Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein,

00:00:03.240 | his fourth time on the podcast.

00:00:05.740 | Both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind,

00:00:10.080 | and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being

00:00:13.680 | who I am fortunate to call a friend.

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00:00:32.120 | As a side note, let me ask that whenever we touch

00:00:35.240 | difficult topics in this or other conversations

00:00:38.240 | that you listen with an open mind,

00:00:40.440 | and forgive me or the guest for a misstep

00:00:44.000 | in an imperfectly thought out statement.

00:00:46.760 | To have any chance of truth,

00:00:48.320 | I think we have to take risks

00:00:50.120 | and make mistakes in conversation,

00:00:52.740 | and then learn from those mistakes.

00:00:54.800 | Please try not to close your mind and heart to others

00:00:57.360 | because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea.

00:01:00.920 | Try to assume that the people in this conversation

00:01:03.440 | are just people in general, are good,

00:01:06.120 | but not perfect and far from it,

00:01:08.680 | but always striving to add a bit more love into the world

00:01:11.800 | in whatever way we know how.

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00:01:20.000 | support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter

00:01:22.920 | at Lex Friedman.

00:01:24.280 | And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

00:01:28.560 | You often talk about getting off this planet,

00:01:31.960 | and I think you don't often talk about

00:01:37.200 | extraterrestrial life, intelligent life out there.

00:01:41.160 | Do you wonder about this kind of thing,

00:01:42.720 | about intelligent civilizations out there?

00:01:45.000 | - I do, but I try to not wonder about it

00:01:47.320 | in a particular way.

00:01:48.540 | In a certain sense, I do find that speculating

00:01:53.040 | about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens

00:01:55.840 | is kind of a recreation for when things

00:01:57.800 | aren't going very well.

00:01:59.080 | At least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives.

00:02:03.520 | So I worry about, for example, the simulation hypothesis

00:02:07.920 | is taking over from religion.

00:02:09.400 | You can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue

00:02:12.240 | or the mosque on the weekend,

00:02:14.280 | so then you just take up an interest

00:02:16.160 | in the simulation theory because that's something

00:02:18.520 | like what you do for your job coding.

00:02:21.000 | I do think that, in some sense, the issue of aliens

00:02:24.360 | is a really interesting one, but it has been spoiled

00:02:27.560 | by too much sort of recreational escapism.

00:02:31.540 | The key question that I find is,

00:02:35.000 | let's assume that it is possible to look out

00:02:39.120 | at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds

00:02:42.000 | and then go visit them.

00:02:43.700 | If that is possible, it's almost certainly possible

00:02:46.280 | through some as yet unknown or not accepted theory

00:02:51.280 | of physics beyond Einstein.

00:02:54.500 | And I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, but probably is.

00:02:59.200 | If that theory exists, there would be a percentage

00:03:04.160 | of the world that have life in sort of a Drake equation

00:03:06.760 | kind of a way that would have encountered the ability

00:03:10.500 | to escape soon enough after unlocking the power

00:03:15.760 | of the atom at a minimum and whatever they have

00:03:19.120 | that is probably analogous to the cell on that world.

00:03:24.120 | So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing

00:03:29.000 | that arises, probably not carbon-based,

00:03:32.520 | probably doesn't have DNA, but that something

00:03:35.660 | that fits the pattern of Darwinian theory,

00:03:39.720 | which is descent with variation, differential success,

00:03:45.520 | and thereby constantly improving and so on,

00:03:47.400 | that through time there'll be a trajectory

00:03:50.120 | where there'll be something increasingly complex

00:03:53.200 | and fascinating and beautiful like us humans,

00:03:55.360 | but much more.

00:03:56.520 | - That can also off-gas whatever entropy it creates

00:03:59.680 | to give an illusion that you're defeating thermodynamics.

00:04:03.200 | So whatever these things are, probably has an analog

00:04:05.760 | of the bilipid layer so that cells can get rid

00:04:08.640 | of the chaos on one side of the barrier

00:04:11.200 | and keep order on the other.

00:04:12.840 | Whatever these things are that create life,

00:04:15.560 | assuming that there is a theory to be found

00:04:17.480 | that allows that civilization to diversify,

00:04:21.040 | we would have to imagine that such a civilization

00:04:26.320 | might have taken an interest in its concept

00:04:29.560 | of the universe and have come here.

00:04:31.320 | - They would come here.

00:04:34.000 | They would have a deep understanding of the physics

00:04:37.120 | of the universe sufficient to have arrived here.

00:04:40.920 | - Well, there's two questions,

00:04:41.760 | whether they could arrive physically

00:04:43.200 | and whether their information could be sent here

00:04:47.800 | and whether they could gain information from us.

00:04:50.440 | It's possible that they would have a way of looking

00:04:55.280 | into our world without actually reaching it.

00:04:57.280 | I don't know.

00:04:58.520 | But yes, if my hope, which is that we can escape this world,

00:05:03.320 | can be realized, if that's feasible,

00:05:07.720 | then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true

00:05:10.560 | and that somebody else should be here.

00:05:15.000 | First of all, I wanna say this.

00:05:17.200 | My purpose when I come on to your show

00:05:19.920 | and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you.

00:05:24.160 | I can sit inside all of those.

00:05:26.000 | It's to give you better audio and video

00:05:27.680 | because I think we've been on an incredible roll.

00:05:29.880 | I really love what you do.

00:05:31.560 | And so I am trying to honor you

00:05:33.440 | by being as disagreeable about frame-breaking as possible.

00:05:36.560 | I think some of your listeners don't understand

00:05:38.920 | that it's actually a sign of respect

00:05:40.520 | as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic,

00:05:43.280 | which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames

00:05:46.800 | and that these are sort of offerings

00:05:48.280 | to get the conversation started.

00:05:49.640 | So let me try to break that frame

00:05:51.160 | and give you something different.

00:05:52.440 | - Beautiful.

00:05:53.280 | - I think what's going on here is that I can prove

00:05:59.320 | effectively that we're not thinking about this

00:06:02.200 | in very deep terms.

00:06:03.240 | As soon as I say we've gotta get off this planet,

00:06:05.840 | the number of people who assume that I'm talking

00:06:08.200 | about faster than light travel is very high.

00:06:12.720 | And faster than light travel assumes some sort of

00:06:16.200 | Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken

00:06:18.680 | by some small adjustment.

00:06:22.200 | And I think that that's fascinating.

00:06:24.720 | It shows me that our failure to imagine

00:06:27.560 | what could be being said is profound.

00:06:30.680 | We don't have an idea of all of the different ways

00:06:35.840 | in which we might be able to visit distant worlds.

00:06:39.680 | All we think about is, okay, it must be Einsteinian

00:06:44.280 | space times and then some means of exceeding the speed limit.

00:06:48.200 | And it's just, it's fascinating to me

00:06:50.440 | that we don't really have,

00:06:52.200 | we've lost the ability to just realize

00:06:57.640 | we don't know the framework.

00:06:59.560 | And what does it even mean?

00:07:01.360 | So one of the things I think about a lot

00:07:03.160 | is worlds with more than one temporal dimension.

00:07:05.660 | It's very hard to think about

00:07:08.520 | more than one temporal dimension.

00:07:10.880 | - So that's a really strong mental exercise

00:07:14.800 | of breaking the framework in which we think.

00:07:17.320 | 'Cause most of the frameworks would have

00:07:19.260 | a single temporal dimension, right?

00:07:20.960 | - Well, first of all, most of the frameworks

00:07:22.920 | in which we think would have no temporal dimension,

00:07:25.040 | would have pure, like in mathematics,

00:07:27.040 | the differential geometry that Riemann

00:07:29.680 | came up with in the 1800s.

00:07:32.960 | We don't usually talk about

00:07:35.240 | what we would call split signature metrics,

00:07:37.960 | or Lorentzian signature.

00:07:39.960 | In fact, if it weren't for relativity,

00:07:41.760 | this would be the most obscure topic out there.

00:07:45.600 | Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature,

00:07:48.240 | and then there's this one freakish case

00:07:50.240 | of relativity theory in physics

00:07:52.080 | that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions.

00:07:55.780 | Fascinating.

00:07:57.880 | - So it's usually momentary and just looking at space.

00:08:01.120 | - Yes, we have these three kinds of equations

00:08:05.400 | that are very important to us.

00:08:06.720 | We have elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic, right?

00:08:11.360 | And so the idea is if I'm chewing gum

00:08:15.160 | after eating garlic bread,

00:08:16.780 | when I open my mouth and I've got chewing gum

00:08:22.520 | between my lips, maybe it's gonna form

00:08:25.400 | an elliptic object called a minimal surface.

00:08:29.080 | Then when I pop that and blow through it,

00:08:31.280 | you're gonna hear a noise that's gonna travel to you

00:08:33.520 | by a wave equation, which is gonna be hyperbolic.

00:08:36.280 | But then the garlic breath is gonna diffuse towards you,

00:08:38.940 | and you're eventually gonna be very upset with me

00:08:41.240 | according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic.

00:08:44.040 | So those are the three basic paradigms

00:08:46.640 | for most of the work that we do.

00:08:48.200 | And a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is elliptic,

00:08:52.320 | whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case.

00:08:54.700 | And I don't even know what to do

00:08:55.800 | about more than one temporal dimension

00:08:57.540 | because I think almost no one studies that.

00:08:59.920 | - I can't believe you just captured much of modern physics

00:09:04.140 | in the example of chewing gum.

00:09:05.820 | - Well, I have an off-color one,

00:09:06.820 | which I chose not to share,

00:09:08.060 | but hopefully the kids at home--

00:09:10.240 | - Can imagine.

00:09:11.140 | (laughing)

00:09:12.920 | - Okay, so, okay, that is the place where we come from.

00:09:16.780 | Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility

00:09:19.040 | of breaking the frameworks with two

00:09:22.780 | versus zero temporal dimensions,

00:09:25.640 | how do we even begin to think about that?

00:09:27.140 | Well, let's think about it as you and I

00:09:28.840 | getting together in New York City, okay?

00:09:31.960 | So if you tell me,

00:09:34.760 | "Eric, I want to meet you in New York City.

00:09:36.600 | "Go to the corner of, I don't know,

00:09:39.620 | "34th Street and 3rd Avenue,

00:09:42.740 | "and you'll find a building on the northwest corner

00:09:45.260 | "and go up to the 17th floor," right?

00:09:48.660 | So when we have 3rd Avenue, that's one coordinate,

00:09:51.560 | 34th Street, that's a second coordinate,

00:09:53.720 | and go up to the 17th.

00:09:55.200 | And what time is it?

00:09:56.120 | Oh, 12 noon.

00:09:57.100 | All right, well now, imagine that we traded

00:10:00.880 | the ability to get up to a particular height in a building

00:10:03.920 | and it's all flat land,

00:10:05.280 | but I'm gonna give you two temporal coordinates.

00:10:07.440 | So meet me at 5 p.m. and 12 noon

00:10:11.400 | at the corner of 34th and 3rd.

00:10:13.440 | That gets to be too mind-blowing.

00:10:15.160 | I've got two separate watches.

00:10:17.320 | - And presumably that's just specifying a single point

00:10:20.640 | in those two different dimensions,

00:10:22.580 | but then being able to travel along those dimensions.

00:10:25.080 | - Let me see your right hand.

00:10:27.080 | You have no watch on that.

00:10:30.280 | - No.

00:10:31.120 | - Okay, I'm very concerned, Lex,

00:10:32.880 | that you're going through life without a wristwatch.

00:10:36.760 | That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch.

00:10:39.720 | I want you to wear it.

00:10:40.940 | - This guy is funnier than basically any human on Earth.

00:10:45.200 | - Lex, that has been in my family for months.

00:10:48.140 | It's a Fitbit.

00:10:51.160 | Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman

00:10:53.560 | is now in a position to live in two spatial

00:10:57.440 | and two temporal dimensions unlike the rest of us.

00:11:00.400 | I clearly am only fit for four spatial dimensions,

00:11:04.760 | so I'm frozen, whereas you can double move.

00:11:07.920 | - I can double move, which is funny

00:11:09.640 | because this is set in Austin time,

00:11:12.600 | so it's 4 p.m., and this is set in Los Angeles time.

00:11:16.600 | - But that's just with an affine shift in mod 12.

00:11:19.000 | But my point is, wouldn't that be interesting

00:11:22.160 | if there were two separate time scales

00:11:23.560 | and you had to coordinate both of those,

00:11:25.720 | but you didn't have to worry about what floor

00:11:27.280 | of the building because everything was on the ground floor?

00:11:30.400 | That is the confusion that we're having.

00:11:32.860 | And if you do one more show,

00:11:35.560 | then they're gonna put a watch on your ankle,

00:11:38.120 | and you're only gonna have one spatial dimension

00:11:40.240 | that you can move around.

00:11:41.120 | But my claim is that all of these are actually sectors

00:11:45.440 | of my theory in case we're interested in that,

00:11:48.260 | which is geometric unity.

00:11:50.240 | There is a two-two sector, and a three-one,

00:11:53.080 | and a one-three, and a zero-four, and a four-zero.

00:11:55.440 | And all of these sectors have some physical reality.

00:11:58.660 | We happen to live in a one-three sector.

00:12:01.460 | But that's the kind of thinking that we don't do.

00:12:04.960 | When I say we have to get off this planet,

00:12:06.680 | people imagine, oh, okay, it's just Einstein

00:12:08.680 | plus some ability to break the law.

00:12:11.000 | - By the way, even though you did this for humor's sake,

00:12:14.200 | I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin.

00:12:19.880 | Did it get whacked?

00:12:20.880 | - No, not quite.

00:12:23.040 | But he was given a Super Bowl ring to look at,

00:12:27.640 | and he, instead of just looking at it,

00:12:29.960 | put it on his finger and walked away with it.

00:12:32.480 | - Robert Kraft? - Robert Kraft, that's right.

00:12:34.120 | So in the same way, I will, if you don't mind,

00:12:38.200 | walk away with this Fitbit and taking the entirety

00:12:40.760 | of your life story with it,

00:12:42.120 | because there's all these steps on it.

00:12:43.920 | - Boy, have you lost a lot of weight.

00:12:45.760 | (laughing)

00:12:48.080 | - And where have I been?

00:12:49.200 | - Exactly.

00:12:50.040 | - That's what we're talking about.

00:12:52.200 | We're talking about, you wanna get into aliens,

00:12:53.800 | let's have an interesting alien conversation.

00:12:55.520 | Let's stop having the typical free will conversation,

00:12:58.920 | the typical alien conversation,

00:13:00.360 | the typical AGI morality conversation.

00:13:02.840 | It's like we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves

00:13:05.720 | because we're not making progress.

00:13:07.600 | Time to have better versions of all these conversations.

00:13:10.400 | - Is there some version of the alien conversation

00:13:13.000 | that could incorporate the breaking of frameworks?

00:13:15.880 | - Well, I think so.

00:13:16.720 | I mean, the key question would be,

00:13:18.680 | we've had the Pentagon release multiple videos

00:13:21.640 | of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us.

00:13:25.080 | I just think it's also really fascinating

00:13:26.960 | to talk about the fact that those of us

00:13:29.240 | who were trained to call BS on all of this stuff

00:13:33.080 | just had the rug pulled out from under us

00:13:35.120 | by the Pentagon choosing to do this.

00:13:36.720 | And you know what the effect of that is?

00:13:38.400 | You've opened the door for every stupid theory

00:13:42.400 | known to man.

00:13:44.040 | My aunt saw a ghost.

00:13:46.640 | Okay, now we're gonna have to listen to,

00:13:49.000 | well, hey, the Pentagon used to deny it.

00:13:51.000 | Then it turned out there were UFOs, dude.

00:13:53.040 | Whoever is in charge of lying to the public,

00:13:57.920 | they need a cost function that incorporates

00:14:00.960 | the damage and trust.

00:14:02.880 | Because I held this line that this was all garbage

00:14:05.400 | and all BS.

00:14:07.200 | Now I don't know what to think.

00:14:09.040 | - There's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion,

00:14:11.480 | the breaking of frameworks,

00:14:12.640 | that involves the release of videos from the Pentagon,

00:14:15.920 | which is almost like another dimension

00:14:18.240 | that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information

00:14:21.920 | is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling

00:14:24.760 | constantly that is messing with my head to think about.

00:14:29.280 | Because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that

00:14:35.880 | into your study of the nature of reality.

00:14:38.360 | It's like the constant shifting of the notation,

00:14:43.160 | the tools we use to communicate that reality.

00:14:45.840 | And so what am I supposed to think about these videos?

00:14:48.920 | Is it a complete distraction?

00:14:51.280 | Is it a kind of cosmic joke?

00:14:53.320 | - I don't know, but you know what?

00:14:54.600 | I'm tired of these people, just completely tired of these.

00:14:57.480 | - The people on the Pentagon side

00:14:59.000 | or the people who are interpreting this stuff

00:15:00.480 | on the Pentagon side?

00:15:01.320 | - I'm tired of the authorities playing games

00:15:05.840 | with what we can know.

00:15:08.360 | The fact that you and I don't,

00:15:09.560 | do you have a security clearance?

00:15:11.720 | Some level of it for,

00:15:13.160 | because I was funding for DARPA for a while.

00:15:15.200 | - I don't have a security clearance.

00:15:17.000 | I am going to release whatever theory I have.

00:15:21.440 | And my guess is that there is zero interest

00:15:23.960 | from our own government.

00:15:25.220 | And so the Chinese will find out about it the same time

00:15:29.600 | our government does,

00:15:30.680 | because Lord knows what they do in these buildings.

00:15:33.280 | I watch crazy people walk in and out

00:15:36.520 | of the intelligence community, walk in and out of DARPA.

00:15:40.000 | And I think, wow, you're talking to that person?

00:15:43.160 | That's really fascinating to me.

00:15:45.240 | We don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball.

00:15:49.020 | - Complete lack of transparency.

00:15:50.560 | Do you think it's possible there's,

00:15:52.080 | the government is in possession of something

00:15:55.400 | deeply fundamental to our understanding of the world

00:15:58.560 | that they're not releasing?

00:16:00.680 | So this is one of the famous distractions

00:16:05.560 | that people play with, the narrative--

00:16:07.040 | - Assume that that were true.

00:16:08.200 | - Of alien life forms, spacecraft in possession,

00:16:12.800 | that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft.

00:16:15.120 | - Assume that were true. - That's a popular narrative.

00:16:16.440 | - Yeah.

00:16:17.640 | - I don't think the government really exists at the moment.

00:16:21.280 | I believe, and this is not an idea that was original to me.

00:16:24.720 | There was a guy named Michael Teitelbaum

00:16:26.640 | who used to be at the Sloan Foundation.

00:16:28.440 | And at some point I pointed out that the US government

00:16:31.320 | had completely contradictory objectives

00:16:33.720 | when it came to the military and science.

00:16:36.240 | And one branch said this, one branch said that.

00:16:38.680 | I said, "I don't understand which is true.

00:16:40.760 | "What does the government want?"

00:16:41.600 | He said, "You think there's a government?"

00:16:43.720 | And I said, "What do you mean?"

00:16:45.360 | He said, "What makes you think that the people

00:16:47.640 | "in those two offices have ever coordinated?

00:16:50.340 | "What is it that allows each office

00:16:54.220 | "to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office?"

00:16:57.720 | And that's when I first started to understand

00:16:59.560 | that there are periods where the government coheres,

00:17:02.480 | and then there are periods where the coherence just decays.

00:17:04.960 | And I think that that's been going on since 1945,

00:17:07.960 | that there have been a few places

00:17:09.540 | where there's been increased coherence,

00:17:10.920 | but in general everything is just getting

00:17:12.640 | less and less coherent.

00:17:14.000 | And that what war did was focus us on the need

00:17:17.240 | to have a government of people and mission,

00:17:20.160 | capacity, technology, commitment, ideology.

00:17:23.880 | And then as soon as that was gone,

00:17:26.280 | different people, those who'd been through World War II

00:17:30.280 | had one set of beliefs.

00:17:31.280 | Those born in the 1950s or late '40s

00:17:35.400 | by the time they got to Woodstock,

00:17:37.080 | they didn't buy any of that.

00:17:39.640 | - So coherence, is it the complete opposite

00:17:42.800 | of like a bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy?

00:17:47.800 | So coherence is efficient, functional government?

00:17:52.520 | Because when you say there's no government,

00:17:54.320 | meaning there's no emergent function

00:17:58.560 | from a collection of individuals,

00:18:00.120 | it's just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices

00:18:03.560 | without any kind of efficient communication

00:18:05.400 | with each other on a single mission.

00:18:07.400 | And so a government that is truly at the epitome

00:18:12.400 | of what a government is supposed to be

00:18:14.160 | is when a bunch of people working together.

00:18:16.200 | - What are we about?

00:18:17.040 | Are we about freedom?

00:18:17.880 | Are we about growth?

00:18:19.400 | Are we about decency and fairness?

00:18:22.120 | Are we about the absence of a national culture

00:18:24.920 | so that we can all just do our own thing?

00:18:27.000 | I've called this thing the USAN,

00:18:28.920 | the United States of Absolutely Nothing.

00:18:31.600 | These are all different visions for our country.

00:18:35.580 | - So it's possible that there's a alien spacecraft somewhere

00:18:39.520 | and there's like 20 people that know about it

00:18:42.840 | and then they're kind of,

00:18:43.960 | it like as you communicate further and further

00:18:46.080 | into the offices, that information dissipates,

00:18:48.600 | it gets distorted in some kind of way

00:18:50.360 | and then it's completely lost,

00:18:52.080 | the power, the possibility of that information is lost.

00:18:54.840 | - We bought a house and I had this idea

00:18:57.800 | that I wanted to find out what all the switches did.

00:19:00.240 | And I quickly found out that your house

00:19:03.200 | doesn't keep updating its plans.

00:19:05.680 | As people do modifications,

00:19:07.360 | they just do the modifications

00:19:08.820 | and they don't actually record why they were doing

00:19:11.160 | what they were doing or what things lead to.

00:19:12.800 | So there are all sorts of bizarre,

00:19:14.880 | like there's a switch in my house that says privacy.

00:19:17.480 | (laughing)

00:19:18.720 | I don't know what privacy is.

00:19:20.200 | Does it turn on an electromagnetic field

00:19:22.280 | that there's some lead shielding go over the house?

00:19:27.540 | That's what we have.

00:19:28.560 | We have a system in which the people

00:19:30.160 | who've inherited these structures

00:19:31.520 | have no idea why their grandparents built them.

00:19:34.140 | - I'd be funny if there's a freedom of speech switch

00:19:37.040 | that you could also control.

00:19:38.680 | Then it would be a perfect metaphor--

00:19:39.920 | - Well, that's different.

00:19:41.000 | Because what they figured out is

00:19:42.920 | is that if they can just make sure

00:19:44.480 | that we don't have any public options for communication,

00:19:48.880 | then hey, every thing that we say to each other

00:19:52.680 | goes through a private company,

00:19:53.720 | private companies can do whatever they want.

00:19:55.420 | And this is like one of the greatest moves

00:19:57.620 | that we didn't really notice.

00:19:59.140 | Electronic and digital speech

00:20:01.940 | makes every other kind of speech irrelevant.

00:20:04.220 | And because there is no public option, guess what?

00:20:08.540 | There's always somebody named Sundar or Jack or Mark

00:20:12.940 | who controls whether or not you can speak

00:20:15.240 | and what it appears to be that is being said

00:20:17.740 | and whose stuff is weighted more highly than others.

00:20:20.420 | It's an absolute nightmare.

00:20:22.220 | And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite,

00:20:26.660 | Lord knows what is going on.

00:20:28.180 | People are so busy making money

00:20:30.700 | that they are not actually upholding any of the values.

00:20:34.260 | So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally against it.

00:20:36.780 | It has this kind of libertarian, free, progressive sheen

00:20:41.780 | to it when it goes to Burning Man.

00:20:44.380 | And then it quickly just imposes rules

00:20:46.500 | on all of the rest of us as to what we can say to each other

00:20:48.980 | if we're not part of the inner elite.

00:20:51.060 | - So what do you think the ideal

00:20:53.260 | of the freedom of speech means?

00:20:55.540 | - Well, this is very interesting.

00:20:57.300 | I keep getting lectured on social media

00:20:59.380 | by people who have no idea how much power

00:21:01.620 | the Supreme Court has to abstract things.

00:21:04.560 | Right now, you have the concept of the letter of the law

00:21:07.900 | and the spirit of the law.

00:21:09.220 | And the spirit of the law would have to say

00:21:12.180 | that our speech that matters is free,

00:21:14.660 | at least at the level of ideas.

00:21:16.140 | I don't claim that I have the right

00:21:17.860 | to endanger your life with speech

00:21:19.660 | or to reveal your private information.

00:21:22.000 | So I really am not opining about directed speech

00:21:25.780 | intended to smear you.

00:21:27.220 | And that's a different kettle of fish.

00:21:30.020 | And maybe I have some rights to do that,

00:21:31.540 | but I don't think that they're infinite.

00:21:33.420 | What I am saying is that the freedom of speech for ideas

00:21:38.420 | is essential that the court abstract it

00:21:43.900 | and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter,

00:21:48.140 | Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are,

00:21:52.580 | because it really matters which abstraction you use.

00:21:56.260 | The case that I really like is search and seizure.

00:21:59.620 | If I have private data that I entered in my house

00:22:02.700 | that is stored on a server that you hold

00:22:04.820 | outside of my house, but I view,

00:22:08.900 | is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter

00:22:11.380 | of my house that I have the right to protect?

00:22:13.540 | Or does my password extend the perimeter of my house

00:22:18.540 | to the data on the server

00:22:20.220 | that is located outside of my house?

00:22:22.940 | These are choices for the court,

00:22:25.940 | and the court is supposed to pretend

00:22:27.440 | that they can divine the true intent of the framers.

00:22:30.680 | But all of the sort of, and I've taken to calling this

00:22:33.620 | the problem of internet hyenas,

00:22:35.240 | people with ready-made answers and LOLs,

00:22:37.900 | and you're such a moron.

00:22:39.940 | These folks love to remind you,

00:22:41.700 | it's a private company, dude, it can do whatever it wants.

00:22:44.580 | No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are.

00:22:48.540 | And just the way, for example, the Griswold decision

00:22:52.860 | found that there was a penumbra

00:22:54.300 | because there was too little in the Constitution,

00:22:56.420 | therefore there were all sorts of things implied

00:22:58.380 | that couldn't be in the document.

00:23:00.860 | Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now

00:23:04.260 | that says Jack cannot do it over he wants.

00:23:09.020 | - It's really, so you say the courts,

00:23:11.460 | but it's also us, people who think about the world, you--

00:23:15.460 | - No, no, no, it's the courts.

00:23:17.220 | If the courts don't do this, we're toast.

00:23:20.680 | - But we can still think about it.

00:23:22.420 | I mean-- - Sure, but I don't feel

00:23:24.740 | like going down the drain.

00:23:25.740 | - Here's what I'm thinking about,

00:23:26.900 | 'cause it's tricky how far it should extend.

00:23:29.840 | I mean, that's an ongoing conversation.

00:23:31.500 | Don't you think the interpretation of the law--

00:23:34.300 | - I think I'm trying to say something very simple,

00:23:36.260 | and it's just not gonna be popular for a while.

00:23:41.220 | Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication.

00:23:45.080 | Print or shouting in a public park.

00:23:48.220 | And so I can go to a public park

00:23:51.300 | and I can shout if I get a permit.

00:23:53.060 | Even there, I think it was in the late 1980s in Atlanta,

00:23:56.400 | we came up with free speech zones

00:23:58.260 | where you can't protest at a convention,

00:24:00.100 | but you can go to a park 23 miles out

00:24:02.460 | and they'll fence off a little area

00:24:04.340 | where you can have your free speech.

00:24:06.140 | No, speech is dangerous.

00:24:09.180 | Ideas are dangerous.

00:24:10.500 | We are a country about danger and risk.

00:24:13.780 | And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals

00:24:17.120 | trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of,

00:24:19.980 | that is very different.

00:24:21.180 | So forget a lot of that stuff.

00:24:24.340 | But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous.

00:24:27.120 | And people will die as a result of free speech.

00:24:31.940 | The idea that one life is too much is preposterous.

00:24:35.500 | Like why did we send, if one life is preposterous,

00:24:38.120 | why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy?

00:24:40.000 | I just don't get this.

00:24:41.580 | - So one thing that I was clearly bothered by,

00:24:45.940 | and maybe you can be my therapist as well.

00:24:48.220 | - I thought you were mine.

00:24:50.700 | - This is a little bit of a miscommunication

00:24:53.980 | on both of our parts then.

00:24:55.300 | Because who's paying who for this?

00:24:58.820 | I was really bothered by Amazon banning Parler from AWS

00:25:06.780 | because my assumption was that the infrastructure,

00:25:11.240 | I drew a distinction between AWS,

00:25:14.320 | the infrastructure on which competing platforms

00:25:18.200 | could be created is different than the actual platforms.

00:25:23.200 | So the standard of the ideal of freedom of speech,

00:25:27.520 | I in my mind, in a shallow way perhaps,

00:25:31.880 | applied differently to AWS than I did to Twitter.

00:25:36.680 | It felt that we've created a more dangerous world,

00:25:41.040 | that freedoms were violated by banning Parler from AWS,

00:25:46.040 | which I saw as the computing infrastructure

00:25:48.180 | which enables the competition of tools,

00:25:50.940 | the competition of frameworks of communication.

00:25:54.960 | What do you think about this?

00:25:56.600 | - First of all, let me give you the internet hyena answer.

00:25:59.940 | I don't understand, dude, just build your own Amazon.

00:26:03.820 | - Yeah. - Right?

00:26:04.660 | - Yes, well, so that's a very shallow statement,

00:26:07.300 | but it's also one that has some legitimacy.

00:26:10.660 | We can't completely dismiss it

00:26:12.380 | because there's levels to this game.

00:26:16.720 | - Yes and no, but if you really wanted to chase that down,

00:26:19.980 | one of the great things about a person-to-person conversation

00:26:22.460 | as opposed to like, let's have 30 of our closest friends,

00:26:25.740 | whenever we have a conversation

00:26:26.740 | with 30 of our closest friends, you know what happens?

00:26:29.200 | It's like passing light through a prism.

00:26:31.600 | Every person says something interesting.

00:26:34.440 | And as a result, it's always muddled.

00:26:36.660 | Like nothing ever resolves.

00:26:38.440 | - Well, one of my conversational techniques

00:26:41.500 | you mentioned you pushed back is,

00:26:44.180 | first, is childlike naivety and curiosity, but also--

00:26:49.180 | - Real or simulated?

00:26:50.260 | - Real, I'm afraid.

00:26:51.540 | - I would say 80% real.

00:26:53.260 | All right, so in this paradigm,

00:26:56.500 | how could you not see this coming?

00:26:58.140 | I mean, I did a show with Ashley Matthews,

00:27:01.820 | who's the woman behind Riley Reid,

00:27:03.900 | and specifically about this.

00:27:05.460 | It was about the idea that if I move away from politics

00:27:08.740 | and go towards sex, I know that there's always a move

00:27:13.180 | to use the infrastructure to shut down sex workers.

00:27:18.180 | And in this case, we had Operation Chokepoint

00:27:21.860 | under the Obama administration.

00:27:25.060 | We have a positive passion for people

00:27:28.520 | who want to solve problems that they don't like this company,

00:27:32.060 | they don't like that company,

00:27:33.020 | payday loans would be another one.

00:27:35.300 | And so you have legal companies that are harassed

00:27:38.300 | by our financial system that you can't,

00:27:41.060 | as Riley Reid, Ashley couldn't get a MailChimp account,

00:27:46.820 | according to her, if I understand her correctly.

00:27:49.380 | And this idea that you charge these people higher rates

00:27:53.380 | because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards,

00:27:56.740 | even if their chargebacks are low,

00:27:59.060 | yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment.

00:28:02.820 | There's something about everybody who shows up at Davos,

00:28:05.980 | they get drunk in the Swiss Alps,

00:28:09.320 | and then they come back home and they coordinate,

00:28:12.640 | and they coordinate things like Build Back Better.

00:28:15.340 | We don't really understand what Build Back Better is,

00:28:17.100 | but my guess is that Build Back Better

00:28:19.380 | has to do with extremism in America.

00:28:21.820 | How do we shut down the Republican Party

00:28:24.300 | as the source of extremism?

00:28:26.420 | Now, I do think the Republican Party

00:28:28.100 | was cut very extreme under Trump.

00:28:29.900 | And I do believe that that was responsive

00:28:32.520 | to how extreme the Democratic Party got

00:28:35.980 | under Clinton first, and then Obama, and then Hillary.

00:28:40.980 | And in all of these circumstances,

00:28:44.940 | it's amazing how much we want

00:28:46.500 | to wield these things as weapons.

00:28:48.780 | Well, our extremism is fine,

00:28:50.740 | because we pretend that Antifa doesn't exist,

00:28:53.100 | and we don't report what goes on in Portland.

00:28:55.740 | But your extremism, my God, that's disgusting.

00:28:59.540 | This is the completely ridiculous place that we're in.

00:29:02.300 | And by the way, our friends, in part,

00:29:06.120 | are coked up on tech money,

00:29:08.860 | and they don't appear to hold the courage

00:29:12.580 | of their convictions at a political level,

00:29:14.460 | because it's not in keeping with shareholder value.

00:29:18.140 | At some level, shareholder value is the ultimate shield

00:29:21.180 | with which everyone can cloak themselves.

00:29:24.840 | - Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter,

00:29:31.060 | and I'm not sure it was a good financial decision

00:29:33.460 | for Twitter, right?

00:29:35.140 | Perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong.

00:29:38.900 | - Well, are you thinking locally,

00:29:40.060 | or are you thinking if Twitter refused to--

00:29:41.660 | - Long term.

00:29:42.500 | - Well, if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump,

00:29:44.900 | what is the odds that the full force

00:29:47.260 | of the antitrust division might find them?

00:29:49.060 | I don't know. - Oh, I see, I see.

00:29:50.540 | So there's a complicated thing.

00:29:52.540 | - Well, there's a, look, these guys are all having

00:29:54.900 | a discussion in very practical terms.

00:29:57.860 | You know, you can say,

00:29:58.700 | you can imagine the sorts of conversation.

00:30:01.320 | Jack, Mark, Sunder, we're really glad you're all here.

00:30:03.940 | We're all trying to sing from the same hymnal

00:30:06.300 | and row in the same direction.

00:30:08.740 | We understand free speech.

00:30:09.800 | We're completely committed to it,

00:30:11.160 | but we have to draw along with extremism, guys.

00:30:13.740 | We just need, we need to make sure

00:30:16.220 | that we're all on the same page.

00:30:17.340 | - Well, they use the term violence, too,

00:30:19.340 | and they, I think, over-apply it.

00:30:21.900 | So basically, anybody--

00:30:23.500 | (laughing)

00:30:27.940 | - I'm telling you, I say dumb things

00:30:31.060 | to incentivize thoughtful conversation.

00:30:34.340 | - Well, whatever these things are,

00:30:36.180 | there is no trace, like, how old are you, Lex?

00:30:39.740 | You're in your mid-30s?

00:30:41.260 | - Yeah, to late 40s.

00:30:43.280 | - Mid, late 20s to late 40s.

00:30:45.540 | - Yeah. - Somewhere in there.

00:30:46.380 | - That's the demographic, yeah.

00:30:47.700 | - I do think that partially what's happened is

00:30:49.580 | is that your group has never seen functional institutions.

00:30:52.900 | These institutions have been so compromised for so long.

00:30:56.660 | You've probably never seen an adult.

00:30:58.500 | Sometimes I think Elon looks like an adult.

00:31:01.780 | I know that he has a wild lifestyle,

00:31:05.420 | but I also see it looking like an adult.

00:31:07.900 | - What does an adult look like, exactly?

00:31:09.380 | - Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things,

00:31:11.940 | speaks carefully, thinks about the future

00:31:14.180 | beyond their own lifespan.

00:31:17.220 | Somebody who has a pretty good idea

00:31:19.100 | of how to get things done,

00:31:21.260 | isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions,

00:31:23.940 | is more focused on breaking new ground

00:31:26.460 | than playing rent-seeking games.

00:31:29.100 | I mean, I really had a positive,

00:31:31.180 | I was so completely jazzed when Elon Musk

00:31:34.260 | ended up as the world's richest person.

00:31:36.220 | He was like, "Well, that's interesting, back to work."

00:31:39.740 | It's just like, that's what an adult would do.

00:31:42.540 | That's what a grownup would do.

00:31:43.660 | And it just made, you know,

00:31:45.220 | weirdly I said something about,

00:31:46.460 | "Isn't it amazing that the world's richest person

00:31:49.220 | "knows what a Lagrangian is?"

00:31:50.540 | And he made a terrible Lagrange joke about potentials.

00:31:54.260 | But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately,

00:31:57.180 | Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult.

00:32:00.140 | And I can tell you that the internet hyenas

00:32:02.060 | will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is

00:32:05.040 | for pumping his stock price,

00:32:06.380 | talking his book and all this stuff.

00:32:08.260 | Shut up.

00:32:09.540 | - So looking at the world seriously and rigorously,

00:32:12.180 | you're saying that the people who are running tech companies

00:32:15.940 | are running the mediums on which we can exercise

00:32:20.940 | the ideal of free speech are not adults.

00:32:24.540 | - I think not.

00:32:25.380 | I think first of all,

00:32:26.200 | a lot of them are Silicon Valley utopian businessmen

00:32:30.620 | where you talk a utopian line and you use it.

00:32:33.660 | You've heard my take,

00:32:34.980 | which is that the idealism of every era

00:32:38.660 | is the cover story of its greatest thefts.

00:32:41.180 | And I believe that in many ways,

00:32:42.980 | the idealism of Silicon Valley,

00:32:44.420 | about connecting the world, a world of abundance,

00:32:46.460 | et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,

00:32:47.860 | is really about the software eating the world

00:32:51.900 | as Marc Andreessen likes to say,

00:32:53.300 | at the role of these legacy properties.

00:32:55.020 | And by simply being a bad tech version

00:32:58.700 | of something that previously existed like a newspaper,

00:33:03.220 | you could immediately start to dwarf that

00:33:05.740 | by aggregating newspapers and their digital versions

00:33:08.100 | because digital is so much more powerful.

00:33:10.420 | As a result, yes, we have lots of man children

00:33:15.060 | wandering around what once was the Bay Area

00:33:18.100 | and is now Austin and Miami and other places,

00:33:22.100 | and maybe Singapore, that all of these people,

00:33:27.100 | these are friends of ours and they're brilliant

00:33:29.740 | with respect to a certain amount of stuff,

00:33:32.380 | but none of them can get off the drip.

00:33:34.360 | It's amazing that none of them have FU money.

00:33:37.220 | We've got billionaires who don't have FU money.

00:33:39.820 | - Okay, I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey

00:33:43.020 | was that there was an incitement of violence,

00:33:45.820 | and not just Jack Dorsey, but everybody

00:33:48.100 | that was banning people.

00:33:50.180 | And then this word violence was used

00:33:52.220 | as a kind of just like extremism and so on

00:33:56.420 | without much reason behind it.

00:33:59.200 | You think it's impossible for Jack Dorsey

00:34:01.620 | or anybody else to be, as you said,

00:34:04.180 | an adult, a grown up and reason--

00:34:06.260 | - Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grown up.

00:34:07.900 | - It seems like he is.

00:34:09.100 | He's-- - But he's under pressures.

00:34:11.600 | - As you've discussed, it seems that he's been

00:34:15.080 | on the verge of almost being quite serious

00:34:18.140 | and transparent and real with people.

00:34:19.380 | - I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went.

00:34:22.300 | And I worry that that must be something

00:34:26.660 | behind the scenes that I can't see.

00:34:29.180 | - From my perspective, what I think is the stress,

00:34:32.740 | the burden of that when people are screaming at you,

00:34:37.420 | it's overwhelming. - Jack is a Zen monk.

00:34:39.580 | He really is.

00:34:41.400 | Jack is an incredibly impressive person,

00:34:46.340 | intellectually, morally, spiritually,

00:34:49.700 | at least for a couple of meetings.

00:34:52.820 | I don't know him very well.

00:34:54.220 | But I'm very impressed by the person I met,

00:34:57.820 | and I don't know where that person is,

00:34:59.300 | and that terrifies me.

00:35:00.520 | - But do you think somebody could step up in that way?

00:35:04.620 | - No.

00:35:05.820 | - So does a human being have the capacity

00:35:09.540 | to be transparent about the reasoning behind the banning?

00:35:14.260 | Or do you think all banning eventually,

00:35:16.620 | all banning of people from mediums of communication

00:35:22.500 | is eventually destructive, or it's impossible

00:35:25.280 | for human beings to reason with ourselves about it?

00:35:27.980 | - Well, let's see what the problem is.

00:35:31.020 | So my phone has been on airplane mode.

00:35:33.380 | I'm gonna unlock it.

00:35:34.440 | I'm gonna take a picture of Lex Fridman.

00:35:38.520 | Now, if I can, I'm gonna tweet that picture out.

00:35:43.340 | - Great.

00:35:44.180 | - But here's the weird part about it.

00:35:45.380 | - Yeah.

00:35:46.820 | - That picture,

00:35:47.820 | sitting with Lex today.

00:35:54.180 | - This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage is made.

00:35:58.660 | - Okay, in so doing,

00:36:00.420 | I have just sent a picture of you

00:36:06.980 | and a tiny piece of text all over the planet

00:36:10.500 | that has arrived at, if statistics tell the truth,

00:36:15.080 | just under half a million different accounts.

00:36:17.480 | - And then more from sharing and so on.

00:36:21.820 | - And we have, well, and some of those accounts are dead.

00:36:23.940 | We don't really know how many places it went.

00:36:25.940 | - Yeah.

00:36:27.460 | - But the key issue with that tweet

00:36:29.840 | is that that is a non-local phenomenon.

00:36:33.700 | - Yes.

00:36:35.620 | - So I just broadcasted to an entire planet.

00:36:40.500 | Somebody in Uganda is reading that

00:36:42.620 | at the same time as somebody in Uruguay.

00:36:44.620 | There is no known solution to have so many people

00:36:51.040 | with the ability to communicate non-locally

00:36:55.060 | because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech

00:36:58.500 | inside of the Constitution.

00:36:59.840 | Friction, locality,

00:37:01.020 | there were all sorts of other aspects to speech.

00:37:04.120 | So if you think about speech as a bundle,

00:37:06.180 | I like this,

00:37:09.740 | then it got unbundled.

00:37:12.820 | And some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on

00:37:17.020 | to retard the impact of speech aren't present.

00:37:22.020 | And we don't have the courage to say,

00:37:23.940 | I wonder if the First Amendment really applies

00:37:26.920 | in the modern era in the same way,

00:37:28.840 | or we have to work through an abstraction.

00:37:30.780 | Either we probably have to amend the Constitution

00:37:33.080 | or we have to abstract it properly.

00:37:34.820 | And that issue is not something we're facing up to.

00:37:40.560 | I watch us constantly look backwards.

00:37:44.820 | We don't seem to try to come up with new ideas

00:37:48.800 | and new theories.

00:37:49.640 | Nobody really imagines that we're going to be able

00:37:52.320 | to wisely amend the Constitution anymore

00:37:54.740 | in the inside of the United States.

00:37:56.180 | Many people abroad will say,

00:37:57.760 | why are these guys talking about the US?

00:37:59.400 | It's a US-centric program.

00:38:01.100 | Well, that's because nobody knows where this program lives.

00:38:04.100 | The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be

00:38:06.860 | in a physical place together is also bizarre.

00:38:10.200 | It could be anywhere.

00:38:11.040 | It doesn't really matter that it happens to be here.

00:38:13.740 | So the difference between logical and between physical,

00:38:16.080 | local, non-local, frictional, non-frictional,

00:38:18.820 | it's the same thing with firearms.

00:38:21.540 | Nobody imagined that the gatling gun

00:38:25.660 | was going to be present when you had to reload a musket.

00:38:29.460 | - And that's fascinating to think about.

00:38:33.460 | I mean, you're exactly right that the nature

00:38:37.220 | of this particular freedom that seems so foundational

00:38:39.860 | to this nation, to what made this nation great

00:38:44.220 | and perhaps much of the world that is great made it great,

00:38:47.760 | is changing completely.

00:38:49.460 | Can we try to reason through how the ideal freedom

00:38:52.100 | of speech is to be changed?

00:38:54.220 | I mean, I guess I'm struggling.

00:38:57.620 | It feels really wrong, perhaps because I wasn't

00:39:00.860 | paying attention to it, it feels really wrong

00:39:02.740 | to ban Donald Trump from Twitter,

00:39:06.900 | to ban not just the president, that's really wrong to me,

00:39:10.900 | but this particular human for being divisive.

00:39:15.540 | But then when there's an incitement of violence,

00:39:19.140 | that is an overused claim, but perhaps there was

00:39:26.860 | actual brewing of local violence happening.

00:39:31.620 | So one of the things I know was happening on Parlor

00:39:34.260 | is people were scheduling meetings together

00:39:39.260 | in physical space.

00:39:40.420 | So you're now going back from this dynamic,

00:39:45.420 | social, large-scale, people from Uganda,

00:39:48.340 | people from all over the world being able to communicate,

00:39:51.400 | you're now mapping that into now back meeting

00:39:54.060 | in the physical space that is similar

00:39:57.300 | to what the founding of this nation was.

00:39:58.140 | - But if the violence were digital,

00:40:00.620 | if ransomware suddenly was unleashed,

00:40:03.520 | the key issue is the abstractions.

00:40:07.360 | So what was freedom of speech as a bundle?

00:40:09.800 | - And now it's--

00:40:12.040 | - And then how do we abstract the bundle

00:40:14.540 | into the digital era?

00:40:16.680 | - Do you think we just need to raise the question

00:40:18.500 | and talk about it?

00:40:19.340 | Do you have ideas?

00:40:20.540 | - Well, sure I have ideas, but the key point is

00:40:22.980 | that I'm not even welcome in mainstream media.

00:40:25.440 | I've never seen you on mainstream media.

00:40:28.340 | Do you do mainstream media?

00:40:29.540 | So we exist in part of an alternate universe

00:40:32.460 | because the mainstream media is trying

00:40:34.740 | to have a coherent story,

00:40:36.900 | which I've called the gated institutional narrative.

00:40:39.420 | And the institutions pretend that they plug their fingers

00:40:42.820 | in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside

00:40:46.100 | of MSNBC talking to CNN about what was

00:40:49.340 | in the New York Times as covered by the Washington Post.

00:40:52.820 | And so that's effectively

00:40:54.180 | like a professional wrestling promotion where they,

00:40:57.180 | the Undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan

00:40:59.820 | and Rowdy Roddy Piper.

00:41:01.820 | Okay, well, that's very different than MMA.

00:41:05.900 | - You've recently been on a Glenn Beck's program.

00:41:08.780 | - Yeah.

00:41:09.740 | - And there was this kind of one of the things

00:41:12.860 | you've talked about is being able to have this conversation.

00:41:16.680 | I don't know if you would put it as a type

00:41:20.100 | of conversation that was happening outside

00:41:21.740 | of the mainstream media,

00:41:22.940 | but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews.

00:41:27.820 | - You're right.

00:41:28.660 | - Having a nuanced or just like a respectful conversation

00:41:33.340 | that's grounded in mutual.

00:41:35.260 | - But we can't have the reality

00:41:36.460 | because the main model is the center, both left and right,

00:41:41.460 | is in the process of stealing all the wealth

00:41:44.340 | that we built up.

00:41:45.280 | And they've organized the extremes

00:41:48.900 | into two LARPing teams that I've called

00:41:50.940 | Magistan and Wokistan.

00:41:53.140 | And then you have everybody who isn't part of that complex,

00:41:56.980 | all seven of us.

00:41:58.260 | The number of us who are able to earn a living,

00:42:00.780 | looking at all of these mad people playing this game.

00:42:04.380 | There's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks

00:42:09.500 | are trying to look at price action.

00:42:12.540 | And somebody says, this doesn't make any sense.

00:42:14.900 | And somebody will say,

00:42:15.740 | it's just the locals stealing from each other.

00:42:17.780 | And that's really what we have.

00:42:20.020 | We've got the leaders of Magistan and Wokistan,

00:42:22.800 | championing these two teams as sponsored by the center

00:42:27.020 | because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver

00:42:29.340 | and cut the paintings out of the frames.

00:42:31.460 | That's what you and I are looking at.

00:42:33.660 | So when you ask me, do you have any ideas

00:42:35.460 | about the abstraction for free speech?

00:42:37.360 | I've never met Mark Zuckerberg.

00:42:41.260 | I've never met Sundar Pichai.

00:42:43.260 | I never met Larry Page.

00:42:45.140 | I was once in a room with Sergey Brin.

00:42:47.500 | I've never spoken to Elon Musk.

00:42:49.600 | I hang out with Peter Thiel,

00:42:52.140 | but we have a very deep relationship,

00:42:54.400 | but I don't really speak to that many other people

00:42:58.660 | sort of at this level.

00:43:00.380 | We're not having any kind of smart conversation

00:43:04.180 | at a national level.

00:43:05.500 | In fact, it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox

00:43:10.500 | in which we could play together.

00:43:13.260 | There's no place that we actually talk

00:43:15.700 | except long form podcasting.

00:43:18.140 | And by the way, they've found,

00:43:20.240 | you see what's going on with like Alex Stamos

00:43:23.180 | and the Hoover Institution.

00:43:25.200 | There's a loophole left.

00:43:28.100 | Long form podcasting allows people to speak

00:43:31.660 | at levels above daytime CNN.

00:43:34.220 | It's like, well, why do you think

00:43:35.880 | they're not watching daytime CNN?

00:43:37.680 | - But that's just silly journalism.

00:43:42.180 | They currently have no power to displace podcasting.

00:43:45.900 | That's why it's so powerful, RSS feed.

00:43:47.740 | I mean, that's why the big challenge with Joe Rogan

00:43:50.300 | and Spotify is like there's this dance

00:43:52.500 | that's fascinating to see.

00:43:54.220 | Joe Rogan is now part of the system,

00:43:57.980 | and then he's also uncancellable.

00:44:00.660 | And there's this tension that's happening.

00:44:03.620 | - Well, think about what happened to Howard Stern.

00:44:05.420 | Howard Stern became much less relevant.

00:44:08.940 | So if they can't control Joe by bringing him in-house,

00:44:13.220 | the key question is, is he going to continue?

00:44:16.800 | Joe says this thing about FU money.

00:44:20.840 | Joe's one of the only people with FU money

00:44:24.380 | who's actually said FU.

00:44:26.160 | I don't understand this.

00:44:30.580 | I don't have FU money.

00:44:32.100 | - What exactly is, can we break apart FU money?

00:44:36.420 | Because I always thought I've been fortunate enough

00:44:40.460 | to always have FU money in the sense

00:44:45.020 | that my standards were so low

00:44:47.020 | that a basic salary in the United States--

00:44:49.060 | - This is the stoic point,

00:44:50.300 | which is if you can live on rice and beans,

00:44:53.020 | you're uncancellable because you're always rich

00:44:54.980 | relative to your need side.

00:44:56.220 | - Isn't that FU, fundamental FU money?

00:44:57.940 | Why do you say that tech billionaires don't have FU money?

00:45:01.540 | - When you need to hire private security

00:45:03.600 | to protect your family,

00:45:05.080 | how do you protect your two children?

00:45:07.020 | - I don't have those yet.

00:45:08.060 | - Bingo.

00:45:08.900 | My point is that FU money

00:45:11.820 | insulates everything that you care about.

00:45:15.480 | It's not just about you.

00:45:17.380 | - So you're saying as the level of responsibility grows,

00:45:20.940 | the amount of money required for FU--

00:45:24.620 | - We have a war going on.

00:45:26.060 | The war is on academic freedom.

00:45:28.660 | Academic freedom used to be present in the system

00:45:31.540 | as in terms of the idea we trust our elite.

00:45:35.820 | Now we have an idea like, you wanna be the elite.

00:45:39.420 | You wanna lord above us.

00:45:40.980 | First of all, there's a populist anti-elitist thing.

00:45:43.940 | Then there's the idea that

00:45:45.300 | we're gonna defer tenure for forever.

00:45:48.620 | Then we're gonna tell people stay in your lane.

00:45:50.220 | Your tenure is only good for your own

00:45:51.980 | particular tiny micro subject.

00:45:54.680 | Then we're gonna also control your grants

00:45:56.500 | and we'll be able to load up your teaching load

00:45:59.000 | if we don't like who you are.

00:46:00.160 | We'll make your life absolutely impossible.

00:46:03.480 | We lost academic freedom.

00:46:05.280 | And we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster.

00:46:09.800 | And then we lost funding so that people were confident

00:46:14.600 | that they would have the ability to do research

00:46:17.280 | no matter what they said.

00:46:18.520 | And as a result, what you find is a world

00:46:22.480 | in which there's no ability to get people to say,

00:46:25.720 | no, I'm not gonna sign your diversity and inclusion

00:46:28.480 | forced loyalty oath.

00:46:30.320 | I won't sign any loyalty oath.

00:46:32.160 | Get the hell out of my office.

00:46:33.680 | F you.

00:46:36.400 | - F you, and you're connecting money to that, but--

00:46:39.160 | - Well, my point is that academic freedom is,

00:46:42.300 | the whole idea behind it was that you will have

00:46:46.320 | the freedom of a billionaire on a much smaller salary.

00:46:50.000 | - Right.

00:46:50.940 | - Okay.

00:46:51.780 | - We've lost that.

00:46:54.120 | - Yeah, the only reason in part that I wanted to go into

00:46:59.320 | academics as a profession, as opposed to wanting to do

00:47:04.080 | physical or mathematical research,

00:47:06.280 | the great prize was freedom.

00:47:09.560 | And Ralph Gomory of the Sloan Foundation,

00:47:12.520 | previously of IBM Research, pointed it out.

00:47:14.840 | He says, if you lose freedom, you lose the only thing

00:47:18.680 | we had to offer top minds.

00:47:20.440 | Top minds value their intellectual freedom

00:47:23.200 | and their physical and economic security

00:47:26.140 | at a different level than other human beings.

00:47:29.240 | And so people say, you know, I don't understand, dude,

00:47:33.480 | you have the ability to do X, Y, and Z, what's the problem?

00:47:36.040 | It's like, well, I value my ability to raise

00:47:38.320 | the middle finger as an American,

00:47:40.220 | practically above everything else.

00:47:43.200 | - I wanna talk to you about freedom here

00:47:46.880 | in the context of something you've mentioned,

00:47:49.180 | which one way to take away freedom is to put

00:47:53.560 | a human being into a cage.

00:47:55.640 | So to create constraints.

00:47:57.380 | The other one that worries me is something

00:47:59.060 | that I think you've spoken to Twitter a little bit,

00:48:01.900 | on Twitter, is we bleed freedom

00:48:06.900 | by kind of slowly

00:48:10.040 | scaring you into not doing,

00:48:16.620 | not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities

00:48:19.740 | you can as freedom.

00:48:20.580 | So like, when you ban Donald Trump,

00:48:24.000 | when you ban Parler, you give a little doubt

00:48:29.000 | in the minds of millions, like me,

00:48:31.020 | a person who's a tech person, who's an entrepreneur,

00:48:34.020 | there's a little, that's what I'm afraid of

00:48:37.740 | when I look in the mirror, is there now

00:48:39.260 | a little doubt in there?

00:48:40.700 | - Sure.

00:48:41.540 | - That limits the amount of options I will try.

00:48:43.780 | - How certain are you that the COVID virus

00:48:47.500 | didn't come from the Wuhan lab and is biosafety level four?

00:48:52.140 | - We both know that we're both supposed to robotically say

00:48:55.880 | the idea that the COVID virus came from a lab

00:48:59.600 | is a discredited conspiracy theory.

00:49:01.500 | There is no evidence that suggests that this is true.

00:49:03.760 | The World Health Organization and the CDC

00:49:05.920 | have both opined this.

00:49:07.200 | To say otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible.

00:49:09.680 | - And the threat of that is the thing

00:49:11.920 | that ultimately limits the freedoms we feel.

00:49:16.780 | - I should be tweeting about Jeff Epstein all the time.

00:49:19.540 | - And you're afraid.

00:49:21.840 | - Well, it's also boring.

00:49:23.500 | I mean, I said it in the public.

00:49:25.540 | - Many times.

00:49:26.380 | - Why is it we don't ask where the records are

00:49:28.820 | from Villard House?

00:49:29.700 | Where are the financial records?

00:49:30.860 | Where are the SEC filings?

00:49:32.980 | Where are the questions on the record

00:49:35.540 | to the intelligence agencies?

00:49:39.220 | Was he known to be part of the intelligence community?

00:49:42.360 | So we're not interested in asking questions.

00:49:46.060 | Like, am I gonna die as a result of asking the question,

00:49:51.180 | was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community

00:49:53.460 | of any nation?

00:49:54.980 | Is there a reason we're not asking

00:49:56.240 | about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund

00:49:58.480 | that he didn't run?

00:49:59.440 | Just like the Wuhan lab.

00:50:02.900 | - Okay, how do we get to the core of the Jeffrey Epstein,

00:50:05.580 | the truth behind Jeffrey Epstein, in a sense?

00:50:08.800 | I mean, there's some things that are just like

00:50:10.860 | useless conspiracy theories around it,

00:50:12.740 | even if they're true.

00:50:13.720 | There's some things that get--

00:50:14.560 | - I hate to say it, you're not gonna like it.

00:50:17.000 | Look at the 1971 media Pennsylvania break-in

00:50:20.600 | of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI.

00:50:23.180 | Those kids, and by the way, they weren't all kids,

00:50:27.140 | did what had to be done.

00:50:30.360 | They broke in, they broke the law.

00:50:33.760 | It was an incredible act of civil disobedience.

00:50:36.140 | And God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her,

00:50:40.240 | she was going to take to her grave

00:50:42.520 | that she'd been part of this.

00:50:43.640 | Like, the coolest thing of all time.

00:50:45.360 | They didn't say anything for forever.

00:50:47.600 | - So civil disobedience, I mean, you have to--

00:50:50.180 | - We are founded on civil disobedience.

00:50:52.320 | Civil disobedience is incredibly,

00:50:55.020 | you screw it up and you're just a vandal.

00:50:59.880 | You screw it up, you're a hooligan.

00:51:01.560 | - Yeah.

00:51:02.400 | - Those cats were so disciplined.

00:51:06.260 | - It's an art form in a sense.

00:51:07.100 | - It was an art form and they risked everything.

00:51:09.760 | They were willing to pay with their freedom.

00:51:12.680 | Those are the sorts of people who earned the right

00:51:17.400 | by putting themselves at risk.

00:51:18.760 | I would not do this.

00:51:20.980 | I am not volunteering to break into anything.

00:51:25.020 | I think it was William Davidon,

00:51:28.220 | who was a student of Murray Gell-Mann

00:51:29.460 | and a physics professor at Haverford,

00:51:32.140 | who corralled these people and led this effort.

00:51:36.100 | And right now, what we need is somebody

00:51:39.900 | to blow the lid off of what is controlling everything.

00:51:43.160 | We have, I'm happy to hear that it's a system

00:51:47.540 | of incentive structures, that it's a system

00:51:49.420 | of selective pressures.

00:51:50.360 | I'm happy to find out that it's emergent.

00:51:52.280 | I'm happy to find that it's partially directed

00:51:54.080 | by our own intelligence community.

00:51:56.540 | I'm happy to hear that, in fact, we've been penetrated

00:52:00.180 | by North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia.

00:52:04.100 | But I need to know why people aren't,

00:52:07.260 | like the firebombing of the courthouse

00:52:09.180 | in Portland, Oregon has no explanation.

00:52:11.380 | And somehow this is normal.

00:52:14.100 | This is not normal to any human being.

00:52:17.320 | We have video that people don't believe.

00:52:19.360 | And I come back to the Shaggy defense of it wasn't me.

00:52:23.540 | You know, it's like, you remember that song?

00:52:29.700 | - Shaggy, yeah, wasn't me, caught you banging

00:52:33.740 | in the shower on the counter.

00:52:35.060 | - Yeah, exactly, wasn't me.

00:52:36.780 | - It wasn't me.

00:52:37.620 | - He says, his friend says, well,

00:52:39.980 | your strategy makes no sense at all.

00:52:41.980 | (laughing)

00:52:42.820 | Well, this is what MSNBC is doing.

00:52:46.180 | You dropped him from the graphic, it wasn't me.

00:52:49.240 | You came up with another Yang, it wasn't me.

00:52:51.600 | - I will never see MSNBC the same again.

00:52:55.520 | So you've spoken about him before.

00:52:57.760 | I think it'd be nice to maybe honor him,

00:53:00.560 | to break it apart a little bit, Aaron Schwartz.

00:53:03.320 | Why was he a special human being in this ilk

00:53:08.680 | of what we're talking about now, civil disobedience?

00:53:11.760 | How do we honor him now moving forward as human beings

00:53:15.920 | who are willing to take risks in this world?

00:53:19.080 | - Well, I don't know.

00:53:20.200 | I mean, are you inspired by Aaron Schwartz?

00:53:23.800 | - I am.

00:53:24.620 | - How do you feel about JSTOR?

00:53:25.760 | Let's talk about JSTOR first.

00:53:27.440 | So let's say what JSTOR is all about, right?

00:53:30.920 | We the taxpayer pay for research,

00:53:34.560 | and then, (laughing)

00:53:39.600 | the people who do the research do all the work

00:53:41.920 | for a bunch of companies who then charge us $30

00:53:45.600 | an article to read what it is that we already paid for.

00:53:48.960 | And if we don't cite these articles,

00:53:51.360 | we're told that we're in violation.

00:53:53.440 | Okay, I almost never call for civil disobedience

00:53:58.240 | because I don't really want to,

00:53:59.680 | but fuck JSTOR, fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer.

00:54:04.680 | Who the fuck are these people?

00:54:11.400 | The smart people need to take the greedy people

00:54:15.960 | behind the woodshed and explain to them what science is.

00:54:19.720 | I have a very old-fashioned idea that's so out of favor

00:54:23.460 | that I will immediately be seen as a knuckle-dragger.

00:54:26.280 | I believe in the great woman theory of history

00:54:29.840 | and the great man theory of history.

00:54:31.760 | Emmy Noether is fantastic.

00:54:33.500 | That's an example.

00:54:37.880 | And I believe in editors over peer reviewers.

00:54:41.440 | And I believe that wrong things

00:54:43.280 | should be allowed into the literature.

00:54:45.200 | And I believe that the gatekeeping should go toward zero

00:54:48.360 | because the costs associated with distribution

00:54:52.040 | are very, very slight.

00:54:53.320 | I believe that we should be looking

00:54:57.060 | at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly

00:55:01.200 | into your competitors' clutches,

00:55:02.660 | particularly if you're a young person

00:55:04.560 | being reviewed by an older person.

00:55:07.520 | Are you familiar with the Doit de Signore?

00:55:10.480 | Are you familiar with the legend of the Magnia?

00:55:14.260 | No, the Magnia is the Miller's daughter.

00:55:18.440 | And the largest food fight in the entire universe,

00:55:21.520 | I believe, is held, I think, in Italy.

00:55:25.680 | It's called the Battle of the Oranges.

00:55:27.680 | And it celebrates the Miller's daughter

00:55:31.480 | who had fallen in love with her beloved.

00:55:34.600 | And when it came time for them to marry,

00:55:38.400 | the virginal Magnia was in fact told

00:55:42.040 | that the lord of the land had the right

00:55:46.080 | to have the first night with the bride.

00:55:48.860 | Well, the Magnia had a different idea.

00:55:51.400 | So she seemed to consent to this perhaps mythical right,

00:55:56.060 | also called the prima notte, the first night.

00:55:59.280 | And by legend, she concealed a dagger underneath her robes.

00:56:05.120 | And when it came time for the hated lord of the manor

00:56:08.480 | to extract this right,

00:56:11.260 | she pulled the knife out and killed him.

00:56:14.560 | And I think it also echoes a little bit

00:56:16.360 | of particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones.

00:56:19.300 | But that inspired both men and women.

00:56:23.600 | And the Magnia is the legendary hero.

00:56:26.140 | Right now, what we need to do is we need

00:56:31.000 | to resist the prima notte, the right of first look, right?

00:56:36.000 | F you, you don't have the right of first look.

00:56:38.320 | I don't wanna send something blindly to my competitors.

00:56:40.760 | I don't wanna subject myself to you naming

00:56:42.800 | what work I've done.

00:56:45.160 | Why are you in my story?

00:56:48.020 | That's my question.

00:56:48.860 | Get out of my story.

00:56:50.000 | If I do work, and then you have an idea,

00:56:52.640 | oh, well, it's the Matthew principle.

00:56:54.400 | To him who has much more will be given.

00:56:57.720 | I've gone to the National Academy of Sciences

00:56:59.640 | and talked about these things.

00:57:00.880 | And it's funny, I've been laughed at by the older people

00:57:03.720 | who think, well, Eric, you know science proceeds

00:57:07.080 | funeral by funeral, that's Planck.

00:57:08.840 | You know the Matthew principle,

00:57:11.080 | you know the Matilda principle,

00:57:12.200 | that things done by women are attributed to men.

00:57:14.540 | These are not new.

00:57:16.280 | And you guys just live like this?

00:57:17.760 | - Yeah.

00:57:18.840 | So the Revolutionary Act now is to resist

00:57:20.920 | all of these things that, these things that are not new.

00:57:23.920 | - So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz.

00:57:25.360 | Aaron Schwartz was the Magnia.

00:57:27.200 | One of the things you've done very beautifully

00:57:29.320 | is to communicate love.

00:57:31.840 | And I think about some of our conversations.

00:57:35.520 | And you got me to talk a little bit

00:57:36.960 | about my own experiences in 02138 and 039.

00:57:41.400 | We are the product of our trauma.

00:57:47.700 | And what people don't understand is that very often

00:57:51.120 | when you see people taking countermeasures

00:57:54.680 | against what appear to be imaginary forces,

00:57:57.800 | they're really actually replaying things

00:57:59.680 | that really happened to them.

00:58:01.140 | And having been through this system

00:58:04.080 | and watching all of the ways in which

00:58:06.780 | it completely rewrites the lives of the people

00:58:09.520 | who I am counting on to cure our diseases,

00:58:11.680 | build our new industries, keep us safe from our foes,

00:58:14.320 | the amount of pressure the system is putting

00:58:18.720 | on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable.

00:58:23.300 | And so my goal is to empower somebody

00:58:26.640 | like an Aaron Schwartz in memory

00:58:28.560 | and to talk about a Jeffrey Epstein situation.

00:58:32.320 | Do you know that the first person outside of me

00:58:36.640 | to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein?

00:58:39.900 | How did he know I was working on this?

00:58:44.920 | I don't know.

00:58:46.000 | - So your ideas that formed geometric unity

00:58:49.340 | was something that his eyes had seen?

00:58:51.920 | - I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein

00:58:55.160 | as one of the only people who could help me.

00:58:59.160 | No, no, no, listen to this.

00:59:00.760 | - Yeah, how does this connect?

00:59:01.800 | - Okay, well, first of all, my old synagogue,

00:59:06.440 | my old shul was the conservative minion at Harvard Hillel.

00:59:10.040 | And I believe it's called Wrosowski Hall

00:59:14.280 | after Henry Wrosowski in the economics department

00:59:18.360 | who was a Japan scholar, if I'm correct.

00:59:21.280 | And he became provost or dean of Harvard.

00:59:25.520 | I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein's money.

00:59:29.120 | And I wondered in part whether the Jewish students

00:59:33.840 | at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck

00:59:36.640 | of Harvard Hillel.

00:59:38.240 | So that was something I found very curious,

00:59:39.960 | but I don't know much about it.

00:59:42.320 | I also found that Jeffrey Epstein

00:59:43.800 | hanging around scientists,

00:59:45.020 | I don't think that either you or Joe exactly,

00:59:47.400 | I mean, got me correct in your last interchange.

00:59:52.160 | - For the record, for people who haven't listened

00:59:53.880 | to Joe Rogan program, Joe has claimed that Eric Weinstein

00:59:56.640 | was the only person who has gotten laid.

00:59:58.760 | - Paid.

01:00:00.200 | - Oh, paid.

01:00:01.600 | - And you said you also got paid as a young man, right?

01:00:05.240 | - I believe the word was laid, but allegedly.

01:00:08.360 | - My hearing isn't so good at age 55.

01:00:10.520 | All right, leaving that aside.

01:00:12.120 | - Yes.

01:00:12.960 | - What was Jeffrey Epstein doing

01:00:16.080 | hanging around all of these scientists?

01:00:18.040 | I don't think that was the same program

01:00:22.160 | that was about compromising political leaders

01:00:24.720 | and business people and entertainment figures.

01:00:27.320 | I think these are two different programs

01:00:29.080 | that were being run through one individual.

01:00:31.720 | And Joe seemed to think that,

01:00:33.880 | I didn't think he was smooth.

01:00:35.440 | I thought he was glib.

01:00:36.700 | I think what Joe was really trying to get at

01:00:39.480 | is that I found his mysticism meretricious.

01:00:43.200 | He had an ability to deflect every conversation

01:00:48.080 | that might go towards revealing

01:00:50.120 | that he didn't know what he was talking about.

01:00:51.600 | Every time you started to get close to something

01:00:54.600 | where the rubber hit the road,

01:00:55.780 | the rubber wouldn't hit the road.

01:00:57.440 | - And yet, can you help me untangle

01:01:00.880 | the fact that you thought deeply

01:01:05.600 | about the physics of the nature of our universe

01:01:10.480 | and Jeffrey Epstein was interested?

01:01:13.480 | - How did he know?

01:01:14.800 | I wasn't really talking about this stuff until,

01:01:17.380 | even my close friends didn't really know

01:01:21.240 | what I was up to.

01:01:22.240 | - And yet, you're saying he did not have

01:01:25.320 | sufficient brilliance to understand

01:01:27.520 | when the rubber hit the road.

01:01:28.640 | So why did he have sufficient interest and curiosity?

01:01:33.080 | - I'll tell you what I thought.

01:01:34.640 | I had been waiting to find out,

01:01:36.160 | does my government even know I exist?

01:01:38.380 | - Do you have an answer to that question?

01:01:40.960 | - I have, a couple times,

01:01:43.800 | the government has reached out to me.

01:01:45.640 | In general, there is zero interest in me.

01:01:49.640 | Like, less than zero interest.

01:01:51.400 | I find that fascinating.

01:01:54.440 | - As far as you know, right?

01:01:56.080 | I mean-- - Well, that's what

01:01:56.920 | I'm trying to say.

01:01:57.760 | The question about not being able to see

01:01:59.800 | through a half-silvered mirror,

01:02:01.980 | you don't know what's going on

01:02:03.600 | behind the half-silvered mirror.

01:02:04.960 | To you, it's all you see is your reflection.

01:02:09.120 | - But your intuition still holds.

01:02:10.920 | Like, this is where I've mentioned that I,

01:02:12.960 | this is where I'll say naive, dumb things,

01:02:16.200 | but I still hold onto this intuition

01:02:18.480 | that Jeff, I'm not confident in this,

01:02:21.920 | but I'm lean towards that direction

01:02:25.160 | that Jeffrey Epstein is the source of evil,

01:02:27.360 | not something that's underlying him.

01:02:29.760 | - You have a bias.

01:02:31.480 | It's different than mine.

01:02:32.760 | Our Bayesian priors are tutored

01:02:35.200 | by different life experiences.

01:02:37.760 | If I was mostly concerned,

01:02:40.160 | like Sam Harris is concerned,

01:02:42.200 | that people fill their heads with nonsense,

01:02:44.360 | I would have a very strong sense

01:02:47.700 | that people need order in the world,

01:02:49.380 | that they take mysterious situations,

01:02:51.700 | they build entire castles in the air,

01:02:53.600 | and then they go move in if they really get crazy.

01:02:56.440 | The old saying is that neurotics

01:02:58.800 | build castles in the air and psychotics move in.

01:03:02.600 | Coming from a progressive family,

01:03:04.960 | we had a different experience.

01:03:06.440 | It's really weird when the government

01:03:07.680 | is actually out to get you,

01:03:08.960 | when they actually send a spy,

01:03:11.020 | when they actually engage in disinformation campaigns,

01:03:13.980 | when they smear you.

01:03:15.600 | And if you've ever had that brought to bear on your family,

01:03:18.980 | you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country,

01:03:22.580 | which is different than having a,

01:03:25.160 | wow, do people believe crazy stuff

01:03:27.140 | because they watch too much TV.

01:03:29.780 | And both of these things have some merit to them,

01:03:32.260 | but it's a question of regulated expression.

01:03:34.180 | When do you want to express more Sam Harris

01:03:36.420 | and when do you want to express more Howard Zinn?

01:03:39.660 | - And you can express both, correct?

01:03:41.340 | One human being can express both?

01:03:42.780 | - Sure, but there's a trade-off between them.

01:03:44.900 | In other words, most people,

01:03:46.660 | like the Michael Shermers of the world

01:03:48.100 | are gonna tilt very strongly to,

01:03:49.980 | extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

01:03:52.380 | You're gonna have that kind of energy.

01:03:54.300 | And then somebody else is gonna say,

01:03:55.580 | how many times do I have to get hit on,

01:03:58.180 | how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb

01:03:59.740 | before I realize that there's a problem?

01:04:02.000 | So my feeling about this is, yes,

01:04:04.660 | people see patterns in clouds.

01:04:06.480 | They see faces and scripture and all sorts of things,

01:04:09.220 | and it's just random cloud patterns.

01:04:10.700 | And it's also the case that there's tremendous pressure

01:04:13.840 | not to see conspiracies when conspiracies

01:04:16.180 | are relatively more common than the people

01:04:18.420 | who shout conspiracy theory will claim.

01:04:21.260 | So both of these things are true.

01:04:22.700 | And you have to ask, when do you express your inner Zinn

01:04:25.140 | and when your inner Harris?

01:04:26.900 | And those are different.

01:04:27.740 | - I wanna find out the difference between you and I,

01:04:29.820 | biases aside, is you've actually met Jeffrey Epstein.

01:04:33.540 | And I'm listening to reverberations years later

01:04:38.540 | of stories and narratives throughout the story.

01:04:42.940 | - I luckily only met him once.

01:04:44.480 | And I think I had one or perhaps two phone conversations

01:04:49.280 | with him other than the one meeting.

01:04:51.120 | - You can learn a lot in just a few words, right,

01:04:54.400 | from a human being.

01:04:55.240 | - Well, that's true.

01:04:56.060 | But I think that the bigger issue was I saw something

01:04:59.500 | that I don't hear much remarked upon,

01:05:01.240 | which is Jeffrey Epstein is all that there is.

01:05:05.040 | In other words, there's the National Science Foundation,

01:05:08.760 | National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes.

01:05:11.440 | There's all this stuff that kind of has the same feel to it,

01:05:16.280 | a little bit of variation and difference,

01:05:18.200 | Department of Energy.

01:05:19.240 | If you fall outside of that, there's just Jeffrey Epstein.

01:05:23.900 | That's what you're told.

01:05:25.220 | - Yes.

01:05:26.060 | - That's not quite true.

01:05:26.880 | There's Kavli, maybe Jim Simons is now in the game.

01:05:30.000 | Peter Thiel has done some stuff.

01:05:32.060 | You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try.

01:05:35.160 | So there is other money running around, Templeton.

01:05:39.620 | But very strongly, there was a belief

01:05:41.980 | that if you're doing something really innovative

01:05:44.060 | and the system can't fund it because we become pussies,

01:05:48.220 | Jeffrey Epstein's your guy.

01:05:49.580 | - So there's that 'cause it's funnel

01:05:51.220 | that you're supposed to go through.

01:05:53.100 | - That's right.

01:05:54.060 | And the idea is that you get called

01:05:55.340 | to the great man's house and the sort of

01:05:59.900 | lubricious version of Ralph Lauren takes you in

01:06:06.180 | and asks you bizarre questions.

01:06:07.940 | And maybe he has an island, maybe he has a plane.

01:06:11.020 | And when you're starved,

01:06:14.160 | somebody showing you a feast

01:06:17.580 | or when you're dehydrated in a death's door

01:06:20.820 | and somebody says, "Oh, I have a well."

01:06:24.060 | (laughing)

01:06:26.780 | That's what it is.

01:06:27.860 | And so the thought is, wow,

01:06:29.620 | can somebody get some effing money into the science system

01:06:33.860 | so that we don't have super creeps

01:06:36.540 | trying to learn all of our secrets ahead of time?

01:06:39.420 | WTF, what is your problem with transparency

01:06:42.340 | and taxpayer dollars?

01:06:43.400 | Just all of you, you wouldn't have a country.

01:06:46.580 | You'd be speaking German.

01:06:47.960 | - So essentially you believe that human beings

01:06:51.280 | would not be able to, when the money's lacking in the system

01:06:54.940 | like in research--

01:06:55.780 | - We produce public goods.

01:06:57.260 | You and I are meant to produce public goods.

01:07:00.340 | Now, I sell Athletic Greens and I sell Theragun

01:07:03.340 | and I sell Unagi scooters and Chili Pad.

01:07:07.740 | I gotta be honest, I love these products.

01:07:09.660 | But I didn't get into this game for the purpose of selling.

01:07:14.660 | I'm trying to figure out how do you have an FU lifestyle?

01:07:20.620 | But you know something, Lex?

01:07:22.660 | I don't know why you built this channel.

01:07:24.340 | It's kind of a mystery.

01:07:25.420 | - Yeah, I don't know why.

01:07:26.900 | - I'll tell you why I built my channel.

01:07:29.100 | - The freedom.

01:07:29.940 | - It's gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time

01:07:31.940 | in an alley.

01:07:33.220 | - Yeah.

01:07:34.060 | - I got rolled multiple times and my point is

01:07:36.980 | I didn't wanna become a celebrity.

01:07:40.060 | I didn't wanna become well-known.

01:07:41.900 | But it's a lot harder to roll somebody who's getting,

01:07:46.900 | you know, I think I'm, I don't know if this is mistaken,

01:07:49.780 | but I think I'm the math PhD with the largest number

01:07:52.140 | of followers on Twitter.

01:07:53.400 | And there was nothing you could do before.

01:07:58.780 | - I mean, again, to put a little responsibility on you,

01:08:01.020 | so you've created something really special

01:08:03.900 | for the distribution of your own ideas.

01:08:06.260 | But because it's not necessarily currently scalable,

01:08:11.020 | you also, perhaps you and I have the responsibility

01:08:15.700 | of giving other people also a chance to spread their ideas.

01:08:19.460 | I mean, Joe Rogan did this very effectively

01:08:21.300 | for a bunch of people that--

01:08:23.700 | - That's why they're angry at him,

01:08:24.660 | because he's a gatekeeper and he let all sorts of people

01:08:28.100 | through that gate, from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones.

01:08:32.820 | - To Jordan Peterson, to, I mean, even,

01:08:37.220 | first of all, to you-- - To Abby Martin.

01:08:39.900 | - To Abby Martin. - To Barry Weiss.

01:08:42.020 | - Yeah. - That's the problem.

01:08:44.680 | - Well, but you have now successfully built up a thing

01:08:48.940 | that allows that to carry that forward.

01:08:50.420 | - Oh, no, no, no, no.

01:08:51.980 | We are all vulnerable to reputational attack,

01:08:56.860 | because what happens, you see, the problem, Lex,

01:08:59.860 | is that you are now an institution at some level.

01:09:02.380 | You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag.

01:09:06.620 | - Wearing a suit. - The last suit

01:09:09.740 | you'll ever need, and you have the reach

01:09:14.220 | of something like CNN to people who matter.

01:09:17.720 | Okay, so now the question is, how do we control something

01:09:23.540 | that doesn't have a board, doesn't have shareholders,

01:09:25.360 | doesn't have to make SEC filings, FCC,

01:09:28.460 | so the best answer they have is,

01:09:31.420 | well, we just have to destroy reputations.

01:09:36.380 | All it takes is for us to take something

01:09:38.420 | that gets said or done or alleged,

01:09:40.120 | and I think it's incredibly important.

01:09:43.100 | One of the things people don't understand is that

01:09:45.980 | I'm going to fight general reputational attacks,

01:09:49.780 | not because some people don't deserve

01:09:51.540 | to have their reputations dragged through the mud,

01:09:55.140 | but because it's too powerful of a tool

01:09:58.260 | to hand it to CNN, MSNBC, Princeton, Harvard,

01:10:02.900 | the State Department. - Yes.

01:10:04.960 | But some of it is also-- - J.P. Morgan.

01:10:09.060 | - Muhammad Ali-style being good enough

01:10:12.860 | at doing everything you need to do

01:10:17.040 | without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks.

01:10:21.660 | Not being afraid, but not giving enough meat.

01:10:25.100 | - I don't see why the people who have good ideas

01:10:28.060 | have to lead lives that are that clean.

01:10:30.220 | If you can do it-- - You can be messy, yeah.

01:10:32.220 | You should be able to be messy,

01:10:34.020 | otherwise we're suppressing too many people.

01:10:37.060 | Too many, too brilliant minds, yeah.

01:10:39.340 | - Can you believe Elon Musk smoked a blunt?

01:10:42.740 | - I still, people tell me this.

01:10:44.400 | Okay, I have discussions about Elon and people,

01:10:48.020 | the Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist

01:10:54.100 | who's talking about a muamua,

01:10:56.220 | that it might be alien technology.

01:10:58.540 | He told me, this outside-the-box thinker,

01:11:03.540 | when speaking to me about Elon,

01:11:08.060 | called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed.

01:11:13.860 | The blunt. - I love it.

01:11:14.860 | - In a dismissive way, like this guy's crazy

01:11:17.840 | because he smoked some weed.

01:11:20.140 | I was looking at him. - Good God.

01:11:21.580 | - I was like, why, wow, wow.

01:11:25.140 | - I think you should be able to have

01:11:26.940 | consensual drug-filled orgies.

01:11:30.300 | Fuck perfect lives.

01:11:32.460 | - Yeah, you should be allowed to be messy.

01:11:34.340 | You're right, I take back my statement.

01:11:35.980 | I was just saying-- - Respectability

01:11:38.180 | is the unique prison where all of the gates are open

01:11:43.020 | and the inmates beg to stay inside.

01:11:45.560 | It's time to end their prison of respectability

01:11:49.780 | because it's too effective of a means

01:11:52.020 | of sidelining and silencing people,

01:11:54.700 | including it is better that we have bad people

01:11:58.880 | in our system than this idea of no platforming people

01:12:03.880 | who are beyond the pale because it's such a simple technique.

01:12:08.180 | - So how do we, what's the heroic action here on the--

01:12:11.780 | - Well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program.

01:12:15.280 | By the way, she was absolutely delightful

01:12:19.660 | as a guest, she is polite in the extreme,

01:12:23.860 | far more polite than I am.

01:12:26.060 | And I had her right after Roger Penrose as a guest

01:12:29.380 | because I wanted to highlight this program can go anywhere.

01:12:32.220 | We can talk to anyone.

01:12:33.660 | - What about social media?

01:12:34.620 | You've started highlighting people being banned

01:12:37.060 | on social media.

01:12:38.740 | How do we fight this?

01:12:40.460 | Like if you get banned from social media,

01:12:42.220 | so you're saying nobody will stand up to me.

01:12:44.540 | - Well, just figure out what your incentive structure

01:12:46.460 | is before.

01:12:47.300 | Assume that I get banned on social media

01:12:49.660 | because somebody wants to make sure that my message

01:12:51.820 | doesn't interfere with the dominant narrative.

01:12:55.100 | Okay.

01:12:55.940 | What will happen, by the way, I'm very glad to be able

01:13:00.780 | to explain this on your show because that video

01:13:04.220 | will presumably be archived and they can't easily make

01:13:07.140 | you take it down.

01:13:08.940 | Okay, so what's gonna happen is that there'll be

01:13:11.820 | a whole bunch of very low quality bot-like accounts

01:13:16.960 | that dog you every time you talk about me.

01:13:19.060 | Dude, it's getting old, it's getting boring.

01:13:22.140 | We already heard you.

01:13:23.500 | Dude, that was like, let it go.

01:13:25.860 | Not a good look.

01:13:27.120 | Not a good look is one of my favorites.

01:13:29.220 | - But what about the high profile ones?

01:13:30.980 | - Well, then you'll get a few high profile ones

01:13:32.800 | and some of the high profile ones command armies.

01:13:37.100 | Like at some point I had 10,000 people using exactly

01:13:41.160 | the same templated tweet, tweeting at me.

01:13:43.580 | It was just actually, it got to the point where it was funny

01:13:45.980 | because everybody said, did you hear that

01:13:48.920 | in Hipster Coffee Shop?

01:13:49.940 | I was like, why are you all suddenly talking

01:13:52.100 | about Hipster Coffee?

01:13:52.940 | It's hilarious.

01:13:54.160 | Those things will cause you to think better of it.

01:13:58.900 | You'll start to see your follower count go down

01:14:01.140 | because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot-like follows

01:14:04.460 | and then just pull them.

01:14:06.020 | So I think that it's pretty well known how,

01:14:09.660 | and then maybe your account will be suspended

01:14:11.580 | and it can't be revoked and et cetera, et cetera,

01:14:14.380 | and then three days later you'll be told it was an error.

01:14:17.340 | - So let me push back.

01:14:18.280 | I just don't see not defending you.

01:14:20.460 | Like, okay, so what are the things you would do

01:14:23.720 | that given that I can actually talk to you offline,

01:14:27.820 | that would make me not defend you?

01:14:31.320 | - Well, first of all--

01:14:34.820 | - I can't, I mean, I can imagine some.

01:14:37.660 | - But all of us have things.

01:14:39.620 | If somebody says, do you hear what your boy Lex said

01:14:42.260 | about you?

01:14:43.540 | What did Lex say about me?

01:14:45.620 | Oh, he said you were flawed, dude.

01:14:47.320 | Oh, shit.

01:14:49.140 | They so distrust because none of us

01:14:54.600 | wanna stand behind flawed people.

01:14:57.020 | That's why you have everybody rushing to say,

01:14:58.740 | I neither condemn nor condone.

01:15:00.060 | I don't condemn nor, you know, what is that?

01:15:02.740 | We're all trying to say--

01:15:03.580 | - By the way, for the record,

01:15:04.940 | I said that Eric is smarter than me

01:15:07.300 | and a brilliant human being, but flawed like all humans are.

01:15:10.860 | My point is, I've now come up with a new policy,

01:15:14.140 | which is I don't care what my friends have done.

01:15:16.660 | I am not disavowing my friends.

01:15:20.020 | Not because they didn't do the wrong thing.

01:15:22.060 | Maybe they did do the wrong thing.

01:15:23.340 | I don't know.

01:15:24.180 | - What's the value of friendship if that's not--

01:15:27.340 | - It's not that.

01:15:28.300 | Like, for example, we've had the situation

01:15:29.900 | with Brian Callan.

01:15:30.840 | Brian Callan was featured recently

01:15:32.580 | in the Los Angeles Times.

01:15:33.980 | I know nothing about the allegations.

01:15:36.900 | I can't.

01:15:37.740 | I didn't even know Brian at the time, right?

01:15:39.720 | I've known him for roughly the time

01:15:41.380 | I've been in Los Angeles, maybe a year and a half.

01:15:44.040 | During that period of time, I've never seen anything wrong.

01:15:46.740 | Now I'm in a situation, well, what do you think he did?

01:15:50.000 | Do you think he didn't?

01:15:50.840 | It's like, you know what?

01:15:52.400 | I don't know.

01:15:53.520 | But I do know this.

01:15:54.620 | Everyone's entitled to have friends

01:15:56.840 | because we can't afford isolated people.

01:15:59.020 | And if your friends do the wrong thing,

01:16:02.140 | they're still your friends.

01:16:04.220 | And if they do terrible, terrible things,

01:16:06.140 | you bring that up with them privately.

01:16:08.940 | And it's not my responsibility to disavow in public.

01:16:12.260 | You know, we've had the situation that I don't like

01:16:15.820 | where particular people that I've been close to,

01:16:19.220 | I'm put under tremendous pressure to disavow them.

01:16:21.880 | What do you think now about your buddy?

01:16:24.140 | - Oh, like Dave Rubin, all that kind of stuff.

01:16:26.020 | - Here's the thing.

01:16:27.020 | My friends are my friends.

01:16:28.960 | I don't disavow my friends.

01:16:30.740 | We all need to make a statement

01:16:34.300 | that we will not be brought under pressure

01:16:36.740 | to disavow our friends, our family members,

01:16:40.820 | because mass murderers are dangerous

01:16:45.820 | the more isolated they become.

01:16:48.140 | It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people.

01:16:53.140 | And it's dangerous.

01:16:54.300 | - And it sends a signal to everybody else

01:16:56.420 | to fit in, to be more cynical about the human--

01:17:00.660 | - So my feeling, if I find out you've been selling heroin

01:17:04.140 | to elementary school students,

01:17:06.480 | you're still my friend, and I will not be disavowing you.

01:17:09.500 | And if I have a problem with you selling heroin

01:17:11.820 | to elementary school students during school hours,

01:17:14.900 | I will bring it up with you privately,

01:17:18.860 | because we don't need to hear my voice

01:17:21.540 | added to that condemnation.

01:17:23.020 | Are there things that you could do

01:17:25.020 | that would cause me to say, actually F this guy?

01:17:27.900 | Yeah, above and beyond that.

01:17:29.620 | But simply doing the wrong thing,

01:17:32.180 | I think we've gone down a terrible path.

01:17:34.780 | I think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing

01:17:37.320 | we could have in a heavily armed society.

01:17:40.340 | - So I deeply agree with you on Brian Callahan

01:17:43.400 | and on all these people that quote-unquote got canceled.

01:17:46.220 | - And I'm not saying that they,

01:17:49.120 | I don't know the truth value, because we can't.

01:17:52.080 | And even if I did know the truth value,

01:17:53.780 | I'm not setting up an incentive structure

01:17:56.840 | for the personal destruction as a means

01:18:00.540 | of letting institutions combat the fact

01:18:03.400 | that individuals are the last thing that can say,

01:18:05.460 | none of you guys make any sense.

01:18:07.060 | I don't treat these things like,

01:18:09.700 | I had a conversation where Kevin Spacey

01:18:12.380 | was at the dinner table when I came down from a hotel room.

01:18:15.540 | And I had a very long conversation with Kevin Spacey.

01:18:18.540 | I will not detail, because I don't do that,

01:18:21.700 | as to what we discussed.

01:18:23.520 | But we talked very specifically about him being canceled.

01:18:27.020 | And I don't think that the world has heard that story

01:18:30.260 | in part because there's a very strong sense

01:18:33.760 | that he has to be outgrouped.

01:18:35.720 | And as a result, I mean, do we want,

01:18:39.200 | do we want to disavow the space program

01:18:42.920 | because it touched Wernher von Braun?

01:18:44.560 | Do we want to disavow quantum mechanics

01:18:46.180 | because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg

01:18:48.400 | passed through it?

01:18:49.400 | Is Ehrenfest's theorem false because he murdered his child?

01:18:53.040 | I mean, at what point do we recognize

01:18:55.720 | that we are the problem?

01:18:57.800 | Humans are humans.

01:18:58.940 | And there is no perfect,

01:19:01.360 | there is no perfect group of people,

01:19:03.080 | even all of the most oppressed people,

01:19:04.920 | the supposed victims of the world,

01:19:06.640 | who we now have fetishized into thinking

01:19:08.440 | that they're all oracles

01:19:09.520 | because their lived experience informs us

01:19:12.080 | and their pain is more salient than everyone else's pain.

01:19:14.920 | Those people aren't necessarily great people.

01:19:18.400 | It's like none of us, we can't do this in this fashion.

01:19:24.800 | - So when we sit down to have a conversation

01:19:27.640 | across the table from somebody,

01:19:29.680 | you should be willing to,

01:19:31.200 | like you should not have NPR in your mind.

01:19:33.900 | You should be willing to take the full risk

01:19:36.660 | and to see the good in the person

01:19:38.660 | with limited information

01:19:41.940 | and to do your best to understand that person.

01:19:44.540 | - Everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget.

01:19:47.200 | I don't believe this is of institutions, okay?

01:19:51.480 | Everybody is entitled to a certain amount

01:19:53.820 | of screwing up in life.

01:19:56.280 | You're entitled to a mendacity budget.

01:19:58.760 | You're entitled to an aggression budget.

01:20:01.860 | The idea of getting rid of everybody,

01:20:04.200 | people haven't even blown through their budgets

01:20:07.820 | and we're already--

01:20:08.660 | - Yeah, I think about, for example, one person,

01:20:12.100 | I'd be curious to get your thoughts about Alex Jones.

01:20:15.580 | - Let's not talk about Alex Jones for a second.

01:20:17.140 | Let's talk about the National Enquirer.

01:20:19.620 | Is everything the National Enquirer says false?

01:20:22.180 | - No.

01:20:25.580 | - Do you remember the John Edwards story?

01:20:27.620 | - Did you know his wife?

01:20:30.140 | Sorry, I don't remember.

01:20:30.980 | - He had a child from an extramarital affair.

01:20:33.180 | - Yes.

01:20:34.460 | - I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story.

01:20:37.460 | And then what does the New York Times do?

01:20:41.180 | The New York Times, I think, is allowed to report

01:20:43.940 | that the National Enquirer is making a claim.

01:20:46.300 | That way they don't have to substantiate the story.

01:20:49.080 | So why is the New York Times talking to Mike Cernovich

01:20:53.580 | or using the National Enquirer as a source?

01:20:56.220 | Are they using Alex Jones as a source?

01:20:58.320 | Here's the big problem that we're having.

01:21:02.540 | Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody

01:21:05.880 | and other people are entitled to talk to no one?

01:21:08.300 | I don't really understand this.

01:21:09.320 | This is an indulgence system.

01:21:10.900 | This is how the Catholic Church used to do things.

01:21:13.340 | - It's hard to fight the system

01:21:14.620 | because the reason you don't talk to Alex Jones

01:21:16.740 | is because the platforms on which we do the communication

01:21:19.340 | will de-platform, will remove you.

01:21:21.940 | - But I'm not platformed.

01:21:23.200 | I used to do NPR and I used to do the News Hour

01:21:27.820 | and I used to provide stories

01:21:29.980 | to Washington Post, New York Times.

01:21:32.660 | That has gone away.

01:21:33.900 | They've circled the wagons closer and closer

01:21:36.940 | and more of us are unacceptable.

01:21:38.860 | And right now I have no question

01:21:40.500 | that they're going through anybody who has a platform

01:21:44.340 | trying to say, okay, what do we have against that person

01:21:46.780 | in case we need to shut that down?

01:21:48.760 | We have to make a different decision, Lex,

01:21:51.100 | and the different decision is that it doesn't matter

01:21:54.320 | how many times Joe said the N word.

01:21:57.620 | It doesn't matter that somebody else,

01:22:01.420 | with mathematical theorems,

01:22:05.580 | if the worst person in the world

01:22:06.940 | proves a mathematical theorem like the Unabomber,

01:22:09.620 | we can't undo the theorem.

01:22:11.380 | And I point out Charles Manson's song,

01:22:15.700 | "Look at Your Game Girl" is an amazing song.

01:22:18.540 | It's a really good song.

01:22:19.580 | I don't think it's one of the greatest songs ever,

01:22:22.140 | but it happens that he wasn't a no talent.

01:22:24.380 | And I don't know how Hitler was as an artist.

01:22:29.300 | - Fiction, not bad.

01:22:30.780 | - Okay, we've got to get past this.

01:22:33.740 | We've got to get past this idea

01:22:35.500 | that we're gonna purge ourselves of our badness

01:22:37.880 | and we're just gonna,

01:22:39.020 | this is like, I've likened it to teenage girls in cutting.

01:22:42.420 | We're just, all we're doing is destroying ourselves

01:22:46.460 | in search of perfection.

01:22:47.840 | And the answer is no, we're not perfect.

01:22:49.980 | We're flawed, we're screwed up.

01:22:52.180 | And we've always been this way.

01:22:53.540 | And we're not going to silence everyone

01:22:55.420 | who you can point a laser beam at and say,

01:22:57.920 | well, that person, look at how bad that person is.

01:23:00.480 | If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye.

01:23:03.500 | We might as well just, let's learn Chinese.

01:23:05.800 | - But there is an art to having those messy conversations,

01:23:10.500 | whether with Alex or anybody else.

01:23:13.260 | - Okay, let's talk about Alex.

01:23:15.160 | There's particular stuff that Alex does

01:23:17.020 | that's absolutely nauseating.

01:23:19.180 | And there's other stuff that he's doing that's funny.

01:23:21.020 | - The methodology of the way he carries--

01:23:23.220 | - And sometimes he's talking about the truth.

01:23:25.520 | And sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy.

01:23:27.460 | His variance is incredibly high.

01:23:30.440 | The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O'Keefe

01:23:33.340 | or the National Enquirer or anything you don't like

01:23:36.220 | is to say, great, go long short.

01:23:38.380 | - What's that mean?

01:23:40.300 | - Well, if you invest in a mutual fund,

01:23:43.900 | all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long.

01:23:46.900 | But if you invest in a hedge fund,

01:23:48.940 | you do something called relative value trade.

01:23:51.220 | It's like, well, you long tech or short tech?

01:23:54.360 | Well, actually, I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Google.

01:23:58.220 | Why is that?

01:24:00.300 | Oh, because I believe Google got way too much attention

01:24:03.780 | and that Microsoft has been unfairly maligned.

01:24:06.020 | And so this is really a play on legacy tech

01:24:08.780 | over more modern tech.

01:24:10.580 | Okay, which part of Alex Jones are you long

01:24:14.540 | and which part are you short?

01:24:15.620 | One of the things that should be a requirement

01:24:17.380 | for being a reporter is like,

01:24:18.580 | what did Donald Trump do that was good?

01:24:21.500 | Nothing.

01:24:22.700 | Okay, then you're not a reporter.

01:24:25.140 | What did Hitler do that was good?

01:24:26.780 | The Rosenstrasse of protest.

01:24:31.420 | Non-Jewish women campaign for their Jewish men

01:24:37.340 | to be returned home to them from certain death

01:24:40.820 | almost in death camps.

01:24:42.580 | It should have been that there were no death camps.

01:24:45.860 | It should have been that everybody was returned home.

01:24:48.780 | But you know what?

01:24:50.300 | The fact that the women of the Rosenstrasse protest,

01:24:53.620 | I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about this.

01:24:56.420 | Some of the baddest ass chicks in the world

01:24:58.620 | got their husbands returned to them.

01:25:03.620 | Kolaka vote.

01:25:05.340 | And I'm not celebrating Hitler.

01:25:08.780 | Hitler's the worst of the worst.

01:25:11.700 | But God damn it, this idea that we can just say

01:25:15.620 | everything that person does is a lie,

01:25:17.780 | everything that person does is evil.

01:25:19.620 | This reflects a simplicity of mind

01:25:23.340 | that humanity cannot afford.

01:25:24.900 | Is Google evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf?

01:25:30.700 | Is Amazon evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf?

01:25:32.980 | If you find out that Mein Kampf

01:25:34.580 | rests on somebody's bookshelves,

01:25:35.740 | do you have any idea what it means?

01:25:37.500 | If you find out that a scholar used the N-word,

01:25:41.400 | should that person lose their job?

01:25:43.100 | Come on, grow the hell up.

01:25:47.540 | - I guess our responsibility to lead by example on that

01:25:50.840 | because you have to acknowledge that the current--

01:25:55.220 | - Have somebody on your podcast who you're worried about.

01:26:01.860 | But do it in a principled fashion.

01:26:03.700 | I mean, in other words, I'm not here to whitewash everything.

01:26:08.500 | On the other hand, if somebody makes some allegations,

01:26:13.440 | I don't know that I'm obligated

01:26:16.260 | to treat every set of allegations as if,

01:26:19.500 | how do you defend yourself against, no.

01:26:21.620 | Allegations are so cheap to make at this moment.

01:26:24.620 | - Well, my standard, I don't know,

01:26:27.100 | maybe you could speak to it, is I don't care,

01:26:29.860 | like in the case of Alex Jones, for example,

01:26:32.060 | I'm willing to have a conversation with Alex Jones

01:26:36.020 | and people like him if I know

01:26:38.620 | he's not going to try to manipulate me.

01:26:40.620 | - Assume that he is gonna try to manipulate you.

01:26:42.340 | - I can't, then we're not going to be two humans.

01:26:45.300 | - Okay, but Lex, I want you to think well of me.

01:26:48.220 | I put on a jacket, I don't usually wear a jacket, okay?

01:26:51.480 | - Thank you, Eric.

01:26:53.320 | - All right, I'm trying to manipulate you.

01:26:55.780 | There's an entire field, no, there's an entire field

01:26:59.220 | that says that speech may be best thought of

01:27:01.860 | as an attempt to manipulate each other.

01:27:04.160 | This is too simplistic.

01:27:06.460 | Everything that we keep talking through,

01:27:08.540 | - Yes.

01:27:10.020 | - You know better than this.

01:27:11.540 | - I disagree.

01:27:12.380 | I think there's ways, there's, of course,

01:27:17.180 | it's a gray area, but there is a threshold

01:27:20.540 | where your intent with which you come to a meeting,

01:27:23.380 | to an interaction, is one that is not one

01:27:28.340 | that is grounded in a respect for a common humanity,

01:27:32.260 | like a love for each other, as deeply messy as humans.

01:27:34.540 | - If somebody's doing really bad stuff,

01:27:36.660 | I expect you to try to keep them

01:27:38.700 | from doing really bad stuff.

01:27:40.700 | But just keep in mind that when I was a younger man,

01:27:44.760 | I saw an amazing anti-pornography documentary,

01:27:49.480 | and it was called "Rate It X,"

01:27:52.580 | and I don't know where it went,

01:27:54.140 | but the conceit of it was,

01:27:57.280 | we're going to get some pornographers

01:27:59.540 | in front of a camera because they want to talk,

01:28:02.060 | and we're going to ask them about what they do for a living

01:28:04.620 | and why it's okay.

01:28:06.360 | No commentary.

01:28:09.120 | Okay?

01:28:13.980 | You could potentially,

01:28:16.080 | if you really think Alex Jones is the worst,

01:28:18.060 | and again, I'm not intimately familiar with him,

01:28:20.700 | you could decide to

01:28:25.180 | just let him talk.

01:28:29.600 | Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people.

01:28:32.820 | I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux.

01:28:35.400 | Stefan Molyneux makes many good points,

01:28:37.760 | and makes many bad points,

01:28:39.480 | and he makes many good points in bad ways,

01:28:42.360 | and I worry about it,

01:28:43.680 | and I don't feel that it's,

01:28:45.320 | it's not my obligation to make sure

01:28:47.060 | that Stefan Molyneux has a voice on the portal.

01:28:49.960 | But I did stand up and say,

01:28:53.960 | I didn't want him banned from social media,

01:28:56.160 | and I do think that a lot of the people

01:28:58.900 | who are being banned from social media

01:29:00.580 | were worried that they're right

01:29:01.780 | rather than that they're wrong.

01:29:03.720 | I certainly don't really think that I'm worried

01:29:06.780 | in some sense that some of the really wrong people

01:29:10.640 | are wrong, but if you look at, for example, Curtis Yarvin,

01:29:13.080 | there's a tremendous amount of interest.

01:29:15.000 | Is Eric going to speak to Curtis Yarvin?

01:29:17.500 | Curtis Yarvin says many interesting things,

01:29:20.160 | and he says many horrible, stupid things,

01:29:21.880 | very provocative.

01:29:23.720 | And I don't, I haven't invited him onto the portal,

01:29:28.280 | but I haven't said I will never invite him onto the portal.

01:29:32.000 | We are all in a difficult position.

01:29:34.960 | - That's what I'm saying.

01:29:35.800 | You're making it kind of,

01:29:37.240 | I think it's a much more difficult task that,

01:29:39.800 | and burden, Cary, as people who have conversations,

01:29:42.980 | because Curtis Yarvin is a good example.

01:29:46.040 | How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis's work

01:29:50.040 | to really understand--

01:29:51.360 | - Let's talk about the problem of Curtis Yarvin.

01:29:53.040 | - Yes.

01:29:53.880 | - 'Cause I think it's probably ill-stripped.

01:29:55.600 | There's this big question is why does somebody

01:29:57.740 | who says such stupid-ass things listen to by so many people?

01:30:01.880 | Very smart people, people who are part of our daily lives

01:30:04.760 | discuss Curtis Yarvin in hushed tones.

01:30:07.480 | Now-- - That's a good question.

01:30:09.080 | - My belief is that Curtis Yarvin has made a number

01:30:12.520 | of very interesting, provocative points,

01:30:15.800 | and they associate Curtis Yarvin as the person

01:30:18.800 | who has made these points,

01:30:20.480 | and they treat the completely asinine stuff

01:30:23.520 | that he says that's super dangerous as,

01:30:26.680 | well, that's Curtis.

01:30:27.880 | Right? - Right.

01:30:30.720 | They give him the credit for,

01:30:31.720 | he's a kind of like, sorry to use the term,

01:30:34.160 | first principles deep thinker about--

01:30:36.360 | - In some category. - In some space

01:30:38.600 | about the world.

01:30:40.280 | - But as a result, we don't actually know

01:30:43.160 | why Curtis Yarvin is knocking around

01:30:46.960 | so many Silicon Valley luminaries' lives.

01:30:51.200 | - Well, see, you said that he said a lot

01:30:53.320 | of asinine stupid stuff, and that's a sense I got

01:30:55.680 | from a few things I've read, not just about him.

01:30:57.920 | This is not just Wikipedia stuff.

01:31:00.040 | Is he's a little, like I've said before,

01:31:03.160 | he seems to be careless.

01:31:05.760 | - I don't think he's careless.

01:31:06.600 | No, no, it's like Jim Watson.

01:31:08.000 | Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things

01:31:12.360 | in order to prove that he's free.

01:31:14.600 | It's not a question of careless.

01:31:15.840 | He enjoys the freedom to say these things.

01:31:20.600 | And the key point is that there's,

01:31:22.320 | I expect something more of Curtis.

01:31:25.440 | I expect that if somebody is insightful

01:31:27.880 | about all sorts of things up to that point,

01:31:30.180 | that they're going to have enough care.

01:31:33.280 | Now, I, for example, make this point repeatedly

01:31:35.400 | that vaccines are not 100% safe.

01:31:38.160 | Most people who have an idea that anybody

01:31:41.000 | who's an anti-vaxxer should be silenced

01:31:43.800 | are in a position where they probably don't say

01:31:46.680 | vaccines are 100% safe, but you keep finding

01:31:49.000 | that statement over and over again.

01:31:50.480 | Believe all women, vaccines are 100% safe.

01:31:53.280 | Climate science is settled science.

01:31:55.680 | Whatever this Mont and Bailey is,

01:31:57.400 | where you make extraordinarily vapid blanket claims,

01:32:02.400 | and then you retreat into something.

01:32:04.200 | Well, defund the, we don't want no more police,

01:32:07.080 | actually just means we want the police

01:32:09.880 | to not take on mental health duties.

01:32:13.780 | We've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society.

01:32:17.620 | And what I'm claiming is, is that I might talk

01:32:21.100 | to Curtis Yarvin, but I have really very little interest

01:32:25.380 | to talk to a guy who seems to be kind of giddy

01:32:28.260 | about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves.

01:32:31.460 | It's like, why do I want to do that on the portal?

01:32:34.260 | - One, first of all, because just as you said,

01:32:37.860 | that's not Curtis's main thing.

01:32:39.660 | He has a lot of ideas and what I've read of him,

01:32:43.780 | which is not a huge amount, is he's very thoughtful

01:32:48.200 | about the way this world works.

01:32:50.540 | And on top of that, he's an important historical figure

01:32:54.660 | in the birth and the development of the alt-right,

01:32:57.900 | or what would be called the alt-right.

01:32:59.340 | - Or the new reactionary movement.

01:33:00.460 | - Yeah, and there's, so he's just an important intellectual.

01:33:05.460 | And so it makes sense to talk to him.

01:33:07.460 | The question is, how much work do you put in?

01:33:10.900 | - Well, this is the issue of fugu.

01:33:12.780 | I'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that fugu.

01:33:16.500 | So you have a puffer fish, you can eat the puffer fish,

01:33:21.600 | you can get kind of a tingly sensation on your tongue

01:33:25.140 | if you get a little bit of the poison organ.

01:33:27.160 | But my point is, I don't know how to serve Curtis Yarvin

01:33:30.820 | so that, in fact, I'm not worried about what happens.

01:33:34.700 | But I believe that if somebody else was a student

01:33:37.300 | of the new reactionary movement,

01:33:39.380 | that person might be in a better position

01:33:41.440 | to host Curtis Yarvin.

01:33:43.020 | - So somebody, that's a really good example,

01:33:44.860 | somebody I think you've spoken with

01:33:47.700 | that's an intermediary, that's a powerful one,

01:33:49.940 | is Michael Malice, and he's spoken with Curtis Yarvin.

01:33:52.740 | And Michael wrote a book about--

01:33:55.060 | - By the way, Michael somewhat changed my mind

01:33:57.080 | about Michael Malice.

01:33:58.700 | - I'm glad he did.

01:33:59.740 | I think, I would call him a friend,

01:34:02.720 | and I think he's a, underneath it all,

01:34:05.800 | a really kind human being.

01:34:08.680 | And I think your skepticism about him was initially

01:34:11.080 | from a surface level of, what did you call him,

01:34:13.440 | hyenas, the trolls, and so on.

01:34:15.880 | - I'm not happy about his,

01:34:17.500 | it's been so long since I've seen good trolls.

01:34:23.180 | - Yes, so he needs (laughs)

01:34:26.440 | he needs a higher quality of trolling.

01:34:28.840 | But he aspires to that.

01:34:30.320 | I mean, disagree or not,

01:34:33.840 | I really enjoy how much care he puts

01:34:38.100 | into the work he does on North Korea

01:34:40.680 | and the study of the world,

01:34:42.240 | and how much, privately, but also in public,

01:34:45.800 | love he has for people, especially those who are powerless.

01:34:50.240 | Just a genuine admiration for them.

01:34:53.200 | - But I think Curtis actually--

01:34:57.280 | - Does too.

01:34:58.120 | - I don't know.

01:34:59.040 | I mean, you have to appreciate,

01:34:59.960 | the first time I met Curtis,

01:35:01.640 | he introduced me, he says,

01:35:02.880 | "I'm the most right-wing person you've ever met."

01:35:05.560 | I was just like, well, this is a conversation

01:35:07.440 | that's already over.

01:35:09.160 | - It's theatrical in a way that's not conductive

01:35:12.780 | to actually having a real connection.

01:35:14.640 | - It turned me off because it was like,

01:35:18.120 | you need to be the most right-wing person,

01:35:19.960 | and so it's like, I'm a troll, I'm a troll.

01:35:22.520 | Okay, why are we doing this?

01:35:24.340 | But what I'm trying to get at is different.

01:35:25.960 | I'm trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend of yours.

01:35:29.160 | If you found out something terrible,

01:35:31.600 | you should still continue to be his friend.

01:35:34.600 | - And in Michael Malice's case,

01:35:36.560 | it's very likely that we'll find out something terrible.

01:35:38.680 | - Curtis is an acquaintance of mine

01:35:40.220 | because he hangs around with some people that I know.

01:35:42.660 | I did not get it.

01:35:44.400 | I've started to understand why the people in my life,

01:35:47.420 | some of them are Curtis Yarvin fans.

01:35:51.040 | Many of them disregard the stupid stuff,

01:35:54.020 | but my feeling is that too much poison organ,

01:35:58.040 | not enough fish, I don't know how to serve that.

01:36:00.520 | It's too intermingled.

01:36:01.360 | I'm not your chef.

01:36:02.960 | - Speaking for defending your friends,

01:36:04.800 | staying with your friends,

01:36:06.680 | and bringing the old band together again,

01:36:10.640 | you coined the term IDW, Intellectual Dark Web.

01:36:14.380 | I like it.

01:36:16.520 | It represents a certain group of people

01:36:19.240 | that are struggling with,

01:36:22.040 | that are almost like challenged the norms

01:36:26.680 | of social and political discourse from all different angles.

01:36:31.680 | What do you think is the state of the IDW?

01:36:33.880 | What do you think is its future?

01:36:35.600 | Is it still a useful?

01:36:39.080 | - Well, it never exists.

01:36:40.160 | Is it a protocol?

01:36:41.400 | Is it a collection of people featured in an article?

01:36:44.080 | What I learned very clearly is that

01:36:46.600 | there's a tremendous desire in the internet age

01:36:49.080 | to pin people down.

01:36:50.160 | Well, what do you say?

01:36:51.000 | Who's in it?

01:36:51.820 | What are the criterion?

01:36:53.240 | It's like, I understand.

01:36:55.520 | You want to play the demarcation game

01:36:57.240 | and you want to make everything that is demarcated

01:36:59.760 | instantly null and void.

01:37:01.500 | No, thank you.

01:37:02.740 | So I resisted saying who was in it.

01:37:06.100 | I resisted saying what it was.

01:37:07.760 | I resisted saying that Barry Weiss's article

01:37:10.240 | was the definitive thing.

01:37:11.640 | They chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs

01:37:17.020 | that we couldn't get out of.

01:37:18.320 | I did not want those photographs taken.

01:37:20.400 | They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer

01:37:23.000 | needed to take them all at twilight.

01:37:25.200 | I don't know, some such thing.

01:37:27.440 | I didn't even necessarily want to do the article.

01:37:29.840 | Barry convinced me that it was the right thing to do.

01:37:32.240 | Undoubtedly, Barry was right.

01:37:33.560 | I was wrong.

01:37:35.020 | But the key point is nothing can grow in this environment.

01:37:40.020 | There's a reason we're not building.

01:37:42.360 | It does not appear that we found a way

01:37:46.040 | to grow anything organic and good and decent

01:37:49.460 | that we need right now.

01:37:50.960 | And that's kind of the key issue.

01:37:52.920 | - Who's the we?

01:37:53.760 | You mean us as a society?

01:37:55.240 | - Those of us who wish to have a future

01:37:57.600 | for our great-grandchildren.

01:37:59.200 | Let's take the subset of people who are worried

01:38:02.560 | about things long after their demise.

01:38:04.640 | - But do you think it's useful to have a term like the IDW

01:38:09.960 | to capture some set of people,

01:38:13.120 | some set of ideas or maybe principles

01:38:18.120 | that capture what I think the IDW,

01:38:21.760 | okay, you can say it's not supposed to mean,

01:38:23.960 | it doesn't exist, it doesn't mean anything,

01:38:25.720 | but to the public, to me, okay, I'll just speak to me,

01:38:29.240 | it represented something.

01:38:30.560 | - Yeah.

01:38:31.400 | - It represented, I think I just said this to you,

01:38:34.480 | it's my first attempt to interview

01:38:38.320 | the great Eric Weinstein.

01:38:39.960 | I said that, I spoke this about you,

01:38:42.040 | but IDW in general is trying to point out

01:38:44.260 | the elephant in the room or that the emperor has no clothes,

01:38:46.720 | the set of people that do that in their own way.

01:38:49.440 | - If there are multiple elephants in the room.

01:38:51.740 | - Yes.

01:38:52.580 | - The point is that the IDW is more interested

01:38:54.600 | in seeing the totality of elephants

01:38:56.880 | and trying to figure out how do we move forward

01:38:59.240 | as opposed to saying I can spot the other guy's elephant

01:39:01.480 | in the room, but I can't see my own.

01:39:03.720 | And in large measure, we didn't represent

01:39:07.840 | an institutional base and therefore,

01:39:10.620 | it wasn't maximally important that we look

01:39:12.840 | at our own hypocrisy because we weren't

01:39:15.400 | on the institutional spectrum.

01:39:18.680 | - This is where friendship comes into play

01:39:20.520 | with the different figures that are loosely

01:39:23.000 | associated with IDW is you are somehow responsible

01:39:27.500 | for the exact thing that you said.

01:39:33.240 | Did you hear what, I don't know, I forget,

01:39:36.400 | oh, what Sam Harris said about IDW?

01:39:39.440 | - Yeah.

01:39:40.720 | - That kind of thing.

01:39:41.560 | - I chuckled.

01:39:42.600 | - Lovingly or chuckled like--

01:39:46.400 | - I was angry at some people who had said things

01:39:49.400 | that caused Sam to say what Sam said

01:39:51.240 | about turning his imaginary club membership

01:39:54.120 | into the IDW.

01:39:55.880 | People said very silly things and I think

01:39:59.720 | that there is just this confusion that integrity

01:40:04.320 | means calling out your friends in front of the world.

01:40:07.640 | I've been pretty clear about this.

01:40:12.320 | I try to choose my friends carefully

01:40:13.880 | and if you would like to recuse me

01:40:16.280 | because I'm not a source of reliable information,

01:40:18.760 | people that I know and love the most,

01:40:20.600 | maybe that's reasonable for you.

01:40:23.960 | Maybe you prefer somebody who was willing

01:40:25.720 | to throw a friend under the bus

01:40:27.480 | at the first sign of trouble.

01:40:29.200 | By all means, exit my feed.

01:40:31.640 | You don't have to subscribe to me.

01:40:33.040 | If that's your concept of integrity,

01:40:36.000 | you're barking up the wrong tree.

01:40:38.840 | What I will say is that I knew these people

01:40:40.720 | well enough to know that they're all flawed.

01:40:43.020 | - Thank you for the callback.

01:40:46.840 | - But the issue is that I love people who are flawed

01:40:51.840 | and I love people who have to earn a living

01:40:55.720 | even if you call them a grifter

01:40:57.040 | and I love people who like the fact

01:41:01.480 | that Donald Trump didn't get us into new wars

01:41:03.520 | even if you call them alt-right.

01:41:05.600 | I love the fact that some people believe

01:41:09.640 | in structural oppression and wanna fight it

01:41:12.520 | even if they're not woke because they don't believe

01:41:15.560 | that structural oppression is hiding everywhere.

01:41:17.960 | I care and love different people in different ways

01:41:21.760 | and I think that the overarching thing, Lex,

01:41:24.400 | that we're not getting at is that we were sold a bill

01:41:27.280 | of goods that you can go through life

01:41:30.880 | like an Eliza program with pre-programmed responses.

01:41:35.680 | Well, it's whataboutism, it's both sides-ism,

01:41:39.880 | it's alt-right, it's the loony left,

01:41:42.760 | it's campus madness.

01:41:44.040 | It's like, okay, why don't you just empty

01:41:46.600 | the entire goddamn magazine?

01:41:49.380 | All of those pre-recorded snips,

01:41:56.180 | now that you've done all of that,

01:41:59.460 | now we can have a conversation.

01:42:02.240 | - Your son put it really well,

01:42:05.180 | which is we should in all things resist labels.

01:42:09.960 | - But we can't deal without labels.

01:42:13.000 | We have to generalize, but we also have to keep in mind

01:42:17.680 | that just in the way in science,

01:42:19.560 | you deal with an effective theory

01:42:20.880 | that isn't a fundamental one.

01:42:22.320 | In science, most of our theories

01:42:25.400 | we consider to be effective theories.

01:42:27.340 | If I generalize about Europe, about women,

01:42:32.040 | about Christians, those things have to be understood

01:42:37.040 | to mean something and not to have their definitions

01:42:42.400 | extend so broadly that they mean nothing at all,

01:42:46.860 | nor that they're so rigid that they're claims

01:42:51.240 | that clearly won't bear scrutiny.

01:42:53.180 | Lex, what do you really wanna talk about?

01:42:56.560 | That's always my question to you.

01:42:58.480 | - That always gets me, that's a good,

01:42:59.960 | maybe you are the therapist.

01:43:02.120 | - But you and I could talk about--

01:43:04.160 | - Anything. - People love,

01:43:05.800 | up until now at least, people have loved listening

01:43:08.560 | to the two of us in conversation.

01:43:10.800 | And my feeling is is that we're not talking

01:43:13.120 | about neural nets, and we're not talking

01:43:17.600 | about geometric unity, and we're not talking

01:43:20.320 | about where distributed computing might go.

01:43:23.600 | And I don't think that we're really focused

01:43:25.800 | on some of the most exciting things we could do

01:43:29.840 | to transform education.

01:43:30.960 | We're still caught in this world of other people

01:43:34.520 | that we don't belong in.

01:43:36.040 | I don't belong in the world as it's been created.

01:43:38.480 | I'm trying to build a new world,

01:43:39.820 | and I'm astounded that the people

01:43:44.120 | with the independent means to help build that world

01:43:46.600 | are so demotivated that they don't wanna

01:43:49.800 | build new structures.

01:43:50.980 | And the people who do wanna build new structures

01:43:54.360 | seem to be wild-eyed.

01:43:56.120 | - Wild-eyed, what do you mean by wild-eyed?

01:43:58.040 | They're not--

01:43:59.080 | - I guarantee you that I will get some message

01:44:01.080 | in my DMs that says, "Hey, Eric,

01:44:03.760 | "I'm a third-year chemistry student

01:44:06.440 | "at South Dakota State,

01:44:08.760 | "and I've got a great idea.

01:44:11.400 | "I just need funding.

01:44:12.400 | "I wanna build--"

01:44:13.300 | - They don't have the means.

01:44:14.420 | So the people who have the means--

01:44:16.460 | - Or the sophistication.

01:44:18.140 | It's like you're looking for somebody

01:44:20.300 | who's proven themselves a few times to say,

01:44:22.700 | "I've got $4 billion behind me that's soft-circled.

01:44:27.700 | "I wanna figure out what a new university would be

01:44:30.760 | "and what it would take to protect academic freedom

01:44:33.340 | "and who we would hire,

01:44:34.280 | "and what are the different characteristics?"

01:44:36.420 | Because I can clearly see that everything

01:44:37.980 | following the current model is falling apart.

01:44:40.060 | Nobody, in my understanding, is saying that.

01:44:43.460 | Nobody is saying, "Let's take that

01:44:47.580 | "which is functioning independently

01:44:51.020 | "and make it less vulnerable.

01:44:53.300 | "Let's boost those signals."

01:44:55.940 | - And a critical component as money, you think.

01:44:58.980 | - It's not only that, but it's also a kind of,

01:45:01.540 | "These people are mobbed up, hands off."

01:45:04.060 | Let's imagine for the moment

01:45:05.840 | that Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg

01:45:10.540 | founded a university-come-social-media entity.

01:45:17.820 | And they said, "The purpose of this

01:45:22.080 | "is to make sure that academic freedom

01:45:23.940 | "will not perish from this Earth

01:45:25.360 | "because it's necessary to keep us from all going crazy.

01:45:28.680 | "And we are going to lock ourselves out."

01:45:31.680 | We've come up with this governance system.

01:45:34.480 | And the idea is that these people

01:45:36.520 | will be assigned the difficult task

01:45:39.080 | of making sure that society doesn't go crazy

01:45:41.320 | in any particular direction.

01:45:42.640 | That we have a fact-based, reality-based,

01:45:45.560 | feasibility-based understanding.

01:45:48.400 | We can try to figure out where our real opportunities are.

01:45:51.580 | It feels like everybody with the ability

01:45:56.980 | to do something like that,

01:45:58.400 | and with the brains and experience and the resources,

01:46:03.000 | would rather sit in the current system

01:46:05.400 | and hope to figure out where they can flee to

01:46:08.480 | if the whole thing comes apart.

01:46:10.240 | - Well, yeah, and maybe to push back on it a little bit,

01:46:12.520 | I agree with you, but it feels like

01:46:15.520 | some people are trying that.

01:46:17.580 | So for example, Google purchased DeepMind.

01:46:21.440 | DeepMind is a company that kind of represents

01:46:23.640 | a lot of radical ideas.

01:46:25.400 | They've become acceptable, actually.

01:46:27.840 | AGI, Artificial General Intelligence,

01:46:30.160 | used to be really radical of a thing to talk about.

01:46:35.160 | And DeepMind and OpenAI are two places

01:46:38.160 | which has made it more acceptable.

01:46:39.800 | I know you can now start to criticize,

01:46:43.880 | well, they're really, now that it's become acceptable,

01:46:46.640 | they're not taking the further step

01:46:48.000 | of being more and more radical.

01:46:49.240 | But that was an attempt by Google to say

01:46:52.040 | that let's try some wild stuff.

01:46:57.560 | - Sort of like Boston Dynamics.

01:46:59.360 | Boston Dynamics is a really good example

01:47:01.960 | of trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose whatsoever,

01:47:06.960 | except to try out their ideas.

01:47:11.400 | - Well, the idea is that innovation is like dessert.

01:47:14.840 | You can have dessert after you solve

01:47:18.400 | the problem of the main course,

01:47:19.760 | and the main course is a bunch of insoluble problems.

01:47:22.880 | So the idea is we can get into innovation

01:47:25.720 | once we perfect ourselves.

01:47:27.760 | - And you're saying that we need to make innovation

01:47:30.440 | the main meal.

01:47:31.280 | - Well, I'm saying that there really is structural oppression.

01:47:34.760 | I mean, if you train a deep learning system

01:47:39.760 | on exclusively white faces, it's gonna get confused.

01:47:46.240 | So let's not disagree that there are real issues around this.

01:47:50.360 | In fact, that's an issue of innovation and data.

01:47:53.480 | Your data should be responsive.

01:47:55.840 | On the other hand, there are things we can't do anything

01:47:58.440 | about that are actually fundamental.

01:48:02.080 | And those things may have to do with the fact

01:48:07.080 | that some of us taste cilantro as soap,

01:48:12.200 | and some of us don't.

01:48:13.800 | Like there are differences between people,

01:48:15.640 | and some of them are in the hardware,

01:48:17.480 | some of them are in the firmware,

01:48:18.560 | some of them are in the software that is the human mind.

01:48:22.320 | And this completely simplistic idea

01:48:27.000 | that every failure of an organization

01:48:32.000 | to promote each person who has particular

01:48:35.720 | intersexual characteristics,

01:48:37.320 | we cannot hold progress hostage to that.

01:48:42.480 | - And you've talked about,

01:48:44.200 | perhaps we'll save this for another time

01:48:46.680 | 'cause it's such a fascinating conversation.

01:48:48.040 | You talked about this with Glenn Beck,

01:48:51.680 | is the whole sort of stagnation of growth

01:48:53.760 | and all that kind of stuff.

01:48:54.640 | Your idea is that in as much as the current situation

01:48:59.640 | is a kind of Ponzi scheme,

01:49:01.880 | the current situation in the United States

01:49:03.920 | is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise

01:49:07.000 | of constant unending innovation.

01:49:10.280 | We need to fund the true innovators

01:49:17.240 | and encourage them and empower them

01:49:22.080 | and sort of culturally say that this is

01:49:23.880 | what this country is about, is the brilliant minds.

01:49:27.560 | - We're gonna kill each other if we don't grow.

01:49:31.480 | Growth is like an immune system,

01:49:33.500 | and you always have pathogens present.

01:49:36.760 | But if you don't have growth present,

01:49:37.960 | you can't fight the pathogens in your society.

01:49:40.240 | And right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere.

01:49:42.880 | So if we don't get growth into our system fairly quickly,

01:49:47.040 | we are in really seriously bad shape.

01:49:49.820 | So it's very important that if I had a horrible person

01:49:54.720 | who was capable of building something

01:49:56.640 | that would give us all a certain amount

01:49:59.200 | of what I've called financial beta to some new technology

01:50:02.120 | where we all benefit, let's say quantum computing comes in

01:50:05.520 | and everybody, the dry cleaner

01:50:07.540 | has a quantum computing angle, right?

01:50:09.960 | - Yes. - Okay.

01:50:10.880 | That's necessary to keep this system that we built going.

01:50:15.740 | We can try to redesign the system,

01:50:17.600 | but our system expects growth.

01:50:19.440 | And we've starved it for growth.

01:50:21.340 | And the madness that we're seeing

01:50:23.240 | is the failure of our immune system

01:50:25.000 | to be able to handle the pathogens

01:50:26.440 | that have always been present.

01:50:28.520 | So people can say, well, this was always there.

01:50:30.680 | Yes, it was.

01:50:31.500 | What's changed was your immune system.

01:50:33.280 | We have got to make sure that one,

01:50:38.160 | we understand why diversity

01:50:40.160 | is potentially really important.

01:50:41.960 | We have mined certain communities to death.

01:50:45.480 | You and I are Ashkenazi Jews.

01:50:47.640 | Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews

01:50:49.760 | are good at technical stuff.

01:50:51.220 | We know that the Chinese are good at technical stuff.

01:50:54.820 | The Indians have many people

01:50:56.320 | who are good at technical stuff as the Japanese.

01:50:58.840 | I also believe that we have communities

01:51:03.000 | where if you think about the Pareto idea

01:51:05.520 | of diminishing returns,

01:51:06.880 | if you've never mined a community,

01:51:08.880 | many of the people you're gonna get at the beginning

01:51:11.400 | are gonna be amazing because that community,

01:51:13.880 | it's like, did you drill for more oil in Texas?

01:51:16.600 | Texas is pretty thoroughly picked over.

01:51:19.080 | Do you find some place that's completely insane?

01:51:23.040 | Maybe there's oil there, who knows?

01:51:24.800 | In particular, I would like to displace our reliance

01:51:29.960 | on our military competitors in Asia

01:51:32.180 | in our scientific laboratories with women,

01:51:35.320 | with African-Americans, with Latinos,

01:51:37.980 | people who are in different categories

01:51:40.600 | than we have traditionally sourced.

01:51:42.040 | And I would like to get them the money

01:51:44.120 | that the market would normally give these fields

01:51:48.040 | were we not using visas in place of payment.

01:51:51.160 | Now, I have a crazy idea, which is that I play,

01:51:57.560 | you and I both play music.

01:51:59.800 | And I find the analytic work that I do

01:52:02.400 | when I'm trying to figure out chord progressions

01:52:04.200 | and symmetries and tritones, all these sorts of things,

01:52:06.600 | to be very similar to the work that I do

01:52:08.080 | when I do physics or math.

01:52:10.840 | I believe that one of the things that is true

01:52:13.800 | is that the analytic contributions of African-Americans

01:52:17.600 | to music are probably fungible to science.

01:52:20.160 | I don't know that that's true.

01:52:23.680 | It's true I haven't done controlled research,

01:52:26.440 | but I believe that it is very important

01:52:28.360 | to let the People's Republic of China know

01:52:31.120 | that they are not staffing our laboratories anymore

01:52:34.640 | and that we need to look to our own people.

01:52:36.880 | And in particular, we are going to get a huge benefit

01:52:39.920 | from making sure that women, Black Americans, Latinos,

01:52:44.920 | are in a position to take over some of these things

01:52:49.520 | because many of these communities have been underutilized.

01:52:52.800 | Now, I don't know if that's an insane idea.

01:52:55.200 | I wanna hear somebody tell me why it's an insane idea.

01:52:58.520 | But I believe that part of what we need to do

01:53:00.760 | is we need to recognize that there are security issues,

01:53:03.920 | there are geopolitical issues with the funding of science.

01:53:07.320 | And that what we've done is we've starved our world

01:53:10.560 | for innovation, and if we don't get back

01:53:12.360 | to the business of innovation,

01:53:13.500 | we should be doing diversity and inclusion

01:53:15.640 | out of greed rather than guilt.

01:53:18.040 | Now, part of the problem with this

01:53:20.360 | is that a lot of the energy behind diversity and inclusion

01:53:23.900 | is based on guilt and accusation.

01:53:26.300 | And what I want is I wanna kick ass.

01:53:30.800 | And my hope is is that diminishing returns

01:53:33.360 | favors mining the communities

01:53:35.020 | that have not been traditionally mined

01:53:37.640 | in order to extract output from those communities,

01:53:41.960 | unless there's a flaw in that plan.

01:53:43.440 | If there's a flaw, somebody needs to tell me.

01:53:45.200 | If there isn't a flaw, we need to get greedy

01:53:48.600 | about innovation rather than guilty about innovation.

01:53:51.600 | - That's really brilliantly put.

01:53:53.400 | My biggest problem with what I see

01:53:55.320 | is it exactly speaks to that

01:53:57.400 | in the discussion of diversity.

01:53:59.720 | It's used, when it's grounded in guilt,

01:54:02.200 | it's then used as a hammer to shame people

01:54:05.500 | that don't care about diversity enough.

01:54:06.900 | - F that shit, okay?

01:54:09.500 | So my point is I'm excited about the idea

01:54:13.300 | of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field theory.

01:54:15.860 | I'm excited about the idea of Art Tatum

01:54:19.300 | trying to figure out what the neural nets

01:54:24.300 | figured out about protein folding.

01:54:26.580 | I have some idea of the level of intellect

01:54:29.220 | of people who have not found their way into STEM subjects

01:54:32.300 | in incredibly technically demanding areas.

01:54:35.200 | And if there's a flaw in that theory,

01:54:37.700 | I want somebody to present the flaw.

01:54:40.060 | But right now, my belief is that

01:54:43.380 | these things are merit-based.

01:54:45.860 | And if you really believe in structural oppression,

01:54:48.560 | you do not want an affirmative action program.

01:54:51.320 | You wanna make sure that people have huge amounts

01:54:53.620 | of resources to get themselves into position.

01:54:56.640 | I wanna push out,

01:54:58.120 | I just tried this on this Clubhouse application,

01:55:00.960 | I wanna push out Klein bottles as a secret sign

01:55:04.520 | inside of rap videos in hip hop, right?

01:55:07.480 | I want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world.

01:55:10.440 | And I wanna get the people who,

01:55:12.960 | hopefully I'm trying to lure into science and engineering,

01:55:16.600 | I want to get them paid.

01:55:18.160 | I don't want them as the cheap substitutes

01:55:20.800 | for the fleeing white males who've learned

01:55:25.400 | that they can't make any money in science and engineering.

01:55:29.200 | So the problem is that we need to take over the ship, Lex.

01:55:34.200 | And it doesn't need to be you and me,

01:55:36.160 | 'cause quite honestly, I have no desire to administer,

01:55:38.840 | I don't wanna be the chief executive officer of anything.

01:55:41.160 | What I do want is I want the baby boomers

01:55:44.440 | who've made this mess and can't see it to be gone.

01:55:48.440 | They had almost all of our universities.

01:55:51.800 | And I want fresh blood, fresh resources,

01:55:56.000 | I want academic freedom, and I want greed

01:55:58.720 | for our country and for the future

01:56:02.160 | to determine diversity and inclusion

01:56:03.800 | as opposed to shame and guilt,

01:56:05.080 | which is destroying our fabric.

01:56:06.760 | - That's as good of a diversity statement

01:56:10.520 | as I've ever heard.

01:56:11.660 | This is a U-turn, but somebody commented

01:56:16.560 | on the tweet you sent that,

01:56:19.520 | as one of the top comments,

01:56:20.880 | they definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency.

01:56:24.160 | So it's a U-turn, but not really.

01:56:27.520 | Since you're an economist, since you're deep,

01:56:29.960 | not an economist, you.

01:56:31.800 | - I pretend to be an economist,

01:56:33.760 | hoping that the economists will take issue

01:56:36.960 | that I'm not an economist so that I can advance

01:56:39.280 | gauge-theoretic and field-theoretic economics,

01:56:41.960 | which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge

01:56:45.520 | was a major innovation that happened

01:56:47.560 | approximately 25 years ago.

01:56:49.720 | I don't think that economists understand

01:56:51.560 | what a price index is that measures inflation,

01:56:53.760 | nor do I think economists understand

01:56:56.180 | what a growth index or a product,

01:57:00.000 | a quantity index is that measures GDP.

01:57:04.200 | I think that they don't even understand the basics

01:57:07.720 | of price and quantity index construction.

01:57:10.640 | And therefore, they can't possibly review

01:57:15.120 | field-theoretic economics,

01:57:17.440 | they can't review gauge-theoretic economics.

01:57:19.720 | They're intellectually not in a position

01:57:21.800 | to manage their own field.

01:57:23.200 | - You talked about that there's a stagnation

01:57:25.200 | in growth currently.

01:57:26.640 | I looked at, from my microeconomics,

01:57:29.120 | macroeconomics in college perspective,

01:57:31.800 | GDP doesn't seem to capture the productivity,

01:57:36.280 | the full, the spectrum of what I think is

01:57:41.000 | as a functioning, successful society.

01:57:43.800 | What do you think is broken about GDP?

01:57:46.720 | What does it need to include?

01:57:48.540 | These indices, like what--

01:57:51.480 | - Let me explain what they don't understand to begin with.

01:57:53.680 | - Sure.

01:57:54.520 | - Imagine that all prices and all quantities of output

01:58:00.560 | are the same at the end of a year

01:58:04.280 | as they are at the beginning.

01:58:05.720 | And you ask, what happened during that year?

01:58:09.020 | Was there inflation?

01:58:10.200 | They meandered over the course of the year,

01:58:12.760 | but miraculously, they all came back

01:58:14.760 | to exactly their values.

01:58:16.300 | The amount produced at the end of the year

01:58:20.680 | is the same as at the beginning in every single quantity.

01:58:23.960 | Typically, the claim would be that the price index

01:58:26.080 | should be 1.0 and that the quantity index should be 1.0.

01:58:30.160 | That's clearly wrong.

01:58:31.340 | - Why?

01:58:34.200 | - Well, it's much easier to see with,

01:58:37.860 | it speaks to a fundamental confusion that economists have.

01:58:41.760 | They don't understand that the economy is curved

01:58:44.180 | and not flat.

01:58:45.080 | In a curved economy, everything should be path-dependent,

01:58:50.680 | but they view path-dependence as a problem

01:58:53.020 | because they are effectively the flat-earth society

01:58:55.860 | of market analysis.

01:58:57.600 | They don't understand that what they've called,

01:58:59.760 | and they've actually called it the cycling problem,

01:59:02.540 | is exactly what they need to understand

01:59:04.920 | to advance their field.

01:59:06.560 | So I'll give you a very simple example, okay?

01:59:09.420 | Let's imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund

01:59:13.400 | and Ted and Alice in another.

01:59:15.020 | In both cases, the females, that is Alice and Carol,

01:59:23.060 | are the chief investment officers,

01:59:25.160 | and Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers

01:59:29.900 | in charge of trying to get money into the fund

01:59:32.020 | and trying to get people not to, in fact,

01:59:37.020 | remove their money from the funds, okay?

01:59:41.540 | If you, in fact, had Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,

01:59:46.540 | and both hedge funds were invested in assets

01:59:51.260 | whose prices came back to the same levels

01:59:53.480 | and whose exposures were in the same quantities,

01:59:57.480 | and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds,

02:00:02.880 | would you compensate them the same necessarily?

02:00:06.200 | What if, for example, Carol was killing it

02:00:11.640 | in terms of investments?

02:00:12.760 | Every time she bought some sort of security,

02:00:15.980 | the price of that security went up, okay?

02:00:20.560 | But Bob was the worst marketing officer,

02:00:25.420 | and as chief marketing officer,

02:00:26.660 | there were tons of redemptions

02:00:28.060 | because Bob was constantly drunk,

02:00:30.960 | Bob was making off-color comments.

02:00:33.780 | Now, as a result, at the end of the year,

02:00:36.500 | the fund hasn't grown in size

02:00:38.540 | because even though Carol was crushing it

02:00:40.800 | in terms of the investments,

02:00:42.980 | Bob was screwing up everything,

02:00:45.180 | and the redemptions were legendary.

02:00:47.500 | So people were making money

02:00:48.660 | and still pulling it out of the fund.

02:00:50.500 | In the other fund, Alice can't seem to buy a base hit.

02:00:56.420 | Every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets.

02:01:00.740 | But Ted's amazing marketing skills

02:01:03.540 | allowed the fund to get all sorts of new subscriptions

02:01:07.220 | and halted the redemptions as people hoped

02:01:09.780 | that the fund would get its act together.

02:01:12.540 | Okay.

02:01:13.380 | Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated.

02:01:19.940 | And quantity indices should be

02:01:27.420 | how Bob and Ted are compensated.

02:01:31.120 | So even though both funds had closed loops

02:01:36.060 | that come back to the original states,

02:01:38.580 | what happened during the period that they were active

02:01:41.660 | tells you how people are supposed to be compensated.

02:01:44.260 | Now, we know that whatever the increase

02:01:49.020 | in the price index is,

02:01:50.900 | is compensated by a decrease in the quantity index,

02:01:54.940 | or conversely, because prices and quantities

02:01:58.100 | return to their original values.

02:02:00.140 | You could have another fund where nothing much happened.

02:02:02.020 | There were no redemptions, no subscriptions.

02:02:04.940 | The fund remained in cash the whole time.

02:02:08.100 | So in that third fund,

02:02:09.560 | let's call that Tristan and Isolde,

02:02:12.740 | that fund should have no bonuses paid

02:02:17.060 | because nobody did anything,

02:02:18.100 | but nobody should be fired either.

02:02:20.420 | Now, the fact that the economists don't even understand

02:02:24.340 | that this is what their price and quantity indices

02:02:26.540 | were intended to do,

02:02:28.200 | that they don't understand that you can actually give

02:02:30.740 | what would be called ordinal agents

02:02:32.580 | the freedom to change their preferences

02:02:35.180 | and still have something defined

02:02:37.540 | as a conus cost of living adjustment,

02:02:41.220 | they don't even understand the mathematics of their field.

02:02:43.940 | - So the indices need to be able to capture

02:02:46.020 | some kind of dynamics that--

02:02:48.100 | - We have had indices that capture these dynamics

02:02:51.200 | due to the work of Francois de Vizia since 1925.

02:02:54.260 | But the economists have not even understood

02:02:57.740 | what de Vizia's index truly represents.

02:02:59.780 | - What do you miss with such crude indices then?

02:03:04.020 | - Well, you miss the fact that you're supposed

02:03:06.460 | to have a field theoretic subject.

02:03:09.260 | The representative consumer

02:03:10.660 | should actually be a probability distribution

02:03:12.700 | on the space of all possible consumers

02:03:14.880 | weighted by the probability of getting any particular pull

02:03:17.460 | from the distribution.

02:03:18.760 | We should not have a single gauge of inflation.

02:03:22.780 | Like what is that in 1973 dollars?

02:03:25.180 | Any more than you should be able to say,

02:03:27.180 | it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on earth yesterday.

02:03:32.060 | So when we get to the cryptocurrency,

02:03:34.940 | what I'm going to say is that

02:03:37.020 | because we didn't found economic theory

02:03:39.940 | on the proper marginal revolution,

02:03:41.900 | because we missed the major opportunity,

02:03:43.980 | which is that the differential calculus of markets

02:03:47.260 | is gauge theory.

02:03:48.340 | It's not ordinary differential calculus.

02:03:53.340 | We found that out in finance

02:03:55.540 | that it was stochastic differential calculus.

02:03:58.220 | We have the wrong version of the differential calculus

02:04:00.700 | underneath all of modern economic theory.

02:04:03.820 | And part of what I've been pushing for in cryptocurrencies

02:04:06.700 | is the idea that we should be understanding

02:04:08.980 | that gold is a gauge theory,

02:04:11.460 | just as modern economic theory

02:04:13.660 | is supposed to be a gauge theory.

02:04:15.660 | And that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies

02:04:18.940 | and more importantly, distributed computing

02:04:21.140 | from the problem of this unwanted global aspect,

02:04:25.620 | which is the blockchain.

02:04:26.780 | The thing that is most celebrated in some sense

02:04:29.460 | about Bitcoin is in fact the reason

02:04:31.500 | that I'm least enthusiastic about it.

02:04:33.300 | I'm hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi did,

02:04:36.380 | but it's an intermediate step towards trying to figure out

02:04:40.740 | what should digital gold actually be?

02:04:43.580 | If physical gold is a collection of up quarks and down quarks

02:04:48.580 | in the form of protons and neutrons

02:04:52.500 | held together the quarks by gluons

02:04:55.100 | with electrons orbiting it held together by photons

02:04:57.700 | with the occasional weak interaction beta decay.

02:05:00.980 | All of those are gauge theories.

02:05:02.660 | So gold is actually coming from gauge theory

02:05:06.220 | and markets are coming from gauge theory.

02:05:08.340 | And the opportunity to do locally enforced

02:05:11.140 | conservation laws, which effectively

02:05:13.060 | is what a Bitcoin transaction is,

02:05:15.620 | should theoretically be founded on a different principle

02:05:19.740 | that is not the blockchain.

02:05:21.340 | It should be a gauge theoretic concept

02:05:23.820 | in which effectively the tokens are excitations

02:05:27.540 | on a network of computer nodes.

02:05:29.620 | And the fact that let's imagine that this is some token.

02:05:34.460 | By moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship,

02:05:39.540 | effectively I pushed that glass as a gauge theory

02:05:42.980 | towards your region of the table.

02:05:45.220 | We should be recognizing the gauge theory

02:05:47.540 | is the correct differential calculus for the 21st century.

02:05:51.340 | In fact, it should have been there in the 20th century.

02:05:53.260 | - You're saying it captures these individual dynamics

02:05:57.500 | much richer.

02:05:58.580 | - Why should my giving you a token have to be,

02:06:01.860 | why should we alert the global community

02:06:05.140 | in this token that that occurred?

02:06:06.820 | You can talk about side chains,

02:06:08.020 | you can talk about any means of doing this.

02:06:10.020 | But effectively we have a problem,

02:06:11.500 | which is if I think about this differently,

02:06:13.900 | I have a glass that is extant,

02:06:16.940 | you have a glass that is abstent.

02:06:18.620 | We're supposed to call the constructor method

02:06:23.100 | on your glass at the same moment

02:06:24.740 | we call the destructor method on my glass

02:06:26.860 | in order to have a conservation principle.

02:06:29.300 | It would be far more efficient to do this

02:06:32.100 | with the one system that is known

02:06:34.740 | never to throw an exception, which is nature.

02:06:37.100 | And nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry

02:06:39.260 | for her underlying language.

02:06:41.460 | We now know due to work of Pia Malani

02:06:44.060 | at Harvard in economics in the mid 1990s,

02:06:48.260 | which I was her co-author on.

02:06:50.860 | But I wish to promote her as well as this being my idea.

02:06:55.580 | We know that modern economic theory

02:06:59.700 | is a naturally occurring gauge theory.

02:07:01.900 | And the failure of that community

02:07:03.500 | to acknowledge that that work occurred

02:07:05.940 | and that it was put down for reasons

02:07:07.540 | that make no analytic sense is important in particular

02:07:12.340 | due to the relatively new innovation

02:07:14.340 | of distributed computing and Satoshi's brainchild.

02:07:17.580 | - So you're thinking we need to have the mathematics

02:07:20.020 | that captures, that enforces cryptocurrency

02:07:23.180 | as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one

02:07:25.740 | where the blockchain says that crypto should be centralized.

02:07:30.220 | - The abundance economy, much discussed in Silicon Valley

02:07:35.020 | or what's left of it, is actually a huge threat

02:07:38.940 | to the planet because what it really is

02:07:41.180 | is that it is what Marc Andreessen has called

02:07:43.660 | software eating the world.

02:07:45.540 | And what that means is that you're gonna push things

02:07:47.800 | from being private goods and services

02:07:49.360 | into public goods and services.

02:07:50.820 | And public goods and services cannot have price

02:07:53.580 | and value tied together.

02:07:55.860 | Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value

02:07:59.060 | to the world that they cannot command a price

02:08:01.860 | and they will not be able to capture the value

02:08:03.740 | that they have created

02:08:04.860 | or a significant enough fraction of it.

02:08:07.080 | The abundance economy is a disaster.

02:08:09.820 | It will lead to a reduction in human freedom.

02:08:13.220 | The great innovation of Satoshi is locally enforced

02:08:16.720 | or semi-locally enforced conservation laws

02:08:20.420 | where the idea is just as gold is hard,

02:08:22.740 | why is gold hard to create or destroy?

02:08:24.940 | It's because it's created not only in stars

02:08:26.700 | but in violent events involving stars

02:08:28.680 | like supernova or collisions.

02:08:30.260 | When gold is created and we transact,

02:08:35.440 | we're using conservation laws.

02:08:38.060 | The physics determines the custodianship,

02:08:41.280 | whatever it is that I don't have,

02:08:42.940 | you now have and conversely.

02:08:45.420 | In such a situation, we should be looking

02:08:48.440 | for the abstraction that most closely matches

02:08:51.260 | the physical world because the physical world

02:08:53.140 | is known not to throw an exception.

02:08:55.240 | The blockchain is a vulnerability.

02:08:57.200 | The idea that the 51% problem isn't solved,

02:09:00.720 | that you could have crazy race conditions,

02:09:03.600 | all of these things, we know that they're solved

02:09:06.880 | inside of gauge theory somehow.

02:09:08.920 | So the important thing is to recognize

02:09:12.200 | that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever

02:09:15.140 | in the history of economic theory took place already

02:09:18.840 | and was essentially instantly buried

02:09:22.040 | and I will stand by those comments.

02:09:24.120 | Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you.

02:09:28.320 | - Are you Satoshi?

02:09:29.420 | - No.

02:09:30.260 | No, no, no, I don't have that kind of ability.

02:09:33.000 | I really don't.

02:09:34.360 | I do other things.

02:09:35.260 | - Speaking of Satoshi and gauge theory,

02:09:38.520 | you've mentioned to Brian Keating

02:09:43.260 | that you may be releasing a geometric unity paper

02:09:46.860 | this year, some other form of additional material

02:09:50.140 | on the topic.

02:09:51.100 | What is your thinking around this?

02:09:54.100 | What's the process you're going through now?

02:09:56.420 | - Well, it's very interesting.

02:09:58.180 | - Preparing this.

02:09:59.260 | - I used April 1st to try to start a tradition

02:10:02.020 | which I hope to use to liberate mankind.

02:10:04.860 | The tradition is that at least one day a year,

02:10:10.180 | you should be able to say heretical things

02:10:13.240 | and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off

02:10:15.720 | or Mark Zuckerberg, your provost shouldn't call you up

02:10:18.360 | and say, what did you say?

02:10:19.680 | We need at some level to have a jubilee

02:10:23.680 | from centralized control.

02:10:26.600 | And so my hope is that, you know what a tradition is

02:10:29.880 | in America?

02:10:31.000 | Something a baby boomer did twice.

02:10:32.800 | - Impeachment?

02:10:36.720 | (laughing)

02:10:39.000 | - Very funny.

02:10:39.840 | Anyway, so I'm not a baby boomer, but as an Xer,

02:10:45.680 | I've thought about whether or not April 1st

02:10:48.820 | would be a good date on which to release a printed version

02:10:52.740 | of what I already said in lecture form.

02:10:55.180 | Because I think it's hysterically funny

02:10:56.980 | that the physics community claims

02:10:59.260 | that it can't decode a lecture.

02:11:02.420 | Yeah.

02:11:03.480 | - It must be paper.

02:11:04.580 | - And you know what?

02:11:05.700 | There will be a steady stream of new complaints

02:11:08.540 | up until the point that they fit it

02:11:10.140 | into a narrative that they like.

02:11:11.700 | Yeah, I'm thinking about April 1st

02:11:16.220 | as a date in which to release a document

02:11:19.340 | and it won't be perfectly complete,

02:11:21.100 | but it'll be very complete.

02:11:22.980 | And then they'll try to say, it's wrong

02:11:26.560 | or you already did it or no, that was dumb,

02:11:29.440 | but what we just did on top of it is brilliant

02:11:31.660 | or it doesn't match experiment or who knows what.

02:11:35.260 | They'll go through all of their usual nonsense.

02:11:38.460 | It's time to go.

02:11:40.340 | - Is there still puzzles in your own mind

02:11:43.260 | that need to be figured out for you

02:11:44.740 | to try to put it on paper?

02:11:46.140 | I mean, those are different mediums, right?

02:11:48.180 | - It was a great question.

02:11:50.260 | I did not count on something that turns out to be important.

02:11:53.260 | When you work on your own outside of the system

02:11:57.140 | for a long time, you probably don't think

02:11:59.940 | you're gonna be doing this as a 55 year old man.

02:12:03.040 | And I have been so long outside

02:12:06.060 | of math and physics departments

02:12:07.420 | and I've been occupied with so many other things

02:12:09.020 | as you can see, that the old idea that I had

02:12:14.020 | was if I always did it in little pieces,

02:12:16.520 | then I was always safe because it wouldn't be stealable.

02:12:21.480 | And so now those pieces never got assembled completely.

02:12:26.100 | In essence, I have all the pieces

02:12:29.060 | and I can fit them together,

02:12:32.540 | but there's probably a small amount of glue code.

02:12:35.740 | Like there are a few algebraic things

02:12:37.260 | I've forgotten how to do.

02:12:38.340 | I may or may not figure them out

02:12:39.940 | between now and April 1st, but it's pretty complete.

02:12:43.500 | - But that's the puzzle you're kind of struggling

02:12:46.380 | to now figure out, to get it all on,

02:12:49.100 | in the same, the glue together.

02:12:50.820 | - I can't tell you whether the theory

02:12:52.460 | is correct or incorrect, but like, you know,

02:12:54.700 | for example, there's what's the exact form

02:12:56.380 | of the supersymmetry algebra,

02:12:57.860 | or what's the rule for passing a minus sign

02:13:00.760 | through a particular operator?

02:13:02.900 | And all of that stuff got a lot more difficult

02:13:05.820 | because I didn't do it.

02:13:09.220 | Look, you know, it's a little bit like,

02:13:11.220 | if you're a violinist and you don't touch your violin

02:13:15.500 | regularly for 15 years, you come back to it

02:13:18.500 | and you pretty much know the pieces sort of,

02:13:20.340 | but there's lots of stuff that's missing.

02:13:21.780 | Your tone is off and that kind of stuff.

02:13:24.040 | I would say I'll get the ship to the harbor

02:13:27.020 | and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in.

02:13:30.260 | And if the tugboat doesn't show up,

02:13:31.760 | then I'll pilot the thing right into the dock myself.

02:13:34.540 | But it's not a big deal.

02:13:35.780 | I think that it is essentially complete.

02:13:38.500 | - Psychologically, just as a human being,

02:13:41.300 | this is, I remember perhaps by accident,

02:13:45.500 | but maybe there's no accidents in the universe.

02:13:48.660 | I was tuned in, I don't remember where,

02:13:51.380 | on April 1st to you, oh, I think on your Discord.

02:13:56.380 | Kind of thinking about, thinking through this release.

02:14:00.980 | I mean, it wasn't like, it wasn't obvious

02:14:04.040 | that you were going to do it.

02:14:04.880 | You were thinking through it.

02:14:05.840 | And I remember there was intellectual,

02:14:08.500 | personal, psychological struggle with this.

02:14:10.780 | - Yeah, well, 'cause I thought it was dangerous.

02:14:13.260 | If this turns out to be right,

02:14:14.980 | I don't know what it unlocks.

02:14:16.500 | If it's wrong, I think I understand where we are.

02:14:23.180 | If it's wrong, it'll be the first fool's gold

02:14:29.000 | that really looks like a theory of everything.

02:14:31.340 | It'll be the iron pyrites of physics.

02:14:35.600 | And we haven't even had fool's gold, in my opinion, yet.

02:14:38.520 | - Got it.

02:14:40.420 | So what is your intuition why this looks right to you?

02:14:45.340 | Like why it feels like it would be,

02:14:48.300 | if wrong, the first fool's gold?

02:14:49.140 | - I can say it very simply.

02:14:51.120 | It's way smarter than I am.

02:14:53.300 | - Can you break that apart a little more?

02:14:55.080 | It's like every time you poke at it,

02:14:56.880 | it's giving you intuitions that follow

02:14:58.720 | with the currently known physics.

02:15:00.400 | - Let's put it in computer science terms.

02:15:02.400 | - Yes, please.

02:15:03.240 | - Okay, there's a concept of technical debt

02:15:05.640 | that computer scientists struggle with.

02:15:08.000 | As you commit crimes, you have to pay those crimes back

02:15:10.640 | at a later date.

02:15:11.580 | In general, most of the problem with physical theories

02:15:15.440 | is that as you try to do something that matches reality,

02:15:20.400 | you usually have to go into some structure

02:15:23.140 | that gets you farther away.

02:15:25.160 | And your hope is is that you're gonna be able

02:15:26.720 | to pay back the technical debt,

02:15:28.240 | and in general, these wind up as check-kiting schemes,

02:15:32.120 | or like you're funding a startup

02:15:34.560 | and there are too many pivots, right?

02:15:37.000 | So you keep adding epicycles in order

02:15:39.400 | to cover things that have gone wrong.

02:15:44.000 | My belief is is that this thing represents something

02:15:49.000 | like a summit to me, and I'm very proud

02:15:54.160 | of having found a route up this summit.

02:15:57.900 | But the route is what's due to me.

02:16:01.540 | The summit can't possibly be due to me.

02:16:04.300 | You know, like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

02:16:09.720 | did not create Mount Everest.

02:16:13.200 | They know that they didn't create that.

02:16:14.440 | They figured out a way up.

02:16:18.760 | - You gotta tell me what Mount Everest is

02:16:21.080 | in this metaphor relative, and also connected

02:16:23.760 | to the technical debt.

02:16:24.600 | So technical debt is a negative thing

02:16:26.520 | that it's kinda, you'll eventually have to pay it.

02:16:30.480 | - Absolutely. - Are you saying

02:16:31.320 | in the ascent that you're seeing now,

02:16:34.760 | in the theory, is you do not have much technical debt.

02:16:37.640 | - Well, that's right.

02:16:38.460 | I think that what happens is is that early on,

02:16:41.000 | what I would say is I believe now

02:16:44.800 | that the physics community has said many things incorrectly

02:16:51.960 | about the current state of the universe.

02:16:54.600 | They're not wildly off, which is why,

02:16:57.820 | like for example, the claim is that there are

02:16:59.560 | three generations of matter.

02:17:01.460 | I do not believe that there are three generations of matter.

02:17:03.520 | I believe that there are two generations of matter,

02:17:05.320 | and there is a third collection

02:17:08.920 | that looks like a generation of matter,

02:17:11.840 | as the first two, only at low energy.

02:17:14.260 | Okay, well, that's not a frequent claim.

02:17:18.400 | People imagine that there are three

02:17:19.840 | or more generations of matter.

02:17:21.560 | I would claim that that's false.

02:17:23.000 | People claim that the matter is chiral,

02:17:25.120 | that is, it knows it's left from its right.

02:17:27.320 | I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental,

02:17:31.100 | but it is emergent.

02:17:32.120 | We could keep going at all these sorts of things.

02:17:36.120 | People think that space-time is

02:17:38.400 | the fundamental geometrical construct.

02:17:41.200 | I do not agree.

02:17:42.020 | I think it's something that I've termed the observers.

02:17:45.480 | All of these different things represent a series

02:17:50.520 | of over-interpretations of the world

02:17:54.200 | that preclude progress.

02:17:56.680 | - So you gave, I think you gave some credit

02:18:01.080 | to string theory as, string theory,

02:18:03.800 | I think loop quantum gravity, if I remember correctly,

02:18:06.840 | as like getting close to the fool's gold.

02:18:11.600 | - Well, I said that Garrett Lisey, phenomenologically,

02:18:16.080 | gets a lot of things right.

02:18:18.080 | He's got a reason for chirality,

02:18:20.600 | a reason for uniqueness using E8,

02:18:23.360 | and the fact that E8 uses something

02:18:24.800 | called Weyl fermions, which are chiral.

02:18:26.760 | He has a way of getting geometry

02:18:30.840 | to get Riemann's geometry underneath general relativity

02:18:35.840 | to play with Erisman's geometry,

02:18:38.120 | which is underneath the standard model,

02:18:39.520 | using something called Cartan connections

02:18:41.320 | that are out of favor.

02:18:42.840 | He's figured out something involving super connections

02:18:45.960 | to make sure that the fermion,

02:18:47.440 | the matter in the system isn't quantized

02:18:49.920 | the same way as the bosons were,

02:18:51.440 | which is a problem in his old theory.

02:18:53.840 | He's got something about three generations for triality.

02:18:56.360 | He's got a lot of phenomenological hits.

02:18:59.520 | I don't think Garrett's theory works.

02:19:01.240 | It also has a very simple Lagrangian.

02:19:02.880 | He's basically using the Yang-Mills norm squared,

02:19:05.600 | the same thing you would use as a cost function

02:19:08.040 | if you were doing neural nets, okay?

02:19:11.800 | The string theorists have a different selling point,

02:19:16.400 | which is that they may have gotten

02:19:18.040 | a renormalizable theory of gravity

02:19:20.200 | if quantum gravity was what we were meant to do.

02:19:22.600 | And they've done some stuff with black holes

02:19:25.320 | that they can get some solutions correct.

02:19:29.080 | And then they have lots of agreements

02:19:30.680 | where they show mathematical truths

02:19:33.760 | that mathematicians didn't even know.

02:19:35.680 | I'm very underwhelmed by string theory

02:19:39.720 | based on how many people have worked on it

02:19:41.920 | and how little is supporting the claims

02:19:44.160 | to it being a theory of everything.

02:19:46.440 | But those are the two that I take quite seriously.

02:19:51.040 | I don't yet take Wolfram's quite seriously

02:19:54.000 | because if he really finds one of these cellular automata

02:19:57.960 | that are really distinct and generative, it'll be amazing.

02:20:01.800 | But he's looking for such a thing.

02:20:03.560 | I don't think he's found anything.

02:20:05.640 | Tegmark, I view as a philosopher

02:20:08.440 | who is somehow taking credit for Platonism,

02:20:11.440 | which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max

02:20:14.360 | 'cause I like Max, but if it ever comes time,

02:20:17.040 | I'm putting a post-it note that I'm not positive

02:20:19.400 | the mathematical universe hypothesis is really anything new.

02:20:23.180 | And in general, loop quantum gravity really, I think,

02:20:29.200 | grew out of some hopes

02:20:30.400 | that the general relativistic community had

02:20:32.440 | for that they would be able to do particle theory.

02:20:34.800 | I don't think that they've shown

02:20:36.560 | any particle theoretic realism.

02:20:38.400 | So essentially, here's what I really think, Lex.

02:20:42.740 | I think we didn't understand how big the difference

02:20:47.400 | between an effective theory

02:20:48.960 | and a theory of everything is conceptually.

02:20:51.560 | Maybe it's not mathematically that different,

02:20:54.600 | but conceptually, trying to figure out

02:20:56.920 | what a theory of everything, how does the universe,

02:20:58.880 | and I've compared it to Escher's drawing hands,

02:21:01.800 | how do two hands draw themselves into existence?

02:21:05.240 | That's the puzzle that I think has just been wanting,

02:21:09.280 | and I'll be honest, I'm really surprised

02:21:12.360 | that the theoretical physics community

02:21:14.680 | didn't even get up on their high horse

02:21:21.020 | and say this is the most stupid nonsense imaginable

02:21:25.280 | because clearly, I always say I'm not a physicist.

02:21:28.560 | So I'm an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors.

02:21:33.880 | - So in your journey of releasing this,

02:21:36.000 | and I'm sure that further,

02:21:37.440 | maybe it will be another American tradition on April 1st

02:21:42.200 | that will continue for years to come.

02:21:43.640 | - I hope so.

02:21:44.480 | - There's sort of crumbs along the way

02:21:53.880 | that I'm hoping to collect in my naive view of things

02:21:58.720 | of the beauty that in your geometric view

02:22:04.040 | of the universe.

02:22:05.440 | So one question I'd like to ask is

02:22:10.440 | if you were to challenge me to visualize

02:22:15.960 | something beautiful, something important

02:22:18.640 | about geometric unity in my struggle

02:22:20.640 | to appreciate some of its beauty

02:22:23.420 | from the outsider's perspective,

02:22:25.680 | what would that thing be?

02:22:27.240 | - Interesting question.

02:22:29.740 | - Perhaps we can both have a journey

02:22:31.880 | towards April 1st.

02:22:33.840 | - Take a look at that.

02:22:36.040 | Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose,

02:22:41.880 | not Melrose, Montana in Santa Monica.

02:22:44.680 | Now you'll notice that all of those disks

02:22:48.760 | rotate independently.

02:22:51.480 | - Yes.

02:22:52.320 | - If you rotate groups of those in a way

02:22:57.600 | that is continuous but not uniform everywhere,

02:23:01.240 | what you're doing is a so-called gauge transformation

02:23:04.760 | on the torus seen as a U1 bundle over a U1 spacetime.

02:23:09.600 | So the concept of spacetime here

02:23:12.920 | in a very simplified case isn't four-dimensional

02:23:16.000 | but it's one-dimensional, it's just a circle.

02:23:18.540 | And there's a circle above every point in the circle

02:23:21.740 | represented by those little disks.

02:23:23.600 | Imagine if you will that we took a rubber band

02:23:30.680 | and placed it around here and decided that

02:23:33.760 | that was a function from the circle

02:23:36.800 | into this circle that is representing a Y-axis

02:23:41.800 | that's wrapped around itself.

02:23:44.240 | Well, you would have an idea of what it means

02:23:46.080 | for a function to be constant

02:23:47.840 | if it just went all around the outside.

02:23:50.200 | But what happens if I turn this a little bit?

02:23:53.820 | Then the function would be mostly constant,

02:23:55.560 | it would have a little place where it dipped

02:23:57.160 | and it went back.

02:23:58.440 | It turns out that you can transform that function

02:24:03.400 | and transform the derivative that says

02:24:06.080 | that function is equal to zero when I take its derivative

02:24:09.920 | at the same time.

02:24:11.360 | That's what a gauge transformation is.

02:24:14.000 | Amazing to me that we don't have a simple video

02:24:19.000 | visualizing things that I've already had built

02:24:23.920 | and that I can clearly demonstrate.

02:24:27.360 | When you do that torus, the code of the torus

02:24:31.040 | is itself generating spinning torus.

02:24:33.840 | - Yeah.

02:24:34.920 | - This is a U1 principle bundle.

02:24:37.520 | And the world needs to know what a gauge theory is,

02:24:39.840 | not by analogy, not what Lawrence Krauss saying,

02:24:42.680 | it's like a checkerboard,

02:24:43.680 | if you change some of the colors this way,

02:24:45.280 | not saying that it's a local symmetry involving,

02:24:50.280 | it's none of those things.

02:24:52.440 | It's a theory of differential calculus

02:24:54.460 | where the functions and the derivatives

02:24:57.360 | are both subject to a particular kind of change

02:25:00.720 | so that if a function was constant under one derivative,

02:25:03.760 | then the new function is constant

02:25:05.920 | under the new derivative transformed in the same fashion.

02:25:09.880 | - And would you put that under the category

02:25:11.600 | of just gauge transformations?

02:25:13.440 | - Yes, that would be gauge transformations

02:25:15.600 | applied to sections and connections

02:25:17.560 | where connections are the derivatives in the theory.

02:25:20.160 | This is easily explained.

02:25:23.720 | It is pathological that the community of people

02:25:27.160 | who understand what I'm saying have never bothered

02:25:29.520 | to do this in a clear fashion for the general public.

02:25:32.120 | You and I could visualize this overnight.

02:25:35.240 | This is not hard.

02:25:37.520 | The public needs to know in some sense

02:25:41.700 | that let's say quantum electrodynamics,

02:25:43.920 | the theory of photons and electrons,

02:25:45.640 | more or less electrons are functions

02:25:48.120 | and photons are derivatives.

02:25:50.600 | Now, you can object in some ways,

02:25:53.680 | but basically a gauge theory is the way

02:25:55.720 | in which you can translate a shift

02:26:00.160 | in the definition of the functions

02:26:02.320 | and the shift of the definition of the derivatives

02:26:04.440 | so that the underlying physics is not harmed or changed.

02:26:08.920 | So you have to do both at the same time.

02:26:10.620 | Now, you and I can visualize that.

02:26:12.120 | So if what you wanted to do,

02:26:14.140 | rather than going directly to geometric unity,

02:26:17.040 | is that I could sit down with you

02:26:18.760 | and I could say here are the various components

02:26:20.640 | of geometric unity.

02:26:22.280 | And if the public needs a visualization

02:26:24.520 | in order to play along,

02:26:26.160 | we've got a little over two months

02:26:27.800 | and I'd be happy to work with you.

02:26:29.880 | - I love that as a challenge and I'll take it on

02:26:32.500 | and I hope we do make it happen.

02:26:33.800 | - And David Goggins,

02:26:34.840 | if Lex doesn't do some super macho thing

02:26:38.280 | because he's got to work to get some of this stuff done,

02:26:42.240 | you'll understand he'll be available to you after April.

02:26:45.200 | - Thank you for the escape clause.

02:26:47.720 | I really needed that escape clause.

02:26:49.280 | I'm glad that's on record.

02:26:50.120 | - I'm worried, 48 miles in 48 hours?

02:26:53.000 | By the way, I just want to say how much I admire

02:26:55.440 | your willingness to keep this kind of hardcore attitude.

02:27:00.220 | I know that Russians have it

02:27:03.080 | and Russian Jews have it in spades,

02:27:04.800 | but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy

02:27:08.280 | and that's weak and that's lazy.

02:27:11.040 | And the fact that you bring so much heart

02:27:13.880 | to saying I'm going to bring this to jujitsu,

02:27:16.360 | I'm going to bring this to guitar,

02:27:17.800 | I'm going to bring this to AI,

02:27:18.880 | I'm going to bring this to podcasting,

02:27:21.200 | it comes through loud and clear.

02:27:22.640 | I just find it completely and utterly inspiring

02:27:25.040 | that you keep this kind of hardcore aspect

02:27:28.080 | at the same time that you're the guy

02:27:29.280 | who's extolling the virtue of love in a modern society

02:27:31.960 | and doing it at scale.

02:27:33.240 | - Thank you, that means a lot.

02:27:34.680 | I don't know why I'm doing it,

02:27:36.040 | but I'm just following my heart on it

02:27:37.800 | and just going with the gut.

02:27:40.080 | It seems to make sense somehow.

02:27:42.280 | - I personally think we better get tougher

02:27:45.840 | or we're going to get in a world of pain.

02:27:47.920 | And I do think that when it comes time to lead,

02:27:51.560 | it's great to have people who you know

02:27:53.600 | don't crack under pressure.

02:27:54.960 | - Do you mind if we talk about love

02:27:59.160 | and what it takes to be a father for a bit?

02:28:01.280 | - Sure.

02:28:02.120 | - Do you mind if Zev joins us?

02:28:03.880 | - I'd be an honor.

02:28:04.800 | - So Eric, I've talked to your son Zev,

02:28:11.520 | who's an incredible human being,

02:28:14.040 | but let me ask you,

02:28:19.040 | this might be difficult

02:28:21.040 | because you're both sitting together.

02:28:22.940 | What advice do you have for him

02:28:27.920 | as he makes his way in this world,

02:28:31.080 | especially given that, as we mentioned before on Joe Rogan,

02:28:35.280 | you're flawed in that just like all humans, you're mortal.

02:28:39.960 | - Well, at some level, I guess one of my issues

02:28:44.720 | is that I've got to stop giving quite so much advice.

02:28:47.320 | Early on, I was very worried

02:28:50.560 | that I could see Zev's abilities

02:28:52.800 | and I could see his challenges

02:28:55.360 | and I saw them in terms of myself.

02:28:57.920 | So a certain amount of Zev rhymes

02:29:00.280 | with whatever I went through as a kid.

02:29:02.760 | And I don't want to doom him to the same outcomes

02:29:07.080 | that sufficed for me.

02:29:09.000 | I think that he's got a much better head on his shoulders

02:29:11.880 | at age 15, he's much better adjusted.

02:29:14.840 | And in part, it's important for me to recognize

02:29:19.280 | that because I think I did a reasonably decent job early on,

02:29:22.680 | I don't need to get this part right.

02:29:26.440 | And I'm looking at Zev's trajectory

02:29:31.440 | and saying, you're gonna need to be incredibly,

02:29:36.200 | even pathologically self-confident

02:29:38.920 | and the antidote for that is gonna be something

02:29:41.040 | you're gonna need to carry on board,

02:29:42.360 | which is radical humility.

02:29:43.860 | And you're gonna have to have those

02:29:46.600 | in a dialectical tension, which is never resolved,

02:29:49.040 | which is a huge burden.

02:29:50.960 | You are going to have to forgive people

02:29:53.420 | who do not appreciate your gifts

02:29:55.480 | because your gifts are clearly evident

02:29:57.540 | and many people will have to pretend not to see them

02:29:59.860 | because if they see your gifts,

02:30:02.480 | then they're gonna have to question their entire approach

02:30:04.520 | to education or employment or critical thinking.

02:30:08.820 | And what my hope is is that you can just forgive those

02:30:12.680 | who don't see them and who complicate

02:30:14.720 | and frustrate your life and realize

02:30:16.280 | that you're gonna have to take care of them too.

02:30:18.400 | - Zev, let me ask you the more challenging question

02:30:20.440 | 'cause the guy's sitting right here.

02:30:22.360 | What advice do you have for your dad?

02:30:24.960 | Since after talking to you, I realize you're the more

02:30:29.520 | brilliant aside from the better looking member of the family.

02:30:37.600 | (laughing)

02:30:38.880 | - It's a bit of an odd question.

02:30:41.180 | - Sorry.

02:30:43.820 | - You can say anything you want,

02:30:44.640 | this is the last time we're gonna be seeing this.

02:30:45.980 | (laughing)

02:30:48.100 | - This is gonna be an awkward drive home.

02:30:50.100 | - I think sort of a new perspective I've taken

02:30:55.960 | on parenting is that it is a task

02:30:59.740 | for which no human is really supposed to be prepared.

02:31:04.960 | There are in Jewish tradition, for example,

02:31:08.180 | there are myriad analogies in the Torah

02:31:12.180 | and the Talmud that compare the role of a parent

02:31:16.180 | to the role of a God, right?

02:31:18.780 | And no human is prepared to play God

02:31:21.540 | and create and guide a life,

02:31:23.860 | but somehow we're forced into it as people.

02:31:27.660 | And I think sometimes it's hard for children

02:31:32.740 | to understand that however their parents are failing.

02:31:35.940 | (laughing)

02:31:38.260 | Sort of has to be.

02:31:39.100 | - It's a theme here.

02:31:40.580 | - Is something for which we must budget

02:31:43.980 | because our parents play a role in our lives

02:31:46.580 | of which they're not worthy and they devote themselves to,

02:31:52.060 | regardless, because that becomes who they are

02:31:54.480 | in a certain sense.

02:31:55.940 | So I hope to,

02:32:00.960 | I hope to have realistic expectations of you as a human

02:32:05.960 | because I think too often it's easy

02:32:12.000 | to have godly expectations of people

02:32:14.720 | who are far from such a role.

02:32:18.000 | And I think I'm really happy that you've been as open

02:32:22.720 | as you have with me about the fact that,

02:32:27.880 | you know, you really, you don't pretend to be a God

02:32:30.120 | in my life.

02:32:30.960 | You are a guide who allows me to see myself.

02:32:38.000 | And that's been very important considering the fact

02:32:41.160 | that by your self-teaching paradigm,

02:32:44.600 | I will have to guide myself.

02:32:48.840 | And being able to see it and see myself accurately

02:32:52.320 | has been one of the greatest gifts that you've given me.

02:32:55.660 | So I'm very appreciative.

02:32:57.760 | And I want you to know that I don't buy into the role

02:33:02.760 | that you're supposed to

02:33:06.120 | sort of fake your way through in my life,

02:33:15.960 | but I am unbelievably happy

02:33:20.960 | with a more realistic connection

02:33:25.680 | that we've been able to build in lieu of it.

02:33:29.140 | - I think it's been easier on you actually

02:33:31.200 | as you come to realize what I don't know,

02:33:34.040 | what I can't do.

02:33:35.760 | And that there's been a period of time, I guess,

02:33:37.560 | that's fascinating to me where you're sort of surprised

02:33:42.000 | that I don't know the answer to a certain thing

02:33:45.160 | as well as you do.

02:33:46.160 | And that I remember going through this

02:33:50.200 | with a particular mathematician who I held,

02:33:52.440 | and I still hold in awe, named David Kajdan.

02:33:55.440 | And he famously said to him,

02:33:58.320 | and weirdly our family knew his family in the Soviet Union,

02:34:01.160 | but he said, "You know, Eric,

02:34:05.360 | "I always appreciate you coming to my office

02:34:07.420 | "because I always find what you have to say interesting,

02:34:10.360 | "but you have to realize that in the areas

02:34:11.720 | "that you're talking about, you are no longer the student.

02:34:13.940 | "You are actually my teacher."

02:34:16.160 | And I wasn't prepared to hear that.

02:34:18.880 | And there are many ways in which,

02:34:20.420 | as I was just saying with the Mozart,

02:34:22.860 | I am learning at an incredible rate from you.

02:34:26.520 | I used to learn from you

02:34:28.920 | because I didn't understand what was possible.

02:34:30.600 | You were very much, I mean, this is the weird thing.

02:34:33.840 | There used to be this thing called Harvey,

02:34:35.400 | the invisible rabbit.

02:34:36.400 | This guy had a rabbit that was like six feet tall

02:34:39.000 | that only he could see, maybe he was talking.

02:34:41.700 | And that was like you at age four.

02:34:43.600 | You were saying batches of crazy things

02:34:47.280 | that were all totally sensible

02:34:48.920 | and nobody else could put them together.

02:34:50.760 | And so what's wonderful is that the world hasn't caught on,

02:34:55.340 | but enormous numbers of people are starting to.

02:34:58.560 | And I really do hope that that genuineness of spirit

02:35:03.560 | and that outside the box intellectual commitment

02:35:08.380 | serves you well as the world starts to appreciate

02:35:13.180 | that I think you're a very trustworthy voice.

02:35:16.020 | You don't get everything right,

02:35:17.340 | but the idea that we have somebody at your age

02:35:20.180 | who's embedded in your generation

02:35:21.620 | who can tell us something about what's happening

02:35:23.820 | is really valuable to me.

02:35:25.020 | And I do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice

02:35:28.340 | more than just at the dinner table.

02:35:30.940 | - I apologize for saying this four-letter word,

02:35:36.540 | but do you love Zev?

02:35:39.800 | - I was really worried it was gonna be another

02:35:43.260 | four-letter word.

02:35:44.300 | - There's so many to choose from.

02:35:46.140 | - It doesn't even rise to the level of a question.

02:35:49.140 | I mean, I just, there are a tiny number of people

02:35:53.820 | with whom you share so much life

02:35:56.580 | that you can't even think of yourself in their absence.

02:36:01.340 | And I don't know if Zev would find that,

02:36:04.560 | but you can have a kid

02:36:08.780 | and never make this level of connection.

02:36:11.100 | I think even right down to the fact that

02:36:15.620 | when Zev chooses boogie-woogie piano

02:36:19.020 | for his own set of reasons

02:36:22.420 | why I would choose boogie-woogie piano

02:36:24.060 | if I could play in any style,

02:36:25.620 | it's a question about a decrease in loneliness.

02:36:30.820 | You know, like my grandfather played the mandolin

02:36:34.180 | and I had to learn some mandolin

02:36:35.820 | because otherwise that instrument would go silent.

02:36:38.560 | You don't expect that you get this much of a chance

02:36:42.620 | to leave this much of yourself in another person

02:36:45.660 | who is choosing it and recreating it

02:36:50.580 | rather than it being directly instilled.

02:36:54.040 | And my proudest achievement is in a certain sense

02:36:59.820 | having not taught him and having shared this much.

02:37:04.820 | So, you know, it's not even love, it's like well beyond.

02:37:09.780 | - So you mentioned love for you making a less lonely world.

02:37:14.780 | I think I speak for, I would argue,

02:37:19.980 | probably millions of people that you, Eric,

02:37:22.820 | 'cause this is a conversation with you,

02:37:24.940 | have made for many people, for me, a less lonely world.

02:37:29.940 | And I can't wait to see how you Zev develop as an intellect,

02:37:35.740 | but also I'm so heartworn by the optimism

02:37:40.740 | and the hopefulness that was in you

02:37:43.420 | that I hope develops further.

02:37:45.940 | And lastly, I'm deeply thankful that you, Eric,

02:37:50.420 | are my friend and would give me,

02:37:53.980 | would honor me with this watch.

02:37:57.580 | It means more than words can say.

02:38:00.100 | Thanks guys, thanks for talking today.

02:38:01.980 | - Thank you.

02:38:03.540 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:38:05.100 | with Eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors.

02:38:08.180 | Indeed hiring site, Theragun muscle recovery device,

02:38:12.540 | Wine Access online wine store,

02:38:14.860 | and Blinkist app that summarizes books.

02:38:17.980 | Click the sponsor links to get a discount

02:38:20.140 | and to support this podcast.

02:38:22.140 | And now let me leave you with some words from Socrates.

02:38:25.340 | To find yourself, think for yourself.

02:38:28.240 | Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:38:31.780 | (upbeat music)

02:38:34.360 | (upbeat music)

02:38:36.940 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #163

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