Einstein Carried His Luggage (Eric Weinstein and Lee Smolin) | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | There are things which are right there in front of us which we miss.
00:00:07.520 | And I'll quote my friend Eric Weinstein in saying, "Look, Einstein carried his luggage.
00:00:14.400 | Freud carried his luggage.
00:00:16.000 | Marx carried his luggage.
00:00:17.280 | Martha Graham carried her luggage, etc.
00:00:20.760 | Edison carried his luggage.
00:00:23.080 | All these geniuses carried their luggage.
00:00:25.960 | Not once before relatively recently did it occur to anybody to put a wheel on luggage
00:00:31.760 | and pull it.
00:00:34.360 | And it was right there waiting to be invented for centuries."
00:00:38.080 | So this is Eric Weinstein.
00:00:42.880 | What do the wheels represent?
00:00:44.280 | Are you basically saying that there's stuff right in front of our eyes that once it just
00:00:49.200 | clicks, we put the wheels in the luggage, a lot of things will fall into place?
00:00:54.160 | Yes.
00:00:55.160 | That's what I do.
00:00:56.520 | And every day I wake up and think, "Why can't I be that guy who was walking to the airport?"
00:01:02.200 | What do you think it takes to be that guy?
00:01:08.080 | Because like you said, a lot of really smart people carried their luggage.
00:01:14.000 | What just psychologically speaking, so Eric Weinstein is a good example of a person who
00:01:18.320 | thinks outside the box.
00:01:20.320 | Who resists almost conventional thinking.
00:01:24.960 | You're an example of a person who by habit, by psychology, by upbringing, I don't know,
00:01:32.760 | but resists conventional thinking as well, just by nature.
00:01:35.640 | Thank you, that's a compliment.
00:01:36.640 | That's a compliment?
00:01:37.640 | Good.
00:01:38.640 | So what do you think it takes to do that?
00:01:41.000 | Is that something you were just born with?
00:01:44.560 | I doubt it.
00:01:46.800 | From my studying some cases, because I'm curious about that, obviously.
00:01:53.920 | And just in a more concrete way, when I started out in physics, because I started a long way
00:01:59.200 | from physics, so it took me a long, not a long time, but a lot of work to get to study
00:02:07.100 | it and get into it.
00:02:08.100 | So I did wonder about that.
00:02:11.280 | And so I read the biographies, in fact I started with the autobiography of Weinstein and Newton
00:02:17.080 | and Galileo and all those people.
00:02:22.640 | And I think there's a couple of things.
00:02:26.680 | Some of it is luck, being in the right place at the right time.
00:02:30.280 | Some of it is stubbornness and arrogance, which can easily go wrong.
00:02:35.840 | And I know all of these are doorways, if you go through them slightly at the wrong speed
00:02:42.600 | or in the wrong angle, they're ways to fail.
00:02:48.840 | But if you somehow have the right luck, the right confidence or arrogance, caring, I think
00:02:56.280 | Einstein cared to understand nature with a ferocity and a commitment that exceeded other
00:03:04.840 | people of his time.
00:03:06.040 | So he asked more stubborn questions, he asked deeper questions.
00:03:13.640 | I think, and there's a level of ability and whether ability is born in or can be developed
00:03:23.720 | to the extent to which it can be developed, like any of these things, like musical talent.
00:03:29.400 | You mentioned ego, what's the role of ego in that process?
00:03:33.320 | Confidence.
00:03:34.320 | Confidence, but do you, in your own life, have you found yourself walking that nice
00:03:39.520 | edge of too much or too little, so being overconfident and therefore leading yourself astray or not
00:03:46.440 | sufficiently confident to throw away the conventional thinking of whatever the theory of the day,
00:03:52.840 | of theoretical physics?
00:03:55.120 | I don't know if I, I mean, I've contributed what I've contributed, whether if I had had
00:04:00.960 | more confidence in something, I would have gotten further, I don't know.
00:04:08.080 | Certainly I'm sitting here at this moment with very much my own approach to nearly everything,
00:04:18.400 | and I'm calm, I'm happy about that.
00:04:22.640 | But on the other hand, I know people whose self-confidence vastly exceeds mine, and sometimes
00:04:31.040 | I think it's justified and sometimes I think it's not justified.
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