The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, his fourth
time on the podcast, both sadness and hope run through his
heart and his mind. And the result is a complicated, brilliant
human being who I'm fortunate to call a friend. Quick mention of
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Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
You often talk about getting off this planet. And I think you
don't often talk about extra terrestrial life, intelligent life
out there. Do you wonder about this kind of thing about
intelligent civilizations out there?
I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way.
In a certain sense, I do find that speculating about Bigfoot and
the Loch Ness Monster and Space Aliens is kind of a recreation
for when things aren't going very well. At least it gives us
some meaning and purpose in our lives. So I worry about, for
example, the simulation hypothesis is taking over from
religion. You can't quite believe enough to go to church or
synagogue or the mosque on the weekend. So then you just take
up an interest in in the simulation theory because that's
something like what you do for your job coding. I do think that
in some sense, the issue of aliens is a really interesting
one, but has been spoiled by too much sort of recreational
escapism. The key question that I find is, let's assume that it
is possible to look out at the night sky and see all of these
distant worlds and then go visit them. If that is possible,
it's almost certainly possible through some as yet unknown or
not accepted theory of physics beyond Einstein. And I mean,
it doesn't have to be that way, but probably is. If that theory
exists, there would be a percentage of the worlds that
have life in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way that
would have encountered the ability to escape soon enough
after unlocking the power of the atom at a minimum and whatever
they have that is probably analogous to the cell on that
world. So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing that
arises, probably not carbon based, probably doesn't have DNA,
but that something that fits the pattern of Darwinian theory,
which is descent with variation, differential success.
And thereby constantly improving and so on that through time,
there'll be a trajectory where there'll be something
increasingly complex and fascinating and beautiful like us
humans, but much more. That can also off gas whatever
entropy it creates to give an illusion that you're defeating
thermodynamics, right? So whatever these things are,
probably has an analog of the bilipid layer so that cells can
get rid of the chaos on one side of the barrier and keep
order on the other. Whatever these things are that create
life, assuming that there is a theory to be found that allows
that civilization to diversify, we would have to imagine that
such a civilization might have taken an interest in its
concept of the universe and have come here.
They would come here. They would have a deep understanding of
the physics of the universe sufficient to have arrived here.
Well, there's two questions, whether they could arrive
physically and whether their information could be sent here
and whether they could gain information from us. It's
possible that they would have a way of looking into our world
without actually reaching it. I don't know, but yes, if my
hope, which is that we can escape this world, is, can be
realized if that's feasible, then you would have to imagine
that the reverse is true and that somebody else should be
here. First of all, I want to say this. My purpose when I
come on to your show and I reframe the questions is not to
challenge you. I can sit inside all of those. It's to give you
better audio and video because I think we've been on an
incredible role. I really love what you do and so I am trying
to honor you by being as disagreeable about frame
breaking as possible. I think some of your listeners don't
understand that it's actually a sign of respect as opposed to
some sort of a complex dynamic, which is I think you can
play outside of some of the frames and that these are
sort of offerings to get the conversation started. So, let
me try to break that frame and give you something
different. Beautiful. I think what's going on here is that
I can prove effectively that we're not thinking about this
in very deep terms. As soon as I say we've got to get off
this planet, the number of people who assume that I'm
talking about faster than light travel is very high and
faster than light travel assumes some sort of
Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken by some small
adjustment and I think that that's fascinating. It shows
me that our failure to imagine what could be being said is
profound. We don't have an idea of all of the different
ways in which we might be able to visit distant worlds.
All we think about is, okay, it must be, it must be
Einsteinian space times and then some means of exceeding
the speed limit and it's just, it's fascinating to me that
we don't really have, we've lost the ability to just
realize we don't know the framework and what does it even
mean? One of the things I think about a lot is worlds with
more than one temporal dimension. It's very hard to
think about more than one temporal dimension. That's a
really strong mental exercise of breaking the framework in
which we think because most of the frameworks would have a
single temporal dimension. First of all, most of the
frameworks in which we think would have no temporal
dimension would have pure, like in mathematics, the
differential geometry that Riemann came up with in the
1800s. We don't usually talk about what we would call
split signature metrics or Lorentzian signature. In fact,
if it weren't for relativity, this would be the most
obscure topic out there. Almost all the work we do is in
Euclidean signature and then there's this one freakish case
of relativity theory in physics that uses this one time
and the rest spatial dimensions. Fascinating. It's
usually momentary and just looking at space. Yes. We
have these three kinds of equations that are very
important to us. We have elliptic, hyperbolic, and
parabolic. The idea is if I'm chewing gum after eating
garlic bread, when I open my mouth and I've got chewing
gum between my lips, maybe it's going to form an
elliptic object called a minimal surface. Then when I
pop that and blow through it, you're going to hear a
noise that's going to travel to you by a wave equation,
which is going to be hyperbolic. But then the garlic
breath is going to diffuse towards you and you're
eventually going to be very upset with me according to
a heat equation, which will be parabolic. So those are
the three basic paradigms for most of the work that we
do. And a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is
elliptic, whereas the physicists are in the
hyperbolic case. And I don't even know what to do about
more than one temporal dimension because I think
almost no one studies that. I can't believe you just
captured much of modern physics in the example of
chewing gum. I have an off-color one, which I chose
not to share, but hopefully the kids at home can
imagine. Okay. So, okay. That is the place where we
come from. Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility
of breaking the frameworks with two versus zero
temporal dimensions, how do we even begin to think
about that? Well, let's think about it as you and I
getting together in New York City. Okay. So, if you
tell me, Eric, I want to meet you in New York City,
go to the corner of 34th Street and 3rd Avenue and
you'll find a building on the northwest corner and go
up to the 17th floor. All right. So, when we have
3rd Avenue, that's one coordinate, 34th Street,
that's a second coordinate and go up to the 17th.
And what time is it? Oh, 12 noon. All right. Well, now
imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a
particular height in a building. It's all flatland,
but I'm going to give you two temporal chords. So, meet me
at 5 p.m. and 12 noon at the corner of 34th and 3rd.
That gets to be too mind-blowing. I've got two separate
watches. And presumably that's just specifying a
single point in those two different dimensions, but then
being able to travel along those dimensions. Let's let me
see your right hand. You have no watch on that. No.
Okay. I'm very concerned, Lex, that you're going through
life without a wrist watch. That is my favorite and most
valued wrist watch. I want you to wear it. This guy's
funnier than basically any human on earth. Lex, that has
been in my family for months. It's a Fitbit. Now, what I
want you to understand is Lex Fridman is now in a
position to live in two spatial and two temporal
dimensions, unlike the rest of us. I clearly am only fit
for four spatial dimensions. So, I'm frozen, whereas you
can double move. I can double move, which is funny
because this is set in Austin time. So, it's 4 p.m. and this
is set in Los Angeles times. Well, but that's just with an
affine shift in mod 12. But my point is, wouldn't that be
interesting if there were two separate timescales and you
had to coordinate both of those, but you didn't have to
worry about what floor of the building because everything
was on the ground floor. That is the confusion that we're
having. And if you do one more show, then they're going to
put a watch on your ankle and you're only going to have
one spatial dimension that you can move around. But my
claim is that all of these are actually sectors of my
theory in case we're interested in that, which is
geometric unity. There is a 2-2 sector and a 3-1 and a 1-3 and
a 0-4 and a 4-0. And all of these sectors have some
physical reality. We happen to live in a 1-3 sector. But
that's the kind of thinking that we don't do. When I say we
have to get off this planet, people imagine, oh, okay, it's
just Einstein plus some ability to break the law.
By the way, even though you did this for humor's sake, I
perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin who-
Am I going to get whacked?
No, not quite. But he was given a Super Bowl ring to look at
and he, instead of just looking at it, put it on his finger
and walked away with it.
Robert Kraft?
Robert Kraft, that's right. So, in the same way, I will,
if you don't mind, walk away with this Fitbit and taking
an entirety of your life story with it because there's all
these steps on it.
Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.
And where have I been?
Exactly.
Right. But that's what we're talking about. We're talking
about, if you want to get into aliens, let's have an
interesting alien conversation. Let's stop having the
typical free will conversation, the typical alien
conversation, the typical AGI morality conversation. It's
like, we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves
because we're not making progress. Time to have better
versions of all these conversations.
Is there some version of the alien conversation that
could incorporate the breaking of frameworks?
Well, I think so. I mean, the key question would be, we've
had the Pentagon release multiple videos of strange UFOs
that undermined a lot of us. I just think it's also really
fascinating to talk about the fact that those of us who were
trained to call BS on all of this stuff just had the rug pulled
out from under us by the Pentagon choosing to do this.
And you know what the effect of that is? You've opened the
door for every stupid theory known to man. My aunt saw a
ghost. Okay. Now we're going to have to listen to, well, hey,
the Pentagon used to deny it. Then it turned out there were
UFOs, dude. Whoever is in charge of lying to the public,
they need a cost function that incorporates the damage and
trust because I held this line that this was all garbage and
all BS. Now I don't know what to think.
There's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion, the
breaking of frameworks that involves the release of videos
from the Pentagon, which is almost like another dimension
that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information
is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling constantly
that is messing with my head to think about because
I mean, because it almost feels like you need to incorporate
that into your study of the nature of reality is like the
constant shifting of the notation, the tools we use to
communicate that reality. And so like, what am I supposed to
think about these videos? Is it a complete distraction? Is it a
kind of cosmic joke? I don't know, but you know what? I'm
tired of these people. Just completely tired of these people.
The people on the Pentagon side or the people who are
interpreting this stuff on the Pentagon side. I'm tired of the
authorities playing games with what we can know. The fact
that you and I don't, do you have a security clearance?
Some level of it for because I was funded for DARPA for a while.
I don't have a security clearance. You know, I am going to
release whatever theory I have and my guess is that there is
zero interest from our own government. And so the Chinese
will find out about it the same time our government does
because Lord knows what they do in these buildings. I watch
crazy people walk in and out of the intelligence community,
walk in and out of DARPA. And I think, wow, you're talking to
that person. That's really fascinating to me. We don't
seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.
Complete lack of transparency. Do you think it's possible
there's the government is in possession of something deeply
fundamental to understanding of the world that they're not
releasing? So this is one thing is this is one of the
famous distractions that people play with the narrative.
Assume that that were true. Of alien life forms and
spacecraft and possession that the government is in possession
of alien spacecraft. Assume that were true. That's a popular narrative.
Yeah. I don't think the government really exists at the moment.
I believe and this is not an idea that was original to me.
There was a guy named Michael Tidalbaum who used to be at the Sloan Foundation
and at some point I pointed out that the US government had
completely contradictory objectives when it came to the
military and science. And one branch said this, one branch said that.
I said, I don't understand which is true. What is the government
wanting? He said, do you think there's a government?
And I said, what do you mean? He said, what makes you think that the
people in those two offices have ever coordinated?
What is it that allows each office to have a coherent plan with respect to
every other office? And that's when I first started to understand
that there are periods where the government coheres and then there are
periods where the coherence just decays. And I think that that's been going on
since 1945. That there have been a few places where
there's been increased coherence but in general everything is just getting
less and less coherent. And that what war did was focus us on the
need to have a government of people, a mission, capacity, technology,
commitment, ideology. And then as soon as that was
gone, different people, those who'd been
through World War II had one set of beliefs, those born in the 1950s
or late 40s by the time they got to Woodstock.
They didn't buy any of that. So coherence is the, is it the complete
opposite of like a bureaucracy being paralyzed by
bureaucracy? So coherence is efficient functional
government because when you say there's no government, meaning there's no
emergent function from a collection of individuals. It's just a bunch of
individuals stuck in their offices without any kind
of efficient communication with each other on a single mission.
And so a government that is truly at the epitome of what a
government is supposed to be is when a bunch of people working together and
saying, what are we about? Are we about freedom? Are we about growth?
Are we about decency and fairness? Are we about the absence of a national
culture so that we can all just do our own thing? I've called this thing the
USAN, the United States of Absolutely Nothing.
These are all different visions for our country.
So it's possible that there's a alien spacecraft somewhere and there's like
20 people that know about it and then they're kind of,
it like as you communicate further and further into the offices,
that information disappears, it gets distorted in some kind of way and then
it's completely lost. The power, the possibility of that information is lost.
We bought a house and I had this idea that I wanted to find out what all the
switches did. And I quickly found out that your house
doesn't keep updating its plans. As people do modifications, they just do
the modifications and they don't actually record why they were doing what
they were doing or what things lead to. So they're all sorts of bizarre,
like there's a switch in my house that says privacy.
I don't know what privacy is. Does it turn on an electromagnetic field that
is, does some lead shielding go over the house?
That's what we have. We have a system in which the people who've inherited these
structures have no idea why their grandparents built them.
I'd be finding if there's a freedom of speech switch
that you could also control and there would be perfect metaphor for our
difference because what they figured out is that if they
can just make sure that we don't have any public options for
communication, then hey, every thing that we say to each
other goes through a private company. Private companies can do whatever they
want. And this is one of the greatest moves that
we didn't really notice. Electronic and digital
speech makes every other kind of speech irrelevant.
And because there is no public option, guess what?
There's always somebody named Sundar or Jack
or Mark who controls whether or not you could speak and
what it appears to be that is being said and who stuff is weighted more highly
than others. It's an absolute nightmare. And by the way,
the Silicon Valley intellectual elite, Lord knows what is going on. People are
so busy making money that they are not actually upholding any of the
values. So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally
against it. It has this kind of libertarian,
free, progressive sheen to it when it goes to Burning Man. And then it
quickly just imposes rules on all of the rest of us as to what we could say to
each other if we're not part of the inner elite.
So what do you think the ideal of the freedom of speech means?
Well, this is very interesting. I keep getting lectured on social media by
people who have no idea how much power the Supreme Court has to
abstract things. Right now, you have a concept of the
letter of the law and the spirit of the law. And the spirit of the law
would have to say that our speech that matters is free,
at least at the level of ideas. I don't claim that I have the right
to endanger your life with speech or to reveal your private information.
So I really am not opining about directed speech intended to smear you and
that that's a different kettle of fish. And maybe I have some rights to do that,
but I don't think that they're infinite. What I am saying is, is that the freedom
of speech for ideas is essential that the court abstract it
and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter,
Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are, because it really matters
which abstraction you use. The case that I really like is search and
seizure. If I have private data that I entered in
my house that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house,
but I view the, is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter of my house
that I have the right to protect? Or does my password extend the
perimeter of my house to the data on the server that is located outside of my
house? These are choices for the court and
the court is supposed to pretend that they can divine the true intent of the
framers. But all of the sort of, and I've taken
to calling this the problem of internet hyenas, people with ready-made answers
and LOLs and you're such a moron. These folks love to remind you,
it's a private company dude, it can do whatever it wants.
No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are. And just the way, for
example, the Griswold decision found that there
was a penumbra because there was too little in the Constitution. Therefore,
there were all sorts of things implied that couldn't be in the document.
Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now
that says, Jack cannot do it if he wants. It's really, so you say the courts,
but it's also us, people who think about the world, it's you.
It's the courts. But the courts don't do this. We're toast.
But we can still think about it. I mean, I don't feel like going down the drain.
Here's what I'm thinking about, because it's tricky how far it should extend.
I mean, that's an ongoing conversation. Don't you think the interpretation of the
law? I think I'm trying to say something very
simple and it's just not going to be popular for a while.
Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication.
Print or shouting in a public park. I can go to a public park and I can
shout if I get a permit. Even there, I think it was in the late 1980s in
Atlanta, we came up with free speech zones where you can't
protest at a convention. You bet you can go to a park 23 miles out
and they'll fence off a little area where you can have your free speech.
No, speech is dangerous. Ideas are dangerous. We are a country about danger
and risk. And yes, I agree that targeted speech at
individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of, that
is very different. So forget a lot of that stuff.
But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous
and people will die as a result of free speech.
The idea that one life is too much is preposterous. Like why did we send...
If one life is preposterous, why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy?
I just don't get this. So one thing that I was clearly bothered
by, and maybe you could be my therapist as well.
I thought you were mine. This is a little bit of a miscommunication
on both of our parts then. Because who's paying who for this?
I was really bothered by Amazon banning parlor from AWS because my assumption
was that the infrastructure, I drew a distinction between AWS,
the infrastructure on which competing platforms can be created
is different than the actual platforms. So the standard of the ideal of freedom
of speech, I in my mind, in a shallow way perhaps,
applied differently to AWS than I did to Twitter.
It felt that we've created a more dangerous world,
that freedoms were violated by banning parlor from AWS, which I saw as the
computing infrastructure which enables the competition of tools,
the competition of frameworks of communication.
What do you think about this? First of all, let me give you the
internet hyena answer. I don't understand, dude. Just build your own Amazon.
Yeah. Right. Yes. Well, so that's a very shallow statement, but it's also
one that has some legitimacy. We can't completely dismiss it because
there's levels to this game. Yes and no, but if you really wanted to
chase that down, one of the great things about a person-to-person
conversation is opposed to like, let's have 30 of our closest friends.
Whenever we have a conversation with 30 of our closest friends, you know what
happens? It's like passing light through a prism.
Every person says something interesting, and as a result, it's always muddled.
Like, nothing ever resolves. Well, one of my
conversational techniques you mentioned, you pushed back, is
first this childlike naivety and curiosity, but also- Real or simulated.
Real, I'm afraid. I would say 80% real.
All right, so in this paradigm, how could you not see this coming?
I mean, I did a show with Ashley Matthews, who's the woman behind Riley Read,
and specifically about this. It was about the idea that if I
move away from politics and go towards sex, I know that there's always a move
to use the infrastructure to shut down sex workers.
And in this case, we had Operation Choke Point under the Obama
administration. We have a positive passion for people
who want to solve problems that they don't like. This company,
they don't like. That company, Payday Loans, would be another one.
And so you have legal companies that are harassed by our financial system that
you can't, you know, as Riley Read,
Ashley couldn't get a MailChimp account according to her, if I understand her
correctly. And this idea that you charge these
people higher rates because of supposed
chargebacks on credit cards, even if their chargebacks are low.
Yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment.
There's something about everybody who shows up at Davos,
they get drunk in the Swiss Alps, and then they come back home
and they coordinate, and they coordinate things like build back better.
We don't really understand what build back better is, but my guess is, is that
build back better has to do with extremism in America.
How do we shut down the Republican Party as the source of extremism?
Now, I do think the Republican Party has got very extreme under Trump.
And I do believe that that was responsive to how extreme the Democratic
Party got under Clinton first, and then Obama,
and then Hillary. And in all of these circumstances,
it's amazing how much we want to wield these things as weapons.
Well, our extremism is fine because we pretend that Tifa doesn't exist and we
don't report what goes on in in Portland, but your extremism, my God, that's
disgusting. This is the completely ridiculous
place that we're in. And by the way, our friends in part
are coked up on tech money, and they don't appear to hold the courage of their
convictions at a political level because it's not in keeping with
shareholder value. At some level, shareholder value is the
ultimate shield with which everyone can cloak themselves.
Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter,
and I'm not sure it was a good financial decision for Twitter,
right? Perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong.
Well, are you thinking locally or are you thinking if Twitter refused to
ban Donald Trump? What are the odds that the full force of the
antitrust division might find them? I don't know.
Oh, I see. I see. So there's complicated things.
Look, these guys are all having a discussion
in very practical terms. You can imagine the sorts of conversation.
Jack, Mark, Sundar, we're really glad you're all here. We're all trying to
sing from the same hymnal and row in the same direction.
We understand free speech. We're completely committed to it, but
we have to draw on with extremism, guys. We just need, we need to make sure we're
all on the same page. Well, they use the term violence, too,
and they, I think, over-apply it. So basically, anybody...
I'm telling you, I say dumb things to incentivize thoughtful conversation.
Well, whatever these things are, there is no trace...
Like, how old are you, Lex? You're in your mid-30s? Yeah, to late 40s.
Late 20s to late 40s, somewhere in there. That's the demographic.
I do think that partially what's happened is that your group has never seen
functional institutions. These institutions have been so
compromised for so long. You've probably never seen an adult.
Sometimes, I think Elon looks like an adult. I know that he has a wild lifestyle,
but I also see him looking like an adult. What does an adult look like, exactly?
Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things, speaks carefully,
thinks about the future beyond their own lifespan.
Somebody who has a pretty good idea of how to get things done,
isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions, is more focused on
breaking new ground than playing rent-seeking games.
I mean, I really had a positive... I was so
completely chastised when Elon Musk ended up as the world's richest person.
He was like, well, that's interesting, back to work.
It's just like, that's what an adult would do. That's what an adult would do.
That's what a grown-up would do. And it just made...
Weirdly, I said something about, isn't it amazing that the world's
richest person knows what a Lagrangian is, and he made a terrible
Lagrange joke about potentials. But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately,
Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult, and I can tell you that
the internet hyenas will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is
for pumping his stock price, talking his book and all this stuff.
Shut up.
So, looking at the world seriously and rigorously, you're saying that the
people who are running tech companies or running the mediums on which we can
exercise the ideal of free speech are not adults?
I think not. I think, first of all, a lot of them are Silicon Valley
utopian businessmen, where you talk a utopian line and you use it.
You've heard my take, which is that the idealism of every era is the cover story
of its greatest thefts. And I believe that in many ways, the idealism of Silicon Valley
about connecting the world, the world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
is really about the software eating the world, as Mark Andreessen likes to say,
at the role of these legacy properties and by simply being a bad tech version of
something that previously existed like a newspaper, you could immediately start to
dwarf that by aggregating newspapers and their digital versions, because digital is
so much more powerful. As a result, yes, we have lots of man-children wandering around
what once was the Bay Area and is now Austin and Miami and other places,
maybe Singapore, that all of these people, these are friends of ours and they're brilliant
with respect to a certain amount of stuff, but none of them can get off the drip. It's amazing
that none of them have FU money. We've got billionaires who don't have FU money.
Okay. I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence,
and not just Jack Dorsey, but everybody that was banning people. And then this word violence was
used as a kind of just like extremism and so on, without much reason behind it. You think it's
impossible for Jack Dorsey or anybody else to be, as you said, an adult, a grown-up and-
Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grown-up. It seems like he is.
Yeah. But he's under pressures.
As you've discussed, it seems that he's been on the verge of almost being quite serious and
transparent and real. I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went. And I worry
that that must be something behind the scenes that I can't see.
From my perspective, what I think is the stress, the burden of that when people are screaming at you
is overwhelming. Jack is a Zen monk. He really is.
Jack is an incredibly impressive person, intellectually, morally, spiritually, at least
for a couple of meetings. I don't know him very well, but I'm very impressed by the person I
met. And I don't know where that person is, and that terrifies me.
But do you think somebody could step up in that way? No.
Yeah. So does a human being have the capacity to be transparent about the reasoning behind
the banning? Or do you think all banning, eventually, all banning of people from mediums of
communication is eventually destructive? Or it's impossible for human beings to reason
with ourselves about it? Well, let's see what the problem is.
So my phone has been on airplane mode. I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to take a picture of Lex
Friedman. Now, if I can, I'm going to tweet that picture out. Great. But here's the weird part about
it. That picture sitting with Lex today. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage is made.
Okay. In so doing, I have just sent a picture of you and a tiny piece of text all over the planet
that has arrived at, if statistics tell the truth, just under half a million different accounts.
And then more from sharing and so on. Well, been some of those accounts are dead. We don't
really know how many places it went. But the key issue with that tweet is that
that is a non-local phenomenon. Yes. So I just broadcasted to an entire planet.
Somebody in Uganda is reading that at the same time as somebody in Uruguay.
There is no known solution to have so many people with the ability to communicate non-locally,
because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech inside of the Constitution.
Friction, locality, there were all sorts of other aspects to speech. So if you think about
speech as a bundle, I like this, then it got unbundled. And some of those aspects that we were
naturally counting on to retard the impact of speech aren't present. And we don't have the
courage to say, I wonder if the First Amendment really applies in the modern era in the same way,
or we have to work through an abstraction. Either we probably have to amend the Constitution,
or we have to abstract it properly. And that issue is not something we're facing up to. I watch us
constantly look backwards. We don't seem to try to come up with new ideas and new theories. Nobody
really imagines that we're going to be able to wisely amend the Constitution anymore inside of
the United States. Many people abroad will say, why are these guys talking about the US? It's a
US-centric program. Well, that's because nobody knows where this program lives. The fact, by the
way, that you and I happen to be in a physical place together is also bizarre. It could be anywhere.
It doesn't really matter that it happens to be here. So the difference between logical and between
physical, local, non-local, frictional, non-fictional, it's the same thing with firearms. Nobody
imagined that the gatling gun was going to be present when you had to reload a musket.
That's fascinating to think about. You're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom
that seems so foundational to this nation, to what made this nation great and perhaps much of the
world that is great, made it great, is changing completely. Can we try to reason through how the
ideal freedom of speech is to be changed? I mean, I guess I'm struggling. It feels really wrong,
perhaps because I wasn't paying attention to it. It feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump
from Twitter, to ban not just the president. That's really wrong to me. But this particular human
for being divisive. But then when there's an incitement of violence, that is an overused claim.
But perhaps there was actual brewing of local violence happening. So one of the things I know
was happening on Parlor is people were scheduling meetings together in physical space. So you're
now going back from this dynamic social large scale people from Uganda, people from all over
the world being able to communicate. You're now mapping that into now back meeting in the physical
space that is similar to what the founding of this nation was. The violence were digital.
If ransomware suddenly was unleashed, the key issue is the abstractions. So what was freedom
of speech as a bundle? And then how do we abstract the bundle into the digital era?
Do you think we just need to raise the question and talk about it? Do you have ideas?
Well, I'm sure I have ideas. But the key point is that I'm not even welcome in mainstream media.
I've never seen you on mainstream media. Do you do mainstream media? So we exist in part
of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story,
which I've called the gated institutional narrative. And the institutions pretend that
they plug their fingers in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of MSNBC talking
to CNN about what was in the New York Times as covered by the Washington Post. And so that's
effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they, you know, the undertaker
faces off against Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper. Okay. Well, that's very different than MMA.
Okay. You've recently been on Glenn Beck's program. Yeah. And there was this kind of,
one of the things you've talked about is being able to have this conversation.
I don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside the
mainstream media, but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews and having a nuanced,
or just like a respectful conversation that's grounded and mutual. But we can't have the reality
because the main model is the center, both left and right, is in the process of stealing all the
wealth that we built up. And they've organized the extremes into two LARPing teams that I've
called Magistan and Wokistan. And then you have everybody who isn't part of that complex,
all seven of us. The number of us who are able to earn a living, looking at all of these mad
people playing this game, you know, there's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks
are trying to look at price action. And somebody says, this doesn't make any sense.
And somebody will say, it's just the locals stealing from each other. And that's really
what we have. We've got the leaders of Magistan and Wokistan, you know, championing these two
teams is sponsored by the center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver
and cut the paintings out of the frames. That's what we, you and I are looking at. So when you
ask me, like, do you have any ideas about the abstraction for free speech? I've never met Mark
Zuckerberg. I've never met Sundar Pichai. I never met Larry Page. I was once in a room with Sergey
Brin. I've never spoken to Elon Musk. I hang out with Peter Thiel, but we have a very deep
relationship, but I don't really speak to that many other people at, you know, it's sort of at
this level. We're not having any kind of smart conversation at a national level. In fact, it's
almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox in which we could play together. There's no place
that we actually talk except long form podcasting. And by the way, they've found,
you see what's going on with like Alex Stamos and the Hoover Institution. There's a loophole left.
Long form podcasting allows people to speak at levels above daytime CNN. It's like, well, why do
you think they're not watching daytime CNN? But, you know, that's just silly journalism. They
currently have no power to displace podcasting. That's why it's so powerful, RSS feed. I mean,
that's why the big challenge with Joe Rogan and Spotify is like, there's this dance that's fascinating
to see is Joe Rogan is not part of the system. And then he's also uncancelable. And there's this
tension that's happening. Well, Howard Stern, Howard Stern became much less relevant.
So if they can't control Joe by bringing him in house, the key question is, is he going to continue
like, you know, this Joe says this thing about FU money. Yeah. Joe's one of the only people
with FU money who's actually said FU. Yeah. I don't understand this. I don't have FU money.
What exactly is, can we break apart FU money? Because I always thought I've been fortunate
enough to have always have FU money in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary
in the United States. This is the stoic point, which is it can live on rice and beans. Right.
You're uncancelable because you're always rich relative to your needs. Right. Isn't that FU
fundamental FU money? Why do you say that tech billionaires don't have FU money?
When you need to hire private security to protect your family, how do you protect your two children?
I don't have those yet. Bingo. Yeah. My point is, is that FU money
insulates everything that you care about. It's not just about you.
So you're saying as the level of responsibility grows, the amount of money required for FU
We have a war going on. The war is on academic freedom. Academic freedom used to be present
in the system. In terms of the idea, we trust our elite. Now we have an idea. You want to be the
elite. You want a lord above us. That's like, first of all, there's like a populist anti-elitist
thing. Then there's the idea that we're going to defer tenure for forever. Then we're going to tell
people stay in your lane. Your tenure is only good for your own particular tiny micro subject.
Then we're going to also control your grants and we'll be able to load up your teaching load
if we don't like who you are and we'll make your life absolutely impossible. We lost academic freedom
and we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster. Then we lost funding so that people were
confident that they would have the ability to do research no matter what they said.
As a result, what you find is a world in which there's no ability to get people to say,
no, I'm not going to sign your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath. I won't sign
any loyalty oath. Get the hell out of my office. FU. FU. You're connecting money to that. My
point is that academic freedom is the whole idea behind it was that you will have the freedom of
a billionaire on a much smaller salary. We've lost that. Yeah. The only reason in part that I
wanted to go into academics as a profession as opposed to wanting to do physical or mathematical
research, the great prize was freedom. Ralph Gomery of the Sloan Foundation previously of IBM
Research pointed it out. He says, if you lose freedom, you lose the only thing we had to offer
top minds. Top minds value their intellectual freedom and their physical and economic security
at a different level than other human beings. People say, I don't understand, dude. You have
the ability to do X, Y, and Z. What's the problem? It's like, well, I value my ability to raise the
middle finger as an American practically above everything else. I want to talk to you about
freedom here in the context of something you've mentioned, which one way to take away freedom
is to put a human being into a cage to create constraints. The other one that worries me is
something that I think you've spoken to Twitter a little bit on Twitter is we bleed freedom by kind
of slowly scaring you into not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities you can as freedom.
So when you ban Donald Trump, when you ban Parler, you give a little doubt in the minds
of millions, like me, a tech person who's an entrepreneur, that's what I'm afraid of when
I look in the mirror. Is there now a little doubt in there that limits the amount of options I will
try? How certain are you that the COVID virus didn't come from the Wuhan lab and
is biosafety level four? We both know that we're both supposed to robotically say
the idea that the COVID virus came from a lab is a discredited conspiracy theory. There is no
evidence that suggests that this is true. The World Health Organization and the CDC have both
applied this to say otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible. And the threat of that is the thing
that ultimately limits the freedoms we feel. I should be tweeting about Jeff Epstein all the time.
And you're afraid?
It's also boring. I mean, I said it in the public many times.
Why is it we don't ask where the records are from the Velard House? Where are the financial
records? Where are the SEC filings? Where are the questions on the record to the intelligence
agencies? Was he known to be part of the intelligence community? We're not interested
in asking questions. Am I going to die as a result of asking the question,
was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community of any nation? Is there a reason
we're not asking about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund that he didn't run?
Just like the Wuhan lab. Okay. How do we get to the core of the Jeff Epstein,
the truth behind Jeff Epstein, in a sense? I mean, there's some things that are just
like useless conspiracy theories around it, even if they're true. There's some things they get to
say. I have to say it. You're not going to like it. Look at the 1971 media Pennsylvania break-in
of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI. Those kids, and by the way, they weren't all kids,
did what had to be done. They broke in. They broke the law. It was an incredible act of
civil disobedience. And God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her, she was going to take to her
grave that she'd been part of this, like the coolest thing of all time. They didn't say anything for
forever. So civil disobedience. I mean, you have to- We are founded on civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience is incredibly, you screw it up and you're just a vandal. You screw it up,
you're a hooligan. Those cats were so disciplined. It's an art form. It was an art form and they
risked everything they were willing to pay with their freedom. Those are the sorts of people who
earned the right by putting themselves at risk. I would not do this. I am not volunteering to break
into anything. I think it was William Davodon, who was a student of Murray Gelman and a physics
professor at Haverford, who corralled these people and led this effort. And right now,
what we need is somebody to blow the lid off of what is controlling everything. I'm happy to hear
that it's a system of incentive structures, that it's a system of selective pressures. I'm happy
to find out that it's emergent. I'm happy to find that it's partially directed by our own
intelligence community. I'm happy to hear that, in fact, we've been penetrated by North Korea, Iran,
China, and Russia. But I need to know why people aren't... The firebombing of the
courthouse in Portland, Oregon has no explanation. And somehow, this is normal. This is not normal
to any human being. We have video that people don't believe. I come back to the shaggy defense
of it wasn't me. You remember that song?
Shaggy, yeah, it wasn't me. Caught you banging in a shower on the counter.
Yeah, exactly. It wasn't me. It wasn't me.
He says, his friend says, well, your strategy makes no sense at all. This is what MSNBC is doing.
You dropped him from the graphic. It wasn't me. You came up with another yang. It wasn't me.
I will never see MSNBC the same again. So you've spoken about him before. I think it'd be nice to
maybe honor him to break it apart a little bit. Aaron Schwartz. Yeah.
Why was he a special human being in this ilk of what we're talking about now,
civil disobedience? How do we honor him now moving forward as human beings who are willing
to take risks in this world? Well, I don't know. Are you inspired by Aaron Schwartz?
I am. How do you feel about JSTOR? Let's talk about JSTOR first.
So let's say what JSTOR is all about. We the taxpayer pay for research.
And then the people who do the research do all the work for a bunch of companies
who then charge us $30 an article to read what it is that we already paid for.
And if we don't cite these articles, we're told that we're in violation.
Okay. I almost never call for civil disobedience because I don't really want to, but
fuck JSTOR, fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer. Who the fuck are these people?
The smart people need to take the greedy people behind the woodshed and explain to them what
science is. I have a very old fashioned idea that's so out of favor that I will immediately
be seen as a knuckle-drager. I believe in the great woman theory of history and the great
man theory of history. Emmy Nerder is fantastic. That's an example. And I believe in editors over
peer reviewers. And I believe that wrong things should be allowed into the literature. And I
believe that the gatekeeping should go towards zero because the costs associated with distribution
are very, very slight. I believe that we should be looking at the perverse incentives of sending
your paper blindly into your competitor's clutches, particularly if you're a young person
being reviewed by an older person. Are you familiar with the Duat de Senor?
Are you familiar with the legend of the Magnaia? No, the Magnaia is the Miller's daughter. And the
largest food fight in the entire universe, I believe, is held, I think in Italy. It's called
The Battle of the Oranges. And it celebrates the Miller's daughter who had fallen in love
with her beloved. And when it came time for them to marry, the virginal Magnaia was, in fact,
told that the lord of the land had the right to have the first night with the bride. Well,
the Magnaia had a different idea. So she seemed to consent to this perhaps mythical right,
also called the Prima Note the first night. And by legend, she concealed a dagger underneath her
robes. And when it came time for the hated lord of the manor to extract this right,
she pulled the knife out and killed him. And I think it also echoes a little bit of
particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones. But that inspired both men and women.
And the Magnaia is the legendary hero. Right now, what we need to do is we need to resist
the Prima Note, the right of first look, right? FU. You don't have the right of first look. I
don't want to send something blindly to my competitors. I don't want to subject myself
to you naming what work I've done. Why are you in my story? That's my question. Get out of my
story. If I do work, and then you have an idea, oh, well, it's the Matthew principle to him
who has much more will be given. I've gone to the National Academy of Sciences and talked about
these things. And it's funny, I've been laughed at by the older people who think, well, Eric,
you know, science proceeds funeral by funeral, that's plonk. You know, the Matthew principle,
you know, the Matilda principle, the things done by women are attributed to men,
that these are not new. And you guys just live like this?
FU. Yeah. So the revolutionary act now is to resist all of these things that are not new.
FU. So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz. Aaron Schwartz was the Magnaia.
One of the things you've done very beautifully is to communicate love. And I think about,
you know, some of our conversations, and you got me to talk a little bit about my own experiences
in 02138 and 39. We are the product of our trauma. And what people don't understand is that very
often when you see people taking countermeasures against what appear to be imaginary forces,
they're really actually replaying things that really happen to them. And having been through
this system and watching all of the ways in which it completely rewrites the lives of the people
who I am counting on to cure our diseases, build our new industries, keep us safe from our foes.
The amount of pressure the system is putting on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable.
And so my goal is to empower somebody like an Aaron Schwartz in memory
and to talk about a Jeffrey Epstein situation. Do you know that the first person outside
of me to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein?
How did he know I was working on this? I don't know.
So your ideas that formed geometric unity was something that his eyes have seen?
I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein as one of the only people who could help me.
No, no, no, listen to this. Yeah, how does this connect?
Okay. Well, first of all, my old synagogue, my old shule, was the conservative minion at Harvard
Hillel. And I believe it's called Rosofsky Hall after Henry Rosofsky in the economics
department who was a Japan scholar, if I'm correct. And he became provost or dean of Harvard.
I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein's money. And I wondered in part whether the
Jewish students at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck of Harvard Hillel. So that
was something I found very curious, but I don't know much about it. I also found that Jeffrey
Epstein hanging around scientists. I don't think that either you or Joe exactly, I mean, got me
correct in your last interchange. For the record, for people who haven't listened to Joe Rogan
program, Joe has claimed that Eric Weinstein was the only person who has gotten paid. And you said
you also got paid as a young man, right? I believe the word was laid, but allegedly.
My hearing isn't so good at age 55. Yeah.
All right. Leaving that aside. What was Jeffrey Epstein doing hanging around all of these scientists?
I don't think that was the same program that was about compromising political leaders and business
people and entertainment figures. I think these are two different programs that were being run
through one individual. And Joe seemed to think that I didn't think he was smooth. I thought he
was glib. I think what Joe is really trying to get out of is that I found his mysticism
meretricious. He had an ability to deflect every conversation that might go towards revealing that
he didn't know what he was talking about. Every time you started to get close to something where
the rubber hit the road, the rubber wouldn't hit the road. And yet, can you help me untangle
the fact that you thought deeply about the physics of the nature of our universe,
and Jeffrey Epstein was interested. How did he know? I wasn't really talking about this stuff
until even my close friends didn't really know what I was up to. And yet, you're saying he did
not have sufficient brilliance to understand when the rubber hit the road. So why did he have
sufficient interest and curiosity? Tell you what I thought. I've been waiting to find out,
does my government even know I exist? Do you have an answer to that question?
A couple times, the government has reached out to me. In general, there is zero interest in me,
like less than zero interest. I find that fascinating. As far as you know, right?
Well, that's what I'm trying to say. The question about not being able to see through a half-silvered
mirror, you don't know what's going on behind the half-silvered mirror. To you, all you see
is your reflection. But your intuition still holds. This is where I mentioned that I,
this is where I'll say naïve, dumb things. But I still hold on to this intuition that
Jeff, I'm not confident in this, but I lean towards that direction that Jeffrey Epstein
is the source of evil, not something that's underlying him.
You have a bias. It's different than mine. Our Bayesian priors are tutored by different life
experiences. If I was mostly concerned, like Sam Harris is concerned, that people fill their heads
with nonsense, I would have a very strong sense that people need order in the world, that they
take mysterious situations, they build entire castles in the air, and then they go move in if
they really get crazy. The old saying is that neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics
move in. Coming from a progressive family, we had a different experience. It's really weird
when the government is actually out to get you, when they actually send a spy, when they actually
engage in disinformation campaigns, when they smear you. And if you've ever had that brought
to bear on your family, you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country,
which is different than having a, wow, do people believe crazy stuff because they watch too much
TV? And both of these things have some merit to them, but it's a question of regulated expression.
When do you want to express more Sam Harris and when do you want to express more Howard Zinn?
You can express both, correct? The one human being can express both?
Sure, but there's a trade-off between them. In other words, most people, like the Michael
Shermers of the world, are going to tilt very strongly to extraordinary claims, require
extraordinary evidence. You're going to have that kind of energy. And then somebody else is
going to say, how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb before I realized that there's a
problem? So my feeling about this is, yes, people see patterns in clouds. They see faces and
scripture and all sorts of things. And it's just random cloud pattern. And it's also the case
that there's tremendous pressure not to see conspiracies when conspiracies are relatively
more common than the people who shout conspiracy theory will claim. So both of these things are
true. And you have to ask, when do you express your inner Zinn and when you're inner Harris?
And those are different. And one fundamental difference you and I
bias these aside is you've actually met Jeffrey Epstein. And I am listening to reverberations
years later of stories and narratives throughout the story. Luckily, I only met him once. And I
think I had one or perhaps two phone conversations with him other than the one meeting.
You can learn a lot in just a few words, right? From a human being.
Well, that's true. But I think that the bigger issue was I saw something that I don't hear much
remarked upon, which is Jeffrey Epstein is all that there is. In other words, there's the National
Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes. There's all this stuff that kind
of has the same feel to it. A little bit of variation and difference. Department of Energy.
If you fall outside of that, there's just Jeffrey Epstein. That's what you're told.
That's not quite true. There's Kavli. Maybe Jim Simons is now in the game. Peter Thiel has done
some stuff. You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try. So there is other money running around,
Templeton. But very strongly, there was a belief that if you're doing something really innovative
and the system can't fund it because we become pussies, Jeffrey Epstein is your guy.
Because it's funnel that you're supposed to go through.
That's right. And the idea is that you get called to the great man's house
and the sort of lubricious version of Ralph Lauren takes you in and asks you bizarre questions.
And maybe he has an island. Maybe he has a plane. And when you're starved,
somebody showing you a feast or when you're dehydrated in a death's door and somebody says,
I have a well. That's what it is. And so the thought is, wow, can somebody get some effing
money into the science system so that we don't have super creeps trying to learn all of our
secrets ahead of time? WTF, what is your problem with transparency and taxpayer dollars? Just
all of you, you wouldn't have a country. You'd be speaking German.
So essentially, you believe that human beings would not be able to,
when the money is lacking in the system, like in research.
We produce public goods. You and I are meant to produce public goods.
Now, I sell athletic greens and I sell Theragun and I sell unagi scooters
and chili pad. Can I be honest? I love these products. But I didn't get into this game
for the purpose of selling. I'm trying to figure out how do you have an FU lifestyle.
But you know something, Lex? I don't know why you built this channel. It's kind of a mystery.
Yeah, I don't know why. I'll tell you why I built my channel.
It's going to be a lot harder to roll me this time in an alley.
Yeah.
I got rolled multiple times and my point is I didn't want to become a celebrity.
I didn't want to become well known, but it's a lot harder to roll somebody who's getting,
you know, I think I'm, I don't know if this is mistaken, but I think I'm the math PhD
with the largest number of followers on Twitter. And there was nothing you could do before.
I mean, again, to put a little responsibility on you. So you've created something really special
for the distribution of your own ideas. I mean, but because it's not necessarily currently scalable,
you also, perhaps you and I have the responsibility of giving other people also a chance to spread
their ideas. I mean, Joe Rogan did this very effectively for a bunch of people that.
That's why they're angry at him because he's a gatekeeper and he let all sorts of people through
that gate from Roger, from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones.
To Jordan Peterson to, I mean, even, well, first of all, to you.
To Abby Martin.
To Abby Martin.
To Barry Weiss.
Yeah.
That's the problem.
Well, but you, you have now successfully built up a thing that allows that to carry that forward.
No, no, no, no. We are all vulnerable to reputational attack because what happens, you see,
the problem Lex is, is that you are now an institution at some level.
You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag, the last suit, the last suit you'll
ever need. And you have the reach of something like CNN to people who matter.
Okay. So now the question is, how do we control something that doesn't have a board,
doesn't have shareholders, doesn't have to make an SEC filing, the FCC.
So the best answer they have is, well, we just have to destroy reputations.
All it takes is for us to take something that gets said or done or alleged.
And I think it's incredibly important. One of the things people don't understand is, is that I'm,
I'm going to fight general reputational attacks, not because some people don't deserve to have
their reputations drawn, dragged through the mud, but because it's too powerful of a tool
to hand it to CNN, MSNBC, Princeton, Harvard, the State Department.
Yes. But as some of it is also,
Jake Morgan, Muhammad Ali style, being good enough at
doing everything you need to do without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks,
not being afraid, but not giving enough meat.
I don't see why the people who have good ideas have to lead lives that are that clean.
If you can do it, you can be messy. Yeah. You should be able to be messy that otherwise
we're, we're suppressing too many people, too many, too billion minds. Yeah.
Can you believe Elon Musk smoked a blunt?
I still, people tell me this. Okay. I have discussions about Elon and people,
the Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist who's talking about Amua Amua that it might be alien technology.
He told me his, this outside the box thinker, when speaking to me about Elon,
said, called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed, the blunt in a dismissive way.
Like this guy is crazy because he smoked some weed. I was looking at him. I was like, why,
wow, wow. Look, I think you should be able to have consensual drug-filled orgies,
fuck perfect lives. Yeah. You should be allowed to be messy.
Yeah, right. I take back my statement. I'm just saying.
Respectability is the unique prison where all of the gates are open and the inmates
beg to stay inside. It's time to end their prison of respectability because it's too
effective of a means of sidelining and silencing people, including it is better that we have bad
people in our system than this idea of no platforming people who are beyond the pale,
because it's such a simple technique. So how do we, what's the heroic action here on the?
Well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program, by the way, she was absolutely
delightful as a guest. She is polite in the extreme, far more polite than I am.
And I had her right after Roger Penrose as a guest because I wanted to highlight this
program can go anywhere. We can talk to anyone.
What about social media? You've started highlighting people being banned on social media.
How do we fight this? Like if you get banned from social media, so you're saying nobody will stand
up to me? Well, just figure out what your incentive structure is before. Assume that I get banned on
social media because somebody wants to make sure that my message doesn't interfere with the dominant
narrative. Okay. What will happen? By the way, I'm very glad to be able to explain this on your
show because that video will presumably be archived and they can't easily make you take it down.
Okay. So what's going to happen is that there'll be a whole bunch of very low quality bot-like
accounts that dog you every time you talk about me.
Dude, it's getting old. It's getting boring. We already heard you. Dude, that was like,
let it go. Not a good look. Not a good look is one of my favorites.
But what about the high profile ones? Well, then you'll get a few high profile ones and some of
the high profile ones command armies. At some point, I had 10,000 people using exactly the same
templated tweeting at me. It got to the point where it was funny because everybody said,
did you hear that in a hipster coffee shop? I was like, why are you all suddenly talking
about hipster coffee? It's hilarious. Those things will cause you to think better of it.
You'll start to see your follower account go down because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot-like
follows and then just pull them. So I think it's pretty well known how,
and then maybe your account will be suspended and it can't be revoked and etc., etc. And then
three days later, you'll be told it was an error. So let me push back. I just don't see not defending
you. Okay. So what are the things you would do that, given that I can actually talk to you offline,
that would make me not defend you?
Well, first of all, I can imagine some, but all of us have things. If somebody says,
do you hear what your boy Lex said about you? What did Lex say about me? Oh, he said you were
flawed, dude. Oh, shit. They're so distressed because none of us want to stand behind flawed
people. That's why you have everybody rushing to say, I neither condemn nor condone. I know,
I don't condemn nor, you know, why, what is that? We're all trying to say-
By the way, for the record, I said that Eric is smarter than me and a brilliant human being,
but flawed like all humans are. My point is I've now come up with a new policy,
which is I don't care what my friends have done. I am not disavowing my friends,
not because they didn't do the wrong thing. Maybe they did do the wrong thing. I don't know.
What's the value of friendship if that's not that?
Like, for example, we've had the situation with Brian Callan. Brian Callan was featured recently
in the Los Angeles Times. I know nothing about the allegations. I can't. I didn't even know Brian
at the time, right? I've known him for roughly the time I've been in Los Angeles, maybe a year
and a half. During that period of time, I've never seen anything wrong. Now I'm in a situation,
well, what do you think he did? Do you think he didn't? It's like, you know what? I don't know. But
I do know this. Everyone's entitled to have friends because we can't afford isolated people.
And if your friends do the wrong thing, they're still your friends.
Yeah.
And if they do terrible, terrible things, you bring that up with them privately. And it's not
my responsibility to disavow in public. We've had this situation that I don't like where
particular people that I've been close to, I'm put under tremendous pressure to disavow them.
What do you think now about your buddy?
I like Dave Rubin, all that kind of stuff.
Here's the thing. My friends are my friends. I don't disavow my friends. We all need
to make a statement that we will not be brought under pressure to disavow our friends,
our family members, because mass murderers are dangerous the more isolated they become.
It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people.
And it's dangerous.
And it sends a signal to everybody else to fit in, to be more cynical about the
human rights that we have to each other.
If I find out you've been selling heroin to elementary school students,
you're still my friend, and I will not be disavowing you.
And if I have a problem with you selling heroin to elementary school students during school hours,
I will bring it up with you privately, because we don't need to hear my voice added to that
condemnation. Are there things that you could do that would cause me to say, actually, F this guy?
Yeah, above and beyond that. But simply doing the wrong thing, I think we've gone down a terrible
path. I think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing we could have in a heavily armed
society. So I deeply agree with you on Brian Callan and on all these people that, quote,
unquote, got canceled. And I'm not saying that I don't know the truth value because we can't.
And even if I did know the truth value, I'm not setting up an incentive structure
for the personal destruction as a means of letting institutions combat the fact that
individuals are the last thing that can say, none of you guys make any sense.
I don't treat these things like, you know, I had a conversation where Kevin Spacey was at the
dinner table when I came down from a hotel room. And I had a very long conversation with Kevin Spacey.
I will not detail because I don't do that as to what we discussed. But we talked very specifically
about him being canceled. And I don't think that the world has heard that story in part because
there is a very strong sense that he has to be outgrouped. And as a result, you know, I mean,
do we want, do we want to disavow the space program because it touched Werner von Braun? Do we
want to disavow quantum mechanics because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg passed through it?
Is Aaron Fest theorem false because he murdered his child? I mean, at what point
do we recognize that we are the problem? Humans are humans. And there is no perfect,
there is no perfect group of people, even all of the most oppressed people, the supposed victims
of the world, who we now have fetishized into thinking that they're all oracles because their
lived experience informs us and their pain is more salient than everyone else's pain.
Those people are necessarily great people. You know, it's like none of us, we can't,
we can't do this in this fashion. So when we sit down to have a conversation
across the table from somebody, you should be willing to, like you should not have NPR in your
mind, you should be willing to take the full risk and to see the good in the person without,
with limited information and to do your best to understand that person. Everybody is entitled to
a hypocrisy budget. I don't believe this is of institutions. Everybody is entitled to a certain
amount of screwing up in life. You're entitled to a mendacity budget. You're entitled to an
aggression budget. The idea of getting rid of everybody is, you know, people haven't even
blown through their budgets and we're already, I think about, for example, one person, I'd be
curious to get your thoughts about Alex Jones. Let's not talk about Alex Jones for a second.
Let's talk about the National Enquirer. Is everything the National Enquirer says false?
No. Okay. Do you remember the John Edwards story?
Did she run his wife? Sorry.
He had a child from an extramarital affair. Yes.
I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story.
Okay. And then what does the New York Times do? The New York Times, I think,
is allowed to report that the National Enquirer is making a claim. That way,
they don't have to substantiate the story. So why is the New York Times talking to Mike Cernovich
or using the National Enquirer as a source? Are they using Alex Jones as a source?
Here's the big problem that we're having. Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody
and other people are entitled to talk to no one? I don't really understand this. This is an indulgence
system. This is how the Catholic Church used to do things. It's hard to fight the system because
the reason you don't talk to Alex Jones is because the platforms on which we do the communication
will remove you. But I'm not platformed it. I used to do NPR and I used to do the news hour
and I used to provide stories to Washington Post New York Times. That has gone away.
They've circled the wagons closer and closer and more of us are unacceptable. Right now,
I have no question that they're going through anybody who has a platform trying to say,
okay, what do we have against that person in case we need to shut that down?
We have to make a different decision, Lex. The different decision is that it doesn't matter
how many times Joe said the N-word. It doesn't matter that somebody else, with mathematical
theorems, if the worst person in the world proves a mathematical theorem like the Unabomber,
we can't undo the theorem. I point out Charles Manson's song,
Look at Your Game Girl, is an amazing song. It's a really good song. I don't think it's one of the
greatest songs ever, but it happens that he wasn't in no talent. I don't know how Hitler was as an
artist. It's actually not bad. Okay. We've got to get past this. We've got to get past this idea
that we're going to purge ourselves of our badness. This is like likened to teenage girls in cutting.
All we're doing is destroying ourselves in search of perfection. The answer is no,
we're not perfect. We're flawed. We're screwed up. We've always been this way. We're not going
to silence everyone who you can point a laser beam at and say, well, that person, look at how
bad that person is. If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye. We might as well just let's learn
Chinese. There is an art to having those messy conversations, whether with Alex or anybody
else. Okay. Let's talk about Alex. There's particular stuff that Alex does that's absolutely
nauseating. There's other stuff that he's doing that's funny. The methodology of the way he carries
and sometimes he's talking about the truth and sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy.
His variance is incredibly high. The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O'Keefe or the
National Enquirer or anything you don't like is to say, great, go long, short. What's that mean?
Well, if you invest in a mutual fund, all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long,
but if you invest in a hedge fund, you do something called relative value trade. It's like,
well, you long tech or short tech? Well, actually, I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Google.
Why is that? Oh, because I believe Google got way too much attention and that Microsoft has been
unfairly maligned. And so this is really a play on legacy tech over more modern tech. Okay.
Which part of Alex Jones are you long and which part are you short? One of the things that
should be a requirement for being a reporter is like, what did Donald Trump do that was good?
Nothing. Okay. Then you're not a reporter. What did Hitler do that was good?
The Rosenstrasse protest.
Non-Jewish women campaign for their Jewish men to be returned home to them
from certain death almost in death camps. It should have been that there were no death camps.
It should have been that everybody was returned home. But you know what? The fact that the women
of the Rosenstrasse protest, I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about, you know, some of the
baddest ass chicks in the world got their husbands returned to them, colica vote. And not, I'm not
celebrating Hitler. Hitler's the worst of the worst. But goddamn it, you know, this idea that
we can just say everything that person does is a lie. Everything that person does is evil.
This reflects a simplicity of mind that humanity cannot afford.
Is Google evil because it will sell you mine comp? Is Amazon evil because it will sell you mine
comp? If you find out that mine comp rests on somebody's bookshelves, do you have any idea what
it means? If you find out that a scholar used the N word, should that person lose their job?
Come on. Grow the hell up. I guess our responsibility to lead by example in that,
because you have to acknowledge that the fact like the current public discourse.
Have somebody on your podcast who you're worried about.
But do it in a principled fashion. I mean, in other words, I'm not here to whitewash
everything. On the other hand, if somebody makes, you know, some allegations,
I don't know that I'm obligated to treat every set of allegations as if,
no, how do you defend yourself against them? No, allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.
Well, my sort of my standard, I don't know, maybe you could speak to it is
I don't care. Like in the case of Alex Jones, for example, I don't, I'm willing to have a
conversation with Alex Jones and people like him. If I know he's not going to try to manipulate me.
Assume that he is going to try to manipulate you.
I can't. Then we're not going to be two humans.
Okay. Lex, I want you to think well of me. I put on a jacket. I don't usually wear a jacket.
Okay. Thank you, Eric.
All right. I'm trying to manipulate you. There's an entire field. There's an entire
field that says that speech may be best thought of as an attempt to manipulate each other.
This is too simplistic. Everything that we keep talking through. Yes.
You know better than this. I disagree. I think there's ways,
there's, of course, it's a gray area, but there is a threshold where your intent with
which you come to a meeting, to an interaction, is one that is not one that's grounded in like
a respect for a common humanity, like a love for each other, as deeply messy humans.
If somebody is doing really bad stuff, I expect you to try to keep them from doing really bad
stuff. But just keep in mind that when I was a younger man, I saw an amazing anti-pornography
documentary. And it was called Rate It X. And I don't know where it went.
But the conceit of it was, we're going to get some pornographers in front of a camera because
they want to talk and we're going to ask them about what they do for a living and why it's okay.
No commentary.
Okay. You could potentially, if you really think Alex Jones is the worst, and again,
I'm not intimately familiar with him, you could decide to just let him talk.
Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people.
You know, I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux. Stefan Molyneux makes many good points,
it makes many bad points, and he makes many good points in bad ways. And I worry about it,
and I don't feel that it's, it's not my obligation to make sure that Stefan Molyneux has a voice on
the portal. But I did stand up and say, I didn't want him banned from social media.
And I do think that a lot of the people who are being banned from social media were worried that
they're right rather than that they're wrong. I certainly don't really think that I'm worried
in some sense that some of the really wrong people are wrong. But you know, if you look at,
for example, Curtis Jarvan, there's a tremendous amount of interest. Is Eric going to speak to
Curtis Jarvan? Curtis Jarvan says many interesting things. And he says many horrible, stupid things,
very provocative. And I don't, I haven't, I haven't invited him onto the portal, but I haven't said,
I will never invite him onto the portal. We are all in a difficult position.
That's what I'm saying. You're making a kind of, I think it's a much more difficult task that,
and burden who carry it as people who have conversations, because Curtis Jarvan is a
good example. How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis's work to really understand?
We should talk about the problem of Curtis Jarvan. Yes.
Because I think it's a problem to be illustrative. There's this big question is,
why does somebody who says such stupid ass things listen to by so many people? Very smart people,
people who are part of our daily lives discuss Curtis Jarvan in hush tones.
No. That's a good question.
My belief is that Curtis Jarvan has made a number of very interesting, provocative points.
And they associate Curtis Jarvan as the person who has made these points,
and they treat the completely asinine stuff that he says that's super dangerous as, well,
that's Curtis. Right? Right. They give him the credit for, he's kind of like, sorry to use the
term, first principles, deep thinker about the way the world, some space about the world.
But as a result, we don't actually know why Curtis Jarvan is knocking around
so many Silicon Valley luminaries lives.
You said that he said a lot of asinine stupid stuff, and that's the sense I got from a few
things I've read, not just about, this is not just like Wikipedia stuff, is he's a little,
like I've said before, he seems to be careless. I don't think he's careless. No, no, no. It's like
Jim Watson. Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things in order to prove that he's free.
It's not a question of careless. He enjoys the freedom to say these things. And the key point
is, is that I expect something more of Curtis. I expect that if somebody is insightful about all
sorts of things up to that point, that they're going to have enough care. Now, I, for example,
make this point repeatedly that vaccines are not 100% safe. Most people who have an idea that
anybody is an anti-vaxxer should be silenced are in a position where they probably don't say vaccines
are 100% safe. But you keep finding that statement over and over again. Believe all women, vaccines
are 100% safe. Climate science is settled science. Whatever this Montanbele is, where you make
extraordinarily vapid blanket claims, and then you retreat into something, well, defund the,
we don't want no more police, actually just means we want the police to not take on mental health
duties. We've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society. And what I'm claiming is, is that
I might talk to Curtis Yardvin, but I have really very little interest to talk to a guy who seems
to be kind of giddy about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves. It's like, why do I
want to do that on the portal? One, first of all, because just as you said, that's not Curtis'
main thing. He has a lot of ideas. And what I've read of him, which is not a huge amount,
is he's very thoughtful about the way this world works. And on top of that, he's an important
historical figure in the birth and the development of the alt-right, or what would be called the
alt-right, the new reaction. Yeah. And there's, so he's just an important intellectual. And so
it makes sense to talk to him. The question is, how much work do you put in?
Well, this is the issue of Fugu. I'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that Fugu.
So you have a puffer fish. You can eat the puffer fish. You can get a kind of a tingly
sensation on your tongue if you get a little bit of the poison organ. But my point is, I don't know
how to serve Curtis Yardvin so that, in fact, I'm not worried about what happens. But I believe
that if somebody else was a student of the new reactionary movement, that person might be in
a better position to host Curtis Yardvin. So somebody, that's a really good example, somebody
I think you've spoken with that's an intermediary. That's a powerful one is Michael Malis. And he
spoke with Curtis Yardvin. And Michael wrote a book about... By the way, Michael somewhat
changed my mind about Michael Malis. I'm glad he did. I think I would call him a friend. And I think
he's a, underneath it all, a really kind human being. And I think your skepticism about him was
initially from a surface level of what did you call him, hyenas, the trolls and so on.
I'm not happy about his... It's been so long since I've seen good trolls.
Yes. So he needs higher quality of drolling, but he aspires to that. I mean, it, you know,
disagree or not, I really enjoy how much care he puts into the work he does, like on North Korea
and the study of the world and how much privately, but also in public, love he has for people,
especially those who are powerless. Yeah. Just a genuine admiration for them.
For... But I think Curtis actually does too. I don't know. I mean, you have to appreciate the
first time I met Curtis, he introduced me and he says, I'm the most right-wing person you've ever
met. I was just like, well, this is a conversation that's already over. It's theatrical in a way
that's not conducted to actually having a real connection. Well, it just, it turned me so, it
turned me off because it was like, you need to be the most right-wing person. And so it's like,
I'm a troll, I'm a troll. Yeah. Okay. Why are we doing this? Yeah. But what I'm trying to get at
is different. I'm trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend of yours. If you found out something
terrible, you should still be a friend. You should still continue to be his friend. And in Michael
Malice's case, it's very likely that we'll find out something different. Curtis is an acquaintance
of mine because he hangs around with some people that I know. I did not get it. I've started to
understand why the people in my life, some of them are Curtis Yarvin fans, many of them disregard
the stupid stuff. But my feeling is, is that too much poison organ, not enough fish. I don't know
how to serve that too intermingled. I'm not your chef. Speaking for defending your friends, staying
with your friends, and bringing the old band together again, you coined the term IDW until
it's your dark web. I like it. It represents a certain group of people that are struggling with
the, that are almost like challenged the norms of social and political discourse from all different
angles. What do you think is the state of the IDW? What do you think is its future? Is it still
a useful? Well, it never exists. Is it a protocol? Is it a collection of people featured in an article?
What I learned very clearly is that there's a tremendous desire in the internet age to pin
people down. What do you say? Who's in it? What are the criteria? It's like, I understand. You
want to play the demarcation game and you want to make everything that is demarcated instantly
null and void. No, thank you. So I resisted saying who was in it. I resisted saying what it was.
I resisted saying that Barry Weiss's article was the definitive thing. They chose a ridiculous
concept for the photographs that we couldn't get out of. I did not want those photographs taken.
They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer needed to take them all at twilight.
I didn't even necessarily want to do the article. Barry convinced me that it was the right thing
to do. Undoubtedly, Barry was right. I was wrong. But the key point is nothing can grow in this
environment. There's a reason we're not building. It does not appear that we found a way to grow
anything organic and good and decent that we need right now. And that's kind of the key issue.
Who's the weed? Do you mean us as a society? Those of us who wish to have a future for our
great grandchildren. Let's take the subset of people who are worried about things long after
their demise. But do you think it's useful to have a term like the IDW to capture some set of
people, some set of ideas or maybe principles that capture what I think the IDW... Okay,
you can say it's not supposed to me. It doesn't exist. It doesn't mean anything. But to the public,
to me, I'll just speak to me. It represented something. I think I said this to you. In my
first attempt to interview the great Eric Weinstein, I said that I spoke this about you,
but IDW in general is trying to point out the elephant in the room or that the emperor has no
clothes. The set of people that do that in their own way. If there are multiple elephants in the
room, the point is that the IDW was more interested in seeing the totality of elephants
and trying to figure out how do we move forward as opposed to saying I can spot the other guy's
elephant in the room, but I can't see my own. In large measure, we didn't represent an institutional
base. Therefore, it wasn't maximally important that we look at our own hypocrisy because we
weren't on the institutional spectrum. This is where friendship comes into play with the different
figures that are loosely associated with IDW is you are somehow responsible for the
exact thing that you said. Did you hear what Sam Harris said about IDW? That kind of thing.
Why chuckled?
Lovingly or chuckled? I was angry at some people who had said things that caused Sam to say what
Sam said about turning his imaginary club membership into the IDW. People said very
silly things. I think that there is just this confusion that integrity means calling out your
friends in front of the world. I've been pretty clear about this. I try to choose my friends
carefully. If you would like to recuse me because I'm not a source of reliable information,
people that I know and love the most, maybe that's reasonable for you. Maybe you prefer
somebody who was willing to throw a friend under the bus at the first sign of trouble.
By all means, exit my feed. You don't have to subscribe to me. If that's your concept
of integrity, you're barking up the wrong tree. What I will say is that I knew these people well
enough to know that they're all flawed. Thank you for the callback. The issue is that I love
people who are flawed. I love people who have to earn a living even if you call them a grifter.
I love people who like the fact that Donald Trump didn't get us into new wars even if you call
them alt-right. I love the fact that some people believe in structural oppression and want to fight
it even if they're not woke because they don't believe that structural oppression is hiding
everywhere. I care and love different people in different ways. I think that the overarching
thing that we're not getting at is that we were sold a bill of goods that you can go through life
like an Eliza program with pre-programmed responses. Well, it's what aboutism? It's both
sidesism. It's alt-right. It's the loony left. It's campus madness. It's like, okay, why don't
you just empty the entire goddamn magazine? All of those pre-recorded snips. Now that you've
done all of that, now we can have a conversation. Your son put it really well, which is we should,
in all things, resist labels. But we can't deal without labels. We have to generalize,
but we also have to keep in mind that just in the way in science, you deal with an effective
theory that isn't a fundamental one. In science, most of our theories, we consider to be effective
theories. If I generalize about Europe, about women, about Christians, those things have to
be understood to mean something and not to have their definitions extend so broadly that they mean
nothing at all, nor that they're so rigid that their claims that clearly won't bear scrutiny.
Lex, what do you really want to talk about? That's always my question to you.
That always gets me. That's a good thing. Maybe you are the therapist.
But you and I could talk about anything. People love, up until now at least,
people have loved listening to the two of us in conversation. My feeling is that we're not talking
about neural nets. We're not talking about geometric unity. We're not talking about where
distributed computing might go. I don't think that we're really focused on
some of the most exciting things we could do to transform education. We're still caught
in this world of other people that we don't belong in. I don't belong in the world as it's been
created. I'm trying to build a new world. I'm astounded that the people with the independent
means to help build that world are so demotivated that they don't want to build new structures.
The people who do want to build new structures seem to be wild-eyed.
Wild-eyed? What do you mean by wild-eyed? They're not.
I guarantee you that I will get some message in my DMs. It says, hey, Eric, I'm a third-year
chemistry student at South Dakota State. I've got a great idea. I just need funding. I want to build.
They don't have the means. The people who have the means have become-
Or the sophistication. It's like you're looking for somebody who's proven themselves a few times
to say, I've got $4 billion behind me that's soft-circled. I want to figure out what a new
university would be and what it would take to protect academic freedom and who we would hire
and what are the different characteristics because I can clearly see that everything
following the current model is falling apart. Nobody in my understanding is saying that.
Nobody is saying, let's take that which is functioning independently and make it less
vulnerable. Let's boost those signals. A critical component as money, you think.
It's not only that, but it's also a kind of, these people are mobbed up hands off.
Let's imagine for the moment that Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg
founded a university-come-social-media entity. They said, the purpose of this is to make sure
that academic freedom will not perish from this earth because it's necessary to keep
us from all going crazy. We are going to lock ourselves out. We've come up with this
governance system. The idea is that these people will be assigned the difficult task
of making sure that society doesn't go crazy in any particular direction, that we have a
fact-based, reality-based, feasibility-based understanding. We can try to figure out where
our real opportunities are. It feels like everybody with the ability to do something
like that and with the brains and experience and the resources would rather sit in the current
system and hope to figure out where they can flee to if the whole thing comes apart.
Maybe to push back on a little bit. I agree with you, but it feels like some people are
trying that. For example, Google purchased DeepMind. DeepMind is a company that represents
a lot of radical ideas. They've become acceptable, actually. AGI, artificial general intelligence,
used to be really radical of a thing to talk about. DeepMind and OpenAI are two places
which has made it more acceptable. I know you can now start to criticize, well, they're really,
now that it's become acceptable, they're not taking the further step of being more and more
radical. But that wasn't intended by Google to say that let's try some wild stuff.
Sort of like Boston Dynamics.
Sort of like Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics is a really good example of trying radical ideas
for perhaps no purpose whatsoever except to try out their ideas.
Well, the idea is that innovation is like dessert. You can have dessert after you solve
the problem of the main course, and the main course is a bunch of insoluble problems.
So that is, we can get into innovation once we perfect ourselves.
And you're saying that we need to make innovation the main meal.
Well, I'm saying that there really is structural oppression. If you train a deep learning system
on exclusively white faces, it's going to get confused. So let's not disagree that there are
real issues around this. In fact, that's an issue of innovation and data. Your data should be
responsive. On the other hand, there are things we can't do anything about that are actually
fundamental. And those things may have to do with the fact that some of us taste cilantro as soap,
and some of us don't. There are differences between people, and some of them are in the hardware,
some of them are in the firmware, some of them are in the software that is the human mind.
And this completely simplistic idea that every failure of an organization to promote
each person who has particular intersectional characteristics, we cannot hold progress hostage
to that. And you've talked about, perhaps we'll save this for another time because it's such a
fascinating conversation. You talked about this with Glenn Beck, is the whole stagnation of growth
and all that kind of stuff. Your idea is that in as much as the current situation is a kind of
Ponzi scheme, the current situation in the United States is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the
promise of constant unending innovation. We need to fund the true innovators and encourage them
and empower them and sort of culturally say that this is what this country is about is
the brilliant minds. We're going to kill each other if we don't grow. Growth is like an immune system
and you always have pathogens present. But if you don't have growth present, you can't fight the
pathogens in your society. And right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere. So if we
don't get growth into our system fairly quickly, we are in really seriously bad shape. So it's
very important that if I had a horrible person who was capable of building something that would
give us all a certain amount of what I've called financial beta to some new technology where we
all benefit, let's say quantum computing comes in and everybody, the dry cleaner has a quantum
computing angle. That's necessary to keep this system that we built going. We can try to redesign
the system, but our system expects growth and we've started it for growth. And the madness
that we're seeing is the failure of our immune system to be able to handle the pathogens that
have always been present. So people can say, well, this was always there. Yes, it was. What's
changed was your immune system. We have got to make sure that one, we understand why diversity
is potentially really important. We have mined certain communities to death. You and I are Ashkenazi
Jews. Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews are good at technical stuff. We know that the Chinese are
good at technical stuff. The Indians have many people who are good at technical stuff as the
Japanese. I also believe that we have communities where if you think about the Pareto idea of
diminishing returns, if you've never mined a community, many of the people you're going to
get at the beginning are going to be amazing because that community, it's like, did you drill
for more oil in Texas? Texas is pretty thoroughly picked over. Do you find someplace that's completely
insane? Maybe there's oil there. Who knows? In particular, I would like to displace our reliance
on our military competitors in Asia, in our scientific laboratories, with women, with African
Americans, with Latinos, people who are in different categories than we have traditionally
sourced. And I would like to get them the money that the market would normally give these fields
were we not using visas in place of payment. Now, I have a crazy idea, which is that you
and I both play music. And I find the analytic work that I do when I'm trying to figure out
chord progressions and symmetries and tritones, all these sorts of things to be very similar to
the work that I do when I do physics or math. I believe that one of the things that is true
is that the analytic contributions of African Americans to music are probably fungible to science.
I don't know that that's true. It's true. I haven't done controlled research, but I believe
that it is very important to let the People's Republic of China know that they are not staffing
our laboratories anymore. And that we need to look to our own people. And in particular,
we are going to get a huge benefit from making sure that women, black Americans,
Latinos are in a position to take over some of these things because many of these communities
have been underutilized. Now, I don't know if that's an insane idea. I want to hear somebody
tell me why it's an insane idea. But I believe that part of what we need to do is we need to
recognize that there are security issues. There are geopolitical issues with the funding of science.
And that what we've done is we've starved our world for innovation. And if we don't get back
to the business of innovation, we should be doing diversity and inclusion out of greed rather than
guilt. Now, part of the problem with this is that a lot of the energy behind diversity and
inclusion is based on guilt and accusation. And what I want is I want to kick ass. And my hope
is that diminishing returns favors mining the communities that have not been traditionally
mined in order to extract output from those communities unless there's a flaw in that plan.
If there's a flaw, somebody needs to tell me if there isn't a flaw, we need to get greedy
about innovation rather than guilty about innovation. That's really brilliantly put.
My biggest problem with what I see is, exactly speaks to that in the discussion of diversity.
It's used when it's grounded in guilt. It's then used as a hammer to shame people that don't care
about diversity. F that shit. So my point is, I'm excited about the idea of Jimi Hendrix
doing quantum field theory. I'm excited about the idea of Art Tatum trying to figure out
what the neural nets figured out about protein folding. I have some idea of the level of intellect
of people who have not found their way into STEM subjects in incredibly technically demanding
areas. If there's a flaw in that theory, I want somebody to present the flaw. But right now,
my belief is that these things are merit-based. And if you really believe in structural oppression,
you do not want an affirmative action program. You want to make sure that people have huge amounts
of resources to get themselves into position. I want to push out, I just tried this on this
Clubhouse application. I want to push out Klein bottles as a secret sign inside of rap videos
in hip-hop. I want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world. And I want to get the
people who, hopefully, I'm trying to lure into science and engineering. I want to get them paid.
I don't want them as the cheap substitutes for the fleeing white males who've learned
that they can't make any money in science and engineering. So, the problem is that we need
to take over the ship, Lex. And it doesn't need to be you and me because, quite honestly,
I have no desire to administer. I don't want to be the chief executive officer of anything.
What I do want is I want the baby boomers who've made this mess and can't see it to be gone.
They had almost all of our universities and I want fresh blood, fresh resources. I want academic
freedom and I want greed for our country and for the future to determine diversity inclusion as
opposed to shame and guilt, which is destroying our fabric. That's as good of a diversity statement
as I've ever heard. This is a U-turn, but somebody commented on the tweet you sent that,
as one of the top comments, they definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency. So,
it's a U-turn, but not really. Okay. Since you're an economist, since you're deep,
not an economist. I mean, I pretend to be an economist hoping that the economists will take
issue that I'm not an economist so that I can advance gauge theoretic and field theoretic economics,
which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge was a major innovation that happened
approximately 25 years ago. I don't think that economists understand what a price index is that
measures inflation, nor do I think economists understand what a growth index or a product
quantity index is that measures GDP. I think that they don't even understand the basics
of price and quantity index construction. Therefore, they can't possibly review
field theoretic economics. They can't review gauge theoretic economics. They're intellectually
not in a position to manage their own field. You talked about that there's a stagnation
in growth currently. I looked at from my microeconomics, macroeconomics in college perspective,
GDP doesn't seem to capture the productivity, the spectrum of what I think is a functioning,
successful society. What do you think is broken about GDP? What does it need to include
these indices? Let me explain what they don't understand to begin with.
Sure. Imagine that all prices and all quantities of output are the same at the end of a year
as they are at the beginning. You ask, what happened during that year? Was there inflation?
They meandered over the course of the year, but miraculously, they all came back to exactly their
values. The amount produced at the end of the year is the same as at the beginning in every
single quantity. Typically, the claim would be that the price index should be 1.0 and that the
quantity index should be 1.0. That's clearly wrong. Why? Well, it speaks to a fundamental
confusion that economists have. They don't understand that the economy is curved and not flat.
In a curved economy, everything should be path dependence, but they view path dependence as a
problem because they are effectively the flat earth society of market analysis. They don't
understand that what they've called, and they've actually called it the cycling problem, is exactly
what they need to understand to advance their field. I'll give you a very simple example.
Let's imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund and Ted and Alice in another.
In both cases, the females that is Alice and Carol are the chief investment officers,
and Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers in charge of trying to get money into the fund
and trying to get people not to, in fact, remove their money from the funds.
If you, in fact, had Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and both hedge funds
were invested in assets whose prices came back to the same levels and whose exposures
were in the same quantities, and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds, would
you compensate them the same necessarily? What if, for example, Carol was killing it
in terms of investments? Every time she bought some sort of security, the price of that security
went up, but Bob was the worst marketing officer. As chief marketing officer, there were tons of
redemptions because Bob was constantly drunk, Bob was making off-color comments. Now, as a result,
at the end of the year, the fund hasn't grown in size because even though Carol was crushing it in
terms of the investments, Bob was screwing up everything and the redemptions were legendary,
so people were making money and still pulling it out of the fund. In the other fund,
Alice can't seem to buy a base hit every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets,
but Ted's amazing marketing skills allowed the fund to get all sorts of new subscriptions and
halted the redemptions as people hoped that the fund would get its act together.
Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated,
and quantity indices should be how Bob and Ted are compensated. Even though both funds
had closed loops that come back to the original states, what happened during the period that
they were active tells you how people are supposed to be compensated. Now, we know that whatever the
increase in the price index is compensated by a decrease in the quantity index or conversely,
because prices and quantities return to their original values. You could have another fund
where nothing much happened, there were no redemptions, no subscriptions, prices, the fund
remained in cash the whole time. In that third fund, let's call that Tristan and Izalda,
that fund should have no bonuses paid because nobody did anything, but nobody should be fired
either. Now, the fact that the economists don't even understand that this is what their price
and quantity indices were intended to do, that they don't understand that you can actually
give what would be called ordinal agents the freedom to change their preferences
and still have something defined as a conus cost of living adjustment.
They don't even understand the mathematics of their field.
So, the indices need to be able to capture some kind of dynamics that-
We have had indices that capture these dynamics due to the work of Francois de Vizier since 1925,
but the economists have not even understood what de Vizier's index truly represents.
What do you miss with such crude indices then?
Well, you miss the fact that you're supposed to have a field theoretic subject.
The representative consumer should actually be a probability distribution on the space of all
possible consumers weighted by the probability of getting any particular pull from the distribution.
We should not have a single gauge of inflation. What is that in 1973 dollars? Any more than you
should be able to say it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on earth yesterday.
When we get to the cryptocurrency, what I'm going to say is that because we didn't
found economic theory on the proper marginal revolution, because we missed the major opportunity,
which is that the differential calculus of markets is gauge theory. It's not ordinary
differential calculus. We found that out in finance that it was stochastic differential
calculus. We have the wrong version of the differential calculus underneath all of modern
economic theory. Part of what I've been pushing for in cryptocurrencies is the idea that we should
be understanding that gold is a gauge theory just as modern economic theory is supposed to be a
gauge theory, and that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies and, more importantly,
distributed computing from the problem of this unwanted global aspect, which is the blockchain.
The thing that is most celebrated in some sense about Bitcoin is, in fact, the reason that I'm
least enthusiastic about it. I'm hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi did, but it's an intermediate
step towards trying to figure out what should digital gold actually be. If physical gold is a
collection of up quarks and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons held together,
the quarks by gluons with electrons orbiting it held together by photons with the occasional
weak interaction beta decay, all of those are gauge theories. Gold is actually coming from
gauge theory, and markets are coming from gauge theory. The opportunity to do locally enforced
conservation laws, which effectively is what a Bitcoin transaction is, should theoretically
be founded on a different principle that is not the blockchain. It should be a gauge
theoretic concept in which, effectively, the tokens are excitations on a network of computer nodes.
Let's imagine that this is some token. By moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship,
effectively, I pushed that glass as a gauge theory towards your region of the table.
We should be recognizing that gauge theory is the correct differential calculus for the 21st
century. In fact, it should have been there in the 20th century.
You're saying it captures these individual dynamics.
Why should my giving you a token have to be, why should we alert the global community
in this token that that occurred? You can talk about side change. You can talk about any means
of doing this. But effectively, we have a problem, which is if I think about this differently,
I have a glass that is extant. You have a glass that is absent. We're supposed to call the
constructor method on your glass at the same moment we call the destructor method on my glass
in order to have a conservation principle. It would be far more efficient to do this
with the one series system that is known never to throw an exception, which is nature.
And nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry for her underlying language.
We now know due to work of Pia Malani at Harvard Economics in the mid-1990s,
which I was her co-author on. But I wish to promote her as well as this being my idea.
We know that modern economic theory is a naturally-occurring gauge theory.
And the failure of that community to acknowledge that that work occurred and that it was put down
for reasons that make no analytic sense is important in particular due to the relatively
new innovation of distributed computing and Satoshi's brainchild.
So you're thinking we need to have the mathematics that captures,
that enforces cryptocurrency as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one where
the blockchain says that crypto should be centralized.
The abundance economy, much discussed in Silicon Valley or what's left of it,
is actually a huge threat to the planet because what it really is,
is what Mark Andreessen has called software eating the world.
And what that means is that you're going to push things from being private goods and services
into public goods and services. And public goods and services cannot have price and value tied
together. Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value to the world that they cannot
command a price and they will not be able to capture the value that they have created
or a significant enough fraction of it. The abundance economy is a disaster.
It will lead to a reduction in human freedom. The great innovation of Satoshi is locally
enforced or semi locally enforced conservation laws where the idea is just as gold is hard.
Why is gold hard to create or destroy? It's because it's created not only in stars,
but in violent events involving stars like supernova collisions.
When gold is created and we transact, we're using conservation laws.
The physics determines the custodianship, whatever it is that I don't have, you now have,
and conversely. In such a situation, we should be looking for the abstraction that most closely
matches the physical world because the physical world is known not to throw an exception.
The blockchain is a vulnerability, the idea that the 51% problem isn't solved,
that you could have crazy race conditions, all of these things. We know that they're solved
inside of gauge theory somehow. The important thing is to recognize that one of the greatest
intellectual feats ever in the history of economic theory took place already and was
essentially instantly buried, and I will stand by those comments. Satoshi, wherever you are,
I probably know you. Are you Satoshi? No. No, no, I don't have that kind of ability.
I really don't. I do other things. Speaking of Satoshi and gauge theory,
you've mentioned to Brian Keating that you may be releasing a geometric community paper
this year or some other form of additional material on the topic. What is your thinking
around this? What's the process you're going through now? I used April 1st to try to start
a tradition, which I hope to use to liberate mankind. The tradition is that at least one day a year
you should be able to say heretical things and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off or Mark Zuckerberg.
Your provost shouldn't call you up and say, what did you say? We need at some level to have a jubilee
from centralized control. My hope is that you know what a tradition is in America.
Something a baby boomer did twice.
Impeachment? That's very funny. Anyway, so I'm not a baby boomer, but as an exer,
I've thought about whether or not April 1st would be a good date on which to release a printed
version of what I already said in lecture form, because I think it's hysterically funny that
the physics community claims that it can't decode a lecture. It must be paper.
You know what? There will be a steady stream of new complaints up until the point that they fit
it into a narrative that they like. I'm thinking about April 1st as a date in which to release a
document. It won't be perfectly complete, but it'll be very complete. Then they'll try to say,
it's wrong, or you already did it, or no, that was done, but what we just did on top of it is
brilliant, or it doesn't match experiment or who knows what, they'll go through all of their usual
nonsense. It's time to go. Is there still puzzles in your own mind that need to be figured out for
you to try to put it on paper? I mean, those are different mediums, right? It was a great question.
I did not count on something that turns out to be important. When you work on your
own outside of the system for a long time, you probably don't think you're going to be doing
this as a 55-year-old man. I have been so long outside of math and physics departments, and
I've been occupied with so many other things, as you can see, that the old idea that I had was,
if I always did it in little pieces, then I was always safe because it wouldn't be steelable.
Now, those pieces never got assembled completely. In essence, I have all the pieces, and I can fit
them together, but there's probably a small amount of glue code. There are a few algebraic
things I've forgotten how to do. I may or may not figure them out between now and April 1st,
but it's pretty complete. But that's the puzzle you're kind of
struggling to now figure out to get it all in the same, the glue together.
I can't tell you whether the theory is correct or incorrect, but for example,
there's what's the exact form of the supersymmetry algebra or what's the rule for passing a minus
sign through a particular operator. All of that stuff got a lot more difficult because I didn't
do it. Look, it's a little bit like, if you're a violinist and you don't touch your violin regularly
for 15 years, you come back to it and you pretty much know the pieces sort of, but there's lots of
stuff that's missing, your tone is off and that kind of stuff. I'll get the ship to the harbor
and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in. If the tugboat doesn't show up, then I'll pilot
the thing right into the dock myself, but it's not a big deal. I think that it is essentially
complete. Psychologically, just as a human being, I remember perhaps by accident,
but maybe there's no accidents in the universe, I was tuned in, I don't remember where,
on April 1st, to you, oh, I think in your discord, kind of thinking about thinking through this
release. I mean, it wasn't obvious that you were going to do it. You were thinking through it and
I remember there was intellectual, personal, psychological struggle with this.
Yeah. Well, because I thought it was dangerous. If this turns out to be right, I don't know what
it unlocks. If it's wrong, I think I understand where we are. If it's wrong, it'll be the first
fool's gold that really looks like a theory of everything. It'll be the iron pyrides of physics
and we haven't even had fool's gold in my opinion yet. Got it. What is your intuition why this
looks right to you? Why it feels like it would be if wrong the first fool's gold?
I can say it very simply. It's way smarter than I am.
Can you break that apart a little more? Every time you poke at it, it's giving you
intuitions that follow with the currently known physics.
Well, let's put it in computer science terms. Yes, please.
Okay. There's a concept of technical debt that computer scientists struggle with.
As you commit crimes, you have to pay those crimes back at a later date.
In general, most of the problem with physical theories is that as you try to do something
that matches reality, you usually have to go into some structure that gets you farther away.
Your hope is that you're going to be able to pay back the technical debt. In general,
these wind up as checkkiting schemes or like you're funding a startup and there are too many
pivots. You keep adding epicycles in order to cover things that have gone wrong.
My belief is that this thing represents something like a summit to me and I'm very proud of having
found a route up this summit. The route is what's due to me. The summit can't possibly be due to me.
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay did not create Mount Everest. They know that they
didn't create that. They figured out a way up. You got to tell me what Mount Everest is in this
metaphor relative and also connected to the technical debt. The technical debt is a negative
thing that you'll eventually have to pay it. Are you saying in the ascent that you're seeing now
in the theory is you do not have much technical debt? That's right. I think that what happens
is that early on, what I would say is I believe now that the physics community has said many
things incorrectly about the current state of the universe. They're not wildly off, which is why,
for example, the claim is that there are three generations of matter. I do not believe that
there are three generations of matter. I believe that there are two generations of matter and
there is a third collection that looks like a generation of matter as the first two, only at
low energy. Well, that's not a frequent claim. People imagine that there are three or more
generations of matter. I would claim that that's false. People claim that the matter is chiral,
that it knows it's left from its right. I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental,
but it is emergent. We could keep going at all these sorts of things. People think that
space-time is the fundamental geometrical construct. I do not agree. I think it's
something that I've termed the observers. All of these different things represent
a series of overinterpretations of the world that preclude progress.
I think you gave some credit to string theory. I think loop quantum gravity,
if I remember correctly, as getting close to the fool's gold.
Well, I said that Garrett Leasy phenomenologically gets a lot of things right. He's got a reason
for chirality, a reason for uniqueness using E8. In fact, E8 uses something called vial fermions,
which are chiral. He has a way of getting geometry to get Riemann's geometry underneath
general relativity to play with Erasmann's geometry, which is underneath the standard model,
using something called Cartan connections that are out of favor. He's figured out something
involving super connections to make sure that the fermion, the matter in the system,
isn't quantized the same way as the bosons were, which is a problem in his old theory.
He's got something about three generations for chirality. He's got a lot of phenomenological
hits. I don't think Garrett's theory works. It also has a very simple Lagrange. He's basically
using the Yang-Mills norm squared, the same thing you would use as a cost function.
If you were doing neural nets, the string theorists have a different selling point,
which is that they may have gotten a renormalizable theory of gravity if quantum gravity was what
we were meant to do. They've done some stuff with black holes that they can get some solutions
correct. Then they have lots of agreements where they show mathematical truths that
mathematicians didn't even know. I'm very underwhelmed by string theory based on how many people
have worked on it and how little is supporting the claims to it being a theory of everything.
Those are the two that I take quite seriously. I don't yet take Wolframs quite seriously because
if he really finds one of these cellular automatons that are really distinct and
generative, it'll be amazing. But he's looking for such a thing. I don't think he's found anything.
Techmark, I view as a philosopher who is somehow taking credit for Platonism,
which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max because I like Max. But if it ever comes
time, I'm putting a post-it note that the mathematical universe hypothesis is really
anything new. In general, loop quantum gravity really I think grew out of some hopes that the
general relativistic community had for that they would be able to do particle theory. I don't think
that they've shown any particle theoretic realism. Essentially, here's what I really think, Lex.
I think we didn't understand how big the difference between an effective theory and a theory of
everything is conceptually. Maybe it's not mathematically that different. But conceptually,
trying to figure out what a theory of everything, how does the universe, and I've compared it to
Escher's drawing hands, how do two hands draw themselves into existence? That's the puzzle
that I think has just been wanting. I'll be honest, I'm really surprised that the theoretical
physics community didn't even get up on their high horse and say this is the most stupid
nonsense imaginable because clearly, I always say I'm not a physicist. I'm an amateur with
the heart as big as all outdoors. In your journey of releasing this, and I'm sure there
further, maybe it will be another American tradition on April 1st that will continue for years to come.
In my, there's sort of
crumbs along the way that I'm hoping to collect in my naive view of things of the beauty
that in your geometric view of the universe. So one question I'd like to ask is if you were to
challenge me to visualize something beautiful, something important about geometric community
in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty from the outsider's perspective, what would that
thing be? Interesting question. Perhaps we can both have a journey towards April 1st.
Take a look at that. Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose, not Melrose,
on Montana in Santa Monica. Now, you'll notice that all of those discs rotate independently.
Yes. If you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous, but not uniform everywhere,
what you're doing is a so-called gauge transformation on the torus seen as a U1 bundle
over a U1 spacetime. So the concept of spacetime here in a very simplified case isn't four-dimensional,
but it's one-dimensional. It's just a circle. And there's a circle above every point in the circle
represented by those little discs. Imagine, if you will, that we took a rubber band and placed it
around here and decided that that was a function from the circle into the circle that is representing
a y-axis that's wrapped around itself. Well, you would have an idea of what it means for a function
to be constant if it just went all around the outside. But what happens if I turn this a little
bit? Then the function would be mostly constant. It would have a little place where it dipped
and it went back. It turns out that you can transform that function and transform the derivative
that says that function is equal to zero when I take its derivative at the same time. That's
what a gauge transformation is. Amazing to me that we don't have a simple video visualizing
things that I've already had built and that I can clearly demonstrate. When you do that
torus, whose the code of the torus is itself generating spinning torus, this is a U1 principle
bundle. And the world needs to know what a gauge theory is, not by analogy, not with Lawrence
Krauss saying it's like a checkerboard. If you change some of the colors this way, not saying
that it's a local symmetry involving like none of those things. It's a theory of differential
calculus where the functions and the derivatives are both subject to a particular kind of change
so that if a function was constant under one derivative, then the new function is constant
under the new derivative transformed in the same fashion. And would you put that under the
category of just gauge transformations? Yes, that would be gauge transformations applied to
sections and connections where connections are the derivatives in the theory. This is easily
explained. It is pathological that the community of people who understand what I'm saying have never
bothered to do this in a clear fashion for the general public. You and I could visualize this
overnight. This is not hard. The public needs to know in some sense that let's say quantum
electrodynamics, the theory of photons and electrons, more or less electrons are functions
and photons are derivatives. Now, there's some you can object in some ways, but basically a
gauge theory is the way in which you can translate a shift in the definition of the functions and
the shift of the definition of the derivatives so that the underlying physics is not harmed
or changed. So you have to do both at the same time. Now, you and I can visualize that. So if
what you wanted to do rather than going directly to geometric unity is that I could sit down with
you and I could say here are the various components of geometric unity. And if the public needs a
visualization in order to play along, we've got a little over two months and I'd be happy to work
with you. I love that as a challenge and I'll take it on and I hope we do make it happen.
And David Goggins, if Lex doesn't do some super macho thing because he's got to work
to get some of this stuff done, you'll understand he'll be available to you after April.
Thank you for the escape clause. I really needed that escape clause. I'm glad that's on record.
I'm worried, 48 miles and 48 hours. By the way, I just want to say how much I admire
your willingness to keep this kind of hardcore attitude. I know that Russians have it and Russian
Jews have it in spades, but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy and that's weak and that's
lazy. And the fact that you bring so much heart to saying, I'm going to bring this to jujitsu.
I'm going to bring this to guitar. I'm going to bring this to AI. I'm going to bring this to
podcasting. It comes through loud and clear. And I just find it completely and utterly inspiring
that you keep this kind of hardcore aspect at the same time that you're the guy who's extolling the
virtue of love in a modern society and doing it at scale. Thank you. That means a lot. I don't know
why I'm doing it, but I'm just following my heart on it and just going with a gut. This seems to
make sense somehow. I personally think we better get tougher or we're going to get in a world of
pain. And I do think that when it comes time to lead, it's great to have people who you know don't
crack under pressure. Do you mind if we talk about love and what it takes to be a father for a bit?
Sure. Do you mind if Zev joins us? I'd be an honor.
So, Eric, I've talked to your son, Zev, who's an incredible human being, but let me
ask you. This might be difficult because you're both sitting together. What advice do you have
for him as he makes his way in this world, especially given that, as we mentioned before
on Joe Rogan, you're flawed in that just like all humans, you're mortal.
Well, at some level, I guess one of my issues is that I've got to stop giving quite so much advice.
Early on, I was very worried that I could see Zev's abilities and I could see his challenges,
and I saw them in terms of myself. So a certain amount of Zev rhymes with whatever I went through
as a kid, and I don't want to doom him to the same outcomes that suffice for me. I think that he's
got a much better head on his shoulders at age 15. He's much better adjusted, and in part,
it's important for me to recognize that because I think I did a reasonably decent job early on,
I don't need to get this part right. I'm looking at Zev's trajectory and saying,
you're going to need to be incredibly and even pathologically self-confident. The antidote for
that is going to be something you're going to need to carry on board, which is radical humility,
and you're going to have to have those in a dialectical tension, which is never resolved,
which is a huge burden. You are going to have to forgive people who do not appreciate your gifts
because your gifts are clearly evident, and many people will have to pretend not to see them because
if they see your gifts, then they're going to have to question their entire approach to education or
employment or critical thinking. What my hope is is that you can just forgive those who don't see
them and who complicate and frustrate your life and realize that you're going to have to take care
of them too. Zev, let me ask you the more challenging question because the guy sitting right here,
what advice do you have for your dad? After talking to you, I realize you're the more brilliant,
aside from the better-looking member of the family.
I could say anything you want. This is the last time we're going to be seeing left.
This could be an awkward drive home.
I think sort of a new perspective I've taken on parenting is that it is a task for which
no human is really supposed to be prepared. In Jewish tradition, for example, there are
myriad analogies in the Torah and the Talmud that compare the role of a parent to the role of a God.
No human is prepared to play God and create and guide a life, but somehow we're forced into it
as people. I think sometimes it's hard for children to understand that however their
parents are failing sort of has to be here is something for which we must budget because our
parents play a role in our lives of which they're not worthy and they devote themselves to
regardless because that becomes who they are in a certain sense. I hope to have realistic
expectations of you as a human because I think too often it's easy to have godly expectations
of people who are far from such a role and I think I'm really happy that you've been as open as you
have with me about the fact that you don't pretend to be a god in my life. You are a guide who allows
me to see myself and that's been very important considering the fact that by your self-teaching
paradigm I will have to guide myself and being able to see it and see myself accurately has
been one of the greatest gifts that you've given me so I'm very appreciative and I want you to know
that I don't buy into the role that you're supposed to sort of fake your way through in my life but
I am unbelievably happy with a more realistic connection that we've been able to build in
lieu of it so I think it's been easier on you actually as you come to realize what I don't
know what I can't do and that there's been a period of time I guess that's fascinating to me
where you're sort of surprised that I don't know the answer to a certain thing as well as you do
and that I remember going through this with a particular mathematician who I held and I still
hold in awe named David Kajdan and you know he famously said to him and weirdly our family knew
his family in the Soviet Union but he said you know Eric I always appreciate you coming to my
office because I always find what you have to say interesting but you have to realize that in the
areas that you're talking about you are no longer the student you are actually my teacher and I
wasn't prepared to hear that and there are many ways in which as I was just saying with the Mozart I
am learning at an incredible rate from you I used to learn from you because I didn't understand what
was possible you were you were very much I mean it's the weird thing there used to be this thing
called Harvey the invisible rabbit this guy could had a rabbit that was like six feet tall that only
he could see maybe was talking and that was like you at age four is you were saying batch of crazy
things that were all totally sensible and that nobody else could put them together and so what's
wonderful is that the world hasn't caught on but enormous numbers of people are starting to and
I really do hope that that genuineness of spirit and that outside the box intellectual commitment
and serves you well as the world starts to appreciate that I think you're a very trustworthy
voice you don't get everything right but the idea that we have somebody at your age who's
embedded in your generation who can tell us something about what's happening is really
valuable to me and I do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice more than just at the dinner
table I apologize for saying this four letter word but do you love Zav
I was really worried it was going to be another four letter word there's so many
it doesn't even rise to the level of a question I mean I just there are a tiny number of people
with whom you share so much life that you can't even think of yourself in their absence and
I don't know if Zav would find that but it's you can have a kid and never make this level of
connection I think I think even right down to the fact that you know when when Zav's
chooses boogie woogie piano for his own set of reasons why I would choose boogie woogie piano
if I could play in any style it's a it's a question about a decrease in loneliness
you know like my grandfather played the mandolin and I had to learn some mandolin because otherwise
that instrument would go silent you don't expect that you get this much of a chance to leave this
much of yourself in another person who is choosing it and recreating it rather than it being
directly instilled and my proudest achievement is in a certain sense having not taught him
and and having shared this much so you know it's not even love it's like well beyond
so you mentioned love for you making a less lonely world I think I speak for
I would argue probably millions of people that you Eric because this is a conversation with you
have made for many people for me a less lonely world and I can't wait to see how
how you Zav develop as an intellect but also I'm so heart-worn by the optimism and the
hopefulness that was in you that I hope develops further and lastly I'm deeply thankful that you
Eric are my friend and would give me would honor me with this watch it means more than
words can say thanks guys thanks for talking today thank you thanks for listening to this
conversation with Eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors indeed hiring site TheraGun
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click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you
some words from Socrates to find yourself think for yourself thanks for listening and hope to see you
next time