Eric Weinstein: On the Nature of Good and Evil, Genius and Madness

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

00:00:02.960 | the third time we've spoken on this podcast.

00:00:05.600 | He is the wise turtle, master oogway to my Kung Fu Panda,

00:00:10.320 | one of my favorite people to talk to in this world.

00:00:13.160 | A complicated and fascinating mind

00:00:15.480 | that I'm grateful to have the chance to accompany

00:00:17.920 | in exploring this world through conversation

00:00:20.560 | on this podcast and on his, the latter called "The Portal."

00:00:25.560 | Quick mention of each sponsor,

00:00:28.240 | followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

00:00:31.240 | First is Grammarly, a service I use in my writing

00:00:35.200 | to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure

00:00:37.720 | and readability.

00:00:39.160 | Second is Sun Basket, a meal delivery service I use

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00:01:05.640 | Please check out these sponsors in the description

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00:01:11.640 | As a side note, let me say that wherever this life takes me,

00:01:15.800 | I'm drawn to the possibility of having many more

00:01:17.880 | conversations with Eric through the years.

00:01:21.240 | I think we have just the right kind

00:01:24.080 | of contrasting worldviews and a deep respect

00:01:28.200 | and appreciation of each other's life stories

00:01:31.000 | that creates for this magical experience

00:01:34.800 | in the realm of conversation that feels like

00:01:37.640 | we're always looking for something

00:01:40.440 | that we never quite find,

00:01:43.600 | but are always better for having tried.

00:01:45.840 | I'm not sure how or why the universe has connected Eric

00:01:50.440 | and me, but it did.

00:01:52.520 | And I would be a fool not to trust his judgment

00:01:56.240 | and enjoy the journey.

00:01:58.560 | If somehow you like this podcast,

00:02:01.440 | please subscribe on YouTube,

00:02:03.000 | review it with Five Stars on Apple Podcast,

00:02:05.440 | follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,

00:02:08.120 | or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

00:02:11.280 | And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.

00:02:15.320 | Who's the greatest musician of all time, would you say?

00:02:19.520 | - We were just off camera talking about Eddie Van Halen.

00:02:21.920 | He unfortunately passed away.

00:02:24.120 | - Who's the greatest musician of all time?

00:02:26.080 | - Yeah.

00:02:27.400 | - Jonathan Richman.

00:02:28.880 | - Who's that?

00:02:30.560 | - It's a weird question,

00:02:31.560 | so I'm gonna give you a weird answer.

00:02:32.720 | It's not because-- - Thank you.

00:02:33.680 | - Okay, Jonathan Richman, the reason I'm picking on him

00:02:36.120 | is that he had a quote.

00:02:37.920 | He was the front man of a group called the Modern Lovers.

00:02:41.540 | And his quote was something like,

00:02:43.440 | "We have to be prepared to play music.

00:02:46.680 | When our instruments are broken,

00:02:48.480 | the electricity's out and it's raining,"

00:02:50.240 | something like that.

00:02:51.240 | And I thought that that quote was very interesting

00:02:53.880 | because what it said was,

00:02:55.440 | "You have to be able to strip this thing down

00:02:57.640 | farther and farther back

00:02:58.800 | to get to something that is intrinsically musical."

00:03:01.120 | So we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity.

00:03:05.720 | We're talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing.

00:03:08.000 | And that affected me emotionally.

00:03:09.680 | I don't know whether it affected you.

00:03:10.600 | I was never a Van Halen, the group fan,

00:03:13.640 | but I revered Eddie Van Halen's capacity for innovation.

00:03:18.640 | I saw him like Rodney Mullin, the skateboarder.

00:03:23.600 | I had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast

00:03:26.400 | just to talk about what it's like

00:03:27.840 | to totally discontinuously innovate.

00:03:30.760 | - And you posted a video of Spanish Fly, I think,

00:03:33.400 | and saying, "I didn't know the guitar

00:03:35.000 | could make those kinds of sounds.

00:03:36.160 | Like, what is this voodoo magic?"

00:03:37.360 | - What is it?

00:03:38.560 | Well, this is the thing, right?

00:03:39.480 | The arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast,

00:03:43.640 | and the attacks from the hammer-ons,

00:03:47.000 | when they go at light speed, as he did,

00:03:50.560 | particularly, and the reason I chose that

00:03:52.080 | was that I wanted to strip out the electronics,

00:03:55.320 | because part of the claim will be

00:03:56.680 | is that he's a rock musician,

00:03:58.000 | and a lot of the innovations had to do with things

00:03:59.960 | peculiar to sort of the electrified setup.

00:04:03.160 | You know, his use of the whammy bar, for example,

00:04:05.840 | or the Frankenstrat that he built from different pieces.

00:04:10.120 | All of those aspects, in my opinion,

00:04:15.720 | are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship,

00:04:19.760 | and that's why I chose Spanish Fly,

00:04:21.640 | because everyone, of course,

00:04:22.680 | will go to something like "Eruption"

00:04:24.160 | or "Running with the Devil,"

00:04:25.080 | which is the first things that they heard

00:04:27.920 | that let them know that there was a new force

00:04:29.560 | erupting out of Southern California

00:04:31.320 | that was Eddie Van Halen.

00:04:33.320 | I'm in love with the story of it.

00:04:36.680 | - You're often so poetic about music.

00:04:40.360 | Like, it clearly touches your soul

00:04:41.960 | on some kind of, on many levels.

00:04:44.000 | What is that?

00:04:45.520 | Is it deeper than just rocking out

00:04:47.840 | with the, in your convertible Corvette '69?

00:04:52.120 | I imagine Eric Weinstein's just driving down

00:04:54.640 | the California highways, blasting some kind of music.

00:04:58.480 | Is it just like being able to be carefree

00:05:02.040 | for moments of time,

00:05:03.240 | or is there something more fundamental

00:05:05.380 | that connects the theory of everything,

00:05:09.000 | and physics, and life, and all of that?

00:05:11.760 | - How often do you have the chance, for example,

00:05:13.980 | to hear mathematics performed, as you do in Bach?

00:05:17.560 | Right, like something with that kind of precision

00:05:19.880 | and elegance that can't really be grasped,

00:05:22.560 | where, you know, to go back to Leonard Cohen's famous line,

00:05:27.560 | the baffled king composing, right?

00:05:31.480 | - That's such a good song.

00:05:32.320 | - It's such a good song, but it's also like,

00:05:34.240 | individual verses of that song are insanely important.

00:05:38.140 | The baffled king is how we often make music.

00:05:43.360 | We don't really understand what did we just do

00:05:46.640 | that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch, right?

00:05:50.200 | And so, it's a very strange thing

00:05:52.200 | that you should be able to have.

00:05:54.040 | Think of it like you're a computer.

00:05:55.440 | You've got this weird open music port,

00:05:57.840 | you know, port 37.8, you know?

00:06:00.680 | Like, it's not even supposed to be there,

00:06:03.080 | and suddenly somebody starts playing a guitar,

00:06:05.240 | and they're making you feel things.

00:06:07.520 | Or, you know, like in particular,

00:06:09.240 | particular instruments like the violin,

00:06:11.400 | it's so difficult, it's so unforgiving,

00:06:15.200 | and when it gives up its secrets,

00:06:16.960 | it just, you know, it wraps its fingers around your heart

00:06:20.400 | and won't let go.

00:06:22.020 | Sometimes I talk about head, heart, and loins.

00:06:25.000 | When something can grab your head, heart, and your loins

00:06:27.600 | at the same moment and integrate them,

00:06:30.660 | there are very few opportunities to live like that.

00:06:34.600 | And if you think about Eddie Van Halen,

00:06:36.560 | you know, as far as your head, the musical innovations,

00:06:42.040 | and the fact that he was drawing directly

00:06:44.000 | from the classical canon, you know,

00:06:47.280 | really speaks to the idea that maybe rock

00:06:49.640 | is what somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it as being,

00:06:53.920 | you know, an infinitely extensible medium.

00:06:56.720 | In terms of heart, I always notice the smile on his face.

00:07:01.680 | It's painful to look at an Eddie Van Halen solo now.

00:07:05.440 | Like, sometimes you'll see the cigarette

00:07:06.960 | dripping off the side of his mouth,

00:07:08.800 | and you're like, that's gonna fucking kill you,

00:07:11.000 | and I'm not even worried about it for you,

00:07:12.400 | I'm worried about it for me.

00:07:13.800 | You're gonna rob, I don't even need to hear you

00:07:15.760 | play another note, I just like knowing

00:07:17.760 | that you're in the world, that there is somebody

00:07:20.160 | that everyone looks to, that nobody,

00:07:22.080 | I've never heard a guitarist say, eh, I don't know,

00:07:25.680 | I think he was okay.

00:07:26.880 | Like, I've just never heard it.

00:07:28.360 | You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius.

00:07:31.560 | There are very few people like that in the world.

00:07:34.840 | And then loins, those leaps, that guy was incredibly

00:07:39.200 | good looking, you know, skin-tight pants,

00:07:41.320 | super athleticism, he completely owned the sexuality,

00:07:45.080 | the male sexuality of the stage, both being

00:07:48.760 | the completely dominant, you know,

00:07:50.360 | sort of mythical alpha male, I hate that expression,

00:07:52.960 | but there you are, but also this kind

00:07:55.400 | of little boy with this mischievous smirk,

00:07:58.480 | and you know, the sense that it all came together,

00:08:01.800 | how could you not eat that up?

00:08:04.080 | - You could just imagine the millions

00:08:05.960 | of like young teenage boys who are just like

00:08:08.240 | playing air guitar in their room,

00:08:11.160 | just, yeah, basically dreaming of being that kind of god,

00:08:15.280 | the most perfect example of what a human being can be.

00:08:20.400 | Yeah, it's fascinating to think.

00:08:22.120 | - It is, and then, you know, as in many of the cases

00:08:25.640 | with these bands, you get these multiple talents

00:08:28.800 | in the same outfit, and I think that the original

00:08:32.680 | configuration with David Lee Roth,

00:08:34.440 | I mean, David Lee Roth is such a hot mess at all times.

00:08:38.160 | - I would love you to talk to David Lee Roth.

00:08:41.600 | Like, if the, that dance would be just gorgeous.

00:08:46.600 | - I don't know.

00:08:48.040 | - Can you handle, can you ride that?

00:08:49.720 | - Probably not.

00:08:50.560 | - Yeah.

00:08:51.400 | - Probably not, because I think he's very,

00:08:54.280 | I get the feeling that he's very smart

00:08:57.240 | and very dysregulated, and I don't know that I could,

00:09:01.320 | like--

00:09:03.160 | - Like bring him down to earth for a moment.

00:09:04.880 | - Well, I can also get pretty dysregulated, you know?

00:09:07.320 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:09:08.160 | - And so, I don't know, I don't know whether,

00:09:09.640 | it could be magic, it could be a shit show,

00:09:11.680 | I don't know what you thought of his appearance on "Rogan,"

00:09:14.040 | that was an interesting one.

00:09:15.680 | - I loved it, but Joe, and Joe does this sometimes,

00:09:19.160 | sometimes he just sits back and listens,

00:09:21.760 | and he just lets the music play, which works really well.

00:09:26.600 | I think you have a chance to kinda jump into the chaos.

00:09:30.720 | - I care to.

00:09:31.560 | - And then you'll just start, and the places you'll go,

00:09:34.840 | you may not even talk about music for hours.

00:09:37.520 | It might just go to this, 'cause he, I think,

00:09:39.400 | lives in Japan, there's a weird, he's--

00:09:41.520 | - He's been in EMT after he was a rock star,

00:09:45.000 | he chose to be kind of like, I don't know.

00:09:48.080 | You know, it like--

00:09:49.680 | - There's depth to that man

00:09:50.920 | that hasn't been explored by him either,

00:09:54.000 | so that'll be an exciting conversation.

00:09:56.320 | Can we go back to Leonard Cohen?

00:09:58.160 | - Yeah.

00:09:59.000 | - Can we just, the things I feel when I listen to "Hallelujah"

00:10:03.440 | by Leonard Cohen, or anything by him, really,

00:10:05.800 | but that one--

00:10:06.680 | - You really wanna get into it?

00:10:08.880 | - Let's go, what does that song mean to you?

00:10:12.780 | Is it love?

00:10:15.840 | - Oh, boy.

00:10:17.160 | Well, first of all, it's mystery.

00:10:19.920 | Like, it starts off about mystery.

00:10:22.560 | So what are you doing?

00:10:24.200 | You're doing this alternation between the two chords,

00:10:28.720 | so three notes at the same time,

00:10:30.440 | one is called the tonic, or you have the major

00:10:35.440 | and the relative minor, and he's alternating between them.

00:10:38.400 | There's only one note of difference

00:10:39.840 | between those two chords.

00:10:41.160 | One of them would be feeling sad,

00:10:42.720 | one of them would be more joyous, typically described.

00:10:46.800 | And so by altering one note, it's the minimal amount

00:10:49.480 | to take you back and forth between joy and happiness

00:10:53.080 | as that's encoded in us.

00:10:54.840 | So he starts off with, I heard there was a scene,

00:10:57.240 | David played the "Please, Lord,"

00:10:58.360 | but you don't really care for music, do ya?

00:11:00.520 | That's really interesting,

00:11:03.760 | because he's using this technique called bathos, right?

00:11:06.640 | So the alternation between the sublime

00:11:10.280 | and kind of the guttural or ridiculous or the mundane, right?

00:11:13.480 | So he's like--

00:11:15.360 | - But there's a bitterness to it, too.

00:11:17.000 | Is it just play?

00:11:18.280 | - Well, the way I hear it, again,

00:11:19.960 | great song allows for different interpretations.

00:11:21.960 | You happen to be asking me, so I'm gonna impart some stuff

00:11:24.440 | that probably isn't in the song, but why it speaks to me,

00:11:26.680 | and that's what makes it great.

00:11:29.000 | The way I hear it is he doesn't believe the audience.

00:11:31.320 | You don't really care for music, do ya?

00:11:32.760 | Then what are you doing listening to this,

00:11:34.240 | you stupid idiots, you know?

00:11:36.400 | Of course you care for music.

00:11:37.480 | You're too cool to care, so I see through you and screw you.

00:11:41.520 | That's the energy I get.

00:11:45.160 | Then he does this weird thing.

00:11:46.480 | It goes like this is where he should put the description

00:11:50.040 | of where he is in the chord progression,

00:11:51.680 | which is the tonic, right?

00:11:53.320 | It goes like this, and then he hits the fourth

00:11:55.600 | and the fifth, which are the two other major elements,

00:11:58.760 | the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony.

00:12:02.040 | So he's describing the chord progression

00:12:04.720 | in real time in the lyrics.

00:12:07.080 | There's two ways this can come about in other songs.

00:12:10.240 | We had this example of every time we say goodbye.

00:12:14.600 | Do you know this song?

00:12:15.880 | ♪ Every time we say goodbye ♪

00:12:17.640 | No, I think it was Cole Porter, maybe,

00:12:20.520 | or Gershwin, maybe Porter, I don't know.

00:12:22.760 | ♪ I cry a little ♪

00:12:24.240 | ♪ There is no love song finer ♪

00:12:27.120 | ♪ But how strange the change from major to minor ♪

00:12:32.120 | Right, like it's a beautiful use of that.

00:12:34.840 | Then there's times when it's duplicitous.

00:12:37.400 | So for example, you'll have,

00:12:39.160 | I guess my favorite examples of this

00:12:42.680 | are Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."

00:12:45.320 | ♪ I fell into a burning ring of fire ♪

00:12:48.360 | Then what does he do with the lyrics in the tune?

00:12:50.840 | ♪ I went down, down, down ♪

00:12:55.640 | He goes up, right?

00:12:56.960 | And so the idea is like, oh, okay, that was a head fake.

00:12:59.880 | Right, and another one of these

00:13:01.480 | is Nina Simone's "Feeling Good."

00:13:04.840 | Well, okay, so what do you get?

00:13:07.400 | ♪ Birds flying high ♪

00:13:10.720 | ♪ You know how I feel ♪

00:13:13.800 | ♪ And sun up in the sky ♪

00:13:16.160 | ♪ You know how I feel ♪

00:13:18.800 | That woman's voice, she doesn't give a damn,

00:13:21.800 | and yet she's just--

00:13:22.640 | - And I feel it, but then what's the,

00:13:23.960 | ♪ Da-dum, da-dum ♪

00:13:26.360 | It's like heavy stripping music.

00:13:28.280 | You're not in a good place.

00:13:30.680 | You're probably in some strip club

00:13:33.240 | with some last of your money. - Some shady.

00:13:34.560 | - You're drinking lousy beer, some bad situation.

00:13:39.240 | And she's feeling good?

00:13:40.480 | No, it's funereal.

00:13:41.720 | It's oppressive, right?

00:13:43.600 | - I never thought of that song that way, wow.

00:13:46.720 | - Well, you think of it as joyous?

00:13:48.320 | - Yeah. - No, no, no.

00:13:49.320 | If you think about it, contrast it with Ray Charles,

00:13:51.960 | for example, you know, do you know "Lonely Avenue"?

00:13:55.360 | ♪ Well, my room has got two windows ♪

00:14:00.080 | ♪ But the sunshine never comes through ♪

00:14:02.840 | It's really depressed.

00:14:04.360 | It's the same sort of vibe as Nina,

00:14:08.040 | but she's claiming that she's in great shape.

00:14:09.840 | So she's like a good case of the unreliable narrator.

00:14:13.400 | Leonard Cohen, to me, is talking

00:14:14.760 | about the unreliable audience that's too cool

00:14:16.920 | to be with the performer on stage.

00:14:18.840 | There are things that go with the music,

00:14:20.120 | like the Cole Porter stuff,

00:14:21.280 | that go against, like the Johnny Cash.

00:14:23.560 | I think these are the games that musicians play

00:14:26.280 | that the rest of us only sort of notice subliminally, okay?

00:14:31.200 | Fourth, the fifth.

00:14:32.040 | Then he, when he, he should say something

00:14:34.880 | about the relative minor or the,

00:14:36.920 | he's giving you the secret, the baffled king.

00:14:39.680 | In other words, he doesn't know why it works.

00:14:42.280 | Did Pachelbel know why Pachelbel's Canon would work?

00:14:45.920 | It was a discovery.

00:14:47.080 | That's the whole thing.

00:14:48.120 | Like some music is discovered and some music is invented.

00:14:52.680 | And he's talking about a musical discovery.

00:14:56.240 | He's talking about the Pythagorean power

00:14:59.040 | of the wave equation and then superimpose,

00:15:01.960 | like there's two genius intellectual concepts behind music.

00:15:05.880 | One of which is the wave equation.

00:15:07.880 | Usually we solve it for a one-dimensional medium

00:15:09.960 | because we're talking about strings or air columns.

00:15:11.920 | Occasionally you're talking about things like handpans

00:15:15.600 | or steel drums or metallophones or gamelans, whatever.

00:15:19.200 | And those have a wave equation too that's much more chaotic.

00:15:23.760 | The other equation is this crazy thing

00:15:25.720 | that two to the 19/12 is almost exactly equal to three,

00:15:29.760 | which is what gave us even temperament.

00:15:31.920 | And so the tension between those two things is in fact

00:15:35.760 | one of these most beautiful stories.

00:15:37.760 | Inside of that system,

00:15:39.240 | that formula of the baffled king is a discovery.

00:15:43.320 | He's not really composing it.

00:15:46.080 | The reason he's baffled,

00:15:47.760 | imagine that you took like a little brush

00:15:50.640 | and you started brushing off a pyramid under the sands.

00:15:55.360 | You might think that you created the pyramid

00:15:57.600 | by your brushing, but in fact somebody else did it.

00:16:00.240 | That's why you're baffled, right?

00:16:02.840 | - That's beautifully put, you're right.

00:16:04.840 | As creating one of the greatest songs of all time

00:16:07.960 | and as he's doing it, he's baffled.

00:16:10.120 | And it's matter of he's within the song.

00:16:13.280 | - And he, Leonard, is baffled is my contention.

00:16:15.680 | But he knows enough to know that he's baffled.

00:16:18.080 | And so the idea is that he is composing.

00:16:20.920 | He has the audacity to compose as David.

00:16:25.920 | He's echoing David at a minimum.

00:16:29.560 | And then in a later song,

00:16:31.680 | which I really wish we would discuss

00:16:33.000 | that's totally dystopic and you will not like it at all,

00:16:36.520 | is "The Future," which contains this line

00:16:39.960 | that I think I used in my episode

00:16:42.000 | with Roger Penrose on the portal.

00:16:44.520 | Note the subtle plug.

00:16:45.960 | - The portal, the portal, the portal.

00:16:47.480 | - He says, "I'm the little Jew that wrote the Bible."

00:16:51.960 | So there is this way in which Leonard Cohen, I think,

00:16:54.440 | is constantly coming to the idea

00:16:56.480 | of being a biblical-like scribe.

00:16:59.960 | And I think this is one of the great things

00:17:01.520 | that you see Dylan doing this with all along the Watchtower.

00:17:04.480 | You saw Warren Zeevon, who we should talk much more about,

00:17:07.920 | doing this with a song called "I Was in the House

00:17:10.200 | When the House Burned Down."

00:17:11.200 | Do you know this?

00:17:12.400 | - No, this is embarrassing.

00:17:13.800 | - Sweetheart, this is a great day to be alive.

00:17:16.520 | Warren Zeevon is one of the most important songwriters

00:17:19.400 | of our time.

00:17:20.240 | And he's been largely forgotten by this generation.

00:17:24.920 | But Bob Dylan would sing one of his songs in tribute.

00:17:29.880 | I've heard Bob Dylan, you know,

00:17:33.040 | very small number of songwriters really move him.

00:17:35.240 | Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Warren Zeevon.

00:17:40.240 | By the way, Bob Dylan, if you're out there,

00:17:43.060 | appear on either one of our podcasts.

00:17:45.320 | We need to get your voice into a new medium for a new group.

00:17:48.620 | - Definitely.

00:17:49.460 | - This is a time for Bob Dylan, my friend.

00:17:51.560 | Honestly, you've been doing an amazing job in this space.

00:17:55.720 | One of the reasons I'm super excited

00:17:56.960 | to do this podcast again is that

00:18:00.120 | I've learned some things about what I don't do well.

00:18:03.240 | And I also have sort of struggled with the question,

00:18:07.240 | should I do those things better?

00:18:08.720 | Because what if it's, you know,

00:18:10.480 | I always use the same example of the fitted sheet.

00:18:12.560 | When you're trying to put a queen-size fitted sheet

00:18:14.780 | on a king-size mattress, he's like,

00:18:16.280 | "Okay, I got that corner squared away."

00:18:17.760 | And then you get another corner that pops off

00:18:19.400 | and then you go back around.

00:18:21.320 | I wonder whether I can improve my style

00:18:23.440 | in the ways in which, you know,

00:18:26.840 | I think it's just a recognition of a difference.

00:18:28.900 | You do a better job of getting to the soul

00:18:32.120 | of a really top intellectual guest

00:18:35.480 | and making them accessible and presenting them as themselves

00:18:40.480 | for a huge number of people.

00:18:42.320 | And I'd give my eye tooth to be able to do that.

00:18:45.280 | - Do you ever think about this?

00:18:47.000 | Like, 'cause I think about

00:18:49.160 | what is the greatest conversation I'll ever have?

00:18:52.560 | You know, like, in a sense, the portal,

00:18:55.680 | not to reduce it to anything,

00:18:57.720 | but there will be the greatest conversation.

00:19:00.860 | You may have already had it, but it's very possible.

00:19:03.720 | If enough people like me can keep twisting your arm

00:19:07.300 | to keep doing the portal, please,

00:19:09.180 | that is, there'll be an amazing conversation.

00:19:12.100 | And one of the questions that I ask myself is like,

00:19:16.060 | who is the person that I'm especially equipped,

00:19:20.460 | for some reason, I'm convinced on Putin.

00:19:23.080 | There's something in my head that says,

00:19:25.220 | I can do this man better than anyone else in this world.

00:19:30.080 | I got this thought in my head about it, I don't know why.

00:19:32.880 | And I'm convinced, but I think the universe

00:19:34.580 | works in that way.

00:19:35.420 | Like, if it tells you, it's gonna happen.

00:19:38.160 | - The way I would say it is that almost everybody

00:19:40.620 | who becomes a Supreme Court justice

00:19:43.320 | believes at a very early age

00:19:44.980 | they're going to become a Supreme Court justice.

00:19:46.540 | Many people believe at an early age

00:19:48.060 | that they can do it, don't get there.

00:19:49.860 | But of those who get there,

00:19:51.020 | almost all of them had this sort of,

00:19:53.740 | well, I call it pathological self-confidence.

00:19:56.900 | And I do think you have pathological self-confidence,

00:20:01.000 | and you also have humility.

00:20:02.500 | And most people would hear those as a contradiction.

00:20:05.580 | I think that you would not be able to get away

00:20:07.420 | with what you do if you didn't have the humility.

00:20:11.840 | And so I think the great danger

00:20:14.420 | is that your equation becomes unbalanced,

00:20:17.060 | that you either lose the humility,

00:20:18.700 | or you lose the humility overwhelms the ego

00:20:22.780 | and the drive, because right now

00:20:24.740 | you've got a Mexican standoff in your mind,

00:20:26.740 | and the rest of us are just benefiting.

00:20:28.540 | - That's beautifully put.

00:20:29.680 | - My Mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours.

00:20:32.180 | (laughing)

00:20:33.340 | It's all reservoir dogs all the time.

00:20:35.380 | - Yeah.

00:20:36.220 | - But actually, the person who that describes is Peter Thiel.

00:20:39.820 | Peter Thiel thinks more, people always say,

00:20:42.260 | what does Peter think about X, Y, and Z, P, and Q?

00:20:44.260 | It's like, well, do you want communist Peter?

00:20:46.220 | Do you want hyper-capitalist Peter?

00:20:47.060 | - There's multiple minds in there.

00:20:48.780 | - Oh my God, right, on everything.

00:20:50.620 | That's why he's successful,

00:20:51.580 | is that he's got all these minds fighting each other.

00:20:53.740 | And so when people say, Peter is this, or Peter is that,

00:20:56.140 | I just laugh, because nobody who knows him

00:20:59.980 | would describe him as having thoughts

00:21:02.500 | at the level that people are claiming.

00:21:04.540 | And I do think that, in my case,

00:21:07.180 | there's also pathological epistemic humility.

00:21:14.820 | Like, just, I know how little I can do in one life.

00:21:20.620 | I know how many things I've screwed up.

00:21:22.740 | I know how many things I've got wrong.

00:21:25.220 | And on the other hand, I know that if not,

00:21:28.420 | it's like Hillel's questions,

00:21:30.140 | if I'm not for myself, who will be for me?

00:21:32.380 | And if I'm only for myself, what am I, if not now, when?

00:21:35.220 | At some level, there's a question about,

00:21:38.940 | if I don't decide that someone is capable

00:21:43.180 | and that that somebody is me,

00:21:45.220 | and if I apply that to everyone else on the planet,

00:21:49.140 | then nobody's gonna do anything.

00:21:50.500 | And so I do think that one of the things

00:21:52.620 | that people like you and I get is,

00:21:54.780 | who are you to say that?

00:21:56.100 | F that, man.

00:21:58.940 | Just sign me up for some Dunning-Kruger.

00:22:02.360 | - Yeah, but it's multiple minds, like you said.

00:22:06.940 | Like, this morning, I was feeling so good and confident

00:22:09.980 | about, I could think no wrong.

00:22:12.300 | And I remember last night clearly thinking

00:22:14.300 | that I'm the dumbest human who's ever lived,

00:22:16.780 | and nothing I've ever said is worth anything.

00:22:19.740 | What the fuck am I doing with my life?

00:22:22.580 | Why am I scared?

00:22:23.740 | I was terrified of this conversation.

00:22:26.340 | Who the hell am I? - This conversation?

00:22:28.020 | - 'Cause I'm an idiot.

00:22:29.180 | - Lex.

00:22:32.100 | - But no, no, no, but this morning,

00:22:35.140 | I was the baddest motherfucker who's ever walked this Earth.

00:22:39.420 | So I was very conscious.

00:22:41.780 | I think it was the coffee, I'm not sure, maybe some sleep.

00:22:44.340 | - This sounds very Russian,

00:22:45.500 | and it involves multiple beverages,

00:22:47.140 | some of them being alcoholic, others containing caffeine.

00:22:49.980 | - There's, in fact, I can't share the story behind it,

00:22:53.660 | but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge.

00:22:56.220 | - Okay. (laughing)

00:22:57.700 | - So, I mean, I should've--

00:22:58.540 | - I should've hit you for coffee,

00:23:00.180 | 'cause this is a morning show here.

00:23:02.620 | - So I put out a call that we get a chance

00:23:05.060 | to have this conversation,

00:23:06.180 | and people ask these wonderful questions.

00:23:08.540 | A few people asked about depression and suicide.

00:23:16.060 | This is a Russian program, so we'll have to go there.

00:23:19.500 | And I think about Leonard Cohen,

00:23:21.020 | and one of the things that always kind of broke my heart

00:23:26.020 | and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just,

00:23:31.580 | I don't know, for love in a person's life,

00:23:36.820 | is to hear how much depression

00:23:39.460 | was a part of Leonard Cohen's life,

00:23:41.620 | and how much he suffered.

00:23:44.500 | I guess one way, I'm not sure where we can go

00:23:47.260 | with this question, but do you think about the places

00:23:50.620 | that the mind can go, like these dark places?

00:23:54.300 | - Yeah.

00:23:55.460 | - Is there something, like, where the only escape out

00:24:00.140 | is suicide, for example, that's the darkest version of it?

00:24:02.980 | - That, I really think suicide is a big place,

00:24:07.460 | and suicidal ideation and self-harm,

00:24:09.940 | and we don't talk a lot about it.

00:24:14.220 | It's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans.

00:24:17.300 | These are umbrella categories,

00:24:19.260 | and if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves,

00:24:23.380 | but we don't know whether that's coming

00:24:25.660 | because of a problem in brain chemistry,

00:24:28.000 | because of an event in their life,

00:24:30.040 | whether evolutionary programming for suicide

00:24:34.500 | is weirdly normal, whether or not

00:24:37.580 | it might have a religious motivation.

00:24:39.780 | There's too many different forms of self-harm,

00:24:43.620 | and something like the 10th largest killer, thereabouts.

00:24:47.280 | And I think that you can look at it from different angles.

00:24:52.820 | I'm old enough to have had Pete Seeger come to my college

00:24:58.620 | when I was at university, and to watch his good humor

00:25:03.620 | in the face of all adversity.

00:25:06.440 | I think of Odetta, I used to go to Odetta concerts,

00:25:10.860 | and I don't know if you know who she is.

00:25:13.580 | Okay, this is gonna be one of the better days of your life.

00:25:15.580 | Check out Odetta when we're done with the interview.

00:25:18.220 | She was a civil rights figure,

00:25:21.220 | but also just had a profound voice, and great musicianship.

00:25:26.220 | These people were in the struggle,

00:25:29.340 | and they saw lots of bad things happen,

00:25:32.880 | and they kept their humor about them.

00:25:34.680 | The thing is that you can take on the Weltschmerz,

00:25:41.780 | the pain of the planet, or you can try to do something else,

00:25:46.580 | which is to be a happy warrior,

00:25:48.300 | even if the odds are terrible,

00:25:51.540 | and the cost of failure is catastrophic.

00:25:55.220 | - So even when surrounded by darkness.

00:25:58.440 | But the thing is with Leonard Cohen,

00:26:00.420 | is he created such beautiful music,

00:26:02.760 | and yet it's like Anthony Bourdain, the same.

00:26:07.300 | And yet they go to this dark place,

00:26:11.460 | and it could be, it's easy to say it's just biochemistry.

00:26:15.440 | - No, there's a linkage between

00:26:18.120 | this highly generative creative side,

00:26:21.860 | and in some cases, dark depression.

00:26:25.620 | In other cases, not.

00:26:26.900 | So you can't say that it's tied,

00:26:29.440 | that genius and madness are always co-traveling,

00:26:32.220 | or that beauty and pain are one and the same.

00:26:35.600 | What you can say is that there's a cluster of people

00:26:38.420 | that tell you that for that cluster,

00:26:40.280 | there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty.

00:26:43.700 | And I do think that in part,

00:26:45.500 | it's squaring circles that can't be squared.

00:26:47.980 | We were just talking before about the inability

00:26:54.820 | to serve two perfect systems,

00:26:56.600 | the perfect system of the wave equation,

00:26:58.860 | and the perfect system of even temperament.

00:27:01.280 | They're both perfect, they're not compatible.

00:27:03.660 | And once you realize that there is perfection

00:27:07.980 | and an inability to make contact with perfection,

00:27:11.100 | I think you recognize that

00:27:16.540 | there is no solution to this world.

00:27:21.540 | - Yeah, that's weird with the poets and musicians.

00:27:26.920 | You wanna say this is a particular thing that you do,

00:27:29.860 | but then there's Spanish Fly by Van Halen.

00:27:32.100 | And then you realize, oh.

00:27:34.900 | - Well, what do you get out of Spanish Fly by Van Halen?

00:27:37.940 | I think it's very singular because of the fact

00:27:40.660 | that it's purely acoustic.

00:27:42.300 | - For some reason, I couldn't imagine Eddie Van Halen

00:27:46.580 | separate from the band in front of thousands of people

00:27:50.100 | just screaming and rocking out with lights everywhere.

00:27:53.480 | And Spanish Fly made me think like,

00:27:55.900 | it made me imagine him sitting alone

00:27:57.740 | in a couch in a room.

00:27:58.580 | - I think that's who he was, I really do.

00:28:00.660 | Believe me, I get it.

00:28:03.340 | He was a rock star, he was a rock god.

00:28:04.660 | Got it, got it, got it, got it.

00:28:07.280 | And I'm almost positive that you can't get

00:28:10.120 | to where he got to without being a complete introvert.

00:28:13.420 | - Yeah, it made me imagine that there's some

00:28:16.060 | half-naked supermodel walking around

00:28:20.020 | hoping that they can do their thing together.

00:28:24.500 | And Eddie's completely disinterested.

00:28:26.260 | He'd be with the guitar.

00:28:27.100 | - He'd be with the guitar, right?

00:28:28.900 | Because honestly, at some level, in one case,

00:28:33.380 | maybe you're conquesting, maybe you're pursuing

00:28:35.940 | love and romance, in the other case,

00:28:37.800 | you're talking about a relationship to the order,

00:28:41.860 | the creator, the almighty, whatever it is

00:28:43.500 | you wanna call that substrate that is reality.

00:28:46.780 | And do I believe that Eddie Van Halen

00:28:51.240 | and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and Heifetz

00:28:53.900 | jacked into the true essence of the world?

00:28:56.520 | Yeah, they did.

00:28:57.740 | I don't think it's as good as differential geometry.

00:29:00.700 | I'm sorry.

00:29:01.540 | I do think it's amazing for other reasons

00:29:05.840 | and thank God because it's very difficult

00:29:08.020 | to communicate differential geometry at scale.

00:29:10.340 | But the thing about eruption, for example,

00:29:13.180 | what level do you wanna come in to eruption?

00:29:15.360 | Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry?

00:29:18.260 | Do you want the theatrics?

00:29:20.060 | Like you could put him on wires

00:29:21.900 | and set his pants on fire or whatever.

00:29:25.060 | It'd be totally in keeping with it.

00:29:27.500 | On the other hand, you wanna talk something

00:29:28.660 | completely precise that shows off the virtuosity

00:29:33.660 | of what's possible with a Stratocaster.

00:29:36.400 | Everything works.

00:29:38.160 | Multi-axis.

00:29:39.000 | - But there's a precision to it

00:29:40.480 | which is very different than Hendrix.

00:29:44.040 | There's a messiness to Hendrix that to me,

00:29:46.040 | somebody who has OCD has always been a struggle.

00:29:49.360 | - How does Hendrix affect you?

00:29:50.620 | I mean, let's have the Jimi Hendrix conversation.

00:29:52.580 | I don't know that we can do anything to it

00:29:53.840 | that hasn't already been done to it.

00:29:56.120 | Maybe that's not true.

00:29:56.960 | Maybe the idea is that every generation

00:29:58.960 | has to have its Hendrix conversation

00:30:01.260 | and this is a long form pocket.

00:30:02.100 | - It's Jimi Hendrix experience.

00:30:03.600 | - Yeah.

00:30:04.920 | - So funny.

00:30:05.760 | I hear he sold it from Joe Rogan.

00:30:07.280 | - Yeah.

00:30:08.120 | There's so many details.

00:30:11.560 | One, it hurt my soul on so many levels

00:30:16.560 | that you can put a thumb over the guitar

00:30:20.160 | to play a note, to hold the note.

00:30:23.520 | And it doesn't, because I wanted to be the Russian virtuoso

00:30:27.760 | that sits with his classical guitar in perfect form,

00:30:31.000 | plays really fast with the fingers

00:30:32.760 | and then you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed

00:30:36.280 | and supported.

00:30:37.120 | - So that's the Russian conservatory student.

00:30:39.040 | - Conservatory, yeah.

00:30:40.680 | - Then there's the Russian wild man.

00:30:43.360 | - Which one is that?

00:30:44.200 | - Well, they're different Russian archetypes, right?

00:30:47.600 | So the completely idiosyncratic Russian

00:30:50.480 | is very different in a weird way from the,

00:30:53.600 | you know, I can do this backwards in any key,

00:30:57.040 | in my sleep and in any time signature

00:31:00.360 | that you, you know, just snap your fingers.

00:31:03.080 | We've discussed my piano tuner in previous episodes.

00:31:08.080 | - No, no, that was offline conversation.

00:31:10.520 | You told me the story.

00:31:11.680 | - I should tell you the story.

00:31:13.160 | - You should retell the story.

00:31:14.480 | - There I was in darkest Manhattan

00:31:16.880 | with the world's shittiest, it wasn't even an upright,

00:31:20.000 | it was a spinet piano.

00:31:21.800 | A friend had given it to me.

00:31:23.600 | The piano fell out of tune and I would have to tune it.

00:31:27.520 | And the only tuner I knew was this Russian guy

00:31:29.960 | and I hated dealing with him.

00:31:31.480 | There was something about his attitude

00:31:32.800 | that just really rubbed me the wrong way.

00:31:35.120 | So anyway, my wife says, "Tune that thing."

00:31:37.320 | So we get the piano tuner to come and he's tuning this.

00:31:40.560 | He's like, "Are you sure you wanna tune this piece of shit?"

00:31:43.960 | You know, okay, fine.

00:31:45.400 | So he's like, "Okay, it's your money."

00:31:47.240 | The phone rings and I have the phone ringer set

00:31:51.840 | on a landline to Paganini Caprice 24.

00:31:55.400 | And immediately as the phone rings,

00:31:58.440 | he figures out what key the phone ringer is

00:32:02.000 | and which is not the key that like Liszt composed

00:32:05.520 | the variations on Caprice 24.

00:32:09.480 | And he starts going into theme and variations

00:32:11.480 | on Caprice 24 at some level I've never heard before,

00:32:14.840 | just jaw dropping it.

00:32:17.120 | And like the phone stops ringing

00:32:18.960 | and we have this awkward silence.

00:32:20.600 | I said, "I didn't know you were such a great piano player."

00:32:23.480 | And then he says one of these things

00:32:24.960 | that in Russian accented English,

00:32:27.400 | hurts in a way you can't imagine.

00:32:29.000 | He said, "No, you are the piano player.

00:32:31.880 | "I am merely the piano tuner."

00:32:34.000 | (laughing)

00:32:34.840 | I was just like, oh man, through the heart.

00:32:38.480 | - You know, it's kind of reminiscent.

00:32:40.080 | I'd love to hear actually your opinion on this.

00:32:41.560 | It's reminiscent of the Goodwill hunting story.

00:32:44.160 | What do you think about that?

00:32:45.760 | - That movie?

00:32:46.600 | - That movie.

00:32:47.440 | - What about it?

00:32:48.260 | - It's MIT.

00:32:49.100 | - Yeah, I guess when I think of that film,

00:32:51.600 | I think about Matt Damon as a young guy,

00:32:56.220 | risking everything, giving up Harvard.

00:33:00.120 | I think probably the most accomplished group of people

00:33:02.800 | in the world are people who choose

00:33:04.160 | to give up Harvard voluntarily.

00:33:05.880 | - Beautiful. - Right?

00:33:08.400 | - That's true.

00:33:09.220 | - Bigger than Harvard.

00:33:10.060 | - That's very true.

00:33:10.900 | - Ives was one of these people, Bill Gates, of course.

00:33:14.660 | And then oddly--

00:33:19.320 | - Zuckerberg.

00:33:20.280 | - What?

00:33:21.100 | Zuckerberg.

00:33:21.940 | But then Steve Jobs gave up a Reed.

00:33:24.560 | And Reed is like the weirdest, craziest college

00:33:26.860 | in the world.

00:33:27.700 | People should pay much more attention to Reed.

00:33:29.200 | And I'm sorry it's going through a hard time at the moment,

00:33:31.800 | but what it was before the current craziness

00:33:33.900 | is really an interesting story.

00:33:36.040 | Irregardless, as we say in the 617 area code,

00:33:38.860 | I think that a lot of my reaction is to the real story

00:33:45.060 | of Matt Damon having this vision

00:33:47.220 | and being the young guy to pull it off.

00:33:49.900 | And I also think about Robin Williams

00:33:52.500 | trying to explore heart through this lens of acting.

00:33:57.500 | And as you and I, you've hung out with comedians,

00:34:03.060 | they know that they already screwed up a bunch of people.

00:34:07.660 | They do.

00:34:08.500 | They're proud about it.

00:34:10.220 | They really are.

00:34:11.800 | The idea that Robin Williams, who I saw many years ago

00:34:14.360 | when I was in LA in the comedy clubs around here,

00:34:18.000 | he was a straight up crazy, disregulated genius

00:34:21.900 | in tremendous pain.

00:34:23.500 | And his desire to do it earnestly through acting

00:34:28.900 | rather than constantly by just sniping,

00:34:32.580 | you know, or being a clown,

00:34:34.940 | or showing us how fast his mind worked relative to ours.

00:34:39.100 | I was really moved by that.

00:34:42.340 | I thought that he brought some authenticity

00:34:45.780 | and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that real.

00:34:49.580 | And again, like you said, it doesn't always have to be,

00:34:52.420 | but in that case, the madness and the genius were neighbors.

00:34:56.340 | - That one couldn't have been any other way.

00:34:58.580 | - Yeah.

00:34:59.420 | - No, because his mind,

00:35:01.260 | the thing about seeing him in a comedy club

00:35:04.100 | was that he would react to random stimulus

00:35:07.220 | in the environment.

00:35:08.900 | You know, it could be a heckler.

00:35:09.740 | Sometimes you almost got the feeling

00:35:10.860 | that he wanted a heckler

00:35:11.940 | because it gave him something to play against, right?

00:35:16.820 | He was infinitely, instantly inventive.

00:35:19.860 | - But I actually, to me, the best Robin Williams

00:35:24.300 | is as he got closer and closer to the end of his life,

00:35:27.960 | because there was a sadness

00:35:30.260 | and he's almost fighting the sadness

00:35:33.500 | with this improvisational,

00:35:36.220 | like the weapons he has is this wit and humor

00:35:40.320 | and this dancing that he does with language.

00:35:42.820 | But, and then sometimes when you just fall silent,

00:35:46.140 | you can see the sadness.

00:35:48.300 | And I don't know, there's something so beautiful about that.

00:35:51.580 | It's like this bird with a broken wing

00:35:53.180 | that's like trying to fly, you know,

00:35:55.420 | and it's getting older and older.

00:35:57.060 | I mean, those, he would have made

00:36:01.700 | a one hell of a podcast guest, I'll tell you that.

00:36:04.620 | That's a sad.

00:36:05.860 | - Yeah, I have some sadness that I really do think

00:36:07.980 | that part of what we call podcasting

00:36:11.020 | is actually just getting to know a soul

00:36:13.500 | over and over again.

00:36:14.740 | Like maybe the idea is that this is talking

00:36:19.140 | about depression and sadness and heavy feelings

00:36:24.140 | is not an American specialty.

00:36:27.080 | Seeing that in context with the beauty of life

00:36:31.340 | is a Russian specialty.

00:36:33.060 | Like it is very much.

00:36:34.960 | - Sounds like a diner menu.

00:36:37.980 | - What? - Yeah.

00:36:38.820 | - You want the Russian specialty?

00:36:39.980 | (laughing)

00:36:43.660 | - A big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression.

00:36:46.700 | I do think that we're in a really terrifying

00:36:49.380 | and depressing time.

00:36:51.580 | And I think that part of it is that we don't know

00:36:54.620 | if something huge is about to get started.

00:36:57.380 | And we don't even know what this is.

00:36:59.300 | I mean, we just sit here in this weird world

00:37:01.940 | that is falling into some new state.

00:37:04.500 | And we're not even super curious.

00:37:06.380 | It's like, what the hell just happened?

00:37:08.740 | Everybody's got an answer.

00:37:09.940 | And I'm positive that all of those answers are wrong.

00:37:13.120 | - Let's try to at least sneak up on the good answer.

00:37:17.460 | - So the central core of the answer is that the US

00:37:20.860 | seemed to be the greatest thing in the world

00:37:24.180 | in large measure because we hadn't noticed

00:37:26.560 | that we were getting a benefit from having no plan,

00:37:30.720 | not having to make a plan for low growth.

00:37:33.300 | As long as we had growth, we were in great shape.

00:37:38.060 | Let's imagine that there was this,

00:37:40.120 | you could run an experiment.

00:37:42.860 | You have a billion copies of earth

00:37:44.580 | and you start the initial condition slightly different.

00:37:47.340 | On some giant number of planets,

00:37:50.820 | a lot of the things that were discovered

00:37:54.680 | from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century

00:37:58.860 | are discovered in a period of time

00:38:01.540 | because a lot of that just has to do with

00:38:03.980 | once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments,

00:38:06.900 | you can see more.

00:38:08.140 | And the more you can see,

00:38:09.180 | the more you can make use of what you can see.

00:38:11.140 | And it turns out there was lots of stuff to do

00:38:13.900 | with like germs or electron orbitals

00:38:18.900 | or spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum.

00:38:22.980 | And so we got to do all of those things.

00:38:25.420 | And the US roughly corresponded

00:38:27.380 | for a good chunk of its history with this bonanza.

00:38:30.540 | And so of course we look like an amazing genius country.

00:38:34.220 | We have no plan.

00:38:35.860 | Imagine that you could sell a car.

00:38:37.460 | You don't have to put in seat belts.

00:38:38.740 | You don't have to put in airbags.

00:38:40.740 | You don't have to put in rear view mirrors

00:38:42.500 | or sensors or a rear view mirror.

00:38:44.620 | You could save a lot of money on a car

00:38:46.720 | by not putting in all of the stuff

00:38:48.980 | to keep things from going wrong.

00:38:50.580 | And I think that's what we had.

00:38:53.260 | We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good,

00:38:57.700 | we plowed it back, the riches and spoils and treasure

00:39:01.380 | back into the system and made more genius stuff.

00:39:04.820 | And we carried along a good chunk of humanity,

00:39:07.100 | hundreds of millions of people.

00:39:09.340 | We did not have a plan for what happens

00:39:11.500 | when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society.

00:39:15.300 | - How confident should we be that the growth has slowed

00:39:19.460 | in a way that is permanent rather than--

00:39:23.540 | - It's not permanent.

00:39:24.540 | - Slap in the face where--

00:39:26.380 | - It's not the right concept.

00:39:27.820 | Right concept is, I try to use the same words

00:39:31.660 | over and over again in case people see mold

00:39:33.380 | because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere.

00:39:35.820 | So I use this analogy of the orchard

00:39:38.040 | because everyone talks about low-hanging fruit.

00:39:40.580 | They know the concept of low-hanging fruit,

00:39:43.540 | but they don't think in terms of orchards.

00:39:47.260 | So they say things like,

00:39:48.700 | "You think we've picked all the low-hanging fruit,

00:39:50.660 | "but I believe in the infinite inventiveness

00:39:52.740 | "of the human mind."

00:39:53.980 | - Yeah.

00:39:54.820 | - It's like, okay, that doesn't even work as an analogy.

00:39:58.660 | What if the idea is we only picked

00:40:00.100 | all the low-hanging fruit here

00:40:01.780 | and then we're having this stupid argument

00:40:03.340 | about low-hanging fruit and we're not going

00:40:05.100 | and looking for new orchards?

00:40:06.900 | We're not planting new orchards,

00:40:08.120 | we're not looking for forests.

00:40:09.820 | We're just sitting here arguing about low-hanging fruit.

00:40:11.880 | So my claim is there's probably a lot more

00:40:13.420 | low-hanging fruit and it's not here.

00:40:15.700 | - It's in other orchards.

00:40:16.740 | - It's in other orchards.

00:40:17.580 | One of those turned out to be the digital orchard.

00:40:20.060 | The digital orchard has not been as stagnant

00:40:22.780 | as lots of these other, like the chemical orchard.

00:40:28.440 | - I have faith that there's a small percentage

00:40:33.540 | of the population, but not zero,

00:40:36.460 | that's looking for those other orchards.

00:40:38.300 | Like I'm excited about one of those orchards,

00:40:40.460 | which is, I believe there'll be robots in everybody's homes

00:40:43.860 | and that will unlock some totally new thing.

00:40:48.100 | Totally new set of technologies, ideas,

00:40:51.820 | the way we live life, the productivity, everything.

00:40:56.500 | It'll change everything.

00:40:57.620 | So I'm excited about that orchard.

00:40:59.220 | So I'm roaming that orchard and wondering

00:41:02.620 | how the hell you kind of bring back

00:41:05.580 | like the ant that finds a new source of food.

00:41:08.540 | I'm trying to find an apple I can bring back

00:41:10.380 | to the rest of the--

00:41:11.580 | - Great, so you're in an explorer idiom.

00:41:16.100 | - And you have faith that there's enough of those.

00:41:18.300 | - I don't think there are very many of us.

00:41:20.140 | I mean, I'm one of them too.

00:41:22.100 | - How many does it take?

00:41:23.220 | It takes one ant.

00:41:24.120 | - It takes one ant.

00:41:26.420 | What are you talking about?

00:41:27.660 | - How many elons does it take to screw in a light bulb?

00:41:31.780 | - Okay, let's imagine that we went,

00:41:35.220 | imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food.

00:41:38.260 | And then it comes back to the colony and it says,

00:41:42.300 | "Hey, I think I found a new source of food."

00:41:44.700 | And the initial reaction is,

00:41:46.820 | "You're not authorized to find new food."

00:41:49.780 | - What?

00:41:51.220 | - Why would you try to go find new food?

00:41:52.740 | - We're gonna remove you from Twitter.

00:41:54.220 | - Yeah, and by the way, I think the fact

00:41:56.180 | that you think you're allowed to go find new food

00:41:57.620 | shows how privileged you are as an ant.

00:41:59.440 | Get out of the colony.

00:42:00.500 | Kill him, kill him!

00:42:01.940 | Well, that's probably not a great model

00:42:04.780 | for finding new orchards.

00:42:06.460 | And I think that what we find is that

00:42:09.020 | where there's a system that allows somebody to ascend

00:42:11.900 | without a lot of gatekeeping, you can have that.

00:42:15.580 | But I saw this happen in hedge funds.

00:42:17.580 | Hedge funds for a while hoovered up a lot of talent

00:42:22.580 | because they were places that had funding and had freedom.

00:42:26.380 | And in general, really smart people want to be free

00:42:32.020 | and they don't want to think a lot about

00:42:34.020 | how they're gonna feed themselves.

00:42:37.300 | They want to get lost in their minds.

00:42:39.980 | So you can either give them productive places to play,

00:42:42.840 | dangerous places to play.

00:42:44.460 | They're either gonna break into computers

00:42:47.420 | or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies.

00:42:52.420 | And we're not providing for the people who have to disrupt

00:42:58.140 | and have to innovate and trying to channel that effort.

00:43:01.520 | We're so focused on this other thing,

00:43:04.020 | which is like fairness and safety.

00:43:06.160 | And fairness and safety, by the way, are really important.

00:43:08.300 | I don't want to denigrate them.

00:43:10.200 | But the singular focus on fairness and safety

00:43:12.900 | without in the same breath being focused on growth

00:43:17.700 | and discovery and creation is gonna doom us

00:43:21.340 | because what we're talking about is we're always talking

00:43:23.620 | about divvying up the pie that is

00:43:25.620 | as opposed to the pie that will be.

00:43:28.500 | Imagine that you spent all your time

00:43:29.920 | trying to divvy up the 13th century pie

00:43:32.580 | and you destroyed your ability to get to the 20th century.

00:43:36.380 | You'd be an idiot.

00:43:38.140 | - But one place I think I disagree with you is

00:43:42.460 | I don't think you need that many people

00:43:45.060 | to empower the geniuses, the innovators,

00:43:47.340 | the people who refuse to spend most of their days

00:43:50.860 | in meetings about fairness.

00:43:52.260 | - This is good.

00:43:53.780 | Let's have a disagreement.

00:43:54.840 | - I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium,

00:43:58.000 | is just one little example of a tool

00:44:01.420 | that you can give power to.

00:44:03.520 | Like you and your podcast can have the next Elon Musk

00:44:09.100 | and make him a star.

00:44:09.940 | - Now I see where you're going.

00:44:11.180 | Okay.

00:44:12.020 | There have been a series of places

00:44:14.100 | for people to play and be free.

00:44:17.320 | And we've lost them successively.

00:44:19.940 | - What's a good place you remember?

00:44:21.460 | 'Cause I disagree with you there too.

00:44:23.220 | I think they're still there.

00:44:24.580 | You can still play.

00:44:25.660 | - You interviewed Noam Chomsky.

00:44:28.200 | - Yes.

00:44:29.200 | - Okay.

00:44:30.040 | Noam Chomsky comes from an era--

00:44:32.200 | - Where you can play?

00:44:33.160 | - Where you could play.

00:44:34.240 | - At MIT.

00:44:35.080 | - At MIT.

00:44:36.200 | - And you can't play.

00:44:37.040 | This is where I disagree with you.

00:44:38.320 | - We've already had this.

00:44:40.080 | Go check the Clips channel, the Lex Friedman podcast.

00:44:43.760 | - I think I wasn't brave enough at that time

00:44:46.720 | and I'm not really brave enough now.

00:44:48.880 | - Come on.

00:44:49.720 | Where's the vodka?

00:44:50.620 | - It's a feeling and people are gonna tear me apart.

00:44:54.680 | - Oh, what are you, you speak from emotion and facts?

00:44:58.260 | - Wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:44:59.420 | - The feeling--

00:45:00.260 | - Which podcast is this?

00:45:01.080 | It's yours.

00:45:01.920 | - Yes.

00:45:02.760 | - Okay, tell the people who are currently editing your brain

00:45:05.920 | 'cause I saw that move right now.

00:45:08.240 | That they should go find another podcast.

00:45:10.820 | Right?

00:45:11.660 | Let's get rid of some of your audience right now.

00:45:13.920 | - Please go find another podcast

00:45:16.500 | if you're editing my brain.

00:45:17.660 | Nevertheless, all the self-doubt,

00:45:19.620 | they're sitting in that brain.

00:45:20.900 | - Oh my God, I can't stand to watch this.

00:45:22.500 | But all right.

00:45:23.340 | But what is this self-doubt loop that you're in?

00:45:25.640 | - The thing is, when I walk the halls of MIT,

00:45:30.640 | there's bureaucracy, there's administrators

00:45:34.500 | that never have done anything interesting

00:45:36.040 | in their entire lives.

00:45:37.520 | There's meetings, there's--

00:45:39.280 | - All the usual crap.

00:45:40.120 | - All the usual crap.

00:45:41.240 | But there's, in the eyes of individuals,

00:45:45.800 | there's this glow of excitement

00:45:48.520 | that has nothing to do with career.

00:45:49.760 | - I understand this.

00:45:51.200 | - And it's still a playground.

00:45:52.880 | There's little pockets of playgrounds

00:45:55.740 | from which genius can emerge still.

00:45:58.120 | And they're unaffected by diversity meetings

00:46:01.360 | or fairness meetings or blah, blah, blah.

00:46:04.580 | - I love to hear that.

00:46:05.540 | - Yeah?

00:46:06.380 | You don't think so?

00:46:07.200 | - I don't believe it.

00:46:08.840 | 'Cause I've watched the change, Lex.

00:46:10.260 | I've watched people,

00:46:11.340 | we're all editing ourselves all the time.

00:46:13.620 | I remember my old mind, I liked it better.

00:46:16.180 | All of this relentless focus on critical race theory

00:46:21.060 | and critical theory, post-modernism,

00:46:24.220 | fairness, social justice,

00:46:26.180 | it's making many of us into worse people.

00:46:29.740 | - You think that's, do you think the Matt Damon's

00:46:32.740 | of the character is paying attention to any of that?

00:46:35.780 | You think that has an effect?

00:46:36.620 | - Have you seen what happened to Matt Damon himself?

00:46:39.340 | Matt Damon has tried to say various things

00:46:41.120 | at various times that seem to be relatively innocuous.

00:46:44.140 | He can't speak.

00:46:45.540 | - Okay, well let's not mix up.

00:46:48.420 | Matt Damon's just an actor.

00:46:50.300 | - No, no, no, no, he was just a Harvard student

00:46:52.580 | who came up with his own genius screenplay,

00:46:55.340 | acted and made it happen.

00:46:56.980 | No, we're somewhere else.

00:46:59.340 | - You don't think you can build the rocket company

00:47:01.820 | out of MIT still?

00:47:03.420 | - I think that there are things that you can still do.

00:47:06.500 | - But we're losing them.

00:47:07.380 | - We lose them.

00:47:08.820 | We keep losing them.

00:47:10.780 | - I would say the biggest problem,

00:47:12.420 | here, let me just say what I think the solution would be

00:47:16.100 | is to fire anybody who's not,

00:47:21.100 | like faculty, especially young faculty

00:47:23.660 | should have way more power

00:47:25.140 | and administration should have much less power.

00:47:27.820 | Because right now the administration,

00:47:30.240 | which used some of whom used to be faculty,

00:47:33.940 | but they've lost the fire, the spark that gave them,

00:47:37.080 | they've lost the memories of the playground.

00:47:39.900 | And so the people that admire and love the playground,

00:47:43.380 | like you could see it in their behavior,

00:47:44.800 | should have way more power.

00:47:46.820 | And so we should create a systems that give them power.

00:47:49.940 | - But you're very idealistic.

00:47:52.500 | And you're very, you've got a huge heart.

00:47:54.540 | It's a weird time, 'cause I don't wanna dissuade you

00:47:58.660 | from believing beautiful things,

00:48:01.060 | because I see how potent you are.

00:48:04.260 | You do all these things, jiu-jitsu, guitar,

00:48:06.860 | podcasting, programming computers, et cetera, et cetera.

00:48:13.900 | I don't think you're right.

00:48:14.920 | I think we're in a really deeply screwed up place

00:48:17.520 | where even the tiny number of,

00:48:19.800 | let me give you an alternate version of this dystopia.

00:48:23.600 | I do think that there are people who are capable

00:48:25.600 | and there's still places to play and cause things to happen

00:48:28.360 | that progress the story forward.

00:48:30.600 | But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in

00:48:33.720 | who fit that profile,

00:48:35.800 | like how much crap has Elon Musk taken?

00:48:38.480 | Quite considerable, right?

00:48:42.880 | - And not much admiration from the-

00:48:46.340 | - Craig Venter, Jim Watson.

00:48:50.260 | These are very difficult people.

00:48:53.700 | Steve Jobs is a very difficult guy.

00:48:56.800 | - It is a bit heartbreaking to me.

00:49:01.500 | I mean, everybody is different generations.

00:49:03.700 | I just, my mind is a little focused on Elon Musk

00:49:05.900 | because he's the modern person.

00:49:08.380 | - Well, you know him.

00:49:09.420 | I mean, he's a person to you.

00:49:11.980 | - It hurts my heart to see how few faculty

00:49:16.440 | and people with Nobel prizes and so on admire Elon.

00:49:21.440 | Like how little, he gets a lot of fans

00:49:26.860 | from like people that buy his products and young minds.

00:49:30.300 | - Yeah. - Just excited.

00:49:31.660 | But like, why don't we as, why doesn't MIT say that

00:49:36.100 | somebody amongst us will be the next Elon Musk

00:49:41.480 | and we want to encourage them?

00:49:43.580 | Like say that, say that in meetings, say that.

00:49:46.700 | Like that's success.

00:49:48.780 | - No kidding. - For us as MIT.

00:49:51.140 | And they, instead there's this jealousy.

00:49:54.140 | It's like, did you hear what Elon Musk tweeted?

00:49:56.980 | Did you, like how responsible is what he's doing?

00:50:00.460 | How, like just saying all these things

00:50:04.040 | that are just dripping with jealousy and basically-

00:50:09.040 | - I want what he's got.

00:50:10.300 | - That's the thing, right?

00:50:11.620 | Here's the weird thing.

00:50:14.780 | Rivalry has a different signature.

00:50:17.260 | You see, when you know that you're never gonna make it,

00:50:21.720 | that's the position you take.

00:50:25.100 | What is it in "Kung Fu Panda," which you've watched now?

00:50:29.940 | - Yes. - Yes.

00:50:31.080 | What does Tai Lung say when he's looking

00:50:35.380 | for the dragon warrior and the Furious Five

00:50:37.760 | come to defeat him on the bridge?

00:50:40.680 | One of them gives up Po's name accidentally

00:50:44.800 | and Tai Lung hears it.

00:50:46.200 | Po, so that is his name.

00:50:48.520 | Finally, a worthy opponent.

00:50:50.520 | Our battle will be legendary, right?

00:50:53.440 | He's excited.

00:50:54.800 | Why is that?

00:50:56.360 | Well, you learn about this in boxing.

00:50:58.080 | Sometimes you'll see a division or an MMA,

00:51:01.560 | which is lousy with talent.

00:51:04.000 | Just you can't swing a cat

00:51:05.360 | without hitting an amazing, amazing athlete.

00:51:09.160 | Sometimes you'll have a division,

00:51:10.320 | which at that particular moment has one star

00:51:12.800 | and no real competition in that weight class or something.

00:51:16.600 | That person is in bad shape

00:51:18.600 | because you can't build a legend without the other.

00:51:23.500 | When you think of Muhammad Ali,

00:51:26.500 | what are the names that you immediately think of?

00:51:29.000 | - You have to phrase your,

00:51:31.360 | you have to think of the other heavyweights.

00:51:33.240 | Liston. - Right.

00:51:35.880 | So those opponents are in part

00:51:40.880 | what made Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali.

00:51:43.880 | And that's why the Mayweather-McGregor revelation

00:51:48.880 | that, okay, this guy has got his opponent's picture

00:51:54.040 | in his house.

00:51:54.880 | How weird is that?

00:51:55.940 | Well, because without the opponent,

00:51:58.320 | you may not be able to get there.

00:51:59.660 | Now, I am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries.

00:52:05.660 | - Do you have examples in mind?

00:52:08.300 | - Well, there are rivalries

00:52:09.580 | where people take each other's credit

00:52:11.500 | and screw each other over.

00:52:12.860 | And then there are other rivalries like the R&A Thai Club,

00:52:17.480 | where these guys were so in love with what they were doing

00:52:20.780 | that they couldn't wait to share everything.

00:52:22.460 | And Nobel Prizes were so abundant

00:52:25.860 | that most people got Nobel Prizes

00:52:28.000 | just for being a member of the R&A Thai Club

00:52:30.100 | and doing cool stuff.

00:52:31.060 | And yeah, that's the golden kind of sweet spot.

00:52:36.060 | Most of these people can't do what Elon's doing

00:52:41.980 | because they can't break rules,

00:52:43.220 | they can't take the pressure.

00:52:44.820 | I'll tell you what really concerns me

00:52:46.220 | about your perspective.

00:52:47.380 | I think that there are a lot of genius ideas

00:52:51.100 | inside of people who don't have the stomach

00:52:53.820 | for conflict and derision.

00:52:56.500 | And I think a lot of those people are female.

00:53:00.100 | And I think that until we come up with a world

00:53:02.900 | in which we can swat down the trolls,

00:53:05.620 | where we can actually cause the trolls

00:53:08.780 | not to ruin everything.

00:53:10.620 | And I don't necessarily mean by shutting them up,

00:53:12.780 | I don't necessarily mean by being brutal to them,

00:53:15.900 | but somehow separating off people who are working

00:53:18.820 | and people who are trolling.

00:53:20.220 | I think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius

00:53:24.220 | in part because women in particular

00:53:29.220 | are not necessarily going to push an idea

00:53:32.340 | if it results in 10 years of being derided.

00:53:35.500 | Very few men are willing to do that either.

00:53:39.980 | But there are some of us who are so dumb

00:53:42.420 | that we will pig-headedly stick to an idea for 10 years

00:53:45.700 | even if the world collapses.

00:53:47.540 | I don't think that there are as many women

00:53:49.820 | who are going to make that calculation

00:53:51.820 | even if they know the idea is correct.

00:53:53.780 | - And one of the things that I believe technology

00:53:56.220 | can help us fight the trolls,

00:53:57.860 | of all definitions of troll,

00:53:59.900 | I believe that a better Twitter can be built.

00:54:02.860 | - Interesting, I do not.

00:54:04.420 | I don't believe that a Twitter successor can be built

00:54:07.940 | that solves most of the problems.

00:54:10.140 | I think you can always improve what we have,

00:54:12.660 | but I don't think that converges in something

00:54:14.780 | that really works because I think ultimately

00:54:16.740 | the problem isn't Twitter, the problem is us.

00:54:19.060 | For example, I've recently made

00:54:21.460 | a very disturbing realization,

00:54:25.780 | which is academics and trolls

00:54:28.180 | have very many similar behaviors.

00:54:30.300 | - Absolutely.

00:54:31.740 | - It's largely a trolling community.

00:54:34.180 | - I tend to believe that the trolls are not,

00:54:38.540 | it's like the Peter Thiel mini-mind idea.

00:54:42.140 | Which in all of the trolls,

00:54:45.100 | there's the possibility of goodness.

00:54:47.820 | And all you have to do, not all you have to do,

00:54:50.260 | what you have to do is create technology

00:54:52.500 | that incentivizes them to embrace,

00:54:56.660 | to discover, to embrace, to practice

00:55:01.700 | the better angels of their nature.

00:55:04.220 | And I believe that, people actually want to do that.

00:55:09.220 | The trolls is a short-term dopamine rush

00:55:15.020 | of childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome.

00:55:20.140 | I believe that deep within, we want to overcome that.

00:55:23.420 | - I try to keep myself from believing what you believe.

00:55:27.540 | - Because you'll be disappointed if it's not true.

00:55:31.020 | - Because it's dangerous, because a lot of these people

00:55:33.220 | are implacable foes and there aren't many of them,

00:55:36.020 | but when you meet somebody who's like,

00:55:38.060 | yeah, I just like screwing people up.

00:55:39.980 | I'm here for the pain.

00:55:41.080 | - I just believe even in them, there's a good--

00:55:44.660 | - There's a wonderful book that I'm gonna recommend to you

00:55:47.620 | where I hope this comes from.

00:55:49.180 | Maybe I've got the source wrong,

00:55:50.660 | but in any event, it's a great book

00:55:52.460 | called Maximum City about Bombay.

00:55:55.560 | And I believe the conceit is that the author

00:56:00.500 | leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult

00:56:04.260 | and he realizes he has to rediscover the city

00:56:06.620 | because he can't live in the city he left.

00:56:09.420 | So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas

00:56:12.820 | of the city and one of them is the underworld.

00:56:15.460 | He hangs out with the police, but in the underworld,

00:56:17.700 | he's talking to contract killers.

00:56:19.940 | And he says, you know, it's really weird.

00:56:22.620 | Everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them.

00:56:26.480 | And they always say this thing about I've got two kids

00:56:30.960 | at home.

00:56:31.800 | He says, never say that to a contract killer

00:56:34.660 | because we have terrible relationships with our parents.

00:56:37.740 | Doesn't it derise you?

00:56:39.020 | (laughing)

00:56:40.260 | And I was just thinking, oh, wow.

00:56:41.620 | So there's a minus sign in front of that statement.

00:56:44.100 | You're sitting there saying, you know,

00:56:45.420 | I've got a three-year-old.

00:56:46.460 | It's like, okay, well, I'm gonna take this POS

00:56:50.020 | out of that kid's life.

00:56:51.500 | Maybe he'll have a chance.

00:56:53.220 | You don't know how people are wired.

00:56:55.020 | And as much as I hate to say it,

00:56:58.700 | there are people whose wiring is so disturbing

00:57:01.500 | and so different from yours that you will never guess

00:57:04.900 | why you can't reach them or how much pleasure

00:57:08.360 | they may have gotten because they may have gone

00:57:09.980 | over a point of no return.

00:57:11.960 | - Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy

00:57:15.900 | who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis.

00:57:19.100 | You do not know this for sure.

00:57:20.580 | - Nope.

00:57:21.700 | - And I am, you know, whatever the hell I am

00:57:26.180 | that has a different hypothesis that even

00:57:31.140 | in the darkest human beings that seem to be

00:57:34.820 | only full of evil, there's a good person there

00:57:38.140 | that could be discovered.

00:57:39.380 | - Lex, one of the reasons I love doing your show

00:57:42.780 | is that you have these beliefs even as a Russian.

00:57:46.380 | (Lex laughing)

00:57:48.220 | - The Russian special.

00:57:49.460 | - As you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness

00:57:52.640 | which is a total cynicism and total idealism

00:57:55.780 | locked together, right?

00:57:56.960 | That's very much a part of the Russian character.

00:57:59.360 | - The reason I kept bothering you,

00:58:02.460 | kept bothering you to have this conversation

00:58:04.180 | is I'm really worried about the next couple of months.

00:58:09.180 | - No kidding.

00:58:10.820 | - And if there's anybody in this world

00:58:13.980 | that could help alleviate my worry

00:58:18.460 | by at least walking along with me

00:58:22.220 | through this worry of mine, it's you.

00:58:26.160 | Do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war,

00:58:29.360 | some kind of division that explodes

00:58:32.620 | beyond just stuff on Twitter,

00:58:35.100 | but something that's really destructive

00:58:39.260 | to the fabric of our society?

00:58:42.180 | - Well, I believe we're in a revolution, as you know.

00:58:45.580 | I've called it the no-name revolution

00:58:47.140 | or N-squared revolution.

00:58:48.540 | I've been talking about it for years.

00:58:50.380 | I don't think, I think waiting for this

00:58:54.940 | to be called a civil war is not smart.

00:58:57.420 | - Only history will call it such, fine.

00:59:00.980 | - I think that the problem is

00:59:02.180 | is that you're encountering things that you've never seen,

00:59:04.400 | trying to fit them into things that you already know.

00:59:07.020 | - Right.

00:59:08.660 | - But history repeats itself.

00:59:10.740 | - Yes, ish.

00:59:12.140 | - You don't see lessons from history--

00:59:15.740 | - I do. - We see today.

00:59:17.340 | - But I don't see it repeating itself.

00:59:19.180 | - What about violence?

00:59:20.500 | - The famous quote is that it rhymes.

00:59:22.140 | - It rhymes.

00:59:23.380 | I mean, the thing I guess I'm speaking to is violence.

00:59:27.140 | - We're in there.

00:59:29.780 | The abstraction of violence.

00:59:31.900 | Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class.

00:59:38.220 | - Thank you for speaking to the audience.

00:59:40.620 | - Trying to lose these people.

00:59:42.180 | Come with me.

00:59:43.020 | - Go on.

00:59:45.700 | - No, no, no.

00:59:47.340 | I've dealt with your audience,

00:59:48.660 | and your audience contains the smartest people around.

00:59:51.740 | I guarantee you if I say some stuff,

00:59:54.220 | first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say,

00:59:55.780 | they're gonna detail, so that'll be a little bit of catnip

00:59:58.300 | to bring in the smart people.

01:00:00.380 | But they'll also digest it for each other.

01:00:02.140 | It's one of the great lessons of long-form podcasting.

01:00:04.500 | If you don't waste all your time explaining things,

01:00:07.620 | that's the job of the audience to do amongst themselves,

01:00:11.260 | they're happy doing the work,

01:00:12.700 | and those who aren't, they leave.

01:00:14.460 | Isn't that great?

01:00:15.280 | They'll leave.

01:00:16.120 | The people who don't wanna struggle will leave.

01:00:18.540 | You can get rid of them.

01:00:20.220 | I think that the point is you would want to say

01:00:23.900 | violence is defined relative to a context.

01:00:28.100 | So let's call it meta-violence,

01:00:29.780 | so that we don't get into the problem

01:00:32.100 | when we already have a term for physical violence.

01:00:34.660 | So we have meta-violence and physical violence.

01:00:37.500 | I would say that physical violence

01:00:38.780 | is subclassed from meta-violence.

01:00:40.660 | Meta-violence is the disruption of a system.

01:00:43.380 | For example, if a cell dies,

01:00:49.220 | it can die through apoptosis or necrosis.

01:00:52.340 | Apoptosis is controlled, programmed cell death.

01:00:55.460 | Necrosis is just like, okay, this didn't work.

01:00:59.980 | That was a violent disruption of the system.

01:01:02.220 | - And this meta-class is presumed in the documentation,

01:01:05.740 | is it all negative?

01:01:07.660 | - No, what are you talking about?

01:01:09.700 | This is part of the problem in the madness of our age,

01:01:14.340 | which is if you open up a drawer in your cabinet,

01:01:19.340 | in your kitchen, and you see knives, spoons, and forks,

01:01:26.020 | do you have a sense that the spoons are good utensils

01:01:28.640 | and the knives or forks are bad utensils

01:01:30.600 | because they're mean?

01:01:32.140 | I mean, if you start thinking in these terms,

01:01:36.040 | that knife is there to do violence.

01:01:38.180 | That's violence you want done.

01:01:40.740 | When I cut a mango, I'm doing violence to the mango.

01:01:45.700 | The mango expects that I will do violence to it

01:01:48.780 | because otherwise I won't be able to get the meat

01:01:51.460 | and it won't get its seed spread somewhere else.

01:01:56.460 | So in part, violence is absolutely part of our story.

01:02:00.700 | - Okay, so there's this meta-violence class.

01:02:04.300 | - Yeah.

01:02:05.140 | - So the meta-violence class is already,

01:02:08.620 | it's a multiple inheritance pattern.

01:02:10.040 | Whatever's going on right now inherits from meta-violence.

01:02:13.480 | - No, but there's certain subclasses

01:02:16.040 | that allow evil to emerge.

01:02:21.040 | So what I'm specifically worried about is that--

01:02:25.200 | - What's on your mind, Lex?

01:02:26.440 | What's really going on?

01:02:27.380 | - Okay.

01:02:28.220 | I worry that amidst the chaos of the world,

01:02:34.560 | of these protests or the chaos that could be created

01:02:39.560 | by the feeling that the election does not represent

01:02:45.260 | the voice of the people,

01:02:48.140 | like saying that whoever gets, quote unquote,

01:02:50.980 | wins the election according to some kind of reporting

01:02:54.620 | of the numbers that come out,

01:02:56.540 | that's not going to represent what people actually,

01:03:01.220 | people actually want to be the leader.

01:03:02.860 | Like something in that narrative will create

01:03:05.180 | so much division that people will resort

01:03:09.060 | to literal violence, like protests that really,

01:03:12.400 | that the United States loses its united aspect.

01:03:17.700 | And because of that, because of that chaos and tension,

01:03:21.840 | evil people, evil forces, that my definition of evil is,

01:03:26.840 | you know, just cruel human beings use that moment

01:03:31.620 | to attain power, the kind of power that ultimately

01:03:36.220 | goes against the ideal of the United States.

01:03:39.220 | That could be Donald Trump,

01:03:40.780 | that could be another human being, it doesn't really matter.

01:03:43.820 | My worry is that love doesn't win out in this.

01:03:47.780 | The unity doesn't win out in this.

01:03:49.980 | And I feel like you and I have responsibility.

01:03:54.980 | - No kidding. - It's small.

01:03:57.980 | - Yeah, I know.

01:03:58.940 | - And so how do we let love win in this moment

01:04:03.820 | of potential chaos? - We're gonna have to fight for it.

01:04:07.500 | You're gonna have to become a fighter.

01:04:09.860 | You're gonna have to throw some serious punches

01:04:12.340 | if that's what you want.

01:04:13.820 | - You have to be Muhammad Ali here

01:04:15.300 | because the moment you start criticizing anything,

01:04:19.540 | people, you have to be a masterful communicator because--

01:04:23.380 | - That's why you're here.

01:04:26.180 | Look, Lex, in part, your decency is allowing you

01:04:31.180 | to do things that you couldn't otherwise do.

01:04:35.180 | I saw that you had Michael Malice on your podcast.

01:04:38.460 | - Yeah.

01:04:39.580 | - Now Michael Malice is, I think of somebody who at his best

01:04:44.500 | is extremely shrewd and insightful, yes?

01:04:47.380 | He's also got this trolling game,

01:04:51.340 | which he's quite open about and you talk to him about it,

01:04:53.620 | which I can't stand.

01:04:55.860 | And this is the idea, oh, grandpa doesn't get the internet.

01:04:58.220 | Well, I'm grandpa, I don't get the internet.

01:05:00.100 | I don't love the trolling.

01:05:01.980 | There are trolls of the past who were incredibly good.

01:05:06.980 | I don't see any of the modern trolls

01:05:10.020 | as being that kind of genius level,

01:05:12.060 | trolling the people who deserve it

01:05:14.620 | in the way that they deserve it.

01:05:16.580 | Right now what I see is that anything that stands up

01:05:19.180 | gets cut down.

01:05:20.860 | It's like anything earnest.

01:05:22.220 | You have to turn it into cynicism and a meme.

01:05:26.020 | It's this idea that the people who believe

01:05:28.500 | that the world is chaos and has no point

01:05:30.860 | are constantly trying to let you know,

01:05:33.380 | don't try to use the internet for meaning,

01:05:35.780 | for decency, for goodness,

01:05:37.740 | because we are going to find out

01:05:39.220 | that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy

01:05:41.900 | and we will make you suffer.

01:05:44.540 | So I do think that there's a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy

01:05:47.940 | in the world, some of it mine, some of it yours,

01:05:50.940 | but we all have it.

01:05:52.260 | And the trolls somewhat remove that,

01:05:55.420 | but it's not a judicious, kind, constructive,

01:05:57.820 | compassionate, caring version most of the time.

01:06:00.420 | And a lot of those trolls,

01:06:01.780 | and I have this feeling about Michael Malice,

01:06:03.700 | I don't know whether it's right,

01:06:05.660 | that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath it

01:06:09.020 | and that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior.

01:06:11.900 | And you and I don't seem to be doing that.

01:06:13.740 | I don't see you as almost ever trolling.

01:06:16.620 | - Yeah, you and I, I'm very much against trolling.

01:06:19.820 | - I'm very much against trolling.

01:06:21.540 | It doesn't mean that it's selective.

01:06:23.980 | No, it's not even true.

01:06:25.660 | Everything we say, we say, "I'm for it, I'm against it."

01:06:30.140 | This isn't my native language.

01:06:33.060 | I speak nuance, I don't speak this internet shit.

01:06:35.500 | And the more I have to communicate

01:06:39.820 | through internet shit, right?

01:06:41.420 | I almost never take a tweet seriously

01:06:44.380 | if it contains the letters LMAO, LOL, RTFL, FOL.

01:06:51.160 | - There's an interesting effect where people say stuff

01:06:54.400 | and then finish with LOL.

01:06:56.360 | You put it beautifully that it indicates to me

01:06:59.720 | that this is a person,

01:07:00.840 | we've talked about why I wear this stupid suit.

01:07:03.320 | It's like, this is to fight the LOL at the end of sentences.

01:07:07.960 | Stand up for the words you're saying.

01:07:11.960 | Don't finish stuff with LOL,

01:07:14.700 | removing completely the responsibility

01:07:16.640 | of the content of the sentence that preceded it.

01:07:19.480 | - Yeah, also, choosing the outfit that worked both

01:07:22.600 | for Men in Black and the Blues Brothers,

01:07:24.520 | not a terrible choice.

01:07:26.720 | Okay, but getting back, look, Lex,

01:07:29.000 | we're not in a position to do this.

01:07:31.100 | You need to be seated in a different chair.

01:07:34.580 | Your chair is the wrong chair.

01:07:37.120 | You're in the wrong chair.

01:07:39.080 | It's been so long.

01:07:40.580 | I wanna talk about you and Joe Biden.

01:07:46.720 | Joe Biden was a 29-year-old guy

01:07:49.400 | with nothing particular going on so far as I can tell.

01:07:52.820 | I know people as impressive at age 29 as Joe Biden,

01:07:59.460 | 12 rows back, 3D, doesn't matter, huge number of people.

01:08:05.840 | None of them my age can get to where he got to.

01:08:09.360 | Like, we're all morons.

01:08:10.600 | Anytime somebody takes out,

01:08:14.840 | like if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop,

01:08:17.600 | you'd be angry.

01:08:19.960 | What is this guy doing repairing guitars?

01:08:23.940 | Then somebody would say, "Maybe he loves to repair guitars."

01:08:29.160 | - Yeah, I mean, what is your Russian piano tuner doing?

01:08:32.280 | - What is my Russian piano,

01:08:33.640 | that was the whole point of that story,

01:08:35.640 | which is what is it that happened in that life

01:08:40.560 | that converted somebody?

01:08:41.720 | And I find this, for example, with Russian doctors

01:08:44.840 | who are technicians in offices now.

01:08:47.620 | There's a huge amount of talent in the world

01:08:52.400 | that's not sitting in its proper seat.

01:08:54.840 | And quite honestly, I've gotten to the point

01:08:59.520 | where my feeling is we've got to take the seats.

01:09:01.920 | - Right.

01:09:05.800 | - Maybe we don't sit in them.

01:09:06.840 | Maybe the idea is that we take the seats

01:09:08.480 | and we put some smart Gen Z person in the seat

01:09:11.360 | and say, "Look, no chanting.

01:09:14.560 | "I don't wanna hear you say, 'No justice, no peace.'"

01:09:17.400 | If there aren't verbs, if it rhymes, it's wrong.

01:09:21.880 | Like I used to have this thing,

01:09:23.440 | if it rhymes, things that rhyme are more true.

01:09:26.320 | But in general, if something starts out one, two, three,

01:09:29.920 | four, I don't wanna hear what the rest of your sentence is.

01:09:32.120 | - Yeah.

01:09:32.960 | But I feel like the responsibility that you carry,

01:09:38.240 | that I carry, this is where Joe Rogan

01:09:42.400 | generally removes himself from being,

01:09:44.680 | I'm just a comedian.

01:09:45.960 | This idea of I'm just a comedian.

01:09:47.840 | - We all do that.

01:09:49.360 | - But at this moment in history,

01:09:52.520 | like history literally can pivot

01:09:55.240 | on the words of a tattooed,

01:09:57.720 | ripped 50-year-old comedian.

01:10:04.280 | And I think the same is true with you.

01:10:07.240 | - Okay, well, I'm interested and I care.

01:10:10.400 | Speaking of lyrics, there are many here among us

01:10:14.500 | who feel that life has been a joke.

01:10:17.040 | That's not us.

01:10:18.440 | The hour is getting late.

01:10:19.400 | That's not us.

01:10:20.800 | In the song, the joker and the thief

01:10:23.320 | are on opposite sides of Jesus

01:10:24.800 | having this conversation over Jesus.

01:10:26.640 | You and I, we've been through that.

01:10:28.960 | That's not our fate.

01:10:30.000 | That's somebody else's fate

01:10:31.120 | to throw spitballs at the internet.

01:10:33.480 | That's not your fate.

01:10:34.640 | You're an earnest guy.

01:10:35.860 | You're filled with love.

01:10:36.840 | You're getting the most amazing podcast guests.

01:10:39.320 | Broadcasting-- - But you can win over

01:10:40.160 | the internet.

01:10:41.000 | This is the point I'm trying to make.

01:10:42.240 | That you're saying I'm just a grandpa.

01:10:44.840 | I don't get internet.

01:10:45.680 | - No, no, I'm telling you you're gonna get bigger

01:10:47.280 | and then you're gonna get cut down.

01:10:49.280 | You're gonna keep ascending for a while, Lex.

01:10:52.080 | - And then you're saying naturally there's--

01:10:53.760 | - I'm telling you, I watch the same process.

01:10:55.760 | People get up to a certain level

01:10:57.940 | and one of the things that's going on,

01:10:59.240 | in my opinion, with Joe Rogan

01:11:01.440 | is that when Joe Rogan starts to talk

01:11:03.960 | about his misgivings about Joe Biden

01:11:06.800 | in a way that you find at any bar in America

01:11:09.800 | about cognitive decline in a 77-year-old

01:11:13.520 | who's about to be 78, I believe in November,

01:11:16.460 | we have never had anything remotely as insane

01:11:20.320 | as a 78-year-old person slated to win the White House.

01:11:25.320 | - And you're saying when that idea

01:11:28.320 | is being communicated,

01:11:29.920 | there's something about the disc concept

01:11:32.040 | that you talk about the system naturally starts to--

01:11:33.760 | - Some bad thing happens to Joe

01:11:35.400 | or one of Joe's close associates.

01:11:37.400 | The ability to destroy people who become inconvenient

01:11:42.840 | has been documented.

01:11:44.200 | This is what we have done in the past.

01:11:47.200 | Whether we are doing it now, we don't know

01:11:49.120 | because we are not doing this Church Committee II.

01:11:52.960 | In order to know whether or not

01:11:54.520 | you are currently destroying American citizens

01:11:57.040 | as we did in the past and as we have documented

01:11:59.360 | and as we found out in 1976,

01:12:03.280 | the federal government destroyed Americans

01:12:05.560 | who had political beliefs

01:12:07.440 | that the government didn't want to continue.

01:12:11.400 | And I don't know whether you are grasping that.

01:12:14.900 | One interpretation of why Jon Stewart

01:12:17.960 | and why Joe Rogan and why Bill Maher,

01:12:21.440 | all these people to some extent hide behind,

01:12:23.880 | it's a joke.

01:12:24.800 | It's because they're trying to find a protected class.

01:12:29.200 | Is there someplace I can stand and speak the truth

01:12:32.680 | which does not result in my being garbage collected?

01:12:35.620 | - Interesting.

01:12:37.360 | I guess you're right.

01:12:38.380 | My intuition is you can stand.

01:12:40.460 | As you gain more power, you can stand behind your--

01:12:46.920 | - There's a fight over Joe Rogan right now.

01:12:49.600 | I mean, I've talked about it for a few years now.

01:12:52.740 | People did not understand how big that program was.

01:12:55.560 | People didn't understand long-form podcasting.

01:12:57.520 | I was derided by people who I think of as being very shrewd

01:13:02.720 | for believing in these podcasts as a major force.

01:13:07.360 | And most of the people who derided me have said,

01:13:09.200 | wow, did I not get things?

01:13:11.440 | It's like if you started to propose,

01:13:13.320 | you wanted to do The Sopranos

01:13:17.440 | in the era of 30-minute sitcoms.

01:13:20.520 | You don't get it, man.

01:13:22.840 | The American people,

01:13:23.680 | they're not interested in these long plot storylines.

01:13:25.920 | That's your weird thing?

01:13:27.180 | Nobody cares, dude.

01:13:28.880 | Everybody just wants short, fast, memorable.

01:13:31.880 | And like, okay, so if you do that,

01:13:33.960 | you totally miss the opportunity.

01:13:35.440 | And the savvy people used to say,

01:13:38.160 | kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime

01:13:40.160 | underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

01:13:43.000 | Well, that was totally wrong

01:13:44.200 | 'cause they didn't calculate opportunity costs.

01:13:46.880 | I have been talking about the problem of Joe

01:13:49.480 | for a long time.

01:13:50.600 | The problem is is that when the system wakes up,

01:13:54.000 | they're gonna wanna control it.

01:13:55.560 | - And they have different,

01:13:57.400 | they come up with new different mechanisms of doing that.

01:13:59.920 | I guess one interesting one is cancel culture.

01:14:03.220 | - Well, look at the number of people around Joe

01:14:05.640 | who they've come after

01:14:06.560 | since they realized that Joe was really big.

01:14:09.480 | Joey Diaz, Brian Callan, Chris D'Elia.

01:14:14.480 | Now, I'm not saying that those are all related,

01:14:22.960 | but I do notice that there are at least correlations

01:14:27.960 | between when Joe says something

01:14:30.000 | when something bad happens in Joe's universe.

01:14:33.320 | It's easier for me to believe that that's happening

01:14:36.320 | when it's happening around Joe himself.

01:14:39.520 | - Yeah.

01:14:40.360 | - But I'm worried about my friend.

01:14:42.540 | - Yeah.

01:14:44.560 | - And I don't necessarily wanna push him

01:14:46.680 | towards being more if he doesn't want it

01:14:48.840 | because I don't think, I don't wanna conscript people.

01:14:51.800 | He's got a great life, he's got a great situation,

01:14:53.920 | he's done a huge service.

01:14:56.240 | Thank God, do you know,

01:14:57.440 | how much do I owe Joe just for what he's done for you

01:15:01.800 | to say nothing of what he's done for me

01:15:03.440 | or for Brett or for Sam or any of these people?

01:15:06.720 | And I'd like to think that we all try to give back,

01:15:10.680 | but I'm worried about Joe.

01:15:12.920 | He's not worried.

01:15:15.120 | - One of the inspiring things about Joe is,

01:15:18.640 | I mean, he's in this war alone

01:15:21.560 | and the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life.

01:15:25.800 | - Well, that's his thing.

01:15:26.640 | As long as he stays close to things that he loves

01:15:29.120 | and being, you know, one of the things,

01:15:30.680 | he's honest about his drug use.

01:15:32.760 | He loves to hunt.

01:15:34.760 | So he's just, he does a certain amount

01:15:36.440 | of like semi-vice signaling up front.

01:15:39.480 | And then you just also know him.

01:15:41.520 | This is why every time they try to take him down,

01:15:43.640 | you use the N word, you know?

01:15:45.840 | It's like, unfortunately, everybody knows who Joe is

01:15:50.840 | and yes, he doesn't act as if he went

01:15:55.160 | to a fancy finishing school, right?

01:15:58.400 | That's not his energy.

01:16:00.120 | The fact that you've got some super smart guy

01:16:02.240 | who always pretends to be a meathead,

01:16:04.200 | just like, you know, hey, I'm a comedian,

01:16:06.640 | like all these defenses and disguises.

01:16:08.640 | Okay, you've got this super smart guy

01:16:11.000 | who he's admitted to most of the things

01:16:14.400 | that you can take him down for

01:16:17.000 | and because everybody's been effectively

01:16:18.960 | in his den or his basement.

01:16:20.680 | Think about that studio as his basement.

01:16:23.040 | People have hung out with Joe so many hours

01:16:24.960 | that you can't tell them something about Joe

01:16:26.840 | where they're gonna say, wow, I'm gonna believe

01:16:28.040 | the New York Times and not the hundreds of hours

01:16:30.680 | I've spent on the Joe Rogan experience.

01:16:32.080 | - But the cool thing is that, this is what inspires me,

01:16:35.240 | is that the way he's waging war against the system,

01:16:37.960 | it's just by being a good person

01:16:40.640 | and talking enough hours in a week

01:16:44.640 | where that message like bleeds throughout the words

01:16:48.720 | and the gaps between.

01:16:49.960 | And that's so inspiring to me

01:16:51.880 | that the good people can win by just being good.

01:16:55.000 | - And he's kind and he's tough and he also,

01:16:59.160 | he's no pushover.

01:17:00.360 | - No.

01:17:02.080 | - I always worry a little bit when I sit down in my chair.

01:17:05.400 | - You still get scared that he'll call you

01:17:07.520 | on some kind of bullshit that you weren't even aware of?

01:17:09.680 | - No, the first time I was on the show,

01:17:12.160 | the energy wasn't great between us

01:17:14.440 | and it was in a sober October situation.

01:17:16.520 | So I think I hadn't understood that

01:17:18.120 | and maybe our egos got a little bit off.

01:17:20.200 | I don't know, I mean, I was having fun

01:17:25.480 | but maybe it was just too complicated life forms

01:17:28.680 | getting to know each other.

01:17:29.600 | The first one was probably,

01:17:32.720 | yeah, it made me a little nervous for the future.

01:17:37.640 | But then Joe and I become friends,

01:17:40.520 | although sometimes we have miscommunications.

01:17:42.480 | Like on Yom Kippur, I texted him and I said,

01:17:46.000 | "Joe, I wanna apologize for ways I've let you down

01:17:50.120 | as a friend and haven't been there for you

01:17:51.920 | and appreciate everything you've done for me."

01:17:54.760 | Like I get this text back,

01:17:56.400 | what the fuck is your problem?

01:17:57.960 | (laughing)

01:17:59.000 | You're great, dude.

01:18:00.000 | I don't know what bad place you're in, but cheer up.

01:18:02.360 | It's like, Joe, don't you have any Jews in your life?

01:18:05.560 | Apologize for what they've done.

01:18:07.640 | He was just like, dude, have you lost your mind?

01:18:09.640 | What the hell's gotten into you?

01:18:12.840 | - Yeah, what do you think about the Spotify thing?

01:18:17.720 | - What about it?

01:18:18.560 | Ask me a question.

01:18:19.400 | - He's now, as opposed to being just a comedian

01:18:23.160 | with a podcast, he now is just a comedian with a podcast

01:18:26.880 | who stepped in the middle of the center of cancel culture,

01:18:31.400 | which is like, I know Spotify is in Sweden,

01:18:33.880 | but they represent Silicon Valley.

01:18:37.120 | They represent the very kind of structures

01:18:40.900 | they contain and represent the kind of structures

01:18:43.680 | that threaten to destroy the Elons of the world.

01:18:47.180 | And he just like stepped, like with his Alex Jones

01:18:52.560 | and his Joey Diaz, just strolled right into the middle of it.

01:18:57.560 | - I think it's awesome.

01:18:58.920 | I love it.

01:18:59.920 | - But do you think he's strong enough to, I don't know.

01:19:04.440 | I mean, I don't even know the right way to ask this,

01:19:06.400 | but is he strong enough to persevere?

01:19:08.960 | - It's a bit interesting.

01:19:10.040 | It's like when a lion decides, wow,

01:19:13.080 | that honey badger looks tasty.

01:19:14.520 | I'm gonna swallow it whole, see what happens.

01:19:17.280 | - 'Cause I talked to him offline.

01:19:18.880 | He really seems to be willing to give away the 100 million,

01:19:22.320 | which gives him so much power.

01:19:24.080 | - Oh, I don't.

01:19:27.040 | - It's a powerful thing to be able to say,

01:19:29.400 | I don't, yeah, to the honey badger.

01:19:32.440 | He just strolls in, but he's willing to walk away

01:19:35.480 | from anything in this world.

01:19:36.320 | - Well, he's gonna walk out the other side of the lion.

01:19:38.640 | I don't think he's gonna go out the way he came in.

01:19:40.800 | - Yeah.

01:19:41.640 | - Well, you know what it is?

01:19:42.600 | It's Tommy Lee Jones entering the bug.

01:19:44.780 | - This is like a giant alien, he just walks into it?

01:19:48.600 | - He gets swallowed by the bug

01:19:49.800 | and he blasts out from the inside.

01:19:52.060 | I have it as Tommy Lee Jones.

01:19:53.720 | - Yeah, but anyway, Joe Rogan to you.

01:19:55.720 | - Yeah, is that my feeling is that Spotify

01:19:58.080 | doesn't understand what they're messing with.

01:19:59.640 | I could be wrong, but I'm not.

01:20:02.000 | - No, you're right.

01:20:02.840 | - I'm right.

01:20:03.680 | (laughing)

01:20:05.080 | Because Joe doesn't need anything, man.

01:20:07.100 | I mean, this is the weird thing about it.

01:20:08.800 | It's like, I'm sure that he loves all his toys, whatever,

01:20:10.880 | blah, blah, blah, he's a rich guy.

01:20:12.740 | Yes, he's got FU money.

01:20:14.200 | He had FU money a long time ago.

01:20:16.720 | And you're not, you know, the other thing about,

01:20:21.260 | it's a bit weird being friends with a dude like that.

01:20:23.720 | It just is, 'cause like, you call him up,

01:20:26.240 | or he'll call you up and he's like,

01:20:28.040 | what's going on in your life?

01:20:28.880 | And you're like, I don't know, kind of depressed,

01:20:31.080 | trying to get some math done, what are you up?

01:20:33.520 | Oh, dude, I can cheer you up, I just came off

01:20:35.480 | of a 29,000 person stadium.

01:20:38.620 | It's like, oh, cool, how'd you do that?

01:20:40.880 | Oh, I don't know, I just announced it on Instagram

01:20:42.560 | a few days ago and it filled up.

01:20:44.600 | Just like, oh, damn.

01:20:46.940 | - Yeah.

01:20:48.600 | - I mean, that thing is powerful.

01:20:49.420 | - So much love in that guy.

01:20:50.260 | - That thing is so powerful.

01:20:51.100 | - Yeah, so there you go.

01:20:52.040 | I mean, you could be that too.

01:20:54.400 | - The instant Joe takes an interest in politics

01:20:57.460 | and saving the world.

01:20:58.300 | - You might destroy all of that.

01:20:59.800 | - It's going bye-bye, I promise you.

01:21:02.200 | - I just disagree with you.

01:21:04.040 | I mean, 'cause you have to do it,

01:21:05.960 | like you've said this many times before.

01:21:07.800 | - I'll bet you, I'll bet you a bottle of Stoli

01:21:11.760 | that you can get, if you get Joe Rogan

01:21:14.860 | to get highly politically active and call out the system

01:21:17.640 | for all the bullshit that it is in a very pointed

01:21:19.960 | and determined fashion, and he doesn't get destroyed,

01:21:24.760 | I'll give you the vodka.

01:21:26.360 | - The vodka?

01:21:27.200 | - Yeah.

01:21:28.020 | - That sounds like a pretty damn good deal.

01:21:29.440 | So, but you've said this, I mean--

01:21:32.360 | - No living heroes, my friend.

01:21:33.960 | No living heroes.

01:21:36.520 | No living heroes.

01:21:39.360 | - It's just difficult, you just have to be good at it.

01:21:42.400 | I mean, if you just say generic political things--

01:21:45.040 | - No, no.

01:21:45.880 | - You're going to be taken down, but if you're--

01:21:48.280 | - The more heroic you are, the more beautiful you are,

01:21:52.620 | the more you will be made to suffer.

01:21:54.880 | If they cannot get you on reputation,

01:21:56.640 | if Jesus himself came down, I don't know if I ever read,

01:22:00.580 | I probably have never read to you the hit piece

01:22:02.700 | I did on Jesus.

01:22:04.640 | You don't know about this?

01:22:05.480 | - No, I do not know about this.

01:22:06.320 | - I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world.

01:22:09.900 | - Wow.

01:22:11.060 | - So whoever it was who cured cancer,

01:22:14.160 | discovered new particles, whatever it is,

01:22:16.900 | I did a hit piece against them to prove

01:22:18.640 | that I can do it to anybody around anything at any time.

01:22:22.720 | - Except Eddie Van Halen is who we're talking about.

01:22:24.880 | - Well, Eddie Van Halen is now dead,

01:22:26.620 | but if this was a situation, you know,

01:22:30.120 | hot for teacher, canceled.

01:22:33.120 | - Disrespectful.

01:22:35.080 | - Absolutely.

01:22:36.300 | Also, you know, packaging female objectification

01:22:43.480 | for young men, clearly Eddie Van Halen

01:22:46.040 | is one of the worst people alive.

01:22:47.680 | - But the skill, the incredible inspiration

01:22:52.680 | that is just radiating from his music

01:22:55.760 | inspires so many millions that they will fight

01:22:58.100 | those canceled pieces, they will fight those.

01:23:00.080 | - This is your thing.

01:23:01.280 | You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil

01:23:03.640 | and the good has already been designated the winner.

01:23:07.000 | And it's not true.

01:23:08.400 | But your belief that it's true.

01:23:11.560 | - Take it till you make it, no?

01:23:13.100 | I mean, you gotta--

01:23:14.800 | - It's motivating both of us.

01:23:16.600 | Like I also believe that we're gonna win

01:23:18.520 | because if I don't, then I can't get out of bed

01:23:20.240 | and it's pretty heavy at the moment.

01:23:22.140 | - Do you think 2021 can make us feel good

01:23:27.140 | about the trajectory of society?

01:23:31.140 | So like where we emerge from this year feeling good.

01:23:36.060 | Like there's a smile on Eric Kwanza's face

01:23:38.540 | and the next time we talk,

01:23:40.380 | we'll be doing some kind of duet on guitar

01:23:42.820 | and not having this worried look on our faces.

01:23:45.980 | - No.

01:23:48.460 | - Okay, but you've also promised

01:23:51.500 | you're going to somehow end this in a positive.

01:23:53.860 | A positive, so okay.

01:23:55.700 | So how do you turn the no around?

01:23:57.660 | What's the U-turn from the no?

01:23:59.380 | - Until we get some actually decent people

01:24:03.100 | in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking

01:24:06.260 | about their next paycheck, I don't see a solution.

01:24:09.400 | Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are

01:24:13.300 | and to let you know why I don't think it's coming.

01:24:15.800 | First of all, both of these political parties,

01:24:21.420 | the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go.

01:24:24.620 | They're tearing us apart.

01:24:26.660 | They lack the will to be Americans.

01:24:28.940 | They don't understand the subtlety of the project.

01:24:32.220 | They're simply the people who figured out

01:24:34.100 | how to inhabit the seats

01:24:35.620 | and that is their great achievement.

01:24:37.660 | I believe that in order to solve this,

01:24:43.820 | you need people who can integrate,

01:24:45.340 | who are not partisan at the level

01:24:47.540 | of the partisan warriors that we're seeing.

01:24:50.100 | People who believe in dividing the pies of the future

01:24:52.600 | rather than the present pie as our main task as Americans

01:24:56.380 | because we are built around growth.

01:24:58.040 | I'm sorry to say it.

01:24:59.100 | You need an ability to have subtle conversations

01:25:06.180 | and you need the ability to exclude.

01:25:08.020 | And at the moment, everyone knows inclusion is good,

01:25:13.320 | which it isn't.

01:25:14.540 | It's like saying, well, water is good.

01:25:16.220 | If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me.

01:25:18.820 | It's not.

01:25:20.020 | People drown.

01:25:20.860 | People need to get dehydrated.

01:25:24.620 | It can be life-saving or life-ending.

01:25:26.780 | It isn't good or bad.

01:25:28.460 | Inclusion is not good or bad.

01:25:30.340 | Inclusion is just inclusion.

01:25:31.740 | Exclusion is part of inclusion.

01:25:33.660 | We've taught people that they can reason through the world

01:25:37.780 | as sub-cocker Spaniels.

01:25:43.960 | They just bark things at each other.

01:25:45.900 | I'm for safety.

01:25:48.540 | I'm for inclusion.

01:25:49.780 | I'm for growth.

01:25:51.140 | Oh, really?

01:25:52.540 | Do you guys use verbs?

01:25:54.180 | Dependent clauses?

01:25:55.660 | Are there compound complex sentences?

01:25:57.340 | Where are we in this sea of nonsense?

01:26:01.040 | You have to be able to build a place

01:26:03.980 | where you have smart, talented people

01:26:06.460 | who represent a diverse group of correct opinions.

01:26:10.740 | You need to get rid of almost all of the people

01:26:13.260 | who have opinions that are antithetical

01:26:15.260 | to what we're trying to accomplish.

01:26:17.700 | You need to give them insulation,

01:26:19.660 | which we're terrified because we don't trust anybody,

01:26:21.860 | so everything has to be transparent.

01:26:23.340 | If you're going to the bathroom,

01:26:24.340 | I want those walls to be plexiglass

01:26:25.860 | so I can see what you're doing.

01:26:27.060 | It's like, that's too much transparency.

01:26:29.340 | We have too much and not enough at the same time.

01:26:32.500 | And then, in essence, you need to ensure

01:26:36.700 | that people aren't worried about feeding their family

01:26:39.260 | every four seconds for being real.

01:26:41.180 | None of that is happening.

01:26:43.580 | And our billionaires, our billionaires are pathetic.

01:26:47.300 | What is the point of billionaires

01:26:49.000 | if you're not going to do billionaire-type cool stuff

01:26:52.020 | like saying, F you, and I'm going to throw

01:26:56.340 | three billion dollars at the project

01:26:58.660 | of restoring the national conversation?

01:27:02.780 | I don't grasp this.

01:27:06.780 | What is the point of creating obscene wealth

01:27:09.100 | if we don't have anyone smart enough

01:27:10.540 | and caring enough to use it?

01:27:12.900 | - So I agree with that last part for sure.

01:27:16.140 | Let me slightly push back on the idea

01:27:20.480 | that the leaders themselves are broken.

01:27:22.840 | I feel like, this goes to the Joe Rogan,

01:27:27.100 | Joe Biden and Trump having a debate on that program.

01:27:31.920 | I feel like Joe Biden has a lot of really interesting ideas

01:27:36.920 | that he's almost forgot how to communicate.

01:27:40.640 | He's been fake for so long within the system.

01:27:44.100 | - Hillary was fake for too long.

01:27:45.480 | I'm sure she had real ideas at the beginning

01:27:47.440 | that she still was campaigning on decades later.

01:27:50.560 | - But if the system, if the platforms

01:27:54.120 | empowered you to search, to be honest, to be real,

01:27:56.720 | to search for those ideas within yourself

01:27:59.520 | like long-form conversations do,

01:28:02.560 | then even the Donald Trump and Joe Biden leaders

01:28:05.840 | we have now would take this country to a better place

01:28:10.600 | that would unite people.

01:28:12.800 | So we can keep the current Congress,

01:28:15.440 | we just need to create better platforms.

01:28:17.680 | This is going to the intuition

01:28:19.040 | that there's good in Donald Trump.

01:28:21.360 | There's depth and complexity and intelligence.

01:28:24.400 | And the same with Joe Biden.

01:28:26.200 | - There's good in Joe Biden.

01:28:28.040 | - And it's just, we're not incentivizing.

01:28:30.260 | I mean, there's several things I think are broken.

01:28:34.960 | One of them is Twitter, the other is journalism.

01:28:38.040 | It's just the platforms of us communicating with each other.

01:28:41.440 | - One of the reasons that I try to come up

01:28:43.200 | with unifying explanations is that,

01:28:45.760 | if you look at the number of wildfires in California,

01:28:49.600 | let's say, that we've just seen,

01:28:51.880 | if you treat them all as spontaneous, uncorrelated instances,

01:28:56.400 | it feels like, oh my God, it's just whack-a-mole.

01:28:58.600 | Every time I send a fire truck here,

01:29:00.580 | there's a fire over there.

01:29:02.080 | So you want to come up with something like a central theory,

01:29:06.040 | which is why do I suddenly have a problem

01:29:07.840 | when I hadn't had a problem before?

01:29:09.960 | So I look for these unifying explanations.

01:29:12.560 | And I found one the other day that really speaks to me.

01:29:15.480 | I mean, people are very frustrated

01:29:18.200 | because they've been trained to think about this

01:29:20.160 | incorrectly, in my opinion.

01:29:21.960 | But here's the graph that you need to look at.

01:29:25.160 | On the X-axis is time by year.

01:29:29.560 | And on the Y-axis is something like average age of a human.

01:29:35.640 | The title of the graph is

01:29:38.480 | Any Desirable Situation Involving Institutions.

01:29:42.380 | So that could be CEO.

01:29:46.140 | It could be tenured professor.

01:29:48.600 | It could be who's getting grants.

01:29:53.500 | It could be the age at which people win Nobel Prizes.

01:29:57.380 | University presidents, all these things go up.

01:30:04.260 | In other words, for a long period of time,

01:30:08.440 | the average age of the person in a desirable situation

01:30:12.420 | has been increasing something like nine months for every 12.

01:30:16.380 | Those graphs have to go down at some point.

01:30:22.060 | The specter of-- - It's brilliantly put.

01:30:24.300 | - Of having five people all born in the 1940s

01:30:28.180 | as the final entrance in the presidential context.

01:30:33.180 | That makes no sense.

01:30:36.300 | Think about how bizarre a thing

01:30:38.540 | that nobody's even really talking about.

01:30:40.440 | The last five people were all ancient

01:30:44.600 | by presidential standards.

01:30:47.060 | Not one, not two, but five.

01:30:49.620 | We are talking about a contest between somebody

01:30:54.040 | who is the oldest of the baby boomers,

01:30:56.540 | the very beginning of the baby boom, summer of '46 birthday,

01:31:01.200 | fighting somebody who is in the silent generation.

01:31:05.060 | The silent generation guy at a town hall in Florida

01:31:08.800 | gets this question from a Gen Z guy saying,

01:31:11.480 | what's going on with my future?

01:31:14.080 | Joe Biden has the audacity to say,

01:31:18.200 | I'm a transitional president.

01:31:20.000 | You guys are the highly educated one.

01:31:21.960 | When has any generation in history

01:31:25.180 | needed a transitional 78-year-old person to take office?

01:31:29.400 | It's bizarre, it's preposterous.

01:31:31.340 | That graph is the graph we can't talk about.

01:31:35.180 | That graph is the graph of our destruction.

01:31:38.340 | Because it has the, you can make a one-line argument,

01:31:44.580 | which is, sounds like ageism,

01:31:46.820 | which isn't a very good argument.

01:31:50.380 | No, but what it does is it muddles the conversation.

01:31:54.600 | And you always have to ask yourself the question,

01:31:56.680 | if this conversation becomes muddled,

01:31:58.700 | who wins as a result of the muddling?

01:32:01.480 | - Well, it's a battle, but let's just win it.

01:32:04.160 | Let's win the battle.

01:32:05.440 | You give-- - Are you running?

01:32:07.440 | - For sure, I'll run.

01:32:09.360 | I was born in Russia, can't run.

01:32:11.160 | So, but we Russians can hack elections,

01:32:13.880 | so we'll figure it out.

01:32:15.640 | This is me officially announcing my run for president.

01:32:17.640 | - I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida.

01:32:20.520 | (laughing)

01:32:23.120 | - Yeah.

01:32:23.960 | - Lex, what is it that you really wanna ask?

01:32:25.840 | - I think, I wanna put some responsibility on the portal.

01:32:30.040 | - On the portal. - The portal.

01:32:32.740 | That the portal gives power to the people in that graph.

01:32:37.740 | 'Cause you put it quite brilliantly

01:32:41.140 | that the people that move the world,

01:32:44.700 | their age has been going up.

01:32:46.220 | And not move the world, but put in the position

01:32:49.780 | where they get the chance to affect the world.

01:32:52.160 | These new platforms, I think Twitter falls in them,

01:32:57.780 | give power to the younger people.

01:33:00.260 | It doesn't have to be about age necessarily,

01:33:01.980 | but the younger thinking people.

01:33:04.140 | So, that's a promising thing.

01:33:06.740 | And you are like, you're like Gandalf.

01:33:09.220 | You get to pick your Frodo's, or whatever.

01:33:11.920 | I'm not very good with the analogy,

01:33:14.180 | but the whole point is for you as Gandalf--

01:33:16.220 | - I don't know that I make that much sense.

01:33:18.120 | Gandalf makes sense.

01:33:20.060 | I don't know if people know how to fit me

01:33:22.360 | into this ecosystem.

01:33:24.080 | I think there's something in my presentation

01:33:26.460 | that people find very confusing.

01:33:27.700 | - No, figure it out.

01:33:28.540 | I disagree with you, but you need to look at the mirror

01:33:30.900 | and think like, what is it?

01:33:32.940 | Maybe you need a mustache, I don't know.

01:33:36.940 | (laughing)

01:33:38.480 | But there's something about figuring out

01:33:41.920 | how to be a charismatic communicator in this.

01:33:43.780 | And that's the responsibility.

01:33:45.260 | You said like finishing sentences with the LOL

01:33:48.660 | is painful for your soul.

01:33:50.100 | - Yeah, that's just how somebody lets me know

01:33:52.180 | I don't have to take their opinion seriously.

01:33:54.580 | - Yeah, it's still the language,

01:33:56.820 | the way that people are communicating.

01:33:58.380 | And you're swimming that wave.

01:33:59.500 | You have a big platform.

01:34:01.540 | I have a growing platform.

01:34:02.700 | It feels like this is the place to give power.

01:34:05.300 | - I agree, but we're gonna get swatted down.

01:34:07.480 | - I just don't think so.

01:34:08.560 | - You're wrong.

01:34:09.400 | - Why are you afraid of the big, like this is--

01:34:11.260 | - 'Cause I've studied it.

01:34:13.140 | Because I've studied, let me ask you a question, Lex.

01:34:17.200 | I believe that every society is supposed to have

01:34:21.860 | a collection of what I call break glass

01:34:25.540 | in case of emergency people.

01:34:27.160 | - Yeah.

01:34:29.580 | - These are people who are universally loved

01:34:31.580 | and trusted by your society.

01:34:33.100 | For example, David Attenborough,

01:34:35.540 | the great British naturalist and presenter,

01:34:39.300 | recently came on Instagram.

01:34:40.700 | He's worried about the planet.

01:34:42.160 | And I said, look, there are very few of these people left.

01:34:46.580 | Let's pay attention, find out what he has to say.

01:34:48.420 | Maybe he's gonna be an ass.

01:34:49.700 | Maybe he's gonna be an idiot.

01:34:50.540 | Maybe he's gonna say wrong things.

01:34:51.540 | Don't know.

01:34:52.660 | Tell me about your top 10 universal American heroes.

01:34:56.420 | - This is not a rhetorical question.

01:34:58.900 | - No.

01:35:00.460 | Give me five.

01:35:02.020 | Everybody looks to that person and says,

01:35:03.900 | yep, the best of us.

01:35:05.640 | - Well, not divisive.

01:35:07.820 | Well, everybody's an interesting concept.

01:35:11.500 | I mean, Elon Musk is very divisive, right?

01:35:15.100 | - I'm talking about overwhelmingly people

01:35:16.940 | would follow that person if that person gave

01:35:20.580 | a rousing, intelligent speech that said,

01:35:24.380 | we must act now because we're in dire straits.

01:35:27.380 | - I think a lot of people fall in that category.

01:35:30.020 | For me, it would be in the tech world,

01:35:33.940 | in the engineering world.

01:35:34.780 | - No, no, no, no.

01:35:35.620 | Tell me names.

01:35:36.440 | - Elon Musk.

01:35:37.280 | - Elon Musk.

01:35:38.120 | - The Rock.

01:35:42.040 | I'm thinking like, who is the most eloquent actor?

01:35:45.860 | So like, you think celebrities.

01:35:47.300 | So people with platforms.

01:35:48.140 | - I didn't say celebrities.

01:35:48.980 | - No, but-- - You have to be well known.

01:35:50.140 | - I believe like, yeah, so this goes to Joe Rogan.

01:35:55.140 | - First two did not really impress me

01:36:02.140 | as being what I said, but okay.

01:36:03.880 | Elon several years ago would have.

01:36:08.260 | - Can you try to--

01:36:10.340 | - Joe Rogan--

01:36:11.180 | - Why do they fail?

01:36:12.340 | Why is Elon--

01:36:13.420 | - Lots of people treat Joe Rogan as if he's

01:36:16.060 | some sort of right-wing racist because

01:36:18.060 | they've never watched his program.

01:36:19.680 | They don't know who his friends are.

01:36:20.700 | I don't know.

01:36:22.060 | - Oh, but when I thought you said everybody,

01:36:24.860 | I thought you meant a large enough people

01:36:29.220 | where a huge change can happen,

01:36:31.160 | not actually literally everybody.

01:36:33.620 | Because I think--

01:36:34.460 | - I mean people who've pulled off,

01:36:35.700 | like people who've pulled off something

01:36:38.580 | where everybody's convinced that that person just deeply,

01:36:41.760 | I mean, I think I've told you this story before,

01:36:47.060 | but the one time I've seen the power of a figure like this,

01:36:52.060 | I mean, very few times I've been in a large crowd

01:36:56.360 | and I've seen people just moved where they would do

01:36:59.320 | almost anything good, bad, and different

01:37:01.120 | because they were primed.

01:37:03.000 | One was a Rolling Stones concert.

01:37:07.440 | The other one was Nelson Mandela coming to Boston.

01:37:10.880 | And man, you've never seen anything like this.

01:37:14.760 | You check out the photos from the banks

01:37:16.320 | of the Charles River when Nelson Mandela came.

01:37:19.080 | There are people that you need in your dark hours

01:37:24.760 | and we can't agree on who they are.

01:37:26.120 | And as soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit.

01:37:29.400 | We get out the shit brush.

01:37:31.420 | - Yeah, I just disagree with you.

01:37:32.560 | So I think--

01:37:33.960 | - What do we disagree about here?

01:37:35.720 | - I think it doesn't matter who it is.

01:37:37.560 | I think really good speeches are needed.

01:37:40.600 | And I think a lot--

01:37:41.440 | - Great, who's gonna give them?

01:37:42.620 | I saw Killer Mike try to give a good speech.

01:37:44.360 | - Yeah, he did.

01:37:45.200 | - In Atlanta, right?

01:37:47.000 | - Yeah, he did.

01:37:47.840 | - That was something.

01:37:49.360 | Very impressed.

01:37:51.040 | Even Killer Mike immediately gets into this, sell out!

01:37:54.860 | - Yeah, but he didn't take up the responsibility,

01:38:01.200 | I would say--

01:38:02.160 | - He didn't.

01:38:03.000 | - Of going bigger.

01:38:05.860 | So he was speaking to the community.

01:38:07.760 | - He was doing what he--

01:38:08.960 | - On this particular moment, he's exceptional at it.

01:38:11.280 | And he was speaking to this particular moment.

01:38:13.680 | He didn't take it a step farther,

01:38:16.240 | which is like giving the same speech,

01:38:21.240 | but bigger than race.

01:38:23.200 | Bigger than this particular moment,

01:38:25.880 | but more about the American project.

01:38:29.400 | - You know the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson?

01:38:31.640 | - Yes, yeah, there you go.

01:38:33.160 | That's a good example.

01:38:34.480 | - That guy, until we screw him up,

01:38:37.340 | is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.

01:38:40.240 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:38:41.080 | I mean, Jocko, maybe.

01:38:42.700 | - That's another--

01:38:43.560 | - Jocko's pretty good.

01:38:44.640 | Jocko is pretty good.

01:38:47.740 | Can't really tell, is he a Democrat, is he a Republican?

01:38:49.880 | I don't know.

01:38:50.720 | He's an American, that's for damn sure.

01:38:52.080 | - Yeah, and I think there's a lot of folks--

01:38:54.160 | - And then, no, I think Jocko, there aren't.

01:38:57.400 | That's one of the reasons why Jocko's so important.

01:38:59.400 | - That's so important, yeah.

01:39:00.740 | Your podcast, The Portal, is something,

01:39:04.480 | in my little universe,

01:39:06.840 | is something a lot of people really love.

01:39:09.880 | And it moves them.

01:39:11.240 | They draw a lot of meaning from it.

01:39:14.020 | And also, especially in difficult times.

01:39:16.880 | It gives them a comfort of,

01:39:22.760 | through this kind of, it's not just nuance.

01:39:26.000 | There's like, even when you're talking about chaos,

01:39:28.940 | there's love underneath all of it.

01:39:31.780 | And I think people draw a lot of meaning from it,

01:39:33.800 | which is why they are wondering why you haven't been doing

01:39:38.800 | that many podcasts, or you haven't done it in maybe

01:39:43.800 | a month and a half or two months,

01:39:46.220 | in this most difficult of times.

01:39:49.380 | Is there a good reason?

01:39:50.960 | - Yeah, there are lots of good reasons.

01:39:55.060 | So the first one is kind of weird,

01:39:58.620 | which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous.

01:40:01.620 | And if you say, I don't wanna be famous,

01:40:05.880 | it's like, oh, you're just saying that

01:40:06.960 | because you want everyone to think you're famous.

01:40:09.120 | You're not that famous!

01:40:09.960 | You know, okay.

01:40:10.800 | I don't love being as well-known as I've become.

01:40:16.820 | There's lots of things that are fun about it.

01:40:21.440 | It's wonderful that you can go to any city in the world,

01:40:24.440 | and there are Portal listeners there.

01:40:26.240 | All I need to do is put out a tweet,

01:40:28.840 | and 20 people show up for a drink.

01:40:30.800 | - And they're amazing people.

01:40:31.800 | - And they're almost, I mean, you can see my live Q&As

01:40:36.280 | on my Instagram page.

01:40:37.480 | If you go to Eric R. Weinstein,

01:40:38.840 | I just pick somebody randomly,

01:40:40.480 | and I was really worried about it at first.

01:40:43.080 | And maybe I should be worried about it,

01:40:45.600 | but in general, people all over the world

01:40:47.920 | are just so positive.

01:40:49.180 | - And thoughtful, and deep, and they have a story.

01:40:53.600 | - 'Cause they're self-selected, right?

01:40:55.640 | But I don't like the fame.

01:40:58.120 | - The thing we just described comes with the fame.

01:41:00.240 | It's a beautiful thing.

01:41:01.400 | You're worried that it's getting--

01:41:03.720 | - It's ephemeral.

01:41:05.680 | Look, Lex, it'll turn on you in a heartbeat.

01:41:09.240 | - Yeah.

01:41:10.120 | - It'll turn on you in a heartbeat.

01:41:11.760 | And the other problem is I don't like my audience

01:41:15.480 | being my audience.

01:41:16.960 | I wanna get closer to them.

01:41:18.080 | I wanna talk to them.

01:41:18.960 | I wanna find out what is this doing in your life?

01:41:21.040 | My house fills up with art that people send me.

01:41:24.720 | The latest thing is an effects pedal,

01:41:27.380 | called something like, I don't know,

01:41:28.220 | it's a Bowtie Overdrive from a guy in Mexico.

01:41:31.720 | (laughing)

01:41:32.760 | Right? - Yeah.

01:41:34.000 | - You play electric, by the way,

01:41:35.120 | in a tiny little tangent?

01:41:36.960 | You play electric?

01:41:37.920 | - I have a Stratocaster.

01:41:39.840 | But it doesn't have a strap,

01:41:41.000 | and I don't know what to do with it,

01:41:42.040 | and I have a bad amp.

01:41:43.000 | So you should hook me up with--

01:41:45.840 | - We'll find it a home, maybe.

01:41:48.280 | - Okay.

01:41:49.280 | - You're starting to sense that this is too much?

01:41:52.200 | - No, I wanna be here.

01:41:54.680 | I wanna do the work.

01:41:55.960 | Very simply.

01:41:57.840 | I don't have an ability to fully explain myself.

01:42:03.720 | I don't wanna claim that I don't love the fact that,

01:42:06.680 | how much love do we get for these programs?

01:42:09.240 | Generically, people are incredibly generous.

01:42:14.160 | People have begged me, set up a Patreon account.

01:42:19.040 | And I haven't been able to do it.

01:42:22.000 | I should do it.

01:42:23.040 | I've said to everybody, it's a business,

01:42:24.360 | it's a business, it's a business.

01:42:26.440 | But they're so used to being defrauded

01:42:28.960 | when somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives.

01:42:31.400 | My goal was to say, I'm gonna keep talking to you about,

01:42:34.520 | you wanna know why I started doing ads on my show?

01:42:36.760 | Was because I wanted people to think from the get-go,

01:42:40.480 | this is a business,

01:42:41.440 | this is what I sound like when I'm selling.

01:42:43.600 | But you know, like you see, I've lost weight.

01:42:47.800 | A lot of that is due to Athletic Greens.

01:42:51.080 | - Athletic Greens.

01:42:52.000 | Code, what's the--

01:42:56.720 | - I don't know what my promo code is for Athletic Greens.

01:42:59.760 | - Probably athleticgreens.com/portal.

01:43:01.840 | But it doesn't matter. - It's a slash portal.

01:43:03.560 | - But Fitbit, who doesn't advertise,

01:43:05.880 | has also been instrumental,

01:43:07.720 | as well as a guy named Steven Cates,

01:43:10.000 | who was a fan from the show,

01:43:12.360 | found me on the street and just said,

01:43:13.520 | "I'm a trainer, I wanna help train you."

01:43:15.120 | And it's got me on a good path.

01:43:18.320 | So that's one paid advertiser

01:43:20.840 | and two people that I'm calling out

01:43:22.920 | just because two outfits,

01:43:25.480 | Steven Cates and Fitbit, that have changed my life.

01:43:28.720 | I wanted people to say,

01:43:30.200 | you don't have to be afraid of advertising.

01:43:31.960 | If I do it in this way, this is powering your show.

01:43:36.240 | But the whole issue of money is weird

01:43:38.960 | because people have these crazy feelings like,

01:43:40.960 | "Oh wow, I knew he was a shill.

01:43:43.160 | He's a grifter."

01:43:44.960 | I didn't love that.

01:43:46.920 | I didn't love the issue.

01:43:48.080 | So I didn't set up a Patreon.

01:43:50.420 | The security issues for talking and being me are significant.

01:43:56.180 | And I don't have the kind of money to hire around the clock.

01:44:00.980 | I mean, I desperately want to get to a level of wealth

01:44:05.020 | where I don't have to think about money.

01:44:07.180 | I don't think it's, you know,

01:44:08.220 | some people want money because they need it for status.

01:44:12.300 | I think I can handle status if I want it doing this.

01:44:15.380 | I don't want the status necessarily.

01:44:18.420 | And I don't want, I'd want the status,

01:44:21.380 | but I don't want the fame that goes with it.

01:44:23.580 | I want the money.

01:44:25.540 | I don't want to be seen as this is about money

01:44:28.460 | 'cause it's about a substance.

01:44:30.020 | All of those things, that's part of,

01:44:34.860 | I haven't solved these issues.

01:44:36.740 | I've been feeling bad because people say,

01:44:39.340 | "Where's the portal?

01:44:40.260 | We're desperate.

01:44:41.100 | These are difficult times.

01:44:41.920 | We have an election coming up."

01:44:43.260 | And it's just like, do you think for a moment

01:44:46.340 | that I want to explain that I actually got

01:44:48.220 | really uncomfortable being as well-known as I was?

01:44:50.500 | And then what is it that I want?

01:44:51.660 | Because I want to be better known

01:44:53.520 | and less well-known at the same time.

01:44:55.460 | There's nothing the audience can do.

01:44:56.980 | I don't want the audience to be the audience.

01:44:58.420 | That doesn't make sense to people.

01:44:59.780 | I want it to be a business,

01:45:01.420 | but I don't think people need to fear a business

01:45:03.360 | if the business is open about being a business.

01:45:06.060 | That, and then that's all to the side.

01:45:09.120 | What you're seeing now in front of the election

01:45:11.460 | is an incredibly meta-violent period

01:45:15.580 | in our online existence.

01:45:17.200 | And I believe that anybody who attempts to say

01:45:22.260 | these two parties are completely screwed

01:45:25.100 | at the moment the leadership of these parties

01:45:27.220 | is unsalvageable, unworkable,

01:45:29.400 | everyone hears that from inside the two-party system.

01:45:33.300 | Oh, I get it.

01:45:35.020 | He's trying to subtract votes off of Biden.

01:45:36.860 | Oh, I get it.

01:45:37.680 | He's trying to scuttle Trump.

01:45:39.360 | Oh, I get it.

01:45:40.300 | This is a play for his show

01:45:41.580 | because he's trying to plug in to discuss.

01:45:44.200 | There's a Bill Hicks routine on marketing.

01:45:46.780 | Have you ever seen this?

01:45:48.500 | Brilliant.

01:45:49.320 | I recommend it to everyone,

01:45:50.780 | where he comes out on stage and he says,

01:45:53.460 | "Are there any people in marketing and sales in the audience?"

01:45:56.260 | Woo, yeah.

01:45:57.100 | It's like, okay, great.

01:45:59.300 | Can you do us all a favor and die?

01:46:01.380 | And like everybody laughs.

01:46:02.660 | He's like, no, I'm not laughing.

01:46:04.240 | I'm being serious.

01:46:05.260 | So he talks about how marketing is horrible.

01:46:07.400 | So you're like, where's this act going?

01:46:09.400 | Then he gets to the point of it.

01:46:11.260 | It's like, oh, I know how you marketing people think.

01:46:13.860 | Bill's going after that resentment dollar.

01:46:17.620 | That's a good dollar.

01:46:18.660 | Let's get that resentment anti-marketing dollar.

01:46:20.980 | It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying.

01:46:21.900 | I really hate marketers.

01:46:23.260 | Oh, that's good.

01:46:24.080 | It's the authenticity dollar.

01:46:25.340 | (laughing)

01:46:26.540 | You can't escape this kind of negative marketing thought.

01:46:31.540 | And I guess that gets to the issue

01:46:34.620 | that I don't want to be destroyed

01:46:38.400 | in advance of this election.

01:46:40.060 | I don't think it's a good use

01:46:43.020 | of my relationship to my audience

01:46:45.060 | to be broadcasting how completely ridiculous

01:46:48.980 | Donald Trump and Joe Biden are as candidates

01:46:51.540 | for the President of the United States, full stop.

01:46:54.180 | None of this makes any sense.

01:46:55.680 | These moderators of these pseudo debates

01:46:58.460 | were in the wrong format with the wrong people.

01:47:01.560 | No part of this makes a whit of sense.

01:47:04.480 | - Can I try to push back several claims?

01:47:08.860 | One is I don't believe the systems as they stand now

01:47:13.860 | can destroy their equine Stein voice, the voice.

01:47:20.540 | - You're a child.

01:47:22.020 | I'm sorry to say that.

01:47:23.420 | - But, well, let me, well, it's also possible.

01:47:26.340 | - Let's fight.

01:47:27.180 | - It's entirely possible that you're the child, okay?

01:47:31.060 | Because a child would say,

01:47:32.660 | you would call other people a child.

01:47:34.460 | - Yeah, get in the first blow.

01:47:35.860 | (laughing)

01:47:37.820 | It's a big reveal to tell.

01:47:39.180 | - Because the only power they have

01:47:43.180 | is to attack you psychologically.

01:47:44.900 | - No.

01:47:45.900 | - Well, I believe that the army of people

01:47:50.100 | that love you is much more powerful than mainstream media,

01:47:55.100 | than people that you might hear say ridiculous things

01:48:00.140 | that you just said, which is try to reduce you,

01:48:02.380 | like the marketing, thinking.

01:48:06.980 | I just believe there's an army,

01:48:09.260 | maybe there's a better term,

01:48:10.820 | of people that see you for who you are and are hungry.

01:48:15.520 | - I'm not disputing those things.

01:48:18.220 | That's not what I'm saying.

01:48:19.540 | I would venture to say, as your therapist,

01:48:22.740 | that you're actually,

01:48:25.140 | the battle is all in your mind,

01:48:30.140 | that you have found these demons in the system,

01:48:34.260 | and they're just a tiny minority,

01:48:38.180 | and it's all in your mind.

01:48:39.420 | They cannot actually remove,

01:48:43.100 | they're not strong enough to remove the voice

01:48:47.060 | of Eric Weinstein, to silence the voice.

01:48:49.060 | - I love this.

01:48:50.520 | This is some of the best fiction writing I've ever heard.

01:48:55.840 | Let me tell you, I have relatives

01:48:59.060 | who've known me my entire life,

01:49:01.540 | where one article in the New York Times,

01:49:03.740 | they will believe that over me.

01:49:05.860 | - My contention is that it has no power

01:49:09.780 | except to affect your psychology.

01:49:11.380 | - You're not hearing me. - What you have to do

01:49:12.300 | is the Rogan thing, which is laugh.

01:49:14.020 | - You're not hearing me.

01:49:14.860 | - Just laugh.

01:49:16.020 | - I am laughing.

01:49:16.940 | - I know, but more.

01:49:18.140 | I'm telling you something.

01:49:20.180 | - Yes.

01:49:21.220 | - The way this works is through ruin.

01:49:23.920 | Ruin can come to anyone.

01:49:27.540 | There's no one who cannot be ruined.

01:49:29.700 | Every single person is signed up right now

01:49:34.460 | to be ruined by the system.

01:49:36.860 | - Don't you understand that you have more power

01:49:39.900 | than the system?

01:49:41.340 | You can ruin the system.

01:49:43.500 | Your Twitter account, the podcast,

01:49:45.940 | that's what I'm telling you about the army.

01:49:47.900 | - I agree that my Twitter account, my podcast,

01:49:50.100 | but what we've seen, for example,

01:49:52.300 | you saw what happened to Brett's articles of Unity Project?

01:49:55.600 | - Yes.

01:49:56.440 | - Okay, what happened?

01:49:57.260 | - You mean on the Twitter side?

01:49:59.220 | - On the Twitter side, what happened?

01:50:01.060 | What happened?

01:50:03.560 | - Well, actually, it's not a good answer.

01:50:04.380 | - Say the words, say the words.

01:50:05.500 | - It was blocked or removed from Twitter.

01:50:07.780 | - Suspended, account suspended.

01:50:09.580 | Okay, I have a direct line to Jack.

01:50:15.260 | Okay, so I'm talking to the CEO

01:50:17.900 | who I am crazy enough to still believe in.

01:50:21.660 | - Good, I do too.

01:50:22.640 | - I believe it.

01:50:23.480 | Somehow, there's a very strange thing

01:50:25.400 | going on with Jack Dorsey.

01:50:27.300 | I cannot possibly reconcile the actions

01:50:30.260 | with the person I've, that is a next level mind in there.

01:50:35.260 | I don't know it well enough to say

01:50:38.620 | that it's all next level.

01:50:39.920 | I'm not claiming he doesn't have any blind spots.

01:50:41.980 | Every smart person I know has blind spots.

01:50:43.940 | I don't know what he's up against, blah, blah, blah.

01:50:46.720 | There's no way that the Jack Dorsey that I've talked to

01:50:50.020 | and the Jack Dorsey that interacted over articles of unity

01:50:53.620 | can be the same person.

01:50:55.540 | He is constrained by that company in some way

01:50:58.020 | that doesn't make sense to me.

01:50:59.460 | Either that or he's the most duplicitous person on earth

01:51:01.700 | and I'm not believing it.

01:51:02.700 | I just don't buy it, okay?

01:51:04.140 | Something horrible is happening.

01:51:07.480 | My claim is I can remove you functionally

01:51:13.740 | from the chess board in a tiny number of moves.

01:51:17.420 | No matter who you are, no matter how virtuous

01:51:19.600 | or how much of a bastard you've been your entire life,

01:51:22.580 | it doesn't take more than three or four moves

01:51:25.100 | to basically neuter you as a force.

01:51:27.960 | - Yeah, and I disagree that if that's possible,

01:51:31.040 | that means I'm not very good at chess.

01:51:33.000 | Like, Unity 2020 was removed from Twitter

01:51:36.200 | because it's not good enough.

01:51:38.280 | Not within the system.

01:51:40.260 | The army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea

01:51:45.220 | was too small.

01:51:46.820 | - But fear, uncertainty, and doubt is the name of the game,

01:51:49.980 | the coin of the realm.

01:51:51.140 | - Psychology, though, it's not real power.

01:51:53.780 | It just affects the mind.

01:51:55.260 | - Okay, I have a reading assignment for you.

01:51:57.420 | Because you're Russian, you'll really enjoy this.

01:51:59.860 | As part of the great American tobacco settlement,

01:52:04.060 | the Tobacco Institute had to disgorge its archives

01:52:07.740 | of all of its strategies, all of its skullduggery,

01:52:11.080 | and put it on the web for all time

01:52:13.200 | so that we could all understand

01:52:14.640 | how the tobacco companies got together

01:52:17.560 | and destroyed people, right?

01:52:20.040 | You see, tobacco destroys people.

01:52:22.600 | You can see, Scientology destroys people.

01:52:26.240 | There are various vindictive organizations

01:52:31.000 | that will not tolerate reality in opposition to them.

01:52:36.920 | - Let's take him down.

01:52:38.520 | - Okay.

01:52:39.360 | - That's what I'm trying to tell you.

01:52:40.440 | - Okay, no.

01:52:41.480 | - So why aren't you doing the podcast, The Return,

01:52:43.880 | because that's one of the weapons of war.

01:52:47.040 | - Well, first of all, if you're at war,

01:52:52.200 | I don't want to discuss strategy on a podcast, right?

01:52:57.200 | - But you're misunderstanding.

01:52:58.720 | - What did Montgomery say about Rommel?

01:53:00.880 | Wasn't his line, "I read your book, you beautiful bastard"?

01:53:06.160 | It's like, why are you using the tactics

01:53:07.560 | that you already explained?

01:53:09.600 | Okay, so one of the things I'm doing

01:53:11.400 | is I'm not having a strategic conversation

01:53:13.680 | with you and several hundred thousand of our closest friends.

01:53:17.420 | I pulled back because this is not the battle

01:53:25.320 | that I know what I'm doing.

01:53:28.600 | I do not feel passionately enough

01:53:30.680 | about defeating Donald Trump to elect Joe Biden,

01:53:33.640 | even if that's the way I'm gonna ultimately vote, right?

01:53:38.160 | I don't believe in the Biden Democratic Party.

01:53:42.600 | I don't believe in the Trump Republican Party.

01:53:45.380 | So yes, it's an incredibly consequential election,

01:53:48.520 | but to me, it's like the Crips and the Bloods

01:53:51.540 | and the Latin Kings fighting over the right

01:53:54.200 | to extort a business and the business trying to figure out

01:53:57.760 | who it wants to do the extorting.

01:54:00.520 | - But don't you think, listen,

01:54:02.360 | there's very few people that are as good

01:54:03.880 | with the English language as you.

01:54:05.800 | Don't you think it's possible to draw a line

01:54:08.960 | that doesn't, in between,

01:54:11.920 | that finds how we find our common humanity

01:54:16.500 | that ensures a better 2021 without having to say,

01:54:20.880 | like, Donald Trump is evil or Joe Biden is incompetent

01:54:24.960 | or any of that, just somehow draw a beautiful line.

01:54:28.000 | - I am seeing people in so much pain.

01:54:30.600 | This election is chewing up the integrity

01:54:33.400 | of everyone who comments on it, Lex.

01:54:35.980 | - Maybe they're not good enough.

01:54:38.360 | - They're not good enough.

01:54:39.200 | No, but that, okay.

01:54:41.160 | Do you believe in me?

01:54:42.880 | - Yes. - You do?

01:54:44.080 | - Yes. - All right,

01:54:44.920 | listen to me very carefully.

01:54:46.760 | My spider sense, my intuition that has allowed me

01:54:50.520 | to survive in this space,

01:54:51.800 | I've been mouthing off since the '80s,

01:54:54.500 | tells me this is a super dangerous time

01:54:59.480 | for smart people to be spending the dry powder

01:55:03.280 | because the election doesn't make sense.

01:55:05.800 | Doesn't mean that I don't have a sense

01:55:08.360 | that one outcome would be better than the other, probably,

01:55:11.400 | but the variance on that,

01:55:12.880 | I'm not even positive that I'm right.

01:55:14.740 | These two options are so completely inappropriate

01:55:20.000 | to the world of 2020.

01:55:21.220 | What we need is so diametrically opposed

01:55:25.000 | to more boomers and more silent generation people

01:55:28.840 | trying to sort out a highly technical world

01:55:32.040 | being mediated through social media.

01:55:34.480 | We need more exclusion.

01:55:37.760 | We need more actual elites.

01:55:39.920 | The people we've called the elites are not the elite.

01:55:42.400 | They need to go.

01:55:44.040 | - Yeah, we need excellence, competence.

01:55:45.880 | - We need people who can be trusted behind closed doors,

01:55:49.020 | and we need to close the doors

01:55:50.600 | so we can't see what those people are doing.

01:55:52.800 | Here's the thing.

01:55:55.800 | Imagine that you had a bunch of people

01:55:57.180 | who'd all seen action in combat,

01:56:00.700 | had all volunteered to be part of the armed services,

01:56:03.560 | had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need to.

01:56:06.120 | So you were convinced that these people

01:56:08.000 | had put their lives on the line for their country,

01:56:10.760 | not for a payday.

01:56:12.320 | Imagine you had 10 of these people

01:56:14.320 | with technical backgrounds,

01:56:15.880 | men, women, black, white, Muslim, Jew, doesn't matter.

01:56:18.720 | I would trust those people, and I'd close the door.

01:56:27.480 | I don't wanna know what they talked about.

01:56:29.280 | I don't want transparency into all of their negotiations.

01:56:33.500 | I wanna know that they're patriotic,

01:56:35.220 | that they see something in the world

01:56:36.800 | bigger than themselves and their family fortunes.

01:56:39.200 | I wanna know that they're courageous.

01:56:42.480 | I wanna know that they've got all of our well-being,

01:56:45.520 | and I'm willing to roll the dice,

01:56:46.900 | and if they screw us over, I'd rather go down like that.

01:56:50.320 | - Okay, so I disagree with you there,

01:56:52.120 | 'cause there's a difference between those and Jocko,

01:56:55.000 | because you're not speaking to people with credentials.

01:57:00.000 | - No, I'm talking about self-credentialed people.

01:57:01.980 | - Self-credentialed.

01:57:02.820 | - I view Jocko as self-credentialed.

01:57:04.540 | - But the biggest, the powerful thing about Jocko

01:57:06.820 | is he's not only self-credentialed,

01:57:08.380 | but he's been real with people.

01:57:11.780 | The magical thing about Jocko isn't his book,

01:57:15.320 | isn't his life story,

01:57:16.620 | is he's been talking on a podcast for a long,

01:57:19.580 | there's something real that happens.

01:57:21.900 | - Okay, so if you took--

01:57:23.900 | - Everybody, yeah.

01:57:24.740 | - If you took Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard,

01:57:27.700 | and you took Jocko Willing and maybe Jesse Ventura,

01:57:30.620 | you can take--

01:57:33.340 | - I see where you're going with this.

01:57:34.540 | - What, you can take Bernie Sanders, who's a lone voice,

01:57:38.820 | you take all of these people who've really just risked,

01:57:43.120 | like why do we trust, why is Katharine Hepburn

01:57:46.300 | the best that Hollywood ever produced?

01:57:48.900 | 'Cause she told Hollywood to go fuck itself.

01:57:52.740 | Hard.

01:57:54.260 | They gave her four Academy Awards,

01:57:56.460 | and she said, "Love you, sweeties,

01:57:58.180 | "I'm gonna use them as the doorstops

01:57:59.580 | "for the bathrooms in my house."

01:58:01.540 | - See, that's skill.

01:58:02.540 | - That's what you were talking about.

01:58:05.820 | Be Katharine Hepburn.

01:58:07.120 | Audrey Hepburn is pretty amazing,

01:58:09.820 | but Katharine Hepburn is next level, right?

01:58:12.220 | That's what you're trying to say to me.

01:58:15.020 | Okay, I'm trying to figure it out, Lex.

01:58:16.860 | I don't have the answer yet.

01:58:18.700 | What I do know is that this election is chewing people up,

01:58:22.100 | and I mean two separate things.

01:58:23.540 | One, that parties don't have enough integrity,

01:58:25.940 | that if you comment either for or against,

01:58:28.980 | there's a short sequence where you make a comment

01:58:32.300 | that's nuanced, you get referenced to something, right?

01:58:36.900 | Like, you know, take this thing about, you know,

01:58:38.900 | fine people on both sides.

01:58:40.560 | That is non-resolved after N years,

01:58:44.420 | whether the context should be reported or not.

01:58:49.020 | We are in some situation in which Democrats and Republicans

01:58:53.060 | are primed to fight each other the way introducing two ants

01:58:56.720 | from two different ant colonies always produces a battle.

01:58:59.700 | - Yeah. - Okay?

01:59:01.200 | I don't want to be in that fray

01:59:04.260 | because those people are gonna kill each other

01:59:06.580 | mindlessly like robots.

01:59:08.840 | And until the election is concluded,

01:59:10.880 | like, do I think this is dire?

01:59:13.760 | Yes.

01:59:14.600 | Could it be make or break?

01:59:15.420 | Absolutely.

01:59:16.260 | I'm not saying that.

01:59:17.100 | Do I know which way this goes?

01:59:18.180 | I can make an excellent argument

01:59:19.660 | that we need to elect Joe Biden right now.

01:59:22.380 | We've got a situation which can only be cured

01:59:25.020 | by voting for Joe Biden.

01:59:26.900 | I can make another argument that we could have a situation

01:59:29.420 | that can only be cured by defeating Joe Biden right now

01:59:33.500 | and all of the things

01:59:34.780 | that the modern Democratic Party represents.

01:59:37.300 | - Yeah.

01:59:38.860 | - I don't have, you know, it's not the lady and the tiger.

01:59:43.860 | We're choosing between the tiger and the tiger.

01:59:45.900 | It's the Sumatran tiger versus the Siberian tiger.

01:59:49.100 | Right, I'm trying to think, well, which tiger can I,

01:59:51.180 | do I have a better chance against?

01:59:52.880 | The key problem for us politically

01:59:56.220 | is that we have to divorce the concept of the center

02:00:00.460 | and moderation from kleptocracy.

02:00:02.940 | Every time we try to say something like,

02:00:05.980 | we need more moderate solutions,

02:00:07.780 | we need more pluralistic solutions,

02:00:09.860 | people will say, wow, you just want to hand us

02:00:12.320 | right back into the swamp, don't you?

02:00:14.420 | Those swamp people, 'cause the moderates

02:00:16.380 | and the swamp people are the same people.

02:00:18.420 | Right, so then we have these two crazy wings.

02:00:23.140 | We can't have crazy right-wing people.

02:00:25.340 | I don't want any tiki torch BS.

02:00:27.820 | We can't have crazy left-wing, don't attack my courthouse.

02:00:30.820 | Really don't attack my courthouse.

02:00:33.400 | And we can't have moderates.

02:00:35.420 | It's like, okay, how do we install our children

02:00:37.220 | and rape, pillage, and get these speaking fees

02:00:39.840 | when we're out of office and become, you know,

02:00:42.300 | cozy with the things when we're supposed

02:00:44.980 | to be regulating them and then become their lobbyists

02:00:48.900 | immediately when we leave office, all of this stuff.

02:00:51.680 | We need an entirely different system.

02:00:53.900 | And I can't talk about that at the moment.

02:00:56.220 | When I talk, people say, oh, wow,

02:00:59.140 | so you're gonna sit this one out 'cause you're a pussy,

02:01:01.060 | 'cause you're a coward?

02:01:02.540 | Great to know, Eric, we thought better of you.

02:01:04.260 | Bye, click.

02:01:05.180 | I don't know what to do.

02:01:07.380 | - But are you thinking of what to do?

02:01:10.240 | - Yeah.

02:01:12.080 | - You better believe it.

02:01:13.780 | Look, Brett had this idea of Unity 2020,

02:01:16.940 | and I told him it was a wrong idea.

02:01:18.700 | I didn't tell him that Unity 2024 was a wrong idea.

02:01:23.180 | I didn't tell him that Unity 2028 is a wrong idea.

02:01:25.740 | And if I were to make the case that he was right

02:01:27.880 | and I was wrong, 'cause he's now shuttered the thing, right?

02:01:30.840 | I would say that the case to be made that he was correct

02:01:35.100 | was is that by doing this in 2020,

02:01:37.140 | we found out what we were up against.

02:01:39.400 | It's good to know that Twitter can turn this off

02:01:41.900 | at the drop of a hat.

02:01:43.620 | Great to know.

02:01:45.060 | It's good to know, as we learned,

02:01:46.860 | that you cannot have meetings of presidential candidates

02:01:51.860 | in a primary that are not approved of by the party.

02:01:57.860 | Right, like they've got this thing figured out,

02:02:01.220 | so we don't have any way in.

02:02:03.260 | And now, Unity 2024 makes sense

02:02:07.180 | because Unity 2020 was tried, okay?

02:02:10.520 | I don't know that we get to 2024 under all circumstances.

02:02:14.640 | In some, we do, in some, we don't.

02:02:16.680 | - But there's a game theoretic thing

02:02:18.440 | that I'm not sure you're accounting for,

02:02:20.200 | but you probably are, but let me just make an argument.

02:02:22.960 | Is Jack Dorsey very likely listens to your podcasts?

02:02:29.560 | And this is the power of these words.

02:02:34.280 | - Something deep went wrong.

02:02:37.160 | - But we can change it with the power of words.

02:02:41.520 | - Something went wrong at Twitter.

02:02:44.000 | - They have so much division on their platform.

02:02:46.120 | - That's what I'm trying to say.

02:02:47.080 | They've gotten--

02:02:48.000 | - It's not wrong, they just don't know,

02:02:49.320 | they're understaffed.

02:02:50.680 | - No, they have an insoluble problem.

02:02:53.520 | - Difficult to solve.

02:02:54.400 | - They have an insoluble problem.

02:02:56.320 | - This is where you and I disagree.

02:02:57.960 | - Because, well, all right.

02:02:58.800 | - Or I'd like to create a competitor.

02:03:00.520 | - No, so then, you know, give it to me.

02:03:03.560 | Create the competitor.

02:03:04.440 | Show me that you actually understood this,

02:03:06.500 | because my guess is that most of the things

02:03:08.640 | that you'll think about, I mean,

02:03:10.360 | I can tell you things I've talked to Jack about,

02:03:12.560 | which I know would make Twitter much better.

02:03:14.760 | However, I think that this problem

02:03:19.540 | of instantaneous communication across the planet,

02:03:22.520 | and you subtract off all sorts of context

02:03:24.760 | and mutual self-knowledge, the problem is us.

02:03:28.240 | It's not the platforms.

02:03:29.780 | You're thinking about a technological solution,

02:03:32.320 | and I'm saying the problem is

02:03:34.160 | is that we are ultimately the product.

02:03:36.080 | - And I just disagree with that,

02:03:38.200 | and there's a lot of, probably could save that for tomorrow.

02:03:40.720 | - I look forward to spending summers in your villa

02:03:44.080 | when you debut this product,

02:03:47.100 | and I would love to angel invest in it.

02:03:49.040 | - By the way, in terms of money,

02:03:52.120 | I'll never have a villa.

02:03:55.080 | - Yeah?

02:03:56.000 | - No, I will always give away everything, Alan.

02:03:58.320 | - Don't do that.

02:03:59.680 | - No, sorry, invest into things like you mentioned,

02:04:03.760 | awesome things.

02:04:04.720 | - Yeah, yeah, invest, fine,

02:04:06.920 | but a little bit of avuncular advice.

02:04:10.180 | Don't pledge to be the person

02:04:15.680 | who disgorges themselves of security.

02:04:20.120 | Money is freedom.

02:04:21.800 | That's what it is.

02:04:22.800 | It's a big, honking pile of freedom, okay?

02:04:26.440 | You can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you

02:04:29.320 | if you don't, you know,

02:04:30.160 | so you can use it as freedom to make yourself

02:04:32.040 | a prisoner of your money,

02:04:33.640 | but generally speaking, Lex,

02:04:35.800 | money is freedom, and your voice is important.

02:04:39.640 | At least retain the amount of money, security you need

02:04:43.120 | to follow Joe's advice.

02:04:46.120 | What is the point of FU money if you don't say FU?

02:04:50.040 | The number of people who have FU money who don't say FU

02:04:53.500 | indicates the number of people

02:04:55.160 | who chose the freedom of their wealth to create a prison.

02:04:59.000 | - Yeah.

02:04:59.840 | - They built a prison with the freedom they had,

02:05:01.160 | and they walked into it, locked the door.

02:05:04.080 | - I think it's too difficult not to create,

02:05:06.640 | the reason I wanna give away the money

02:05:08.120 | is 'cause I just know my own psychology,

02:05:09.760 | and you create prisons.

02:05:11.080 | Our human mind just creates those prisons.

02:05:14.080 | The FU money is enough for basic shelter and basic food.

02:05:19.080 | That's the optimal FU money.

02:05:22.960 | - You don't have kids yet.

02:05:23.800 | - This is a, okay, this is the problem.

02:05:25.800 | This is why I'm, so this is me, single Lex,

02:05:28.960 | speaking, but kids change it.

02:05:31.880 | - Future Lex, I'm talking to future Lex.

02:05:34.600 | Single present Lex, please don't listen.

02:05:38.060 | Don't be an ass.

02:05:39.560 | You're gonna need some money,

02:05:41.160 | and don't make these pledges to say on a podcast.

02:05:45.360 | I wanna save you from yourself.

02:05:46.880 | You need money to do many of the beautiful things

02:05:50.360 | that we're counting on you to do.

02:05:51.780 | Don't F it up.

02:05:52.760 | - Can I talk to you about Roger Penrose?

02:05:58.760 | - Sure.

02:05:59.600 | - You've talked to Roger on the portal,

02:06:02.520 | but also in between the lines and offline,

02:06:05.560 | just everything you've said about Roger Penrose.

02:06:08.760 | For people who don't know,

02:06:09.640 | he just recently, a few days ago, won the 2020,

02:06:14.520 | shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for physics.

02:06:18.120 | But it's clear to me that he had

02:06:21.280 | like a deep personal impact on you,

02:06:23.920 | a connection with you,

02:06:25.100 | in terms of both your love of mathematics,

02:06:28.560 | just the way you see the world.

02:06:30.640 | This is the Eddie Van Halen conversation.

02:06:32.640 | This is clearly somebody who's profound in your worldview.

02:06:35.960 | Can you talk about Roger?

02:06:37.940 | Can you talk about what it means

02:06:40.320 | that he won this highest of prizes?

02:06:42.560 | Just in general, let's celebrate the man.

02:06:44.320 | - Yeah, okay.

02:06:45.640 | So first of all, there are two other people

02:06:47.040 | who won this prize.

02:06:48.000 | I'm sorry, I just didn't happen to know

02:06:49.520 | who they were before they won.

02:06:51.020 | Roger is a very,

02:06:56.560 | it is not Roger in particular,

02:06:59.320 | but the class from which Roger comes that is so important.

02:07:04.320 | So I would put Roger in the class

02:07:06.640 | of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang.

02:07:11.400 | - Put Witten in there?

02:07:15.680 | - Yeah. - Or no?

02:07:16.520 | - I mean, Witten's a special case,

02:07:19.560 | but Witten is weirdly the reverse

02:07:23.320 | of the Roger Penrose story, right?

02:07:25.080 | Because Witten is the first physicist

02:07:27.120 | to win a mathematical fields medal,

02:07:29.240 | the highest honor in mathematics.

02:07:31.720 | Penrose is in some sense a mathematician

02:07:34.040 | who's now won the Nobel Prize.

02:07:36.040 | So it's a perfect sort of a couplet.

02:07:37.840 | Roger's class means everything to me.

02:07:45.240 | That's the highest achievement of the human mind.

02:07:48.640 | I'd probably throw Bach in

02:07:51.000 | with Feynman and Dirac and company, right?

02:07:53.900 | (Roger laughs)

02:07:56.060 | I think that he was so inventive.

02:07:59.340 | It was very frustrating to watch this career.

02:08:01.820 | It was a little bit frustrating to watch Feynman's career.

02:08:04.740 | Feynman was so good,

02:08:10.260 | and had he been born at a slightly different time,

02:08:13.940 | I believe his claim on physics would be far greater.

02:08:21.500 | I feel like Penrose in some sense

02:08:23.500 | came up a very difficult path

02:08:25.100 | because you see, Einstein effectively solved

02:08:27.420 | most of the most important problems

02:08:29.180 | in general relativity right at the beginning.

02:08:31.980 | As a result, the children of Einstein are impoverished

02:08:35.220 | because there wasn't as much to pick off of the trees

02:08:38.620 | and sell at the market,

02:08:39.620 | whereas Bohr and Planck didn't do nearly as good of a job

02:08:43.700 | with quantum theory,

02:08:44.580 | so there's lots to do in quantum theory.

02:08:47.300 | I think that Roger affected me personally

02:08:51.220 | by a diagram that I saw in a paper of Herman Gluck

02:08:56.220 | at the University of Pennsylvania.

02:08:59.100 | It was the first picture I'd ever seen

02:09:00.740 | of the Hopf vibration sketched,

02:09:03.340 | and weirdly, I brought that to the Rogan program

02:09:06.900 | in order to sort of convey the wonder.

02:09:10.340 | It was recapitulating my own journey.

02:09:12.340 | I think I probably saw that at age 16 or something,

02:09:17.420 | and it just flipped my mind.

02:09:19.880 | Roger's incredibly visual, he's incredibly geometric,

02:09:23.600 | he's incredibly sui generis, he just does his own thing.

02:09:28.600 | He's got lots of bets.

02:09:30.840 | None of them had really come through the way you would hope,

02:09:35.340 | and I think they stretched the rules, to be blunt about it.

02:09:38.880 | - To give him the prize. - Yeah, I do.

02:09:41.040 | - You said this thing on Twitter which is beautiful,

02:09:43.640 | that every once in a while comes a human being

02:09:46.280 | that gives value to the prize

02:09:50.400 | versus the prize giving value to the human.

02:09:52.640 | - Two different kinds of prizes.

02:09:54.040 | The reason that we care about the Nobel Prize

02:09:56.920 | isn't because of Alfred Nobel.

02:09:59.240 | It's because it came along at the right time to reward

02:10:02.960 | Einstein, Dirac, Schrodinger, Feynman.

02:10:09.560 | Most of the people who should have won, won.

02:10:14.800 | Most of the awards are not good

02:10:18.320 | in the sense that they don't really follow.

02:10:20.480 | The prize is used to rewrite history, that's its problem.

02:10:25.680 | So you should have a love-hate relationship with it

02:10:28.720 | because on the one hand it does focus the world

02:10:31.240 | on what really matters, and on the other hand

02:10:33.300 | it distorts what really matters,

02:10:34.840 | and both of those functions take place simultaneously.

02:10:38.040 | In this case, I think that they violated

02:10:40.000 | their own rules slightly.

02:10:41.760 | So it wasn't really clearly a case of a prediction

02:10:46.000 | and a discovery in the typical fashion,

02:10:48.840 | but we better give this award to somebody

02:10:52.520 | of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize

02:10:56.600 | is fully funded with prestige going forward.

02:10:59.800 | That's sort of my weird speculative guess

02:11:02.680 | as to what happened.

02:11:04.240 | And so Roger's getting on in years,

02:11:06.120 | and the person should be alive,

02:11:08.080 | so I think they bent the rules,

02:11:11.000 | and I think they couldn't have bent it for a better person,

02:11:13.320 | and I hope they will not bend the rules out of weakness

02:11:16.640 | but out of strength in the future.

02:11:19.080 | Would be great to get Madame Wu and Emmy Noether

02:11:23.880 | a posthumous prize along with Doug Prasher,

02:11:27.320 | George Sudarshan, and George Zweig,

02:11:32.020 | as well as Ernst Stuckelberg, Nobel Prizes.

02:11:35.000 | There have been some terrible omissions.

02:11:37.960 | The first two being females who revolutionized

02:11:42.880 | our view of the world.

02:11:44.880 | And I take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes

02:11:49.880 | for people from ethnic groups or genders or whatever

02:11:52.840 | in order to make it plural and inclusive

02:11:55.240 | if it's not following the work,

02:11:57.160 | and I feel very clear that in a few cases

02:11:59.500 | we know there was a real problem with the Nobel Committee

02:12:01.760 | because we have stunning accomplishments.

02:12:06.160 | And to try to get through a day as a physicist

02:12:08.080 | without Noether's theorem,

02:12:10.280 | and try to imagine the universe

02:12:12.180 | without Madame Wu's discovery that left and right

02:12:14.600 | don't appear to be symmetric.

02:12:16.560 | I mean, these are terrible omissions,

02:12:18.640 | and they're a huge blot on science

02:12:21.660 | for not being more inclusive when it matters.

02:12:25.520 | - Yeah, so just like you said,

02:12:26.640 | the Nobel Prize is plagued by omissions as much as--

02:12:30.200 | - And distortions and dilutions.

02:12:31.580 | For example, Dirac and Schrodinger were, I believe,

02:12:33.960 | given the prize in the same year.

02:12:35.880 | There's no reason that those two people

02:12:37.560 | needed to dilute each other.

02:12:39.360 | The same thing with, you know, Dyson was an omission.

02:12:43.640 | Tomonaga probably got included in part

02:12:46.120 | because we had an opportunity to show

02:12:48.580 | that something had happened on both sides of the Pacific

02:12:51.080 | after the war.

02:12:52.140 | But I don't think we needed to dilute Weinberg

02:12:57.300 | or Feynman or Schwinger.

02:12:59.520 | It just makes me, it makes me somewhat sick.

02:13:01.840 | All of these people are such important giants,

02:13:04.480 | and it has to do with the field, I think,

02:13:06.800 | not wanting to create luminaries and superstars

02:13:10.880 | who could have defended the field from budget cuts

02:13:13.480 | and worldly pressure.

02:13:14.940 | So I think it's really important

02:13:16.720 | that we have absolute superstars

02:13:19.280 | because we produce superstars.

02:13:20.760 | We acknowledge them, we don't dilute them,

02:13:22.860 | and that we bend the rules to make sure

02:13:26.000 | that the prize stays funded with the prestige

02:13:29.000 | that comes from giving it to the Roger Penrose's,

02:13:32.880 | and Albert Einstein's, and Paul Dirac's of the war.

02:13:35.440 | - Can we talk a little bit about evil?

02:13:39.680 | - Sure.

02:13:40.520 | - I haven't actually talked to you about this topic,

02:13:45.320 | and it's been sitting on my mind

02:13:48.040 | mostly because everybody at MIT is quiet about it,

02:13:52.380 | which is Jeffrey Epstein.

02:13:55.420 | I didn't get a chance to experience what MIT was like

02:14:01.180 | at the time when Jeffrey Epstein was part of this,

02:14:04.400 | but I'd love to try to understand

02:14:08.600 | how evil was allowed to flourish

02:14:14.200 | in the place that I love.

02:14:16.760 | Whether you think,

02:14:20.020 | maybe let me ask the question this way.

02:14:24.200 | Was it the man evil, or was the system evil?

02:14:30.000 | Or is evil too strong a word?

02:14:31.840 | Because what I see is the presence

02:14:38.640 | of this particular human being

02:14:41.560 | in the eyes of many destroyed

02:14:46.120 | the reputations of many really strong scientists,

02:14:50.600 | and also weakened the ability,

02:14:53.640 | like weakened the institution of MIT

02:14:58.200 | by making everybody quiet,

02:15:02.520 | like almost making them unable to say

02:15:04.640 | anything interesting or difficult.

02:15:06.500 | - Yeah.

02:15:09.480 | - And what is that?

02:15:11.400 | And what am I supposed to?

02:15:12.760 | - We don't know.

02:15:15.200 | - Why is everyone quiet about Jeffrey?

02:15:16.520 | What I wanna scream-- - We don't know.

02:15:20.000 | Obviously, I wanna scream about it too, right?

02:15:22.400 | And I probably have said too much about Jeffrey Epstein.

02:15:27.680 | Look, something horrible happened.

02:15:29.560 | I don't know what it is, but something horrible happened.

02:15:33.280 | And at the one thing that, okay, let's just do this.

02:15:39.200 | The first thing I need to do is I need to get rid

02:15:41.880 | of this woke crap about power differentials, okay?

02:15:46.880 | In general, you can talk about,

02:15:51.400 | hypergamy and power differentials

02:15:53.760 | are Russell conjugates of the same concept.

02:15:56.840 | Just the way particular proportions and symmetries

02:16:00.160 | are mathematically provable to be attractive

02:16:02.880 | in females to males.

02:16:06.020 | Male attractiveness is largely determined

02:16:10.480 | by male competence and ability to amass power and success

02:16:15.280 | and all these sorts of things.

02:16:16.840 | The relationship between consenting adults

02:16:23.100 | is quite frankly not something I wanna sort out.

02:16:26.680 | The relationship between the sexuality of adults

02:16:31.180 | and minors and particularly,

02:16:35.180 | there's the 17, 18 issue.

02:16:40.440 | That's very different than 12, 13.

02:16:44.220 | We're talking about really sick depravity

02:16:50.220 | with respect to what it appears

02:16:52.280 | that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in at some level.

02:16:56.280 | I believe this story is super complicated in part

02:16:59.680 | because I think one thing that Jeffrey Epstein was doing

02:17:02.760 | was providing money, encouragement

02:17:06.720 | and support to scientists.

02:17:09.640 | Another thing he was doing, I believe,

02:17:11.360 | was giving tax advice to very rich people.

02:17:15.840 | I believe another thing he was doing

02:17:17.800 | was hooking very wealthy people up

02:17:22.800 | with young adult females.

02:17:26.040 | Another thing he was doing, I think,

02:17:28.960 | was doing stuff with children that will curl your toes.

02:17:33.120 | So there's an entire spectrum of different stuff

02:17:39.680 | and at the moment, nobody can pull apart

02:17:42.160 | or de-conflate anything because the woke thing

02:17:46.120 | comes over it and says,

02:17:48.120 | I think it's disgusting that a 43-year-old billionaire

02:17:53.280 | would be partying with a 23-year-old.

02:17:55.640 | Okay, I don't wanna adjudicate that.

02:18:00.200 | I'm worried about 12 and 14-year-olds

02:18:02.440 | that we're not talking about.

02:18:03.600 | - But I mostly--

02:18:05.040 | - I don't think MIT was deep into pedophilia.

02:18:08.440 | My guess is that that did not happen.

02:18:10.600 | I don't think that the scientists were the targets

02:18:15.600 | of the really sick depraved stuff.

02:18:18.120 | It's my guess.

02:18:19.880 | My guess is that what you're looking at

02:18:21.920 | was a government construct.

02:18:23.560 | It may have been our government,

02:18:26.280 | it may have been a joint government project,

02:18:27.880 | it may have been somebody else's government, I don't know.

02:18:31.360 | I believe that in part,

02:18:32.840 | we don't really understand Robert Maxwell.

02:18:37.020 | - Sorry, who's Robert Maxwell?

02:18:39.480 | - Ghislaine Maxwell's father was very active

02:18:43.080 | in scientific publishing.

02:18:44.760 | I don't know where peer review came from.

02:18:46.540 | I would love to run down the relationship

02:18:48.440 | between peer review and Robert Maxwell.

02:18:50.320 | I would love to run down the missing fortune

02:18:52.760 | of Robert Maxwell and the mysterious fortune

02:18:56.160 | of Jeffrey Epstein because I don't think Jeffrey Epstein

02:18:58.680 | ever ran a hedge fund.

02:19:00.720 | I don't think he was a money advisor

02:19:02.360 | the way people claimed.

02:19:04.160 | - So there's two things I wanna talk about.

02:19:06.120 | So one is the shallow conversations

02:19:10.080 | of woke identity politics that you're referring to

02:19:13.560 | seems to be removing everyone's ability,

02:19:17.320 | no, everyone's willingness--

02:19:18.160 | - It's one of the things, one of the things.

02:19:19.760 | - To talk about like, what the hell is this person

02:19:23.360 | and how is he allowed?

02:19:24.640 | Most importantly, to how do we prevent it in the future?

02:19:29.640 | And from the individual perspective,

02:19:31.420 | the question for me is the same question I ask

02:19:34.800 | about 1930s Nazi Germany.

02:19:36.600 | I've been reading way too much probably,

02:19:38.680 | or not enough about that period currently,

02:19:41.140 | is if I was in Germany at that time,

02:19:44.640 | what is the heroic action to take?

02:19:47.160 | When I think about MIT with Jeffrey Epstein,

02:19:49.600 | what is the heroic action to take?

02:19:51.560 | We're not talking about virtue signaling action.

02:19:53.400 | - You wouldn't know what,

02:19:54.640 | I would not know what you're up against, Lex.

02:19:56.800 | You're not hearing me.

02:19:57.900 | The problem here is, what was Jeffrey Epstein?

02:20:02.560 | - Well, that question might be the heroic action to take.

02:20:05.800 | - That's all I'm trying to say.

02:20:06.760 | I'm just trying to get my first question.

02:20:08.320 | You have to map the silence with Jeffrey Epstein.

02:20:10.880 | What you're describing is a map of the silence at MIT.

02:20:15.640 | - Yeah.

02:20:17.160 | - Well, is there a map of the silence

02:20:19.440 | in Washington State around Jeffrey Epstein?

02:20:23.200 | The Bay Area, New York City?

02:20:25.140 | The amount of silence around Jeffrey Epstein

02:20:28.440 | should be telling you everything.

02:20:30.080 | The number of dogs that don't bark

02:20:34.000 | is like nothing we've ever seen.

02:20:36.320 | - You're exactly correct,

02:20:38.040 | but I want to know what is it telling us?

02:20:40.120 | Because what it's telling me

02:20:42.120 | is not some kind of conspiracy,

02:20:44.440 | but more a disappointing weakness.

02:20:49.440 | - Not some kind of conspiracy?

02:20:51.120 | - It's not some kind of conspiracy, but--

02:20:52.960 | - You've got to be kidding.

02:20:55.040 | You're so afraid of saying the word conspiracy

02:20:56.960 | that you don't think it's a conspiracy?

02:20:58.880 | - I personally, I just think it's people

02:21:00.960 | who I thought were my heroes just being weak.

02:21:04.520 | - No.

02:21:05.980 | Be of good cheer, sir.

02:21:07.140 | - A cheer?

02:21:09.080 | - Be of good cheer.

02:21:10.200 | - Of good cheer?

02:21:11.040 | - Yeah.

02:21:11.880 | - You think that there's a conspiracy?

02:21:12.880 | - I think there is a conspiracy.

02:21:14.480 | - That'd be a very impressive one.

02:21:18.360 | That's the scale of it.

02:21:20.280 | I tend to believe that large scale

02:21:23.560 | can only be an emergent phenomena.

02:21:25.440 | - Really?

02:21:26.800 | I find this so fascinating.

02:21:28.200 | - Yeah.

02:21:29.040 | - 'Cause I always see you as like a logic,

02:21:31.240 | logic and love drive your soul.

02:21:35.120 | You're very logical, you're relentless,

02:21:37.560 | you've got a lot of love in your heart.

02:21:38.920 | I believe that if you would review the video,

02:21:41.160 | where is it from, Dubai or Abu Dhabi

02:21:43.680 | of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest?

02:21:47.520 | You ever seen this thing?

02:21:48.360 | - No.

02:21:49.200 | What happened?

02:21:50.020 | - It's the assassination in 2010, 10 years ago

02:21:53.760 | of Mahmoud Al-Mabuh, something like that,

02:21:57.440 | in Dubai where I believe 26 separate individuals

02:22:02.440 | on multiple teams are shown converging,

02:22:07.440 | coming in from all over the world on false passports,

02:22:10.920 | pretending to be tennis players

02:22:14.040 | or business people or vacationers.

02:22:17.440 | And all of these teams have different functions

02:22:21.880 | and they murder this guy in his hotel room.

02:22:27.080 | And the Dubai, I guess, chief of police

02:22:29.960 | or security officer was so angry

02:22:34.600 | that he put together this amazing video

02:22:36.680 | that says we can completely detail what you did.

02:22:39.720 | We caught you on closed circuit TV.

02:22:41.720 | We don't know exactly who you are

02:22:44.280 | 'cause your disguises and your false passports.

02:22:46.800 | But yeah, 26 people converged to kill one.

02:22:50.020 | No, I don't believe you.

02:22:53.600 | I don't believe after COINTELPRO and Operation Paperclip

02:22:58.000 | and Operation Mockingbird,

02:23:01.000 | I don't know whether I should even bring up Rex84,

02:23:07.040 | to not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy.

02:23:10.700 | - So you have a sense that evil can be as competent

02:23:16.560 | or more competent than--

02:23:18.000 | - First of all, when evil wants to operate at scale,

02:23:20.720 | it needs to make sure that people

02:23:22.440 | don't try to figure out evil.

02:23:24.900 | When evil operates at scale, from first principles,

02:23:29.120 | you have to realize that evil must not want it investigated.

02:23:33.520 | - That's correct.

02:23:35.080 | - The most efficient way

02:23:36.640 | to keep yourself from being investigated,

02:23:40.080 | if you are an evil institutional player

02:23:42.640 | and needs to do this repeatedly,

02:23:44.560 | is to invest in a world in which no one can afford

02:23:47.760 | to say the word conspiracy.

02:23:49.880 | You'll notice that there is a special radioactivity

02:23:52.720 | around the word conspiracy.

02:23:54.440 | We have provable conspiracies.

02:23:56.100 | We have admitted to conspiracies.

02:23:57.720 | You have been invited to conspiracies.

02:23:59.920 | There is no shortage.

02:24:00.760 | Conspiracies are everywhere.

02:24:02.700 | Some of them are mundane.

02:24:04.100 | Some of them are like price-fixing cartels,

02:24:06.440 | or trade groups, or generally speaking, conspiracies.

02:24:10.240 | So the first thing you have to realize

02:24:13.280 | is that all of us are under a,

02:24:16.200 | in a mimetic complex where you can be taken

02:24:20.320 | off the chessboard by saying conspiracy theorists.

02:24:22.920 | Good done.

02:24:23.760 | It's like a one-line proof.

02:24:24.960 | We don't have to listen to Alex.

02:24:26.040 | He said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show.

02:24:28.960 | Okay, that is partially distorting our conversation.

02:24:32.560 | If you want to ask me about Jeffrey Epstein,

02:24:34.500 | you have to agree with me that that is a logical description

02:24:37.900 | of what you would have to have

02:24:39.300 | if you wanted to commit conspiracies,

02:24:40.980 | is that you have to make sure that people

02:24:42.660 | are dissuaded from investigating this.

02:24:44.980 | Okay.

02:24:46.220 | - But it's a fascinatingly difficult idea then,

02:24:51.060 | because the world with conspiracy theories

02:24:53.420 | and the world without conspiracy theories,

02:24:56.100 | to the shallow glance, looks the same.

02:24:58.820 | - Well, my point, there is responsible conspiracy theorizing

02:25:03.820 | where you look at the history of unearthed conspiracies,

02:25:08.560 | and just like you would with any other topic,

02:25:10.560 | just think about how different the rules in your mind are

02:25:13.600 | for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing

02:25:16.760 | where X can be anything, right?

02:25:20.080 | It's like if I say to you,

02:25:21.400 | I can say the statement that average weight

02:25:27.720 | is not the same between widely separated populations.

02:25:30.720 | You'd say, yeah.

02:25:33.100 | I'd say average height is not the same

02:25:34.600 | between widely separated populations.

02:25:36.560 | You'd say, yeah.

02:25:38.680 | Then I say, in fact, no continuous variable

02:25:42.360 | that shows variation should be expected

02:25:44.840 | to be identical between widely separated.

02:25:46.800 | Of course, Eric, like IQ.

02:25:49.040 | Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, right?

02:25:52.280 | So we have a violent reaction to specific topics.

02:25:56.760 | So the first thing I wanna do is just to notice

02:25:59.760 | that conspiracy has that built into everyone's mind.

02:26:04.080 | - That's really important to state, yeah.

02:26:07.200 | It's very interesting that,

02:26:09.520 | and as a prerequisite, as you're saying,

02:26:13.000 | that would be the first step if you wanted to

02:26:15.200 | pull off a conspiracy in a competent way.

02:26:19.360 | You would have to first convince the world of that.

02:26:21.800 | - I just watched the film 1971

02:26:24.360 | about my favorite conspiracy of all time.

02:26:26.640 | I highly recommend it.

02:26:27.920 | - 1971?

02:26:29.240 | - Well, the film is entitled 1971,

02:26:32.480 | and it's about the Citizens Committee

02:26:34.040 | to investigate the FBI,

02:26:36.320 | which was run by a student of Murray Gelman, a physicist,

02:26:41.240 | and broke into FBI offices in Pennsylvania

02:26:44.640 | to steal files which allowed freedom of information requests

02:26:48.080 | that discovered a huge conspiracy.

02:26:50.000 | It was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy

02:26:53.160 | inside the federal government,

02:26:54.680 | a double conspiracy story,

02:26:56.320 | which launched multiple conspiracies.

02:27:00.680 | I think that the problem with modern Americans

02:27:03.000 | is that they are so timid that they don't even learn

02:27:06.320 | about the history of conspiracies

02:27:08.200 | that we have absolutely proven.

02:27:10.800 | So with that done, Jeff Epstein, in my opinion,

02:27:15.280 | represented somebody's construction.

02:27:17.680 | I don't think that-- - Kind of scary to think about.

02:27:20.920 | - Yeah.

02:27:21.760 | Well, what part of the story isn't scary?

02:27:24.960 | I, in part, did something

02:27:26.680 | which I imagine may get me destroyed

02:27:28.960 | because I was more worried about being destroyed

02:27:31.920 | by somebody else I had a conversation with

02:27:34.800 | around Jeff Epstein, right?

02:27:37.600 | So I'm just trying to let it be known

02:27:40.560 | that I don't know anything more than I've already said.

02:27:43.040 | Now, your friends at MIT,

02:27:46.040 | their problem is that Jeff Epstein showed up

02:27:50.360 | as the only person capable

02:27:52.240 | of continuing US scientific tradition.

02:27:55.640 | You see, the US scientific tradition

02:28:00.560 | is a little bit like the Russian.

02:28:03.480 | It's combative, okay?

02:28:07.480 | And we're a free society and we act like a free society.

02:28:12.340 | We're a rich society and we research

02:28:14.280 | like we're a rich society.

02:28:15.640 | That is historically.

02:28:16.680 | And then came the 1970s.

02:28:19.160 | And William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece Awards

02:28:21.960 | and the idea that we're paying too much

02:28:24.400 | and these are welfare queens and lab coats

02:28:26.400 | and blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:28:27.960 | We need more transparency, more oversight.

02:28:31.120 | Everything went to hell.

02:28:32.360 | And the national culture of US science was lost.

02:28:37.400 | The thing that produced all this prosperity

02:28:39.520 | and security and power was lost.

02:28:43.320 | And then Jeff Epstein shows up.

02:28:46.120 | And a tiny number of funders, maybe Fred Kavli,

02:28:49.840 | maybe Yuri Milner, maybe who else would be in this category?

02:28:56.800 | Peter Thiel to an extent.

02:29:01.240 | Howard Hughes would be the largest of these things

02:29:05.160 | which has different grant structures than the NIH,

02:29:08.120 | gave people a modicum of risk-taking ability.

02:29:11.880 | Okay, well, when Jeff Epstein showed up,

02:29:15.260 | everybody wanted to take risk in science.

02:29:20.000 | And suddenly a charismatic billionaire says,

02:29:22.720 | hey, I can make that work for you.

02:29:24.200 | Here's $100,000, go research something crazy.

02:29:27.180 | Well, that money was supposed to be provided

02:29:31.520 | by the federal government under the terms

02:29:34.760 | of the endless frontier compact

02:29:36.600 | between the federal government and the universities.

02:29:39.000 | And the federal government and the taxpayers welched.

02:29:42.040 | Okay?

02:29:43.760 | - So that's one place to lay the blame for Jeff Epstein

02:29:46.580 | as at the failure of the federal government--

02:29:50.660 | - To honor its commitment.

02:29:53.380 | - Yeah.

02:29:54.220 | - Right?

02:29:55.300 | So the universities became psychopathic.

02:29:57.940 | It's not like everybody doesn't remember

02:29:59.620 | what we're supposed to be doing to be moral.

02:30:02.380 | But the point was there wasn't enough money to be moral.

02:30:04.940 | So it was time to eye each other as a source of protein,

02:30:09.520 | as I like to say.

02:30:11.020 | And in that process, Jeffrey Epstein said,

02:30:14.260 | hey, come to my world.

02:30:16.660 | We can do it like we used to do.

02:30:19.420 | So in part, my point is that almost none

02:30:25.560 | of your colleagues at MIT have that kind

02:30:28.900 | of religious commitment to science,

02:30:30.960 | that they're willing to go down with ship science.

02:30:33.460 | The Galileo Galilei thing became very important to science

02:30:39.740 | because occasionally you just have to say,

02:30:42.740 | look, this isn't about me and you.

02:30:45.980 | There isn't enough money in the world

02:30:48.180 | to buy the kind of legacy I want to leave to this planet.

02:30:51.180 | This is one of the great things about science.

02:30:55.420 | You know, potentially it's worth dying for.

02:30:57.500 | - Yeah, I'm glad you said it.

02:31:01.660 | Science is one of the things at its best

02:31:05.380 | that's worth dying for.

02:31:08.180 | I mean, I'm not eager to martyr myself,

02:31:10.880 | but I've certainly risked my health, my fortune.

02:31:15.800 | You know, I've destroyed myself economically over science.

02:31:20.820 | And my need to oppose these sons of bitches

02:31:25.820 | in chaired professorships who are destroying our system

02:31:30.860 | along with everyone else.

02:31:34.340 | - Let me bring in Grandmaster Uguay into this.

02:31:39.340 | - Uguay. - Uguay.

02:31:40.740 | - Master Uguay.

02:31:41.660 | - I think he's a grandmaster.

02:31:44.620 | - Oh, that would make him a chess-playing turtle.

02:31:46.860 | - So I read some Wikipedia.

02:31:48.300 | - Uh-oh.

02:31:49.140 | - A she-fu's a master.

02:31:52.340 | There's apparently only one grandmaster, and that's Uguay.

02:31:55.420 | Anyway.

02:31:57.340 | - Is the phrase grandmaster ever uttered in the script?

02:31:59.340 | - I don't think so. - I don't think so.

02:32:00.660 | - But there's a story.

02:32:01.860 | - Oh, there's off-script canon?

02:32:05.460 | I'm gonna call Glenn Burger right now

02:32:07.140 | and find out if any of this is true.

02:32:09.140 | - All right, you're not supposed to call out

02:32:11.060 | my journalistic integrity.

02:32:12.600 | But-- - Master Uguay.

02:32:15.580 | - Master Uguay.

02:32:17.180 | He says a couple things I'd like to bring up with you.

02:32:20.660 | So one, as part of a longer quote,

02:32:23.460 | recommends that you should find a battle worth fighting.

02:32:31.780 | We've talked about several battles just now.

02:32:34.440 | What is the battle worth fighting for, for Erik Weinstein,

02:32:39.860 | in the next few months, in the next year?

02:32:43.620 | - There's only one.

02:32:44.580 | Well, it's the Moses, it's the Moses thing.

02:32:51.620 | It's time to go, it's time to leave.

02:32:54.820 | This place is over.

02:32:55.800 | - To get off the planet.

02:32:57.000 | - Yeah, I freak people out when I say that,

02:33:00.380 | but look at your world.

02:33:03.420 | You just got introduced to the problem of a virus.

02:33:07.220 | Wait 'til it's fusion devices,

02:33:08.940 | and you understand what it means

02:33:10.140 | to have one interconnected planet

02:33:12.020 | with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else.

02:33:17.020 | - So do you see the foray, your work in physics,

02:33:23.380 | and maybe the echoes of it in ship Elon?

02:33:28.020 | Everybody who has a possible plan

02:33:31.380 | to avoid what is coming if we don't have one

02:33:34.740 | should work on the plan that he, she thinks best, right?

02:33:39.740 | So Elon wants to do rockets.

02:33:43.660 | People misinterpret me.

02:33:45.100 | Meta Erik says, "I don't think that's a smart plan."

02:33:49.280 | Regular Erik says, "All people who have hope should work."

02:33:56.420 | - Everybody who has hope should do that thing.

02:33:59.140 | - Yeah, that-- - At least it's Mars, man.

02:34:01.820 | At least it's the moon and Mars and maybe Titan and whatever,

02:34:04.980 | and I don't think it'll work,

02:34:06.060 | and it doesn't make sense, and it looks silly.

02:34:08.020 | - But that's exactly the kind of fight worth fighting.

02:34:09.900 | - But it's the kind of, it's for the same reason

02:34:12.180 | that I went on Brett's Unity 2020 thing

02:34:14.500 | when I didn't think it had a hope in hell,

02:34:16.020 | and people were making fun of it.

02:34:17.700 | It's just like, we gotta do things

02:34:19.180 | that make us feel dumb and silly and childish

02:34:22.700 | that possibly have a hope of working, okay?

02:34:25.380 | So everybody should do something.

02:34:27.140 | My version of this, I am the most hopeful about

02:34:29.660 | because I wouldn't have chosen to do it

02:34:31.700 | if I thought that Daniel Schmachtenberger's wisdom project

02:34:35.280 | was a better hope, I'd do that.

02:34:37.860 | It's more down to earth in a certain way.

02:34:41.980 | I just think that it's more probable.

02:34:44.180 | Look, we got from powered flight

02:34:46.580 | with the Wright brothers in wind tunnels

02:34:49.060 | to sending back images from the surface of Titan

02:34:51.740 | via Huygens-Cassini in less than a century, okay?

02:34:56.420 | What we can do if we can change the laws of physics

02:34:59.700 | is something we can't even conceive of.

02:35:02.980 | It may be that it buys us nothing,

02:35:05.160 | and at least we will know why we died on this planet.

02:35:10.600 | - As a small aside, I think this is not the right time

02:35:16.580 | to take the full journey, but I feel like you'll guide me,

02:35:20.180 | like Master Hui did, and I'm the Kung Fu Panda at some point.

02:35:24.620 | - They only have one conversation.

02:35:26.380 | We're on our like, what?

02:35:28.740 | - We didn't, well, we're Jews and they weren't,

02:35:33.060 | so we talk too much,

02:35:34.900 | but the guide doesn't have to be with words.

02:35:37.860 | - You don't think Poe is Jewish?

02:35:39.460 | - It's debatable, we'll have to go back to the Wikipedia.

02:35:43.500 | - Yeah, okay.

02:35:46.740 | Is there that you would guide me through

02:35:49.700 | some more intuition about the source code,

02:35:55.500 | the source code of our universe?

02:35:57.940 | Can you comment on where, since we last spoke,

02:36:00.780 | where your thinking has been,

02:36:02.660 | has roamed around geometric unity,

02:36:05.000 | around that work in physics, in this fight?

02:36:08.380 | - Yeah, I'm trying to figure out

02:36:09.940 | when to release it and how.

02:36:13.180 | I mean, I've released the video,

02:36:15.380 | and the video, quite honestly,

02:36:18.020 | I think it has a very bizarre reaction.

02:36:19.920 | I think one of the things that I've learned from the video,

02:36:22.380 | 'cause the video is coming up on half a million views

02:36:25.580 | on YouTube alone, to say nothing of the audio,

02:36:30.580 | but yeah, it produced a very strange reaction.

02:36:34.620 | One of the things I don't think that I properly understood

02:36:37.380 | is that most physicists don't talk

02:36:41.500 | in this geometric language.

02:36:43.380 | I thought that more of the physics world

02:36:48.380 | probably had converted over into manifolds, bundles,

02:36:52.900 | differential forms, connections,

02:36:54.300 | curvature tensors, et cetera.

02:36:55.920 | And I saw a lot of the comments would say things like,

02:37:00.340 | I have a PhD in theoretical physics,

02:37:02.340 | and I'm not even familiar with all of these concepts.

02:37:04.860 | And I think that was probably a distortion

02:37:08.580 | coming from living in Cambridge, Massachusetts

02:37:12.100 | for almost 20 years.

02:37:13.260 | - So what's the solution to that?

02:37:16.340 | - Well, I mean, I can translate it into,

02:37:18.620 | I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to.

02:37:21.260 | My problem is, my calculation is that

02:37:26.260 | as long as the boomers are still in charge,

02:37:30.980 | the same people have these perverse incentives on them,

02:37:34.180 | where they've invested in these programs that didn't work,

02:37:36.780 | so they're extremely hostile

02:37:38.580 | and kind of difficult to deal with.

02:37:41.780 | The fact that I'm not a physicist

02:37:43.540 | has its own set of issues,

02:37:46.180 | which is that effectively it's like the hermit kingdom.

02:37:48.480 | They don't get any visitors,

02:37:49.980 | and they don't necessarily want somebody

02:37:53.780 | rolling up and saying, I know how to do physics.

02:37:56.940 | So I'm always very clear, I'm not a physicist.

02:37:59.420 | That said, if I wait too long,

02:38:04.020 | I don't know that theoretical physics

02:38:05.660 | is really gonna exist after the boomers

02:38:07.660 | because everyone in you,

02:38:09.620 | I think you had Wolfram on your program.

02:38:12.260 | I don't remember whether he said this to you

02:38:13.740 | or Brian Keating,

02:38:14.980 | but he said something like, everybody got discouraged.

02:38:17.660 | It was too hard.

02:38:18.660 | We can't do that, guys.

02:38:21.940 | We cannot do that.

02:38:23.060 | There's something about the renormalization revolution

02:38:25.700 | that enervated the physics community

02:38:27.580 | because it taught them,

02:38:29.340 | just because you can see in this energy regime

02:38:31.300 | doesn't mean you can extrapolate somewhere else

02:38:33.340 | unless you understand how coupling constants run

02:38:36.680 | and what kind of UV fixed points exist, blah, blah, blah.

02:38:41.280 | Somehow that discouraged people from guessing,

02:38:43.840 | from believing everything became an effective theory.

02:38:46.960 | The beauty of the effective theory

02:38:48.600 | wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe,

02:38:51.560 | just the beauty of an energy level.

02:38:53.320 | So I think that renormalization

02:38:56.040 | was one of the most important revolutions

02:38:58.280 | that ever happened in science,

02:38:59.760 | and also its interpretation by the physics community

02:39:03.240 | was catastrophic.

02:39:04.860 | Well, the story I'm telling myself

02:39:06.240 | is that in part I'm waiting for them to get weaker,

02:39:09.020 | but on the other hand,

02:39:10.960 | I don't know that we have any time left.

02:39:13.080 | - Are you also thinking about ways of,

02:39:16.180 | the podcast medium is revolutionary for public,

02:39:22.480 | for discourse, for what,

02:39:23.920 | I mean, I don't even know the right words for it.

02:39:25.880 | Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas

02:39:27.800 | for re-energizing the physics community?

02:39:30.640 | So basically for communicating geometry.

02:39:32.640 | - Look, I have a fantasy, okay?

02:39:36.920 | My fantasy is that all of these things

02:39:38.400 | are the same problem.

02:39:39.960 | And it goes back to this thing that I read about

02:39:42.080 | in Feynman's books about Tartaglia.

02:39:46.920 | They asked him this question,

02:39:48.080 | like what's the greatest thing that ever happened in math?

02:39:50.440 | And he says, "Tartaglia's solution of the cubic."

02:39:53.560 | It's just like the weirdest answer.

02:39:55.800 | So you're like, okay, I'll bite.

02:39:58.040 | Why is it Tartaglia's solution of the cubic?

02:40:00.360 | And he said, "Because it was the first time

02:40:02.240 | "a modern person had done something profound

02:40:04.280 | "that the ancients had failed to do."

02:40:06.180 | I was like, oh, I get it.

02:40:09.360 | It's the thing that opens up new psychology

02:40:11.780 | that says maybe things are possible again.

02:40:14.220 | - It's the new orchard.

02:40:16.840 | - New orchard.

02:40:17.660 | New farmers, new people who can find fruit

02:40:22.120 | that they can pick.

02:40:23.620 | And once you have one person do that,

02:40:25.780 | very often you get many.

02:40:26.860 | Like one of the things that we were talking about

02:40:28.080 | with Eddie Van Halen,

02:40:29.600 | the reason that he created a revolution

02:40:31.840 | and somebody like Roy Buchanan did not,

02:40:34.800 | is that you could follow Eddie Van Halen.

02:40:36.940 | You couldn't pioneer it.

02:40:38.360 | And maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly

02:40:40.360 | and as fast and as inventively,

02:40:42.260 | but you could follow.

02:40:44.440 | Once you understand that there is a tapping principle,

02:40:47.040 | it was just the beginning

02:40:48.140 | of something called percussive guitar.

02:40:50.080 | My belief is that once we start innovating in the present,

02:40:56.180 | everything will come

02:41:00.040 | because everything that around us is screwed up.

02:41:02.500 | - On that, let me, with one last question,

02:41:06.480 | bring back Master Oogway.

02:41:08.220 | Probably the most famous quote of his, right?

02:41:12.440 | With yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery,

02:41:15.520 | but today is a gift.

02:41:16.740 | That is why it is called the present.

02:41:20.640 | - It's very beautiful.

02:41:21.480 | Although I would have gone with,

02:41:23.680 | quit, don't quit, noodles, don't noodles.

02:41:27.480 | I feel like people need to know way too much context

02:41:30.480 | to make sense.

02:41:32.600 | It's your audience.

02:41:34.720 | To hell with context.

02:41:35.720 | Yep, they'll figure it out.

02:41:37.520 | Well, let me ask, what are you grateful for today?

02:41:41.720 | What is your present?

02:41:43.080 | We've talked about a lot of dark things,

02:41:46.040 | but what brings you joy to your heart

02:41:50.440 | that I can't believe I'm lucky enough to have this?

02:41:55.600 | - You know, Nyla and Zev, my wife, Pia,

02:41:59.520 | the fact that we've got our health,

02:42:02.960 | all the little things, saying grace after meals.

02:42:07.960 | You're coming over for Friday night Shabbat dinner,

02:42:10.400 | so we'll bench together and say grace.

02:42:13.560 | It's important to just,

02:42:16.600 | like this bottle of water in front of me,

02:42:18.720 | I made a point of just thinking

02:42:24.320 | how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle

02:42:26.520 | that happens to be placed in front of me

02:42:28.080 | because somebody cared.

02:42:29.640 | So that small thing made a difference to me.

02:42:32.420 | I still have strength for the fight so far.

02:42:40.880 | I think that's something I'm grateful for.

02:42:43.120 | I can't believe that I'm not more beaten down

02:42:45.800 | after all of this nonsense.

02:42:47.980 | I have the most interesting set of friends.

02:42:54.280 | I really do.

02:42:55.120 | I mean, I'm not that rich by monetary standards,

02:42:59.880 | but if there were friend billionaires,

02:43:01.720 | Forbes would be all over my ass.

02:43:03.320 | I just can't believe who I can talk to,

02:43:09.280 | you know, at the drop of a hat.

02:43:11.180 | And I'm really grateful.

02:43:22.520 | I think this is the end of something profound,

02:43:25.680 | and it's the beginning of whatever is next.

02:43:28.800 | And whatever's next could be terminal.

02:43:30.600 | Whatever's next could be amazing.

02:43:32.560 | Whatever's next could be a return to the horrors

02:43:36.120 | of the early 20th century that doesn't manage

02:43:38.320 | to go totally catastrophic,

02:43:39.980 | but takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process.

02:43:43.940 | I'm grateful to having half of my life

02:43:47.420 | in the rear view mirror.

02:43:48.620 | Maybe it took place in a bubble,

02:43:52.080 | and maybe it was unsustainable.

02:43:54.480 | But it was nice to be able to move around the world

02:43:58.320 | without a mask.

02:44:00.160 | It was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world,

02:44:03.040 | even if it was from a cot in a hostel in some country.

02:44:07.560 | - To fall in love.

02:44:10.340 | - Absolutely.

02:44:12.560 | I mean-- - It was a good life.

02:44:14.120 | - Find the last Indian Jewish girl left.

02:44:17.340 | (laughing)

02:44:18.640 | Who knew?

02:44:19.480 | You're a lucky guy.

02:44:21.840 | - Well, let me just say--

02:44:23.560 | - Actually, there's something I wanted to just say

02:44:25.100 | before you get to that.

02:44:26.880 | I forgot to say something.

02:44:28.720 | Falling in love with an intellectual collaborator

02:44:32.000 | is a special thing that not everybody gets a chance to do.

02:44:36.200 | I think when I met Pia, I fell deeply in love with her,

02:44:39.840 | all her normal characteristics.

02:44:42.680 | She and I had an antagonistic relationship

02:44:45.800 | around geometry and economics.

02:44:50.520 | And then, weirdly, just like in a buddy picture

02:44:53.800 | where in the first half of the film, they hate each other,

02:44:56.800 | the two feel like we're fighting

02:44:58.280 | with each other, cats and dogs.

02:44:59.560 | And finally, the sexual tension clearly was so thick

02:45:03.280 | you could cut it with a knife.

02:45:04.720 | And we came up with geometric marginalism,

02:45:07.080 | which is this other theory, not geometric unity,

02:45:09.880 | which allowed me to inhabit space

02:45:13.880 | with somebody who I already knew intimately

02:45:18.120 | and had fallen in love with,

02:45:20.160 | and to see the quality and beauty of their mind

02:45:22.800 | and to play and to dance.

02:45:23.860 | It's sort of the intellectual version of the tango.

02:45:26.540 | One of the most romantic periods of my life

02:45:30.360 | that doesn't fall into most people's experience.

02:45:33.680 | That was a chance to see something totally unexpected.

02:45:37.000 | Haven't really had it since

02:45:38.300 | because she doesn't wanna revisit the material,

02:45:41.000 | but something I'm super grateful for

02:45:42.800 | that's very particular and unique.

02:45:44.560 | - But to flip the tables on you

02:45:47.360 | for hundreds of thousands, I think millions of people,

02:45:51.920 | I can speak, me and them are really grateful.

02:45:57.520 | One, that you exist, and two, sorry for your podcast.

02:46:02.520 | And I do hope your voice in some form continues

02:46:08.880 | to reverberate, I think,

02:46:12.880 | in the, at least in the 2021s and beyond.

02:46:16.640 | Even if it takes a brief pause.

02:46:19.840 | - We're pausing at the moment.

02:46:21.600 | We've recorded some for future episodes

02:46:25.000 | and I'm recording for you.

02:46:26.440 | I really appreciate that.

02:46:27.600 | I mean, it's, earnestness trades at a discount at the moment

02:46:32.600 | because it's easy to make fun of it.

02:46:34.480 | And one of the things I like best about you

02:46:36.040 | is that you and I are both fairly earnest.

02:46:38.440 | We may joke and jab, but honestly,

02:46:41.800 | there's a project here and a world to win, as they say.

02:46:44.940 | The thing that I want my and your listeners to know

02:46:49.940 | is that I'm not stepping away from the podcast

02:46:54.160 | because I don't appreciate that people really want more.

02:46:58.800 | It's not, you know,

02:47:01.000 | this is hugely financially costly to me.

02:47:03.440 | I want to make sure you guys are getting

02:47:07.320 | the best that I can do.

02:47:09.720 | And destroying myself right in front of an election,

02:47:14.600 | I think Lex is incorrect.

02:47:16.080 | I think that the forces that are trying to make sure

02:47:19.220 | that there aren't any planes in the sky

02:47:20.880 | that aren't either colored red or colored blue

02:47:23.640 | is a big danger given how angry I am at the system.

02:47:29.000 | And I don't want to be removed from the chessboard

02:47:30.960 | because if nobody's going to talk about Jeff Epstein,

02:47:32.960 | there need to be people.

02:47:33.880 | If nobody's going to talk about various things

02:47:36.040 | that we've talked about on these programs,

02:47:38.160 | I want to make sure that I'm there.

02:47:39.840 | Do I think that this is potentially

02:47:41.200 | an existential election?

02:47:42.320 | Yes.

02:47:43.160 | Am I positive that I know that my way to bed

02:47:44.840 | is the right way out?

02:47:45.860 | No, I'm not.

02:47:47.460 | I don't know, people.

02:47:48.460 | I just don't know.

02:47:49.540 | And where we are right now seems so dumb

02:47:52.440 | and so catastrophic in terms of how it is

02:47:55.400 | chewing up smart people that I decided,

02:47:59.940 | it's really not about cowardice

02:48:01.380 | because it's hard for me to restrain myself.

02:48:04.320 | I have so many reactions every day.

02:48:06.280 | This is really about trying to plan for all of our futures

02:48:10.580 | to make sure that I'm around.

02:48:12.360 | I had a huge concern that what happened

02:48:14.340 | to Brett's articles of unity was going to happen to Brett.

02:48:17.480 | It's going to happen to the YouTube channels.

02:48:19.420 | I want to make sure that we don't have all of our eggs

02:48:21.480 | in one basket.

02:48:22.760 | So if something goes wrong over there,

02:48:25.040 | that's the whole idea of the intellectual dark web,

02:48:27.000 | which is at some level a loose confederation.

02:48:30.960 | It can become a strong confederation

02:48:32.780 | if somebody wants to back it and make it work.

02:48:35.160 | It can dissolve so that there really isn't anything.

02:48:38.820 | The thing is to be hard to kill

02:48:42.280 | because ultimately when the hit pieces come,

02:48:46.040 | they don't come for what it is

02:48:47.440 | that they're angry at you about.

02:48:48.640 | They come for where they can get you.

02:48:51.440 | And so it's very important that right in front

02:48:53.360 | of an election, yeah, I think that the desire

02:48:58.360 | of the old system to defend itself

02:49:01.720 | through reputational destruction

02:49:03.840 | is one of the most pernicious aspects of the new America.

02:49:07.180 | And we have to fight the ability to destroy reputations

02:49:11.200 | as a means of institutions keeping individuals

02:49:14.540 | with podcasts and the ability to reach millions

02:49:16.880 | like through Substack out of their domain.

02:49:20.360 | I don't surrender this domain to them.

02:49:22.360 | They have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us.

02:49:25.760 | And I believe that they could remove you or me

02:49:27.920 | in an instant.

02:49:28.760 | By the end of today, if they wanted us off the chessboard,

02:49:31.600 | we would be off the chessboard.

02:49:33.040 | I know that's not your perspective.

02:49:34.900 | My goal is to stay here as long as possible

02:49:38.160 | to make sure that you have enough

02:49:40.240 | of a counterbalancing set of ideas

02:49:42.520 | and to let and help other podcasters start.

02:49:46.280 | And my hope is that that works.

02:49:50.100 | But long heroism, short martyrdom

02:49:54.120 | is a good motto for anyone.

02:49:56.480 | And I try to remember the short martyrdom part of that.

02:49:59.480 | - First of all, beautifully put.

02:50:02.840 | Second of all, a way to end a conversation

02:50:05.160 | and a disagreement, which is how you hook them

02:50:08.440 | for the next conversation to be continued.

02:50:11.160 | - When Lex says.

02:50:12.400 | - Eric, it's a huge honor.

02:50:15.280 | Thank you once again.

02:50:16.960 | - Lex, really appreciate every time we get together.

02:50:18.960 | Thanks, buddy.

02:50:20.480 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:50:21.920 | with Eric Weinstein.

02:50:23.160 | And thank you to our sponsors.

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02:51:05.960 | follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,

02:51:08.680 | or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

02:51:12.080 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:51:14.600 | from Leonard Cohen in a song titled "Hallelujah".

02:51:19.320 | Well, maybe there's a God above,

02:51:21.780 | but all I've ever learned from love

02:51:24.120 | was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.

02:51:26.800 | And it's not a cry that you hear at night.

02:51:30.480 | It's not somebody who's seen the light.

02:51:32.880 | It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah.

02:51:36.120 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:51:40.960 | (upbeat music)

02:51:43.540 | (upbeat music)

02:51:46.120 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Eric Weinstein: On the Nature of Good and Evil, Genius and Madness | Lex Fridman Podcast #134

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