back to indexEric Weinstein: Geometric Unity and the Call for New Ideas & Institutions | Lex Fridman Podcast #88
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The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, the second time we've
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spoken on this podcast, he's a mathematician with a bold and piercing
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intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and
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shine a light on the darkest corners of our society.
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He is the host of the portal podcast, a part of which he recently released his
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2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of geometric unity that is at the center of
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his lifelong efforts to arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the
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fundamental laws of physics.
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This conversation was recorded recently in the time of the coronavirus pandemic
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for everyone feeling the medical, psychological and financial burden of
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young people around the world.
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And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
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Do you see a connection between world war II and the crisis
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we're living through right now?
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The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these
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abstractions, like everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do
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for himself and leave everyone else alone.
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None of these abstractions work in a global crisis.
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And this is just a reminder that we didn't somehow put all that behind us.
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When I hear stories about my grandfather who was in the army.
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And so the Soviet union where most people die, when you're in the army,
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there's a brotherhood that happens.
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There's a love that happens.
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Do you think that's something we're going to see here?
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Uh, since we're not there, I mean, what the Soviet union went through, I mean,
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the enormity of the war on, uh, the Russian doorstep, this is different.
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What we're going through now is not, we can't talk about Stalingrad and
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COVID in the same breath yet.
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And the, the sort of, uh, you know, just the sense of like the great patriotic
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war and the way in which I was very moved by the Soviet custom of,
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of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day.
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It's like the happiest day of your life.
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You have to say thank you to the people who made it possible.
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We're, we're just restarting history.
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We, you know, I've called this on the Rogan program.
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I called it the great nap, the 75 years with, um, very little by historical
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standards in, in terms of really profound disruption.
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And so when you call it the great nap, meaning lack of deep global tragedy,
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well, lack of realized global tragedy.
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So I think that the development, for example, of the hydrogen bomb, you know,
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was something that happened during the great nap.
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And that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel
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feared and no anxiety, but it was to say that most of the violent potential
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of the human species was not realized.
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It was in the form of potential energy.
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And this is the thing that I've sort of taken issue with, with the description
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of Steven Pinker's optimism is that if you look at the realized kinetic
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variables, things have been getting much better for a long time, which is the
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great nap, but it's not as if, uh, our fragility has not grown our dependence
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on electronic systems, our vulnerability to disruption.
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And so all sorts of things have gotten much better. Other things have gotten
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much worse and the destructive potential is skyrocketed.
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The only way we wake up from the big nap.
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Well, no, you could also have a, you know, jubilation about positive things, but
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it's harder to get people's attention.
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Can you give an example of a big global positive thing that could happen?
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I think that when, for example, just historically speaking, uh, HIV
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went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with
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for a very long period of time.
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It would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday, right?
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Like all at once, like you knew that things had changed.
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And so the bleed in somewhat kills the, the sort of the Wednesday effect
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where it all happens on a particular day at a particular moment.
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I think if you look at the stock market here, you know, there's a very clear
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moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus.
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I think that with respect to, um, positives, the moon landing was the best
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example of a positive that happened at a particular time or, uh, recapitulating
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the Soviet American, uh, link up in terms of, um, Skylab and Soyuz, right?
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Like that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting.
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And so, yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful
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and amazing happens, you know, but it's just, there are fewer of, that's why,
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that's why as much as I can't imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event,
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when you have like 30,000 people waiting and you know, like she says, yes,
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it's pretty exciting.
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So I think that we shouldn't, we shouldn't discount that.
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So how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of, um,
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of the global suffering that we're going to experience with this, with this crisis?
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I can't figure this one out.
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I'm just not smart enough.
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Something is going weirdly wrong.
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They're almost like two separate storylines.
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We in one storyline, we aren't taking things nearly seriously enough.
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We see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses.
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Um, we hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage.
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And that's a very terrifying story.
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On the other hand, there's this other story, which says there are
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tons of ventilators someplace.
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We've got lots of masks, but they haven't been released.
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We've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used.
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And it's very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling
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that they both must be true simultaneously, and they can't both be true in any kind
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of standard way, whether I don't know whether it's just that I'm dumb, but I
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can't get one or the other story to quiet down.
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So I think weirdly, this is much more serious than we had understood it.
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And it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the
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same time and that we're not being given the tools to actually understand, Oh,
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here's how to interpret the data, or here's the issue with the personal protective
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equipment is actually a jurisdictional battle or a question of who pays for it
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rather than a question of whether it's present or absent.
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I don't understand the details of it, but something is wildly off in our
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ability to understand where we are.
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So that's, that's policy that's institutions.
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What about, do you think about the quiet suffering of millions of
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people that have lost their job?
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Is this a temporary thing?
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I mean, what I'm my ears, not to the suffering of those people who have
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lost their job or the 50% possibly a small businesses that are going to go
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bankrupt, do you think about that?
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Well, and how that might arise itself could be not quiet too.
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That's the, could be a depression.
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This could go from recession to depression and depression could go
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to armed conflict and then to war.
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So it's not a very, um, abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where
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we can begin with quiet suffering and anxiety and all of these sorts of things
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and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress and all sorts of things.
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But, um, look, anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in a, I mean,
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I think about this as an incredible experiment. Imagine that you proposed,
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Hey, I want to do a bunch of research.
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Let's figure out what changes in our emissions, emissions profiles for our
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carbon footprints when we're all indoors or what happens to traffic patterns or
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what happens to the vulnerability of retail sales, uh, as Amazon gets stronger,
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you know, et cetera, et cetera.
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I believe that in many of those situations, um, we're running an incredible
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experiment and I, am I worried for us all?
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Yes, there are some bright spots.
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One of which is that when you're ordered to stay indoors, people are
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going to feel entitled and the usual thing that people are going to hit when
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they hear that they've lost your job, you know, there's this kind of tough,
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um, tough love attitude that you see, particularly in the United States, like,
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Oh, you lost your job, poor baby.
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Well, go retrain, get another one.
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I think there's going to be a lot less appetite for that.
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Um, because we've been asked to sacrifice, to risk, to act collectively.
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And that's the interesting thing.
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What does that reawaken in us?
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Maybe the idea that we actually are nations and that, you know, you're
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fellow countrymen may, may start to mean something to more people.
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It certainly means something to people in the military, but I wonder how many
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people who aren't in the military start to think about this as like, Oh yeah,
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we are kind of running separate experiments and we are not China.
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So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come.
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From my perspective, we are a part of experiment, but I don't feel like
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we have access to the full range of knowledge.
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But I don't feel like we have access to the full data, the full data of the
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experiment, we're just like little mice in a large, does this one make sense to you?
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I'm, I'm romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to world war II.
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So I keep connecting to historical events and making sense of them through that way
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or reading the plague by Camus, like almost kind of telling narratives and
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stories, but it might, I'm not hearing the suffering that people are going
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through because I think that's quiet there.
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Everybody's numb currently.
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They're not realizing what it means to have lost your job and
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to have lost your business.
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There's kind of a, I don't, I, um, I'm afraid how that fear will materialize
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itself once the numbness wears out.
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And especially if this lasts for many months, then if it's connected to
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the incompetence of the CDC and the WHO and our government and perhaps the
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election process, you know, my biggest fear is that the elections get delayed
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or something like that.
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So the, the, the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or
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damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have that
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turns to panic, that turns to anger, that anger.
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Can I just play with that for a little bit?
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What if in fact, all of that structure that you grew up thinking about, and
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again, you grew up in two places, right?
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So, uh, when you were inside the U S we tend to look at all of these things as
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museum pieces, like how often do we amend the constitution anymore?
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And in some sense, if you think about the Jewish tradition of Simha Torah,
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you've got this beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn and
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calligraphy, um, that's very valuable.
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And it's very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered.
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And so we, one day a year, we dance with the Torah and we hold this incredibly
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vulnerable document up and we treat it as if, uh, you know, it was Ginger
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Rogers being, uh, led by Fred Astaire.
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Well, that is how you become part of your country.
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In fact, maybe the, maybe the election will be delayed.
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Maybe extraordinary powers will be used.
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Maybe any one of a number of things will indicate that you're
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actually living through history.
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This isn't a museum piece that you were handed by your great, great grandparents.
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But you're kind of suggesting that there might be a, like a
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community thing that pops up like, like, um, as opposed to, uh, an angry revolution.
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It might have a positive effect of, well, for example, are you telling me
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that if the right person stood up and called for us to sacrifice PPE, uh, for
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our nurses and our, our MDs who are on the front lines, that like people wouldn't
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reach down deep in their own supply that they've been like stocking and carefully
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storing them just say, like, say here, take it.
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Like right now, an actual leader would use this time to bring out the heroic
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character and I'm going to just go wildly patriotic cause I frigging love this
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country, we've got this dormant population in the us that loves leadership
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and country and pride in our freedom and not being told what to do.
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And we still have this thing that binds us together and all of them,
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the merchants of division just be gone.
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I totally agree with you.
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There's a, I think there is a deep hunger for that leadership.
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Why hasn't that, why, why hasn't one of us, we don't have the right search
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surgeon general, we have a guy saying, you know, come on guys, don't buy masks.
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They don't really work for you.
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Save them for our healthcare professionals.
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No, you can't do that.
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You have to say, you know what, these masks actually do work and they more
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work to protect other people from you, but they would work for you.
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They'll keep you somewhat safer if you wear them.
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You've got somebody who's taking huge amounts of viral load all the time
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because the patients are shedding.
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Do you want to protect that person who's volunteered to be on the front
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line, who's up sleepless nights?
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You just changed the message.
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You stop lying to people.
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You just, you level with them.
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It's like, it's bad.
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But that's a, that's a little bit specific.
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So you, you have to be just honest about the facts of the situation.
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But I think you were referring to something bigger than just that inspiring,
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like, you know, rewriting the constitution, sort of rethinking how
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we work as a nation.
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I think you should probably, you know, amend the constitution once
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or twice in a lifetime so that you don't get this distance from the foundational
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documents and, you know, part of the problem is that we've got two generations
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on top that feel very connected to the U S they feel bought in and we've got three
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generations below it's a little bit like watching your parents riding the tricycle
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that they were supposed to pass on to you.
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And it's like, you're now too old to ride a tricycle and they're still
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whooping it up, ringing the bell with the streamers coming off the handlebars.
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And you're just thinking, do you guys never get bored?
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Do you never pass a torch?
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Do you really want it?
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We had five septuagenarians all born in the forties running for president of the
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United States when Clovis sure dropped out.
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The youngest was Warren.
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We had Warren Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Trump from like 1949 to 1941.
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All who had been the oldest president at inauguration and nobody's, nobody says
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grandma and grandpa, you're embarrassing us except Joe Rogan.
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Let me put it on you.
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You have a big platform.
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You're somewhat of an intelligent, eloquent guy.
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What, what role do you somewhat, what role do you play?
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Why aren't you that leader?
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Well, you're, I mean, I would argue that you're in, in ways becoming a leader.
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In ways becoming that leader.
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So I haven't taken enough risk.
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Is that your idea?
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What should I do or say at the moment?
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No, you're a little bit, no, you have taken quite a big risks
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and we'll, we'll talk about it.
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But you're also on the outside shooting in, meaning, um, you're, uh, dismantling
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the institution from the outside as opposed to becoming the institution.
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Do you remember that thing you brought up when you were on the view, the view?
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When you were on Oprah, I didn't make, I didn't get the invite.
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When you were on Bill Maher's program, what was that thing you were saying?
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They don't know we're here.
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They may watch us.
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They may quietly slip us a direct message, but they pretend that this
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internet thing is, uh, some dangerous place where only lunatics play.
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Well, who has the bigger platform, the portal or Bill Maher's program or the
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view, Bill Maher and the view in terms of viewership or in terms of what's
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the metric of size?
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Well, first of all, the key thing is, um, take, take a newspaper and even
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imagine that it's completely fake.
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And then there's very little in the way of circulation.
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Yet imagine that it's an a hundred year old paper and that it's still part of
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this game, this internal game of media.
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The key point is, is that those sources that have that kind of, um, mark of
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respectability to the institutional structures matter in a way that even if
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I say something on a very large platform that makes a lot of sense, if it's
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outside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative or gin, I'm
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sorry, institutional narrative or gin, it sort of doesn't matter to the
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institutions. So the game is if it happens outside of the club, we can
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pretend that it never happened.
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How can you get the credibility and the authority from outside the, the
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gated institutional narrative?
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Well, first of all, you and I both share, um, institutional credibility coming
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from organizations. So you, we were both at MIT, were you at Harvard at any
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point? Nope. Okay.
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Well, I lived in Harvard square.
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So did I, but you know, at some level, the issue isn't whether you have
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credentials in that sense.
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The key question is, can you be trusted to file a flight plan and not deviate
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from that flight plan when you are in an interview situation, will you stick to
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the talking points?
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Not, and that's why you're not going to be allowed in the general
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conversation, which amplifies these sentiments, but I'm still trying to, um,
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so your, your point, it would be, is that we're, let's say both.
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So you've done how many Joe Rogan for I've done for two, right?
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So both of us are somewhat frequent guests. The show is huge.
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You know, the power as well as I do, and people are going to watch this
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conversation. A huge number watched our last one, by the way, I want to thank
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you for that one. That was a terrific, terrific conversation.
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Really did change my life. Like you're brilliant interviewer. So thank you.
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Thank you. That was that you changed my life too.
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That you gave me a chance. So I was so glad I did that one.
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What I would say is, is that we keep mistaking how big the audience is for
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whether or not you have the kiss and the kiss is a different thing.
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Yes. Yeah. Well, it doesn't, it's not an acronym yet. Okay. Um,
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it's uh, but thank you for asking. It's a question of,
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are you part of the inter interoperable institution friendly discussion?
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And that's the discussion which we ultimately have to break into.
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But that's what I'm trying to get at is how do we, how do you,
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how does Eric Weinstein become the president of the United States?
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I shouldn't become the president of the United States. Not interested.
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Thank you very much for asking. Okay.
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Get into a leadership position where I guess I don't know what that means,
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but where you can inspire millions of people to, uh,
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the inspire the sense of community, inspire the,
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the kind of actions required to overcome hardship,
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the kind of hardship that we may be experiencing to inspire people,
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to work hard and face the difficult,
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hard facts of the realities we're living through all those kinds of things that
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you're talking about. That leader, you know,
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can that leader emerge from the current institutions or
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alternatively, can it also emerge from the outside?
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I guess that's what I was asking.
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is that this is the last hurrah for the elderly centrist kleptocrats.
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Can you define each of those terms? Okay. Elderly.
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I mean people who were born at least a year before I was,
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that's a joke. You can laugh. Uh, no,
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because I'm born at the cusp of the gen X boomer divide. Um,
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centrist they're pretending, you know,
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there are two parties, Democrat and Republican party in the United States.
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I think it's easier to think of the mainstream of both of them as part of a,
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an aggregate party that I sometimes call the looting party,
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which gets us to kleptocracy, which is ruled by thieves.
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And the great temptation has been to treat the U S like a trough.
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And you just have to get yours because it's not like we're doing anything
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So everybody's sort of looting the family mansion and somebody stole the silver
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and somebody is cutting the pictures out of the frames and you know,
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roughly speaking, we're watching our elders, uh,
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we'll live it up in a way that doesn't make sense to the rest of us.
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Okay. So if it's the last hurrah,
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this is the time for leaders to step up.
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We're not ready yet. We're not ready.
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I just disagree with that. I call, I call out, you know,
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the head of the CDC should resign, should resign.
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The surgeon general should resign. Trump should resign. Pelosi should resign.
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De Blasio should resign. I understand that. So that's why. So we'll wait.
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No, but that's not how revolutions work. You don't wait for people to resign.
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You, uh, step up and inspire the alternative.
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Do you remember the Russian revolution of 1907? It's before my time,
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but there wasn't a Russian revolution of 1907.
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So you're thinking we're in 1907. I'm saying we're too early.
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But we got this, you know, Spanish flu came in 17, 18.
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So I would argue that there's a lot of parallels there or there were one.
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I think it's not time yet. Like John Prine, the, uh,
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uh, the songwriter just died of COVID. That was a pretty big,
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really? Yeah. By the way, you, yes, of course. I, um,
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every time we do this, uh,
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we discover our mutual appreciation of obscure brilliant witty
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songwriter. He's really, he's really quite good, right? He's, he's really good.
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My understanding is that he passed recently due to complications of Corona.
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Yeah. So we haven't had large enough,
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enough large, large enough shocking deaths yet,
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picturesque deaths, deaths of a family that couldn't get treatment.
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There are stories that will come and break our hearts and we have not had enough
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of those. The visuals haven't come in, but I think they're coming. Well,
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But that you gotta, you have to be there. He has to be there when they come.
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but we didn't get the visual for example of falling man from nine 11.
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Right. So the outside world did, but Americans were not,
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it was thought that we would be too delicate.
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So just the way you remember Pulitzer prize winning photographs from the Vietnam
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you don't easily remember the photographs from all sorts of things that have
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happened since because something changed in our media.
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We are in sense that we cannot feel or experience our own lives and the tragedy
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that would animate us to action.
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Yeah. But I think there, again,
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I think there's going to be that suffering that's going to build and build and
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build in terms of businesses,
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mom and pop shops that close. And I, like,
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I think for myself, I think often that,
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that I'm being weak and,
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and like I feel like I should be doing something.
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I should be becoming a leader on a small scale.
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You can't, this is not world war II, and this is not Soviet Russia.
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Because our internal programming,
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the malware that sits between our ears is much different than the propaganda is
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malware of the Soviet era. I mean,
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people were both very indoctrinated and also knew that some level it was BS.
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They had a double mind. I don't know.
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There must be a great word in Russian for being able to think both of those
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things simultaneously.
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You don't think people are actually sick of the partisanship,
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sick of incompetence.
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Yeah, but I called for revolt the other day on Joe Rogan.
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People found it quixotic.
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Well, because I think you're not, I think revolt is different.
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I think that's like, okay, I'm really angry. I'm, I'm furious.
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I cannot stand that this is my country at the moment. I'm embarrassed.
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So let's build a better one. Yeah. Right. That's the, I'm in.
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Okay. So, well, okay, so let's take over a few universities.
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Let's start running a different experiment at some of our better universities.
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Like when I did this experiment and I said, what,
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at this, if this were 40 years ago, the median age,
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I believe of a university president was 51 that would have the person in gen X
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and we'd have a bunch of millennial presidents, a bunch of, you know,
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more than half gen X it's almost 100% baby boom at this point.
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Um, and how did that happen?
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We can get into how they changed retirement,
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but this generation of people are not going to be able to do that.
link |
But this generation above us does not feel for even even the older generous
link |
silent generous. I had Roger Penrose on my program.
link |
Excellent. And I thank you. I really appreciate that.
link |
And I asked him a question that was very important to me. I said, look,
link |
you're in your late eighties.
link |
Is there anyone you could point to as a successor that we should be watching?
link |
We can get excited. You know, I said,
link |
here's an opportunity to pass the baton and he said, well, let me,
link |
let me hold off on that. It was like, Oh,
link |
is it ever the right moment to point to somebody younger than you to keep your
link |
flame alive after you're gone? And also like, I don't know whether,
link |
I'm just going to admit to this.
link |
People treat me like I'm crazy for caring about the world after I'm dead
link |
or wanting to be remembered after you're gone. Like, well,
link |
what does it matter to you? You're gone.
link |
It's this deeply sort of secular somatic perspective on everything where we
link |
don't, you know, that phrase in a, as time goes by,
link |
it says it's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory,
link |
a case of do or die.
link |
I don't think people imagined then that there wouldn't be a story about
link |
fighting for love and glory.
link |
And like we are so out of practice about fighting, you know,
link |
rivals for love and and and and fighting for glory and something bigger than
link |
But the hunger is there.
link |
Well, that was the point then, right? The whole idea is that Rick was,
link |
you know, it was like Han Solo of his time. He's just like,
link |
I stick my neck out for nobody. You know, it's like, Oh, come on, Rick,
link |
you're just pretending you actually have a big soul. Right.
link |
And so at some level, that's the question. Do we have a big soul or is it just
link |
So yeah, I think, I think there's huge Manhattan project style projects,
link |
whether you talk about physical infrastructure or going to Mars, you know,
link |
the SpaceX NASA efforts or huge,
link |
huge scientific efforts.
link |
we need to get back into the institutions and we need to remove the weak
link |
leadership that we have weak leaders and the weak leaders need to be removed and
link |
they need to seat people more dangerous than the people who are currently sitting
link |
in a lot of those chairs.
link |
Yeah. Or build new institutions. Good luck. Well,
link |
so one of the nice things of, uh,
link |
from the internet is for example,
link |
somebody like you can have a bigger voice than almost anybody at the particular
link |
institutions we're talking about.
link |
That's true. But the thing is I might say something.
link |
You can count on the fact that the, you know,
link |
provost at Princeton isn't going to say anything.
link |
Yeah. What do you mean to, to afraid?
link |
Well, if that person were to give an interview,
link |
how are things going in research at Princeton? Well,
link |
I'm hesitant to say it,
link |
but they're perhaps as good as they've ever been and I think they're going to
link |
get better. Oh, is that right? All fields? Yep. I don't see a weak one.
link |
It's just like, okay, great. Who are you and what are you even saying?
link |
We're just used to total nonsense. 24 seven.
link |
What do you think might be a beautiful thing that comes out of this?
link |
Like what is there a hope that like a little inkling,
link |
a little fire of hope you have about our time right now?
link |
I think one thing is coming to understand that the freaks, weirdos,
link |
mutants, and other, uh,
link |
near do wells, uh, sometimes referred to as grifters. I like that one.
link |
Grifters, uh, and gadflies were very often the earliest people on the coronavirus.
link |
That's a really interesting question. Why was that?
link |
And it seems to be that they had already paid such a social price that they
link |
weren't going to be beaten up by being, um,
link |
told that, Oh my God, you're xenophobic. You just hate China, you know,
link |
or wow, you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Um,
link |
so if you'd already paid those prices, you were free to think about this.
link |
And everyone in an institutional framework was terrified that they didn't want
link |
to be seen as the alarmist, the, um,
link |
chicken little. And so that's why you have this confidence where, you know,
link |
the Blasio says, you know, get on with your lives,
link |
get back in there and celebrate Chinese new year in Chinatown.
link |
Uh, despite coronavirus, it's like, okay, really?
link |
So you just always thought everything would automatically be okay if you,
link |
if you adapted, sorry, if you adopted that posture.
link |
this time reveals the weakness of our institutions and reveals the strength of
link |
our gadflies and the weirdos and the.
link |
No, not necessarily the strength, but the, the, the value of freedom,
link |
like a different way of saying it would be, wow,
link |
even your gadflies and your grifters were able to beat your institutional folks
link |
because your institutional folks were playing with a giant mental handicap.
link |
So just imagine like we were in the story of Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut and
link |
our smartest people were all subjected to, uh,
link |
distracting noises every seven seconds. Well,
link |
they would be functionally much dumber because they couldn't continue a thought
link |
through all the disturbance.
link |
So in some sense, that's a little bit like what belonging to an institution is,
link |
is that if you have to make a public statement,
link |
of course the surgeon general is going to be the worst because they're,
link |
they're just playing with too much of a handicap.
link |
There are too many institutional players are like, don't screw us up.
link |
And so the person has to say something wrong.
link |
We're going to back propagate a falsehood. And this is very interesting.
link |
Some of my socially oriented friends say, Eric,
link |
I don't understand what you're on about. Of course masks work,
link |
but you know what they're trying to do.
link |
They're trying to get us not to buy up the masks for the doctors. And I think,
link |
so you imagine that we can just create scientific fiction at will so that you can
link |
run whatever social program you want. This is what I, you know,
link |
my point is get out of my lab, get out of the lab.
link |
You don't belong in the lab. You're not meant for the lab.
link |
You're constitutionally incapable of being around the lab.
link |
You need to leave the lab.
link |
You think the CDC and WHO knew that masks work and we're trying to,
link |
and we're trying to sort of imagine that people are kind of stupid and they would
link |
buy masks in excess if they were told that masks work.
link |
cause this does seem to be a particularly clear example of mistakes made.
link |
You're asking me this question. No, you're not. What do you think, Lex?
link |
Well, I actually probably disagree with you a little bit. Great. Let's do it.
link |
I think it's not so easy to be honest with the populace when the danger of
link |
panic is always around the corner.
link |
So I think the kind of honesty you exhibit appeals to a certain class of brave
link |
intellectual minds that, uh, it appeals to me,
link |
but I don't know from the perspective of WHO,
link |
I don't know if it's so obvious that they should,
link |
um, be honest 100% of the time with people.
link |
I'm not saying you should be perfectly transparent and 100% honest.
link |
I'm saying that the quality of your lies has to be very high and it has to be
link |
public spirited. There's a big difference between, so I'm not,
link |
I'm not a child about this. I'm not saying that when you're at war,
link |
you turn over all of your plans to the enemy because it's important that you're
link |
transparent with 360 degree visibility. Far from it.
link |
What I'm saying is something has been forgotten and I forgot who it was who
link |
but it was a fellow graduate student in the Harvard math department and he said,
link |
I learned one thing being out in the workforce because he was one of the few
link |
people who had had a work life in the department as a grad student.
link |
And he said, you can be friends with your boss,
link |
but if you're going to be friends with your boss,
link |
you have to be doing a good job at work.
link |
And there's an analog here,
link |
which is if you're going to be reasonably honest with the population,
link |
you have to be doing a good job at work as the surgeon general or as the head of
link |
the CDC. So if you're doing a terrible job,
link |
you're supposed to resign.
link |
And then the next person is supposed to say, look,
link |
I'm not going to lie to you. I inherited the situation.
link |
It was in a bit of disarray.
link |
But I had several requirements before I agreed to step in and take the job
link |
because I needed to know I could turn it around.
link |
I needed to know that I had clear lines of authority.
link |
I needed to know that I had the resources available in order to rectify the
link |
And I needed to know that I had the ability and the freedom to level with the
link |
American people directly as I saw fit. All of my wishes were granted.
link |
And that's why I'm happy here on Monday morning. I've got my sleeves rolled up.
link |
Boy, do we got a lot to do.
link |
So please come back in two weeks and then ask me how I'm doing then.
link |
And I hope to have something to show you. That's how you do it.
link |
So why is that excellence and basic competence
link |
The big net. You see,
link |
you come from multiple traditions where it was very important to remember
link |
The Soviet tradition made sure that you remembered the sacrifices that came in
link |
that war and the Jewish tradition we're doing this on Passover,
link |
right? Okay. Well, every year we tell one simple story.
link |
Well, why can't it be different every year?
link |
Maybe we could have a rotating series of seven stories because it's the one
link |
story that you need. It's like, you know, you work with the men in black group,
link |
right? And it's the last suit that you'll ever need.
link |
This is the last story that you ever need.
link |
Don't think I fell for your neuralyzer last time.
link |
In any event, we tell one story because it's the,
link |
get out of Dodge story.
link |
There's a time when you need to not wait for the bread to rise.
link |
And that's the thing, which is even if you live through a great nap,
link |
you deserve to know what it feels like to have to leave everything that has
link |
become comfortable and, and unworkable.
link |
It's sad that you need, you need that tragedy.
link |
I imagine to have the tradition of remembering
link |
it's, it's sad to to think that because things have been
link |
nice and comfortable means that we can't have great competent leaders,
link |
which is kind of the implied statement.
link |
Like, can we have great leaders who take big risks,
link |
who are, who inspire hard work,
link |
who deal with difficult truth, even though things have been comfortable?
link |
Well, we know what those people sound like. I mean, you know, if,
link |
for example, Jaco Willink suddenly threw his hat into the ring,
link |
everyone would say, okay, right.
link |
Party's over. It's time to get up at four 30 and really work hard.
link |
And we've got to get back into fighting shape. And yeah,
link |
but Jaco is a very special, I think,
link |
that whole group of people by profession,
link |
put themselves in the way of, and into hardship on a daily basis.
link |
And he's not, I don't, well, I don't know,
link |
but he's probably not going to be, well, could Jaco be president?
link |
Okay. But it doesn't have to be Jaco, right? Like in other words,
link |
if it was Kai Lenny or if it was Alex
link |
Honnold from rock climbing, right. But they're just serious people.
link |
They're serious people who can't afford your BS.
link |
But why do we have serious people that do rock climbing and uh,
link |
don't have serious people who lead the nation? That seems to.
link |
Because that was a,
link |
those skills needed in rock climbing are not good during the big nap.
link |
And at the tail end of the big nap, they would get you fired.
link |
don't you think there's a fundamental part of human nature that desires to,
link |
to excel, to be exceptionally good at your job?
link |
Yeah. But what is your job? I mean, in other words, my, my,
link |
my point to you is if you,
link |
if you're a general in a peacetime army and your major activity is playing war
link |
what if the skills needed to win war games are very different than the skills
link |
needed to win wars? Because you know how the war games are scored and you've,
link |
you've done money ball, for example, with war games,
link |
you figured out how to win games on paper.
link |
So then the advancement skill becomes divergent from the, uh,
link |
ultimate skill that it was proxying for.
link |
Yeah. But you create this, we're good as human beings to, I mean,
link |
I, at least me, I can't do a big nap.
link |
So at any one moment when I finish something,
link |
a new dream pops up. So going to Mars,
link |
what do you like to do? You like to do Brazilian jujitsu?
link |
Well, first of all, I like to do every, you like to play guitar,
link |
guitar, you do this podcast, you do theory. You're always,
link |
you're constantly taking risks and exposing yourself. Right? Why?
link |
Because you've got one of those crazy, I'm sorry to say it.
link |
You've got an Eastern European Jewish personality, which I'm still tied to,
link |
and I'm a couple of generations more distant than you are.
link |
And I've held on to that thing because it's valuable to me.
link |
You don't think there's a huge percent of the populace,
link |
even in the United States. That's that's that might be a little bit dormant,
link |
but do you know Anna Hatchian from the red scare podcast?
link |
Did you interview her? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I listened. Yeah, yeah, she was great.
link |
She was great, right? Yeah. She's fun. She's, she's terrific.
link |
But she also has the same thing going on.
link |
And I made a joke in the liner notes for that episode,
link |
which is somewhere on the road from Stalingrad to forever 21,
link |
something was lost. Like how can Stalingrad and forever 21 be in the same
link |
sentence? And, you know, in part it's that weird thing.
link |
It's like trying to remember even words like I'm in Russian and Hebrew things,
link |
like it's like what pom yet then the score, you know,
link |
these words have much more potency about memory and I don't know.
link |
I do, I think, I think there's still a dormant populace that craves leaders on a
link |
small scale and large scale.
link |
And I hope to be that leader on a small scale.
link |
And I think you sir have a role to be a leader.
link |
You kids go ahead without me. I'm just gonna,
link |
I'm going to do a little bit of weird podcast.
link |
I see now you're, you're putting on your, uh, Joe Rogan hat.
link |
Uh, he says, I'm just a comedian. Oh no, I'm not saying I'm just a,
link |
it's not that if I say I want to lead too much because of the big nap,
link |
there's like a group, a chorus of automated idiots and their first thought is
link |
like, ah, I knew it. So it's a power grab all along. Why should you lead?
link |
You know, it's just like,
link |
and so the idea is you're just trying to skirt around,
link |
not stepping on all of the idiot landmines. It's like, okay,
link |
so now I'm going to hear that in my inbox for the next three days.
link |
Okay. So lead by example, just live. No, I mean, the issue platform, look,
link |
we should take over the institutions. There are institutions.
link |
We've got bad leadership.
link |
We should mutiny and we should inject a, I don't know,
link |
15% 20% uh, disagreeable, dissident,
link |
very aggressive loner, individual mutant freaks,
link |
all the people that you go to see Avengers movies about or the X men or whatever
link |
it is and stop pretending that everything good comes out of some great giant
link |
inclusive, communal, uh, 12 hour meeting.
link |
It's like, stop it. That's not how shit happens.
link |
You recently published the video of a lecture you gave at Oxford presenting
link |
some aspects of a theory, uh,
link |
theory of everything called geometric unity.
link |
So this was a work of 30, 30 plus years.
link |
This is life's work.
link |
Let me ask her the, the silly old question.
link |
How do you feel as a human? Excited, scared,
link |
the experience of posting it.
link |
You know, it's funny. One of the, one of the things that you,
link |
you learn to feel as an academic is, um,
link |
the great sins you can commit in academics, uh,
link |
is to show yourself to be a non serious person to show yourself to have
link |
to avoid the standard practices,
link |
which everyone has signed up for.
link |
it's weird because like, you know that those people are going to be angry.
link |
He did what, you know, why would he do that? And,
link |
and what we're referring to, for example,
link |
there's traditions of sort of publishing incrementally,
link |
certainly not trying to have a theory of everything,
link |
perhaps working within the academic departments, all those things.
link |
So that's true. And so you're going outside of all of that.
link |
Well, I mean, I was going inside of all of that and we did not come to terms
link |
when I was inside and what they did was so outside to me was so weird,
link |
so freakish, like the most senior, respectable people at the most senior,
link |
respectable places were functionally insane as far as I could tell.
link |
And again, it's like being functionally stupid.
link |
If you're the head of the CDC or something where, you know,
link |
you're giving recommendations out that aren't based on what you actually
link |
believe. They're based on what you think you have to be doing. Well,
link |
I think that that's a lot of how I saw the math and physics world as
link |
the physics world was really crazy and the math world was considerably less
link |
crazy, just very strict and kind of dogmatic.
link |
Well, we'll psychoanalyze those folks,
link |
but I really want to maybe linger on it a little bit longer of how you feel
link |
because yeah, so this is such a, such a special moment in your life.
link |
I really appreciate it. It's a great question.
link |
So that if we can pair off some of that other, those other issues. Um,
link |
it's new being able to say what the observers is,
link |
which was my attempt to replace space time with something that is both closely
link |
related to space, time and not space time. Um,
link |
so I used to carry the number 14 as a closely guarded secret in my life and uh,
link |
we're 14 is really four dimensions of space and time plus 10.
link |
Extra dimensions of rulers and protractors or for the cool kids out there,
link |
uh, symmetric two tensors.
link |
She had a geometric,
link |
a complicated, beautiful geometric view of the world that you cared with you
link |
for a long time. Yeah. Did you,
link |
did you have friends that you, um, colleagues, essentially? No.
link |
Talked. No. In fact, part of these, part of some of these stories are me,
link |
coming out of the world,
link |
to my friends, um, and I use the phrase coming out because I think that gays
link |
have monopolized the concept of the closet.
link |
Many of us are in closets having nothing to do with our sexual orientation.
link |
Um, yeah, I didn't really feel comfortable talking to almost anyone.
link |
So this was a closely guarded, uh, secret.
link |
And I think that I let on in some ways that I was up to something and probably
link |
I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was,
link |
I was up to something and probably, but it was a very weird life. So I had to,
link |
I had to have a series of things that I pretended to care about so that I could
link |
use that as the stalking horse for what I really cared about. And to your point,
link |
um, I never understood this whole thing about theories of everything.
link |
Like if you were going to go into something like theoretical physics,
link |
isn't that what you would normally pursue?
link |
Like wouldn't it be crazy to do something that difficult and that poorly paid if
link |
you were going to try to do something other than figure out what this is all
link |
Now I have to reveal my cards,
link |
my sort of weaknesses and lack and understanding of the music of physics and
link |
But there's an analogy here to artificial intelligence and often folks come in
link |
so there's a giant department working on quote unquote artificial intelligence,
link |
right? But why is nobody actually working on intelligence?
link |
Like you're all just building little toys, right?
link |
You're not actually trying to understand. And that breaks a lot of people. Uh,
link |
they, it confuses them because like, okay, so I'm at MIT,
link |
I'm at Stanford, I'm at Harvard, I'm here.
link |
I dreamed of being working on artificial intelligence.
link |
Why is everybody not actually working on intelligence?
link |
And I have the same kind of sense that that's what working on the theory of
link |
everything is that strangely you somehow become an outcast for even,
link |
but we know why this is right. Why? Well, it's because let's take the artificial,
link |
let's, let's play with AGI for example.
link |
I think that the idea starts off with nobody really knows how to work on that.
link |
And so if we don't know how to work on it,
link |
we choose instead to work on a program that is tangentially related to it.
link |
So we do a component of a program that is related to that big question because
link |
it's felt like at least I can make progress there.
link |
And that wasn't where I was, where I was in,
link |
it's funny there was this book of a called Frieden Uhlenbeck and it had this
link |
weird mysterious line in the beginning of it.
link |
And I tried to get clarification of this weird mysterious line and everyone said
link |
wrong things. And then I said, okay, well,
link |
so I can tell that nobody's thinking properly because I just asked the entire
link |
department and nobody has a correct interpretation of this.
link |
And so, you know, it's a little bit like you see a crime scene photo
link |
and you have a different idea.
link |
Like there's a smoking gun and you figure that's actually a cigarette lighter.
link |
I don't really believe that. And then there's like a pack of cards and you think,
link |
that looks like the blunt instrument that the person was beaten with. You know,
link |
so you have a very different idea about how things go.
link |
And very quickly you realize that there's no one thinking about that.
link |
There's a few human sides to this and technical sides,
link |
both of which I'd love to try to get down to. So the human side,
link |
I can tell from my perspective, I think it was before April 1st, April Fools,
link |
maybe the day before, I forget,
link |
but I was laying in bed in the middle of the night and somehow it popped up,
link |
you know on my feed somewhere that your beautiful face is speaking live and I
link |
clicked. And you know,
link |
it's kind of weird how the universe just brings things together in this kind of
link |
And all of a sudden I realized that there's something big happening at this
link |
particular moment. It's strange. On a day,
link |
like any day and all of a sudden you were thinking of,
link |
you had this somber tone, like you were serious,
link |
like you were going through some difficult decision and it seems strange.
link |
I almost thought you were maybe joking,
link |
but there was a serious decision being made and it was a wonderful experience
link |
to go through with you.
link |
I really appreciate it. I mean it was April 1st.
link |
Yeah, it was, it's kind of fascinating. I mean it's just the whole experience.
link |
And so I want to ask,
link |
I mean thank you for letting me be part of that kind of journey of decision
link |
making that took 30 years, but why now?
link |
Why did you think,
link |
why did you struggle so long not to release it and decide to release it now?
link |
While the whole world is on lockdown on April Fools,
link |
is it just because you like the comedy of absurd ways that the universe comes
link |
I think that the COVID epidemic is the end of the big nap.
link |
And I think that I actually tried this seven years earlier in Oxford.
link |
So I, uh, and it was too early.
link |
Which part was too, is it the platform?
link |
Cause your platform is quite different now actually the internet. I remember you,
link |
uh, I read several of your brilliant answers that people should read for the
link |
edge questions. One of them was related to the internet.
link |
And it was the first one. Was it the first one? Yeah.
link |
An essay called go virtual young man. Yeah. Yeah. That seemed,
link |
that's like forever ago now. Well that was 10 years ago.
link |
And that's exactly what I did is I decamped to the internet,
link |
which is where the portal lives, the portal, the portal, the portal.
link |
Well, so the whole, the theme, that's the ominous theme music,
link |
which you just listened to forever.
link |
I actually started recording a tiny guitar licks, uh,
link |
for the audio portion, not for the video portion. Um,
link |
you've kind of inspired me with bringing your guitar into the story,
link |
So you thought, so the Oxford was like step one and you kind of,
link |
you put your foot into the, in the water to sample it,
link |
but it was too cold at the time. So you didn't want to step in.
link |
I was just really disappointed.
link |
What was disappointing about that experience?
link |
It's very, it's a hard thing to talk about.
link |
It has to do with the fact that, and I can see this,
link |
this, you know, this mirrors a disappointment within myself.
link |
There are two separate issues.
link |
One is the issue of making sure that the idea is actually heard and explored.
link |
And the other is the,
link |
I is the question about will I become disconnected from my work because it will
link |
be ridiculed. It will, it will be immediately improved.
link |
It will be found to be derivative of something that occurred in some paper in
link |
1957. When the community does not want you to gain a voice,
link |
it's a little bit like a policeman deciding to weirdly enforce all of these
link |
little known regulations against you. And you know,
link |
sometimes nobody else. And I think that's kind of, you know,
link |
this weird thing where I just don't believe that we can reach the final theory
link |
necessarily within the political economy of academics.
link |
So if you think about how academics are tortured by each other and how they're
link |
paid and where they have freedom and where they don't,
link |
I actually weirdly think that that system of selective pressures is going to
link |
eliminate anybody who's going to make real progress.
link |
So that's interesting.
link |
So if you look at the story of Andrew Wiles, for example,
link |
with from our last term, I mean, he,
link |
as far as I understand,
link |
he pretty much isolated himself from the world of academics in terms of the big,
link |
the bulk of the work he did.
link |
And it from my perspective is dramatic and fun to read about,
link |
but it seemed exceptionally stressful. The first step he took,
link |
the first steps he took when actually making the work public that seemed to me
link |
it would be hell, but it's like so artificially dramatic, you know,
link |
he leads up to it at a series of lectures.
link |
He doesn't want to say it. And then he finally says it at the end,
link |
because obviously this comes out of a body of work where, I mean,
link |
the funny part about from us last theorem is that wasn't originally thought to
link |
be a deep and meaningful problem.
link |
It was just an easy to state one that had gone unsolved.
link |
But if you think about it,
link |
it became attached to the body of regular theory.
link |
So he built up this body of regular theory gets all the way up to the end
link |
announces. And then like, there's this whole drama about, okay,
link |
somebody's checking the proof. I don't understand what's going on in line 37,
link |
you know, and like, Oh, is this serious?
link |
It seems a little bit more serious than we knew.
link |
I mean, do you see parallels?
link |
Do you share the concern that your experience might be something similar?
link |
Well, in his case, I think that if I recall correctly,
link |
his original proof was unsalvageable.
link |
He actually came up with a second proof with a
link |
colleague, Richard Taylor.
link |
And it was that second proof which carried the day.
link |
So it was a little bit that he got put under incredible pressure and then had
link |
to succeed in a new way, having failed the first time,
link |
which is like even a weirder and stranger story.
link |
That's an incredible story in some sense. But I mean, are you,
link |
I'm trying to get a sense of the kind of stress.
link |
I think that this is okay, but I'm rejecting what I don't think people
link |
understand with me is the scale of the critique.
link |
It's like, I don't, you, people say, well,
link |
you must implicitly agree with this and implicitly agree. It's like, no,
link |
try me ask before you,
link |
you decide that I am mostly in agreement with the community about how these
link |
things should be handled or what these things mean.
link |
Can you, can you elaborate? And also just why, um,
link |
does criticism matter so much here?
link |
So you seem to dislike the burden of criticism that it will choke away all
link |
different kinds of criticism.
link |
There's constructive criticism and there's destructive criticism.
link |
And what I don't like is I don't like a community that can't,
link |
first of all, like if you take the physics community,
link |
like just the way we screwed up on masks and PPE, uh,
link |
just the way we screwed up in the financial crisis and mortgage backed
link |
securities, we screwed up on string theory.
link |
Can we just forget the string theory happened or sure,
link |
but somebody should say that, right? Somebody should say, you know,
link |
it didn't work out. Yeah. But okay.
link |
But you're asking this,
link |
like why do you guys get to keep the prestige after failing for 35 years?
link |
Yeah. That's an interesting question. You guys, because to me,
link |
look these things, if there is a theory of everything to be had, right?
link |
It's going to be a relatively small group of people where this will be sorted
link |
out. Absolutely. It's, it's, it's not tens of thousands.
link |
It's probably hundreds at the top.
link |
But within that, within that community,
link |
there is the assholes.
link |
There's the, I mean, they, you have,
link |
you always in this world have people who are kind, open minded.
link |
It's a question about, okay,
link |
let's imagine for example,
link |
that you have a story where you believe that ulcers are definitely
link |
caused by stress and you've never questioned it.
link |
Or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of the blue and attacked us at
link |
Pearl Harbor, right?
link |
And now somebody introduces a new idea to you, which is like,
link |
what if it isn't stress at all?
link |
Or what if we actually tried to make resource star of Japan attack us somewhere
link |
in the Pacific so we could have cast this belly to enter the Asian theater
link |
person's original idea is like, what, what are you even saying? You know,
link |
it's like too crazy. Well,
link |
when Dirac in 1963
link |
talked about the importance of beauty as a guiding principle in physics and he
link |
wasn't talking about the scientific method, that was crazy talk,
link |
but he was actually making a great point and he was using Schrodinger.
link |
And I think it was Schrodinger was standing in for him and he said that if your
link |
equations don't agree with experiment, that's kind of a minor detail.
link |
If they have true beauty in them,
link |
you should explore them because very often the agreement with experiment is
link |
that it is an issue of fine tuning of your model of the instantiation.
link |
And so it doesn't really tell you that your model is wrong.
link |
And of course Heisenberg told Dirac that his model was wrong because that the
link |
proton and the electron should be the same mass if they are each other's
link |
And that was an irrelevant kind of silliness rather than a real threat to the
link |
Dirac theory. But okay. So amidst all this silliness,
link |
I'm hoping that we could talk about the journey that geometric unity has taken
link |
and will take as an idea and an idea that we'll see the light.
link |
Yeah. That. So first of all, let's,
link |
I'm thinking of writing a book called geometric unity for idiots. Okay.
link |
And I need you as a consultant. So can we, first of all,
link |
I hope I have the trademark on geometric unit. You do. Good.
link |
Can you give a basic introduction of the goals of geometric unity?
link |
The basic tools of mathematics use the viewpoints in general for idiots.
link |
Sure. Like me. Okay. Great. Fun.
link |
So what's the goal of geometric unity?
link |
The goal of geometric unity is to start with something so completely bland that
link |
you can simply say, well,
link |
that's a something that begins the game is as close to a mathematical.
link |
Nothing is possible. In other words, I can't answer the question.
link |
Why is there something rather than nothing?
link |
But if there has to be a something that we begin from,
link |
let it begin from something that's like a blank canvas.
link |
Let's even more basic. So what is something, what are we trying to describe here?
link |
Right now we have a model of our world and it's got two sectors.
link |
Two sectors. One of the sectors is called general relativity.
link |
The other is called the standard model.
link |
So we'll call it GR for general relativity and SM for standard model.
link |
What's the difference between the two? What are the two described?
link |
So general relativity gives pride of place to gravity and everything else is
link |
acting as a sort of a back, a backup singer.
link |
Gravity is the star of the show. Gravity is the star of general relativity.
link |
And in the standard model,
link |
the other three non gravitational forces.
link |
So if there are four forces that we know about three of the four non
link |
gravitational, that's where they get to shine. Great.
link |
So tiny little particles and how they interact with each other.
link |
So photons, gluons and so called intermediate vector bosons.
link |
Those are the things that the standard model showcases and general relativity
link |
showcases gravity. And then you have matter,
link |
which is accommodated in both theories,
link |
but much more beautifully inside of the standard model.
link |
So what, what is a theory of everything do?
link |
So, so first of all, I think that that's,
link |
that's the first place where we haven't talked enough.
link |
We assume that we know what it means,
link |
but we don't actually have any idea what it means.
link |
And what I claim it is, is that it's a theory where the questions beyond that
link |
theory are no longer of a mathematical nature.
link |
In other words, if I say, let us take, um,
link |
X to be a four dimensional manifold
link |
to a mathematician or a physicist. I've said very little.
link |
I've simply said there's some place for calculus and linear algebra to,
link |
to, uh, to dance together and to play.
link |
And that's what manifolds are. They're the most natural place where,
link |
where our two greatest math theories can really, uh,
link |
Which are the two? Oh, you mean calculus and linear algebra. Right. Okay.
link |
Now the question is beyond that. So it's sort of like saying,
link |
I'm an artist and I want to order a canvas.
link |
Okay. Now the question is, does the canvas paint itself?
link |
Does the can, does the canvas come up with an artist
link |
and paint an ink, which then paint the canvas? Like that's the,
link |
that's the hard part about theories of everything,
link |
which I don't think people talk enough about.
link |
Can we just, you bring up Escher and the hand that draws itself.
link |
Is it the fire that lights itself or drawing hands, the drawing hands. Yeah.
link |
And, uh, every time I start to think about that, my mind like, uh,
link |
shuts down. Well, don't do that. There's a spark and this is the most beautiful
link |
part. We should do this together. No, it's beautiful, but, uh,
link |
this robot's brain, uh, sparks fly.
link |
So can we try to say the same thing over and over in different ways about what,
link |
what, what you mean by that having to be a thing we have to contend with?
link |
why do you think that creating a theory of everything,
link |
as you call the source code are understanding our source code require a view
link |
like the hand that draws itself. Okay.
link |
Well here's what goes on in the regular physics picture.
link |
We've got these two main theories, general relativity and the standard model.
link |
Okay. Think of general relativity as more or less,
link |
the theory of the canvas. Okay.
link |
Maybe you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape.
link |
Maybe you've measured it. So it's got length and it's got angle,
link |
but more or less it's just canvas and length and angle.
link |
And that's all that really general relativity is,
link |
but it allows the canvas to warp a bit.
link |
Okay. Then we have the second thing,
link |
which is this import of foreign libraries where,
link |
which aren't tied to space and time.
link |
So we've got this crazy set of symmetries called SU three cross SU two cross U
link |
We've got this collection of 16 particles in a generation,
link |
which are these sort of twisted spinners.
link |
And we've got three copies of them.
link |
Then we've got this weird Higgs field that comes in and like Deus ex machina
link |
solves all the problems that have been created in the play that can't be
link |
resolved otherwise.
link |
So that's the standard model of quantum field theory just plopped on top.
link |
It's a problem of the double origin story.
link |
One origin story is about space and time.
link |
The other origin story is about what we would call internal quantum numbers and
link |
internal symmetries.
link |
And then there was an attempt to get one to follow from the other called
link |
Kaluza Klein theory, which didn't work out.
link |
And this is sort of in that vein.
link |
So you said origin story. So in the hand that draws itself,
link |
So it's, it's as if you had the canvas and then you ordered
link |
up also give me paint brushes, paints, pigments, pencils, and artists.
link |
But you're saying that's like, if you want to create a universe from scratch,
link |
the canvas should be generating the paintbrushes and the paintbrushes and the
link |
artists, right? Like you should, who's the artist in this analogy?
link |
Well, this is sorry.
link |
Then we're going to get into a religious thing and I don't want to do that.
link |
Okay. Well, you know my shtick, which is that we are the AI.
link |
We have two great stories about the simulation and artificial general
link |
intelligence. In one story,
link |
man fears that some program we've given birth to will become self aware,
link |
smarter than us and we'll take over in another story.
link |
There are genius simulators and we live in their simulation and we haven't
link |
realized that those two stories are the same story. In one case,
link |
we are the simulator. In another case,
link |
we are the simulated and if you buy those and you put them together,
link |
we are the AGI and whether or not we have simulators,
link |
we may be trying to wake up by learning our own source code.
link |
So this could be our Skynet moment,
link |
which is one of the reasons I have some issues around it.
link |
I think we'll talk about that cause I,
link |
well that's the issue of the emergent artist within the story just to get back
link |
to the point. Okay. So,
link |
so now the key point is the standard way we tell the story is that Einstein sets
link |
the canvas and then we order all the stuff that we want and then that paints the
link |
picture that is our universe.
link |
So you order the, the, the paint,
link |
you order the artist,
link |
you order the brushes and that then when you collide the two gives you two
link |
separate origin stories.
link |
The canvas came from one place and everything else came from somewhere else.
link |
So what are the mathematical tools required to,
link |
to construct consistent geometric theory?
link |
You know, make this concrete.
link |
Well, somehow you need to get three copies,
link |
of generations with 16 particles each,
link |
right? And so the question would be like, well, there's a lot,
link |
there's a lot of special personality in those symmetries.
link |
Where would they come from? So for example,
link |
you've got what would be called grand unified theories that sound like,
link |
um, SU five, uh, the George I.
link |
Glashow theory. There's something that should be called spin 10,
link |
but physicists insist on calling it SO 10.
link |
There's something called the petit salon theory that tends to be called SU four
link |
cross SU two cross SU two, which should be called spin six cross spin four.
link |
I can get into all of these.
link |
What are they all accomplishing?
link |
They're all taking the known forces that we see and packaging them up
link |
to say, we can't get rid of the second origin story,
link |
but we can at least make that origin story more unified.
link |
So they're trying grand unification is the attempt to.
link |
And that's a mistake in your, in your.
link |
It's not a mistake that the problem is, is it was born lifeless. When,
link |
And Glashow first came out with the SU five theory, um,
link |
it was very exciting because it could be tested in a South Dakota, um,
link |
mine filled up with like, I dunno, cleaning fluid or something like that.
link |
And they looked for proton decay and didn't see it.
link |
And then they gave up because in that day,
link |
when your experiment didn't work, you gave up on the theory.
link |
It didn't come to us born of a fusion between Einstein and,
link |
and, and bore, you know,
link |
and that was kind of the problem is that it had this weird parenting where it
link |
was just on the bore side. There was no Einsteinian contribution.
link |
Lex, how can I help you most? I'm trying to figure,
link |
what questions do you want to ask so that you get the most satisfying answers?
link |
Uh, there's, there's a, there's a bunch,
link |
there's a bunch of questions I want to ask. I mean, one,
link |
and I'm trying to sneak up on you somehow to reveal
link |
in a accessible way, then the nature of our universe.
link |
So I can just give you a guess, right?
link |
We have to be very careful that we're not claiming that this has been accepted.
link |
This is a speculation, but I will, I will make the speculation that what,
link |
I think what you would want to ask me is how can the canvas generate all the
link |
stuff that usually has to be ordered separately? All right. Should we do that?
link |
Let's go there. Okay.
link |
Okay. So the first thing is,
link |
is that you have a concept in computers called technical debt.
link |
You're coding and you cut corners and you know,
link |
you're going to have to do it right before the thing is safe for the world,
link |
but you're piling up some series of IO use to yourself and your project as
link |
you're going along.
link |
So the first thing is we can't figure out if you have only four degrees of
link |
freedom. And that's what your canvas is.
link |
How do you get at least Einstein's world? Einstein says, look,
link |
it's not just four degrees of freedom,
link |
but there need to be rulers and protractors to measure length and angle in the
link |
world. You can't just have a flabby four degrees of freedom.
link |
So the first thing you do is you create 10 extra variables,
link |
which is like if we can't choose any particular set of rulers and protractors to
link |
measure length and angle, let's take the,
link |
take the set of all possible rulers and protractors.
link |
And that would be called symmetric non degenerate two tensors on the tangent
link |
space of the four manifold X four.
link |
Now because there are four degrees of freedom,
link |
you start off with four dimensions.
link |
Then you need four rulers for each of those different directions.
link |
So that's four that gets us up to eight variables.
link |
And then between four original variables, there are six possible angles.
link |
So four plus four plus six is equal to 14.
link |
So now you've replaced X four with another space, which in the lecture,
link |
I think I called you 14, but I'm now calling Y 14.
link |
This is one of the big problems of working on something in private is every time
link |
you pull it out, you sort of can't remember it. You name something, something new.
link |
Okay. So you've got a 14 dimensional world,
link |
which is the original four dimensional world plus a lot of extra gadgetry for
link |
Yeah. And because you're not in the four dimensional world,
link |
you don't have the technical debt.
link |
No, now you've got a lot of technical debt because now you have to explain away
link |
a 14 dimensional world, which is a big,
link |
you're taking a huge advance on your payday check, right?
link |
But aren't more dimensions allow you more freedom to, I mean,
link |
maybe, but you have to get rid of them somehow because we don't perceive them.
link |
So eventually you have to collapse it down to the thing that we perceive or you
link |
have to sample a four dimensional filament within that 14 dimensional world known
link |
as a section of a bundle.
link |
Okay. So how do we get from the four 14 dimensional world where I imagine a lot
link |
of, oh, wait, wait, wait. Yep. You're cheating.
link |
The first question was how do we get something from almost nothing?
link |
Like how do we get the,
link |
if I've said that the who and the what in the newspaper story that is a theory
link |
theory of everything are bosons and Fermions. So let's make the who,
link |
the Fermions and the what the bosons think of it as the players and the
link |
equipment for a game.
link |
Are we supposed to be thinking of actual physical things with mass or energy?
link |
Okay. So think about everything you see in this room.
link |
So from chemistry, you know, it's all protons, neutrons and electrons,
link |
but from a little bit of late 1960s physics,
link |
we know that the protons and neutrons are all made of up quarks and down quarks.
link |
So everything in this room is basically up quarks, down quarks,
link |
and electrons stuck together with, with the, the, what the equipment.
link |
Now the way we see it currently is we see that there are space time indices,
link |
which we would call spinners that correspond to the who that is the Fermions,
link |
the matter, the stuff, the up quarks, the down quarks, the electrons.
link |
And there are also
link |
16 degrees of freedom that come from this in this space of internal quantum
link |
numbers. So in my theory,
link |
there's no internal quantum number space that figures in.
link |
It's all just spin oriel.
link |
So spinners in 14 dimensions without any festooning with extra linear algebraic
link |
There's a concept of a, of, of, of spinners,
link |
which is natural if you have a manifold with length and angle and Y 14 is almost
link |
a manifold with length and angle. It's,
link |
it's so close. It's in other words,
link |
because you're looking at the space of all rulers and protractors,
link |
maybe it's not that surprising that a space of rulers and protractors might come
link |
very close to having rulers and protractors on it itself.
link |
Like can you measure the space of measurements and you almost can't in a space
link |
that has length and angle.
link |
If it doesn't have a topological obstruction comes with these objects called
link |
Now spinners are the stuff of of our world.
link |
We are made of spinners. They are the most important,
link |
really deep object that I can tell you about. They were very surprising.
link |
What is a spinner? So famously,
link |
there are these weird things that require 720 degrees of rotation in order to
link |
come back to normal. And that doesn't make sense.
link |
And the reason for this is that there's a knottedness in our three dimensional
link |
world that people don't observe. And you know,
link |
you can famously see it by this Dirac string trick.
link |
So if you take a glass of water,
link |
imagine that this was a tumbler and I didn't want to spill any of it.
link |
And the question is if I rotate the cup without losing my grip on the base,
link |
360 degrees and I can't go backwards,
link |
is there any way I can take a sip? And the answer is this weird motion,
link |
go over first and under second.
link |
And that that's 720 degrees of rotation to come back to normal so that I can
link |
take a sip. Well, that weird principle,
link |
which sometimes is known as the Philippine wine glass dance because waitresses
link |
in the Philippines apparently learned how to do this.
link |
so that that move defines if you will,
link |
this hidden space that nobody knew was there of spinners,
link |
which Dirac figured out when he took the square root of something called the
link |
Klein Gordon equation, uh, which I think had earlier,
link |
um, work incorporated from Cartan and killing and company in mathematics.
link |
So spinners are one of the most profound aspects of human existence.
link |
I mean, forgive me for the perhaps dumb questions, but, uh,
link |
would a spinner be the mathematical objects that's the basic unit of our
link |
When you, when you start with a manifold,
link |
um, which is just like something like a donut or a sphere circle or a Mobius
link |
a spinner is usually the first wildly surprising thing that you found was
link |
hidden in your original purchase.
link |
you order a manifold and you didn't even realize it's like buying a house and
link |
finding a panic room inside that you hadn't counted on.
link |
It's very surprising when you understand that spinners are running around on
link |
Again, perhaps a dumb question,
link |
but we're talking about 14 dimensions and four dimensions.
link |
What is the manifold we're operating under?
link |
So in my case, it's proto space time. It's before,
link |
it's before Einstein can slap rulers and protractors on space time.
link |
What do you mean by that? Sorry to interrupt is space.
link |
Time is the four D manifold.
link |
Space time is a four dimensional manifold with extra structure.
link |
What's the extra structure?
link |
It's called a semi Ramanian or pseudo Ramanian metric.
link |
there is something akin to a four by four symmetric manifold.
link |
Four symmetric matrix from which is equivalent to length and angle.
link |
So when I talk about rulers and protractors,
link |
or I talk about length and angle,
link |
or I talk about Ramanian or pseudo Ramanian or semi Ramanian met manifolds,
link |
I'm usually talking about the same thing.
link |
Can you measure how long something is and what the angle is between two
link |
different rays or vectors?
link |
So that's what Einstein gave us as his arena, his place to play, his his canvas.
link |
So there's a bunch of questions I can ask here.
link |
But like I said, I'm working on this book, Geometric Unity for Idiots.
link |
And and I think what would be really nice as your editor
link |
to have like beautiful, maybe even visualizations that people could try to
link |
play with, try to try to reveal small little beauties about the way you're
link |
thinking about the score.
link |
Well, I usually use the Joe Rogan program for that.
link |
Sometimes I have him doing the Philippine wine glass dance.
link |
I had the hop vibration.
link |
The part of the problem is that most people don't know this language about
link |
spinners, bundles, metrics, gauge fields.
link |
And they're very curious about the theory of everything, but they have no
link |
understanding of even what we know about our own world.
link |
Is it, is it a hopeless pursuit?
link |
So like even gauge theory, right?
link |
Just this, I mean, it seems to be very inaccessible.
link |
Is there some aspect of it that could be made accessible?
link |
I mean, I could go to the board right there and give you a five minute lecture
link |
on gauge theory that would be better than the official lecture on gauge theory.
link |
You would know what gauge theory was.
link |
So it is, it's, it's possible to make it accessible, but nobody does.
link |
Like, in other words, you're going to watch over the next year, lots of
link |
different discussions about quantum entanglement or, you know, the multiverse.
link |
Or, you know, many worlds, are they all equally real?
link |
I mean, yeah, that's okay.
link |
But you're not going to hear anything about the hop vibration except if
link |
it's from me and I hate that.
link |
Why, why can't you be the one?
link |
Well, because I'm going a different path.
link |
I think that we've made a huge mistake, which is we have things we can show
link |
people about the actual models.
link |
We can push out visualizations where they they're not listening by analogy.
link |
They're watching the same thing that we're seeing.
link |
And as I've said to you before, this is like choosing to perform sheet music
link |
that hasn't been performed in a long time.
link |
Or, you know, the experts can't afford orchestras.
link |
So they just trade Beethoven symphonies as sheet music.
link |
And they, Oh, wow, that was beautiful.
link |
But it's like, nobody heard anything.
link |
They just looked at the score.
link |
Well, that's how mathematicians and physicists trade papers and ideas is that
link |
they, they write down the things that represent stuff.
link |
I want to at least close out the thought line that you started, which is how does
link |
the canvas order all of this other stuff into being so I at least want to say some
link |
incomprehensible things about that.
link |
And then we'll, we'll have that much done.
link |
And that just point, does it have to be incomprehensible?
link |
Do you know what the Schrodinger equation is?
link |
Do you know what the Dirac equation is?
link |
What does no mean?
link |
Well, my point is you're going to have some feeling that, you know, what the
link |
Schrodinger equation is, as soon as we get to the Dirac equation, your eyes are
link |
going to get a little bit glazed, right?
link |
So now why is that?
link |
Well, the answer to me is, is that you, you want to ask me about the theory
link |
of everything, but you haven't even digested the theory of everything as
link |
we've had it since 1928 when Dirac came out with his equation.
link |
So for whatever reason, and this isn't a hit on you, you haven't been motivated
link |
enough in all the time that you've been on earth to at least get as far as the
link |
And this was very interesting to me after I gave the talk in Oxford new scientist.
link |
Who had done kind of a hatchet job on me to begin with sent a reporter to come to
link |
the third version of the talk that I gave.
link |
And that person had never heard of the Dirac equation.
link |
So you have a person who's completely professionally, not qualified to ask
link |
these questions wanting to know, well, how does, how does your theory solve
link |
new problems and like, well, in the case of the Dirac equation, well, tell me
link |
I don't know what that is.
link |
So then the point is, okay, I got it.
link |
You're not even caught up minimally to where we are now.
link |
And that's not a knock on you.
link |
Almost nobody even knows where you are.
link |
And that's not a knock on you, almost nobody is.
link |
But then how does it become my job to digest what has been available
link |
for like over 90 years?
link |
Well, to me, the open question is whether what's been available for over 90 years
link |
can be, um, there could be, uh, a blueprint of a journey that one takes to
link |
understand it, not to do that with you.
link |
And I, I, one of the things I think I've been relatively successful at, for
link |
example, you know, when you ask other people what gauge theory is, you get
link |
these very confusing responses and my response is much simpler.
link |
It's, oh, it's a theory of, uh, differentiation where when you calculate
link |
the instantaneous rise over run, you measure the rise, not from a flat
link |
horizontal, but from a custom endogenous reference level.
link |
What do you mean by that?
link |
And then I do this thing with Mount Everest, which is Mount Everest is how
link |
high then they give the height I say above what then they say sea level.
link |
And I say, which sea is that in Nepal?
link |
Like, oh, I guess there isn't a sea cause it's landlocked.
link |
It's like, okay, well, what do you mean by sea level?
link |
Oh, there's this thing called the geoid I'd never heard of.
link |
Oh, that's the reference level.
link |
That's a custom reference level that we imported.
link |
So you, all sorts of people have remembered the exact height of Mount
link |
Everest without ever knowing what it's a height from.
link |
Well, in this case, engage theory, there's a hidden reference level where
link |
you measure the rise in rise over run to give the slope of the line.
link |
What if you have different concepts of what, of where that rise should be
link |
measured from that vary within the theory that are endogenous to the theory.
link |
That's what gauge theory is.
link |
We have a video here, right?
link |
I'm going to use my phone.
link |
If I want to measure my hand and its slope, this is my attempt to
link |
measure it using standard calculus.
link |
In other words, the reference level is apparently flat and I measure the
link |
rise above that phone using my hand.
link |
If I want to use gauge theory, it means I can do this or I can do that, or
link |
I can do this, or I can do this, or I could do what I did from the beginning.
link |
At some level, that's what gauge theory is.
link |
Now that is an act.
link |
No, I've never heard anyone describe it that way.
link |
So while the community may say, well, who is this guy and why does he
link |
have the right to talk in public?
link |
I'm waiting for somebody to jump out of the woodwork and say, you know,
link |
Eric's whole shtick about rulers and protractors, uh, leading to a derivative.
link |
Derivatives are measured as rise over run above reference level.
link |
The reference levels don't fit together.
link |
Like I go through this whole shtick in order to make it accessible.
link |
I've never heard anyone say it.
link |
I'm trying to make Prometheus would like to discuss fire with everybody else.
link |
I'm going to just say one thing to close out the earlier line, which is what I
link |
think we should have continued with.
link |
When you take the naturally occurring spinners, the unadorned spinners, the
link |
naked spinners, not on this 14 dimensional manifold, but on something very closely
link |
tied to it, which I've called the chimeric tangent bundle, that is the object
link |
which stands in for the thing that should have had length and angle on it,
link |
When you take that object and you form spinners on that and you don't adorn them.
link |
So you're still in the single origin story.
link |
You get very large spin oriel objects upstairs on this 14 dimensional world.
link |
Why 14, which is part of the observers.
link |
When you pull that information back from Y 14 down to X four, it miraculously
link |
looks like the adorned spinners, the festoon spinners, the spinners that
link |
we play with in ordinary reality.
link |
In other words, the 14 dimensional world looks like a four dimensional world
link |
plus a 10 dimensional compliment.
link |
So 10 plus four equals 14, that 10 dimensional compliment, which is called
link |
a normal bundle, generates spin properties, internal quantum numbers that look like
link |
the things that give our, our particles personality that make let's say up quarks
link |
and down quarks charged by negative one third or plus two thirds, you know, that
link |
kind of stuff, or whether or not, you know, some quarks feel the weak side.
link |
Quarks feel the weak force and other quarks do not.
link |
So the X four generates Y 14 Y 14 generates something called the chimeric
link |
tangent bundle chimeric tangent bundle generates unadorned spinners.
link |
The unadorned spinners get pulled back from 14 down to four where they
link |
look like adorned spinners.
link |
And we have the right number of them.
link |
You thought you needed three.
link |
You only got two, but then something else that you'd never seen before
link |
broke apart on this journey and it broke into another copy of the thing that you
link |
already have two copies of one piece of that thing broke off.
link |
So now you have two generations plus an imposter third generation, which is, I
link |
don't know why we never talk about this possibility in regular physics.
link |
And then you've got a bunch of stuff that we haven't seen, which has descriptions.
link |
So people always say, does it make any falsifiable predictions?
link |
It says that the matter that you should be seeing, um, next has particular
link |
properties that can be read off like, like a weak ISIS spin, weak hypercharge,
link |
like the responsiveness to the strong force.
link |
The one I can't tell you is what energy scale it would happen at.
link |
So you would, if you can't say if those characteristics can be
link |
detected with the current, but it may be that somebody else can.
link |
I'm not a physicist.
link |
I'm not a quantum field theorist.
link |
I can't, I don't know how you would do that.
link |
The hope for me is that there's some simple explanations for all of it.
link |
Like, should we have a drink?
link |
You're having fun.
link |
No, I'm trying to have fun with you.
link |
You know, there's a bunch of fun things to talk about here.
link |
Anyway, that was how I got what I thought you wanted, which is,
link |
if you think about the fermions as the artists and the bosons as the brushes
link |
and the paint, what I told you is that's how we get the artists.
link |
What are the open questions for you in this?
link |
What were the challenges?
link |
So you're not done.
link |
Well, there's, there's things that I would like to have in better order.
link |
So a lot of people will say, see, if you're going to do this, you have to
link |
say, see, the reason I hesitate on this is I just have a totally different
link |
view than the community.
link |
So for example, I believe that general relativity began in 1913
link |
with Einstein and Grossman.
link |
Now that was the first of like four major papers in this line of thinking.
link |
To most physicists, general relativity happened when Einstein produced, uh,
link |
a divergence free, um, gradient, which turned out to be the gradient of the,
link |
of the so called Hilbert or Einstein Hilbert action.
link |
And from my perspective, that wasn't true.
link |
This is that it began when Einstein said, look, this is about, um, differential
link |
geometry and it's the final answer is going to look like a curvature tensor
link |
on one side and matter and energy on the other side.
link |
And that was enough.
link |
And then he published a wrong version of it where it was the Ricci tensor,
link |
not the Einstein tensor.
link |
Then he corrected the reach, the Ricci tensor to make it into the Einstein
link |
tensor, then he corrected that to add a cosmological constant.
link |
I can't stand that the community thinks in those terms.
link |
There's some things about which, like there's a question about
link |
which contraction do I use?
link |
There's an Einstein contraction.
link |
There's a Ricci contraction.
link |
They both go between the same spaces.
link |
I'm not sure what I should do.
link |
I'm not sure which contraction I should choose.
link |
This is called a shiab operator for ship in a bottle and my stuff.
link |
You have this big platform in many ways that inspires people's
link |
curiosity about physics and mathematics.
link |
Now, and I'm one of those people and, but then you start using a lot of words
link |
that I don't understand and, or like I might know them, but I don't understand.
link |
And what's unclear to me, if I'm supposed to be listening to those words, or if
link |
it's just, if this is one of those technical things that's intended for
link |
a very small community, or if I'm supposed to actually take those words and start,
link |
you know, a multi year study, not, not a serious study, but a, the community
link |
study, but the kind of study when you, you're interested in learning about
link |
machine learning, for example, or any kind of discipline, that's where
link |
I'm a little bit confused.
link |
So you've, you've speak beautifully about ideas.
link |
You often reveal the beauty in math, in geometry, and I'm unclear in what
link |
are the steps I should be taking.
link |
I, I'm curious, how can I explore?
link |
How can I play with something?
link |
How can I play with these ideas?
link |
And, and, and enjoy the beauty of not necessarily understanding the
link |
depth of the theory that you're presenting, but start to share in the
link |
beauty, as opposed to sharing and enjoying the beauty of just the way,
link |
the passion with which you speak, which is in itself fun to listen to, but
link |
also starting to be able to understand some aspects of this theory that I can
link |
enjoy it to, and start to build an intuition, what the heck we're even
link |
talking about, because you're basically saying we need to throw a lot of our
link |
ideas of, of views of the universe out.
link |
And I'm trying to find accessible ways in, not in this conversation.
link |
No, I appreciate that.
link |
So one of the things that I've done is I've, I've picked on one
link |
paragraph from Edward Witten, and I said, this is the paragraph.
link |
If I could only take one paragraph with me, this is the one I'd take.
link |
And it's almost all in prose, not an equation.
link |
And he says, look, this is, this is our knowledge of the
link |
universe at its deepest level.
link |
And he was writing this during the 1980s.
link |
And he has three separate points that constitute our deepest knowledge.
link |
And those three points refer to equations, one to the Einstein field
link |
equation, one to the Dirac equation, and one to the Yang Mills Maxwell equation.
link |
Now, one thing I would do is take a look at that paragraph and say, okay,
link |
what do these three lines mean?
link |
Like it's a finite amount of verbiage.
link |
You can write down every word that you don't know.
link |
And you can say, what do I think done now?
link |
There's a beautiful wall in Stony Brook, New York built by someone
link |
who I know you will interview named Jim Simons and Jim Simons.
link |
He's not the artist, but he's the guy who funded it.
link |
World's greatest hedge fund manager.
link |
And on that wall contain the three equations that Witten
link |
refers to in that paragraph.
link |
And so that is the transmission from the paragraph or graph to the wall.
link |
Now that wall needs an owner's manual, which Roger Penrose has written
link |
called the road to reality.
link |
And let's call that the tome.
link |
So this is the subject of the so called graph wall tome project that is going
link |
on in our discord server and our general group around the portal community, which
link |
is how do you take something that purports in one paragraph to say what the deepest
link |
understanding man has of the universe in which he lives, it's memorialized on a
link |
wall, which nobody knows about, which is an incredibly gorgeous piece of, uh, of
link |
And that was written up in a book, which is, has been written for no man.
link |
Maybe, maybe it's for a woman.
link |
I don't know, but no, no one should be able to read this book because either
link |
you're a professional and you know, a lot of this book, in which case it's kind of
link |
a refresher to see how Roger thinks about these things, or you don't even know that
link |
this book is a self contained, uh, invitation to understanding our deepest
link |
So I would say find yourself in the graph wall tome transmission sequence and join
link |
the graph wall tome project if that's of interest.
link |
Uh, now just to linger on a little longer, what kind of journey do you
link |
see geometric community taking?
link |
I mean, that's the thing is that.
link |
First of all, the professional community has to get very angry and outraged and
link |
they have to work through their feeling that this is nonsense.
link |
This is bullshit or like, no, wait a minute.
link |
This is really cool.
link |
Actually, I need some clarification over here.
link |
So there's going to be some sort of weird coming back together process.
link |
Are you already hearing murmurings of that?
link |
It was very funny.
link |
Officially I've seen very little.
link |
So it's perhaps happening quietly.
link |
You, you often talk about, we need to get off this planet.
link |
Can I try to sneak up on that by asking what in your kind of view is the
link |
difference, the gap between the science of it, the theory and the actual
link |
engineering of building something that leverages the theory to do something?
link |
Like how big is that?
link |
I mean, if you have 10 extra dimensions to play with that are the rules of
link |
protractors of the world themselves, can you gain access to those dimensions?
link |
Do you have a hunch?
link |
I don't want to get ahead of myself because you have to appreciate, I can
link |
have hunches and I can, I can jaw off.
link |
But one of the ways that I'm succeeding in this world is to not bow down to my
link |
professional communities nor to ignore them.
link |
Like I'm actually in the middle of a world where I'm not
link |
going to ignore them, like I'm actually interested in the criticism.
link |
I just want to denature it so that it's not mostly interpersonal and irrelevant.
link |
I believe that they don't want me to speculate and I don't
link |
need to speculate about this.
link |
I can simply say I'm open to the idea that it may have engineering prospects
link |
and it may be a death sentence.
link |
We may find out that there's not enough new here that even if it were right, that
link |
there would be nothing new to do.
link |
Can't tell you that's what you mean by death sentences.
link |
There would not be exciting breakthroughs.
link |
Wouldn't it be terrible if you couldn't, like you can do new things in an
link |
Einsteinian world that you couldn't do in a Newtonian world, right?
link |
You know, like you have twin paradoxes or Lorentz contraction of length or
link |
any one of a number of new cool things happen in relativity theory
link |
that didn't happen for Newton.
link |
What if there wasn't new stuff to do at the next and final level?
link |
Yeah, that would be quite sad.
link |
Let me ask a silly question, but we'll say it with a straight face.
link |
So let me mention Elon Musk.
link |
What are your thoughts about he's more, you're more on the physics theory side
link |
of things, he's more on the physics engineering side of things in terms of
link |
SpaceX efforts, what do you think of his efforts to, uh, get off this planet?
link |
Well, I think he's the other guy who's semi serious about getting off this planet.
link |
I think there are two of us who are semi serious about getting off the planet.
link |
What do you think about his methodology and yours when you look at them?
link |
Don't, and I don't want to be against you because like I was so excited that like
link |
your top video was Ray Kurzweil and then I did your podcast and we had some
link |
chemistry, so it zoomed up and I thought, okay, I'm going to beat Ray Kurzweil.
link |
So just as I'm coming up on Ray Kurzweil, you're like, and now Alex Fridman
link |
special Elon Musk and he blew me out of the water.
link |
So I don't want to be petty about it.
link |
I want to say that I don't, but I am.
link |
But here's the funny part.
link |
Um, he's not taking enough risk.
link |
Like he's trying to get us to Mars.
link |
Imagine that he got us to Mars, the moon, and we'll throw in Titan and nowhere
link |
good enough, the diversification level is too low.
link |
Now there's a compatibility.
link |
First of all, I don't think Elon is serious about Mars.
link |
I think Elon is using Mars as a, as a narrative, as a story, as a dream to
link |
make the moon jealous to make the, uh,
link |
uh, I think he's using it as a story to organize us, to reacquaint ourselves
link |
with our need for space, our need to get off this planet.
link |
It's a concrete thing.
link |
He shown that, um, many people think that he's shown that he's the most
link |
brilliant and capable person on the planet.
link |
I don't think that's what he showed.
link |
I think he showed that the rest of us have forgotten our capabilities.
link |
And so he's like the only guy who has still kept the faith and is like,
link |
what's wrong with you people?
link |
So you think the lesson we should draw from Elon Musk is there's, uh, there's
link |
a capable person within, within a lot of us, Elon makes sense to me in what way
link |
he's doing, what any sensible person should do.
link |
He's trying incredible things and he's partially succeeding, partially failing
link |
to try to solve the obvious problems before, you know, when he comes up with
link |
things like, uh, you know, I got it.
link |
We'll come up with a battery company, but batteries aren't sexy.
link |
So we'll, we'll make a car around it.
link |
It's like, great, you know, or, um, any one of a number of things.
link |
Elon is behaving like a sane person and I view everyone else is insane.
link |
And my feeling is, is that we really have to get off this planet.
link |
We have to get out of this.
link |
We have to get out of the neighborhood.
link |
To linger on a little bit.
link |
Do you think that's a physics problem or an engineering problem?
link |
I think it's a cowardice problem.
link |
I think that we're afraid that we had 400 hitters of the mind, like Einstein
link |
and Dirac and that, that era is done.
link |
And now we're just sort of copy editors.
link |
So it's some of it money, like if we become brave enough to go outside the
link |
solar system, can we afford to financially?
link |
Well, I think that that's not really the issue.
link |
The issue is look what Elon did well, he amassed a lot of money and then he,
link |
you know, he plowed it back in and he spun, spun the wheel and he made more
link |
money and now he's got F you money.
link |
Now the problem is, is that a lot of the people who have F you money are not
link |
people whose middle finger you ever want to see.
link |
I want to see Elon's middle finger.
link |
I want to see what he's doing by that.
link |
Or like when you say, fuck it, I'm going to do the biggest possible.
link |
Do whatever the fuck you want, right?
link |
Fuck anything that gets in his way that he can afford to push out of his way.
link |
And you're saying he's not actually even doing that enough.
link |
No, I'm he's not going, please.
link |
Elon's doing fine with his money.
link |
I just want him to enjoy himself, have the most, you know, Dionysian, but
link |
you're saying Mars is playing it safe.
link |
He doesn't know how to do anything else.
link |
He knows rockets and he might know some physics at a fundamental level.
link |
I guess, okay, just, let me just go right back to how much physics do you really,
link |
how much brilliant breakthrough ideas on the physics side do you
link |
need to get off this planet?
link |
And I don't know whether like in my most optimistic dream, I don't know
link |
whether my stuff gets us out of this.
link |
Like in my most optimistic dream, I don't know whether my stuff gets us off the
link |
planet, but it's hope it's hope that there's a more fundamental theory that
link |
we can access that we don't need.
link |
Um, you know, whose elegance and beauty will suggest that this is probably
link |
the way the universe goes.
link |
Like you have to say this weird thing, which is this, I believe, and this,
link |
I believe is a very dangerous statement, but this, I believe, I believe that my
link |
theory, um, points the way now, Elon might or might not be able to access my
link |
I don't know what he knows, but keep in mind, why are we all so focused on Elon?
link |
It's really weird.
link |
It's kind of creepy too.
link |
Why he's just the person who's just asking the, the obvious questions
link |
and doing whatever he can, but he makes sense to me.
link |
You see Craig Venter makes sense to me.
link |
Jim Watson makes sense to me, but we're focusing on Elon.
link |
Because he's, he's somehow is rare.
link |
Well, that's the weird thing.
link |
Like we've come up with a system that eliminates all Elon from our pipeline
link |
and Elon somehow, uh, snuck through when they weren't quality adjusting
link |
everything, you know?
link |
And this, this idea of, uh, of disc, right?
link |
Distributed idea suppression complex.
link |
Is that what's bringing the Elans of the world down?
link |
You know, it's so funny.
link |
It's like, he's asking Joe Rogan, like, is that a joint, you know, it's like,
link |
well, what, what will happen if I smoke it?
link |
What will happen to the stock price?
link |
What will happen if I scratch myself in public?
link |
What will happen if I say what I think about Thailand or COVID or who knows what?
link |
And everybody's like, don't say that, say this, go do this, go do that.
link |
Well, it's crazy making, it's absolutely crazy making.
link |
And if you think about what we put through people through, um, we, we
link |
need to get people who can use FU money, the FU money they need to insulate
link |
themselves from all of the people who know better, because the, the, my
link |
nightmare is, is that why did we only get one Elon?
link |
What if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of Elans?
link |
And the weird thing is like, this is all that remains you're, you're looking
link |
at like OB one and Yoda, and it's like, this is the only, this is all that's
link |
left after X, uh, order 66 has been executed.
link |
And that's the thing that's really upsetting to me is we used, we
link |
used to have Elon's five deep.
link |
And then we could talk about Elon in the context of his cohort.
link |
But this is like, if you were to see a giraffe in the Arctic with no
link |
trees around, you'd think why the long neck, what a strange sight, you know?
link |
You know, how do we get more Elans?
link |
How do we change these?
link |
So I think the use, so we know MIT and Harvard, so maybe returning to our
link |
previous conversation, my sense is that the Elans of the world are supposed
link |
to come from MIT and Harvard, right?
link |
And how do you change?
link |
Let's think of one that MIT sort of killed.
link |
Have any names in mind?
link |
Aaron Schwartz leaps to my mind.
link |
Are we MIT supposed to shield the Aaron Schwartz's from, I don't know, journal
link |
publishers, or are we supposed to help the journal publishers so that we can
link |
throw 35 year sentences in his face or whatever it is that we did that depressed
link |
So here's my point.
link |
I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz, and if you want to
link |
send Aaron Schwartz to a state where he's looking at 35 years in prison or
link |
something like that, you are my sworn enemy.
link |
You are the traitors, uh, irresponsible, middle brow, pencil pushing green
link |
eyeshade fool that needs to not be in the seat at the, at the presidency of MIT
link |
period, the end, get the fuck out of there and let one of our people sit in that
link |
And the thing that you've articulated is that the people in those chairs are not
link |
the way they are because they're evil or somehow morally compromised is that it's
link |
just the, that's the distributed nature is that there's some kind of aspect of
link |
the system that people who wed themselves to the system, they adapt every instinct.
link |
And the fact is, is that they're not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt.
link |
Let me ask a silly question.
link |
Do you think institutions generally just tend to become that?
link |
We get some of the institutions, we get Caltech.
link |
Here's what we're supposed to have.
link |
We're supposed to have Caltech.
link |
We're supposed to have a read.
link |
We're supposed to have deep springs.
link |
We're supposed to have MIT.
link |
We're supposed to have a part of Harvard.
link |
And when the sharp elbow crowd comes after the shelf, sharp, uh, mind crowd,
link |
we're supposed to break those sharp elbows and say, don't come around here
link |
So what are the weapons that the sharp minds are supposed to use in our modern
link |
So to reclaim MIT, what, what is the, what's the future?
link |
Are you kidding me?
link |
First of all, assume that this is being seen at MIT.
link |
Hey everybody is okay.
link |
Hey everybody, try to remember who you are.
link |
You're the guys who put the police car on top of the great dump.
link |
You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge.
link |
You created a Tetris game in the green building.
link |
Now, what is your problem?
link |
Is your problem they killed one of your own.
link |
You should make their life a living hell.
link |
You should be the ones who keep the mayor memory of Aaron Schwartz alive and all
link |
of those hackers and all of those mutants, you know,
link |
it's like it's either our place or it isn't.
link |
And if we have to throw 12 more pianos off of the
link |
If Harold Edgerton was taking those photographs, you know,
link |
uh, with slow mo back in the forties,
link |
if Noam Chomsky is on your faculty,
link |
what the hell is wrong with you kids?
link |
You are the most creative and insightful people and you can't figure out how to
link |
defend Aaron Schwartz. That's on you guys.
link |
So some of that is giving more power to the young, like you said,
link |
no, it's taking power from taking power from the feeble and the middle
link |
Brown. Yeah. But how do you, what is the mechanism to me?
link |
I don't know. You, you have some nine volt batteries, copper wire.
link |
I, uh, I tend to, do you have a capacitor?
link |
I tend to believe you have to create an alternative and, uh,
link |
make the alternative so much better that it makes MIT obsolete unless
link |
they change. And that's what forces change. So as opposed to somehow,
link |
okay, so use projection mapping, what's projection mapping,
link |
where you take some complicated edifice and you map all of its planes.
link |
And then you actually project some unbelievable graphics,
link |
re skinning a building, let's say at night. That's right. Yeah. Okay.
link |
So you want to do some graffiti art with like basically want to hack the system.
link |
No, I'm saying, look, listen to me. Yeah. We're smarter than they are.
link |
And they, you know what they say? They say things like,
link |
okay, I think we need some geeks. Get me two PhDs.
link |
Right. You treat PhDs like that. That's a bad move.
link |
Because PhDs are capable and we act like our job is to peel
link |
grapes for our betters.
link |
Yeah. That's a strange thing. And I,
link |
I you speak about it very eloquently is how we treat basically
link |
the greatest minds in the world, which is like at their prime,
link |
which is PhD students like that. We pay them nothing.
link |
Uh, I'm done with it. Yeah. Right. We got to take what's ours.
link |
So, so take back MIT, become ungovernable,
link |
become ungovernable. And by the way, when you become ungovernable,
link |
don't do it by throwing food.
link |
Don't do it by pouring salt on the lawn, like a jerk,
link |
do it through brilliance, because what you Caltech and MIT can do,
link |
and maybe Rensselaer Polytechnic or Worcester Polytech, I don't know.
link |
Lehigh. God damn it. What's wrong with you technical people?
link |
You act like you're a servant class.
link |
It's unclear to me how you reclaim it except with brilliance,
link |
like you said. Uh,
link |
but to me that the way you reclaim it with brilliance is to go outside the
link |
Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class.
link |
What are you guys going to do about it? Right.
link |
The super capable people need to flex,
link |
need to be individual. They need to stop giving away all their power to,
link |
you know, a zeitgeist or a community or this or that you're not,
link |
you're not indoor cats. You're outdoor cats. Go be outdoor cats.
link |
Do you think we're going to see this, this kind of one asking me, you know,
link |
before, like what about the world war II generation? Right.
link |
and I'm trying to say is that there's a technical revolt coming here's you want
link |
to talk about it, but I'm trying to lead it. I'm trying to see,
link |
no, you're not trying to lead it. I'm trying to get a blueprint here.
link |
All right, Lex. Yeah.
link |
How angry are you about our country pretending that you and I can't actually do
link |
technical subjects so that they need an army of, uh,
link |
kids coming in from four countries in Asia.
link |
It's not about the four countries in Asia. It's not about those kids.
link |
It's about lying about us that we don't care enough about science and
link |
technology that we're incapable of it as if we don't have Chinese and Russians
link |
and Russians and Koreans and Croatians. Like we've got everybody here.
link |
The only reason you're looking outside is,
link |
is that you want to hire cheap people from the family business because you don't
link |
want to pass the family business on. And you know what?
link |
You didn't really build the family business. It's not yours to decide.
link |
You the boomers and you the silent generation, you did your bit,
link |
but you also fouled a lot of stuff up and you're custodians.
link |
You are caretakers. You were supposed to hand something.
link |
What you did instead was to gorge yourself on cheap foreign labor,
link |
which you then held up as being much more brilliant than your own children,
link |
which was never true.
link |
But I'm trying to understand how we create a better system without anger,
link |
without revolution, not, not,
link |
not by kissing and hugs and, and,
link |
I don't understand within MIT what the mechanism of building a better MIT is.
link |
We're not going to pay Elsevier. Aaron Schwartz was right.
link |
JSTOR is an abomination.
link |
But why, who within MIT, who within institutions is going to do that?
link |
When just like you said,
link |
the people who are running the show are more senior.
link |
I don't know, get Frank Wilczek to speak out.
link |
So you're, it's basically individuals that step up. I mean,
link |
one of the surprising things about Elon is that one person can inspire so
link |
He's got academic freedom. It just comes from money.
link |
I don't agree with that. That you think money. Okay.
link |
So yes, certainly. Sorry.
link |
And testicles. Yes.
link |
I think that testicles are more important than money or guts.
link |
I think I do agree with you.
link |
You speak about this a lot that because the money in academic institutions
link |
has been so constrained that people are misbehaving and horrible.
link |
But I don't think that if we reverse that and give a huge amount of money,
link |
people will all of a sudden behave well. I think it also takes guts.
link |
No, you need to give people security. Security. Yes.
link |
Like you need to know that you have a job on Monday when on
link |
Friday you say, I'm not so sure I really love diversity and inclusion.
link |
And somebody is like, wait, what? You didn't love diversity?
link |
We had a statement on diversity and you wouldn't sign.
link |
Are you against the inclusion part or are you against diverse?
link |
Do you just not like people like you?
link |
Like actually that has nothing to do with anything.
link |
You're making this into something that it isn't.
link |
I don't want to sign your goddamn stupid statement and get out of my lab,
link |
right? Get out of my lab. It all begins from the middle finger.
link |
Get out of my lab. The administrators need to find other
link |
Yeah. Listen, I agree with you and I hope to seek your advice
link |
and wisdom as we change this, because I'd love to see...
link |
I will visit you in prison if that's what you're asking.
link |
I have no... I think prison is great.
link |
You get a lot of reading done and good working out.
link |
Well, let me ask something I brought up before is the Nietzsche quote
link |
of beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
link |
For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
link |
Are you worried that your focus on the flaws in the system
link |
that we've just been talking about has damaged your mind
link |
or the part of your mind that's able to see the beauty in the world
link |
in the system that because you have so sharply been able to see
link |
the flaws in the system, you can no longer step back and appreciate its beauty?
link |
Look, I'm the one who's trying to get the institutions to save themselves
link |
by getting rid of their inhabitants, but leaving the institution
link |
like a neutron bomb that removes the unworkable leadership class,
link |
but leaves the structures.
link |
So the leadership class is really the problem.
link |
The leadership class is the problem.
link |
But the individual, like the professors, the individual scholars...
link |
No, the professors are going to have to go back into training
link |
to remember how to be professors.
link |
Like people are cowards at the moment because if they're not cowards,
link |
they're unemployed.
link |
Yeah, that's one of the disappointing things I've encountered is to me, tenure...
link |
But nobody has tenure now.
link |
Whether they do or not, they certainly don't have the kind of character
link |
and fortitude that I was hoping to see.
link |
But they'd be gone.
link |
See, you're dreaming about the people who used to live at MIT.
link |
You're dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university.
link |
And if you looked at somebody like, you know, Isidore Singer is very old.
link |
I don't know what state he's in, but that guy was absolutely the real deal.
link |
And if you look at Noam Chomsky, tell me that Noam Chomsky has been muzzled.
link |
Now, what I'm trying to get at is you're talking about younger energetic people,
link |
but those people...
link |
Like when I say something like, I'm against...
link |
I'm for inclusion and I'm for diversity, but I'm against diversity and inclusion TM,
link |
like the movement.
link |
Well, I couldn't say that if I was a professor.
link |
Oh my God, he's against our sacred document.
link |
Well, in that kind of a world, do you want to know how many things I don't agree with you on?
link |
Like we could go on for days and days and days, all the nonsense that you've parroted inside of the institution.
link |
Any sane person like has no need for it.
link |
They have no want or desire.
link |
Do you think you have to have some patience for nonsense when many people work together in a system?
link |
How long has string theory gone on for?
link |
And how long have I been patient?
link |
So you're talking about...
link |
There's a limit to patience.
link |
You're talking about like 36 years of modern nonsense and string theory.
link |
So you can do like eight to 10 years, but not more.
link |
I can do 40 minutes.
link |
Well, you've done that over two hours already.
link |
No, but I appreciate it.
link |
But it's been 36 years of nonsense since the anomaly cancellation in string theory.
link |
It's like, what are you talking about about patience?
link |
I mean, Lex, you're not even acting like yourself.
link |
You're trying to stay in the system.
link |
I'm trying to see if perhaps... So my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it,
link |
which you highlight, and the fundamentals of the system are broken.
link |
Because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken, then I just don't see a way for MIT to succeed.
link |
Like, I don't see how young people take over MIT.
link |
I don't see how...
link |
You know, the great part about being at MIT, like when you saw the genius in these pranks,
link |
the heart, the irreverence, it's like, don't...
link |
We were talking about Tom Lehrer the last time.
link |
Tom Lehrer was as naughty as the day is long.
link |
Was he also a genius?
link |
Was he well spoken?
link |
Was he highly cultured?
link |
He was so talented, so intellectual that he could just make fart jokes morning,
link |
Well, in part, the right to make fart jokes, the right to, for example, put a functioning
link |
phone booth that was ringing on top of the great dome at MIT has to do with we are such
link |
bad asses that we can actually do this stuff.
link |
Well, don't tell me about it anymore.
link |
Go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not want to prosecute you.
link |
Break the law in a way that lets us know that you're calling us out on our bullshit, that
link |
you're filled with love, and that our technical talent has not gone to sleep, it's not incapable.
link |
And if the idea is that you're going to dig a moat around the university and fill it with
link |
tiger sharks, that's awesome because I don't know how you're going to do it.
link |
But if you actually manage to do that, I'm not going to prosecute you under a reckless
link |
That's beautifully put.
link |
I hope those, first of all, they'll listen, I hope young people at MIT will take over
link |
in this kind of way.
link |
In the introduction to your podcast episode on Jeffrey Epstein, you give to me a really
link |
moving story, but unfortunately for me, too brief, about your experience with a therapist
link |
and a lasting terror that permeated your mind.
link |
Can you go there, can you tell?
link |
I mean, I appreciate what you're saying.
link |
I said it obliquely, I said enough.
link |
There are bad people who cross our paths and the current vogue is to say, oh, I'm a survivor,
link |
I'm a victim, I can do anything I want.
link |
This is a broken person and I don't know why I was sent to a broken person as a kid.
link |
And to be honest with you, I also felt like in that story, I say that I was able to say
link |
no and this was like the entire weight of authority and he was misusing his position
link |
and I was also able to say no.
link |
What I couldn't say no to was having him re inflicted in my life.
link |
Right, so you were sent back a second time.
link |
I tried to complain about what had happened and I tried to do it in a way that did not
link |
immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself because we don't
link |
have the tools to deal with sexual misbehavior.
link |
We have nuclear weapons, we don't have any way of saying this is probably not a good
link |
place or a role for you at this moment as an authority figure and something needs to
link |
So in general, when we see somebody who is misbehaving in that way, our immediate instinct
link |
is to treat the person as Satan and we understand why.
link |
We don't want our children to be at risk.
link |
Now I personally believe that I fell down on the job and did not call out the Jeffrey
link |
Epstein thing early enough because I was terrified of what Jeffrey Epstein represents and this
link |
recapitulated the old terror trying to tell the world this therapist is out of control.
link |
And when I said that, the world responded by saying, well, you have two appointments
link |
booked and you have to go for the second one.
link |
So I got re inflicted into this office on this person who was now convinced that I was
link |
about to tear down his career and his reputation and might have been on the verge of suicide
link |
But he was very, very angry and he was furious with me that I had breached a sacred confidence
link |
What kind of ripple effects does that have?
link |
Has that had to the rest of your life?
link |
The absurdity and the cruelty of that?
link |
I mean, there's no sense to it.
link |
Well, see, this is the thing people don't really grasp, I think there's an academic
link |
who I got to know many years ago, um, named Jennifer fried, who has a theory of betrayal,
link |
which she calls institutional betrayal.
link |
And her gambit is, is that when you were betrayed by an institution that is sort of like a fiduciary
link |
or a parental obligation to take care of you, that you find yourself in a far different
link |
situation with respect to trauma than if you were betrayed by somebody who's a peer.
link |
And so I think that my, in my situation, um, I kind of repeat a particular dynamic with
link |
I come in not following all the rules, trying to do some things, not trying to do others,
link |
And then I get into a weird relationship with authority.
link |
And so I have more experience with what I would call institutional betrayal.
link |
Now, the funny part about it is that when you don't have masks or PPE in a influenza
link |
like pandemic and you missing ICU beds and ventilators, that is ubiquitous institutional
link |
So I believe that in a weird way, I was very early, the idea of, and this is like the really
link |
hard concept pervasive or otherwise universal institutional betrayal where all of the institutions
link |
you can count on any hospital to not charge you properly for what their services are.
link |
You can count on no pharmaceutical company to produce the drug that will be maximally
link |
beneficial to the people who take it.
link |
You know that your financial professionals are not simply working in your best interest.
link |
And that issue had to do with the way in which growth left our system.
link |
So I think that the weird thing is, is that this first institutional betrayal by a therapist
link |
left me very open to the idea of, okay, well maybe the schools are bad.
link |
Maybe the hospitals are bad.
link |
Maybe the drug companies are bad.
link |
Maybe our food is off.
link |
Maybe our journalists are not serving journalistic ends.
link |
And that was what allowed me to sort of go all the distance and say, huh, I wonder if
link |
our problem is that something is causing all of our sensemaking institutions to be off.
link |
That was the big insight and that tying that to a single ideology.
link |
What if it's just about growth?
link |
They were all built on growth and now we've promoted people who are capable of keeping
link |
quiet that their institutions aren't working.
link |
So we've, the privileged silent aristocracy, the people who can be counted upon, not to
link |
mention a fire when a raging fire is tearing through a building.
link |
But nevertheless, it's how big of a psychological burden is that?
link |
It's very, it's very comforting to be the parental, I mean, I don't know.
link |
I treasure, I mean, we were just talking about MIT.
link |
We can, until I can intellectualize and agree with everything you're saying, but there's
link |
a comfort, a warm blanket of being within the institution and up until Aaron Schwartz,
link |
let's say, in other words, now, if I look at the provost and the president as mommy
link |
and daddy, you did what to my big brother?
link |
You did what to our family?
link |
You sold us out in which way?
link |
What secrets left for China?
link |
You hired which workforce?
link |
You did what to my wages?
link |
You took this portion of my grant for what purpose?
link |
You just stole my retirement through a fringe rate.
link |
But can you still, I mean, the thing is about this view you have is it often turns out to
link |
Well, this is the thing.
link |
But let me just, in this silly, hopeful thing, do you still have hope in institutions?
link |
Can you within your, psychologically, I'm referring not intellectually, because you
link |
have to carry this burden, can you still have a hope within you?
link |
When you sit at home alone and as opposed to seeing the darkness within these institutions,
link |
Well, but this is the thing.
link |
I want to confront, not for the purpose of a dust up.
link |
I believe, for example, if you've heard episode 19, that the best outcome is for Carol Greider
link |
to come forward, as we discussed in episode 19, and say, you know what, I screwed up.
link |
He did suggest the experiment.
link |
I didn't understand that it was his theory that was producing it.
link |
I was slow to grasp it.
link |
And I don't want to pay for this bad choice on my part, let's say.
link |
For the rest of my career, I want to own up, and I want to help make sure that we do what's
link |
right with what's left.
link |
And that's one little case within the institution that you would like to see made.
link |
I would like to see MIT very clearly come out and say, Margot O'Toole was right when
link |
she said David Baltimore's lab here produced some stuff that was not reproducible with
link |
Teresa Imanishi Kari's research.
link |
I want to see the courageous people.
link |
I would like to see the Aaron Schwartz wing of the computer science department.
link |
Yeah, wouldn't, no, let's think about it.
link |
Wouldn't that be great if we said, you know, an injustice was done and we're going to write
link |
that wrong just as if this was Alan Turing?
link |
Which I don't think they've righted that wrong.
link |
Well then let's have the Turing Schwartz wing.
link |
They're starting a new college of computing.
link |
It wouldn't be wonderful to call it the Turing Schwartz wing.
link |
I would like to have the Madame Wu wing of the physics department.
link |
And I'd love to have the Emmy Nerder statue in front of the math department.
link |
I mean, like you want to get excited about actual diversity and inclusion?
link |
Well, let's go with our absolute best people who never got theirs because there is structural
link |
bigotry, you know?
link |
But if we don't actually start celebrating the beautiful stuff that we're capable of
link |
when we're handed heroes and we fumble them into the trash, what the hell?
link |
I mean, Lex, this is such nonsense.
link |
We just pulling our head out.
link |
You know, on everyone's cecum should be tattooed, if you can read this, you're too close.
link |
Beautifully put and I'm a dreamer just like you.
link |
So I don't see as much of the darkness genetically or due to my life experience, but I do share
link |
From my teeth, the institution that we care a lot about.
link |
And a Harvard institution I don't give a damn about, but you do.
link |
So I love Harvard.
link |
I love Harvard, but Harvard and I have a very difficult relationship.
link |
And part of what, you know, when you love a family that isn't working, I don't want
link |
I didn't bring up the name of the president of MIT during the Aaron Schwartz period.
link |
It's not vengeance.
link |
I want the rot cleared out.
link |
I don't need to go after human beings.
link |
Just like you said with the, with the disc formulation, the individual human beings aren't
link |
don't necessarily carry them.
link |
It's those chairs that are so powerful that in which they sit.
link |
It's the chairs, not the humans, not the humans without naming names.
link |
Can you tell the story of your struggle during your time at Harvard, maybe in a way that
link |
tells the bigger story of the struggle of young bright minds that are trying to come
link |
up with big, bold ideas within the institutions that we're talking about?
link |
I mean, in part, uh, it starts with, uh, coffee with, uh, a couple, uh, of Croatians in the
link |
math department at MIT.
link |
And, um, we used to talk about, um, music and dance and math and physics and love and
link |
all this kind of stuff as Eastern Europeans, uh, love to, and I ate it up and my friend
link |
Gordon, uh, who was, uh, an instructor in the MIT math department when I was a graduate
link |
student at Harvard said to me, I'm probably gonna do a bad version of her accent, but
link |
It, um, will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar?
link |
And I said, w what secret seminar, Eric, don't joke.
link |
I said, I'm not used to this style of humor.
link |
Then she's Eric, the secret seminar that your advisor is running.
link |
I said, what are you talking about?
link |
Ha ha ha, uh, you know, your advisor is running a secret seminar on this aspect.
link |
I think it was like the churn Simon's invariant.
link |
I'm not sure what the topic was again, but she gave me the room number and the time and
link |
she was like not cracking a smile.
link |
I've never known her to make this kind of a joke.
link |
And I thought this was crazy and I was trying to have an advisor.
link |
I didn't want an advisor, but people said you have to have one.
link |
So I took one and I went to this room at like 15 minutes early and there was not a soul
link |
It was outside of the math department and it was still in the same building, the science
link |
center at Harvard.
link |
And I sat there and I let five minutes go by, I let seven minutes go by, 10 minutes
link |
I thought, okay, so this was all an elaborate joke.
link |
And then like three minutes to the hour, this graduate student walks in and like sees me
link |
and does a double take.
link |
And then I start to see the professors in geometry and topology start to file in and
link |
everybody's like very disconcerted that I'm in this room.
link |
And finally the person who was supposed to be my advisor walks in to the seminar and
link |
sees me and goes white as a ghost.
link |
And I realized that the secret seminar is true, that the department is conducting a
link |
secret seminar on the exact topic that I'm interested in, not telling me about it.
link |
And that these are the reindeer games that the Rudolph's of the department are not invited
link |
And so then I realized, okay, I did not understand it.
link |
There's a parallel department.
link |
And that became the beginning of an incredible odyssey in which I came to understand that
link |
the game that I had been sold about publication, about blind refereeing, about openness and
link |
scientific transmission of information was all a lie.
link |
I came to understand that at the very top, there's a second system that's about closed
link |
meetings and private communications and agreements about citation and publication that the rest
link |
of us don't understand.
link |
And that in large measure, that is the thing that I won't submit to.
link |
And so when you ask me questions like, well, why wouldn't you feel good about, you know,
link |
talking to your critics or why wouldn't you feel the answer is, oh, you don't know.
link |
Like if you stay in a nice hotel, you don't realize that there is an entire second structure
link |
inside of that hotel where like there's usually a worker's cafe in a resort complex that isn't
link |
available to the people who are staying in the hotel.
link |
And then there are private hallways inside the same hotel that are parallel structures.
link |
So that's what I found, which was in essence, just the way you can stay hotels your whole
link |
life and not realize that inside of every hotel is a second structure that you're not
link |
supposed to see as the guest.
link |
There is a second structure inside of academics that behaves totally differently with respect
link |
to how people get dinged, how people get their grants taken away, how this person comes to
link |
have that thing named after them.
link |
And by pretending that we're not running a parallel structure, um, I have no patience
link |
So I got a chance to see how the game, how hard ball is really played at Harvard.
link |
And I'm now eager to play hard ball back with the same people who played hard ball with
link |
Let me ask two questions on this.
link |
So one, do you think it's possible, so I call those people assholes, that's the technical
link |
Do you think it's possible that that's just not the entire system, but a part of the system?
link |
Sort of that there's, you can navigate, you can swim in the waters and find the groups
link |
of people who do aspire to the openness.
link |
The guy who rescued my phd was one of the people who filed in to the secret seminar.
link |
But are there people outside of this, right?
link |
Well, yes, I was, it was a bad, no, but I'm trying to make this point, which is this isn't
link |
my failure to correctly map these people.
link |
You, you have a simplification that isn't going to work.
link |
If I asked what was the wrong term, I would say lacking of character and what would you
link |
have had these people do?
link |
Why did they do this?
link |
Why have a secret seminar?
link |
I don't understand the exact dynamics of a secret seminar, but I think the right thing
link |
to do is to, I mean, to see individuals like you, there might be a reason to have a secret
link |
seminar, but they should detect that an individual like you, a brilliant mind who's thinking
link |
about certain ideas could be damaged by this.
link |
I don't think that they see it that way.
link |
The idea is we're going to sneak food to the children we want to survive.
link |
So that that's highly problematic and there should be people within that room.
link |
I'm trying to say this is the thing, the ball that can't is thrown, but won't be caught.
link |
The problem is they know that most of their children won't survive and they can't say
link |
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
You mean that the fact that the whole system is underfunded, that they naturally have to
link |
They live in a world which reached steady state at some level, let's say, you know,
link |
in the early seventies and in that world before that time you have a professor like Norman
link |
Steenrod and you'd have 20 children that is graduate students and all of them would go
link |
on to be professors and all of them would want to have 20 children, right?
link |
So you start like taking higher and higher powers of 20 and you see that the system could
link |
not, it's not just about money, the system couldn't survive.
link |
So the way it's supposed to work now is that we should shut down the vast majority of PhD
link |
programs and we should let the small number of truly top places populate, um, mostly teaching
link |
and research departments that aren't PhD producing.
link |
We don't want to do that because we use PhD students as a labor force.
link |
So the whole thing has to do with growth, resources, dishonesty, and in that world you
link |
see all of these adaptations to a ruthless world where the key question is where are
link |
we going to bury this huge number of bodies of people who don't work out?
link |
So my problem was I wasn't interested in dying.
link |
So you clearly highlight that there's aspects of the system that are broken, but as an individual,
link |
is your role to, uh, exit the system or just acknowledge that it's a game and win it?
link |
My role is to survive and thrive in the public eye.
link |
In other words, when you have an escapee of the system, like yourself, such as, and that
link |
person says, you know, I wasn't exactly finished, let me show you a bunch of stuff.
link |
Let me show you that, uh, the theory of telomeres never got reported properly.
link |
Let me show you that all of, uh, marginal economics, uh, is supposed to be redone with
link |
a different version of the differential calculus.
link |
Let me show you that you didn't understand the self dual Yang Mills equations correctly
link |
in topology and physics because they're in fact, uh, much more broadly found and it's
link |
only the mutations that happen in special dimensions.
link |
There are lots of things to say, but this particular group of people, like if you just
link |
take, where are all the gen X and millennial university presidents?
link |
They're all, they're all in a holding pattern.
link |
Now where, why in this story, you know, was it of telomeres?
link |
Was it an older professor and a younger graduate student?
link |
It's this issue of what would be called interference competition.
link |
So for example, orcas try to drown minke whales by covering their blow holes so that they
link |
suffocate because the needed resource is air.
link |
Well, what do the universities do?
link |
They try to make sure that you can't be viable, that you need them, that you need their grants.
link |
You need to be, uh, zinged with overhead charges or fringe rates or all of the games that the
link |
locals love to play.
link |
Well, my point is, okay, what's the cost of this?
link |
How many people died as a result of these interference competition games?
link |
You know, when you take somebody like Douglas Prasher who did green fluorescent protein
link |
and he drives a shuttle bus, right?
link |
Cause he, his grant runs out and he has to give away all of his research and all of that
link |
research gets a Nobel prize and he gets to drive a shuttle bus for $35,000 a year.
link |
What do you mean by died?
link |
You mean their career, their dreams, their passions?
link |
Yeah, the whole, as an academic, Doug Prasher was dead for a long period of time.
link |
So as a, as a person who's escaped the system, can't you at this, cause you also have in
link |
your mind a powerful theory that may turn out to be a useful, maybe not.
link |
So can't you also play the game enough?
link |
Like with the children, so like publish and, but also if you told me that this would work,
link |
really what I want to do, you see, is I would love to revolutionize a field with an H index
link |
of zero, like we have these proxies that count how many papers you've written, how cited
link |
are the papers you've written.
link |
All of this is nonsense.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
What do you mean by field with an H index as your, so a totally new field.
link |
H index is count somehow.
link |
How many papers have you gotten that get so many citations?
link |
Let's say H index undefined, like for example, um, I don't have an advisor for my PhD, but
link |
I have to have an advisor as far as something called the math genealogy project that tracks
link |
who advised who, who advised whom down the line.
link |
So I am my own advisor, which sets up a loop, right?
link |
How many students do I have?
link |
An infinite number.
link |
Um, your descendants, they don't want to have that story.
link |
So I have to be, I have to have formal advisor, Raul bought, and my Wikipedia entry, for example,
link |
says that I was advised by Raul bought, which is not true.
link |
So you get fit into a system that says, well, we have to know what your H index is.
link |
We have to know, um, you know, where are you a professor?
link |
If you want to apply for a grant, it makes all of these assumptions.
link |
What I'm trying to do is in part to show all of this is nonsense.
link |
This is proxy BS that came up in the institutional setting.
link |
And right now it's important for those of us who are still vital, like Elon, it would
link |
be great to have Elon as a professor of physics and engineering.
link |
It seems ridiculous to say, but just as a shot, just as a shot in the arm.
link |
You know, like it'd be great to have Elon at Caltech even one day a week, one day a
link |
Well, why can't we be in there?
link |
It's the same reason.
link |
Well, why can't you be on the view?
link |
Why can't you be on bill Martin?
link |
We need to know what you're going to do before we take you on the show on the show.
link |
Well, I don't want to tell you what I'm going to do.
link |
Do you think you need to be able to dance the dance a little bit?
link |
I can dance the dance fun to be on the view.
link |
So you can, yeah, you do.
link |
You're not, I can do that.
link |
Here's where the place that it goes south is there like a set of questions that get
link |
you into this more adversarial stuff.
link |
And you've in fact asked some of those more adversarial questions, the setting, and they're
link |
not things that are necessarily aggressive, but they're things that are making assumptions.
link |
So when you make a, I have a question is like, you know, Lex, are you avoiding your critics?
link |
You know, it's just like, okay, well why did you?
link |
You frame that that way.
link |
Or the next question would be like, um, do you think that you should have a special exemption
link |
and that you should have the right to break rules and everyone else should have to follow
link |
Like that question I find innervating.
link |
It doesn't really come out of anything meaningful.
link |
It's just like we feel we're supposed to ask that of the other person to show that we're
link |
not captured by their madness.
link |
That's not the real question you want to ask me.
link |
If you want to get really excited about this, you want to ask, do you think this thing is
link |
Do you think that it's going to be immediately seen to be right?
link |
I think it's going to, it's going to have an interesting fight and it's going to have
link |
an interesting evolution and well, what do you hope to do with it in nonphysical terms?
link |
Gosh, I hope it revolutionizes our relationship of well with people outside of the institutional
link |
framework and it re inflicts us into the institutional framework where we can do the most good to
link |
bring the institutions back to health.
link |
You know, it's like these are positive, uplifting questions and if you had Frank will check,
link |
you wouldn't say, Frank, let's be honest, you have done very little with your life after
link |
the original, a huge show that you used to break onto the physics scene.
link |
Like we weirdly ask people different questions based upon how they sit down.
link |
That's very strange, right?
link |
But you have to understand that.
link |
So here's the thing.
link |
I get these days, a large number of emails from people with the equivalent of a theory
link |
of everything for AGI and I use my own radar, BS radar to detect unfairly, perhaps whether
link |
they're full of shit or not, because I love where you're going with this, by the way.
link |
My concern I often think about is there's elements of brilliance in what people write
link |
to me and I'm trying to right now, as you made it clear, the kind of judgments and assumptions
link |
we make, how am I supposed to deal with you who are not an outsider of the system and
link |
think about what you're doing because my radar is saying you're not full of shit.
link |
But I'm also not completely outside of the system.
link |
You've danced beautifully.
link |
You've actually got all the credibility that you're supposed to get, all the nice little
link |
stamps of approval, not all, but a large enough amount.
link |
I mean, it's hard to put into words exactly why you sound, whether your theory turns out
link |
to be good or not, you sound like a special human being.
link |
I appreciate that and thank you in a good way.
link |
So but what am I supposed to do with that flood of emails from AGI?
link |
Why do I sound different?
link |
And I would like to systemize that.
link |
Look, you know, when you're talking to people, you very quickly can surmise, like, am I claiming
link |
to be a physicist?
link |
No, I say it every turn.
link |
I'm not a physicist, right?
link |
When I say to you, when you say something about bundles, you say, well, can you explain
link |
You know, I'm pushing around on this area, that lever over there.
link |
I'm trying to find something that we can play with and engage.
link |
And you know, another thing is that I'll say something at scale.
link |
So if I was saying completely wrong things about bundles on the Joe Rogan program, you
link |
don't think that we wouldn't hear a crushing chorus.
link |
And you know, same thing with geometric unity.
link |
So I put up this video from this Oxford lecture.
link |
I understand that it's not a standard lecture, but you haven't heard, you know, the most
link |
brilliant people in the field say, well, this is obviously nonsense.
link |
They don't know what to make of it.
link |
And they're going to hide behind, well, he hasn't said enough details.
link |
Where's the paper?
link |
Where's the paper?
link |
I've seen the criticism.
link |
I've gotten the same kind of criticism.
link |
I've published a few things and like, especially stuff related to Tesla that we did studies
link |
on Tesla vehicles and the kind of criticism I've gotten, which showed that they're completely.
link |
Like the guy who had Elon Musk on his program twice is going to give us an accurate assessment.
link |
It's just very low level.
link |
Like without actually ever addressing the content.
link |
You know, Lex, I think that in part you're trying to solve a puzzle that isn't really
link |
I think, you know, that I'm sincere.
link |
You don't know whether the theory is going to work or not.
link |
And you know that it's not coming out of somebody who's coming out of left field, like the story
link |
There's enough that's new and creative and different in other aspects where you can check
link |
me that your real concern is, are you really telling me that when you start breaking the
link |
rules, you see the system for what it is and it's become really vicious and aggressive.
link |
And the answer is yes, and I had to break the rules in part because of learning issues
link |
because I came into this field, you know, with a totally different set of attributes.
link |
My profile just doesn't look like anybody else's remotely, but as a result, what that
link |
did is it showed me what is the system true to its own ideals or does it just follow these
link |
weird procedures and then when it, when you take it off the rails, it behaves terribly.
link |
And that's really what my story I think does is it just says, well, he completely takes
link |
the system into new territory where it's not expecting to have to deal with somebody with
link |
these confusing sets of attributes.
link |
And I think what he's telling us is he believes it behaves terribly.
link |
Now, if you take somebody with perfect standardized tests and you know, a winner of math competitions
link |
and you put them in a PhD program, they're probably going to be okay.
link |
I'm not saying that the system, um, you know, breaks down for any everybody under all circumstances.
link |
I'm saying when you present the system with a novel situation at the moment, it will almost
link |
certainly break down with probability approaching 100%.
link |
But to me, the painful and the tragic thing is it, uh, sorry to bring out my motherly
link |
instinct, but it feels like it's too much.
link |
It could be too much of a burden to exist outside the system, maybe, but psychologically,
link |
first of all, I've got a podcast that I kind of like and I've got amazing friends.
link |
I have a life which has more interesting people passing through it than I know what to do
link |
And they haven't managed to kill me off yet.
link |
So, so far, so good.
link |
Speaking of which you host an amazing podcast that we've mentioned several times, but should
link |
mention over and over the portal, uh, where you somehow manage every single conversation
link |
You go, I mean, not just the guests, but just the places you take them, uh, the, the kind
link |
of ways they become challenging and how you recover from that.
link |
I mean, it's, uh, there's just, it's full of genuine human moments.
link |
So I really appreciate what you're, it's a fun, fun podcast to listen to.
link |
Uh, let me ask some silly questions about it.
link |
What have you learned about conversation about human to human conversation?
link |
Well, I have a problem that I haven't solved on the portal, which is that in general, when
link |
I ask people questions, they usually find their deeply grooved answers and I'm not so
link |
interested in all of the deeply grooved answers.
link |
And so there's a complaint, which I'm very sympathetic to actually that I talk over people
link |
that I won't sit still for the answer.
link |
And I think that that's weirdly sort of correct.
link |
It's not that I'm not interested in hearing other voices.
link |
That I'm not interested in hearing the same voice on my program that I could have gotten
link |
on somebody else's.
link |
And I haven't solved that well.
link |
So I've learned that I need a new conversational technique where I can keep somebody from finding
link |
their comfortable place and yet not be the voice talking over that person.
link |
I can sense like your conversation with Brett, I can sense you detect that the line he's
link |
going down, you know how it's going to end and you think it's a useless line, so you'll
link |
just stop it right there and you take them into the direction that you think it should
link |
But that requires interruption.
link |
Well, and it does so far.
link |
I haven't found a better way.
link |
I'm looking for a better way.
link |
It's not like I don't hear the problem.
link |
I do hear the problem.
link |
I haven't solved the problem.
link |
And you know, on the, on the bread episode, um, I was insufferable.
link |
It was very difficult to listen to.
link |
It was so overbearing.
link |
But on the other hand, I was right.
link |
You know, it's like funny.
link |
You keep saying that, but I didn't find it maybe because I heard brothers, like I heard
link |
It was pretty bad.
link |
I didn't think it was bad.
link |
Well, a lot of people found it interesting.
link |
And I think it also has to do with the fact that this has become a frequent experience.
link |
I have several shows where somebody who I very much admire and think of as courageous,
link |
um, you know, I'm talking with them, maybe we're friends and they sit down on the show
link |
and they immediately become this fake person.
link |
Like two seconds in there, they're sort of saying, well, I don't want to be too critical
link |
I don't want to name any names.
link |
I wanted this story.
link |
He was like, okay, I'm going to put my listeners through three hours of you being sweetness
link |
Like at least give me some reality and then we can decide to shelve the show and never
link |
let it hear, uh, you know, the, the, the call of freedom in the, in the bigger world.
link |
But I've seen you break out of that a few times.
link |
I've seen you to be successful that, uh, I forgot to guess, but she was dressed with,
link |
um, um, you were at the end of the episode, you had an argument about Brett.
link |
She was one of the philosophers for at the university of Chicago.
link |
You've continuously broken out of her.
link |
Uh, you guys went, you know, uh, I didn't even seem pretty genuine.
link |
I'm completely ethically opposed to what she's ethically for.
link |
Well, she was great.
link |
And she wasn't like that.
link |
You're both going hard.
link |
And she knows that I care about her.
link |
So that was awesome.
link |
But you're saying that some people are difficult to break out.
link |
Well, it's just that, you know, she was bringing the courage of her convictions.
link |
She was sort of defending the system and I thought, wow, that's a pretty indefensible
link |
system that you're doing.
link |
That's great though.
link |
I mean, it made for an awesome, it's very informative for the world.
link |
I just can't stand the idea that somebody says, well, we don't care who gets paid or
link |
who gets the credit as long as we get the goodies.
link |
Cause that seems like insane.
link |
Have you ever been afraid leading into a conversation?
link |
By the way, I mean, I know I'm just a fan taking requests, but I started, I started
link |
the beginning in Russian and in fact I used one word incorrectly.
link |
You know, it was, it was pretty good.
link |
It's pretty good Russian.
link |
What was terrible is I think he complimented you.
link |
Did he compliment you or was that me?
link |
Did he compliment you on your Russian?
link |
Well, he said almost perfect Russian.
link |
Like he was full of shit.
link |
That was not great Russian, but that was not great Russian.
link |
That was, you tried hard, which is what matters.
link |
That is so insulting.
link |
But I do hope you continue.
link |
It felt like, I don't know how long it went.
link |
It might've been like a two hour conversation, but it felt, I hope it continues.
link |
Like I feel like you have many conversations with Gary.
link |
I would love to hear.
link |
There's certain conversations I would just love to hear a long, much longer.
link |
He's coming from a very, it's this issue about needing to overpower people in a very dangerous
link |
And so Gary has that need.
link |
He wasn't, he was interrupting you.
link |
It was an interesting dynamic.
link |
It was a, it was an interesting dynamic.
link |
Two Weinsteins going at you.
link |
I mean, two powerhouse egos, brilliant.
link |
No, don't say egos, minds, spirits.
link |
You don't have an ego.
link |
You're the most humble person I know.
link |
No, that's a complete lie.
link |
Do you think about your own mortality, death?
link |
Well, I released a theory during something that can kill older people.
link |
Oh, is there a little bit of a parallel there?
link |
I don't want it to die with me.
link |
What do you hope your legacy is?
link |
Oh, I hope my legacy is accurate.
link |
I'd like to write on my accomplishments rather than how my community decided to ding me while
link |
That would be great.
link |
What about if it was significantly exaggerated?
link |
You want it to be accurate.
link |
I've got some pretty terrific stuff and whether it works out or doesn't that I would like
link |
it to reflect what I actually was.
link |
I'll settle for accurate.
link |
What would you say, what is the greatest element of a Eric Weinstein accomplishment in life
link |
in terms of being accurate?
link |
What are you most proud of?
link |
The idea that we were stalled out in the hardest field at the most difficult juncture and that
link |
I didn't listen to that voice ever that said, stop, you're hurting yourself.
link |
You're hurting your family.
link |
You're hurting everybody.
link |
You're embarrassing yourself.
link |
You're screwing up.
link |
You can't do this.
link |
Turn back, save yourself.
link |
That voice, I didn't ultimately listen to it and it was going for 35, 37 years.
link |
And I hope you never listen to that voice.
link |
That's why you're an inspiration.
link |
I appreciate that.
link |
I'm just infinitely honored that you would spend time with me.
link |
You've been a mentor to me, almost a friend.
link |
I can't imagine a better person to talk to in this world.
link |
So thank you so much for talking to me.
link |
I can't wait till we do it again.
link |
Lex, thanks for sticking with me and thanks for being the most singular guy in the podcasting
link |
In terms of all of my interviews, I would say that the last one I did with you, many
link |
people feel was my best and it was a nonconventional one.
link |
So whatever it is that you're bringing to the game, I think everyone's noticing and
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein.
link |
And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
link |
Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast.
link |
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
link |
subscribe on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Eric Weinstein's first appearance
link |
Everything is great about war, except all the destruction.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.