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Eric 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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this crisis, I'm sending love your way.
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Stay strong.
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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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Sure.
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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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We're not ready.
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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 not there.
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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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It's tragedy.
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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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Uh, in orbit.
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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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Sure.
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It's suffering.
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Well, and how that might arise itself could be not quiet too.
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I mean, right.
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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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Sure.
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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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Here's the deal.
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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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Absolutely.
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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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Yes.
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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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Yeah.
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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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All right.
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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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I'm sorry.
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When you were on Oprah, I didn't make, I didn't get the invite.
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Sorry.
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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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Yeah.
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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.
link |
00:18:32.840
Well, who has the bigger platform, the portal or Bill Maher's program or the
link |
00:18:37.880
view, Bill Maher and the view in terms of viewership or in terms of what's
link |
00:18:43.120
the metric of size?
link |
00:18:44.160
Well, first of all, the key thing is, um, take, take a newspaper and even
link |
00:18:50.160
imagine that it's completely fake.
link |
00:18:52.440
Okay.
link |
00:18:53.160
And then there's very little in the way of circulation.
link |
00:18:55.600
Yet imagine that it's an a hundred year old paper and that it's still part of
link |
00:18:59.920
this game, this internal game of media.
link |
00:19:03.520
The key point is, is that those sources that have that kind of, um, mark of
link |
00:19:10.120
respectability to the institutional structures matter in a way that even if
link |
00:19:16.680
I say something on a very large platform that makes a lot of sense, if it's
link |
00:19:20.600
outside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative or gin, I'm
link |
00:19:24.600
sorry, institutional narrative or gin, it sort of doesn't matter to the
link |
00:19:29.160
institutions. So the game is if it happens outside of the club, we can
link |
00:19:34.680
pretend that it never happened.
link |
00:19:37.120
How can you get the credibility and the authority from outside the, the
link |
00:19:41.760
gated institutional narrative?
link |
00:19:43.920
Well, first of all, you and I both share, um, institutional credibility coming
link |
00:19:52.560
from organizations. So you, we were both at MIT, were you at Harvard at any
link |
00:19:57.600
point? Nope. Okay.
link |
00:19:59.520
Well, I lived in Harvard square.
link |
00:20:02.160
So did I, but you know, at some level, the issue isn't whether you have
link |
00:20:07.600
credentials in that sense.
link |
00:20:09.880
The key question is, can you be trusted to file a flight plan and not deviate
link |
00:20:14.400
from that flight plan when you are in an interview situation, will you stick to
link |
00:20:19.400
the talking points?
link |
00:20:20.280
Not, and that's why you're not going to be allowed in the general
link |
00:20:25.640
conversation, which amplifies these sentiments, but I'm still trying to, um,
link |
00:20:30.520
so your, your point, it would be, is that we're, let's say both.
link |
00:20:33.600
So you've done how many Joe Rogan for I've done for two, right?
link |
00:20:37.720
So both of us are somewhat frequent guests. The show is huge.
link |
00:20:40.880
You know, the power as well as I do, and people are going to watch this
link |
00:20:44.800
conversation. A huge number watched our last one, by the way, I want to thank
link |
00:20:48.880
you for that one. That was a terrific, terrific conversation.
link |
00:20:51.560
Really did change my life. Like you're brilliant interviewer. So thank you.
link |
00:20:56.560
Thank you. That was that you changed my life too.
link |
00:21:00.520
That you gave me a chance. So I was so glad I did that one.
link |
00:21:04.640
What I would say is, is that we keep mistaking how big the audience is for
link |
00:21:08.720
whether or not you have the kiss and the kiss is a different thing.
link |
00:21:12.120
Yes. Yeah. Well, it doesn't, it's not an acronym yet. Okay. Um,
link |
00:21:16.120
it's uh, but thank you for asking. It's a question of,
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00:21:20.960
are you part of the inter interoperable institution friendly discussion?
link |
00:21:25.960
And that's the discussion which we ultimately have to break into.
link |
00:21:29.520
But that's what I'm trying to get at is how do we, how do you,
link |
00:21:32.600
how does Eric Weinstein become the president of the United States?
link |
00:21:36.360
I shouldn't become the president of the United States. Not interested.
link |
00:21:39.160
Thank you very much for asking. Okay.
link |
00:21:40.640
Get into a leadership position where I guess I don't know what that means,
link |
00:21:45.280
but where you can inspire millions of people to, uh,
link |
00:21:50.200
the inspire the sense of community, inspire the,
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00:21:54.960
the kind of actions required to overcome hardship,
link |
00:21:57.760
the kind of hardship that we may be experiencing to inspire people,
link |
00:22:01.880
to work hard and face the difficult,
link |
00:22:05.280
hard facts of the realities we're living through all those kinds of things that
link |
00:22:09.080
you're talking about. That leader, you know,
link |
00:22:13.080
can that leader emerge from the current institutions or
link |
00:22:18.480
alternatively, can it also emerge from the outside?
link |
00:22:21.840
I guess that's what I was asking.
link |
00:22:22.920
So my belief is,
link |
00:22:23.840
is that this is the last hurrah for the elderly centrist kleptocrats.
link |
00:22:31.760
Can you define each of those terms? Okay. Elderly.
link |
00:22:36.200
I mean people who were born at least a year before I was,
link |
00:22:40.240
that's a joke. You can laugh. Uh, no,
link |
00:22:43.800
because I'm born at the cusp of the gen X boomer divide. Um,
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00:22:49.160
centrist they're pretending, you know,
link |
00:22:51.560
there are two parties, Democrat and Republican party in the United States.
link |
00:22:54.920
I think it's easier to think of the mainstream of both of them as part of a,
link |
00:22:58.560
an aggregate party that I sometimes call the looting party,
link |
00:23:01.760
which gets us to kleptocracy, which is ruled by thieves.
link |
00:23:05.880
And the great temptation has been to treat the U S like a trough.
link |
00:23:09.600
And you just have to get yours because it's not like we're doing anything
link |
00:23:12.280
productive.
link |
00:23:13.320
So everybody's sort of looting the family mansion and somebody stole the silver
link |
00:23:17.480
and somebody is cutting the pictures out of the frames and you know,
link |
00:23:20.840
roughly speaking, we're watching our elders, uh,
link |
00:23:25.120
we'll live it up in a way that doesn't make sense to the rest of us.
link |
00:23:28.840
Okay. So if it's the last hurrah,
link |
00:23:32.320
this is the time for leaders to step up.
link |
00:23:35.040
We're not ready yet. We're not ready.
link |
00:23:36.920
I just disagree with that. I call, I call out, you know,
link |
00:23:40.600
the head of the CDC should resign, should resign.
link |
00:23:45.680
The surgeon general should resign. Trump should resign. Pelosi should resign.
link |
00:23:49.920
De Blasio should resign. I understand that. So that's why. So we'll wait.
link |
00:23:55.240
No, but that's not how revolutions work. You don't wait for people to resign.
link |
00:24:00.120
You, uh, step up and inspire the alternative.
link |
00:24:03.880
Do you remember the Russian revolution of 1907? It's before my time,
link |
00:24:09.800
but there wasn't a Russian revolution of 1907.
link |
00:24:12.360
So you're thinking we're in 1907. I'm saying we're too early.
link |
00:24:16.040
But we got this, you know, Spanish flu came in 17, 18.
link |
00:24:20.480
So I would argue that there's a lot of parallels there or there were one.
link |
00:24:25.360
I think it's not time yet. Like John Prine, the, uh,
link |
00:24:29.040
uh, the songwriter just died of COVID. That was a pretty big,
link |
00:24:34.240
really? Yeah. By the way, you, yes, of course. I, um,
link |
00:24:40.080
every time we do this, uh,
link |
00:24:41.560
we discover our mutual appreciation of obscure brilliant witty
link |
00:24:46.800
songwriter. He's really, he's really quite good, right? He's, he's really good.
link |
00:24:50.520
Yeah. He died.
link |
00:24:52.560
My understanding is that he passed recently due to complications of Corona.
link |
00:24:56.720
Yeah. So we haven't had large enough,
link |
00:25:01.320
enough large, large enough shocking deaths yet,
link |
00:25:05.400
picturesque deaths, deaths of a family that couldn't get treatment.
link |
00:25:10.160
There are stories that will come and break our hearts and we have not had enough
link |
00:25:14.840
of those. The visuals haven't come in, but I think they're coming. Well,
link |
00:25:18.360
we'll find out.
link |
00:25:19.440
But that you gotta, you have to be there. He has to be there when they come.
link |
00:25:22.560
I mean,
link |
00:25:23.000
but we didn't get the visual for example of falling man from nine 11.
link |
00:25:27.840
Right. So the outside world did, but Americans were not,
link |
00:25:32.000
it was thought that we would be too delicate.
link |
00:25:33.960
So just the way you remember Pulitzer prize winning photographs from the Vietnam
link |
00:25:37.960
era,
link |
00:25:38.640
you don't easily remember the photographs from all sorts of things that have
link |
00:25:43.720
happened since because something changed in our media.
link |
00:25:46.200
We are in sense that we cannot feel or experience our own lives and the tragedy
link |
00:25:51.200
that would animate us to action.
link |
00:25:53.760
Yeah. But I think there, again,
link |
00:25:56.000
I think there's going to be that suffering that's going to build and build and
link |
00:25:59.880
build in terms of businesses,
link |
00:26:02.600
mom and pop shops that close. And I, like,
link |
00:26:05.680
I think for myself, I think often that,
link |
00:26:09.960
that I'm being weak and,
link |
00:26:13.440
and like I feel like I should be doing something.
link |
00:26:17.280
I should be becoming a leader on a small scale.
link |
00:26:19.760
You can't, this is not world war II, and this is not Soviet Russia.
link |
00:26:24.800
Why not? Why not?
link |
00:26:27.080
Because our internal programming,
link |
00:26:29.880
the malware that sits between our ears is much different than the propaganda is
link |
00:26:36.560
malware of the Soviet era. I mean,
link |
00:26:40.720
people were both very indoctrinated and also knew that some level it was BS.
link |
00:26:45.720
They had a double mind. I don't know.
link |
00:26:48.440
There must be a great word in Russian for being able to think both of those
link |
00:26:53.440
things simultaneously.
link |
00:26:54.280
You don't think people are actually sick of the partisanship,
link |
00:27:00.280
sick of incompetence.
link |
00:27:01.680
Yeah, but I called for revolt the other day on Joe Rogan.
link |
00:27:05.160
People found it quixotic.
link |
00:27:06.480
Well, because I think you're not, I think revolt is different.
link |
00:27:11.160
I think that's like, okay, I'm really angry. I'm, I'm furious.
link |
00:27:16.680
I cannot stand that this is my country at the moment. I'm embarrassed.
link |
00:27:21.080
So let's build a better one. Yeah. Right. That's the, I'm in.
link |
00:27:25.880
Okay. So, well, okay, so let's take over a few universities.
link |
00:27:30.320
Let's start running a different experiment at some of our better universities.
link |
00:27:34.120
Like when I did this experiment and I said, what,
link |
00:27:36.720
at this, if this were 40 years ago, the median age,
link |
00:27:41.240
I believe of a university president was 51 that would have the person in gen X
link |
00:27:46.840
and we'd have a bunch of millennial presidents, a bunch of, you know,
link |
00:27:50.280
more than half gen X it's almost 100% baby boom at this point.
link |
00:27:56.680
Um, and how did that happen?
link |
00:27:58.520
We can get into how they changed retirement,
link |
00:28:00.880
but this generation of people are not going to be able to do that.
link |
00:28:04.880
But this generation above us does not feel for even even the older generous
link |
00:28:12.920
silent generous. I had Roger Penrose on my program.
link |
00:28:16.800
Excellent. And I thank you. I really appreciate that.
link |
00:28:19.800
And I asked him a question that was very important to me. I said, look,
link |
00:28:22.840
you're in your late eighties.
link |
00:28:24.880
Is there anyone you could point to as a successor that we should be watching?
link |
00:28:28.640
We can get excited. You know, I said,
link |
00:28:31.000
here's an opportunity to pass the baton and he said, well, let me,
link |
00:28:33.440
let me hold off on that. It was like, Oh,
link |
00:28:36.360
is it ever the right moment to point to somebody younger than you to keep your
link |
00:28:40.480
flame alive after you're gone? And also like, I don't know whether,
link |
00:28:44.080
I'm just going to admit to this.
link |
00:28:45.280
People treat me like I'm crazy for caring about the world after I'm dead
link |
00:28:51.160
or wanting to be remembered after you're gone. Like, well,
link |
00:28:53.600
what does it matter to you? You're gone.
link |
00:28:55.040
It's this deeply sort of secular somatic perspective on everything where we
link |
00:29:00.040
don't, you know, that phrase in a, as time goes by,
link |
00:29:04.520
it says it's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory,
link |
00:29:10.040
a case of do or die.
link |
00:29:13.040
I don't think people imagined then that there wouldn't be a story about
link |
00:29:18.760
fighting for love and glory.
link |
00:29:20.160
And like we are so out of practice about fighting, you know,
link |
00:29:25.080
rivals for love and and and and fighting for glory and something bigger than
link |
00:29:31.080
yourself.
link |
00:29:34.320
But the hunger is there.
link |
00:29:35.920
Well, that was the point then, right? The whole idea is that Rick was,
link |
00:29:39.520
you know, it was like Han Solo of his time. He's just like,
link |
00:29:42.760
I stick my neck out for nobody. You know, it's like, Oh, come on, Rick,
link |
00:29:46.240
you're just pretending you actually have a big soul. Right.
link |
00:29:49.320
And so at some level, that's the question. Do we have a big soul or is it just
link |
00:29:53.120
all bullshit?
link |
00:29:53.960
So yeah, I think, I think there's huge Manhattan project style projects,
link |
00:29:59.320
whether you talk about physical infrastructure or going to Mars, you know,
link |
00:30:03.360
the SpaceX NASA efforts or huge,
link |
00:30:08.880
huge scientific efforts.
link |
00:30:10.040
Well,
link |
00:30:10.200
we need to get back into the institutions and we need to remove the weak
link |
00:30:13.360
leadership that we have weak leaders and the weak leaders need to be removed and
link |
00:30:17.040
they need to seat people more dangerous than the people who are currently sitting
link |
00:30:21.000
in a lot of those chairs.
link |
00:30:21.960
Yeah. Or build new institutions. Good luck. Well,
link |
00:30:27.080
so one of the nice things of, uh,
link |
00:30:30.440
from the internet is for example,
link |
00:30:32.240
somebody like you can have a bigger voice than almost anybody at the particular
link |
00:30:38.440
institutions we're talking about.
link |
00:30:39.920
That's true. But the thing is I might say something.
link |
00:30:43.560
You can count on the fact that the, you know,
link |
00:30:46.000
provost at Princeton isn't going to say anything.
link |
00:30:48.200
Yeah. What do you mean to, to afraid?
link |
00:30:51.440
Well, if that person were to give an interview,
link |
00:30:55.120
how are things going in research at Princeton? Well,
link |
00:30:58.840
I'm hesitant to say it,
link |
00:30:59.920
but they're perhaps as good as they've ever been and I think they're going to
link |
00:31:03.120
get better. Oh, is that right? All fields? Yep. I don't see a weak one.
link |
00:31:08.440
It's just like, okay, great. Who are you and what are you even saying?
link |
00:31:14.600
We're just used to total nonsense. 24 seven.
link |
00:31:17.000
Yeah.
link |
00:31:18.360
What do you think might be a beautiful thing that comes out of this?
link |
00:31:23.360
Like what is there a hope that like a little inkling,
link |
00:31:27.440
a little fire of hope you have about our time right now?
link |
00:31:31.320
Yeah.
link |
00:31:31.720
I think one thing is coming to understand that the freaks, weirdos,
link |
00:31:36.080
mutants, and other, uh,
link |
00:31:39.560
near do wells, uh, sometimes referred to as grifters. I like that one.
link |
00:31:43.240
Grifters, uh, and gadflies were very often the earliest people on the coronavirus.
link |
00:31:51.560
That's a really interesting question. Why was that?
link |
00:31:54.120
And it seems to be that they had already paid such a social price that they
link |
00:32:00.800
weren't going to be beaten up by being, um,
link |
00:32:05.760
told that, Oh my God, you're xenophobic. You just hate China, you know,
link |
00:32:09.960
or wow, you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Um,
link |
00:32:14.360
so if you'd already paid those prices, you were free to think about this.
link |
00:32:17.240
And everyone in an institutional framework was terrified that they didn't want
link |
00:32:21.720
to be seen as the alarmist, the, um,
link |
00:32:26.200
chicken little. And so that's why you have this confidence where, you know,
link |
00:32:30.880
the Blasio says, you know, get on with your lives,
link |
00:32:34.320
get back in there and celebrate Chinese new year in Chinatown.
link |
00:32:37.920
Uh, despite coronavirus, it's like, okay, really?
link |
00:32:41.040
So you just always thought everything would automatically be okay if you,
link |
00:32:44.960
if you adapted, sorry, if you adopted that posture.
link |
00:32:49.000
So you think, uh,
link |
00:32:50.160
this time reveals the weakness of our institutions and reveals the strength of
link |
00:32:55.180
our gadflies and the weirdos and the.
link |
00:32:58.080
No, not necessarily the strength, but the, the, the value of freedom,
link |
00:33:02.280
like a different way of saying it would be, wow,
link |
00:33:04.920
even your gadflies and your grifters were able to beat your institutional folks
link |
00:33:09.120
because your institutional folks were playing with a giant mental handicap.
link |
00:33:13.800
So just imagine like we were in the story of Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut and
link |
00:33:18.800
our smartest people were all subjected to, uh,
link |
00:33:23.480
distracting noises every seven seconds. Well,
link |
00:33:27.520
they would be functionally much dumber because they couldn't continue a thought
link |
00:33:31.800
through all the disturbance.
link |
00:33:33.080
So in some sense, that's a little bit like what belonging to an institution is,
link |
00:33:37.200
is that if you have to make a public statement,
link |
00:33:39.080
of course the surgeon general is going to be the worst because they're,
link |
00:33:42.800
they're just playing with too much of a handicap.
link |
00:33:44.400
There are too many institutional players are like, don't screw us up.
link |
00:33:48.160
And so the person has to say something wrong.
link |
00:33:50.040
We're going to back propagate a falsehood. And this is very interesting.
link |
00:33:54.440
Some of my socially oriented friends say, Eric,
link |
00:33:57.680
I don't understand what you're on about. Of course masks work,
link |
00:34:00.000
but you know what they're trying to do.
link |
00:34:01.320
They're trying to get us not to buy up the masks for the doctors. And I think,
link |
00:34:05.520
okay,
link |
00:34:05.840
so you imagine that we can just create scientific fiction at will so that you can
link |
00:34:10.840
run whatever social program you want. This is what I, you know,
link |
00:34:13.960
my point is get out of my lab, get out of the lab.
link |
00:34:16.360
You don't belong in the lab. You're not meant for the lab.
link |
00:34:19.040
You're constitutionally incapable of being around the lab.
link |
00:34:21.960
You need to leave the lab.
link |
00:34:23.760
You think the CDC and WHO knew that masks work and we're trying to,
link |
00:34:28.760
and we're trying to sort of imagine that people are kind of stupid and they would
link |
00:34:34.800
buy masks in excess if they were told that masks work.
link |
00:34:39.960
Is that like, uh,
link |
00:34:42.400
cause this does seem to be a particularly clear example of mistakes made.
link |
00:34:48.880
You're asking me this question. No, you're not. What do you think, Lex?
link |
00:34:53.440
Well, I actually probably disagree with you a little bit. Great. Let's do it.
link |
00:34:58.120
I think it's not so easy to be honest with the populace when the danger of
link |
00:35:04.800
panic is always around the corner.
link |
00:35:08.000
So I think the kind of honesty you exhibit appeals to a certain class of brave
link |
00:35:18.640
intellectual minds that, uh, it appeals to me,
link |
00:35:22.960
but I don't know from the perspective of WHO,
link |
00:35:26.800
I don't know if it's so obvious that they should,
link |
00:35:32.240
um, be honest 100% of the time with people.
link |
00:35:37.440
I'm not saying you should be perfectly transparent and 100% honest.
link |
00:35:41.040
I'm saying that the quality of your lies has to be very high and it has to be
link |
00:35:44.920
public spirited. There's a big difference between, so I'm not,
link |
00:35:49.040
I'm not a child about this. I'm not saying that when you're at war,
link |
00:35:52.400
for example,
link |
00:35:53.000
you turn over all of your plans to the enemy because it's important that you're
link |
00:35:57.200
transparent with 360 degree visibility. Far from it.
link |
00:36:01.120
What I'm saying is something has been forgotten and I forgot who it was who
link |
00:36:06.120
told it to me,
link |
00:36:06.880
but it was a fellow graduate student in the Harvard math department and he said,
link |
00:36:12.960
you know,
link |
00:36:13.240
I learned one thing being out in the workforce because he was one of the few
link |
00:36:16.400
people who had had a work life in the department as a grad student.
link |
00:36:20.840
And he said, you can be friends with your boss,
link |
00:36:24.400
but if you're going to be friends with your boss,
link |
00:36:26.080
you have to be doing a good job at work.
link |
00:36:29.760
And there's an analog here,
link |
00:36:32.320
which is if you're going to be reasonably honest with the population,
link |
00:36:36.760
you have to be doing a good job at work as the surgeon general or as the head of
link |
00:36:40.160
the CDC. So if you're doing a terrible job,
link |
00:36:44.760
you're supposed to resign.
link |
00:36:45.920
And then the next person is supposed to say, look,
link |
00:36:50.320
I'm not going to lie to you. I inherited the situation.
link |
00:36:53.320
It was in a bit of disarray.
link |
00:36:55.800
But I had several requirements before I agreed to step in and take the job
link |
00:36:59.160
because I needed to know I could turn it around.
link |
00:37:00.800
I needed to know that I had clear lines of authority.
link |
00:37:03.040
I needed to know that I had the resources available in order to rectify the
link |
00:37:06.240
problem.
link |
00:37:06.840
And I needed to know that I had the ability and the freedom to level with the
link |
00:37:09.520
American people directly as I saw fit. All of my wishes were granted.
link |
00:37:12.840
And that's why I'm happy here on Monday morning. I've got my sleeves rolled up.
link |
00:37:17.280
Boy, do we got a lot to do.
link |
00:37:18.560
So please come back in two weeks and then ask me how I'm doing then.
link |
00:37:21.320
And I hope to have something to show you. That's how you do it.
link |
00:37:24.680
So why is that excellence and basic competence
link |
00:37:29.400
missing?
link |
00:37:31.000
The big net. You see,
link |
00:37:32.680
you come from multiple traditions where it was very important to remember
link |
00:37:36.880
things.
link |
00:37:38.040
The Soviet tradition made sure that you remembered the sacrifices that came in
link |
00:37:42.440
that war and the Jewish tradition we're doing this on Passover,
link |
00:37:47.280
right? Okay. Well, every year we tell one simple story.
link |
00:37:52.440
Well, why can't it be different every year?
link |
00:37:54.080
Maybe we could have a rotating series of seven stories because it's the one
link |
00:37:58.320
story that you need. It's like, you know, you work with the men in black group,
link |
00:38:02.640
right? And it's the last suit that you'll ever need.
link |
00:38:04.680
This is the last story that you ever need.
link |
00:38:06.520
Don't think I fell for your neuralyzer last time.
link |
00:38:10.440
In any event, we tell one story because it's the,
link |
00:38:14.960
get out of Dodge story.
link |
00:38:16.080
There's a time when you need to not wait for the bread to rise.
link |
00:38:19.760
And that's the thing, which is even if you live through a great nap,
link |
00:38:24.880
you deserve to know what it feels like to have to leave everything that has
link |
00:38:29.600
become comfortable and, and unworkable.
link |
00:38:33.760
It's sad that you need, you need that tragedy.
link |
00:38:37.800
I imagine to have the tradition of remembering
link |
00:38:42.840
it's, it's sad to to think that because things have been
link |
00:38:47.640
nice and comfortable means that we can't have great competent leaders,
link |
00:38:54.120
which is kind of the implied statement.
link |
00:38:55.600
Like, can we have great leaders who take big risks,
link |
00:39:00.400
who are, who inspire hard work,
link |
00:39:03.560
who deal with difficult truth, even though things have been comfortable?
link |
00:39:08.480
Well, we know what those people sound like. I mean, you know, if,
link |
00:39:12.320
for example, Jaco Willink suddenly threw his hat into the ring,
link |
00:39:17.720
everyone would say, okay, right.
link |
00:39:21.800
Party's over. It's time to get up at four 30 and really work hard.
link |
00:39:26.040
And we've got to get back into fighting shape. And yeah,
link |
00:39:30.640
but Jaco is a very special, I think,
link |
00:39:34.640
that whole group of people by profession,
link |
00:39:39.800
put themselves in the way of, and into hardship on a daily basis.
link |
00:39:44.200
And he's not, I don't, well, I don't know,
link |
00:39:47.120
but he's probably not going to be, well, could Jaco be president?
link |
00:39:52.680
Okay. But it doesn't have to be Jaco, right? Like in other words,
link |
00:39:55.120
if it was Kai Lenny or if it was Alex
link |
00:39:59.840
Honnold from rock climbing, right. But they're just serious people.
link |
00:40:04.480
They're serious people who can't afford your BS.
link |
00:40:10.440
Yeah.
link |
00:40:10.600
But why do we have serious people that do rock climbing and uh,
link |
00:40:16.440
don't have serious people who lead the nation? That seems to.
link |
00:40:20.760
Because that was a,
link |
00:40:22.360
those skills needed in rock climbing are not good during the big nap.
link |
00:40:27.360
And at the tail end of the big nap, they would get you fired.
link |
00:40:29.720
But I don't,
link |
00:40:30.560
don't you think there's a fundamental part of human nature that desires to,
link |
00:40:35.040
to excel, to be exceptionally good at your job?
link |
00:40:38.400
Yeah. But what is your job? I mean, in other words, my, my,
link |
00:40:42.040
my point to you is if you,
link |
00:40:44.040
if you're a general in a peacetime army and your major activity is playing war
link |
00:40:48.040
games,
link |
00:40:50.200
what if the skills needed to win war games are very different than the skills
link |
00:40:54.200
needed to win wars? Because you know how the war games are scored and you've,
link |
00:40:57.800
you've done money ball, for example, with war games,
link |
00:41:01.320
you figured out how to win games on paper.
link |
00:41:03.720
So then the advancement skill becomes divergent from the, uh,
link |
00:41:08.760
ultimate skill that it was proxying for.
link |
00:41:12.320
Yeah. But you create this, we're good as human beings to, I mean,
link |
00:41:16.760
I, at least me, I can't do a big nap.
link |
00:41:20.000
So at any one moment when I finish something,
link |
00:41:22.600
a new dream pops up. So going to Mars,
link |
00:41:25.800
what do you like to do? You like to do Brazilian jujitsu?
link |
00:41:28.960
Well, first of all, I like to do every, you like to play guitar,
link |
00:41:31.680
guitar, you do this podcast, you do theory. You're always,
link |
00:41:35.320
you're constantly taking risks and exposing yourself. Right? Why?
link |
00:41:40.400
Because you've got one of those crazy, I'm sorry to say it.
link |
00:41:43.360
You've got an Eastern European Jewish personality, which I'm still tied to,
link |
00:41:47.240
and I'm a couple of generations more distant than you are.
link |
00:41:51.040
And I've held on to that thing because it's valuable to me.
link |
00:41:54.760
You don't think there's a huge percent of the populace,
link |
00:41:58.000
even in the United States. That's that's that might be a little bit dormant,
link |
00:42:01.760
but do you know Anna Hatchian from the red scare podcast?
link |
00:42:06.080
Did you interview her? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I listened. Yeah, yeah, she was great.
link |
00:42:09.480
She was great, right? Yeah. She's fun. She's, she's terrific.
link |
00:42:12.560
But she also has the same thing going on.
link |
00:42:14.280
And I made a joke in the liner notes for that episode,
link |
00:42:17.360
which is somewhere on the road from Stalingrad to forever 21,
link |
00:42:22.360
something was lost. Like how can Stalingrad and forever 21 be in the same
link |
00:42:26.120
sentence? And, you know, in part it's that weird thing.
link |
00:42:30.480
It's like trying to remember even words like I'm in Russian and Hebrew things,
link |
00:42:35.000
like it's like what pom yet then the score, you know,
link |
00:42:38.200
these words have much more potency about memory and I don't know.
link |
00:42:43.200
I do, I think, I think there's still a dormant populace that craves leaders on a
link |
00:42:53.080
small scale and large scale.
link |
00:42:55.160
And I hope to be that leader on a small scale.
link |
00:42:58.840
And I think you sir have a role to be a leader.
link |
00:43:04.480
You kids go ahead without me. I'm just gonna,
link |
00:43:07.160
I'm going to do a little bit of weird podcast.
link |
00:43:08.760
I see now you're, you're putting on your, uh, Joe Rogan hat.
link |
00:43:14.040
Uh, he says, I'm just a comedian. Oh no, I'm not saying I'm just a,
link |
00:43:17.000
it's not that if I say I want to lead too much because of the big nap,
link |
00:43:21.800
there's like a group, a chorus of automated idiots and their first thought is
link |
00:43:26.160
like, ah, I knew it. So it's a power grab all along. Why should you lead?
link |
00:43:30.560
You know, it's just like,
link |
00:43:31.760
and so the idea is you're just trying to skirt around,
link |
00:43:34.400
not stepping on all of the idiot landmines. It's like, okay,
link |
00:43:38.280
so now I'm going to hear that in my inbox for the next three days.
link |
00:43:41.120
Okay. So lead by example, just live. No, I mean, the issue platform, look,
link |
00:43:45.240
we should take over the institutions. There are institutions.
link |
00:43:47.960
We've got bad leadership.
link |
00:43:49.120
We should mutiny and we should inject a, I don't know,
link |
00:43:53.120
15% 20% uh, disagreeable, dissident,
link |
00:43:57.360
very aggressive loner, individual mutant freaks,
link |
00:44:00.760
all the people that you go to see Avengers movies about or the X men or whatever
link |
00:44:04.280
it is and stop pretending that everything good comes out of some great giant
link |
00:44:09.320
inclusive, communal, uh, 12 hour meeting.
link |
00:44:14.720
It's like, stop it. That's not how shit happens.
link |
00:44:19.560
You recently published the video of a lecture you gave at Oxford presenting
link |
00:44:24.880
some aspects of a theory, uh,
link |
00:44:27.600
theory of everything called geometric unity.
link |
00:44:29.840
So this was a work of 30, 30 plus years.
link |
00:44:34.440
This is life's work.
link |
00:44:37.000
Let me ask her the, the silly old question.
link |
00:44:40.000
How do you feel as a human? Excited, scared,
link |
00:44:44.160
the experience of posting it.
link |
00:44:47.200
You know, it's funny. One of the, one of the things that you,
link |
00:44:49.360
you learn to feel as an academic is, um,
link |
00:44:53.800
the great sins you can commit in academics, uh,
link |
00:44:57.720
is to show yourself to be a non serious person to show yourself to have
link |
00:45:01.720
delusions,
link |
00:45:03.800
to avoid the standard practices,
link |
00:45:07.920
which everyone has signed up for.
link |
00:45:12.400
And you know,
link |
00:45:14.560
it's weird because like, you know that those people are going to be angry.
link |
00:45:19.000
He did what, you know, why would he do that? And,
link |
00:45:23.600
and what we're referring to, for example,
link |
00:45:25.640
there's traditions of sort of publishing incrementally,
link |
00:45:29.000
certainly not trying to have a theory of everything,
link |
00:45:32.520
perhaps working within the academic departments, all those things.
link |
00:45:37.200
So that's true. And so you're going outside of all of that.
link |
00:45:41.480
Well, I mean, I was going inside of all of that and we did not come to terms
link |
00:45:47.000
when I was inside and what they did was so outside to me was so weird,
link |
00:45:52.000
so freakish, like the most senior, respectable people at the most senior,
link |
00:45:57.040
respectable places were functionally insane as far as I could tell.
link |
00:46:01.600
And again, it's like being functionally stupid.
link |
00:46:03.760
If you're the head of the CDC or something where, you know,
link |
00:46:07.680
you're giving recommendations out that aren't based on what you actually
link |
00:46:10.600
believe. They're based on what you think you have to be doing. Well,
link |
00:46:13.680
in some sense,
link |
00:46:14.520
I think that that's a lot of how I saw the math and physics world as
link |
00:46:18.680
the physics world was really crazy and the math world was considerably less
link |
00:46:22.680
crazy, just very strict and kind of dogmatic.
link |
00:46:25.880
Well, we'll psychoanalyze those folks,
link |
00:46:27.960
but I really want to maybe linger on it a little bit longer of how you feel
link |
00:46:33.520
because yeah, so this is such a, such a special moment in your life.
link |
00:46:36.560
I really appreciate it. It's a great question.
link |
00:46:38.280
So that if we can pair off some of that other, those other issues. Um,
link |
00:46:43.280
it's new being able to say what the observers is,
link |
00:46:49.400
which was my attempt to replace space time with something that is both closely
link |
00:46:53.400
related to space, time and not space time. Um,
link |
00:46:57.240
so I used to carry the number 14 as a closely guarded secret in my life and uh,
link |
00:47:03.280
we're 14 is really four dimensions of space and time plus 10.
link |
00:47:08.280
Extra dimensions of rulers and protractors or for the cool kids out there,
link |
00:47:13.560
uh, symmetric two tensors.
link |
00:47:16.120
She had a geometric,
link |
00:47:18.160
a complicated, beautiful geometric view of the world that you cared with you
link |
00:47:22.120
for a long time. Yeah. Did you,
link |
00:47:24.240
did you have friends that you, um, colleagues, essentially? No.
link |
00:47:28.920
Talked. No. In fact, part of these, part of some of these stories are me,
link |
00:47:33.120
coming out of the world,
link |
00:47:34.160
to my friends, um, and I use the phrase coming out because I think that gays
link |
00:47:39.160
have monopolized the concept of the closet.
link |
00:47:41.920
Many of us are in closets having nothing to do with our sexual orientation.
link |
00:47:46.160
Um, yeah, I didn't really feel comfortable talking to almost anyone.
link |
00:47:50.640
So this was a closely guarded, uh, secret.
link |
00:47:54.320
And I think that I let on in some ways that I was up to something and probably
link |
00:47:58.280
I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was,
link |
00:48:02.720
I was up to something and probably, but it was a very weird life. So I had to,
link |
00:48:07.040
I had to have a series of things that I pretended to care about so that I could
link |
00:48:11.280
use that as the stalking horse for what I really cared about. And to your point,
link |
00:48:15.560
um, I never understood this whole thing about theories of everything.
link |
00:48:19.160
Like if you were going to go into something like theoretical physics,
link |
00:48:22.840
isn't that what you would normally pursue?
link |
00:48:25.480
Like wouldn't it be crazy to do something that difficult and that poorly paid if
link |
00:48:29.720
you were going to try to do something other than figure out what this is all
link |
00:48:33.000
about?
link |
00:48:34.400
Now I have to reveal my cards,
link |
00:48:36.160
my sort of weaknesses and lack and understanding of the music of physics and
link |
00:48:41.360
math departments.
link |
00:48:42.800
But there's an analogy here to artificial intelligence and often folks come in
link |
00:48:49.680
and say, okay,
link |
00:48:50.920
so there's a giant department working on quote unquote artificial intelligence,
link |
00:48:55.320
right? But why is nobody actually working on intelligence?
link |
00:49:00.560
Like you're all just building little toys, right?
link |
00:49:04.560
You're not actually trying to understand. And that breaks a lot of people. Uh,
link |
00:49:08.760
they, it confuses them because like, okay, so I'm at MIT,
link |
00:49:13.440
I'm at Stanford, I'm at Harvard, I'm here.
link |
00:49:16.400
I dreamed of being working on artificial intelligence.
link |
00:49:20.000
Why is everybody not actually working on intelligence?
link |
00:49:23.200
And I have the same kind of sense that that's what working on the theory of
link |
00:49:27.280
everything is that strangely you somehow become an outcast for even,
link |
00:49:33.040
but we know why this is right. Why? Well, it's because let's take the artificial,
link |
00:49:38.480
let's, let's play with AGI for example.
link |
00:49:41.200
I think that the idea starts off with nobody really knows how to work on that.
link |
00:49:45.760
And so if we don't know how to work on it,
link |
00:49:48.160
we choose instead to work on a program that is tangentially related to it.
link |
00:49:52.920
So we do a component of a program that is related to that big question because
link |
00:49:58.040
it's felt like at least I can make progress there.
link |
00:50:02.240
And that wasn't where I was, where I was in,
link |
00:50:06.600
it's funny there was this book of a called Frieden Uhlenbeck and it had this
link |
00:50:10.040
weird mysterious line in the beginning of it.
link |
00:50:13.320
And I tried to get clarification of this weird mysterious line and everyone said
link |
00:50:17.920
wrong things. And then I said, okay, well,
link |
00:50:20.440
so I can tell that nobody's thinking properly because I just asked the entire
link |
00:50:24.520
department and nobody has a correct interpretation of this.
link |
00:50:29.320
And so, you know, it's a little bit like you see a crime scene photo
link |
00:50:33.880
and you have a different idea.
link |
00:50:36.040
Like there's a smoking gun and you figure that's actually a cigarette lighter.
link |
00:50:39.400
I don't really believe that. And then there's like a pack of cards and you think,
link |
00:50:43.320
Oh,
link |
00:50:43.680
that looks like the blunt instrument that the person was beaten with. You know,
link |
00:50:47.360
so you have a very different idea about how things go.
link |
00:50:50.560
And very quickly you realize that there's no one thinking about that.
link |
00:50:55.440
There's a few human sides to this and technical sides,
link |
00:50:58.480
both of which I'd love to try to get down to. So the human side,
link |
00:51:03.120
I can tell from my perspective, I think it was before April 1st, April Fools,
link |
00:51:08.320
maybe the day before, I forget,
link |
00:51:10.000
but I was laying in bed in the middle of the night and somehow it popped up,
link |
00:51:15.000
you know on my feed somewhere that your beautiful face is speaking live and I
link |
00:51:23.560
clicked. And you know,
link |
00:51:26.840
it's kind of weird how the universe just brings things together in this kind of
link |
00:51:29.960
way.
link |
00:51:30.880
And all of a sudden I realized that there's something big happening at this
link |
00:51:34.720
particular moment. It's strange. On a day,
link |
00:51:38.400
like any day and all of a sudden you were thinking of,
link |
00:51:42.840
you had this somber tone, like you were serious,
link |
00:51:46.640
like you were going through some difficult decision and it seems strange.
link |
00:51:54.000
I almost thought you were maybe joking,
link |
00:51:56.080
but there was a serious decision being made and it was a wonderful experience
link |
00:51:59.520
to go through with you.
link |
00:52:00.640
I really appreciate it. I mean it was April 1st.
link |
00:52:03.000
Yeah, it was, it's kind of fascinating. I mean it's just the whole experience.
link |
00:52:05.880
And so I want to ask,
link |
00:52:10.720
I mean thank you for letting me be part of that kind of journey of decision
link |
00:52:14.760
making that took 30 years, but why now?
link |
00:52:19.560
Why did you think,
link |
00:52:21.240
why did you struggle so long not to release it and decide to release it now?
link |
00:52:28.360
While the whole world is on lockdown on April Fools,
link |
00:52:32.360
is it just because you like the comedy of absurd ways that the universe comes
link |
00:52:38.120
together?
link |
00:52:38.960
I don't think so.
link |
00:52:40.880
I think that the COVID epidemic is the end of the big nap.
link |
00:52:46.920
And I think that I actually tried this seven years earlier in Oxford.
link |
00:52:53.120
So I, uh, and it was too early.
link |
00:52:56.800
Which part was too, is it the platform?
link |
00:52:59.200
Cause your platform is quite different now actually the internet. I remember you,
link |
00:53:02.480
uh, I read several of your brilliant answers that people should read for the
link |
00:53:06.840
edge questions. One of them was related to the internet.
link |
00:53:10.320
And it was the first one. Was it the first one? Yeah.
link |
00:53:12.880
An essay called go virtual young man. Yeah. Yeah. That seemed,
link |
00:53:16.760
that's like forever ago now. Well that was 10 years ago.
link |
00:53:19.520
And that's exactly what I did is I decamped to the internet,
link |
00:53:22.520
which is where the portal lives, the portal, the portal, the portal.
link |
00:53:27.120
Well, so the whole, the theme, that's the ominous theme music,
link |
00:53:30.600
which you just listened to forever.
link |
00:53:32.720
I actually started recording a tiny guitar licks, uh,
link |
00:53:36.920
for the audio portion, not for the video portion. Um,
link |
00:53:40.400
you've kind of inspired me with bringing your guitar into the story,
link |
00:53:43.560
but keep going.
link |
00:53:45.200
So you thought, so the Oxford was like step one and you kind of,
link |
00:53:48.640
you put your foot into the, in the water to sample it,
link |
00:53:52.640
but it was too cold at the time. So you didn't want to step in.
link |
00:53:55.600
I was just really disappointed.
link |
00:53:57.440
What was disappointing about that experience?
link |
00:53:59.320
It's very, it's a hard thing to talk about.
link |
00:54:01.080
It has to do with the fact that, and I can see this,
link |
00:54:05.600
this, you know, this mirrors a disappointment within myself.
link |
00:54:09.240
There are two separate issues.
link |
00:54:10.640
One is the issue of making sure that the idea is actually heard and explored.
link |
00:54:16.960
And the other is the,
link |
00:54:18.360
I is the question about will I become disconnected from my work because it will
link |
00:54:24.400
be ridiculed. It will, it will be immediately improved.
link |
00:54:27.520
It will be found to be derivative of something that occurred in some paper in
link |
00:54:31.320
1957. When the community does not want you to gain a voice,
link |
00:54:37.040
it's a little bit like a policeman deciding to weirdly enforce all of these
link |
00:54:42.720
little known regulations against you. And you know,
link |
00:54:47.160
sometimes nobody else. And I think that's kind of, you know,
link |
00:54:50.880
this weird thing where I just don't believe that we can reach the final theory
link |
00:54:59.520
necessarily within the political economy of academics.
link |
00:55:03.800
So if you think about how academics are tortured by each other and how they're
link |
00:55:08.400
paid and where they have freedom and where they don't,
link |
00:55:11.760
I actually weirdly think that that system of selective pressures is going to
link |
00:55:15.360
eliminate anybody who's going to make real progress.
link |
00:55:18.400
So that's interesting.
link |
00:55:19.200
So if you look at the story of Andrew Wiles, for example,
link |
00:55:22.440
with from our last term, I mean, he,
link |
00:55:26.480
as far as I understand,
link |
00:55:28.240
he pretty much isolated himself from the world of academics in terms of the big,
link |
00:55:33.200
the bulk of the work he did.
link |
00:55:35.200
And it from my perspective is dramatic and fun to read about,
link |
00:55:39.920
but it seemed exceptionally stressful. The first step he took,
link |
00:55:43.080
the first steps he took when actually making the work public that seemed to me
link |
00:55:47.240
it would be hell, but it's like so artificially dramatic, you know,
link |
00:55:51.720
he leads up to it at a series of lectures.
link |
00:55:55.560
He doesn't want to say it. And then he finally says it at the end,
link |
00:55:59.800
because obviously this comes out of a body of work where, I mean,
link |
00:56:02.920
the funny part about from us last theorem is that wasn't originally thought to
link |
00:56:06.680
be a deep and meaningful problem.
link |
00:56:09.160
It was just an easy to state one that had gone unsolved.
link |
00:56:12.400
But if you think about it,
link |
00:56:13.960
it became attached to the body of regular theory.
link |
00:56:17.600
So he built up this body of regular theory gets all the way up to the end
link |
00:56:21.320
announces. And then like, there's this whole drama about, okay,
link |
00:56:25.840
somebody's checking the proof. I don't understand what's going on in line 37,
link |
00:56:30.040
you know, and like, Oh, is this serious?
link |
00:56:31.720
It seems a little bit more serious than we knew.
link |
00:56:33.640
I mean, do you see parallels?
link |
00:56:35.000
Do you share the concern that your experience might be something similar?
link |
00:56:38.280
Well, in his case, I think that if I recall correctly,
link |
00:56:41.040
his original proof was unsalvageable.
link |
00:56:42.680
He actually came up with a second proof with a
link |
00:56:47.600
colleague, Richard Taylor.
link |
00:56:50.880
And it was that second proof which carried the day.
link |
00:56:53.800
So it was a little bit that he got put under incredible pressure and then had
link |
00:56:58.520
to succeed in a new way, having failed the first time,
link |
00:57:00.920
which is like even a weirder and stranger story.
link |
00:57:03.520
That's an incredible story in some sense. But I mean, are you,
link |
00:57:06.880
I'm trying to get a sense of the kind of stress.
link |
00:57:09.600
I think that this is okay, but I'm rejecting what I don't think people
link |
00:57:14.040
understand with me is the scale of the critique.
link |
00:57:18.440
It's like, I don't, you, people say, well,
link |
00:57:21.560
you must implicitly agree with this and implicitly agree. It's like, no,
link |
00:57:24.280
try me ask before you,
link |
00:57:27.160
you decide that I am mostly in agreement with the community about how these
link |
00:57:30.880
things should be handled or what these things mean.
link |
00:57:33.640
Can you, can you elaborate? And also just why, um,
link |
00:57:37.280
does criticism matter so much here?
link |
00:57:41.880
So you seem to dislike the burden of criticism that it will choke away all
link |
00:57:49.560
different kinds of criticism.
link |
00:57:51.320
There's constructive criticism and there's destructive criticism.
link |
00:57:54.840
And what I don't like is I don't like a community that can't,
link |
00:58:01.640
first of all, like if you take the physics community,
link |
00:58:03.760
like just the way we screwed up on masks and PPE, uh,
link |
00:58:08.720
just the way we screwed up in the financial crisis and mortgage backed
link |
00:58:11.320
securities, we screwed up on string theory.
link |
00:58:13.880
Can we just forget the string theory happened or sure,
link |
00:58:17.680
but somebody should say that, right? Somebody should say, you know,
link |
00:58:20.600
it didn't work out. Yeah. But okay.
link |
00:58:24.880
But you're asking this,
link |
00:58:25.880
like why do you guys get to keep the prestige after failing for 35 years?
link |
00:58:30.240
Yeah. That's an interesting question. You guys, because to me,
link |
00:58:34.720
look these things, if there is a theory of everything to be had, right?
link |
00:58:39.640
It's going to be a relatively small group of people where this will be sorted
link |
00:58:43.240
out. Absolutely. It's, it's, it's not tens of thousands.
link |
00:58:46.840
It's probably hundreds at the top.
link |
00:58:50.360
But within that, within that community,
link |
00:58:53.400
there is the assholes.
link |
00:58:57.200
There's the, I mean, they, you have,
link |
00:59:00.280
you always in this world have people who are kind, open minded.
link |
00:59:05.600
It's a question about, okay,
link |
00:59:08.160
let's imagine for example,
link |
00:59:10.000
that you have a story where you believe that ulcers are definitely
link |
00:59:14.560
caused by stress and you've never questioned it.
link |
00:59:18.640
Or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of the blue and attacked us at
link |
00:59:21.920
Pearl Harbor, right?
link |
00:59:23.760
And now somebody introduces a new idea to you, which is like,
link |
00:59:27.160
what if it isn't stress at all?
link |
00:59:29.000
Or what if we actually tried to make resource star of Japan attack us somewhere
link |
00:59:33.720
in the Pacific so we could have cast this belly to enter the Asian theater
link |
00:59:38.520
person's original idea is like, what, what are you even saying? You know,
link |
00:59:42.120
it's like too crazy. Well,
link |
00:59:45.040
when Dirac in 1963
link |
00:59:47.320
talked about the importance of beauty as a guiding principle in physics and he
link |
00:59:52.320
wasn't talking about the scientific method, that was crazy talk,
link |
00:59:57.200
but he was actually making a great point and he was using Schrodinger.
link |
01:00:00.120
And I think it was Schrodinger was standing in for him and he said that if your
link |
01:00:04.240
equations don't agree with experiment, that's kind of a minor detail.
link |
01:00:08.400
If they have true beauty in them,
link |
01:00:10.280
you should explore them because very often the agreement with experiment is
link |
01:00:15.280
that it is an issue of fine tuning of your model of the instantiation.
link |
01:00:22.440
And so it doesn't really tell you that your model is wrong.
link |
01:00:25.560
And of course Heisenberg told Dirac that his model was wrong because that the
link |
01:00:30.400
proton and the electron should be the same mass if they are each other's
link |
01:00:33.680
anti particles.
link |
01:00:35.560
And that was an irrelevant kind of silliness rather than a real threat to the
link |
01:00:40.560
Dirac theory. But okay. So amidst all this silliness,
link |
01:00:46.560
I'm hoping that we could talk about the journey that geometric unity has taken
link |
01:00:51.240
and will take as an idea and an idea that we'll see the light.
link |
01:00:56.000
Yeah. That. So first of all, let's,
link |
01:00:59.320
I'm thinking of writing a book called geometric unity for idiots. Okay.
link |
01:01:03.920
And I need you as a consultant. So can we, first of all,
link |
01:01:07.200
I hope I have the trademark on geometric unit. You do. Good.
link |
01:01:10.400
Can you give a basic introduction of the goals of geometric unity?
link |
01:01:17.120
The basic tools of mathematics use the viewpoints in general for idiots.
link |
01:01:23.640
Sure. Like me. Okay. Great. Fun.
link |
01:01:26.240
So what's the goal of geometric unity?
link |
01:01:28.800
The goal of geometric unity is to start with something so completely bland that
link |
01:01:36.000
you can simply say, well,
link |
01:01:37.520
that's a something that begins the game is as close to a mathematical.
link |
01:01:41.320
Nothing is possible. In other words, I can't answer the question.
link |
01:01:44.400
Why is there something rather than nothing?
link |
01:01:46.120
But if there has to be a something that we begin from,
link |
01:01:49.160
let it begin from something that's like a blank canvas.
link |
01:01:53.520
Let's even more basic. So what is something, what are we trying to describe here?
link |
01:01:59.000
Right now we have a model of our world and it's got two sectors.
link |
01:02:04.000
Two sectors. One of the sectors is called general relativity.
link |
01:02:07.680
The other is called the standard model.
link |
01:02:09.840
So we'll call it GR for general relativity and SM for standard model.
link |
01:02:15.960
What's the difference between the two? What are the two described?
link |
01:02:19.320
So general relativity gives pride of place to gravity and everything else is
link |
01:02:26.760
acting as a sort of a back, a backup singer.
link |
01:02:30.600
Gravity is the star of the show. Gravity is the star of general relativity.
link |
01:02:34.960
And in the standard model,
link |
01:02:38.160
the other three non gravitational forces.
link |
01:02:41.360
So if there are four forces that we know about three of the four non
link |
01:02:44.240
gravitational, that's where they get to shine. Great.
link |
01:02:48.480
So tiny little particles and how they interact with each other.
link |
01:02:52.280
So photons, gluons and so called intermediate vector bosons.
link |
01:02:57.120
Those are the things that the standard model showcases and general relativity
link |
01:03:02.120
showcases gravity. And then you have matter,
link |
01:03:05.800
which is accommodated in both theories,
link |
01:03:08.040
but much more beautifully inside of the standard model.
link |
01:03:11.160
So what, what is a theory of everything do?
link |
01:03:14.880
So, so first of all, I think that that's,
link |
01:03:17.520
that's the first place where we haven't talked enough.
link |
01:03:19.840
We assume that we know what it means,
link |
01:03:22.600
but we don't actually have any idea what it means.
link |
01:03:25.080
And what I claim it is, is that it's a theory where the questions beyond that
link |
01:03:30.960
theory are no longer of a mathematical nature.
link |
01:03:36.240
In other words, if I say, let us take, um,
link |
01:03:40.680
X to be a four dimensional manifold
link |
01:03:45.720
to a mathematician or a physicist. I've said very little.
link |
01:03:49.000
I've simply said there's some place for calculus and linear algebra to,
link |
01:03:54.000
to, uh, to dance together and to play.
link |
01:03:58.080
And that's what manifolds are. They're the most natural place where,
link |
01:04:00.840
where our two greatest math theories can really, uh,
link |
01:04:06.800
intertwine.
link |
01:04:07.880
Which are the two? Oh, you mean calculus and linear algebra. Right. Okay.
link |
01:04:12.680
Now the question is beyond that. So it's sort of like saying,
link |
01:04:16.600
I'm an artist and I want to order a canvas.
link |
01:04:18.680
Okay. Now the question is, does the canvas paint itself?
link |
01:04:26.720
Does the can, does the canvas come up with an artist
link |
01:04:31.960
and paint an ink, which then paint the canvas? Like that's the,
link |
01:04:36.720
that's the hard part about theories of everything,
link |
01:04:39.240
which I don't think people talk enough about.
link |
01:04:41.640
Can we just, you bring up Escher and the hand that draws itself.
link |
01:04:45.480
Is it the fire that lights itself or drawing hands, the drawing hands. Yeah.
link |
01:04:50.480
And, uh, every time I start to think about that, my mind like, uh,
link |
01:04:54.880
shuts down. Well, don't do that. There's a spark and this is the most beautiful
link |
01:05:00.200
part. We should do this together. No, it's beautiful, but, uh,
link |
01:05:04.320
this robot's brain, uh, sparks fly.
link |
01:05:08.680
So can we try to say the same thing over and over in different ways about what,
link |
01:05:12.880
what, what you mean by that having to be a thing we have to contend with?
link |
01:05:17.440
Sure. Like why,
link |
01:05:19.200
why do you think that creating a theory of everything,
link |
01:05:23.000
as you call the source code are understanding our source code require a view
link |
01:05:29.320
like the hand that draws itself. Okay.
link |
01:05:31.040
Well here's what goes on in the regular physics picture.
link |
01:05:35.040
We've got these two main theories, general relativity and the standard model.
link |
01:05:38.400
Right?
link |
01:05:39.240
Okay. Think of general relativity as more or less,
link |
01:05:44.800
the theory of the canvas. Okay.
link |
01:05:48.880
Maybe you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape.
link |
01:05:52.720
Maybe you've measured it. So it's got length and it's got angle,
link |
01:05:55.480
but more or less it's just canvas and length and angle.
link |
01:05:58.720
And that's all that really general relativity is,
link |
01:06:02.560
but it allows the canvas to warp a bit.
link |
01:06:04.720
Okay. Then we have the second thing,
link |
01:06:08.560
which is this import of foreign libraries where,
link |
01:06:13.680
which aren't tied to space and time.
link |
01:06:18.880
So we've got this crazy set of symmetries called SU three cross SU two cross U
link |
01:06:23.200
one.
link |
01:06:24.240
We've got this collection of 16 particles in a generation,
link |
01:06:27.600
which are these sort of twisted spinners.
link |
01:06:30.600
And we've got three copies of them.
link |
01:06:32.600
Then we've got this weird Higgs field that comes in and like Deus ex machina
link |
01:06:37.160
solves all the problems that have been created in the play that can't be
link |
01:06:40.960
resolved otherwise.
link |
01:06:42.040
So that's the standard model of quantum field theory just plopped on top.
link |
01:06:45.920
It's a problem of the double origin story.
link |
01:06:48.880
One origin story is about space and time.
link |
01:06:51.600
The other origin story is about what we would call internal quantum numbers and
link |
01:06:56.320
internal symmetries.
link |
01:06:58.040
And then there was an attempt to get one to follow from the other called
link |
01:07:02.440
Kaluza Klein theory, which didn't work out.
link |
01:07:06.160
And this is sort of in that vein.
link |
01:07:10.800
So you said origin story. So in the hand that draws itself,
link |
01:07:15.400
what is it?
link |
01:07:16.200
So it's, it's as if you had the canvas and then you ordered
link |
01:07:21.000
up also give me paint brushes, paints, pigments, pencils, and artists.
link |
01:07:26.040
But you're saying that's like, if you want to create a universe from scratch,
link |
01:07:29.800
the canvas should be generating the paintbrushes and the paintbrushes and the
link |
01:07:33.960
artists, right? Like you should, who's the artist in this analogy?
link |
01:07:38.280
Well, this is sorry.
link |
01:07:40.160
Then we're going to get into a religious thing and I don't want to do that.
link |
01:07:42.880
Okay. Well, you know my shtick, which is that we are the AI.
link |
01:07:47.600
We have two great stories about the simulation and artificial general
link |
01:07:51.440
intelligence. In one story,
link |
01:07:54.400
man fears that some program we've given birth to will become self aware,
link |
01:07:59.400
smarter than us and we'll take over in another story.
link |
01:08:04.680
There are genius simulators and we live in their simulation and we haven't
link |
01:08:10.200
realized that those two stories are the same story. In one case,
link |
01:08:14.960
we are the simulator. In another case,
link |
01:08:18.640
we are the simulated and if you buy those and you put them together,
link |
01:08:23.960
we are the AGI and whether or not we have simulators,
link |
01:08:27.080
we may be trying to wake up by learning our own source code.
link |
01:08:30.320
So this could be our Skynet moment,
link |
01:08:31.960
which is one of the reasons I have some issues around it.
link |
01:08:35.200
I think we'll talk about that cause I,
link |
01:08:37.160
well that's the issue of the emergent artist within the story just to get back
link |
01:08:40.800
to the point. Okay. So,
link |
01:08:42.400
so now the key point is the standard way we tell the story is that Einstein sets
link |
01:08:47.120
the canvas and then we order all the stuff that we want and then that paints the
link |
01:08:52.720
picture that is our universe.
link |
01:08:54.040
So you order the, the, the paint,
link |
01:08:57.920
you order the artist,
link |
01:09:00.600
you order the brushes and that then when you collide the two gives you two
link |
01:09:06.640
separate origin stories.
link |
01:09:08.080
The canvas came from one place and everything else came from somewhere else.
link |
01:09:12.840
So what are the mathematical tools required to,
link |
01:09:18.240
to construct consistent geometric theory?
link |
01:09:21.480
Yeah.
link |
01:09:23.600
You know, make this concrete.
link |
01:09:25.760
Well, somehow you need to get three copies,
link |
01:09:30.240
for example,
link |
01:09:31.760
of generations with 16 particles each,
link |
01:09:36.720
right? And so the question would be like, well, there's a lot,
link |
01:09:40.760
there's a lot of special personality in those symmetries.
link |
01:09:44.440
Where would they come from? So for example,
link |
01:09:47.680
you've got what would be called grand unified theories that sound like,
link |
01:09:52.600
um, SU five, uh, the George I.
link |
01:09:55.280
Glashow theory. There's something that should be called spin 10,
link |
01:09:58.400
but physicists insist on calling it SO 10.
link |
01:10:01.680
There's something called the petit salon theory that tends to be called SU four
link |
01:10:06.080
cross SU two cross SU two, which should be called spin six cross spin four.
link |
01:10:10.360
I can get into all of these.
link |
01:10:11.960
What are they all accomplishing?
link |
01:10:13.800
They're all taking the known forces that we see and packaging them up
link |
01:10:18.800
to say, we can't get rid of the second origin story,
link |
01:10:22.640
but we can at least make that origin story more unified.
link |
01:10:26.520
So they're trying grand unification is the attempt to.
link |
01:10:29.240
And that's a mistake in your, in your.
link |
01:10:30.800
It's not a mistake that the problem is, is it was born lifeless. When,
link |
01:10:35.240
when George I.
link |
01:10:35.920
And Glashow first came out with the SU five theory, um,
link |
01:10:40.520
it was very exciting because it could be tested in a South Dakota, um,
link |
01:10:45.200
mine filled up with like, I dunno, cleaning fluid or something like that.
link |
01:10:49.600
And they looked for proton decay and didn't see it.
link |
01:10:51.800
And then they gave up because in that day,
link |
01:10:54.240
when your experiment didn't work, you gave up on the theory.
link |
01:10:57.680
It didn't come to us born of a fusion between Einstein and,
link |
01:11:02.280
and, and bore, you know,
link |
01:11:05.160
and that was kind of the problem is that it had this weird parenting where it
link |
01:11:09.440
was just on the bore side. There was no Einsteinian contribution.
link |
01:11:15.920
Lex, how can I help you most? I'm trying to figure,
link |
01:11:19.880
what questions do you want to ask so that you get the most satisfying answers?
link |
01:11:24.600
Uh, there's, there's a, there's a bunch,
link |
01:11:26.080
there's a bunch of questions I want to ask. I mean, one,
link |
01:11:28.560
and I'm trying to sneak up on you somehow to reveal
link |
01:11:33.440
in a accessible way, then the nature of our universe.
link |
01:11:40.040
So I can just give you a guess, right?
link |
01:11:42.520
We have to be very careful that we're not claiming that this has been accepted.
link |
01:11:47.880
This is a speculation, but I will, I will make the speculation that what,
link |
01:11:51.920
I think what you would want to ask me is how can the canvas generate all the
link |
01:11:55.480
stuff that usually has to be ordered separately? All right. Should we do that?
link |
01:11:59.240
Let's go there. Okay.
link |
01:12:00.360
Okay. So the first thing is,
link |
01:12:03.600
is that you have a concept in computers called technical debt.
link |
01:12:08.560
You're coding and you cut corners and you know,
link |
01:12:10.440
you're going to have to do it right before the thing is safe for the world,
link |
01:12:15.400
but you're piling up some series of IO use to yourself and your project as
link |
01:12:21.960
you're going along.
link |
01:12:23.680
So the first thing is we can't figure out if you have only four degrees of
link |
01:12:28.680
freedom. And that's what your canvas is.
link |
01:12:30.680
How do you get at least Einstein's world? Einstein says, look,
link |
01:12:35.320
it's not just four degrees of freedom,
link |
01:12:36.880
but there need to be rulers and protractors to measure length and angle in the
link |
01:12:40.720
world. You can't just have a flabby four degrees of freedom.
link |
01:12:46.360
So the first thing you do is you create 10 extra variables,
link |
01:12:49.440
which is like if we can't choose any particular set of rulers and protractors to
link |
01:12:53.480
measure length and angle, let's take the,
link |
01:12:55.960
take the set of all possible rulers and protractors.
link |
01:13:00.080
And that would be called symmetric non degenerate two tensors on the tangent
link |
01:13:04.880
space of the four manifold X four.
link |
01:13:08.480
Now because there are four degrees of freedom,
link |
01:13:11.000
you start off with four dimensions.
link |
01:13:12.600
Then you need four rulers for each of those different directions.
link |
01:13:17.880
So that's four that gets us up to eight variables.
link |
01:13:20.480
And then between four original variables, there are six possible angles.
link |
01:13:24.800
So four plus four plus six is equal to 14.
link |
01:13:29.280
So now you've replaced X four with another space, which in the lecture,
link |
01:13:33.440
I think I called you 14, but I'm now calling Y 14.
link |
01:13:36.160
This is one of the big problems of working on something in private is every time
link |
01:13:39.720
you pull it out, you sort of can't remember it. You name something, something new.
link |
01:13:43.120
Okay. So you've got a 14 dimensional world,
link |
01:13:45.560
which is the original four dimensional world plus a lot of extra gadgetry for
link |
01:13:51.400
measurement.
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01:13:52.240
Yeah. And because you're not in the four dimensional world,
link |
01:13:55.200
you don't have the technical debt.
link |
01:13:56.880
No, now you've got a lot of technical debt because now you have to explain away
link |
01:13:59.840
a 14 dimensional world, which is a big,
link |
01:14:02.680
you're taking a huge advance on your payday check, right?
link |
01:14:05.960
But aren't more dimensions allow you more freedom to, I mean,
link |
01:14:10.360
maybe, but you have to get rid of them somehow because we don't perceive them.
link |
01:14:14.000
So eventually you have to collapse it down to the thing that we perceive or you
link |
01:14:16.880
have to sample a four dimensional filament within that 14 dimensional world known
link |
01:14:23.040
as a section of a bundle.
link |
01:14:26.280
Okay. So how do we get from the four 14 dimensional world where I imagine a lot
link |
01:14:31.240
of, oh, wait, wait, wait. Yep. You're cheating.
link |
01:14:33.760
The first question was how do we get something from almost nothing?
link |
01:14:38.920
Like how do we get the,
link |
01:14:40.720
if I've said that the who and the what in the newspaper story that is a theory
link |
01:14:45.720
theory of everything are bosons and Fermions. So let's make the who,
link |
01:14:50.680
the Fermions and the what the bosons think of it as the players and the
link |
01:14:54.240
equipment for a game.
link |
01:14:56.320
Are we supposed to be thinking of actual physical things with mass or energy?
link |
01:15:00.840
Okay. So think about everything you see in this room.
link |
01:15:05.240
So from chemistry, you know, it's all protons, neutrons and electrons,
link |
01:15:08.480
but from a little bit of late 1960s physics,
link |
01:15:12.240
we know that the protons and neutrons are all made of up quarks and down quarks.
link |
01:15:16.720
So everything in this room is basically up quarks, down quarks,
link |
01:15:19.840
and electrons stuck together with, with the, the, what the equipment.
link |
01:15:25.200
Okay.
link |
01:15:26.760
Now the way we see it currently is we see that there are space time indices,
link |
01:15:32.960
which we would call spinners that correspond to the who that is the Fermions,
link |
01:15:38.200
the matter, the stuff, the up quarks, the down quarks, the electrons.
link |
01:15:41.120
And there are also
link |
01:15:46.640
16 degrees of freedom that come from this in this space of internal quantum
link |
01:15:51.640
numbers. So in my theory,
link |
01:15:55.920
in 14 dimensions,
link |
01:15:58.200
there's no internal quantum number space that figures in.
link |
01:16:03.560
It's all just spin oriel.
link |
01:16:05.200
So spinners in 14 dimensions without any festooning with extra linear algebraic
link |
01:16:14.920
information.
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01:16:17.040
There's a concept of a, of, of, of spinners,
link |
01:16:20.920
which is natural if you have a manifold with length and angle and Y 14 is almost
link |
01:16:27.880
a manifold with length and angle. It's,
link |
01:16:32.240
it's so close. It's in other words,
link |
01:16:35.080
because you're looking at the space of all rulers and protractors,
link |
01:16:39.320
maybe it's not that surprising that a space of rulers and protractors might come
link |
01:16:43.520
very close to having rulers and protractors on it itself.
link |
01:16:47.040
Like can you measure the space of measurements and you almost can't in a space
link |
01:16:52.720
that has length and angle.
link |
01:16:54.600
If it doesn't have a topological obstruction comes with these objects called
link |
01:16:58.480
spinners.
link |
01:16:59.320
Now spinners are the stuff of of our world.
link |
01:17:05.160
We are made of spinners. They are the most important,
link |
01:17:08.360
really deep object that I can tell you about. They were very surprising.
link |
01:17:11.720
What is a spinner? So famously,
link |
01:17:14.640
there are these weird things that require 720 degrees of rotation in order to
link |
01:17:23.400
come back to normal. And that doesn't make sense.
link |
01:17:26.040
And the reason for this is that there's a knottedness in our three dimensional
link |
01:17:31.880
world that people don't observe. And you know,
link |
01:17:34.400
you can famously see it by this Dirac string trick.
link |
01:17:39.000
So if you take a glass of water,
link |
01:17:40.440
imagine that this was a tumbler and I didn't want to spill any of it.
link |
01:17:43.680
And the question is if I rotate the cup without losing my grip on the base,
link |
01:17:49.520
360 degrees and I can't go backwards,
link |
01:17:53.480
is there any way I can take a sip? And the answer is this weird motion,
link |
01:17:58.480
which is
link |
01:18:01.440
go over first and under second.
link |
01:18:04.800
And that that's 720 degrees of rotation to come back to normal so that I can
link |
01:18:08.400
take a sip. Well, that weird principle,
link |
01:18:10.880
which sometimes is known as the Philippine wine glass dance because waitresses
link |
01:18:14.840
in the Philippines apparently learned how to do this.
link |
01:18:18.320
Um,
link |
01:18:19.160
so that that move defines if you will,
link |
01:18:24.520
this hidden space that nobody knew was there of spinners,
link |
01:18:28.720
which Dirac figured out when he took the square root of something called the
link |
01:18:32.760
Klein Gordon equation, uh, which I think had earlier,
link |
01:18:37.680
um, work incorporated from Cartan and killing and company in mathematics.
link |
01:18:43.280
So spinners are one of the most profound aspects of human existence.
link |
01:18:46.760
I mean, forgive me for the perhaps dumb questions, but, uh,
link |
01:18:49.560
would a spinner be the mathematical objects that's the basic unit of our
link |
01:18:54.560
universe?
link |
01:18:55.560
When you, when you start with a manifold,
link |
01:19:01.560
um, which is just like something like a donut or a sphere circle or a Mobius
link |
01:19:06.200
band,
link |
01:19:07.680
a spinner is usually the first wildly surprising thing that you found was
link |
01:19:12.760
hidden in your original purchase.
link |
01:19:14.720
So you,
link |
01:19:15.560
you order a manifold and you didn't even realize it's like buying a house and
link |
01:19:20.560
finding a panic room inside that you hadn't counted on.
link |
01:19:23.960
It's very surprising when you understand that spinners are running around on
link |
01:19:27.200
your spaces.
link |
01:19:29.960
Again, perhaps a dumb question,
link |
01:19:31.640
but we're talking about 14 dimensions and four dimensions.
link |
01:19:34.920
What is the manifold we're operating under?
link |
01:19:38.600
So in my case, it's proto space time. It's before,
link |
01:19:41.720
it's before Einstein can slap rulers and protractors on space time.
link |
01:19:47.000
What do you mean by that? Sorry to interrupt is space.
link |
01:19:49.680
Time is the four D manifold.
link |
01:19:52.760
Space time is a four dimensional manifold with extra structure.
link |
01:19:57.760
What's the extra structure?
link |
01:19:58.920
It's called a semi Ramanian or pseudo Ramanian metric.
link |
01:20:04.200
In essence,
link |
01:20:05.280
there is something akin to a four by four symmetric manifold.
link |
01:20:10.280
Four symmetric matrix from which is equivalent to length and angle.
link |
01:20:15.680
So when I talk about rulers and protractors,
link |
01:20:17.520
or I talk about length and angle,
link |
01:20:19.520
or I talk about Ramanian or pseudo Ramanian or semi Ramanian met manifolds,
link |
01:20:24.040
I'm usually talking about the same thing.
link |
01:20:26.560
Can you measure how long something is and what the angle is between two
link |
01:20:30.720
different rays or vectors?
link |
01:20:32.960
So that's what Einstein gave us as his arena, his place to play, his his canvas.
link |
01:20:43.320
So there's a bunch of questions I can ask here.
link |
01:20:45.920
But like I said, I'm working on this book, Geometric Unity for Idiots.
link |
01:20:51.240
And and I think what would be really nice as your editor
link |
01:20:57.280
to have like beautiful, maybe even visualizations that people could try to
link |
01:21:05.760
play with, try to try to reveal small little beauties about the way you're
link |
01:21:09.760
thinking about the score.
link |
01:21:10.680
Well, I usually use the Joe Rogan program for that.
link |
01:21:13.120
Sometimes I have him doing the Philippine wine glass dance.
link |
01:21:16.480
I had the hop vibration.
link |
01:21:18.400
The part of the problem is that most people don't know this language about
link |
01:21:23.680
spinners, bundles, metrics, gauge fields.
link |
01:21:27.960
And they're very curious about the theory of everything, but they have no
link |
01:21:31.720
understanding of even what we know about our own world.
link |
01:21:34.360
Is it, is it a hopeless pursuit?
link |
01:21:37.520
So like even gauge theory, right?
link |
01:21:39.960
Just this, I mean, it seems to be very inaccessible.
link |
01:21:43.680
Is there some aspect of it that could be made accessible?
link |
01:21:46.080
I mean, I could go to the board right there and give you a five minute lecture
link |
01:21:50.120
on gauge theory that would be better than the official lecture on gauge theory.
link |
01:21:54.560
You would know what gauge theory was.
link |
01:21:56.800
So it is, it's, it's possible to make it accessible, but nobody does.
link |
01:22:01.280
Like, in other words, you're going to watch over the next year, lots of
link |
01:22:05.400
different discussions about quantum entanglement or, you know, the multiverse.
link |
01:22:09.920
Where are we now?
link |
01:22:11.760
Or, you know, many worlds, are they all equally real?
link |
01:22:15.120
Yeah.
link |
01:22:17.160
Right.
link |
01:22:17.840
I mean, yeah, that's okay.
link |
01:22:19.120
But you're not going to hear anything about the hop vibration except if
link |
01:22:22.120
it's from me and I hate that.
link |
01:22:24.320
Why, why can't you be the one?
link |
01:22:26.400
Well, because I'm going a different path.
link |
01:22:28.240
I think that we've made a huge mistake, which is we have things we can show
link |
01:22:31.840
people about the actual models.
link |
01:22:34.160
We can push out visualizations where they they're not listening by analogy.
link |
01:22:38.240
They're watching the same thing that we're seeing.
link |
01:22:40.840
And as I've said to you before, this is like choosing to perform sheet music
link |
01:22:45.640
that hasn't been performed in a long time.
link |
01:22:47.520
Or, you know, the experts can't afford orchestras.
link |
01:22:50.040
So they just trade Beethoven symphonies as sheet music.
link |
01:22:53.160
And they, Oh, wow, that was beautiful.
link |
01:22:55.440
But it's like, nobody heard anything.
link |
01:22:57.920
They just looked at the score.
link |
01:22:59.040
Well, that's how mathematicians and physicists trade papers and ideas is that
link |
01:23:03.280
they, they write down the things that represent stuff.
link |
01:23:07.880
I want to at least close out the thought line that you started, which is how does
link |
01:23:13.840
the canvas order all of this other stuff into being so I at least want to say some
link |
01:23:22.320
incomprehensible things about that.
link |
01:23:23.960
And then we'll, we'll have that much done.
link |
01:23:26.120
All right.
link |
01:23:27.760
And that just point, does it have to be incomprehensible?
link |
01:23:32.520
Do you know what the Schrodinger equation is?
link |
01:23:34.440
Yes.
link |
01:23:35.280
Do you know what the Dirac equation is?
link |
01:23:38.160
What does no mean?
link |
01:23:39.760
Well, my point is you're going to have some feeling that, you know, what the
link |
01:23:42.960
Schrodinger equation is, as soon as we get to the Dirac equation, your eyes are
link |
01:23:47.440
going to get a little bit glazed, right?
link |
01:23:51.360
So now why is that?
link |
01:23:53.520
Well, the answer to me is, is that you, you want to ask me about the theory
link |
01:23:59.920
of everything, but you haven't even digested the theory of everything as
link |
01:24:05.600
we've had it since 1928 when Dirac came out with his equation.
link |
01:24:10.240
So for whatever reason, and this isn't a hit on you, you haven't been motivated
link |
01:24:17.120
enough in all the time that you've been on earth to at least get as far as the
link |
01:24:21.560
Dirac equation.
link |
01:24:22.640
And this was very interesting to me after I gave the talk in Oxford new scientist.
link |
01:24:28.040
Who had done kind of a hatchet job on me to begin with sent a reporter to come to
link |
01:24:32.080
the third version of the talk that I gave.
link |
01:24:34.560
And that person had never heard of the Dirac equation.
link |
01:24:37.200
So you have a person who's completely professionally, not qualified to ask
link |
01:24:43.560
these questions wanting to know, well, how does, how does your theory solve
link |
01:24:49.600
new problems and like, well, in the case of the Dirac equation, well, tell me
link |
01:24:53.120
about that.
link |
01:24:53.400
I don't know what that is.
link |
01:24:54.520
So then the point is, okay, I got it.
link |
01:24:57.560
You're not even caught up minimally to where we are now.
link |
01:25:01.560
And that's not a knock on you.
link |
01:25:03.120
Almost nobody even knows where you are.
link |
01:25:04.960
And that's not a knock on you, almost nobody is.
link |
01:25:08.040
Yeah.
link |
01:25:08.480
But then how does it become my job to digest what has been available
link |
01:25:14.000
for like over 90 years?
link |
01:25:17.840
Well, to me, the open question is whether what's been available for over 90 years
link |
01:25:22.280
can be, um, there could be, uh, a blueprint of a journey that one takes to
link |
01:25:30.000
understand it, not to do that with you.
link |
01:25:32.600
And I, I, one of the things I think I've been relatively successful at, for
link |
01:25:36.560
example, you know, when you ask other people what gauge theory is, you get
link |
01:25:41.720
these very confusing responses and my response is much simpler.
link |
01:25:45.520
It's, oh, it's a theory of, uh, differentiation where when you calculate
link |
01:25:49.800
the instantaneous rise over run, you measure the rise, not from a flat
link |
01:25:54.360
horizontal, but from a custom endogenous reference level.
link |
01:25:58.640
What do you mean by that?
link |
01:25:59.840
It's like, okay.
link |
01:26:00.520
And then I do this thing with Mount Everest, which is Mount Everest is how
link |
01:26:04.280
high then they give the height I say above what then they say sea level.
link |
01:26:07.640
And I say, which sea is that in Nepal?
link |
01:26:10.320
Like, oh, I guess there isn't a sea cause it's landlocked.
link |
01:26:12.400
It's like, okay, well, what do you mean by sea level?
link |
01:26:14.600
Oh, there's this thing called the geoid I'd never heard of.
link |
01:26:17.240
Oh, that's the reference level.
link |
01:26:18.840
That's a custom reference level that we imported.
link |
01:26:22.120
So you, all sorts of people have remembered the exact height of Mount
link |
01:26:27.280
Everest without ever knowing what it's a height from.
link |
01:26:31.840
Well, in this case, engage theory, there's a hidden reference level where
link |
01:26:35.600
you measure the rise in rise over run to give the slope of the line.
link |
01:26:40.880
What if you have different concepts of what, of where that rise should be
link |
01:26:46.560
measured from that vary within the theory that are endogenous to the theory.
link |
01:26:51.040
That's what gauge theory is.
link |
01:26:53.720
Okay.
link |
01:26:54.040
We have a video here, right?
link |
01:26:55.200
Yeah.
link |
01:26:55.680
Okay.
link |
01:26:56.000
Okay.
link |
01:26:57.160
I'm going to use my phone.
link |
01:26:59.280
If I want to measure my hand and its slope, this is my attempt to
link |
01:27:05.000
measure it using standard calculus.
link |
01:27:07.800
In other words, the reference level is apparently flat and I measure the
link |
01:27:11.280
rise above that phone using my hand.
link |
01:27:14.960
Okay.
link |
01:27:15.640
If I want to use gauge theory, it means I can do this or I can do that, or
link |
01:27:20.200
I can do this, or I can do this, or I could do what I did from the beginning.
link |
01:27:24.040
Okay.
link |
01:27:24.480
At some level, that's what gauge theory is.
link |
01:27:27.080
Now that is an act.
link |
01:27:27.880
No, I've never heard anyone describe it that way.
link |
01:27:31.640
So while the community may say, well, who is this guy and why does he
link |
01:27:34.240
have the right to talk in public?
link |
01:27:35.880
I'm waiting for somebody to jump out of the woodwork and say, you know,
link |
01:27:39.960
Eric's whole shtick about rulers and protractors, uh, leading to a derivative.
link |
01:27:44.920
Derivatives are measured as rise over run above reference level.
link |
01:27:47.640
The reference levels don't fit together.
link |
01:27:48.800
Like I go through this whole shtick in order to make it accessible.
link |
01:27:51.680
I've never heard anyone say it.
link |
01:27:54.360
I'm trying to make Prometheus would like to discuss fire with everybody else.
link |
01:28:00.040
All right.
link |
01:28:00.160
I'm going to just say one thing to close out the earlier line, which is what I
link |
01:28:03.800
think we should have continued with.
link |
01:28:05.960
When you take the naturally occurring spinners, the unadorned spinners, the
link |
01:28:10.960
naked spinners, not on this 14 dimensional manifold, but on something very closely
link |
01:28:18.120
tied to it, which I've called the chimeric tangent bundle, that is the object
link |
01:28:24.000
which stands in for the thing that should have had length and angle on it,
link |
01:28:27.560
but just missed.
link |
01:28:28.600
Okay.
link |
01:28:30.440
When you take that object and you form spinners on that and you don't adorn them.
link |
01:28:34.440
So you're still in the single origin story.
link |
01:28:37.600
You get very large spin oriel objects upstairs on this 14 dimensional world.
link |
01:28:43.800
Why 14, which is part of the observers.
link |
01:28:46.520
When you pull that information back from Y 14 down to X four, it miraculously
link |
01:28:56.360
looks like the adorned spinners, the festoon spinners, the spinners that
link |
01:29:03.800
we play with in ordinary reality.
link |
01:29:06.720
In other words, the 14 dimensional world looks like a four dimensional world
link |
01:29:11.400
plus a 10 dimensional compliment.
link |
01:29:13.640
So 10 plus four equals 14, that 10 dimensional compliment, which is called
link |
01:29:17.960
a normal bundle, generates spin properties, internal quantum numbers that look like
link |
01:29:24.360
the things that give our, our particles personality that make let's say up quarks
link |
01:29:30.160
and down quarks charged by negative one third or plus two thirds, you know, that
link |
01:29:36.080
kind of stuff, or whether or not, you know, some quarks feel the weak side.
link |
01:29:42.640
Quarks feel the weak force and other quarks do not.
link |
01:29:46.520
So the X four generates Y 14 Y 14 generates something called the chimeric
link |
01:29:52.600
tangent bundle chimeric tangent bundle generates unadorned spinners.
link |
01:29:56.520
The unadorned spinners get pulled back from 14 down to four where they
link |
01:30:00.760
look like adorned spinners.
link |
01:30:03.200
And we have the right number of them.
link |
01:30:05.200
You thought you needed three.
link |
01:30:06.600
You only got two, but then something else that you'd never seen before
link |
01:30:10.720
broke apart on this journey and it broke into another copy of the thing that you
link |
01:30:15.800
already have two copies of one piece of that thing broke off.
link |
01:30:19.680
So now you have two generations plus an imposter third generation, which is, I
link |
01:30:25.200
don't know why we never talk about this possibility in regular physics.
link |
01:30:28.520
And then you've got a bunch of stuff that we haven't seen, which has descriptions.
link |
01:30:32.080
So people always say, does it make any falsifiable predictions?
link |
01:30:34.800
Yes, it does.
link |
01:30:35.480
It says that the matter that you should be seeing, um, next has particular
link |
01:30:41.120
properties that can be read off like, like a weak ISIS spin, weak hypercharge,
link |
01:30:47.640
like the responsiveness to the strong force.
link |
01:30:50.560
The one I can't tell you is what energy scale it would happen at.
link |
01:30:54.560
So you would, if you can't say if those characteristics can be
link |
01:30:58.760
detected with the current, but it may be that somebody else can.
link |
01:31:02.000
I'm not a physicist.
link |
01:31:02.920
I'm not a quantum field theorist.
link |
01:31:04.640
I can't, I don't know how you would do that.
link |
01:31:07.920
The hope for me is that there's some simple explanations for all of it.
link |
01:31:14.960
Like, should we have a drink?
link |
01:31:17.280
You're having fun.
link |
01:31:18.600
No, I'm trying to have fun with you.
link |
01:31:20.200
You know, there's a bunch of fun things to talk about here.
link |
01:31:26.840
Anyway, that was how I got what I thought you wanted, which is,
link |
01:31:30.680
if you think about the fermions as the artists and the bosons as the brushes
link |
01:31:37.760
and the paint, what I told you is that's how we get the artists.
link |
01:31:43.800
What are the open questions for you in this?
link |
01:31:46.280
What were the challenges?
link |
01:31:48.120
So you're not done.
link |
01:31:49.800
Well, there's, there's things that I would like to have in better order.
link |
01:31:53.600
So a lot of people will say, see, if you're going to do this, you have to
link |
01:31:59.120
say, see, the reason I hesitate on this is I just have a totally different
link |
01:32:03.920
view than the community.
link |
01:32:04.880
So for example, I believe that general relativity began in 1913
link |
01:32:10.640
with Einstein and Grossman.
link |
01:32:13.920
Now that was the first of like four major papers in this line of thinking.
link |
01:32:19.960
To most physicists, general relativity happened when Einstein produced, uh,
link |
01:32:25.800
a divergence free, um, gradient, which turned out to be the gradient of the,
link |
01:32:32.800
of the so called Hilbert or Einstein Hilbert action.
link |
01:32:36.800
And from my perspective, that wasn't true.
link |
01:32:39.400
This is that it began when Einstein said, look, this is about, um, differential
link |
01:32:45.040
geometry and it's the final answer is going to look like a curvature tensor
link |
01:32:50.000
on one side and matter and energy on the other side.
link |
01:32:53.280
And that was enough.
link |
01:32:54.520
And then he published a wrong version of it where it was the Ricci tensor,
link |
01:32:58.640
not the Einstein tensor.
link |
01:32:59.920
Then he corrected the reach, the Ricci tensor to make it into the Einstein
link |
01:33:03.200
tensor, then he corrected that to add a cosmological constant.
link |
01:33:08.600
I can't stand that the community thinks in those terms.
link |
01:33:11.840
There's some things about which, like there's a question about
link |
01:33:15.360
which contraction do I use?
link |
01:33:17.080
There's an Einstein contraction.
link |
01:33:19.120
There's a Ricci contraction.
link |
01:33:20.400
They both go between the same spaces.
link |
01:33:22.240
I'm not sure what I should do.
link |
01:33:23.840
I'm not sure which contraction I should choose.
link |
01:33:26.760
This is called a shiab operator for ship in a bottle and my stuff.
link |
01:33:32.040
You have this big platform in many ways that inspires people's
link |
01:33:39.360
curiosity about physics and mathematics.
link |
01:33:42.160
Right.
link |
01:33:43.920
Now, and I'm one of those people and, but then you start using a lot of words
link |
01:33:50.960
that I don't understand and, or like I might know them, but I don't understand.
link |
01:33:58.400
And what's unclear to me, if I'm supposed to be listening to those words, or if
link |
01:34:03.160
it's just, if this is one of those technical things that's intended for
link |
01:34:08.280
a very small community, or if I'm supposed to actually take those words and start,
link |
01:34:14.280
you know, a multi year study, not, not a serious study, but a, the community
link |
01:34:20.240
study, but the kind of study when you, you're interested in learning about
link |
01:34:24.320
machine learning, for example, or any kind of discipline, that's where
link |
01:34:28.040
I'm a little bit confused.
link |
01:34:29.400
So you've, you've speak beautifully about ideas.
link |
01:34:32.840
You often reveal the beauty in math, in geometry, and I'm unclear in what
link |
01:34:39.960
are the steps I should be taking.
link |
01:34:42.040
I, I'm curious, how can I explore?
link |
01:34:45.640
How can I play with something?
link |
01:34:46.880
How can I play with these ideas?
link |
01:34:48.440
And, and, and enjoy the beauty of not necessarily understanding the
link |
01:34:52.400
depth of the theory that you're presenting, but start to share in the
link |
01:34:56.280
beauty, as opposed to sharing and enjoying the beauty of just the way,
link |
01:35:01.680
the passion with which you speak, which is in itself fun to listen to, but
link |
01:35:08.520
also starting to be able to understand some aspects of this theory that I can
link |
01:35:14.160
enjoy it to, and start to build an intuition, what the heck we're even
link |
01:35:19.520
talking about, because you're basically saying we need to throw a lot of our
link |
01:35:23.240
ideas of, of views of the universe out.
link |
01:35:29.200
And I'm trying to find accessible ways in, not in this conversation.
link |
01:35:36.960
No, I appreciate that.
link |
01:35:37.800
So one of the things that I've done is I've, I've picked on one
link |
01:35:40.600
paragraph from Edward Witten, and I said, this is the paragraph.
link |
01:35:46.480
If I could only take one paragraph with me, this is the one I'd take.
link |
01:35:49.840
And it's almost all in prose, not an equation.
link |
01:35:53.360
And he says, look, this is, this is our knowledge of the
link |
01:35:55.480
universe at its deepest level.
link |
01:35:57.120
And he was writing this during the 1980s.
link |
01:35:59.720
And he has three separate points that constitute our deepest knowledge.
link |
01:36:04.520
And those three points refer to equations, one to the Einstein field
link |
01:36:08.840
equation, one to the Dirac equation, and one to the Yang Mills Maxwell equation.
link |
01:36:14.480
Now, one thing I would do is take a look at that paragraph and say, okay,
link |
01:36:20.760
what do these three lines mean?
link |
01:36:22.920
Like it's a finite amount of verbiage.
link |
01:36:24.560
You can write down every word that you don't know.
link |
01:36:27.720
And you can say, what do I think done now?
link |
01:36:32.680
Young man.
link |
01:36:33.560
Yes.
link |
01:36:33.920
There's a beautiful wall in Stony Brook, New York built by someone
link |
01:36:39.400
who I know you will interview named Jim Simons and Jim Simons.
link |
01:36:45.160
He's not the artist, but he's the guy who funded it.
link |
01:36:47.720
World's greatest hedge fund manager.
link |
01:36:49.720
And on that wall contain the three equations that Witten
link |
01:36:53.360
refers to in that paragraph.
link |
01:36:56.880
And so that is the transmission from the paragraph or graph to the wall.
link |
01:37:01.840
Now that wall needs an owner's manual, which Roger Penrose has written
link |
01:37:07.640
called the road to reality.
link |
01:37:09.400
And let's call that the tome.
link |
01:37:11.480
So this is the subject of the so called graph wall tome project that is going
link |
01:37:17.400
on in our discord server and our general group around the portal community, which
link |
01:37:22.600
is how do you take something that purports in one paragraph to say what the deepest
link |
01:37:28.520
understanding man has of the universe in which he lives, it's memorialized on a
link |
01:37:34.760
wall, which nobody knows about, which is an incredibly gorgeous piece of, uh, of
link |
01:37:40.600
art.
link |
01:37:41.920
And that was written up in a book, which is, has been written for no man.
link |
01:37:47.280
Right.
link |
01:37:47.960
Maybe, maybe it's for a woman.
link |
01:37:48.960
I don't know, but no, no one should be able to read this book because either
link |
01:37:52.920
you're a professional and you know, a lot of this book, in which case it's kind of
link |
01:37:56.560
a refresher to see how Roger thinks about these things, or you don't even know that
link |
01:38:00.880
this book is a self contained, uh, invitation to understanding our deepest
link |
01:38:05.560
nature.
link |
01:38:06.680
So I would say find yourself in the graph wall tome transmission sequence and join
link |
01:38:12.360
the graph wall tome project if that's of interest.
link |
01:38:15.800
Okay.
link |
01:38:16.040
Beautiful.
link |
01:38:17.000
Uh, now just to linger on a little longer, what kind of journey do you
link |
01:38:20.440
see geometric community taking?
link |
01:38:22.640
I don't know.
link |
01:38:23.600
I mean, that's the thing is that.
link |
01:38:25.160
First of all, the professional community has to get very angry and outraged and
link |
01:38:28.280
they have to work through their feeling that this is nonsense.
link |
01:38:31.520
This is bullshit or like, no, wait a minute.
link |
01:38:33.920
This is really cool.
link |
01:38:35.440
Actually, I need some clarification over here.
link |
01:38:37.280
So there's going to be some sort of weird coming back together process.
link |
01:38:41.560
Are you already hearing murmurings of that?
link |
01:38:45.720
It was very funny.
link |
01:38:46.680
Officially I've seen very little.
link |
01:38:50.160
So it's perhaps happening quietly.
link |
01:38:52.040
Yeah.
link |
01:38:52.400
You, you often talk about, we need to get off this planet.
link |
01:38:55.200
Yep.
link |
01:38:57.320
Can I try to sneak up on that by asking what in your kind of view is the
link |
01:39:01.920
difference, the gap between the science of it, the theory and the actual
link |
01:39:07.760
engineering of building something that leverages the theory to do something?
link |
01:39:11.320
Like how big is that?
link |
01:39:12.800
We don't know.
link |
01:39:13.920
Gap.
link |
01:39:14.880
I mean, if you have 10 extra dimensions to play with that are the rules of
link |
01:39:19.320
protractors of the world themselves, can you gain access to those dimensions?
link |
01:39:25.320
Do you have a hunch?
link |
01:39:26.320
So I don't know.
link |
01:39:28.480
I don't want to get ahead of myself because you have to appreciate, I can
link |
01:39:31.840
have hunches and I can, I can jaw off.
link |
01:39:35.360
But one of the ways that I'm succeeding in this world is to not bow down to my
link |
01:39:42.280
professional communities nor to ignore them.
link |
01:39:45.080
Like I'm actually in the middle of a world where I'm not
link |
01:39:47.720
going to ignore them, like I'm actually interested in the criticism.
link |
01:39:50.840
I just want to denature it so that it's not mostly interpersonal and irrelevant.
link |
01:39:58.920
I believe that they don't want me to speculate and I don't
link |
01:40:01.560
need to speculate about this.
link |
01:40:02.960
I can simply say I'm open to the idea that it may have engineering prospects
link |
01:40:08.000
and it may be a death sentence.
link |
01:40:09.480
We may find out that there's not enough new here that even if it were right, that
link |
01:40:15.360
there would be nothing new to do.
link |
01:40:16.360
Can't tell you that's what you mean by death sentences.
link |
01:40:19.640
There would not be exciting breakthroughs.
link |
01:40:21.480
Wouldn't it be terrible if you couldn't, like you can do new things in an
link |
01:40:25.600
Einsteinian world that you couldn't do in a Newtonian world, right?
link |
01:40:29.520
You know, like you have twin paradoxes or Lorentz contraction of length or
link |
01:40:33.200
any one of a number of new cool things happen in relativity theory
link |
01:40:36.800
that didn't happen for Newton.
link |
01:40:38.640
What if there wasn't new stuff to do at the next and final level?
link |
01:40:43.040
Yeah, that would be quite sad.
link |
01:40:47.880
Let me ask a silly question, but we'll say it with a straight face.
link |
01:40:55.480
Impossible.
link |
01:40:57.400
So let me mention Elon Musk.
link |
01:41:01.680
What are your thoughts about he's more, you're more on the physics theory side
link |
01:41:07.680
of things, he's more on the physics engineering side of things in terms of
link |
01:41:11.400
SpaceX efforts, what do you think of his efforts to, uh, get off this planet?
link |
01:41:18.920
Well, I think he's the other guy who's semi serious about getting off this planet.
link |
01:41:26.360
I think there are two of us who are semi serious about getting off the planet.
link |
01:41:29.480
What do you think about his methodology and yours when you look at them?
link |
01:41:33.600
Don't, and I don't want to be against you because like I was so excited that like
link |
01:41:38.480
your top video was Ray Kurzweil and then I did your podcast and we had some
link |
01:41:42.920
chemistry, so it zoomed up and I thought, okay, I'm going to beat Ray Kurzweil.
link |
01:41:46.200
So just as I'm coming up on Ray Kurzweil, you're like, and now Alex Fridman
link |
01:41:50.720
special Elon Musk and he blew me out of the water.
link |
01:41:53.400
So I don't want to be petty about it.
link |
01:41:55.240
I want to say that I don't, but I am.
link |
01:41:58.640
Okay.
link |
01:41:59.000
But here's the funny part.
link |
01:42:00.560
Um, he's not taking enough risk.
link |
01:42:03.840
Like he's trying to get us to Mars.
link |
01:42:05.280
Imagine that he got us to Mars, the moon, and we'll throw in Titan and nowhere
link |
01:42:12.360
good enough, the diversification level is too low.
link |
01:42:15.400
Now there's a compatibility.
link |
01:42:18.280
First of all, I don't think Elon is serious about Mars.
link |
01:42:22.680
I think Elon is using Mars as a, as a narrative, as a story, as a dream to
link |
01:42:29.080
make the moon jealous to make the, uh,
link |
01:42:33.640
uh, I think he's using it as a story to organize us, to reacquaint ourselves
link |
01:42:39.160
with our need for space, our need to get off this planet.
link |
01:42:42.240
It's a concrete thing.
link |
01:42:43.720
He shown that, um, many people think that he's shown that he's the most
link |
01:42:48.800
brilliant and capable person on the planet.
link |
01:42:50.840
I don't think that's what he showed.
link |
01:42:52.120
I think he showed that the rest of us have forgotten our capabilities.
link |
01:42:55.520
And so he's like the only guy who has still kept the faith and is like,
link |
01:42:59.320
what's wrong with you people?
link |
01:43:00.560
So you think the lesson we should draw from Elon Musk is there's, uh, there's
link |
01:43:04.360
a capable person within, within a lot of us, Elon makes sense to me in what way
link |
01:43:10.480
he's doing, what any sensible person should do.
link |
01:43:12.520
He's trying incredible things and he's partially succeeding, partially failing
link |
01:43:17.440
to try to solve the obvious problems before, you know, when he comes up with
link |
01:43:21.640
things like, uh, you know, I got it.
link |
01:43:24.040
We'll come up with a battery company, but batteries aren't sexy.
link |
01:43:26.680
So we'll, we'll make a car around it.
link |
01:43:28.400
It's like, great, you know, or, um, any one of a number of things.
link |
01:43:34.760
Elon is behaving like a sane person and I view everyone else is insane.
link |
01:43:40.200
And my feeling is, is that we really have to get off this planet.
link |
01:43:45.080
We have to get out of this.
link |
01:43:46.080
We have to get out of the neighborhood.
link |
01:43:48.560
To linger on a little bit.
link |
01:43:49.640
Do you think that's a physics problem or an engineering problem?
link |
01:43:54.040
I think it's a cowardice problem.
link |
01:43:55.400
I think that we're afraid that we had 400 hitters of the mind, like Einstein
link |
01:44:01.800
and Dirac and that, that era is done.
link |
01:44:03.880
And now we're just sort of copy editors.
link |
01:44:07.920
So it's some of it money, like if we become brave enough to go outside the
link |
01:44:13.640
solar system, can we afford to financially?
link |
01:44:17.560
Well, I think that that's not really the issue.
link |
01:44:19.840
The issue is look what Elon did well, he amassed a lot of money and then he,
link |
01:44:28.240
you know, he plowed it back in and he spun, spun the wheel and he made more
link |
01:44:31.880
money and now he's got F you money.
link |
01:44:35.000
Now the problem is, is that a lot of the people who have F you money are not
link |
01:44:41.640
people whose middle finger you ever want to see.
link |
01:44:43.800
I want to see Elon's middle finger.
link |
01:44:46.600
I want to see what he's doing by that.
link |
01:44:47.960
Or like when you say, fuck it, I'm going to do the biggest possible.
link |
01:44:50.800
Do whatever the fuck you want, right?
link |
01:44:53.280
Fuck you.
link |
01:44:54.080
Fuck anything that gets in his way that he can afford to push out of his way.
link |
01:44:57.480
And you're saying he's not actually even doing that enough.
link |
01:45:00.280
No, I'm he's not going, please.
link |
01:45:02.440
I'm going to go.
link |
01:45:03.360
Elon's doing fine with his money.
link |
01:45:05.240
I just want him to enjoy himself, have the most, you know, Dionysian, but
link |
01:45:11.000
you're saying Mars is playing it safe.
link |
01:45:14.480
He doesn't know how to do anything else.
link |
01:45:15.800
He knows rockets and he might know some physics at a fundamental level.
link |
01:45:25.120
Yeah.
link |
01:45:25.640
I guess, okay, just, let me just go right back to how much physics do you really,
link |
01:45:30.520
how much brilliant breakthrough ideas on the physics side do you
link |
01:45:34.400
need to get off this planet?
link |
01:45:37.480
I don't know.
link |
01:45:38.400
And I don't know whether like in my most optimistic dream, I don't know
link |
01:45:41.520
whether my stuff gets us out of this.
link |
01:45:42.920
Like in my most optimistic dream, I don't know whether my stuff gets us off the
link |
01:45:46.080
planet, but it's hope it's hope that there's a more fundamental theory that
link |
01:45:51.200
we can access that we don't need.
link |
01:45:54.120
Um, you know, whose elegance and beauty will suggest that this is probably
link |
01:46:00.040
the way the universe goes.
link |
01:46:01.400
Like you have to say this weird thing, which is this, I believe, and this,
link |
01:46:06.160
I believe is a very dangerous statement, but this, I believe, I believe that my
link |
01:46:11.560
theory, um, points the way now, Elon might or might not be able to access my
link |
01:46:18.280
theory.
link |
01:46:18.680
I don't know.
link |
01:46:19.200
I don't know what he knows, but keep in mind, why are we all so focused on Elon?
link |
01:46:25.720
It's really weird.
link |
01:46:26.640
It's kind of creepy too.
link |
01:46:28.320
Why he's just the person who's just asking the, the obvious questions
link |
01:46:32.240
and doing whatever he can, but he makes sense to me.
link |
01:46:35.040
You see Craig Venter makes sense to me.
link |
01:46:37.080
Jim Watson makes sense to me, but we're focusing on Elon.
link |
01:46:41.000
Because he's, he's somehow is rare.
link |
01:46:44.160
Well, that's the weird thing.
link |
01:46:45.560
Like we've come up with a system that eliminates all Elon from our pipeline
link |
01:46:51.280
and Elon somehow, uh, snuck through when they weren't quality adjusting
link |
01:46:56.600
everything, you know?
link |
01:46:57.840
And this, this idea of, uh, of disc, right?
link |
01:47:02.200
Distributed idea suppression complex.
link |
01:47:04.480
Yeah.
link |
01:47:04.880
Is that what's bringing the Elans of the world down?
link |
01:47:09.520
You know, it's so funny.
link |
01:47:10.320
It's like, he's asking Joe Rogan, like, is that a joint, you know, it's like,
link |
01:47:14.520
well, what, what will happen if I smoke it?
link |
01:47:16.240
What will happen to the stock price?
link |
01:47:17.920
What will happen if I scratch myself in public?
link |
01:47:20.840
What will happen if I say what I think about Thailand or COVID or who knows what?
link |
01:47:26.800
And everybody's like, don't say that, say this, go do this, go do that.
link |
01:47:30.400
Well, it's crazy making, it's absolutely crazy making.
link |
01:47:34.440
And if you think about what we put through people through, um, we, we
link |
01:47:41.240
need to get people who can use FU money, the FU money they need to insulate
link |
01:47:46.840
themselves from all of the people who know better, because the, the, my
link |
01:47:51.720
nightmare is, is that why did we only get one Elon?
link |
01:47:55.640
What if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of Elans?
link |
01:47:59.080
And the weird thing is like, this is all that remains you're, you're looking
link |
01:48:03.400
at like OB one and Yoda, and it's like, this is the only, this is all that's
link |
01:48:09.240
left after X, uh, order 66 has been executed.
link |
01:48:14.320
And that's the thing that's really upsetting to me is we used, we
link |
01:48:16.720
used to have Elon's five deep.
link |
01:48:18.600
And then we could talk about Elon in the context of his cohort.
link |
01:48:23.400
But this is like, if you were to see a giraffe in the Arctic with no
link |
01:48:27.320
trees around, you'd think why the long neck, what a strange sight, you know?
link |
01:48:32.200
You know, how do we get more Elans?
link |
01:48:35.880
How do we change these?
link |
01:48:37.000
So I think the use, so we know MIT and Harvard, so maybe returning to our
link |
01:48:44.520
previous conversation, my sense is that the Elans of the world are supposed
link |
01:48:48.800
to come from MIT and Harvard, right?
link |
01:48:51.240
And how do you change?
link |
01:48:53.160
Let's think of one that MIT sort of killed.
link |
01:48:57.480
Have any names in mind?
link |
01:48:58.600
Aaron Schwartz leaps to my mind.
link |
01:49:01.440
Yeah.
link |
01:49:01.920
Okay.
link |
01:49:02.600
Are we MIT supposed to shield the Aaron Schwartz's from, I don't know, journal
link |
01:49:11.720
publishers, or are we supposed to help the journal publishers so that we can
link |
01:49:15.640
throw 35 year sentences in his face or whatever it is that we did that depressed
link |
01:49:19.840
him? Okay.
link |
01:49:21.000
So here's my point.
link |
01:49:22.080
Yeah.
link |
01:49:22.400
I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz, and if you want to
link |
01:49:29.240
send Aaron Schwartz to a state where he's looking at 35 years in prison or
link |
01:49:36.440
something like that, you are my sworn enemy.
link |
01:49:39.560
You are not MIT.
link |
01:49:41.800
Yeah.
link |
01:49:42.040
You are the traitors, uh, irresponsible, middle brow, pencil pushing green
link |
01:49:53.920
eyeshade fool that needs to not be in the seat at the, at the presidency of MIT
link |
01:49:59.160
period, the end, get the fuck out of there and let one of our people sit in that
link |
01:50:03.360
chair.
link |
01:50:04.080
And the thing that you've articulated is that the people in those chairs are not
link |
01:50:10.160
the way they are because they're evil or somehow morally compromised is that it's
link |
01:50:15.240
just the, that's the distributed nature is that there's some kind of aspect of
link |
01:50:19.280
the system that people who wed themselves to the system, they adapt every instinct.
link |
01:50:25.600
And the fact is, is that they're not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt.
link |
01:50:32.120
Let me ask a silly question.
link |
01:50:33.280
Do you think institutions generally just tend to become that?
link |
01:50:38.000
No.
link |
01:50:38.400
We get some of the institutions, we get Caltech.
link |
01:50:41.920
Here's what we're supposed to have.
link |
01:50:42.960
We're supposed to have Caltech.
link |
01:50:44.320
We're supposed to have a read.
link |
01:50:46.360
We're supposed to have deep springs.
link |
01:50:49.520
We're supposed to have MIT.
link |
01:50:50.760
We're supposed to have a part of Harvard.
link |
01:50:54.040
And when the sharp elbow crowd comes after the shelf, sharp, uh, mind crowd,
link |
01:50:58.200
we're supposed to break those sharp elbows and say, don't come around here
link |
01:51:01.840
again.
link |
01:51:02.400
So what are the weapons that the sharp minds are supposed to use in our modern
link |
01:51:06.320
day?
link |
01:51:06.680
So to reclaim MIT, what, what is the, what's the future?
link |
01:51:11.160
Are you kidding me?
link |
01:51:12.480
First of all, assume that this is being seen at MIT.
link |
01:51:15.920
Hey everybody is okay.
link |
01:51:18.640
Hey everybody, try to remember who you are.
link |
01:51:22.240
You're the guys who put the police car on top of the great dump.
link |
01:51:25.680
You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge.
link |
01:51:28.120
You created a Tetris game in the green building.
link |
01:51:31.360
Now, what is your problem?
link |
01:51:33.920
Is your problem they killed one of your own.
link |
01:51:37.440
You should make their life a living hell.
link |
01:51:40.960
You should be the ones who keep the mayor memory of Aaron Schwartz alive and all
link |
01:51:45.720
of those hackers and all of those mutants, you know,
link |
01:51:50.360
it's like it's either our place or it isn't.
link |
01:51:54.160
And if we have to throw 12 more pianos off of the
link |
01:51:58.760
roof, right?
link |
01:52:01.040
If Harold Edgerton was taking those photographs, you know,
link |
01:52:06.240
uh, with slow mo back in the forties,
link |
01:52:10.520
if Noam Chomsky is on your faculty,
link |
01:52:13.800
what the hell is wrong with you kids?
link |
01:52:16.120
You are the most creative and insightful people and you can't figure out how to
link |
01:52:19.880
defend Aaron Schwartz. That's on you guys.
link |
01:52:22.560
So some of that is giving more power to the young, like you said,
link |
01:52:25.880
no, it's taking power from taking power from the feeble and the middle
link |
01:52:30.200
Brown. Yeah. But how do you, what is the mechanism to me?
link |
01:52:32.920
I don't know. You, you have some nine volt batteries, copper wire.
link |
01:52:38.200
I, uh, I tend to, do you have a capacitor?
link |
01:52:41.720
I tend to believe you have to create an alternative and, uh,
link |
01:52:46.440
make the alternative so much better that it makes MIT obsolete unless
link |
01:52:51.400
they change. And that's what forces change. So as opposed to somehow,
link |
01:52:56.280
okay, so use projection mapping, what's projection mapping,
link |
01:53:00.240
where you take some complicated edifice and you map all of its planes.
link |
01:53:04.240
And then you actually project some unbelievable graphics,
link |
01:53:07.160
re skinning a building, let's say at night. That's right. Yeah. Okay.
link |
01:53:10.120
So you want to do some graffiti art with like basically want to hack the system.
link |
01:53:13.600
No, I'm saying, look, listen to me. Yeah. We're smarter than they are.
link |
01:53:18.600
And they, you know what they say? They say things like,
link |
01:53:21.240
okay, I think we need some geeks. Get me two PhDs.
link |
01:53:26.600
Right. You treat PhDs like that. That's a bad move.
link |
01:53:31.200
Because PhDs are capable and we act like our job is to peel
link |
01:53:35.800
grapes for our betters.
link |
01:53:37.600
Yeah. That's a strange thing. And I,
link |
01:53:39.120
I you speak about it very eloquently is how we treat basically
link |
01:53:43.800
the greatest minds in the world, which is like at their prime,
link |
01:53:48.520
which is PhD students like that. We pay them nothing.
link |
01:53:54.160
Uh, I'm done with it. Yeah. Right. We got to take what's ours.
link |
01:53:58.840
So, so take back MIT, become ungovernable,
link |
01:54:04.040
become ungovernable. And by the way, when you become ungovernable,
link |
01:54:08.920
don't do it by throwing food.
link |
01:54:12.400
Don't do it by pouring salt on the lawn, like a jerk,
link |
01:54:15.360
do it through brilliance, because what you Caltech and MIT can do,
link |
01:54:19.720
and maybe Rensselaer Polytechnic or Worcester Polytech, I don't know.
link |
01:54:23.760
Lehigh. God damn it. What's wrong with you technical people?
link |
01:54:27.440
You act like you're a servant class.
link |
01:54:30.400
It's unclear to me how you reclaim it except with brilliance,
link |
01:54:33.800
like you said. Uh,
link |
01:54:35.480
but to me that the way you reclaim it with brilliance is to go outside the
link |
01:54:39.000
system.
link |
01:54:39.440
Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class.
link |
01:54:42.200
What are you guys going to do about it? Right.
link |
01:54:44.920
The super capable people need to flex,
link |
01:54:49.960
need to be individual. They need to stop giving away all their power to,
link |
01:54:53.160
you know, a zeitgeist or a community or this or that you're not,
link |
01:54:56.840
you're not indoor cats. You're outdoor cats. Go be outdoor cats.
link |
01:54:59.800
Do you think we're going to see this, this kind of one asking me, you know,
link |
01:55:03.400
before, like what about the world war II generation? Right.
link |
01:55:06.280
Oh,
link |
01:55:06.400
and I'm trying to say is that there's a technical revolt coming here's you want
link |
01:55:10.520
to talk about it, but I'm trying to lead it. I'm trying to see,
link |
01:55:13.360
no, you're not trying to lead it. I'm trying to get a blueprint here.
link |
01:55:15.680
All right, Lex. Yeah.
link |
01:55:17.120
How angry are you about our country pretending that you and I can't actually do
link |
01:55:22.480
technical subjects so that they need an army of, uh,
link |
01:55:26.040
kids coming in from four countries in Asia.
link |
01:55:29.160
It's not about the four countries in Asia. It's not about those kids.
link |
01:55:32.640
It's about lying about us that we don't care enough about science and
link |
01:55:35.840
technology that we're incapable of it as if we don't have Chinese and Russians
link |
01:55:40.840
and Russians and Koreans and Croatians. Like we've got everybody here.
link |
01:55:46.360
The only reason you're looking outside is,
link |
01:55:48.600
is that you want to hire cheap people from the family business because you don't
link |
01:55:52.160
want to pass the family business on. And you know what?
link |
01:55:56.120
You didn't really build the family business. It's not yours to decide.
link |
01:56:00.400
You the boomers and you the silent generation, you did your bit,
link |
01:56:03.840
but you also fouled a lot of stuff up and you're custodians.
link |
01:56:07.600
You are caretakers. You were supposed to hand something.
link |
01:56:11.320
What you did instead was to gorge yourself on cheap foreign labor,
link |
01:56:16.560
which you then held up as being much more brilliant than your own children,
link |
01:56:20.400
which was never true.
link |
01:56:22.720
But I'm trying to understand how we create a better system without anger,
link |
01:56:26.120
without revolution, not, not,
link |
01:56:28.680
not by kissing and hugs and, and,
link |
01:56:32.320
but by any,
link |
01:56:35.000
I don't understand within MIT what the mechanism of building a better MIT is.
link |
01:56:39.800
We're not going to pay Elsevier. Aaron Schwartz was right.
link |
01:56:42.840
JSTOR is an abomination.
link |
01:56:45.400
But why, who within MIT, who within institutions is going to do that?
link |
01:56:50.080
When just like you said,
link |
01:56:51.920
the people who are running the show are more senior.
link |
01:56:54.800
I don't know, get Frank Wilczek to speak out.
link |
01:56:58.320
So you're, it's basically individuals that step up. I mean,
link |
01:57:01.040
one of the surprising things about Elon is that one person can inspire so
link |
01:57:05.920
much.
link |
01:57:06.560
He's got academic freedom. It just comes from money.
link |
01:57:10.760
I don't agree with that. That you think money. Okay.
link |
01:57:15.160
So yes, certainly. Sorry.
link |
01:57:19.160
And testicles. Yes.
link |
01:57:20.800
I think that testicles are more important than money or guts.
link |
01:57:25.200
I think I do agree with you.
link |
01:57:27.240
You speak about this a lot that because the money in academic institutions
link |
01:57:30.960
has been so constrained that people are misbehaving and horrible.
link |
01:57:35.760
Yes.
link |
01:57:36.440
But I don't think that if we reverse that and give a huge amount of money,
link |
01:57:40.960
people will all of a sudden behave well. I think it also takes guts.
link |
01:57:43.720
No, you need to give people security. Security. Yes.
link |
01:57:46.600
Like you need to know that you have a job on Monday when on
link |
01:57:51.360
Friday you say, I'm not so sure I really love diversity and inclusion.
link |
01:57:56.040
And somebody is like, wait, what? You didn't love diversity?
link |
01:57:59.320
We had a statement on diversity and you wouldn't sign.
link |
01:58:02.040
Are you against the inclusion part or are you against diverse?
link |
01:58:05.040
Do you just not like people like you?
link |
01:58:06.960
Like actually that has nothing to do with anything.
link |
01:58:09.920
You're making this into something that it isn't.
link |
01:58:11.960
I don't want to sign your goddamn stupid statement and get out of my lab,
link |
01:58:16.200
right? Get out of my lab. It all begins from the middle finger.
link |
01:58:19.840
Get out of my lab. The administrators need to find other
link |
01:58:24.720
work.
link |
01:58:25.560
Yeah. Listen, I agree with you and I hope to seek your advice
link |
01:58:30.880
and wisdom as we change this, because I'd love to see...
link |
01:58:35.760
I will visit you in prison if that's what you're asking.
link |
01:58:38.240
I have no... I think prison is great.
link |
01:58:41.840
You get a lot of reading done and good working out.
link |
01:58:45.800
Well, let me ask something I brought up before is the Nietzsche quote
link |
01:58:52.040
of beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
link |
01:58:56.640
For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
link |
01:59:01.000
Are you worried that your focus on the flaws in the system
link |
01:59:05.240
that we've just been talking about has damaged your mind
link |
01:59:09.280
or the part of your mind that's able to see the beauty in the world
link |
01:59:13.360
in the system that because you have so sharply been able to see
link |
01:59:20.440
the flaws in the system, you can no longer step back and appreciate its beauty?
link |
01:59:25.840
Look, I'm the one who's trying to get the institutions to save themselves
link |
01:59:31.160
by getting rid of their inhabitants, but leaving the institution
link |
01:59:34.560
like a neutron bomb that removes the unworkable leadership class,
link |
01:59:40.800
but leaves the structures.
link |
01:59:42.400
So the leadership class is really the problem.
link |
01:59:45.240
The leadership class is the problem.
link |
01:59:46.680
But the individual, like the professors, the individual scholars...
link |
01:59:48.760
No, the professors are going to have to go back into training
link |
01:59:52.120
to remember how to be professors.
link |
01:59:54.760
Like people are cowards at the moment because if they're not cowards,
link |
01:59:58.000
they're unemployed.
link |
02:00:00.240
Yeah, that's one of the disappointing things I've encountered is to me, tenure...
link |
02:00:06.520
But nobody has tenure now.
link |
02:00:10.520
Whether they do or not, they certainly don't have the kind of character
link |
02:00:19.200
and fortitude that I was hoping to see.
link |
02:00:22.880
But they'd be gone.
link |
02:00:25.400
See, you're dreaming about the people who used to live at MIT.
link |
02:00:33.120
You're dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university.
link |
02:00:37.200
And if you looked at somebody like, you know, Isidore Singer is very old.
link |
02:00:42.080
I don't know what state he's in, but that guy was absolutely the real deal.
link |
02:00:46.560
And if you look at Noam Chomsky, tell me that Noam Chomsky has been muzzled.
link |
02:00:51.600
Right?
link |
02:00:52.120
Yeah.
link |
02:00:53.080
Now, what I'm trying to get at is you're talking about younger energetic people,
link |
02:00:58.120
but those people...
link |
02:00:59.040
Like when I say something like, I'm against...
link |
02:01:02.440
I'm for inclusion and I'm for diversity, but I'm against diversity and inclusion TM,
link |
02:01:09.880
like the movement.
link |
02:01:12.400
Well, I couldn't say that if I was a professor.
link |
02:01:16.360
Oh my God, he's against our sacred document.
link |
02:01:18.840
Okay.
link |
02:01:19.240
Well, in that kind of a world, do you want to know how many things I don't agree with you on?
link |
02:01:24.480
Like we could go on for days and days and days, all the nonsense that you've parroted inside of the institution.
link |
02:01:30.840
Any sane person like has no need for it.
link |
02:01:33.280
They have no want or desire.
link |
02:01:37.560
Do you think you have to have some patience for nonsense when many people work together in a system?
link |
02:01:44.240
How long has string theory gone on for?
link |
02:01:45.920
And how long have I been patient?
link |
02:01:48.200
Okay.
link |
02:01:48.400
So you're talking about...
link |
02:01:49.040
There's a limit to patience.
link |
02:01:50.280
You're talking about like 36 years of modern nonsense and string theory.
link |
02:01:54.960
So you can do like eight to 10 years, but not more.
link |
02:01:57.800
I can do 40 minutes.
link |
02:02:01.440
This is 36 years.
link |
02:02:02.200
Well, you've done that over two hours already.
link |
02:02:03.880
No, but I appreciate it.
link |
02:02:05.320
But it's been 36 years of nonsense since the anomaly cancellation in string theory.
link |
02:02:11.000
It's like, what are you talking about about patience?
link |
02:02:13.800
I mean, Lex, you're not even acting like yourself.
link |
02:02:18.680
You're trying to stay in the system.
link |
02:02:20.560
I'm not trying...
link |
02:02:22.120
I'm trying to see if perhaps... So my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it,
link |
02:02:29.640
which you highlight, and the fundamentals of the system are broken.
link |
02:02:35.640
Because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken, then I just don't see a way for MIT to succeed.
link |
02:02:42.840
Like, I don't see how young people take over MIT.
link |
02:02:47.320
I don't see how...
link |
02:02:49.960
By inspiring us.
link |
02:02:52.440
You know, the great part about being at MIT, like when you saw the genius in these pranks,
link |
02:02:59.160
the heart, the irreverence, it's like, don't...
link |
02:03:03.320
We were talking about Tom Lehrer the last time.
link |
02:03:05.640
Tom Lehrer was as naughty as the day is long.
link |
02:03:08.560
Agreed?
link |
02:03:09.280
Agreed.
link |
02:03:10.160
Was he also a genius?
link |
02:03:11.680
Was he well spoken?
link |
02:03:12.680
Was he highly cultured?
link |
02:03:14.840
He was so talented, so intellectual that he could just make fart jokes morning,
link |
02:03:19.040
noon and night.
link |
02:03:20.280
Okay.
link |
02:03:21.280
Well, in part, the right to make fart jokes, the right to, for example, put a functioning
link |
02:03:26.280
phone booth that was ringing on top of the great dome at MIT has to do with we are such
link |
02:03:31.520
bad asses that we can actually do this stuff.
link |
02:03:34.760
Well, don't tell me about it anymore.
link |
02:03:36.640
Go break the law.
link |
02:03:38.640
Go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not want to prosecute you.
link |
02:03:43.600
Break the law in a way that lets us know that you're calling us out on our bullshit, that
link |
02:03:48.040
you're filled with love, and that our technical talent has not gone to sleep, it's not incapable.
link |
02:03:56.480
And if the idea is that you're going to dig a moat around the university and fill it with
link |
02:04:00.800
tiger sharks, that's awesome because I don't know how you're going to do it.
link |
02:04:06.120
But if you actually manage to do that, I'm not going to prosecute you under a reckless
link |
02:04:10.800
endangerment.
link |
02:04:13.320
That's beautifully put.
link |
02:04:15.000
I hope those, first of all, they'll listen, I hope young people at MIT will take over
link |
02:04:19.760
in this kind of way.
link |
02:04:22.160
In the introduction to your podcast episode on Jeffrey Epstein, you give to me a really
link |
02:04:29.780
moving story, but unfortunately for me, too brief, about your experience with a therapist
link |
02:04:37.020
and a lasting terror that permeated your mind.
link |
02:04:40.440
Can you go there, can you tell?
link |
02:04:45.160
I don't think so.
link |
02:04:46.160
I mean, I appreciate what you're saying.
link |
02:04:47.720
I said it obliquely, I said enough.
link |
02:04:51.920
There are bad people who cross our paths and the current vogue is to say, oh, I'm a survivor,
link |
02:05:00.280
I'm a victim, I can do anything I want.
link |
02:05:05.660
This is a broken person and I don't know why I was sent to a broken person as a kid.
link |
02:05:11.200
And to be honest with you, I also felt like in that story, I say that I was able to say
link |
02:05:15.520
no and this was like the entire weight of authority and he was misusing his position
link |
02:05:23.440
and I was also able to say no.
link |
02:05:28.160
What I couldn't say no to was having him re inflicted in my life.
link |
02:05:32.680
Right, so you were sent back a second time.
link |
02:05:36.160
I tried to complain about what had happened and I tried to do it in a way that did not
link |
02:05:42.040
immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself because we don't
link |
02:05:48.440
have the tools to deal with sexual misbehavior.
link |
02:05:55.400
We have nuclear weapons, we don't have any way of saying this is probably not a good
link |
02:06:01.840
place or a role for you at this moment as an authority figure and something needs to
link |
02:06:07.760
be worked on.
link |
02:06:08.800
So in general, when we see somebody who is misbehaving in that way, our immediate instinct
link |
02:06:15.960
is to treat the person as Satan and we understand why.
link |
02:06:23.040
We don't want our children to be at risk.
link |
02:06:28.080
Now I personally believe that I fell down on the job and did not call out the Jeffrey
link |
02:06:33.480
Epstein thing early enough because I was terrified of what Jeffrey Epstein represents and this
link |
02:06:38.240
recapitulated the old terror trying to tell the world this therapist is out of control.
link |
02:06:45.200
And when I said that, the world responded by saying, well, you have two appointments
link |
02:06:50.040
booked and you have to go for the second one.
link |
02:06:52.520
So I got re inflicted into this office on this person who was now convinced that I was
link |
02:06:57.640
about to tear down his career and his reputation and might have been on the verge of suicide
link |
02:07:01.160
for all I know.
link |
02:07:02.160
I don't know.
link |
02:07:03.160
But he was very, very angry and he was furious with me that I had breached a sacred confidence
link |
02:07:08.400
of his office.
link |
02:07:11.200
What kind of ripple effects does that have?
link |
02:07:13.600
Has that had to the rest of your life?
link |
02:07:16.400
The absurdity and the cruelty of that?
link |
02:07:19.480
I mean, there's no sense to it.
link |
02:07:22.560
Well, see, this is the thing people don't really grasp, I think there's an academic
link |
02:07:30.240
who I got to know many years ago, um, named Jennifer fried, who has a theory of betrayal,
link |
02:07:39.200
which she calls institutional betrayal.
link |
02:07:41.400
And her gambit is, is that when you were betrayed by an institution that is sort of like a fiduciary
link |
02:07:47.320
or a parental obligation to take care of you, that you find yourself in a far different
link |
02:07:54.760
situation with respect to trauma than if you were betrayed by somebody who's a peer.
link |
02:08:02.480
And so I think that my, in my situation, um, I kind of repeat a particular dynamic with
link |
02:08:12.880
authority.
link |
02:08:13.880
I come in not following all the rules, trying to do some things, not trying to do others,
link |
02:08:20.400
blah, blah, blah.
link |
02:08:21.680
And then I get into a weird relationship with authority.
link |
02:08:25.560
And so I have more experience with what I would call institutional betrayal.
link |
02:08:29.840
Now, the funny part about it is that when you don't have masks or PPE in a influenza
link |
02:08:38.200
like pandemic and you missing ICU beds and ventilators, that is ubiquitous institutional
link |
02:08:45.520
betrayal.
link |
02:08:46.920
So I believe that in a weird way, I was very early, the idea of, and this is like the really
link |
02:08:53.200
hard concept pervasive or otherwise universal institutional betrayal where all of the institutions
link |
02:09:01.080
you can count on any hospital to not charge you properly for what their services are.
link |
02:09:06.940
You can count on no pharmaceutical company to produce the drug that will be maximally
link |
02:09:11.480
beneficial to the people who take it.
link |
02:09:14.560
You know that your financial professionals are not simply working in your best interest.
link |
02:09:19.880
And that issue had to do with the way in which growth left our system.
link |
02:09:25.280
So I think that the weird thing is, is that this first institutional betrayal by a therapist
link |
02:09:30.560
left me very open to the idea of, okay, well maybe the schools are bad.
link |
02:09:34.620
Maybe the hospitals are bad.
link |
02:09:35.880
Maybe the drug companies are bad.
link |
02:09:37.240
Maybe our food is off.
link |
02:09:39.080
Maybe our journalists are not serving journalistic ends.
link |
02:09:42.180
And that was what allowed me to sort of go all the distance and say, huh, I wonder if
link |
02:09:47.600
our problem is that something is causing all of our sensemaking institutions to be off.
link |
02:09:54.260
That was the big insight and that tying that to a single ideology.
link |
02:09:59.360
What if it's just about growth?
link |
02:10:00.680
They were all built on growth and now we've promoted people who are capable of keeping
link |
02:10:05.600
quiet that their institutions aren't working.
link |
02:10:08.720
So we've, the privileged silent aristocracy, the people who can be counted upon, not to
link |
02:10:15.300
mention a fire when a raging fire is tearing through a building.
link |
02:10:20.680
But nevertheless, it's how big of a psychological burden is that?
link |
02:10:25.280
It's huge.
link |
02:10:26.560
It's terrible.
link |
02:10:27.560
It's crushing.
link |
02:10:28.560
It's very, it's very comforting to be the parental, I mean, I don't know.
link |
02:10:34.280
I treasure, I mean, we were just talking about MIT.
link |
02:10:38.480
We can, until I can intellectualize and agree with everything you're saying, but there's
link |
02:10:42.600
a comfort, a warm blanket of being within the institution and up until Aaron Schwartz,
link |
02:10:49.680
let's say, in other words, now, if I look at the provost and the president as mommy
link |
02:10:54.880
and daddy, you did what to my big brother?
link |
02:11:00.580
You did what to our family?
link |
02:11:03.540
You sold us out in which way?
link |
02:11:06.860
What secrets left for China?
link |
02:11:09.000
You hired which workforce?
link |
02:11:10.800
You did what to my wages?
link |
02:11:13.180
You took this portion of my grant for what purpose?
link |
02:11:15.700
You just stole my retirement through a fringe rate.
link |
02:11:18.560
What did you do?
link |
02:11:19.820
But can you still, I mean, the thing is about this view you have is it often turns out to
link |
02:11:26.760
be sadly correct.
link |
02:11:27.760
Well, this is the thing.
link |
02:11:29.880
But let me just, in this silly, hopeful thing, do you still have hope in institutions?
link |
02:11:37.000
Can you within your, psychologically, I'm referring not intellectually, because you
link |
02:11:42.560
have to carry this burden, can you still have a hope within you?
link |
02:11:47.480
When you sit at home alone and as opposed to seeing the darkness within these institutions,
link |
02:11:53.320
seeing a hope.
link |
02:11:54.320
Well, but this is the thing.
link |
02:11:55.760
I want to confront, not for the purpose of a dust up.
link |
02:12:02.240
I believe, for example, if you've heard episode 19, that the best outcome is for Carol Greider
link |
02:12:09.000
to come forward, as we discussed in episode 19, and say, you know what, I screwed up.
link |
02:12:17.760
He did call.
link |
02:12:18.760
He did suggest the experiment.
link |
02:12:20.920
I didn't understand that it was his theory that was producing it.
link |
02:12:24.380
I was slow to grasp it.
link |
02:12:27.480
But my bad.
link |
02:12:30.120
And I don't want to pay for this bad choice on my part, let's say.
link |
02:12:38.480
For the rest of my career, I want to own up, and I want to help make sure that we do what's
link |
02:12:44.000
right with what's left.
link |
02:12:45.280
And that's one little case within the institution that you would like to see made.
link |
02:12:48.680
I would like to see MIT very clearly come out and say, Margot O'Toole was right when
link |
02:12:54.560
she said David Baltimore's lab here produced some stuff that was not reproducible with
link |
02:13:02.920
Teresa Imanishi Kari's research.
link |
02:13:05.600
I want to see the courageous people.
link |
02:13:08.760
I would like to see the Aaron Schwartz wing of the computer science department.
link |
02:13:14.600
Yeah, wouldn't, no, let's think about it.
link |
02:13:17.640
Wouldn't that be great if we said, you know, an injustice was done and we're going to write
link |
02:13:22.200
that wrong just as if this was Alan Turing?
link |
02:13:26.660
Which I don't think they've righted that wrong.
link |
02:13:28.940
Well then let's have the Turing Schwartz wing.
link |
02:13:33.160
They're starting a new college of computing.
link |
02:13:34.920
It wouldn't be wonderful to call it the Turing Schwartz wing.
link |
02:13:37.280
I would like to have the Madame Wu wing of the physics department.
link |
02:13:41.080
And I'd love to have the Emmy Nerder statue in front of the math department.
link |
02:13:45.480
I mean, like you want to get excited about actual diversity and inclusion?
link |
02:13:48.920
Yeah.
link |
02:13:49.920
Well, let's go with our absolute best people who never got theirs because there is structural
link |
02:13:53.880
bigotry, you know?
link |
02:13:56.100
But if we don't actually start celebrating the beautiful stuff that we're capable of
link |
02:14:00.800
when we're handed heroes and we fumble them into the trash, what the hell?
link |
02:14:05.320
I mean, Lex, this is such nonsense.
link |
02:14:10.280
We just pulling our head out.
link |
02:14:16.080
You know, on everyone's cecum should be tattooed, if you can read this, you're too close.
link |
02:14:25.840
Beautifully put and I'm a dreamer just like you.
link |
02:14:30.680
So I don't see as much of the darkness genetically or due to my life experience, but I do share
link |
02:14:38.820
the hope.
link |
02:14:39.820
From my teeth, the institution that we care a lot about.
link |
02:14:42.640
You both do.
link |
02:14:43.640
Yeah.
link |
02:14:44.640
And a Harvard institution I don't give a damn about, but you do.
link |
02:14:48.040
So I love Harvard.
link |
02:14:49.040
I'm just kidding.
link |
02:14:50.040
I love Harvard, but Harvard and I have a very difficult relationship.
link |
02:14:53.520
And part of what, you know, when you love a family that isn't working, I don't want
link |
02:14:58.400
to trash.
link |
02:14:59.400
I didn't bring up the name of the president of MIT during the Aaron Schwartz period.
link |
02:15:05.080
It's not vengeance.
link |
02:15:06.600
I want the rot cleared out.
link |
02:15:09.000
I don't need to go after human beings.
link |
02:15:11.840
Yeah.
link |
02:15:12.840
Just like you said with the, with the disc formulation, the individual human beings aren't
link |
02:15:19.080
don't necessarily carry them.
link |
02:15:22.960
It's those chairs that are so powerful that in which they sit.
link |
02:15:26.640
It's the chairs, not the humans, not the humans without naming names.
link |
02:15:34.240
Can you tell the story of your struggle during your time at Harvard, maybe in a way that
link |
02:15:41.140
tells the bigger story of the struggle of young bright minds that are trying to come
link |
02:15:47.440
up with big, bold ideas within the institutions that we're talking about?
link |
02:15:54.360
You can start.
link |
02:15:55.360
I mean, in part, uh, it starts with, uh, coffee with, uh, a couple, uh, of Croatians in the
link |
02:16:06.520
math department at MIT.
link |
02:16:09.680
And, um, we used to talk about, um, music and dance and math and physics and love and
link |
02:16:17.560
all this kind of stuff as Eastern Europeans, uh, love to, and I ate it up and my friend
link |
02:16:24.960
Gordon, uh, who was, uh, an instructor in the MIT math department when I was a graduate
link |
02:16:30.280
student at Harvard said to me, I'm probably gonna do a bad version of her accent, but
link |
02:16:36.440
here we go.
link |
02:16:37.440
It, um, will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar?
link |
02:16:42.560
And I said, w what secret seminar, Eric, don't joke.
link |
02:16:48.920
I said, I'm not used to this style of humor.
link |
02:16:52.880
Then she's Eric, the secret seminar that your advisor is running.
link |
02:16:57.840
I said, what are you talking about?
link |
02:17:00.960
Ha ha ha, uh, you know, your advisor is running a secret seminar on this aspect.
link |
02:17:06.120
I think it was like the churn Simon's invariant.
link |
02:17:09.240
I'm not sure what the topic was again, but she gave me the room number and the time and
link |
02:17:14.960
she was like not cracking a smile.
link |
02:17:16.760
I've never known her to make this kind of a joke.
link |
02:17:18.840
And I thought this was crazy and I was trying to have an advisor.
link |
02:17:22.080
I didn't want an advisor, but people said you have to have one.
link |
02:17:24.480
So I took one and I went to this room at like 15 minutes early and there was not a soul
link |
02:17:32.160
inside it.
link |
02:17:33.160
It was outside of the math department and it was still in the same building, the science
link |
02:17:38.960
center at Harvard.
link |
02:17:41.260
And I sat there and I let five minutes go by, I let seven minutes go by, 10 minutes
link |
02:17:45.440
go by.
link |
02:17:46.440
There's nobody.
link |
02:17:47.440
I thought, okay, so this was all an elaborate joke.
link |
02:17:50.680
And then like three minutes to the hour, this graduate student walks in and like sees me
link |
02:17:56.720
and does a double take.
link |
02:17:58.660
And then I start to see the professors in geometry and topology start to file in and
link |
02:18:05.760
everybody's like very disconcerted that I'm in this room.
link |
02:18:11.120
And finally the person who was supposed to be my advisor walks in to the seminar and
link |
02:18:18.440
sees me and goes white as a ghost.
link |
02:18:22.880
And I realized that the secret seminar is true, that the department is conducting a
link |
02:18:30.480
secret seminar on the exact topic that I'm interested in, not telling me about it.
link |
02:18:36.120
And that these are the reindeer games that the Rudolph's of the department are not invited
link |
02:18:41.440
to.
link |
02:18:42.880
And so then I realized, okay, I did not understand it.
link |
02:18:45.840
There's a parallel department.
link |
02:18:49.600
And that became the beginning of an incredible odyssey in which I came to understand that
link |
02:19:00.680
the game that I had been sold about publication, about blind refereeing, about openness and
link |
02:19:12.360
scientific transmission of information was all a lie.
link |
02:19:18.240
I came to understand that at the very top, there's a second system that's about closed
link |
02:19:24.640
meetings and private communications and agreements about citation and publication that the rest
link |
02:19:33.760
of us don't understand.
link |
02:19:36.040
And that in large measure, that is the thing that I won't submit to.
link |
02:19:41.040
And so when you ask me questions like, well, why wouldn't you feel good about, you know,
link |
02:19:45.240
talking to your critics or why wouldn't you feel the answer is, oh, you don't know.
link |
02:19:49.200
Like if you stay in a nice hotel, you don't realize that there is an entire second structure
link |
02:19:54.560
inside of that hotel where like there's usually a worker's cafe in a resort complex that isn't
link |
02:20:01.580
available to the people who are staying in the hotel.
link |
02:20:03.920
And then there are private hallways inside the same hotel that are parallel structures.
link |
02:20:11.960
So that's what I found, which was in essence, just the way you can stay hotels your whole
link |
02:20:16.560
life and not realize that inside of every hotel is a second structure that you're not
link |
02:20:20.920
supposed to see as the guest.
link |
02:20:23.200
There is a second structure inside of academics that behaves totally differently with respect
link |
02:20:28.600
to how people get dinged, how people get their grants taken away, how this person comes to
link |
02:20:33.820
have that thing named after them.
link |
02:20:37.640
And by pretending that we're not running a parallel structure, um, I have no patience
link |
02:20:44.880
for that anymore.
link |
02:20:45.880
So I got a chance to see how the game, how hard ball is really played at Harvard.
link |
02:20:52.400
And I'm now eager to play hard ball back with the same people who played hard ball with
link |
02:20:59.080
me.
link |
02:21:00.080
Let me ask two questions on this.
link |
02:21:02.640
So one, do you think it's possible, so I call those people assholes, that's the technical
link |
02:21:10.600
term.
link |
02:21:11.600
Do you think it's possible that that's just not the entire system, but a part of the system?
link |
02:21:18.040
Sort of that there's, you can navigate, you can swim in the waters and find the groups
link |
02:21:23.840
of people who do aspire to the openness.
link |
02:21:26.640
The guy who rescued my phd was one of the people who filed in to the secret seminar.
link |
02:21:33.680
Right.
link |
02:21:35.600
But are there people outside of this, right?
link |
02:21:38.200
Is he an asshole?
link |
02:21:39.200
Well, yes, I was, it was a bad, no, but I'm trying to make this point, which is this isn't
link |
02:21:44.600
my failure to correctly map these people.
link |
02:21:48.120
It's yours.
link |
02:21:49.120
You, you have a simplification that isn't going to work.
link |
02:21:53.200
I think, okay.
link |
02:21:54.200
If I asked what was the wrong term, I would say lacking of character and what would you
link |
02:21:59.800
have had these people do?
link |
02:22:02.600
Why did they do this?
link |
02:22:03.700
Why have a secret seminar?
link |
02:22:06.120
I don't understand the exact dynamics of a secret seminar, but I think the right thing
link |
02:22:09.880
to do is to, I mean, to see individuals like you, there might be a reason to have a secret
link |
02:22:15.800
seminar, but they should detect that an individual like you, a brilliant mind who's thinking
link |
02:22:23.160
about certain ideas could be damaged by this.
link |
02:22:25.400
I don't think that they see it that way.
link |
02:22:27.860
The idea is we're going to sneak food to the children we want to survive.
link |
02:22:32.480
Yeah.
link |
02:22:33.480
So that that's highly problematic and there should be people within that room.
link |
02:22:36.800
I'm trying to say this is the thing, the ball that can't is thrown, but won't be caught.
link |
02:22:41.800
The problem is they know that most of their children won't survive and they can't say
link |
02:22:50.560
that.
link |
02:22:51.560
I see.
link |
02:22:52.560
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
02:22:54.560
You mean that the fact that the whole system is underfunded, that they naturally have to
link |
02:23:00.440
pick favorites.
link |
02:23:02.240
They live in a world which reached steady state at some level, let's say, you know,
link |
02:23:08.440
in the early seventies and in that world before that time you have a professor like Norman
link |
02:23:16.640
Steenrod and you'd have 20 children that is graduate students and all of them would go
link |
02:23:20.980
on to be professors and all of them would want to have 20 children, right?
link |
02:23:25.000
So you start like taking higher and higher powers of 20 and you see that the system could
link |
02:23:30.680
not, it's not just about money, the system couldn't survive.
link |
02:23:34.580
So the way it's supposed to work now is that we should shut down the vast majority of PhD
link |
02:23:41.040
programs and we should let the small number of truly top places populate, um, mostly teaching
link |
02:23:49.040
and research departments that aren't PhD producing.
link |
02:23:53.040
We don't want to do that because we use PhD students as a labor force.
link |
02:23:56.720
So the whole thing has to do with growth, resources, dishonesty, and in that world you
link |
02:24:04.480
see all of these adaptations to a ruthless world where the key question is where are
link |
02:24:10.040
we going to bury this huge number of bodies of people who don't work out?
link |
02:24:14.640
So my problem was I wasn't interested in dying.
link |
02:24:18.620
So you clearly highlight that there's aspects of the system that are broken, but as an individual,
link |
02:24:26.440
is your role to, uh, exit the system or just acknowledge that it's a game and win it?
link |
02:24:32.640
My role is to survive and thrive in the public eye.
link |
02:24:37.560
In other words, when you have an escapee of the system, like yourself, such as, and that
link |
02:24:45.520
person says, you know, I wasn't exactly finished, let me show you a bunch of stuff.
link |
02:24:50.440
Let me show you that, uh, the theory of telomeres never got reported properly.
link |
02:24:55.560
Let me show you that all of, uh, marginal economics, uh, is supposed to be redone with
link |
02:25:00.920
a different version of the differential calculus.
link |
02:25:03.040
Let me show you that you didn't understand the self dual Yang Mills equations correctly
link |
02:25:07.400
in topology and physics because they're in fact, uh, much more broadly found and it's
link |
02:25:15.360
only the mutations that happen in special dimensions.
link |
02:25:17.840
There are lots of things to say, but this particular group of people, like if you just
link |
02:25:24.400
take, where are all the gen X and millennial university presidents?
link |
02:25:30.240
Right.
link |
02:25:31.240
Okay.
link |
02:25:32.240
They're all, they're all in a holding pattern.
link |
02:25:36.320
Now where, why in this story, you know, was it of telomeres?
link |
02:25:42.040
Was it an older professor and a younger graduate student?
link |
02:25:45.520
It's this issue of what would be called interference competition.
link |
02:25:50.060
So for example, orcas try to drown minke whales by covering their blow holes so that they
link |
02:25:55.520
suffocate because the needed resource is air.
link |
02:25:58.960
Okay.
link |
02:25:59.960
Well, what do the universities do?
link |
02:26:01.660
They try to make sure that you can't be viable, that you need them, that you need their grants.
link |
02:26:08.160
You need to be, uh, zinged with overhead charges or fringe rates or all of the games that the
link |
02:26:15.440
locals love to play.
link |
02:26:17.200
Well, my point is, okay, what's the cost of this?
link |
02:26:20.640
How many people died as a result of these interference competition games?
link |
02:26:25.880
You know, when you take somebody like Douglas Prasher who did green fluorescent protein
link |
02:26:30.120
and he drives a shuttle bus, right?
link |
02:26:32.160
Cause he, his grant runs out and he has to give away all of his research and all of that
link |
02:26:36.280
research gets a Nobel prize and he gets to drive a shuttle bus for $35,000 a year.
link |
02:26:40.920
What do you mean by died?
link |
02:26:41.920
You mean their career, their dreams, their passions?
link |
02:26:43.920
Yeah, the whole, as an academic, Doug Prasher was dead for a long period of time.
link |
02:26:49.760
Okay.
link |
02:26:51.400
So as a, as a person who's escaped the system, can't you at this, cause you also have in
link |
02:26:58.560
your mind a powerful theory that may turn out to be a useful, maybe not.
link |
02:27:05.040
So can't you also play the game enough?
link |
02:27:09.840
Like with the children, so like publish and, but also if you told me that this would work,
link |
02:27:16.640
really what I want to do, you see, is I would love to revolutionize a field with an H index
link |
02:27:23.960
of zero, like we have these proxies that count how many papers you've written, how cited
link |
02:27:31.700
are the papers you've written.
link |
02:27:34.160
All of this is nonsense.
link |
02:27:35.160
That's interesting.
link |
02:27:36.160
Sorry.
link |
02:27:37.160
What do you mean by field with an H index as your, so a totally new field.
link |
02:27:40.240
H index is count somehow.
link |
02:27:42.200
How many papers have you gotten that get so many citations?
link |
02:27:46.320
Let's say H index undefined, like for example, um, I don't have an advisor for my PhD, but
link |
02:27:56.160
I have to have an advisor as far as something called the math genealogy project that tracks
link |
02:28:01.400
who advised who, who advised whom down the line.
link |
02:28:07.160
So I am my own advisor, which sets up a loop, right?
link |
02:28:10.600
How many students do I have?
link |
02:28:11.600
An infinite number.
link |
02:28:12.600
Um, your descendants, they don't want to have that story.
link |
02:28:16.940
So I have to be, I have to have formal advisor, Raul bought, and my Wikipedia entry, for example,
link |
02:28:21.920
says that I was advised by Raul bought, which is not true.
link |
02:28:25.760
So you get fit into a system that says, well, we have to know what your H index is.
link |
02:28:31.000
We have to know, um, you know, where are you a professor?
link |
02:28:34.520
If you want to apply for a grant, it makes all of these assumptions.
link |
02:28:38.040
What I'm trying to do is in part to show all of this is nonsense.
link |
02:28:41.960
This is proxy BS that came up in the institutional setting.
link |
02:28:45.760
And right now it's important for those of us who are still vital, like Elon, it would
link |
02:28:50.400
be great to have Elon as a professor of physics and engineering.
link |
02:28:53.640
Yeah.
link |
02:28:54.640
Right.
link |
02:28:55.640
It seems ridiculous to say, but just as a shot, just as a shot in the arm.
link |
02:29:00.440
Yeah.
link |
02:29:01.440
You know, like it'd be great to have Elon at Caltech even one day a week, one day a
link |
02:29:07.120
month.
link |
02:29:08.120
Okay.
link |
02:29:09.120
Well, why can't we be in there?
link |
02:29:10.920
It's the same reason.
link |
02:29:11.920
Well, why can't you be on the view?
link |
02:29:13.440
Why can't you be on bill Martin?
link |
02:29:14.880
We need to know what you're going to do before we take you on the show on the show.
link |
02:29:18.200
Well, I don't want to tell you what I'm going to do.
link |
02:29:20.760
Do you think you need to be able to dance the dance a little bit?
link |
02:29:24.440
I can dance the dance fun to be on the view.
link |
02:29:26.760
Oh, come on.
link |
02:29:27.760
So you can, yeah, you do.
link |
02:29:28.760
You're not, I can do that.
link |
02:29:30.560
Fine.
link |
02:29:31.560
Here's where the place that it goes south is there like a set of questions that get
link |
02:29:37.320
you into this more adversarial stuff.
link |
02:29:39.880
And you've in fact asked some of those more adversarial questions, the setting, and they're
link |
02:29:44.680
not things that are necessarily aggressive, but they're things that are making assumptions.
link |
02:29:49.200
Right.
link |
02:29:50.200
Right.
link |
02:29:51.200
So when you make a, I have a question is like, you know, Lex, are you avoiding your critics?
link |
02:29:57.120
You know, it's just like, okay, well why did you?
link |
02:29:58.720
You frame that that way.
link |
02:29:59.720
Or the next question would be like, um, do you think that you should have a special exemption
link |
02:30:04.480
and that you should have the right to break rules and everyone else should have to follow
link |
02:30:07.400
them?
link |
02:30:08.400
Like that question I find innervating.
link |
02:30:09.960
Yeah.
link |
02:30:10.960
It doesn't really come out of anything meaningful.
link |
02:30:12.400
It's just like we feel we're supposed to ask that of the other person to show that we're
link |
02:30:16.160
not captured by their madness.
link |
02:30:18.480
That's not the real question you want to ask me.
link |
02:30:20.120
If you want to get really excited about this, you want to ask, do you think this thing is
link |
02:30:24.480
right?
link |
02:30:25.480
Yeah.
link |
02:30:26.480
Weirdly I do.
link |
02:30:27.480
Do you think that it's going to be immediately seen to be right?
link |
02:30:30.160
I don't.
link |
02:30:31.160
I think it's going to, it's going to have an interesting fight and it's going to have
link |
02:30:34.280
an interesting evolution and well, what do you hope to do with it in nonphysical terms?
link |
02:30:39.560
Gosh, I hope it revolutionizes our relationship of well with people outside of the institutional
link |
02:30:47.240
framework and it re inflicts us into the institutional framework where we can do the most good to
link |
02:30:52.280
bring the institutions back to health.
link |
02:30:55.500
You know, it's like these are positive, uplifting questions and if you had Frank will check,
link |
02:31:00.480
you wouldn't say, Frank, let's be honest, you have done very little with your life after
link |
02:31:05.240
the original, a huge show that you used to break onto the physics scene.
link |
02:31:10.160
Like we weirdly ask people different questions based upon how they sit down.
link |
02:31:14.720
Yeah.
link |
02:31:15.720
That's very strange, right?
link |
02:31:16.720
But you have to understand that.
link |
02:31:20.000
So here's the thing.
link |
02:31:21.000
I get these days, a large number of emails from people with the equivalent of a theory
link |
02:31:27.440
of everything for AGI and I use my own radar, BS radar to detect unfairly, perhaps whether
link |
02:31:39.920
they're full of shit or not, because I love where you're going with this, by the way.
link |
02:31:48.680
My concern I often think about is there's elements of brilliance in what people write
link |
02:31:54.400
to me and I'm trying to right now, as you made it clear, the kind of judgments and assumptions
link |
02:32:01.900
we make, how am I supposed to deal with you who are not an outsider of the system and
link |
02:32:08.440
think about what you're doing because my radar is saying you're not full of shit.
link |
02:32:15.680
But I'm also not completely outside of the system.
link |
02:32:18.260
That's right.
link |
02:32:19.260
You've danced beautifully.
link |
02:32:20.620
You've actually got all the credibility that you're supposed to get, all the nice little
link |
02:32:26.080
stamps of approval, not all, but a large enough amount.
link |
02:32:33.080
I mean, it's hard to put into words exactly why you sound, whether your theory turns out
link |
02:32:41.560
to be good or not, you sound like a special human being.
link |
02:32:46.720
I appreciate that and thank you in a good way.
link |
02:32:50.400
So but what am I supposed to do with that flood of emails from AGI?
link |
02:32:54.840
Why do I sound different?
link |
02:32:56.640
I don't know.
link |
02:32:58.240
And I would like to systemize that.
link |
02:32:59.600
I don't know.
link |
02:33:01.480
Look, you know, when you're talking to people, you very quickly can surmise, like, am I claiming
link |
02:33:09.420
to be a physicist?
link |
02:33:10.420
No, I say it every turn.
link |
02:33:11.600
I'm not a physicist, right?
link |
02:33:14.840
When I say to you, when you say something about bundles, you say, well, can you explain
link |
02:33:17.720
it differently?
link |
02:33:18.720
You know, I'm pushing around on this area, that lever over there.
link |
02:33:25.080
I'm trying to find something that we can play with and engage.
link |
02:33:30.320
And you know, another thing is that I'll say something at scale.
link |
02:33:34.540
So if I was saying completely wrong things about bundles on the Joe Rogan program, you
link |
02:33:38.840
don't think that we wouldn't hear a crushing chorus.
link |
02:33:41.480
Yes.
link |
02:33:42.480
Absolutely.
link |
02:33:43.480
And you know, same thing with geometric unity.
link |
02:33:45.400
So I put up this video from this Oxford lecture.
link |
02:33:50.160
I understand that it's not a standard lecture, but you haven't heard, you know, the most
link |
02:33:56.840
brilliant people in the field say, well, this is obviously nonsense.
link |
02:34:00.960
They don't know what to make of it.
link |
02:34:01.960
And they're going to hide behind, well, he hasn't said enough details.
link |
02:34:06.720
Where's the paper?
link |
02:34:07.720
Where's the paper?
link |
02:34:08.720
I've seen the criticism.
link |
02:34:10.560
I've gotten the same kind of criticism.
link |
02:34:11.880
I've published a few things and like, especially stuff related to Tesla that we did studies
link |
02:34:19.120
on Tesla vehicles and the kind of criticism I've gotten, which showed that they're completely.
link |
02:34:24.480
Oh, right.
link |
02:34:25.480
Like the guy who had Elon Musk on his program twice is going to give us an accurate assessment.
link |
02:34:29.720
Next.
link |
02:34:30.720
Exactly.
link |
02:34:31.720
Exactly.
link |
02:34:32.720
Exactly.
link |
02:34:33.720
It's just very low level.
link |
02:34:34.720
Like without actually ever addressing the content.
link |
02:34:40.480
You know, Lex, I think that in part you're trying to solve a puzzle that isn't really
link |
02:34:44.840
your puzzle.
link |
02:34:45.840
I think, you know, that I'm sincere.
link |
02:34:47.640
You don't know whether the theory is going to work or not.
link |
02:34:50.820
And you know that it's not coming out of somebody who's coming out of left field, like the story
link |
02:34:55.440
makes sense.
link |
02:34:56.440
There's enough that's new and creative and different in other aspects where you can check
link |
02:35:01.880
me that your real concern is, are you really telling me that when you start breaking the
link |
02:35:08.120
rules, you see the system for what it is and it's become really vicious and aggressive.
link |
02:35:13.080
And the answer is yes, and I had to break the rules in part because of learning issues
link |
02:35:18.240
because I came into this field, you know, with a totally different set of attributes.
link |
02:35:23.620
My profile just doesn't look like anybody else's remotely, but as a result, what that
link |
02:35:28.300
did is it showed me what is the system true to its own ideals or does it just follow these
link |
02:35:34.080
weird procedures and then when it, when you take it off the rails, it behaves terribly.
link |
02:35:39.360
And that's really what my story I think does is it just says, well, he completely takes
link |
02:35:45.500
the system into new territory where it's not expecting to have to deal with somebody with
link |
02:35:49.960
these confusing sets of attributes.
link |
02:35:52.400
And I think what he's telling us is he believes it behaves terribly.
link |
02:35:56.440
Now, if you take somebody with perfect standardized tests and you know, a winner of math competitions
link |
02:36:04.320
and you put them in a PhD program, they're probably going to be okay.
link |
02:36:09.880
I'm not saying that the system, um, you know, breaks down for any everybody under all circumstances.
link |
02:36:17.680
I'm saying when you present the system with a novel situation at the moment, it will almost
link |
02:36:23.360
certainly break down with probability approaching 100%.
link |
02:36:29.240
But to me, the painful and the tragic thing is it, uh, sorry to bring out my motherly
link |
02:36:35.840
instinct, but it feels like it's too much.
link |
02:36:39.220
It could be too much of a burden to exist outside the system, maybe, but psychologically,
link |
02:36:44.280
first of all, I've got a podcast that I kind of like and I've got amazing friends.
link |
02:36:51.760
I have a life which has more interesting people passing through it than I know what to do
link |
02:36:55.840
with.
link |
02:36:56.840
Yeah.
link |
02:36:57.840
And they haven't managed to kill me off yet.
link |
02:36:58.840
So, so far, so good.
link |
02:37:02.000
Speaking of which you host an amazing podcast that we've mentioned several times, but should
link |
02:37:06.400
mention over and over the portal, uh, where you somehow manage every single conversation
link |
02:37:13.440
is a surprise.
link |
02:37:15.560
You go, I mean, not just the guests, but just the places you take them, uh, the, the kind
link |
02:37:22.080
of ways they become challenging and how you recover from that.
link |
02:37:25.280
I mean, it's, uh, there's just, it's full of genuine human moments.
link |
02:37:30.920
So I really appreciate what you're, it's a fun, fun podcast to listen to.
link |
02:37:35.280
Uh, let me ask some silly questions about it.
link |
02:37:38.240
What have you learned about conversation about human to human conversation?
link |
02:37:43.480
Well, I have a problem that I haven't solved on the portal, which is that in general, when
link |
02:37:50.040
I ask people questions, they usually find their deeply grooved answers and I'm not so
link |
02:37:56.760
interested in all of the deeply grooved answers.
link |
02:37:59.120
And so there's a complaint, which I'm very sympathetic to actually that I talk over people
link |
02:38:03.920
that I won't sit still for the answer.
link |
02:38:05.400
And I think that that's weirdly sort of correct.
link |
02:38:09.280
It's not that I'm not interested in hearing other voices.
link |
02:38:12.680
That I'm not interested in hearing the same voice on my program that I could have gotten
link |
02:38:16.880
on somebody else's.
link |
02:38:17.880
And I haven't solved that well.
link |
02:38:19.600
So I've learned that I need a new conversational technique where I can keep somebody from finding
link |
02:38:25.200
their comfortable place and yet not be the voice talking over that person.
link |
02:38:29.960
Yeah.
link |
02:38:30.960
It's funny.
link |
02:38:31.960
I can sense like your conversation with Brett, I can sense you detect that the line he's
link |
02:38:36.440
going down, you know how it's going to end and you think it's a useless line, so you'll
link |
02:38:43.800
just stop it right there and you take them into the direction that you think it should
link |
02:38:47.360
go.
link |
02:38:48.360
But that requires interruption.
link |
02:38:49.360
Well, and it does so far.
link |
02:38:51.320
I haven't found a better way.
link |
02:38:52.440
I'm looking for a better way.
link |
02:38:54.240
It's not like I don't hear the problem.
link |
02:38:57.020
I do hear the problem.
link |
02:38:59.280
I haven't solved the problem.
link |
02:39:01.880
And you know, on the, on the bread episode, um, I was insufferable.
link |
02:39:06.680
It was very difficult to listen to.
link |
02:39:08.640
It was so overbearing.
link |
02:39:10.520
But on the other hand, I was right.
link |
02:39:12.640
You know, it's like funny.
link |
02:39:14.000
You keep saying that, but I didn't find it maybe because I heard brothers, like I heard
link |
02:39:19.360
a big brother.
link |
02:39:20.360
Yeah.
link |
02:39:21.360
It was pretty bad.
link |
02:39:22.360
Really?
link |
02:39:23.360
I think so.
link |
02:39:24.360
I didn't think it was bad.
link |
02:39:25.360
Well, a lot of people found it interesting.
link |
02:39:26.440
And I think it also has to do with the fact that this has become a frequent experience.
link |
02:39:31.040
I have several shows where somebody who I very much admire and think of as courageous,
link |
02:39:35.960
um, you know, I'm talking with them, maybe we're friends and they sit down on the show
link |
02:39:41.400
and they immediately become this fake person.
link |
02:39:44.560
Like two seconds in there, they're sort of saying, well, I don't want to be too critical
link |
02:39:49.200
or too harsh.
link |
02:39:50.200
I don't want to name any names.
link |
02:39:51.200
I wanted this story.
link |
02:39:52.200
He was like, okay, I'm going to put my listeners through three hours of you being sweetness
link |
02:39:57.440
and light.
link |
02:39:58.440
Like at least give me some reality and then we can decide to shelve the show and never
link |
02:40:04.960
let it hear, uh, you know, the, the, the call of freedom in the, in the bigger world.
link |
02:40:10.040
But I've seen you break out of that a few times.
link |
02:40:12.800
I've seen you to be successful that, uh, I forgot to guess, but she was dressed with,
link |
02:40:18.000
um, um, you were at the end of the episode, you had an argument about Brett.
link |
02:40:24.520
I forgot.
link |
02:40:25.520
Agnes Callard.
link |
02:40:26.520
Yeah.
link |
02:40:27.520
She was one of the philosophers for at the university of Chicago.
link |
02:40:30.080
Yeah.
link |
02:40:31.080
You've continuously broken out of her.
link |
02:40:33.280
Uh, you guys went, you know, uh, I didn't even seem pretty genuine.
link |
02:40:38.040
I like her.
link |
02:40:39.400
I'm completely ethically opposed to what she's ethically for.
link |
02:40:42.720
Well, she was great.
link |
02:40:44.480
And she wasn't like that.
link |
02:40:46.000
You're both going hard.
link |
02:40:47.600
She's a grownup.
link |
02:40:48.600
Yeah.
link |
02:40:49.600
And she knows that I care about her.
link |
02:40:50.600
So that was awesome.
link |
02:40:51.600
Yeah.
link |
02:40:52.600
But you're saying that some people are difficult to break out.
link |
02:40:55.520
Well, it's just that, you know, she was bringing the courage of her convictions.
link |
02:40:59.840
She was sort of defending the system and I thought, wow, that's a pretty indefensible
link |
02:41:05.320
system that you're doing.
link |
02:41:06.320
That's great though.
link |
02:41:07.320
She's doing that.
link |
02:41:08.320
Isn't it?
link |
02:41:09.320
I mean, it made for an awesome, it's very informative for the world.
link |
02:41:13.840
Yes.
link |
02:41:14.840
You just hated.
link |
02:41:15.840
I just can't stand the idea that somebody says, well, we don't care who gets paid or
link |
02:41:19.720
who gets the credit as long as we get the goodies.
link |
02:41:21.920
Cause that seems like insane.
link |
02:41:24.360
Have you ever been afraid leading into a conversation?
link |
02:41:30.760
Gary Kasparov.
link |
02:41:31.760
By the way, I mean, I know I'm just a fan taking requests, but I started, I started
link |
02:41:39.920
the beginning in Russian and in fact I used one word incorrectly.
link |
02:41:43.280
Is that terrible?
link |
02:41:44.280
You know, it was, it was pretty good.
link |
02:41:46.240
It's pretty good Russian.
link |
02:41:47.240
What was terrible is I think he complimented you.
link |
02:41:49.680
Right?
link |
02:41:50.680
No.
link |
02:41:51.680
Did he compliment you or was that me?
link |
02:41:52.680
Did he compliment you on your Russian?
link |
02:41:54.600
Well, he said almost perfect Russian.
link |
02:41:57.040
Yeah.
link |
02:41:58.040
Like he was full of shit.
link |
02:42:00.040
That was not great Russian, but that was not great Russian.
link |
02:42:03.000
That was great.
link |
02:42:04.000
That was hard.
link |
02:42:05.000
That was, you tried hard, which is what matters.
link |
02:42:07.280
That is so insulting.
link |
02:42:08.280
I hope so.
link |
02:42:10.160
But I do hope you continue.
link |
02:42:12.160
It felt like, I don't know how long it went.
link |
02:42:13.960
It might've been like a two hour conversation, but it felt, I hope it continues.
link |
02:42:18.600
Like I feel like you have many conversations with Gary.
link |
02:42:21.520
Yeah.
link |
02:42:22.520
I would love to hear.
link |
02:42:23.520
There's certain conversations I would just love to hear a long, much longer.
link |
02:42:27.720
He's coming from a very, it's this issue about needing to overpower people in a very dangerous
link |
02:42:33.320
world.
link |
02:42:34.320
And so Gary has that need.
link |
02:42:36.320
Yeah.
link |
02:42:37.320
He wasn't, he was interrupting you.
link |
02:42:38.880
Sure.
link |
02:42:39.880
It was an interesting dynamic.
link |
02:42:40.880
It was a, it was an interesting dynamic.
link |
02:42:43.200
Two Weinsteins going at you.
link |
02:42:44.760
I mean, two powerhouse egos, brilliant.
link |
02:42:47.760
No, don't say egos, minds, spirits.
link |
02:42:51.560
You don't have an ego.
link |
02:42:52.560
You're the most humble person I know.
link |
02:42:54.200
Is that true?
link |
02:42:55.360
No, that's a complete lie.
link |
02:42:58.520
Do you think about your own mortality, death?
link |
02:43:01.320
Sure.
link |
02:43:02.320
Are you afraid?
link |
02:43:03.320
Well, I released a theory during something that can kill older people.
link |
02:43:07.840
Sure.
link |
02:43:08.840
Oh, is there a little bit of a parallel there?
link |
02:43:12.640
Of course.
link |
02:43:13.640
Of course.
link |
02:43:14.640
I don't want it to die with me.
link |
02:43:16.860
What do you hope your legacy is?
link |
02:43:20.000
Oh, I hope my legacy is accurate.
link |
02:43:28.960
I'd like to write on my accomplishments rather than how my community decided to ding me while
link |
02:43:33.520
I was alive.
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02:43:34.520
That would be great.
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02:43:35.520
What about if it was significantly exaggerated?
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02:43:38.280
I don't want it.
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02:43:39.820
You want it to be accurate.
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02:43:42.560
I've got some pretty terrific stuff and whether it works out or doesn't that I would like
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02:43:48.240
it to reflect what I actually was.
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02:43:52.920
I'll settle for accurate.
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02:43:56.600
What would you say, what is the greatest element of a Eric Weinstein accomplishment in life
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02:44:04.240
in terms of being accurate?
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02:44:09.360
What are you most proud of?
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02:44:14.160
The idea that we were stalled out in the hardest field at the most difficult juncture and that
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02:44:27.160
I didn't listen to that voice ever that said, stop, you're hurting yourself.
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02:44:36.120
You're hurting your family.
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02:44:37.120
You're hurting everybody.
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02:44:38.120
You're embarrassing yourself.
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02:44:39.120
You're screwing up.
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02:44:40.120
You can't do this.
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02:44:41.120
You're a failure.
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02:44:42.120
You're a fraud.
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02:44:43.540
Turn back, save yourself.
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02:44:46.640
That voice, I didn't ultimately listen to it and it was going for 35, 37 years.
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02:44:58.800
Very hard.
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02:45:02.400
And I hope you never listen to that voice.
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02:45:05.440
That's why you're an inspiration.
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02:45:07.680
Thank you.
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02:45:08.680
I appreciate that.
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02:45:09.680
I'm just infinitely honored that you would spend time with me.
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02:45:15.680
You've been a mentor to me, almost a friend.
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02:45:21.200
I can't imagine a better person to talk to in this world.
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02:45:23.600
So thank you so much for talking to me.
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02:45:24.920
I can't wait till we do it again.
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02:45:26.520
Lex, thanks for sticking with me and thanks for being the most singular guy in the podcasting
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02:45:32.280
space.
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02:45:33.280
In terms of all of my interviews, I would say that the last one I did with you, many
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02:45:38.080
people feel was my best and it was a nonconventional one.
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02:45:43.840
So whatever it is that you're bringing to the game, I think everyone's noticing and
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02:45:46.720
keep at it.
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02:45:48.320
Thank you.
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02:45:49.320
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein.
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02:45:52.640
And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
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02:45:55.600
Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast.
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02:46:00.360
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
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02:46:06.720
subscribe on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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02:46:11.720
And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Eric Weinstein's first appearance
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02:46:16.400
on this podcast.
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02:46:19.120
Everything is great about war, except all the destruction.
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02:46:24.560
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.