33: Josh Wolfe - The Mind Financing The Future

The Mind Financing The Future
Information
Guest	Josh Wolfe
Length	01:42:37
Release Date	3 May 2020
Apple Podcasts	Listen
Links
Portal Blog	Read
All Episodes << >>

Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital is a leading mind in the current wave of venture capitalists making waves. While aware of each other for some time, in this episode Josh sits down with Eric for their first meeting. Together the two explore various topics from comparing notes on their encounters with Jim Watson of DNA fame, to talking about what society gets wrong and how to see that as a source of opportunity.

It is frequently asked what makes a great venture capitalist. This conversation reveals that it is likely not one thing but a combination of rigor, breath, flexibility of mind, openness, self-skepticism and mental courage to take on the unknown. That is because the myriad concerns that arise in any early stage attempt to grab the future by the tail from only the information available to us in the present will easily overwhelm those with narrow specializations. As the conversation takes many twists and turns, Josh's flexibility is put to the test as he freely doles out numerous wise observations from his wealth of experience.

Sponsors

• Personna: Amazing.com/personna and use the code RAZORS25

• Wine Access: Wineaccess.com/portal

• Express VPN: Expressvpn.com/portal

• Quip: Quip.com/portal

Transcript

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [intro music] Hello, this is Eric with a few thoughts to share that have been on my mind this week before we get to this episode's conversation. I wanna share a line of thinking that many of you initially may find somewhat unsettling. Nevertheless, I believe that at least some of you will find it interesting, and perhaps ultimately even liberating or useful. The theory is this: when powerful people use their advantage to engage in new involuntary transfers of wealth, safety, or freedom from those too weak to defend themselves, the winners are almost always forced to create an idealism as a cover for their siphoning. In simpler terms, these idealisms are actually cover stories or bespoke fig leaves which almost exactly fit the extraction or taking that they are tailored to mask. Once this is understood, we realize that to test this theory, each wave of idealism would have to be matched to a highly specific effective confession for an injustice that pervaded the era in which it was found. This concept of idealism as disguising theft is of course an upsetting cognitive shift. It is therefore naturally initially difficult to come to see the waves of idealism that characterized each era that we have lived through, not as the best of our aspirations for a better world, but rather as the photographic negative of the greed of our own ruling classes. For example, the idealism of United States competitiveness was everywhere in the nineteen eighties and early to mid-nineteen nineties. At that time, it seemed to be about the need for all Americans to pull together and get back into fighting shape as a country. Looking below the surface however, it was not really about the need of managers, owners, and workers to pull together through shared austerity to reinvigorate American industry. Rather, it was a false idealism that instructed organized American labor to give up hard-won gains that were then not matched by comparable sacrifices from the other groups. Once United States labor had been sufficiently humbled and attenuated in its power by the mid-nineteen nineties, the drumbeat of patriotic competitiveness gave way to the post-national Davos idealism of a world without borders, singing the praises of financial inclusion, trade, immigration, and philanthropy. With the maudlin sentiments of nineteen eighty-five's We Are the World as its anthem, the purpose of the post-national movement was not to include those overseas, but instead to allow the wealthy of the industrialized world to break the bonds with their fellow citizens of the working class, and to access cheaper labor pools abroad using far-flung supply chains. Likewise, the idealism of so-called constructive engagement with governments like Communist China's would be seen through this lens as the rationalization for ignoring issues of human rights and strategic risk in such a way as to benefit economically in the short term while selling out American interests in the long term. Meanwhile, back home in the States, the techno-utopian perspective that arose to dominate the Bay Area of California held that information just wants to be free, and that now transparency is king because privacy is dead. Perversely, as you would expect in this theory, this hippy-dippy sounding digital vision is exactly what ushered in the surveillance economy as the platforms became not windows, but half-silvered mirrors through which the social media barons learned every intimate detail about their users. These startups-turned-techno-behemoths turned the most intimate personal details of our private lives into their proprietary business data, which was as far from free or transparent as one could possibly imagine. The idealism of gender and identity too fits this exact pattern. Second-wave feminism seemed to be about recognizing the intrinsic worth of women in the workforce, but it may also be seen as an employer's dream to push out the labor supply curve in such a way as to make the previous single breadwinner household require a second income just to keep pace. The politics of identity, which caught fire in the wake of the twenty ten Colorado Senate upset, are explained largely by economist Pia Malaney's theory that identity is the cheapest substitute for the labor voting bloc which demanded far more significant economic concessions. More bizarrely, the strange media ritual of pointing the finger of Islamophobia at anyone who dares ask about a mass murder in which the killer triumphantly shouts, "Allahu Akbar," amidst bloody and sadistic mayhem, may well be about protecting transfer payments from oil-rich monarchies, while the official admonition to see the niqab, hijab, burka, and clitoridectomy predominantly as ethnic differences or symbols of female liberation is so absurd as to go a long way towards establishing the need for some theory as this to fill the space. The left-leaning idealism of making housing affordable for all led to many bad loans that inflated the housing bubble, while the right-leaning Ayn Randian idealism of self-regulating markets practiced by Alan Greenspan allowed the banks to privatize gains while socializing the risks and losses. The giving pledge too may well be an attempt to keep governments from clawing back unpaid taxes from carefully sheltered fortunes or establishing wealth and asset taxes in a period of radical inequality. In this sense, it can be seen as something of a bargain. If I promise to screw over my own children for charity, I hope that you will leave me alone and unquestioned to enjoy my vast and carefully sheltered wealth while I'm alive. And as we have just seen with the Biden endorsements from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and former Senator Hillary Clinton, the Me Too movement appears to be less about sexual assault and more about adding a tool for extrajudicial vigilantism, which can be wielded selectively or kept sheathed according to taste. Suffice it to say that #believeallwomen has now given way to #believeconvenientwomen. So you may ask, why bring this up now? Well, in my opinion, what we need now is someone who is not part of any of the official idealisms. Of course, that would have sounded quite weird in isolation if I had simply said that we need an anti-utopian to lead us. Wouldn't we want someone of vision, a dreamer-doer hybrid, to point the way? No. We want someone who has not signed on for any of these horrible anti-patriotic charades from either party. Someone who never believed in free trade, free markets, post-nationalism, housing for all, deregulation, competitiveness, et cetera, et cetera. We need someone who is not close with Jeffrey Epstein. And who does not possess significant financial relationships abroad. Additionally, someone alienated by both the hardline pro-life and pro-choice perspectives would be perfect for where most Americans are today. Since the time of Nixon, we have been in an era of predatory idealism with our best impulses used against us from both right and left. It is now time to get back to the hard work of cleaning up from two disastrous generations of failed businesspeople, politicians, reporters, and professors. And perhaps most importantly, we need to flush our dependence on near-totalitarian communist China out of our system before it is too late. So I will leave you with this thought. One of the false idealisms that I have held back is the fight against ageism. The current seniors in firm control of our world benefited immensely from mandatory retirement policies for their elders and a general sense that used to be common. This was that long-term policy should be made by those who will have to live for many years in the world that they will create. By two thousand and nine, when Joe Biden, for example, left the Senate to become vice president, he was already quite advanced as the fourth most senior senator at the time. But he had actually been a senator at that point for thirty-seven years, since nineteen seventy-two, when he was first elected at the age of twenty-nine. As luck would have it, this is almost exactly the year in which wages suddenly and mysteriously stagnated after twenty-five or so magical years of post-war technologically led growth. This stagnation is what ushered in all of the false idealisms that we have discussed here previously. We need young and dynamic people again to reinvigorate our society, but fifty years of fake idealisms have now piled up to create an unequal nation that cannot be explained by productivity. Most all of our idealisms have been poisonous and from both left and right. In that at least, we have been relentlessly bipartisan for almost fifty years. After a few brief words from our sponsors, I'll be back with the introduction to today's episode. [guitar music] Returning sponsor Personna has been making razors for almost a hundred and forty-five years, and I've recently shifted over completely to Personna's Men's five-blade razor. Why? Because as a mathematician, I don't actually think about shaving while I'm shaving. I think about math. And their pivoting design makes sure that I don't get nicks and cuts. Plus, the quick rinse technology means that the shaving process is much faster and easier. So if you want to think about something else in the shower, you'll love Personna. The difference between my old razor and Personna has been profound. I've switched over completely. I'm getting a great shave, and I feel aligned with the company. I think you'll love it too. So order from Amazon today, and you'll get an extra twenty-five percent off your first order. It'll be shipped directly to your door with zero hassle, which is a terrific help during the corona lockdown. So don't wait. Go to amazon.com/personna and use our discount code razors25. That's amazon.com/personna, P-E-R-S-O-N-N-A, and use the code razors25 for twenty-five percent off your first order. Amazon.com/personna, code razors25. Ever wonder why no newspaper on Earth seems to have the resources to find Ghislaine Maxwell and no country on Earth seems to know exactly where she is? Well, I have an offbeat theory. You see, as one of the top VPNs, our loyal sponsor ExpressVPN of course can give you the ability to protect your data on an open channel. But it also gives you the ability to hide your IP address and let you control where you want sites to think that you're located. You can choose already from almost a hundred different countries. Just think about it. This whole week in quarantine, you could have been using ExpressVPN to give you a London IP address so that you could watch Doctor Who on UK Netflix or a Tokyo IP address so that you could watch Japanese anime on Japanese Netflix at the same time as Ghislaine Maxwell was projecting her IP address somewhere else. So if you visit our special link right now at expressvpn.com/portal, you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. That's expressvpn.com/portal. You'll be supporting the show and watching what you want and protecting yourself at the same time with ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com/portal. [guitar music] If you follow technology at the moment, ask yourself this question: Who is the venture capitalist who currently has the scent of innovation in twenty twenty and is most likely to be on the trail of the future? In previous eras, I have heard many different names, but lately I've been hearing the name Josh Wolfe from some of the people I respect most. Josh is a founder of Lux Capital and the owner of a powerful and unusual mind. The thing I always have to remind myself about venture capital is just how many different skills it requires to do well. Even our best ideas are subjected to numerous hazards on the way to implementation, including intellectual property challenges, fraud, fierce competitors, interpersonal dysfunction, loss of funding, marketing failures, regulatory hurdles, and a host of other concerns. Thus, rather than talking about venture capital specifically, I thought I would try to explore the idea that most all leading venture capitalists are great intellectual generalists, conversationalists, and contrarians. Now, why would that be? Well, first of all, investing in technology requires having a broad analytic base because when you are trying to invent the future, you never really know how to prepare for the next large opportunity that is going to walk through your door. Thus, the generalist's ability to integrate many different areas of interest will typically be able to outcompete the specialist's advantage in a very narrow silo of knowledge. Next, conversational skill seems to be very important, but at a technical level. This is true in part because it is often easier to tell whether someone is genuine and on top of their game by testing them on intellectual flexibility and insight well outside of their carefully prepared pitch, and it is easiest to do this if you can put that person at ease. Lastly, I wanted to say something about contrarianism, namely that it is actually misnamed. Simply putting a minus sign in front of whatever the crowd appears to believe is an excellent way to go bankrupt quickly and really has nothing to do with being a contrarian if you'll think about it. Contrarianism is usually not so much about whether the crowd is wrong, but about exploring in what highly specific ways the world may not be alert to possibilities or courageous enough to consider their implications. In this episode, I think Josh reveals that his mind and approach exemplifies all these traits in spades. This first meeting took place at the end of 2019, and I've become an eager consumer of his thinking in the time since. If you want to hear what the crest of the new wave of venture capitalists sound like in 2020, you could do worse than to listen to Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital for the ease and fearlessness with which he appears to explore any landscape of new ideas. We will be right back with my uninterrupted conversation with Josh after these words from our sponsors. [guitar music] Okay, let's face up to it. I've talked to you about the miracle that is your teeth before, and most of us still can't get excited about it. You've got a mouth full of hard, white jewels, and you're still not thinking about brushing and flossing often enough. In fact, about 75% of us use old, worn-out bristles that are ineffective, and even more people forget to floss daily. That's where returning sponsor Quip really comes in handy. You see, good health starts with good habits, and Quip makes it easy by delivering the oral care essentials that you need to brush and floss better. The Quip electric toothbrush that I use has timed sonic vibrations with 30-second pulses for each quadrant of my mouth to guide a dentist-recommended two-minute routine, and the Quip brush head, toothpaste, and floss refills are automatically delivered on a dentist-recommended schedule every three months so that I don't have to think about it. And if you go to getquip.com/portal right now, you'll get your first refill for free. That's your first refill free at getquip.com/portal, spelled get Q-U-I-P dot com slash portal. Quip, they're the good habits company. All right, the entire planet may be stuck at home under quarantine, but what will you have to show for it? Are you writing the novel that you always dreamed of? Are you perhaps composing the symphony that will bring people back to the orchestra? Or maybe you're just getting into the most fabulous shape of your life, shedding pounds hand over fist. Well, if you're doing those things, you're probably listening to Naval Ravikant or perhaps to Jocko Willink. But if you're listening to this podcast, I hope you're drinking heavily, and that's where returning sponsor Wine Access really comes in handy. You see, as I'm whooping it up and singing and drinking my way through indistinguishable evenings that bleed one into the next, Wine Access' team of wine experts are violating the quarantine to scour the globe from Napa to Burgundy and bring me exceptional values from offbeat labels. In some sense, it's like getting to visit the best wine regions of the world but from the comfort of my own home-ish. In any event, Wine Access will deliver these straight to my doorstep. So join me, won't you, and shop their online store at any time, no subscription needed, and you'll find amazing values. With wineaccess.com/portal, you're gonna get yourself one hell of a bottle. With wineaccess.com/portal, so why not order them bottles tonight? For a limited time, you can support the show and get $20 off your first purchase of $50 or more. [guitar music] [upbeat music] Hello, you've found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I'm joined by none other than Josh Wolfe, the co-founder of Lux Capital. Josh, welcome.

00:15:24
Josh Wolfe: Great to be here.

00:15:24
Eric Weinstein: So I've heard a lot about you. Um, you have a tremendous amount of respect right now from a lot of the innovators that I'm listening to in technology, and they think that maybe you've got the ball with respect to venture capital. Can you tell me a little bit, not about venture capital, but about what you can see from the perch of venture capital that the rest of us might not be able to see at the moment in terms of this moment in time in our innovative history?

00:15:49
Josh Wolfe: Well, I think the probably cliched thing of venture generally, and, you know, this, this extends beyond us specifically, is the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And the people who are inventing it are the scientists and, uh, you know, typically engineers that, uh, often inspired by science fiction say, "I want that thing to be real," and then they go and make it so. And our job is to basically find them before others have and take this asymmetric view. Uh, it's sort of the power of somebody who has a secret. Um, I think it was the, um, you know, Nobel laureate, uh, uh, who had the, uh, the quote that, you know, "I know something that nobody else knows, and they won't know until I tell them." And it's that sort of power and that asymmetry that we're trying to find just as investors. So we go and scour the world trying to find really cutting edge technologists and engineers and entrepreneurs that, uh, are building the future, and then we have to figure out if they're full of shit or not.

00:16:38
Eric Weinstein: That's a great place to be. You know, there's a famous story about, uh, Eddington, who I guess was the first person to sort of test Einstein's general theory, that he was, uh, courting his lady love on a, on a bench looking at the night sky. And, uh, his gal said something like, "How beautiful are the night stars?" And he says, "Yes, and right now I'm the only person [chuckles] on earth who knows why they shine."

00:17:01
Josh Wolfe: Ah.

00:17:01
Eric Weinstein: Talk about, uh-

00:17:03
Josh Wolfe: I love that

00:17:03
Eric Weinstein: ... great patter. Um, so you're looking for secrets, but you, you actually stepped, uh, into an area that I'm passionate about, which is I'm terrified that our actual innovators, the people who really break the new ground, get completely, uh, screwed over in the feeding chain because they have to invent the future out of personal need, and so they're not watching the ball. And you see the same thing in music, that the people who love the music are often preyed upon to some extent by the industry, which is extremely extractive. And so if you don't survive long enough to learn how the game goes, very often you wind up as prey for the predators that are supposedly simply helping the value chain along. Do you see that at the moment?

00:17:51
Josh Wolfe: Uh, well, I think that's a firm-by-firm kind of thing. So if we were predatory upon-

00:17:55
Eric Weinstein: Oh, sorry. It, it has nothing to do with Lux Capital.

00:17:58
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, no, no, I know, I know. But, but I think generally, uh, it, it... This is a, a sidebar if I can go off on a tangent here, which is the transactional nature of certain businesses. I think about, like, Turkish, uh, rug salesmen or something. You know, like, you go to the Blue Mosque and, um, uh, you know, you go to the bazaar. You have a one-time interaction with that person. And so the game theory of it is that they can completely screw you over, right? Because they're never gonna see you again, and they'll churn through people. In venture capital generally, I think that, um, it's a game theoretic, uh, where, uh, I'm only as good as the last deal that I did, and I've gotta maintain a long-term reputation that's compromised if somehow you exploit somebody because your, you know, reputation will very quickly spread in a negative way.

00:18:36
Eric Weinstein: That assumes that the person who's going to be exploited is the CEO that's coming to seek the venture capital.

00:18:43
Josh Wolfe: No, I think-

00:18:43
Eric Weinstein: But what if, for example, the real innovator is buried inside the company and the person who's claiming to be the technologist is sort of the visible head at the top? Maybe that person gets a good enough deal because of the repeated games aspect, just to take the game theory Uh, part of it seriously but that in fact the problem is, is that the person who is actually the technologist is in fact too busy solving problem, writing code or soldering joints or doing something that means that they can't actually watch all of the games that are getting played.

00:19:17
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, I, I- it's possible. I think that, um, uh, the best ones that I see tend to attract really talented people and, um, most of the really smart technologists can identify if somebody is, like, really trying to exploit them or not. And I think the best entrepreneurs, the people who are maybe taking a technology and trying to commercialize it, um, you know, I think they have that same sort of game theoretic of wanting to be good actors at long term. There's no doubt there's bad scientific actors who are liars and bullshit artists. There's bad technologists. There's bad entrepreneurs. But I don't know that, um, that there's an epidemic of, uh, uh, scientists or PhDs that are toiling away, you know, and being exploited. Uh, I'm, I'm, I'm more worried about the deception or, uh, the BS artists, you know, who are faking it and, uh, are actually, you know, bilking investors.

00:20:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's from the other side, so-

00:20:04
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

00:20:04
Eric Weinstein: ... I mean-

00:20:05
Josh Wolfe: Fair

00:20:05
Eric Weinstein: ... in other words, I see a two-way game where you have predatory investors and predatory charlatans. Sometimes you have to, of course, adjust for the fact that people are fooling themselves. They're at least being kind enough to fool themselves before fooling anyone else.

00:20:20
Josh Wolfe: Right, and self-deception is probably the best, uh, evolved mechanism to deceive somebody else.

00:20:25
Eric Weinstein: Right, as we were, as was, uh, we were talking both, um, to each other.

00:20:28
Josh Wolfe: But, but yeah, that, that's interesting. I, I, um, I would think that the payback, that the consequence of, of an investor exploiting, uh, somebody who is maybe, um, gullible, naive or, you know, s- just scientifically innocent, uh, I think it would be pretty swift. I think somebody would say, "Wait, wait, what happened? You only owned what percent?" You know, like, and I think that person would end up getting a really bad rep, uh, pretty quickly. So I think there's a natural corrective-

00:20:52
Eric Weinstein: So for example, Mariana Mazzucato has made an economics career out of claiming that the majority of the work happens, um-

00:21:02
Josh Wolfe: Government

00:21:02
Eric Weinstein: ... before, right, is funded by government, effectively by taxpayers, and that the taxpayer effectively socializes the cost of developing and then the sort of last mile towards invention, uh, is handled by the industry where the rewards are incredibly handsome.

00:21:22
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, I think there's elements of her argument that have, um, um, merit. Uh, uh, a lot of the things that government has historically funded that she talks about are these base infrastructure things, you know, the substrates upon which an inventor then has some novel, often variant idea, and then they say, "Okay, you know, let's, uh, let's take that and run with it." And then, uh, you still need somebody to then take that risk and say, "Okay, we're gonna turn that into a product. We're gonna build a company around it," and that typically is, uh, you know, a, a, uh, profit-seeking venture capitalist or a co-founder that says, "Let's, let's go do it."

00:21:53
Eric Weinstein: Sure, but, like, a, a Tim Berners-Lee or a Francis Crick or a Jim Watson or a Bill Shockley-

00:22:00
Josh Wolfe: Or a Rosalind Franklin

00:22:01
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, yeah, although I'm not a huge fan of the Rosalind Franklin theory of the double helix construction. I think that she was a, she was a much better scientist than Watson or Crick from the perspective, or Wilkins, uh, maybe even, uh, from the perspective of regularity and skepticism, but they were wild-eyed risk takers, and the fact that they were perhaps great scientists but not good scientists at that point.

00:22:32
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

00:22:32
Eric Weinstein: And so there's this, I, the way I, the way it shakes out, she was a really great, she was a really good scientist. They were great scientists, but not good scientists. Like, they decided it had to be a helix on the basis of the Maltese cross, which was scant evidence, and, uh, she, you know, quite correctly said that you guys are too pr- probably too influenced by, uh, Linus Pauling's alpha helix. But anyway, I mean, m- my, my, um, just that's a contrarian view that we can't hold because for some reason, um, because so many women have been treated unfairly in science, it's become very popular to say, "Well, Rosalind Franklin did the work."

00:23:09
Josh Wolfe: No, but it's not about the work. In her case, it's more just, like, the, um, uh, attribution of credit. There's some, you know, she, she's a, there are a lot of women-

00:23:16
Eric Weinstein: They were extractive upon her work.

00:23:18
Josh Wolfe: Yes.

00:23:19
Eric Weinstein: So that, there's no question in my mind that we have to acknowledge-

00:23:22
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

00:23:22
Eric Weinstein: ... that that's true.

00:23:23
Josh Wolfe: No, I'm not trying to give, I'm not trying to, to give her more credit than she deserves, but I think that history treated her, and now it's sort of rectifying itself, but, uh, history treated her less than-

00:23:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I think, I think there's an aspect, but-

00:23:32
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

00:23:32
Eric Weinstein: ... but Watson and Crick were huge value adds, uh, in that system.

00:23:36
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, nothing to take away from them.

00:23:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure. But, uh, another-

00:23:38
Josh Wolfe: Jim, by the way, gave me the best advice I ever got. Tea at his house, and, you know, and, and they don't let him go out very often now because he says-

00:23:45
Eric Weinstein: You had it recently?

00:23:46
Josh Wolfe: Uh, five years ago, six years ago.

00:23:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I think I had him three years ago.

00:23:50
Josh Wolfe: Okay. So, so, and I'd love to hear, you know, but, but his, uh, his, his, his, his quote, which I think is a beautiful double entendre, is, "Avoid boring people." And, uh, you know, it, like, avoid boring you-

00:24:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:24:04
Josh Wolfe: ... and avoid people who are boring. And I think, you know, everybody that you hang out with I think are, like, not boring people, and, uh, I think he-

00:24:10
Eric Weinstein: His standard is even higher.

00:24:11
Josh Wolfe: Ah.

00:24:12
Eric Weinstein: Um, yeah, well, I mean, I, I think actually we should talk about this because I'm very frustrated that his boorishness and his, uh, desire to stick his finger in the eye of sensibilities has cheated us of one of the great sages of science, and so my quote, I think, is that Jim Watson is far too important to be left to Jim Watson, that we can't afford to have Jim Watson screw up all of the stuff that he figured out.

00:24:44
Josh Wolfe: Well, this is interesting 'cause it ties back to the thing we were just talking about, about, you know, whether it's capitalist exploitation of a scientist or a scientist's own, uh, uh, reputation against the political correct environment. Um, how do you separate, and this is, you know, something that I think transcends into Hollywood and elsewhere, how do you separate the artist from the art? How do you separate the scientist from their discoveries when, um, they might behave in a way that is socially unacceptable?

00:25:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's a certain amount of Jim that is fugu, right? So you have to... You- you- you're served up pufferfish.

00:25:16
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

00:25:16
Eric Weinstein: It's not that you can't eat it, and in fact, a little bit of toxin, uh, plays beautifully on the tongue. But if you consume the wrong organ, that's gonna be really fatal.

00:25:25
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:25:25
Eric Weinstein: Jim had all sorts of positive characteristics, and the problem is is that you've got, uh, like, generations of people who've been taught if there's anything wrong, like, you know, then there- there's no fugu chef that's safe enough, and so you- the all the fish has-

00:25:40
Josh Wolfe: 100% dismissal, right.

00:25:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:25:41
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:25:42
Eric Weinstein: And, you know.

00:25:42
Josh Wolfe: And, and I do think, I mean, that's generally, and I know it's something that you're drawing, I think, important attention to, is the idea of, like, cancel culture, that somebody makes one foot fault, and the tolerance for that is virtually nil. And so, uh, you know, people who have great contributions for society are gonna be shut down and say, you know, they're advised by people who care about them, uh, "You gotta stay low. You gotta stay out of the limelight. You gotta stay out of the public." And I actually think he, Jim, uh, had people that were trying to help him to, you know, you know, sort of be a counsel, conciliary, like when he was going to things because, um, I think he felt on the one hand entitled to just speak his mind, and, um-

00:26:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, this was the great privilege of actually understanding, uh, not only natural and sexual selection, but its molecular embodiment in, uh, genetics and epigenetics with the result of his discovery. Now, part of the problem, just to be very blunt about it, is that biology is terrifying. If you actually understand biology, it is in some sense like the worst possible collection of truths you could ever happen upon. There's something to offend everybody for every occasion. So if you believe that the world [laughs] should be a nice and beautiful place-

00:26:52
Josh Wolfe: You don't want to study biology

00:26:53
Eric Weinstein: ... well, you have no choice but to not be a biologist. You can't do it, and in fact, you have to leave the room when biology is being discussed because, uh, if you want any horrific, uh, trait that's found in the world to be explained rationally, I can find you a perfect system that serves up that bad trait, um, a- and shows, you know, that motherhood isn't what you think it is, uh, y- trust isn't what you think it is. I mean, like, every bad thing happens.

00:27:22
Josh Wolfe: You know, th- this I actually agree with. And in fact, if you think about most of the books that are written about biology, evolutionary biology, uh, psychology, uh, they're all like, you know, the, the true nature of this, right? Or why we do these things. And it, it is in part, I think, that there has been a lot of, um, um, you know, papering over or, um, desensitizing, uh, of what true human nature is. And, uh, true human nature is, and, and maybe this seems too Hobbesian, but, you know, it, it is, um, it is dark. Uh, we are, uh, competitive social primates. Uh, um, we, uh, we try to outwit each other and, uh, take advantage of each other. Uh, there, uh, y- we have idealistic views that, uh, is, is, is the thing that is, um, taboo to go against, but, uh, but I agree with you. I think, uh, human nature itself, rooted in biology, is, uh, you know, quite dark.

00:28:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think once you've paid the price in, in biology and you've seen all of the darkness and you've reconciled yourself to the fact that there's no escape from the darkness, then a new door opens, and then you start to realize that ethics are in some sense a means of out-competing groups that lack them, right? That if you have an ethical system, you may be able to defeat a prisoner's dilemma that would befuddle your rival, and therefore you're in the position after a while to take their land and their resources because they're always c- squabbling amongst themselves for position.

00:28:48
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, there's a great, um, Jack Handy quote that I'm gonna get roughly right, which is, you know, "I imagine-"

00:28:54
Eric Weinstein: Jack Handy, the great evolutionary theorist.

00:28:56
Josh Wolfe: E- exactly, [laughs] from SNL. [laughs] Um, "I imagine a world where people live in peace and harmony and love, and I imagine us attacking that world because they will never expect it."

00:29:10
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] That's very funny. Do you remember Steve Martin had this, uh, you know, wishes for Christmas or something?

00:29:15
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

00:29:15
Eric Weinstein: It starts off with, uh, "My, my first wish for Christmas is for all the babies in the world to be happy and healthy in their mother's arms."

00:29:24
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:29:24
Eric Weinstein: And then, you know, like 12 wishes in, he, he wants the aerobics instructor and the Porsche and, you know, it's like-

00:29:30
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

00:29:30
Eric Weinstein: ... it's just, it, it, it's-

00:29:31
Josh Wolfe: It devolves

00:29:31
Eric Weinstein: ... it's completely... Yes.

00:29:33
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

00:29:33
Eric Weinstein: It's ev- every politically incorrect thing that you would actually want. Um, so I guess, you know, i- in this framework, uh, one of the things that's really important to realize is that when people can't handle reality and in fact make it impossible to speak openly, you're creating, um, niches of opportunity for people who can handle reality and who can serve up fugu, who can cut out the bad parts. So I learned more from Jim Watson in a week, um, by learning how to just ignore his incredibly... I mean, he just has a need to be badly behaved in order to, to keep checking in that he's still a free person.

00:30:22
Josh Wolfe: It's interesting 'cause he, he may do it for the provocation, the stimulation of the provocation, to be able to see that he gets a rise out of somebody, right? Which itself is a form of intellect, to know that I'm gonna say something wittingly that might piss you off or make you unsettled. Um, there is an entire class of people who we pay, uh, to reveal these kinds of truths.

00:30:40
Eric Weinstein: And comedians?

00:30:41
Josh Wolfe: Yes. And, and I find them absolutely fascinating because they are, um... To me, they are investigative journalists, scientists of human nature. You know, scientists study things. Social scientists study things who study things. And, uh, comedians to me reveal these great truths, and they, they are given permission on a stage To say the things, uh, um, that people might be thinking but be afraid to say. And I mean, there's so many people that are-

00:31:06
Eric Weinstein: I don't think they're given permission. They're given an opportunity

00:31:09
Josh Wolfe: No, they're given permission, because you, you consent. You consent when you're going in there that you are going to be offended. And I know clearly there's a minority of people that, you know, you hear stories of people walking out, and, you know, Chappelle has talked about stories of this with transgender people that have walked out, and, like, he overtly will say, like, "I'm, you know, I just, I can't stop telling transgender jokes." And, and he does this in a funny way and reveals these truths. But, um, uh, I actually think we give them consent. When we, when we sit down-

00:31:34
Eric Weinstein: We give them initial consent to try, and then, like, if you look at what happened to Michael Richards-

00:31:41
Josh Wolfe: Well, uh, okay, yeah

00:31:42
Eric Weinstein: ... because you have this issue where the cell phone, first of all, breaks... It used to be that the space-

00:31:48
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, no, that's... Okay. So, so-

00:31:50
Eric Weinstein: Like, it's like namespace pollution in Python. You think that you're having a conversation at 2:00 AM with consenting adults who want to be offended-

00:31:59
Josh Wolfe: Right, and there's an entirely-

00:32:00
Eric Weinstein: And then suddenly you're talking to your grandmother, uh, on Sunday morning about the video that circulated.

00:32:05
Josh Wolfe: Right, with no context or-

00:32:06
Eric Weinstein: Exactly

00:32:06
Josh Wolfe: ... right, yeah. Um-

00:32:08
Eric Weinstein: And in that case, no skill.

00:32:10
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:32:10
Eric Weinstein: Like, that was not a funny routine. He tried, and he failed, and he paid a very large price for trying and failing.

00:32:17
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

00:32:17
Eric Weinstein: And I think that you have to appreciate that if we are giving them consent, it's very, it's very tenuous. It's, it's up to us to retract it.

00:32:27
Josh Wolfe: It is, it is interesting, though, because I do think that the funniest things that are both most psychically relieving, the release, you know, like when you have this great laugh-

00:32:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah

00:32:35
Josh Wolfe: ... are often the most taboo topics. You know, and again, that's a certain brand of humor, but the people that touch the third rail... Um, we, we, we just went to a comedy show last week in New York, and-

00:32:45
Eric Weinstein: Comedy Cellar?

00:32:46
Josh Wolfe: No, it was, uh, Stand.

00:32:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:32:48
Josh Wolfe: And, um, and I, and I wish I could remember the, the comic's name. I'm doing t- a horrible injustice, but... And I'm not gonna tell the jokes, but, but they talked about, um, school shootings and, uh, and they talked about, um, uh, the current environmental movement a- against plastics. And in, in the latter case, he, he, you know, he's talking about, uh, turtles and, uh, straws, and this was a phenomenon that amazed me. There's no way a decade ago or two decades ago straws would've been, you know, obsolesced like that, plastic straws. Um, I happen to like plastic straws. I know that's probably taboo. Maybe it's politically incorrect, but, like, I don't like... I, I use four paper straws instead of one plastic straw. Uh, but he was saying, like, you know, "People are saying save the turtles. Do you know how old the average turtle lives?" It's like... People are like, "70 years." He's like, "200 years. These things live three times as long as us, you know, and we're telling-"

00:33:35
Eric Weinstein: That's very funny.

00:33:36
Josh Wolfe: Okay, so, so but it, it put it in perspective a way.

00:33:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:33:39
Josh Wolfe: But then he went on to this school shooting thing, and I, if I told you without the context that it was a comedy club that you were gonna take 150 or 200 people and put them in a room and talk about school shootings and they would be hysterically laughing, like, that moment, that phenomenon was just confounding to me. And everybody in there felt really uncomfortable even laughing at the topic, but he did it in such an artful way-

00:34:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's, yeah, this is it

00:34:04
Josh Wolfe: ... to get to a truth, uh-

00:34:06
Eric Weinstein: Which is in general we don't have the Indiana Jones ability to steal the thing we want and put the sand bag and it's exactly the same weight, right? And this is the... And, and I, I guess I get really... I discriminate very strongly between comedians of great skill and comedians who are just gonna go for it. And they, you know, they're two, they're two very different kinds. Like, one just shocks you-

00:34:30
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

00:34:30
Eric Weinstein: ... for the sake of shocking you, and sometimes you, and sometimes you marry the two. Like, I don't know, um, if you've ever watched the, what is it, Gilbert Gottfried's, um, version of the Aristocrats joke-

00:34:42
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

00:34:42
Eric Weinstein: ... to signal that it was okay to laugh def- after 9/11.

00:34:45
Josh Wolfe: Yes. Yeah. Was it, wait, was this in the Penn, uh, and Teller-produced one, the, the movie The Aristocrats?

00:34:53
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I don't know. I, I saw a, I saw footage of it.

00:34:57
Josh Wolfe: A clip of it, yeah. And, and, and what's his name, too, who I never expected was, um-

00:35:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the other, the other-

00:35:00
Josh Wolfe: ... Bob Saget.

00:35:02
Eric Weinstein: Oh, Bob Saget's famous for-

00:35:04
Josh Wolfe: Like-

00:35:04
Eric Weinstein: ... working blue but h- having a squeaky clean image.

00:35:07
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:35:07
Eric Weinstein: Lots of people did that. There was another one of these jokes in, in SNL, um, where I think Lorne Michaels turns to Rudy Giuliani and says, "Is, is it okay, uh, t- to be funny?" And he says, "Why start now?"

00:35:22
Josh Wolfe: Right. [laughs]

00:35:23
Eric Weinstein: And, like, there's this moment where it's the first time after something traumatic-

00:35:27
Josh Wolfe: That you're saying it's okay to laugh

00:35:29
Eric Weinstein: ... well, there's that, or there's, like, a, th- there's another version of this which is, um, was it Yves Saint Laurent was the first one to introduce sumptuous fabrics after World War II-

00:35:38
Josh Wolfe: Mm

00:35:38
Eric Weinstein: ... to signal rationing is now over. Or coming back to Eddington, Eddington's discovery of the bending of light, um, in the crook of Africa, um, around São Tomé, uh, was the first positive thing that a European had done other than mowing somebody down, uh, in trench warfare.

00:35:56
Josh Wolfe: But that, but that is interesting generally in, in, you know, and even the way that you, um, phrased the earlier question about, you know, where, where we are in this moment of science. It was like there are these moments, and those moments are shared moments.

00:36:06
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:36:06
Josh Wolfe: And suddenly it's like, uh, there's a temperature, there's an emotional temperature, you know, in society, in the room, and like where are we? Is it okay to laugh? Is it okay to be silly? Is it okay to be... And, uh, and that, that itself is an interesting phenomenon of, like, what is the, you know, what is the shared collective temperature and, and who gets to set that? And sometimes it is, you know, the, um, you know, sometimes it's, it's, it's the shocking moment. It's, it's Kanye in, uh, the Katrina, you know, when he's standing there next to Mike Myers and shocks people, right, and, and changes the conversation in an, in a completely diverted shift.

00:36:36
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] I love watching Mike Myers express-

00:36:39
Josh Wolfe: No, he, he's just like, "W- Wait, what?"

00:36:40
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, right.

00:36:41
Josh Wolfe: And, and that itself is genius because, you know, he himself is a master of comedy and delivery and surprise, and the fact that he had, like, no idea that that was coming, that moment, and, uh, with a white guy and a Black guy and the context and, like, the, the politics behind the-

00:36:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, and Kanye is, like, so clean cut. He just looks... I mean, it was, it was-

00:36:57
Josh Wolfe: But, but that was, like, a great defining moment.

00:36:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:36:59
Josh Wolfe: And there's n- nobody predicted that, right? That, that informational surprise in that moment- It, it, it, it made it okay to talk about this uncomfortable thing that was there, but nobody was, like, actually comfortable talking about.

00:37:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:37:12
Josh Wolfe: And, um, anyway, so, so in that moment, you know, I, I think he did it with deep gravitas, but it was a funny moment. And so going back to this idea, like, comedians reveal great truths. I, I also think it's why... And, and I'm making a horrible generalization, because I know you're also friends with a lot of comedians, and, but I think a lot of them are, like, seriously depressed because they see truth.

00:37:35
Eric Weinstein: Oh, dude, they all talk about how screwed up comedians are. You don't have to, you don't have to worry that-

00:37:40
Josh Wolfe: Okay. No, no

00:37:40
Eric Weinstein: ... they, they, they're aware-

00:37:41
Josh Wolfe: No, no, they're aware

00:37:42
Eric Weinstein: ... that they're badly broken people

00:37:44
Josh Wolfe: Right

00:37:44
Eric Weinstein: ... right?

00:37:44
Josh Wolfe: So, so you, you know, they see reality, I think, in a way that other people don't, and they reveal it to people in a, in a comfortable way, in the same way a chef might prepare a meal. I'm like, "I'm gonna prepare this for you, and so that you can digest it in a way that might be comfortable to you." But, but I, I admire them because I think they're, they're burdened. They have to carry truths that they see that I think make them depressed. And so it's this great irony and, and weird paradox of, like, they're on stage making these people hysterically laugh, but I think deep inside they're like, "Oh my God," like, you know, "I can't believe reality and nature and people are like this."

00:38:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It's-

00:38:18
Josh Wolfe: It's a beautifully dark thing.

00:38:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, it, it, it... So, so this... I think this is broader than comedians. I have a general theory that says reality is the second-best strategy. That's the bumper sticker. And what it means is, is that if you're born into a functional universe, so you, you take the Anna Karenina principle that all happy families are exactly alike, uh, but each unhappy one is unhappy in its own way. I believe that reality is only discovered when social reality breaks.

00:38:47
Josh Wolfe: Hm.

00:38:47
Eric Weinstein: So if you think of social reality as the Matrix-like thing that was actually being referenced in that movie, you discover underlying reality when you can't maintain social reality. Something cracks it open and you f- like, if you think about it, uh, one analogy that I like to talk about is separated regimes. If you have an ice hockey game, you only discover that it's taking place over a frozen lake [laughs] when-

00:39:13
Josh Wolfe: Somebody falls

00:39:14
Eric Weinstein: ... the ice cracks.

00:39:14
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:39:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And then it's like, "Oh, okay, there are fish down here," and it's quite cold, and, you know, you learn a lot. Um, I think that comedians are one group of people who are not able to maintain the ice illusion that this is solid ground, and I think we're entirely dependent on so-called dysfunctional, broken people, and this is, like, the dirty, interesting, wonderful-

00:39:39
Josh Wolfe: To tell us the truth.

00:39:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, not just to tell us the truth, to create, to take risks, to manage those risks. You know, when I first saw Rodney Mullen skateboarding-

00:39:48
Josh Wolfe: Hm

00:39:49
Eric Weinstein: ... I thought, "Something went wrong in this guy's life. Boy, did he spend a lot of time alone. Nobody would in- over-invest." But, like, the explosion of creativity, I mean, I talked to, to, uh, my producer Jesse Michaels about this. I said, "What if... Should we get Eddie Van Halen and Rodney Mullen in for one common interview?" Because they're sort of the same guy. They both came up with so much in terms of a vocabulary that no one had known was, was present in either the guitar or the skateboard, that it's pretty clear that something in common happened to both people. Now, that may be a bad idea for a show.

00:40:25
Josh Wolfe: No, I think it would be awesome. I mean, I think actually this, this is... I think you're hitting on something that transcends not just skateboarding and heavy metal or rock, but I think human nature, which is that I think great artistic expression comes because somebody wants to communicate. They find their medium to communicate, and the way that they express it. I am always caught by that, um, thought experiment of imagining a world in which a particular person existed, but the technology didn't.

00:40:52
Eric Weinstein: Hm.

00:40:52
Josh Wolfe: So imagine a world in which Hendrix exists, but the electric guitar didn't. Imagine a world in which-

00:40:56
Eric Weinstein: Oh, this is good. I really wanna know where you go with that one

00:40:58
Josh Wolfe: ... where, where Spielberg exists, but the 8 millimeter camera doesn't, where Mozart exists, but the harpsichord doesn't, where Gates exists, but the PC doesn't. All these things were instruments for them to express some sort of genius. Now, maybe the genius is hindsight post facto, but there was something in them. Now, if you look at all of those things, it could be you're the African American guy that, like, people don't wanna hear from in a white, you know, club. You are the nerd that's being picked on, you know, so you spend your time in a more, uh, solitary state programming. Uh, but there's something that, you know, is sort of broken in you, and you want to express it. You, you almost by definition don't feel understood, and you need to communicate, and you find the instrument to express yourself. And I think the common thing between, uh, skateboarding and, and, uh, and rock and programming and, uh, um, uh, j- scientific entrepreneur, like, they all are like, "I have something to say, and I'm gonna express it in this different instrument."

00:41:52
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, l- l- l- okay. You, you, you hit on the Hendrix one, which has been an obsession of mine. So l- let's just do an analogy.

00:41:59
Josh Wolfe: Okay.

00:42:00
Eric Weinstein: Urethane wheels and the drought in the early 1970s or mid-1970s, forget exactly when it was, created a universe in Southern California of, uh, impromptu skate parks where you could actually grip the walls of the s- pool, so I mean, the dry-

00:42:20
Josh Wolfe: Pools with no water

00:42:20
Eric Weinstein: ... pool.

00:42:20
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

00:42:21
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:42:21
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

00:42:21
Eric Weinstein: And that weird collision was like the electrified guitar. Now, Charlie Christian had been, like, the first electric guitarist, but he wasn't really fully exploring what was new-

00:42:34
Josh Wolfe: Hm

00:42:34
Eric Weinstein: ... which was the, the instrument is no longer the guitar. It is the guitar amplified system. Now, Les Paul had been there with using the recording studio and, and the multi-track recording and all sorts of trickery. What would Hendrix have done? Because the, the, the reason I love what you brought up is we have almost n- no recordings of him visually on acoustic instruments.

00:42:58
Josh Wolfe: Hm.

00:42:58
Eric Weinstein: I've seen him playing Hound Dog, uh, at some party, and I've seen, um- Like, Hear My Train A Comin', which is like the famous video of him with the 12-string guitar. But it's not like with Stevie Ray Vaughan where you- you actually see just the absolute mastery of the acoustic guitar. Hendrix was really fused with, with the amplified system as the total instrument, including the feedback.

00:43:25
Josh Wolfe: I mean, that's really interesting though because I, I, I don't know, to your point, um, was he classically trained before? Did he just pick this thing up and then started breathing? Like Picasso, you know, we see the crazy Picasso paintings, but he was, his early-

00:43:38
Eric Weinstein: Very classical before though

00:43:40
Josh Wolfe: ... I mean, it was like you would look at it, you'd th- think it's something you'd buy at like a, you know, a, a, comes in a bowl.

00:43:44
Eric Weinstein: Container?

00:43:44
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, exactly. And-

00:43:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:43:45
Josh Wolfe: ... it is horrible, right?

00:43:47
Eric Weinstein: No, it's not, it's not hor- uh, y- but yet-

00:43:48
Josh Wolfe: It, it's outstanding. Okay, I can't draw a bean

00:43:50
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I sh- I don't, I don't wanna kibitz. K- keep going.

00:43:52
Josh Wolfe: Uh, but, but, um, but, but so, so he was really cla- Picasso was really classically trained, and then, uh, you know, found his voice, right? Found the confidence or the comfort to basically do something totally different. Um, I think there's a lot of examples of that where, um, uh, Dylan was another one, you know, who like, you know, copycatted people and, and, uh, really s-

00:44:10
Eric Weinstein: Woody Guthrie at the beginning

00:44:12
Josh Wolfe: ... right, really studied and then found his own voice and his own confidence. So I wonder, and, uh, I don't know, I'm speaking out of ignorance about Hendrix.

00:44:17
Eric Weinstein: But apparently, so I have, I have some information that Dylan was actually the one who told Hendrix which path to go down. He said, "Your thing should be psychedelic ro- uh, psychedelic blues."

00:44:26
Josh Wolfe: But, but-

00:44:26
Eric Weinstein: "That, that's you"

00:44:27
Josh Wolfe: ... but, but, but, but he must have heard him doing something else and said-

00:44:30
Eric Weinstein: Well-

00:44:30
Josh Wolfe: ... "No, no, that genre's already taken. You need to find your white space."

00:44:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that's, that, this is... So, so this is my obsession, which is how does someone know that there is space to break into?

00:44:41
Josh Wolfe: Mm.

00:44:41
Eric Weinstein: Right? Like, that's the portal.

00:44:43
Josh Wolfe: So I am psychotically focused and obsessed in my companies and when I look for things on competitive advantage, and looking at things where somebody else isn't there, either because they've... It, it requires an understanding of the consensus. So you have to understand, and this is interesting, this goes back to sort of those shared realities.

00:45:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:45:01
Josh Wolfe: And it's a very analogous phenomenon that's just like the comedian or somebody else breaking that shared reality and, you know, cracking through the ice. The entrepreneur, the engineer, the scientist, the inventor, the person who says, "I'm gonna create a new company," uh, it is considered arrogance of the highest order. Uh, they are basically saying, "This is the way that the world ought to look, and I'm gonna go create it," or, "I've invented something and nobody else knows about it." But in any of those cases, I think it requires an understanding of what everybody else believes, and then having that confidence to say, "I'm gonna go orthogonally in this different direction." And so whether it's Hendrix being told or identifying, like, okay, he, he had to have a survey of what everybody else was doing.

00:45:36
Eric Weinstein: He started with g- he started as a left-handed guitarist with a right-handed guitar flipped over. So that's already a pretty clear indication you're not in Kansas anymore.

00:45:43
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:45:43
Eric Weinstein: Right? It's not completely unheard of, but it's, it like-

00:45:47
Josh Wolfe: But there, but it ha- there had to be an intrinsic general desire to say, "I want to stand out. I want to be different," and that itself requires, whether it's an acknowledged or it's innate, uh, or, um, uh, implicit, uh, a understanding of what everybody else is doing. Whether you're in rock music or you're writing or you're doing a podcast or you're doing math or you're inventing something, you have to understand, like, what does everybody else believe, what is everybody else doing, and then what's the thing adjacent or orthogonal that I can do that nobody else is doing? I mean, in a sense, that, that's the status-seeking, identity-creating thing that I think leads... I, I think that's what we call creativity.

00:46:23
Eric Weinstein: What I find is is that they're two separate things. Do you have creativity to break into new space, and do you have the disagreea- disagreeability in your nature to tell everyone else, "No, you're all wrong. Let me do my thing"?

00:46:36
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

00:46:37
Eric Weinstein: I, the number of times I've seen somebody innovate something, and they cannot find the bad attitude necessary to carry that thing to market. You know, and I, like I, we're both friends with Peter Thiel, and here's a guy who his conviction gets stronger the more people tell him he's an evil idiot.

00:47:00
Josh Wolfe: Oh, I think it's his secret weapon.

00:47:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It's a secret.

00:47:02
Josh Wolfe: I mean, uh, you know, it, it's one of these like, you know, things where everybody wants to be a contrarian, right? So then everybody's like this consensus contrarian. I think he is an authentic contrarian. But it also, he has a measure of what does everybody else believe.

00:47:14
Eric Weinstein: Sure. I mean, he's also, he's also running... I mean, maybe I shouldn't be giving away his secrets, but one of the things that I'm very impressed by is that he's cornered the market on first-order contrarians. And so he runs them all as subroutines because everybody loves talking to him because he's, he's an amazing, uh, judge of talent and risk and strategy. So he's, he's an authentic genius, and it's weird because I, I think a lot of business doesn't really require genius. It requires other traits more than it requires that. And then he's got the, the strength to tell absolutely everyone that they're wrong. And what I look at is the number of times where if you told me the end result that he was gonna get was gonna be positive, and I, I said, "Okay, let's imagine that you told 1,000 people that if you just hold this position for two years, you're gonna be fabulously rewarded. But it's gonna be so painful. You're gonna lose friends. You're gonna be denounced in the press." Almost everyone would drop the hot coal rather than carry it through to completion.

00:48:22
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:48:23
Eric Weinstein: And that is a separate trait from the ability to break into new territory. It's not the same thing.

00:48:30
Josh Wolfe: It's the comfort with discomfort. It's the willingness, as you said, it's the, the ability to be like the bad guy, to stand out, to... It, it, it's a-

00:48:37
Eric Weinstein: The ability to be misunderstood for extended periods of time.

00:48:41
Josh Wolfe: But not just misunderstood, disliked.

00:48:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, uh, uh, yes. I mean that-

00:48:44
Josh Wolfe: 'Cause you could be misunderstood but liked, but it's, it's, it's being misunderstood and disliked. It's the comfort-

00:48:49
Eric Weinstein: And ridiculed. I mean, the, it's the whole nine yards of-

00:48:51
Josh Wolfe: Which, going back, we are social primates.

00:48:54
Eric Weinstein: Yep.

00:48:54
Josh Wolfe: The most painful feeling, aside from like somebody like slicing you or stabbing you-

00:48:57
Eric Weinstein: Yes

00:48:57
Josh Wolfe: ... is being socially ostracized. So having the thick skin, having... I mean, literally, like it is why we have epidemics of depression and suicide, and it's, it's just when somebody is socially ostracized, whether by means of technology or just, you know, mean girls, it is a horribly painful thing. It is why when you watch some of these documentaries about people trying to leave, uh, the Orthodox Jews or, or, or, um, any sect, um, the, the, the, the spite, the pain, the, the tribal exclusion and so if you are part of, um, yeah, some tribe in society, whether it's, you know, a tribe of venture capitalists or a tribe of San Franciscans or what- you know, and, and you don't have that willingness to, to stand out from the pack with comfort knowing these people are going to talk about you behind your back, they're gonna ostracize you, uh, no, I agree with you. I, I, I actually find it's interesting when, when I hunt for entrepreneurs, there's a common trait that I, that I find, which is that, that chip on their shoulder. Uh, I always say that, you know, chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. And, uh, the, the- there's something that, you know, th- they could've been the fat kid, they could've been the little minority, they could've been, uh, from a broken family. There's something that they have to prove, and it's like this inextinguishable flame. Doesn't matter how much money they make, doesn't matter how much success they have, it's this, it's this thing inside that is gonna propel them forward and, and it's often or always in the face of some adversity that they suffered where everybody else was, like, over here, and they're okay being the lone person.

00:50:27
Eric Weinstein: Or they can't be other.

00:50:30
Josh Wolfe: Yeah. And, and in some cases they-

00:50:31
Eric Weinstein: They can't be other than, than that thing. I mean-

00:50:33
Josh Wolfe: But, but in, in some cases maybe the rejection from the others have defined them, "Okay, you're not one of us."

00:50:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, so why don't we teach this? Like, I, I have had a curriculum, um, somewhere in a drawer in which you graduate people based on the i- the question, uh, can you pass the Asch conformity test?

00:50:52
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

00:50:53
Eric Weinstein: Can you pass the Milgram obedience test, and can you pass the Zimbardo immersive reality rejection-

00:51:01
Josh Wolfe: Prison experiment

00:51:01
Eric Weinstein: ... yeah. So you got these three great experiments, and I'm y- a bunch of people now leave, uh-

00:51:07
Josh Wolfe: They're questioning on the second and the third else-ism

00:51:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, you know, th- th- those things have been debunked. No.

00:51:11
Josh Wolfe: The Asch, Asch still holds up, and it's amazing because I think, um-

00:51:14
Eric Weinstein: Mil- Milgram I think, I, I think all of these things hold up.

00:51:17
Josh Wolfe: Well, but there's-

00:51:17
Eric Weinstein: They just were done in the most controlled-

00:51:18
Josh Wolfe: There's elements of truth. But, but the Asch-

00:51:20
Eric Weinstein: But, uh-

00:51:20
Josh Wolfe: ... experiment is interesting 'cause two times-

00:51:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:51:22
Josh Wolfe: ... twice is what it takes for social conformity.

00:51:24
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:51:25
Josh Wolfe: Because the first time you watch him, the guy in the red sweater on the, you know, the sort of famous video of it, and he's like, "It's two, you idiots." You know, he's, he's, like, confounded-

00:51:33
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:51:33
Josh Wolfe: ... at, at... And then they do it again, and it's just, like, that quickly as, again, as a, as a social primate to feel the pressure when you know objectively the truth and you see everybody else is wrong, and you're like, "You know what? It's not worth pursuing truth. I'd rather pursue the comfort of being accepted."

00:51:51
Eric Weinstein: Amen. And, and, and the other thing is is that all it takes is one other person for most people, uh, if, if that, if that person goes f- first, like you have seven confederates before you get asked-

00:52:06
Josh Wolfe: Yes

00:52:07
Eric Weinstein: ... and one person out of those seven-

00:52:09
Josh Wolfe: Then you feel comfortable

00:52:10
Eric Weinstein: ... says the truth, then you're willing to say the truth as well.

00:52:13
Josh Wolfe: Yeah. You need an ally.

00:52:15
Eric Weinstein: You need not to be the only lunatic.

00:52:17
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

00:52:17
Eric Weinstein: That, that, that it's a question of fitness versus, uh, truth, and-

00:52:22
Josh Wolfe: There, there was a, you know, one of these playful videos that, um, surfaced, I don't know, 5, 10 years ago, of the guy who is freakishly dancing at the festival by himself.

00:52:31
Eric Weinstein: And then everybody's freakishly dancing.

00:52:32
Josh Wolfe: But, like, it starts out and, like, at first he's the joke.

00:52:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:52:36
Josh Wolfe: Because he looks like maybe he's on drugs or he's just too happy or I don't know what it is, but, like, he's got his shirt off, and, like, people are, like, laughing at him. I think the first person that joined him-

00:52:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:52:44
Josh Wolfe: ... probably joined him to mock him.

00:52:46
Eric Weinstein: Maybe.

00:52:46
Josh Wolfe: So the, the intent, it felt like o- on observation.

00:52:48
Eric Weinstein: Or I, I think s- so I, I, uh, a previous, uh, portal victim, uh, was Timur Kuran in one of our first episodes. I think maybe it's the third or something like that. And he studied the, exactly this phenomena, what happens when, um, you get the second person, which is like the curating role, I am willing to say that I see what that person who has previously been isolated says, and then you start to find this chain reaction that is incredibly powerful. And so, you know, this is how, uh, I don't think we've talked enough about it. Do you know Jeff Tenenbaum?

00:53:26
Josh Wolfe: No. But, but before you go to Jeff, to Peter's deals-

00:53:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:53:30
Josh Wolfe: ... and to what we do in venture capital, that sense of belief, especially if you have an entrepreneur or an engineer, an inventor who feels like they haven't had somebody believe in them, and suddenly they're doing something and somebody says, "Yes, I agree with the way that you, the world you wanna create," that is-

00:53:45
Eric Weinstein: OMG

00:53:45
Josh Wolfe: ... I mean, that, that sets it off.

00:53:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, you're catalyzing so- so this is, um-

00:53:50
Josh Wolfe: We, we like to say that we like to believe before others understand.

00:53:53
Eric Weinstein: Oh, really? Is that your line?

00:53:55
Josh Wolfe: Well, it's a line. [laughs]

00:53:56
Eric Weinstein: I love that.

00:53:57
Josh Wolfe: Yeah. But, but we also have to be careful because, you know, and we talked about this before, at the moment of it, of inception or conception of a company, you don't know whether that person is a true visionary and genius with good intentions or is trying to defraud you.

00:54:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but even when somebody's [laughs] trying to defra- I mean, like, th- this gets into really crazy territory. So if I have a great personality flaw, it's that I don't think I see people as they are. I think I see people as I believe they could be, and-

00:54:28
Josh Wolfe: That's a very optimistic take.

00:54:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's not always functional. Um-

00:54:35
Josh Wolfe: You, oh, so you see the better nature of somebody.

00:54:38
Eric Weinstein: All I see is limitless potential-

00:54:40
Josh Wolfe: You give them the benefit of the doubt

00:54:41
Eric Weinstein: ... in just about everyone.

00:54:42
Josh Wolfe: Okay, so it's amazing because I am the polar opposite.

00:54:44
Eric Weinstein: Tell me.

00:54:45
Josh Wolfe: I meet somebody, and it's like my favorite line from Shakespeare, "There's daggers in men's smiles." Somebody smiles, and I'm assuming that, uh, there's an ulterior agenda, uh, an ulterior motive. Um, uh, I remember my first day, I, I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Everybody's running some scam or game. You're always on guard. You don't make eye contact. My first day in college somebody was like, "Hey, nice hair." They were being authentic. They were being nice. They were giving me a compliment.

00:55:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:55:09
Josh Wolfe: My reaction is, "What are you trying to say?" So I think it totally depends. I, I, I mean, it'd be interesting of-

00:55:15
Eric Weinstein: But I don't disagree with that

00:55:17
Josh Wolfe: ... but, but your default First impression when you meet somebody is-

00:55:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. We're, we're, we're not, we're, we're not having a conversation yet. So the way I would say it is let's imagine you and I both meet somebody who's got an ulterior motive.

00:55:32
Josh Wolfe: Okay.

00:55:34
Eric Weinstein: And they start flattering you. My feeling is, "Wow, look at them trying to scam Josh."

00:55:41
Josh Wolfe: Okay.

00:55:43
Eric Weinstein: That skill could be repurposed with huge rewards if they only realized that sometimes you have to tell a narrative about something that's actually positive, and by, by fraud, that's the shortest ride in the world. You're not gonna get the value out of that thing.

00:56:00
Josh Wolfe: Okay, so that's interesting. So you, you view the temporary liability as a longterm asset should it be repurposed?

00:56:07
Eric Weinstein: I'm trying to, I'm trying to de-risk the deal-

00:56:09
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

00:56:09
Eric Weinstein: ... and I'm trying to figure out what is the value of the resource. Now, if the person turns out to be pathologically committed to the short term, like, you can convince me out of this.

00:56:19
Josh Wolfe: Right, it's not recoverable. Yeah.

00:56:21
Eric Weinstein: But, like, if I met a fraudster or a murderer or a, you know, a psychopath or any one of these things, there would at least be a period of time where I would say, "Wow, that's a really unusual trait. I wonder if it could be used positively."

00:56:39
Josh Wolfe: I admire your curiosity. Uh, I think as a protective mechanism I am way more quick to dismiss, that when I sense somebody-

00:56:47
Eric Weinstein: Look, I'll run for cover.

00:56:49
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

00:56:49
Eric Weinstein: No, it's not, it's not a commitment to martyrdom.

00:56:51
Josh Wolfe: Right.

00:56:52
Eric Weinstein: It's not like I don't feel fear.

00:56:53
Josh Wolfe: No, but you'll sit in it and explore it curiously. Is there some, is there some virtue?

00:56:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, so I gave this example, I forget which show it was. Um, have you ever listened to Charles Manson's, uh, music?

00:57:06
Josh Wolfe: No. Is it good?

00:57:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's one song called, uh, Look At Your Game, Girl. If you really wanna creep yourself out, listen to that song, 'cause it's pretty terrific.

00:57:16
Josh Wolfe: Hmm.

00:57:17
Eric Weinstein: Now-

00:57:18
Josh Wolfe: Meaning if you played it for me without telling me who this was?

00:57:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, you'd love it.

00:57:22
Josh Wolfe: Really? I mean, this goes back to what we were talking about before.

00:57:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, exactly.

00:57:26
Josh Wolfe: Between the artist and the art, and are they separable?

00:57:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay. You know, one of my favorite mathematicians or physicists is this Nazi named Pascal Jordan. The son of a bitch.

00:57:38
Josh Wolfe: I-

00:57:38
Eric Weinstein: A no-goodnik

00:57:39
Josh Wolfe: I, I kid you not

00:57:39
Eric Weinstein: ... the horrible, horrible man.

00:57:40
Josh Wolfe: I came from an entrepreneur in LA today.

00:57:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:57:44
Josh Wolfe: Brilliant. Brilliant entrepreneur.

00:57:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:57:47
Josh Wolfe: Incredible branding. And he made a comment that so unsettled me, to your, to your point. Uh, may- maybe I, maybe I need to give myself a little bit more credit. He said, you know... We were talking about his logo and the design of the logo, which is very thoughtful. And he said, "You know, the SWAT sticker was a brilliant logo." And it... And, and I was like, I was shocked. Now, I don't... Uh, you know, same sort of Jim Watson style. I don't know if he said it as a measure of provocation-

00:58:17
Eric Weinstein: No. No, no, no. It's, look, so-

00:58:17
Josh Wolfe: ... or as an objective thing of the symmetry and, and, and... But I sat there thinking, like, I'm, I'm sitting here, I'm... And, and maybe he's right. Maybe, maybe there's something... But, but there's so much meaning in the object.

00:58:29
Eric Weinstein: So here... So if you go to India, right? So I, I don't exactly know what the etymology is, but SWA is going to be Indic for beautiful.

00:58:38
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

00:58:39
Eric Weinstein: And you've got a four-fold symmetry, so it's Z mod 4, and then there's, I forget, how do you say this word, like aposematics, where you use colorations that are used as warning symbols, so it's, you know, you have, like, a white, black, and red field. So, you know, just in terms of design, um, you know, this is extremely powerful. Now, it is so colored by the horrible fucking things that were done under it that I can't have a normal reaction, so that when I go to India, even though the thing is turned the other way around, it's not on a tilt-

00:59:16
Josh Wolfe: The e-

00:59:16
Eric Weinstein: ... the dots in the middle-

00:59:17
Josh Wolfe: The, the emotional implication of it-

00:59:19
Eric Weinstein: I'm still going through-

00:59:19
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, no, I'm with you

00:59:20
Eric Weinstein: ... I... Right. You know? It's like what-

00:59:21
Josh Wolfe: So, so this is interesting by the way too, because, um, you know, I, I think one of the purposes as, as I listen to your journey through the portal is about the meaning of meaning.

00:59:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Thank you.

00:59:32
Josh Wolfe: And, and, um-

00:59:34
Eric Weinstein: It sounds like the Walpi, yes.

00:59:35
Josh Wolfe: [laughs] And, and I, I've been caught... You, you know, so I invest in technology. I love engineering. I love magic, right? Magic is a form of engineering. I saw this one guy, maybe he's an LA guy, Derek Delgado. Have you, have you heard of him?

00:59:51
Eric Weinstein: No.

00:59:51
Josh Wolfe: He did this, this show in, um, in Union Square called In and of Itself, and, uh, it had great production. It was Frank Oz. It was very thoughtful, and I like thoughtful magic. I don't like hocus pocus BS. I like people that are philosophical, Ricky Jay and Penn and Teller and... And so he had five props that he did different magic pieces in, but this one thing, it's sort of like in the same way I say when I see Chappelle or somebody else, like, I can't remember the jokes, but I remember the socially poignant points that they make.

01:00:17
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:00:18
Josh Wolfe: He t- he takes one of the five objects, which is a gold brick, and he tells a story about how he was a teenager, and he came home with his friend, and he opens the door, and he sees his mother on the couch, and she's making out with another woman. And his friend feels really uncomfortable and runs away, and he felt slightly uncomfortable, but then he said, "You know what? My mom, who's single, uh, she, she found somebody she loves," and it was his mother, and he felt love. They talk about it, and it's totally cool and calm and whatever, and, uh, he wakes up the next morning, they're having breakfast, and a brick gets thrown through the front window of their house with a paper on it that says, "Go home, faggots." And it was either his friend or somebody that his friend told or whatever it was. And so he does this magic trick, now having told you this story, and I'm getting chills, you know, thinking about it.

01:01:05
Eric Weinstein: Right. Yeah, yeah, sure.

01:01:06
Josh Wolfe: And, and the gold brick, and he builds this house of cards over it, and then, you know, with this flourish, he blows the house of cards away, and it and the brick are gone. Now, earlier in the show, he asked people for two intersecting streets, and it was sort of out of context, and you didn't understand why, but let's say he said Delancey and Essex He said, "Now I want you to know that when you leave the show in about five minutes," 'cause it was pretty much the, the either the ultimate or penultimate trick he did, "if you go to Delancey and Essex, you will see that brick on this c- on the corner of, uh, Delancey and Essex." But the notable thing, and this is the thing that, that shakes me, and w- when we were just talking about the symbol that shakes us to this day-

01:01:40
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

01:01:40
Josh Wolfe: ... because of the historic meaning that's put into it.

01:01:42
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:01:44
Josh Wolfe: He's like, "10,000 people walk by that brick, that gold brick on a corner, and they won't think a th- a thought about it. But because you know what this brick means to me, what it caused in the relationship between me and my mother, the betrayal of a friend," all, all of this meaning-

01:01:59
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:01:59
Josh Wolfe: ... that was narratively injected into this physical, solid object, to me it was really powerful. And so I, I offer that as a story because I think just in this quest that you're on, on the meaning of meaning, and just thinking about the objects around us and the stories that are in the ether, there's something really powerful there to explore.

01:02:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, in particular, just to riff with you-

01:02:23
Josh Wolfe: Please

01:02:23
Eric Weinstein: ... um, in a world in which we can no longer be certain, like for example, if I see a Nazi flag, am I seeing it as part of a documentary?

01:02:34
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

01:02:35
Eric Weinstein: Which changes its meaning as opposed to somebody's decided to fly it in the front lawn? A- as opposed to it's being used in an art exhibition by somebody who was a survivor of the Holocaust versus-

01:02:50
Josh Wolfe: Context

01:02:50
Eric Weinstein: ... well, y- you know, th- this is the odd thing that... A- and I always use this example of Python's namespaces-

01:03:00
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm

01:03:00
Eric Weinstein: ... where you have a variable that means different things depending upon what context, and then w- you have this beautiful concept of namespace pollution, so that, you know, when we referred earlier to Peter Thiel, uh, if I, if I know that we're in a VC context, I might just say Peter. But if we're in some other, um, context, I might be describing robbing Peter to pay Paul and it has nothing to do with Peter.

01:03:23
Josh Wolfe: Right.

01:03:24
Eric Weinstein: Uh, that other Peter. So the, the part of the problem is, is that what we've built now is technology that has created universal namespace pollution, and we can't tell whether somebody's using something for a scholarly reason, whether they're using something as a troll. Um, you know, the Pepe, uh, image, uh, I've had it used maliciously against me so many times, and then somebody says, "Wow, you're just reacting to a frog. It's a joke. Don't you even know the, the history of it?"

01:03:54
Josh Wolfe: But it's anti-Semitic or...

01:03:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the point is it isn't any of those things. It's an ambiguous object with mysterious ties, some of which can be anticipated at why is somebody choosing to play with it, you know? Um-

01:04:10
Josh Wolfe: But it's, but it's intent. There's an embedded intent.

01:04:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, but sometimes that you d- it's not even the intent. Maybe somebody has good intent and they're a skilled player and they're using it correctly, but you're so afraid that there are unskilled players that you wanna make sure that nobody even reproduces the image. Like, you have this thing with the Christchurch shooter's manifesto-

01:04:29
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm

01:04:30
Eric Weinstein: ... in New Zealand, which I think it's a crime now to possess the manifesto.

01:04:35
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

01:04:36
Eric Weinstein: Wow. I mean, so what if I need to s- oh, well, we have an exception for scholars. They can possess it.

01:04:41
Josh Wolfe: In a safe space.

01:04:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, and what we've, what we don't realize is is that embedded, for example, in the First Amendment, were assumptions about the context of a pamphleteer, let's say.

01:04:54
Josh Wolfe: Mm.

01:04:55
Eric Weinstein: Now what happens when you've got some channel that can broadcast something instantly to 25 million people within five minutes that isn't being checked for its impact? We have no idea as to whether or not we should be clinging to the original letter of free speech, to the intent of free speech, to the embedded context of free speech, and we're terrified that if we open that up, we're gonna have so many bad, unskilled actors talking about it that we're never gonna get something as good as the original intent of our Constitution, let's say.

01:05:30
Josh Wolfe: Well, this is-

01:05:30
Eric Weinstein: Or that you're fusing a culture where you can't talk about something, like the P- you know, Pakistan has been making these legal complaints that Twitter agrees to pass along saying, "I know that you have never been to Pakistan and you're not Pakistani, but you are apparently violating Pakistani law, and we are obligated to tell you that you're doing that." We now have no idea what anything means. And, you know, I give this example of if, if you see C, the letter C-

01:05:58
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm

01:05:58
Eric Weinstein: ... in Roman orthography on a water faucet, what does it mean?

01:06:03
Josh Wolfe: I mean, I would have assumed 100, but, uh-

01:06:07
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:06:07
Josh Wolfe: W- what, what, what does it mean?

01:06:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, it could mean cold, or it could mean caldo or caliente.

01:06:13
Josh Wolfe: Mm.

01:06:14
Eric Weinstein: Right? So depending upon-

01:06:15
Josh Wolfe: Context. Yeah

01:06:16
Eric Weinstein: ... well, if it's, if it's, if it's Te- if it's a Teutonic derivative-

01:06:19
Josh Wolfe: Well, well these are-

01:06:20
Eric Weinstein: ... it's gonna be cold, and if it's-

01:06:21
Josh Wolfe: But these are meanings that are lost-

01:06:22
Eric Weinstein: ... Roman-

01:06:22
Josh Wolfe: ... in translation, right? I mean, the, you know, you had the Pinto, right, as the car. And, and there's all these examples where something was done with good intent, but with ignorance of-

01:06:31
Eric Weinstein: Pinto because it explodes, or do you mean the Chevy Nova because it doesn't go?

01:06:35
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, exactly.

01:06:36
Eric Weinstein: Oh, wow.

01:06:36
Josh Wolfe: No, the, the, yeah. Right. Or, yeah. Uh, oh, was it the Nova? Uh-

01:06:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I think... Well, I, I don't know.

01:06:42
Josh Wolfe: E- either way, but, but the, the, but the point is the intent was not malicious.

01:06:45
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:06:46
Josh Wolfe: But it was ignorant of, of the context of another culture. And, um, it's almost impossible to know the, I don't wanna say near infinite, but there's so many different uses of certain things that in one case it's dangerous-

01:06:58
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:06:58
Josh Wolfe: ... uh, and in one case, you know, nobody cares. And these people who find it dangerous are really offended by the thing. Uh, and, uh, so, so that is complicated on how the sort of meta, uh, labeling of these things, you know, and, and, and, you know, that, that's why we're getting these... I, I mean, you know, I, I know you've talked extensively about this, but, like, trigger warnings and, and, you know, the Jonathan Haidt view of the, the antithesis of the heterodox in the academy is like- I- i- it's really complicated. You, you, you have these minefields of, of being able to speak freely, and I know what, that, that's what this space is for. Um-

01:07:36
Eric Weinstein: But it isn't. See, the, people even get this wrong. I mean, this was, this was very disheartening to me, is that the media needed an extremely simplistic thing to say, which is, "These people, uh, wish to have every possible conversation. There is no holds barred. There are no safe spaces. You know, absolute free speech." Are you kidding me? No. That's not how it works. We've had, you know, Brandenburg versus Ohio. We've had all sorts of adjustments. You know, slander isn't necessarily okay. You can't create clear and present dangers. There's all sorts of barriers to, uh-

01:08:14
Josh Wolfe: Free speech

01:08:15
Eric Weinstein: ... to s- well, to... We call free speech the thing that we have that's a remainder after we've fenced us- ourselves out of the things that we all agree are pretty dangerous.

01:08:27
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

01:08:27
Eric Weinstein: Child pornography probably won't be counted as free speech. And I watch people get into, into error because they start off with this idea, well, Christopher Hitchens really had it right. You should be able to say anything. You know, and I, I did this riff, um, uh, I opened for Jordan Peterson doing a harmonica, um, little harmonica solo, and I said, "Well, will you guys," this was in Long Island, I said, "Will you, um, will you indulge me? Uh, w- I, I have a song that I love that I want to sing, but I don't remember all the words." I said, "You know that it would be untrue. You know that I would be," and everybody goes, "Liar. If it was a girl, couldn't get. Come on, b-" So I, I build it up. "Come on, baby, light my..." And everybody goes, "Fire."

01:09:11
Josh Wolfe: Ah.

01:09:12
Eric Weinstein: I said, "Congratulations."

01:09:13
Josh Wolfe: You just screamed fire.

01:09:13
Eric Weinstein: That was the sound of 2,000 people screaming fire in a th- in a crowded-

01:09:16
Josh Wolfe: Well done

01:09:17
Eric Weinstein: ... theater. Well done. And-

01:09:19
Josh Wolfe: Context

01:09:19
Eric Weinstein: ... well, and that was the whole point-

01:09:21
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

01:09:21
Eric Weinstein: ... is, is that we don't notice this stuff. And that's what scares me, is that we don't realize that there were embedded hypotheses in the First Amendment. We don't realize the role that context plays. And now we're exploring every flavor of stupid with respect to trying to put this back together.

01:09:41
Josh Wolfe: So is it, is it a function of speed? Would it be better if we slowed down so that you could sit and adjust? And in the same way, when you approach somebody and you're like, "Let me give them the benefit of the doubt," or, "Let me see how this could be used as an asset in the future," the person, like, if I, if I relayed factually, uh, 2,000 people just screamed fire-

01:10:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:10:03
Josh Wolfe: ... in a theater, but without the context, which requires time and space to explain, at a time where arguably people's attention spans are shorter, we spend less time getting nuance and details, and things can very quickly, you know, flutter away, and you know, a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth has gotten out of bed or whatever the appropriate quote is, right?

01:10:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:10:27
Josh Wolfe: Uh, i- is it a function of time? Is there a case where, um, we could ch- chastise people for, "No, no, you, you went too quick"?

01:10:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:10:36
Josh Wolfe: Is, is there something that shames people back into a civility of slow?

01:10:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, uh, I'm glad you're asking the question. Um, let's play with it and see where it goes. To me, the real problem is that for almost 50 years we sold people on the idea that they could get by with very simplistic heuristics. And the thing that allowed that to happen was the fact that very few people had a seat on what I call the gated institutional narrative. It's like an exchange of ideas, but you need to have a seat on the exchange in order to participate.

01:11:14
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

01:11:14
Eric Weinstein: And so people were participating, discussing these issues at home, but you know, it was Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, you know, opining, or William F. Buckley, and nobody else could get in on that. Now you've got a lot of skilled actors. You've got unskilled actors. All walls have broken down. And the main thing that we need to say is, you know that situation where for 50 years you, you could get by with, like, just talking about free speech, or let's slow things down, or let's be kind to each other, or inclusion and diversity?

01:11:48
Josh Wolfe: Right.

01:11:49
Eric Weinstein: None of those things are workable, and it's th- it's the complexity level's stupid. That's the issue. We c- we... The reason that I have an audience at the moment is in part due to the fact that these people have figured out there's no workable solution with simplistic primitives. They're n- uh, to, to use another computer term, they're not expressive enough.

01:12:13
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm.

01:12:14
Eric Weinstein: I can't get these heuristics to work. And if you really want to know what you can and can't say and why somebody's offended and what we should be doing, there is no Christopher Hitchens simple answer because the technology changed too much and revealed... It's a little bit like you were in a Newtonian realm, and Newtonian physics worked, and then you get close to the speed of light or you get very, very small or something happens and you're in a quantum or a relativistic picture, and you have to realize that you were in a simplification, and the simplification worked in a regime, and the regime is blown away.

01:12:51
Josh Wolfe: So go back to the, you know, the three anchors on three major networks.

01:12:57
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:12:57
Josh Wolfe: And technology then, you know, blows that apart, and now you have thousands of people, and you don't know who to trust.

01:13:03
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:13:04
Josh Wolfe: And I actually contend that in this moment, it isn't a function that people are just gullible sheep, although many are, but it's that people have grown so cynical that they don't know who to trust.

01:13:14
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:13:14
Josh Wolfe: And, um, I mean, I've listened to you, right? That you, you know, whether it was the Times or Washington Post or these institutions that were once beacons of trust that you say I, I, I see games that they're playing on both sides, right? And so-

01:13:26
Eric Weinstein: It's one of the reasons I run ads on my program Which is this is a commercial enterprise.

01:13:31
Josh Wolfe: Right.

01:13:31
Eric Weinstein: And I listen to a lot of my friends who refuse to run ads. "I'm very uncomfortable. I don't wanna sell people." And I think that they are more honest than I am.

01:13:39
Josh Wolfe: Hmm.

01:13:39
Eric Weinstein: But I think I'm more meta honest than they are.

01:13:42
Josh Wolfe: Interesting. I like that.

01:13:43
Eric Weinstein: In other words, the message is, "Hey, I'm just some guy and I'm opining, and, you know, I lie, and I misrepresent, and I'm self-kind, and I do all sorts of things to make myself look better or smarter, and I'd love to be open about that. And no, I'm not going to stop doing those things because that's preposterous. What am I supposed to do, self-extinguish? Should I just fund this out of my own pocket, bankrupt myself, reveal all of my warts, all of my failings, make myself absolutely [laughs] you know, unappealing to every-..." No. I mean, I mean-

01:14:18
Josh Wolfe: But by, by the way, that would open up a new audience, and there would be a whole lot of people that would, uh, appreciate that raw honesty, right? So you, you, you wouldn't... You'd blow up one audience, maybe a repor- portion of it, but gain another. But-

01:14:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but people who can't... You see, there's the Howard Stern sort of appeal, you know, or the, you know, there's a new thing called the dirtbag left, let's say. And the idea there, I, I think we are entitled to tell certain basic societal lies about ourselves. Like-

01:14:47
Josh Wolfe: Like what?

01:14:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, by-

01:14:51
Josh Wolfe: I mean, this is a lie, right? We're, we're-

01:14:52
Eric Weinstein: That's exactly right. By wearing clothes-

01:14:53
Josh Wolfe: Okay

01:14:54
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, w- we disguise whatever it is that we are, you know? Or, you know, should you be allowed to color your hair?

01:15:00
Josh Wolfe: Right. And, and that's a sh- that's a shared reality, right, where, um, which itself is interesting, breaking through the ice again. We all know that we're naked under these clothes.

01:15:08
Eric Weinstein: No, we don't.

01:15:10
Josh Wolfe: We don't know we're naked under our clothes?

01:15:12
Eric Weinstein: No. As much I can try to picture it, but it, it's actually quite shocking when somebody becomes naked. My brain actually doesn't even accept it. I can know it in some corner of my mind, but if you, I say, "We all know," I, no, I, I really don't. I fall for the illusion.

01:15:27
Josh Wolfe: So, so I have a crazy-

01:15:28
Eric Weinstein: Like, we were just talking, for example, about this bizarre animal, the spider-tailed viper from Iran.

01:15:36
Josh Wolfe: Insane. Insane. I-

01:15:37
Eric Weinstein: I know that that tail of that snake is a fake spider because its movement of the spider into this kind of weird eight pattern is so realistic that I would fall for it even knowing that it's a lure so that if I was a bird, I will try to prey on the spider and I'm gonna get eaten. So even knowing it, I still fall for it.

01:15:59
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, but that's true of illusions, it's true of cognitive biases that we educate ourselves on. Uh, just because you know it doesn't mean you won't fall for it, but you sh- you don't not know it. Uh, you know, again, I know you're naked under there. Uh, and, uh, if, if I sat down here in the chair and you said, "Hey, let's, you know, do this, um, this episode of The Portal," and, uh, and you were sitting there naked when I walked in, that would be shocking. But it would confound my expectations, right? Um, I would have an expectation.

01:16:25
Eric Weinstein: I'm gonna do that when the show starts to fail.

01:16:27
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

01:16:27
Eric Weinstein: That's when we jump the shark, my friend.

01:16:29
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

01:16:30
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:16:30
Josh Wolfe: You just have... By the way, you should just do a whether or not you're actually naked.

01:16:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:16:34
Josh Wolfe: Just a blurred thing, and people would be like, "Oh my God, is he really naked?" [laughs]

01:16:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, but what I'm trying to say is that part of the problem is the, the lie isn't in the nakedness. It's in the multiplicity of self that somehow I'm stupidly calling Josh or Eric.

01:16:49
Josh Wolfe: Right.

01:16:49
Eric Weinstein: Like, I both know this and I don't know this, and this is, again, the same thing. Most of the time, it's sufficient to say, "Well, Josh says this," or, "Josh feels this," or, "Josh thinks this." But there are lots of situations where I say, okay, we're now in the non-Newtonian realm. Josh thinks a bunch of different things, and they're completely different.

01:17:08
Josh Wolfe: I contain multitudes.

01:17:09
Eric Weinstein: Right. And, you know, this is the thing with Sam Harris. Sam Harris is trying to be the unified mind, and I think it's beautiful, but I also think it's completely bizarre. I've never seen anything like it.

01:17:20
Josh Wolfe: Well, but that, that is interesting, too, because, um, we, we each have lots of different selves.

01:17:26
Eric Weinstein: True.

01:17:26
Josh Wolfe: Each one is different in context. I mean, the way that I am with you or the way that I am with an entrepreneur in a board meeting might be very different. The way that I am with my children is very different. Each one of those things requires a different, uh, power dynamic, a different, uh, set of expectations.

01:17:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but some of those don't even know about each other.

01:17:42
Josh Wolfe: Right. Right. So in a sense, yeah, we have these, um, hidden, hidden selves. But I don't know that it's a overtly hidden, right? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not hiding from you that, uh, I father, uh, or parent a certain way. It's just irrelevant for this particular context.

01:18:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but there are things that you could do that I would to- would totally change my concept-

01:18:05
Josh Wolfe: Right

01:18:05
Eric Weinstein: ... of you, and the, the point that-

01:18:07
Josh Wolfe: Which actually is true, 'cause that's what's happening when, going back to this art and the artist thing, you find out about something in somebody's life, could be their personal life or something else, and they get canceled.

01:18:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, and, and this is the really scary part about this. Every single private life would be shocking if it were moved into the public.

01:18:25
Josh Wolfe: I, I've always thought that the greatest act of terrorism in the United States would not be an attack on a building. It would be the revelation of the last year's worth of emails and texts, possibly.

01:18:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's interesting. You, you know the record producer Rick Rubin.

01:18:39
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

01:18:40
Eric Weinstein: So he's very interested in the question of whether if all emails were revealed simultaneously, that would be a positive. It's the selective revelation that's terrifying.

01:18:53
Josh Wolfe: Um, it would be a negative in that it would destroy individual relationships. Uh, the perception that people would have, the things that they assumed about other people-

01:19:02
Eric Weinstein: Sure

01:19:02
Josh Wolfe: ... the things that they were led to believe about other people would be revealed to be untrue in many cases. Um, they would find out about, um, infidelities. They would find out about betrayals. They would find out about all the things that make us these complex humans, the dark side of biology that we spoke about earlier. And, um, and I think it would destroy that fundamental fabric of trust. So in that same way that we have this story layer, you know-

01:19:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:19:23
Josh Wolfe: ... with the ice that's there, it's stable, uh- There is, I mean, that is a lie. Uh, you know, when, when I, I, I, I didn't write to you like this, but, you know, "Dear Eric," you know, "Y- y- yours truly, Josh." Like, that's a lie, right? That's a, that's a lie of civility.

01:19:37
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:19:37
Josh Wolfe: Sure it is.

01:19:38
Eric Weinstein: Why is that?

01:19:38
Josh Wolfe: Because i- it's not natural to, to speak with those kind of, uh, pleasantries. Uh, that is a, a confirmation, uh, uh, to an expectation of civility which maintains, um-

01:19:50
Eric Weinstein: I, I mean-

01:19:51
Josh Wolfe: ... a presentation of self that is, is, uh-

01:19:53
Eric Weinstein: I don't buy this at all, Josh. My, my, my belief is, is that when you, I mean, when you brush your hair or when you, you know, uh, when you attend to your grooming-

01:20:06
Josh Wolfe: It's an act of dishonesty.

01:20:08
Eric Weinstein: No, it isn't.

01:20:09
Josh Wolfe: Sure it is.

01:20:09
Eric Weinstein: No, it's an act of signaling.

01:20:11
Josh Wolfe: Okay, fair. Fair.

01:20:12
Eric Weinstein: Right? Or it's a, it's, or it's hybrid.

01:20:15
Josh Wolfe: You-

01:20:15
Eric Weinstein: It's chimeric between signaling and dishonesty. And the-

01:20:17
Josh Wolfe: Because I'm presenting a self, I'm presenting something I want you to believe.

01:20:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you imagine that theater is untrue?

01:20:25
Josh Wolfe: Is theater untrue?

01:20:27
Eric Weinstein: Or is it hyper true? I mean, uh, th- this is this old point that I make about Updike where somebody said, "Why is it that you write fiction?" He says, "Opposed to what?" Somebody says, "Well, the truth." And he said, "My good man, what is it you imagine fiction to be?"

01:20:43
Josh Wolfe: So this is an area that I'm at the moment obsessed with.

01:20:46
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:20:47
Josh Wolfe: Because, um, the, the gap between reality and simulation I think is shrinking. Uh, technologically, I think that's true in our ability to measure and model the world around us with ever greater resolution.

01:21:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:21:01
Josh Wolfe: Um, the machines that we are inventing are relying on models, not of reality, but of models. Uh, when a robot or autonomous vehicle is going through the, they're not relying on actually looking at the road. They're, they're looking at a model of the road that is coming through.

01:21:16
Eric Weinstein: As, as we do.

01:21:16
Josh Wolfe: As we do. Um, and so, so, uh, so, so put that aside for a s- for a moment on, on technology. Uh, the machine does not know the difference between a game, uh, simulation that is teaching it how to drive on a road and actually driving on the road. And I would actually, to your point about the truth of fiction, argue that the more movies you watch, the more books you read, the more simulated virtual reality experiences you have-

01:21:45
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:21:45
Josh Wolfe: ... through literature, um, I don't know. Who's to say that, you know, that... Certainly the emotional experience is as real. You know, the feeling of horror, of shock, of awe, of sadness, of empathy, of, um, of introspection, all the things that fiction can invoke in you is a very real, authentic reaction to something that is entirely fake. And so I'm, I'm sort of intrigued-

01:22:12
Eric Weinstein: I'm very confused by this. See, Josh, you and I have never met. The thing that I am talking to now is the projection of you inside of my head, which I have never left-

01:22:23
Josh Wolfe: Right

01:22:24
Eric Weinstein: ... um, that comes from the stimulation. I mean, I believe that I have eyes. I'm not, I don't wanna g- get completely jiggy. But just assume that reality is the standard picture of reality. Uh, I th- I see you as being across the room from me, but y- that's not the thing that, that's really happening. What's really happening if, if everything I know to be is correct is that the thing across the room from me generated a model in my mind which is the only thing I've ever interacted with that is Josh. And what is astounding, if you know the phrase the map is not the territory-

01:22:58
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm

01:22:59
Eric Weinstein: ... is the other part of that, which is, but wow, what a goddamn map it is because it's so close to the territory that we, we are astounded when we find the discrepancies, the deltas between the map and the territory.

01:23:11
Josh Wolfe: So this, i- i- all these things to me are related. The technological gap that shrinks between the simulacrum and reality.

01:23:21
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:23:21
Josh Wolfe: The expectation that we have that we're sitting across model to model.

01:23:25
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:23:26
Josh Wolfe: Uh, the awareness which others might not have that I am actually looking at the you of, you know, a 10th of a second ago in the past and not, you know, you. Um-

01:23:36
Eric Weinstein: Uh, David Eagleman says we live 43 milliseconds [laughs] in the past.

01:23:39
Josh Wolfe: Which is fascinating, right?

01:23:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:23:40
Josh Wolfe: But true. Uh-

01:23:42
Eric Weinstein: So being that there is a David Eagleman.

01:23:44
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, right. Exactly. And, um, um, but, but, um, um, the, the idea of, of the model itself, um, and, and something you said about, you know, confounding sort of expectations or surprise, the most... Can, can we talk about consciousness for a second?

01:24:03
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

01:24:04
Josh Wolfe: The most persuasive argument that I've heard about consciousness goes back to, um, Jeff Hawkins when he wrote On Intelligence, and I think he took from the hierarchical structure of, uh, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and, um, the idea of memory prediction.

01:24:18
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:24:18
Josh Wolfe: So if you see my shoes-

01:24:20
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

01:24:20
Josh Wolfe: ... and you say, "Okay, that's Josh," then I have a mo- you have a model now. You see me again. Y- maybe you just see the element of the shoe, and you predict from the specific to the general, and you say, "That, that's gonna be Josh." But if it wasn't Josh, if it was your brother. If Brad is sitting here and he's wearing my shoes, you'd be, "Oh," you know. You have an emotional surprise.

01:24:35
Eric Weinstein: Yep.

01:24:35
Josh Wolfe: The surprise adjusts the weight of your model-

01:24:39
Eric Weinstein: Yep

01:24:39
Josh Wolfe: ... biologically, physiologically.

01:24:40
Eric Weinstein: Hopefully.

01:24:41
Josh Wolfe: And, and said, "Whoa, that is a surprise." And it's an informational surprise, and it shocks you into updating your model. And, um, and, and, um, th- this phenomenon of memory prediction in technology, in us thinking about ourselves, in the gap between fiction and reality, in the work of philosophers that at the moment I find really interesting, like Karl Friston and, and Andy Clark, um, they're all thinking about how this model of reality that we hold then interacts with the real world, assuming that exists and-

01:25:19
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:25:19
Josh Wolfe: ... and, and, um, and then just is constantly f- f- feedback be- between the two. It's, it's to me where technology is trending Is, is right at this nexus where it's becoming harder and harder to know where model and reality, th- that line is becoming thinner and thinner. And I think, I think there's gonna be a whole suite of engineers and technologists that go mad because of it.

01:25:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, at the moment we're, you know, we're experimenting... Because Joe Rogan has left so much of his voice in the world, we can train-

01:25:53
Josh Wolfe: Deep fake Rogans.

01:25:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:25:55
Josh Wolfe: And deep fake Weinsteins.

01:25:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, increasingly. I'll, I'll leave a larger corpus and the machines will get better, right?

01:26:01
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

01:26:01
Eric Weinstein: So now you have deep fakes everywhere, and then there's gonna be increasingly an issue about what is authenticity, what is its dependable signature.

01:26:11
Josh Wolfe: So-

01:26:11
Eric Weinstein: We'll be able to manufacture a haystack around everything we wish to hide as a needle.

01:26:17
Josh Wolfe: So, um, if you think about finding opportunity between abundance and scarcity.

01:26:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:26:24
Josh Wolfe: In the late '90s the thing that became really abundant was everybody producing blogs and information online, and the scarce thing was being able to find that needle in that haystack.

01:26:33
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

01:26:33
Josh Wolfe: And so ergo, search engines, Google. It wasn't maybe obvious amongst the 20 that-

01:26:37
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:26:37
Josh Wolfe: ... preceded it, but post facto in hindsight you say-

01:26:40
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:26:40
Josh Wolfe: ... of course. Today with the abundance of the tools we have, whether they're video editing or Photoshopping or audio or whatever comes next-

01:26:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:26:49
Josh Wolfe: ... where the simulacrum and that distance between reality and simulation keeps shrinking in what we're using to train our technologies and in our own perception of reality and news and information, the abundance of that means that there's something scarce, and the scarce thing is being able to accurately detect veracity. And so I feel like there will be an increasing weight of value put on tools that can detect is that photo real, is there some aberration in that voice, and, and it's still gonna be somewhat perceptible and detectable. If you watch these deep fakes of Obama or Zuckerberg, you know, the things that people post online, to the native eye it's very hard to detect.

01:27:25
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:27:26
Josh Wolfe: There's still... It's past the uncanny valley, but there's still this weird-

01:27:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but that's gonna shrink.

01:27:32
Josh Wolfe: It will. Uh, this gap is absolutely shrinking, but, but technology can still detect that. It can still-

01:27:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, you'll have an arms race as we've always seen in nature. So we were talking before about Batesian and Müllerian mimicry-

01:27:41
Josh Wolfe: Yes

01:27:42
Eric Weinstein: ... or, uh-

01:27:42
Josh Wolfe: Deception and detection.

01:27:44
Eric Weinstein: Yes. And the idea that is if two things are different, then there's almost always going to be something that can tell the two apart, but that becomes increasingly expensive and invasive. And I don't think that... I mean, I don't think that this game that we've been living in and calling life is long for this planet.

01:28:07
Josh Wolfe: Okay, that's provocative.

01:28:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the portal.

01:28:10
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

01:28:10
Eric Weinstein: We have to get out of here.

01:28:12
Josh Wolfe: Where, where are we going?

01:28:13
Eric Weinstein: Uh, well, there's one phrase that constantly recurs in my mind, and I've decided to give it a non-zero weight value just to shut it up, but the phrase is our home is in the stars or not at all.

01:28:27
Josh Wolfe: So y- Okay. Uh-

01:28:28
Eric Weinstein: And my belief is, is that we can talk about uploading, we can talk about an outbreak of wisdom that allows us to be good stewards of our planet, but more or less in the mid-20th century, around 1952 to '54, we had two discoveries that almost certainly we should all be a- [laughs] able to calculate, start at a clock, where if we don't get out of here and spread out and try a bunch of different experiment... A- a- and of course that's probably impossible, and it's also probably impossible to diversify it enough, and where would we hide from each o- th- all sorts of issues.

01:29:01
Josh Wolfe: But is your implication a, a metaphor that, uh, uh, a literal that we're going to the stars? We're gonna go to Mars or wherever it might be. We're going to outer space. We're leaving this planet. Or, or is it a, uh, or is it a metaphor, poetic metaphor of, um-

01:29:14
Eric Weinstein: I wish it was a metaphor. I wish, I wish it wasn't what I'm actually saying. But if I, if I say it straight-

01:29:21
Josh Wolfe: Say it straight

01:29:23
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, we are about to hack our own source code.

01:29:26
Josh Wolfe: Okay.

01:29:26
Eric Weinstein: And it, there's this very bizarre thing that has happened in technology, which is we are very afraid that we, the, the, the ones who can simulate humans, let's say-

01:29:39
Josh Wolfe: Mm

01:29:39
Eric Weinstein: ... with, uh, Boston Dynamics, and we can simulate speech with, uh, deep learning and all of these sorts of things. Okay. We are afraid that our technology is about to become artificially generally intelligent and self-aware or begin to run out of control and outwit us. But we're also at the same exact moment wondering, are we part of a simulation where there are programmers? Now, the obvious implication is almost never discussed, which is we are the emergent artificially general int- intelligence, and we are on the verge of learning our own source code. And is the simulator afraid that we are going to arise in the system with powers that the simulator does not possess? I don't know. Why are we worried about it in one direction, not d- Like, we've, we've become deeply nonsensical because if you look at the decision tree, and this is the really hard thing to grasp, and push the decision tree out 500 years, there is no branch of the decision tree that does not look insane.

01:30:53
Josh Wolfe: That part I might agree with because I-

01:30:55
Eric Weinstein: Like, either we're gonna upload or we're gonna become wise and kind, or we're going to diversify into the three rocks that we can reach without violating the Einsteinian speed limit and somehow that'll be enough, or we're gonna get around the Einsteinian speed limit, or we're gonna reboot from tardigrades. What- whatever it is-

01:31:14
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, but, but those things need not be mutually exclusive, right? There might be different camps that pursue each of those different strategies

01:31:19
Eric Weinstein: ... there is no branch of that decision tree that [laughs] looks like us continuing on more or less as we are with a little bit of improvement here and there.

01:31:25
Josh Wolfe: That's probably true. I, I, um... By the way, when you say the we, um, I realize there's a large subset and maybe a growing subset, and even a g- growing subset in technology, but I am staunchly not in the Bostrom, uh, camp, and, and I think even the Sam Harris camp about AGI. I am much more in the David Deutsch camp. Um, and, uh, you know, this is a subtle and maybe very long argument. Um- But, uh, I actually posed this to David recently on, um, the idea about simulation and, and we were talking about mathematical concepts.

01:31:55
Eric Weinstein: Can you just sort of say what those camps are? Because I generally don't follow these.

01:31:59
Josh Wolfe: Uh, well, well Bostrom makes a philosophical argument that I think is, um, widely celebrated and has, um, i- in the same way that, uh, if you go back 20 years in nanotechnology, you had Eric Drexler that was propo- pro-poning a sort of pseudoscientific but had elements of science, um, uh, argue about nanobots, you know, run, uh, amok, and he had his credible and wealthy technology champion, uh, which at the time was, uh, Bill Joy. And so Bill Joy was basically warning, you know, nanobots are going amok, and so on. Today you have Bostrom, and Bostrom's, uh, equivalent of Bill Joy today is Elon, uh, Elon Musk. And, and, um, and, and very smart people are very concerned about, you know, uh, us becoming, you know, paperclip factories and being, uh, harvested by intelligent, sentient machines, uh, that are gonna run amok. And, um, and David Deutsch's view is a little bit more, and, and this was something that I posted recently, that, um, you know, are we a simulation? That, that a simulation can take, um, all of the tools and principles that, uh, that we have, uh, or so- sorry. Uh, inside of a simulation, it can have all the tools that we give it, but, uh, but it need not have, uh, or may not have and probably won't have all of the tools that are outside the simulation. And so, um, he makes to me a more logical argument that the more dangerous thing is not an AGI run amok, but your average, you know, 15 to 17-year-old teenager. Uh-

01:33:19
Eric Weinstein: The cost of everything coming down and what power is put within reach?

01:33:22
Josh Wolfe: Yeah, but we get more processing power, we get more memory, we have better algorithms. But, um, but, uh... And, and, and everything in fairness that, uh, everybody said was gonna need to be a limit of some human ability has been eclipsed, you know, from checkers to chess to Go to, you know, even artistic creation and now generative text and, um, you know, that's another area. And technologically we are... We had maybe five years ago an ImageNet moment where you had greater than 90 or 95% computer accuracy of what a human could do in detecting objects in a picture, and there's still lots of errors and comical ones that people poke fun of online. Uh, surprisingly, images are, uh, less complex than text. Um, and today we're approaching sort of a Turing-like moment of, Turing test-like moment of being able to, uh, have greater than 95%, uh, accuracy in being able to construct text, complex, uh, conversational text. Uh, conversational text taken from, you know, your library of, of, uh, words and phrases that you're apt to use and, you know, sort of in your voice, where, where it would, it would fool... If, if you were texting with Peter or, or with Joe Rogan or me, you, you would be fooled. Um, uh-

01:34:34
Eric Weinstein: I don't think, I don't think you could fool me about Peter.

01:34:37
Josh Wolfe: No? Why?

01:34:40
Eric Weinstein: The level of surprise.

01:34:42
Josh Wolfe: Okay, that's, that's an interesting test, 'cause we, we have a company that's doing this. Maybe that's a-

01:34:46
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I think I can run Peter as well in emulation as many people I know.

01:34:51
Josh Wolfe: And you would still confound yourself and...

01:34:54
Eric Weinstein: I mean, hi- his operating system is not built the way the rest of ours is.

01:34:57
Josh Wolfe: Okay. All right, so let's put him aside as a-

01:34:59
Eric Weinstein: Sure, sure, sure

01:34:59
Josh Wolfe: ... as a escapable anomaly. But, um, but, but all of these things are still parametrically constrained in the system. Uh, they can do that particular thing extremely well. They can look at images extremely well. They can, uh, navigate a road extremely well. They can, um, search query from Jeopardy extremely well, but they can't suddenly come out of that system. So if you accept that premise of it's a simulation and it has the tools, um, that you've put inside of it, but it, it can't go and create other tools that are outside of it.

01:35:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, have you heard my riff on the square root?

01:35:26
Josh Wolfe: No.

01:35:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, the square root is the really dangerous mathematical operation.

01:35:30
Josh Wolfe: Why?

01:35:32
Eric Weinstein: Because it allows you to ask questions within a system that have to be answered within another.

01:35:38
Josh Wolfe: Okay.

01:35:39
Eric Weinstein: So, for example-

01:35:40
Josh Wolfe: Yeah

01:35:40
Eric Weinstein: ... there's a something called the determinant of a matrix, but the square root that might exist is called the Pfaffian. That really requires an extra, uh, leap. Same thing with vectors become spinors. The square root of the antisymmetric tensor system brings out this thing out of the vacuum that you sort of didn't know was lurking around. Um, you know, it's like the square root of negative one.

01:36:07
Josh Wolfe: Right.

01:36:09
Eric Weinstein: There's no answer in the real numbers. You pose the question in the real number. So this is the question of finding the portal. Uh, I've said it's the psychedelic of mathematics. Now, if you allow me to train a machine, and I, I, um, I find it very surprising that nobody talks about this.

01:36:25
Josh Wolfe: Hmm.

01:36:26
Eric Weinstein: But the square root is the most dangerous operation known to mathematics, and if you teach a computer all of the instances in which a square root allowed humans to find... Even humans don't think of this, right? They don't think, how many times have we taken the square root and found a new universe waiting for us?

01:36:50
Josh Wolfe: I've never thought that.

01:36:52
Eric Weinstein: Weirdly, nobody does. I mean-

01:36:54
Josh Wolfe: But you, so but, but you were saying if you could train a computer to, to what? Fi- finish that thought.

01:36:58
Eric Weinstein: I've got an N-

01:36:59
Josh Wolfe: Mm-hmm

01:37:00
Eric Weinstein: ... that includes Pfaffians, spinors, uh, spin groups, um, norm division algebras. All the best stuff in my life comes from the square root.

01:37:12
Josh Wolfe: Mathematical geometry, complex.

01:37:15
Eric Weinstein: It's... There's nothing like it, man. Square root is, is, is heroin.

01:37:20
Josh Wolfe: [laughs]

01:37:20
Eric Weinstein: It, there's no operation that is as cool as the square root, and we don't tell people this, and it's because of Flatland. I l- I was born into Flatland, but I learned from the masters. I learned from the people who innovated, and I noticed this pattern that many of them didn't notice. Like to, to, to this day, I'm not aware of anyone teaching this... I, I'm now doing this at scale. I mean, I think I did this on Joe Rogan. Mostly I don't talk about it, but you wanna teach people to bust out of the cognitive prisons? Teach them the square root.

01:37:53
Josh Wolfe: Hmm. So if you could program into a machine the ability to detect the square root of any of these abstract-

01:38:01
Eric Weinstein: Just to ask the question. Like you could ask the question.

01:38:04
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

01:38:04
Eric Weinstein: Assume you're given a system.

01:38:06
Josh Wolfe: Yes.

01:38:07
Eric Weinstein: Assume that you're given an operation that is the square root that is functional in part of that system and returns nonsensical answers in some other part. Ask yourself the question, what can I adjoin to the original system so that the square root will become meaningful? It's like you want to find the panic room in a house.

01:38:29
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

01:38:30
Eric Weinstein: That's how you find the book in the shelves that when you pull it out, swings open the bookcase and shows you the magnificent crystal palace that was hidden in your two-story walk-up.

01:38:43
Josh Wolfe: That's your book, The Danger of the Square Root. Danger Squared.

01:38:48
Eric Weinstein: Well.

01:38:52
Josh Wolfe: No?

01:38:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, we're headed Look, this program is trying This is my distribution channel. My entire life, I have had my access to the world gated by people who I have come not to respect.

01:39:09
Josh Wolfe: And now that gate is open. You've created a gate. You've created your own portal.

01:39:12
Eric Weinstein: Until they've noticed.

01:39:14
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

01:39:14
Eric Weinstein: Right? And then they're going to say, well

01:39:16
Josh Wolfe: Those are dangerous ideas.

01:39:19
Eric Weinstein: Dan Dresner, a columnist for the Washington Post, Professor Tufts, said about me that everything that I think that's true isn't new, and everything that I think that I say is new isn't true.

01:39:32
Josh Wolfe: Yeah.

01:39:32
Eric Weinstein: So I am miraculously incapable of generating anything of interest. And I'm really looking forward to having him on the podcast.

01:39:40
Josh Wolfe: Have you invited him?

01:39:42
Eric Weinstein: He's being invited right now for the first time.

01:39:44
Josh Wolfe: Awesome. I hope he accepts.

01:39:46
Eric Weinstein: Josh, I could talk to you forever. I hope you're going to come back to the portal. And I don't think we talked a lot about venture capital, but I think what we did do is we talked about the thing that you do that infuses venture capital with hope and wonder and transcendence. And I hope to have another conversation with you soon, which doesn't necessarily talk about venture capital either.

01:40:14
Josh Wolfe: I'd love to. Love what you're doing.

01:40:15
Eric Weinstein: It's been fantastic.

01:40:17
Josh Wolfe: Thanks, man.

01:40:17
Eric Weinstein: All right. You've been through the portal with Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital. And I hope that you will subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And then head over to YouTube and subscribe to our channel there. And remember to click the bell so that you'll be notified when our next episode drops. Be well.