Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society
Guests: Eric Weinstein
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript · 00:00–09:24
The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein.
He's a mathematician, economist, physicist,
and the managing director of Thiel Capital.
He coined the term, and you could say,
is the founder of the intellectual dark web,
which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals
that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker,
Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others.
This conversation is part
of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast at MIT and beyond.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes,
or simply connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman,
spelled F-R-I-D.
And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
- Are you nervous about this?
- Scared shitless.
- Okay, (speaking in foreign language)
- You mentioned "Kung Fu Panda"
as one of your favorite movies.
It has the usual profound master-student dynamic going on.
So, who has been a teacher
that significantly influenced the direction
of your thinking and life's work?
So, if you're the Kung Fu Panda, who was your shifu?
- Oh, that's interesting,
because I didn't see shifu as being the teacher.
- Who was the teacher?
- Oogway, Master Oogway, the turtle.
- Oh, the turtle, right.
- They only meet twice in the entire film,
and the first conversation sort of doesn't count.
So, the magic of the film, in fact,
its point is that the teaching that really matters
is transferred during a single conversation,
and it's very brief.
And so, who played that role in my life?
I would say either my grandfather,
Harry Rubin, and his wife, Sophie Rubin, my grandmother,
or Tom Lehrer.
- Tom Lehrer?
- Yeah.
- In which way?
- If you give a child Tom Lehrer records,
what you do is you destroy their ability
to be taken over by later malware.
And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene,
that it destroys the ability to lead a normal life
for many people.
So, if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted
from any kind of neurotypical presentation,
I'll often ask them, are you a Tom Lehrer fan?
And the odds that they will respond are quite high.
- Now, Tom Lehrer's Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Tom Lehrer?
- That's very interesting.
There are a small number of Tom Lehrer songs
that broke into the general population.
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, the Element song,
and perhaps the Vatican rag.
So, when you meet somebody who knows those songs,
but doesn't know--
- Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you?
- Harshly.
No, but you're Russian, so undoubtedly you know
Nikolai Ivanovich Lubachevsky, that song.
- Yes, yeah.
- So, that was a song about plagiarism
that was in fact plagiarized,
which most people don't know, from Danny Kaye,
where Danny Kaye did a song called
Stanislavski of the Muskie Arts.
And so, Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job
of plagiarizing a song and making it about plagiarism,
and then making it about this mathematician
who worked in non-Euclidean geometry.
That was like giving heroin to a child.
It was extremely addictive, and eventually led me
to a lot of different places,
one of which may have been a PhD in mathematics.
- And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics,
I believe, at Harvard, something like that.
- I just had dinner with him, in fact.
When my son turned 13, we didn't tell him,
but his bar mitzvah present was dinner
with his hero, Tom Lehrer.
And Tom Lehrer was 88 years old, sharp as a tack,
irreverent and funny as hell, and just,
you know, there are very few people in this world
that you have to meet while they're still here,
and that was definitely one for our family.
- So that wit is a reflection of intelligence
in some kind of deep way, like where,
that would be a good test of intelligence,
whether you're a Tom Lehrer fan.
So what do you think that is about wit,
about that kind of humor,
ability to see the absurdity in existence?
Do you think that's connected to intelligence,
or are we just two Jews on a mic
that appreciate that kind of humor?
- No, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence.
So you can see it, there's a place where Tom Lehrer
decides that he's going to lampoon Gilbert
of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert
with clever, meaningless wordplay.
And he has, forget the, well, let's see.
He's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan wrote it,
and he says, "That I mister de prester,
"young sister, nay mister, this mister de pester,
"she tried, pestering sister's a festering blister,
"you best to resister, say I.
"The sister persisted, the mister resisted,
"I kissed her all loyalty slip.
"When she said I could have her, her sister's cadaver
"must surely have turned in its crypt."
That's so dense, it's so insane,
that that's clearly intelligence,
because it's hard to construct something like that.
If I look at my favorite Tom Lehrer lyric,
there's a perfectly absurd one, which is,
"Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
"but that couldn't happen again.
"We taught them a lesson in 1918,
"and they've hardly bothered us since then."
That is a different kind of intelligence.
You're taking something that is so horrific,
and you're sort of making it palatable and funny,
and demonstrating also just your humanity.
I think the thing that came through,
as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible, horrible lines,
was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was,
who was channeling pain through humor and through grace.
I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia,
that same kind of humor emerged
from the generation of World War II.
It seemed like that humor is required
to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering
of that that war created.
- Well, you do need the environment
to create the broad Slavic soul.
I don't think that many Americans
really appreciate Russian humor,
how you had to joke during the time of,
let's say, Article 58 under Stalin.
You had to be very, very careful.
The concept of a Russian satirical magazine
like "Krokodil" doesn't make sense.
So you have this cross-cultural problem
that there are certain areas of human experience
that it would be better to know nothing about.
And quite unfortunately,
Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them,
which makes the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky so potent.
The prose of Pushkin, whatever it is,
you have to appreciate the depth
of the Eastern European experience.
And I would think that perhaps Americans
knew something like this around the time of the Civil War,
or maybe under slavery and Jim Crow,
or even the harsh tyranny of the coal and steel employers
during the labor wars.
But in general, I would say it's hard for us
to understand and imagine the collective culture
unless we have the system of selective pressures
that, for example, Russians were subjected to.
- Yeah, so if there's one good thing that comes out of war,
it's literature, art, and humor, and music.
- Oh, I don't think so.
I think almost everything is good about war
except for death and destruction.
- Right.
- Without the death, it would bring the romance of it.
The whole thing is nice.
- Well, this is why we're always caught up in war.
We have this very ambiguous relationship to it,
is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful
and at an unacceptable price,
and the price has never been higher.
- So to jump into AI a little bit,
in one of the conversations you had, or one of the videos,
you described that one of the things AI systems can't do,
and biological systems can,
is self-replicate in the physical world.
- Oh, no, no, no.
- In the physical world.
- Well, yes, the physical robots can't self-replicate.
This is a very tricky point,
which is that the only thing that we've been able to create
that's really complex,
that has an analog of our reproductive system, is software.
But nevertheless, software replicates itself,
if we're speaking strictly for the replication,
in this kind of digital space.
So let me, just to begin, let me ask a question.
Do you see a protective barrier or a gap
between the physical world and the digital world?
- Let's not call it digital.
Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world.
- Why logical?
- Well, because even though we had,
let's say Einstein's brain preserved,
§02Transcript · 09:27–19:09
it was meaningless to us as a physical object
because we couldn't do anything
with what was stored in it at a logical level.
And so the idea that something may be stored logically
and that it may be stored physically are not necessarily,
we don't always benefit from synonymizing.
I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis
to the logical world,
but that it does warrant identification
with a separate layer that need not invoke logic gates
and zeros and ones.
- And so connecting those two worlds,
so the logical world and the physical world,
or maybe just connecting to the logical world
inside our brain, Einstein's brain,
you mentioned the idea of out, outtelligence.
- Artificial outtelligence.
- Artificial outtelligence.
- Yes, this is the only essay
that John Brockman ever invited me to write
that he refused to publish in Edge.
- Why?
- Well, maybe it wasn't well-written, but I don't know.
- The idea is quite compelling.
It's quite unique and new,
and at least from my view, a stance point,
maybe you can explain it.
- Sure.
What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting
to be terrified by artificial general intelligence
when in fact artificial life is terrifying in and of itself
and it's already here.
So in order to have a system of selective pressures,
you need three distinct elements.
You need variation within a population,
you need heritability, and you need differential success.
So what's really unique,
and I've made this point I think elsewhere,
about software is that if you think about
what humans know how to build, that's impressive.
So I always take a car and I say,
does it have an analog of each
of the physiological systems?
Does it have a skeletal structure?
That's its frame.
Does it have a neurological structure?
It has an onboard computer.
It has a digestive system.
The one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system.
But if you can call spawn on a process,
effectively you do have a reproductive system.
And that means that you can create something
with variation, heritability, and differential success.
Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was
where do we see inanimate, non-intelligent life
outwitting intelligent life?
And I have two favorite systems
and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted.
One of which is the Ofres orchid subspecies,
or subclade, I don't know what to call it.
- Is it a type of flower?
- Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female
of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males
into engaging, it was called pseudocopulation,
with the fake female, which is usually represented
by the lowest petal.
And there's also a pheromone component
to fool the males into thinking
they have a mating opportunity.
But the flower doesn't have to give up energy
in the form of nectar as a lure
because it's tricking the males.
The other system is a particular species of mussel,
Lampicillus in the clear streams of Missouri.
And it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip
that contain its young.
And when the bass see this fleshy lip,
which looks exactly like a species of fish
that the bass like to eat,
the young explode and clamp onto the gills
and parasitize the bass and also use the bass
to redistribute them as they eventually release.
Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent dupe
being fooled by a lower life form.
And what is sculpting these convincing lures?
It's the intelligence of previously duped targets
for these strategies.
So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy,
those weaker mimics fall off.
They have terminal lines.
And only the better ones survive.
So it's an arms race between the target species
that is being parasitized, getting smarter,
and this other less intelligent or non-intelligent object
getting as if smarter.
And so what you see is that artificial general intelligence
is not needed to parasitize us.
It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves.
So you could have a program, let's say,
one of these Nigerian scams that writes letters
and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin
to figure out which aspects of the program should be kept,
which should be varied and thrown away.
And you don't need it to be in any way intelligent
in order to have a really nightmarish scenario
of being parasitized by something
that has no idea what it's doing.
- So you phrased a few concepts really eloquently.
So let me try to, as a few directions this goes.
So one, first of all, in the way we write software today,
it's not common that we allow it to self-modify.
- But we do have that ability now.
- We have the ability.
It's-- - Just not common.
- It's not just common.
So your thought is that that is a serious worry
if there becomes a reason--
- But self-modifying code is available now.
- So there's different types of self-modification, right?
There's personalization, your email app,
your Gmail is self-modifying to you
after you log in or whatever, you can think of it that way.
But ultimately, it's central,
all the information is centralized.
But you're thinking of ideas where you're completely,
this is a unique entity operating under selective pressures
and it changes--
- Well, you just, if you think about the fact
that our immune systems don't know
what's coming at them next,
but they have a small set of spanning components.
And if it's a sufficiently expressive system
in that any shape or binding region can be approximated
with the Lego that is present,
then you can have confidence that you don't need to know
what's coming at you because the combinatorics
are sufficient to reach any configuration needed.
- So that's a beautiful thing, well,
terrifying thing to worry about
because it's so within our reach.
- Whenever I suggest these things,
I do always have a concern as to whether or not
I will bring them into being by talking about them.
- So there's this thing from OpenAI,
so next week, I have to talk to the founder of OpenAI,
this idea that their text generation,
the new stuff they have for generating text
is they didn't wanna bring it,
they didn't wanna release it
because they're worried about the--
- I'm delighted to hear that,
but they're going to end up releasing it.
- Yes, so that's the thing, I think talking about it,
well, at least from my end,
I'm more a proponent of technology preventing,
so further innovation preventing
the detrimental effects of innovation.
- Well, we're sort of tumbling down a hill
at accelerating speed,
so whether or not we're proponents or--
- It doesn't really matter.
- It may not matter, but I--
- Well, it may not.
- Well, I do feel that there are people
who've held things back and died poorer
than they might have otherwise been,
we don't even know their names.
I don't think that we should discount the idea
that having the smartest people
showing off how smart they are by what they've developed
may be a terminal process.
I'm very mindful in particular of a beautiful letter
that Edward Teller of all people wrote to Leo Zillard
where Zillard was trying to figure out
how to control the use of atomic weaponry
at the end of World War II,
and Teller rather strangely,
because many of us view him as a monster,
showed some very advanced moral thinking
talking about the slim chance we have for survival
and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable.
I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut
what it is we are playing with
when we are working on technical problems.
And I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it,
a movie called "The Bridge on the River Kwai"
about, I believe, captured British POWs
who just in a desire to do a bridge well
end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors.
- Well, now you're making me question
the unrestricted open discussion of ideas in AI.
- I'm not saying I know the answer.
I'm just saying that I could make a decent case
for either our need to talk about this
and to become technologically focused on containing it
or need to stop talking about this
and try to hope that the relatively small number
of highly adept individuals
who are looking at these problems
is small enough that we should in fact
§03Transcript · 19:12–29:14
be talking about how to contain them.
- Well, the way ideas, the way innovation happens,
what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus,
whether if he was silent,
the idea would emerge elsewhere.
Well, in the case of Newton, of course.
But in the case of AI,
how small is the set of individuals
out of which such ideas would arise?
Is it a question? - Well, the idea
is that the researchers we know
and those that we don't know
who may live in countries that don't wish us to know
what level they're currently at
are very disciplined in keeping these things to themselves.
Of course, I will point out
that there's a religious school in Kerala
that developed something very close to the calculus,
certainly in terms of infinite series
in, I guess, religious prayer and rhyme and prose.
So it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back,
and I don't really believe
that we have an ability to hold it back.
I do think that we could change the proportion
of the time we spend worrying about the effects,
what if we are successful,
rather than simply trying to succeed
and hope that we'll be able to contain things later.
- Beautifully put.
So on the idea of our intelligence,
what form, treading cautiously,
as we've agreed as we tumbled down the hill,
what form-- - Can't stop ourselves, can we?
- We cannot.
What form do you see it taking?
So one example, Facebook, Google,
do want to, I don't know a better word,
you want to influence users to behave a certain way.
And so that's one kind of example of our intelligence,
is systems perhaps modifying the behavior
of these intelligent human beings
in order to sell more product of different kind.
But do you see other examples of this actually emerging in--
- Just take any parasitic system.
Make sure that there's some way in which
that there's differential success,
heritability, and variation.
And those are the magic ingredients.
And if you really wanted to build a nightmare machine,
make sure that the system that expresses the variability
has a spanning set so that it can learn to arbitrary levels
by making it sufficiently expressive.
That's your nightmare.
- So it's your nightmare, but it could also be,
it's a really powerful mechanism by which to create,
well, powerful systems.
So are you more worried about the negative direction
that might go versus the positive?
So you said parasitic, but that doesn't necessarily
need to be what the system converges towards.
It could be, what is it, symbiotic?
- Parasitism, the dividing line between parasitism
and symbiosis is not so clear.
- That's what they tell me about marriage.
I'm still single, so I don't know.
- Well, yeah, we could go into that too, but.
(Lex laughing)
No, I think we have to appreciate,
are you infected by your own mitochondria?
- Right. (laughing)
- Good.
Right? - Yeah.
- So in marriage, you fear the loss of independence,
but even though the American therapeutic community
may be very concerned about codependence,
what's to say that codependence isn't what's necessary
to have a stable relationship in which to raise children
who are maximally case-selected
and require incredible amounts of care
because you have to wait 13 years
before there's any reproductive payout,
and most of us don't want our 13-year-olds having kids.
It's a very tricky situation to analyze,
and I would say that predators and parasites
drive much of our evolution,
and I don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them.
- Well, ultimately, I mean, nobody knows the meaning of life
or what even happiness is, but there is some metrics.
- Oh, they didn't tell you?
- They didn't, that's why all the poetry in books are about.
You know, there is some metrics under which
you can kind of measure how good it is
that these AI systems are roaming about.
So you're more nervous about software
than you are optimistic about ideas of,
yeah, self-replicating large scale.
- I don't think we've really felt where we are.
You know, occasionally we get a wake-up.
9/11 was so anomalous compared to everything else
we've experienced on American soil
that it came to us as a complete shock
that that was even a possibility.
What it really was was a highly creative
and determined R&D team deep in the bowels of Afghanistan
showing us that we had certain exploits
that we were open to that nobody had chosen to express.
I can think of several of these things
that I don't talk about publicly
that just seem to have to do with
how relatively unimaginative those who wish
to cause havoc and destruction have been up until now.
But the great mystery of our time,
of this particular little era,
is how remarkably stable we've been since 1945
when we demonstrated the ability
to use nuclear weapons in anger.
And we don't know why things like that
haven't happened since then.
We've had several close calls, we've had mistakes,
we've had brinksmanship.
And what's now happened is that we've settled
into a sense that, oh, it'll always be nothing.
It's been so long since something was
at that level of danger
that we've got a wrong idea in our head.
And that's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro show,
I talked about the need to resume
above-ground testing of nuclear devices,
because we have people whose developmental experience
suggests that when, let's say, Donald Trump
and North Korea engage on Twitter,
oh, it's nothing, it's just posturing.
Everybody's just in it for money.
There's a sense that people are in a video game mode
which has been the right call since 1945.
We've been mostly in video game mode.
It's amazing.
- So you're worried about a generation
which has not seen any existential--
- We've lived under it.
You see, you're younger.
I don't know if, and again, you came from Moscow.
There was a TV show called The Day After
that had a huge effect on a generation growing up in the US.
And it talked about what life would be like
after a nuclear exchange.
We have not gone through an embodied experience
collectively where we've thought about this.
And I think it's one of the most irresponsible things
that the elders among us have done,
which is to provide this beautiful garden
in which the thorns are cut off of the rose bushes
and all of the edges are rounded and sanded.
And so people have developed this totally unreal idea
which is everything's going to be just fine.
And do I think that my leading concern is AGI
or my leading concern is thermonuclear exchange
or gene drives or any one of these things?
I don't know.
But I know that our time here
in this very long experiment here is finite
because the toys that we've built are so impressive.
And the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized.
And I think we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945.
We had a lot of dangerous skilled players
on the world stage who nevertheless,
no matter how bad they were, managed to not embroil us
in something that we couldn't come back from.
- The Cold War.
- Yeah, and the distance from the Cold War.
You know, I'm very mindful of,
there was a Russian tradition actually,
of on your wedding day,
going to visit a memorial to those who gave their lives.
Can you imagine this?
Where on the happiest day of your life,
you go and you pay homage to the people
who fought and died in the Battle of Stalingrad?
I'm not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say.
But there were a couple of things that the Russians did
that were really positive in the Soviet era.
And I think trying to let people know
how serious life actually is,
the Russian model of seriousness
is better than the American model.
- And maybe, like you mentioned,
there was a small echo of that after 9/11.
- We wouldn't let it form.
We talk about 9/11, but it's 9/12
that really moved the needle.
When we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak.
We witnessed something super serious
and we didn't want to run to our computers
and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings.
And it was profound because we woke up briefly there.
I talk about the gated institutional narrative
that sort of programs our lives.
I've seen it break three times in my life.
One of which was the election of Donald Trump.
Another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers
§04Transcript · 29:17–38:23
when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns
wasn't that important knew that Lehman Brothers
met AIG was next.
And the other one was 9/11.
And so if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times
that the global narrative was really interrupted,
that tells you how much we've been on top
of developing events.
I mean, we had the Murrow Federal Building explosion,
but it didn't cause the narrative to break.
It wasn't profound enough.
Around 9/12, we started to wake up out of our slumber.
And the powers that be did not want to coming together.
The admonition was go shopping.
- The powers that be was what is that force
as opposed to blaming individuals?
- We don't know.
- So whatever that--
- Whatever that force is,
there's a component of it that's emergent
and there's a component of it that's deliberate.
So give yourself a portfolio with two components.
Some amount of it is emergent,
but some amount of it is also an understanding
that if people come together,
they become an incredible force.
And what you're seeing right now, I think,
is there are forces that are trying to come together
and there are forces that are trying to push things apart.
And one of them is the globalist narrative
versus the national narrative,
where to the globalist perspective,
the nations are bad things in essence,
that they're temporary, they're nationalistic,
they're jingoistic, it's all negative.
To people in the national, more in the national idiom,
they're saying, "Look, this is where I pay my taxes.
"This is where I do my army service.
"This is where I have a vote.
"This is where I have a passport.
"Who the hell are you to tell me
"that because you've moved into some place
"that you can make money globally,
"that you've chosen to abandon other people
"to whom you have a special and elevated duty?"
And I think that these competing narratives
have been pushing towards the global perspective
from the elite and a larger and larger number
of disenfranchised people are saying,
"Hey, I actually live in a place and I have laws
"and I speak a language, I have a culture,
"and who are you to tell me that because you can profit
"in some faraway land that my obligations
"to my fellow countrymen are so much diminished?"
- So these tensions between nations and so on,
ultimately you see being proud of your country and so on,
which creates potentially the kind of things
that led to wars and so on.
Ultimately it is human nature and it is good for us
for wake-up calls of different kinds.
- Well, I think that these are tensions.
And my point isn't, I mean, nationalism run amok
is a nightmare, and internationalism run amok
is a nightmare.
And the problem is we're trying to push these pendulums
to some place where they're somewhat balanced,
where we have a higher duty of care to those
who share our laws and our citizenship,
but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system.
I would think this is elementary,
but the problem that we're facing concerns the ability
for some to profit by abandoning their obligations
to others within their system.
And that's what we've had for decades.
- You mentioned nuclear weapons.
I was hoping to get answers from you
since one of the many things you've done as economics,
and maybe you can understand human behavior,
why the heck we haven't blown each other up yet.
But okay, so we'll get back--
- I don't know the answer.
- Yeah, it's really important to say
that we really don't know.
- A mild uptick in wisdom.
- A mild uptick in wisdom.
Well, Steven Pinker, who I've talked with,
has a lot of really good ideas about why, but--
- I don't trust his optimism.
- Listen, I'm Russian, so I never trust a guy
who's that optimistic.
- No, no, no, it's just that you're talking
about a guy who's looking at a system
in which more and more of the kinetic energy,
like war, has been turned into potential energy,
like unused nuclear weapons.
- Wow, beautifully put.
- And now I'm looking at that system,
and I'm saying, okay, well,
if you don't have a potential energy term,
then everything's just getting better and better.
- Yeah, wow, that's beautifully put.
Only a physicist could, okay.
- I'm not a physicist.
- Is that a dirty word?
- No, no, I wish I were a physicist.
- Me too, my dad's a physicist.
I'm trying to live up to that,
probably for the rest of my life.
He's probably gonna listen to this too, so.
- He did. - Yeah.
So your friend Sam Harris worries a lot
about the existential threat of AI,
not in the way that you've described, but in the more.
- Well, he hangs out with Elon, I don't know Elon.
(laughing)
- So are you worried about that kind of,
you know, about the,
about either robotic systems
or traditionally defined AI systems
essentially becoming super intelligent,
much more intelligent than human beings,
and getting-- - Well, they already are.
And they're not.
- When seen as a collective, you mean?
- Well, I mean, I can mean all sorts of things,
but certainly many of the things that we thought
were peculiar to general intelligence
do not require general intelligence.
So that's been one of the big awakenings
that you can write a pretty convincing sports story
from stats alone without needing to have watched the game.
So, you know, is it possible to write lively prose
about politics?
Yeah, no, not yet.
So we're sort of all over the map.
One of the things about chess,
there's a question I once asked on Quora
that didn't get a lot of response,
which was what is the greatest brilliancy ever produced
by a computer in a chess game,
which was different than the question
of what is the greatest game ever played.
So if you think about brilliancies
is what really animates many of us
to think of chess as an art form.
Those are those moves and combinations
that just show such flair, panache, and soul.
Computers weren't really great at that.
They were great positional monsters.
And recently we've started seeing brilliancies.
- Yeah, a few grandmasters have identified
with AlphaZero that things were quite brilliant.
- Yeah, so that's an example of something.
We don't think that that's AGI,
but in a very restricted set of rules like chess,
you're starting to see poetry of a high order.
And so I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI.
AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives
in the same way that I don't think a worm should be,
C. elegans shouldn't be treated as non-conscious
because it only has 300 neurons.
Maybe it just has a very low level of consciousness
because we don't understand what these things mean
as they scale up.
So am I worried about this general phenomena?
Sure, but I think that one of the things that's happening
is that a lot of us are fretting about this
in part because of human needs.
We've always been worried about the Golem, right?
- Well, the Golem is the artificially created--
- Life, you know.
- It's like Frankenstein type of character.
- It's a Jewish version.
And Frankenberg, Frankenstein.
- Yeah, that makes sense.
- But we've always been worried
about creating something like this
and it's getting closer and closer.
And there are ways in which
we have to realize that the whole thing
that we've experienced or the context of our lives
is almost certainly coming to an end.
And I don't mean to suggest that we won't survive,
I don't know.
And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow.
It could be 300, 500 years.
But there's no plan that I'm aware of
if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit
that are sensible within current technological dreams,
the Earth, the Moon, and Mars.
And we have a very competitive civilization
that is still forced into violence
to sort out disputes that cannot be arbitrated.
It is not clear to me that we have a long-term future
until we get to the next stage,
which is to figure out whether or not
the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken.
And that requires our source code.
- Our source code, the stuff in our brains
to figure out, what do you mean by our source code?
§05Transcript · 38:26–47:17
- The source code of the context,
whatever it is that produces the quarks,
the electrons, the neutrinos.
- Our source code, I got it.
So this is--
- No, you're talking about stuff
that's written in a higher level language.
- Yeah, yeah, that's right.
You're talking about the low level, the bits.
That's what is currently keeping us here.
We can't even imagine.
We have harebrained schemes for staying
within the Einsteinian speed limit.
Maybe if we could just drug ourselves
and go into a suspended state,
or we could have multiple generations.
I think all that stuff is pretty silly.
But I think it's also pretty silly to imagine
that our wisdom is going to increase
to the point that we can have the toys we have,
and we're not going to use them for 500 years.
- Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough
when I realized you're just one letter away from the guy.
- Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein.
- It's, well, you get to pick.
(laughing)
Okay, so unified theory.
You know, you've worked, you enjoy the beauty of geometry.
I don't actually know if you enjoy it.
You certainly are quite good at explaining--
- I tremble before it.
- Tremble before it.
If you're religious, that is one of the--
- I don't have to be religious.
It's just so beautiful, you will tremble anyway.
- I mean, I just read Einstein's biography,
and one of the ways, one of the things you've done
is try to explore a unified theory,
talking about a 14-dimensional observer
that has the 4D space-time continuum embedded in it.
I'm just curious how you think,
philosophically, at a high level,
about something more than four dimensions.
How do you try to, what does it make you feel,
talking in the mathematical world about dimensions
that are greater than the ones we can perceive?
Is there something that you take away
that's more than just the math?
- Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me.
Okay.
Now, on the front of that tongue,
- Yeah?
- There was a sweet receptor.
And next to that were salt receptors on two different sides.
A little bit farther back, there were sour receptors.
And you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue
where your bitter receptor was.
- Show the good side always.
- Okay, but that was four dimensions of taste receptors.
But you also had pain receptors on that tongue,
and probably heat receptors on that tongue.
So let's assume that you had one of each.
That would be six dimensions.
So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza,
and it's got some hot pepper on it, maybe some jalapeno.
You're having a six-dimensional experience, dude.
- Do you think we overemphasize the value of time
as one of the dimensions, or space?
Well, we certainly overemphasize the value of time,
'cause we like things to start and end,
or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to.
- Well, what if you flipped one of the spatial dimensions
into being a temporal dimension?
And you and I were to meet in New York City,
and say, "Well, where and when should we meet?"
Say, "How about I'll meet you on 36th and Lexington
"at two in the afternoon and 11 o'clock in the morning?"
That would be very confusing.
- Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time,
you mean?
- We happen to be in a delicious situation
in which we have three dimensions of space and one of time,
and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric
where we can trade off a little space for a little time,
but we still only have one dimension that is picked out
relative to the other three.
It's very much "Gladys Knight and the Pips."
- So which one developed for who?
Do we develop for these dimensions,
or did the dimensions, or were they always there
and it doesn't--
- Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place
where there are four temporal dimensions,
or two and two of space and time,
or three of time and one of space,
and then would time not be playing the role of space?
Why do you imagine that the sector that you're in
is all that there is?
- Certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise.
I mean, I haven't done ayahuasca or any of those drugs,
I'd hope to one day, but--
- Instead of doing ayahuasca,
you could just head over to building two.
- That's where the mathematicians are?
- Yeah, that's where they hang.
- Just to look at some geometry?
- Well, just ask about pseudo-Riemannian geometry,
that's what you're interested in.
(Lex laughs)
- Okay.
- Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru.
- And then some extra money for that trip?
- Yeah, but you won't be able to do any calculations
if that's how you choose to go about it.
- Well, a different kind of calculation.
- So to speak.
- Yeah.
One of my favorite people, Edward Frankel,
Berkeley professor, author of "Love and Math,"
great title for a book,
said that you were quite a remarkable intellect
to come up with such beautiful original ideas
in terms of the unified theory and so on,
but you were working outside academia.
So one question, in developing ideas
that are truly original, truly interesting,
what's the difference between inside academia
and outside academia when it comes to developing such ideas?
- Oh, it's a terrible choice, terrible choice.
So if you do it inside of academics,
you are forced to constantly
show great loyalty to the consensus
and you distinguish yourself with small,
almost microscopic heresies
to make your reputation in general.
And you have very competent people
and brilliant people who are working together
who form very deep social networks
and have a very high level of behavior,
at least within mathematics
and at least technically within physics,
theoretical physics.
When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people,
madmen, and these are people
who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position
and almost always lose their way.
And the key question is,
will progress likely come from someone
who has miraculously managed to stay within the system
and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy
that is sort of unthinkable,
in which case that will be fascinating?
Or is it more likely that somebody will maintain
a level of discipline from outside of academics
and be able to make use of the freedom
that comes from not having to constantly
affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field?
- So you've characterized in ways
that academia in this particular sense is declining.
You posted a plot,
the older population of the faculty is getting larger,
the younger is getting smaller and so on.
So which direction of the two are you more hopeful about?
- Well, the baby boomers can't hang on forever.
- Well, first of all, in general true,
and second of all, in academia.
- But that's really what this time is about.
- Is the baby boomers control.
We're used to like financial bubbles
that last a few years in length and then pop.
The baby boomer bubble is this really long lived thing.
And all of the ideology,
all of the behavior patterns, the norms,
now for example, string theory
is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomena.
It was something that baby boomers were able to do
because it required a very high level
of mathematical ability.
- You don't think of string theory as an original idea?
- Oh, I mean, it was original to Veneziano
probably is older than the baby boomers.
And there are people who are younger than the baby boomers
who are still doing string theory.
And I'm not saying that nothing discovered
within the large string theoretic complex is wrong.
Quite the contrary, a lot of brilliant mathematics
and a lot of the structure of physics
was elucidated by string theorists.
What do I think of the deliverable nature
of this product that will not ship called string theory?
I think that it is largely an affirmative action program
for highly mathematically and geometrically talented
baby boomer physicists so that they can say
that they're working on something
within the constraints of what they will say
is quantum gravity.
Now there are other schemes,
there's like asymptotic safety.
There are other things that you could imagine doing.
I don't think much of any of the major programs,
§06Transcript · 47:20–56:11
but to have inflicted this level of loyalty
through a shibboleth, well, surely you don't question X.
Well, I question almost everything in the string program.
And that's why I got out of physics.
When you called me a physicist, it was a great honor.
But the reason I didn't become a physicist
wasn't that I fell in love with mathematics.
As I said, wow, in 1984, 1983, I saw the field going mad.
And I saw that mathematics,
which has all sorts of problems, was not going insane.
And so instead of studying things within physics,
I thought it was much safer to study
the same objects within mathematics.
There's a huge price to pay for that.
You lose physical intuition.
But the point is that it wasn't
a North Korean reeducation camp either.
- Are you hopeful about cracking open
the Einstein unified theory in a way
that has really, really understanding
whether this uniting everything together
with quantum theory and so on?
- I mean, I'm trying to play this role myself.
To do it to the extent of handing it over
to the more responsible, more professional,
more competent community.
So I think that they're wrong about a great number
of their belief structures.
But I do believe, I mean,
I have a really profound love hate relationship
with this group of people.
- On the physics side? - Oh yeah.
- 'Cause the mathematicians actually
seem to be much more open-minded.
- They are and they aren't.
They're open-minded about anything
that looks like great math.
They'll study something that isn't very important physics,
but if it's beautiful mathematics,
then they'll have, they have great intuition
about these things.
As good as the mathematicians are,
and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level
give them the edge, the theoretical physics community
is bar none the most profound intellectual community
that we have ever created.
It is the number one, there's nobody in second place
as far as I'm concerned.
Look, in their spare time, in their spare time,
they invented molecular biology.
- What was the origin of molecular biology?
You're saying physics?
- Well, somebody like Francis Crick.
I mean, a lot of the early molecular biologists.
- Were physicists? - Yeah, I mean,
you know, Schrodinger wrote, "What is life?"
That was highly inspirational.
I mean, you have to appreciate that there is no community
like the basic research community in theoretical physics.
And it's not something, I'm highly critical of these guys.
I think that they would just wasted the decades of time
with a near religious devotion
to their misconception conceptualization
of where the problems were in physics.
But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse
ever witnessed within academics.
- You see it as a collapse or just a lull?
- Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality.
We can't afford to pay these people.
We can't afford to give them an accelerator
just to play with in case they find something
at the next energy level.
These people created our economy.
They gave us the Rad Lab and radar.
They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II.
They created the semiconductor and the transistor
to power our economy through Moore's Law.
As a positive externality of particle accelerators,
they created the World Wide Web.
And we have the insolence to say,
"Why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars?"
No, the question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars?
Right, these guys signed
the world's worst licensing agreement.
And if they simply charged for every time
you used a transistor or a URL,
or enjoyed the peace that they have provided
during this period of time through the terrible weapons
that they developed, or your communications devices,
all of the things that power our economy,
I really think came out of physics,
even to the extent that chemistry came out of physics
and molecular biology came out of physics.
So, first of all, you have to know
that I'm very critical of this community.
Second of all, it is our most important community.
We have neglected it, we've abused it,
we don't take it seriously,
we don't even care to get them to rehab
after a couple of generations of failure.
No one, I think the youngest person
to have really contributed to the standard model
of theoretical level was born in 1951, right?
Frank Wilczek.
And almost nothing has happened
that in theoretical physics after 1973, '74
that sent somebody to Stockholm
for theoretical development that predicted experiment.
So, we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves
now with that said, these guys have behaved abysmally,
in my opinion, because they haven't owned up
to where they actually are,
what problems they're really facing,
how definite they can actually be.
They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries
which are desperately needed in other fields,
like gauge theory,
which at least the mathematicians can share,
which is an upgrade of the differential calculus
of Newton and Leibniz.
And they haven't shared the importance
of renormalization theory,
even though this should be standard operating procedure
for people across the sciences dealing with different layers
and different levels of phenomena.
- And by shared, you mean communicated in such a way
that it disseminates throughout the different sciences.
- These guys are sitting,
both theoretical physicists and mathematicians
are sitting on top of a giant stockpile
of intellectual gold, right?
They have so many things
that have not been manifested anywhere.
I was just on Twitter, I think I mentioned
the Habermann switch pitch that shows the self-duality
of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism.
Now, this is like a triviality
and it makes an amazing toy that's built a market,
hopefully a fortune for Chuck Habermann.
Well, you have no idea how much great stuff
that these priests have in their monastery.
- So it's truly a love and hate relationship for you.
- Yeah, well, look--
- Sounds like it's more on the love side.
- This building that we're in right here
is the building in which I really put together
the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences
and the National Science Foundation
through the government university industry
research round table to destroy the bargaining power
of American academics using foreign labor.
- With a--
- On microfiche in the basement.
Oh yeah, that was done here in this building.
Isn't that weird?
- And I'm truly speaking with a revolutionary
and a radical--
- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
At an intellectual level, I am absolutely garden variety.
I'm just straight down the middle.
The system that we are in,
this university is functionally insane.
Harvard is functionally insane.
And we don't understand that when we get these things wrong,
the financial crisis made this very clear.
There was a long period where every grownup,
everybody with a tie who spoke in baritone tones
with the right degree at the end of their name,
we're talking about how we banished volatility.
We were in the great moderation.
Okay, they were all crazy.
And who was right?
It was like Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini.
Now, what happens is that they claimed
the market went crazy, but the market didn't go crazy.
The market had been crazy.
And what happened is that it suddenly went sane.
Well, that's where we are with academics.
Academics right now is mad as a hatter.
And it's absolutely evident.
I can show you graph after graph.
I can show you the internal discussions.
I can show you the conspiracies.
Harvard's dealing with one right now
over its admissions policies for people of color
who happen to come from Asia.
All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going.
What we're talking about,
just while we're on the topic of revolutionaries,
is we're talking about the danger of an outbreak of sanity.
- Yeah, you're the guy pointing out the elephant
in the room here.
- The elephant has no clothes.
(Lex laughing)
- Is that how that goes?
I was gonna talk a little bit to Joe Rogan about this.
We ran out of time.
But I think you have some,
just listening to you,
you could probably speak really eloquently to academia
§07Transcript · 56:14–1:04:58
on the difference between the different fields.
So you think there's a difference
between science, engineering,
and then the humanities and academia
in terms of tolerance that they're willing to tolerate?
So from my perspective, I thought,
computer science and maybe engineering
is more tolerant to radical ideas,
but that's perhaps innocent of me.
'Cause I always, all the battles going on now
are a little bit more on the humanities side
and gender studies and so on.
- Have you seen the American Mathematical Society's
publication of an essay called "Get Out the Way"?
- I have not.
What's the--
- The idea is that white men who hold positions
within universities in mathematics
should vacate their positions
so that young black women can take over
or something like this.
- That's in terms of diversity,
which I also wanna ask you about,
but in terms of diversity of strictly ideas.
- Oh, sure.
- Do you think, 'cause you're basically saying physics
as a community has become a little bit intolerant
to some degree to new radical ideas.
Or at least you said--
- Well, it's changed a little bit recently,
which is that even string theory is now admitting,
okay, we don't, this doesn't look very promising
in the short term, right?
So the question is what compiles,
if you wanna take the computer science metaphor,
what will get you into a journal?
Will you spend your life trying to push some paper
into a journal or will it be accepted easily?
What do we know about the characteristics of the submitter?
And what gets taken up and what does not?
All of these fields are experiencing pressure
because no field is performing so brilliantly well
that it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking
in the ways in which we've become accustomed.
- But don't you think, even in theoretical physics,
a lot of times, even with theories like string theory,
you could speak to this, it does eventually lead to
what are the ways that this theory would be testable?
- So ultimately, although, look,
there's this thing about Popper and the scientific method
that's a cancer and a disease
in the minds of very smart people.
That's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out,
it's how it gets checked.
And there is a dialogue between theory and experiment.
But everybody should read Paul Dirac's 1963
scientific American article where he,
it's very interesting, he talks about it
as if it was about the Schrodinger equation
and Schrodinger's failure to advance his own work
because of his failure to account for some phenomenon.
The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off,
it won't agree with experiment,
but it doesn't mean that the theory is actually wrong.
But Dirac could as easily have been talking
about his own equation in which he predicted
that the electrons should have an antiparticle.
And since the only positively charged particle
that was known at the time was the proton,
Heisenberg pointed out, well, shouldn't your antiparticle,
the proton have the same mass as the electron
and doesn't that invalidate your theory?
So I think that Dirac was actually being quite,
potentially quite sneaky and talking about the fact
that he had been pushed off of his own theory
to some extent by Heisenberg.
But look, we fetishized the scientific method
and Popper and falsification because it protects us
from crazy ideas entering the field.
So it's a question of balancing type one and type two error
and we were pretty maxed out in one direction.
- The opposite of that, let me say what comforts me,
sort of biology or engineering,
at the end of the day, does the thing work?
- Yeah.
- You can test the crazies away.
The crazy, well, see, now you're saying,
but some ideas are truly crazy
and some are actually correct.
- So there's pre-correct, currently crazy.
- Yeah. - Right?
And so you don't wanna get rid of everybody
who's pre-correct and currently crazy.
The problem is is that we don't have standards in general
for trying to determine who has to be put to the sword
in terms of their career and who has to be protected
as some sort of giant time suck pain in the ass
who may change everything.
- Do you think that's possible,
creating a mechanism of those selected?
- Well, you're not gonna like the answer, but here it comes.
- Oh, boy.
- It has to do with very human elements.
We're trying to do this at the level of rules and fairness.
It's not gonna work.
'Cause the only thing that really understands this
is the rules.
- You ever read the "Double Helix"?
- It's a book.
- Oh, you have to read this book.
Not only did Jim Watson half discover
this three-dimensional structure of DNA,
he was also one hell of a writer before he became an ass.
No, he's tried to destroy his own reputation.
- I knew about the ass,
I didn't know about the good writer.
- Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living.
And as I've said before,
Jim Watson is too important a legacy
to be left to Jim Watson.
That book tells you more
about what actually moves the dial.
And there's another story about him,
which I don't agree with,
which is that he stole everything from Rosalind Franklin.
I mean, the problems that he had
with Rosalind Franklin are real,
but we should actually honor that tension in our history
by delving into it rather than having a simple solution.
Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick
being a pain in the ass
that everybody secretly knew was super brilliant.
And there's an encounter between Chargaff,
who came up with the equimolar relations
between the nucleotides,
who should have gotten the structure of DNA,
and Watson and Crick.
And he talks about missing a shiver
in the heartbeat of biology.
And this stuff is so gorgeous,
it just makes you tremble even thinking about it.
Look, we know very often who is to be feared,
and we need to fund the people that we fear.
The people who are wasting our time
need to be excluded from the conversation.
You see, and maybe we'll make some errors
in both directions,
but we have known our own people.
We know the pains in the asses that might work out.
And we know the people who are really just blowhards
who really have very little to contribute most of the time.
It's not 100%, but you're not gonna get there with rules.
- Right, it's using some kind of instinct.
I mean, to be honest,
I'm gonna make you roll your eyes for a second,
but the first time I heard
that there is a large community of people
who believe the Earth is flat,
actually made me pause and ask myself the question.
- Why would there be such a community?
- Yeah, is it possible the Earth is flat?
So I had to like, wait a minute.
I mean, then you go through a thinking process
that I think is really healthy.
It ultimately ends up being a geometry thing, I think.
It's an interesting thought experiment at the very least.
- Well, I do a different version of it.
I say, why is this community stable?
- Yeah, that's a good way to analyze it.
- Interesting that whatever we've done
has not erased the community.
So, you know, they're taking a long shot bet
that won't pan out, you know.
Maybe we just haven't thought enough
about the rationality of the square root of two
and somebody brilliant will figure it out.
Maybe we will eventually land one day
on the surface of Jupiter and explore it.
Right, these are crazy things that will never happen.
- So much of social media operates by AI algorithms.
You talked about this a little bit,
recommending the content you see.
So on this idea of radical thought,
how much should AI show you things you disagree with
on Twitter and so on?
In a Twitter verse.
- I hate this question.
- Yeah? - Yeah.
- 'Cause you don't know the answer?
- No, no, no, no.
Look, they've pushed out this cognitive Lego to us
that will just lead to madness.
It's good to be challenged with things
that you disagree with.
The answer is no.
It's good to be challenged with interesting things
with which you currently disagree,
but that might be true.
So I don't really care about whether or not
I disagree with something or don't disagree.
§08Transcript · 1:05:00–1:14:15
I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing
is being pushed out.
Is it because it's likely to be true?
Is it because, is there some reason?
Because I can write a computer generator
to come up with an infinite number of disagreeable statements
that nobody needs to look at.
So please, before you push things at me
that are disagreeable, tell me why.
- There is an aspect in which that question is quite dumb,
especially because it's being used to almost,
very generically by these different networks to say,
well, we're trying to work this out.
But basically, how much,
do you see the value of seeing things you don't like,
not you disagree with, because it's very difficult
to know exactly what you articulated,
which is the stuff that's important for you to consider
that you disagree with.
That's really hard to figure out.
The bottom line is the stuff you don't like.
If you're a Hillary Clinton supporter,
you may not want to, it might not make you feel good
to see anything about Donald Trump.
That's the only thing algorithms
can really optimize for currently.
They really can't. - No, they can do better.
This is, we're-- - You think so?
- No, we're engaged in some moronic back and forth
where I have no idea why people who are capable
of building Google, Facebook, Twitter
are having us in these incredibly low level discussions.
Do they not know any smart people?
Do they not have the phone numbers of people
who can elevate these discussions?
- They do, but this, they're optimizing
for a different thing and they are pushing those people
out of those rooms.
- They're optimizing for things we can't see.
And yes, profit is there.
Nobody's questioning that.
But they're also optimizing for things like
political control or the fact that they're doing business
in Pakistan and so they don't want to talk
about all the things that they're going to be
bending to in Pakistan.
So we're involved in a fake discussion.
- You think so?
You think these conversations at that depth
are happening inside Google?
You don't think they have some basic metrics
under user engagements?
- You're having a fake conversation with us, guys.
We know you're having a fake conversation.
I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation.
You know how to cool these units.
You know high availability like nobody's business.
My Gmail never goes down, almost.
- So you think just because they can do incredible work
on the software side with infrastructure,
they can also deal with some of these difficult questions
about human behavior, human understanding,
you're not, you're not.
- I mean, I've seen the developers' screens
that people take shots of inside of Google.
And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple.
We're not, we're engaged, they're engaging us
in the wrong conversations.
We are not at this low level.
Here's one of my favorite questions.
Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase
in tech space equipped as a listening device?
Where's my physical shutter to cover my lens?
We had this in the 1970s.
The cameras that had lens caps, you know?
How much would it cost to have a security model?
Pay five extra bucks.
Why is my indicator light software controlled?
Why, when my camera is on, do I not see
that the light is on by putting it as something
that cannot be bypassed?
Why have you set up all my devices
at some difficulty to yourselves as listening devices
and we don't even talk about this?
This thing is total fucking bullshit.
- Well, I hope-- - No, no, wait, wait, wait.
- These discussions are happening about privacy.
Is there a more difficult thing you're giving credit for?
- It's not just privacy.
It's about social control.
We're talking about social control.
Why do I not have controls over my own levers?
Just have a really cute UI where I can switch,
I can dial things, or I can at least see
what the algorithms are.
- But you think that there is some deliberate choices
being made here. - There is emergence
and there is intention.
There are two dimensions.
The vector does not collapse onto either axis.
But the idea that anybody who suggests
that intention is completely absent is a child.
- That's really beautifully put.
And like many things you've said is gonna make me--
- Can I turn this around slightly?
- Yeah.
- I sit down with you and you say
that you're obsessed with my feed.
I don't even know what my feed is.
What are you seeing that I'm not?
- I was obsessively looking through your feed on Twitter
'cause it was really enjoyable
because there's the Tom Lehrer element,
there's the humor in it.
- By the way, that feed is Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter.
- It's great. - Eric R. Weinstein.
No, but seriously, why?
- Why did I find it enjoyable or what was I seeing?
- What are you looking for?
Why are we doing this?
What is this podcast about?
I know you've got all these interesting people.
I'm just some guy who's sort of a podcast guest.
- Sort of a podcast, you're not even wearing a tie.
I mean, it's not even a serious interview.
I'm searching for meaning, for happiness,
for a dopamine rush, so short-term and long-term.
- And how are you finding your way to me?
I don't honestly know what I'm doing to reach you.
The representing ideas which feel common sense to me
and not many people are speaking,
so it's kind of like the intellectual dark web folks.
These folks, from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson to yourself,
are saying things where it's like you're saying,
look, there's an elephant and he's not wearing any clothes.
And I say, yeah, yeah, let's have more of that conversation.
That's how I'm finding you.
- I'm desperate to try to change
the conversation we're having.
I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020.
I don't think we can afford four more years
of a misinterpreted message,
which is what Donald Trump was.
And I don't want the destruction of our institutions.
They all seem hell-bent on destroying themselves.
So I'm trying to save theoretical physics,
trying to save the New York Times,
trying to save our various processes.
And I think it feels delusional to me
that this is falling to a tiny group of people
who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out
that everything they say will be misinterpreted
and that their lives will be ruined through the process.
I mean, I think we're in an absolutely bananas period
of time, and I don't believe it should fall
to such a tiny number of shoulders to shoulder this way.
- So I have to ask you, on the capitalism side,
you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism,
or it has effects that are, well, not unintended,
but not what economists would predict
or speak of capitalism creating.
I just wanna talk to you about, in general,
the effect of even then artificial intelligence
or technology automation taking away jobs
and these kinds of things,
and what you think is the way to alleviate that,
whether the Andrew Yang presidential candidate
with universal basic income, UBI,
what are your thoughts there?
How do we fight off the negative effects of technology?
- All right, you're a software guy, right?
A human being is a worker is an old idea.
A human being has a worker is a different object, right?
So if you think about object-oriented programming
as a paradigm, a human being has a worker
and a human being has a soul.
We're talking about the fact that for a period of time,
the worker that a human being has was in a position
to feed the soul that a human being has.
However, we have two separate claims
on the value in society.
One is as a worker and the other is as a soul,
and the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity,
it needs meaning, it needs purpose.
As long as your means of support is not highly repetitive,
I think you have a while to go
before you need to start worrying.
But if what you do is highly repetitive
and it's not terribly generative,
you are in the crosshairs of for loops and while loops,
and that's what computers excel at, repetitive behavior.
And when I say repetitive, I may mean things
that have never happened through combinatorial possibilities
but as long as it has a looped characteristic to it,
you're in trouble.
We are seeing a massive push towards socialism
because capitalists are slow to address the fact
that a worker may not be able to make claims.
A relatively undistinguished median member of our society
still has needs to reproduce, needs to dignity.
§09Transcript · 1:14:20–1:21:48
And when capitalism abandons the median individual
or the bottom 10th or whatever it's going to do,
it's flirting with revolution.
And what concerns me is that the capitalists
aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand this.
You really want to court authoritarian control
in our society because you can't see
that people may not be able to defend themselves
in the marketplace because the marginal product
of their labor is too low to feed their dignity as a soul.
So my great concern is that our free society has to do
with the fact that we are self-organized.
I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan
when Lehman Brothers collapsed and thinking,
who's going to tell all these people
that they need to show up at work
when they don't have a financial system
to incentivize them to show up at work?
So my complaint is first of all, not with the socialists
but with the capitalists, which is you guys are being idiots.
You're courting revolution by continuing to harp
on the same old ideas that, well, you know,
try harder, bootstrap yourself.
Yeah, to an extent that works, to an extent.
But we are clearly headed in a place
that there's nothing that ties together our need
to contribute and our need to consume.
And that may not be provided by capitalism
because it may have been a temporary phenomenon.
So check out my article on anthropic capitalism
and the new gimmick economy.
I think people are late getting the wake-up call
and we would be doing a better job
saving capitalism from itself
because I don't want this done under authoritarian control.
And the more we insist that everybody
who's not thriving in our society
during their reproductive years
in order to have a family is failing at a personal level.
I mean, what a disgusting thing that we're saying.
What a horrible message.
Who the hell have we become
that we've so bought into the Chicago model
that we can't see the humanity
that we're destroying in that process?
And I hate the thought of communism.
I really do.
My family has flirted with it decades past.
It's a wrong, bad idea.
But we are going to need to figure out
how to make sure that those souls
are nourished and respected
and capitalism better have an answer.
And I'm betting on capitalism,
but I gotta tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with my team.
- So you're still on the capitalism team.
You just, there's a theme here.
- Radical capital.
- Hyper capitalism.
- I want, I think hyper capitalism
is gonna have to be coupled to hyper socialism.
You need to allow the most productive people
to create wonders.
And you gotta stop bogging them down
with all of these extra nice requirements.
Nice is dead.
Good has a future.
Nice doesn't have a future
because nice ends up with gulags.
- Damn, that's a good line.
Okay, last question.
You tweeted today a simple, quite insightful equation
saying imagine that every unit F of fame you picked up
as stalkers and H haters.
So I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame
perhaps a little bit.
- Well, it's not as simple.
People always take these things literally
when you have like 280 characters to explain yourself.
(laughing)
- So you mean that that's not a mathematical--
- No, there's no law.
- Oh, okay.
All right.
I put the word imagine
because I still have a mathematician's desire for precision.
Imagine that this were true.
- But it was a beautiful way to imagine
that there is a law that has those variables in it.
And you've become quite famous these days.
So how do you yourself optimize that equation
with the peculiar kind of fame
that you have gathered along the way?
- I wanna be kinder.
I wanna be kinder to myself.
I wanna be kinder to others.
I wanna be able to have heart,
compassion, these things are really important.
And I have a pretty spectrumy kind of approach to analysis.
I'm quite literal.
I can go full Rain Man on you at any given moment.
No, I can't.
I can't.
It's faculty of autism, if you like.
And people are gonna get angry
because they want autism to be respected.
But when you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics,
I'm, you know, I speak with speech apnea.
(stammering)
Be right down to dinner.
And we have to try to integrate ourselves
in those tensions between, you know,
it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul.
Many of us are optimizing one at the expense of the other.
And I struggle with social media
and I struggle with people making threats
against our families.
And I struggle with just how much pain people are in.
And if there's one message I would like to push out there,
you're responsible, everybody, all of us,
myself included, with struggling.
Struggle, struggle mightily because you,
it's nobody else's job to do your struggle for you.
Now with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying
and you're trying to figure out how to better yourself
and where you've failed, where you've let down your family,
your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff,
give yourself a break.
You know, if it's not working out,
I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success.
There's been no period of my life
where both haven't been present in one form or another.
And I do wish to say that a lot of times
people think this is glamorous.
I'm about to go, you know, do a show with Sam Harris.
People are gonna listen in on two guys
having a conversation on stage.
It's completely crazy.
I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure
that those people get maximum value.
And that's why I'm doing this podcast, you know,
just give yourself a break.
You owe us, you owe us your struggle.
You don't owe your family or your coworkers
or your lovers or your family members success.
As long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up,
recognize that this new situation with the economy
that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions
has caused the people who've risen to the top
of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel.
Everybody is lying at the moment.
Nobody's really a truth teller.
Try to keep your humanity about you.
Try to recognize that if you're failing,
if things aren't where you want them to be
and you're struggling and you're trying to figure out
what you're doing wrong, what you could do,
it's not necessarily all your fault.
We are in a global situation.
I have not met the people who are honest,
kind, good, successful.
Nobody that I've met is checking all the boxes.
Nobody's getting all 10s.
So I just think that's an important message
that doesn't get pushed out enough.
Either people wanna hold society responsible
for their failures, which is not reasonable.
You have to struggle, you have to try.
Or they wanna say you're 100% responsible
for your failures, which is total nonsense.
- Beautifully put.
Eric, thank you so much for talking today.
- Thanks for having me, buddy.
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