Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics
Guests: Eric Weinstein
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents18 chapters
§01Transcript · 00:00–09:25§02Transcript · 09:27–17:54§03Transcript · 17:58–26:51§04Transcript · 26:53–35:45§05Transcript · 35:46–45:08§06Transcript · 45:08–54:19§07Transcript · 54:23–1:03:15§08Transcript · 1:03:18–1:12:34§09Transcript · 1:12:37–1:20:53§10Transcript · 1:20:56–1:29:50§11Transcript · 1:29:51–1:38:23§12Transcript · 1:38:25–1:47:34§13Transcript · 1:47:39–1:57:00§14Transcript · 1:57:04–2:06:37§15Transcript · 2:06:39–2:15:26§16Transcript · 2:15:28–2:25:15§17Transcript · 2:25:17–2:34:43§18Transcript · 2:34:47–2:38:34§01Transcript · 00:00–09:25
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 am fortunate to call a friend.
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at Lex 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
extraterrestrial 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 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 it 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 world 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.
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,
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 wanna 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 roll.
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 gotta 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 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?
So 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.
- So that's a really strong mental exercise
of breaking the framework in which we think.
'Cause most of the frameworks would have
a single temporal dimension, right?
- Well, 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.
- So 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, right?
And so 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 gonna form
an elliptic object called a minimal surface.
Then when I pop that and blow through it,
you're gonna hear a noise that's gonna travel to you
by a wave equation, which is gonna be hyperbolic.
But then the garlic breath is gonna diffuse towards you,
and you're eventually gonna 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.
- Well, I have an off-color one,
which I chose not to share,
but hopefully the kids at home--
- Can imagine.
(laughing)
- 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?
§02Transcript · 09:27–17:54
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, I don't know,
"34th Street and 3rd Avenue,
"and you'll find a building on the northwest corner
"and go up to the 17th floor," 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
and it's all flat land,
but I'm gonna give you two temporal coordinates.
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 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 wristwatch.
That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch.
I want you to wear it.
- This guy is 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 time.
- 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 time scales
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 gonna put a watch on your ankle,
and you're only gonna 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 two-two sector, and a three-one,
and a one-three, and a zero-four, and a four-zero.
And all of these sectors have some physical reality.
We happen to live in a one-three 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.
Did it 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 the entirety
of your life story with it,
because there's all these steps on it.
- Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.
(laughing)
- And where have I been?
- Exactly.
- That's what we're talking about.
We're talking about, you wanna 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 gonna 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 it almost feels like you need to incorporate that
into your study of the nature of reality.
It's like the constant shifting of the notation,
the tools we use to communicate that reality.
And so 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.
- 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 funding for DARPA for a while.
- I don't have a security clearance.
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 our understanding of the world
that they're not releasing?
So this is one of the famous distractions
that people play with, the narrative--
- Assume that that were true.
- Of alien life forms, spacecraft in 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 Teitelbaum
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 does the government want?"
He said, "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 and 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 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
§03Transcript · 17:58–26:51
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.
- 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 dissipates,
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 there are all sorts of bizarre,
like there's a switch in my house that says privacy.
(laughing)
I don't know what privacy is.
Does it turn on an electromagnetic field
that there's 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 funny if there's a freedom of speech switch
that you could also control.
Then it would be a perfect metaphor--
- Well, that's different.
Because what they figured out is
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 like 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 can speak
and what it appears to be that is being said
and whose 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 can 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 the 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'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 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,
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 over he wants.
- It's really, so you say the courts,
but it's also us, people who think about the world, you--
- No, no, no, it's the courts.
If the courts don't do this, we're toast.
- But we can still think about it.
I mean-- - Sure, but I don't feel
like going down the drain.
- Here's what I'm thinking about,
'cause 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 gonna be popular for a while.
Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication.
Print or shouting in a public park.
And so 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,
but 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 can 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 Parler from AWS
because my assumption was that the infrastructure,
I drew a distinction between AWS,
the infrastructure on which competing platforms
could 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 Parler 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
as 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, is childlike naivety and curiosity, but also--
- Real or simulated?
- Real, I'm afraid.
- I would say 80% real.
§04Transcript · 26:53–35:45
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 Reid,
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 Chokepoint
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,
as Riley Reid, 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 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
was cut 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 Antifa doesn't exist,
and we don't report what goes on 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--
- Long term.
- Well, if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump,
what is 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 a complicated thing.
- Well, there's a, look, these guys are all having
a discussion in very practical terms.
You know, you can say,
you can imagine the sorts of conversation.
Jack, Mark, Sunder, 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 along with extremism, guys.
We just need, we need to make sure
that we're all on the same page.
- Well, they use the term violence, too,
and they, I think, over-apply it.
So basically, anybody--
(laughing)
- 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.
- Mid, late 20s to late 40s.
- Yeah. - Somewhere in there.
- That's the demographic, yeah.
- I do think that partially what's happened is
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 it 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 jazzed 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 a grownup would do.
And it just made, you know,
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
are 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, a world of abundance,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
is really about the software eating the world
as Marc 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,
and 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 reason--
- Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grown up.
- It seems like he is.
He's-- - 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 with people.
- 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,
it's 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.
- 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 gonna unlock it.
I'm gonna take a picture of Lex Fridman.
Now, if I can, I'm gonna tweet that picture out.
- Great.
- But here's the weird part about it.
- Yeah.
§05Transcript · 35:46–45:08
- 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.
- And we have, well, and some of those accounts are dead.
We don't really know how many places it went.
- Yeah.
- 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
in the 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-frictional,
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.
- And that's fascinating to think about.
I mean, 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.
- But if 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 now it's--
- 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, 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,
the Undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan
and Rowdy Roddy Piper.
Okay, well, that's very different than MMA.
- You've recently been on a 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
of the mainstream media,
but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews.
- You're right.
- Having a nuanced or just like a respectful conversation
that's grounded in 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.
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,
championing these two teams as 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 you and I are looking at.
So when you ask me, 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
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 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.
Joe Rogan is now part of the system,
and then he's also uncancellable.
And there's this tension that's happening.
- Well, think about what happened to 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?
Joe says this thing about FU money.
Joe's one of the only people with FU money
who's actually said FU.
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 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 if you can live on rice and beans,
you're uncancellable because you're always rich
relative to your need side.
- 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.
§06Transcript · 45:08–54:19
My point 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
as in terms of the idea we trust our elite.
Now we have an idea like, you wanna be the elite.
You wanna lord above us.
First of all, there's a populist anti-elitist thing.
Then there's the idea that
we're gonna defer tenure for forever.
Then we're gonna tell people stay in your lane.
Your tenure is only good for your own
particular tiny micro subject.
Then we're gonna also control your grants
and we'll be able to load up your teaching load
if we don't like who you are.
We'll make your life absolutely impossible.
We lost academic freedom.
And we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster.
And then we lost funding so that people were confident
that they would have the ability to do research
no matter what they said.
And as a result, what you find is a world
in which there's no ability to get people to say,
no, I'm not gonna sign your diversity and inclusion
forced loyalty oath.
I won't sign any loyalty oath.
Get the hell out of my office.
F you.
- F you, and you're connecting money to that, but--
- Well, 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.
- Right.
- Okay.
- 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.
And Ralph Gomory 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.
And so people say, you know, 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 wanna 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.
So 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 doing,
not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities
you can as freedom.
So like, when you ban Donald Trump,
when you ban Parler, you give a little doubt
in the minds of millions, like me,
a person who's a tech person, who's an entrepreneur,
there's a little, that's what I'm afraid of
when I look in the mirror, is there now
a little doubt in there?
- Sure.
- 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 opined 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.
- Well, 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 Villard 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?
So we're not interested in asking questions.
Like, am I gonna 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 Jeffrey Epstein,
the truth behind Jeffrey 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 that get--
- I hate to say it, you're not gonna 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.
- Yeah.
- Those cats were so disciplined.
- It's an art form in a sense.
- 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 Davidon,
who was a student of Murray Gell-Mann
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.
We have, 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,
like 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.
And I come back to the Shaggy defense of it wasn't me.
You know, it's like, you remember that song?
- Shaggy, yeah, wasn't me, caught you banging
in the shower on the counter.
- Yeah, exactly, wasn't me.
- It wasn't me.
- He says, his friend says, well,
your strategy makes no sense at all.
(laughing)
Well, 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.
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.
I mean, 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, right?
We the taxpayer pay for research,
and then, (laughing)
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
§07Transcript · 54:23–1:03:15
that I will immediately be seen as a knuckle-dragger.
I believe in the great woman theory of history
and the great man theory of history.
Emmy Noether 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 toward 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 competitors' clutches,
particularly if you're a young person
being reviewed by an older person.
Are you familiar with the Doit de Signore?
Are you familiar with the legend of the Magnia?
No, the Magnia 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 Magnia was in fact told
that the lord of the land had the right
to have the first night with the bride.
Well, the Magnia had a different idea.
So she seemed to consent to this perhaps mythical right,
also called the prima notte, 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 Magnia is the legendary hero.
Right now, what we need to do is we need
to resist the prima notte, the right of first look, right?
F you, you don't have the right of first look.
I don't wanna send something blindly to my competitors.
I don't wanna 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 Planck.
You know the Matthew principle,
you know the Matilda principle,
that things done by women are attributed to men.
These are not new.
And you guys just live like this?
- Yeah.
So the Revolutionary Act now is to resist
all of these things that, these things that are not new.
- So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz.
Aaron Schwartz was the Magnia.
One of the things you've done very beautifully
is to communicate love.
And I think about some of our conversations.
And you got me to talk a little bit
about my own experiences in 02138 and 039.
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 happened 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 had 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 shul was the conservative minion at Harvard Hillel.
And I believe it's called Wrosowski Hall
after Henry Wrosowski 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 laid.
- Paid.
- Oh, 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.
All right, leaving that aside.
- Yes.
- 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 was really trying to get at
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?
- I'll tell you what I thought.
I had been waiting to find out,
does my government even know I exist?
- Do you have an answer to that question?
- I have, 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?
I mean-- - 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, it's all you see is your reflection.
- But your intuition still holds.
Like, this is where I've mentioned that I,
this is where I'll say naive, dumb things,
but I still hold onto this intuition
that Jeff, I'm not confident in this,
but I'm 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,
§08Transcript · 1:03:18–1:12:34
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?
- And you can express both, correct?
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 gonna tilt very strongly to,
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You're gonna have that kind of energy.
And then somebody else is gonna say,
how many times do I have to get hit on,
how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb
before I realize 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 patterns.
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 your inner Harris?
And those are different.
- I wanna find out the difference between you and I,
biases aside, is you've actually met Jeffrey Epstein.
And I'm listening to reverberations years later
of stories and narratives throughout the story.
- I luckily 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.
- Yes.
- 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's your guy.
- So there's that 'cause 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, "Oh, I have a well."
(laughing)
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's 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.
I gotta 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.
- The freedom.
- It's gonna 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 wanna become a celebrity.
I didn't wanna 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.
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 Penrose to Alex Jones.
- To Jordan Peterson, to, I mean, even,
first of all, to you-- - To Abby Martin.
- To Abby Martin. - To Barry Weiss.
- Yeah. - That's the problem.
- Well, but you have now successfully built up a thing
that allows that to carry that forward.
- Oh, no, no, no, no.
We are all vulnerable to reputational attack,
because what happens, you see, the problem, Lex,
is that you are now an institution at some level.
You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag.
- Wearing a 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 SEC filings, 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 that
I'm going to fight general reputational attacks,
not because some people don't deserve
to have their reputations 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 some of it is also-- - J.P. 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,
otherwise we're suppressing too many people.
Too many, too brilliant 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 a muamua,
that it might be alien technology.
He told me, this outside-the-box thinker,
when speaking to me about Elon,
called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed.
The blunt. - I love it.
- In a dismissive way, like this guy's crazy
because he smoked some weed.
I was looking at him. - Good God.
- I was like, why, wow, wow.
- I think you should be able to have
consensual drug-filled orgies.
Fuck perfect lives.
- Yeah, you should be allowed to be messy.
You're right, I take back my statement.
I was 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
§09Transcript · 1:12:37–1:20:53
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 gonna 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.
Like at some point I had 10,000 people using exactly
the same templated tweet, tweeting at me.
It was just actually, it got to the point where it was funny
because everybody said, did you hear that
in 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 count go down
because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot-like follows
and then just pull them.
So I think that it's pretty well known how,
and then maybe your account will be suspended
and it can't be revoked and et cetera, et cetera,
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.
Like, 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't, I mean, 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 so distrust because none of us
wanna stand behind flawed people.
That's why you have everybody rushing to say,
I neither condemn nor condone.
I don't condemn nor, you know, 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--
- It'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.
And if they do terrible, terrible things,
you bring that up with them privately.
And it's not my responsibility to disavow in public.
You know, we've had the 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?
- Oh, 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--
- So my feeling, 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 Callahan
and on all these people that quote-unquote got canceled.
- And I'm not saying that they,
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,
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's a very strong sense
that he has to be outgrouped.
And as a result, I mean, do we want,
do we want to disavow the space program
because it touched Wernher von Braun?
Do we want to disavow quantum mechanics
because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg
passed through it?
Is Ehrenfest's 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 aren't necessarily great people.
It's like none of us, 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
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, okay?
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,
people haven't even blown through their budgets
and we're already--
- Yeah, 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.
- Do you remember the John Edwards story?
- Did you know his wife?
Sorry, I don't remember.
- He had a child from an extramarital affair.
- Yes.
- I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story.
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?
§10Transcript · 1:20:56–1:29:50
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 de-platform, will remove you.
- But I'm not platformed.
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.
And 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,
and 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.
And 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 a no talent.
And I don't know how Hitler was as an artist.
- Fiction, not bad.
- Okay, we've got to get past this.
We've got to get past this idea
that we're gonna purge ourselves of our badness
and we're just gonna,
this is like, I've likened it to teenage girls in cutting.
We're just, all we're doing is destroying ourselves
in search of perfection.
And the answer is no, we're not perfect.
We're flawed, we're screwed up.
And we've always been this way.
And 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.
- But 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.
And 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 of 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 this.
Some of the baddest ass chicks in the world
got their husbands returned to them.
Kolaka vote.
And I'm not celebrating Hitler.
Hitler's the worst of the worst.
But God damn it, 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 Mein Kampf?
Is Amazon evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf?
If you find out that Mein Kampf
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 on that
because you have to acknowledge that the current--
- 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 some allegations,
I don't know that I'm obligated
to treat every set of allegations as if,
how do you defend yourself against, no.
Allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.
- Well, 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'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 gonna try to manipulate you.
- I can't, then we're not going to be two humans.
- Okay, but 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, no, 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 is grounded in a respect for a common humanity,
like a love for each other, as deeply messy as humans.
- If somebody's 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.
I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux.
Stefan Molyneux makes many good points,
and 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 if you look at, for example, Curtis Yarvin,
there's a tremendous amount of interest.
Is Eric going to speak to Curtis Yarvin?
Curtis Yarvin says many interesting things,
and he says many horrible, stupid things,
very provocative.
And I don'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 it kind of,
I think it's a much more difficult task that,
and burden, Cary, as people who have conversations,
because Curtis Yarvin is a good example.
How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis's work
to really understand--
§11Transcript · 1:29:51–1:38:23
- Let's talk about the problem of Curtis Yarvin.
- Yes.
- 'Cause I think it's probably ill-stripped.
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 Yarvin in hushed tones.
Now-- - That's a good question.
- My belief is that Curtis Yarvin has made a number
of very interesting, provocative points,
and they associate Curtis Yarvin 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 a kind of like, sorry to use the term,
first principles deep thinker about--
- In some category. - In some space
about the world.
- But as a result, we don't actually know
why Curtis Yarvin is knocking around
so many Silicon Valley luminaries' lives.
- Well, see, you said that he said a lot
of asinine stupid stuff, and that's a sense I got
from a few things I've read, not just about him.
This is not just 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, 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 that there's,
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
who's 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 Mont and Bailey 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 Yarvin, 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's 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.
- Or the new reactionary movement.
- 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 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 Yarvin
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 Yarvin.
- 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 Malice, and he's spoken with Curtis Yarvin.
And Michael wrote a book about--
- By the way, Michael somewhat changed my mind
about Michael Malice.
- 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 (laughs)
he needs a higher quality of trolling.
But he aspires to that.
I mean, disagree or not,
I really enjoy how much care he puts
into the work he does 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.
Just a genuine admiration for them.
- 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, 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 conductive
to actually having a real connection.
- 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.
Okay, why are we doing this?
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 continue to be his friend.
- And in Michael Malice's case,
it's very likely that we'll find out something terrible.
- 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 that too much poison organ,
not enough fish, I don't know how to serve that.
It's 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, Intellectual Dark Web.
I like it.
It represents a certain group of people
that are struggling with,
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.
Well, what do you say?
Who's in it?
What are the criterion?
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 don't know, some such thing.
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 we?
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 mean,
it doesn't exist, it doesn't mean anything,
§12Transcript · 1:38:25–1:47:34
but to the public, to me, okay, I'll just speak to me,
it represented something.
- Yeah.
- It represented, I think I just said this to you,
it's 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.
- Yes.
- The point is that the IDW is 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.
And in large measure, we didn't represent
an institutional base and 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, I don't know, I forget,
oh, what Sam Harris said about IDW?
- Yeah.
- That kind of thing.
- I chuckled.
- Lovingly or chuckled like--
- 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 and 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
and 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.
- But the issue is that I love people who are flawed
and I love people who have to earn a living
even if you call them a grifter
and 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 wanna 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
and I think that the overarching thing, Lex,
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 whataboutism, it's both sides-ism,
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 they're claims
that clearly won't bear scrutiny.
Lex, what do you really wanna talk about?
That's always my question to you.
- That always gets me, that's a good,
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.
And my feeling is is that we're not talking
about neural nets, and we're not talking
about geometric unity, and we're not talking
about where distributed computing might go.
And 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,
and I'm astounded that the people
with the independent means to help build that world
are so demotivated that they don't wanna
build new structures.
And the people who do wanna 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 that says, "Hey, Eric,
"I'm a third-year chemistry student
"at South Dakota State,
"and I've got a great idea.
"I just need funding.
"I wanna build--"
- They don't have the means.
So the people who have the means--
- 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 wanna 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."
- And 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.
And 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.
"And we are going to lock ourselves out."
We've come up with this governance system.
And 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.
- Well, yeah, and maybe to push back on it a little bit,
I agree with you, but it feels like
some people are trying that.
So for example, Google purchased DeepMind.
DeepMind is a company that kind of 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.
And 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 was an attempt by Google to say
that let's try some wild stuff.
- 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 the idea 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.
I mean, if you train a deep learning system
§13Transcript · 1:47:39–1:57:00
on exclusively white faces, it's gonna 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.
Like 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
intersexual characteristics,
we cannot hold progress hostage to that.
- And you've talked about,
perhaps we'll save this for another time
'cause it's such a fascinating conversation.
You talked about this with Glenn Beck,
is the whole sort of 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 gonna 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, right?
- Yes. - Okay.
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 starved 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 gonna get at the beginning
are gonna 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 some place 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 I play,
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 wanna 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 wanna kick ass.
And my hope is 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 it 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 enough.
- F that shit, okay?
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.
And 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 wanna make sure that people have huge amounts
of resources to get themselves into position.
I wanna push out,
I just tried this on this Clubhouse application,
I wanna push out Klein bottles as a secret sign
inside of rap videos in hip hop, right?
I want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world.
And I wanna 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,
'cause quite honestly, I have no desire to administer,
I don't wanna 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 and 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.
Since you're an economist, since you're deep,
not an economist, you.
- 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,
a quantity index is that measures GDP.
§14Transcript · 1:57:04–2:06:37
I think that they don't even understand the basics
of price and quantity index construction.
And 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 full, the spectrum of what I think is
as a functioning, successful society.
What do you think is broken about GDP?
What does it need to include?
These indices, like what--
- 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.
And 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's much easier to see with,
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-dependent,
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.
So I'll give you a very simple example, okay?
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, okay?
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, okay?
But Bob was the worst marketing officer,
and 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.
Okay.
Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated.
And quantity indices should be
how Bob and Ted are compensated.
So 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,
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.
The fund remained in cash the whole time.
So in that third fund,
let's call that Tristan and Isolde,
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 Vizia since 1925.
But the economists have not even understood
what de Vizia'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.
Like what is that in 1973 dollars?
Any more than you should be able to say,
it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on earth yesterday.
So 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.
And 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.
So gold is actually coming from gauge theory
and markets are coming from gauge theory.
And 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.
And the fact that 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 the 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
much richer.
- 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 chains,
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 abstent.
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 system that is known
never to throw an exception, which is nature.
And nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry
§15Transcript · 2:06:39–2:15:26
for her underlying language.
We now know due to work of Pia Malani
at Harvard in 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 that it is what Marc Andreessen has called
software eating the world.
And what that means is that you're gonna 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 or 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.
So 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, 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 unity paper
this year, some other form of additional material
on the topic.
What is your thinking around this?
What's the process you're going through now?
- Well, it's very interesting.
- Preparing this.
- 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.
And so my hope is that, you know what a tradition is
in America?
Something a baby boomer did twice.
- Impeachment?
(laughing)
- Very funny.
Anyway, so I'm not a baby boomer, but as an Xer,
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.
Yeah.
- It must be paper.
- And 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.
Yeah, I'm thinking about April 1st
as a date in which to release a document
and it won't be perfectly complete,
but it'll be very complete.
And then they'll try to say, it's wrong
or you already did it or no, that was dumb,
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 gonna be doing this as a 55 year old man.
And 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 stealable.
And so 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.
Like 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 on,
in the same, the glue together.
- I can't tell you whether the theory
is correct or incorrect, but like, you know,
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?
And all of that stuff got a lot more difficult
because I didn't do it.
Look, you know, 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 would say I'll get the ship to the harbor
and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in.
And 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,
this is, 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 on your Discord.
Kind of thinking about, thinking through this release.
I mean, it wasn't like, 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, 'cause 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 pyrites of physics.
And we haven't even had fool's gold, in my opinion, yet.
- Got it.
So what is your intuition why this looks right to you?
Like 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?
It's like every time you poke at it,
it's giving you intuitions that follow
with the currently known physics.
- 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.
And your hope is is that you're gonna be able
to pay back the technical debt,
§16Transcript · 2:15:28–2:25:15
and in general, these wind up as check-kiting schemes,
or like you're funding a startup
and there are too many pivots, right?
So you keep adding epicycles in order
to cover things that have gone wrong.
My belief is is that this thing represents something
like a summit to me, and I'm very proud
of having found a route up this summit.
But the route is what's due to me.
The summit can't possibly be due to me.
You know, like 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 gotta tell me what Mount Everest is
in this metaphor relative, and also connected
to the technical debt.
So technical debt is a negative thing
that it's kinda, you'll eventually have to pay it.
- Absolutely. - Are you saying
in the ascent that you're seeing now,
in the theory, is you do not have much technical debt.
- Well, that's right.
I think that what happens is 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,
like 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.
Okay, 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 is, 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 over-interpretations of the world
that preclude progress.
- So you gave, I think you gave some credit
to string theory as, string theory,
I think loop quantum gravity, if I remember correctly,
as like getting close to the fool's gold.
- Well, I said that Garrett Lisey, phenomenologically,
gets a lot of things right.
He's got a reason for chirality,
a reason for uniqueness using E8,
and the fact that E8 uses something
called Weyl fermions, which are chiral.
He has a way of getting geometry
to get Riemann's geometry underneath general relativity
to play with Erisman'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 triality.
He's got a lot of phenomenological hits.
I don't think Garrett's theory works.
It also has a very simple Lagrangian.
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, okay?
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.
And they've done some stuff with black holes
that they can get some solutions correct.
And 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.
But those are the two that I take quite seriously.
I don't yet take Wolfram's quite seriously
because if he really finds one of these cellular automata
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.
Tegmark, I view as a philosopher
who is somehow taking credit for Platonism,
which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max
'cause I like Max, but if it ever comes time,
I'm putting a post-it note that I'm not positive
the mathematical universe hypothesis is really anything new.
And 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.
So 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,
and 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.
So I'm an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors.
- So in your journey of releasing this,
and I'm sure that further,
maybe it will be another American tradition on April 1st
that will continue for years to come.
- I hope so.
- 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 unity 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, Montana in Santa Monica.
Now you'll notice that all of those disks
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 disks.
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 this 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, the code of the torus
is itself generating spinning torus.
- Yeah.
- This is a U1 principle bundle.
And the world needs to know what a gauge theory is,
not by analogy, not what 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,
it's 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
§17Transcript · 2:25:17–2:34:43
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, 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 in 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.
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 the gut.
It 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 sufficed 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.
And I'm looking at Zev's trajectory
and saying, you're gonna need to be incredibly,
even pathologically self-confident
and the antidote for that is gonna be something
you're gonna need to carry on board,
which is radical humility.
And you're gonna 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 gonna have to question their entire approach
to education or employment or critical thinking.
And 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 gonna have to take care of them too.
- Zev, let me ask you the more challenging question
'cause the guy's sitting right here.
What advice do you have for your dad?
Since after talking to you, I realize you're the more
brilliant aside from the better looking member of the family.
(laughing)
- It's a bit of an odd question.
- Sorry.
- You can say anything you want,
this is the last time we're gonna be seeing this.
(laughing)
- This is gonna 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.
There are 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, right?
And no human is prepared to play God
and create and guide a life,
but somehow we're forced into it as people.
And I think sometimes it's hard for children
to understand that however their parents are failing.
(laughing)
Sort of has to be.
- It's a theme 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.
So I hope to,
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 know, you really, 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.
- 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 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 very much, I mean, this is the weird thing.
There used to be this thing called Harvey,
the invisible rabbit.
This guy had a rabbit that was like six feet tall
that only he could see, maybe he was talking.
And that was like you at age four.
You were saying batches of crazy things
§18Transcript · 2:34:47–2:38:34
that were all totally sensible
and 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
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 Zev?
- I was really worried it was gonna be another
four-letter word.
- There's so many to choose from.
- 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 Zev would find that,
but you can have a kid
and never make this level of connection.
I think even right down to the fact that
when Zev 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 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 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,
'cause 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 you Zev develop as an intellect,
but also I'm so heartworn 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.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Socrates.
To find yourself, think for yourself.
Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.
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