Difference between revisions of "11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends"

'''Sam:''' Yeah. I remember one that, a vacation that was unraveling and I was calling you from literally from poolside in Hawaii, yeah, the one vacation I'd taken with my family in a year and I was, I was poised to ruin it and ruin it I did. And I don't blame you for it, but whatever counsel you gave me did not prevent the unraveling of a vacation.

'''Eric:''' I'm just curious, so first of all, I've taken your advice and Tim Ferriss's and Joe Rogan's and started this podcast. You were actually the first person I sat down with, but I had so little idea what I was doing that we blocked out the windows, we had an uncomfortable table in front, and the feng shui was completely off.

'''Sam:''' Go wherever you want to go. This is your show.  

'''Eric:''' Okay. So, one of the things that I'm starting to think about is doing a little bit of retrospective work, trying to think about where our world, our country is, we're going into another electoral cycle. And I just think this is the most bizarre age imaginable. It doesn't behave like any previous time. And I hear that we're at peak this and peak that, but I don't see any signs of the, what I increasingly see is the incoherence, slowing down. Are you also perceiving a world that is kind of intellectually unraveling or are you seeing new kinds of formations that give you the idea that something is actually filling the voids that have been opening up when it comes to coherence?  

'''Sam:''' Well, I worry that this is a kind of cognitive delusion to think that the time you're in is always sort of newly chaotic or incoherent, or you know, that civilization's on the brink in some new way in your time. But I'm taken in by it.

'''Sam:''' Yeah, yeah, I mean no, no, this is, there's gotta be some name for this, you know, it's some kind of recency effect or, I mean, clearly there have been periods in history where things really have been on the brink in some new way.  

'''Sam:''' No, no, I don't mean like World War II was about to happen, you know, or World War III is happening, but I do feel like we are witnessing several sea changes, which I couldn't have honestly said that, you know, 15 years ago or 20 years ago. I mean, something has changed and it's, some things have clearly changed for the worse and maybe there's a silver lining to this chaos, but I would be hard-pressed to find it at the moment.  

'''Eric:''' Well, so what I'm starting to think about what kind of chaos we're in and using the fact that you and I agree on a lot, which I think makes our disagreements more interesting, because I don't like the ground level he said/she said kinds of disagreements. I don't think they're that interesting.  

For me, the big thing that's really new is that I can't think of a single institution I trust. There's no place that I can go to for ground truth.

'''Sam:''' Like this is an example, so you take the New York Times and you and I whinge about The New York Times a fair amount, uh...

'''Eric:'''  Yeah, I was very early to this party for our...

'''Eric:'''  Ok.

'''Eric:''' I'm really tempted to call it... Yeah, but I'm not, I'm not going back. Gambit declined.

'''Eric:''' And I have cholera. So, I think that the narrative aspect of The New York Times has been both its structural reason for its importance and the fatal flaw that, in essence, it carries these very long narrative arcs that come from the editor - the editorial function at The Times. And that those are written in some sense before the facts are known. And so, the facts are then fit to the narratives. And then when the counter-narratives occur, The Times really either doesn't report the story as is, and they really couldn't handle the situation that happened with my brother because it was exactly counter-narrative, or then they distort based on the idea that they need to push things back into the narrative.

00:07:24

So I think that has always been present. And there are particular kinds of stories that The Times writes that I find absolutely - well, I'll go so far as to say - borderline evil. And what they do is they crowd out whatever natural inquiry process would be happening.  

'''Sam:''' I don't know if this, The Times is maybe an exception here, but I think generally what's happening in journalism, there's just been a clearing out of real journalists, right? I mean, the business has gotten so bad and again, The Times and the Post and The Atlantic, there's a few outliers here that are doing well in the age of Trump at least, you know, sort of, well.  

'''Eric:'''  Trump is saving their business models.  

'''Sam:'''  Yeah. I mean they were actually there, they weren't doing great before Trump, but now they're doing okay. But the rest of journalism has been gutted. And now we basically have the Blogosphere and you know, kind of what the Huffington Post did to the landscape where you just have a lot of people blogging for free propping up an ad-based clickbait business model.

'''Eric:'''  Sure. But again, I guess what I want to play with is, is there something special about institutions? Imagine that you can get all of the interesting articles that you like somewhere, and somebody's saying something interesting, you can piece them together. But the fact that there's no institutional home where you can trust that, like, the Office of Management and Budget or something or...

'''Sam:'''  But it's not what I'm saying about journalism in general is that what you think of as the institution. I mean, just like the veneer, the front-facing website is not even an institution in many cases. It's like — it's hard to differentiate what is a blog and what is an actual journalistic resource that has editors and fact-checkers and copy editors. And you know, for certain sites, the distinction is apparently non-existent. I mean, so like, you know, people used to think Salon was real journalism or with The Guardian. I mean, The Guardian has like kind of the blog side and The Guardian side and you can't tell the difference. You're just reading what somebody wrote and well...

'''Sam:''' And then everyone is nuts on Twitter, whatever their reputation—

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Sam:''' — really is, you know, or should have been.  

'''Eric:'''   Well, you could just see their bias, like they're not hiding it on Twitter and then they hide it when they're in their journalistic frame.

00:10:18

00:12:50

'''Sam:''' Well, I would argue that, you know, I'm fairly forgiving on that point because I feel that Trump has made the hiding of one's so-called bias irresponsible, essentially, it's like you, you can't, you can't pretend that this is a normal president doing normal things and you're going to be a normal journalist without an opinion.  

'''Eric:'''  Maybe not. I'm  more worried about the loss of things like Nature and Science than I am The New York Times. I'm now worried that there is nothing, and even in the hard sciences, almost, that can stand up to the onslaught of political pressure creeping in to everything that has to be able to say no, that we've lost the ability to tell people to screw off if they're wrong.  

'''Sam:''' Well it's certainly been creeping up on us in the life sciences. It's been true of the social sciences for a very long time.

'''Eric:''' Yeah.  Probably, you know, physics and math are going to be the last to go, but I've even seen a little bit of inroads there. And so, I find the loss of Nature and Cell in the universities terrifying; different from The New York Times. Like, this is a few layers deeper and more dangerous. Do you not perceive that?

'''Sam:''' Oh, I think it's just different problems. I don't know which is more consequential. I think the I think the failure to have a fact-based discussion and the incentives to avoid one, I think that's just the scariest thing we have going, apart from the true Monsters of Pandemic and Nuclear War and things like that.  

'''Eric:'''  Well, those are now increasingly relative with the, you know, vaxxer or anti-vaxxer you know, controversy, but the self-refereeing - like, one of the things that's really important to have a decent discussion, in my opinion, is that you have to agree what a discussion is and what constitutes an illegal move. And increasingly I feel like we're having these combat sports where we can't agree on what rules - like is biting an ear part of boxing? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Who's to say? Well, that's an imposition of your views on mine. Who can still self-adjudicate?

'''Sam:''' Well I think if you wait long enough, you see the failures of hypocrisy, right?  You see people try to enshrine a new set of rules that prove unworkable in some of the context, you know, or, or they, they just can't live up to them because of... it's impossible. I mean, we're now noticing, and it's been widely observed that more or less, if you wait around long enough, everyone's going to get canceled. You know, it's like the repurposing of the Warhol quote, you know, we'll all be canceled for 15 minutes at some point.  

'''Eric:''' Well, I think we're trying to do harm to ourselves.  

'''Eric:'''    I think that the idea... You know, sometimes I think about Trump as the doctor who has to break a bone that has miss - has been mis-set in the hopes that it can finally heal properly. And this is one of the places where you are...

'''Sam:''' Yeah except he's the doctor who doesn't know which bone he has in hand and, and a isn't actually intending to heal you.  

'''Sam:''' So, it's the happy accident of the doctor who happens, the mad man who happens to have a hold of the right femur and a is breaking it for the wrong reasons, but to good effect.

'''Eric:''' Right. Or you know, is it doctored in folklore and from some non-accredited university...

'''Sam:'''  Right.

'''Eric:'''  And it's not, I see what you see and it's maddening. It's driving me crazy. The idea of spending four more precious years of my dwindling life, talking about whatever Trump less said or tweeted or worried that I don't know what would happen if we actually had a five-alarm fire in the U.S. that had to be handled.

'''Sam:''' Do you think my model of his mind is wrong or my model of the consequences of him being in office is wrong?  

'''Eric:'''  Well, I think that you were slow to give him his due. I mean, of course, as you know, I wrote this essay on kayfabe anticipating that professional wrestling was going to turn out to be incredibly important. And in fact, I thought it was going to determine the presidency - that was a, a belief I had that understanding how lies play within the mind and how hypocrisy works and then a concept called "namespaces" out of Python programming and the like, how we compartmentalize, led me to believe that in essence we were - I had seen these other candidacies in other countries in which people seem not to be able to distinguish an actor from the character that they played, you know, and whatnot. And so, I believed that the system of laws within professional wrestling told us what was possible. And Trump actually sort of came out of the WWE through his association with the McMahon family.  

'''Sam:'''  Yeah, I think, I think, but it's hard to know that could happen. I mean, it's definitely falsifiable. My theory is falsifiable. He could prove to me with a string of utterances that he's the evil genius that I haven't imagined him to be, but he hasn't done that.  

'''Eric:'''  I bet if you and I had a couple of old-fashioneds between us and we sat down with a thousand of his tweets, we could figure out that they're recurrent structures and we could write an Eliza program to generate them to, to tangle Democrats. I think that there's much more method to the madness. And I don't have to go full Scott Adams - Scott, I know you're out there somewhere - to say that everything is intentional and brilliant. I just think he's got a, you know, it was for years, I said that if you wanted to win an election against a Democrat, you just would talk about the "nucular" family, let them correct you to "nuclear", and then you'd win because you'd come across as an ass.  

'''Sam:'''  Right.  

'''Eric:''' Exactly. So I think that there is a certain amount of method that you were slow to give him credit for. But I think you're probably inching towards the idea that if he's not an evil genius, he has some evil genius.  

'''Sam:'''  I think it's just, again, I'm enamored of my Chauncey Gardner analogy.  

'''Sam:'''  Well here's another analogy that that is even simpler and easier to confirm. It's clear there's a method, but I think it's just a very simple method that the power of which is an accident of the context. So it's like an Instagram model has a method, right? You know, they just, if you have a great body, show it to great effect on your Instagram channel and then wait around for people to follow you. Right? So there's a very simple formula. There's no question it works. It's, there's not a lot of method to it.

'''Eric:'''  So he knows, he knows that the feedback that he's getting from the press, in general, has a constant distortion. And so by holding a rally, he can figure out, to some ext..... I mean, it's like constant A/B testing.

'''Sam:'''  No, but the fact that there are enough people to insulate... he has enough fans of this style of communication and living that he's uncancellable. Right?  

'''Eric:'''  Believe me, I think about this. I don't know - I haven't followed all the details. It's possible he's compromised and under direct control —

'''Eric:'''  You see, you don't carry the same anger and passion that I do for getting rid of the rot that was the American center. In other words, I believe ... one of the things that I find very confusing is, is that you and I, I think, would normally have been called centrists, right? But we're not crypt... we're not kleptocentrists. I mean, I've never been in a position to, you know, to loot the treasury from the position of being a centrist.  

'''Eric:'''  So the interesting thing about the center is that the center produces the, the blank canvas of America on which we get to paint. So I'm not really super excited to get a politician that makes me swoon. I want somebody to just gesso a canvas so that we can build all of the, you know, companies and nonprofits and do all the beautiful work that makes this country amazing. I'm not trying to get my entertainment from government.

 

The thing that crept into our system with Reagan and Bush giving way to the Clintons back to Bush, and then bizarrely — I thought Obama was going to be a break from this — that thing induces a passion in some of us to get rid of it. We hate it, and I don't know that you carry that passion and so I think it's harder for you to understand it, and I carry it not from a right-wing perspective. I carry it from a progressive to center-left position.

00:25:22

'''Sam:''' Well, and some of this comes back to the hypocrisy point I was making before. So, I have that Trumpian module in my brain that feels just the pure schadenfreude of seeing Justin Trudeau get wholly cloistered on his own petard, right?

'''Eric:''' Exactly

'''Sam:''' So, here's this sanctimonious enforcer of woke culture just pandering to the left, it's clearly unsustainable, it's clearly dishonest and unworkable. And, you know, offline we spoke about just that moment where he's admonishing this, this elementary school-age girl when she says the word mankind, which is a, you know it's great to hear a sixth grader use "mankind". But he says: "No, we say people kind". Maybe they say people kind up in Canada, I haven't heard that. But, you know, even just saying humankind there and, and enforcing that, that taboo there was just, that's the elitism the goofy elitism that, that...  

'''Sam:'''  I'm just saying, I get the, 'let's just watch these fuckers burn' stream of pleasure that you can get coursing in your brain. And that, that explains a lot of the Trump phenomenon where it's just, on some level, they don't care that he's the most odious liar we've ever seen - "they" being his fan base - they just love to see him wind up the libtards or they love to see...  

'''Eric:'''  It's not the libtards that they...Sam, I'm really trying to get at something. I may be wrong, so forgive me if I'm going off on a tangent, but I really think that there was something much more evil. It wasn't just that people were sneering at us over crudité. You know, it's like, it's that they were picking our pockets. They were divorcing us from each other. They came up with a bullshit ideology, if you will, of the, of the Davos flavor, that said, you know, "we are the world" and divorced us from each other in terms of our obligations to fellow countrymen above our obligations to people who, you know, live abroad. That was really a cover for figuring out how to make money when we were largely in many ways stagnant. And so you had a class of people who probably blew out the Gini coefficient for the U.S. without getting to the real issues of the fact that we're a country, that we put people in uniform and you know, send them into harm's way, that we have a higher duty and care in most of our minds to each other than we do to equally deserving people overseas.  

'''Sam:''' But for the most part the left was the political party that, I mean everyone was part of that same extractive economy, but the left at least paid lip service to the virtue of spreading the wealth around.

'''Eric:''' Well, you know, there's this poem by Lewis Carroll about the walrus and the carpenter and in one of the Alice sagas, and they're both going to trick a bunch of oysters into following them and then eating the oysters. And one of them is quite clear about his desire to eat oysters. And the other one makes a big show of how sad it is that they played a little trick and all of them were eaten. And the key question is, which of these two figures is more reprehensible. And I always disliked the one who was terribly sad about what they'd done. And I think that's the left.

'''Sam:''' Yeah, there's something to that. But I think there's also all too common phenomenon of people motivated by actually good intentions, even incredibly noble intentions, causing a lot of chaos that they didn't intend, right? So, let me take...  

'''Sam:'''  Well, it's my model for part of it. So, I mean, take someone like, well, let me take Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, right? Well, I don't know Mark I don't know how mercenary he's been from the beginning, or how out of touch with the possible harms he might cause, he's been.

 

 

 

 

And what happens when you're the one superpower and decide you can't get involved? Well, then people, you know, butcher their neighbors and there's no way to stop them. So, I think with the best of intentions, she and many others drew the lesson that we really do have to be the world's cop on some level and we have to get involved. And we're morally culpable for not stopping at a rape in progress or a murder in progress. And, but now we're on the other side of that, you know, U-shaped horror curve where we now know what it's like to get involved with however mixed intentions and it's a thankless job, right? Like, nation building is not a job that we're going to want for a long time and for good reason.

'''Eric:''' I actually have some weird backstory on that one. So, I knew Samantha Power at the Kennedy School and she and I sat down, I mean, not well, I think we sat down at a meal and we had friends that connected us.  

'''Sam:''' Right.  

'''Eric:''' And I asked, "What are you interested in?" And she said, "Well, I'm obsessed with the Red Sox and genocide."

'''Sam:''' Yeah.  

'''Eric:''' I said, "What?"

'''Eric:'''  And she said, "Well, you know, the rap on me is I'm all genocide all the time, but nobody cares. And I, you know, I've got book and I can't figure out the answer to the question, 'Why is there not a resolution that we will never - Why is it never again not a resolution?' And every time I try to get a state to sign up for this, or somebody to take this seriously, there's this weird wall that comes down. It's the clearest thing in the world that we should never let genocide ever happen again." Right? And she was convinced and nobody's going to take her seriously. This was going to go nowhere. And then progressively, somehow this thing started to catch fire and I, for a period of time I was emailing her like, "Do you believe it now? Do you believe it now?" that this - cause I, I knew this thing was going to get huge?

I also knew that it wasn't going to work because it just, it comes from this beautiful place that is not really deeply beautiful. I mean it's sort of meretricious. It's appealing, but it doesn't understand what the forces are that create genocide, because very few people want to go that deep on that question. And in that case, I saw a human being who I can just vouch for it - this was the purest of intentions early on. And then, as the complexity started to reveal themselves, she became enmeshed in a very difficult series of trolley problems, or you know, trolley-like problems, right?  

I believe that that partially happens in places like Facebook and Google, but very often - I think it's your theory of mind that I'm going to take issue with, which is that I don't think people are as unified in their thinking. They very often have a mercenary part of their brain, and a beautiful part of their brain, and they have a partition that keeps those from talking to each other. And one of the ways in which I found this out was when a group of people, doctors, actually, in New York city wanted to sort of use me as a consultant for my mathematical and analytic mind. And we went out for a very fancy dinner and they said, I said, "What's the topic?" And they said, "reconceptualizing medical debt". I knew nothing about this. And essentially what they told me is that if you go to an emergency room and you agree to have all sorts of things done, you don't feel like paying exorbitant inflated bills later because you feel like, "That was an emergency. I had no ability to actually think this through."

'''Sam:''' Couldn't shop around, yeah.  

'''Eric:''' Exactly. And this is extortionary. But if you give somebody the ability to say, okay, what if you pay us 82 cents on the dollar and we'll let 18 cents go. Then suddenly the performance of that debt skyrockets.

And a phrase came out, which was when they talked about reconceptualization, they said "It's a beautiful thing." And I realized that I had heard that phrase in New York, whenever people are up to no good, "It's a beautiful thing". It's a beautiful thing", you know, it's just, and so I then put out this thing in my group, which is, "did you notice that when people in New York do bad things to other people, they always say 'it's a beautiful thing'?". And sure enough, it caught in people's minds. Whenever anybody started to say it, they realized, "Oh my gosh, I'm in a part of my mind that recognizes that I can transfer wealth from somebody else to me largely without the other person knowing it in a way that results in benefit for me in some harm that's been externalized."

I think that people both know that they're doing tremendous harm and carry the idealism that propels it. And that's, it's the combination of these things and the fact that they don't talk to each other.  

'''Sam:''' Yeah. Well I think people are, you're not going to get me to disagree there that people are impressively split or at least can be. And I think a coherence generally speaking - or at least striving for it - is good. And I think, living an examined life in part as it is, is struggling with those discoveries of, of incoherence and figuring out how to get this congress of mind, as you call yourself, to actually cohere.

'''Sam:''' Yeah. No. So, but so, but when you're talking about the normal person who, I think it is a frequent phenomenon , to have, you know, normal, the normal range of good intentions to not be a sociopath, to want to help the world, to be in philanthropy, for instance, right. To actually to be this, I mean, you're already, if you're devoting your life, if you are, you know, a smart person who, you know, got a good degree, who could work more or less anywhere, but you decide to work for, for a charity, right? You're already an outlier. You're already somebody who said no to Wall Street or no to Hollywood or no to something, and now you're working for the, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center or something like, you want to just stop racism, right? So, you're already one of the good guys, right?

And but so, I mean, this is an example, dear to my heart that I flog at every opportunity, the Southern poverty law center is, you know, I think was probably consciously started for the best of intentions operated under the, you know,nthe blindingly brilliant light of those intentions for a very long time. But something flipped. And one thing that flipped is that, and it's probably unbeknownst to everybody, there's a bad incentive problem here. I mean the only way they survive as an organization is to continue to stay in this sort of long emergency mode of "there are Nazis everywhere", right? The everyone, it's like, this is a problem. It's a four-alarm fire, give us money. We now have a budget of whatever it is, you know, $30 million a year. I mean, it's gotta be huge. And, you know, the fundraising drive never stops. And so, what happens to an organization like that when you begin to run out of Nazis? Well then you gotta, you have to find more, right?

Like you can't - the incentive is to never recognize that you've gotten a handle on the problem. Right? It'd be like, you know, in some, you know, epidemiological space where, you know, you're curing smallpox, but you could never admit that you've actually cured it. You have to pretend to find smallpox everywhere. Now, I'm not saying obviously I'm not saying white supremacy or white power or anything has been cured, but what has happened is you have people who probably were true outliers in their ethical scrupulosity who are now behaving in appalling ways, you know, destroying people's reputations, calling them Nazis when they know they're not Nazis.

'''Eric:''' Well, let's be, let's put a finer point on it. They are now more likely to let the genie out of the bottle because of their bad behavior or to, you know, huff and puff on an ember that is the pathetic Ku Klux Klan of 2019 -

'''Sam:''' Right.

'''Eric:''' - to actually create something that could turn into a roaring fire. I mean, this is a general feature, I often talk about this in terms of magnetic and true North where the angle of declination that separates them is very small at the equator, but in Northern Canada it's very large. Right?  

'''Sam:''' And at the pole South is everywhere.  

'''Eric:''' Well, that's right. Yeah. Right. And so it's just the problem is that the institution, I mean, look, I've made this point elsewhere so a regular listeners will have heard it, but the concept of the Embedded Growth Obligation, the E.G.O. of an institution, which is, it has to do work and grow in order to meet its mandates.

'''Eric:''' That is the thing that has metastasized throughout our institutional structure. And so, it's not the Southern Poverty Law Center. I mean, that's particularly egregious, but the entire university system, every single measure you can take on that thing, looks like an intergenerational wealth transfer right down to the nondischargeability of student debt in bankruptcy, the loading up of every university by administrators, and the monopolization - at the moment, almost 100% of our leading institutions are run by a baby boomer whereas the average age, in a different era of a university president, we could have most of them under Gen X control and some of them under millennial control. There were university presidents in their thirties who had a huge impact. I mean, that is a system which has gone totally metastatic.

'''Sam:''' Yeah, yeah. Well that may be an outlier. I mean -

'''Eric:''' It's the worst large system of its kind.

'''Sam:''' Yeah. I mean, the way costs have gone up there, you know, way outpacing inflation.  

'''Eric:''' Outpacing medical inflation.

'''Sam:''' And, yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. And the fact that you can't discharge your debt in bankruptcy.  

'''Eric:''' It’s perfect.  

'''Sam:'''  Yeah. And the fact that, you know, many of our friends who have spent a lot of time complaining about this, but the fact that you have whole fields that are essentially, you know, sham fields, right, that are in the humanities where it's just pseudo knowledge is being imparted to the next generation. And it's not only its own walled garden of pseudo knowledge, it is a disparagement of real knowledge. Like, so like the anti-science, you know, moral panic that is happening in the humanities…

'''Sam:'''  Well, it's, apparently, it's fit thus far. I mean it's producing new graduates, yeah.

 

 

What I believe is that we're looking at the difference between truth and fitness. And if you recall when I went first one in your program, I said I care about four things. Truth is one of them, but I also care about meaning, fitness, and grace. This is a great example where fitness is out-competing truth.  

'''Sam:''' But we have a hand in this, so we can tune the landscape, right?

'''Eric:'''  You and me? Sometimes I just feel like the two of us.  

'''Sam:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' That's why I call you up, like, "Sam, what the hell is going on?"

'''Sam:'''  Yes. Well, a relatively small number of people can do it. It's not, it doesn't take 7 billion people or 8 billion people. No, but like you, you need to convince the top, you know, 3000 people that one way of talking doesn't work, right. And to align fitness and truth more faithfully.  

'''Eric:''' Sam, I think we've screwed up a lot worse than you're imagining in the past. And that that is the fodder for the twin evils of Trumpism and Wokeism.

'''Sam:''' But just, just grant me the, the possible sea change effect of the 3000 people, the right 3000 people, fundamentally getting their head straight on these issues or any issue, right. Whatever it is. So, you're talking about basically all of Hollywood, all of journalism, and all of the science that's public facing.  

'''Eric:'''    *If *we could do that.  

'''Eric:'''  Okay. In some, some thought experiment?  

 

'''Sam:''' Yeah.  

 

'''Eric:''' I guess what my feeling is, first of all is that my head is so filled with malware. I've got, I'm running so many nonsensical programs put there by other people that I don't even know are nonsense. Where I can detect —

 

 

'''Eric:'''  Well, so we're currently sitting in a room with reflective glass and anechoic tiles that deaden sound. If I echolocate by things that I am absolutely positive would sell newspapers that aren't printed, it's like, okay, you're echolocating and instead of hearing the reflection off of glass, you're hearing an absence, which is anechoic tile. And so, if I just look at Google trends, which tells me what people are searching on, if I look at how Google autocompletes, which tells me what they want me to see is what other people are searching on in the search bar. If I look at what stories aren't being run, all of the dead stuff is astounding to me right at the moment.  

Like, I know, for example, that people are fascinated by the Jeffrey Epstein story. And in general, like you know, we just had, so normally I don't love talking about current events because it dates the program, but we just had Kevin Spacey's accuser reported as dying. I don't think that that is likely to be part of some super evil plot. So, just so people can calibrate, it's not that everything that could make sense, because there's an incentive, I chalk up to a conspiracy.  

The Jeffrey Epstein thing is totally different, and you and I both met this guy. For 15 years - and he's the only person I've been saying this with conviction about for 15 years - I had one meeting with him, I've said he's a construct. Somebody hired a person probably named Jeffrey Epstein to play a role, super genius mega-billionaire philanthropist. I wasn't buying any of it, I've never bought it. And I've talked to everybody in our sort of mutual network and always used one word because I wanted to make a huge bet that when the time came, I would say "he was a construct" and that I would be revealed to be correct. And that everybody was asking, what do you mean by a construct?

'''Sam:''' Right.  

'''Eric:''' Okay.  

'''Eric:'''  Probably not. I recorded an entire Jeffrey Epstein episode, which is just me soloing for an hour, but I haven't released it cause I'm terrified. And I've had one ambiguous dinner where somebody sort of quasi threatened me, and I wasn't entirely sure what they were saying. It was a little bit creepy.  

 

 

'''Sam:'''— the likelihood that Epstein had a facilitated suicide. I think the likelihood that he was murdered is low, but allowed to commit suicide, I don't have a strong —

'''Eric:'''  I’m agnostic about that, whether people stepped away so that he could do the thing that he needed to do, whether there's some vanishing probability that he actually isn't dead. I don't know.

'''Sam:'''  Well I wouldn't, I know enough about probability to put almost nothing at zero odds.

 

'''Eric:''' It’s a huge, huge difference between those people who insist, when I hear somebody insists that that probability be zero, I take it — and that person is smart,  

'''Eric:'''  I wasted no time thinking about it at the moment, but I'm happy to have my Bayesian priors tutored.  

'''Eric:''' I find that that's an interesting heuristic for somebody as —

'''Sam:''' Yeah. I mean, I just, he was someone who I didn't want to spend any more time with because he had this sort of schlocky rich guy...

 

 

'''Sam:''' Well, no, no, I mentioned, but like when you see a, I guess he was probably, you know, close to 60 at this point and you know, he's with a 21 year old, you know, it's like a, it's like the optics of that are all the, I mean, obviously there are many rich guys who do that, you know, and there are many, certainly many people in Hollywood to do that. And you know, that's just the way some people roll when they have the opportunity to roll that way and, okay, fine. But he was just a, I have a kind of a level of, you know, judgmentalism around that, you know, it's like, at minimum, that's an attractor on the landscape of well-being that is not all that interesting to me. And so, when you see someone captivated by that, like this is like "life is going great because I'm 60 and she's 20". Right? Like that's the one variable that...

 

 

'''Sam:''' Exactly, you've, you know, you've bored me already. But I had no more insight into him than that.

'''Eric:''' From one meeting I've been I've been talking about him for 15 years.

'''Sam:''' Right, because this was like a 10-person lunch.  

'''Eric:''' Okay.  

'''Sam:''' And I had maybe, you know, three sentences exchange with him.

'''Eric:'''  You know, so mine was at his house, right. I'm ushered into a waiting room. He's got some super complicated electronical electronic art. I get up, I look at it and I say, "Wait, is that, is that a camera inside the art?" I first think, "I'm a genius for finding the camera inside there." My next thought is "I'm supposed to find the camera inside the art because the art is supposed to draw my attention and I'm supposed to see that I'm being recorded."

I'm called out to a room in back with a huge long, it's sort of exaggerated dining table with a giant American flag as its tablecloth, so that any food or drink that is served on it may spill onto an American flag. And I'm just in high alert, like, "Fuck you. Who, who, who are you?"

'''Sam:''' And I think I, one detail I'd like to add here, in defense of the many people, and the many scientists, who are in this guy's orbit and who didn't know how unseemly his life actually was, some of these young women who you'd meet in his company were not just, you know, bimbos or strippers or that some of these people were going to medical school and there's like, these were like smart young women.

'''Eric:''' Well, and adult — no, no, this is incredibly important distinction and I don't think that the news media has done a good job of teasing out. It's very attached to the idea of Pedophile Island and Lolita Express. And that lazy, sensationalist journalism is crowding something out, which is that in general from what I understand, so, I met him in 2000- I think 2004, maybe 2003 but before his Florida incarceration and charges, most people that I knew who met him met him with young adult women. And so, my theory is that he was constructed to be the sapiosexual Hugh Hefner.  

'''Eric:'''  And that they stupidly hired, probably, and I guess I don't know this, Humbert Humbert for the role, and that, that dichotomy explains at least a lot of the initial willingness of the science community to play with this person. That, I mean, I'll be honest, I'm not particularly judgmental about consenting adults, even if it's probably ill-advised. You know, to have a 50-year spread between two people. If somebody is 20 and somebody's 80 ...

'''Sam:''' There's just, it's a completely different thing is it's very easy to see that if you've seen this guy be sort of the womanizing schmuck, right within the bounds of, you know, total legality and he's surrounded by 20 year olds and you know, he's got a 40 year...  

'''Eric:''' Everybody's party to the game.  

'''Sam:''' You would never, you would never suspect this other thing about him. Right. Okay.

'''Eric:''' That is not a fair defense after the Florida situation, the Florida situation changes that structure.

'''Sam:''' You mean his prosecution or Miami Herald thing that came out like a year ago?

'''Eric:''' No, no, no, the prosecution.  

'''Eric:'''  So, a lot of people continued to talk to him in part because - and I think this is something that hasn't been teased out - he was supporting an older style of science, which - this is again, something that's gonna be super complicated - was much more disagreeable. Now the woke movement has seized on this as, well, that's the cowboy oppressive science of male assholes. But he was supporting a network of people who might not have been supported otherwise to somewhat break out of the mold. And because the U.S. government had stepped away from that work, in large measure, in my opinion, people were so dependent on him that they were eager to look the other way. And there was also the hint, I think, that this wasn't really Jeffrey Epstein, that this was really something else funding.

'''Sam:''' Hmm. Well, I dunno about that. I mean, I think the relative penury of science is a corrupting variable and the fact that we underfund science and that it matters that when the rich guy comes into the room, right to scientists because they're so starved for money, that's just corrupting.

'''Eric:''' Look, this is, I've been on this, this is going to get us into the immigration question, which is that the - in the mid-eighties, under Reagan, the science complex, particularly the National Science Foundation under Eric Block, through the National Academy of Sciences and a subdivision called the Government University Industry Research Roundtable, GUIRR, are conspired to destroy the bargaining power of American scientists by flooding the market. And what they did is they did an economic analysis with both supply and demand curves to say that the wages, which you can calculate when you have two intersecting curves, were going to go above six figures for new PhDs. And then -

'''Sam:''' Let's get a lot of Indians in here and —?

'''Eric:'''  Well, it's four, it was four countries. It was China, India, Taiwan and Korea. And China went from zero to 60 in like, no, they were sending us nobody, and then I think there were like over 25% of all graduate students. And of course, graduate students aren't students, they're workers. So there's a cryptic labor economy inside of the universities. And what the university system figured out was that in order to get this work done, we'd have to have these misclassified students who do the work, imported as foreign workers. And what we would do is we would take the economic analysis, which they secretly did in 1986, and they'd subtract off the demand curve and they'd just do a supply analysis based on the demography of the baby boom going into the baby bust, which is our generation, Gen X. And that demographic alarm was sounded to get the immigration act of 1990 passed, which has like the H1B as one of its most famous features. So that's a whole story about how the actual workings — I'm the guy who uncovered that and I chased that all the way down to the person who wrote that secret study that was never released, never dated, never authored.  

'''Eric:'''  That thing was the stepping away of the federal government from its commitment through the Vannevar Bush Endless Frontier agreement to fund the kickass blue-sky research that this country has done better than anyone else.

 

 

 

 

'''Eric:''' Right.  

'''Sam:''' — because we're now open for the world's business. But if you actually wanted to maximize, you know, creativity and industry here, you would want to import Indians and Chinese and Taiwanese and Koreans.  

'''Eric:''' Well, I mean, look, I've married the maximum number of brilliant women from the developing world who came here to do STEM that the law will allow. So I'm absolutely guilty.  

'''Sam:''' You got your wife and then you want to close the border?

'''Eric:''' What? Yeah. Well, first of all, that's how country clubs work, right? Right. So, the idea is that when you get country club, when you get into a country club, you don't instantly say, well, I don't understand. It would be immoral for me to close the country club.

'''Eric:''' I mean, so it's a very weird thing for me that people who are very steeped in what you were just talking about, which is this interesting mimetic complex that got pushed out, don't tend to think critically about it. Of course, we want the best people in the world to come to the U.S., selfishly.

'''Sam:''' I mean, you know, everyone doesn't, I mean, the person who has to compete with the best coming from India and Taiwan and China.  

'''Eric:''' Yeah.  

'''Sam:''' That person, let's say in, in a, you know, software engineering, that person has found, now suddenly on a much more competitive playing field.  

'''Eric:''' And yeah, this is, this is... So what I was told about this —

'''Sam:''' But I'm just not, I'm not saying that it's not without cost to somebody. It's definitely costing somebody something.

'''Eric:'''  Right, like the "bad people", the people who can't compete —

'''Sam:'''  No, no, no. Not the bad people, but just, it's like  

'''Eric:'''  I don't even know how to go into all of the things that are like really funny and wrong about this. Like one of which is, "Well, are you afraid to compete with somebody from India?" Well, maybe I'm afraid to compete with a hundred people from India. You know, like the issue is what is your your price point...

'''Eric:'''  Because it's not a uniform, because it's not a uniform product, Sam.  

'''Eric:'''  When you talked about software, right, most of software is glorified for and while loops. Let's not, you know, you invoke a library, you code up a class.

'''Sam:''' You can outsource it.  

'''Eric:''' All right. Well no, it's just, I'm just saying that most of what it is you're just writing code. It's got a kind of a mystique about it because a lot of people haven't done it and it's too symbolic, whatever.  

'''Sam:''' But it's plumbing.   

'''Eric:''' It's plumbing and a lot of science is plumbing. Yeah. And so, a lot of the stuff about the best is not very relevant. If you wanted to take the stuff that's really distinguished, you know, like you've got Ramanujan coming from India, you know you've got you know, Ellis coming from South Africa, whoever it is, that's really amazing, we have plenty of room for the tiny number of people who are absolutely nonhomogeneous super contributors.  

'''Eric:'''  I'm not saying that, I'm saying a lot of different things. One is that people in the country have rights and they have asymmetric rights to their own labor market. That's a large part of what it means to be a citizen of a country. If I start to talk about your rights that are perhaps your most valuable economic possession, if you really think about the American workers, most valuable economic possession is asymmetric access to the American labor market. If I say, you know, your right is not an asset, but is instead an impediment, it's a barrier. And what we need to do is get rid of the red tape and I'm not going to pay you for it because it's not an asset. I'm going to take it from you and I'm going to say that that's what the free market is. Well, that has nothing to do with the free market. I wrote a paper called Migration for the Benefit of All that pointed out you're free to securitize people's right and pay for it. And then everybody wins.  

'''Eric:'''           There's a giant structure below it called the Moorhouse Rectangle, which is what is transferred from labor to capital.  

'''Eric:'''           That is the thing that caused the system to have to rescue itself with immigration. So, it's really not about immigration or brown people or I don't want to compete against the best and the prizes. It, the issue was we didn't have enough people to feed into a pyramid system. And what you could do is you could, you could reference a poverty differential between Asia, which was training people acceptably well in technical subjects, but had it at a lower level, now that's changed some to fill in the bottom of the pyramid. And so that's really what it was. It was an economic X point that has nothing to do with the best and the brightest or the color of one's skin. It was just a way of saving a pyramid scheme.

'''Sam:'''               Well, I, so clearly there is room for innovation on all these fronts and we should be eager to do it. And we should be certainly eager to find Ponzi schemes that we didn't know were Ponzi schemes. Right? Like I think it's, eh, we again, this touches where we started when we were talking about Samantha Power and other and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I think there, there are systems we set up with the best of intentions and you know, projects and, and meme, you know, mimetic complexes. We launch you know, upon the world with the best of intentions and we don't see the way incentives will align or the, or the, you know, the knock-on effects or the externalities of, of doing those things. And then it's just the world is more complicated than we realized.

'''Eric:'''           And that's what was, so that's like the thing that scares me a little bit. Remember when I said that I have malware in my head? My belief is, is that a lot of the beautiful things that you were thinking about, about being open to the world, training the best and the brightest, keeping some of them for ourselves, distributing some of them back home to grow the pie for everyone, et cetera, et cetera. That's a mimetic complex that I, I associate with malware. It's not that there aren't aspects of it, it wasn't movement, right?