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, the third time we've spoken on this podcast.
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He is the wise turtle, Master Ugwe, to my Kung Fu Panda, one of my favorite people to talk to in this world.
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A complicated and fascinating mind that I'm grateful to have the chance to accompany in exploring this world through conversation, on this podcast and on his, the latter called the portal.
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Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.
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First is Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability.
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Second is Sunbasket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety into my culinary life.
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Third is SEM Rush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across.
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I don't like looking at numbers, but somebody should, 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 internet.
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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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As a side note, let me say that wherever this life takes me, I'm drawn to the possibility of having many more conversations with Eric through the years.
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I think we have just the right kind of contrasting worldviews and a deep respect and appreciation of each other's life stories.
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That creates for this magical experience in the realm of conversation that feels like we're always looking for something that we never quite find, but are always better for having tried.
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I'm not sure how or why the universe is connected to Eric and me, but it did.
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And I would be a fool not to trust its judgment and enjoy the journey.
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If somehow you like this podcast, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
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connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. 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. He unfortunately passed away.
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Who's the greatest musician of all time?
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Jonathan Richmond.
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It's a weird question, so I'm going to give you a weird answer. It's not because of you.
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Jonathan Richmond, the reason I'm picking on him is that he had a quote.
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He was the frontman of a group called The Modern Lovers.
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And his quote was something like, we have to be prepared to play music when our instruments are broken, the electricity's out, and it's raining, something like that.
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And I thought that that quote was very interesting because what it said was, you have to be able to strip this thing down farther and farther back to get to something that is intrinsically musical.
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We were having a conversation just now about virtuosity.
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And we're talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing.
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And that affected me emotionally. I don't know whether it affected you.
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I was never a Van Halen the group fan, but I revered Eddie Van Halen's capacity for innovation.
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I saw him like Rodney Mull in the skateboard.
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I had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast just to talk about what it's like to totally discontinuously innovate.
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And he posted a video of Spanish fly, I think, and saying, like, 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, and the attacks from the hammer ons, when they go at light speed as he did, particularly, and the reason I chose that was that I wanted to strip out the electronics.
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Because part of the claim will be that he's a rock musician, and a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar to sort of the electrified setup.
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His use of the whammy bar, for example, or the Frankenstrat that he built from different pieces, right?
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All of those aspects, in my opinion, are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship.
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And that's why I chose Spanish fly, because everyone, of course, will go to something like your eruption or running with the devil, which is the first things that they heard that let them know that there was a new force erupting 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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It clearly touches your soul on many levels.
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Is it deeper than just rocking out in your convertible Corvette 69?
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I imagine Eric Weinstein is just driving down the California highways, blasting some kind of music.
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Is it just being able to be carefree for moments of time, or is there something more fundamental that connects to the theory of everything in physics and life and all of that?
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How often do you have the chance, for example, to hear mathematics performed as you do in Bach, right?
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Like something with that kind of precision and elegance that can't really be grasped where, you know, to go back to Leonard Cohen's famous line, the baffled king composing, right?
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Such a good song, but it's also like individual verses 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 that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch, right?
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And so it's a very strange thing 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, you know, port 37.8, you know?
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Like it's not even supposed to be there, and suddenly somebody starts playing guitar and they're making you feel things.
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Or, you know, like in particular, particular instruments like the violin, it's so difficult, it's so unforgiving.
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And when it gives up its secrets, it just, you know, it wraps its fingers 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 at the same moment and integrate them, there are very few opportunities to live like that.
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And if you think about Eddie Van Halen, you know, as far as your head, the musical innovations and the fact that he was drawing directly from the classical canon,
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you know, really speaks to the idea that maybe rock is what somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it as being, you know, an infinitely extensible medium.
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In terms of heart, I always notice the smile on his face. 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 the side of his mouth and you're like, that's going to fucking kill you.
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And I'm not even worried about it for you. I'm worried about it for me.
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You're going to rob. 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, that there is somebody that everyone looks to that know.
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But I've never heard a guitarist say, eh, I don't know. I think he was OK. Like I've never heard it.
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You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius. There are very few people like that in the world.
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And then loins, those leaps, that guy was incredibly good looking, you know, skin tight pants, super athleticism.
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He completely owned the male sexuality of the stage, both being the completely dominant, 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 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 of young teenage boys playing air guitar in their room. Yeah, basically dreaming of being that kind of God.
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The most perfect example of what a human being can be. It's fascinating to think.
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It is. And then, you know, as in many of the cases with these bands, you get these multiple talents in the same outfit.
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And I think that the original configuration with David Lee Roth, I mean, 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 that dance would be just gorgeous.
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Can you handle it? Can you ride that?
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Probably not because I think he's very, I get the feeling that he's very smart and very dysregulated.
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And I don't know that I could 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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But Joe and that and Joe does it sometimes.
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Sometimes he just sits back and listens and he just lets like the music play, 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, you may not even talk about music for like hours.
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It might just go to this because he I think lives in Japan.
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Like there's a weird, he's been an EMT after he was a rock star.
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He chose to be kind of like, I don't know.
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You know, there's depth to that man 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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Can we just, the things I feel when I listen to Hallelujah by Larry Cohen or anything by him really.
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You really want to get into it?
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What does 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 or you have the major and the relative minor and he's alternating between them.
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There's only one note of difference 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, it's the minimal amount to take you back and forth between joy and happiness.
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As that's encoded in us.
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So he starts off with it.
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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 because it's, he's using this technique called bathos, right?
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So the alternation between the sublime 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, you know, 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 that probably isn't in the song, 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, you know?
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Of course you, 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 like the kind of, that's the energy I get at.
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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 of where he is in the chord progression, 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, which are the two other major elements, the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony.
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So he's describing the chord progression 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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Like we had this example of every time we say goodbye, do you know the song?
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Every time we say goodbye.
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No, I think it was a Cole Porter, maybe or Gershwin, maybe Porter.
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I cry a little, there is no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor, right?
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Like it's beautiful use.
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Then there's times when it's duplicitous.
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So for example, you'll have, I guess my favorite examples of this are Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.
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I fell into a burning ring of fire.
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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, right?
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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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That woman's voice.
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She doesn't give a damn.
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But then what's the...
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It's like heavy stripping music.
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You're not in a good place.
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You're probably in some strip club.
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Last of your money, you're drinking lousy beer, some bad situation.
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And she's feeling good.
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No, it's funerial.
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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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If you think about it, contrast it with Ray Charles, for example.
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Do you know Lonely Avenue?
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Well, my room has got two windows, 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, 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, is talking about the unreliable audience that's too cool to be with
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the performer on stage.
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There are things that go with the music, like the Cole Porter stuff that go against, like
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I think these are the games that musicians play that the rest of us only sort of notice
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Fourth, the fifth.
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He should say something about the relative minor or the, he's giving you the secret, the
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In other words, he doesn't know why it works.
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Did Pockelbel know why Pockelbel'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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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 of the wave equation and then superimposed, like
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there's two genius intellectual concepts behind music, one of which is the wave equation.
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Usually we solve it for a one dimensional medium because we're talking about strings
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Occasionally, you're talking about things like handpans or steel drums or metallophones
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or gamelons, whatever.
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And those have a wave equation too that's much more chaotic.
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The other equation is this crazy thing that two to the 1912 is almost exactly equal to
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three, which is what gave us even temperament.
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And so the tension between those two things 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, it's imagine that you took like a little brush and you started
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brushing off a pyramid under the sands.
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You might think that you created the pyramid by your brushing, but in fact, somebody else
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That's why you're baffled.
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That's beautifully put.
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And as creating one of the greatest songs of all time 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 my contention, but he knows enough to know that he's baffled.
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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, which I really wish we would discuss that's totally dystopic and
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you will not like it at all, is the future, which contains this line that I think I used
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in my episode with Roger Penrose on the portal, not the subtle plug, 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, I think is constantly coming to the idea of
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being a biblical like scribe.
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And I think this is one of the great things that, you know, you see Dylan doing this with
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all along the watch tower.
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You saw Warren Zevon, who we should talk much more about doing this with a song called I
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Was In The House When The House Burned Dad, do you know this thing?
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No, 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 of our time, and he's been largely
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forgotten by this generation.
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But you know, Bob Dylan would sing one of his songs in tribute.
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I've heard Bob Dylan, you know, 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, appear on either one of our podcasts.
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We need to get your voice into a new medium for a new group.
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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 again is that I've learned some
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things about what I don't do well.
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And I also have sort of struggled with the question, should I do those things better?
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Because what if it's, you know, I always use the same example of the fitted sheet when
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you're trying to put a queen size fitted sheet on a king size mattress.
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He's like, okay, I got that corner squared away, and then you get another corner that
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pops off and then you go back around.
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I wonder whether I can improve my style in the ways in which, you know, I think it's
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just a recognition of a difference.
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You do a better job of getting to the soul of a really top intellectual guest and making
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them accessible and presenting them 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, like, because I think about what is the greatest conversation
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I'll ever have, you know, like in a sense of the portal, 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 if enough people like me can keep
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twisting your arm to keep doing the portal, please, that there'll be an amazing conversation.
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One of the questions that I ask myself is like, who is the person that I'm especially
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equipped for some reason I'm convinced on Putin.
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There's something in my head that says, I can do this man better than anyone else in
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I got this thought in my head about it.
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I don't know why and I'm convinced, but I think the universe works in that way.
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Like if it tells you, it's going to happen.
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The way I would say it is that almost everybody who becomes a Supreme Court justice believes
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at a very early age, they're going to become 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 had this sort of, well, I call it pathological
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I do think you have pathological self confidence and you also have humility.
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Most people would hear those as a contradiction.
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I think that you would not be able to get away with what you do if you didn't have the
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The great danger is that your equation becomes unbalanced, that you either lose the humility
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or you lose the humility, overwhelms the ego and the drive because right now you've got
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a Mexican standoff 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, what does Peter think about X, Y, and
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It's like, well, do you want communist Peter?
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Do you want hypercapitalist Peter?
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That's why he's successful is that he's got all these minds fighting each other.
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When people say, Peter is this or Peter is that, I just laugh because nobody who knows
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him would describe him as having thoughts at the level that people are claiming.
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I do think that in my case, there's also pathological epistemic humility.
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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, it's like Hillel's questions, if I'm not
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for myself, who will be for me?
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If I'm only for myself, what am I if not now when?
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At some level, there's a question about if I don't decide that someone is capable and
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that somebody is me, and if I apply that to everyone else on the planet, then nobody's
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going to do anything.
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And so I do think that one of the things that people like you and I get is, who are you
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to say that, f that, man?
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Sign me up for some Dunning Kruger.
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Yeah, but it's multiple minds, like you said.
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This morning, I was feeling so good and confident about I couldn't think no wrong.
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And I remember last night clearly thinking that I'm the dumbest human who has 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, 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.
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This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages, some of them being alcoholic,
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others containing caffeine.
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There's, in fact, I can't share the story behind it, but there is a bottle of vodka
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So I mean, I should have hit you for coffee because this is a morning show here.
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So I put out a call that we get a chance to have this conversation and people ask these
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wonderful questions, 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 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, I don't know, for love in a person's
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life is to hear how much depression was a part of Leonard Cohen's life and how much
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I guess one way, I'm not sure where we can go with this question, but do you think about
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the places that the mind can go, like these dark places?
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Is there something like where the only escape out is suicide, for example, that's the darkest
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But I really think suicide is a big place 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, but we don't know whether that's
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coming because of a problem in brain chemistry, because of an event in their life, whether
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the evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal, whether or not it might have
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a religious motivation, there's too many different forms of self harm.
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It's something like the 10th largest killer thereabouts.
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And I think that you can look at it from different angles.
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I'm old enough to have had Pete Seeger come to my college when I was at university and
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to watch his good humor in the face of all adversity.
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I think of Odetta.
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I used to go to Odetta concerts, I don't know who she is.
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Okay, this is going to be one of the better days of your life.
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Check out Odetta when we're done with the interview.
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She was a civil rights figure, but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship.
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These people were in the struggles, and they saw lots of bad things happen, and they kept
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their humor about them.
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The thing is that you can take on the Veldschmerz, the pain of the planet, or you can try to do
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something else, which is to be a happy warrior, even if the odds are terrible and the cost
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of failure is catastrophic.
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So even once surrounded by darkness, but the thing is with Leonard Cohen is he created
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such beautiful music, and yet it's like Anthony Bourdain, the same.
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And yet they go to this dark place.
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And it's easier to say it's just biochemistry.
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There's a linkage between this highly generative, creative side, and in some cases, dark depression.
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In other cases, not.
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So you can't say that it's tied.
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The genius and madness are always co traveling, or the beauty and pain are one and the same.
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What you can say is that there's a cluster of people that tell you that for that cluster,
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there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty.
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And I do think that in part, it's squaring circles that can't be squared.
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We were just talking before about the inability to serve two perfect systems, the perfect
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system of the wave equation and the perfect system of even temperament.
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They're both perfect.
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They're not compatible.
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And once you realize that there is perfection and an inability to make contact with perfection,
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I think you recognize that there is no solution to this world.
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That's weird with the poets and musicians.
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You want to say, this is a particular thing that you do, but then there's Spanish fly
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And then you realize, oh.
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Well, what do you get out of Spanish fly by Van Halen?
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I think it's very singular because of the fact that it's purely acoustic.
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For some reason, I couldn't imagine Van Halen separate from the band in front of thousands
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of people just screaming and rocking out with lights everywhere.
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And Spanish fly made me think like, you made me imagine him sitting alone in a college
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I think that's who he was.
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I mean, believe me, I get it.
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He was a rock star.
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He was a rock god.
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I'm almost positive that you can't get to where he got to without being a complete introvert.
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It made me imagine that there's some half naked supermodel walking around hoping that they
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can do their thing together.
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And Eddie's completely disinterested.
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He'd be with the guitar.
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He'd be with the guitar.
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It's totally, at some level, in one case, maybe you're conquesting, maybe you're pursuing
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In the other case, you're talking about a relationship to the order, the creator, the
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almighty, whatever it is you want to call that substrate that is reality.
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And do I believe that Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and Heifetz jacked
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into the true essence of the world?
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I don't think it's as good as differential geometry.
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I do think it's amazing for other reasons and thank God because it's very difficult to
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communicate differential geometry at scale.
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But the thing about eruption, for example, what level do you want to come into eruption?
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Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry?
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Do you want the theatrics?
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You could put them on wires and set his pants on fire or whatever.
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You know, it'd be totally in keeping with it.
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On the other hand, you want to have something completely precise that shows off the virtuosity
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of what's possible with the Stratocaster.
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But there's a precision to it, which is very different than Hendrix.
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There's a messiness to Hendrix that to me, somebody who has OCD has always been struggling.
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How does Hendrix affect you?
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I mean, let's have the Jimi Hendrix conversation.
link |
I don't know that we can do anything to it that hasn't already been done to it.
link |
Maybe that's not true.
link |
Maybe the idea is that every generation has to have its Hendrix conversation and this
link |
It's Jimi Hendrix experience.
link |
I hear he stole it from Joe Rogan.
link |
There's so many details.
link |
One, it hurt my soul on so many levels that you can put a thumb over the guitar to play
link |
a note, to hold the note.
link |
And it doesn't because I want it to be the Russian virtuoso that sits with his classical
link |
guitar in a perfect form, plays really fast with the fingers, and then you don't want,
link |
you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed 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 |
They're different Russian archetypes, right?
link |
So the completely idiosyncratic Russian is very different in a weird way from the, you
link |
know, I can do this backwards in any key in any, in my sleep and in any time signature
link |
that you, you know, just snap your fingers.
link |
We've discussed my piano tuner in previous episodes.
link |
That was offline conversation.
link |
You told me the story.
link |
But I should tell you the story.
link |
You should retell the story.
link |
There it was in darkest Manhattan with the world's shittiest, it wasn't even an upright,
link |
it was a spin at 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 and I hated dealing with him.
link |
There was something about his attitude 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 and he's like, are you sure, are
link |
you sure you want to tune this, this piece of shit, you know, okay, fine.
link |
So he's like, okay, it's your money.
link |
The phone rings and I have the phone ringer set on a landline to Paganini Caprice 24.
link |
And immediately as the phone rings, he figures out what key the phone ringer is and which
link |
is not the key that like list composed the variations on Caprice 24.
link |
And he starts going into theme and variations on Caprice 24.
link |
At some level, I've never heard before, just jaw dropping it.
link |
And like the phone stops ringing 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 that in, you know, in Russian accent, in English
link |
hurts in a way you can't imagine, he said, no, you are the piano player.
link |
I am merely the piano tuner.
link |
And it's just like, oh man, through the heart.
link |
You know, it's kind of reminiscent, I'd love to hear actually your opinion, this is reminiscent
link |
of the Goodwill hunting story.
link |
What do you think about that?
link |
I guess when I think of that film, I think about Matt Damon as a young guy risking everything,
link |
giving up Harvard.
link |
I think, you know, probably the most accomplished group of people in the world are people who
link |
choose to give up Harvard voluntarily.
link |
That's true, that's true.
link |
Bigger than Harvard.
link |
You know, Ives was one of these people, Bill Gates, of course.
link |
And then oddly, you know.
link |
But then Steve Jobs gave up a read and read is like the weirdest craziest college in the
link |
People should pay much more attention to read and I'm sorry it's going through a hard time
link |
But what it was before the current craziness is really an interesting story.
link |
Regardless, as we say in the 617 area code, I think that a lot of my reaction is to the
link |
real story of Matt Damon having this vision and being the young guy to pull it off.
link |
And you know, I also think about Robin Williams trying to explore heart through this lens
link |
And, you know, as you and I, you've hung out with comedians, they know that they're a screwed
link |
up bunch of people.
link |
They're proud about it.
link |
The idea that Robin Williams, who I saw many years ago when I was in LA in the comedy clubs
link |
around here, you know, he was a straight up crazy, dysregulated genius in tremendous pain
link |
and his desire to do it earnestly through acting rather than constantly by just sniping,
link |
you know, or being a clown or showing us how fast his mind worked relative to ours.
link |
I was really moved by that.
link |
I thought that he brought some authenticity and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that
link |
And again, like you said, it doesn't always have to be, but in that case, the madness and
link |
the genius were neighbors.
link |
That one couldn't have been any other way.
link |
No, because his mind, the thing about seeing him in a comedy club was that he would react
link |
to random stimulus in the environment.
link |
You know, it could be a heckler.
link |
Sometimes you almost got the feeling that he wanted a heckler because it was, it gave
link |
him something to play against.
link |
He was, he was infinitely, instantly inventive.
link |
But I actually, to me, the best Robin Williams is, has he got closer and closer to the end
link |
of his life because there was a sadness and he's almost fighting the sadness with this
link |
improvisational, like the weapons he has is this wit and humor and his dancing that he
link |
does with language.
link |
But, and then sometimes when you just fall silent, you can see the sadness.
link |
But I don't know, there's something so beautiful about that.
link |
It's like this bird with a broken wing that's like trying to fly, you know, and it's getting
link |
I mean, those, he would have made a one hell of a podcast guest, I'll tell you that.
link |
I have some sadness that I really do think that part of what we call podcasting is actually
link |
just getting to know a soul over and over again.
link |
But maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression and sadness and heavy feelings
link |
is not an American specialty.
link |
Seeing that in context with the beauty of life is a Russian specialty.
link |
Like, it is very much, it 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 and depressing time and I think that part
link |
of it is that we don't know if something huge is about to get started and we don't even
link |
know what this is.
link |
I mean, we just sit here in this weird world that is falling into some new state and we're
link |
not even super curious.
link |
It's like, what the hell just happened?
link |
He's got an answer 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 |
The central core of the answer is that the US seemed to be the greatest thing in the
link |
world in large measure because we hadn't noticed that we were getting a benefit from
link |
having no plan, 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 and you start the initial conditions slightly different.
link |
Some giant number of planets, a lot of the things that were discovered from the 1800s
link |
through the end of the 20th century are discovered in a period of time because a lot of that
link |
just has to do with once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments, you can see
link |
The more you can see, the more you can make use of what you can see and it turns out there
link |
was lots of stuff to do with like germs or electron orbitals or spectrum, electromagnetic
link |
We got to do all of those things and the US roughly corresponded for a good chunk of
link |
its history with this bonanza.
link |
Of course, we look like an amazing genius country.
link |
Imagine that you could sell a car, you don't have to put in seat belts, you don't have
link |
to put in airbags, you don't have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors or a rear view
link |
You could save a lot of money on a car by not putting in all of the stuff to keep things
link |
from going wrong and I think that's what we had.
link |
We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good, we plowed it back, the riches
link |
and spoils and treasure back into the system and made more genius stuff and we carried
link |
along a good chunk of humanity, hundreds of millions of people.
link |
We did not have a plan for what happens when the growth goes below the stall speed of our
link |
How confident should it be that the growth has slowed in a way that is permanent rather
link |
than a slap in the face where we…
link |
It's not the right concept.
link |
Right concept is, I try to use the same words over and over again in case people see more
link |
often because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere.
link |
I use this analogy of the orchard because everyone talks about low hanging fruit.
link |
They know the concept of low hanging fruit but they don't think in terms of orchards.
link |
They say things like, you think we've picked all the low hanging fruit but I believe in
link |
the infinitiveness 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 all the low hanging fruit here and then we're having
link |
this stupid argument about low hanging fruit 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 |
My claim is there's probably a lot more low hanging fruit 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 as lots of these other like the chemical orchard.
link |
I have faith that there's a small percentage of the population but not zero that's looking
link |
for those other orchards.
link |
I'm excited about one of those orchards which is, I believe there will be robots in everybody's
link |
homes and that will unlock some totally new thing.
link |
Totally new set of technologies, ideas, the way we live life, the productivity, everything.
link |
It'll change everything.
link |
I'm excited about that orchard.
link |
I'm roaming that orchard and wondering how the hell you bring back the ant that finds
link |
a new source of food.
link |
I'm trying to find an apple I can bring back to the rest of the earth.
link |
You're in an explorer idiom.
link |
Do you have faith that there's enough of those?
link |
I don't think there are very many of us.
link |
I'm one of them too.
link |
How many does it take?
link |
What are you talking about?
link |
How many eelons does it take to screw in a light bulb?
link |
Let's imagine that we went, imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food.
link |
Then it comes back to the colony and it says, hey, I think I found a new source of food.
link |
The initial reaction is, you're not authorized to find new food.
link |
Why would you try to go find new food?
link |
We're going to remove you from Twitter.
link |
By the way, I think the fact that you think you're allowed to go find new food shows how
link |
privileged you are as an ant.
link |
Get out of the colony.
link |
Well, that's probably not a great model for finding new orchards.
link |
What we find is that where there's a system that allows somebody to ascend without a lot
link |
of gatekeeping, you can have that.
link |
I saw this happen in hedge funds.
link |
Hedge funds for a while hoovered up a lot of talent because they were places that had
link |
funding and had freedom.
link |
In general, really smart people want to be free and they don't want to think a lot about
link |
how they're going to feed themselves.
link |
They want to get lost in their minds.
link |
You can either give them productive places to play, dangerous places to play.
link |
They're either going to break into computers or find vaccines for you or build bombs or
link |
We're not providing for the people who have to disrupt and have to innovate and trying
link |
to channel that effort.
link |
We're so focused on this other thing, which is fairness and safety.
link |
Fairness and safety, by the way, are really important.
link |
I don't want to denigrate them.
link |
The singular focus on fairness and safety in the same breath being focused on growth
link |
and discovery and creation is going to doom us because what we're talking about is we're
link |
always talking about divvying up the pie that is as opposed to the pie that will be.
link |
Imagine that you spent all your time trying to divvy up the 13th century pie and you destroyed
link |
your ability to get to the 20th century.
link |
You'd be an idiot.
link |
One place I think I disagree with you is, I don't think you need that many people to
link |
empower the geniuses, the innovators, the people who refuse to spend most of their days in
link |
meetings about fairness.
link |
Let's have a disagreement.
link |
I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium, is just one little example of a tool
link |
that you can give power to, like you and your podcast can have the next day on Musk and
link |
Now I see where you're going.
link |
There has been a series of places for people to play and be free and we've lost them successfully.
link |
What's a good place you remember 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 where you could play at MIT 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 and I'm not really brave enough now.
link |
Because I don't...
link |
It's a feeling and the people are going to tear me apart.
link |
Oh, what are you and you speak from emotion and facts?
link |
The podcast is yours.
link |
Tell the people who are currently editing your brain because I saw that move right now.
link |
I think you should go find another podcast, right?
link |
Let's get rid of some of your audience right now.
link |
Please go find another podcast if you're editing my brain.
link |
Nevertheless, all the self doubt, they're sitting in that brain.
link |
I can't stand to watch this, but all right.
link |
What is the self doubt loop that you're in?
link |
The thing is, when I walk the halls of MIT, there's bureaucracy, there's administrators
link |
that never have done anything interesting in their entire lives.
link |
There's meetings, there's all the usual crap.
link |
But there's in the eyes of individuals, there's this glow of excitement that has nothing to
link |
I understand this.
link |
And it's still a playground.
link |
There's little pockets of playgrounds from which genius can emerge still.
link |
And they're unaffected by diversity meetings or fairness meetings or blah, blah, blah.
link |
I love to hear that.
link |
You don't think so?
link |
Because I've watched the change, Lex.
link |
I've watched people, we're all editing ourselves all the time.
link |
I remember my old mind, I liked it better.
link |
All of this relentless focus on critical race theory and critical theory, postmodernism,
link |
fairness, social justice, it's making many of us into worse people.
link |
You think that's that?
link |
Do you think the mad daemons of the character 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 that seem to be relatively
link |
Well, let's not mix up.
link |
Matt Damon is just an actor.
link |
He was just a Harvard student who came up with his own genius screenplay, acted and made
link |
But we're somewhere else.
link |
You don't think you can build the rocket company out of MIT still?
link |
I think there are things that you can still do, but we're losing them.
link |
We keep losing them.
link |
I would say the biggest problem here, let me just say, what I think the solution would
link |
be is to fire anybody who's not faculty, especially young faculty, should have way more power
link |
and administration should have much less power.
link |
Because right now, the administration, some of whom used to be faculty, but they've lost
link |
the fire, the spark that gave them, they've lost the memories of the playground.
link |
So the people that admire and love the playground, like you could see it in their behavior, should
link |
have way more power.
link |
So we should create a systems that give them power.
link |
Lex, you're very idealistic and you've got a huge heart.
link |
It's a weird time because I don't want to dissuade you from believing beautiful things
link |
because I see how potent you are.
link |
You do all these things, jiu jitsu, guitar, podcasting, programming, computers, et cetera,
link |
I don't think you're right.
link |
I think we're in a really deeply screwed up place where even the tiny number, let me give
link |
you an alternate version of the dystopia.
link |
I do think that there are people who are capable and there's still places to play and cause
link |
things to happen that progress the story forward.
link |
But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in who fit that profile, like how
link |
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 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 and people with Nobel Prizes and so on admire
link |
Elon, like how little problem...
link |
He gets a lot of fans from people that buy his products and young minds just excited.
link |
But like, why don't we as an institution...
link |
Why doesn't MIT say that we want to...
link |
Somebody amongst us will be the next Elon Musk and we want to encourage them.
link |
Say that in meetings.
link |
And they, instead, there's this jealousy.
link |
Well, here's the crazy...
link |
Did you hear what Elon Musk tweeted?
link |
Like how responsible is what he's doing?
link |
Like he's just saying all these things 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, 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 for the Dragon Warrior and the Furious Five come
link |
to defeat him on the bridge?
link |
One of them gives up Poe's name accidentally and Tai Lung hears it.
link |
So that is his name.
link |
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, which is lousy with talent.
link |
It's just you can't swing a cat without hitting an amazing athlete.
link |
Sometimes you'll have a division, which at that particular moment has one star and no
link |
real competition in that weight class or something.
link |
That person is in bad shape because you can't build a legend without the other.
link |
When you think of Muhammad Ali, what are the names that you immediately think of?
link |
And you have to phrase your, you have to think of the other heavyweights, right?
link |
So those opponents are in part what made Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali.
link |
And that's why the Mayweather, McGregor revelation that, okay, this guy has got his opponents
link |
picture in his house.
link |
How weird is that?
link |
Well, because without the opponent, 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 where people take each other's credit and screw each other over.
link |
And then there are other rivalries like the RNA Tie Club, where these guys were so in
link |
love with what they were doing that they couldn't wait to share everything.
link |
And like, Nobel Prizes were so abundant that most people got Nobel Prizes just for being
link |
a member of the RNA Tie Club 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 because they can't break rules.
link |
They can't take the pressure.
link |
I'll tell you what really concerns me about your perspective.
link |
I think that there are a lot of genius ideas 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 in which we can swat down the trolls, where
link |
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, but somehow separating off people who
link |
are working and people who are trolling.
link |
I think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius in part because women in particular
link |
are not necessarily going to push an idea 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 that we will pigheadedly stick to an idea for 10
link |
years, even if the world collapses.
link |
I don't think that there are as many women who are going to make that calculation, even
link |
if they know the idea is correct.
link |
And one of the things that I believe technology can help us fight the trolls of all definitions
link |
I believe that a better Twitter can be built.
link |
I don't believe that a Twitter successor can be built that solves most of the problems.
link |
I think you can always improve what we have, but I don't think that converges in something
link |
that really works because I think ultimately the problem isn't Twitter, the problem is
link |
For example, I've recently made a very disturbing realization, which is academics and trolls
link |
have very many similar behaviors.
link |
It's largely a trolling community.
link |
I tend to believe that the trolls are not, it's like the Peter Thiel mini mind idea,
link |
which in all of the trolls, there's the possibility of goodness.
link |
And all you have to do, not all you have to do, what you have to do is create technology
link |
that incentivizes them to embrace, to discover, to embrace, to practice the better angels
link |
And I believe that people actually want to do that.
link |
The trolls is a short term dopamine rush of childish toxicity that all of us want to
link |
We believe that 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 because a lot of these people are implacable foes and there aren't
link |
But when you meet somebody, it's like, 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 going to recommend to you where I hope this comes from.
link |
Maybe I've got the source wrong, but in any event, it's a great book called Maximum City
link |
And I believe the conceit is that the author leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an
link |
And he realizes he has to rediscover the city because he can't live in the city he left.
link |
So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas of the city.
link |
And one of them is the underworld, 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, I've got two kids at home.
link |
He says, never say that to a contract killer because we have terrible relationships with
link |
Doesn't it dearest you?
link |
And I was just thinking, oh, wow.
link |
So there's a minus sign in front of that statement.
link |
You're sitting there saying, you know, I've got a three year old.
link |
It's like, OK, well, I'm going to 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, there are people whose wiring is so disturbing and so
link |
different from yours that you will never guess why you can't reach them or how much pleasure
link |
they may have gotten because they may have gone over a point of no return.
link |
Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis.
link |
You do not know this for sure.
link |
And I am a, you know, whatever the hell I am that has a different hypothesis that even
link |
in the darkest human beings that seem to be only full of evil, there's a good person there
link |
that could be discovered.
link |
One of the reasons I love doing your show is that you have these beliefs even as a Russian.
link |
The Russian special.
link |
As you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness, which is a total cynicism and total idealism
link |
locks together, right?
link |
That's very much part of the Russian character.
link |
The reason I was kept bothering you, kept bothering you to have this conversation is
link |
I'm really worried about the next couple of months.
link |
And if there's anybody in this world that could help alleviate my worry by at least
link |
walking along with me through this worry of mine, it's you.
link |
Do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war, some kind of division that explodes
link |
beyond just stuff on Twitter, but something that's really destructive to the fabric of
link |
Well, I believe we're in a revolution, as you know, 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 to be called a civil war is not smart.
link |
Only history will call it such.
link |
The thing that the problem is is that you're encountering things that you've never seen
link |
trying to fit them into things that you already know, right?
link |
But history repeats itself.
link |
You don't see lessons from history.
link |
But I don't see it repeating itself.
link |
What about violence?
link |
The famous quote is that it rhymes.
link |
I mean, the thing I guess I'm speaking to is violence and we're in there.
link |
The abstraction of violence.
link |
Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class, okay?
link |
Thank you for speaking to the audience.
link |
Trying to lose these people.
link |
I've dealt with your audience and your audience contains the smartest people around.
link |
I guarantee you if I say some stuff, first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say, they're
link |
in the detail, so that'll be a little bit of catnip 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, that's the job of the audience to
link |
do amongst themselves, they're happy doing the work and those who aren't, they leave.
link |
The people who don't want to struggle will leave and you can get rid of them.
link |
I think that the point is you would want to say violence is defined relative to a context.
link |
Let's call it meta violence so that we don't get into the problem.
link |
We already have a term for physical violence.
link |
We have meta violence and physical violence.
link |
I would say that physical violence is subclassed from meta violence.
link |
Meta violence is the disruption of a system.
link |
For example, if a cell dies, 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 |
This meta class is presumed in the documentation.
link |
Is it all negative?
link |
What are you talking about?
link |
This is part of the problem in the madness of our age, which is if you open up a drawer
link |
in your cabinet, in your kitchen, and you see knives, spoons, and forks, do you have
link |
a sense that the spoons are good utensils and the knives or forks are bad utensils because
link |
If you start thinking in these terms, that knife is there to do violence.
link |
That's violence you want done.
link |
When I cut a mango, I'm doing violence to the mango.
link |
The mango expects that I will do violence to it because otherwise I won't be able to
link |
get the meat and it won't get its seed spread somewhere else.
link |
In part, violence is absolutely part of our story.
link |
There's this meta violence class.
link |
The meta violence class is already, it's a multiple inheritance pattern.
link |
Whatever's going on right now inherits from meta violence.
link |
No, but there's certain subclasses that allow evil to emerge.
link |
What I'm specifically worried about is that the fact...
link |
What's on your mind, Lex?
link |
What's really going on?
link |
I worry that amidst the chaos of these protests or the chaos that could be created by the
link |
feeling that the election does not represent the voice of the people, saying that whoever
link |
gets, quote unquote, wins the election according to some kind of reporting of the numbers
link |
that come out that's not going to represent what people actually want to be the leader.
link |
Something in that narrative will create so much division that people will resort to literal
link |
violence, protests that really...
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That the United States loses its united aspect.
link |
Because of that, because of that chaos and tension, evil people, evil forces, that my
link |
definition of evil is just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power, the kind
link |
of power that ultimately goes against the ideal 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, the unity doesn't win out in this.
link |
I feel like you and I have a responsibility, it's small.
link |
How do we let love win in this moment of potential chaos?
link |
We're going to have to fight for it.
link |
You're going to have to become a fighter.
link |
You're going to have to throw some serious punches if that's what you want.
link |
You have to be Muhammad Ali here because the moment you start criticizing anything,
link |
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 to do things that you couldn't otherwise
link |
I saw that you had Michael Malis on your podcast.
link |
Michael Malis is, I think, of somebody who at his best is extremely shrewd and insightful.
link |
He's also got this trolling game, which he's quite open about and you talk to him about
link |
it, which I can't stand.
link |
Oh, grandpa doesn't get the internet.
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Well, I'm grandpa.
link |
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 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 that stands up gets cut down.
link |
It's like anything earnest.
link |
You have to turn into cynicism and a meme.
link |
It's this idea that the people who believe that the world is chaos and has no point are
link |
constantly trying to let you know, don't try to use the internet for meaning, for decency,
link |
for goodness, because we are going to find out that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy
link |
and we will make you suffer.
link |
I do think that there's a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world.
link |
Some of it mine, some of it yours, but we all have it.
link |
The trolls somewhat remove that, but it's not a judicious, kind, constructive, compassionate,
link |
caring version most of the time.
link |
A lot of those trolls, and I have this feeling about Michael Malis.
link |
I don't know whether it's right, that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath
link |
it, and that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior, and you and I don't seem
link |
I don't see you as almost ever trolling.
link |
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, you know, I'm not even, it's not even true.
link |
Everything we say, we say like, 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, right, I almost never take
link |
a tweet seriously if it contains the letters LMAO, LOL, RTFL, you know, FOL.
link |
There's an interesting effect where people say stuff and then finish it with LOL.
link |
You put it beautifully that it indicates to me that this is a person, we've talked about
link |
like why we're the stupid suit, is like this is anti, this is to fight the LOL at the end
link |
of sentences is take, like stand up for the words you're saying.
link |
Don't finish stuff with LOL, removing completely the responsibility of the content of the sentence
link |
Also, choosing the outfit that worked both for Men in Black and the Blues Brothers, not
link |
a terrible choice.
link |
Okay, but getting back, look, Lex, 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, I want to talk about you and Joe Biden.
link |
Joe Biden was a 29 year old guy with nothing particular going on so far as I can tell.
link |
I know people as impressive at age 29 as Joe Biden, 12 rows back, 3D, doesn't matter.
link |
Huge number of people.
link |
None of them, my age, can get to where he got to.
link |
It's like we're all morons.
link |
Anytime somebody takes out, like if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop, you'd be
link |
What is this guy doing repairing guitars?
link |
And somebody will say, maybe he loves to repair guitars.
link |
I mean, what is your Russian piano tuner doing?
link |
What is my Russian piano tuner?
link |
That was the whole point of that story, which is what is it that happened in that life that
link |
converted somebody?
link |
I find this, for example, with Russian doctors who are technicians and offices now.
link |
There's a huge amount of talent in the world that's not sitting in its proper seat.
link |
And quite honestly, I've gotten to the point where my feeling is we've got to take the
link |
Maybe we don't sit in them.
link |
Maybe the idea is that we take the seats and we put some smart Gen Z person in the seat
link |
and say, look, no chanting.
link |
I don't want to 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, if it rhymes, things that rhyme are more true.
link |
But in general, if something starts at one, two, three, four, I don't want to hear what
link |
the rest of your sentence is.
link |
But I feel like the responsibility that you carry that I carry, this is where Joe Rogan
link |
generally removes himself from being, I'm just a comedian.
link |
This idea of I'm just a comedian, I'll do that.
link |
But at this moment in history, history literally can pivot on the words of a tattooed, ripped,
link |
50 year old comedian.
link |
And I think the same is true with you.
link |
Well, I'm interested and I care.
link |
Speaking of lyrics, there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
link |
The hour is getting late.
link |
In the song, the joker and the thief are on opposite sides of Jesus having this conversation
link |
You and I, we've been through that.
link |
That's not our fate.
link |
That's somebody else's fate to throw spitballs at the internet.
link |
That's not your fate.
link |
You're in earnest guy.
link |
You're filled with love.
link |
You're getting the most amazing podcast.
link |
But you can win over the internet.
link |
This is the point I'm trying to make that you're saying, I'm just a grandpa, I don't
link |
I'm telling you, you're going to get bigger and then you're going to get cut down.
link |
You're going to keep ascending for a while, Lex.
link |
And then you're saying, naturally, there's, I'm telling you, I watched the same process.
link |
People get up to a certain level.
link |
And one of the things that's going on in my opinion with Joe Rogan is that when Joe Rogan
link |
starts to talk about his misgivings about Joe Biden, you know, in a way that you find
link |
it any bar in America about cognitive decline in a 77 year old who's about to be 78.
link |
I believe in November.
link |
We have never had anything remotely as insane as a 78 year old person slated to win the
link |
And you're saying when that idea is being communicated, is there something about the
link |
disc concept that you talk about, the system naturally starts to...
link |
Some bad thing happens to Joe or one of Joe's close associates.
link |
The ability to destroy people who become inconvenient has been documented.
link |
This is what we have done in the past.
link |
Whether we are doing it now, we don't know because we are not doing this church committee
link |
In order to know whether or not you are currently destroying American citizens as we did in
link |
the past and as we have documented, as we found out in 1976, the federal government
link |
destroyed Americans who had political beliefs that the government didn't want to continue.
link |
And I don't know whether you are grasping that.
link |
One interpretation of why John Stuart and why Joe Rogan and why Bill Maher, all these
link |
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, which does not result in my being
link |
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 work for the better.
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 for believing in these podcasts
link |
And most of the people who derided me have said, wow, did I not get things?
link |
It's like if you started to propose, you wanted to do the Sopranos in the era of 30
link |
minute sitcoms, it's like, you don't get it, man.
link |
The American people, they're not interested 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, you totally miss the opportunity.
link |
The savvy people used to say, kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime underestimating
link |
the intelligence of the American people.
link |
Well, that was totally wrong 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, they're going to want to control it.
link |
And they come up with new different mechanisms of doing that.
link |
I guess one interesting one is cancel culture.
link |
Well, look at the number of people around Joe who they've come after since they've realized
link |
that Joe is really big.
link |
Joey Diaz, Brian Callan, Crystalia.
link |
Now, I'm not saying that those are all related, but I do notice that there are at least correlations
link |
between when Joe says something, when something bad happens in Joe's universe.
link |
It's easier for me to believe that that's happening when it's happening around Joe himself.
link |
But I'm worried about my friend.
link |
And I don't necessarily want to push him towards being more if he doesn't want it.
link |
Because I don't want to conscript people.
link |
He's got a great life.
link |
He's got a great situation.
link |
He's done a huge service.
link |
Do you know how much do I owe Joe just for what he's done for you to say nothing of what
link |
he's done for me 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 is, I mean, 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.
link |
As long as he stays close to things that he loves and being, you know, one of the things
link |
is he's honest about his drug use.
link |
So he does a certain amount of like semi vice signaling up front.
link |
And then you just also know him.
link |
This is why every time they try to take him down, you use the N word, you know, like unfortunately,
link |
everybody knows who Joe is.
link |
And yes, he doesn't act as if he went to a fancy finishing school, right?
link |
That's not his energy.
link |
The fact that you've got some super smart guy who always pretends to be a meathead,
link |
just like, you know, hey, I'm a comedian, like all these defenses and disguises.
link |
He's a super smart guy who he's admitted to most of the things that, you know, you can
link |
take him down for him because everybody's been effectively in his den or his basement.
link |
Think about that studio as his basement.
link |
People have hung out with Joe so many hours that you can't tell them something about Joe
link |
or they're going to say, wow, I'm going to believe the New York Times and not the hundreds
link |
of hours I've spent on the Joe Rogan experience.
link |
But the cool thing is that this is what inspires me is that the way he's waging war against
link |
the system is just by being a good person and talking enough hours in a week where that
link |
message like bleeds throughout the words and the gaps between.
link |
And that, that's so inspiring to me that the good people can win by just being good.
link |
And he's kind and he's tough and he also, he's no pushover.
link |
I always worry a little bit when I sit down in my chair, you still get scared that he
link |
will call you on some kind of bullshit that you weren't even aware of.
link |
The first time I was on the show, the energy wasn't great between us and it was in a sober
link |
October situation.
link |
So I think I hadn't understood that and maybe our egos got a little bit off.
link |
I mean, I was having fun, but maybe it was just too complicated life forms getting to
link |
The first one was probably, yeah, that made me a little nervous for the future.
link |
But then, you know, Joe and I become friends, although sometimes we have miscommunications
link |
like on Yom Kippur, I texted him and I said, Joe, you know, I want to apologize for ways
link |
of let you down as a friend that haven't been there for you and appreciate everything you've
link |
I was like, like, I get this text back and like, 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 |
I was like, Joe, are there any Jews in your life that apologize for what they've done?
link |
He was just like, dude, if you lost your mind, what the hell's gotten into you?
link |
What do you think about the Spotify thing?
link |
Ask me a question.
link |
He's now, as opposed to being just a comedian with a podcast, he now is just a comedian
link |
with a podcast who stepped like in the middle of the center of cancel culture, which is
link |
like, I know Spotify is in Sweden, but they represent Silicon Valley.
link |
They represent the very kind of structures they contain and represent the kind of structures
link |
that threaten to destroy the elons of the world.
link |
And he just like stepped like with his Alex Jones and his Joe idea has just strolled right
link |
into the middle of it.
link |
I think it's awesome.
link |
But do you think he's strong enough to, I don't know, I mean, I don't even know the
link |
right way to ask this, but is he strong enough to persevere?
link |
It's a bit interesting.
link |
It's like when Alliance decides, wow, that honey badger looks tasty, I'm going to swallow
link |
Because I talked to him offline.
link |
He really seems to be willing to give away the hundred million, which gives him so much
link |
Oh, I don't, it's a powerful thing to be able to say, I don't, yeah, to the honey badger.
link |
He just strolls in, but he's willing to walk away from anything in this.
link |
Well, he's going to walk out the other side of the line.
link |
I don't think he's going to 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 who just walks into it.
link |
He just, he gets swallowed by the bug and he blasts out from the inside.
link |
I have it as Tommy Lee Jones.
link |
That's Joe Rogan to you.
link |
Is that my feeling is, is that Spotify 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, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
link |
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 it's a bit weird being friends with
link |
It just is because like you call him up or he'll call you up and he's like, what's
link |
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 was on Instagram a few days ago and it's filled up just like, oh, damn.
link |
I mean, that thing is powerful.
link |
So much love in that guy.
link |
That thing is so powerful.
link |
I mean, you could be that too.
link |
The instant Joe takes an interest in politics and saving the world.
link |
You might destroy all that.
link |
It's going bye bye.
link |
I just disagree with you.
link |
I mean, because you have to do it like you've said this many times before.
link |
You have a bottle of Stoli that you can get, if you get Joe Rogan to get highly politically
link |
active and call out the system for all the bullshit that it is in a very pointed and
link |
determined fashion.
link |
And he doesn't get destroyed.
link |
I'll give you the vodka.
link |
That sounds like a pretty damn good deal.
link |
But you've said this.
link |
I mean, no living heroes, my friend.
link |
It's just difficult.
link |
You just have to be good at it.
link |
I mean, if you just say generic political things, no, no, you're going to be taken down.
link |
But the more heroic you are with it, the more beautiful you are, the more you will be made
link |
to suffer if they cannot get you on reputation.
link |
If Jesus himself came down, I don't know if I ever read, I probably have never read to
link |
you the hit piece I did on Jesus.
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, you know, discovered new particles or whatever it is,
link |
I did a hit piece against them to prove that I can do it to anybody around anything at
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, canceled.
link |
Also, you know, packaging female objectification for young men, clearly Eddie Van Halen is
link |
one of the worst people alive.
link |
But was the skill, the incredible inspiration that is just radiating from his music inspires
link |
so many millions that they will fight those canceled pieces.
link |
They will fight those.
link |
This is your thing.
link |
You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil and the good is already been
link |
decided, designated the winner.
link |
But your belief in that it's true.
link |
Take it till you make it, no?
link |
It's motivating both of us.
link |
Like, I also believe that we're going to win because if I don't, then I can't get out
link |
of bed and it's pretty heavy at the moment.
link |
Do you think 2021 can make us feel good about the trajectory of society?
link |
Where we emerge from this year feeling good, like there's a smile, an air quintess phase
link |
and the next time we talk, we'll be doing some kind of duet and guitar and not having
link |
this worried look on our faces.
link |
But you've also promised that you're going to somehow end this in a positive...
link |
So, how do you turn the no around?
link |
What's the U turn from the no?
link |
Will we get some actually decent people 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 and to let you know why I
link |
don't think it's coming.
link |
First of all, both of these political parties, the leadership of them is disgusting and has
link |
They're tearing us apart.
link |
They lack the will to be Americans, they don't understand the subtlety of the project.
link |
They're simply the people who figured out how to inhabit the seats and that is their
link |
great achievement.
link |
I believe that in order to solve this, you need people who can integrate, who are not
link |
partisan at the level of the partisan warriors that we're seeing, people who believe in dividing
link |
the pies of the future rather than the present pie as our main task as Americans because
link |
we are built around growth, I'm sorry to say it.
link |
You need an ability to have subtle conversations and you need the ability to exclude.
link |
At the moment, everyone knows inclusion is good, which it isn't.
link |
It's like saying, well, water is good.
link |
If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me.
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 as subcocker spaniels.
link |
They just bark things at each other.
link |
I'm for inclusion.
link |
Do you guys use verbs?
link |
In clauses, are there compound, complex sentences?
link |
Where are we in this sea of nonsense?
link |
You have to be able to build a place where you have smart, talented people who represent
link |
a diverse group of correct opinions.
link |
You need to get rid of almost all of the people 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 because we don't trust anybody,
link |
so everything has to be transparent.
link |
If you're going to the bathroom, I want those walls to be plexiglass so I can see what you're
link |
That's too much transparency.
link |
We have too much and not enough at the same time.
link |
In essence, you need to ensure that people aren't worried about feeding their family
link |
every four seconds for being real.
link |
None of that is happening.
link |
Our billionaires are pathetic.
link |
What is the point of billionaires if you're not going to do billionaire type cool stuff
link |
like saying F you, and I'm going to throw $3 billion at the project of restoring the
link |
national conversation?
link |
I don't grasp this.
link |
What is the point of creating obscene wealth if we don't have anyone smart enough and caring
link |
I agree with that last part for sure.
link |
Let me slightly push back on the idea that the leaders themselves are broken.
link |
I feel like this goes to Joe Rogan, Joe Biden, and Trump having a debate on that program.
link |
I feel like Joe Biden has a lot of really interesting ideas that he's almost forgot
link |
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 that she still was campaigning on decades
link |
If the system, if the platforms empowered you to search to be honest, to be real, to
link |
search for those ideas within yourself like long form conversations do, then even the
link |
Donald Trump and Joe Biden leaders we have now would take this country to a better place
link |
that would unite people.
link |
We can keep the current Congress, we just need to create better platforms.
link |
This is going to the intuition that there's good in Donald Trump.
link |
There is depth and complexity in intelligence and the same with Joe Biden.
link |
There's good in Joe Biden.
link |
It's just we're not incentivizing.
link |
There's several things I think are broken.
link |
One of them is Twitter, 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 with unifying explanations is that if you look
link |
at the number of wildfires in California, let's say that we've just seen, if you treat
link |
them all as spontaneous uncorrelated instances, it feels like, oh my God, it's just whack
link |
Every time I send a fire truck here, there's a fire over there.
link |
You want to come up with something like a central theory, which is why do I suddenly
link |
have a problem when I hadn't had a problem before?
link |
I look for these unifying explanations and I found one the other day that really speaks
link |
People are very frustrated because they've been trained to think about this incorrectly
link |
in my opinion, but here's the graph that you need to look at.
link |
On the X axis is time by year and on the Y axis is something like average age of a human.
link |
The title of the graph is Any Desirable Situation Involving Institutions.
link |
That could be CEO, it could be tenured professor, it could be who's getting grants, it could
link |
be the age at which people win Nobel Prizes.
link |
In other words, for a long period of time, the average age of the person in a desirable
link |
situation 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 as the final entrance in the
link |
many presidential context, that makes no sense.
link |
Think about how bizarre a thing that nobody's even really talking about.
link |
The last five people were all ancient by presidential standards, not one, not two, but five.
link |
We are talking about a contest between somebody who is the oldest of the baby boomers, the
link |
very beginning of the baby boom, summer of 46th birthday, fighting somebody who is in
link |
the silent generation, the silent generation guy in a town hall in Florida gets this question
link |
from a Gen Z guy saying, what's going on with my future?
link |
Joe Biden has the audacity to say, I'm a transitional president.
link |
You guys are the highly educated one.
link |
Biden has any generation in history needed a transitional 78 year old person to take
link |
It's preposterous.
link |
That graph is the graph we can't talk about.
link |
That graph is the graph of our destruction because it has the, you can make a one line
link |
argument, which is sounds like ageism, which isn't a very good argument now.
link |
But what it does is it muddles the conversation.
link |
And you always have to ask yourself the question, if this conversation becomes muddled, who
link |
wins as a result of the muddling?
link |
Let's just win it.
link |
Let's win the battle.
link |
I was born in Russia, can't run.
link |
But we Russians can hack elections, so we'll figure it out.
link |
This is me officially announcing my run.
link |
I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida.
link |
Lex, what is it that you really want to ask?
link |
I want to put some responsibility on the portal, the portal, the portal, that the portal gives
link |
power to the people in that graph.
link |
Because you put it quite brilliantly, that the people that move the world, their age
link |
has been going up, and not move the world, but put in the position where they get the
link |
chance to affect the world.
link |
These new platforms, I think Twitter falls in them, give power to the younger people.
link |
It doesn't have to be about Asia necessarily, but the younger thinking people.
link |
So that's a promising thing.
link |
And you're like Gandalf.
link |
You get to pick your photos, whatever, I'm not very good with the analogy.
link |
But the whole point is for you as Gandalf to find a photo.
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 into this ecosystem.
link |
I think there's something in my presentation that people find very confusing.
link |
No, figure it out.
link |
I disagree with you, but you need to look at the mirror and think like, what is it?
link |
Is it maybe you need a mustache?
link |
But there's something about figuring out how to be a charismatic communicator in this.
link |
And that's the responsibility.
link |
You said like finishing sentences with the LOL is painful for your soul.
link |
That's just how somebody lets me know I don't have to take their opinion seriously.
link |
It's still the language, the way that people are communicating and you're swimming that
link |
You have a big platform.
link |
I have a growing platform.
link |
It feels like this is the place to give power.
link |
But we're going to get swatted down.
link |
I just don't think so.
link |
Why are you afraid of the big, like this is I've studied it.
link |
Because I've studied.
link |
Let me ask you a question, Lex.
link |
I believe that every society is supposed to have a collection of what I call break glass
link |
in case of emergency people.
link |
Yeah, these are people who are universally loved and trusted by your society.
link |
For example, David Attenborough, the great British naturalist and presenter recently
link |
came on Instagram.
link |
He's worried about the planet.
link |
And I said, you know, 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 going to be an ass.
link |
Maybe he's going to be in it.
link |
Maybe he's going to say wrong things.
link |
Tell me about your top 10 universal American heroes.
link |
This is not a rhetorical question.
link |
Everybody looks to that person and says, yep, the best of us.
link |
Well, not divisive.
link |
Well, everybody's an interesting concept.
link |
I mean, Elon Musk is very divisive, right?
link |
I'm talking about overwhelmingly, people would follow that person if that person gave
link |
a rousing, intelligent speech that said, we must act now 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, in the engineering world.
link |
I'm thinking, who is the most eloquent actor?
link |
You think celebrities, so people with platforms.
link |
I didn't say celebrities.
link |
They have to be well known.
link |
I believe, yeah, so this goes to Joe Rogan.
link |
First two did not really impress me as being what I said, but okay.
link |
Elon, several years ago, would have.
link |
Can you try to, Joe Rogan has.
link |
Lots of people treat Joe Rogan as if he's some sort of right wing racist because they've
link |
never watched his program.
link |
They don't know who his friends are.
link |
Oh, but when I thought you said everybody, I thought you meant a large enough people
link |
where a huge change can happen, not actually literally everybody.
link |
I mean, people who've pulled off something where everybody's convinced that that person
link |
just deeply, I think I've told you the story before, but the one time I've seen the power
link |
of a figure like this, very few times I've been in a large crowd and I've seen people
link |
just moved where they would do almost anything good, bad, and different because they were
link |
One was a Rolling Stones concert.
link |
The other one was Nelson Mandela coming to Boston and man, you've never seen anything
link |
You check out the photos from the banks of the Charles River when Nelson Mandela came.
link |
There are people that you need in your dark hours and we can't agree on who they are and
link |
as soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit.
link |
We get out the shit breach.
link |
I just disagree with this.
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 and I think a lot...
link |
I was going to 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 sell out, like, yeah, but he didn't take up
link |
the responsibility, I would say, of going bigger.
link |
He was speaking to the community on this particular moment.
link |
He's exceptional at it and he was speaking to this particular moment.
link |
He didn't take it a step farther, which is giving the same speech but bigger than race,
link |
bigger than this particular moment, 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 |
That guy, until we screw him up, is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.
link |
I mean, Jaco, maybe.
link |
Jaco's pretty good.
link |
Jaco is pretty good.
link |
Can't really tell.
link |
Is he a Republican?
link |
That's for damn sure.
link |
I think there's a lot of folks.
link |
No, I think Jaco...
link |
That's one of the reasons why Jaco is so important.
link |
Your podcast, The Portal, is something in my little universe, is something a lot of people
link |
really love, and it moves them.
link |
They draw a lot of meaning from it, and also especially in difficult times.
link |
It gives them a comfort of through this kind of...
link |
It's not just nuance.
link |
There's like, even when you're talking about chaos, there's love underneath all of it,
link |
and I think people draw a lot of meaning from it, which is why they are wondering why you
link |
haven't been doing that many podcasts, or you haven't done it in maybe a month and a
link |
half or two months in this most difficult of times.
link |
Is there a good reason?
link |
There are lots of good reasons.
link |
The first one is kind of weird, which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous.
link |
If you say, I don't want to be famous, it's like, oh, you're just saying that because
link |
Everyone would 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 I can go to any city in the world, there are portal listeners there.
link |
All I need to do is put out a tweet and 20 people show up for a drink.
link |
They're amazing people.
link |
I mean, you can see my live Q&As on my Instagram page.
link |
If you go to Eric R. Weinstein, I'd just pick somebody randomly, and I was really worried
link |
about it at first, and maybe I should be worried about it, but in general, people all over the
link |
world are just so positive and so...
link |
And thoughtful and deep and have a story that's kind of...
link |
Because they're self selected, right?
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're worried that it's getting...
link |
Look, Lex, it'll turn on you in a heartbeat.
link |
It'll turn on you in a heartbeat, and the other problem is I don't like my audience being
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 called something like...
link |
It's a bow tie overdrive from a guy in Mexico.
link |
You play electric, by the way, in a tiny little tangent.
link |
Did you play electric?
link |
I have a Stratocaster, but it doesn't have a strap, and I don't know what to do with
link |
it, and I have a bad amp.
link |
So 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 |
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...
link |
How much love do we get from these programs?
link |
Actually, people are incredibly generous.
link |
People have begged me, set up a Patreon account, and I haven't been able to do it.
link |
I've said to everybody, it's a business, it's a business, it's a business, but they're
link |
so used to being defrauded when somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives.
link |
My goal was to say, I'm going to keep talking to you about...
link |
You want to know why I started doing ads on my show was because I wanted people to think
link |
from the get go, this is a business, this is what I sound like when I'm selling.
link |
But you see, I've lost weight.
link |
A lot of that is due to Athletic Greens.
link |
I don't know what my promo code is for Athletic Greens.
link |
They're probably athleticgreens.com slash portal.
link |
But doesn't matter.
link |
Just slash portal.
link |
Fitbit, who doesn't advertise, has also been instrumental as well as a guy named Steven
link |
Cates, who was a fan from the show, found me on the street and just said, I'm a trainer.
link |
I want to help train you.
link |
It's got me on a good path.
link |
That's one paid advertiser and two people I'm calling out just because two outfits, Steven
link |
Cates and Fitbit, that have changed my life.
link |
I wanted people to say, you don't have to be afraid of advertising.
link |
If I do it in this way, this is powering your show.
link |
But the whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy feelings like, oh,
link |
wow, I knew he was a shill.
link |
I didn't love that.
link |
I didn't love the issues.
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 desperately want to get to a level of wealth where I don't have to think about
link |
I don't think it's...
link |
Some people want money because they need it for status.
link |
I think I can handle status if I want it doing this.
link |
I don't want the status necessarily and I don't 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 about a substance.
link |
All of those things, that's part of...
link |
I haven't solved these issues.
link |
I've been feeling bad because people say, where's the Port Award?
link |
These are difficult times.
link |
We have an election coming up.
link |
And it's just like, do you think for a moment that I want to explain that I actually got
link |
really uncomfortable being as well known as I was and then what is it that I want?
link |
Because I want to be better known and less well known at the same time.
link |
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 fear a business if the business
link |
is open about being a business.
link |
And then that's all to the side.
link |
What you're seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly meta violent period in our
link |
And I believe that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are completely screwed
link |
at the moment, 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 in to discuss.
link |
There's a Bill Hicks routine on marketing.
link |
Have you ever seen this?
link |
He recommended it to everyone where he comes out on stage and he says, are there any people
link |
in marketing and sales in the audience?
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 him being serious.
link |
So he talks about how marketing is horrible.
link |
So you're like, where's this act going?
link |
Then he gets to the point where it's like, oh, I know how you marketing people think.
link |
Bill's going after that 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 destroyed in advance of this election.
link |
I don't think it's a good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting how completely
link |
ridiculous Donald Trump and Joe Biden are as candidates for the president of the United
link |
None of this makes any sense.
link |
These moderators of these pseudo debates, we're in the wrong 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 destroy their request on voice,
link |
I'm sorry to say that.
link |
But well, let me, well, it's also possible.
link |
It's entirely possible that you're the child, because a child would say you would call other
link |
Get in the first blow.
link |
That's a big reveal to tell.
link |
Because the only power they have is to attack you psychologically.
link |
Well, I believe that the army of people that love you is much more powerful than mainstream
link |
media, than people that you might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said,
link |
which has tried to reduce you, like the marketing thinking, I just believe there's an army,
link |
maybe there's a better term, of people that see you for who you are and are hungry.
link |
I'm not disputing those things.
link |
I know what I'm saying.
link |
I would venture to say as your therapist that you're actually, the battle is all in
link |
your mind that you have found these demons in the system and they're just a tiny minority
link |
and it's all in your mind.
link |
They cannot actually remove, 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 life, where one article
link |
in the New York Times, they will believe that over me.
link |
My contention is that that has no power except to affect your psychology.
link |
You're not hearing me.
link |
What you have to do is the Rogan thing, just laugh.
link |
You're not hearing me.
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 the system.
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, that's what I'm telling you about the army.
link |
I agree that my Twitter account, my pocket, but what we've seen, for example, you saw
link |
what happened to Brett's Articles of Unity project?
link |
On the Twitter site.
link |
On the Twitter site.
link |
Well, actually, that's not an answer.
link |
It was blocked or removed from Twitter.
link |
I have a direct line to Jack.
link |
So I'm talking to the CEO who I am crazy enough to still believe in.
link |
There's a very strange thing going on with Jack Dorsey.
link |
I cannot possibly reconcile the actions with the person I've... That is a next level mind
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, blah, blah, blah.
link |
There's no way that the Jack Dorsey that I've talked to and the Jack Dorsey that interacted
link |
over articles of unity can be the same person.
link |
He is constrained by that company in some way that doesn't make sense to me.
link |
Either that or he's the most deplicitest person on earth and 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 in a tiny number of moves,
link |
no matter who you are, no matter how virtuous or how much of a bastard you've been your
link |
entire life, it doesn't take more than three or four moves to basically neuter you as a
link |
I disagree that if that's possible, that means I'm not very good at chess.
link |
Unity 2020 was removed from Twitter because it's not good enough, not within the system.
link |
The army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea was too small.
link |
Your uncertainty in doubt is the name of the game, the coin of the realm.
link |
Psychology though.
link |
It's not real power.
link |
It just affects the mind.
link |
I have a reading assignment for you.
link |
Because you're Russian, you'll really enjoy this.
link |
As part of the Great American Tobacco Settlement, the Tobacco Institute had to discourage its
link |
archives of all of its strategies, all of its skull duggery, and put it on the web for
link |
all time so that we can all understand how the tobacco companies got together and destroyed
link |
You see, tobacco destroys people.
link |
You can see, Scientology destroys people.
link |
There are various vindictive organizations that will not tolerate reality in opposition
link |
Let's take them down.
link |
That's what I'm trying to tell you is.
link |
Well, 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 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 already explained?
link |
So, one of the things I'm doing is I'm not having a strategic conversation with you and
link |
several hundred thousand of our closest friends.
link |
I pulled back because this is not the battle that I know what I'm doing.
link |
I do not feel passionately enough about defeating Donald Trump to elect Joe Biden, even if that's
link |
the way I'm going 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 Kings fighting over the right
link |
to extort a business and the 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 are as good with the English
link |
Don't you think it's possible to draw a line that in between, that finds how we find our
link |
common humanity, that ensures a better 2021 without having to say like Donald Trump is
link |
evil or Joe Biden is incompetent or any of that, just somehow draw beautiful lines.
link |
I am seeing people did so much pain.
link |
This election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who comments on it, Lex.
link |
Maybe they're not good enough.
link |
They're not good enough.
link |
Do you believe in me?
link |
Listen to me very carefully.
link |
My spider sense, my intuition that has allowed me to survive in this space, I've been mouthing
link |
off since the 80s, tells me this is a super dangerous time for smart people.
link |
To be spending the dry powder because the election doesn't make sense.
link |
It doesn't mean that I don't have a sense that one outcome would be better than the
link |
other probably, but the variance on that, I'm not even positive that I'm right.
link |
These two options are so completely inappropriate to the world of 2020.
link |
What we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and more silent generation
link |
people trying to sort out a highly 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 to close the doors
link |
so we can't see what those people are doing.
link |
Imagine you had a bunch of people who'd all seen action in combat, had all volunteered
link |
to be part of the armed services, had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need
link |
So you were convinced that these people had put their lives on their line for their
link |
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 bigger than
link |
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 to roll the dice
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 between those and Jaco because
link |
you're not speaking to people with credentials of a particular...
link |
No, I'm talking about self credentialed people.
link |
I view Jaco as self credentialed.
link |
But the powerful thing about Jaco is he's not only self credentialed, but he's been
link |
The magical thing about Jaco isn't his book, isn't his life story.
link |
He's been talking on a podcast for a long.
link |
There's something real that happens.
link |
So if you took Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard and you took Jaco Willing and maybe Jesse
link |
You can take Bernie Sanders who's a lone voice.
link |
You take all of these people who've really just risked.
link |
Why do we trust...
link |
Why is Catherine 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 what you were talking about.
link |
Be Catherine Hepburn.
link |
Audrey Hepburn is pretty amazing, but Catherine Hepburn is next level, right?
link |
I mean, that's what you're trying to say to me.
link |
I'm trying to figure it out, Lex.
link |
I haven't answered 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, you get referenced
link |
to something, right?
link |
Like, 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, okay?
link |
I don't want to be in that fray because those people are going to kill each other mindlessly
link |
like robots and until the election is concluded, like, 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, that we've
link |
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 defeating
link |
Joe Biden right now and all of the things that the modern Democratic Party represents.
link |
I don't have, you know, it's not the lady and the tiger.
link |
We're choosing between 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 do I have a better chance against?
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 solutions, people will say, wow, you just want to hand us right back into the
link |
Those swamp people, because 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.
link |
And we can't have moderates.
link |
It's like, okay, how do we install our children and rape pillage and get these speaking fees
link |
when we're out of office and become, you know, cozy with the things when we're supposed
link |
to be regulating them and then, you know, become their lobbyists, you know, immediately
link |
when we leave office, all of this stuff.
link |
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 because you're a
link |
pussy, because you're a coward.
link |
Great to know, Eric.
link |
We thought better of you.
link |
Buy, click, you know.
link |
I don't know what to do.
link |
So are you thinking of what to do?
link |
Oh, you better believe it.
link |
Look, 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, because he's now shuttered
link |
I would say that the case to be made that he was correct was that by doing this in 2020,
link |
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 presidential candidates in
link |
a primary that are not approved of by the party, right?
link |
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 a game theoretic thing that I'm not sure you're counting for, but you probably
link |
I just want to make an argument is Jack Dorsey very likely listens to your podcast.
link |
And wait, 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 |
It's what I'm trying to say.
link |
They just don't know.
link |
They're understaffed.
link |
They have an insoluble problem.
link |
Difficult to solve.
link |
They have an insoluble problem.
link |
This is where you and I disagree.
link |
Or I'd like to create a competitor.
link |
No, so then give it to me.
link |
Create the competitor.
link |
Show me that you actually have understood this because my guess is that most of the
link |
things that you'll think about, I mean, I can tell you things I've talked to Jack about,
link |
which I know would make Twitter much better.
link |
However, I think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet, and you subtract
link |
off all sorts of context and mutual self knowledge.
link |
The problem is us.
link |
It's not the platforms.
link |
You'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...
link |
That's probably could save that for tomorrow.
link |
I look forward to spending summers in your villa when you debut this product, and I would
link |
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 |
No, sorry, invest into things like you mentioned, awesome things.
link |
Just fine, but a little bit of avuncular 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, so you can use
link |
it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money.
link |
And 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 FU money if you don't say FU?
link |
The number of people who have FU money who don't say FU indicates the number of people
link |
who chose the freedom of 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.
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.
link |
The FU money is enough for basic shelter and basic food.
link |
That's the optimal FU.
link |
This is the problem.
link |
So this is me, single Lex, speaking, but future Lex, I'm talking to future Lex.
link |
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 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 Penderos?
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 Penderos.
link |
For people who don't know, he just recently, a few days ago, won the 2020, shared the 2020
link |
Nobel Prize for physics.
link |
But it's clear to me that he had a deep personal impact on you, a connection with you, in terms
link |
of both your love of mathematics, just the way you see the world.
link |
This is the Eddie Van Halen conversation.
link |
This is 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?
link |
Just in general, let's celebrate the man.
link |
For the two other people who won this prize, I'm sorry, I just didn't happen to know who
link |
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 |
I would put Roger in the class of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang, put Witten in there.
link |
Witten's a special case, but Witten is weirdly the reverse of the Roger Penderos story, because
link |
Witten is the first physicist to win a mathematical fields medal, the highest honor in mathematics.
link |
Penderos is in some sense a mathematician who's now won the Nobel Prize, so it's a perfect
link |
sort of a couplet.
link |
Roger's class means everything to me.
link |
That's the highest achievement of the human mind.
link |
I'd probably throw Bach in with Feynman and Dirac in 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 at a slightly different time, I believe his
link |
claim on physics would be far greater.
link |
I feel like Penderos in some sense came up a very difficult path, because Einstein effectively
link |
solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the beginning.
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, whereas Bohr and Planck didn't do nearly
link |
as good of a job with quantum theory, 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 convey the wonder, it was recapitulating
link |
I think I probably saw that at age 16 or something, and it just flipped my mind.
link |
Roger is incredibly visual, he's incredibly geometric.
link |
He's incredibly sui generis, he just does his own thing.
link |
He's got lots of bets.
link |
None of them had really come through the way you had hoped, and I think they stretched
link |
the rules to be blunt about it.
link |
To give them 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
link |
the world on what really matters, and on the other hand, it distorts what really matters,
link |
and both of those functions take place simultaneously.
link |
In this case, I think that they violated their own rules slightly.
link |
It wasn't really clearly a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion, but
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 my weird speculative guess as to what happened.
link |
Roger's getting on in years, and the person should be alive.
link |
I think they've bent the rules, and I think they couldn't have bent it for a better person,
link |
and I hope they will not bend 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.
link |
I take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people from ethnic groups or
link |
genders or whatever in order to make it plural and inclusive if it's not following the work,
link |
and I feel very clear that in a few cases, we know there was a real problem with the
link |
Nobel Committee because we have stunning accomplishments.
link |
Try to get through a day as a physicist without Nerder's theorem, and try to imagine the universe
link |
without Madame Wu's discovery that left and right don't appear to be symmetric.
link |
These are terrible omissions, and they're a huge blot on science for not being more
link |
inclusive when it matters.
link |
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 Schrödinger, where 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 Dyson was an omission.
link |
Toma Naga probably got included in part because we had an opportunity to show that something
link |
had happened on both sides of the Pacific after the war.
link |
But I don't think we needed to dilute Weinberg or Feynman or Schwinger.
link |
It just makes me somewhat sick.
link |
All of these people are such important giants, and it has to do with the field, I think,
link |
not wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget
link |
cuts and worldly pressure.
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 |
that I love, whether you think, maybe let me ask the question this way, was it the man
link |
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 |
to weaken the institution of MIT by making everybody quiet, almost making them unable
link |
to say anything interesting or difficult.
link |
What am I supposed to...?
link |
Why is everyone quiet about Jeffrey?
link |
Obviously, I want to scream about it too, and I probably have said too much about Jeffrey
link |
Look, something horrible happened.
link |
I don't know what it is, but something horrible happened.
link |
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
link |
The relationship between the sexuality of adults and minors, and particularly, there's
link |
the 17, 18 issue, that's very different than 12, 13.
link |
We're talking about really sick depravity with respect to what 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 which 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 |
There's an entire spectrum of different stuff.
link |
At the moment, nobody can pull apart or deconflate anything because the woke thing comes over
link |
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.
link |
It may have been a joint government project.
link |
It may have been somebody else's government.
link |
I believe that in part, we don't really understand Robert Maxwell.
link |
Sorry, who's Robert Maxwell?
link |
Gilean 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
link |
seems to be removing everyone's ability to talk about what the hell is this person and
link |
how is he allowed, most importantly, to 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 is
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 you're up against, Lex.
link |
You're not hearing me.
link |
The problem here is what was Jeffrey Epstein?
link |
That question might be the heroic action to take.
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 |
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 is 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.
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 is a conspiracy?
link |
I think there is a conspiracy.
link |
I'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 |
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 disguise is in your false passports.
link |
But yeah, 26 people converged to kill one.
link |
No, I don't believe you.
link |
I don't believe after Cointel Pro, an 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 |
You have a sense that evil can be as competent or more competent than…
link |
First of all, when evil wants to operate at scale, it needs to make sure that people
link |
don't 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, conspiracies are everywhere.
link |
Some of them are mundane.
link |
Some of them are like price fixing cartels or trade groups are generally speaking conspiracies.
link |
The first thing you have to realize is that all of us are under a mimetic complex where
link |
you can be taken off the chessboard by saying, conspiracy theorists.
link |
It's like a one line proof.
link |
We don't have to listen to Rex.
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 very, it's a fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy
link |
theories and the world without conspiracy theories to the shallow glance looks the same.
link |
Well, my point, there is responsible conspiracy theorizing where you look at the history of
link |
unearthed conspiracies and just like you would with any other topic, just think about how
link |
different the rules in your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing where X can
link |
If I say to you, I can say the statement that average weight is not the same between
link |
widely separated populations, you'd say, yeah, I'd say average height is not the same between
link |
widely separated populations.
link |
You'd say, yeah, then I say, in fact, no continuous variable that shows variation should be expected
link |
to be identical between widely separate.
link |
Of course, Eric, 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, yeah.
link |
It's very interesting that and as a prerequisite, as you're saying, that will be the first step
link |
if you wanted to pull off a conspiracy in a competent way, that's you would have to first
link |
convince the world of that.
link |
I just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time, I highly recommend
link |
Well, the film is titled 1971, and it's about the Citizens Committee to Investigate the
link |
FBI, which was 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 |
So 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...
link |
Kind of 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 let it be known that I don't know anything more than I've already
link |
Now, your friends at MIT, their problem is that Jeff Epstein showed up as the only person
link |
capable of continuing U.S. scientific tradition.
link |
You see, the U.S. 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 researched like we're a rich society.
link |
That is historically.
link |
And then came the 1970s and William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece Awards and the idea
link |
that we have to...
link |
We're paying too much and these are welfare queens and lab coats and blah, blah, blah,
link |
We need more transparency, more oversight.
link |
Everything went to hell and the national culture of U.S. 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 Cavley, 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 |
Well, when Jeff Epstein showed up, everybody wanted to take risk in science and suddenly
link |
a charismatic billionaire says, hey, I can make that work for you.
link |
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.
link |
And the federal government, the taxpayers welched, okay?
link |
So that's one place to lay the blame for Jeff Epstein as at the failure of the federal
link |
government to honor its commitment, right?
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,
link |
but the point was there wasn't enough money to be moral.
link |
So it was time 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.
link |
There isn't enough money in the world to buy the kind of legacy I want to leave to this
link |
This is one of the great things about science.
link |
You know, potentially it's worth dying for.
link |
Yeah, 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 murder myself, but I've certainly risked my health, my fortune.
link |
You know, I've destroyed myself economically over science.
link |
And my need to oppose these sons of bitches in chaired professorships who are destroying
link |
our system along with everyone else.
link |
Let me bring in Grandmaster Oogway into this.
link |
I think he's a grandmaster.
link |
Oh, that would make him a chess playing turtle.
link |
So I've read some Wikipedia.
link |
And Shifu is a master, there's apparently only one grandmaster.
link |
Is the phrase grandmaster ever uttered in the script?
link |
But there's a story.
link |
Oh, there's off script canon.
link |
I'm going to call Glenberger right now and find out if any of this is true.
link |
You're not supposed to call out my journalistic integrity.
link |
But 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 that you should find a battle worth fighting.
link |
We've talked about several battles just now.
link |
What is the battle worth fighting for?
link |
For Erich Weinstein in the next few months, in the next year?
link |
It's the Moses thing.
link |
It's time to leave.
link |
This place is over to get off the planet.
link |
Yeah, I freak people out when I say that, but look at your world.
link |
You just got introduced to the problem of a virus.
link |
Wait till it's fusion devices and you understand what it means to have one interconnected planet
link |
with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else.
link |
So do you see the foray, your work in physics, and maybe the echoes of it in ship Elon?
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Everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming if we don't have one should
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work on the plan that he, she thinks best.
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So Elon wants to do rockets.
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People misinterpret me.
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Meta Erich says, I don't think that's a smart plan.
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Regular Erich says all people who have hope should do that thing.
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At least it's Mars, man.
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At least it's the moon and Mars and maybe Titan and whatever.
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And I don't think it'll work and it doesn't make sense and it looks silly.
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But that's exactly the kind of fight worth fighting.
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But it's the kind of, it's for the same reason that I went on Brett's Unity 2020 thing when
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I didn't think it had a hope in hell and people are making fun of it.
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We got to do things that make us feel dumb and silly and childish that possibly have
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a hope of working.
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So everybody should do something.
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My version of this, I'm the most hopeful about because I wouldn't have chosen to do it.
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If I thought that Daniel Schmockenberger's wisdom project was a better hope, I'd do that.
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It's more down to earth in a certain way.
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I just think that it's more probable.
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Look, we got from a powered flight with the Wright brothers and wind tunnels to sending
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back images from the surface of Titan via Huygens Cassini in less than a century.
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What we can do if we can change the laws of physics is something we can't even conceive
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It may be that it buys us nothing.
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And at least we will know why we died on this planet.
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As a small aside, I think this is not the right time to take the full journey.
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But I feel like you'll guide me like Master Wei did.
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And I'm the Kung Fu Panda at some point.
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They only have one conversation.
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We're on our likewise.
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Well, we're Jews and they weren't.
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So we talked too much.
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But the guide doesn't have to be with words.
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You don't think Poe is Jewish?
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We'll have to go back to the Wikipedia.
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Is there that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source code,
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the source code of our universe?
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Can you comment on where, since the last book, where your thinking has been, has roamed
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around geometric unity, around that work in physics, in this fight?
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Yeah, I'm trying to figure out when to release it and how.
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I mean, I've released the video.
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The video, quite honestly, I think it has a very bizarre reaction.
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I think one of the things that I've learned from the video, because the video is coming
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up on half a million views on YouTube alone to say nothing of the audio.
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But yeah, it produced a very strange reaction.
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One of the things I don't think that I properly understood is that most physicists don't talk
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in this geometric language.
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I thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds, bundles,
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differential forms, connections, curvature, tensors, et cetera.
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And I saw a lot of the comments would say things like, I have a PhD in theoretical physics
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and I'm not even familiar with all of these concepts.
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And I think that was probably a distortion coming from living in Cambridge, Massachusetts
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for almost 20 years.
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So what's the solution to that?
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Well, I mean, I can translate it into that.
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I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to.
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My problem is that my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge,
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the same people have these perverse incentives on them, where they've invested in these programs
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So they're extremely hostile and difficult to deal with.
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The fact that I'm not a physicist has its own set of issues, which is that effectively
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it's like the Hermit Kingdom, they don't get any visitors and they don't necessarily want
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somebody rolling up and saying, I know how to do physics.
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So I'm always very clear, I'm not a physicist.
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That said, if I wait too long, I don't know that theoretical physics is really going to
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exist after the boomers because everyone in you, I think you had Wolfram on your program.
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I don't remember whether he said this to you or Brian Keating, but he said something like
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everybody got discouraged.
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We can't do that, guys.
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We cannot do that.
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There's something about the renormalization revolution that innervated the physics community
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because it taught them just because you can see in this energy regime doesn't mean you
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can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how coupling constants run and what
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kind of UV fixed points exist, blah, blah, blah.
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Somehow that discouraged people from guessing, from believing everything became an effective
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The beauty of the effective theory wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe,
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just the beauty of an energy level.
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So I think that renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened
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in science and also its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic.
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Well, the story I'm telling myself is that in part I'm waiting for them to get weaker,
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but on the other hand, I don't know that we have any time left.
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Are you also thinking about ways of, you know, the podcast medium is revolutionary for public,
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for discourse, for what?
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I mean, I don't even know the right words for it.
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Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for reenergizing the physics community?
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So basically for communicating geometry.
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Look, I have a fantasy.
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My fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem.
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And it goes back to this thing that I read about in Feynman's books about Tartaglia.
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They asked him this question, like, what's the greatest thing that ever happened in math?
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And he says, Tartaglia's solution to the cubic is just like the weirdest answer.
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So you're like, okay, I'll bite.
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Why is it Tartaglia's solution to 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, it's like, oh, I got it.
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It's the thing that opens up new psychology that says maybe things are possible again.
link |
It's a new orchard, new orchard.
link |
New farmers, new people who can find fruit that they can pick.
link |
And once you have one person do that, very often you get many.
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Like one of the things that we were talking about with Eddie Van Halen, the reason that
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he created a revolution in somebody like Roy Buchanan did not is that you could follow
link |
You couldn't pioneer it.
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And maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly and as fast and as inventively.
link |
But you could follow.
link |
Once you understand that there is a tapping principle, it was just the beginning of something
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called percussive guitar.
link |
My belief is that once we start innovating in the present, everything will come.
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Because everything that around us is screwed up.
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On that, let me, with one last question, bring back Master Ugwe, the probably the most famous
link |
quote of his, right, with yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift.
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That is why it is called the present.
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It's very beautiful, although I would have gone with quit, don't quit, noodles, don't
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I feel like people need to know way too much context to put that to make sense.
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It's your audience, just to hell with context.
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Yeah, they'll figure it out.
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Well, let me ask, what are you grateful for today?
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What is your present?
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We've talked about a lot of dark things, but what are you brings you joy to your heart
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that I can't believe I'm lucky enough to have this?
link |
No, Nyla and Zev, my wife, Pia, the fact that we've got our health, all the little things,
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saying grace after meals.
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You're coming over for Friday night Shabbat dinner, so we'll bench together and say grace.
link |
It's important to just, this bottle of water in front of me, I made a point of just thinking
link |
about how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle that happens to be placed in front
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of me because somebody cared.
link |
That small thing made a difference to me.
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I still have strength for the fight so far.
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I think that's something I'm grateful for.
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I can't believe that I'm not more beaten down after all of this nonsense.
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I have the most interesting set of friends.
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I'm not that rich by monetary standards, but if there were friend billionaires, Forbes
link |
would be all over my ass.
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I just can't believe who I can talk to at the drop of a hat.
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I'm really grateful.
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I think this is the end of something profound, and it's the beginning of whatever is next.
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Whatever is next could be terminal, whatever is next could be amazing, whatever is next
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could be a return to the horrors of the early 20th century that doesn't manage to go totally
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catastrophic but takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
link |
I'm grateful to having half of my life in the rearview mirror.
link |
Maybe it took place in a bubble and maybe it was unsustainable, but it was nice to be
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able to move around the world without a mask.
link |
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.
link |
I mean, 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, it'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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She and I had an antagonistic relationship around geometry and economics.
link |
Then weirdly, just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film, they
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hate each other, the two fields were fighting with each other, cats and dogs.
link |
Finally, the sexual tension clearly was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
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We came up with geometric marginalism, which is this other theory, not geometric unity,
link |
which allowed me to inhabit space with somebody who I already knew intimately and had fallen
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in love with and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play and to dance.
link |
It's the intellectual version of the tango.
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One of the most romantic periods of my life that doesn't fall into most people's experience.
link |
That was a chance to see something totally unexpected, haven't really had it since because
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she doesn't want to revisit the material, but something I'm super grateful for that's
link |
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
link |
podcast and I do hope your voice in some form continues to reverberate, I think, at least
link |
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, I really appreciate
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I mean, earnestness trades at a discount at the moment because it's easy to make fun
link |
One of the things I like best about you is that you and I are both fairly earnest.
link |
We may joke and jab, but honestly, there's a project here in a world to win as they say.
link |
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.
link |
This is hugely financially costly to me.
link |
I want to make sure you guys are getting the best that I can do and destroying myself
link |
right in front of an election, I think Lex is incorrect.
link |
I think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren't any planes in
link |
the sky that aren't either colored red or colored blue is a big danger given how angry
link |
I am at the system and I don't want to be removed from the chessboard because if nobody's
link |
going to talk about 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?
link |
Am I positive that I know that my way to bed is the right way out?
link |
I don't know people.
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I just don't know and where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms
link |
of how it is chewing up smart people that I decided it's really not about cowardice
link |
because it's hard for me to restrain myself.
link |
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's 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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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.
link |
It can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work.
link |
It can dissolve so that there really isn't anything.
link |
The thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately, when the hit pieces come, they don't come
link |
for what it is that they're angry at you about.
link |
They come for where they can get you.
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It's very important that right in front of an election, I think that the desire of the
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old system to defend itself through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects
link |
of the new America.
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We have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions keeping individuals
link |
with podcasts and the ability to reach millions like 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
link |
set of ideas and to let and help other podcasters start.
link |
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, wait 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 every time we get together.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein, and thank you to our sponsors,
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Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure
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and readability, Sunbasket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety into
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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 on Apple Podcast, follow
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on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
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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 somebody
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And it's not a cry that you hear at night.
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It's not somebody who's seen the light, 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.