Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics (YouTube Content)

Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics
Information
Host(s)	Lex Fridman
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	02:38:40
Release Date	23 February 2021
Links
YouTube	Watch
Portal Blog	Read
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Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics was episode 163 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, hosted by Lex Fridman with guest Eric Weinstein.

Description

Eric Weinstein is a mathematical physicist and podcaster.

Transcript

00:00:00
Lex Fridman: The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, his fourth time on the podcast. Both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind, and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being who I am fortunate to call a friend. Quick mention of our sponsors. Indeed hiring site, Theragun muscle recovery device, Wine Access online wine store, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me ask that whenever we touch difficult topics in this or other conversations, that you listen with an open mind and forgive me or the guest for a misstep in an imperfectly thought-out statement. To have any chance at truth, I think we have to take risks and make mistakes in conversation, and then learn from those mistakes. Please try not to close your mind and heart to others because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea. Try to assume that the people in this conversation, or just people in general, are good, but not perfect, and far from it, but are always striving to add a bit more love into the world in whatever way we know how. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman. And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. You often talk about getting off this planet, and I think you don't often talk about extraterrestrial life, intelligent life out there. Do you wonder about this kind of thing, about intelligent civilizations out there?

00:01:45
Eric Weinstein: I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way. Um, in a, in a certain sense, I do find that speculating about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens is kind of a recreation for when things aren't going very well. Uh, at least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives. So I worry about, you know, for example, the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion. You can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend, so then you just take up an interest in, uh, in simulation theory because that's something like what you do for your job coding. I do think that in some sense the issue of aliens is a really interesting one, but has been spoiled by too much sort of recreational escapism. The key question that I find is, let's assume that it is possible to look out at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds, and then go visit them. If that is possible, it's almost certainly possible through some, uh, as yet un- u- unknown or not accepted theory of physics beyond Einstein. And I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, but probably is. If that theory exists, there would be a, a percentage of the worlds that have life in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way that would have encountered the ability to escape, uh, soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom at a minimum and whatever they have that is probably analogous to the cell, uh, on that world. So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing that arises, uh, probably not carbon based, probably doesn't have DNA, but that something that fits the pattern of, uh, Darwinian theory, which is descent with variation, um, differential success.

00:03:45
Lex Fridman: And thereby constantly improving and so on, that, that, that through time there will be a trajectory where w- there'll be something increasingly complex and fascinating and beautiful like us humans, but much more.

00:03:56
Eric Weinstein: That can also off-gas whatever entropy it creates to give an illusion that you're defeating, uh, thermodynamics, right? So whatever, whatever these things are, probably has an analog of the bilipid layer so that cells can get rid of the chaos on one side of the barrier and keep order on the other. Whatever these things are that create life, assuming that there is a theory to be found that allows that civilization to diversify, um, we would have to imagine that such a civilization might have taken an interest in its concept of the universe and have come here.

00:04:32
Lex Fridman: They would come here. They would have a deep understanding of the physics of the universe sufficient to have arrived here.

00:04:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's two questions, whether they could arrive physically and whether their information could be sent here, and whether they could gain information from us. It's possible that, um, they would have a way of looking into our world without actually reaching it. I don't know. But yes, i- if my hope, which is that we can escape this world, is-- can be realized, if that's, if that's feasible, then you would have to imagine that the re- reverse is true and that somebody else, uh, should be here. First of all, I, I want to say this. My purpose when I come on to your show and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you. I can sit inside all of those. It's to give you better audio and video because I think we've been on a, an incredible roll. I really love what you do, and so I am trying to honor you by being as disagreeable about frame breaking as possible. I think some of your listeners don't understand that it's actually a sign of respect as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic, which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames, and that these are sort of offerings to get-

00:05:48
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:05:48
Eric Weinstein: ... the conversation started. So let me try to break that frame and give you something different.

00:05:52
Lex Fridman: Beautiful.

00:05:54
Eric Weinstein: I, I think what's going on here is that, um, I can prove effectively that we're not thinking about this in very deep terms. As soon as I say we've got to get off this planet, the number of people who assume that I'm talking about faster than light travel Is very high. And faster than light travel as- assumes some sort of Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken-

00:06:18
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:06:19
Eric Weinstein: ... um, by some small adjustment. And I think that that's fascinating. It shows me that our failure to imagine what could be being said is profound. We don't have an idea, um, of all of the difference, different ways in which we might be able to visit distant worlds. Um, all we think about is, okay, it must be, it must be Einsteinian spacetimes, and then some means of exceeding the speed limit. And it's just, it's fascinating to me that we don't really have... W- we, we've lost the ability to just realize we don't know the framework, and what is, what does it even mean? So one of the things I think about a lot is worlds with more than one temporal dimension. It's very hard to think about one, more than one temporal dimension.

00:07:10
Lex Fridman: So th- that's a really strong mental exercise of breaking the framework in which we think, 'cause, uh, most of the frameworks would have a single temporal dimension, right?

00:07:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, m- most of the frameworks in which we think would have no temporal dimension.

00:07:25
Lex Fridman: Right. [laughs]

00:07:25
Eric Weinstein: Would have pure, like in mathematics, the differential geometry-

00:07:28
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:07:29
Eric Weinstein: ... that Riemann came up with in the 1800s. We don't usually talk about, um, what we would call split signature metrics, uh, or Lorentzian signature. In fact, if it weren't for relativity, this would be the most obscure topic out there. Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature, and then there's this one freakish case of relativity theory in physics that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions. Fascinating.

00:07:57
Lex Fridman: So it's usually momentary and just looking at space.

00:08:01
Eric Weinstein: Yes. You know, we have these three kinds of, uh, equations that are very important to us. We have elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic, right? And so the idea is i- if, if I'm, um, chewing gum after eating garlic bread, uh, w- when I open my mouth and I've got chewing gum between my lips, maybe it's gonna form an el- an elliptic object called a minimal surface. Then when I pop that and blow through it, you're gonna hear a noise that's gonna travel to you by a wave equation, which is gonna be hyperbolic. But then the garlic breath is gonna diffuse towards you, and you're eventually gonna be very upset with me-

00:08:40
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:08:41
Eric Weinstein: ... according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic. So those are the three basic paradigms for most of the work that we do, and a lot of the work that we do in, in mathematics is elliptic, whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case. And I don't even know what to do about more than one temporal dimension because I think almost no one studies that.

00:09:00
Lex Fridman: I can't believe you just captured, uh, much of modern physics in the example of chewing gum.

00:09:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, I have an off-color one, which I chose not to share, but hopefully the kids at home, uh-

00:09:10
Lex Fridman: Can imagine? [laughs] Okay, so b- okay. That is the place where we come from. Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility of breaking the frameworks at, with two versus zero temporal dimensions, how do we even begin to think about that?

00:09:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's think about it as you and I getting together in New York City, okay? So if you tell me, uh, "Eric, I wanna meet you in New York City. Go to the corner of, I don't know, 34th Street and 3rd Avenue and, and you'll find a building on the northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor." Right? So what do we have? 3rd Avenue, that's one coordinate, 34th Street, that's a second coordinate, and go up to the 17th. And what time is it? Oh, 12:00 noon. All right. Well, now imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a particular height in a building, and it's all flat land, but, uh, y- I'm gonna give you two temporal coordinates. So meet me at 5:00 PM and 12:00 noon at the corner of 34th and 3rd. That gets to be too mind-blowing. I've got two separate watches.

00:10:17
Lex Fridman: And presumably that's just specifying a single point in those two different dimensions, but then being able to travel along those dimensions.

00:10:25
Eric Weinstein: Let's, l- let me see your right hand. You have no watch on that.

00:10:30
Lex Fridman: No.

00:10:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I'm very concerned, Lex, that you're going through life without a wristwatch.

00:10:35
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:10:36
Eric Weinstein: That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch. I want you to wear it.

00:10:41
Lex Fridman: This guy is funnier than basically any human on Earth. [laughs]

00:10:45
Eric Weinstein: Lex, it, that has been in my family for months.

00:10:49
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:10:49
Eric Weinstein: It's a Fitbit. Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman is now in a position to live in two spatial and two temporal dimensions, unlike the rest of us. I clearly am only fit for four, four spatial dimensions.

00:11:04
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:11:04
Eric Weinstein: So I'm frozen, whereas you can double move.

00:11:08
Lex Fridman: I can double move.

00:11:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:11:08
Lex Fridman: Which is funny because this is set in, uh, Austin time-

00:11:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:11:12
Lex Fridman: ... so it's 4:00 PM, and this is set in Los Angeles time, so it's 2:00.

00:11:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, but that's just with an affine shift in mod 12.

00:11:19
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:11:19
Eric Weinstein: But my, my point is, is that wouldn't that be interesting if there were two separate timescales and you had to coordinate both of those, but you didn't have to worry about what floor of the building because everything was on the ground floor? Okay, that is the confusion that we're having. And if you do one more show-

00:11:36
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:11:36
Eric Weinstein: ... right, then they're gonna put a watch on your ankle and you're only gonna have one spatial dimension that you can move around. But my claim is, is that all of these are actually sectors of, of my theory, in case we're interested in that, which is geometric unity. There is a 2:2 sector, uh, and a 3:1 and a 1:3 and a 0:4 and a 4:0, and all of these sectors have some physical reality. We happen to live in a 1:3 sector. But that's the kind of thinking that we don't do. When I say we have to get off this planet, people imagine, oh, okay, it's just Einstein plus some ability to break the law.

00:12:11
Lex Fridman: By the way, even though you did this for humor's sake- I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin, uh, when, who, who-

00:12:19
Eric Weinstein: Am I gonna get whacked?

00:12:21
Lex Fridman: No, not quite but he was given a, a Super Bowl ring to, uh, to look at and he, instead of just looking at it, put it on his finger and walked away with it.

00:12:32
Eric Weinstein: Robert Kraft?

00:12:33
Lex Fridman: Robert Kraft, that's right.

00:12:34
Eric Weinstein: All right.

00:12:35
Lex Fridman: So [laughs] in the same way, I will, if you don't mind, walk away with this Fitbit and taking all, the entirety of your life story with it because there's all these steps on it.

00:12:43
Eric Weinstein: Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.

00:12:45
Lex Fridman: [laughs] And where have I been?

00:12:49
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.

00:12:50
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:12:50
Eric Weinstein: Right, that's what I'm, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about you want to get into aliens, let's have an interesting alien conversation. Let's stop having the typical free will conversation, the typical alien conversation, the typical AGI morality convers- It's like w- we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves because we're not making progress. Time to have better versions of all these conversations.

00:13:10
Lex Fridman: Is there some version of the alien conversation that could incorporate, uh, the breaking of frameworks?

00:13:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think so. I mean, the key question would be, uh, we- we've had the Pentagon release, uh, multiple videos of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us. I just think it's also really fascinating to talk about the fact that those of us who were trained to call BS on all of this stuff just had the rug pulled out from under us by the Pentagon choosing to do this. And you know what the effect of that is? You've opened the door for every stupid theory known to man. My aunt saw a ghost. Okay, now we're gonna have to listen to, "Well, hey, the Pentagon used to deny it, then it turned out there were UFOs, dude." Whoever is in charge of lying to the public, they need a cost function that incorporates the, the damage in trust because I held this line that this was all garbage and all BS. Now I don't know what to think.

00:14:09
Lex Fridman: There's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion, the breaking of frameworks, that involves the release of videos from the Pentagon, which is almost like another dimension that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information is a kind of dimension [laughs] along which we're traveling constantly, that is, is, uh, messing with my head to think about because, I mean, do you... [laughs] Like, because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that into your study of the nature of reality, is like the constant shifting of the notation, the tools we use to communicate that reality. And so, like, what am I supposed to think about these videos? Is it c- is it a complete distraction? Is it a kind of cosmic joke?

00:14:53
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. But you know what? I'm tired of these people, just completely tired of these people.

00:14:56
Lex Fridman: The g- the, the people on the Pentagon side or the people who are interpreting the stuff on the Pentagon side or the entirety of the-

00:15:02
Eric Weinstein: I'm tired of, I'm tired of the authorities playing games with what we can know. The fact that you and I don't... Do you have a security clearance?

00:15:11
Lex Fridman: Some level of it for, because I was funded for DARPA for a while.

00:15:15
Eric Weinstein: I don't have a security clearance. You know, I, I am going to release whatever theory I have, and my guess is, is that there is zero interest from our own government. Um, and so the Chinese will find out about it at the same time our government does because Lord knows what they do in these buildings. I, I, I watch crazy people wa- walk in and out of the intelligence community, walk in and out of DARPA, and I think, "Wow, you're talking to that person? That's really fascinating to me." We don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.

00:15:49
Lex Fridman: Complete lack of transparency.

00:15:50
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:15:50
Lex Fridman: Do you think it's possible there's, the government is in possession of something deeply fundamental to our understanding of the world that they're not releasing? So this is one, one of the things is this is one of the famous distractions that people play with, the narrative-

00:16:07
Eric Weinstein: Assume that that were true

00:16:07
Lex Fridman: ... of alien life forms-

00:16:10
Eric Weinstein: Get it

00:16:10
Lex Fridman: ... uh, spacecraft in possession, that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft.

00:16:15
Eric Weinstein: Assume that were true.

00:16:15
Lex Fridman: That's the popular narrative, yeah.

00:16:17
Eric Weinstein: I don't think the government really exists at the moment. I believe, and this is not an or- idea that was original to me. There was a, a guy named Michael Teitelbaum who used to be at the Sloan Foundation, and at some point I pointed out that the US government had completely contradictory objectives when it came to the military and science, and one, one branch said this, one branch said that. I said, you know, "I, I don't understand. Which, which is true? What does the government want?" He said, "You think there's a government?" And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "What makes you think that the people in those two offices have ever coordinated? What is it that allows each office to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office?"

00:16:57
Lex Fridman: Mm.

00:16:57
Eric Weinstein: And that's when I first started to understand that there are periods where the government coheres, and then there are periods where the coherence just decays, and I think that that's been going on since 1945, that there have been a few places where there's been increased coherence, but in general, everything is just getting less and less coherent, and that what war did was focus us on the need to have a government, a people, a mission, capacity, technology, commitment, ideology. And then as soon as that was gone, um, you know, different people, th- those who'd been through World War II had one set of beliefs. Those born in the 1950s, uh, you know, or, or late '40s by the time they got to Woodstock, uh, they didn't buy any of that.

00:17:39
Lex Fridman: So coherence is the, is it the complete opposite of, like, par- uh, like, of bureaucracy, being paralyzed by bureaucracy? So coherence is efficient, functional government? Because when you say there's no government, meaning there's no, uh, emergent function from a collection of individuals. It's just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices without any kind of efficient communication with each other on a single mission. And so a g- a government that is truly at the epitome of what a government's supposed to be is when a bunch of people working together on a single mission.

00:18:16
Eric Weinstein: What are we about? Are we about freedom? Are we about growth? Are we about decency and fairness? Uh, are we about the absence of a national culture so that we can all just do our own thing? I've called this thing the USA-N, the United States of absolutely nothing. Uh, these are all different visions for our country.

00:18:35
Lex Fridman: So it's possible that there's a alien spacecraft somewhere, and there's, like, 20 people that know about it, and then they're kind of... And like, as you communicate further and further into the offices, that information dissipates. It gets distorted in some kind of way, and then it's completely lost. The power, the possibility of that information is lost.

00:18:55
Eric Weinstein: We bought a house, and I had this idea that I wanted to find out what all the switches did. And I quickly found out that your house doesn't keep updating its plans. As people do modifications, they just do the modifications, and they don't actually record why they were doing what they were doing or what things lead to... So there are all sorts of bizarre... Like, there's a switch in my house that says privacy. [laughs] I don't know what privacy is. Does it turn on an electromagnetic field that is-- does some lead shielding go over the house?

00:19:26
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:19:26
Eric Weinstein: Um, that's what we have. We have a system in which the people who've inherited these structures have no idea why their grandparents built them.

00:19:34
Lex Fridman: It'd be funny if there's a freedom of speech switch that you could also control. [laughs] Then it would be a perfect metaphor for our current state of-

00:19:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's different because what they figured out is, is that if they can just make sure that we don't have, uh, any public options for communication, then, hey, every, every pri- every, uh, thing that we say to each other goes through a private company. Private companies can do whatever they want, and this is like one of the greatest moves that we didn't really notice. Uh, electronic and digital speech makes every other kind of speech irrelevant, and because there is no public option, uh, guess what? There's always somebody named Sundar or Jack or Mark who controls whether or not [laughs] you can speak and what it appears to be that is being said and who, whose stuff is weighted more highly than other. It's an absolute nightmare. And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite, Lord knows what is going on. People are so busy making money that they are not actually upholding any of the values. So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally against-- it, it has this kind of libertarian, uh, free, progressive sheen to it when it goes to Burning Man, and then it quickly just imposes rules on all of the rest of us as to what we can say to each other if we're not part of the inner elite.

00:20:51
Lex Fridman: So what do you think the ideal of the freedom of speech means?

00:20:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is very interesting. I keep getting lectured on social media by people who have no idea how much power the Supreme Court has to abstract things.

00:21:04
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:21:04
Eric Weinstein: Right now, you have a concept of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and the spirit of the law would have to say that our speech that matters is free, at least at the level of ideas. I don't claim that I have the right to endanger your life with speech or to reveal your private information, so I really am not opining about directed speech intended to smear you, and... That, that's a different kettle of fish, and maybe I have some rights to do that, but I don't think that they're infinite. Um, what I am saying is, is that the sp- freedom of speech for ideas is essential that the court abstract it and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are, because it really matters which abstraction you use. The, the, the case that I really like is search and seizure. If I have private data that I entered in my house that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house-

00:22:06
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:22:06
Eric Weinstein: ... um, but I view the abs- is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter of my house that I have the right to protect, or does my password extend the perimeter of my house to the data on the server that is located outside of my house? These are court, are choices for the court, and the court is supposed to pretend that they can divine the true intent of the framers. But all of the sort of-- And I, I've taken to calling this the problem of internet hyenas, people with ready-made answers and LOLs and, "You're such a moron." These folks love to remind you, "It's a private company, dude. It can do whatever it wants."

00:22:44
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:22:44
Eric Weinstein: No. The court has to figure out what the abstractions are. And just the way, for example, the Griswold decision, um, found that there was a penumbra because there was too little in the Constitution, therefore, there were all sorts of things implied that couldn't be in the document. Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now that says, uh, "Jack cannot do whatever he wants."

00:23:09
Lex Fridman: It's really... So you say the courts, but it's also us, people who think about the world. It's you.

00:23:15
Eric Weinstein: No. No, no. It's the courts.

00:23:17
Lex Fridman: But-

00:23:17
Eric Weinstein: If the courts don't do this-

00:23:18
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:23:19
Eric Weinstein: ... we're toast.

00:23:20
Lex Fridman: But we can still think about it. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll-

00:23:23
Eric Weinstein: Sure. But I, I don't feel like going down the drain.

00:23:25
Lex Fridman: Here's what I'm thinking about, uh, 'cause it's tricky how far it should extend. I mean, that's a ongoing conversation, don't you think, the interpretation of the law?

00:23:34
Eric Weinstein: I think I'm trying to say something very simple-

00:23:36
Lex Fridman: Mm

00:23:36
Eric Weinstein: ... and it's just not gonna be popular for a while. Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication, print or shouting in a public park. And so, you know, I, I can go to a public park and I can shout if I get a permit. Even there, I think it was in the nine- late 1980s in Atlanta, we came up with free speech zones where you can't protest at a convention, but you can go to a park 23 miles out and they'll, they'll fence off a little area where you can have your free speech.

00:24:05
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:24:06
Eric Weinstein: Um, no. Speech is dangerous. Ideas are dangerous. We are a country about danger and risk. And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of-- that, that is very different. So forget a lot of that stuff. But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous. And people will die as a result of free speech. The idea that one life is too much is preposterous. Like, why did we send... If one life is preposterous, why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy? I just don't get this.

00:24:41
Lex Fridman: So one thing that I was clearly bothered by, and maybe you can be my therapist as well [laughs]

00:24:49
Eric Weinstein: I thought you were mine.

00:24:50
Lex Fridman: [laughs] This is, this is a little bit of a miscommunication on both of our parts then, uh, because who's paying who for this? [laughs]

00:24:59
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:25:00
Lex Fridman: I was really bothered by, uh, Amazon banning Parler from AWS, because my assumption was that the infrastructure... I drew a distinction between AWS, the infrastructure on which competing platforms could be created, is different than the actual platforms. So I, I... The standard of the ideal of freedom of speech, I, in my mind, in a shallow way perhaps, apply differently to AWS than I did to Twitter. It felt that we've created a more dangerous world, that freedoms were violated by banning, uh, Parler from AWS, which I saw as the competing infrastructure which enables the competition of tools, the competition of frameworks of communication. What do you think about this level?

00:25:56
Eric Weinstein: First of all, let me give you the, the, uh, internet hyena answer. I don't understand, dude.

00:26:01
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:26:01
Eric Weinstein: Just build your own Amazon.

00:26:03
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:26:04
Eric Weinstein: Right?

00:26:04
Lex Fridman: Yes. Well, so that's a very shallow statement, but it's also one that has some legitimacy. We can't completely dismiss it because, uh, there's levels to this, to this game.

00:26:16
Eric Weinstein: Yes and no. But if we-

00:26:17
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:26:17
Eric Weinstein: ... if you really wanted to chase that down-

00:26:19
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:26:19
Eric Weinstein: ... one of the great things about a person-to-person conversation as opposed to, like, let's have 30 of our closest friends, whenever we have a conversation with 30 of our closest friends, you know what happens? It's like passing light through a prism. Every person says something interesting, and as a result, it's always muddled. You... Like, nothing ever resolves.

00:26:39
Lex Fridman: Well, one of my conversational techniques you mentioned, uh, you pushed back, is, uh, uh, first this childlike naivete and curiosity, but also I-

00:26:49
Eric Weinstein: Real or simulated?

00:26:50
Lex Fridman: Real, I'm afraid. [laughs]

00:26:51
Eric Weinstein: I would say 80% real.

00:26:53
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:26:53
Eric Weinstein: All right. So in this paradigm-

00:26:55
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:26:56
Eric Weinstein: ... how could you not see this coming? I mean, th- I, I did a show with, um, Ashley Matthews, who's the woman behind Riley Reid, and specifically about this. It was about the idea that if I move away from politics and go towards sex, uh, I know that there's always a move to use the infrastructure to shut down, um, sex workers. And in this case, uh, we had Operation Choke Point under the Obama, uh, administration. We have a positive passion for people who want to solve problems, that they, they don't like this company, they don't like that company. Payday loans would be another one. And so you have legal companies that are harassed by our financial system, that har- you can't, you know, uh... As Riley Reid, uh, Ashley couldn't get a Mailchimp account according to her, if I understand her correctly. And this idea that you charge these people higher rates because of supposed, uh, chargebacks on credit cards, even if their chargebacks are low, yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment. There's something about everybody who shows up at Davos, uh, they get drunk in the Swiss Alps, and then they come back home and they coordinate, and they coordinate things like Build Back Better. We don't really understand what Build Back Better is, but my guess is, is that Build Back Better has to do with extremism in America. How do we shut down the Republican Party as the source of extremism? Now, I do think the Republican Party has got very extreme under Trump, and I do believe that that was responsive to how extreme the Democratic Party, uh, got under Clinton first, and then Obama, and then Hillary. And in all of these circumstances, it's amazing how much we want to wield these things as weapons. Well, our extremism is fine because we pretend that Antifa doesn't exist and we don't report what goes on in, in Portland, but your extremism, my God, that's disgusting. This is the completely ridiculous place that we're in. And by the way, our friends, in part, are coked up on tech money, and they don't appear to hold the courage of their convictions at a political level because it's not in keeping with shareholder value. You know, at some level, shareholder value is the ultimate shield with, with which everyone can cloak themselves.

00:29:24
Lex Fridman: Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, and I'm not sure it was a good financial decision for Twitter, right? Uh, but I'm... Perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong. Uh-

00:29:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, are you thinking locally, or are you thinking if Twitter refused to-

00:29:42
Lex Fridman: Long term.

00:29:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump, what is the odds that, that, uh, the full force of the antitrust division might fine them? I don't know.

00:29:49
Lex Fridman: Oh, I see. I see. So there's a, a complicated thing.

00:29:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's a... Look, these guys are all having a discussion in very practical terms. You know, you can say... You can imagine the sorts of conversation. Jack, Mark, Sundar, we're really glad you're all here. We're, we're all trying to sing from the same hymnal and row in the same direction. We understand free speech. We're completely committed to it. But we have to draw along with extremism, guys. We, we just need, we need to make sure we're all on the same page.

00:30:17
Lex Fridman: Well, they use the term violence, too, and they, I think, overapply it. So basically, anybody who [laughs]... I'm, I'm telling you, I'm, uh, I say dumb things to, uh, to incentivize a thoughtful conversation.

00:30:34
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, what- whatever these things are There is no trace. Like, how old are you, Lex? You're in your mid-30s?

00:30:41
Lex Fridman: Yeah, to late 40s.

00:30:43
Eric Weinstein: Mid... Late 20s to late 40s.

00:30:45
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:30:45
Eric Weinstein: Somewhere in there.

00:30:46
Lex Fridman: That, that's the demographic, yes.

00:30:47
Eric Weinstein: I do think that partially what's happened is, is that your group has never seen functional institutions. These institutions have been so compromised for so long. Um, you've probably never seen an adult. Sometimes I think Elon looks like an adult. I know that he, he has a wild lifestyle, but I [laughs] also see him looking like an adult.

00:31:07
Lex Fridman: What does an adult look like, exactly?

00:31:09
Eric Weinstein: Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things, speaks carefully, thinks about the future beyond their own life s- lifespan. Uh, somebody who has a pretty good idea of how to get things done. Isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions. Is more focused on breaking new ground than playing rent-seeking games.

00:31:28
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:31:29
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I really had a positive... I was so completely chaste [laughs] when Elon Musk ended up as the world's richest person. It was like, "Well, that's interesting. Back to work."

00:31:39
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:31:39
Eric Weinstein: It's just like, that's what, that's what a grown-up-

00:31:41
Lex Fridman: That's what an adult would do, yeah

00:31:42
Eric Weinstein: ... that's what a, that's what a grown-up would do. And it just made, you know... E- weirdly, I said something about, "Isn't it amazing that the world's richest person knows what a Lagrangian is?" And he made a terrible Lagrange joke about potentials.

00:31:53
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:31:54
Eric Weinstein: But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately, Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult, and I can tell you that the internet hyenas will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is for pumping his stock price, talking his book, and all this stuff. Shut up.

00:32:09
Lex Fridman: Just looking at the world seriously and rigorously, and you're saying that the people who are running tech companies or running the mediums on which we can exercise the ideal of free speech are not adults.

00:32:24
Eric Weinstein: I think not. I think first of all, a lot of them are Silicon Valley utopian, uh, businessmen, where you talk a utopian line, and you use it. You- you've heard my, my take, which is that, uh, the idealism of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts. And I believe that in many ways, the idealism of Silicon Valley about connecting the world, a world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is really about the, uh, software eating the world, as Marc Andreessen likes to say. That there were all these legacy properties, and by simply being a bad tech version of, uh, something that previously existed, like a newspaper, you could immediately start to dwarf that by aggregating newspapers and their digital versions, because digital is so much more powerful. As a result, yes, we have lots of, uh, man children, um, wandering around, uh, what once was [laughs] the Bay Area and is now Austin and Miami and other places. Um, and maybe Singapore. That, um, all of these people that, you know, these are friends of ours, and they're brilliant with respect to a certain amount of stuff, but none of them can get off the drip. It's amazing that none of them have F you money. We've got billionaires who don't have F you money.

00:33:39
Lex Fridman: Okay. I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence, and not just Jack Dorsey, by everybody, uh, that was banning people. And then this word violence was used as a kind of, uh, just, like, extremism and so on to, uh, without much reason behind it. You think it's impossible for Jack Dorsey or anybody else to be, as you said, an adult, a grown-up, and reason?

00:34:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grown-up.

00:34:07
Lex Fridman: It seems like he is.

00:34:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:34:09
Lex Fridman: He's o- he's, as you've ta-

00:34:10
Eric Weinstein: But he's under pressures

00:34:11
Lex Fridman: ... as you've discussed, he, it seems that he's been on the verge of almost being quite-

00:34:17
Eric Weinstein: I don't-

00:34:17
Lex Fridman: ... serious and transparent and real with people.

00:34:19
Eric Weinstein: I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went, and I worry that that must be something behind the scenes that I can't see.

00:34:29
Lex Fridman: From my perspective, what I think is the stress, the burden of that when people are screaming at you is, uh-

00:34:37
Eric Weinstein: No, Jack, Jack-

00:34:37
Lex Fridman: ... is overwhelming

00:34:38
Eric Weinstein: ... Jack is a Zen monk.

00:34:39
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:34:40
Eric Weinstein: He really is.

00:34:41
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:34:42
Eric Weinstein: Jack is an incredibly impressive person intellectually, morally, spiritually, at least for a couple of meetings. I don't know him very well, but I'm very impressed by the person I met, and I don't know where that person is, and that terrifies me.

00:35:02
Lex Fridman: But do you think somebody could step up in that way?

00:35:04
Eric Weinstein: No.

00:35:04
Lex Fridman: Uh, you, so, it, does, can, does a human being have the capacity to be transparent about the reasoning behind the banning, or do you think all banning eventually, uh, all banning of people from mediums of communication is eventually destructive? Or it's impossible for human beings to reason with ourselves about it?

00:35:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, let, let's, let's see what the problem is. So my phone has been on airplane mode. I'm gonna unlock it, and I'm gonna take a picture of Lex Fridman. Now, if I can, I'm gonna tweet that picture out.

00:35:43
Lex Fridman: Great.

00:35:43
Eric Weinstein: But here's the weird part about it.

00:35:45
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:35:46
Eric Weinstein: Um, that picture, sitting with-

00:35:51
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:35:52
Eric Weinstein: ... Lex today.

00:35:55
Lex Fridman: This, th- this, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage is made.

00:35:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay. In so doing-

00:36:00
Lex Fridman: Yes

00:36:02
Eric Weinstein: ... I have just sent, um, a picture of you and a tiny piece of text all over the planet that has arrived at, i- if statistics tell the truth, just under half a million different accounts.

00:36:17
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm. And then more from sharing and so on.

00:36:21
Eric Weinstein: And we have, well, and been, some of those accounts are dead. We don't really know how many places it went.

00:36:25
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:36:27
Eric Weinstein: But the key issue with that tweet is that that is a non-local phenomenon.

00:36:34
Lex Fridman: Yes.

00:36:35
Eric Weinstein: So I just... Broadcasted to an entire planet. Somebody in Uganda is reading that at the same time as somebody in Uruguay.

00:36:44
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:36:46
Eric Weinstein: There is no known solution to have so many people with the ability to communicate non-locally, because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech inside of the Constitution. Friction, locality, there were all sorts of other aspects to speech. So if you think about speech as a bundle-

00:37:07
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm. I like this. [laughs]

00:37:10
Eric Weinstein: Then it got unbundled, and some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on to retard, uh, the impact of speech aren't present, and we don't have the courage to say, "I wonder if the First Amendment really applies in the modern era in the same way, or we have to work through an abstraction." Either we probably have to amend the Constitution or we have to abstract it properly, and that issue is not something we're facing up to. I watch us constantly look backwards.

00:37:46
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:37:46
Eric Weinstein: We don't seem to c- try to come up with new ideas and new theories. Nobody really imagines that we're going to be able to wisely amend the Constitution anymore in the inside of the United States. Many people, uh, abroad will say, "Why are these guys talking about the US? It's a US-centric program." Well, that's because nobody knows where this program lives. The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be in a physical place together-

00:38:08
Lex Fridman: Mm

00:38:08
Eric Weinstein: ... is also bizarre. It could be anywhere. It doesn't really matter that it happens to be here. So the difference between logical and between physical, local, non-local, frictional, non-frictional. It's the same thing with, uh, firearms. Uh, nobody imagined that the Gatling gun, uh, was gonna be present when you had to reload a musket.

00:38:29
Lex Fridman: And that's fascinating to think about. I mean, y- y- you're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom that seems so foundational to the, to this nation, to what made this nation great and perhaps m- much of the world that is great, made it great, is changing completely. Can we try to reason through how the ideal f- freedom of speech is to be changed? I, uh, I guess I'm struggling. It feels really wrong, perhaps because I wasn't paying attention to it, it feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump, uh, from Twitter and, uh, to, to ban not just the President, that's really wrong to me, but this particular human for being, uh, divisive. But then when, when there's an incitement of violence, th- that is an overused claim, but perhaps there was a actual, a brewing of local violence happening. So one of the things I know was happening on Parler is people were, uh, scheduling meetings together in physical space. So you're now go- going back from this dynamic, social, large scale, people from Uganda, people from all over the world being able to communicate. You're now mapping that into now back meeting in the physical space that is, uh, similar to what the founding of this nation was referring to.

00:39:58
Eric Weinstein: But if the, if the violence were digital, if ransomware suddenly was unleashed-

00:40:04
Lex Fridman: True.

00:40:04
Eric Weinstein: Um-

00:40:04
Lex Fridman: True

00:40:05
Eric Weinstein: ... the key issue is the abstractions.

00:40:07
Lex Fridman: True.

00:40:07
Eric Weinstein: So what was freedom of speech as a bundle?

00:40:11
Lex Fridman: And now it's-

00:40:12
Eric Weinstein: And then how do we abstract the bundle into the digital era?

00:40:16
Lex Fridman: Do you think we just need to raise the question and talk about it? Do you have, do you have ideas? Because-

00:40:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, sure, I have ideas, but the c- key point is, is that I'm not even welcome in mainstream media.

00:40:26
Lex Fridman: Do you think-

00:40:26
Eric Weinstein: I've never seen you on mainstream media. Do you do mainstream media?

00:40:29
Lex Fridman: No.

00:40:29
Eric Weinstein: So we, we exist in part of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story, which I c- I've called the gated institutional narrative.

00:40:39
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:40:39
Eric Weinstein: And the institutions pretend that they plug their fingers, uh, in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of MSNBC talking to CNN about what was in The New York Times, uh, as covered by The Washington Post. And so that's effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they, you know, "The Undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper." Okay, well, that's very different than MMA.

00:41:06
Lex Fridman: You've, uh, recently been on, uh, Glenn Beck's program.

00:41:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:41:09
Lex Fridman: And there was this kind of, one of the things you've talked about is being able to have this conversation w- I, I don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside the mainstream media, but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews.

00:41:27
Eric Weinstein: You're right.

00:41:28
Lex Fridman: And having a nuanced or just, like, a respectful conversation that's grounded in mutual human respect.

00:41:35
Eric Weinstein: But we can't have the reality because the main model is, is, um, the center, both left and right, is in the process of stealing all the wealth that we built up, and they've organized the extremes, uh, into two LARPing teams that I've called MAGAstan and WOKAstin. And then you have everybody who isn't part of that complex, all seven of us. The number of us who are able to earn a living looking at all of these mad people playing this game. You know, th- there's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks are trying to look at price action, and somebody says, "This doesn't make any sense." And somebody will say, "It's just the locals stealing from each other." And that's really what we have. We have, we've got the leaders of MAGAstan and WOKAstin, uh, you know, championing these two tr- teams as sponsored by the center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver and cut the paintings out of the frames. That's what we, you and I are looking at. So when you ask me, like, do you have any ideas about the abstraction for free speech?

00:42:37
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:42:39
Eric Weinstein: I've never met Mark Zuckerberg. I've never met Sundar Pichai. I never met Larry Page. I was once in a room with Sergey Brin. I've never spoken to Elon Musk. I hang out with Peter Thiel, but we have a very deep relationship, but I don't really speak to m- that many other people at, at, you know, at sort of at this level. We're not having any kind of smart conversation nat- at a national level. In fact, it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox [laughs] in which we could play together. There's no place that we actually talk except long form podcasting. And by the way, they've found, you see what's going on with, like, Alex Stamos-

00:43:23
Lex Fridman: No

00:43:23
Eric Weinstein: ... and the Hoover Institution. We've, you know, th- there's a loophole left.

00:43:28
Lex Fridman: Oh, for, for-

00:43:28
Eric Weinstein: Long form podcasting allows people to speak at levels above daytime CNN. [laughs]

00:43:33
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:43:34
Eric Weinstein: It's like, well, why do you think they're not watching daytime CNN?

00:43:39
Lex Fridman: But, you know, th- that's, that's just silly journalism. They, uh, currently have no power to displace podcasting. That's why it's so powerful, RSS feed. I mean, that's why the big challenge with Joe Rogan and Spotify is, like, there's this dance that's fascinating to see, is Joe Rogan's now part of the system, and then he's also uncancellable, and there's this tension that's happening that's fascinating.

00:44:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, think about what happened to Howard Stern, though. Howard Stern became much less relevant. So if they can't control Joe by bringing him in-house-

00:44:12
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:44:13
Eric Weinstein: ... the key question is, is he going to continue... Like, you know, this, Joe says this thing about F you money.

00:44:20
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:44:22
Eric Weinstein: Joe's one of the only people with F you money who's actually said F you.

00:44:27
Lex Fridman: Yeah. Yeah.

00:44:28
Eric Weinstein: I don't understand this. I don't have F you money.

00:44:32
Lex Fridman: What, what exactly is... C- can we break apart-

00:44:35
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:44:35
Lex Fridman: ... F you money?

00:44:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:44:36
Lex Fridman: Because I always thought, I've been fortunate enough to have, always have F you money in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary in the United States-

00:44:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the stoic point, which is that-

00:44:50
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:44:50
Eric Weinstein: ... if you can l- live on rice and beans-

00:44:52
Lex Fridman: Right

00:44:53
Eric Weinstein: ... you're uncancellable because you're always rich relative to your needs.

00:44:56
Lex Fridman: Right. Isn't that F you fundamental, F you money? Why do you say that tech billionaires don't have F you money?

00:45:01
Eric Weinstein: When you need to hire private security to protect your family, how do you protect your two children?

00:45:07
Lex Fridman: I don't have those yet.

00:45:08
Eric Weinstein: Bingo.

00:45:09
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:45:10
Eric Weinstein: My point is, is that F you money insulates everything that you care about. It's not just about you.

00:45:17
Lex Fridman: So you're saying as the level of responsibility grows, the amount of money required for F you grows.

00:45:24
Eric Weinstein: We, we have a war going on. The war is on academic freedom. Academic freedom used to be present in the system as a, in terms of the idea w- we, we trust our elite.

00:45:35
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:45:35
Eric Weinstein: Now we have an idea elite. You wanna be the elite, you know. You want a lord above us. That's like, first of all, there's, like, a populist, anti-elitist thing. Then there's the idea that, um, we're gonna defer tenure for forever. Then we're gonna tell people, "Stay in your lane. Your tenure's only good for your own particular tiny micro subject. And then we're gonna also control your grants, and we'll be able to load up your teaching load if we don't like who you are, and we'll make your life n- absolutely impossible." We lost academic freedom, and we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster. And then we lost funding so that people were conf- confident that they would have the ability to do research no matter what they said. And as a result, what you find is, is a world in which there's no ability to get people to say, "No, I'm not gonna sign your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath. I won't sign any loyalty oath. Get the hell out of my office."

00:46:34
Lex Fridman: Uh-

00:46:35
Eric Weinstein: F you.

00:46:36
Lex Fridman: F you. And you're s- you're connecting money to that, but-

00:46:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, my point is, is that academic freedom is the, the whole idea behind it was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire on a much smaller salary.

00:46:50
Lex Fridman: Right.

00:46:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:46:53
Lex Fridman: We've lost that.

00:46:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. The only reason, in part, that I wanted to go in- into academic, a- academics as a profession as opposed to wanting to do physical or mathematical research, the great prize was freedom. And R- Ralph Gomory, uh, of the Sloan Foundation, previously of IBM Research, pointed it out. He says, "If, if you lose freedom, you lose the only thing we had to offer top minds. Top minds value their intellectual freedom and their physical and economic security at a different level than other human beings." And so people say, you know, "I don't understand, dude. You have the ability to do X, Y, and Z. What's the problem?"

00:47:36
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:47:36
Eric Weinstein: It's like, well, I value my ability to raise the middle finger as an American practically above everything else.

00:47:44
Lex Fridman: I, I wanna talk to you about freedom here in the context of something you've mentioned, which is that one way to take away freedom is to put a human being into a cage, is to create constraints. The other one that worries me is something that I think you've spoken to, to Twitter a little bit, on Twitter, is we bleed freedom by kind of slowly, uh, scaring you into not doing, not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities you can as freedom. So, like, when you ban Donald Trump-

00:48:22
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:48:24
Lex Fridman: ... when you, uh, ban P- uh, Parler, you give a little doubt in the minds of millions, like me, a person who's a tech person, who's an entrep- entrepreneur. There's a little, that's what I'm afraid of when I look in the mirror, is there now a little doubt in there-

00:48:40
Eric Weinstein: Sure

00:48:41
Lex Fridman: ... that, that limits the amount of options I will try?

00:48:43
Eric Weinstein: How certain are you that theCOVID virus didn't come from the Wuhan lab and is biosafety level four, we both know that we're both supposed to robotically say, "The idea that the COVID virus came from a lab is a discredited conspiracy theory. There is no evidence that suggests that this is true. The World Health Organization and the CDC have both opined this. To say otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible."

00:49:09
Lex Fridman: And the threat of that-

00:49:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:49:11
Lex Fridman: ... is the thing that ultimately limits the, the freedoms we feel.

00:49:16
Eric Weinstein: I should be tweeting about Jeff Epstein all the time.

00:49:20
Lex Fridman: And you're afraid.

00:49:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's also boring.

00:49:22
Lex Fridman: In a sense.

00:49:23
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I said it in the public.

00:49:25
Lex Fridman: Yeah, many times.

00:49:26
Eric Weinstein: Why is it we don't ask where the records are from Vollard House? Where, where are the financial records? Where are the SEC filings?

00:49:33
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:49:33
Eric Weinstein: Where are the questions on the, on the record to the intelligence, uh, agencies? Was he known to be part of the intelligence community?

00:49:42
Lex Fridman: So the, the-

00:49:42
Eric Weinstein: So we're, we're, we're not interested in asking questions. Like, am I gonna die as a result of asking the question, was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community of any nation? Is there a reason we're not asking about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund that he didn't run? Uh, just like the Wuhan lab.

00:50:02
Lex Fridman: Okay. How do we get to the core of the Jeffrey Epstein, the, the truth behind Jeffrey Epstein, in a sense? I mean, there's, there's some things that are just, like, useless conspiracy theories around it, even if they're true. There's some things that get to some-

00:50:14
Eric Weinstein: I hate to say it. You're not gonna like it. Look at the 1971 Media Pennsylvania break-in of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI. Those kids, and by the way, they weren't all kids, did what had to be done. They broke in. They broke the law. It was an incredible act of civil disobedience, and God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her... She was going to take to her grave that she'd [laughs] been part of this. Like, the coolest thing of all time. They didn't say anything for forever.

00:50:47
Lex Fridman: So civil disobedience. I mean, you have to-

00:50:50
Eric Weinstein: We are founded on civil disobedience.

00:50:52
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:50:52
Eric Weinstein: Civil disobedience is incredibly... You screw it up, and you're just a vandal. You screw it up, you're a hooligan.

00:51:01
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:51:02
Eric Weinstein: Those, those cats were so disciplined.

00:51:06
Lex Fridman: It's an art form in and of-

00:51:07
Eric Weinstein: It was an art form-

00:51:08
Lex Fridman: ... in a sense

00:51:08
Eric Weinstein: ... and they risked everything. They were willing to pay with their freedom. Those are the sorts of people who earned the right by putting themselves at risk. I would not do this. I am not volunteering to break into anything. I think it was, uh, William Davidon, who was a student of Murray Gell-Mann and a physics professor at Haverford, who corralled these people and led this effort. And right now, what we need is somebody to blow the lid off of what is controlling everything. We have... I, I'm happy to hear that it's a system of incentive structures, that it's a system of selective pressures. I'm happy to find out that it's emergent. I'm happy to find that it's partially directed by our own intelligence community. I'm happy to hear that, uh, in fact, we've been penetrated by North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia. But I need to know why people aren't... Like, the, the firebombing of the courthouse in Portland, Oregon, has no explanation. Uh, and, and somehow this is normal? This is not normal to any human being. We have video that people don't believe, and, you know, I, I come back to the Shaggy defense of, "It wasn't me." You know? [laughs] So it's like, um... You, you remember that song?

00:52:30
Lex Fridman: Shaggy, yeah. What, Wasn't Me. Caught you, uh-

00:52:32
Eric Weinstein: Caught-

00:52:33
Lex Fridman: ... banging-

00:52:33
Eric Weinstein: On the counter

00:52:34
Lex Fridman: ... in the shower. On the counter.

00:52:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:52:35
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:52:36
Eric Weinstein: Wasn't me.

00:52:36
Lex Fridman: It wasn't me.

00:52:37
Eric Weinstein: He's like... He says, uh, uh, his friend says, "Well, your, your strategy makes no sense at all." [laughs] Well, this is what MSNBC is doing. [laughs] You dropped him from the graphic. It wasn't me.

00:52:48
Lex Fridman: Yeah, it wasn't me.

00:52:49
Eric Weinstein: He, he came up with another yang. It wasn't me.

00:52:52
Lex Fridman: [laughs] I will never see MSNBC the same again. So you've sp- spoken about him before. I think it'd be nice to maybe honor him, to break it apart a little bit.

00:53:02
Eric Weinstein: Who?

00:53:02
Lex Fridman: Aaron Swartz.

00:53:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:53:03
Lex Fridman: Uh, why was he a special human being in this, uh, ilk of what we're talking about now, civil disobedience? Um, how do we honor him now moving forward as human beings who are willing to take risks in this world?

00:53:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don't know. I mean, d- are you inspired by Aaron Swartz?

00:53:23
Lex Fridman: I am. What-

00:53:24
Eric Weinstein: How do you feel about JSTOR? Let's talk about JSTOR first. So let's, let's, let's say what JSTOR is all about.

00:53:29
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:53:29
Eric Weinstein: Right? We the taxpayer pay for research, and then [laughs] the people who do the research do all the work for a bunch of companies who then charge us $30 an article to read what it is that we already paid for, and if we don't cite these articles, uh, we're told that we're in violation. Okay. I almost never call for civil disobedience, because I don't really wanna d-

00:53:59
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:53:59
Eric Weinstein: ... but fuck JSTOR.

00:54:03
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:54:03
Eric Weinstein: Fuck Elsevier. Fuck Springer. Who the fuck are these people?

00:54:07
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:54:09
Eric Weinstein: Get... The smart people need to take the greedy people behind the woodshed and explain to them what science is. I have a very old-fashioned idea that's so out of favor that, uh, I will immediately be seen as a knuckle dragger.

00:54:26
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:54:27
Eric Weinstein: I believe in the great woman theory of history and the great man theory of history. Emmy Noether is fantastic.

00:54:33
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:54:34
Eric Weinstein: Um, as an example, and I believe in editors over peer reviewers, and I believe that wrong things should be allowed into the literature, and I believe that the gatekeeping should go towards zero, because the costs, uh, associated with distribution are very, very slight. I believe that, um- We should be looking at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly into your competitor's clutches, particularly if you're a young person being reviewed by an older person. Uh, are you familiar with the, the Duat de Signor?

00:55:11
Lex Fridman: No.

00:55:11
Eric Weinstein: Are you familiar with the legend of the Mugnaia?

00:55:15
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:55:15
Eric Weinstein: Now, the Mugnaia is the miller's daughter, and the largest food fight in the entire universe, I believe, is held, I think, in Italy. Uh, it's called the Battle of the Oranges.

00:55:27
Lex Fridman: Okay.

00:55:27
Eric Weinstein: And it celebrates the miller's daughter, who had fallen in love with her beloved, and when it came time for them to marry, uh, the virginal Mugnaia was, in fact, uh, told that the lord, uh, of the land had the right to have the first night with the bride.

00:55:48
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:55:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, the Mugnaia had a different idea. So she seemed to consent to this, uh, perhaps mythical right, also called, uh, the, the Prima Notte, the first night.

00:55:58
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:55:59
Eric Weinstein: And by, by legend, she concealed a dagger underneath her robes, and when it came time for the ha- the hated lord of the manor to extract, uh, this right, uh, she pulled the knife out and killed him. And I think it also echoes a little bit a particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones. Uh, but that inspired both men and women, and the Mugnaia is the legendary hero. Um, right now what we need to do is we need to resist the Prima Notte, the right of first look. Right?

00:56:35
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:56:36
Eric Weinstein: F you. You don't have the right of first look. I don't want to send something blindly to my competitors. I don't want to subject myself to you naming what, what work I've done. Why, why are you in my story? That's my question. Get out of my story. I... If I do work, uh, and then you have an idea, oh, well, it's the Matthew principle. To him, uh, who has much, more will be given. I've gone to the National Academy of Sciences and talked about these things, and it's funny, I've been laughed at by the older people, who think, "Well, Eric, you know science proceeds funeral by funeral. That's Planck." You know-

00:57:10
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:57:10
Eric Weinstein: ... the Matthew principle, you know the Matilda principle, the things done by women are attributed to men. The- these are not new. I'm like, and you guys just live like this?

00:57:17
Lex Fridman: Yeah. So the revolutionary act now is to resist all of these things that-

00:57:22
Eric Weinstein: We need-

00:57:22
Lex Fridman: ... these things that are not new.

00:57:23
Eric Weinstein: So you asked me about Aaron Swartz.

00:57:25
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:57:25
Eric Weinstein: Aaron Swartz was the Mugnaia. One of the things you've done very beautifully is to communicate love, and I think about, you know, some of our conversations. And you got me to talk a little bit about my own experiences in, uh, 02138 and 39.

00:57:41
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:57:42
Eric Weinstein: Um, we are the product of our trauma, and what people don't understand is is that very often when you see people taking countermeasures against what appear to be imaginary forces, they're really actually replaying things that really happened to them. And having been through this system and watching all of the ways in which it completely rewrites the lives of the people who I'm counting on to cure our diseases, build our new industries, keep us safe from our foes, the amount of pressure the system is putting on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable. And so my, my goal is to empower somebody like an Aaron Swartz in memory and to talk about a Jeffrey Epstein situation. Do you know that the first person outside, um, of me to get a look at Geometric Unity was Jeffrey Epstein? How did he know I was working on this? I don't know.

00:58:46
Lex Fridman: So your ideas that formed Geometric Unity was something that, uh, his eyes had seen?

00:58:52
Eric Weinstein: I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein as one of the only people who could help me. No, no, listen to this.

00:59:00
Lex Fridman: How, how does this... Yeah, how does this connect?

00:59:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, first of all, my old synagogue, my old shul, was the conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel, and I believe it's called Rosovsky Hall, after Henry Rosovsky in the economics department, who was a Japan scholar, if I'm correct. And he became provost or dean of Harvard. I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein's money, and I wondered, in part, whether the Jewish students at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck of Harvard Hillel. So that was something I found very curious, but I don't know much about it. I also found that Jeffrey Epstein hanging around scientists... I don't think that either you or Joe exactly, I mean, got me correct, uh, in your-

00:59:50
Lex Fridman: Yes

00:59:50
Eric Weinstein: ... last interchange.

00:59:52
Lex Fridman: Uh, for the record, for people who haven't listened to the Joe Rogan program, Joe has claimed that Eric Weinstein was the only person who has gotten laid-

00:59:58
Eric Weinstein: Paid.

01:00:00
Lex Fridman: Oh. Paid.

01:00:01
Eric Weinstein: And you said you also got paid as a young man. Right?

01:00:05
Lex Fridman: I believe the word was laid, but, uh, allegedly.

01:00:08
Eric Weinstein: My hearing isn't so good at age 55.

01:00:10
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:00:10
Eric Weinstein: All right. Leaving that aside.

01:00:12
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:00:13
Eric Weinstein: Um, what was Jeffrey Epstein doing hanging around all of these scientists? I don't think that was the same program that was about compromising political leaders and business people and entertainment figures. I think these are two different programs that were being run through one individual. And Joe seemed to think that... I didn't think he was smooth. I thought he was glib. I think what Joe was really trying to get at was is that I found his mysticism meretricious. He had a, an ability to deflect every conversation that might go towards revealing that he didn't know what he was talking about. Every time you started to get close to something where the rubber hit the road, the rubber wouldn't hit the road

01:00:58
Lex Fridman: And yet, can you help me untangle-

01:01:00
Eric Weinstein: Sure

01:01:00
Lex Fridman: ... the, the fact that you thought deeply about the physics of the nature of our universe, and Jeffrey Epstein was interested?

01:01:13
Eric Weinstein: How did he know? I wasn't really talking about this stuff until... You know, even my close friends didn't really know what I was up to.

01:01:22
Lex Fridman: And yet you're saying he w- he did not have sufficient brilliance to understand when the rubber hit the road. So why, why did he have sufficient interest and curiosity?

01:01:32
Eric Weinstein: Tell you what I thought. I had been waiting to find out, does my government even know I exist?

01:01:39
Lex Fridman: Do you have an answer to that question?

01:01:41
Eric Weinstein: I have... A couple times, the government has reached out to me. In general, there is zero interest in me. Like, less than zero interest. I find that fascinating.

01:01:54
Lex Fridman: A- as far as you know, right? I mean, if-

01:01:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's what I'm trying to say. E- the question about not being able to see through a half-silvered mirror, you don't know what's going on-

01:02:03
Lex Fridman: Mm

01:02:03
Eric Weinstein: ... behind the half-silvered mirror. To you, it's a, it's... all you see is, uh, is your reflection.

01:02:09
Lex Fridman: But your intuition still holds. Like, this is where I've mentioned that I, uh... This is where I'll say naive, dumb things, but I still hold onto this intuition that Jeff- Not, I'm not confident in this, but I, I'm lean towards that direction that Jeffrey Epstein is the source of evil, not something that's underlying him, that he-

01:02:30
Eric Weinstein: You have, you have a bias. It's different than mine. Our Bayesian priors are tutored by different life experiences.

01:02:37
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:02:37
Eric Weinstein: If I was mostly concerned, like Sam Harris was, is concerned, that people fill their heads with nonsense, I would have a very strong sense that people need order in the world, that they take mysterious situations, they build entire castles in the air, and then they go move in if they really get crazy. You know, the old s- saying is that neurotics, um, build castles in the air and psychotics move in.

01:03:02
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

01:03:02
Eric Weinstein: Coming from a progressive family, we had a different experience.

01:03:06
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:03:06
Eric Weinstein: It's really weird when the government is actually out to get you, when they actually send a spy-

01:03:10
Lex Fridman: Mm

01:03:10
Eric Weinstein: ... when they actually engage in disinformation campaigns, when they smear you. And if you've ever had that brought to bear on your family, you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country, which is different than having a, "Wow, do people believe crazy stuff because they watch too much TV?" And both of these things have some merit to them, but it's a question of regulated expression. When do you want to express more Sam Harris, and when do you want to express more Howard Zinn?

01:03:39
Lex Fridman: And you can express both, correct? One human being can express both?

01:03:42
Eric Weinstein: Sure, but there's a trade-off between them. In other words, most of, most people, like the Michael Shermers of the world, are gonna tilt very strongly to, you know, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

01:03:52
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:03:52
Eric Weinstein: You're gonna have that kind of energy. And then somebody else is gonna say, "How many times do I have to get hit on, uh, y- you know, how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb before I realize that there's a problem?" So, you know, my feeling about this is yes, people see patterns in clouds. They see faces in scripture and all sorts of things, and it's just random cloud patterns.

01:04:10
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:04:10
Eric Weinstein: And it's also the case that there's tremendous pressure not to see conspiracies when conspiracies are relatively more common than the people [laughs] who shout conspiracy theory will, will claim. So both of these things are true, and you have to ask when do you express your inner Zinn and when, your inner Harris.

01:04:26
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:04:26
Eric Weinstein: And th- those are different, for sure.

01:04:27
Lex Fridman: And one fundamental difference between you and I, biases aside, is you've actually met Jeffrey Epstein, and I'm, uh, listening to, like, reverberations years later of stories and narratives through, uh, the story that-

01:04:42
Eric Weinstein: Luckily, I only met him once, and I, I think I had one or perhaps two phone conversations with him other than the one meeting.

01:04:51
Lex Fridman: Y- you can learn a lot in just a few words, right, from a human being.

01:04:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's true, but I think that the bigger issue was I saw something that I don't hear much remarked upon, which is Jeffrey Epstein is all there, that there is. In other words, there's the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes. There's all this stuff that kind of has the same feel to it, a little bit of variation and difference. Department of Energy. If you fall outside of that, there's just Jeffrey Epstein. That's what you're told.

01:05:25
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:05:25
Eric Weinstein: That's not quite true. There's Kavli. Maybe Jim Simons is now in the game. Peter Thiel has done some stuff. You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try. So there is other money running around. Templeton. But very strongly there was a belief that if you're doing something really innovative and the system can't fund it because it's, we've become pussies, Jeffrey Epstein's your guy. And that's-

01:05:50
Lex Fridman: So there's like this funnel-

01:05:51
Eric Weinstein: Exactly

01:05:51
Lex Fridman: ... that you're supposed to go through.

01:05:53
Eric Weinstein: That's right. And the idea is that you get called to the great man's house, and, you know, this sort of, uh, lubricious version of Ralph Lauren, you know, takes you in and asks you bizarre questions, and maybe he has an island, maybe he has a plane. And, you know, when you're starved, uh, you know, somebody showing you a feast, or when you're dehydrated and at death's door and somebody says, "Oh, you know, I, I have a well." [laughs] Um, you know, that's what it is.

01:06:27
Lex Fridman: Oh, wow.

01:06:27
Eric Weinstein: And so the thought is, wow, can you, can somebody get some effing money into the science system so that we don't have super creeps, uh, trying to learn all of our secrets ahead of time? WTF, what is your problem with transparency and taxpayer dollars? Just all of you. You wouldn't have a country. You'd be speaking German.

01:06:49
Lex Fridman: So e- essentially, you believe that human beings would not be able to in the c- when the money's lacking in the system, like, on research-

01:06:55
Eric Weinstein: We produce public goods. You and I are meant to produce public goods. Now, I sell Athletic Greens, and I sell Theragun, and I sell Unagi scooters, and ChiliPAD. I gotta be honest, I love these products, but I didn't get into this game for the purpose of selling. I'm trying to figure out how do you have an F-you lifestyle. But you know something, Lex? I don't know why you built this channel. It's kind of a mystery.

01:07:25
Lex Fridman: Yeah, I don't know why.

01:07:26
Eric Weinstein: I'll tell you why I built my channel.

01:07:29
Lex Fridman: The freedom.

01:07:29
Eric Weinstein: It's gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time in an alley.

01:07:33
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:07:33
Eric Weinstein: I got rolled multiple times, and my point is [laughs] I didn't wanna become a, a celebrity. I didn't wanna become well-known. But it's a lot harder to roll somebody who's getting... You know, I th- I think I'm... I, I don't know if this is mistaken, but I think I'm the math PhD with the largest number of followers on Twitter. And there was nothing you could do before.

01:07:58
Lex Fridman: I mean, again, to put a little responsibility on you, so you've created something really special for the distribution of your own ideas. I mean, uh, but-

01:08:07
Eric Weinstein: Uh-huh

01:08:07
Lex Fridman: ... because it's not necessarily currently scalable, you also, b- perhaps you and I have the responsibility of giving other people also a chance to spread their ideas. I mean, Joe Rogan did this very effectively for a bunch of people that-

01:08:23
Eric Weinstein: That's why they're angry at him, because he's a gatekeeper, and he let all sorts of people through that gate. From Roger, from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones

01:08:32
Lex Fridman: ... to, uh, Jordan Peterson, to, I mean, even... Well, first of all, to you and-

01:08:38
Eric Weinstein: To Abby Martin

01:08:39
Lex Fridman: ... to Abby Martin to-

01:08:41
Eric Weinstein: To Barry Weiss.

01:08:42
Lex Fridman: Yeah. And-

01:08:43
Eric Weinstein: That's the problem.

01:08:44
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Well, but you, you have now successfully built up a thing that allows that to carry that forward.

01:08:50
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, no, no, no. We are all vulnerable to reputational attack because what happens... You see, the problem, Lex, is, is that you are now an institution at some level. You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag. Uh, the last suit-

01:09:09
Lex Fridman: Wearing a suit

01:09:09
Eric Weinstein: ... the last suit you'll ever need, and, um, you have the reach of something like CNN to people who matter. Okay. So now the question is, how do we control something that doesn't have a board, doesn't have shareholders, doesn't have to make SEC filings, FCC fi- uh... So the best answer they have is, "Well, we just have to destroy reputations. All it takes is for us to take something that gets said or done or alleged." And I think it's incredibly important. One of the things people don't understand is, is that I'm, I'm going to fight general reputational attacks, not because some people don't deserve [laughs] to have their reputations drawn, dragged through the mud, but because it's too powerful of a tool to hand it to CNN, MSNBC-

01:10:01
Lex Fridman: Right

01:10:01
Eric Weinstein: ... Princeton, Harvard, the State Department.

01:10:04
Lex Fridman: Yes. But some of it is also-

01:10:07
Eric Weinstein: JPMorgan

01:10:08
Lex Fridman: ... it's a Muhammad Ali style, being good enough at, uh, doing everything you need to do without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks. Not being afraid, but not giving enough meat.

01:10:25
Eric Weinstein: I don't see why the people who have good ideas have to lead lives that are that clean. If you can do it-

01:10:30
Lex Fridman: You can be messy, yeah. You should be able to be messy. That, otherwise we're, we're suppressing too many people.

01:10:36
Eric Weinstein: Look.

01:10:37
Lex Fridman: Too many... Two billion minds. Yeah.

01:10:39
Eric Weinstein: Can you believe Elon Musk smoked a blunt?

01:10:42
Lex Fridman: I... Still people tell me this, that... Okay, I have discussions about Elon, and people, uh... The Avi Loeb, the-

01:10:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:10:52
Lex Fridman: ... Harvard scientist-

01:10:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:10:54
Lex Fridman: ... who's talking about ʻOumuamua, that it might be alien technology. He told me his v... He, he... This outside-the-box thinker-

01:11:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:11:05
Lex Fridman: ... when speaking to me about Elon, said th- called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed.

01:11:13
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:11:13
Lex Fridman: He... The blunt.

01:11:14
Eric Weinstein: I love it.

01:11:14
Lex Fridman: In a dismissive way. Like, "This guy's crazy because he smoked some weed." I was looking at him.

01:11:21
Eric Weinstein: Good God.

01:11:21
Lex Fridman: I was like, "Why, uh... Wow. Wow."

01:11:24
Eric Weinstein: Look, I think you should be able to have-

01:11:26
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

01:11:27
Eric Weinstein: ... consensual drug-filled orgies. Fuck perfect lives.

01:11:32
Lex Fridman: Yeah. You should be allowed to be messy. You're right. I, I take back my statement. I'm just saying-

01:11:37
Eric Weinstein: Respectability is the unique prison where all of the gates are open and the inmates beg to stay inside. It's time to end the prison of respectability because it's too effective of a means of sidelining and silencing people, including... It is better that we have bad people in our system than this idea of n- no platforming people who are beyond the pale, because it's such a simple technique.

01:12:08
Lex Fridman: So how do we, uh... What's the heroic action here on the-

01:12:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program. By the way, she was absolutely, um, delightful as a guest. She was, uh, she is polite in the extreme, far more polite than I am, and I had her right after Roger Penrose, uh, as a guest because I wanted to highlight this program can go anywhere. We can talk to anyone.

01:12:33
Lex Fridman: What about social media? You've started highlighting people being banned on social media. Uh, how do we fight this? Like, if you get banned from social media... So you're saying nobody will stand up to me, uh, who-

01:12:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, just figure out what your incentive structure is before. Assume that they're... Assume that I get banned on social media because somebody wants to make sure that my message doesn't, uh, interfere with the dominant narrative.

01:12:54
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:12:55
Eric Weinstein: Okay. What will happen... By the way, I'm very glad to be able to explain this on your show because that video will presumably be archived and they can't easily make you take it down. Okay. So what's gonna happen is, is that there'll be a, a whole bunch of very low quality bot-like, uh- ... accounts that dog you every time you talk about me.

01:13:19
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:13:20
Eric Weinstein: "Dude, it's getting old, getting boring. We already heard you. Dude, that was... Like, let it go. Not a good look." Not a good look is one of my favorites. [laughs]

01:13:29
Lex Fridman: But what about the high-profile ones?

01:13:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, then, then you'll get a few high-profile ones, and some of the high-profile ones command armies.

01:13:37
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:13:37
Eric Weinstein: Like, at some point, I had 10,000 people using exactly the same templated tweet, uh, tweeting at me. It was just... Actually, it got to the point where it was funny because everybody said, "Did you, did you hear that new hipster coffee shop?" I was like, "Why are you all suddenly talking about hipster coffee?" It was-

01:13:53
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:13:53
Eric Weinstein: ... hilarious. Um, those things will cause you to think better of it. You'll start to see your follower count go down, because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot, like, follows, and then just pull them. So I think that it's pretty well known how... And then maybe your account will be suspended, and it can't be revoked and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, and then three days later you'll be told it was an error.

01:14:17
Lex Fridman: So let me push back. I just don't see not defending you. Like, okay, so what are the things you would do that, given that I can actually talk to you-

01:14:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:14:26
Lex Fridman: ... offline, that, that would, uh, make me not defend you? Uh-

01:14:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all-

01:14:34
Lex Fridman: [laughs] I can't... I mean-

01:14:35
Eric Weinstein: No, but, because-

01:14:36
Lex Fridman: I can imagine some.

01:14:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but, but all of us have-

01:14:38
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:14:38
Eric Weinstein: ... things. If, if somebody says, "Do you hear what your boy Lex said about you?"

01:14:43
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:14:43
Eric Weinstein: "What, what did Lex say about me?" "Oh, he said you were flawed, dude." "Oh, shit."

01:14:49
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:14:49
Eric Weinstein: You know, they sow distrust, because none of us wanna stand behind flawed people. That's why you have everybody rushing to say, "I, I neither condemn nor condone." I know. I don't condemn nor c- You know, why? What is that?

01:15:02
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:15:02
Eric Weinstein: We're all trying to say-

01:15:03
Lex Fridman: By the way, for the record, I said that Eric is smarter than me and a brilliant human being, but flawed like all humans are.

01:15:10
Eric Weinstein: My point is, I've now come up with a new policy, which is I don't care what my friends have done, I am not disavowing my friends. B-

01:15:20
Lex Fridman: Right

01:15:20
Eric Weinstein: ... not because they didn't do the wrong thing. Maybe they did do the wrong thing. I don't know.

01:15:25
Lex Fridman: What's the value of friendship if you c- if that's not-

01:15:27
Eric Weinstein: It's not that. Like, for example, we've had the situation with Bryan Callen. Bryan Callen was featured recently in the Los Angeles Times. I know nothing about the allegations. I can't. I didn't even know Bryan at the time, right? I've known him for roughly the time I've been in Los Angeles, maybe a year and a half.

01:15:43
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:15:44
Eric Weinstein: During that period of time, I've never seen anything wrong. Now I'm in a situation, "Well, what do you think he did? Do you think he didn't?" Like, you know what? I don't know. But I do know this. Everyone's entitled to have friends, because we can't afford isolated people, and if your friends do the wrong thing, they're still your friends.

01:16:03
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:16:04
Eric Weinstein: And if they do terrible, terrible things, y- you bring that up with them privately, and it's not my responsibility to disavow in public. You know, we've had the situation that I don't like, where, you know, particular people that I've been close to, uh, I'm put under tremendous pressure to disavow them. "What do you think now about your buddy?"

01:16:24
Lex Fridman: Oh, like Dave Rubin, all that kind of stuff.

01:16:26
Eric Weinstein: Here's the thing.

01:16:27
Lex Fridman: Just 'cause they-

01:16:27
Eric Weinstein: My friends are my friends.

01:16:29
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:16:29
Eric Weinstein: I don't disavow my friends.

01:16:30
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:16:30
Eric Weinstein: We all need to make a statement that we will not be brought under pressure to disavow our friends, our family members, because m- mass murderers are dangerous the more isolated they become. It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people.

01:16:53
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:16:53
Eric Weinstein: And it's dangerous. And so-

01:16:54
Lex Fridman: And it sends a signal to everybody else to, uh, to f- fit in-

01:16:58
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:16:58
Lex Fridman: ... to be more s- actually-

01:16:59
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:16:59
Lex Fridman: ... cynical about the human connection-

01:17:00
Eric Weinstein: So my feeling-

01:17:01
Lex Fridman: ... we have to each other

01:17:01
Eric Weinstein: ... if I find out you've been selling heroin to elementary school students, you're still my friend, and I will not be disavowing you. And if I have a problem with you selling heroin to elementary school students during school hours, I will bring it up with you privately.

01:17:18
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:17:19
Eric Weinstein: Because we don't need to hear my voice added to that condemnation. Are there things that you could do that would cause me to say, "Actually, F this guy"? Yeah, above and beyond that. But simply doing the wrong thing, I think we've gone down a terrible path. I think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing we could have in a heavily armed society.

01:17:40
Lex Fridman: So I, I, I deeply agree with you on, uh, on Bryan Callen and on all these people that, quote, unquote, "got canceled." Uh...

01:17:47
Eric Weinstein: And I'm not saying that they... I d- I don't, I don't know the truth value, because we can't. And even if I did know the truth value, I'm not setting up an incentive structure for the dis- personal destruction as a means of letting institutions combat the fact that individuals are the last thing that can say, "None of you guys make any sense." I don't treat these things like... You know, I had a conversation where Kevin Spacey was at the dinner table when I came down from a hotel room, and I had a very long conversation with Kevin Spacey. I will not detail, because I don't do that, uh, as to what we discussed.

01:18:23
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:18:23
Eric Weinstein: But we talked very specifically about him being canceled, and I don't think that the world has heard that story in part because there is a s- a, a very strong sense that he has to be out-grouped. And as a result-

01:18:36
Lex Fridman: It's crazy

01:18:37
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, I mean, do we want d- do we wanna disavow the space program because it touched Wernher von Braun? Do we wanna disavow quantum mechanics because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg passed through it? Is Ehrenfest's theorem false because he murdered his child?

01:18:53
Lex Fridman: No.

01:18:53
Eric Weinstein: I mean, at what point do we recognize that we are the problem? Humans are humans, and there is no perfect... There, there is no perfect group of people. Even all of the most oppressed people, the supposed victims of the world who we now have fetishized into thinking that they're all oracles because their lived experience informs us, and their pain is more salient than everyone else's pain, those people aren't necessarily great people. You know? It's, it's like none, none of us.

01:19:21
Lex Fridman: So-

01:19:21
Eric Weinstein: We can't, we can't do this in this fashion.

01:19:25
Lex Fridman: So when we sit down to have a conversation across the table from somebody, you should be willing to... Like, you should not have NPR in your mind. You should be willing to take the full risk, and to see the good in the person without, with limited information, and to do your best to understand that person.

01:19:44
Eric Weinstein: Everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget. I don't believe this is of institutions.

01:19:50
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:19:50
Eric Weinstein: Okay? Everybody is entitled to a certain amount of screwing up in life. You're entitled to a mendacity budget. You're ent- entitled to an aggression budget. The idea of getting-

01:20:02
Lex Fridman: Beautiful

01:20:02
Eric Weinstein: ... rid of everybody [laughs] who has... You know, people haven't even blown through their budgets, and we're already...

01:20:08
Lex Fridman: Yeah. I, I think about, for example, one person, um, I'd be curious to get your thoughts about Alex Jones.

01:20:15
Eric Weinstein: Let's not talk about Alex Jones for a second. Let's talk about the National Enquirer.

01:20:18
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Uh-huh.

01:20:19
Eric Weinstein: Is everything the National Enquirer says false?

01:20:23
Lex Fridman: Uh, no.

01:20:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Do you remember the John Edwards story?

01:20:28
Lex Fridman: Uh, did he cheat on his wife? Sorry, yeah.

01:20:30
Eric Weinstein: He had a child from an extramarital affair.

01:20:33
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:20:34
Eric Weinstein: I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story. And then what does The New York Times do? The New York Times, I think, is allowed to report that the [laughs] National Enquirer is making a claim. That way, they don't have to substantiate the story.

01:20:49
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:20:49
Eric Weinstein: So why is The New York Times talking to Mike Cernovich or using the National Enquirer as a source? Are they using Alex Jones as a source? Who... Here's the big problem that we're having.

01:21:01
Lex Fridman: Mm.

01:21:02
Eric Weinstein: Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody, and other people are entitled to talk to no one? I don't really understand this. This is an indulgence system. This is how the Catholic Church used to do things.

01:21:13
Lex Fridman: It, it's hard to fight the system, because the reason you don't talk to Alex Jones is because the platforms on which you do the communication will, will de-platform, will remove you.

01:21:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but I'm not platformed at... I used to, I used to do NPR, and I used to do the News Hour.

01:21:27
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:21:27
Eric Weinstein: And I used to provide stories to Washington Post, New York Times. That has gone away. They've circled the [laughs] wagons closer and closer, and more of us are unacceptable. And right now, I have no question that they're going through anybody who has a platform, trying to say, "Okay, what do we have against that person in case we need to shut that down?" We have to make a different decision, Lex, and the different decision is that it doesn't matter how many times, uh, Joe said the N-word.

01:21:58
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:21:58
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't matter that somebody else, you know... Like, with mathematical theorems, if the worst person in the world proves a mathematical theorem, like the Unabomber, we can't undo the theorem.

01:22:11
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:22:12
Eric Weinstein: You know, and, and I, I point out Charles Manson's song, uh, Look At Your Game, Girl, is an amazing song. It's a really good song. I don't think it's one of the greatest songs ever, but it happens that he wasn't a no-talent. And, you know, I don't know how Hitler was as an artist.

01:22:29
Lex Fridman: It's actually not bad.

01:22:30
Eric Weinstein: Okay. We've gotta get past this. We've gotta get past this idea that we're gonna purge ourselves of our badness, and we're just gonna... It, this is like a, I've-

01:22:40
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:22:40
Eric Weinstein: ... likened it to teenage girls and cutting. We're just... All we're doing is destroying ourselves in search of perfection, and the answer is no, we're not perfect. We're flawed. We're screwed up. And we've always been this way, and we're not going to silence everyone who you can point a laser beam at and say, "Well, that person, look at how bad that person is." If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye. You, we might as well just, let's learn Chinese.

01:23:07
Lex Fridman: But there is an art to having those messy conversations, whe- whether with, uh, with, uh, Alex or anybody else. It's-

01:23:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay, let's talk about Alex.

01:23:14
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:23:15
Eric Weinstein: There's particular stuff that Alex does that's absolutely nauseating, and there's other stuff that he's doing that's funny.

01:23:21
Lex Fridman: The methodology of, of the way he carries, like, communicates.

01:23:23
Eric Weinstein: And sometimes he's talking about the truth, and sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy theory. His variance is incredibly high.

01:23:30
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:23:30
Eric Weinstein: The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O'Keefe or the National Enquirer or anything you don't like is to say, "Great. Go long-short."

01:23:39
Lex Fridman: What does that mean?

01:23:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, if you invest in a mutual fund, all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long.

01:23:46
Lex Fridman: Mm.

01:23:47
Eric Weinstein: But if you invest in a hedge fund, you do something called relative value trade. It's like, "Well, are you long tech or short tech?" "Well, actually, I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Google." Why is that? "Oh, because I believe Google got way too much, uh, attention and that Microsoft has been unfairly maligned, and so this is really a play on legacy tech over more modern tech."

01:24:10
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:24:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Which part of Alex Jones are you long and which part are you short? One of the things that should be a requirement for being a reporter is, like, what, what did Donald Trump do that was good?

01:24:21
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:24:21
Eric Weinstein: Nothing. Okay, then you're not a reporter. What did Hitler do that was good? The Rosenstrasse pro- protest. Non-Jewish women cam- campaigned for their Jewish men to be returned home to them from certain death, almost, in death camps. It should've been that not-- there were no death camps. It should've been that everybody was returned home. But you know what? The fact that the, the women of the Rosenstrasse protest... I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about this. You know, some of the baddest ass chicks in the world got their husbands returned to them. Kol Hakavod. And not, I'm not celebrating Hitler. Hitler's the worst of the worst. But goddammit, you know, y- this idea that we can just say, "Everything that person does is a lie. Everything that person does is evil," this reflects a simplicity of mind that humanity cannot afford. Or is, is Google evil, evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf? Is Amazon evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf? If you find out that Mein Kampf re- rests on somebody's bookshelf, do you have any idea what it means? If you find out that a scholar used the N-word, should that person lose their job? Come on, grow the hell up.

01:25:47
Lex Fridman: I, I guess our responsibility to lead by example in that, because th- you have to acknowledge that the fab... like, the, the current public discourse-

01:25:55
Eric Weinstein: Have somebody on your podcast who you're worried about. And, but, but-

01:26:01
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:26:01
Eric Weinstein: ... but do it in a principled fashion. I mean, in other words, I'm not here to whitewash-

01:26:06
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:26:06
Eric Weinstein: ... everything. On the other hand, if somebody makes, you know, some allegations, I don't know that I'm obligated to treat every set of allegations as if th- now, how do you defend yourself against... They are... No. Allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.

01:26:24
Lex Fridman: Well, my sort of my standard, I don't know, you maybe could speak to it, is I don't care, like in the case of Alex Jones, for example, I don't... I'm willing to have a conversation with Alex Jones and people like him if I know he's not going to try to manipulate me.

01:26:40
Eric Weinstein: Assume that he is gonna try to manipulate you.

01:26:42
Lex Fridman: I can't. Then, then we're not going to be two humans.

01:26:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But Lex, I want you to think well of me. I put on a jacket. I don't usually wear a jacket, okay?

01:26:51
Lex Fridman: Um, thank you, Eric.

01:26:53
Eric Weinstein: All right. I'm trying to manipulate you. There's an entire f- field-

01:26:57
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:26:57
Eric Weinstein: ... no, there's an entire field that says that speech may be best thought of as an attempt to manipulate each other. This is too simplistic. Everything that we keep talking through.

01:27:08
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:27:10
Eric Weinstein: You know better than this.

01:27:11
Lex Fridman: No, I disagree. I, I think-

01:27:12
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:27:13
Lex Fridman: ... I think there's ways... There's, uh, of course, it's a gray area, but there is a, a threshold where your intent with which you come to a meeting, to an int- an interaction, is one that is not one that's grounded in, like, a respect for common humanity, like a love for each other as deeply messy humans.

01:27:34
Eric Weinstein: If somebody's doing really bad stuff, I expect you to try to keep them from doing really bad stuff. But, you know, just keep in mind that when I was a younger man, I saw an amazing anti-pornography documen- documentary, and it was called Rate It X, and I don't know where it went, but the conceit of it was, we're gonna get some pornographers in front of a camera because they wanna talk, and we're gonna ask them about what they do for a living and why it's okay. No commentary. Okay? You could potentially, if you really think Alex Jones is the worst, and I, again, I'm not intimately familiar with him, you could decide to, um, just let him talk. Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people. You know, I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux. Stefan Molyneux makes many good points and makes many bad points, and he makes many good points in bad ways.

01:28:41
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:28:42
Eric Weinstein: And I worry about it, and I don't feel that it's... it's not my obligation to make sure that Stefan Molyneux has a voice on The Portal. But I did stand up and say I didn't want him banned from social media, and I do think that a lot of the people who are being banned from social media were worried that they're right rather than that they're wrong. I certainly don't really think that I'm worried in some sense that, uh, some of the really wrong people are wrong. But, you know, if you look at, for example, Curtis Yarvin, there's a tremendous amount of interest. Is Eric gonna speak to Curtis Yarvin? Curtis Yarvin says many interesting things, and he says many horrible, stupid things, very provocative.

01:29:23
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:29:23
Eric Weinstein: And I don't-- I haven't invi- I haven't invited him onto The Portal, but I haven't said I will never invite him onto The Portal. We, we are all in a difficult position.

01:29:35
Lex Fridman: That's what I'm saying. You're, you're making a kinda... I think it's a much more difficult task that, and burden, who carry it as people who have conversations because Curtis Yarvin is a good example. How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis's work to really under-

01:29:51
Eric Weinstein: Let's talk about the problem of Curtis Yarvin.

01:29:53
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:29:53
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause I think it, it's probably illustrative. There's this big question is, why does somebody who says such stupid-ass things listened to by so many people? Very smart people, people who are part of our daily lives discuss Curtis Yarvin in hushed tones. Now-

01:30:07
Lex Fridman: That's a good question

01:30:09
Eric Weinstein: ... my belief is that Curtis Yarvin has made a number of very interesting, provocative points, and they associate Curtis Yarvin as the person who has made these points, and they treat the completely asinine stuff that he says that's super dangerous as, "Well, that's Curtis." Right?

01:30:29
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:30:30
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:30:30
Lex Fridman: They, they give him the credit for... He, he's, he's a kinda like, sorry to use the term, first principles, deep thinker about, like-

01:30:36
Eric Weinstein: In some category

01:30:36
Lex Fridman: ... the way the world... in some, in some space about-

01:30:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:30:39
Lex Fridman: ... the world. Yeah.

01:30:40
Eric Weinstein: But as a result, we don't actually know why Curtis Yarvin is knocking around so many Silicon Valley luminaries' lives.

01:30:51
Lex Fridman: What's... See, see, you said that he said a lot of asinine, stupid stuff, and that's the sense I got from the few things I've read, not just about... this is not just like Wikipedia stuff, is he, he's a little, like I've said before, he seems to be careless.

01:31:05
Eric Weinstein: I don't think he's care... No, no, no. It's like Jim Watson. Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things in order to prove that he's free. It's not a question of careless. He enjoys-

01:31:17
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:31:17
Eric Weinstein: ... the freedom to say these things.

01:31:20
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:31:20
Eric Weinstein: And the key point is, is that there's... I expect something more of Curtis. I expect that if somebody is insightful about all sorts of things up to that point- That they're going to have enough care. Now I, for example, make this point repeatedly that vaccines are not 100% safe Most people who have an idea that anybody who's an anti-vaxxer should be silenced-

01:31:43
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

01:31:43
Eric Weinstein: ... are in a position where they, they, they probably don't say, "Vaccines are 100% safe," but you keep finding that statement over and over again.

01:31:50
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:31:50
Eric Weinstein: Like, believe all women. Vaccines are 100% safe. Climate science is settled science.

01:31:55
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:31:55
Eric Weinstein: Whatever this motte and bailey is, where you make extraordinarily, uh, vapid blanket claims, and then you retreat into something. Well, defund the pol- you know, we don't want no more police actually just means we want the police to, uh, not take on mental health duties. We've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society, and what I'm claiming is, is that I might talk to Curtis Yarvin, but I have really very little interest to talk to a guy who seems to be kind of giddy about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves. It's like, why do I wanna do that on The Portal?

01:32:34
Lex Fridman: One, uh, first of all, because j- just as you said, uh, that's not Curtis's main thing. He has, um, a lot of ideas, and s- uh, the, the, what I've read of him, which is not a huge amount, uh, is there's, he's very thoughtful about the way this world works, and on top of that, he's an important historical figure in the birth and the development of the alt-right, or wh- what would be called the alt-right-

01:32:59
Eric Weinstein: Or the new reactionary

01:33:00
Lex Fridman: ... Yeah. And there's... So he's an im- just an important intellectual, and so it, it makes sense to talk to him. The question is, how much work do you put in?

01:33:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the issue of fugu. I'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that fugu. So you have a, you have a puffer fish. You can eat the puffer fish. You can, you can get a, kind of a tingly sensation on your tongue if you eat-

01:33:25
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:33:25
Eric Weinstein: ... a little bit of the poison organ. But my point is, I don't know how to serve Curtis Yarvin-

01:33:30
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:33:30
Eric Weinstein: ... so that, in fact, I'm not worried about what happens.

01:33:34
Lex Fridman: And, and-

01:33:34
Eric Weinstein: But I believe that if somebody else was a student of the new reactionary movement, that person might be in a better position to host Curtis Yarvin.

01:33:43
Lex Fridman: So s- somebody, that's a really good example. Somebody I think you've, you've spoken with, uh, that's an intermediary, that's a powerful one, is Michael Malice, and he's spoken with Curtis Yarvin. And, uh, Michael wrote a book about-

01:33:55
Eric Weinstein: By the way, Michael somewhat changed my mind about Michael Malice.

01:33:58
Lex Fridman: I'm glad he did. I think, uh, I, I would call him a, a friend, and I think he's a, underneath it all, a really kind human being. And I think your skepticism about him was initially from a surface level of, what did you call him, hyenas, the trolls, and so on.

01:34:15
Eric Weinstein: I'm not happy about his... I, it's been so long since I've seen good trolls.

01:34:23
Lex Fridman: Yes. So he need [laughs] he needs a higher quality of trolling, but he aspires to that. I mean, it, you know, disagree or not, I really enjoy how much care he puts into the work he does, like on North Korea and the study of the world, and how much privately, but also in public, love he has for people, especially those who are powerless.

01:34:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:34:50
Lex Fridman: Just a genuine admiration for them, uh, for-

01:34:54
Eric Weinstein: But, but-

01:34:55
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:34:55
Eric Weinstein: ... I think Curtis actually-

01:34:57
Lex Fridman: Does too

01:34:58
Eric Weinstein: ... I don't know. I mean, you have to appreciate, the first time I met Curtis, he introduces me, he says, "I'm the most right-wing person you've ever met." I was just like, "Well, this is a conversation that's already over." [laughs]

01:35:09
Lex Fridman: It's theatrical in a way that's not pr- conductive to actually having a real human connection.

01:35:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, it just, it, it turned me so... It turned me off-

01:35:16
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:35:16
Eric Weinstein: ... because it was like-

01:35:17
Lex Fridman: Yeah, it's all about-

01:35:18
Eric Weinstein: ... you need to be the most right-wing person, and so it's like-

01:35:20
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:35:20
Eric Weinstein: ... "I'm a troll, I'm a troll."

01:35:22
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:35:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay, why are we doing this?

01:35:24
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:35:24
Eric Weinstein: But what I'm trying to get at is different. I'm trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend of yours. If you found out something terrible, you should continue-

01:35:31
Lex Fridman: He should still be a friend

01:35:32
Eric Weinstein: ... you should still continue to be his friend. You know, and Curtis is not-

01:35:34
Lex Fridman: And in, in Michael Malice's case, it's very likely [laughs] that we'll find out something terrible.

01:35:38
Eric Weinstein: Curtis is an acquaintance of mine because he hangs around with some people that I know. I did not get it. I've started to understand why the people in my life, uh, some of them are Curtis Yarvin fans. Many of them disregard the stupid stuff. But my feeling is, is that too much poison organ, not enough fish. I don't know how to serve that. It's too intermingled. I, I'm not your chef.

01:36:03
Lex Fridman: Speaking for de- defending your friends, staying with your friends, and, uh, bringing the old band, uh, together again, you, uh, coined the term IDW, Intellectual Dark Web. Uh, I like it. It's, it represents a certain group of people that are struggling with, uh, that are almost like, um, challenge the norms of social and political discourse from all different angles.

01:36:30
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:36:31
Lex Fridman: What do you think is the state of the IDW? What do you think is its future? Is it still a useful-

01:36:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, it never existed. Is it a protocol? Is it a collection of people featured in an article? What I learned very clearly is, is that there's a tremendous desire in the internet age to pin people down. Well, what do you say? Who's in it?

01:36:51
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:36:51
Eric Weinstein: What are the criterion? It's like, I understand. You want to play the demarcation game, and you want to make everything that is demarcated instantly null and void. No, thank you. So I resisted saying who was in it. I resisted saying what it was. I resisted saying that Bari Weiss's article was the definitive thing. You know. They chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs that we couldn't get out of. I did not want those photographs taken. They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer needed to take them all at twilight or, you know, I don't know, some such thing. I didn't even necessarily want to do the article. Um, Bari convinced me that it was the right thing to do. Undoubtedly, Bari was right. I was wrong. But The key point is nothing can grow in this environment. There's a reason we're not building. It does not appear that we've found a way to grow anything organic and good and decent that we need right now, and that's kind of the key issue.

01:37:53
Lex Fridman: Who's the we? Do you mean u- us as a society?

01:37:55
Eric Weinstein: Those of us who wish to have a future for our great-grandchildren. Let's c- let's, let's take the subset of people who are worried about things long after their demise.

01:38:06
Lex Fridman: But do you think it's useful to have a term like the IDW to capture some set of people, some set of, uh, ideas or maybe principles that capture what... I think the IDW... Okay, you can say th- it's not supposed to mean, it doesn't exist, it doesn't mean anything, but to the public, to me, okay, I'll just speak to me, it represented something.

01:38:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:38:31
Lex Fridman: I, I, it, uh, represented... I think [laughs] I said this to you. It's my, in my first a- [coughs] attempt to interview the great Eric Weinstein, uh, I said that, uh, I spoke this about you, but IDW in general is trying to point out the elephant in the room or that the emperor has no clothes. There's a set of people that do that in their own way.

01:38:49
Eric Weinstein: If there are multiple elephants in the room-

01:38:51
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Yes

01:38:52
Eric Weinstein: ... the point is, is that the IDW was more interested in seeing the totality of ele- elephants and trying to figure out how do we move forward as opposed to saying, "I can spot the other guy's elephant in the room, but I can't see my own."

01:39:03
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:39:03
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, in large measure, we didn't represent an institutional base, and therefore it wasn't maximally important that we look at our own hypocrisy because we weren't on the institutional spectrum.

01:39:18
Lex Fridman: This is where friendship comes into play with the different figures that are loosely associated with IDW, is you are somehow, uh, responsible for, you know, the, the, the exact thing that you said. Did you hear what, I don't know, uh, I forget. Was it Dame... Oh, oh, who, what Sam Harris said about IDW? [laughs]

01:39:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:39:40
Lex Fridman: Uh, that, that kind of thing is-

01:39:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, I chuckled.

01:39:42
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Lovingly or chuckle like, uh, or, uh, out of boredom?

01:39:46
Eric Weinstein: I was angry at some people who had said things that caused Sam to say what Sam said about turning his imaginary club membership into the IDW. People said very silly things and, you know, I think that there is just this confusion that, um, integrity means calling out your friends in f- in, in front of the world.

01:40:07
Lex Fridman: Right.

01:40:08
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, I've been pretty clear about this. Uh, I try to choose my friends carefully, and if you would like to recuse me because I'm not a source of reliable information, people that I know and love the most, um, maybe that's reasonable for you. Maybe you, you prefer somebody who is willing to throw a friend, uh, under the bus at the first sign of trouble. By all means, uh, exit my feed. You don't have to subscribe to me. If that's, if that's your concept of integrity, uh, you're, you're barking up the wrong tree. What I will say is is that I knew these people well enough to know that they're all flawed.

01:40:44
Lex Fridman: Thank you for the callback.

01:40:45
Eric Weinstein: And, uh, but the issue is that, um, I love people who are flawed, and I love people who have to earn a living, even if you call them a grifter, and I love people who, uh, you know, like the fact that Donald Trump didn't get us into new wars, even if you call them alt-right. I love the fact that, um, some people believe in structural oppression and wanna fight it, even if they're not woke because they don't believe that structural oppression is hiding everywhere. Um, I care and love different people in different ways, and I just, I think that, you know, the overarching thing, Lex, that we're not getting at is that we were sold a bill of goods that you can go through life like an Eliza program with pre-programmed responses. Well, it's what about-ism. It's both sides-ism. It's alt-right. It's the loony left. It's campus madness. You know, it's like, okay, why don't you just empty the entire goddamn magazine? All of those pre-recorded snips.

01:41:57
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:41:57
Eric Weinstein: Now that you've done all of that, now we can have a conversation.

01:42:02
Lex Fridman: Your son put it really well, which is we should i- in all things resist labels.

01:42:10
Eric Weinstein: But we can't deal without labels.

01:42:13
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:42:13
Eric Weinstein: We have to generalize, but we also have to keep in mind that, just in the way in science you deal with an effective theory that isn't a fundamental one. In science, most of our theories we consider to be effective theories. If I generalize about, about Europe, about women, about, uh, you know, Christians, those things have to be understood to mean something and not to have their definitions extend so broadly that they mean nothing at all, nor, um, that they're so rigid that they're claims that clearly won't bear scrutiny. Lex, what do you really wanna talk about? That's my, always my question to you.

01:42:58
Lex Fridman: That always gets me. That's a good ther- maybe you are the therapist.

01:43:02
Eric Weinstein: But, like, you and I could talk about-

01:43:04
Lex Fridman: Anything

01:43:04
Eric Weinstein: ... pe- people love, up until now at least, people have loved listening to the two of us in conversation.

01:43:10
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:43:10
Eric Weinstein: And my feeling is is that we're not talking about neural nets, and we're not talking about geometric unity, and we're not talking about where distributed computing might go, and I don't think that we're really focused on some of the most exciting things we could do to transform education. We're still caught in this world of other people that we don't belong in. I don't belong in the world as it's been created. I'm trying to build a new world, and- I'm astounded that the people with the independent means to help build that world are so demotivated that they don't wanna build new structures. And the people who do wanna build new structures seem to be wild-eyed.

01:43:56
Lex Fridman: Wild-eyed. What do you mean by wild-eyed? They're not d- they're not, uh-

01:43:59
Eric Weinstein: I guarantee you that I will get some message in my DMs that says, "Hey, Eric. Uh, you know, I'm, I'm a third-year chemistry student at, uh, you know, South Dakota State, and, uh, I've got a great idea. I just need funding. I wanna build-"

01:44:13
Lex Fridman: So they don't have the means. So the people who have the means, uh, have become-

01:44:16
Eric Weinstein: Or the sophistication or... You know, it's like you're looking for somebody who's proven themselves a few times to say, you know, "I've got $4 billion behind me, uh, that's soft circled. I wanna figure out what a new university would be and what it would take to protect academic freedom and who we would hire and what are, what are the different characteristics, because I can clearly see that everything following the current model is falling apart." Nobody, in my understanding, is saying that. Nobody is saying, um, let's take that which is functioning independently and make it less vulnerable, and let's boost those, those signals.

01:44:56
Lex Fridman: And a critical component is money, you think.

01:44:59
Eric Weinstein: It's not only that, but it's also a kind of these people are mobbed up, hands off. Let's imagine for the moment that Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg, um, founded a university-cum-social media entity.

01:45:19
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:45:20
Eric Weinstein: And they said, "This is... The purpose of this is to make sure that academic freedom will not perish from this earth, because it's necessary to keep us from all going crazy. And we are going to lock ourselves out. We've come up with this governance system, and the idea is, is that these people will be assigned the difficult task of making sure that society doesn't go crazy in any particular direction, that we have a fact-based, reality-based, feasibility-based understanding. We can try to figure out where our real opportunities are."

01:45:53
Lex Fridman: So-

01:45:53
Eric Weinstein: It feels like everybody with a pos- with the ability to do something like that, and with the, with the brains and experience and the resources, would rather sit in the current system and hope to figure out where they can flee to if the whole thing comes apart.

01:46:10
Lex Fridman: Well, yeah, I mean, maybe to push back on it a little bit, I, I agree with you, but, you know, it feels like there... some people are trying that. So for example, Google purchased DeepMind. Uh, DeepMind is a company that kind of represents a lot of radical ideas. They're-- They've become acceptable, actually. AGI, artificial general intelligence, used to be really radical of a thing to talk about, and DeepMind and OpenAI are two places which has made it more acceptable. I know you can now start to criticize. Well, they're really... Now that it's become acceptable, they're not taking the further step of being more and more radical. But, you know, th-that was an attempt by Google to say, uh, that, "Let's, let's try some wild stuff." Uh, that-

01:46:57
Eric Weinstein: Sort of like Boston Dynamics.

01:46:59
Lex Fridman: Sort of like Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics is a really good example of, uh, trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose whatsoever, except to try, to try out their ideas. And that-

01:47:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, the idea is that innovation is like dessert. You can have dessert after you solve the, uh, the problem of the main course, and the main course is a bunch of insoluble problems. So the idea is we can get into innovation-

01:47:27
Lex Fridman: Sure

01:47:27
Eric Weinstein: ... once we be-- o-once we perfect ourselves.

01:47:29
Lex Fridman: And you're, you're saying that we need to make innovation the, the main meal.

01:47:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm saying that there really is structural oppression. I mean, the... If you train, uh, a, a, a, a deep learning system on exclusively white faces, it's gonna get confused.

01:47:47
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:47:48
Eric Weinstein: So let's not disagree that there are real issues around this. In fact, it, that's an issue of innovation in data. Your, your data should be responsive. On the other hand, there are things we can't do anything about that are actually, you know, fundamental. And, um, those things ha- may have to do with the fact that, uh, you know, some of us, uh, taste cilantro as soap, and some of us don't. Like, there are differences between people, and some of them are in the hardware, some of them are in the firmware, some of them are in the software that is the human mind. And this completely simplistic idea that every failure of, uh, of an organization to promote each person who has particular intersexual characteristics, we cannot hold progress hostage to that.

01:48:42
Lex Fridman: And you've talked about... Perhaps we'll save this for another time, 'cause it's such a fascinating conversation. You talked about this with, uh, Glenn Beck, is the whole sort of stagnation of growth and all that kind of stuff. Your idea is that in as much as the current situation is a kind of a Ponzi scheme, the current situation in the United States is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise of constant unending innovation. We need, um, we need to f-fund the true innovators and, uh, encourage them and empower them, and sort of culturally say that this is what this country's about is-

01:49:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's put it this way

01:49:26
Lex Fridman: ... is the brilliant minds.

01:49:27
Eric Weinstein: We're gonna kill each other if we don't grow. Growth is like an immune system, and you always have pathogens present. But if you don't have growth present, you can't fight the pathogens in your society, and right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere. So if we don't get growth into our system fairly quickly, we are in really seriously bad shape. So it's very important that if, if I had a horrible person who was capable of building something that would give us all a certain amount of what I've called financial beta to some new technology where we, we all benefit... Let's say quantum computing comes in and everybody-- the dry cleaner has a quantum computing angle, right?

01:50:10
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:50:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay. That's necessary to keep this system that we built going. We can try to redesign the system, but our system expects growth, and we've started... starved it for growth, and the madness that we're seeing is the failure of our immune system to be able to handle the pathogens that have always been present. So people, you know, can say, "Well, this was always there." Yes, it was. What's changed was your immune system. We have got to make sure that, one, we understand why diversity is potentially really important. We have mined certain communities to death. You and I are Ashkenazi Jews. Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews are good at technical stuff. We know that the Chinese are good at technical stuff. The Indians have many people who are good at technical stuff, as do the Japanese. I also believe that we have communities where if you think about the Pareto idea of diminishing returns, if you've never mined a community, many of the people you're gonna get at the beginning are gonna be amazing because that community, it's like do- did you drill for more oil in Texas? Texas is pretty thoroughly picked over. Do you find some place that's, you know, completely insane? Maybe there's oil there. Who knows? Um, in particular, I would like to displace our reliance on our military competitors in Asia, in our scientific laboratories with women, with African Americans, with Latinos, people who are in different categories than we have traditionally sourced, and I would like to get them the money that the market would normally give these fields were we not using visas in place of payment, right?

01:51:52
Lex Fridman: Mm.

01:51:52
Eric Weinstein: Now, I partic- I have c- crazy idea, which is that I play... You, you and I both play music, and I find the an- analytic work that I do when I'm trying to figure out chord progressions and symmetries and tritones and all these sorts of things to be very similar to the work that I do when I do physics or math. I believe that one of the things that is true is, is that the a- analytic contributions of African Americans to music are probably fungible to science. I don't know that that's true. It's true I, I haven't done controlled research, but I believe that it is very important to let the People's Republic of China know that they are not st- staffing our laboratories anymore and that we need to look to our own people, and in particular, we are going to get a huge benefit from making sure that women, uh, Black Americans, L- Latinos are in a position to take over some of these things because l- many of these communities have been v- underutilized. Now, I don't know if that's an insane idea. I wanna hear somebody tell me why it's an insane idea, but I believe that part of what we need to do is we need to recognize that there is-- there are security issues, there are geopolitical issues with the funding of science, and that what we've done is we've starved our world for innovation, and if we don't get back to the business of innovation... We should be doing diversity and inclusion out of greed rather than guilt. Now-

01:53:18
Lex Fridman: Yeah

01:53:18
Eric Weinstein: ... part of the problem with this is, is that a lot of the energy in, behind diversity and, and inclusion is based on guilt and accusation.

01:53:27
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:53:27
Eric Weinstein: And what I want is I wanna kick ass, and my hope is, is that diminishing returns favors mining the communities that have not been traditionally mined in order to extract, um, output from those communities, unless there's a flaw in that plan. If there's a flaw, somebody needs to tell me. If there isn't a flaw, we need to get greedy about innovation rather than guilty about innovation.

01:53:51
Lex Fridman: That's really brilliantly put. My biggest problem with what I see is... it exactly speaks to that in, in the discussion is diversity. It's used... When it's grounded in guilt, it's then used as a hammer to shame people that don't care about diversity enough.

01:54:07
Eric Weinstein: F, F that shit, okay? So my point is I'm excited about the idea of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field theory.

01:54:15
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

01:54:15
Eric Weinstein: I'm excited about the idea of, of, of, uh, Art Tatum trying to figure out, uh, what the, uh, neural nets figured out about protein folding.

01:54:26
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:54:26
Eric Weinstein: I have some idea of the level of intellect of people who have not found their way into STEM subjects in incredibly technically demanding areas, and m- if there's a flaw in that theory, I want somebody to present the flaw. But right now, my belief is, is that these things are merit-based, and if you really believe in structural oppression, you do not want an affirmative action program. You wanna make sure that people have huge amounts of resources to get themselves into position. I wanna push out... I, I just tried this on this Clubhouse application. I wanna push out Klein bottles as a secret sign, uh, inside of rap videos in hip-hop, right?

01:55:07
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:55:07
Eric Weinstein: I want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world, and I wanna get the people who hopefully I'm trying to lure into science and engineering, I want to get them paid. I don't want them as the cheap substitutes for the fleeing, uh, w- white males who have learned that they can't make any money in science and engineering.

01:55:28
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:55:29
Eric Weinstein: So the problem is, is that we've need, we need to take over the ship, Lex. And it doesn't need to be you and me 'cause ki- quite honestly, I have no desire to administer. I don't wanna be the chief executive officer of anything. What I do want is I want the baby boomers who've made this mess and can't see it- To be gone. They, they, they had almost all of our universities and I want fresh blood, fresh resources, I want academic freedom, and I want greed for our country and for the future to determine diversity inclusion as opposed to shame and guilt, which is destroying our fabric.

01:56:08
Lex Fridman: That's as good of a diversity statement as I've ever heard. Uh, this is a U-turn, but somebody commented on the tweet you sent that as one of the top comments, that I definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency. So it's a U-turn, but not really-

01:56:27
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:56:27
Lex Fridman: ... since you're an economist, since you're deep... Not an economist. You [laughs]

01:56:31
Eric Weinstein: I'm an... I, I, I pretend to be an economist, hoping that the economists will take issue that I'm not an economist so that I can advance gauge theoretic and field theoretic economics, which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge was a major innovation that happened approximately 25 years ago. I don't think that economists understand what a price index is that measures inflation, nor do I think economists understand what a growth index, uh, or a, a product, um, a quantity index is that measures GDP. I think that they don't even understand the basics of, uh, price and quantity index construction, and therefore, um, they can't possibly review, uh, field theoretic economics. They can't review gauge theoretic economics. They're intellectually not in a position to manage their own field.

01:57:23
Lex Fridman: You, you talked about that there's a stagnation in growth currently.

01:57:26
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:57:26
Lex Fridman: I looked at, from my microeconomics, macroeconomics in college perspective, GDP doesn't seem to capture the productivity, the full, the spectrum of what I think is, as a functioning-

01:57:42
Eric Weinstein: As I said

01:57:42
Lex Fridman: ... successful society.

01:57:43
Eric Weinstein: They don't-

01:57:43
Lex Fridman: What do you think is broken about GDP? What does it need to include, uh, at these indices? Like what-

01:57:51
Eric Weinstein: Let me, let me explain what they don't understand to begin with.

01:57:53
Lex Fridman: Sure.

01:57:55
Eric Weinstein: Imagine that all prices and all quantities, uh, of output are the same at the end of a year as they are at the beginning.

01:58:06
Lex Fridman: Sure.

01:58:06
Eric Weinstein: And you ask, what happened during that year? Was there inflation? They meandered over the course of the year, but miraculously they all came back to exactly their values. The amount produced, uh, at the end of the year is the same as at the beginning in every single quantity. Typically, the claim would be that the price index should be 1.0 and that the quantity index should be 1.0. That's clearly wrong.

01:58:32
Lex Fridman: Why?

01:58:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's much easier to see with... It, it speaks to a c- fundamental confusion that economists have. They don't understand that the economy is curved and not flat. In a curved economy, everything should be path dependence, but they view path dependence as a problem because they are effectively the flat Earth society of market analysis. They don't understand that what they've called, and they've actually called it the cycling problem, is exactly what they need to understand to advance their field. So I'll give you a very simple example, okay? Let's imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund and Ted and Alice in another. Uh, in both cases, um, the females, that is Alice and Carol, are the chief investment o- officers.

01:59:25
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:59:26
Eric Weinstein: And Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers in charge of trying to get money into the fund and trying to get people not, um, to, uh, in fact, uh, remove their, their money from the funds. Okay? If you in fact had, uh, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and both hedge funds were invested in assets whose prices came back to the same levels and whose exposures were in the same quantities, and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds, would you compensate them the same necessarily? What if, for example, uh, Carol was killing it in terms of investments. Every time she bought, uh, some sort of security, the price of that security went up.

02:00:19
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

02:00:19
Eric Weinstein: Okay? But Bob was the worst marketing officer, and as chief marketing officer, there were tons of redemptions because Bob was constantly drunk, um, Bob was making off-color comments. Now, as a result, at the end of the year, the fund hasn't grown in size because even though Carol was crushing it in terms of the investments, Bob was screwing up everything be- and the redemptions were legendary. So people were making money and still pulling it out of the fund.

02:00:51
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm. Sure.

02:00:51
Eric Weinstein: In the other fund-

02:00:52
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

02:00:53
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, Alice can't seem to buy a base hit. Every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets. But Ted's amazing marketing skills allowed, uh, the fund to get all sorts of new subscriptions and halted the redemptions as people hoped that the fund would get its act together.

02:01:11
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

02:01:12
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Price indices should be how, uh, Carol and Alice are compensated. And quantity indices should be how, um, Bob and Ted are compensated. So even though both funds had closed loops that come back to the original states, what happened during the period that they were active tells you how people are supposed to be compensated.

02:01:45
Lex Fridman: Hmm.

02:01:47
Eric Weinstein: Now, we know that whatever the increase in the price indus- index is, is compensated by a decrease in the quantity index, or conversely. Because prices and quantities return to their original values. You could have another fund where nothing much happened. There were no redemptions, no subscriptions. Prices... The fund remained in cash the whole time. So in that third fund, um, you know, let's call that Tristan and Isolde, right? That fund should have no bonuses paid because nobody did anything, but nobody should be fired either. Now, the fact that economists don't even understand that this is what their price and quantity indices were intended to do, that they don't understand that you can actually give what would be called ordinal agents the freedom to change their preferences and still have something defined as a, a CONUS cost of living adjustment.

02:02:41
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

02:02:41
Eric Weinstein: They don't even understand the mathematics of their field.

02:02:44
Lex Fridman: So the, the indices need to be able to capture some kind of dynamics, uh, that-

02:02:48
Eric Weinstein: We have had indices that capture these dynamics due to the work of Francois Divisia since 1925. But the economists have not even understood what Divisia's index truly represents.

02:02:59
Lex Fridman: What do you miss with, uh, with, uh, c- such crude indices then?

02:03:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, you, you miss the fact that you're supposed to have a field theoretic subject. The representative consumer should actually be a probability distribution on the space of all possible consumers weighted by the probability of getting any particular pull from the distribution. We should not have a single gauge of inflation. Like, what, what is that in 1973 dollars any more than you should be able to say, uh, it, it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on Earth yesterday. So when we get to the cryptocurrency, what I'm going to say is, is that because we didn't found economic theory on the proper marginal revolution, because we missed the major opportunity, which is, is that the differential calculus of markets is gauge theory. It's not ordinary, uh, differential calculus. Uh, we found that out in, in, in finance that it was stochastic differential calculus. We have the wrong version of the differential calculus underneath all of modern economic theory. And part of what I've been pushing for in cryptocurrencies is the idea that we should be understanding that gold is a gauge theory just as modern economic theory is supposed to be a gauge theory, and that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies, and more importantly distributed computing, from the problem of this unwanted global aspect, which is the blockchain. The thing that is most celebrated in some sense about Bitcoin is in fact the reason that I'm least enthusiastic about it. I'm hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi did, but it's an intermediate step towards trying to figure out what should digital gold actually be. If physical gold is a collection of, uh, up quarks and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons held together the quarks by gluons with electrons orbiting it held together by photons with the occasional weak interaction beta decay, all of those are gauge theories. So gold is actually coming from gauge theory, and markets are coming from gauge theory. And the opportunity to do locally enforced conservation laws, which effectively is what a Bitcoin transaction is, should theoretically be founded on a different principle that is not the blockchain. It should be a gauge theoretic concept in which effectively the tokens are excitations on a network of computer nodes.

02:05:29
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

02:05:30
Eric Weinstein: And the fact that... Let's imagine that this is some token. By moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship, effectively I pushed that glass as a gauge theory-

02:05:42
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

02:05:43
Eric Weinstein: ... towards your region of the table. We should be recognizing the gauge theory is the correct differential calculus for the twenty-first century. In fact, it should've been there in the twentieth century.

02:05:53
Lex Fridman: You're saying it captures these individual tr- um, individual dynamics, uh-

02:05:57
Eric Weinstein: Why should my-

02:05:57
Lex Fridman: Much richer

02:05:58
Eric Weinstein: ... why should my giving you a token have to be-- Why should we alert the global community in this token that that occurred? You can talk about side chains, you can talk about any means of doing this, but effectively we have a problem, which is if I think about this differently-

02:06:13
Lex Fridman: Yeah

02:06:13
Eric Weinstein: ... I have a glass that is extant. You have a glass that is abstant. We're supposed to call the constructor method on your glass at the same moment we call the destructor method on my glass in order to have a conservation principle. It would be far more efficient to do this with the one th- se- system that is known never to throw an exception, which is nature, and nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry for her underlying language. We now know due to work of Pia Malaney at Harvard, uh, in economics in the mid-nineteen nineties, um, which I was her co-author on, but I, I, I wish to promote her, uh, as, as, as well as, as this being my idea. Um, we know that modern economic theory is a naturally occurring gauge theory, and the failure of that community to acknowledge that that work occurred and that it was put down for reasons that make no analytic sense, uh, is important in particular due to the relatively new innovation of distributed computing and Satoshi's brainchild.

02:07:17
Lex Fridman: So you're, you're thinking we need to have the mathematics that captures, that enforces cryptocurrency as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one where the blockchain says that crypto should be, uh-

02:07:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:07:29
Lex Fridman: ... centralized.

02:07:30
Eric Weinstein: The abundance economy much discussed in Silicon Valley, or what's left of it, is actually a huge threat to the planet because what it really is, is the-- it is what Marc Andreessen has called software eating the world. And what that means is that you're gonna push things from being private goods and services into public goods and services, and public goods and services cannot have pri- price and value tied together. Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value- To, to the world, that they cannot command a price and they will not be able to capture the value that they have created or a significant enough fraction of it. The abundance economy is a disaster. It will lead to a reduction in human freedom. The great innovation of Satoshi is locally enforced or semi-locally enforced conservation laws, where the idea is just as gold is hard... You know, why is gold hard to create or destroy? It's because it's created not only in stars, but in violent events involving stars, like supernova collisions.

02:08:30
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

02:08:31
Eric Weinstein: When gold is created and we transact, we're using conservation laws. The physics determines the custodianship. Whatever it is that I don't have, you now have, and conversely. In such a situation, we should be looking for the abstraction that most closely matches the physical world because the physical world is known not to throw an exception. The blockchain is a vulnerability. The idea that the 51% problem isn't solved, that you could have crazy, uh, race conditions, all of these things, we know that they're solved inside of gauge theory somehow. So the important thing is to recognize that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever in the history of economic theory took place already and was essentially instantly buried, and I will stand by those comments. Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you.

02:09:28
Lex Fridman: Are you Satoshi?

02:09:29
Eric Weinstein: No. No, no, no, I don't have that kind of ability. I really don't. I do other things.

02:09:36
Lex Fridman: Speaking of Satoshi and gauge theory, you've mentioned to Brian Keating that you may be releasing a geometric unity paper this year or some other form of, uh, additional material-

02:09:50
Eric Weinstein: Mm

02:09:50
Lex Fridman: ... on the topic. Uh, what is your thinking around this? What's the process you're going through now-

02:09:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's very interesting

02:09:57
Lex Fridman: ... for preparing this?

02:09:58
Eric Weinstein: I, uh, I used April 1st to try to start a tradition, which I hope to use to liberate mankind. The tradition is that at least one day a year, you should be able to say heretical things and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off or Mark Zuckerberg. Your provost shouldn't call you up and say, "What did you say?" We need, at some level, to have a jubilee from contr- centralized control. And so my, my hope is that... You know what a tradition is in America? Something a baby boomer did twice.

02:10:35
Lex Fridman: Impeachment? [laughs]

02:10:38
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] That's very funny. Uh, a- anyway, um, so what I'm... I'm not a baby boomer, but as an X-er, I've thought about whether or not April 1st would be a good date on which to release a printed version of what I already said in lecture form because I think it's hysterically funny that the physics community claims that it can't decode-

02:11:01
Lex Fridman: Video

02:11:01
Eric Weinstein: ... a lecture. Yeah, I-

02:11:03
Lex Fridman: It must be paper.

02:11:04
Eric Weinstein: And you know what? There will be a steady stream of new complaints up until the point that they fit it into a narrative that they like. Um, yeah, I'm thinking about April 1st, uh, as a date in which to release a document, and it won't be perfectly complete, but it'll be very complete, and then they'll try to say, "It's wrong," or, "You already did it," or, "No, that was dumb, but what we just did on top of it is brilliant," or, "It doesn't match experiment," or who knows what. They'll go through all of their usual nonsense. It's time to go.

02:11:40
Lex Fridman: Is there still puzzles in your own mind that need to be figured out for you to try to put it on paper? I mean, th- those are different mediums, right?

02:11:48
Eric Weinstein: Y- Well, it's a g- great question. I did not count on something that turns out to be important. When you work on your own outside of the system for a long time, you probably don't think you're gonna be doing this as a 55-year-old man. And I have been so long outside of math and physics departments, and I've been occupied with so many other things, as you can see, that m- the old idea that I had was if I always did it in little pieces, then I was always safe because it wouldn't be stealable. And so now those pieces never got assembled completely. In essence, I, I have all the pieces and I can fit them together, but there's probably a small amount of glue code. Like, there are a few algebraic things I've forgotten how to do. I may or may not figure them out between now and April 1st. But it's pretty complete.

02:12:43
Lex Fridman: But that's the puzzle you're kind of, uh, ch- struggling to now figure out, to get it all on, in a sense-

02:12:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, again-

02:12:49
Lex Fridman: ... the glue together

02:12:50
Eric Weinstein: ... I can't tell you whether the theory is correct or incorrect. But like, you know, for example, there's what's the exact form of the supersymmetry algebra or how do... what's the rule for passing a minus sign through a particular operator? And all of that stuff got a lot more difficult because I didn't, I didn't do it ev- Look, you know, it's a little bit like, uh, if you're, you know, if you're a violinist and you don't touch your violin regularly for 15 years, you come back to it and you pretty much know the pieces sort of, but there's lots of stuff that's missing. Your tone is off and that kind of stuff. I would say I've got-- I'll get the ship to the harbor, and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in. And, and if the tugboat doesn't show up, then I'll pilot the thing right into the dock myself. But it's not a big deal. I, I think that it is essentially complete.

02:13:38
Lex Fridman: Psychologically, just as a human being, this is, uh... I remember perhaps by accident, but maybe there's no accidents in the universe, I was tuned in, I don't remember where-

02:13:50
Eric Weinstein: A big reference

02:13:51
Lex Fridman: ... on April 1st-

02:13:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:13:53
Lex Fridman: ... to you, uh... Oh, I think on your Discord-

02:13:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:13:57
Lex Fridman: ... uh, kind of thinking about thinking through this release.

02:14:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:14:01
Lex Fridman: I mean, it wasn't like, uh, it wasn't obvious that you were going to do it. You were thinking through it, and I remember there was intellectual, personal, psychological struggle with this-

02:14:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:14:11
Lex Fridman: ... right?

02:14:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, 'cause I did. I thought it was dangerous.

02:14:13
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

02:14:13
Eric Weinstein: If this turns out to be right, I don't know what it unlocks. I'm-- If it's wrong I, I think I understand where we are. If it's wrong it'll be the first fool's gold that really looks like a theory of everything.

02:14:33
Lex Fridman: So-

02:14:33
Eric Weinstein: It'll be the iron pyrites of physics, and we haven't even had fool's gold in my opinion yet.

02:14:39
Lex Fridman: Got it. So what is your intuition why this looks right to you? Like, why it feels like it would be, if, if wrong, the first fool's gold?

02:14:49
Eric Weinstein: I can say it very simply it's way smarter than I am.

02:14:53
Lex Fridman: Can you break that apart a little more? Like, every time you poke at it, it's giving you intuitions that follow with the, the, the currently known physics.

02:15:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's put it in computer science terms.

02:15:02
Lex Fridman: Yes, please. [laughs]

02:15:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:15:03
Lex Fridman: It helps.

02:15:03
Eric Weinstein: There's a concept of technical debt that computer scientists struggle with.

02:15:07
Lex Fridman: Mm.

02:15:08
Eric Weinstein: As you commit crimes, you have to pay those crimes back at a later date.

02:15:11
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

02:15:12
Eric Weinstein: In general, most of the problem with physical theories is that as you try to do something that matches reality, you usually have to go into some structure that gets you farther away, and your hope is, is that you're gonna be able to pay back the technical debt. And it-- In general, these wind up as check kiting schemes or, like, you're funding a startup, and there are too many pivots, right? So you, you keep adding epicycles in order to, to cover things that have gone wrong. My belief is, is that this thing represents something like a summit to me, and I'm very proud of having found a route up the summit. But the route is what's due to me. The summit can't possibly be due to me. You know, like, Edmund Hillary and, and Tenzing Norgay did not create Mount Everest. They know that they didn't create Mount... They, they figured out a way up.

02:16:18
Lex Fridman: You gotta tell me what, uh, Mount Everest is in this metaphor relative a-and also connected to the technical debt. So technical debt is a, is a negative thing that it's kinda you, you'll eventually have to pay it.

02:16:30
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely.

02:16:30
Lex Fridman: Are you saying in the, in the ascent that you're seeing now-

02:16:34
Eric Weinstein: So you-

02:16:34
Lex Fridman: ... in the theory is-

02:16:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:16:35
Lex Fridman: ... you do not have much technical debt.

02:16:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's right. I think that what happens is, is that early on what I would say is I believe now that the physics community has said many things incorrectly about the current state of the universe. They're not wildly off, which is why-- Like, for example, the claim is that there are three generations of matter. I do not believe that there are three generations of matter. I believe that there are two generations of matter, and there is a third collection that looks like a generation of matter as the first two, only at low energy. Okay, well, that's not a frequent claim. People imagine that there are three or more generations of matter. I would claim that that's false. People claim that the matter is chiral, that it, it knows its left from its right. I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental, but it is emergent. We could keep going at all these sorts of things. People think that it, space-time is the fundamental geomatic, geometrical construct. I do not agree. I think it's something that I've termed the observers. All of these different things represent a series of over interpretations of the world that preclude progress.

02:17:57
Lex Fridman: So you, you gave, I think you gave, uh, some credit to string theory as, uh, string theory and I think loop qu-quantum gravity, if I remember correctly, as, as, like, getting close to the f-fool's, uh, gold.

02:18:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, I've, I said that Garrett Lisi-

02:18:13
Lex Fridman: Garrett Lisi

02:18:13
Eric Weinstein: ... phenomenologically gets a lot of things right. He gets-- He, he's got a reason for chirality, a reason for uniqueness using E 八. And in fact, E 八 uses something called Weyl fermions, which are chiral. He has a way of getting geometry to get Riemann's geometry underneath general relativity to play with Erisman's geometry, which is underneath the standard model using something called Cartan connections that are out of favor. He's figured out something involving super connections to make sure that the fermion, the matter in the system isn't quantized the same way as the bosons were, which is a problem in his old theory. He's got something about three generations for triality. He's got a lot of phenomenological hits. I, I don't think Garrett's theory works. It also has a very simple Lagrangian. He's basically using the Yang-Mills, uh, norm squared, the same thing you would use as a, as a cost function, uh, if you were doing neural nets, okay? The string theorists have a different selling point, which is, is that they may have gotten a renormalizable theory of gravity if quantum gravity was what we were meant to do. And they've done some stuff with black holes that they can get some solutions, uh, correct, and then they have lots of agreements with where they show mathematical truths that mathematicians didn't even know. I'm very underwhelmed by string theory based on how many people have worked on it and how little is supporting the claims to it being a theory of everything. But those are the two that I take quite seriously. I don't yet take Wolfram's quite seriously because if he really finds one of these, uh, cellular automata that are really distinct and ge-generative, it'll be amazing. But he's looking for such a thing. I don't think he's found anything. Tegs- Tegmark I view as a philosopher who is somehow taking credit for Platonism, which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max 'cause I like Max. But if it ever comes time, I'm putting a Post-it note that I'm not positive the mathematical universe hypothesis is really anything new. Um, and in general, uh, loop quantum gravity really I think grew out of some hopes that the general relativistic community had for that they would be able to do particle theory, and I don't think that they've shown any particle theoretic realism. So essentially here's what I really think, Lex. I think we didn't understand how big the difference between an effective theory and a theory of everything is conceptually.

02:20:51
Lex Fridman: Hmm.

02:20:51
Eric Weinstein: Maybe it's not mathematically that different, but conceptually trying to figure out what a theory of every... How does the universe, and I've, I've compared it to Escher's drawing hands.

02:21:01
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

02:21:01
Eric Weinstein: How do two hands draw themselves into existence? That's the puzzle that I think has just been wanting, and I, I, I'll be honest, I'm really surprised that the theoretical physics community, um, didn't even get up on their high horse and say, "This is the most stupid nonsense imaginable," because clearly I'm... Like I always say, I'm not a physicist, so I'm just a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors.

02:21:33
Lex Fridman: So in, in your journey of releasing this, and I'm sure there further maybe, uh, it will be another American tradition on April 1st that will continue for years to come.

02:21:43
Eric Weinstein: I hope so.

02:21:44
Lex Fridman: Uh, in my... A lo- there's sort of, uh, crumbs along the way that I'm hoping to, uh, collect in my naive view of things, of the beauty that i- in your geometric view of the universe. So, uh, one question I'd like to ask is, um, i- if you were to challenge me to visualize something beautiful, something important about geometric unity in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty from the outsider's perspective, what would that be- thing be?

02:22:28
Eric Weinstein: Interesting question.

02:22:29
Lex Fridman: Perhaps we can both have a journey towards April 1st. [laughs]

02:22:35
Eric Weinstein: Take a look at that. Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose.

02:22:41
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

02:22:41
Eric Weinstein: Uh, not Melrose, on Montana i- in Santa Monica. Now, you'll notice that all of those disks rotate independently.

02:22:51
Lex Fridman: Yes.

02:22:54
Eric Weinstein: If you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous but not uniform everywhere, what you're doing is a so-called gauge transformation-

02:23:04
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

02:23:04
Eric Weinstein: ... on the torus seen as a U1 bundle over a U1 spacetime. So the concept of spacetime here in a very simplified case isn't four-dimensional, but it's one-dimensional. It's just a circle, and there's a circle above every point in the circle represented by those little disks. Imagine, if you will, that we took a rubber band and placed it around here and decided that that was a function from the circle into this circle that is r- representing a Y-axis that's wrapped around itself. Well, you would have an idea of what it means for a function to be constant if it just went all around the outside. But what happens if I t- turn this a little bit? Then the function would be mostly constant. It would have a little place where it dipped, and it went back. It turns out that you can transform that function and transform the derivative that says that function is equal to zero when I take its derivative at the same time. That's what a gauge transformation is. Amazing to me that we don't have a simple video visualizing things that I've already had built and that I can clearly demonstrate when you do that torus who's the code of the torus is itself generating-

02:24:32
Lex Fridman: The torus

02:24:32
Eric Weinstein: ... a spinning torus.

02:24:33
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

02:24:35
Eric Weinstein: This is a U1 principle bundle, and the world needs to know what a gauge theory is, not by analogy, not with Lawrence Krauss saying, "It's like a checkerboard if you change some of the colors this way," not saying, you know, that it, it, it's a, it's a, a local symmetry involving like... It's none of those things. It's a theory of differential calculus where the functions and the derivatives are both subject to a particular kind of change so that if a function was constant under one derivative, then the new function is constant under the new derivative transformed in the same fashion.

02:25:09
Lex Fridman: And would you put that under the category of just gauge transformations?

02:25:13
Eric Weinstein: Yes, that would be gauge transformations applied to sections and connections where connections are the derivatives in the theory. This is easily explained. It is pathological that the community of people who understand what I'm saying have never bothered to do this in a clear fashion for the general public. You and I could visualize this overnight. This is not hard. The public needs to know in some sense that, let's say, quantum electrodynamics, the theory of photons and electrons, more or less electrons are functions, and photons are derivatives. Now, there's some... You can object in some ways, but basically a gauge theory is the way in which you can translate, uh, a shift in the definition of the functions and the shift of the definition of the derivatives so that the underlying physics is not harmed or changed. So you have to do both at the same time. Now, you and I can visualize that. So if what you wanted to do, rather than going directly to geometric unity, is that I could sit down with you, and I could say, "Here are the various components of geometric unity," and if the public needs a visualization in order to play along, we've got a little o- over two months, and I'd be happy to work with you.

02:26:29
Lex Fridman: I love that as a challenge, and I'll take it on, and I hope we do make it happen

02:26:33
Eric Weinstein: And David Goggins, if Lex doesn't do some super macho thing because he's gotta work, uh, to get some of this stuff dow- done, uh, you'll understand. He'll be available to you after April.

02:26:45
Lex Fridman: Thank you for the, [laughs] thank you for the escape clause. I really needed that escape clause. I'm glad that's on record.

02:26:50
Eric Weinstein: I'm worried, 48 miles in 48 hours.

02:26:52
Lex Fridman: There, yeah.

02:26:53
Eric Weinstein: By the way, I just wanna say how much I admire your willingness to keep this kind of hardcore attitude. Um, w- I know that Russians have it and Russian Jews have it in spades, but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy, and that's weak, and that's lazy. And the fact that you bring so much heart to saying, "I'm gonna bring this to jujitsu, I'm gonna bring this to guitar, I'm gonna bring this to AI, I'm gonna bring this to podcasting," uh, it comes through loud and clear. And I just find it completely and utterly inspiring that you keep this kind of hardcore aspect, at the same time that you're the guy who's extolling the virtue of love in a modern society and doing it at scale.

02:27:33
Lex Fridman: Thank you. That means a lot. I don't know why I'm doing it, but I'm just following my heart on it, and just going with the gut. And it seems to make sense somehow.

02:27:43
Eric Weinstein: I, I personally think we better get tougher or we're gonna get in a, a world of pain, and I, I do think that when it comes time to lead, uh, it's great to have people who you know don't crack under pressure.

02:27:56
Lex Fridman: Do you mind if we talk about love and what it takes to be a father for a bit?

02:28:01
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

02:28:02
Lex Fridman: Do you mind if Zev joins us?

02:28:03
Eric Weinstein: That'd be an honor.

02:28:07
Lex Fridman: So Eric, I've, uh, talked to your son Zev, who's an incredible human being. But let me, uh, ask you, this might be difficult because you're both sitting together. What advice do you have for him as he makes his way in this world, especially given that, as we mentioned before on Joe Rogan, you're flawed in that just like all humans, you're mortal?

02:28:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, at, at some level I guess one of my issues is that I've gotta stop giving quite so much advice. Uh, early on I was very worried that I could see Zev's abilities and I could see his, uh, challenges, and I saw them in terms of myself. So a certain amount of Zev rhymes with whatever I went through as a kid, and I don't wanna doom him to the same outcomes that, that sufficed for me. I think that he's got a much better head on his shoulders at age 15. He's much better adjusted. And in part it's important for me to recognize that because I think I did a, a reasonably decent job early on, I don't need to get this part right. And, you know, I, I'm looking at, at Zev's trajectory and saying, "You're gonna need to be incredibly, and even pathologically self-confident. The antidote for that is gonna be something you're gonna need to carry on board, which is radical humility. Um, and you're gonna have to have those in a dialectical tension which is never resolved, which is a huge burden. You are going to have to forgive people who do not appreciate your gifts, because your gifts are clearly evident, and many people will have to pretend not to see them, because if they see your gifts, then they're gonna have to question their entire approach to education or employment or critical thinking." And what my hope is is that you can just forgive those who don't see them and who complicate and frustrate your life, and realize that you're gonna have to take care of them, too.

02:30:18
Lex Fridman: Zev, let me ask you the more challenging question 'cause the guy sitting right here, what advice do you have for your dad since, uh, after talking to you, I realize you're the, uh, the more brilliant, aside from the, the better looking, uh, member of the family.

02:30:36
Zev Weinstein: Um...

02:30:38
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

02:30:38
Zev Weinstein: It's a bit of an odd, an odd question. I-

02:30:41
Lex Fridman: Yeah

02:30:41
Zev Weinstein: ... um-

02:30:42
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Sorry.

02:30:43
Eric Weinstein: You can say anything you want. This is the last time we're gonna be seeing Lex.

02:30:45
Lex Fridman: [laughs] This is gonna be an awkward drive home. [laughs]

02:30:51
Zev Weinstein: I think sort of a new perspective I've taken on parenting is that it is a task for which no human is really supposed to be prepared. You know, there are, uh, you know, in Jewish tradition, for example, there are, uh, myriad analogies in the Torah and the Talmud that compare, um, the role of a parent to the role of a god, right? And no human is prepared to play god and create and guide a life, but somehow we're, we're forced into it as, as people. Um, and I think sometimes it's hard for, uh, children to understand that however their, their parents are failing, um-

02:31:37
Lex Fridman: [laughs] That's the theme here

02:31:39
Zev Weinstein: ... sort of has to be [laughs] is, is something for, for which we must budget because our parents play a role in our lives, uh, of which they're, they're not worthy and they devote themselves to, uh, regardless, because that becomes who they are in a certain sense. So [sighs] I hope to, um, [sighs] I hope to have realestic- realistic expectations of you as a human, because I think too often it, it, it's easy to have godly expectations of people who are far from such a role. And I think I'm really happy that you've been as open as you have with me about the fact that, um, you know, you really, you don't pretend to be a god in my life. You- You are a guide who allows me to see myself, and that's been very important considering the fact that, uh, by your self-teaching paradigm, um, I will have to, I will have to guide myself. And being able to see it and see myself accurately has been one of the greatest gifts that you've, you've given me. So I'm very appreciative. And, uh, I want you to know that I don't buy into the, the role that you're, you're supposed to, um, sort of fake your way through, uh, in my, in my life, but I am unbelievably happy with, uh, a more realistic connection that we've been able to build in lieu of it, so.

02:33:29
Eric Weinstein: I think it's been easier on you, actually, as you come to realize what I don't know and what I can't do, and that there's been a period of time, I guess, that's fascinating to me, where, um, you're sort of surprised that I don't know the answer to a certain thing as well as you do. And that I remember going through this with a particular mathematician who I held, and I still hold in awe, named David Kajdan. And, you know, he famously said to... And weirdly, our family knew his family in the Soviet Union. But, um, he said, "You know, Eric, I always appreciate you coming to my office because, uh, I always find what you have to say interesting, but you have to realize that in the areas that you're talking about, you are no longer the student, you are actually my teacher." And I wasn't prepared to hear that. And there are many ways in which, as I was just saying with the Mozart, I am learning at an incredible rate from you. Um, I used to learn from you because I didn't understand what was possible. You were, you, you were very much... [laughs] I mean, this is the weird thing. There used to be this thing called Harvey the Invisible Rabbit. This guy could... had a rabbit-

02:34:37
Zev Weinstein: Okay

02:34:37
Eric Weinstein: ... that was like six feet tall that only he could see, maybe it was talking.

02:34:41
Zev Weinstein: Yeah. Yeah.

02:34:41
Eric Weinstein: And that was like you at age four, is you were saying batshit crazy things that were all totally sensible, and it... nobody else could put them together. And so what's wonderful is is that the world hasn't caught on, but enormous numbers of people are starting to. And I really do hope that, uh, that genuineness of spirit and that outside-the-box intellectual commitment serves you well as the world starts to appreciate that I think you're a very trustworthy voice. You don't get everything right, but the idea that we have somebody at your age who's embedded in your generation who can tell us something about what's happening is really valuable to me. And I do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice more than, uh, just at the dinner table.

02:35:31
Lex Fridman: I apologize for saying this four-letter word, but do you love Zev?

02:35:41
Zev Weinstein: I was really worried it was gonna be another four-letter word. [laughs]

02:35:44
Lex Fridman: There's so many to choose from.

02:35:46
Zev Weinstein: There are many. [laughs]

02:35:46
Eric Weinstein: It, it doesn't even rise to the level of a question. I mean, I just... Th- there are a tiny number of people with whom you share so much life that you can't even think of yourself in their absence. And, and, uh, I don't know if Zev would find that, but it's... You can have a kid and never make this level of connection. The... I, I think, I think even right down to the fact that, you know, when, when Zev chooses boogie woogie piano, for his own set of reasons why I would choose boogie woogie piano if I could play in any style, um, it's a, it's a question about a decrease in loneliness. You know, like my grandfather played the mandolin, and I had to learn some mandolin because otherwise that instrument would go silent. You don't expect that you get a, this much of a chance to leave this much of yourself in another person who is choosing it and recreating it rather than it being directly instilled. And my proudest achievement is in a certain sense having not taught him and, and have- having shared this much. So you know, it, it's not even love. It's like well beyond.

02:37:09
Lex Fridman: So you mention love for you making a less lonely world. I think I speak for, I would argue, probably millions of people that you, Eric, 'cause this is a conversation with you, have made for many people, for me, a less lonely world. And I can't wait to see how you, Zev, develop as an intellect, but also I'm so heart-worn by the optimism and the hopefulness that was in you that I hope develops further. And lastly, I'm deeply thankful that you, Eric, are my friend and would give me, would honor me with this watch. It, uh, means more than words can say. Thanks, guys. Thanks for talking today.

02:38:02
Eric Weinstein: Thank you.

02:38:03
Lex Fridman: Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein, and thank you to our sponsors, Indeed hiring site, Theragun muscle recovery device, Wine Access online wine store, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Socrates. "To find yourself, think for yourself." Thanks for listening, and hope to see you next time.