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Eric 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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Yeah.
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Jonathan Richmond.
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Who's that?
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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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Thank 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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What is it?
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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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What is that?
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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.
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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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I don't know.
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Can you handle it? Can you ride that?
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Probably not.
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Yeah.
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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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Yeah.
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And so I don't know whether it could be magic.
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It could be a shit show.
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I don't know what you thought of his appearance on Rogan.
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That was an interesting one.
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I loved it.
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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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I care too.
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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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Yeah.
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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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But that one.
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You really want to get into it?
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Let's go.
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What does that song mean to you?
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Is it love?
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Oh boy.
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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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So he's like.
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There's a bitterness to it too.
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Is it just play?
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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 don't know.
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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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And I feel it.
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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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Wow.
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Well, you think of it as joyous?
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Yeah.
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No, no, no.
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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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the Johnny Cash.
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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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subliminally.
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Okay.
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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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baffled king.
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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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Yeah.
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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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or air columns.
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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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did it.
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That's why you're baffled.
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Right?
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That's beautifully put.
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You're right.
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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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Right?
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And so the idea is that he is composing.
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He has the audacity to compose as David.
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He's echoing David at a minimum.
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And then in a later song, 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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Sweetheart.
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This is a great day.
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Darling.
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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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Definitely.
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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.
link |
00:19:00.920
You may have already had it, but it's very possible if enough people like me can keep
link |
00:19:06.200
twisting your arm to keep doing the portal, please, that there'll be an amazing conversation.
link |
00:19:12.240
One of the questions that I ask myself is like, who is the person that I'm especially
link |
00:19:19.160
equipped for some reason I'm convinced on Putin.
link |
00:19:23.200
There's something in my head that says, I can do this man better than anyone else in
link |
00:19:29.320
this world.
link |
00:19:30.320
I got this thought in my head about it.
link |
00:19:31.640
I don't know why and I'm convinced, but I think the universe works in that way.
link |
00:19:35.440
Like if it tells you, it's going to happen.
link |
00:19:38.200
The way I would say it is that almost everybody who becomes a Supreme Court justice believes
link |
00:19:43.640
at a very early age, they're going to become a Supreme Court justice.
link |
00:19:46.680
Many people believe at an early age that they can do it.
link |
00:19:48.920
Don't get there.
link |
00:19:49.920
But of those who get there, almost all of them had this sort of, well, I call it pathological
link |
00:19:55.600
self confidence.
link |
00:19:58.320
I do think you have pathological self confidence and you also have humility.
link |
00:20:03.200
Most people would hear those as a contradiction.
link |
00:20:05.560
I think that you would not be able to get away with what you do if you didn't have the
link |
00:20:10.680
humility.
link |
00:20:13.680
The great danger is that your equation becomes unbalanced, that you either lose the humility
link |
00:20:18.720
or you lose the humility, overwhelms the ego and the drive because right now you've got
link |
00:20:25.000
a Mexican standoff in your mind and the rest of us are just benefiting.
link |
00:20:28.600
That's beautifully put.
link |
00:20:29.760
My Mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours.
link |
00:20:32.480
It's all reservoir dogs all the time.
link |
00:20:36.240
But actually the person who that describes is Peter Thiel.
link |
00:20:40.000
Peter Thiel thinks more, people always say like, what does Peter think about X, Y, and
link |
00:20:43.560
Z, P, and Q?
link |
00:20:44.560
It's like, well, do you want communist Peter?
link |
00:20:46.280
Do you want hypercapitalist Peter?
link |
00:20:48.560
Oh my God, right?
link |
00:20:50.080
On everything.
link |
00:20:51.080
That's why he's successful is that he's got all these minds fighting each other.
link |
00:20:53.960
When people say, Peter is this or Peter is that, I just laugh because nobody who knows
link |
00:20:59.400
him would describe him as having thoughts at the level that people are claiming.
link |
00:21:05.040
I do think that in my case, there's also pathological epistemic humility.
link |
00:21:15.840
I know how little I can do in one life.
link |
00:21:20.560
I know how many things I've screwed up.
link |
00:21:22.680
I know how many things I've got wrong.
link |
00:21:25.280
And on the other hand, I know that if not, it's like Hillel's questions, if I'm not
link |
00:21:30.400
for myself, who will be for me?
link |
00:21:32.120
If I'm only for myself, what am I if not now when?
link |
00:21:36.960
At some level, there's a question about if I don't decide that someone is capable and
link |
00:21:43.200
that somebody is me, and if I apply that to everyone else on the planet, then nobody's
link |
00:21:49.520
going to do anything.
link |
00:21:50.520
And so I do think that one of the things that people like you and I get is, who are you
link |
00:21:55.120
to say that, f that, man?
link |
00:22:00.960
Sign me up for some Dunning Kruger.
link |
00:22:03.000
Yeah, but it's multiple minds, like you said.
link |
00:22:07.120
This morning, I was feeling so good and confident about I couldn't think no wrong.
link |
00:22:12.400
And I remember last night clearly thinking that I'm the dumbest human who has ever lived
link |
00:22:16.560
and nothing I've ever said is worth anything.
link |
00:22:19.880
What the fuck am I doing with my life?
link |
00:22:22.680
Why am I scared?
link |
00:22:23.680
I was terrified of this conversation.
link |
00:22:26.520
Who the hell am I?
link |
00:22:27.520
This conversation?
link |
00:22:28.520
Because I'm an idiot.
link |
00:22:29.520
And because, you know, Lex, but no, no, no, but this morning, I was the baddest motherfucker
link |
00:22:38.240
who's ever walked this earth.
link |
00:22:39.520
So I was very conscious.
link |
00:22:41.800
I think it was the coffee.
link |
00:22:42.800
I'm not sure.
link |
00:22:43.800
Maybe some sleep.
link |
00:22:44.800
This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages, some of them being alcoholic,
link |
00:22:48.400
others containing caffeine.
link |
00:22:50.200
There's, in fact, I can't share the story behind it, but there is a bottle of vodka
link |
00:22:54.800
in the fridge.
link |
00:22:55.800
Okay.
link |
00:22:56.800
So I mean, I should have hit you for coffee because this is a morning show here.
link |
00:23:02.720
So I put out a call that we get a chance to have this conversation and people ask these
link |
00:23:07.000
wonderful questions, a few people asked about depression and suicide.
link |
00:23:16.120
This is a Russian program, so we have to go there.
link |
00:23:19.600
And I think about Leonard Cohen and one of the things that always kind of broke my heart
link |
00:23:28.600
and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just, I don't know, for love in a person's
link |
00:23:35.960
life is to hear how much depression was a part of Leonard Cohen's life and how much
link |
00:23:41.920
he suffered.
link |
00:23:44.400
I guess one way, I'm not sure where we can go with this question, but do you think about
link |
00:23:49.920
the places that the mind can go, like these dark places?
link |
00:23:54.280
Yeah.
link |
00:23:55.480
Is there something like where the only escape out is suicide, for example, that's the darkest
link |
00:24:02.120
version of it?
link |
00:24:03.120
But I really think suicide is a big place in suicidal ideation and self harm.
link |
00:24:10.400
And we don't talk a lot about it.
link |
00:24:14.600
It's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans.
link |
00:24:17.400
These are umbrella categories.
link |
00:24:19.560
And if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves, but we don't know whether that's
link |
00:24:25.200
coming because of a problem in brain chemistry, because of an event in their life, whether
link |
00:24:32.200
the evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal, whether or not it might have
link |
00:24:38.040
a religious motivation, there's too many different forms of self harm.
link |
00:24:43.640
It's something like the 10th largest killer thereabouts.
link |
00:24:49.920
And I think that you can look at it from different angles.
link |
00:24:53.960
I'm old enough to have had Pete Seeger come to my college when I was at university and
link |
00:25:02.280
to watch his good humor in the face of all adversity.
link |
00:25:08.040
I think of Odetta.
link |
00:25:09.040
I used to go to Odetta concerts, I don't know who she is.
link |
00:25:12.840
Okay, this is going to be one of the better days of your life.
link |
00:25:15.760
Check out Odetta when we're done with the interview.
link |
00:25:19.480
She was a civil rights figure, but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship.
link |
00:25:27.400
These people were in the struggles, and they saw lots of bad things happen, and they kept
link |
00:25:33.320
their humor about them.
link |
00:25:36.720
The thing is that you can take on the Veldschmerz, the pain of the planet, or you can try to do
link |
00:25:45.800
something else, which is to be a happy warrior, even if the odds are terrible and the cost
link |
00:25:53.040
of failure is catastrophic.
link |
00:25:55.280
So even once surrounded by darkness, but the thing is with Leonard Cohen is he created
link |
00:26:01.120
such beautiful music, and yet it's like Anthony Bourdain, the same.
link |
00:26:08.280
And yet they go to this dark place.
link |
00:26:11.560
And it's easier to say it's just biochemistry.
link |
00:26:16.920
There's a linkage between this highly generative, creative side, and in some cases, dark depression.
link |
00:26:25.640
In other cases, not.
link |
00:26:26.960
So you can't say that it's tied.
link |
00:26:29.480
The genius and madness are always co traveling, or the beauty and pain are one and the same.
link |
00:26:35.680
What you can say is that there's a cluster of people that tell you that for that cluster,
link |
00:26:40.360
there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty.
link |
00:26:43.800
And I do think that in part, it's squaring circles that can't be squared.
link |
00:26:49.280
We were just talking before about the inability to serve two perfect systems, the perfect
link |
00:26:57.360
system of the wave equation and the perfect system of even temperament.
link |
00:27:01.360
They're both perfect.
link |
00:27:02.520
They're not compatible.
link |
00:27:05.680
And once you realize that there is perfection and an inability to make contact with perfection,
link |
00:27:14.280
I think you recognize that there is no solution to this world.
link |
00:27:22.360
Yeah.
link |
00:27:24.360
That's weird with the poets and musicians.
link |
00:27:26.960
You want to say, this is a particular thing that you do, but then there's Spanish fly
link |
00:27:31.000
by Van Halen.
link |
00:27:33.160
And then you realize, oh.
link |
00:27:34.160
Well, what do you get out of Spanish fly by Van Halen?
link |
00:27:37.920
I think it's very singular because of the fact that it's purely acoustic.
link |
00:27:42.400
For some reason, I couldn't imagine Van Halen separate from the band in front of thousands
link |
00:27:48.960
of people just screaming and rocking out with lights everywhere.
link |
00:27:53.560
And Spanish fly made me think like, you made me imagine him sitting alone in a college
link |
00:27:58.120
in a room.
link |
00:27:59.120
I think that's who he was.
link |
00:28:00.120
I really do.
link |
00:28:01.120
I mean, believe me, I get it.
link |
00:28:03.400
He was a rock star.
link |
00:28:04.400
He was a rock god.
link |
00:28:05.400
Got it.
link |
00:28:06.400
Got it.
link |
00:28:07.400
Got it.
link |
00:28:08.400
Got it.
link |
00:28:09.400
I'm almost positive that you can't get to where he got to without being a complete introvert.
link |
00:28:12.680
Yeah.
link |
00:28:13.680
It made me imagine that there's some half naked supermodel walking around hoping that they
link |
00:28:21.520
can do their thing together.
link |
00:28:24.680
And Eddie's completely disinterested.
link |
00:28:26.280
He'd be with the guitar.
link |
00:28:27.280
He'd be with the guitar.
link |
00:28:28.280
Right?
link |
00:28:29.280
Yeah.
link |
00:28:30.280
It's totally, at some level, in one case, maybe you're conquesting, maybe you're pursuing
link |
00:28:35.840
love and romance.
link |
00:28:36.840
In the other case, you're talking about a relationship to the order, the creator, the
link |
00:28:42.760
almighty, whatever it is you want to call that substrate that is reality.
link |
00:28:47.040
And do I believe that Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and Heifetz jacked
link |
00:28:54.160
into the true essence of the world?
link |
00:28:56.600
Yeah, they did.
link |
00:28:57.600
I don't think it's as good as differential geometry.
link |
00:29:00.600
I'm sorry.
link |
00:29:01.600
I do think it's amazing for other reasons and thank God because it's very difficult to
link |
00:29:08.000
communicate differential geometry at scale.
link |
00:29:10.400
But the thing about eruption, for example, what level do you want to come into eruption?
link |
00:29:15.400
Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry?
link |
00:29:18.280
Do you want the theatrics?
link |
00:29:20.200
You could put them on wires and set his pants on fire or whatever.
link |
00:29:25.080
You know, it'd be totally in keeping with it.
link |
00:29:27.520
On the other hand, you want to have something completely precise that shows off the virtuosity
link |
00:29:33.520
of what's possible with the Stratocaster.
link |
00:29:36.760
Everything works.
link |
00:29:37.760
Multiaccess.
link |
00:29:38.760
But there's a precision to it, which is very different than Hendrix.
link |
00:29:44.200
There's a messiness to Hendrix that to me, somebody who has OCD has always been struggling.
link |
00:29:49.480
How does Hendrix affect you?
link |
00:29:50.480
I mean, let's have the Jimi Hendrix conversation.
link |
00:29:52.560
I don't know that we can do anything to it that hasn't already been done to it.
link |
00:29:56.360
Maybe that's not true.
link |
00:29:57.360
Maybe the idea is that every generation has to have its Hendrix conversation and this
link |
00:30:01.440
is a long form.
link |
00:30:02.440
It's Jimi Hendrix experience.
link |
00:30:03.440
Yeah.
link |
00:30:04.440
Yeah.
link |
00:30:05.440
So funny.
link |
00:30:06.440
Yeah.
link |
00:30:07.440
I hear he stole it from Joe Rogan.
link |
00:30:08.440
Yeah.
link |
00:30:09.440
There's so many details.
link |
00:30:11.840
One, it hurt my soul on so many levels that you can put a thumb over the guitar to play
link |
00:30:20.880
a note, to hold the note.
link |
00:30:23.720
And it doesn't because I want it to be the Russian virtuoso that sits with his classical
link |
00:30:28.880
guitar in a perfect form, plays really fast with the fingers, and then you don't want,
link |
00:30:34.200
you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed and supporting the neck.
link |
00:30:36.920
So that's the Russian conservatory student.
link |
00:30:39.200
Conservatory student, yeah.
link |
00:30:40.800
Then there's the Russian wild man.
link |
00:30:43.440
Which one is that?
link |
00:30:44.440
Well, haven't.
link |
00:30:45.440
They're different Russian archetypes, right?
link |
00:30:47.640
So the completely idiosyncratic Russian is very different in a weird way from the, you
link |
00:30:55.400
know, I can do this backwards in any key in any, in my sleep and in any time signature
link |
00:31:00.240
that you, you know, just snap your fingers.
link |
00:31:03.200
We've discussed my piano tuner in previous episodes.
link |
00:31:08.280
No, no, no.
link |
00:31:09.280
That was offline conversation.
link |
00:31:10.280
You told me the story.
link |
00:31:11.280
But I should tell you the story.
link |
00:31:13.160
You should retell the story.
link |
00:31:14.160
There it was in darkest Manhattan with the world's shittiest, it wasn't even an upright,
link |
00:31:19.920
it was a spin at piano.
link |
00:31:21.400
A friend had given it to me.
link |
00:31:23.600
The piano fell out of tune and I would have to tune it.
link |
00:31:27.640
And the only tuner I knew was this Russian guy and I hated dealing with him.
link |
00:31:31.280
There was something about his attitude that just really rubbed me the wrong way.
link |
00:31:35.240
So anyway, my wife says tune that thing.
link |
00:31:37.400
So we get the piano tuner to come and he's tuning this and he's like, are you sure, are
link |
00:31:41.440
you sure you want to tune this, this piece of shit, you know, okay, fine.
link |
00:31:44.880
So he's like, okay, it's your money.
link |
00:31:48.320
The phone rings and I have the phone ringer set on a landline to Paganini Caprice 24.
link |
00:31:56.560
And immediately as the phone rings, he figures out what key the phone ringer is and which
link |
00:32:02.120
is not the key that like list composed the variations on Caprice 24.
link |
00:32:09.560
And he starts going into theme and variations on Caprice 24.
link |
00:32:13.080
At some level, I've never heard before, just jaw dropping it.
link |
00:32:17.200
And like the phone stops ringing and we have this awkward silence.
link |
00:32:20.560
I said, I didn't know you were such a great piano player.
link |
00:32:23.520
And then he says one of these things that in, you know, in Russian accent, in English
link |
00:32:27.400
hurts in a way you can't imagine, he said, no, you are the piano player.
link |
00:32:31.960
I am merely the piano tuner.
link |
00:32:33.960
And it's just like, oh man, through the heart.
link |
00:32:38.600
You know, it's kind of reminiscent, I'd love to hear actually your opinion, this is reminiscent
link |
00:32:42.240
of the Goodwill hunting story.
link |
00:32:44.320
What do you think about that?
link |
00:32:45.880
That movie?
link |
00:32:46.880
That movie.
link |
00:32:47.880
It's MIT.
link |
00:32:48.880
It's, yeah.
link |
00:32:49.880
I guess when I think of that film, I think about Matt Damon as a young guy risking everything,
link |
00:32:58.720
giving up Harvard.
link |
00:33:00.120
I think, you know, probably the most accomplished group of people in the world are people who
link |
00:33:03.760
choose to give up Harvard voluntarily.
link |
00:33:05.800
Right.
link |
00:33:06.800
That's true, that's true.
link |
00:33:09.080
Bigger than Harvard.
link |
00:33:10.080
That's very true.
link |
00:33:11.080
You know, Ives was one of these people, Bill Gates, of course.
link |
00:33:18.240
And then oddly, you know.
link |
00:33:19.680
Zuckerberg.
link |
00:33:20.680
What?
link |
00:33:21.680
Zuckerberg.
link |
00:33:22.680
But then Steve Jobs gave up a read and read is like the weirdest craziest college in the
link |
00:33:27.000
world.
link |
00:33:28.000
People should pay much more attention to read and I'm sorry it's going through a hard time
link |
00:33:31.240
at the moment.
link |
00:33:32.240
But what it was before the current craziness is really an interesting story.
link |
00:33:36.280
Regardless, as we say in the 617 area code, I think that a lot of my reaction is to the
link |
00:33:44.520
real story of Matt Damon having this vision and being the young guy to pull it off.
link |
00:33:50.400
And you know, I also think about Robin Williams trying to explore heart through this lens
link |
00:33:57.200
of acting.
link |
00:33:58.200
And, you know, as you and I, you've hung out with comedians, they know that they're a screwed
link |
00:34:06.160
up bunch of people.
link |
00:34:07.680
They do.
link |
00:34:08.680
They're proud about it.
link |
00:34:10.240
They really are.
link |
00:34:11.840
The idea that Robin Williams, who I saw many years ago when I was in LA in the comedy clubs
link |
00:34:17.200
around here, you know, he was a straight up crazy, dysregulated genius in tremendous pain
link |
00:34:25.200
and his desire to do it earnestly through acting rather than constantly by just sniping,
link |
00:34:32.640
you know, or being a clown or showing us how fast his mind worked relative to ours.
link |
00:34:41.000
I was really moved by that.
link |
00:34:42.320
I thought that he brought some authenticity and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that
link |
00:34:47.960
real.
link |
00:34:48.960
And again, like you said, it doesn't always have to be, but in that case, the madness and
link |
00:34:54.160
the genius were neighbors.
link |
00:34:56.720
That one couldn't have been any other way.
link |
00:34:58.760
Yeah.
link |
00:34:59.760
No, because his mind, the thing about seeing him in a comedy club was that he would react
link |
00:35:05.760
to random stimulus in the environment.
link |
00:35:08.080
You know, it could be a heckler.
link |
00:35:10.000
Sometimes you almost got the feeling that he wanted a heckler because it was, it gave
link |
00:35:12.960
him something to play against.
link |
00:35:15.400
Right?
link |
00:35:16.400
He was, he was infinitely, instantly inventive.
link |
00:35:20.880
But I actually, to me, the best Robin Williams is, has he got closer and closer to the end
link |
00:35:26.840
of his life because there was a sadness and he's almost fighting the sadness with this
link |
00:35:34.120
improvisational, like the weapons he has is this wit and humor and his dancing that he
link |
00:35:41.240
does with language.
link |
00:35:42.240
That's right.
link |
00:35:43.240
But, and then sometimes when you just fall silent, you can see the sadness.
link |
00:35:48.880
But I don't know, there's something so beautiful about that.
link |
00:35:51.600
It's like this bird with a broken wing that's like trying to fly, you know, and it's getting
link |
00:35:55.960
older and older.
link |
00:35:56.960
I mean, those, he would have made a one hell of a podcast guest, I'll tell you that.
link |
00:36:04.760
That's a sad.
link |
00:36:05.760
Yeah.
link |
00:36:06.760
I have some sadness that I really do think that part of what we call podcasting is actually
link |
00:36:11.400
just getting to know a soul over and over again.
link |
00:36:14.880
Yeah.
link |
00:36:15.880
But maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression and sadness and heavy feelings
link |
00:36:25.160
is not an American specialty.
link |
00:36:29.200
Seeing that in context with the beauty of life is a Russian specialty.
link |
00:36:32.760
Like, it is very much, it sounds like a diner menu.
link |
00:36:37.920
What?
link |
00:36:38.920
Yeah.
link |
00:36:39.920
You want the Russian specialty?
link |
00:36:40.920
A big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression.
link |
00:36:46.640
I do think that we're in a really terrifying and depressing time and I think that part
link |
00:36:53.640
of it is that we don't know if something huge is about to get started and we don't even
link |
00:36:58.000
know what this is.
link |
00:36:59.000
I mean, we just sit here in this weird world that is falling into some new state and we're
link |
00:37:04.640
not even super curious.
link |
00:37:06.200
It's like, what the hell just happened?
link |
00:37:09.000
He's got an answer and I'm positive that all of those answers are wrong.
link |
00:37:12.800
Let's try to at least sneak up on the good answer.
link |
00:37:17.640
The central core of the answer is that the US seemed to be the greatest thing in the
link |
00:37:22.860
world in large measure because we hadn't noticed that we were getting a benefit from
link |
00:37:29.280
having no plan, not having to make a plan for low growth.
link |
00:37:34.360
As long as we had growth, we were in great shape.
link |
00:37:38.480
Let's imagine that you could run an experiment.
link |
00:37:42.880
You have a billion copies of Earth and you start the initial conditions slightly different.
link |
00:37:49.160
Some giant number of planets, a lot of the things that were discovered from the 1800s
link |
00:37:57.240
through the end of the 20th century are discovered in a period of time because a lot of that
link |
00:38:03.040
just has to do with once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments, you can see
link |
00:38:07.600
more.
link |
00:38:08.600
The more you can see, the more you can make use of what you can see and it turns out there
link |
00:38:11.680
was lots of stuff to do with like germs or electron orbitals or spectrum, electromagnetic
link |
00:38:21.880
spectrum.
link |
00:38:22.880
We got to do all of those things and the US roughly corresponded for a good chunk of
link |
00:38:28.200
its history with this bonanza.
link |
00:38:30.840
Of course, we look like an amazing genius country.
link |
00:38:34.280
We have no plan.
link |
00:38:36.160
Imagine that you could sell a car, you don't have to put in seat belts, you don't have
link |
00:38:39.040
to put in airbags, you don't have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors or a rear view
link |
00:38:44.160
mirror.
link |
00:38:45.160
You could save a lot of money on a car by not putting in all of the stuff to keep things
link |
00:38:49.560
from going wrong and I think that's what we had.
link |
00:38:53.240
We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good, we plowed it back, the riches
link |
00:38:59.800
and spoils and treasure back into the system and made more genius stuff and we carried
link |
00:39:05.240
along a good chunk of humanity, hundreds of millions of people.
link |
00:39:09.400
We did not have a plan for what happens when the growth goes below the stall speed of our
link |
00:39:14.440
society.
link |
00:39:16.240
How confident should it be that the growth has slowed in a way that is permanent rather
link |
00:39:22.240
than a slap in the face where we…
link |
00:39:26.000
It's not the right concept.
link |
00:39:27.920
Right concept is, I try to use the same words over and over again in case people see more
link |
00:39:33.240
often because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere.
link |
00:39:35.920
I use this analogy of the orchard because everyone talks about low hanging fruit.
link |
00:39:40.920
They know the concept of low hanging fruit but they don't think in terms of orchards.
link |
00:39:47.400
They say things like, you think we've picked all the low hanging fruit but I believe in
link |
00:39:51.480
the infinitiveness of the human mind.
link |
00:39:54.960
It's like, okay, that doesn't even work as an analogy.
link |
00:39:58.840
What if the idea is we only picked all the low hanging fruit here and then we're having
link |
00:40:02.320
this stupid argument about low hanging fruit and we're not going and looking for new orchards.
link |
00:40:06.360
We're not planting new orchards.
link |
00:40:08.120
We're not looking for forests.
link |
00:40:09.840
We're just sitting here arguing about low hanging fruit.
link |
00:40:11.960
My claim is there's probably a lot more low hanging fruit and it's not here.
link |
00:40:15.840
It's in other orchards.
link |
00:40:16.840
It's in other orchards.
link |
00:40:17.840
One of those turned out to be the digital orchard.
link |
00:40:20.080
The digital orchard has not been as stagnant as lots of these other like the chemical orchard.
link |
00:40:29.920
I have faith that there's a small percentage of the population but not zero that's looking
link |
00:40:37.040
for those other orchards.
link |
00:40:38.520
I'm excited about one of those orchards which is, I believe there will be robots in everybody's
link |
00:40:43.320
homes and that will unlock some totally new thing.
link |
00:40:49.320
Totally new set of technologies, ideas, the way we live life, the productivity, everything.
link |
00:40:56.520
It'll change everything.
link |
00:40:57.520
I'm excited about that orchard.
link |
00:41:00.080
I'm roaming that orchard and wondering how the hell you bring back the ant that finds
link |
00:41:06.680
a new source of food.
link |
00:41:08.520
I'm trying to find an apple I can bring back to the rest of the earth.
link |
00:41:12.080
Great.
link |
00:41:13.080
You're in an explorer idiom.
link |
00:41:16.240
Do you have faith that there's enough of those?
link |
00:41:18.240
I don't think there are very many of us.
link |
00:41:20.440
I'm one of them too.
link |
00:41:22.360
How many does it take?
link |
00:41:23.360
It takes one ant.
link |
00:41:24.360
It takes one ant.
link |
00:41:26.360
What are you talking about?
link |
00:41:28.800
How many eelons does it take to screw in a light bulb?
link |
00:41:33.400
Let's imagine that we went, imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food.
link |
00:41:39.600
Then it comes back to the colony and it says, hey, I think I found a new source of food.
link |
00:41:44.840
The initial reaction is, you're not authorized to find new food.
link |
00:41:51.240
Why would you try to go find new food?
link |
00:41:52.560
We're going to remove you from Twitter.
link |
00:41:55.080
By the way, I think the fact that you think you're allowed to go find new food shows how
link |
00:41:57.960
privileged you are as an ant.
link |
00:41:59.520
Get out of the colony.
link |
00:42:00.520
Kill him.
link |
00:42:01.520
Kill him.
link |
00:42:02.520
Well, that's probably not a great model for finding new orchards.
link |
00:42:07.880
What we find is that where there's a system that allows somebody to ascend without a lot
link |
00:42:12.440
of gatekeeping, you can have that.
link |
00:42:15.960
I saw this happen in hedge funds.
link |
00:42:17.680
Hedge funds for a while hoovered up a lot of talent because they were places that had
link |
00:42:24.640
funding and had freedom.
link |
00:42:28.400
In general, really smart people want to be free and they don't want to think a lot about
link |
00:42:34.960
how they're going to feed themselves.
link |
00:42:36.840
They want to get lost in their minds.
link |
00:42:40.440
You can either give them productive places to play, dangerous places to play.
link |
00:42:45.800
They're either going to break into computers or find vaccines for you or build bombs or
link |
00:42:51.360
build companies.
link |
00:42:54.280
We're not providing for the people who have to disrupt and have to innovate and trying
link |
00:42:59.960
to channel that effort.
link |
00:43:01.560
We're so focused on this other thing, which is fairness and safety.
link |
00:43:06.600
Fairness and safety, by the way, are really important.
link |
00:43:08.280
I don't want to denigrate them.
link |
00:43:10.360
The singular focus on fairness and safety in the same breath being focused on growth
link |
00:43:17.640
and discovery and creation is going to doom us because what we're talking about is we're
link |
00:43:22.920
always talking about divvying up the pie that is as opposed to the pie that will be.
link |
00:43:28.560
Imagine that you spent all your time trying to divvy up the 13th century pie and you destroyed
link |
00:43:34.320
your ability to get to the 20th century.
link |
00:43:36.720
You'd be an idiot.
link |
00:43:39.360
One place I think I disagree with you is, I don't think you need that many people to
link |
00:43:45.080
empower the geniuses, the innovators, the people who refuse to spend most of their days in
link |
00:43:50.800
meetings about fairness.
link |
00:43:52.280
This is good.
link |
00:43:53.280
Let's have a disagreement.
link |
00:43:54.760
I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium, is just one little example of a tool
link |
00:44:01.200
that you can give power to, like you and your podcast can have the next day on Musk and
link |
00:44:09.200
make him a star.
link |
00:44:10.200
Now I see where you're going.
link |
00:44:11.200
Okay.
link |
00:44:12.200
There has been a series of places for people to play and be free and we've lost them successfully.
link |
00:44:20.040
What's a good place you remember because I disagree with you there too.
link |
00:44:23.160
I think they're still there.
link |
00:44:24.600
You can still play.
link |
00:44:25.680
You interviewed Noam Chomsky.
link |
00:44:27.800
Yes.
link |
00:44:28.800
Okay.
link |
00:44:29.800
Noam Chomsky comes from an era where you could play at MIT and you can't play.
link |
00:44:36.960
This is where I disagree with you.
link |
00:44:38.360
We've already had this.
link |
00:44:40.080
Go check the Clips channel for the Lex Friedman podcast.
link |
00:44:43.960
I think I wasn't brave enough at that time and I'm not really brave enough now.
link |
00:44:48.840
Come on.
link |
00:44:49.840
Because I don't...
link |
00:44:50.840
It's a feeling and the people are going to tear me apart.
link |
00:44:54.640
Oh, what are you and you speak from emotion and facts?
link |
00:44:58.440
The feeling...
link |
00:44:59.440
The podcast is yours.
link |
00:45:01.640
Yes.
link |
00:45:02.640
Okay.
link |
00:45:03.640
Tell the people who are currently editing your brain because I saw that move right now.
link |
00:45:07.280
Yeah.
link |
00:45:08.280
I think you should go find another podcast, right?
link |
00:45:11.400
Let's get rid of some of your audience right now.
link |
00:45:15.120
Please go find another podcast if you're editing my brain.
link |
00:45:17.800
Nevertheless, all the self doubt, they're sitting in that brain.
link |
00:45:21.040
I can't stand to watch this, but all right.
link |
00:45:23.520
What is the self doubt loop that you're in?
link |
00:45:25.680
The thing is, when I walk the halls of MIT, there's bureaucracy, there's administrators
link |
00:45:34.400
that never have done anything interesting in their entire lives.
link |
00:45:37.640
There's meetings, there's all the usual crap.
link |
00:45:41.320
But there's in the eyes of individuals, there's this glow of excitement that has nothing to
link |
00:45:48.880
do with career.
link |
00:45:49.880
I understand this.
link |
00:45:51.400
And it's still a playground.
link |
00:45:52.920
There's little pockets of playgrounds from which genius can emerge still.
link |
00:45:58.280
And they're unaffected by diversity meetings or fairness meetings or blah, blah, blah.
link |
00:46:04.520
I love to hear that.
link |
00:46:05.520
Yeah?
link |
00:46:06.520
You don't think so?
link |
00:46:07.520
No.
link |
00:46:08.520
Because I've watched the change, Lex.
link |
00:46:10.200
I've watched people, we're all editing ourselves all the time.
link |
00:46:13.560
I remember my old mind, I liked it better.
link |
00:46:17.560
All of this relentless focus on critical race theory and critical theory, postmodernism,
link |
00:46:24.280
fairness, social justice, it's making many of us into worse people.
link |
00:46:29.800
You think that's that?
link |
00:46:30.800
Do you think the mad daemons of the character is paying attention to any of that?
link |
00:46:35.800
You think that has an effect?
link |
00:46:36.800
Have you seen what happened to Matt Damon himself?
link |
00:46:39.440
Matt Damon has tried to say various things at various times that seem to be relatively
link |
00:46:43.240
innocuous.
link |
00:46:44.240
He can't speak.
link |
00:46:45.240
Okay.
link |
00:46:46.240
Well, let's not mix up.
link |
00:46:48.560
Matt Damon is just an actor.
link |
00:46:49.560
Well, no, no, no.
link |
00:46:51.060
He was just a Harvard student who came up with his own genius screenplay, acted and made
link |
00:46:55.920
it happen.
link |
00:46:56.920
No.
link |
00:46:57.920
But we're somewhere else.
link |
00:46:59.360
You don't think you can build the rocket company out of MIT still?
link |
00:47:02.800
No, I do think.
link |
00:47:03.800
I think there are things that you can still do, but we're losing them.
link |
00:47:07.400
We lose them.
link |
00:47:08.840
We keep losing them.
link |
00:47:10.720
I would say the biggest problem here, let me just say, what I think the solution would
link |
00:47:15.160
be is to fire anybody who's not faculty, especially young faculty, should have way more power
link |
00:47:25.080
and administration should have much less power.
link |
00:47:28.000
Because right now, the administration, some of whom used to be faculty, but they've lost
link |
00:47:34.880
the fire, the spark that gave them, they've lost the memories of the playground.
link |
00:47:40.120
So the people that admire and love the playground, like you could see it in their behavior, should
link |
00:47:44.920
have way more power.
link |
00:47:47.000
So we should create a systems that give them power.
link |
00:47:49.280
Lex, you're very idealistic and you've got a huge heart.
link |
00:47:54.800
It's a weird time because I don't want to dissuade you from believing beautiful things
link |
00:48:02.400
because I see how potent you are.
link |
00:48:04.840
You do all these things, jiu jitsu, guitar, podcasting, programming, computers, et cetera,
link |
00:48:13.040
et cetera.
link |
00:48:14.040
I don't think you're right.
link |
00:48:15.040
I think we're in a really deeply screwed up place where even the tiny number, let me give
link |
00:48:20.360
you an alternate version of the dystopia.
link |
00:48:23.560
I do think that there are people who are capable and there's still places to play and cause
link |
00:48:27.440
things to happen that progress the story forward.
link |
00:48:30.680
But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in who fit that profile, like how
link |
00:48:36.080
much crap has Elon Musk taken?
link |
00:48:39.960
Quite considerable, right?
link |
00:48:43.000
And not much admiration from the...
link |
00:48:46.520
Craig Venter, Jim Watson.
link |
00:48:51.680
These are very difficult people.
link |
00:48:54.880
Steve Jobs is a very difficult guy, you know?
link |
00:48:57.960
Yeah, it is a bit heartbreaking to me.
link |
00:49:01.200
I mean, everybody is different generations.
link |
00:49:03.520
I just, my mind is a little focused on Elon Musk because he's the modern person.
link |
00:49:08.400
Well, you know him.
link |
00:49:09.400
I mean, he's a person to you.
link |
00:49:12.440
It hurts my heart to see how few faculty and people with Nobel Prizes and so on admire
link |
00:49:21.360
Elon, like how little problem...
link |
00:49:25.520
He gets a lot of fans from people that buy his products and young minds just excited.
link |
00:49:31.720
But like, why don't we as an institution...
link |
00:49:33.640
Why doesn't MIT say that we want to...
link |
00:49:38.800
Somebody amongst us will be the next Elon Musk and we want to encourage them.
link |
00:49:43.960
Say that.
link |
00:49:44.960
Say that in meetings.
link |
00:49:45.960
Say that.
link |
00:49:46.960
That's success.
link |
00:49:47.960
No kidding.
link |
00:49:48.960
For us as MIT.
link |
00:49:51.320
And they, instead, there's this jealousy.
link |
00:49:54.200
It's like...
link |
00:49:55.200
Well, here's the crazy...
link |
00:49:56.200
Did you hear what Elon Musk tweeted?
link |
00:49:57.200
Did you...
link |
00:49:58.200
Did you see...
link |
00:49:59.200
Like how responsible is what he's doing?
link |
00:50:00.560
How...
link |
00:50:01.560
Like he's just saying all these things that are just dripping with jealousy and basically...
link |
00:50:09.160
I want what he's got.
link |
00:50:10.160
Yeah.
link |
00:50:11.160
That's the thing, right?
link |
00:50:12.160
And if...
link |
00:50:13.160
Yeah.
link |
00:50:14.160
Here's the weird thing.
link |
00:50:15.160
Rivalry has a different signature.
link |
00:50:18.960
You see, when you know that you're never going to make it, that's the position you take.
link |
00:50:26.400
What is it in Kung Fu Panda, which you've watched now?
link |
00:50:29.960
Yes.
link |
00:50:30.960
Yes.
link |
00:50:31.960
What does Tai Lung say when he's looking for the Dragon Warrior and the Furious Five come
link |
00:50:37.920
to defeat him on the bridge?
link |
00:50:41.160
One of them gives up Poe's name accidentally and Tai Lung hears it.
link |
00:50:46.320
Poe!
link |
00:50:47.320
So that is his name.
link |
00:50:48.920
Really.
link |
00:50:49.920
A worthy opponent.
link |
00:50:50.920
Our battle will be legendary, right?
link |
00:50:53.520
He's excited.
link |
00:50:55.000
Why is that?
link |
00:50:56.000
Well, you learn about this in boxing.
link |
00:50:58.400
Sometimes you'll see a division or an MMA, which is lousy with talent.
link |
00:51:03.760
It's just you can't swing a cat without hitting an amazing athlete.
link |
00:51:09.520
Sometimes you'll have a division, which at that particular moment has one star and no
link |
00:51:12.920
real competition in that weight class or something.
link |
00:51:16.720
That person is in bad shape because you can't build a legend without the other.
link |
00:51:24.880
When you think of Muhammad Ali, what are the names that you immediately think of?
link |
00:51:28.560
And you have to phrase your, you have to think of the other heavyweights, right?
link |
00:51:35.960
So those opponents are in part what made Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali.
link |
00:51:43.920
And that's why the Mayweather, McGregor revelation that, okay, this guy has got his opponents
link |
00:51:53.560
picture in his house.
link |
00:51:54.920
How weird is that?
link |
00:51:56.280
Well, because without the opponent, you may not be able to get there.
link |
00:51:59.760
Now, I am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries.
link |
00:52:05.880
Do you have examples in mind?
link |
00:52:08.120
Well, there are rivalries where people take each other's credit and screw each other over.
link |
00:52:12.920
And then there are other rivalries like the RNA Tie Club, where these guys were so in
link |
00:52:19.160
love with what they were doing that they couldn't wait to share everything.
link |
00:52:22.600
And like, Nobel Prizes were so abundant that most people got Nobel Prizes just for being
link |
00:52:28.560
a member of the RNA Tie Club and doing cool stuff.
link |
00:52:31.240
And yeah, that's the golden kind of sweet spot.
link |
00:52:39.440
Most of these people can't do what Elon's doing because they can't break rules.
link |
00:52:43.240
They can't take the pressure.
link |
00:52:44.240
I'll tell you what really concerns me about your perspective.
link |
00:52:48.440
I think that there are a lot of genius ideas inside of people who don't have the stomach
link |
00:52:53.680
for conflict and derision.
link |
00:52:55.640
And I think a lot of those people are female.
link |
00:53:00.160
And I think that until we come up with a world in which we can swat down the trolls, where
link |
00:53:05.680
we can actually cause the trolls not to ruin everything.
link |
00:53:10.680
And I don't necessarily mean by shutting them up.
link |
00:53:12.760
I don't necessarily mean by being brutal to them, but somehow separating off people who
link |
00:53:18.160
are working and people who are trolling.
link |
00:53:21.200
I think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius in part because women in particular
link |
00:53:29.160
are not necessarily going to push an idea if it results in 10 years of being derided.
link |
00:53:37.040
Very few men are willing to do that either.
link |
00:53:40.040
But there are some of us who are so dumb that we will pigheadedly stick to an idea for 10
link |
00:53:45.560
years, even if the world collapses.
link |
00:53:47.480
I don't think that there are as many women who are going to make that calculation, even
link |
00:53:51.920
if they know the idea is correct.
link |
00:53:54.000
And one of the things that I believe technology can help us fight the trolls of all definitions
link |
00:53:59.040
of troll.
link |
00:54:00.040
I believe that a better Twitter can be built.
link |
00:54:02.720
Interesting.
link |
00:54:03.720
I do not.
link |
00:54:05.220
I don't believe that a Twitter successor can be built that solves most of the problems.
link |
00:54:10.080
I think you can always improve what we have, but I don't think that converges in something
link |
00:54:14.760
that really works because I think ultimately the problem isn't Twitter, the problem is
link |
00:54:18.320
us.
link |
00:54:19.320
For example, I've recently made a very disturbing realization, which is academics and trolls
link |
00:54:28.120
have very many similar behaviors.
link |
00:54:30.360
Absolutely.
link |
00:54:31.860
It's largely a trolling community.
link |
00:54:34.080
I tend to believe that the trolls are not, it's like the Peter Thiel mini mind idea,
link |
00:54:42.280
which in all of the trolls, there's the possibility of goodness.
link |
00:54:47.920
And all you have to do, not all you have to do, what you have to do is create technology
link |
00:54:52.360
that incentivizes them to embrace, to discover, to embrace, to practice the better angels
link |
00:55:03.160
of their nature.
link |
00:55:04.400
And I believe that people actually want to do that.
link |
00:55:10.160
The trolls is a short term dopamine rush of childish toxicity that all of us want to
link |
00:55:19.480
overcome.
link |
00:55:20.480
We believe that deep within, we want to overcome that.
link |
00:55:24.200
I try to keep myself from believing what you believe.
link |
00:55:29.440
Because you'd be disappointed if it's not true.
link |
00:55:31.080
Because it's dangerous because a lot of these people are implacable foes and there aren't
link |
00:55:35.280
many of them.
link |
00:55:36.280
But when you meet somebody, it's like, yeah, I just like screwing people up.
link |
00:55:39.920
I'm here for the pain.
link |
00:55:42.720
I just believe even in them, there's a good...
link |
00:55:44.640
There's a wonderful book that I'm going to recommend to you where I hope this comes from.
link |
00:55:49.360
Maybe I've got the source wrong, but in any event, it's a great book called Maximum City
link |
00:55:54.480
about Bombay.
link |
00:55:57.000
And I believe the conceit is that the author leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an
link |
00:56:03.960
adult.
link |
00:56:04.960
And he realizes he has to rediscover the city because he can't live in the city he left.
link |
00:56:09.480
So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas of the city.
link |
00:56:13.560
And one of them is the underworld, hangs out with the police.
link |
00:56:16.600
But in the underworld, he's talking to contract killers.
link |
00:56:20.440
And he says, you know, it's really weird.
link |
00:56:22.840
Everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them.
link |
00:56:26.800
And they always say this thing about, I've got two kids at home.
link |
00:56:31.760
He says, never say that to a contract killer because we have terrible relationships with
link |
00:56:36.200
our parents.
link |
00:56:37.200
Doesn't it dearest you?
link |
00:56:39.200
And I was just thinking, oh, wow.
link |
00:56:41.680
So there's a minus sign in front of that statement.
link |
00:56:44.160
You're sitting there saying, you know, I've got a three year old.
link |
00:56:46.480
It's like, OK, well, I'm going to take this POS out of that kid's life.
link |
00:56:51.600
Maybe I'll have a chance.
link |
00:56:53.320
You don't know how people are wired.
link |
00:56:56.600
And as much as I hate to say it, there are people whose wiring is so disturbing and so
link |
00:57:01.720
different from yours that you will never guess why you can't reach them or how much pleasure
link |
00:57:08.240
they may have gotten because they may have gone over a point of no return.
link |
00:57:12.080
Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis.
link |
00:57:19.120
You do not know this for sure.
link |
00:57:21.080
No.
link |
00:57:22.080
And I am a, you know, whatever the hell I am that has a different hypothesis that even
link |
00:57:31.080
in the darkest human beings that seem to be only full of evil, there's a good person there
link |
00:57:38.000
that could be discovered.
link |
00:57:39.520
One of the reasons I love doing your show is that you have these beliefs even as a Russian.
link |
00:57:48.240
The Russian special.
link |
00:57:49.560
As you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness, which is a total cynicism and total idealism
link |
00:57:55.440
locks together, right?
link |
00:57:57.040
That's very much part of the Russian character.
link |
00:58:00.800
The reason I was kept bothering you, kept bothering you to have this conversation is
link |
00:58:04.280
I'm really worried about the next couple of months.
link |
00:58:08.640
No kidding.
link |
00:58:10.920
And if there's anybody in this world that could help alleviate my worry by at least
link |
00:58:20.960
walking along with me through this worry of mine, it's you.
link |
00:58:26.240
Do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war, some kind of division that explodes
link |
00:58:32.480
beyond just stuff on Twitter, but something that's really destructive to the fabric of
link |
00:58:40.200
our society?
link |
00:58:41.200
Well, I believe we're in a revolution, as you know, I've called it the no name revolution
link |
00:58:47.040
or N squared revolution.
link |
00:58:48.480
I've been talking about it for years.
link |
00:58:51.520
I don't think, I think waiting for this to be called a civil war is not smart.
link |
00:58:58.600
Only history will call it such.
link |
00:59:00.280
Fine.
link |
00:59:01.280
The thing that the problem is is that you're encountering things that you've never seen
link |
00:59:04.320
trying to fit them into things that you already know, right?
link |
00:59:08.800
But history repeats itself.
link |
00:59:10.800
Yes.
link |
00:59:11.800
Ish.
link |
00:59:12.800
You don't see lessons from history.
link |
00:59:15.720
I do.
link |
00:59:16.720
We see today.
link |
00:59:17.720
But I don't see it repeating itself.
link |
00:59:19.200
What about violence?
link |
00:59:20.200
The famous quote is that it rhymes.
link |
00:59:22.160
It rhymes.
link |
00:59:23.160
I mean, the thing I guess I'm speaking to is violence and we're in there.
link |
00:59:29.800
The abstraction of violence.
link |
00:59:31.920
Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class, okay?
link |
00:59:38.400
Thank you for speaking to the audience.
link |
00:59:40.800
Trying to lose these people.
link |
00:59:42.320
Come with me.
link |
00:59:43.320
Go on.
link |
00:59:44.320
No, no, no.
link |
00:59:47.320
I've dealt with your audience and your audience contains the smartest people around.
link |
00:59:51.720
I guarantee you if I say some stuff, first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say, they're
link |
00:59:55.880
in the detail, so that'll be a little bit of catnip to bring in the smart people.
link |
01:00:00.520
But they'll also digest it for each other.
link |
01:00:02.160
It's one of the great lessons of long form podcasting.
link |
01:00:05.160
If you don't waste all your time explaining things, that's the job of the audience to
link |
01:00:09.160
do amongst themselves, they're happy doing the work and those who aren't, they leave.
link |
01:00:14.520
Isn't that great?
link |
01:00:15.520
They'll leave.
link |
01:00:16.520
The people who don't want to struggle will leave and you can get rid of them.
link |
01:00:20.200
I think that the point is you would want to say violence is defined relative to a context.
link |
01:00:28.640
Let's call it meta violence so that we don't get into the problem.
link |
01:00:32.400
We already have a term for physical violence.
link |
01:00:34.760
We have meta violence and physical violence.
link |
01:00:37.440
I would say that physical violence is subclassed from meta violence.
link |
01:00:40.760
Meta violence is the disruption of a system.
link |
01:00:44.000
For example, if a cell dies, you can die through apoptosis or necrosis.
link |
01:00:53.040
Apoptosis is controlled, programmed cell death.
link |
01:00:56.920
Necrosis is just like, okay, this didn't work.
link |
01:01:00.040
That was a violent disruption of the system.
link |
01:01:02.400
This meta class is presumed in the documentation.
link |
01:01:05.800
Is it all negative?
link |
01:01:07.240
No.
link |
01:01:08.240
What are you talking about?
link |
01:01:11.040
This is part of the problem in the madness of our age, which is if you open up a drawer
link |
01:01:18.560
in your cabinet, in your kitchen, and you see knives, spoons, and forks, do you have
link |
01:01:26.160
a sense that the spoons are good utensils and the knives or forks are bad utensils because
link |
01:01:30.760
they're mean?
link |
01:01:32.800
If you start thinking in these terms, that knife is there to do violence.
link |
01:01:39.160
That's violence you want done.
link |
01:01:43.120
When I cut a mango, I'm doing violence to the mango.
link |
01:01:46.560
The mango expects that I will do violence to it because otherwise I won't be able to
link |
01:01:50.320
get the meat and it won't get its seed spread somewhere else.
link |
01:01:57.480
In part, violence is absolutely part of our story.
link |
01:02:02.000
There's this meta violence class.
link |
01:02:05.880
The meta violence class is already, it's a multiple inheritance pattern.
link |
01:02:10.240
Whatever's going on right now inherits from meta violence.
link |
01:02:12.960
No, but there's certain subclasses that allow evil to emerge.
link |
01:02:22.240
What I'm specifically worried about is that the fact...
link |
01:02:25.320
What's on your mind, Lex?
link |
01:02:26.480
What's really going on?
link |
01:02:29.480
I worry that amidst the chaos of these protests or the chaos that could be created by the
link |
01:02:42.440
feeling that the election does not represent the voice of the people, saying that whoever
link |
01:02:49.560
gets, quote unquote, wins the election according to some kind of reporting of the numbers
link |
01:02:55.320
that come out that's not going to represent what people actually want to be the leader.
link |
01:03:03.400
Something in that narrative will create so much division that people will resort to literal
link |
01:03:10.000
violence, protests that really...
link |
01:03:14.520
That the United States loses its united aspect.
link |
01:03:18.720
Because of that, because of that chaos and tension, evil people, evil forces, that my
link |
01:03:24.720
definition of evil is just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power, the kind
link |
01:03:33.440
of power that ultimately goes against the ideal of the United States.
link |
01:03:39.320
That could be Donald Trump.
link |
01:03:40.840
That could be another human being.
link |
01:03:42.520
It doesn't really matter.
link |
01:03:44.800
My worry is that love doesn't win out in this, the unity doesn't win out in this.
link |
01:03:50.400
I feel like you and I have a responsibility, it's small.
link |
01:03:59.520
How do we let love win in this moment of potential chaos?
link |
01:04:05.040
We're going to have to fight for it.
link |
01:04:07.560
You're going to have to become a fighter.
link |
01:04:09.920
You're going to have to throw some serious punches if that's what you want.
link |
01:04:13.880
You have to be Muhammad Ali here because the moment you start criticizing anything,
link |
01:04:20.680
you have to be a masterful communicator because...
link |
01:04:23.440
That's why you're here.
link |
01:04:25.160
Look, Lex, in part, your decency is allowing you to do things that you couldn't otherwise
link |
01:04:35.080
do.
link |
01:04:36.080
I saw that you had Michael Malis on your podcast.
link |
01:04:39.920
Michael Malis is, I think, of somebody who at his best is extremely shrewd and insightful.
link |
01:04:47.440
Yes?
link |
01:04:49.440
He's also got this trolling game, which he's quite open about and you talk to him about
link |
01:04:53.280
it, which I can't stand.
link |
01:04:56.240
This is the idea.
link |
01:04:57.240
Oh, grandpa doesn't get the internet.
link |
01:04:58.240
Well, I'm grandpa.
link |
01:04:59.240
I don't get the internet.
link |
01:05:00.240
I don't love the trolling.
link |
01:05:02.040
There are trolls of the past who were incredibly good.
link |
01:05:07.680
I don't see any of the modern trolls as being that kind of genius level trolling the people
link |
01:05:12.920
who deserve it in the way that they deserve it.
link |
01:05:16.760
Right now, what I see is that anything that stands up gets cut down.
link |
01:05:20.840
It's like anything earnest.
link |
01:05:22.320
You have to turn into cynicism and a meme.
link |
01:05:26.320
It's this idea that the people who believe that the world is chaos and has no point are
link |
01:05:30.880
constantly trying to let you know, don't try to use the internet for meaning, for decency,
link |
01:05:36.760
for goodness, because we are going to find out that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy
link |
01:05:41.840
and we will make you suffer.
link |
01:05:44.960
I do think that there's a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world.
link |
01:05:48.480
Some of it mine, some of it yours, but we all have it.
link |
01:05:53.320
The trolls somewhat remove that, but it's not a judicious, kind, constructive, compassionate,
link |
01:05:58.600
caring version most of the time.
link |
01:06:00.480
A lot of those trolls, and I have this feeling about Michael Malis.
link |
01:06:03.640
I don't know whether it's right, that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath
link |
01:06:08.160
it, and that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior, and you and I don't seem
link |
01:06:12.960
to be doing that.
link |
01:06:13.960
I don't see you as almost ever trolling.
link |
01:06:16.200
You and I, I'm very much against trolling.
link |
01:06:19.720
I'm very much against trolling.
link |
01:06:21.360
It doesn't mean that it's selective, you know, I'm not even, it's not even true.
link |
01:06:27.520
Everything we say, we say like, I'm for it, I'm against it.
link |
01:06:31.280
This isn't my native language.
link |
01:06:33.000
I speak nuance.
link |
01:06:34.000
I don't speak this internet shit.
link |
01:06:38.160
And the more I have to communicate through internet shit, right, I almost never take
link |
01:06:43.440
a tweet seriously if it contains the letters LMAO, LOL, RTFL, you know, FOL.
link |
01:06:51.320
There's an interesting effect where people say stuff and then finish it with LOL.
link |
01:06:57.000
You put it beautifully that it indicates to me that this is a person, we've talked about
link |
01:07:01.400
like why we're the stupid suit, is like this is anti, this is to fight the LOL at the end
link |
01:07:06.960
of sentences is take, like stand up for the words you're saying.
link |
01:07:12.120
Don't finish stuff with LOL, removing completely the responsibility of the content of the sentence
link |
01:07:17.760
that preceded it.
link |
01:07:19.120
Yeah.
link |
01:07:20.120
Also, choosing the outfit that worked both for Men in Black and the Blues Brothers, not
link |
01:07:24.720
a terrible choice.
link |
01:07:25.720
Okay, but getting back, look, Lex, we're not in a position to do this.
link |
01:07:31.280
You need to be seated in a different chair.
link |
01:07:35.640
Your chair is the wrong chair.
link |
01:07:37.160
You're in the wrong chair.
link |
01:07:39.200
It's been so long, I want to talk about you and Joe Biden.
link |
01:07:46.760
Joe Biden was a 29 year old guy with nothing particular going on so far as I can tell.
link |
01:07:54.080
Okay.
link |
01:07:55.720
I know people as impressive at age 29 as Joe Biden, 12 rows back, 3D, doesn't matter.
link |
01:08:04.480
Huge number of people.
link |
01:08:06.040
None of them, my age, can get to where he got to.
link |
01:08:08.840
It's like we're all morons.
link |
01:08:12.520
Anytime somebody takes out, like if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop, you'd be
link |
01:08:19.520
angry.
link |
01:08:21.040
What is this guy doing repairing guitars?
link |
01:08:25.640
And somebody will say, maybe he loves to repair guitars.
link |
01:08:28.200
Yeah.
link |
01:08:29.200
I mean, what is your Russian piano tuner doing?
link |
01:08:32.360
What is my Russian piano tuner?
link |
01:08:33.920
That was the whole point of that story, which is what is it that happened in that life that
link |
01:08:40.600
converted somebody?
link |
01:08:41.800
I find this, for example, with Russian doctors who are technicians and offices now.
link |
01:08:49.640
There's a huge amount of talent in the world that's not sitting in its proper seat.
link |
01:08:56.840
And quite honestly, I've gotten to the point where my feeling is we've got to take the
link |
01:09:01.160
seats.
link |
01:09:06.000
Maybe we don't sit in them.
link |
01:09:07.000
Maybe the idea is that we take the seats and we put some smart Gen Z person in the seat
link |
01:09:11.320
and say, look, no chanting.
link |
01:09:14.640
I don't want to hear you say, no justice, no peace.
link |
01:09:17.480
If there aren't verbs, if it rhymes, it's wrong.
link |
01:09:22.000
Like I used to have this thing, if it rhymes, things that rhyme are more true.
link |
01:09:26.480
But in general, if something starts at one, two, three, four, I don't want to hear what
link |
01:09:30.760
the rest of your sentence is.
link |
01:09:34.680
But I feel like the responsibility that you carry that I carry, this is where Joe Rogan
link |
01:09:42.360
generally removes himself from being, I'm just a comedian.
link |
01:09:46.080
This idea of I'm just a comedian, I'll do that.
link |
01:09:49.640
But at this moment in history, history literally can pivot on the words of a tattooed, ripped,
link |
01:10:01.440
50 year old comedian.
link |
01:10:04.440
And I think the same is true with you.
link |
01:10:06.640
Okay.
link |
01:10:07.640
Well, I'm interested and I care.
link |
01:10:10.480
Speaking of lyrics, there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
link |
01:10:15.960
That's not us.
link |
01:10:18.440
The hour is getting late.
link |
01:10:19.520
That's not us.
link |
01:10:20.920
In the song, the joker and the thief are on opposite sides of Jesus having this conversation
link |
01:10:25.720
over Jesus.
link |
01:10:27.920
You and I, we've been through that.
link |
01:10:29.080
That's not our fate.
link |
01:10:30.080
That's somebody else's fate to throw spitballs at the internet.
link |
01:10:33.560
That's not your fate.
link |
01:10:34.680
You're in earnest guy.
link |
01:10:35.920
You're filled with love.
link |
01:10:36.920
You're getting the most amazing podcast.
link |
01:10:38.640
Yes.
link |
01:10:39.640
But you can win over the internet.
link |
01:10:40.800
This is the point I'm trying to make that you're saying, I'm just a grandpa, I don't
link |
01:10:45.040
know.
link |
01:10:46.040
I'm telling you, you're going to get bigger and then you're going to get cut down.
link |
01:10:49.320
You're going to keep ascending for a while, Lex.
link |
01:10:52.120
And then you're saying, naturally, there's, I'm telling you, I watched the same process.
link |
01:10:55.960
People get up to a certain level.
link |
01:10:58.040
And one of the things that's going on in my opinion with Joe Rogan is that when Joe Rogan
link |
01:11:02.520
starts to talk about his misgivings about Joe Biden, you know, in a way that you find
link |
01:11:08.440
it any bar in America about cognitive decline in a 77 year old who's about to be 78.
link |
01:11:15.000
I believe in November.
link |
01:11:17.960
We have never had anything remotely as insane as a 78 year old person slated to win the
link |
01:11:24.600
White House.
link |
01:11:25.600
And you're saying when that idea is being communicated, is there something about the
link |
01:11:31.000
disc concept that you talk about, the system naturally starts to...
link |
01:11:33.560
Some bad thing happens to Joe or one of Joe's close associates.
link |
01:11:38.600
The ability to destroy people who become inconvenient has been documented.
link |
01:11:45.160
This is what we have done in the past.
link |
01:11:47.360
Whether we are doing it now, we don't know because we are not doing this church committee
link |
01:11:52.240
too.
link |
01:11:53.240
In order to know whether or not you are currently destroying American citizens as we did in
link |
01:11:57.680
the past and as we have documented, as we found out in 1976, the federal government
link |
01:12:04.040
destroyed Americans who had political beliefs that the government didn't want to continue.
link |
01:12:11.600
And I don't know whether you are grasping that.
link |
01:12:15.080
One interpretation of why John Stuart and why Joe Rogan and why Bill Maher, all these
link |
01:12:21.720
people to some extent hide behind, it's a joke.
link |
01:12:25.120
It's because they're trying to find a protected class.
link |
01:12:29.320
Is there some place I can stand and speak the truth, which does not result in my being
link |
01:12:34.460
garbage collected?
link |
01:12:35.960
Interesting.
link |
01:12:36.960
I guess you're right.
link |
01:12:38.480
My intuition is you can stand as you gain more power.
link |
01:12:43.400
You can stand behind your work for the better.
link |
01:12:46.760
There's a fight over Joe Rogan right now.
link |
01:12:49.120
I mean, I've talked about it for a few years now.
link |
01:12:53.000
People did not understand how big that program was.
link |
01:12:55.760
People didn't understand long form podcasting.
link |
01:12:57.560
I was derided by people who I think of as being very shrewd for believing in these podcasts
link |
01:13:05.640
as a major force.
link |
01:13:07.480
And most of the people who derided me have said, wow, did I not get things?
link |
01:13:11.520
It's like if you started to propose, you wanted to do the Sopranos in the era of 30
link |
01:13:19.320
minute sitcoms, it's like, you don't get it, man.
link |
01:13:22.880
The American people, they're not interested in these long plot storylines.
link |
01:13:26.040
That's your weird thing.
link |
01:13:27.540
Nobody cares, dude.
link |
01:13:29.240
Everybody just wants short, fast, memorable.
link |
01:13:32.200
And like, okay, so if you do that, you totally miss the opportunity.
link |
01:13:35.880
The savvy people used to say, kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime underestimating
link |
01:13:40.880
the intelligence of the American people.
link |
01:13:42.760
Well, that was totally wrong because they didn't calculate opportunity costs.
link |
01:13:46.880
I have been talking about the problem of Joe for a long time.
link |
01:13:51.600
The problem is, is that when the system wakes up, they're going to want to control it.
link |
01:13:56.600
And they come up with new different mechanisms of doing that.
link |
01:13:59.880
I guess one interesting one is cancel culture.
link |
01:14:02.840
Well, look at the number of people around Joe who they've come after since they've realized
link |
01:14:07.440
that Joe is really big.
link |
01:14:09.560
Joey Diaz, Brian Callan, Crystalia.
link |
01:14:17.520
Now, I'm not saying that those are all related, but I do notice that there are at least correlations
link |
01:14:28.360
between when Joe says something, when something bad happens in Joe's universe.
link |
01:14:33.400
It's easier for me to believe that that's happening when it's happening around Joe himself.
link |
01:14:40.400
But I'm worried about my friend.
link |
01:14:43.000
And I don't necessarily want to push him towards being more if he doesn't want it.
link |
01:14:48.960
Because I don't want to conscript people.
link |
01:14:51.800
He's got a great life.
link |
01:14:52.800
He's got a great situation.
link |
01:14:53.960
He's done a huge service.
link |
01:14:55.640
Thank God.
link |
01:14:56.640
Do you know how much do I owe Joe just for what he's done for you to say nothing of what
link |
01:15:02.480
he's done for me or for Brett or for Sam or any of these people?
link |
01:15:07.120
And I'd like to think that we all try to give back.
link |
01:15:10.960
But I'm worried about Joe.
link |
01:15:13.900
He's not worried.
link |
01:15:15.400
One of the inspiring things about Joe is, I mean, he's in this war alone.
link |
01:15:21.640
And the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life.
link |
01:15:25.640
Well, that's his thing.
link |
01:15:26.640
As long as he stays close to things that he loves and being, you know, one of the things
link |
01:15:30.600
is he's honest about his drug use.
link |
01:15:32.800
He loves to hunt.
link |
01:15:34.800
So he does a certain amount of like semi vice signaling up front.
link |
01:15:40.360
And then you just also know him.
link |
01:15:41.520
This is why every time they try to take him down, you use the N word, you know, like unfortunately,
link |
01:15:48.240
everybody knows who Joe is.
link |
01:15:51.160
And yes, he doesn't act as if he went to a fancy finishing school, right?
link |
01:15:58.480
That's not his energy.
link |
01:16:00.080
The fact that you've got some super smart guy who always pretends to be a meathead,
link |
01:16:04.320
just like, you know, hey, I'm a comedian, like all these defenses and disguises.
link |
01:16:08.320
Okay.
link |
01:16:09.320
He's a super smart guy who he's admitted to most of the things that, you know, you can
link |
01:16:16.200
take him down for him because everybody's been effectively in his den or his basement.
link |
01:16:20.760
Think about that studio as his basement.
link |
01:16:23.200
People have hung out with Joe so many hours that you can't tell them something about Joe
link |
01:16:26.600
or they're going to say, wow, I'm going to believe the New York Times and not the hundreds
link |
01:16:30.200
of hours I've spent on the Joe Rogan experience.
link |
01:16:32.160
But the cool thing is that this is what inspires me is that the way he's waging war against
link |
01:16:37.000
the system is just by being a good person and talking enough hours in a week where that
link |
01:16:45.080
message like bleeds throughout the words and the gaps between.
link |
01:16:50.000
And that, that's so inspiring to me that the good people can win by just being good.
link |
01:16:55.160
And he's kind and he's tough and he also, he's no pushover.
link |
01:17:00.520
No.
link |
01:17:01.520
I always worry a little bit when I sit down in my chair, you still get scared that he
link |
01:17:06.960
will call you on some kind of bullshit that you weren't even aware of.
link |
01:17:10.600
The first time I was on the show, the energy wasn't great between us and it was in a sober
link |
01:17:15.120
October situation.
link |
01:17:16.520
So I think I hadn't understood that and maybe our egos got a little bit off.
link |
01:17:22.920
I don't know.
link |
01:17:23.920
I mean, I was having fun, but maybe it was just too complicated life forms getting to
link |
01:17:28.880
know each other.
link |
01:17:29.880
The first one was probably, yeah, that made me a little nervous for the future.
link |
01:17:37.680
But then, you know, Joe and I become friends, although sometimes we have miscommunications
link |
01:17:42.360
like on Yom Kippur, I texted him and I said, Joe, you know, I want to apologize for ways
link |
01:17:49.240
of let you down as a friend that haven't been there for you and appreciate everything you've
link |
01:17:53.120
done for me.
link |
01:17:54.120
I was like, like, I get this text back and like, what the fuck is your problem?
link |
01:17:58.240
You're great, dude.
link |
01:17:59.960
I don't know what bad place you're in, but cheer up.
link |
01:18:02.440
I was like, Joe, are there any Jews in your life that apologize for what they've done?
link |
01:18:07.720
He was just like, dude, if you lost your mind, what the hell's gotten into you?
link |
01:18:11.680
Yeah.
link |
01:18:12.680
What do you think about the Spotify thing?
link |
01:18:17.840
What about it?
link |
01:18:18.840
Ask me a question.
link |
01:18:19.840
He's now, as opposed to being just a comedian with a podcast, he now is just a comedian
link |
01:18:26.080
with a podcast who stepped like in the middle of the center of cancel culture, which is
link |
01:18:31.720
like, I know Spotify is in Sweden, but they represent Silicon Valley.
link |
01:18:37.200
They represent the very kind of structures they contain and represent the kind of structures
link |
01:18:43.560
that threaten to destroy the elons of the world.
link |
01:18:48.720
And he just like stepped like with his Alex Jones and his Joe idea has just strolled right
link |
01:18:55.840
into the middle of it.
link |
01:18:56.840
Yeah.
link |
01:18:57.840
I think it's awesome.
link |
01:18:58.840
I love it.
link |
01:19:00.040
But do you think he's strong enough to, I don't know, I mean, I don't even know the
link |
01:19:05.400
right way to ask this, but is he strong enough to persevere?
link |
01:19:09.120
It's a bit interesting.
link |
01:19:10.120
It's like when Alliance decides, wow, that honey badger looks tasty, I'm going to swallow
link |
01:19:15.160
it whole.
link |
01:19:16.160
See what happens.
link |
01:19:17.160
Because I talked to him offline.
link |
01:19:19.280
He really seems to be willing to give away the hundred million, which gives him so much
link |
01:19:23.640
power.
link |
01:19:24.640
Oh, I don't, it's a powerful thing to be able to say, I don't, yeah, to the honey badger.
link |
01:19:33.480
He just strolls in, but he's willing to walk away from anything in this.
link |
01:19:36.400
Well, he's going to walk out the other side of the line.
link |
01:19:38.640
I don't think he's going to go out the way he came in.
link |
01:19:40.640
Yeah.
link |
01:19:41.640
Well, you know what it is?
link |
01:19:42.640
It's Tommy Lee Jones entering the bug.
link |
01:19:45.800
This is like a giant alien who just walks into it.
link |
01:19:48.080
He just, he gets swallowed by the bug and he blasts out from the inside.
link |
01:19:52.000
I have it as Tommy Lee Jones.
link |
01:19:53.680
Yeah.
link |
01:19:54.680
That's Joe Rogan to you.
link |
01:19:55.680
Yeah.
link |
01:19:56.680
Is that my feeling is, is that Spotify doesn't understand what they're messing with.
link |
01:19:59.560
I could be wrong, but I'm not.
link |
01:20:01.720
No, you're right.
link |
01:20:02.720
I'm right.
link |
01:20:03.720
Because Joe doesn't need anything, man.
link |
01:20:07.000
I mean, this is the weird thing about it.
link |
01:20:08.760
It's like, I'm sure that he loves all his toys, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
link |
01:20:11.360
He's a rich guy.
link |
01:20:12.360
Yes.
link |
01:20:13.360
He's got a few money.
link |
01:20:14.360
He had a few money a long time ago.
link |
01:20:17.040
And you're not, you know, the other thing about it's a bit weird being friends with
link |
01:20:22.640
a dude like that.
link |
01:20:23.640
It just is because like you call him up or he'll call you up and he's like, what's
link |
01:20:28.120
going on in your life?
link |
01:20:29.120
I don't know.
link |
01:20:30.120
Kind of depressed, trying to get some math done.
link |
01:20:32.000
What are you up?
link |
01:20:33.000
Oh, dude, I can cheer you up.
link |
01:20:34.720
I just came off of a 29,000 person stadium.
link |
01:20:37.600
It's like, oh, cool.
link |
01:20:40.080
How'd you do that?
link |
01:20:41.080
Oh, I don't know.
link |
01:20:42.080
I was on Instagram a few days ago and it's filled up just like, oh, damn.
link |
01:20:46.960
Yeah.
link |
01:20:47.960
I mean, that thing is powerful.
link |
01:20:48.960
So much love in that guy.
link |
01:20:49.960
That thing is so powerful.
link |
01:20:50.960
Yeah.
link |
01:20:51.960
So there you go.
link |
01:20:52.960
I mean, you could be that too.
link |
01:20:54.440
The instant Joe takes an interest in politics and saving the world.
link |
01:20:58.480
You might destroy all that.
link |
01:20:59.920
It's going bye bye.
link |
01:21:01.320
I promise.
link |
01:21:02.320
I just disagree with you.
link |
01:21:03.320
Okay.
link |
01:21:04.320
I mean, because you have to do it like you've said this many times before.
link |
01:21:07.720
I'll bet you.
link |
01:21:08.720
Yeah.
link |
01:21:09.720
You have a bottle of Stoli that you can get, if you get Joe Rogan to get highly politically
link |
01:21:15.840
active and call out the system for all the bullshit that it is in a very pointed and
link |
01:21:19.920
determined fashion.
link |
01:21:23.640
And he doesn't get destroyed.
link |
01:21:24.640
I'll give you.
link |
01:21:25.640
I'll give you the vodka.
link |
01:21:26.640
The vodka?
link |
01:21:27.640
Yeah.
link |
01:21:28.640
That sounds like a pretty damn good deal.
link |
01:21:29.640
Yeah.
link |
01:21:30.640
But you've said this.
link |
01:21:31.640
I mean, no living heroes, my friend.
link |
01:21:35.360
No living heroes.
link |
01:21:36.600
I just.
link |
01:21:37.760
No living heroes.
link |
01:21:39.560
It's just difficult.
link |
01:21:40.560
You just have to be good at it.
link |
01:21:42.280
I mean, if you just say generic political things, no, no, you're going to be taken down.
link |
01:21:48.160
But the more heroic you are with it, the more beautiful you are, the more you will be made
link |
01:21:54.240
to suffer if they cannot get you on reputation.
link |
01:21:56.640
If Jesus himself came down, I don't know if I ever read, I probably have never read to
link |
01:22:01.840
you the hit piece I did on Jesus.
link |
01:22:04.640
You don't know about this?
link |
01:22:05.640
No, I did not know.
link |
01:22:06.640
I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world.
link |
01:22:09.840
Wow.
link |
01:22:10.840
So whoever it was who cured cancer, you know, discovered new particles or whatever it is,
link |
01:22:16.840
I did a hit piece against them to prove that I can do it to anybody around anything at
link |
01:22:21.280
any time.
link |
01:22:22.780
Except Eddie Van Halen is what we're talking about.
link |
01:22:24.840
Well, Eddie Van Halen is now dead.
link |
01:22:26.720
But if this was a situation, you know, hot for teacher, canceled.
link |
01:22:34.080
Disrespectful.
link |
01:22:35.080
Absolutely.
link |
01:22:36.080
Also, you know, packaging female objectification for young men, clearly Eddie Van Halen is
link |
01:22:46.080
one of the worst people alive.
link |
01:22:48.000
But was the skill, the incredible inspiration that is just radiating from his music inspires
link |
01:22:56.240
so many millions that they will fight those canceled pieces.
link |
01:22:59.320
They will fight those.
link |
01:23:00.320
This is your thing.
link |
01:23:01.320
Yeah.
link |
01:23:02.320
You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil and the good is already been
link |
01:23:04.640
decided, designated the winner.
link |
01:23:06.880
Yeah.
link |
01:23:07.880
It's not true.
link |
01:23:08.880
But your belief in that it's true.
link |
01:23:10.880
Take it till you make it, no?
link |
01:23:13.880
You gotta...
link |
01:23:14.880
It's motivating both of us.
link |
01:23:16.240
Like, I also believe that we're going to win because if I don't, then I can't get out
link |
01:23:19.840
of bed and it's pretty heavy at the moment.
link |
01:23:22.160
Do you think 2021 can make us feel good about the trajectory of society?
link |
01:23:31.960
Where we emerge from this year feeling good, like there's a smile, an air quintess phase
link |
01:23:38.400
and the next time we talk, we'll be doing some kind of duet and guitar and not having
link |
01:23:43.360
this worried look on our faces.
link |
01:23:46.560
No.
link |
01:23:47.560
Okay.
link |
01:23:48.560
But you've also promised that you're going to somehow end this in a positive...
link |
01:23:53.960
Okay.
link |
01:23:54.960
So, how do you turn the no around?
link |
01:23:57.760
What's the U turn from the no?
link |
01:23:59.680
Will we get some actually decent people in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking
link |
01:24:06.160
about their next paycheck, I don't see a solution.
link |
01:24:10.560
Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are and to let you know why I
link |
01:24:14.640
don't think it's coming.
link |
01:24:18.760
First of all, both of these political parties, the leadership of them is disgusting and has
link |
01:24:23.840
to go.
link |
01:24:24.840
They're tearing us apart.
link |
01:24:26.680
They lack the will to be Americans, they don't understand the subtlety of the project.
link |
01:24:32.360
They're simply the people who figured out how to inhabit the seats and that is their
link |
01:24:36.760
great achievement.
link |
01:24:41.120
I believe that in order to solve this, you need people who can integrate, who are not
link |
01:24:45.640
partisan at the level of the partisan warriors that we're seeing, people who believe in dividing
link |
01:24:51.280
the pies of the future rather than the present pie as our main task as Americans because
link |
01:24:56.520
we are built around growth, I'm sorry to say it.
link |
01:25:02.920
You need an ability to have subtle conversations and you need the ability to exclude.
link |
01:25:10.240
At the moment, everyone knows inclusion is good, which it isn't.
link |
01:25:14.040
It's like saying, well, water is good.
link |
01:25:16.320
If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me.
link |
01:25:18.920
It's not.
link |
01:25:20.200
People drown.
link |
01:25:22.560
People need to get dehydrated.
link |
01:25:24.640
It can be life saving or life ending.
link |
01:25:27.400
It isn't good or bad.
link |
01:25:28.960
Inclusion is not good or bad.
link |
01:25:30.800
Inclusion is just inclusion.
link |
01:25:32.320
Exclusion is part of inclusion.
link |
01:25:34.680
We've taught people that they can reason through the world as subcocker spaniels.
link |
01:25:44.160
They just bark things at each other.
link |
01:25:47.600
I'm for safety.
link |
01:25:48.600
I'm for inclusion.
link |
01:25:49.720
I'm for growth.
link |
01:25:50.720
Oh, really?
link |
01:25:51.720
Do you guys use verbs?
link |
01:25:54.560
In clauses, are there compound, complex sentences?
link |
01:25:57.680
Where are we in this sea of nonsense?
link |
01:26:01.080
You have to be able to build a place where you have smart, talented people who represent
link |
01:26:07.560
a diverse group of correct opinions.
link |
01:26:10.780
You need to get rid of almost all of the people who have opinions that are antithetical
link |
01:26:15.160
to what we're trying to accomplish.
link |
01:26:17.760
You need to give them insulation, which we're terrified because we don't trust anybody,
link |
01:26:21.880
so everything has to be transparent.
link |
01:26:23.320
If you're going to the bathroom, I want those walls to be plexiglass so I can see what you're
link |
01:26:26.520
doing.
link |
01:26:27.520
That's too much transparency.
link |
01:26:29.520
We have too much and not enough at the same time.
link |
01:26:33.720
In essence, you need to ensure that people aren't worried about feeding their family
link |
01:26:39.120
every four seconds for being real.
link |
01:26:42.120
None of that is happening.
link |
01:26:43.720
Our billionaires are pathetic.
link |
01:26:47.360
What is the point of billionaires if you're not going to do billionaire type cool stuff
link |
01:26:51.840
like saying F you, and I'm going to throw $3 billion at the project of restoring the
link |
01:27:01.320
national conversation?
link |
01:27:05.160
I don't grasp this.
link |
01:27:06.920
What is the point of creating obscene wealth if we don't have anyone smart enough and caring
link |
01:27:11.160
enough to use it?
link |
01:27:12.400
I agree with that last part for sure.
link |
01:27:15.720
Let me slightly push back on the idea that the leaders themselves are broken.
link |
01:27:22.800
I feel like this goes to Joe Rogan, Joe Biden, and Trump having a debate on that program.
link |
01:27:31.880
I feel like Joe Biden has a lot of really interesting ideas that he's almost forgot
link |
01:27:39.720
how to communicate.
link |
01:27:40.720
He's been fake for so long within the system.
link |
01:27:44.120
Hillary was fake for too long.
link |
01:27:45.440
I'm sure she had real ideas at the beginning that she still was campaigning on decades
link |
01:27:49.720
later.
link |
01:27:50.720
If the system, if the platforms empowered you to search to be honest, to be real, to
link |
01:27:56.800
search for those ideas within yourself like long form conversations do, then even the
link |
01:28:03.840
Donald Trump and Joe Biden leaders we have now would take this country to a better place
link |
01:28:10.600
that would unite people.
link |
01:28:13.560
We can keep the current Congress, we just need to create better platforms.
link |
01:28:17.760
This is going to the intuition that there's good in Donald Trump.
link |
01:28:21.560
There is depth and complexity in intelligence and the same with Joe Biden.
link |
01:28:26.320
There's good in Joe Biden.
link |
01:28:28.280
It's just we're not incentivizing.
link |
01:28:33.480
There's several things I think are broken.
link |
01:28:35.080
One of them is Twitter, the other is journalism.
link |
01:28:38.160
It's just the platforms of us communicating with each other.
link |
01:28:41.560
One of the reasons that I try to come up with unifying explanations is that if you look
link |
01:28:47.280
at the number of wildfires in California, let's say that we've just seen, if you treat
link |
01:28:52.280
them all as spontaneous uncorrelated instances, it feels like, oh my God, it's just whack
link |
01:28:58.240
them all.
link |
01:28:59.240
Every time I send a fire truck here, there's a fire over there.
link |
01:29:02.200
You want to come up with something like a central theory, which is why do I suddenly
link |
01:29:07.160
have a problem when I hadn't had a problem before?
link |
01:29:10.240
I look for these unifying explanations and I found one the other day that really speaks
link |
01:29:14.840
to me.
link |
01:29:17.340
People are very frustrated because they've been trained to think about this incorrectly
link |
01:29:20.680
in my opinion, but here's the graph that you need to look at.
link |
01:29:25.240
On the X axis is time by year and on the Y axis is something like average age of a human.
link |
01:29:37.120
The title of the graph is Any Desirable Situation Involving Institutions.
link |
01:29:44.840
That could be CEO, it could be tenured professor, it could be who's getting grants, it could
link |
01:29:53.760
be the age at which people win Nobel Prizes.
link |
01:30:01.920
In other words, for a long period of time, the average age of the person in a desirable
link |
01:30:11.440
situation has been increasing something like nine months for every 12.
link |
01:30:19.360
Those graphs have to go down at some point.
link |
01:30:22.120
The specter of having five people all born in the 1940s as the final entrance in the
link |
01:30:31.880
many presidential context, that makes no sense.
link |
01:30:36.440
Think about how bizarre a thing that nobody's even really talking about.
link |
01:30:40.440
The last five people were all ancient by presidential standards, not one, not two, but five.
link |
01:30:50.680
We are talking about a contest between somebody who is the oldest of the baby boomers, the
link |
01:30:57.760
very beginning of the baby boom, summer of 46th birthday, fighting somebody who is in
link |
01:31:03.520
the silent generation, the silent generation guy in a town hall in Florida gets this question
link |
01:31:09.560
from a Gen Z guy saying, what's going on with my future?
link |
01:31:14.200
Joe Biden has the audacity to say, I'm a transitional president.
link |
01:31:20.160
You guys are the highly educated one.
link |
01:31:23.160
Biden has any generation in history needed a transitional 78 year old person to take
link |
01:31:28.680
office.
link |
01:31:29.680
It's bizarre.
link |
01:31:30.680
It's preposterous.
link |
01:31:31.680
That graph is the graph we can't talk about.
link |
01:31:35.320
That graph is the graph of our destruction because it has the, you can make a one line
link |
01:31:44.320
argument, which is sounds like ageism, which isn't a very good argument now.
link |
01:31:51.200
But what it does is it muddles the conversation.
link |
01:31:54.720
And you always have to ask yourself the question, if this conversation becomes muddled, who
link |
01:31:58.800
wins as a result of the muddling?
link |
01:32:01.600
It's a battle.
link |
01:32:02.600
Let's just win it.
link |
01:32:04.280
Let's win the battle.
link |
01:32:05.280
Are you running?
link |
01:32:06.280
I'll run.
link |
01:32:07.280
I was born in Russia, can't run.
link |
01:32:12.320
But we Russians can hack elections, so we'll figure it out.
link |
01:32:15.680
This is me officially announcing my run.
link |
01:32:17.600
I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida.
link |
01:32:21.880
Lex, what is it that you really want to ask?
link |
01:32:26.680
I want to put some responsibility on the portal, the portal, the portal, that the portal gives
link |
01:32:34.480
power to the people in that graph.
link |
01:32:39.440
Because you put it quite brilliantly, that the people that move the world, their age
link |
01:32:45.040
has been going up, and not move the world, but put in the position where they get the
link |
01:32:50.240
chance to affect the world.
link |
01:32:54.400
These new platforms, I think Twitter falls in them, give power to the younger people.
link |
01:33:00.200
It doesn't have to be about Asia necessarily, but the younger thinking people.
link |
01:33:04.240
So that's a promising thing.
link |
01:33:06.840
And you're like Gandalf.
link |
01:33:09.240
You get to pick your photos, whatever, I'm not very good with the analogy.
link |
01:33:14.240
But the whole point is for you as Gandalf to find a photo.
link |
01:33:16.240
I don't know that I make that much sense.
link |
01:33:18.040
Gandalf makes sense.
link |
01:33:20.000
I don't know if people know how to fit me into this ecosystem.
link |
01:33:24.920
I think there's something in my presentation that people find very confusing.
link |
01:33:27.680
No, figure it out.
link |
01:33:28.680
I disagree with you, but you need to look at the mirror and think like, what is it?
link |
01:33:33.000
Is it maybe you need a mustache?
link |
01:33:36.080
I don't know.
link |
01:33:38.520
But there's something about figuring out how to be a charismatic communicator in this.
link |
01:33:43.800
And that's the responsibility.
link |
01:33:45.240
You said like finishing sentences with the LOL is painful for your soul.
link |
01:33:50.920
That's just how somebody lets me know I don't have to take their opinion seriously.
link |
01:33:54.920
It's still the language, the way that people are communicating and you're swimming that
link |
01:33:59.160
wave.
link |
01:34:00.160
You have a big platform.
link |
01:34:01.160
I have a growing platform.
link |
01:34:02.680
It feels like this is the place to give power.
link |
01:34:05.200
I agree.
link |
01:34:06.200
But we're going to get swatted down.
link |
01:34:07.400
I just don't think so.
link |
01:34:08.600
You're wrong.
link |
01:34:09.600
Why are you afraid of the big, like this is I've studied it.
link |
01:34:13.280
Because I've studied.
link |
01:34:15.600
Let me ask you a question, Lex.
link |
01:34:18.840
I believe that every society is supposed to have a collection of what I call break glass
link |
01:34:25.400
in case of emergency people.
link |
01:34:27.560
Yeah, these are people who are universally loved and trusted by your society.
link |
01:34:33.120
For example, David Attenborough, the great British naturalist and presenter recently
link |
01:34:39.600
came on Instagram.
link |
01:34:40.600
He's worried about the planet.
link |
01:34:43.160
And I said, you know, look, there are very few of these people left.
link |
01:34:46.640
Let's pay attention, find out what he has to say.
link |
01:34:48.480
Maybe he's going to be an ass.
link |
01:34:49.840
Maybe he's going to be in it.
link |
01:34:50.840
Maybe he's going to say wrong things.
link |
01:34:51.840
Don't know.
link |
01:34:52.840
Tell me about your top 10 universal American heroes.
link |
01:34:57.520
This is not a rhetorical question.
link |
01:34:59.680
No.
link |
01:35:00.680
Give me five.
link |
01:35:02.440
Everybody looks to that person and says, yep, the best of us.
link |
01:35:05.880
Well, not divisive.
link |
01:35:08.280
Well, everybody's an interesting concept.
link |
01:35:11.440
I mean, Elon Musk is very divisive, right?
link |
01:35:15.000
I'm talking about overwhelmingly, people would follow that person if that person gave
link |
01:35:20.440
a rousing, intelligent speech that said, we must act now because we're in dire straits.
link |
01:35:28.360
I think a lot of people fall in that category.
link |
01:35:30.040
For me, it would be in the tech world, in the engineering world.
link |
01:35:34.920
No, no, no.
link |
01:35:35.920
How many names?
link |
01:35:36.920
Elon Musk.
link |
01:35:37.920
Elon Musk.
link |
01:35:38.920
The Rock.
link |
01:35:43.360
I'm thinking, who is the most eloquent actor?
link |
01:35:46.320
You think celebrities, so people with platforms.
link |
01:35:48.200
I didn't say celebrities.
link |
01:35:49.200
They have to be well known.
link |
01:35:50.200
I believe, yeah, so this goes to Joe Rogan.
link |
01:35:59.840
First two did not really impress me as being what I said, but okay.
link |
01:36:04.880
Elon, several years ago, would have.
link |
01:36:08.360
Can you try to, Joe Rogan has.
link |
01:36:11.480
Why do they fail?
link |
01:36:12.480
Why is Elon Musk?
link |
01:36:13.480
Lots of people treat Joe Rogan as if he's some sort of right wing racist because they've
link |
01:36:18.280
never watched his program.
link |
01:36:19.680
They don't know who his friends are.
link |
01:36:20.680
I don't know.
link |
01:36:21.680
Oh, but when I thought you said everybody, I thought you meant a large enough people
link |
01:36:29.080
where a huge change can happen, not actually literally everybody.
link |
01:36:33.760
I mean, people who've pulled off something where everybody's convinced that that person
link |
01:36:40.440
just deeply, I think I've told you the story before, but the one time I've seen the power
link |
01:36:51.240
of a figure like this, very few times I've been in a large crowd and I've seen people
link |
01:36:57.200
just moved where they would do almost anything good, bad, and different because they were
link |
01:37:02.160
primed.
link |
01:37:05.220
One was a Rolling Stones concert.
link |
01:37:07.560
The other one was Nelson Mandela coming to Boston and man, you've never seen anything
link |
01:37:14.160
like this.
link |
01:37:15.160
You check out the photos from the banks of the Charles River when Nelson Mandela came.
link |
01:37:22.240
There are people that you need in your dark hours and we can't agree on who they are and
link |
01:37:26.160
as soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit.
link |
01:37:29.440
We get out the shit breach.
link |
01:37:31.640
I just disagree with this.
link |
01:37:32.880
I think...
link |
01:37:33.880
What do we disagree about here?
link |
01:37:35.680
I think it doesn't matter who it is.
link |
01:37:37.520
I think really good speeches are needed and I think a lot...
link |
01:37:41.360
I was going to give them.
link |
01:37:42.360
I saw Killer Mike try to give a good speech.
link |
01:37:44.560
Yeah, he did.
link |
01:37:45.560
In Atlanta, right?
link |
01:37:46.560
Yeah.
link |
01:37:47.560
He did.
link |
01:37:48.560
That was something.
link |
01:37:49.560
Very impressed.
link |
01:37:50.560
Yeah.
link |
01:37:51.560
Even Killer Mike immediately gets into this sell out, like, yeah, but he didn't take up
link |
01:37:59.800
the responsibility, I would say, of going bigger.
link |
01:38:06.040
He was speaking to the community on this particular moment.
link |
01:38:09.920
He's exceptional at it and he was speaking to this particular moment.
link |
01:38:13.760
He didn't take it a step farther, which is giving the same speech but bigger than race,
link |
01:38:23.520
bigger than this particular moment, but more about the American project.
link |
01:38:29.520
You know the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson?
link |
01:38:31.840
Yes.
link |
01:38:32.840
Yeah, there you go.
link |
01:38:33.840
That's a good example.
link |
01:38:34.840
That guy, until we screw him up, is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.
link |
01:38:40.520
Yeah, exactly.
link |
01:38:41.520
I mean, Jaco, maybe.
link |
01:38:42.840
That's another...
link |
01:38:43.840
Jaco's pretty good.
link |
01:38:45.840
Jaco is pretty good.
link |
01:38:47.240
Can't really tell.
link |
01:38:48.480
Is he a Democrat?
link |
01:38:49.480
Is he a Republican?
link |
01:38:50.480
I don't know.
link |
01:38:51.480
He's an American.
link |
01:38:52.480
That's for damn sure.
link |
01:38:53.480
Yeah.
link |
01:38:54.480
I think there's a lot of folks.
link |
01:38:55.480
No, I think Jaco...
link |
01:38:56.980
There aren't.
link |
01:38:57.980
That's one of the reasons why Jaco is so important.
link |
01:38:59.480
Yeah.
link |
01:39:00.960
Your podcast, The Portal, is something in my little universe, is something a lot of people
link |
01:39:08.160
really love, and it moves them.
link |
01:39:11.320
They draw a lot of meaning from it, and also especially in difficult times.
link |
01:39:18.920
They...
link |
01:39:20.120
It gives them a comfort of through this kind of...
link |
01:39:24.360
It's not just nuance.
link |
01:39:26.080
There's like, even when you're talking about chaos, there's love underneath all of it,
link |
01:39:31.880
and I think people draw a lot of meaning from it, which is why they are wondering why you
link |
01:39:39.040
haven't been doing that many podcasts, or you haven't done it in maybe a month and a
link |
01:39:44.880
half or two months in this most difficult of times.
link |
01:39:49.840
Is there a good reason?
link |
01:39:51.840
Yeah.
link |
01:39:52.840
There are lots of good reasons.
link |
01:39:56.920
The first one is kind of weird, which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous.
link |
01:40:03.880
If you say, I don't want to be famous, it's like, oh, you're just saying that because
link |
01:40:07.120
you want to be...
link |
01:40:08.120
Everyone would think you're famous.
link |
01:40:09.120
You're not that famous.
link |
01:40:10.120
Okay.
link |
01:40:11.120
Yeah.
link |
01:40:12.120
I don't love being as well known as I've become.
link |
01:40:19.960
There's lots of things that are fun about it.
link |
01:40:21.520
It's wonderful that I can go to any city in the world, there are portal listeners there.
link |
01:40:27.320
All I need to do is put out a tweet and 20 people show up for a drink.
link |
01:40:30.880
They're amazing people.
link |
01:40:32.040
They're...
link |
01:40:33.040
Almost.
link |
01:40:34.040
I mean, you can see my live Q&As on my Instagram page.
link |
01:40:37.480
If you go to Eric R. Weinstein, I'd just pick somebody randomly, and I was really worried
link |
01:40:41.800
about it at first, and maybe I should be worried about it, but in general, people all over the
link |
01:40:47.520
world are just so positive and so...
link |
01:40:51.480
And thoughtful and deep and have a story that's kind of...
link |
01:40:54.200
Because they're self selected, right?
link |
01:40:55.800
Yeah.
link |
01:40:56.800
But I don't like the fame.
link |
01:40:58.300
The thing we just described comes with the fame.
link |
01:41:00.320
It's a beautiful thing.
link |
01:41:01.320
You don't...
link |
01:41:02.320
You're worried that it's getting...
link |
01:41:03.840
It's ephemeral.
link |
01:41:04.840
It'll...
link |
01:41:05.840
Look, Lex, it'll turn on you in a heartbeat.
link |
01:41:10.200
It'll turn on you in a heartbeat, and the other problem is I don't like my audience being
link |
01:41:15.640
my audience.
link |
01:41:16.640
I want to get closer to them.
link |
01:41:18.080
I want to talk to them.
link |
01:41:19.080
I want to find out what is this doing in your life?
link |
01:41:21.120
My house fills up with art that people send me.
link |
01:41:24.760
The lightest thing is an effects pedal called something like...
link |
01:41:28.240
I don't know.
link |
01:41:29.240
It's a bow tie overdrive from a guy in Mexico.
link |
01:41:32.120
Right?
link |
01:41:33.120
Yeah.
link |
01:41:34.120
You play electric, by the way, in a tiny little tangent.
link |
01:41:36.640
Did you play electric?
link |
01:41:37.840
I have a Stratocaster, but it doesn't have a strap, and I don't know what to do with
link |
01:41:41.960
it, and I have a bad amp.
link |
01:41:43.040
So you should hook me up with the...
link |
01:41:46.960
We'll find it a home, maybe.
link |
01:41:49.520
You're starting to sense that this is too much?
link |
01:41:51.840
No.
link |
01:41:52.840
I want to be here.
link |
01:41:54.680
I want to do the work very simply.
link |
01:42:00.680
I don't have an ability to fully explain myself.
link |
01:42:03.400
I don't want to claim that I don't love the fact that...
link |
01:42:06.880
How much love do we get from these programs?
link |
01:42:11.120
Actually, people are incredibly generous.
link |
01:42:16.640
People have begged me, set up a Patreon account, and I haven't been able to do it.
link |
01:42:22.000
I should do it.
link |
01:42:23.000
I've said to everybody, it's a business, it's a business, it's a business, but they're
link |
01:42:26.840
so used to being defrauded when somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives.
link |
01:42:31.760
My goal was to say, I'm going to keep talking to you about...
link |
01:42:34.720
You want to know why I started doing ads on my show was because I wanted people to think
link |
01:42:38.560
from the get go, this is a business, this is what I sound like when I'm selling.
link |
01:42:45.600
But you see, I've lost weight.
link |
01:42:49.280
A lot of that is due to Athletic Greens.
link |
01:42:51.200
Athletic Greens.
link |
01:42:53.200
Code...
link |
01:42:56.200
I don't know what my promo code is for Athletic Greens.
link |
01:42:59.560
They're probably athleticgreens.com slash portal.
link |
01:43:01.920
But doesn't matter.
link |
01:43:02.920
Just slash portal.
link |
01:43:03.920
Fitbit, who doesn't advertise, has also been instrumental as well as a guy named Steven
link |
01:43:08.760
Cates, who was a fan from the show, found me on the street and just said, I'm a trainer.
link |
01:43:14.120
I want to help train you.
link |
01:43:15.120
It's got me on a good path.
link |
01:43:19.080
That's one paid advertiser and two people I'm calling out just because two outfits, Steven
link |
01:43:25.640
Cates and Fitbit, that have changed my life.
link |
01:43:28.600
I wanted people to say, you don't have to be afraid of advertising.
link |
01:43:32.000
If I do it in this way, this is powering your show.
link |
01:43:36.600
But the whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy feelings like, oh,
link |
01:43:41.440
wow, I knew he was a shill.
link |
01:43:44.160
He's a grifter.
link |
01:43:45.160
Okay.
link |
01:43:46.160
I didn't love that.
link |
01:43:47.160
I didn't love the issues.
link |
01:43:48.160
So I didn't set up a Patreon.
link |
01:43:50.440
The security issues for talking and being me are significant.
link |
01:43:56.520
And I don't have the kind of money to hire around the clock.
link |
01:44:00.560
I mean, I desperately want to get to a level of wealth where I don't have to think about
link |
01:44:06.200
money.
link |
01:44:07.200
I don't think it's...
link |
01:44:08.360
Some people want money because they need it for status.
link |
01:44:12.320
I think I can handle status if I want it doing this.
link |
01:44:16.280
I don't want the status necessarily and I don't want the status, but I don't want the
link |
01:44:21.880
fame that goes with it.
link |
01:44:24.680
I want the money.
link |
01:44:25.680
I don't want to be seen as this is about money because it's about a substance.
link |
01:44:31.920
All of those things, that's part of...
link |
01:44:34.840
I haven't solved these issues.
link |
01:44:37.520
I've been feeling bad because people say, where's the Port Award?
link |
01:44:40.280
We're desperate.
link |
01:44:41.280
These are difficult times.
link |
01:44:42.280
We have an election coming up.
link |
01:44:43.280
And it's just like, do you think for a moment that I want to explain that I actually got
link |
01:44:48.120
really uncomfortable being as well known as I was and then what is it that I want?
link |
01:44:51.760
Because I want to be better known and less well known at the same time.
link |
01:44:55.040
It doesn't...
link |
01:44:56.040
There's nothing the audience can do.
link |
01:44:57.040
I don't want the audience to be the audience.
link |
01:44:58.480
That doesn't make sense to people.
link |
01:44:59.680
I want it to be a business, but I don't think people need to fear a business if the business
link |
01:45:03.840
is open about being a business.
link |
01:45:06.920
And then that's all to the side.
link |
01:45:09.240
What you're seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly meta violent period in our
link |
01:45:15.800
online existence.
link |
01:45:19.560
And I believe that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are completely screwed
link |
01:45:25.080
at the moment, the leadership of these parties is unsalvageable, unworkable.
link |
01:45:30.720
Everyone hears that from inside the two party system.
link |
01:45:33.400
Oh, I get it.
link |
01:45:35.080
He's trying to subtract votes off of Biden.
link |
01:45:36.800
Oh, I get it.
link |
01:45:37.800
He's trying to scuttle Trump.
link |
01:45:38.800
Oh, I get it.
link |
01:45:40.400
This is a play for his show because he's trying to plug in to discuss.
link |
01:45:44.320
There's a Bill Hicks routine on marketing.
link |
01:45:46.440
Have you ever seen this?
link |
01:45:48.280
Brilliant.
link |
01:45:49.280
He recommended it to everyone where he comes out on stage and he says, are there any people
link |
01:45:54.280
in marketing and sales in the audience?
link |
01:45:56.560
Okay, great.
link |
01:45:58.000
Can you do us all a favor and die?
link |
01:46:00.960
And like everybody laughs.
link |
01:46:02.360
He's like, no, I'm not laughing.
link |
01:46:04.200
I'm seeing him being serious.
link |
01:46:05.200
So he talks about how marketing is horrible.
link |
01:46:07.440
So you're like, where's this act going?
link |
01:46:09.480
Then he gets to the point where it's like, oh, I know how you marketing people think.
link |
01:46:15.040
Bill's going after that resentment dollar.
link |
01:46:17.760
That's good dollar.
link |
01:46:18.760
Let's get that resentment anti marketing dollar.
link |
01:46:20.600
Yeah.
link |
01:46:21.600
It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying.
link |
01:46:22.600
I really hate marketers.
link |
01:46:23.600
Oh, that's good.
link |
01:46:24.600
It's the authenticity dollar.
link |
01:46:26.600
You can't escape this kind of negative marketing thought.
link |
01:46:31.800
And I guess that gets to the issue that I don't want to be destroyed in advance of this election.
link |
01:46:41.280
I don't think it's a good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting how completely
link |
01:46:48.280
ridiculous Donald Trump and Joe Biden are as candidates for the president of the United
link |
01:46:52.640
States.
link |
01:46:53.640
Full stop.
link |
01:46:54.640
None of this makes any sense.
link |
01:46:55.760
These moderators of these pseudo debates, we're in the wrong format with the wrong people.
link |
01:47:01.760
No part of this makes a wit of sense.
link |
01:47:05.840
Can I try to push back several claims?
link |
01:47:09.120
One is I don't believe the systems as they stand now can destroy their request on voice,
link |
01:47:19.920
the voice.
link |
01:47:20.920
You're a child.
link |
01:47:21.920
I'm sorry to say that.
link |
01:47:23.520
But well, let me, well, it's also possible.
link |
01:47:26.280
Let's fight.
link |
01:47:27.280
It's entirely possible that you're the child, because a child would say you would call other
link |
01:47:33.400
people a child.
link |
01:47:34.400
Yeah.
link |
01:47:35.400
Get in the first blow.
link |
01:47:36.400
That's a big reveal to tell.
link |
01:47:40.880
Because the only power they have is to attack you psychologically.
link |
01:47:44.960
No.
link |
01:47:45.960
Well, I believe that the army of people that love you is much more powerful than mainstream
link |
01:47:55.160
media, than people that you might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said,
link |
01:48:00.960
which has tried to reduce you, like the marketing thinking, I just believe there's an army,
link |
01:48:09.400
maybe there's a better term, of people that see you for who you are and are hungry.
link |
01:48:16.320
I'm not disputing those things.
link |
01:48:17.720
I know what I'm saying.
link |
01:48:19.480
I would venture to say as your therapist that you're actually, the battle is all in
link |
01:48:28.600
your mind that you have found these demons in the system and they're just a tiny minority
link |
01:48:38.080
and it's all in your mind.
link |
01:48:39.440
They cannot actually remove, they're not strong enough to remove the voice of Eric Weinstein
link |
01:48:47.760
to silence the voice.
link |
01:48:48.960
I love this.
link |
01:48:50.800
This is some of the best fiction writing I've ever heard.
link |
01:48:57.120
Let me tell you, I have relatives who've known me my entire life, where one article
link |
01:49:02.400
in the New York Times, they will believe that over me.
link |
01:49:05.920
My contention is that that has no power except to affect your psychology.
link |
01:49:11.200
You're not hearing me.
link |
01:49:12.200
What you have to do is the Rogan thing, just laugh.
link |
01:49:13.840
You're not hearing me.
link |
01:49:14.840
Just laugh.
link |
01:49:15.840
I am laughing.
link |
01:49:16.840
I know.
link |
01:49:17.840
But more.
link |
01:49:18.840
No.
link |
01:49:19.840
I'm telling you something.
link |
01:49:20.840
Yes.
link |
01:49:21.840
The way this works is through ruin.
link |
01:49:26.600
Ruin can come to anyone.
link |
01:49:27.600
There's no one who cannot be ruined.
link |
01:49:29.960
Every single person is signed up right now to be ruined by the system.
link |
01:49:37.120
Don't you understand that you have more power than the system?
link |
01:49:41.440
You can ruin the system.
link |
01:49:43.600
Your Twitter account, the podcast, that's what I'm telling you about the army.
link |
01:49:47.800
I agree that my Twitter account, my pocket, but what we've seen, for example, you saw
link |
01:49:52.440
what happened to Brett's Articles of Unity project?
link |
01:49:55.320
Yes.
link |
01:49:56.320
Okay.
link |
01:49:57.320
What happened?
link |
01:49:58.320
On the Twitter site.
link |
01:49:59.320
On the Twitter site.
link |
01:50:00.320
What happened?
link |
01:50:02.800
What happened?
link |
01:50:03.800
Well, actually, that's not an answer.
link |
01:50:04.800
Say the word.
link |
01:50:05.800
It was blocked or removed from Twitter.
link |
01:50:08.000
Suspended.
link |
01:50:09.000
Sounds suspended.
link |
01:50:10.000
Okay.
link |
01:50:11.000
I have a direct line to Jack.
link |
01:50:14.600
Yeah.
link |
01:50:15.600
Okay.
link |
01:50:16.600
So I'm talking to the CEO who I am crazy enough to still believe in.
link |
01:50:21.000
Good.
link |
01:50:22.000
I do too.
link |
01:50:23.000
I believe it.
link |
01:50:24.000
There's a very strange thing going on with Jack Dorsey.
link |
01:50:27.240
I cannot possibly reconcile the actions with the person I've... That is a next level mind
link |
01:50:34.680
in there.
link |
01:50:37.040
I don't know it well enough to say that it's all next level.
link |
01:50:39.880
I'm not claiming he doesn't have any blind spots.
link |
01:50:42.080
Every smart person I know has blind spots.
link |
01:50:43.880
I don't know what he's up against, blah, blah, blah.
link |
01:50:46.800
There's no way that the Jack Dorsey that I've talked to and the Jack Dorsey that interacted
link |
01:50:52.240
over articles of unity can be the same person.
link |
01:50:55.560
He is constrained by that company in some way that doesn't make sense to me.
link |
01:50:59.560
Either that or he's the most deplicitest person on earth and I'm not believing it.
link |
01:51:02.640
I just don't buy it.
link |
01:51:03.960
Okay?
link |
01:51:04.960
Yeah.
link |
01:51:05.960
Something horrible is happening.
link |
01:51:10.240
My claim is I can remove you functionally from the chessboard in a tiny number of moves,
link |
01:51:17.440
no matter who you are, no matter how virtuous or how much of a bastard you've been your
link |
01:51:21.080
entire life, it doesn't take more than three or four moves to basically neuter you as a
link |
01:51:26.720
force.
link |
01:51:27.720
Yeah.
link |
01:51:28.720
I disagree that if that's possible, that means I'm not very good at chess.
link |
01:51:34.160
Unity 2020 was removed from Twitter because it's not good enough, not within the system.
link |
01:51:40.320
The army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea was too small.
link |
01:51:46.280
Okay.
link |
01:51:47.280
Your uncertainty in doubt is the name of the game, the coin of the realm.
link |
01:51:51.640
Psychology though.
link |
01:51:52.640
It's not real power.
link |
01:51:53.800
It just affects the mind.
link |
01:51:55.160
Okay.
link |
01:51:56.160
I have a reading assignment for you.
link |
01:51:57.620
Because you're Russian, you'll really enjoy this.
link |
01:52:01.400
As part of the Great American Tobacco Settlement, the Tobacco Institute had to discourage its
link |
01:52:06.800
archives of all of its strategies, all of its skull duggery, and put it on the web for
link |
01:52:12.240
all time so that we can all understand how the tobacco companies got together and destroyed
link |
01:52:18.400
people.
link |
01:52:19.400
Right?
link |
01:52:20.400
You see, tobacco destroys people.
link |
01:52:22.600
You can see, Scientology destroys people.
link |
01:52:26.320
There are various vindictive organizations that will not tolerate reality in opposition
link |
01:52:36.240
to them.
link |
01:52:37.240
Let's take them down.
link |
01:52:38.240
Okay.
link |
01:52:39.240
That's what I'm trying to tell you is.
link |
01:52:40.600
Okay.
link |
01:52:41.600
Well, why aren't you doing the podcast to return?
link |
01:52:44.080
Because that's one of the weapons of war.
link |
01:52:47.760
Well, first of all, if you're at war, I don't want to discuss strategy on a podcast, right?
link |
01:52:58.000
But that's your misunderstanding.
link |
01:52:59.000
What did Montgomery say about Rommel?
link |
01:53:02.120
But wasn't his line, I read your book, You Beautiful Bastard?
link |
01:53:05.400
It's like, why are you using the tactics that you already explained?
link |
01:53:09.040
Okay.
link |
01:53:10.040
So, one of the things I'm doing is I'm not having a strategic conversation with you and
link |
01:53:14.200
several hundred thousand of our closest friends.
link |
01:53:20.320
I pulled back because this is not the battle that I know what I'm doing.
link |
01:53:28.560
I do not feel passionately enough about defeating Donald Trump to elect Joe Biden, even if that's
link |
01:53:34.200
the way I'm going to ultimately vote, right?
link |
01:53:39.720
I don't believe in the Biden Democratic Party.
link |
01:53:42.560
I don't believe in the Trump Republican Party.
link |
01:53:45.480
So yes, it's an incredibly consequential election.
link |
01:53:48.600
But to me, it's like the Crips and the Bloods and the Latin Kings fighting over the right
link |
01:53:54.120
to extort a business and the business trying to figure out who it wants to do the extorting.
link |
01:54:00.280
But don't you think, listen, there's very few people that are as good with the English
link |
01:54:04.280
language as you.
link |
01:54:05.280
Don't you think it's possible to draw a line that in between, that finds how we find our
link |
01:54:15.120
common humanity, that ensures a better 2021 without having to say like Donald Trump is
link |
01:54:22.440
evil or Joe Biden is incompetent or any of that, just somehow draw beautiful lines.
link |
01:54:27.760
I am seeing people did so much pain.
link |
01:54:30.680
This election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who comments on it, Lex.
link |
01:54:37.080
Maybe they're not good enough.
link |
01:54:38.400
They're not good enough.
link |
01:54:39.400
No.
link |
01:54:40.400
Okay.
link |
01:54:41.400
Do you believe in me?
link |
01:54:42.880
Yes.
link |
01:54:43.880
You do?
link |
01:54:44.880
Yes.
link |
01:54:45.880
Listen to me very carefully.
link |
01:54:46.880
My spider sense, my intuition that has allowed me to survive in this space, I've been mouthing
link |
01:54:53.160
off since the 80s, tells me this is a super dangerous time for smart people.
link |
01:55:00.640
To be spending the dry powder because the election doesn't make sense.
link |
01:55:05.640
It doesn't mean that I don't have a sense that one outcome would be better than the
link |
01:55:10.360
other probably, but the variance on that, I'm not even positive that I'm right.
link |
01:55:16.080
These two options are so completely inappropriate to the world of 2020.
link |
01:55:22.680
What we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and more silent generation
link |
01:55:27.680
people trying to sort out a highly technical world being mediated through social media.
link |
01:55:36.200
We need more exclusion.
link |
01:55:37.800
We need more actual elites.
link |
01:55:39.920
The people we've called the elites are not the elite.
link |
01:55:42.440
They need to go.
link |
01:55:43.440
Yeah.
link |
01:55:44.440
We need excellence, competence.
link |
01:55:45.920
We need people who can be trusted behind closed doors and we need to close the doors
link |
01:55:50.480
so we can't see what those people are doing.
link |
01:55:55.080
Here's the thing.
link |
01:55:56.080
Imagine you had a bunch of people who'd all seen action in combat, had all volunteered
link |
01:56:01.920
to be part of the armed services, had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need
link |
01:56:06.000
to.
link |
01:56:07.000
So you were convinced that these people had put their lives on their line for their
link |
01:56:09.960
country, not for a payday.
link |
01:56:12.720
Imagine you had 10 of these people with technical backgrounds.
link |
01:56:16.080
Men, women, black, white, Muslim, Jew, doesn't matter.
link |
01:56:22.360
I would trust those people and I'd close the door.
link |
01:56:27.440
I don't want to know what they talked about.
link |
01:56:29.240
I don't want transparency into all of their negotiations.
link |
01:56:33.440
I want to know that they're patriotic, that they see something in the world bigger than
link |
01:56:37.120
themselves and their family fortunes.
link |
01:56:40.120
I want to know that they're courageous.
link |
01:56:42.440
I want to know that they've got all of our well being and I'm willing to roll the dice
link |
01:56:46.760
and if they screw us over, I'd rather go down like that.
link |
01:56:49.640
Okay.
link |
01:56:50.640
So I disagree with you there because there's a difference between those and Jaco because
link |
01:56:57.080
you're not speaking to people with credentials of a particular...
link |
01:57:00.360
No, I'm talking about self credentialed people.
link |
01:57:02.480
I view Jaco as self credentialed.
link |
01:57:04.640
But the powerful thing about Jaco is he's not only self credentialed, but he's been
link |
01:57:10.440
real with people.
link |
01:57:12.840
The magical thing about Jaco isn't his book, isn't his life story.
link |
01:57:16.840
He's been talking on a podcast for a long.
link |
01:57:19.640
There's something real that happens.
link |
01:57:21.880
Okay.
link |
01:57:22.880
So if you took Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard and you took Jaco Willing and maybe Jesse
link |
01:57:29.720
Ventura, right?
link |
01:57:32.640
You can take Bernie Sanders who's a lone voice.
link |
01:57:38.840
You take all of these people who've really just risked.
link |
01:57:44.280
Why do we trust...
link |
01:57:45.280
Why is Catherine Hepburn the best that Hollywood ever produced?
link |
01:57:48.280
Because she told Hollywood to go fuck itself, hard.
link |
01:57:54.280
They gave her four Academy Awards and she said, love you, sweeties.
link |
01:57:58.200
I'm going to use them as the doorstop for the bathrooms in my house.
link |
01:58:01.600
See that's skill.
link |
01:58:02.600
That's just...
link |
01:58:04.100
That's what you were talking about.
link |
01:58:05.840
Be Catherine Hepburn.
link |
01:58:08.120
Audrey Hepburn is pretty amazing, but Catherine Hepburn is next level, right?
link |
01:58:12.400
Well, you...
link |
01:58:13.400
I mean, that's what you're trying to say to me.
link |
01:58:14.720
Yeah.
link |
01:58:15.720
Okay.
link |
01:58:16.720
I'm trying to figure it out, Lex.
link |
01:58:17.720
I haven't answered yet.
link |
01:58:18.720
What I do know is that this election is chewing people up and I mean two separate things.
link |
01:58:23.800
One that parties don't have enough integrity, that if you comment either for or against,
link |
01:58:29.080
there's a short sequence where you make a comment that's nuanced, you get referenced
link |
01:58:34.960
to something, right?
link |
01:58:36.360
Like, take this thing about, you know, find people on both sides.
link |
01:58:41.640
That is non resolved after n years, whether the context should be reported or not.
link |
01:58:49.120
We are in some situation in which Democrats and Republicans are primed to fight each other
link |
01:58:55.000
the way introducing two ants from two different ant colonies always produces a battle, okay?
link |
01:59:01.160
I don't want to be in that fray because those people are going to kill each other mindlessly
link |
01:59:07.400
like robots and until the election is concluded, like, do I think this is dire?
link |
01:59:13.840
Yes.
link |
01:59:14.840
Could it be make or break?
link |
01:59:15.840
Absolutely.
link |
01:59:16.840
I'm not saying that.
link |
01:59:17.840
Do I know which way this goes?
link |
01:59:18.840
I can make an excellent argument that we need to elect Joe Biden right now, that we've
link |
01:59:22.520
got a situation which can only be cured by voting for Joe Biden.
link |
01:59:26.840
I can make another argument that we could have a situation that can only be cured by defeating
link |
01:59:31.840
Joe Biden right now and all of the things that the modern Democratic Party represents.
link |
01:59:38.840
I don't have, you know, it's not the lady and the tiger.
link |
01:59:43.960
We're choosing between the tiger and the tiger.
link |
01:59:45.960
It's the Sumatran tiger versus the Siberian tiger, right?
link |
01:59:49.240
I'm trying to think, well, which tiger do I have a better chance against?
link |
01:59:54.400
The key problem for us politically is that we have to divorce the concept of the center
link |
02:00:00.400
and moderation from kleptocracy.
link |
02:00:04.040
Every time we try to say something like, we need more moderate solutions, we need more
link |
02:00:08.320
pluralistic solutions, people will say, wow, you just want to hand us right back into the
link |
02:00:13.200
swamp, don't you?
link |
02:00:14.200
Those swamp people, because the moderates and the swamp people are the same people, right?
link |
02:00:20.760
So then we have these two crazy wings.
link |
02:00:23.200
We can't have crazy right wing people.
link |
02:00:25.320
I don't want any Tiki torch BS.
link |
02:00:27.880
We can't have crazy left wing.
link |
02:00:29.560
Don't attack my courthouse.
link |
02:00:32.000
Really don't attack my courthouse.
link |
02:00:34.320
And we can't have moderates.
link |
02:00:35.320
It's like, okay, how do we install our children and rape pillage and get these speaking fees
link |
02:00:39.760
when we're out of office and become, you know, cozy with the things when we're supposed
link |
02:00:44.920
to be regulating them and then, you know, become their lobbyists, you know, immediately
link |
02:00:49.280
when we leave office, all of this stuff.
link |
02:00:51.780
We need an entirely different system.
link |
02:00:54.120
And I can't talk about that at the moment.
link |
02:00:57.200
When I talk, people say, oh, wow, so you're going to sit this one out because you're a
link |
02:01:00.760
pussy, because you're a coward.
link |
02:01:02.760
Great to know, Eric.
link |
02:01:03.760
We thought better of you.
link |
02:01:04.760
Buy, click, you know.
link |
02:01:06.160
I don't know what to do.
link |
02:01:07.160
So are you thinking of what to do?
link |
02:01:10.360
Yeah.
link |
02:01:11.360
Oh, you better believe it.
link |
02:01:13.600
Look, Brett had this idea of Unity 2020 and I told him it was a wrong idea.
link |
02:01:20.440
I didn't tell him that Unity 2024 was a wrong idea.
link |
02:01:23.160
I didn't tell him that Unity 2028 is a wrong idea.
link |
02:01:25.880
And if I were to make the case that he was right and I was wrong, because he's now shuttered
link |
02:01:29.360
the thing, right?
link |
02:01:31.840
I would say that the case to be made that he was correct was that by doing this in 2020,
link |
02:01:37.200
we found out what we were up against.
link |
02:01:39.520
It's good to know that Twitter can turn this off at the drop of a hat.
link |
02:01:43.960
Great to know.
link |
02:01:45.200
It's good to know as we learned that you cannot have meetings of presidential candidates in
link |
02:01:53.240
a primary that are not approved of by the party, right?
link |
02:01:59.760
They've got this thing figured out so we don't have any way in.
link |
02:02:03.320
And now Unity 2024 makes sense because Unity 2020 was tried.
link |
02:02:10.480
I don't know that we get to 2024 under all circumstances and some we do and some we don't.
link |
02:02:16.520
There's a game theoretic thing that I'm not sure you're counting for, but you probably
link |
02:02:21.000
are.
link |
02:02:22.000
I just want to make an argument is Jack Dorsey very likely listens to your podcast.
link |
02:02:30.680
And wait, this is the power of these words.
link |
02:02:34.680
Something deep went wrong, but we can change it with the power of words.
link |
02:02:41.980
Something went wrong at Twitter.
link |
02:02:44.040
They have so much division on their platform.
link |
02:02:46.080
It's what I'm trying to say.
link |
02:02:47.160
They've gotten...
link |
02:02:48.160
It's not wrong.
link |
02:02:49.160
They just don't know.
link |
02:02:50.160
They're understaffed.
link |
02:02:51.160
They have an insoluble problem.
link |
02:02:53.840
Difficult to solve.
link |
02:02:54.840
They have an insoluble problem.
link |
02:02:55.840
This is where you and I disagree.
link |
02:02:58.240
Because...
link |
02:02:59.240
All right.
link |
02:03:00.240
Or I'd like to create a competitor.
link |
02:03:01.240
No, so then give it to me.
link |
02:03:03.680
Create the competitor.
link |
02:03:04.680
Show me that you actually have understood this because my guess is that most of the
link |
02:03:08.240
things that you'll think about, I mean, I can tell you things I've talked to Jack about,
link |
02:03:12.600
which I know would make Twitter much better.
link |
02:03:15.520
However, I think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet, and you subtract
link |
02:03:23.200
off all sorts of context and mutual self knowledge.
link |
02:03:26.840
The problem is us.
link |
02:03:28.360
It's not the platforms.
link |
02:03:29.920
You're thinking about a technological solution, and I'm saying the problem is, is that we
link |
02:03:34.500
are ultimately the product.
link |
02:03:37.120
And I just disagree with that, and there's a lot of...
link |
02:03:39.120
That's probably could save that for tomorrow.
link |
02:03:40.640
I look forward to spending summers in your villa when you debut this product, and I would
link |
02:03:47.440
love to angel invest in it.
link |
02:03:50.560
By the way, in terms of money, I'll never have a villa.
link |
02:03:55.200
Yeah?
link |
02:03:56.200
No, I will always give away everything I own.
link |
02:03:58.520
Don't do that.
link |
02:03:59.520
No, sorry, invest into things like you mentioned, awesome things.
link |
02:04:05.200
Yeah, yeah.
link |
02:04:06.440
Just fine, but a little bit of avuncular advice.
link |
02:04:12.640
Don't pledge to be the person who disgorges themselves of security.
link |
02:04:20.360
Money is freedom.
link |
02:04:21.920
That's what it is.
link |
02:04:22.920
It's a big hunking pile of freedom.
link |
02:04:26.520
You can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you, if you don't, so you can use
link |
02:04:30.720
it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money.
link |
02:04:33.760
And generally speaking, Lex, money is freedom, and your voice is important.
link |
02:04:39.760
At least retain the amount of money, security you need to follow Joe's advice.
link |
02:04:46.280
What is the point of FU money if you don't say FU?
link |
02:04:50.080
The number of people who have FU money who don't say FU indicates the number of people
link |
02:04:55.120
who chose the freedom of their wealth to create a prison.
link |
02:04:59.160
They built a prison with the freedom they had, and they walked into it, locked the door.
link |
02:05:04.040
I think it's too difficult not to create.
link |
02:05:06.680
The reason I want to give away the money is because I just know my own psychology and
link |
02:05:09.880
you create prisons.
link |
02:05:12.040
Our human mind just creates those prisons.
link |
02:05:14.120
The FU money is enough for basic shelter and basic food.
link |
02:05:21.440
That's the optimal FU.
link |
02:05:23.720
This is the problem.
link |
02:05:26.920
So this is me, single Lex, speaking, but future Lex, I'm talking to future Lex.
link |
02:05:35.600
Single present Lex, please don't listen.
link |
02:05:38.200
Don't be an ass.
link |
02:05:39.200
You're going to need some money, and don't make these pledges to say on a podcast.
link |
02:05:45.280
I want to save you from yourself.
link |
02:05:47.040
You need money to do many of the beautiful things that we're counting on you to do.
link |
02:05:51.960
Don't eff it up.
link |
02:05:53.360
Can I talk to you about Roger Penderos?
link |
02:05:58.840
Sure.
link |
02:05:59.840
You've talked to Roger on the portal, but also in between the lines and offline, just
link |
02:06:05.760
everything you've said about Roger Penderos.
link |
02:06:08.760
For people who don't know, he just recently, a few days ago, won the 2020, shared the 2020
link |
02:06:16.400
Nobel Prize for physics.
link |
02:06:18.200
But it's clear to me that he had a deep personal impact on you, a connection with you, in terms
link |
02:06:26.240
of both your love of mathematics, just the way you see the world.
link |
02:06:30.720
This is the Eddie Van Halen conversation.
link |
02:06:32.640
This is clearly somebody who's profound in your worldview.
link |
02:06:36.040
Can you talk about Roger?
link |
02:06:38.000
Can you talk about what it means that he won this highest of prizes?
link |
02:06:42.720
Just in general, let's celebrate the man.
link |
02:06:44.400
Yeah.
link |
02:06:45.400
Okay.
link |
02:06:46.400
For the two other people who won this prize, I'm sorry, I just didn't happen to know who
link |
02:06:49.560
they were before they won.
link |
02:06:54.360
Roger is a very, it is not Roger in particular, but the class from which Roger comes that
link |
02:07:02.360
is so important.
link |
02:07:04.360
I would put Roger in the class of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang, put Witten in there.
link |
02:07:18.040
Witten's a special case, but Witten is weirdly the reverse of the Roger Penderos story, because
link |
02:07:25.320
Witten is the first physicist to win a mathematical fields medal, the highest honor in mathematics.
link |
02:07:32.080
Penderos is in some sense a mathematician who's now won the Nobel Prize, so it's a perfect
link |
02:07:36.720
sort of a couplet.
link |
02:07:41.720
Roger's class means everything to me.
link |
02:07:45.440
That's the highest achievement of the human mind.
link |
02:07:49.520
I'd probably throw Bach in with Feynman and Dirac in company, right?
link |
02:07:56.040
I think that he was so inventive.
link |
02:07:59.400
It was very frustrating to watch this career.
link |
02:08:01.760
It was a little bit frustrating to watch Feynman's career.
link |
02:08:06.160
Feynman was so good, and had he been born at a slightly different time, I believe his
link |
02:08:16.440
claim on physics would be far greater.
link |
02:08:21.480
I feel like Penderos in some sense came up a very difficult path, because Einstein effectively
link |
02:08:26.800
solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the beginning.
link |
02:08:32.040
As a result, the children of Einstein are impoverished, because there wasn't as much
link |
02:08:36.720
to pick off of the trees and sell at the market, whereas Bohr and Planck didn't do nearly
link |
02:08:42.880
as good of a job with quantum theory, so there's lots to do in quantum theory.
link |
02:08:47.280
I think that Roger affected me personally by a diagram that I saw in a paper of Herman
link |
02:08:56.000
Gluck at the University of Pennsylvania.
link |
02:08:58.240
It was the first picture I'd ever seen of the Hopf vibration sketched, and that weirdly
link |
02:09:04.880
I brought that to the Rogan program in order to convey the wonder, it was recapitulating
link |
02:09:11.280
my own journey.
link |
02:09:14.280
I think I probably saw that at age 16 or something, and it just flipped my mind.
link |
02:09:21.040
Roger is incredibly visual, he's incredibly geometric.
link |
02:09:23.640
He's incredibly sui generis, he just does his own thing.
link |
02:09:29.360
He's got lots of bets.
link |
02:09:31.200
None of them had really come through the way you had hoped, and I think they stretched
link |
02:09:36.520
the rules to be blunt about it.
link |
02:09:38.480
To give them the prize.
link |
02:09:40.480
Yeah, I do.
link |
02:09:41.480
You said this thing on Twitter, which is beautiful, that every once in a while comes a human being
link |
02:09:46.120
that gives value to the prize versus the prize giving value to the human.
link |
02:09:52.640
Two different kinds of prizes.
link |
02:09:54.040
The reason that we care about the Nobel Prize isn't because of Alfred Nobel.
link |
02:09:59.320
It's because it came along at the right time to reward Einstein, Dirac, Schrodinger, Feynman.
link |
02:10:11.160
Most of the people who should have won won.
link |
02:10:15.160
Most of the awards are not good in the sense that they don't really follow.
link |
02:10:21.680
The prize is used to rewrite history, that's the problem.
link |
02:10:26.800
You should have a love hate relationship with it, because on the one hand, it does focus
link |
02:10:30.600
the world on what really matters, and on the other hand, it distorts what really matters,
link |
02:10:34.880
and both of those functions take place simultaneously.
link |
02:10:38.080
In this case, I think that they violated their own rules slightly.
link |
02:10:42.520
It wasn't really clearly a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion, but
link |
02:10:50.520
we better give this award to somebody of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize
link |
02:10:56.440
is fully funded with prestige going forward.
link |
02:10:59.960
That's my weird speculative guess as to what happened.
link |
02:11:04.480
Roger's getting on in years, and the person should be alive.
link |
02:11:09.680
I think they've bent the rules, and I think they couldn't have bent it for a better person,
link |
02:11:13.400
and I hope they will not bend the rules out of weakness, but out of strength in the future.
link |
02:11:18.400
It would be great to get Madame Wu and Emmy Nerder, a posthumous prize along with Doug
link |
02:11:26.120
Prasher, George Sudarshan, and George Zweig, as well as Ernst Stuckelberg, Nobel Prizes.
link |
02:11:35.040
There have been some terrible omissions, the first two being females who revolutionized
link |
02:11:42.760
our view of the world.
link |
02:11:45.520
I take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people from ethnic groups or
link |
02:11:51.680
genders or whatever in order to make it plural and inclusive if it's not following the work,
link |
02:11:57.240
and I feel very clear that in a few cases, we know there was a real problem with the
link |
02:12:00.920
Nobel Committee because we have stunning accomplishments.
link |
02:12:06.360
Try to get through a day as a physicist without Nerder's theorem, and try to imagine the universe
link |
02:12:12.000
without Madame Wu's discovery that left and right don't appear to be symmetric.
link |
02:12:17.440
These are terrible omissions, and they're a huge blot on science for not being more
link |
02:12:23.480
inclusive when it matters.
link |
02:12:25.040
Yeah.
link |
02:12:26.040
So just like you said, the Nobel Prize is plagued by omissions as much as...
link |
02:12:30.280
And distortions and dilutions.
link |
02:12:31.600
For example, Dirac and Schrödinger, where I believe, given the prize in the same year,
link |
02:12:35.920
there's no reason that those two people needed to dilute each other.
link |
02:12:39.360
The same thing with Dyson was an omission.
link |
02:12:43.680
Toma Naga probably got included in part because we had an opportunity to show that something
link |
02:12:48.960
had happened on both sides of the Pacific after the war.
link |
02:12:53.760
But I don't think we needed to dilute Weinberg or Feynman or Schwinger.
link |
02:12:58.920
It just makes me somewhat sick.
link |
02:13:01.920
All of these people are such important giants, and it has to do with the field, I think,
link |
02:13:07.040
not wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget
link |
02:13:12.720
cuts and worldly pressure.
link |
02:13:15.000
So I think it's really important that we have absolute superstars because we produce superstars.
link |
02:13:20.840
We acknowledge them, we don't dilute them, and that we bend the rules to make sure that
link |
02:13:26.160
the prize stays funded with the prestige that comes from giving it to the Roger Penrose's
link |
02:13:33.080
Albert Einstein's and Paul Dirac's of the world.
link |
02:13:36.760
Can we talk a little bit about evil?
link |
02:13:39.480
Sure.
link |
02:13:40.480
I haven't actually talked to you about this topic, and it's been sitting on my mind mostly
link |
02:13:49.560
because everybody at MIT is quiet about it, which is Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
02:13:56.680
I didn't get a chance to experience what MIT was like at the time when Jeffrey Epstein
link |
02:14:02.400
was part of this, but I'd love to try to understand how evil was allowed to flourish in a place
link |
02:14:15.320
that I love, whether you think, maybe let me ask the question this way, was it the man
link |
02:14:25.520
evil or was the system evil or is evil too strong a word?
link |
02:14:35.420
Because what I see is the presence of this particular human being in the eyes of many
link |
02:14:44.920
destroyed the reputations of many really strong scientists and also weakened the ability
link |
02:14:55.360
to weaken the institution of MIT by making everybody quiet, almost making them unable
link |
02:15:04.040
to say anything interesting or difficult.
link |
02:15:10.240
What is that?
link |
02:15:11.240
What am I supposed to...?
link |
02:15:14.360
We don't know.
link |
02:15:15.360
Why is everyone quiet about Jeffrey?
link |
02:15:16.640
We don't know.
link |
02:15:17.800
Obviously, I want to scream about it too, and I probably have said too much about Jeffrey
link |
02:15:24.520
Epstein.
link |
02:15:25.520
Look, something horrible happened.
link |
02:15:29.480
I don't know what it is, but something horrible happened.
link |
02:15:37.560
One thing that...
link |
02:15:38.560
Okay.
link |
02:15:39.560
Let's just do this.
link |
02:15:40.560
The first thing I need to do is I need to get rid of this woke crap about power differentials.
link |
02:15:47.440
In general, you can talk about...hypergamy and power differentials are Russell conjugates
link |
02:15:54.960
of the same concept, just the way particular proportions and symmetries are mathematically
link |
02:16:01.280
provable to be attractive in females to males.
link |
02:16:08.000
Male attractiveness is largely determined by male competence and ability to amass power
link |
02:16:14.280
and success and all these sorts of things.
link |
02:16:18.240
The relationship between consenting adults is, quite frankly, not something I want to
link |
02:16:25.120
sort out.
link |
02:16:26.720
The relationship between the sexuality of adults and minors, and particularly, there's
link |
02:16:37.880
the 17, 18 issue, that's very different than 12, 13.
link |
02:16:46.680
We're talking about really sick depravity with respect to what appears that Jeffrey
link |
02:16:52.640
Epstein was involved in at some level.
link |
02:16:56.160
I believe this story is super complicated in part because I think one thing which Jeffrey
link |
02:17:01.240
Epstein was doing was providing money, encouragement, and support to scientists.
link |
02:17:09.880
Another thing he was doing, I believe, was giving tax advice to very rich people.
link |
02:17:15.800
I believe another thing he was doing was hooking very wealthy people up with young adult females.
link |
02:17:26.280
Another thing he was doing, I think, was doing stuff with children that will curl your toes.
link |
02:17:36.440
There's an entire spectrum of different stuff.
link |
02:17:39.440
At the moment, nobody can pull apart or deconflate anything because the woke thing comes over
link |
02:17:46.680
it and says, I think it's disgusting that a 43 year old billionaire would be partying
link |
02:17:54.000
with a 23 year old.
link |
02:17:58.520
I don't want to adjudicate that.
link |
02:18:00.120
I'm worried about 12 and 14 year olds that we're not talking about.
link |
02:18:05.040
I don't think MIT was deep into pedophilia.
link |
02:18:08.480
My guess is that that did not happen.
link |
02:18:10.520
I don't think that the scientists were the targets of the really sick depraved stuff.
link |
02:18:18.280
It's my guess.
link |
02:18:19.920
My guess is that what you're looking at was a government construct.
link |
02:18:24.960
It may have been our government.
link |
02:18:25.960
It may have been a joint government project.
link |
02:18:28.000
It may have been somebody else's government.
link |
02:18:29.280
I don't know.
link |
02:18:31.320
I believe that in part, we don't really understand Robert Maxwell.
link |
02:18:37.120
Sorry, who's Robert Maxwell?
link |
02:18:39.640
Gilean Maxwell's father was very active in scientific publishing.
link |
02:18:44.720
I don't know where peer review came from.
link |
02:18:46.520
I would love to run down the relationship between peer review and Robert Maxwell.
link |
02:18:50.320
I would love to run down the missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and the mysterious fortune
link |
02:18:56.080
of Jeffrey Epstein because I don't think Jeffrey Epstein ever ran a hedge fund.
link |
02:19:00.160
I don't think he was a money advisor the way people claimed.
link |
02:19:04.920
There's two things I want to talk about.
link |
02:19:06.560
One is the shallow conversations of woke identity politics that you're referring to
link |
02:19:13.560
seems to be removing everyone's ability to talk about what the hell is this person and
link |
02:19:23.480
how is he allowed, most importantly, to how do we prevent it in the future.
link |
02:19:30.160
From the individual perspective, the question for me is the same question I ask about 1930s
link |
02:19:35.840
Nazi Germany.
link |
02:19:36.840
I've been reading way too much probably or not enough about that period currently is
link |
02:19:41.560
if I was in Germany at that time, what is the heroic action to take?
link |
02:19:47.240
When I think about MIT with Jeffrey Epstein, what is the heroic action to take?
link |
02:19:51.600
We're not talking about virtue signaling action.
link |
02:19:53.520
You wouldn't know what you're up against, Lex.
link |
02:19:57.040
You're not hearing me.
link |
02:19:58.840
The problem here is what was Jeffrey Epstein?
link |
02:20:02.680
That question might be the heroic action to take.
link |
02:20:05.920
I'm just trying to get my first question.
link |
02:20:08.320
You have to map the silence with Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
02:20:10.960
What you're describing is a map of the silence at MIT.
link |
02:20:17.600
Is there a map of the silence in Washington State around Jeffrey Epstein, the Bay Area,
link |
02:20:24.160
New York City?
link |
02:20:26.160
The amount of silence around Jeffrey Epstein should be telling you everything.
link |
02:20:31.600
The number of dogs that don't bark is like nothing we've ever seen.
link |
02:20:36.480
You're exactly correct, but I want to know what is it telling us?
link |
02:20:40.360
Because what is telling me is not some kind of conspiracy, but more a disappointing weakness.
link |
02:20:49.600
Not some kind of conspiracy?
link |
02:20:51.160
It's not some kind of conspiracy.
link |
02:20:52.880
You've got to be kidding.
link |
02:20:55.080
You're so afraid of saying the word conspiracy that you don't think it's a conspiracy?
link |
02:20:58.800
I personally, I just think it's people who I thought were my heroes just being weak.
link |
02:21:04.640
No.
link |
02:21:05.640
Be of good cheer, sir.
link |
02:21:07.520
A cheer?
link |
02:21:09.000
Be of good cheer.
link |
02:21:10.160
Be of good cheer.
link |
02:21:11.160
Yeah.
link |
02:21:12.160
You think that there is a conspiracy?
link |
02:21:13.160
I think there is a conspiracy.
link |
02:21:15.160
I'd be a very impressive one.
link |
02:21:18.480
That's the scale of it.
link |
02:21:20.240
I tend to believe that large scale can only be an emergent phenomena.
link |
02:21:25.640
Really?
link |
02:21:26.640
I find this so fascinating.
link |
02:21:28.080
Yeah.
link |
02:21:29.080
Because I always see you as like a logic and love drive your soul.
link |
02:21:35.200
You're very logical.
link |
02:21:36.200
You're relentless.
link |
02:21:37.200
You've got a lot of love in your heart.
link |
02:21:38.800
I believe that if you would review the video, where is it from?
link |
02:21:41.840
Dubai or Abu Dhabi of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest?
link |
02:21:47.560
Ever seen this thing?
link |
02:21:48.560
Yeah.
link |
02:21:49.560
Oh, it happened.
link |
02:21:50.560
It's the assassination in 2010, 10 years ago of Mahmoud Al Mabou, something like that,
link |
02:21:57.480
in Dubai where I believe 26 separate individuals on multiple teams are shown converging, coming
link |
02:22:07.600
in from all over the world on false passports, pretending to be tennis players or business
link |
02:22:15.480
people or vacationers.
link |
02:22:19.800
All of these teams have different functions, and they murder this guy in his hotel room.
link |
02:22:27.960
The Dubai, I guess, chief of police or security officer was so angered that he put together
link |
02:22:35.240
this amazing video that says, we can completely detail what you did.
link |
02:22:39.780
We caught you on closed circuit TV.
link |
02:22:42.680
We don't know exactly who you are because your disguise is in your false passports.
link |
02:22:46.880
But yeah, 26 people converged to kill one.
link |
02:22:51.000
No, I don't believe you.
link |
02:22:53.560
I don't believe after Cointel Pro, an operation paperclip and Operation Mockingbird.
link |
02:23:02.840
I don't know whether I should even bring up Rex 84.
link |
02:23:07.600
To not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy.
link |
02:23:12.120
You have a sense that evil can be as competent or more competent than…
link |
02:23:18.200
First of all, when evil wants to operate at scale, it needs to make sure that people
link |
02:23:22.360
don't try to figure out evil.
link |
02:23:25.120
When evil operates at scale, from first principles, you have to realize that evil must not want
link |
02:23:32.380
it investigated.
link |
02:23:35.160
The most efficient way to keep yourself from being investigated, if you are an evil institutional
link |
02:23:42.240
player who needs to do this repeatedly, is to invest in a world in which no one can afford
link |
02:23:47.720
to say the word conspiracy.
link |
02:23:49.960
You'll notice that there is a special radioactivity around the word conspiracy.
link |
02:23:54.520
We have provable conspiracies.
link |
02:23:56.160
We have admitted to conspiracies.
link |
02:23:57.840
You have been invited to conspiracy.
link |
02:24:00.040
There is no shortage, conspiracies are everywhere.
link |
02:24:02.880
Some of them are mundane.
link |
02:24:04.240
Some of them are like price fixing cartels or trade groups are generally speaking conspiracies.
link |
02:24:12.000
The first thing you have to realize is that all of us are under a mimetic complex where
link |
02:24:19.560
you can be taken off the chessboard by saying, conspiracy theorists.
link |
02:24:22.520
Good done.
link |
02:24:23.520
It's like a one line proof.
link |
02:24:25.040
We don't have to listen to Rex.
link |
02:24:26.240
He said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show.
link |
02:24:29.520
That is partially distorting our conversation.
link |
02:24:32.640
If you want to ask me about Jeffrey Epstein, you have to agree with me that that is a logical
link |
02:24:37.080
description of what you would have to have if you wanted to commit conspiracies is that
link |
02:24:41.160
you have to make sure that people are dissuaded from investigating this.
link |
02:24:46.400
But it's a very, it's a fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy
link |
02:24:52.920
theories and the world without conspiracy theories to the shallow glance looks the same.
link |
02:24:59.000
Well, my point, there is responsible conspiracy theorizing where you look at the history of
link |
02:25:06.120
unearthed conspiracies and just like you would with any other topic, just think about how
link |
02:25:11.280
different the rules in your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing where X can
link |
02:25:17.280
be anything.
link |
02:25:20.280
If I say to you, I can say the statement that average weight is not the same between
link |
02:25:28.840
widely separated populations, you'd say, yeah, I'd say average height is not the same between
link |
02:25:34.800
widely separated populations.
link |
02:25:36.320
You'd say, yeah, then I say, in fact, no continuous variable that shows variation should be expected
link |
02:25:44.720
to be identical between widely separate.
link |
02:25:46.800
Of course, Eric, like IQ, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, right?
link |
02:25:52.320
So we have a violent reaction to specific topics.
link |
02:25:56.800
So the first thing I want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into
link |
02:26:02.960
everyone's mind.
link |
02:26:05.240
That's really important to state, yeah.
link |
02:26:07.280
It's very interesting that and as a prerequisite, as you're saying, that will be the first step
link |
02:26:14.000
if you wanted to pull off a conspiracy in a competent way, that's you would have to first
link |
02:26:20.840
convince the world of that.
link |
02:26:21.840
I just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time, I highly recommend
link |
02:26:27.680
it.
link |
02:26:28.680
1971.
link |
02:26:29.680
Well, the film is titled 1971, and it's about the Citizens Committee to Investigate the
link |
02:26:34.840
FBI, which was run by a student of Murray Gelman, a physicist, and broke into FBI offices
link |
02:26:43.040
in Pennsylvania to steal files which allowed freedom of information requests that discovered
link |
02:26:48.840
a huge conspiracy.
link |
02:26:49.840
So it was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy inside the federal government, a double conspiracy
link |
02:26:55.760
story which launched multiple conspiracies.
link |
02:27:00.680
I think that the problem with modern Americans is that they are so timid that they don't
link |
02:27:05.640
even learn about the history of conspiracies that we have absolutely proven.
link |
02:27:10.920
So with that done, Jeff Epstein, in my opinion, represented somebody's construction.
link |
02:27:19.400
I don't think that...
link |
02:27:20.400
Kind of scary to think about.
link |
02:27:21.400
Yeah.
link |
02:27:22.400
Well, what part of the story isn't scary?
link |
02:27:24.960
I in part did something which I imagine may get me destroyed because I was more worried
link |
02:27:31.040
about being destroyed by somebody else I had a conversation with around Jeff Epstein, right?
link |
02:27:37.720
So I'm just trying to let it be known that I don't know anything more than I've already
link |
02:27:43.240
said.
link |
02:27:44.240
Now, your friends at MIT, their problem is that Jeff Epstein showed up as the only person
link |
02:27:51.600
capable of continuing U.S. scientific tradition.
link |
02:27:58.080
You see, the U.S. scientific tradition is a little bit like the Russian.
link |
02:28:04.240
It's combative, okay?
link |
02:28:09.160
And we're a free society and we act like a free society.
link |
02:28:12.400
We're a rich society and we researched like we're a rich society.
link |
02:28:15.800
That is historically.
link |
02:28:16.800
And then came the 1970s and William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece Awards and the idea
link |
02:28:22.440
that we have to...
link |
02:28:23.440
We're paying too much and these are welfare queens and lab coats and blah, blah, blah,
link |
02:28:27.720
blah.
link |
02:28:28.720
We need more transparency, more oversight.
link |
02:28:31.440
Everything went to hell and the national culture of U.S. science was lost.
link |
02:28:37.440
The thing that produced all this prosperity and security and power was lost.
link |
02:28:43.400
And then Jeff Epstein shows up and a tiny number of funders, maybe Fred Cavley, maybe
link |
02:28:52.840
Yuri Milner, maybe who else would be in this category?
link |
02:28:59.680
Peter Thiel to an extent, Howard Hughes would be the largest of these things, which has
link |
02:29:05.440
different grant structures than the NIH, gave people a modicum of risk taking ability.
link |
02:29:11.920
Okay.
link |
02:29:12.920
Well, when Jeff Epstein showed up, everybody wanted to take risk in science and suddenly
link |
02:29:20.480
a charismatic billionaire says, hey, I can make that work for you.
link |
02:29:24.320
Here's $100,000.
link |
02:29:25.760
Go research something crazy.
link |
02:29:27.800
Well, that money was supposed to be provided by the federal government under the terms
link |
02:29:34.640
of the endless frontier compact between the federal government and the universities.
link |
02:29:39.080
And the federal government, the taxpayers welched, okay?
link |
02:29:43.800
So that's one place to lay the blame for Jeff Epstein as at the failure of the federal
link |
02:29:49.100
government to honor its commitment, right?
link |
02:29:55.360
So the universities became psychopathic.
link |
02:29:58.000
It's not like everybody doesn't remember what we're supposed to be doing to be moral,
link |
02:30:02.460
but the point was there wasn't enough money to be moral.
link |
02:30:05.000
So it was time to eye each other as a source of protein, as I like to say.
link |
02:30:11.480
And in that process, Jeffrey Epstein said, hey, come to my world.
link |
02:30:17.760
We can do it like we used to do.
link |
02:30:22.000
So in part, my point is, is that almost none of your colleagues at MIT have that kind of
link |
02:30:28.880
religious commitment to science that they're willing to go down with ship science.
link |
02:30:35.800
The Galileo Galilei thing became very important to science because occasionally you just have
link |
02:30:41.120
to say, look, this isn't about me and you.
link |
02:30:46.160
There isn't enough money in the world to buy the kind of legacy I want to leave to this
link |
02:30:50.520
planet.
link |
02:30:51.520
This is one of the great things about science.
link |
02:30:55.080
You know, potentially it's worth dying for.
link |
02:30:59.040
Yeah, I'm glad you said it.
link |
02:31:03.360
Science is one of the things that is best that's worth dying for.
link |
02:31:08.120
I mean, I'm not eager to murder myself, but I've certainly risked my health, my fortune.
link |
02:31:17.280
You know, I've destroyed myself economically over science.
link |
02:31:24.160
And my need to oppose these sons of bitches in chaired professorships who are destroying
link |
02:31:30.240
our system along with everyone else.
link |
02:31:33.000
Let me bring in Grandmaster Oogway into this.
link |
02:31:39.040
Oogway.
link |
02:31:40.040
Oogway.
link |
02:31:41.040
Master Oogway.
link |
02:31:42.040
I think he's a grandmaster.
link |
02:31:43.880
Oh, that would make him a chess playing turtle.
link |
02:31:46.960
So I've read some Wikipedia.
link |
02:31:48.840
Uh oh.
link |
02:31:49.840
And Shifu is a master, there's apparently only one grandmaster.
link |
02:31:54.760
That's Oogway.
link |
02:31:55.760
Anyway.
link |
02:31:56.760
Is the phrase grandmaster ever uttered in the script?
link |
02:31:59.280
I don't think so.
link |
02:32:00.280
I don't think so.
link |
02:32:01.280
But there's a story.
link |
02:32:02.280
Oh, there's off script canon.
link |
02:32:05.400
I'm going to call Glenberger right now and find out if any of this is true.
link |
02:32:08.800
All right.
link |
02:32:09.800
You're not supposed to call out my journalistic integrity.
link |
02:32:14.000
But Master Oogway.
link |
02:32:15.920
Master Oogway.
link |
02:32:17.420
He says a couple of things I'd like to bring up with you.
link |
02:32:20.760
So one, as part of a longer quote, recommends that you should find a battle worth fighting.
link |
02:32:31.880
We've talked about several battles just now.
link |
02:32:35.840
What is the battle worth fighting for?
link |
02:32:38.440
For Erich Weinstein in the next few months, in the next year?
link |
02:32:43.720
There's only one.
link |
02:32:49.760
It's the Moses.
link |
02:32:50.760
It's the Moses thing.
link |
02:32:52.960
It's time to go.
link |
02:32:53.960
It's time to leave.
link |
02:32:54.960
This place is over to get off the planet.
link |
02:32:57.440
Yeah, I freak people out when I say that, but look at your world.
link |
02:33:03.600
You just got introduced to the problem of a virus.
link |
02:33:07.440
Wait till it's fusion devices and you understand what it means to have one interconnected planet
link |
02:33:11.960
with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else.
link |
02:33:17.120
So do you see the foray, your work in physics, and maybe the echoes of it in ship Elon?
link |
02:33:28.560
Everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming if we don't have one should
link |
02:33:34.920
work on the plan that he, she thinks best.
link |
02:33:40.200
Right?
link |
02:33:41.200
So Elon wants to do rockets.
link |
02:33:43.880
People misinterpret me.
link |
02:33:46.480
Meta Erich says, I don't think that's a smart plan.
link |
02:33:51.720
Regular Erich says all people who have hope should do that thing.
link |
02:33:59.320
Yeah.
link |
02:34:00.320
At least it's Mars, man.
link |
02:34:01.840
At least it's the moon and Mars and maybe Titan and whatever.
link |
02:34:05.040
And I don't think it'll work and it doesn't make sense and it looks silly.
link |
02:34:07.840
But that's exactly the kind of fight worth fighting.
link |
02:34:10.000
But it's the kind of, it's for the same reason that I went on Brett's Unity 2020 thing when
link |
02:34:14.560
I didn't think it had a hope in hell and people are making fun of it.
link |
02:34:18.280
We got to do things that make us feel dumb and silly and childish that possibly have
link |
02:34:23.480
a hope of working.
link |
02:34:25.440
So everybody should do something.
link |
02:34:27.240
My version of this, I'm the most hopeful about because I wouldn't have chosen to do it.
link |
02:34:31.720
If I thought that Daniel Schmockenberger's wisdom project was a better hope, I'd do that.
link |
02:34:39.000
It's more down to earth in a certain way.
link |
02:34:41.920
I just think that it's more probable.
link |
02:34:43.880
Look, we got from a powered flight with the Wright brothers and wind tunnels to sending
link |
02:34:49.560
back images from the surface of Titan via Huygens Cassini in less than a century.
link |
02:34:56.580
What we can do if we can change the laws of physics is something we can't even conceive
link |
02:35:02.720
of.
link |
02:35:03.720
It may be that it buys us nothing.
link |
02:35:06.480
And at least we will know why we died on this planet.
link |
02:35:11.920
As a small aside, I think this is not the right time to take the full journey.
link |
02:35:18.120
But I feel like you'll guide me like Master Wei did.
link |
02:35:22.640
And I'm the Kung Fu Panda at some point.
link |
02:35:24.560
They only have one conversation.
link |
02:35:27.840
We're on our likewise.
link |
02:35:28.840
We didn't.
link |
02:35:29.840
Well, we're Jews and they weren't.
link |
02:35:33.120
So we talked too much.
link |
02:35:35.060
But the guide doesn't have to be with words.
link |
02:35:37.880
You don't think Poe is Jewish?
link |
02:35:39.840
It's debatable.
link |
02:35:40.840
We'll have to go back to the Wikipedia.
link |
02:35:42.720
Really like Poe.
link |
02:35:43.720
Yeah.
link |
02:35:44.720
Okay.
link |
02:35:45.720
Is there that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source code,
link |
02:35:55.560
the source code of our universe?
link |
02:35:58.040
Can you comment on where, since the last book, where your thinking has been, has roamed
link |
02:36:03.160
around geometric unity, around that work in physics, in this fight?
link |
02:36:08.320
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out when to release it and how.
link |
02:36:12.680
I mean, I've released the video.
link |
02:36:15.440
The video, quite honestly, I think it has a very bizarre reaction.
link |
02:36:19.880
I think one of the things that I've learned from the video, because the video is coming
link |
02:36:23.200
up on half a million views on YouTube alone to say nothing of the audio.
link |
02:36:31.040
But yeah, it produced a very strange reaction.
link |
02:36:34.720
One of the things I don't think that I properly understood is that most physicists don't talk
link |
02:36:41.440
in this geometric language.
link |
02:36:46.680
I thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds, bundles,
link |
02:36:53.120
differential forms, connections, curvature, tensors, et cetera.
link |
02:36:57.160
And I saw a lot of the comments would say things like, I have a PhD in theoretical physics
link |
02:37:02.240
and I'm not even familiar with all of these concepts.
link |
02:37:05.240
And I think that was probably a distortion coming from living in Cambridge, Massachusetts
link |
02:37:11.960
for almost 20 years.
link |
02:37:14.840
So what's the solution to that?
link |
02:37:16.240
Well, I mean, I can translate it into that.
link |
02:37:18.560
I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to.
link |
02:37:21.280
My problem is that my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge,
link |
02:37:31.000
the same people have these perverse incentives on them, where they've invested in these programs
link |
02:37:35.880
that didn't work.
link |
02:37:36.880
So they're extremely hostile and difficult to deal with.
link |
02:37:41.880
The fact that I'm not a physicist has its own set of issues, which is that effectively
link |
02:37:47.280
it's like the Hermit Kingdom, they don't get any visitors and they don't necessarily want
link |
02:37:53.040
somebody rolling up and saying, I know how to do physics.
link |
02:37:56.960
So I'm always very clear, I'm not a physicist.
link |
02:38:01.800
That said, if I wait too long, I don't know that theoretical physics is really going to
link |
02:38:06.160
exist after the boomers because everyone in you, I think you had Wolfram on your program.
link |
02:38:12.200
I don't remember whether he said this to you or Brian Keating, but he said something like
link |
02:38:16.000
everybody got discouraged.
link |
02:38:17.720
It was too hard.
link |
02:38:19.220
We can't do that, guys.
link |
02:38:21.960
We cannot do that.
link |
02:38:23.120
There's something about the renormalization revolution that innervated the physics community
link |
02:38:27.480
because it taught them just because you can see in this energy regime doesn't mean you
link |
02:38:31.720
can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how coupling constants run and what
link |
02:38:37.760
kind of UV fixed points exist, blah, blah, blah.
link |
02:38:41.720
Somehow that discouraged people from guessing, from believing everything became an effective
link |
02:38:46.000
theory.
link |
02:38:47.000
The beauty of the effective theory wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe,
link |
02:38:51.720
just the beauty of an energy level.
link |
02:38:53.400
So I think that renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened
link |
02:38:58.920
in science and also its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic.
link |
02:39:04.200
Well, the story I'm telling myself is that in part I'm waiting for them to get weaker,
link |
02:39:10.200
but on the other hand, I don't know that we have any time left.
link |
02:39:13.160
Are you also thinking about ways of, you know, the podcast medium is revolutionary for public,
link |
02:39:22.560
for discourse, for what?
link |
02:39:23.560
I mean, I don't even know the right words for it.
link |
02:39:25.920
Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for reenergizing the physics community?
link |
02:39:30.720
So basically for communicating geometry.
link |
02:39:33.000
Look, I have a fantasy.
link |
02:39:36.960
My fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem.
link |
02:39:40.040
And it goes back to this thing that I read about in Feynman's books about Tartaglia.
link |
02:39:46.960
They asked him this question, like, what's the greatest thing that ever happened in math?
link |
02:39:50.080
And he says, Tartaglia's solution to the cubic is just like the weirdest answer.
link |
02:39:55.880
So you're like, okay, I'll bite.
link |
02:39:58.120
Why is it Tartaglia's solution to the cubic?
link |
02:40:00.400
And he said, because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound
link |
02:40:04.280
that the ancients had failed to do, it's like, oh, I got it.
link |
02:40:09.440
It's the thing that opens up new psychology that says maybe things are possible again.
link |
02:40:14.480
It's a new orchard, new orchard.
link |
02:40:19.680
New farmers, new people who can find fruit that they can pick.
link |
02:40:23.840
And once you have one person do that, very often you get many.
link |
02:40:26.920
Like one of the things that we were talking about with Eddie Van Halen, the reason that
link |
02:40:30.200
he created a revolution in somebody like Roy Buchanan did not is that you could follow
link |
02:40:35.960
Eddie Van Halen.
link |
02:40:36.960
You couldn't pioneer it.
link |
02:40:38.200
And maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly and as fast and as inventively.
link |
02:40:42.320
But you could follow.
link |
02:40:44.640
Once you understand that there is a tapping principle, it was just the beginning of something
link |
02:40:48.440
called percussive guitar.
link |
02:40:53.320
My belief is that once we start innovating in the present, everything will come.
link |
02:41:00.160
Because everything that around us is screwed up.
link |
02:41:04.080
On that, let me, with one last question, bring back Master Ugwe, the probably the most famous
link |
02:41:10.560
quote of his, right, with yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift.
link |
02:41:17.640
That is why it is called the present.
link |
02:41:20.080
It's very beautiful, although I would have gone with quit, don't quit, noodles, don't
link |
02:41:26.400
noodles.
link |
02:41:27.400
I feel like people need to know way too much context to put that to make sense.
link |
02:41:32.280
It's your audience, just to hell with context.
link |
02:41:35.720
Yeah, they'll figure it out.
link |
02:41:37.280
Well, let me ask, what are you grateful for today?
link |
02:41:41.800
What is your present?
link |
02:41:44.040
We've talked about a lot of dark things, but what are you brings you joy to your heart
link |
02:41:50.400
that I can't believe I'm lucky enough to have this?
link |
02:41:55.400
No, Nyla and Zev, my wife, Pia, the fact that we've got our health, all the little things,
link |
02:42:06.000
saying grace after meals.
link |
02:42:08.440
You're coming over for Friday night Shabbat dinner, so we'll bench together and say grace.
link |
02:42:13.720
It's important to just, this bottle of water in front of me, I made a point of just thinking
link |
02:42:24.200
about how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle that happens to be placed in front
link |
02:42:27.840
of me because somebody cared.
link |
02:42:30.040
That small thing made a difference to me.
link |
02:42:37.280
I still have strength for the fight so far.
link |
02:42:40.800
I think that's something I'm grateful for.
link |
02:42:43.040
I can't believe that I'm not more beaten down after all of this nonsense.
link |
02:42:51.080
I have the most interesting set of friends.
link |
02:42:54.240
I really do.
link |
02:42:56.920
I'm not that rich by monetary standards, but if there were friend billionaires, Forbes
link |
02:43:02.000
would be all over my ass.
link |
02:43:07.320
I just can't believe who I can talk to at the drop of a hat.
link |
02:43:12.600
I'm really grateful.
link |
02:43:22.480
I think this is the end of something profound, and it's the beginning of whatever is next.
link |
02:43:29.160
Whatever is next could be terminal, whatever is next could be amazing, whatever is next
link |
02:43:33.240
could be a return to the horrors of the early 20th century that doesn't manage to go totally
link |
02:43:38.960
catastrophic but takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
link |
02:43:45.240
I'm grateful to having half of my life in the rearview mirror.
link |
02:43:50.880
Maybe it took place in a bubble and maybe it was unsustainable, but it was nice to be
link |
02:43:56.600
able to move around the world without a mask.
link |
02:43:59.320
It was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world even if it was from a cot in
link |
02:44:05.760
a hostel in some country.
link |
02:44:09.320
To fall in love.
link |
02:44:11.320
Absolutely.
link |
02:44:12.320
I mean, it was a good life.
link |
02:44:15.160
Find the last Indian Jewish girl left.
link |
02:44:17.800
Who knew?
link |
02:44:21.000
You're a lucky guy.
link |
02:44:22.000
Well, let me just say...
link |
02:44:23.000
Actually, it's something I wanted to just say before you get to that.
link |
02:44:26.200
Yes.
link |
02:44:27.200
I forgot to say something.
link |
02:44:29.000
Falling in love with an intellectual collaborator is a special thing that not everybody gets
link |
02:44:34.480
a chance to do.
link |
02:44:36.320
I think when I met Pia, I fell deeply in love with her, all her normal characteristics.
link |
02:44:43.960
She and I had an antagonistic relationship around geometry and economics.
link |
02:44:50.800
Then weirdly, just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film, they
link |
02:44:55.560
hate each other, the two fields were fighting with each other, cats and dogs.
link |
02:44:59.880
Finally, the sexual tension clearly was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
link |
02:45:05.000
We came up with geometric marginalism, which is this other theory, not geometric unity,
link |
02:45:10.000
which allowed me to inhabit space with somebody who I already knew intimately and had fallen
link |
02:45:18.960
in love with and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play and to dance.
link |
02:45:23.880
It's the intellectual version of the tango.
link |
02:45:28.320
One of the most romantic periods of my life that doesn't fall into most people's experience.
link |
02:45:33.200
That was a chance to see something totally unexpected, haven't really had it since because
link |
02:45:38.440
she doesn't want to revisit the material, but something I'm super grateful for that's
link |
02:45:42.880
very particular and unique.
link |
02:45:45.640
But to flip the tables on you for hundreds of thousands, I think millions of people,
link |
02:45:53.760
I can speak, me and them are really grateful, one, that you exist and two, sorry for your
link |
02:46:02.800
podcast and I do hope your voice in some form continues to reverberate, I think, at least
link |
02:46:14.200
in the 2021s and beyond, even if it takes a brief pause.
link |
02:46:19.920
We're pausing at the moment.
link |
02:46:21.640
We've recorded some for future episodes and I'm recording for you, I really appreciate
link |
02:46:27.280
that.
link |
02:46:28.280
I mean, earnestness trades at a discount at the moment because it's easy to make fun
link |
02:46:33.960
of it.
link |
02:46:34.960
One of the things I like best about you is that you and I are both fairly earnest.
link |
02:46:39.000
We may joke and jab, but honestly, there's a project here in a world to win as they say.
link |
02:46:45.120
The thing that I want my and your listeners to know is that I'm not stepping away from
link |
02:46:52.920
the podcast because I don't appreciate that people really want more.
link |
02:47:01.240
This is hugely financially costly to me.
link |
02:47:05.240
I want to make sure you guys are getting the best that I can do and destroying myself
link |
02:47:12.480
right in front of an election, I think Lex is incorrect.
link |
02:47:16.080
I think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren't any planes in
link |
02:47:20.360
the sky that aren't either colored red or colored blue is a big danger given how angry
link |
02:47:27.560
I am at the system and I don't want to be removed from the chessboard because if nobody's
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02:47:31.600
going to talk about Jeff Epstein, there need to be people.
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02:47:33.880
If nobody's going to talk about various things that we've talked about on these programs,
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02:47:38.080
I want to make sure that I'm there.
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02:47:39.880
Do I think that this is potentially an existential election?
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02:47:42.360
Yes.
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02:47:43.360
Am I positive that I know that my way to bed is the right way out?
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02:47:45.880
No, I'm not.
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02:47:47.400
I don't know people.
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02:47:48.400
I just don't know and where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms
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02:47:54.600
of how it is chewing up smart people that I decided it's really not about cowardice
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02:48:01.240
because it's hard for me to restrain myself.
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02:48:04.240
I have so many reactions every day.
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02:48:07.880
This is really about trying to plan for all of our futures to make sure that I'm around.
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02:48:12.280
I had a huge concern that what happened to Brett's articles of unity was going to happen
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02:48:16.240
to Brett.
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02:48:17.240
It's going to happen to the YouTube channels.
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02:48:19.360
I want to make sure that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket.
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02:48:22.880
If something goes wrong over there, that's the whole idea of the intellectual dark web,
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02:48:27.000
which is at some level a loose confederation.
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02:48:31.000
It can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work.
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02:48:35.200
It can dissolve so that there really isn't anything.
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02:48:40.360
The thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately, when the hit pieces come, they don't come
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02:48:46.560
for what it is that they're angry at you about.
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02:48:48.640
They come for where they can get you.
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02:48:51.720
It's very important that right in front of an election, I think that the desire of the
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02:48:58.840
old system to defend itself through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects
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02:49:05.960
of the new America.
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02:49:07.360
We have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions keeping individuals
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02:49:14.440
with podcasts and the ability to reach millions like through Substack out of their domain.
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02:49:20.280
I don't surrender this domain to them.
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02:49:22.400
They have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us, and I believe that they could remove
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02:49:27.000
you or me in an instant.
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02:49:28.640
By the end of today, if they wanted us off the chessboard, we would be off the chessboard.
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02:49:32.960
I know that's not your perspective.
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02:49:34.960
My goal is to stay here as long as possible to make sure that you have enough of a counterbalancing
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02:49:41.440
set of ideas and to let and help other podcasters start.
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02:49:48.600
My hope is that that works, but long heroism, short martyrdom is a good motto for anyone,
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02:49:56.520
and I try to remember the short martyrdom part of that.
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02:50:01.640
First of all, beautifully put.
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02:50:03.200
Second of all, wait to end the conversation and the disagreement, which is how you hook
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02:50:08.080
them for the next conversation to be continued.
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02:50:11.280
When Lex says …
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02:50:12.280
Eric, it's a huge honor.
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02:50:15.440
Thank you once again.
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02:50:17.080
Lex really appreciate every time we get together.
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02:50:19.120
Thanks, buddy.
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02:50:20.120
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein, and thank you to our sponsors,
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02:50:25.280
Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure
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02:50:30.040
and readability, Sunbasket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety into
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my culinary life, 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 someone should.
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02:50:46.440
It helps you make good decisions.
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02:50:48.640
And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the
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02:50:54.520
internet.
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02:50:55.960
Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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02:51:00.760
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow
link |
02:51:06.160
on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
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02:51:12.200
And now, let me leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen in the song titled, Hallelujah.
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02:51:18.520
Well, maybe there's a God above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody
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02:51:25.280
who outdrew you.
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02:51:27.000
And it's not a cry that you hear at night.
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02:51:30.600
It's not somebody who's seen the light, it's a cold, and it's a broken hallelujah.
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02:51:37.880
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.