back to indexEric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #163
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The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, his fourth time on the podcast,
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both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind, and the result is a complicated,
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brilliant human being who I am fortunate to call a friend.
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and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me ask that whenever we touch difficult
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Please try not to close your mind and heart to others because of a single sentence or an
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at Lex Freedman. And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. You often talk about getting
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off this planet and I think you don't often talk about extra terrestrial life, intelligent life out
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there. Do you wonder about this kind of thing about intelligent civilizations out there?
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I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way. In a certain sense, I do find
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that speculating about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and Space Aliens is kind of a recreation
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for when things aren't going very well. At least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives.
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So I worry about, for example, the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion. You
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can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend. So then
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you just take up an interest in the simulation theory because that's something like what you do
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for your job coding. I do think that in some sense, the issue of aliens is a really interesting one,
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but has been spoiled by too much recreational escapism. The key question that I find is,
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let's assume that it is possible to look out at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds
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and then go visit them. If that is possible, it's almost certainly possible through some
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as yet unknown or not accepted theory of physics beyond Einstein.
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It doesn't have to be that way, but probably is. If that theory exists, there would be a
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percentage of the worlds that have life in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way that would have
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encountered the ability to escape soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom at a
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minimum and whatever they have that is probably analogous to the cell on that world. So assuming
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that life is a fairly generic thing that arises, probably not carbon based, probably doesn't have
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DNA, but that something that fits the pattern of Darwinian theory, which is descent with variation,
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differential success. And thereby constantly improving and so on that through time, there'll
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be a trajectory where there'll be something increasingly complex and fascinating and beautiful
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like us humans, but much more. That can also off gas whatever entropy it creates to give
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an illusion that you're defeating thermodynamics. So whatever these things are, probably has an
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analog of the bilipid layer so that cells can get rid of the chaos on one side of the barrier and
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keep order on the other. Whatever these things are that create life, assuming that there is a
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theory to be found that allows that civilization to diversify, we would have to imagine that
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such a civilization might have taken an interest in its concept of the universe and have come here.
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They would come here. They would have a deep understanding of the physics of the universe
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sufficient to have arrived here. Well, there's two questions, whether they could arrive physically
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and whether their information could be sent here and whether they could gain information from us.
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It's possible that they would have a way of looking into our world without actually reaching it. I
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don't know. But yes, if my hope, which is that we can escape this world, can be realized if that's
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feasible, then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true and that somebody else should be
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here. First of all, I want to say this. My purpose when I come on to your show and I reframe the
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questions is not to challenge you. I can sit inside all of those. It's to give you better audio and
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video because I think we've been on an incredible role. I really love what you do. I am trying to
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honor you by being as disagreeable about frame breaking as possible. I think some of your listeners
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don't understand that it's actually a sign of respect as opposed to some sort of a complex
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dynamic, which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames and that these are sort of
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offerings to get the conversation started. Let me try to break that frame and give you something
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different. Beautiful. I think what's going on here is that I can prove effectively that we're
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not thinking about this in very deep terms. As soon as I say we've got to get off this planet,
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the number of people who assume that I'm talking about faster than light travel is very high. Faster
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than light travel assumes some sort of Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken by some small
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adjustment. I think that that's fascinating. It shows me that our failure to imagine what could
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be being said is profound. We don't have an idea of all of the different ways in which we might be
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able to visit distant worlds. All we think about is, okay, it must be Einsteinian space times and
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then some means of exceeding the speed limit. It's fascinating to me that we've lost the ability
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to just realize we don't know the framework and what does it even mean? One of the things I think
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about a lot is worlds with more than one temporal dimension. It's very hard to think about more
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than one temporal dimension. That's a really strong mental exercise of breaking the framework
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in which we think because most of the frameworks would have a single temporal dimension.
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First of all, most of the frameworks in which we think would have no temporal dimension,
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would have pure mathematics, the differential geometry that Riemann came up with in the 1800s.
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We don't usually talk about what we would call split signature metrics or Lorentzian
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signature. In fact, if it weren't for relativity, this would be the most obscure topic out there.
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Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature and then there's this one freakish case
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of relativity theory in physics that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions.
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Fascinating. It's usually momentary and just looking at space.
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Yes. We have these three kinds of equations that are very important to us. We have elliptic,
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hyperbolic, and parabolic. The idea is if I'm chewing gum after eating garlic bread,
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when I open my mouth and I've got chewing gum between my lips, maybe it's going to form an
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elliptic object called a minimal surface. Then when I pop that and blow through it,
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you're going to hear a noise that's going to travel to you by a wave equation,
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which is going to be hyperbolic. But then the garlic breath is going to diffuse
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towards you and you're eventually going to be very upset with me according to a heat equation,
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which will be parabolic. Those are the three basic paradigms for most of the work that we
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do. A lot of the work that we do in mathematics is elliptic, whereas the physicists are in the
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hyperbolic case. I don't even know what to do about more than one temporal dimension because
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I think almost no one studies that. I can't believe you just captured much of modern physics
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in the example of chewing gum. I have an off color one, which I chose not to share,
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but hopefully the kids at home can imagine. That is the place where we come from.
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Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility of breaking the frameworks with two versus zero
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temporal dimensions, how do we even begin to think about that? Well, let's think about it as
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you and I getting together in New York City. If you tell me, Eric, I want to meet you in
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New York City, go to the corner of 34th Street and 3rd Avenue, and you'll find a building on
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the northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor. When we have 3rd Avenue, that's one
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coordinate, 34th Street, that's a second coordinate, and go up to the 17th. What time is it? Oh,
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12 noon. All right. Well, now imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a particular
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height in a building. It's all flat land, but I'm going to give you two temporal coordinates.
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Meet me at 5 p.m. and 12 noon at the corner of 34th and 3rd. That gets to be too mind blowing.
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I've got two separate watches. And presumably that's just specifying a single point in those
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two different dimensions, but then being able to travel along those dimensions. Let me see your
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right hand. You have no watch on that. I'm very concerned, Lex, that you're going through life
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without a wristwatch. That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch. I want you to wear it.
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This guy's funnier than basically any human on earth. That has been in my family for months.
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It's a Fitbit. Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman is now in a position to live in
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two spatial and two temporal dimensions, unlike the rest of us. I clearly am only fit for four
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spatial dimensions. So I'm frozen, whereas you can double move. I can double move,
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which is funny because this is set in Austin time, so it's 4 p.m. and this is set in Los
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Angeles time. That's just with an affine shift in mod 12. My point is, wouldn't that be interesting
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if there were two separate timescales and you had to coordinate both of those,
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but you didn't have to worry about what floor of the building because everything was on the
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ground floor. That is the confusion that we're having. And if you do one more show,
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then they're going to put a watch on your ankle and you're only going to have one spatial dimension
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that you can move around. But my claim is that all of these are actually sectors of my theory,
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in case we're interested in that, which is geometric unity. There is a 2,2 sector and a 3,1
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and a 1,3 and a 0,4 and a 4,0. And all of these sectors have some physical reality. We happen
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to live in a 1,3 sector, but that's the kind of thinking that we don't do. When I say we have to
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get off this planet, people imagine, oh, okay, it's just Einstein plus some ability to break the law.
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By the way, even though you did this for humor's sake, I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin.
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Am I going to get whacked? No, not quite. But he was given a Super Bowl ring to look at,
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and he, instead of just looking at it, put it on his finger and walked away with it.
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Robert Kraft? Robert Kraft, that's right. So, in the same way, I will, if you don't mind,
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walk away with this Fitbit and taking an entirety of your life story with it,
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because there's all these steps on it. Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.
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And where have I been? Exactly.
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Right. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about, you want to get into aliens.
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Let's have an interesting alien conversation. Let's stop having the typical free will conversation,
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the typical alien conversation, the typical AGI morality conversation. It's like, we have to
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recognize that we're amusing ourselves because we're not making progress. Time to have better
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versions of all these conversations. Is there some version of the alien conversation that could
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incorporate the breaking of frameworks? Well, I think so. I mean, the key question would be,
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we've had the Pentagon release multiple videos of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us. I
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just think it's also really fascinating to talk about the fact that those of us who were trained
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to call BS on all of this stuff just had the rug pulled out from under us by the Pentagon choosing
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to do this. And you know what the effect of that is? You've opened the door for every stupid theory
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known to man. My aunt saw a ghost. Okay. Now we're going to have to listen to,
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well, hey, the Pentagon used to deny it. Then it turned out there were UFOs, dude.
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Dude, whoever is in charge of lying to the public, they need a cost function that incorporates the
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damage and trust because I held this line that this was all garbage and all BS.
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Now I don't know what to think. There's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion,
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the breaking of frameworks that involves the release of videos from the Pentagon,
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which is almost like another dimension that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information
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is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling constantly that is messing with my head to think
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about because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that into your study of the nature
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of reality is like the constant shifting of the notation, the tools we use to communicate that
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reality. And so what am I supposed to think about these videos? Is it a complete distraction?
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Is it a kind of cosmic joke? I don't know. But you know what? I'm tired of these people. Just
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completely tired of these people. The people on the Pentagon side or the people who are interpreting
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this stuff on the Pentagon side? I'm tired of the authorities playing games with what we can know.
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The fact that you and I don't, do you have a security clearance?
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Some level of it for, because I was funded for DARPA for a while.
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I don't have a security clearance. You know, I am going to release whatever theory I have. And
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my guess is, is that there is zero interest from our own government. And so the Chinese will find
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out about it at the same time. Our government does, because Lord knows what they do in these
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buildings. I watch crazy people walk in and out of the intelligence community, walk in and out of
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DARPA. And I think, wow, you're talking to that person? That's really fascinating to me. We don't
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seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball. Complete lack of transparency. Do you think it's
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possible there's, the government is in possession of something deeply fundamental to understanding
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of the world that they're not releasing? So this is one, one thing is, this is one of the
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the famous distractions that people play with, the narrative of alien life forms,
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spacecraft and possession, that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft,
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the popular narrative. I don't think the government really exists at the moment.
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I believe, and this is not an idea that was original to me. There was a guy named Michael
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Tidalbaum who used to be at the Sloan Foundation. And at some point I pointed out that the US
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government had completely contradictory objectives when it came to the military and science.
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And one branch said this, one branch said that. I said, I don't understand which is true. What
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does the government want? And he said, do you think there's a government? And I said, what do
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you mean? He said, what makes you think that the people in those two offices have ever coordinated?
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What is it that allows each office to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office?
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And that's when I first started to understand that there are periods where the government coheres
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and then there are periods where the coherence just decays. And I think that that's been going
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on since 1945, that there have been a few places where there's been increased coherence, but in
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general, everything is just getting less and less coherent. And that what war did was focus us on the
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need to have a government of people and mission capacity, technology, commitment, ideology.
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And then as soon as that was gone, different people, those who'd been through World War II had
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one set of beliefs, those born in the 1950s or late 40s by the time they got to Woodstock,
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they didn't buy any of that.
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So coherence is the complete opposite of bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy.
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So coherence is efficient functional government, because when you say there's no government,
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meaning there's no emergent function from a collection of individuals, it's just a bunch
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of individuals stuck in their offices without any kind of efficient communication with each other
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on a single mission. And so a government that is truly at the epitome of what a government is
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supposed to be is when a bunch of people working together.
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What are we about? Are we about freedom? Are we about growth? Are we about decency and fairness?
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Are we about the absence of a national culture so that we can all just do our own thing?
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I've called this thing the USAN, the United States of Absolutely Nothing.
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These are all different visions for our country.
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So it's possible that there's an alien spacecraft somewhere and there's like
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20 people that know about it. And then they're kind of, as you communicate further and further
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into the offices that information dissipates, it gets distorted in some kind of way, and then
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it's completely lost. The power, the possibility of that information is lost.
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We bought a house. And I had this idea that I wanted to find out what all the switches did.
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And I quickly found out that your house doesn't keep updating its plans. As people do modifications,
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they just do the modifications and they don't actually record why they were doing what they
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were doing or what things lead to. So there are all sorts of bizarre, like there's a switch in
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my house that says privacy. I don't know what privacy is. Does it turn on an electromagnetic
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field that there's some lead shielding go over the house? That's what we have. We have a system
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in which the people who've inherited these structures have no idea why their grandparents
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built them. I'd be funny if there's a freedom of speech switch that you could also control,
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and it would be a perfect metaphor for our current state of mind. Well, that's different
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because what they figured out is that if they can just make sure that we don't have any public
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options for communication, then, hey, every thing that we say to each other goes through
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a private company. Private companies can do whatever they want. And this is like one of the
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greatest moves that we didn't really notice. Electronic and digital speech makes every other
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kind of speech irrelevant. And because there is no public option, guess what? There's always somebody
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named Sundar or Jack or Mark who controls whether or not you could speak and what it appears to be
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that is being said and who stuff is weighted more highly than others. It's an absolute nightmare.
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And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite, Lord knows what is going on. People
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are so busy making money that they are not actually upholding any of the values. So Silicon Valley is
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sort of maximally against it. It has this kind of libertarian, free, progressive sheen to it when
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it goes to Burning Man. And then it quickly just imposes rules on all of the rest of us as to what
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we can say to each other if we're not part of the inner elite. So what do you think the ideal
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of the freedom of speech means? Well, this is very interesting. I keep getting lectured on
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social media by people who have no idea how much power the Supreme Court has to abstract things.
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Right now, you have the concept of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. And the spirit
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of the law would have to say that our speech that matters is free, at least at the level of ideas.
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I don't claim that I have the right to endanger your life with speech or to reveal your private
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information. So I really am not opining about directed speech intended to smear you. And
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that's a different kettle of fish. And maybe I have some rights to do that, but I don't think
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that they're infinite. What I am saying is that the freedom of speech for ideas
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is essential that the court abstract it and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook,
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Twitter, Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are, because it really matters which
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abstraction use. The case that I really like is search and seizure. If I have private data that
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I entered in my house that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house,
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but I view the is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter of my house that I have the right
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to protect, or does my password extend the perimeter of my house to the data on the server
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that is located outside of my house. These are choices for the court. And the court is supposed
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to pretend that they can divine the true intent of the framers. But all of the sort of, and I've
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taken the call on this, the problem of internet hyenas, people with ready made answers and LOLs
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and you're such a moron. These folks love to remind you, it's a private company, dude, it can do
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whatever it wants. No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are. And just the way,
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for example, the Griswold decision found that there was a penumbra because there was too little in
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the Constitution. Therefore, there were all sorts of things implied that couldn't be in the document.
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And somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now that says Jack cannot do it if he
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wants. It's really, so you say the courts, but it's also us, people who think about the world,
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it's you. No, no, no. It's the courts. But the courts don't do this. We're toast.
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But we can still think about it. I mean, I don't feel like going down the drain.
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Here's what I'm thinking about because it's tricky how far it should extend. I mean, that's
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an ongoing conversation. Don't you think the interpretation of the law?
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I think I'm trying to say something very simple and it's just not going to be popular for a while.
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Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication. Print or shouting in a public park.
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And so, you know, I can go to a public park and I can shout if I get a permit. Even there,
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I think it was in the late 1980s in Atlanta. We came up with free speech zones where you
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can't protest at a convention. You bet you can go to a park 23 miles out and they'll fence
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off a little area where you can have your free speech. No, speech is dangerous. Ideas are
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dangerous. We are a country about danger and risk. And yes, I agree that targeted speech
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at individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of that is very different.
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So, forget a lot of that stuff. But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous
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and people will die as a result of free speech. The idea that one life is too much
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is preposterous. Like, why did we send, if one life is preposterous, why did we send
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anyone to the beaches of Normandy? I just don't get this. So, one thing that I was clearly bothered
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by and maybe you can be my therapist as well. I thought you were mine. This is a little bit of
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a miscommunication on both of our parts then. Because who's paying who for this? I was really
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bothered by Amazon banning parlor from AWS because my assumption was that the infrastructure,
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I drew a distinction between AWS, the infrastructure on which competing platforms could be created
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is different than the actual platforms. So, the standard of the ideal of freedom of speech,
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I in my mind in a shallow way perhaps applied differently to AWS than I did to Twitter.
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It felt that we've created a more dangerous world, that freedoms were violated by banning
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parlor from AWS, which I saw as the computing infrastructure which enables the competition
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of tools, the competition of frameworks of communication. What do you think about this?
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First of all, let me give you the internet hyena answer. I don't understand, dude. Just build your
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own Amazon. Yeah. Right? Yes. So, that's a very shallow statement, but it's also
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one that has some legitimacy. We can't completely dismiss it because there's levels to this game.
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Yes and no, but if you really wanted to chase that down, one of the great things about a
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person to person conversation is opposed to let's have 30 of our closest friends.
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Whenever we have a conversation with 30 of our closest friends, you know what happens?
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It's like passing light through a prism. Every person says something interesting
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and as a result, it's always muddled. Nothing ever resolves.
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Well, one of my conversational techniques you mentioned, you pushed back, is first,
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this childlike naivety and curiosity, but also real or simulated.
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Real, I'm afraid. I would say 80% real.
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All right. So, in this paradigm, how could you not see this coming? I did a show with
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Ashley Matthews, who's the woman behind Riley Reed, and specifically about this. It was about
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the idea that if I move away from politics and go towards sex, I know that there's always a move
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to use the infrastructure to shut down sex workers. And in this case, we had Operation
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Choke Point under the Obama administration. We have a positive passion for people who want
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to solve problems that they don't like. This company, they don't like that company.
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Payday loans would be another one. And so, you have legal companies that are harassed
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by our financial system that you can't, you know, as Riley Reed, Ashley couldn't get a
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MailChimp account according to her, if I understand her correctly. And this idea that you charge
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these people higher rates because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards, even if their
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chargebacks are low. Yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment. There's something about
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everybody who shows up at Davos. They get drunk in the Swiss Alps, and then they come back home,
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and they coordinate, and they coordinate things like build back better. We don't really understand
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what build back better is, but my guess is that build back better has to do with extremism in
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America. How do we shut down the Republican Party as the source of extremism? Now, I do think the
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Republican Party has got very extreme under Trump. And I do believe that that was responsive to how
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extreme the Democratic Party got under Clinton first, and then Obama, and then Hillary. And in
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all of these circumstances, it's amazing how much we want to wield these things as weapons. Well,
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our extremism is fine because we pretend that Tifa doesn't exist, and we don't report what goes on
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in Portland, but your extremism, my God, that's disgusting. This is the completely ridiculous
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place that we're in. And by the way, our friends, in part, are coked up on tech money, and they
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don't appear to hold the courage of their convictions at a political level because
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it's not in keeping with shareholder value. At some level, shareholder value is the ultimate
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shield with which everyone can cloak themselves. Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned
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from Twitter. And I'm not sure it was a good financial decision for Twitter, right? Perhaps
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you can correct me if I'm wrong. Well, are you thinking locally, or are you thinking if Twitter
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refused to ban Donald Trump, what is the odds that the full force of the antitrust division
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might find them? I don't know. Oh, I see. I see. So there's a complicated thing. Look, these guys
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are all having a discussion in very practical terms. You can imagine the sorts of conversation.
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Jack, Mark, Sunder, we're really glad you're all here. We're all trying to sing from the same
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hymnal and row in the same direction. We understand free speech. We're completely committed to it,
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but we have to draw on with extremism, guys. We just need to make sure we're all on the same page.
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Well, they use the term violence, too, and they, I think, overapply it. So basically, anybody...
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I'm telling you, I say dumb things to incentivize thoughtful conversation.
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Well, whatever these things are, there is no trace. Like, how old are you, Lex? You're in your
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mid 30s? Yeah, to late 40s. Late 20s to late 40s, somewhere in there. That's the demographic.
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I do think that partially what's happened is that your group has never seen functional
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institutions. These institutions have been so compromised for so long. You've probably never
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seen an adult. Sometimes, I think Elon looks like an adult. I know that he has a wildlife style,
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but I also see him looking like an adult. What does an adult look like, exactly? Oh, you know,
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somebody who weighs things, speaks carefully, thinks about the future beyond their own lifespan.
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Somebody who has a pretty good idea of how to get things done, isn't wildly caught up in punitive
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actions, is more focused on breaking new ground than playing rent seeking games. I mean, I really
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had a positive... I was so completely chastised when Elon must have ended up as the world's richest
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person. He was like, well, that's interesting. Back to work. That's what an adult would do.
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That's what a grownup would do. Weirdly, I said something about, isn't it amazing that the world's
link |
richest person knows what a Lagrangian is? He made a terrible Lagrange joke about potentials.
link |
But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately, Elon may be one of the closest things we have
link |
to an adult. And I can tell you that the internet hyenas will immediately descend as to what a
link |
fraudster he is for pumping his stock price, talking his book and all this stuff. Shut up.
link |
So, looking at the world seriously and rigorously, you're saying that the people who are running tech
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companies or running the mediums on which we can exercise the ideal of free speech are not adults?
link |
I think not. I think, first of all, a lot of them are Silicon Valley,
link |
utopian businessmen, where you talk a utopian line and you use it. You've heard my take,
link |
which is that the idealism of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts.
link |
And I believe that in many ways, the idealism of Silicon Valley about connecting the world,
link |
the world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is really about the
link |
software eating the world, as Mark Andreessen likes to say, at the role of these legacy
link |
properties. And by simply being a bad tech version of something that previously existed
link |
like a newspaper, you could immediately start to dwarf that by aggregating newspapers and
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newspapers and their digital versions, because digital is so much more powerful. As a result,
link |
yes, we have lots of man children wandering around what once was the Bay Area and is now
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Austin and Miami and other places, maybe Singapore, that all of these people,
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these are friends of ours, and they're brilliant with respect to a certain amount of stuff.
link |
But none of them can get off the drip. It's amazing that none of them have FU money.
link |
We've got billionaires who don't have FU money.
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Okay. I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence,
link |
and not just Jack Dorsey, but everybody that was banning people. And then this word violence was
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used as a kind of just like extremism and so on, without much reason behind it.
link |
You think it's impossible for Jack Dorsey or anybody else to be, as you said, an adult, a
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grownup and... Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grownup. It seems like he is.
link |
Yeah. But he's under pressures.
link |
As you've discussed, it seems that he's been on the verge of almost being
link |
quite serious and transparent and real. I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went.
link |
And I worry that that must be something behind the scenes that I can't see.
link |
From my perspective, what I think is the stress, the burden of that when people are screaming at you
link |
is overwhelming. Jack is a Zen monk. He really is.
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Jack is an incredibly impressive person, intellectually, morally, spiritually, at least
link |
for a couple of meetings. I don't know him very well, but I'm very impressed by the person I met.
link |
And I don't know where that person is. 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 about the reasoning behind the
link |
banning? Or do you think all banning, eventually, all banning of people from mediums of communication
link |
is eventually destructive? Or it's impossible for human beings to reason with ourselves about it?
link |
Well, let's see what the problem is. So my phone has been on airplane mode. I'm going to unlock it.
link |
I'm going to take a picture of Lex Fridden. Now, if I can, I'm going to tweet that picture out.
link |
But here's the weird part about it. That picture sitting with Lex today.
link |
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage is made.
link |
Okay. In so doing, I have just sent a picture of you and a tiny piece of text all over the planet
link |
that has arrived at, if statistics tell the truth, just under half a million different accounts.
link |
And then more from sharing and so on.
link |
Well, been some of those accounts are dead. We don't really know how many places it went.
link |
But the key issue with that tweet is that that is a non local phenomenon.
link |
So I just broadcasted to an entire planet. Somebody in Uganda is reading that at the same time as somebody in Uruguay.
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There is no known solution to have so many people with the ability to communicate non locally
link |
because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech inside of the Constitution.
link |
Friction, locality, there were all sorts of other aspects to speech.
link |
So if you think about speech as a bundle, then it got unbundled.
link |
And some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on to retard the impact of speech
link |
aren't present. And we don't have the courage to say,
link |
I wonder if the First Amendment really applies in the modern era in the same way,
link |
or we have to work through an abstraction. Either we probably have to amend the Constitution,
link |
or we have to abstract it properly. And that issue is not something we're facing up to.
link |
I watch us constantly look backwards. We don't seem to try to come up with new ideas and new
link |
theories. Nobody really imagines that we're going to be able to wisely amend the Constitution anymore
link |
inside of the United States. Many people abroad will say, why are these guys talking about the
link |
US? It's a US centric program. Well, that's because nobody knows where this program lives.
link |
The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be in a physical place together
link |
is also bizarre. It could be anywhere. It doesn't really matter that it happens to be here.
link |
So the difference between logical and between physical, local, non local,
link |
frictional, non frictional, it's the same thing with firearms. Nobody imagined that the
link |
gatling gun was going to be present when you had to reload a musket. That's fascinating to think
link |
about. You're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom that seems so foundational
link |
to this nation, to what made this nation great, and perhaps much of the world that is great,
link |
made it great, is changing completely. Can we try to reason through how the ideal
link |
freedom of speech is to be changed? I mean, I guess I'm struggling. It feels really wrong,
link |
perhaps because I wasn't paying attention to it. It feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump
link |
from Twitter, to ban not just the president. That's really wrong to me. But this particular
link |
human for being divisive. But then when there's an incitement of violence, that is an overused
link |
claim. But perhaps there was actual brewing of local violence happening. So one of the things
link |
I know was happening on Parler is people were scheduling meetings together in physical space.
link |
So you're now going back from this dynamic social, large scale, people from Uganda,
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people from all over the world being able to communicate. You're now mapping that into now
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back meeting in the physical space that is similar to what the founding of this nation was.
link |
The violence were digital. If ransomware suddenly was unleashed. The key issue is the
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abstractions. So what was freedom of speech as a bundle? And then how do we abstract the bundle
link |
into the digital era? Do you think we just need to raise the question and talk about it? Do you
link |
have ideas? Well, sure I have ideas. But the key point is that I'm not even welcome in mainstream
link |
media. I've never seen you on mainstream media. Do you do mainstream media? So we exist in part
link |
of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story,
link |
which I've called the gated institutional narrative. And the institutions pretend that
link |
they plug their fingers in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of MSNBC
link |
talking to CNN about what was in the New York Times as covered by the Washington Post.
link |
And so that's effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they, you know,
link |
the undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper. Okay. Well,
link |
that's very different than MMA. You've recently been on Glenn Beck's program. Yeah.
link |
And there was this kind of one of the things you've talked about is being able to have this
link |
conversation. I don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside
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of the mainstream media, but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews and having a
link |
nuanced or just like a respectful conversation that's grounded and mutual.
link |
But we can't have the reality because the main model is the center, both left and right,
link |
is in the process of stealing all the wealth that we built up. And they've organized the extremes
link |
into two LARPing teams that I've called Magistan and Wokistan. And then you have everybody who
link |
isn't part of that complex, all seven of us, the number of us who are able to earn a living looking
link |
at all of these mad people playing this game. There's a phrase inside finance when the investment
link |
banks are trying to look at price action. And somebody says, this doesn't make any sense.
link |
And somebody will say, it's just the local stealing from each other. And that's really what we have.
link |
We've got the leaders of Magistan and Wokistan championing these two teams is sponsored by the
link |
center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver and cut the paintings out of the
link |
frames. That's what you and I are looking at. So when you ask me, like, do you have any ideas
link |
about the abstraction for free speech? I've never met Mark Zuckerberg. I've never met
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Zuckerberg. I've never met Sundar Pichai. I never met Larry Page. I was once in a room with Sergey
link |
Brin. I've never spoken to Elon Musk. I hang out with Peter Thiel, but we have a very deep
link |
relationship, but I don't really speak to that many other people at sort of at this level.
link |
We're not having any kind of smart conversation at a national level. In fact, it's almost as if
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we've destroyed every sandbox in which we could play together. There's no place that we actually
link |
talk except long form podcasting. And by the way, they've found, you see what's going on with like
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Alex Stamos and the Hoover Institution. There's a loophole left. Long form podcasting allows
link |
people to speak at levels above daytime CNN. It's like, well, why do you think they're not watching
link |
daytime CNN? But you know, that's just silly journalism. They currently have no power to
link |
displace podcasting. That's why it's so powerful. RSS feed. I mean, that's why the big challenge
link |
with Joe Rogan and Spotify is like, there's this dance that's fascinating to see is Joe Rogan is
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not part of the system. And then he's also uncancelable. And there's this tension that's
link |
happening. Well, Howard Stern, Howard Stern became much less relevant. So if they can't control Joe
link |
by bringing him in house, the key question is, is he going to continue? Like, you know, this
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Joe says this thing about FU money. Yeah. Joe's one of the only people with FU money who's actually
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said FU. Yeah. I don't understand this. I don't have FU money. What exactly is, can we break apart
link |
FU money? Because I always thought I've been fortunate enough to have always have FU money
link |
in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary in the United States. This is the
link |
stoic point, which is if you can live on rice and beans, you're uncancelable because you're always
link |
rich relative to your needs. Right. Isn't that FU fundamental? Why do you say that tech billionaires
link |
don't have FU money? When you need to hire private security to protect your family,
link |
how do you protect your two children? I don't have those yet. Bingo. Yeah. My point is that FU
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money insulates everything that you care about. It's not just about you. So you're saying as the
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level of responsibility grows, the amount of money required for FU. We have a war going on.
link |
The war is on academic freedom. Academic freedom used to be present in the system as a, in terms
link |
of the idea, we trust our elite. Now we have an idea like, you want to be the elite. You want a
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Lord above us. That's like, first of all, there's like a populist anti elitist thing. Then there's
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the idea that we're going to defer tenure for forever. Then we're going to tell people, stay in
link |
your lane. Your tenure is only good for your own particular tiny micro subject. Then we're going to
link |
also control your grants and we'll be able to load up your teaching load if we don't like who you are
link |
and we'll make your life absolutely impossible. We lost academic freedom and we ushered in peer
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review, which was a disaster. Then we lost funding so that people were confident that they would have
link |
the ability to do research no matter what they said. As a result, what you find is,
link |
is a world in which there's no ability to get people to say, no, I'm not going to sign your
link |
diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath. I won't sign any loyalty oath. Get the hell out of
link |
my office. F you. F you and you're connecting money to that. Well, my point is that academic
link |
freedom is the whole idea behind it was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire
link |
on a much smaller seller. Right. Okay. We've lost that. Yeah. The only reason in part that I wanted
link |
to go into academic academics as a profession, as opposed to wanting to do physical or mathematical
link |
research. The great prize was freedom. Ralph Gomery of the Sloan Foundation previously of IBM
link |
Research pointed it out. He says, if you lose freedom, you lose the only thing we had to offer
link |
top minds. Top minds value their intellectual freedom and their physical and economic security
link |
at a different level than other human beings. And so people say, I don't understand, dude,
link |
you have the ability to do X, Y, and Z. What's the problem? It's like, well, I value my ability
link |
to raise the middle finger as an American practically above everything else. I want to talk
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to you about freedom here in the context of something you've mentioned, which one way to
link |
take away freedom is to put a human being into a cage to create constraints. The other one that
link |
worries me is something that I think you spoke into Twitter a little bit on Twitter is we bleed
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freedom by kind of slowly scaring you into not doing, not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities
link |
you can as freedom. So when you ban Donald Trump, when you ban Parler, you give a little doubt in
link |
the minds of millions, like me, a person who's a tech person, who's an entrepreneur,
link |
there's a little, that's what I'm afraid of when I look in the mirror. Is there not a little doubt
link |
in there that limits the amount of options that we'll try? How certain are you that the COVID
link |
virus didn't come from the Wuhan lab and his biosafety level four? We both know that we're
link |
both supposed to robotically say the idea that the COVID virus came from a lab is a discredited
link |
conspiracy theory. There is no evidence that suggests that this is true. The World Health
link |
Organization and the CDC have both upon this to say otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible.
link |
And the threat of that is the thing that ultimately limits the freedoms we feel.
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I should be tweeting about Jeff Epstein all the time.
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And you're afraid. It's also boring. I mean, I said it in the public many times.
link |
Why is it, we don't ask where the records are from the Velard House? Where are the financial
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records? Where are the SEC filings? Where are the questions on the record to the intelligence
link |
agencies? Was he known to be part of the intelligence community? We're not interested
link |
in asking questions. Am I going to die as a result of asking the question,
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was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community of any nation? Is there a reason
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we're not asking about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund that he didn't run?
link |
Just like the Wuhan lab. Okay. How do we get to the core of the Jeff Epstein,
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the truth behind Jeff Epstein, in a sense? I mean, there's some things that are just
link |
like useless conspiracy theories around it, even if they're true. There's some things they get to
link |
say. I have to say it. You're not going to like it. Look at the 1971 media Pennsylvania break in
link |
of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI. Those kids, and by the way, they weren't all kids,
link |
did what had to be done. They broke in. They broke the law. It was an incredible act of
link |
civil disobedience. And God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her, she was going to take to her
link |
grave that she'd been part of this, like the coolest thing of all time. They didn't say anything for
link |
forever. So civil disobedience. I mean, you have to. We are founded on civil disobedience.
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Civil disobedience is incredibly, you screw it up and you're just a vandal. You screw it up,
link |
you're a hooligan. Those cats were so disciplined. It's an art form. It was an art form and they
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risked everything they were willing to pay with their freedom. Those are the sorts of people who
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earned the right by putting themselves at risk. I would not do this. I am not volunteering to break
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into anything. I think it was William Davodon, who was a student of Murray Gelman and a physics
link |
professor at Haverford, who corralled these people and led this effort. And right now,
link |
what we need is somebody to blow the lid off of what is controlling everything. I'm happy to hear
link |
that it's a system of incentive structures, that it's a system of selective pressures. I'm happy
link |
to find out that it's emergent. I'm happy to find that it's partially directed by our own
link |
intelligence community. I'm happy to hear that, in fact, we've been penetrated by North Korea, Iran,
link |
China, and Russia. But I need to know why people aren't... The firebombing of the
link |
courthouse in Portland, Oregon has no explanation. And somehow, this is normal. This is not normal
link |
to any human being. We have video that people don't believe. I come back to the shaggy defense
link |
of it wasn't me. You remember that song?
link |
Shaggy, yeah, it wasn't me. He caught you banging in a shower on the counter.
link |
Yeah, exactly. It wasn't me. It wasn't me.
link |
He says, his friend says, well, your strategy makes no sense at all. This is what MSNBC is doing.
link |
You dropped him from the graphic. It wasn't me. He came up with another yang. It wasn't me.
link |
I will never see MSNBC the same again. So you've spoken about him before. I think it'd be nice to
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maybe honor him to break it apart a little bit. Aaron Schwartz. Yeah.
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Why was he a special human being in this ilk of what we're talking about now,
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civil disobedience? How do we honor him now moving forward as human beings who are willing
link |
to take risks in this world? Well, I don't know. Are you inspired by Aaron Schwartz?
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I am. How do you feel about JSTOR? Let's talk about JSTOR first.
link |
So let's say what JSTOR is all about. We the taxpayer pay for research.
link |
And then the people who do the research do all the work for a bunch of companies
link |
who then charge us $30 an article to read what it is that we already paid for. And if we don't
link |
cite these articles, we're told that we're in violation. Okay. I almost never call for civil
link |
disobedience because I don't really want to, but fuck JSTOR, fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer.
link |
Who the fuck are these people? The smart people need to take the greedy people
link |
behind the woodshed and explain to them what science is. I have a very old fashioned idea
link |
that's so out of favor that I will immediately be seen as a knuckle dragger. I believe in the
link |
great woman theory of history and the great man theory of history. Emmy Nerder is fantastic.
link |
That's an example. And I believe in editors over peer reviewers. And I believe that wrong
link |
thing should be allowed into the literature. And I believe that the gatekeeping should go
link |
toward zero because the costs associated with distribution are very, very slight. I believe
link |
that we should be looking at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly into
link |
your competitors clutches, particularly if you're a young person being reviewed by an older person.
link |
Are you familiar with the Duat de Senor? Are you familiar with the legend of the Magnaia?
link |
No. The Magnaia is the Miller's daughter. And the largest food fight in the entire universe,
link |
I believe, is held, I think in Italy. It's called the Battle of the Oranges. And it celebrates
link |
the Miller's daughter who had fallen in love with her beloved. And when it came time for them to
link |
marry, the Virginal Magnaia was in fact told that the Lord of the land had the right to have
link |
the first night with the bride. Well, the Magnaia had a different idea. So she seemed to consent to
link |
this perhaps mythical right, also called the Prima note the first night. And by legend,
link |
she concealed a dagger underneath her robes. And when it came time for the hated Lord of the
link |
Manor to extract this right, she pulled the knife out and killed him. And I think it also echoes
link |
a little bit of particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones. But that inspired both men and
link |
women. And the Magnaia is the legendary hero. Right now, what we need to do is we need to resist
link |
the Prima note, the right of first look, right? F you, you don't have the right of first look.
link |
I don't want to send something blindly to my competitors. I don't want to subject myself
link |
to you naming what work I've done. Why are you in my story? That's my question. Get out of my story.
link |
If I do work, and then you have an idea, oh, well, it's the Matthew principle,
link |
to him who has much more will be given. I've gone to the National Academy of Sciences and talked
link |
about these things. And it's funny, I've been laughed at by the older people who think, well,
link |
Eric, you know, science proceeds funeral by funeral, that's plonk. You know, the Matthew
link |
principle, you know, the Matilda principle, that things done by women are attributed to men,
link |
that these are not new. And you guys just live like this?
link |
Yeah. So the revolutionary act now is to resist all of these things that are not new.
link |
So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz. Aaron Schwartz was the Magnaia. One of the things
link |
you've done very beautifully is to communicate love. And I think about, you know, some of our
link |
conversations. And you got me to talk a little bit about my own experiences in 02138 and 39.
link |
We are the product of our trauma. And what people don't understand is that very often,
link |
when you see people taking countermeasures against what appear to be imaginary forces,
link |
they're really actually replaying things that really happen to them.
link |
And having been through this system and watching all of the ways in which it completely rewrites
link |
the lives of the people who I am counting on to cure our diseases, build our new industries,
link |
keep us safe from our foes, the amount of pressure the system is putting on the most hopeful minds
link |
is unimaginable. And so my goal is to empower somebody like an Aaron Schwartz in memory
link |
and to talk about a Jeffrey Epstein situation. Do you know that the first person outside
link |
of me to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein?
link |
How did he know I was working on this? I don't know.
link |
So your ideas that formed geometric unity was something that his eyes are seeing?
link |
I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein as one of the only people who could help me.
link |
No, no, no, listen to this. Yeah, how does this connect?
link |
Okay. Well, first of all, my old synagogue, my old school was the conservative minion at Harvard
link |
Hillel. And I believe it's called Rossofsky Hall after Henry Rossofsky in the economics
link |
department who was a Japan scholar, if I'm correct. And he became provost or dean of Harvard.
link |
I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein's money. And I wondered in part whether the
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Jewish students at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck of Harvard Hillel. So that
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was something I found very curious, but I don't know much about it. I also found that Jeffrey
link |
Epstein hanging around scientists. I don't think that either you or Joe exactly, I mean, got me
link |
correct in your last interchange. For the record, for people who haven't listened to Joe Rogan
link |
program, Joe has claimed that Eric Weinstein was the only person who has gotten paid. Oh, paid.
link |
And you said you also got paid as a young man, right? I believe the word was laid, but allegedly.
link |
My hearing isn't so good at age 55. Yeah.
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All right. Leaving that aside. What was Jeffrey Epstein doing hanging around all of these scientists?
link |
I don't think that was the same program that was about compromising political leaders and business
link |
people and entertainment figures. I think these are two different programs that were being run
link |
through one individual. And Joe seemed to think that I didn't think he was smooth. I thought he
link |
was glib. I think what Joe is really trying to get out of is that I found his mysticism
link |
meretricious. He had an ability to deflect every conversation that might go towards revealing that
link |
he didn't know what he was talking about. Every time you started to get close to something where
link |
the rubber hit the road, the rubber wouldn't hit the road. And yet, can you help me untangle
link |
the fact that you thought deeply about the physics of the nature of our universe,
link |
and Jeffrey Epstein was interested. How did he know? I wasn't really talking about this stuff
link |
until even my close friends didn't really know what I was up to. And yet, you're saying he did
link |
not have sufficient brilliance to understand when the rubber hit the road. So why did he have
link |
sufficient interest and curiosity? Tell you what I thought. I've been waiting to find out,
link |
does my government even know I exist? Do you have an answer to that question?
link |
A couple times, the government has reached out to me. In general, there is zero interest in me,
link |
like less than zero interest. I find that fascinating. As far as you know, right?
link |
Well, that's what I'm trying to say. The question about not being able to see through
link |
a half silvered mirror, you don't know what's going on behind the half silvered mirror. To you,
link |
it's all you see is your reflection. But your intuition still holds. This is where I mentioned
link |
that I, this is where I'll say naïve, dumb things. But I still hold on to this intuition that
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Jeff, I'm not confident in this, but I lean towards that direction that Jeffrey Epstein
link |
is the source of evil, not something that's underlying him.
link |
You have a bias. It's different than mine. Our Bayesian priors are tutored by different life
link |
experiences. If I was mostly concerned, like Sam Harris is concerned, that people fill their heads
link |
with nonsense, I would have a very strong sense that people need order in the world, that they
link |
take mysterious situations, they build entire castles in the air, and then they go move in if
link |
they really get crazy. The old saying is that neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics
link |
move in. Coming from a progressive family, we had a different experience. It's really weird
link |
when the government is actually out to get you, when they actually send a spy, when they actually
link |
engage in disinformation campaigns, when they smear you. And if you've ever had that brought
link |
to bear on your family, you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country,
link |
which is different than having a, wow, do people believe crazy stuff because they watch too much
link |
TV? And both of these things have some merit to them, but it's a question of regulated expression.
link |
When do you want to express more Sam Harris and when do you want to express more Howard Zinn?
link |
You can express both, correct? The one human being can express both? Sure, but there's a trade
link |
off between them. In other words, most people, like the Michael Shermers of the world, are going
link |
to tilt very strongly to extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence. You're going to
link |
have that kind of energy. And then somebody else is going to say, how many times do I have to get
link |
hit on, how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb before I realize that there's a problem?
link |
So, my feeling about this is, yes, people see patterns in clouds. They see faces and
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scripture and all sorts of things. And it's just random cloud pattern. And it's also the case
link |
that there's tremendous pressure not to see conspiracies when conspiracies are relatively
link |
more common than the people who shout conspiracy theory will claim. So both of these things are
link |
true. And you have to ask, when do you express your inner Zinn and your inner Harris? And those
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are different. One fundamental difference you and I biases aside is you've actually met Jeffrey
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Epstein. And I'm listening to reverberations years later of stories and narratives throughout the
link |
story. Luckily, I only met him once. And I think I had one or perhaps two phone conversations with
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him other than the one meeting. You can learn a lot in just a few words, right, from a human being.
link |
Well, that's true. But I think that the bigger issue was, I saw something that I don't hear
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much remarked upon, which is Jeffrey Epstein is all that there is. In other words, there's the
link |
National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes, there's all this stuff
link |
that kind of has the same feel to it, a little bit of variation and difference,
link |
department of energy. If you fall outside of that, there's just Jeffrey Epstein. That's what
link |
you're told. That's not quite true. There's Kavli. Maybe Jim Simons is now in the game.
link |
Peter Thiel has done some stuff. You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try. So there is other
link |
money running around, Templeton. But very strongly, there was a belief that if you're
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doing something really innovative and the system can't fund it because we become pussies, Jeffrey
link |
Epstein is your guy. Because it's funnel that you're supposed to go through.
link |
That's right. And the idea is that you get called to the great man's house
link |
and the sort of lupricious version of Ralph Lauren takes you in and asks you bizarre questions.
link |
And maybe he has an island. Maybe he has a plane. And when you're starved,
link |
somebody showing you a feast or when you're dehydrated in a death's door and somebody says,
link |
I have a well. That's what it is. And so the thought is, wow, can somebody get some effing
link |
money into the science system so that we don't have super creeps trying to learn all of our
link |
secrets ahead of time? WTF, what is your problem with transparency and taxpayer dollars? Just
link |
all of you, you wouldn't have a country. You'd be speaking German.
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So essentially, you believe that human beings would not be able to, when the money is lacking in
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the system, like in research. We produce public goods. You and I are meant to produce public
link |
goods. Now, I sell athletic greens and I sell Theragun and I sell unagi scooters
link |
and chili pad. Can I be honest? I love these products. But I didn't get into this game
link |
for the purpose of selling. 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 this channel. It's kind of a mystery.
link |
Yeah, I don't know why. I'll tell you why I built my channel.
link |
It's going to 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 to become a celebrity. I didn't
link |
want to become well known, but it's a lot harder to roll somebody who's getting, you know, I think
link |
I'm, I don't know if this is mistaken, but I think I'm the math PhD with the largest number
link |
of followers on Twitter. And there was nothing you could do before. I mean, again, to put a
link |
little responsibility and you, so you've created something really special for the distribution
link |
of your own ideas. I mean, but because it's not necessarily currently scalable, you also,
link |
perhaps you and I have the responsibility of giving other people also a chance to spread
link |
their ideas. I mean, Joe Rogan did this very effectively for a bunch of people that
link |
that's why they're angry at him because he's a gatekeeper and he let all sorts of people
link |
through that gate from Roger, from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones to Jordan Peterson to,
link |
I mean, even first of all, to you and to Abby Martin to Barry Weiss. Yeah.
link |
Yeah. That's the problem. Well, but you, you have now successfully built up a thing that
link |
allows that to carry that over. No, no, no, no. We are all vulnerable to reputational attack
link |
because what happens, you see, the problem Lexis 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, the last suit you'll ever need. And you have the reach
link |
of something like CNN to people who matter. Okay. So now the question is, how do we control
link |
something that doesn't have a board, doesn't have shareholders, doesn't have to make
link |
SEC filing the FCC. So the best answer they have is, well, we just have to destroy reputations. All
link |
it takes is for us to take something that gets said or done or alleged. And I think it's incredibly
link |
important. One of the things people don't understand is, is that I'm, I'm going to fight
link |
general reputational attacks, not because some people don't deserve to have their reputations
link |
drawn, dragged through the mud, but because it's too powerful of a tool to hand it to CNN, MSNBC,
link |
Princeton, Harvard, the State Department. Yes. But as some of it is also
link |
Jason Morgan, Muhammad Ali style, being good enough at
link |
doing everything you need to do without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks,
link |
not being afraid, but not giving enough meat. I don't see why the people who have good ideas
link |
have to lead lives that are that clean. If you can do it, you can be messy. Yeah. You should be
link |
able to be messy that otherwise we're suppressing too many people, too many, too billion minds.
link |
Yeah. Can you believe Elon Musk smoked a blunt? I still people tell me this. Okay. I have discussions
link |
about Elon and people, the Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist who's talking about a more and more
link |
that it might be alien technology. He told me his, this outside the box thinker. Yeah.
link |
When speaking to me about Elon said, called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed,
link |
he's the blunt in a dismissive way. Like this guy is crazy because he smoked some weed.
link |
I was looking at him. I was like, why? Wow. Wow. I think you should be able to have
link |
consensual drug filled orgies, fuck perfect lives. Yeah. You should be allowed to be messy.
link |
Yeah. Right. I take back my statement. I'm just saying. Respectability is the unique prison
link |
where all of the gates are open and the inmates beg to stay inside. It's time to end their prison
link |
of respectability because it's too effective of a means of sidelining and silencing people,
link |
including it is better that we have bad people in our system than this idea of no platforming
link |
people who are beyond the pale because it's such a simple technique. So how do we, what's
link |
the heroic action here on the? Well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program. By the way,
link |
she was absolutely delightful as a guest. She was, she is polite in the extreme, far more polite than
link |
I am. And I had her right after Roger Penrose as a guest because I wanted to highlight this
link |
program can go anywhere. We can talk to anyone. What about social media? You've started highlighting
link |
people being banned on social media. How do we fight this? Like if you get banned from social
link |
media, so you're saying nobody will stand up to me? Well, just figure out what your incentive
link |
structure is before. Assume that they're, assume that I get banned on social media because somebody
link |
wants to make sure that my message doesn't interfere with the dominant narrative. Yeah. Okay.
link |
What will happen? By the way, I'm very glad to be able to explain this on your show because
link |
that video will presumably be archived and they can't easily make you take it down.
link |
Okay. So what's going to happen is, is that there'll be a whole bunch of very low quality
link |
bot like accounts that dog you every time you talk about me.
link |
Right. Dude, it's getting old, getting boring. We already heard you. Dude, that was like,
link |
let it go. Not a good look. Not a good look is one of my favorites.
link |
But what about the high profile ones? Well, then you'll get a few high profile ones and some of
link |
the high profile ones command armies. Right. Like at some point, I had 10,000 people using exactly
link |
the same templated tweet tweeting at me. It was just actually, it got to the point where it was
link |
funny because everybody said, did you, did you hear that in hipster coffee shop? I was like,
link |
why are you all suddenly talking about hipster coffee? It's hilarious.
link |
Those things will cause you to think better of it. You'll start to see your follower can't
link |
go down because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot like follows and then just pull them.
link |
So I think that's pretty well known how, and then maybe your account will be suspended and it
link |
can't be revoked and you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then three days later, you'll be told it was
link |
an error. So let me push back. I just don't see not defending you. Like, okay, so what are the
link |
things you would do that, given that I can actually talk to you offline, that would make me not defend
link |
you? Well, it's first of all, I can't, I mean, I can imagine some, but all of us have things.
link |
If somebody says, do you hear what your boy Lex said about you? What did Lex say about me? Oh,
link |
he said you were flawed, dude. Oh, shit. Yeah. You know, they so distressed because none of us
link |
want to stand behind flawed people. That's why you have everybody rushing to say, I need a
link |
condemn nor condone. I know I don't condemn nor, you know, why, what is that? We're all trying
link |
to say for the record, I said that Eric is smarter than me in a brilliant human being,
link |
but flawed like all humans are. My point is, I've now come up with a new policy,
link |
which is I don't care what my friends have done. I am not disavowing my friends,
link |
not because they didn't do the wrong thing. Maybe they did do the wrong thing. I don't know.
link |
What's the value of friendship if that's not that? Like, for example, we've had the situation
link |
with Brian Callan. Brian Callan was featured recently in Los Angeles Times. I know nothing
link |
about the allegations. I can't. I didn't even know Brian at the time, right? I've known him for
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roughly the time I've been in Los Angeles, maybe a year and a half during that period of time,
link |
never seen anything wrong. Now I'm in a situation, what do you think he did? Do you think he didn't?
link |
It's like, you know what? I don't know. But I do know this. Everyone's entitled to have friends
link |
because we can't afford isolated people. And if your friends do the wrong thing, they're still
link |
your friends. And if they do terrible, terrible things, you bring that up with them privately.
link |
And it's not my responsibility to disavow in public. We've had this situation
link |
that I don't like where particular people that I've been close to, I'm put under tremendous
link |
pressure to disavow them. What do you think now about your buddy? I like Dave Rubin and all that
link |
kind of stuff. Here's the thing. My friends are my friends. I don't disavow my friends.
link |
We all need to make a statement that we will not be brought under pressure to disavow our friends,
link |
our family members, because mass murderers are dangerous the more isolated they become.
link |
It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people. And it's dangerous.
link |
And it sends a signal to everybody else to fit in, to be more cynical about the next
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we have to each other. If I find out you've been selling heroin to elementary school students,
link |
you're still my friend and I will not be disavowing you. And if I have a problem with you
link |
selling heroin to elementary school students during school hours, I will bring it up with you
link |
privately because we don't need to hear my voice added to that condemnation. Are there things that
link |
you could do that would cause me to say, actually, f this guy? Yeah, above and beyond that. But
link |
simply doing the wrong thing, I think we've gone down a terrible path. I think isolated people
link |
are about the most dangerous thing we could have in a heavily armed society. So I deeply
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agree with you on Brian Callan and on all these people that quote unquote got canceled.
link |
And I'm not saying that I don't know the truth value because we can't. And even if I did know
link |
the truth value, I'm not setting up an incentive structure for the personal destruction as a means
link |
of letting institutions combat the fact that individuals are the last thing that can say,
link |
none of you guys make any sense. I don't treat these things like, you know, I had a conversation
link |
where Kevin Spacey was at the dinner table when I came down from a hotel room. And I had a very
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long conversation with Kevin Spacey. I will not detail because I don't do that as to what we
link |
discussed. But we talked very specifically about him being canceled. And I don't think that the
link |
world has heard that story in part because there's a very strong sense that he has to be outgrouped.
link |
And as a result, you know, I mean, do we want, do we want to disavow the space program because
link |
it touched Werner von Braun? Do we want to disavow quantum mechanics because Pascal Jordan
link |
and Werner Heisenberg passed through it? Is Aaron Fest theorem false because he murdered his child?
link |
I mean, at what point do we recognize that we are the problem, humans are humans. And
link |
there is no perfect, there is no perfect group of people, even all of the most oppressed people,
link |
the supposed victims of the world, who we now have fetishized into thinking that they're all
link |
oracles because their lived experience informs us and their pain is more salient than everyone
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else's pain. Those people are necessarily great people. You know, it's like none, none of us,
link |
we can't, we can't do this in this fashion. So when we sit down to have a conversation
link |
across the table from somebody, you should be willing to, like you should not have NPR in
link |
your mind, you should be willing to take the full risk and to see the good in the person
link |
without, with limited information and to do your best to understand that person.
link |
Everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget. I don't believe this is of institutions.
link |
Yeah. Okay. Everybody is entitled to a certain amount of screwing up in life.
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You're entitled to a mendacity budget. You're entitled to an aggression budget. The idea of
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getting rid of everybody is, you know, people haven't even blown through their budgets and
link |
we're already. Yeah. I think about, for example, one person, I'd be curious to get your thoughts
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about Alex Jones. Let's not talk about Alex Jones for a second. Let's talk about the National
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Enquirer. Is everything the National Enquirer says false? No. Okay. Do you remember the John
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Edwards story? Did she run his wife? Sorry. Get a child from an extramarital affair. Yes.
link |
I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story. And then what does the New York Times
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do? The New York Times, I think, is allowed to report that the National Enquirer is making a
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claim. That way they don't have to substantiate the story. So why is the New York Times talking
link |
to Mike Cernovich or using the National Enquirer as the source? Are they using Alex Jones as the
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source? Here's the big problem that we're having. Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody
link |
and other people are entitled to talk to no one? I don't really understand this. This is an
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indulgence system. This is how the Catholic Church used to do things. It's hard to fight the system
link |
because the reason you don't talk to Alex Jones is because the platforms on which we do the
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communication will remove you. But I'm not platformed. I used to do NPR and I used to do
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the news hour and I used to provide stories to Washington Post, New York Times. That has gone
link |
away. They've circled the wagons closer and closer and more of us are unacceptable. And right now,
link |
I have no question that they're going through anybody who has a platform trying to say, okay,
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what do we have against that person in case we need to shut that down? We have to make a different
link |
decision, Lex. And the different decision is that it doesn't matter how many times
link |
Joe said the N word. It doesn't matter that somebody else, with mathematical theorems,
link |
if the worst person in the world proves a mathematical theorem like the Unabomber,
link |
we can't undo the theorem. And I point out Charles Manson's song, Look At Your Game Girl,
link |
is an amazing song. It's a really good song. I don't think it's one of the greatest songs ever,
link |
but it happens that he wasn't in no talent. And, you know, I don't know how Hitler was as an artist.
link |
Okay, we've got to get past this. We've got to get past this idea that we're going to purge
link |
ourselves of our badness. And we're just going to, this is like, I likened it to teenage girls
link |
in cutting. We're just, all we're doing is destroying ourselves in search of perfection.
link |
And the answer is no, we're not perfect. We're flawed. We're screwed up. And we've always been
link |
this way. And we're not going to silence everyone who you can point a laser beam at,
link |
and say, well, that person, look at how bad that person is. If we do that, kiss the whole thing
link |
goodbye. We might as well just, let's learn Chinese. But there is an art to having those messy
link |
conversations, whether with Alex or anybody else. Okay, let's talk about Alex. There's
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particular stuff that Alex does that's absolutely nauseating. And there's other stuff that he's
link |
doing that's funny. The methodology of the way he carries. And sometimes he's talking about the
link |
truth. And sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy. His variance is incredibly high.
link |
The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O. Keefe or the National Enquirer or anything you
link |
don't like is to say, great, go long short. What's that mean? Well, if you invest in a mutual fund,
link |
all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long. But if you invest in a hedge fund,
link |
you do something called relative value trade. It's like, well, you long tech or short tech?
link |
Well, actually, I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Google. Why is that? Oh, because I believe Google
link |
got way too much attention and that Microsoft has been unfairly maligned. And so this is really a
link |
play on legacy tech over more modern tech. Okay. Which part of Alex Jones are you long and which
link |
part are you short? One of the things that should be a requirement for being a reporter is like,
link |
what did Donald Trump do that was good? Nothing. Okay, then you're not a reporter.
link |
What did Hitler do that was good? The Rosenstrasse protest.
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Non Jewish women campaign for their Jewish men to be returned home to them
link |
from certain death, almost in death camps. It should have been that not there were no death
link |
camps. It should have been that everybody was returned home. But you know what? The fact that
link |
the women of the Rosenstrasse protest, I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about,
link |
you know, some of the baddest ass chicks in the world got their husbands returned to them,
link |
colica vote. And not, I'm not celebrating Hitler. Hitler's the worst of the worst.
link |
But God damn it, you know, this idea that we can just say everything that person does is a lie.
link |
Everything that person does is evil. This reflects a simplicity of mind that humanity cannot afford.
link |
Is Google evil, evil because it will sell you mine comp? Is Amazon evil because it will sell
link |
you mine comp? If you find out that mine comp rests on somebody's bookshelves, do you have any idea
link |
what it means? If you find out that a scholar use the n word, should that person lose their job?
link |
Come on, grow the hell up. I guess our responsibility to lead by example on that.
link |
Because you have to acknowledge that the fact, like the current public discourse... Have somebody
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on your podcast who you're worried about. But do it in a principled fashion. I mean,
link |
in other words, I'm not here to whitewash everything. On the other hand, if somebody makes,
link |
you know, some allegations, I don't know that I'm obligated to treat every set of allegations as if...
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Now, how do you defend yourself against them? No, allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.
link |
Well, my sort of my standard, I don't know, maybe you could speak to it is,
link |
I don't care. Like in the case of Alex Jones, for example, I don't,
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I'm willing to have a conversation with Alex Jones and people like him. If I know he's not
link |
going to try to manipulate me. Assume that he is going to 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. I put on a jacket. I don't usually wear a jacket.
link |
All right. I'm trying to manipulate you. There's an entire field that says that speech
link |
may be best thought of as an attempt to manipulate each other. This is too simplistic.
link |
Everything that we keep talking through. Yes. You know better than this.
link |
I disagree. I think there is ways. Of course, it's a gray area, but there is a threshold
link |
where your intent with which you come to a meeting, to an interaction, is one that is not
link |
one that's grounded in like a respect for a common humanity, like a love for each other,
link |
as deeply messy humans. If somebody is doing really bad stuff,
link |
I expect you to try to keep them from doing really bad stuff.
link |
But just keep in mind that when I was a younger man, I saw an amazing anti pornography documentary
link |
and it was called Rate It X. I don't know where it went,
link |
but the conceit of it was we're going to get some pornographers in front of a camera because
link |
they want to talk and we're going to ask them about what they do for a living and why it's okay.
link |
No commentary. Okay. You could potentially, if you really think Alex Jones is the worst,
link |
and again, I'm not intimately familiar with him, you could decide to just let him talk.
link |
Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people. I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux.
link |
Stefan Molyneux makes many good points, it makes many bad points, and he makes many good points
link |
in bad ways, and I worry about it, and I don't feel that it's not my obligation to make sure
link |
that Stefan Molyneux has a voice on the portal. But I did stand up and say I didn't want him banned
link |
from social media, and I do think that a lot of the people who are being banned from social media
link |
were worried that they're right rather than that they're wrong. I certainly don't really think that
link |
I'm worried in some sense that some of the really wrong people are wrong, but if you look at, for
link |
example, Curtis Jarvin, there's a tremendous amount of interest. Is Eric going to speak to Curtis
link |
Jarvin? Curtis Jarvin says many interesting things, and he says many horrible, stupid things,
link |
very provocative. I haven't invited him onto the portal, but I haven't said I will never
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invite him onto the portal. We are all in a difficult position.
link |
That's what I'm saying. I think it's a much more difficult task and burden who carry it as people
link |
who have conversations because Curtis Jarvin is a good example. How much work do I have to put
link |
in reading Curtis's work to really understand? We should talk about the problem of Curtis Jarvin,
link |
because I think it's a problem to be illustrative. There's this big question as why does somebody
link |
who says such stupid ass things listen to by so many people? Very smart people, people who are
link |
part of our daily lives discuss Curtis Jarvin in hush tones. That's a good question. My belief is
link |
that Curtis Jarvin has made a number of very interesting provocative points, and they associate
link |
Curtis Jarvin as the person who has made these points. They treat the completely asinine stuff
link |
that he says that's super dangerous as, well, that's Curtis. Right? Right. They give him the
link |
credit for, he's kind of like, sorry to use the term, first principles, deep thinker about
link |
in some category. In some space of the world. But as a result, we don't actually know why
link |
Curtis Jarvin is knocking around so many Silicon Valley luminaries lives.
link |
You said that he said a lot of asinine stupid stuff, and that's the sense I got from a few
link |
things I've read, not just about it. This is not just Wikipedia stuff. He's a little, like I've
link |
said before, he seems to be careless. I don't think he's careless. No, no, it's like Jim Watson.
link |
Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things in order to prove that he's free. It's not a question
link |
of careless. He enjoys the freedom to say these things. And the key point is, is that I expect
link |
something more of Curtis. I expect that if somebody is insightful about all sorts of things up to that
link |
point, that they're going to have enough care. Now, I, for example, make this point repeatedly
link |
that vaccines are not 100% safe. Most people who have an idea that anybody is an antivaxxer should
link |
be silenced are in a position where they probably don't say vaccines are 100% safe. But you keep
link |
finding that statement over and over again. Believe all women. Vaccines are 100% safe.
link |
Climate science is settled science. Whatever this Montanbele is, where you make extraordinarily
link |
vapid blanket claims, and then you retreat into something, well, defund the pull, you know,
link |
we don't want no more police actually just means we want the police to not take on mental health
link |
duties. We've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society. And what I'm claiming is, is that
link |
I might talk to courtesy of them, but I have really very little interest to talk to a guy who
link |
seems to be kind of giddy about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves. It's like,
link |
why do I want to do that on the portal? One, first of all, because just as you said,
link |
that's not Curtis's main thing. He has a lot of ideas. And what I've read of him, which is not
link |
a huge amount, is he's very thoughtful about the way this world works. And on top of that,
link |
he's an important historical figure in the birth and the development of the alt right,
link |
or what would be called the right new reaction. Yeah. And there's, so he's in just an important
link |
intellectual. And so it makes sense to talk to him. The question is, how much work do you put in?
link |
Well, this is the issue of Fugu. I'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that Fugu.
link |
So you have a puffer fish. You can eat the puffer fish. You can get a kind of a tingly sensation
link |
on your tongue if you get a little bit of the poison organ. But my point is, I don't know how
link |
to serve Curtis Jarvan so that, in fact, I'm not worried about what happens. But I believe that
link |
if somebody else was a student of the new reactionary movement, that person might be in a better
link |
position to host Curtis Jarvan. So somebody, that's a really good example of somebody I think you've
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spoken with that's an intermediary. That's a powerful one is Michael Malis. And he's spoken
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with Curtis Jarvan. And Michael wrote a book about... By the way, Michael somewhat changed
link |
my mind about Michael Malis. I'm glad he did. I think I would call him a friend. And I think he's
link |
a, underneath it all, a really kind human being. And I think your skepticism about him was initially
link |
from a surface level of, what did you call him, hyenas, the trolls and so on. I'm not happy about
link |
his... It's been so long since I've seen good trolls. Yes. So he needs a higher quality of
link |
drolling, but he aspires to that. I mean, it disagree or not. I really enjoy how much care
link |
he puts into the work he does, like a North Korea and study of the world and how much privately,
link |
but also in public, love he has for people, especially those who are powerless. Just a genuine
link |
admiration for them. But I think Curtis actually does too. I don't know. I mean,
link |
you have to appreciate the first time I met Curtis, he introduced me and says,
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I'm the most right wing person you've ever met. I was just like, well, this is a conversation
link |
that's already over. It's theatrical in a way that's not conducted to actually having a real
link |
connection. Well, it just turned me off because it was like, you need to be the most right wing
link |
person. And so it's like, I'm a troll. I'm a troll. Yeah. Okay. Why are we doing this? Yeah.
link |
But what I'm trying to get at is different. I'm trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend
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of yours. If you found out something terrible, you should still be a friend. You should still
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continue to be his friend. And in Michael Malice's case, it's very likely that we'll find out something.
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Curtis is an acquaintance of mine because he hangs around with some people that I know.
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I did not get it. I've started to understand why the people in my life, some of them are Curtis
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Yavin fans, many of them disregard the stupid stuff. But my feeling is, is that too much poison
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organ, not enough fish. I don't know how to serve that too intermingled. I'm not your chef.
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Speaking for defending your friends, staying with your friends,
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and bringing the old band together again, you coined the term IDW until that's your dark web.
link |
I like it. It represents a certain group of people that are struggling with,
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that are almost like challenged the norms of social and political discourse
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from all different angles. What do you think is the state of the IDW? What do you think is its
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future? Is it still a useful? Well, it never exists. Is it a protocol? Is it a collection
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of people featured in an article? What I learned very clearly is that there's a tremendous desire
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in the internet age to pin people down. What do you say? Who's in it? What are the criterion?
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I understand. You want to play the demarcation game and you want to make everything that is
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demarcated instantly null and void. No, thank you. I resisted saying who was in it.
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I resisted saying what it was. I resisted saying that Barry Weiss's article was the definitive
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thing. They chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs that we couldn't get out of. I did
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not want those photographs taken. They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer
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needed to take them all at twilight. I don't know some such thing. I didn't even necessarily want
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to do the article. Barry convinced me that it was the right thing to do. Undoubtedly,
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Barry was right. I was wrong. But the key point is nothing can grow in this environment. There's
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a reason we're not building. It does not appear that we found a way to grow anything organic
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and good and decent that we need right now. That's kind of the key issue. Who's the weed?
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Do you mean us as a society? Those of us who wish to have
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a future for our great grandchildren. Let's take the subset of people who are worried
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about things long after their demise. Do you think it's useful to have a term like the IDW
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to capture some set of people, some set of ideas or maybe principles that capture what
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I think the IDW, okay, you can say it's not supposed to me. It doesn't exist. It doesn't
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mean anything. But to the public, to me, okay, I'll just speak to me. It represented something.
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It represented, I think I said this to you. In my first attempt to interview the great
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Eric Weinstein, I said that I spoke this about you, but IDW in general is trying to point out
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the elephant in the room or that the emperor has no clothes, the set of people that do that in their
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own way. If there are multiple elephants in the room, the point is that the IDW was more interested
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in seeing the totality of elephants and trying to figure out how do we move forward as opposed to
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saying I can spot the other guy's elephant in the room, but I can't see my own. In large measure,
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we didn't represent an institutional base. Therefore, it wasn't maximally important that
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we look at our own hypocrisy because we weren't on the institutional spectrum. This is where
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friendship comes into play with the different figures that are loosely associated with the IDW
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is you are somehow responsible for the exact thing that you said. Did you hear what Sam Harris said
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about IDW? That kind of thing. Why chuckled? Lovingly or chuckled? I was angry at some people
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who had said things that caused Sam to say what Sam said about turning his imaginary club membership
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into the IDW. People said very silly things. I think that there is just this confusion that
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integrity means calling out your friends in front of the world. I've been pretty clear about this.
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I try to choose my friends carefully. If you would like to recuse me because I'm not a source
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of reliable information, people that I know and love the most, maybe that's reasonable for you.
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Maybe you prefer somebody who was willing to throw a friend under the bus at the first sign
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of trouble. By all means, exit my feed. You don't have to subscribe to me. If that's your concept
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of integrity, you're barking up the wrong tree. What I will say is that I knew these people well
link |
enough to know that they're all flawed. Thank you for the callback. The issue is that I love
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people who are flawed and I love people who have to earn a living even if you call them a grifter.
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I love people who like the fact that Donald Trump didn't get us into new wars even if you call them
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alt right. I love the fact that some people believe in structural oppression and want to fight it
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even if they're not woke because they don't believe that structural oppression is hiding
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everywhere. I care and love different people in different ways. I think that the overarching thing
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Lex that we're not getting at is that we were sold a bill of goods that you can go through life
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like an Eliza program with preprogrammed responses. Well, it's what aboutism? It's both sidesism.
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It's alt right. It's the loony left. It's campus madness. It's like, okay, why don't you just empty
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the entire goddamn magazine? All of those prerecorded snips. Now that you've done all of that,
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now we can have a conversation. Your son put it really well, which is we should,
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in all things, resist labels. But we can't deal without labels. We have to generalize,
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but we also have to keep in mind that just in the way in science, you deal with an
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effective theory that isn't a fundamental one. In science, most of our theories,
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we consider to be effective theories. If I generalize about Europe, about women, about
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Christians, those things have to be understood to mean something and not to have their
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definitions extend so broadly that they mean nothing at all, nor that they're so rigid that
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their claims that clearly won't bear scrutiny. Lex, what do you really want to talk about? That's
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always my question to you. That always gets me. That's a good thing. Maybe you are the therapist.
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But you and I could talk about anything. People love, up until now at least,
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people have loved listening to the two of us in conversation. My feeling is that we're not talking
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about neural nets. We're not talking about geometric unity. We're not talking about where
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distributed computing might go. I don't think that we're really focused on
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some of the most exciting things we could do to transform education. We're still caught
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in this world of other people that we don't belong in. I don't belong in the world as it's been
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created. I'm trying to build a new world. I'm astounded that the people with the independent
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means to help build that world are so demotivated that they don't want to build new structures.
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The people who do want to build new structures seem to be wild eyed.
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Wild eyed? What do you mean by wild eyed? They're not.
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I guarantee you that I will get some message in my DMs. It says, hey, Eric, I'm a third year
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chemistry student at South Dakota State. I've got a great idea. I just need funding. I want to build.
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They don't have the means. The people who have the means have become.
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Or the sophistication. It's like you're looking for somebody who's proven themselves a few times
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to say, I've got $4 billion behind me that's soft circled. I want to figure out what
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a new university would be and what it would take to protect academic freedom and who we would hire
link |
and what are the different characteristics because I can clearly see that everything
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following the current model is falling apart. Nobody in my understanding is saying that.
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Nobody is saying, let's take that which is functioning independently and make it less
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vulnerable. Let's boost those signals. And a critical component as money, you think?
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It's not only that, but it's also a kind of these people are mobbed up hands off.
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Let's imagine for the moment that Sundar, Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg
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founded a university cum social media entity.
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And they said, the purpose of this is to make sure that academic freedom will not perish from
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this earth because it's necessary to keep us from all going crazy. And we are going to lock
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ourselves out. We've come up with this governance system. And the idea is that these people will
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be assigned the difficult task of making sure that society doesn't go crazy in any particular
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direction, that we have a fact based reality based feasibility based understanding. We can
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try to figure out where our real opportunities are.
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It feels like everybody with the ability to do something like that and with the
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brains and experience and the resources would rather sit in the current system
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and hope to figure out where they can flee to if the whole thing comes apart.
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Well, yeah, I mean, maybe to push back on a little bit, I agree with you, but
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it feels like there's some people are trying that. So for example, Google purchased DeepMind.
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DeepMind is a company that kind of represents a lot of radical ideas. They've become acceptable,
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actually. AGI, artificial general intelligence, used to be really radical of a thing to talk about.
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And DeepMind and OpenAI are two places which has made it more acceptable. I know
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you can now start to criticize, well, they're really now that it's become acceptable,
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they're not taking the further step of being more and more radical. But that wasn't
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intended by Google to say that let's try some wild stuff.
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Sort of like Boston Dynamics.
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Boston Dynamics is a really good example of trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose,
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whatsoever, except to try out their ideas. Well, the idea is that innovation is like
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dessert. You can have dessert after you solve the problem of the main course and the main
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course is a bunch of insoluble problems. So that is, we can get into innovation once we
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perfect ourselves. And you're saying that we need to make innovation the main meal.
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Well, I'm saying that there really is structural oppression. I mean, if you train
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a deep learning system on exclusively white faces, it's going to get confused. So let's not
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disagree that there are real issues around this. In fact, that's an issue of innovation and data.
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Your data should be responsive. On the other hand, there are things we can't do anything about
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that are actually fundamental. And those things may have to do with the fact that
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some of us taste cilantro as soap and some of us don't. There are differences between people.
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And some of them are in the hardware, some of them are in the firmware, some of them are in the
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software that is the human mind. And this completely simplistic idea that every failure
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of an organization to promote each person who has particular intersexual characteristics,
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we cannot hold progress hostage to that. And you've talked about,
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perhaps we'll save this for another time because it's such a fascinating conversation.
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You talked about this with Glenn Beck is the whole stagnation of growth and all that kind of stuff.
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Your idea is that in as much as the current situation is a kind of Ponzi scheme, the current
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situation in the United States is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise of constant
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unending innovation. We need to fund the true innovators and encourage them and empower them
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and sort of culturally say that this is what this country is about is the brilliant minds.
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We're going to kill each other if we don't grow. Growth is like an immune system
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and you always have pathogens present. But if you don't have growth present,
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you can't fight the pathogens in your society. And right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere.
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So if we don't get growth into our system fairly quickly, we are in really seriously bad shape.
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So it's very important that if I had a horrible person who was capable of building something
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that would give us all a certain amount of what I've called financial beta to some new
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technology where we all benefit, let's say quantum computing comes in and the dry cleaner
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has a quantum computing angle. That's necessary to keep this system that we built going. We can
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try to redesign the system, but our system expects growth and we've started for growth.
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And the madness that we're seeing is the failure of our immune system to be able to handle the
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pathogens that have always been present. So people can say, well, this was always there.
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Yes, it was. What's changed was your immune system. We have got to make sure that one,
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we understand why diversity is potentially really important. We have mined certain communities
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to death. You and I are Ashkenazi Jews. Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews are good at technical
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stuff. We know that the Chinese are good at technical stuff. The Indians have many people
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who are good at technical stuff as the Japanese. I also believe that we have communities where,
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if you think about the Pareto idea of diminishing returns, if you've never mined a community,
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many of the people you're going to get at the beginning are going to be amazing
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because that community, it's like, did you drill for more oil in Texas? Texas is pretty
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thoroughly picked over. Do you find some place that's completely insane? Maybe there's oil there.
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Who knows? In particular, I would like to displace our reliance on our military competitors in Asia,
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in our scientific laboratories, with women, with African Americans, with Latinos, people who are
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in different categories than we have traditionally sourced. And I would like to get them the money
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that the market would normally give these fields were we not using visas in place of payment.
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Now, I have a crazy idea, which is that you and I both play music, and I find the analytic work
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that I do when I'm trying to figure out chord progressions and symmetries and tritones and
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all these sorts of things to be very similar to the work that I do when I do physics or math.
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I believe that one of the things that is true is that the analytic contributions of African
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Americans to music are probably fungible to science. I don't know that that's true. It's true. I
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haven't done controlled research, but I believe that it is very important to let the People's
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Republic of China know that they are not staffing our laboratories anymore, and that we need to
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look to our own people. And in particular, we are going to get a huge benefit from making sure that
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women, black Americans, Latinos are in a position to take over some of these things because many
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of these communities have been underutilized. Now, I don't know if that's an insane idea.
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I want to hear somebody tell me why it's an insane idea, but I believe that part of what we need to
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do is we need to recognize that there are security issues. There are geopolitical issues with the
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funding of science and that what we've done is we've starved our world for innovation. And if
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we don't get back to the business of innovation, we should be doing diversity and inclusion out
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of greed rather than guilt. Now, part of the problem with this is that a lot of the energy
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behind diversity and inclusion is based on guilt and accusation. And what I want is I want to kick
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ass. And my hope is that diminishing returns favors mining the communities that have not
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been traditionally mined in order to extract output from those communities. Unless there's
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a flaw in that plan. If there's a flaw, somebody needs to tell me. If there isn't a flaw,
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we need to get greedy about innovation rather than guilty about innovation.
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That's really brilliantly put. My biggest problem with what I see is,
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exactly speaks to that in the discussion of diversity. It's used when it's grounded in guilt.
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It's then used as a hammer to shame people that don't care about diversity enough.
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F that shit. So my point is, I'm excited about the idea of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field
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theory. I'm excited about the idea of art Tatum trying to figure out what the neural nets figured
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out about protein folding. I have some idea of the level of intellect of people who have not
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found their way into STEM subjects in incredibly technically demanding areas.
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If there's a flaw in that theory, I want somebody to present the flaw.
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But right now, my belief is that these things are merit based. And if you really believe in
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structural oppression, you do not want an affirmative action program. You want to make
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sure that people have huge amounts of resources to get themselves into position. I want to push out,
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I just tried this on this clubhouse application. I want to push out Klein bottles as a secret sign
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inside of rap videos in hip hop. I want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world.
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And I want to get the people who hopefully I'm trying to lure into science and engineering.
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I want to get them paid. I don't want them as the cheap substitutes for the fleeing
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white males who've learned that they can't make any money in science and engineering.
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So the problem is that we need to take over the ship, Lex. And it doesn't need to be you and me
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because, quite honestly, I have no desire to administer. I don't want to be the chief executive
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officer of anything. What I do want is I want the baby boomers who've made this mess and can't see it
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to be gone. They had almost all of our universities. And I want fresh blood, fresh resources. I want
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academic freedom. And I want greed for our country and for the future to determine diversity,
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inclusion as opposed to shame and guilt, which is destroying our fabric.
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That's as good of a diversity statement as I've ever heard.
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This is a U turn, but somebody commented on the tweet you sent that as one of the top comments,
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they definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency. So it's a U turn, but not really,
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since you're an economist, since you're deep, not an economist.
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I mean, I pretend to be an economist hoping that the economists will take issue that I'm not an
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economist so that I can advance gauge theoretic and field theoretic economics, which the economics
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profession has failed to acknowledge was a major innovation that happened approximately 25 years
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ago. I don't think that economists understand what a price index is that measures inflation,
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nor do I think economists understand what a growth index or a product quantity index is
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that measures GDP. I think that they don't even understand the basics of price and quantity
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index construction. And therefore, they can't possibly review field theoretic economics. They
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can't review gauge theoretic economics. They're intellectually not in a position to manage their
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own field. You talked about that there's a stagnation in growth currently. I looked at,
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from my microeconomics, macroeconomics and college perspective, GDP doesn't seem to capture
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the productivity, the full spectrum of what I think is a functioning, successful society.
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What do you think is broken about GDP? What does it need to include at these indices?
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Let me explain what they don't understand to begin with.
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Sure. Imagine that all prices and all quantities of output are the same at the end of a year
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as they are at the beginning. And you ask, what happened during that year? Was there inflation?
link |
They meandered over the course of the year, but miraculously, they all came back to exactly their
link |
values. The amount produced at the end of the year is the same as at the beginning in every
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single quantity. Typically, the claim would be that the price index should be 1.0 and that the
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quantity index should be 1.0. That's clearly wrong. Why? Well, it speaks to a fundamental
link |
confusion that economists have. They don't understand that the economy is curved and not flat.
link |
In a curved economy, everything should be path dependence, but they view path dependence as
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a problem because they are effectively the flat earth society of market analysis. They don't
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understand that what they've called, and they've actually called it the cycling problem, is exactly
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what they need to understand to advance their field. I'll give you a very simple example.
link |
Let's imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund and Ted and Alice in another.
link |
In both cases, the females that is Alice and Carol are the chief investment officers,
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and Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers in charge of trying to get money into the fund
link |
and trying to get people not to, in fact, remove their money from the funds.
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If you, in fact, had Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and both hedge funds
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were invested in assets whose prices came back to the same levels and whose exposures
link |
were in the same quantities, and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds, would
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you compensate them the same necessarily? What if, for example, Carol was killing it
link |
in terms of investments? Every time she bought some sort of security, the price of that security
link |
went up, but Bob was the worst marketing officer. As chief marketing officer, there were tons of
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redemptions because Bob was constantly drunk, Bob was making off color comments. Now, as a result,
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at the end of the year, the fund hasn't grown in size because even though Carol was crushing it in
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terms of the investments, Bob was screwing up everything and the redemptions were legendary,
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so people were making money and still pulling it out of the fund. In the other fund,
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Alice can't seem to buy a base hit every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets,
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but Ted's amazing marketing skills allowed the fund to get all sorts of new subscriptions and
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halted the redemptions as people hoped that the fund would get its act together.
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Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated,
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and quantity indices should be how Bob and Ted are compensated. So even though both funds
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had closed loops that come back to the original states, what happened during the period that
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they were active tells you how people are supposed to be compensated. Now, we know that whatever the
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increase in the price index is compensated by a decrease in the quantity index or conversely,
link |
because prices and quantities return to their original values. You could have another fund
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where nothing much happened, there were no redemptions, no subscriptions, prices, the fund
link |
remained in cash the whole time. So in that third fund, let's call that Tristan and Izalda,
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that fund should have no bonuses paid because nobody did anything, but nobody should be fired
link |
either. Now, the fact that the economists don't even understand that this is what their price
link |
and quantity indices were intended to do, that they don't understand that you can actually
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give what would be called ordinal agents, the freedom to change their preferences,
link |
and still have something defined as a 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 some kind of dynamics that...
link |
We have had indices that capture these dynamics due to the work of Francois de Vizier since 1925,
link |
but the economists have not even understood what de Vizier's index truly represents.
link |
What do you miss with such crude indices then?
link |
Well, you miss the fact that you're supposed to have a field theoretic subject.
link |
The representative consumer should actually be a probability distribution on the space
link |
of all possible consumers weighted by the probability of getting any particular pull
link |
from the distribution. We should not have a single gauge of inflation. What is that in 1973
link |
dollars any more than you should be able to say it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on earth yesterday?
link |
So when we get to the cryptocurrency, what I'm going to say is that because we didn't
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found economic theory on the proper marginal revolution, because we missed the major opportunity,
link |
which is that the differential calculus of markets is gauge theory. It's not ordinary
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differential calculus. We found that out in finance that it was stochastic differential
link |
calculus. We have the wrong version of the differential calculus underneath all of modern
link |
economic theory. And part of what I've been pushing for in cryptocurrencies is the idea
link |
that we should be understanding that gold is a gauge theory, just as modern economic theory is
link |
supposed to be a gauge theory, and that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies, and more
link |
importantly, distributed computing, from the problem of this unwanted global aspect, which is
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the blockchain. The thing that is most celebrated in some sense about Bitcoin is, in fact, the
link |
reason that I'm least enthusiastic about it. I'm hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi did.
link |
But it's an intermediate step towards trying to figure out what should digital gold actually be.
link |
If physical gold is a collection of up quarks and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons
link |
held together, the quarks by gluons with electrons orbiting it held together by photons with the
link |
occasional weak interaction beta decay, all of those are gauge theories. So gold is actually
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coming from gauge theory, and markets are coming from gauge theory, and the opportunity to do
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locally enforced conservation laws, which effectively is what a Bitcoin transaction is,
link |
should theoretically be founded on a different principle that is not the blockchain. It should
link |
be a gauge theoretic concept in which effectively the tokens are excitations on a network of computer
link |
nodes, and the fact that let's imagine that this is some token. By moving it from my custodianship
link |
to your custodianship, effectively, I pushed that glass as a gauge theory towards your region of the
link |
table. We should be recognizing the gauge theory is the correct differential calculus for the 21st
link |
century. In fact, it should have been there in the 20th century. You're saying it captures these
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individual dynamics. Why should my giving you a token have to be, why should we alert the global
link |
community in this token that that occurred? You can talk about side change, you can talk about
link |
any means of doing this. But effectively, we have a problem, which is if I think about this
link |
differently, I have a glass that is extant. You have a glass that is abstent. We're supposed to call
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the constructor method on your glass at the same moment we call the destructor method on my glass
link |
in order to have a conservation principle. It would be far more efficient to do this
link |
with the one series system that is known never to throw an exception, which is nature, and nature
link |
has chosen gauge theory and geometry for her underlying language. We now know due to work
link |
of Pia Malani at Harvard 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. We know that modern economic
link |
theory is a naturally occurring gauge theory. The failure of that community to acknowledge that
link |
that work occurred and that it was put down for reasons that make no analytic sense
link |
is important in particular due to the relatively new innovation of distributed computing
link |
and Satoshi's brainchild. You're thinking we need to have the mathematics that captures,
link |
that enforces cryptocurrency as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one where
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the blockchain says that crypto should be centralized. The abundance economy, much
link |
discussed in Silicon Valley or what's left of it, is actually a huge threat to the planet
link |
because what it really is is what Mark Andreessen is called software eating the world.
link |
What that means is that you're going to push things from being private goods and services
link |
into public goods and services. Public goods and services cannot have price and value tied
link |
together. Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value to the world that they cannot
link |
command a price and they will not be able to capture the value that they have created or a
link |
significant enough fraction of it. The abundance economy is a disaster. It will lead to a reduction
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in human freedom. The great innovation of Satoshi is locally enforced or semi locally enforced
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conservation laws where the idea is why is gold hard to create or destroy? It's
link |
because it's created not only in stars but in violent events involving stars like supernova
link |
collisions. When gold is created and we transact, we're using conservation laws.
link |
The physics determines the custodianship, whatever it is that I don't have, you now have,
link |
and conversely. In such a situation, we should be looking for the abstraction that most closely
link |
matches the physical world because the physical world is known not to throw an exception.
link |
The blockchain is a vulnerability. The idea that the 51% problem isn't solved, that you could have
link |
crazy race conditions, all of these things, we know that they're solved inside of gauge theory
link |
somehow. The important thing is to recognize that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever in the
link |
history of economic theory took place already and was essentially instantly buried and I will
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stand by those comments. Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you. Are you Satoshi? No.
link |
No, no, I don't have that kind of ability. I really don't. I do other things. Speaking of
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Satoshi and gauge theory, you've mentioned to Brian Keating that you may be releasing a
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geometric community paper this year or some other form of additional material on the topic.
link |
What is your thinking around this? What's the process you're going through now?
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Well, it's very interesting. I used April 1st to try to start a tradition,
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which I hope to use to liberate mankind. The tradition is that at least one day a year,
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you should be able to say heretical things and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off
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or Mark Zuckerberg. Your provost shouldn't call you up and say, what did you say?
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We need at some level to have a jubilee from centralized control. And so my hope is that
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you know what a tradition is in America, something a baby boomer did twice.
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Impeachment? That's very funny. Anyway, so I'm not a baby boomer, but as an exer,
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I thought about whether or not April 1st would be a good date on which to release a printed
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version of what I already said in lecture form, because I think it's hysterically funny that
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the physics community claims that it can't decode a lecture. It must be paper.
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And you know what? There will be a steady stream of new complaints
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up until the point that they fit it into a narrative that they like.
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Yeah, I'm thinking about April 1st as a date in which to release a document and it won't be
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perfectly complete, but it'll be very complete. And then they'll try to say,
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it's wrong, or you already did it, or no, that was done, but what we just did on top of it is
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brilliant, or it doesn't match experiment or who knows what, they'll go through all of their
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usual nonsense. It's time to go. Is there still puzzles in your own mind that need to be figured
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out for you to try to put it on paper? I mean, those are different mediums, right?
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That was a great question. I did not count on something that turns out to be important. When
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you work on your own outside of the system for a long time, you probably don't think you're going
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to be doing this as a 55 year old man. And I have been so long outside of math and physics
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departments, and I've been occupied with so many other things as you can see, that the old idea
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that I had was if I always did it in little pieces, then I was always safe because it wouldn't be
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steelable. And so now those pieces never got assembled completely. In essence, I have all the
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pieces and I can fit them together. But there's probably a small amount of glue code, like there
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are few algebraic things I've forgotten how to do. I may or may not figure them out between now
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and April 1st. But it's pretty complete. But that's the puzzle you're kind of struggling to now
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figure out to get it all in the same, the glue together. I can't tell you whether the theory
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is correct or incorrect. But for example, there's what's the exact form of the supersymmetry algebra
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or what's the rule for passing a minus sign through a particular operator. And all of that
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stuff got a lot more difficult because I didn't do it. Look, it's a little bit like if you're
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a violinist and you don't touch your violin regularly for 15 years, you come back to it and
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you pretty much know the pieces sort of, but there's lots of stuff that's missing, your tone is off
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and that kind of stuff. I would say I'll get the ship to the harbor and it'll require a tugboat
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probably to get it in. And if the tugboat doesn't show up, then I'll pilot the thing right into
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the dock myself. But it's not a big deal. I think that it is essentially complete.
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Psychologically, just as a human being, this is, I remember perhaps by accident,
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but maybe there's no accidents in the universe, I was tuned in, I don't remember where on April 1st
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to you. Oh, I think in your discord, kind of thinking about thinking through this release.
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I mean, it wasn't obvious that you were going to do it. You were thinking through it. And I
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remember there was intellectual, personal, psychological struggle with this.
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Yeah. Well, because I thought it was dangerous. If this turns out to be right, I don't know what
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it unlocks. If it's wrong, I think I understand where we are. If it's wrong, it'll be the first
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fool's gold that really looks like a theory of everything. It'll be the iron pyrides of physics.
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And we haven't even had fool's gold in my opinion yet.
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Got it. So what is your intuition? Why this looks right to you? Like why it feels like it would be
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if wrong? I can say it very simply. It's way smarter than I am.
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Can you break that apart a little more? Like every time you poke at it, it's giving you
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intuitions that follow with the currently known physics.
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Well, let's put it in computer science terms. Yes, please.
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Okay. There's a concept of technical debt that computer scientists struggle with.
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As you commit crimes, you have to pay those crimes back at a later date.
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In general, most of the problem with physical theories is that as you try to do something
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that matches reality, you usually have to go into some structure that gets you farther away.
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And your hope is, is that you're going to be able to pay back the technical debt.
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In general, these wind up as checkkiting schemes or like you're funding a startup and there are
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too many pivots. So you keep adding epicycles in order to cover things that have gone wrong.
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Yeah. My belief is, is that this thing represents something like a summit to me.
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And I'm very proud of having found a route up this summit.
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But the route is what's due to me. The summit can't possibly be due to me.
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You know, like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norge did not create Mount Everest.
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They know that they didn't create that. They figured out a way up.
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You got to tell me what Mount Everest is in this metaphor relative and also connected to the
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technical debt. So technical debt is a negative thing that it's kind of, you're a little venture
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to have to pay it. Are you saying in the, in the ascent that you're seeing now in the theory is
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you do not have much technical debt? Well, that's right. I think that what happens is, is that early
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on, what I would say is, I believe now that the physics community has said many things
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incorrectly about the current state of the universe. They're not wildly off, which is why,
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like for example, the claim is that there are three generations of matter. I do not believe that
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there are three generations of matter. I believe that there are two generations of matter and
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there is a third collection that looks like a generation of matter as the first two, only at
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low energy. Okay. Well, that's not a frequent claim. People imagine that there are three or more
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generations of matter. I would claim that that's false. People claim that the matter is chiral,
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that it is, it knows it's left from its right. I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental,
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but it is emergent. We could keep going at all these sorts of things. People think that space
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time is the fundamental geometric, geometric construct. I do not agree. I think it's something
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that I've termed the observers. All of these different things represent a series of over
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interpretations of the world that preclude progress. I think you gave some credit to
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string theory. I think loop quantum gravity, if I remember correctly, as getting close to the
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fool's gold. I've said that Garrett Leasy phenomenologically gets a lot of things right.
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He's got a reason for chirality, a reason for uniqueness using E8. In fact, E8 uses something
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called vial fermions, which are chiral. He has a way of getting Riemann's geometry underneath
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general relativity to play with Erasmann's geometry, which is underneath the standard model,
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using something called Cartan connections that are out of favor. He's figured out something
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involving super connections to make sure that the fermions, the matter in the system,
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isn't quantized the same way as the bosons were, which is a problem in his old theory.
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He's got something about three generations for triality. He's got a lot of phenomenological
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hits. I don't think Garrett's theory works. It also has a very simple Lagrangian. He's
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basically using the Yang–Mills norm squared, the same thing you would use as a cost function
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if you were doing neural nets. The string theorists have a different selling point,
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which is that they may have gotten a renormalizable theory of gravity if quantum gravity was what
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we were meant to do. They've done some stuff with black holes that they can get some solutions
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correct, and then they have lots of agreements where they show mathematical
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truths that mathematicians didn't even know. I'm very underwhelmed by string theory based
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on how many people have worked on it and how little is supporting the claims to it being a
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theory of everything. Those are the two that I take quite seriously. I don't yet take Wolframs
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quite seriously because if he really finds one of these cellular automatons that are really
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distinct and generative, it'll be amazing. But he's looking for such a thing. I don't think
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he's found anything. Techmark, I view as a philosopher who is somehow taking credit for
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Platonism, which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max because I like Max. But
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if it ever comes time, I'm putting a post it note that I'm not positive that the mathematical
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universe hypothesis is really anything new. In general, loop quantum gravity really I think
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grew out of some hopes that the general relativistic community had that they would be able to do
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particle theory. I don't think that they've shown any particle theoretic realism. Essentially,
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here's what I really think, Lex. I think we didn't understand how big the difference between
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an effective theory and a theory of everything is conceptually. Maybe it's not mathematically
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that different. But conceptually, trying to figure out what a theory of everything—how
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does the universe—and I've compared it to Escher's drawing hands—how do two hands draw
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themselves into existence? That's the puzzle that I think has just been wanting. I'll be honest,
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I'm really surprised that the theoretical physics community didn't even get up on their high horse
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and say, this is the most stupid nonsense imaginable because clearly, I always say,
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I'm not a physicist. I'm an amateur with the heart as big as all outdoors.
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In your journey of releasing this, and I'm sure there may be another American tradition on
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April 1st that will continue for years to come, there's crumbs along the way that I'm hoping
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to collect in my naive view of things, of the beauty in your geometric view of the universe.
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One question I'd like to ask is if you were to challenge me to visualize something beautiful,
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something important about geometric unity in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty
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from the outsider's perspective, what would that thing be?
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Interesting question.
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Perhaps we can both have a journey towards April 1st.
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Take a look at that.
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Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose—not Melrose, a Montana in Santa Monica.
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Now, you'll notice that all of those discs rotate independently.
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Yes. If you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous but not uniform everywhere,
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what you're doing is a so called gauge transformation on the torus seen as a U1 bundle
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over a U1 spacetime. The concept of spacetime here in a very simplified case isn't four
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dimensional, but it's one dimensional. It's just a circle and there's a circle above every
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point in the circle represented by those little discs. Imagine, if you will, that we took a rubber
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band and placed it around here and decided that that was a function from the circle into
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this circle that is representing a y axis that's wrapped around itself.
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Well, you would have an idea of what it means for a function to be constant
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if it just went all around the outside. But what happens if I turn this a little bit? Then the
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function would be mostly constant. It would have a little place where it dipped and it went back.
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It turns out that you can transform that function and transform the derivative that says
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that function is equal to zero when I take its derivative at the same time. That's what a gauge
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transformation is. Amazing to me that we don't have a simple video visualizing things that I've
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already had built and that I can clearly demonstrate when you do that torus whose the code of the
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torus is itself generating spinning. This is a U1 principle bundle. The world needs to know what
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a gauge theory is, not by analogy, not what Lawrence Krauss is saying. It's like a checkerboard. If
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you change some of the colors this way, not saying that it's a local symmetry involving
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like none of those things. It's a theory of differential calculus where the functions and
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the derivatives are both subject to a particular kind of change so that if a function was constant
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under one derivative, then the new function is constant under the new derivative transformed in
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the same fashion. Would you put that under the category of just gauge transformations?
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Yes, that would be gauge transformations applied to sections and connections where
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connections are the derivatives in the theory. This is easily explained. It is pathological
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that the community of people who understand what I'm saying have never bothered to do this in a
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clear fashion for the general public. You and I could visualize this overnight. This is not hard.
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The public needs to know in some sense that, let's say quantum electrodynamics, the theory of
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photons and electrons, more or less electrons are functions and photons are derivatives.
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You can object in some ways, but basically a gauge theory is the way in which you can translate
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a shift in the definition of the functions and the shift of the definition of the derivatives
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so that the underlying physics is not harmed or changed. You have to do both at the same time.
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Now, you and I can visualize that. If what you wanted to do rather than going directly to geometric
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unity is that I could sit down with you and I could say, here are the various components of
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geometric unity. If the public needs a visualization in order to play along, we've got a little
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over two months and I'd be happy to work with you. I love that as a challenge and I'll take it on
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and I hope we do make it happen. David Goggins, if Lex doesn't do some super macho thing because
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he's got to work to get some of this stuff done, you'll understand he'll be available to you after
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April. Thank you for the escape clause. I really needed that escape clause. I'm glad that's on
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record. I'm worried 48 miles in 48 hours. By the way, I just want to say how much I admire
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your willingness to keep this hard core attitude. I know that Russians have it and Russian Jews
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have it in spades, but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy and that's weak and that's
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lazy. The fact that you bring so much heart to saying, I'm going to bring this to jujitsu,
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I'm going to bring this to guitar, I'm going to bring this to AI, I'm going to bring this to
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podcasting, it comes through loud and clear. I just find it completely and utterly inspiring
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that you keep this hard core aspect at the same time that you're the guy who's extolling the
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virtue of love in a modern society and doing it at scale. Thank you. That means a lot. I don't
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know why I'm doing it, but I'm just following my heart on it and just going with the gut.
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This seems to make sense somehow. I personally think we better get tougher or we're going to get
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in a world of pain. I do think that when it comes time to lead, it's great to have people who
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you know don't crack under pressure. Do you mind if we talk about love and what it takes to be a
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father for a bit? Sure. Do you mind if Zev joins us? I'd be an honor.
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So, Eric, I've talked to your son, Zev, who's an incredible human being, but let me
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ask you, this might be difficult because you're both sitting together,
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what advice do you have for him as he makes his way in this world, especially given that,
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as we mentioned before on Joe Rogan, you're flawed and that just like all humans, you're mortal.
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Well, at some level, I guess one of my issues is that I've got to stop giving quite so much advice.
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Early on, I was very worried that I could see Zev's abilities and I could see his challenges,
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and I saw them in terms of myself. A certain amount of Zev rhymes with whatever I went through
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as a kid, and I don't want to doom him to the same outcomes that suffice for me. I think that he's
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got a much better head on his shoulders at age 15. He's much better adjusted, and in part,
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it's important for me to recognize that because I think I did a reasonably decent job early on,
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I don't need to get this part right. I'm looking at Zev's trajectory and saying,
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you're going to need to be incredibly and even pathologically self confident.
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The antidote for that is going to be something you're going to need to carry on board,
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which is radical humility, and you're going to have to have those in a dialectical tension,
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which is never resolved, which is a huge burden. You are going to have to forgive people who do
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not appreciate your gifts because your gifts are clearly evident and many people will have to pretend
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not to see them because if they see your gifts, then they're going to have to question their
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entire approach to education or employment or critical thinking. What my hope is is that you
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can just forgive those who don't see them and who complicate and frustrate your life and realize
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that you're going to have to take care of them too. Zev, let me ask you the more challenging
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question because the guy sitting right here, what advice do you have for your dad?
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Since after talking to you, I realize you're the more brilliant aside from the better looking
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member of the family. Sorry. You can say anything you want. This is the last time
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we're going to be seen left. This could be an awkward drive home.
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I think sort of a new perspective I've taken on parenting is that it is a task for which
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no human is really supposed to be prepared. There are Jewish tradition, for example, there are
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myriad analogies in the Torah and the Talmud that compare the role of a parent to the role of a God.
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No human is prepared to play God and create and guide a life, but somehow we're forced into it
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as people. I think sometimes it's hard for children to understand that however their parents are
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failing is something for which we must budget because our parents play a role in our lives,
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of which they're not worthy and they devote themselves to regardless because that becomes
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who they are in a certain sense. I hope to have realistic expectations of you as a human because
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I think too often it's easy to have godly expectations of people who are far from
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such a role. I think I'm really happy that you've been as open as you have with me about the fact
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that you don't pretend to be a god in my life. You are a guide who allows me to see myself
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and that's been very important considering the fact that by your self teaching paradigm
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I will have to guide myself and being able to see it and see myself accurately has been
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one of the greatest gifts that you've given me. So I'm very appreciative and I want you to know
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that I don't buy into the role that you're supposed to sort of fake your way through in my life but
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I am unbelievably happy with a more realistic connection that we've been able to build in
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lieu of it. I think it's been easier on you actually as you come to realize what I don't know
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and what I can't do and that there's been a period of time I guess that's fascinating to me where
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you're sort of surprised that I don't know the answer to a certain thing as well as you do and
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that I remember going through this with a particular mathematician who I held and I still
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hold in awe named David Kajdan and you know he famously said to him and weirdly our family knew
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his family in the Soviet Union but he said you know Eric I always appreciate you coming to my
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office because I always find what you have to say interesting but you have to realize that in the
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areas that you're talking about you are no longer the student you are actually my teacher
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and I wasn't prepared to hear that and there are many ways in which as I was just saying with the
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Mozart I am learning at an incredible rate from you I used to learn from you because I didn't
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understand what was possible you were very much I mean this is the weird thing there used to be
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this thing called Harvey the invisible rabbit this guy could had a rabbit that was like six feet
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tall that only he could see maybe was talking and that was like you at age four is you were saying
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batch of crazy things that were all totally sensible and nobody else could put them together
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and so what's wonderful is that the world hasn't caught on but enormous numbers of people
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are starting to and I really do hope that that genuineness of spirit and that outside the box
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intellectual commitment serves you well as the world starts to appreciate that I think you're a
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very trustworthy voice you don't get everything right but the idea that we have somebody at your
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age who's embedded in your generation who can tell us something about what's happening is
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really valuable to me and I do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice more than just at
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the dinner table. I apologize for saying this four letter word but do you love Zav? I was really
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worried it was going to be another four letter word. There's so many. It doesn't even rise
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to the level of a question. I mean I just there are a tiny number of people with whom you share
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so much life that you can't even think of yourself in their absence and I don't know if Zav would
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find that but it's you can have a kid and never make this level of connection. I think even right
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down to the fact that you know when Zav chooses boogie woogie piano for his own set of reasons
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why I would choose boogie woogie piano if I could play in any style it's a question about a decrease
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in loneliness. You know like my grandfather played the mandolin and I had to learn some
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mandolin because otherwise that instrument would go silent. You don't expect that you get
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this much of a chance to leave this much of yourself in another person who is choosing it
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and recreating it rather than it being directly instilled and my proudest achievement is in a
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certain sense having not taught him and having shared this much so you know it's not even love
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it's like well beyond. So you mentioned love for you making a less lonely world. I think I speak for
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I would argue probably millions of people that you Eric because this is a conversation with you
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have made for many people for me a less lonely world and I can't wait to see how
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how you Zav develop as an intellect but also I'm so heartworn by the optimism and the hopefulness
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that was in you that I hope develops further and lastly I'm deeply thankful that you Eric
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are my friend and would give me would honor me with this watch. It means more than words can say.
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Thanks guys thanks for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with
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Eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors indeed hiring site TheraGun muscle recovery device
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wine access online wine store and blinkest app that summarizes books. Click the sponsor links
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to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from Socrates
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to find yourself think for yourself. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.