The Ricochet Podcast - Busted and Babeling

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Messrs. Lileks and Robinson chat with Peter Schweizer, best-selling author of Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, to discuss the malfeasant Biden family and the cronies who give them cover. Then David Berlinksi stops by to muse on the vast everything that the scientific community promises to explain; and why he thinks they haven't delivered. (Read all about it in his newly released Science After Babel .)

I'm not all here today, but I'm getting better, I guess. This coffee is helping. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new action. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs. Rob Long is out this week. We're going to talk to Peter Schweitzer about Chinese influence,

and David Berlinski about, well, you're just going to have to listen. So let's have ourselves a podcast. So it's hard to believe that an expungible gun charge and two misdemeanors is what Hunter Biden gets. It's an intentional production by the DOJ. In my administration, no one, in my, no one is above the law. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet podcast, number 9,743,642,000. If you're keeping track. No, it just seems like that. Actually, no, it doesn't. It feels like number 10, number 15, the spirit of adventure and newness is still in the air as Peter Robinson, who's been doing this longer than I have, steps up to the mic once again with that fresh courage of a man who's willing to take on the

world and let the opinions fly and damn the consequences. Right, Peter? Well, damn it anyway. Well, damn it anyway. We were just saying before we started the show that, you know, here we are at the end of the week. Don't know when you're listening to it, but chances are that the things, the objects, the fascinations, the concerns that have churned through the American mind for the last week are probably, as with us, seeping out into sort of torpid state where we want to move on for example the whole week everyone was concerned about the titanic submersible and now we know and there's really nothing more to be said about it except to hum a few bars of for those in peril at the sea and regret and move on you maybe maybe can talk about knock on things, the way that some people took this as an opportunity to let the world know what horrible people that they are. Ben Dreyfus, the actor, did a piece on his substack about empathy and the basic human quality of. And how these people who were taking just absolute delight in the fact that there were rich people down there who were probably lost and or dead or are suffering

was a good thing, actually, and that it is a sign of virtue to wish ill of those people and to find that their situation was almost a delight in some sort of cosmic sense. The people who see things explicitly and entirely through a tiny little economic prism themselves are miserable, unhappy people who go about every day in a state of fury because the world is not conforming to what they know to be the truth and the inevitability of things. And they have to get it out like this in a way that is the most curious form of virtual signaling I can imagine. I don't know if you saw a lot of this, Peter, but is this new to our age? Is social media amplified it or is social media just allowed us to see that there are just rotten people out there

and there always have been? What is there to say? Social media permitted people. Don't we know? I haven't heard studies. I don't even know how you'd structure this people what what don't we know i haven't there's studies i don't even know how you'd structure this study but don't we know that being on social media is like driving in your car you james mild-mannered person that mild wealth not mild-mannered is not right but you wouldn't ordinarily strolling down the sidewalk flip flip the bird to someone else on the sidewalk. In the car, I have, I have to say, momentary anger. I have said nasty things. Twitter's like that. Is this hatred for the rich anything new?

No, envy is one of the seven deadly sins. Do you think it stems from envy? Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. It seems to me perfectly obvious. And this last week was really, really, first of all, they missed the economic point. They missed the story. And the story is that the richest man on that submersible, Hamish something or other, can't recall.

But as far as I can tell, he was largely a self-made man. So, this is a man who had gone through life creating enterprises, employing people, creating value of all kinds. He did not pull together his fortune from the sweat of the brow of oppressed peoples. It was a free market economy in which he was operating. The second economic point, of course, is that when rich people spend money on things that seem frivolous to the rest of us, they permit things to happen. Electric vehicles were originally just, it was rich people around here in Silicon Valley who started buying Teslas. Now they're a mass market commodity. On and on we go. So, I don't know exactly what the future is of deep sea exploration but that people were paying a quarter of a million dollars a seat for the last some number of years I know Bill Buckley was one of the very

first who went down into submersible and looked at the Titanic wrote a marvelous piece about it that all strikes me as admirable and I'm waiting for you to hymn the usual ode to the human spirit. So the other bit of this, I have to say, looking at the news this morning, and it now seems to be clear that something went wrong with that submersible very quickly. The Navy picked up the sound of an implosion. I read a couple of pieces that if that is indeed what happens, and it now seems clear that that is what happened, then death would have been instantaneous for everybody aboard. And I have to say, for me personally, that was a relief. Because even as all over Twitter, people were mocking the five down below the surface, I was thinking to myself, I can't imagine a worse way to die. Slow asphyxiation over 96

hours, a mile and a half beneath the surface of the ocean, total darkness. I just can't, how, I just, it's a relief to me to know that it all happened instantly. I can't watch videos of people spelunking. So I can't imagine putting myself in a situation where I hear the 17 bolts being put in place to seal me in the tube before I'm dropped down to the inky depths. So no, yes. Right. No, you're absolutely correct. I mean, although when driving, I've never flipped anybody off. What I have done is...

Have you never? Okay. Let the record show you are a better human. What everyone has long suspected, you are a better human being than I am. What I have done is given the Minnesota Midwestern equivalent of it, which is the raised hand. Just a raised hand, like what? And if you're watching this on video, of course, you can see me making that distinctive gesture. But no, you're right, because you are ensconced in your own little intellectual emotional bubble as you scroll

through social media ping-ponging amongst a dozen different things that make you angry and so when you land on something um yes you can bring all the full force of the peevishness that you've brought from the other tweets into this one it's not a pleasant place i it has you know it has a great boon and i'm glad it's there. It's revelatory in what it says about people, but you're right. Social media doesn't make kids happy. It doesn't really contribute to. So it's not, you know, could we do without it? I'm just, I'm thinking back to the way we were talking before the show started. And I know there's nothing more compelling than telling people what we were talking about before the show started, but we were talking about AM call in

radio and somebody was bemoaning the fact that, but we were talking about AM call-in radio. And somebody was bemoaning the fact that, well, when Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine, all of a sudden it turned into hate radio and all these crazy people started calling. There was the same thing. It is nonsense. But there was, at the time, the sort of notion that opening up the airwaves to everybody allows these voices, allows these crazy people to say these things unmediated. And that conversation continues to this day, where you have my own

Senator Amy Klobuchar, who's being very concerned about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter and the rest of it, and whether or not they will be able to get in front of disinformation for the next campaign. I'm just, you know, I'm looking at these people the same way we looked at the people talking about the callers. Let me decide. Let me listen or read and figure out exactly. So the idea, and this is this big, overarching, top-down idea that has come about from, you want to say the left, but it's probably our technocratic betters, our handlers. The idea that disinformation is this great threat and that freedom of speech, while it may sound nice in the abstract, certainly has to be constrained by the smart people, or we're going to get the wrong outcomes. And looking at Twitter this week, as people talked about this, it's like,

you know, all this is sort of emotional disinformation, what they were saying about these people, but I'm still glad it's out there. Like I said, I'd rather, I'd rather all the flowers, you know, all the poisons in the mud hatch out as Robert Graves had Claudia say. Right. I'm, I'm with you on that. I have to say say I'm also with you on, I don't know, every time I say I'm shocked by something, you say, oh, come on, get with it. Maybe it's acceptable to be shocked. You should have been shocked a decade ago. I was shocked a decade ago, but I'm still shocked at, I don't know. How is it that I, am I the only person left who considers free speech the most important

of our rights it seems like it sometimes i just don't understand the way the country has just let it go and again again again i say it go right ahead pile on me for continuing to be shocked but that the mainst the journalists their entire profession, the whole tradition in which they're working depends upon freedom of speech. And they're the first to do that. We now know, thanks to the work of Matt Taibbi and others, that the federal government, agency after agency after agency, was telling Twitter and Facebook, take that down, take that down, take that down. And when they didn't do it, the federal agency would leak to the New York Times or other members of the press, and the reporters would call and say, are you taking this down?

Because if it doesn't go down, there's going to be a story. Journalists at major and formerly honorable institutions permitted themselves to become, knowingly, to become instruments of censorship. I am just staggered by this. Instruments of the state in order to do the right thing. Exactly. Because the younger crop of journalists do not believe in, they speak sarcastically of both sides-ism. If one side is illegitimate and destructive, there's no point in giving it. If the planet is going to die because of climate change or climate crisis, then both sides is hastening the decline, the demise of us all. So it is actually injurious to the body politic to let the other side seem to have the same amount of weight and merit as the other. That's part of the all. So it is actually injurious to the body politic to let the other side seem to have

the same amount of weight and merit as the other. That's part of the problem. But that's another podcast. This podcast is going to be as current as is possible because we're going to talk about, well, we're going to talk with Peter Schweitzer, founder of the Governmental Accountability Institute. He's the host of the Drill down podcast and the author of clinton cash secret empires profiles and corruption and most recently of red-handed welcome peter thanks for joining us in the podcast so peter found out this week that hunter biden you know that fellow who left the laptop and which was of course the subject of russian information or i think so he pled guilty federal tax misdemeanors, and he struck a deal to resolve a federal gun charge. Gosh, that was sweet. Or was it? They

say he got a sweetheart deal. Is that so? Absolutely. No question about it. Sweetheart deal on a couple levels. Number one, the level of criminal activity that he agreed to. In other words, really what he was engaged in is felony tax evasion. That's what these whistleblowers are, I think, showing and demonstrating and arguing. But also in terms of what was not in that agreement. It seems pretty clear that the U.S. attorney in Delaware wanted to charge Hunter Biden with a felony violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA. That was not allowed to proceed by the Department of Justice.

So it was a sweetheart deal on multiple levels for Hunter Biden. And I think that this issue is only going to further unspool. And let's remember, this plea agree is subject to the approval of a judge during sentencing. That judge is a Trump appointee, and in light of the revelations of these IRS whistleblowers, I'm not so sure the judge is going to go along. The judge may refuse to accept the plea agreement? Yes. Yeah, the judge has that option. Peter, we are old friends. I want to disclose that as if it's, I'm actually, I'm not disclosing,

I'm boasting about it. I know Peter Schweitzer. I want to get to red-handed in a moment. Of course, I want to talk about this topic, the other topic, but you know what I want to do is just say thanks, because you're doing what a lot of people used to do, but almost nobody does anymore, and that is called journalism. You are a genuine investigative reporter. You go after big stories and you dig and you dig and you dig. And since we are long past the days when the Washington Post or the New York Times will publish big stories that tend to reflect badly on members of the establishment, you publish these as books. So truly, I want to say thank you. And the other thing I want to ask is, is there, are we now at the stage at which we can feel confident that an alternative business model for journalism, real journalism, has emerged. That is to say, we now have our own

Fox News, Peter Schweitzer. You're heading something called the Government Accountability Institute. I'd like you to tell us about that. But can we now feel confident, A, that our side of each story is going to get out, but also that real journalism will continue. I think of you, and I think of Matt Taibbi, although I'd be willing to bet that you never voted the same way in either of your lives. But he's now said, wait a minute, the whole journalistic enterprise as I used to know it is gone. And he's setting himself up. So, can we relax? Have people figured out a new model, or are you still struggling? Well, it's a great question, and it's always great to be with you, Peter. I don't think that we've quite got the model yet, and that's not because we don't have great

people. I think Matt does fantastic journalism. Michael Schellenberger does great journalism. It's a combination of things. Number one, you have to have the resources for these deep investigative dives. It takes a lot of time and a lot of money. News organizations, mainstream media news organizations used to have it. That has dwindled. But at the same time, you've seen this ideological tilt. You were talking about this earlier among journalists where, you know, Donald Trump is an existential threat or climate change is an existential threat. So we're going to do tilted stories because we're saving the planet. Right.

Those two trends, I think that the sort of showing how the journalists are biased and only showing one side of the story has emerged, you still have the resource problem. I mean, you know, we exposed the Biden deals in China in 2018. I had seven researchers working full time. Did you really? For 10 months to uncover that story. We're a 5-1-C-3. We get donations. The point being, we found that story because there was a Chinese social media website that had pictures of Hunter Biden standing with the equivalent in China of the head of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Secretary in 2011. And I was thinking, what is going on here? It takes a lot of time and money to unspool very

complex stories. And I don't think we have the resources to do that yet. But if I can interject here, I mean, I work for a newspaper, a pretty solidly staffed newspaper. And yeah, we're not going to do that story because we're concentrated here on our home and our state. But the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have the resources to do that. And if The New York Times and The Washington Post does that story, it will be amplified through the wire services to willing papers elsewhere. So it's resources, yes, but it's also desire. I mean, as we saw, NPR came out right away and said, we're not going to handle the laptop story because obviously this is just all, you know, nonsense, something for which they've never been

brought to account. So it's a choice. I mean, resources, yes, but it is a choice. And the problem with that is that since the mainstream journals aren't doing it, it's easier to delegitimize guys like you because you're seen as being partisan hacks who come to this with bushels of axe handles and agendas to grind. No, I think you're right. You come to this with bushels of axe handles and agendas to grind. No, I think you're right. The resources exist in these mainstream media outlets. They don't want to cover these stories. When I first covered the Bidens and exposed it in 2018 in China, I actually had a very

nice lunch with a very experienced, seasoned, well-known reporter for The New York Times who covers China and other issues. And in that book in 2018, I had, you know, profile exposing things related to Mitch McConnell's family and their ties to China, as well as the Bidens. They followed up with a story on Mitch McConnell. The New York Times did themselves sort of standing on the shoulders of my work, which is fine, which is great. That reporter told me in 2018, if Joe Biden runs for president, we are absolutely going to cover this story. They never did. They never did. I don't think it's because he didn't want to cover it. I think it's because the editorial leadership did not want to cover it. So yeah, they don't have

a desire to cover these stories. But honestly, what they are doing is they are completely trashing their brands. If you look at if you look at Pew Research, you know, that looks at trust in American institutions, Congress is at 19 percent. It's the lowest're choosing to cover and what they're not covering. And it's only going to get worse. And they're only damaging themselves because they can't muzzle these stories anymore precisely because of what Peter said. You've got these alternatives that are putting this stuff out. Okay. Too red-handed then, Peter. How did – I was about to say what attracted you to this story, but you've already made clear that in a certain sense, this is a story you've been covering for years. Give

us, well, let's sell some books. Give us one or two of the most arresting revelations. What's the book about? Just give us, let's just take it through and give listeners, they'll be hearing about this for the first time. What is the book about? Give us one or two really arresting findings. Red-handed. I mean, the subtitle is, you know, How Americans Get Rich Helping China Win. And so it focuses on Washington D, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. And just three quick illustrations. When it comes to the Bidens, based on the laptop, the Bidens have received $31 million from four Chinese businessmen who are named in the laptop, who are named in the book. And all four of those businessmen who transferred money to the Bidens with no services or anything

given in return for that money. All of those businessmen have links to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence. One of them, at the same time, he set up the Bidens in a $20 million deal, was at the same time business partners with the vice minister for state security in China. All of them have that profile. So the Biden money, in my mind, is not just about corruption. It's about compromise. It's about espionage. It's about possible recruitment. Go to Silicon Valley. The biggest, most talented companies in Silicon Valley are aiding and abetting China in its military efforts to exploit artificial intelligence. They know it's going on. They've helped those companies in China

that are developing these military technologies enhance their capabilities. Microsoft, Facebook, or Meta, and Elon Musk regularly say very favorable things about China because they want access to the China market. And then go to Wall Street and you can find the same thing, inglorious things that are being said by major hitters on Wall Street who are prostrating themselves, let's be honest about this, and saying wonderful things

about China in exchange for access to the market. So that's really what the book is about. And if you look at the front cover, you can see the collection of individuals that we expose in the book. If you know this, the FBI does or should know it. The National Security Agency does or should know it. The CIA does or should know it. And the New York Times and the Washington Post do or should know it. Why is only Peter Schweitzer writing about this? Well, good question. I know the FBI knows about it. And I can say this now because the New York Times ran a piece about it. The FBI knows about it because the FBI has been in communication with me on a myriad of research projects going back to 2015. And we're always happy to cooperate with law enforcement.

What's interesting is the New York Times story was basically saying the FBI is relying on people like Peter Schweitzer rather than checking the veracity of what was being reported. So the FBI knows about this. I think a lot of government agencies know about it. The New York Times and The Washington Post know about it. They choose not to cover it. And part of the reason we don't get a lot of action in Washington on this on Capitol Hill, we're getting some movement, is you frankly have some powerful Republicans that benefit commercially mightily from their relationships with China. And they're over a barrel. I mean, as I talk about in the book, Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, the Chao family has a shipping business. The ships are all built by Chinese state-owned companies. The construction

of these ships, it's hundreds of millions of dollars, are financed by Chinese state banks. The crews that man these ships are all recruited from China. And the contracts that they have to ship goods on these big vessels across the Pacific come from Chinese state-owned enterprises. If Mitch McConnell does something that ticks off China, they can destroy the Chao family business overnight. And that's the kind of leverage that China wants over its political opponents. Peter, out here in Silicon Valley where I live, I'm not going to name names because this is the kind of talk that takes place among friends. Name any one of the big operations out here and they all employ a lot of Chinese. Some are Chinese nationals, some are Chinese Americans. And the general feeling is it's hopeless. Meaning we can either do business, we can either code and work on

our next product, or we can run our own Intel operation and try to make sure that whatever we develop doesn't get to Beijing. But we can't do both because we have so many Chinese employees that it is simply taken for granted that when a major innovation takes place, it gets flipped over to Beijing pretty quickly. Now, in one sense, that's chilling. But in another sense, you just described the kind of actual reality that people are dealing with here. All of these operations that we're describing are publicly listed companies. They have fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders.

They are in competitive marketplaces. They must continue to innovate. And so the question, I mean, the first impulse is to say, well, they're just not good Americans. But on the other hand, you say, wait a minute, when did it become their job? Where is the United States government? It's up to them. And making sure that your fundamental security measures get put in place within companies becomes a fundamental way of doing business across the competitive space. I don't know. So there's a premise there, which is that in some sense it's hopeless. That in some sense, these people are in business. They have to do business. And then maybe really it's the federal government that's failing here. Attack any of those if you want to. What do you make of that?

That is in the air out here. That's a kind of standard conversation. Yeah, no, and I think there's some truth to that. What I would say is, yes, we cannot totally disengage from China, but we should at least make it harder for them. So I'll give you an example. Yes, Google has Chinese employees. You could argue Google needs Chinese employees because we don't have the STEM talent in the United States. But that's different than Google funding, literally funding and sponsoring research facilities for artificial intelligence in China that are controlled by the Chinese military. It seems to me that is something on a order of magnitude exponentially worse

than recognizing you're going to have certain employees in your company and they may engage intellectual property theft. So that's kind of what I'm talking about. And I think it's really incumbent upon shareholders and consumers in the United States to effectively shame these companies, you know, to make clear that this is a problem, that you're subsidizing our enemy, and we don't want you to do it. The federal government has been lax here. But I also think that, you know, it's high time that we hold some of these companies into account. They're certainly concerned about their posture on other, let's say, social issues. I would think this is one we need to make sure that they're being clear on as well.

Last question, Peter. Does it matter? If you look at China demographically, they're going to suffer collapse. They have a huge amount of debt and an economy based on a real estate bubble that is popping and popping and popping and being refilled and popping and popping. In the long run, of course, we're all dead. But in the long run, really, do we have to worry that much about China or can we just sit it out and let them fall apart? Well, the question really comes down to what do you think President Xi or the man that follows President Xi's posture is going to be given the realities they face? Is it going to make him more aggressive or is it going to make

him softer towards the West? All indications with Xi since 2012 is that it has made him harder. It has made him more aggressive. It's made him more desperate. That's what I think we need to be concerned about. And we also need to realize this is sort of the subject of the research I'm working on right now in the next book is, in a lot of respects, it's not a question of whether we're going to be at war with China. I would contend China's already at war with the United States. Their involvement with fentanyl, the things that they did during COVID to exacerbate the body count of American dying, other things that they are doing. So they kind of view their posture already at war with the United States. There are serious casualties, I would argue,

in the millions that have died as a result of China's policies. That's the present reality. I don't think we have the comfort of looking 25, 30 years down the road because of these trends, as you correctly point out, are against China. I don't have the comfort of looking 35 years down the road. The two of you may. Peter Schweitzer from the Governmental Accountability Institute. The books are Clinton Cash, Secret Empires, Profile in Corruption, and most recently, Red Handed. We'd like to have you back again soon. There's so much to talk about, and thanks for joining us here on the podcast today, Peter. Peter Schweitzer, one of the best working journalists in the country.

Get Red Handed. Thanks, guys. Take care, Peter. get red-handed thanks guys take care peter and now we pivot to the philosophical the theosophical to different matters entirely than we were talking about before and we are honored to have with us david berlinski senior fellow the discovery institute's center for science and culture is the author of the deniable darwin the devilusion, Human Nature, and just out this month, Science After Babel. David, welcome. I was reading an excerpt of your book today, and one of the lines that struck me, and I copied it down, was that talking about science and the constellations or lack thereof of science, talking about the arid nature of the things we are

discussing, you said, there remains a curious fact that no one much likes what everyone accepts. I found that interesting, that we are in this world of scientism, that we are in this world where we had erected this edifice of knowledge, but it hasn't brought anybody happiness. As a matter of fact, the more it comes out with what you regard as outlandish ideas, the unhappier our view of ourselves and the world and the universe seems to be. So why is it? Why do we all just trust the science, I guess I should ask you? Well, I don't know that we all trust the science. We just find ourselves in a world in which we are obliged to accept certain features of the world,

which are clearly the usufructs of the scientific system of belief. We don't have much choice with respect to many of those artifacts, telephones, food system, habitation, sanitation. All of those are just given to us. And as givens, we have to accept it. So our margin of choice is relatively narrow. When I remark that none of us much likes this system of belief, it's not for the technological benefits, which may or may not be particularly satisfactory. It's for the underlying vision of what it means to be a human a great deal of careful reflection on the part of the

scientific community, it has nonetheless given us a certain perspective that as we occupy a minor planet in the solar system, we are of no cosmic significance whatsoever. There's nothing particularly remarkable about human life. It's our continuity with animal life and animal life is an accident. There's no intrinsic meaning, purpose, dignity, or teleology associated with human life. Religious beliefs are completely arbitrary and lacking in all credibility. As far as we can see the ultimate constituents of reality, so speaks the scientific community, are things like quantum fields erupting every now and then into some shower of particles, and that's about it. Now, it's perfectly obvious why most people don't consider that a particularly attractive worldview, but there it is anyway.

That is a worldview. It's a dominant worldview. It's a very pervasive worldview. And it's a worldview that's not all that easy to rebut. And yet, rebut it, David Berlinski does do in his book, Science After Babel. David, may I tell you why you are just an execrable human being for having the temerity to write such a book and offer such arguments. Here's why.

Because we know better. We know what religion leads to. We've been through the wars of religion. It was only science, only the discovery and steady application of the scientific method of empiricism, of trial and error, of serious engagement with reality around us that got us out of our heads, out of useless, unprovable speculation on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin that enabled us to climb out of poverty, that gave us the industrial revolution, that is now giving us, that gave us the communications revolution, that's now giving us a world of green energy,

and that has imposed a certain peace that has let us get along together in a pluralistic way by putting religion and this whole dark age of human thought in a box where it belongs and giving us science instead. And this is the existential, we speak to you in Paris, Paris is the city of Camus and Sartre. If it is the case that we are alone in a vast universe, that life has no meaning except the meaning that we impute to it, well then, welcome to existentialism. Great minds have been there already in the 20th century. That is just, we just are going to have to learn to live with reality.

Be brave. Embrace it. and don't try to knock it down. To which David Berlinski responds, how? Well, that sounds good to me, at least the first 40 seconds of your remark. I should always stop after 40 seconds. Yeah, if you could point me in the direction of where I would find the Enlightenment in its full flower, I would at least consider leaving my apartment and going there. But as far as I can see, sitting where I am in my apartment in Europe, the Enlightenment is about as far from contemporary concerns as it has always been. It seems to be even on the contrary that the Enlightenment has proven itself feckless and incompetent in the face of 20th century horrors, and it seems to be doing no better in the face of 21st century calamities.

But more to the point, what we have been offered on the part of the scientific fact of the scientific enterprise in the 21st century. Every sense of reality is now trembling because there's a very cold wind blowing. The Enlightenment ideal, which

is really a Greek ideal, that we can know the world as it really is seems very fragile. We can't really know the world as it really is seems very fragile. No, we can't really know the world as it is. What we can know are various theories, various perceptions. Look, all of our social life today is consumed with the idea that to believe a proposition is exactly what is meant by knowing that proposition. That's what the phrase so often used, my truth really comes to. The standard for epistemological commitment now is not knowledge but belief, inner conviction. That's not a

confrontation with reality, that's a withdrawal from reality. Every sense of the world and both its constraints on human cognition. That's proven to be very flabby. Look at the chat GPT. Interact with chat GPT. It's a remarkable technological achievement, no doubt. And interacting with it is very instructive, very salutary.

Look, the thing hallucinates. It says things which are not so. It's a form of intelligence. I think it's a prophetic form of intelligence because that is where we are headed, to a universe in which what is imagined, believed, conjectured, construed, has epistemological primacy over what is known and what is true. It's not hallucinating, it's just behaving the way we're all going to behave in 50 years. I don't know where to start to pull out questions

from these remarkable answers. I mean, we can know the world, in a sense. I know that if I bang my head against that wall, it will hurt. I know that if I slam my hand on that door, it will hurt. I know that if I slam my hand on that door over there, it'll be a similar sensation. I also know that there are things that I do not see that birds and bugs see because they are looking at the world through different wavelengths and for different purposes. But we can all agree on a certain number of things that exist that are true, that are solid, that are right. That's the hope. That's the hope. But what we have now is in the absence of a dominating

idea with such gravity that everything revolves around it, we have instead just a kaleidoscope of individual constellations in which everybody has their own beliefs and they're all equally valid, and we have nothing uniting us except for the belief that all beliefs are valid, if I'm summing up correctly what you have to say. The question isn't how do we get back to a central organizing principle again, because that could be a very bad central organizing principle. How do we get back to a good one? And is it possible in these days where identity and information and knowledge and belief is so prismatically scattered that there's no hope of gathering it back into a single shaft of light again, if that sounds like a sort of question that makes any sense? What do

we do, I guess? Well, I don't know what we are going to do. I'm going to finish my cigar. Well, let me ask ChatGPT, what is David Berlinski going to do? But here's the point. Everything you just said is commonsensical. The people with a certain kind of education, certain disposition, certain background.

But this was accommodated in the 18th century by Bishop Barclay, for example, who said, to be is to be perceived. There's nothing else. You bang your hand on a door, you can dismiss the door as an external object and savor or regret the pain that has just been induced in your hand. Einstein had the same discussion with proponents of quantum theory. I have forgotten who he asked, Heisenberg or Niels Bohr.

Do you really believe that when I'm not looking at the moon, it disappears? There's no such thing. To which the obvious answer from Barclay's position, from any idealist's position, any solipsist's position, is yes, there is no such thing as the external object. There are only ideas in your mind or in the mind of God. Interesting way to present that. When I was in graduate school in the mid-1960s, the philosopher to which everyone repaired was Jung. And after Jung, Kant, and then after Kant, the 20th century, critical analysts, Bertrand Russell, all the way to Kwan.

I would bet that the philosophers who are being read avidly now in the graduate schools, not Jung but Barclay, not Kant but Hegel, and following Barclay and Hegel, all the old forgotten British idealists, because we are clearly living in a time bordering on a form of collective solipsism. The fact that when I smack my hand on my own table, I feel something in my hand is undoubted. We all agree to that. But the further inference that there's a system of permanently existing objects beyond the ken of my senses can be denied, and it has very consistently been denied.

By Barclay, for example. To be is to be perceived. It's replaced in the 21st century by the apathem. To be is to be believed. And even more notable, to be is to be believed by a great many people. That increases the strength of conviction which we can bring to bear on a belief. Something profoundly has changed in the way we look at these issues. David, Boswell's Life of Johnson. Sir, how do you refute Bishop Barclay?

I refute him thus, he kicked the stone. Does that convince you after what I've just said? It convinces me, but that's because I start in a certain position in the first place, to which I now come. You have named this book Science After Babel. You're going to tell us in a moment quite what you mean by that, but I can't help observing. It's in the title and it's in you, and you and I have known each other a while now, that not only are you totally conversant with all the philosophers of the 20th century and with

the mathematic, the only man I know who really understands quantum mechanics. I mean, really understands it. Here you are putting right into the title an allusion to the Hebrew scriptures, which means what? You take this late Bronze Age, early modern period book collection of scriptures seriously? You think there is wisdom to be found there relevant to us today? I know better than to say, David, do you believe in God? Because I've tried that before and it's gotten me nowhere. Why is Babel in the title? David Well, there are two reasons.

One, you pointed out yourself, it's a magnificent biblical story. It's a pregnant biblical story. It's also the subject of a great painting by Peter Bruegel. I'm not sure. I'm looking for a copy of it now. I don't know where it is. But I think there's a copy of the painting on the book cover, if I'm not mistaken. But it's an ambiguous title. The story of the Tower of Babel is a story of the extent to which the arrogance of architects building a

tower to reach the heavens was confounded by God because he divided their tongues so they could no longer successfully communicate. And that's in the picture too, because you can see looking at the picture that this enormous squat tower is incoherent. I like that image. I like this story because even though it makes a point about the incoherence of the architecture, the fact visible in front of your eyes remains

the tower is still standing. Architects or no architects. I think that's the real meaning of the title. We are clearly in a position where we have begun to examine the scientific work of three centuries, incredible scientific work of three centuries with an eye toward consistency, coherence, and further development, discovered that there are places of incoherence. But we on the outside, and I'm certainly on the outside, nonetheless are obliged to admit that this great power is still standing, despite any anti-mad versions I may have expressed. And it can be finished.

If people get together, solve the language problem, learn one another's tongues, work out a way to do it. But now, unfortunately, where we are today, we have the very notions of empiricism are being eroded by this

this insistence on personal truth, on my truth uh because all of the the things that undergird the ability to construct the tower things like just basic mechanics things like math are being held up as products of a of an errant evil civilization with colonialism and racism and everything else baked right into the bones of it i mean it's critical race theory says you have to demolish all of these institutions in order to create the one that will bring about the utopia so you can't even the tower may stand but we look at it like dumb apes goddling because we are will end up without the skills to begin construction anew. I agree with you.

I agree with you completely. I don't look forward to an era under the best of circumstances in which languages are suddenly reconciled, and the development of the sciences taking place between the 16th and the 20th century once again proceeds unopposed. Something new will happen. I think something new is happening right now in artificial intelligence. That's a separate discussion.

But I agree with you that there are real and serious threats to the integrity, not only of the scientific establishment, but of intellectual life itself. Our ability clearly and critically to reason about anything is compromised when some sense of the superiority of certain ways of addressing issues is dismissed from consideration in favor of rather squalid political deals in which every identity group in society is represented in proportion to its numbers so that at at the Institute for Advanced Study, if you propose to study the latest developments in quantum field theory, at least 2% of your professorship must be comprised of Swiss-Chinese lesbians.

That is a recipe for disaster. Everybody understands that. Everybody knows it. Everyone's afraid of it. No one can do a blessed thing about it. That is a fact of life. It's not a fact of theory, but it's a fact of life anyway. Whether any form of organized intellectual life is going to survive the present moment of collective solipsism, it's very difficult to answer. But all that being said, and I agree with you completely on the shrewdness of your political analysis, you must not forget that every squalid movement in contemporary life can be traced back intellectually to philosophical or mathematical or physical principles that are much deeper than the squalidness of the present day would indicate. Compromising with truth, for example, drawing back from empiricism, these are not simply matters of identity, they have their roots in philosophical and mathematical developments of the 1930s. And that should be acknowledged.

It's not a trivial phenomenon you're facing. It's a very deep one. It has its trivial aspects. I'm the first one to make fun of it. But it has its much more significant aspects as well. We know certain things now in the fashion of no-go theorems in physics. That is to say, we know certain things are just not possible. When we want to speak of the truth, we know there is no terminal point.

We consistently and continuously will be forced to move to ever more expansive definitions of the truth. That's just a fact of logic. And there are many other similar considerations that could be deduced. It's not the fact that all progress in mathematics and philosophy leads in the direction we would like it to lead. Sometimes it leads in the reverse direction, and that's happened in the 20th century. The fact that quantum mechanics does not support naive empiricism, nobody wanted that, nobody expected it, but it doesn't. And that's just a fact.

We're talking with David Berlinski, philosopher and mathematician whose new book is Science After Babel. And if you are like me, and unlike David, you will need to savor science after Babel, page by page by page. David, here's... We have to talk more. We just have to. But here's a kind of closing question from me for now. Recognizing that it's morning over here for us, and James and i have commitments and it's evening over there for you and you'd like to i got all the time in the world okay i was about to say you want to you

want a negroni to go with that cigar all right so we have been through an episode in this country and in the west generally but of covid of public health officials standing on the science, the science, the science, using that, using the science to justify a certain political, well, I think it was just ham-fistedness, but to shut down opposition. And your, so this is in mind. You seem, you being you, of course, there are many arguments taking place at many different levels. But are you arguing in Science After Babel that we have been untrue to the scientific project, that we have failed to treat science as science, that during the COVID lockdown, for example, even as Burke said, a thousand knights should have sprung to the defense of the Queen of Marie Antoinette of France. A thousand scientists should have sprung up to say to Fauci, no, no, no, there's still

debate over this and over this and over this, and you should use some of your budget of billions to set up rapid tests, in other words, to pursue the science. Or are you making the argument that at this stage of the game, one of the many things we now know about science is that it is in and of itself limited. That far from giving us the sword with which we can slash every Gordian knot that stands between us and a deep understanding of reality, it's a limited tool. It can slash some knots, but not others. I guess what I'm asking, and of course, by comparison with whatever you're about to say, it's a crude question, are you saying more science, but we must be true to science, we have permitted ourselves to misunderstand it?

Or are you saying the whole scientific project became infused with a kind of pomposity? Science is itself very limited. I don't know. Both sound pretty good to me. Can I adopt both positions simultaneously? You being you, of course. Look, one thing I have to remind your viewers, I was not in the United States during COVID. I was in France, and I think experiences I was between France and the United States, in retrospect

they look rather different. There is no comparable movement in France attacking French health officials, for example, in the way that Fauci is being attacked. And I'm not even sure what the what the grovelment of the attack is. That's how far away I am from current affairs in the United States. But apparently he made some serious mistakes. With respect to masking, with respect to school shutdowns. I think I remember. Masking, school shutdowns, and I forgot the rest. There was really nothing comparable.

I think there was a fairly widespread, indeed, sense of admiration in France for the way health officials actually managed the pandemic in the end. Everybody agrees that the French government blundered very badly in the first two or three months. They didn't take the lesson of Italy very seriously. They were slow to respond and people were horrified to discover that they had no masks, that they had never bothered to stock up on masks. The mask program ended in 2008 or something like that.

But thereafter, I think the government very successfully rebounded. It did launch a program of vaccination, which continues to this day. It did obtain, I think, something like 80% vaccinal coverage. I can't say it was a triumph because too many people died, but in certain respects, it was France's public system at its best. So I really can't comment on it. I do know that Fauci seems to have played an extremely dishonorable role with respect to the origins of the COVID virus in Wuhan. And that I know from the inside because I've published pieces and influence about that. And I know about the calls that he made and I know about his efforts to gain a unanimity of opinion with respect to the impossibility of a laboratory leak.

But I gather that's not really what you were talking about. Well, even setting Fauci aside, are you saying we need to, our problem today is that we have misunderstood what science can and cannot do and we need to return to a true understanding of science and back it. We need more science, but we need to understand it properly. Or are you saying, ladies and gentlemen, after 300 years of this, science has an announcement to make. It can only do so much. And we must, while remaining true and appreciating these staggering goods that science has given us, if we wish meaning in life, if we wish to pursue the deepest philosophical questions that we've been working on for the

last couple of thousand years, we're going to have to accept the limits on science and turn to other means. Is that closer to the argument in Science After Babel? Well, I think it's a reasonable argument, and to the extent that it's reasonable, I hope I've made it. For sure, there are many areas of life, perhaps the most important areas, where none of the great theories really is helpfully instructive, certainly not quantum field theory when it comes to the aching questions of life and death, meaning, significance, the inference to something beyond our brief human existence. None of these questions are touched on by quantum field theory or the Langlands program in mathematics or anything else. What we get from the sciences are glimpses of a more ordered, structured, glorious, coherent, persuasive world.

That's something else. That's a benefit. It's the same benefit we get from looking at works of art. But in terms of science as its practice today, it seems to me there is a far more dangerous and hubristic sense of limitless possibilities than there was, say, 50 years ago. After all, the introduction of artificial intelligence is not supposed to end with a system that roughly mimics human intelligence. It's supposed to introduce us to an inferior or ever superior intelligence in our minds. And that's a program of unlimited ambition. The same thing is true of various attempts in Silicon Valley and beyond to merge consciousness into a computer system

or to promote various absurd name-deceiving, personally repugnant, transhumanist schemes. They all participate in the same desire to push boundaries away and march well beyond the boundaries we thought we had imposed. So no, I don't think the message is that the scientific community itself is discovering limits. It never will.

It never has. The question is, and it's a real philosophic as well as a scientific question, are there those limits? Is everything that's not forbidden by the laws of physics actually possible and if possible, desirable? Those are very significant questions. I wouldn't have an answer but i think they should be asked well to peter's point uh there has been there's never been a time in american culture where there hasn't been a desire for some sort of spirituality they just don't like christianity because it's what their parents made them go to when they were kids and they had to wear itchy

church pants and and be in a place that smelled of old candles. They didn't like it. And so they fell for every single little idiotic, newfangled, or imported idea that came along. So there's always been a desire for some sort of spirituality. It's a question of whether we have something that can meet the challenges that the new era of science is providing when you say that there are no no boundaries there that there's a a sense of a desire for more and more almost theological forms of science that posit these strange these strange quantum ideas that the brain really can't wrap itself around in but maybe are true when we need to find out and etc etc It brings me back to the one thing I've never been able to grasp in my gut and head at the same time, and that's dark matter. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for it and that there are people who can explain it to me, but it almost seems religious in its desire for, we can't explain this part about the universe, so we're going to make up a thing that explains it. And what I love about this whole theory is that it comes down to two views of humanity, of our destiny. If there is sufficient

mass in the universe, at some point expansion stops and it contracts back down into that singularity, into that infinitely hot, dense point. Then it explodes and starts the whole thing again. And the whole universe is a series of this, of the back and forth, almost like respiration. And we're in one form of the breath now. The other, if there isn't sufficient mass to bring the universe back together, is heat death, where the end of the universe is every single particle separated by hundreds of billions of light years, which is a bleak thing. And there are some people who find solace in heat death, and there are some people who find solace in heat death, and there are some people who find solace in... Name one. The people who believe that humanity itself is a uniquely loathsome thing, a virus in the universe. There are lots of those nuts around, but they always believe that getting rid of humanity might promote the welfare, say, of cows.

You don't want to confront them with a prospect of an omnivorous heat death that destroys everything. Everybody rebels against that, scruples at that. But the idea of the multiverse, that's equally repugnant, isn't it? Imagine clambering to the edge of space and time only to find your double on the other side of the fence pursuing some inane course of correction in your own life and having all sorts of philosophical problems about which is the real you. I think I prefer the heat death to that. I would like to argue about the multiverse with you, and we probably already are in some other multiverse but we're gonna have to get to that in another show you're gonna have to come back because um there is so much to be found in what you say that i just takes me i'm gonna go back and listen to this and regret all the things that i've never asked and uh and feel stupid for the questions that i did in the meantime however uh david thank you. The Spirit of the Spirit. You know that wonderful movie?

Of course, The Spirit of the Spirit. Exactly. I know. That's exactly it. In any case, we envy you your cigar, your view of the city. Almost done. It's a metaphor for the show, right? Right, right, right.

That's it. So buy an extra long Romeo and Juliet next time, and we'll have at it again. The book is Science After Babel, and we're going to have you on again. We vow it. We pledge it. We demand it. David Berlinski in Paris, joining us on the Ricochet podcast. What a pleasure, sir.

Good night. Good night. Thanks very much for having me. David, thank you so much. So I can do both of you. You know, this is the point of the podcast where

you usually tell people that they can meet up in real space and have a meeting.

But I think we should have a Paris Ricochet meetup. I don't know how

we're going to figure it out, but I think we should. And we should all

find some extraordinary restaurant, complete with French beers and snails and the rest of it,

and invite David and just pepper him with questions for the entire evening. Because I have the feeling that the fellow is inclined to a philosophical conversation of an unstinting nature, and that would be a good idea. Right, Peter? Oh, I have experienced essentially unstinted, yes, unstinted, two cigars, several Negronis. Talking with David is one of the great, I was about to call it mind-blowing, which is a kind of banality from what, the 1960s, but it does really feel almost as though after you, do you know, there's some people, it's almost the definition of a bore that you feel less alive after talking to him. David, it's the other way around. Not only do you feel more alive, but you feel as though in some basic way your brain is actually bigger inside your skull, that he has somehow expanded your way, the very way in which you look at, anyway.

Well, he drives me to bad radio. Good radio is where you come back immediately with a question. There's no dead air. You move along. And if you're trained in radio or trained as a guest, you have the ability to start speaking even if you do not know what you're going to say. Exactly. It just comes with the profession. Talking with David, I would take that paragraph and I'd download it and I'd download it, and I'd pick it apart, and I would be comfortable with 45 seconds of dead air, which is an eternity, trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to say what I wanted to say and not make a fool of myself for saying it.

So that's absolutely fun, and I cannot imagine adding alcohol to the mix, but we're going to have to leave that for some other day. Like I say, in the multiverse, we're already doing this in Paris. We're on our third Negroni. So what more can we say than that, Peter? Can we? No. We want to tell you, by the way, this podcast was brought to you by us and by all the wonderful folks you've heard about in the interstitials. And of course, by Ricochet.com. Support us by supporting Ricochet.com. Go to Ricochet.com slash join, J-O-I-N, and become part of what some are saying is the last remaining sane sliver of the Internet. And there are days when I doubt that.

But there's never a day where I don't hit Ricochet four or five times just to see what's new. Peter, that's it. Rob next week, I hope, or Charlie or somebody. We don't know whatchet four or five times just to see what's new. Peter, that's it. Rob next week, I hope, or Charlie or somebody. We don't know what happened. Do we know what happened to Rob? We don't know what happened. Actually, wait, isn't he... How bizarre.

It occurs to me, isn't he in Europe? He may be in Paris at this very moment. It would have been great if he just wandered into the frame there. Exactly. Playing his accordion. Like a clown of Monty Python. But for all we know, that's exactly what he is doing.

He was sitting in the other room, just biding his time. All right. That's it. We're done. We're good. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. À la semaine prochaine. Mais oui.

Mais oui. Ricochet. Join the conversation.