Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society (YouTube Content)

Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society
Information
Host(s)	Lex Fridman
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	01:21:55
Release Date	20 March 2019
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Eric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society was an interview with Eric Weinstein by Lex Fridman on the Lex Fridman Podcast (then called the AI Podcast).

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Transcript

00:00:00
Lex Fridman: The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein. He's a mathematician, economist, physicist, and the managing director of Thiel Capital. He coined the term, and you can say is the founder of the intellectual dark web, which is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast at MIT and beyond. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

00:00:44
Eric Weinstein: Are you nervous about this?

00:00:46
Lex Fridman: Scared shitless.

00:00:47
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:00:47
Lex Fridman: You mentioned Kung Fu Panda as one of your favorite movies. It has the usual profound master-student dynamic going on. So who was-- who has been a teacher that significantly influenced the direction of your thinking and life's work? So if you're the Kung Fu Panda, who was your Shifu?

00:01:08
Eric Weinstein: Oh, well, that's interesting because I didn't see Shifu as being the teacher.

00:01:12
Lex Fridman: Who was the teacher?

00:01:13
Eric Weinstein: Oogway, Master Oogway, the turtle.

00:01:16
Lex Fridman: Oh, the turtle. Right.

00:01:18
Eric Weinstein: They only meet twice in the entire film, and the first conversation sort of doesn't count. So the magic of the film, in fact, its point, uh, is that the teaching that really matters is transferred, uh, during a single conversation-

00:01:37
Lex Fridman: Right

00:01:38
Eric Weinstein: ... and it's very brief. And so who played that role in my life? I would say, uh, either, uh, my grandfather, uh, Harry Rubin, and his wife, Sophie Rubin, my grandmother, or Tom Lehrer.

00:01:55
Lex Fridman: Tom Lehrer?

00:01:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:01:57
Lex Fridman: In which way?

00:01:58
Eric Weinstein: If you give a child Tom Lehrer records, what you do is you destroy their ability to be taken over by later malware, and it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene that it destroys the ability to lead a normal life for many people. So if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted from any kind of neurotypical presentation, I'll often ask them, uh, "Are you a Tom Lehrer fan?" And the odds that they will respond are, are quite high.

00:02:34
Lex Fridman: Now, Tom Lehrer is, uh, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park Tom Lehrer?

00:02:38
Eric Weinstein: That's very interesting. There are a small number of Tom Lehrer songs that broke into the general population: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Elements Song, and perhaps The Vatican Rag.

00:02:47
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:02:48
Eric Weinstein: Uh, so when you meet somebody who knows those songs but doesn't know-

00:02:52
Lex Fridman: Oh, you're judging me right now, aren't you?

00:02:54
Eric Weinstein: Harshly.

00:02:55
Lex Fridman: Okay.

00:02:55
Eric Weinstein: Uh, no, but you're Russian, so-

00:02:57
Lex Fridman: Okay

00:02:57
Eric Weinstein: ... undoubtedly you've known Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, that song.

00:03:01
Lex Fridman: Yes. Yeah. Yep.

00:03:01
Eric Weinstein: Uh, so that was a song about plagiarism that was in fact plagiarized, which most people don't know, from Danny Kaye. Uh, where Danny Kaye did a song called Stanislavsky of the Musky Arts. And so Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job of plagiarizing a song about, and making it about plagiarism, and then making it about this mathematician who worked in non-Euclidean geometry. That was like, uh, giving heroin to a child. It was extremely addictive, and eventually led me to a lot of different places, one of which may have been a PhD in mathematics.

00:03:36
Lex Fridman: And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics, I believe, at Harvard, something like that.

00:03:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I just had dinner with him, in fact.

00:03:44
Lex Fridman: Oh.

00:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Um, when my son turned thirteen, we didn't tell him, but, um, his bar mitzvah present was dinner with his hero, Tom Lehrer.

00:03:54
Lex Fridman: [chuckles]

00:03:54
Eric Weinstein: And, uh, Tom Lehrer was eighty-eight years old, sharp as a tack, irreverent and funny as hell, and just... You know, there are very few people in this world that you have to meet while they're still here, and that was definitely one for our family.

00:04:09
Lex Fridman: So that wit is a reflection of intelligence in some kind of deep way. Like where that would be a good test of intelligence, whether you're a Tom Lehrer fan. So what do you think that is about wit, about that kind of humor, ability to see the absurdity in existence? What-- Do you think that's connected to intelligence, or are we just two Jews on a mic, uh, that appreciate that kind of humor?

00:04:34
Eric Weinstein: No, I, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence. So you c- you can see it... There's a place where Tom Lehrer decides that he's going to lampoon, uh, Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan, and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever, meaningless wordplay.

00:04:49
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:04:49
Eric Weinstein: And he has-- Uh, f- forget the... Well, let's see. He, he's doing Clementine as if Gilbert & Sullivan wrote it, and he says, "That I, mister, depressed her young sister named Esther. This mister to pester she tried. Pestering sister's a festering blister you best to resist her, say I. The sister persisted, the mister resisted. I kissed her. All loyalty slipped when he s- when she said I could have her. Her sister's cadaver must surely have turned in its crypt." That's so dense. It's so insane-

00:05:13
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:05:13
Eric Weinstein: ... that that's clearly intelligence, uh, because it's hard to construct something like that. If I look at my favorite Tom Lyric-- Tom Lehrer lyric, you know, there's a, a perfectly absurd one, which is, "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen, and they've hardly bothered us since then." Right? That is a different kind of intelligence. You know, you're taking something that is so horrific, and you're, you're sort of making it palatable and funny and demonstrating also, um, just your humanity. I mean, I think the thing that came through as, as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible, horrible lines was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was, who was channeling pain through humor and through grace.

00:06:02
Lex Fridman: I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia, that same kind of humor emerge from the generation of World War II. It seemed like that humor is required to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering of that, that war created.

00:06:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, you do need the environment to create the broad Slavic soul. I don't think that, uh, many Americans really appreciate, um, Russian humor, how you had to joke during the time of, let's say, Article 58 under Stalin. You had to be very, very careful. You know, the, the concept of a Russian satirical magazine like Krokodil, uh, doesn't make sense. So you have this cross-cultural problem that there are certain areas of human experience that it would be better to know nothing about, and quite unfortunately, Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them, which makes the, you know, the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky so potent, the, uh, you know, the prose of Pushkin, whatever it is. Uh, you have to appreciate the depth of the Eastern European experience, and I, I would think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time of the Civil War or may- maybe, um, you know, under slavery and Jim Crow or even the, uh, harsh tyranny of, uh, the coal and steel employers during the labor wars. Um, but in general, I would say it's hard for us to understand and imagine the collective culture unless we have the system of selective pressures that, for example, uh, Russians were subjected to.

00:07:42
Lex Fridman: Yeah, so if there's one good thing that comes out of war, it's literature, art, and, uh, humor, and music.

00:07:51
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I don't think so. I think almost everything is good about war except for death and destruction.

00:07:57
Lex Fridman: Right. [laughs] Uh, without the death, it would bring, uh, the romance of it. The whole thing is nice, but-

00:08:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is why we're always caught up in war, and we have this very ambiguous relationship to it, is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful, and at an unacceptable price, and the price has never been higher.

00:08:17
Lex Fridman: So just jumping a, uh, into AI a little bit, you, uh... In, in one of the conversations you had or one of the videos, you described that one of the things AI systems can't do and biological systems can is self-replicate in the physical world.

00:08:34
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, no.

00:08:37
Lex Fridman: In the physical world.

00:08:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, yes. The physical robots can't self-replicate, but if it-- but you-- th- th- this is a very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we've been able to create that's really complex, that has an analog of our reproductive system, is software.

00:08:57
Lex Fridman: But nevertheless, software rep- replicates itself, uh, if we're speaking strictly for the replication, in this kind of digital space. So let me-- just to begin, let me ask a question. Do you see a, a protective barrier or a gap between the physical world and the digital world? Do you-

00:09:15
Eric Weinstein: Let's not call it digital. Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world.

00:09:20
Lex Fridman: Why logical?

00:09:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, because even though we had, let's say, Einstein's brain preserved, uh, it was meaningless to us as a physical object because we couldn't do anything with what was stored in it at a logical level. And so the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically, uh, are not necessarily, uh... We don't always benefit from synonymizing. I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis to the logical world, but that it does warrant, uh, identification with a separate layer that need not, um, invoke logic gates and zeros and ones.

00:09:59
Lex Fridman: And, uh, so connecting those two worlds, so the logical world and the physical world, or maybe just connecting to the logical world inside our brain, inside Einstein's brain, you, you mentioned the idea of out- outtelligence.

00:10:14
Eric Weinstein: Artificial outtelligence.

00:10:15
Lex Fridman: Artificial outtelligence.

00:10:16
Eric Weinstein: Yes. This is the only essay that John Brockman ever invited me to write that he refused to publish in Edge.

00:10:24
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Why?

00:10:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, maybe it wasn't, it wasn't well-written. Um-

00:10:29
Lex Fridman: Oh, well-

00:10:29
Eric Weinstein: ... but I don't know. Uh-

00:10:31
Lex Fridman: The idea is quite compelling. It's quite unique and new and, at least from my view, uh, standpoint. Maybe you can explain it.

00:10:38
Eric Weinstein: Sure. What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial general intelligence when, in fact, artificial life, uh, is terrifying in and of itself, and it's already here. So in order to have a system of selective pressures, you need three distinct elements. You need variation within a population, you need heritability, and you need differential success. So what's really unique, and I've made this point I think elsewhere, about software, is that if you think about what humans know how to build that's impressive, so I always take a car, and I say, does it have an analog of each of the physical, physiological systems? Does it have a skeletal structure? That's its frame. Does it have a, a, a neurological structure? It has an onboard computer. It has a digestive system. The one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system. But if you can call spawn on a process, effectively you do have a reproductive system, and that means that you can create something with variation, heritability, and differential success. Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was, where do we see inanimate, non-intelligent life outwitting intelligent life? And, um, I have two favorite systems, and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted. One of which is the Ophrys orchid, um, subspecies or sub clade, I don't know what to call it.

00:12:18
Lex Fridman: Is it a type of flower?

00:12:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males into, uh, engaging, it was called pseudocopulation, with the fake female, which is usually represented by the lowest petal, and there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating opportunity. But the flower doesn't have to give up ener- energy in the form of nectar as a lure because it's tricking the males. The other system is a particular species, uh, of mussel, Lamprosis, in the clear streams of Missouri, and it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young. And when the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that the bass like to eat, the, uh, the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the bass and also use the bass to redistribute them as they eventually release. Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent dupe being fooled by a lower life form. And what is sculpting these, these convincing lures? It's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies. So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, uh, those weaker mimics, uh, fall off. They, they have terminal lines, and only the better ones survive. So it's an arms race between the target species, uh, that is being parasitized getting smarter, and this other l- less intelligent or non-intelligent object getting as if smarter. And so what you see is, is that artificial intelligi- artificial general intelligence is not needed to parasitize us. It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves. So you could have a, a program, let's say, you know, one of these Nigerian scams-

00:14:25
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:14:26
Eric Weinstein: ... um, that writes letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin, uh, to figure out which aspects of the program should be kept, which should be varied and thrown away, and you don't need it to be in any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario of being parasitized by something that has no idea what it's doing.

00:14:46
Lex Fridman: So you, you, you phrased a few concepts really eloquently. So let me try to, uh... There's a few directions this goes. So one, first, first of all, in the way we write software today, it's not common that we allow it to self-modify. Uh-

00:15:01
Eric Weinstein: But we do have that ability now.

00:15:02
Lex Fridman: We have the ability. It's-

00:15:04
Eric Weinstein: It's just not common.

00:15:05
Lex Fridman: It's not just common.

00:15:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:15:06
Lex Fridman: So, so your, your thought is that that is a s- a serious worry if, if there becomes, uh, a reason to-

00:15:15
Eric Weinstein: But self-modifying code is, is available now.

00:15:18
Lex Fridman: So there's, there's different types of self-modification, right? There's, uh, personalization. You know, your email app, your Gmail is, uh, self-modifying to you after you log in or whatever. You can think of it that way. But ultimately, it's central... All the information is centralized. But you're thinking of ideas where you're completely se- this is an, a unique entity, uh, operating under selective pressures, and it changes-

00:15:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, you just... If you think about the fact that our immune systems, uh, don't know what's coming at them next, but they have a small set of spanning components, and if it's, if it's a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape, uh, or binding region can be approximated-

00:16:07
Lex Fridman: Mm

00:16:07
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, with, with the Lego that is present, um, then you can have confidence that you don't need to know what's coming at you because the combinatorics, um, are sufficient to reach any configuration needed.

00:16:23
Lex Fridman: Uh, so that's a, a beautiful thing [laughs]... Well, terrifying thing to worry about because it's so within our reach. W-

00:16:30
Eric Weinstein: Whenever I suggest these things, I do always have a concern as to whether or not I will bring them into being by talking about them.

00:16:37
Lex Fridman: So, uh, there's this thing from OpenAI, so I've t- uh, t- next, next week to talk to the founder of OpenAI, uh, this idea that, uh, their text generation, the new, uh, the n- the new stuff they have for generating text is they didn't wanna bring it, they didn't wanna release it because they're worried about the cons-

00:16:57
Eric Weinstein: I'm delighted to hear that, but they, they're going to end up releasing it.

00:17:00
Lex Fridman: Yes. So that's the thing, is I think talking about it, I'm... Well, at least from my end, I'm more a proponent of technology preventing techno- uh, so further innovation preventing the detrimental effects of innovation.

00:17:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, we're at a... W- we're sort of tumbling down a hill at accelerating speed.

00:17:22
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:17:22
Eric Weinstein: So whether or not we're proponents or-

00:17:24
Lex Fridman: It doesn't, it doesn't really matter

00:17:25
Eric Weinstein: ... it may not matter.

00:17:26
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:17:26
Eric Weinstein: But I, I-

00:17:27
Lex Fridman: Well, it may not.

00:17:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, I do feel that there are people who have held things back and, uh, you know, died poorer than they might have otherwise been. We don't even know their names. I don't think that we should discount the idea that having the smartest people showing off how smart they are by what they've developed may be a terminal process. I'm, I'm very mindful, in particular, of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller, of all people, wrote to Leo Szilard, where Szilard was trying to figure out how to control the use of atomic weaponry at the end of World War II. And Teller Rather strangely, because many of us view him as a monster, um, showed some very advanced moral thinking talking about the slim chance we have for survival, and that the only hope is to make war unthinkable. I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut what it is we are playing with when we are working on technical problems. And I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it, a movie called The Bridge Over the R- uh, Bridge on the River Kwai about, I believe, captured British POWs who just in a desire to do a bridge well end up over-collaborating with their Japanese captors.

00:18:43
Lex Fridman: Well, now you're making me, uh, question the unrestricted open discussion of ideas in AI. But I'm not-

00:18:51
Eric Weinstein: I'm not saying I know the answer. I'm just saying that I could make a decent case for either our need to talk about this and to become technologically focused on containing it, or our need to stop talking about this and try to hope that the relatively small number of highly adept individuals who are looking at these problems is small enough that we should in fact be talking about how to contain them.

00:19:14
Lex Fridman: Well, the way ideas, the way innovation happens, what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus, whether if, uh, he was silent, the idea would be, would emerge elsewhere. Well, in the case of Newton, of course. But, uh, th- you know, in the case of AI, how small is the set of individuals out of which such ideas would arise? Is, is it, isn't a question-

00:19:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the ideas of the researchers we know and those that we don't know, who may live in countries that don't wish us to know what, what level they're currently at, are very disciplined in keeping these, uh, things to themselves. Uh, of course, I will point out that there's a religious school in Kerala that developed something very close to the calculus, uh, certainly in terms of infinite series in, um, i- in p- I, I guess, religious, uh, prayer, uh, and, and, uh, and rhyme and prose. So, you know, it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back, and I don't really believe that we have an ability to hold it back. I do think that we could change the proportion-

00:20:20
Lex Fridman: Mm

00:20:20
Eric Weinstein: ... of the time we spend worrying about the effects, what if we are successful rather than simply trying to succeed and hope that we'll be able to contain things later.

00:20:28
Lex Fridman: Beautifully put. So on the idea of intelligence, what form... Treading cautiously, as we've agreed, as we tumbled down the, on the hill. Uh, what form-

00:20:38
Eric Weinstein: We can't stop ourselves, can we?

00:20:39
Lex Fridman: [laughs] We can, we cannot. Uh, what form do you, do you see it taking? So o- o- one example, Facebook, Google, um, do want to, I don't know a better word, you want to influence users to behave a certain way, and so that's one kind of example of intelligence is, uh, systems perhaps modifying the behavior of thir- the, these intelligent human beings in order to sell more product of different kind. But do you, do you see other examples of this actually emerging in-

00:21:13
Eric Weinstein: Just take any parasitic system. You know, make, make sure that there's some way in which that there's differential success, heritability, and, and variation. And those are the magic ingredients. And if you really wanted to build a nightmare machine, make sure that the system that expresses the variability, uh, has a spanning set so that it can learn to arbitrary levels, uh, by making it sufficiently expressive. That's your nightmare.

00:21:43
Lex Fridman: So it's your nightmare, but it could also be... It's, it's a really powerful mechanism by which to create, well, powerful systems. So d- are you more worried about the, the negative direction that might go versus the positive? So you said parasitic, but that doesn't necessarily need to be what the system converges towards. It could be, uh, what is it? Symbiotic.

00:22:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, parasit- parasitism, the dividing line between parasitism and symbiosis is not so clear.

00:22:13
Lex Fridman: That's what they tell me about marriage. I'm still single, so I don't [laughs]...

00:22:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, um, yeah, I d- we could go into that too, but, um-

00:22:22
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:22:23
Eric Weinstein: No, I think we have to appreciate, you know, are, are, are you infected by your own mitochondria?

00:22:30
Lex Fridman: Right. [laughs] Uh, uh, yeah.

00:22:35
Eric Weinstein: Right? So, you know, in marriage, you fear the loss of independence, but even though the American, uh, therapeutic community may be very concerned about codependence, what's to say that codependence isn't what's necessary to have a stable, uh, relationship in which to raise children who are maximally K selected and require incredible amounts of care because you have to wait 13 years before there's any reproductive payout, and most of us don't want our 13-year-olds having kids. That's a very tricky situation to analyze, and I would say that, um, predators and parasites drive much of our evolution, and I don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them.

00:23:13
Lex Fridman: Well, ultimately, the... I mean, the, nobody knows the meaning of life or what even happiness is, but, uh, there is some metrics that we sh-

00:23:21
Eric Weinstein: They didn't tell you?

00:23:22
Lex Fridman: They didn't, they didn't, uh... That's why all the poetry and books are about, uh, th- you know, there are some metrics under which you can kind of measure, uh, how good it is that these AS- AI systems are roaming about. So y- you're more s- you're more nervous about software than you are optimistic about ideas of-

00:23:43
Eric Weinstein: But-

00:23:43
Lex Fridman: Yeah, self-replicating large-

00:23:45
Eric Weinstein: Look, I don't think we've really felt where we are. You know, occasionally we get a wake-up. 9/11 was so anomalous c- compared to everything we've e- uh, everything else we've experienced on American soil that- It came to us as a complete shock that that was even a possibility. What it really was was a highly creative and determined R&D team, uh, deep in the bowels of, of Afghanistan, um, showing us that we had certain exploits that we were open to that nobody had chosen to express. I, I can think of several of these things that I don't talk about publicly that just seem to have to do with, um, how relatively unimaginative those who wish to cause havoc and destruction have been up until now. But the, the great mystery of our time of, of this particular little era is how remarkably stable we've been since 1945 when we demonstrated the ability to use, uh, nuclear weapons in anger. And we don't know why things like that haven't happened since then. We've had several close call. We've had mistakes. We've had, uh, brinksmanship. And what's now happened is that we've settled into a sense that, oh, it's, it, it'll always be nothing. It's been so long since something was at that level of danger that we've got a wrong idea in our head, and that's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro Show, I talked about the need to resume above ground testing of nuclear devices because we have people whose developmental experience suggests that when, let's say, Donald Trump and, uh, North Korea engage on Twitter, oh, it's nothing. It's just posturing. Everybody's just in it for money. There's n- there, there's a n- a sense that people are in a video game mode, which has been the right call since 1945. We've been mostly in video game mode. It's amazing.

00:25:52
Lex Fridman: So you're worried about a generation which has not seen any existential-

00:25:57
Eric Weinstein: We've lived under it. See, you're younger. You... I don't know if, if, uh... And y- again, you came from, from Moscow.

00:26:04
Lex Fridman: From, yeah.

00:26:05
Eric Weinstein: There was a, a TV show called The Day After that had a huge effect, uh, on a generation, uh, growing up in the US, and it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange. We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively where we've thought about this, and I think it's one of the most irresponsible things that the elders among us have done, which is to provide this beautiful garden in which the thorns are c- cut off of the, of the rose bushes, and all of the edges are, are rounded and sanded. And so people have developed this, this totally unreal [chuckles] idea, which is everything's going to be just fine. And do I think that my leading concern is AGI or my leading concern is, uh, thermonuclear exchange or gene drives or any one of these things? I don't know. But I know that our time here in this very long experiment here is finite because the toys that we've built are so impressive, and the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized. And I, I think it's... We actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945. We had a lot of dangerous skilled players on the world stage who nevertheless, no matter how bad they were, managed to not embroil us in something that we couldn't come back from. And-

00:27:38
Lex Fridman: The Cold War.

00:27:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, and the distance from the Cold War. You know, I, I'm very mindful of, uh... There was a Russian tradition actually of on your wedding day going to visit, uh, a memorial to those who gave their lives. Can you imagine this? Where you, you... On the happiest day of your life, you go and you pay homage to the people who fought and died in the Battle of Stalingrad.

00:28:06
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:28:07
Eric Weinstein: Um, I'm not a huge fan of communism, I gotta say, but there were a couple of things that the Russians did that were really positive in the Soviet era. And I think trying to let people know how serious life actually is is a, is... The Russian model of seriousness is better than the American model.

00:28:28
Lex Fridman: And maybe, like you mentioned, there was a small echo of that after 9/11, but-

00:28:34
Eric Weinstein: But we wou- we wouldn't let it form. We talk about 9/11, but it's 9/12 that really moved the needle, when we were all just there and nobody wanted to speak. We... Some... We, we witnessed something super serious, and we didn't want to, uh, run to our computers and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings, and it, it was profound because we woke up briefly there. You know, I talk about the gated institutional narrative, uh, that sort of programs our lives there. I've seen it break three times in my life. One of which was the election of Donald Trump. W- Another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns wasn't that important knew that Lehman Brothers meant AIG was next.

00:29:26
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:29:27
Eric Weinstein: And the other one was 9/11. And so if, if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times that the m- the global narrative was really interrupted, that tells you how much we've been on top of developing events, you know? I mean, we had the Murrah Felt- Federal Building explosion, but it didn't cause the narrative to break. It wasn't profound enough. Around 9/12, we started to wake up out of our slumber, and the powers that be did not want a coming together. They d- you know, the, the, the admonition was, "Go shopping."

00:30:03
Lex Fridman: And the, the powers that be was what is that force as opposed to blaming individuals?

00:30:07
Eric Weinstein: We don't know.

00:30:08
Lex Fridman: So whatever that-

00:30:10
Eric Weinstein: Whatever that force is-

00:30:11
Lex Fridman: ... that sounds-

00:30:11
Eric Weinstein: ... there's a component of it that's emergent, and there's a component of it that's deliberate. So give yourself a portfolio with two components. Some amount of it is emergent, but some amount of it is also an understanding that if people come together, they become an incredible force. And what you're seeing right now, I think, is there are forces that are trying to come together, and there are tr- forces that are trying to push things apart. And, you know, one of them is the globalist narrative versus the national narrative, where to the global, uh, globalist perspective, uh, the nat- nations are bad things, in essence. That they're temporary, they're nationalistic, they're jingoistic. It's all negative. To people in the national- more in the national idiom, they're saying, "Look, this is where I pay my taxes. This is where I do my army service. This is where I have a vote. This is where I have a passport. Who the hell are you to tell me that because you've moved into some place that you can make money globally, that you've chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special and elevated duty?" And I think that these competing narratives have been pushing towards the global perspective, uh, from the elite, and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised people are saying, "Hey, I, I actually live in a, in a place, and I have laws, and I speak a language. I have a culture. And who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some faraway land, that my obligations to my fellow countrymen are so, so much diminished?"

00:31:43
Lex Fridman: So these tensions between nations and so on, ultimately you see being proud of your country and so on, which creates potentially the kind of things that led to wars and so on. They, they ultimately it is human nature, and it is good for us, uh, for wake-up calls of different kinds.

00:31:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think that these are tensions, and my point isn't... I mean, nationalism run amok is a nightmare, and internationalism run amok is a nightmare. And the problem is we're trying to push these pendulums, uh, to some place where they're somewhat balanced, where we, we have a higher duty of care to those, uh, who share our log- our laws and our citizenship, but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system. I would think this is elementary, but the problem that we're facing concerns the ability for some to profit at the aban- uh, by abandoning their obligations, uh, to others within their system, and that's what we've had for decades.

00:32:48
Lex Fridman: You mentioned nuclear weapons. I was hoping to get answers from you since one of the many things you've done is, uh, economics, so maybe you can understand human behavior, why the heck we haven't, uh, blown each other up yet. But okay, so, uh, we'll get back-

00:33:02
Eric Weinstein: I don't know the answer.

00:33:03
Lex Fridman: Yeah. [laughs] It's a, it's a fas- it, it's really important to say that we really don't know, and-

00:33:07
Eric Weinstein: A mild uptick in wisdom.

00:33:09
Lex Fridman: A mild uptick in wisdom. That's... Well, S- Steven Pi- Pinker, who I've talked with, has a lot of really good ideas about why, but nobody really-

00:33:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, he... I, I don't trust his optimism.

00:33:19
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Listen, I'm Russian, so I never trust a guy who's that optimistic either.

00:33:24
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, it's just that you're talking about a guy who's looking at a system in which more and more of the kinetic energy, like war, has been turned into potential energy, like unused nuclear weapons.

00:33:38
Lex Fridman: Wow, beautifully put.

00:33:39
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, now I'm looking at that system and I'm saying, "Okay, well, if you don't have a potential energy term, then everything's just getting better and better."

00:33:46
Lex Fridman: Yeah, yeah. Wow, that's, that's beautifully put. Only a physicist could. Okay, uh-

00:33:51
Eric Weinstein: I'm not a physicist.

00:33:53
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Is that a dirty word?

00:33:55
Eric Weinstein: No. No, I wish I were a physicist.

00:33:57
Lex Fridman: Ah, me too. My dad's a physicist. I'm trying to live up that probably for the rest of my life. He's probably gonna listen to this too, so.

00:34:05
Eric Weinstein: He did.

00:34:05
Lex Fridman: Yeah. [laughs] So your friend Sam Harris, uh, worries a lot about the existential threat of AI, not in the way that you've described, but in the more-

00:34:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, he hangs out with Elon. I don't know Elon.

00:34:18
Lex Fridman: [laughs] So are you worried about that kind of, uh, uh, you know, about the, um, about r- either r- robotic systems or, you know, traditionally defined AI systems essentially becoming, uh, super intelligent, much more intelligent than human beings, and, uh, getting rid of us?

00:34:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, they already are, and they're not.

00:34:42
Lex Fridman: When, when seen as, um, a collective, you mean?

00:34:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, I, I, I can mean all sorts of things, but certainly many of the things that we thought were peculiar to general intelligence are-- do not require general intelligence. So that's been one of the big awakenings, that you can write a pretty convincing sports story from stats alone, uh, without needing to have watched the game. So, you know, is it possible to write lively prose about politics? Yeah, no, not yet. So we're sort of all over the map. One of the, one of the things about chess that I, you'll... There's a question I once asked on Quora that didn't get a lot of response, which was what is the greatest brilliancy ever produced by a computer in a chess game? Which was different than the question of what is the greatest com-

00:35:33
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:35:34
Eric Weinstein: ... game ever played. So if you think about brilliancies as what really animates many of us to think of chess as an art form-

00:35:40
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:35:42
Eric Weinstein: ... those are those moves and combinations that just show such flair, panache, and, and, and, and soul.

00:35:48
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:35:48
Eric Weinstein: Um, computers weren't really great at that. They were great positional monsters. And, you know, recently we, we've started seeing brilliancies.

00:35:56
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:35:57
Eric Weinstein: And so-

00:35:57
Lex Fridman: A few grandmasters have identified, uh, with, uh, with AlphaZero that things were q- quite brilliant.

00:36:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:36:03
Lex Fridman: Right? Right. Creative.

00:36:03
Eric Weinstein: So that's a, that's a, that's a, you know, that's an example of something. We don't think that that's AGI, but in a very restricted set, uh, set of rules like chess, you're starting to see poetry, uh, of a high order. And- And so I'm not... I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI. AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating our lives in the same way that I don't think a worm should be, you know, the C. elegans shouldn't be treated as non-conscious because it only has 300 neurons. Maybe it just has a very low level of consciousness because we don't understand what these things mean as they scale up.

00:36:40
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:36:40
Eric Weinstein: So am I worried about this general phenomena? Sure, but I think that one of the things that's happening is that a lot of us are fretting about this, uh, in part because of human needs. We've always been worried about the golem, right?

00:36:57
Lex Fridman: Well, the golem's the artificially created-

00:36:59
Eric Weinstein: Life, you know.

00:37:00
Lex Fridman: It's like Frankenstein type-

00:37:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure

00:37:02
Lex Fridman: ... of character. Yeah.

00:37:02
Eric Weinstein: It's a, it's a Jewish version. And, um-

00:37:05
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:37:07
Eric Weinstein: Frankenberg, Frankenstein.

00:37:08
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:37:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:37:09
Lex Fridman: That makes sense. [laughs]

00:37:10
Eric Weinstein: That's right. So the, uh... But we've always been worried about creating something like this, and it's getting closer and closer, and there are ways in which we have to realize that the whole thing is kind-- The whole thing that we've experienced or the context of our lives is almost certainly coming to an end. And I don't mean to suggest that, uh, we won't survive. I don't know. And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow. It could be 300, 500 years. But there's no plan that I'm aware of if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit that are, uh, sensible within current, uh, technological dreams, the Earth, the Moon, and Mars, and we have a very competitive civilization that is still forced into violence to sort out disputes that cannot be arbitrated. It is not clear to me that we have a long-term future until we get to the next stage, which is to figure out whether or not the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken, and that requires our source code.

00:38:21
Lex Fridman: Our source code, the stuff in our brains to figure out... What, what do you mean by our source code?

00:38:26
Eric Weinstein: The source code of the context, whatever it is that produces the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos.

00:38:31
Lex Fridman: Oh, our, our source code. I got it. So this is [laughs] at the deep-

00:38:35
Eric Weinstein: No, you're talking about stuff that's written, uh, in a higher level language.

00:38:38
Lex Fridman: Yeah, yeah. That's right. You're talking about the low level, uh, the bits or even lower.

00:38:41
Eric Weinstein: Right. That, that's what is currently keeping us here. We can't even imagine. You know, we have harebrained schemes for staying within the Einsteinian speed limit. Uh, you know, maybe if we could just drug ourselves and go into a suspended state or we could have multiple generations of... I, I think all that stuff is pretty silly, but I think it's also pretty silly to imagine that our wisdom is going to increase to the point that we can have the toys we have and, uh, we're not going to use them for 500 years.

00:39:14
Lex Fridman: Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough when I realized you're just one letter away from the guy. Like-

00:39:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein.

00:39:23
Lex Fridman: It's... Well, you get to pick. [laughs] Okay, so unified theory. You know, you've worked, uh... You, you enjoy the beauty of geometry. Well, I don't actually know if you enjoy it. You certainly are quite good at explaining-

00:39:35
Eric Weinstein: I tremble before it.

00:39:36
Lex Fridman: Tremble before it. You... That if you're religious, that is one of the, the gods.

00:39:41
Eric Weinstein: I don't have to be religious. It's just so beautiful. You will tremble anyway.

00:39:45
Lex Fridman: I, I, yeah, just read, uh, Einstein's biography, and one, one of the ways-- Uh, one of the things you've done is try to explore a, uh, a unified theory, uh, talking about a 14 dimensional oberverse that has the 4D space-time continuum embedded in, in it. I, I- I'm just curious how you think and how, philosophically at a high level, about something more than four dimensions. Uh, how do you try to... What, what does it make you feel talking in the mathematical world about dimensions that are greater than the ones we can perceive? Is, is there something that you take away that's more than just the math?

00:40:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me. Okay.

00:40:33
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:40:33
Eric Weinstein: Now, on the front of that tongue-

00:40:36
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:40:37
Eric Weinstein: ... there was a sweet receptor.

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

00:40:40
Eric Weinstein: And next to that were salt receptors on two different sides. A little bit farther back, there were sour receptors, and you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue where your bitter receptor was.

00:40:49
Lex Fridman: Oh, show the good side always.

00:40:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But that was four dimensions of taste receptors. But you also had pain receptors on that tongue and probably heat receptors on that tongue. So let's assume that you had one of each. That would be six dimensions. So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza, and it's got some, some, uh, some hot pepper on it, maybe some jalapeño, you're having a six-dimensional experience, dude.

00:41:17
Lex Fridman: Do you think we overemphasize the value of time as one of the dimensions or space? Well, we certainly overemphasize the value of time 'cause we like things to start and end, or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to.

00:41:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, what if you flipped one of the, uh, spatial dimensions into being a temporal dimension, and you and I were to meet in New York City, and you say, "Well, where, where and when should we meet?" I say, "How about I'll meet you on, uh, 36th and Lexington at 2:00 in the afternoon and, uh, 11 o'clock in the morning." That would be very confusing.

00:41:56
Lex Fridman: Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time, you mean.

00:41:59
Eric Weinstein: We happen to be in a delicious situation in which, uh, we have three dimensions of space and one of time, and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade off a little space for a little time, but we still only have one dimension that is picked out relative to the other three. It's very much Gladys Knight & The Pips.

00:42:15
Lex Fridman: So which one developed for who? Do we develop for these dimensions, or did the dimensions- Or were they always there and it doesn't-

00:42:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place where there are four temporal dimensions, or two and two of space and time, or three of time and one of space, and then would time not be playing the role of space? Why do you imagine that the sector that you're in is all that there is?

00:42:37
Lex Fridman: I ce- I certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise. I mean, I, I haven't, uh, done ayahuasca or any, any of those drugs. I hope to one day, but, uh-

00:42:46
Eric Weinstein: Instead of doing ayahuasca, you could just head over to building two.

00:42:49
Lex Fridman: That's where the mathematicians are?

00:42:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that's where they hang.

00:42:52
Lex Fridman: Just to look at some geometry.

00:42:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, just ask about pseudo-Riemannian geometry if that's what you're interested in.

00:42:56
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Okay.

00:42:58
Eric Weinstein: Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru.

00:43:01
Lex Fridman: And then some extra money for that trip.

00:43:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but you won't be able to do any calculations if that's how you choose to go about it.

00:43:06
Lex Fridman: Well, a different kind of calculation, right?

00:43:08
Eric Weinstein: So to speak.

00:43:08
Lex Fridman: Yeah. One of my favorite people, Edward Frenkel, Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math, great title for a book, uh, said, uh, that you're quite a remarkable intellect to come up with such beautiful original ideas in terms of the unified theory and so on, but you're working outside academia. So one question in developing ideas that are truly original, truly interesting, what's the difference between inside academia and outside academia when it comes to developing such ideas?

00:43:40
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's a terrible choice. Terrible choice. So if you do it inside of academics, you are forced to constantly show great loyalty to the consensus, and you distinguish yourself with small, almost microscopic heresies, uh, to make your reputation in general.

00:44:05
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:44:07
Eric Weinstein: And you have very competent people and brilliant people who are working together, who are, who form very deep social networks and have a very high level of behavior, at least within mathematics and at least technically within physics, theoretical physics. When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people, madmen, and these are people who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position and almost always lose their way. And the key question is will progress likely come from someone who has miraculously managed to stay within the system and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy that is sort of unthinkable, uh, in which case that will be fascinating, or is it more likely that somebody will maintain a level of discipline from outside of academics and be able to make use of the freedom that comes from not having to constantly affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field?

00:45:21
Lex Fridman: So you've characterized in ways that acad- academia in this particular sense is, uh, declining. You, you, uh, posted a plot. The older population of the faculty is getting larger. The younger is getting smaller and so on. So what's, which direction of the two are you more hopeful about?

00:45:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, the baby boomers can't hang on forever.

00:45:43
Lex Fridman: Well, that's, first of all, in general true, and second of all, in, in academia.

00:45:46
Eric Weinstein: But that's really what, uh-

00:45:47
Lex Fridman: You think-

00:45:48
Eric Weinstein: ... what this time is about-

00:45:49
Lex Fridman: Is the baby boomers control

00:45:50
Eric Weinstein: ... is we didn't-- We're, we're used to, like, financial bubbles that last a few years in length and then pop.

00:45:57
Lex Fridman: Yes.

00:45:57
Eric Weinstein: The baby boomer bubble is this really long-lived thing, and all of the ideology, all of the behavior patterns, the norms... You know, for example, string theory is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomena. It was something that baby boomers were able to do because it required a very high level of mathematical ability. It's not-

00:46:20
Lex Fridman: You don't, you don't think of, uh, string theory as, uh, an original idea? It's-

00:46:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I mean, it was original to Veneziano, who probably is older than the baby boomers, and there are people who are younger than the baby boomers who are still doing string theory, and I'm not saying that nothing discovered within the large string theoretic complex is wrong. Quite the contrary. A lot of brilliant mathematics and a lot of the structure of physics was elucidated by string theorists. What do I think of the deliverable nature of this product that will not ship called string theory? I think that it is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and geometrically talented baby boomer physics, physicists so that they can say that they're working on something within the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity. Now, there are other schemes. You know, there's, like, asymptotic safety. There are other things that you could imagine doing. I don't think much of any of the major programs, but to have inflicted this level of loyalty through a shibboleth, well, surely you don't question X. Well, I question almost everything in the string program, and that's why I got out of physics. When you called me a physicist, it was a great honor, but the reason I didn't become a physicist wasn't that I fell in love with mathematics. As I said, wow, in 1984, in 1983, I saw the field going mad, and I saw that mathematics, which has all sorts of problems, was not going insane, and so instead of studying things within physics, I thought it was much safer to study the same objects within mathematics. There's a huge price to pay for that. You lose physical intuition.

00:48:03
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:48:03
Eric Weinstein: But the point is, is that the, it wasn't a North Korean reeducation camp either.

00:48:08
Lex Fridman: Are you hopeful about cracking open the Einstein unified theory in a way that has-- I mean, really, really, uh, understanding whether this, uh, uniting everything together with quantum theory and so on for-

00:48:21
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I'm trying to play this role Myself to, to do it-

00:48:26
Lex Fridman: Well, I- yeah, I know

00:48:26
Eric Weinstein: ... to the extent of handing it over to the more responsible, more professional, more competent community. Um, so I think that they're wrong about a great number of their belief structures, but I do believe... I, I mean, I have a really profound love-hate relationship with this group of people. I think-

00:48:47
Lex Fridman: On the physics side?

00:48:47
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yeah

00:48:48
Lex Fridman: 'Cause the mathematicians actually seem to be much more open-minded and, uh-

00:48:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, they are and they aren't. They're open-minded about anything that looks like great math.

00:48:57
Lex Fridman: Right.

00:48:57
Eric Weinstein: Right? They'll study something that isn't very important physics, but if it's beautiful mathematics, then they'll have, uh, they have great intuition about these things. As good as the mathematicians are, and I might even intellectually at some horsepower level give them the edge, the theoretics- theoretical physics community is bar none the most profound intellectual community that we have ever created. It is the number one. There is nobody in second place as far as I'm concerned. Like, in their spare time, in their spare time, they invented molecular biology.

00:49:31
Lex Fridman: What, what was the origin of molecular biology? You're saying physics-

00:49:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, somebody like Francis Crick. I mean, a lot of-

00:49:35
Lex Fridman: Francis

00:49:35
Eric Weinstein: ... a lot of the early molecular biologists-

00:49:38
Lex Fridman: Were physicists?

00:49:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I mean f- you know-

00:49:40
Lex Fridman: Physicists

00:49:40
Eric Weinstein: ... Schrödinger wrote What Is Life?, and that was highly inspirational. I mean, y- you have to appreciate that there is no community like the basic research community in theoretical physics, and it's not something... I, I'm highly critical of these guys. I think that they w- just wasted the, you know, decades, uh, of time with, um, a near religious devotion to their misconceptualization of where the problems were in physics. But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse-

00:50:16
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:50:16
Eric Weinstein: ... ever witnessed within academics.

00:50:20
Lex Fridman: You see it as a collapse or just a lull?

00:50:22
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality. We can't afford to pay these people. Um, we can't afford to give them an accelerator just to play with in case they find something at the next energy level. These people created our economy. They gave us the Rad Lab a- and radar. They gave us two atomic devices to end World War II. They created the semiconductor and the transistor to power our economy through Moore's Law. Uh, as a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the World Wide Web, and we have the insolence to say, "Why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars?" No. The question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars?

00:51:07
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Well, yeah

00:51:08
Eric Weinstein: Right? We, the, th- these guys signed the world's worst licensing agreement.

00:51:11
Lex Fridman: Right.

00:51:12
Eric Weinstein: And if, if they simply charged for every time you used a transistor or a URL, uh, or enjoyed the peace that they have provided, um, during this period of time through the terrible weapons that they developed, uh, or your communications devices, all of the things that power our economy I really think came out of physics even to the extent that chemistry came out of physics and molecular biology came out of physics. So first of all, you have to know that I'm very critical of this community. Second of all, it is our most important community. We've neglected it. We've abused it. We don't take it seriously. We don't even care to get them to rehab after a couple of generations of failure, right? No one... I, I think the youngest person, uh, to have really contributed to the standard model at the theoretical level was born in 1951, right? Frank Wilczek. And almost nothing has happened, um, that in theoretical physics after 1973, '74 that sent somebody to Stockholm for theoretical development that predicted experiment. So we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves. Now, with that said-

00:52:25
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:52:26
Eric Weinstein: ... these guys have behaved abysmally in my opinion, um, because they haven't owned up to where they actually are, what problems they're really facing, how definite they can actually be. They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries which are desperately needed in other fields like gauge theory, which at least the mathematicians can, can share, which is an upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz, and they haven't shared the importance of renormalization theory, uh, even though this should be standard operating procedure for people across the sciences dealing with different layers and different levels of phenomena. So-

00:53:01
Lex Fridman: And by shared, you mean communicated in such a way that, uh, dis- it, uh, disseminates throughout the different sciences as well?

00:53:06
Eric Weinstein: These guys are sitting... Both theoretical physicists and mathematicians are sitting on top of a giant stockpile of intellectual gold, right? They have so many things that have not been manifested anywhere. I was just on Twitter, I think I mentioned the Hoberman switch pitch that shows the self-duality of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism. Now, this is like a triviality, a- and it makes an amazing toy that's, you know, built a-

00:53:35
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:53:35
Eric Weinstein: ... a, a market, hopefully a fortune for Chuck Hoberman. Well, you have no idea how much great stuff that these priests have in their monastery.

00:53:43
Lex Fridman: [laughs] So it's truly a love and hate relationship for you.

00:53:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, well, look, this-

00:53:48
Lex Fridman: I mean, it sounds like it's more on the love side though

00:53:49
Eric Weinstein: ... this building that we're in right here-

00:53:50
Lex Fridman: Yes

00:53:51
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, is the building in which I really put together the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation, uh, through the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable to destroy the bargaining power of American academics, uh, using foreign labor-

00:54:08
Lex Fridman: With, uh, one postdocs and so on

00:54:10
Eric Weinstein: ... on one feature in the, in the bas- Oh, yeah.

00:54:11
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:54:11
Eric Weinstein: That was done here in this building. Isn't that weird?

00:54:14
Lex Fridman: And I'm, I'm tr- I'm truly speaking with a revolutionary and a radical, uh, radical mind. I like it.

00:54:18
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. At an intellectual level-

00:54:21
Lex Fridman: Yes

00:54:22
Eric Weinstein: ... I am absolutely garden variety. I'm just straight down the middle.

00:54:27
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:54:27
Eric Weinstein: The system that we are in, this, this university- Is functionally insane.

00:54:33
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

00:54:34
Eric Weinstein: Harvard is functionally insane. And we don't understand that when we get these things wrong, the financial crisis made this very clear. There was a long period where every grownup, everybody with a tie-

00:54:47
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:54:48
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, who spoke in a, you know, in, in bari- baritone tones-

00:54:52
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

00:54:52
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, with, with the right degree in, uh, at the end of their name-

00:54:55
Lex Fridman: Yeah

00:54:56
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, was talking about how we banished volunteer- volatility. We were in the Great Moderation. Okay, they were all crazy, and who was, who was right? It was, like, Nassim Taleb-

00:55:06
Lex Fridman: Right

00:55:07
Eric Weinstein: ... Nouriel Roubini. Now, what happens is, is that they claimed the market went, uh, went crazy.

00:55:12
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

00:55:13
Eric Weinstein: But the market didn't go crazy. The market had been crazy, and what happened is, is that it suddenly went sane. Well, that's where we are with academics. Academics right now is mad as a hatter, and it's, it's absolutely evident. I can show you graph after graph. I can show you the internal discussions. I can show you the conspiracies. Uh, Harvard's dealing with one right now over, uh, its admissions policies for people, uh, of color, uh, who happen to come from Asia. All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going.

00:55:41
Lex Fridman: The-

00:55:41
Eric Weinstein: What we're talking about, just, uh, on- while we're on the topic of revolutionaries, is we're talking about the danger of an outbreak of sanity.

00:55:50
Lex Fridman: Yeah. You're, you're the guy pointing, uh, out the elephant in the room here, and-

00:55:55
Eric Weinstein: The elephant has no clothes.

00:55:56
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Is that how that goes? I was gonna talk a little bit to, uh, Joe Rogan about this. Ran out of time. But I think you're... You have some... You g- j- just listening to you, you could probably speak really eloquently to academia on the difference between the different fields. So you think there's a difference between science, engineering, and then the humanities in academia in terms of tolerance, that they're willing to tolerate? So from my perspective, I thought c- computer science and maybe engineering is more tolerant to radical ideas, but that's perhaps innocent of me 'cause I, I always... You know, all the battles going on now are a little bit more on the humanities side and gender studies and so on.

00:56:43
Eric Weinstein: Have you seen the, uh, American Mathematical Society's publication of an essay called Get Out The Way?

00:56:49
Lex Fridman: I have not. What's, what's the-

00:56:51
Eric Weinstein: The idea is that white men who hold, uh, positions within universities in mathematics should vacate their positions so that young Black women can take over, something like this.

00:57:03
Lex Fridman: That's in terms of diversity, which I also wanted to ask you about, but in terms of diversity of strictly ideas-

00:57:10
Eric Weinstein: Oh, sure

00:57:11
Lex Fridman: ... do you think... 'Cause y- you're basically saying physics a- as a community has become a little bit intolerant to s- some degree to new radical ideas, or at least you, uh, you said that-

00:57:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's changed a little bit recently, which is that even string theory is now a- admitting, okay, w- we don't [laughs]... This doesn't look very promising in the short term, right? So the, the question is what compiles, if you wanna take the computer science metaphor, what will get you into a journal? Will you spend your life trying to push some paper into a journal, or will it be accepted easily? What do we know about the characteristics of the submitter and w- what gets, uh, taken up and what does not? All of these fields are experiencing pressure because no field is performing so brilliantly well-

00:58:02
Lex Fridman: Mm

00:58:02
Eric Weinstein: ... um, that th- it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking in the ways in which we have become accustomed.

00:58:12
Lex Fridman: But don't you think even in theoretical physics, th- a lot of times, even with theories like string theory, you could speak to this, it does eventually lead to what are the ways that this theory would be testable? And, and so-

00:58:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, ultimately, although... Look, there's this thing about Popper and the scientific method that's a cancer and a disease in the minds of very smart people. That's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out. It's how it gets checked.

00:58:42
Lex Fridman: All right, so-

00:58:42
Eric Weinstein: And there is a dialogue between theory and experiment, but y- everybody should read Paul Dirac's 1963 American, Scientific American article where he, he... You know, it's very interesting. He talks about it as if it was about the Schrödinger equation and Schrödinger's failure to, uh, advance his own work because of his failure to account for some phenomena. The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off, it won't agree with experiment-

00:59:10
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

00:59:10
Eric Weinstein: ... but it doesn't mean that the theory is actually wrong. Um, but Dirac could as easily have been talking about his own equation in which he predicted that the electrons should have an antiparticle, and since the only positively charged particle that was known at the time was the proton, Heisenberg pointed out, well, shouldn't your antiparticle, the proton, have the same mass as the electron, and doesn't that invalidate your theory? So I think that Dirac was actually being quite, potentially quite sneaky, um, in, uh, talking about the fact that he had been pushed off of his own theory to some extent by Heisenberg. Um, but look, w- we fetishize the scientific method and Popper and falsification, um, because it protects us from crazy ideas entering the field, so y- you know, it's a question of balancing Type I and Type II error, and we're pretty, we were pretty maxed out in one direction.

01:00:01
Lex Fridman: The opposite of that... Le- let me say what comforts me, sort of biology or engineering, uh, at, at the end of the day, does the thing work?

01:00:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:00:11
Lex Fridman: Y- you can, uh, test the crazies away, [laughs] the crazy ide... Well, see, now you're saying, but some ideas are truly crazy and some are, are actually correct, [laughs] so-

01:00:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's pre-correct, currently crazy.

01:00:24
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:00:25
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so you, you don't wanna get rid of everybody who's pre-correct and currently crazy. Um, the problem is, is that we don't have e- Standards in general for trying to determine who has to be put to the sword in terms of their career and who has to be protected, uh, as some sort of giant time suck pain in the ass, uh, who may change everything.

01:00:47
Lex Fridman: Do you think that's possible, uh, creating a mechanism of those select-

01:00:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, you're not gonna like the answer, but here it comes.

01:00:53
Lex Fridman: Oh, boy.

01:00:55
Eric Weinstein: It has to do with very human elements. We're trying to do this at the level of, like, rules and fairness. It's not gonna work, 'cause the only thing that really understands this... You ever read The, read The Double Helix?

01:01:12
Lex Fridman: It's a book?

01:01:13
Eric Weinstein: Oh. [laughs] You have-

01:01:14
Lex Fridman: Oh, boy

01:01:14
Eric Weinstein: ... to read this book. Not only did Jim Watson, uh, ha- half discover this three-dimensional structure of DNA, he's also one hell of a writer be- before he became an ass, uh-

01:01:25
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

01:01:25
Eric Weinstein: ... that... No, he-

01:01:27
Lex Fridman: Yeah, he is

01:01:27
Eric Weinstein: ... he- he's tried to destroy his own reputation because he-

01:01:29
Lex Fridman: I knew about the ass. I didn't know about the good writer. So-

01:01:33
Eric Weinstein: Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living, and, uh, as I've said before, Jim Watson is too important a legacy to be left to Jim Watson. Um-

01:01:44
Lex Fridman: Yeah, that's unfortunate

01:01:45
Eric Weinstein: ... that book tells you more about what actually moves the dial, right? And there's another story or, or, about him which I don't, don't agree with, which is that he stole everything from Rosalind Franklin. I mean, the, the problems that he had with Rosalind Franklin are real, but we should actually honor that tension in our history by delving into it rather than having a simple solution.

01:02:04
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:02:05
Eric Weinstein: Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick being a pain in the ass that everybody secretly knew was super brilliant. And there's an encounter between, uh, Chargaff, uh, who came up with the, the equimolar relations between the nucleotides, who should have gotten the structure of DNA, and Watson and Crick. And, you know, he talks about missing a shiver in the heartbeat of biology, and this stuff is so gorgeous, it just makes you tremble even thinking about it. Um, look, we know very often who is to be feared, and we need to fund the people that we fear. The people who are wasting our time need to be excluded from the conversation. You see... And, and, you know, maybe we'll make some errors in both directions, but we have known our own people. We know the pains in the asses that might work out, and we know the people who are really just blowhards who really have very little to contribute most of the time. It's not 100%, but you're not gonna get there with rules.

01:03:10
Lex Fridman: Right. It's, uh, using some kind of instinct. I mean, I... To be honest, I'm gonna make you roll your eyes for a second, but, uh, and the first time I heard that there is a large community of people who believe the Earth is flat actually made me pause and ask myself the question, well, is it-

01:03:26
Eric Weinstein: Why would there be such a community?

01:03:28
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:03:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:03:28
Lex Fridman: Is it possible the Earth is flat? So I had to, like, wait a minute. [laughs] I mean, then you go through a thinking process that I think is really healthy. Uh, it ultimately ends up being a geometry thing, I think. Uh, it's an interesting... It's an interesting thought experiment at the very least.

01:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, see, I don't... I do a different version of it. I say, why is this community stable?

01:03:48
Lex Fridman: Yeah. That's a good, uh, way to analyze it.

01:03:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, interesting that whatever we've done has not erased the community. So, you know, they're taking a long shot bet that won't pan out, you know? Maybe we just haven't thought enough about the rationality of the square root of two, and somebody f- brilliant will figure it out. Maybe we will eventually land one day on the surface of Jupiter and explore it, right? These, these are crazy things that will never happen.

01:04:14
Lex Fridman: So much of social media operates by AI algorithms, you talked about this a little bit, uh, recommending the content you see. So on this idea of radical thought, how much should AI show you things you disagree with on Twitter and so on, in, in the Twitter verse, in the, the broad internet?

01:04:33
Eric Weinstein: I hate this question.

01:04:34
Lex Fridman: Yeah?

01:04:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:04:36
Lex Fridman: 'Cause you don't know the answer?

01:04:37
Eric Weinstein: No. No, no, no. Look, we've been... They- they've pushed out this cognitive Lego to us-

01:04:43
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

01:04:43
Eric Weinstein: ... that will just lead to madness. It's good to be challenged with things that you disagree with. The answer is no. It's good to be challenged with interesting things with which you currently disagree but that might be true. So I don't really care about whether or not I disagree with something or don't disagree. I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing is being pushed out. Is it because it's likely to be true? Is it because-

01:05:08
Lex Fridman: Hmm

01:05:08
Eric Weinstein: ... is there some reason? Because I can write, I can write a computer generator, uh, to come up with an infinite number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at. So please, before you push things at me that w- are disagreeable, tell me why.

01:05:22
Lex Fridman: There is an aspect in which that question is, is quite dumb, especially because it's being used to, uh, almost, um, uh, very generically by these different networks to say, "Well, we're trying to work this out." But y- you know, basically, uh, how much... Do you see the value of seeing things, uh, you don't like, not you disagree with? Because it's very difficult to know exactly what you articulated, which is, uh, the stuff that's important for you to consider that you disagree with. That's really hard to figure out. The bottom line is the stuff you don't like. If you're a, uh, a Hillary Clinton supporter, you may not wanna s- s- it might not make you feel good to see anything about Donald Trump. That's the only thing algorithms can really optimize for currently. They really can't-

01:06:09
Eric Weinstein: No, they can do better. This, this is... We're, we're, we're-

01:06:11
Lex Fridman: You think so?

01:06:12
Eric Weinstein: No. We're engaged in some moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people who are capable of building Google, Facebook, Twitter are having us in these incredibly low level discussions. Do they not know any smart people? Do they not have the phone numbers of people who can elevate these discussions?

01:06:36
Lex Fridman: They do, but this They're optimizing for a different thing-

01:06:40
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no

01:06:40
Lex Fridman: ... and they are pushing those people out of those runes.

01:06:42
Eric Weinstein: They're, they're optimizing for things we can't see. And yes, profit is there. Nobody, nobody's questioning that. But they're also optimizing for things like political control or the fact that they're doing business in Pakistan, and so they don't wanna talk about all the things that they're going to be bending to in Pakistan. So the, the... We're, we're, we're involved in a fake discussion.

01:07:07
Lex Fridman: You think so. You think these conversations at that depth are happening inside Google? You don't think they have some basic metrics under user engagements?

01:07:15
Eric Weinstein: You're having a fake conversation with us, guys. We know you're having a fake conversation. I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation. You know how to cool, you know, these units. You know high availability like nobody's business. My Gmail never goes down. Almost.

01:07:33
Lex Fridman: So you think just because they can do incredible work on the software side with infrastructure, they can also deal with some of these difficult questions about human behavior, human understanding, human... You're not... [laughs]

01:07:47
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I've seen the, I've seen the developers' screens that people take shots of-

01:07:52
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm

01:07:53
Eric Weinstein: ... inside of Google.

01:07:54
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:07:55
Eric Weinstein: And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple. We're not... We're engaged, they're engaging us in the wrong conversations. We are not at this low level. Here's one of my favorite questions.

01:08:08
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:08:08
Eric Weinstein: Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase in, in, in tech space equipped as a listening device? Where, where's my physical shutter to cover my lens? We had this in the 1970s. We had cameras that had lens caps, you know?

01:08:24
Lex Fridman: Mm-hmm.

01:08:25
Eric Weinstein: How much would it cost to have a security model? Pay five extra bucks. Why is my indicator light c- software controlled? Why, when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on by putting it as a, as something that cannot be bypassed? Why have you set up my, all of my devices, at some difficulty to yourselves, as listening devices, and we don't even talk about this? This is, this, this thing is total fucking bullshit.

01:08:51
Lex Fridman: Uh, well, I have-

01:08:52
Eric Weinstein: No, no. Wait, wait, wait

01:08:53
Lex Fridman: ... so these discussions are happening about privacy-

01:08:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is a-

01:08:55
Lex Fridman: Is there a diff- more difficult than you're giving them credit for.

01:08:57
Eric Weinstein: It's not just privacy.

01:08:58
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:08:59
Eric Weinstein: It's about social control. We're talking about social control. Why do I not have controls over my own levers? Just have a really cute UI where I can switch, I can dial things, or I can at least see what the algorithms are.

01:09:13
Lex Fridman: But you th- you think that there is some deliberate choices being made here-

01:09:17
Eric Weinstein: There is emergence and there is, uh, intention.

01:09:21
Lex Fridman: Two-

01:09:21
Eric Weinstein: There are two dimensions

01:09:22
Lex Fridman: ... yeah

01:09:22
Eric Weinstein: The vector does not collapse onto either axis. But the idea that anybody who suggests that intention is completely absent is, is a child.

01:09:34
Lex Fridman: That's really beautifully put, and, uh, like many things you've said, is gonna make me think-

01:09:38
Eric Weinstein: Can I turn, can I turn this around slightly, Lex?

01:09:40
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:09:41
Eric Weinstein: I sit down with you and you say that you're obsessed with my feed.

01:09:44
Lex Fridman: Uh-huh.

01:09:45
Eric Weinstein: I don't even know what my feed is. What are you seeing that I'm not?

01:09:49
Lex Fridman: I was obsessively looking through h- your feed, uh, on Twitter, 'cause it was really enjoyable, because it was the Tom Lehrer element. It was the humor in it.

01:09:58
Eric Weinstein: By the way, that feed is Eric R. Weinstein-

01:10:00
Lex Fridman: Yeah. [laughs] Eric Weinstein

01:10:00
Eric Weinstein: ... on Twitter.

01:10:01
Lex Fridman: It's great.

01:10:02
Eric Weinstein: @ericrweinstein.

01:10:03
Lex Fridman: It... Yeah, yeah.

01:10:04
Eric Weinstein: No, but seriously, why?

01:10:06
Lex Fridman: Why did I find it enjoyable, or what was I seeing?

01:10:09
Eric Weinstein: What are, what are you looking for? Why are we doing this? What is this podcast about? I know you got all these interesting people. I'm just some guy who's sort of a podcast guest.

01:10:18
Lex Fridman: [laughs] Sort of a podcast... You're not even wearing a tie. I mean-

01:10:22
Eric Weinstein: I'm not even wearing a tie

01:10:23
Lex Fridman: ... it's not even a serious interview. Uh, I was searching for meaning, for happiness, for a dopamine rush, so short-term, long-term.

01:10:34
Eric Weinstein: And how are you finding your way to me? What is, what is, what is... I, I don't honestly know what I'm doing to reach you.

01:10:41
Lex Fridman: The representing ideas which are, s- feel common sense to me and not many people are speaking, so it's kind of like the dark, the intellectual dark web folks, right? Uh, they s- th- these folks, so from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson to yourself, are saying things where it's like you're, like, saying, "Look, there's an elephant and he's not wearing any clothes." A- and I say, "Uh, yeah, yeah. W- let's have more of that conversation." That's how I'm finding you.

01:11:11
Eric Weinstein: I'm desperate to try to change the conversation we're having. I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020. I don't think we can afford four more years of a misinterpreted message, um, which is what Donald Trump was, and I don't want the destruction of our institutions. They all seem hellbent on destroying themselves, so I'm trying to save theoretical physics, trying to save The New York Times, trying to save our various processes, and I think it feels delusional to me that, uh, this is falling to a tiny group of people who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out that everything they say will be misinterpreted and that their lives will be ruined through the process. I mean, I think we're in an absolutely bananas period of time, and I don't believe it should fall to such a tiny number of, of shoulders to sh- shoulder this weight.

01:12:02
Lex Fridman: So I have to ask you, on the capitalism side, you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism, or it has effects that are, uh, uh, uninten- well, not unintended, but, uh, not what economists would predict or speak of capitalism creating. Uh, I just wanna talk to you about in general the effect of even then artificial intelligence or technology automation taking away jobs and these kinds of things, and what you think is the way to alleviate that, whether the Andrew Yang presidential candidate with universal basic income, UBI, what are your thoughts there? How do we fight off the negative effects of technology that, uh-

01:12:42
Eric Weinstein: All right, you're a software guy, right?

01:12:43
Lex Fridman: Yep.

01:12:44
Eric Weinstein: A human being Is a worker is an old idea.

01:12:48
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:12:49
Eric Weinstein: A human being has a worker is a different object, right?

01:12:53
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:12:54
Eric Weinstein: So if you think about object-oriented programming as a paradigm, uh, a human being has a worker, and a human being has a soul. We're talking about the fact that for a period of time, the worker that a human being has was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has. However, we have two separate claims on the value in society. One is as a worker, and the other is as a soul, and the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity, it needs meaning, it needs purpose. As long as your s- means of support is not highly repetitive, I think you have a while to go before you need to start worrying. But if what you do is highly repetitive and it's not terribly generative, you are in the crosshairs of for- for loops and while loops, and that's what computers excel at, repetitive behavior. And when I say repetitive, I may m- I may mean things that have never happened b- through combinatorial possibilities. But as long as it has a looped characteristic to it, you're in trouble. We are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address the fact that a worker may not be able to make claims. A, a relatively n- undistinguished median member of our society still has needs to reproduce, needs to h- to dignity. And when capitalism abandons the median individual or, you know, the, the bottom 10th or whatever it, it's going to do, it's flirting with revolution. And what concerns me is that the capitalists aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand this. You really want to court, uh, authoritarian control in our society because you can't see that people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the marginal product of their labor is too s- too low to feed their dignity as a soul? So it... My great concern is that our free society has to do with the fact that we are self-organized. I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan when Lehman Brothers collapsed and thinking, "Who's gonna tell all these people that they need to show up at work when they don't have a financial system to incentivize them to show up at work?" So my complaint is, first of all, not with the socialists, but with the capitalists, which is you guys are being idiots. You're courting revolution by continuing to harp on the same old ideas that, well, you know, try, try harder, bootstrap yourself. Yeah, to an extent that works. To an extent. But we are clearly headed to a place that there's nothing that ties together our need to contribute and our need to consume, and that may not be provided by capitalism because it may have been a temporary phenomena. So check out my article on anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy. Uh, I think people are, are late getting the wake-up call, and we would be doing a better job saving capitalism from itself, um, because I don't want this done under authoritarian control. And the more we insist that, uh, everybody who's not thriving in our society during their reproductive years in order to have a family is failing at a personal level, I mean, what a disgusting thing that we're saying. What a, what a, what a horrible message. Who the, who the hell have we become that we've so bought into the Chicago model, um, that we can't see the humanity that we're destroying in that process? And it's... I hate, I hate the thought of communism. I really do. My family has flirted with it d- decades past. It's a wrong, bad idea. But we are going to need to figure out how to make sure that those souls are nur- nourished and respected, and capitalism better have an answer. And I'm betting on capitalism, but I gotta tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with my team.

01:16:50
Lex Fridman: So you're still on the capitalism team, just, uh... There's a theme here with-

01:16:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, radical, radical capitalism.

01:16:55
Lex Fridman: Rad-- hypercapitalism, yeah.

01:16:57
Eric Weinstein: Look, I want... I think hypercapitalism is gonna have to be cup- coupled to hypersocialism. You need to allow the most productive people to create wonders, and you've gotta stop bogging them down with all of these extra nice requirements. You know? Nice is dead. Good has a future. Nice doesn't have a future because nice ends up with, with gulags.

01:17:19
Lex Fridman: Damn, that's a good line. Okay, last question. You, uh, tweeted today a simple, quite insightful equation saying, uh, "Imagine that every unit F of fame you picked up, S stalkers and H haters." So I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame perhaps a little bit.

01:17:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, it, it's not as simple. I mean, people always take these things literally when you have, like, 280 characters to explain yourself.

01:17:45
Lex Fridman: Yeah. [laughs] So you mean that that's not a mathematical, uh-

01:17:49
Eric Weinstein: No, there's no law.

01:17:50
Lex Fridman: Oh, okay. All right. So why-

01:17:52
Eric Weinstein: I just said ima- I put the word imagine because I still have a mathematician's desire for precision.

01:17:56
Lex Fridman: Yes.

01:17:56
Eric Weinstein: Imagine that this were true.

01:17:57
Lex Fridman: But it was a beautiful way to imagine that there is a law that has those variables in it.

01:18:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:18:03
Lex Fridman: And, uh, you've become quite famous these days, so how do you yourself optimize that equation with the peculiar kind of fame that you have gathered along the way?

01:18:13
Eric Weinstein: I wanna be kinder. I wanna be kinder to myself. I wanna be kinder to others. I wanna be able to have heart. Compassion or these things are really important, and, uh, I have a pretty spectrum-y kind of approach to analysis. I'm quite literal. I can go full Rain Man on you at any given moment.

01:18:32
Lex Fridman: [laughs]

01:18:33
Eric Weinstein: No, I can.

01:18:33
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:18:34
Eric Weinstein: I can. Uh, it's facultative autism, if you like, and people are gonna get angry because they want autism to be respected. But when you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics, I'm... You know, I speak with speech apnea. Uh, uh, uh, uh, be right down to dinner. You know?

01:18:50
Lex Fridman: Yeah.

01:18:52
Eric Weinstein: We have to try to integrate ourselves and those tensions between, you know, it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul. Many of us are optimizing one to the, at the expense of the other. And I struggle with social media, and I struggle with people making threats against our families, and I struggle with, um, just how much pain people are in. And if there's one message I would like to push out there, um, you're responsible, everybody, all of us, myself included, with struggling. Struggle, struggle mightily because you-- it's nobody else's job to do your struggle for you. Now, with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure out how to better yourself and where you've failed and where you've let down your family, your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break. You know, if, if, if it's not working out, I, I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success. There's been no period of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another. And I, I do wish to say that a lot of times people think this is glamorous. I'm about to go, you know, do a show with Sam Harris. People are gonna listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage. It's completely crazy. I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum value, and, uh, and it's why I'm doing this podcast. You know, just give yourself a break. You owe us, you owe us your struggle. You don't owe your family or your coworkers or your lovers or your family members success. Um, as long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up, recognize that this, this new situation with the economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions has caused the people who've risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel. Everybody is lying at the moment. Nobody's really a truth teller. Um, try to keep your humanity about you. Try to re- recognize that if you're failing, if things aren't where you want them to be and you're struggling and you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, what you could do, it's not necessarily all your fault. We are in a global situation. I have not met the people who are honest, kind, good, successful. Nobody that I've met is check, is checking all the boxes. Uh, nobody's getting all tens. So I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough. Either people wanna hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable, you have to struggle, you have to try, uh, or they wanna say you're 100% responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense.

01:21:31
Lex Fridman: Beautifully put. Eric, thank you so much for talking today.

01:21:34
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me, buddy.