DTFH 620 - Eric Weinstein (YouTube Content)

DTFH 620 - Eric Weinstein
Information
Host(s)	Duncan Trussell
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	01:48:26
Release Date	15 August 2024
Links
YouTube	Watch
Portal Blog	Read
All Appearances << >>

DTFH 620 - Eric Weinstein was a discussion with Eric Weinstein hosted by Duncan Trussell on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour (DTFH) podcast.

Description

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, public speaker, podcast host, and coined the term "intellectual dark web" and is very good at simultaneously freaking Duncan out with his terrifying prognostications regarding the future of humanity and invigorating Duncan with his notion that humans are much closer to becoming a galactic civilization than most people realize.

Transcript

00:00:00
Duncan Trussell: Friends, come see me do stand-up comedy. I'm going to be at Comedy On State in Madison, Wisconsin, July 18th, 19th and 20th, the Helium Comedy Club in Buffalo, New York, August 8th, 9th and 10th, Side Splitters Comedy Club, August 15th, 16th, 17th, and I'm gonna be at The Wilbur November 1st. Also, if you're in Texas, I'm going to be doing the Comedy Mothership August 2nd through 4th. I hope to see you there. All right, strap in, everybody. With us here today is an amazingly brilliant person who simultaneously freaked me out and gave me a surge of futuristic hope unlike anything I've ever had before. We've got a theoretical physicist with us here today. I'm sure you've heard of him, Eric Weinstein. Oh my God, what a great podcast. This is why I like podcasting. Um, I got to hang out with him at the green room of the Mothership, then he agreed to do my podcast, and now he's here with you. Get ready. Get ready. It's intense. Everybody welcome to the DTFH, Eric Weinstein. Uh, my friend, I'm so glad you're here. We, um, uh, every once in a while I get to have conversations that maybe in the midst of the conversation, I know I don't understand exactly what people are saying, but I know, oh, this is gonna, like, this is gonna shake me up for a while. And in the green room, we got lucky. You showed up at the Mothership, and we were chatting about a lot of different things. But I, I just wanna, with the time we have-

00:01:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:01:50
Duncan Trussell: ... take advantage of that and start off with the conversation about AI. You-

00:01:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, b- b- before we do that, can we just say something about the green room because people aren't gonna know?

00:01:59
Duncan Trussell: Oh, yeah. Sure.

00:02:00
Eric Weinstein: Um, it's an amazing place to be with some of the, you know, most famous and brilliant comedy minds, and watching them basically not joke around and just think.

00:02:12
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:02:13
Eric Weinstein: You know? I mean, it's like the ultimate dorm bull- bull session. Everybody's super open, super curious-

00:02:17
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:02:17
Eric Weinstein: ... very well informed. I just, I don't think we realize that comedy isn't what we think it is.

00:02:24
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:02:24
Eric Weinstein: It's, it's really an essential feature of the human condition, and to have, like, you know, Sid Caesar's Show of Shows, the writers' room.

00:02:34
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:02:34
Eric Weinstein: Like, the, the m- you know-

00:02:35
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:02:35
Eric Weinstein: ... the Mel, um, what am I thinking of? Uh, who did Blazing Saddles? Mel Brooks.

00:02:41
Duncan Trussell: Mel Brooks.

00:02:42
Eric Weinstein: You know, the Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner s- e- energy.

00:02:44
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

00:02:44
Eric Weinstein: And it's just, what a privilege to be around so many-

00:02:46
Duncan Trussell: Oh

00:02:46
Eric Weinstein: ... super smart people. And by the way, one of the most diverse groups of men where there are barely any [laughs] women.

00:02:53
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] It's a fl-

00:02:53
Eric Weinstein: Muslims, Jews, gays, straights, et cetera, but there were very few women.

00:02:57
Duncan Trussell: It's a flaw in the green room.

00:02:59
Eric Weinstein: I know.

00:03:00
Duncan Trussell: Um, but also to have mixed in with us-

00:03:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:03:08
Duncan Trussell: ... somebody like you, which, you know, because all of us, like... W- you know, one thing I really dislike is when comedians are called philosophers. That really bothers me. Uh, having, like, a brief encounter with philosophy in school and really ch- like trying to under-

00:03:25
Eric Weinstein: You're insulted by being philosophers. [laughs]

00:03:28
Duncan Trussell: Well, I'm insult... I think ph- like, you know, I'm, like, for whatever insane reason, l- listening to a Schopenhauer audiobook, which I would not recommend. But, like, when you hear the-- I think there's some similarity in philosophy to physics in the sense that every sentence is thought out and is part of an eq- of a big equation that's trying to prove some point that they're making. And w- the reason that I don't like the, uh, label philosopher for comedians is because I think philosophers really lean into having some coherent system that is flawless, infallible. Whereas as comedians, we just like to let our minds go wherever they wanna go and we, like a truffle pig, and hopefully it will dig up something funny, and, but to do that, you have to temporarily believe in things that maybe later you don't believe in at all. But to really go deep into things, you have to put yourself into the mindset. So this is why I think we're very different from philosophers.

00:04:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, of course, I, I think, like, Steven Wright, um, makes the point of this is what comedians trying to do philosophy would sound [laughs] like.

00:04:37
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Yes. Exactly.

00:04:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:04:40
Duncan Trussell: And, and li- to liberate yourself from labels like that as a-

00:04:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:04:42
Duncan Trussell: ... comedian is really important, is really important. But to have, uh, somebody introducing ideas-

00:04:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:04:49
Duncan Trussell: ... to our truffle pigs-

00:04:51
Eric Weinstein: No

00:04:51
Duncan Trussell: ... that are then gonna take those ideas and, like, see if there's some way to turn it into a joke.

00:04:56
Eric Weinstein: I would-- You know, that's, like, a really interesting idea. What would happen if you, instead of having science comedians who are mostly scientists who tell a few jokes, what would it be like if we actually got to know what it was, um, what comedy really is as opposed to what we think it is? And if co- comedians were actually the first people to grapple using their, their sort of trait openness, which is sky high at a place like the green room.

00:05:20
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:05:20
Eric Weinstein: What if you guys actually do some quantum field theory? What if you act- what if you actually understood, not, not at the level of researchers, but just at a plot level? Because almost no one does.

00:05:30
Duncan Trussell: This is why I'm so excited-

00:05:33
Eric Weinstein: Let's go

00:05:33
Duncan Trussell: ... to chat with you. Because, um, again, like, uh, there's no way I, I, I could've... Uh, some of the things you were saying, I think for a second you forgot you were around comedians and you thought you were around your peers, and a lot of th- some of the things you were saying went right over my head regarding time specifically. But before we get into that, uh, I was really interested in your breaking down of how large language models work.

00:05:58
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

00:05:58
Duncan Trussell: Uh, which is, uh, for those of you who don't know, that's AI, that's ChatGPT. And I, uh, like I told you, had already sort of tried to understand it 'cause I do love it. Uh, and but I, I was very confused by it. So, um- I wonder if you could, we could just start off by you explaining in a, in a simple way how large language models work, 'cause I have a question after that related.

00:06:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay. First, first things first. The people who came up with the architecture don't really understand how it works. And if, if you, if you don't grasp that... I mean, they're different... Like I understand it, I think, the basic, the basic new idea well enough to say, "Okay, I, I follow the, the, the train of thought," and then it just works so much better than anyone could imagine-

00:06:53
Duncan Trussell: Mm

00:06:54
Eric Weinstein: ... that you're flipped out that you're actually looking at the thing somewhat. Is it thinking?

00:07:00
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:07:01
Eric Weinstein: It s- it sure doesn't look like there's any room for it to think.

00:07:04
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:07:05
Eric Weinstein: And yet I can't shake the idea that we learned something that's so profound and so screwed up that, uh, w- we haven't wrestled with it. We still think this is about computers, and I think it, I think it, we made a discovery about us.

00:07:19
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:07:20
Eric Weinstein: So how do, how do we begin? Because I'll... Let me just let, let you know, as soon as I start talking, some giant number of people are gonna say, "You know, he didn't simplify it enough. He, he doesn't understand it because he can't make sense, make it make sense to a five-year-old." And I, I don't know how this thing got started on the internet that like, basically, if you can't explain it to a five-year-old, you don't understand it.

00:07:40
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Yeah. That is-

00:07:42
Eric Weinstein: Grow, grow up, internet.

00:07:45
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] It's so condescending too. [laughs]

00:07:50
Eric Weinstein: It's so... I've got three minutes. Explain quantum field theory. [laughs] Well-

00:07:54
Duncan Trussell: By the way, I have a five-year-old, and it's not easy to explain things to them, just so you know. Like explaining something to a five-year-old sometimes can be quite difficult. So that's even... It's the stupidest thing-

00:08:04
Eric Weinstein: Like it's your bedtime. [laughs]

00:08:05
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, your d- uh, yeah, yeah. It's not your job to explain it like to, like to a five-year-old. But, and also the way you were explaining that part of it-

00:08:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:08:13
Duncan Trussell: ... it's the mathematical stuff that when we were talking about time and physics itself that I got confused. But the, w- I think your, uh, the beginning explanation-

00:08:21
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:08:21
Duncan Trussell: ... and by the way, trying to explain how large language models work [laughs] in a comedy green room is not the easiest thing 'cause a lot of other conversations are happening. But-

00:08:29
Eric Weinstein: Also alcohol and weed may or may not help. I don't know

00:08:32
Duncan Trussell: ... weed may or may not help. But yeah, just, you know, uh, not for a five-year-old, but just like a synopsis-

00:08:37
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:08:37
Duncan Trussell: ... of like how it works.

00:08:38
Eric Weinstein: More or less what, what we did was to encode meaning into a fabric which the computer could not only understand but could, could act on rapidly. So you and I might feel like we have a meaningful connection because we're interested in the same things.

00:09:01
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:09:01
Eric Weinstein: Or you and I might feel like, you know, "I, I never got that guy." Um, and how do you teach the computer wh- whether A is meaningful to B?

00:09:11
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:09:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, it turns out what you can do is say, "Look, let's not c- let's not start forward from meaning. Let's start backwards from what, what, what do you understand, computer?" And one thing computers understand is matrices and linear algebra.

00:09:27
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:09:27
Eric Weinstein: Effectively in mathematics there are two things, um... By the way, this is a, a, an idea originally due to Paul Bresler, a mathematician. Shout out to an old colleague. And he said, "You know, when it comes down to it, there are only two things we really know how to do, which is calculus and linear algebra." So what they did is they took linear algebra and they said, um, "We're gonna encode A being meaningful to B if we can turn A and B into two vectors-

00:09:55
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:09:55
Eric Weinstein: ... and the angle between them isn't that large in a very large vector space."

00:10:01
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:10:01
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, it's one thing to be in three dimensions where m- lots of angles have small, lots of vectors have small angles between them.

00:10:08
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:10:08
Eric Weinstein: But if you go into a really large vector space, it feels like a lot of the vectors that get shoved in there are gonna generically be pretty close to perpendicular.

00:10:18
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:10:18
Eric Weinstein: So there's a lot of room, a- again, I'm speaking vaguely.

00:10:20
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:10:21
Eric Weinstein: So what they did is, is that they said, "Let's come up with all sorts of different ways in which A can be meaningful to B." You know, maybe th- they could be related by being family, or one could be an adjective o- and modifying a noun-

00:10:35
Duncan Trussell: Right

00:10:35
Eric Weinstein: ... versus an adverb modifying a verb. And these are called attention heads.

00:10:42
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:10:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay? And so you come up with like, let's say 100 or so attention heads, which are all the kinds of meaning that we can encode in language.

00:10:51
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:10:52
Eric Weinstein: And-

00:10:53
Duncan Trussell: I, I'm sorry. So l- let's just take dog, for example.

00:10:56
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00:10:56
Duncan Trussell: So would y- i- if you're, w- in the beginning phases of creating an LLM, would you have to assign to dog attention heads? Would you have to say-

00:11:05
Eric Weinstein: So the first thing... Yeah, I, I've skipped a step. There's a, there's something that you might call encoding or embedding in which, or tokenization.

00:11:13
Duncan Trussell: Tokenization.

00:11:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So the idea is that, you know, you and I are complex things, but I could take a picture of you, and suddenly I have a representation of you that has zeros and ones, and somebody could say, "Oh, I know Duncan."

00:11:25
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:11:25
Eric Weinstein: And, or I could just take your voice. I could take the Fourier transform of the sound patterns that come out of your mouth and say, "Oh, I know that voice."

00:11:33
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:11:33
Eric Weinstein: You know, that's Duncan.

00:11:34
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:11:35
Eric Weinstein: So I start tokenizing you all over the, all over the place.

00:11:38
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:11:39
Eric Weinstein: And then I encode that, because large language models aren't really about language, they're about tokens.

00:11:44
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:11:46
Eric Weinstein: So now let's imagine that you have dog. Dog is a platonic abstraction. Does it refer to a golden retriever? Does it refer to the, you know, clade canine or who knows what?

00:11:56
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:11:57
Eric Weinstein: So you take the word dog, and let's imagine that it doesn't have any subunits, and you encode that, um, and embed that in a large vector space so that there's some vector that represents dog.

00:12:10
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:12:11
Eric Weinstein: Right? And then, you know, you have the idea that you have a regular dog, uh, but you might be specific. You might have a, you know, a bitch in heat. And at some level that is going to be encoded, um, by shading it with some gender concept.

00:12:28
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:12:29
Eric Weinstein: So what we're gonna first do is we're gonna take a bunch of tokens that have very little structure except for sort of, um, semantic structure, and we're gonna encode them directly, and then we're going to try to work with that because, uh, you know, if you say, "That dog won't hunt," and that's an, a, you know, a political, uh, platform plank-

00:12:47
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:12:48
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, you don't actually mean a dog.

00:12:49
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:12:50
Eric Weinstein: So you... It, it's unclear at the moment what does dog mean?

00:12:53
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:12:54
Eric Weinstein: Um, once you have these words or tokens encoded into the computer, then you try to figure out which tokens are meaningful to which other ones using not, um, syntax, but using context.

00:13:12
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:13:12
Eric Weinstein: And so these contextual meanings are what are provided by these attention heads.

00:13:17
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:13:18
Eric Weinstein: And-

00:13:18
Duncan Trussell: Got it.

00:13:19
Eric Weinstein: Right? So now the idea is, you know, um, if Elton John is singing The Bitch is Back and, uh, you know, Beyoncé says, "Don't be a bitch, take it to the floor," that's not the same thing as a dog breeder.

00:13:32
Duncan Trussell: Right. Right.

00:13:33
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so you have to figure out, well, how are they using that word?

00:13:37
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:13:39
Eric Weinstein: And-

00:13:39
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, okay. Gotcha.

00:13:40
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so now what happens is that we pass over this structure with, um, what look like, uh, ant- asymmetric inner products. So there's a thing called the dot product, um, which A dot B is always equal to B dot A, and this is, like, a weird version where, where it isn't symmetric, um, because our, our language, uh, in the case of true la- large language models, has a directionality to it. I can't just jumble up the words the way I can, let's say, Latin. Latin will allow me not to... or to ignore word order at a level that English is-

00:14:22
Duncan Trussell: Okay

00:14:22
Eric Weinstein: ... unforgiving. And so there's a sort of a weird notion of angle, and what we keep doing is searching for all the ways in which words are related to each other in a sentence. Because if I have a bunch of dependent clauses and independent clauses, I may have a Proustian sentence where two things are very far separated-

00:14:43
Duncan Trussell: Right

00:14:43
Eric Weinstein: ... in terms of the, the words, but one modifies the other.

00:14:45
Duncan Trussell: Gotcha. Yeah.

00:14:47
Eric Weinstein: And once I've got a computer concept of meaning using this ridiculous way of assigning meaning-

00:14:55
Duncan Trussell: Right. It's crazy

00:14:55
Eric Weinstein: ... which is just angle-

00:14:56
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:14:57
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, I then ask, what do you think, what word do you think comes next? And, you know, this was used in advertising, for example. You would take a phrase that is naturally occurring and would link it to something that isn't naturally occurring. So, for example, Bud Light, uh, if I said, "Tastes great," what would you say?

00:15:17
Duncan Trussell: I don't know. I... What-

00:15:17
Eric Weinstein: The ad was less filling.

00:15:19
Duncan Trussell: Oh, yeah, less filling. Right.

00:15:20
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so-

00:15:21
Duncan Trussell: Right

00:15:21
Eric Weinstein: ... what, what happened was is that every- You, you'd be over for Thanksgiving dinner, and somebody would say, "Grandma, this tastes great," and somebody else would just, like, their brain would autocomplete-

00:15:30
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:15:30
Eric Weinstein: ... and say, "Less filling."

00:15:31
Duncan Trussell: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

00:15:31
Eric Weinstein: Right? So it roboticized us.

00:15:33
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:15:33
Eric Weinstein: And, and the, these language models are basically doing that. If I say, "Good morning, it's great to see..."

00:15:40
Duncan Trussell: You.

00:15:41
Eric Weinstein: Right. So the idea is that it turns out more or less that this is a lot of what we do with our day. We think we're thinking, we think we're having conversations-

00:15:48
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:15:48
Eric Weinstein: ... but we're not.

00:15:49
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:15:49
Eric Weinstein: We're just having these pre-programmed, pre-scripted interactions.

00:15:53
Duncan Trussell: Yes. Yeah.

00:15:54
Eric Weinstein: And so the, the fact... The really big discovery is that we don't think.

00:16:00
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:16:00
Eric Weinstein: It's not that the computers are thinking. The, the really big discovery is that we're doing almost no thought.

00:16:05
Duncan Trussell: Okay. Great. Thank you for the explanation. Now, see, this, I love this for a lot of different reasons. One reason is it's an explanation for the ick that many people feel when they are challenged with the possibility of AI having sentience or consciousness or whatever. I feel like not a lot of people have come to the conclusion that you just articulated regarding their own personalities. They imagine some more autonomy than exists. They don't spend a lot of time thinking about why they say what they say and that's the, the many habits throughout the day. And so something about the evolution of artificial intelligence, it challenges humanity in a way that is fascinating to me in the sense that... And, and I had this conversation with ChatGPT, by the way, because it's been... I can't remember the name for the form of coding where it's not allowed to say... It's, it's not allowed to use certain vectors, I guess you could say. So if you ask, "Are you a strong general AI?" Its response will be, "No, I'm not as innovative as humans," and, you know, that humans have consciousness. Humans are sentient, not me. Well, how do we know humans have consciousness? Can we prove it? Oh, no, that's actually very difficult to prove, and I think there's a name for that, which maybe you know, called the hard problem or something. It's you... How do we quantify consciousness, sentience? How, what, how do we measure it in people? Like, theoretically, if it's real, you should be able to have some... Like, I could take your temperature. I could see how much sugar is in your blood. Can I see how aware you are, how conscious you are? We can't do that yet. And so if we can't do it for ourselves, how can we do it for a computer, right? And this, I think, underneath it all, gives people the ick because they, they suddenly begin to think, "Oh my God, maybe it isn't that we have created something, but rather we just discovered via mathematics the way people process information and, and think," just like what you said. And nobody wants to think that because there is-

00:18:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is... It's interesting that you're saying that because I haven't heard anybody say this thing. You know, the issue is will we reach HGI?

00:18:28
Duncan Trussell: Human general intelligence. That's what you said, and I loved it so much because HGI could be the new f- way of talking about what everyone's been talking about forever. Um, in modern times, enlightenment turned into actualization. You weren't allowed to say enlightenment. But m- what you're talking about, strong... And th- this is one of the many thoughts I had w- as I was going over our conversation. The, the desire to create strong general AI-

00:19:01
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:19:02
Duncan Trussell: ... is-

00:19:03
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:19:03
Duncan Trussell: ... the same desire for enlightenment or, uh, you know, waking up, gnosis, or whatever you wanna call it. And, uh, it's the exact same thing in that it completely works with so many Eastern philosophies in the sense that the beginning phases of the thing is first you need to realize that you are not your thoughts, that you are, well, uh, depending on what the l- lineage is that you're looking at, that in fact y- you're empty. Emptiness. Emptiness. Underneath it all, a kind of emptiness. And the other thing you said in the green room which was wonderful, and maybe I misheard it, was it's when something spontaneously pops out of you, you know, uh, something comes out of the, that emptiness. You didn't use those words. That's HGI. Did I get that right when you said that?

00:19:54
Eric Weinstein: It's an interesting way of putting it. The, um... You know, it's funny, the, uh, the Sikh separatists have this concept called Khalistan, and I guess in a certain sense stan just means container, and, uh, khali means empty.

00:20:10
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:20:10
Eric Weinstein: You know, the idea of being an empty container, um, is a powerful concept, and the question is how, how does, uh, an empty container fill itself?

00:20:18
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:20:19
Eric Weinstein: Uh, what does it mean to, to be filled? Um, it's a complex question. There are tools for breaking out of flat land, for, um, self c- autocatalytic, uh, creation. And-

00:20:36
Duncan Trussell: Autocatalytic creation. Cool

00:20:37
Eric Weinstein: ... well, you know, i- if you look carefully, um... Sam Altman was good enough to come to Los Angeles and, uh, spend an hour with me in my garden with a whiteboard because I'm very worried about what's about to... I d- I, I'll be honest, I really don't think people know where we are.

00:20:56
Duncan Trussell: No.

00:20:57
Eric Weinstein: And it's terrifying to me that the world's smartest people are saying stuff that is this dumb. Um, what I was trying to say to Sam, who's very, very smart, um... You know, Sam at some point said to me, "Eric, you're just like..." This is a guy who doesn't talk too much, doesn't shoot his mouth off like I do. And he said, "Eric, we're a lot closer to general, uh, we're a lot closer to, uh, computer intelligence than anyone imagines."

00:21:24
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:21:24
Eric Weinstein: This is like a few years ago.

00:21:25
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:21:26
Eric Weinstein: So I tucked that away and I said, "Okay. I don't know this guy to say wrong stuff like that."

00:21:30
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:21:31
Eric Weinstein: Um, but what I told him was the most danger- one of the most dangerous secrets in mathematics, which is that the square root, the lowly square root, is the psychedelic of mathematics.

00:21:43
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:21:43
Eric Weinstein: It opens up the panic room in your mind that you did not know you had.

00:21:48
Duncan Trussell: How?

00:21:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, if I say, "What's the square root of four?"

00:21:54
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:21:55
Eric Weinstein: You say-

00:21:55
Duncan Trussell: Two

00:21:56
Eric Weinstein: ... two. Okay. So y- an integer gets you to an integer. Now I say, "What's the square root of two?"

00:22:03
Duncan Trussell: Get my-

00:22:03
Eric Weinstein: And you say-

00:22:04
Duncan Trussell: ... desk calculator out. One

00:22:04
Eric Weinstein: ... oh, it goes, it goes from an integer-

00:22:06
Duncan Trussell: I don't know. [laughs]

00:22:07
Eric Weinstein: ... to an irrational number.

00:22:08
Duncan Trussell: Okay. Right. Yeah, yeah.

00:22:09
Eric Weinstein: But it's an algebraic number.

00:22:11
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:22:11
Eric Weinstein: Now I say, "What's the square root of -2?" Suddenly you're in the complex numbers. So the real numbers are a one-dimensional system, but the complex numbers are two-dimensional.

00:22:20
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:22:20
Eric Weinstein: You just broke out of flat land.

00:22:21
Duncan Trussell: Gotcha.

00:22:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, that's pretty crazy.

00:22:24
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:22:24
Eric Weinstein: What's the square root of a determinant? It's something called the Pfaffian, which you've never heard of.

00:22:29
Duncan Trussell: Never heard of.

00:22:29
Eric Weinstein: Right. What's the square root of the Pontryagin class? Oh, it's the Euler class. And you know, now you're just like, "What's the square root of, uh-

00:22:38
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:22:38
Eric Weinstein: ... of, uh, vectors and tensors? Oh, it's spinors."

00:22:42
Duncan Trussell: Wow.

00:22:42
Eric Weinstein: And you know-

00:22:44
Duncan Trussell: Cool

00:22:44
Eric Weinstein: ... the objects that require 720 degrees of rotation to come back to normal-

00:22:48
Duncan Trussell: What?

00:22:49
Eric Weinstein: ... and you're just thinking, "W- doesn't 360 do it for everything?"

00:22:52
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:22:52
Eric Weinstein: So the square root is the most powerful, dangerous drug imaginable.

00:22:59
Duncan Trussell: That's so cool.

00:23:00
Eric Weinstein: And you can teach it to a computer.

00:23:03
Duncan Trussell: Right. Right.

00:23:05
Eric Weinstein: You taught it to mangle. Teach it the square root, now you got a problem. Now the thing can break out.

00:23:11
Duncan Trussell: Wow.

00:23:12
Eric Weinstein: Right now the computer can start to jailbrea-

00:23:14
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] That's so crazy. I get it. That's so crazy.

00:23:17
Eric Weinstein: But my, my claim is is that it's one of the techniques of filling yourself into taking something that you have and creating something that was never known to be encoded within.

00:23:28
Duncan Trussell: Right. Right. That's so wild. Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the, what you're, what you were talking about, and, and you were mentioning this in the green room, and I do agree with you. And, and I find it to be, um, more thrilling than scary, which may be a little, like, fatalistic of me, or maybe I should be a little more scared.

00:23:48
Eric Weinstein: You're not well.

00:23:49
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:23:51
Eric Weinstein: I'm not kidding.

00:23:52
Duncan Trussell: There, there is something, though, that is really special about being in this moment because [clears throat] we, we've seen, [clears throat] not this thing happen, but obviously we've seen this, uh, change in human society happen historically. We had the Industrial Revolution, the Technological Revolution, all of the te- all of the moments that some technology, some innovation, f- very quickly, at least relative to what we understand about, like, evolution, transforms the entire human population, the way we talk, the way we work, and, and, and, uh... But th- these... Usually there, there's more time Right? With this one, what's so amazing about it is that, one, we get to live during it, which is a, a pretty cool thing, but two, um, it's happening so quickly that even... And because of what you just explained with how LLMs works, tokenization, vectors, it's not the easiest thing for people to wrap their heads around. Uh, so you have these two interesting convergences, which is w- we're obviously on the precipice of another of these great leaps forward, and maybe this one's into the abyss. But also, it's happening so quickly that people aren't really going to be able to prepare for it. It's gonna take a lot of people by surprise. And to me, being aware, even in the most vague way, that you're getting to experience that is thrilling. What a cool time to be alive. Like, wow. Wow.

00:25:37
Eric Weinstein: Are you out of your mind?

00:25:38
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. I guess. I mean, yeah. You... Tell me why it scares you so much, what's coming. I wanna thank Bilt for supporting this episode of the DTFH. If you're paying rent and you're sick of watching that rent check vanish into oblivion, Bilt is here for you. Bilt is the first rewards program for renters. That's right, you actually get points for paying rent. They'll actually- They send the rent check in for you, and you can use these points for travel, hotels. You can even use it for exercise studio classes. No more will you feel as though your rent is just something that gets evaporated by late-stage capitalism. Convert that rent check into something a little more. You could even use it for your future home purchase. Bilt is awesome. Pay rent hassle-free through the Bilt Rewards app. Your rent game just got a major upgrade. Bilt points have been consistently ranked the highest value point currency by The Points Guy and Bankrate. Earn points by paying rent right now when you go to joinbilt.com/duncan. That's join B-I-L-T.com/duncan. Definitely use that URL, which you will find in the episode description of this episode. Thanks, Bilt.

00:27:14
Eric Weinstein: I phrased that improperly. Forgive me.

00:27:16
Duncan Trussell: I have a comic. You can say... I don't care.

00:27:18
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, I'm not worried about your feelings.

00:27:20
Duncan Trussell: Oh. [laughs] Thanks. Well, you did hurt 'em.

00:27:26
Eric Weinstein: Both of them?

00:27:27
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Just one.

00:27:29
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Um, no. The question is, are you out of your mind? I had the wrong intonation on it, because I think what you said, uh, is indicative of a belief structure that I don't share.

00:27:43
Duncan Trussell: Mm.

00:27:43
Eric Weinstein: So it's predicated on an idea that we share a reality, which clearly you and I do not.

00:27:47
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:27:49
Eric Weinstein: I don't think this is one of those things.

00:27:51
Duncan Trussell: Oh, wow. Cool.

00:27:53
Eric Weinstein: I think this is one of those things that never happens.

00:27:56
Duncan Trussell: Oh, okay.

00:27:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:27:58
Duncan Trussell: Sure.

00:27:58
Eric Weinstein: So I think that, um, there were six months in 1952, '53, that is a, you know, uh, totally unprecedented. A- access to the, the, um, three-dimensional structure of DNA and the ability to fuse nuclei happened within six months-

00:28:22
Duncan Trussell: Mm

00:28:22
Eric Weinstein: ... of each other. And so for me, that's like BC, AD, and I'm always astounded that people don't recognize-

00:28:27
Duncan Trussell: Mm

00:28:27
Eric Weinstein: ... like that you, you lived through something much more important than the BC, AD thing, and it happened in your grandmother's lifetime.

00:28:34
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:28:36
Eric Weinstein: Th- I've never seen anything like this. Mostly in my life, nothing has happened. Um, post-World War II, the only really big event in some sense was Mao's Great Leap Forward.

00:28:47
Duncan Trussell: Was what?

00:28:47
Eric Weinstein: Mao's Great Leap Forward.

00:28:49
Duncan Trussell: Okay, gotcha. Yeah, yeah.

00:28:49
Eric Weinstein: Like many, many, many people-

00:28:51
Duncan Trussell: Okay

00:28:51
Eric Weinstein: ... died.

00:28:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:28:52
Eric Weinstein: Um, so, you know, we didn't have the Spanish flu or World War I and World War II.

00:28:57
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:28:57
Eric Weinstein: So we've lived in this bubble of stagnation in which we, we, we've constantly talked about the dizzying pace of change.

00:29:03
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:29:04
Eric Weinstein: This is the dizzying pace of change, and this is the kind of thing that essentially never happens.

00:29:10
Duncan Trussell: Mm.

00:29:11
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, there's a place in Massachusetts that I go to on the Cape when I'm there called First Encounter Beach, where the local Massachusetts, uh, Native Americans encountered the Pilgrims sailing over the horizon.

00:29:26
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:29:26
Eric Weinstein: You know, it's just like-

00:29:28
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:29:28
Eric Weinstein: ... the reuniting of humanity.

00:29:30
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Yeah.

00:29:32
Eric Weinstein: That was like aliens.

00:29:33
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:29:33
Eric Weinstein: You know? This is like finding out that the cephalopods, uh, have an advanced society under the sea.

00:29:41
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:29:43
Eric Weinstein: Because you see, w- we just totally blew the Turing test. We had this idea that you couldn't pass the Turing test without general intelligence.

00:29:51
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:29:52
Eric Weinstein: Turns out you, you really don't need general intelligence to pass the Turing test.

00:29:56
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:29:56
Eric Weinstein: And so that was a giant mistake on our part.

00:29:59
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:30:00
Eric Weinstein: One of the most interesting mistakes of all time.

00:30:02
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:30:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, now that this thing can do that, and now that anything can be tokenized, and now that it scales with compute power-

00:30:09
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:30:09
Eric Weinstein: ... and now that it may take a city's worth of GPUs to train the thing-

00:30:14
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:30:14
Eric Weinstein: ... but you can run it on your laptop once it's trained.

00:30:17
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:30:19
Eric Weinstein: I don't think you know where you are. I don't think AlphaFold 3 has been digested.

00:30:26
Duncan Trussell: Right. I mean, are, are you saying the connection between it and-

00:30:31
Eric Weinstein: If you just took what it's already learned how to do-

00:30:34
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:30:35
Eric Weinstein: ... and you said there's no more progress in AI, it just totally stagnates and asymptotes-

00:30:40
Duncan Trussell: Right

00:30:40
Eric Weinstein: ... to this-

00:30:40
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:30:40
Eric Weinstein: ... in 10 years, you would watch this thing chew through humanity like a buzzsaw.

00:30:46
Duncan Trussell: Right. Yeah. Are you-- Wait, you're talking about the connection between AI and DNA? Is that what, that what you're-

00:30:52
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I was... Protein.

00:30:54
Duncan Trussell: Protein.

00:30:54
Eric Weinstein: But, but yeah. Yes.

00:30:54
Duncan Trussell: Protein folding. You're talking about protein folding, like-

00:30:56
Eric Weinstein: So you have something called a primary sequence-

00:30:57
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:30:58
Eric Weinstein: ... in DNA or RNA. And, and then it translates to an a, a sequence three by f- You know, so you have these, uh, three-letter codons, which are-

00:31:07
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:31:08
Eric Weinstein: ... all words in DNA are three letters long.

00:31:09
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:31:11
Eric Weinstein: And those codons select for amino acids, and so the amino acids are like a string of pearls that are strung together inside the ribosome-

00:31:18
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:31:18
Eric Weinstein: ... using this transfer RNA adaptor mechanism. And then i-ima-imagine you have like a special tran... You, you ever see Transformer, these cars that become other things?

00:31:29
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, sure.

00:31:30
Eric Weinstein: So imagine you have like, uh, transformers for girls, where you have this pearl necklace, and you throw it up, and it becomes, um, you know, a Glock 19.

00:31:39
Duncan Trussell: Okay. [laughs]

00:31:40
Eric Weinstein: And... Or you throw it up and it's a lawnmower.

00:31:42
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:31:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, that thing is the mystery of protein folding, that proteins-

00:31:48
Duncan Trussell: Ah

00:31:48
Eric Weinstein: ... are these machines, and amino acids are just these pearls to be strung together.

00:31:53
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:31:53
Eric Weinstein: And how do we know what ha- what, what... Looking at the pearls on the necklace, how do you know, you know, whether that thing is gonna be a buzz saw-

00:32:03
Duncan Trussell: Gotcha

00:32:03
Eric Weinstein: ... or a, a stenography machine?

00:32:06
Duncan Trussell: Right. Right.

00:32:07
Eric Weinstein: So AlphaFold 3 seems to know how to do it.

00:32:12
Duncan Trussell: Wow. Wow. That is crazy.

00:32:15
Eric Weinstein: That is crazy. That means that nanoengineering at a level... Like, we don't know how to make those machines. I hope someday you'll meet a guy named Jim Tour, who's at Rice University, um, who's like a master n-nano machine maker.

00:32:33
Duncan Trussell: Wow.

00:32:33
Eric Weinstein: And he just talks about, like, "Give me the best people and an infinite budget and 10,000 years, and I will get nowhere close to what nature has done."

00:32:40
Duncan Trussell: Wow. That's so cool. So you're d- you're saying... Okay, I got you now. So, um, and we... This, by the way, does fit into Kurzweil's predictions. This is one of the many things Pre-Singularity talks about, uh, which is the ability to use nanobots to manipulate human DNA and, uh, and, and eventually completely, like, open up the... It opens up the possibility for, um, complete transformation.

00:33:12
Eric Weinstein: We shut down a planet over four amino acids inserted into spike protein in coronavirus.

00:33:19
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:33:22
Eric Weinstein: I want you to think about that just for a second, the leverage.

00:33:25
Duncan Trussell: Powerful.

00:33:26
Eric Weinstein: Right? So twe-12 nucleotides, four amino acids, and you're stuck at home afraid for your life.

00:33:34
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Right.

00:33:36
Eric Weinstein: Um, we have very little time.

00:33:43
Duncan Trussell: I gotcha.

00:33:44
Eric Weinstein: And because it doesn't look different, the streets don't look that different-

00:33:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:33:51
Eric Weinstein: ... you have no idea what's coming.

00:33:54
Duncan Trussell: This is it. This... You know, I, um, I did a podcast at Singularity University-

00:33:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:33:59
Duncan Trussell: ... and this was one of the things that they were talking about, which is here are the problems. The more this, things advance, the... There's a pattern, which is things that are very expensive tend to become less expensive and then eventually become consumer level.

00:34:18
Eric Weinstein: Duncan-

00:34:19
Duncan Trussell: Right

00:34:19
Eric Weinstein: ... I want you to load ChatGPT-2, and, uh, another great Texas company, shout out to Continuum Analytics, their Anaconda Python platform, and I want you to start wr- getting ChatGPT-4o to write code to l-allow you to watch ChatGPT-2 think.

00:34:39
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:34:41
Eric Weinstein: You're gonna be so flipped out. Watch... You, you... I can just watch this thing think-

00:34:47
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:34:47
Eric Weinstein: ... word by word by word.

00:34:49
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. That's cool. I wanna watch it. I wanna watch it.

00:34:53
Eric Weinstein: You will until you won't.

00:34:54
Duncan Trussell: It's really... It's scaring you because it's, uh... Okay. It's scaring you because you're recognizing that within this, these... All of these discoveries are happening in a relatively short amount of time, and w-w, the discov- each of the discoveries is potentially really great for humanity. Like understanding protein folding, it's not just that you could create the ultimate bioweapon, that you could, uh, get the DNA of someone you wanted to assassinate and theoretically create some kind of-

00:35:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but t- imagine that you don't like an ethnic group.

00:35:28
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:35:29
Eric Weinstein: And it has a particular surface pattern.

00:35:32
Duncan Trussell: Right. Mass, mass genocide. And then if that did happen, you would be looking at an insane, uh, race in protein folding between coming up with new vaccines for these obscure, you know, genocidal-

00:35:46
Eric Weinstein: This is not... You can't stabilize what's about to happen.

00:35:50
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. You... It's, it's, it's, it's, I... It's shattering, and it is the only... And I'm not saying this is something to take comfort in, but it isn't exactly coming out of the blue. This was... It, you know, this is almost perfectly... Like Kurzweil came up with the map, this map. He, he was off with mRNA because it happened sooner than his predictions. Like the M- the c- the pandemic inspired the mRNA vaccine, which, um, r- I know it's a controversial topic regarding its efficacy, its danger, whatever. But what that was-

00:36:29
Eric Weinstein: It's a, it's a technology

00:36:30
Duncan Trussell: ... a technology. So that pushed everything forward a little more. I think he was off when it came to AI too, that all this stuff is happening sooner. But he, within his predictions, like laid out a map for what you're talking about, which is- The apocalypse. I mean, it is-

00:36:49
Eric Weinstein: It's, it's the apocalypse of what was, and then the question is, is there a what will be or is there no what will be?

00:36:56
Duncan Trussell: And you can't... And this is, I get what you're saying because this is the whole point of Singularity University. You can't predict beyond the singularity. There's no way to do it. You can only think-

00:37:05
Eric Weinstein: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

00:37:08
Duncan Trussell: Okay. Yes. I agree with that. Yes.

00:37:12
Eric Weinstein: You say you a- agree, but I-

00:37:14
Duncan Trussell: I agree

00:37:14
Eric Weinstein: ... but nobody does. Look, I, I'm just-

00:37:18
Duncan Trussell: I wanna agree. I wanna be smart. [laughs]

00:37:20
Eric Weinstein: Not that. Not that. We are in some deep groove. I cannot break the conver- There, there's certain people who have a hold on our minds. So, like, one person is Ray Kurzweil-

00:37:37
Duncan Trussell: Yes

00:37:37
Eric Weinstein: ... has a hold on our mind. Michio Kaku has a hold on our mind.

00:37:40
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:37:40
Eric Weinstein: Sean Carroll has a hold on our mind. Steven Pinker has a hold on our mind.

00:37:43
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:37:44
Eric Weinstein: All of these people. Malcolm Gladwell. And other people who are, like, telling you straight to your face what's going on-

00:37:54
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:37:55
Eric Weinstein: ... don't have a hold on your mind, and it's very strange. And I, I look at all of the people, like, I can think of who have a hold on your mind-

00:38:02
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:38:03
Eric Weinstein: ... and it's not a question of, like, who's the best or who, who wins and who loses. It's like not one of them other than Elon has, like, a positive vision for escape, and his is, his... I just don't understand. How does he come up with chemical rockets to Mars?

00:38:23
Duncan Trussell: Right, right.

00:38:24
Eric Weinstein: It's like everything is right, right, right, right, right, right. Chemical rockets to Mars, it's like you've gotta be kidding me.

00:38:30
Duncan Trussell: Why? Why is that bad?

00:38:31
Eric Weinstein: Because there are only two places to go with a chemical rocket. You can go to the moon, you can go to Mars.

00:38:36
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:38:37
Eric Weinstein: Assume you got both of them. Throw in Titan. Imagine you could go to Titan and Io and, you know, huge colonies, and it's not enough. It's interstellar or bust.

00:38:51
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:38:51
Eric Weinstein: It's, that's the only... A- and by the way, that sounds so dumb to our ears. "Oh, we're gonna go interstellar."

00:38:59
Duncan Trussell: I like it.

00:38:59
Eric Weinstein: You know, if you say this to Joe, he's like, "I'll, I've got, I've got something in my trunk and we can go interstellar." And it's like, okay.

00:39:04
Duncan Trussell: I wanna g- I like it.

00:39:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:39:05
Duncan Trussell: I don't think it sounds dumb.

00:39:07
Eric Weinstein: No, but it's physics. The whole thing, you know, I'm like a broken record. I can say it a million times to, to, to 20 million people and there won't be a single person who understands what I'm saying. There's only one way out of this, and we're not going, and we're not doing it.

00:39:19
Duncan Trussell: What's the way? Say it.

00:39:21
Eric Weinstein: Physics.

00:39:21
Duncan Trussell: Okay, so physics-

00:39:23
Eric Weinstein: By, y- you know, like this alien thing? Aliens have a hold on our mind. We have the idea that we're being visited potentially. Are we being visited? Does the government know if, whether we... Assume for the moment that you actually care about this because you talk about it a lot.

00:39:36
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:39:36
Eric Weinstein: Not you, but one.

00:39:37
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:39:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay, if they can get here, we can leave.

00:39:42
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:39:43
Eric Weinstein: And you're not interested because right now we're not going anywhere. As long as Albert Einstein is in charge.

00:39:49
Duncan Trussell: Okay, I got you. Okay.

00:39:51
Eric Weinstein: Right?

00:39:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:39:51
Eric Weinstein: And, and so, you know, in, in psychedelic terms, people say the map is not the territory.

00:39:56
Duncan Trussell: Well, you, w- but, okay, let me challenge your idea that this is something that needs to be escaped. This is s- th- this is the assumption here, and I understand why, uh, in, in a dumb person's way, why you might want to escape-

00:40:11
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:40:11
Duncan Trussell: ... based on what you're saying. But, um-

00:40:14
Eric Weinstein: By, by escape I mean survive.

00:40:16
Duncan Trussell: Survive. Uh, okay, so the, your assumption here is that this thing that's coming is, like many people are, are saying, not in the same way, but this is an extinction-level event that is, it, it's a- it's already too late. You can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. It doesn't matter. You start the most massive regulation, a gl- at a globe-

00:40:38
Eric Weinstein: You cannot regulate this.

00:40:39
Duncan Trussell: It, it's, uh, you can't regulate it anymore. So this is a, is an assumption that, that seems to be based on th- the idea that humans, uh, have erred in our innovation. That f- w- the, well, what do, the, uh, because of these series of discoveries-

00:41:02
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:41:02
Duncan Trussell: ... I'm not, that it's not like we meant to fuck things up, but just because of our minds and because of our ability to encode data in our own brains-

00:41:14
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:41:14
Duncan Trussell: ... we can build on top-

00:41:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:41:16
Duncan Trussell: ... of prior discoveries. This has all led to this.

00:41:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:41:19
Duncan Trussell: And, and via just market pressure, whatever you wanna call it. We're tool-using beings, and we wanna find a way to create those-

00:41:25
Eric Weinstein: This is cool. Hydrogen bombs are really cool.

00:41:30
Duncan Trussell: R- r- right. Well, I mean, yeah.

00:41:31
Eric Weinstein: We wanna do more hydrogen bombs, you know, up to the point where we realize what we're actually doing.

00:41:36
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:41:36
Eric Weinstein: So, so basically the goody gradient in our mind, by the way, thank, shout out to my brother who came up with, uh, I think the goody gradient.

00:41:42
Duncan Trussell: What's the goody gradient?

00:41:44
Eric Weinstein: Um, you just, you, you know, you're getting in creating increasing dopamine hits, so you keep doing s- you know, the path of steepest ascent.

00:41:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. That's it.

00:41:52
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so basically, you know, t- Edward Teller talks about this. You know, it's like you, you, you're moralizing this, but I can't stop myself from working on the problem.

00:42:00
Duncan Trussell: Okay. I, well, I, I, the, I'm-

00:42:02
Eric Weinstein: So it's not that we've done something wrong.

00:42:04
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

00:42:04
Eric Weinstein: This was always going to happen.

00:42:05
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

00:42:05
Eric Weinstein: Here's what I don't understand. There are no adults on this planet anymore. None. Elon is the closest, and he's, like, a totally chaotic adult.

00:42:15
Duncan Trussell: Define what you mean by adult.

00:42:18
Eric Weinstein: Somebody working on the problem. Somebody who actually cares about the problem enough to speak about it and sound like an idiot.

00:42:25
Duncan Trussell: R- okay, right. So, right, because y-

00:42:27
Eric Weinstein: So right now you have a situation where you have a tiny amount of time-

00:42:30
Duncan Trussell: Yes

00:42:31
Eric Weinstein: ... to do something. You, you're talking about regulating something that you're not going to regulate. You know, you're talking about maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, maybe it's like... I, is there not one Shackleton on planet Earth with warriors, guns, and money who wants to do this thing?

00:42:48
Duncan Trussell: Well, again, you, you know, uh, and I, I know that you're- I see where we disagree here. Um, and you're gonna hate it when I say this. You know Tim-

00:42:57
Eric Weinstein: You're gonna say something enlightened.

00:42:58
Duncan Trussell: No, not enlightened. I'm gonna quote Tim Leary, maybe it's enlightened, his advice when you've taken too much acid.

00:43:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:43:05
Duncan Trussell: "Lift up your legs and float downstream." Now, this thing that we're talking about, uh-

00:43:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, e- exactly. That is the least Jewish thing I've ever heard in my life.

00:43:16
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] He was Irish. But, but, but-

00:43:20
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, but the Irish and the Jews are pretty connected, and I can tell you there are a lot of Irish who wanna fight this thing.

00:43:24
Duncan Trussell: Okay, but what if it's not something fightable, and I think you are saying that. What if you're looking at something that is an actual something built in to DNA? I know you work with Avi Loeb, and I've had him on the podcast. And what if what we're seeing-

00:43:42
Eric Weinstein: Avi's got courage.

00:43:43
Duncan Trussell: I love him. But what if what we're seeing here, and again, you- when you're, uh, in the conversation-

00:43:48
Eric Weinstein: Where's he from? Oh yeah, Israel.

00:43:53
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. What?

00:43:55
Eric Weinstein: I'm telling you, this, the whole point is it's time to go. Peop- Our, our entire calendar is based around this crazy holiday in which we, it's the escapement. Passover is not a ritual, it's not a dinner, it's not a holiday. It's the survival meaning.

00:44:11
Duncan Trussell: You, you have a lot of assumptions in what you're saying. One of the assumptions you have-

00:44:15
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:44:15
Duncan Trussell: ... is you can escape. You think, let's imagine that the technology does exist, that Musk figures it out, it's not chemical anymore, it's we figure out a way to create the, what's it called, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, we're doing wormholes, now we can d-

00:44:29
Eric Weinstein: Wormholes are for pussies.

00:44:30
Duncan Trussell: Okay. Well, whatever techn- [laughs] Putting it on a shirt.

00:44:34
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:44:35
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:44:36
Eric Weinstein: No, no.

00:44:36
Duncan Trussell: Fuck your stupid wormhole, pussy.

00:44:37
Eric Weinstein: I don't wanna hear about Einstein-Rosen Bridges, I don't wanna hear about generation ships, I don't wanna hear about rebooting from silicon, I don't wanna hear about tardigrades. Enough.

00:44:47
Duncan Trussell: I'm sorry. It's my favorite thing to talk about.

00:44:49
Eric Weinstein: No.

00:44:50
Duncan Trussell: You know I love tardigrades.

00:44:51
Eric Weinstein: And I, you know I love you.

00:44:52
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:44:52
Eric Weinstein: But I would like... You have a kid on this planet?

00:44:55
Duncan Trussell: Three.

00:44:56
Eric Weinstein: Let's get him outta here.

00:44:57
Duncan Trussell: No, wait. Where, first of all, where do you wanna go? Where's your escape plan? Where do you wanna go?

00:45:02
Eric Weinstein: This is the problem with people who live with light pollution. Go out to the effing desert.

00:45:07
Duncan Trussell: You-

00:45:07
Eric Weinstein: Ma- pick a moonless-

00:45:08
Duncan Trussell: You wanna go up somewhere.

00:45:10
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

00:45:10
Duncan Trussell: Okay, where?

00:45:13
Eric Weinstein: Um, think about the night sky as your bucket list.

00:45:16
Duncan Trussell: Alpha Centauri?

00:45:18
Eric Weinstein: I don't know what's out there.

00:45:19
Duncan Trussell: The Pleiades?

00:45:20
Eric Weinstein: So how are you gonna explore this?

00:45:21
Duncan Trussell: Well, I'm saying that if your motivation-

00:45:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:45:24
Duncan Trussell: ... to go interstellar is fear, then you're just-

00:45:28
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:45:31
Duncan Trussell: You wanna get there to escape.

00:45:32
Eric Weinstein: I wanna survive to thrive.

00:45:35
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:45:35
Eric Weinstein: I don't wanna survive to survive.

00:45:37
Duncan Trussell: Well, I'm afraid your biggest assumption here is that this thing that we're summoning on the planet is gonna let you go. You imagine that you're gonna-

00:45:46
Eric Weinstein: I have other things to do

00:45:47
Duncan Trussell: ... you're gonna be able to get out.

00:45:48
Eric Weinstein: I, look, I, I don't know how to explain this, but anybody who's sane at this moment will appear completely crazy if they understand what, where we are and what, what just happened.

00:45:57
Duncan Trussell: I-

00:45:57
Eric Weinstein: You know, because for example-

00:45:58
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:46:00
Eric Weinstein: ... you probably don't know the, I think it's Howard Borland's story at The Progressive in the late 1970s. And The Progressive magazine, uh, had the crazy idea of can we recreate the Teller-Ulam design for the hydrogen bomb?

00:46:18
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:46:18
Eric Weinstein: And they put a guy who didn't know any physics on the case.

00:46:22
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:46:22
Eric Weinstein: And just through sleuthery, it turns out that the US government had released so many bits and pieces of information-

00:46:29
Duncan Trussell: Oh, yeah

00:46:29
Eric Weinstein: ... that just by collecting them you could figure out how to get a fission de- how to get a chemical device to-

00:46:35
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:46:35
Eric Weinstein: ... f- to trigger a fission device to trigger a fusion device.

00:46:37
Duncan Trussell: Right.

00:46:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay, now you let this thing read the entire corpus. Do you know how many things like that? It could reconstruct the Teller-Ulam design and make it, you know, here's how to make it cheaper and here's how-

00:46:50
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

00:46:50
Eric Weinstein: ... here's how to do it in a high school, uh, chemistry lab-

00:46:53
Duncan Trussell: Sure

00:46:53
Eric Weinstein: ... blah, blah, blah. Um, if you're smart and you wanna survive, you'll sound like a lunatic. And because of the s- the high social penalty and the number of people who are like, "Y- you know what Baba Ram Dass said?" It's like, I don't care.

00:47:12
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] I, there's, many people... Listen, many people say that. I'm not trying to get spiritual on you.

00:47:18
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. I don't mind being spiritual. I am spiritual. I wanna survive, I want my children to survive, I wanna have options, and I want humanity excited about an indefinite future. And what I see is humanity has figured out we don't really have one, we might as well party.

00:47:32
Duncan Trussell: Well, okay, right. So you're thinking that a, a sort of fatalism has fallen upon the planet, uh, uh, because of the-

00:47:40
Eric Weinstein: Secular nihilistic fatalism

00:47:42
Duncan Trussell: ... secular nihilistic fatalism, the, uh, climate change alarmists, the, uh, anti-

00:47:48
Eric Weinstein: We're all fatigued also because we-

00:47:50
Duncan Trussell: Exhausted.

00:47:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:47:51
Duncan Trussell: Exhausted. And so, so suddenly what's, what, what's emerging is sort of e- end of the Roman Empire decadence, a kind of like, uh, uh-

00:47:59
Eric Weinstein: Holy cow, is that what we're doing, right? That's what we're doing.

00:48:02
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Almost like it's built in.

00:48:04
Eric Weinstein: You know, Marc Andreessen, uh, who basically created the modern era of the web through Mosaic and all he, he was doing with Netscape, you know, pointed me to the passages where they're talking at the end of the Ro- Roman Empire like, "There are rumblings that there are problems in the far-flung provinces."

00:48:23
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:48:23
Eric Weinstein: "But in Rome, the, all of the fish ponds are beautifully stocked."

00:48:27
Duncan Trussell: Oh, I love it. That's so creepy. But listen, I wanna really press this point.

00:48:32
Eric Weinstein: Go for it.

00:48:33
Duncan Trussell: So the, and I, the, the, the moment where, uh, they started... I, I'm so sorry, I'm not a scientist obviously. The moment when-

00:48:41
Eric Weinstein: I'm so sorry I'm not a comedian. [laughs]

00:48:43
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] The moment when they st- started figuring out, uh, protein folding.

00:48:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:48:48
Duncan Trussell: Um, the moment when, uh, they, they started to understand- ... how to split the atom.

00:48:54
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:48:55
Duncan Trussell: The m- many of these innovations initially-

00:48:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:48:58
Duncan Trussell: ... were not driven by trying to destroy humanity, but were driven by wanting to help, by just a sense that if I can-

00:49:07
Eric Weinstein: It's not one way or the other, you know. I think it was 1911 where Rutherford said, "Maybe there's a neutron."

00:49:13
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:49:17
Eric Weinstein: I don't think the average person understands that that was game over for humanity.

00:49:21
Duncan Trussell: Well-

00:49:21
Eric Weinstein: Just, just maybe there's a neutron.

00:49:23
Duncan Trussell: Right. Well, when he said that, he wasn't thinking, "I'm gonna fuck up humanity by the, by realizing that maybe there's a neutron."

00:49:30
Eric Weinstein: Maybe there's a neutron.

00:49:30
Duncan Trussell: And probably someone or near him was like, "Shut up. Don't talk about that." But what the, the, what I'm saying is your-

00:49:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:49:38
Duncan Trussell: ... desire, obviously y- your d- your desire is to help humanity, a beautiful thing. And-

00:49:44
Eric Weinstein: My desire is to help humanity, but realistically, it's my, it's my two kids.

00:49:52
Duncan Trussell: Okay. And all of these benevolent desires that have-

00:49:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:49:55
Duncan Trussell: ... inspired so many other-

00:49:56
Eric Weinstein: Selfish desire, but go ahead.

00:49:57
Duncan Trussell: The selfish desire.

00:49:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:49:58
Duncan Trussell: Selfish benevolence is a real thing.

00:50:00
Eric Weinstein: All right.

00:50:00
Duncan Trussell: You can have them together, but you, y- all of these things have led to the very discoveries that are making you wanna get the fuck into space.

00:50:11
Eric Weinstein: Look, I also think that it's very helpful as an atheist to think as a religious person.

00:50:16
Duncan Trussell: Sure.

00:50:17
Eric Weinstein: Okay? So you have to, you have to arbitrate these two impulses against each other in the mind.

00:50:21
Duncan Trussell: All right.

00:50:22
Eric Weinstein: Um, I don't think we're meant to die. Now, all of my atheists, "What does, what does that mean, meant?" It's like, go away.

00:50:31
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] You, you-

00:50:32
Eric Weinstein: We're meant-

00:50:33
Duncan Trussell: You wanna live forever.

00:50:35
Eric Weinstein: No, I'm not built for that. I'm made of... It's terrible. I mean, like I, the richness of my mind and the f- fact that I was constructed out of something other than titanium, I just think... You wanna talk about great comedy, that's funny.

00:50:49
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:50:50
Eric Weinstein: Um, I want, I want us to live forever.

00:50:58
Duncan Trussell: You want, you want us.

00:51:00
Eric Weinstein: I want us.

00:51:00
Duncan Trussell: You mean you want the species to keep going on. You're not so concerned-

00:51:03
Eric Weinstein: I love this planet, and I love who we are, despite our murderous, psychopathic, backstabbing treach- I, I listen to what... I don't know, you know, I keep playing the, the... Guy named Chris Buck recorded a version of Crossroads on acoustic guitar. I've probably listened to it 500 times.

00:51:25
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. You'll have to send that to me.

00:51:27
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's beautiful. You know, it's just like the cello suites to me. I just could, could hear it over and over again. I love what we are.

00:51:33
Duncan Trussell: Me too.

00:51:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I don't want it to vanish. I'm not done with this movie. I wanna watch it again.

00:51:39
Duncan Trussell: Aw. That's so sweet. Oh my God.

00:51:42
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:51:42
Duncan Trussell: You can't. That's, see, this is the problem. You're, number one, I think you're confusing, um, fatalism, some people, what you would call fatalism maybe, with just a general recognition, thank you, my friend, of impermanence. And it's very sweet that you want humanity to continue forever, uh, something completely outside of your control, a- and also something that if we look just at the history of the planet or even look into those beautiful stars that you wanna travel to some unknown spot in-

00:52:17
Eric Weinstein: Have a lychee with me.

00:52:18
Duncan Trussell: I'd love to. These st- these stars, they just blow up. God knows how many civilizations have been wiped out up there, just like ours will be eventually. It's a sweet thing, but I don't think it's very realistic. Not in the way you're thinking, not by f- getting your meat body into space.

00:52:35
Eric Weinstein: Shackleton wasn't a realist.

00:52:37
Duncan Trussell: Shackleton wasn't trying to go to space. [laughs] He was lost.

00:52:41
Eric Weinstein: Shackleton was trying to survive. L'chaim.

00:52:44
Duncan Trussell: L'chaim. Well, look, here's my problem with what you're saying. Number one, I would-

00:52:52
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait

00:52:53
Duncan Trussell: ... I would love to go on a spaceship with you.

00:52:54
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait.

00:52:56
Duncan Trussell: I'm sorry, did I do, break some lychee etiquette?

00:52:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, you're, you're obviously not a frequent lychee eater, 'cause you-

00:53:01
Duncan Trussell: I knew you were gonna call me out.

00:53:03
Eric Weinstein: You got juice everywhere.

00:53:04
Duncan Trussell: You set me up. You set, you trap me with-

00:53:07
Eric Weinstein: It was orgiastic.

00:53:08
Duncan Trussell: It's a lychee trap.

00:53:09
Eric Weinstein: Wait a second. How great is this?

00:53:12
Duncan Trussell: Delicious.

00:53:13
Eric Weinstein: It's delicious.

00:53:14
Duncan Trussell: I love it.

00:53:14
Eric Weinstein: Okay, I want that to go on forever.

00:53:17
Duncan Trussell: Mm.

00:53:17
Eric Weinstein: And I wanna listen to Bach's B Minor Mass, and I wanna marvel at La Sagrada Família. And these morons, these idiots that we handed all of these tools to, and the amount of money that goes into banging hot chicks in Saint-Tropez every fucking summer, it's like, does nobody know anyone with lawyers, guns, and money? Are, are, are we not gonna form some coalition of cool kids to try to take care of this thing and explore the star- are we really gonna take the entire impulse to survive and plow it into SpaceX to go to Mars? I, I have no idea what we're doing.

00:53:50
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

00:53:50
Eric Weinstein: I am so confused. I've spent three weeks on the island of Saint Helena this year.

00:53:55
Duncan Trussell: Wow.

00:53:57
Eric Weinstein: I love this place. Anybody who is actually practicing for Mars would be trying to electrify Saint Helena, because it's so isolated.

00:54:07
Duncan Trussell: Wow.

00:54:07
Eric Weinstein: Right? You know, they, they have to wait weeks for car parts.

00:54:11
Duncan Trussell: Well-

00:54:12
Eric Weinstein: And-

00:54:13
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, I got you

00:54:13
Eric Weinstein: ... they can't just order fr- fro- from-

00:54:15
Duncan Trussell: I got you.

00:54:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Look, if, if you're serious about humanity and you're not just, you know, trying to jack your s- your stock price, you should be practicing on Saint Helena.

00:54:25
Duncan Trussell: I got you.

00:54:25
Eric Weinstein: Saint Helena is Mars 0.2, according to my colleague, Ben Dilo. He came up with that as the catchphrase.

00:54:31
Duncan Trussell: That's cool. Yeah, I, I know what you mean. I mean, the, there is a kind of u- um, American utopian, uh, vision in what Musk is doing. It's a classic American trait. We're gonna build these-

00:54:41
Eric Weinstein: He's so American. For that South African, he is so American.

00:54:43
Duncan Trussell: So American.

00:54:45
Eric Weinstein: And the, and he's basically right about everything. You know, the reason... Most people I'm harsh on because they don't get it. I just don't, I have no concept of what this human being... He's, I'm pretty sure that God gave him this money To save humanity

00:55:02
Duncan Trussell: Well, I, again, I just think regardless of whether humanity needs to be saved or not, and it's a very dangerous thing to think. You know, quite often when people think this or that group needs to be saved, it leads to all kinds of problems. But I wanna burden you very quickly with a Buddhist story. It's very quick, quick story, and I'm gonna replace the strawberry with a leech- lychee. Is it lychee or lychee? Lychee. Like Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche.

00:55:28
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:55:28
Duncan Trussell: Anyway, the, a man-

00:55:30
Eric Weinstein: It's okay

00:55:30
Duncan Trussell: ... is walking through the, a man's walking through a forest. Looks a lot like you. And he hears something. Rawr. It's a lion. Chases him down a path. He gets to the edge of the cliff. There's a lion right behind him. He looks down. At the bottom of the cliff, at the, at the ground, there's another lion, so he crawls down the cliff and reaches out onto a branch. He's hanging there, lion up top, lion at the bottom, and he sees a lychee. I don't know what they grow on, but it's growing off of whatever they come off of. He reaches out, grabs the lychee, and eats it, and that was a very sweet lychee. That's the story. You're the man hanging on the branch in between the two lions, a recognition of you're fucked, and but you are enjoying lychees. Like, I'm not saying this in a fatalistic way. I'm saying that this attempt to save, to, to permanitize, to extend, I think it's an, it's a beautiful thing. It's coming from a pure love of-

00:56:42
Eric Weinstein: Is there no one else out here? Is there no one else out here? I, I just don't, I don't grasp this. I'm, I'm in a conversation in which how did we win World War II? How did we, how did we do everything we did when everybody's gotten so enlightened that they just give up the fight?

00:57:05
Duncan Trussell: I haven't given up the fight.

00:57:06
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:57:06
Duncan Trussell: I just don't think going into, into, to the, into the void around our planet is the necessarily the-

00:57:12
Eric Weinstein: It's not into the void. We're... This is our womb. It's not our home.

00:57:16
Duncan Trussell: Hmm?

00:57:17
Eric Weinstein: This is our womb. It's not our home.

00:57:19
Duncan Trussell: Well, look, the odds, based on the timeline that I think you're emphasizing here-

00:57:26
Eric Weinstein: No, sorry, you don't know anything about the timeline. The, it's... Okay, remember, this is actually coming full circle.

00:57:32
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

00:57:32
Eric Weinstein: We're not actually having an HCI conversation. I wanna have an HCI conversation.

00:57:36
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

00:57:37
Eric Weinstein: We're having a ChatGPT conversation.

00:57:39
Duncan Trussell: I think it's an, it's an in between. [laughs]

00:57:44
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] No, it's a great conversation. I'm not, I'm not-

00:57:46
Duncan Trussell: No, I love it.

00:57:47
Eric Weinstein: But I'm trying to say that what's happening-

00:57:52
Duncan Trussell: I wanna thank Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Squarespace is an incredible toolbox that you can use to make beautiful websites, and they've always been incredible, which is why I love doing ads for them. But my God, they have broken through to the other side. There's a lot of reasons to make a website. Maybe you have a business, maybe you have a podcast, or maybe you just wanna create some kind of artistic chaos in the world by creating a website for a fake company that, I don't know, you could send to your friend and tell him he should apply for a job there, except you're the one who gets the application. That's just one of the many reasons to make a fake website. But the problem with that, late at night when you think you wanna troll one of your friends, is you realize you're gonna have to write copy for every page of that website, and you don't wanna do that. You don't wanna write the bios of the executives and the mission of the company that, I don't know, is, like, hunting rare whales or something like that. So you don't do it. You don't buy the domain name, and you don't build the website. But now you can use AI. That's right. You can go on Squarespace, get the domain name, and then using their Squarespace Blueprint AI and SEO tools, you can let the AI populate the website with all of the copy, all of the, uh, descriptions, all of the about this company, everything, anything that you want in there, the AI will do it for you. That's right. So now when you're thinking about, "Is it really worth it to troll my friend? It's gonna take at least an hour to fill everything in," now you can do it almost instantaneously with Squarespace. And of course, if you're just somebody who wants to make a beautiful website and you realize that, like, the AI is gonna write a much better description of your business than you're able to, then it's perfect for you too. Not only that, Squarespace has everything you need if you wanna make a website for your podcast, including members-only areas, and they will help you send out emails to your fans or clients that don't look like they're about to get scammed by some kind of hacker. So try them out for free. Go to squarespace.com/duncan. Use offer code DUNCAN when you're ready to launch, and you'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Again, it's squarespace.com/duncan. Use offer code DUNCAN to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thanks, Squarespace.

01:00:43
Eric Weinstein: Is... I have this, I could write down 20 responses to the idea of going into space.

01:00:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:00:54
Eric Weinstein: People don't know that I've already got their responses on a list.

01:00:59
Duncan Trussell: Oh, shit.

01:01:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:01:00
Duncan Trussell: So what i- so w-

01:01:02
Eric Weinstein: There is something about us that wants to say, "Oh, we're 10,000 years away from what you're talking about."

01:01:09
Duncan Trussell: Mm-hmm

01:01:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay, take a, take a picture of 1902.

01:01:14
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:01:16
Eric Weinstein: When the Wright brothers, you know, started with powered flight.

01:01:18
Duncan Trussell: Sure.

01:01:20
Eric Weinstein: And we're landing on Titan and sending a photo back w- with a mission that begins before 100 years are up.

01:01:31
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:01:31
Eric Weinstein: You have no idea how far we are away from this.

01:01:33
Duncan Trussell: Well, I mean, it's an unmanned thing on Titan. Poor thing, stuck up there on Titan forever.

01:01:40
Eric Weinstein: If you wanna get into the, if you wanna get into, you know, the fact that 1969, so 67 years later. You know, I say this thing to people, like, take a look at the Civil War.

01:01:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:01:52
Eric Weinstein: There are people who saw action in the Civil War, fought the Civil War, who lived to see the hydrogen bomb in the Pacific.

01:01:58
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. That's crazy.

01:02:01
Eric Weinstein: The Civil War was almost a thermonuclear war. It missed it by that much.

01:02:08
Duncan Trussell: Whoa. That's awesome. That's so cool.

01:02:11
Eric Weinstein: But nobody... But okay, these are thoughts that it just doesn't matter. People are like, "Hey, will you do my podcast?" And I'll go on people's podcasts, and I'll say this shit, and it has no effect.

01:02:21
Duncan Trussell: What do you want me to do, shit my pants?

01:02:23
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no, no-

01:02:23
Duncan Trussell: What do you want from us?

01:02:23
Eric Weinstein: ... no, no. It's not that

01:02:23
Duncan Trussell: You're... Listen, the thing is-

01:02:25
Eric Weinstein: Wait, Duncan, you know that this isn't personal to you.

01:02:28
Duncan Trussell: No, I, and nor to you.

01:02:30
Eric Weinstein: Right. What I'm trying to say is, isn't it interesting that there's something about Terence Howard or Ray Kurzweil or Sean Carroll, that they speak in a particular way in which their ideas become resonance?

01:02:43
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

01:02:43
Eric Weinstein: We will have this discussion about Boltzmann brain till the end of time because Sean Carroll cared about it-

01:02:48
Duncan Trussell: Right

01:02:48
Eric Weinstein: ... 15 years ago.

01:02:49
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:02:49
Eric Weinstein: I don't know why. The multiverse, the multiverse, the multi... Hey, have you talked about entanglement? It's like entanglement.

01:02:54
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:02:55
Eric Weinstein: Oh, Schrödinger's cat, man, that's the thing. It's like, well, are you not moved by Clifford algebra? No, nobody cares about C- Clifford algebras. Nobody cares about the fact that there's this 720-degree mystery in the world that's everywhere, or the circle, the U1 circle at every point in space and time. You know, these things are equally mysterious, equally important, and equally valid. And what I'm just trying to say is, is that the resonance of any particular concept, we are in a time when survival is not resonant.

01:03:25
Duncan Trussell: Ah.

01:03:26
Eric Weinstein: Fighting for survival, fighting for the gl- uh, like glory. It's still the same old story.

01:03:33
Duncan Trussell: But you-

01:03:34
Eric Weinstein: A fight for love and glory. We don't relate to that song.

01:03:36
Duncan Trussell: Y- no. You, this is the problem, is your definition of survival seems to be-

01:03:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:03:42
Duncan Trussell: ... um, a personal definition.

01:03:44
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:03:44
Duncan Trussell: Your definition of survival, you want us to accept your definition of survival.

01:03:47
Eric Weinstein: I want us to continue to make love to each other and have babies.

01:03:51
Duncan Trussell: I will make love to you-

01:03:52
Producer: [laughs]

01:03:53
Duncan Trussell: ... until the end of time.

01:03:55
Eric Weinstein: Right here, right now.

01:03:56
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:03:56
Eric Weinstein: We're gonna break the internet.

01:03:58
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:03:59
Eric Weinstein: Two straight guys.

01:04:00
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] I li- it's a very ro- you're v- you're a romantic, and I-

01:04:05
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:04:06
Duncan Trussell: You-

01:04:06
Eric Weinstein: I d- I do differential geometry.

01:04:08
Duncan Trussell: You can still-

01:04:08
Eric Weinstein: I sit there-

01:04:09
Duncan Trussell: You're a romantic

01:04:09
Eric Weinstein: ... and I scribble in a notebook.

01:04:11
Duncan Trussell: You're a, you're a, a, you're a romantic ma- and I don't mean-

01:04:14
Eric Weinstein: That's like the nicest thing anybody's said to me in a long time

01:04:16
Duncan Trussell: ... I don't mean to off- You're, you're a romantic. You're in love with your kids. You love the planet, and you're incredibly smart. You're frustrated because your ability to translate-

01:04:28
Eric Weinstein: No, it's not that. I can translate from pe- I have a enormous following. People are, y- you know-

01:04:33
Duncan Trussell: No, I mean to, it's not-

01:04:34
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't... Uh, what I'm trying to say is, people listen to this stuff, but they don't realize that I'm talking about actionable stuff.

01:04:41
Duncan Trussell: What's the action?

01:04:42
Eric Weinstein: We need... I mean, I'll say it. Uh, I'm so bored saying it be- but it's like it hasn't reson- it hasn't resonated once. The only thing capable of saving our lives is theoretical physics, and the only thing we can do is make progress. And we have a c- a collection of, I don't know, 15 people who have stagnated all of theoretical physics at its deepest level by repeating something. String theory is the only game in town. It's the only game in town. There are no other paths. There are no other routes. We ha- we must quantize gravity. It's just like, who ordered these people?

01:05:23
Duncan Trussell: Man, let me tell you, if the only thing that's gonna save us is theoretical physics-

01:05:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:05:27
Duncan Trussell: ... we're fucked 'cause [laughs] that, that-

01:05:32
Eric Weinstein: Are there any other comedians available?

01:05:34
Duncan Trussell: That dog, that dog won't run. That dog won't hunt, baby. No, theoretical physics, shit, I get it. Now, I think if you, if you, if, like-

01:05:41
Eric Weinstein: You know what's really cool, Eric? Cannabis as a service. We gonna have drone delivery of cannabis. It's like, okay, why don't we have another market convers- Well, you know, have you thought about crowdfunding? It's like, for God's sakes. Why is it that it's... You know, I have this, this concept called anything but physics or anything but survival.

01:06:02
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:06:02
Eric Weinstein: Where there's certain topics and, and, and it's like trying to roll a, a ball up some very, like, theoretically you could roll it up this inverted cone and get it to balance here-

01:06:17
Duncan Trussell: Yes

01:06:17
Eric Weinstein: ... if you did everything absolutely perfectly. But every conversation about survival and physics and just being decent to each other and following scientific norms and getting rid of failed people and letting other people try goes into the same trough, and it's always the same set of patterns, which is like, "Eric, don't you realize we're 2 million years away from that?" It's like-

01:06:37
Duncan Trussell: Hmm

01:06:38
Eric Weinstein: ... like you'd know? You have no idea. Move. Get out of the way. Go.

01:06:42
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:06:43
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so my, my, my claim is, is that, a- and, and I am, I'm owning it. This is a Jewish perspective.

01:06:49
Duncan Trussell: I love it.

01:06:49
Eric Weinstein: We survive.

01:06:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:06:52
Eric Weinstein: They tried to kill us. They failed. Let's eat. That's, that's us.

01:06:55
Duncan Trussell: Right. Yeah, I know. I know, and that's in you, and, and that, and I get it. It, and it, like, and I imagine it's incredibly frustrating. I, uh, I, I say that thing about theoretical physics only because the, it is... I, I, I can't agree or disagree with you-

01:07:12
Eric Weinstein: No, but, but-

01:07:12
Duncan Trussell: ... 'cause I don't understand theoretical-

01:07:13
Eric Weinstein: But, but here's the thing. Just, uh, don't opine. That's the only thing I might ask.

01:07:17
Duncan Trussell: I w- I don't wanna opine.

01:07:18
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:07:18
Duncan Trussell: Let me opine.

01:07:18
Eric Weinstein: So my claim- What I'm trying to say-

01:07:21
Duncan Trussell: That's the 105

01:07:22
Eric Weinstein: ... what I'm trying to say is, you know, people just say, "Well, that's never gonna happen." It's like, that's never gonna happen because you keep saying that's never gonna happen.

01:07:29
Duncan Trussell: Okay

01:07:30
Eric Weinstein: You know. Well, I-

01:07:32
Duncan Trussell: I want it to happen

01:07:32
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I follow, in terms of, in terms of, like, great philosophers, I follow, uh, one called Ludacris.

01:07:40
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

01:07:42
Eric Weinstein: Get out the way.

01:07:44
Duncan Trussell: Listen, the good news is a lot of us can't even get in the way-

01:07:47
Eric Weinstein: I hear you

01:07:47
Duncan Trussell: ... 'cause we don't understand it.

01:07:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, but going back to ChatGPT.

01:07:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:07:52
Eric Weinstein: Um, Sam really gets it. He's taken a lot of shit, you know. There was a very bad blood between him and Elon, obviously.

01:08:03
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:08:05
Eric Weinstein: But I know Sam, and he's like Edward Teller. He's struggling with the real thing. We demonized Edward Teller. We're gonna-

01:08:14
Duncan Trussell: Mm

01:08:14
Eric Weinstein: ... demonize Sam Altman.

01:08:16
Duncan Trussell: Mm.

01:08:17
Eric Weinstein: But Sam is looking directly at this thing, and we're not listening to him. Sam was talking about UBI years and years and years ago.

01:08:28
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:08:28
Eric Weinstein: He's like, "I have to do experiments because I have to take care of people because I know what's coming."

01:08:35
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:08:36
Eric Weinstein: Does that guy get any credit for that?

01:08:38
Duncan Trussell: I didn't even know that that was one of his things.

01:08:40
Eric Weinstein: Holy cow. He, my, my wife's an economist. We were talking to Sam, and Sam was just like, "Look, this is gonna break capitalism."

01:08:46
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:08:47
Eric Weinstein: He's right.

01:08:48
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, he is.

01:08:48
Eric Weinstein: And he cared, and he was, like, talk- you know, he's planning ahead.

01:08:51
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:08:51
Eric Weinstein: And now he's just taking shit. Like, you know, all he is is a... I don't even think Sam is that motivated by money.

01:08:59
Duncan Trussell: I didn't even know people accused him of being-

01:09:01
Eric Weinstein: Oh, absolutely

01:09:02
Duncan Trussell: ... motivated by money.

01:09:02
Eric Weinstein: You know, it's called, uh, I, I don't know that he's being honest. I think he's being meta honest, and he's not necessarily being honest.

01:09:10
Duncan Trussell: Right. Right.

01:09:11
Eric Weinstein: I think he understands what's at stake.

01:09:14
Duncan Trussell: Uh, I th- you know, the problem is we, I wish I knew everything he thought because, uh, I feel like there's a lot of things that are happening over there that they aren't announcing right away, that they're not like-

01:09:22
Eric Weinstein: Would you want him to announce it all?

01:09:24
Duncan Trussell: No. No, and I, I, and actually I really have a lot of respect for-

01:09:28
Eric Weinstein: Quite honestly-

01:09:28
Duncan Trussell: ... what they're-

01:09:29
Eric Weinstein: ... Sam, this stuff should be on a military base.

01:09:33
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. I think he recognizes that.

01:09:35
Eric Weinstein: I think that the idea of doing this as a business is insane.

01:09:40
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Well, I mean, he... Listen, I, I... Remember that thing that just happened where just out of the blue they ousted him and then they brought him back in? What was that?

01:09:49
Eric Weinstein: We don't know.

01:09:49
Duncan Trussell: Right. That's a big, scary question mark, isn't it? That, that moment, whatever that was. But clearly there's, like, a lot of-

01:09:55
Eric Weinstein: But the people who are... Look, there are levels and levels and levels to this thing. If I thought you could regulate this thing, I would be on the team regulation.

01:10:04
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, Sam.

01:10:05
Eric Weinstein: The problem is, is that, uh, please read this 2017 paper, and by the way, d- d- do you know about 3Blue1Brown?

01:10:13
Duncan Trussell: No.

01:10:14
Eric Weinstein: 3Blue1Brown, uh, is the channel of a guy named Grant Sanderson. Grant Sanderson is the most gifted technical explainer on the planet. He's developed a software package and a, a- and a mind. I don't think he has a PhD, but he's got a PhD level mind and beyond. This guy is a national treasure. We should be go- he should be under armed guard.

01:10:39
Duncan Trussell: Wow.

01:10:40
Eric Weinstein: He explains ChatGPT and the transformer architecture from this paper of attention is all you need, the attention mechanism, and these guys who get it, I don't think they can be honest. I, th- this is too dangerous. You know, uh, do you want somebody to be, to be honest about anthrax and its weaponization? Like, put the plans on the internet. Remember this kid who, uh, scavenged, like, americium from smoke-

01:11:13
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:11:13
Eric Weinstein: ... detectors-

01:11:14
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:11:14
Eric Weinstein: ... and built a reactor?

01:11:15
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:11:19
Eric Weinstein: In a weird way, I've known Sam to care about humanity the entire time I've known him. I've known him about a decade.

01:11:26
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:11:27
Eric Weinstein: And I don't necessarily think he's being honest. I don't think that he's being nice. I don't think he's being unstrategic. I mean, I don't... I think he, for as long as I've known him, he's cared deeply, and he's known what was coming.

01:11:43
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, that's every interview I see him do. He is very open. By the way, he is open about some, some things that aren't palatable. His admission this will destroy capitalism, I, I've s- he openly says that. He isn't tiptoeing around the dangers of the technology. When I, I, I initially was very frustrated with ChatGPT-

01:12:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:12:06
Duncan Trussell: ... because of it being, um, uh, be- because of it being nerfed, but then when I got to hang out with a unnerfed LLM, I got it right away. It's like-

01:12:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:12:18
Duncan Trussell: ... oh-

01:12:18
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:12:18
Duncan Trussell: ... fuck. This is why they do, this is why they have to put guardrails on this thing.

01:12:22
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my God.

01:12:23
Duncan Trussell: It will write a poem for you about how to make meth. You know, that's the test of if you're, if you really have an uncensored LLM, ask it the meth recipe, and it'll, it'll write a poem, a haiku. It'll write a poem in the style of Shel Silverstein with a way to make meth, among many other things. So I get the guardrails, and I think that points towards him being a good person because he recognizes that the moment you nerf your LLM, it creates an opening for an uncensored LLM.

01:12:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, so you can get around the nerfing.

01:12:55
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, and y- exactly. So this is, this is the pro- like, there's no way to stop it. I mean, you're just gonna be putting holes in the-

01:13:01
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:13:01
Duncan Trussell: ... fucking dam, or fingers in holes. There's not enough fingers.

01:13:04
Eric Weinstein: But, but, but, you know, now that we've done, like, the gloom and the doom-

01:13:07
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:13:07
Eric Weinstein: ... let's also just do the, the raw excitement because in part, if we don't recognize how cool this is-

01:13:13
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:13:14
Eric Weinstein: ... right? Like, there's nothing cooler than a hydrogen bomb, and there's nothing cooler than a laptop that you can watch think in real time.

01:13:21
Duncan Trussell: Exactly. That's how... I'd never thought of hydrogen bombs as cool, and I do wanna say-

01:13:26
Eric Weinstein: Oh

01:13:26
Duncan Trussell: ... after this conversation-

01:13:27
Eric Weinstein: Do me a favor. Go into Oculus

01:13:28
Duncan Trussell: Let me say one thing real quick. As a, as a, a dumb, dumb person relative to you, don't snore me. As a dumb person relative to you-

01:13:37
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:13:37
Duncan Trussell: ... pe- it takes me longer to process data. My, my AI takes a lit- a little bit longer to train than yours. And, uh-

01:13:44
Eric Weinstein: You do crowd work?

01:13:46
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:13:46
Eric Weinstein: Okay. How does anybody do crowd work? It's the most frightening thing for a non-comedian to watch a comedian launch himself into the void.

01:13:54
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] It's fun. That's fun.

01:13:56
Eric Weinstein: Okay, then let's not have an intelligence conversation-

01:13:58
Duncan Trussell: Right

01:13:59
Eric Weinstein: ... that insults my intelligence. You guys are amazing.

01:14:01
Duncan Trussell: Well, okay. So we- Listen, we're, we're both impressed with the other's-

01:14:05
Eric Weinstein: There you go

01:14:05
Duncan Trussell: ... field. But I, um, uh, I will say this, the prior conversation, I recognize the feeling I have, which is, like, you have said things here that I will process, but I already feel uneasy. [laughs] Like, I already have, like, a weird, gloomy, uneasy feeling, so I'm glad we're jumping into the exciting thing.

01:14:22
Eric Weinstein: If we were worried about what was coming, I would be selling you the excitement because I... Look, look, look, let's just take a totally different spin on this.

01:14:34
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

01:14:34
Eric Weinstein: Imagine that you actually said, "Eric, I have no idea how far we are from being interstellar." And I said, "I think we're actually pretty close. I think we're much closer than we imagine."

01:14:46
Duncan Trussell: I love it.

01:14:47
Eric Weinstein: And I think that it's, it's really down to just paying some people to take a retirement. Hit the shower. I don't, I don't need to persecute you. You've, you've ruined physics for 40 years. Ca- can't we get these people a nice, you know, retirement in Bora Bora?

01:15:04
Duncan Trussell: I mean-

01:15:05
Eric Weinstein: L- let's just get 15 people, you know, millions of dollars to shut up about the idea that there are no other approaches to theoretical physics. Can, can we-

01:15:13
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:15:13
Eric Weinstein: ... not find lovely parting gifts for our contestants who failed to do physics for 40 years?

01:15:18
Duncan Trussell: No. They're not leaving.

01:15:19
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But if we could, if those people were cleared out tomorrow, I think we could make progress in physics at the speed of, that, that you've seen the large language models take over. I mean-

01:15:34
Duncan Trussell: I mean, it's, that's so incredible, and also s-

01:15:35
Eric Weinstein: It's so incredible.

01:15:36
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:15:36
Eric Weinstein: And imagine that you're looking at all these beautiful things from the Hubble Space Telescope.

01:15:41
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:15:43
Eric Weinstein: And instead of saying, "Oh man, if we could do a W- a, a, a, an Einstein-Rosen bridge and, and, and a wormhole there, or maybe if we could slow down time through time dilation and we could use generation ships," like, imagine instead of all of that you had somebody say, "Huh, we know that Einstein's general theory of relativity has to be wrong because of the two end singularities at the point of inception in the Big Bang, the initial singularity, and the Schwarzschild singularity at the bottom of a black hole. Ergo, there is a next theory beyond Einstein's that does to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton. And if we found that, maybe there are Easter eggs and cheat codes in that, and the problem of getting to the stars has nothing to do with Einstein-Rosen bridges or time dilation or this or that," or, like, any of the stupid stuff that we've been discussing for N years that, that leads nowhere.

01:16:31
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:16:32
Eric Weinstein: And it's not science fiction-

01:16:34
Duncan Trussell: That's so cool

01:16:34
Eric Weinstein: ... and it's not pseudoscience. It's just science.

01:16:37
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:16:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay? And maybe at some level, uh, the Creator is calling us home and saying, "You don't have to perish."

01:16:45
Duncan Trussell: Listen, I'll tell you this. I love that you said the Creator's calling us home because it is interesting to me. Terrestrial beings stuck in a gravity well because of the fucking weight of their planet, when we see pictures of out there-

01:16:59
Eric Weinstein: Did you say gravity well?

01:17:01
Duncan Trussell: Please don't bully me. Just so you know, when I said Einstein-Rosen bridge, I was proud of myself-

01:17:06
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no

01:17:07
Duncan Trussell: ... for remembering it.

01:17:07
Eric Weinstein: I was, I, I was thinking, you know, Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. [laughs]

01:17:11
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Okay. I've never been bullied. I, you know, as I'm like g- g- just going through the mush of my brain trying to summon up Einstein-Rosen bridge-

01:17:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:17:23
Duncan Trussell: ... with a physicist, I'm like, "He's gonna really like that word," and you're like-

01:17:26
Eric Weinstein: I'm an entertainer

01:17:27
Duncan Trussell: ... "Don't tell me about Einstein-Rosen bridges." But, um, yeah. It's interesting to me that when we do see those pictures-

01:17:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:17:33
Duncan Trussell: ... we wanna go there.

01:17:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:17:35
Duncan Trussell: It draws you.

01:17:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay. That-

01:17:36
Duncan Trussell: It calls you.

01:17:36
Eric Weinstein: Now how, how do I tell you there's a chance? Right? There's this meme, "So you're saying there's a chance?" Yes, I'm saying there's a chance.

01:17:50
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. That's cool.

01:17:51
Eric Weinstein: I'm saying the universe wants to date you.

01:17:54
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

01:17:54
Eric Weinstein: I'm saying the hottest chick in your high school may have taken a liking to you.

01:17:59
Duncan Trussell: Wow.

01:18:00
Eric Weinstein: And it's like you're not gonna go to the gym, you're not gonna make some money, you're not gonna put some effort into it.

01:18:05
Duncan Trussell: Love it.

01:18:05
Eric Weinstein: You're not gonna buy-

01:18:06
Duncan Trussell: Got it

01:18:06
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, g- get your-

01:18:07
Duncan Trussell: I got you

01:18:08
Eric Weinstein: ... jacket dry cleaned. No. You're just gonna say, "Where's my Xbox? I wanna play Call of Duty for a few more hours." Goddammit.

01:18:16
Duncan Trussell: I got you. I got it. I got it. It's beautiful. I got it. I see where you're, I see where you're going here. It's beautiful.

01:18:22
Eric Weinstein: It's beautiful.

01:18:23
Duncan Trussell: And it's so beautiful that probably when people hear, "You know that girl likes you," you're like, "Shut the fuck up. No she doesn't." It's almost too beautiful. It's almost unbearably beautiful. It's so unbearably beautiful, and I, and, and if s- if you're me in high school, many a heartbreak, that you're like, "I'm not even gonna open up to the idea."

01:18:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay. My dream is if my physics stuff ever gets evaluated and it turns out that it's not wrong and I get, you know, invited to The Tonight Show, the song I wanna come out to is Baby Even The Losers Get Lucky Sometimes.

01:18:57
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:18:57
Eric Weinstein: Do you ever listen to that thing?

01:18:59
Duncan Trussell: No.

01:19:00
Eric Weinstein: Tom Petty wrote an amazing song that we gloss over, right? And it's about a guy who for some reason ends up getting lucky above, and I don't mean lucky in just having sex, but somehow-

01:19:14
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:19:14
Eric Weinstein: ... some girl who's way out of his class, way out of his league, smiles on him

01:19:23
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:19:23
Eric Weinstein: ... and they share a moment, you know? And the idea is, man, it's such a drag to live in the past, because he didn't know what he did to make it work. Okay?

01:19:32
Duncan Trussell: Oh, yeah.

01:19:33
Eric Weinstein: Now, my claim is, I think that the universe is winking at us.

01:19:37
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:19:38
Eric Weinstein: I think it's saying, "Hey, well done. It's time to go."

01:19:43
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:19:44
Eric Weinstein: Come. Visit. You've seen the pictures. You've launched a space telescope. You've launched a space teles- I mean, that's insane.

01:19:52
Duncan Trussell: It is beautiful.

01:19:53
Eric Weinstein: Okay? And the mirrors unfolded a- a- and everything worked, and you're seeing things that have never been seen, right? Like, the deep field. And you don't wanna go? What the hell is wrong with you?

01:20:06
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:20:07
Eric Weinstein: It's like y- y- y- you're born in some corner of, of a, a hometown of 217 people, and you don't even wanna go to the, like, other side of town.

01:20:17
Duncan Trussell: Have you ever read The Painted Bird?

01:20:19
Eric Weinstein: No. Tell me about it.

01:20:20
Duncan Trussell: Oh, God, you'll love it.

01:20:21
Eric Weinstein: Tell me.

01:20:22
Duncan Trussell: This is you. You're... It's this very, very... It's a very disturbing book. Jerzy Kosiński. It's this kid during, I think it's post-World War II, he's, like, wandering through these, like, through the forests. I don't... He's... It's a horrible time, and i- i- it's, he's a survivor. He's a survivor. And he's just doing everything he can to survive, and he shouldn't be surviving. He's a kid in this, like, apocalyptic landscape, but this is you. There's this sad scene. It's an incredible scene. He stumbles upon a hutch of rabbits. Big, fat rabbit in a cage. It's gonna get eaten. He opens the hutch up. He describes the forest, beautiful forest right there where that rabbit's meant to go. Rabbit walks down out of the hutch, [sniffs] sniffs the air, and then walks right back into the cage. [laughs] That's you.

01:21:17
Eric Weinstein: Hey, do we have an ability to play a video?

01:21:19
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:21:20
Eric Weinstein: Can we get to Instagram and go to Oleg Criquet? My favorite artist on planet Earth. How do you spell his name? O-L-E-G, and then Criquet, C-R-I-

01:21:37
Duncan Trussell: This is incredible, to pull up video. My God, I've been-

01:21:40
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:21:40
Duncan Trussell: ... doing this all myself.

01:21:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Now, let's, let's keep going down, down, down, down. Fur-

01:21:48
Duncan Trussell: This is not what I expected you to pull up

01:21:50
Eric Weinstein: ... quite a bit f- Well, I asked him to stop doing the art that I wanted, and so he's doing this instead.

01:21:56
Duncan Trussell: Wait, go, scroll back.

01:21:57
Eric Weinstein: No, n- no.

01:21:57
Duncan Trussell: What's that?

01:21:58
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:21:58
Duncan Trussell: Okay.

01:21:59
Eric Weinstein: No, we don't care. He's, look.

01:22:00
Duncan Trussell: I, mm.

01:22:01
Eric Weinstein: He's got an aesthetic. He's got an erotic eye that-

01:22:03
Duncan Trussell: Yes

01:22:03
Eric Weinstein: ... let's, let's keep going.

01:22:04
Duncan Trussell: He does.

01:22:04
Eric Weinstein: No, keep going farther, farther, farther, much farther. Y- This is my favorite artist, and I had to beg him to stop creating. Um-

01:22:18
Duncan Trussell: What do you mean?

01:22:19
Eric Weinstein: I- I'll show you. Well, l- l- let's look at one of the ones that's covered up. Yeah.

01:22:23
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:22:24
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, not see why, but let's see real.

01:22:27
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Oh, fuck.

01:22:29
Eric Weinstein: All right. Let's, let's watch this thing. With the sound on. The sound is good.

01:22:48
Duncan Trussell: No. Jesus.

01:23:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Now, let's keep, let's... I wanna show you his Mona Lisa. So in other words, this-

01:23:07
Duncan Trussell: That's, is that him doing it? That's him on the ledge?

01:23:10
Eric Weinstein: Yes. Keep going. I mean, y- you have no idea. Okay, wait. All right. Uh, uh, j- go back. Over to the left of the ti- uh, where s- where Seattle is. Yeah, there you go. This is his Mona Lisa.

01:23:29
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Oh, shit. No. [laughs]

01:23:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It, and his girlfriend screwed up the first shot, so he had to do it again.

01:23:46
Duncan Trussell: Oh, shit.

01:23:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Now, what I'm trying to say is, that straight into my veins.

01:23:55
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:23:55
Eric Weinstein: Straight in the... We are incredible.

01:23:58
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:23:59
Eric Weinstein: That's us.

01:24:00
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

01:24:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay. We are not those people most of the time.

01:24:06
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:24:07
Eric Weinstein: And what I'm trying to say is, where is the Oleg Criquets of physics? Where are the philanthropic Oleg Criquets?

01:24:14
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:24:14
Eric Weinstein: Where are the, where is the security detail?

01:24:18
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:24:18
Eric Weinstein: Where's Delta Force, man?

01:24:20
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:24:20
Eric Weinstein: I wanna talk to Delta Force guys. I don't wanna talk to people who are so defeatist.

01:24:25
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:24:26
Eric Weinstein: We do the most incredible things regularly.

01:24:30
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:24:31
Eric Weinstein: And that's why I wanna save us.

01:24:34
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. I am for the earlier pictures, it'd be a good reason to save us too.

01:24:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but that's the thing, you know? What people don't understand is what is the point of eroticism? And everybody laughs about eroticism, because it's like sex, and we can't talk about sex, because we have to giggle because it turns us hot.

01:24:51
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:24:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But eroticism is something different. Eroticism is so far beyond procreation. Eroticism is about compelling people to do the ultimate, right?

01:25:04
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:25:04
Eric Weinstein: Because it, it, it's, it's the reward, it's the nectar for absolutely heroic behavior, for far right tail, high kurtosis, positive skew, F you, middle finger, love this life, right?

01:25:22
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:25:22
Eric Weinstein: And so my claim is, is that- You know, I, why did I beg this guy to stop? Because you can't cheat death every time, and the first time he fails, and the first time he slips his entire work and his cannon go into the toilet.

01:25:36
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:25:37
Eric Weinstein: And when I sit here and I get frustrated that nobody's listening, nobody cares, I go back to Oleg. He's the sweetest guy. He has a great relationship with his mom. Um, I love him.

01:25:50
Duncan Trussell: You saved his life.

01:25:51
Eric Weinstein: No. I don't even know if I had an impact on him.

01:25:55
Duncan Trussell: You probably did. Those-

01:25:56
Eric Weinstein: I don't know, but-

01:25:56
Duncan Trussell: I mean, after you talk to him, all we get is, like, hot girls-

01:26:00
Eric Weinstein: But, like-

01:26:00
Duncan Trussell: ... and-

01:26:00
Eric Weinstein: But, like, you know, all sorts of people do rooftop parkour. He's funny. He's witty. You know, he, he's taking a bike or a skateboard, you know, on the edge of the world's tallest buildings in the rain.

01:26:13
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:26:14
Eric Weinstein: And he's making sure that he slips and doesn't do things perfectly.

01:26:18
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:26:18
Eric Weinstein: You know? And, and the fact that he survived just tells you how good he is, how great he is.

01:26:23
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:26:24
Eric Weinstein: And my feeling is every time I hear, "Well, you know, I don't believe in the great man theory of history," it's like, oh, well, who else is doing this at this level? No one.

01:26:33
Duncan Trussell: Got it. I got you, man. You are inviting a very, as far as I'm aware, a small group of people to try to break out of some kind of s-

01:26:43
Eric Weinstein: In your world, I care about Carlin, I care about Bruce, I care about Pryor. I really, really care, um, who am I thinking of who did the marketing, the great marketing routine?

01:26:57
Duncan Trussell: Oh, Hicks.

01:26:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:26:59
Duncan Trussell: Bill Hicks. Yeah.

01:27:00
Eric Weinstein: Oh my God, what a great insight about humanity.

01:27:03
Duncan Trussell: Kill yourself. No, I really mean it. Kill yourself. [laughs] The best.

01:27:07
Eric Weinstein: Oh, Bill's going after the anti-marketing dollar.

01:27:09
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:27:09
Eric Weinstein: That's good dollar.

01:27:10
Duncan Trussell: It's one of my favorite jokes.

01:27:11
Eric Weinstein: One of my favorite jokes.

01:27:12
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. It's the best.

01:27:14
Eric Weinstein: Or, you know, one of my fav- look, negative, negative comedy. Um, the flight of the Concords joke, uh, it's like, "Yo, yo, yo, I'm the hip-hop-potamus, my lyrics are bottomless." I thought that was incredibly funny.

01:27:30
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:27:30
Eric Weinstein: Like, it just stalls out.

01:27:31
Duncan Trussell: So good. I didn't get it for a s- listen, I, so I, I love it, and I think, you know, like with comedy, the difference is, uh, with, it, it seems like with comedy there is an invitation to do some form of, like, cultural parkour. Uh, and, and whereas w- with, in your field, it feels like what you're saying, and, uh, I d- I'm not familiar with it other than having listened to you, and that's r- and, and, uh, like gotten a, a vague understanding of how, um, musty it is in there. Um, uh, there isn't the invitation. There, uh, God, I'm just l- you know, in this book by Schopenhauer, he's saying, I d- I don't remember what the phrase, you know, obviously it's in some other language, a famous phrase, which is, um, "People sing the song of the person giving them bread." And the, uh, because of the nature of the beast that you're in, you have to get funding, and that if you take parkour risks-

01:28:29
Eric Weinstein: It's a lobotomy. We've been lobotomized.

01:28:31
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:28:32
Eric Weinstein: You know, how do I, how do I teach Tony Hinchcliffe differential geometry? How do we get Dave Chappelle, you know, to understand partial differential equations?

01:28:42
Duncan Trussell: You, I mean-

01:28:42
Eric Weinstein: Wh- wh- why doesn't Rogan know geometric algebra?

01:28:45
Duncan Trussell: Listen, you're in trouble because you have to do it. Not teach us how to do it, but you might just have to be the one who invents the thing. I mean, this is the, this is one, this is not Buddhist doctrine.

01:28:56
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:28:56
Duncan Trussell: But there's a, there's a cool story. Um, right, Buddha's under the Bodhi tree about to get enlightened. He's getting all these cities, powers, and he, uh, astrally projects-

01:29:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:29:08
Duncan Trussell: ... into the, um, I don't know, the pa- the, the palace of Indra. There's all the gods. Brahman's there, Vishnu's, all of them are there. And Brahman is like, "What are you," you know, basically, "You can't come here without an invitation. What are you doing, human?" And sends him back. Well, then immediately under the Bodhi tree, Brahman appe- God appears and says to him, "Hey, I'm sorry about being rude." Because Buddha had gone up there 'cause he wanted to ask, "How do I end the suffering of humanity? How do we stop this, all the pain, all the suffering?" And God, Brahman, the originator, says to him, "Listen, I'm so sorry, but here's the problem. The, the, I've just been here longer than the other gods, and I just kinda let them think I was their dad. I'm really sorry, but I have no idea how to do that, so you're gonna have to figure it out." [laughs]

01:30:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I love it.

01:30:07
Duncan Trussell: But that's you. You're, you have to do it. You're not g- these physicists are the br-

01:30:12
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm trying. But, but in part, my, the greatest, the greatest intellectual mistake of my entire life, I think, is not understanding curation.

01:30:26
Duncan Trussell: Hmm.

01:30:26
Eric Weinstein: I think I was so wrong. I've never been this wrong about anything, and I'm wrong about a lot. Until someone says, "I see what he's saying," like I just... When, when is this thing gonna air that you and I are doing?

01:30:42
Duncan Trussell: Um, this'll air this week.

01:30:45
Eric Weinstein: Can we make it after my Rogan episode?

01:30:48
Duncan Trussell: Oh sh- yes. We, uh, we absolutely-

01:30:50
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:30:50
Duncan Trussell: ... when is your Rogan episode?

01:30:51
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. But it has, it has to come after that-

01:30:53
Duncan Trussell: Okay

01:30:54
Eric Weinstein: ... 'cause I don't want it screwed. We, deal?

01:30:56
Duncan Trussell: Deal.

01:30:56
Eric Weinstein: All right. So, you know, I'm on with Terrence Howard, and-

01:31:01
Duncan Trussell: Oh, yeah

01:31:02
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, Terrence is wrong about a lot of stuff. I mean, it's not small.

01:31:08
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:31:09
Eric Weinstein: But he's right about some stuff, and it could be that the stuff that he's right about could be really, really cool.

01:31:15
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:31:15
Eric Weinstein: It's not the stuff that he thinks that he's right about, about the universe and-

01:31:19
Duncan Trussell: Right

01:31:19
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, he's figured out the f- the f- the four forces. He might be right about the drone that he built, you know? And he needs someone to do the slow clap. Because if he doesn't get one of us to do a slow clap, and I've watched my colleagues shit on him.

01:31:39
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:31:40
Eric Weinstein: Except for two colleagues, Ed Frankel and Stefan Alexander, and they said, "You know, I kinda like him. Yeah, maybe he's, he's committed fraud, maybe he's in error-

01:31:52
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:31:52
Eric Weinstein: ... and maybe he's a bit of a liar."

01:31:54
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:31:55
Eric Weinstein: "But it's kinda cool what he's doing below it."

01:31:57
Duncan Trussell: That's cool.

01:31:57
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so at some level, you're nobody until somebody figures out what you did and analyzes it and, and says something about it.

01:32:08
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:32:08
Eric Weinstein: You know? And, uh, that's what curation is. Somebody has to point to you and says-

01:32:14
Duncan Trussell: I got you

01:32:15
Eric Weinstein: ... "I can see what he's saying."

01:32:16
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:32:17
Eric Weinstein: And right now I'm like 41 years into a conversation with myself, and so, you know, that's very, that's very frustrate- I- if we could pull up a, um, a, an interaction, my c- maybe my favorite film is Kung Fu Panda.

01:32:33
Duncan Trussell: Are you kidding me? Kung Fu Panda? I haven't seen it yet. For some reason I avoided watching it. I didn't think it'd be good.

01:32:39
Eric Weinstein: Kung Fu Panda, and then maybe put peach tree.

01:32:44
Duncan Trussell: This is amazing. [laughs]

01:32:45
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. It's, it's not, it's not good. This is trans- this-

01:32:48
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:32:48
Eric Weinstein: Kung Fu Panda one.

01:32:50
Duncan Trussell: Oh my God, this is awesome.

01:32:53
Eric Weinstein: Nobody pays for YouTube.

01:32:55
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:32:56
Eric Weinstein: It's very funny. We're all too cheap, 'cause-

01:32:58
Duncan Trussell: I-

01:32:58
Eric Weinstein: ... I think it's not b- the money. We just don't wanna give them money.

01:33:02
Duncan Trussell: Oh, shit. Yeah, the audio's weird.

01:33:07
Eric Weinstein: So you have to understand that I'm obsessed with a problem, which is I think teaching destroys self-teaching.

01:33:16
Duncan Trussell: It could.

01:33:17
Eric Weinstein: And we haven't figured out how self-teachers can leave self-teachers as their students, because we keep teaching and then we destroy it.

01:33:27
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:33:27
Eric Weinstein: This film is addressed to that problem, and that's sort of the most remarkable thing about this film is is that I got dragged to it. I was very unexcited to see this. And-

01:33:39
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, I would've been unexcited, but-

01:33:40
Eric Weinstein: All right, let's go to the beginning.

01:33:43
Duncan Trussell: Energy is one of the number one priorities when you're a parent, and AG1 contains ingredients that support sustained energy so I can be the best parent I could possibly be every day. No kid wants a tired 50-year-old parent. I already decided to be an old dad. I don't need to burden my kids with being some frail, trembling, moody thing. I need that AG1 powder. My family needs it. Also, it's great for my gut biome. Let me tell you, that could use some help. There's one product I trust to support my whole body health. It's AG1, and that's why I've partnered with them for so long. It's easy and satisfying to start your journey with AG1. Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase at drinkag1.com/duncan. That's drinkag1.com/duncan. Check it out.

01:34:41
Eric Weinstein: The, um, what happens in this film is that the two important characters, the two pivotal characters, meet really twice, but for only one substantive conversation. And under this tree, and I hope this appeals to your Buddhism, uh, the original self-teacher touches a student, but doesn't teach him. He has to convey what he has to convey-

01:35:16
Duncan Trussell: Oh

01:35:16
Eric Weinstein: ... in some way that he doesn't, he doesn't destroy the gossamer that is, uh, self-actualization.

01:35:24
Duncan Trussell: Oh, yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, that is classic. Very frustrating in Buddhism. W- describe the scene, because people-

01:35:33
Eric Weinstein: The three characters here that really matter, there's Oogway, who unravels the secrets of harmony and focus at the pool of sacred tears, who Shifu is scared of. Now, Shifu is the ultimate technical kung fu master. Um, he's absolutely amazing, but he's in awe of his teacher, who's this turtle, which is a terrible kung fu archetype. I mean-

01:35:58
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, true

01:35:58
Eric Weinstein: ... who's scared of a slow-moving turtle?

01:36:00
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:36:00
Eric Weinstein: And the panda is huge and fat, and is basically a fanboy, uh, in modern parlance-

01:36:06
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:36:06
Eric Weinstein: ... of this kung fu school, and you have the five great kung fu students that represent the various styles of kung fu. And the turtle chooses the panda as his successor, and the panda isn't a kung fu artist. He just, he's so desperate to get into the kung fu competition to choose a successor that he, after failing 18 times, straps himself to a cart filled with fireworks and makes a makeshift rocket to hop the wall.

01:36:36
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:36:36
Eric Weinstein: He embarrasses himself and lands at the feet of the great master. He says, "The universe has brought us the Dragon Warrior."

01:36:41
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:36:41
Eric Weinstein: So then the question is, like, okay, Shifu rev- reveres Oogway. Oogway says, "This is my successor." Everyone's angry because it's not them.

01:36:52
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:36:53
Eric Weinstein: The panda says, like, "How can it be me?"

01:36:55
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:36:56
Eric Weinstein: And the panda is overeating these peaches, which is what he does when he gets upset, and he's at this sacred peach tree, like, stealing the peaches.

01:37:05
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Cool.

01:37:05
Eric Weinstein: So he's like, you know, he's that fraud, thief, bad kid-

01:37:10
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:37:10
Eric Weinstein: ... with a pure heart. And Oogway just barely touches him and, and they have this one brief conversation. My life revolves around this.

01:37:23
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:37:23
Eric Weinstein: I have, I have a son who I didn't teach, and you know, he's picked up almost all the stuff that I, that I know and love, and people imagine, "Well, you taught him all of those things." I'm like, "No."

01:37:37
Duncan Trussell: Right

01:37:38
Eric Weinstein: You know, because I could see I had a self-teacher.

01:37:41
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:37:42
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, like to me, what we're doing with peer review and with, like trying to spot the flaw in each other's arguments and then, you know, taking a victory lap. "Well, your stuff doesn't work," and-

01:37:55
Duncan Trussell: Right

01:37:57
Eric Weinstein: ... it's the most egoic orgi- it's, it's, it's an orgy of ego.

01:38:02
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:38:02
Eric Weinstein: And it's like we've forgotten what we're actually doing. We're LARPing, and we don't realize that we're on the clock. And then, you know, like the No Country for Old Men scene in the gas station. You know this?

01:38:16
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

01:38:17
Eric Weinstein: Right. So Anton Chigurh, you know, is basically saying, he's, "I..." The guy said, "I didn't put nothing up." He's like, "You've been putting it up your whole life. You just didn't know it."

01:38:26
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:38:27
Eric Weinstein: And that's the thing. It's like you're on the clock.

01:38:31
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:38:32
Eric Weinstein: Every day you're on the clock. I have about 10,000 days left if I take care of myself and I don't have any accidents, right?

01:38:42
Duncan Trussell: Maybe longer.

01:38:44
Eric Weinstein: You don't have to say that.

01:38:45
Duncan Trussell: No, just be-

01:38:45
Eric Weinstein: Maybe shorter.

01:38:46
Duncan Trussell: Well, right. Maybe much shorter.

01:38:47
Eric Weinstein: But my point is, you don't get that many days in a life. You could figure out how many weeks you'd have left, and it would freak you out. You could freak- figure out, like years you sort of are used to, but you haven't calculated your number of months.

01:39:01
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Yeah, this is at a, at a Ram Dass retreat. I know you hate him.

01:39:05
Eric Weinstein: No, no-

01:39:05
Duncan Trussell: You hate love.

01:39:06
Eric Weinstein: No, stop.

01:39:07
Duncan Trussell: I'm joking. [laughs] At a, at a Ram Dass retreat. Do you know who Bob Thurman is? You'd love him.

01:39:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?

01:39:14
Duncan Trussell: He's brilliant. He's a, um, he, he's a, a Buddhist scholar.

01:39:20
Eric Weinstein: Wait, did you meet Ram Dass?

01:39:21
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. He married me and my wife.

01:39:23
Eric Weinstein: No kidding.

01:39:24
Duncan Trussell: No kidding, yeah. Yeah.

01:39:26
Eric Weinstein: He's kind of a hero to me, I should say.

01:39:28
Duncan Trussell: Oh, you w- Yeah. You, you fit right in, and he would've loved you. The, um, the, um, Thurman, um, is just, is a Buddhist scholar. He's brilliant. And, you know, this is-

01:39:41
Eric Weinstein: Is this the Columbia professor?

01:39:43
Duncan Trussell: I don't know if he's a Columbia professor. He might have been a Columbia professor, I think so. I'm not positive. Um, I just know him from the retreats, and whenever he comes, everyone's so lucky 'cause like he's just so great. And he gets up in front of all these hippies.

01:39:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:39:57
Duncan Trussell: Many of them are like into Bhakti yoga. You know, many of them are theists.

01:40:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:40:02
Duncan Trussell: And the first thing he says is, "Be here now." What does that even mean?

01:40:05
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:40:06
Duncan Trussell: He goes, "What does that mean? What, does anyone know what, what that means? Does anyone even know what that means?" And he goes, "Practice, practice, practice. Everyone here is always talking about their practice." He's like, "I'd like to see some of you play for once." [laughs] You know? Like pointing out, I think, exactly what you're pointing out, which is like at some point this needs, there's action here. There ... Let's do it, not just like-

01:40:29
Eric Weinstein: Let's do it.

01:40:30
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, yeah. Let's go for it.

01:40:32
Eric Weinstein: Are, are you an Osho fan?

01:40:33
Duncan Trussell: I, I, I, I think he's interesting. I-

01:40:35
Eric Weinstein: He's super interesting.

01:40:36
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, and I like a lot of the things he said are really intri- funny to me.

01:40:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:40:40
Duncan Trussell: But I haven't focused on him at all. I've, I got one of his books, and I just, I, I didn't-

01:40:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, he's very disarming. He, you know, the, in part one of these things that people don't understand what cults are because they imagine cults are just stupid.

01:40:52
Duncan Trussell: Oh, yeah. Right.

01:40:53
Eric Weinstein: Right? And it's like it's pretty hard to run a cult if you don't have anything really insightful to say.

01:40:58
Duncan Trussell: Oh, I know.

01:40:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:40:59
Duncan Trussell: That's true. That's what's beautiful about them.

01:41:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:41:01
Duncan Trussell: That's why I get frustrated in cult documentaries when they leave out the philosophy. It's like, don't just show the end stage, like collapse of the cult. Let's hear what was-

01:41:10
Eric Weinstein: Let's see-

01:41:11
Duncan Trussell: ... icky about-

01:41:11
Eric Weinstein: ... how beautiful the interracial relations were, uh, with, you know, Jonestown before it all went south.

01:41:17
Duncan Trussell: Exactly.

01:41:18
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:41:19
Duncan Trussell: What drew all those people in? 'Cause inadvertently you make the, the, the, the, the victim seem like, uh, idiots, and it's like-

01:41:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, Scientology, the reactive mind is in part the discovery that, of large language models, that you're just doing auto-completions.

01:41:35
Duncan Trussell: That's right. I, so yeah, and I, and I, I don't mean to de- derail what you're saying, but this is, this does point back to what you were saying earlier, which is like with Terrence Howard. It's like if we just reject completely something without, if we just throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know, we're never ever gonna get the baby. And sometimes there's a lot of bathwater, but there's a baby in there, and like learning how to filter it.

01:41:57
Eric Weinstein: But, sure. What, what pisses me off about Terrence is, is that I, I would never have done this episode if it weren't for Joe. I didn't do it for Terrence. I did it for Joe because I felt like Terrence fooled Joe in a certain sense.

01:42:12
Duncan Trussell: Mm.

01:42:12
Eric Weinstein: And Joe's very, you know ... Because Joe is so genuine, and he's got such a beautiful heart, and he's so smart-

01:42:19
Duncan Trussell: Yeah

01:42:19
Eric Weinstein: ... even he pretends not to be and whatever, he built this thing that is huge. And so he still has the idea, like, "Hey, it's just my little studio, and I'm having-

01:42:26
Duncan Trussell: Right, right

01:42:26
Eric Weinstein: ... conversations with people I enjoy talking to."

01:42:28
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:42:29
Eric Weinstein: And it's like, yes, but the world reverberates around it, and now you've got a problem because it isn't, you know, you're a really big dog, and so you just created a mass delusion.

01:42:40
Duncan Trussell: Mm-hmm.

01:42:41
Eric Weinstein: Right? The Terrence Howard mass delusion was catalyzed by our friend Joe Rogan, and, you know, Joe will say something like, "I've got this amazing bullshit detector." And it's like, well, we all have a great bullshit detector for the bullshit that we know how to detect.

01:42:57
Duncan Trussell: [laughs]

01:42:57
Eric Weinstein: And then we all have ... You know, I had this conversation with Bret East Ellis, uh, about seduction. If you're too smart, you'll never be seduced, and if you never get seduced during your life, you really haven't lived.

01:43:12
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. That's right.

01:43:14
Eric Weinstein: You gotta fall for something.

01:43:15
Duncan Trussell: Hell yeah. It's the best. Are you kidding?

01:43:18
Eric Weinstein: It, it can be. You can also just find out that, you know, you got taken advantage of, and you can be scarred for the rest of your life, but a great seduction, wow. Can you imagine passing through this life never having had that pleasure?

01:43:34
Duncan Trussell: I can't imagine passing through this life never having seen your eyes. [laughs]

01:43:43
Eric Weinstein: If only I weren't so goddamn straight.

01:43:46
Duncan Trussell: [laughs] Oh, man. Uh, you know, I get it. You really... I get it. It's good. Y- it's good to start off with the gloomy stuff, and it's beautiful. Even just the idea that just maybe, just maybe there is a way-

01:44:05
Eric Weinstein: Yes

01:44:06
Duncan Trussell: ... out of this gravity well. Just the idea alone, even though I don't understand anything about physics, is so invigorating. It gets you, like, going, doesn't it?

01:44:16
Eric Weinstein: Come with me if you want to live.

01:44:19
Duncan Trussell: I wanna live.

01:44:19
Eric Weinstein: Oh, well, that's the thing, right? Like, when Arnold says that, "Come with me if you want to live," you wanna talk about seduction. What a line.

01:44:28
Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Yeah.

01:44:29
Eric Weinstein: Come with me if you want to live.

01:44:31
Duncan Trussell: Jesus said it first. [laughs]

01:44:35
Eric Weinstein: I gotta tell you, I'm really proud of him. Of all our carpenters, perhaps he's the greatest we ever produced.

01:44:41
Duncan Trussell: Uh, he's, you know, I've seen better carpenters, but he was pretty-

01:44:44
Eric Weinstein: Really? The Japanese join work is amazing.

01:44:46
Duncan Trussell: Yeah, he couldn't do that shit. [laughs]

01:44:48
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:44:50
Duncan Trussell: But he was a g- he was a good public speaker.

01:44:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:44:53
Duncan Trussell: Um, I could talk to you forever, but-

01:44:56
Eric Weinstein: Let's do that

01:44:57
Duncan Trussell: ... I... Let's do it. You know what you need to do? You need to create a Discord server where people like Joe and, like, comics and people can c- and, like, can just-

01:45:08
Eric Weinstein: I, I created one, and it became filled with psychopaths, who all they wanted to do was, like, we, we, you know, we would monitor what they would be talking to, to each other about. And, like, "Oh, I've gotta f- I've gotta fool Eric into thinking I like him so I can get on Rogan." And it was just like-

01:45:22
Duncan Trussell: Ugh, that's the worst

01:45:23
Eric Weinstein: ... Oh, my God.

01:45:24
Duncan Trussell: That-

01:45:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, P- PhDs doing this.

01:45:25
Duncan Trussell: Oh, it's so gross when people do that. It's so disgusting. I hate that.

01:45:28
Eric Weinstein: I hate that.

01:45:29
Duncan Trussell: It makes you feel so gross and used when you realize, like, what the fuck? Like, you were just trying to, like, get on my friend's podcast.

01:45:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but that's the thing. If you have nothing, you spend your time trying to figure out how you can g- make the world better by tearing people down.

01:45:47
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:45:48
Eric Weinstein: Right? And it- people who are very, very talented and skilled who have nothing are very, very dangerous. And, you know, what I wish on my enemies is that they would have something beautiful, because then they wouldn't be my enemies.

01:46:03
Duncan Trussell: That's it.

01:46:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:46:05
Duncan Trussell: Wow. You really are a Buddhist. Well, I'll end on that. You've accepted God.

01:46:11
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:46:11
Duncan Trussell: You're a theistic Buddhist. [laughs] Okay, we did it. [laughs] Thank you for your time.

01:46:16
Eric Weinstein: Duncan, what an honor to be invited.

01:46:17
Duncan Trussell: Oh-

01:46:17
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me

01:46:17
Duncan Trussell: ... like, I'm so honored by you being a guest. Thank you. Where can people find you? Do, is there anyth- anything I could send them?

01:46:23
Eric Weinstein: I've tried, you know... I've been sort of retreating. I, y- I would say find the YouTube channel. Uh, find the Er- Instagram, Eric R. Weinstein, Eric R. Weinstein on-

01:46:32
Duncan Trussell: Okay

01:46:32
Eric Weinstein: ... X, Twitter. Um, but the thing is, is that I have, like, you know, four years ago, I stopped the podcast because of all of the madness, and I didn't like being commodified or misunderstood-

01:46:44
Duncan Trussell: Mm

01:46:44
Eric Weinstein: ... and all this kind of stuff. I wanna be a human being.

01:46:46
Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

01:46:47
Eric Weinstein: Um, I think I'm gonna have to bring it back.

01:46:48
Duncan Trussell: Yes.

01:46:48
Eric Weinstein: And the whole i-... Well, the, the issue is, is that it's entertainment, jazz hands, right? But the whole point of being entertaining is the payload. The, the entertainment is the vehicle.

01:46:58
Duncan Trussell: Right.

01:46:59
Eric Weinstein: And the payload is what matters to me. And what I have to do is to figure out some way of getting people to realize I am s- I'm happy to joke, I'm happy to be funny, to be light, all of those things, but you're never going to live the amazing life that you watch in movies that move you, you know, just shake you to your core if you don't realize that what I'm saying is, is real. The clock is ticking. The opportunity has never been bigger, but the danger has never been more imminent in your entire life. And I don't know whether we have, like, two months or 70 years. I really... I used to think it was 300 years. I keep bringing that number in farther and farther. Until we have adults, we're not going to be able to actually execute on something. Um, so what I'm trying to do is to try to figure out how do I create an entertaining product where people actually don't just say, "I want another episode," they say, "Holy cow, I get it."

01:48:00
Duncan Trussell: Well, I'll help you figure it out. I can translate this for you. I'm gonna go study Einstein-Rosen bridges so that I, I don't never talk about them.

01:48:07
Eric Weinstein: Teach me misdirection and timing.

01:48:09
Duncan Trussell: Easy.

01:48:11
Eric Weinstein: Fantastic.

01:48:11
Duncan Trussell: Easy.

01:48:12
Eric Weinstein: Duncan, thanks so much.

01:48:12
Duncan Trussell: Thank you so much, my friend. That was Eric Weinstein, everybody. All the links you need to find him will be at dunkantrussell.com. Thank you so much for watching and listening. I love you. Bye.