The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, the second time we've spoken on this podcast.
He's a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest
questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host
of the Portal podcast, a part of which he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture
on his theory of geometric unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts
to arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics.
This conversation was recorded recently in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.
For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis,
I'm sending love your way. Stay strong. We're in this together. We'll beat this thing.
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for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
Do you see a connection between World War II and the crisis we're living through right now?
Sure. The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these abstractions
like everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do for himself and leave everyone
else alone, none of these abstractions work in a global crisis. And this is just a reminder
that we didn't somehow put all that behind us. When I hear stories about my grandfather
who was in the army, and so the Soviet Union where most people die when you're in the army,
there's a brotherhood that happens. There's a love that happens. Do you think that's
something we're going to see here? Since we're not there. I mean,
what the Soviet Union went through. I mean, the enormity of the war on the Russian doorstep.
This is different. What we're going through now is not...
We can't talk about Stalingrad and COVID in the same breath yet. We're not ready. And the
sense of the great patriotic war and the way in which I was very moved by the Soviet custom of
newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day. It's like the happiest day
of your life. You have to say thank you to the people who made it possible. We're not there.
We're just restarting history. I've called this... On the Rogan program,
I called it the Great Knapp, the 75 years with very little by historical standards
in terms of really profound disruption.
When you call it the Great Knapp, meaning lack of deep global tragedy.
Well, lack of realized global tragedy. So I think that the development, for example,
of the hydrogen bomb was something that happened during the Great Knapp.
And that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel feared and no anxiety.
But it was to say that most of the violent potential of the human species was not realized.
It was in the form of potential energy. And this is the thing that I've sort of taken
issue with with the description of Stephen Pinker's optimism is that if you look at the
realized kinetic variables, things have been getting much better for a long time,
which is the Great Knapp. But it's not as if our fragility has not grown,
our dependence on electronic systems, our vulnerability to disruption.
And so all sorts of things have gotten much better. Other things have gotten much worse.
And the destructive potential is skyrocketed.
Is tragedy the only way we wake up from the Big Knapp?
Well, no, you could also have jubilation about positive things, but it's harder
to get people's attention.
Can you give an example of a big global positive thing that could happen?
I think that when, for example, just historically speaking,
HIV went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with
for a very long period of time, it would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday,
right? Like all at once, like you knew that things had changed. And so the bleed in somewhat
kills the sort of the Wednesday effect where it all happens on a particular
day at a particular moment. I think if you look at the stock market here,
there's a very clear moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus.
I think that with respect to positives, the moon landing was the best example of a positive
that happened at a particular time or recapitulating the Soviet American link-up in terms of
Skylab and Soyuz, right? Like that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations
connecting in orbit. And so, yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and
wonderful and amazing happens, but it's just, they're fewer. That's why as much as I can't
imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event, when you have like 30,000 people waiting and,
you know, like she says, yes, it's pretty exciting. So I think that we shouldn't discount that.
So how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of the global suffering that we're going
to experience with this crisis? I can't figure this one out. I'm just not smart enough. Something
is going weirdly wrong. They're almost like two separate storylines. In one storyline,
we aren't taking things nearly seriously enough. We see people using food packaging lids as masks
who are doctors or nurses. We hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to
triage. And that's a very terrifying story. On the other hand, there's this other story which says
there are tons of ventilators someplace. We've got lots of masks, but they haven't been released.
We've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used. And it's very confusing to me
that somehow these two stories give me the feeling that they both must be true simultaneously,
and they can't both be true in any kind of standard way. I don't know whether it's just that I'm
dumb, but I can't get one or the other story to quiet down. So I think weirdly, this is much more
serious than we had understood it. And it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it
out to be at the same time, and that we're not being given the tools to actually understand,
oh, here's how to interpret the data. The issue with the personal protective equipment
is actually a jurisdictional battle or a question of who pays for it,
rather than a question of whether it's present or absent. I don't understand the details of it,
but something is wildly off in our ability to understand where we are.
So that's policy, that's institutions. Do you think about the quiet suffering
of millions of people that have lost their job? Is this a temporary thing? I mean, my
ear is not to the suffering of those people who have lost their job or the 50% possibly
of small businesses that are going to go bankrupt. Do you think about that
quiet suffering? And how that might arise itself?
Could be not quiet too. I mean, could be a depression. This could go from recession to
depression, and depression could go to armed conflict and then to war. So it's not a very
abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where we can begin with quiet suffering and
anxiety and all of these sorts of things and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress
and all sorts of things. But look, anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in a...
I mean, think about this as an incredible experiment. Imagine that you proposed,
hey, I want to do a bunch of research. Let's figure out what changes in our emissions profiles for
our carbon footprints when we're all indoors or what happens to traffic patterns or what
happens to the vulnerability of retail sales as Amazon gets stronger, et cetera, et cetera.
I believe that in many of those situations, we're running an incredible experiment. And am
I worried for us all? Yes. There are some bright spots, one of which is that when you're ordered
to stay indoors, people are going to feel entitled. And the usual thing that people are going to hit
when they hear that they've lost your job, there's this kind of tough love attitude
that you see, particularly in the United States, like, oh, you lost your job, poor baby. Well,
go retrain, get another one. I think there's going to be a lot less appetite for that
because we've been asked to sacrifice to risk to act collectively. And that's the interesting thing.
What does that reawaken in us? Maybe the idea that we actually are nations and that your
fellow countrymen may start to mean something to more people, certainly mean something to people
in the military. But I wonder how many people who aren't in the military start to think about this
as like, oh, yeah, we are kind of running separate experiments and we are not China.
So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come?
From my perspective, we are a part of the experiment, but I don't feel like we have access
to the full data, the full data of the experiment. We're just like little mice in a large...
Does this one make sense to you, Lex?
I'm romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to World War II. So I keep connecting to
historical events and making sense of them through that way or reading The Plague by Camus.
Like almost kind of telling narratives and stories, but I'm not hearing
the suffering that people are going through because I think that's quiet. Everybody's
numb currently. They're not realizing what it means to have lost your job and to have lost
your business. There's kind of a... I'm afraid how that fear will materialize itself once the numbness
wears out. And especially if this lasts for many months and if it's connected to the incompetence
of the CDC and the WHO and our government and perhaps the election process. My biggest fear
is that the elections get delayed or something like that. So the basic mechanisms of our democracy
get slowed or damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have that turns to
panic, that turns to anger, that anger. Can I just play with that for a little bit? Sure.
What if, in fact, all of that structure that you grew up thinking about, and again, you grew up
in two places, right? So when you were inside the US, we tend to look at all of these things as
museum pieces. Like how often do we amend the Constitution anymore? And in some sense, if you
think about the Jewish tradition of Simba Torah, you've got this beautiful scroll that has been
lovingly hand-drawn in calligraphy that's very valuable. And it's very important that you not
treat it as a relic to be revered. And so one day a year, we dance with the Torah and we hold this
incredibly vulnerable document up. And we treat it as if it was Ginger Rogers being led by Fred
Astaire. Well, that is how you become part of your country. In fact, maybe the election will
be delayed. Maybe extraordinary powers will be used. Maybe any one of a number of things will
indicate that you're actually living through history. This isn't a museum piece that you were
handed by your great-great grandparents. But you're kind of suggesting that there might be
like a community thing that pops up. As opposed to an angry revolution, it might have a positive
effect of- Well, for example, are you telling me that if the right person stood up and called for
us to sacrifice PPE for our nurses and our MDs who are on the front lines, that people wouldn't
reach down deep in their own supply that they've been stocking and carefully storing there and
just say, here, take it. Right now, an actual leader would use this time to bring out the
heroic character. And I'm going to just go wildly patriotic because I freaking love this country.
We've got this dormant population in the US that loves leadership and country and pride in our
freedom and not being told what to do. And we still have this thing that binds us together. And all
of the merchants of division just be gone. I totally agree with you. I think there is a deep
hunger for that leadership. Why hasn't that- Why hasn't one- Because we don't have the right surgeon
general. We have guys saying, come on, guys, don't buy masks. They don't really work for you. Save
them for our healthcare professionals. No, you can't do that. You have to say, you know what,
these masks actually do work and they more work to protect other people from you,
but they would work for you. They'll keep you somewhat safer if you wear them. Here's the deal.
You've got somebody who's taking huge amounts of viral load all the time because the patients are
shedding. Do you want to protect that person who's volunteered to be on the front line,
who's up sleepless nights? You just change the message. You stop lying to people. You level
with them. It's bad. Absolutely. But that's a little bit specific. So you have to be just
honest about the facts of the situation. Yes. But I think you were referring to something
bigger than just that. Yeah. It's inspiring, rewriting the constitution, sort of rethinking
how we work as a nation. Yeah. I think you should probably amend the constitution once or twice
in a lifetime so that you don't get this distance from the foundational documents.
Part of the problem is that we've got two generations on top that feel very connected to
the US. They feel bought in and we've got three generations below. It's a little bit like watching
your parents riding the tricycle that they were supposed to pass on to you. And it's like,
you're now too old to ride a tricycle and they're still whooping it up, ringing the bell with the
streamers coming off the handlebars and you're just thinking, do you guys never get bored?
Do you never pass a torch? Do you really want it? We had five septic generians all born in the 40s
running for president of the United States when Klobuchar dropped out. The youngest was Warren.
We had Warren, Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Trump from like 1949 to 1941,
all who had been the oldest president at inauguration. And nobody says grandma and grandpa,
you're embarrassing us. Except Joe Rogan. Let me put it on you. You have a big platform.
You're somewhat of an intelligent, eloquent guy. What role do you play? Why aren't you
that leader? I would argue that you're in ways becoming that leader.
So I haven't taken enough risk. Is that your idea? What should I do or say at the moment?
No, you're a little bit... No, you have taken quite a big risks and we'll talk about it.
All right. But you're also on the outside shooting in,
meaning you're dismantling the institution from the outside as opposed to becoming the
institution. Well, do you remember that thing you brought up when you were on The View?
The View? I'm sorry, when you were on Oprah?
I didn't get the invite. I'm sorry. When you were on Bill Maher's program,
what was that thing you were saying? They don't know we're here. They may watch us.
Yeah. They may quietly slip us a direct message,
but they pretend that this internet thing is some dangerous place where only lunatics play.
Well, who has the bigger platform? The Portal or Bill Maher's program or The View?
Bill Maher in The View. In terms of viewership or in terms of what's the metric of size?
Well, first of all, the key thing is take a newspaper and even imagine that it's completely
fake and then it has very little in the way of circulation. Yet imagine that it's a 100-year-old
paper and that it's still part of this game, this internal game of media. The key point is,
is that those sources that have that mark of respectability to the institutional structures
matter in a way that even if I say something on a very large platform that makes a lot of sense,
if it's outside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative or GIN,
it doesn't matter to the institutions. The game is, if it happens outside of the club,
we can pretend that it never happened. How can you get the credibility and
the authority from outside the gated institutional narrative?
Well, first of all, you and I both share institutional credibility coming from our
associations. So we were both at MIT? Yes. Were you at Harvard at any point?
Nope. And lived in Harvard Square. So did I. But at some level, the issue isn't
whether you have credentials in that sense. The key question is, can you be trusted to
file a flight plan and not deviate from that flight plan when you are in an interview situation?
Will you stick to the talking points? I will not. And that's why you're not going to be allowed
in the general conversation, which amplifies these sentiments.
But I'm still trying to... So your point, it would be, is that we're, let's say, both...
So you've done how many Joe Rogan? Four. I've done four too, right? So both of us are somewhat
frequent guests. The show is huge. You know the power as well as I do. And people are going to
watch this conversation. Huge number watched our last one. By the way, I want to thank you
for that one. That was a terrific, terrific conversation. Really did change my life.
Changed my life. You're a brilliant interviewer. So thank you.
Thank you. That was... That you changed my life too. That you gave me a chance.
So that was... No, no, no. I'm so glad I did that one. What I would say is, is that we keep
mistaking how big the audience is for whether or not you have the kiss. And the kiss is a different
thing. Kiss? What does that stand for? Well, it's not an acronym yet.
Okay. It's a... Thank you for asking. It's a question of, are you part of the interoperable
institution-friendly discussion? And that's the discussion which we ultimately have to break into.
But that's what I'm trying to get at is how do we... How does Eric Weinstein become the president
of the United States? Meaning... I shouldn't become the president of the United States.
Not interested. Thank you very much for asking. Okay. Get into a leadership position where...
I guess I don't know what that means, but where you can inspire millions of people
to inspire the sense of community, inspire the kind of actions required to overcome hardship,
the kind of hardship that we may be experiencing, to inspire people to work hard and face the
difficult hard facts of the realities we're living through, all those kinds of things
that you're talking about. Can that leader emerge from the current institutions? Or
alternatively, can it also emerge from the outside? I guess that's what I was asking.
So my belief is that this is the last hurrah for the elderly, centrist kleptocrats.
Can you define each of those terms? Okay.
Okay. Elderly. I mean, people who were born at least a year before I was. That's a joke,
you can laugh. No, because I'm born at the cusp of the Gen X boomer divide.
Centrist, they're pretending... There are two parties, Democrat and Republican party in the
United States. I think it's easier to think of the mainstream of both of them as part of an
aggregate party that I sometimes call the looting party, which gets us to kleptocracy,
which is ruled by thieves. And the great temptation has been to treat the U.S. like a trough,
and you just have to get yours because it's not like we're doing anything productive.
So everybody's looting the family mansion and somebody stole the silver and somebody's
cutting the pictures out of the frames. Roughly speaking, we're watching our elders
live it up in a way that doesn't make sense to the rest of us.
Okay. So if it's the last hurrah, this is the time for leaders to step up.
Well, no, we're not ready yet. We're not ready to disagree with that.
I call out, you know, the head of the CDC should resign.
Should resign. The Surgeon General should resign. Trump should resign. Pelosi should
resign. De Blasio should resign.
They're not going to resign.
I understand that. So that's why, so we'll wait.
No, but that's not how revolutions work. You don't wait for people to resign.
You step up and inspire the alternative.
Do you remember the Russian Revolution of 1907?
It's before my time.
But there wasn't a Russian Revolution of 1907.
So you're thinking we're in 1907, not 1907.
I'm saying we're too early.
But we got this, you know, Spanish flu came in 1718.
So I would argue that there's a lot of parallels there.
Or there were one.
I think it's not time yet.
Like John Prine, the songwriter just died of COVID.
That was a pretty big.
Really?
Yeah.
By the way, yes, of course I, every time we do this, we discover our mutual appreciation
of obscure, brilliant, witty songwriter.
Well, he's really quite good, right?
He's really good, yeah. He died.
My understanding is that he passed recently due to complications of corona.
So we haven't had large enough, enough large, large enough shocking deaths yet.
Picturesque deaths, deaths of a family that couldn't get treatment.
There are stories that will come and break our hearts.
And we have not had enough of those.
The visuals haven't come in.
But I think they're coming.
Well, we'll find out.
But you have to be there when they come.
But we didn't get the visual, for example, of falling man from 9-11.
So the outside world did.
But Americans were not, it was thought that we would be too delicate.
So just the way you remember Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from the Vietnam era,
you don't easily remember the photographs from all sorts of things that have happened since.
Because something changed in our media.
We are in sense that we cannot feel or experience our own lives
and the tragedy that would animate us to action.
Yeah, but I think there, again, I think there's going to be that suffering
that's going to build and build and build in terms of businesses, mom-and-pop shops that close.
And I think, for myself, I think often that I'm being weak and I feel like I should be doing something.
Like I should be becoming a leader on a small scale.
You can't.
This is not World War II and this is not Soviet Russia.
Why not?
Why not?
Because our internal programming, the malware that sits between our ears,
is much different than the propagandized malware of the Soviet era.
I mean, people were both very indoctrinated and also knew that some level it was BS.
They had a double mind.
I don't know.
There must be a great word in Russian for being able to think both of those things simultaneously.
You don't think people are actually sick of the partisanship, sick of incompetence?
Yeah, but I called for revolt the other day on Joe Rogan and people found it quixotic.
Well, because I think you're not, I think revolt is different.
I think that's like a...
Okay, I'm really angry.
Yes.
I'm furious.
I cannot stand that this is my country at the moment.
I am embarrassed.
So let's build a better one.
Yeah.
Right?
That's the...
I'm in.
Okay, so, well, that's something I take about it.
So let's take over a few universities.
Well, let's start running a different experiment at some of our better universities.
Like when I did this experiment, I said, if this were 40 years ago,
the median age, I believe, of a university president was 51.
That would have the person in Gen X and we'd have a bunch of millennial presidents,
a bunch of more than half Gen X.
It's almost 100% baby boom at this moment.
And how did that happen?
We can get into how they changed retirement,
but this generation above us does not feel...
Or even the older generation, silent generation.
I had Roger Penrose on my program.
Excellent content.
And I...
Thank you.
I really appreciate that.
And I asked him a question that was very important to me.
I said, look, you're in your late 80s.
Is there anyone you could point to as a successor that we should be watching?
We can get excited.
You know, I said, here's an opportunity to pass the baton.
He said, well, let me hold off on that.
I was like, oh, is it ever the right moment
to point to somebody younger than you to keep your flame alive after you're gone?
And also, like, I don't know whether...
I'm just going to admit to this.
People treat me like I'm crazy for caring about the world after I'm dead.
Or wanting to be remembered after you're gone.
Like, well, what does it matter to you?
You're gone.
It's this deeply sort of secular, somatic perspective on everything,
where we don't...
You know that phrase in As Time Goes By?
He says, it's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of duet.
But I don't think people imagined then that there wouldn't be a story about fighting for love and glory.
And like, we are so out of practice about fighting rivals for love and fighting for glory
in something bigger than yourself.
But the hunger is there.
Well, that was the point then, right?
The whole idea is that Rick was, you know, he was like Han Solo of his time.
He's just like, I stick my neck out for nobody.
You know, it's like, oh, come on, Rick, you're just pretending you actually have a big soul, right?
And so at some level, that's the question.
Do we have a big soul or is it just all bullshit?
See, I think there's huge Manhattan project style projects,
whether you talk about physical infrastructure or going to Mars, you know,
the SpaceX, NASA efforts or huge, huge scientific efforts.
Well, we need to get back into the institutions and we need to remove the weak leadership,
that we have weak leaders and the weak leaders need to be removed and they need to seat people
more dangerous than the people who are currently sitting in a lot of those chairs.
Or build new institutions.
Good luck.
Well, so one of the nice things from the internet is, for example,
somebody like you can have a bigger voice than almost anybody at the particular institutions
we're talking about.
That's true.
But the thing is, I might say something.
You can count on the fact that the, you know, provost at Princeton isn't going to say anything.
What do you mean?
To afraid?
Well, if that person were to give an interview, how are things going in research at Princeton?
Well, I'm hesitant to say it, but they're perhaps as good as they've ever been.
And I think they're going to get better.
Oh, is that right?
All fields?
Yep.
I don't see a weak one.
It's just like, okay, great.
Who are you and what are you even saying?
We're just used to total nonsense 24-7.
Yeah.
What do you think might be a beautiful thing that comes out of this?
Like, is there a hope, like a little inkling, a little fire of hope you have about our time right now?
Yeah.
I think one thing is coming to understand that the freaks, weirdos, mutants, and other
ne'er-duels, sometimes referred to as grifters, I like that one, grifters, and gadflies were
very often the earliest people on the coronavirus.
That's a really interesting question.
Why was that?
And it seems to be that they had already paid such a social price that they weren't going
to be beaten up by being told, oh my God, you're xenophobic, you just hate China, you know,
or, wow, you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
So if you'd already paid those prices, you were free to think about this.
And everyone in an institutional framework was terrified that they didn't want to be
seen as the alarmist, the chicken little, and so that's why you have this confidence
where De Blasio says, get on with your lives, get back in there and celebrate Chinese New
Year in Chinatown despite coronavirus.
It's like, okay, really?
So you just always thought everything would automatically be okay if you, if you, if you
adapted, sorry, if you adopted that posture.
So you think this time reveals the weakness of our institutions and reveals the strength
of our gadflies and the weirdos and the-
No, not necessarily the strength, but the value of freedom, like a different way of
saying it would be, wow, even your gadflies and your grifters were able to beat your
institutional folks because your institutional folks were playing with a giant mental handicap.
So just imagine like we were in the story of Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut and our smartest
people were all subjected to distracting noises every seven seconds.
Well, they would be functionally much dumber because they couldn't continue a thought through
all the disturbance.
So in some sense, that's a little bit like what belonging to an institution is, is that
if you have to make a public statement, of course the surgeon general is going to be the
worst because they're, they're just playing with too much of a handicap.
They're too many institutional players are like, don't screw us up.
And so the person has to say something wrong.
We're going to back propagate a falsehood and this is very interesting.
Some of my socially oriented friends say, Eric, I don't understand what you're on about.
Of course, masks work, but you know what they're trying to do.
They're trying to get us not to buy up the masks for the doctors.
And I think, okay, so you imagine that we can just create scientific fiction and we can
create scientific fiction at will so that you can run whatever social program you want.
This is what I, you know, my point is get out of my lab, get out of the lab.
You don't belong in the lab.
You're not meant for the lab.
You're constitutionally incapable of being around the lab.
You need to leave the lab.
You think the CEC and WHO knew that masks work and we're trying to sort of imagine
that people are kind of stupid and they would buy masks in excess.
If they were told that masks work.
Because this does seem to be a particularly clear example of mistakes made.
You're asking me this question?
Yeah.
No, you're not.
What do you think, Lex?
Well, I actually probably disagree with you a little bit.
Great.
Let's do it.
I think it's not so easy to be honest with the populace
when the danger of panic is always around the corner.
So I think the kind of honesty you exhibit appeals to a certain class of brave intellectual minds
that it appeals to me, but I don't know from the perspective of WHO.
I don't know if it's so obvious that they should be honest 100% of the time with people.
I'm not saying you should be perfectly transparent and 100% honest.
I'm saying that the quality of your lies has to be very high and it has to be public spirited.
There's a big difference between, so I'm not a child about this.
I'm not saying that when you're at war, for example, you turn over all of your plans
to the enemy because it's important that you're transparent with 360-degree visibility,
far from it.
What I'm saying is something has been forgotten and I forgot who it was who told it to me,
but it was a fellow graduate student in the Harvard Math Department and he said,
you know, I learned one thing being out in the workforce because he was one of the few
people who had had a work life in the department as a graduate and he said,
you can be friends with your boss, but if you're going to be friends with your boss,
you have to be doing a good job at work.
And there's an analog here, which is if you're going to be reasonably honest with the population,
you have to be doing a good job at work as the surgeon general or as the head of the CDC.
So if you're doing a terrible job, you're supposed to resign.
And then the next person is supposed to say, look, I'm not going to lie to you.
I inherited the situation.
It was in a bit of disarray, but I had several requirements before I agreed to step in and
take the job because I needed to know I could turn it around.
I needed to know that I had clear lines of authority.
I needed to know that I had the resources available in order to rectify the problem.
And I needed to know that I had the ability and the freedom to level with the American
people directly as I saw fit.
All of my wishes were granted and that's why I'm happy here on Monday morning.
I've got my sleeves rolled up.
Boy, do we got a lot to do.
We got a lot to do, so please come back in two weeks and then ask me how I'm doing then.
And I hope to have something to show you.
That's how you do it.
So why is that excellence and basic competence missing?
The big net.
You see, you come from multiple traditions where it was very important to remember things.
The Soviet tradition made sure that you remembered the sacrifices that came in that war.
And the Jewish tradition, we're doing this on Passover, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, every year we tell one simple story.
Well, why can't it be different every year?
Maybe we can have a rotating series of seven story because it's the one story that you need.
It's like, you know, you work with the men in black group, right?
And it's the last suit that you'll ever need.
This is the last story that you ever need.
Don't think I fell for your neuralizer last time.
In any event,
in any event, we tell one story because it's the get out of dodge story.
There's a time when you need to not wait for the bread to rise.
And that's the thing, which is even if you live through a great nap,
you deserve to know what it feels like to have to leave everything that has become
comfortable and unworkable.
It's sad that you need that tragedy.
I imagine to have the tradition of remembering.
It's sad to think that because things have been nice and comfortable,
means that we can't have great competent leaders,
which is kind of the implied statement.
Like, can we have great leaders who take big risks or who inspire hard work,
who deal with difficult truth, even though things have been comfortable?
Well, we know what those people sound like.
I mean, you know, if, for example,
Jaco Willink suddenly threw his hat into the ring,
everyone would say, okay, right, party's over.
It's time to get up at 4.30 and really work hard.
And we've got to get back into fighting shape.
And yeah, but Jaco is a very special, I think that whole group of people by profession
put themselves in the way of, into hardship on a daily basis.
And he's not, well, I don't know, but he's probably not going to be,
well, could Jaco be president?
Okay, but it doesn't have to be Jaco, right?
Like, in other words, if it was Kai Lenny or if it was Alex Honnold from rock climbing.
Right.
But they're just serious people.
They're serious people who can't afford your BS.
Yeah, but why do we have serious people that do rock climbing
and don't have serious people who lead the nation?
Because that was a, those skills needed in rock climbing
are not good during the big nap.
And at the tail end of the big nap, they would get you fired.
But I don't, don't you think there's a fundamental part of human nature that
desires to, to excel, to be exceptionally good at your job?
Yeah, but what is your job?
I mean, in other words, my point to you is if you, if you're a general in a peacetime army
and your major activity is playing war games,
what if the skills needed to win war games are very different than the skills needed to win
wars because you know how the war games are scored and you've, you've done money ball,
for example, with war games and you figured out how to win games on paper.
So then the, the advancement skill becomes divergent from the ultimate skill that it was proxying for.
Yeah, but you create, we're good as human beings to, I mean, at least me, I can't do a big nap.
So at any one moment when I finish something, a new dream pops up.
So go into Mars.
What, what, what do you like to do?
You like to do Brazilian jujitsu?
Well, first of all, I like to do everything.
You like to play guitar?
Guitar.
You do this podcast, you do theory.
You're always, you're constantly taking risks and exposing yourself, right?
Why? Because you got one of those crazy, I'm sorry to say it, you got an Eastern European
Jewish personality, which I'm still tied to.
And I'm a couple generations more distant than you are.
And I've held on to that thing because it's valuable to me.
You don't think there's a huge percent of the populace, even in the United States.
That's, that's that.
Maybe a little bit dormant, but.
Do you know Anahachin from the Red Scare podcast?
Did you interview her?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was, yeah, yeah, she was great.
She was great, right?
Yeah, she's fun.
She's, she's terrific.
But she also has the same thing going on.
And I made a joke in the liner notes for that episode, which is somewhere on the road from
Stalingrad to forever 21, something was lost.
Like, how can Stalingrad and forever 21 be in the same sentence?
And, you know, in part, it's that weird thing.
It's like trying to remember.
Even words, like, I mean, Russian and Hebrew, things like, it's like,
but Pomyat and Lyskor, you know, these words have much more potency about memory.
And I don't know, I do, I think, I think there's still a dormant populace
that craves leaders on a small scale and large scale.
And I hope to be that leader on a small scale.
And I think you, sir, have a role to be a leader.
You kids go ahead without me.
I'm just going to, I'm going to do a little bit of weird podcast.
So, see, now you're, you're putting on your Joe Rogan hat.
He says, I'm just a comedian.
Oh, no, I'm not.
You say, I'm just a.
It's not that.
If I say I want to lead too much because of the big nap, there's like a group,
a chorus of automated idiots.
And they're, they're first thought, I was like, ah, I knew it.
It was a power grab all along.
Why should you lead?
You know, just like, and so the, the idea is you're just trying to skirt around,
not stepping on all of the idiot landmines.
It's like, okay.
So now I'm going to hear that in my inbox for the next three days.
Okay.
So lead by example, just live a large platform.
Look, we should take over the institutions.
There are institutions.
We've got bad leadership.
We should mutiny and we should inject a, I don't know, 15%, 20%, disagreeable,
dissident, very aggressive, loner, individual, mutant freaks, all the people
that you go to see Avengers movies about or the X-Men or whatever it is.
And stop pretending that everything good comes out of some great,
giant, inclusive, communal, 12 hour meeting.
It's like, stop it.
That's not how shit happens.
You recently published the video of a lecture.
You gave it Oxford presenting some aspects of a theory, theory of everything called geometric unity.
So this was a work of 30, 30 plus years.
This is life's work.
Let me ask you the silly old question.
How do you feel as a human, excited, scared, the experience of posting it?
You know, it's funny.
One of the things that you learn to feel as an academic is the great sins you can commit in
academics is to show yourself to be a non-serious person, to show yourself to have delusions,
to avoid the standard practices which everyone has signed up for.
And, you know, it's weird because like, you know that those people are going to be angry.
He did what?
You know, why would he do that?
And what we're referring to, for example, the traditions of sort of publishing incrementally,
certainly not trying to have a theory of everything,
perhaps working within the academic departments, all those things.
That's true.
And so you're going outside of all of that?
Well, I mean, I was going inside of all of that.
And we did not come to terms when I was inside.
And what they did was so outside to me, was so weird, so freakish.
Like the most senior respectable people at the most senior respectable places were functionally
insane, as far as I could tell.
And again, it's like being functionally stupid if you're the head of the CDC or something,
where, you know, you're giving recommendations out that aren't based on what you actually
believe, they're based on what you think you have to be doing.
Well, in some sense, I think that that's a lot of how I saw the math and physics
world, as the physics world was really crazy, and the math world was considerably less crazy,
just very strict and kind of dogmatic.
Well, we'll psychoanalyze those folks, but I really want to maybe linger on it a little
bit longer of how you feel, because this is such a special moment in your life.
Well, I really appreciate it.
It's a great question.
So if we can pair off some of those other issues.
It's new, being able to say what the observer is, which is my attempt to replace spacetime
with something that is both closely related to spacetime and not spacetime.
So I used to carry the number 14 as a closely guarded secret in my life.
And we're 14 is really four dimensions of space and time, plus 10 extra dimensions
of rulers and protractors, or for the cool kids out there, symmetric two tensors.
So you had a geometric, a complicated, beautiful geometric view of the world that you cared with
you for a long time.
Yeah.
Did you have friends that you colleagues?
Essentially, no.
Talked?
No.
In fact, part of these, part of some of these stories are me coming out to my friends,
and I use the phrase coming out because I think that gays have monopolized the concept of the
closet.
Many of us are in closets and having nothing to do with their sexual orientation.
Yeah, I didn't really feel comfortable talking to almost anyone.
So this was a closely guarded secret, and I think that I let on in some ways that I was
up to something and probably, but it was a very weird life.
So I had to have a series of things that I pretended to care about so that I could
use that as the stalking horse for what I really cared about.
And to your point, I never understood this whole thing about theories of everything.
Like, if you were going to go into something like theoretical physics, isn't that what you
would normally pursue?
Like, wouldn't it be crazy to do something that difficult and that poorly paid if you
were going to try to do something other than figure out what this is all about?
Now, I have to reveal my cards, my weaknesses and lack and understanding of what this is all
understanding of the music of physics and math departments.
But there's an analogy here to artificial intelligence.
And often folks come in and say, okay, so there's a giant department working on quote,
unquote, artificial intelligence.
But why is nobody actually working on intelligence?
Like, you're all just building little toys.
Right.
You're not actually trying to understand.
And that breaks a lot of people.
They, it confuses them because like, okay, so I'm at MIT, I'm at Stanford, I'm at Harvard,
I'm here, I dreamed of being working on artificial intelligence.
Why is everybody not actually working on intelligence?
And I have the same kind of sense that that's what working on the theory of everything is
that strangely you somehow become an outcast for even.
But we know why this is, right?
Right.
Why?
Well, it's because let's take the artificial, let's play with AGI, for example.
Yeah.
I think that the idea starts off with nobody really knows how to work on that.
And so if we don't know how to work on it, we choose instead to work on a program that
is tangentially related to it.
So we do a component of a program that is related to that big question because it's felt like,
at least I can make progress there.
And that wasn't where I was, where I was in, it's funny, there was this book called
Frieden Uhlenbeck and it had this weird mysterious line in the beginning of it.
And I tried to get clarification of this weird mysterious line and everyone said wrong things.
And then I said, okay, well, so I can tell that nobody's thinking properly because I just asked
the entire department and nobody has a correct interpretation of this.
And so, you know, it's a little bit like you see a crime scene photo and you have a different idea.
Like there's a smoking gun and you figure, that's actually a cigarette lighter.
I don't really believe that.
And then there's like a pack of cards and you think, oh, that looks like the blunted
instrument that the person was beaten with.
You know, so you have a very different idea about how things go and very quickly you
realize that there's no one thinking about that.
There's a few human sides to this and technical sides, both of which I'd love to try to get down to.
So the human side, I can tell from my perspective, I think it was before April 1st, April Fools,
maybe the day before, I forget, but I was laying in bed in the middle of the night
and somehow it popped up, you know, on my feed somewhere that your beautiful face is speaking
live and I clicked and, you know, it's kind of weird how the universe just brings things
together in this kind of way and all of a sudden I realized that there's something big happening
at this particular moment.
It's strange, like any day, on a day like any day and all of a sudden you were thinking
of, you had this somber tone, like you were serious, like you were going through some
difficult decision and it seems strange, I almost thought you were maybe joking,
but there was a serious decision being made and it was a wonderful experience to go through with you.
I really appreciate it.
I mean, it was April 1st.
Yeah, it was kind of fascinating.
I mean, just the whole experience and so I want to ask, I mean, thank you for letting me be part
of that kind of journey of decision making that took 30 years.
But why now?
Why did you think, why did you struggle so long not to release it and decide to release it now?
While the whole world is on lockdown, on April Fool's, is it just because you like the comedy
of absurd ways that the universe comes together?
I don't think so.
I think that the COVID epidemic is the end of the big nap.
And I think that I actually tried this seven years earlier in Oxford and it was too early.
Which part was too early?
Is it the platform?
Because your platform is quite different now, actually, the internet.
I remember you, I read several of your brilliant answers that people should read for the edge
questions.
One of them was related to the internet.
It was the first one.
Was it the first one?
The essay called Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good
called Go Virtual Young Man.
Yeah.
Yeah, that seems, that's, like, forever ago now.
That was 10 years ago and that's exactly what I did is I decant to the internet,
which is where the portal lives.
Yeah.
The portal of the world.
We'll start the whole, the theme, the ominous theme music, which he just listened to forever.
I actually started recording tiny guitar licks for the audio portion, not for the video portion.
Beautiful.
You've kind of inspired me with bringing your guitar into the story, but keep going.
So you thought, so the Oxford was like step one, and you kind of, you put your foot into the,
in the water to sample it, but it was too cold at the time. So you didn't want to step in all.
I was just really disappointed.
What was disappointing about that experience?
It's very, it's a hard thing to talk about. It has to do with the fact that,
and I can see this, you know, this mirrors a disappointment within myself.
There are two separate issues. One is the issue of making sure that the idea is actually heard
and explored. And the other is the, is the question about, will I become disconnected from my work?
Because it will be ridiculed. It will, it will be immediately improved. It will be found to be
derivative of something that occurred in some paper in 1957. When the community does not want
you to gain a voice, it's a little bit like a policeman deciding to weirdly enforce all of these
little known regulations against you and, you know, sometimes nobody else. And I think that's
kind of, you know, this weird thing where I just don't believe that we can reach the final theory
necessarily within the political economy of academics. So if you think about how academics
are tortured by each other and how they're paid and where they have freedom and where they don't,
I actually weirdly think that that system of selective pressures is going to eliminate anybody
who's going to make real progress. So that's interesting. So if you look at the story of
Andrew Wiles, for example, with, from our last theorem, he, as far as I understand, he pretty
much isolated himself from the world of academics in terms of the big, the bulk of the work he
did. And it, from my perspective, is dramatic and fun to read about. But it seemed exceptionally
stressful. The first step he took, the first steps he took when actually making the work public,
that seemed to me would be hell. Yeah, but it's like so artificially dramatic. You know, he leads
up to it at a series of lectures. He doesn't want to say it. And then he finally says it at the end,
because obviously this comes out of a body of work where, I mean, the funny part about,
for my last theorem is that wasn't originally thought to be a deep and meaningful problem.
It was just an easy to state one that had gone unsolved. But if you think about it,
it became attached to the body of regular theory. So he built up this body of regular theory,
gets all the way up to the end, announces. And then like, there's this whole drama about,
okay, somebody's checking the proof. I don't understand what's going on in line 37.
You know, and like, oh, is it serious? It seems a little bit more serious than we knew.
I mean, do you see parallels? Do you share the concern that your, your experience might be
something similar? Well, in his case, I think that if I recall correctly, his original proof was
unsalvageable. He actually came up with a second proof with a colleague, Richard Taylor, and it
was that second proof which carried the day. So it was a little bit that he got put under incredible
pressure and then had to succeed in a new way having failed the first time, which is like,
even a weirder and stranger story. That's an incredible story in some sense. But I mean,
are you, I'm trying to get a sense of the kind of stress. I think that this is okay, but I'm rejecting.
What I don't think people understand with me is the scale of the critique.
It's like, I don't, you, people say, well, you must implicitly agree with this and implicitly
agree. It's like, no, try me. Ask before you, you decide that I am mostly in agreement with the
community about how these things should be handled or what these things mean.
Can you elaborate and also just why this criticism matter so much here? So you seem to
dislike the burden of criticism that it will choke away all.
There's different kinds of criticism. There's constructive criticism and there's destructive
criticism. And what I don't like is I don't like a community that can't, first of all,
like if you take the physics community, just the way we screwed up on masks and PPE,
just the way we screwed up in the financial crisis and mortgage-backed securities,
we screwed up on string theory. Can we just forget the string theory happened or?
Sure. But then somebody should say that, right? Somebody should say, you know, it didn't work out.
Yeah. Okay. But you're asking this, like, why do you guys get to keep the prestige after
failing for 35 years? That's an interesting question. Who is the you guys? Because to me...
Whoever the profession... Look, these things, if there is a theory of everything to be had,
right, it's going to be a relatively small group of people where this will be sorted out.
Absolutely. It's not tens of thousands. It's probably hundreds at the top.
Yeah. But within that community, there is the assholes. You always in this world have
people who are kind, open-minded. It's not a question about kind. It's a question about,
okay, let's imagine, for example, that you have a story where you believe that ulcers are definitely
caused by stress. And you've never questioned it, or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of
the blue and attacked us at Pearl Harbor, right? And now somebody introduces a new idea to you,
which is like, what if it isn't stress at all? Or what if we actually tried to make resource
star of Japan attack us somewhere in the Pacific so we could have Cassus Belli to enter the Asian
Theater? And the person's original idea is like, what? What are you even saying? You know, it's like
too crazy. Well, when Dirac in 1963 talked about the importance of beauty as a guiding principle
in physics, and he wasn't talking about the scientific method. That was crazy talk. But he
was actually making a great point. And he was using Schrodinger. And I think it was Schrodinger
was standing in for him. And he said that if your equations don't agree with experiment, that's kind
of a minor detail. If they have true beauty in them, you should explore them because very often
the agreement with experiment is an issue of fine tuning of your model, of the instantiation.
And so it doesn't really tell you that your model is wrong. And of course, Heisenberg told
Dirac that his model was wrong because that the proton and the electron should be the same mass
if they are each other's antiparticles. And that was an irrelevant kind of silliness rather than
a real threat to the Dirac theory. But okay, so amidst all this silliness, I'm hoping that we
could talk about the journey that geometric unity has taken and will take as an idea and an idea that
will see the light. Yeah. So first of all, I'm thinking of writing a book called Geometric
Unity for Idiots. Okay. And I need you as a consultant. So can we... First of all,
I hope I have the trademark on geometric unity. You do. Good. Can you give a basic introduction of
the goals of geometric unity, the basic tools of mathematics, use the viewpoints in general
for idiots like me? Okay, great. Fun. So what's the goal of geometric unity? The goal of geometric
unity is to start with something so completely bland that you can simply say, well, that's
something that begins the game is as close to a mathematical nothing as possible. In other words,
I can't answer the question, why is there something rather than nothing? But if there has to be a
something that we begin from, let it begin from something that's like a blank canvas.
That's even more basic. So what is something? What are we trying to describe here?
Okay. Right now, we have a model of our world and it's got two sectors. One of the sectors is
called general relativity. The other is called the standard model. So we'll call it GR for general
relativity and SM for standard model. What's the difference between the two? What are the two described?
So general relativity gives pride of place to gravity and everything else is acting as a
sort of a backup singer. Gravity is the star of the show. Gravity is the star of general relativity.
And in the standard model, the other three non-gravitational forces. So if there are four
forces that we know about three of the four are non-gravitational, that's where they get to shine.
Great. So tiny little particles and how they interact with each other.
So photons, gluons, and so-called intermediate vector bosons, those are the things that the
standard model showcases and general relativity showcases gravity. And then you have matter,
which is accommodated in both theories, but much more beautifully inside of the standard model.
So what does a theory of everything do?
So first of all, I think that that's the first place where we haven't talked enough.
We assume that we know what it means, but we don't actually have any idea what it means.
And what I claim it is, is that it's a theory where the questions beyond that theory are no
longer of a mathematical nature. In other words, if I say, let us take X to be a four-dimensional
manifold, to a mathematician or a physicist, I've said very little. I've simply said,
there's some place for calculus and linear algebra to dance together and to play.
And that's what manifolds are. They're the most natural place where our two greatest math theories
can really intertwine.
Which are the two? Oh, you mean the calculus and linear algebra.
Yep. Right. Okay. Now the question is beyond that. So it's sort of like saying, I'm an artist
and I want to order a canvas. Now the question is, does the canvas paint itself?
Does the canvas come up with an artist and paint an ink, which then paint the canvas?
Like that's the hard part about theories of everything, which I don't think people talk
enough about. Can we just, you bring up that Escher and the hand that draws itself.
The fire that lights itself or drawing hands. The drawing hands. Yeah.
And every time I start to think about that, my mind like shuts down.
No, don't do that.
There's a spark. No, but this is the most beautiful part. We should do this together.
No, it's beautiful, but this robot's brain sparks fly. So can we try to say the same
thing over and over in different ways about what you mean by that having to be a thing
we have to contend with? Sure.
Why do you think that creating a theory of everything, as you call the source code,
our understanding our source code, require a view like the hand that draws itself?
Okay. Well, here's what goes on in the regular physics picture.
We've got these two main theories, general relativity and the standard model, right?
Think of general relativity as more or less the theory of the canvas.
Okay. Maybe you, you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape. Maybe you've measured
it. So it's got length and it's got angle, but more or less it's just canvas and length and
angle. And that's all that really general relativity is, but it allows the canvas to warp a bit.
Then we have the second thing, which is this import of foreign libraries where,
which aren't tied to space and time. So we've got this crazy set of symmetries called SU3
cross SU2, cross U1. We've got this collection of 16 particles in a generation, which are these
sort of twisted spinners. And we've got three copies of them. Then we've got this weird Higgs
field that comes in and like Deus Ex Machina solves all the problems that have been created
in the play that can't be resolved otherwise. So that's the standard model quantum field
theory just plopped on top of this canvas. Yes. It's a problem of the double origin story.
One origin story is about space and time. The other origin story is about what we would call
internal quantum numbers and internal symmetries. And then there was an attempt to get one to
follow from the other called Kaluza Klein theory, which didn't work out. And this is
sort of in that vein. So you said origin story. So in the hand that draws itself, what is it?
So it's as if you had the canvas and then you ordered up, also give me paint brushes,
paints, pigments, pencils, and artists. But you're saying that's like,
if you want to create a universe from scratch, the canvas should be generating the paint brushes
and the paint brushes should be generating the canvas. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like you should.
Who's the artist in this analogy? Well, this is, sorry, then we're going to get into a religious
thing and I don't want to do that. Okay. Well, you know my shtick, which is that we are the AI.
We have two great stories about the simulation and artificial general intelligence. In one story,
man fears that some program we've given birth to will become self-aware, smarter than us,
and we'll take over. In another story, there are genius simulators and we live in their simulation.
And we haven't realized that those two stories are the same story. In one case,
we are the simulator. In another case, we are the simulated. And if you buy those and you put them
together, we are the AGI and whether or not we have simulators, we may be trying to wake up
by learning our own source code. So this could be our Skynet moment, which is one of the reasons
I have some issues around it. I think we'll talk about that because I-
Well, that's the issue of the emergent artist within the story, just to get back to the point.
Okay. So now the key point is the standard way we tell the story is that Einstein sets the canvas
and then we order all the stuff that we want and then that paints the picture that is our universe.
So you order the paint, you order the artist, you order the brushes, and that then when you
collide the two gives you two separate origin stories. The canvas came from one place and
everything else came from somewhere else. So what are the mathematical tools required to
construct consistent geometric theory, you know, make this concrete?
Well, somehow you need to get three copies, for example, of generations with 16 particles each.
Right? And so the question would be like, well, there's a lot of special personality in those
symmetries. Where would they come from? So for example, you've got what would be called grand
unified theories that sound like SU5, the George I. Glashow theory. There's something that should
be called spin 10, but physicists insist on calling it SO10. There's something called the
patissalon theory that tends to be called SU4 cross SU2 cross SU2, which should be called
spin 6 cross spin 4. I can get into all of these. What are they all accomplishing?
They're all taking the known forces that we see and packaging them up to say, we can't
get rid of the second origin story, but we can at least make that origin story more unified.
So they're trying grand unification as the attempt to do that.
That's a mistake. It's not a mistake. The problem is that it was born lifeless.
When George I. Glashow first came out with the SU5 theory, it was very exciting because
it could be tested in a South Dakota mine filled up with cleaning fluid or something like that.
And they looked for proton decay and didn't see it. And then they gave up because in that day,
when your experiment didn't work, you gave up on the theory. It didn't come to us born of a fusion
between Einstein and Bohr. And that was kind of the problem is that it had this weird parenting
where it was just on the Bohr side. There was no Einsteinian contribution.
Lex, how can I help you most? I'm trying to figure out what questions you want to ask
so that you get the most satisfying answers. There's a bunch of questions I want to ask.
And I'm trying to sneak up on you somehow to reveal
in an accessible way the nature of our universe.
Well, I can just give you a guess. We have to be very careful that we're not claiming
that this has been accepted. This is a speculation. But I will make the speculation that what I think
what you would want to ask me is how can the canvas generate all the stuff that usually has
to be ordered separately? All right, should we do that? Let's go there. Okay. So the first thing
is that you have a concept in computers called technical debt. You're coding and you cut corners
and you know you're going to have to do it right before the thing is safe for the world.
But you're piling up some series of IOUs to yourself and your project as you're going along.
So the first thing is we can't figure out if you have only four degrees of freedom and that's what
your canvas is. How do you get at least Einstein's world? Einstein says, look, it's not just four
degrees of freedom, but there need to be rulers and protractors to measure length and angle in
the world. You can't just have a flabby four degrees of freedom. So the first thing you do is you
create 10 extra variables, which is like if we can't choose any particular set of rulers,
and protractors to measure length and angle. Let's take the set of all possible rulers and
protractors and that would be called symmetric non-degenerate two tensors on the tangent space
of the four manifold X4. Now, because there are four degrees of freedom, you start off with four
dimensions, then you need four rulers for each of those different directions. So that's four. That
gets us up to eight variables. And then between four original variables, there are six possible
angles. So four plus four plus six is equal to 14. So now you've replaced X4 with another space,
which in the lecture I think I called U14, but I'm now calling Y14. This is one of the big problems
of working on something in private is every time you pull it out, you sort of can't remember it,
you name something new. Okay, so you've got a 14 dimensional world, which is the original four
dimensional world, which is the original four dimensional world, plus a lot of extra gadgetry
for measurement. And because you're not in the four dimensional world, you don't have the technical
debt. No, now you've got a lot of technical debt, because now you have to explain the way a 14
dimensional world, which is a big, you're taking a huge advance on your payday check, right? But
aren't more dimensions allow you more freedom? Maybe you have to get rid of them somehow because
you're cheating. So eventually, you have to collapse it down to the thing that we proceed
or you have to sample a four dimensional filament within that 14 dimensional world known as a
section of a bundle. Okay, so how do we get from the 14 dimensional world where I imagine a lot
of wait, wait, wait, wait, yep. You're cheating. The first question was, how do we get something
from almost nothing? Like, how do we get the, if I've said that the who and the what in the newspaper
story that is a theory of everything are bosons and fermions. So let's make the who the fermions
and the what the bosons think of as the players and the equipment for a game.
Are we supposed to be thinking of actual physical things with mass or energy?
Yep. Okay. So think about everything you see in this room. So from chemistry, you know,
it's all protons, neutrons and electrons, but from a little bit of late 1960s physics,
we know that the protons and neutrons are all made of upcorks and downcorks.
So everything in this room is basically upcorks, downcorks and electrons stuck together with
with the what the equipment. Okay. Now, the way we see it currently is we see that there are
spacetime indices, which we would call spinners that correspond to the who that is the fermions,
the matter, the stuff, the upcorks, the downcorks, the electrons. And there are also
16 degrees of freedom that come from this space of internal quantum numbers.
So in my theory, in 14 dimensions, there's no internal quantum number space that figures in.
It's all just spinorial. So spinners in 14 dimensions without any
festooning with extra linear algebraic information.
There's a concept of a of spinners, which is natural if you have a manifold with length and
angle and why 14 is almost a manifold with length and angle. It's, it's so close. It's in other
words, because you're looking at the space of all rulers and protractors, maybe it's not that
surprising that a space of rulers and protractors might come very close to having rulers and
protractors on it itself. Like, can you measure the space of measurements? And you almost can.
And in a space that has length and angle, if it doesn't have a topological obstruction,
comes with these objects called spinners. Now, spinners are the stuff of, of our world. We
are made of spinners. They are the most important, really deep object that I can tell you about.
They were very surprising. What is a spinner? So famously, there are these weird things that
require 720 degrees of rotation in order to come back to normal. And that doesn't make sense.
And the reason for this is that there's a knottedness in our three-dimensional world
that people don't observe. And, you know, you can famously see it by this
Dirac string trick. So if you take a glass of water, imagine that this was a tumbler and I
didn't want to spill any of it. And the question is, if I rotate the cup without losing my grip on
the base 360 degrees, and I can't go backwards, is there any way I can take a sip? And the answer
is this weird motion, which is go over first and under second. And that that's 720 degrees of
rotation to come back to normal so that I can take a sip. Well, that weird principle, which
sometimes is known as the Philippine wine glass dance because waitresses in the Philippines
apparently learned how to do this. That, that move defines, if you will, this hidden space that
nobody knew was there of spinners, which Dirac figured out when he took the square root of
something called the Klein Gorton equation, which I think had earlier work incorporated from
Cartan and Killing & Company in mathematics. So spinners are one of the most profound aspects
of human existence. And you forgive me for the perhaps dumb questions, but would a spinner be
the mathematical objects that's the basic unit of our universe? When you, when you start with a
manifold, which is just like something like a donut or a sphere or a circle or a mobius band,
a spinner is usually the first wildly surprising thing that you found was hidden in your original
purchase. So you, you order a manifold and you didn't even realize it's like buying a house
and finding a panic room inside that you hadn't counted on. It's very surprising when you understand
that spinners are running around in your spaces. Again, perhaps a dumb question, but we're talking
about 14 dimensions and four dimensions. What is the manifold we're operating under? So in my case,
it's proto spacetime. It's before, it's before Einstein can slap rulers and protractors on
spacetime. What do you mean by that? Sorry to interrupt is spacetime is the 4D manifold.
Spacetime is a 4 dimensional manifold with extra structure.
What's the extra structure? It's called a semi-Romanian or pseudo-Romanian metric.
In essence, there is something akin to a 4 by 4 symmetric matrix from, which is equivalent to,
to length and angle. So when I talk about rulers and protractors, or I talk about length and angle,
or I talk about Romanian or pseudo-Romanian or semi-Romanian manifolds, I'm usually talking
about the same thing. Can you measure how long something is and what the angle is between two
different rays or vectors? So that's what Einstein gave us as his arena, his place to play, his,
his canvas. There's a bunch of questions I can ask here, but like I said, I'm working on this book,
Geometric Unity for Idiots. And I think what would be really nice as your editor to have
like beautiful, maybe even visualizations that people could try to play with, try to,
try to reveal small little beauties about the way you're thinking about the score.
Well, I usually use the Joe Rogan program for that. Sometimes I have him doing the
Philippine wine glass dance. I had the hop vibration. The part of the problem is, is that
most people don't know this language about spinners, bundles, metrics, gauge fields. And
they're very curious about the theory of everything, but they have no understanding
of even what we know about our own world. Is it, is it a hopeless pursuit? So like even gauge theory.
Right. Just this, I mean, it seems to be very inaccessible. Is there some aspect of it that
could be made accessible? I mean, I could go to the board right there and give you a five-minute
lecture on gauge theory that would be better than the official lecture on gauge theory. You
would know what gauge theory was. So it is, it's possible to make it accessible.
Yeah. But nobody does, like in other words, you're going to watch over the next year,
hear lots of different discussions about quantum entanglement or, you know, the multiverse,
where are we now? Right. Or, you know, many worlds, are they all equally real?
Yeah. Right? I mean, yeah, that's like that.
Yeah, but you're not going to hear anything about the hop vibration except if it's from me and I
hate that. Why, why can't you be the one? Well, because I'm going a different path. I think that
we've made a huge mistake, which is we have things we can show people about the actual models.
We can push out visualizations where they, they're not listening by analogy. They're
watching the same thing that we're seeing. And as I've said to you before, this is like
choosing to perform sheet music that hasn't been performed in a long time or, you know,
the experts can't afford orchestras. So they just trade Beethoven symphonies and
has sheet music and they go, oh, wow, that was beautiful. But it's like nobody heard anything.
They just looked at the score. Well, that's how mathematicians and physicists trade papers and
ideas is that they, they write down the things that represent stuff. I want to at least close out
this thought line that you started. Yes. Which is how does the canvas
order all of this other stuff into being. So I at least want to say some incomprehensible
things about that. And then we'll, we'll have that much done. All right.
And that just point, does it have to be incomprehensible? Do you know what the Schrodinger
equation is? Yes. Do you know what the Dirac equation is? What does no mean? Well, my point is
you're going to have some feeling that you know what the Schrodinger equation is.
As soon as we get to the Dirac equation, your eyes are going to get a little bit
glazed, right? So now why is that? Well, the answer to me is that you, you want to ask me
about the theory of everything, but you haven't even digested the theory of everything as we've
had it since 1928 when Dirac came out with his equation. So for whatever reason, and this isn't
the hit on you. Yeah. You haven't been motivated enough in all the time that you've been on earth
to at least get as far as the Dirac equation. And this was very interesting to me after I gave
the talk in Oxford. New scientist who had done kind of a hatchet job on me to begin with sent
a reporter to come to the third version of the talk that I gave. And that person had never heard
of the Dirac equation. So you have a person who's completely professionally not qualified to ask
these questions wanting to know, well, how does, how does your theory solve new problems? Like,
well, in the case of the Dirac equation, well, tell me about that. I don't know what that is.
So then the point is, okay, I got it. You're not even caught up minimally to where we are now.
And that's not a knock on you. Almost nobody is. But then how does it become my job to digest
what has been available for like over 90 years? Well, to me, the open question is whether what's
been available for over 90 years can be, there could be a blueprint of a journey that one takes
to understand it. Oh, I want to do that with you. And I, one of the things I think I've been
relatively successful at, for example, you know, when you ask other people what gauge theory is,
you get these very confusing responses. And my response is much simpler. It's, oh, it's a theory
of differentiation, where when you calculate the instantaneous rise over run, you measure the rise
not from a flat horizontal, but from a custom endogenous reference level. What do you mean by that?
It's like, okay, and then I do this thing with Mount Everest, which is Mount Everest is how high?
Then they give the height, I say above what? Then they say sea level. And I say,
which sea is that in Nepal? Like, oh, I guess there isn't a sea because it's landlocked. It's
like, okay, well, what do you mean by sea level? Oh, there's this thing called the geoid I'd never
heard of. Oh, that's the reference level. That's a custom reference level that we imported.
So you, all sorts of people have remembered the exact height of Mount Everest without ever knowing
what it's a height from. Well, in this case, in gauge theory, there's a hidden reference level
where you measure the rise in rise over run to give the slope of the line. What if you have
different concepts of what, of where that rise should be measured from that vary within the
theory that are endogenous to the theory. That's what gauge theory is. Okay, we have a video here,
right? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to use my phone. If I want to measure my hand and its slope,
this is my attempt to measure it using standard calculus. In other words, the reference level
is apparently flat. And I measure the rise above that phone using my hand. Okay. If I want to use
gauge theory, it means I can do this, or I can do that, or I can do this, or I can do this,
or I could do what I did from the beginning. Okay. At some level, that's what gauge theory is.
Now that is an act. No, I've never heard anyone describe it that way. So while the community
may say, well, who is this guy and why does he have the right to talk in public? I'm waiting
for somebody to jump out of the woodwork and say, you know, Eric's whole shtick about rulers and
protractors, uh, leading to a derivative. Derivatives are measured as rise of a run above
reference level. The reference levels don't fit together. Like I go through this whole shtick
in order to make it accessible. I've never heard anyone say it. I'm trying to make,
Prometheus would like to discuss fire with everybody else. All right. I'm going to just
say one thing to close out the earlier line, which is what I think we should have continued with.
When you take the naturally occurring spinners, the unadorned spinners, the naked spinners,
not on, on this 14 dimensional manifold, but on something very closely tied to it,
which I've called the chimeric tangent bundle. That is the, the object which stands in for
the thing that should have had length and angle on it, but just missed. Okay. When you take that
object and you form spinners on that and you don't adorn them, so you're still in the single origin
story, you get very large spinorial objects upstairs on this 14 dimensional world, Y 14,
which is part of the observers. When you pull that information back from Y 14 down to X four,
it miraculously looks like the adorned spinners, the festoon spinners, the spinners that we play
with in ordinary reality. In other words, the 14 dimensional world looks like a four dimensional
world plus a 10 dimensional compliment. So 10 plus four equals 14. That 10 dimensional compliment,
which is called a normal bundle, generates spin properties, internal quantum numbers that look
like the things that give our particles, our particles personality that make, let's say,
up quarks and down quarks charged by negative one third or plus two thirds, that kind of stuff,
or whether or not some quarks feel the weak force and other quarks do not.
So the X four generates Y 14, Y 14 generates something called the chimeric tangent bundle,
chimeric tangent bundle generates unadorned spinners. The unadorned spinners get pulled back
from 14 down to four, where they look like adorned spinners. And we have the right number of them.
You thought you needed three, you only got two, but then something else that you'd never seen
before broke apart on this journey. And it broke into another copy of the thing that you already
have two copies of one piece of that thing broke off. So now you have two generations plus an
imposter third generation, which is, I don't know why we never talk about this possibility
in regular physics. And then you got a bunch of stuff that we haven't seen, which has descriptions.
So people always say, does it make any falsifiable predictions? Yes, it does.
It says that the matter that you should be seeing next has particular properties that can be read
off like weak isospin, weak hypercharge, like the responsiveness to the strong force. The one I
can't tell you is what energy scale it would happen at. So you can't say if those characteristics
can be detected with the current. But it may be that somebody else can. I'm not a physicist.
I'm not a quantum field theorist. I can't, I don't know how you would do that.
The hope for me is that there's some simple explanations for all of it.
Lex, should we have a drink? You're having fun. No, I'm trying to have fun with you.
You know, I had, there's a bunch of fun things to talk about here.
Anyway, that was how I got what I thought you wanted, which is if you think about the fermions
as the artists and the bosons as the brushes and the paint, what I told you is that's how we get
the artists. What are the open questions for you in this? What are the challenges? So you're not
done. Well, there's things that I would like to have in better order. So a lot of people will say,
the reason I hesitate on this is I just have a totally different view than the community.
So for example, I believe that general relativity began in 1913 with Einstein and Grossman.
Now that was the first of like four major papers in this line of thinking. To most physicists,
this general relativity happened when Einstein produced a divergence free gradient,
which turned out to be the gradient of the so-called Hilbert or Einstein-Hilbert action.
And from my perspective, that wasn't true. This is that it began when Einstein said,
look, this is about differential geometry. And the final answer is going to look like
a curvature tensor on one side and matter and energy on the other side. And that was enough.
And then he published a wrong version of it, where it was the Ricci tensor, not the Einstein tensor,
then he corrected the Ricci tensor to make it into the Einstein tensor, then he corrected that to add
a cosmological constant. I can't stand that the community thinks in those terms. There's some
things about which, like there's a question about which contraction do I use? There's an Einstein
contraction. There's a Ricci contraction. They both go between the same spaces. I'm not sure what I
should do. I'm not sure which contraction I should choose. This is called a Shia operator for ship in
a bottle and my stuff. You have this big platform in many ways that inspires people's curiosity about
physics and mathematics. Right. Now, and I'm one of those people. Well, great.
But then you start using a lot of words that I don't understand. I might know them,
but I don't understand. And what's unclear to me if I'm supposed to be listening to those words,
or if it's just, if this is one of those technical things that's intended for a very small
community, or if I'm supposed to actually take those words and start a multi-year study,
not a serious study, but a kind of study when you're interested in learning about machine
learning, for example, or any kind of discipline. That's where I'm a little bit confused. So you
speak beautifully about ideas. You often reveal the beauty in mathematics, in geometry, and I'm
unclear in what are the steps I should be taking. I'm curious, how can I explore? How can I play
with something? How can I play with these ideas and enjoy the beauty of not necessarily understanding
the depth of the theory that you're presenting, but start to share in the beauty, as opposed to
sharing and enjoying the beauty of just the way, the passion with which you speak, which is in itself
fun to listen to, but also starting to be able to understand some aspects of this theory that I can
enjoy it to, and start to build an intuition, what the heck we're even talking about, because
you're basically saying we need to throw a lot of our ideas of views of the universe out,
and I'm trying to find accessible ways along, not in this conversation.
No, I appreciate that. So one of the things that I've done is I've picked on one paragraph
from Edward Witton, and I said, this is the paragraph. If I could only take one paragraph
with me, this is the one I'd take, and it's almost all in prose, not in equations.
And he says, look, this is this is our knowledge of the universe at its deepest level. And he was
writing this during the 1980s. And he has three separate points that constitute our deepest knowledge.
And those three points refer to equations, one to the Einstein field equation, one to the
Dirac equation, and one to the Yang-Mills-Maxwell equation. Now, one thing I would do is take
a look at that paragraph and say, okay, what do these three lines mean? Like it's a finite
amount of verbiage. You can write down every word that you don't know. And you can say,
what do I think? Done. Now, young man. Yes. There's a beautiful wall in Stony Brook, New York,
built by someone who I know you will interview named Jim Simons.
And Jim Simons, he's not the artist, but he's the guy who funded it, world's greatest hedge fund
manager. And on that wall contain the three equations that Whitton refers to in that paragraph.
And so that is the transmission from the paragraph or graph to the wall. Now, that wall needs an
answer, which Roger Penrose has written called the road to reality. Let's call that the tome. So,
this is the subject of the so-called graph wall tome project that is going on in our discord
server and our general group around the portal community, which is how do you take something
that purports in one paragraph to say what the deepest understanding man has of the universe
in which he lives. It's memorialized on a wall, which nobody knows about, which is an incredibly
gorgeous piece of art. And that was written up in a book, which has been written for no man,
right? Maybe it's for a woman, I don't know. But no one should be able to read this book,
because either you're a professional and you know a lot of this book, in which case it's kind of a
refresher to see how Roger thinks about these things. Or you don't even know that this book is
a self-contained invitation to understanding our deepest nature. So, I would say find yourself
in the graph wall tome transmission sequence and join the graph wall tome project if that's of
interest. Okay, beautiful. Now, just to linger on a little longer, what kind of journey do you see
geometric community taking? I don't know. I mean, that's the thing is that first of all,
the professional community has to get very angry and outraged and they have to work through
their feeling that this is nonsense, this is bullshit, or like, no, wait a minute, this is
really cool. Actually, I need some clarification over here. So, there's going to be some sort
of weird coming back together process. Are you already hearing murmurings of that?
That's very funny. Officially, I've seen very little.
So, it's perhaps happening quietly. Yeah. You often talk about we need to get off this planet.
Yep. Can I try to sneak up on that by asking, what in your kind of view is the difference,
the gap between the science of it, the theory, and the actual engineering of building something
that leverages the theory to do something? Like, how big is that? We don't know.
Gap. I mean, if you have 10 extra dimensions to play with
that are the rulers and protractors of the world themselves, can you gain access to those dimensions?
Do you have a hunch? So, I don't know. I don't want to get ahead of myself
because you have to appreciate, I can have hunches and I can, I can jaw off. But one of the ways that
I'm succeeding in this world is to not bow down to my professional communities, nor to ignore them.
Like, I'm actually interested in the criticism. I just want to denature it so that it's not
mostly interpersonal and irrelevant. I believe that they don't want me to speculate,
and I don't need to speculate about this. I can simply say I'm open to the idea that it may
have engineering prospects and it may be a death sentence. We may find out that there's not enough
new here, that even if it were right, that there would be nothing new to do. I can't tell you.
That's what you mean by death sentences. There would not be exciting breakthroughs that follow on.
Wouldn't it be terrible if you couldn't, like, you can do new things in an Einsteinian world
that you couldn't do in a Newtonian world. You know, like you have twin paradoxes or
Lorentz contraction of length or any one of a number of new cool things happen in relativity
theory that didn't happen for Newton. What if there wasn't new stuff to do at the next and
final level? That would be quite sad. Let me ask a silly question. We'll say it with a straight face.
Impossible. So, let me mention Elon Musk. What are your thoughts about he's more,
you're more on the physics theory side of things. He's more on the physics engineering side of
things in terms of SpaceX efforts. What do you think of his efforts to get off this planet?
Well, I think he's the other guy who's semi-serious about getting off this planet.
I think there are two of us who are semi-serious about getting off the planet.
What do you think about his methodology and yours when you look at them?
I don't want to be against Elon. I was so excited that your top video was Ray Kurzweil,
and then I did your podcast. We had some chemistry, so it zoomed up. I thought,
okay, I'm going to beat Ray Kurzweil. So, just as I'm coming up on Ray Kurzweil,
you're like, and now, Alex Friedman's special, Elon Musk, and he blew me out of the water.
So, I don't want to be petty about it. I want to say that I don't, but I am.
Here's the funny part. He's not taking enough risk. He's trying to get us to Mars.
Imagine that he got us to Mars, the moon, and will throw in Titan, and nowhere good enough.
The diversification level is too low. Now, there's a compatibility.
First of all, I don't think Elon is serious about Mars. I think Elon is using Mars.
As a narrative, as a story, as a dream?
No, to make the moon jealous.
To make the moon.
No. I think he's using it as a story to organize us, to reacquaint ourselves with our need
for space, our need to get off this planet. It's a concrete thing. Many people think that he's
shown that he's the most brilliant and capable person on the planet. I don't think that's what
he showed. I think he showed that the rest of us have forgotten our capabilities. So, he's the
only guy who has still kept the faith and is like, what's wrong with you people?
So, you think the lesson we should draw from Elon Musk is there's a capable person within a lot of
us. Elon makes sense to me. In what way?
He's doing what any sensible person should do. He's trying incredible things and he's
partially succeeding, partially failing. To try to solve the obvious problems before us.
Duh. Yeah.
You know, but he comes up with things like, I got it. We'll come up with a battery company,
but batteries aren't sexy. So, we'll make a car around it. It's like, great.
Right. You know, or any one of a number of things. Elon is behaving like a sane person
and I view everyone else as insane. And my feeling is, is that we really have to get off
this planet. We have to get out of this. We have to get out of the neighborhood.
Dillingan, a little bit. Do you think that's a physics problem or an engineering problem?
I think it's a cowardice problem. I think that we're afraid that we had 400 hitters of the mind
like Einstein and Dirac and that era is done and now we're just sort of copy editors.
So, is some of it money? Like, if we become brave enough to go outside the solar system,
can we afford to financially?
Well, I think that that's not really the issue. The issue is, look what Elon did well. He amassed
a lot of money and then he, you know, he plowed it back in and he spun, he spun the wheel and he
made more money and now he's got FU money. Now, the problem is, is that a lot of the people who
have FU money are not people whose middle finger you ever want to see. I want to see Elon's middle
finger. What do you mean by that? Or like, when you say, fuck it, I'm going to do the biggest
possible thing. He's going to do whatever the fuck he wants. Yeah. Right? Fuck you. Fuck anything
that gets in his way that he can afford to push out of his way. And you're saying he's not actually
even doing that enough? No, I'm, he's not going. Please. I'm going to go, Elon's doing fine with
his money. I just want him to enjoy himself, have the most, you know, Dionysian. But you're
saying Mars is playing it safe. He doesn't know how to do anything else. He knows rockets. Yeah.
And he might know some physics at a fundamental level. Yeah. I guess, okay, just let me just
go right back to it. How much physics do you really, how much brilliant breakthrough ideas on the
physics side do you need to get off this planet? I don't know. And I don't know whether, like,
in my most optimistic dream, I don't know whether my stuff gets us off the planet,
but it's hope. It's hope that there's a more fundamental theory that we can access, that we
don't need, you know, whose elegance and beauty will suggest that this is probably the way the
universe goes. Like, you have to say this weird thing, which is this I believe. And this I believe
is a very dangerous statement. But this I believe, I believe that my theory points the way. Now,
Elon might or might not be able to access my theory. I don't know. I don't know what he knows.
But keep in mind, why are we also focused on Elon? It's really weird. It's kind of creepy too.
Why? He's just the person who's asking the obvious questions and doing whatever he can.
But he makes sense to me. You see, Craig Venter makes sense to me. Jim Watson makes sense to me.
But we're focusing on Elon because he's somehow is rare.
Well, that's the weird thing. Like, we've come up with a system that eliminates all Elon
from our pipeline. And Elon somehow snuck through when they weren't quality adjusting
everything. And this idea of disk, distributed idea suppression complex, is that what's
bringing the elons of the world down? It's so funny. He's asking Joe Rogan,
is that a joint? It's like, what will happen if I smoke it? What will happen to the stock price?
What will happen if I scratch myself in public? What will happen if I say what I think about
Thailand or COVID or who knows what? And everybody's like, don't say that. Say this, go do this,
go do that. Well, it's crazy making. It's absolutely crazy making. And if you think about
what we put people through, we need to get people who can use FU money, the FU money they need to
insulate themselves from all of the people who know better. Because my nightmare is that
why did we only get one Elon? What if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of
elons? And the weird thing is like, this is all that remains. You're looking at like Obi-Wan
and Yoda. And it's like, this is all that's left after Order 66 has been executed.
And that's the thing that's really upsetting to me is we used to have elons five deep. And then
we could talk about Elon in the context of his cohort. But this is like, if you were to see a
giraffe in the Arctic with no trees around, you'd think, why the long neck? What a strange site,
you know? How do we get more elons? How do we change this? So I think the use, so we know MIT
and Harvard. So maybe returning to our previous conversation, my sense is that the elons of
the world are supposed to come from MIT and Harvard. Right. And how do you change?
Let's think of one that MIT sort of killed. Have any names in mind? Aaron Schwartz leaps to my
mind. Yeah. Okay. Are we MIT supposed to shield the Aaron Schwartz's from, I don't know, journal
publishers? Or are we supposed to help the journal publishers so that we can throw 35-year
sentences in his face or whatever it is that we did that depressed him? Okay. So here's my point.
Yeah. I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz. And if you want to send Aaron
Schwartz to a state where he's looking at 35 years in prison or something like that, you are my sworn
enemy. You are not MIT. You are the traitorous, irresponsible, middle-brow, pencil-pushing,
green-eye-shade fool that needs to not be in the seat at the presidency of MIT. Period the end.
Get the fuck out of there and let one of our people sit in that chair. And the thing that you've
articulated is that the people in those chairs are not the way they are because they're evil or
somehow morally compromised is that it's just that that's the distributed nature, is that there's
some kind of aspect of the system. These are people who wed themselves to the system. They
adapt every instinct. And the fact is that they're not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt.
Let me ask a silly question. Do you think institutions generally just tend to become that?
No. We get some of the institutions. We get Caltech. Here's what we're supposed to have.
We're supposed to have Caltech. We're supposed to have Reed. We're supposed to have Deep Springs.
We're supposed to have MIT. We're supposed to have a part of Harvard. And when the sharp
elbow crowd comes after the sharp mind crowd, we're supposed to break those sharp elbows and say,
don't come around here again. So what are the weapons that the sharp mind is supposed to use
in our modern day? So to reclaim MIT. What's the future? Are you kidding me?
First of all, assume that this is being seen at MIT. Hey, everybody.
Definitely is. Okay. Hey, everybody. Try to remember who you are. You're the guys who put the
police car on top of the great dump. You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge.
You created a Tetris game in the green building. Now, what is your problem? They killed one of
your own. You should make their life a living hell. You should be the ones who keep the memory
of Aaron Schwartz alive and all of those hackers and all of those mutants. It's like,
it's either our place or it isn't. And if we have to throw 12 more pianos off of the roof,
right? If Harold Edgerton was taking those photographs with slow mo back in the 40s,
if Noam Chomsky is on your faculty, what the hell is wrong with you kids? You are the most
creative and insightful people and you can't figure out how to defend Aaron Schwartz. That's
on you guys. So, some of that is giving more power to the young, like you said, to the brave.
Taking power from the feeble and the middle brown. Yeah, but what is the mechanism to me?
I don't know. Do you have some nine volt batteries? No. It's a copper wire.
A capacitor? I tend to believe you have to create an alternative
and make the alternative so much better that it makes MIT absolutely unless they change.
And that's what forces change. So, as opposed to somehow...
Okay, so use projection mapping. What's projection mapping?
Where you take some complicated edifice and you map all of its planes and then you actually
project some unbelievable graphics, re-skinning a building, let's say, at night.
That's right. Yeah.
Okay, so you want to do some graffiti art with light.
You basically want to hack the system.
No, I'm saying, look, listen to me. We're smarter than they are.
And they, you know what they say? They say things like,
I think we need some geeks. Get me two PhDs.
Right.
You treat PhDs like that, that's a bad move because PhDs are capable.
And we act like our job is to peel grapes for our betters.
Yeah, that's a strange thing. And you speak about it very eloquently is how we treat
the, basically the greatest minds in the world, which is like at their prime, which is PhD students.
Like we pay them nothing.
I'm done with it.
Yeah.
Right? We got to take what's ours.
So, take back MIT, become ungovernable, become ungovernable.
And by the way, when you become ungovernable, don't do it by throwing food.
Don't do it by pouring salt on the lawn like a jerk.
Do it through brilliance because what you Caltech and MIT can do, and maybe
Rensselaer Polytechnic or Worcester Polytechnic, I don't know, Lehigh.
God damn it. What's wrong with you technical people? You act like you're a servant class.
It's unclear to me how you reclaim it, except with brilliance, like you said.
But to me that the way you reclaim it with brilliance is to go outside the system.
Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class, what you guys are going to do about it, right?
The super capable people need to flex, need to be individual.
They need to stop giving away all their power to a zeitgeist or a community or this or that.
You're not indoor cats. You're outdoor cats. Go be outdoor cats.
Do you think we're going to see this kind of change happen?
You were the one asking me before, like what about the World War II generation?
Right. What I'm trying to say is that there's a technical revolt coming.
Here's, you want to talk about this?
But I'm trying to lead it, right? I'm trying to see.
No, you're not trying to lead it.
I'm trying to get a blueprint here.
All right, Lex.
Yeah.
How angry are you about our country pretending that you and I can't actually do technical
subjects so that they need an army of kids coming in from four countries in Asia?
It's not about the four countries in Asia. It's not about those kids.
It's about lying about us, that we don't care enough about science and technology,
that we're incapable of it, as if we don't have Chinese and Russians and Koreans and Croatians.
Like we've got everybody here. The only reason you're looking outside is that you want to hire
cheap people from the family business because you don't want to pass the family business on.
And you know what? You didn't really build the family business. It's not yours to decide.
You, the boomers, and you, the silent generation, you did your bit,
but you also fouled a lot of stuff up. And you're custodians. You are caretakers.
You were supposed to hand something. What you did instead was to gorge yourself on cheap foreign
labor, which you then held up as being much more brilliant than your own children, which was never true.
See, but I'm trying to understand how we create a better system without anger,
without revolution, not by kissing and hugs. I mean, I don't understand within MIT what
the mechanism of building a better MIT is. We're not going to pay Elsevier.
Aaron Schwartz was right. JSTOR is an abomination. But why, who within MIT,
who within institutions is going to do that when, just like you said, the people who are running the
show are more senior. I don't know if Frank will check to speak out.
So you're, it's basically individuals that step up. I mean, one of the surprising things about
Elon is that one person can inspire so much. He's got academic freedom. It just comes from money.
I don't agree with that. Do you think money? Okay. So yes, certainly,
sorry, and testicles. Yes, but I think that testicles is more important than money or guts.
I think, I do agree with you. You speak about this a lot that because the money in the academic
institutions has been so constrained that people are misbehaving and horrible. Yes. But I don't
think that if we reverse that and give a huge amount of money, people will all of a sudden
behave well. I think it also takes guts. Now you need to give people security.
Like you need to know that you have a job on Monday. When on Friday you say,
I'm not so sure I really love diversity and inclusion. And somebody's like, wait, what?
You didn't love diversity? We had a statement on diversity and you wouldn't sign? Are you
against the inclusion part or are you against diversity? Do you just not like people like you?
You're like, actually, that has nothing to do with anything. You're making this into
something that it isn't. I don't want to sign your goddamn stupid statement and get out of my lab.
Right? Get out of my lab. It all begins from the middle finger. Get out of my lab.
The administrators need to find other work. Yeah. Listen, I agree with you and I hope to
seek your advice and wisdom as we change this because I'd love to see.
I will visit you in prison if that's what you're asking.
I have no, I think prison is great. You get a lot of reading done and good working out.
Well, let me ask something I brought up before is the Nietzsche quote of,
beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
Are you worried that your focus on the flaws in the system that we've just been talking about
has damaged your mind or the part of the mind of your mind that's able to see the beauty in
the world in the system? Because you have so sharply been able to see the flaws in the system,
you can no longer step back and appreciate its beauty.
Look, I'm the one who's trying to get the institutions to save themselves by getting
rid of their inhabitants, but leaving the institution, like a neutron bomb that removes
the unworkable leadership class, but leaves the structures.
So the leadership class is really the problem.
The leadership class is the problem.
But the individual like the professors, the individual scholars.
Well, the professors are going to have to go back into training to remember how to be professors.
Like people are cowards at the moment because if they're not cowards, they're unemployed.
Yeah. That's one of the disappointing things I've encountered is, to me, 10-year...
But nobody has 10-year now.
Whether they do or not, they certainly don't have the kind of character and
fortitude that I was hoping to see to me.
But they'd be gone.
But see, you're dreaming about the people who used to live at MIT.
You're dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university.
And if you looked at somebody like Isidore Singer is very old,
I don't know what state he's in, but that guy was absolutely the real deal.
And if you look at Noam Chomsky, tell me that Noam Chomsky has been muzzled.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, what I'm trying to get at is you're talking about younger energetic people,
but those people, like when I say something like, I'm against, I'm for inclusion and I'm
for diversity, but I'm against diversity and inclusion, TM, like the movement.
Well, I couldn't say that if I was a professor.
Oh my God, he's against our sacred document.
Okay. Well, in that kind of a world, do you want to know how many things I don't agree with you on?
Like we could go on for days and days and days, all of the nonsense that you've parroted
inside of the institution.
Any sane person has no need for it.
They have no want for desire.
Do you think you have to have some patience for nonsense
when many people work together in a system?
How long has string theory gone on for and how long have I been patient?
Okay. So you're talking about limit to patience.
You're talking about like 36 years of modern nonsense in string theory.
So you can do like eight to 10 years, but not more.
I can do 40 minutes.
This is 36 years.
Well, you've done that over two hours already.
No, but I appreciate it.
It's been 36 years of nonsense since the anomaly cancellation in string theory.
It's like, what are you talking about about patience?
I mean, Lex, you're not even acting like yourself.
You're trying to stay in the system.
I'm trying to see if perhaps, so my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it,
which you highlight and the fundamentals of the system aren't broken.
Because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken,
then I just don't see a way for my teachers to succeed.
I don't see how young people take over MIT.
By inspiring us.
You know, the great part about being at MIT,
like when you saw the genius in these pranks, the heart, the irreverence,
we were talking about Tom Lehrer the last time.
Tom Lehrer was as naughty as the day is long.
Agreed?
Agreed.
Was he also a genius?
Was he well-spoken?
Was he highly cultured?
He was so talented, so intellectual that he could just make fart jokes morning, noon, and night.
Okay.
Well, in part, the right to make fart jokes, the right to, for example, put a functioning phone
booth that was ringing on top of the great dome at MIT has to do with, we are such bad asses that
we can actually do this stuff.
Well, don't tell me about it anymore.
Go break the law.
Go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not want to prosecute you.
Break the law in a way that lets us know that you're calling us out on our bullshit,
that you're filled with love, and that our technical talent has not gone to sleep.
It's not incapable.
You know, and if the idea is that you're going to dig a moat around the university and fill it
with tiger sharks, that's awesome, because I don't know how you're going to do it.
Because I don't know how you're going to do it, but if you actually manage to do that,
I'm not going to prosecute you under a reckless endangerment.
That's beautifully put.
I hope those, first of all, they'll listen.
I hope young people at MIT will take over in this kind of way.
In the introduction to your podcast episode on Jeff Epstein, you give to me a really moving
story, but unfortunately for me too brief about your experience with a therapist
and the lasting terror that permeated your mind.
Can you go there?
Can you tell?
No, thanks.
I mean, I appreciate what you're saying.
I said it obliquely.
I said enough.
There are bad people who cross our paths, and the current vogue is to say, oh, I'm a survivor.
I'm a victim.
I can do anything I want.
This is a broken person, and I don't know why I was sent to a broken person as a kid.
And to be honest with you, I also felt like in that story, I say that I was able to say no.
And this was like the entire weight of authority, and he was misusing his position,
and I was also able to say no.
What I couldn't say no to was having him reinflicted in my life.
All right, so you were sent back a second time.
I tried to complain about what had happened, and I tried to do it in a way that did not
immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself, because I didn't—we
don't have the tools to deal with sexual misbehavior.
We have nuclear weapons.
We don't have any way of saying this is probably not a good place or a role for you at this moment
as an authority figure, and something needs to be worked on.
So in general, when we see somebody who is misbehaving in that way, our immediate instinct
is to treat the person as Satan, and we understand why.
We don't want our children to be at risk.
Now, I personally believe that I fell down on the job and did not call out the Jeffrey Epstein
thing early enough because I was terrified of what Jeffrey Epstein represents, and this recapitulated
the old terror trying to tell the world this therapist is out of control.
And when I said that, the world responded by saying, well, you have two appointments
booked and you have to go for the second one.
So I got reinflicted into this office on this person who was now convinced that I was about
to tear down his career and his reputation.
It might have been on the verge of suicide for all I know.
I don't know, but he was very, very angry.
And he was furious with me that I had breached a sacred confidence of his office.
What kind of ripple effects has that had to the rest of your life,
the absurdity and the cruelty of that?
I mean, there's no sense to it.
Well, see, this is the thing people don't really grasp, I think.
There's an academic who I got to know many years ago named Jennifer Fried who has a theory of
betrayal, which she calls institutional betrayal.
And her gambit is, is that when you were betrayed by an institution that is sort of like a fiduciary
or a parental obligation to take care of you, that you find yourself in a far different situation
with respect to trauma than if you were betrayed by somebody who's a peer.
And so I think that in my situation, I kind of repeat a particular dynamic with authority.
I come in not following all the rules, trying to do some things, not trying to do others,
blah, blah, blah, and then I get into a weird relationship with authority.
And so I have more experience with what I would call institutional betrayal.
Now, the funny part about it is that when you don't have masks or PPE in a influenza-like
pandemic and you're missing ICU beds and ventilators, that is ubiquitous institutional betrayal.
So I believe that in a weird way, I was very early.
The idea of, and this is like the really hard concept, pervasive or otherwise universal
institutional betrayal, where all of the institutions, you can count on any hospital
to not charge you properly for where their services are.
You can count on no pharmaceutical company to produce the drug that will be maximally beneficial
to the people who take it.
But you know that your financial professionals are not simply working in your best interest.
And that issue had to do with the way in which growth left our system.
So I think that the weird thing is, is that this first institutional betrayal by a therapist
left me very open to the idea of, okay, well, maybe the schools are bad, maybe the hospitals
are bad, maybe the drug companies are bad, maybe our food is off, maybe our journalists
are not serving journalistic ends, and that was what allowed me to sort of go all the distance and
say, huh, I wonder if our problem is that something is causing all of our sense-making
institutions to be off.
That was the big insight and tying that to a single etiology.
What if it's just about growth?
They were all built on growth and now we've promoted people who are capable of keeping
quiet that their institutions aren't working.
So we've, the privileged, silent aristocracy, the people who can be counted upon,
not to mention a fire when a raging fire is tearing through a building.
But nevertheless, it's how big of a psychological burden is that?
It's huge.
It's terrible.
I mean, it's crushing.
It's very, it's very comforting to be the parental, I mean, I don't know.
I treasure, I mean, we were just talking about MIT, we can, I can intellectualize and agree
with everything you're saying, but there's a comfort, a warm blanket of being within the
institution and up until Aaron Schwartz, let's say.
In other words, now, if I look at the provost and the president as mommy and daddy,
you did what to my big brother?
You did what to our family?
Yeah.
You sold us out in which way?
What secrets left for China?
You hired which workforce?
You did what to my wages?
You took this portion of my grant for what purpose?
You just stole my retirement through a fringe rate.
What did you do?
But can you still, I mean, the thing is about this view you have, is it often turns out to be
sadly correct?
Well, this is the thing.
And, but let me just, in this silly hopeful thing, do you still have hope in institutions?
Can you within your, psychologically?
Yes.
I'm referring not intellectually, because you have to carry this burden.
Can you still have a hope like within you, when you sit at home alone, and as opposed
to seeing the darkness within these institutions, seeing a hope?
Well, but this is the thing, I want to confront
not for the purpose of a dust-up.
I believe, for example, if you've heard episode 19, that the best outcome is for
Carol Greider to come forward as we discussed in episode 19.
Would your brother, Brett, want to start a new episode?
And say, you know what, I screwed up.
He did call, he did suggest the experiment.
I didn't understand that it was his theory that was producing it.
Maybe I was slow to grasp it, but my bad, and I don't want to pay for this bad
choice on my part, let's say, for the rest of my career.
I want to own up and I want to help make sure that we do what's right with what's left.
And that's one little case within the institution that you would like to see made?
I would like to see MIT very clearly come out and say, you know,
Margot O'Toole was right when she said, David Baltimore's lab here
produced some stuff that was not reproducible with Teresa Minishikari's research.
I want to see the courageous people, I would like to see the Aaron Schwartz wing
of the computer science department.
Yeah, let's think about it.
Wouldn't that be great if they said, you know, an injustice was done and we're going to write
that wrong just as if this was Alan Turing?
Which I don't think they've righted that wrong.
Well, then let's have the Turing Schwartz wing.
They're starting a new college of computing.
It wouldn't be wonderful to call it the Turing Schwartz wing.
I would like to have the Madame Woo wing of the physics department.
And I'd love to have the Emmy Nerder statue in front of the math department.
I mean, like you want to get excited about actual diversity and inclusion?
Yeah.
Well, let's go with our absolute best people who never got theirs because there is structural
bigotry, you know?
But if we don't actually start celebrating the beautiful stuff that we're capable of when
we're handed heroes and we fumble them into the trash, what the hell?
I mean, Lex, this is such nonsense.
We just pulling our head out.
Well, you know, on everyone's seekum should be tattooed.
If you can read this, you're too close.
Beautifully put, and I'm a dreamer just like you.
So I don't see as much of the darkness genetically or due to my life experience,
but I do share the hope.
For MIT, the institution that we care a lot about.
We both do.
Yeah.
And Harvard institution, I don't give a damn about, but you do.
So I love Harvard.
I'm just kidding.
I love Harvard, but Harvard and I have a very difficult relationship.
And part of what, you know, when you love a family that isn't working,
I don't want to trash.
I didn't bring up the name of the president of MIT during the Aaron Schwartz period.
It's not vengeance.
I want the rot cleared out.
I don't need to go after human beings.
Yeah. Just like you said, with the, with the disk formulation,
the individual human beings don't necessarily carry them.
It's those chairs that are so powerful in which they sit.
It's the chairs, not the humans.
It's not the humans.
Without naming names, can you tell the story of your struggle
during your time at Harvard?
Maybe in a way that tells the bigger story of the struggle of young,
bright minds that are trying to come up with big, bold ideas
within the institutions that we're talking about.
You can start.
I mean, in part, it starts with coffee with a couple of Croatians
in the math department at MIT, and we used to talk about
music and dance and math and physics and love and all this kind of stuff,
as Eastern Europeans love to, and I ate it up.
And my friend, Gordana, who was an instructor in the MIT math department
when I was a graduate student at Harvard, said to me,
and I'm probably going to do a bad version of her accent, but here we go.
Will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar?
And I said, what secret seminar?
Eric, don't joke.
And I said, I'm not used to this style of humor, Gordana.
I said, Eric, the secret seminar that your advisor is running,
I said, what are you talking about?
You know, your advisor is running a secret seminar on this aspect.
I think it was like the churned Simon's invariant.
Not sure what the topic was again, but she gave me the room number and the time,
and she was like not cracking a smile.
I've never known her to make this kind of a joke,
and I thought this was crazy.
And I was trying to have an advisor.
I didn't want an advisor, but people said you have to have one, so I took one.
And I went to this room like 15 minutes early, and there was not a soul inside it.
It was outside of the math department.
And it was still in the same building, the science center at Harvard.
And I sat there and I let five minutes go by.
I let seven minutes go by, 10 minutes go by.
There's nobody.
I thought, okay, so this was all an elaborate joke.
And then like three minutes to the hour,
this graduate student walks in and like sees me and does a double take.
And then I start to see the professors in geometry and topology start to file in.
And everybody's like very disconcerted that I'm in this room.
And finally, the person who was supposed to be my advisor walks in to the seminar
and sees me and goes, why does a ghost? And I realized that the secret seminar is true,
that the department is conducting a secret seminar on the exact topic that I'm interested in,
not telling me about it.
And that these are the reindeer games that the Rudolphs of the department are not invited to.
And so then I realized, okay, I did not understand it.
There's a parallel department. And that became the beginning of an incredible odyssey
in which I came to understand that the game that I had been sold about publication,
about blind refereeing, about openness and scientific transmission of information
was all a lie. I came to understand that at the very top, there's a second system that's about
closed meetings and private communications and agreements about citation and publication
that the rest of us don't understand. And that in large measure, that is the thing that I won't
submit to. And so when you ask me questions like, well, why wouldn't you feel good about
talking to your critics? The answer is, oh, you don't know. If you stay in a nice hotel,
you don't realize that there is an entire second structure inside of that hotel where
there's usually a workers' cafe in a resort complex that isn't available to the people
who are staying in the hotel. And then there are private hallways inside the same
hotel that are parallel structures. So that's what I found, which was, in essence,
just the way you can stay hotels your whole life and not realize that inside of every hotel is
a second structure that you're not supposed to see as the guest. There is a second structure
inside of academics that behaves totally differently with respect to how people get
dinged, how people get their grants taken away, how this person comes to have that thing named
after them. And by pretending that we're not running a parallel structure,
I have no patience for that anymore. So I got a chance to see how the game,
how hardball is really played at Harvard. And I'm now eager to play hardball
back with the same people who played hardball with me.
Let me ask two questions on this. So one, do you think it's possible, I call those people
assholes, that's the technical term. Do you think it's possible that that's just
not the entire system, but a part of the system? You can navigate, you can swim in the waters
and find the groups of people who do aspire to-
The guy who rescued my PhD was one of the people who filed in to the secret seminar.
Right. But are there people outside of this?
Is he an asshole?
Well, yes, I was a bad-
No, but I'm trying to make this point, which is this isn't my failure to correctly map these
people. It's yours. You have a simplification that isn't going to work.
I think, okay, asshole is the wrong term. I would say lacking of character.
What would you have had these people do? Why did they do this? Why have a secret seminar?
I don't understand the exact dynamics of a secret seminar, but I think the right thing to do
is to see individuals like you. There might be a reason to have a secret seminar,
but they should detect that an individual like you, a brilliant mind who's thinking about
certain ideas, could be damaged by this. I don't think that they see it that way.
The idea is we're going to sneak food to the children we want to survive.
Yes, so that's highly problematic and there should be people within that room.
But I'm trying to say, this is the thing, the ball that can't, is Thrombeck won't be caught.
The problem is, they know that most of their children won't survive, and they can't say that.
I see. Sorry to interrupt. You mean that the fact that the whole system is underfunded,
that they naturally have to pick favorites?
They live in a world which reached steady state of some level, let's say, in the early 70s.
In that world, before that time, you have a professor like Norman Steenrod, and you'd have
20 children that is graduate students, and all of them would go on to be professors,
and all of them would want to have 20 children. You start taking higher and higher powers of 20,
and you see that the system could not, it's not just about money. The system couldn't survive.
The way it's supposed to work now is that we should shut down the vast majority of PhD programs,
and we should let the small number of truly top places populate
mostly teaching and research departments that aren't PhD producing. We don't want to do that
because we use PhD students as a labor force. The whole thing has to do with growth, resources,
dishonesty, and in that world, you see all of these adaptations to a ruthless world where
the key question is, where are we going to bury this huge number of bodies of people who don't
work out? My problem was I wasn't interested in dying.
You clearly highlight that there's aspects of the system that are broken, but as an individual,
is your role to exit the system or just acknowledge that it's a game and win it?
My role is to survive and thrive in the public eye. In other words, when you have an escapee
of the system, like yourself, such as, and that person says, you know, I wasn't exactly finished.
Let me show you a bunch of stuff. Let me show you that the theory of telomeres never got reported
properly. Let me show you that all of marginal economics is supposed to be redone with a different
version of the differential calculus. Let me show you that you didn't understand the
self-dual Yang-Mills equations correctly in topology and physics because they're in fact
much more broadly found and it's only the mutations that happen in special dimensions. There are lots
of things to say, but this particular group of people, like if you just take, where are all the
Gen X and Millennial University presidents? They're all in a holding pattern. Now,
why in the story of telomeres was it an older professor and a younger graduate student?
It's this issue of what would be called interference competition. So, for example,
orcas try to drown minke whales by covering their blow holes so that they suffocate because the
needed resource is air. Okay, well, what do the universities do? They try to make sure that you
can't be viable, that you need them, that you need their grants, you need to be zinged with overhead
charges or fringe rates or all of the games that the locals love to play. Well, my point is, okay,
what's the cost of this? How many people died as a result of these interference competition games?
You know, when you take somebody like Douglas Prasher who did green fluorescent protein
and he drives a shuttle bus, right? Because his grant runs out and he has to give away all of his
research and all of that research gets a Nobel Prize and he gets to drive a shuttle bus for
$35,000 a year. What do you mean by died? Do you mean their career, their dreams, their passions?
Yeah, as an academic, Doug Prasher was dead for a long period of time.
Okay, so as a person who's escaped the system, can't you at this, because you also have in
your mind a powerful theory that may turn out to be useful, maybe not. Let's hope.
Can't you also play the game enough, like with the children? So like publish,
and if you told me that this would work, really what I want to do, you see, is I would love to
revolutionize a field with an H index of zero. We have these proxies that count how many papers
you've written, how cited are the papers you've written. All this is nonsense.
That's interesting. Sorry, what do you mean by a field with an H index?
So H index is count somehow, how many papers have you gotten that get so many citations?
Let's say H index undefined. For example, I don't have an advisor for my PhD,
but I have to have an advisor as far as something called the math genealogy project that tracks
who advised whom down the line. So I am my own advisor, which sets up a loop.
How many students do I have an infinite number or descendants?
They don't want to have that story. So I have to be, I have to have formal advisor,
Raoul Bot, and my Wikipedia entry, for example, says that I was advised by Raoul Bot, which is not
true. So you get fit into a system that says, well, we have to know what your H index is.
We have to know, you know, where are you a professor if you want to apply for a grant?
It makes all of these assumptions. What I'm trying to do is in part to show all of this
is nonsense. This is proxy BS that came up in the institutional setting. And right now,
it's important for those of us who are still vital like Elon. It would be great to have Elon as a
professor of physics and engineering, right? It seems ridiculous to say, but just as a shot
in the arm, you know, like, it'd be great to have you on at Caltech even one day a week.
One day a month. Okay. Well, why can't we be in there? It's the same reason. Why can't you be
on the view? Why can't you be on Bill Martin? We need to know what you're going to do before we
take you on the show. Well, I don't want to tell you what I'm going to do.
Do you think you need to be able to dance the dance a little bit?
I can dance the dance fun to be on the view. Oh, come on.
So you can. Yeah, you do. I can do that fine. Here's where the place that it goes south is
there like a set of questions that get you into this more adversarial stuff. And you've in fact
asked some of those more adversarial questions this setting. And they're not things that are
necessarily aggressive, but they're things that are making assumptions. Right? So when you have
a question like, you know, Lex, are you avoiding your critics? You know, it's just like, okay,
well, why did you frame that that way? Or the next question would be like,
do you think that you should have a special exemption and that you should have the right
to break rules and everyone else should have to follow them? Like that question I find
innervating. Yeah, it doesn't really come out of anything meaningful. It's just like we feel
we're supposed to ask that of the other person to show that we're not captured by their madness.
That's not the real question you want to ask me. If you want to get really excited about this,
you want to ask, do you think this thing is right? Yeah, weirdly, I do. Do you think that
it's going to be immediately seen to be right? I don't. I think it's gonna, it's gonna have
an interesting fight and it's gonna have an interesting evolution. And what do you hope
to do with it in non physical terms? Gosh, I hope it revolutionizes our relationship of
well, with people outside of the institutional framework and it reinflicts us into the institutional
framework where we can do the most good to bring the institutions back to health.
You know, it's like, these are positive uplifting questions. If you had Frank Wilczek,
you wouldn't say, Frank, let's be honest, you have done very little with your life after the
original huge show that you used to break onto the physics scene. Like we weirdly ask people
different questions based upon how they sit down. Yeah, that's very strange, right? But
you have to understand that. So here's the thing, I get these days a large number of emails from
people with the equivalent of a theory of everything for AGI. Yeah. And I use my own radar, BS radar,
to detect unfairly, perhaps, whether they're full of shit or not. Right. I love where you're
going with this, by the way. And my concern I often think about is there's elements of brilliance
in what people write to me. And I'm trying to right now, as you made it clear, the kind of
judgments and assumptions we make, how am I supposed to deal with you who are not an outsider of
the system and think about what you're doing? Because my radar is saying you're not full of
shit. But I'm also not completely outside of the system. That's right. You've danced beautifully.
You've actually got all the credibility that you're supposed to get all the nice little stamps
of approval, not all, but a large enough amount. I mean, it's hard to put into words exactly why
you sound, whether your theory turns out to be good or not, you sound like a special human being.
I appreciate that. And thank you very much. In a good way.
So, but what am I supposed to do with that flood of emails from AGI?
Well, why do I sound different? I don't know. And I would like to systemize that. I don't know.
Look, when you're talking to people, you very quickly can surmise. Am I claiming to be a physicist?
No, I say it every turn. I'm not a physicist. When you say something about bundles, you say,
well, can you explain it differently? I'm pushing around on this area,
that lever over there. I'm trying to find something that we can play with and engage.
And, you know, another thing is that I'll say something at scale. So, if I was saying completely
wrong things about bundles on the Joe Rogan program, you don't think that we wouldn't hear a crushing
chorus? And the same thing with geometric unity. So, I put up this video from this Oxford lecture.
I understand that it's not a standard lecture, but you haven't heard, you know,
the most brilliant people in the field say, well, this is obviously nonsense.
They don't know what to make of it. They're going to hide behind, well, he hasn't said enough
details. Where's the paper? Where's the paper? I've seen the criticism. I've gotten the same kind
of criticism. I've published a few things and like especially stuff related to Tesla.
We did studies on Tesla vehicles and the kind of criticism I've gotten
showed that they're completely... Oh, right. Like the guy who had Elon Musk on his program
twice is going to give us an accurate assessment. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
It's just very low level. Like without actually ever addressing the content.
You know, Lex, I think that in part you're trying to solve a puzzle that isn't really your puzzle.
I think you know that I'm sincere. You don't know whether the theory is going to work or not.
And you know that it's not coming out of somebody who's coming out of left field.
Like the story makes sense. There's enough that's new and creative and different in other
aspects where you can check me that your real concern is, are you really telling me that when
you start breaking the rules, you see the system for what it is and it's become really vicious
and aggressive? And the answer is yes. And I had to break the rules in part because of learning
issues because I came into this field with a totally different set of attributes. My profile
just doesn't look like anybody else's remotely. But as a result, what that did is it showed me
what is the system true to its own ideals or does it just follow these weird procedures?
And then when you take it off the rails, it behaves terribly. And that's really what my
story I think does is it just says, well, he completely takes the system into new territory
where it's not expecting to have to deal with somebody with these confusing sets of attributes.
And I think what he's telling us is he believes it behaves terribly. Now,
if you take somebody with perfect standardized tests and a winner of math competitions and you
put them in a PhD program, they're probably going to be okay. I'm not saying that the system
breaks down for everybody under all circumstances. I'm saying when you present the system with a
novel situation, at the moment, it will almost certainly break down with probability approaching
100%. But to me, the painful and the tragic thing is it sorry to bring out my motherly instinct,
but it feels like it's too much. It could be too much of a burden to exist outside the system.
Maybe, by psychologically. First of all, I've got a podcast that I kind of like and I've got
amazing friends. I have a life which has more interesting people passing through it than I
know what to do with. And they haven't managed to kill me off yet. So, so far, so good.
Speaking of which, you host an amazing podcast that we've mentioned several times,
but should mention over and over the portal where you somehow manage every single conversation
is a surprise. You go, I mean, not just the guests, but just the places you take them,
the, the kind of ways they become challenging and how you recover from that. I mean, it's,
there's just, it's full of genuine human moments. So, I really appreciate what you're,
it's a fun, fun podcast to listen to. Let me ask some silly questions about it. What,
what have you learned about conversation, about human to human conversation?
Well, I have a problem that I haven't solved on the portal, which is that in general, when I ask
people questions, they usually find their deeply grooved answers. And I'm not so interested in
all of the deeply grooved answers. And so, there's a complaint, which I'm very sympathetic to
actually, that I talk over people that I won't sit still for the answer. And I think that that's
weirdly sort of correct. It's not that I'm not interested in hearing other voices. It's that
I'm not interested in hearing the same voice on my program that I could have gotten than somebody
else's. And I haven't solved that well. So, I've learned that I need a new conversational technique
where I can keep somebody from finding their comfortable place and yet not be the voice
talking over that person. Yeah, it's funny. I get sense, like your conversation with Brett,
I can sense you detect that the line he's going under down is, you know how it's going to end.
And you think it's a useless line. So, you'll just stop it right there and you take them
into the direction that you think it should go. But that requires interruption.
Well, and it does so far. I haven't found a better way. I'm looking for a better way.
It's not like I don't hear the problem. I do hear the problem. I just, I haven't solved the problem.
And on the Brett episode, I was insufferable. It was very difficult to listen to. It was so
overbearing. But on the other hand, I was right. It's funny. You keep saying that,
but I didn't find it, maybe because I heard brothers. Like I heard a big brother.
Yeah, it was pretty bad. Really? I think so. I didn't think it was bad at all.
Well, a lot of people found it insufferable. Interesting.
And I think it also has to do with the fact that this has become a frequent experience.
I have several shows where somebody who I very much admire and think of as courageous,
just, you know, I'm talking with them, maybe we're friends and they sit down on their show
and they immediately become this fake person, like two seconds in there. They're sort of
saying, well, I don't want to be too critical or too harsh. I don't want to name any names. I want
to this don't, he's like, okay, I'm going to put my listeners through three hours of you being
sweetness and light. Yeah. Like at least give me some reality and then we can decide to shelve
the show and never let it hear, you know, the call of freedom in the bigger world.
But I've seen you break out of that a few times. I've seen you be successful with it.
I forgot to guess, but she was dressed with,
where at the end of the episode, you had to nod your head about Brett.
Agnes Caller. Yeah, Agnes Caller. Agnes Caller, the philosopher at the University of Chicago.
Yeah, you've continuously broken out of her. You guys went, you know, I didn't even seem pretty
genuine. I like her. I'm completely ethically opposed to what she's ethically for.
Well, she was great. And she wasn't like, you're both going hard. She's grown up.
Yeah, exactly. And she doesn't like care about her. So that was awesome. Yeah.
But you're saying that some people are difficult to break out. Well, it's just that, you know,
she was bringing the courage of her convictions. She was sort of defending the system. And I thought,
wow, that's a pretty indefensible system that you're defending.
Well, that's great though. She's doing that, isn't it?
I mean, it made for an awesome, I think it's very informative for the world.
Yes, you just hated. I just can't stand the idea that somebody says, well,
we don't care who gets paid or who gets the credit as long as we get the goodies,
because that seems like insane. Have you ever been afraid leading into a conversation?
Gary Kasparov. Really?
By the way, I mean, I know I'm just a fan taking requests.
But I started the beginning in Russian. And in fact, I used one word incorrectly.
Is that terrible?
You know, it was pretty good. It's pretty good Russian.
What was terrible is I think he complimented you, right? No, he complimented you, he was like me.
Did he compliment you on your Russian?
Well, he said almost perfect Russian.
Yeah, like he was full shit. That was not great Russian.
That was not great Russian.
Yeah, that was hard. You tried hard, which is what matters.
That is so insulting.
I hope so. But I do hope you continue. It felt like, I don't know how long it went.
It might have been like a two hour conversation, but it felt, I hope it continues.
Like I feel like you have many conversations with Gary. Yeah.
I would love to hear. There's certain conversation I would just love to hear.
Well, it's just, you know, he's coming from a very,
it's this issue about needing to overpower people in a very dangerous world.
And so Gary has that need.
Yeah, he was interrupting you. It's an interesting dynamic.
It was a, it was an interesting dynamic. Two Weinstein's going on.
Two, I mean, two powerhouse egos, brilliant.
No, you don't say egos. Minds, spirits.
You don't have an ego. You're the most humble person I know.
Is that true?
No, that's a complete lie. Do you think about your own mortality?
Death? Sure.
Are you afraid?
Well, death.
I released a theory during something that can kill older people. Sure.
Oh, is there a little bit of a parallel there?
Of course. Of course. I don't want it to die with me.
What do you hope your legacy is?
Oh, I hope my legacy is accurate.
I'd like to write on my accomplishments rather than
how my community decided to ding me while I was alive. That would be great.
What about if it was significantly exaggerated?
I don't want it.
You want it to be accurate?
I've got some pretty terrific stuff and whether it works out or doesn't,
that I would like it to reflect what I actually was.
I'll settle for accurate.
What would you say, what is the greatest element of
Erich Weinstein's accomplishment in life,
in terms of being accurate? What are you most proud of?
Trying.
The idea that we were stalled out in the hardest field at the most difficult juncture,
and that I didn't listen to that voice ever that said, stop.
You're hurting yourself. You're hurting your family.
You're hurting everybody. You're embarrassing yourself.
You're screwing up. You can't do this. You're a failure. You're a fraud.
Turn back. Save yourself.
That voice, I didn't ultimately listen to it and it was going for 35, 37 years.
Very hard.
And I hope you never listen to that voice.
That's why you're an inspiration.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Erich, I'm just infinitely honored that you would spend time with me.
You've been a mentor to me, almost a friend.
I can't imagine a better person to talk to in this world.
So thank you so much for talking to me.
I can't wait till we do it again.
Lex, thanks for sticking with me.
And thanks for being the most singular guy in the podcasting space.
In terms of all of my interviews, I would say that the last one I did with you,
many people feel was my best and it was a non-conventional one.
So whatever it is that you're bringing to the game,
I think everyone's noticing and keep at it.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Erich Weinstein
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And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Erich Weinstein's first
appearance on this podcast.
Everything is great about war, except all the destruction.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.