 The Portal, Eric Weinstein's new show. The first episode featured Peter Thiel. It was such an incredible episode, and I'll be breaking down key highlights. The first thing that I thought was so profound that they talked about was this idea of orchards of low-hanging fruit. What that means is that there are certain knowledge patches that civilization has been going to over time and trying to gather these low-hanging fruit of knowledge from those knowledge patches. And we can think about this with how we discovered certain things like fire, how we discovered language, how we discovered art, how we discovered writing and books and the Industrial Revolution, Agricultural Revolution, this now new hockey stick of exponential technologies. There's all these little tiny fruits that are lowest hanging in these orchards, in biology, in physics, in mathematics, and in emotional intelligence and spirituality. And we have to go and we have to find where these orchards are. And we also have to recognize when we're exhausting the orchards, when sometimes we have to find these big ladders and we have to go and try and climb up really high to get these fruits that are no longer low-hanging, but they're medium or high-hanging fruits and those are harder to get. And so it takes more resources, more humans and more time, maybe more AI to try and get to those fruits. So we can always move to new patches and who knows about this word always, right? How far does this edge of knowledge go? But we can continue moving to new patches, orchards and finding low-hanging fruits and we'll revisit this concept later on as well. So we've been, they also really talked about the stagnation that was happening, the stagnation in science and technology and how that's stagnating our culture and our development. And so one of the things that I think is really important here is that you can find these embedded growth obligations in law firms, you can find them in the university system where as Peter and Eric explained, partners hire associates then hope to become partners and then hire associates with law firms or university systems. Every professor trains graduate students to become research professors to then train graduate students. And so the time for these embedded growth obligations has run out. Institutions have become pathological, sociopathic. It's a very interesting way to view it that these embedded growth obligations will sometimes continuously just be trying to reward shareholders' money and sucking value from a system rather than trying to actually create value, create more value than you capture such an important first principle. And we saw it when the tech bubble, we saw it with the housing bubble, we saw it with this government loans bubble. So it can't no longer be a fringe view if civilization's at a time of tech stagnation, of spiritual stagnation, of scientific stagnation, it's so important for us to admit that we are there and we need to get ourselves out of there as fast and effectively as possible. And that we need to respect people that think that way and engage them with dialogue and not say you can't talk about that and just wave them down with political correctness and say you can't do that, the economy is fantastic right now. We need to get over this intellectual dishonesty that we're propagating this meme of dishonesty across our own ethos and across our own civil society's advancements. We're lying to young people and saying that if you go to these institutions that you will leave with a sheet of paper and that you will get a job that will help you repay these $200,000 of debt. We need to think of things like this teal fellowship, think of things like how do you get 13 year olds that are really passionate about a specific field to the edge of that field as fast as possible by the time they're 17, they can be making the next massive advancements with the right mentors around them but we're not thinking that way. We need to start thinking that way and helping children achieve what they're really passionate about fast. And again, we're revisiting this concept of these orchards of low hanging fruit because it seems like the biological revolution was really around these 1950s of the discovery of the double helix, of the discovery of the human genome and mapping it and then why is it taking 50, 70 years for us to make this era of the social genome finally happening? That things like this Carlson curve that we could have potentially had much earlier is only really kicking off now with the decreased cost and sequencing and the speed and sequencing and that all of these new CAS enzymes that we're finding, the way for us to do these genetic engineering technologies for us to probe and understand how all of the different microbes and bacteria across our planet have evolved and what interesting insights we can take from them and apply in biotech. Why has it taken this long? Why is it so interesting that we're in this biology orchard but why are we not capturing these low hanging fruits and how do we do that better as a civilization and how do we work together with the United States and China and other intelligence bodies across the planet to work together on figuring that out? Also another huge aspect about these institutions and even in culture in general is that there's this no polymaths rule allowed that you can't be someone of wide ranging knowledge. You can't go and see how a specific field meshes with another specific field because then the people in that field will say they're not really serious about the depth of that field. Well actually typically what happens is when you mesh together two different fields what you do is you gain unique insights about each field that other people aren't thinking about. That's so important. Bridging together different abstract fields and seeing how they co-play and interplay is such so critical for pushing the edge of knowledge further and finding new discoveries and innovating. We need more polymaths, we need more people. Breath is the new depth and we need to make that more common around our world finding these unique connections that are so frequently just buried under the rug by culture and saying that you're not gonna figure anything out, you're not gonna innovate, you're not gonna get a new job. And it's so unfortunate that within these embedded growth obligations at institutions that there's this notion that they have to keep convincing the government and the alumni that there's nothing going wrong and that everything is great versus actually being able to step up and say that, hey no, not everything is great. There are certain aspects of our institutions that are sociopathic, that are pathological and we need to fix them and we need to innovate on our institutions like our universities. We need to innovate on these embedded growth obligations in private sector as well. We need to really think about what is the trajectory of our future? What is the teleology of human civilization? What is our end goal? What is our purpose? And how do we maximize our potential in getting there? The debt has gotten ridiculous with student loans, 1.7 trillion that the over-promising is continuing to happen. You see young kids that are being constantly pulled out of creative endeavoring and funneled into the education system of universities, promised these excellent outcomes, whereas really they could achieve way more excellent outcomes by finding mentors, pursuing entrepreneurship, pursuing art and creativity at younger ages, meshing together these abstract fields. We need to make that more common. A great way to put this is to ask this question of how would you redesign civilization? That question can help a lot. How would you redesign the institutions that are becoming pathological? How would you redesign our civil society to make it more effective at achieving our end goals? To make it more just, to make the opportunities more equal for people to self-actualize and bring their unique gifts to the world. And that question needs to be talked about with our family, with our friends, with our coworkers, people online, redesign civilization, look around everywhere you look and think about how you would redesign and re-engineer things to be better. We talked about this, this so important polymaths. Remember that word, go and learn much across different disciplines and find those unique connections and also think about what is the point of all this? What is the natural teleology of the human race on this rock orbiting the star? What is the point? In many ways, it is a massive big artistic expression of creation that we're all here and that it's then our goal to help children to find out what is their North Star? They remember that they come from source and that we all do and that then we artistically express ourselves each individually creatively with the Nash equilibrium so that we also bring our gifts to society at the same time and that we create more value than we capture. These are critical principles for children and for adults to remember. And it's a huge problem that all of the people that are using the word equality are forgetting that we all have individual unique skill sets and that those unique skill sets are so critical. There are a bunch of little competence hierarchies that exist across the world which is why certain people are good at making food and other people are good at getting us electricity. And when you think about that, then you say, okay, let them be good at doing what they do and let's see how we can trade between those two to make it easier for us all to live and pursue what we actually care about. So we have to remember to recognize our unique gifts as unique skill sets but we do need an equality of opportunity for people to pursue with an equal degrees of economic freedom for people to pursue what they love in the world. And this is also an interesting point that Eric brought up and Peter said that you're not gonna get a conversion this time but it may be true that this median individual in the future may not be able to defend a position to make a family. And we'll see because Peter had multiple times claimed that the speed of automation is nowhere near what people are claiming it to be and that there will always be these different jobs available and whatnot. And so this is kind of a massive contrasting point to the memes that people like Andrew Yang are propagating and that both of these statements are very true that in many ways Silicon Valley is not at pace. The world of these bits is moving so fast but the world of the atoms is moving so slow and are we actually making these steps in automation because if we were, wouldn't so many more things be automated by now? When we already have figured out nuclear fusion for a sustainable source of energy, would we have already not figured out how to map our entire biometric state to make it easier for us to live longer, to restore our youthful homeostatic capacity faster? All of these things are such interesting points and principles to keep in mind but also will it be that with this rush of memetics that now people are spending their lives spreading memes and ideas to eight billion people instead of having genes and their genes spreading through having children that maybe then is that that the idea of me spreading my own memes out is actually more important and then I'm not gonna focus as much on having kids and so maybe this idea of the family in the future is gonna be completely different and with the designer baby era and all of these ideas that we have ahead of us that the notion of a family may be completely different and to be able to still have families is gonna be important and for people to be able to afford to do that is gonna be important and we'll see exactly where automation takes us in that area. Okay, we need less people talking about relying on the government for help. There are edge cases of vulnerable people and Eric was mentioning this and this is why I love Eric so much. He's super polymathic and he's also able to identify these vulnerable edge cases. When people are vulnerable, they need our help and that's totally true. People with any physical or mental disabilities absolutely need our help to fully creatively actualize their own potential into the world and to have a fun and engaging time on this planet and so we do need to figure out how to structure the programs that assist that but just in general, the idea of me being able to rely on the government versus me being able to rely on myself and knowing that I can then bring some sort of a divine potential to reality, that is way more important and so less people talking about relying on government and more people talking about taking control of their own destiny and coordinated social action for the vulnerable, as we said, do not use ad hominem attacks to try and attack people rather than talk about their ideas remember the principle of steel manning, steel man instead of straw man, don't misrepresent people's arguments to make them easy to defeat but build up on their arguments and then you can showcase whether or not their critical thinking was incorrect or maybe you can add on top of it. This idea of dining a la carte is very interesting in many ways it comes from Greek eclecticos or eclecticism that you can take ideas from disparate, seemingly disparate fields, add them into some beautiful new synthesis and then make your world view more robust so again, dining a la carte from different buffets of thinking and teal cares a lot about growth leading to the reduction of violence I think that's so critical and important to talk about so remember to put a flag in that that we do not want stagnation because stagnation can result in more violence and that as we continue growing we can decrease the amount of violence more people can increase the standards of living more people can creatively actualize in the world I think this was really important that Peter and Eric got to how World War II and Germany was actually a big dual wound happened between Germany and the Jews that it's still seeping into the culture today between Germany and the Jewish spirit for both of them it's still seeping this wound it's a dual wound that happened and we need to prevent these dual wounds from emerging there's still so many of these conflicts that are occurring geopolitically across our planet and for us to be able to remember that every time we embark on one of these violent conflicts against each other geopolitically that it creates a dual wound in our ethos and then we have to do this tedious process of healing and of integrating that trauma over multiple generations and it's been happening for the longest time since the start of civilization and we really need to figure out how to do that less and to figure out how to have more peace but to still have memetic parallax where we're still working on bettering and bettering civilization over time not stagnation with peace but peace for cooperation and then continuously compete on ideas to maximize prosperity and then trauma causes the loss of intellectual dynamism and there's also some trauma there's also some treasures on the other side of traumas as well there's some learning lessons these ideas of orphaned or unpopular theories so if you take these edge theories and you try and integrate them more into the social fabric typically you'll see people that are trying to in many ways do that process of scapegoating that Renee Gerard was talking about as well and Peter had an air convention but just that you want to come in as a one percenter and into a place of 99% homogenized thinking because what you can do is you can then start poking at people's perspective bubbles and try and augment their perspective if we're talking about an overton window and we're talking about being at one of these edges of the bell curve a couple standard deviations out and people aren't realizing what you're saying yet finding people that are closer to your position on the bell curve and recruiting them over you're trying to move the overton window towards progress and so to move the overton window towards progress you need to be able to have these orphaned or unpopular theories that come back into play with this edge thinking that then move the overton window over they also talk about preference falsification one set of public preferences one set of private preferences and in many ways they explain this with how so many people in Silicon Valley have made it such a monoculture of thinking where you can't actually talk about any sort of conservative principles and that make it really hard for people to talk freely and truthfully about how they feel and how they can how you can better have a syncretic politics that you can bring left and right together to help build up ideas instead it just immediately polarizes and so political correctness in general being one of the biggest problems in the world putting pressure on people to say things that they don't mean that's so important that we have to eliminate that people have to feel free to express themselves and have a really powerful art of conversation of having great empowering conversations where you can build up on top of each other's points find the nuance, find the multivariability and then be able to take progressive action on how you want to make the world better The Intellectual Dark Web is a bipartisan coalition that that's super important and it's super true to the ethos of the Intellectual Dark Web there's so much nuance there's so much multivariability on across who's in it, what they talk about and the importance of what they talk about so remember that it's a bipartisan coalition and that's one of these seemingly main reasons why mainstream media is not trying to talk about the Intellectual Dark Web there are always mainstream media is almost always propagating binary memes they're propagating one sided thinking but the IDW is heavily concentrated on nuanced thinking don't get distracted from these really important things especially when so much sociopathic behavior is occurring with the phishing to get clicks on things maybe sociopathic behavior is needed to get people's attention so that you can stay more relevant so there's this kind of dichotomous thinking with that but nuanced thinking is much harder to get people to click on right now because it's more cognitively challenging it's more cognitively easing to find something that's binary to make it easy to make a point in your world view but it's way harder to find something that's nuanced and the memetic theory of Renee Gerard and how imitation can engender pointless conflict in general we are a very imitative species so that we do things that very frequently imitate each other especially with these things like embedded growth obligations that all of a sudden one of these contracts for one of these companies looks exactly like the same contract the same company and we're not and then all of the company's contracts look exactly the same and all of the law firms are making the same damn contracts for the same companies and they're not innovating or iterating on what could be better and then religion was necessary in evolution to control the violence that came from memetic rivalry that was very important and also that we work years of our time for transient materialistic possessions we must do our best to realize that the things that we take on as material possessions are really important to just help us become more well-being as well as more artistically expressing into the world so getting things that help you your family, your community, society both have better well-being and also better actualization and bringing your gifts to the world is critical but you can literally feel when you take things in as materialistic possessions and you work your ass off for them and then they just sit there and they don't do anything it's just really annoying so really and it's actually it's counterintuitive because you're part of the economy by working to earn money to get that thing and it's actually that whole process is broken because you could have spent that time doing something else that was more actualizing that actually brought the world more value you're likely to get scapegoated if you don't take reference in the herd and push the edge of knowledge so this is a very good point is that if you do take this place in the herd where in the 99% like we were saying before where you can kinda just disappear into the rest of the herd you will not likely get targeted but the one percenters that come with these fringe theories in to try and push the overton window are most likely to get uniquely identified and then scapegoated so you also have to be very careful and this is why we see so many anonymous deployments of civilization updates like the decentralization technologies that Satoshi Nakamoto deployed why was it done so anonymously? Well maybe in the future it's going to be these anonymous updates that make it so that the overton window can get pushed by people that don't have ad hominem attacks onto this Satoshi Nakamoto but instead people are critiquing the idea over time instead and we have to respect the burden of genius in general these fringe theories that come in to try and push the overton window we have to respect them we have to actually have deep interlocuting experiences with them, dialectic experiences where we can push poke and probe at their theories build up on top of them see if they can stand the test of our critique to see if they are the best ways to progress civilization forward and remember that the more self dealing that we have the more trauma we have especially with things like institutional betrayal that it's going to be so important for us to not let these fake foods these fake politicians these fake physicians these fake teachers these fake life coaches these fake spiritual leaders to let them seep into our ethos to stay really vigilant about all of the inputs that we take in especially inputs into our health as well and into our mind and our spirit and that what we can do is we can gain a really good amount of robust ethos the way that we take those inputs in share that with our friends and family and try and decrease the amount of fake foods fake politicians, fake news etc that's propagating around the world and focus on these things that can we were talking about this yesterday on one of our interviews that we have this beautiful library of life experience that's stored in us and then all of the neurodegenerative diseases they basically they burn our library down of what unique things we've stored and if we can radically extend life we can do things like add more books to our library and make new connections and make more creative input into our world so these are really important things to be focused on and to just shatter through the intellectual stagnation and the institutional stagnation and the sociopathic and pathologic behaviors of both institutions and the private sector and the government sector and make things a little bit more lean but keep in mind the vulnerable people that need help to this has been a summary of some of the things that that Peter Thiel came on to Eric Weinstein's show to talk about the portal on the first episode it was such a good episode I hope you guys have enjoyed this little synthesis of it and let me know your thoughts in the comments below and what you think about it I'd love to hear from you and also you know support the different artists the entrepreneurs, the organizations the spiritual leaders in your communities that you believe in support them and help them grow have more community events around these stop-provoking topics go and talk more on the internet on social media about and family and friends in the communities about these different topics that we talked about today talk more about them and build more into our world on these topics and support people like us our show Simulation where I host it Alan Saakyan and you can support us below we have Patreon Cryptocurrency PayPal down there you can design cool merch and get paid help support us we can keep doing cool things like this and just build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in and we'll see you soon peace