40 years now since the Soviet Union collapsed, the last 30 something years. The the last several decades of privatization, I think have been much harder on the Russian psyche than the 70 odd years or so. We’re all getting worse at

Eric Weinstein 2:14:30
this.

anna 2:14:30
Yeah. But I think that this is slowly waning, you know, Russia was was known basically for its educational system for it’s a static programs and no more, right.

Eric Weinstein 2:14:40
Yeah, but some of these things were bizarre. Everybody’s getting less genius.

anna 2:14:49
That’s true, and also not true. Who’s getting more in a really profound way?

Eric Weinstein 2:14:55
in a profound way? I mean, that’s a good question. I have I’ll get back to you on that. I’m just saying everybody’s taking a huge hit at the moment. It’s like we started belching out lead exhaust. From leaded gasoline, the IQ of the world functionally, is getting dumber and Dumber and Dumber.

anna 2:15:15
Like since the medieval era. I mean, people frown upon the Middle Ages is like, you know, they’re not called the Dark Ages for nothing. But people reached a really high pinnacle of achievement.

Eric Weinstein 2:15:26
Right? Listen to music from back.

anna 2:15:28
Yeah, I do too. And I don’t even like music. I mean, I do but I have like a very kind of one dimensional hobbyists. sensibility. I’m not like a musician or composer. Yeah. But yeah, I think the whole but I think this is due kind of to the proliferation of information technologies, the triumph of the internet. And you look at me, too. Me too, is the nexus of a kind of the imperatives of the marketplace. of the internet and the triumph of feminism. It wouldn’t have had. feminists are very fond of saying that we live in a patriarchy if we lived in a patriarchy there would be no viral online movement called me to. The fact is, you know, now in this day and age, women are the cultural brokers and gatekeepers

Eric Weinstein 2:16:22
and they’re not doing that great of a job. I mean, I want Hedi Lamar back.

anna 2:16:27
Yeah, and oh, yeah,

Eric Weinstein 2:16:28
I, I was gonna write this book about Marie Curie called radium slut. And it was about the it was gonna be about the prohibition of her to come to Stockholm for her second Nobel because she was getting shipped by a married guy. I’m, you know, my favorite story in physics is Madame Wu figured out the asymmetry of the weak force and the cobalt 60 beta decay in the electromagnetic field. I want those amazing hot, sexy blue Brilliant chicks back.

anna 2:17:02
Yeah, they don’t exist. That’s why that’s why the you know, there’s a cultural fixation on Russian women, because only in Russia or like in the Russian amniotic fluid, can you find a woman who has like a PhD in philology or linguistics but looks like a supermodel and is great in the sack and knows the powers of seduction?

Eric Weinstein 2:17:27
Well, there’s this like super dangerous thing in there’s a way of saying that’s a little bit less fun than what you say I love I love listening to you, but I also like not being nailed to a cross when when, when the when the abuse to the audience Yeah. Which is to say that the cultures that were women enjoy self feminizing but don’t see this as competitive with intellectual achievement. Yes, Russia and to some extent Eastern Europe is one But East Asia is also

Unknown Speaker 2:18:03
in the sea. I think those are the two big ones. Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 2:18:07
And I would love to talk to you about all manners of dangerous, disgusting, horrible, vile and illegal things. Yeah. But I hope you’ll accept an invitation to come back through the portal when you’re next out in LA. And thank you for showing up and just bringing aside that maybe not everybody seen before.

anna 2:18:28
That’s horrifying. I’m very happy to do it. I’m happy to chat anyway. Thank you for having me.

Eric Weinstein 2:18:33
I’m sorry to horrify you

anna 2:18:34
notice the weight to get a buzzer that tells you when the time

Eric Weinstein 2:18:38
No, okay, I’m just sort of thinking that you’ve got this happening party to go okay. And I want to be respectful of your time. Otherwise, I’d completely monopolize you till the cows

anna 2:18:47
come. Yeah, no, it’s fine.

Eric Weinstein 2:18:49
Okay, yeah, you’ve been through the portal.

Unknown Speaker 2:18:54
Hi, Jenna Chan Pacha

Eric Weinstein 2:18:56
please check out the Red Scare podcast comm with another in mind, and hopefully don’t give her too much grief unless that’s good for building her audience. With respect to the portal, please subscribe on Apple Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts and also navigate over to our YouTube channel, where if you’ll subscribe and click the bell you’ll be notified of any upcoming episodes. And this was any civil whichever all the best