back to indexEric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #163
link |
The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein,
link |
his fourth time on the podcast.
link |
Both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind,
link |
and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being
link |
who I am fortunate to call a friend.
link |
Quick mention of our sponsors.
link |
Indeed hiring site, Theragun muscle recovery device,
link |
Wine Access online wine store,
link |
and Blinkist app that summarizes books.
link |
Click the sponsor links to get a discount
link |
and to support this podcast.
link |
As a side note, let me ask
link |
that whenever we touch difficult topics in this
link |
or other conversations, that you listen with an open mind
link |
and forgive me or the guest for a misstep
link |
in an imperfectly thought out statement.
link |
To have any chance at truth,
link |
I think we have to take risks
link |
and make mistakes in conversation
link |
and then learn from those mistakes.
link |
Please try not to close your mind and heart to others
link |
because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea.
link |
Try to assume that the people in this conversation
link |
or just people in general are good,
link |
but not perfect and far from it,
link |
but always striving to add a bit more love into the world
link |
in whatever way we know how.
link |
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
link |
support it on Patreon,
link |
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
link |
And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
link |
You often talk about getting off this planet
link |
and I think you don't often talk
link |
about extra terrestrial life, intelligent life out there.
link |
Do you wonder about this kind of thing,
link |
about intelligent civilizations out there?
link |
I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way.
link |
In a certain sense, I do find that speculating
link |
about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens
link |
is kind of a recreation
link |
for when things aren't going very well.
link |
At least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives.
link |
So I worry about, for example,
link |
the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion.
link |
You can't quite believe enough to go to church
link |
or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend,
link |
so then you just take up an interest in simulation theory
link |
because that's something like what you do
link |
for your job coding.
link |
I do think that in some sense,
link |
the issue of aliens is a really interesting one,
link |
but has been spoiled by too much
link |
sort of recreational escapism.
link |
The key question that I find is let's assume
link |
that it is possible to look out at the night sky
link |
and see all of these distant worlds and then go visit them.
link |
If that is possible, it's almost certainly possible
link |
through some as yet unknown or not accepted theory
link |
of physics beyond Einstein.
link |
And I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, but probably is.
link |
If that theory exists, there would be a percentage
link |
of the worlds that have life
link |
in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way
link |
that would have encountered the ability to escape
link |
soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom
link |
at a minimum and whatever they have
link |
that is probably analogous to the cell on that world.
link |
So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing
link |
that arises, probably not carbon based,
link |
probably doesn't have DNA,
link |
but that something that fits the pattern
link |
of Darwinian theory, which is descent with variation,
link |
differential success.
link |
And thereby constantly improving and so on
link |
that through time, there'll be a trajectory
link |
where there'll be something increasingly complex
link |
and fascinating and beautiful like us humans, but much more.
link |
That can also off gas whatever entropy it creates
link |
to give an illusion that you're defeating thermodynamics.
link |
So whatever these things are probably has an analog
link |
of the biolipid layer so that cells can get rid
link |
of the chaos on one side of the barrier
link |
and keep order on the other.
link |
Whatever these things are that create life,
link |
assuming that there is a theory to be found
link |
that allows that civilization to diversify,
link |
we would have to imagine that such a civilization
link |
might have taken an interest in its concept
link |
of the universe and have come here.
link |
They would come here, they would have a deep understanding
link |
of the physics of the universe sufficient
link |
to have arrived here.
link |
Well, there's two questions,
link |
whether they could arrive physically
link |
and whether their information could be sent here
link |
and whether they could gain information from us.
link |
It's possible that they would have a way
link |
of looking into our world without actually reaching it.
link |
But yes, if my hope, which is that we can escape this world,
link |
can be realized, if that's feasible,
link |
then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true
link |
and that somebody else should be here.
link |
First of all, I wanna say this.
link |
My purpose when I come on to your show
link |
and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you.
link |
I can sit inside all of those.
link |
It's to give you better audio and video
link |
because I think we've been on an incredible role.
link |
I really love what you do.
link |
And so I am trying to honor you by being as disagreeable
link |
about frame breaking as possible.
link |
I think some of your listeners don't understand
link |
that it's actually a sign of respect
link |
as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic,
link |
which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames
link |
and that these are sort of offerings
link |
to get the conversation started.
link |
So let me try to break that frame
link |
and give you something different.
link |
I think what's going on here is that I can prove effectively
link |
that we're not thinking about this in very deep terms.
link |
As soon as I say we've gotta get off this planet,
link |
the number of people who assume
link |
that I'm talking about faster than light travel is very high
link |
and faster than light travel assumes some sort
link |
of Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken
link |
by some small adjustment.
link |
And I think that that's fascinating.
link |
It shows me that our failure to imagine
link |
what could be being said is profound.
link |
We don't have an idea of all of the different ways
link |
in which we might be able to visit distant worlds.
link |
All we think about is, okay,
link |
it must be Einsteinian space times
link |
and then some means of exceeding the speed limit.
link |
And it's just, it's fascinating to me
link |
that we don't really have, we've lost the ability
link |
to just realize we don't know the framework
link |
and what does it even mean?
link |
So one of the things I think about a lot
link |
is worlds with more than one temporal dimension.
link |
It's very hard to think about
link |
more than one temporal dimension.
link |
So that's a really strong mental exercise
link |
of breaking the framework in which we think
link |
because most of the frameworks
link |
would have a single temporal dimension, right?
link |
Well, first of all, most of the frameworks
link |
in which we think would have no temporal dimension
link |
would have pure, like in mathematics,
link |
the differential geometry that Riemann came up with
link |
We don't usually talk about
link |
what we would call split signature metrics
link |
or Lorentzian signature.
link |
In fact, if it weren't for relativity,
link |
this would be the most obscure topic out there.
link |
Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature
link |
and then there's this one freakish case
link |
of relativity theory in physics
link |
that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions.
link |
So it's usually momentary and just looking at space.
link |
Yes, we have these three kinds of equations
link |
that are very important to us.
link |
We have elliptic, hyperbolic and parabolic, right?
link |
And so the idea is if I'm chewing gum
link |
after eating garlic bread, when I open my mouth
link |
and I've got chewing gum between my lips,
link |
maybe it's gonna form an elliptic object
link |
called a minimal surface.
link |
Then when I pop that and blow through it,
link |
you're gonna hear a noise that's gonna travel to you
link |
by a wave equation, which is gonna be hyperbolic.
link |
But then the garlic breath is gonna diffuse towards you
link |
and you're eventually gonna be very upset with me
link |
according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic.
link |
So those are the three basic paradigms
link |
for most of the work that we do.
link |
And a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is elliptic,
link |
whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case.
link |
And I don't even know what to do
link |
about more than one temporal dimension
link |
because I think almost no one studies that.
link |
I can't believe you just captured much of modern physics
link |
in the example of chewing gum.
link |
Well, I have an off color one, which I chose not to share,
link |
but hopefully the kids at home can imagine.
link |
Okay, so, okay, that is the place where we come from.
link |
Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility
link |
of breaking the frameworks with two
link |
versus zero temporal dimensions,
link |
how do we even begin to think about that?
link |
Well, let's think about it as you and I getting together
link |
in New York City, okay?
link |
So if you tell me, Eric, I wanna meet you in New York City,
link |
go to the corner of, I don't know, 34th Street
link |
and Third Avenue, and you'll find a building
link |
on the Northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor, right?
link |
So when we have Third Avenue, that's one coordinate,
link |
34th Street, that's the second coordinate,
link |
and go up to the 17th.
link |
And what time is it?
link |
All right, well, now imagine that we traded the ability
link |
to get up to a particular height in a building
link |
and it's all flat land,
link |
but I'm gonna give you two temporal coordinates.
link |
So meet me at 5 p.m. and 12 noon
link |
at the corner of 34th and Third.
link |
That gets to be too mind blowing.
link |
I've got two separate watches.
link |
And presumably that's just specifying a single point
link |
in those two different dimensions,
link |
but then being able to travel along those dimensions.
link |
Let me see your right hand.
link |
You have no watch on that.
link |
Okay, I'm very concerned, Lex,
link |
that you're going through life without a wristwatch.
link |
That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch.
link |
I want you to wear it.
link |
This guy is funnier than basically any human on Earth.
link |
Lex, that has been in my family for months.
link |
Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman
link |
is now in a position to live in two spatial
link |
and two temporal dimensions unlike the rest of us.
link |
I clearly am only fit for four spatial dimensions.
link |
So I'm frozen, whereas you can double move.
link |
I can double move, which is funny
link |
because this is set in Austin time.
link |
So it's 4 p.m. and this is set in Los Angeles time.
link |
Well, but that's just with an affine shift in mod 12.
link |
But my point is, wouldn't that be interesting
link |
if there were two separate time scales
link |
and you had to coordinate both of those,
link |
but you didn't have to worry about what floor
link |
of the building because everything was on the ground floor.
link |
That is the confusion that we're having.
link |
And if you do one more show, right,
link |
then they're gonna put a watch on your ankle
link |
and you're only gonna have one spatial dimension
link |
that you can move around.
link |
But my claim is that all of these are actually sectors
link |
of my theory in case we're interested in that,
link |
which is geometric unity.
link |
There is a two, two sector and a three, one and a one, three
link |
and a zero, four and a four, zero.
link |
And all of these sectors have some physical reality.
link |
We happen to live in a one, three sector.
link |
But that's the kind of thinking that we don't do.
link |
When I say we have to get off this planet,
link |
people imagine, oh, okay, it's just Einstein
link |
plus some ability to break the law.
link |
By the way, even though you did this for humor's sake,
link |
I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin who.
link |
Am I gonna get whacked?
link |
But he was given a Super Bowl ring to look at
link |
and he, instead of just looking at it,
link |
put it on his finger and walked away with it.
link |
Rubbercraft, that's right.
link |
So in the same way, I will, if you don't mind,
link |
walk away with this Fitbit
link |
and taking the entirety of your life story with it
link |
because there's all these steps on it.
link |
Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.
link |
And where have I been?
link |
Right, that's what we're talking about.
link |
We're talking about, you wanna get into aliens,
link |
let's have an interesting alien conversation.
link |
Let's stop having the typical free will conversation,
link |
the typical alien conversation,
link |
the typical AGI morality conversation.
link |
It's like, we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves
link |
because we're not making progress.
link |
Time to have better versions of all these conversations.
link |
Is there some version of the alien conversation
link |
that could incorporate the breaking of frameworks?
link |
I mean, the key question would be,
link |
we've had the Pentagon release multiple videos
link |
of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us.
link |
I just think it's also really fascinating
link |
to talk about the fact that those of us
link |
who were trained to call BS on all of this stuff
link |
just had the rug pulled out from under us
link |
by the Pentagon choosing to do this.
link |
And you know what the effect of that is?
link |
You've opened the door for every stupid theory known to man.
link |
My aunt saw a ghost.
link |
Okay, now we're gonna have to listen to,
link |
well, hey, the Pentagon used to deny it.
link |
Then it turned out there were UFOs, dude.
link |
Whoever is in charge of lying to the public,
link |
they need a cost function that incorporates
link |
the damage and trust because I held this line
link |
that this was all garbage and all BS.
link |
Now I don't know what to think.
link |
There's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion,
link |
the breaking of frameworks that involves
link |
the release of videos from the Pentagon,
link |
which is almost like another dimension
link |
that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information
link |
is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling
link |
constantly that is messing with my head to think about
link |
because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that
link |
into your study of the nature of reality
link |
is like the constant shifting of the notation,
link |
the tools we use to communicate that reality.
link |
And so what am I supposed to think about these videos?
link |
Is it a complete distraction?
link |
Is it a kind of cosmic joke?
link |
I don't know, but you know what?
link |
I'm tired of these people,
link |
just completely tired of these people.
link |
The people on the Pentagon side
link |
or the people who are interpreting this stuff
link |
on the Pentagon side?
link |
I'm tired of the authorities playing games
link |
with what we can know.
link |
The fact that you and I don't,
link |
do you have a security clearance?
link |
Some level of it for,
link |
because I was funded for DARPA for a while.
link |
I don't have a security clearance.
link |
You know, I am going to release whatever theory I have.
link |
And my guess is that there is zero interest
link |
from our own government.
link |
And so the Chinese will find out about it at the same time,
link |
our government does,
link |
because Lord knows what they do in these buildings.
link |
I watch crazy people walk in and out
link |
of the intelligence community, walk in and out of DARPA.
link |
And I think, wow, you're talking to that person?
link |
That's really fascinating to me.
link |
We don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.
link |
Complete lack of transparency.
link |
Do you think it's possible there's,
link |
the government is in possession
link |
of something deeply fundamental
link |
to our understanding of the world
link |
that they're not releasing?
link |
So this is one of the things is,
link |
this is one of the famous distractions
link |
that people play with, the narrative.
link |
Assume that that were true.
link |
Of alien life forms and spacecraft in possession,
link |
that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft.
link |
Assume that were true.
link |
I don't think the government really exists at the moment.
link |
I believe, and this is not an idea that was original to me.
link |
There was a guy named Michael Teitelbaum
link |
who used to be at the Sloan Foundation.
link |
And at some point I pointed out that the US government
link |
had completely contradictory objectives
link |
when it came to the military and science.
link |
And one branch said this, one branch said that.
link |
I said, I don't understand which is true.
link |
What does the government want?
link |
He said, do you think there's a government?
link |
And I said, what do you mean?
link |
He said, what makes you think that the people
link |
in those two offices have ever coordinated?
link |
What is it that allows each office
link |
to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office?
link |
And that's when I first started to understand
link |
that there are periods where the government coheres,
link |
and then there are periods where the coherence just decays.
link |
And I think that that's been going on since 1945.
link |
That there have been a few places
link |
where there's been increased coherence,
link |
but in general everything is just getting
link |
less and less coherent.
link |
And that what war did was focus us on the need
link |
to have a government of people, a mission,
link |
capacity, technology, commitment, ideology.
link |
And then as soon as that was gone,
link |
different people, those who'd been through World War II
link |
had one set of beliefs, those born in the 1950s
link |
or late 40s by the time they got to Woodstock,
link |
they didn't buy any of that.
link |
So coherence is the complete opposite
link |
of bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy.
link |
So coherence is efficient, functional government.
link |
Because when you say there's no government,
link |
meaning there's no emergent function
link |
from a collection of individuals.
link |
It's just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices
link |
without any kind of efficient communication
link |
with each other on a single mission.
link |
And so a government that is truly at the epitome
link |
of what a government is supposed to be
link |
is when a bunch of people working together.
link |
What are we about?
link |
Are we about freedom?
link |
Are we about growth?
link |
Are we about decency and fairness?
link |
Are we about the absence of a national culture
link |
so that we can all just do our own thing?
link |
I've called this thing the USA and the United States
link |
have absolutely nothing.
link |
These are all different visions for our country.
link |
So it's possible that there's a alien spacecraft somewhere
link |
and there's like 20 people that know about it.
link |
And then they're kind of like,
link |
as you communicate further and further into the offices,
link |
that information dissipates,
link |
it gets distorted in some kind of way.
link |
And then it's completely lost the power,
link |
the possibility of that information is lost.
link |
We bought a house and I had this idea
link |
that I wanted to find out what all the switches did.
link |
And I quickly found out that your house
link |
doesn't keep updating its plans.
link |
As people do modifications,
link |
they just do the modifications
link |
and they don't actually record
link |
why they were doing what they were doing
link |
or what things lead to.
link |
So there are all sorts of bizarre,
link |
like there's a switch in my house that says privacy.
link |
I don't know what privacy is.
link |
Does it turn on an electromagnetic field?
link |
Does some lead shielding go over the house?
link |
That's what we have.
link |
We have a system in which the people
link |
who've inherited these structures have no idea
link |
why their grandparents built them.
link |
I'd be funny if there's a freedom of speech switch
link |
that you could also control.
link |
And there'd be a perfect metaphor.
link |
Well, that's different because what they figured out is,
link |
is that if they can just make sure
link |
that we don't have any public options for communication,
link |
then hey, everything that we say to each other
link |
goes through a private company,
link |
private companies can do whatever they want.
link |
And this is like one of the greatest moves
link |
that we didn't really notice.
link |
Electronic and digital speech
link |
makes every other kind of speech irrelevant.
link |
And because there is no public option, guess what?
link |
There's always somebody named Sundar or Jack or Mark
link |
who controls whether or not you can speak
link |
and what it appears to be that is being said
link |
and whose stuff is weighted more highly than others.
link |
It's an absolute nightmare.
link |
And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite,
link |
Lord knows what is going on.
link |
People are so busy making money
link |
that they are not actually upholding any of the values.
link |
So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally against,
link |
it has this kind of libertarian, free, progressive sheen
link |
to it when it goes to Burning Man.
link |
And then it quickly just imposes rules
link |
on all of the rest of us as to what we could say
link |
to each other if we're not part of the inner elite.
link |
So what do you think the ideal
link |
of the freedom of speech means?
link |
Well, this is very interesting.
link |
I keep getting lectured on social media
link |
by people who have no idea how much power
link |
the Supreme Court has to abstract things.
link |
Right now, you have the concept of the letter of the law
link |
and the spirit of the law.
link |
And the spirit of the law would have to say
link |
that our speech that matters is free,
link |
at least at the level of ideas.
link |
I don't claim that I have the right
link |
to endanger your life with speech
link |
or to reveal your private information.
link |
So I really am not opining about directed speech
link |
intended to smear you.
link |
And that's a different kettle of fish.
link |
And maybe I have some rights to do that,
link |
but I don't think that they're infinite.
link |
What I am saying is that the freedom of speech for ideas
link |
is essential that the court abstract it
link |
and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter,
link |
Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are
link |
because it really matters which abstraction you use.
link |
The case that I really like is search and seizure.
link |
If I have private data that I entered in my house
link |
that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house,
link |
but I view is the abstraction
link |
that it's only the perimeter of my house
link |
that I have the right to protect,
link |
or does my password extend the perimeter of my house
link |
to the data on the server
link |
that is located outside of my house?
link |
These are choices for the court, and the court is supposed
link |
to pretend that they can divine the true intent
link |
But all of the sort of, and I've taken to calling this
link |
the problem of internet hyenas,
link |
people with readymade answers and LOLs,
link |
and you're such a moron.
link |
These folks love to remind you, it's a private company,
link |
dude, it can do whatever it wants.
link |
No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are.
link |
And just the way, for example,
link |
the Griswold decision found that there was a penumbra
link |
because there was too little in the Constitution,
link |
therefore there were all sorts of things implied
link |
that couldn't be in the document.
link |
Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now
link |
that says Jack cannot do it if he wants.
link |
It's really, so you say the courts,
link |
but it's also us, people who think about the world,
link |
it's you. No, no, no.
link |
But the courts don't do this.
link |
But we can still think about it.
link |
Sure, but I don't feel like going down the drain.
link |
Here's what I'm thinking about,
link |
because it's tricky how far it should extend.
link |
I mean, that's an ongoing conversation.
link |
Don't you think the interpretation of the law...
link |
I think I'm trying to say something very simple,
link |
and it's just not gonna be popular for a while.
link |
Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication.
link |
Print or shouting in a public park.
link |
And so I can go to a public park
link |
and I can shout if I get a permit.
link |
Even there, I think it was in the late 1980s in Atlanta,
link |
we came up with free speech zones
link |
where you can't protest at a convention.
link |
You bet you can go to a park 23 miles out
link |
and they'll fence off a little area
link |
where you can have your free speech.
link |
No, speech is dangerous.
link |
Ideas are dangerous.
link |
We are a country about danger and risk.
link |
And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals
link |
trying to reveal their private stuff
link |
and all that kind of...
link |
That is very different.
link |
So forget a lot of that stuff.
link |
But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous
link |
and people will die as a result of free speech.
link |
The idea that one life is too much is preposterous.
link |
Like why did we send...
link |
If one life is preposterous,
link |
why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy?
link |
I just don't get this.
link |
So one thing that I was clearly bothered by,
link |
and maybe you can be my therapist as well.
link |
I thought you were mine.
link |
This is a little bit of a miscommunication
link |
on both of our parts then.
link |
Because who's paying who for this?
link |
I was really bothered by Amazon banning Parler from AWS
link |
because my assumption was that the infrastructure...
link |
I drew a distinction between AWS,
link |
the infrastructure on which competing platforms
link |
could be created is different than the actual platforms.
link |
So the standard of the ideal of freedom of speech,
link |
I, in my mind, in a shallow way perhaps,
link |
applied differently to AWS than I did to Twitter.
link |
It felt that we've created a more dangerous world,
link |
that freedoms were violated by banning Parler from AWS,
link |
which I saw as the computing infrastructure
link |
which enables the competition of tools,
link |
the competition of frameworks of communication.
link |
What do you think about this?
link |
First of all, let me give you the internet hyena answer.
link |
I don't understand, dude, just build your own Amazon.
link |
Yes. Well, so that's a very shallow statement,
link |
but it's also one that has some legitimacy.
link |
We can't completely dismiss it
link |
because there's levels to this game.
link |
Yes and no, but if you really wanted to chase that down,
link |
one of the great things about a person to person conversation
link |
as opposed to let's have 30 of our closest friends,
link |
whenever we have a conversation
link |
with 30 of our closest friends, you know what happens?
link |
It's like passing light through a prism.
link |
Every person says something interesting.
link |
And as a result, it's always muddled.
link |
Nothing ever resolves.
link |
Well, one of my conversational techniques you mentioned,
link |
you pushed back is first this childlike naivety
link |
and curiosity, but also.
link |
Real or simulated?
link |
I would say 80% real.
link |
So in this paradigm, how could you not see this coming?
link |
I mean, I did a show with Ashley Matthews,
link |
who's the woman behind Riley Reid.
link |
And specifically about this, it was about the idea
link |
that if I move away from politics and go towards sex,
link |
I know that there's always a move to use the infrastructure
link |
to shut down sex workers.
link |
And in this case, we had Operation Choke Point
link |
under the Obama administration.
link |
We have a positive passion for people
link |
who want to solve problems,
link |
that they don't like this company,
link |
they don't like that company,
link |
payday loans would be another one.
link |
And so you have legal companies
link |
that are harassed by our financial system
link |
that you can't, as Riley Reid,
link |
Ashley couldn't get a Mailchimp account according to her,
link |
if I understand her correctly.
link |
And this idea that you charge these people higher rates
link |
because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards,
link |
even if their chargebacks are low.
link |
Yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment.
link |
There's something about everybody who shows up at Davos,
link |
they get drunk in the Swiss Alps,
link |
and then they come back home and they coordinate,
link |
and they coordinate things like Build Back Better.
link |
We don't really understand what Build Back Better is,
link |
but my guess is that Build Back Better
link |
has to do with extremism in America.
link |
How do we shut down the Republican Party
link |
as the source of extremism?
link |
Now, I do think the Republican Party
link |
got very extreme under Trump.
link |
And I do believe that that was responsive
link |
to how extreme the Democratic Party got under Clinton first
link |
and then Obama and then Hillary.
link |
And in all of these circumstances,
link |
it's amazing how much we want
link |
to wield these things as weapons.
link |
Well, our extremism is fine
link |
because we pretend that Antifa doesn't exist
link |
and we don't report what goes on in Portland,
link |
but your extremism, my God, that's disgusting.
link |
This is the completely ridiculous place that we're in.
link |
And by the way, our friends in part
link |
are coked up on tech money,
link |
and they don't appear to hold the courage
link |
of their convictions at a political level
link |
because it's not in keeping with shareholder value.
link |
At some level, shareholder value is the ultimate shield
link |
with which everyone can cloak themselves.
link |
Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter,
link |
and I'm not sure it was a good financial decision
link |
for Twitter, right?
link |
Perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong.
link |
Well, are you thinking locally,
link |
or are you thinking if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump,
link |
what is the odds that the full force
link |
of the antitrust division might find them?
link |
So there's a complicated thing.
link |
Well, look, these guys are all having a discussion
link |
in very practical terms.
link |
You can imagine the sorts of things
link |
and imagine the sorts of conversation.
link |
Jack, Mark, Zunder, we're really glad you're all here.
link |
We're all trying to sing from the same hymnal
link |
and row in the same direction.
link |
We understand free speech.
link |
We're completely committed to it,
link |
but we have to draw a line with extremism, guys.
link |
We just need to make sure that we're all on the same page.
link |
Well, they use the term violence, too,
link |
and they, I think, over apply it.
link |
So basically, anybody...
link |
I'm telling you, I say dumb things
link |
to incentivize thoughtful conversation.
link |
Well, whatever these things are, there is no trace.
link |
Like, how old are you, Lex?
link |
You're in your mid 30s?
link |
Yeah, to late 40s.
link |
Mid, late 20s to late 40s, somewhere in there.
link |
That's the demographic, yes.
link |
I do think that partially what's happened
link |
is that your group has never seen functional institutions.
link |
These institutions have been so compromised for so long.
link |
You've probably never seen an adult.
link |
Sometimes I think Elon looks like an adult.
link |
I know that he has a wild lifestyle,
link |
but I also see it looking like an adult.
link |
What does an adult look like exactly?
link |
Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things, speaks carefully,
link |
thinks about the future beyond their own lifespan.
link |
Somebody who has a pretty good idea of how to get things done,
link |
isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions,
link |
is more focused on breaking new ground
link |
than playing rent seeking games.
link |
I mean, I really had a positive...
link |
I was so completely jazzed when Elon Musk ended up
link |
as the world's richest person.
link |
He was like, well, that's interesting, back to work.
link |
It's just like, that's what an adult would do.
link |
And it just made, you know, weirdly,
link |
I said something about, isn't it amazing
link |
that the world's richest person knows what a Lagrangian is?
link |
And he made a terrible Lagrange joke about potentials.
link |
But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately,
link |
Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult.
link |
And I can tell you that the internet hyenas
link |
will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is
link |
for pumping his stock price,
link |
talking his book and all this stuff.
link |
Just looking at the world seriously and really saying,
link |
you're saying that the people who are running tech companies
link |
or running the mediums on which we can exercise
link |
the ideal of free speech are not adults.
link |
I think, first of all, a lot of them
link |
are Silicon Valley utopian businessmen,
link |
where you talk a utopian line and you use it.
link |
You've heard my take, which is that the idealism
link |
of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts.
link |
And I believe that in many ways,
link |
the idealism of Silicon Valley about connecting the world,
link |
the world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
link |
is really about the software eating the world
link |
as Mark Andreessen likes to say,
link |
that there were all these legacy properties
link |
and by simply being a bad tech version
link |
of something that previously existed like a newspaper,
link |
you could immediately start to dwarf that
link |
by aggregating newspapers and their digital versions
link |
because digital is so much more powerful.
link |
As a result, yes, we have lots of man children
link |
wandering around what once was the Bay Area
link |
and is now Austin and Miami and other places,
link |
maybe Singapore, that all of these people,
link |
these are friends of ours and they're brilliant
link |
with respect to a certain amount of stuff,
link |
but none of them can get off the drip.
link |
It's amazing that none of them have FU money.
link |
We've got billionaires who don't have FU money.
link |
Okay, I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey
link |
was that there was an incitement of violence
link |
and not just Jack Dorsey,
link |
but everybody that was banning people.
link |
And then this word violence was used
link |
as a kind of just like extremism and so on
link |
to without much reason behind it.
link |
You think it's impossible for Jack Dorsey
link |
or anybody else to be, as you said, an adult,
link |
a grownup and reason.
link |
Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grownup.
link |
It seems like he is.
link |
Yeah, but he's under pressures.
link |
As you've discussed,
link |
it seems that he's been on the verge
link |
of almost being quite serious and transparent
link |
and real with people.
link |
I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went.
link |
And I worry that that must be something behind the scenes
link |
From my perspective, what I think is the stress,
link |
the burden of that when people are screaming at you
link |
No, Jack is a Zen monk.
link |
Jack is an incredibly impressive person intellectually,
link |
morally, spiritually, at least for a couple of meetings.
link |
I don't know him very well,
link |
but I'm very impressed by the person I met
link |
and I don't know where that person is.
link |
And that terrifies me.
link |
But do you think somebody could step up in that way?
link |
So does a human being have the capacity to be transparent
link |
about the reasoning behind the banning?
link |
Or do you think all banning of people
link |
from mediums of communication is eventually destructive
link |
or it's impossible for human beings
link |
to reason with ourselves about it?
link |
Well, let's see what the problem is.
link |
So my phone has been on airplane mode.
link |
I'm gonna unlock it.
link |
And I'm gonna take a picture of Lex Fridman.
link |
Now, if I can, I'm gonna tweet that picture out.
link |
But here's the weird part about it.
link |
That picture sitting with Lex today.
link |
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage is made.
link |
In so doing, I have just sent a picture of you
link |
and a tiny piece of text all over the planet
link |
that has arrived at, if statistics tell the truth,
link |
just under half a million different accounts.
link |
And then more from sharing and so on.
link |
Well, and then some of those accounts are dead.
link |
We don't really know how many places it went.
link |
But the key issue with that tweet
link |
is that that is a nonlocal phenomenon.
link |
So I just broadcasted to an entire planet.
link |
Somebody in Uganda is reading that
link |
at the same time as somebody in Uruguay.
link |
There is no known solution to have so many people
link |
with the ability to communicate nonlocally
link |
because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech
link |
inside of the constitution.
link |
Friction, locality, there were all sorts
link |
of other aspects to speech.
link |
So if you think about speech as a bundle.
link |
Then it got unbundled.
link |
And some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on
link |
to retard the impact of speech aren't present.
link |
And we don't have the courage to say,
link |
I wonder if the first amendment really applies
link |
in the modern era in the same way,
link |
or we have to work through an abstraction.
link |
Either we probably have to amend the constitution
link |
or we have to abstract it properly.
link |
And that issue is not something we're facing up to.
link |
I watch us constantly look backwards.
link |
We don't seem to try to come up with new ideas
link |
Nobody really imagines that we're going to be able
link |
to wisely amend the constitution anymore
link |
in the inside of the United States.
link |
Many people abroad will say,
link |
why are these guys talking about the US?
link |
It's a US centric program.
link |
Well, it's because nobody knows where this program lives.
link |
The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be
link |
in a physical place together is also bizarre.
link |
It could be anywhere.
link |
It doesn't really matter that it happens to be here.
link |
So the difference between logical and between physical,
link |
local, nonlocal, frictional, nonfrictional,
link |
it's the same thing with firearms.
link |
Nobody imagined that the Gatling gun
link |
was gonna be present when you had to reload a musket.
link |
And that's fascinating to think about.
link |
I mean, you're exactly right that the nature
link |
of this particular freedom that seems so foundational
link |
to this nation, to what made this nation great
link |
and perhaps much of the world that is great,
link |
made it great, is changing completely.
link |
Can we try to reason through how the ideal freedom
link |
of speech is to be changed?
link |
I mean, I guess I'm struggling.
link |
It feels really wrong, perhaps because I wasn't
link |
paying attention to it.
link |
It feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump from Twitter,
link |
to ban not just the president.
link |
That's really wrong to me.
link |
But this particular human for being divisive.
link |
But then when there's an incitement of violence,
link |
that is an overused claim.
link |
But perhaps there was actual brewing
link |
of local violence happening.
link |
So one of the things I know was happening on Parler
link |
is people were scheduling meetings together
link |
in physical space.
link |
So you're now going back from this dynamic, social,
link |
large scale, people from Uganda, people from all
link |
over the world being able to communicate.
link |
You're now mapping that into now back meeting
link |
in the physical space that is similar
link |
to what the founding of this nation was.
link |
The violence would be digital
link |
if ransomware suddenly was unleashed.
link |
The key issue is the abstractions.
link |
So what was freedom of speech as a bundle?
link |
And then how do we abstract the bundle
link |
into the digital era?
link |
Do you think we just need to raise the question
link |
and talk about it?
link |
Do you have ideas?
link |
Well, sure I have ideas.
link |
But the key point is that I'm not even welcome
link |
in mainstream media.
link |
I've never seen you on mainstream media.
link |
Do you do mainstream media?
link |
So we exist in part of an alternate universe
link |
because the mainstream media is trying to have
link |
a coherent story, which I've called
link |
the gated institutional narrative.
link |
And the institutions pretend that,
link |
they plug their fingers in their ears
link |
and pretend that nothing exists outside
link |
of MSNBC talking to CNN about what was
link |
in the New York Times as covered by the Washington Post.
link |
And so that's effectively like a professional
link |
wrestling promotion where they, you know,
link |
the Undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan
link |
and Rowdy Roddy Piper.
link |
Okay, well, that's very different than MMA.
link |
You've recently been on Glenn Beck's program.
link |
And there was this kind of, one of the things
link |
you've talked about is being able to have
link |
this conversation, I don't know if you would put it
link |
as a type of conversation that was happening
link |
outside the mainstream media, but a conversation
link |
that reaches across different world views.
link |
Being a nuanced, or just like a respectful conversation
link |
that's grounded in mutual.
link |
But we can't have the reality because the main model
link |
is the center, both left and right,
link |
is in the process of stealing all the wealth
link |
And they've organized the extremes into two LARPing teams
link |
that I've called Magistan and Wokistan.
link |
And then you have everybody who isn't part
link |
of that complex, all seven of us.
link |
The number of us who are able to earn a living
link |
looking at all of these mad people playing this game.
link |
There's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks
link |
are trying to look at price action.
link |
And somebody says, this doesn't make any sense.
link |
And somebody will say, it's just the locals
link |
stealing from each other.
link |
And that's really what we have.
link |
We've got the leaders of Magistan and Wokistan,
link |
championing these two teams is sponsored by the center
link |
because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver
link |
and cut the paintings out of the frames.
link |
That's what you and I are looking at.
link |
So when you ask me, do you have any ideas
link |
about the abstraction for free speech?
link |
I've never met Mark Zuckerberg.
link |
I've never met Sundar Pichai.
link |
I never met Larry Page.
link |
I was once in a room with Sergey Brin.
link |
I've never spoken to Elon Musk.
link |
I hang out with Peter Thiel,
link |
but we have a very deep relationship,
link |
but I don't really speak to that many other people
link |
at sort of at this level.
link |
We're not having any kind of smart conversation
link |
at a national level.
link |
In fact, it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox
link |
in which we could play together.
link |
There's no place that we actually talk
link |
except long form podcasting.
link |
And by the way, they've found,
link |
you see what's going on with like Alex Stamos
link |
and the Hoover Institution.
link |
There's a loophole left.
link |
Long form podcasting allows people to speak
link |
at levels above daytime CNN.
link |
It's like, well, why do you think
link |
they're not watching daytime CNN?
link |
But that's just silly journalism.
link |
They currently have no power to displace podcasting.
link |
That's why it's so powerful, RSS feed.
link |
I mean, that's why the big challenge with Joe Rogan
link |
and Spotify is like, there's this dance that's fascinating
link |
to see is Joe Rogan is not part of the system
link |
and then he's also uncancellable
link |
and there's this tension that's happening.
link |
Well, think about what happened to Howard Stern though.
link |
Howard Stern became much less relevant.
link |
So if they can't control Joe by bringing him in house,
link |
the key question is, is he going to continue,
link |
like Joe says this thing about FU money.
link |
Joe's one of the only people with FU money
link |
who's actually said FU.
link |
I don't understand this.
link |
I don't have FU money.
link |
What exactly is, can we break apart FU money?
link |
Because I always thought I've been fortunate enough
link |
to always have FU money in the sense
link |
that my standards were so low that a basic salary
link |
in the United States.
link |
Well, this is the stoic point,
link |
which is if you can live on rice and beans,
link |
you're uncancellable because you're always rich
link |
relative to your needs.
link |
Isn't that FU fundamental, FU money?
link |
Why do you say that tech billionaires don't have FU money?
link |
When you need to hire private security
link |
to protect your family,
link |
how do you protect your two children?
link |
I don't have those yet.
link |
My point is that FU money insulates everything
link |
that you care about.
link |
It's not just about you.
link |
So you're saying as the level of responsibility grows,
link |
the amount of money required for FU.
link |
We have a war going on.
link |
The war is on academic freedom.
link |
Academic freedom used to be present in the system
link |
as a, in terms of the idea, we trust our elite.
link |
Now we have an idea like, you wanna be the elite.
link |
You want a Lord above us.
link |
First of all, there's like a populist, anti elitist thing.
link |
Then there's the idea
link |
that we're gonna defer tenure for forever.
link |
Then we're gonna tell people, stay in your lane.
link |
Your tenure is only good
link |
for your own particular tiny micro subject.
link |
Then we're gonna also control your grants
link |
and we'll be able to load up your teaching load.
link |
If we don't like who you are,
link |
we'll make your life absolutely impossible.
link |
We lost academic freedom
link |
and we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster.
link |
And then we lost funding
link |
so that people were confident
link |
that they would have the ability to do research
link |
no matter what they said.
link |
And as a result, what you find is,
link |
is a world in which there's no ability
link |
to get people to say, no, I'm not gonna sign
link |
your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath.
link |
I won't sign any loyalty oath.
link |
Get the hell out of my office.
link |
FU, and you're connecting money to that, but.
link |
Well, my point is, is that academic freedom
link |
is the, the whole idea behind it
link |
was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire
link |
on a much smaller salary.
link |
Yeah, the only reason in part
link |
that I wanted to go into academic,
link |
academics as a profession,
link |
as opposed to wanting to do physical
link |
or mathematical research.
link |
The great prize was freedom.
link |
And Ralph Gomery of the Sloan Foundation,
link |
previously of IBM research pointed it out.
link |
He says, if you lose freedom,
link |
you lose the only thing we had to offer top minds.
link |
Top minds value their intellectual freedom
link |
and their physical and economic security
link |
at a different level than other human beings.
link |
And so people say, you know,
link |
I don't understand, dude,
link |
and you have the ability to do X, Y, and Z.
link |
What's the problem?
link |
It's like, well, I value my ability
link |
to raise the middle finger as an American,
link |
practically above everything else.
link |
I want to talk to you about freedom here
link |
in the context of something you've mentioned,
link |
which is one way to take away freedom
link |
is to put a human being into a cage
link |
to create constraints.
link |
The other one that worries me
link |
is something that I think you've spoken to
link |
to Twitter a little bit on Twitter,
link |
is we bleed freedom by kind of slowly
link |
scaring you into not doing,
link |
not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities
link |
you can as freedom.
link |
So like when you ban Donald Trump,
link |
when you ban Parler,
link |
you give a little doubt in the minds of millions,
link |
like me, a person who's a tech person,
link |
who's an entrepreneur,
link |
that's what I'm afraid of when I look in the mirror,
link |
is there now a little doubt in there
link |
that limits the amount of options I will try?
link |
How certain are you that the COVID virus
link |
didn't come from the Wuhan lab
link |
and is biosafety level four?
link |
We both know that we're both supposed to robotically say
link |
the idea that the COVID virus came from a lab
link |
is a discredited conspiracy theory.
link |
There is no evidence that suggests that this is true.
link |
The World Health Organization and the CDC
link |
have both opined this to say otherwise
link |
would be incredibly irresponsible.
link |
And the threat of that is the thing
link |
that ultimately limits the freedoms we feel.
link |
I should be tweeting about Jeff Epstein all the time.
link |
And you're afraid.
link |
I mean, I said it in the public.
link |
Why is it we don't ask where the records are
link |
from Villard House?
link |
Where are the financial records?
link |
Where are the SEC filings?
link |
Where are the questions on the record
link |
to the intelligence agencies?
link |
Was he known to be part of the intelligence community?
link |
So we're not interested in asking questions.
link |
Like, am I gonna die as a result of asking the question,
link |
was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community
link |
Is there a reason we're not asking
link |
about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund
link |
that he didn't run?
link |
It's just like the Wuhan lab.
link |
Okay, how do we get to the core of the Jeffrey Epstein,
link |
the truth behind Jeffrey Epstein in a sense?
link |
I mean, there's some things that are just like
link |
useless conspiracy theories around it,
link |
even if they're true.
link |
There's some things that get to say it.
link |
You're not gonna like it.
link |
Look at the 1971 media Pennsylvania break in
link |
of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI.
link |
Those kids, and by the way, they weren't all kids,
link |
did what had to be done.
link |
They broke in, they broke the law.
link |
It was an incredible act of civil disobedience.
link |
And God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her,
link |
she was going to take to her grave,
link |
that she'd been part of this,
link |
like the coolest thing of all time.
link |
They didn't say anything for forever.
link |
So civil disobedience, I mean, you have to.
link |
We are founded on civil disobedience.
link |
Civil disobedience is incredibly,
link |
you screw it up and you're just a vandal.
link |
You screw it up, you're a hooligan.
link |
Those cats were so disciplined.
link |
It was an art form and they risked everything.
link |
They were willing to pay with their freedom.
link |
Those are the sorts of people who earned the right
link |
by putting themselves at risk.
link |
I would not do this.
link |
I am not volunteering to break into anything.
link |
I think it was William Davidon who was a student
link |
of Murray Gellman and a physics professor at Haverford
link |
who corralled these people and led this effort.
link |
And right now, what we need is somebody to blow the lid
link |
off of what is controlling everything.
link |
We have, I'm happy to hear that it's a system
link |
of incentive structures,
link |
that it's a system of selective pressures.
link |
I'm happy to find out that it's emergent.
link |
I'm happy to find that it's partially directed
link |
by our own intelligence community.
link |
I'm happy to hear that, in fact, we've been penetrated
link |
by North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia.
link |
But I need to know why people aren't,
link |
like the firebombing of the courthouse in Portland, Oregon
link |
has no explanation.
link |
And somehow this is normal.
link |
This is not normal to any human being.
link |
We have video that people don't believe.
link |
And I come back to the shaggy defense of it wasn't me.
link |
You know, so it's like, you remember that song?
link |
Shaggy, yeah, it wasn't me caught you banging
link |
in the shower on the counter.
link |
Yeah, exactly, it wasn't me.
link |
He says, but his friend says,
link |
well, your strategy makes no sense at all.
link |
Well, this is what MSNBC is doing.
link |
You dropped it from the graphic, it wasn't me.
link |
You came up with another Yang, it wasn't me.
link |
I will never see MSNBC the same again.
link |
So you've spoken about him before.
link |
I think it'd be nice to maybe honor him
link |
to break it apart a little bit.
link |
Why was he a special human being in this ilk
link |
of what we're talking about now, civil disobedience?
link |
How do we honor him now moving forward as human beings
link |
who are willing to take risks in this world?
link |
Well, I don't know.
link |
I mean, are you inspired by Aaron Schwartz?
link |
How do you feel about JSTOR?
link |
Let's talk about JSTOR first.
link |
So let's say what JSTOR is all about, right?
link |
We the taxpayer pay for research.
link |
And then the people who do the research
link |
do all the work for a bunch of companies
link |
who then charge us $30 an article
link |
to read what it is that we already paid for.
link |
And if we don't cite these articles,
link |
we're told that we're in violation.
link |
I almost never call for civil disobedience
link |
because I don't really want to, but fuck JSTOR,
link |
fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer.
link |
Who the fuck are these people?
link |
Get the smart people need to take the greedy people
link |
behind the woodshed and explain to them what science is.
link |
I have a very old fashioned idea that's so out of favor
link |
that I will immediately be seen as a knuckle dragger.
link |
I believe in the great woman theory of history
link |
and the great man theory of history.
link |
Emmy Nerder is fantastic as an example.
link |
As an example, and I believe in editors over peer reviewers.
link |
And I believe that wrong things should be allowed
link |
into the literature.
link |
And I believe that the gatekeeping should go towards zero
link |
because the costs associated with distribution
link |
are very, very slight.
link |
I believe that we should be looking
link |
at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly
link |
into your competitor's clutches,
link |
particularly if you're a young person being reviewed
link |
by an older person.
link |
Are you familiar with the Duat de Senor?
link |
Are you familiar with the legend of the Magnaia?
link |
No, the Magnaia is the Miller's daughter
link |
and the largest food fight in the entire universe,
link |
I believe is held, I think in Italy,
link |
it's called the Battle of the Oranges.
link |
And it celebrates the Miller's daughter
link |
who had fallen in love with her beloved.
link |
And when it came time for them to marry,
link |
the virginal Magnaia was in fact told
link |
that the Lord of the land had the right
link |
to have the first night with the bride.
link |
Well, the Magnaia had a different idea.
link |
So she seemed to consent to this perhaps mythical right,
link |
also called the Prima Note, the first night.
link |
And by legend, she concealed a dagger underneath her robes.
link |
And when it came time for the hated Lord of the Manor
link |
to extract this right, she pulled the knife out
link |
And I think it also echoes a little bit
link |
of particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones.
link |
But that inspired both men and women.
link |
And the Magnaia is the legendary hero.
link |
So right now, what we need to do is we need
link |
to resist the Prima Note, the right of first look, right?
link |
F you, you don't have the right of first look.
link |
I don't wanna send something blindly to my competitors.
link |
I don't wanna subject myself to you naming
link |
what work I've done.
link |
Why are you in my story?
link |
That's my question, get out of my story.
link |
If I do work and then you have an idea,
link |
oh, well, it's the Matthew principle.
link |
To him who has much more will be given.
link |
I've gone to the National Academy of Sciences
link |
and talked about these things.
link |
And it's funny, I've been laughed at by the older people
link |
who think, well, Eric, you know science proceeds
link |
funeral by funeral, that's Planck.
link |
You know the Matthew principle,
link |
you know the Matilda principle,
link |
the things done by women are attributed to men.
link |
That these are not new.
link |
And you guys just live like this?
link |
Yeah, so the Revolutionary Act now is to resist
link |
all of these things that are not new.
link |
So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz.
link |
Aaron Schwartz was the Magnaia.
link |
One of the things you've done very beautifully
link |
is to communicate love.
link |
And I think about some of our conversations.
link |
And you got me to talk a little bit about
link |
my own experiences in 02138 and 39.
link |
We are the product of our trauma.
link |
And what people don't understand is that very often
link |
when you see people taking countermeasures
link |
against what appear to be imaginary forces,
link |
they're really actually replaying things
link |
that really happened to them.
link |
And having been through this system and watching
link |
all of the ways in which it completely rewrites
link |
the lives of the people who I am counting on
link |
to cure our diseases, build our new industries,
link |
keep us safe from our foes,
link |
the amount of pressure the system is putting
link |
on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable.
link |
And so my goal is to empower somebody
link |
like an Aaron Schwartz in memory
link |
and to talk about a Jeffrey Epstein situation.
link |
Do you know that the first person outside of me
link |
to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein?
link |
How did he know I was working on this?
link |
So your ideas that formed geometric unity
link |
was something that his eyes have seen?
link |
I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein
link |
as one of the only people who could help me.
link |
No, no, no, listen to this.
link |
Yeah, how does this connect?
link |
Okay, well, first of all, my old synagogue,
link |
my old shul was the conservative minion at Harvard Hillel.
link |
And I believe it's called Rosovsky Hall
link |
after Henry Rosovsky in the economics department,
link |
who was a Japan scholar, if I'm correct.
link |
And he became provost or dean of Harvard.
link |
I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein's money.
link |
And I wondered in part whether the Jewish students
link |
at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck
link |
of Harvard Hillel.
link |
So that was something I found very curious,
link |
but I don't know much about it.
link |
I also found that Jeffrey Epstein hanging around
link |
scientists, I don't think that either you or Joe exactly,
link |
I mean, got me correct in your last interchange.
link |
For the record, for people who haven't listened
link |
to Joe Rogan program, Joe has claimed that Eric Weinstein
link |
was the only person who has gotten laid.
link |
And you said you also got paid as a young man, right?
link |
I believe the word was laid, but allegedly.
link |
My hearing isn't so good at age 55.
link |
All right, leaving that aside.
link |
Leaving that aside, what was Jeffrey Epstein doing
link |
hanging around all of these scientists?
link |
I don't think that was the same program
link |
that was about compromising political leaders
link |
and business people and entertainment figures.
link |
I think these are two different programs
link |
that were being run through one individual.
link |
And Joe seemed to think that I didn't think he was smooth.
link |
I thought he was glib.
link |
I think what Joe is really trying to get at is that
link |
I found his mysticism meretricious.
link |
He had an ability to deflect every conversation
link |
that might go towards revealing
link |
that he didn't know what he was talking about.
link |
Every time you started to get close to something
link |
where the rubber hit the road,
link |
the rubber wouldn't hit the road.
link |
And yet, can you help me untangle the fact
link |
that you thought deeply about the physics
link |
of the nature of our universe
link |
and Jeffrey Epstein was interested?
link |
I wasn't really talking about this stuff until,
link |
even my close friends didn't really know what I was up to.
link |
And yet you're saying he did not have
link |
sufficient brilliance to understand
link |
when the rubber hit the road.
link |
So why did he have sufficient interest and curiosity?
link |
I'll tell you what I thought.
link |
I had been waiting to find out,
link |
does my government even know I exist?
link |
Do you have an answer to that question?
link |
I have, a couple times the government
link |
has reached out to me.
link |
In general, there is zero interest in me,
link |
like less than zero interest.
link |
I find that fascinating.
link |
As far as you know, right?
link |
Well, that's what I'm trying to say.
link |
The question about not being able to see
link |
through a half silvered mirror,
link |
you don't know what's going on
link |
behind the half silvered mirror.
link |
To you, it's all you see is your reflection.
link |
But your intuition still holds,
link |
like this is where I've mentioned that I,
link |
this is where I'll say naive dumb things,
link |
but I still hold on to this intuition that Jeff,
link |
I'm not confident in this,
link |
but I lean towards that direction
link |
that Jeffrey Epstein is the source of evil,
link |
not something that's underlying him.
link |
It's different than mine.
link |
Our Bayesian priors are tutored
link |
by different life experiences.
link |
If I was mostly concerned, like Sam Harris is concerned,
link |
that people fill their heads with nonsense,
link |
I would have a very strong sense
link |
that people need order in the world,
link |
that they take mysterious situations,
link |
they build entire castles in the air,
link |
and then they go move in if they really get crazy.
link |
The old saying is that neurotics build castles in the air
link |
and psychotics move in.
link |
Coming from a progressive family,
link |
we had a different experience.
link |
It's really weird when the government
link |
is actually out to get you,
link |
when they actually send a spy,
link |
when they actually engage in disinformation campaigns,
link |
when they smear you.
link |
And if you've ever had that brought to bear on your family,
link |
you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country,
link |
which is different than having a,
link |
wow, do people believe crazy stuff
link |
because they watch too much TV.
link |
And both of these things have some merit to them,
link |
but it's a question of regulated expression.
link |
When do you want to express more Sam Harris
link |
and when do you want to express more Howard Zinn?
link |
And you can express both, correct?
link |
The one human being can express both?
link |
Sure, but there's a trade off between them.
link |
In other words, most people like the Michael Shermers
link |
of the world are gonna tilt very strongly
link |
to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
link |
So you're gonna have that kind of energy.
link |
And then somebody else is gonna say,
link |
how many times do I have to get hit on,
link |
how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb
link |
before I realize that there's a problem?
link |
So my feeling about this is yes,
link |
people see patterns in clouds.
link |
They see faces and scripture and all sorts of things,
link |
and it's just random cloud patterns.
link |
And it's also the case that there's tremendous pressure
link |
not to see conspiracies when conspiracies
link |
are relatively more common than the people
link |
who shout conspiracy theory will claim.
link |
So both of these things are true.
link |
And you have to ask, when do you express your inner Zinn
link |
and when your inner Harris?
link |
And those are different.
link |
I want to find them out.
link |
The difference in you and I biases aside
link |
is you've actually met Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
And I'm listening to reverberations years later
link |
of stories and narratives throughout the story.
link |
Luckily, I only met him once.
link |
And I think I had one or perhaps two phone conversations
link |
with him other than the one meeting.
link |
You can learn a lot in just a few words, right,
link |
from a human being.
link |
Well, that's true, but I think that the bigger issue
link |
was I saw something that I don't hear much remarked upon,
link |
which is Jeffrey Epstein is all that there is.
link |
In other words, there's the National Science Foundation,
link |
National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes.
link |
There's all this stuff that kind of has the same feel to it,
link |
a little bit of variation and difference,
link |
Department of Energy.
link |
If you fall outside of that, there's just Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
That's what you're told.
link |
That's not quite true.
link |
There's Kavli, maybe Jim Simons is now in the game.
link |
Peter Thiel has done some stuff.
link |
You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try.
link |
So there is other money running around, Templeton.
link |
But very strongly, there was a belief
link |
that if you're doing something really innovative
link |
and the system can't fund it because we become pussies,
link |
Jeffrey Epstein's your guy.
link |
So there's like this funnel
link |
that you're supposed to go through.
link |
And the idea is that you get called
link |
the great man's house and the sort of lubricious version
link |
of Ralph Lauren takes you in and asks you bizarre questions.
link |
And maybe he has an island, maybe he has a plane.
link |
And when you're starved, somebody showing you a feast
link |
or when you're dehydrated in a death's door
link |
and somebody says, oh, I have a well, that's what it is.
link |
And so the thought is, wow, can somebody get some effing
link |
money into the science system so that we don't have
link |
super creeps trying to learn all of our secrets
link |
WTF, what is your problem with transparency
link |
and taxpayer dollars?
link |
Just all of you, you wouldn't have a country.
link |
You'd be speaking German.
link |
So essentially you believe that human beings
link |
would not be able to, when the money is lacking
link |
in the system, like in research.
link |
We produce public goods.
link |
You and I are meant to produce public goods.
link |
Now I sell Athletic Greens and I sell Theragun
link |
and I sell Unagi scooters and Chili Pad.
link |
Can I be honest, I love these products,
link |
but I didn't get into this game for the purpose of selling.
link |
I'm trying to figure out how do you have an FU lifestyle?
link |
But you know something Lex, I don't know why you built
link |
this channel, it's kind of a mystery.
link |
I'll tell you why I built my channel.
link |
It's gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time in an alley.
link |
I got rolled multiple times and my point is I didn't want
link |
to become a celebrity, I didn't want to become well known,
link |
but it's a lot harder to roll somebody who's getting,
link |
I think I'm, I don't know if this is mistaken,
link |
but I think I'm the math PhD with the largest number
link |
of followers on Twitter.
link |
And there was nothing you could do before.
link |
I mean again, to put a little responsibility on you,
link |
so you've created something really special
link |
for the distribution of your own ideas.
link |
I mean, but because it's not necessarily currently scalable,
link |
you also, perhaps you and I have the responsibility
link |
of giving other people also a chance to spread their ideas.
link |
I mean Joe Rogan did this very effectively
link |
for a bunch of people that.
link |
That's why they're angry at him because he's a gatekeeper
link |
and he let all sorts of people through that gate
link |
from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones.
link |
To Jordan Peterson to, I mean, even first of all, to you.
link |
That's the problem.
link |
Well, but you have not successfully built up a thing
link |
that allows that to carry that forward.
link |
Oh no, no, no, no.
link |
We are all vulnerable to reputational attack
link |
because what happens, you see, the problem, Lex,
link |
is that you are now an institution at some level.
link |
You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag.
link |
The last suit you'll ever need.
link |
And you have the reach of something like CNN
link |
to people who matter.
link |
So now the question is, how do we control something
link |
that doesn't have a board, doesn't have shareholders,
link |
doesn't have to make SEC filings, FCC.
link |
So the best answer they have is,
link |
well, we just have to destroy reputations.
link |
All it takes is for us to take something
link |
that gets said or done or alleged.
link |
And I think it's incredibly important.
link |
One of the things people don't understand is that
link |
I'm going to fight general reputational attacks.
link |
Not because some people don't deserve
link |
to have their reputations dragged through the mud,
link |
but because it's too powerful of a tool
link |
to hand it to CNN, MSNBC, Princeton, Harvard,
link |
the State Department.
link |
But some of it is also.
link |
Muhammad Ali style, being good enough at
link |
doing everything you need to do
link |
without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks.
link |
Not being afraid, but not giving enough meat.
link |
I don't see why the people who have good ideas
link |
have to lead lives that are that clean.
link |
You can be messy, yeah.
link |
You should be able to be messy.
link |
Otherwise, we're suppressing too many people.
link |
Too many, too brilliant minds.
link |
Can you believe Elon Musk smoked a blunt?
link |
I still, people tell me this.
link |
Okay, I have discussions about Elon and people,
link |
the Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist,
link |
who's talking about a Muammuah
link |
that it might be alien technology.
link |
He told me his, this outside the box thinker.
link |
When speaking to me about Elon said,
link |
called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed.
link |
In a dismissive way.
link |
Like this guy's crazy because he smoked some weed.
link |
I was looking at him.
link |
I think you should be able to have
link |
consensual drug filled orgies.
link |
Fuck perfect lives.
link |
Yeah, you should be allowed to be messy.
link |
I take back my statement.
link |
Respectability is the unique prison
link |
where all of the gates are open
link |
and the inmates beg to stay inside.
link |
It's time to end their prison of respectability
link |
because it's too effective of a means of sidelining
link |
and silencing people.
link |
Including it is better that we have bad people
link |
in our system than this idea of no platforming people
link |
who are beyond the pale because it's such a simple technique.
link |
So how do we, what's the heroic action here on the?
link |
Well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program.
link |
By the way, she was absolutely delightful as a guest.
link |
She was, she is polite in the extreme,
link |
far more polite than I am.
link |
And I had her right after Roger Penrose as a guest
link |
because I wanted to highlight this program can go anywhere.
link |
We can talk to anyone.
link |
What about social media?
link |
You've started highlighting people being banned
link |
How do we fight this?
link |
Like if you get banned from social media,
link |
so you're saying nobody will stand up to me.
link |
Well, just figure out what your incentive structure
link |
Assume that I get banned on social media
link |
because somebody wants to make sure
link |
that my message doesn't interfere
link |
with the dominant narrative.
link |
What will happen, by the way,
link |
I'm very glad to be able to explain this on your show
link |
because that video will presumably be archived
link |
and they can't easily make you take it down.
link |
So what's gonna happen is,
link |
is that there'll be a whole bunch
link |
of very low quality bot like accounts
link |
that dog you every time you talk about me.
link |
Right, dude, it's getting old, getting boring.
link |
We already heard you.
link |
Dude, that was like, let it go.
link |
Not a good look is one of my favorites.
link |
But what about the high profile ones?
link |
Well, then you'll get a few high profile ones
link |
and some of the high profile ones command armies.
link |
Like at some point I had 10,000 people
link |
using exactly the same templated tweet, tweeting at me.
link |
It was just actually, it got to the point
link |
where it was funny because everybody said,
link |
did you hear that in a hipster coffee shop?
link |
why are you all suddenly talking about hipster coffee?
link |
Those things will cause you to think better of it.
link |
You'll start to see your follower count go down
link |
because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot like follows
link |
and then just pull them.
link |
So I think that's pretty well known how,
link |
and then maybe your account will be suspended
link |
and it can't be revoked and et cetera, et cetera.
link |
And then three days later, you'll be told it was an error.
link |
So let me push back.
link |
I just don't see not defending you.
link |
Like, okay, so what are the things you would do
link |
that given that I can actually talk to you offline,
link |
that would make me not defend you?
link |
Well, first of all, I can't, I mean, I can imagine some,
link |
but all of us have things.
link |
If somebody says, do you hear what your boy,
link |
Lex said about you?
link |
What did Lex say about me?
link |
Oh, he said you were flawed, dude.
link |
They so distressed
link |
because none of us wanna stand behind flawed people.
link |
That's why you have everybody rushing to say,
link |
I neither condemn nor condone.
link |
I know I don't condemn nor, what is that?
link |
We're all trying to say.
link |
By the way, for the record,
link |
I said that Eric is smarter than me
link |
in a brilliant human being, but flawed like all humans are.
link |
My point is I've now come up with a new policy,
link |
which is I don't care what my friends have done.
link |
I am not disavowing my friends,
link |
not because they didn't do the wrong thing.
link |
Maybe they did do the wrong thing.
link |
What's the value of friendship if that's not that?
link |
Like, for example, we've had the situation
link |
with Brian Callan.
link |
Brian Callan was featured recently in the Los Angeles Times.
link |
I know nothing about the allegations.
link |
I can't, I didn't even know Brian at the time, right?
link |
I've known him for roughly the time I've been in Los Angeles,
link |
maybe a year and a half during that period of time.
link |
I've never seen anything wrong.
link |
Now I'm in a situation, well, what do you think he did?
link |
Do you think he didn't?
link |
It's like, you know what?
link |
I don't know, but I do know this.
link |
Everyone's entitled to have friends
link |
because we can't afford isolated people.
link |
And if your friends do the wrong thing,
link |
they're still your friends.
link |
And if they do terrible, terrible things,
link |
you bring that up with them privately.
link |
And it's not my responsibility to disavow in public.
link |
We've had the situation that I don't like
link |
where particular people that I've been close to,
link |
I'm put under tremendous pressure to disavow them.
link |
What do you think now about your buddy?
link |
I like Dave Rubin, all that kind of stuff.
link |
Here's the thing, my friends are my friends.
link |
I don't disavow my friends.
link |
We all need to make a statement
link |
that we will not be brought under pressure
link |
to disavow our friends, our family members,
link |
because mass murderers are dangerous
link |
the more isolated they become.
link |
It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people.
link |
And it's dangerous, and so.
link |
And it sends a signal to everybody else
link |
to fit in, to be more cynical about the human.
link |
So my feeling, if I find out you've been selling heroin
link |
to elementary school students,
link |
you're still my friend, and I will not be disavowing you.
link |
And if I have a problem with you selling heroin
link |
to elementary school students during school hours,
link |
I will bring it up with you privately,
link |
because we don't need to hear my voice
link |
added to that condemnation.
link |
Are there things that you could do
link |
that would cause me to say, actually, F this guy?
link |
Yeah, above and beyond that.
link |
But simply doing the wrong thing,
link |
I think we've gone down a terrible path.
link |
I think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing
link |
we could have in a heavily armed society.
link |
So I deeply agree with you on Brian Callan
link |
and on all these people that, quote, unquote, got canceled.
link |
And I'm not saying that they,
link |
I don't know the truth value, because we can't.
link |
And even if I did know the truth value,
link |
I'm not setting up an incentive structure
link |
for the personal destruction
link |
as a means of letting institutions combat
link |
the fact that individuals are the last thing that can say,
link |
none of you guys make any sense.
link |
I don't treat these things like,
link |
I had a conversation where Kevin Spacey
link |
was at the dinner table when I came down from a hotel room.
link |
And I had a very long conversation with Kevin Spacey.
link |
I will not detail, because I don't do that,
link |
as to what we discussed.
link |
But we talked very specifically about him being canceled.
link |
And I don't think that the world has heard that story
link |
in part because there's a very strong sense
link |
that he has to be outgrouped.
link |
And as a result, I mean, do we want,
link |
do we want to disavow the space program
link |
because it touched Werner von Braun?
link |
Do we want to disavow quantum mechanics
link |
because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg passed through it?
link |
Is Ehrenfest's theorem false because he murdered his child?
link |
I mean, at what point do we recognize
link |
that we are the problem?
link |
Humans are humans.
link |
And there is no perfect,
link |
there is no perfect group of people,
link |
even all of the most oppressed people,
link |
the supposed victims of the world,
link |
who we now have fetishized into thinking
link |
that they're all oracles
link |
because their lived experience informs us
link |
and their pain is more salient than everyone else's pain.
link |
Those people aren't necessarily great people.
link |
It's like none of us, we can't do this in this fashion.
link |
So when we sit down to have a conversation
link |
across the table from somebody,
link |
you should be willing to,
link |
like you should not have NPR in your mind.
link |
You should be willing to take the full risk
link |
and to see the good in the person
link |
with limited information
link |
and to do your best to understand that person.
link |
Everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget.
link |
I don't believe this is of institutions, okay?
link |
Everybody is entitled
link |
to a certain amount of screwing up in life.
link |
You're entitled to a mendacity budget.
link |
You're entitled to an aggression budget.
link |
The idea of getting rid of everybody,
link |
you know, people haven't even blown through their budgets
link |
and we're already.
link |
Yeah, I think about, for example, one person,
link |
I'd be curious to get your thoughts about Alex Jones.
link |
Let's not talk about Alex Jones for a second.
link |
Let's talk about the National Enquirer.
link |
Is everything the National Enquirer says false?
link |
Okay, do you remember the John Edwards story?
link |
Did you cheat on his wife?
link |
He had a child from an extramarital affair.
link |
I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story.
link |
And then what does the New York Times do?
link |
The New York Times, I think, is allowed to report
link |
that the National Enquirer is making a claim.
link |
That way they don't have to substantiate the story.
link |
So why is the New York Times talking to Mike Cernovich
link |
or using the National Enquirer as a source?
link |
Are they using Alex Jones as a source?
link |
Here's the big problem that we're having.
link |
Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody
link |
and other people are entitled to talk to no one?
link |
I don't really understand this.
link |
This is an indulgence system.
link |
This is how the Catholic church used to do things.
link |
It's hard to fight the system because the reason
link |
you don't talk to Alex Jones is because the platforms
link |
on which we do the communication will deplatform.
link |
I used to do NPR and I used to do the NewsHour
link |
and I used to provide stories
link |
to Washington Post, New York Times.
link |
That has gone away.
link |
They've circled the wagons closer and closer
link |
and more of us are unacceptable.
link |
And right now I have no question that they're going
link |
through anybody who has a platform trying to say,
link |
okay, what do we have against that person
link |
in case we need to shut that down?
link |
We have to make a different decision, Lex,
link |
and the different decision is that it doesn't matter
link |
how many times Joe said the N word.
link |
It doesn't matter that somebody else,
link |
with mathematical theorems, if the worst person
link |
in the world proves a mathematical theorem
link |
like the Unabomber, we can't undo the theorem.
link |
And I point out Charles Manson's song,
link |
Look at Your Game Girl is an amazing song.
link |
It's a really good song.
link |
I don't think it's one of the greatest songs ever,
link |
but it happens that he wasn't a no talent.
link |
And I don't know how Hitler was as an artist.
link |
Okay, we've got to get past this.
link |
We've got to get past this idea
link |
that we're going to purge ourselves of our badness
link |
and we're just going to, this is like,
link |
I've likened it to teenage girls in cutting.
link |
We're just, all we're doing is destroying ourselves
link |
in search of perfection.
link |
And the answer is no, we're not perfect.
link |
We're flawed, we're screwed up.
link |
And we've always been this way.
link |
And we're not going to silence everyone
link |
who you can point a laser beam at
link |
and say, well, that person, look at how bad that person is.
link |
If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye.
link |
We might as well just, let's learn Chinese.
link |
But there is an art to having those messy conversations,
link |
whether with Alex or anybody else.
link |
Okay, let's talk about Alex.
link |
There's particular stuff that Alex does
link |
that's absolutely nauseating.
link |
And there's other stuff that he's doing that's funny.
link |
The methodology of the way he carries.
link |
And sometimes he's talking about the truth.
link |
And sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy.
link |
His variance is incredibly high.
link |
The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O. Keefe
link |
or the National Enquirer or anything you don't like
link |
is to say, great, go long short.
link |
Well, if you invest in a mutual fund,
link |
all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long.
link |
But if you invest in a hedge fund,
link |
you do something called relative value trade.
link |
It's like, well, you long tech or short tech?
link |
Well, actually I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Google.
link |
Oh, because I believe Google got way too much attention
link |
and that Microsoft has been unfairly maligned.
link |
And so this is really a play on legacy tech
link |
over more modern tech, okay?
link |
Which part of Alex Jones are you long
link |
and which part are you short?
link |
One of the things that should be a requirement
link |
for being a reporter is like,
link |
what did Donald Trump do that was good?
link |
Okay, then you're not a reporter.
link |
What did Hitler do that was good?
link |
The Rosenstrasse of protest.
link |
Non Jewish women campaign for their Jewish men
link |
to be returned home to them
link |
from certain death almost in death camps.
link |
It should have been that there were no death camps.
link |
It should have been that everybody was returned home.
link |
But you know what?
link |
The fact that the women of the Rosenstrasse protest,
link |
I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about this.
link |
Some of the baddest ass chicks in the world
link |
got their husbands returned to them.
link |
And not, I'm not celebrating Hitler.
link |
Hitler's the worst of the worst.
link |
But God damn it, this idea that we can just say
link |
everything that person does is a lie.
link |
Everything that person does is evil.
link |
This reflects a simplicity of mind
link |
that humanity cannot afford.
link |
Is Google evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf?
link |
Is Amazon evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf?
link |
If you find out that Mein Kampf
link |
rests on somebody's bookshelves,
link |
do you have any idea what it means?
link |
If you find out that a scholar use the N word,
link |
should that person lose their job?
link |
I guess our responsibility to lead by example in that,
link |
because you have to acknowledge that the fact,
link |
like the current public discourse.
link |
Have somebody on your podcast who you're worried about.
link |
But do it in a principled fashion.
link |
I mean, in other words, I'm not here to whitewash everything.
link |
On the other hand, if somebody makes some allegations,
link |
I don't know that I'm obligated
link |
to treat every set of allegations as if,
link |
no, how do you defend yourself against, no.
link |
Allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.
link |
Well, my standard, I don't know,
link |
maybe you could speak to it is,
link |
I don't care, like in the case of Alex Jones, for example,
link |
I don't, I'm willing to have a conversation
link |
with Alex Jones and people like him.
link |
If I know he's not going to try to manipulate me.
link |
Assume that he is gonna try to manipulate you.
link |
I can't, then we're not going to be two humans.
link |
Okay, but Lex, I want you to think well of me.
link |
I put on a jacket, I don't usually wear a jacket, okay?
link |
All right, I'm trying to manipulate you.
link |
There's an entire field, no, there's an entire field
link |
that says that speech may be best thought of
link |
as an attempt to manipulate each other.
link |
This is too simplistic.
link |
Everything that we keep talking through.
link |
You know better than this.
link |
I disagree, I think there is ways,
link |
there's, of course, it's a gray area,
link |
but there is a threshold where your intent
link |
with which you come to a meeting, to an interaction,
link |
is one that is not one that's grounded
link |
in like a respect for a common humanity,
link |
like a love for each other, is deeply messy.
link |
If somebody is doing really bad stuff,
link |
I expect you to try to keep them
link |
from doing really bad stuff.
link |
But just keep in mind that when I was a younger man,
link |
I saw an amazing anti pornography documentary,
link |
and it was called Rate It X,
link |
and I don't know where it went,
link |
but the conceit of it was we're going to get
link |
some pornographers in front of a camera
link |
because they want to talk,
link |
and we're going to ask them about what they do
link |
for a living and why it's okay.
link |
You could potentially,
link |
if you really think Alex Jones is the worst,
link |
and again, I'm not intimately familiar with him,
link |
you could decide to just let him talk.
link |
Just let him talk.
link |
Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people.
link |
I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux.
link |
Stefan Molyneux makes many good points,
link |
makes many bad points,
link |
and he makes many good points in bad ways,
link |
and I worry about it,
link |
and I don't feel that it's not my obligation
link |
to make sure that Stefan Molyneux
link |
has a voice on the portal.
link |
But I did stand up and say I didn't want him banned
link |
from social media,
link |
and I do think that a lot of the people
link |
who are being banned from social media
link |
were worried that they're right
link |
rather than that they're wrong.
link |
I certainly don't really think that I'm worried
link |
in some sense that some of the really wrong people
link |
are wrong, but if you look at, for example, Curtis Yarvin,
link |
there's a tremendous amount of interest.
link |
Is Eric going to speak to Curtis Yarvin?
link |
Curtis Yarvin says many interesting things,
link |
and he says many horrible, stupid things, very provocative.
link |
And I haven't invited him onto the portal,
link |
but I haven't said I will never invite him onto the portal.
link |
We are all in a difficult position.
link |
That's what I'm saying.
link |
You're making it kind of,
link |
I think it's a much more difficult task
link |
and burden to carry as people who have conversations
link |
because Curtis Yarvin is a good example.
link |
How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis's work
link |
to really understand?
link |
We should talk about the problem of Curtis Yarvin,
link |
I think it's probably illustrative.
link |
There's this big question is why does somebody
link |
who says such stupid ass things listen to
link |
by so many people?
link |
Very smart people, people who are part of our daily lives
link |
discuss Curtis Yarvin in hushed tones.
link |
Now, it's a good question.
link |
My belief is that Curtis Yarvin has made a number
link |
of very interesting, provocative points,
link |
and they associate Curtis Yarvin as the person
link |
who has made these points,
link |
and they treat the completely asinine stuff
link |
that he says that's super dangerous as,
link |
well, that's Curtis, right?
link |
Right, they give him the credit for,
link |
he's a kind of like, sorry to use the term,
link |
first principles deep thinker about the way the world,
link |
in some space about the world.
link |
But as a result, we don't actually know
link |
why Curtis Yarvin is knocking around
link |
so many Silicon Valley luminaries lives.
link |
See, you said that he said a lot of asinine stupid stuff,
link |
and that's the sense I got from a few things I've read,
link |
not just about, this is not just like Wikipedia stuff,
link |
is he's a little, like I've said before,
link |
he seems to be careless.
link |
I don't think he's, no, no, no, it's like Jim Watson.
link |
Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things
link |
in order to prove that he's free.
link |
It's not a question of careless.
link |
He enjoys the freedom to say these things.
link |
And the key point is, is that there's,
link |
I expect something more of Curtis.
link |
I expect that if somebody is insightful
link |
about all sorts of things up to that point,
link |
that they're going to have enough care.
link |
Now, I, for example, make this point repeatedly
link |
that vaccines are not 100% safe.
link |
Most people who have an idea that anybody
link |
who's an anti vaxxer should be silenced are in a position
link |
where they probably don't say vaccines are 100% safe,
link |
but you keep finding that statement over and over again,
link |
like believe all women, vaccines are 100% safe,
link |
climate science is settled science.
link |
Whatever this Mont and Bailey is,
link |
where you make extraordinarily vapid blanket claims,
link |
and then you retreat into something,
link |
well, defund the, we don't want no more police,
link |
actually just means we want the police to not take
link |
on mental health duties.
link |
We've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society.
link |
And what I'm claiming is, is that I might talk
link |
to Curtis Yarvin, but I have really very little interest
link |
to talk to a guy who seems to be kind of giddy
link |
about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves.
link |
It's like, why do I want to do that on the portal?
link |
One, first of all, because just as you said,
link |
that's not Curtis's main thing.
link |
He has a lot of ideas and what I've read of him,
link |
which is not a huge amount, is he's very thoughtful
link |
about the way this world works.
link |
And on top of that, he's an important historical figure
link |
in the birth and the development of the alt right,
link |
or what would be called the alt right.
link |
Or the new reactionary.
link |
Yeah, and there's,
link |
so he's just an important intellectual.
link |
And so it makes sense to talk to him.
link |
The question is, how much work do you put in?
link |
Well, this is the issue of fugu.
link |
I'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that fugu.
link |
So you have a puffer fish, you can eat the puffer fish.
link |
You can get kind of a tingly sensation on your tongue
link |
if you get a little bit of the poison organ.
link |
But my point is, I don't know how to serve Curtis Yarvin
link |
so that, in fact, I'm not worried about what happens.
link |
And I believe that if somebody else was a student
link |
of the new reactionary movement,
link |
that person might be in a better position
link |
to host Curtis Yarvin.
link |
So somebody, that's a really good example,
link |
somebody I think you've spoken with that's an intermediary,
link |
that's a powerful one, is Michael Malice.
link |
And he's spoken with Curtis Yarvin.
link |
And Michael wrote a book about.
link |
By the way, Michael somewhat changed my mind
link |
about Michael Malice.
link |
I think, I would call him a friend,
link |
and I think he's underneath it all
link |
a really kind human being.
link |
And I think your skepticism about him was initially
link |
from a surface level of, what did you call him,
link |
hyenas, the trolls, and so on.
link |
I'm not happy about his.
link |
It's been so long since I've seen good trolls.
link |
He needs a higher quality of trolling.
link |
But he aspires to that.
link |
I mean, disagree or not,
link |
I really enjoy how much care he puts
link |
into the work he does, like on North Korea
link |
and the study of the world,
link |
and how much privately, but also in public,
link |
love he has for people, especially those who are powerless.
link |
Just a genuine admiration for them.
link |
I think Curtis actually.
link |
I mean, you have to appreciate,
link |
the first time I met Curtis, he introduced me,
link |
he says, I'm the most right wing person you've ever met.
link |
I was just like, well,
link |
this is a conversation that's already over.
link |
It's theatrical in a way that's not conducted
link |
to actually having a real human connection.
link |
It turned me off because it was like,
link |
you need to be the most right wing person.
link |
And so it's like, I'm a troll, I'm a troll.
link |
Okay, why are we doing this?
link |
But what I'm trying to get at is different.
link |
I'm trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend of yours.
link |
If you found out something terrible,
link |
you should still be a friend.
link |
You should still continue to be his friend.
link |
And in Michael Malice's case,
link |
it's very likely that we'll find out something terrible.
link |
Curtis is an acquaintance of mine
link |
because he hangs around with some people that I know.
link |
I've started to understand why the people in my life,
link |
some of them are Curtis Yarvin fans.
link |
Many of them disregard the stupid stuff.
link |
But my feeling is that too much poison organ,
link |
I don't know how to serve that.
link |
It's too intermingled.
link |
I'm not your chef.
link |
Speaking for defending your friends,
link |
staying with your friends,
link |
and bringing the old band together again,
link |
you coined the term IDW, Intellectual Dark Web.
link |
It represents a certain group of people
link |
that are struggling with,
link |
that are almost like challenged the norms
link |
of social and political discourse
link |
from all different angles.
link |
What do you think is the state of the IDW?
link |
What do you think is its future?
link |
Is it still a useful?
link |
Well, it never exists.
link |
Is it a collection of people featured in an article?
link |
What I learned very clearly
link |
is that there's a tremendous desire in the internet age
link |
to pin people down.
link |
Well, what do you say?
link |
What are the criteria?
link |
It's like, I understand.
link |
You wanna play the demarcation game
link |
and you wanna make everything that is demarcated
link |
instantly null and void.
link |
So I resisted saying who was in it.
link |
I resisted saying what it was.
link |
I resisted saying that Barry Weiss's article
link |
was the definitive thing.
link |
They chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs
link |
that we couldn't get out of.
link |
I did not want those photographs taken.
link |
They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer
link |
needed to take them all at twilight.
link |
I don't know, some such thing.
link |
I didn't even necessarily wanna do the article.
link |
Barry convinced me that it was the right thing to do.
link |
Undoubtedly Barry was right.
link |
But the key point is nothing can grow in this environment.
link |
There's a reason we're not building.
link |
It does not appear that we found a way
link |
to grow anything organic and good and decent
link |
that we need right now.
link |
And that's kind of the key issue.
link |
Do you mean us as a society?
link |
Those of us who wish to have a future
link |
for our great grandchildren.
link |
Let's take the subset of people who are worried
link |
about things long after their demise.
link |
But do you think it's useful to have a term like the IDW
link |
to capture some set of people,
link |
or maybe principles that capture what I think the IDW,
link |
okay, you can say it's not supposed to mean,
link |
it doesn't exist, it doesn't mean anything,
link |
but to the public, to me, okay, I'll just speak to me,
link |
it represented something.
link |
It represented, I think I just said this to you,
link |
in my first attempt to interview the great Eric Weinstein,
link |
I said that, I spoke this about you,
link |
but IDW in general is trying to point out the elephant
link |
in the room or that the emperor has no clothes.
link |
The set of people that do that in their own way.
link |
If there are multiple elephants in the room,
link |
the point is that the IDW was more interested
link |
in seeing the totality of elephants
link |
and trying to figure out how do we move forward
link |
as opposed to saying I can spot the other guy's elephant
link |
in the room, but I can't see my own.
link |
And in large measure,
link |
we didn't represent an institutional base.
link |
And therefore it wasn't maximally important
link |
that we look at our own hypocrisy
link |
because we weren't on the institutional spectrum.
link |
This is where friendship comes into play
link |
with the different figures
link |
that are loosely associated with IDW
link |
is you were somehow responsible for the exact thing
link |
that you said, did you hear what, I don't know,
link |
I forget, oh, what Sam Harris said about IDW.
link |
That kind of thing is.
link |
Lovingly or chuckle like, oh.
link |
I was angry at some people who had said things
link |
that caused Sam to say what Sam said
link |
about turning his imaginary club membership into the IDW.
link |
People said very silly things.
link |
And I think that there is just this confusion
link |
that integrity means calling out your friends
link |
in front of the world.
link |
And I've been pretty clear about this.
link |
I try to choose my friends carefully.
link |
And if you would like to recuse me
link |
because I'm not a source of reliable information,
link |
people that I know and love the most,
link |
maybe that's reasonable for you.
link |
Maybe you prefer somebody who was willing
link |
to throw a friend under the bus
link |
at the first sign of trouble.
link |
By all means, exit my feed.
link |
You don't have to subscribe to me.
link |
If that's your concept of integrity,
link |
you're barking up the wrong tree.
link |
What I will say is that I knew these people well enough
link |
to know that they're all flawed.
link |
Thank you for the callback.
link |
But the issue is that I love people who are flawed.
link |
And I love people who have to earn a living,
link |
even if you call them a grifter.
link |
And I love people who like the fact
link |
that Donald Trump didn't get us into new wars,
link |
even if you call them alt right.
link |
I love the fact that some people believe
link |
in structural oppression and wanna fight it,
link |
even if they're not woke,
link |
because they don't believe that structural oppression
link |
is hiding everywhere.
link |
I care and love different people in different ways.
link |
And I think that the overarching thing, Lex,
link |
that we're not getting at is that
link |
we were sold a bill of goods
link |
that you can go through life like an ELISA program
link |
with pre programmed responses.
link |
Well, it's what about ism, it's both sides ism,
link |
it's alt right, it's the loony left, it's campus madness.
link |
It's like, okay, why don't you just empty
link |
the entire goddamn magazine?
link |
All of those pre recorded snips.
link |
Now that you've done all of that,
link |
now we can have a conversation.
link |
Your son put it really well, which is we should,
link |
in all things, resist labels.
link |
But we can't deal without labels, we have to generalize.
link |
But we also have to keep in mind
link |
that just in the way in science,
link |
you deal with an effective theory
link |
that isn't a fundamental one.
link |
In science, most of our theories,
link |
we consider to be effective theories.
link |
If I generalize about Europe, about women,
link |
about Christians, those things have to be understood
link |
to mean something and not to have their definitions
link |
extend so broadly that they mean nothing at all,
link |
nor that they're so rigid that they're claims
link |
that clearly won't bear scrutiny.
link |
Lex, what do you really wanna talk about?
link |
That's always my question to you.
link |
That always gets me, maybe you are the therapist.
link |
But you and I could talk about anything.
link |
People love, up until now at least,
link |
people have loved listening
link |
to the two of us in conversation.
link |
And my feeling is is that we're not talking
link |
about neural nets, and we're not talking
link |
about geometric unity, and we're not talking
link |
about where distributed computing might go.
link |
And I don't think that we're really focused
link |
on some of the most exciting things
link |
we could do to transform education.
link |
We're still caught in this world of other people
link |
that we don't belong in.
link |
I don't belong in the world as it's been created.
link |
I'm trying to build a new world,
link |
and I'm astounded that the people
link |
with the independent means to help build that world
link |
are so demotivated that they don't wanna
link |
build new structures.
link |
And the people who do wanna build new structures
link |
seem to be wild eyed.
link |
Wild eyed, what do you mean by wild eyed?
link |
They're not, they're not.
link |
I guarantee you that I will get some message
link |
in my DMs that says, hey, Eric.
link |
You know, I'm a third year chemistry student
link |
at South Dakota State, and I've got a great idea.
link |
I just need funding.
link |
They don't have the means.
link |
So the people who have the means have become.
link |
Or the sophistication, it's like you're looking
link |
for somebody who's proven themselves a few times
link |
to say, you know, I've got $4 billion behind me
link |
that's soft circled.
link |
I wanna figure out what a new university would be
link |
and what it would take to protect academic freedom
link |
and who we would hire
link |
and what are the different characteristics
link |
because I can clearly see that everything
link |
following the current model is falling apart.
link |
Nobody in my understanding is saying that.
link |
Nobody is saying let's take that
link |
which is functioning independently
link |
and make it less vulnerable.
link |
Let's boost those signals.
link |
And a critical component as money, you think?
link |
It's not only that, but it's also a kind of
link |
these people are mobbed up hands off.
link |
Let's imagine for the moment that Sundar Pichai,
link |
Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg
link |
founded a university come social media entity.
link |
And they said, the purpose of this is to make sure
link |
that academic freedom will not perish from this earth
link |
because it's necessary to keep us from all going crazy.
link |
And we are going to lock ourselves out.
link |
We've come up with this governance system.
link |
And the idea is that these people will be assigned
link |
the difficult task of making sure that society
link |
doesn't go crazy in any particular direction.
link |
That we have a fact based, reality based,
link |
feasibility based, understaffed,
link |
theory based understanding.
link |
We can try to figure out where our real opportunities are.
link |
It feels like everybody with the ability
link |
to do something like that,
link |
and with the brains and experience and the resources,
link |
would rather sit in the current system
link |
and hope to figure out where they can flee to
link |
if the whole thing comes apart.
link |
Well, yeah, and maybe to push back in a little bit,
link |
I agree with you, but you know,
link |
it feels like some people are trying that.
link |
So for example, Google purchased DeepMind.
link |
DeepMind is a company that kind of represents
link |
a lot of radical ideas.
link |
They've become acceptable, actually.
link |
AGI, artificial general intelligence,
link |
used to be really radical of a thing to talk about.
link |
And DeepMind and OpenAI are two places
link |
which has made it more acceptable.
link |
I know you can now start to criticize,
link |
well, they're really, now that it's become acceptable,
link |
they're not taking the further step
link |
of being more and more radical.
link |
But you know, that wasn't an attempt by Google
link |
to say that let's try some wild stuff.
link |
Sort of like Boston Dynamics.
link |
Sort of like Boston Dynamics.
link |
Boston Dynamics is a really good example
link |
of trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose whatsoever
link |
except to try out their ideas.
link |
Well, the idea is that innovation is like dessert.
link |
You can have dessert after you solve the problem
link |
of the main course, and the main course
link |
is a bunch of insoluble problems.
link |
So the idea is we can get into innovation
link |
once we perfect ourselves.
link |
And you're saying that we need to make innovation
link |
Well, I'm saying that there really is structural oppression.
link |
I mean, if you train a deep learning system
link |
on exclusively white faces, it's gonna get confused.
link |
So let's not disagree that there are real issues
link |
In fact, that's an issue of innovation and data.
link |
Your data should be responsive.
link |
On the other hand, there are things
link |
we can't do anything about that are actually fundamental.
link |
And those things may have to do with the fact
link |
that some of us taste cilantro as soap,
link |
and some of us don't.
link |
Like there are differences between people,
link |
and some of them are in the hardware,
link |
some of them are in the firmware,
link |
some of them are in the software that is the human mind.
link |
And this completely simplistic idea
link |
that every failure of an organization
link |
to promote each person
link |
who has particular intersexual characteristics,
link |
we cannot hold progress hostage to that.
link |
And you've talked about, perhaps we'll save this
link |
for another time because it's such a fascinating conversation.
link |
You talked about this with Glenn Beck,
link |
is the whole sort of stagnation of growth
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Your idea is that in as much as the current situation
link |
is a kind of Ponzi scheme,
link |
the current situation in the United States
link |
is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise
link |
of constant unending innovation,
link |
we need to fund the true innovators
link |
and encourage them and empower them
link |
and sort of culturally say that this is what
link |
this country is about is the brilliant minds.
link |
We're gonna kill each other if we don't grow.
link |
Growth is like an immune system
link |
and you always have pathogens present,
link |
but if you don't have growth present,
link |
you can't fight the pathogens in your society.
link |
And right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere.
link |
So if we don't get growth into our system fairly quickly,
link |
we are in really seriously bad shape.
link |
So it's very important that if I had a horrible person
link |
who was capable of building something
link |
that would give us all a certain amount
link |
of what I've called financial beta
link |
to some new technology where we all benefit,
link |
let's say quantum computing comes in
link |
and everybody, the dry cleaner
link |
has a quantum computing angle, right?
link |
That's necessary to keep this system that we built going.
link |
We can try to redesign the system,
link |
but our system expects growth
link |
and we've started it for growth
link |
and the madness that we're seeing
link |
is the failure of our immune system
link |
to be able to handle the pathogens
link |
that have always been present.
link |
So people can say, well, this was always there.
link |
What's changed was your immune system.
link |
We have got to make sure that one,
link |
we understand why diversity
link |
is potentially really important.
link |
We have mined certain communities to death.
link |
You and I are Ashkenazi Jews.
link |
Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews
link |
are good at technical stuff.
link |
We know that the Chinese are good at technical stuff.
link |
The Indians have many people
link |
who are good at technical stuff as the Japanese.
link |
So I also believe that we have communities
link |
where if you think about the Pareto idea
link |
of diminishing returns,
link |
if you've never mined a community,
link |
many of the people you're gonna get at the beginning
link |
are gonna be amazing because that community,
link |
it's like, did you drill for more oil in Texas?
link |
Texas is pretty thoroughly picked over.
link |
Do you find someplace that's completely insane?
link |
Maybe there's oil there, who knows?
link |
And in particular, I would like to displace our reliance
link |
on our military competitors in Asia
link |
in our scientific laboratories with women,
link |
with African Americans, with Latinos,
link |
people who are in different categories
link |
than we have traditionally sourced.
link |
And I would like to get them the money
link |
that the market would normally give these fields
link |
were we not using visas in place of payment, right?
link |
Now, I have a crazy idea,
link |
which is that I play, you and I both play music,
link |
and I find the analytic work that I do
link |
when I'm trying to figure out chord progressions
link |
and symmetries and tritones, all these sorts of things
link |
to be very similar to the work that I do
link |
when I do physics or math.
link |
I believe that one of the things that is true
link |
is that the analytic contributions of African Americans
link |
to music are probably fungible to science.
link |
I don't know that that's true.
link |
It's true I haven't done controlled research,
link |
but I believe that it is very important
link |
to let the People's Republic of China know
link |
that they are not staffing our laboratories anymore,
link |
and that we need to look to our own people.
link |
And in particular, we are going to get a huge benefit
link |
for making sure that women, Black Americans, Latinos
link |
are in a position to take over some of these things
link |
because many of these communities have been underutilized.
link |
Now, I don't know if that's an insane idea.
link |
I want to hear somebody tell me why it's an insane idea,
link |
but I believe that part of what we need to do
link |
is we need to recognize that there are security issues,
link |
there are geopolitical issues with the funding of science,
link |
and that what we've done is we've starved our world
link |
for innovation, and if we don't get back
link |
to the business of innovation,
link |
we should be doing diversity and inclusion
link |
out of greed rather than guilt.
link |
Now, part of the problem with this
link |
is that a lot of the energy behind diversity and inclusion
link |
is based on guilt and accusation.
link |
And what I want is I want to kick ass,
link |
and my hope is that diminishing returns favors
link |
mining the communities that have not been traditionally mined
link |
in order to extract output from those communities,
link |
unless there's a flaw in that plan.
link |
If there's a flaw, somebody needs to tell me.
link |
If there isn't a flaw, we need to get greedy
link |
about innovation rather than guilty about innovation.
link |
That's really brilliantly put.
link |
My biggest problem with what I see
link |
is it exactly speaks to that in the discussion of diversity.
link |
It's used, when it's grounded in guilt,
link |
it's then used as a hammer to shame people
link |
that don't care about diversity enough.
link |
F that shit, okay?
link |
So my point is I'm excited about the idea
link |
of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field theory.
link |
I'm excited about the idea of Art Tatum
link |
trying to figure out what the neural nets
link |
figured out about protein folding.
link |
I have some idea of the level of intellect
link |
of people who have not found their way into STEM subjects
link |
in incredibly technically demanding areas.
link |
And if there's a flaw in that theory,
link |
I want somebody to present the flaw.
link |
But right now, my belief is that
link |
these things are merit based.
link |
And if you really believe in structural oppression,
link |
you do not want an affirmative action program.
link |
You wanna make sure that people have huge amounts
link |
of resources to get themselves into position.
link |
I just tried this on this Clubhouse application.
link |
I wanna push out Klein bottles as a secret sign
link |
inside of rap videos in hip hop, right?
link |
I want people to have an idea
link |
that there's an amazing world.
link |
And I wanna get the people who,
link |
hopefully I'm trying to lure into science and engineering.
link |
I want to get them paid.
link |
I don't want them as the cheap substitutes
link |
for the fleeing white males who've learned
link |
that they can't make any money in science and engineering.
link |
So the problem is that we need to take over the ship Lex.
link |
And it doesn't need to be you and me
link |
because quite honestly, I have no desire to administer.
link |
I don't wanna be the chief executive officer of anything.
link |
What I do want is I want the baby boomers
link |
who've made this mess and can't see it to be gone.
link |
They had almost all of our universities
link |
and I want fresh blood, fresh resources.
link |
I want academic freedom and I want greed for our country
link |
and for the future to determine diversity inclusion
link |
as opposed to shame and guilt,
link |
which is destroying our fabric.
link |
That's as good of a diversity statement as I've ever heard.
link |
This is a U turn, but somebody commented on the tweet
link |
you sent that as one of the top comments,
link |
they definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency.
link |
So it's a U turn, but not really.
link |
Since you're an economist, since you're deep,
link |
I mean, I pretend to be an economist,
link |
hoping that the economists will take issue
link |
that I'm not an economist so that I can advance
link |
gauge theoretic and field theoretic economics,
link |
which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge
link |
was a major innovation
link |
that happened approximately 25 years ago.
link |
I don't think that economists understand
link |
what a price index is that measures inflation,
link |
nor do I think economists understand what a growth index
link |
or a product, a quantity index is that measures GDP.
link |
I think that they don't even understand the basics
link |
of price and quantity index construction.
link |
And therefore they can't possibly review
link |
field theoretic economics.
link |
They can't review gauge theoretic economics.
link |
They're intellectually not in a position
link |
to manage their own field.
link |
You talked about that there's a stagnation
link |
in growth currently.
link |
I looked at, from my microeconomics,
link |
macroeconomics in college perspective,
link |
GDP doesn't seem to capture the productivity,
link |
the full, the spectrum of what I think is
link |
as a functioning successful society.
link |
What do you think is broken about GDP?
link |
What does it need to include?
link |
These indices, like what?
link |
Let me explain what they don't understand to begin with.
link |
Imagine that all prices and all quantities of output
link |
are the same at the end of the year
link |
as they are at the beginning.
link |
And you ask what happened during that year?
link |
Was there inflation?
link |
They meandered over the course of the year,
link |
but miraculously they all came back to exactly their values.
link |
The amount produced at the end of the year
link |
is the same as at the beginning in every single quantity.
link |
Typically the claim would be that the price index
link |
should be 1.0 and that the quantity index should be 1.0.
link |
That's clearly wrong.
link |
Well, it's much easier to see with,
link |
it speaks to a fundamental confusion that economists have.
link |
They don't understand that the economy is curved
link |
In a curved economy, everything should be path dependence,
link |
but they view path dependence as a problem
link |
because they are effectively the flat earth society
link |
of market analysis.
link |
They don't understand that what they've called,
link |
and they've actually called it the cycling problem,
link |
is exactly what they need to understand
link |
to advance their field.
link |
So I'll give you a very simple example, okay?
link |
Let's imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund
link |
and Ted and Alice in another.
link |
In both cases, the females, that is, Alice and Carol,
link |
are the chief investment officers,
link |
and Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers
link |
in charge of trying to get money into the fund
link |
and trying to get people not to, in fact,
link |
remove their money from the funds, okay?
link |
If you, in fact, had a hedge fund
link |
with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,
link |
and both hedge funds were invested in assets
link |
whose prices came back to the same levels
link |
and whose exposures were in the same quantities,
link |
and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds,
link |
would you compensate them the same necessarily?
link |
What if, for example, Carol was killing it
link |
in terms of investments?
link |
Every time she bought some sort of security,
link |
the price of that security went up, okay?
link |
But Bob was the worst marketing officer,
link |
and as chief marketing officer,
link |
there were tons of redemptions
link |
because Bob was constantly drunk,
link |
Bob was making off color comments.
link |
Now, as a result, at the end of the year,
link |
the fund hasn't grown in size
link |
because even though Carol was crushing it
link |
in terms of the investments,
link |
Bob was screwing up everything
link |
and the redemptions were legendary,
link |
so people were making money
link |
and still pulling it out of the fund.
link |
In the other fund, Alice can't seem to buy a base hit
link |
every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets,
link |
but Ted's amazing marketing skills allowed the fund
link |
to get all sorts of new subscriptions
link |
and halted the redemptions as people hoped
link |
that the fund would get its act together, okay.
link |
Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated,
link |
and quantity indices should be how Bob and Ted
link |
are compensated, so even though both funds
link |
had closed loops that come back to the original states,
link |
what happened during the period that they were active
link |
tells you how people are supposed to be compensated.
link |
Now, we know that whatever the increase
link |
in the price index is, is compensated by a decrease
link |
in the quantity index or conversely,
link |
because prices and quantities
link |
return to their original values.
link |
You could have another fund where nothing much happened,
link |
there were no redemptions, no subscriptions,
link |
the fund remained in cash the whole time.
link |
So in that third fund, you know,
link |
let's call that Tristan and Isolde, right?
link |
That fund should have no bonuses paid
link |
because nobody did anything,
link |
but nobody should be fired either.
link |
Now, the fact that the economists don't even understand
link |
that this is what their price and quantity indices
link |
were intended to do, that they don't understand
link |
that you can actually give what would be called
link |
ordinal agents the freedom to change their preferences
link |
and still have something defined as a
link |
CONUS cost of living adjustment.
link |
They don't even understand the mathematics of their field.
link |
So the indices need to be able to capture
link |
some kind of dynamics that...
link |
We have had indices that capture these dynamics
link |
due to the work of Francois de Vizier since 1925.
link |
But the economists have not even understood
link |
what de Vizier's index truly represent.
link |
What do you miss with such crude indices then?
link |
Well, you miss the fact that you're supposed
link |
to have a field theoretic subject.
link |
The representative consumer should actually
link |
be a probability distribution on the space
link |
of all possible consumers weighted by the probability
link |
of getting any particular pull from the distribution.
link |
We should not have a single gauge of inflation.
link |
What is that in 1973 dollars?
link |
Any more than you should be able to say
link |
it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on earth yesterday.
link |
So when we get to the cryptocurrency,
link |
what I'm going to say is that
link |
because we didn't found economic theory
link |
on the proper marginal revolution,
link |
because we missed the major opportunity,
link |
which is that the differential calculus of markets
link |
It's not ordinary differential calculus.
link |
We found that out in finance
link |
that it was stochastic differential calculus.
link |
We have the wrong version of the differential calculus
link |
underneath all of modern economic theory.
link |
And part of what I've been pushing for in cryptocurrencies
link |
is the idea that we should be understanding
link |
that gold is a gauge theory,
link |
just as modern economic theory
link |
is supposed to be a gauge theory.
link |
And that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies
link |
and more importantly distributed computing
link |
from the problem of this unwanted global aspect,
link |
which is the blockchain.
link |
The thing that is most celebrated in some sense
link |
about Bitcoin is in fact the reason
link |
that I'm least enthusiastic about it.
link |
I'm hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi did.
link |
But it's an intermediate step towards trying to figure out
link |
what should digital gold actually be?
link |
If physical gold is a collection of up quarks
link |
and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons
link |
held together, the quarks by gluons
link |
with electrons orbiting and held together by photons
link |
with the occasional weak interaction beta decay,
link |
all of those are gauge theories.
link |
So gold is actually coming from gauge theory
link |
and markets are coming from gauge theory.
link |
And the opportunity to do locally enforced conservation laws,
link |
which effectively is what a Bitcoin transaction is,
link |
should theoretically be founded on a different principle
link |
that is not the blockchain.
link |
It should be a gauge theoretic concept
link |
in which effectively the tokens are excitations
link |
on a network of computer nodes.
link |
And the fact that, let's imagine that this is some token.
link |
By moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship,
link |
effectively I pushed that glass as a gauge theory
link |
towards your region of the table.
link |
We should be recognizing the gauge theory
link |
is the correct differential calculus for the 21st century.
link |
In fact, it should have been there in the 20th century.
link |
You're saying it captures these individual dynamics,
link |
Why should my giving you a token have to be,
link |
why should we alert the global community
link |
in this token that that occurred?
link |
You can talk about side chains,
link |
you can talk about any means of doing this,
link |
but effectively we have a problem,
link |
which is if I think about this differently,
link |
I have a glass that is extant,
link |
you have a glass that is abstent.
link |
We're supposed to call the constructor method
link |
on your glass at the same moment
link |
we call the destructor method on my glass
link |
in order to have a conservation principle.
link |
It would be far more efficient to do this
link |
with the one system that is known
link |
never to throw an exception, which is nature.
link |
And nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry
link |
for her underlying language.
link |
We now know due to work of Pia Malani at Harvard
link |
in economics in the mid 1990s, which I was her coauthor on,
link |
but I wish to promote her as well as this being my idea.
link |
We know that modern economic theory
link |
is a naturally occurring gauge theory.
link |
And the failure of that community to acknowledge
link |
that that work occurred and that it was put down
link |
for reasons that make no analytic sense
link |
is important in particular due to the relatively
link |
new innovation of distributed computing
link |
and Satoshi's brainchild.
link |
So you're thinking we need to have the mathematics
link |
that captures, that enforces cryptocurrency
link |
as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one
link |
where the blockchain says that crypto should be centralized.
link |
The abundance economy much discussed in Silicon Valley
link |
or what's left of it is actually a huge threat
link |
to the planet because what it really is
link |
is that it is what Marc Andreessen
link |
has called software eating the world.
link |
And what that means is that you're gonna push
link |
things from being private goods and services
link |
into public goods and services and public goods
link |
and services cannot have price and value tied together.
link |
Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value
link |
to the world that they cannot command a price
link |
and they will not be able to capture the value
link |
that they have created or a significant enough
link |
The abundance economy is a disaster.
link |
It will lead to a reduction in human freedom.
link |
The great innovation of Satoshi is locally enforced
link |
or semi locally enforced conservation laws
link |
where the idea is just as gold is hard,
link |
why is gold hard to create or destroy?
link |
It's because it's created not only in stars
link |
but in violent events involving stars
link |
like supernova collisions.
link |
When gold is created and we transact,
link |
we're using conservation laws.
link |
The physics determines the custodianship,
link |
whatever it is that I don't have, you now have
link |
and conversely, in such a situation,
link |
we should be looking for the abstraction
link |
that most closely matches the physical world
link |
because the physical world is known
link |
not to throw an exception.
link |
The blockchain is a vulnerability.
link |
The idea that the 51% problem isn't solved,
link |
that you could have crazy race conditions,
link |
all of these things, we know that they're solved
link |
inside of gauge theory somehow.
link |
So the important thing is to recognize
link |
that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever
link |
in the history of economic theory took place already
link |
and was essentially instantly buried
link |
and I will stand by those comments.
link |
Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you.
link |
No, no, no, I don't have that kind of ability.
link |
I do other things.
link |
Speaking of Satoshi and gauge theory,
link |
you've mentioned to Brian Keating
link |
that you may be releasing a geometric unity paper this year
link |
or some other form of additional material on the topic.
link |
What is your thinking around this?
link |
What's the process you're going through now
link |
in preparing this?
link |
I used April 1st to try to start a tradition
link |
which I hope to use to liberate mankind.
link |
The tradition is that at least one day a year,
link |
you should be able to say heretical things
link |
and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off or Mark Zuckerberg.
link |
Your provost shouldn't call you up and say,
link |
We need at some level to have a jubilee
link |
from centralized control.
link |
And so my hope is that,
link |
you know what a tradition is in America?
link |
Something a baby boomer did twice.
link |
That's very funny.
link |
Anyway, so I'm not a baby boomer, but as an exer,
link |
I've thought about whether or not April 1st
link |
would be a good date on which to release a printed version
link |
of what I already said in lecture form.
link |
Because I think it's hysterically funny
link |
that the physics community claims
link |
that it can't decode a lecture.
link |
And you know what?
link |
There will be a steady stream of new complaints
link |
up until the point that they fit it into a narrative
link |
Yeah, I'm thinking about April 1st
link |
as a date in which to release a document
link |
and it won't be perfectly complete,
link |
but it'll be very complete.
link |
And then they'll try to say, it's wrong.
link |
Or you already did it.
link |
Or no, that was dumb,
link |
but what we just did on top of it is brilliant.
link |
Or it doesn't match experiment.
link |
Or who knows what.
link |
They'll go through all of their usual nonsense.
link |
Is there still puzzles in your own mind
link |
that need to be figured out
link |
for you to try to put it on paper?
link |
I mean, those are different mediums, right?
link |
It was a great question.
link |
I did not count on something
link |
that turns out to be important.
link |
When you work on your own outside of the system
link |
you probably don't think you're gonna be doing this
link |
as a 55 year old man.
link |
And I have been so long outside
link |
of math and physics departments,
link |
and I've been occupied with so many other things
link |
that the old idea that I had was
link |
if I always did it in little pieces,
link |
then I was always safe because it wouldn't be stealable.
link |
And so now those pieces never got assembled completely.
link |
In essence, I have all the pieces
link |
and I can fit them together.
link |
But there's probably a small amount of glue code.
link |
Like there are a few algebraic things
link |
I've forgotten how to do.
link |
I may or may not figure them out
link |
between now and April 1st.
link |
But it's pretty complete.
link |
But that's the puzzle you're kind of struggling
link |
to now figure out,
link |
to get it all in the same, the glue together.
link |
I can't tell you whether the theory
link |
is correct or incorrect.
link |
But for example, there's what's the exact form
link |
of the supersymmetry algebra,
link |
or what's the rule for passing a minus sign
link |
through a particular operator.
link |
And all of that stuff got a lot more difficult
link |
because I didn't do it every,
link |
look, it's a little bit like if you're a violinist
link |
and you don't touch your violin regularly for 15 years,
link |
you come back to it and you pretty much know the pieces,
link |
sort of, but there's lots of stuff that's missing,
link |
your tone is off and that kind of stuff.
link |
I would say I'll get the ship to the harbor
link |
and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in.
link |
And if the tugboat doesn't show up,
link |
then I'll pilot the thing right into the dock myself.
link |
But it's not a big deal.
link |
I think that it is essentially complete.
link |
Psychologically, just as a human being,
link |
this is, I remember perhaps by accident,
link |
but maybe there's no accidents in the universe.
link |
I was tuned in, I don't remember where,
link |
on April 1st to you, oh, I think on your Discord,
link |
kind of thinking about, thinking through this release.
link |
I mean, it wasn't like,
link |
it wasn't obvious that you were going to do it,
link |
you were thinking through it.
link |
And I remember there was intellectual,
link |
personal, psychological struggle with this, right?
link |
Well, because I thought it was dangerous.
link |
If this turns out to be right,
link |
I don't know what it unlocks.
link |
If it's wrong, I think I understand where we are.
link |
If it's wrong, it'll be the first fool's gold
link |
that really looks like a theory of everything.
link |
It'll be the iron pyrites of physics.
link |
And we haven't even had fool's gold in my opinion yet.
link |
So what is your intuition why this looks right to you?
link |
Like why it feels like it would be,
link |
if wrong, the first fool's gold.
link |
I can say it very simply.
link |
It's way smarter than I am.
link |
Can you break that apart a little more?
link |
Every time you poke at it,
link |
it's giving you intuitions that follow
link |
with the currently known physics.
link |
Let's put it in computer science terms.
link |
Okay, there's a concept of technical debt
link |
that computer scientists struggle with.
link |
As you commit crimes,
link |
you have to pay those crimes back at a later date.
link |
In general, most of the problem with physical theories
link |
is that as you try to do something that matches reality,
link |
you usually have to go into some structure
link |
that gets you farther away.
link |
And your hope is, is that you're gonna be able
link |
to pay back the technical debt.
link |
And in general, these wind up as check hiding schemes
link |
or like you're funding a startup
link |
and there are too many pivots, right?
link |
So you keep adding epicycles in order to cover,
link |
things that have gone wrong.
link |
My belief is, is that this thing
link |
represents something like a summit to me.
link |
And I'm very proud of having found a route up this summit.
link |
But the root is what's due to me.
link |
The summit can't possibly be due to me.
link |
You know, like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay
link |
did not create Mount Everest.
link |
They know that they didn't create that.
link |
They figured out a way up.
link |
You gotta tell me what Mount Everest
link |
is in this metaphor relative
link |
and also connected to the technical debt.
link |
So technical debt is a negative thing that it's kind of,
link |
you will eventually have to pay it.
link |
Are you saying in the,
link |
in the ascent that you're seeing now in the theory
link |
is you do not have much technical debt.
link |
Well, that's right.
link |
That what happens is, is that early on what I would say is,
link |
I believe now that the physics community
link |
has said many things incorrectly
link |
about the current state of the universe.
link |
They're not wildly off, which is why,
link |
like for example, the claim is that
link |
there are three generations of matter.
link |
I do not believe that there are three generations of matter.
link |
I believe that there are two generations of matter
link |
and there's a third collection
link |
that looks like a generation of matter as the first two,
link |
only at low energy.
link |
Okay, well, that's not a frequent claim.
link |
People imagine that there are three
link |
or more generations of matter.
link |
I would claim that that's false.
link |
People claim that the matter is chiral.
link |
That is, it knows it's left from its right.
link |
I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental,
link |
but it is emergent.
link |
But we could keep going at all these sorts of things.
link |
People think that space time
link |
is the fundamental geometrical construct.
link |
I think it's something that I've termed the observers.
link |
All of these different things
link |
represent a series of overinterpretations of the world
link |
that preclude progress.
link |
So you gave, I think you gave some credit
link |
to string theory as, string theory,
link |
I think loop quantum gravity, if I remember correctly,
link |
as like getting close to the fool's gold.
link |
Well, I said that Garrett Lisi, phenomenologically,
link |
gets a lot of things right.
link |
He gets, he's got a reason for chirality,
link |
a reason for uniqueness using E8.
link |
In fact, E8 uses something called vial fermions,
link |
He has a way of getting geometry
link |
to get Riemann's geometry underneath general relativity
link |
to play with Erisman's geometry,
link |
which is underneath the standard model,
link |
using something called Cartan connections
link |
that are out of favor.
link |
He's figured out something involving super connections
link |
to make sure that the fermion,
link |
the matter in the system isn't quantized
link |
the same way as the bosons were,
link |
which is a problem in his old theory.
link |
He's got something about three generations for triality.
link |
He's got a lot of phenomenological hits.
link |
I don't think Garrett's theory works.
link |
It also has a very simple Lagrangian.
link |
He's basically using the Yang Mills norm squared,
link |
the same thing you would use as a cost function
link |
if you were doing neural nets, okay?
link |
The string theorists have a different selling point,
link |
which is that they may have gotten
link |
a renormalizable theory of gravity
link |
if quantum gravity was what we were meant to do.
link |
And they've done some stuff with black holes
link |
that they can get some solutions correct.
link |
And then they have lots of agreements
link |
with where they show mathematical truths
link |
that mathematicians didn't even know.
link |
I'm very underwhelmed by string theory
link |
based on how many people have worked on it
link |
and how little is supporting the claims
link |
to it being a theory of everything.
link |
But those are the two that I take quite seriously.
link |
I don't yet take Wolfram's quite seriously
link |
because if he really finds one of these cellular automata
link |
that are really distinct and generative,
link |
But he's looking for such a thing.
link |
I don't think he's found anything.
link |
Tegmark, I view as a philosopher
link |
who is somehow taking credit for Platonism,
link |
which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max
link |
because I like Max, but if it ever comes time,
link |
I'm putting a post it note that I'm not positive
link |
the mathematical universe hypothesis
link |
is really anything new.
link |
And in general, loop quantum gravity really,
link |
I think grew out of some hopes
link |
that the general relativistic community had
link |
that they would be able to do particle theory.
link |
And I don't think that they've shown
link |
any particle theoretic realism.
link |
So essentially, here's what I really think, Lex.
link |
I think we didn't understand how big the difference
link |
between an effective theory and a theory of everything
link |
Maybe it's not mathematically that different,
link |
but conceptually trying to figure out
link |
what a theory of every, how does the universe,
link |
and I've compared it to Escher's drawing hands.
link |
How do two hands draw themselves into existence?
link |
That's the puzzle that I think has just been wanting.
link |
And I'll be honest, I'm really surprised
link |
that the theoretical physics community didn't even get up
link |
on their high horse and say,
link |
this is the most stupid nonsense imaginable,
link |
because clearly I always say I'm not a physicist.
link |
So I'm an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors.
link |
So in your journey of releasing this,
link |
and I'm sure further maybe it will be
link |
another American tradition on April 1st
link |
that will continue for years to come.
link |
There's sort of crumbs along the way
link |
that I'm hoping to collect in my naive view of things
link |
of the beauty that, in your geometric view of the universe.
link |
So one question I'd like to ask is
link |
if you were to challenge me to visualize something beautiful,
link |
something important about geometric unity
link |
in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty
link |
from the outsider's perspective, what would that thing be?
link |
Interesting question.
link |
Perhaps we can both have a journey
link |
towards April 1st.
link |
Take a look at that.
link |
Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose,
link |
not Melrose, Montana in Santa Monica.
link |
Now you'll notice that all of those disks
link |
rotate independently.
link |
If you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous,
link |
but not uniform everywhere,
link |
what you're doing is a so called gauge transformation
link |
on the torus seen as a U1 bundle over a U1 space time.
link |
So the concept of space time here
link |
in a very simplified case isn't four dimensional,
link |
but it's one dimensional, it's just a circle.
link |
And there's a circle above every point in the circle
link |
represented by those little disks.
link |
So imagine if you will, that we took a rubber band
link |
and placed it around here and decided
link |
that that was a function from the circle
link |
into the circle that is representing a Y axis
link |
that's wrapped around itself.
link |
Well, you would have an idea of what it means
link |
for a function to be constant,
link |
if it just went all around the outside.
link |
But what happens if I turn this a little bit?
link |
Then the function would be mostly constant.
link |
We'd have a little place where it dipped and it went back.
link |
It turns out that you can transform that function
link |
and transform the derivative that says that function
link |
is equal to zero when I take its derivative
link |
That's what a gauge transformation is.
link |
Amazing to me that we don't have a simple video,
link |
visualizing things that I've already had built
link |
and that I can clearly demonstrate.
link |
When you do that Taurus,
link |
who's the code of the Taurus is itself generating.
link |
The spinning Taurus.
link |
This is a U1 principle bundle.
link |
And the world needs to know what a gauge theory is,
link |
not by analogy, not with Lawrence Krauss saying,
link |
it's like a checkerboard.
link |
If you change some of the colors this way,
link |
not saying that it's a local symmetry involving,
link |
it's none of those things.
link |
It's a theory of differential calculus
link |
where the functions and the derivatives
link |
are both subject to a particular kind of change
link |
so that if a function was constant under one derivative,
link |
then the new function is constant under the new derivative
link |
transformed in the same fashion.
link |
And would you put that under the category
link |
of just gauge transformations?
link |
Yes, that would be gauge transformations
link |
applied to sections and connections
link |
where connections are the derivatives in the theory.
link |
This is easily explained.
link |
It is pathological that the community of people
link |
who understand what I'm saying have never bothered
link |
to do this in a clear fashion for the general public.
link |
You and I could visualize this overnight.
link |
The public needs to know in some sense
link |
that let's say quantum electrodynamics,
link |
the theory of photons and electrons,
link |
more or less electrons are functions
link |
and photons are derivatives.
link |
Now there's some, you can object in some ways,
link |
but basically a gauge theory is the way
link |
in which you can translate a shift
link |
in the definition of the functions
link |
and the shift of the definition of the derivatives
link |
so that the underlying physics is not harmed or changed.
link |
So you have to do both at the same time.
link |
Now you and I can visualize that.
link |
So if what you wanted to do rather than going directly
link |
to geometric unity is that I could sit down with you
link |
and I could say here are the various components
link |
of geometric unity and if the public needs a visualization
link |
in order to play along, we've got a little over two months
link |
and I'd be happy to work with you.
link |
I love that as a challenge and I'll take it on
link |
and I hope we do make it happen.
link |
And David Goggins, if Lex doesn't do some super macho thing
link |
because he's gotta work to get some of this stuff done,
link |
you'll understand he'll be available to you after April.
link |
Thank you for the escape clause.
link |
I really needed that escape clause.
link |
I'm glad that's on record.
link |
I'm worried 48 miles in 48 hours.
link |
By the way, I just wanna say how much I admire
link |
your willingness to keep this kind of hardcore attitude.
link |
I know that Russians have it and Russian Jews have it
link |
in spades, but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy
link |
and that's weak and that's lazy.
link |
And the fact that you bring so much heart to saying,
link |
I'm gonna bring this to jujitsu,
link |
I'm gonna bring this to guitar, I'm gonna bring this to AI,
link |
I'm gonna bring this to podcasting.
link |
It comes through loud and clear.
link |
I just find it completely and utterly inspiring
link |
that you keep this kind of hardcore aspect at the same time
link |
that you're the guy who's extolling the virtue of love
link |
in a modern society and doing it at scale.
link |
I don't know why I'm doing it,
link |
but I'm just following my heart on it
link |
and just going with the gut.
link |
It seems to make sense somehow.
link |
I personally think we better get tougher
link |
or we're gonna get in a world of pain.
link |
And I do think that when it comes time to lead,
link |
it's great to have people who you know
link |
don't crack under pressure.
link |
Do you mind if we talk about love
link |
and what it takes to be a father for a bit?
link |
Do you mind if Zev joins us?
link |
So Eric, I've talked to your son Zev,
link |
who's an incredible human being,
link |
but let me ask you,
link |
this might be difficult
link |
because you're both sitting together.
link |
What advice do you have for him
link |
as he makes his way in this world,
link |
especially given that, as we mentioned before on Joe Rogan,
link |
you're flawed in that just like all humans, you're mortal.
link |
Well, at some level, I guess one of my issues
link |
is that I've got to stop giving quite so much advice.
link |
Early on, I was very worried
link |
that I could see Zev's abilities
link |
and I could see his challenges
link |
and I saw them in terms of myself.
link |
So a certain amount of Zev rhymes with
link |
whatever I went through as a kid.
link |
And I don't wanna doom him to the same outcomes
link |
that sufficed for me.
link |
I think that he's got a much better head on his shoulders
link |
at age 15, he's much better adjusted.
link |
And in part, it's important for me to recognize
link |
that because I think I did a reasonably decent job early on,
link |
I don't need to get this part right.
link |
And I'm looking at Zev's trajectory and saying,
link |
you're gonna need to be incredibly
link |
and even pathologically self confident.
link |
The antidote for that is gonna be something
link |
you're gonna need to carry on board,
link |
which is radical humility.
link |
And you're gonna have to have those
link |
in a dialectical tension, which is never resolved,
link |
which is a huge burden.
link |
You are going to have to forgive people
link |
who do not appreciate your gifts
link |
because your gifts are clearly evident.
link |
And many people will have to pretend not to see them
link |
because if they see your gifts,
link |
then they're gonna have to question their entire approach
link |
to education or employment or critical thinking.
link |
And what my hope is, is that you can just forgive those
link |
who don't see them and who complicate
link |
and frustrate your life and realize
link |
that you're gonna have to take care of them too.
link |
Zev, let me ask you the more challenging question
link |
because the guy's sitting right here.
link |
What advice do you have for your dad?
link |
Since after talking to you,
link |
I realize you're the more brilliant
link |
aside from the better looking member of the family.
link |
It's a bit of an odd question.
link |
You can say anything you want.
link |
This is the last time we're gonna be seeing left.
link |
It's gonna be an awkward drive home.
link |
I think sort of a new perspective I've taken on parenting
link |
is that it is a task for which no human
link |
is really supposed to be prepared.
link |
You know, there are in Jewish tradition, for example,
link |
there are myriad analogies in the Torah and the Talmud
link |
that compare the role of a parent to the role of a God,
link |
That no human is prepared to play God
link |
and create and guide a life,
link |
but somehow we're forced into it as people.
link |
And I think sometimes it's hard for children to understand
link |
that however their parents are failing
link |
sort of has to be.
link |
It's a theme here.
link |
Is something for which we must budget
link |
because our parents play a role in our lives
link |
of which they're not worthy
link |
and they devote themselves to regardless
link |
because that becomes who they are in a certain sense.
link |
So I hope to have realistic expectations of you as a human
link |
because I think too often it's easy
link |
to have godly expectations of people
link |
who are far from such a role.
link |
And I think I'm really happy
link |
that you've been as open as you have with me
link |
about the fact that, you know, you really,
link |
you don't pretend to be a God in my life.
link |
You are a guide who allows me to see myself
link |
and that's been very important considering the fact
link |
that by your self teaching paradigm I will have to,
link |
I will have to guide myself and being able to see it
link |
and see myself accurately has been one of the greatest gifts
link |
that you've given me.
link |
So I'm very appreciative.
link |
And I want you to know that I don't buy into the role
link |
that you're supposed to sort of fake your way through
link |
in my life but I am unbelievably happy
link |
with a more realistic connection
link |
that we've been able to build in lieu of it, so.
link |
I think it's been easier on you actually
link |
as you come to realize what I don't know,
link |
what I can't do and that there's been a period of time,
link |
I guess, that's fascinating to me
link |
where you're sort of surprised
link |
that I don't know the answer to a certain thing
link |
as well as you do.
link |
And that I remember going through this
link |
with a particular mathematician who I held,
link |
I still hold in awe, named David Kajdan.
link |
And, you know, he famously said to,
link |
and weirdly our family knew his family
link |
in the Soviet Union.
link |
But he said, you know, Eric,
link |
I always appreciate you coming to my office
link |
because I always find what you have to say interesting
link |
but you have to realize that in the areas
link |
that you're talking about, you are no longer the student,
link |
you are actually my teacher.
link |
And I wasn't prepared to hear that.
link |
And there are many ways in which,
link |
as I was just saying with the Mozart,
link |
I am learning at an incredible rate from you.
link |
I used to learn from you
link |
because I didn't understand what was possible.
link |
You were very much, I mean, this is the weird thing.
link |
There used to be this thing called Harvey,
link |
the invisible rabbit.
link |
This guy had a rabbit that was like six feet tall
link |
that only he could see maybe was talking.
link |
And that was like you at age four.
link |
You were saying batshit crazy things
link |
that were all totally sensible
link |
and nobody else could put them together.
link |
And so what's wonderful is that the world hasn't caught on,
link |
but enormous numbers of people are starting to.
link |
And I really do hope that that genuineness of spirit
link |
and that outside the box intellectual commitment
link |
serves you well as the world starts to appreciate
link |
that I think you're a very trustworthy voice.
link |
You don't get everything right,
link |
but the idea that we have somebody at your age
link |
who's embedded in your generation
link |
who can tell us something about what's happening
link |
is really valuable to me.
link |
And I do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice
link |
more than just at the dinner table.
link |
I apologize for saying this four letter word,
link |
but do you love Zev?
link |
Was really worried it was gonna be another four letter word.
link |
There's so many to choose from.
link |
It doesn't even rise to the level of the question.
link |
I mean, I just, there are a tiny number of people
link |
with whom you share so much life
link |
that you can't even think of yourself in their absence.
link |
And I don't know if Zev would find that,
link |
but it's, you can have a kid
link |
and never make this level of connection.
link |
I think even right down to the fact
link |
that when Zev chooses boogie woogie piano
link |
for his own set of reasons,
link |
why I would choose boogie woogie piano
link |
if I could play in any style, it's a question
link |
about a decrease in loneliness.
link |
You know, like my grandfather played the mandolin
link |
and I had to learn some mandolin
link |
because otherwise that instrument would go silent.
link |
You don't expect that you get this much of a chance
link |
to leave this much of yourself in another person
link |
who is choosing it and recreating it
link |
rather than it being directly instilled.
link |
And my proudest achievement is in a certain sense
link |
having not taught him and having shared this much.
link |
So, you know, it's not even love, it's like well beyond.
link |
So you mentioned love for you making a less lonely world.
link |
I think I speak for, I would argue,
link |
probably millions of people that you, Eric,
link |
because this is a conversation with you,
link |
have made for many people, for me, a less lonely world.
link |
And I can't wait to see how you develop as an intellect,
link |
but also I'm so heartworn by the optimism
link |
and the hopefulness that was in you
link |
that I hope develops further.
link |
And lastly, I'm deeply thankful that you, Eric are my friend
link |
and would give me, would honor me with this watch.
link |
It means more than words can say.
link |
Thanks guys, thanks for talking today.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with Eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors,
link |
Indeed Hiring Site, Theragun Muscle Recovery Device,
link |
Wine Access Online Wine Store,
link |
and Blinkist app that summarizes books.
link |
Click the sponsor links to get a discount
link |
and to support this podcast.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words from Socrates.
link |
To find yourself, think for yourself.
link |
Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.