back to indexEric Weinstein: On the Nature of Good and Evil, Genius and Madness | Lex Fridman Podcast #134
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The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein,
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the third time we've spoken on this podcast.
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He is the wise turtle master Oogway to my Kung Fu Panda,
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one of my favorite people to talk to in this world.
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A complicated and fascinating mind
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that I'm grateful to have the chance to accompany
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in exploring this world through conversation
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on this podcast and on his, the latter called The Portal.
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Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts
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related to the episode.
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First is Grammarly, a service I use in my writing
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to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure,
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Second is Sunbasket, a meal delivery service I use
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to add healthy variety into my culinary life.
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Third is SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool
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I've ever come across.
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I don't like looking at numbers, but somebody should.
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It helps you make good decisions.
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And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years
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to protect my privacy on the internet.
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Please check out these sponsors in the description
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that wherever this life takes me,
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I'm drawn to the possibility of having many more
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conversations with Eric through the years.
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I think we have just the right kind of contrast
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in having worldviews and a deep respect and appreciation
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of each other's life stories that creates for
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this magical experience in the realm of conversation
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that feels like we're always looking for something
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that we never quite find,
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but are always better for having tried.
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I'm not sure how or why the universe has connected
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Eric and me, but it did.
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And I would be a fool not to trust its judgment
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and enjoy the journey.
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If somehow you like this podcast,
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please subscribe on YouTube,
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review it with five stars on Apple podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
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or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
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Who's the greatest musician of all time, would you say?
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We were just off camera talking about Eddie Van Halen.
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He unfortunately passed away.
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Who's the greatest musician of all time?
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It's a weird question.
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So I'm gonna give you a weird answer.
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It's not because of...
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Okay, Jonathan Richman.
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The reason I'm picking on him is that he had a quote.
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He was the front man of a group called the Modern Lovers.
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And his quote was something like,
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"'We have to be prepared to play music
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"'when our instruments are broken,
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"'the electricity's out and it's raining,'
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"'something like that."
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And I thought that that quote was very interesting
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because what it said was,
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you have to be able to strip this thing down
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farther and farther back
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to get to something that is intrinsically musical.
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So we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity.
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We're talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing.
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And that affected me emotionally.
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I don't know whether it affected you.
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I was never a Van Halen, the group fan,
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but I revered Eddie Van Halen's capacity for innovation.
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I saw him like Rodney Mullen, the skateboarder.
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I had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast
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just to talk about what it's like
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to totally discontinuously innovate.
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And he posted a video of Spanish Fly, I think,
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I didn't know the guitar could make those kinds of sounds.
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Like, what is this voodoo magic?
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Well, this is the thing, right?
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The arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast
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and the attacks from the hammer ons,
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when they go at light speed as he did, particularly.
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And the reason I chose that was,
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is that I wanted to strip out the electronics
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because part of the claim will be is
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that he's a rock musician.
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And a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar
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to sort of the electrified setup.
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His use of the whammy bar, for example,
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or the Frankenstrat that he built from different pieces.
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All of those aspects, in my opinion,
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are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship.
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And that's why I chose Spanish Fly,
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because everyone, of course,
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will go to something like your eruption
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or running with the devil,
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which is the first things that they heard
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that let them know that there was a new force erupting
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out of Southern California that was Eddie Van Halen, right?
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I mean, I'm in love with the story of it.
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You're often so poetic about music.
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Like it clearly touches your soul on many levels.
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Is it deeper than just rocking out
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with the in your convertible Corvette 69?
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I imagine Eric Weinstein is driving down
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the California highways, blasting some kind of music.
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Is it just like being able to be carefree
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for moments of time?
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Or is there something more fundamental
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that connects to like the theory of everything
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in physics and life and all of that?
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How often do you have the chance, for example,
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to hear mathematics performed as you do in Bach, right?
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Like something with that kind of precision
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and elegance that can't really be grasped,
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where to go back to Leonard Cohen's famous line,
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the baffled king composing, right?
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Such a good song, but it's also like individual verses
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of that song are insanely important.
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The baffled king is how we often make music.
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We don't really understand what did we just do
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that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch, right?
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And so it's a very strange thing
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that you should be able to have.
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Think of it like you're a computer.
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You've got this weird open music port, port 37.8, you know?
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Like it's not even supposed to be there.
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And suddenly somebody starts playing guitar
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and they're making you feel things.
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Or like in particular, particular instruments
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like the violin, it's so difficult.
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It's so unforgiving.
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And when it gives up its secrets,
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it just, you know, it wraps its fingers
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around your heart and won't let go.
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Sometimes I talk about head, heart, and loins.
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When something can grab your head, heart, and your loins
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at the same moment and integrate them,
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there are very few opportunities to live like that.
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And if you think about Eddie Van Halen,
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as far as your head, the musical innovations
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and the fact that he was drawing directly
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from the classical canon really speaks to the idea
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that maybe rock is what somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it
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as being, you know, an infinitely extensible medium.
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In terms of heart, I always notice the smile on his face.
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It's painful to look at an Eddie Van Halen solo now.
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Like sometimes you'll see the cigarette dripping off
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the side of his mouth and you're like,
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that's gonna fucking kill you.
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And I'm not even worried about it for you.
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I'm worried about it for me.
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I don't even need to hear you play another note.
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I just like knowing that you're in the world,
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that there is somebody that everyone looks to that nobody,
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I've never heard a guitarist say, eh, I don't know.
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I think he was okay.
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Like I've never heard it.
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You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius.
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There are very few people like that in the world.
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And then loins, those leaps,
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that guy was incredibly good looking
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and, you know, skin tight pants, super athleticism.
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He completely owned the male sexuality of the stage,
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both being the completely dominant,
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you know, sort of mythical alpha male.
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I hate that expression, but there you are.
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But also this kind of little boy with this mischievous smirk
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and, you know, the sense that it all came together.
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How could you not eat that up?
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You could just imagine the millions
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of like young teenage boys, gorgeous,
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like playing air guitar in their room,
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just that, yeah, basically dreaming
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of being that kind of God,
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the most perfect example of what a human being can be.
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Yeah, it's fascinating to think.
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It is, and then, you know,
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as in many of the cases with these bands,
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you get these multiple talents in the same outfit.
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And I think that the original configuration
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with David Lee Roth, I mean,
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David Lee Roth is such a hot mess at all times.
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I would love you to talk to David Lee Roth.
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Like if the, that dance would be just gorgeous.
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Can you handle it?
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Can you ride that?
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Probably not because I think he's very,
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I get the feeling that he's very smart
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and very dysregulated.
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And I don't know that I could,
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like bring him down to earth for a moment.
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Well, I can also get pretty dysregulated, you know?
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And so I don't know whether, it could be magic.
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It could be a shit show.
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I don't know what you thought of his appearance on Rogan.
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That was an interesting one.
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I loved it, but Joe and that,
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and Joe does this sometimes,
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sometimes he just sits back and listens
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and he just lets like the music play,
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which works really well.
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I think you have a chance to kind of jump into the chaos
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and then you'll just start.
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And the places you will go,
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you may not even talk about music for like hours.
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It might just go to this,
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cause he, I think lives in Japan.
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Like there's a weird,
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he's been an EMT after he was a rock star.
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He chose to be kind of like,
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You know, it's like there's depth to that man
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that hasn't been explored by him either.
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So that'll be an exciting conversation.
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Can we go back to Larry Cohen?
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the things I feel when I listen to Hallelujah
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by Leonard Cohen or anything by him really,
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Do you really want to get into it?
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What is it that song mean to you?
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Well, first of all, it's mystery.
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Like it starts off about mystery.
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So what are you doing?
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You're doing this alternation between the two chords.
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So three notes at the same time.
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One is called the tonic,
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or you have the major and the relative minor
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and he's alternating between them.
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There's only one note of difference
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between those two chords.
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One of them would be feeling sad.
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One of them would be more joyous, typically described.
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And so by altering one note,
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it's the minimal amount to take you back and forth
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between joy and happiness as that's encoded in us.
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So he starts off with,
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I heard there was a scene,
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David played the please a little bit.
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You don't really care for music, do you?
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That's really interesting
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because he's using this technique called Bethos, right?
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So the alternation between the sublime
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and kind of the guttural or ridiculous or the mundane, right?
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There's a bitterness to it too.
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Well, the way I hear it, again,
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a great song allows for different interpretations.
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You happen to be asking me,
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so I'm going to impart some stuff
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that probably isn't in the song,
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but why it speaks to me,
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that's what makes it great.
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The way I hear it is he doesn't believe the audience.
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You don't really care for music, do you?
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Then what are you doing listening to this?
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You stupid idiots, of course you care for music.
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You're too cool to care.
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So I see through you and screw you.
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That's the energy I get.
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Then he does this weird thing.
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It goes like this is where he should put the description
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of where he is in the chord progression,
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which is the tonic, right?
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It goes like this.
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And then he hits the fourth and the fifth,
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which are the two other major elements,
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the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony.
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So he's describing the chord progression
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in real time in the lyrics.
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There's two ways this can come about in other songs.
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We had this example of every time we say goodbye.
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Do you know this song?
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Every time we say goodbye.
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No, I think it was a Cole Porter, maybe,
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or Gershwin, maybe Porter, I don't know.
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I cry a little, there is no love song finer,
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but how strange the change from major to minor, right?
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Like it's a beautiful use of it.
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Then there's times when it's duplicitous.
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So for example, you'll have,
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I guess my favorite examples of this
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are Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.
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I fell into a burning ring of fire.
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And then what does he do with the lyrics in the tune?
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I went down, down, down.
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He goes up, right?
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And so the idea is like, oh, okay, that was a head fake.
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And another one of these is Nina Simone's Feeling Good.
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Oh, okay, so what do you get?
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Birds flying high, you know how I feel.
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Then sun up in the sky, you know how I feel.
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That woman's voice, she doesn't give a damn yet.
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And I feel it, but then what's the, da dum, da dum.
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It's like heavy stripping music.
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It's, you're not in a good place.
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You're probably in some strip club,
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with the last of your money,
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you're drinking lousy beer, some bad situation.
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And she's feeling good?
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No, it's funereal.
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It's oppressive, right?
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I never thought of that song that way.
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Well, you think of it as joyous?
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No, no, no, if you think about it,
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contrast it with Ray Charles, for example.
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You know, do you know Lonely Avenue?
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Well, my room has got two windows,
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but the sunshine never comes through.
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It's really depressed.
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It's the same sort of vibe as Nina,
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but she's claiming that she's in great shape.
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So she's like a good case of the unreliable narrator.
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Leonard Cohen, to me,
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is talking about the unreliable audience.
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That's too cool to be with the performer on stage.
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There are things that go with the music,
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like the Cole Porter stuff,
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there's go against like the Johnny Cash.
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I think these are the games that musicians play
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that the rest of us only sort of notice subliminally.
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Fourth, the fifth, then he,
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when he, he should say something about the relative minor
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or the, he's giving you the secret,
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the baffled king, in other words,
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he doesn't know why it works.
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Did Pachelbel know why Pachelbel's Canon would work?
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It was a discovery.
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That's the whole thing.
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Like some music is discovered and some music is invented.
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And he's talking about a musical discovery.
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He's talking about the Pythagorean power
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of the wave equation and then superimpose,
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like there's two genius intellectual concepts behind music.
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One of which is the wave equation.
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Usually we solve it for a one dimensional medium
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because we're talking about strings or air columns.
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Occasionally you're talking about things like handpans
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or steel drums or metallophones or gamelons, whatever.
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And those have a wave equation too,
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that's much more chaotic.
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The other equation is this crazy thing
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that two to the 19 twelfths is almost exactly equal to three,
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which is what gave us even temperament.
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And so the tension between those two things
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is in fact one of these most beautiful stories
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inside of that system.
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That formula of the baffled king is a discovery.
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It's not, he's not really composing it.
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The reason he's baffled,
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it's imagine that you took like a little brush
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and you started brushing off a pyramid under the sands.
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You might think that you created the pyramid
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by your brushing, but in fact, if somebody else did it,
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that's why you're baffled, right?
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That's beautifully put, you're right.
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And as creating one of the greatest songs of all time
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and as he's doing it, he's baffled.
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And he's within the song.
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And he Leonard is baffled is my contention,
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but he knows enough to know that he's baffled, right?
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And so the idea is that he is composing,
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he has the audacity to compose as David.
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He's echoing David at a minimum.
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And then in a later song,
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which I really wish we would discuss,
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that's totally dystopic and you will not like it at all,
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is the future, which contains this line
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that I think I used in my episode
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with Roger Penrose on the portal.
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Note the subtle plug.
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The portal, the portal, the portal, the portal.
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I'm the little Jew that wrote the Bible.
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So there is this way in which Leonard Cohen,
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I think is constantly coming to the idea
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of being a biblical like scribe.
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And I think this is one of the great things
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that you see Dylan doing this with all along the watchtower.
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You saw Warren Zevon, who we should talk much more about,
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doing this with a song called I Was in the House
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When the House Burned Down.
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Do you know this thing?
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This is embarrassing.
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This is a great day.
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Warren Zevon is one of the most important songwriters
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And he's been largely forgotten by this generation.
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But Bob Dylan would sing one of his songs in tribute.
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I've heard Bob Dylan, you know,
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very small number of songwriters really move him.
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Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Warren Zevon.
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By the way, Bob Dylan, if you're out there,
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appear on either one of our podcasts.
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We need to get your voice into a new medium
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This is a time for Bob Dylan, my friend.
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Honestly, you've been doing an amazing job in this space.
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One of the reasons I'm super excited to do this podcast
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again is that I've learned some things
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about what I don't do well.
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And I also have sort of struggled with the question,
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should I do those things better?
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Because what if it's, you know,
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I always use the same example of the fitted sheet
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when you're trying to put a queen size fitted sheet
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on a king size mattress.
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He's like, okay, I got that corner squared away.
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Then you get another corner that pops off
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and they have to go back around.
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I wonder whether I can improve my style in the ways in which,
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you know, I think it's just a recognition of a difference.
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You do a better job of getting to the soul
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of a really top intellectual guest
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and making them accessible and presenting them
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as themselves for a huge number of people.
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And I'd give my eye tooth to be able to do that.
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Do you ever think about this?
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Like, cause I think about what is the greatest
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conversation I'll ever have.
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You know, like in a sense of the portal,
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not to reduce it to anything,
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but there will be the greatest conversation.
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You may have already had it, but it's very possible.
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If enough people like me can keep twisting your arm
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to keep doing the portal, please,
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that is, there'll be an amazing conversation.
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One of the questions that I ask myself is like,
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who is the person that I'm especially equipped?
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For some reason, I'm convinced on Putin.
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There's something in my head that says,
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I can do this man better than anyone else in this world.
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I got this thought in my head about it, I don't know why.
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And I'm convinced, but I think the universe works
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Like if it tells you, it's gonna happen.
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The way I would say it is, is that almost everybody
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who becomes a Supreme Court justice believes
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at a very early age, they're going to become
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a Supreme Court justice.
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Many people believe at an early age that they can do it,
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But of those who get there, almost all of them
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had this sort of, well, I call it pathological
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And I do think you have pathological self confidence
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and you also have humility.
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And most people would hear those as a contradiction.
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I think that you would not be able to get away
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with what you do if you didn't have the humility.
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And so I think the great danger is that your equation
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becomes unbalanced, that you either lose the humility
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or you lose the humility overwhelms the ego and the drive.
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Because right now you've got a Mexican standoff
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in your mind and the rest of us are just benefiting.
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That's beautifully put.
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My Mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours.
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It's all reservoir dogs all the time.
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But actually the person who that describes is Peter Thiel.
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Peter Thiel thinks more, people always say like,
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what does Peter think about X, Y, and Z, P, and Q?
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It's like, well, do you want communist Peter?
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Do you want hyper capitalist Peter?
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He's got all these minds in there, oh my God, right?
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That's why he's successful is that he's got all these minds
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fighting each other.
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And so when people say Peter is this or Peter is that,
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I just laugh because like nobody who knows him
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would describe him as having thoughts at the level
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that people are claiming.
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And I do think that in my case,
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there's also pathological epistemic humility.
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Like just, I know how little I can do in one life.
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I know how many things I've screwed up.
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I know how many things I've got wrong.
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And on the other hand, I know that if not,
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it's like Hillel's questions,
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if I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
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And if I'm only for myself, what am I?
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At some level, there's a question about
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if I don't decide that someone is capable
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and that that somebody is me.
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And if I apply that to everyone else on the planet,
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then nobody's gonna do anything.
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And so I do think that one of the things
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that people like you and I get is who are you to say that?
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F that, man, just sign me up for some Dunning Kruger.
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Yeah, but it's multiple minds like you said.
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Like this morning, I was feeling so good and confident
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about I couldn't think no wrong.
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And I remember last night clearly thinking
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that I'm the dumbest human who's ever lived
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and nothing I've ever said is worth anything.
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What the fuck am I doing with my life?
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I was terrified of this conversation.
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Who the hell am I?
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This conversation?
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Because I'm an idiot.
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And because, you know, Lex, but no, no, no, no.
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But this morning, I was the baddest motherfucker
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who's ever walked this earth.
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So I was very conscious.
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I think it was the coffee, I'm not sure, maybe some sleep.
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This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages,
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some of them being alcoholic, others containing caffeine.
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There's, in fact, I can't share the story behind it,
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but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge.
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So, I mean, I should have hit you for coffee
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because this is a morning show here.
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So I put out a call that we get a chance
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to have this conversation
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and people ask these wonderful questions.
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A few people asked about depression and suicide.
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This is a Russian program, so we have to go there.
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And I think about Leonard Cohen
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and one of the things that always kind of broke my heart
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and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just,
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I don't know, for love in a person's life
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is to hear how much depression was a part
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of Leonard Cohen's life and how much he suffered.
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I guess one way, I'm not sure where we can go
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with this question, but do you think about the places
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that the mind can go, like these dark places?
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Is there something like where the only escape out
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is suicide, for example, that's the darkest version of it?
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That, I really think suicide is a big place
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in suicidal ideation and self harm
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and we don't talk a lot about it.
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It's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans.
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These are umbrella categories.
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And if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves,
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but we don't know whether that's coming
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because of a problem in brain chemistry,
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because of an event in their life,
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whether evolutionary programming for suicide
link |
is weirdly normal, whether or not
link |
it might have a religious motivation.
link |
There's too many different forms of self harm.
link |
It's something like the 10th largest killer thereabouts.
link |
And I think that you can look at it from different angles.
link |
I'm old enough to have had Pete Seeger come to my college
link |
when I was at university and to watch his good humor
link |
in the face of all adversity.
link |
I think of Odetta, I used to go to Odetta concerts.
link |
I don't know if you know who she is.
link |
Okay, this is gonna be one of the better days of your life.
link |
Check out Odetta when we're done with the interview.
link |
She was a civil rights figure,
link |
but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship.
link |
These people were in the struggle, right?
link |
And they saw lots of bad things happen
link |
and they kept their humor about them.
link |
And the thing is that you can take on the Weltschmerz,
link |
the pain of the planet,
link |
or you can try to do something else,
link |
which is to be a happy warrior,
link |
even if the odds are terrible
link |
and the cost of failure is catastrophic.
link |
So even when surrounded by darkness.
link |
But the thing is with Leonard Cohen
link |
is he created such beautiful music.
link |
And yet it's like Anthony Bourdain, the same.
link |
And yet they go to this dark place.
link |
And it could be, it's easy to say it's just biochemistry.
link |
There's a linkage between this highly generative,
link |
creative side and in some cases,
link |
dark depression, in other cases, not.
link |
So you can't say that it's tied,
link |
the genius and madness are always co traveling
link |
or the beauty and pain are one in the same.
link |
What you can say is that there's a cluster of people
link |
that tell you that for that cluster,
link |
there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty.
link |
And I do think that in part,
link |
it's squaring circles that can't be squared.
link |
We were just talking before about the inability
link |
to serve two perfect systems,
link |
the perfect system of the wave equation
link |
and the perfect system of even temperament.
link |
They're both perfect, they're not compatible.
link |
And once you realize that there is perfection
link |
and an inability to make contact with perfection,
link |
I think you recognize that there is no solution
link |
Yeah, that's weird with the poets and musicians.
link |
Do you want to say this is a particular thing that you do,
link |
but then there's Spanish fly by Van Halen.
link |
And then you realize, oh, well,
link |
what do you get out of Spanish fly by Van Halen?
link |
I think it's very singular because of the fact
link |
that it's purely acoustic.
link |
For some reason, I always,
link |
I couldn't imagine Eddie Van Halen separate from the band
link |
in front of thousands of people just screaming
link |
and rocking out with lights everywhere.
link |
And Spanish fly made me think like,
link |
it made me imagine him sitting alone
link |
on a couch in a room.
link |
I think that's who he was, I really do.
link |
I mean, believe me, I get it.
link |
He was a rockstar, he was a rock god.
link |
Got it, got it, got it, got it.
link |
I'm almost positive that you can't get
link |
to where he got to without being a complete introvert.
link |
Yeah, it made me imagine
link |
that there's some half naked supermodel walking around,
link |
hoping that they can do their thing together.
link |
And Eddie's completely disinterested.
link |
He'd be with the guitar.
link |
He'd be with the guitar, right?
link |
Because honestly, at some level,
link |
in one case, maybe you're conquesting,
link |
maybe you're pursuing love and romance.
link |
In the other case, you're talking about a relationship
link |
to the order, the creator, the almighty,
link |
whatever it is you want to call that substrate
link |
And do I believe that Eddie Van Halen
link |
and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and Heifetz
link |
jacked into the true essence of the world?
link |
I don't think it's as good as differential geometry.
link |
I do think it's amazing for other reasons.
link |
And thank God, because it's very typical
link |
to communicate differential geometry at scale.
link |
But the thing about eruption, for example,
link |
what level do you want to come into eruption?
link |
Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry?
link |
Do you want the theatrics?
link |
Like you could put him on wires
link |
and set his pants on fire or whatever,
link |
and it'd be totally in keeping with it.
link |
On the other hand, you want to talk
link |
to something completely precise
link |
that shows off the virtuosity
link |
of what's possible with the Stratocaster.
link |
But there's a precision to it,
link |
which is very different than Hendrix.
link |
There's a messiness to Hendrix that to me,
link |
somebody who has OCD has always been a struggle.
link |
How does Hendrix affect you?
link |
I mean, let's have the Jimi Hendrix conversation.
link |
I don't know that we can do anything to it
link |
that hasn't already been done to it.
link |
Maybe that's not true.
link |
Maybe the idea is that every generation
link |
has to have its Hendrix conversation,
link |
and this is a long form part.
link |
It's Jimi Hendrix experience.
link |
I hear you stole it from Joe Rogan.
link |
There's so many details.
link |
One, it hurt my soul on so many levels
link |
that you can put a thumb over the guitar
link |
to play a note, to hold the note.
link |
And it doesn't, because I want it to be the Russian virtuoso
link |
that sits with his classical guitar in a perfect form,
link |
plays really fast with the fingers,
link |
and then you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed
link |
and supporting the neck.
link |
So that's the Russian conservatory student.
link |
Conservatory student, yeah.
link |
Then there's the Russian wild man.
link |
Which one is that?
link |
Well, they're different Russian archetypes, right?
link |
So the completely idiosyncratic Russian
link |
is very different in a weird way from the,
link |
I can do this backwards in any key in my sleep
link |
and in any time signature that you just snap your fingers.
link |
We've discussed my piano tuner in previous episodes.
link |
No, no, that was offline conversation.
link |
You told me the story.
link |
I should tell you the story.
link |
You should retell the story.
link |
There I was in darkest Manhattan
link |
with the world's shittiest, it wasn't even an upright,
link |
it was a spinet piano.
link |
A friend had given it to me.
link |
The piano fell out of tune and I would have to tune it.
link |
And the only tuner I knew was this Russian guy
link |
and I hated dealing with him.
link |
There was something about his attitude
link |
that just really rubbed me the wrong way.
link |
So anyway, my wife says, tune that thing.
link |
So we get the piano tuner to come and he's tuning this.
link |
He's like, are you sure you wanna tune this piece of shit?
link |
So he's like, okay, it's your money.
link |
The phone rings and I have the phone ringer set
link |
on a landline to Paganini Caprice 24.
link |
And immediately as the phone rings,
link |
he figures out what key the phone ringer is
link |
and which is not the key that like list composed
link |
the variations on Caprice 24.
link |
And he starts going into theme and variations
link |
on Caprice 24 at some level I've never heard before,
link |
just jaw dropping it.
link |
And like the phone stops ringing
link |
and we have this awkward silence.
link |
I said, I didn't know you were such a great piano player.
link |
And then he says one of these things
link |
in Russian accented English hurts in a way
link |
you can't imagine.
link |
He said, no, you are the piano player.
link |
I am merely the piano tuner.
link |
And I was just like, oh man, through the heart.
link |
You know, it's kind of reminiscent.
link |
I'd love to hear actually your opinion.
link |
This is reminiscent of the Good Will Hunting story.
link |
What do you think about that?
link |
Yeah, I guess when I think of that film,
link |
I think about Matt Damon as a young guy,
link |
risking everything, giving up Harvard.
link |
I think probably the most accomplished group
link |
of people in the world are people
link |
who choose to give up Harvard voluntarily.
link |
Bigger than Harvard.
link |
Ives was one of these people, Bill Gates, of course.
link |
And then oddly, you know.
link |
But then Steve Jobs gave up a Reed,
link |
and Reed is like the weirdest, craziest college
link |
People should pay much more attention to Reed.
link |
And I'm sorry it's going through a hard time at the moment,
link |
but what it was before the current craziness
link |
is really an interesting story.
link |
Irregardless, as we say in the 617 Area Code,
link |
I think that a lot of my reaction
link |
is to the real story of Matt Damon having this vision
link |
and being the young guy to pull it off.
link |
And I also think about Robin Williams
link |
trying to explore heart through this lens of acting.
link |
And as you and I, you've hung out with comedians.
link |
They know that they already screwed up a bunch of people.
link |
They're proud about it.
link |
The idea that Robin Williams, who I saw many years ago
link |
when I was in LA in the comedy clubs around here,
link |
he was a straight up crazy, dysregulated genius
link |
in tremendous pain.
link |
And his desire to do it earnestly through acting
link |
rather than constantly by just sniping
link |
or being a clown or showing us how fast his mind worked
link |
relative to ours, I was really moved by that.
link |
I thought that he brought some authenticity
link |
and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that real.
link |
And again, like you said, it doesn't always have to be,
link |
but in that case, the madness and the genius were neighbors.
link |
That one couldn't have been any other way.
link |
No, because his mind,
link |
the thing about seeing him in a comedy club
link |
was that he would react to random stimulus
link |
in the environment.
link |
You know, it could be a heckler.
link |
Sometimes you almost got the feeling
link |
that he wanted a heckler
link |
because it gave him something to play against, right?
link |
He was infinitely, instantly inventive.
link |
But I actually, to me, the best Robin Williams
link |
is as he got closer and closer to the end of his life
link |
because there was a sadness
link |
and he's almost fighting the sadness
link |
with this improvisational,
link |
like the weapons he has is this wit and humor
link |
and this dancing that he does with language.
link |
But, and then sometimes when you just fall silent,
link |
you can see the sadness.
link |
And I don't know, there's something so beautiful about that.
link |
It's like this bird with a broken wing
link |
that's like trying to fly, you know,
link |
and it's getting older and older.
link |
And I mean, those,
link |
he would have made a one hell of a podcast guest,
link |
I'll tell you that.
link |
Yeah, I have some sadness that I really do think
link |
that part of what we call podcasting
link |
is actually just getting to know a soul
link |
over and over again.
link |
Like maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression
link |
and sadness and heavy feelings
link |
is not an American specialty.
link |
Seeing that in context with the beauty of life
link |
is a Russian specialty.
link |
Like it is very much.
link |
Russian specialty, sounds like a diner menu.
link |
You want the Russian specialty?
link |
A big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression.
link |
I do think that we're in a really terrifying
link |
and depressing time.
link |
And I think that part of it is that we don't know
link |
if something huge is about to get started.
link |
And we don't even know what this is.
link |
I mean, we just sit here in this weird world
link |
that is falling into some new state
link |
and we're not even super curious.
link |
It's like, what the hell just happened?
link |
Everybody's got an answer.
link |
And I'm positive that all of those answers are wrong.
link |
Let's try to at least sneak up on the good answer.
link |
So the central core of the answer is
link |
that the US seemed to be the greatest thing in the world
link |
in large measure because we hadn't noticed
link |
that we were getting a benefit from having no plan,
link |
not having to make a plan for low growth.
link |
As long as we had growth, we were in great shape.
link |
Let's imagine that you could run an experiment,
link |
you have a billion copies of Earth
link |
and you start the initial conditions slightly different.
link |
On some giant number of planets,
link |
a lot of the things that were discovered
link |
from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century
link |
are discovered in a period of time
link |
because a lot of that just has to do with
link |
once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments,
link |
And the more you can see,
link |
the more you can make use of what you can see.
link |
And it turns out there was lots of stuff to do
link |
with like germs or electron orbitals
link |
or spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum.
link |
And so we got to do all of those things
link |
and the US roughly corresponded
link |
for a good chunk of its history with this bonanza.
link |
And so of course we look like an amazing genius country.
link |
Imagine that you could sell a car,
link |
you don't have to put in seat belts,
link |
you don't have to put in airbags,
link |
you don't have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors
link |
or a rear view mirror.
link |
You could save a lot of money on a car
link |
by not putting in all of the stuff
link |
to keep things from going wrong.
link |
And I think that's what we had.
link |
We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good,
link |
we plowed it back, the riches and spoils and then treasure
link |
back into the system and made more genius stuff.
link |
And we carried along a good chunk of humanity,
link |
hundreds of millions of people.
link |
We did not have a plan for what happens
link |
when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society.
link |
How confident should we be that the growth has slowed
link |
in a way that is permanent rather than a kind of slap
link |
in the face where we...
link |
It's not the right concept.
link |
Right concept is, I try to use the same words
link |
over and over again in case people see mold
link |
because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere.
link |
So I use this analogy of the orchard
link |
because everyone talks about low hanging fruit.
link |
They know the concept of low hanging fruit,
link |
but they don't think in terms of orchards.
link |
So they say things like,
link |
you think we've picked all the low hanging fruit,
link |
but I believe in the inventiveness of the human mind.
link |
It's like, okay, that doesn't even work as an analogy.
link |
What if the idea is we only picked
link |
all the low hanging fruit here,
link |
and then we're having this stupid argument
link |
about low hanging fruit,
link |
and we're not going and looking for new orchards.
link |
We're not planting new orchards.
link |
We're not looking for forests.
link |
We're just sitting here arguing about low hanging fruit.
link |
So my claim is there's probably a lot more low hanging fruit
link |
and it's not here.
link |
It's in other orchards.
link |
It's in other orchards.
link |
One of those turned out to be the digital orchard.
link |
The digital orchard has not been as stagnant
link |
as lots of these other, like the chemical orchard.
link |
I have faith that there is a small percentage
link |
of the population, but not zero,
link |
that's looking for those other orchards.
link |
Like I'm excited about one of those orchards,
link |
which is, I believe there'll be robots in everybody's homes
link |
and that will unlock some totally new thing.
link |
Totally new set of technologies, ideas,
link |
the way we live life, the productivity,
link |
all the everything, it'll change everything.
link |
So I'm excited about that orchard.
link |
So I'm roaming that orchard
link |
and wondering how the hell you kind of bring back
link |
like the ant that finds a new source of food.
link |
I'm trying to find an apple I can bring back to the.
link |
Great, so you're in an explorer idiom.
link |
And do you have faith that there's enough of those?
link |
I don't think there are very many of us.
link |
I mean, I'm one of them too.
link |
How many does it take?
link |
What are you talking about?
link |
How many elons does it take to screw in a light bulb?
link |
Okay, let's imagine that we went,
link |
imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food, right?
link |
And then it comes back to the colony and it says,
link |
hey, I think I found a new source of food.
link |
And the initial reaction is,
link |
you're not authorized to find new food.
link |
Why would you try to go find new food?
link |
We're gonna remove you from Twitter.
link |
Yeah, and by the way,
link |
I think the fact that you think you're allowed
link |
to go find new food shows how privileged you are as an ant.
link |
Get out of the colony, kill him, kill him.
link |
Well, that's probably not a great model
link |
for finding new orchards.
link |
And I think that what we find is that
link |
where there's a system that allows somebody to ascend
link |
without a lot of gatekeeping, you can have that.
link |
But I saw this happen in hedge funds.
link |
Hedge funds for a while hoovered up a lot of talent
link |
because they were places that had funding and had freedom.
link |
And in general, really smart people want to be free
link |
and they don't wanna think a lot about
link |
how they're gonna feed themselves.
link |
They wanna get lost in their minds.
link |
So you can either give them productive places to play,
link |
dangerous places to play.
link |
They're either gonna break into computers
link |
or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies.
link |
And we're not providing for the people who have to disrupt
link |
and have to innovate and trying to channel that effort.
link |
We're so focused on this other thing,
link |
which is fairness and safety.
link |
And fairness and safety, by the way, are really important.
link |
I don't wanna denigrate them.
link |
But the singular focus on fairness and safety
link |
without, in the same breath, being focused on growth
link |
and discovery and creation is gonna doom us
link |
because what we're talking about is we're always talking
link |
about divvying up the pie that is
link |
as opposed to the pie that will be.
link |
Imagine that you spent all your time trying to divvy up
link |
the 13th century pie and you destroyed your ability
link |
to get to the 20th century.
link |
You'd be an idiot.
link |
But one place I think I disagree with you
link |
is I don't think you need that many people
link |
to empower the geniuses, the innovators,
link |
the people who refuse to spend most of their days
link |
in meetings about fairness.
link |
Let's have a disagreement.
link |
I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium,
link |
is just one little example of a tool
link |
that you can give power to,
link |
like you and your podcast can have the next Elon Musk
link |
and make him a star.
link |
Now I see where you're going.
link |
There have been a series of places
link |
for people to play and be free.
link |
And we've lost them successively.
link |
What's a good place you remember?
link |
Because I disagree with you there too.
link |
I think they're still there.
link |
You can still play.
link |
You interviewed Noam Chomsky.
link |
Noam Chomsky comes from an era.
link |
Where you can play?
link |
Where you could play?
link |
And you can't play.
link |
This is where I disagree with you.
link |
We've already had this.
link |
Go check the Clips channel for the Lex Friedman podcast.
link |
I think I wasn't brave enough at that time
link |
and I'm not really brave enough now.
link |
Where's the vodka?
link |
It's a feeling and people are gonna tear me apart.
link |
And you speak from emotion and facts.
link |
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
link |
What podcast is this?
link |
Tell the people who are currently editing your brain,
link |
because I saw that move right now.
link |
That they should go find another podcast.
link |
Let's get rid of some of your audience right now.
link |
Please go find another podcast
link |
if you're editing my brain.
link |
Nevertheless, all the self doubt,
link |
they're sitting in that brain.
link |
I can't stand to watch this.
link |
What is this self doubt loop that you're in?
link |
when I walk the halls of MIT.
link |
There's bureaucracy, there's administrators
link |
that never have done anything interesting
link |
in their entire lives.
link |
There's meetings, there's.
link |
All the usual crap.
link |
All the usual crap.
link |
But there's, in the eyes of individuals.
link |
There's this glow of excitement
link |
that has nothing to do with career.
link |
I understand this.
link |
And it's still a playground.
link |
There's little pockets of playgrounds
link |
from which genius can emerge still.
link |
And they're unaffected by diversity meetings
link |
or fairness meetings or blah, blah, blah.
link |
I love to hear that.
link |
Well, you don't think so?
link |
I don't believe it.
link |
Cause I've watched the change, Lex.
link |
I've watched people.
link |
We were all editing ourselves all the time.
link |
I remember my old mind.
link |
I liked it better.
link |
All of this relentless focus on critical race theory
link |
and critical theory, postmodernism, fairness,
link |
It's making many of us into worse people.
link |
You think that's that?
link |
Do you think the Matt Damon's of the character
link |
is paying attention to any of that?
link |
You think that has an effect?
link |
Have you seen what happened to Matt Damon himself?
link |
Matt Damon has tried to say various things at various times
link |
that seemed to be relatively innocuous.
link |
Well, let's not mix up.
link |
Matt Damon is just an actor.
link |
Well, I don't know.
link |
He was just a Harvard student
link |
who came up with his own genius screenplay,
link |
acted and made it happen.
link |
No, we're somewhere else.
link |
You don't think you can build a rocket company
link |
I think that there are things that you can still do.
link |
But we're losing them.
link |
We keep losing them.
link |
I would say the biggest problem,
link |
here, let me just say,
link |
what I think the solution would be
link |
is to fire anybody who's not faculty,
link |
especially young faculty should have way more power
link |
and administration should have much less power.
link |
Because right now, the administration,
link |
which used some of the, who used to be faculty,
link |
but they've lost the fire, the spark that gave them,
link |
they've lost the memories of the playground.
link |
And so the people that admire and love the playground,
link |
like you could see it in their behavior,
link |
should have way more power.
link |
And so we should create a systems that give them power.
link |
I think I'll take it.
link |
You're very idealistic.
link |
And you're very, you've got a huge heart.
link |
It's a weird time.
link |
Cause I don't want to dissuade you
link |
from believing beautiful things.
link |
Because I see how potent you are.
link |
You do all these things,
link |
Jiu Jitsu, guitar, podcasting, programming, computers,
link |
et cetera, et cetera.
link |
I don't think you're right.
link |
I think we're in a really deeply screwed up place
link |
where even the tiny number of,
link |
let me give you an alternate version of this dystopia.
link |
I do think that there are people who are capable
link |
and there's still places to play
link |
and cause things to happen that progress the story forward.
link |
But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in
link |
who fit that profile,
link |
like how much crap has Elon Musk taken?
link |
Quite considerable, right?
link |
And not much admiration from the...
link |
Craig Venter, Jim Watson.
link |
These are very difficult people.
link |
Steve Jobs is a very difficult guy, you know?
link |
Yeah, it is a bit heartbreaking to me.
link |
I mean, everybody is different generations.
link |
I just, my mind is a little focused on Elon Musk
link |
because he's the modern person.
link |
Well, you know him.
link |
I mean, he's a person to you.
link |
It hurts my heart to see how few faculty
link |
and people with Nobel prizes and so on admire Elon.
link |
He gets a lot of fans from people that buy his products
link |
and young minds just excited.
link |
But why don't we as an institution,
link |
why doesn't MIT say that somebody amongst us
link |
will be the next Elon Musk and we want to encourage them?
link |
Like say that, say that in meetings, say that.
link |
Like that's success for us as MIT.
link |
And they, instead there's this jealousy.
link |
It's like, did you hear what Elon Musk tweeted?
link |
Did you see, like how irresponsible is what he's doing?
link |
How, like you're just saying all these things
link |
that are just dripping with jealousy and basically...
link |
I want what he's got.
link |
That's the thing, right?
link |
Here's the weird thing.
link |
Rivalry has a different signature.
link |
You see, when you know that you're never going to make it,
link |
that's the position you take.
link |
What is it in Kung Fu Panda, which you've watched now?
link |
What does Tai Lung say when he's looking
link |
for the dragon warrior and the furious five
link |
come to defeat him on the bridge?
link |
One of them gives up Poe's name accidentally
link |
and Tai Lung hears it.
link |
Poe, so that is his name.
link |
Finally, a worthy opponent.
link |
Our battle will be legendary, right?
link |
Well, you learn about this in boxing.
link |
Sometimes you'll see a division or an MMA,
link |
which is lousy with talent.
link |
Just, you can't swing a cat
link |
without hitting an amazing athlete.
link |
Sometimes you'll have a division,
link |
which at that particular moment has one star
link |
and no real competition in that weight class or something.
link |
That person is in bad shape
link |
because you can't build a legend without the other.
link |
When you think of Muhammad Ali,
link |
what are the names that you immediately think of?
link |
And you have to phrase your,
link |
you have to think of the other heavyweights.
link |
So those opponents are in part what made Muhammad Ali
link |
And that's why the Mayweather McGregor revelation that,
link |
okay, this guy has got his opponent's picture in his house.
link |
How weird is that?
link |
Well, because without the opponent,
link |
you may not be able to get there.
link |
Now, I am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries.
link |
Do you have examples in mind?
link |
Well, there are rivalries
link |
where people take each other's credit cards
link |
and take each other's credit and screw each other over.
link |
And then there are other rivalries like the RNA Thai Club
link |
where these guys were so in love with what they were doing
link |
that they couldn't wait to share everything.
link |
And like Nobel prizes were so abundant
link |
that most people got Nobel prizes
link |
just for being a member of the RNA Thai Club
link |
and doing cool stuff.
link |
And yeah, that's the golden kind of sweet spot.
link |
Most of these people can't do what Elon's doing
link |
because they can't break rules,
link |
they can't take the pressure.
link |
I'll tell you what really concerns me
link |
about your perspective.
link |
I think that there are a lot of genius ideas
link |
inside of people who don't have the stomach
link |
for conflict and derision.
link |
And I think a lot of those people are female.
link |
And I think that until we come up with a world
link |
in which we can swat down the trolls,
link |
or we can actually cause the trolls not to ruin everything.
link |
And I don't necessarily mean by shutting them up,
link |
I don't necessarily mean by being brutal to them,
link |
but somehow separating off people who are working
link |
and people who are trolling.
link |
I think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius
link |
in part because women in particular
link |
are not necessarily going to push an idea
link |
if it results in 10 years of being derided.
link |
Very few men are willing to do that either.
link |
But there are some of us who are so dumb
link |
that we will pigheadedly stick to an idea for 10 years
link |
even if the world collapses.
link |
I don't think that there are as many women
link |
who are going to make that calculation
link |
even if they know the idea is correct.
link |
And one of the things that I believe technology
link |
can help us fight the trolls,
link |
of all definitions of troll,
link |
like I believe that a better Twitter can be built.
link |
Interesting, I do not.
link |
I don't believe that a Twitter successor can be built
link |
that solves most of the problems.
link |
I think you can always improve what we have,
link |
but I don't think that converges in something
link |
that really works because I think ultimately
link |
the problem isn't Twitter, the problem is us.
link |
For example, I've recently made
link |
a very disturbing realization,
link |
which is academics and social scientists
link |
and academics and trolls have very many similar behaviors.
link |
It's largely a trolling community.
link |
I tend to believe that the trolls are not,
link |
it's like the Peter Thiel mini mind idea,
link |
which in all of the trolls,
link |
there's the possibility of goodness.
link |
And all you have to do, not all you have to do,
link |
what you have to do is create technology
link |
that incentivizes them to embrace,
link |
to discover, to embrace,
link |
to practice the better angels of their nature.
link |
And I believe that people actually want to do that.
link |
The trolls is a short term dopamine rush
link |
of childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome.
link |
I believe that like deep within, we want to overcome that.
link |
I try to keep myself from believing what you believe.
link |
Because you'd be disappointed if it's not true.
link |
Because it's dangerous,
link |
because a lot of these people are implacable foes
link |
and there aren't many of them,
link |
but when you meet somebody who's like,
link |
yeah, I just like screwing people up.
link |
I'm here for the pain.
link |
I just believe even in them, there's a good.
link |
There's a wonderful book that I'm gonna recommend to you
link |
where I hope this comes from.
link |
Maybe I've got the source wrong,
link |
but in any event, it's a great book
link |
called Maximum City about Bombay.
link |
And I believe the conceit is that the author
link |
leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult
link |
and he realizes he has to rediscover the city
link |
because he can't live in the city he left.
link |
So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas
link |
of the city and one of them is the underworld.
link |
He hangs out with the police,
link |
but in the underworld, he's talking to contract killers.
link |
And he says, you know, it's really weird.
link |
Everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them.
link |
And they always say this thing about,
link |
I've got two kids at home.
link |
He says, never say that to a contract killer
link |
because we have terrible relationships with our parents.
link |
Doesn't it dare us to do that?
link |
And I was just thinking like, oh, wow.
link |
So there's a minus sign in front of that statement.
link |
You're sitting there saying, you know,
link |
I've got a three year old, it's like,
link |
okay, well, I'm gonna take this POS out of that kid's life.
link |
Maybe I'll have a chance.
link |
You don't know how people are wired.
link |
And as much as I hate to say it,
link |
there are people whose wiring is so disturbing
link |
and so different from yours
link |
that you will never guess why you can't reach them
link |
or how much pleasure they may have gotten
link |
because they may have gone over a point of no return.
link |
Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy
link |
who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis.
link |
You do not know this for sure.
link |
And I am, you know, whatever the hell I am
link |
that has a different hypothesis
link |
that even in the darkest human beings
link |
that seem to be only full of evil,
link |
there's a good person there that could be discovered.
link |
And that's one of the reasons I love doing your show
link |
is that you have these beliefs, even as a Russian.
link |
The Russian special.
link |
As you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness
link |
which is a total cynicism and total idealism
link |
locked together, right?
link |
That's very much a part of the Russian character.
link |
The reason I kept bothering you,
link |
kept bothering you to have this conversation
link |
is I'm really worried about the next couple of months.
link |
And if there's anybody in this world
link |
that could help alleviate my worry
link |
by at least walking along with me
link |
through this worry of mine, it's you.
link |
Do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war?
link |
Some kind of division that explodes
link |
beyond just stuff on Twitter,
link |
but something that's really destructive
link |
to the fabric of our society?
link |
Well, I believe we're in a revolution, as you know.
link |
I've called it the no name revolution
link |
or N squared revolution.
link |
I've been talking about it for years.
link |
I don't think, I think waiting for this
link |
to be called a civil war is not smart.
link |
Only history will call it such.
link |
But I think that the problem is
link |
is that you're encountering things
link |
that you've never seen trying to fit them
link |
into things that you already know.
link |
But history repeats itself.
link |
You don't see lessons from history in.
link |
But I don't see it repeating itself.
link |
You know, the famous quote is that it rhymes.
link |
I mean, the thing I guess I'm speaking to is violence.
link |
The abstraction of violence.
link |
Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class.
link |
Thank you for speaking to the audience.
link |
Trying to lose these people.
link |
Look, I've dealt with your audience
link |
and your audience contains the smartest people around.
link |
I guarantee you if I say some stuff,
link |
first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say,
link |
they're gonna detail.
link |
So that'll be a little bit of catnip
link |
to bring in the smart people.
link |
But they'll also digest it for each other.
link |
It's one of the great lessons of long form podcasting.
link |
If you don't waste all your time explaining things,
link |
that's the job of the audience to do amongst themselves.
link |
They're happy doing the work.
link |
And those who aren't, they leave.
link |
The people who don't wanna struggle will leave.
link |
You can get rid of them.
link |
I think that the point is you would want to say
link |
violence is defined relative to a context.
link |
So let's call it meta violence so that we don't get
link |
We already have a term for physical violence, right?
link |
So we have meta violence and physical violence.
link |
I would say that physical violence
link |
is subclassed from meta violence.
link |
Meta violence is the disruption of a system.
link |
It's sort of, for example, if a cell dies,
link |
you can die through apoptosis or necrosis.
link |
Apoptosis is controlled programmed cell death.
link |
Necrosis is just like, okay, this didn't work.
link |
That was a violent disruption of the system.
link |
And this meta class is presumed in the documentation.
link |
Is it all negative?
link |
No, what are you talking about?
link |
So this is part of the problem
link |
in the madness of our age, right?
link |
Which is if you open up a drawer in your cabinet,
link |
right, in your kitchen,
link |
and you see knives, spoons, and forks,
link |
do you have a sense that the spoons are good utensils
link |
and the knives or forks are bad utensils
link |
because they're mean?
link |
I mean, like if you start thinking in these terms,
link |
that knife is there to do violence.
link |
That's violence you want done, right?
link |
When I cut a mango, I'm doing violence to the mango.
link |
The mango expects that I will do violence to it
link |
because otherwise I won't be able to get the meat
link |
and it won't get its seed spread somewhere else.
link |
So in part, violence is absolutely part of our story.
link |
So, okay, so there's this meta violence class.
link |
So the meta violence class is already,
link |
it's a multiple inheritance pattern.
link |
Whatever's going on right now inherits from meta violence.
link |
No, but there's certain subclasses
link |
that allow evil to emerge.
link |
So what I'm specifically worried about is that...
link |
What's on your mind, Lex?
link |
What's really going on?
link |
I worry that amidst the chaos of these protests
link |
or the chaos that could be created by the feeling
link |
that the election does not represent the voice
link |
of the people, like saying that whoever gets,
link |
quote unquote, wins the election
link |
according to some kind of reporting of the numbers
link |
that come out, that's not going to represent
link |
what people actually want to be the leader.
link |
Like something in that narrative will create
link |
so much division that people will resort
link |
to literal violence, like protests that really...
link |
That the United States loses its united aspect.
link |
And because of that, because of that chaos and tension,
link |
evil people, evil forces that my definition of evil
link |
is just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power.
link |
The kind of power that is ultimately goes against the ideal
link |
of the United States.
link |
That could be Donald Trump.
link |
That could be another human being.
link |
It doesn't really matter.
link |
My worry is that love doesn't win out in this.
link |
The unity doesn't win out in this.
link |
And I feel like you and I have responsibility.
link |
No kidding. Yeah, I know.
link |
And so how do we let love win in this moment
link |
of potential chaos? We're gonna have to fight for it.
link |
You're gonna have to become a fighter.
link |
You're gonna have to throw some serious punches
link |
if that's what you want.
link |
You have to be Muhammad Ali here
link |
because the moment you start criticizing anything,
link |
people, you have to be a masterful communicator because...
link |
That's why you're here.
link |
Look, Lex, in part, your decency is allowing you
link |
to do things that you couldn't otherwise do.
link |
I saw that you had Michael Malice on your podcast.
link |
Now, Michael Malice is, I think of somebody
link |
who at his best is extremely shrewd and insightful, yes?
link |
He's also got this trolling game,
link |
which he's quite open about and you talk to him about it,
link |
which I can't stand.
link |
And this is the idea, oh, grandpa doesn't get the internet.
link |
Well, I'm grandpa, I don't get the internet.
link |
I don't love the trolling.
link |
There are trolls of the past who were incredibly good.
link |
I don't see any of the modern trolls
link |
as being that kind of genius level trolling the people
link |
who deserve it in the way that they deserve it.
link |
Right now, what I see is that anything
link |
that stands up gets cut down.
link |
It's like anything earnest,
link |
you have to turn it into cynicism and a meme.
link |
It's this idea that the people who believe
link |
that the world is chaos and has no point
link |
are constantly trying to let you know,
link |
don't try to use the internet for meaning,
link |
for decency, for goodness, because we are going to find out
link |
that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy.
link |
And we will make you suffer.
link |
So I do think that there's a lot
link |
of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world.
link |
Some of it mine, some of it yours, but we all have it.
link |
And the trolls somewhat remove that,
link |
but it's not a judicious, kind, constructive,
link |
compassionate, caring version most of the time.
link |
And a lot of those trolls,
link |
and I have this feeling about Michael Malice,
link |
I don't know whether it's right,
link |
that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath it
link |
and that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior.
link |
And you and I don't seem to be doing that.
link |
I don't see you as almost ever trolling.
link |
Now you and I, I'm very much against trolling.
link |
I'm very much against trolling.
link |
It doesn't mean that it's selective.
link |
You know what, it's not even true.
link |
Like everything we say, we say like,
link |
I'm for it, I'm against it.
link |
This isn't my native language.
link |
I don't speak this internet shit.
link |
And the more I have to communicate through internet shit,
link |
right, I almost never take a tweet seriously
link |
if it contains the letters LMAO, LOL, RTFOL, you know, FOL.
link |
There's an interesting effect where people say stuff
link |
and then finish with LOL.
link |
You put it beautifully that it indicates to me
link |
that this is a person,
link |
we've talked about like why I wear this stupid suit,
link |
is like this is anti, this is to fight the LOL
link |
at the end of sentences, is take,
link |
it's like stand up for the words you're saying.
link |
Don't finish stuff with LOL,
link |
removing completely the responsibility of the content
link |
of the sentence that preceded it.
link |
Yeah, also choosing the outfit that works both
link |
for Men in Black and the Blues Brothers,
link |
not a terrible choice.
link |
Okay, but getting back, look, Lex,
link |
we're not in a position to do this.
link |
You need to be seated in a different chair.
link |
Your chair is the wrong chair.
link |
You're in the wrong chair.
link |
It's been so long.
link |
All right, I want to talk about you and Joe Biden.
link |
Joe Biden was a 29 year old guy
link |
with nothing particular going on so far as I can tell.
link |
Okay, I know people as impressive at age 29 as Joe Biden,
link |
12 rows back, 3D, doesn't matter, huge number of people.
link |
None of them my age can get to where he got to.
link |
Like we're all morons.
link |
Anytime somebody takes out,
link |
like if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop,
link |
What is this guy doing repairing guitars?
link |
Then somebody will say, maybe he loves to repair guitars.
link |
Yeah, I mean, what is your piano,
link |
Russian piano tuner doing?
link |
What is my Russian piano?
link |
That was the whole point of that story,
link |
which is what is it that happened in that life
link |
that converted somebody?
link |
And I find this, for example, with Russian doctors
link |
who are technicians in offices now.
link |
There's a huge amount of talent in the world
link |
that's not sitting in its proper seat.
link |
And quite honestly, I've gotten to the point
link |
where my feeling is we've got to take the seats.
link |
And maybe we don't sit in them.
link |
Maybe the idea is that we take the seats
link |
and we put some smart Gen Z person in the seat
link |
and say, look, no chanting.
link |
I don't wanna hear you say, no justice, no peace.
link |
If there aren't verbs, if it rhymes, it's wrong.
link |
Like I used to have this thing,
link |
if it rhymed things that rhymed wrong,
link |
if it rhymed things that rhyme are more true.
link |
But like in general, if something starts out
link |
one, two, three, four,
link |
I don't wanna hear what the rest of your sentences.
link |
But I feel like the responsibility that you carry,
link |
that I carry, this is where Joe Rogan
link |
generally removes himself from being,
link |
I'm just a comedian.
link |
This idea of I'm just a comedian.
link |
But at this moment in history,
link |
like history literally can pivot
link |
on the words of a tattooed,
link |
ripped 50 year old comedian.
link |
And I think the same is true with you.
link |
Okay, well, I'm interested and I care.
link |
Speaking of lyrics,
link |
there are many here among us
link |
who feel that life has been a joke.
link |
The hour is getting late.
link |
In the song, the joker and the thief
link |
are on opposite sides of Jesus
link |
having this conversation over Jesus.
link |
You and I, we've been through that.
link |
That's not our fate.
link |
That's somebody else's fate
link |
to throw spitballs at the internet.
link |
That's not your fate.
link |
You're an earnest guy.
link |
You're filled with love.
link |
You're getting the most amazing podcasts.
link |
Yes, you're broadcasting.
link |
But you can win over the internet.
link |
This is the point I'm trying to make
link |
that you're saying I'm just a grandpa.
link |
I don't get the internet.
link |
No, I'm telling you, you're gonna get bigger
link |
and then you're gonna get cut down.
link |
You're gonna keep ascending for a while, Lex.
link |
And then you're saying, and naturally there's a...
link |
I'm telling you, I watch the same process.
link |
People get up to a certain level.
link |
And one of the things that's going on,
link |
in my opinion, with Joe Rogan,
link |
is that when Joe Rogan starts to talk
link |
about his misgivings about Joe Biden,
link |
in a way that you find at any bar in America,
link |
about cognitive decline in a 77 year old
link |
who's about to be 78, I believe in November,
link |
we have never had anything remotely as insane
link |
as a 78 year old person slated to win the White House.
link |
And you're saying when that idea is being communicated,
link |
is there something about the disc concept
link |
that you talk about, the system naturally starts to...
link |
Some bad thing happens to Joe
link |
or one of Joe's close associates.
link |
The ability to destroy people who become inconvenient
link |
has been documented.
link |
This is what we have done in the past.
link |
Whether we are doing it now, we don't know,
link |
because we are not doing this church committee too.
link |
In order to know whether or not
link |
you are currently destroying American citizens
link |
as we did in the past and as we have documented,
link |
as we found out in 1976,
link |
the federal government destroyed Americans
link |
who had political beliefs
link |
that the government didn't want to continue.
link |
And I don't know whether you are grasping that.
link |
One interpretation of why Jon Stewart
link |
and why Joe Rogan and why Bill Maher,
link |
all these people to some extent hide behind, it's a joke.
link |
It's because they're trying to find a protected class.
link |
Is there some place I can stand and speak the truth
link |
which does not result in my being garbage collected?
link |
I guess you're right.
link |
My intuition is you can stand, as you gain more power,
link |
you can stand behind your words.
link |
There's a fight over Joe Rogan right now.
link |
I mean, I've talked about it for a few years now.
link |
People did not understand how big that program was.
link |
People didn't understand long form podcasting.
link |
I was derided by people who I think of as being very shrewd
link |
for believing in these podcasts as a major force.
link |
And most of the people who derided me have said,
link |
wow, did I not get things?
link |
It's like if you started to propose,
link |
you wanted to do the Sopranos
link |
in the era of 30 minute sitcoms.
link |
Like, you don't get it, man.
link |
The American people, they're not interested
link |
in these long plot storylines.
link |
That's your weird thing?
link |
Nobody cares, dude.
link |
Everybody just wants short, fast, memorable.
link |
And like, okay, so if you do that,
link |
you totally miss the opportunity.
link |
And the savvy people used to say,
link |
kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime
link |
underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
link |
Well, that was totally wrong
link |
because they didn't calculate opportunity costs.
link |
I have been talking about the problem of Joe for a long time.
link |
The problem is, is that when the system wakes up,
link |
they're gonna wanna control it.
link |
And they come up with new different mechanisms
link |
I guess one interesting one is cancel culture.
link |
Well, look at the number of people around Joe
link |
who they've come after since they realized
link |
that Joe was really big.
link |
Joey Diaz, Brian Callan, Chris Delia.
link |
Now, I'm not saying that those are all related,
link |
but I do notice that there are at least correlations
link |
between when Joe says something
link |
when something bad happens in Joe's universe.
link |
It's easier for me to believe that that's happening
link |
when it's happening around Joe himself.
link |
But I'm worried about my friend.
link |
And I don't necessarily wanna push him
link |
towards being more if he doesn't want it.
link |
Because I don't wanna conscript people.
link |
He's got a great life.
link |
He's got a great situation.
link |
He's done a huge service.
link |
How much do I owe Joe just for what he's done for you
link |
to say nothing of what he's done for me
link |
or for Brett or for Sam or any of these people?
link |
And I'd like to think that we all try to give back,
link |
but I'm worried about Joe.
link |
One of the inspiring things about Joe
link |
is he's in this war alone.
link |
And the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life.
link |
Well, that's his thing, as long as he stays close
link |
to things that he loves and being,
link |
one of the things is he's honest about his drug use.
link |
So he's just, he does a certain amount
link |
of like semi vice signaling upfront.
link |
And then you just also know him.
link |
This is why every time they try to take him down,
link |
you use the N word.
link |
Unfortunately, everybody knows who Joe is.
link |
And yes, he doesn't act as if he went to a fancy
link |
finishing school, right?
link |
That's not his energy.
link |
The fact that you've got some super smart guy
link |
who always pretends to be a meathead,
link |
just like, hey, I'm a comedian.
link |
It's like all these defenses and disguises.
link |
Okay, you've got this super smart guy
link |
who he's admitted to most of the things
link |
that you can take him down for.
link |
And because everybody's been effectively in his den
link |
his basement, think about that studio is his basement.
link |
People have hung out with Joe so many hours
link |
that you can't tell them something about Joe
link |
where they're gonna say, wow,
link |
I'm gonna believe the New York Times
link |
and not the hundreds of hours I've spent
link |
on the Joe Rogan experience.
link |
But the cool thing is that this is what inspires me
link |
is that the way he's waging war against the system,
link |
it's just by being a good person
link |
and talking enough hours in a week
link |
where that message like bleeds throughout the words
link |
and the gaps between.
link |
And that's so inspiring to me
link |
that the good people can win by just being good.
link |
And he's kind and he's tough.
link |
And he also, he's no pushover.
link |
I always worry a little bit when I sit down in my chair.
link |
You still get scared that he'll call you
link |
on some kind of bullshit that you weren't even aware of?
link |
No, the first time I was on the show,
link |
the energy wasn't great between us.
link |
And it was in a sober October situation.
link |
So I think I hadn't understood that
link |
and maybe our egos got a little bit off.
link |
I mean, I was having fun,
link |
but maybe it was just too complicated life forms
link |
getting to know each other.
link |
The first one was probably,
link |
yeah, that made me a little nervous for the future.
link |
But then, Joe and I have become friends,
link |
although sometimes we have miscommunications
link |
like on Yom Kippur, I texted him and I said,
link |
Joe, I want to apologize for ways I've let you down
link |
as a friend that haven't been there for you
link |
and appreciate everything you've done for me all this time.
link |
Like I get this text back like,
link |
what the fuck is your problem?
link |
You're great, dude.
link |
I don't know what bad place you're in, but cheer up.
link |
It's like, Joe, don't you have any Jews in your life
link |
that apologize for what they've done?
link |
He was just like, dude, have you lost your mind?
link |
What the hell's gotten into you?
link |
Yeah, what do you think about the Spotify thing?
link |
Ask me a question.
link |
He's now, as opposed to being just a comedian
link |
with the podcast, he now is just a comedian
link |
with the podcast who stepped like in the middle
link |
of the center of cancel culture,
link |
which is like, I know Spotify is in Sweden,
link |
but they represent Silicon Valley.
link |
They represent the very kind of structures.
link |
They contain and represent the kind of structures
link |
that threatened to destroy the Elans of the world.
link |
And he just like stepped like with his Alex Jones
link |
and his Joey Diaz just strolled right into the middle of it.
link |
Yeah, I think it's awesome.
link |
But do you think he's strong enough to, I don't know.
link |
I mean, I don't even know the right way to ask this,
link |
but is he strong enough to persevere?
link |
It's a bit interesting.
link |
It's like when a lion decides, wow,
link |
that honey badger looks tasty.
link |
I'm gonna swallow it whole, see what happens.
link |
Because I talked to him offline.
link |
He really seems to be willing to give away the 100 million,
link |
which gives him so much power.
link |
Oh, I don't, it's a powerful thing to be able to say,
link |
I don't, yeah, to the honey badger.
link |
He just strolls in, but he's willing to walk away
link |
from anything in this world.
link |
Well, he's gonna walk out the other side of the lion.
link |
I don't think he's gonna go out the way he came in.
link |
Well, you know what it is?
link |
It's Tommy Lee Jones entering the bug.
link |
This is like a giant alien, he just walks into it?
link |
He just, he gets swallowed by the bug
link |
and he blasts out from the inside.
link |
I have it as Tommy Lee Jones.
link |
Yeah, that's Joe Rogan to you.
link |
Yeah, is that my feeling is that Spotify
link |
doesn't understand what they're messing with.
link |
I could be wrong, but I'm not.
link |
Because Joe doesn't need anything, man.
link |
I mean, this is the weird thing about it.
link |
It's like, I'm sure that he loves all his toys,
link |
whatever, blah, blah, blah.
link |
Yes, he's got a few money.
link |
He had a few money a long time ago.
link |
And you're not, you know, the other thing about,
link |
it's a bit weird being friends with a dude like that.
link |
Cause like you call him up or he'll call you up
link |
and he's like, what's going on in your life?
link |
Kind of depressed, trying to get some math done.
link |
Oh dude, I can cheer you up.
link |
I just came off of a 29,000 person stadium.
link |
It's like, oh cool.
link |
How'd you do that?
link |
I just announced it on Instagram a few days ago
link |
Just like, oh damn.
link |
I mean, that thing is so powerful.
link |
I mean, you could be that too.
link |
The instant Joe takes an interest in politics
link |
and saving the world.
link |
You might destroy all of that.
link |
It's going bye bye.
link |
I just disagree with you.
link |
I mean, cause you have to do it.
link |
Like you've said this many times before.
link |
I'll bet you, I'll bet you a bottle of Stoli
link |
that you can get, if you get Joe Rogan
link |
to get highly politically active
link |
and call out the system for all the bullshit that it is
link |
in a very pointed and determined fashion
link |
and he doesn't get destroyed, I'll give you the vodka.
link |
That sounds like a pretty damn good deal.
link |
But you've said this, I mean.
link |
No living heroes, my friend, no living heroes.
link |
It's just difficult.
link |
You just have to be good at it.
link |
I mean, if you just say generic political things.
link |
You're going to be taken down.
link |
But if you're. The more heroic you are,
link |
the more beautiful you are,
link |
the more you will be made to suffer.
link |
If they cannot get you on reputation.
link |
If Jesus himself came down.
link |
I don't know if I ever read.
link |
I probably have never read to you the hit piece
link |
You don't know about this?
link |
No, I did not know.
link |
I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world.
link |
So whoever it was who cured cancer,
link |
discovered new particles or whatever it is,
link |
I did a hit piece against them to prove
link |
that I can do it to anybody around anything at any time.
link |
Except Eddie Van Halen is what we're talking about.
link |
Well, Eddie Van Halen is now dead.
link |
But if this was a situation, you know, hot for teacher,
link |
Also, you know, packaging female objectification
link |
Clearly Eddie Van Halen is one of the worst people alive.
link |
But the skill, the incredible inspiration
link |
that is just radiating from his music
link |
inspires so many millions
link |
that they will fight those canceled pieces.
link |
This is your thing.
link |
You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil
link |
and the good has already been designated the winner.
link |
And it's not true.
link |
But your belief that it's true.
link |
Fake it till you make it, no?
link |
I mean, you gotta, it's motivating both of us.
link |
Like I also believe that we're gonna win
link |
because if I don't, then I can't get out of bed
link |
and it's pretty heavy at the moment.
link |
Do you think 2021 can make us feel good
link |
about the trajectory of society?
link |
So like where we emerge from this year feeling good.
link |
Like there's a smile on Eric Weinstein's face
link |
and the next time we talk,
link |
we'll be doing some kind of duet on guitar
link |
and not having this worried look on our faces.
link |
Okay, but you've also promised
link |
you're going to somehow end this in a positive.
link |
Okay, so how do you turn the no around?
link |
What's the U turn from the no?
link |
Until we get some actually decent people
link |
in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking
link |
about their next paycheck, I don't see a solution.
link |
Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are
link |
and to let you know why I don't think it's coming.
link |
First of all, both of these political parties,
link |
the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go.
link |
They're tearing us apart.
link |
They lack the will to be Americans.
link |
They don't understand the subtlety of the project.
link |
They're simply the people who figured out
link |
how to inhabit the seats and that is their great achievement.
link |
I believe that in order to solve this,
link |
you need people who can integrate,
link |
who are not partisan at the level
link |
of the partisan warriors that we're seeing,
link |
people who believe in dividing the pies of the future
link |
rather than the present pie as our main task as Americans
link |
because we are built around growth.
link |
I'm sorry to say it.
link |
You need an ability to have subtle conversations
link |
and you need the ability to exclude.
link |
And at the moment, everyone knows inclusion is good,
link |
It's like saying, well, water is good.
link |
If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me.
link |
It's not, people drown.
link |
People need to get dehydrated.
link |
It can be life saving or life ending.
link |
It isn't good or bad.
link |
Inclusion is not good or bad.
link |
Inclusion is just inclusion.
link |
Exclusion is part of inclusion.
link |
We've taught people that they can reason through the world
link |
as sub cocker spaniels.
link |
They just bark things at each other.
link |
I'm for inclusion.
link |
Do you guys use verbs, dependent clauses?
link |
Are there compound complex sentences?
link |
Where are we in this sea of nonsense?
link |
You have to be able to build a place
link |
where you have smart, talented people
link |
who represent a diverse group of correct opinions.
link |
You need to get rid of almost all of the people
link |
who have opinions that are antithetical
link |
to what we're trying to accomplish.
link |
You need to give them insulation, which we're terrified
link |
because we don't trust anybody.
link |
So everything has to be transparent.
link |
If you're going to the bathroom,
link |
I want those walls to be plexiglass
link |
so I can see what you're doing.
link |
It's like, that's too much transparency.
link |
We have too much and not enough at the same time.
link |
And then in essence, you need to ensure
link |
that people aren't worried about feeding their family
link |
every four seconds for being real.
link |
None of that is happening.
link |
And our billionaires, our billionaires are pathetic.
link |
What is the point of billionaires
link |
if you're not going to do billionaire type cool stuff
link |
like saying, F you, and I'm going to throw $3 billion
link |
at the project of restoring the national conversation?
link |
I don't grasp this.
link |
What is the point of creating obscene wealth
link |
if we don't have anyone smart enough
link |
and caring enough to use it?
link |
So I agree with that last part for sure.
link |
Let me slightly push back on the idea
link |
that the leaders themselves are broken.
link |
I feel like this goes to the Joe Rogan,
link |
Joe Biden and Trump having a debate on that program.
link |
I feel like Joe Biden has a lot of really interesting ideas
link |
that he's almost forgot how to communicate.
link |
He's been fake for so long within the system.
link |
Hillary was fake for too long.
link |
I'm sure she had real ideas at the beginning
link |
that she still was campaigning on decades later.
link |
But if the system, if the platforms empowered you
link |
to search, to be honest, to be real,
link |
to search for those ideas within yourself,
link |
like long form conversations do,
link |
then even the Donald Trump and Joe Biden leaders
link |
we have now would take this country to a better place
link |
that would unite people.
link |
So like, we can keep the current Congress.
link |
We just need to create better platforms.
link |
This is going to the intuition
link |
that there's good in Donald Trump.
link |
There's depth and complexity and intelligence.
link |
And the same with Joe Biden.
link |
There's good in Joe Biden.
link |
And it's just, we're not incentivizing.
link |
I mean, there's several things I think are broken.
link |
One of them is Twitter.
link |
The other is journalism.
link |
It's just the platforms of us communicating with each other.
link |
One of the reasons that I try to come up
link |
with unifying explanations is that,
link |
if you look at the number of wildfires in California,
link |
let's say, that we've just seen,
link |
if you treat them all as spontaneous,
link |
uncorrelated instances, it feels like,
link |
oh my God, it's just whack a mole.
link |
Every time I send a fire truck here,
link |
there's a fire over there.
link |
So you want to come up with something
link |
like a central theory, which is,
link |
why do I suddenly have a problem
link |
when I hadn't had a problem before?
link |
So I look for these unifying explanations.
link |
And I found one the other day that really speaks to me.
link |
I mean, people are very frustrated
link |
because they've been trained to think about this
link |
incorrectly, in my opinion.
link |
But here's the graph that you need to look at.
link |
On the x axis is time by year.
link |
And on the y axis is something like average age of a human.
link |
The title of the graph is any desirable situation
link |
involving institutions.
link |
So that could be CEO, it could be tenured professor.
link |
It could be who's getting grants.
link |
It could be the age at which people win Nobel Prizes.
link |
University presidents, all these things go up.
link |
In other words, for a long period of time,
link |
the average age of the person in a desirable situation
link |
has been increasing something like nine months for every 12.
link |
Those graphs have to go down at some point.
link |
The specter of having five people all born in the 1940s
link |
as the final entrance in the presidential context,
link |
that makes no sense.
link |
Think about how bizarre a thing
link |
that nobody's even really talking about.
link |
The last five people were all ancient
link |
by presidential standards.
link |
Not one, not two, but five.
link |
We are talking about a contest between somebody
link |
who is the oldest of the baby boomers,
link |
the very beginning of the baby boom,
link |
summer of 46th birthday, fighting somebody
link |
who is in the silent generation.
link |
The silent generation guy in a town hall in Florida
link |
gets this question from a Gen Z guy saying,
link |
what's going on with my future?
link |
Joe Biden has the audacity to say,
link |
I'm a transitional president.
link |
You guys are the highly educated one.
link |
When has any generation in history needed
link |
a transitional 78 year old person to take office?
link |
It's bizarre, it's preposterous.
link |
That graph is the graph we can't talk about.
link |
That graph is the graph of our destruction.
link |
Because it has the, you can make a one line argument,
link |
which sounds like ageism, which isn't a very good argument.
link |
But what it does is, is it muddles the conversation.
link |
And you always have to ask yourself the question,
link |
if this conversation becomes muddled,
link |
who wins as a result of the muddling?
link |
Well, it's a battle, but let's just win it.
link |
Let's win the battle.
link |
For sure, I'll run.
link |
I was born in Russia, can't run.
link |
So, but we Russians can hack elections,
link |
so we'll figure it out.
link |
This is me officially announcing my run for president.
link |
I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida.
link |
Lex, what is it that you really wanna ask?
link |
I think, I wanna put some responsibility on the portal.
link |
That the portal gives power to the people in that graph.
link |
Like, cause you put it quite brilliantly
link |
that the people that move the world,
link |
their age has been going up.
link |
And not move the world, but put in the position
link |
where they get the chance to affect the world.
link |
These new platforms, I think Twitter falls in them,
link |
give power to the younger people.
link |
It doesn't have to be about age necessarily,
link |
but the younger thinking people.
link |
So that's a promising thing.
link |
And you are like, you're like Gandalf.
link |
You get to pick your Frodo's or whatever.
link |
I'm not very good with the analogy,
link |
but the whole point is for you as Gandalf.
link |
I don't know that I make that much sense.
link |
Gandalf makes sense.
link |
I don't know if people know how to fit me
link |
into this ecosystem.
link |
I think there's something in my presentation
link |
that people find very confusing.
link |
No, figure it out.
link |
I disagree with you, but you need to look at the mirror
link |
and think like, what is it?
link |
Is it, maybe you need a mustache.
link |
But there's something about figuring out
link |
how to be a charismatic communicator in this.
link |
And that's the responsibility.
link |
You said like finishing sentences with the LOL
link |
is painful for your soul.
link |
Yeah, that's just how somebody lets me know.
link |
I don't have to take their opinion seriously.
link |
Yeah, it's still the language,
link |
the way that people are communicating
link |
and you're swimming that wave.
link |
You have a big platform.
link |
I have a growing platform.
link |
It feels like this is the place to give power.
link |
I agree, but we're gonna get swatted down.
link |
I just don't think so.
link |
Why are you afraid of the big?
link |
Like this is, I've studied it.
link |
Because I've studied, let me ask you a question, Lex.
link |
I believe that every society is supposed to have
link |
a collection of what I call break glass
link |
in case of emergency people.
link |
These are people who are universally loved
link |
and trusted by your society.
link |
For example, David Attenborough,
link |
the great British naturalist and presenter,
link |
recently came on Instagram.
link |
He's worried about the planet.
link |
And I said, look, there are very few of these people left.
link |
Let's pay attention, find out what he has to say.
link |
Maybe he's gonna be an ass.
link |
Maybe he's gonna be in it.
link |
Maybe he's gonna say wrong things, don't know.
link |
Tell me about your top 10 universal American heroes.
link |
This is not a rhetorical question.
link |
Okay, everybody looks to that person and says,
link |
yep, the best of us.
link |
Probably follow that person.
link |
Well, everybody's an interesting concept.
link |
I mean, Elon Musk is very divisive, right?
link |
But I'm talking about overwhelmingly people
link |
would follow that person if that person gave a rousing,
link |
intelligent speech that said, we must act now
link |
because we're in dire straits.
link |
I think a lot of people fall in that category.
link |
For me, it would be in the tech world,
link |
in the engineering world.
link |
No, no, no, no, no.
link |
Tell me his names.
link |
I'm thinking like, who is the most eloquent actor?
link |
So like, you think celebrities, so people with platforms.
link |
I didn't say celebrities, but you have to be well known.
link |
I believe like, yeah, so this goes to Joe Rogan.
link |
First two did not really impress me
link |
as being what I said, but okay.
link |
Elon several years ago would have.
link |
Why does Elon fail?
link |
Lots of people treat Joe Rogan
link |
as if he's some sort of right wing racist
link |
because they've never watched his program.
link |
They don't know who his friends are.
link |
Oh, but when I thought you said everybody,
link |
I thought you meant a large enough people
link |
where a huge change can happen,
link |
not actually literally everybody.
link |
I mean people who've pulled off,
link |
like people who've pulled off something
link |
where everybody's convinced that that person just deeply.
link |
I mean, I think I've told you this story before,
link |
but the one time I've seen the power of a figure like this,
link |
I mean, very few times I've been in a large crowd
link |
and I've seen people just moved
link |
where they would do almost anything good,
link |
bad and different because they were primed.
link |
One was a Rolling Stones concert.
link |
The other one was Nelson Mandela coming to Boston.
link |
And man, you've never seen anything like this.
link |
You check out the photos from the banks
link |
of the Charles River when Nelson Mandela came.
link |
There are people that you need in your dark hours
link |
and we can't agree on who they are.
link |
And as soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit.
link |
We get out the shit branch.
link |
I just disagree with you.
link |
What do we disagree about here?
link |
I think it doesn't matter who it is.
link |
I think really good speeches are needed.
link |
And I think a lot.
link |
Who's gonna give them?
link |
I saw Killer Mike try to give a good speech.
link |
In Atlanta, right?
link |
That was something.
link |
Even Killer Mike immediately gets into this.
link |
Yeah, but he didn't take up the responsibility.
link |
So he was speaking to the community.
link |
And he was doing what he.
link |
On this particular moment, he's exceptional at it.
link |
And he was speaking to this particular moment.
link |
He didn't take it a step farther,
link |
which is like giving the same speech,
link |
but bigger than race.
link |
Bigger than this particular moment,
link |
but more about the American project.
link |
You know the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson?
link |
Yeah, there you go.
link |
That's a good example.
link |
So that guy until we screw him up
link |
is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.
link |
I mean, Jaco, maybe that's another.
link |
Jaco's pretty good.
link |
Can't really tell.
link |
Is he a Republican?
link |
That's for damn sure.
link |
And I think there's a lot of folks.
link |
And then, you know.
link |
No, I think Jaco, there aren't.
link |
That's one of the reasons why Jaco's so special.
link |
That's so important.
link |
Your podcast, The Portal, is something in my little universe
link |
is something a lot of people really love.
link |
And it moves them.
link |
They draw a lot of meaning from it.
link |
And also, especially in difficult times.
link |
It gives them a comfort of through like this kind of,
link |
it's not just nuance.
link |
There's like, even when you're talking about chaos,
link |
there's love underneath all of it.
link |
And I think people would draw a lot of meaning from it,
link |
which is why they are wondering why you haven't been doing
link |
I'm wondering why you haven't been doing that many podcasts
link |
or you haven't done it in maybe a month and a half
link |
or two months in this most difficult of times.
link |
Is there a good reason?
link |
There are lots of good reasons.
link |
So the first one is kind of weird,
link |
which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous.
link |
And if you say, I don't want to be famous,
link |
it's like, oh, you're just saying that
link |
because you want to be everyone to think you're famous.
link |
You're not that famous.
link |
I don't love being as well known as I've become.
link |
There's lots of things that are fun about it.
link |
It's wonderful that you can go to,
link |
I can go to any city in the world
link |
and there are portal listeners there.
link |
All I need to do is put out a tweet
link |
and 20 people show up for a drink.
link |
And they're amazing people.
link |
And they're almost, I mean, you can see my live Q and A's
link |
on my Instagram page.
link |
If you go to Eric R. Weinstein,
link |
I just pick somebody randomly
link |
and I was really worried about it at first.
link |
And you know, maybe I should be worried about it,
link |
but in general, people all over the world
link |
are just so positive.
link |
And thoughtful and have a story that's kind of self selected.
link |
But I don't like the fame.
link |
The thing we just described comes with the fame.
link |
It's a beautiful thing.
link |
You know, you're worried that it's getting.
link |
It'll, look Lex, it'll turn on you in a heartbeat.
link |
It'll turn on you in a heartbeat.
link |
And the other problem is I don't,
link |
I don't like my audience being my audience.
link |
I want to get closer to them.
link |
I want to talk to them.
link |
I want to find out what is this doing in your life?
link |
My house fills up with art that people send me.
link |
The lightest thing is an effects pedal
link |
called something like, I don't know,
link |
bow tie overdrive from a guy in Mexico, right?
link |
You play electric, by the way, in a tiny little tangent.
link |
Do you play electric?
link |
I have a Stratocaster, but it doesn't have a strap
link |
and I don't know what to do with it and I have a bad amp.
link |
So you should, you should, you should hook me up with the.
link |
We'll find it a home maybe.
link |
You're starting to sense that this is too much.
link |
No, I want to be, I want to be here.
link |
I want to do the work very simply.
link |
I don't have an ability to fully explain myself.
link |
I don't want to claim that I don't love the fact that how
link |
much love do we get from these programs?
link |
Like I, the generically people are incredibly generous.
link |
You know, people have begged me, set up a Patreon account
link |
and I haven't been able to do it.
link |
I've said to everybody, it's a business.
link |
It's a business, but like they're so used to being defrauded.
link |
When somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives, my,
link |
my goal was to say, I'm going to keep talking to you about you.
link |
You wonder why I started doing ads on my show was because I
link |
wanted people to think from the get go, this is a business.
link |
This is what I sound like when I'm selling, but you know, like
link |
you see I've lost weight.
link |
A lot of that is due to athletic greens, athletic greens, you
link |
know, um, code, uh, what's the, I don't know what my promo code
link |
is for athletic greens, probably athletic greens.com slash portal,
link |
but doesn't that portal, but you know, Fitbit who doesn't
link |
advertise has also been instrumental as well as a guy
link |
named Steven Cates, who, you know, was a fan from the show,
link |
found me on the street and just said, I'm a trainer.
link |
I want to help train you.
link |
And it's got me on a, on a good, uh, good path.
link |
So, you know, that's one paid advertiser and two people on
link |
I'm calling out just because there are, you know, two, two
link |
outfits, Steven Cates and Fitbit that have changed my life.
link |
I wanted people to say, you know, you don't have to be
link |
afraid of advertising.
link |
If I do it in this way, this is powering your show, but the
link |
whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy
link |
feelings like, Oh wow.
link |
I knew he was a shill.
link |
He's a grifter, you know?
link |
I didn't love that.
link |
I didn't love the issue.
link |
So I didn't set up a Patreon.
link |
The security issues for talking and being me are significant.
link |
And I don't have the kind of money to hire around the clock.
link |
I mean, I, I desperately want to get to a level of wealth
link |
where I don't have to think about money.
link |
I don't think it's, you know, some people want money because
link |
they, they, they need it for status.
link |
I think I can handle status if I want it doing this, I don't
link |
want the status necessarily.
link |
And I don't want, I'd want the status, but I don't want the
link |
fame that goes with it.
link |
I don't want to be seen as this is about money because it's
link |
about a substance and drink, you know, all of those things.
link |
That's part of, I haven't solved these issues.
link |
I've been feeling bad because people say, where's the portal
link |
These are difficult times.
link |
We have an election coming up and it's just like, do you
link |
think for a moment that I want to explain that I actually got
link |
really uncomfortable being as well known as I was?
link |
And then what is it that I want?
link |
Because I want to be better known and less well known at
link |
It doesn't, there's nothing the audience can do.
link |
I don't want the audience to be the audience.
link |
That doesn't make sense to people.
link |
I want it to be a business, but I don't think people need to
link |
fear a business of the businesses open about being a
link |
business that, and then that's all to the side, what you're
link |
seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly
link |
meta violent period in our online existence, and I believe
link |
that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are
link |
completely screwed at the moment.
link |
The leadership of these parties is unsalvageable, unworkable.
link |
Everyone hears that from inside the two party system.
link |
He's trying to subtract votes off of Biden.
link |
He's trying to scuttle Trump.
link |
This is a play for his show because he's trying to plug
link |
in to discuss there's a bill Hicks routine on marketing.
link |
Have you ever seen this brilliant?
link |
I recommend it to everyone where he comes out on stage and
link |
he says, are there any people in marketing and sales in the
link |
It's like, okay, great.
link |
Can you do us all a favor and die?
link |
And like, everybody laughs.
link |
He's like, no, I'm not laughing.
link |
I'm seeing being serious.
link |
So he's talked about how marketing is horrible.
link |
So you're like, where's this act going?
link |
Then he gets to the point of it.
link |
It's like, oh, I know how you marketing people think bills
link |
going after that, uh, resentment dollar.
link |
That's good dollar.
link |
Let's get that resentment anti marketing dollar.
link |
It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying.
link |
I really hate marketers.
link |
It's the authenticity dollar.
link |
You can't escape this kind of negative marketing thought.
link |
And I guess that gets to the issue that I don't want to be
link |
destroyed in advance of this election. I don't think it's a
link |
good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting
link |
how completely ridiculous Donald Trump and Joe Biden are as
link |
candidates for the president of the United States.
link |
None of this makes any sense.
link |
These moderators of these pseudo debates were in the wrong
link |
format with the wrong people.
link |
No part of this makes a wit of sense.
link |
Can I try to push back several claims?
link |
One is I don't believe the systems as they stand now can
link |
destroy their equine voice, the voice you're a child.
link |
I'm sorry to say that, but, well, let me, well, it's also
link |
possible. It's entirely possible that you're the child.
link |
Because a child would say you would call other people a child.
link |
Yeah. Get in the first blow reveal the tell because the only
link |
power they have is to attack you psychologically.
link |
Well, I believe that the army of people that love you is much
link |
more powerful than mainstream media, than people that you
link |
might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said,
link |
which has tried to reduce you, like the marketing thinking.
link |
I just believe there's an army.
link |
Maybe there's a better term of people that see you for who
link |
you are and a hungry, like I'm not disputing those things.
link |
And what I'm saying, I would venture to say as your therapist
link |
that you're actually, uh, the battle is all in your mind.
link |
All in your mind that you have found these demons in the
link |
system, and they're just a tiny minority and it's all in your
link |
mind. They cannot actually remove.
link |
They're not strong enough to remove the voice of Eric Weinstein
link |
to silence the voice.
link |
This is some of the best fiction writing I've ever heard.
link |
Let me tell you, I have relatives who've known me my entire
link |
life, where one article in the New York Times, they will
link |
believe that over me.
link |
My contention is that it has no power except to affect your
link |
psychology. What you have to do is the Rogan thing, which is
link |
laugh. Just laugh.
link |
I'm telling you something.
link |
The way this works is through ruin.
link |
Ruin can come to anyone.
link |
There's no one who cannot be ruined.
link |
Every single person is signed up right now to be ruined by
link |
Don't you understand that you have more power than the system?
link |
You can ruin the system.
link |
Your Twitter account, the podcast.
link |
I'm telling you about the Army.
link |
I agree that my Twitter account, my pocket.
link |
But what we've seen, for example, you saw what happened
link |
to Brett's Articles of Unity project.
link |
What happened on the Twitter side?
link |
Well, actually, say the word and say the word.
link |
It was blocked or removed from Twitter.
link |
Account suspended.
link |
And I have a direct line to Jack.
link |
So I'm talking to the CEO who I am crazy enough to still
link |
I believe somehow there's a very strange thing going on
link |
I cannot possibly reconcile the actions with the person I've...
link |
That is a next level mind in there.
link |
I don't know it well enough to say that it's all next level.
link |
I'm not claiming he doesn't have any blind spots.
link |
Every smart person I know has blind spots.
link |
I don't know what he's up against.
link |
There's no way that the Jack Dorsey that I've talked to and
link |
the Jack Dorsey that interacted over Articles of Unity can be
link |
He is constrained by that company in some way that
link |
doesn't make sense to me.
link |
Either that or he's the most duplicitous person on earth and
link |
I'm not believing it.
link |
I just don't buy it.
link |
Something horrible is happening.
link |
My claim is I can remove you functionally from the chessboard
link |
in a tiny number of moves, no matter who you are, no matter
link |
how virtuous or how much of a bastard you've been your entire
link |
life, it doesn't take more than three or four moves to
link |
basically neuter you as a force.
link |
And I disagree that if that's possible, that means I'm not
link |
very good at chess.
link |
Like Unity 2020 was removed from Twitter because it's not
link |
good enough, not within the system.
link |
Like the army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea
link |
Okay, but fear, uncertainty and doubt is the name of the
link |
game, the coin of the realm.
link |
Psychology though, it's not real power.
link |
It just affects the mind.
link |
Okay, I have a reading assignment for you because you're
link |
Russian, you'll really enjoy this.
link |
As part of the great American tobacco settlement, the Tobacco
link |
Institute had to disgorge its archives of all of its
link |
strategies, all of its skullduggery and put it on the
link |
web for all time so that we can all understand how the tobacco
link |
companies got together and destroyed people, right?
link |
You see tobacco destroys people.
link |
You can see, you know, Scientology destroys people.
link |
There are various vindictive organizations that will not
link |
tolerate reality in opposition to them.
link |
Let's take them down.
link |
That's what I'm trying to tell you is...
link |
So why aren't you doing the podcast to return?
link |
Because that's one of the weapons of war.
link |
Well, first of all, if you're at war, I don't want to
link |
discuss strategy on a podcast, right?
link |
But that's your misunderstanding.
link |
What did Montgomery say about Rommel?
link |
But wasn't his line, I read your book, you beautiful bastard.
link |
It's like, why are you using the tactics that you
link |
already explained?
link |
So one of the things I'm doing is I'm not having a strategic
link |
conversation with you and several hundred thousand of
link |
our closest friends.
link |
I pulled back because this is not the battle that I know
link |
I do not feel passionately enough about defeating Donald
link |
Trump to elect Joe Biden, even if that's the way I'm going
link |
to ultimately vote, right?
link |
I don't believe in the Biden Democratic Party.
link |
I don't believe in the Trump Republican Party.
link |
So, yes, it's an incredibly consequential election.
link |
But to me, it's like the Crips and the Bloods and the Latin
link |
Kings fighting over the right to extort a business and the
link |
business trying to figure out who it wants to do the extorting.
link |
But don't you think, listen, there's very few people that
link |
are as good with the English language as you.
link |
Don't you think it's possible to draw a line in between that
link |
finds how we find our common humanity that ensures a better
link |
2021 without having to say like Donald Trump is evil or Joe
link |
Biden is incompetent or any of that, just somehow draw a
link |
I am seeing people in so much pain.
link |
This election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who
link |
comments on it, Lex.
link |
Maybe they're not good enough.
link |
They're not good enough.
link |
No, but the hope is...
link |
Do you believe in me?
link |
Listen to me very carefully.
link |
My spider sense, my intuition that has allowed me to survive
link |
in the space, I've been mouthing off since the 80s, tells me
link |
this is a super dangerous time for smart people to be spending
link |
the dry powder because the election doesn't make sense.
link |
Doesn't mean that I don't have a sense that one outcome would
link |
be better than the other probably, but the variance on
link |
that, I'm not even positive that I'm right.
link |
These two options are so completely inappropriate to the
link |
What we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and
link |
more silent generation people trying to sort out a highly
link |
technical world being mediated through social media.
link |
We need more exclusion.
link |
We need more actual elites.
link |
The people we've called the elites are not the elite.
link |
We need excellence, competence.
link |
We need people who can be trusted behind closed doors and we need
link |
to close the doors so we can't see what those people are doing.
link |
Imagine that you had a bunch of people who'd all seen action
link |
in combat, had all volunteered to be part of the armed services,
link |
had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need to.
link |
So you were convinced that these people had put their lives on
link |
the line for their country, not for a payday.
link |
Imagine you had 10 of these people with technical backgrounds,
link |
men, women, black, white, Muslim, Jew, doesn't matter.
link |
I would trust those people and I'd close the door.
link |
I don't want to know what they talked about.
link |
I don't want transparency into all of their negotiations.
link |
I want to know that they're patriotic, that they see something in the world
link |
bigger than themselves and their family fortunes.
link |
I want to know that they're courageous.
link |
I want to know that they've got all of our well being and I'm willing
link |
And if they screw us over, I'd rather go down like that.
link |
So I disagree with you there because there's a difference in those
link |
and Jocko because you're not speaking to people with credentials.
link |
No, I'm talking about self credentialed people.
link |
I view Jocko as self credentialed.
link |
But the biggest, the powerful thing about Jocko is he's not only self credentialed,
link |
but he's been real with people.
link |
The magical thing about Jocko isn't his book, isn't his life story is he's been
link |
talking on a podcast for a long, there's something real that happens.
link |
So if you took everybody, if you took Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard and you took
link |
Jocko Willing and maybe Jesse Ventura, right, you can take, you can take Bernie
link |
Who's, you know, a lone voice.
link |
You take all of these people who've like really just risked, like why do we trust?
link |
Why is Katherine Hepburn the best that Hollywood ever produced?
link |
Because she told Hollywood to go fuck itself hard.
link |
They gave her four Academy awards and she said, love you, sweeties.
link |
I'm going to use them as the doorstop for the bathrooms in my house.
link |
That's, uh, that's, that's just, that's what you were talking about.
link |
Be Katherine Hepburn.
link |
Audrey Hepburn is pretty amazing, but Katherine Hepburn is next level.
link |
Well, you, I mean, that's what you're trying to say to me.
link |
I'm trying to figure it out, Lex.
link |
I don't have the answer yet.
link |
What I do know is that this election is chewing people up and I mean two separate things.
link |
One that parties don't have enough integrity that if you comment either for or against,
link |
there's a short sequence where you make a comment that's nuanced.
link |
You get referenced to something, right?
link |
Like, you know, take this thing about, you know, find people on both sides.
link |
That is non resolved after N years, whether the context should be reported or not.
link |
We are in some situation in which Democrats and Republicans are primed to fight each other.
link |
The way introducing two ants from two different ant colonies always produces a battle.
link |
I don't want to be in that fray because those people are going to kill each other mindlessly
link |
And until the election is concluded, like I, do I think this is dire?
link |
Could it be make or break?
link |
I'm not saying that.
link |
Do I know which way this goes?
link |
I can make an excellent argument that we need to elect Joe Biden right now.
link |
We've got a situation which can only be cured by voting for Joe Biden.
link |
I can make another argument that we could have a situation that can only be cured by
link |
defeating Joe Biden right now.
link |
And all of the things that the modern democratic party represents.
link |
I don't have, you know, it's, it's not the lady and the tiger we're choosing between
link |
the tiger and the tiger.
link |
It's the Sumatran tiger versus the Siberian tiger, right?
link |
I'm trying to think, well, which tiger can I, do I have a better chance against, um,
link |
the key problem for us politically is that we have to divorce the concept of the center
link |
and moderation from kleptocracy.
link |
Every time we try to say something like we need more moderate solutions, we need more
link |
pluralistic solution.
link |
People will say, wow, you just want to hand us right back into the swamp, don't you?
link |
The swamp people cause the moderates and the swamp people are the same people, right?
link |
So then we have these two crazy wings.
link |
We can't have crazy right wing people.
link |
I don't want any Tiki torch BS.
link |
We can't have crazy left wing.
link |
Don't attack my courthouse.
link |
Really don't attack my courthouse and we can't have moderates.
link |
It's like, okay, how do we install our children and, and rape pillage and get these speaking
link |
fees when we're out of office and become, you know, cozy with the things when we're
link |
supposed to be regulating them and then, you know, become their lobbyists, you know, immediately
link |
when we leave office, all of this stuff, we need an entirely different system.
link |
And I can't talk about that at the moment.
link |
When I talk, people say, oh wow, so you're going to sit this one out cause you're a pussy
link |
because you're a coward.
link |
Great to know Eric.
link |
We thought better of you by click.
link |
I don't know what to do.
link |
But are you thinking of what to do?
link |
Oh, you better believe it.
link |
Look, Brett, Brett had this idea of unity 2020 and I told him it was a wrong idea.
link |
I didn't tell him that unity 2024 was a wrong idea.
link |
I didn't tell him that unity 2028 is a wrong idea.
link |
And if I were to make the case that he was right and I was wrong, cause he's now shuttered
link |
I would say that the case to be made that he was correct was, is that by doing this
link |
in 2020, we found out what we were up against.
link |
It's good to know that Twitter can turn this off at the drop of a hat.
link |
It's good to know as we learned that you cannot have meetings of vice of presidential candidates
link |
in a primary that are not approved of by the party, right?
link |
Like they've got this thing figured out so we don't have any way in.
link |
And now unity 2024 makes sense because unity 2020 was tried.
link |
I don't know that we get to 2024 under all circumstances and some we do and some we don't.
link |
There's, there's a game theoretic thing that I'm not sure you're accounting for, but you,
link |
But let me just make an argument is Jack Dorsey very likely listens to your podcasts and wait,
link |
this is the power of these words.
link |
Something deep went wrong, but we can change it with the power of words.
link |
Something went wrong at Twitter.
link |
They have so much division on their platform.
link |
That's what I'm trying to say.
link |
They've gotten, it's not wrong.
link |
They just don't know they're understaffed.
link |
No, they have an insoluble problem.
link |
Difficult to solve.
link |
They have an insoluble problem.
link |
This is where you and I disagree because, well, all right, I'd like to create a competitor.
link |
So then, you know, give it to me, create the competitor, show me that you actually have
link |
understood this because my guess is, is that most of the things that you'll think about,
link |
I mean, I can tell you things I've talked to Jack about, which I know would make Twitter
link |
However, I, I think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet and you subtract
link |
off all sorts of context and mutual self knowledge, the problem is us.
link |
It's not the platforms.
link |
We're thinking about a technological solution and I'm saying the problem is, is that we
link |
are ultimately the product.
link |
And I just disagree with that and there's a lot of, that's probably could save that
link |
I look forward to spending summers in your villa when you, when you debut this product
link |
and I would love to angel invest in it.
link |
By the way, in terms of money, I'll never have a villa.
link |
No, I will always give away everything I own.
link |
Invest into like things like you mentioned, awesome things.
link |
Invest fine, but a little bit of a vuncular advice.
link |
Don't pledge to be the person who disgorges themselves of security.
link |
That's what it is.
link |
It's a big hunking pile of freedom.
link |
You can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you if you don't, you know, so you
link |
can use it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money.
link |
But generally speaking, Lex money is freedom and your voice is important.
link |
At least retain the amount of money security you need to follow Joe's advice.
link |
What is the point of f you money if you don't say f you, the number of people who have f
link |
you money who don't say f you indicates the number of people who chose the freedom of
link |
their wealth to create a prison.
link |
They built a prison with the freedom they had and they walked into it, locked the door.
link |
I think it's too difficult not to create it.
link |
The reason I want to give away the money is because I just know my own psychology and
link |
you create prisons.
link |
Our human mind just creates those prisons that f you money is enough for basic shelter
link |
That's, that's the optimal if you don't have kids yet.
link |
This is a, okay, this is the problem.
link |
This is why I'm sitting.
link |
So this is me, single Lex speaking, but future Lex, future Lex.
link |
I'm talking to future Lex, single, single present Lex, please don't listen.
link |
You're going to need some money and don't make these pledges to say on a podcast.
link |
I'm saying I want to save you from yourself.
link |
You need money to do many of the beautiful things that we're counting on you to do.
link |
Can I talk to you about Roger Penrose?
link |
You've talked to Roger on the portal, but also in between the lines and offline, just
link |
everything you've said about Roger Penrose for people who don't know.
link |
He just recently, a few days ago, won the 2020 shared the 2020 Nobel prize for physics,
link |
but it's clear to me that he had like a deep personal impact on you, a connection with
link |
you in terms of both your love of mathematics, just the way you see the world.
link |
This is the Eddie Van Halen conversation.
link |
This was clearly somebody who's profound in your worldview.
link |
Can you talk about Roger?
link |
Can you talk about what it means that he won this highest of prizes just in general?
link |
Let's celebrate the man.
link |
So first of all, there are two other people who won this prize.
link |
I just didn't happen to know who they were before they won.
link |
Roger is a very, it is not Roger in particular, but the class from which Roger comes that
link |
So I would put Roger in the class of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang, um, put Whitten in
link |
I mean, Whitten is a special case, but Whitten is weirdly the reverse of the Roger Penrose
link |
Because Whitten is the first physicist to win a mathematical Fields Medal, the highest
link |
honor in mathematics.
link |
Penrose is in some sense, a mathematician who's now won the Nobel prize.
link |
So it's a perfect sort of a couplet.
link |
Roger's class means everything to me.
link |
That's the highest achievement of the human mind.
link |
I would probably throw Bach in with Feynman and Dirac and company, right?
link |
I think that he was so inventive.
link |
It was very frustrating to watch this career.
link |
It was a little bit frustrating to watch Feynman's career.
link |
Feynman was so good and had he been born slightly different and a slightly different time, I
link |
believe his claim on physics would be far greater.
link |
I feel like Penrose in some sense came up a very difficult path because you see Einstein
link |
effectively solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the
link |
As a result, the children of Einstein are impoverished because there wasn't as much
link |
to pick off of the trees and sell at the market.
link |
Whereas Bohr and Planck didn't do nearly as good of a job with quantum theory.
link |
So there's lots to do in quantum theory.
link |
I think that Roger affected me personally by a diagram that I saw in a paper of Herman
link |
Gluck at the University of Pennsylvania.
link |
It was the first picture I'd ever seen of the Hopf vibration sketched and that weirdly
link |
I brought that to the Rogan program in order to sort of convey the wonder.
link |
It was recapitulating my own journey.
link |
I think I probably saw that at like age 16 or something and it just flipped my mind.
link |
Roger is incredibly visual, he's incredibly geometric, he's incredibly sui generis, he
link |
just does his own thing.
link |
He's got lots of bets.
link |
None of them had really come through the way you would hope and I think they stretched
link |
the rules to be blunt about it.
link |
To give him the prize.
link |
You said this thing on Twitter which is beautiful that every once in a while comes a human being
link |
that gives value to the prize versus the prize giving value to the human.
link |
Two different kinds of prizes.
link |
The reason that we care about the Nobel Prize isn't because of Alfred Nobel.
link |
It's because it came along at the right time to reward Einstein, Dirac, Schrodinger, Feynman.
link |
Most of the people who should have won, won.
link |
Most of the awards are not good in the sense that they don't really follow.
link |
The prize is used to rewrite history, that's the problem.
link |
You should have a love hate relationship with it because on the one hand it does focus the
link |
world on what really matters and on the other hand it distorts what really matters and both
link |
of those functions take place simultaneously.
link |
In this case, I think that they violated their own rules slightly so it wasn't really clearly
link |
a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion.
link |
We better give this award to somebody of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize
link |
is fully funded with prestige going forward.
link |
That's sort of my weird speculative guess as to what happened.
link |
So Roger's getting on in years and the person should be alive so I think they bent the rules
link |
and I think they couldn't have bent it for a better person and I hope they will not bend
link |
the rules out of weakness but out of strength in the future.
link |
It would be great to get Madame Wu and Emmy Nerder a posthumous prize along with Doug
link |
Prasher, George Sudarshan and George Zweig as well as Ernst Stuckelberg Nobel Prizes.
link |
There have been some terrible omissions, the first two being females who revolutionized
link |
our view of the world and I take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people
link |
from ethnic groups or genders or whatever in order to make it plural and inclusive.
link |
If it's not following the work and I feel very clear that in a few cases we know there
link |
was a real problem with the Nobel committee because we have stunning accomplishments and
link |
try to get through a day as a physicist with that Nerder's theorem and try to imagine the
link |
universe without Madame Wu's discovery that left and right don't appear to be symmetric.
link |
I mean these are terrible omissions and they're a huge blot on science for not being more
link |
inclusive when it matters.
link |
Yeah so just like you said the Nobel Prize is plagued by omissions as much as...
link |
And distortions and dilutions.
link |
For example, Dirac and Schrodinger were I believe given the prize in the same year.
link |
There's no reason that those two people needed to dilute each other.
link |
The same thing with you know Dyson was an omission, Tominaga probably got included in
link |
part because we had an opportunity to show that something had happened on both sides
link |
of the Pacific after the war.
link |
But I don't think we needed to dilute Weinberg or Feynman or Schwinger.
link |
It makes me somewhat sick.
link |
All of these people are such important giants and it has to do with the field I think not
link |
wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget
link |
cuts and worldly pressures.
link |
So I think it's really important that we have absolute superstars because we produce superstars.
link |
We acknowledge them, we don't dilute them and that we bend the rules to make sure that
link |
the prize stays funded with the prestige that comes from giving it to the Roger Penrose's,
link |
Albert Einstein's and Paul Dirac's of the world.
link |
Can we talk a little bit about evil?
link |
I haven't actually talked to you about this topic and it's been sitting on my mind mostly
link |
because everybody at MIT is quiet about it, which is Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
I didn't get a chance to experience what MIT was like at the time when Jeffrey Epstein
link |
was part of this, but I'd love to try to understand how evil was allowed to flourish in a place
link |
Whether you think, maybe let me ask the question this way.
link |
Was it the man evil or was the system evil or is evil too strong a word?
link |
Because what I see is the presence of this particular human being in the eyes of many
link |
destroyed the reputations of many really strong scientists and also weakened the ability,
link |
like weakened the institution of MIT by making everybody quiet, like almost making them unable
link |
to say anything interesting or difficult.
link |
And what is that and what am I supposed to?
link |
Why is everyone quiet about Jeff?
link |
Obviously I want to scream about it too, right?
link |
And I probably have said too much about Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
Look, something horrible happened.
link |
I don't know what it is, but something horrible happened.
link |
And you know, at the one thing that, okay, let's just do this.
link |
The first thing I need to do is I need to get rid of this woke crap about power differentials.
link |
In general, you can talk about hypergamy and power differentials are Russell conjugates
link |
of the same concept, just the way particular proportions and symmetries are mathematically
link |
provable to be attractive in females to males.
link |
Male attractiveness is largely determined by male competence and ability to amass power
link |
and success and all these sorts of things.
link |
The relationship between consenting adults is quite frankly not something I want to sort
link |
out the relationship between the sexuality of adults and minors.
link |
And particularly, you know, there's the 17, 18 issue that's very different than 12, 13.
link |
We're talking about really sick depravity with respect to what it appears that Jeffrey
link |
Epstein was involved in at some level.
link |
I believe this story is super complicated in part because I think one thing Jeffrey
link |
Epstein was doing was providing money, encouragement, and support to scientists.
link |
Another thing he was doing, I believe, was giving tax advice to very rich people.
link |
I believe another thing he was doing was hooking very wealthy people up with young adult females.
link |
Another thing he was doing, I think, was doing stuff with children that will curl your toes.
link |
So there's an entire spectrum of different stuff.
link |
And at the moment, nobody can pull apart or deconflate anything because the woke thing
link |
comes over it and says, I think it's disgusting that a 43 year old billionaire would be partying
link |
with a 23 year old.
link |
I don't want to adjudicate that.
link |
I'm worried about 12 and 14 year olds that we're not talking about.
link |
I don't think MIT was deep into pedophilia.
link |
My guess is that that did not happen.
link |
I don't think that the scientists were the targets of the really sick depraved stuff.
link |
My guess is that what you're looking at was a government construct.
link |
It may have been our government, it may have been a joint government project, maybe somebody
link |
else's government.
link |
I believe that in part, we don't really understand Robert Maxwell.
link |
Sorry, who's Robert Maxwell?
link |
Ghislaine Maxwell's father was very active in scientific publishing.
link |
I don't know where peer review came from.
link |
I would love to run down the relationship between peer review and Robert Maxwell.
link |
I would love to run down the missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and the mysterious fortune
link |
of Jeffrey Epstein because I don't think Jeffrey Epstein ever ran a hedge fund.
link |
I don't think he was a money advisor the way people claimed.
link |
There's two things I want to talk about.
link |
One is the shallow conversations of woke identity politics that you're referring to seems to
link |
be removing everyone's ability, no, everyone's willingness to talk about like, what the hell
link |
is this person and how is he allowed?
link |
Most importantly, how do we prevent it in the future?
link |
From the individual perspective, the question for me is the same question I ask about 1930s
link |
I've been reading way too much probably or not enough about that period currently.
link |
If I was in Germany at that time, what is the heroic action to take?
link |
When I think about MIT with Jeffrey Epstein, what is the heroic action to take?
link |
We're not talking about virtue signaling action.
link |
You wouldn't know what to do.
link |
I would not know what you're up against, Lex.
link |
You're not hearing me.
link |
The problem here is what was Jeffrey Epstein?
link |
Well, that question might be the heroic action to take.
link |
That's all I'm trying to say.
link |
I'm just trying to get my first question.
link |
You have to map the silence with Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
What you're describing is a map of the silence at MIT.
link |
Well, is there a map of the silence in Washington state around Jeffrey Epstein, the Bay Area,
link |
The amount of silence around Jeffrey Epstein should be telling you everything.
link |
The number of dogs that don't bark is like nothing we've ever seen.
link |
You're exactly correct, but I want to know what is it telling us?
link |
Because what it's telling me is not some kind of conspiracy, but more a disappointing weakness.
link |
Not some kind of conspiracy?
link |
It's not some kind of conspiracy, but...
link |
You've got to be kidding.
link |
You're so afraid of saying the word conspiracy that you don't think it's a conspiracy?
link |
I personally, I just think it's people who I thought were my heroes just being weak.
link |
Be of good cheer, sir.
link |
You think that there's a conspiracy?
link |
I think there is a conspiracy.
link |
That'd be a very impressive one.
link |
That's the scale of it.
link |
I tend to believe that large scale can only be an emergent phenomena.
link |
I find this so fascinating.
link |
Because I always see you as like a logic and love drive your soul.
link |
You're very logical.
link |
You're relentless.
link |
You've got a lot of love in your heart.
link |
I believe that if you would review the video, where is it from?
link |
Dubai or Abu Dhabi of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest?
link |
You ever seen this thing?
link |
It's the assassination in 2010, 10 years ago, of Mahmoud Al Mabou, something like that,
link |
in Dubai where I believe 26 separate individuals on multiple teams are shown converging coming
link |
in from all over the world on false passports, pretending to be tennis players or business
link |
people or vacationers.
link |
All of these teams have different functions and they murder this guy in his hotel room.
link |
The Dubai, I guess, chief of police or security officer was so angered that he put together
link |
this amazing video that says, we can completely detail what you did.
link |
We caught you on closed circuit TV.
link |
We don't know exactly who you are because your disguises and your false passports, but
link |
yeah, 26 people converged to kill one.
link |
No, I don't believe you.
link |
I don't believe after COINTELPRO and Operation Paperclip and Operation Mockingbird.
link |
I don't know whether I should even bring up Rex 84.
link |
To not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy.
link |
So you have a sense that evil can be as competent or more competent.
link |
First of all, when evil wants to operate at scale, it needs to make sure that people don't
link |
try to figure out evil.
link |
When evil operates at scale, from first principles, you have to realize that evil must not want
link |
The most efficient way to keep yourself from being investigated, if you are an evil institutional
link |
player who needs to do this repeatedly, is to invest in a world in which no one can afford
link |
to say the word conspiracy.
link |
You'll notice that there is a special radioactivity around the word conspiracy.
link |
We have provable conspiracies.
link |
We have admitted to conspiracies.
link |
You have been invited to conspiracy.
link |
There is no shortage.
link |
Conspiracies are everywhere.
link |
Some of them are mundane.
link |
Some of them are like price fixing cartels, or trade groups, or generally speaking, conspiracies.
link |
So the first thing you have to realize is that all of us are in a memetic complex where
link |
you can be taken off the chessboard by saying, conspiracy theorists, get done.
link |
It's like a one line proof.
link |
We don't have to listen to Lex.
link |
He said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show.
link |
That is partially distorting our conversation.
link |
If you want to ask me about Jeffrey Epstein, you have to agree with me that that is a logical
link |
description of what you would have to have if you wanted to commit conspiracies is that
link |
you have to make sure that people are dissuaded from investigating this.
link |
But it's a fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy theories
link |
and the world without conspiracy theories to the shallow glance looks the same.
link |
There is responsible conspiracy theorize where you look at the history of unearthed conspiracies
link |
and just like you would with any other topic, just think about how different the rules in
link |
your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing where X can be anything, right?
link |
It's like if I say to you, um, I can say the statement that average weight is not the same
link |
between widely separated populations.
link |
You'd say, yeah, I'd say average height is not the same between widely separated populations.
link |
Then I say, in fact, no continuous variable that has that shows variation should be expected
link |
to be identical between widely separate.
link |
Of course they're like IQ, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, right?
link |
So we have a violent reaction to specific topics.
link |
So the first thing I want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into
link |
That's really important to state.
link |
Yeah, that's, it's very interesting that, and as a prerequisite, as you're saying, that
link |
would be the first step.
link |
If you wanted to pull off a conspiracy in a competent way, that's, you would have to
link |
first convince the world.
link |
I just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time, I highly recommend
link |
it 1971 well, the film is entitled 1971 and it's about the citizens committee to investigate
link |
the FBI, which was a run by a student of Murray Gelman, a physicist and broke into FBI offices
link |
in Pennsylvania to steal files, which allowed freedom of information requests that discovered
link |
a huge conspiracy.
link |
It was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy inside the federal government, a double conspiracy
link |
story, which launched multiple conspiracies.
link |
I think that the problem with modern Americans is that they are so timid that they don't
link |
even learn about the history of conspiracies that we have absolutely proven.
link |
So with that done, Jeff Epstein, in my opinion, represented somebody's construction.
link |
I don't think that scary to think about.
link |
Well, what part of the story isn't scary?
link |
I in part did something which I imagine may get me destroyed because I was more worried
link |
about being destroyed by somebody else I had a conversation with around Jeff Epstein, right?
link |
So I'm just trying to like get, let it be known that I don't know anything more than
link |
I've already said.
link |
Now, your friends at MIT, their problem is that Jeff Epstein showed up as the only person
link |
capable of continuing US scientific tradition.
link |
You see, the US scientific tradition is a little bit like the Russian.
link |
It's combative, okay?
link |
And we're a free society and we act like a free society.
link |
We're a rich society and we research like we're a rich society.
link |
That is historically, and then came the 1970s and William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece
link |
Awards and the idea that we have to, we're paying too much and these are welfare queens
link |
and lab coats and blah, blah, blah, blah.
link |
We need more transparency, more oversight.
link |
Everything went to hell and the national culture of US science was lost.
link |
The thing that produced all this prosperity and security and power was lost.
link |
And then Jeff Epstein shows up and a tiny number of funders, maybe Fred Kavli, maybe
link |
Yuri Milner, maybe who else would be in this category?
link |
Peter Thiel to an extent, Howard Hughes would be the largest of these things, which has
link |
different grant structures than the NIH, gave people a modicum of risk taking ability.
link |
Okay, well, when Jeff Epstein showed up, everybody wanted to take risk in science.
link |
And suddenly a charismatic billionaire says, hey, I can make that work for you.
link |
Here's $100,000, go research something crazy.
link |
Well, that money was supposed to be provided by the federal government under the terms
link |
of the endless frontier compact between the federal government and the universities and
link |
the federal government and the taxpayers Welch.
link |
So that's one place to lay the blame for Jeff Epstein as at the failure of the federal government
link |
to honor its commitment.
link |
So the universities became psychopathic.
link |
It's not like everybody doesn't remember what we're supposed to be doing to be moral, but
link |
the point was there wasn't enough money to be moral.
link |
So it was time to, uh, to eye each other as a source of protein, as I like to say.
link |
And in that process, Jeffrey Epstein said, Hey, come to my world.
link |
We can do it like we used to do.
link |
So in part, my point is, is that almost none of your colleagues at MIT have that kind of
link |
religious commitment to science that they're willing to go down with ship science.
link |
The Galileo Galilei thing became very important to science because occasionally you just have
link |
to say, look, this isn't about me and you, there isn't enough money in the world to buy
link |
the kind of legacy I want to leave to this planet.
link |
This is one of the great things about science, you know, potentially it's worth dying for
link |
I'm glad you said it.
link |
Science is one of the things that is best that's worth dying for.
link |
I mean, I'm not eager to martyr myself, but I've certainly risked my health, my fortune,
link |
you know, I've, I've destroyed myself economically over science and, um, and my, my, my, my need
link |
to oppose these sons of bitches in chaired professorships who are destroying our system
link |
along with everyone else.
link |
Let me, um, bring in grandmaster into this.
link |
Oogway, master Oogway.
link |
I think he's a grandmaster.
link |
That would make him a chess playing turtle.
link |
Well, I've read some wikipedia and she was a master.
link |
There's apparently only one grandmaster and that's anyway, is the phrase grandmaster ever
link |
uttered in the script?
link |
But there's a story.
link |
Oh, there's, there's off off script cannon.
link |
I'm going to call Glenn burger right now and find out if any of this is true.
link |
You're not supposed to call up my journalistic integrity, um, but master Oogway, master Oogway
link |
he says a couple of things I'd like to bring up with you.
link |
So one as part of a longer quote recommends, uh, that you should, uh, find a battle worth
link |
We've talked about several battles just now.
link |
What is the battle worth fighting for, for Eric Weinstein in the next few months, in
link |
There's only one, well, it's, it's the Moses, it's the Moses thing.
link |
It's time to leave.
link |
This place is over to get off the planet.
link |
I, yeah, I, I, I freak people out when I say that, but like, look at your world.
link |
You just got introduced to the problem of a virus.
link |
Wait, wait till it's fusion devices and you understand what it means to have one interconnected
link |
planet with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else.
link |
So do you see the foray, your work in physics and maybe like the echoes of it in a ship
link |
Everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming if we don't have one should
link |
work on the plan that he, she thinks best, right?
link |
So Elon wants to do rockets.
link |
People misinterpret me.
link |
I meta Eric says, I don't think that's a smart plan.
link |
Regular Eric says all people who have hope should do that thing.
link |
At least it's Mars, man, at least it's the moon and Mars and maybe Titan and whatever.
link |
And I don't think it'll work and it doesn't make sense and it looks silly, but that's
link |
exactly the kind of fight worth fighting.
link |
But it's, it's the kind of fits for the same reason that I went on Brett's unity, 2020
link |
thing when I didn't think it had a hope in hell and people are, you know, are making
link |
It's like, we got to do things that make, that make us feel dumb and silly and childish
link |
that it possibly have a hope of working.
link |
So everybody should do something.
link |
My version of this, I am the most hopeful about because I wouldn't have chosen to do
link |
if I thought that Daniel Schmack did burgers wisdom project was a better hope.
link |
It's more down to earth in a certain way.
link |
I just think that it's more probable.
link |
Look, we got from a powered flight with the Wright brothers and wind tunnels to sending
link |
back images from the surface of Titan via Huygens Cassini in less than a century.
link |
So what we can do if we can change the laws of physics is something we can't even conceive
link |
It may be that it buys us nothing and at least we'll, we will know why we died on this planet
link |
I think this is not the right time to take the full journey, but I feel like you'll guide
link |
me like master way did.
link |
And I'm the Kung Fu Panda.
link |
They only have one conversation.
link |
We're on our, like, we didn't, we didn't, well, we're, we're, we're Jews and they weren't.
link |
So we talked too much, but the guide doesn't have to be with words.
link |
You don't think Poe was Jewish?
link |
We'll have to go back to the Wikipedia.
link |
Is there, um, that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source code,
link |
the source code of our universe.
link |
Can you comment on where, since we last spoke, where your thinking has been, has roamed around
link |
geometric unity around that work in physics in this fight?
link |
I'm trying to figure out when to release it and how, I mean, I've released the video and
link |
the video, quite honestly, I think it has a very bizarre reaction.
link |
I think one of the things that I've learned from the video, cause the video is coming
link |
up on half a million views on YouTube alone to say nothing of the, um, the audio, but
link |
yeah, it produced a very strange reaction.
link |
One of the things I don't think that I properly understood is that most physicists don't talk
link |
in this geometric language.
link |
I thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds, bundles,
link |
differential forms, connections, curvature, tensors, et cetera.
link |
And I, I saw a lot of the comments would say things like, I have a PhD in theoretical physics
link |
and I'm not even familiar with all of these concepts.
link |
And I think that was probably a distortion coming from living in Cambridge, Massachusetts
link |
for almost 20 years.
link |
So what's the solution to that?
link |
Well, I mean, I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to.
link |
My problem is my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge, the same
link |
people have these perverse incentives on them where they've invested in these programs that
link |
So they're extremely hostile and kind of difficult to deal with.
link |
The fact that I'm not a physicist, um, has its own set of issues, which is that effectively
link |
it's like the hermit kingdom.
link |
They don't get any visitors and they don't necessarily want somebody, you know, rolling
link |
up and saying, I know how to do physics.
link |
So I'm, I'm always very clear.
link |
I'm not a physicist.
link |
That said, if I wait too long, I don't know that theoretical physics is really going to
link |
exist after the boomers because everyone in you, I think you had Wolfram on your program.
link |
I don't remember whether he said this to you or Brian Keating, but he said something like
link |
everybody got discouraged.
link |
We cannot do that.
link |
There's something about the renormalization revolution that innervated the physics community
link |
because it taught them just because you can see in this energy regime doesn't mean you
link |
can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how, you know, coupling constants
link |
run and what kind of a UV fixed points exist, blah, blah, blah.
link |
Somehow that discouraged people from guessing from believing everything became an effective
link |
The beauty of the effective theory wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe,
link |
just the beauty of an energy level.
link |
So I think that renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened
link |
And also its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic.
link |
Well, the story I'm telling myself is that in part I'm waiting for them to get weaker.
link |
But on the other hand, I don't know that we have any time left.
link |
And so are you also thinking about ways of, uh, you know, you know, the, the podcast medium
link |
is revolutionary for public for discourse for what, I mean, I don't even know the right
link |
Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for re energizing the physics community?
link |
So basically for communicating, look, I have a fantasy, okay?
link |
My fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem.
link |
And it goes back to this thing that I read about in, in Fineman's, um, books about Tartaglia.
link |
They asked him this question, like, what's the greatest thing that ever happened in math?
link |
And he says, Tartaglia is solution of the cubic.
link |
It's just like the weirdest answer.
link |
So you're like, okay, I'll bite.
link |
Why is it Tartaglia solution of the cubic?
link |
And he said, because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound
link |
that the ancients had failed to do.
link |
I was like, Oh, I got it.
link |
It's the thing that opens up new psychology that says maybe things are possible again.
link |
It's a new orchard, new orchard, new farmers, new people who can find fruit that they can
link |
And once you have one person do that, very often you get many, like one of the things
link |
that we were talking about with Eddie Van Halen.
link |
The reason that he created a revolution and somebody like Roy Buchanan did not is that
link |
you could follow Eddie Van Halen.
link |
You couldn't pioneer it.
link |
And maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly and as fast and as inventively, but
link |
you could follow once you understand that there is a tapping principle.
link |
It was just the beginning of something called percussive guitar.
link |
My belief is that once we start innovating in the present, everything will come because
link |
everything that around us is screwed up on that.
link |
Let me with one last question, bring back master Oogway, the probably the most famous
link |
quote of his, right, with yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift.
link |
That is why it is called the present.
link |
It's very beautiful.
link |
Although I would have gone with quit, don't quit, noodles, don't noodles.
link |
I feel like people need to know way too much context for that to make sense.
link |
It's your audience.
link |
To hell with context.
link |
They'll figure it out.
link |
Let me ask, what are you grateful for today?
link |
What is your present?
link |
We've talked about a lot of dark things, but what brings you joy to your heart that I can't
link |
believe I'm lucky enough to have this?
link |
You know, Nyla and Zev, my wife, Pia, the fact that we've got our health, all the little
link |
things, saying grace after meals.
link |
You're coming over for Friday night Shabbat dinner, so we'll bench together and say grace.
link |
It's important to just, like this bottle of water in front of me, I made a point of just
link |
thinking about how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle that happens to be placed
link |
in front of me because somebody cared.
link |
That small thing made a difference to me.
link |
I still have strength for the fight so far.
link |
I think that's something I'm grateful for.
link |
I can't believe that I'm not more beaten down after all of this nonsense.
link |
I have the most interesting set of friends.
link |
I'm not that rich by monetary standards, but if there were friend billionaires, Forbes
link |
would be all over my ass.
link |
I just can't believe who I can talk to, you know, at the drop of a hat.
link |
And I'm really grateful.
link |
I think this is the end of something profound, and it's the beginning of whatever is next.
link |
And whatever is next could be terminal.
link |
Whatever is next could be amazing.
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Whatever is next could be a return to the horrors of the early 20th century that doesn't
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manage to go totally catastrophic, but takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
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I'm grateful to having half of my life in the rearview mirror.
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Maybe it took place in a bubble, and maybe it was unsustainable.
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But it was nice to be able to move around the world without a mask.
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It was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world, even if it was from a cot in
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a hostel in some country.
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It was a good life.
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Find the last Indian Jewish girl left.
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You're a lucky guy.
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Well, let me just say…
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Actually, there's something I wanted to just say before you get to that.
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I forgot to say something.
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Falling in love with an intellectual collaborator is a special thing that not everybody gets
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I think when I met Pia, I fell deeply in love with her, all her normal characteristics.
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Pia and I had an antagonistic relationship around geometry and economics.
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And then weirdly, just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film they hate
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each other, the two fields were fighting with each other, cats and dogs, and finally the
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sexual tension clearly was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
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And we came up with geometric marginalism, which is this other theory, not geometric
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unity, which allowed me to inhabit space with somebody who I already knew intimately and
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had fallen in love with, and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play and to
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It's sort of the intellectual version of the tango, one of the most romantic periods
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of my life that doesn't fall into most people's experience.
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So that was a chance to see something totally unexpected, haven't really had it since
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because she doesn't want to revisit the material, but something I'm super grateful for that's
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very particular and unique.
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But to flip the tables on you, for hundreds of thousands, I think millions of people,
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I can speak, me and them are really grateful, one, that you exist, and two, sorry, for your
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podcast and I do hope your voice in some form continues to reverberate, I think, at least
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in the 2021s and beyond, even if it takes a brief pause.
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We're pausing at the moment.
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We've recorded some for future episodes and I'm recording for you.
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I really appreciate that.
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But earnestness trades at a discount at the moment because it's easy to make fun of it.
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One of the things I like best about you is that you and I are both fairly earnest.
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We may joke and jab, but honestly, there's a project here and a world to win, as they
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The thing that I want my and your listeners to know is that I'm not stepping away from
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the podcast because I don't appreciate that people really want more.
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This is hugely financially costly to me.
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I want to make sure you guys are getting the best that I can do, and destroying myself
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right in front of an election, I think Lex is incorrect.
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I think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren't any planes in
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the sky that aren't either colored red or colored blue is a big danger given how angry
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I am at the system.
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I don't want to be removed from the chess board because if nobody's going to talk about
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Jeff Epstein, there need to be people.
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If nobody's going to talk about various things that we've talked about on these programs,
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I want to make sure that I'm there.
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Do I think that this is potentially an existential election?
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Am I positive that I know that my way to bet is the right way out?
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I don't know, people.
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I just don't know.
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Where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms of how it is chewing
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up smart people that I decided it's really not about cowardice because it's hard for
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me to restrain myself.
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I have so many reactions every day.
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This is really about trying to plan for all of our futures to make sure that I'm around.
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I had a huge concern that what happened to Brett's Articles of Unity was going to happen
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It was going to happen to the YouTube channels.
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I want to make sure that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket.
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So if something goes wrong over there, that's the whole idea of the intellectual dark web,
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which is at some level a loose confederation.
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It can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work.
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It can dissolve so that there really isn't anything.
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The thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately, when the hit pieces come, they don't come
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for what it is that they're angry at you about.
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They come for where they can get you.
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It's very important that right in front of an election, the desire of the old system
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to defend itself through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects of the
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We have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions keeping individuals
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with podcasts and the ability to reach millions through Substack out of their domain.
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I don't surrender this domain to them.
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They have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us, and I believe that they could remove
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you or me in an instant.
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By the end of today, if they wanted us off the chessboard, we would be off the chessboard.
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I know that's not your perspective.
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My goal is to stay here as long as possible to make sure that you have enough of a counterbalancing
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set of ideas and to let and help other podcasters start.
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My hope is that that works, but long heroism, short martyrdom is a good motto for anyone,
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and I try to remember the short martyrdom part of that.
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First of all, beautifully put.
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Second of all, a way to end the conversation and the disagreement, which is how you hook
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them for the next conversation to be continued.
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Eric, it's a huge honor.
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Thank you once again.
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Lex, really appreciate it every time we get together.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein, and thank you to our
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Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure
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SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across.
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I don't like looking at numbers, but someone should.
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It helps you make good decisions.
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And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the
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Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast,
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go on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen in the song titled, Hallelujah.
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Well, maybe there's a God above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot
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somebody who outdrew you.
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And it's not a cry that you hear at night, it's not somebody who's seen the light,
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it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.